Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek 1138188530, 9781138188532

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Religion and European Philosophy

Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek draws together a diverse group of scholars in theology, religious studies, and philosophy to discuss the role that religion plays among key figures in the European philosophical ­tradition. Designed for accessibility, each of the thirty-four chapters includes background information on the key thinker, an overview of the main themes, concepts, and concerns that occupy his or her attention, and a discussion of the religious and theological elements present in his or her thought, in light of contemporary issues. Given the scope of the volume, Religion and European Philosophy will be the go-to guide for understanding the religious and theological dimensions of European p­ hilosophy, for both students and established researchers alike. Philip Goodchild is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, UK. Hollis Phelps is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Mount Olive, in North Carolina, USA.

“With Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek, Goodchild and Phelps contribute an impressive addition to the bibliography on European philosophy of religion and religious studies. The text is functionally comprehensive, exceptionally lucid, and informatively stimulating.” Keith Putt, Samford University, USA

Religion and European Philosophy Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek

Edited by Philip Goodchild and Hollis Phelps

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park,  Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Philip Goodchild and Hollis Phelps, individual chapters, the contributors The right of Philip Goodchild and Hollis Phelps to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress-Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-18853-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-18852-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64225-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS



Contributors

ix



Religion and European Philosophy:  A brief introduction Hollis Phelps

1

Part 1

German idealism

15

1 Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Philip Goodchild

17

2 G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) Molly Farneth

31

3 F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854) Karin Nisenbaum and Daniel Whistler

44

4 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) Christopher Ryan

60

5 Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) Nina Power

74

vi  Contents

Part 2

Critical theory

85

  6 Karl Marx (1818–1883) Roland Boer

87

  7 Ernest Bloch (1885–1977) Ian Bacher

101

  8 Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) Agata Bielik-Robson

115

  9 Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) Daniel Colucciello Barber

127

10 Jürgen Habermas (1929–) Maureen Junker-Kenny

141

Part 3

Living experience

157

11 Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Edward F. Mooney

159

12 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) Bruce Ellis Benson

173

13 Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) Agata Bielik-Robson

184

14 Henri Bergson (1859–1941) Philip Goodchild

196

15 Simone Weil (1909–1943) Stuart Jesson

207

16 Georges Bataille (1897–1962) Rina Arya

222

Contents  vii  

Part 4

Phenomenology and hermeneutics

235

17 Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) James G. Hart

237

18 Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) Ben Vedder

254

19 Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) Nigel Zimmermann

266

20 Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) J. R. Hustwit

278

21 Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) Todd Mei

294

22 Michel Henry (1922–2002) W. Chris Hackett

307

23 Jean-Luc Marion (1946–) Christina Gschwandtner

324

Part 5

Structuralism, post-structuralism, and beyond

339

24 Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) Aron Dunlap

341

25 Michel Foucault (1926–1984) Jeremy Carrette

355

26 Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) Kristien Justaert

370

27 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) Clayton Crockett

383

viii  Contents

28 Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–) Joeri Schrijvers

396

29 Julia Kristeva (1941–) Catherine Tomas

408

30 Luce Irigaray (1930–) Patrice Haynes

423

31 Alain Badiou (1937–) Hollis Phelps

438

32 Giorgio Agamben (1942–) Adam Kotsko

452

33 François Laruelle (1937–) Anthony Paul Smith

465

34 Slavoj Žižek (1949–) Marcus Pound

479



Index

493

CONTRIBUTORS

Rina Arya is Reader in Visual Communications at the University of W ­ olverhampton (UK). She is the author of Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film, and Literature; and Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World. Ian Bacher is a PhD student in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham (UK), where he works on the philosophies of Ernst Bloch and Gilles Deleuze. Daniel Colucciello Barber is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Pace University (USA). He was previously affiliated with the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. He is the author of Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence; and On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity. Bruce Ellis Benson is former Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (USA). He is the author of The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (with J. Aaron Simmons); Liturgy as a Way of Life: Embodying the Arts in Christian Worship; Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith; and Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Marion on Modern Idolatry. Agata Bielik-Robson is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of ­Nottingham (UK). She is the author of Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos; and The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction. Roland Boer is Professor of Literary Theory at Renmin (People’s) University of China, Beijing and Research Professor in Religious Thought at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Among other books, he is the author of The Sacred

x  Contributors

­ conomy of Ancient Israel; Idols of Nations: Biblical Myth at the Origins of Capitalism E (with ­Christina Petterson); Lenin, Religion, and Theology; Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes; and the five-part On Marxism and Theology series. Jeremy Carrette is Professor of Religion and Culture at the University of Kent (UK). He is the author of William James’s Hidden Religious Imagination: A Universe of Relations; Religion and Critical Psychology: Religious Experience in the Knowledge Economy; Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (with Richard King); and Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporeality and Spiritual Spirituality. Clayton Crockett is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Central Arkansas (USA). He is the author of Deleuze Beyond Badiou; Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism (with Jeffrey Robbins); Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism; Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory; and A Theology of the Sublime. Aron Dunlap is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at Shimer College (USA). He is the author of Lacan and Theology. Molly Farneth is Assistant Professor in the Religion Department at Haverford College (USA). She is the author of Hegel’s Social Ethics: Norms, Conflicts, and Rituals of Reconciliation. Philip Goodchild is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham (UK). He is the author of Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy; Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire; Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety; and Theology of Money. Christina Gschwandtner is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University (USA). She is the author of Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics; Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments about God in Contemporary Philosophy; Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion; Marion and Theology. W. Chris Hackett is Research Fellow/Lecturer in the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at the Institute for Religion & Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University (AU). He is the author of Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology (with Tarek Dika). James G. Hart is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University (USA). He is the author of Who One Is: A Transcendental-Existential Phenomenology; and The Person and the Common Life: Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics. Patrice Haynes is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University (UK). She is the author of Immanent Transcendence: Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy.

Contributors  xi  

J. R. Hustwit is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Methodist ­University (USA). He is the author of Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth. Stuart Jesson is Lecturer in Religion, Philosophy, and Ethics at York St John University (UK). His published work focuses on Simone Weil. Maureen Junker-Kenny is Professor in Theology at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of Religion and Public Reason: A Comparison of the Positions of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur; and Habermas and Theology. Kristien Justaert is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Katholieke Universiteit Lueven (BE). She is the author of Theology After Deleuze. Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College (USA). He is the author of The Prince of this World; The Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation; Žižek and Theology; Agamben’s Coming Philosophy: Finding a New Use for Theology (with Colby Dickinson); Awkwardness; Creepiness; and Why We Love Sociopaths. Edward F. Mooney is Emeritus Professor in the Departments of Religion and Philosophy at Syracuse University (USA). He is the author of Excursions With Thoreau: Philosophy, Poetry, Religion; Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy from Thoreau to Cavell; Excursions With Kierkegaard: Others, Goods, Death, and Final Faith; On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time; and Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Todd Mei is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent (UK). He is the author of Heidegger, Work, and Being. Karin Nisenbaum is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Colgate University (USA). She is currently completing a monograph titled For the Love of Metaphysics: Nihilism and the Conflict of Reason from Kant to Rosenzweig. Hollis Phelps is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Mount Olive (USA). He is the author of Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-Theology. Marcus Pound is Lecturer and Assistant Director of the Centre for Catholic Studies in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University (UK). He is the author of Žižek: A Very Critical Introduction and Theology, Psychoanalysis, and Trauma. Nina Power is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton (UK). She is the author of One-Dimensional Woman. Christopher Ryan is Lecturer in Philosophy at London Metropolitan University (UK). He is the author of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Religion: The Death of God and the Oriental Renaissance.

xii  Contributors

Joeri Schrijvers is Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (BE). He is the author of Ontotheological Turnings? The Decentering of the Modern Subject in Recent French Phenomenology; and Between Faith and Belief: Toward a Contemporary Phenomenology of Religious Life. Anthony Paul Smith is Assistant Professor of Religion at La Salle University (USA). He is the author of Laruelle: A Stranger Thought; François Laruelle’s Principles of Non-Philosophy: A Critical Introduction and Guide; A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought. Catherine Tomas gained her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford (UK), with a thesis that proposes a “hermeneutics of power” through the work of Julia Kristeva and Hannah Arendt. Her research interests include mysticism, marginalized epistemic voices, and the metaphysics of food. Ben Vedder is Emeritus Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion at Radboud University Nijmegen (NL). He is the author of Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion: From God to Gods. Daniel Whistler is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool (UK). He is the author of Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity. Nigel Zimmermann is Lecturer in Theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia (AU). He is the author of Levinas and Theology.

Religion and European Philosophy A brief introduction Hollis Phelps

The development of the academic study of religion and the specific concerns of modern theology owe a great deal to the European philosophical tradition. The concepts, concerns and various styles present in that tradition have directly and indirectly informed discussions in religious studies and theology, both past and present, and many of the key figures associated with it have made direct contributions to religious studies and theology in their own right. For instance, Immanuel Kant, the focus of the first essay in this volume, set the agenda for the field with his “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy: this upended traditional metaphysics, concerned with the existence and nature of God, in favor of an analysis of the human subject and how he or she knows the world. Kant’s view that the mind actively contributes to the production of our knowledge of the world has far-reaching consequences, including how we understand the nature of theological and religious knowledge. Is religion just a human projection or is there something divine about human thought? Similarly, Heidegger’s phenomenological investigations into the nature of being have had immense influence on the development of the field of religious studies and contemporary theological reflection. In the phenomena of religion, we are now confronted with fields of interpretation of reality itself. Indeed, Heidegger’s shadow continues to loom large over much contemporary philosophy of religion, along with many of the later thinkers presented in this volume. The list could go on, but suffice it to say at this point that much of the most innovative work in religious studies and theology has arisen from an engagement with the European philosophical tradition, although not exclusively so. The significance of such mutual engagement, moreover, often extends well beyond the confines of religious studies, theology, and philosophy, as seen for instance in recent discussions concerned with “the return of the religious” and the complicated and often contentious role that religion continues to play in the political, economic, and social spheres.

2  Hollis Phelps

Gaining a basic foothold in European philosophy is, then, essential for ­understanding past and present intellectual trends, both in religious studies and theology and beyond. Moreover, and perhaps even more significantly, the European philosophical tradition also contains vast, often untapped resources for those studying religion and theology, resources that have the potential to drive innovative work into the future. Thus, those looking to think about religion and theology critically and in new ways will find ample material in the body of literature that constitutes the European philosophical tradition. Yet students of religious studies and theology often face a daunting task when attempting to enter the literature. For a start, the literature itself is extremely diverse. Although it is possible to speak generally of shared themes and concerns that have developed over time, the thinkers associated with modern and contemporary European philosophy evince vast differences in focus, approach and style, and each introduces a certain novelty into the tradition itself. Getting a handle on the continuities and differences in the tradition, along with the peculiarities of individual figures and their specific contributions, is certainly a difficult task, one that can take years of study. Nevertheless, that process is often made more difficult by the nature of the material. Much of the literature that constitutes the European philosophical tradition is notoriously difficult, at times abstruse, even for the trained specialist. Jumping into, say, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or Derrida’s Of Grammatology for the first time is for most people to invite confusion, at least when done on one’s own. To be sure, there is a large secondary literature on the figures and themes that populate the philosophical tradition. This literature itself, however, can often be just as difficult, to the extent that it adopts the language and way of thinking of the thinker(s) in question. Moreover, even the most basic introductions often assume a fair amount of knowledge in advance, which is one more difficulty presented to the uninitiated reader. Matters are often more difficult to the student interested primarily in theology and religious studies. Even when the secondary literature is admirably clear, the best of it often does not discuss at length the issues that may be of most interest to students of religion and theology. That is, the religious themes and concepts, along with various theological resonances, found in the thinkers in question are often not brought to the fore in interpretative discussions, if they are discussed at all. To state as much is not a criticism per se, but a simple acknowledgment that we approach and write about figures with specific concerns in mind. Those specializing in philosophy may, understandably, not always ground the importance of religious and theological themes in the thinkers in question. When the literature does take up these themes, even in ways that specifically address religious and theological matters, other concerns often overburden the need for a clear introduction. Otherwise put, the secondary literature often does not explicitly have the student in mind, especially students in religion and theology. Moreover, there currently is no single volume available that adequately covers the broad terrain of European philosophy from the perspective of religious studies and theology. Until now, that is. We have gathered under one cover a collection of essays

Introduction  3  

that takes the student of religion and theology as its primary audience. The goal of each essay, in this sense, is on the one hand to provide a basic, readable introduction to a key thinker in the European philosophical tradition read specifically through his or her use of and relation to religious and theological themes. On the other hand, each of the essays intends to provoke further research and study, above and beyond the basic terrain covered. The ultimate goal of this volume, then, is to provide resources that will incite students to chart new, unexpected paths in their disciplines.

Secularism and the turn to religion Certain presuppositions, interpretative principles and themes, whether stated or not, guide all academic work, including the formation and organization of edited volumes. This is no less the case with Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek. The essays in the volume read as a sort of “who’s who” among continental thinkers, and in this sense the volume can be read in terms of an overview of the field from a particular perspective. Nevertheless, the volume as a whole—in terms of the thinkers included in the volume, the authors of the individual essays, and the volume’s organization and scope—can perhaps best be understood as a response to the “return of the religious.” Also referred to as the “theological turn” or simply the “turn to religion,” the term designates an apparently renewed and concerted focus on religious and theological themes across a broad spectrum of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Such a turn, it should be noted, is not entirely self-evident, at least from a certain perspective. To generalize, in the twentieth century the dominant discourse on religion often adopted some form of the so-called secularization thesis, which posits an inverse correlation between modernization and religious belief. As societies become more modern and even postmodern, the public importance of religious belief simultaneously declines. Societies, in other words, become secular, guided by principles rooted in rational discourse and consensus and not directly in religion, at least in an overtly confessional guise. To the extent that religion persists, it does so primarily as an individual, private affair, but even this, the secularization thesis posits, is on the wane and is bound to eventually dissipate. So described, the secularization thesis corresponds to liberalism as a political project. Although the secularization thesis still has its advocates (Bruce 2002), even among scholars of religion, its explanatory value and guiding assumptions have been severely called into question on numerous fronts. According to the sociologist Peter L. Berger, who was once one of its most prominent advocates, the “key idea” behind secularization theory “has turned out to be wrong”: To be sure, modernization has had some secularizing effects, more in some places than in others. But it has also provoked powerful movements of countersecularization. Also, secularization on the societal level is not necessarily linked to secularization on the level of individual consciousness. Certain religious institutions have lost power and influence in many societies, but both

4  Hollis Phelps

old and new religious beliefs and practices have nevertheless continued in the lives of individuals, sometimes taking new institutional forms and sometimes leading to great explosions of religious fervor. Conversely, religiously identified institutions can play social and political roles even when very few people believe or practice the religion that the institutions represent. To say the least, the relation between religion and modernity is rather complicated. (Berger 1999, 2–3) To say that the relationship between religion and modernity—and now postmodernity and beyond—is complicated, is to say along with Hent de Vries that “citations from religious traditions are more fundamental to the structure of language and experience than the genealogies, critiques, and transcendental reflections of the modern discourse that has deemed such citations obsolete and tended to reduce them to what they are not” (de Vries 1999, 2). De Vries’s claim can be understood in a variety of ways. To begin with, we can take it as an indication of the various, convoluted ways that secularization and modernization continue to be informed by religion and, moreover, even remain inside the latter’s logic and trajectory.The usual tale about the Enlightenment—that it represents a turning point in human history, as we progressively march our way on up, which includes away from religion—functions, from this perspective, as little more than retroactive wish fulfilment.The narrative of inevitable and irreversible progress has, no doubt, largely caved under pressure from the realities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno had already argued as much in the 1940s, in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Although enlightenment, as they argued, “has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters,” in actuality, it reveals itself as a form of domination, as it “regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 1 and 20). “Enlightenment is totalitarian,” they baldly state (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 4). A central component of that mythology concerns the supposed exodus from religion, but the Enlightenment and its intellectual, cultural, socio-political and economic offshoots are better understood in a different, more complex key. This is not to say that the line that runs from the pre-modern to the modern era does so smoothly, without any major breaks or interruptions, and that includes the notion of religion. Nietzsche captured a difference between the two in his famous Parable of the Madman. A madman, the parable goes, runs into the marketplace, crying, “I seek God! I seek God!” Some of the townspeople, whom the parable tells us did not believe in God, meet his search with mockery instead, “Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?” In response, the madman jumps into their midst, confronting them with God’s death, and the shock that it should provoke: The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I.

Introduction  5  

All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. (Nietzsche 1974, 181–2) Confronted with the greatness of their deed, which is also ours, the townspeople can only respond to the madman in silent astonishment, which leads him to conclude that he has “come too early.” “This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men,” he says. “Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most ­distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.” One way to interpret Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death is to read it in terms of the aforementioned secularization thesis. On this view, Nietzsche’s description of what he took to be the intellectual and socio-cultural climate of nineteenth-century Europe would correspond to the decline of religion—and, for him, Christianity specifically—as the symbolic glue that holds society together. This is largely how the Italian philosopher and politician, Gianni Vattimo, interprets it, though with a seemingly ironic twist. Following Heidegger, for Vattimo Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death coincides with the end of metaphysics, the ability to reduce existence to its first principles. Vattimo writes that the phenomenon of God’s death “has made useless and obsolete the radical hypothesis concerning the existence of a supreme Being as the ground and ultimate telos of the world” (Vattimo 2002, 13). For Vattimo, it is important to point out, this does not necessarily spell the end of belief in God or the practice of religion, at least in a certain key. The dissolution of metaphysics, that is, the grounding of existence in an absolute, rules out the making of “strong” claims regarding anything whatsoever, hence God’s death has also ironically “made the philosophical denial of God’s existence impossible” (Vattimo 2002, 15). Indeed, for Vattimo, the lightening of existence or, as he often refers to it, its weakening allows for a post-metaphysical return of religion. Nevertheless, any such “return” must, if it is to be legitimate, pass through God’s death, meaning that it must be “weak” (i.e. lacking ultimate foundations) rather than “strong.” Religion—and any other form of thought, for that matter— must coincide with secularization, which Vattimo understands as a trajectory that emerges out of Christianity itself. He writes that general weakening of being

6  Hollis Phelps

reopens the philosophical debate on the end of metaphysics, and provides the basis for a critical evaluation of the forms in which the rebirth of the sacred appears in our time. The term around which these two aspects of my argument can be further developed is secularization. Having recognized its family resemblance with the biblical message of the history of salvation and with God’s incarnation, philosophy can call the weakening that it discovers as the characteristic feature of the history of Being secularization in its broadest sense, which comprises all forms of dissolution of the sacred characteristic of the modern process of civilization. If it is the mode in which the weakening of Being realizes itself as the kenosis of God, which is the kernel of the history of salvation, secularization shall no longer be conceived of as the abandonment of religion but as the paradoxical realization of Being’s religious vocation. From the perspective of secularization—of the vocation of weakening— postmetaphysical philosophy will understand and criticize the multifaceted phenomena of religion’s return in our culture, thus inescapably putting itself into question. (Vattimo 2002, 24) Secularization, then, does not so much spell the end of religion as fulfil its trajectory, as the kenotic debasement of being. But only so long as religion adopts a ­post-metaphysical form, meaning that it coincides with secularization itself. Vattimo’s take on the secularization thesis differs, in that it reads secularization as the fulfilment of religion rather than its dissolution, but it shores up the fact that secularization as a discourse is far from neutral. Although secularization, when understood in light of the weakening of being, theoretically allows for a plurality of individual and collective beliefs, stances and paradigms, the medium in which these occur is essentially Christian, both in form and content. As stated in the quotation above, secularization on Vattimo’s account coincides with such theological notions as the history of salvation, incarnation and kenosis. This may not be much of a problem in and of itself, so long as the discourse of weakening could itself function in “weak” terms, but it clearly functions as a sort of master narrative to police what Vattimo takes as insufficiently secular. Consider the following claim concerning the status of religious identity in relation to public displays of religious symbols in Western societies: Christians cannot claim the right to expose the crucifix in public schools and at the same time adopt it as a sign of a particular, highly dogmatic religion. Or, Christmas can continue to be celebrated in Western societies as a holiday for all, but then it makes no sense to complain that it has become too lay, too mundane, that is, that it has been deprived of its original, authentic meaning. In the end, also, the prohibition of the chador in French public schools can be justified precisely because in that context it is an affirmation of a strong identity, a kind of profession of fundamentalism. By contrast, in our society the crucifix has become an almost obvious—and hence unobtrusive—sign,

Introduction  7  

which allows for the continued existence of a lay orientation of which it only underscores the religious origin within the context of a development toward secularization. It is precisely by appealing to generic meaning—one that offers openings and possibilities—that the crucifix can claim its right to be accepted as a universal symbol in a lay society. (Vattimo 2002, 101–102) Vattimo rules out any sort of public display of identity, particularly religious identity, because of the way in which such displays cut against the secular organization of life. Pluralism is valued—indeed, required by Vattimo’s critique of metaphysics—but only to the extent that the identities involved take on a weak form, modelled after the lay practice of Christianity and its now generic symbols. Secular and secularized identities are the only ones that count, because they are assumed to be “unobtrusive.” Vattimo’s articulation of the weakening of being in terms of a secularized Christianity and the values that it emphasizes, then, gives body to Nietzsche’s coincident claim that Christianity actually survives the death of God, in the form of a specific morality (see Zupančič 2002, 35). The passage form the pre-modern to the modern, from the “religious” to the “secular,” then, is smoother than is normally thought. There is not an absolute disjunction between the two, but rather continuity, and this continuity rests on the legacy of Christianity, in both form and content. The death of God certainly names a shift in values, but this shift should be understood from within the parameters of Christianity and its legacy. The formation of the secular, as Talal Asad might put it (Asad 2003), although historically, socially, economically, culturally and politically complex, remains in basic fashion a Christian phenomenon. Two well-known examples may help illustrate the point. First, is Carl Schmitt’s famous thesis concerning political theology: All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. (Schmitt 1985, 36) Theology, for Schmitt, lingers across the so-called “modern divide” in the political. The maintenance of theology in a secular guise, however, cannot be reduced to historical influence or accident, to the mere fact that one emerges out of and after the other. The link between the two is, rather, deep-seated, rooted in a conceptual relationship that is less easy to dismiss. One could argue, of course, that the analogy between the two is just that, an analogy, with little real explanatory force behind it. To do so, however, is to mistake content for form and its power. As Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, secularization “leaves intact the forces it deals with by

8  Hollis Phelps

simply moving them from one place to another. Thus, the political secularization of theological concepts … does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact” (Agamben 2007, 77). Second, are Walter Benjamin’s claims concerning the religious nature of capitalism, in “Capitalism as Religion.” Benjamin takes issue with Weber’s thesis concerning the development of capitalism as conditioned by Christianity. For Benjamin, the relationship is stronger: capitalism does not simply emerge out of Christianity, as a sort of by-product, but is rather a religious phenomenon in its own right, one that draws on, but also twists and reverses, Christian theological notions. Benjamin writes: “Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God’s transcendence is at an end. But he is not dead; he has been incorporated into human existence” (Benjamin 1996, 289). Capitalism, in this sense, emerges as “a parasite of Christianity in the West,” but as Benjamin points out, the parasite eventually becomes the host. Now, it is possible to see that “Christianity’s history is essentially that of its parasite—that is to say, of capitalism” (Benjamin 1996, 289). The recognition of the secular’s entanglement in the religious and vice versa, combined with the continuing visibility of religion as a public, political actor at local, national and international levels, has led to talk of a post-secular approach to both religion and society. Although the concept itself is not singular, in the sense that it serves as a sort of catch-all for a variety of theoretical and practical approaches, post-secularism can function either descriptively or normatively in both positive and negative senses, though the line between the two is often ambiguous (Dalferth 2010). We can understand the discourse on the “return of the religious” as broadly within this trajectory. Many of the thinkers included in this volume have, variously, been associated with that turn or return, although representing different positions on the ambiguous line between the descriptive and normative. Nevertheless, the essays we have gathered here also complicate the notion of a “return.” Although the recent emphasis on religion as part of the emergence of a post-secular paradigm from numerous quarters may indeed raise new questions, it is also worth recognizing that the question of religion, generally speaking, has been part and parcel of the European philosophical tradition from its inception. Immanuel Kant set the tone here. As Goodchild points out in his essay, “Kant’s critical turn towards the transcendental subject—exploring how the nature of human thinking imposes conditions upon all understanding of reality—is the precursor to all that follows.” But that critical turn, as Goodchild also shows, culminated in a philosophy of religion, a move that puts religion squarely within the domain of philosophical reflection. The question of religion, as the essays included in this volume show, will remain live for the thinkers that follow in Kant’s footsteps, even down to the present, among contemporary thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Luc Marion, François Laruelle and Slavoj Žižek.

Introduction  9  

Religion does not play the same role for the thinkers included in this volume, and each approaches religion with different, though often overlapping, concerns in mind. Nor do the thinkers presented in this volume evaluate religion in the same way. Nevertheless, what remains constant is a wrestling with religion, even if in ways less overt and often even concealed. Mark C. Taylor’s observation seems apt, in this respect: “People talk about the return of religion, that’s a mistake. It didn’t return because it never went away” (Hoffman and Taylor, 2008). The essays presented in this volume, we hope, help map this persistence, across a diverse array of philosophical perspectives. The essays thus not only provide basic introductions to the thinkers in question but also contribute to an evaluation of the role that religion has played in the construction of modernity and postmodernity. Far from a progressive movement away from religion, what the essays show instead is that religion remains a constant site of negotiation and delineation, from Kant up to the present.

The scope of the volume Any anthology must negotiate the fine line between inclusion and exclusion, and that is no less the case with this volume. Although we have tried to be as inclusive as possible, both in terms of the volume itself and the content of the individual essays, certain figures have inevitably been left out, and some readers may take issue with their exclusion. Likewise, in terms of the individual essays, certain themes have been emphasized over others, particularly those that bear directly on theology and religious studies. Our goal has not been to produce an authoritative canon but, rather, provide a set of essays that we think represents as best as possible the mainstream of the modern and contemporary European philosophical tradition, as it relates to current methodologies, themes, concerns and trends found in religious studies and theology. In many ways, the list of thinkers we have included is conventional, but this is wholly intentional on our part. For students to gain an adequate foothold in European philosophy, it is necessary first to grapple with the standard thinkers in that tradition. Selecting whom to include has not been an entirely straightforward affair. Many of the figures included in this volume should cause no argument. For instance, it is inconceivable that a volume such as this would not include figures like Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, to name but a few, given their stature and broad influence across multiple disciplines and, in particular, religious studies and theology. The inclusion of other figures, however, may prove more controversial and problematic to some, especially when weighed against those who have not been included. Why include, for example, Simone Weil but not Maurice MerleauPonty, Ernst Bloch but not Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Rosenzweig but not Sigmund Freud? That goes double for the inclusion of contemporary figures, whose work, and thus contributions to the field, is still very much in development, and may even remain largely unknown outside specialized domains, as is the case with someone like Laruelle.

10  Hollis Phelps

Being all-inclusive is, frankly, an impossible task, and in the end the figures that we have chosen constitute at least to some extent certain preferences on our part and a judgment about the current state of the field and its potential future. Nevertheless, we have sought to include figures whose work currently drives discussions, both in and beyond the scope of European philosophy proper. The work of the figures we have chosen, then, is sufficiently wide-ranging, but also specifically addresses issues of interest to the intended audience of this volume. That is, each of the figures chosen, both past and present, not only directly discusses at some point in his or her work religious and theological themes, but also uses these critically as resources to construct his or her philosophy. We hope at the end of the day that readers will focus more on whom and what we have included rather than excluded, as we are confident that readers will benefit immensely from the essays that we have gathered here. One more criterion is worth mentioning. We have limited the inclusion of figures to Europeans, specifically those whose work is widely available in translation, at least for the most part. Including those whose work has been translated into English fits with the overall emphasis of this volume. We aim, as stated above, to provide a readable, accessible introduction to the European philosophical tradition, but we also hope that the essays serve as catalysts for further reading and research. Since the volume is introductory in nature, it makes no sense to include figures who may not be accessible to those who lack facility in French, German and Italian. By focusing solely on European philosophers, our intent is not to be overly provincial. The European philosophical tradition does, of course, extend well beyond the geographical confines of the continent. Hence the use of the term “continental philosophy” in the English-speaking world as a virtual synonym to what we are referring to here as European philosophy. There are, no doubt, numerous wellknown figures in the English-speaking world whose work, in both substance and style, can be classified as “continental.” Indeed, some of those figures may even be better known than some of the thinkers included in this volume. What is called continental philosophy, and its closely related cousin critical theory, is a vast, global field, and cannot in the end be confined to a singular provenance. Nevertheless, it remains the case that much of the work done in the continental tradition remains derivative of the European philosophical tradition proper. Because of this, and again respecting the introductory nature of the volume, we have limited inclusion to those figures whose work originates from and takes place primarily within Europe.

Defining religion Religion is, of course, notoriously difficult to define, and its use as a descriptor of certain ideas, beliefs and practices has a complex, often checkered history. In exploring the relationship between religion and European philosophy (another term that, for what it is worth, is also difficult to define adequately, though for different reasons), our purpose is not to enter debates regarding the term’s status or scope. That goes as well for our inclusion of religious studies and theology under

Introduction  11  

the category of religion. Rather than entering debates regarding the shifting line that demarcates the two, we hope that the chapters included in this volume will prove useful to students and scholars of both. Whatever the status of the term “religion” in current debates, much of the material included in this volume can, we maintain, be lumped under that term without much difficulty. This is not because there is an “essence” of religion to which the thinkers included here respond but, rather, because it is often labelled as religious, often by the thinkers themselves. Our approach to the notion of religion as an organizing feature in this volume is, in this sense, pragmatic rather than theoretical. We certainly think that the individual chapters contribute to current debates regarding the status of the term, but we would also maintain that the chapters as a whole do so as well. That is, there is no singular definition of “religion” at work among the figures presented, a fact that may provide another means for complicating the notion of religion itself. Nevertheless, there are commonalities. The “religion” discussed in many of the chapters is, inevitably, that associated with the Judeo–Christian tradition, and Christianity remains more of a focus than Judaism. This has nothing to do with any normative assumptions but is, rather, a basic feature of the European philosophical tradition, at least as it has developed until now. That emphasis is, of course, understandable, albeit limited. Whatever one’s view of the matter, the religious, cultural and textual history of Europe and its intellectual traditions is indebted to Christianity, in terms of both origin and development and the themes taken up. That continues to remain the case today, even as Europe becomes increasingly more diverse and arguments of secularism notwithstanding. The authors of the chapters that follow evaluate this legacy differently, of course, and in light of this, many of the chapters explicitly intend to move beyond the thematically narrow focus on Christianity and its tradition. This is in keeping with current trends in continental philosophy, religious studies and theology, which seek to break out of the confines of a particular religious and cultural identity. We hope, then, that the chapters serve as well to broaden the focus of the European philosophical tradition when it comes to treating religious and theological matters. A broader focus, in our minds, can only enrich both.

Structure of the volume and format of the chapters The chapters that follow, as we have said, aim at a broad readership, but are designed specifically for students of religious studies and theology looking to gain a foothold in the European philosophical tradition. We have organized the chapters into five different sections, each of which corresponds to broad movements and shared concerns within the European philosophical tradition as a whole: German idealism; Critical theory; Living experience; Phenomenology and hermeneutics; and Structuralism, post-structuralism and beyond. We hope that by organizing the volume in this manner, students will get a handle on key thinkers commonly associated with various movements, along with the movements themselves. We also hope that

12  Hollis Phelps

the chosen organization will shore up the broad differences and similarities in the approach to religion in European philosophy, as it plays out over the course of its history to the present. The organization of the volume, then, allows for an appreciation of certain trends when it comes to the question of religion, which will, in turn, allow for a better evaluation of current discussions regarding religion, both in and outside philosophy. Concerning the chapters themselves, all of them are introductory in nature, in at least three senses. First, the goal of each chapter is to provide an overview of the key concepts of a major figure in relation to issues in religious studies and theology. The chapters, in this sense, do not just focus on religion and theology, but rather use the latter as a lens through which to present the major themes that constitute the philosophy in question. The chapters proceed on the assumption that the reader will have no specific knowledge of the thinker in question, and the hope is that the reader will come away with a general knowledge of the thinker and more specific information about how the latter relates to issues in religious studies and theology. Second, the chapters attempt to avoid all unnecessary jargon. The use of some amount of specialized vocabulary is, of course, inevitable, but every attempt has been made to do so in a limited fashion. When specialized terminology is used, moreover, care is taken to define the terms being used as clearly as possible. There is certainly a place for specialized vocabulary and every discipline must employ it to some extent as a way of moving discussions forward and producing knowledge. This is no less the case with European philosophy, even if it is often accused of being unnecessarily opaque. Nevertheless, our aim is readability for the uninitiated reader, and we have made every attempt to uphold that goal. Third, references to secondary literature and internal debates have been kept to a minimum to avoid overwhelming the novice reader with information that is initially unnecessary. This does not mean, however, that the chapters lack rigor. The chapters are written by experts on the figures in question, and are, we maintain, of the highest quality. Moreover, despite having kept secondary discussions to a minimum, many of the chapters make distinct contributions in their own right by intervening in the existing literature and attempting to show how the figure’s thought remains fruitful. The latter dimension of each chapter moves beyond description and towards construction, and because of this, we hope that the chapters will also appeal to seasoned readers as they make distinct contributions to the field. Although the organization of the chapters differ, depending on how the author thought best to present the subject matter, each chapter contains the following components: a brief biographical sketch that situates the thinker in his or her cultural and intellectual milieu; a readable overview of the main themes found throughout the thinker’s body of works; a discussion of how these themes relate to religious themes, explicitly or implicitly; and an evaluation of the thinker’s present and future relevance in regard to religious studies and theology. In conclusion, we hope that the chapters that follow prove broadly useful, helping students and scholars to navigate a diverse and difficult body of literature and so enable future scholarly work.

Introduction  13  

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. “In Praise of Profanation.” In Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1996. “Capitalism as Religion.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berger, Peter L. 1999. “The Desecularization of the Word: A Global Overview.” In The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Edited by Peter L. Berger. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Bruce, Steve. 2002. God is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Dalferth, Ingolf. 2010. “Post-secular Society: Christianity and the Dialectics of the Secular.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78.2: 317–45. de Vries, Hent. 1999. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hoffmann, Claire, and Mark C. Taylor. 2008. “Religion’s ‘Return’ and Globalization.” https://www.onfaith.co/onfaith/2008/04/24/guest-blog-post-what-is-religi/2752. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Vintage. Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Vattimo, Gianni. 2002. After Christianity. Translated by Luca D’Isanto. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Zupančič, Alenka. 2003. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Part 1

German idealism

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1 Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Philip Goodchild

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant is an obvious starting point for this volume on European philosophy and its relation to religion. In many ways, Kant’s critical turn towards the transcendental subject—exploring how the nature of human thinking imposes conditions upon all understanding of reality—is the precursor to all that follows. Kant remains a major interlocutor or figure to debate with for his immediate successors, such as Hegel, Schelling and Schopenhauer, as well as a major reference point for key founders of new approaches in this tradition, such as Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger, and, indeed, an intimate and often unspoken influence on such diverse figures as Kierkegaard, Bloch, Weil, Ricoeur, Foucault and Deleuze. Kant’s influence on subsequent Christian theology has also been immense, both in setting the agenda for liberal theology and in offering a touchstone for the kind of modern thought that theology resists; Kant’s critique of speculative approaches to God and his deontological approach to ethics has also held significant resonances for Jewish thought. Moreover, the depth of thinking that has gone into each page of his writing, and his enthusiasm for reason working towards a coherent and systematic unity, sets his work apart: one can be deeply educated by working through his writings. Nevertheless, like most great innovators, Kant himself stands firmly within the philosophical era that preceded the tradition he made possible. An Enlightenment thinker himself, Kant was brought up as a Pietist and remained fundamentally concerned with giving a rational articulation to an essentially Protestant faith. Salvation through grace alone, a personal commitment to holiness, belief in an afterlife and a suspicion of rites and priests, characterize his thought, even if he regarded stories such as the resurrection and the ascension as potentially misleading by giving a sensuous imagination to the future life (Kant 1998, 133n). Nevertheless, because Kant’s influence on metaphysics and epistemology, on the one hand, and on moral philosophy, on the other, has been so immense, he is often interpreted

18  Philip Goodchild

one-sidedly through the lens of later debates on religion, whether as offering a case for ­skepticism regarding religion, based on his critique of metaphysics or as reducing religion to morality, based on his practical philosophy. In the interpretation that follows, I shall endeavor to show that Kant’s philosophy of religion is the culminating completion of his critical project, reuniting theoretical and practical reason.1 For Kant’s philosophy is structured around three questions: “(1) What can I know (metaphysics)? (2) What ought I to do (moral philosophy)? (3) What can I hope (philosophy of religion)?”2 The context for Kant’s critical turn in philosophy lies in the tension between the rise of modern science, with its determinist view of nature understood as following given laws, and the purposive world of human freedom, where actions are undertaken to obtain good ends. Human beings seem to participate in both realms at once. In the study of nature, priority is given to the means by which ends are attained, and natural laws are universal principles according to which these means operate. In the study of morality, priority is given to the ends to be obtained, and the choice of ends determines which means are adopted. Here, for Kant, moral laws are universal principles according to which a free will may choose its ends. In both cases, whether seeking a theoretical understanding of nature or practical conduct within the world, reason operates by finding universal and necessary principles. Since universality and necessity can never be reached by any empirical process, one must abstract from what is given through the senses to find what contribution is made by the mind: this contribution is “transcendental,” referring to the conditions of possible experience. Nevertheless, there is the danger of a clash between theoretical and practical reason: at the theoretical level, if nature follows determined laws, it is difficult to find any place for human freedom; at the practical level, if conduct is purely moral, it rarely fully is effective in achieving its end of human happiness. Kant’s critical turn consists in setting limits to the use of theoretical reason so that it does not transgress into the moral domain of human freedom; it also consists in purifying practical reason so that it concerns the will alone and does not transgress into the empirical domain by pursuing pleasures or goods. Nevertheless, a reconciliation may still be hoped for: the moral will necessarily hopes for the realization of happiness in the future. For morality has both its grounds, that to be moral it is based on principles that are universal and necessary, as well as its objects, that the will acts in the world to achieve the good. Morality, therefore, hopes for a reconciliation between the purposive order of nature and the purposive order of freedom so that doing the good may effectively achieve happiness. Of course, experience shows a mismatch between moral conduct and happiness. But what is not possible for humans, as a result of natural finitude and moral guilt, may be possible for God. This hope for reconciliation belongs neither to metaphysics nor to morality, but to the domain of religion: God, as the author of both nature and morality, can ensure their successful combination (even if in a future life). God, freedom and immortality are the three central ideas in Kant’s rational philosophy of religion (Kant 1929, 46). In this respect, Kant’s critical turn consists in reducing the pretensions of both theoretical and practical reason to

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)  19  

keep them in properly human proportions. He offers a critique of the illusions and delusions inherent within reason itself consistent with a religious reverence for the holiness, benevolence and justice of God. Kant famously stated: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (1929, 29).3 Criticism orients faith towards true religion: “Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally” (1929, 32). Atheists and simple believers alike have not followed Kant’s critical path.

What can I know? Kant’s critical project was first announced in his Critique of Pure Reason ([1781] 1929), which posed a simple problem: how is metaphysics possible?4 If human reason, when abstracted from all experience, does not merely analyze concepts to find out what has already been presupposed in them, but actually draws constructive conclusions by combining concepts (in synthetic judgments), under what conditions is such reasoning possible (or legitimate)? This is, at first sight, a strange question, one that has never been asked before. Let us take as an example the metaphysical principle, “every alteration must have a cause” (Kant 1929, 44). Under what conditions is it legitimate? It cannot be verified from experience, since we might meet a future case where it does not apply; but it can still be taken as universally applicable, as a guide to our understanding, in that for every alteration, we should look for a cause. Nevertheless, this principle can lead directly to a contradiction when we look for an unconditioned origin of all conditions. On the one hand, if every alteration has a cause, then that cause, in bringing about an alteration, must also change, so it must also have a cause. The series of causes will be infinite; there cannot be a first cause. On the other hand, the series of hypothetical causes cannot be infinite or else it would never have got started, for every actual alteration actually has a cause. There must be a first cause. The search for the unconditioned leads directly to contradictions. This conflict in metaphysics is one of many. According to Kant, all metaphysical systems have been in conflict with others, none have proven decisive, and this has given way to skepticism (1929, 21). Yet attempts to root metaphysics in experience by means of a “physiology” of the understanding have also failed, since such an empirical account is a fiction without any necessary force (1929, 8). Metaphysics is necessary, but cannot be pursued successfully through pure reason or through analyzing experience. Kant offers a clue to the solution of this dilemma by pointing to the phenomena of left-handedness and right-handedness. While a subject can distinguish between his or her own left or right, there is no purely objective way of distinguishing between left and right as mirror images of each other. In our experience of space, the subject’s point of view is necessary to give orientation (Kant 1996, 54). Kant generalizes this principle to our understanding of space as such, and to all concepts through which we understand reality. Just as left or right are appearances, ways in which we make sense of things simply from our own point of view, then so also all

20  Philip Goodchild

phenomena are mere appearances which may not correspond to how things are in themselves. Experience is composed from a combination of sensibility and understanding. We do not see things as they are in themselves through perception, but intuit only the way in which they affect our senses (1996, 58). The understanding, in turn, makes judgments about what we perceive, and it does so by connecting those intuitions into meaningful relations such as causation. In other words, the purpose of understanding is purely to make sense of experience by making judgments or grasping relations. We use concepts such as “cause” (itself a relation), substance, power, action or reality to make our experience meaningful, but just like left and right, they explain how experience appears to us. Sensibility offers an endlessly variable material, while understanding offers a fixed set of relational elements. But if the concepts of understanding, instead of relating sense intuitions to form a meaningful experience, are taken to refer to things in themselves then this usage is illegitimate, and contradictions are bound to arise. To assume that we can gain knowledge from pure ideas, without experience, is a demand that knows no limits. “The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space” (Kant 1929, 47). We only know experience; we do not directly know causes or “things-in-themselves.” To imagine that we do is to add an element from sensibility to our understanding; it is therefore to narrow the scope of our reasoning, not to enhance it. “Objects of the senses therefore exist only in experience; whereas to give them a self-subsisting existence apart from experience or before it is merely to represent to ourselves that experience actually exists apart from experience or before it” (Kant 1996, 102). It is not that our understanding of experience is entirely foreign to the things-inthemselves (as though we could say that there are no causes in nature, but merely in us)—Kant will later allow the use of analogies to enable us to discuss them—but the only knowledge that we have of any fit between things and our experience is that experience itself. The understanding cannot judge the categories it uses by means of its own categories. This critical insight seems to point towards a subjectivism, relativism or skepticism: if understanding is limited to processing experience, all we can know is what appears to us from a particular point of view. A second critical insight recovers the possibility of metaphysics. To be oriented in space by left and right is not merely subjective; it is universal and necessary. Now, we might normally think of universal rules objectively in terms of nature, which is the existence of things in so far as it is determined according to universal laws (as such, nature is not an object of possible experience). Yet there are also universal rules, which prescribe how we use our understanding. For example, we conceive all outer objects as existing in space, and when their specific or intuited features are removed, pure space remains. Similarly, we conceive all our inner life as existing in time, and when specific thoughts are taken away, the pure form of time remains. We do not experience space and time in themselves; we only experience phenomena in space and time. The subject provides space and time as the grounds of all intuitions, but these conditions of subjective intuition are universal

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)  21  

and necessary. Kant will term “transcendental” the subjective conditions of possible experience, or the concepts that each person’s understanding must use to make sense of experience. The second critical insight is that metaphysics is possible so long as it is concerned with the universal and necessary principles of subjective representation. Previous approaches to metaphysics have missed this distinctive limitation, for when we take the subjective grounds of our judgments to be objective, as if we could know substances, powers, actions, realities and causes as they are in themselves, then we fall into an illusion (Kant 1996, 91). For we then treat these as though they could be objects of possible experience, and we try to make sense of them through the understanding. We make the subjective objective. But, for Kant, they are simply that through which the understanding makes sense of things, not objects of the understanding. So, if we simply treat them as the necessary categories through which our understanding constructs relations to make sense of experience, then all illusions, together with the contradictions they produce, vanish. In Kant’s thought, metaphysics is universal and necessary, but no longer objective or imagined. Instead, it delineates the constitution of subjectivity. Kant’s crucial distinctions between the faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason are metaphysical distinctions that refer solely to the constitution of subjectivity. Of course, we cannot know such faculties as they are in themselves, but we can regulate our thinking by means of them. Sensibility is the faculty of producing intuitions, which are necessarily intuited in terms of space and time. Understanding, by contrast, is the faculty of making logical judgments about what is the case. Kant deduces the nature of the understanding from four dimensions of logic. Logical judgments can express a quantitative dimension, stating whether something is universal, merely particular, or entirely singular and unique. To make such judgments, one must call upon categories of unity, plurality and totality. These are not objects of intuition, but the concepts employed by the understanding in its judgments. Similarly, logical judgments can express a qualitative dimension, affirming the existence of something, or denying it, or denying any possible limitation on it and so affirming it to be infinite. To make such judgments, one must call upon categories of reality, negation and limitation. Furthermore, logical judgments can express relations, indicating whether a relation is categorical, that is, true under all circumstances, or hypothetical, true under certain conditions, or disjunctive, offering a necessary alternative. For categorical relations, one needs a concept of inherence or subsistence; for hypothetical relations, one needs a concept of causality or dependence; for disjunctive relations, one has to group these in a community of alternative possibilities. Finally, judgments can be expressed in differing modalities: they can be apodeictic, asserting the judgment is necessary, relying on concepts of necessity and contingency. They can be assertoric, stating what is the case, relying on concepts of existence and non-existence. They can even be problematic, suggesting something as possible but leaving its actual truth still to be resolved, relying on conceptions of possibility and impossibility. This enumeration, according to Kant, is the complete table of transcendental concepts of the understanding used in making sense of experience.

22  Philip Goodchild

Another of Kant’s innovations is to make a clear distinction between ­understanding and reason (Kant 1996, 88). Whereas judgments of the understanding can be expressed in single propositions, the faculty of reason makes use of arguments to connect propositions. For example, a typical rational argument connects a universal judgment with a particular judgment: all men are mortal; Caius is a man; therefore, Caius is mortal (Kant 1929, 315). Such reasoning is based on special a priori concepts, which Kant will call pure concepts of reason or transcendental ideas. For reason can extend knowledge obtained through the understanding, but it extends that knowledge in three directions. In one direction, reason seeks the reality behind appearances, or the substance underlying an accident, asking the metaphysical question of what is truly real. It seeks a subject that can never become a predicate. For men can be mortal, Caius can be a man, but what can be Caius? Caius, as a human subject, is logically unconditioned. Kant is consistent in denying any knowledge of the substance of external realities, and treating the human subject as the unconditioned limit of this inquiry. In the last instance, all knowledge is qualified as my knowledge, yielding a concept of the self: “Hence the concept of a substance arises when I perceive in myself that I am not the predicate of any other thing” (Kant 1978, 74). The self is the unconditioned idea of categorical syllogisms. In a second direction, reason seeks the presupposition that presupposes nothing further. For that all men are mortal may be based on the presuppositions that all men are living beings, all living beings die, and so on. Each stage is hypothetical, that is, the conclusion follows only if the condition is given. The final unity of all such conditions is the world itself, all the rules that make experience meaningful, or the sum total of nature: the world is the unconditioned idea of hypothetical syllogisms. In a third direction, reason seeks a system that will specify all alternative possibilities: Caius is either mortal or immortal, living or inanimate, human or inhuman. This system finds its unity in the highest being, which is the primordial being, and the most real being. Each being may be specified in relation to this idea by the negation of certain perfections. In a perhaps surprising move, Kant defines God as the unconditioned idea of disjunctive syllogisms. Perhaps this particular conception of God is not religiously significant, and purely of interest to Kant insofar as it defines the concept of God through theoretical reason. So, reason is oriented by its three transcendental ideas: the self, world and God. Now we come to the necessary contradiction, the “dialectic” that is found in pure theoretical reason itself. On the one hand, we may link syllogisms using reason, but we can never arrive at the unconditioned limit in any of these three directions—for every condition there is a further condition. The regress is infinite. On the other hand, to reason at all, we must treat all three ideas as if they are firmly in place: we must assume that there is an ultimate subject, a totality of conditions, and a complete space of possibilities, even if these are not known. The transcendental ideas of self, world and God are regulative ideas that give an orientation to reason; yet they cannot be encountered in sense experience and subjected to the understanding. To reduce self, world or God to experience would be to reduce them

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)  23  

to being merely contingent things within experience, rather than treating them as what gives meaning to experience. Therefore, we cannot know what they refer to in themselves, outside the thinking subject. Kant’s famous criticisms of the classical arguments for the existence of God follow from this threefold analysis of the sensibility, the understanding and reason: it is illegitimate to subject these transcendental ideas of reason to the principles of the understanding that are used solely for making sense of experience. Kant distinguishes three illegitimate approaches. The ontotheological approach to God considers God purely in terms of concepts of being. God may be conceived as the original being, the highest being or as the being (or ground) of all beings. The ontological proof would endeavor to deduce the existence of God from these conceptions of being—for if God lacked existence, God could be neither original, highest nor ground since God would simply be a concept in our own minds and subordinate to our minds. Now, from Kant’s perspective, the ontological predicates of God, such as possibility, existence, necessity, substance, unity, simplicity, infinity, duration and presence, simply derive from the categories of our understanding. They are used to make sense of experience, but when one connects them with the idea of existence, then one transgresses the boundaries of understanding. For the understanding can only make connections between its objects; it cannot reach outside of experience altogether. This is the case even when one understands an object as existing: “Being … is only the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations, in themselves. In its logical employment, it is merely the copula in a judgment” (Kant 1978, 59). One does not break out of representation simply through understanding. To say that something “is” is to make a judgment that links subject and predicate; this is why Kant says that existence itself is not a predicate. A hundred dollars in reality does not contain any more than a hundred dollars in imagination (Kant 1929, 505). By existing, a thing is merely posited (by the understanding) and no new predicate is added. Otherwise, “if existence were a special reality belonging to the thing, it would not be the same thing that I had thought before” (Kant 1978, 59). Another approach to God, the cosmotheological, infers the highest being from the existence of the world in general: from the fact that all existence is contingent, yet actually exists, it is necessary that a being exists upon which it depends. “If anything exists, an absolutely necessary must also exist. Now I at least exist. Therefore, an absolutely necessary being must exist” (Kant 1929, 508). But this, for Kant, extends the connection of the conditioned with its condition so far that experience cannot keep up with it (Kant 1996, 99): we cannot experience a necessary idea. To show that such a necessary idea exists, we would have to infer existence from its concept. But logical necessity in the understanding is purely subjective; it is not the same thing as actual necessity in reality. The cosmological proof presupposes the ontological proof in moving from a concept to existence. It applies the principle of causality beyond the analysis of experience, where it belongs, to a realm where it has no meaning. There is no reason for identifying a necessary being with the highest being, or God.

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Finally, the physicotheological approach to God infers the existence of God from our experience of how the world is: the presence of purposiveness, order, and beauty inclines us to believe in an author of these.5 Kant always mentions this “proof” with respect: it is the “oldest, clearest, and most accordant with the common reason of mankind” (Kant 1929, 520). Even Hume’s objection to the design argument is described as weak. “Purposiveness in the effects always presupposes understanding in the cause” (Kant 1978, 100–1). Kant explicitly rejects any alternative naturalistic explanation of the world for these refuse any planning, any looking forwards, any relation to what is outside of one’s own being—each of which involves intelligence. “For assuming that we think of nature as such a blindly working original being, it would never have had the capacity to relate itself to subjects, to things outside it. But then how could it have the causality or capacity to actualize things outside it, and indeed things which are to agree to a plan?” (1978, 101). A fertile or evolutionary cause of the world cannot be thought without contradiction. Kant even devoted his third critique, Critique of Judgment ([1790]), to discerning legitimate judgments of beauty, order, and purpose in the world. Kant’s own critique of the design argument is simply intended to tone down the language of proof to the more humble and moderate requirements of a belief adequate to quieten our doubts, though not to command unconditional submission” (Kant 1929, 521). For the argument to work, it would be necessary to show that things are not only susceptible to purpose, order, and beauty, but also that they could not be so without being made by supreme wisdom. The best that the argument could show is an architect of the world, one hampered by his materials; it could not show that this architect is a creator, to whose idea everything is subject. “To advance to absolute totality by the empirical road is utterly impossible. None the less, this is what is attempted in the physico-theological proof ” (1929, 522). One can only look for purpose within nature itself; one cannot look outside of nature for the purpose of nature’s existence. While one might admire the greatness, wisdom, and power of the author of the world, to go any further would require that we rely purely on concepts, and so on the ontotheological proof. For Kant, all possible theoretical arguments for the existence of God reduce to these, and none have necessary force.

What ought I to do? Reason is concerned with what is necessary. Now in addition to logical necessity and natural necessity, there is also moral necessity: one ought not to do some things, and ought to do others. Morality is also necessary and universal. Practical reason is concerned with ends: it does not seek purely to know objects, but to make them real (Kant 1976, 195). It presupposes freedom. If one takes a purely theoretical view of the human subject, understood as an object in time, then the grounds for any action lie in the past and are no longer in its power. But if one takes this view as mere appearance, so that the subject in itself lies outside this chain of natural necessities, then freedom is possible. Freedom, for Kant, is the keystone of the system of pure reason (1976, 118). There is no theoretical proof for freedom;

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but critique refutes determinism by reducing it to appearance. Causality applies to appearances; freedom to things in themselves (Kant 1929, 28). Freedom, in fact, is a necessary presupposition of the moral law. Since we act as if we are free, as if we are morally obliged, by that fact we are free (Kant 1978, 105). The reality of intelligent agents and an intelligible world is established only from a practical point of view, from morality and freedom (1976, 210). Since morality and freedom stand or fall together, Kant’s critical move in respect of practical reason is to keep pure, intelligible morality separable from all empirical principles: this is the primary agenda of his Critique of Practical Reason ([1788] 1978). Practical reason is concerned with the grounds of determination of the will, the reasons for its free choices. Only a will can be moral. Empirical ideas of what is good, based on happiness, want or need, are contingent: they cannot furnish any necessary law. For whether one bases morality on what one takes as objectively good, or else on feelings and inclinations such as sympathy, the determining ground of the will is a form of self-love. It cannot be truly moral, because its incentives are not truly moral. Kant rejects love, sympathy and love of order as genuine moral maxims because they take features from experience as the ground of the will (Kant 1976, 189). For a will that chooses a good empirical end is merely prudent, adapting its means for a given end. Only a truly moral will chooses ends because they are moral. Duty and obligation are the sole relation to the moral law for moral conduct must be entirely independent from the mechanism of nature. Kant’s most important task in his critique of practical reason is separating empirical principles of happiness from the pure, rational doctrine of morality. The highest good, therefore, is not to be taken as a ground that determines the will. If the human will was necessarily to will the highest good, then it would not be free, and one would lose the moral and intelligible world in its separation from nature. Nevertheless, the highest good should be taken as an object of the will, since a good will endeavors to realize its object in experience. Kant asks, “How is the highest good practically possible?” (Kant 1976, 217). The highest good has two sides: happiness in the order of nature, and virtue in the order of morality. In human experience, there is no natural fit between these: the wicked will often flourish, while the virtuous may be despised and persecuted. Yet this is just as well, for if virtue led naturally to happiness, then people would conform to virtue out of self-interest, and so would fail to be truly moral. For the only moral reason for doing anything is from duty or respect for the moral law; any other reason for conforming to the law may be legal, but it is not moral. Nevertheless, a truly moral will has to seek the highest good as both personal holiness, complete subjective conformity to the moral law, and as human happiness, the realization of the good will’s ultimate ends in the world.

What can I hope? Kant uses this concept of the highest good to bring in religion. Practical reason is self-sufficient without religion: it is not necessary to assume God to deduce the

26  Philip Goodchild

moral law from the principle of its universalizability. Moral duties are ­absolutely certain, derived from reason, and grounded in the nature of free and rational beings. Nevertheless, practical reason leads to religion. For if the highest good is not practically possible, then the moral law is fantastic, directed towards imaginary ends (Kant 1976, 218). To will the highest good, one must assume that it is possible. In other words, one must assume the possibility of an adaptation of the natural order of the world, which produces happiness, and the moral order of the good, which produces virtue. This assumption, which goes against the evidence, is nevertheless necessary, otherwise “all subjectively necessary duties which I as a rational being am responsible for performing will lose their objective reality” (Kant 1978, 110). Such a good will finds it subjectively necessary to assume that it can continue to make moral progress in adapting itself to the moral law; this indefinite progress requires the presupposition of immortality (Kant 1976, 226). It also finds it necessary to presuppose something like a “kingdom of God,” a harmony between virtue and happiness that is foreign to nature and morality in this life. “The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all conduct. This I cannot hope to effect except through agreement of my will with that of a holy and beneficent Author of the world” (1976, 232). Morality merely tells us how to be worthy of happiness. Only a God who is at once holy, perfectly in conformity with the moral law, benevolent, wishing to give happiness and just, apportioning happiness to worthiness, is capable of assuring the ultimate adaptation of nature to morality. Such a God is the divine author of both nature and morality, capable of reuniting theoretical and practical reason. It is important to recognize that this is a hope, not a proof: “The righteous man may say: I will that there be a God, that my existence in this world be also an existence in a pure world of the understanding outside the system of natural connections, and finally that my duration be endless” (1976, 245). It is morally necessary to assume the existence of God, but this necessity is subjective—it is a need, not a duty itself (1976, 228). It is not intended to prove to a sceptic that there is a God (Kant 1987, 340n). Instead, it is a rational faith or necessary belief, one founded entirely on subjective grounds, but necessary nonetheless. Moral certainty is entirely different from logical certainty. “No, my conviction is not logical, but moral certainty; and since it rests on subjective grounds (of the moral sentiment), I must not even say, “It is morally certain that there is a God, etc.,” but “I am morally certain, etc.” (Kant 1929, 650). For if religion were founded on logical certainty, then fear of the existence of God and the future life would supplant all truly religious motives. Religion, for Kant, is defined in purely subjective terms as a quality of the human will: religion is the recognition of all moral duties as divine commands (Kant 1998, 153). Religion does not give a better knowledge of such duties; instead, it assists people in realizing such duties (Kant 1978, 24). It is intended to give an objective, practical reality to the combination of the purposiveness arising from freedom and the purposiveness of nature (Kant 1998, 35). Yet, even as such, religion remains a purely rational concept, abstracting from all experience (1998, 40). While religion is a matter of faith, not reason—there is no universal or necessary reason why

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a­ nyone must be religious or moral—true religion is rational insofar as it conforms to morality. Kant can therefore offer a critique of religion to distinguish pure, genuine religion as a subjective condition of the will from its mixtures with experience: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason ([1793] 1998). Kant derives religion from the human freedom to execute moral duties. It is the subjective attitude that takes such duties with utmost seriousness: religion is conscientiousness. Religion is a matter of avoiding self-deception by using means as a substitute for ends. Now, according to Kant, freedom has a peculiar characteristic because it operates in both the natural and moral world. If one chooses a course of action based on an incentive, in the natural order, one has also adopted it based on a universal rule, in the moral order, according to which the will conducts itself. By making a choice for a particular reason, one treats the ground of such a reason (the “maxim”) as a universal rule to follow in all choices (Kant 1998, 49). Moreover, the first subjective ground of all choices is a single decision which subsequently applies to all choices (Kant 1998, 50). The good or evil heart is the subjective ground of the possibility of an inclination. Natural inclinations and incentives are good in themselves. Problems arise when the incentives of self-love and their inclinations are made into conditions of compliance with the moral law, instead of treating the moral law itself as the supreme condition for the satisfaction of self-love (Kant 1998, 59). Kant divides human predispositions into three kinds, each of which are good in themselves, but the first two can easily become the basis for evil: there are those which are not rooted in reason, such as predispositions towards self-love, reproduction and community; there are those which are rooted in incentives but apply reason, such as desires for worth in the opinion of others; and there is the desire which consists in respect for the moral law because it is moral. If one complies with the moral law only when it is in one’s own interests, then one has subordinated the moral law to self-interest. This “propensity to evil” seems innate, and yet it is one’s own deed, subordinating moral duties to self-love. Once such a choice has been taken—and all human beings do take it to some extent—then it cannot be overcome by one’s own choice, since the subjective ground of moral decisions is already evil. The human predicament is one of “radical evil” wherein it is impossible to choose to have a holy will. This corruption of the heart is the occasion for the relevance of religion. For Kant, there are only two essential kinds of religion. One may simply wish for happiness, or wish to become a better human being, and expect God to provide—these are religions of rogation (petition). Alternatively, one may do all that is in one’s power to become a better human being—these are religions of good life conduct. Now, for Kant, only the latter kind is genuine in the sense that it demonstrates an authentic will for the good. Of course, it is impossible for humans to save themselves. But a good will endeavors to realize the good in action; without that sincere intention, no moral salvation has taken place. Only by doing as much as is within one’s power does one demonstrate one’s sincerity; one may then hope for cooperation from divine grace. For God is holy, benevolent and just, apportioning happiness to those who are worthy of it. Such a holy God can only approve of a sincere heart, a heart that endeavors

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to conform to morality: “there is absolutely no salvation for human beings except in the innermost adoption of genuine moral principles in their disposition” (Kant 1998, 97). Moral conduct is all that is required from humans; it is God’s prerogative if grace is added from above to purify the heart. Religions lose this focus if they require “divine service” apart from morality. But since there is a “natural need for something the senses can hold onto, some confirmation from experience or the like,” historical religions emerge to supplement a purely rational religion (1998, 118). While a true, rational religion is universal, pure, unchangeable and guarantees freedom to its members (since only free action is truly moral action), a historical religion is restricted to one people, mixes pure reason with experience, has an origin and evolution in history and is ultimately based on the authority of those who interpret the revelation. In such revealed religions, one must know that something is a divine command before it can be recognized as one’s duty; in the purely moral religion, by contrast, one knows moral duties first before treating them as divine commands. Kant is very clear: he does not condemn revealed, historical, ecclesiastical or statutory religions. In fact, historically speaking, moral action is enhanced by forming an ethical community committed to doing the good, and ecclesiastical faith precedes pure religious faith (1998, 115). Such religions are good insofar as they teach true morality. Kant never contests the intrinsic possibility of a divine revelation, since “no human being can determine anything through reason in these matters” (1998, 154). Revelation must even be cherished as a means for giving meaning, diffusion and continuity to religion among the ignorant (1998, 162). There is even nothing wrong in trying to make oneself receptive to supernatural influence, so long as this is to be received, not claimed (1998, 174). Private prayer, church-going, baptism and communion are encouraged by Kant as means of forming an ethical community (1998, 184).6 Yet, for revealed and historical religions to be moral, they require an interpretation which harmonizes with the pure religion of reason. This, in fact, is what has always been done by the great religious thinkers (1998, 118), for it is the moral force of religious teachers that is recognized. Kant affirms the freedom of a purely philosophical theology by which all biblical theology should be judged. The danger, with historical religions, is one of counterfeit service: declaring that pure morality is damnable, while particular rites, membership or beliefs are salvific (1998, 152). Once this step is taken, then a concern for true morality is subordinated to the particular incentives of personal salvation. This is “radical evil” at the communal level, a corruption at the most fundamental level of the heart. It is based on a collective delusion, the mistake of regarding the mere representation of moral goodness as equivalent to moral goodness (1998, 164). It is a delusion to attribute the mind’s readiness to take on attitudes of devotion to God the value of true devotion to God (1998, 166). To take an ecclesiastical faith as essential to the service of God, and the supreme condition of divine favor, is “a pretension of honoring God through which we act directly contrary to the true service required by him” (1998, 164). Even in its better forms, ecclesiastical faith can encourage the habit of hypocrisy that quietly undermines the integrity and loyalty of subjects

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(1998, 174). Such attitudes arise from failing to keep morality and service of God entirely distinct from questions of knowledge. For experience is never sufficient to give us knowledge of the supersensible; instead, religions must be tested to see if they conform to what we know of morality. It is strictly unnecessary to know what God does for human salvation. Religious delusions arise when people claim to know the effects of grace in inner experience, leading to enthusiasm. They arise when people claim to know the effects of grace in outer experience, in the belief in miracles, leading to superstition. They arise when people claim an enlightenment of the understanding through illumination, or the belief in mysteries, leading to the delusion of initiates. They arise when people claim to know the means of grace, and attempt to use these to influence the supernatural, leading to “thaumaturgy” or magic (1998, 72). Strictly speaking, Kant cannot be denying that God acts in any of these ways, for reason can tell us nothing about this. Instead, he says that we cannot have any knowledge of such divine actions, and we cannot make such aspects of religion into a requirement for salvation, which is purely a matter of having a good will. We cannot incorporate the effects of grace for theoretical or practical use (1998, 72). Each of these tends to be substituted for what is really required, which is to treat all our duties as divine commands. “Each must, on the contrary, so conduct himself as if everything depended on him. Only on this condition may he hope that a higher wisdom will provide the fulfilment of his well-intentioned effort” (1998, 111). Of course, salvation does not depend on the individual; but one may only hope for salvation if one acts as if it does.

Conclusion Kant remained preoccupied by religion throughout his life. Prior to his critical turn, he endeavored to make religion rational through metaphysics, giving it a rational foundation in knowledge. But if a speculative demonstration were achieved, it would destroy the grounds for reverence of divine holiness. Following his critical turn, he explained religious life in terms of the moral life. Yet while morality simply identifies obligations through reason, religion puts these into practice as though they were divine commands. Instead of finding a foundation for God, freedom and immortality in theoretical knowledge, these are founded on moral necessity. One who truly seeks the highest good, according to Kant, must be religious. While the three critiques concerned the transcendental roles of understanding, reason and judgment as necessary a priori forms, religion is concerned with human temporal experience. On this new foundation, many of the traditional philosophical approaches to constructing a concept of God become relevant. Kant even recommends the way of analogy (Kant 1929, 531): although nothing can be known of God in Godself, God’s relation to the world can be understood as a cause by analogy with human freedom as an intelligent, purposive cause. The way of negation removes all anthropomorphisms; the way of eminence extends concepts to the divine (Kant 1978, 53–4). Kant’s purely philosophical religion is

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quite conventional, and compatible with aspects of Protestant and Catholic thought that understand the relation to the divine in strictly moral terms. Nevertheless, his shattering of the arguments for the existence of God, his turn towards the human subject, his attempt to replace revealed theology with philosophy, and his emphasis on religion as conscientiousness have had immense ramifications that set the path for philosophy over the following two centuries.

Notes 1 2 3 4

This is in accord with the reading of Collins 1967. Letter to C. F. Stäudlin, 1793, cited in Despland (1973, 158). Here, and in all subsequent quotations, emphasis is as found in the original. More formally, Kant’s question is “how are a priori synthetic judgments possible?” These are judgments which link different ideas together apart from experience, such as “every body has a weight” and “every alteration has a cause.” This question is wider than metaphysics, since it includes the whole of mathematics, which finds necessary relations by linking different ideas (e.g. 7+5=12), as well as the basic assumptions of science. Kant’s primary agenda, however, is to defend the possibility of a restricted metaphysics against empiricist skepticism and rationalist dogmatism. 5 Although not explicitly discussed here, arguments for the existence of God on the basis of miracles, answered prayer, or religious experience would also fit under this heading. 6 We might note that Kant stopped attending church himself, perhaps because of the dangers of moral hypocrisy.

References Collins, James. 1967. The Emergence of Philosophy of Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Despland, Michel. 1973. Kant on History and Religion. Montreal, CA: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Firestone, Chris L. and Palmquist, Stephen R. 2006. Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Firestone, Chris L. 2009. Kant and Theology at the Boundaries of Reason. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Kant, Immanuel. [1781] 1929. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Kant, Immanuel. [1783] 1996. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Edited by Beryl Logan. London, UK: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel. [1788] 1976. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Lewis White Beck. New York, NY: Garland. Kant, Immanuel. 1978. Lectures on Philosophical Theology. Translated by Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kant, Immanuel. [1790] 1987. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Kant, Immanuel. [1793] 1998. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Norman Kemp. 1923. A Commentary to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” London, UK: Macmillan.

2 G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) Molly Farneth

G. W. F. Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770, on the cusp of a great transformation in European social, intellectual and political life. Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel looked to the French revolution as the dawn of a new era, an era of greater freedom. His hopes dissipated as the revolution became “the Terror” and, later, transformed as the Holy Roman Empire collapsed and Napoleon reshaped Europe. Meanwhile, the German Enlightenment, although less hostile to religion than its French counterpart, challenged forms of heteronomous authority, including many traditional sources of religious authority.1 In the midst of all of this, Hegel was hopeful about the expanding possibilities for human freedom and rationality, but also worried about the forces capable of holding together this changing society. In particular, he worried that the emphasis on the authority of individual reason would lead to individuals’ isolation and alienation from one another and from the norms of their communities. Hegel was preoccupied by these tensions throughout his life and work. As a seminary student at the Tübinger Stift, he was enamoured of ancient Greece and the apparent harmony found there. In his early writings, Hegel suggested that the ethos and rituals fostered by ancient Greek religion reconciled individuals with one another and with their shared norms, laws and institutions. He wondered whether Christianity could play a similar role in modern society. While Hegel’s early essays express his scepticism about this possibility, his later philosophy of religion envisages a significant and positive role for religion in modern society.2 Beginning in the Phenomenology of Spirit and continuing through the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel makes two rather startling claims regarding religion and philosophy. First, unlike philosophers and theologians who relegate religion and philosophy to different spheres of human inquiry and activity, Hegel emphasizes their continuity. He claims that religion and philosophy have the same object: “the absolute.” Note, however, that what Hegel means by “the absolute” is far from obvious.

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Sometimes, especially when he is discussing religion, he uses “the absolute” interchangeably with “God.” At other times, he uses it interchangeably with “spirit.” What Hegel calls the absolute is an ultimate and self-sufficient authority—the standard by which we evaluate our norms as well as our judgments about those norms—but one cannot assume that it is the God of orthodox Christianity. In fact, Hegel is rethinking what is worthy of the title “God,” and his philosophy of religion attempts to define that term in a new way. Therefore, at the outset of the inquiry, one must hold off on importing any familiar sense of “the absolute” or “God” into Hegel’s use of these terms. The second claim that Hegel makes about religion and philosophy is that while they share the same object, they know this object in different forms. Religion knows the absolute in a representational form (Vorstellung). Philosophy, meanwhile, knows the absolute in the form of thought (Denken) or concept (Begriff  ). For this reason, Hegel suggests, philosophy’s knowledge of the absolute goes beyond or exceeds religion’s. But, once again, it is far from clear at the outset what this might mean. In what sense does philosophy’s knowledge of the absolute exceed religion’s? If religion and philosophy share the same object and content, then what is lost or distorted when it is known representationally rather than conceptually? These questions have been, and continue to be, the starting point for major debates among scholars interested in Hegel’s philosophy of religion.3 This essay explores the role of religion and theology in Hegel’s work through a discussion of these two major works: Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. In these works, Hegel offers an account of “the absolute” as a self-conscious and self-sufficient authority. When religion calls this authority “God,” it projects it outward, beyond the human realm. When philosophy calls this authority “spirit,” it grasps authority’s immanent character. What philosophy understands that religion does not is that the absolute (God or spirit) is none other than the collective normative activity of individuals in community. Nevertheless, Hegel’s later work suggests that religion serves an indispensable social function that philosophy does not. Because religion is “for everyone,” it can cultivate the habits and dispositions of free citizens and reconcile them to one another and to their shared society.

Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel published the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807, when he was working as an unsalaried lecturer in Jena. The Phenomenology is Hegel’s first presentation of his mature philosophical system and remains one of his most important works. In it, Hegel describes the search for a self-sufficient standard of knowledge—the authority that grounds human beings’ judgments about what is good, right or true. He calls this search a “voyage of discovery.” The voyage begins with the simplest account of that standard that Hegel can imagine, and it moves, through immanent critique and revision, toward more complex and adequate accounts. Each account tries to capture the strengths and overcome the weaknesses of the previous one. As the book progresses, Hegel shows how the standard of k­ nowledge

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is both socially and historically embedded. Any account of the standard must take account of individuals’ knowledge claims and their community’s norms for mediating and judging such knowledge. To provide such an account, Hegel introduces the concept of “spirit.”4 This concept captures the evolving social norms that mediate individuals’ knowledge claims. From the perspective of spirit, the standard of knowledge is that which can account for the authority of this set of social norms. The voyage ends at “the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where the concept corresponds to the object and the object to the concept” (Hegel 1977, §80/74).5 The endpoint of the phenomenological inquiry, in other words, is a self-sufficient standard, one that no longer collapses under the weight of internal conflicts and contradictions. Hegel calls the self-sufficient standard “the absolute.” Religions, according to Hegel, are communities or formations of spirit that self-consciously reflect on their relationship to the absolute. He addresses religion explicitly in Chapter VII of the Phenomenology, titled “Religion.” In the introductory paragraphs of Chapter VII, Hegel states that “the self-knowing spirit is, in religion, immediately its own pure self-consciousness” (Hegel 1977, §677/496). Religion is the self-consciousness of spirit that knows itself as spirit. It is a normative activity in which consciousness reflects on the absolute, that is, the selfsufficient standard. Through this activity, which is religion itself, consciousness becomes aware of itself and its reflections as related to and, ultimately, constituting the absolute. Hegel fills out this abstract claim through a discussion of various religions. While one can find historical referents for many of the religions that Hegel describes, Chapter VII of the Phenomenology is not intended to be a history of religions (Jaeschke 1990, 189–190). Rather, the chapter follows the movement of spirit in conceptual terms rather than historical terms. The movement from one form of religion to another is not a matter of historical trajectory but of conceptual adequacy; to demonstrate conceptual adequacy, one form of religion must avoid the shortcomings of a previous form without introducing more significant problems. Generally, simple accounts of a community’s relationship to the absolute give way to more complex accounts of that relationship. In the Phenomenology, Hegel conceptually groups these accounts under the categories of natural religion, religion of art and revealed religion. Natural religion includes those religions that relate to the absolute in a natural object, such as light, animal or plant. “The first reality of spirit is the concept of religion itself, or religion as immediate, and therefore natural religion. In this, spirit knows itself as its object in a natural or immediate shape” (Hegel 1977, §683/502). In Hegel’s account, nature is anything given or immediate, whereas spirit is marked by self-consciousness and normative activity. A religion that relates to the absolute in a natural object has not yet recognized itself—as spirit—in the absolute. Its relation to God is one of immediate sensory knowledge. It casts the absolute as something other than itself; it does not perceive itself as participating in it, merely as knowing and worshipping it. The transition from natural religion to religion of art

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comes with what Hegel calls the artificer. The artificer does not worship a simple natural object, but creates the object of its worship out of nature’s raw materials. Thus, its object is not merely natural; it has become spiritual. While the artificer shapes nature into spirit, however, he does not recognize that this is what he is doing. Therefore, his activity is not yet accompanied by the recognition of himself as a participant in spirit or the absolute. The forms of natural religion move from a conception of the relation to the absolute in something fixed and given (nature) to a not-yet-self-conscious relation to the absolute in something normative (spirit). In the second form of religion that Hegel considers, the relation to the absolute as spirit becomes increasingly self-consciousness. This movement takes place in what Hegel calls religion of art. Here, Hegel focuses on the ancient Greek religion with which he was so taken as a youth. He argues that Greek religion fosters in individuals a sense of unity with the community. This collective ethos then determines the identities and obligations of these individuals. Hegel writes that “this spirit is the free people within whom hallowed custom constitutes the substance of all, whose actuality and existence each and everyone knows to be his own will and deed” (Hegel 1977, §700/512–13). While this creates a strong sense of community, it deemphasizes individuality. Through art, however, the individual becomes conscious of his participation in and reflection on spirit. The artist begins by creating statues of gods and goddesses. In the statue, the divine takes an individual, human form. Nevertheless, it is mute; this divinity can neither speak nor act. Next, the artist produces “living works of art,” including the oracles, hymns and Bacchic reveries. These works of art express and participate in a “national spirit” that “bears the particular life, the demands, the needs, and customs of his nation” (1977, §726/529). These works of art do what the young Hegel admired about Greek religion—they participate in the spirit or collective ethos of the community and reconcile individuals to that spirit. But Hegel now recognizes that these works of art do not inspire reflection on or self-consciousness of spirit. It is only in the “spiritual works of art,” especially tragic and comic drama, that the artist reflects on this “national spirit.” In this third form of the religion of art, the artist reflects on spirit and recognizes his own activity as part of what constitutes spirit, but because Greek life emphasizes the collective at the expense of the individual, the artist’s reflection remains at odds with the spirit of Greek ethical life. Finally, Hegel turns to revealed religion. In revealed religion, individuals relate to the absolute as spirit. Moreover, they recognize the absolute as self-conscious spirit, which is to say that it is spirit that reflects on itself as spirit. In the final section of Chapter VII, Hegel’s task is to show how this is the case. To do so, he turns to an idiosyncratic presentation of Christian doctrine and practice. According to revealed religion, the absolute—God—comprises three persons with a single essence or nature. These three persons are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father begets the Son, who enters the world, dies for the sins of humanity, and returns to the side of the Father. The Holy Spirit proceeds from their union, descending into and dwelling in the world as God’s continuing presence in the Church. Hegel emphasizes the negations, or kenotic sacrifices, of the Father and the Son. The Father, as the absolute, humbles and empties Godself to enter the world and then,

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as the incarnate Son, dies on the cross for the sake of humanity. The Holy Spirit, as the Church and the spiritual community, emerges from these kenotic sacrifices: “For actuality or self-consciousness … are its two moments through whose reciprocal externalization [or kenosis], each becoming the other, spirit comes into existence as this their unity” (1977, §755/475).6 Hegel argues that the incarnation of the Son is the central insight of revealed religion and the reason that Christianity can be considered the absolute religion. He writes that “this incarnation of the divine essence, or the fact that it essentially and directly has the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of the absolute religion” (1977, §759/552). Human nature and divine nature are unified in the Son, who knows Himself as a participant in the absolute. In Christianity, the absolute is self-conscious spirit and, through the incarnation, comes to encompass human nature itself.7 With this in mind, we can return to Hegel’s two claims about the relationship between religion and philosophy: (1) that religion and philosophy share the same object, and (2) that they know this object in quite different forms. Hegel claims that religion and philosophy both have the absolute as their object. Moreover, revealed religion and philosophy both conceive of the absolute as self-conscious and selfsufficient spirit. This does not mean, however, that philosophy’s object is the Trinitarian God of revealed religion. Rather, Hegel claims that the doctrine of the Trinity, with its notion that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the three persons that make up the absolute, is representational. Revealed religion grasps its content in terms of discrete moments, personalities, and historical events. Their relationship is circumstantial, rather than conceptually necessary. “The content is the true content, but all its moments, when placed in the element of representational thought, have the character of being uncomprehended, of appearing as completely independent sides which are externally connected with each other” (1977, §765/556). Revealed religion captures true content in a representational form. The incarnation, for example, captures the truth about the self-consciousness of the absolute as both human and divine. It represents this truth, however, as a one-time historical event that took place in the distant past. Hegel writes: Remoteness in time and space is, however, only the imperfect form in which the immediate mode is given a mediated or universal character; it is merely dipped superficially into the element of thought, is preserved in it as a sensuous mode, and not made one with the nature of thought itself. It is merely raised into the realm of representational thought, for this is the synthetic combination of sensuous immediacy and its universality or thought. (1977, §764/556) Revealed religion represents the incarnation as a historical event that took place long ago. Its insight about the unity of human and divine nature in the absolute, therefore, is “dipped superficially” into thought, grasped in a way that remains sensuous and representational.

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Just as it claims that the Son’s birth, death and resurrection took place in the distant past, revealed religion holds that ordinary human beings will be reconciled with God in a distant future (1977, §787/574).8 Revealed religion, therefore, does not experience reconciliation as a present possibility, despite the social practices (including rituals of sacrifice, confession and forgiveness) that actually reconcile individuals to one another and to the absolute. “Its reconciliation, therefore, is in its heart, but its consciousness is still divided against itself and its actual world is still disrupted” (1977, §787/574).9 The reconciliation that revealed religion attains in its practices is obscured by a representational mode of thought that projects this reconciliation outward. Thus, Hegel suggests that revealed religion remains alienated from its object because of its representational mode of thinking. “This combination of essence and thought is, therefore, defective in that spiritual essence is still burdened with an unreconciled split into a here and a beyond” (1977, §765/556). Despite its picture of the absolute in the world in the persons of the incarnate Son and the indwelling Holy Spirit, revealed religion still conceives of this absolute as other to ordinary human beings. Thus, it fails to grasp an important feature of the nature of the absolute. “There is something hidden from consciousness in its object if the object is for consciousness an ‘other’ or something alien, and if it does not know it as its own self. This concealment ceases when the absolute essence qua spirit is the object of consciousness; for then the object has the form of self in its relation to consciousness, i.e. consciousness knows itself immediately in the object, or is manifest to itself in the object” (1977, §759/552). In revealed religion, consciousness relates to its object as an other, for it does not yet recognize itself in the absolute. Only in philosophy does consciousness come to recognize itself—consciousness and its reflection on the absolute—as the absolute. Philosophy grasps the shared content of religion and philosophy in the form of thought rather than representation. Like religion, it knows the absolute as selfconscious and self-sufficient spirit. Whereas revealed religion still conceives of this absolute as an ultimate standard of authority outside of itself, philosophy knows the absolute as the epistemic and normative authority generated through the movement of self-consciousness. Understood conceptually, in the mode of thought rather than the mode of representation, the absolute is the collective process by which self-conscious subjects make claims and judgments about what authority is and how it binds them.

Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Although the concepts of “spirit” and “the absolute” were central throughout Hegel’s work, he did not revisit his philosophy of religion until nearly fifteen years after the Phenomenology of Spirit was published. By that time, Hegel was a chaired professor in Berlin, where he offered a lecture series on the philosophy of religion four times over the course of the last decade of his life (1821, 1824, 1827 and 1831).10 Although the philosophy of religion in the Lectures differs in structure

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and some details from the presentation of religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Lectures maintain a remarkable degree of consistency with the earlier text. In particular, Hegel repeats his two claims about the relationship between religion and philosophy. In the introduction to the Lectures, Hegel states that “the content of philosophy, its need and interest, is wholly in common with that of religion. The object of religion, like that of philosophy, is the eternal truth, God and nothing but God and the explication of God” (Hegel 2006, 1: 63). Once again, one must be careful not to import familiar notions of “God” into Hegel’s claim here. Indeed, he cautions: “According to the philosophical concept, God is spirit, concrete; and if we inquire more precisely what spirit is, it turns out that the basic concept of spirit is the one whose development constitutes the entire doctrine of religion” (2006, 1: 74).11 Hegel warns us that we must work through the entire philosophy of religion to understand what terms like God and spirit refer to. In the first section of the Lectures, “the concept of religion,” Hegel addresses religion in the abstract, including the concept of God, ways of knowing God and the function of the cultus. Along the way, he clarifies what he sees as the relationship between religion and philosophy and he introduces the idea that religion and philosophy know their object (God, spirit, the absolute) in different forms. For religion, this object appears in the form of sensory images and metaphors (2006, 1: 293). Hegel states: “We are directly conscious that they are only images but that they have a significance distinct from that which the image as such primitively expresses—that the image is something symbolic or allegorical and that we have before us something twofold, first the immediate and then what is meant by it, its inner meaning” (2006, 1: 293). Doctrine is “symbolic or allegorical.” In the movement from religious representation to philosophical concept, the content of doctrine will come to be known in its absolute and non-symbolic form. Philosophy does not add anything new to the content of religion. Its contribution is simply to grasp this content in a new form. “Philosophy does nothing but transform our representation into concepts. The content remains always the same” (2006, 1: 292). The second section of the Lectures moves from an abstract discussion of religion to “determinate religion.” In this section, Hegel discusses particular religions as they have appeared in the world. As in the Phenomenology, Hegel intends to show how these religions conceive of themselves and their object, and how their conceptions run into trouble. In this sense, it is a conceptual framework for understanding how each determinate religion attempts to address the problems that appear before and within it. In the Lectures, however, Hegel maps this conceptual framework onto a narrative of historical development, in which the conceptual changes within and among religions takes place as a real historical progression through the religions of the world, ending with Christianity. “These determinate religions are definite stages of the consciousness and knowledge of spirit. They are necessary conditions for the emergence of the true religion, for the authentic consciousness of spirit” (2006, 2: 415). In the 1827 version of the Lectures, determinate religion progresses through three progressive stages of consciousness of the absolute as spirit before arriving

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at consummate religion. The first is immediate religion or nature religion. In this category, Hegel includes what he calls the religion of magic (Chinese religion), religions of being-within-self (Buddhism and Lamaism), Hinduism and transitional religions (Persian religion and Egyptian religion). The second category is religion that elevates the spiritual over the natural, namely, the religion of beauty (Greek religion) and the religion of sublimity ( Jewish religion). The third division of determinate religion is the religion of expediency, with which Hegel identifies Roman religion. These three stages of determinate religion are followed by consummate religion, or Christianity, which is the subject of the third section of the Lectures. This historical approach presents several problems for Hegel’s account. One problem is that Hegel presents each of the determinate religions as static, as though they do not change or develop over time. In his account of Judaism, for instance, Hegel ignores the differences between Israelite religion, Second Temple Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism, and instead treats the tradition as a singular, unchanging entity. Only Christianity encompasses multiple moments, which arise from internal tensions and developments. A second problem with the historical narrative stems from Hegel’s claim that these determinate religions are “necessary conditions for the emergence of true religion.” One wonders, how do they serve as historical (as opposed to conceptual) conditions for the emergence of “later” religions? How, for example, could the state religion of the Chinese empire have been historically necessary for the emergence of Greek religion? Perhaps due to these problems, Hegel himself is never satisfied with his treatment of the determinate religions; the order in which he presents them changes significantly each time he gives the lectures.12 The result is a highly questionable history of the religions of the world, marred by Eurocentricism. Robert Bernasconi writes: “The identifying, multiplying, and subsequent classifying of religions allowed new ways of privileging Christianity within a hierarchical ordering. That is to say, the plurality of religions was understood as subject to laws of development that are historically necessary and that culminated in the Christian religion” (Bernasconi 2009, 218–19).13 According to the view of religion in the Lectures, the determinate religions are earlier and lower forms, necessary stepping stones that are nevertheless left behind on the path to Protestant Christianity. Hegel’s conflation of the conceptual framework and historical narrative clearly raises problems for contemporary readers. By leaving aside the historical narrative, however, we can isolate his more insightful conceptual framework. Hegel claims that all religions have the absolute as their object, but that their consciousness of or relationship to this object takes different forms. He describes the different forms that this consciousness can take, once again beginning with nature, religion’s immediate consciousness of the absolute, and ending with Christianity’s mediated self-consciousness of spirit. On a conceptual (as opposed to a historical) level, this narrative charts the development of religious consciousness as it tries to account for its knowledge of the absolute. This kind of conceptual framework need not map onto actual historical religions, nor must it culminate in Christianity (even though Hegel thinks it does). The conceptual framework identifies the forms that religions

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can take—the ways that they relate to the absolute—including the form that a consummate religion must take. While he identifies key elements of this consummate religion in nineteenth-century German Protestantism, there is nothing necessary about Christianity holding that title. Even if Christianity has the features that Hegel says it does, one might identify similar features in another religion that Hegel has either ignored or misunderstood. A religion the adherents to which recognize their own role in generating and sustaining the authority of their collective beliefs and practices, as many members of religious traditions now do, may meet Hegel’s criteria. Alternately, one might identify a new account of religion’s relation to the absolute that reveals inadequacies in what was previously taken to be “consummate religion.” This latter option would entail a new conceptual form, which would go beyond Hegel’s presentation in the Lectures. Regardless, what Hegel called “revealed religion” in the Phenomenology appears in the Lectures as the consummation of this conceptual development. While all religions concern a community’s consciousness of the absolute, consummate religion knows this about itself. Consummate religion involves the community’s consciousness of its consciousness of the absolute. Its object is both the absolute and the community’s reflection on the absolute; according to Hegel, consummate religion and philosophy share the insight that the absolute and the community’s reflection on the absolute are ultimately inseparable. This insight is captured in consummate religion’s idea of reconciliation, according to which the self-conscious subject recognizes her unity with God. This idea of reconciliation, put forward in an abstract form in doctrine, is expressed and realized through worship. Sacramental practices, such as penance and communion, are said to symbolize and actualize the subject’s unity with God (Hegel 2006, 3: 259–61). At the same time, these practices habituate subjects to “the true and the good,” that is, to the absolute (2006, 3: 259). Confession and forgiveness, for example, symbolize and actualize individuals’ need for recognition from and reconciliation with one another as co-equal participants in the absolute—the norms and normative standards in the community that they share.14 Although religion is still surpassed by philosophy, Hegel thinks that these practices ensure that consummate religion can do what he had worried in his youth that Christianity could not do. It reconciles individuals to one another and to the norms, laws and institutions of a free and rational society. If the absolute is spirit itself, and if spirit is the animating normative activity of a form of life, brought to self-consciousness and subject to rational consideration and critique, then to be reconciled to the absolute is to be reconciled with this on-going communal process. Only philosophy understands spirit and the absolute in these terms. Religion retains a representational form. But by the time he gives the 1827 lectures, Hegel has come to believe that religion can reconcile individuals to modern society. Religious instruction, practices and rituals cultivate the virtues of freedomloving citizens (Lewis 2011, 2013). Moreover, as Hegel states early in the Lectures, “religion is for everyone,” and can thus fulfil a function that philosophy, with its more limited reach, cannot. It is, he continues, “the manner or mode in which all human beings become conscious of truth for themselves” (Hegel 2006, 1: 88).

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Conclusion Hegel’s philosophy of religion has been a source of controversy and inspiration for subsequent generations of philosophers and theologians. The controversy began immediately; after Hegel’s death in 1831, his followers divided into what have been called “right” and “left” Hegelians. Whereas the right Hegelians believed that “the absolute” had been realized in German Protestantism and the Prussian state, left Hegelians argued that it was only incompletely realized—if it could be realized at all. Feuerbach, for example, emphasized the alienation present in religion and called for the withering away of religious representation (or, in his words, “projection”). Marx went on to “stand Hegel on his head,” using Hegel’s dialectical method to call for the elimination of religion and the total transformation of politics and economy. Some philosophers, including many Christians, criticized Hegel’s claims about religion and philosophy for other reasons. Kierkegaard, for example, criticized the Hegelian claim that religion could be rationally comprehended in philosophy. According to Kierkegaard, religion requires faith in a God who is, ultimately, other and unknowable to human beings.15 Later, existentialist and post-modernist philosophers combined aspects of Hegelian and Kierkegaardian thought in their own approaches to religion, philosophy and the absolute. What remains vibrant in Hegel’s philosophy of religion after many generations of criticisms and revisions is his claim that both religion and philosophy seek “the absolute,” and his conceptual framework for understanding what it would take to be justified in one’s account of this self-sufficient standard. There have been and will continue to be debates about what this standard turns out to be, whether Hegel is right about its immanence, whether he is correct that philosophy can comprehend it and whether he is correct that religions have a unique and positive role to play in modern society. Whether his answers still satisfy, Hegel’s questions about religion and philosophy and his approach to thinking through them continue to provoke and influence conversations in religious studies and theology.

Notes 1 See the entry on Kant in this volume. 2 For the early writings, see Hegel (1984 and 1975). For discussions of influences on Hegel’s view of religious and theological matters, see Dickey (1987) and Crites (1998, esp. 1–142). For an assessment of the role of religion in Hegel’s early essays, particularly with respect to social cohesion, see Lewis (2011, 18–56). 3 For a discussion of the nineteenth-century debates over Hegel’s views on these matters, see Dickey (1993). For an overview of recent English-language scholarship on Hegel’s philosophy of religion, see Lewis (2008). My own interpretation is indebted to the growing body of literature often referred to as the “non-metaphysical” or “post-Kantian Hegel.” The label “non-metaphysical” is misleading, however, as it is not clear what is being ruled out. What my interpretation resists is the claim that “spirit” or “the absolute” is best understood as a cosmic subject or onto-theological entity. Although there are precursors to this interpretation (e.g. Hartman [1972]), its starting point is generally identified as Pippin (1989). Redding (2009, 151ff) includes a nuanced discussion of the

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complications surrounding this issue. For criticism of the post-Kantian view, see Beiser (2005); Desmond (2003); and Hodgson (2005).   4 Spirit is a central concept in Hegel’s work, as well as the source of much debate. As mentioned in note 3, a large body of Hegel scholarship contends that spirit is best understood as a cosmic subject or onto-theological entity. Peter Hodgson expresses one such view when he writes that “the being of God (the ontos of the theos) discloses itself not to be pure immediacy or abstract substance or “supreme being” but rather “spirit” (Geist) in the sense of energy, movement, life, revelation, differentiation, and reconciliation. Spirit designates a God who is intrinsically self-revelatory, self-manifesting” (2005, 16). By defining spirit in terms of God, however, Hodgson is reversing the direction of the conceptual explication that Hegel ultimately recommends. Hegel insists that we must work our way through the philosophy of religion before knowing what is ultimately worth calling “God.” My own view is closer to that expressed by Terry Pinkard: “‘Spirit’ therefore denotes for Hegel not a metaphysical entity but a fundamental relation among persons that mediates their self-consciousness, a way in which people reflect on what they have come to take as authoritative for themselves” (1996, 9).  5 References to the Phänomenologie des Geistes include the paragraph number of A. V. Miller’s English translation followed by the page number in the German edition. I have made use of Miller’s translation, but have altered it where I deemed necessary. All emphasis is Hegel’s own, unless otherwise noted.   6 Some interpreters emphasize the death of God in Hegel’s account of Christianity. On this reading, it is the negation of the transcendent absolute (the Father) in the incarnation, and the negation of the incarnated Christ (the Son) in the crucifixion that brings about the full revelation of the absolute as immanent spirit. See the chapter on Slavoj Žižek in this volume.  7 For excellent theological studies of the relationship between human and divine in Hegel’s work—especially in connection with Hegel’s interest in overcoming dualisms— see Wendte (2007) and Adams (2013).   8 For more on Hegel’s account of Christian doctrines in the Phenomenology, see Crites (1998, 497–517).   9 While Hegel’s criticism is directed toward revealed religion’s account of reconciliation, it applies to other religions as well. Because religion is spirit’s reflection on the absolute, without philosophy’s recognition that spirit’s self-consciousness itself constitutes the absolute, religion remains alienated from its object. As Walter Jaeschke notes: “What Hegel says about the Christian community is true for religion as a whole: ‘it is the spiritual self-consciousness that is not an object to itself as this self-consciousness, or that does not unfold itself to a consciousness of itself ’” (Jaeschke 1990, 192). 10 I will focus on the 1827 lectures. For a careful study of the lectures, including the changes that Hegel makes from one version of the lectures to another, see Jaeschke (1990, 208–348). For a discussion of how Hegel changes his mind about the role of religion in modern society, see Lewis (2013). 11 References to the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion include the page number in the German edition, which is noted in the margin of P. C. Hodgson et al.’s English translation. 12 Hegel’s categorization of Judaism, for example, changes across the four-lecture series, particularly in relation to Greek religion and to Christianity. Judaism precedes Greek religion in Hegel’s 1821, 1824 and 1831 lectures, but follows it in the 1827 lectures. In the 1831 lectures, moreover, Judaism is re-categorized in the transition from Eastern religions to Greek and Roman religion, where Persian and Egyptian religion are found in the 1827 lectures. This positions Judaism further from Christianity than in previous versions of the lectures, both conceptually and historically. For a discussion of these differences, see Lewis (2011, 183–84) and Jaeschke (1990, 272–77). It is also worth noting that Hegel’s knowledge of Asian religions, while remaining sketchy, did expand significantly over the course of the decade, leading to a fuller treatment of these religions in the later versions of the lectures and ongoing revisions of his categorizations of them.

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13 Like Bernasconi, Lewis discusses in detail how Hegel’s account of determinate religion contributes to the creation of a Eurocentric project of comparative religion, but Lewis also offers a way of reading Hegel’s discussion of determinate religion against itself by teasing apart the conceptual and historical narratives (2011, 179–202). 14 Shanks (2011) provides a generative study of the theological possibilities of Hegel’s interest in atonement. 15 See entries on Feuerbach, Marx and Kierkegaard in this volume.

References Adams, Nicholas. 2013. Eclipse of Grace: Divine and Human Action in Hegel. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Beiser, Frederick. 2005. Hegel. New York, NY: Routledge. Bernasconi, Robert. 2009. “Must We Avoid Speaking of Religion? The Truths of Religions.” Research in Phenomenology 39: 204–223. Crites, Stephen. 1998. Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Desmond, William. 2003. Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Dickey, Laurence. 1987. Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dickey, Laurence. 1993. “Hegel on Religion and Politics.” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, edited by F. C. Beiser. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hartman, Klaus. 1972. “Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View.” Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Alisdair MacIntyre. New York, NY: Anchor Books. 101–24. Hegel, G. W. F. 1975. Early Theological Writings. Translated by T. M. Knox. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. [1970. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke, vol. 3. Edited by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.] Hegel, G. W. F. 1984. “The Tübingen Essay.” Three Essays, 1793–1795, translated by Peter Fuss and John Dobbins. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. 30–58. [1971. “Fragmente über Volksreligion und Christentum,” Frühe Schriften (vol. 1 of Werke), 9–44.] Hegel, G. W. F. 2006. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, One-Volume Edition. Translated by Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. [1983–1985. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. Edited by Walter Jaeschke. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, Verlag.] Hodgson, Peter C. 2005. Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Jaeschke, Walter. 1990. Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. Translated by J. M. Stewart and Peter C. Hodgson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lewis, Thomas A. 2008. “Beyond the Totalitarian: Ethics and Philosophy of Religion in Recent Hegel Scholarship.” Religion Compass 2/4: 556–74. Lewis, Thomas A. 2011. Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Thomas A. 2013. “Religion, Reconciliation, and Modern Society: The Shifting Conclusions of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.” Harvard Theological Review 106.1: 37–60.

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Pinkard, Terry. 1996. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert. 1989. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Redding, Paul. 2009. Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche. New York, NY: Routledge. Shanks, Andrew. 2011. Hegel and Religious Faith: Divided Brain, Atoning Spirit. London: Bloomsbury. Wendte, Martin. 2007. Gottmenschliche Einheit bei Hegel: Eine logische und theologische Untersuchung. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter.

3 F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854) Karin Nisenbaum and Daniel Whistler

Schelling never stopped returning to religion, despite the very different intellectual contexts that separate his earliest writings of 1795 from his last lectures in 1850.1 At the Tübingen Stift in the mid-1790s, Schelling received the best theological education in Germany, submitting theses on original sin and Marcion, as well as a final oral examination on the Letter to the Philippians. And yet his time there was spent in a febrile, anti-theological atmosphere where religion was thought “empty twaddle.”2 It is little wonder that Goethe was initially wary of appointing Schelling to the University of Jena because of his reputation as a Jacobin (Schelling 1962, 1:131–2). In Jena, Schelling was at the heart of the Romantic movement as its members became increasingly interested in the potential of religion, and then, with Hegel, played midwife to the birth of absolute idealism. In 1804, Schelling moved to Bavaria, working alongside Baader and others, like Windischmann, attempting to resuscitate neoplatonic and mystical writings. Böhme, Eckhart, Swedenborg and Plotinus, among others, become key thinkers for Schelling from this point onwards. Schelling’s middle period (including the 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom3 and the drafts of The Ages of the World from 1811– 15) is permeated by this Bavarian interest in mysticism. Moreover, the engagement with theological and religious themes that resulted and were developed over the next 30 years were finally put to the test in another very different intellectual context: post-Hegelian Berlin, where Schelling lectured on his philosophy of revelation in front of Engels, Bakunin and Kierkegaard in 1841. The question for this chapter is whether, out of this diversity, a common thread can be discerned in Schelling’s engagement with religion. Such is of course a version of the question that has forever haunted Schelling scholarship: is Schelling, as Hegel famously taunted, the “Proteus of philosophy” (Hegel 1896, 3:513), or is there a fundamental continuity to his trajectory? In what follows, we argue that, in relation to religion at least, there is one problematic to which Schelling always

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returns, if not one answer: the compatibility of naturalism with religion. That is, Schelling is always interested in the reconciliation of religious explanations with naturalistic ones, implicitly asking whether a commitment to naturalism threatens religious belief. What results is a continuing attempt to incorporate religious phenomena into a thoroughgoing philosophy of nature, to find continuity between nature and the divine.4 We will argue that before 1809, Schelling is initially uneasy with the idea of reconciling the competing claims of nature and religion. However, in the Investigations he begins to sketch out a model for a successfully naturalistic account of religious phenomena by adopting some of the central concepts from the Kabbalistic tradition.

I I don’t worry about the invisible too much, Instead I remain with what I can see and touch: What I can smell, taste and feel, So all my senses grasp what’s real. Let my one religion be To love a pretty knee And breasts so full and hips so slim, Flowers from which sweet smells overbrim. (Schelling 2014, lines 73–80)

Heinz Widerporst’s Epicurean Confession of Faith, from which the above is extracted, was written in winter 1799, as Schelling, in Friedrich Schlegel’s words, “suffered a new attack of his old enthusiasm for irreligion.”5 Widerporst’s diatribe against religion is founded upon a hedonistic affirmation of worldly pleasures, and so the poem issues in a raucous declaration of the joys of this life, of immanence over transcendence. Widerporst repeatedly sets himself against “those high, otherworldly screechings” (line 5) of the theologians and preachers: I just don’t know how they can compose All these endless pieces of religious prose… In response, at this very moment I insist That the only real and true things to exist Are what one can feel with one’s hand, Not things you can only understand Through mortification, suffering and fasts ’till you wish for release from your body at last. (lines 9–10, 15–20)

Apotheosis and the emasculatory practices needed to effect it are here rejected. Widerporst continues, the “hallucination” of the theologians is a phantom used

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to scare humanity into behaving with propriety (lines 56–7). On the contrary, ­Widerporst “disdain[s] all smoke and shimmer,” preferring instead thoughts with “nerves, flesh, blood and marrow” (lines 307–10). Schelling is here taking particular aim at “the religious turn” in early German Romanticism that had been launched in the spring of 1799 with the publication of Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion and continued by Novalis in his Europa, or Christendom (lines 24, 30–2, 83–105). As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy put it, the poem “represented a reaction … to the climate of religiosity that had become dominant within the Jena group” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988, 79). Yet, Schelling’s rejection of this return to religion is not merely ad hominem; he also combats it by means of a naturalistic account of consciousness. Hence, he repeats in poetic form the basic tenets of his contemporaneous philosophy of nature, in which a dynamic force of productivity surges forward incessantly, or potentiates itself, to bring about products of ever-increasing complexity.6 The productive force extend[s] and move[s] onwards with might. In what is living and even what has died It struggles towards consciousness with active strides. This explains how all things appear, For it swells up and makes them persevere. (Schelling 2014, lines 195–9) Ultimately, consciousness emerges out of this series of potentiations of the productive force, and at this point the construction of the world is repeated in thought, as the productive force comes to know itself (this is Schelling’s naturalistic variant of the struggle for self-consciousness) (lines 219–29). And yet, according to Schelling, consciousness for the most part fails to acknowledge its own natural genesis: He has forgotten his previous names, And torments himself with ghosts of the dead. (lines 233–4)

That is, consciousness makes appeal to fictitious religious explanations that mask its emergence from nature. So, to torment oneself with ghosts is precisely what Schleiermacher and Novalis end up doing, because they fail to realise that man is nature. Schelling thus identifies religious thinking with alienation from nature: it is a deceitful by-product of nature’s potentiation, a ghost that does not result from a genuine moment in nature’s process of production, but from an illusion produced by a lack of self-recognition. Such a critique of religion is, moreover, frequent in Schelling’s works up until 1809. From his days at the Tübingen Stift, Schelling is suspicious of the “mischief of the theologians,” as he puts it in a 1795 letter to Hegel (Schelling 1976, III/1:21). During the mid-1790s, he is concerned with safeguarding the findings of Kantianism from being “perverted into conventional phrases and preacher’s

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l­itanies” (Schelling 1980, 160). With Hegel he forcefully insists, “For us the orthodox concepts of God are no more … We reach further than a personal being” (Schelling 1976, III/1:22; original emphasis). This is in part a continuation of the Enlightenment attack on positive religions. Hence, in good eighteenth-century fashion, Schelling is quick to damn priestcraft (Schelling 1856, 1:480),7 the promise of heaven and hell (Schelling 1856, 6:565-60), miracles (Schelling 1989, 228) and the way in which divine revelation is deployed to constrain human autonomy (Schelling 1856, 1:476–7).8 And yet Schelling is no less critical of Enlightenment attitudes towards religion: he claims that during the eighteenth century theology “sunk to its lowest ebb,” becoming “a theology totally divorced from speculative thought” (Schelling 1966, 99). In other words, Schelling bemoans theology’s capitulation to empiricism in modernity, its interpretation of central religious dogmas (such as the Incarnation and the Resurrection) through the framework of the mechanistic sciences (Schelling 1966, 92). In consequence, theology should learn a lesson from speculative philosophy and return to its non-empiricist roots, thereby becoming a “Gospel of the absolute” (Schelling 1966, 102). In particular, Schelling’s point is the self-serving one that theology needs to model itself on Schellingian philosophy and interpret dogmas through its categories (such as the absolute). “Philosophy,” Schelling writes, “is the true organ of theology” (Schelling 1966, 95).9 The privilege here accorded to philosophy over theology is most evident in Schelling’s 1804 treatise, Philosophy and Religion, even though one of the ironies of Schelling scholarship is that it is typically taken to prefigure what is seen as Schelling’s later turn towards theological categories.10 Even Beiser claims that Philosophy and Religion is testament to the fact that Schelling’s commitment to immanence “was giving way, slowly but surely, to a Christian theism” (2002, 576). On the contrary, the text is (in some ways)11 one last “attack” of Schelling’s “old enthusiasm for irreligion.” Specifically, Philosophy and Religion is a response to K.A. Eschenmayer’s contention that Schelling’s philosophy remains incomplete without a transcendent deity. ­Eschenmayer writes: As far as knowledge reaches, speculation reaches also, [and this is] the absolute … Hence what lies beyond this point can no longer be an act of intuition, but a faith. What lies beyond all imagining, all concepts and ideas, and indeed beyond speculation is something which faith apprehends—namely the divinity. (Eschenmayer, quoted in Lukács 1980, 156–7; original emphasis) In other words, for Eschenmayer, the absolute is not enough: Schellingian philosophy is incomplete without recourse to a transcendent God and faith. Schelling’s response is simple: any appeal to such theological concepts is illegitimate. He writes: I do not situate the faith described by Eschenmayer above philosophy (as one must not), but rather below it. I thus return to my project of r­ eclaiming,

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in the name of reason and philosophy, those problems which have been appropriated by religious dogmatism and the non-philosophy of faith. (Schelling 1856, 6:20) Schelling’s argument is twofold. First, to conceive of God as transcending the ­absolute is to completely misconceive the latter’s unconditional nature, for “nothing higher can remain above the absolute, the idea of which excludes all limitation, not just contingently, but by nature” (Schelling 1856, 6:21). There is nothing beyond the absolute. Secondly and likewise, to posit faith above knowledge is to limit the latter; as Schelling wrote to Fichte in 1801, “To speak of faith in philosophy is, in my opinion, as unacceptable as it is in geometry” (Schelling 1962, 2:350). In 1804, Schelling is thus once again repeating the very same claim that animated his polemics in Heinz Widerporst: transcendence and the forms of religious life that it gives rise to are pernicious illusions or contradictions. Those who tout belief in an orthodox God fail to see the world for what it is: productive nature or immanence. Before 1809, religion and nature sit uneasily together.

II Schelling’s struggle to reconcile religion with naturalism is one that is played out even more forcefully today, not least in the culture wars between dogmatic Darwinism and fundamentalist religions. At bottom one finds the same recurrent question: should religious phenomena be excluded from a naturalistic worldview, reduced to more basic non-religious elements, or preserved whole as integral components of human existence?12 As we have seen, prior to 1809 Schelling is committed to the first response (with occasional nods towards the second): religious phenomena, particularly a transcendent personal God, have no place in the philosophy of nature. However, we want to argue that from 1809 onwards Schelling provides a different account, and indeed it is one that is still relevant to contemporary issues in religious studies and theology. Beginning in the Investigations, Schelling offers an alternative to the two varieties of naturalism that dominate contemporary philosophical debates about the compatibility of religion with the modern commitment to naturalism. Before turning to the Investigations themselves, we wish to set out Schelling’s solution in terms of this contemporary context. In his 1983 Woodbridge Lectures, Skepticism and Naturalism, P. F. Strawson makes an influential distinction between what he called “strict,” “reductive,” or “hard” naturalism, and “catholic,” “liberal” or “soft” naturalism (Strawson 1985, 1). The hard naturalist is committed to the view that nature consists of nothing but the physical bare-bones of things.13 This austere conception of nature goes together with a commitment to the view that the reality of phenomena in our shared lived world, including our experience of meaning, purpose and value, and including our moral attitudes and feelings towards ourselves and others, can and should be eventually reduced to biological and physical processes, to facts that have no bearing on our value-orientation. In this way, hard naturalism undermines a central aspect of

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a religious outlook: it undermines our conception of ourselves as beings endowed with ethical value, inhabiting a world where our purposes can be realized. Soft naturalism generally develops in response to hard naturalism’s austere conception of the natural order. By employing anti-reductionist arguments, the soft naturalist tries to show that the natural order can encompass both the physical bare-bones of things and our shared lived world. Thus, soft naturalism presents itself as the only outlook that makes possible a commitment to explain all phenomena naturalistically without abandoning our purposeful orientation. Yet as Sebastian Gardner has pointed out, even if our value-interests give us reason to be soft naturalists, soft naturalism fares badly when it comes to “basic philosophical plausibility” for two main reasons (Gardner 2007, 29). First, it is difficult to see how the soft and hard naturalists could agree on the very criteria for deciding whether a given phenomenon is reducible to the “bald natural facts privileged by the hard naturalist” (2007, 29). If such agreement fails, so too do the soft naturalist’s anti-reductionist arguments against the hard naturalist. More importantly, while hard naturalism is a philosophical position that secures, or aims to secure, completeness of explanation, soft naturalism fails to meet traditional standards of philosophical explanation. Hard naturalism answers the metaphysical question concerning what gives the phenomena of our lived world their reality: “The hard naturalist holds that the reality of the phenomena in the Lebenswelt—those that do have genuine reality—derives from the hard natural facts to which they reduce, while these facts derive their reality in turn from the nature of the basic stuff or structure that exhausts reality” (2007, 29). Because hard naturalism secures completeness of explanation, it “enjoys the formal advantages of a monistic metaphysical system, exemplifying … the virtues of Spinozism” (2007, 30). By contrast, soft naturalism leaves these phenomena bereft of explanation: it insists on the reality of the phenomena of our lived world, but fails to legitimate the reality of these phenomena by revealing their ontological grounding. In other words, soft naturalism merely reaffirms “that the phenomenon stands in need of metaphysical explanation” (2007, 30). If these are the only two philosophical positions available to those who wish to reconcile commitments to naturalism and religion, both are unsatisfactory. Schelling’s philosophy of nature from 1809 onwards enables us to move beyond this impasse. And this is because philosophy of nature as Schelling conceives it has two pertinent characteristics: 1. It provides a full account of the “basic stuff or structure that exhausts reality,” as well as the way in which religious phenomena emerge out of it. 2. It nevertheless refuses merely to reduce religious phenomena to this “basic stuff”: God and human beings maintain fundamental autonomy in the Schellingian cosmos, and our experience of meaning and value is thereby ­preserved. It is Schelling’s insistence on this second point that marks a new departure in his treatment of religion from 1809 onwards. We will return to these two claims in

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detail in the next section; for the rest of this section, we wish initially to point to the seeds of the above in terms of Schelling’s relation to Kant prior to 1809, particularly the former’s redeployment of the concept of purposiveness as constitutive. That is, Schelling here begins to incorporate a weak form of meaning or value into his naturalistic description of the basic stuff of reality. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant had proposed that the gulf between the domains of nature and freedom could be bridged if we conceived an overall teleology or inner purposiveness of nature (Kant 1987, 5:373).14 Yet for a variety of reasons, Kant held that we could not know whether anything real satisfied the concept of inner purposiveness (Kant 1987, 5:373; Kreines, 2008). On Kant’s view, both the principle of purposiveness and the concept of a natural end serve only as regulative principles, when we reflect on nature. As Kant claims: “the concept of a thing as in itself a natural end is therefore not a constitutive concept of the understanding or of reason, but it can still be a regulative concept for the reflecting power of judgment” (Kant 1987, 5:376). However, if the principle of purposiveness were to be conceived as a constitutive principle, then nature as a whole could in fact be considered as an organism, and all the different forms of matter, all the species of minerals, plants and animals, as expressions of a single living force that is the cause and effect of itself. On Schelling’s view, every organic and inorganic entity strives to produce itself according to its own concept, so the effect of its activity can also be understood as its cause (Beiser 2002, 517; Kosch 2006, 66). In the Introduction to the Investigations, Schelling claims that this idea ultimately implies that “there is no other Being than will,” or that “freedom [is] the one and all of philosophy” (Schelling 1936, 24). On Schelling’s view, this is the greatest achievement of idealism. In other words, Schelling equates the idea that every organic and inorganic entity strives to produce itself according to its own concept with the idea that “freedom [is] the one and all of philosophy,” because he understands what he calls the “formal” concept of freedom in Kantian terms, as autonomy or rational self-determination (1936, 24–6). Since now there is no longer a split between the domains of nature and freedom—both are governed by the principle of teleology—Schelling calls this form of idealism a “higher realism” (1936, 26). It is to the “higher realism” identified in 1809 that we now turn.

III Schelling famously writes in a passage from the Investigations, which is central to our purposes: Nothing can be achieved at all by such attenuated conceptions of God [which] separate God as far as possible from all of nature. God is more of a reality than he is a mere moral world-order, and he has in him quite other and more vital activating powers than the barren subtlety abstract idealists ascribe to him. The abhorrence of all reality, which might sully the spiritual through any contact with it, must naturally blind the eye to the origin of evil too. Idealism, if it is not grounded in a vital realism, will become just as empty and attenuated a

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system as the Leibnizian, Spinozistic or any other dogmatic philosophy. The whole of modern European philosophy since its inception (through Descartes) has this common deficiency—that nature does not exist for it and that it lacks a living basis … [Realism] must be the basis and the instrument by which idealism realizes itself and takes on flesh and blood. (Schelling 1936, 30) The intent of this passage is clear: to explain the divine one must make recourse to nature and, in particular, the categories of philosophy of nature. God falls within the remit of a Schellingian philosophy of nature, and must be explained by means of it. Otherwise, his “vital activating powers” become lost in a fog of idealist a­bstraction and ascetism. As Schelling goes on to write, a merely ideal conception of the divine, separated from the “higher realism” developed in the Investigations, “gives birth to a dreary and fanatic enthusiasm which breaks forth in selfmutilation or—as in the case of the priests of the Phygian goddess—in selfemasculation, which in philosophy is accomplished by the renunciation of reason and science” (1936, 30-1). The only means, according to the Schelling of 1809, to prevent such intellectual self-harm is by incorporating religious phenomena into one’s philosophy of nature, a change from his pre-1809 position. Thus, rather than being the pernicious “hallucination” of an alienated consciousness, falsifying its own natural origins (as narrated in Heinz Widerporst), God is now seen as a “vital” product of nature’s process of potentiation. Like everything else in Schelling’s naturalistic universe, God is an assemblage of natural forces, and it is only philosophy’s disdain for nature (its “abhorrence of all reality”) that has blinded it to the fact that nature reproduces itself in God. A doctrine of God, Schelling insists, “could only be developed from the fundamental principles of a genuine philosophy of nature” that “sought out the vital basis of nature” (1936, 32). Indeed, when setting out his concept of God in detail, Schelling’s first recourse is to what “the philosophy of nature of our time first established” (1936, 31)—the distinction between ground and existence—and his second recourse is to an “analogy” from nature, the relation between gravity and light (1936, 32).15 Schelling never leaves off practising philosophy of nature throughout the treatise, and in consequence, he is somewhat disdainful (within the Investigations at least) of attempts to know God through written texts or mystical experience. That is, the Investigations ends by insisting that there is no need to rely on the Bible or historical faith to understand religion; nature is a sufficient key to any theory of the divine: “We have an earlier revelation than any written one— nature. If the understanding of that unwritten revelation were inaugurated, the only true system of religion and science would appear” (1936, 98). To make sense of Schelling’s new position, it is worth returning to the two basic claims of this reformed philosophy of nature introduced in the previous section: (1) that such a philosophy of nature provides a full account of the “basic stuff or structure that exhausts reality,” as well as the way in which religious phenomena emerge out of it; and (2) that it nevertheless refuses merely to reduce religious phenomena to this “basic stuff.” We will treat these two claims in turn.

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In respect to the first claim, it is evident that Schelling now includes religious phenomena within his naturalistic worldview and attempts to provide some account of how God is an assemblage of natural forces or “vital activating powers.”16 This is, moreover, a necessary part of his overall project in philosophy of nature, as it had been developing since the late 1790s: the inclusion of all phenomena within its purview. Grant labels this fundamental motivation “the extensity test.” Quoting Schelling,17 Grant writes: [Philosophy] is ‘the infinite science’, and cannot therefore be ‘conditioned’ by eliminating anything a priori from its remit … The infinite science must test itself against the All, which lacks neither nature nor Idea. It is the extensity therefore, the range and capacity of philosophical systems that is being tested … [Schelling] challenges systems to reveal what they eliminate. Insofar as philosophy still leaves nature to the sciences, it continues to fail Schelling’s test, and becomes a conditioned, that is, a compromised antiphysics. (Grant 2006, 19–21; original emphasis; see Schelling 1856, 2:56) Everything—God and religion included—needs to be incorporated into Schelling’s philosophy of nature for it to count as absolute and infinite. It requires maximum extensity. The Investigations is therefore a significant moment in this process of becoming extensive: here Schelling explicitly turns his attention to the “ideal” phenomena of freedom, religion and morality and accounts for them naturalistically. The result is, to quote Grant once more, “an uninterrupted physicalism leading from “the real to the ideal” (Grant 2006, 11) in which religion is just one more regional object of inquiry for a philosopher of nature (see Whistler 2010). Schelling’s solution to the second claim is less evident from the above, for it in fact seems as if these “ideal” phenomena—freedom, religion and morality—have been merely reduced to natural forces. It is here that the discussion of Spinozism in the Investigations and, in particular, Schelling’s reinterpretation of “the meaning of the copula in judgment” (Schelling 1936, 12) become central. Schelling is interested in how one might understand the principle, “the essence of the moral world is also the essence of the world of nature” (1936, 13) or, to rephrase it for our purposes, that the essence of the natural world is also the essence of God. Schelling reacts against the traditional readings of pantheism in German Idealism, which conceive such statements as expressions of absolute sameness, thereby merely reducing God or morality to nature, or nature to God.18 For him, such reductivism is grounded on a “general misunderstanding of the law of identity” that erroneously insists on absolute sameness between the subject and predicate (1936, 13). Instead, he claims forcefully: “The unity of this law [of identity] is of an intrinsically creative kind … Dependence does not exclude autonomy or even freedom. Dependence does not determine the nature of the dependent” (1936, 18). In other words, the divine (or the moral) may be dependent upon nature, but it can nevertheless remain free from it. As Schelling points out, by drawing an analogy with the causality of organic life, the fact that every organism depends on another organism for its genesis

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does not mean that it remains in the other’s thrall: “A single organ, like the eye, is possible only in the organism as a whole; nevertheless it has a life of its own, indeed a kind of freedom, as is manifestly proved through those diseases to which it is subject” (1936, 19). Yet, by using the analogy of disease to clarify the form of freedom or independence that he has in mind, Schelling makes it clear that he no longer understands freedom merely as autonomy or rational self-determination. As we saw above, Schelling equates the idea that every organic and inorganic entity strives to produce itself according to its own concept or end with the idea that “freedom [is] the one and all of philosophy” (1936, 24), because he understands what he calls the “formal” (1936, 26) concept of freedom in Kantian terms, as autonomy or rational self-determination. If Schelling uses the analogy of disease to clarify his new conception of freedom—the form of freedom or independence that God and human beings must possess if we do not wish to reduce ideal phenomena to natural forces—then freedom must be closer to something like defiance: an entity’s capacity to choose not to fulfil its own natural end. On Schelling’s view, this capacity is what sets human freedom apart from the freedom of all other natural entities. For this reason, the Investigations moves from the “formal” concept of freedom as rational self-determination to the concept of human freedom as “the capacity for good and evil” (1936, 26). We can see, then, that Schelling makes good on the second claim, and so successfully manages to steer a path between soft and hard naturalism, only if he can explain the possibility of moral evil. Heidegger phrases the central question that the Investigations seeks to answer as follows: “How can the reality of evil be brought into harmony with the system? The previous system has become impossible. How is the reality of evil to be thought?” (Heidegger 1985, 99). In other words, Schelling’s question concerns the reality—the ontological foundation—of evil. The previous, idealistic system has become impossible, because it identifies Being with the will, understood as rational self-determination. Thus, if an ontological foundation for evil is to be found, Schelling must move beyond the idealist attempt to make freedom “the one and all of philosophy” (Schelling 1936, 24), and he must reconsider the nature of Being and the ground of all beings, God. This is one more reason why “the question of God and the totality of the world, the question of ‘theism’ in the broadest sense” appears anew in Schelling’s late works (Heidegger 1985, 61). One might think that the only way to provide an ontological foundation for evil, while retaining the traditional view that evil cannot arise from God as pure goodness, is to adopt a Manichean or dualistic philosophy, and posit evil as a second equipotent power alongside God. Yet, that would mean renouncing the systematic task of philosophy, for as we saw above, that task consists in the attempt to meet reason’s demand for a total explanation of reality. Thus, Schelling must show how evil can have a root independent of God, while at the same time retaining the thought that God is the sole root or ground of all beings. As we shall see in the next section, Schelling solves this problem by adopting the Kabbalistic idea that Creation is an act of divine withdrawal or contraction (tsimtsum).

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IV Schelling begins to solve the problem concerning how to provide an ontological foundation for evil, while retaining the traditional view that evil cannot arise from God as pure goodness, by proposing that there is something in God, which God Himself “is” not. As he observes in the Investigations: Since there can be nothing outside God, this contradiction can only be solved by things having their basis in that within God which is not God himself, i.e. in that which is the ground of his existence. If we wish to bring this Being nearer to us from a human standpoint, we may say: It is the longing which the eternal One feels to give birth to itself. (Schelling 1936, 33–4) Schelling here entertains the idea that God is in some sense incomplete or does not fully exist. That is, God becomes or produces Himself by making explicit what is implicit in His nature (cf. Schelling 1994, 206–7). As Schelling has just remarked in the Investigations: “The philosophy of nature of our time first established the distinction in science between Being insofar as it exists, and being insofar as it is the mere ground of existence” (Schelling 1936, 31; see Heidegger 1985, 108; and Schulte 1994, 111).19 In the Investigations and in the drafts of The Ages of the World, Schelling first shows how this distinction of ground and existence is configured in God; then he shows how it is configured in all natural entities, and finally in human beings. Below we shall see why, in so doing, Schelling develops the view that human reason is the vehicle for God’s self-disclosure. For now, it is important to note that this view of human reason forces Schelling to reconceive the nature of human freedom and moral agency. As Heidegger remarks: “Freedom can no longer be understood as independence of nature, but must be understood as independence in opposition to God” (Heidegger 1985, 62). That is, moral evil is conceived as the defiant refusal to participate in God’s disclosure by turning away from or denying the absolute source of moral knowledge. In other words, only if we believe that human reason is the vehicle for God’s disclosure do we understand evil as a form of defiance, and only then do we understand goodness as a form of love. On Schelling’s view, both defiance and love are forms of opposition: the first, against the summons to take up one’s proper place, the second, against the temptation to break away from it (see Habermas 1971, 93). Defiance and love are in Schelling’s view the two forms of human individuation. The Kabbalistic lineage of some of these ideas throws further light on Schelling’s intention here. In his 1917 “Urzelle” to the Star of Redemption, the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig first observed the parallels between Schelling’s idea that God gives birth to Himself from a “dark ground” and the Lurianic doctrine of tsimtsum (contraction): Just as there ‘is’ a God before all relation, whether to the world or to Himself, and this being of God, which is wholly unhypothetical, is the seed-point of

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the actuality of God, which Schelling … calls the ‘dark ground,’ etc., an interiorization of God, which precedes not merely His self-externalization, but rather even His self (as the Lurianic kabbalah teaches). (Rosenzweig 2000, 56–7)20 The doctrine of tsimtsum, or God’s contraction, consists in the idea that every act of divine creation requires an act of divine self-limitation. God, who is All, withdraws into Himself and limits Himself in order to create a space for something else to arise (see Schochet 1988, 52; Habermas 1971, 189–93; and Schulte 1994, 97).21 Moreover, in Lurianic Kabbalah, since the En Sof or divinity in itself is conceived as an overwhelming force to create and destroy, the act of creation must itself be preceded by the “negation” of divine negativity, or in Schelling’s own words: “The subordination of divine egoism under the divine love marks the beginning of all creation” (Schulte 1994, 211; see Franks 2013, 8). Schelling depicts this “negation” of divine negativity in the first book of The Ages of the World, “The Past.” Here, he narrates a myth about what precedes Creation to construct the concept of a living God. The concept of God includes both unity and duality. Before Creation or God’s self-revelation, there is a distinction between God’s nature and God’s freedom. God is not in harmony with Himself. He is involved in a contradiction between an anarchic, negating, force of selfhood and a rational, self-giving force of love (Schelling 2000, 6). This internal contradiction comes to an end through the subordination of God’s nature to God’s freedom and, ultimately, by accepting this relationship of subordination, nature becomes Being for the pure Godhead, and God recognizes in nature His own eternal nature (2000, 38). This unity in duality and duality in unity is what on Schelling’s view constitutes divine individuality, for as he says: “Were God one and the same with its eternal nature or bound to it, then there would only be unity. Were both outside of and separated from one another, then there would only be duality” (2000, 49). Moreover, in the Investigations and in the drafts of The Ages of the World, Schelling also traces the movement from Creation through Revelation to Redemption. Creation is a free divine decision: in Creation, God severs the relationship between His nature and freedom—the relationship that constituted divine individuality—and resolves to reveal His highest Self in time (2000, 80). This means that after Creation, God is partly absent from, not fully immanent in, nature. His presence now depends on human participation. That is, nature as an ordered cosmos only comes into being when the self-will of each creature endowed with understanding is one with the primal will, and, according to Schelling, this can only take place through the redemptive activity of human beings. God first reveals Himself through his proclaimed word, and the human being through his or her proclaimed word proclaims unity to nature. This activity restores the natural world, God, and each human being to wholeness. Only through this completed morality—which is what Schelling understands by “religiosity”—can God again “accept nature” and “make it into himself” (Schelling 1936, 92).22 Only then

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could we say with Spinoza that all things are immanent in God, or with Paul in I Corinthians that God is “all in all” (1936, 84). Yet we have seen that for Schelling moral evil is precisely the defiant refusal to take one’s place in this cosmic order and participate in the divine-human covenant. Because moral goodness requires the negation of this form of defiance, it repeats the overcoming of divine egoism by divine love that expresses itself in the existence of the finite world (see Habermas 1971, 193). Towards the end of the Investigations, Schelling reconsiders the question concerning the relationship between his system and pantheism. He holds that if we understand the dynamic relationship between God, human beings and the natural world, it is not exactly “untrue” to say that his system amounts to pantheism, for human freedom depends on God, and through our redemptive activity God again accepts nature into his own being. Yet, we must understand Schelling’s pantheism precisely in this sense: “Only man is in God and through this very being-in-God is capable of freedom. He alone is a central being and therefore should also remain in the centre. In him all things are created, just as it is also only through man that God accepts nature and ties it to him” (Schelling 1936, 92). This form of pantheism leaves room for human and divine freedom; it fulfils, therefore, the task set by a naturalistic account of religion: to explain the emergence of religious phenomena from the basic stuff of reality while simultaneously maintaining the fundamental autonomy of God and our experience of value.

Notes 1 It is worth noting from the start that “religion” for Schelling is primarily a matter of the doctrine of God and divine transcendence in particular. However, as we shall see in the discussion of Heinz Widerporst (and this is true elsewhere), Schelling is frequently interested in other elements of religion, such as ecclesiology, the sacraments, the Incarnation and even, in later years, the exegesis of sacred texts. 2 J. G. Phahl (a contemporary of Schelling’s at the Tübingen Stift), quoted in Richards (2002, 119). 3 Henceforth, Investigations. 4 We are thus proposing a weak version of “the continuity thesis” recently proposed by Grant (2006), in which philosophy of nature acts as the constant thread throughout Schelling’s philosophical works. We agree that the categories of nature remain always primary for Schelling, yet, contra Grant’s emphasis (at least), he remains obsessively interested in accounting for freedom and religion in these terms. See further Section 3. 5 Friedrich Schlegel, “Letter to Schleiermacher, 1799,” quoted in Pareyson (1977, 86–7). For a full discussion of the context and content of the poem, see Whistler (2014). 6 The clearest statement of this metaphysical model at work in Schelling’s philosophy of nature occurs in the opening to the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (2004, 13–6). 7 He writes in this vein, “All of society is fully alike in respect to religion. There are in fact … no teachers and no pupils” (1856, 1:480; original emphasis). 8 The 1798 essay, On Revelation and the Teaching of the People, provides a wholesale critique of orthodox concepts of revelation that “presuppose a receptivity in human spirit which is contrary to its whole nature” (1856, 1:476–7). 9 For Schelling’s own early attempt at such a reinterpretation of theological dogmas, see Schelling (1989, 57–82). On the above, see Whistler (2013, 209–21).

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10 For example, Bowie (1993, 87–90) and White (1983, 93–101) both give problematic accounts of this text. For a detailed discussion of the place of Philosophy and Religion in Schelling’s thinking, see Brown (1996, 110–31). 11 Nevertheless, it is still important to note that Philosophy and Religion does speak to some of Schelling’s concerns in his later work on the question of the origin of the finite, and particularly how to conceive a real difference between the finite and the infinite while upholding the unconditional nature of the absolute. We return at length to this question in Section 4. 12 On a contemporary rendition of this question, see Plantinga (2012). 13 In what follows we draw extensively on Gardner (2007). For further discussion of naturalism and German Idealism, see Franks (2005, 385–393). 14 All references to Kant cite the Akademie edition page numbers. 15 Below we clarify further the philosophical significance of Schelling’s distinction between ground and existence. 16 Below we clarify the Kabbalistic lineage of this idea. 17 In particular, Schelling (1856, 2:56). 18 Schelling calls this interpretation “a total identification of God with all things, a confusion of creature and creator” (1936, 11). 19 Although the concept of divine contraction is implicit in Schelling’s discussion of the distinction between ground and existence in the Investigations, it is first explicitly developed in his 1810 Stuttgart Lectures: “A passive limitation is indeed a mere insufficiency or a relative lack of power; however, to limit oneself, to concentrate oneself in one point, yet also to hold on to the latter with all one’s might and not to let go until it has been expanded into a world, such constitutes the greatest power and perfection … Concentration [Contraktion], then, marks the beginning of all reality” (1994, 203). 20 Schelling knew of this doctrine through the works of the Swabian Pietist and Kabbalist Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, and he was also influenced by Kabbalistic teachings through his reading of Jakob Böhme. In a letter from 1802, Schelling asks his parents to send him the works of Oetinger (Schelling 1962, 408–409). Oetinger knew well Ez Chaim by the foremost disciple of Isaac Luria, Chaim Vital (see Oetinger 1977, 133– 135). For illuminating recent discussion of the concept of tsimtsum in Schelling’s works, see Franks (2013) and Schulte (1994); see also Cahnman (1994, 189–93), Schulze (1957, 65–99, 143–70, 210–32) and Habermas (1971, 184–200). 21 In his Stuttgart lectures, Schelling observes that moral action requires the same form of self-restraint that God’s contraction of being requires; see Schelling (1994, 208–9), and, for a discussion of this passage, Courtine (1990, 230). 22 On Schelling’s similar deployment of religiosity in his earlier work, see Whistler (2013, 217).

References Beiser, Frederick C. 2002. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bowie, Andrew. 1993. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction. London, UK: Routledge. Brown, Robert F. 1996. “Is Much of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift Already Present in His Philosophie und Religion?” Schellings Weg zur Freiheitsschrift: Legende und Wirklichkeit. Edited by H. M. Baumgartner and W. G. Jacobs. Stuttgart, Germany: Frommann-Holzboorg. 110-31. Cahnman, Werner J. 1994. “Schelling and the New Thinking of Judaism.” Kabbala und Romantik. Edited by E. Goodman-Thau, G. Mattenklott and C. Schulte. Tübigen, Germany: Niemeyer. 167–206. Courtine, Jean-François. 1990. Extase de la Raison. Paris, France: Éditions Galilé.

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Franks, Paul. 2005. All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism in German Idealism. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Franks, Paul. 2013. “Rabbinic Idealism and Kabbalistic Realism: Jewish Dimensions of Idealism and Idealist Dimensions of Judaism.” The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of PostKantian German Thought. Edited by N. Adams. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 219–45. Gardner, Sebastian. 2007. “The Limits of Naturalism and the Metaphysics of German Idealism.” German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives. Edited by E. Hammer. London: Routledge. 19–49. Grant, Ian Hamilton. 2006. Philosophies of Nature after Schelling. London, UK: Continuum. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. Theorie und Praxis. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Hegel, G. W. F. 1896. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. 3 volumes. Translated by E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson. London, UK: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1985. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by P. Guyer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kosch, Michelle. 2006. Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kreines, James. 2008. “The Logic of Life: Hegel’s Philosophical Defense of Teleological Explanation of Living Beings.” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. Edited by Frederick C. Beiser. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 344-377. Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillip and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1988. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by P. Bernard and C. Lester. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Lukács, Georg. 1980. The Destruction of Reason. Translated by P. Palmer. London, UK: Merlin. Maesschalck, M. 1989. Philosophie et Révélation dans l’Itinéraire de Schelling. Paris, France: Vrin. Oetinger, F. C. 1977. Die Lehrtafel der Prinzessin Antonia. Herausgegeben von Reinhard Breymayer und Friedrich Häusserman. Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter. Pareyson, Luigi, ed. 1977. Schellingiana Rariora. Torino: Erasmo. Plantinga, Alvin. 2012. Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Richards, R. J. 2002. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rosenzweig, Franz. 2000. “‘Urzelle’ to the Star of Redemption.” Philosophical and Theological Writings. Edited by Paul Franks and Michael Morgan. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. 48–72. Schelling, F. W. J. 1856. Werke. 14 volumes. Edited by K. F. A. Schelling. Stuttgart, Germany: Cotta. Schelling, F. W. J. 1936. Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom. Translated by J. Gutmann. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Schelling, F. W. J. 1962. Briefe und Dokumente. 3 volumes. Edited by H. Fuhrmans. Bonn, Germany: Grundmann. Schelling. F. W. J. 1966. On University Studies. Edited by N. Guterman. Translated by E. S. Morgan. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Schelling, F. W. J. 1976. Werke: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe. 3 Reihe, ongoing. Edited by H. M. Baumgartner et al. Stuttgart, Germany: Frommann-Holzboog. Schelling, F. W. J. 1980. “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism.” The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays. Edited and translated by F. Marti. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. 156–96.

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Schelling, F. W. J. 1989. Philosophy of Art. Translated by D. W. Stott. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Schelling, F. W. J. 1994. “Stuttgart Seminars.” Idealism and the Endgame of Theory. Edited and translated by Thomas Pfau. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. 195–243. Schelling, F. W. J. 2000. The Ages of the World. Translated by J. M. Wirth. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Schelling, F. W. J. 2004. First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature. Translated by K. R. Peterson. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Schelling. F. W. J. Two Poems: Heinz Widerporst’s Epicurean Confession of Faith and The Heavenly Image. Clio 43.2, translated by J. Kahl and D. Whistler, forthcoming. Schochet, J. Immanuel. 1988. Mystical Concepts in Chassidism. Brooklyn, NY: Kehot. Schulte, Christoph. 1994. “Zimzum bei Schelling.” Kabbala und Romantik. Edited by E. Goodman-Thau, G. Mattenklott, and C. Schulte Tübigen, Germany: Niemeyer Verlag. 97–118. Schulze, W. A. 1957. “Schelling und die Kabbala.” Judaica 13: 65–232. Strawson, P. F. 1958. Skepticism and Naturalism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Whistler, Daniel. 2010. “Language after Philosophy of Nature: Schelling’s Geology of Divine Names.” After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion. Edited by Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press. 335–59. Whistler, Daniel. 2013. Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Whistler, Daniel. 2014. “Schelling’s Poetry.” Clio 43.2, forthcoming. White, Alan. 1983. Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

4 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) Christopher Ryan

Arthur Schopenhauer was born into a family of patrician traders in Danzig (now Polish Gdansk) on 22 February 1788, and died seventy-two years later on 21 September 1860 in Frankfurt-am-Main. His upbringing lacked the atmosphere of piety and religious ritual that marked the early experiences of the majority of his contemporaries on the German intellectual scene, and unlike almost all thinkers of the great period of Teutonic dominance of philosophy from Kant to Heidegger, Schopenhauer approached the study of philosophy from initial training in the natural sciences rather than theology. The early nineteenth century of Schopenhauer’s education and intellectual maturity was heir to a number of intellectual and cultural developments, which had placed theology and religion on the defence. Philosophy had assumed a critical stance towards the transcendent claims of theology under the impetus of Hume and Kant, while discoveries in the physical sciences were beginning to erode the unique importance that theological narratives had lovingly bestowed upon the human species. Historical analyses of the Bible were tracing its historical development, thereby challenging the established view that it had fallen to earth, fully-formed, from the mind of God, while the nascent study of non-Christian religions was revealing archaic but sophisticated forms of religious metaphysics, most of which departed radically from the familiar patterns of monotheistic belief and practice. All these developments came together in Schopenhauer’s initial statement of his philosophy, published in 1818 as the first volume of The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer’s “chief work” was the first systematic philosophical account of the world and life since the Greeks that not only dispensed with God, but positively excluded him. But irrespective of his philosophically-informed atheism, Schopenhauer was as caustic and dismissive of naturalism and materialism as he was of monotheism (Schopenhauer 1995b, 4–5), regarded Hume’s metaphysical scepticism and Kant’s agnosticism as merely strategic or interim positions (Schopenhauer

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1969, Vol. I, 510–511), and consummated his philosophy with a soteriological solution to the human condition (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. I, 410–12). The phenomenon of a philosophical atheist who repudiated materialism and terminated his interpretation of the world and life with apophatic mysticism has made it difficult to fix Schopenhauer’s stance on religion and theology with any certainty. The title of one recent publication of his writings implies that he was unequivocally opposed to religion’s alleged “horrors and absurdities” (Schopenhauer 2009),1 while some theological commentators have contrived to baptise his metaphysics as clandestine theism, which either does or ought to have introduced God and theological propositions at the negative point at which, so Schopenhauer argued, knowledge necessarily ceases (Gonzales 1992; Mannion 2003). Such contradictory presentations might, in part, be attributed to Schopenhauer himself, who tended to oscillate between affirming religion as a necessary instrument of culture, while also castigating its more absurd superstitions and horrific barbarisms.2 However, the greater responsibility for the confusion concerning Schopenhauer’s standpoint on religion stems from the parochialism of the dominant categories of western philosophy of religion. The entrenched tendency to equate religion with monotheism, or even Christianity, has compounded the assumption that spiritualist monotheism and materialist atheism exhaust all metaphysical possibilities, with the result that Schopenhauer’s combination of anti-materialist atheism seems contradictory, akin to a square circle. However, as Schopenhauer argued, the concept of God is not merely superfluous to metaphysics, but also to religion, insofar as it is specific to belief systems that arose from Judaism. By contrast, the great religious traditions of the east—Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism—have been atheistic (Schopenhauer 1992, 183–187).

Post-Kantian metaphysics and ethics The mismatch between Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and those of western theology stem from Schopenhauer’s fidelity to what he called “Kant’s greatest merit … the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. I, 417; original emphasis). Whereas classical theism had contrasted a real but contingent empirical world from its perfectly real and necessarily existent transcendent origin or creator, Kant’s division between the formal and material part of conscious experience established a new contrast—between the outer part of the world experienced by the subject (called by Schopenhauer “the world as representation”) and its inner side or unchanging essence. Contrary to Kant, Schopenhauer did not think that this new division brought an end to metaphysical enquiry as such, but merely set it in a new direction. This new species of post-Kantian and critical metaphysics will make no transcendent inferences concerning the whence, how or why of the existence of the empirical world, but will confine itself to interpreting the nature of the what, or immanent, inner essence of the phenomenon—that which is left over once we remove the forms imposed by the intellect—namely, Kant’s thing-in-itself (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 612).

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Schopenhauer identified embodiment as providing the key to the riddle of Kant’s thing-in-itself, for the incarnate individual is not only a Kantian knower, but also and simultaneously one of the objects whose inner side it is seeking to know. Every individual encounters his body in two distinct ways: first, objectively, as an object among objects, inhabiting space and changing in accordance with causation and the flow of time; and again, through introspection, as unmediated feeling—“desiring, striving, wishing, longing, yearning, hoping, loving, rejoicing, exulting … in short, all affections and passions” (Schopenhauer 1999, 10)—which multitude of states Schopenhauer subsumed under the concept of will. Schopenhauer acknowledged that the customary meanings attached to the concept of will—as a power guided by representational motives, which in the case of humans are often abstract rules—rendered it inappropriate as a signifier for the inner nature of all phenomena. However, since willing as experienced within the interior of our bodies provides our most proximate encounter with the thing-in-itself, the concept must be refined through the methods of remotion or negation, methods developed by mystics and theologians in the western tradition for removing or negating inappropriate predicates and associations from a concept before applying it to the divine. So, just as Thomas Aquinas maintained that we must remove or negate the predicates of materiality and carnality from the concept of generation before saying that God the Father generates God the Son (Aquinas 1947, Ia, 33, 2), so Schopenhauer maintained that we must remove all anthropomorphic connotations from the concept of willing to arrive at its “innermost essence” (Schopenhauer 1969,Vol. I, 111). Only once we have perfected this separation are we warranted in using the concept as an interpretative key for the inner being and fundamental springs of all other external phenomena, thereby naming Kant’s thing-in-itself will. Insofar as his metaphysics of will departs from our immediate, nonrepresentational acquaintance with primeval processes bubbling up within our bodies, Schopenhauer admits that we can know very little about the will as it might be, apart from its appearance within the forms of experience, for such knowledge would be transcendent rather than immanent. However, transcendental idealism enables us to make some negative inferences about it: the most important is that, since the thing-in-itself is distinct from the phenomenon, the will is free from the forms by which the intellect carves up experience, especially those forms that are the conditions for the possibility of plurality and individuation, space and time. Once we remove these from the thing-in-itself, we are left with a single inner principle of the world. However, as embodiment shows, this is no quiescent cosmic consciousness or Geist seeking its own realisation, but a blind striving entity that suffers inner conflict, to escape from which it tragically manifests itself as a plural world and thereby “buries its teeth in its own flesh, not knowing that it always injures only itself, revealing in this form through the medium of individuation the conflict with itself which it bears in its inner nature” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. I, 354). These metaphysical speculations are confirmed when we examine nature, a domain characterised by a ceaseless and purposeless war of all against all at every

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level—from the conflict between inorganic forces for possession of matter, through plant life competing for resources, only to be devoured in turn by animals, the different species of which feed off each other. At the crown of the phenomenon, or world as representation, stand humans, who feed off all other things as well as each other, in accordance with Seneca’s aphorism homo homini lupus (“man is a wolf to man”) (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 577). It is, therefore, the will’s objectification as a plural phenomenon, through which it blindly strives towards final satiation, that provided the premise for Schopenhauer’s most notorious position his pessimism, summarised in startling aphorisms such as “this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 583), and that “[a]t bottom, we are something that ought not to be” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 507). Human existence is driven to satisfy an insatiable hunger that stems from its inner nature, and thereby experiences the pain and suffering that accompanies willing at every point. A human life is a meaningless round of unconnected episodes of willing, for although every act of striving may have an immediate object or aim, willing itself, as the inner principle of life, has no final purpose. As embodied units of will, seemingly separated from others by space and time, every individual is an unmitigated egotist, concerned only with his own weal or woe and prepared to commit any act to lay hold of the former while avoiding the latter. The only way to escape the anxiety, suffering and pain that necessarily accompany a life animated by willing is to turn against the inner essence of our bodies and deny our will. The salvific denial of the will-to-live is not, however, an imperative that an individual can freely choose, for whether life impacting upon our character teaches us to be malicious, egotistical, compassionate or given over to asceticism is a matter of fatality. The intellect of the philosopher may be sufficiently free to discover that the ascetic denial of the will is the only satisfactory solution to the human situation, but rational knowledge cannot produce any change in the nature of the will itself. By contrast, a saint or holy ascetic may be totally ignorant of the true, conceptual explanation of his actions and mode of life, yet possess that deep, intuitive and inarticulate knowledge that informs him of the vanity of life which he expresses in deeds (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. I, 383). Although we can have no metaphysical knowledge of what is left over when a saint’s will has turned and denied itself, for that is a transcendent question, a “peace that is higher than all reason” is conveyed by their mode of life and calm countenance, standing as a reminder of the vanity of striving for those who are still locked into the empty ends of life (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. I, 411).

Metaphysical need And Schopenhauer not only thought that we could continue to construct metaphysical interpretations of the world and life after Kant, but that we have a pressing need to do so, otherwise the representations that pass before our intellects appear alien and strange to us, and the felt awareness of our kinship with them

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fails to receive an explanation (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. I, 95). This is because Schopenhauer detected within human nature as such an ineradicable and universal need for metaphysical interpretations of the world and life, a need that cannot be satisfied by scepticism, scientific naturalism or even Kant’s combination of metaphysical agnosticism and moral fideism (Schopenhauer 1969 Vol. II, 162; Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. I, 428). Schopenhauer would have regarded the secular societies and frequently anti-religious higher culture of twentieth-century Europe as an anomaly and exception in the history of civilisation, whose histories, documents and buildings testify to a demand for metaphysics which, he argued, follows close upon physical needs such as hunger and thirst (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 162). Schopenhauer traced the origin of metaphysical need to two causes in human nature as it confronts the world—one intellectual, the other emotional. In the first case, metaphysical need arises from astonishment or wonder (θαυμάζειν) at the sheer contingency of the world, which prompts the question “why there is something at all when there so easily could have been nothing?” This state of wonder, Schopenhauer acknowledged, is rare, insofar as most people, most of the time, are engaged in practical activities serving their will, wherein the world and life are taken as a matter of course, as brute facts rather than metaphysical riddles (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 160). The second origin of metaphysical need is more dismal than that of wonder, stemming from a deeper investigation of the specific conditions under which the inner essence of the world manifests itself. Wonder and astonishment soon pass over into dismay and distress upon the discovery that this existence, otherwise so enigmatic and unnecessary, is given over to vain purposes and achievements, accompanied at every point by evil and suffering, and crowned by death (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 171). The interaction between wonder and distress establishes two basic criteria that, Schopenhauer argued, any metaphysical account of the world and life must satisfy: it must give a true and valid account of the origin and nature of phenomena, an account that—unlike the causal explanations of natural science—discloses the character of “that which is hidden by nature, and renders nature possible” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 164); the same account must also, somehow, place the evil and suffering of life within a moral context that gives it meaning, and thereby provide consolation for the hardships of existence, especially its termination by death (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 161). But irrespective of the universal and permanent character of the causes of metaphysical need, Schopenhauer thought that the fare by which it has been fed is as diverse in taste and nourishment as the culinary means by which different civilisations have satisfied the equally ineradicable and universal need for food. Schopenhauer divided metaphysics into two broad classes, each of which was tailored to satisfy the metaphysical erudition of their devotees: on the one hand, there is philosophical metaphysics, catering to the needs of a free-thinking intellectual elite; on the other, popular metaphysics, otherwise known as religion, which appeals to the “great majority” who, Schopenhauer claimed (rather ungraciously), were “not capable of thinking but only of believing” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 164).

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Schopenhauer’s grounds for distinguishing between philosophical and religious metaphysics were, once again, twofold, and adapted to the intellectual capacities of their respective audiences. His criteria were purely formal, and took little account of whether, overall, the determinate or actual systems of philosophy have a greater proximity to truth than the historical religions. This is hardly surprising, insofar as he thought that the Buddhist religion contained a greater degree of material truth than, say, the philosophy of Spinoza or that of Hegel. Schopenhauer’s first criterion of distinction between philosophy and religion is that they are, respectively, a “doctrine of conviction and doctrine of faith” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 165). Philosophical metaphysics “has its verification and credentials in itself” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 164; original emphasis), developing arguments in support of its interpretation of the world and life, while religious systems rely on external supports. The external verifications of religion are all, in different ways, established upon authority, such as the venerable authority attending “revelation, documents, miracles, prophecies,” but also the very real authority of “government protection” and “hosts of sworn priests” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 166). Another form of authority that guarantees the perpetuation of a society’s religious metaphysic from one generation to the next is that invested in state-appointed teachers, for “the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at the tender age of childhood” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 166), ensures that the beliefs and dogmas of the religion in question “grow into a kind of second inborn intellect, like the twig on the grafted tree” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 165). Confessional religious education gives that quality of inviolability to the images of the metaphysic which its adult votives call the commitment of faith, not realising that they have been so thoroughly conditioned to look upon their own religion as self-evidently true and morally superior that they have been rendered incapable of even understanding an alternative system, never mind entertaining the possibility of its truth (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 186). Schopenhauer’s second criterion for distinguishing philosophical metaphysics from religion is that, whereas the former is obliged to communicate its views in clear and literal language, consisting of theoretical concepts that are true sensu stricto et proprio, religion employs symbolic and mythical means for communicating its teachings which, when they contain truth, are at best indirectly so, or true sensu allegorico (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 166). Once again, the ground for Schopenhauer’s contrast arises from the respective intellectual capacities of the target audiences of these contrasting types of metaphysical systems: the metaphysical need of intellectual elites is nourished by conceptual thought, while the believing majority can only grasp abstractions when translated into sensuous pictures, made up of elements borrowed from perception.

Religious truth sensu allegorico Schopenhauer did not merely claim that all religions were a repository of symbols, myths and allegorical stories and leave it at that, for he thought that some religions

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were more faithful to the demands of metaphysical need than others, and that some doctrines communicate a greater degree of truth within the medium of allegory. He identified three broad classes of religious teachings found within the major world religions, all serving specific functions in relation to their primary task of satisfying popular metaphysical need. The first are mysteries, paradoxes that stun the intellect into submission as it fails to form their propositions into determinate thoughts; next are transcendent doctrines that are intelligible but unverifiable; last, allegorical doctrines which are vehicles for immanent truths known to philosophy. Religious teachings that belong to the latter category have such a light allegorical dusting that they are virtually indistinguishable from the strict truths known to philosophical metaphysics, apart from that they are supported by authority rather than arguments. They appeal to a complex of thought and feeling, communicating valid cognitions to the intellect by way of the imagination. Mysteries, by contrast, possess such a dense baroque overlay that they communicate no clear thoughts at all, bypassing the intellect altogether and impacting directly on the feelings and the will. The transcendent doctrines are the most deceptive, since they convey possible cognitions and thereby seem to be factual, but in reality, impact solely on feeling in order to determine attitudes towards the world and life. I will discuss each of these broad categories in turn. Schopenhauer maintained that every religion relies on mysteries, “absolute inconsistencies and contradictions, some actual absurdities,” or “certain dogmas that cannot even be distinctly conceived, much less be literally true.” As real absurdities, mysteries are not to be analysed or investigated at length, in the hope of separating their truthful kernel from their allegorical dress. They serve the very general purpose of recalling believers from absorption in mundane projects, “making the ordinary mind and understanding feel what would be incomprehensible to it, namely that religion deals at bottom with an entirely different order of things, an order of things-in-themselves” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 165; original emphasis). The contradictory propositions of mysteries are therefore an invitation to believers to cease imagining that thought can enclose the metaphysical realm, a domain wherein the laws and purposes of phenomenal life are annulled. Unfortunately, Schopenhauer rarely mentioned specific doctrines from the world religions that might belong to his category of mysterious absurdities. It is possible that he had in mind the doctrine of the Trinity and perhaps orthodox pronouncements concerning Christology (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 629; Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. I, 405). Although Schopenhauer was not aware of them, the paradoxical koans of Ch’an and Zen masters accord with his notion of mysterious absurdities, such as the Zen saying that the ultimate principle of Buddhism is “the cypress tree in the courtyard” (Suzuki 1964, 76). In agreement with Zen masters, Schopenhauer recognised that religious absurdities and contradictions were not only employed to recall the great majority from absorption in phenomenal goals, but also nourished and expressed the more sophisticated metaphysical needs of religious adepts. The mystics of the world religions used them as pure symbols for expressing their hyper-phenomenal awareness that the soteriological denial of the will is “a blank spot for knowledge,

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the point where all knowledge necessarily ceases” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 610). It seems, therefore, that Schopenhauer thought that religion not only begins with mysterious absurdities, insofar as their popular function is to awaken the metaphysical needs of the masses, but also ends with them, where they are used as symbolical signs that go beyond negations, to show what cannot be said. Schopenhauer’s next category of religious allegories consists of dogmas which are intelligible, but unverifiable in the light of transcendental idealism. These include theological dogmas and creation myths, which, prima facie, profess to communicate transcendent facts, but without reasons and on authority alone. Since the propositions of these dogmas consist of truth-claims that go beyond knowledge, Schopenhauer maintained that they do not possess cognitive content, but function to modify feeling in accordance with the overall ethos of the religion. He detected two fundamental attitudes towards the world and life within the world religions, optimism and pessimism, in relation to which the theological and cosmogonical myths are merely supports: I cannot, as is generally done, put the fundamental difference of all religions in the question whether they are monotheistic, polytheistic, pantheistic or atheistic, but only in the question whether they are optimistic or pessimistic, in other words, whether they present the existence of this world as justified by itself, and consequently praise and commend it, or consider it as something which can be conceived only as the consequence of our guilt, and thus really ought not to be, in that they recognize that pain and death cannot lie in the eternal, original, and immutable order of things, that which in every respect ought to be. (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 170) Using this typology, Schopenhauer maintained that the theological doctrines and creation myths of monotheism supported optimism, insofar as the Genesis myth narrates the creation of a real world out of nothing by an almighty and benevolent personal being, who thereafter pronounces his creation good (Schopenhauer 2000, 378). By contrast, Hindu creation myths support pessimism by attributing the origin of the world to a lascivious sensualist, Brahma (Schopenhauer 1995b, 49, note 1), whose act of creation is sinful, because it proceeds from uncontrollable desire (Schopenhauer 1992, 184). The cosmogonical stories of Buddhism improve on this by dispensing with all anthropomorphic theology and attributing phenomenal change not to a god, but to “the moral works of the animal beings” that preceded this world cycle (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 169). A theologian might, for this reason, place Hinduism and Buddhism in opposing religious categories, one polytheistic (or, more properly, henotheistic) and the other atheistic. According to Schopenhauer’s typology, however, insofar as their stories imprint on their followers the pessimistic view that the phenomenon is something that ought not to be, and thereby implant the desire for a transformed or soteriological mode of existence, there is little between them.

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Schopenhauer’s last category of religious allegories consists of a variety of ­doctrines with distinct functions, all of which share the common characteristic that they are vehicles for immanent truths known to metaphysical philosophy in their sensu stricto form. Doctrines belonging to this class possess genuine cognitive content, imparting truths concerning the human condition, the inner springs of actions of genuine moral worth, and the possibilities of continued existence and a soteriological transformation of the human condition. Although Schopenhauer thought that knowledge concerning these matters had been resolved by philosophy in general, and in its proper form by his own in particular, he thought that religion was still obliged to teach them in the indirect form of allegory. This is because the great majority cannot follow the deductive paths by which knowledge concerning these matters is derivable from the premises of transcendental philosophy and immanent metaphysics, or grasp the abstract terms of their expression. Religious myths, stories and allegories reformulate the abstractions of transcendental philosophy in images which presuppose the ultimate reality of phenomenal forms such as time, space and causation, using elements from sensuous perception as vehicles for doctrines to which these elements do not properly belong. Schopenhauer includes within this class of categories doctrines such as the Genesis story of the expulsion from Eden (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 580), the Christian doctrine that we are predestined to damnation through participation in Adam and saved through participation in Christ (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 628), and the Indian doctrine of karma and rebirth (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 507). Irrespective of their seeming differences, all three doctrines use time and perception to teach the transcendental truth that the will’s objectification as an individual is a transgression, for which the individual is guilty and must repay a debt (schuld) to nature through death. In Schopenhauer’s view, the fact that these three religions communicate the same broad evaluation of the human condition, albeit using different allegorical stories, is a sufficient reason for incorporating them within the category of pessimistic religions. This led Schopenhauer to argue that Christianity and Judaism’s “optimistic history of creation” are “most certainly in contradiction” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 620). Historical Christianity is, he argued, a hybrid, comprised of optimistic transcendent doctrines taken over from Judaism, and a pessimistic set of immanent doctrines that are “in spirit and ethical tendency” identical with those of Hinduism and Buddhism. And, as we saw earlier, Schopenhauer’s post-Kantian typology of religions entails that the “spirit and ethical tendency … are the essentials of a religion, not the myths in which it clothes them” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 623). Christianity is, therefore, closer to Indic pessimism than optimistic Judaism.

Theology As we have seen, Schopenhauer’s stance towards religion oscillated between affirming its practical necessity as a tool for cultivating and informing popular metaphysical need, while objecting to its theoretical shortcomings, insofar as it satisfies

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metaphysical need “somewhat in the same way that a wooden leg takes the place of a natural” (Schopenhauer 2000, 335). His stance towards theology, however, is not so complex, since he regarded it as not merely theoretically false, but practically unnecessary. Its function is relative, insofar as it formulates a set of creeds that sustain the social ascendancy of the priestly class who guard the popular metaphysic, which thereby provides political grounds for persecuting dissenters. Theology arises from a difficulty that attends all religions, for as popular metaphysics they “never dare acknowledge their allegorical nature, but have to assert that they are true sensu proprio” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 167). The remit of theology is to organise the propositions of religious metaphysics in systematic order, which systematisation is the proper form of science (wissenschaft). But this places theology at odds with philosophy, insofar as Schopenhauer thought that the latter was the master discipline, which possessed systematic metaphysical knowledge of life in true form backed by arguments, and therefore the only science capable of releasing the inner kernel of truth from the allegorical shell of religious doctrines. By contrast, theology takes the myths and allegories themselves at face value, and vainly attempts to rework them in the systematic form of science, oblivious to the fact that material deliberately riddled with contradictions and absurdities is necessarily resistant to systematic organisation. For example, many theologians would agree with Schopenhauer that religion consists of paradoxical mysteries. However, they tend to assume that, as revealed doctrines, they appear paradoxical only in relation to the weakness of the human intellect, but are—in the mind of God—perfectly rational. By contrast, as we have seen, Schopenhauer thought that they were genuinely absurd, being deliberate contrivances that serve a heuristic purpose alone. Schopenhauer thought that the greater portion of theology was given over to fruitless and irresolvable infighting between different wings or tendencies. This was especially true of Christian theology, which throughout the nineteenth century was central to a dispute concerning the relationship between traditional Christianity and the Enlightenment. On the one side were the rationalists or modernisers who, noticing the disparity between the optimistic and rationalist spirit of the age and the doctrines of original sin, predestination and the necessity for salvation through self-denial and asceticism, rejected the latter in favour of a minimal set of doctrines concerning God’s creation of a good world out of nothing and the freedom of the will (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 605). In opposition to rationalism was supernaturalism, which regarded any concession to the rational spirit of the age as a betrayal, and thereby asserted the truth of the tradition “with skin and hair” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 167). In Schopenhauer’s view, both sides were in error, insofar as they failed to realise that “Christianity is an allegory that reflects a true idea, but in itself the allegory is not what is true” (Schopenhauer 2000, 389). It is an oddity, however, that although Schopenhauer thought that the dispute between theological rationalism and supernaturalism was predicated upon a common misunderstanding of the nature of religious doctrines, his preference lay with the supernaturalists. The rationalists, though intellectually sincere, were foolhardy in their attempts to reduce Christianity to a putatively rational core, for

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their revised version of the faith consisted of those transcendent doctrines which Christianity had taken over from optimistic Judaism, and which Kant had shown to be transcendental illusions (Kant 2000, A297/B354). By contrast, the supernaturalists showed a sound instinct when they refused to surrender that complex of doctrines which supported the “anticosmic tendency … peculiar to original and genuine Christianity” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 616). Taken in their literal sense, Schopenhauer admitted that such doctrines appear “absolutely untenable and even revolting,” and for that reason are likely to ghettoise Christianity as enlightenment spreads. However, when taken purely as allegories and separated from the transcendent doctrines defended by theological rationalists, “the whole of dogmatics is rational” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 406). However, Schopenhauer’s claim that Christian dogmatics might be made rational presupposes an upheaval in the constitution of the faith, which all Christians are likely to regard as inconceivable and perhaps even scandalous. He recommended evacuating the transcendent and optimistic doctrines of Judaism from Christianity, and retaining only its pessimistic, immanent core (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 623). This would, of course, make Christianity an atheistic religion, but such drastic surgery would cut the “Gordian knot on which most of the controversies of the church turn” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 293). Central to these controversies has been the theological problem of evil, a cause of mental acrobatics performed by theologians for centuries, as they attempt to justify God’s seeming indifference to evil, pain and suffering. Schopenhauer thought that if anything symbolised the purposelessness of Christian theology, it was theodicy. It explained no real dilemma arising from life, since pain and suffering were essential to individuation as such. Theodicy merely served the purpose of uniting two religions with a historical connection, but with fundamentally opposed evaluations of the world and life. Original Christianity was based on the accurate insight that the phenomenal world was a vale of tears, predicated upon a mistake, salvation from which required a thoroughgoing rejection of natural existence (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 628). By contrast, Judaism consisted of a set of optimistic, transcendent dogmas culled from revelation, concerning God’s good creation and life as a gift. Since these teachings are “diametrically opposed” (Schopenhauer 2000, 387), theodicy is called in to patch over the opposition. It does so by redistributing various elements from both sides of the equation, incessantly turning in a circle “to solve an arithmetical sum which never comes right, but the remainder of which appears now in one place, now in another, after it has been concealed elsewhere” (Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. I, 407, note).

Conclusion Given Schopenhauer’s assessment of the pursuits and contributions of theology, it is hardly surprising to find that his philosophy of religion has exerted no influence on mainstream theology whatsoever. Some theologians who have swum against the current have referred to him in their works with approval, such as

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Don Cupitt, but without evidence of substantial influence (Cupitt 1984, 166–71). His main contribution to theological thought may be regarded as largely hidden and almost completely negative, working its way through Nietzsche’s hostile reaction to Schopenhauer’s strange combination of atheism and Christian asceticism, which prompted Nietzsche to declare war on Christianity as a force hostile to life (Nietzsche 1968, §62). Nevertheless, it is novel, given Schopenhauer’s lack of influence upon theology, to find a number of subsequent religious thinkers adopting a position similar to his concerning the allegorical character of religious doctrines. Paul Tillich similarly emphasised the purely symbolic character of religious propositions, while R. B. Braithwaite maintained that religious language concerning “original sin” and “‘the old Adam” can be “given meanings within statements expressing general hypotheses about human personality” (Braithwaite 1964, 233). However, neither of these would have been sympathetic to Schopenhauer’s assumption that the symbolic language of religion obtains its strict and literal expression when reinterpreted by immanent metaphysics. Braithwaite’s commitment to the verification principle of the Logical Positivists would have made him as unreceptive to the strict truth of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will as he was to the strict truth of religion, while Tillich thought that symbols cannot be reduced to literal language, for they open “levels of reality which otherwise are closed for us” (Tillich 2001, 48). Schopenhauer’s impact on the scholarly study of religions has been more substantial. His most famous disciple, Paul Deussen, was the first scholar to translate a complete collection of the Upaniṣads directly from Sanskrit into a European language, in addition to composing substantial monographs on Indian religion, which affirmed Schopenhauer’s advocacy of Brahmanism and Buddhism to the west. Paul Hacker has argued that Deussen’s encounter with the founder of Neo-Vedānta, Vivekananda, stimulated the latter to reinterpret the monist phrase from the Upaniṣads, tat tvam asi (“that art thou”) as a novel justification for ethics, in accordance with Schopenhauer’s interpretation of it (Hacker 1995, 294–7; Schopenhauer 1969, Vol. II, 600). And a publication by a sociologist has traced the categories and assumptions of Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life to Schopenhauer’s philosophy in general, and his philosophical analyses of religion in particular (Meštrović 1989). But apart from these general and atmospheric influences, it is perhaps not so surprising to find that the specificities of Schopenhauer’s account of religion and theology have exerted little influence on the academic worlds of theology and philosophy. His philosophical account of the world and life, and the function of religion within it, had far greater impact on the creative arts than on intellectual history or academia.3 However, it might be claimed that his philosophy of religion contains one undeniable insight of unquestionable and abiding value. It is that, irrespective of the specific dogmatic form through which it is expressed—whether pantheism, monotheism, polytheism, or atheism—humans have an unquenchable need to place their lives within a broader context of metaphysical meaning. The political, social and cultural institutions of Europe in the twentieth century were

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emphatically secular, which encouraged social scientists and secularising intellectuals to imagine that this state of affairs portended the eventual future of all societies, irrespective of evidence to the contrary. At the same time, anti-metaphysical movements proliferated within both Anglophone and Continental philosophy. Neither of these developments were a genuine reflection of the culture at large, nor did they make any enduring impact upon human hopes and aspirations. In the last decades, we have seen, amidst the growth of mass communications, global economies and the production of innumerable complex gadgets for the palliation of suffering and a distraction from death, the return of religion with a vengeance. The conviction of the decline of grand narratives was, it appears, a mere blip, as post-moderns still thirst for material by which they might satisfy that universal and ineradicable accompaniment of human nature that Schopenhauer called “man’s need for metaphysics.”

Notes 1 This publication is a truncated collection taken from Hollingdale’s 1970 translation of sections from Parerga and Paralipomena under the title Essays and Aphorisms. The 2009 publication has no editorial details, and no introductory explanation of the context of the writings or justification of the title. It is almost as if its purpose were to identify Schopenhauer as a precursor of those virulently anti-religious forms of contemporary atheism. 2 This is especially evident in his dialogue “On Religion,” the interlocutors of which—Demopheles (“lover of the people”) and Philalethes (“lover of truth”)—are dramatisations of Schopenhauer’s own indecision concerning whether the psychological and cultural benefits of religion outweigh its intellectual and social drawbacks. See Parerga and Paralipomena vol. 2 (2000, 324–94). 3 Prominent artists who have either paid explicit tribute to the influence of Schopenhauer on their work, or whose indebtedness to Schopenhauer has been revealed through scholarship, include Richard Wagner, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Samuel Beckett, and more recently Jose Luis Borges.

References Aquinas, Thomas. 1947. Summa Theologica: First Complete American Edition in Three Volumes. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York, NY: Benziger Brothers. Braithwaite, Richard B. 1964. “An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief.” The Existence of God. Edited by John Hick. New York and London: The Macmillan Company. Berger, Douglas L. 2004. The Veil of Maya: Schopenhauer’s System and Early Indian Thought. New York, NY: Global Academic Publishing. Cartwright, David. 2010. Schopenhauer: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Copleston, Frederick. 1975. Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism. London, UK: Barnes & Noble. Cupitt, Don. 1984. The Sea of Faith. London, UK: BBC. Gonzales, Robert A. 1992. An Approach to the Sacred in the Thought of Schopenhauer. San Francisco, CA: Mellen Research University Press.

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Hacker, Paul. 1995. Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedānta. Edited and translated by Wilhelm Halbfass. New York, NY: SUNY. Jacquette, Dale. 2005. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Chesham, UK: Acumen. Janaway, Christopher. 1989. Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Jordan, Neil. 2010. Schopenhauer’s Ethics of Patience: Virtue, Salvation and Value. New York, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2000. The Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and A.W. Wood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. “The Anti-Christ.” Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mannion, Gerard. 2003. Schopenhauer, Religion and Morality: The Humble Path to Ethics. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Meštrović, Stjepan G. 1989. “Reappraising Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in the Context of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 28 (3): 255–72. Ryan, Christopher. 2010. Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Religion: The Death of God and the Oriental Renaissance. Leuven, Netherlands: Peeters Publishing. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1969. The World as Will and Representation. 2 Vols. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York, NY: Dover. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1992. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1995a. On the Basis of Morality. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1995b. On the Will in Nature. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Oxford, UK: Berg. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1999. Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2000. Parerga and Paralipomena. 2 Vols. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2009. The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London, UK: Penguin. Suzuki, D. T. 1964. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. New York, NY: Grove Press. Tillich, Paul. 2001. Dynamics of Faith. New York, NY: Perennial Classics. Wicks, Robert. 2008. Schopenhauer. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

5 Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) Nina Power

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), when he is remembered at all, generally appears in intellectual history as a footnote to Marx. Indeed, Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) and, to a lesser extent, Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886) have for a long time determined the reception of Feuerbach as a minor intellectual and philosophical figure, the last of the great idealists before the serious critique of political economy and the turn to practice took the wind out of philosophy’s sails. Even those who would in no way understand themselves as heirs to Marx’s work, still take his critique of Feuerbach at face-value: Feuerbach remains wedded to pre-political conceptions of consciousness and his critiques of philosophy are stuck in the same metaphysical frameworks he claims to have broken out of. But Feuerbach’s ideas have had a peculiar tenacity—his critique of Christianity is widely accepted even by those who have never heard his name, and his reflections on the centrality of humanity prefigure ideas that did not truly take hold in parts of the world until the twentieth century. The son of a famous Bavarian lawyer, Feuerbach married into money and was able to pursue a life of relative ease, marred only by the death of a daughter and his early more-or-less permanent dismissal from university teaching because of his anti-religious views. But Feuerbach is far more than a precursor to Marx, and his contributions to the history of critical thinking about both philosophy and religion bear careful examination, to avoid over-determination both by the Marxist tradition and by other stereotypical images of Feuerbach as a naïve humanist that persist. Feuerbach is a kind of atheist, of course, an explicitly anthropocentric thinker (albeit one with a comprehensive theory of nature) and was, briefly at least, an incredibly popular and influential European thinker (“we all became at once Feuerbachians” as Engels claimed in 1886). His star waned with the collapse of the 1848 revolutions, and his later work never quite maintained the complexity of his earlier insights. But his influence remains important, if under-theorised, to

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this day, and his thought has been useful, in however attenuated a form, to theologians, philosophers, political theorists and anthropologists. As Karl Barth, noted Protestant theologian, put it in his introduction to Feuerbach’s key work, The Essence of Christianity (1841), “Among recent philosophers, there is no one to equal Feuerbach in taking such an intense interest in the question of God, even if he went about the task with an unhappy love” (quoted in Forte 2003, 111). Feuerbach’s most important idea, as simple as it is ingenuous, is that “the true sense of Theology is Anthropology” (Feuerbach 1957, xvii). In other words, instead of looking to the heavens and the vagaries of religious belief to understand religion, we need to turn the question around: what is it in us that needs to believe? Why do we hanker after immortality? Why do we project all those things we admire in ourselves—the capacity to forgive, to create, to love—on to something transcendent we cannot see and cannot prove? Feuerbach’s answer lies in demonstrating that every aspect of what we call “God” corresponds to some feature or need of human nature. We project human capacities on to something beyond because what we imagine is possible goes far beyond what we as individual mortal beings can achieve. As individuals, we cannot possibly hope to be as wonderful, kind and intelligent as we would like to be, argues Feuerbach, but instead assume there must be an entity that is a perfect form of man (immortal instead of mortal, infinitely benevolent instead of petty, all-knowing instead of ignorant). But we should steal these qualities back from religion and understand them in their rightful place—as human ambitions, not godly attributes. We as individual men and women may not be perfect, but at the level of the species we possess all those attributes we assign and project on to God. The publication of Feuerbach’s major work, 1841’s The Essence of Christianity, which was translated into English by George Eliot, caused a scandal in Europe and helped many young atheists, anarchists and communists (including Marx) to formulate their opposition to church, state and philosophical dogma. Feuerbach remained committed to his radical thesis, and became even more myth-busting in his later years as he attempted to prove that even the loftiest sentiments have their origins in more practical, human concerns such as eating and the need for affection. In 1850, he wrote: “If you want to better the people, give them better food, instead of declamations against sin” (quoted in Wartosfsky 1977, 415). Throughout his work he advocated a combination of rationalism and sensualism that took as its object not the fevered brain of the philosopher, nor the fantasies of religion, but real living human beings, understood as a species, as a collective social and political subject. What Feuerbach ultimately proposes is a thorough examination of human nature, its needs, successes and desires. It is only then, he argues, that we will have a complete “philosophy of the future.” This essay attempts to place Feuerbach in his intellectual context firstly as a follower then critic of G. W. F. Hegel, secondly as a surprisingly careful reader of Christian thought, despite his reputation as a vulgar atheist and precursor to Nietzsche, and finally, as a serious thinker with continued importance, even if much of his work is fragmentary, historically specific and overly polemical. The main focus will be on The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach’s central work, and the

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place where his interaction with biblical ideas is most systematically carried out. Feuerbach’s subtle relation to the related disciplines of philosophical anthropology, theology and philosophy lead him to be an incredibly important, if not the most important, thinker of “anthropotheism,” as Speshnev described it in a letter to Chojecki (quoted in Kamenka 1970, 16). Anthropotheism, the attributing of human characteristics to God or Gods, is an important starting point for Feuerbach, as it is this idea, coupled with his understanding and subversive use of Hegel’s method that leads him to make several important arguments about Christianity. “Man has his highest being, his God, in himself; not in himself as an individual, but in his essential nature, his species” (Feuerbach 1957, 281). It is with this insight that Feuerbach remains closer to the claims of Christianity than might be imagined, for it is not that Christianity must be abolished, as simplistic understandings of Feuerbach would have it, but that it must be returned to man as his own invention but preserved in its moral and theoretical glory. The history of religion is thus the history of man, and the content of Christianity—love, forgiveness, kindness—is to be preserved even while its location, in humankind rather than in God, is shifted.

Feuerbach as a student of Hegel Feuerbach, originally a theology student, studied under Hegel in Berlin in 1824– 26, switching to philosophy under the influence of his teacher before financial difficulties forced him to leave Berlin for Erlangen, where things were cheaper. His 1828 thesis, De Ratione Una, Universali, Infinita (On the infinitude, unity, and commonality of Reason), a study of the role of reason as the activity of the universal, was heavily influenced by Hegel’s own conception of the centrality of rational thought. But there were already important differences in Feuerbach’s approach. Whereas Hegel had described Christianity as the high point of thought, Feuerbach opposed the universality of human reason to what he saw as the anti-rational egotism and individuality of the existing Christianity of the time. Feuerbach’s intervention into this debate took place against the backdrop of a larger concern at the time with the question of personalism, both religious and philosophical, which Feuerbach regarded as the emphasis on the individual at the expense of the collective. In his 1828 dissertation, Feuerbach made the following criticism of the contemporary state of philosophy: “Too many philosophers of our time want to make the single and contingent individual (that is, themselves) into the principle and content of their philosophising” (quoted in Breckman 2001, 96). Whilst Feuerbach’s claim might be seen as, in part, an ad hominem attack on his immediate philosophical predecessors (including Hegel, Fichte, Jacobi and Novalis)1 and the very idea of a “philosopher,” it is also a criticism of the role of personality in conservative Christian theology and hierarchical political forms. Feuerbach saw a homology between the personal God and personal monarchy and private property in the increasingly common right-wing German attacks on Hegel in the 1830s. Some of these conservative anti-Hegelians took up positions diametrically opposed to what would become Feuerbach’s own, such as Göschel’s “political Christology,” which

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derived the principle of monarchical authority from the divine ­personality of Christ, for ­example. Feuerbach argued that an egoistical belief in personal immortality resulted in the decline of ancient political life, as well as bolstering the ­centrality of the isolated self-seeking bourgeois of civil society. “Virtueless, egotistic religiosity,” he writes, “is poison to man’s political energy” (“The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy,” in Feuerbach 1972, 151). Against this perceived “individualism,” Feuerbach construed thinking to be the process by which we not only attain a universal object, but become universal in ourselves. In opposition to the apparent individualism of his immediate predecessors, Feuerbach argues in the Preface to the “Principles of the Philosophy of the Future” that “At present, the task is not to invent a theory of man, but to pull man out of the mire in which he is bogged down … to establish a critique of human philosophy through a critique of divine philosophy” (Feuerbach 1972, 176). Feuerbach’s concern is with humankind as a whole, rather than elite individuals concerned about the salvation of their souls or the bolstering of their bank accounts. Following his 1828 thesis, Feuerbach’s early work, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, published anonymously in 1830, was a critique of the idea of personal immortality, and a historical attack (which he would later expand greatly in The Essence of Christianity) on the personal God of Christianity as “the religion of the pure self, the person as the single spirit” (quoted in Breckman 2001, 443). The publication of this work, although anonymous, was immediately linked to Feuerbach and, as a result, he lost any chance of working in any of the conservative state-run universities in Germany. In the end, he retreated to Bavaria, living off the proceeds of his wife’s inheritance, which came from the manufacture of porcelain.

The Essence of Christianity In some ways, the ground had been laid out for Feuerbach’s systematic critique of Christianity, 1841’s The Essence of Christianity. David Strauss’ The Life of Jesus had scandalously argued that Christian miracles operated as myths rather than as truths. But it is in The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach’s most consistent and influential work, that the originality, and courage, of his thinking emerges. Feuerbach’s critique of divine philosophy takes the form of an attempt first and foremost to understand the motivations behind religious belief. As such it can be understood as an anthropological text, a philosophical text, a theological text and as a history of the very structure of religious belief. It inaugurates a systematic form of humanism, which is at the same time a plea to turn all conceptual work into the celebration of man, and not his continued alienation in religious forms. Feuerbach’s theories were immediately important for those dissatisfied with Hegelian conservatism visà-vis religion and the state, for certain radical theologians, as well for those in the twentieth century for whom the image or ideology would be central to their thinking—Guy Debord and the Situationists, Ernst Bloch and even Louis Althusser, that well-known theoretical anti-humanist, would later devote pages and pages dealing with the questions raised by Feuerbach’s philosophy.2

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In an early section in The Essence of Christianity, entitled “The Essential Nature of Man,” Feuerbach lays out his theory of human capacities as a way of understanding how these same capacities can be turned towards religious feeling. Feuerbach, common to many philosophers of his age and others, begins by opposing man to “brute.” Animals are possessed of an immediate egoistical relation to the world; men and women, on the other hand, possess consciousness “in the strict sense”: “Consciousness in the strictest sense is present only in a being to whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought” (Feuerbach 1957, 1). Feuerbach’s theory of thought, the idea that thought, all thinking, is immediately human in its structure, is his crucial starting point. If thought is, in its very nature, antiindividualist, it is because it is thought itself that reveals to us the generic, that is shared, nature of consciousness—the fact that it is something that all humans, by virtue of being human, can perform, regardless of whatever content it contains. As Feuerbach puts it: “Where there is this higher consciousness there is a capability of science. Science is the cognisance of species” (Feuerbach 1957, 2). Science here is to be understood in the broadest possible sense, as the sum of all human knowledge and capacities. Whatever knowledge human beings acquire literally belongs to all of them because every new thought or discovery is an immediate reflection of generic human abilities. Feelings of individuality in the face of the anonymous mass of other people or worthlessness in the face of God are basically misunderstandings or, in Feuerbach’s crucial and influential term, forms of alienation (entfremdung). To feel solipsism or imperfection are indications not of the fundamental truth of human being, but precisely the opposite: the things that are most human—our ability to think, to create, to organize—have, for some reason, been handed over to higher authorities, whether they be secular ones or religious ones, rather than recognized as belonging to humanity as such. Thus, in the case of Christianity, God becomes all-powerful, the Creator and infinite, whereas, as Feuerbach will never cease arguing throughout his work, it is human beings that possess the power to create, to invent and to “think the infinite.” But this power must be understood as something that the species as a whole is capable of doing, not just brilliant or unique individuals. Feuerbach’s humanism is thus a universalism, a kid of pan-intellectualism in which every human being, living or dead, forms a part of human knowledge as a whole, or at least has the potential to understand the insights of others. A useful example of Feuerbach’s insight can be shown in the idea that once a scientific or mathematical formula has been constructed, however difficult, it becomes possible to explain the achievement to others such that they too can understand it, even if they as individuals would likely have not come up with the hypothesis themselves. Furthermore, humanity is a cumulative project: “Each new man is a new predicate, a new phasis (sic) of humanity” (Feuerbach 1957, 23). Feuerbach’s claim about the openness of human knowledge and learning is not merely an epistemological claim but also an ethical one: “Man is at once I and thou; he can put himself in the place of another” (Feuerbach 1957, 2). These categories, taken from Feuerbach, become central for the later philosopher, Martin Buber, who uses them to describe man’s relation with others as well as God. Feuerbach

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in The Essence of Christianity is keen to stress the ethical dimension of C ­ hristianity. Christianity is not wrong in stressing forgiveness, charity, faith and love; it is merely, for Feuerbach, that these should be understood as human emotions that are useless if pointed in the direction of heaven, but incredibly powerful if directed towards other humans. Thus, both the relationality of Hegelian dialectics, as well as the emphasis on forgiveness and love in the Bible, indicate for Feuerbach that a formal illusion (that structures are somehow “out there,” that human emotions are directed towards the fulfilment of a religious life) has been perpetrated. The species-being of humanity (gattungswesen)—a term Marx will later use in his early writings—is the real being of humanity, not the systems of idealism or Christianity, which try to place this real being outside of humanity itself. But it is not only or paradigmatically in “love” that Feuerbach finds gattungswesen, although this is one of his key empirical examples for the truth of our shared nature—it is found also in his discussions of language, for example in “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy” (1839), where he argues: “Language is nothing other than the realisation of the species; i.e., the ‘I’ is mediated with the ‘You’ in order, by eliminating their individual separateness, to manifest the unity of the species” (Feuerbach 1972, 63). Althusser argues that Feuerbach owes to Hegel “the intersubjectivity of the ‘we’.” But it is clear that Feuerbach retains this element of relationality that Hegel first identified to demonstrate man’s capacity for transcending himself as an individual.3 Thus, relationality is doubled for Feuerbach in a way that it is not for Hegel. We can see that there is also a sense in which this relationality is rational (there is a self-relation in thought that paradoxically indicates one’s relation to universality and the species). Feuerbach does not, in the end, overcome this tension between the more domestic I-thou distinction and the rationality of thought in its relation to the species. Instead he draws a direct continuum from sexual contact, the elemental expression of the transcendence of the self, “to the love of humanity as the object of self-sacrifice and devotion” (Breckman 2001, 96). Unlike Hegel, for Feuerbach, love (rather than society-sanctioned marriage) is a partnership of equality (and not simply the fusion of heterosexual partners). Pulling “man” out of the mire also entails rescuing woman. Feuerbach’s feminism is therefore quite consistent with his “properly” universal humanism: “Whereas with the ancient philosophers love was an illegitimate child begotten with the concubine of nature, with modern philosophers it is the legitimate daughter of their philosophy. Woman has been accepted into the community of the spirit; she is the living compendium of philosophy” (“Fragments Concerning the Characteristics of My Philosophical Development,” in Feuerbach 1972, 277). In the Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach makes the following appeal: “[I]t is to be hoped that readers whose eyes are not sealed … will admit, even though reluctantly, that my work contains a faithful, correct translation of the Christian religion out of the Oriental language of imagery into plain speech” (Feuerbach 1957, xxxiii). This quotation highlights the simultaneously sympathetic yet devastating critique of Christianity. Far from simply

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d­ ismissing the religion, Feuerbach seeks to understand it, and by doing so reveal its internal truth: “It is not I, but religion that worships man,” he claims (Feuerbach 1957, xxxvi). Thus, Feuerbach’s humanism is less an exaltation of man based on a naïve assumption of man’s glory but rather the drawing out of the value of man already present in religion. The secret of theology is thus anthropology—its true object is not God, or heaven, but man: “I … while reducing theology to anthropology, exalt anthropology, exalt anthropology into theology” (Feuerbach 1957, xxxviii). Feuerbach could indeed be criticized for remaining with the same form as religion (merely replacing God with man), and indeed this is the main historical criticism of Feuerbach from Marx onwards, but it is as a result of a careful dialectical approach to the kernel of religion that he reaches this conclusion rather than as a simple assertion of the value of humankind. Nevertheless, even before Marx launched his attack on Feuerbach in the “Theses” of 1845, Max Stirner, in 1844, published a vicious critique on what he saw as Feuerbach’s residual theologism: [H]ow thoroughly theological is the liberation that Feuerbach is labouring to give us. What he says is that we had only mistaken our own essence, and therefore looked for it in the other world, but that now, when we see that God was only our human essence, we must recognise it again as ours and move it back out of the other world and into this … To this we reply: The supreme being is indeed the essence of man, but, just because it is his essence and not he himself, it remains quite immaterial whether we see it outside him and view it as ‘God,’ or find it in him and call it ‘Essence of Man’ or ‘Man.’ I am neither God nor man, neither the supreme essence nor my essence, and therefore it is all one in the main whether I think of the essence as in me or outside me. (Stirner 1995, 33–4) Stirner, in his egocentric individualism, ultimately finds no evidence for the existence of any essence of mankind, either in its religious or in its humanist formulations. The universality and generic quality of Feuerbach’s conception of both religion and humanity is simply an illusion for Stirner: “essence” is just as much an article of faith whether it attaches itself to “religious” notions like God or “secular” ones such as mankind. The abstract nature of Feuerbach’s claims regarding thought and emotion, as outlined above, are precisely the problem for both Stirner and, in a different way, Marx a year or so later. There are hints in The Essence of Christianity that Feuerbach has moved beyond a merely idealist or essentialist understanding of thought as abstract. Indeed, he seeks to situate part of his critique of Christianity in the recognition of a changed modern landscape: I have sketched … the historical solution of Christianity, and have shown that Christianity has in fact vanished, not only from the reason but from the life

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of mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed idea, in flagrant ­contradiction with our fire and life assurance companies, our railroads and steam-carriages, our picture and sculpture galleries, our military and industrial schools, our theatres and scientific museums. (Feuerbach 1957, xxxix) Yet Marx, in the famous “Theses on Feuerbach” chastises Feuerbach for precisely neglecting the “sensuous” dimension of human experience: The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. (Marx 2000, 171) Thus, even Feuerbach’s conception of the sensuous—of love and relationality— does not manage to escape its idealist character. It ignores, Marx argues, the real historical, social, economic and frequently brutal experience of modern life from the standpoint of those human beings whose “humanity” has been obscured by the punitive demands of a rapacious capitalism. Marx will thus move beyond both Feuerbach and the critique of Feuerbach towards an entirely new kind of historically materialist analysis.

Feuerbach’s influence Following the failure of the 1848 revolutions, and despite his previous popularity, Feuerbach’s fame came quite quickly to an end. Feuerbach regarded his own work as making a direct contribution to radical politics, but he was vague on the details in a way that Marx and others would hold him in contempt for: [Feuerbach] supported, to be sure, an ill-defined ‘revolution’ against the ‘German-Christian state system’ and for ‘communism.’ Given that Feuerbach simultaneously upheld the sanctity of property, the latter seemed to mean little more than ‘not individualism.’ (Caldwell 2009, 33) Whatever Feuerbach meant by “revolution,” then, it was certainly not the rapid, violent overthrow of the existing order, as in the French Revolution, or the type desired by many in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. Instead, Feuerbach, much as he had done in his work on Christianity, was interested in the slow, careful transmission of abstract ideas into a more human reality. If “atheism is historical destiny” for Feuerbach, as the title of this paper suggests, it is only because theology

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will come to realize that its “truth” is in fact anthropology, but it will not reach this conclusion by being “forced” to see it in this way. As he puts it in the Preface to The Essence of Christianity: “I do nothing more to religion—than to speculative philosophy and theology also—than to open its eyes, or rather to turn its gaze from the internal towards the external” (Feuerbach 1957, xxxix). Furthermore: The historical progress of religion consists in this: that what by an earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now recognized as subjective; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshipped as God is now perceived to be something human. (Feuerbach 1957, 13) Feuerbach’s role in intellectual history then seems to be more one of a ­“facilitator”— someone who, in the wake of Hegel and the anachronisms of Christianity in the modern age, said what everyone else was already thinking but had not yet quite articulated. Despite his efforts to propose a “Philosophy of the Future,” which would at the same time be a “non-philosophy” because it would be about real human lives, and not simply about abstractions or idealisms, Marx and others were quick to shuffle off the influence of this rather vague project, and Feuerbach was marginalized both intellectually and geographically, as his exile from universities, coupled with his poverty, meant he lived and taught far from the discussions of the more dynamic Young and Left Hegelians. His later work tended to reinforce many of the criticisms that Marx and others had made—moving even further away from politics, Feuerbach stressed the centrality of physical and physiological understanding to his thinking. In an 1850 review, he argued that “we are stuck together ultimately, out of acid, nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen, out of these mean simple elements” (Wartofsky 1977, 414). Where earlier Feuerbach had reduced theology to anthropology, now he reduced mankind to chemical processes, ignoring the criticisms of Marx and others that his work neglected to examine the real conditions of humanity in the present. Yet despite his brief fame then fall from influence, many of Feuerbach’s ideas have lived on, and re-emerged in some perhaps surprising places, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not. Guy Debord (1931–1994), founding member of the Situationist International, quotes the following extract from Feuerbach at the beginning of 1967’s The Society of the Spectacle: [T]he present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, this change, inasmuch as it does away with illusion, is an absolute annihilation, or at least a reckless profanation; for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane. (Feuerbach 1957, xix) Here Feuerbach sounds at his most contemporary. We can see that, to stay with the example of religion, in many ways it has disappeared, and in its place,

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we have the appearance of religion. The simulated religious indignation, the ­hyper-evangelicism of contemporary Christianity, for example, is perhaps best understood as a desperate bid to ward of the admission that it is in fact no longer relevant in many ways. Feuerbach’s influence re-emerges in contemporary French and Italian political thought too. After Marx, and the collapse of really existing socialism, philosophers have turned to other ways of conceiving the political subject than ways that depend upon the classical Marxist perspectives of antagonism and class. Alain Badiou, for example, has returned, though without explicitly acknowledging his debt to Feuerbach, to a discourse of the “generic” nature of humanity as a minimal kind of precondition for any thinking of who or what a revolutionary subject might be (see Power, 2006). Theorists of changes in labour and capacity under post-Fordism, such as Paolo Virno, have also returned to a Feuerbachian approach to a thinking of human capacities—if it is as “complete” human beings that we are now exploited, for our communicative skills, and our character (the idea that one must “sell oneself ”), then it makes sense to return to questions of our shared human nature to discover a way to resist newer forms of alienation. Feuerbach may well be a “facilitator,” a mediating figure between the giants of Hegel and Marx, but there is much of relevance in his work today, for theology, philosophy and politics. At base, his guiding insight is that the human mind is capable of much more than we are lead to believe. As he puts it: Could I perceive the beauty of a fine picture if my mind were aesthetically an absolute piece of perversion? Though I may not be a painter, though I may not have the power of producing what is beautiful myself, I must yet have aesthetic feeling, aesthetic comprehension, since I perceive the beauty that is presented to me externally. Either goodness does not exist at all for man, or, if it does exist, therein is revealed to the individual man the holiness and goodness of human nature. (Feuerbach 1957, 28)

Notes 1 Cf. Feuerbach’s similarly ironic, later criticism of Hegel’s systematic teleology, in “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy” (1839): “Is it at all possible that a species realises itself in one individual, art as such in one artist, and philosophy as such in one philosopher?” (Feuerbach 1972, 56). Feuerbach further argues that: “Whatever enters into time and space must also subordinate itself to the laws of time and space. The god of limitation stands guard at the entrance to the world. Self-limitation is the condition of entry. Whatever becomes real, becomes so only as something determined. The incarnation of the species with all its plenitude into one individuality would be an absolute miracle, a violent suspension of all the laws and principles of reality; it would, indeed, be the end of the world” (1972, 57). 2 See, for instance, the essays in The Humanist Controversy (Althusser 2003). 3 Cf. Breckman (2001, 96): “Feuerbach relied explicitly on Hegel’s concept of relation in order to articulate this transcendence of individuality, even citing the discussion of the relational formulation of concrete personality in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia.”

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References Althusser, Louis. 2003. The Humanist Controversy. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. London, UK: Verso. Breckman, Warren. 2001. Marx, the Young Hegelians and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Caldwell, Peter C. 2009. Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe: Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Louise Dittmar, Richard Wagner. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1957. The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1972. The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach. Translated by Zawar Hanfi. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Forte, Bruno. 2003. The Essence of Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. Kamenka, Eugene. 1970. The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marx, Karl. Selected Writings. 2000. Edited by David McLellan. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Power, Nina. 2006. “Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude: Badiou and the Political Subject.” Cosmos and History, Issue 2. Stirner, Max. 1995. The Ego and Its Own. Edited by David Leopold. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Wartofsky, Marx W. 1977. Feuerbach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Part 2

Critical theory

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6 Karl Marx (1818–1883) Roland Boer

“Religion is the opium of the people”—this would have been the most w ­ ell-known statement by Karl Marx concerning religion. It seems to mean that religion is no better than a drug that dulls the senses; it makes one forget one’s sorrows, and causes bodily and psychological harm. Not only is this assumption incorrect, but it is also a caricature of Marx’s complex position on religion. To provide a more comprehensive and nuanced picture, I will outline the main points of Marx’s thoughts on religion in relation to philosophy. It involves relating his work to the Young Hegelians, Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach. I then deal with the ambivalence of the opium metaphor in the context of the passage in which it appears. I close with the most interesting and significant of Marx’s arguments concerning religion, namely, the fetish. As these features of Marx’s reflections on religion unfold, it will become clear how they are crucial to the nature of his work as a whole.

Biography, context and writings on religion Before proceeding, some biographical and contextual material is needed. Marx was born in 1818 (two years before his closest friend and lifelong comrade, Friedrich Engels) in Trier, Prussia. He was a brilliant student at the gymnasium, before obtaining a doctorate from the Friedrich Wilhelm IV (now Humboldt) University in Berlin. Through an eventful 65 years, Marx had to flee Prussia, then France, then Belgium, since the police were on his tail for revolutionary activity. He and his family settled in London, living in poverty until Engels was able to supply them with resources from his family firm. In London, Marx and Engels organized the International Working Men’s Association, or First International, and fostered communist movements around the world. Marx died from overwork in 1883.

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The context into which Marx was born was the backward economic and ­political status of the German states. Economically, they lagged well behind the Netherlands, England and France in the development of capitalism; politically, the Prussian kings, Friedrich Wilhelm III and IV, sought to ensure the continuance of the monarchy, stifle any reform movements and foster the “Christian state.” When the new Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, took power in 1840 he succeeded a father who had begun a process of ensuring the Restoration of authority in the monarchy. Frightened by the revolutionary Frenchmen across the border, one Friedrich after another set about shoring up their domain. In 1822, the devoutly Calvinist Friedrich Wilhelm III had brought together the Calvinist and Lutheran churches to form the Prussian Union (Preussische Landeskirche). He enforced a single liturgy for the church, ensured a strict hierarchy and placed himself at the head of the church. Theology and politics, it seemed, were united in a broad reactionary front, concentrated in one person who was both political leader and Christ’s representative on earth. Despite a few vague hints at reform to keep the liberals hopeful, Friedrich Wilhelm IV sought to wind back the clock even further. The “Christian state” would be maintained no matter what stood in its way: one by one, the reforms of 1805–15 (reluctantly granted by his father during republican ferment in the wake of the French Revolution) were rolled back. In effect, they were trying to hold back the push for political power from a newly wealthy bourgeoisie, a push they saw as anti-church, anti-aristocratic and democratic. Unlike France, with its revolutionary experiences and the radical atheism of Voltaire and company, and unlike England, with its burst of industrialisation and the growth of deism, in the German states debate over modern issues was mediated through theology and the Bible (see Breckman 1999). As Engels put it, “the battle for dominion over German public opinion in politics and religion” is in fact a battle “over Germany itself” (Engels 1841, 181). They waged furious controversies over the Bible, especially the New Testament and its Gospels. In short, the stories about Jesus in the Gospels were the gunpowder in the political powder-keg, precisely because political and ecclesiastical power hinged on this figure. If theology was nothing less than the lingua franca of public debate in Germany for most of the first half of the nineteenth century, then the Bible was the terrain of battle for the knot of political struggles—over republicanism, politics, parliamentary representation, freedom of the press, bourgeois democracy, individual rights, secularism, reason and religion. Thus, to criticize the Bible or Christianity was to criticize the reactionary political situation. It is no surprise, then, that the most controversial work of mid-nineteenth century Germany was the work of David Strauss, Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. The furor over Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1835) arose over its argument that the narratives of Jesus in the Gospels are purely mythological and that each person is able to become a democratic Christ. Similarly, Bauer’s radical atheism (1838, 1840, 1841, 1842, 1843a) argued through biblical interpretation, challenged the oppressive particularism of religion and urged a democratic selfconsciousness. And Feuerbach’s proposal ([1841] 1989) that religion is the projection of what is best in human beings was seen as deeply revolutionary, since it

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meant that human beings en masse were the sovereign creators of the gods and their own future. In this context, Marx began his work in response to theology, seeking to differentiate himself from the dominant theological frame in which German thought functioned in the 1830s and 1840s. Although Marx never held a teaching position due to his radical political work, he was a prolific writer, producing journalism for newspapers and magazines in Europe and North America as well as significant contributions to economics, philosophy, history and politics. No complete collection of Marx’s works yet exists, although the most comprehensive is contained in the 50 volumes of Marx and Engels Collected Works (MECW), an English translation published between 1975 and 2005. The original language edition, the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), is only halfway through a projected 112 volumes. Most of Marx’s explicit reflections on religion appear in his earlier works, written in the 1840s. They include an important but neglected article on religion and philosophy (Marx [1842] 1975a), as well as writings on the Rhine Assembly (Marx [1842] 1975b), on Hegel (Marx [1843] 1975, [1844] 1975a), and the well-known Theses on Feuerbach (Marx [1845] 1976). However, in his later work we find crucial developments of the theme of fetishism, so much so that is becomes central to his analysis of capitalism (Marx [1867] 1996, 81–94; [1861–63] 1994, 455–61; [1894] 1998, 388–97, 801–18). Two joint works with Engels are also saturated in religious themes: The Holy Family and The German Ideology (Marx and Engels [1845] 1975, [1845–46] 1976). The early works, from the 1830s and 1840s, show how much theology saturated public debate, but also how hard Marx laboured to free himself from his context. This effort shows up particularly in an important but neglected article of 1842 called “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung.” The article is a sustained response to a certain Karl Hermes, editor of the journal mentioned in the title, conservative Roman-Catholic and government agent. Hermes had fired a broadside against the young Hegelians and the relatively new critical approach to the Bible and theology. So, we find Marx in a curious position: he wants to defend these new approaches to the Bible and theology, while at the same time seeking to extricate himself from the theological tenor of public debate. How does he do so? Theology is presented as an other-worldly, reactionary and traditional venture; against it are ranged scientific research, history and philosophical reason. The catch is that Marx ends up defending a form of theology and biblical research that is scientific, historical and rigorously philosophical. In this article, we also find Marx mercilessly tackling the contradictions of the “Christian state” and introducing one of his first explorations of the fetish (to which we return below).

The young and theological Hegelians Although he studied theology at the gymnasium, Marx never felt any religious commitment. Indeed, he found the connection between the churches and the ruling classes obnoxious. However, given the way philosophical and political thought was mediated through theology, and given that the most radical thinkers in the

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German states were the Young Hegelians (a radical group of philosophers seeking to develop Hegel’s thought), both Marx and Engels had to negotiate that thought to develop their own positions. The following focuses on three important philosophers and theologians. Against Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, Marx began to define his own position, especially since their positions too were radical. By contrast, Ludwig Feuerbach influenced Marx deeply, and he used Feuerbach as a springboard for his own approach to religion.

Bruno Bauer The first to influence Marx deeply was Bruno Bauer (1809–82), the radical biblical critic. Bauer taught and deeply influenced Marx, especially during the latter’s studies at university. Not only did Marx study the biblical book of Isaiah under Bauer’s direction (1839), but Marx’s doctoral thesis on Epicurus reveals Bauer’s influence (1841). In the early 1840s, they planned numerous works together, including a journal and a jointly authored book. Marx, however, was unable to complete his part, which became the now lost work, A Treatise on Christian Art.1 Marx’s close connection with Bauer was also pragmatic, for he hoped for a university position under Bauer’s patronage. This was not to be, for Bauer’s radical theological work and political republicanism saw him removed, first from his post at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in 1839, and then from Bonn in 1842. With no options left within a university as his license to teach was revoked, he purchased a small farm, ran a tobacco shop and wrote—as prolifically as ever—in the evenings until his death in 1882. As for Bauer, he argued that the church was ossified and dogmatic, since it claimed universal status for a particular person (Christ) and group (the church). In the name of free self-consciousness, he argued that the church’s religious dogmatism should be overthrown and replaced with atheism, democracy and republicanism. Marx was initially enthused, but he later came to criticize Bauer sharply, especially in his reply to Bauer’s On the Jewish Question (Bauer 1843b, Marx [1844] 1975c). Why did Marx change his tune? Bauer had reached a radical republican and democratic position through his theology, but for Marx this was the wrong approach. The Marx of this time held that theology deals with heaven and not earth—that is the task of the new historical materialism. In the end, for Marx, Bauer was too much under the influence of Hegel’s idealist method. So, we find the repeated criticism that “‘saint Bruno” left matters in the realm of theology and thereby stunted his critical work.

Max Stirner Max Stirner was the nom-de-plume of Johann Kaspar Schmidt (1806–56). His book, The Ego and Its Own ([1845] 2005), caused quite a stir when it was first published, but it was forgotten until its much later recovery as a core text of anarchism, nihilism and even post-modernism. Stirner’s central category was the individual, in the most

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radical sense: this individual was shorn of any social, state, family, church or collective connections so as to stand solitarily before history. Indeed, Stirner set out in a somewhat rambling fashion to reshape the understanding of history itself in light of what he felt was a new approach. For Marx and Engels, Stirner’s book was crucial, so they devoted over 300 pages to refuting it in The German Ideology. It prompted them to develop the first coherent statement of historical materialism in response to Stirner’s account of world history. That is, Marx and Engels offered an alternative theory of world history as they developed their critique of Stirner. The way they wrote the manuscript (which was never published in their lifetimes) is important: as they wrote on Stirner they found that increasingly coherent statements of an alternative position began to emerge. Some of these statements remain in the Stirner section, while others were moved to the beginning of the manuscript and placed in the Feuerbach chapter (especially sections II and III). In contrast to Stirner’s radical focus on the individual, Marx and Engels developed a collective focus. Instead of Stirner’s use of Jesus as the first great individual human ego, they sought an approach that was very much of this world. Above all, Stirner wanted to provide a schema of world history that was pitched against Hegel. The reason why Marx and Engels devoted so much attention to him is that they too wanted a schema of world history that overturned Hegel. The difference was that while Stirner made that lever of history the radical individual ego modelled on a very human Jesus, Marx and Engels located the lever in the internal contradictions of class, economics and modes of production. The long struggle with Stirner was an effort to overcome this residual religious influence. One need only look at the structure of their criticism—moving through the major books of the Bible and quoting the Bible ad nauseam, criticizing Stirner’s prophetic role and theological dabbling—to see that religion is at stake. Out of that intense struggle the first clear statement of historical materialism arose.

Ludwig Feuerbach Thus, Marx developed his position by criticising the work of Bauer and Stirner. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) was a different proposition, for Marx drew deeply on his work. In Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity ([1841] 1989), Marx found the proposal that religion and the gods were projections of human beings immensely helpful. At its core is what may be called the “Feuerbachian inversion”: previous thought about religion began at the wrong point, namely in the middle, working from God to human beings. Instead, argued Feuerbach, God is not a pre-existing being who determines human existence; rather, human beings determine God, who then comes to be seen as the cause of human existence. We may see Feuerbach’s influence in the midst of Marx’s most famous statement on religion, in the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral

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sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. (Marx [1844] 1975a, 175) At the same time, Marx went beyond Feuerbach on two counts. First, since human beings project religion from within themselves, one begins analysis not in the heavens, but here on earth. Marx still tended to see theology as an other-worldly concern, while the business of philosophy and political criticism is this-worldly (see also Marx [1842] 1975a). In doing so, Marx missed the dialectical nature of Feuerbach’s argument, for he was both radically theological and radically materialist. Feuerbach sought both to ground theology in human reality and thereby purify theology in the process. Second, the fact that people make such projections is a signal that something is wrong here on earth, for if they place their hopes elsewhere, then they cannot realize them here and now. Religion becomes a sign of social and economic alienation and that needs to be fixed. We find this theme very strongly in the fourth and eleventh Theses on Feuerbach, the most developed of Marx’s engagement with Feuerbach: Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionised in practice. Thus, for instance, once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. (Marx [1845] 1976, 4–5) Soon, Marx deployed his appropriation of the “Feuerbachian inversion” in a number of ways, especially in his criticism of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Hegel [1820] 1991). Marx argued that Hegel’s position on the state was analogous to theology: instead of beginning with a materialist basis, it began with abstracted ideas such as state, sovereignty and constitution and tried to make human beings fit into them. Marx’s answer was to focus precisely on flesh-and-blood human beings and see how and why they produced such abstractions (Marx [1843] 1975).

On the nature of historical materialism Thus far, we have found that Marx developed his own philosophical position in response to the work of Bauer and Stirner, and used Feuerbach as a springboard to reach much deeper conclusions. That position came to be known as “historical” or

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“dialectical” materialism. Rather than the monism of naïve materialism, in which all aspects of reality are produced out of matter, Marx’s materialism is dialectical. The key is not so much a dualistic opposition with idealism, in which one argues over causation in terms of ideas or matter—are ideas the primary cause of reality, or is all our reality caused by matter? Rather, the materialism in question is able to account for the nature and reality of idealism. As the quotations concerning Feuerbach show, Marx did not seek to reject idealism, instead, he sought to understand it in a different, materialist fashion. At times, this position leads Marx to espouse a vulgar form of materialism, in which religion—among other idealist forms—are mere excrescences of the brain. Although this vulgar form remains a part of Marxism, it is always tied in with sophisticated dialectical formulations, in which ideas are both produced by material conditions and contribute to the production of those conditions. The complex dialectic is found at the heart of his arguments concerning fetishism and capitalism. This materialism is also historical, in the sense that economic and social factors play a crucial role in producing the world and who we are as human beings. This approach has become so commonplace today (feeding into the understanding that we are socially constructed beings) that its origins with Marx and Engels is often forgotten. If we return to the quotation concerning Feuerbach, the historical conditions are the “inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness” of our everyday world. Of course, the point of historical materialism is not merely to understand this striferidden world, but to change it.

Opium and the ambivalence of religion One text from Marx’s engagement with Feuerbach has caught the popular imagination in relation to Marx’s theory of religion. It comes yet again from the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Marx [1844] 1975a, 175) Too often the phrase “opium of the people” is understood in a negative fashion. Opium is understood by the vast majority of readers to designate a drug that dulls the senses and makes us forget for a little while our misery. This is far from Marx’s understanding of the phrase. To understand “opium of the people” we need, first, to consider the sentences that precede it. Religious suffering may be an expression of real suffering and religion may be the sigh, heart and soul of a heartless and soulless world. But it is also a protest against that suffering. The key is the ambivalence of the opium metaphor. Second, the context of nineteenth-century Europe enhances that ambivalence (McKinnon 2006). Against our own associations of opium with

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drugs, altered states, addicts, organised crime, wily Taliban insurgents and ­desperate farmers making a living the only way they can, the situation in the nineteenth century was quite different. Opium was regarded as a beneficial, useful and cheap medicine, especially for the poor who could hardly afford a doctor.2 However, opium was at the same time (and more so later in the nineteenth century) seen as a curse, doing more harm than good. Opium was the centre of debates and parliamentary enquiries; it was praised and condemned. Opium was a source of utopian visions for artists and poets, but it was increasingly stigmatised as a source of addiction and illness. Perceptions of opium ran all the way from blessed medicine to recreational curse. Third, Marx himself was a regular user of opium. Along with “medicines” such as arsenic and creosote, Marx imbibed opium to deal with his carbuncles, liver problems, toothaches, eye pain, ear aches, bronchial coughs and so on—the multitude of ailments that came with chronic overwork, lack of sleep, chain smoking and endless pots of coffee. As Jenny Marx wrote to Engels: Chaley’s [Karl’s] head hurts him almost everywhere, terrible tooth-ache, pains in the ears, head, eyes, throat and God knows what else. Neither opium pills nor creosote do any good. The tooth has got to come out and he jibs at the idea (Marx (senior) [1857] 1983, 563) To sum up, for Marx, opium was a very multidimensional metaphor. This is precisely why he chose it as a metaphor for religion. Like opium, religion may be source of hope, a way of curing an illness, a sigh for a better world; but it is also a result of a world out of kilter, and may even be a source of harm in its own right.

Idols and fetishes I have left the most significant aspect of Marx’s approach to religion until last. It concerns the fetish. Perhaps the most read section of Marx’s Capital is “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” (Marx [1867] 1996, 81–94). Marx traces the way commodities gain a life of their own and begin to interact with one another as though they were social beings. At the same time, human social relations suffer since they have become like the relations between things. Commodities and human beings have swapped roles. Yet, this was not the first time Marx made such an argument, for it derives ultimately from the study of religion. Marx offers the following hint at the opening of this section in Capital: “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx [1867] 1996, 81). Let us follow his hint. Twenty-five years earlier Marx had become enthralled by the emerging study of world religions, where data and studies were becoming available. In the early 1840s, Marx read Charles de Brosses’s Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches ou Parallèle de l’Ancienne Religion de l’Egypte avec la Religion Actuelle de Nigritie

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(1760). A pioneering work in ethno-anthropology and the history of religion, it made the term “fetish” a central category for the analysis of religion, arguing that it applies just as much to ancient Egypt and the Bible as to contemporary practices in Africa. By “fetish,” de Brosses meant an object attributed with superhuman and magical powers, a practice characteristic of “primitive” peoples. These included amulets worn on the body and even edible objects that would be eaten at crucial moments of social exchange. Indeed, for the West Africans, the objects were crucial to social and cultural interaction, so much so that the Portuguese themselves had to use them when engaging with the Africans. Marx took up the idea with gusto, turning it over and adapting it for many uses, not least of which was the lost study on Christian art. That fetishism was a life-long interest is revealed by the reading notes from forty years later, now published as The Ethnological Notebooks (1972). It is a collection of notes and comments on the anthropologists L. H. Morgan (the basis for Engels’s Origin of the Family), John B. Phear, Henry Maine and John Lubbock. Particularly in the section on Lubbock, Marx once again deals with the religious dimensions of fetishism, quoting the Bible as a source of data on fetishism. The examples come from many parts of the world, from Siberia through Greece to Australia. But when Marx cites Lubbock on sacrifice, the Bible appears. Marx begins by noting that sacrifice may be either a sacrifice to the idol or a sacrifice of the idol. The latter he calls, quoting Lubbock, “eating the fetish.” Now four biblical texts appear: a reference to the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11, the prescriptions for Israelite sacrifice of animals in Leviticus 7 (actually the whole of chapters 1 to 7 deal with sacrifice), Paul’s comments on the origin of idolatry in Romans 1:23, and, last but by no means least, Christ’s sacrifice, which is as good an example as any of “eating the fetish” (Marx 1972, 339–51). In the four decades between his reading of de Brosses and Lubbock, Marx deployed fetishism for political polemic, but above all for his economic arguments, including the categories of money, labour, commodities and capitalism itself. As an example of political polemic, there is an early piece criticizing the various decisions by the Rhine Province Assembly ([1842] 1975b). Marx accuses the Rhineland nobles of having a fetish for wood and hares, since they wished to punish the peasants who helped themselves to fallen wood and hares. A couple of years later, he would suggest that money as a mediator of exchange is analogous to Christ, who is projected by human beings as the ideal mediator. Similarly, money becomes a quasi-divine mediator: before it too we must kneel, since we gain our worth from money, its pursuit becomes our goal in life, and it mediates between objects and us (Marx [1844] 1975b, 212). Marx also extends the fetish to deal with labour and commodities. Now fetishism is the transference of human social characteristics to objects and vice versa. With labour, the more the worker puts into the product he or she is making, the less the worker becomes. The value of the worker’s labour-power is transferred to the object produced, the commodity, which becomes alien and independent at the expense of the worker ([1844] 1975b, 272). By the time of Capital, this fetish transfer is applied to the commodity-form:

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the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. ([1867] 1996, 82–83) At the beginning of this section, I mentioned that Marx’s well-known idea of the fetishism of commodities appears in an early section of Capital. Many interpreters assume that this is the final word on the fetish, as Marx attempts to uncover the secret of capital, to represent what can almost not be represented. However, a careful reading of all three (or four if one includes Theories of Surplus Value (Marx [186163] 1968)) volumes of Capital reveals that this section in volume one is merely the introduction to a significant development of the idea. After this introduction, Marx expands the fetish well beyond the commodity. Now we find a whole range of items that form the many workings of capitalism: interest, rent, wages, profit, land, landlord, capitalist, labour, machinery, circulation, world market and so on. All of them face the labourer as pre-existing, objective, alien realities that rule his life; they “‘stand on their hind legs vis-à-vis the worker and confront him as ‘capital’ (Marx [1861–63] 1994, 457–58). This expansion of what counts as a fetish is really the preliminary to a distillation of the fetish. In the third volume of Capital, Marx initially identifies three core features of the fetish: capital, land and labour. These form what Marx calls “The Trinity Formula” (Marx [1894] 1998, 801–18), with capital producing interest, land producing ground rent and labour producing wages. The key is that the processes by which interest, ground rent and wages are produced are pushed into the background and forgotten, so that it seems as though interest, ground rent and wages are produced in and of themselves. Marx sums up: In capital-profit, or still better capital-interest, land-rent, labour-wages, in this economic trinity represented as the connection between the component parts of value and wealth in general and its sources, we have the complete mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the conversion of social relations into things, the direct coalescence of material production relations with their historical and social determination. It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things. ([1894] 1998, 817) At last we come to the heart of capitalism itself, and Marx seeks a single formula, the essence of capitalism (Marx [1894] 1998, 388–97). His argument is that interest-bearing capital, or the financialization of the market, is the ultimate expression of fetishism.3 That is, capital creates its own surplus value, money creates money,

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expanding of its own accord without the mediation of the commodity. He invokes the beautifully simple formula of “M-C-M,” in which money is mediated by the commodity to produce yet more money. However, in the case of interest-bearing capital the crucial item of the commodity (C), with its dependence on production and circulation, disappears. Instead, the essence of capitalism is simply “M-M.” Money produces yet more money of its own accord. Interest, financial speculation, the very mechanisms of the modern stock market—these are expressions of the pure fetish. What has happened to the fetishism of commodities, let alone all the other instances of fetishism? In light of this argument, each of them has become a localized instance of fetishism, an example of a much more basic operation. Distilled to its pure essence, the fetish is none other than capital itself, and the fetish relation operates in terms of “M-M”—“the original starting-point of capital” ([1894] 1998, 389). That is, capital apparently produces surplus value in and of itself, unassisted by the processes of production and circulation. The argument concerning fetishism has expanded far beyond that initial foray in the first volume concerning commodities, let alone the first experiments concerning Prussian laws concerning hares and fallen wood. Now all that has gone before, the full range of items from commodities through to the personification of the landlord, have become incarnations of capital’s “pure fetish form” [seine reine Fetishform] ([1894] 1998, 801–2). To express this argument that the fetish functions at the core of capitalism, providing the secret of its workings, Marx coins a new term, eliding capital and fetish as “kapitalfetisch” (Marx [1894] 1973, 412).

Summary and conclusion We have travelled far from the caricatures of Marx’s understanding of religion. It should be clear by now that his thoughts on religion are far more complex and dialectical. The public and political context in which Marx began his work was saturated with theology, so much so that he had to begin by responding to theological positions—via Bauer, Stirner and Feuerbach. His own initial development beyond Feuerbach, with the opium metaphor, revealed a significant ambivalence concerning religion. Yet, Marx’s most sustained engagement was with the idea of the fetish. Over four decades he transformed the idea for political criticism, the analysis of labour, money and commodities, to identify the core of the capitalism. I would suggest that this redeployment of the fetish constitutes Marx’s sublation, or aufhebung,4 of religion in his work. Religion is thus negated, preserved and transformed in Marx’s work. Marx has not simply kicked away the ladder of religion, but pulled it up and then used the materials to construct something quite new. Are Marx’s insights into religion still valid today? I suggest that the core insight into the function of capitalism, especially the financialisation of the market, was already seen by Marx with his treatment of the fetish. The idea that money simply produces money, effacing the role of labour and material, remains central to the way capitalism works. Much of the discussion today concerning the “theology”

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of the market misses this insight (see Meeks 1989; Loy 1996; Goodchild 2002, 2009). Further, the ambivalence over religion that Marx reveals through his image of opium is a real insight. I refer to the political ambivalence of religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which may be both politically reactionary—supporting tyrannical regimes—and revolutionary, seeking to overthrow those regimes. It is not the case that one sense is the true one and the other an aberration or betrayal, but that both senses are part of the very nature of these religious traditions.

Notes 1 Bauer published his part as Die Posaune or The Last Trumpet (Bauer 1983 [1841]). 2 Even in the early twentieth century, opium was used by doctors to treat melancholy and other ailments. As the left-leaning theologian, Metropolitan Vvedensky of Moscow, said in 1925, opium is not merely a drug that dulls the senses, but also a medicine that “reduces pain in life and, from this point of view, opium is for us a treasure that keeps on giving, drop by drop” (Vvedensky [1925] 1985, 223). This comes from a very popular debate between Vvedensky and Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar for Enlightenment in Soviet Russia, on September 20–21 in 1925. This observation is the first observation concerning the ambivalence of the opium image. 3 “The relations of capital assume their most external and most fetish-like form [fetischartigste form] in interest-bearing capital” (Marx [1894] 1998, 388). 4 Aufhebung is almost untranslatable, for it is drawn from Hegel and means both cancellation and transformation to another level, where it takes on a whole new life. See the detailed discussion of Marx’s Aufhebung of religion and economics in my book, In The Vale of Tears (Boer 2014, 47–57).

References Bauer, Bruno. 1838. Kritik der Geschichte der Offenbarung: Die Religion des alten Testaments in der Geschichtlichen Entwicklung ihrer Prinzipien Dargestellt. Berlin, Germany: Ferdinand Dümmler. Bauer, Bruno. 1840. Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes. Bremen, Germany: Karl Schünemann. Bauer, Bruno 1841. Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker. 2 vols. Leipzig, Germany: Otto Wigand. Bauer, Bruno. 1842. Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker und des Johannes, Dritter und letzter Band. Braunschweig, Germany: Fr. Otto. Bauer, Bruno. 1843a. Das entdeckte Christenthum. Eine Erinnerung an das 18. Jahrhundert und ein Beitrag zur Krisis des 19. Jahrhundert. Zürich und Winterthur, Switzerland: Verlag des literarischen Comptoirs. Bauer, Bruno. 1843b. Die Judenfrage. Braunschweig, Germany: Otto Wigand. Bauer, Bruno. [1841] 1983. Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen: Ein Ultimatum. Aalen, Germany: Scientia Verlag. Original edition, Leipzig, Germany: Otto Wigand. Boer, Roland. 2014. In The Vale of Tears: On Marxism and Theology V. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Breckman, Warren. 1999. Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brosses, Charles de. 1760. Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches ou Parallèle de l”Ancienne Religion de l’Égypte. Paris, France: n.p.

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Engels, Friedrich. [1841] 1975. Schelling on Hegel in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 2. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. 181–87. Feuerbach, Ludwig. [1841] 1989. The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot. New York, NY: Prometheus Books. Goodchild, Philip. 2002. Capitalism as Religion: The price of piety. London, UK: Routledge. Goodchild, Philip. 2009. Theology of Money. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. [1820] 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Loy, David. 1996. “The Religion of the Market.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 2: 275–90. Marx (senior), Jenny. [1857] 1983. “Jenny Marx to Engels in Manchester, London, about 12 April 1857.” Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 40. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. 563. Marx, Karl. [1842] 1975a. “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung.” Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 1. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. 184–202. Marx, Karl. [1842] 1975b. “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article: Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood.” Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 1. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. 224–63. Marx, Karl. [1843] 1975. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.” Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol 3. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. 3–129. Marx, Karl. [1844] 1975a. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction.” Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. 175–87. Marx, Karl. [1844] 1975b. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. 229–346. Marx, Karl. [1844] 1975c. “On the Jewish Question.” Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. 146–74. Marx, Karl. [1845] 1976. “Theses on Feuerbach (original version).” Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. 3–5. Marx, Karl. [1861–63] 1994. Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63 (Conclusion): A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 34. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl. [1861–63] 1968. Theories of Surplus Value. Moscow, Russia: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Marx, Karl. [1867] 1996. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl. [1894] 1973. Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Dritter Band Buch III. Der Gesamtprozeß der kapitalistischen Produktion. In Marx Engels Werke, Vol. 25. Berlin, Germany: Dietz. Marx, Karl. [1894] 1998. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 37. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl. 1972. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. Edited by Lawrence Krader. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. [1845] 1975. The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 4. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. 5–211. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels [1845–46]. 1976. The German Ideology: Critique of Modern German Philosophy According to Its Representatives Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stirner, and of German Socialism According to Its Various Prophets. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers. 19–539.

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McKinnon, Andrew M. 2006. “Opium as Dialectics of Religion: Metaphor, Expression and Protest.” Marx, Critical Theory and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice. Edited by W. S. Goldstein. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. 11–29. Meeks, M. Douglas. 1989. God the economist: The doctrine of God and political economy. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress. Stirner, Max. [1845] 2005. The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority. Translated by S. T. Byington. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Strauss, David Friedrich. 1835. Das Leben Jesu, Kritisch Bearbeitet. Tübingen, Germany: C. F. Osiander. Vvedensky, Aleksandr Ivanovich. [1925] 1985. “Otvetnoe slovo A. I. Vvedensky.” Religia I prosveshchenie. Edited by V. N. Kuznetsova. Moscow, Russia: Sovetskaia Rossiia. 214–23.

7 Ernest Bloch (1885–1977) Ian Bacher

Who are we? Where are we going? How do we bring about a better world? These are the essential questions which concerned Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), the GermanJewish philosopher, Marxist, and cultural critic. The breadth and scope of Bloch’s work is vast: his Gesamtausgabe runs 17 volumes and traverses a range of topics including music, literature, mythology, everyday life, the political and social realities of his day, eschatology, the Bible and the self. Though he remains little-known in the English-speaking world, his thought has been influential on a wide range of thinkers including György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Moltmann, Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. Moreover, through Moltmann in particular, he has had a marked influence on liberation theology. Perhaps some of his obscurity stems from the difficulty of his texts, which are themselves often couched in a prophetic tone, which seems to proclaim its truth through obtuse, gnomic phrases.Yet despite this difficulty, it is possible to detect a red thread, a conceptual signature that runs through Bloch’s thought: a vision of the world as radically open towards a transformation into utopia. Utopia, for Bloch, however, is not a strange, obscure fantasy, a “building of castles in the sky,” as Germans say. Rather, Bloch’s utopia is concrete, built on materials already present within the world. Utopia is a latent tendency within reality itself. As already within the world, utopia realizes itself through our dreams of a better life, through our deepest desires and longings. Bloch’s work as a whole seeks to excavate the traces of utopia in our lives, to bring them to light, and show their trajectory. In approaching Bloch, it is important to bear in mind that though his writings sometimes appear systematic, Bloch never gives us a final, closed system. Rather, his works are deeply experimental. His thought constantly pushes itself beyond its boundaries, following the threads of the new material it digests. Hence the motif of Bloch’s magnum opus, The Principle of Hope: “Thinking means venturing beyond” (Bloch 1986b, 5). By its very nature, Bloch’s thought follows an ever-changing task

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that must seek to adapt and accommodate itself to the circumstances in which it finds itself. So, too, Bloch’s life was shaped by and accommodated itself to many of the significant events of the twentieth century, including the October Revolution of 1917, World War I, the rise of the Nazi party, World War II, Stalinism and the construction of the Berlin Wall. Moreover, from a young age, Bloch was actively engaged with the German intellectual culture of his day. In short, it is impossible to understand Bloch without understanding the historical context within which he wrote.

Early life Bloch was born in 1885 to an assimilated Jewish family in Ludwigshafen, a German city located across the Rhine from Mannheim. It was in the juxtaposition of the “workers’ city” of Ludwigshafen and the “old cultural city” of Mannheim that Bloch saw his own political consciousness begin to develop (Löwy 1976, 40; Bloch 1991, 191). Although he reportedly had an indifferent school record, he developed a keen interest in philosophy, which he was actively discouraged from pursuing by his parents. Instead, he would leave Ludwigshafen for the libraries of Mannheim to pursue his passion. Upon leaving Ludwigshafen for university, he studied philosophy, physics and music theory, first in Munich then in Würzberg. In 1908, he completed his dissertation Critical Reflections on Rickert’s Theory of Knowledge, a work which articulated many of the themes that were to haunt his career. Most importantly, it announced his discovery of the category of the “Not-Yet” [Noch-Nicht]. The Not-Yet describes a latent inner potential, something which is unrealized, but whose movement is nevertheless detectable at a subterranean level. It was this concept that launched Bloch’s philosophical career. The publication of Bloch’s dissertation led to an invitation to attend Georg Simmel’s private colloquium, which he accepted, although he was eventually to break with Simmel both intellectually and politically. The final sundering of their relationship happened with the outbreak of World War I, which Bloch—a committed pacifist—utterly opposed, but which Simmel supported. Between attending Simmel’s colloquium and the outbreak of the war, Bloch spent time in Heidelberg, attending Max Weber’s private seminar. Weber, though a self-described consummate member of the bourgeoisie, was known to associate with radical elements of all sorts, leading to friction within his circle. He seems to have taken a particularly personal dislike to Bloch, the reason for which may be espied in his wife’s recollection of Bloch’s presence at one of the seminar meetings: A new Jewish philosopher happened to be there—a young man with an enormous crown of black hair and an equally enormous self-assurance. He evidently regarded himself as the precursor of a new Messiah and wanted to be recognized as such. From the height of his apocalyptic speculation he directed all sorts of questions to Naumann, who was very amiable but obviously had the impression that he was dealing with someone a bit cracked. (Geoghegan 1995, 12)

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Despite the personal animus, however, Weber proved instrumental in the ­publication of Bloch’s first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, and Weber’s own work on capitalism and religion was an important impetus for Bloch’s Thomas Münzer as Theologian of the Revolution.

Exile and the world wars Bloch left Germany for Switzerland at the outbreak of World War I to avoid military service. During this period of exile, he composed The Spirit of Utopia, his first major work. This work would have a lasting influence, particularly on the Frankfurt School, as it provided a resurrection and reinvigoration of the concept of utopia by locating utopia as a tendency within the present moment. After the war, he returned to Germany and became active in the literary circles of Weimar Berlin. Among the works published during the Weimar period was Traces—a book of literary, imaginative and autobiographical stories which attempt to locate traces of dreams of a better world in everyday life. During this period, Bloch’s thought was profoundly influenced by the events of the October Revolution. In essays written in the 1920s—though not published until 1935 in Heritage of Our Times—Bloch began looking to Communist Russia as a proof of the possibility of things being otherwise. This was perhaps the start of Bloch’s sometimes-strained relationship with official Communism. With Hitler’s rise to power, Bloch, a Jew and anti-fascist, was stripped of his citizenship and targeted by the Gestapo, whom he narrowly managed to avoid. He fled Germany with his wife, Karola, who was at that time an agent of the Communist Party. They travelled through various parts of Europe, as Karola’s assignments changed until, in 1939, they made their way to the United States, where they stayed until 1949. Bloch, unlike many other German expatriates of the period, was rather cut off from the intellectual culture of America, having made no attempt to learn English, and having been treated with suspicion by American officials due to his pro-Marxist publications. Again, in exile, Bloch wrote prolifically during this period, though most of these writings would remain unpublished until he returned to Germany in 1949. The works he wrote included a book on Aristotle and Islamic philosophy, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, a book on law, Natural Law and Human Dignity, and The Principle of Hope, a sweeping work spanning three volumes and over 1300 pages.1

Return to divided Germany In 1949, Bloch received and accepted an offer of a chair in philosophy at the University of Leipzig in East Germany, replacing Hans-Georg Gadamer, who had recently left Leipzig for West Germany. Initially, Bloch’s appointment was seen as a victory for the political forces of East Germany who thought Bloch more amenable to Marxist orthodoxy than Gadamer had been. Bloch had been broadly supportive of Lenin and Stalin, seeing them as steps in the right direction. To the dismay of

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his political supporters, however, Bloch never quite embraced the party line, and a series of political incidents culminating in Khrushchev’s famous denunciation of Stalin, led to Bloch—publicly perceived as a Stalinist—to become persona non grata to the government of East Germany. In 1961, while on vacation in West Germany, construction began on the Berlin Wall and Bloch and Karola elected to stay in West Germany, settling in Tübigen, where Bloch taught until his death in 1977. This period saw the publication of numerous of Bloch’s works, including an in-depth study of the Bible and its stories, Atheism in Christianity, and a book which recapitulates and attempts to explain what his philosophy had been doing, Experimentum Mundi. It is somewhat of an irony that Bloch, whose works are so driven by a sense of utopia as home-coming, had his life marked by a divided homeland, and whose chief works were largely composed while in exile of one sort or another.

Themes and concepts Religion as subversive material It seems natural to wonder what the relevance of religion could be for a committed atheist philosopher and Marxist. After all, is Marxism not explicitly anti-religious? A twofold answer is necessary here. Very little of Bloch’s work concerns itself with the sort of exposition, explanation or discussion that we typically associate with philosophical texts. Rather, his texts are themselves undertaking a certain exploration, an experimentation with material to identify within it the traces of utopian thought that it contains. This concern manifests itself whatever topic Bloch addresses himself to, be it music, literature, memory, philosophy or religion. Religion, in this sense, is just one more field of cultural production to be mined. It is yet one more expression of the inner longing that we each live out, just one more form of expression of the human spirit yearning for utopia. Yet, religion informs and suffuses Bloch’s writings, not merely in those which explicitly deal with religious subject matter. Bloch’s language, like that of Thomas Münzer, is littered with phrases from and allusions to the Bible, but also the Talmud and the Qu’ran, as well as Gnostic and Kabbalistic writings. Throughout Bloch’s works, there is a constant return of religion as a means of expressing a truth that cannot be expressed otherwise. Bloch was fond of quoting and alluding to the passage in Marx’s “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” wherein Marx not only famously states that religion is the opium of the people, but also claims that “Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering,” and, therefore, the task of criticism is not to merely abolish religion but to pluck “the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower” (Marx 1975, 244). In other words, religion is not merely an illusion, but expresses a truth, and it is the task of the Marxist critique not simply to demand the abolition of religion, but rather to find and give expression to this form of suffering bound within religious experience.

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The type of criticism of religion envisioned by Bloch can probably be most readily descried from his Atheism in Christianity, which seeks to extract from the Biblical text the traces of what Bloch calls “slave-talk.” This “slave-talk” is “found in the studied lines in the underground text” (Bloch 2009, 2). It is the “art of cursing while one blessed” (2009, 3), a subversive mode of speaking that conceals itself in apparent praise. This way of speaking is not to damn with faint praise, but rather, as Bloch describes it: “praising the prince and praising the gallows to prove it” (2009, 3). It is a use of language that presses language to its limits to prove the opposite of what it claims to be proving. Religion serves to legitimize and enforce certain forms of power: the power of the state, the power of the priests and so on. And yet, the very same texts that seem to legitimize such power, read as instances of slave-talk, are nothing other than the subversive kernel that undoes the chains they appear to bind. Such texts offer hope where there may seem to be none. A key example of this slave-talk, for Bloch, is the story of the serpent in Genesis 3.2 In Genesis, the serpent tricks Eve into eating the fruit of the tree from which God forbid Adam and Eve to eat. The serpent does this by claiming that eating the fruit will not cause her to die, but rather to become like God. Near the end of the chapter, the figure of God himself seems to confirm this: Then the Lord God said, ‘see, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’—therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden. (Genesis 3:22–23 NRSV) How, asks Bloch, can becoming like God be a bad thing? Moreover, why would God fear his creation becoming like him? The moral often drawn from this story, that human beings must obey God without question, seems to bespeak less an omnipotent God—who, after all, would hardly be affected by human disobedience—than a weak God who must frighten “his people” into blindly obeying him. The God that appears in this story is, according to Bloch, nothing more than an invention of the priests, eager to maintain their power over the Israelites—a tyrannical class, that like every other tyrannical class, has only a weak hold over its subjects. The story of Genesis 3, thus, is not a warning against disobedience. Rather, it points to the limitations of the exercise of tyrannical power and the fear on which such power always relies to keep its subjects in line. There is more going on in this Genesis text than just this, however. Underneath the tale of a tyrannical and vengeful creator, God is the outline of another story, a story about a different God and a different relationship between that God and humankind. This other God is not the figure of Elohim, but the serpent. After all, in the story, it is the serpent who actively encourages human beings to eat of the tree of knowledge. The serpent does not want human beings penned within their “proper place” of his pre-established order, but rather seeks to allow human beings to attain their full potential, to become Gods like him. This serpent-god is not a

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God of tyranny, but a God of liberation. The serpent-god, not fearing humans becoming godlike, instead desires for us our full realization of ourselves. Thus, it is the serpent-god alone who can declare, without any irony, “Let my people go!” This brings us to the aspect of the Biblical tradition most important to Bloch: the notion of the God of the Exodus. For Bloch, the first name that God gives to Moses on Sinai—Ehyeh asher ehyeh—says it all: “I will be what I will be.”3 The God of Moses, the God who leads the Israelites out of Egypt, is not the God of Eden, but the God who is not yet, not the creator God, but the God who must be created, declared and named and then laboured for. It is this vision of God that Bloch finds running through the Biblical prophets. It is this vision which reaches a head in the figure of Jesus, “the supreme model of another world in which there was no oppression and no lordly God” (Bloch 2009, 122). It is, moreover, for Bloch, this vision of God through which non-Abrahamic traditions can become understandable to Europeans. There is in this figure, this “exodus-archetype” (Bloch 1986b, 1232), that Bloch finds in every religious tradition, not a demand for worship, but for action, for human effort and human labour to bring about this God, this final realized utopia. Hence, for Bloch, there are always elements within every religious tradition which resist a petrification into organized religion, into a mere form of ritual and worship, into an image of the state. Yet, if these elements are to be used to undermine organized religion from within, why should one even want to keep the façade of religion? Surely it is better to be done altogether with religion, to excise the ghost from the banquet. But one must be careful: to throw out religion, and with it anything which resembles the religious form, is to throw out a true expression of the human spirit. To throw out religion because one no longer believes its metaphysical and ideological pretensions is to risk throwing out the very material with which one might oppose this metaphysics and this ideology. One cannot throw out religion without throwing out the subversive kernel within religion. But it is precisely this subversive kernel that allows one to re-appropriate the hopes, fears and dreams which religion embodies. This is perhaps why Bloch writes, at the very beginning of Atheism in Christianity, that “only an atheist can be a good Christian” (Bloch 2009).

Dreaming and desiring utopia Of course, religion is not the only way that dreams are embodied. To dream is the human condition. Dreams give expression and realization to our hopes and wishes without which “we would be the dead bodies over which the wicked would stride on to victory” (Bloch 1986b, 77). “[D]reams are not just foam” (1986b, 78),4 though they retain a certain fantastic character. Their very existence, the fact that we dream, evinces an as-yet unfulfilled desire. In dreams, the fantastic is possible and it is this element of the fantastic that expresses what we want—if only as something glimpsed through a glass darkly. Dreams are a groping for a better world. They bespeak our seeking for another world, another possibility, another reality. It is in this form that dreams become important for Bloch: they express a dark

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desire within us—dark not in the sense of something horrific that lurks beneath the surface, but rather dark in the sense of something unknown, subterranean, to be brought to light—and so serve to make this desire visible. In dreaming, we break out of this world and grope for the “right world”—or rather, the world set aright. That dreams embody desires is, in itself, nothing new. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Freud published his The Interpretation of Dreams, which interpreted dreams as a means of wish-fulfilment. Dreams, for Freud, function as a means by which the unconscious is able to give expression to desires of which the conscious mind is often unaware. Dreams are the point where our unconscious desires present themselves most nakedly. Freud’s presentation of dreams is very close to Bloch’s. However, according to Bloch, Freud fails to properly distinguish how these dreams are dreamt. Bloch distinguishes between two kinds of dreams: daydreams [tagträume] and nightdreams [nachtträume]. Daydreams are not nightdreams, but an entirely different mode of dreaming: “The castle in the air5 is not a stepping-stone to the nocturnal labyrinth, if anything, the nocturnal labyrinths lie like cellars beneath the daytime castle in the air” (1986b, 87). Nightdreams, for Bloch, have two tendencies: either, as Freud claims, towards wish fulfilment or towards nightmares. Both of these tendencies end in enervation, either by convincing us that our desires have been fulfilled, and thus there is nothing left to desire or by frightening us of the possible outcomes of our desires. Nightdreams are not inspirations to action, but means of accommodating ourselves to the world as it is. Daydreams, on the contrary, show us a better world, and serve to drive desire rather than stifle it. They picture the world not as it is but as it could be, without ever taking leave of the world entirely. Daydreams differ from nightdreams in that they are dreamt with open eyes and tend towards the fairy tale. They inculcate a sense of awe and wonder, but also a yearning for something more. As such, they belong not to the world of our fantasy, but to the world made fantastic. What is this better world we find in daydreams? In a literal sense, it is ou topos, no place, which is to say utopia. What is dreamt in this world rendered fantastic is not to be found anywhere. It is a world that only exists in the dream and for the dreamer. Dreams are thus a way of creating an exit from this world towards this no place, a way out, an Exodus. The religious language here is intentional, for the Exodus is the way that leads—eventually—to the Promised Land. So, too, dreams as our groping towards utopia are our own Exodus, our way out of this world and towards the not-yet-here of the Promised Land. “The daydream … builds castles in the air as blueprints … and not always just fictitious ones” (Bloch 1986b, 86). Rather these blueprints become a plan, a way of showing us the possibility of this exit. And yet, this exit is not merely fantastic, for “there would be no loathings or cravings at all without the external something that evokes them” (1886b, 71). To desire is to demand the real satisfaction of that desire, but more than that, the desire itself is awakened by something external, something that fulfils the desire. Our dreams of a better life, thus, are not just expressions of longing, but they give us something to strive for, even if, like Moses, we get only the faintest glimpse of our goal.

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The warm and cool streams Dreams by themselves are not enough. To become effective, dreams must make themselves concrete; the fermentations of spirit must produce a new brew. It is this process of dreams becoming concrete that Bloch names “concrete utopia.” Concrete utopia is opposed to the “abstract,” “bad” utopias Marx denounces. “Abstract utopias” dream of possibilities that have no relation to reality, or at least to reality properly understood, for they do not comprehend utopia according to the possibilities of things. What is needed as a corrective, therefore, is an account of what Bloch calls the “objective-real possibility,” that is, a type of possibility that draws on the latent potentials hidden within an object. Dreams, in other words, must supplement themselves with an account of the object, for it is only from dreaming starting from the possibilities for the object that dreams can become actualized and utopia can be more than just fiction. Bloch distinguishes between two types of objective-real possibility that he traces back to Aristotle: kata to dynaton, what-is-according-to-possibility, and dynamei on, what-is-in-possibility.6 Of the first, Bloch writes that “seen from this side, matter is the site of the conditions according to whose stipulations entelechies reveal themselves” (Bloch 1986b, 207). In other words, matter imposes itself as a boundary, a limit on possibility. The matter of the thing ensures that it retains its identity as thing. But that there are possibilities can only make sense if there is a field of possibilities beyond the possibilities contained in the object. This is what Bloch calls the dynamei on, which he describes as the “womb of fertility from which all worldforms inexhaustibly emerge” (1986b, 207). The dynamei on refers to possibilities beyond those disclosed within things themselves, genuinely new possibilities, and so to the possibility of transgressing the limited of possibilities of the kata to dynaton. For Bloch, these two types of possibility are inseparable. To attend solely to the limitations of matter is to fail to see the ways in which what-is can be shaped into something new. This is the attitude of a fetishistic scientism that forecloses the possibility of what might-be in favour of the rigorous stasis of what is. But to neglect the limitations imposed by matter is to live in the world of castles in the sky with no hope of constructing those castles on earth. This is the attitude of the abstract utopians who dream of what may be without any means of bringing it about. Only a perspective which combines these ways of regarding possibility can realize concrete utopia, just as the sculptor must both see the possibilities of the material before her and yet also see the possibilities not disclosed by its bare matter. Bloch names these two modes of regarding possibility the cold-stream and the warm-stream. To the cold-stream belongs rational analysis, which lays bare the possibilities of things. But without the warm-stream, without the necessary transgression of the stasis of what-is towards the dynamei on, nothing new can be achieved. This is precisely the issue that Bloch saw in Marx’s work: [M]an does not live by bread alone. As extensively important as the external may be … it still only suggests, it does not create … What must still

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come economically, the necessary economic-institutional change, is defined by Marx, but the new man, the leap, the power of love and of light, morality itself, has not yet been allotted the desirable degree of autonomy in the definitive social order. (Bloch 2000b, 243) Nevertheless, Marx’s “unromantic coldness and his materialism” is necessary to overcome “the Philistine cultural ideals socialism [had] taken over from the bourgeoisie” (2000b, 243). One cannot merely dream reality; it must be produced from the concrete conditions of the kata to dynaton.

Concrete engagement with what-is The merging of the warm and cool streams opens up new possibilities within the world by transgressing the boundaries of the limits of the possibilities present in things. But such transgression, if it is not to regress back to abstract dreaming, must take its lead from what actually exists. We thus face a conundrum: where can we find a source within what-is that can open up new possibilities? In a key passage of The Principle of Hope, Bloch gives a definition of the three basic concepts which constitute the three principal moments of his dialectic: the Not, the Not-Yet, and the Nothing or the All. The Not points to a lack and hence is the source of the desire for something that is missing. This desire is concrete in that what it desires is the “right thing,” a determinate thing, even if exactly what is desired is unknown, rather like a piece missing from a jigsaw puzzle. So, too, the desire arising from this lack is not merely a mental phenomenon, but rather it is a material process, a process of seeking for the thing that is lacking. This is the Not-Yet, the working out of this desire, the process by which it becomes fulfilled. The Not-Yet thus characterizes the active tendency of all things. Finally, the Nothing or the All characterizes what-is when it is not actively seeking after the right thing. Here it must be noted that in the Nothing, the desire is not sated, but merely rendered latent. The right thing is still lacking, but there is no drive to pursue it. By activating these tendencies and latencies within what-is, thought can push beyond the boundaries of what-is towards something genuinely new. By itself, this might seem merely a pretty ontological fiction. We might be inclined to ask how it is we can go about showing that these tendencies and latencies are, in fact, actually there. After all, it is only through securing their presence in material reality that Bloch’s vision of the world can guarantee its own concreteness. And indeed, much of Bloch’s writings are taken up with convincing us of this fact, not through general or abstract argumentation, but through a detailed analysis of particular cultural phenomena, in whatever field of cultural production they might occur. Perhaps one of the more interesting examples of this is developed in Bloch’s 1935 book, Heritage of Our Times, a book aimed at understanding how the left failed to ward off fascism, and what potentials remain unembraced by ­emancipatory

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thinking. With this aim, Bloch develops the concept of non-contemporaneity [ungleichzeitigkeit], which he explains thus: “Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, through the fact that they can be seen today. But they are thereby not yet living at the same time with the others” (Bloch 1991, 97). Although this sounds complex it is in some ways a very simple idea: although we all live in the same present, our time is broken up differently according to the rhythms of our lives. Academics live according to very different rhythms from those inhabited by farmers, which are in turn different from those of factory workers, shop workers and so on. Our “same” time is thus embodied in diverse ways according to our way of life. These strata of time not only embody different ways of life, but keep alive the memory of other ways of living. Bloch’s clearest description of this comes in discussing peasant farmers: The peasant … has given up his traditional costumes, furniture, much ancient style, and by no means under compulsion. But even if the peasant reacts to economic questions in a refreshingly sober way, even if the handwoven phrases he now uses are not all root in the soil, the sober element is still not of today, and wherever silence and dullness, convention of custom and belief occurs the peasant wears traditional costume. (Bloch 1991, 99) Bloch’s point here is not to claim that peasants are backwards, but rather to point out that despite all the “modern” trappings of peasant life, there is something of a different way of life that has not been extinguished. This unextinguished remnant points to an opening, an aporia in the contemporary order that offers new and different possibilities—for although these possibilities might seem to belong to the past, they are present and can never quite be restored as they were.

The prophetic voice Of course, drawing on the past is not the only mode for generating something new in Bloch. The past is one of many sources that open and reveal themselves when we begin to look for the traces of utopia. Here, however, we run up against one of the easiest misreadings of Bloch. It’s very easy to misunderstand the unfolding process of utopia Bloch describes as an inexorable “automatic process-optimism” (Bloch 1986b, 198), as though the telos—the final goal—was something known and the dialectical process Bloch describes is nothing but its inevitable unfolding. It is true that the materials for constructing this dialectic are there and, when read correctly, point towards a goal which is utopia, but everything hangs on this “read correctly.” The element of dialectics that appears most absent from Bloch’s thought is that of what Hegel calls “the tremendous power of the negative” (Hegel 1977, 19). This power of the negative is the element of failure, despair, resistance and death. Yet, to think that the negative is lacking in Bloch is to misunderstand him. In Bloch’s

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dialectic, one does not start at a pure beginning, but rather in media res. But to find oneself in the middle is to find oneself amongst the negative. Thus, at the outset of The Spirit of Utopia, Bloch writes that “Life has been put in our hands. For itself it became empty already long ago. It pitches senselessly back and forth, but we stand firm” (Bloch 2000b, 1). This life is empty and barren. Left to itself, it cannot produce a new form, but rather is restricted to self-reproduction. To break out of this, to produce something genuinely new is the task which has been put in our hands. It is the supremely human task: to repair the world, to activate its latent tendencies and build towards a better tomorrow. It is only by becoming the creative power that we can be that the course of the world can be set aright. But being this creative power is precisely what it means to read the materials presented by the world correctly. To take up the production of the new, to discover within the world the concrete tendencies and latencies which enable this production, is the supremely human task. Yet this does not mean that it follows automatically from our being or even from our being human. Rather it is a calling, a summons to “the table of labor” (Bloch 2000b, 246), to the production of the new. In this way, it is necessary to understand Bloch’s writings not as a philosophical expounding of a process—though there are certainly those elements within his corpus—but rather as a prophetic text. The invocation of prophecy, here, does not refer to prophecy as prognostication—for Bloch, the shape of the future remains hidden from us—but rather to prophecy as a summons to action. Every prophecy is a call to action, a call to change our behaviour in the here and now, either to ward off the promised doom or to secure the promised reward. Bloch’s texts are not philosophical treatises designed to explain the cold logic by which things happen, but rather are meant to excite the imagination, to engage the warm stream of passion and bring it into the process of producing the better world.

Conclusion: homecoming The task Bloch calls us to, therefore, is that of constructing utopia, of identifying and activating the latent tendencies towards utopia within reality. To construct utopia is to construct a different world, a better world, a world made right. Consequently, this construction demands an exit from this world towards utopia as a different world. Yet, just as the Hegelian negation of negation is a return, albeit a return with a difference, so too, utopia, as the world set right, is still the return of this very world. Our exodus from the world is the precondition for our re-entry. However, what is returned to us in the form of utopia is not something foreign, something alien, but something most dearly expected. And so, Bloch concludes The Principle of Hope with a single word: home [Heimat]. This invocation of home, however, cannot be understood as a return to where we begin, for we are, in a certain sense, always already homeless. To be at home is to be at rest, to find the place where one no longer needs to strive, where one can give up the “fervent and enigmatic” (2000b, 191) sense of

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longing which, according to Bloch, characterizes our lives. “Already as children we are constantly impatient, waiting, finally making sure of ourselves in it. It stays with a person... making us jump on Sunday evenings every time the doorbell rings; will the right thing finally be delivered?” (Bloch 2000b, 191). To be human is to be caught up in this longing, in this desire for “the right thing.” To finally find that which satiates this desire, then, is to find a sense of completion, a sense of belonging, something which is beyond every form of alienation. It is this state which allows utopia to be characterized as Heimat; it is the home which we have always sought without knowing it, where everything is arranged just as it should be. Only there can the voice that cries out within us silence itself and sit down at the table for the utopian feast. How, then, can reading Bloch help in the study of religion today? Bloch has a certain, definitive view of the human spirit and particularly of its mission as seeking a way towards utopia, a way towards the home where we have never been. This singular vision gives Bloch’s writings a character that, as Adorno says, walks “the fine line between magic formula and theorem” (Adorno 1992, 212). It is easy to disagree with Bloch’s over-determined vision of human nature and over-determined view of the role of religion in civilization. Moreover, for all his enthusiasm on the subject of religion, Bloch can seem, at times, too reductive of religion, where it becomes yet another set of cultural phenomena. Nevertheless, there is much to commend Bloch’s thought to the study of religion. Despite being a confessed atheist, he takes religion very seriously and does not seek to dismiss it, but rather finds truth at work in religion. In so doing, he shows us a different way of deploying religious material from what we typically encounter: neither as something to be accepted without question, nor as something to be merely studied with a dispassionate scientific eye, nor as something to be merely dismissed, nor as something to be overcome, but as a genuine concrete realization of the human spirit, as a concrete expression of utopian longing, and so as a source for thought and action that might change the world. This is not to suggest that the future of the study of religion must be Blochian, but to neglect Bloch, to neglect his understanding of religion as a place within which new possibilities of the human spirit emerge, is to neglect an important sense in which the study of religion can be made relevant to our lives and, perhaps, society.

Notes 1 The German original is over 1600 pages, due to difference in the formatting. 2 Bloch discusses the figure of the serpent in Genesis throughout Atheism and Christianity and in The Principle of Hope, 1265–1274. My account is based primarily on Atheism and Christianity. 3 In English, this phrase from Exodus 3:14 is typically translated “I am that I am” or variants thereof. Rendering this phrase “I will be what I will be” has a long history in both the Rabbinic and Kabbalistic literatures. Bloch’s source for this phrasing is Luther’s translation of the Bible. 4 Referring to a German proverb: “Träume sind Schäume”—“Dreams are foam.” 5 Luftschloss, a German word which refers to daydreams, but literally means “sky-castle.”

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6 Although Bloch deploys these concepts in The Principle of Hope, the main source for his discussion of this distinction with numerous textual references is Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1992. “The Handle, the Pot and Early Experience.” Notes to Literature. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 210–11. Adorno, Theodore, et al. 1980. Aesthetics and Politics. London, UK: Verso. Bloch, Ernst. 1959–1978. Gesamtausgabe. 16 vols. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Bloch, Ernst. 1969 [1921]. Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution. Vol. 2 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Bloch, Ernst. 1970 [1959]. Man on his Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York, NY: Herder & Herder. Bloch, Ernst. 1972 [1952]. Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke. In Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz, vol. 7 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Bloch, Ernst. 1975. Experimentum Mundi: Frage, Kategorien des Herausbringens, Praxis. Vol. 15 of Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Bloch, Ernst. 1978. Tendenz -Latenz -Utopie. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Bloch, Ernst. 1985. Briefe 1903–1975. Edited by Karola Bloch, Jan Robert Bloch, Anne Frommann, Hanna Gelke, Igne Jens, Martin Korol, Inka Mülder, Arno Münster, Uwe Opolka and Burghart Schmidt. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Bloch, Ernst. 1986a [1961]. Natural Law and Human Dignity. Translated by Dennis J. Schmidt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloch, Ernst. 1986b [1954–1959]. The Principle of Hope. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bloch, Ernst. 1991 [1935]. Heritage of Our Times. Translated by Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bloch, Ernst. 2000a. Logos der Materie: Eine Logik im Wedern. Aus Dem Nachlas 1923–1949. Edited by Gerardo Cunico. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Bloch, Ernst. 2000b [1918]. The Spirit of Utopia. Translated by Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bloch, Ernst. 2006 [1930]. Traces. Translated by Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bloch, Ernst. 2009 [1968]. Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. With an introduction by Peter Thompson. London, UK: Verso. Boer, Roland. 2007. “Bloch’s Detective Work.” Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Boldyrev, Ivan. 2014. Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Daniel, Jamie Owen and Tom Moylan, eds. 1997. Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. London, UK: Verso. Freud, Sigmund. 1995. The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. Edited and translated by A. A. Brill. New York, NY: The Modern Library. Geoghegan, Vincent. 1995. Ernst Bloch. London, UK: Routledge. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 2001. Faust. 2nd ed. Edited by Cyrus Hamlin. Translated by Walter Arndt. London, UK: W. W. Norton & Company.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 1969–1970. “Ernst Bloch—A Marxist Romantic.” Salmagundi, nos. 10–11 (Fall / Winter): 311–25. Originally published as “Ein marxistischer Schelling—Zu Ernst Blochs spekulativen Materialismus.” Merkur 14, no. 153 (November 1960): 1078–1091. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Löwy, Michael. 1976. “Interview with Ernst Bloch.” Translated by Vicki Williams Hill. New German Critique, no. 9 (Autumn): 35–45. Löwy, Michael. 1992. Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity. Translated by Hope Heaney. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lukács, György. 1974. Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marx, Karl. 1975. “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.” In Karl Marx: Early Writings. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London, UK: Penguin. 243–57. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume One. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London, UK: Penguin. Thompson, Peter and Slavoj Žižek, eds. 2013. The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weber, Max. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings. Edited and translated by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. London, UK: Penguin.

8 Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) Agata Bielik-Robson

Unlike Franz Rosenzweig, who uses theological idiom openly, Walter Benjamin keeps his religious inspirations “undercover”—or as in the famous opening chess-playing image from “On the Concept of History,” under the table. They are personified by the dwarf secretly pulling the strings of the puppet representing Marxist discourse, which is Benjamin’s official idiom of choice. In one of his notes, Benjamin invents yet another metaphor for his hidden, “ugly and small” theology, which needs to be kept out of sight (SW4, 389): the ink blotter, which simultaneously erases the theological writing and absorbs its liquidated content.1 This “liquidation of theology,” which Benjamin sees as his main method, is highly ambivalent: on the surface it may suggest a destruction of the theological paradigm, now to be replaced by a secularised modern Marxist idiom—deep down however, it aims at making the theological message fluid again, before it has congealed into religious dogmas. Theology turned into liquid ink may thus be used once again to compose a new scripture, which will reverberate with the stronger original messianic message than the Holy Writ of the orthodox theologies, either Jewish or Christian. Walter Bendix Schönfliess Benjamin, who was born in 1892 in Berlin to a very wealthy assimilated Jewish-Ashkenazi family of bankers, never practiced orthodox Judaism, but had a sympathy for more heretical strains of Jewish religion, most of all Jewish Kabbalistic Gnosticism and Messianism, which he began to study under the influence of his friend, Gershom Scholem, the great specialist in these matters. Benjamin’s intellectual life can be seen as spun between two very powerful points of attraction: Jewish Messianism on the one hand, and Marxism on the other, which he eagerly embraced due to his friendship with Bertolt Brecht, the German poet and communist. In the case of Benjamin, these two powerful influences produced a fruitful tension, which despite many problems on the personal front, with Scholem and Brecht engaging in a constant psychomachia over Benjamin’s soul, led to a

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unique philosophical synthesis in the form of a messianic Marxism. This synthesis matured for a long time, passing through various experiments, finally to emerge as a teaching of the weak messianic power in one of the last of Benjamin’s works—“On the Concept of History” —which he wrote not long before his suicide in 1940 in the Spanish border town of Port Bou, after his failed escape from Nazi-occupied France. Walter Benjamin never created a philosophy of religion. He did not write about theology—rather, he wrote with theology, wanting to use its energetic potential without feeling obliged by its traditional categories. By “liquidating” theology into an ink, he wished to convey in a more adequate manner the most precious messianic message of the revealed religion, which always eludes open articulation. For, as his friend, Gershom Scholem, once declared “authentic tradition remains hidden” (Scholem 1978, 264). For Benjamin, therefore, the key to the proper transmission of this message was a secrecy bordering on silence. This, however, is not the typical position of negative theology: it is not that the message is ineffable, transgressing the capacity of human language. The idea behind the Benjaminian secrecy is not apophatic but antinomian. The concealment of Benjamin’s Hidden God does not derive from a supraontological position, which cannot be captured in deficient words; it is not a matter of God’s being beyond being or God’s power surpassing any earthly idea of power. It is rather a matter of the divine incompatibility with the laws of this world, which cannot express itself properly in the language which also fell under their rule and, precisely because of that, is regarded by Benjamin as fallen. For Benjamin, to fall under the rule of the legalistic arrangement of creaturely reality—be it the nomos of the Earth, the statutory law of the state or the grammar of language based on general concepts—is synonymous with the religious Fall as such. The caution and secrecy, which surround Benjamin’s notion of the divine, do not result from the traditional suspicion towards language as incapable of expressing the absolute and unconditional, but from an ethical mistrust towards being, which tends to close upon itself in systems of generalizing laws. The revelatory message, in contrast, is always a matter of a strictly singular justice. One of the greatest authorities on Benjamin’s, Irving Wohlfarth, described his messianism as “eccentric” (Wohlfahrt 1979, 73), full of anxious anticipations of olam ha-ba (the world-to-come), yet deliberately without footing in any “central” institution of faith and, for this reason, with no clear sense of direction. This disoriented—always radical and restlessly searching—sense of messianic activity in Benjamin stems from his conviction that we live in a world without revelation. The divine message, which would give an unambiguous hint of where to aim and how to proceed, became lost in the labyrinth of creation. It rather resembles Franz Kafka’s “Letter from the Emperor”: a word arriving too late, distorted and mediated through too many layers of being to mean anything. Benjamin, who, together with Gershom Scholem, regarded Kafka as the only truly modern Kabbalistic mind (Benjamin 1994, 142), agrees with the author of The Castle that transcendence (if it exists) does not communicate with immanence. Messages coming from “up

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high”—if we can be sure that they come at all—never reach us the way they were intended; by entering the immanent sphere of being they either perish or get ­contaminated with alien forces, which Benjamin calls the “powers of myth.”

The antinomian conundrum Throughout all of Benjamin’s writings, “myth” is a hostile structure which governs immanence, whereas revelation, strictly opposed to the worldly realm, remains alien and transcendent. They are, so to say, as matter to anti-matter; whenever they clash, violence issues. Either myth swallows the revelatory message, by killing its subversive potential through “mythic violence,” or the subversive revelation explodes the world of myth in apocalyptic “divine violence.” One way or another, this is a violent messianism, which refuses to see the creaturely world as safely progressing towards its redemptive finale. Instead of the Hegelian concept of “holy history” (heilsgeschichte), in which the world has already been given a right prompt and now merely realizes the message in a teleological manner, progressing slowly but surely, Benjamin champions the messianic vision of extreme irreconciliation: there is no progress, rather a deepening Fall, which can be reverted only when the flow of history gets violently arrested. “Pulling the brake”—the image Benjamin creates in his “On the Concept of History”—is the only consistent figure of messianic practice which emerges in all Benjamin’s texts, from the earliest essays on Hölderlin up to his latest historico-philosophical theses. Consciously anti-Hegelian, Benjamin would rather follow his fellow Jewish Gnostic, Nachman of Bratslav (who also happened to be Kafka’s true master and precursor), and repeat after him that we are like people drowning in the swamp: the more we fret and try to rescue ourselves, the quicker we go under. The immanentist fix, ruled by the powers of myth, is a subterfugeous and deceptive snare; the more we are convinced that we are acting for the sake of our salvation, the more probable it is that we are doing all to the contrary. Revelation—if it ever came—never cooperates with the forces of actuality, never gives in to its laws, be it the physical laws of the cosmos or the legal organisations of human communities: it is strictly antinomian—which for Benjamin is the only conceivable meaning of transcendence. To be transcendent is to be against the law: against the “mythic,” that is, the quasi-harmonious arrangements of being, the only purpose of which is to show immanence as self-sufficient, self-repeating, well-ordered and thus in no need of anything radically other. Yet the Hegelian challenge, which determined the development of late modern philosophy, does not allow Benjamin to fall safely back upon the traditional mode of “expecting Messiah” patiently and without moving. Although disorienting (and proud of it), Benjamin’s messianic Gnosis faces nonetheless the same problem that was posed by Hegel: how to make the antinomian divine message work in the condition of the fallen world? How to make it operative within a completely hostile environment of material being? And how to press for redemption even if nothing in this world anticipates it? Benjamin’s answers to these questions will vary depending on the firmness of this very nothing: from the Manichean wholesale rejection of all

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material existence to a more qualified Lurianic search after the divine traces in the world, which may indeed count as nothing compared to matter’s solid actuality, but already offer a ground, albeit shaky, for a redemptive practice. Thus, although seemingly “nothing,” merely gleaming weakly through the shards of the fallen mythic laws, all these signs and traces add to a precarious sense of anticipation, which allows Benjamin to move out of the position of mere passivity. The beacons of the “higher, blessed life” eventually form a dispersed constellation of “stars of redemption,” which shed a dim light on the creaturely night of the world. In two decades of writing, Benjamin would test all possible solutions to the problem of messianic in/activity, taking inspiration from all sorts of messianic Gnosticisms which he skilfully adopted to modern philosophical idiom: starting from Marcion, passing through Basilides and ending with Isaac Luria. Following John Fekete, who argued that there was not one Benjamin but three—apocalyptic Benjamin, busying himself with Kabbalah; libertarian Benjamin, displaying his anarchic tendencies; and political Benjamin, concerned mostly about his participation in KPD, the Communist Party of Germany (Fekete 1978, 192)—we can complicate things even more and say that on top of that there are at least three apocalyptic-messianic Benjamins: Marcionite Benjamin, Basilidian Benjamin and Lurianic Benjamin. In what follows I will try to elucidate this complex systematization, by focusing on three texts from three Benjaminian phases (rather than periods, since neither of these tendencies can be shown as absolutely dominant in a given time of Benjamin’s life): “Theological-Political Fragment,” “Critique of Violence” and “On the Concept of History.”

A “Jewish Marcionite?” In 1918, Benjamin, deeply influenced by Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia, writes an apocalyptic impression, “Theological-Political Fragment,” which in the name of a messianico-antinomian purity, denies any positive connection between redemption and the profane order of history: For this reason nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic … To have repudiated with utmost vehemence the political significance of theocracy is the cardinal merit of Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia. (SW3, 305) Its main thesis is that world politics, equated by Benjamin with the nihilistic pursuit of happiness, is always a blatant contradiction of the divine order. History can do nothing to either hasten or slow down the coming of the Messiah, whom Benjamin at that time still sees as a strictly personified figure—according to the rule later formulated by Scholem that the less of the messianic power we grant to the inhabitants of the historical world, the more “oddity” is granted to the image of the Redeemer who comes wholly unexpected to the unprepared world. In this early piece, Benjamin does not yet believe that we, humans, possess even the weakest

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messianic power, a theme which will come on later. The “Fragment” may thus be seen as a variation on the Scholemian Leben in Aufschub (“Life in Postponement”), in which the whole of historical time is nothing but the delay of the apocalypse, which executes the final blow—indeed a mercy kill—to the erroneous world of creation. But it may also be seen as a modern, Bloch-inspired, variation on Marcion’s theme of the alien God, who can never reconcile himself with the created world. In Marcion’s teaching, God the Creator and God the Redeemer are strictly opposed to one another. The creaturely realm can be maintained only at the cost of messianic hope—while the realization of the latter can only mean the destruction of the former. The alien God of redemption—the Messiah—must remain radically alien, for nothing in this world is capable of anticipating his advent. Benjamin will take this motif literally and exploit it in its extreme form: the “Fragment” is indeed a philosophical impression on the Messiah’s unfathomable alienness, which cannot be mediated, signalled or indicated by anything real. The course of history cannot have any bearing on the Messiah’s coming or not coming. Historical and eschatological time never meet, so the notorious question “what to do?” cannot be answered directly in messianic terms. However, it can be answered in the purely immanentist and mundane terms that are dictated by world politics. Its essence is nihilism, that is, fostering the pursuit of happiness in the creaturely realm—yet not understood in a liberal manner, which still harbours progressive hopes investing in the melioration of social reality, but as playing along with the “rhythm of transience.” Benjamin refers here to Paul’s saying about the figure of the world passing away, which he interprets as the spontaneous movement of being left to its own devices; it is in the nature of the world to pass, that is, to fade away. This nihilising tendency, in which the created world winds in itself, should not be disturbed by any pseudo-messianic efforts to raise it to a higher mode of existence, but rather helped. The only conceivable function of world politics, therefore, is to let the world go—to let it dissolve into transience, which is its metaphysical destiny: To the spiritual restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality, corresponds a worldly restitution that leads to the eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal totality, the rhythm of Messianic nature, is happiness. For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away. To strive after such passing, even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism. (SW3, 305–6) But apart from the Pauline-Marcionite influence, we can detect in Benjamin’s “Fragment” yet another Gnostic voice, coming from second-century Alexandria. Giorgio Agamben has rightly spotted in Benjamin an echo of the teachings of Basilides, which went against the mainstream of the Alexandrian Gnosticism by taking the side of “tormented matter” (Agamben 2004, 90). Thus, while usually the Gnostics supported the interests of the Spirit (pneuma) against the material world,

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in which they saw the main source of evil and oppression (hyle), Basilides reverted this tendency and attacked the Spirit. As if in an inverted Marcionite image, the Basilidian Spirit invades material nature from the outside, as an alien and parasitic life form, which pushes all natural beings out of joint, forcing them to want things that do not lie in their nature. This artificial and perverse force is called desire by Basilides; as he claims in his commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, it is due to the desire imbued by the Spirit that “fish striving to graze on the hills with the sheep” (ibid.). Spirit, therefore, does not help the material world to achieve its redemption; being so incompatible with Matter, it only disturbs the world and makes it deeply unhappy. The only solution, therefore, is to separate the two alien principles: make the Spirit go to where it originally belongs, that is, the pleroma, and leave Matter alone to its own intrinsic and self-nihilising rhythm of happiness, which is perpetual transience. This Basilidian motif of separation is the deep, underlying theme of Benjamin’s “Fragment”: the principle of Matter is represented here by the “order of the profane,” while the principle of Spirit is called “messianic intensity.” The former is “erected on the idea of happiness,” while the latter “passes through misfortune, as suffering.” Nature cannot be redeemed but it can nonetheless “assist, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom.” Benjamin calls it “the quietest approach” (SW3, 306): though we can do nothing to provoke the advent of the Kingdom directly, we can help nature in its spontaneous tendency towards selfannihilation. Just like Basilides, who believed that nature’s cyclical eternity is only relative and, when no longer bothered by Spirit, Matter will eventually succumb to its lethal destiny, Benjamin also stakes his hopes on the world peacefully dissolving into nothingness. The Messianic Kingdom is not the world’s goal, but merely its end: it must expire with no trace, before the Messiah sets it. Thus, if nature is called here Messianic, it is only due to its indirect and oblique relation to the Kingdom; the easier it passes away, the sooner the Messiah is to be expected. The deeper the fall of the profane order, the higher chance of the apocalyptic Messianic coming, which not only will not crown the “historical dynamic,” but close it once and for all as a fully separate and finished chapter—not to be continued.

The divine justice Pereat mundum, sed fiat iustitia—let the world perish, so the idea of justice may triumph: this Latin sentence could become a motto for Benjamin’s messianic pursuits, which concentrate solely on the idea of justice. Not love which forgives all; not grace which annuls all sins; and not even happiness which restores man to his “innocence of becoming.” All this can come only if justice is given to the idea of justice, which constitutes the sine qua non of redemption. “God’s language has no grammar; it consists only of names”—this statement of Scholem (1995, 293) may serve as a succinct commentary on Benjamin’s sense of the immense incompatibility between the divine and the worldly ideas of justice: the former, anarchic and individualized, the latter, ordered and based on the sys-

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tem of universal law. For Benjamin, this difference will eventually boil down to the crucial biblical choice between life and death. While divine justice follows the principle of life, always singular and infinitely complex, worldly justice models itself on the greatest natural necessity, which is the law of death. From the perspective of the legal order, life as such spells merely a danger of chaos and anarchy; the will to stay alive—which, according to Greek tragic wisdom, makes every singular living being suspect of unduly hubris—can only generate trespass. The law, therefore, following the lethal justice of “Death, the absolute master” (yet another reason for disliking Hegel!), wants to punish life in advance, preventively, before it even gets a chance to flourish: according to ancient mythical thought, life itself is “the marked bearer of guilt” (SW3, 251). Later, in the notes to “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin will put it even harsher: “The basic conception of myth is the world as punishment” (SW4, 403). In “Critique of Violence” (1921), Benjamin lays down the foundations of his antinomian and antimythic teaching, by inscribing every law in the deadly legalistic machine in which every individual life stands no chance of happiness; it is nothing but “mere life” pursued from the moment of its inception by the vengeful “mythic violence.” Mythic violence constitutes the most primordial arrangement of nature: a singular life springs into being surrounded by a halo of innocence, but soon becomes entangled in the grid of guilt-relations (schuldzusammenhang) that expose it to the punishing powers of fate. Consequently, it is fate which “in all cases underlies legal violence” (SW3, 248), while death appears as fate’s most effective weapon, by establishing the law and punishing for its trespasses. In the mythic world, therefore, man is a natural trespasser, an unruly and hubristic “guilty innocent,” who cannot but transgress the frontiers set by the mythic arrangement and be punished for this with his own blood. For indeed, it is blood which “is the symbol of mere life,” that is, a life spent under the oppressive rule of mythic archons. Now, the messianic problem can only take the shape of the pressing question as to what “might be able to call a halt to mythic violence” (SW3, 249). The only possible answer appears to be the counter-violence administered by God: Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythical violence is confronted by the divine. And the latter constitutes its antithesis is all respects. If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood. (SW3, 249–250) To illustrate this crucial difference, Benjamin juxtaposes the mythical story of Niobe and the biblical story of the rebellion of Korah. While Niobe is being punished for her “arrogance” (she famously claimed to have more offspring than the Olympian gods and to be a better mother than Juno), which challenges fate and must be pun-

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ished by it; Korah’s Levites, who rebelled against Moses’ leadership, are not only annihilated by God, but also, in this very moment of their bloodless destruction, expiated and exonerated. While Niobe in her hubristic defiance merely stumbles upon the implicit law of the universe, run by the silently efficient Fatum, Korah’s aristocrats, who claimed that the law of progeniture lies on their side, are obliterated by the divine justice, which “strikes without bloodshed” and operates “by the absence of all lawmaking” (SW3, 250). While the mythic violence executed on Niobe petrifies the “power over mere life for its own sake,” the divine violence, which strikes an apocalyptic blow to Korah’s attempt to “remythicize” the Jewish community, exercises “pure power over all life for the sake of the living” (ibid.). It is precisely this “regard to the soul of the living” (ibid.) that justifies the annihilating impact of divine violence, whose goal is to break and destroy the “system of guilt” in which all creaturely life, caught in the fateful net of myth, remains implicated. The living soul—innocent and pristine—can only be saved-expiated when the mythic guilt-inducing context is thoroughly destroyed, even if it means a total annihilation of man’s “bodily mere life” (SW3, 251). So, even if this means death, it will nonetheless be a liberating death—different than the death serving the perpetuation of the mythic captivity. Here, once again, the messianic finale equals the apocalyptic cataclysm of destruction, which is ultimately “end-making” (SW3, 248); unlike the bloody sacrifice of the mythic victims, which calls for the cycle of revenge, this bloodless blow erases all traces of what it destroys.

The weak messianic power “Critique of Violence” is an essay that locates itself on the threshold between two types of Benjamin’s messianism: apocalyptic and dialectical. The apocalyptic Benjamin (Paulian, Marcionite, Basilidian) invests all his hopes in the “end-making” manifestation of the divine violence which, on the level of immanence, can only be met by a passive “general strike” of all creatures: either, metaphysically speaking, as their nihilistic abandonment to the rhythm of transience; or, politically speaking, in the “proletarian general strike” which “sets itself the sole task in destroying state power” (SW3, 246). Later, however, Benjamin will begin to elaborate the idea of a “weak messianic power” which, as a power, entitles the inhabitants of the immanent realm also to a messianic action. The text “On the Concept of History,” written in 1940, finally brings the long-expected definition of this new active prerogative. It is the unique power to read and interpret history—differently, discontinuously, “brushing it against the grain” (SW4, 407), that is, in search of the scattered sparks and images that became distorted by the official historical narrative and its smooth holistic approach. In the notes to his theses, Benjamin quotes Hoffmanstahl’s famous line—“Read what was never written”—and adds: “The reader one should think of here is the true historian” (SW4, 405). But “what was never written” does not refer us to any hard reality which was deliberately omitted by the “court historians” of this world. What the gaze of the historian awakens is rather the force of what-could-have-been, con-

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ceived as the antinomian, heterogeneous element in the flow of historical ­reality; something in the conditionality of modus irrealis, which can be retrieved only from the past: The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? … If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim. (SW4, 389–390) The proper element of the messianic practice, therefore, is neither the present, nor the future: it is only the past. We have no strength to know what to do here and now, but we nonetheless possess a weak possibility to recognize what we could have done there and then. The pressure of actuality weighs on us so strongly that here and now we are unable to feel the lighter and more elusive substance of the merely possible. The light of the day blinds us to such an extent that we cannot see the darker shades of modalities: of what-is-not, but could-be. It is solely when we search the past that we get a glimpse of the messianic-possible—if only as a missed chance. This is how “the true image of the past … flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again” (SW4, 390-1). The strange modal term “recognizability” is applied here as the very synonym of the weak messianic power: it is a claim of the past acknowledged by the present in an instant of the Now [  Jetztzeit], which constitutes a fragment of the messianic time. To be able to recognize the missed redemptive possibility of the past means to open the claims of the past to the needs of the present. In the privileged moment of crossing between the past and the present, the messianic trace left in history comes alive again as a still valid potentiality here and now. If the messianic power means to give life, this, says Benjamin, is our only possible way of resurrecting the dead. Such “resurrections” are the proper task of the historical materialist: to create “flashes” in which the hidden spark of the past connects with the present to form a constellation which breaks out of the continuum of ordinary history. The possible messianic fulfilment can only be anticipated on the basis of such peculiar—constellatory instead of continuous—experiences of temporality, in which “every second is the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter” (SW4, 397). To perceive history via the lenses of flashing up, instantaneous constellations rather than as a continuous chain of the “empty time”—empty, because complicit with the flow and the fall—means to be able to condense history into its very essence; to distil from the idle ages of ruin and waste the essential moments of a true historicity, free from the natural cycle: “Now-time … as a model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation” (SW4, 396). The historical ­materialist, therefore, does not write history to leave the past to the past, or let the

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dead bury their dead; he is “man enough to blast open the continuum of history” (SW4, 396). Benjamin’s polemic against historicism is thus not only directed against Hegel, but also against Christian historiography, of which Hegel is the best example: while Christianity announced the messianic kairos as something that already happened and thus saw history as the triumphant progress of the Spirit, the Jewish messianist, now personified by the historical materialist, never tires of searching attentively for signs and traces of redemption that did not take place and, precisely because of that, can be read only through signs and traces. He does not let dead bury their dead and thus face confidently the future in which the revealed Spirit, the Hegelian Zeitgeist, secures the advances of progress through the historical continuum. To the contrary: extremely mistrustful towards the Christian dogma of progress, Benjamin engages in a retrospection, looking for what has been overlooked in the mass of the continuous historical time—the small spots of heterogeny, which, as “secret indexes,” restlessly point to the still unfulfilled promise. To write a proper history is thus to resurrect the dead killed by history: to give voice to the victims who could not be saved in their present time, but at least can be saved by the weak messianic power of the next generations. The messianic power of the materialist historian cannot give the victims a full new life, but it can nonetheless save them, by not burying them again in memory, that is, by giving them their share of justice. The only possible redemptive practice, therefore, which can be exercised on the basis of the weak messianic power, is to “give justice” to those in the past to whom justice had been denied. The weak messianic power of the historical materialist is best symbolized by the image of the Angel of History: Paul Klee’s drawing called Angelus Novus, created in 1920, which Benjamin owned for some time: His face is turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm. (SW4, 392) The Angel’s weakness consists in his incapability to stop: to “pull the brake” on the failed experiment of being. Even if he wished to arrest the permanent catastrophe of creation and undo the storm blowing from the broken paradise by awakening all dead to their true, never realized life, he is unable to do so. The wind in his wings pushes him unwillingly forward. Yet his gaze is firmly fixed on the past—and it is only this gaze, the gaze of the historical materialist, which counteracts the movement of the deepening fall and dispersion.

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In the Benjaminian metaphor of the Angel, the Marxian dimension of secularized messianism and the theological dimension of the Gnostic reversal of creation are so tightly mixed that they can no longer be separated: the philosophical puppet and the theological dwarf speak here in polyphony to prepare together the coming of messianic time: Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake. (SW4, 402) But what exactly is this messianic time? In as much as Benjamin approaches it via Marx’s secularized messianism of the “classless society,” he also enriches the Marxian concept of “classlessness” with all the treasures of messianic vocabulary, which he does not want to see lost without a trace in modern philosophical translation. Thus, in Benjamin’s interpretation of Marx, “classless” does not have only a political connotation. It means most of all—without classification: beyond the grip of the mythic concepts and charts; beyond the principle of power and sovereignty; beyond hierarchies, both natural and social, which always inevitably turn upside down and reproduce themselves within the continuum of “natural history.” This nightmarish cycle must finally be transgressed—“the kaleidoscope must be smashed” (SW4, 164)—so that mankind can finally begin to enjoy a different, happily anarchic, kind of life which would finally be worth calling “life”: life freed of the mythic guilt and thus giving justice to itself as the “innocence of becoming.” And although Benjamin insists on calling it a Judgment Day (SW4, 390), it no longer bears the violent, apocalyptic overtones of his earlier messianic attempts (or, at least, less so). Here the divine justice is no more opposed to happiness as the nihilistic “rhythm of transience,” but emerges as one with the “happy, blessed life,” which it helps to restore to its original guiltlessness. To achieve redemption, therefore, means the same as to end myth and its illusory rule over human subjects. The moment we manage collectively to “pull the brake” on the inertial tendency to perpetuate myth and awake from the mythic spell—we are almost there, with the messianic time at hand. Thus, while in his earlier stages Benjamin toyed with the violent solution of smashing the scandalous totality of being—now he only (!) wants to “smash the kaleidoscope,” that is, to jam the demonic mechanism of subjection which imprisons our life in the preestablished context of guilt and debt (schuld). To be redeemed, therefore, is to be exonerated: freed from the mythic system of culpability. But our “weak messianic power” does not allow us to achieve this blessed solution for ourselves: we can only do it for others, who lost their lives in the past, in the hope that someone will do the same for us in the future. This obligation, however—to lend ear to the claims of the past—is different from the mythic guilt that burdens every individual life with irredeemable debt. Unlike the mythic totality, which forces every singular individual to sacrifice his

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or her life and happiness for the sake of the social whole—the “secret agreement” between past and present generations creates a messianic community which, for Benjamin, constitutes the only admissible form of communal existence: based not on a compulsory system, but on a free relation tied always and only for the sake of justice. Benjamin’s influence on the twentieth-century continental philosophy and theology cannot be overestimated. Despite being a rather hermetic thinker, Benjamin informed the work of many of his contemporaries and their successors: his younger colleague and admirer, Gershom Scholem, who regarded Benjamin as the incarnation of Isaac Luria himself and the renewer of the Kabbalistic doctrine in late modernity; Theodor W. Adorno who, thanks to Benjamin’s ingenious combination of Marxist and Jewish theological motives, imbued the Critical Theory of the early Frankfurt School with the unmistakable spirit of Jewish messianism; and last, but certainly not least, Jacques Derrida whose idea of deconstruction as messianic justice derives directly from Benjamin’s precursory reflections on that matter. The whole discipline of cultural studies, which grew partly out of the Critical Theory, uses Benjamin’s pioneering studies in culture, most of all The Arcade Project and one of his most famous essays, written under Bertolt Brecht’s influence, “The World of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Subtle and versatile, Walter Benjamin’s writings serve as a lasting inspiration for all domains of contemporary humanities: from literary theory to systematic theology.

Note 1 References to Benjamin’s Selected Writings are abbreviated SW throughout, along with volume number.

References Agamben, Giorgio 2004. The Open. Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1994. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. 1910–1940. Edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1996–2003. Selected Writings. 4 Vols. Translated by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fekete, John. 1978. “Benjamin’s Ambivalence.” Telos, Vol. 11:1, No. 35. Scholem, Gershom. 1963. Judaica 1. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp. Scholem, Gershom 1973. Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbalah.” In Judaica 3. Studien zur jüdischen Mystik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Scholem, Gershom 1995. The Messianic Idea in Judaism. And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York, NY: Schocken. Wohlfahrt, Irving. 1979. “Walter Benjamin’s Image of Interpretation.” New German Critique, no. 17 (Spring).

9 Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) Daniel Colucciello Barber

Insistence on negativity Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was born in 1903, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where he resided until 1934, when he left in response to the Nazi regime (his father was an assimilated Jew). Following stays in London and New York, he spent the bulk of his exile in Los Angeles before returning, in 1949, to Germany. Upon his return, he took a position at Frankfurt while also continuing his longstanding association with the Institute for Social Research (more often referred to as the Frankfurt School). The work he pursued throughout his life, which ended in 1969, drew on discourses of philosophy, theology, sociology, Marxism, and musicology. He was a prolific author: in addition to many books—including, most notably, Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer), Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory—he wrote an immense number of articles. In what follows, I will draw primarily on Negative Dialectics, for it is here that we find the most explicit treatment of the negativity that motivates both his thought in general and his use of religious and theological themes.1 It has become a commonplace of European philosophy to presume a bifurcation between philosophers of difference and philosophers who follow the terms set forth by Hegel. While the former are no doubt readers of Hegel, their readings are most often advanced in service of a break with his dialectic.2 Such philosophies of difference might follow a Heideggerean or a Spinozian trajectory—and these trajectories might even develop a polemical relation to one another—but common to these trajectories is the claim that difference cannot be adequately thought within Hegel’s dialectical terms of subject and object. This claim, otherwise put, is that there is something at issue in difference—Heideggerean “being” or Spinozian “power”— that entails a break with Hegel. The peculiarity of Adorno’s thought stems from its lack of conformity with this commonplace. While Adorno presents a theory of

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difference that is resolutely opposed to the sort of identitarian thinking associated with Hegel, he nonetheless refuses to break with Hegel’s thought in the manner that philosophies of difference generally have done. In other words, Adorno also thinks there is something at issue in difference that exceeds the terms of subject and object, yet he insists on thinking this excess precisely in dialectical terms. This predicament presents a challenge to Adorno’s endeavour: How can one break with Hegel while using Hegel’s terms? The answer resides in the “negative” character of Adorno’s dialectic. The notion of negativity, however, is not novel to Adorno—Hegel’s dialectical thought, after all, revolves around negations. So, while it is true that, for Adorno, the object negates the subject and the subject negates the object, this does not yet distinguish his thought from that of Hegel. The distinction of Adorno’s thought has to do not with the presence of negativity but instead with the radicalization of an already present negativity. Adorno insists on negativity in a manner that Hegel does not, and he makes this insistence on negativity, already at issue in the dialectic, into a means of breaking with Hegel. The break, when simply phrased, is this: for Hegel, the mutual negation of subject and object occurs within a horizon anticipating their identity; for Adorno, this same mutual negation occurs within a horizon of non-identity. The fact that subject and object do not agree is something on which Hegel and Adorno agree. In other words, the fact that the subject’s idea of a stone (for example) does not match the material reality of a stone, that the material stone must negate the subject’s idea, and that the subject must then articulate (after this negation of the idea by the material stone) a new idea of the stone—all this is agreed upon by Hegel and Adorno. What is not agreed upon, however, is the narration of this new idea’s relation to the mutual negations: for Hegel, the new idea of the stone is narrated as converging toward the material stone, such that reconciliation between idea-of-stone and material stone can be anticipated; for Adorno, it is precisely this anticipated reconciliation that must then, still, be negated. Simply put, then, Hegel implies that mutual negation will produce a positive reconciliation, and it is precisely this positivity that Adorno refuses. To equate the negation of negation with positivity is the quintessence of identification; it is the formal principle in its purest form. What thus wins out in the inmost core of [Hegel’s] dialectics is the anti-dialectical principle: that traditional logic which … takes minus times minus for a plus. (Adorno 1973, 158) Against this positive reconciliation, Adorno insists on negativity, and he insists on this by speaking not of identity, but instead of non-identity. For Adorno, mutual negation gives rise to still more negativity—a negativity indicated by the “non” of non-identity. Another way of putting this last point is to observe Adorno’s refusal of any third term.3 The terms of subject and object are maintained, as is their mutual negation, but in the wake of this mutual negation, no third term emerges: “In truth, the

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subject is never quite the subject, and the object never quite the object; and yet the two are not pieced together out of any third that transcends them. The third would be no less deceptive” (Adorno 1973, 175).4 For Adorno, difference emerges as the break within the subject, the break within the object—both “never quite” being themselves—and the break between these breaks. Yet, if there is nothing beyond subject and object, then how are these breaks to be conceived? Or, if the mutual negation of subject and object makes something emerge in excess of them, and if this excess cannot be made into a third term, then how can we articulate this excess? Once again, it is “non-identity” that emerges, as a name of excess, but also as a name that insists on negativity. Along these lines, we could say that non-identity is yet another negation—for if the object negates the subject, and the subject negates the object, then one might imagine that these negations consequently achieve a new identity. Instead of allowing a name, a third term, to be given to what exceeds subject and object, Adorno gives this excess a name that negates identifiable names, a name that insists on what cannot be identified. The negativity that insists by means of non-identity should be understood as asymmetrical. I invoke this term to indicate that the negation of subject and object by one another, while mutual, is not equivalent. When an object—such as stone, a puddle or a corpse—negates the subject’s ideas about it, what happens is something quite different from what happens when the subject negates or thinks against the limits of an object. The force of materiality is enacted in the first instance in a way that it is not enacted in the second instance. In fact, to imagine these instances as equivalent or reversible (rather than as different or asymmetrical), one must remove this material force of the first instance—one must idealize, which is precisely what Adorno’s materialism refuses to do. In other words, an equivalence or reversibility of these negations would require a degree of idealization precluded by Adorno’s materialism. Against such idealization, greater value is given to the force of materiality, to the object’s capacity to negate the subject. This valorisation is articulated as “the primacy of the object” (Adorno 1973, 188). The primacy granted to the object has to do with Adorno’s materialist critique of the idealist pretensions of the subject. The object, insofar as it refers to what exceeds the ideas and conceptual names of the subject, upholds the excess of matter over thought. Accordingly, the primacy of the object is a means of refusing the tendency of dialectical movement to proceed in terms of the subject and thereby to constrain negativity, or matter, by taking for granted ideational practices of thought. Such a tendency presupposes precisely what Adorno contests, namely the division of thought from matter. His insistence on the primacy of the object is thus an insistence on the primacy of matter—not because matter is divided from thought, but because thought has divided itself from matter, and so thought can begin only when matter (understood in the form of the object) negates thought (understood in the form of a subject divided from matter). Yet even as negativity asymmetrically begins with the object, negation is mutual: the object’s negation of the subject is followed by the subject’s negation of the object. Why, one may ask, is this second negation necessary? If the object has primacy, then why should there ever be a negation of the object? The answer is that

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the object, although it has primacy over and exceeds the subject, remains something defined in terms of its division from the subject; the subject must negate the object precisely because “object” is an idea produced by, and dependent on a division from, the subject. In other words, the object that negates the subject is the effect of thought’s division between subject and object. Consequently, while the object must first negate the subject, the subject must then negate the “idea” that what is negating it is a positively divided object. As Adorno says, thought must proceed “subjectively according to the demands of the object” (Adorno 1997, 166), it “must transform the concepts which it, as it were, brings in from outside into those which the object has by itself, into that which the object itself would like to be” (in Rose 1978, 44). The subject, instead of thinking the object according to the idea it has of the object, must think a different idea, an idea that is according to what the object would like to be, apart from what the subject wants to think about that object. A corpse does not belong to or accord with the subject’s idea about it. On the contrary, the subject must learn from the corpse—the subject must think not from its own existence, but rather from the existence of the corpse, which is exterior to the ideas that the subject counts among its possessions (including even the idea of “object”). Another way of putting this is to observe that what negates the subject is not the object so much as the materiality that is indicated in the object-form—not the objectnamed-corpse so much as the materiality indicated in ideas such as “object” and “corpse.”This materiality, under the object-form, is able to negate the subject-form, which is constraining thought. Yet thought, having become unconstrained by the subject-form, must then negate the object-form, which is constraining materiality. This means there is power in the thought indicated yet constrained by the subjectform. Adorno observes this by remarking that “if thinking is to be true … it must also be a thinking against itself ” (Adorno 1973, 365).5 It is precisely at this point, with the movement of thought becoming material and material becoming thought, that non-identity is insisted upon in a radical manner. The temptation is to take this movement as an achievement, to positively identify it as something achieved by the movement of negativity. Adorno insists on negating any such thing.Yet such negativity is not that of a lack, for the movement indicated by non-identity has a material force that Adorno speaks of in terms of a “more”: “What is, is more than it is” (Adorno 1973, 161). Non-identity thus names excess both as negativity and as more. In each case identity, or a positive third term, is refused. Non-identity negates identity because it names a movement that is always more than identity can take into account; it names a movement that negates a name’s identifications because it is even more than any name could name. Yet even as non-identity names a more, this more exceeds—and negates—the name of “more.” The reason for this negation of the name “more” is that negativity is material, and the very act of naming matter loses the reality of matter. As Adorno says: The fact that, just by talking about matter, one endows this matter with form—that is, conceptual form—should not be confused with the meaning of this form itself. The peculiarity of the concept of … matter, is that we are

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here using a concept or speaking of a principle which, by its meaning, refers to something which is not a concept or a principle. (Adorno 2000, 67)

Materialism and theology Adorno’s discussion of the problematic surrounding the naming of matter is strikingly resonant with the problematic surrounding the naming of God. In each case, the problematic is one of naming that which is irreducible to the order of names and to the divisions enacted by this order—that which is more than any name, and thus negates every name, including the name “more.” This raises the question of a non-identity between materialism and theology. Before pursuing this question, however, we should look at Adorno’s discussion of suffering, which plays a significant role in theological or religious discourse. We can begin such a discussion by commenting on Adorno’s claim that “The need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth” (Adorno 1973, 17–18). This claim should not be separated from his claim that suffering “is objectivity that weighs upon the subject” (Adorno 1973, 18). Nor should it be separated from his claim that suffering “remains foreign to knowledge,” that it “rebuffs rational knowledge” and “remains mute and inconsequential” when it is “conceptualized” (Adorno 1997, 18). To say in this context that lending a voice to suffering is the condition of truth is to say that suffering must be addressed, but also that it must be addressed in a way that breaks with the available forms of address. It should be noted that speaking of suffering as such does not guarantee speaking of truth: the former is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the latter. Furthermore, attempts to name the meaning of suffering easily occlude truth, for suffering resists meaning—this is its “objectivity,” which exceeds the names available to the subject and makes conceptions of suffering “mute and inconsequential.” The insistence on negativity here is quite radical, as it turns the excess of suffering, no matter how seemingly minor, against the very horizon of positivity: “The smallest trace of senseless suffering in the empirical world belies all the identitarian philosophy that would talk us out of that suffering (Adorno 1973, 203). In this sense, addressing suffering reveals truth by way of negation, for the truth one finds is that “rational knowledge,” or the conceivable order of names, is false. The truth is that truth is not available: the conditions of our given existence amount to the denial of truth because these conditions produce material suffering. In fact, the muteness of suffering is the muteness of matter, just as the resistance of suffering to the meaning of names is the resistance of matter to the meaning of names. It is due to this material resistance that we may speak of suffering as a condition of truth; it is because matter is experienced in terms of suffering that we cannot speak of it except as negativity’s meaninglessness.6 Looping back to the question of the material and the theological, we can now highlight the anti-Christian implications of Adorno’s discussion of suffering. Consider, for instance, how standard Christology claims that the suffering of Christ

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provides meaning to all human suffering. One can complicate this meaning by saying that it cannot yet be known, or that it is known only to God. Yet even if these complications are admitted their full force, it remains the case that there is a horizon of meaning; meaning has a positive existence, even if that existence cannot be expressed. In other words, the incapacity of expression does not affect the existence of a horizon of positive meaning, for this horizon is secured through temporal transcendence (the meaning of suffering will be eschatologically revealed) or ontological transcendence (the meaning of suffering is held in the being of God). It is precisely this horizon of positive meaning that Adorno’s thought negates. Hence, if Adorno calls for a non-identity of the material and the theological, then Christianity, through its narration of Christ’s sacrificial suffering, installs a horizon that attempts to supersede non-identity’s negativity. Christology, as I have just sketched it, may be read as a negative theology of suffering, and thus as corresponding to Christian approaches to the naming of God: just as Christ provides a positive meaning to suffering that may not be able to be named, so the name of God provides a positive existence that may not be able to be named. Significant weight may be given to the fact that no name is adequate to God, but this weight is simultaneously lifted because such negativity occurs within an interval between positively identified names. This Christian logic is the essence of analogy, which measures the inadequacy of positive human names in virtue of a name of God so positive that it is beyond human names. Human names are thus negated precisely to reactivate positivity at the level of transcendently existing divinity. This logic of negation in service of a renewed or progressively developing positivity—that is, the logic by which negativity’s difference and suffering are affirmed to be superseded—is not only Christian, it is also Hegelian. In fact, we should not forget that this supersessionist logic was first developed by Christianity against what became defined as the “religion” of “Judaism.”7 Jews, and Jewish theology, were positioned as being temporally prior to Christianity, such that they provided a moment whose import could be realized only through its negation by Christianity; Judaism was negated as part of a developmental narrative that gave rise, in the wake of this negation, to the positive identity of Christianity. The rationale for the negation of Judaism was often that it insisted too much on negativity, leaving God radically unnameable. Christianity thus negated this negativity in service of positivity. It provided a mediator (Christ) that superseded the radical negativity at issue in Judaism (the incapacity to name God). In other words, Christianity articulated its supersession of Judaism through its claim to provide a positive third term between humans and God. Although Hegel pushed further than the mediation of the God-man, preferring instead the third term of the community of Spirit, he still proceeded within the Christian logic of the Trinity, which structured his Phenomenology of the Spirit. All of this is to propose that Adorno’s insistence on negativity, and specifically on the negation of any third term, can be read as a critique not only of Hegel, but also of Christianity. Otherwise put, this is to propose that critique of the former entails critique of the latter, since Hegel, by

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putting negativity in service of the development of a positive third term (identity), perpetuates the logic at work in Christianity’s own positive third term (the incarnation of Christ). We can push further on this point by recalling Adorno’s primacy of the object and its asymmetrical valorisation of matter, which is both negative and more than what it negates. We can now observe that God, like matter, resists the subject’s desire for conceptual comprehension. Just as matter turns away from the resolution of a third term, so God turns away from all names, including the name of God. Such a theology of God’s non-conceptuality, or of God’s primacy over all names, points to an asymmetry between the theological trajectory of Christianity (including its Hegelian, death of God version) and the theological trajectory marked out by—and valorised as—a radically negative insistence on the unnameability of God. This latter trajectory is one according to which God cannot be said to exist, for to say that God exists is to speak of God and thus to provide a horizon of positivity. It must be furthermore noted, that this theological trajectory, at least within the discourse of religion governed by Christianity, is one assigned to Judaism. From the vantage of this theological trajectory, the attempt to identify a positive third term between God and man is idolatrous, for it replaces the negativity of the divine with an image. In this sense, Adorno’s use of theology can be read as a radicalization of the prohibition of idolatry: just as Christian theology appeared, from the asymmetrical vantage of Jewish theology, as a denial of the command against making an image of God, so Hegel’s identity appears, from the asymmetrical vantage of Adorno’s negative dialectics, as a denial of the material reality of suffering.8

Without the image This ban on making any image of God (the Bilderverbot) is central to Adorno’s insistence on negativity: Once upon a time the image ban extended to pronouncing the name; now the ban itself has in that form come to evoke suspicions of superstition. The ban has been exacerbated: the mere thought of hope is a transgression against it, an act of working against it. (Adorno 1973, 402)9 In other words, the exacerbation consists of making the Bilderverbot apply not only to God, but also to post-theological accounts of social emancipation.10 This means that the force of the Bilderverbot extends to positivity as such, whether this positivity is theologically or socially conceived, whether it is narrated as divinely or humanly grounded hope for emancipation. While materialism rightly negates the identification of emancipation with the existence of God, it must still insist on negativity so as not to replace the negated image of God with a new image of social emancipation. It is in this sense that Adorno resists the reduction of the Bilderverbot to superstition: the value of the Bilderverbot was precisely its power to negate the

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superstitious image of God; to make the Bilderverbot itself into superstition precludes its power to negate the new superstition of social emancipation. Adorno thereby refuses to draw a line between superstition and modernity, a line that would put images of God and the Bilderverbot on the side of the former to leave images of hope on the side of the latter. On the contrary, he draws the line between images as such—whether of God or of the modern hope for social emancipation—and the Bilderverbot. Accordingly, he contends that materialism should bring “the theological ban on images … into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured” (Adorno 1973, 207). We will come back, by way of conclusion, to the role of the secular in Adorno’s thought. First, however, we must observe that his insistence on the negation of any positive image indicates a heliotropic asymmetry: to give negativity primacy over the “positively pictured” is to give darkness primacy over light. This asymmetrical valorisation stems from his belief that our parameters of visibility are bound up in our social conditions, which produce immense suffering. Darkness is determined as the “blind spot” of our social conditions (Adorno 1974, 151), and thus the task of speaking from suffering entails entering darkness in its excess over the light of meaning. We must see precisely what our conditions train us not to see. However, our faculty of vision is part and parcel of these conditions, and so a break with such conditions requires an insistence on the negativity of blindness, on the need “to work one’s way through the darkness without a lamp … and to immerse oneself in the darkness as deeply as one possibly can” (Adorno 2000, 144). The asymmetrical primacy that Adorno gives to darkness over light means that he will not promote—but instead will negate—attempts to locate alternative possibilities within society. Such attempts have as their limit the assumption that something different or new can emerge within the parameters of visibility conditioned by our society.11 Attempts to create new possibilities for those on the wrong side of domination will fail insofar as these possibilities are imagined within given social conditions. Since “the process of adaptation to which people are subject is posited as absolute” (Adorno 2000, 107), attempts to mark out alternatives within society are bound to become modalities of adaptation to society.12 Critical force should be located not in an image of hope for alternative possibilities, but in the negation of any image—not within a different form of visibility, but rather within a darkness that negates the entire spectrum of differences within our social imaginary. The imagination of alternative possibilities must be negated because the desire to realize this wish in a positive form, within the given conditions, is a denial of the wish. Another way of putting Adorno’s objection is to say that the imagination of alternative possibilities cannot avoid a symmetrical relation to the society from which it seeks to differ. The old society (anterior to the alternative possibility) and the new society (posterior to the alternative possibility) are not fundamentally different. Their supposed difference conceals that they are, in reality, bound to the same imaginary. While Adorno makes this sort of claim throughout his work, his most prominent articulation can be found in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where he contests the supposed division between myth and enlightenment.13 More

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specifically, he argues that this division conceals a co-mingling: enlightenment ­carries within itself mythical elements, while myth already harbours the contours of enlightenment.14 Adorno, by attending to what is here concealed, negates not only the division between myth and enlightenment, or irrationality and rationality, but also the enlightenment’s developmental narrative of emancipation. This narrative tells us that we once were beholden to myth, but that we are now on a path of emancipation; the path of emancipation is secured through its commitment to enlightenment, which is divided from myth. The division between myth and enlightenment thus structures the narrative of emancipation. When Adorno negates the former, he concomitantly negates the latter.15 The narrative dimension of myth and enlightenment returns us to Adorno’s critique of idolatry and Christianity. In the enlightenment narrative, rationality and irrationality define themselves through their division from one another not just conceptually, but also temporally. Enlightenment rationality is defined in terms of a future divided from the mythic irrationality of the past. These divided yet symmetrical imaginations are, one could say, idolatrous—as is the narrative to which both belong. This is especially the case insofar as we consider the connection between the idolatry of Christianity’s third term and the Christian structure of the narrative at work in enlightenment. Christianity, by defining itself as the supersession of Judaism, also defined its future emancipatory potential in terms of its division from the past.16 We can, furthermore, observe that for Christian theology salvation belongs to a future that is not yet here, but that is secured through a division of history as such—the division between the time before and the time after Christ. To say, following Christianity, that we live between the times is to say that salvation is both already secured (by Christ) and that it is yet to fully arrive (with Christ’s eschatological return). The resonances between this narrative of salvation history and the narrative of enlightenment critiqued by Adorno are quite strong, given that enlightenment understands itself both as something already secured (insofar as it has divided itself from and begun to overcome myth) and as something yet to fully arrive (insofar as the emancipation promised by enlightenment remains in the future). In this sense, Adorno’s critique of enlightenment can be read as a critique of Christianity, or more generally of salvation history—that is, of any narration of history in terms of the development of emancipation. Can this critique of narratives of salvation history be understood as a “secularization” of the Bilderverbot? Secularization appears to be an inadequate term for describing Adorno’s critique, for it is a term bound up with the very narratives being put under critique.17 Yet Adorno does use the term “secularization,” and so we must understand what is at stake in this use. A key indication is provided when he asserts that the “interpretive eye which sees more in a phenomenon than it is—and solely because of what it is—secularizes metaphysics” (Adorno 1973, 28). Metaphysics, we should keep in mind, refers for Adorno not only to the science or theoretical practice to which that name is commonly attributed, but also to the broader set of tendencies that seek to bring about reconciliation by providing sense prior to the materiality of historical experience. To oppose metaphysics is thus to

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oppose the idea that this experience has a meaning that can be found apart from it. Yet, if this marks Adorno’s opposition to metaphysics, then what is at stake in his invocation of a secularized metaphysics? Central to this invocation is the previously discussed “more,” and the location of this more in a phenomenon’s being “solely … what it is.” Secularization thus refuses metaphysics’ division from the materiality of historical experience by means of an insistence on the excessive negativity of this experience. Consequently, secularization—although indicative of something more than available meaning—requires a commitment to meaninglessness. Adorno is resolute on this point: In the face of the experiences we have had, not only through Auschwitz but through the introduction of torture as a permanent institution and through the atomic bomb … the assertion that what is has meaning … become[s] a mockery … For anyone who allows himself to be fobbed off with such meaning moderates in some way the unspeakable and irreparable things which have happened by conceding that somehow, in a secret order of being, all this will have had some kind of purpose. (Adorno 2000, 104) Even if metaphysics, when secularized, provides a sense that things could be different than they are, this difference is radically negated by the materiality of historical experience. Such experience, which is given asymmetrical primacy over metaphysics—just as the object is given asymmetrical primacy over the subject—amounts to a ban on the metaphysical bank of images, concepts, names and meaning that give credit to an emancipatory narrative of historical experience. If things are to be different, then the condition of bringing about such a difference is the radical negation of metaphysics. Though Adorno speaks of this by using the term “secularization,” the term is incapable of funding any narrative of development, for such a narrative would repeat the very mistake of metaphysics: attributing sense to a materiality that, in its suffering, is senseless. If Adorno’s insistence on negativity is a secularization of the Bilderverbot, then it is one that must be turned against the idea of secular progress. Secularization, then, is not a narrative of overcoming religion, not a narrative of enlightenment, it is nothing but the insistence on materiality, the insistence on “how it is” (Adorno 1997, 133), without the identification of a positive image. In this sense, the negativity that Adorno articulates in relation to Hegel should be turned not only “backwards” against Christianity, but also “forwards” against any account of a secular overcoming of Christianity. While some might call for a renewed use of Christian theology, and while others might urge a more thoroughgoing commitment to secular development, Adorno’s thought refuses to participate in the projects of either side. This is because, whatever side one takes, one is using division to leverage a project of positivity; division is made to make the positive identifiable. For Adorno, however, the problem is not that of replacing one project

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with another, of accounting for previous failures to enable future success, it is rather that of the continuation of positivity through the accounting of negativity. What is necessary, then, is to insist on the enactment of negativity without image. This is not easy to enact, since the engrained tendencies of thought point out negativity in order to point negativity to a path of future reconciliation. However, the difficulty involved in enacting the negativity of Adorno’s thought is precisely what is at issue. This is to say that Adorno’s thought is not about accounting for projects but rather about encountering the deeply habituated tendency to think in terms of accounts and projects. If theology is of use for Adorno, then it will be only and precisely insofar as theology offers a way of encountering and opposing this deeply habituated tendency; but if theology is committed to thinking in terms of this tendency (and thus refuses to oppose the tendency), then Adorno will be of no use for the projects and accounts produced. For Adorno, what theology is ultimately about is not Christianity or religion or the overcoming of religion; it is only ever a matter of naming what cannot be identified, a matter of insisting on the force of this problematic against all media of reconciliation.18

Notes 1 The account of Adorno I here provide, draws on the argument I made in Barber (2014). For an extensive treatment of Adorno’s relation to theology, the best source is Brittain (2010). Notable uses of Adorno in relation to questions of theology and religion include Steunebrink (2000) and de Vries (2005). For the most prominent treatments of Adorno’s thought in general, see: Bernstein (2001), Brunkhorst (1999), Buck-Morss (1977), Foster (2007), Jameson (1990), Jarvis (1998), Jay (1984), Schweppenhäuser (2009), Zuidervaart (1991). Autobiographical approaches to Adorno are provided by Claussen (2008) and Müller-Doohm (2005). 2 It should be noted that, more recently, an increasing effort has been made to demonstrate that Hegel’s thought is more complex than presumed by philosophies of difference. For a representative instance of such work, see Žižek et al. (2011). 3 This refusal of a positive third term can be extended to anti-Hegelian discourses such as Heidegger’s and Spinoza’s: just as Hegel sought a third term of identity, so Heidegger and Spinoza sought third terms of being and power. 4 Subject and object, he says, “are neither an ultimate duality nor a screen hiding ultimate unity” (Adorno 1973, 174). 5 He also remarks that “the best energy of thought is to outstrip the feeble and fallible thinker” (Adorno 1973, 128). 6 The negativity of meaninglessness is not to be moderated. It is better to insist on meaninglessness and be imagined as a nihilist than to moderate meaningless in order to avoid the imagined threat of nihilism: “The true nihilists are the ones who oppose nihilism with their more and more faded positivities, the ones who are thus conspiring with all extant malice … Thought honors itself by defending what is damned as nihilism” (Adorno 1973, 381). 7 For an account of this process in its relation to a larger genealogy of the discourse of religion, and of the secular modernity advanced by someone such as Hegel, see Barber (2011). 8 For an account of the asymmetry between Christianity and Judaism with regard to materiality, see Boyarin (1995). 9 Also see the citation and development of this same passage, by way of the notion of an “inverse theology,” in Brittain (2010).

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10 While Adorno’s reasons for such a radically critical approach to such accounts of social emancipation will become clearer in what follows, we can say, for now, that he understands them as participating in the same kind of positivity that he finds (and criticizes) in Christianity and Hegel (the division between theological and post-theological thus conceals a more fundamental continuity of identity-thinking or positivity). In other words, such accounts of social emancipation provide a narratively structured anticipation of reconciliation that turns attention away from the material reality of suffering. This last becomes a moment or the production of an emancipatory account that does not oppose at root the imaginaries and habits that already enable suffering. The narrative accounting of suffering’s reconciliation cannot adequately conceive the materiality of suffering; it converts material suffering into a redemptive project, whereas material suffering, in its meaninglessness, demands the refusal of meaning that such redemption anticipates. 11 Adorno’s heliotropic valorization of darkness, along with his awareness that social life is built on the expurgation of darkness, could be read as a study and critique of anti-blackness. Yet this critical possibility is undermined by his consistent sense that contemporary society has lost something that was possessed by previous social regimes. In this way, he is like Norman Mailer, what James Baldwin calls a “white boy.” Baldwin writes: “There is a difference … between Norman and myself in that I think he still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose” (Baldwin, 1993, 217). 12 A representative instance of this claim is found in his remark that “the continued existence of traditional society has warped the emancipation of women. Few things are as symptomatic of the decay of the workers’ movement as its failure to notice this. The admittance of women to every conceivable supervised activity conceals continuing dehumanization. In big business they remain what they were in the family, objects … Instead of solving the question of women’s oppression, male society has so extended its own principle that the victims are no longer able even to pose the question” (Adorno 1974, 92). 13 Some of the more striking formulations of this contestation, within Adorno and Horkheimer (2002), are worth noting: “No matter which myths are invoked against [enlightenment], by being used as arguments they are made to acknowledge the very principle of corrosive rationality of which enlightenment stands accused. Enlightenment is totalitarian” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 3–4); “Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized” (2002, 11); “for both mythical and enlightened justice, guilt and atonement, happiness and misfortune, are seen as the two sides of an equation. Justice gives way to law. The shaman wards off a danger with its likeness” (2002, 11–12). 14 Enlightenment, for instance, defines itself in terms of its commitment to “the explanation of every event as repetition” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 12). In other words, enlightenment understands itself as enlightened—and not as mythical—insofar as it is able, by way of science, to articulate truth in terms of the identifiable and repeatable. Yet, as Adorno and Horkheimer (2002) go on to point out, such a practice of explaining every event as repetition “is the principle of myth itself ” (2002, 12). This is because the principle governing enlightenment’s science is already at work in myth’s mimetic practices of magic and sacrifice. Consequently, when enlightenment seeks the explanation of every event as repetition, it is doing what myth does, or it is carrying myth within itself. And, looking at the same overlap from the other side, we can say that if enlightenment is defined in terms of the explanation of every event as repetition, then myth, because it was already practicing such explanation, carries within itself the contours of enlightenment. 15 It should also be noted that this narrative can run in the other direction: one might narrate enlightenment in terms of declension and emancipation in terms of a return to myth. Although this narrative moves in a direction opposed to that of enlightenment, it belongs to the same premise of division. Consequently, it too is negated by Adorno’s negation of division. 16 It is worth noting how closely the logic of enlightenment, which in claiming to overcome myth actually reiterates it, resembles the logic of Christianity. In the midst of a section entitled “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment,” we find the

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claim: “But by virtue of the same moments by which it lifted the spell of nature religion, Christianity is producing ideology once again, in a spiritualized form. To the same degree as the absolute is brought closer to the finite, the finite is made absolute. Christ, the incarnated spirit, is the deified sorcerer” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 145). 17 See, for instance: Anidjar (2007), Asad (2003) and Fernando (Forthcoming). 18 I would like to express my thanks to the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry for their support of my work.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York, NY: Continuum. Adorno. Theodor W. 1974. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York, NY: Verso. Adorno, Theodor W., et al. 1976. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Translated by Glyn Adey and David Frisby. London, UK: Heinemann. Adorno, Theodor W. 1981. Prisms. Translated by Sam Weber and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 1982. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies. Translated by Willis Domingo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 1989. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 2000. Metaphysics. Translated by Edmond Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. Philosophy of New Music. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Anidjar, Gil. 2007. Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Baldwin, James. 1993. “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.” Nobody Knows My Name. New York, NY: Vintage. 216–42. Barber, Daniel C. 2011. On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity. Eugene, OR: Cascade. Barber, Daniel C. 2014. Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Bernstein, J. M. 2001. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Boyarin, Daniel. 1995. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Brittain, Christopher C. 2010. Adorno and Theology. London, UK: T&T Clark. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 1999. Adorno and Critical Theory. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1977. The Origin of Negative Dialectics; Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute. New York, NY: Free Press. Claussen, Detlev. 2008. Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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de Vries, Hent. 2005. Levinas. Translated G. Hale. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fernando, Mayanthi. 2014. The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foster, Roger. 2007. Adorno: The Recovery of Experience. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Jameson, Frederic. 1990. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. New York, NY: Verso. Jarvis, Simon. 1998. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. New York, NY: Routledge. Jay, Martin. 1984. Adorno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno: A Biography. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Malden, MA: Polity. Rose, Gillian. 1978. The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press. Schweppenhäuser, Gerhard. 2009. Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction. Translated by J. Rolleston. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Steunebrink, Gerrit. 2000. “Is Adorno’s Negative Philosophy a Negative Theology?” Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology. Edited by I.N. Bulhof and L. ten Kate. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. 293–319. Žižek, Slavoj, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis, eds. 2011. Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, Dialectic. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Zuidervaart, L. 1991. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

10 Jürgen Habermas (1929–) Maureen Junker-Kenny

Religion appears as a theme in the work of Jürgen Habermas in the heritage of the founding generation of the Frankfurt School, with the project of modernity conceived in different ways by Kant and Hegel, as well as in his responses to the theological reception and critique of his thinking. His theory of communicative action seeks to anchor reason in language and to spell out a universalistic discourse theory of ethics in a concept of participative democracy. In the first part of this chapter, I shall trace the ways in which his understanding of religion changes from a first phase in which it is superseded by communicative rationality, through a second phase of ongoing coexistence, to a third stage of mutual engagement in which modern, “postmetaphysical” reason and religion can learn from each other. The internal critiques put by philosophical respondents to his enterprise treated in the second part will be followed, thirdly, by the points currently raised by his theological conversation partners regarding his most recent position and the tools he has made available to conceptualize religion as a contemporary form of the spirit that is “not simply ‘irrational’” (Habermas 2008, 112).

Changes in the understanding of religion in the course of habermas’s thinking The directions of research outlined in Habermas’s inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt in 1965, stand in critical continuity with the interdisciplinary program devised in the first phase of the Frankfurt School. In distinction from “traditional theory,” it investigated the contexts of origin and the contexts of use in the intellectual realm of productivity assigned to universities in a society’s division of labour.1 The activity of theorizing is thus linked back to its social-historical basis, that is, the needs and interests of a given period; the ability and task of philosophy is to uncover and evaluate the goals a society sets for itself in the approaches

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and aspirations of the theoretical investigations it pursues. They are to be oriented towards an emancipative, enlightened social praxis by bridging hitherto rival traditions of thinking, such as Marx’s explanation of consciousness in reference to material conditions and the technological stages of production, and Freud’s analysis of the levels of the human psyche. With the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, the economist Friedrich Pollok and philosophers of history, art, music, literature and religion Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, the program of the Institute for Social Research encompassed the material foundations and psychological manifestations of society as well as the contemporary movements of its culture. The “postmetaphysical” understanding of philosophy that Habermas has proposed since the early 1980s shares the critique of “theory” as a “strong” concept, isolated from the conditions and goals of its production, and the cultural diagnostic brief of philosophy, its orientation towards enabling a non-dominating, participative praxis, and its cooperation with empirical social studies. The third phase of the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School, represented by Habermas, begins when the interdisciplinary enterprise outlined by Max Horkheimer in 1934 is reconceived thirty years later from the conditions of a democratic society. Its second phase, epitomized by the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), written by Horkheimer and Adorno during their American exile at the time of the Holocaust, had given up hope in the ability of reason to extricate itself from the descent of civilization “into a new kind of barbarism” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1975, xi) that they were witnessing. After their post-war return to Germany, Habermas joined the Frankfurt School in 1956 as a lecturer and scientific collaborator with Adorno. He bases his research program on the key anthropological capacity that developed in the history of evolution: language, whose potential for enabling mutual understanding and for forging a consensus he explores.2 The format he designs inspires new departures for philosophically reflected enquiries in fields such as linguistics and developmental psychology, political theory and law, history and cultural and gender studies. In the “positivism dispute,” he argues for a self-reflective and normative understanding of social science against an objectivizing and “valuefree” view of research. Against the guiding paradigms of “work” and of “purposive rationality” (Zweckrationalität) and the diagnosis of a purely “instrumental reason” that eclipsed the relevance of intersubjective relations in Marx, Max Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno, he assigns priority to communicative reason; this opens up the possibility of pursuing an analysis of basic human competencies into the foundations of an ethics of mutual recognition. He renews Kant’s deontological approach in the interactive terms of a “discourse theory of ethics” that draws on the moral capacity of each participant to offer and accept reason’s in order to jointly identify norms and policies that fulfil the criterion of being good for everyone affected by them. From Hegel, he accepts the need to offer an account of the history of the self-reflection of the spirit. With the existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspers, he traces its origin back to the “Axial Age,” three millennia ago, when within the space of a few centuries the world religions and the philosophical systems that still mark contemporary reflection emerged simultaneously ( Jaspers 1953).

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The following overview of the shifts in his understanding of religion will reveal changes in emphasis also in his concepts of reason and of philosophy.

The first phase: religion as a historical stage of symbolic social integration to be superseded by a consensus achieved in discourse on validity claims The sociological reconstruction offered in Theory of Communicative Action in a chapter entitled “The Rational Structure of the Linguistification of the Sacred” casts religion in the position of a foundation that once secured “the generality of … interests”3 through a symbiotic relationship with society; subsequently, worldviews and institutions emerged that allowed for a differentiated formation of identities (cf. Habermas 1987, 88). Emile Durkheim’s observations regarding crucial shifts in monotheism—to a more “abstract” divinity, formed “not of sensations, as originally, but of ideas,” from “tradition” to the “future,” and from a shared territory to a “kingdom not of this world”—are quoted (Habermas 1987, 86), but not followed up at this stage. Thus, the path of development is portrayed in terms of a dichotomy from a “basic religious consensus in which everyone is merged with everyone else” (Habermas 1987, 83) to a rational agreement achieved by arguing out a consensus from different perspectives: the “authority of the sacred converted over to the binding force of normative validity claims … redeemed only in discourse” (Habermas 1987, 93–4). The place where this new civic unity of individuals in their roles as addressees and authors of laws is worked out is the public sphere; this new space arising in modernity is distinct from the previous, immediate rule of the state, as yet unbroken by the input of those governed: To the degree that the basic religious consensus gets dissolved and the power of the state loses its sacred supports, the unity of the collectivity can be established and maintained only as the unity of a communication community, that is to say, only by way of a consensus arrived at communicatively in the public sphere. (Habermas 1987, 82) Religion thus stands for community-forging symbolizations destined to be replaced in the course of rationalization by communicative reason.4 In his analysis of the different stages of Habermas’s view of religion, the philosopher Eduardo Mendieta concludes this sociological reconstruction with the following question: “Has religion been totally absorbed into norms of social interaction, leaving nothing behind but the memory of ecstatic rituals and the empty pedestals of exiled gods?” (Mendieta 2013, 398). In his most recent, nuanced account of developments after the archaic level, Habermas charts the moves of religious belief between legitimation and critique in the high cultures of antiquity; he points out the individuating effect of prophetic monotheism, the disenchantment of nature following from its understanding as God’s creation, the critique in ethical monotheism of rituals

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like human sacrifice5 and theology’s role in the ongoing “linguistification of the sacred” (Habermas 2013a, 298). Yet, he still locates the specificity of religion in its distinction from reason in the “solidarity” it creates by uniting individuals into a community through the performance of rituals; this places it closer to the experience of art than to reflection and reasoned exchange on foundational texts and the self-understandings they have given rise to. Before discussing some theological responses to his current position, it must be made clear why the first prognosis— the overtaking of the function of religion by communicative reason—ceded to an assumption of coexistence, at least for the time being.

The second phase: coexistence of religion and postmetaphysical reason as parallel enterprises In the same year in which the two volumes of Theory of Communicative Action were published, Habermas gave a keynote lecture at the Hegel-Congress held in Stuttgart in 1981. This address on the role of philosophy in an age marked by the extension and diversification of rationality into different disciplines of enquiry has been highlighted as “one, if not the key to his whole work” (Brunkhorst 2009, 215). It put forward a “postmetaphysical” concept of philosophy, renouncing its role as “judge” and as “usher,” which allocates places to other disciplines, and invested it instead with two more moderate functions. The first is that of a “stand-in” or “placeholder,” directed at maintaining its critical capacity of establishing truth by inspiring scientific enquiries with a universalistic generative idea. The second is that of “interpreter,” mediating between research cultures and contexts of living, that is, the lifeworld in which a society reproduces and transforms itself and new citizens are socialized (Habermas 1990, 1–20). By revising philosophy’s previous and, in his eyes, overextended claims, introspective and idealistic mindset, distance from practical contexts and air of distinction from empirical enquiries, Habermas declares its claims to truth be as fallible as those of the sciences. The difference this move away from the legacy of speculative thinking (as, for example, in philosophies of history) into applied research into human competencies makes for religion is that its future can no longer be forecast. Its role in the lifeworld receives greater recognition, especially its motivating and consoling powers. The reduced role of philosophy at first sight seems to leave more space for faith positions among the diverse stances taken in the lifeworld; religion can strengthen its resources against the intrusion of “system imperatives” (Habermas 1987, 155) by intuitions from its heritage in Western self-understanding and ethics. In this second phase, dialogues take place with theologians who have engaged with his work since the 1970s, who were attracted to it even at a time when the unifying effect of the sacred was destined to be taken over by communicative reason. Having agreed with his position in the positivism dispute, they engaged with different features of his work from disciplines like systematic theology, church history, theological ethics and practical theology: with his theory of action oriented towards a democratic public sphere, with his awareness of the relevance

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of the heritage of Jewish religious questioning from German idealism to the first ­generation of critical theory, and with his reformulation of Kant’s universalistic ethics of human dignity in the egalitarian and inclusive principles of his discourse ethics.6 The questions theologians put to him at a conference held in Chicago in 1988 still have resonance today: David Tracy’s enquiry about the relationship between dialogue as the foundational level of interaction, and discourse as a metalevel where claims are being problematized (Tracy 1992), and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza’s proposition that churches be communities of interpretation that offer a broad-based venue in civil society, as universities do in their areas, where questions at the intersection of the right and the good can be articulated, facilitating much-needed exchange on visions of human flourishing that guide individual lives and society (Schüssler Fiorenza 1992). Helmut Peukert’s incisive comparison of the scope of Habermas’s ethics of argumentation with the limit questions raised by Kant in the antinomy of practical reason and in the earlier phases of critical theory by Walter Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer: a universalistic ethics of communicative action becomes paradoxical in the face of the victims of history whose unjust fate could only be redeemed by a power beyond human anamnestic reason (Peukert 1992). This question about the discrepancy between moral effort and the justified human striving for happiness that led to Kant’s postulate of the existence of God as a matter of subjective faith, is consistently turned down in Habermas’s responses. In contrast to Habermas, it affects the foundations of ethics for Kant, threatening morality with absurdity. It is thus a problem of meaning and hope that arises at the highest level of ethics; interpreting this postulate as a reward strategy is as misleading as taking theological references to this antinomy as “proofs” for the existence of God (Pensky 2013, 445–46, n.23). While it shows the relevance of faith in a God who can rescue, it leaves the answer to individuals, as a matter of their practical option, underlining the irreplaceability of personal judgment in the normative framework of modernity.

The third phase: complementarity from a shared origin in the axial age and mutual “translation” of unexhausted religious intuitions The third phase of Habermas’s thinking on religion got its first public expression with his speech on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Booktrade in 2001, a few weeks after the attacks of September 11. Under the Hegelian contrast of “Faith and Knowledge,” he makes a case for reconsidering the intellectual resources that religions can offer to the project of modernity, refuting the latter’s identification with a secularistic understanding of society (Habermas 2003, 101–115). The project of modernity is endangered by cultural tendencies of self-objectivization and self-instrumentalization through a scientism that is diagnosed—as in the positivism dispute of the 1960s—to come at the price of self-reflected agency. A pervasive loss of solidarity is evident in the “transformation of the citizens of prosperous and peaceful liberal societies into isolated, self-interested monads who use their individual liberties exclusively against one another like weapons” (Habermas 2008, 107).

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Against these pathological aspects of modern rationalization, the access of religions to sources that create solidarity is one of the unexhausted potentials they are seen to offer. The unexpected ongoing vitality of religious traditions also within secular societies requires a change in the consciousness of citizens and of the constitutional state, to be open to “all cultural sources that nurture citizens’ solidarity and their normative awareness” (Habermas 2008, 111). In distinction from John Rawls’s proviso that only requires the religious side to find translations into public reason, Habermas sees this exchange as a cooperative task. Secular contemporaries can be expected to participate in it in view of the rediscoveries that may be in store for them, owing to the shared origin of the world religions and philosophies in the Axial Age. He interprets Jaspers’s thesis in terms of a “complementarity” between the two forms of the spirit. One key point that has met theological critique is his statement that the kernel of religious faith remains “opaque” to reason, giving “discursive extraterritoriality” to its “existential certainties” (Habermas 2008, 130). What does this characterization and the contrast it sets up between the “dogmatic authority of an inviolable core of infallible revealed truths” (Habermas 2008, 129) and the “publicly accessible” (Habermas 2008, 310), criticisable and fallible proposals of communicative rationality imply for the task of translation? Before discussing the theological questions raised to this third stage, which sees religion as one source able to sustain the normative project of modernity’s universalistic commitment to freedom and equality, it is necessary to present three core philosophical objections to his earlier foundational theory decisions.

Philosophical critiques The changing view of religion in relation to communicative reason in the different phases of Habermas’s developing approach, is connected to the range of disciplines drawn into his program, giving rise to the question of how their different methodologies are linked. The design of a research programme that combines strands from such a variety of intellectual lineages has been the subject of analysis and debate with his philosophical colleagues in all its stages. From anchoring the achievements of linguistic communication in a natural history of evolution, to restricting the remit of philosophy to a “postmetaphysical” brief, and to curtailing the scope of ethics, his outline has attracted differentiated proposals, especially from other Kantian thinkers, on how its universalistic egalitarian intention can be based on more consistent premises. It is relevant for philosophy of religion and theology how he determines “communicative rationality,” the capacity that conducts research into identifying structures and processes of repression-free intersubjective deliberation on moral and political norms.

Anthropological premises between nature and history In relaunching the interdisciplinary enquiries of critical theory from the platform of language, Habermas had identified a key capacity that he deemed able to overcome

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the dualisms of the “philosophy of consciousness,” which had contributed to the inescapability of reason ending in pure domination. In his view, its categories of reason and nature, subject and object, implied a dichotomy that ignored their prior connectedness. The paradigm change to language overcomes the deficits arising from starting with the consciousness of a solitary subject with its typical distinctions, such as that between appearance and essence, and it anchors it in conditions like embodiment, intersubjectivity and lifeworld. Michael Theunissen, whose work encompasses analyses of social philosophical approaches to “the other,” Kierkegaard, and conceptions of time and negative theology, questioned this strategy as “naturalizing” human capacities into given “anthropological frameworks” (Theunissen 1999). He proposes instead to interpret human capacities in categories of history and freedom, in the interest of accessing “possibilities of real historical transformation.”7 Also, after turning from the materialist philosophy of history, to which Theunissen’s comments relate, towards a more Kantian orientation, Theory of Communicative Action speaks of, for example, the “individuating force of linguistically established intersubjectivity” (Habermas 1987, 87). Agency is seen as embedded in anthropological conditions, rather than as directed by intentionality. For Dieter Henrich, a scholar of German idealism, a category like “lifeworld” offers an apparent immediacy and harmony which, when set in contrast to the systemic aspects of economic and political rationality, is marked by “avoidance” (Henrich 1999, 298–99): it unifies alternative positions and directions of enquiries that should be distinguished and argued out. Thus, it is the combinations of disciplines in Habermas’s theory that has provoked questions as to how to reconcile its diverse perspectives, methods and levels. Henrich is also the key spokesperson for an understanding of metaphysics that is compatible with and indispensable for modernity, against Habermas’s unchanged advocacy of the need for “postmetaphysical thinking.”

The strictures of postmetaphysical thinking Again, the objections voiced here are internal ones: they share the normative interpretation of modernity as offering the required autonomous foundation for human rights in its universalism against the instrumentalization of any human being, and they argue against a naturalizing scientism for a philosophy that analyses selfreflection as an underived, original human capacity. Here, a decisive division from the tools of Habermas’s approach emerges. While he had emphasized reflexivity already in the positivism dispute, he offered no corresponding theory of self to explain this faculty. In Theory of Communicative Action, reflexivity had been expressly declared as a consequence of interaction: if ego “views himself through the eyes of an arguing opponent and considers how he will answer to his critique, he gains a reflective relation to himself … It is the relation-to-self established by this model of self-criticism that we shall call ‘reflective’ (Habermas 1987, 74–5). For Henrich, it is exactly the capability for perspective-taking that needs to be explained. Presupposed, but not elucidated as a separate moment in George Herbert Mead’s

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theory in which the self emerges from interaction, it requires a theory of self in which reflexivity is “as primordial” as intersubjectivity (Henrich 1999, 310–11). The method for such an analysis is transcendental, enquiring back from the level of phenomena (such as perspective-taking) to the conditions of its possibility in human subjectivity. By replacing this method of thinking with language theory, in which self and other are reconstructed as facts of grammar visible in the first, second and third grammatical person, Habermas leaves a crucial level unexplored. He only returns to the heritage provided by the thinkers of classical modernity in the context of the debate on future scientific technologies of genetic enhancement; here, protecting the normative project of modernity requires the possibilities of thinking an originary, underived authenticity which the philosophy of subjectivity provided, as Kierkegaard did in his concept of “being able to be a self” (Habermas 2003, 5–15, 63). For Karl-Otto Apel, his co-author in the two-part project of discourse ethics, the transcendental-pragmatic method of justification he develops as a necessary part in addition to Habermas’s universal-pragmatic reconstruction, rules out the possibility of understanding philosophy as “fallible” in the same sense as empirical enquiries (Otto 2002, 362). A further defender of metaphysics in the history of its transformations is Herbert Schnädelbach. While in critical debate with Neo-Aristotelianism, religion and theology, he asks what will take the place of metaphysics, defined by him as “the effort to reach a cognitive comprehensive orientation with interpretive means”: Could it not be that a thinking that has purged itself from anything that reminds one of metaphysics no longer deserves the label “thinking”? Does not the ‘postmetaphysical age’ only begin when we—flooded by media and other tranquilizers—simply stop asking certain questions? (Schnädelbach 1992, 144, 138) In Nachmetaphysisches Denken II, Habermas has contextualized his critique of metaphysics as a response to a return of metaphysics in the 1980s (Habermas 2012, 8) and highlights the current need to re-emphasize self-reflection.8 Yet he still sees the transcendental subject as replaceable by the general structures of the lifeworld (Habermas 2012, 101). How the self-imposed limits of the postmetaphysical mode of philosophy affect the reflections pursued in ethics, philosophy of religion and theology, will become evident in the next point and in the theological responses treated subsequently.

The scope of ethics A final range of questions to the core of his approach, discourse ethics, has been relevant in its theological reception and critique. The first enquiry asks him to specify the content of the mutual recognition offered in the discourse situation in which arguments are tested for their universalizability in a live exchange of reasons, rather than in a “monological” searching of one’s conscience, as in Kant’s ­Categorical Imperative.

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Are contributors valued as providers of arguments or in their quality as ­fellow-humans, even “despite their arguments” (Wellmer 1991, 184-5)? His answer at the time failed to grasp the intention of the question as relating to human dignity. The second issue relates to the scope of ethics in relation to the “highest good,” differentiated by Kant into the two elements of “virtue” as purity of motives or moral effort, and of “happiness.” Philosophers like Paul Ricoeur, for whom the basic structure of Kant’s approach is one of “hope” for human agency, in contrast to Hegel’s system that looks back at the accomplishments of the spirit and is oblivious to failures and suffering, share Kant’s analysis of the antinomy of practical reason (Ricoeur 1995, 203–16; Junker-Kenny 2014). Other recent philosophical interlocutors at conferences with Habermas, like Herta Nagl-Docekal and Rudolf Langthaler, have questioned his dismissal of Kant’s analysis of the antinomy that appears in the attempt to realize practical reason and of Kant’s response with the “postulate” of God’s existence.9 By reallocating the philosophy of religion, which Kant’s ethics relates to as an unavoidable question of reason, to theology instead, Habermas gets rid of the challenge to the foundations of ethics that the experience of one-sided, unrequited or failed efforts at peacebuilding, reconciliation after conflict, or intervention with a risk to oneself poses to moral theorizing. While the earlier generation of the Frankfurt School recognized the abyss that the question of meaning arising from the history of human suffering meant for human reason and agency, for Habermas it “only attests to the constitution of our finite existence” and makes us “aware of the limits of that transcendence from within which is directed to this world” (Habermas 1992, 237–38).10

Current debates on the relation between religion and reason On the one hand, the new openness of the third phase to the intellectual resources religions can offer to contemporary cultures, based on the new topicality of Jaspers’s Axial Age idea, is unprecedented: “On these premises, it would be irrational to reject those ‘strong’ traditions as ‘archaic’ residua instead of elucidating their internal connection with modern forms of thought” (Habermas 2008, 6). On the other hand, what this connection consists of is less clear. For Jaspers, their shared reflexivity and ability to conceive individuality from its relation to transcendence were among the features that distinguished both the world religions and philosophy from the mythical age. I shall analyse some recent key statements and conclude with a theological proposal on where to look apart from ritual for what makes religion “other” and complementary to reason. The “combination” of methodological atheism and agnosticism that Habermas develops in response to two interlocutors offers a key to his resistance against “secularistic” proposals. He critiques J. M. Bernstein for taking a position that seems to know too much, namely the meaninglessness of religion. Bernstein rejects agnosticism when he continues: ‘This is not to deny that there is an existential excess to religious beliefs that defies the translation procedure; but for us that excess is not simply unavailable to philosophical reflection, it is what is per-

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manently lost in the transition to modernity.’ What does ‘permanently lost’ mean here? The agnostic only asserts that these semantic contents are inaccessible and refrains from making judgments concerning the truth claim that believers associate with them. In leaving a truth claim undecided, the agnostic expresses his failure to understand a form of discourse … I share J. M. Bernstein’s adherence to methodological atheism and argue (against J. Rawls, for example) that the practical reason of political philosophy, rather than the truths proclaimed by religious communities, must have the final say when it comes to the rational accessibility of secular constitutional essentials. But that does not prevent me from adopting an agnostic stance on the dogmatic foundations of the validity claims of a religious interlocutor. (Habermas 2013b, 366–67) Thus, postmetaphysical reason can and will not refute the possible truth of a religious faith stance that opts for belief in the existence of God. Here, its “fallibility” seems to stand for the Kantian distinction between what understanding (verstand) can know (wissen) and prove or disprove, and what reason (vernunft) can conceive of (denken). Having clarified the epistemic limits of reason, a further task is to identify what links the two forms of the spirit: [P]hilosophy shares with religious and metaphysical doctrines that remarkable (markant) relation to ourselves which gets lost when philosophy understands itself only as a provider (Zuliefererbetrieb) for the cognitive sciences. While the sciences turn their attention exclusively to an object area, philosophy is interested not only in knowledge but in enlightenment—that is, what a newly found piece of world knowledge means for us. It allows itself to partake in an interaction between world and self-understanding. (Habermas 2013a, 297) In view of this shared orientation, it makes sense to assume that secular outlooks may benefit from taking an interest in insights from religions: “The imposition consists in the demand that state citizens should not rule out the possibility of recognizing in the articulated language of religious positions and expressions resonances of suppressed intuitions of their own” (Habermas 2013a, 293). A question that becomes inescapable, but is not asked, at this stage, in view of “intuitions of their own” coming at them from a religious tradition, is: On what basis can this point of coincidence between two traditions of reflection arise? In her discussion of a similar point in Rawls, Herta Nagl-Docekal has made the argument that what is being presupposed, but not identified, here is that religion responds to a need of reason (Nagl-Docekal 2008).11 Habermas acknowledges the conceptual achievements of theology since Early Christianity: By insisting on a non-assimilating conceptual clarification of the most provocative (anstössigsten) contents of faith, theologians since Augustine have

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awakened a completely non-Greek sensitivity for the specificity (Eigenart) of those self-reflective and performatively disclosed (erschlossen) practical, historical and communicative experiences that are unattainable by the ontological concepts of a substance metaphysics. Theology has continued with conceptual means this process of a linguistification of the sacred that had begun with myth. (Habermas 2013a, 298) Yet the element that he has emphasized as crucial in recent years makes it distinct from, and “complementary” to, reason. If the religious potentials were ‘used up’ … religious tradition would forfeit precisely the solidarity-­ founding element of a communal practice of religious worship that sets it apart from all other cultural formations in the modern era. A religion that had lost the capacity to organize the encounter with the sacred in ritual forms and survived only in the fleeting shape of religiosity would be indistinguishable from other ethical forms of life (Habermas 2013b, 353–54) … This complementarity establishes a contemporaneity between the two intellectual formations that excludes a secularistic devaluation of religion as long as theology is able to understand itself as the interpretation of a vital faith rooted in some form of worship of a religious community. For in this way it maintains the connection to an archaic source of social solidarity under modern social conditions to which secular thought no longer has access. Only aesthetic experience retains trace elements from this largely dried-up source. (Habermas 2013b, 351) Habermas is correct in pointing out the performative element of religious faith, which is more than cognitive remembrance. It takes different forms, one of which is worship and thanksgiving in communal celebration; others are the proclamation of the word of God, and a praxis inspired by faith. Instead of casting religion as the “other” of reason, with an opaque content that cannot be reached by it, and of establishing wordless rituals as the counterpart to discursive reason, Continental theologians have pointed to the need to determine the concept of religion in an analysis of subjectivity in its facticity, as Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard did (Schleiermacher 1976, §§ 3 and 4; Kierkegaard 1989, 44). To believe in a creator as the ground who posited the self, fulfils the self ’s desire for unconditional recognition and meaning. There is no a priori opacity to faith, as if its content was completely foreign to human reason. What remains “other” is the initiative of an absolute freedom, to which human existence is called to respond. The systematic theologian Thomas Pröpper questions the disjunctive terms in which Habermas interprets the difference of faith from reason: “Why should there only be potential for reason in what is completely out of its reach (instead of what is not at its disposal because of its freedom)?” (Pröpper 2011, 765, n.127).

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Habermas’s theological conversation partners have pointed out that many ­“intuitions” from religious traditions, which may enlighten and motivate public conversations on the good and the right, cannot be cut off from their basis in God’s self-communication. This is most clearly the case for a “transcendence from within,” which is unable to take the place of a saving God; Habermas is aware of this himself regarding the concept of human dignity in comparison with imago Dei (Habermas 2008, 110). While his confidence that such mutual effort is worthwhile for both sides and is a sign of his trust in the power of public exchange, the process of translation will only succeed if the need for this independent origin is recognized. The sociologist Austin Harrington concludes his analysis by suggesting how the universalistic ethics, which Habermas has stood up for against postmodern, Neo-pragmatist, and other culturalist critics and has elaborated in dialogue with numerous disciplines, could be reached: Only when his thinking regains a commitment to expose itself to something more one-sided, something more dangerously particularistic, decisive or excessive—perhaps with the consequence of failing, disappointing or even antagonizing certain people or parties—only then, one might suggest, will it have a chance of acceding to the universality it so passionately desires. (Harrington 2011, 7–41)12

Notes 1 “The social genesis of problems, the real situations in which science is put to use, and the purposes it is made to serve are all regarded by science as external to itself. The critical theory of society, on the other hand, has for its focus humans as producers of their own historical way of life in its totality” (Horkheimer 1972, 244). For a summary of the key points of this 1937 essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory” and its relevance for the positivism dispute in sociology in the 1960s, see Peukert (1984, 117–118). 2 His programmatic inaugural lecture names the goal and the medium of this enterprise: “The human interest in autonomy and responsibility (Mündigkeit) is not mere fancy, for it can be apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structures autonomy and responsibility are posited for us. With the first sentence the intention of a universal and unconstrained consensus is unmistakeably expressed” (Habermas 1971, 301–317, 314). 3 “The binding force of moral agreement grounded in the sacred can be replaced only by moral agreement that expresses in rational form what was always intended in the symbolism of the holy: the generality of the underlying interests” (Habermas 1987, 81). 4 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 sacrally protected normative contexts. 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. The aura of rapture and terror that emanates from the sacred, the spellbinding power (bannende Kraft) of the holy, is sublimated into the binding/bonding force (bindende Kraft) of criticizable validity claims and at the same time turned into an everyday occurrence” (Habermas 1987, 80). In Habermas (2012, 12-15), he adds the mediating role of mythical narratives in the transition from ritual to discourse on rational validity claims.

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  5 Responding to Jose Casanova in Habermas and Religion, documenting a conference held in 2009 at New York University, Habermas points out that “the sublimation of the sacred into a transcendent power went hand-in-hand with distinct paths to salvation, which in turn involved an ethical reinterpretation of the traditional rites and the abolition (or later on the inversion) of the magical meaning of sacrifice” (2013b, 350). In his response to J. M. Bernstein’s objection to the “masochistic” legacy of monotheism, he offers an exegetically knowledgeable discussion of the “Binding of Isaac” in Genesis 22 (2013b, 367–70).   6 I have treated the internal reasons for the attractiveness of Habermas’s program for disciplines in theology in Chapter 1 of Habermas and Theology (  Junker-Kenny 2011, 7–4) 1.   7 Cf. Peter Dews’s introduction to Theunissen in (Theunissen 1999, 241).  8 Self-reflection is needed against the threat of an “ideological polarization” between “hard forms of naturalism” and “religious orthodoxies” (Habermas 2008, 1–2). It is identified as the “royal path of philosophy” (Habermas 2012, 16, 107).  9 Cf. their contributions in Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal (2007, 32–92, 93–119) and Habermas’s response (2007, 366–414), reprinted in Habermas (2012, 183–237). 10 In “Politik und Religion” (2013a, 299), he concludes with “the question whether the defeatism of reason that is brooding in philosophy itself consumes its power towards a transcendence from within and thus weakens (zermürbt) the vigour (Spannkraft) of a normative consciousness that aims beyond a given status quo.” 11 Nagl-Docekal points out (2008, 854) that without the “thesis that all religions have their origin in the same need of reason (Bedürfnis der Vernunft),” it is not possible to maintain Rawls’s implicit assumption that they can indeed overlap in supporting freedom and equality. 12 A. Harrington, “Habermas’s theological turn?,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37 (2007) 45–61, 59.

References Apel, Karl-Otto. 2002. “Normatively grounding ‘critical theory’ by recourse to the lifeworld? A transcendental-pragmatic attempt to think with Habermas against Habermas.” Jürgen Habermas, Vols. I–IV (Sage Masters of Modern Thought). Edited by D. M. Rasmussen and J. Swindal. London, UK: Sage. 344–78. Browning, Don S. and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza (eds.). 1992. Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology. York, UK: Crossroad. Brunkhorst, Hauke. 2009. “Platzhalter und interpret.” Habermas-Handbuch. Leben– Werk–Wirkung. Edited by Hauke Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide and Christina Lafont. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung/C.E. Poeschel Verlag und Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 214–20. Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. “Appendix. Knowledge and human interests: A general ­perspective.” Knowledge and Human Interests. Translated by J. J. Shapiro Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by T. McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. “Transcendence from within, transcendence in this world.” Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology. Edited by Don S. Browning and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza. New York, NY: Crossroad. 226–50. Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. The Future of Human Nature. Translated by W. Rehg, M. Pensky, and H. Beister. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

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Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. Between Naturalism and Religion. Translated by C. Cronin Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2012. Nachmetaphysisches Denken II. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen. 2013a. “Politik und religion.” Politik und Religion. Zur Diagnose der Gegenwart. Edited by F. W. Graf and H. Meier. München, Germany: Verlag C. H. Beck. 287–300. Habermas, Jürgen. 2013b. “Reply to my critics.” Habermas and Religion. Edited by Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 347–90. Harrington, Austin. 2007. “Habermas’s theological turn?” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37: 45–61. Henrich, Dieter. 1999. “What is metaphysics—what is modernity?” Habermas: A Critical Reader. Edited by Peter Dews. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. 291–319. Horkheimer, Max. 1972. Critical Theory. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. New York, NY: Herder & Herder. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1975. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by J. Cumming. New York, NY: Seabury Press, xi. Jaspers, Karl. 1953. The Origin and Goal of History. Translated by M. Bullock. London, UK: Routledge, 1953. Junker-Kenny, Marueen. 2011. Habermas and Theology. London/New York: T & T Clark International. Junker-Kenny, Maureen. 2014. Religion and Public Reason. A Comparison of the Positions of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1989. The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by A. Hannay Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Langthaler, Rudolf, and Herta Nagl-Docekal (eds.). 2007. Glauben und Wissen. Ein Symposium mit Jürgen Habermas. Wien: Oldenbourg/Berlin, Germany: Akademie-Verlag. Mendieta, Eduardo. 2013. “Appendix: Religion in Habermas’s work.” Habermas and Religion. Edited by Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 391–407. Nagl-Docekal, Herta. 2008. “Moral und religion aus der optik der heutigen rechtsphilosophischen debatte.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 56: 843–55. Pensky, Max. 2013. “Solidarity with the past and the work of translation.” Habermas and Religion. Edited by Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 301–21. Peukert, Helmut. 1984. Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology of Communicative Action. Translated by James Bohman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Peukert, Helmut. 1992. “Enlightenment and theology as unfinished projects.” Translated by E. Crump and P. Kenny. Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology. Edited by Don S. Browning and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza. New York, NY: Crossroad. 43–65. Pröpper, Thomas. 2011. Theologische Anthropologie. Volume II. Freiburg, Germany: Herder. Ricoeur, Paul. 1995. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Translated by D. Pellauer, edited by M. Wallace. Minneapolis, MI: Fortress Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1976 [1830/1]. The Christian Faith. Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T Clark. Schnädelbach, Herbert. 1992. “Metaphysik und religion heute.” Zur Rehabilitierung des animal rationale. Vorträge und Abhandlungen 2. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp. 137–157. Schüssler Fiorenza, Francis. 1992. “The church as a community of interpretation: Political theology between discourse ethics and hermeneutical reconstruction.” Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology. Edited by Don S. Browning and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza. New York, NY: Crossroad. 66–91.

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Theunissen, Michel. 1999. “Society and history: A critique of critical theory.” Translated by G. Finlayson and P. Dews. Habermas: A Critical Reader. Edited by Peter Dews. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. 241–71. Tracy, David. 1992. “Theology, critical social theory, and the public realm.” Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology. Edited by Don S. Browning and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza. New York, NY: Crossroad. 19–42. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1991. The Persistence of Modernity. Translated by D. Midgley. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

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Part 3

Living experience

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11 Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Edward F. Mooney

Søren Kierkegaard lived in Copenhagen, Denmark from 1813 to 1855, in the ­backwaters of European culture. The centres of cultural genius and innovation were Paris, Berlin and London. But in the following century Kierkegaard put Copenhagen on the map. Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are the indispensable thinkers for nineteenth-century theology and religious studies. Kierkegaard wrote a series of provocative texts that became a priceless inheritance for philosophers, dramatists, theologians, critical theorists and poets alike. A short list would include Heidegger, Ibsen, Kafka, Barth and Sartre; a longer one would add Buber, Ortega, Derrida, Rilke and Tillich. Between the Wars in Germany and France, Existentialism was born in the writing of Jaspers, Heidegger, Marcel, Buber and Sartre, and Critical Theory was born at The Institute for Social Research (later, The Frankfurt School) in the writing of Benjamin, Fromm, Adorno and Marcuse. These existentialists and critical theorists frame their thinking at least partially as a response to Kierkegaard.1 Along with phenomenologists they are the basis for “continental philosophy,” a movement that reaches back to Hegel and Kierkegaard that took hold in the interim between the World Wars. Those who sensed a crisis of spirit, not least in religion, were attracted to Kierkegaard. His psycho-social analyses of “the crowd,” of dread, love and hope, of self-deception and anxiety, provided a diagnosis of those years of tumult and despair, the rise of Nazism hanging ominously over everything. Kierkegaard’s subtle mix of scepticism, hope and social critique was poignantly alluring. The genius of his writing—its cutting irony, psychological acuity and astounding intelligence—makes him an irresistible thinker and writer, then and today. From his earliest journal, Kierkegaard pleads for knowledge that will “come alive in me,” for knowledge that has subjective weight (Kierkegaard 1996, 33). He refuses a university career in part because he wants more than objective knowledge. He needs knowledge that will quicken an intimate self-recognition keyed

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to folds of his existence that he alone could access—alone, in communion with books, memories, imagined and actual readers, friends, a brother, a father, a girl he couldn’t marry (see Garff 2005). He has regard for my reading—and yours. He prods me to shelve the objective, world-historical and starkly impersonal. To take up with my being as a subject is not solipsism. My subjectivity develops through relations. Kierkegaard’s develops in relation to his mentors—to Socrates, but also to Cervantes or Hamlet. My mentors might include these, and those marvellous Kierkegaardian inventions, the pseudonyms: the immortal Johannes de Silentio, who pens Fear and Trembling, or that humorous anti-professor, Johannes Climacus, who pens The Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Kierkegaard’s aim is to disquiet rather than to argue for an abstract doctrine. If rough captions are required, he works from Christian, Socratic, Romantic and Ironic standpoints, and can be called a poet or philosopher, preacher or pundit— any at a moment’s notice, or all rolled into one.

Choosing a life In 1843, Kierkegaard published Either/Or, Fear and Trembling and Repetition. The reader of Either/Or confronts, at first glance, a radical choice between two ways of life. The first path is evoked in “Either,” the life of an aesthete, artist or bohemian, contemptuous of social institutions and the claims of ethics and religion. Shall I choose it? Perhaps the “Or” of Either/Or is better. The second volume gives us two letters from an upright member of society, a judge, who shows the emptiness of a vague aesthetic, non-ethical life of melancholy and despair. The judge summons “A,” the anonymous author of volume one, to make a life-choice, to choose to become himself. This means choosing social roots and the obligations linked to social roles. This snapshot of Kierkegaard’s first great work leaves much up in the air. For one thing, the aesthete is attractive—perhaps more attractive than the judge. He writes The Diary of the Seducer (often published separately). He writes “The Musical Erotic” on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and a number of other short essays and sets of aphorisms. If he can produce these gems, why does he need to “get a life”? Why isn’t the aesthete just fine as he is? And “A” may have already “chosen himself”— chosen to be a self his self-righteous accuser disapproves of. He might enjoy a creative freedom the judge will never know—we won’t know, because the aesthete is not allowed a rebuttal. “A” might be upright and just write for amusement. To imagine a seducer is not to be one; a decent person can sketch unethical lives. Where does Kierkegaard stand? Does he favour the judge, who defends the ethicalreligious life? Perhaps he believes the notion of “objective superiority” has no grip here, and wants to leave the subjective choice up to us.2 Yet if reason is impotent to show one way of life superior to the other—if life-choice is arbitrary—then we endorse nihilism or value-relativism. Kierkegaard plays with these existential ambiguities. To make matters worse, Either/Or ends with the sketch of a third life-option. A parson’s sermon follows the

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exhortations of the judge. Whereas the judge intimates that one can attain a good life by affirming “the ethical” and eschewing a life where the aesthetic dominates, the parson warns the judge that in God’s eyes, we will always be in the wrong, which seems to be a dash of cold water on any hope for a fulfilling good life. So, life options now include the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. This is the germ of a three-stage theory of human existence. Two years later Kierkegaard will write Stages on Life’s Way (also under a pseudonym). Does Kierkegaard take the religious way of life to be best, or is he pulled in three directions at once? A philosopher or theologian should make clear what position is advanced. How else can we assess it? Yet Kierkegaard withholds a resolution to the (apparent?) standoff among life options, withholds a motive for withholding, and withholds responsibility for authorship. Here is “Victor Emeritus” (responsible for Either/Or), or Johannes de Silentio (responsible for Fear and Trembling) or Johannes Climacus (responsible for Philosophical Crumbs). But where is Kierkegaard? There are reasons to be elusive. If he wrote as a professor, pastor, or celebrity he’d add false authority to his books. Literature should be evaluated apart from its author’s notoriety. We admire Homeric texts or Genesis or the Vedas, knowing nothing about the persons who wrote them. Pseudonyms insure Kierkegaard’s biographical absence. As important, the device enacts the truth, or partial truth, that persons are multiple, a kind of theatre (see Mooney 2013c). “The” self is a cast of many characters or roles, like the array of pseudonyms. Then again, pseudonyms are teasing entertainment. We ask why he chooses just this name or plays hide and seek this way, and why his religious, sermon-like discourses (published regularly alongside his pseudonymous works) carry his own name. Overall, hide and seek is seductive. Kierkegaard is a pestering, provocative, elusive and seductive Socrates.

Faith and spiritual crisis A second great work of 1843 is Fear and Trembling. Johannes de Silentio (the pseudonym) improvises on the biblical account of Abraham taking Isaac to Mount Moriah to be sacrificed. Nothing in Kierkegaard is more grippingly elusive.3 Most readers assume the book will defend Abraham. But Johannes just wants to understand him, and he says over and over that he can’t. You can’t defend what you can’t understand. Johannes asks (without answering) if there is a “teleological suspension of the ethical” in play on Moriah. If Abraham isn’t about to murder Isaac, then ethics must be idle or suspended. Of course, at the last moment an angel tells Abraham to put down his knife. Nevertheless, he seems prepared to commit what any sane person would call murder—unless God sets ethics aside. Surely Kierkegaard knows the danger of postulating a God who expects us to act unethically. So, what is his suggestion? Either/Or apparently puts two ways of life in collision. Fear and Trembling apparently puts God and ethics in collision. Kant said Abraham should have doubted it was God who was speaking. Kant was ready to rewrite the Bible. He would halt Abraham and have him doubt it was God who had spoken. That would leave ethics an absolute even God couldn’t c­ ontravene.

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If Kant is correct, Kierkegaard appears to advocate a dangerously irrational and immoral submission to God’s will. Many philosophers in the Anglophone and Continental traditions side with Kant, and scorn Fear and Trembling. But to show massive moral-religious ambiguity in the Genesis story is not to argue for irrationality or immorality. It is to show massive ambiguity. Ambiguous biblical stories can be valuable the way ambiguous dreams are. There are portraits of four Abrahams and four mothers in the beginning of Fear and Trembling. These are sketched against a dreamy, fairy tale background: “Once there was a man who remembered the beautiful tale he heard as a child.” Nightmares don’t advocate the horrors they depict—yet we interpret them for insight. Abraham or Job can lead us into profound reflections, even as their situations baffle us. Socrates can lead us into wondrous irresolution, leaving us enthralled. It’s more than distressing that Abraham is asked to climb Moriah, that God lets Satan afflict Job, that God has an irrational impulse to kill Moses. These tales beg for interpretation and leave us in Socratic ignorance. Let’s suppose that in yielding to the Voice from the Whirlwind Job comes to acknowledge a Creation profoundly unconcerned with his wellbeing or whether his suffering is just or unjust. Still, we’d wonder how that sort of Creator co-exists alongside a God of Justice. Similarly, we ask how the God whose angel stays Abraham’s hand coexists alongside a God who asks Abraham to raise his knife. Johannes de Silentio avers that Abraham has a double consciousness, convinced both that Isaac will be lost (he’ll sacrifice him) and that Isaac will not be lost (he’ll get Isaac back). But how can we believe this “contradiction”? Dreams deliver such paradoxical tales. Is it ducking an issue to say that these are inscrutable mysteries? To answer, nothing short of a book would suffice. In any case, displaying a quandary is not giving a conclusion. It is admirable that Kierkegaard never pronounces, “One must always obey God, even when a command is unethical,” and never pronounces, “When a command is unethical, one must disobey.” Johannes doesn’t make obedience the centre of the story. A line of questioning is opened, and left open—and we learn something along the way. He bequeaths a searing Socratic ignorance. There are other issues raised—and left hanging. Early on, Johannes de Silentio gives us four pictures of what might have been going through Abraham’s mind as he responded to God’s command. None of these is an adequate picture of faith. In one, Abraham’s hand shakes in despair—that can’t be faith. Johannes cannot tell a story that satisfies him. But we see by these failures that faith can’t be simple obedience (three of the failed Abrahams obey). Now in a stroke of innovative genius, Johannes appends under each of the four portraits a counter portrait of a mother weaning her child. Faith is a bridge that gets Abraham through a catastrophic crisis. Now faith as weathering a catastrophic situation becomes faith as getting through something mundane. The portraits of weaning mothers bring faith into the ordinary. How can Abraham bear to sacrifice his son? gets translated into, How can this mother bear to wean her child? This transposition from the catastrophic to the mundane lets us ask

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a new question. Is Abraham’s trial less about extinguishing Isaac’s life than about a ­separation of father and son—where the father can hope that all is not entirely lost? This suggests he has to wean himself from Isaac—and perhaps also, be weaned from the presumption that God is simply a benevolent protector. The theme of mundane faith apparently distinct from the stupendous crisis on Mount Moriah is pervasive in Fear and Trembling. Johannes finds an important distinction between “a knight of resignation” (one who gives up on worldly gains), and “a knight of faith” who, like Abraham, both gives up on worldly things (Abraham will lose Isaac) and simultaneously believes worldly goods will be returned (Isaac will be returned). Johannes detects a knight of faith not on a mountain but in the town square disguised as an ordinary shopkeeper. And he finds a knight of resignation, someone who seeks faith by renouncing the world, in the figure of a young man suffering unrequited love. As de Silentio puts it, these low-key improvisations show “the sublime in the pedestrian.” We are light years from the horror on Moriah. In addition, these pedestrian figures of faith include mothers weaning. None of these are irrational or immoral. Along the way, Johannes quietly gives us a serviceable definition of faith. It is managing crisis by “giving up and getting back.” In weaning, a mother gives up her infant and gets it back. Abraham gives up Isaac, and gets him back. The first, preliminary “movement” of faith is resigning one’s self-absorbed claims to possess aspects of life, or to possess others whose lives are woven into ours. The second movement is finding oneself enjoying the gift of a world or a loved one returned. We open ourselves to getting back what we had given up. In a crisis, not of their making, Abraham and the mother give up their most prized “possession,” then get it back, being free of possessiveness. The would-be lover whom de Silentio calls the knight of resignation gives up the beloved, performing only “the first movement” of faith: he lacks the second movement, the assurance that the beloved will be returned.

Recollection and revelation Kierkegaard’s third great work from 1843 is Repetition. It begins with a long disquisition by “Constantine Constantius” on a quasi-metaphysical concept he calls “repetition”—revelation as getting back from an open future what one has lost. The second half of the book contains letters between Constantine and a young man who is waiting despairingly for love to arrive (or return or “repeat”). He wants Job’s apocalyptic moment when the heavens part, and the Voice from the Whirlwind descends to bestow meaning. Nothing less will sooth his distraught and hapless existence. He fancies he faces catastrophe. Wildly sentimental, he likens his suffering to Job’s. The comparison is comical, like raising a parallel between Abraham’s crisis and the worry of the shopkeeper over whether his wife will offer him a lamb roast for supper—as Abraham, on Moriah, received a lamb that released him from pain. Repetition hearkens the gift of a world restored, of finding one’s feet once again, after first having lost them.

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Threading through these early works we find several striking themes: 1. A pervasive aura of Socratic seeking, ignorance and wonder. 2. A yearning for satisfying life. 3. A transposition of biblical catastrophe into the everyday (in Fear and Trembling and Repetition). 4. Replacing faith as “irrational blind obedience” or creedal belief in deity, with faith as a capacity to receive a crisis-weathering gift, to lose a life that we may find it. 5. Finding joy even amidst the catastrophe in the hope for a “repetition” or a “receiving back.”4

A glance at Postscript Philosophical Crumbs (1844) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) are next, but first: Kierkegaard loves the hide-and-seek of pseudonymous authorship; this displays his literary innovation; he avoids academic works of philosophy or theology, and avoids plain and simple poetry, drama or the novel; he’s a master of crossbreeding. What looks like a very serious academic tome—the 600-page Postscript—is in many ways a satire on academic, philosophical-theological tomes. What looks like a work in psychology, The Concept of Anxiety, is an investigation of sin. What looks like a literary miscellany, the varied papers in Either/Or, hints at a theory of advance from aesthetic to ethical to religious spheres of existence.5 Literature and theory, philosophy, theology and psychology arrive as a stew. Kierkegaard shifts us from sorting things by socially objective categories—finding this to be psychology; this, philosophy; this, irony. We are made to seek answers with subjective resonance. He wants me to wrestle subjectively with this writing, whatever the genre. Religious thinking mingles with literary innovations: he launches a book Prefaces that contains nothing but prefaces. His literary-religious efforts are seasoned with philosophical acumen. He’s a defender of the faith and a critic of its institutions. He defies categorization. Kierkegaard’s treatise of 1844, Philosophical Crumbs or a Crumb of Philosophy, mocks weighty tomes: he offers only crumbs swept from the high table. The irony is that the title indicates a collection of throw-away thoughts, while the content of the book is a set of highly sophisticated dialectic arguments. A Socratic view of truth as recollection faces the Christian view of truth as revelation. For Socrates, truth is within us, waiting to be dredged from memory. For Christianity, truth is a revelatory impact that makes us new persons without pasts to dredge. The content is as far from “philosophical throw-aways” or crumbs as you can imagine.

Subjective truth Like Philosophical Crumbs, the 1846 Postscript mocks academic tomes. Consider the full title: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs: A Mimic Pathetic

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Dialectical Compilation: An Existential Contribution. It’s a “postscript” (or afterthought) that runs six times the length of the text it’s appended to. The age aspires to be triumphantly scientific yet here’s something unscientific. The postscript dares to be “concluding,” ringing down the curtain on otherwise interminable discussions. A mimic compilation forecasts farce, satire, or humour. A pathetic compilation foretells tragedy, pathos. A dialectical compilation is after the style of Hegel. A compilation is a loose-knit assembly of thoughts, not a system or dissertation. Finally, it’s an existential contribution, a subjective gift meant to brace and clarify myself. For many, Kierkegaard’s fate is linked to the Postscript idea that “truth is subjectivity.” A person’s existence or subjectivity resonates in testimonies of faith and in the sense of agency (and passivity) one has in relations to oneself, others, an environing world, God—anything of value. The truth of subjectivity is the truth that we are subjectivities and need exposure to (and the responsiveness from) other subjectivities whose co-ordinate existence is the weave of our worlds. Kierkegaard’s “subjectivity” is not the subjectivity of statements or reports, where “subjectivity” means defect or bias. Every day, Kierkegaardian subjectivity affords flowing contact with the world. Persons, subjects—not objects—objectively contest truths and pursue what’s real. And his subjectivity is not an isolated Cartesian atom of consciousness—a substance sundered from others, isolated from the world. I am in this town, at this address, happy or unhappy in this family and this job, disgusted or delighted by this evening’s news. I am a “me” open to the world and others, being here, Dasein. The truth of subjectivity is the inescapability of immersion in life, and a practical appeal to turn away from the illusion of merely objective existence, a no man’s land instilling despair. A return to subjectivity exposes what matters to me, as I expose myself to it.

Irony: demonic or bracing Kierkegaard’s university dissertation was The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates (1841). He returned to the topic often, confessing late in life that he was always Socratic—and I suspect nearly always ironic. Irony is the capacity to see the underside and topside of our aspirations and evaluations simultaneously. We hold vividly in mind both our recurrent failures and our bracing victories, great and small. Perhaps it is the fundamental structure of evaluative consciousness for modern subjects. In any case, we need distinctions among three levels of sorts of irony (see Lear 2011). Kierkegaard, like Socrates, is a master of the ironic wisecrack or quip. He can take a jaded view of what his audience takes as a happy or normal way to see things and turn that perception upside down—priests dressing like kings while preaching Gospel poverty; or he takes a happy outlook on what his audience sees as jaded—he considers becoming a master thief, tossing off the suggestion as a quip. Reversing evaluations, flipping them, through ironic wisecracks is a staple of comedy and casual banter, targeting normal views of gender, age, ethnicity, size, family, eating, kissing or priests. It can be serious, not only a laughing matter.

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Irony can be more sustained than the quip. It also appears in Kierkegaard’s ­writing as a reflective stance, as a backward step, affording a sweeping view of a large sector of life, now put under scrutiny, seeing upsides and downsides simultaneously. Love life, sports life, political life, religious life or humanity in general, can be viewed under the aspect of a cultivated irony. Double vision replaces the hard edge of one-dimensional judgment. To think “preachers are corrupt” could be onedimensional and wooden, hence unironic. An ironic Kierkegaard could have that thought yoked to a salutary view of a priest’s contribution, say, at funerals. Irony abides and cultivates binocular evaluative vision. Kierkegaard loved Socrates for his irony. Think of it: Socrates believes in the examined life yet, in the Symposium, he accepts what the priestess Diotima tells him about love with no examination of her or of the theory at all. It seems that he proceeds on blind faith. A backward step toward a broad ironic perspective is reflective, at a distance from action. If it becomes chronic, and negative—demonic—it stalls action for an indefinite time of boredom or melancholy. Kierkegaard criticizes the life of the aesthete as limitlessly negative and one-dimensional, or when ironic, as over emphasizing the negative. When the bracing and vibrant side of a twofold evaluative perspective takes hold, life veers toward joy and delight, or perhaps a serenity. Socrates can see—and live—the upside of his life in the city, avoiding melancholy and despair, despite clear awareness of downsides. Demonic irony freezes action, souring morale, indulging a regressive cycle that buries irony’s capacity to see upsides with downsides. To relentlessly subvert one’s better perceptions, criticizing this project and that, is the death of irony and of living. A full life can be sustained in a bracing ironic perspective, vibrant with doubleness, downsides in dominance only episodically. And ironic living can abide shelving the double perspective. I’d say Socrates shelves it as he gives way to Diotima. There are no rules for when the backward step will be of service, and when it should be overridden. Kierkegaard conveys living ironically in the dramas and scenarios of his writing (not to say in the detail of his everyday life—Is he or isn’t he in love? Is he or isn’t he a “good Christian”?). At our best, we are lively in improvising in the arenas of meaning, morale and action, having a knack for when and how to allow reflection’s backward step. When bad things happen, we improvise at escaping prolonged downslides. Irony lies at the heart of Socratic religion, and also, I’d hazard, at the heart of Christian religion. To see life under the withering judgment of sin is the wound of Christian existence married to its double, restorative love and forgiveness.

Paradox, the absurd and indirect communication Kierkegaard was by and large an anti-theologian. His Socratic sting punctured the pretensions of formal abstract philosophy, and abstract theology too. Philosophy and theology should be silenced before Abraham on Moriah, and before Christ, either on the cross or rising from the dead. His great satire on a philosophy or t­heology attempting to freeze the vitality of living religiosity, Postscript, is not ­without its

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moments of dialectical genius, even if we’re not quite sure what to do with the fruit of these moments. Thus, the notions of “the absurd,” the paradox and indirect communication seem to carry lasting, not merely satirical, weight. The Incarnation is a paradox for thought, an absolute paradox, because it asks us to affirm the GodMan, which sounds like affirming something more radically incongruous than a tree bird or ignorant wise man. The polemical basis for speaking of the paradox, the absolute paradox or the absurd (which are not exactly equivalent for Climacus in the Postscript) is to counter the common-sense idea that the world is surely an intelligible whole, or the Hegelian idea that the world is developing toward seamless rational unity. The Incarnation, or Absolute Paradox, rends asunder any such hopes of ultimate rationality, intelligibility, or tension-less unity. And there’s something “absurd” about the situation in which Abraham finds himself saddled. This is perhaps the moment to concede that for reasons of space I’ve had to neglect Climacus’ contrast in Postscript between Socratic “religiousness A” and the paradoxical Christian religiousness B (see Mooney 2007). “Religiousness A” is an advance on a conformist Christendom that has no place for the sort of true religious passion that could bring one into conflict with one’s society; it features a pagan, non-Christian passion. The passion of “Religiousness B” affirms the Christian paradox of the God-Man. That passion can bring one into conflict with one’s society and also with one’s reason: a “God-Man” offends the principle of non-contradiction. I’ve also had to neglect his kenotic Christology and his ties to Luther, Paul and Augustine (see Law 2013). The idea of indirect communication is meant, polemically, to underline the fact that in communing or communicating with others, we transfer objective content (theory or information) or simple requests or promises, for instance, but also subjective feeling, mood and interest. If we reserve the technical term “direct communication” for the transfer of objective content or intention between subjects, then “indirect communication” becomes transfer of subjective content or intention. I can say I’m going to church in a tone of distain, anger, indifference, devotion or giddiness. The tone is a subjective modality underlying the objective information transferred. For Kierkegaard, it is essential that one’s belief in Christ (for instance) not be conveyed in a dull, indifferent or enraged subjective modality. It won’t get you anywhere if you just say “I believe in Jesus Christ.” You must think and speak in a heartfelt tone free of spite or anger. How it’s said or believed is as important as what is believed. And the “how” is an indirect communication.

The relational self The Sickness Unto Death (1849) pictures the self as a pattern of interweaving relationships. It is not a Cartesian mental substance, nor a substance of any sort. It is not a Zen-like nothingness, nor a Nietzschean useful fiction, nor a dubious cultural construction in need of deconstruction. It is a constellation of internal relationships, each member of the resulting ensemble acting, listening and responding like

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the members of a musical ensemble. Sickness puts the matter austerely in its first paragraphs: “The self is a relation that relates to itself, and in that relation, relates to another” (Kierkegaard 1989, 43). Melodic lines weave in and out of a constellation made of nothing but other lines. Any member of an a cappella choir relates to her- or himself, relates to her or his fellow singers and the constellation of sound they produce, and relates to “another”—we might say the composer’s conception of the piece, or the “form” of the piece inherited (when a composer is unknown). If we are theologians, we might say that the ensemble relates to itself and then as a whole to God (we will return to this) (see Mooney 2013a). We needn’t ask whether self is body or soul, corporeal or psychic, any more than we ask whether waterfalls are water or rock face. And self is a porous set of interior relations. In hearing a simple request, another’s words enter my socially attuned consciousness—I am not alone. In Repetition, a pathos-ridden youth awaits a gift of self. His readiness is outward yet heartfelt. In acknowledging the warmth of a child’s smile, I find myself glad for a gift I cannot choose or command to appear. Among the bequeathed goods I might await and cultivate are justice or creativity, athletic prowess or camaraderie, bravery or honour, service, family or contemplation. These possibilities appear as inheritance, strands of an identity not yet my own, ready for partial or wholehearted acceptance (or refusal). Each member of the ever-emerging self-ensemble can be interpreted as a need, project or desire in tensed opposition to a contrary. A need for immersion in time, for the temporal bustle of the city, is opposed to a need to escape bustle, to enter a timeless solitude. These paired “self-factors” (six in all: freedom-necessity, timeeternity and infinite-finite) have their correlative goods. My need for detachment or freedom is a need for the good of detachment or freedom. My need for immersion with others is a pursuit of the good of immersion, say in the mutual dependences of family life. Strength of self is strength in the feelings and separations of unfolding melodic lines. Loss of self is the dispersion or disappearance of some array of goods, or the dispersion of my capacity to assess or negotiate this array. I lose the capacity to relate to these relations. My career life, love life, athletic life, religious life, art life, family life or bar life, either conjoin in a loosely interwoven ensemble of goods, or fall apart in disarray.

Authenticity Self-relations are always open to revisions and assessments internal to their unfolding. Kant saw the essence of our humanity in our capacity to step back and add an “I think” to any mental state. Kierkegaard sees the essence of my humanity as a capacity to step back and ask, “Am I really this?” Thus do I value and evaluate a need, desire, project or correlative good. Paired arrays of commitments or desires are open to evaluation and revision as a self-ensemble improvises its way into a future it will call its own. An authentic

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self is fairly constantly under negotiation and revision. This is the familiar process of weighing alternatives: one’s family needs more time; one’s career can be cut back; one has been lax in attention to relatives. Humans are a disquieting issue for themselves. Authenticity comes into play as persons care for, take a stand on, what they are about and what they will be. My friend is vulnerable to the conflicting demands of being a sister, a pilot, a cancer survivor. She evaluates whether she has been, and will be, true to herself—been in line with the self that over time she has articulated and become for herself (and others). This is not easy. She may fall prey to self-righteousness or self-deception. Perhaps she blushes with shame, suspicious that she has betrayed the self she would be. She would not enjoy narrating that self, were she to lean in that direction. There is no room here for a “super-self,” an executive self that conducts the negotiations and evaluations. My finite needs qualify (and assess) my infinite hope; my momentary anger qualifies (and assesses) my lasting compassion. There is no digging deeper than the ensemble of relations that reaches out expressively to others. But if this is correct, what are we to make of the claim, in Sickness Unto Death, that the relational self relates to “another” in whom it finds itself “established”?

Abyss—or grounding power Kierkegaard appeals frankly to God as the power that grounds the self, rescuing it from an abyss of flailing relations. This power is also the source of all goods, thus supreme. But Anti-Climacus (our pseudonym) also adopts a less religiously committed stance. After all, an “establishing power” might be one’s history or a concatenation of virtues. Or it might be a mysterious sense of dependence. George Pattison writes, “for those in the stream of Schleiermacher’s thought [Kierkegaard was in that stream] the choice is not: do I have to be a fundamentalist believer or a secularist, but: how can I best articulate this mysterious moment in which I realize my life is given to me, as if from another” (personal correspondence). I might feel that my life is “given to me, as if from another” in a moment of groundlessness, awe and grateful wonder. Groundlessness emerges in the experience of futility in endlessly seeking layers under layers, grounds under grounds, reasons beneath everything. This seeking is what Kant calls a “need of reason,” a need, it seems, that can never be satisfied. Yet we shudder at the prospect of a dizzying regress. We want Ultimate Power (beneath powers) and Final Good (beneath goods). If I find rest or assurance without finding a regression-stopping absolute, I face my ignorance. But in the instance that interests Pattison, I do not find in my ignorance a frightening abyss. I find rest from my worry, patience in the sense of an establishing power—the sense that “my life is given me,” or groundlessly grounded. There are two senses of “grounding.” When I ask for grounds for a belief, I ask for grounding-in-reason. Overwhelmed by rampant contingency or doubt, I ask for grounding-in-assurance: a handhold. The shopkeeper knight of faith from Fear

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and Trembling enjoys grounding-in-assurance with no recourse to reasons. I enjoy grounding as I wonder at the smile of a child with no recourse to reasons. For no worldly reason, Socrates listens spellbound to Diotima, groundlessly grounded. Demonic irony leaves one staring into an abyss. Bracing or salvific irony manifests assured responsiveness.

Acknowledging establishing power—final faith A picture of faith as “grounding power”—the sense that the world is welcoming rather than a dizzying mess—is implicit in the image of the jaunty shopkeeper.6 This knight of faith from Fear and Trembling strolls home for dinner, taking delight in all that strikes his eye. He is assured, implicitly grounded. Johannes de Silentio avers that the knight is “‘secure to take pleasure in [the world]”—he is “living happily and joyfully.”7 This is a fine picture of Kierkegaardian faith. Thank God, Mount Moriah is nowhere in sight. This image of faith as a silent, implicit power underlying assured and happy living—despite the absence of justifying reasons—is found repeatedly in Kierkegaard’s texts. We can find it lyrically sung in his beautiful discourse on The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air (1849). He doesn’t write a lawyerly defence of this appeal to “establishing power” or of the contours of faith as assurance. To provide such defence would be tedious and in any case, would give pride of place to forensic or philosophical reasoning. This would bury the phenomena in question, opening the door to distracting digressions. Remember that Socrates repeatedly turns to myths, images and fantastical stories at key points, knowing that arguments only go so far. It’s absurd, and self-defeating, to offer three reasons for believing that one is in love. One does not come to undergo awe or love or wonder through reasoning. “Grounding power” marks the displacement of dispassionate knowledge and reason giving. It bespeaks the radiant goodness of goods or the power of a relation to relate to itself. As the rose radiates its beauty without a Why, so I am grounded without a Why. Reason lies at the ready, at our service, but does not interfere to impede living. To proceed in faithful assurance is not to assert a debater’s claim that something eternally transcendent exists any more than such a claim hovers as I attest to the beauty of this rose—a beauty that sweeps all need for reasons or metaphysics brusquely aside. To mention “establishing power” here remains a confession of ignorance with regard to explicating the power of love or beauty or establishing power to bind. Yet there is nothing ill-advised in affirming and welcoming wonders afloat, despite and alongside ignorance and awareness of loss and lack, if not desolation. Remembering the knight of faith, we could call the core of this faith the persistence of a groundless joy and delight. Kierkegaard’s impact on European and North American philosophy, literature and theology has been immense, from Karl Barth to Buber and Tillich, from Rilke to Kafka, and Ibsen, from Heidegger, Sartre and Wittgenstein to Camus. His championing of the individual and the need for subjective passion and commitment

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appealed in an age when these were increasingly overshadowed by commercial and social powers that levelled differences in personality, talent and disposition, and diluted the passion to become an authentic self. His taxonomy of despair, his exposure of shallowness of an aesthetic life style and the complacency of middle class “success,” not to mention his devotion to Socratic provocation and wit, made him a great reservoir of insight and cultural critique, including a critique of religion and theology. His extensive use of masks and pseudonyms added both mystery and excitement to the still unfinished project of mapping his oeuvre. Kierkegaard is a dazzling stylist with a prodigious literary imagination, making him a favourite of literary critics, novelists and poets. It’s risky to assess longevity, but I see no reason to predict a downturn in his still-burgeoning appeal. He avoids jargon and abstraction, allowing him to be rediscovered when short-term fads in cultural discourse run their course. Kierkegaard predicted, with little modesty, that Fear and Trembling would make his name immortal. He has attained a sort of immortality on the basis of that short book and of a dozen more works of startling genius.

Notes 1 In Germany, Heidegger took up with Kierkegaard, who provided him with diction for Being and Time. He picks up Kierkegaard’s “levelling,” “repetition,” “prattle,” “angst,” “being toward death,” “temporality,” “Augenblick” (or “moment”), and much more. 2 Sartre’s theory of “radical choice” might have its roots in this sort of quandary. See Mooney (2001). 3 Immodestly, Kierkegaard predicts—correctly—that his little book will make his name immortal. 4 Joyful “eucatastrophy”—Tolkien’s term—is discussed by Davenport (2008). 5 Mentioning the great variety of Kierkegaard’s texts, I should acknowledge the inevitable neglect of many of them in this essay. To display a “living sense” of half-a-dozen of his important texts seems better than rushing through. Thus, I leave aside The Concept of Anxiety and Prefaces (1844), Stages on Life’s Way (1845), A Literary Review: Two Ages (1846), Works of Love (1847), Crisis in the Life of an Actress (1848), The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air (1849), Practice in Christianity (1850), “The Attack Literature” (the 1855 polemics against the church), the discourses collected as Purity of Heart, and several other sets of discourses distributed through these years. See Pattison (2002). Nor can I take up the posthumous The Point of View of my Work as an Author, The Book on Adler, or his voluminous Journals. One can find these works, and other works I discuss, in Kierkegaard’s Writings (1978–2000). 6 In “speech in Praise of Abraham,” Johannes de Silentio rejects a world where one thing “just follows another” without grounding-in-assurance (Kierkegaard 1985, 49). 7 The “Knight of faith” finds “joy on the strength of the absurd” (Kierkegaard 1985, 79).

References Davenport, John and Rudd, Anthony. 2001. Kierkegaard After MacIntyre. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Davenport, John. 2008. “Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling.” Ethics, Love, and Faith. Edited by Edward F. Mooney. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Garff, Joakim. 2005. Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography. Translated by Bruce Kirmmse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Hannay, Alastair. 2001. Kierkegaard: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1978–2000. Kierkegaard’s Writings. 26 Volumes. Edited and translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1985. Fear and Trembling. Edited and translated by Alastair Hannay. New York, NY: Penguin. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1989. The Sickness Unto Death. Edited and translated by Alastair Hannay. New York, NY: Penguin. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1992. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life. Edited and translated by Alastair Hannay. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1996. Papers and Journals: A Selection. Edited and translated by Alastair Hannay. New York, NY: Penguin. Kierkegaard, Søren. 2009. Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. Translated by M.G. Piety, with an introduction by E. F. Mooney. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Law, David R. 2013. Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lear, Jonathan. 2011. A Case for Irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lippitt, John and George Pattison. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mooney, Edward F. 2001. “The Perils of Polarity: Kierkegaard and MacIntyre in Search of Moral Truth.” Kierkegaard After MacIntyre. Edited by John Davenport and Anthony Rudd. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mooney, Edward F., ed. 2008. Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mooney, Edward F. 2013a. “Dependence and its Discontents.” MLN 128: 1038–60. Mooney, Edward F. 2013b. Excursions with Kierkegaard: Others, Goods, Death, and Final Faith. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Mooney, Edward F. 2013c. “Pseudonyms and Style.” The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. Edited by John Lippitt and George Pattison. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 191–211. Pattison, George. 2002. Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology. New York, NY: Routledge. Pattison, George. 2013. Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

12 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) Bruce Ellis Benson

Friedrich Nietzsche was not only the son of a Lutheran pastor but part of a long line of pastors going back nearly 250 years. His father had a theology that was deeply affected by the revivalist movement and his mother lived a life of constant prayer. As a child, Fritz was known as the “Little Pastor,” since he would often cite long passages from scripture or sing hymns with great fervour. At age five, his father died. While Nietzsche never seems to have fully recovered from that blow, it did strengthen his faith. When he was fourteen, he began attending Schulpforta, a school where he was able to study with Robert Buddensieg, who was also a revivalist and a great influence on Nietzsche. In 1861, Nietzsche read Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, in which Feuerbach argues that the concept of God is merely the product of wish projection, and thus God is essentially anthropomorphic. While studying at the University of Bonn, he read writers like David Strauss, who had published Life of Jesus, a text in which he denies the divinity of Jesus. Exactly when Nietzsche lost his faith is unclear, though it was sometime around leaving Schulpforta. Nietzsche went on to become a philologist (someone who studies classic texts) and was given the chair in philology at the University of Basel in 1869 (even though Nietzsche had never finished a proper doctorate and, even more remarkable, had never written a Habilitationschrift—in effect, a second doctorate). But, in 1879, he was forced to give up the chair due to poor health. For the next ten years, he lived a life of rootlessness in Swiss and Italian rooming houses. It is in these years that he wrote his greatest texts. On 3 January 1889, he came out of the place where he was staying and saw a man beating a horse. Overcome with compassion, he rushed to hug the horse. At that point, he collapsed both physically and mentally. He remained in this state until 1900, when he died.

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From Christian Pietism to Dionysian Pietism Nietzsche’s relation to Christian faith is rather complicated. Raised in a devout Pietistic household, he deeply imbibed Christianity. His mother was the absolute model of Lutheran Piety, though his aunt Rosalie (who lived with the family) had a more rationalistic approach to faith. Young Nietzsche seems to have been particularly influenced by his mother. Consider the following prayer that he wrote at the tender age of thirteen (1858): I have firmly resolved within me to dedicate myself forever to His service. May the dear Lord give me strength and power to carry out my intention and protect me on life’s way. Like a child I trust in His grace: He will preserve us all, that no misfortune may befall us. But His holy will be done! All He gives I will joyfully accept: happiness and unhappiness, poverty and wealth, and boldly look even death in the face, which shall one day unite us all in eternal joy and bliss. Yes, dear Lord, let Thy face shine upon us forever! Amen! (Nietzsche 1967, I/1, 310; Hollingdale 1985, 17) Here we have a picture of Nietzsche that is profoundly resolute in his faith and devotion to God. One can hardly imagine a more vivid expression of traditional German Pietism. Yet, within a few years, that faith becomes more problematic. In 1862, he writes a poem in which he says: I do not know what I love I have neither peace nor rest I do not know what I believe (Grundlehner 1986, 15)

At this point, Nietzsche’s faith slowly dissipates. Nietzsche himself attributes it to reading books of higher criticism about the Bible, which undermined the authority of Scripture. Yet he also thinks that one can give a psychological explanation for why one might no longer believe in God. As he puts it, “in former times, one sought to prove that there is no God—today one indicates how the belief that there is a God could arise and how this belief acquired its weight” (Nietzsche 1982, 95). Once one realizes the distinctly human origins of religion, thinks Nietzsche, religious belief is no longer plausible. In effect, Nietzsche is thinking of what we might call a “genealogical” refutation of Christian belief, in which we discredit belief by way of citing its origins. Yet it would be wrong to think that this faith simply goes away. Instead, Nietzsche wants to move from Christian Pietism to Dionysian Pietism, a new faith that retains the basic structure of Pietism but adopts Dionysus—the Greek god—as his god. Nietzsche proclaims this new faith as “the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus” (Nietzsche 1997, 49). Nietzsche had earlier claimed that he could only believe in a god who can dance and that

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god turns out to be Dionysus. Indeed, Nietzsche describes himself as “the last ­ disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus” (Nietzsche 2002, 176). The Pietism that Nietzsche wishes to affirm is one that fully embraces life. Thus, Nietzsche remains a deeply religious man. Julian Young contends, as would I, that Nietzsche is “above all a religious thinker” (Young 2006, 201). On my account, Nietzsche remains a Pietist throughout his life. To be sure, he is a rather unorthodox Pietist, for his goal is to create a very different kind of Pietism. Yet the Pietism that he leaves behind and the one that he embraces are still ones of the heart. As he writes to two of his childhood friends in 1862: Christianity is essentially a matter of the heart … The main teachings of Christianity only relate to the fundamental truths of the heart … To become blessed through faith means nothing other than the old truth, that only the heart, not knowledge can make one happy. (Nietzsche 1986b, 1: 202) So, Christianity is all about becoming a different kind of person. As Nietzsche moves from Christian Pietism to Dionysian Pietism, what changes is the content rather than the structure. As a Dionysian Pietist, Nietzsche wants to affirm exactly what he had affirmed in that prayer he wrote at age thirteen—except to Dionysus. In one of his last texts, Nietzsche writes: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it” (Nietzsche 1968, 714). Nietzsche calls the embracing of amor fati “redemption”: “To redeem those who lived in the past and to transform every ‘It was’ into an ‘I wanted it thus!’—that alone do I call redemption!” (1954b, 254). Even though Nietzsche uses the term “redemption,” it is crucial to note that he is using it in the exact opposite sense of the usual meaning of “redemption.” His use of the phrase “that alone do I call redemption” clearly calls attention to the fact that he employs the term in a very different way. For the underlying assumption of “redemption” as normally defined is that something is wrong and needs to be fixed. Instead, Nietzsche thinks that the world needs to be embraced as it is. To be sure, reading Nietzsche as a Dionysian Pietist seems to fly in the face of the thing that most people associate with him: that he is an atheist. As we have seen, though, he is only an atheist to the extent that he rejects the God of Christianity. And that requires understanding what he is rejecting when he rejects Christianity.

Nietzsche’s rejection of Christianity First, we need to understand the context of his move away from Christianity. In some ways, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche thinks that much of the Christianity of his day is a sham: there is a formal profession of faith by most people and almost everyone goes to church, but there is little real faith. One must remember that much

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of the “Christianity” to which Nietzsche is exposed is that kind of Christianity advocated by people such as Strauss, who also wrote The Old Faith and the New. For Strauss, Christianity is not about the transforming relationship with the Christ who died and rose from the dead for our sins but consists in following Christ the good moral teacher who instructs us to be good people. Quite rightly, Nietzsche realizes that this can hardly be Christian faith, and he even writes a text against Strauss (David Strauss: The Confessor and the Writer) in which he accuses Strauss of being a philistine, a bad writer and a phony. For this “new faith” is really a wholesale rejection of Christianity, while keeping the name. Nietzsche’s message is essentially that the emperor has no clothes. It is understandable why Nietzsche (in The Gay Science) has a madman go through the marketplace proclaiming the message “God is dead”: the madman is the only one honest and perspicacious enough to realize that Christians of his day are merely “playing” religion (and it is significant that the people listening to him are not believers themselves). The madman is not arguing that God has suffered a stroke; rather, the possibility of belief in the God of Christianity is no longer open to thinking people. Yet how does God die? Nietzsche gives us a number of accounts. One is simply that of Strauss: as Nietzsche puts it, “Christianity has thus crossed over into a gentle moralism: it not so much ‘God, freedom and immortality’ that have remained, as benevolence and decency of disposition … it is the euthanasia of Christianity” (Nietzsche 1982, 92). The madman just confirms what has taken place: “[W]e have killed him—you and I. We are all his murderers” (Nietzsche 2001, 125). A further way in which God dies comes out in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In speaking to his disciples, he says: “But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Hence there are no gods” (Nietzsche 1954b, 198). This is a strikingly different reason for rejecting God, and one that is hardly intellectually defensible. In fact, its logic seems to be childish in the worst possible way: “I don’t get to be god, so no one gets to be god.” No wonder Zarathustra realizes he is revealing something from deep in his heart. For here the motivation for the death of God turns out to be purely emotional and selfish. This psychological account for the death of God is further strengthened by what the “ugliest man” says. Zarathustra encounters the ugliest man and recognizes him as “the murderer of God” (Nietzsche 1954b, 376). He accuses him of having taken revenge upon God and the ugliest man admits that this is exactly what he has done. Speaking of God, the ugliest man says: “He had to die: he saw with eyes that saw everything … The god who saw everything, even man—this god had to die! Man cannot bear it that such a witness should live” (Nietzsche 1954b, 378–9). Yet what exactly does Nietzsche think of Christianity? As late as 11 July 1881, he was able to write the following: “After all,” he says of Christianity, “it is the best example of the ideal life I have really come to know; I have pursued it from my childhood on, and I do not think my heart has ever dealt meanly with it” (Nietzsche 1986, 6:109). Conversely, on 30 September 1888 (right after finishing The Anti-Christ), he writes a document titled “Decree Against Christianity” in which he says “war to the death against depravity: depravity is Christianity” and

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“be more severe toward Protestants than toward Catholics and more severe toward liberal Protestants than toward those of strict belief” (Shapiro 1989, 146). Indeed, Nietzsche is most of all critical of Protestants like Strauss, for he sees them as retaining the name “Christianity” without retaining its content; conversely, he goes out of his way to avoid disturbing those of genuine and sincere belief.

Deconstructing Paul Here it is helpful to turn to what Nietzsche says regarding Paul, Jesus and Christianity. On Nietzsche’s account, what we call “Christianity” is almost entirely a fabrication from Paul. Whereas Jesus had taught “glad tidings” (as Nietzsche puts it), Paul preached a very different sort of “gospel,” one based on hatred and revenge. Nietzsche claims that Paul’s gospel is dependent only on Jesus’ death, not his life (and Nietzsche is correct that Paul has little substantive to say about the life of Jesus). Just as Nietzsche provides a genealogical refutation for religious belief, so he provides a similar refutation for Paul’s gospel. In effect, Nietzsche thinks that he is able to give a psychological account of how Paul formulated his gospel. Consider Paul: he is obsessed with his sin—his inability to keep the law. Then consider the Christian context: while his disciples expected him to set up the kingdom of God on earth, Jesus suffers the ignoble death of crucifixion. What, then, is one to do with the life and death of Jesus? In that death, Paul suddenly finds a way around the demands of the law. As Nietzsche puts it: “What essentially happened then is rather this: his mind suddenly became clear: ‘it is unreasonable,’ he says to himself, ‘to persecute precisely this Christ! For here is the way out, here is perfect revenge, here and nowhere else do I have and hold the destroyer of the law!’ (Nietzsche 1986, 68). Nietzsche refers to Paul as the “first Christian,” since he sees Paul as having “invented” Christian theology. Yet Paul is not merely trying to get over his guilty conscience: he likewise has a lust for power, at least on Nietzsche’s read. In effect, Paul wants to usurp the place of God, yet he does so by cleverly inverting the classic values of the Greeks. It is with this movement that we have a powerful example of what Nietzsche refers to as the “slave revolt.” Whereas the ancient Greek nobility saw its own values as being obviously true, Paul devalues “the wisdom of the world” in favour of a heavenly sort of wisdom (I Cor. 1:25). To employ terminology that Nietzsche is famous for using (but largely in his unpublished and thus less important texts), we can say that the ancient Greeks allowed their “will to power” to flourish. That is, they didn’t deny the drive of life to establish oneself as superior to others. In contrast, the slaves repress their will to power. Yet, this move is actually a kind of act of revenge (and thus a disguised will to power), since it involves the weak of the world turning around the values of the strong—what had been considered “bad” is now taken to be “good”—and vice versa. Moreover, from Nietzsche’s perspective, this move represents a direct frontal attack on life itself. The result is that Christianity is fundamentally a “No to everything on earth that represents the ascending tendency of life” (Nietzsche 1954a, 593). What this means in practice is that Christianity finds

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itself pitted against the instincts and preaches a message of redemption from suffering and sin. Nietzsche accuses the Christian Church of “ripping out the passions by the root,” with the result that the church is “an enemy to life” (Nietzsche 1997, 25). Yet Nietzsche goes even further: the God of Christianity is the ultimate enemy of life, since he says no to all human desires and thus promotes decadence, the turning against life itself. Indeed, the very notion of God is what Nietzsche takes to be a “counterconcept of life,” in which the soul is exalted to despise the body (Nietzsche 1968, 790). Not surprisingly, then, Christianity is deemed by Nietzsche to be even more “otherworldly” than Platonism. Nietzsche thinks that Paul takes the notion of the priesthood from Judaism but turns it into a distinctly Christian thing. To exercise priestly power, Nietzsche says that the “priestly type” has “an interest in making mankind sick” (Nietzsche 1954a, 594). The goal of the priest is to exercise power over those who suffer. Of course, the priest is sick himself and very much related to the sick. Yet the priest is able to use the sickness of others to his advantage. The priest says to the sick “you yourself are to blame for your illness,” thus giving the sick a deep sense of guilt. But the priest also uses the poison of pity, which is yet another way of saying No to life. “Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect” (Nietzsche 1954a, 572). Although there are many debilitating effects of pity, it is ultimately a disguised form of superiority, for in pity one places oneself above the one being pitied. However, it is not surprising that Nietzsche sees pity as a form of nihilism, the negation of all things. Although Nietzsche is often thought to be a nihilist, he is actively against it in every form. In contrast, Christianity simply gives in to it. With Christianity, then, nihilism and decadence reach a new low. How exactly does Nietzsche come to this reading of Paul? While there are some aspects of it that reflect orthodox Christianity, it is largely a distortion of what Paul writes. Instead, what we have is a kind of “psychology” of Paul that Nietzsche simply invents. As Alain Badiou—hardly a friend of Christianity—notes, Nietzsche’s read of Paul is simply unfounded (Badiou 2003, 71). Indeed, the accusation that Paul and Christianity are “against life” seems a strange claim. To be sure, Nietzsche’s idea of life is not that of Christianity, but one can hardly say that Christianity is against life. In an important respect, Nietzsche and Christianity are in agreement: life is a fundamentally good thing. The incarnation and resurrection are affirmative of life, not just in some otherworldly sense but in the sense of affirming life here and now. Of course, Nietzsche needs to find a lens to read Paul by that discredits him: for Nietzsche wants to do exactly what Paul does—to change the centre of gravity by way of the resurrection. In effect, Nietzsche wants to change it back to the old noble virtues, to undo the slave revolt in which ancient Greek virtues and values are upended.

Deconstructing Jesus Yet Nietzsche’s read of Paul is eclipsed by his read of Jesus in terms of cleverness and inventiveness. He confesses that “one cannot read [the] Gospels cautiously

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enough,” for Nietzsche sees them as largely fabrications (Nietzsche 1954a, 620). In considering Nietzsche’s account of Jesus, we must keep in mind that he is engaging in a project that would have been very popular in his day: rethinking and re-interpreting the Gospels. Yet, Nietzsche is not simply engaging in an act of objective philology: his goal is to reduce Jesus to render him powerless and to provide the model for Nietzsche’s own this-worldly Pietism. At points, there are aspects of Nietzsche’s Jesus with which an orthodox believer can truly resonate. Yet, his overall reading is simply heterodox. Nietzsche attempts to interpret Jesus just as he interpreted Paul, from a psychological point of view. In so doing, he claims to be giving us the “real” Jesus. Of course, he admits that he thinks that the Gospels are unreliable and that philology is likewise unreliable when it comes to saints’ lives. Both admissions should give us pause as to how seriously to take Nietzsche’s account. Nietzsche claims that he is describing “the psychological type of the Redeemer” (Nietzsche 1954a, 600). In so doing, he is giving us his own account of the historical Jesus rather than the Christ of faith. That psychology of Jesus can be worked out in the following terms: decadence, nihilism, idiocy, childlikeness, free spiritedness and freedom from ressentiment. Nietzsche’s Jesus is, first, characterized by an acute sensitivity to pain. In this, he applies the Buddhist sensibility of pain to the Redeemer. On Nietzsche’s read, Jesus and his followers have always been reacting to the pain of human existence. As weak slaves, they are only able to respond by way of ressentiment. Although Nietzsche always uses the French term, it can be translated rather exactly into English as “resentment”—the slaves resent the fact that they, as slaves, cannot respond to the world except by recoiling from it and trying to find inner peace. They hate the body and find refuge in the soul. Instinctively, they turn against life in a decadent sort of way. Of course, while Nietzsche can find all too many cases to support this thesis, it is hard to depict the entire history of Christianity in terms of self-hatred and denial. Yet what Nietzsche calls the Evangel—another name for Jesus—is quite different from all this. In contrast to his followers, Jesus exemplifies “the superiority over any feeling of ressentiment” (Nietzsche 1954a, 615). In this respect—and in others—Nietzsche can only admire Jesus: for Jesus is free from the very thing— resentment—that Nietzsche feels so acutely. Of course, the portrait that Nietzsche paints of Jesus is more complex than this. For Nietzsche also thinks that Jesus can be described as an “idiot.” There is good reason to think that Nietzsche had read Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot and that he has its protagonist Prince Myshkin in mind. Yet this comparison only goes so far. Whereas Myshkin is shy and feels at home only with children, Jesus is anything but shy and hangs out with a rather varied crowd of characters. One can likewise point to the meaning of idios in classical Greek—someone who is private and doesn’t have a place in the public world—and rightly argue that Jesus is a rabbi who doesn’t have a place in society. More important for our concern here is that Nietzsche somewhat grudgingly acknowledges that Jesus is a “free spirit.” As it turns out, this kind of freedom

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and some kind of childlikeness is what Nietzsche has been seeking all along. He speaks of Jesus as living a life that breaks “with the whole Jewish doctrine of repentance and reconciliation”; instead, he lives a life in which “in the practice of life … one feels ‘divine,’ ‘blessed,’ ‘evangelical,’ at all times a “child of God” (Nietzsche 1954a, 607). Indeed, Nietzsche thinks that this very kind of life is still possible and, for some people, still very desirable. Of course, anyone familiar with the New Testament will realize that Nietzsche is giving us a radical rereading of the Gospels, one that has very little warrant textually. Yet, this reading of Jesus as a kind of Pietist, for whom only action matters and not belief, allows Nietzsche to depict Jesus as prefiguring his own Dionysian Pietism. In an important sense, Nietzsche is building off this Jesus figure. Of course, that Jesus is so distinct from his followers and what Christianity has made him out to be allows Nietzsche to say: “[I]n truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross,” which leads Nietzsche to go on to write: “In fact, there have been no Christians” (Nietzsche 1954a, 612–13). So, Jesus is the only one of his kind and the attempt of Christianity to embody Jesus’ life has been an abject failure. Nietzsche insists that Jesus introduces “a new way of life, not a new faith,” the result being that ‘the kingdom of God’ … is an experience of the heart” (Nietzsche 1954a, 607–8). Given this rather different interpretation of Christianity, Nietzsche’s comment to a friend in 1881—that he finds Christianity the highest form of life and that he has never dealt meanly with it—makes perfect sense. While Christians will no doubt take issue with this account of Jesus, Nietzsche does seem to get something important right: he recognizes that Jesus is by his very nature subversive—rather than simply support the status quo, Jesus subverts it.

Nietzsche’s new religion Having dismissed Christianity, where does Nietzsche go from here? With the death of the Christian god, there emerges the possibility of a new god. As he himself says, “how many gods are still possible!” (Nietzsche 1967, 534). We have already noted that Nietzsche does not end up godless: instead, he adopts Dionysus as his god. It is only in the sense of rejecting the God of Christianity that Nietzsche can be called an “atheist.” Although Dionysus first comes to light in Nietzsche’s early work The Birth of Tragedy, Dionysus comes to fruition in his late works. Looking back at The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes that he invented “a fundamentally opposed doctrine and counter-evaluation of life” that he claims to have “baptized … by the name of a Greek god: I called it Dionysiac” (Nietzsche 1999, 9). That Nietzsche becomes a disciple of Dionysus is made even clearer by some of his late letters, written around the time of his mental collapse, in which he signs his name as “Dionysos.” What does Nietzsche want to become in following Dionysus? Consider what Nietzsche writes in one of his last texts: Goethe conceived of a human being who was strong, highly cultivated, skilled in everything bodily, with self-control and self-respect … a tolerant

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human being, not out of weakness but out of strength … Such a spirit who has become free stands with a glad and trusting fatalism in the midst of the ­universe, with a faith that only the particular is to be rejected, that as a whole, everything redeems and affirms itself—such a spirit does not negate anymore. (Nietzsche 1997, 84) Here the kind of “faith” Nietzsche has in mind is that of the strong: the kind of person that the poet Goethe envisioned is not a weakling but someone capable of great strength and self-control. It is often thought that Nietzsche’s move away from the distinction between “good and evil” to “good and bad” (in which the very idea of morality is negated) results in Nietzsche simply eschewing all traditional moral ideals. Yet, contrary to popular belief, Nietzsche remains remarkably traditional in his “moral views.” As he puts it, “it goes without saying that I do not deny—unless I am a fool—that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged” (Nietzsche 1982, 103). Nietzsche recognizes that most of the things we generally call “wrong” are simply bad, from a prudential point of view. Ultimately, Nietzsche’s embracing of the amor fati means that the kind of person he wants to become is a “free spirit.” Although Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra had exalted the Übermensch, alternatively translated into English as “superman” or “overman” (the more literal translation), by his late writings the free spirit overshadows the overman and becomes that to which Nietzsche aspires. For the project of becoming Dionysian is one still needing to be accomplished. Nietzsche’s goal is to give a kind of ultimate “Yes” to life, to will it in all its vicissitudes and uncertainties. As late as 1886, Nietzsche speaks of the free spirit yet to come: “[O]ne may conjecture that a spirit in whom the type ‘free spirit’ will one day become ripe and sweet” (Nietzsche 1986a, 6). Nietzsche makes it clear that one becomes a free spirit by overcoming oneself. Of course, a major problem for Nietzsche to become a “yes-sayer” is that he must say “yes” to everything: one must affirm all of life, which means affirming even Christianity. Yet, can Nietzsche accomplish this himself? In an important sense, Jesus proves to be the exemplar for Nietzsche, for he reads Jesus as living out a kind of blessedness here on earth by saying “yes” to life in a way that Nietzsche cannot. Whereas Jesus can say “yes” to life in a profound way (admittedly, only on a rather unorthodox reading of Jesus), Nietzsche desperately wants to become like a child who is a new beginning. It is in this respect that Jesus is already like a child: he does not need to become one. Further, Nietzsche admits that Jesus is a free spirit, which means that Jesus has already accomplished what Nietzsche so desperately wants to accomplish. Even though Nietzsche claims that he has become a free spirit by the time of The Anti-Christ (1888), it is hard to believe him. If anything, he still seems to be mired in ressentiment. Nietzsche is filled with the desire to be free and to radically affirm his Dionysian Piety, but he seems to be simply incapable of living this out. He wants to be characterized by the glad and trusting fatalism that he identifies with Goethe;

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instead, he finds himself trapped in the reactive logic of ressentiment. In his very last year of sanity, Nietzsche tries but fails to achieve a positive project—what he called the Revaluation of All Values. Instead, we find him still filled with ­resentment. He tries to be true to Dionysus and to life, but he is unfaithful. However, the ultimate question is whether Nietzsche can escape from the logic of redemption—whether he can truly affirm that life, just as it is, can be utterly affirmed without any qualifications. Nietzsche does realize that such a move can only be made by way of faith. But he is not able to make this move. Nietzsche writes: “When I have looked into my Zarathustra, I walk up and down in my room for half an hour, unable to master an unbearable fit of sobbing” (Nietzsche 1968, 702). Why does he sob? Given that he is looking into himself—which he characterizes as “an abyss”—his tears are for the nothingness within him and the nothingness without. While Nietzsche had earlier claimed that “the free spirit par excellence” can dance “even beside abysses,” he now finds that he is simply unable to do so. His tears, then, are for his own lack of faith in his Dionysian Pietism.

References Grundlehner, Philip. 1986. The Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hollingdale, R. J. 1999. Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy. Rev. ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954a. The Anti-Christ(ian). In The Portable Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Viking. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954b. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In The Portable Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Viking. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York, NY: Random House, 1967. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich 1968. Ecce Homo. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Random House. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1982. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1983. Untimely Meditations. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1986a. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1986b. Sämtliche Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter/Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by Richard Polt. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Translated by Ronald Speirs. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2001. The Gay Science. Edited by Bernard Williams. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shapiro, Gary. 1989. Nietzschean Narratives. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Young, Julian. 1992. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

13 Franz RoSenzweig (1886–1929) Agata Bielik-Robson

Franz Rosenzweig’s life-long attempt to create a new thinking might be understood in Nietzschean terms as an attempt to philosophize with a star: a child of a stormy marriage between philosophy and Judaism. Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously philosophized with a hammer, figures very strongly in the opening pages of Rosenzweig’s major work, The Star of Redemption.1 He is hailed there as a thinker who inaugurated a new style of thought, spoken directly from the self: the stubborn I—“I first and last name” (Rosenzweig 1999a, 48)—who refuses to be swallowed by the philosophical system, or any system at all. For Rosenzweig, this Nietzschean gesture of throwing off the nets of systematic generalities to save the singularity of the self will form the very paradigm of his philosophy of religion. For, unlike philosophy, which privileges conceptual abstractions of the generalized “world-view,” revelation offers an alternative based on the “life-view,” which never does away with the singular subject. The Star of Redemption was written in the trenches of the First World War, fought by Rosenzweig on the German side; no wonder that it exudes with despair of the individual struggling for survival, who first “wants to remain, wants to live” (SR, 3). This urgency bestows Rosenzweig’s erudite speculation with a sharp existential edge: threatened directly with the vision of tragic doom, the self fights for a glimpse of hope. This “mood” will be immediately transposed into the leading motif of The Star: the passage from the tragic world view, in which every individual becomes sacrificed to the holistic order of being, to the messianic life view, which offers the singular existence a hopeful exit from the system—with the “star of redemption” as the sole guide through the wretched “night of the world,” immersed in the war of elements. Franz Rosenzweig, who was born in 1886 in Kassel in a Jewish assimilated family that preserved only minimal connection to the synagogal life, began his intellectual career as a scholar of Hegel, to whom he devoted his doctoral dissertation

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defended at the University of Freiburg, Hegel und der Staat (Hegel and the State). Deeply i­nfluenced by his older friend, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, he even contemplated conversion to Christianity, but changed his mind quite suddenly, after having observed a Yom Kippur ceremony in Berlin, during which he not only decided to remain Jewish but also to rediscover Judaism for philosophical thinking. Soon after he was drafted, and began to work on The Star of Redemption in life-threatening war conditions, which forced him to revise thoroughly his former education. Whereas before he was a devoted Hegelian, he now departs from Hegel, perceiving in his philosophy the ominous culmination of the systematic tyranny which poses a danger to anything singular: the tendency of abstract totalization spreading and reinforcing itself “from Ionia to Jena”—from the first pre-Socratic metaphysicians to their crowning result in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Yet, this anti-Hegelian move does not make him simply anti-philosophical. Instead of rejecting philosophy altogether for the sake of Judaic piety, Rosenzweig creates a third language made from their turbulent confrontation, which he calls a new thinking (neues denken). His Star, therefore, is not a “Jewish book” (as, to his chagrin, some commentators named it after it first appeared in 1921); it is a lively experiment in new methods of thought, which draws religious problematics into the centre of its main concern—how to save the individual from the oppression of the system. It is easy to see why Nietzsche should be such an important precursor for Rosenzweig, for it was indeed his “hammer philosophy” that first gave voice to the singular living subject, by violently breaking the systematic wholes and separating the self from any gregarious sense of belonging. Following Nietzsche, whom he sees as the modern incarnation of the “tragic hero”—the archetypal singular self, falling away from his community—Rosenzweig defines the self as metaethical: a remnant that cannot be absorbed by the ethos of any totality, either natural or social. He exists not when knowledge ceases, but before it begins. And it is only because he exists prior to knowledge that he exists afterward too, that he again and again announces his triumphant “I am still there” to all knowledge, no matter how completely it has deluded itself with having captured him in the vessels of its universal validity and its necessity. Precisely this is his essence: that he will not be taped into bottles; that he is eternally “still there”; that he ever exults over the peremptory dictate of the universal in his distinctiveness; that for his own distinctiveness is not, as the world would presumably like to grant, an incident, but rather just his self-evident quality—his essence. His first word, his primeval Yea, affirms his peculiarity. This affirmation establishes his distinctiveness, his idiosyncrasy, as his essence in the boundless Not of its Nought. (SR, 64) From the point of view of philosophy, which originated in the pagan world, everything appears as an ineluctable part of ethical totality (allheit), which aims at engulfing also the living self. As Rosenzweig will try to prove, it is only

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the word of revelation that is capable of addressing the self, which rebels against its dissolution in the ontological whole. Revelation thus inaugurates a new way of capturing the relations between the original elements—God, Man and World—which Rosenzweig, after Martin Buber, calls dialogic; instead of a seamless totality, the religious dialogue is based on the primordial separation of these elements. The true beginning of the proper life view, therefore, is possible only within the “broken whole.” Against philosophy, which privileges the conceptual totalities of a universal logos, revelation is a word uttered by a unique God (echad) to the unique individual, the metaethical man. In Rosenzweig’s highly innovative approach, the usual vector of the relation between “the Hebrews and the Hellenes” becomes reversed. Now it is not Greek philosophy which delivers categories to capture the specificity of Jerusalem, but the other way around: Athens, and the whole philosophical formation “from Ionia to Jena,” is perceived and interrogated from the position of Rosenzweigian “new thinking,” deriving—to use Hermann Cohen’s phrase—straight “out of the sources of Judaism” (Cohen, 1995). This dialogue, therefore, is not so much a philosophical symposium as a religious encounter. Now it is not two systems of thought—one free to seek wisdom, the other restrained from the start by the revealed word—that stand against one another but rather two forms of religiosity, which rely on two different models of faith and obedience. In this reversed scrutiny, Athens stands not for a philosophical freedom, but rather for a tragic religion that sees life as constrained by fate, death and natural necessity, from which there is no escape. Jerusalem, on the other hand, stands not for fanatical obedience, but rather for a religious revolution that allows an Exodus from the Egypt of self-enclosed nature and liberates life from the power of death. It is not the traditional pairing of reason versus unreason, which delivers the right criterion of difference, but the opposition of two fundamental decisions—life against death and love against indifference.

Death The gist of Rosenzweig’s ingenious reversal of perspectives, in which it is Jerusalem that interrogates Athens and not the usual other way around, lies in his assuming from the very start a completely different set of questions, which provide a canvas for this examination. So, while philosophy asks about “what is” and “what is not” (Rosenzweig 1999b, 40) and, accordingly, about “what is true” and “what is false,” thus inquiring about the conditions of the possibilities of contemplative knowledge—this other language, which Rosenzweig associates with a “life-centred view,” asks immediately about life and death and inquiries about the conditions of the possibility of life augmented and intensified. While philosophy, in its contemplative désintéressement for the living, can in the end “recommend only suicide” (SR, 4), that is, a state of mind that is already virtually dead—this other language endorses the interest of life, which always “wants to remain, wants to live” (SR, 3), as its openly admitted point of departure. While philosophy is bound to lethal paralysis and has no story to unfold (a perfect contemplation is either a time-

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less moment or a circular motion of the Aristotelian thought thinking itself), this other, life-centred language truly departs, takes on the journey (“course” or “path”) that leads to the anticipated state of messianic redemption, which Rosenzweig, if he knew Harold Bloom, could call “the blessing of more life” (Bloom, 1990). And if Rosenzweig avoids here the explicit word “religion,” it is because he wants to eliminate any orthodox dogmatic associations that would kill the effect of movement and surprise. In contrast to philosophy’s immobility, devoted to the ideal of adequate mirroring of what is, this other form is a paradigm of all possible narration because it introduces at the first the story as such, which grows from a microcosmic life-narrative into a macrocosmic “history of redemption” [heilsgeschichte]. With this narrating canvas, this form also introduces the order of its denouement, the sequence of chapters leading to the saving finale: creation, revelation and redemption. Together with the first triad of elements-protagonists (God, Man and World), these three narrative moments will form the remaining three points of the Jewish Star, Magen David, which Rosenzweig adopts as the scheme of his project of New Thinking. The six-point star thus becomes a model of a dynamic dialogic interplay between primary elements immersed in the vivid narrative. The tensions between the six poles symbolize the “breaking of the whole,” the monotony of philosophy “from Ionia to Jena”: instead of a mute totality, which knows only one way of being, the scheme of the Star introduces an unpredictable suspense in relations between the sharply separated elements.2 God, Man and World turn to each other with either Yes or No—the two archetypal words of the dialogic grammar—and create new configurations which propel the development of the “holy story.” Rosenzweig, who knew thoroughly the whole tradition of German Idealism, follows here Hegel’s adversary, Friedrich Schelling, who, rebelling against the former’s systematic obsessions, postulated a more open-ended and dynamic “narrative philosophy” [erzählende philosophie]. His New Thinking, the function of which is to tell stories, locates itself on the very antipodes of the silence that surrounds the “religious man” in Pascal, Kierkegaard and Shestov. Nothing is further from the Rosenzweigian opening of philosophical language to the living word of story than the Pascalian gesture of rejecting all logos in the name of the ineffable, blind obedience to revelation. Pascal’s “sacrifice of the intellect,” Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith,” or Shestov’s “persistence in the absurd” do not look for another language; having transgressed the discourse of philosophy, they fall into a silence that replaces all speech. Rosenzweig, however, chooses a radically different approach, which produces a surprising reversal of this traditional topos of talkative logos and silent faith. When interrogated by the vital questions of life, death and better life, the idiom of the Hebrews suddenly bursts with eloquence—while the language of the Hellenes turns strangely mute, choking on never asked, indeed non-askable, questions. Inquiring into the reasons of this non-askability constitutes the main theme of Rosenzweig’s analysis of the “pagan proto-cosmos” [Vorwelt], in which he tries to uncover the obstruction that forces Greeks to this double silence—not just of non-given answers but also of deeper, non-asked questions. He tries to see into the failure of the pagan configuration of elements—God, World and Man—which

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excludes in advance any perspective that could give a chance to a singular life: allow to stake on it, offer it a “breathing space,” so it can speak for itself, bestow it with a narrative, proleptic, future-oriented dimension, or, simply, grant it with hope. This failure is the overall theme of Rosenzweig’s analysis of the tragic hero, where he—polemically following Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy—presents Greek tragedy as a para-religious form, almost approaching the threshold of revelation, but also withdrawing in the last moment, precisely because of the non-askability of certain vital questions, “the Job-like questions” the tragic hero is unable to pose: “The poets may pose Job-like questions of guilt and fate, but to the heroes themselves, unlike Job, it never even occurs to pose them” (SR, 78). It is only in the religious world “after revelation,” in which such human figures as Job the Rebel become possible at all: the paradigmatic embodiment of the self “who wants to remain, wants to live” (SR, 3) and who, for the sake of this individual will, throws an accusation against the unjust arrangement of being, including the creator of the worldly order, God himself. The critique of the tragic world-view constitutes the most important part of the first book of The Star, called “Creation.” For Rosenzweig (as for Nietzsche), tragedy is not a distant genre of ancient Greece; it is the ever actual, “­ ever-recurring” pattern of old thinking which lies at the bottom of every philosophy “from Ionia to Jena.” Yet, his main purpose is not exactly Nietzschean: while Nietzsche wished for the return of the tragic religion of the Dionysiac, all-embracing One, Rosenzweig wants to create a new way out of the tragic universe—a new Exodus, which will lead us once again from the “house of bondage,” the Egypt of totality. He sees tragedy as a critical transition between the mythical pagan pre-world and the world of revelation and focuses on the tragic hero as the first rebel who dares to defy the holistic order of being. But because the tragic hero yet lacks the language in which he could meaningfully articulate his rebellion, his separation manifests itself only in a defiant silence, through which he receives the final verdict of Fate. Even if he must “go under” and be punished for his rebellious hubris, he does not accept death as a just judgment. Rosenzweig paints a portrait of the tragic hero as a self-enclosed, impenetrable and inwardly dead Selbstheit (Self) that is “mute as a marble” (SR, 207): a human monument that proudly commemorates his defiant hubris and simultaneously a helpless stone in the hands of Fate, the Heraclitean Great Child who plays with the mortals as if with the marbles. In tragedy, therefore, the pagan pre-world comes to a sudden stony standstill, which exposes the contradiction between the interest of the individual and the interest of totality. Yet, this contradiction is nothing but an error (which is one of the possible translations of the Greek hamartia, the “tragic guilt”), a barren clash of the archetypal Yes and No, which cannot yet unfold into a story. The tragic hero reaches the limit of life in the plastic universe whose flow suddenly congeals into an iron cage: his No, thrown toward the mythological arrangement of life, finds no outlet in any “beyond” and must return to the Yes of cathartic reconciliation with the wounded whole. The life of the tragic hero—precisely as his singular life and his character, which is always, by necessity,

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“­ non-harmonious” and “unevenly blended” (SR, 212) in the display of one trait— must be punished for transgression of the order, which is based on harmony and an even blend of everything. What remains is the very shadow of this error, hovering over the seemingly healed totality; a spectral remnant in the form of the mute, deaf, self-enclosed Selbst that preserves itself not in life, which after all becomes punished and taken away, but only in death. Such is the paradoxical birth of the metaethical man, who falls out of the ontological order and whose beginning is, literally, in his end; he is born in the moment of his demise, in a flash of singularity with no consequence, a mere error. So, despite all the appearances to the contrary, tragedy cannot tell a good story. Its peripeteias, that is,“turns,” are limited by an a priori set context, and bear no prophecy and no promise that could change this chronicle of a foretold death, written by an indifferent and impersonal Fate.The tragic hero is, from the very beginning, singled out only in the sense of a doom, which makes him subordinate to “the only sovereign event in his life,” the Hegelian “Death, the absolute lord and master”—the only “‘sombre law” in the world of myth, which otherwise is nothing but baseless “life purely unto itself ” (SR, 35). In the well-oiled machine of the pre-world, he is nothing but a metaethical error, too isolated and too helpless to forge his erroneous status into a new principle: to truly turn it into life affirmed and augmented. He cannot live as a fallen-out exception to the mythological rule that allows no exceptions; as Schelling says in his reading of the Greek tragedy, which must have been well known to Rosenzweig, the tragic hero can only affirm his freedom in the way he dies, that is, in the way he freely and willingly gives up on life and chooses death. “Death, his own death, has become the sovereign event of his life. He himself has entered that sphere where the world becomes strange to man … the sphere of pure and lofty speechlessness, the self ” (SR, 76–77; my emphasis). The tragic hero, therefore, stands alone on the threshold to a potential new world that will no longer be ruled by the mythical Fate. As the transitional figure, he can turn both ways. First, he can give in to a mythic nostalgia and assume death as a punishment for his unruly hubris. He can accept the most archaic justice, dike, older than any order created by gods or men, and thus maintain the traditional view of tragedy as a cathartic morality play. But he can also choose a messianic option: he can affirm his being an error and an offense to any “ethical totality,” including the justice offered by the death that rules the “creaturely world,” and go on surviving, leaving the whole issue of “tragic guilt” behind him. Passing naturally into the new type of hero—no longer the tragic Antigone or Oedipus, but the Hebrew Job—he may also insist on his innocence and demand a new kind of justice that will exonerate him from his guilt, as well as a new form of life—a better “blessed life”—that will be free from the crippling mythic entanglement in the All. By choosing the messianic path, the tragic hero breaks radically with the tragic universe. He enters a new world that turns the old one on its head, and transforms himself into a survivor, who goes on living beyond all his worldly identifications and boldly locates his human life in a metaethical transcendence which, from now on, can be addressed by God only. He thus exits the confines of the creaturely ­condition

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and enters a vast and open land of messianic vocation, in which he is guided by the revelatory word that orders him to obey the idea of a new, life-affirming justice, based solely on one commandment: Love Thy Neighbour. In Rosenzweig, this moment of turn, umkehr, is equivalent to the instant of revelation: a violent reorganization of the psyche that breaks the structure of identification (“as a part, as a member of a larger social or political whole”) and instead singles out. In his commentary on The Star, Eric Santner very aptly calls this effect of the turn the “amplification by reduction,” where the loss of qualities is simultaneously accompanied by the increase of vitality (2001, 65). In consequence of the umkehr, the remnant, as in Isaiah’s famous prophecy, acquires the vital intensity of a “band of survivors”: “In Judaism man is always somehow a survivor, an inner something, whose exterior was seized by the current of the world and carried off while he himself, what is left of him, remains standing on the shore. Something within him is waiting” (SR, 404–5). Waiting to be used in a way that had never been tried before, he is exceptional, full of miraculous potentialities, a truly new beginning of “more life.”

Love The second book of The Star offers a description of the brave new world in which the singular living being is given the ultimate priority, made possible only thanks to the “singling out” act of revelation. It is here that the polemic against the whole philosophical tradition “from Ionia to Jena” gathers a true momentum. Offered a contrast in the form of the life-giving and life-affirming word of revelation, Rosenzweig can now openly accuse philosophy of its thanatic, death-driven tendency. For, by giving idealist primacy to the concept, philosophy always obliterates the living individual. By stressing the necessity of participation in the system of allheit (totality), it kills singularity, allowing it to lead a merely secondary and shadowy life, devoid of ontological significance. For Rosenzweig, therefore, the blunder of philosophy consists in perpetuating the tragic mode of treating the singular life as nothing more than an error, guilt or accident, which needs to be levelled down to the general matrix of universality: in always choosing static permanence over the dynamic realm of becoming, and in always allying itself with being’s indifference against life’s precariousness and concern. Philosophy, therefore, makes the singular thing, in Rosenzweig’s notation designated as B (das Besondere), wholly dependent on its participation in the general concept (A for das Allgemeine), and conceives it in terms of a meaningless dark “remainder” of the emanation of ideas. Contrary to this, Rosenzweig’s neues denken, which sets new priorities for thought, aims at rescuing the singular from the thrall of the general. This goal is not just descriptive—it is also redemptive in the strongest sense of the word. The role of the human soul, which in Rosenzweig’s system becomes the agent of this messianic practice, is to break open false totalities, single out particulars and breathe life back into their being in the act of naming: giving things, in the manner of the first Adam, their proper names. This goal is commanded to the soul

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in the moment of revelation: the divine love, uttered in the first person directly by “God’s I” (SR, 178), is a dialogic intervention which manages to open the hermetically locked Self and give new life to its deadened singularity: In these words creation visibly extends upward into revelation and is visibly topped by revelation. Death is the Ultimate and Consummate of creation— and love is strong as death. This is the only thing that can be stated, predicated, re-counted about love. Everything else can only be spoken by love itself, not stated ‘about’ it. For love is—speech, wholly active, wholly personal, wholly living, wholly—speaking. All true statements about love must be words from its own mouth, borne by the I. The only exception is this one sentence, that it is strong as death. In it love does not speak itself; in it, the whole world of creation is conquered and laid at the feet of love. (SR, 202) The soul, die seele, thus differs from the tragic Self, der selbst, just like life differs from death, or, like the world after revelation differs from the non-illuminated preworld. While the Self emerges in the process of tragedy as a dark dead-end of mute self-withdrawal, the Soul appears as a radiating centre of life intensified, whose mission is to spread the mode of singularisation onto the remaining multitude of creatures: The soul demands, as object animated by it, an articulated life. It then exercises its freedom on this life, animating it in all its individual members, and everywhere inseminating this ground of the living structure with the seeds of name, of animated individuality, of immortality. (SR, 241) Articulated life, that is, life fragmented into separate living singularities of which everyone can be named, is the target of the operation—simultaneously ethical and linguistic—which Rosenzweig calls die Belebung, “animation.” The soul as the source of animating activity, addresses its neighbours, that is, anything that happens to be nigh and as this or that occupies a place nearby. Neighbour is thus simply a Platzhalter for “my nearest.” The gist of this messianic metamorphosis consists in establishing a new dialogic relation with the neighbour, be it a person or a thing. The messianic “fullness of life,” marked by “animated individuality,” realizes itself in a new way of addressing our neighbours who no longer emerge in front of us as concrete examples of general ideas—or, as Rosenzweig puts it, as in-stances, standing here and now in-stead of the concepts they represent—but as metaethical entities: as ultimately individuated beings that have fallen out of the ethos, that is, the totality of the order-of-being, and thus can only be called by their proper names. Against the sceptical thought, which sees in the name nothing but a conventional “sound and fury,” Rosenzweig insists on its fundamental substantiality:

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With the proper name, the rigid wall of objectness has been breached. That which has a name of its own can no longer be a thing, no longer an everyman’s affair. It is incapable of utter absorption into the category for there can be no category for it to belong to; it is its own category … For name is in truth word and fire, and not sound and fury as unbelief would have it again and again in obstinate vacuity. It is incumbent to name the name and to acknowledge: I believe it. (SR, 186–8) To name, therefore, is to redeem the thing named; it is to bring an end to the process of creation, precisely as revealed to Adam in paradise, bestowed by God with the redemptive function of naming. In the act of giving the name and believing in it, creation realizes itself fully. In fact, redemption is nothing else but bringing creation to its furthest completion thanks to the loving hint given with revelation: it consists in letting things be in their singular status, which is fully affirmed by neighbourly love, fulfilling itself in the passion of naming.

Law The first book—on creation—was overshadowed by death. The rebellion of life against death led us towards the dominant theme of love in the second book devoted to revelation. But the third book of The Star, concerning redemption, moves even further beyond love—towards law. The Christian intuition would be to say: back to the Law, back to the Judaic teaching of halacha, for, as Saint Paul triumphally announced, the Jewish law became once and for all sublated by the divine love and grace. Rosenzweig, however, very consciously defies the Christian sequence of events and sketches a reverse scenario in which love precedes law, conceived as a codification of the loving dialogic relationship between, first, God and soul, and then, between soul and her worldly neighbours. Far from being merely a tool of mechanical obedience of man to God, the Jewish law represents the wisdom of love: by codifying the divine loving impulse, it makes it effective in the creaturely world. If love’s purpose is to redeem every singular thing in its “neighbourly” status, it must enlist the aids of halacha, which in Hebrew means “teaching how to walk.” But this move towards law may indeed be confusing, not just to Christian readers. Focused up until now almost solely on saving the singular from the thrall of the general, The Star now sings an unexpected praise of a ritualized, holistic and static “synagogal life,” in which the metaethical self, once separated from the ontological totality, finds a new communal shelter. Anxious restlessness, which characterized the self-seeking word of revelation, evaporates from the Jewish life and migrates to the Christian side, which takes upon itself the proselytic zeal of converting the pagans. In “Redemption,” Judaism, self-enclosed and blind to the outside world (Rosenzweig loved the medieval representation of the Synagogue—a maiden with downcast eyes—which he found on the porch of the Freiburg cathedral), already enjoys the redeemed status of eternity; freed from the historical-temporal

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­ imension, which is now given over to missionary Christianity, Jewish life sinks d into itself, into its own repetitive rhythm of rituals and law-obeying mitsvot. This surprising conclusion is uncanny also for biographical reasons. In this static vision of the “synagogal existence,” self-sufficiently immersed in its rituals, it is as if Rosenzweig anticipates the future events of his life: the coming severe illness (today it would be diagnosed as Lou Gehrig’s Disease), which will paralyse him almost completely and cause his premature death in 1929. Tied to his chair and rapidly losing capacity to communicate with the outside world (Rosenzweig’s later works were “dictated” to his wife Edith by a special code of blinking), the thinker sank into a quietist mode of piety, bordering on a mystical silence. It is for this reason that in his critical appraisal of Rosenzweig’s major work, “On the 1930 Edition of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption,” Gershom Scholem called the system of The Star “church-like”: The deep-seated tendency to remove the apocalyptic thorn from the organism of Judaism makes Rosenzweig the last and certainly one of the most vigorous exponents of a very old and very powerful movement in Judaism, which crystallized in a variety of forms. This tendency is probably also responsible for the strangely church-like aspect which Judaism unexpectedly sometimes takes on here … Here, in a mode of thought deeply concerned for order, it (the anarchic element) underwent metamorphosis. The power of redemption seems to be built into the clockwork of life lived in the light of revelation, though more as restlessness than as potential destructiveness. For a thinker of Rosenzweig’s rank could never remain oblivious to the truth that redemption possesses not only a liberating but also a destructive force—a truth which only too many Jewish theologians are loath to consider and which a whole literature takes pains to avoid. Rosenzweig sought at least to neutralize it in a higher order of truth. If it be true that the lightning of redemption directs the universe of Judaism, then in Rosenzweig’s work the life of the Jew must be seen as the lightning rod whose task it is to render harmless its destructive power. (Scholem 1995, 323) But, even though Gershom Scholem felt no sympathy for Rosenzweig’s project, it is nonetheless possible to turn his accusation into Rosenzweig’s advantage, at least partially. Scholem very aptly describes the crucial role of the Rosenzweigian concept of the Law as a “defense mechanism”—a sort of a “retainer” designed to interrupt, arrest and attenuate the apocalyptic fire of divine love, to prevent both the subject and the world from instantaneous annihilation. To explain the functioning of this defence, Scholem introduces two useful metaphors. One, the traditional metaphor of lightning, symbolizes the vertiginous moment of revelation as an antagonistic flash of the transcendent in the immanent: an infectious flame that, when unstopped, makes soul “vanish amorphously in the divine love” (SR, 211). The second metaphor, of his own making, is that of a “lightning rod”:

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the device which both uses and tames the divine energy, by directing it towards the ground of the creaturely condition, and thus makes it better adjusted to the ethical transformation of the world—“no longer in heaven” (lo beshamaiim), but operative here and now. Thus, although Rosenzweig, following Rabbi Hillel, truly believes that all Judaism can be brought down to one commandment—Love Thy Neighbour!—he also believes that love alone just won’t do. Love is after all blind: blinded, it stumbles into the nearest thing it bounces at and, only accidentally, it becomes the love of the neighbour; and in its mystical enthusiasm, in which the fire of revelation still burns, it does good to others only as an unintended “side-effect” (SR, 269). It is only later that these “side-effects” become organized and disciplined under the supervision of the Law, which changes the emphasis of the blind love action and makes it concentrate precisely on what initially seemed only its unintended consequence: the neighbour. Blind love thus acquires sight thanks to halacha; only when instructed by the props of the Law can it truly function; that is, instead of stumbling, it can walk: The bond of the consummate and redemptive bonding of man and the world is to begin with neighbor and ever more only the neighbor, the well-nigh nighest … Love glides from one bearer to the other, the next one, from one neighbor to the next neighbor. It is not satisfied until it has paced off the whole orbit of creation … it leaves its traces everywhere in its migration by providing the plural of things everywhere with the sign of singularity. (SR, 235) But this process of “gliding from one bearer to another,” this gradual “pacing of the whole orbit of creation” cannot happen all at once; the apocalyptic energy of love has to be restrained if it is not to destroy but to transform the creaturely reality. Its restless fire must be tamed by the obstacle of ritual, a stumbling block of the Law that will disrupt its spontaneous overflow. The vessel of the Law keeps the steady flame of an effective neighbourly love, still nonetheless fuelled by the apocalyptic lightning. It is thus the restraining respect for the Law’s heteronomy, which leads to the “wisdom of love,” as opposed to love’s uncontrolled “madness” (which Rosenzweig sometimes attributes to Christianity). It may be, therefore, that despite all the criticism Rosenzweig manages to achieve a more wary, truly man-made form of messianism, which is better adjusted to our worldly here and now. By taming the apocalyptic fire, he rather stakes on modest works of the ordinary saint who does what only humans can do: patiently lift the world from the lowest indifferent realms of creaturely condition to the level of the “object of love”—always chosen, special and singular. Rosenzweig’s influence on twentieth-century thought was significant, but perhaps not as great as his innovative project of “new thinking” truly deserved. Just as Rosenzweig feared, his writings generally shared the fate of his first book, The Star of Redemption, which landed on the dusty bookshelves in Jewish homes as an

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ill-chosen and rarely read Bar Mitzvah present, that is, as a confessional work of ­Jewish piety. His main proponent in the world of philosophy was Emmanuel Lévinas, who openly admitted his indebtedness to Rosenzweig’s precursorial critique of the philosophical mode of thinking “from Ionia to Jena.” But since Levinas himself is frequently accused of being partial to “Jewish particularism,” this argument applies all the more to Rosenzweig. The proper reception of Rosenzweig’s thought, therefore, is still a task to be done. It would be worthwhile to look at him as an interesting parallel to Heidegger on the one hand (the critique of idealism) and Wittgenstein, on the other (the later emphasis on practice and philosophical pragmatism), and in this sense also as a precursor of deconstruction (although Derrida mentions Rosenzweig few times, he is never treated by him as a major influence). Such works have already been appearing, 3but so far, they have not yet managed to secure Rosenzweig a safe place in the central canon of late modern thought.

Notes 1 References to The Star of Redemption are abbreviated SR, throughout. 2 The Rosenzweigian pun, shevirat ha-kolim, refers to the original kabbalistic shevirath ha-kelim, “the breaking of the vessels” coined by Isaac Luria. 3 See most of all Robert Gibbs (1994); Peter Elli Gordon (2005); and Benjamin Pollock (2014).

References Bloom, Harold 1990. The Book of J. New York, NY: Harper Publishers. Cohen, Hermann. 1995. Religion of Reason. Out of the Sources of Judaism. Translated by Simon Kaplan. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Gibbs, Robert. 1994. Correlations in Rosenzweig and Lévinas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gordon, Peter Elli. 2005. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy. Berkeley & London: University of California Press. Pollock, Benjamin 2014. Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1985. The Star of Redemption. Translated by William W. Hallo. Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press. Rosenzweig, Franz 1999a. Franz Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking.” Edited by Udoff, A. and Galli, B. E. New York, NY: Syracuse University Press. Rosenzweig, Franz. 1999b. Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God. Translated by Nahum Glatzer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Santner, Eric L. 2001. On Psychotheology of Everydaylife: Reflections on Rosenzweig and Freud. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Scholem, Gershom. 1995. The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York, NY: Schocken Books.

14 Henri Bergson (1859–1941) Philip Goodchild

Henri Bergson represents a distinctively French approach to philosophy. Heavily influenced by his teachers at the elite École Normale Supérieure, Jules Lachelier and Félix Ravaisson, he maintained and developed a Cartesian tradition of thought that gave priority to consciousness and freedom over matter. His doctoral dissertation, Time and Free Will (1889), submitted alongside a short Latin thesis on Aristotle, met with initial opposition, but was eventually received with acclaim. He followed the standard French career of teaching in lycées for several years, before being appointed as professor at the École Normale in 1898, and subsequently to the Collège de France in 1900 where he remained until his retirement in 1920. He became enormously successful, with crowds attending his open lectures, invitations and honours arriving from Oxford, Cambridge and the United States, culminating in a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927 for his book Creative Evolution (1907), and France’s highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Légion d’Honneur in 1930. He was involved in the negotiations for the United States to enter the First World War, and in the establishment of the League of Nations. This success and influence was later reversed by a subsequent generation of philosophers: his thought was held up for criticism by both analytic and German philosophers, in particular for his refusal to engage with the linguistic mediation of thought. Few studies of his work appeared. Some influence persisted in France, since his accessible work could be taught in schools, and his work became a major influence on Emmanuel Lévinas and Gilles Deleuze. It is only with the rise in popularity of the latter, and the translation of his Bergsonism (1963), that Bergson’s work has seen a resurgence in the English-speaking world. Bergson is one of those philosophers who grappled most deeply with the temporal nature of existence. In parallel to a more Germanic tradition of Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, he showed how the view of time as a series of “nows” or present instants is a mere abstraction. Time is continuous change, and

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all things in time change continuously. This has immense ramifications: it challenges the priority of a purely theoretical viewpoint. There is an ideal that had held sway in philosophy from Plato to Kant and beyond: to fix the right view of things, and therefore to attain a fixed view of things. It is an ideal that underlies all philosophical analysis, which breaks experience down into its component elements; it is also an ideal that underlies positivist, materialist and mechanist approaches to life. For materialism, only the fundamental, static elements really matter; for Bergson, by contrast, the subjective experience of the flow of time is more basic than any fixed viewpoint or material reality. Bergson offered a profound challenge to all reductionism, and, as such, has been adopted as an ally by many religious thinkers.

Bergson and philosophy As with many modern European philosophers, the starting point for Bergson’s philosophy lies with Kant. Kant drew a sharp line of separation between space, as a homogeneous medium that we employ to represent things as separate entities in the external world, and time, as the medium through which we represent our experience of changing consciousness. So, for example, if we wish to count anything, such as a flock of sheep, we must first set out the individuals distinct from each other as separated in space. When it comes to time, it would appear that we can do the same: the ticks of a clock are separate moments through which we can count the successive events in time that we experience. Bergson, in his first major work Time and Free Will (1889), adopted this sharp separation between things intuited in space and things intuited in time, but made it much more radical: Kant’s great mistake, he claimed, was to treat time as a homogeneous medium consisting of separate entities, as though it were simply a kind of inner space. But is time really like that? Bergson adopted a distinctively French method of deep introspection, deriving from Descartes but developed in the nineteenth century by thinkers such as Maine de Biran and Félix Ravaisson. Instead of constructing logical arguments or analysing concepts, this involves paying attention first to the reality of conscious experience. A first observation of conscious experience is that it is undergoing continuous change: there is no sharp separation between one moment and the next. When one experiences successive moments of time, like the successive chimes of a bell or the notes of a melody, the last one heard only has the number or quality it does because it is immediately related back to all the previous ones. So, while quantity can be attributed to separable entities represented externally in space, quality pertains to conscious experiences in time. Now materialism endeavours to rebuild the conscious experience of qualities out of successive instantaneous presents: it treats mind as a product of matter. Matter is merely a sum of objects and forces in a simultaneous present. Yet this model is an abstraction, for an instantaneous present is never given in experience. Instead, our fundamental experience is of continuously changing qualities. What materialism cannot explain is how one present gives rise to a successive one, or how one note of a melody is related to the preceding ones. Bergson points out that it is the same

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when reading a sentence: one does not pick out the meaning of each individual word before combining them together to gain a sense. Instead, one follows the emerging sense of the sentence to select the appropriate meaning of each individual word. Far from consciousness being analysable into separable atoms of sensation or information, then, it only exists as a changing whole. For example, if time were to travel twice as fast throughout the universe, then the materialist would claim that this would be undetectable for it is only a relative measure between intervals. It would be as though only the designated points of time were real, not the interval between them. For consciousness, however, there would be only half the intensity of storing up experience, and half the time available to deliberate on free action; consciousness experiences the intervals themselves. So, what is this experience, if it is not merely a succession of moments? On the one hand, consciousness is essentially memory, the conservation and accumulation of the past in the present. For each moment is preserved in itself and as it is happening: this is the flow of time, things pass, and the present moment is known as such in relation to the past. On the other hand, consciousness is essentially expectation, anticipation of the future: it is freedom and decision, oriented towards the future. Duration, which is a continually changing whole, consists in both these movements or tendencies at once: it is conserving the past and choosing the future. Even if the present is the moment when both tendencies operate, it is not an instant but a duration. All instantaneous presence is an abstraction. Bergson links duration to freedom. The notion that our minds could be determined by internal or external forces requires the assumption that like causes can produce like effects. The nature of duration, however, is such that the same moment never recurs: even a repetition of a sound or an event will be distinguished from all preceding ones by being another repetition. There is a qualitative change. The immediate fact of consciousness, therefore, insofar as it preserves the past and is oriented towards the future, is freedom. Determinism is an abstract hypothesis laid over experience. Yet it does point to a real phenomenon in experience: free acts are actually exceptional. For the most part, our actions are induced not by our constantly changing feelings or the whole of our character. Instead, our actions are usually induced by unchanging images so that, through acquired habits, we respond to stimuli as though through automatic reflexes. So, the mechanism that a materialist invokes to explain our conduct ends up controlling it in practice. Our psychic states become separate from each other and solidified; external movements establish permanent associations with these states; and automatism covers over freedom. To make a free choice, by contrast, involves taking time: as we hesitate, considering our feelings about options, the self grows and changes until a decision drops out from it like an over-ripe fruit. Freedom, then, consists in acting in accord with the whole of our most intimate feelings, thoughts, and aspirations, as though the deep-seated self rushes to the surface. For Bergson, such a feeling is formed from the entirety of our past insofar as we conserve it as a whole. Intuition, as a philosophical method, is aimed at re-establishing human freedom through taking time and paying attention.

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This account of the contrast between free duration and mechanism underlies the entirety of Bergson’s subsequent work. Whereas in Time and Free Will, Bergson had followed Kant in sharply distinguishing between the external and the internal, in his next major book Matter and Memory (1896) duration is no longer conceived as purely inside the psyche (which would require a spatial metaphor). Instead, it is no longer time that exists in us, but we exist in time, and matter is simply the most extended limit of duration as it expands and contracts. The whole of existence is composed of matter and memory, with memory preserved in duration just as matter is extended in space. In practice, then, the entirety of what we can know of existence from empirical observation of matter is merely the superficial skin of reality; such observation cannot attain to the underlying tendencies that operate in depth. Just as a virtuoso performance of a violin concerto cannot be explained by either the mechanical movements of the player’s arm nor the musical notation, so also life presents us with profound tendencies, qualities and experiences that cannot be reduced to matter. Yet likewise, the metaphysical nature of reality is a flowing duration that cannot be re-composed out of fixed concepts: Bergson offers a challenge to both materialist and metaphysical traditions. Metaphysics is to be pursued instead by a method of intuition, a deep introspection into conscious experience to observe the tendencies that operate in and through our minds. Yet, what interests Bergson most is the intersection of space and time, matter and memory. For if matter is necessity and consciousness is freedom, then life has found a way of reconciling them. This is what life is: freedom inserting itself within necessity, turning it to its profit. In Bergson’s most influential work, Creative Evolution (1907), he seeks out the traces of duration or life in the development of species. Instead of regarding all evolutionary change as essentially passive, a response to environmental change or genetic mutation, he tries to discern a distinct tendency towards complexity in the course of evolution. It is as though an invisible arm has made a movement that disturbs a set of iron filings leaving just its imprint behind: we have the imprint of the created species, but cannot directly observe the movement that made them (except perhaps in ourselves and our own free and creative lives). Since life has produced many successful species that still survive, why has it not stopped at one successful form, but continues to produce new species as though striving for complexity? We are clearly facing a matter of considerable controversy. The empirical method of the biological sciences eliminates in advance any hypothesis concerning tendencies that cannot be directly detected: life itself is no longer an object of study in biology. In fact, for Bergson this is as it should be, for the human intelligence has evolved to guide our practical behaviour in and among inanimate objects. We are at home in the material world, and methodological and metaphysical habits of constructing concepts on the basis of solids are natural and practical. If we endeavour to turn this intelligence to the metaphysical analysis of forms, then we are liable to import conceptions drawn from matter and produce contradictions. In this respect, Kant was correct to restrict the work of the intelligence to the analysis of sensory experience, for as soon as we apply the categories we use to understand experience to the inner world of our thoughts, then we produce contradictions.

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Yet, for Bergson, the qualitative experience of the absolute intuited directly as duration remains available to us. The intelligence is not equipped to understand this; on the contrary, with its concern for practical orientation among tools and inanimate objects, it drives back into the unconscious almost the whole of the past that endures in our experience. Attention to the present is a form of repression. Philosophy, therefore, must run counter to the natural bent of the intelligence. Bergson sets aside the presuppositions of mechanism, that the only real systems are in an instantaneous present that is constantly being renewed. Yet, he also sets aside the presuppositions of traditional metaphysics or finalism, which assume a fixed point towards which all movement is directed, constructing this concept as though it were an inanimate object. In both radical mechanism and radical finalism, it is as though the totality of the real is postulated in eternity and time does not really exist or matter. Against mechanism, Bergson shows how life manufactures like apparatuses by unlike means—the biology of his day had identified seven different paths towards the evolution of the eye in separate lines of species. Similarly, after damage to an organ, it can be regenerated by several different routes. Against finalism, Bergson proposes that harmony is behind us rather than before us: there are common impulses which split into a variety of different lines of evolution, not a common focus of aspiration. Thus, cooperation between species is limited: there is no master plan assigning a role and place to all, but evolution of complexity alongside conflict, disease and disorder. What is especially striking here is that metaphysical proposals are rendered more or less probable according to certain “lines of fact” discovered by empirical science. Bergson’s opposition to a materialist metaphysics requires in practice that the philosopher be deeply engaged with learning from the scientific discoveries of the day. There is a turn towards the results of science, aside from the metaphysics of materialism. Likewise, there is a turn towards observing the tendencies of life through intuition, without the postulation of fixed metaphysical objects. By means of such introspection, Bergson specifies two fundamental illusions: a first is when we try to think the mobile by means of the immobile, the unstable by means of the stable. This follows from the notion that the present instant is an abstraction. A second, however, is when we judge what we see by what we want or expect: we then report an absence of what is expected, rather than the presence of what is—perhaps the absence of an instantaneous, stable present rather than the presence of unfolding duration. We make use of the void to think the full, or negation to conceive of affirmation. Bergson explains that although this is useful in practical life, when we turn to purely speculative questions about what is real, then this approach imports an anthropomorphism into the external world. For example, we find disorder when we do not find the order that interests us; yet it is only order that is real. If we try to deny order completely, then all that is left of disorder is a word without any conceptual content. These illusions have significant ramifications for the traditional metaphysical arguments for the existence of God. For example, the cosmological argument starts out by wondering “why is there something rather than nothing?” I tell myself

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that there ought to be nothing, and then ask why I exist, or the universe exists, or reason exists. Yet, when we think of the nothing, Bergson says we can either imagine it or conceive it. If we imagine it, we eliminate all sensation and memory from consciousness, but we are still left with the consciousness of this elimination, and the next moment of consciousness of this consciousness. If I imagine abolishing my inner self, this abolition of this inner self becomes an external object of an imaginary self that watches the inner self fade away. If, by contrast, one attempts to conceive the idea of nothing, then it consists in the annihilation of all things. Yet, again, Bergson says that this is impossible: we can conceive of the annihilation of anything, but each time we do so we are left with the place in which the thing has been represented. There is absence only for a being capable of remembering or expecting. The idea of nothingness is therefore conceived by the substitution of one thing for another externally, and the feeling one has about this substitution internally. So, the idea of absolutely nothing is a mere word without any conceptual content: if annihilation means substitution, the idea of “annihilation of everything” is a self-contradiction like a square circle. To represent something as non-existent is always to add something to the idea of something—its negation. There is more in the idea of something non-existent than there is in the idea of something existing. Negation is not symmetrical with affirmation (except in the case of numbers), for while an affirmation is a self-sufficient act of the mind, a negation is a partial act for it is dependent on conceiving the idea to be negated. While an affirmation, such as “this table is white,” has a bearing on the thing itself, a negation, “this table is not white,” merely has a bearing on a judgment. Negation takes to task an interlocutor. It sets aside a proposition, “this table is white,” in favour of another proposition, “this table is red or green or black” and so on, which is to be provided later. No idea comes out of negation because it simply takes as its content the affirmation which is to be rejected, and it awaits a future affirmation that is to be substituted for it. The implications of this discussion are highly significant. In the first place, the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is without any determinate content. It is a false problem. If one first imagines nothing, then its replacement by the universe, then a God who created and explains the reason for the universe, one has merely pursued a series of substitutions for reality. First, one sets aside the present duration of consciousness, then one suspends the affirmation of what would substitute for it, then one invokes the abstract concept of a possible universe that would replace the nothing, and finally the abstract concept of a possible God that would cause the universe. At each substitution, one passes further and further from reality, replacing it with wishful thinking. In the second place, many philosophical strategies of thinking are mere substitutions of wishful thinking in place of direct attention to life. To invoke a possible metaphysical cause to explain phenomena is to abandon attention to real phenomena in favour of an abstract conception. Once such an abstraction has been postulated, there is no more testing to see how well it fits, no ongoing attention to the facts of life yielded by knowledge of the world, for its very positing is based on a negation of the determining power of p­ henomena

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in favour of the determining power of a mere abstract or logical conception. In the same way, more contemporary approaches to metaphysics which consider possible worlds, have abandoned attention to this life in favour of a set of abstract conceptions already embedded in the notion of “worlds.” Similarly, approaches to philosophy inspired by Hegel that seek progress in consciousness through negating previous levels of consciousness do not introduce any true movement or understanding: they only consist in the negation of judgments. One may realize the inadequacy of previous states of consciousness because they do not achieve the results that we want, but this still involves an anthropomorphism insofar as we judge the world on the basis of what we want. Of course, none of this precludes philosophers of any disposition holding implicit affirmations based on their attention to life, and these will still remain the underlying basis for the direction of their arguments. Yet, the positing of abstract worlds, concepts and judgments does preoccupy the mind to the point of making progress through fresh intuitions difficult to achieve. Bergson concludes that if we pass through the idea of nothing to attain the idea of the real, a merely conceptual or logical notion of the real is invoked, and a static conception of the real is given to us: everything is given once for all in eternity. Yet, intuition of duration need not preclude the idea of an absolute. While both science and traditional metaphysics deal only with symbols, their ideas can be exceeded by intuition: both sensory intuition of the external world, and direct experience of life and of the mind. Through a kind of supra-intellectual intuition, the mind can take possession of itself. It does so as pure duration, an experience freed from the moulds of intellectual forms, where each form flows out of previous forms, adding to them something new, explaining them as much as being explained by them. What the mind discovers, as it casts aside its determination by intellectual forms, reflex habits, and social obligations, is an original personality, incommensurable with others, and undefinable in words.

Bergson and religion Bergson gave little attention to religion in his main early works. Coming from a Jewish background, he did little to appropriate the rich Jewish intellectual heritage. His challenge to metaphysics led to his work being placed on the Catholic Church’s list of prohibited books in 1914. He supported psychic research, found anecdotal evidence sufficient to support a belief in telepathy, and gave arguments for the probable endurance of the soul after death. On his deathbed, he announced his conversion to Catholicism by asking for a priest, having previously favoured a public stance of solidarity with other Jews. It was only in his final main book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), that he began to discuss religion directly. As we have seen, Bergson distinguished two tendencies in the movement of duration: a tendency to conserve the past and a tendency to differentiate the future. On a macroscopic scale, these tendencies are at work in the course of evolution, in the preservation of established species and the development of new species. Bergson applies this metaphysical scheme, developed in his considerations of ­duration, mat-

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ter, memory and life, to morality and religion as two distinct “sources” or tendencies: a static morality and a static religion, aimed at preserving forms of society, alongside a dynamic morality and a dynamic religion, aimed at transforming society. In reality, in any determinate life or institution, both kinds of religion may be mixed and confused. He deduces static morality from habit: obligation is merely the habit of obeying obligations. He refuses any transcendent origin of obligation as some kind of unique fact, incommensurable with others. Instead, social life is seen as a system of more or less deeply rooted habits, where each trivial obligation possesses the authority of the whole of society. One is obliged, above all else, to cultivate a social ego: it is impossible to live daily life without obeying a multitude of minor rules automatically and unconsciously. There is no reason why such rules should be sensible, rational or good: the more they are obeyed, the greater the coherence of the community, and the stronger the force of obligation in counteracting temptations to disobey. Now, instead of deriving consciousness from obligation, Bergson saw consciousness as a hesitation in the automatic performance of duty. For if people are alike in their performance of duty, they are differentiated insofar as they are conscious: the more one strips the habits of the social ego aside, the more one discovers a unique and original personality, undefinable in words. The creative personality, with its exercise of thought and intelligence, tends to dissolve society. One cannot therefore seek the origin of social forms in the will, or in decrees of leaders or strong personalities. Bergson derives obligation from habit, and habit from the need for social cohesion. Bergson draws on a notion of group survival of the fittest: the purpose of social cohesion is to offer discipline in the face of the enemy. His paradigm for static morality is the military inculcation of a sense of obligation and obedience through pointless activities on the parade ground. For the duty of respecting life and property is largely only applied within a closed society: war and conquest often show little such respect for the enemy, and so do not extend obligation as far as humanity in general. A society constitutes itself, its identity, its obligations and its morality, by excluding the outsider. Yet, such exclusion occurs at a cost to the members of the closed society itself, for they must also repress anything within themselves, whether their own self-interest or compassion for the outsider, that does not conform to social obligation. If intelligence asks about the sense and value of specific obligations, then reason threatens to dissolve the basis of the social order, which is the obligation to obey obligations as a whole. Static religion, here, introduces an auto-immune effect: it counteracts the work of reason. The human mind also has a “myth-making function”: it produces the ghost of “facts,” imaginary representations, to counteract the intelligence. Religion is an unconscious defensive reaction of nature against the dissolvent powers of the intelligence. It does so by adding another layer of explanation: where the natural order explains the course of events according to their force, or the physical effort required to overcome obstacles, the “supernatural” is invoked to explain the importance of events to people. If an insignificant accident occurs, then it can

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be attributed to chance; but if a significant accident happens to someone, then its human significance must be caused by something that has as much human significance, of the same order: an intention. According to the myth-making function, therefore, the world is populated by spirits or deities who take a direct interest in aiding or hindering human intentions. This account of religion as emerging from a belief in spirits is a common idea. Yet, unlike established explanations of superstition, such as those of Hume and Feuerbach, as originating from the fear of unknown external threats, those of disease, accident, enemies or natural disasters, Bergson derives the myth-making function from the internal threat represented by the intelligence. It is as though instinct keeps a close watch upon intelligence, and restrains it lest it injure some vital interest through its independence. Religion is motivated by a kind of confidence, a confidence in the survival value of the closed society and the totality of obligation, which cannot allow individual intelligences to disrupt it. The myth-making function is then a kind of reflection of instinct within consciousness, distracting it with imagination, and confusing its sense of reality. On Bergson’s account, then, static religion is false, and it inclines one to error; yet, these errors have enormous value for life. One cannot simply judge that myth is bad. Indeed, the irony of this account is that the original judgments of the human significance of things may be true: purely mechanical accounts of natural causes are incomplete. Indeed, Bergson sees a grave danger in the extent to which modern rationality has liberated humanity from superstition. For modern reason can only put in the place of mutual obligation a kind of instrumental reason: intelligence is only suited to working with tools or language and changing the external environment. If the Middle Ages can be seen as too pious, the pendulum has swung the other way, and humanity is in danger without anything to guide and direct the work of the intelligence. For intelligence does not provide motives: if the mind is not in service to obligations or myths, it will be in service to desire, passion, and interest. There is, however, a dynamic source of morality and religion to be considered as well, for the only other direct action on the will happens via feeling. For pure duration, attended to apart from interests and obligations, is a state of feeling. While intelligence is limited to the manipulation of exterior objects, and takes for granted the division and distribution of reality by the categories of speech—words which are themselves relative to the needs of social obligation—intuition is direct awareness of duration. While static morality consists in the universal acceptance of a law, dynamic morality consists in a common imitation of a model: saints and moral pioneers incite moral feelings of compassion in those around them. What the saint communicates and expresses in every thought and action, others may also intuit; they find within themselves a longing to resemble the saints, which is itself an incipient resemblance. Bergson draws an analogy with music: music expresses intense emotions, which are not attached to anything in particular, and each new musical work brings with it new feelings which are created by that music. In the same way, saints are moral creators: they inspire imitation out of love. In fact, we do not choose such moral emotions, but they choose us, as passers-by are forced

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into a street dance. Exceptional souls exceed the obligations of a closed society and recognise their kinship with the soul of everyone: they experience a great surge of love for humanity in general. Sensing this kinship, individuals may respond to the exceptional with a surge of affection in turn, functioning as a basis for their own love for humanity in general. This dynamic source of morality extends beyond the sphere of the purely moral. For the exceptional souls are mystics: they sense within themselves something better than themselves. What they have received affects them like an onslaught of love, seeking to reach out to others. It is as though each mystic is a new species consisting of only one individual: an entirely new emotion is created in and through them, capable of transforming the souls of others around them. For they have made contact with the creative effort that life itself consists in. Complete mysticism, for Bergson, is not simply feeling, it is at once action, creation and love. It is no longer a human love for God, but the love of God for all humankind and all creation. And yet its effect is purely individual: creative emotion can only spread from one person to another. The social dimensions of religion, the ritual obligations and doctrine, are a crystallization of the emotion that has been poured into the soul of the mystic. Yet, at its heart, mysticism converges around the realisation that God is love, and God is an object of love. This realisation is a creative idea: it searches for new modes of expression, new uses of language, to communicate its appeal. It might seem, therefore, that Bergson reduces religion, in both its sources, to the metaphysics he had developed to account for evolution. In the final instance, both sources of religion are one: it is the life force itself that makes for social obligation and creative emotion. Bergson refuses any dogmatic metaphysics, whether Platonic or Kantian, that would account for or give shape to the life-force. Time itself, as duration, conservation and creative emotion, is primary. And yet time itself is one whole qualitative experience of emotion: far from reducing love to time, Bergson elevates time to love. His account of time, memory, evolution and religion are explanations of reality in terms of love.

References Barnard, G. William. 2011. Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Bergson, Henri. 1910. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London, UK: Swan Sonnenschein. Bergson, Henri. 1911. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London, UK: George Allen and Unwin. Bergson, Henri. 1913. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T. E. Hulme. London, UK: Macmillan. Bergson, Henri. 1920. Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays. Translated by H. Wildon Carr. London, UK: Macmillan. Bergson, Henri. 1977. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York, NY: Dover.

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Goodchild, Philip. 2002. “Politics and Experience: Bergsonism Beyond Transcendence and Immanence.” Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy. Edited by Philip Goodchild. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Lawlor, Leonard. 2011. Early 20th Century Continental Philosophy. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Mullarkey, John. 1999. Bergson and Philosophy. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Mullarkey, John, ed. 1999b. The New Bergson. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

15 Simone Weil (1909–1943) Stuart Jesson

Simone Weil died in 1943 at the age of 34, in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent. ­During her life, she taught philosophy in a number of girl’s lycees, published a relatively small number of articles containing social and political critique, and was active in various labour movements. Outside of a fairly small circle, most of the people who were acquainted with her at the time of her death would have known her as a ferociously intelligent and eccentric teacher, a keen social and political critic, or an increasingly disillusioned activist. A few, however, had had long conversations with her about religion, which became increasingly important to her in the final years of her life. A very short time after her death—less than a decade—following the publication of material that she wrote in the final years of her life, her reputation in the intellectual world was such that she could be hailed by diverse figures as a “great spirit” (Albert Camus), a possessor of saintly genius (T. S. Eliot) or “the most truly spiritual writer of the twentieth century” (André Gide). She subsequently came to be seen by many, especially Christian thinkers, as a mystic of sorts, one who introduced a powerful new set of concepts into religious thought: the importance of attention; the absence of God; the experience of “affliction”; and the idea of “waiting in the void.” The estimation in which her thought was held was intimately entwined with a particular picture of her life and character, that of a modern “outsider saint” with a deep capacity to empathise with the suffering of others, an austere asceticism and a luminous and uncompromising commitment to truth. The gradual publication of more of Simone Weil’s writing—including collections of essays on a wide range of topics, lecture notes from her philosophy classes and complete editions of her notebooks—has complicated this picture somewhat. Weil’s writing displays many different concerns, and there are important and intriguing connections between them, such that neatly dividing them up—the political from the religious, for example—is problematic. Although Weil

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did ­experience something like a religious conversion, and subsequently devoted much of her intellectual attention to exploring this, the Simone Weil of Gravity and Grace or Waiting on God, who left fascinatingly suggestive, and seemingly timeless meditations on God, suffering and “the void,” cannot be understood apart from the Simone Weil who composed penetrating and highly contextual essays relating to the social and political issues of her day. There is little doubt, however, that it is the explicitly religious writings of the last years of Weil’s life that are the primary reason for her renown, and which mark her out as a truly distinctive, even unique, voice in twentieth-century thought.

Life Simone Weil was born in 1909, the second child of a reasonably wealthy Jewish couple, Bernard and Selma Weil, both of whom were intelligent and well educated, and neither of whom had much interest in the Jewish religion—Bernard, at least, was an atheist. The young Simone formed a very close relationship with her elder brother, Andre, who from a young age showed remarkable ability in mathematics, and was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure at only sixteen. Weil was later to recall that her brother’s ability was a source of despair for her at a young age, as she feared that her lack of genius would mean that she could not enter “the kingdom of truth” reserved for genius (Weil 1977, 21). Despite this lack of “genius,” Simone Weil was, in the end, to have a very successful academic career, and made an impression on two of her more prestigious philosophy teachers, René Le Senne and Émile Chartier (known as Alain). Weil went on to gain entrance to the École Normale Supérieure, where she studied from 1928–31, and gained a reputation for austere moral intensity (the director of studies, Célestin Bouglé, is said to have referred to her as “the categorical imperative in skirts”). Towards the end of her time there, Weil studied for a long dissertation on Descartes, during which she began reflecting on a theme that would stay with her throughout her life: the significance of work. After graduation from the École, Weil began her teaching career at a lycee in Le Puy, and over the next few years would move posts a number of times, in part because of friction between herself and the educational authorities. Weil’s increasing interest in social problems, led to her involvement with the bi-monthly journal La Revolution Proletarienne and involvement with leftist trade unions, as well as the growing working-class education movement. During this period, Weil wrote several increasingly pessimistic essays on the plight of the working classes, concluding that despite the brilliance of Marx’s analyses, there was something fundamentally flawed in his understanding of revolution. Her reflections on the weaknesses in Marxist accounts of oppression led Weil to seek direct contact with industrial labour, and late in 1934 she requested a year of unpaid leave to live and work as a factory worker. This period, much of which she spent in a state of physical and mental exhaustion—unsurprising given her generally poor health and lack of experience—is documented in her Factory Journal. Weil’s decision to do this has,

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for better or worse, become a central part of the narrative that inevitably colours interpretation of her religious thought. Regardless of the religious or moral significance of this decision, it left an indelible mark on her thought, in terms of her analysis of industrialised labour (which remained one of her central concerns right up to her death), but perhaps more importantly in terms of her analysis of the relationship between suffering and spirituality, which would become a dominant theme in her later writing. Following her time in the factories, and after a brief and ill-advised attempt to fight alongside anarchist militia in the Spanish Civil War, Weil’s health had declined considerably. Plagued by increasingly severe headaches, and recovering from a serious burn from an accident in Spain, she spent some time on holiday in Italy. During a visit to a twelfth-century chapel in Assisi, she describes the feeling of being compelled, for the first time, to kneel by “something stronger than I” (Weil 1977, 24). A few months later, while listening to the plain chant at the Abbey at Solesmes, and suffering from an intense headache, Weil recounts finding a “pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words” (Weil 1977, 24). Not long afterwards, and again while suffering from a severe headache, Weil attests to having experienced “a presence more personal, more certain, and more real than that of a human being” (Weil 1965, 140) while reciting the George Herbert’s poem “Love.” Weil states that prior to this she had always seen the question of God as an insoluble—and therefore irrelevant—problem (Weil 1977, 20). Following these experiences, Weil devoted herself to trying to understand and express what it was she had experienced, and to join the ideas that emerged as a result with her understanding of social life, political organisation and human culture more generally. As it turned out, she was only to have a few years in which to do this. Following the fall of France in 1940, Simone Weil left Paris with her family, arriving in Marseilles in September. It was here that she began to write the notebooks, which are the source of the collection Gravity and Grace, as well as most of the essays collected in Waiting on God and Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks. While in Marseilles she formed a number of close friendships with Catholics, with whom she shared her growing (and very critical) understanding of the Christian tradition, and wrote several articles for the journal Cahiers du Sud (including “The Iliad, Poem of Might”). In May 1942, the Weils sailed for New York, where she wrote the notebooks that would be published in English as First and Last Notebooks, as well as a long letter later published as Letter to a Priest, which outlined in the form of a series of questions her reservations about entering the Catholic church. Eager to return to Europe to be involved with the Free French, she set sail for London in November. While in London, she wrote The Need for Roots, which was intended to contribute to preparations for the reconstruction of France after the war, and various other articles including “Human Personality” (which is one of her finest, and perhaps the best introduction to her mature thought). Weil collapsed in April 1943, and was found to be suffering from tuberculosis, from which she never recovered. She died in August, and was buried in Ashford, Kent.

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Religious thought One of the key problems facing anyone wanting to examine Weil’s thought more closely is its fragmentary nature. Many of the most influential ideas in Weil’s published work come from the notebooks that she kept during the war. These consist of a mixture of fairly long, coherent trains of thought, commentary on various texts (Plato, St John of the Cross, the Bhagavad Gita are frequently referenced, for example), as well as a great number of shorter statements and questions. It seems that she intended some of the material in these notebooks to form the basis of more sustained reflection (and indeed, some of the ideas from the notebooks can be seen in the essays that she wrote during this time), but at the same time, some of these comments have the appearance of experimental formulations being tested for their value. It is quite tempting—especially for the Christian theologian—to treat these writings simply as a repository of occasionally profound remarks, but in many respects Weil was a deeply systematic thinker, one deserving of more systematic and critical examination. The difficulty, however, is that whether intentionally or because of circumstance (and it is probably both), Weil did not write systematically. As a result, not only is it not clear exactly how it all was intended to fit together, it is also not obvious how satisfied Weil herself was with the various ways in which she formulated some of her ideas, or how much weight should be given to some of what she wrote. To complicate matters, Weil also believed that paradox—or even what she called contradiction—is an essential part of an adequate understanding of the world. Miklos Veto notes that Weil’s thought is “constitutionally, and not just accidentally, incomplete and paradoxical” (Veto 1994, 161); that is, its form reflects something important about its content. We might add, however, that it is also accidentally incomplete: had she had the chance, Weil may very well have gone on to write more sustained, systematic treatments of some of her most central ideas, or resolved some of the conceptual difficulties with which she was wrestling. As a result of this, it is not always easily apparent which seeming tensions or contradictions reflect the accidental incompleteness of her work, and which are consciously affirmed as paradoxes necessary to contemplate reality, which is, on Weil’s account, inherently paradoxical.

Necessity and the good It may be helpful to begin by pointing out a basic dualism that runs through Weil’s thought, between the realm of necessity (which includes far more of human life than is usually imagined), and the good. Her particular formulation of this dualism arises in large part through her engagements with Marx and Plato, whose essential insights she thought it possible to combine. The ideas that lie behind her use of the terms “necessity,” “material” and “reality” are quite complex, and perhaps confused in places (see Rhees 2000, chapters 5 and 6 for discussion of this), but the central idea is of material reality as a network of

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relations entirely governed by law. As material beings, humans are simply another part of this order; as thinking beings, humans transcend it to grasp its workings; and through work, humans experience necessity (see Chenavier in Rozelle-Stone and Stone, 2010). In her early work, Weil emphasises the intellect as that aspect of the person which grasps, and so transcends, necessity; hence her horror, recorded in her factory journal, at realising that her exhaustion caused her to lose consciousness of her situation, making her submissive and docile, so that any re-awakening of thought was painful (Weil 2010, 171). As her thought developed, Weil assigned more and more of human life to the realm of “necessity,” as she increasingly considered psychological, social, political and economic processes to be governed by necessities analogous to the laws that determine physical events. This can be seen in the development of her ideas about work, which was a concern of hers throughout her adult life. In her student dissertation on Descartes, Weil suggested that it is the capacity to act in the world that unites the active theoretical understanding with the passivity of sensation, so that in a sense the worker’s tools are manifestations of geometry. This led her to an idea, which would crop up in her subsequent writing on industrialised labour, that one of the tragedies of modern life is the way that those who work are prevented from understanding the theory that is already embodied in their labour (Weil 2010, 85; see also Winch 1989, chapters 1 and 2). In a later notebook, she writes of work as that which achieves a balance between human life and the forces of nature; that is, equilibrium is only achieved by action (Weil 1970, 18). This goes along with her suspicion of the ideal of liberation from subjection to natural forces, because human life will always be subject to natural forces, even if this subjection ends up being mediated by increasingly sophisticated forms of technology and organisation (Weil 2001, 59–60; Winch 1989, 77–89). For Weil, the secret is rather to understand the nature of one’s subjection (Weil 2001, 81), and—in her later work—to consciously consent to, and even love, this subjection (Weil 1956, 496). These ideas were influenced by her critical engagement with Marx. In the long essay she wrote just prior to her year in the factories (“Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression”), Weil puts forward a critique of Marx’s understanding of historical progress and revolution, which she thought was insufficiently materialist: “to believe that our will coincides with a mysterious will which is at work in the universe and helps us to conquer is to think religiously, to believe in Providence” (Weil 2002, 43). In a later essay, written after her religious experiences, this assessment becomes even stronger; Weil’s objection is that Marx is so concerned with justice that he fails to acknowledge that the forces that determine social existence are entirely blind and amoral: “Marx’s revolutionary materialism consists in positing, on the one hand, that everything is exclusively regulated by force, and on the other that a day will suddenly come when force will be on the side of the weak” (Weil 2001, 183). Weil’s political analyses became increasingly pessimistic, because she thought that human social affairs were governed by forces akin to natural laws, as can be seen, for example, in an essay from 1937 called “The Power of Words,” in which she describes the workings of prestige: “the

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essential contradiction in human society is that every social status quo rests upon an ­equilibrium of forces; but between one prestige and another there can be no equilibrium. Prestige has no bounds, and its satisfaction always involves the infringement of someone else’s prestige or dignity” (Weil 1962, 169). The behaviour of political entities in the buildup to war, for example, is determined by forces in the same way that the boiling point of water or the orbit of the moon are. In this sense, Weil always understood herself to be a materialist: “[w]hen studying [these forces] one cannot be too cold-blooded, lucid, cynical. In this sense, to this extent, one must be a materialist” (Weil 2001, 157). As Weil’s thought develops, she becomes increasingly convinced that the only way that humans can escape from being entirely subject to these forces is through the contemplation of that which entirely transcends this realm: the good. In this respect, her thought is thoroughly Platonic, as can be seen from the following: There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man’s mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties. Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is a longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there, and is never appeased by any object in this world… Just as that world is the sole foundation of facts, so that other reality is the sole foundation of good. (Weil 1986, 221–2) The good cannot be found, or directly pursued; it can only be desired or given attention, and it is only through such attention that there is any good to be found “here below.” The only choice is between recognising force as “sovereign,” or else recognising a principle of an entirely different kind, which she will variously call “grace” or “the supernatural” (Weil 2002c, 238–9). There is an important shift in her thought as she begins to see the important distinction being not so much as between material necessities and the intellect that grasps these necessities, as between the rule of force and the desire for the good (Chenavier 2012, 38). As Weil sees it, we cannot help but have some conception of the good –“[n]o human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself toward which his thought turns in a moment of desire, supplication and hope” (Weil 1970, 308)—and so the important question is not whether one hopes for or desires “the good,” but how we do so. To put the matter in her own terms, the important question is of what “level” we conceive the good. If we fail to recognise that the good is, in a certain sense, absent, we will conceive of the good at the wrong level, that is, as visible in the immediate future, obtainable through particular means, or visible in some particular finite form. As we will see, for Weil, the capacity to desire the good while accepting its absence, or its non-being, is a necessary condition of the pursuit of truth, of acts of genuine compassion and of all real love.

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Suffering and affliction One of the most famous passages from Weil’s explicitly religious writing concerns the notion of “affliction.” Weil describes affliction as an extreme form of suffering, in which the human soul feels itself to be submerged in horror with nothing to love; it is suffering that pierces through to the most intimate parts of the person (Weil 1977, 62–4). Affliction is the state of being uprooted from everything that might nourish one’s being, such as physical comfort and social and psychological well-being (Weil 1977, 63). An example that Weil uses a number of times is the experience of a slave, who might be commanded to expend all his or her energy carrying rocks from A to B, and then the next day, do the same again in reverse. The slave is of no real significance to the master, and functions merely as an extension of an arm, but the slave has all his or her sense of purpose, goodness and beauty taken from him or her (e.g. Weil 2002a, 7). In other words, in affliction there is a kind of asymmetry between the internal state of the afflicted and external reality— the only place where affliction is registered and even known as affliction is in the inner being of the afflicted one. These passages are evidence not only of a sensitivity to human vulnerability and suffering, but equally of a conviction that a first stage in any attempt to respond with justice to such realities is to describe them; this is what she most admired in Marx’s Capital, and what she found so moving in Homer’s Iliad. The lack of recognition of the suffering of the afflicted is itself part of their burden. There is a good reason for this lack of recognition, however. For Weil, the effect of suffering upon thought is to produce evasion, dishonesty and denial, or as she expresses it succinctly: “[t]hought flies from affliction as promptly and irresistibly as an animal flies from death” (Weil 1977, 62). It is nearly impossible—and on Weil’s account, takes something like a miracle—to recognise affliction, or to use her terms, to give attention to the afflicted. Part of what it means, Weil thinks, to recognise suffering is to sense the immense difference between the condition of the afflicted and their desire—if it has not been extinguished—not to have harm done to them. In a notable passage from “Human Personality” she gives another powerful description of what it means to suffer: At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience and crimes committed, suffered and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being … Every time that there arises from the depths of the human heart the childish cry which Christ himself could not restrain, ‘why am I being hurt?’ then there is certainly injustice … In those who have suffered too many blows, slaves for example, that place in the heart from which the infliction of evil evokes a cry of surprise may seem to be dead. But it is never quite dead; it is simply unable to cry out any more. It has sunk into a state of dumb and ceaseless lamentation. (Weil 1986, 71–2)

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Part of the reason that intense suffering is so difficult to recognise is that it involves confronting our own vulnerability: the fact that to be human is to be exposed, so that that which is most precious is also most vulnerable (Weil 1987, 48). The sense that this is tremendously difficult to acknowledge to oneself is expressed further on in the same essay: To acknowledge the reality of affliction means saying to oneself: ‘I may lose at any moment, through the play circumstances over which I have no control, anything whatsoever that I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as being myself. There is nothing that I might not lose’ … To be aware of this in the depths of one’s soul is to experience non-being. (Weil 1986, 90) We can see, then, that simply to acknowledge the reality of affliction, and the presence of the afflicted, involves a sort of painful sacrifice: I must give up the illusion that my deepest identity is secure. Weil seems to have been gripped by the realisation that a stoic commitment to withdrawing from investment in that which is temporary and passing is not enough to prepare one for the worst that human life has to offer. There is no inner citadel to which one might retreat in the midst of suffering, or which remains out of reach of the blind play of physical and social forces, since that which one calls “oneself” is in fact dependent upon the play of forces beyond one’s control (Allen and Springsted 1994, 99–101). To face this in another is to face it in oneself: “[w]e dislike to see affliction because it compels us to see what it is we love when we love ourselves” (Weil 1970, 326). Hence real attention to the afflicted, which is what compassion is made of, requires a difficult and costly acceptance of one’s own exposure, fragility and transience, and is a kind of miracle—“[t]he sight of an afflicted man frightens away every kind of attention except that which has made contact with God” (Weil 1970, 327).

The supernatural use of suffering Despite the descriptive brilliance of some of the best-known sections of Weil’s late work, her understanding of how suffering is to be “used” is conceptually perhaps more central to her work, and certainly to her understanding of Christianity: “[t]he tremendous greatness of Christianity comes from the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy against suffering, but a supernatural use of suffering” (Weil 1956, 387). In the passage from “Human Personality,” we can glimpse an idea that is returned to again and again in her notebooks. Affliction is not primarily understood here as the consequence of social injustice, capitalist forces or the folly of war (even though it may also be all or any of those). Regardless of how affliction arises, Weil sees it as revelatory in some sense. That is, it reveals something about human existence, which is an unavoidable condition of its possibility, and which it is the task of spiritual life to accept, and even love: “[h]uman life is impossible. But

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it is only affliction which makes us feel this” (Weil 2002a, 94). For Weil, the truth that affliction teaches is an essential one to learn, even if—as she sometimes writes, as if to pre-emptively defend herself from the charge of masochism—one should never seek it out: “I believe in the value of suffering, so long as one makes every [legitimate] attempt to escape it” (Weil 1970, 3). More than this, it seems as though Weil set herself the task of formulating her understanding of God, and the relationship between God and world, in such a way as to give affliction centre stage. That is, rather than see “the problem of evil” as a side issue, something to be dealt with once one has established other key ideas, Weil seems to think that the central theological problem is one of how, in the words of Patrick Patterson and Lawrence E. Schmidt, to “think together human affliction and the perfection of God” (Patterson and Schmidt 2004, 79). We can risk summarising her train of thought here as follows. Intense suffering is a kind of paradigmatic instance of what it is to exist at all; it is contained as a possibility in all our dealings with the world. To honestly accept existence as it is, one must therefore accept this possibility. More than this, to love God is nothing other than to love reality as such absolutely, so that “[t]o think on God, to love God, is nothing else than a certain way of thinking on the world” (Weil 1956, 25). However, this means that the love of God (and reality as such) is paradoxical, because justice also requires that one detest the destruction that suffering brings to others: “[w]e have to love God through evil as such: to love God through the evil we hate, while hating this evil: to love God as the author of the evil which we are actually hating” (Weil 2002a, 75). Finally then, and in a further paradox, Weil affirms that suffering is not only necessary, but actually beneficial, even though suffering is at the same time without meaning: “[s]uffering has no significance. There lies the very essence of its reality. We must love it in its reality, which is the absence of significance. Otherwise we do not love God” (Weil 1956, 483–4). In attempting to combine a rigorous phenomenology of suffering with an articulation of how that suffering may have “use,” she is led into paradox. Weil reflects on this seeming contradiction in different ways throughout her notebooks: one thought is that there are “levels” of truth—suffering is meaningless and destructive; at another, it is a means of contact with God (Weil 1970, 134, 179); another is to suggest that the idea of suffering having a supernatural “use” should be believed “in secret” (Weil 1970, 122).

Grace and the void One of the recurrent themes in Weil’s notebooks—and one that Gustav Thibon chose to emphasise in the selections for Gravity and Grace—is the idea of “imbalance” and “the void”: The necessity for a reward, the need to receive the equivalent of what we give. But if, doing violence to this necessity, we leave a vacuum, as it were a suction of air is produced and a supernatural reward results. It does not come if we receive other wages: it is this vacuum which makes it come.

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It is the same with the remission of debts (and this applies not only to the harm which others have done us but to the good which we have done them). There again, we accept a void in ourselves. (Weil 2002a, 10–11) This is another example of Weil seeing in human affairs something like a natural law. Here Weil characterises social relations in terms of the process of redressing imbalance: to receive in proportion to what one has given, to harm in return, and so on. More than this, she relates the “imbalance” that we may feel if, for example, we are not praised or thanked following some good deed in the way that we had anticipated to a more fundamental experience, which she calls the experience of “void” (see, e.g. Weil 2002a, 9). To suffer affliction is to experience void, because no meaning, reason or reward can be conceived that corresponds to the experience. As a result, and no doubt influenced by Marx’s understanding of the way that the religious world is the “reflex” of the real world, Weil felt that religious concepts could be described as attempts to “fill the void”: We must leave on one side the beliefs which fill up voids and sweeten what is bitter. The belief in immortality. The belief in the utility of sin: etiam peccata. The belief in the providential ordering of events—in short, the “consolations” which are ordinarily sought in religion. (Weil 2002a, 13) In this sense, Weil had the intuition that in practice many of the beliefs that are held to most fervently by religious believers have a “compensatory” function, and more than this, that the task of real spiritual life was to refuse such compensations. However, the reason for her insistence on this point is that the experience of the void, when faced without evasion, actually opens up to a realisation that is both painful and transformative, namely, that one’s desires are unavoidably and intrinsically out of sync with reality, and that the true aim of one’s desire is real, but absent. In fact, the desire Weil is interested in is not so much something that one has, but rather something one is; we are composed of a movement toward the good (Weil 1956, 489). Throughout her late notebooks and essays, Weil attempts in many different ways to describe this moment of realisation, or awakening. In one of her most striking essays (“Some Reflections on the Love of God”) she describes it as follows: It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in, God. He has only to refuse his love to everything which is not God. This refusal does not presuppose any belief. It is enough to recognise, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present and future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually within us for an infinite and perfect good. All men know this, and more than once in their lives they recognise it for a moment, but then they ­immediately

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begin deceiving themselves again so as not to know it any longer, because they feel that if they knew it they could not go on living. And their feeling is true, for that knowledge kills, but it inflicts a death which leads to a resurrection. But they do not foresee that beforehand; all they foresee is death; they must either choose truth and death or falsehood and life. (Weil 1975, 85) “Void,” then, is not the result of exceptional circumstances which cause one to suffer, but is rather the accompaniment of the asymmetry between desire and reality, and so a kind of background hum of human existence as such. As a result, “belief in God” is not what is needed, because belief in “God” could simply be a symptom of one’s refusal to accept imbalance or void. As it is expressed in one of her most memorable phrases, “it is a terrible thing to love God as a gambler loves his game,” that is, in desperation or as an escape. In Waiting on God, she writes that although it may seem too difficult to believe in God, because of the distance between Creator and creature, in another sense it is too easy to believe in God, “because we can imagine [God] as we please” (Weil 1977, 107). What is actually needed, then, is a refusal to lie to oneself, and an acceptance of the impossibility of our desire: “[t]o detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute good” (Weil 2002a, 13).

The metaphysics of creation and decreation One way of summarizing this chapter thus far might be to say that on Weil’s account, existence is constitutionally traumatic, but that when accepted, this trauma becomes transformative. It is hardly surprising, then, to find that her attempts to reflect upon the nature of spiritual transformation and the being of God use increasingly stark and disturbing images. The cross becomes for Weil a picture of what human existence is like when the tension or “impossibility” inherent in existence is accepted: The only man who feels all the bitterness of affliction, completely and at the centre of his soul, is the man who tries, like Job to continue to love God in the depth of affliction … In this state the soul is lacerated, nailed to the two poles of creation: inert matter and God. This laceration is a copy, within a finite soul, of God’s creative act. Perhaps it is necessary to pass through that in order to emerge from creation and return to the origin. (Weil 1970, 328) The talk of creation as a kind of “laceration” relates to a theme that is explored consistently throughout the notebooks. For Weil, the act of creation can be thought of only as a kind of renunciation, loss or even as a crucifixion; God consents to be less than everything so as to let creation be itself, and as a result, there is a sense in which God is completely absent from creation (see McCullough in Vroom 2007

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for a helpful discussion of these issues). More than this, there is an e­ ssential unity between the act of creation and the “self-emptying” involved in the ­incarnation and crucifixion, or as she sometimes suggests, creation is already a kind of c­ rucifixion (Weil 1970, 69–60). As she explores these ideas, Weil sometimes gives the impression that when seen from the perspective of God, existence itself is a kind of scandal: “My existence is a diminution of God’s glory: God gives me it so that I may desire to lose it” (Weil 1970, 178). It follows from all this that the “way back” from the exile that is created existence is through a movement that mirrors the creative renunciation of God, whereby creatures consent to their own non-existence and “forgive” God for creating them (“decreation”). On the ethical plane, “decreation” is the process of learning to give disinterested attention to the reality of others, the refusal to desire others as a material for one’s own self-expansion, and so on; on the metaphysical plane, however, it is a refusal of being, a consent to become nothing—“[t]o cease to be, out of love” (Weil 1956, 364). It can appear, then, as though Weil’s version of the beatific vision is of a return to an original purity, in which there is God, and only God, and this may raise the suspicion that Weil’s metaphysical thought itself displays the tendency to seek the equilibrium that she diagnoses so well (Little 1993). It may be that this is the point at which Weil is most obviously at odds with Christianity, insofar as it seems to compromise the affirmation of the goodness of created being, or the eschatological vision of Christianity, which remains relational, and affirms the value of distinct, finite perspectives, in contrast to the kind of re-absorption that Weil seems to envisage (Williams 1993). From an entirely different perspective, one might see in these comments an attempt to insert human affliction into a metaphysical scheme; just another theodicy, and therefore a failure to fully acknowledge what she nevertheless knew: that affliction is destructive, nothing more (as one of the earliest critical evaluations of Weil’s work maintained; see Taubes 1955). Either way, the more metaphysical comments recorded in the notebooks that Weil left are the most likely to provoke strong reactions.

Conclusion The difficulties raised by the more metaphysical comments briefly introduced in this chapter leave the question of how Weil’s thought should be used, and of what sort of use would be most consonant with the ideas themselves. As briefly indicated, there is a powerful inclination towards system in Weil’s thinking, insofar as one often gets the impression that she is driven to find the level at which seemingly disparate or even conflicting truths might be united. Miklos Veto’s book, The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil, makes a good case for treating her work in this way. One of the most recent books on Weil sees her thought as akin to poetry; the paradoxical formulations, the sometimes-startling images are attempts to reveal a conception of life, rather than a set of theological concepts. As with a poem, the aim is to enable an encounter: “the

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poem confronts us with a certain and undeniable presence, which we are ­disabled from objectifying” (Rozelle-Stone and Stone 2013, 4). In a similar vein, Weil’s use of paradox might be seen to work in a similar way to how Weil herself saw religious mysteries, that is as a way of pushing to the limits of thought, so that thought gives way to attention and love (Springsted in Rozelle-Stone and Stone, 97). Despite the idiosyncratic character of the work that Weil is most famous for, and despite the fact that it has given rise to no distinct school of thought, her ideas have nevertheless had a significant impact on subsequent thinkers from a range of disciplines. Several influential twentieth-century philosophers have used her thought in the formulation of their own ideas. For example, Iris Murdoch used Weil’s reflections on attention in her The Sovereignty of Good, D. Z. Phillips’ assault on the “friendly fire” of analytic philosophy of religion often made use of Weil as an exemplar of serious religious thought, and more recently, in moral philosophy, Raimond Gaita’s influential book Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception makes significant use of Weil’s reflections on the nature of moral concern. Weil also remains an important dialogue partner for contemporary Christian theologians (see Sallie McFague’s recent book Blessed Are the Consumers, for example), and the short incisive comments compiled in Gravity and Grace have been put to any number of uses in sermons and in popular writing on spirituality (see the work of Lawrence Freeman OSB and Richard Rohr OFM, for example). The range and depth of this influence suggests that Simone Weil was wrong about at least one thing; in a letter written to her mother a month prior to her death, she wrote: “I have a sort of growing inner certainty that there is within me a deposit of pure gold which must be handed on. Only I become more and more convinced, by experience and by observing my contemporaries, that there is no one to receive it” (Weil 1965, 196).

References Allen, Diogenes. 1980. “Natural Evil and the Love of God.” In Religious Studies 16 (4): 439–56. Allen, Diogenes, and Eric O. Springsted, 1994. Spirit, Nature, and Community Issues in the Thought of Simone Weil. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Bell, Richard H. 1998. Simone Weil the Way of Justice as Compassion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Bell, Richard H., ed. 1993. Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture: Readings Toward a Divine Humanity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chenavier, Robert. 2012. Simone Weil: Attention to the Real. Translated by Bernard E. Doering. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame. Chenavier, Robert. 2004. “Simone Weil: Completing Platonism Through a Consistent Materialism.” The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil. Edited by E. Jane Doering and Eric O. Springsted. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 61–76. Doering, E. Jane, and Eric O. Springsted, eds. 2004. The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Little, J. P. 1993. “Simone Weil’s Concept of Decreation.” Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture: Readings Toward a Divine Humanity. Edited by Richard Bell. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 25–51. McCullough, Lissa. 2007. “The Void: Simone Weil’s Naming of Evil.” Wrestling with God and with Evil: Philosophical Reflections. Edited by H. M. Vroom. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi. 25–42. McLellan, David. 1990. Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil. New York, NY: Poseidon Press. Patterson, Patrick and Lawrence E. Schmidt. 2004. “The Christian Materialism of Simone Weil.” The Christian Platonism of Simone Weil. Edited by E. Jane Doering and Eric O. Springsted. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 77–94. Pétrement, Simone. 1976. Simone Weil: A Life. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Rhees, Rush. 1999. Discussions of Simone Weil. Edited by D. Z. Phillips and Mario Von der Ruhr. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rozelle-Stone, Rebecca, and Lucian Stone. 2013. Simone Weil and Theology. London, UK: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Rozelle-Stone, Rebecca and Lucian Stone, eds. 2010. The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later. London, UK: Continuum. Springsted, Eric O. 2010. Simone Weil and the Suffering of Love. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Springsted, Eric O. 2010. “Mystery and Philosophy.” The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later. Edited by Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian Stone. London, UK: Continuum. 91–106. Taubes, Susan A. 1967. “The Absent God.” Journal of Religion 35 (1): 6–16. Veto, Miklos. 1994. The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil. Translated by Joan Dargon. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Von der Ruhr, Mario. 2006. Simone Weil: An Apprenticeship in Attention. London, UK: Continuum. Weil, Simone. 1956. The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Volumes 1 and 2. Translated by Arthur Wills. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Weil, Simone. 1962. Selected Essays, 1934–1943. Translated by Richard Rees. London, UK: Oxford University Press. Weil, Simone. 1965. Seventy Letters. Translated by Richard Rees. London, UK: Oxford University Press. Weil, Simone. 1970. First and Last Notebooks. Translated by Richard Rees. London, UK: Oxford University Press. Weil, Simone. 1975. Gateway to God. Edited by D. Raper. Glasgow, Scotland: Collins/ Fontana. Weil, Simone. 1977. Waiting on God. Translated by Emma Crawford. London, UK: HarperCollins. Weil, Simone. 1986. Simone Weil: An Anthology. Edited by Sian Miles. New York, NY: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Weil, Simone. 1987. Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Weil, Simone. 2001. Oppression and Liberty. Translated by A. Wills and J. Petrie. London, UK: Routledge. Weil, Simone. 2002a. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford. London, UK: Routledge. Weil, Simone. 2002b. Letter to a Priest. Translated by A. Wills. London, UK: Routledge.

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Weil, Simone. 2002c. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by A. Wills. London, UK: Routledge. Weil, Simone. 2010. Formative Writings, 1929-1941. Translated by Dorothy Tuck McFarland and Wilhelmina Van Ness. London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Williams, Rowan. 1993. “The Necessary Non-Existence of God.” Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture: Readings Toward a Divine Humanity. Edited by Richard Bell, 52–76. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Winch, Peter. 1989. Simone Weil: “The Just Balance.” Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

16 Georges Bataille (1897–1962) Rina Arya

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a French cultural theorist and philosopher who wrote widely in a number of fields that included anthropology, sociology, art, economics, erotic literature and religion. Roland Barthes picked up on these shifts of register and suggested that Bataille could be seen as a “[n]ovelist, poet, essayist, economist, philosopher, mystic” (Barthes 1977, 157). One possible perspective is to argue for a composite identity for this paradoxical figure, where the different faces sit side-by-side rather than merging to form a homogeneous identity. Despite the many fields that he explored, we can elicit various themes that he returned to; indeed, the dominant theme was an interest in the role of the sacred in society.1 Bataille’s influences were many and disparate, and included the anthropological studies of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss; the writings of mystics such as St. John of the Cross; the works of various philosophers including Hegel and Nietzsche; and the psychoanalytic work of Freud. Bataille makes a distinction between institutionalized religion, of which he is predominantly concerned with Christianity, which had become rationalized and geared towards productivity, and the sacred, which is a force or dynamic that disrupts profane order. He believed that religion has distorted the sacred by domesticating it. Although he was antireligious, he sought to explore the limits of thought and language and did so with an ardent fervour that can be described as religious. His central preoccupation was with the recovery of the sacred in modern society. His approach is encapsulated by the term “atheology.” Atheology is related but not equivalent to negative theology,2 and is used to denote the problematic nature of his thinking about the sacred in a world where God is absent or dead, or any other state that denies the absolute presence of God as the transcendent other or guarantor of meaning. In his atheology, Bataille rejects the existence of a God as postulated in philosophy and theology. The concept of God or the divine (but not the sacrifice of Christ, which is treated as a different sense of the divine) has also been rendered servile, reified and

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enslaved by reason, and God in this modality needs to be killed and reconfigured to rekindle the intimacy of being. Atheology characterizes the subversive tendency of Bataille’s writings, which used the symbols and ideas of Christianity to show his opposition to them and to convey the problem of how to speak about God. This chapter will survey the main ideas in Bataille’s thought by considering his influences, affiliations and theoretical formulations. Before I proceed, it needs to be emphasized that Bataille was not a systematic philosopher: he was not formally trained as a philosopher, and as such his writings lack the systematization that is characteristic of conventional philosophical exposition, and many are elusive and even esoteric. He also addressed themes that are marginalized by traditional or discursive philosophy, such as the excremental, which led to criticisms of his work.3 These aspects should not be viewed negatively, that is, as a way of sidelining Bataille, but rather as embodying the Dionysian spirit that is central to his thought. Bataille also had an ambivalent relationship with natural language, which he believed could only take one so far in communicating the limits of experience, which he sought to do. While he desired silence, and a violent silence at that, believing this to be the primal state of the human, he was compelled to write to articulate the experiences that he wanted to communicate. This bore close comparison to the Christian mystics with whom he was deeply engaged, and who also dealt with the problem of ineffability and religious experience. Born in Billom, Puy-de-Dôme, Bataille’s early life was marked by the infirmity of his syphilitic father, who Bataille “remembers” as being blind, paralysed and insane (Surya 2002, 5–8, 14–15).4 Bataille was not raised in a religious environment but converted to Catholicism in 1914, the year that he and his mother fled from their home town to escape the threat of German shelling. The author of Bataille’s “intellectual biography” (as it is subtitled), Michel Surya (2002, 16), attributes Bataille’s religious conversion to a way of giving meaning to his father’s horror, although by abandoning his father, who died shortly afterwards, Bataille contravened the Catholic moral code. In the years that followed, he developed his faith further and joined the seminary of Saint-Fleur in 1917, intending to take holy orders following the period of his conscription. A year later, he left the seminary and was admitted to the École des Chartes, where he began his training as a medievalist librarian and studied the works of numerous writers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, who would greatly influence his philosophy by their shared concerns with sovereignty, excess and power. In 1922 he gained a position at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where he was introduced to ethnology, which became foundational in his approach to art and culture. He had two decades of service here and resigned because of ill health (tuberculosis) in 1942. Seven years later he resumed work as a librarian at Carpentras (1949–51) and Orleans (1951–61). While at École des Chartes, he came across Le Latin mystique by Remy de Gourmont, which was a history of ecclesiastic poetry in Latin and was a key text that shaped his outlook. This medieval text warned of the dangers of the flesh, from which God alone could save one; the flesh needed to be renounced “less because [it] is odious … than because it is terrifying” (Surya 2002, 27), a notion

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that haunted Bataille throughout his life. During this time, he regularly attended church and lived a godly life until 1920, when he lost his faith and succumbed to the temptations of the flesh by frequenting brothels. These newly found pleasures were, according to him, liberating—more “authentic,” “indefensible,” and “chasmic”—because they were not illusory, like the religion from which he had fallen away. And yet they still inspired a divine dread (Surya 2002, 83). This radical shift from piety to excess was significant and conveyed his obsessive and extreme nature, features that were reflected in his philosophy.5 It also anticipated the transgressive tenor of his novels, where God is frequently coupled with the excremental. In Story of the Eye (1928), written pseudonymously by Lord Auch, which approximates to “God in the shithouse,” Christianity is overturned in an exploration of the impure sacred. The final part features the brutal sacrifice of the Catholic priest Don Aminado who is raped, slaughtered and has his eye enucleated and inserted up the vagina of the female protagonist Simone. In Madame Edwarda (1956) the narrator pursues the eponymous heroine into a brothel where he confronts the gross animality of God. Despite his loss of faith, Bataille retained an understanding of the power of religious feelings, especially guilt and sin (Noys 2000, 12), which fuelled his atheology. In fact, his religiosity was intensified by his intellectual experiences. His work can be situated in a Nietzschean vein, in that he is responding to the crisis of Western nihilism by revisiting the idea of the death of God and its ramifications. Although Bataille had encountered the writings of Nietzsche earlier in his studies, his understanding was deepened and guided by the Russian scholar Léon Chestov, who acted as Bataille’s mentor from about 1922 to 1925 and fuelled his a-theological fervour. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the death of God is followed by uncertainty and the wanderings of the last man in the void of the religious hangover. Bataille takes this further, but ends up departing from Nietzschean tradition. The point of rupture occurs in the different attitudes towards the affirmation and desecration of life taken by each thinker. Nietzsche advocates a valorisation of life—an amor fati—that looks beyond the legacy of God’s death to think about the open possibilities of the future. Bataille, however, delves into the depths of abject humanity to reveal the pathology of human beings and turns to the sacred to explore this.

The sacred One of Bataille’s central contributions to a-theological thinking is the centrality of the sacred in modern life. Bataille makes a contrast between world religions and “primitive” and archaic religions, where the sacred was central to ritualistic practice and the movement between the two domains of the sacred and profane was fluid. In his philosophy of culture, he conveys the significance and importance that the sacred has for the meaning of the social. His interest in the sacred extends beyond the intellectual, where it is formulated in Durkheimian terms as a contagious experience that is brought about when boundaries are transgressed, to the emotional, where he articulates how it makes us feel (its affective qualities) and how it can take

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us to extremes of experience, where language and meaning collapse. Taking his lead from a range of influences, including Durkheimian sociology,6 Marcel Mauss, Alfred Métraux and Freudian psychoanalysis, Bataille animates the sacred as a life force, showing its dual and ambivalent behaviour. It maintains and yet also destroys communities and society, and is an integral feature of different spheres of experience. Bataille’s thought concerns the opposition that exists between two different spheres of existence that inform the workings of society at different levels—from the economic, to the religious, to the artistic. His essays “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933) and “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (1933) are useful in understanding his analysis of society and the economy.7 In the former he discusses the two concepts of “the useful” and “the useless” and in the latter, he develops the terms “homogeneous” and “heterogeneous,” to convey different types of orders. In short, on the one hand we have the restricted economy, which constitutes the profane world of work that we live in.Values here are geared towards maintaining the homogeneity of systems and involve certain attitudes, including production, acquisition, and conservation. In opposition to this is the general economy that is heterogeneous, and advocates polar values including an exuberant expenditure without return. In “The use-value of D. A. F. de Sade” (1929–30; see Bataille 1985, 91–102), Bataille discusses the different dynamics of these realms of thought and activity and describes the sacred as heterological, that is, involving das ganz Andere—the “foreign body” that is other to us (Bataille 1985, 94).The sacred is described as a force which brings about a state of disruption to the profane and involves that which is beyond utility, which is why it lies beyond the homogeneous. In The Accursed Share (La Part Maudite) (Vol. 1, 1967), Bataille examines the flow of energy in the general economy and turns to cosmology for his analysis. He begins by asserting that living organisms receive more energy (from the sun) than they actually need for the maintenance of life, which means that there is an excess, resulting in loss. This portion of excess, described as the “accursed share,” is the basis of the general economy and is counter to the impulse of a capitalist economy, or other manifestations of the restrictive economy, where all measures are taken to absorb energy (in whatever form it takes) into the system. While the objectives of acquisition and production enhance an economy, and are principles whose ideas are expounded in classical economic theory, Bataille focuses on the need for expending the surplus to relieve a build-up of forces that might otherwise result in violence. Examples of unproductive expenditure include activities that are often viewed as ends in themselves, including festivals, poetry, laughter and its most extreme manifestation, war. Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift in his essay The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925/1967)8 underpins the logic of Bataille’s understanding of non-utilitarian economic exchange. Mauss studied archaic systems of exchange among certain groups of indigenous peoples living on the northwest coast of North America, and he argued that these societies’ economies are characterized by potlatch, that is, the ritualized exchange of gifts that were set up at significant points in the life cycle including birth, marriage and death. During these

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occasions the giving of a gift set up a cycle of exchange that involved putting on a show of wealth in different ways—by giving, squandering or destroying wealth. In turn the beneficiary was socially obliged to reciprocate by giving more, or else lose status and prestige. This competitive cycle of demonstrating wealth, which could continue ad infinitum, continued to result in bigger stakes and an increasing sense of obligation. Bataille’s general economy is based on this principle of exuberant loss that is unconcerned with acquisition of any kind. He also appropriated the notion of a loss without return demonstrated by potlatch in his idea of the accursed share, where the loss that cannot be appropriated into homogeneous society brings about an experience of the heterological forces of the sacred. Bataille in fact radicalized the idea of potlatch by dispensing with the idea of socially enforced reciprocation and looked to the exuberance of the sun as his model of the ultimate potlatch. In his formulation of the sacred, Bataille drew on the sacred-profane distinction in Durkheimian sociology. His commitment to the investigation and application of the sacred was realized in the 1930s in a working group, the Collège de Sociologie, which will be discussed later in the chapter. Durkheim took the sacred and profane to be mutually incompatible realms of experience, which was borne out by his studies at the start of the twentieth century. For Bataille, however, in modern society the sacred is experienced in the profane through transgression. The profane realm is disrupted through experiences, such as in sacrifice, eroticism, festivals and other occurrences that transcend and transgress the homogeneity of the profane. The destabilizing effects of the sacred disrupt the order of the profane world, which needs to be protected by taboos.

Theory of religion Written in the 1940s and published posthumously, Theory of Religion provides an important account of Bataille’s account of the sacred. In that respect, it serves as a summary of his ideas. In broad terms, he argues for the return of an understanding of the sacred that involves a return to “intimacy” (immanence), which he identifies as the condition of animality understood as continuity. The qualification “understood as continuity” is crucial because it conveys the distinctive feature of humans who, unlike animals, are self-conscious and aware of death. The human differs from the animal because she has come to know herself as a subject, which stands apart from objects in the profane world. In the “real order” (i.e. of everyday living) we have ordered the universe in terms of utility, which means that entities, possessive natural beings, are seen as tools, as objects, and hence are subjugated to humans’ desires. This order constitutes the realm of work where we view things with respect to their utility and where work helps maintain society. However, this outlook leads to a state of discontinuity where we are individuated and separated from other beings and “the flow of all that is” (Bataille 1992b, 29). We come to experience the world in the profane realm as fragmented, and we yearn for the experience of the sacred in which we are continuous with all that there is. The power that we exert over the world alienates us from other things, including ourselves: “If he places the

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world in his power, this is to the extent that he forgets that he is himself the world: he denies the world but it is himself that he denies” (1992b, 41). Spurred on by desire, we continually strive to overcome this state of separation, which we do by transgressing the boundaries of the real order of things. This transition takes us from servility (utility) to sovereignty (beyond utility) where we live in the moment. We strive for “communication,” which is a technical term to describe the situation of being suspended in a state beyond oneself and momentarily united with the other through the experience of death, at the limit of nothingness. As Bataille states: “‘Communication’ cannot proceed from one full and intact individual to another. It requires individuals whose separate existence in themselves is risked, placed at the limit of death and nothingness; the moral summit is the moment of risk taking …” (Bataille 1992a, 19). In Durkheimian terms, the individual moves from a state of individuality to a collective identity that is effervescent and becomes the founding moment of the sacred. Intimacy can be brought about in various ways, such as sacrifice and eroticism, all of which return the object or entity to its original state of being. Bataille comments that sacrifice does not necessarily require the death of the victim but rather the utility that is attached to the victim: “The thing—only the thing—is what sacrifice means to destroy in the victim. Sacrifice destroys an object’s real ties of subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible caprice” (Bataille 1992b, 43). Similarly, in eroticism, as opposed to animal sexuality, the goal is not the production of a new, distinct individual, a productive one of giving new life, but about challenging the limits of discontinuity, placing ourselves at risk and opening ourselves up to the anguish that this entails. Eroticism involves the “assenting to life up to the point of death” (Bataille 1987, 11). One of Bataille’s objections to Christianity was that it too had led to “a ‘profanation’ of the world” (Hegarty 2000, 90), and had made the sacred transcendent, meaning that it was not accessible as an experience in immanence. Equally, the divine too had become subject to the ideas of the human, thereby rendering it servile, reduced to the status of a thing. God needed to be killed to rekindle the intimacy of being. Bataille explores this idea in On Nietzsche ([1945] 1992a),9 where he discusses how Christianity was founded upon an act that involved killing to reestablish community. The sublimity of the crucified Christ demonstrates that the “exuberance of forces” that brings about ek-stasis is “evil,” insofar as it is an act that involves immeasurable violence and does not protect the integrity of the individual by violating its boundaries (Botting and Wilson 1997, 7).10 But this act of evil is integral to the maintenance of Christian community. Integral to communication is laceration and wounding, and the death of Christ on the Cross and cry at the sixth hour, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” is the apotheosis of this. The body needs to be broken as a symbol of sacrificial love and it is then reconstituted in community. The experience of bodily sparagmos that the Crucifixion betokens was encapsulated in a series of photographs, the “Torture of a Hundred Pieces” that Bataille received early on in his career from his psychoanalyst, Dr Adrien Borel. It captured the image of a Chinese man, Fu Chou Li, who had

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been subject to unspeakable torture, having been found guilty of murdering Prince Ao-Han-Ouan in 1905. His punishment was that he should be dismembered and lacerated into one hundred pieces while alive. Perhaps the most incongruous feature of the photo was the ecstatic expression on the man’s face in the joy before death. These images, which haunted Bataille for the rest of his life, symbolized an extreme manifestation of non-productive expenditure and combines the coincidence of opposites, “the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror” (Bataille 1989, 207) that was characteristic of the mystics and which encapsulates the Bataillean ethos. On Nietzsche was part of a trilogy with Inner Experience (1943) and Guilty (1944), which were written during the war years and collectively comprised La Somme Athéologique, which was a radical subversion of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. While Aquinas’ systematic treatise reconciled the teachings of the Catholic church (faith) with Aristotle (reason) by addressing questions about a host of topics such as the existence of God and the nature of human beings, Bataille’s texts indicated the withdrawal and introspection that he felt at the time and were meditations on the experience of the dead God. The texts themselves were written in notebook form and reflected his Nietzschean spirit and mystical leanings. They involved a retreat into inner experience, eliminating any sense of outer reference points, where one is taken to the limits of experience, through meditation or ecstasy for instance, which leads to “the extreme limit of the possible” (Bataille 1988, passim), the abyss of un-knowing and the dissolution of the self. We saw how in On Nietzsche, Christ on the cross in a state of ek-stasis is taken beyond himself and his brutalized body aids the establishment of community; similarly, in Inner Experience, “Christ’s torment is seen to surpass the very summit of religious order, God” (Botting and Wilson 1997, 8). Bataille sought “to go completely beyond Christianity by means of a hyperchristianity” (Biles 2007, 121), where the humiliating and excruciating death does not hold out any promise of an afterlife but instead refers only to itself. In spite of this revelation of the death of God, Bataille has a relentless need in texts such as Inner Experience to speak again of God, “to reintroduce the word ‘God’ in his texts” (ten Kate 2000, 252).

Acéphale and the Collège de Sociologie Before the war, Bataille was involved in a number of fringe left-wing political and cultural organizations. Two of these groupings were Acéphale and the Collège de Sociologie. The first, started in 1936, continued until 1939 and referred to a secret society, about which little is known, and the second was a Nietzschean review that aimed to exercise the workings of the sacred through ritual transgression. The ethos was embodied in the symbol of the acéphalic sovereign headless man, as articulated in a drawing by the surrealist, André Masson. This gnostic-like symbol identifies with his death of God philosophy, where we are looking at a conglomerate being that is beyond both the human and God, and expresses what Jeremy Biles describes as “a sacred monster” (Biles 2007, 3). The headless state of the man and displace-

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ment of the skull to the groin area conveys the sensibility that Bataille wanted to impart about the group, where the mind and reason are displaced in favour of the materiality of the body. Moreover, the headlessness is emblematic of a community without a “God,” as it is exposed and opened to death. From 1937 to 1939, the exploration of a sacred sociology became formalized in a grouping that comprised Bataille and his fellow dissident surrealists, namely Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois. The Collège de Sociologie was an extension of many of the principles of Acéphale, and represented ideals that went against the mainstream political practice of the marshalling of communities under Nazi occupation that characterized the war years and widened the remit to examine the sacred potential of culture in its many forms, including in festivals and art. Both in theory and practice the Collège wanted to interrogate the foundations of collective movements and to show the active expression of the sacred in modern society and culture. They examined the collective groupings of certain political groups and religious orders that lay outside the parameters of previous research on crowd psychologies. They drew from the French school of sociology that concerned the ethnographic study of “primitive” cultures, especially the work of Durkheim and Mauss, whose influences had already been seen in the formulation of core ideas about the sacred in society and whose findings they sought to apply to modern formations.11 Tenets that were core to the Collège’s outlook included the socially transformative potential of the sacred, often described as a collective effervescence or effusion that binds people into a collectivity, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The sacred itself has a complex and ambivalent nature, a finding put forward by the scholar William Robertson Smith: it is opposed to the profane and furthermore is characterized as being both pure and impure. These differences, which are often indicated by the designations of “right” and “left” poles, cause the contradictory feelings of attraction and repulsion.12 Both aspects of the sacred are marked by their heterogeneity with respect to the profane but inspire different sentiments, namely purity and creativity (the beneficent “right”) and impurity, horror and death (the maleficent “left”). Throughout his career Bataille explored both poles of the sacred but was particularly drawn to the violent and destructive effects of the sacred, which he developed in his novels.

Alexandre Kojève’s reinterpretation of Hegel In his investigation of the “concept” of un-knowing, Bataille was influenced by the reinterpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) that formed the basis of a seminar series that ran from 1933 until 1939 at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Alexandre Kojève, a Russian-born French philosopher, used the seminar series as the forum for his reading of Hegel. It was attended by many French thinkers who would become influential, such as Jacques Lacan, Pierre ­Klossowski, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and André Breton. Bataille was one of the attendees and was influenced by Kojève’s unorthodox reading of Hegel,13 which would subsequently shape Bataille’s intellectual outlook on the world, the effects of which are

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seen in his anti-rationalism and his philosophy of excess. To account for the extent of Kojève’s departure from Hegel, it is necessary to give an overview of the latter’s history of philosophy as articulated in the Phenomenology. For Hegel, human history was a universal historical process that would ultimately convey underlying unity, known as Absolute Spirit (Geist). Throughout the course of history, the individual experiences/perceives itself as separate from entities in the world (nature, other beings), and this split sets up reality as a dualism between opposing terms such as subject and object, human and desire, and God and human. The process of reconciliation occurs through a dialectic that brings about the end of history in different forms, namely art, religion and philosophy. Kojève’s radical interpretation, which was transcribed and edited by Raymond Queneau, appeared in 1947 as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Kojève reworked Hegel’s idealism through the lens of Marx’s materialism and Heidegger’s ontology. The result was an anthropological reading, focusing upon human action through which we form our understanding about being in the world. The displacement of the theological ground of existence with the material nature of human production coupled with the human’s recognition of itself as a being in time—that is, as finite—creates the self-consciousness of reality that motivates desire, which is a central characteristic of humanity. Working through Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, which underscores the significance of achieving mastery over nature, Kojève conveys how the human is divided against itself (not God) and reconciliation comes in the individual’s understanding of shared human nature. The end of history, in the sense of the end of philosophy, was achieved through revolutionary action, which transformed the terms in the master-slave relation: the slave achieves autonomy and self-consciousness. Bataille extrapolates from concepts in Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, but puts those concepts to radically different ends. To all intents and purposes, he wrote against Hegel. He argued that we are “discontinuous” (separated, alienated) and reach continuity or “communication” in different ways, all of which achieve momentary unity through the dissolution of the subject. But this does not involve a final reconciliation or higher synthesis, as it did in Hegel’s account of the end of history, but instead involves a negativity that does not disappear. The term “negativity” refers to action, in the sense of “doing,” so action is negative. Death is the ultimate form of negativity because it annihilates thought and action. In Hegel, negativity is recuperated through the dialectical turn of negation to sublation (which elevates it to a higher stage), but in Bataille negativity becomes “unemployed,” a point Bataille makes in his “Letter to X,” where he states his concerns to Kojève (Bataille 2011, 111). By “unemployed” he is referring to the actions that involve exuberant expenditure deemed to be useless and wasteful. This action has no purpose in the sense of utility and is an “open wound” in “the refutation of Hegel’s closed system” (Bataille 2011, 111). So, in Bataille instead of the end of history and the recollection of unity we experience the limitations of the profane world. The rationality of humanity, as endorsed by Hegel and Kojève, does not lead to enlightenment or liberation but to a destructive negativity that exposes the extreme conditions of transgression through madness and perversion. Herein lies the

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point of difference between Bataille and his intellectual forefathers Hegel and Kojève. Where they reappropriate negativity into history by rationalizing it in their various ways, Bataille exposes the workings of negativity in his exploration of the sacred. This takes us to a primal (and original) state of being where we embrace the violence of animality and the sovereignty of un-knowing. In Bataille, there is no resolution between the dualisms, and instead of closure we have an exuberant expenditure without return. Furthermore, we must place ourselves at risk, in the face of death, in our desire to overcome self-consciousness and return to animal continuity. In his subversion of Hegelian philosophy, he pokes fun at the enterprise of philosophers, an idea that informed his identity. He stated in Méthode de meditation that: “I am not a philosopher, but a saint, perhaps a madman” (Richardson 1998, 1).14 The absolute knowledge so key to Hegelian philosophy is replaced by nonknowledge or un-knowing, which is experienced in the abandonment of meaning and sense. Overlaid on this was the equation of absolute knowledge with the God of positive theology, and then the inversion of this—where un-knowing is associated with the death of God. Bataille was more interested in articulating experiences that involved a release from the bounds of language and identity than he was in developing his core knowledge about philosophy. Scott Wilson and Fred Botting discuss the “extreme subjective and corporeal disturbance” that his writing generates, “which attempts to push understanding and empathy to a vertiginous summit, produces the reaction that bypasses or exceeds intellectual appraisal, leaping from reading to feeling in a violent movement” (Botting and Wilson 1997, 1). This is especially apparent in some of his non-fictional work, such as Inner Experience and Guilty, and is common to his novels. Michael Richardson argues that Bataille’s novels “respond to a need to open the wound even more, to look horror full in the face and recognize one’s identity within the realm of transgression” (Richardson 1994, 64). Despite their graphic and often pornographic content, we need to remember that Bataille is using sexuality to convey the base realism of the flesh, which marks the human condition, and also symbolically to reflect the fear of death. His novels should be read as studies of the anguish and passion of human life. He claims that “In human consciousness eroticism is that within man which calls his being in[to] question” (Bataille 1987, 29). In reading his novels we experience the darkness of the sacred that takes us to the boundaries of language and experience where we face the death of God. In Bataille it is the erotic, not the mystical or religious, where the absence of God experienced as divine dread is most acutely felt and where the sacred as the transgression of limits is experienced: what mysticism could not say (at the moment it began to pronounce its message, it entered it—entered its trance), eroticism does say: God is nothing if He is not, in every sense, the surpassing of God: in the sense of common everyday being, in the sense of dread, horror and impurity, and, finally, in the sense of nothing. (Bataille 1995, 141–42)

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Conclusion Bataille was a contradictory figure whose public persona as a librarian contrasted with his virulent and obsessive mental states and his writings on excess, which saw him explore ideas and experiences that were regarded as being on the fringes of normalized thought. His atheology couples the exploration of the virulent power of the sacred in its dual nature and the emergence of a God whose existence is no longer tenable and has to be killed all over again. But this absence is maintained as an excremental presence, as the abandonment on the Cross, or the remains at ­Golgotha. The positing of God as the transcendent limit presents a limit on the sacred, which in Bataille’s exposition is immanent. God needs to be killed before the sacred can be recovered. “Christianity has made the sacred substantial, but the nature of the sacred, in which today we recognize the burning existence of religion, is perhaps the ungraspable thing that has been produced between men” (Bataille in Hegarty 2000, 96). Michel Foucault, following Bataille, developed the Godless genealogy of Western philosophy, and argued in “A Preface to Transgression” that Bataille depicted the death of God, not as a historical event that signalled the beginnings of atheism or secularism, but rather as “the now constant space of our experience” (Foucault 1998, 26). Bataille offers a philosophy of transgression that involves going beyond the limits of knowledge and identity to a state beyond the self. Since his death, he has enjoyed a revival in critical and cultural theory as a result of the publication of his twelve-volume Oeuvres Complètes (1971–88). The increasing number of translations of his works into English and the publication of new editions and anthologies about him convey the growing significance of his work. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary nature of his work lends itself to art criticism, sociology, literary criticism and cultural studies and has established him as a key thinker in the twentieth century who is often presented as a precursor of poststructuralist thought. His influence on French intellectual life such as the philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, among others, has been profound. While having broad appeal to scholars in different fields of study, Bataille has a special significance in the sociology of religion, atheology and postmodern theology because of his views about religion and the sacred.15

Notes 1 For an excellent study on the topic, see The Sacred and Society by William Pawlett (2015). 2 Negative theology attempts to describe the nature of God by focusing on what God is not rather than what God is. 3 Sartre condemned Bataille’s 1943 text Inner Experience, labelling him a “new mystic.” Another critic was André Breton who denounced Bataille in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism as “obsessive,” “pathological” and as being preoccupied with “that which is vilest, most discouraging, and most corrupted” (1930) (1969, 181). 4 Writing with reference to Surya’s account, Amy Hollywood argues that there is no external evidence beyond “Coincidences” to support the claims about Bataille’s father (Hollywood 2002, 45). 5 The theme of piety and libertinism is also explored in Bataille’s novel L’Abbé C. (1950). 6 The Durkheimian school of sociology was established by the 1920s.

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  7 Both essays are contained in Bataille (1985, 116–129 and 137–160).   8 1967 is the date of the English translation.  9 On Nietzsche is not about Nietzsche as such but is closely associated with him both thematically and stylistically in its use of aphorisms. It also conveys the mark that he left on Bataille’s sensibility. Bataille also reclaimed Nietzsche from the hands of fascism (his philosophy was being used to promulgate fascist ideals) in the second journal of Acéphale, which was devoted entirely to Nietzsche. 10 Bataille is not using the terms “good” and “evil” in their conventional sense but in a post-moral sense where the latter is about shattering the limits of homogeneity to give rise to an experience of heterogeneity. His revision of these terms of morality is unmistakably Nietzschean. 11 A strong ethnographic focus is shown in the art review Documents that ran from 1929–31. 12 In their recognition of the split nature of the sacred, contributors were influenced by Robert Hertz’s 1907 study Death and the Right Hand. 13 While Kojève is regarded as integral to the dissemination of French Hegelianism, other writers and philosophers, such as Jean Hyppolite, provide a more scholarly exposition of Hegel. 14 There are other instances where Bataille distances himself from the discourse of philosophy, which he regards as being restrictive in its need for form, structure and closure. For instance, in his elucidation of the “concept” of the formless (l’informe) he argues that: “[i]n fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat” (Bataille 1985, 31). He sought to move beyond, to escape these bounded ways of thinking. Denis Hollier’s study Against Architecture (1989) discusses Bataille’s antithesis of architectural metaphors such as building and constructing in the presentation of his thoughts, opting instead to work against the systematization of thought. 15 I am very grateful to Jeremy Biles and William Pawlett for their detailed and helpful comments on this chapter.

References Barthes, Roland. 1977. “From work to text.” Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London, UK: Fontana. 155–164. Bataille, Georges. 1970–1988. Œuvres complètes. 12 Volumes. Paris, France: Gallimard. Bataille, Georges. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Edited and translated by Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bataille, Georges. 1987 [1957]. Eroticism. Translated by Mary Dalwood. London, UK: Marion Boyars. Bataille, Georges. 1988 [1954]. Inner Experience. Translated by Leslie Anne Boldt. New York, NY: SUNY Press. Bataille, Georges. 1989 [1961]. The Tears of Eros. Translated by Peter Connor. San Francisco, CA: City Light Books. Bataille, Georges. 1991 [1967]. The Accursed Share. Volume I. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Zone Books. Bataille, G. 1992a [1945]. On Nietzsche. Translated by B. Boone, London, UK: The Athlone Press. Bataille, G. 1992b [1973]. Theory of Religion. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Zone Books. Bataille, Georges. 1995. My Mother [1966], Madame Edwarda [1956], The Dead Man [1967]. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse. London, UK: Marion Boyars.

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Bataille, Georges. 2011 [1961]. Guilty. Translated by Stuart Kendall. New York, NY: SUNY Press. Biles, Jeremy. 2007. Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Botting, Fred and Scott Wilson, eds. 1997. The Bataille Reader. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Breton, Andre. 1969. “Second Manifesto of Surrealism.” Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. 117–194. Foucault, Michel. 1998. “A Preface to Transgression.” Bataille: A Critical Reader. Edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, 24–40. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Hegarty, Paul. 2000. Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist. London, UK: SAGE Publications Ltd. Hollywood, Amy. 2002. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mauss, Marcel. (1988 [1967]). The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Noys, Benjamin. 2000. Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction. London, UK: Pluto Press. Pawlett, William. 2015. Georges Bataille: The Sacred and Society. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Richardson, Michael. 1994. Georges Bataille. London, UK: Routledge. Richardson, Michael. 1998. Georges Bataille: Essential Writings. London, UK: SAGE Publications Ltd. Surya, Michel. 2002. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. Translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. London, UK: Verso. ten Kate, Laurens. 2000. “The Gift of Loss: A Study of the Fugitive God in Bataille’s Atheology, with References to Jean-Luc Nancy.” Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives of Negative Theology. Edited by Ilse N. Bulhofand Laurens ten Kate, New York, NY: Fordham University Press. 249–292.

Part 4

Phenomenology and hermeneutics

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17 Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) James G. Hart

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), subsequent to his graduate work at Vienna in ­mathematics, was awakened to philosophy by Franz Brentano. After the early works, The Concept of Number and The Philosophy of Arithmetic, he published in 1900 the first volume of his Logical Investigations. This work inaugurated the “phenomenological movement.” Many brilliant students who were weary with various forms of reductionism and/or what they took for abstract-dialectical idealist constructs were drawn to Husserl, because of a longed-for realism they believed he represented. Whereas for these students Husserl’s Ideas (1913) seemed to regress into a kind of transcendental idealism, it became the basis in 1916, when Husserl moved to Freiburg, for a new wing of this early “movement.” Thus, what was known as “phenomenology” initially had two directions, neither of which met Husserl’s approval. Nevertheless, the movement spread over Europe well into the twentieth century, with its bi-polar tension: the Munich-Göttingen “realist-essential” phenomenology and the “existential-hermeneutical” phenomenology, led by Martin Heidegger, Husserl’s teaching assistant at Freiburg. Husserl’s teachings and writings influenced many distinguished works, but even other movements in twentieth-century philosophy, such as analytic philosophy, phenomenological Marxism, existentialism, hermeneutical and personalist philosophy. Both Husserl and his famous colleague, Max Scheler, appreciated the eidetic richness of Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy, in spite of its psychological apriorism. (It was Scheler who may be said to have written the first and still perhaps best forays into a philosophical phenomenology of religion.) Subsequent generations of major thinkers in the area of philosophical phenomenology of religion, such as Levinas, Ricoeur, Henry, Marion and Sokolowski, are clearly indebted to Husserl’s thought. It was perhaps the influence of Leibniz, Kant, Neo-Kantians and especially Fichte, in his “popular writings,” which nudged him to strive to acknowledge the metaphysical themes and relevance of religion in the articulation of his ­transcendental

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phenomenological idealism. Nevertheless, his writings only sporadically pursued a metaphysical philosophy of religion. Husserliana XLII is the best source for a glimpse of his explicit struggle with the topics.

Absolute consciousness and the relative being of the world Science, much of philosophy and everyday life occurs in the “natural attitude.”1 Modern science is in the “naturalistic natural attitude.” The basic implicit philosophical dogma of the natural attitude is that being is indifferent to mind. Thus, for modern science “being” (ens) is not philosophically convertible with “the true” (verum). Indeed, for most of science and life it is not essential to posit a tie between being and its display to mind. But for transcendental phenomenology, philosophy as the knowledge most worth (wisdom), in the absence of the basic connection of being and its display the truthfulness of being vanishes, the agency of truth is occluded, and spirit rendered irrelevant. A philosophical error that lends support to the implicit dogma of the natural attitude is to think that true knowing of the world may dispense with the appearings, syntax, perspectives and so on of things, for example, as if the paradigmatic knowing were by a creative archetypal mind for which there are no appearances and no absences. But Husserl argues that if God knows the perceptual world as such then God knows things through appearances, that is, where there is an interplay of present and absent perspectives (Husserl 1950/1913, §43). One assumes the phenomenological attitude by disengaging the spontaneous, natural belief or allegiance to the transcendent being in itself. Instead, one attends to how its appearing in this way is inseparable from one’s (or our) agency of manifestation. Assuming the phenomenological attitude does five things. First, it secures, as the proper realm for philosophy, absolute consciousness and the realm displayed by its agency of manifestation. This realm of “immanence” is, in the transcendental attitude, “absolute,” as it does not need something outside of itself for it to be itself; that is, its display is essentially part of its being. This stands in contrast to the transcendent realm of the “world” of perception. Here, what is displayed, for example, the chestnut tree shading the terrace, is, in the natural attitude, simply there, and not relative to the agent of manifestation (Husserl 1950/1913, Chapters 2 and 3).2 Second, and inseparably, in this absolute realm of philosophy, being and its display cannot conceivably be separated. Third, the phenomenological attitude brings to light the ideal of an absolute givenness where there is no dubitability, because there are no absences due to the distinction between the appearing and what appears. Fourth, it makes clear that in the realm of transcendent perceptual reality the distinction between what appears and its appearings is insurmountable, for example, not only is the chestnut tree given from this perspective now, but even this perspective or angle now, will have endless aspects, as we inch this way or that, up or down, enabling the same enduring chestnut tree to appear differently at different nows. Fifth, it undermines the dogma that the being of the world is properly thought of apart from its display.

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The phenomenological attitude’s “placing into parentheses” or “doxastic ­disengagement” of the world and things within the world enables the world to become the world as it appears to me/us. That is, the prior anonymous functioning and agency of manifestation by which the world and the things in the world appear, and appear the way they do, themselves become themes for philosophical reflection. But this “functioning” is not itself known or made present as something real in the world. In interrupting this spontaneous belief or allegiance one does not doubt the things or become sceptical, but one now lets them be as they are appearing to me/us. This is not to say that that they are because I am perceiving them or they are my perceptions. Rather, how they are “in truth” is inseparable from how my truthfulness toward them enables them to appear.3 Thus when we think or speak phenomenologically about what is, we have to do with things as they are presented to us as agents of manifestation. Husserl calls the source of this agency the transcendental “I.”

Teleology and transcendental phenomenological truth Absolute consciousness is ineluctably tied to the drive to display truthfully what exists. As especially the Prolegomenon to the Logical Investigations shows, a theory that makes display, truth or theory impossible cannot be a good theory.4 Much of modern scientistic naturalism is such a bad theory. Despite temptations to scepticism and cynicism, the desire for truth is ineluctable, and the truth of this claim is demonstrated in its various doctrinal defences as well as in forms of denial. It is shown as well in the dynamic, teleological drift of conscious life as “intentional.” The general mode of wakeful engagement with something is a kind of tending and attending to it. It is an act (or series of acts) of “intentionality.” In intending something there is a basic belief in its being. As such, intending is not yet, properly speaking, a question of “truth.” Truth surfaces in connection with my entertaining something proposed for my assent/belief, as in a statement (a proposition): “There’s a lion in the hall.” What the statement enables me to make present is itself not first-personally present to me; it is not given in a “filled intention.” The proposed proposition may be a string of concepts which say much, little or nothing; even if I understand the terms, I myself don’t see for myself that what is being said is really so. “There is a lion in the hall”; “These lymph nodes have metastasized.” Both propositions may be emptily and inauthentically assented to, that is, I may assert them as true without I myself knowing them to be true. For example, I assert them because I trust the expert making the declarative sentence. In such cases, the truth is not given in a filled intention to me but I assent to what I presume is given in a filled intention to another. If I simply assent and pretend to myself and perhaps to others that I am a knower, in the robust sense of having the evidence myself, then it is inauthentic. The goal of knowing is always the adequate givenness, presencing or “filled intention” of what is first “emptily intended.” Consciousness in its desiring, questioning,

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doubting, verifying and so on, is pervaded by a nisus to fill intentions at both the cognitive as well as emotive and conative levels. But there is a difference between the truth of the absolute immanent realm and that of the transcendent world. Everything that we know perceptually in the world, what Husserl generically calls a “thing,” is present as an interplay of empty and filled intentions in the context of an ever-wider horizon, which solicits our interest. That is, things present themselves as fully there “themselves” and yet there are spatial and temporal absent aspects that we co-mean but are not directly given.5 Our life is lived in the tension of having to do presently with what must remain essentially always inadequately given. We intend things but they show up inadequately: as the person appearing to me from this side, but not that, or speaking her mind but my hearing only this part of her thought, for example, hearing her now is after what she just said and before what she is about to say. Much of conscious life, as musing, questioning, believing, reading and hearing about, desiring, fearing, dreading and so on, is soaked with empty intentions. But as questions head toward answers, so desires and fears resolve themselves in forms of filled intentions or the cancelling of the empty intention. Nevertheless, even the answers and the satisfied desires always have unfilled, cointended horizons which themselves are presumed capable of fulfilment. There is not only the fact that there are hidden aspects, but the anticipation of these may be mistaken, as in the other side of the building not being Neo-Gothic too, but surprisingly it turns out to be Byzantine. The previously unseen but anticipated other sides/aspects of, for example, the person, when no longer anticipated but given in a filled intention, will affect the truth or falsity of my prior knowing of what it is I am now perceiving and have perceived. (“He is not so easy to get along with as I previously thought.”) All worldly truths are necessarily corrigible and pervaded by vagueness. Perceptions of things, for example, a cathedral, revealed in the things meant as well as in the meaning acts, are not only an interplay of presence and absence, given and co-meant, filled and empty and so on, there are also nestled layers of appearings of what appears, of immanence and transcendence, and the correlative “constituting” acts. At the bottom level, there are the temporalizings of aspects, the primal presencing of their apppearings. Now which emerge out of portended Not Yets and elapsing into No Longers, all passively and synthetically connected together. Founded on these are the (immanent) given sides or aspects of sides, for example, of the building, that are transcendent to the appearing aspects (of the sides of the building). As given aspects or sides, they are related to what is not (yet) given or beyond the given, for example, the (transcendent) whole building or the city’s or earth’s changing patterns. On the one hand, we have to do with the inside of the cathedral, or the building behind it. The whole of the cathedral “itself” is given only inadequately in this present side, and “it itself” transcends each presentation through a side or aspect. Thus, we perceive wholes, even the transcendent whole of the planet or the phenomenological whole of the absolute horizon of “the world,” but we see them through the (immanent) aspects which only partially present the whole, for example, the entrance to the cathedral.

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And as all the aspects adumbrate or profile the apperceived “thing itself ” (e.g. the cathedral), so the apperceived, that is, co-perceived or marginally perceived, social, architectural and natural world, and ultimately the phenomenological ultimate setting or “world,” is incessantly profiled by not only the things but also by the spatial and temporal aspects of these things, and by the raw sensa or constitutive foundations of these things. And world is transcendent to any thing and all things, just as the things transcend their sides and aspects, and these transcend the ongoing pulses of temporalizing. Of basic importance for Husserl’s religious-philosophical position is to grasp that although the “constitution” of the world is interlaced with I-acts like judgments, for which one is responsible, these build on and presuppose the pre-reflectively lived wunder, “miracle,” and “grace” of the automatic, passivesynthetic linkage of wholes and parts, and foundings and founded, which Husserl calls proto-rationality (Husserl 1956, 394; see Kern 1964). This means that each I-act is passively-synthetically based on layers of sedimented prior achievements, but also passive-synthetically integrated into ever larger temporal and conceptual identity syntheses and wholes. And this universal synthesis of “world” happens incessantly on its own without I myself doing anything. As we shall see, at the same time, this gracious happening is a pervasive teleological necessity: beata necessitas boni. All conscious life is pervaded by a founding temporal streaming presencing, which passively synthesizes all of what we experience, and which accounts for the organic unity of temporal-spatial parts and wholes, the immanences and transcendences of what we perceive. Our perception of the world or any spatial thingtemporal thing is comparable to hearing a more or less melodic whole where the present occurrences (sounding notes, noises, words, aspects, etc.) are “immanent parts” of the (transcendent) “melody.” Of course, it typically is a spatial-temporal event (as the passing sides of the barn evident from my moving car). These notes/ parts themselves are informed by what immediately preceded and by our ineluctably anticipating what is to follow. This all occurs “on its own,” apart from my active responsible agency. The present (note of the melody or aspect of the barn) is thick with the absent past (notes or aspects) and future (notes or aspects). We may say that this temporal flow is a proto-doxastic undercurrent where the truth of experiences, for example, this building having a Neo-Gothic style not only here but also on the other side, is presumed quite automatically in our ongoing perception. And if it does turn out to have such a side, then the next coming side that is contiguous with it will likely have the same style, reflected in, for example, its windows, arches, the tower and so on. If it does not so turn out, then there is a cancellation of the respective prior anticipations. Thereby the sense of the whole is modified. For example, one now says: This is not a Neo-Gothic cathedral but an eclectic patched quilt of competing styles. The world is present as that within which we continuously perceive things that are constantly in flux. Yet it is always the same ultimate setting or horizon, analogous to the perception of a building which we are passing. As “the building” is the context for the sides and aspects directly now perceived as “sides of this building,”

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so everything is present within as well as a presence of the world. But in contrast to things within the world, which individuate one another, there is no evident external horizon to the world individuating it, even though there might be some religious-philosophical reason to think of the world itself as having a telos or ideal transcendent to the actual world. A teleology pervades one’s life in the world. This is founded on a general “latent will-horizon,” which is the motor of the wunder of all intentional life, not just the appetitive, conative, voluntary and cognitive, but also the founding streaming primal presencing’s passive syntheses. Indeed, individual and communal consciousness themselves are a striving, prior to any individual or communal acts of intellect or will, for what may be explicated subsequently as a perfect unity and synthesis of all acts of manifestation and will. This “general will” pervades both individual and communal consciousness. In the former it awakens what Husserl calls the “absolute ought” and in the communalized monad the ideal of an eutopian “we,” or analogous “I” of Is, which Husserl calls a “godly person of a higher order.” But in each case, we have to do with infinite regulative ideals. Human persons are consigned never to arrive at a state of satisfaction because the filling of the infinite intentions of the mind and will awakened to the infinite ideals, remains, as what is within the horizon, inadequate to the ideals which are essentially horizonal (Husserl 1973c, 404–305).6

The first truth of phenomenology and the theological question In disengaging the naturalness of the natural attitude Husserl retrieves ancient ­Aristotelian themes, for example, that a task of metaphysics is the study of being as the true. Furthermore, metaphysics has to do with the first principles upon which everything depends and yet at the start are hidden from us because they are what we take most for granted. Thus, bringing them to light already presupposes them. The transcendental reduction, in other words, the disengagement of the natural attitude by which things appear to us in such a way that how they appear to be is indifferent to the agency of manifestation, purports to bring to light that by which and through which everything is brought to light and which is always already presupposed in all making sense and bringing to light. Yet, properly speaking, as transcendental phenomenology, it only brings to light the process and agency of articulating the world and the principles at play in this articulation, that is, that through which the world appears and what is anonymous in the natural attitude. It attends to the essential features of that through which the world is displayed but neglects (pre-supposes) the “from which” of the display itself, that is, that beginning principle of luminosity, which intentional consciousness, meaning and so on, presuppose and upon which they may be said to “depend.” Even though the “through which” (the transcendental I’s directed agency of manifestation) is, as presencing what is present, not strictly “present” or “given” but rather lived (erlebt) and that to which, from which, and by which everything is given or manifest, we may still attend to it as manifest in a way that any spatial

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perspectivality makes no sense. (Perceptions, doubtings, rememberings, syntactic ties and so on, are not spatially extended, and are not given in one spatial aspect or profile at a time, nor are there any hidden aspects.) And because there are no hidden aspects the manifestness of such agency is such that any modalization, for example, doubting, of it on the basis of hidden aspects or essential ambiguity, makes no sense. Here the pervasive feature of life, as the pursuit of truth through striving to fill empty cognitive intentions, is pre-empted in a prior manifestness of transcendental life to itself. Here, there is a contrast to the knowledge of transcendent things in the world, because the distinction of knower and known is nullified by reason of transcendental life’s self-luminosity. Further, whereas every other belief, truth-claim, state of affairs can, in a thoughtexperiment, be mentally eliminated, cancelled, modalized, and submitted to radical doubt, this manifestness (“first truth”) of transcendental life to itself may not be so cancelled or modalized. Furthermore, whatever consideration we bring to mind may become an essential consideration, as an eidos or essence, for example, the NSA’s surveillance of my present thoughts on Husserl as registered in my computer, and may be so entertained without its necessarily enjoying actual existence. In contrast, the eidos of the transcendental I as the agency of manifestation is not able to be thought of without its necessarily actually existing. Thus, here there is a kind of “ontological argument” for the first principle of phenomenology (Husserl 1973c, 385–386; Husserl 2014, 122). The necessity of the I is tied to its being necessary for the present display and displaying. All the necessities and contingencies it displays are necessarily related back to the manifesting transcendental I—who is a primal fact, but not a fact in the same sense as facts in the world, for the reasons mentioned above. This facticity eludes elucidation. One simply is given, yet I can lay no claim to responsibility for it/me nor can I get beyond it/me. As the agent and dative of manifestation and as the lived, non-reflective sourcepole and presupposition of all that is given, the transcendental I is not something we ever can strive for. Because it enjoys an ineliminable and ineluctable nearness, its presence is exemplarily “adequate” in so far as there is no possible distance or disagreement between meant and given. Indeed, the very theme of adequation is out of place here because the self-givenness of oneself to oneself is never in question, never an empty intention needing to be filled. If the ideal of evidence is apodicticity and the filling of what was meant in its absence as it was so meant (i.e. “truth”), we here have, in the case of the manifestness or self-luminosity of the transcendental I or absolute consciousness, the “first truth” and an evidence that of necessity always goes in advance of all evidences, and where the possibility of error, hallucination, deception, etc. are excluded in principle (Husserl 1976; Hua III/2, 632).7 This is the “first truth” and clearly it is not a truth of or in the world. It is typical of all other truths that they may be shown to be true by the display of other subsequent and/or prior considerations or manifestations. But there is no such demonstration of this truth because all manifestation always already p­ resupposes it.

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Manifestation and/or manifestness of the primal presencing is a “fact” and any effort to demonstrate this fact already presupposes it.8 Further, whereas every other belief or being or event, even that of the world itself (as Husserl shows in numerous thought-experiments), may be presented as having come to be and as no longer (e.g. it is necessarily true that it will have been), this first truth of manifestness cannot conceivably be present to oneself as coming to be or passing away, for all manifest becoming happens within its horizon. There is no horizon within which it is true that manifestness will have been. Similarly, all persons whom I take to be other Is die, and I believe that I, as incarnately presentable other to the other I, will die. Yet I, as first-personally lived in the transcendentally reduced attitude, am non-ephemeral and non-destructible; my beginning and ending are not able to be presenced. To presence first-personally my beginning I would have to be before I began. To presence first-personally my ending or being no more, I would have to exist after I ceased to exist. Of course, it may be that second- or third-personally I appear to die without my being able to presence it, that I die without my knowing it. The implication of this might suggest the correctness of the natural attitude of naturalism and this would seem to be an instance of the general truth that manifestness may come into being and be extinguished unmanifestly, that there is no “first truth” of manifestness, that elimination of display is metaphysically insignificant to being, that ens et verum are not convertible, and the metaphysical significance assigned to the agency of manifestation and spirit are mere fantasies of Husserlian phenomenology. But showing the hegemony of physics and neuro-physiology in regard to the world’s appearing meets the resistance of the evident essential heterogeneity of the explanandum and the explanans, in other words, it would display the incommensurability of the manifestation and the agency of manifestation with the correlative neurophysiological events. And showing this would manifest being’s inseparability from display.9 The transcendental I as the first phenomenological truth is, as self-luminous manifestness, necessary to the world manifested and is the absolute substance upon which the displayed world rests. But it does not give itself to itself. It is an odd fact and not one in the world.Yet that it is, and is transcendentally manifesting, is a fact. The transcendental I myself is always also an incarnate person who is radically contingent and historically enmeshed with Others in the world. As such I am amenable to a “definite description,” but such “eidetic singularity” cannot capture the radical singularity or unique essence of what/whom “I” refers to. “I” refers to me without the need of any third-person non-indexical terms. “I,” as transcendental I-pole of the agency of manifestation, am not a universal “agent intellect” but an individuality per se and not per accidens, a radical singularity, a “pure, non-sortal solus ipse.” In contrast, I, considered as embodied in the world, am distinguishable by being endlessly individuated by acquiring properties.10 “World” too is per se individual, and is at once fundamentally “my world” but also profoundly sortal, and, through appresentation, profoundly intersubjective, communicable, and shareable.

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From the transcendental phenomenological perspective this first ­ principle (“absolute substance” and “absolute consciousness”) is phenomenologically ­ultimate. It has its ground in its “groundless being.” This absolute substance as ultimate necessity is the concretum with respect to which everything else is abstract. It is that within which everything else is brought to light and within which all acts, considerations, moments, modes, etc. of necessity inhere (Husserl 1973c, 386, 668–669; Husserl 3003, 70–72; Kern 1975, 339–341; Hart 1986, 130–132; Hart 1995, 146–148). The facticity of this ultimate self-grounding phenomenological necessity raises questions about a deeper theological possibility. But the “necessity,” “facticity” and “contingency” of the primal presencing as the first principle of phenomenology may not be thought of in terms of the necessities and contingencies that are present for it within its horizon, that of the world. As the source of all display of being, nothing can be given behind or prior to the “metafact” of this Whence. This is because everything about which we can say, “it is,” must be something appearing for or “in” or “to” this absolute consciousness. This is not to say that everything of a supernatural, theological nature is to be ruled out. But if God may be said to “exist” in some sense, God can only be presenced to, and God’s manifestness grounded in, the agency of manifestation or the display by absolute consciousness. “God” is not “there” in any sense unless somehow manifest to, articulated by, absolute consciousness. This is the only path open for our knowledge of any intentional presencings of whatsoever consideration.11 Husserl’s reflection on God borrows from the cultural inheritance of the ­Abrahamic religions. It is “impossible” for God to be a being within or a part of the world in the sense that “God” would be commensurate with the world and inferior to absolute consciousness. God must be transcendent in a way surpassing even the world’s transcendence. And, similarly absurd or impossible would be to think of God as immanently present (“constituted”) in absolute consciousness as an “experience” within the stream of consciousness. And yet if God “exists” God must at once “constitute” and surpass the transcendence in immanence of the pure I of the agency of manifestation. As the I is at once immanent within all the stream of consciousness as the “owner” and yet transcendent to any of the ingredients or moments of the stream, similarly God would have to transcend the I of absolute consciousness and yet somehow account for this I. Thus, God would be absolute “in a totally different sense from the absolute of consciousness, as on the other hand, it would be transcendent in a totally different sense than that of the world” (Husserl 1950, §58).12 Thus, for God to be God for transcendental phenomenology God must account for, be “shown” to be more basic than, the absolute consciousness or absolute substance, and thus be a second or ultimate absolute consciousness or substance that accounts for the whence of all display. God thus must be absolute in a way

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that is different than absolute consciousness. Yet, this absolute is only able to be manifested within absolute consciousness’ agency of manifestation. Thus for Husserl, God is a theme only through this agency of manifestation: “Even God is for me what God is by way of my own achievement of consciousness.”13 The luminosity of self-awareness or absolute consciousness is the “metafact” founding or presupposed by all other displays, even the displays of the supernatural transcendent realm, but which itself cannot be displayed by something outside itself, but only presupposed. “Only when the nature of transcendental consciousness is understood, can the transcendence of God be understood” (Cairns 1976, 46; cf. Hart 1986, 102–3). All religion is naïve until it permits its doctrines to be measured against absolute consciousness. It seems transcendental phenomenology cannot offer a demonstration of “the second absolute” which would account for the contingency of the (first) “­ absolute substance” uncovered by transcendental phenomenology; it cannot manifest the foundation of the contingent fact of the self-luminous self-awareness upon which all manifestation is based without presupposing this very “metafact.” But Husserl believes transcendental phenomenology shows a kind of divine teleology and necessity in the heart of this metafact upon which the inexorable agency of m ­ anifestation is based. Thus, the ultimate focus of Husserl’s philosophical theology is not in displaying “a second absolute substance,” or why there is “the luminously true” c­ learing of meaning rather than dumb dark meaningless black silence. Rather Husserl’s focus is the rational-teleological way in which rational presencing occurs, and the ­transcendental-transcendent conditions for the possibility of this presencing. A consequence of this is that the first truth of phenomenology must give way to the ideal of truth and of all truths, in other words, to the idea that all truths must be tied to an absolutely necessary, not factual, I that has all truths in its self-presence and who/which is an intellect that can be the origination of all possible truths and all Is. The ideal of truth becomes eventually the ideal of a necessary subject of all truths (Husserl 2014, 172–3).14

Phenomenological metaphysics and the divine entelechy15 Phenomenology, as pure eidetic transcendental phenomenology, deals with the essential structures through which the world is displayed. Yet Husserl was always concerned with how this realm of essence, ideas, and essential possibility fit with and emerged out of facticity. A discipline was needed which wrestled with what he called the “destiny of reason.” He called the pure eidetic a priori science “first philosophy” or ontology. “First philosophy’s” application to, or synthesis with, facticity and contingency, was named “second philosophy” or “metaphysics.” The latter was concerned with how the a priori forms and rationality of transcendental subjectivity amount to, mesh with, and survive the facticity of empirical nature so that there results a “nature” as described by natural science. If transcendental phenomenology uncovers the essence of consciousness and rationality, how do we think about teleology in non-conscious nature (how does nature have ends without

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having purposes?). Likewise, how do we think of infant, anomalous and animal consciousness, to which we normal adult humans have no first-person access? Of special interest for “metaphysics” is the facticity of transcendental subjectivity’s own proto-rational beginnings in instinct and the emergence into the forms and the logos of the higher-order achievements. Given the antipodes within transcendental subjectivity of facticity and necessity, irrationality and rationality, metaphysics has the task of revealing the unity. “Metaphysics” chiefly accounts for how the world, with its realm of essences, necessity and causality, is founded on, constitutionally, the hyletic facticity of the primal streaming; how what is propter hoc can be founded in a realm of contingent post hoc (Husserl 1973a, 357; see Hart 1986, especially 124–129). This world building with its teleological dynamism toward ever greater synthesis and harmony is not absolutely necessary. But, nevertheless, in spite of and on the basis of this facticity there is de facto a world laced with necessities and values all integrated into a relative harmony tied to a unifying world-pole. Husserl believed the rationality and teleology of the constitution of the world and the constituted world required a transcendent power. This power informed the facticity, which was at both the constituting basement (primal presencing) as well as in every subsequent phase of the world’s presence. Classical accounts of God (e.g. Aristotle and Brentano) tend to describe God in human terms and work from the teleology of the realm of natural things or human-made things. They thus apply this teleology to the divine mind. In contrast, Husserl saw the proper task to see in the immanent first-personally lived teleology of transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity the divine as the key to meaning in the individual, history and nature (Husserl Nachlass MS, K III 1; cf. Husserl 2014, 209–211; see Hart 1986, 116). Here the (Aristotelian) concept of “entelechy” becomes the explanatory principle of phenomenological metaphysics. There are here two basic considerations, “form” and “telos.” “Entelechy” explicates the basic formal style of transcendental life: life lived by the egoic nisus toward filling empty intentions (“truthing”) and toward the horizon of the ideal world-pole. It also explicates the I-pole as principle of the whence informing the lived factual passive synthesizing presencing. Entelechy is constituted by both form and telos or goal. “Entelechy” is the way the end-pole (telos or perfection) of the being is present and possessed actively (hechein) within (en) the I-pole in a way which is not yet complete. The proper perfection or actuality (entelecheia) of the egoic form of being is essentially related to an already, or not yet, realized potentiality or possibility (dynamis). Husserl points out that the analogy of entelechy here limps because, in contrast to developing organisms (e.g. acorns to oaks), the telos of transcendental subjectivity is an open infinity of infinite ideals and not a finite perfection of a form. Think of reason as the way egoic life is enabled to make present essential looks (eidé), which are joined by ideal part-whole, causal and essential relations (“this on account of that,” “this reminds me of that”), all of which are interplays of presence and absence, filled and empty intentions, and identity and difference. “Entelechy” accounts for why such achievements of reason suffuse the presencing of being and

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why the particular achievements are part of an infinite nisus to an ideal pole of synthesis in which are joined ens, verum et bonum (Husserl 2014, 250). The primal streaming bears witness to consciousness’ wondrous linkages of the formal necessary unifications riding on the contingent presencings. Teleology is “the form of all forms.” This is not because it is for us the first form to which all being must make reference and which is manifest in all beings of experience. Rather, it is, in the order of appearing, for us last, but in itself it is first. That is, we are drawn first of all to given forms, but because being is most basically absolute transcendental subjectivity, particular forms must be understood ultimately in the light of this subjectivity’s agency as informed by a universal creative will. This “divine” will is in tension or “contradiction” with itself in so far as entelechy renders the being existing at once in relative true being and in relative not yet or non-being with regard to the world of monads that it informs. In any case this divine will encompasses the totality of forms into itself in its work of “eternal creation … from the nothingness” of relative non-being, that is, from the realm of dormancy or only potentially conscious wakefulness to the matters of truth and falsehood (Husserl 1973c, 380–81). Yet Husserl also claims that God is utterly transcendent. Only transcendental naivety would think that there could be an infinity of possible worlds. All such worlds are declensions of the world that is valid for us. This world of transcendental intersubjectivity is founded in the one God who is uniquely singular and necessary, a being who is not an eidos, but a super-actual essence, who bears in Godself all true being beyond all relativity of perspectives and horizontality (Husserl 2014, 251). Leibniz’s universal monadology, with its analogy of more or less self-aware, striving substances under the sway of the divine monad of monads, was an inspiration for Husserl’s metaphysics. Throughout all the monads is a universal teleology anchored first of all in the divine will manifesting itself in a system of a priori “instincts” which, prior to conscious purposes and prior to a self-conscious embrace of the universal telos, propel them. For transcendental reflection, each absolute monadic consciousness exhibits a self-constituting entelechy under the sway of the overarching divine entelechy. The basic latent will-horizon is the core of Husserl’s theory of “God,” both as super-essence as well as divine entelechy, because it reveals the lived dynamism toward the One, the True, and the Good. As a general “latent will” it refers to the transcendence in immanence of the I-pole, a “retroscendence” (vis á tergo). At the same time, “latent will-horizon” indicates the radical transcendence towards which the will is drawn, thus a vis á fronté. These are two moments of the one divine dynamism which at once is a divine and human achievement. Thus, the divine is both beyond the transcendence of the world and immanent to the transcendent immanence of the transcendental I which indwells every moment of my stream of consciousness as the dative and nominative pole, without being a part or a content of the stream. The divine is thus the ne plus ultra transcendence toward which each monad moves through knowing, desiring, loving, or

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imagining: it is that than which nothing more beautiful, true, good, perfect, can be conceived or aspired to. At the same time the divine is immanent as informing the I’s primal streaming and higher-order acts.

The absolute ought and faith This transcendent-transcendental divine will works at the foundational levels of the consciousness of inner time. And it works also in the higher founded layers of the individual and intersubjective acts by which one responsibly and reflectively constitutes both a unified world as a common good and oneself as an agent within it in tune with the “truth of will” or “absolute ought.” These are key aspects of Husserl’s moral theory (see the last half of Husserl 2014, 183 ff.; also Hart 2009, Book 2, Ch. V). It is not possible that God be an object of a possible experience, as another person or a thing. But given Husserl’s theory of divine entelechy, God would be pre-reflectively experienced or lived “in each belief that believes originallyteleologically in the eternal value of that which lies in the direction of each absolute ought and which engages itself for this eternal meaning” (Husserl 2014, 242). Husserl speaks of the divine will as “the universal absolute will, which lives in all transcendental subjects, and which makes possible the individual-concrete being of the transcendental all-subjectivity.” The divine will presupposes the total monadic intersubjectivity, but not as if transcendental intersubjectivity preceded it as possible without the divine will (as one might think the soul presupposes the body), “but rather as a structural level without which this divine will cannot be concrete” (Husserl 1973c, 381).16 Existentially-ethically the core revelation of the divine will is in what Husserl calls the “absolute ought,” wherein the single individual experiences attunement to the divine entelechy in “the truth of will.” Persons are called to a blessed life. The chief feature of so living is responding to the call to an authentic constitution of oneself in the world with Others. A marker of this authentic response is a vocational choice with which one identifies in a way that will be free of regrets. Another essential aspect is a discernment of the revelation of the “absolute ought,” or “the one thing necessary,” that is, of what one must do if one is to live with oneself, in the midst of the crises and irrationalities of life. It is a form of inadequately filling the massive empty intention of the drift of one’s life and embracing a value that is not able to be surpassed or absorbed by any other. “Metaphysics” becomes quotidian in the challenge to the “absolute ought” by death and other surds. Whereas the annihilation of the world is a frequent thoughtexperimental theme in Husserl, the threat of ultimate meaninglessness, due to life’s real irrationalities, shadows all radical reflection. Yet, I cannot pursue a life of meaning unless I can believe that what matters most to me and my community is realizable. I must be able to believe, and believe myself capable of appropriate thought and action in the face of threats of possible extinction and universal decay. I must nurture an attitude that fate is not essentially hostile to me and humanity. In the face of the appearance of total disaster it is permissible to strive to overestimate

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the probabilities in a way which in theory is reprehensible. In this respect, Husserl’s theory of moral perception and education is similar to that of both Aristotle and Scheler. Thus, he holds that edification and encouragement from the example of heroes and saints must be our daily bread. Here Husserl combines an appropriation of the traditional notion of grace and an endorsement of “perhaps Kant’s greatest discovery,” namely the theory of postulates: We must always postulate any beliefs that keep open the world’s horizon as a hopeful space for meaningful engaged agency (see Kern 1964, 302).17 This desire and “will to believe” is not a voluntaristic caprice; rather, “I believe from the necessity of being I and a member of humanity, and existing in regard to my actual surrounding as a beneficent agent” (Husserl 2014, 407). I must believe to be who I most fundamentally am called to be and want to be. If I want to be informed by true and absolute values that are free of sin and error, I must be able to believe that everything serves the Good and that good intentions count for something in the ultimate scheme of things. But to do all this I must believe in the divine teleological power holding sway over life and the world. Thus, to believe in myself and my power to develop into my true self, I must believe in God, and “as long as I live in faith and in the direction of my calling, God’s power lives in me” (Husserl 2014, 407). Here, Husserl acknowledges the grace of “faith” as the source of the strength of one’s life. But upon reflection one may think of it as a postulate of practical reason functioning naively prior to philosophy and theology which offer grounds for one’s faith. This is not to say faith’s so functioning is thereby rendered nugatory (Husserl 2014, 254–255).

Conclusion Although twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy bears witness, for example, through the journals and congresses, the enduring legacy of Husserl, what is called in America the philosophy of religion has little or no interest in his work. But, of course, as long as basic philosophical issues are at stake Husserl’s voice tends to be heard, especially when it comes to naturalist reductionism, ontologies of meaning and reference, philosophy of language, temporality, “transcendence,” consciousness and subjectivity. Recently “continental philosophy” has taken a “theological turn” wherein the major themes of the conversation rest on taking a stance toward distinctions, most of which make their first appearance in Husserlian phenomenology. Similarly, twentieth-century theology is characterized by themes of existentialism and hermeneutics, and these developments, such as in existential theology and Transcendental Thomism, and their major opponents, for example, Neo-Orthodox “dialectical theology,” are marked directly or indirectly by Husserlian discussions. Finally, religious studies departments began as reactions to the perception of a mistreatment by other university disciplines of the phenomena of religion. Religion was typically studied by historians, philosophers, theologians, sociologists, psychologists, neural scientists, archeologists and so on, all in terms

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of their own disciplines and assumptions. Most religious studies departments in the late 1960’s honoured in their incipiency the works of Otto, Eliade, Van der Leeuw and so on, as offering an alternative to reigning academic studies of religion, in other words, one could study religion “phenomenologically” in its own ways of appearing by way of conceptual, essential or eidetic analysis. This work, for all of its merits, was philosophically thin—there were few necessities brought to light and “essence analyses” were confused with or reduced to contingent generalities or morphologies drawn from historical comparisons. Furthermore, transcendental constitutional analyses were missing. Before long, the other disciplines could show the deficiencies in what was then called “phenomenological approaches to religion,” for example, in Eliade’s discussions of a morphological type based on historical religions like Shamanism or Yogic meditation. And even though the essential place of, for example, Jaspersian “limit-situations” (cf. the anthropologist, Paul Radin’s “crisis situations” and the philosopher, Stephen Toulmin’s “limit-questions”) were occasionally recognized, the phenomenological analyses of existence, death, birth, affliction and so on (as were to be found in Jaspers and Heidegger, and other phenomenological-existential philosophers) were surprisingly missing. The chief deficit today perhaps is a general failure on all sides to appreciate Husserl’s theories of consciousness, intentionality and critique of all forms of reductionism, especially the basic thesis that a theory that makes theory impossible cannot be a good theory. Likewise, the picture of Husserl as an agnostic whose horizon of interests was restricted to those of, for example, a mathematician, logician, epistemologist, foundationalist and critic of scientism, needs to be supplemented by studying why Husserl found it philosophically and existentially necessary to make repeated, if not frequent, forays into metaphysics and religious matters.

Notes   1 For the natural and transcendental attitude as well as Husserl’s critique of scientism and naturalism, see Husserl (1962).   2 For philosophical-theological analyses, see Boehm (1968, 84–105).   3 I have been helped by John Maraldo’s reading of this paper.   4 See Husserl (1913, §32), and the discussion of “psychologism” that leads up to this.   5 In this section, we rehearse basic themes from Husserl’s major works; for excellent introductions, see Sokolowski (2000) and Sokolowski (1974).   6 For “personality of a higher order” and religious-philosophical aspects of Husserl’s theory of community, see Hart (1992, Chapters 3–5).   7 These are all themes orchestrated in Michel Henry’s writings, e.g. Henry (1996).   8 For the topic of “metafact,” I have been helped by J. J. Valberg (2007, especially 192–195).   9 The reflections on the beginninglessness and endlessness of the transcendental I are scattered throughout the Nachlass. See Husserl (1966, 377–381); Husserl (2002, 141–146); Husserl (2006, 96–106; 417–430; 435–443); Husserl (2008), 224–230; Husserl (2014, 1–25, 78–82). See also Hart (2009, Book 1, Ch. VII–VIII); also Hart (1993, 17–45). 10 See Hart (2009, Vol. 1, especially Ch. 8) for Husserl on the radical singularity of “I.” 11 A particularly good but dense text presenting transcendental phenomenology’s claim to be absolute and where theological implications are tacitly subsumed under the foundations of transcendental phenomenology, is Husserl (2003, 70–72): “Consciousness shows itself to be the ultimate principle, as the άρχή, which preserves and bears all other Being

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in itself and yet bears Being in itself not as a piece or part or moment, and even less as something fictionally projected.” 12 There are many hints at Husserl’s philosophical phenomenological theology scattered throughout his writings, but the chief texts perhaps are the very brief sketches in Ideas I, §§51 and 58. Now one can consult the excellent collection of texts in Husserl (2014), along with the editors’ fine introduction. Hart (1986, 89 ff.) attempts a systematic synthesis. Cf. also: Strasser (1959); Laycock (1988); Hart (1992a) and Hart (1992b, especially Chapters III–IV); Hart (1994, 265 ff.); Bello (2009). 13 “Aus meiner eigenen Bewustseinsleistung.” That this is remote from Feuerbach is evident in what Husserl goes on to say: “Even here I must not look aside for fear of a supposed blasphemy, but rather must see the problem. Even here, just as in the case of the alterego, the achievement of consciousness will hardly signify that I invent and create [mache] this highest transcendence” (Husserl 1974, 58). 14 But does this not stand in tension with the critique of Kant’s archetypal intellect? See discussion at n. 2. 15 For “divine entelechy” see, e.g. Husserl (2014, 102, 166, 176, 242, 336, 450). 16 Here we draw near to a panentheism, while passing over in silence the question of whether the theological ultimate is a “second absolute” that creates from nothing the absolute of transcendental subjectivity. 17 The letter to Cassirer is April 3, 1925. The best analyses and statements of Husserl’s application of the theory of postulates are perhaps Husserl (1959, 336–355) and Husserl (2014, passim, perhaps especially 253–256, 400–407).

References Bello, Angela Ales. 2009. The Divine in Hussserl and Other Explorations, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XCVIII. Boehm, Rudolf. 1968. Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phänomenologie. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Cairns, Dorion. 1976. Conversations with Husserl and Fink. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Hart, James G. 1986. “A Précis of an Husserlian Philosophical Theology.” Essays in Phenomenological Theology. Edited by Steven W. Laycock & James G. Hart, 89–168. New York, NY: SUNY. Hart, James G. 1992a. The Person and the Common Life. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer. Hart, James G. 1992b. “Entelechy in Transcendental Phenomenology.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66 (2): 189–212. Hart, James G. 1993. “Phenomenological Time: Its Religious Significance.” Religion and Time. Edited by Anindita Niyogi Balslev and J. N. Mohanty. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill. Hart, James G. 1994. “The Study of Religion in Husserl’s Writings.” Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines. Edited by Mano Daniel and Lester Embree 265–296. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer. Hart, James G. 1995. “Husserl and Fichte.” Husserl Studies 12 (2): 135–163. Hart, James G. 2009. Who One Is, Books 1 and 2. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Henry, Michel. 2006. C’est Moi La Vérité. Paris, France: Édition du Seuil. Husserl, Edmund. 1913/1900. Logische Untersuchungen, Vol. I, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer. Husserl, Edmund. 1950/1913. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1956. Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Vol. I, Husserliana VII. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Husserl, Edmund. 1959. Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Vol. II, Husserliana VIII. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1963. Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und Transzendentale Phänomenologie, Husserliana VI. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1973a. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Vol. I, Husserliana XIII. Edited by Iso Kern. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1973c. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Vol. III, Husserliana XV. Edited by Iso Kern. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1974. Formale und Transzendentale Logik. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1976. Ideen zu einer Reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie, Husserliana III/2, Ergänzende Texte. Edited by Karl Schuhmann. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 2003. Transzendental Idealismus, Husserliana XXXVI. Edited by Robin D. Rollinger and Rochus Sowa. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer. Husserl, Edmund. 2006. Späte Texte über Zeitkonstitution (1929–1934), Husserliana Materialien, Vol 8. Edited by Dieter Lohmar. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Husserl, Edmund. 2008. Die Lebenswelt, Husserliana XXXIX. Edited by Rochs Sowa. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Husserl, Edmund. 2014. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, Husserliana XLII. Edited by Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Kern, Iso, 1964. Husserl und Kant. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Kern, Iso, 1975. Die Idee und Methode der Philosophie. Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter. Laycock, Stephen. 1988. Foundations for a Phenomenological Theology. Lewiston/Queenston: Edwin Mellen. Sokolowski, Robert. 1974. Husserlian Meditations. Evanston, IL: Northwestern. Sokolowski, Robert. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Strasser, Stephen. 1959. “Das Gottesproblem in der Spätphilosophie Edmund Husserls.” Philosophisches Jahrbuch der Görresgesellschaft (67): 130–142. Valberg, J. J. 2007. Death, Dream, and the Self. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

18 Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) Ben Vedder

Martin Heidegger, born in Messkirch (Germany) in 1889, was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His father, a sexton of the Roman Catholic Church in the village, had his house just in front of the side-entrance of the church, so Heidegger’s youth was deeply marked by religious activities. It was not remarkable, then, that he studied theology in Freiburg and later philosophy in the same city. As a young teacher of philosophy, he was very successful. He tried to develop a philosophy that did not start with the abstract concepts used in Thomism or Neo-Kantian philosophy. He wanted to start from life as it is experienced in our daily concerns and praxis. He wanted to begin with human facticity. Under the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology, he repeats the question of being as a historical question, meaning that being is to be fundamentally understood within the limits of the human’s historical situation. In a certain sense, it is a radicalization of Kant and Dilthey. Whereas Kant and Dilthey find these limits in a-historical and universal conditions, Heidegger finds these limits in the historicity of human existence. After a short period of teaching in Marburg in 1928 he became Husserl’s successor in Freiburg. In Marburg, he prepared his most influential work, Being and Time, published in 1927. After a period of successful teaching, in 1933 he was asked to become Rector of the university. This is a dark page in his history, about which there is still a lot of discussion. As a teacher, Heidegger used to write down the complete texts of his lecture courses, in which he mainly interpreted great philosophers from the history of philosophy, such as Parmenides, Plato Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and others. These texts are published in the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, which contains about 100 volumes. Shortly after the publication of the first volume in 1976, Heidegger died and was buried in Messkirch. Heidegger’s relationship with religion is very complicated. His philosophical claim is that religious faith is completely different from philosophy, in that both

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represent different engagements. For Heidegger faith is in the first instance religious faith, and because of this he excludes faith from thinking. But to the extent that there is meaning in religious faith, it is seen as an expression of the fundamental ontological structure of Dasein, an expression of the formal structure of Dasein’s facticity. We see this in the earliest writings of Heidegger, and especially in the essay “Phenomenology and Theology,” where the difference between faith and philosophy is most clearly expressed. He even considers both as mortal enemies. Nevertheless, he often uses religious words like “God,” “Gods,” and “Holy,” in his work, and even speaks about “the last God.” Accordingly, this chapter discusses Heidegger’s relationship to religion under the following themes: Heidegger’s interpretation of early Christianity; philosophy and religious faith as mortal enemies; and a possible meaning of the last God.

Heidegger’s interpretation of early christianity Heidegger understands the human being (Dasein) first and foremost as a radical historical being. The human being performs historicity and lives completely within the limits of future, past and present. In Heidegger’s earliest lecture course The Phenomenology of the Religious Life (Heidegger 2004), which focused on St Paul and Augustine, we see how he brings the content of faith back to an historical ontological level, which is his main concern.1 He writes in his lecture course on Paul: Real philosophy of religion arises not from preconceived concepts of philosophy and religion. Rather, the possibility of its philosophical understanding arises out of a certain religiosity—for us, the Christian religiosity. Why exactly the Christian religiosity lies in the focus of our study, that is a difficult question; it is answerable only through the solution of the problem of the historical connections. The task is to gain a real and original relationship to history, which is to be explicated from out of our own historical situation and facticity. At issue is what the sense of history can signify for us, so that the ‘objectivity’ of the historical ‘in itself’ disappears. History exists only from out of a present. Only thus can the possibility of a philosophy of religion be begun. (Heidegger, 2004, 89) To catch a glimpse of this original historical facticity, Heidegger develops a hermeneutics of Paul’s letters, especially of the first letter to the Thessalonians. The crucial question in this connection is: how are we to understand the coming of Christ as a moment of historicity? The coming of Christ is the content of an image that refers to a future event. The sense of orientation given in it is that both the coming and that in which the coming is to take place—time—are represented as beings (entities) that are present at hand. Things that are present at hand are considered to be there just like objects that can be mastered and determined by human action.

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However, Paul’s concern is not with a coming that will take place at a certain fixed time. He writes, “For you know perfectly well that the day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night” (1 Thess. 5:2). The kind knowing Paul refers to, then, has to do with the sense of the coming. Against this background, Paul stands opposed to two groups and two ways of living. The first group is those who see the coming of Christ as something that is to happen at a certain fixed time. The way of living that corresponds to this group is one that looks for certainty and peace; it is the life of those living in darkness because they lack the illumination of authentic knowing. They are unaware that Christ comes like a thief in the night. Members of the second group are those who know about the coming of Christ as something indeterminate, and they live in insecurity and uncertainty. According to Heidegger, the latter is a moment of the actualization or performance of factical life. Actualization is connected to historicity as the whole in which this process of understanding takes place. It is necessary to understand the sense of this performance from the perspective of the historicity of human existence. This is the point where the two opposite ways of living become explicit and diverge. The apostates do not accept the truth that the coming of Christ cannot be determined and mastered as a moment in the future: they see the coming as something that will happen in the foreseeable future. The others do not determine the moment of the coming of Christ, which opens them up to the unexpected. Since they do without an understanding of the coming as a particular content contained within a future moment, they avoid neutralizing historicity. Heidegger interprets the coming, then, as an indication of factical and historical existence. For Heidegger, the faith of the Thessalonians is not a concern here, nor is the specific content of their faith. He is concerned instead and first and foremost with the experience of historicity that is implied in such faith, as well as with the ontology implied in this experience. However, it remains in question whether this experience of historicity is accessible at all if we consider it in isolation from its content, which is the unpredictability of history with respect to the Christians’ hope for the coming of Christ. That hope recoils utterly from calculative manipulation; this period of waiting is oriented instead to a sudden, startling event, which nullifies everything that we take to be predictable, certain, and secure. The human being lives and dies in the face of a future that rejects objectification. Values, contents of meaning and totalities thus cannot be deduced on the basis of this Christian experience of time. Philosophy also should not, according to Heidegger, start from objectified pre-given concepts. However, this is difficult in the established philosophy, the philosophy that is presented at schools like pre-given concepts, as he shows in his analysis of Augustine’s Confessions. This analysis is part of a lecture course he taught in the summer of 1921, entitled “Augustine and NeoPlatonism” (Heidegger 2004, 115–227). According to Heidegger, Augustine, like Paul, approaches life from the perspective of facticity.2 Augustine does not consider the “beata vita” (the beatific life) from the perspective of its content, as something in the external world, but from the perspective of the way we look forward to it. Augustine transforms the question of how to find God into how to find the beatific life. This was possible for

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him because he regarded the beatific life as real life, and real life is the true life that he calls God. Heidegger sought to illuminate the way in which people are related to this content. The most common relation to Augustine’s beatific life comes in the form of looking forward to it and hoping for it. It is the same orientation towards the future that Heidegger emphasizes in his analysis of Saint Paul. Here we see that Heidegger “historilizes,” to use a neologism, the relation that a believer maintains to God. The relation to God is no longer a vertical relation to a transcendent entity, but a horizontal relation that is executed as historicity. While Augustine approaches the quest for God from life’s facticity, he also displays a tendency to move away from facticity. This, however, as we shall see, is part of Augustine’s conception of facticity. According to Heidegger, Augustine does not radically question his quest for God because his situation is such that he operates with an objective conception of knowing (Heidegger 2004, 142). Nevertheless, Augustine knows that the beatific life is not present in the way that, for example, the town of Carthage is present for someone who has visited it and subsequently retains a mental image of it. The beatific life is present to us in such a way that our understanding of it compels us to make it our own, but it is difficult to find oneself in the right position with respect to this authentic truth after which we search. Augustine explains in his Confessions why it is so difficult to put oneself into the right position, even though the quest for truth seems to us to be so natural and straightforward. In factical life, people tend to operate according to their own prima facie opinions. These may be determined by tradition, objectified concepts, fashion, convenience, or fear. The truth is hidden from humanity, in part because humanity itself flees from it. Yet on the other side of this flight, Heidegger sees a concern for truth, despite the fact that it is primarily hidden. This concern or care, which is typical of factical life, is actualized within a horizon of expectations. For ­Heidegger, the most important element in this sense is the observation that this care is actualized historically (Heidegger 2004, 153). Here the human self is seen from the perspective of historical experience because care itself is historical. In the tendency characteristic of care, there is also, however, a constant danger of falling into inauthenticity. For instance, the human being is also related to its daily concerns: the gossip and the rumours, the fun and pleasure and the desire of being an important philosopher or theologian. This means that in Augustine’s terms the individual is no longer directed toward God as the true beatific life. For Heidegger, the self is completely historical; it is not a tranquil, theoretical moment, but rather historical actualization. In the theoretical approach to philosophy, Heidegger sees humanity’s tendency to fall back into its mere enjoyment of obvious things. Augustine describes three such tendencies that we, as humans, are subject to. The first he calls “concupiscentia carnis” (desire of the flesh), the second “concupiscentia oculorum” (desire of the eyes) and the third “ambitio saeculi” (worldly ambition). In his analysis of Augustine’s description of the three tendencies, H ­ eidegger demonstrates how it is that we are always absorbed in the world. Being absorbed in the world means that we are mostly oriented on our nearby environment. We are mostly directed to the present nearby and not to the future

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that comes to us. The obvious reality and concepts look more important than the indeterminate future. Heidegger works this out later in Being and Time, which is still based on his analysis of Augustine (Heidegger 1962, §35–38). In Heidegger’s earliest work, the historicity of religion has to be understood out of its own situation and out of the presuppositions contained within it. It should not be taken up from a philosophical framework, as if from the standpoint of some highest being, precisely because the philosophical idea of a highest being hinders our understanding of facticity, and with this, religion as an expression of facticity. In Heidegger’s thinking, the orientation toward the highest is instead reformulated as an historical orientation. We see this change actualized in Heidegger’s earliest writings, and it involves as well the philosophical paradigm with which he approaches religion. What we are left with, then, is a religion that is an expression of historicity. The idea that Greek philosophy corrupts the original Christian faith is an idea found especially in Luther’s Protestantism. However, this is not Heidegger’s position. Heidegger looks for a different philosophy, not for a new faith that would be a faith without philosophy. Instead, the metaphysical paradigm is put into perspective, where one can see how it opposes the understanding of facticity. There is a collision between two philosophical approaches, but not a collision between faith and philosophy. Heidegger seeks an atheistic philosophy, or at the very least, a philosophy without an a priori concept of a God.

Philosophy and religious faith as mortal enemies In Heidegger’s view, there is almost no relation between faith and philosophy as it is worked out in his essay Phenomenology and Theology, because that which (as faith) has to be understood conceptually here is inconceivable from the very beginning. Such inconceivability does not arise from a lack of reason, but from the nature of the positum itself, that it is given from revelation. It is not possible, for instance, to understand the meaning of the cross, of sin and grace in another way than in faith. The question of being, however, is not raised in faith, meaning that faith cannot become the criterion of knowledge for the philosophical-ontological question. Nevertheless, the basic concepts of faith are not completely isolated from philosophical questioning. How are we to regard this relation between the basic concepts of faith and philosophical questioning? Heidegger indicates faith as a rebirth. Does this mean that the pre-faithful existence of Dasein has disappeared? Heidegger answers: “Though faith does not bring itself about, and though what is revealed in faith can never be founded by way of a rational knowing as exercised by autonomously functioning reason, nevertheless the sense of the Christian occurrence as rebirth is that Dasein’s pre-faithful, i.e., unbelieving, existence is sublated (aufgehoben) therein” (Heidegger 1998a, 51). This sublating does not mean that pre-faithful existence is removed, but that it is lifted up into a new form, in which it is kept and preserved. The ontological conditions of the pre-faithful human being persist in the faithful human being. In faith, pre-Christian existence is mastered at an existentiell level as rebirth. Heidegger’s use

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of the term “aufheben” here immediately calls Hegel to mind. Does this mean that the relation between religion and philosophy must be understood from a Hegelian perspective? Obviously not, since in Hegel religion is regarded as something preserved in the rationality of spirit. It would be too much to analyse the difference between Heidegger and Hegel regarding religion here, but a few remarks are possible. There is not a considerable difference between religion and philosophy in Hegel, because the content of religion and that of philosophy remain one and the same. In Heidegger, on the other hand, continuity exists between the two at an implicit ontological level, yet at the ontic level, the difference between them is decisive. In Heidegger’s analysis, what is existential-ontological remains implied within what is religious faith. We can see the relation as follows: “Hence we can say that precisely because all basic theological concepts, considered in their fully regional context, include a content that is indeed existentially powerless, that is, ontically sublated, they are ontologically determined by a content that is pre-Christian and that can thus be grasped purely rationally” (Heidegger 1998a, 51). The believer remains anchored in the ontological presuppositions of Dasein. Theological concepts necessarily include an understanding of being that human Dasein possesses to the extent that Dasein exists. Heidegger adds a key remark on the kinship between theology and philosophy in a footnote in Being and Time. All theological concepts of existence that are centred on faith intend a specific transition of existence, in which pre-Christian and Christian existence are united in their own way. This transitional character is what motivates the multidimensionality of theological concepts (Heidegger 1962, 496). The transition characteristic to Dasein is obviously distinguished from Christian existence in a particular way. Because of this, theological concepts possess an ambiguity in which one can see pre-Christian (ontological) concepts in and through Christian ones. As a result, the metaphor of rebirth gestures toward the characteristics of the first birth, throwness and existentiality. The concept of sin, for instance, is only meaningful within faith; only the believer can exist as a sinner, since sin in Christianity also presupposes a belief in the revelation of God. Sin is the faithful and existentiell interpretation of what is existential-ontologically founded in the concept of guilt. Heidegger presupposes that the theological explication of sin remains oriented towards the ontological concept of guilt. This does not mean that theology is patronized by philosophy: “For sin, in its essence, is not to be deduced rationally from the concept of guilt” (Heidegger 1998a, 52). Theology needs the ontological concept of guilt from the pre-faithful Dasein, which is in turn sublated in faithful Dasein. In Hegel, the sublation proceeds from religion to spirit; in Heidegger, it goes from philosophy to religion and is not philosophically necessary. If the concepts of faith are to be philosophically explicable, and are not to remain in a specific, yet meaningless, conceptuality, then what is said must be understood from an existential-ontological perspective. The concept of guilt remains silent about sin. Heidegger, as we see, uncovers existential structures of Dasein from certain religious phenomena and contexts. The world of the believer offers an e­ xpression of

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more fundamental existential structures. In themselves, such structures have ­nothing to do with religion. This point legitimates Heidegger’s entire intention. He does not, however, answer the question of whether the ontological implications of these religious phenomena are meaningful for the validity of faith. It might be true that Heidegger’s philosophy of guilt and of the future is essentially developed from out of his interpretation of Christianity, but it is his explicit intention to analyse its philosophical meaning. His project is not about theology, nor Christian faith, nor religion in general; his references to the religious are always oriented toward, and for the sake of, the ontological analysis. For its part, ontological understanding is neutral with regard to religious faith. From this understanding of being, philosophy can eventually function as a corrective for the ontic content of the basic concepts of theology, but it cannot speak about its theological content. It is not necessary for philosophy to serve a corrective function with regard to theology. As ontology, philosophy offers the possibility to function as this corrective for theology. If theology wants to belong to the facticity of Dasein, then it must stay within the ontology of facticity; without this, it can never be understood from the perspective of an ontology of facticity. That theology seeks to answer to this demand to limit itself within the borders of facticity does not originate from philosophy itself, but rather originates from theology, which strives to understand itself scientifically. According to Heidegger, it is theology that wants to strengthen itself with philosophy. Out of itself, philosophy is not aware of a possible meaning for theology because the theological positum, the revealed faith, does not belong to its domain. Against this background, Heidegger understands faith as the natural enemy, as it were, of philosophy: “This peculiar relationship does not exclude but rather includes the fact that faith, as a specific possibility of existence, is in its innermost core the mortal enemy of the form of existence that is an essential part of philosophy and that is factically ever-changing” (Heidegger 1998a, 53). What we see here is the fundamental opposition of two possibilities of existence, which cannot be realized by one person in one and the same moment. Faith as a possibility of existence, implies death to philosophy as the possibility of existence. This does not mean that those in each field must behave like enemies. The existentiell opposition between faith, on the one hand, and philosophical self-understanding, on the other, must be effective in its scientific design and in its explications. And this must be done in such a way that each meets the other with mutual respect. This can be undertaken more easily where one sees the different points of departure more sharply. Christian philosophy, therefore, is in Heidegger’s view a “square circle” (Heidegger 1998a, 53). Christian faith in Heidegger’s view does not need philosophy and philosophy does not need Christian faith; trying to connect them is to attempt the impossible.

A possible meaning of the last God With regard to the notion of a God, for Heidegger the metaphysical construction of God as a moment of ontotheology is dead. Nevertheless, he keeps thinking

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about a God, and especially the notion of the last God. “The last God has its most unique uniqueness and stands outside those calculating determinations meant by titles such as ‘mono-theism’, ‘pan-theism’ and ‘a-theism’.” ‘Mono-theism’ and all types of ‘theism’ exist only since Judaeo-Christian “apologetics,” which has metaphysics as its intellectual presupposition. With the dead of this God, all theisms collapse” (Heidegger, 1999, 289). The notion of the last God in the later Heidegger is as complicated as the other ideas regarding religion in Heidegger. The subject of the last God runs like a thread through the Contributions, and it may be the most fascinating theme in it. There is no other text in which Heidegger talks about it. It is connected with Heidegger’s project to think being as historical, and has to do with the emphasis on the eventuality and the critical rejection of an essentializing or hypostasising history of being. The last God has its main character in passing-by (Vorbeigang). This God has the character of a passer-by, of someone who happened to be passing of which one sees only a glimpse, thus not something like an eternal entity. Heidegger describes the last God mostly by indicating what it is not, specifically in opposition to the Christian God. The Christian God is, according to Heidegger, a hindrance for the experience of the last God. The long period of Christianization has undermined the possibilities for experiencing the coming of the last God. Seen from within a Christian point of view, God is understood in terms of a transcendent reality; he is thought of within a theistic paradigm, as a highest being that goes beyond being and man. This way of thinking is present even where it is denied, since it also determines the secularized visions of life by transcendent ideals that are still present in humanism and socialism. The last God has nothing to do with the Christian God, because the last God cannot be found from within the forgetfulness-of-being (Heidegger, 1999, 63). Indeed, Christianity, with its own particular concept of God, has contributed to this forgetfulness-of-being. Therefore, one of the purposes of the Contributions is to gain a new concept of transcendence and a new space for the divine in opposition to the long-since Christianized metaphysical concept of God. So, the fight against onto-theology and metaphysics in the later works of Heidegger is at one and the same time a fight against Christianity as a philosophical system, which implies a God as a transcendent entity. The idea of the passing God is, rather, as in Being and Time, an effort to think transcendence as temporality. Therefore, it concerns the possibility of knowing a God in a post-metaphysical era. Heidegger is involved in a post-metaphysical thinking of God. The last God is connected to the experience of being as an historical event. This bears on the finitude of being, which Heidegger thematizes in Being and Time in the existential analysis of being-toward-death. Just as we understand the passing-by of being in death, so too does the radical finitude of being manifest itself in the hint of the last God. With this, Heidegger continues the polemic against the Christian idea of God, who is seen as infinite eternal entity. To the question of what or who the last God is, Heidegger answers, in the context of understanding being as an historical event, that the last God is a hint, and nothing but a hint. The last God essentially is as passing-by. For this reason, the last God does not manifest itself as something present as an eternal entity, but is only there as a hint (Heidegger 1999, 289).

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A hint is something that gives the possibility of meaning (Figal 2001, 206). ­Heidegger explicates this notion of understanding in Being and Time, where he writes: “Meaning is that wherein the intelligibility (Verständlichkeit) of something maintains itself” (Heidegger 1962, 193). So, the image of the last God is an image that provides a hint or a clue to understand something. Heidegger writes: The image is never intended to stand for itself alone, but indicates that something is to be understood, providing a clue as to what this is. The image provides a hint—it leads into the intelligible, into a region of intelligibility (the dimension within which something is understood), into a sense (hence sensory image). However, it is important to bear in mind: what is to be understood is not a sense, but rather an occurrence. ‘Sense’ (Sinn) says only: it is a matter of something intelligible. What is understood is never itself sense; we do not understand something as sense, but always only ‘in the sense of’. Sense is never the topic of the understanding. (Heidegger 2002 12–13) This means that the hint of the last God is not something that is understood but just a hint or an appeal that calls for understanding. The hint of the last God refers to the historicity of Dasein and being. It refers to the paradigm or horizon within which Dasein is to be understood. This implies that the word “last” has no ontic meaning. It indicates something that anticipates very far into the future towards the deepest beginning, which reaches out to the farthest and cannot be outstripped. The last God therefore withdraws from every calculation and has to bear the burden of the loudest and most frequent misinterpretations (Heidegger 1999, 285). The hint of the last God springs from a moment that is beyond calculative thinking: “Given that as yet we barely grasp ‘death’ in its utmost, how are we then ever going to be primed for the rare hint of the last God?” (Heidegger 1999, 285). With the last God, we arrive at a domain that is more difficult to reach than death. We only can guess and interpret about our death, almost in the same way we can interpret about the last God based on hints that are difficult to grasp. But just as in Being and Time (§ 53) death opens the appearance of being as possibility, so too does the passing of the last God. Likewise, both are difficult to understand authentically. Because of this difficulty, the idea of the last God is perceptible to only a few people, since the majority take everything as having been made convenient to the planned control and correctness of a safe and successful outcome. Therefore, “the last God is not the end but the other beginning of immeasurable possibilities for our history” (Heidegger 1999, 289). The last is not a predictable moment in time, the last can only be experienced in the performance of anticipation and forerunning (vor-laufen). The German word “vorlaufen” alludes also to the word “vorläufig,” which means temporary or provisional. This fore-running is pro-visional (vor-läufig), and so it is only understandable as having passed-by.

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In the idea of the last God Heidegger tries to think the temporality of being. This moment of provisional fore-running is the moment of the experience of the hint of the last God. Only retrospectively can we understand something as a pro-vision of the last God. The passing of the last God opens the perspective of the possible. In opposition to the metaphysical understanding of being as actuality, Heidegger offers his counter-paradigm of the possible: “The possible—and even the possible pure and simple—opens out only in the attempt. The attempt must be totally governed by a fore-grasping will … That being is and therefore does not become a being; this is expressed most sharply thus: Being is possibility” (Heidegger 1999, 335). Being is thus understood as a wealth of possibilities. As Dasein the human being is open to the possible: his task is to take care of the possibility of the possible. Those who have this openness are the “ones to come” or the “future ones” (die Zukünftigen). The “ones to come” are those who understand the hint of the coming of the last God (Heidegger 1999, 277). They are the ones who can bear and endure the passing-by of a God, whose arrival is at one and the same time a farewell. It is a farewell because the hint is only seen afterwards as something that refers to the future. The signs of the future are only seen afterwards. Only the attitude of reservation can provide a place for the last God. The encounter with the last God is especially tuned to “restraint” (Verhaltenheit).3 Restraint stands midway between fear and diffidence; in this mood Dasein tunes itself to the stillness of the passing of the last God (Heidegger 1999, 13). This concept of reservedness turns up again in Heidegger‘s later works as “resignedness” (Gelassenheit). This means also regarding religious faith Heidegger wants to keep silent. This stillness originates in keeping silent, and this keeping silent arises from reservedness (Heidegger 1999, 25). To understand Heidegger’s interpretation of those who have the experience of a passing God and are in the mood of reservedness, the notion of provisonality or temporarity is very important. In Zur Sache des Denkens, Heidegger emphasizes this once again. For thinking that is understood from being as an event is pro-visional (Vorläufig). It is a pre-paring thinking, but in its deepest sense it is fore-running. This pro-visional character of the fore-running concerns the finitude of thinking and that which must be thought. The more adequate the step backwards, the more adequate the pro-visional fore-running or anti-cipating thinking (Heidegger 1969b, 38). The last God is the horizon that is farthest away, which surrounds as the uttermost possibility which cannot be overtaken and which must be anticipated in provisionality, because as such it cannot be outstripped. This recalls the discussion of death in Being and Time. Since death cannot be outstripped, its anticipation must be provisional: “Being-toward-death is the anticipation of a potentiality-for-Being of that entity whose kind of being is anticipation itself” (Heidegger 1962, 307).4 So it is contradictory to the structure of “Vorlaufen” as an essential characteristic of Dasein’s historicality that it could be outstripped, or objectified; it can only be

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provisional (Vorlaüfig). For this experience of the historicality of being, only the ones to come—the few—are called up. Only the great and unrevealed individuals will provide the stillness for the passing of the God and, among themselves, for the reticent accord of those who are prepared (Heidegger 1999, 291). The notion of last God has a temporal meaning. This temporality is not understood from the perspective of Dasein as it is developed in Being and Time, but from the perspective of being as an event, which presupposes Heidegger’s explication of Dasein. To radicalize this notion of temporality, Heidegger calls upon the services of a God that/who is characterized as passing-by. As an essentially momentary and historical transition, the passing of the last God is not an end, but offers the possibility of a beginning. What Being and Time says about the anticipation of death counts for the ones to come: in this anticipating and forerunning every orientation gets lost with regard to the given. The future ones, or the ones to come, do not anticipate something real or present, but “‘something” possible that has yet to be decided. The divine that has its essence in passing-by gives itself to Dasein in a hint, in something that is to be interpreted and in which one is uncertain and pro-visional. The hint is something that disappears in the distance in such a way that the divine withdraws when it gives itself to man—suddenly and briefly, as ungraspable and unavailable. Is it possible to see any theology here in this historical or historizing of the godhead? It could be a theology within the limits of historical hermeneutical reason alone without reference or presupposition of “something” eternal and unchangeable. This would be a theology that is completely historical, because its subject is historical: a passing God. It is therefore not a question of whether these gods are pagan or Christian. What is at issue is the historicality of being, which implies the historicality of the gods. Therefore, any talk of theology here is not to be taken seriously. Heidegger would never call this “theology,” because all theology presupposes the Theos, the God as an entity. So, it is too simple to see in the notion of the last God a task for theology.5 That would turn the whole project of a provisional passing God into a Theism. The notion of the last God is thus a notion that refers to the earlier notion of Heidegger’s analysis of Paul’s letters: it is the notion of to eschaton. This is the outermost, the last, “der letztendlichen Gott.” From a philosophical perspective there can only be a wink of the last. Heidegger kept silent regarding the possible content of that wink. This also is the reason why Heidegger wants to keep silent regarding theology based on religious faith. Looking backwards, we see that Heidegger considers religious faith of the early Christians as an expression of the historicity of human being and of its execution of temporality. Once he has developed his insight in the temporality of human being and of being as an event he distances himself from theology as based on religious faith. He refuses to answer on and to accept theological insights, since he sees in it a tendency to neglect the historicity of being. On the other hand, the idea of a last God could be seen as Heidegger’s philosophical theology. But he would never use that name for his ideas.

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Notes 1 In the following I revise the chapters II, III and VII of my book Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion, From God to the Gods (Vedder 2007). 2 I am following Heidegger here: the references are not to the work of Augustine. 3 Heidegger mentions this other basic mood of the other beginning as opposite to wonder as the basic mood of the first beginning (Heidegger 1994, 4, 131–155). 4 See also the footnote: “dessen Seinsart das Vorlaufen selbst ist.” The earlier editions have “hat” instead of “ist.” 5 As is the case in Krieger (1990).

References Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin. 1969a. “The Onto-theological-constitution of Metaphysics.” Identity and Difference. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Heidegger, Martin. 1969b. Zur Sache des Denkens. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Heidegger, Martin. 1976. “‘Only a God Can Save Us’, Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger.” Philosophy Today 20: 267–284. Heidegger, Martin. 1992. “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle.” Translated by Michael Baur. Man and World, 25: 358–393. Heidegger, Martin. 1994. Basic Questions of Philosophy, Selected “Problems” of “Logic.” Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1998. “Phenomenology and Theology.” Translated by James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo. Pathmarks. Edited by William McNeill. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. 39–62. Heidegger, Martin. 1999. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2002. The Essence of Truth, On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus. Translated by Ted Sadler. London, UK: Continuum. Heidegger, Martin. 2004. The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Translated by Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Figal, Günter. 2001. “Forgetfulness of God: Concerning the Center of Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy.” In Companion to Heidegger’s “Contributions to Philosophy.” Edited by Charles Scott, et al. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. 198–212. Krieger, David J. 1990. “Das Andere des Denkens und das andere Denken—Heideggers Dekonstruktion und die Theologie.” Martin Heidegger und der Christliche Glaube. Edited by H-J Braun. Zürich, Switzerland: Theologischer Verlag. 89–114. Vedder, Ben. 2005. “A Philosophical Understanding of Heidegger’s Notion of the Holy.” Epoche: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 10: 141–154. Vedder, Ben. 2007. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion, From God to the Gods. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Vedder, Ben. 2009. “Heidegger’s Explication of Religious Phenomena in the Letters of Saint Paul.” Bijdragen: International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 70: 152–167.

19 Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) Nigel Zimmermann

Students of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) often find themselves fluctuating between a state of philosophical excitement at his insights and perplexed anxiety as to their meaning. So often it seems his work takes theory to a threshold of authentic ethics amidst the violence of the world, and yet there remains a haunting sense of ambiguity in what he means by God and religion. The distance between his Talmudic commentaries and his philosophical works is often narrower than he admits, but constant reference to the divine adds to the murkiness of their meaning rather than distinguishes or clarifies. So much of it depends on his notion that a new epoch is opening up as a kind of post-onto-theological turn. That is to say, of God-language after metaphysics. He says at one point: “To contrast [oppose] God with onto-theo-logy is to conceive a new mode, a new notion of meaning. And it is from a certain ethical relationship that one may start out on this search” (“Beginning with Heidegger” in Levinas 1993, 125). So, with this accent upon the “ethical” in mind, we may set out to describe the basic contours of Levinas’ “search” and why religion and God are crucial to it. This chapter is necessarily limited in its scope, but invites the interested student into a rich and fertile arena of contemporary scholarship with significant consequences for theology and philosophy of religion. Levinas wishes his work to be a post-metaphysical endeavour that describes the responsibility we have for the Other—the other person who is strictly unique and other to oneself. As such, Levinas offers a perplexing philosophy from the context of the twentieth century that includes constant reference to the categories of God and the other. In light of the tragic events of the Holocaust, Levinas’ work gives a phenomenological account of otherness and develops a philosophy of the face as a means of understanding the nature of alterity and ethical responsibility. Born to a religiously observant Jewish family in Kaunas in the (then) Russian Empire (now Lithuania), he took French citizenship as an adult and adopted a Western European culture

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and disposition. In many ways, his life was lived in a conservatively middle-class style with little in the way of direct political activity or indeed adventure of any kind. This contrasts with other significant French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, who forayed into contemporary politics and who gained the status of intellectual celebrities in France and abroad (a peculiarly French and Western European status generally unobtainable in places like the United Kingdom or the United States, where other factors are more important to the popular imagination). Nevertheless, in Levinas’ work is to be found a rich and adventurous philosophical provocation on behalf of the suffering other that elicits a new structure of the I-other relationship and account of ethics as first philosophy. Perhaps more radically still, Levinas’ philosophy countenances that in the face of the other is found the trace of God.

Life and education The biographical details of Emmanuel Levinas’ life span great changes in the twentieth century. His birthplace, Kaunas in Lithuania, is a stronghold of European Jewry, but it experienced the scourge of the Nazis, and then Soviet Communism, and finally the intoxication of Western liberal democracy when the Soviet empire collapsed. When Levinas was born, his birthday of 30 December 1905 was assigned according to the then used Julian Calendar, which in the Gregorian C ­ alendar is of course 12 January 1906. Levinas was given the name Emanuelis, which was later Westernized, and he and his young brothers, Boris and Aminadav, were given a traditional religious upbringing. Jewish feasts were observed and synagogue attendance was normal in his household, as were tutorials in Hebrew and a kosher diet. The lively Jewishness of the Levinas household held intellectual achievement in high regard and culture and literature, especially the Russian authors such as Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Gogol, who were read with enthusiasm, were considered achievements in which to take pride. Russian was the first language of the Levinas home, and it was followed by an adept skill in German, English, Yiddish and French. Levinas was shaped by his religion, literary interests, a long cultural tradition and a family household that valued mutual respect and the cultivation of good manners. By all accounts, Levinas was proud of his upbringing and his Lithuanian homeland, but it was to France that his heart and his career carried him. The young Levinas chose to study philosophy and move to France, and through his university education learned of the innovative thought of Edmund Husserl, the German father of phenomenology. Levinas took the crucial step in travelling to Freiburg im Breisgau to sit at Husserl’s feet, as it were, and there in the beautiful surrounds of one of Europe’s great medieval cities, perched on the edge of the Black Forest, Levinas was taught by the master. In an unexpected twist, Levinas discovered, through this journey, another great thinker whose work was to be instrumental to his own later approach, that of Husserl’s prize student, the controversial Martin Heidegger. As Levinas puts it, “I went to Freiburg because of Husserl, but d­ iscovered Heidegger”

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(Critchley and Bernasconi 2002, xvii). By this stage, Husserl was an older man and the younger Heidegger was filling lecture halls with attentive students. Levinas found in Husserl the exciting new philosophy of phenomenology, but found in Heidegger a way through such a philosophy to being-in-the-world, and both Husserl and Heidegger became influential markers along the way to Levinas’ radical turn towards the Other. After this formative time abroad, Levinas returned to France and continued to embrace French culture and feed his appetite for a philosophy that “went to the things themselves” (see Husserl’s much quoted mantra in the Logical Investigations, 1970). He took French citizenship in 1930, completed his obligations in military service and married the love of his life, Raïsa Levi. Without losing his academic focus, Levinas completed his license in philosophy but, whether through circumstance or choice, did not obtain a position in a university. Instead, Levinas became a teacher in a Parisian school, the Alliance Israélite Universalle, and it appears he developed his patient, pastoral approach to students and the work of administration, being a well-respected mentor and colleague. Some essays were published during these unremarkable years, which is evidence that Levinas was a focused writer who wrote, largely, when he had something to say, and not because he wished to make a big splash. An early, and important example of how his philosophy was developing into something new and far-reaching can be seen in his essay, On Escape, in which he began to break with the thought of Heidegger (Levinas 2003). This break foreshadowed a significant turn against Heidegger in later years because of the latter’s sympathies for German National Socialism, and it is a matter of scholarly dispute as to how much influence the man’s philosophy had upon his politics. This dispute has gained greater currency since the publication of the Black notebooks [The Schwarze Hefte] in 2014 by Peter Trawny, in which some of Heidegger’s small black-covered notebooks have been published with commentary, with others still to be published, and which include various anti-Semitic references. There is little doubt that Heidegger’s personal views and politics are intertwined with his philosophy and need to be considered carefully. It was the war that most profoundly affected Levinas’ account of the other, and shaped his religious and his philosophical thought. His work took him to a private school, the École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO), and in 1939 he was drafted as a translator and the following year taken as a prisoner of war in Rennes with the Tenth French Army ( June 1940). He was held in Frontstalag for a number of months and then transferred to a camp located in Fallingpostel in northern Germany. Because he was an officer, Levinas was not held in a concentration camp as such, but endured forced labour in camp number 1492.1 Nevertheless, even here he was marked as a Jew, was separated from non-Jewish prisoners and bore the letters JUD on his uniform. Astoundingly, his writing was not halted by this, and he carried on putting pen to paper during the war years and wrote much to his wife. She, along with his daughter, also endured much hardship and were protected by the friendship of Maurice Blanchot and religious sisters of a Vicentian convent who gave them shelter. In addition, Levinas’ employers provided a living allowance

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to support the family. In the Nazi pogroms, which began in 1940, members of Levinas’ family (not his wife and daughter) were murdered by the Nazis. Out of these experiences, and in the revelations of just how many Jews and other so-called undesirables were killed by Hitler and his followers, Levinas, like countless others, learned and internalized much. Upon his release at the end of the war in 1945, he returned to Paris and became director of the ENIO and continued his reading and his writing. In the post-war period, Levinas was introduced to the enigmatic ­Monsieur Chouchani, an influential Jewish intellectual who opened up the Talmud to Levinas and others such as Elie Wiesel, but whose real identity remains shrouded in mystery. The intrigue of this subtext in the biography of Levinas is significant, because it shows a close alignment of Levinas’ philosophical interests with that of his religious reading, and of an embodied intertextuality between the two. We know little of the precise influence of the mystical Chouchani upon Levinas, but the fact that the latter took the former into his home for some time indicates a warm hospitality and a mark of friendship. It also shows how the time after the dark days of the war became a creative and reflective context for Levinas’ thought. It is impossible to read Levinas’ philosophy properly if the above key moments and themes from his life are marginalized. His experience of the horrors of the ­Holocaust, of episodes of distance from loved ones, of a full but publicly unrecognized scholarship of mind and texts in the hidden and suburban contexts of a Jewish high school, of forced labour and of public segregation because of his Jewishness; these are crucial to the Levinasian philosophical project. It is remarkable that through these events, Levinas built his project with ongoing reference to God and the other, given how much trouble each category caused in his life.

Overview of Levinas’ thought In 1931, only two years after the completion of his doctorate on Edmund Husserl’s theory of intuition, Levinas, along with Gabriele Pfeiffer, co-translated Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations from German to French. As such, it was the combined efforts of Levinas and Pfeiffer that introduced Husserlian phenomenology to France. This marks the beginning of Levinas’ reputation as a scholar of a new and important philosophy, but it took some years after the war before that reputation reached general recognition in the French academy, let alone abroad. For Husserl, phenomenology is a way or a style of philosophy that has the capacity to obtain universal knowledge. That is, in its rigorous attention to what is given and received in knowledge, it is able to look upon an object of attention and achieve knowledge of what is given in one’s intentionality towards that object. Husserl’s phenomenological method developed over the course of his publishing career, and his students took that method in various directions, but chiefly it relies on what is called the epoché or suspension, or what is called the phenomenological reduction. Its historical providence goes as far back, at least, to the Greek sceptics, and it appears in René Descartes’ methodology as a means of ensuring doubt about one’s intellectual conclusions or assertions, thus ensuring a certain process

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of refinement in one’s philosophy. It is cause for the philosopher to block and to resist personal assumptions and prejudices by suspending the natural world. What some call Cartesian doubt expresses this principle, in which the distinction between dream and reality is called into question and what one believes to be true turns out to be merely an assertion that has no substantive grounds as such. Husserl took from Descartes the activity of an intellectual suspension of the world as more than just a principle, and viewed it as an agent of honest philosophizing, in that it was an attitudinal shift on the part of the philosopher. The phenomenological reduction became known as a form of bracketing the natural world and suspending one’s beliefs, prejudices, assumptions and so on, so that any particular phenomenon might be examined according to its own objective content and meaning. In other words, the world and one’s attitude to the world is suspended or bracketed out of the philosophical act so that a phenomenon can be studied and interpreted comprehensibly. This way, one’s intention towards a phenomenon is called into question, and our intuitions concerning phenomena are placed into a respectful suspension before all that is surveyed and analysed. For Levinas, the reduction is not a slavish methodology or system that phenomenologists must follow with unqualified precision or via the same methodological steps as Husserl, but is rather one of a number of “elements of a system” (Levinas, 1998), and in many ways, remains a foundational element. Levinas views the phenomenological reduction as a way of opening up reality behind or beyond a “naive vision of things” and of furnishing “the prototype rather than the technology,” as it were (Levinas 1998). Levinas does not deny a rigor and method to phenomenology, but he retains an honest and broad account of Husserlian method as a science open to the real, rather than a philosophy closed in upon itself with an obsession over its own structures and foci. As Husserl famously puts it, to do phenomenology is to go “back to the things themselves” and as such, it gives to Levinas a certain reality-orientated openness to what is true in the world in a substantial and philosophically compelling manner (Husserl 1970). Phenomenology, for Levinas, opens up paths to the real, and it is the philosopher’s duty to carefully follow such paths for the sake of describing the phenomena discovered along such paths. Levinas’ implementation of phenomenological method, in this broad understanding, is crucial to his two most important books: Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority and Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence.2 Each is a substantial contribution in philosophy and gives impetus to new directions in philosophical thought. In Totality and Infinity, we find an expansive account of Levinas’ phenomenological re-reading of philosophy, including a critique of how Being has been treated in the Western tradition. For Anglo-trained English speaking students, reading this book can be a perplexing experience because Levinas does not construct an argument in the way that the analytic tradition is accustomed to, and in fact obtaining a working French vocabulary can help the wit and style of Levinas to become clearer and better understood. In many ways, he does not follow a clear line of logic or draw on evidence to support a particular “theory.” Instead, his work advances

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an approach in which inter-subjectivity comes under phenomenological scrutiny. This approach is echoed and repeated in other publications by Levinas, including both his philosophical works and his commentaries on the Talmud. For Levinas, the social or inter-subjective context of persons in which Dasein finds itself is saturated with ethical significance, in which Levinas analyses the “infinity which opens in the ethical relationship of man to man” (Levinas 1985, 80). By the “ethical relationship,” Levinas means the relationship of responsibility that exists between each human person and each other human person. In each example of this relationship, Levinas describes what he calls the “infinity” of the Other, in which there is no limit placed on the ethical significance or the ethical responsibility derived through the call of the Other. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas looks closely at the structure of otherness or “alterity” and develops his reading of it as the event of absolute difference between oneself and the Other. He writes: To approach the Other is to put into question my freedom, my spontaneity as a living being, my emprise over the things, this freedom of a ‘moving force’, this impetuosity of the current to which everything is permitted, even murder. (Levinas 2004, 303) In many respects, the book (and much of Levinas’ broader project) is a response to Husserl and Heidegger, and this is expanded in the second of Levinas’ two major works, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence. This book bears the following inscription: To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism. (Levinas 1998, vii) While Levinas maintained a strong distinction between his Talmudic commentaries and his philosophical publications, this is an example of the broader ethical context in which the two genres overlap. By committing this book to the memory of “those who were closest” among the six million killed by the Nazis and to all victims of human violence and hatred, Levinas places his philosophical reflections at the service of the victim in every age and in every culture. Those who suffer because of some “hatred of the other” bear the same wounds of the Jew who is hated for being a Jew. In this way, otherness is honoured by Levinas and is viewed within the historical narrative of the people of God, who in each generation suffer various examples of anti-Semitism, of hatred because of who they are and how this makes them different. Such suffering is a cause of anxiety for Levinas, and he criticizes the tradition of Western philosophy for not giving more time and attention to the categories of difference and otherness. In the close bind between Western philosophy and the Greek notion of Being, Levinas believes the question

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of uniqueness evident in each human person is diminished. In Being, philosophy imposes upon the other a totalization, which is fundamentally at odds with an ethical account of how we might receive and relate to the other person. In its place, Levinas proposes that the other (what he calls “the Other”) constitutes the principle event for philosophical reflection.3 By turning to the other, Levinas does not merely reject or overturn the tradition of Being. Rather, he encounters it with a radical critique for the sake of what can be called an “ethical metaphysics,” in which the ethical height and exorbitance of the other is considered, along with a further development of the role of sense and the exigencies of incarnate human life.4 In Totality and Infinity, Levinas peels away at the phenomenological layers of meaning involved in the event of the other and locates, or rather describes, the phenomenon of infinity, whereas in Otherwise than Being, he takes this further as the event that unmoors the self from ontology and sees us flying always into the immersion of ethics. In both, otherness and infinity are not objects or things which can be obtained or used (and as such negates Heidegger’s instrumentalization of objects for Dasein), as he writes: “In reality man has already the idea of infinity, that is, lives in society and represents things to himself” (Levinas 2004, 139). Infinity bears itself up to be known in some way, but not to be manipulated and controlled. Instead, infinity is to be given and received, intimately explored and ethically respected—altogether bearing down upon the self in an exhaustive capacity for issuing responsibility before otherness in the world. Our finitude cannot bear such a capacity, but it must answer the call that the infinite carries. And how is infinity known to us? Levinas answers this question with characteristic certainty: It is known to us in its trace, which is to be found in what Levinas calls the face.

The face and God The face utilizes what we might call incarnate language, denoting a sensory experience of the visage of the other person, with which human beings are constantly engaged. Human faces appear to us in our homes and families, in the news and online, as well as in public spaces and where we work, study and socialize. We see our own image in a bathroom mirror and we seek to manipulate it for the sake of presentation to others, and we make swift judgments upon others based on nothing more than a fleeting glance or the flicker of interest. Before an infant, we contort ourselves for the sake of eliciting a smile or wide-eyed amusement, and in magazines and highway billboards are lit up manufactured faces to entice us to purchase items of which we are not in any need and had no desire until we witnessed the pleasing effect of those items in the perfect face staring back at us. Faces excite us and they haunt us, and often they hide the truth of a person’s thoughts or feelings more than they might reveal them. Levinas takes up the language of the face, but draws from this language a concept not simply bound to the human face qua a face. Rather, the face is not to be understood merely as the physical face of the other person, but as something all the more demanding.

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What Levinas means by the face is the trace of the other, which is also the ­occasion for Levinas’ use of theological language—the trace of God. Keep in mind that all of Otherwise than Being, building as it does upon his previous work, is intended as a kind of exposure of the “significance of subjectivity” (Levinas 1998, 141). Our lived lives, described as the experience of inter-subjectivity, are what concerns Levinas, and for this reason the event of alterity is the extraordinary call of responsibility for the other person that rises in the utterly non-extraordinary banality of everyday life. The face is the call of the other in the context of intersubjectivity, but it does not mean that every occasion of the face includes an incarnate face-to-face aspect. Think here of the asylum seeker whose boat is overturned within the coastal borders of one’s own nation; here, the other is a person seeking to be a refugee far from their own home, from which they might be fleeing any manner of suffering and discrimination, and yet their story elicits a response from the person who sits at their morning newspaper, reading about the sad loss of a boat full of asylum seekers. One does not necessarily have in mind their actual faces, let alone their names, the sound of their voices, or any kind of direct relationship, but the asylum seekers issue a call of responsibility, even if it is only fleetingly known. For Levinas, the face of the other still stands over the self as one reads of the plight of desperate families upon the ocean waters, and what he calls an ethical proximity draws a person intimately into the circle of those persons’ narrative. For Levinas, you are also responsible for these faceless people, and you have a responsibility to seek out ways to serve them with justice and care. The very use of the “you” denotes biblical language in which God issues a call to the “thou” of the people of Israel. The face is a concept used by Levinas because of its immediate incarnate quality, but also because it helps to paint the picture of ethical metaphysics as Levinas sees it, and that is an ethics of exposure to the other. Levinas speaks of the “exposure of me to the other” and the “claim laid on the same by the other in the core of myself” (Levinas 1998, 141). It is not always “lived” in the inter-subjective moment, but it shows itself as a call to responsible action that is not divorced from, although it rigorously corrects, the Heideggerian understanding of Being, as Levinas puts with a poetic flourish: “Responsibility for the other is extraordinary, and is not prevented from floating over the waters of ontology” (Levinas 1998, 141). Repeatedly, Levinas takes advantage of incarnate imagery to make his case, even as he thrills in the paradox of the non-appearing of the face: A face as a trace, trace of itself, trace expelled in a trace, does not signify an indeterminate phenomenon; its ambiguity is not an indetermination of a noema, but an invitation to the fine risk of approach qua approach, to the exposure of one to the other, to the exposure of this exposedness, the expression of exposure, saying. In the approach of a face the flesh becomes word, the caress a saying. (Levinas 1998, 94) These words are a fine example of the movement backwards and forwards in L ­ evinas’ work, which can be perplexing to the new student and enticing for those who

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enjoy the poetic and paradoxical layers of some philosophy (especially ­continental French philosophy). For Levinas, this poetic rendering is rigorous because it gnaws at the heart of the problem: the trace of the divine appears in the face of the Other, but it cannot be contained in conceptual categories or the language of ontology. The very notion of “God-language” refuses such philosophical containment and instead reveals itself most properly as ethics. Jacques Derrida calls Totality and Infinity an “immense treatise of hospitality” (Derrida 1999, 21), which is interpreted by the unravelling of the description of what is meant in the face-to-face. To be sure, it is a discursive argument made by Levinas, but it intertwines biblical language concerning the presence or the call of the divine with the phenomenological language of the Other. For Derrida, the book is a persevering repetition on the same theme and this can be said also for Otherwise than Being. It is at this juncture that the religious and theological element in Levinas’ philosophy can be seen for its radical nature. While the Other is the significant object of intuition in Levinas’ philosophy, it cannot be understood without reference to the face and to its association with the language of divinity and God. Levinas is at pains to avoid any hint of a direct revelation of God in what he means here and argues: A God invisible means not only a God unimaginable, but a God accessible in justice. Ethics is the spiritual optics. The subject-object relation does not reflect it; in the impersonal relation that leads to it the invisible but personal God is not approached outside of all human presence. (Levinas 2004, 78) Here, Levinas explains the relationship between what is seen of the divine with what is not seen of God. For Levinas, the divine trace is invisible, and because it appears to us as invisible, it invites us to step up to our responsibility to act ethically for the other. In this way, “ethics is the spiritual optics,” a remarkable phrase that indicates how the practice of ethics shows forth and reveals what Levinas thinks of as the spiritual. Levinas does not deny the possibility that God might reveal himself directly in some fashion, but does not rely on such an action to explain what he means by the occasion of divinity in the face of the other. It is because of this that one commentator makes the claim that we cannot ignore or sideline Levinas in discussion about God and religion. Michael Purcell argues: This is not a reduction of religion to ethics, nor is it a ‘godless morality’. Rather, it is a new way of considering religion and God on the basis of the ethical subject which the phenomenological reduction of intersubjectivity has reached. What Levinas provokes is a rethinking of morality ‘without denying the postmodern horizon of thought (the end of metaphysics and the death of God’. (Purcell here quotes, in part, Jeffrey Kosky. See Purcell 2006, 56) So, the ethical subject is reached through Levinas’ phenomenological approach. It becomes a means of considering morality without the marginalization of religion as is so often witnessed in contemporary discussion and indeed cannot be achieved

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without reference to “God.” Purcell is right to begin his theology with the ethical subject that Levinas lands upon, for this intends for theological work to be incarnate work, taking the topics of the body and the flesh seriously. As he says, it is not a “godless morality,” but acts instead as a provocation of “rethinking,” a crucial point to have reached in the tradition of continental philosophy and a challenging terminus for those who wish to think, and to do so ethically. Moreover, the texts included in Levinas’ Talmudic commentaries accentuate this provocation from within a different genre, one more defined by an openness to things of the divine. The primary collections of these commentaries are the New Talmudic Readings [Nouvelles Lectures Talmudiques, 1996] and Nine Talmudic Readings [Quatre Lectures Talmudiques, 1968, and Du sacré au saint: cinq nouvelles lectures talmudiques, 1977], in which Levinas writes explicitly within the tradition of giving a critical reading of the Babylonian Talmud (with some reference to the earlier Jerusalem Talmud), largely guided by approaches that developed from the nineteenth century onward. In this way, Levinas writes within a modern style of short essay style prose that seeks to elucidate and critically apply what he reads in the traditional Talmud, and with an eye on how the Hebrew Scriptures guide and inform our lives. Of the earlier commentaries (the Nine), Levinas chose to publish these from the Actes or proceedings of the annual Colloques des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Française in Paris, which he attended and in which he was well regarded (although not without an affectionate and good-natured level of criticism). Of great use to students of Levinas, is that in these commentaries Levinas would utilize the Rabbinic tradition of telling a story to illustrate a point, and often the use of stories told in the Talmud itself would be employed in a philosophical way, making a point about ethics and the Other. Levinas was concerned with exploring the meaning of Judaism in the modern post-War world, and tends to give an austere and intellectual reading of the major texts of his Jewish tradition. Levinas retained here his suspicion of mysticism and a shyness from Hassidic expressions of his religion, such as in the commentary “Toward the Other” or in “Judaism and Revolution,” in which he looks for a Judaism that opens up to the universalism of the human condition and says: The heirs of Abraham—men to whom their ancestor bequeathed a difficult tradition of duties toward the other man, which one is never done with, an order in which one is never free. In this order, above all else, duty takes the form of obligations toward the body, the obligation of feeding and sheltering. So defined, the heirs of Abraham are of all nations: any man truly man is no doubt of the line of Abraham. (Levinas 1994b, 99) Here, Levinas looks to Abraham as the father of all who belong to the human race. For Levinas, personal experiences of holiness or individual acts of piety are of little interest because ours is a time in need of a universalism of the human experience and of a dignity that cannot be reduced to the private or to the few. This is viewed as fundamental to Judaism and a wisdom that Levinas’ Jewish religion is

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d­ uty-bound to share with the “seventy nations,” a term Talmudic literature uses to refer to the Gentile nations of the world. The things of God, of a holiness above our meagre attempts at goodness, of self-sacrifice for the widow and the orphan, and of prophecy itself, denote a spirituality that philosophy is free to interrogate and learn from, as Levinas alludes to in “The Will of God and the Power of Humanity”: Prophecy is not some happy accident of the spirit, a ‘genius’, but its very spirituality: an affection of self and others stronger than the receptivity which waits for it, a listening, an understanding surpassing the capacity of hearing, impossible possibility—or miracle—the most hidden, of human existing and perhaps the very manner in which the spirit penetrates nature. (Levinas 1999, 77) These themes of the Talmud and of Scripture open up to that which belongs to each human person and to humanity as a whole; and in this way Levinas makes the biblical tradition of prophecy a means of understanding the ancient providence of his own philosophical insights into alterity. The Talmud sits more closely to ­Levinas’ broader philosophical project than he admits, and in fact work together with a certain harmony of intent and methodology.

Conclusion The philosophy and Talmudic commentaries of Emmanuel Levinas are a challenge to phenomenology and religion. In the former, phenomenological boundaries are pushed, developed and, arguably, overcome; and in the latter, the boundaries of what moderns understand as religion are trespassed. In both, Levinas’ concern is not the dismantling of traditions in a juvenile act of intellectual vandalism, but the acknowledgement and reception of what is true. Students of continental philosophy and theology may find in Levinas evidence of a new way of doing philosophy. There are rich and helpful tangents to explore, but there are also perplexing deficiencies regarding the other which call for close attention and further work. In the scheme of things, only a small number of theologians have addressed L ­ evinas’ work, but it is important to note that of that number, a prodigious amount of critical reflection has now been published. Emerging from this scholarship is an account of how God-language cannot be split from anthropology. To force a divide between, on the one hand, religious syntax and analogies of the divine, and on the other hand, the mystery of the human being, is to encroach upon a full account of ethics as it appears in what we call inter-subjectivity. That is to say, if we take seriously a comprehensive picture of what it is to be human then we must be open to what Levinas calls the “trace of God” and its unnerving ethical demand. Whether such a demand can be described phenomenologically or if we must move beyond phenomenology to achieve this openness is rightly contested, and theologians have other resources on hand to take this exploration further (e.g. Scripture, ecclesiology, sacramental theology, moral theology). Of course, as has been argued,

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this makes the boundary between what we call theology and philosophy unstable and insecure, at least insofar as those categories are understood in modernity. This might be an unwelcome claim for the modern and even the postmodern mind, but for the sake of truth and the suffering other, it must be faced.

Notes 1 Levinas notes sardonically that it was in the year 1492 that the Jews were expelled from Spain. 2 Original French titles: Totalité et Infini: essai sur l’extériorité (1961); Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974). 3 Typically, Levinas’ autrui is translated as the “Other.” 4 See especially the work of Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics.

References Critchley, Simon and Robert Bernasconi, eds. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1999. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Pascale-Ann Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. Logical Investigations Translated by J.N. Findlay. London, UK: Routledge. Levinas, Emmanuel and Philippe Nemo. 1985. “Secrecy and Freedom.” Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1988. “Reflections on Phenomenological ‘Technique’.” Discovering Existence with Husserl. Translated by Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1993. God, Death, and Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1994. Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. Translated by Gary D. Mole. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1994b. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1999. New Talmudic Readings. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2003. De l’évasion: On Escape. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2004. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Purcell, Michael. 2006. Levinas and Theology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wyschogrod, Edith. 2000. Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

20 Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) J. R. Hustwit

The discipline of hermeneutics studies how human beings interpret the world around them. It was named for the Greek messenger god Hermes, whose job was to carry messages between the gods and mortals. This task presumably involved a fair amount of translation and interpretation, as gods not only speak other languages, but presumably think and perceive in ways altogether different from human beings. Originally, hermeneutics was applied only to particularly unclear portions of legal, religious, and classical texts. However, since the eighteenth century, hermeneutics has gradually broadened in scope. By the latter half of the twentieth century, hermeneutic philosophers had claimed all human understanding as their domain—the activity of the mind was pervasively interpretive. This universalisation is largely due to the influence of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), whose development of philosophical hermeneutics established interpretation as a fundamental category in studies of knowledge, perception and textual analysis. The implications for religion are inescapable. If all human understanding is interpreting, this includes the reading of scriptures, the anthropological study of religious communities, inter-religious dialogue and religious experience itself.

Biographical overview Gadamer was born in 1900 in Marburg, Germany. Though he grew up in ­Breslau, he returned to Marburg and completed his habilitation, titled Plato’s Dialectical E ­ thics (1931), under the guidance of his mentor Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s early work is chiefly concerned with the question of the meaning of being. That is, Heidegger questions the standard concerns of the Western philosophical tradition, for example, the existence of God, souls, universals, causation and so on. He asks under which conditions the meaning of being is first asked at all. One of Heidegger’s key insights is that affect, or care (sorge), precedes all epistemic r­elations. Theoretical

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objects of knowledge (vorhandenheit) are always already useful (zuhandenheit) to the concerns of the inquirer. That is, an object must first matter to us to be an object at all. A being is not picked out, given a name and assigned predicates unless there is a project that requires us to do so. This insight erodes the Enlightenment foundation that objective knowledge can and should be given as a result of passionless inquiry. Even those scientific theories with no apparent technological applications arise out of an existential concern—a desire to systematize natural phenomena. Consequently, Heidegger’s model of a self is not alienated from or opposite to a world of objects. Rather, the self (dasein) is the location of the world. Undermining the idea that knowing is an objective enterprise subject to the technical control of an autonomous will also defines much of Gadamer’s own work, which is chiefly the development of a systematic philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer held positions in many German universities, including Marburg (1928), Kiel (1934), Leipzig (1939), Frankfurt-am-Main (1947) and Heidelberg (1949). After his official retirement in 1968, he held visiting positions at various universities in Europe and North America. His most influential work by far is Truth and Method (1960), though he was prolific throughout his career, writing about the ways that hermeneutical consciousness impacts aesthetics, myth, theology, the history of philosophy and even medicine. Gadamer did more to systematize and innovate hermeneutics than any other contemporary figure, and the influence of his thought on the study of religion is both profound and varied. His key ideas are found in Truth and Method, his opus, though the elaborations of his later works will be examined as well.

The history of effects The most famous of Gadamer’s insights stem from his critique of the ­historicist procedures of those thinkers who came before him. For example, Friedrich ­Schleiermacher (d. 1834), the father of romantic hermeneutics, conceived of interpreting texts as an activity that can be done correctly or incorrectly (Schleiermacher 1998, 3). The correct interpretation is one that understands the author better than he or she understands him- or herself, that is, grasping the general psychological intent that unifies all the author’s works (keimentschluss) (Schleiermacher 1998, 8, 33). Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics are representative of a general trend in the social sciences that defined understanding in terms of an authorial intention. This requires one, at least according to Schleiermacher’s theory, to divine a psychological reality behind the text-as-cipher. For example, to properly understand Paul’s letter to the Romans is to use a mixture of grammatical knowledge and psychological empathy to reconstruct the apostle’s state of mind. For several reasons, Gadamer objected that such divinations were impossible, and that intentionalism was a fallacy. The most basic obstacle to divining an author’s intention is that a person’s understanding is composed of prejudgment or prejudice (vorurteil). This notion, adopted from Heidegger’s phenomenology, observes that humans do not approach an object as a blank slate, free of preconceptions. Instead, we encounter the object of

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­ nderstanding with pre-formed concepts in terms of which we assimilate, or ­perhaps u digest, the new text. This insight was hardly new to Gadamer. Johann Chladenius (d. 1759) pointed out that among the factors that influence the perspective of a person are the “various associations within the subject” (Chladenius [1742] 1985, §308). What was novel was Gadamer’s claim that reason did not have the power to “correct” these subjective associations because human reason is nothing more than the sedimentation of these subjective associations (Gadamer 2000, 277–285). For Gadamer, prejudice is not an intellectual vice but a necessary condition for the possibility of understanding. The Enlightenment critique of religion opposes the vice of overhasty judgment to the clear objectivity of reason, and thus limits the meaning of prejudice to unfounded judgment (Gadamer 2000, 270–271). For this reason, Gadamer’s English translators will frequently avoid the prejudice against prejudice by translating his term vorurteil as prejudgment instead to indicate that these inherited structures of the understanding are neutral and could reflect the collective wisdom of generations just as often as they could lead to overhasty generalizations. The vast and largely unconscious body of prejudgments that constitutes human understanding is the result of countless empirical encounters, many of which occur in early childhood. Colours, shapes, mathematical axioms, abstract concepts, hierarchies and values all contribute to a person’s worldview. Thus, when a person encounters a new object, she categorizes it according to these predetermined possibilities given by her understanding. Most of the time, this categorization is unconscious and opaque to self-reflection. Imagine walking into a restaurant of unknown cuisine. A plate of sizzling brown material is placed in front of you. Already certain concepts must be engaged to make sense of and participate in the event: meal, entrée, meat, sauté, restaurant, etiquette. This is probably familiar so far. But if a brass basin of steaming cloudy liquid was then placed in the centre of the table, the meaning may be unclear. Multiple interpretations are possible—say soup or a hand bath (or something else entirely). The criteria used to decide if the basin is full of soup or bathwater are prejudgments derived from the communal consensus of one’s past. And though the majority of prejudgments, to the degree that they are homogenous in a time and place, enjoy considerable influence in the faculty of understanding, no two persons belong to the exact same past. Thus, prejudgments, taken as a totality, are ultimately unique in each individual, despite vast swathes of similarity among persons from common backgrounds. A person who washes before sitting down at the table (as in some cultures) may assume that the basin contains soup, whereas a person accustomed to bathing after eating (as is common in other cultures) would guess the basin contains bathwater. Not only are those criteria prejudgments, but the very scheme that divides the phenomenal world into discrete qualities and objects like basin, table, liquid, clear are themselves instances of prejudgment. Most importantly, without prejudgments, no analogies can be made to prior experience, so no understanding can occur. Gadamer argues that Aristotle and Locke’s model of the mind as a blank slate is a myth, and would be useless if real. Understanding requires traction between text and reader, not a frictionless mirror.

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Though every interpreter is infinitely particular, the sedimentation of ­prejudgments cannot be random or subject to the caprice of will. Rather, there are observable causal factors at play, and Gadamer analyses this causation in terms of history. The cause and effect of prejudgment acquisition extends along the dimension of history, so that history is more than the flow of interactions among physical substances. Rather, the real influence of history lies in the causal ­influence of concepts as they constitute an interpreter and are in turn expressed again in text and event. Hermeneutics is frequently described as a circular causation: prior readings inform the interpreter, who brings those influences to bear on a new reading. For Gadamer, these circles—each one a dialogue between person and text1—are stretched along their temporal axes into webs of coiled filaments— a causally2 effective history (wirkungsgeschichte). Pinning down the absolute origin of a tradition is difficult. Take, for example, the common Western concept of a vampire. Most of the traits of vampires come from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which established the archetype of a Balkan noble who is undead, drinks blood, avoids the sun and so on. But Stoker himself was weaving together previous sources, most likely from his Hungarian acquaintance Ármin Vámbéry, who himself was interpreting stories of a Vlad “Țepeș” Dracula, fifteenth-century voivode of Wallachia, and more diffuse legends of vampirism from the Carpathian region. Prince Vlad’s own story was the result of numerous retellings in the generations between his own life and that of Vámbéry. And those tellings are influenced by, among other things, Vlad’s actual deeds, which were influenced by Vlad’s own prejudgments and the traditions to which he belonged. The character of Dracula has no absolute beginning but emerges gradually out of the history of effects. If we then trace the vampire concept forward from 1897, we find a whole host of stage plays, cinematic recreations and farces that play off each other and accumulate in the understanding of contemporary audiences. From the standpoint of the present, the concept of a vampire may owe as much to Sesame Street’s The Count as it does to Stoker or Wallachia’s battles with the Ottoman Empire. Every person’s ability to understand, whether the object is a vampire or the Christian Gospel, is historically conditioned, and in turn, conditions history. In this web of dialogical encounters, one would observe that some prejudgments tend to replicate generation after generation. As such, they constitute a common bed of meaning by which understanding is possible. When this happens, we have a tradition. Likewise, every subsequent act of interpretation adds to that tradition. Gadamer elaborates: The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to a tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in relation to a tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in this evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves. (Gadamer 2000, 293)

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Thus, tradition not only refers to the body of prejudgments that inform an ­interpretation, but describes the temporal ontology of understanding. Traditions are things, very real and powerful. We belong to them, they do not belong to us. Returning to the question of an author’s intention, we see that in Gadamer’s model of human understanding, one can never recreate the psychological state of an author who is removed at any historical distance. The intervening distance between reader and author is filled with the history of effects. Due to these effects, twentyfirst-century understanding is qualitatively different than first-century understanding. Readers can attempt to recreate the worldview of an author, but the result will always be something of a sham. What a contemporary reader imagines, even after the most careful and erudite scholarship, is not the apostle Paul’s worldview, or Nagārjuna’s worldview, but a simulacrum that uses modern concepts as the basis for the projected other. One can never escape her own tradition to enter entirely into another. Gadamer’s history of effects has had dramatic repercussions in biblical studies. Though many had already realised that the authorial intention of biblical authors is obscured, many historicists still offered techniques to reconstruct these intentions, either based on investigation into the authors’ material conditions, grammatical choices, cultural milieu or (given a theological commitment to unity of meaning in scripture) a text’s coherence with other biblical books. Gadamer’s argument, however, revealed that any such reconstructions are constituted by the reader’s own projects and tradition more than the author’s own worldview. Given that the author’s intentions are forever lost, hermeneutics after Gadamer tends to define meaning and truth in terms of a text’s reception, rather than the circumstances of its creation. Gadamer’s rejection of authorial intention drew criticism from many theorists, most notable among them E. D. Hirsch, who argued that replacing the alterity of the author’s intention with prejudice and tradition made interpretation far too relativistic and underestimated the ability of the reader to bracket her own worldview when encountering a text (Hirsch 1967). But Gadamer also laments the subjectivization of meaning in art and scripture alike. The experience of art contains a claim to truth that is different, but not inferior to the truths discovered by the natural sciences (Gadamer 2000, 83–84, 97–100). Likewise, the meaning found (not created) in scriptures, though dependent on context and interpreter’s background, is a form of truth. Theologian David Tracy names this appearance of truth manifestation, and insists that although it belongs to lived experience, and not a sterile laboratory, it is nevertheless given and authentic, and not at all subject to the will of the interpreter (Tracy 1981, 101, 198). Though it is uncontroversial to assert that the meaning of a painting or poem is relative to the observer, applying a similar model to texts that enjoy the authority of revelation is a marked break from most traditional theological doctrines. One of the challenges facing Gadamer’s philosophy is that it may require substantial revision to the concepts of truth and meaning already deployed in many religious traditions, particularly those that have adopted a definition of truth as a correspondence between language and a non-linguistic reality.

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Tradition and authority Another key feature of Gadamer’s ontology of understanding is that the majority of our prejudgments are opaque to us. They work unconsciously. They do not normally draw our attention, and usually operate without criticism. Whereas the Enlightenment construed reason to be the antidote to prejudice, Gadamer argues that reason is the very creature of prejudice, and in fact constituted by the accumulation of inherited prejudgments (Gadamer 2000, 282). Thus, the fundamental relationship of an interpreter is that of belonging to a tradition. Prejudgments are not seen as other or an object of inquiry, but rather constitute the self. Put another way, texts are always encountered with the “foreconception of completeness” (Gadamer 2000, 294). When reading a text, the reader’s unconscious assumption is that meaning is unproblematic and the text completely expresses its meaning. Only when a reading breaks down, appearing unintelligible or false, does one engage the critical function of reason that foregrounds the prejudgments of reader with prejudgments of author. Interruptions of meaning only appear against a background of vast acquiescence. Thus, for better or worse, one’s tradition establishes the default standards of meaning and intelligibility, which are only suspended in exceptional cases. We see illustrations of this every day. One may mishear a song on the radio, mistaking the intended lyric (Can’t find a better man…) for another phrase entirely (Can’t find the buttermilk…). If the misheard phrase makes some sense, if there is no problem of meaning, a person may go on for years hearing and singing the wrong(?) lyric. But when the misheard lyric interrupts the meaning, creating nonsense or meaning that strongly contradicts the other lyrics, only then does a person examine their own prejudgments to work out the puzzle. Reason only turns on itself with a critical function when faced with an insurmountable break in meaning. Unlike song lyrics, which echo repeatedly in the conscious mind, most prejudgments are not easily isolated or brought to consciousness. Pastries do not explode when touched. My body is a machine that continually extrudes hair into space. Trees have little to no antipathy toward humans. No one thinks these thoughts (until now) because there have been no problems with our understanding of the world that requires these prejudgments to be brought to consciousness. Even when one can bring a prejudgment to consciousness and critically examine it, this necessarily obscures others. Foregrounding requires a background. We are only transparent to ourselves in partial glimpses. Gadamer is not, however, entirely denying agency of the individual, making human beings the automatons of tradition. He points out that the continuation of a tradition involves elements of both givenness and free choice. Even when older traditions are preserved, that preservation requires individuals in the stream of history to consciously choose to preserve them (Gadamer 2000, 282). And tradition, for this reason, is (and perhaps ought to be) granted at least some provisional authority because previous generations have made conscious decisions to preserve those traditional elements of a worldview, finding them to contain truth. This position sparked a well-known debate with Jürgen Habermas, who argued against

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such conservatism, preferring instead an autonomous reason that could “break up the nature-like substance of tradition” (Habermas 1977, 354). Gadamer would later temper his position on this matter, admitting he had overemphasized the force of belonging for rhetorical purposes in the first edition of Truth and Method (Gadamer 2000, xxxviii). Gadamer admits that understanding, though it may be the ­creature of history, is sufficiently rich to bend back upon itself and reflexively critique itself to some degree. Nevertheless, for Gadamer, belonging is always logically prior to critique. For the scholar of religions (and other social scientists), Gadamerian belonging requires a serious rethinking of how to approach unfamiliar beliefs or practices. Aspiring to the passionless objectivity championed by the Enlightenment would result in self-delusion, and worse, the oblivious imposition of the scholar’s traditional prejudgments upon the communities or objects studied.3 The alternative lies between a fatalistic acceptance of tradition and a futile attempt to be objective. Instead, we might hold all judgments in tension with the consciousness that our own understanding is relative to a tradition that is contingent, that others may not share. This development of hermeneutic consciousness requires that we all “think within [our] own historicity” (Gadamer 2000, 360–361). The result is a perpetual openness to new truth claims and methods of inquiry, perhaps even a drive to encounter the other again and again to come to the fullest understanding feasible.

Truth, not method If the meaning of a text is different for every reader, and depends in part on that reader’s prejudgments, what is the status of truth? Does this model of understanding reduce truth to an entirely individualized affair, or does truth somehow operate intersubjectively, binding communities together? Our answer begins with the definition of truth against which Gadamer was reacting. Gadamer’s generation of philosophers had to grapple with the lionization of the natural sciences that was characteristic of high modernity, particularly in late nineteenth-century ­Germany. The procedures and methods of physics, chemistry and biology laboratories had achieved great technological progress. As a result, many sought to apply such methods to the human sciences, for example, history, philology and anthropology. Wilhelm Dilthey, who preceded Heiddeger and Gadamer in the hermeneutic tradition, reasoned that the human ability to know the natural world, as successful as it has been, is hampered by the dissimilarity between a scientific mind and its object of inquiry. While scientists are composed of human consciousness, a helium atom or tectonic plate participates in no such consciousness. The human sciences [geisteswissenschaften] of history, politics, literature and religion, according to Dilthey, should be capable of even deeper knowledge, as there is a participation of the knower in the known, that is, the human sciences study direct expressions of human consciousness. Dilthey sought a methodological analogue for the human sciences, an account of how spirit inductively comes to know the meaning of an expressionof-spirit (i.e. a text). Dilthey believed that by accumulating the ­correlations of

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signs and meanings in a particular cultural “‘sphere,” one could reliably interpret the world. The problem of course, is that objectivity, in the sense of uniformity of appearance to all perceivers, is not attainable in the humanities. Gadamer sharply criticizes Dilthey’s inductive procedure as inadequate ­(Gadamer 2000, 241). Even if a person could build up a vast sedimentary store of cultural associations between meanings and symbols—the pain of a grimace, the coquetry of a wink—such generalizations do not function as laws. One cannot then use these associations to predict with any degree of certainty meaning in other contexts. The wink of a secret lover is not usually the same wink of an elderly uncle, and one ignores such contextual clues to meaning at one’s peril. Furthermore, one cannot guarantee that an uncle will not wink with genuinely amorous intent, as rare as that may be. The problem that ultimately defeats Dilthey’s project is that circumstances admit of “infinite variety” (Gadamer 2000, 21). There can be no method of interpretation prior to the event of interpretation, because every reader and every text are infinitely particular in their histories, concerns, and contexts. This criticism applies not only to Dilthey but a forteriori to those in the social sciences who would try to understand a text by means of a pre-established method.4 The humanities are not analogous to the natural sciences, and so the search for a method is mistaken. As an alternative to method, or perhaps as an anti-method, Gadamer invokes Aristotle’s virtue of phronēsis, or practical wisdom. In Aristotle’s Ethics, this is the ability to adjust means to ends (Aristotle 1971, 1140a32–1140b7). It involves the practical ability to evaluate and respond to contingencies and circumstances as they arise. Phronēsis is thoroughly of the present—an event. It cannot be anticipated in any concrete formulation, because of the infinite particularities by which the good manifests. Nor is it ever completed, for hermeneutics is always circular, and understanding involves a ceaseless flow from text back to self and out to text again. Nevertheless, this practical wisdom is what guides interpretation in an event. It is fitting that an ethical concept is used, for hermeneutics is essentially an ethical occurrence, an inter-subjective event. More importantly, because interpretation is phronetic, it resists any attempt to be controlled or steered by law-seeking methodologies.

The fusion of horizons If understanding is not a method but an event that resists technical control, how does it proceed? Gadamer’s notion of understanding, which is always also interpretation, occurs in the event of dialogue, which Gadamer poetically describes as a fusion of horizons. His phenomenological account of dialogue begins with the recognition of finitude—that some things are familiar while others are unfamiliar. The former category is largely defined by an individual’s tradition, while the latter lays beyond it. The boundary or limit between appears as a horizon. So, a reader has a horizon and a text has a different horizon—after all, each occupies a different point in the stream of tradition. The event, if it is an authentic instance of dialogue, occurs in what Gadamer calls a play-space (spielraum). Engaging a text authentically is similar to playing a game.

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Most importantly, one relinquishes self-determination to the rules of the game (Gadamer 2000, 111). In an authentic conversation, one does not try to force a particular outcome, nor does a chess player move his or her pieces in whatever way he or she wills. The game itself has autonomy and the players suspend their own projects, submit to the constraining logic of the conversation, and participate in a back-and-forth to see what will be revealed. In this model then, authentic dialogue involves the reader relinquishing control and allowing the text to offer its own meaning for recognition, to disclose its own truths à la Platonic anamnesis (Gadamer 2000, 114). Thus, to interpret a text authentically is to make oneself vulnerable, and expose oneself to its claim to truth. It is a risk (Gadamer 1976a, 201). This is why the controlling methods of the natural sciences are so inappropriate to the humanities. To dissect a work of art with a foreordained methodology is to destroy its disclosive power to reveal truths. In one of his later writings, Gadamer draws this out with regard to the power of myth. He defends the autonomy of myth and criticises Wagner for deliberately trying to construct a new Germanic mythos. By consciously aiming to create myth, Wagner “forfeits the spontaneity and validity that belonged to its [myth’s] earlier period.” The results of such violations are seen in “Führer cults of totalitarian states and … the enigma of brainwashing” (Gadamer 1999, 97). Technical control warps the event of understanding, often with ethically disastrous consequences. When technical control is relinquished, an event of authentic understanding is possible, and then horizons are fused. This fusion is not so much of a subordination of the text to the reader’s prejudgments. That would be assimilation. Rather, the reader transcends “to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity, but that of the other” (Gadamer 2000, 305). Transcendence in this case involves foregrounding unfamiliar symbols against a wider background of shared prejudgments. Even in cases in which reader and text seem to be completely alienated, Gadamer argues that the broadest universality—language use in general—still unites them. It is “in the play between the traditionary text’s strangeness and familiarity to us, between being a historically intended, distanciated object and belonging to a tradition. The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between” (Gadamer 2000, 295). The otherness of a text—and Gadamer thought primarily in terms of historical otherness, not cultural otherness—is projected as a contrast to the reader’s own horizon. It is then immediately understood by means of analogy to the familiar, overtaken or superseded by the present horizon in a moment in which the continuing tradition is realized to engulf both. At the same time, the event of understanding transforms the initial horizon, becoming the leading edge of the tradition. This cyclical fusion of horizons is ceaseless, as readers reinterpret and simultaneously accrete a tradition for every generation anew. Shakespeare’s Hamlet serves as a good example. Though it is historically distant from the twenty-first century, it is a classic, which is a term Gadamer reserves for special texts that are able to disclose truth to every generation (Gadamer 2000, 289– 290). Upon an initial reading, I may be rebuffed by unfamiliar character names: Polonius and Fortinbras. I read about daggers, tapestries, kings and poison, all of

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which play no meaningful role in my life. I encounter a plot involving notions of honour, vengeance and royal succession, all of which have little to do with my day-to-day concerns. Initially, the strangeness of this play stands out, and I project it as an historical other: men in hose carrying blades, obsolete verse, unusual familial affections, castles and ghosts. But, very quickly, I may see those strange elements in a broader horizon to which the text and I both belong. I recognize ruthless ambition, contrition for wrongdoing, withheld maternal affection, grief, obsession. These are themes that have a place in my world and the world of the text, and so whatever lessons I find in Hamlet enlarge my own horizon. (Less classical texts would require greater effort to find a common belonging.) At the same time, some elements may be foregrounded as problematic. Hamlet’s relationship with his mother for example, strikes many contemporary readers as unsettling. Thus, certain prejudgments are foregrounded, challenged and the tension must be negotiated. Ultimately a meaning will be assigned to this relationship, which in some small way may alter my own body of prejudgments. My reading of Hamlet advances this literary tradition into the future, and meanwhile, my own horizon continues to shift as every meaningful encounter I have tests some prejudgment or other. Note that I have not deciphered Shakespeare’s intentions, nor have I assimilated Hamlet to a rote reflection of my own concerns. Nevertheless, this interaction has revealed certain truths, which are applied to a new particularity—my particularity—and thus appended to the flow of tradition. Gadamer’s fusion metaphor, however, has been criticized for the perhaps overly sanguine assumption that most, if not all, readers and texts relate to each other in a mode of agreement and community. Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton objects: History, for Gadamer, is not a place of struggle, discontinuity and exclusion but a ‘continuing chain’, an everflowing river, almost, one might say, a club of the like-minded. Historical differences are tolerantly conceded, but only because they are effectively liquidated by an understanding which ‘bridg(es) the temporal distance which separates the interpreter from the text’. (Eagleton 1983, 73) Eagleton’s accusation that Gadamerian tradition liquidates important differences echoes a criticism made earlier by Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard argues that different genres of discourse, because of both historical and cultural alienation, can never be legitimately totalized or fused, as each operates according to different rules of discursive logic, which are ultimately incommensurable (Lyotard 1984, xxiii, 25–27, 61). When dialogue is attempted, power relations come into play, and one mode of discourse inevitably does violence to the other (Lyotard 1988, 9, 13). Ultimately, Gadamer sees language use itself and the desire to be understood as sufficient conditions for some fusion of horizons, and this fusion is not a Hegelian totalization of meaning. The fusion does not refer to “an abiding and identifiable

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‘one’, but just to what takes place in conversation as it goes along” (Gadamer 1989, 119). That is, according to Gadamer, because horizons are never static and constantly shifting, dialogue is not entirely stable and every new conversation contains new limits, prescriptions and logics (cf. Hustwit 2014, 100–104).

Theological hermeneutics Though he never considered himself a theologian proper, Gadamer frequently applied his system of hermeneutics to the work of other theologians, most notably in the interpretation of scripture.5 He points out that because all understanding involves interpretation, the formerly distinct task of applying a passage of scripture to a situation can no longer be distinguished from understanding it. Understanding, interpretation and application all occur simultaneously and are inseparable. An important consequence of this is that the gospel does not exist in order to be understood as a merely historical document, but to be taken in such a way that it exercises its saving effect. This implies that the text … if it is to be understood properly—i.e. according to the claim it makes—must be understood at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way. (Gadamer 2000, 309; emphasis added) Meaning is not univocal, nor even a stable multiplicity attributed to the text. The meaning of scripture is instead an event, actualized by the reader’s singular application, and relative to her concerns and horizon. Meaning happens only in the space between text and reader and does not reside in the text itself. At the same time, the status of scripture as the word of God means that it has “absolute priority over the doctrine of those who interpret it” (Gadamer 2000, 331). That is, even though meaning is always located in front of the text in the event of application, the interpreter is not free to create any interpretation. Interpretive activity, regardless of genre, “considers itself wholly bound by the meaning of the text. Neither jurist nor theologian regards the work of application as making free with the text” (Gadamer 2000, 332). Though some of Gadamer’s critics have anxiety about freeing meaning from an author’s intention, Gadamer’s phenomenology of play-space entails that meaning is not subject to the caprice of the interpreter. A meaning always discloses itself independently of the reader’s will, and is always at the same time an application of that revealed meaning. Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most renowned theologians of the early twentieth century, illustrates Gadamer’s notion that meaning cannot be limited to “the supposed opinion of its author,” and that meaning must always make contact with the horizon of the reader if it is to be understood at all (Gadamer 2000, 521). Bultmann is most famous for advocating a demythologization of the New Testament. That is, Bultmann argues that the worldview of the Biblical authors, because they are ­prescientific, are literally incredible to modern readers.

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It is impossible to use electric light and wireless and to avail ourselves of ­modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles. We may think we can manage it in our own lives, but to expect others to do so is to make the Christian faith unintelligible and unacceptable to the modern world. (Bultmann 1961, 5) It is necessary, according to Bultmann, to distinguish between the true meanings of myths, which are existential relationships like origin, dependence, finitude and deliverance, and the supernatural terms through which those relations are expressed. The “apparent objectivity” of the mythic elements of scripture must be interpreted existentially (Bultmann 1961, 11). Here, Bultmann and Gadamer share an insight, that meaning must be applicable to the worldview of the reader. Bultmann’s call for demythologization is born of the hermeneutical recognition that horizons must fuse, and the corresponding worry that modern sensibilities may lose their ability to recognize the truths of the Gospel. At the same time, readers in the early twenty-first century may see Bultmann’s theology receding into the past, a product of his own effective history. Namely, Bultmann’s conviction that a specific method, even a demythologizing one, can guide the event of interpretation, is the product of certain positivistic theories of human agency. As stated previously, Gadamer argues that meaning and truth manifest spontaneously, and not as the result of a wilful interpretation program. Likewise, Bultmann’s identification of modern science as the dominant influence over biblical readers may not be as applicable today as it was in the atomic age. We may argue that in 2015, multinational media conglomerates or political ideologies are more likely to shape and guide today’s worldviews. Bultmann’s theological hermeneutics thus illustrates Gadamer’s hermeneutics in two ways. First, to the degree that Bultmann worries about the distance between reader and text, and advocates demythologization as a remedy, he speaks in accord with Gadamer regarding the protean relevance of a text that comes to light for every new generation. Second, to the degree that Bultmann’s assessment of the reader-text relation can be objectified as a product of its now-dated historical prejudgments, it unwittingly testifies to the finitude of every interpretation.

The reign of language Historical finitude was not a new insight. Gadamer was aware of the formal similarities between his own process of horizon-fusion and Hegel’s dialectic of history. But whereas Hegel’s movement was materially constituted by Spirit, Gadamer’s process takes place in and through the medium of language (Gadamer 2000, 384). The significance of this linguistic medium becomes apparent when investigating Gadamer’s theory of knowledge, which he offers as a third way between ontotheology and Kantian scepticism. The problem of knowledge appears when we try to account for how a belief about the world can correspond, or be related rightly,

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to the actual world. Classical metaphysicians and German idealists explain this correspondence in terms of a primordial sameness of thought and being, that thoughts and the world all had their origin is the self-same Absolute. By contrast, many neo-Kantians have asserted that beliefs and things were fundamentally incommensurable, like oil and water. The thing-in-itself is a “mere ideal goal of an infinite task of progressive determination” (Gadamer 1976b, 72–75). We will never be able to escape out own heads to check if our beliefs correspond to things apart from our perceptions of them. Gadamer proposes, however, that the correspondence between beliefs and beings is grounded in language itself. Because understanding is already immersed in linguistic prejudgments prior to any particular act of understanding, the objects of all mental activities (beliefs, desires, etc.) are linguistic entities. Thus, the world is not a thing apart from language, but the phenomenological “continuity with which the various perceptual perspectives on objects shade into one another” (Gadamer 2000, 447). We live as if swimming in language, and the world of shared experience is a perceptual averaging of the sum total of idiosyncratic conceptual schemes. Gadamer was handy with the aphorism and two of his most famous are appropriate here. “Being that can be understood is language,” and “language is the language of reason itself” (Gadamer 2000, 401, 474). Thus truth, whether a mundane truth of how much peanut butter remains in a jar, or the deepest mystery about God, does not lie in an extra-linguistic realm of things-in-themselves, as Plato imagined, waiting for discovery. Rather truth waits down in the logoi, in the realm of human discourse (Gadamer 2000, 410–412). Truth is not correspondence, but manifestation in and through language. Locating truth down in the logoi presents serious challenges to the self-­ understanding of many religions. First, it entails that the salvation pursued and objects of devotion, whether God, saint, or spirit, never transcends human collective conceptions of that object. A more charitable, religion-friendly reading of Gadamer may argue that language simply delimits what can be understood, and God’s mystery may ultimately lay beyond that horizon. But as long as it does, it will never be understood, and implies only robustly apophatic theologies. Nevertheless, Gadamer’s insistence on the primacy of language in human understanding raises questions about those liminal experiences—half-understood religious experience, the ineffable, and the sublime. Given the importance of dialogue and fusing horizons in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, it seems that the most pressing task for contemporary thinkers is no longer how to overcome historical distance, but how to overcome cultural distance, that is, between religious traditions that have little in common.6 Interreligious dialogue offers rich opportunities to work out questions of understanding, commensurability and truth. But if we follow Gadamer and revise religions so that the truth manifests entirely within a linguistic horizon, and not beyond it, connecting to some nonlinguistic other (Gadamer 2000, 448), we may rightly worry about reducing sacred mysteries to conceptual idols, or the unpredictable phenomenon of recognition that Gadamer cites as a primary truth criterion (see Hustwit 2014, 75–98).

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So, if Gadamer’s work is to be taken forward, we must reconcile his insight that truth is only recognized in and through language with the intuitions shared by many religions and philosophers that hermeneutical finitude implies that there is a realm of being beyond our interpretative horizon. Thinkers like Ricoeur and Tracy recognize this limit, and concede that there may be experience of the Impossible (Tracy 2010) or pre-linguistic signification (Ricoeur 1976, 59–63). They run up to the limits of human understanding and stop. The future of hermeneutics and religion seems to be to take another step and transgress that boundary, and imagine how the Beyond, whether divinely beyond or culturally beyond, influences our interpretations from its seat in obscurity. In turn, are there more and less faithful ways of projecting our interpretations back across the limits to reinvigorate speculative philosophy? Perception and reason are creatures of the horizon, and cannot get past it, but by practicing dialogue and comparative inquiry, horizons may always be enriched. Could they be enriched to the point where a collective gloss on the cosmos was comparable to the cosmos an sich? Though Gadamer would argue that such an approach is “a foolish ideal that mistook the nature of tradition” (Gadamer 2000, 397), I see no reason why such a task must necessarily fail, only countless contingent reasons why it would probably fail. Gadamer’s metaphor of horizons cannot conceal that there always seems to be an other to the self, a text for the reader, and a nature behind the phenomena. Hermeneutics cannot jettison the former for the latter while maintaining its identity. It has always instead productively straddled the horizon that divides understanding from mystery. Despite these unfinished tasks, Gadamer looms as the most formidable figure in modern hermeneutics. His models of interpretation and the ontology of effective history have influenced students of scriptural studies, the social sciences, theology and linguistic philosophy. For even if our current generation of thinkers were to continue working completely unconscious of Gadamer’s philosophy, his impact upon our received traditionary prejudgments is so great that we cannot help but confess to belonging to Gadamer.

Notes 1 For Heidegger and Gadamer, the notion of text is not exclusive to writing, but includes speech events, persons, icons and any other event that can be understood. For the remainder of this essay, text will be used in this broad sense. 2 Gadamer’s notion of causation is not a deterministic one, as found in the natural sciences. A cause influences an effect rather than exhaustively determines it. 3 For example, Gadamer’s influence can be seen in the work of cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, particularly Geertz’s insistence upon contextual or “thick” descriptions of behaviours as well as his semiotic theory of culture. See Geertz (1973). 4 Cf. Wilhelm Windelband’s nomothetic sciences in Windelband (1884). 5 Other thinkers have used his system of philosophical hermeneutics as the central metaphor for systematic theology. American theologian David Tracy’s hermeneutical theology is exemplary. See, especially, Tracy (1981, 1987). 6 Paul Ricoeur’s interpretation theory addresses many of these problems—human agency and cultural otherness, for example—and in many senses, advances the work that Gadamer began. See Ricoeur (1976, esp. 71–88; 1981).

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References Aristotle. 1971. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by J. A. K. Thomson. Penguin Classics. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books. Bultmann, Rudolf. 1961. “New Testament and Mythology.” Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate. Edited by Hans Werner Bartsch, translated by Reginald H. Fuller. New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks. 1–44. Chladenius, Johann Martin. 1985. “Introduction to the Correct Interpretation of Reasonable Speeches and Writings.” The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present. Edited and translated by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer. New York, NY: Continuum. Originally published in German as Einleitung zur richtingen auslegung vernünftiger Reden und Schriften (Leipzig 1742). Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1976a. “Martin Heidegger and Marburg Theology (1964).” Philosophical Hermeneutics. Edited and translated by David E. Linge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 198–212. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1976b. “The Nature of Things and the Language of Things.” Philosophical Hermeneutics. Edited and translated by David E. Linge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 198–212. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. “Hermeneutics and Logocentrism.” Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Edited by Diane P. Michelfielder and Richard E. Palmer. SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 114–128. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1999. “Myth in the Age of Science.” Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer. Yale Studies in Hermeneutics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 91–102. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2000. Truth and Method. Second Revised Edition. Edited by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York, NY: Continuum Books. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books. Habermas, Jürgen. 1977. “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method.” Understanding and Social Inquiry. Edited by F. Dallmayr and T. McCarthy. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Hirsch, E. D. 1967. Validity and Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hustwit, J. R. 2014. Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Translated by G. Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1976. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Edited and Translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1998. Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings. Edited and translated by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tracy, David. 1981. The Analogical Imagination. New York, NY: Crossroad Publishing. Tracy, David. 1987. Plurality and Ambiguity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tracy, David. 2010. “Western Hermeneutics and Interreligious Dialogue.” Interreligious Hermeneutics. Edited by Catherine Cornille. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. 1–44.

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Winch, Peter. 1990. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. Second Edition. London, UK: Routledge. Windelband, Wilhelm. 1884. “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft: Straßburger Rektoratsrede.” Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Einleitung in die Philosophie. Tuebingen: J. C. B. Mohr. 136–160.

21 Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) Todd Mei

Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) was a French philosopher who made significant ­contributions in the fields of phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics, social philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of religion and biblical hermeneutics. His engagement with specific philosophers is widespread and includes not just his European contemporaries and classical figures in the history of philosophy, but also philosophers within the analytic tradition, such as Donald Davidson, Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit. His life during World War II was spent mainly in captivity as a French army officer in a German prisoner of war camp. During this period, he famously translated into French for the first time, Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I. After the years of student protests in the 1960s in France and an unfortunate failed attempt to run a new university at Nanterre based on some of the ideals driving the student call for change, Ricoeur moved to the United States to assume the John Nuveen chair at the University of Chicago Divinity School, previously held by Paul Tillich. In the 1980s, he returned to Paris, where he pursued with vigour studies on legal and distributive justice and was even summoned as an expert witness (as a philosopher!) to comment on a case involving HIV-contaminated blood (Ricoeur 2007b, 249–256). Despite the breadth and depth of Ricoeur’s work, his involvement in theology was occasional and “ad hoc,” mostly relating to biblical exegesis (Stiver 2012, 145). Whereas this involvement was by no means without significance, understanding its remit is somewhat complex. This is because by his own account, Ricoeur considered himself a philosopher and not a theologian (Blundell 2010, 3); and, perhaps more importantly, he maintained that philosophy and theology should be kept separate as disciplines. One of the main reasons for this separation involves the respective structures of engagement: philosophy is situated within the ­“question-answer” format whereas for theology, reflection is subordinate to revelation (Ricoeur 1992, 24; 1977, 20). This distinction obviously raises more questions

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than answers. Within Ricoeur scholarship, this topic has been explored in much detail (Blundell 2012; Stiver 2001, 2012).1 Herein, I wish to maintain Ricoeur’s disciplinary “asceticism,” to use his own words (Ricoeur 1992, 24), to show the ways in which his philosophical hermeneutics is productive in distinct ways for both the philosophy of religion and theology. More specifically, in this chapter I will explain how Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach allows us to see theology as being relevant in view of atheism. In other words, although Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutics does not make theological claims or attempt to do theology, it does respond to several of the philosophical criticisms that would like to dismiss theology as obsolete or fatally flawed. Ricoeur, thus, enables the philosopher of religion to see new possibilities for the role and status of religion, while at the same time allowing the theologian to engage with a new critical context that attempts to elucidate new conditions for the possibility of a thinking God. In what follows, I will provide a brief account of Ricoeur’s contribution to and his use of hermeneutics. I will then discuss how Ricoeur understands modernity’s suspicion of religion and how he sees this suspicion being overcome through a better understanding of the affective and symbolic dimensions of religion.

Ricoeur’s hermeneutics in view of atheism Hermeneutics includes both biblical and philosophical branches, with the two sharing an interest in the methods of interpreting texts. The central concern of hermeneutics is a theory of interpretation, and it is the hallmark of philosophical hermeneutics in the twentieth century to see interpretation as applicable not just to texts, but also to our own existence. Distinguishing biblical from philosophical hermeneutics involves understanding a complex history. Rather than offer a version of this history, which is a topic in its own right,2 in this section I will account for the historical context and facets of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics that anticipate a critical assessment of atheism. In the 1960s, when Ricoeur began developing his hermeneutical philosophy, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer had already established the centrality of hermeneutics, not just as a way of doing philosophy but as a fundamental feature of human existence. This involves the claim that the unique mode of our being is interpretive, both in the manner we seek to know and in how an understanding of human existence is not reducible to a scientific explanation of putatively objective facts. Heidegger demonstrates this claim when offering a new philosophical analysis of the finite nature of human being. He argues that the condition of finitude has not really been grasped within the history of philosophy, and for Heidegger this is evident in how previous philosophers elide the relation between being and temporality—that is to say, how the attempt to understand being and temporality is often suppressed by a concern for what is everlasting and eternal. The branch of philosophy interested in the eternal is metaphysics, or the science of being qua being. In contrast, by taking finitude as a central feature of being, Heidegger

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begins ­philosophical enquiry with what is opposed to the eternal. Especially since Descartes, the possibility of thinking finitude philosophically was hampered by the endeavour to remove ourselves from the limitations of finitude, most notably in the search for certain knowledge and presuppositionless beginnings, or what Søren Kierkegaard (1992, 301–318) famously derided as “pure thinking” concerned with eternal things (sub specie aeterni) and not actual existence. With hermeneutics, the idea is to embrace our existential limitations and show how they can be philosophically productive. In this respect, one of the main contributions of Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time (published in 1927) is the elucidation of our manner of being as one directed above all by our concern for death, or what he called our “beingtowards-death.” Despite the prominence given to death, it would be a mistake to assume Heidegger has a pessimistic or even nihilistic view of human existence. In fact, he coins the word “Dasein” (being-there) to indicate how humans have a unique form of engaging with one another and the world that is “disclosive”;3 that is to say, the anticipation of death discloses the world in terms of possibilities we recognise for our existence. Another way of stating this is to say that as beings who recognise the condition of our finitude, we are preoccupied with the question of what our finite existence means. Paul Tillich aptly summarises this concern as “the question of being” (Tillich 1955, 11). Our response to this question is not simply theoretical or rhetorical but in fact shapes the way we act and interact, and indeed, the way the world then takes shape according to these actions. If this summary of Heidegger suggests that he is advocating a form of humanism in which the human being takes centre stage as the creator of the world, then it is worthwhile noting that Heidegger as well as Gadamer and Ricoeur situate the human being in relation to something already given. That which precedes us is that to which we are in some sense indebted. For Heidegger, this is being understood as gift; Gadamer will often speak of the beautiful; and for Ricoeur, as we will see, it is a sense of the surplus of meaning. Gadamer, in numerous respects, continues the momentum of Heidegger’s analysis of being, most notably in relation to how our existence is embedded in tradition. At one level, each culture participates in a specific history constituted by its tradition, which consists primarily of its texts (fictional, factual, philosophical, etc.), its monuments, its artworks and so on. Yet these constituents of a tradition are not simply extant entities; they are above all linguistic phenomena. At the risk of oversimplifying Gadamer’s understanding of language, itself stemming from ­Heidegger, one can say that for human beings the primary way in which we engage with the world is through language—not just a language, such as French, Japanese or English. Rather, Gadamer (and Heidegger) refer to a fundamental language that each particular instance of language presupposes. In this sense, Gadamer remarks that “language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs” (Gadamer 1989, 389). One way of understanding this notion of language involves seeing how any type of human experience is not an isolated, brute event. Rather, it is experienceable precisely because language is already active in allowing one to recognize

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that what is happening or has happened is meaningful or significant. Not only varying dialects, but even for Gadamer non-verbal scientific systems, are therefore instances of the universal phenomenon of the constitution of meaning through language. On this view, the instances of tradition referred to above are entities understood in and through language and which are then received by present and future generations in and through language. A second, more important, meaning of tradition here emerges: tradition is a participation in language. Moreover, this participation is never transparent, for language in any sense requires an interpretation. So, participation in tradition is a mode of understanding, that is, a mode of interpretation. Before seeing how this philosophical context relates to Ricoeur, there is one last detail to note. For Heidegger and Gadamer, the requirement of interpretation means that the past is never fully excavated of meaning. Our engagement with the past, especially through its texts, is a way of retrieving it in order to understand our own situation. This aspect is so decisive for hermeneutics that it avers we cannot but understand the present (and future) except through the retrieval (die wiederholung) of the past. And let us recall, this understanding is never certain or complete. One thus gets the sense of a continuing process of engagement and learning, or what is often referred to as “the hermeneutical spiral” (Ricoeur 1981, 171; as quoted in Stiver 2001, 57). Ricoeur assumes numerous facets of the hermeneutics of Heidegger and ­Gadamer, but he also differs from them in several significant respects.4 Most important for our purposes is how he agrees with Gadamer’s position on the centrality of texts. Ricoeur in fact argues that our understanding is always mediated by the texts and symbols which constitute our historical consciousness (Ricoeur 1991, 15–17). He therefore departs from Heidegger’s tendency to want to focus “immediately” on the question of being, which tends to omit the diverse ways through which being is manifest (Ricoeur 1974, 6). Ricoeur’s departure from Gadamer is more difficult to explain; although he accepts the centrality of texts as constitutive of our understanding, Ricoeur is much more concerned than Gadamer with the process by which such texts are interpreted. So, while one of the foci of Gadamer’s arguments in Truth and Method (published in 1960) is to claim a universal validity for hermeneutics vis-à-vis our participation in language, tradition and texts, Ricoeur alights upon the obstacles this participation encounters. To put the matter simply, he is concerned with historical and critical distance. How do we account for the historical distance that separates the reader from a historical source? Do we claim that interpretation has direct access to the past? And how is it possible to gain a critical distance from our relation to these texts? If this distance is not attainable, then tradition remains a hegemonic authority in need of a critique of its ideology (Ricoeur 1981, 61).5 Thus, a telling indication of the difference between Gadamer and Ricoeur emerges over the role of what is termed “distanciation” (Ricoeur 1981, 131–144). Ricoeur alleges that Gadamer only discusses distanciation as a form of alienation from the text, where alienation is a mistaken form of intentionality towards a text

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or artwork that hampers our ability to interpret it. Gadamer’s classic example is the abstracting nature of “aesthetic consciousness,” which presupposes qualities of what constitute a work of art and then applies these criteria in trying to understand a particular artwork. This process is a way of disengaging from the artwork to see it in terms of predetermined features. The aesthetic consciousness is thus an alienated form of relating to art, which Gadamer believes can be dissolved by attending instead to the world an artwork invites us to encounter. He refers to this alternative mode of engagement as being involved in play, wherein we allow the artwork to transform our subjectivity (Gadamer 1989, 85–87, 102). To summarise Ricoeur’s criticism, he finds Gadamer’s claim that the play of the artwork can be encountered so easily problematic. In this respect, Gadamer wants to introduce a substantial sense of belonging between a reader and a text, whereas Ricoeur wants to maintain this belonging but as long as it only passes through a critical experience of not really knowing what the text in question is actually intending or “saying.” Whatever world a text might have, it is better to say that this world is projected to us over a distance (Stiver 2012, 45–46); it is neither transparent nor immediate, but distanced from us. This distance cannot be ignored; it must be traversed through a critical engagement, or what he speaks of elsewhere in terms of “the hermeneutical arc” (Ricoeur 1981, 164, 218). This distance between reader and text enables Ricoeur to accommodate a critical view of the text itself since the distance implies a space in which different readers encounter and propose different interpretations. By explicitly allowing for the phenomenon of conflicting interpretations,6 a naive belief in a single or true meaning of the text is no longer viable. Competing interpretations must be given equal weight. And whereas it may seem his position implies a form of semantic relativism, by virtue of the distance one must traverse (between oneself and the world projected by the text), one is made aware more discreetly of the act of interpretation. The critical distance, in other words, raises questions of how the text can make sense, what rules of interpretation might need to be applied, how one might decide on one meaning of a phrase or metaphor rather than another, or indeed how one might try to retain multiple levels of meaning. As we will see, the main form this distanciation takes with respect to theology involves the way scripture and the texts constituting a religious tradition project a world whose meaning is not familiar yet is relevant, and indeed moves beyond the literal meanings with which atheism so often takes issue.

Atheism and suspicion At one point, Ricoeur describes modernity as “an open question” (Ricoeur 1995, 63). What he means by this is how the critical attitude towards religion that is influenced by atheism has beneficial effects for the philosophy of religion. In view of Ricoeur’s conception of distanciation, one can say that this critical attitude creates a distance between ourselves and the texts of a religious tradition in which a new understanding can emerge. Ricoeur puts this boldly with respect to atheism

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when saying, “[it] clears the ground for a new faith, a faith for a postreligious age” (Ricoeur 1969, 59). What this ground entails is, specifically, a philosophical clarification of what is possible, and I will elucidate this ground in the next two sections. For now, I will explain how Ricoeur sees this critical distance as one generated through an attitude of suspicion, which itself has emerged from three sources— Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, or those whom he famously called “the masters of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970, 32). This suspicion does not jettison religion as such, but a specific interpretation of religious texts. With respect to Christian theology specifically, it jettisons the possibility of conceiving and thinking theism in terms of a moral God who is primarily a dispenser of ethical laws and obligations. What Nietzsche, Marx and Freud claim to uncover are forms of false consciousness rooted in religious belief, and that, furthermore, it is the nature of this false consciousness to be unaware of the illusions and fantasies comprising it. While the critiques of the three masters are well known, and while much attention has already been given to Ricoeur’s treatment of them, it is worthwhile mentioning how he delineates their respective criticisms. For example, at one point he pairs Nietzsche and Freud together insofar as they want to “deprive the [religious] principle of obligation from its a priori character” (Ricoeur 1969, 66; 1974, 445)7—or, more precisely, the grounding of this principle in an illusory source of authority. For Nietzsche, the conformity of the will within Christian morality is a corruption of the will to power to the point that it replaces this will with its opposite, namely, subjugation and passivity. This is expressed above all in the religious language of the God who accuses and condemns. For Freud, the source of obligation in his psychology is the superego, whose construction is based on the primal father figure. The father figure is both hated and loved for his authority, which are at once the objects of jealousy and admiration. It is in this sense that religious consciousness, whether totemistic or monotheistic, is motivated by a father figure promising shelter; and it is the latter which is a hyperbolisation of this illusion since it places at the centre of its discourse and practices not gods, but a single omnipotent authority (Ricoeur 1974, 132–133). With Marx, there is no single figure of authority per se, but a dominant class whose ideology masks real relations. So, obligation in Marx’s sense is a kind of obedience to a mask—that is, a reproduction that has distorted real life. Religion in this sense is more a tool of domination in the service of the dominant class. Instead of addressing access to material needs in terms of production and the arrangement and control of the modes of production, religious consciousness redirects attention from this world towards an otherworldly life. Whatever suffering has ensued because of the dominance of one class need not be remedied in this world; indeed, one should seek salvation in the next. Ricoeur sees each of these critiques as presenting real criticisms of religion when religion takes the form of ideology, or what in a general sense can be construed as religion as domination and distortion. More precisely, what religion as ideology does is constrain our capacity to be and act. It replaces this capacity with an ethics of obligation, in which we merely obey. In other words, our capacity to pose and

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respond to the question of being, discussed in the previous section, is diminished since it is replaced by an obedience to a conception of a moral authority. This loss of capacity is therefore rightly diagnosed and criticised. And to the proclamation that “God is dead,” Ricoeur qualifies that the moral God of obligation is the one who is dead. “Even prohibition has its place; but it is not an origin, not a principle” (Ricoeur 1969, 77, cf. 67; 1974, 446, cf. 453). But then what place might prohibition occupy? Specifically, it provides a sense of measure or relation that is not infallible or incorrigible. It guides us by way of indicating how we might act and calls upon us to question its relevance when considering specific situations and even agreeing upon an exception to its provisional rule. Before turning to Ricoeur’s conception of religion after the death of the moral God in a post-religious age, I would like to consider briefly another type of criticism of religion involving the problem of evil. This will address what is perhaps a more common argument faced in the philosophy of religion, and it will provide an appropriate transition to the way Ricoeur reinterprets religion according to its affective and symbolic dimensions.

The Affective experience of evil Perhaps the most challenging problem for theism concerns the problem of evil in the world and how this squares with belief in an omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent deity. Why would a God who possesses these attributes allow evil to exist? Explaining this apparent contradiction is traditionally referred to as theodicy, and Ricoeur’s response to this problem is one of reservation. Why? At one level, the description of God as an entity having attributes is problematic because the God of Judaism and Christianity does not appear in religious discourse in this expressly conceptual guise until the Middle Ages. This criticism is familiar within larger continental philosophical debates through Heidegger’s charge that the history of Western metaphysics is “onto-theo-logical,” meaning that to understand the universe and our place within it, we posit a highest being as the ultimate causal principle. While Ricoeur acknowledges that ontotheology pervades much of Western philosophy and theology, he notes how the explicitly metaphysical approach is one deriving from ancient Greek philosophy, which is then blended with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Its culmination is not in medieval theology, but in Kantian metaphysics, which confines God to the ethical and moral sphere in which good and evil (as well as obligation) are paramount questions (Ricoeur 2007a, 34; 1969, 66, 82–83).8 At another level, the attempt to describe God in terms of attributes assumes that religious discourse originally aimed to express itself in terms of propositions. Even if propositional language has the modest remit of discussing God in view of epistemological and logical possibilities, it still misses the confessional nature of religious discourse (Ricoeur 2007a, 34). Ricoeur approaches the meaning of this confessional nature according to the sphere of affectation, that is, of what is felt in and by existence. So, in this respect, the confessional nature of language is both an a­ dmittance

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and an avowal: it admits (in the sense of recognising and embracing) one’s own fragility of existing; and it avows an effort and desire to be (Ricoeur 1986). Ricoeur, nonetheless, does not entirely dismiss the epistemological and logical arguments for and against the existence of God in relation to theodicy, but he does see as much more essential to the question of religion and theology the way in which evil is practically addressed through the affective sphere. In this sense, he argues that the speculative question of the origin of evil is not only a distraction but ultimately unanswerable within its own discourse. In part, this is because the conceptions of good and evil are usually so oppositional that their polar relation really makes no sense of lived existence, where things are mediated and embodied and not simply conceptual. The abstract mode of reflection not only assumes a Godlike view of the problem but also ignores how evil appears to us in situ. So, beginning with the finite, one can say evil is possible through any action we take because we are at once finite and fallible. This is not absolute evil in the abstract form but, as Ricoeur proposes, evil as part of our existential facticity. The contrast here is stark. Rather than attempt a conceptual resolution where absolute good can be understood in relation to absolute evil, Ricoeur admits the problem as already beyond conceptual resolution; it is an unsurpassable aporia that does not require a solution but a productive response. This is the wager of his affective understanding of religion. Moreover, Ricoeur maintains that the richness of religious discourse is that which provides the most productive means for affronting the problem of evil as it is experienced existentially and not conceived abstractly vis-à-vis the speculative existence of God (Ricoeur 2007a, 65–66). Here, religious symbolism plays a decisive role in allowing affective experience to “make sense” of evil in order for us to act and to be.

Affronting evil through symbolism and the surplus of meaning In this last section, I will explain the way in which Ricoeur sees religious discourse presenting a surplus of meaning that can transform the way we think and act in view of evil. This will involve clarifying how the affective sphere is made coherent through religious symbolism, and how in turn this symbolism leads to a predication of new meaning. Another way of seeing this is to say religious symbolism allows us to admit our fragile condition of finitude and avow a meaning enabling us to be despite this fragility. Ricoeur famously sums this up as “the Joy of Yes in the sadness of the finite.” To contrast this with the religion of the moral God, Ricoeur comments that religion is not directed at obligation, but the desire to be (Ricoeur 1986, 140; 1969, 75). Within Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation, symbols employ a double meaning—one literal and the other symbolic, or what he sees as a surplus meaning that is not reducible to the literal (Ricoeur 1976, 45–69). While for Ricoeur metaphors also partake in the same structure of double meaning, the distinction between the two is that symbols are not just linguistic in character since they refer to a nonlinguistic content. For example, the metaphor “the palm at the end of the mind”

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in a ­Wallace Stevens poem relies on a semantic juxtaposition of words whose literal meanings, when taken together, make no sense. Yet, rather than being “nonsensical,” Ricoeur observes that the problem of making no sense at the literal level results in a predication of new meaning at the metaphorical level. This predication is new insofar as each reader of the metaphor will attempt to make sense of the juxtaposition of literal meanings in new ways. It is also a surplus of meaning because what appears to be fixed in written discourse and by literal senses of words has generated a meaning above and beyond these limitations. The metaphor, nonetheless, is a semantic innovation whose ability to predicate resides within the linguistic sphere. With symbol, on the other hand, there are two features to note. First, symbols include a wide variety of words and entities, often by themselves and not situated in relation to other words. Religious symbolism can include “trees, labyrinths, ladders, and mountains” (Ricoeur 1976, 53). Secondly, and most importantly, the surplus of meaning in symbolism refers to a non-linguistic content, which in turn gives rise to critical reflection on its meaning. That is to say, symbolic reference is non-reducible to linguistic articulation but understood partially through this articulation. So, the symbol “tree,” although we come to designate it in language, is for religious discourse interpretable as such only because it is a manifestation of its non-linguistic source (Ricoeur 1995, 53)—in the case of religion, the sacred.9 Symbols, in other words, capture something essential and often enigmatic in the way the world is for a particular culture and which cannot be exhausted by the linguistic discourse that articulates and reflects on this symbol. The symbolic surplus of meaning is brought over to us by our affective encounter with fragility. Ricoeur notes the symbols of evil—most notably, sin—do not refer primarily to a moral sphere, which is recognizably linguistic in its commands. Rather, symbols like sin point beyond obvious meanings to a primordial ontological non-coincidence between ourselves and the world that is felt. This noncoincidence, as indicated earlier, is in one simple sense our capacity to err, which is inscribed in our condition of finitude. Ricoeur writes: [Our] [f  ]ragility is not merely the ‘locus’, the point of insertion of evil, nor the ‘origin’ starting from which man falls; it is the ‘capacity’ for evil. To say that man is fallible is to say that limitation peculiar to a being who does not coincide with himself is the primordial weakness from which evil arises. (Ricoeur 1986, 146) A symbol such as sin thus embodies an ontological condition of human existence whose affective dimension produces a demand to grasp it reflectively. What Ricoeur emphasises is how the affective dimension prevents the encounter with sin from becoming purely speculative. To reiterate, the speculative reduction of sin tends towards the positing of evil as a problem that can be resolved, most commonly in terms of the ethics of obligation. In contrast, Ricoeur notes how the affective dimension introduces an embodied form of address, where sin is not confronted in order to be resolved, but affronted in

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order to be lived. Sin cannot be corrected because it inheres in our finite ­condition as both a problem and a productive catalyst (the joy of yes in the sadness of the finite). Affronting is thus a way of coping with this condition according to situations that arise, and this coping makes sense only because the religious narratives which constitute one’s tradition articulate and predicate new ways, new meanings by which sin can be understood. Ricoeur’s reading of sin as symbolic and affective also has the advantage of combating the kind of futility involved in a historical interpretation. In fact, in his theological work, Ricoeur’s reading of the episode in Genesis dealing with sin and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden is complex. It by no means endorses conventional interpretations of a historical and biological kind, such as we find in Augustine’s notion of original sin. Ricoeur considers historical interpretations of sin to be “an error and grave mistake” (LaCocque and Ricoeur 1998, 44). Why? To locate the origin of sin historically is to create a lost starting point that the human subject can never recover. Ontologically, this would mean the question of being is something that is futile for our existence after the Fall. Because the affective dimension focuses on affronting in and by existing, Ricoeur notes that the meaning of sin should be taken as therefore describing a productive, even if limiting, condition of our being. The narrative at the beginning of Genesis, Ricoeur observes, has at its core a meditation on the meaning of separation. On one level, this is evident when typically referring to the Fall as an exile from Eden. Yet such a reading poses risks that, as we saw above, Ricoeur wants to avoid since the Fall can be easily translated into a historical event and Eden taken to be an actual place. To this end, he notes that the theme of separation is significantly subtle in suggesting the divine and sacred attain their fullness in and through finite human existence. Thus, there persists an aporia in which the creation is somehow “in itself” complete, yet not complete because it is not yet “for itself.” In other words, by being in itself the creation is passively complete. For the creation to be for itself seems to involve an active participation in which creation gains more through human self-reflection and existence. It is, of course, the capacity to reflect that marks expulsion from Eden as both an event and a distinction synonymous with the human mode of being. Ricoeur notes that whereas the narrative builds towards different types of separation—for example, the naming of animals—it also marks how some things are different only by virtue of knowledge. Or we can consider nakedness, which is at first “exempt from shame” (Gen. 2:25) but then not so “under the reign of the Fall” (Ricoeur 1998, 44). What Ricoeur draws from this is a counter-interpretation dispensing with the idea that the Fall involves a curse under which we are now aware of our shame. Instead, he maintains that the difference between being naked and being ashamed of such is itself a knowledge of distinctions, a gain that comes at a price. We are henceforth burdened with a reflective capacity synonymous with our existence, that is, our finitude. We are familiar with this finitude owing to such feelings as anxiety, and we are asked in some way to come to reflective equilibrium with our condition, our knowledge of this condition, and what we feel in and through this

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condition. But for Ricoeur, it is never finally about anxiety (Ricoeur 1977, 20). Such feelings mediate towards a fuller mode of being that he names, in affirming the heart of Spinoza’s ethics, joy. In the last analysis, the Fall suggests that expulsion from Eden is not an exile but a necessary detour to attain a more complex type of wholeness relating the sacred and infinite to the existential and finite. In this sense, Ricoeur’s turn to the affective dimension of religion can be understood as a confirmation of the human experience of finitude and what it seeks to affirm in terms of its capacity to be; it does not address narrowly logical or epistemological requirements. As Richard Kearney notes, Ricoeur provides the “option” and “possibility” of religion after atheism.10

Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined how Ricoeur’s hermeneutics employs and transforms certain features of the philosophies of Heidegger and Gadamer—namely, finitude and the interpretation of texts—to address atheism’s challenges to religion and theology. Ricoeur’s strategy for doing this involves accepting the criticisms of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud insofar as they describe religion as ideology but not insofar as they have the final word on religion. On the other hand, he sees the problem of evil as having given rise to an irresolvable speculative problem. Ricoeur alternatively accounts for religion in terms of affectation and symbolism, arguing that the former is able to provide a more meaningful account of evil and the latter the possibility for religion beyond a moral God. However, a caveat should be noted. If philosophy—or at least Ricoeur’s view of it—enables one to save the phenomenon of religion from its atheist critics, it is not philosophy of any kind that can fill in the gaps where a meaning of and for existence might be affirmed. Ricoeur states that such a move requires a step towards a wager and affirmation that takes one beyond the limits of philosophical analysis. There is only so far philosophy can go, according to Ricoeur, at which point its discourse can only note—and not translate or communicate—the surplus and abundance intimated in the symbols interwoven in religion. This is not to marginalize Ricoeur’s philosophical perspective; rather, it is to affirm that claims to meaning at such exalted levels always involve wagers and convictions which, because of our existential condition of ­finitude, are inchoate and remain to be worked out in and through existing.11

Notes 1 On Ricoeur’s doubts expressed later in his life about the separation between philosophy and theology, see Stiver (2012, 145–152). 2 For a comprehensive account of hermeneutics in its biblical and philosophical forms, see Thiselton (2009). For Ricoeur’s own account of hermeneutics, see Ricoeur (1981, 43–62). 3 For an account of this, see Rojcewicz (2006, 54–55). 4 Some of the main points over which Ricoeur disagrees with Heidegger that Ricoeur himself mentions and that are not covered in this chapter: the preoccupation with death instead of natality (e.g. Ricoeur 2004, 351–357), Heidegger’s criticism of Christianity as

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ontotheology (e.g. LaCocque and Ricoeur 1998, 355–361), and the marginalization of ethics in Heidegger’s ontology (Ricoeur 1992, 348–355). For a nuanced understanding of how Ricoeur differs from Heidegger especially, see Sebastian Purcell (2013). As for differences with Gadamer, see Mootz and Taylor (2011).  5 This is part of a larger, famous debate between Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas. For Ricoeur’s attempt to mediate the positions of tradition and the critique of ideology, see Ricoeur (1981, 63–100).   6 Whether or not the difference between Gadamer and Ricoeur, as I have expressed it, actually exists is still a subject of debate. Some aspects of this debate can be seen in Mootz and Taylor (2011).  7 There are two translations of this essay, which was given as a lecture in Columbia University’s Bampton Lecture Series in 1968. Alasdair MacIntyre, whose lecture appears in Ricoeur (1969), also participated.   8 A shorter version of Ricoeur (2007a) appears in Ricoeur (1995, 249–261). Ricoeur also sees advantages to what Kant has done with the problem of evil; see Kearney (2008).   9 Ricoeur also refers to psychoanalysis and particular symbols which refer to non-linguistic conditions of the psyche (Ricoeur 1976, 53–54). 10 Kearney (2010, 74). Kearney refers to this possibility as “anatheism.” 11 My thanks to Tom Angier and Valentin Gerlier for reading drafts of this chapter and for their comments and suggestions.

References Blundell, Boyd. 2010. Paul Ricoeur between Philosophy and Theology: Detour and Return. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gadamer, Hand-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. Second Edition. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London, UK: Sheed & Ward. Kearney, Richard. 2010. Anatheism: Returning to God after God. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1992. Concluding Unscientific Postscripts to Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, MA: Princeton University Press. LaCocque, André, and Paul Ricoeur. 1998. Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mootz, Francis J. and George H. Taylor, eds. 2011. Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics. London, UK: Continuum. Purcell, Sebastian. 2013. “Hermeneutics and Truth: From aletheia to Attestation.” Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies 4(1); http://ricoeur.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/ricoeur/article/ view/156 (accessed January 2014). Ricoeur, Paul. 1969. “Religion, Atheism, and Faith.” The Religious Significance of Atheism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 59–98. Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1974. The Conflict of Interpretations. Translated by McLaughlin. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1976. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1977. “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation.” The Harvard Theological Review, 70(1/2): 1–37. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Translated by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Ricoeur, Paul. 1986. Fallible Man. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, IL. Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1995. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2007a. Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology. Translated by John Bowden. London, UK: Continuum. Ricoeur, Paul. 2007b. Reflections on the Just. Translated by D Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rojcewicz, Richard. 2006. The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Stiver, Dan. 2001. Theology After Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Stiver, Dan. 2012. Ricoeur and Theology. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Thiselton, Anthony. 2009. Hermeneutics: An Introduction. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Tillich, Paul. 1955. Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

22 Michel Henry (1922–2002) W. Chris Hackett

In the summer of 1943, a young intellectual, Michel Henry (1922–2002), having just successfully completed his first academic degree with a study of Spinoza,1 joined a section of the undercover French Résistance located in the Haut-Jura, a natural park on the French-Swiss border, and committed to fighting the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. He was given the codename “Kant” because there were only a few peculiar items among his personal effects, including a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This anecdote is sometimes told in introductions to Michel Henry’s life and thought, and it is rightly paired with his own reflections on the significance of this experience for his philosophy: The experience of the Resistance and of covert fighting had a profound influence on my conception of life. The underground movement gave me an everyday but acute sense of the incognito. During this entire period one had to hide what one thought and, even more, what one did. Thanks to this permanent hypocrisy, the essence of true life was revealed to me, namely, that it is invisible. At the worst moments, when the world became monstrous, I experienced life within myself as a secret to protect and one which protected me. A manifestation deeper and older than the world determines our human condition … From this moment I understood that the salvation of the individual cannot come from the world. (Henry 2007, 13–14) This experience became the necessary point of division, the test by which Henry would always measure what counts as valid in philosophy’s permanent quest to find, to utter and to explicate the truth of our human condition. In this way, we could say, Michel Henry became one of the most important French philosophers from the end of World War II to the turn of the third millennium.

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Oeuvre Michel Henry was the author of numerous philosophical works on a host of subjects, which, though diverse, are deeply intertwined. What holds this oeuvre together is at the same time simple and elusive. On the one hand, Henry’s thought emerges from a single intuition that crystalized over the patient decade he committed to writing his doctoral dissertation; this intuition stays remarkably constant through the entirety of his nearly fifty-year career, and only seems to deepen and show a vibrant and variegated perspicacity through the analysis of his oeuvre’s various themes. This intuition must be articulated by reference to Henry’s dissatisfaction with the philosophical tradition’s account of what is most important, universal and irreplaceable to us as human creatures: philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger, does not do justice to one’s own sense of life, and in crucial ways, Henry came to believe, it actually conceals, obfuscates and even turns against it (Henry 2013a, 57–74). This endeavour toward fidelity to the significance of life is precisely the task of Henry’s thought, and the sense or feeling of the unfathomable density and singular irreplaceability of one’s own experience as living is its central intuition. Every book and article he published explores this theme from different vantage points and in different regions of inquiry. His thinking is always indebted to the phenomenological tradition, which Henry however uniquely traces back from Husserl, its explicit founder, to (an idiosyncratic reading of) Descartes in particular (Henry 1997, 11–39; Henry 2013a, 12–16, 55n1). Therefore, Henry’s work is restlessly broad and differentiated. It is almost as if the rich implications of his central intuition regarding life created conditions that liberated him to offer remarkably creative and penetrating studies in diverse regions of the history of Western thought and culture. In the first place, Henry published major works in phenomenology, including L’Essence de la Manifestation (1963), a massive and rigorous text that discerns two modes of phenomenological appearing, that of “transcendence,” on the one hand, and “immanence” on the other, grounding the former “transcendentally” in the latter. The affective experience of the self in immanence is absolute in itself and is ever-present as the secret condition in the appearing of objective transcendence in the world, in the data of consciousness ordered by intentional experience. When the phenomenality of transcendence, however, is taken on its own terms as absolute (a thesis that Henry calls “ontological monism,” which he conceives as the central unexamined presupposition of Western thought), it only hides the affective manifestation of life and veils its fundamental conditioning by it. Another way to put all of this is to say that Henry’s question is a matter of pushing forward a difficulty at the heart of philosophy uniquely crystallized in phenomenology: the ego, or self, is clearly one thing among others in the world, both actual and possible, but at the same time it is that one thing that is actually more than the world, since it alone can receive the world in its totality as the ultimate condition by which anything can exist. Everything that appears does so for and to a perceiving subject who discerns it as a thing

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in the world. This subjectivity or self is a problematic phenomenon: how do we understand it? Henry’s thesis is that we cannot think about it simply according to the ways we think about everything else, which is precisely the perpetual problem of philosophy only exacerbated in Husserl and Heidegger. The hand that grasps a stick or the eye that sees a leaf dangling off its end, already implicitly feels and sees itself touching and seeing, but this feeling and seeing as such does not feel and see according to the manner of what we call conscious experience, which requires distance and differentiation—in short, a fundamental context or “world” in the phenomenological sense—in order to touch and to see, but is absolutely coincident with itself as the act of seeing and touching itself. The eye cannot see its own sight, but “feels” it and lives through it. The “interiority” of absolute immanence, of the self in its feeling of itself as living, as “life,” makes the experience of “exteriority” in the world intelligible. This fundamental region of experience, immanence, the simple coincidence of life with itself as feeling, as “autoaffection,” manifest according to the primordial modalities of suffering and joy, is the “really real” ignored or forgotten by the entire history of philosophy, which because of its unexamined prejudices could only think life in a manner alien to it, as a thing in the world, and hence in a “biological” sense. Henry’s Philosophie et Phénoménologie du Corps (1965) secures this linkage between the phenomenological investigation of the self and its peculiar relation to the world by radicalizing the phenomenological concept of the “body,” setting it within the particularly French context of the tradition of vitalism developing out of the thought of Maine de Biran and Felix Ravaisson, and discovers that at the origin of experience is the subjective capacity to act and to feel oneself acting through the play of effort and resistance. This theme of the body as ontological site where the phenomenon of selfhood is revealed will become a crucial theme in later works as the “flesh.” “Flesh” is his term for the self conceived as the impressional material where each individual experiences itself and which is, as an absolute experience of “passivity” or being given to oneself as a self, the revelation of the Absolute, conceived as the origin of life and Life itself. Though published in book form only after the war, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body was actually written much earlier, in 1950, having been originally intended as a major part of his dissertation, which would eventually become The Essence of Manifestation. Henry also published Phénoménologie Matérielle (1990), containing studies concerned with differentiating the reduction to the transcendent opening of consciousness in Husserl from the reduction to life of his own “material phenomenology.” It contains a chapter on the phenomenological method demonstrating the fidelity to but fundamental advancement beyond classic phenomenology achieved by his own “breakthrough” to immanence. This book also contains two further studies: on the problem of the material substrate of phenomenological intuition in the flow of temporal subjective experience, in which Henry shows that although Husserl discovered the material element, the hyle, always present at the basis of consciousness, he misses the former’s significance by his bias towards consciousness; and on the problem of intersubjectivity, of “other minds” (as it were), which Henry grounds

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not in the common sharing of a world, but in the “milieu” of life. The studies of this text are undertaken with special reference to Husserl, thereby showing the rigor and phenomenological specificity of his thought, particularly the manner in which it deepens the phenomenological project as such.2 These three works, taken together, may form for us the theoretical core of his philosophy, elaborating its main elements, which are developed and put to creative hermeneutical use in the rest of his oeuvre. The major works pertaining to this “remainder” (as it were) can be organized thematically under the following headings: economics/politics, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, aesthetics or the philosophy of art, and Christianity.3 The economic-political works elaborate and build upon a creative interpretation of the thought of Karl Marx, proposing that Marxism itself is founded on a fundamental interpretive error that negates Marx’s basic philosophical insight that the activity of work, a basic mode of individual life understood as the site where desire is converted into the effort to satisfy it, is the unsurpassable foundation of all economic reality. For Henry, Marx is a Christian author as far removed from Hegelianism as subjective individuality is from the abstract moments of the becoming of a blind Absolute.4 This perspective allows Henry ultimately to propose that both communism and capitalism are playing the same game of substituting abstractions for the life-seeking and -sustaining activity of human subjectivity in the world. His “genealogy” of psychoanalysis argues that Freud’s “discovery” of the unconscious is a forward-stepping misinterpretation of the nature of human subjectivity and hence a “lost beginning.” The unconscious is an irreal representation of the true foundation of consciousness, self-affectivity at the basis of our experience as human selves. In the “manifesto” of cultural theory, Barbarism, Henry diagnoses the sickness of our era with reference to the separation of sensibility from abstract idealities that made possible the scientific revolution in Galileo. This revolution, by making its specific modalities of knowing alone objective and universal, has led to the absolute dominance and even “negation” of human life by technology and the dissolution of the basic forms of culture, art, ethics and religion. Visual art was a particularly acute interest of Henry’s (he owned an extensive collection of paintings); in his book-length study of the work, both theoretical and visual, of Wassily Kandinsky, the so-called father of abstract painting, Henry argues that the truth of painting is not found in representation but in the specific, affective tonalities of life it invokes, intensifies and refines. The three volumes on Christianity will be addressed at length below. Finally, important to this oeuvre precisely for their philosophical and religious significance (mostly unrecognized) are his four novels, which explore the same theme of life from within a literary (narrative-imaginary), as opposed to philosophical-scientific (conceptual), purview.5

English-language reception: interrogating a “theological turn” It is useful to discern two phases in the history of Michel Henry’s reception in the English-speaking world. This history is a story of the translation of his works and the influence they have accomplished in the philosophical and theological domains.

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This history is important because the English-language reception is certainly distinct from his reception in his native France. We will see that in actuality, Henry’s oeuvre has been received more or less in reverse in the English-speaking world: we have tended to receive Henry as a “theological” philosopher in the first place, a phenomenologist interested in religious phenomena, one who articulates his questions and forms his thought in theological categories (however transformed). This theological dimension, although always present from his earliest publications, only becomes explicit and sustained as an object of inquiry in the last phase of Henry’s thought. It is important therefore to see the theological dimension of Henry’s thought in the context of its organic development. If not to outright misunderstandings, this reception in reverse can at the very least lead to an understanding that dramatically colours a diverse and creative oeuvre too monochromatically. The first phase of this history is more or less the story of the translation of his early major philosophical works with little response. In fact, Henry’s first major work, destined to remain his magnum opus, The Essence of Manifestation, was already translated into English by his early English-speaking champion, Girard Etzkorn, in 1973. Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body was translated into English by Etzkorn again in 1975.6 Neither of these works accomplished in their early English iteration anything close to what they accomplished in France, where the Essence of Manifestation was taken as a bombshell, putting Henry on the map from the beginning as a major phenomenological thinker—though one who remained a permanent outsider to the philosophical politics and fashions of Paris.7 The problem seems to be that these works did not come to us in context, with an appropriate awareness on our part of what was at stake and being played out both in his thought and in the French context. Henry was therefore seen, if at all, as an idiosyncratic thinker—brilliant, remarkable but hardly understood, too far removed from the heart of the discussions in phenomenology, which, in the Anglophone world, were mainly centred at this time on the reception and interpretation of Husserl, either the early Husserl in conversation with analytic philosophy (Frege in particular), the task of the so-called “West Coast” school in the United States (and its English counterpart in Manchester), or the later Husserl, and without the mediation of analytic philosophy, the work of the “East Coast” school.8 The second phase of Henry’s reception, after this more or less stillborn first phase, remains current. It begins with the publication in 1999 of a special issue of Continental Philosophy Review dedicated to Henry (vol. 32.3).9 Along with a broad range of articles assessing Henry’s thought, it contains a translation of an important essay of Henry’s, “Material Phenomenology and Language (or, Pathos and Language).”10 The issue presents itself as deeply concerned to avoid a merely “theological” reception of Henry and to demonstrate the breadth of his thinking, presenting him, rightly, as a thinker dealing with the “core” of the philosophical concerns of the twentieth century.11 In hindsight, however, this second phase continues to take its point of orientation a year later, in 2000, with the translation and publication in a single volume of two brief but influential books, from 1991 and 1992 respectively, Le Tournant Théologique de la Phénoménologie Française [The Theological Turn of

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French Phenomenology], by Dominique Janicaud, and Phénoménologie et Théologie [Phenomenology and Theology], a set of four essays by major lights in contemporary French philosophy, Paul Ricœur, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Luc Marion and Henry, introduced by Jean-François Courtine. This latter collection was the result of a colloquium held at the Archives Husserl in Paris, the last of a series of similar colloquia on phenomenology’s relation to other disciplines, “Phenomenology and X.” Henry’s essay, “Speech and Religion: The Word of God,” is the last chapter of the book. The influential English edition bears the title, Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate. Through this text the “new” French phenomenology gained considerable traction in the United States in particular.12 It is probably not too strong to say that this publication has dominated the terms for the English-speaking world’s understanding of the state and aims of French phenomenology since its appearance.13 Henry’s own English-language reception in the main therefore bears the mark of the question posed by Dominique Janicaud: has there been a “theological turn” in French phenomenology? Janicaud, of course, intended this designation as an accusation, as a critique, as the castigation of a confusion of philosophy with the theological (or even as a covert apologetics) and therefore as a “swerve” from the original intentions for the scope and object of phenomenology set out in the works of its major founding figures, Husserl and Heidegger. For the most part, the English-speaking world has taken Janicaud at his word; it is primarily by theologians and theologically interested, indeed, “religious” philosophers, that Henry’s oeuvre has been received, studied and commented upon. However, there has been, as yet, no comprehensive critical interrogation of Henry’s oeuvre on its own terms, either from a philosophical or theological vantage point.14 The present reception mostly accepts therefore Janicaud’s assessment of Henry and of contemporary French phenomenology, but welcomes it, in polar contrast to him, as a valid development. Before examining the centrepiece of Henry’s present reception in the Englishspeaking world, which also happens to be the final, most mature phase of his thinking, the so-called “Christian trilogy,” composed of his last three works, it is worth proposing some points of interrogation regarding the received denomination of a “theological turn” in French phenomenology. Is it the best way to understand Henry’s work in context? In the first place, the critical problem raised by articulating the central movement of French phenomenology from last century as a “theological turn” is that the denunciation behind the ascription is ideological before it is philosophical. It presumes a priori a certain conception of philosophy, of reason and of the human person—and hence of the object and goals of phenomenology—that excludes without question certain questions and dimensions of the human being, dimensions in which reason is at work, dimensions that may inform—who knows, perhaps critically—the tasks of philosophy. More broadly, therefore, the castigation of a theological turn supposes that philosophy most properly can have no interest in religious or even theological data, that, from beginning to end, the formal “object” of philosophy and theology “makes two.”15 But what if the essential human ques-

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tions, sought for and posed by philosophy, find themselves intensified and uniquely lived out in religion and posed in theology—as Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, ­Rosenzweig, to name only some crucial post-Kantian figures, thought? Is theology not in this case “philosophical”? What if philosophy versus theology is itself the aberration (historically traced to interpretive decisions and socio-political compromises made at the foundation of modernity in the high middle ages) (Lacoste 2014), and that the radicalization of phenomenology found in Henry and others is actually a recovery of the essential overlap of philosophy and theology regarding their ultimate goal and the greatest task defining our humanity, the divine? (Whether God exists or not the question of God proposes itself as the greatest possible question humans can pose and they can seek to understand themselves as those who can pose this question.)16 What if, therefore, philosophy may find in theology and the theological, in religion, the greatest possible expansion of intelligibility and the most radical possible experience, and even, as a result, the paradigm case of rationality as such, which can redound onto the philosophical towards its own benefit, precisely, for example, when it poses questions about itself?17 Our acceptance or use of the parlance of a theological turn in French phenomenology and Michel Henry should at the least be critical.18 It is clear, as we already alluded to above, that Henry lies squarely in the ­tradition of the modern French modification of “Neoplatonism” inaugurated by ­Bergson (but traceable back to Maine de Biran), which is distinctive in its attempt to overcome the failures of the modern objectification of reality by articulating an immediate relation if not coincidence between the nameless Platonic Absolute and the sensible experience and practical action of life (Hankey 2005). When Michel Henry states therefore that “one of the most essential affirmations of Christianity” is “that the truth that is its own can testify only to itself” and even that “the truth that alone has the power to reveal itself is God’s truth” and finally, even more radically, that “the divine essence consists in Revelation as self-revelation” leading to the consequence that “the absolute truth revealing itself to itself also reveals itself to someone to whom it is given to hear it” making the person “who hears it the son of that truth, the son of God,” we should accept the fact that, ideologies aside, a strong case can be made that, on the terms that it provides, this perspective in fact faces up to the challenge of philosophy head on (Henry 2002, 10). Let us turn therefore to the Christian trilogy of Henry, acknowledging with him that what is at stake within it is the articulation of the human truth par excellence, of our life, which Christianity uniquely communicates.

The Christian trilogy In 1996, just after publishing his first book on Christianity, Henry schematized his corpus a little differently than we did. It is worth quoting here inasmuch as it highlights the character of the relation of these later, seemingly more “theological” works to his earlier works: “If I look back on my work in its totality, it seems to me to have two parts: the elaboration of fundamental phenomenological

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p­ resuppositions that define the duplicity of appearing (The Essence of Manifestation) on the one hand, and the implementation of these presuppositions and application to diverse problems or philosophies” in the remainder of the corpus on the other hand. This schematic overlays relatively well with what we described above. Yet Henry does not rest here. At the same time, he immediately problematizes this relation of elaboration and application. He continues: Of course, the elaboration of presuppositions is never totally separate from their ‘application’. In the first book (Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body) these [two modes] are contemporaneous … My other works are above all the occasion to verify the fruitfulness of these presuppositions. In this second category Henry explicitly sets the work on Christianity, placing it at the end of a list of his major works that follows this quotation. Again, however, he does not rest here but elucidates the relation more rigorously if also paradoxically: “The last essay on Christianity (I Am the Truth) is [actually] an exception and pursues the task of The Essence of Manifestation.” This task is then described: By placing the bar of intelligibility very high—at the level of what I call now Archi-intelligibility—Christianity has made me pose questions that without a doubt were already implied in my earlier research, but which were not yet explicitly treated as such: the relation of life to the living as it is organized around a fundamental ipseity, the disassociation of absolute Life and of a finite life and their simultaneous reciprocal immanence, etc.19 We see here that Henry considers the books on Christianity to be making explicit problems already implied within his earliest work, a work predicated on the discovery of what he calls here the “duplicity of appearing.”20 Observe that the phenomenon of Christianity, as it were, that which Christianity gives the philosopher to think, “made me,” Henry says, “pose questions.” It is Christianity that came to interrogate and challenge Henry’s philosophy—a striking reversal of the typical situation made possible by phenomenology. The result of this remarkable interrogation is the Christian trilogy, regarding which, in this context, Henry divulges what to him are some of its most fundamental points of interrogation. Let us first briefly look at this trilogy in outline before finally drawing out some of its crucial dimensions by following the indications Henry gives us here. Henry published C’est Moi la Vérité [I Am the Truth] in 1996. The task he assumes in this text is the explication of that which Christianity proposes as true—the truth according to Christianity, which Henry, following the Johannine literature in the New Testament, sets in square opposition to the “truth of the world” (cf. John 1.10; I John 2.15–17). Here we have a complete overlapping of Henry’s earlier explication of the “duplicity” of appearing in experience and that of divine and worldly truth. Christianity proposes God as the truth over-against the truth of the world, which asserts itself as divine, as the absolute truth, but which in reality—inasmuch as this

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assertion is its “truth”—is only a false appearance. The truth of God, by contrast, is the truth of life itself: our life, in its simple phenomenological structure, is the revelation or “word” of God. This revelation of life in its total equality with itself reveals (inasmuch as life discovers that it is not its own origin) the life of God, the God who is Life, the generation of the Son as “First Living,” as absolute expression of the Father, who is at the same time completely immanent to the Father as God. Human life, as the experience of being given oneself without remainder in the feeling of life, discloses the Absolute Life from which it comes. In Incarnation: Une Philosophie de la Chair [Incarnation: A Philosophy of the Flesh] (2000), Henry discovers (to use a phrase of H. Austryn Wolfson) the “philosophy of the Church Fathers” (see Wolfson 1970)—or rather, finds his philosophy of Christianity and his conception of the “flesh” as the site and inexhaustible content of the revelation of life to be elaborated in the reading of the Christian Scriptures found in early Christian thinkers such as Tertullian and St Irenaeus. Henry proposes that the possibility of the incarnation of the Word is a thesis made intelligible by the phenomenological conception of “incarnation,” namely, that the truth of humanity understood as “flesh”—an understanding that exhausts the meaning of our humanity—is found in the infinite auto-generation of absolute Life in its Word. It is this reality, and the path of salvation that it determines and opens up, that the Incarnation of Christ reveals.21 It is evident that I am the Truth and Incarnation parallel the two early books, The Essence of Manifestation and Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body. The latter works deepen the philosophical investigations of the first books, in pursuit of the intelligible structure of affective immanence as such and the incarnate body, respectively. Not that the early works did not already have religious implications and even “theological” themes: famously, section III of The Essence of Manifestation deeply engages with Meister Eckhart in order to expose the infinite and, indeed, unconditioned and absolute character of what is opened up in the realm of pure phenomenological immanence; and the conclusion of Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body argues against Nietzsche’s castigation of Christianity as a flight from the material world by reference to the dogma of the resurrection of the body explicated through a line from Rimbaud’s poem, Une Saison en Enfer (see Hackett 2013). From the beginning, Henry understood Christianity to bear within itself compelling philosophical implications. It is in these latter works that we see just how compelling, how philosophically basic (that is how fundamental for our understanding of the human condition as such), Henry came to consider Christianity to be. Henry’s last book, completed virtually on his deathbed and published posthumously, is the remarkable Paroles du Christ [Words of Christ]. One can see a virtual sketch of this book’s problematic in Henry’s essay “Speech and Religion,” mentioned above (Henry 2001). In it Henry’s central concern is to answer a specific problem: how can Christ speak to us about God and as God in words that are nondivine, in human words; how can he, being human, be the divine Truth as such that he claims to be? “Is it possible for humans to hear in their own language a word which would speak in another language, namely that of God or more exactly of

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his Word?” (Henry 2013b, 6). By posing and answering this question in particular, Henry seeks to fulfil the philosophical task to provide a “correct understanding of the human condition,” which he describes in the following terms: not only that humans are capable of hearing the very Word of God, but also that this openness defines them, that to be human means being in an “interior relation to this absolute Truth and Love one calls God” (Henry 2013b, 7–8). Henry tells us that Christianity intensifies the philosophical problematic concerning the intelligible structure of immanence, what immanence gives to think. By “raising the bar,” this “Archi-intelligibility” that is the source of the affective mystery at the heart of human experience—the phenomenon of life itself—opens onto an essential problematic by which alone life can be properly understood. What is the relation between the finite life of living ones like ourselves and the divine Life it ceaselessly speaks as its perpetual Word? How are they distinguished? Here in religion we find, for Henry, the very centre of philosophy, where his entire life’s work comes together and concentrates on a single point. The problem that this intensification acutely raises is that of the relation between the self in its infinite experience of life and the divine absolute which its self-experience as living manifests. Does an individual life collapse into the divine abyss without remainder, into a pantheism which would undo the singular character that forms a determinative feature of its phenomenality? Is our experience of the singularity and irreplaceability of our life an illusion? We cannot fully explicate this fundamental question that propels forward and forms the intellectual basis of these last works, but we can refer the reader to Henry’s essential theses on the matter: It is life that generates any conceivable living thing. But this generation of the living can be accomplished by Life only insofar as it is capable of engendering itself. A life that is capable of engendering itself, what Christianity calls God, we are calling absolute life … Insofar as the relation of Life to the living, occurs inside God himself, it is produced as the generation of the First Living at the core of Life’s self-generation. Insofar as such a relation concerns not just God’s relation with himself but also his relationship with man, it is produced as the generation of transcendental man at the core of God’s self-generation. (Henry 2002, 51) These words require much explication, which is the central task of I Am the Truth. The point here is to see the intrinsic relation of the meaning and possibility of human being, understood in its most fundamental terms as “living,” with the (Trinitarian) life of God.22 Our life in its absolute coincidence with itself as an undergoing or suffering of itself that reaches into and establishes every part of ourselves as living, is the undergoing of a passivity so profound that it reveals the original generation of life in God that God is: we are therefore given to ourselves within the life of God shared between Father and Son in the Spirit. Life phenomenologically reveals that we do not constitute ourselves in an original spontaneity, but rather that our

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freedom is through and through gift, at every moment being given to itself in God’s absolute, eternal and infinite self-giving. It is at this point that the radicality of the Christian conception of God that Henry’s philosophy aspires to articulate begins to become clear. The demand that Christianity places on thought about God is to think—to quote Kierkegaard—what thought cannot think,23 to conceive of the God in excess of every condition and distinction that determine the world in which thought thinks, to think the distinction between the world and the God who superlatively exceeds every distinction and contrast.24 It is this God of Christian orthodoxy, beyond the being of the world, but thought necessarily within the limits of its order of intelligibility, that Henry’s philosophy of Christianity, his theology of God as the principle of Life, as the key to the mystery of our humanity and as the only sufficient answer to the profundity of our experience, pursues.25 To explicate this reading and by it to pass to a concluding remark on the significance of Henry’s corpus, let us make a brief response to a perpetual criticism of Henry’s work, one which certainly forms a fundamental current in Paroles du Christ, but which is often lurking behind or to the side of his reflections. The criticism goes like this: how can we speak in concepts of that which exceeds language, of that which is strictly invisible to our conscious experience in the world, of that which thought cannot grasp? How can a theoretical and rigorous philosophy like Henry’s phenomeno-logy, undertaken, necessarily, within the domain of duplicity, of transcendence, say anything about the absolute night and silence of the abyss of life at all?26 Let us take only a single quotation, from the conclusion of Paroles du Christ, to discern the logic of Henry’s response: The legitimacy of Christ’s affirmation of his divine status hence does not rest in any way on a human word, which would always be suspect. It is not because Christ says, with terms that we employ daily in our language, ‘I am in the Father and the Father is in me’, that this proposition is true in the domain of absolute reality which is that of God. Quite the contrary: it is because it is thus in the absolute reality of the divine essence, eternally thus. It is because, in Life’s generation within it of the First Living One, experiencing itself in him, Life reveals itself to itself in the self-revelation which is his Word [Verbe], his Speech [Parole]. It is for this reason alone that this Word, Archrevelation of divine life, is in itself Truth, this original and absolute Truth on which everything else depends. (Henry 2013b, 113; translation modified) There is surely much of interest here, but let us simply draw out of it a comparison between this philosophy of life and classical theology. We see the fundamental opposition between transcendence and immanence, the world and life, on which Henry’s thought turns explicated here in the Christian categories that Henry considers most fundamental. And although there is nothing in common between life and the world, although no “proportion,” we might say, “between the finite and

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infinite” inheres,27 it is nevertheless the case that we may pass from worldly speech to God according to a specific logic. We suggest that it is something strangely akin to the logic that the tradition calls “analogy” that is at work in Henry’s thinking here. When we speak of God within the logic of the world, the sole domain of human speech, we speak in a manner alien to God as he is in himself. But the fact that the world is itself God’s speech, a ceaseless expression of God’s nature, inasmuch as the being of the world is rooted in God’s unfathomable being, means that the world of transcendence possesses a truth, the truth of its deepest reality, that it dissimulates or veils over.When we say “God is love” the words are not true because there is a one to one correspondence between what we say and what God is, which is impossible. Our speech always lies in this regard. But recognizing its limits and failure is only half the truth about it. Our (or Christ’s own) worldly speech is true, is capable of the truth as such because the truth is hidden within it as this speech’s fundamental condition (and in fact of any speech at all), the ground of its possibility.This is precisely what, according to Henry, Christ’s own words reveal.“God is love” is true in our speech because it is eminently and unfathomably most true in God, and in a way that never ceases elusively to haunt our speech. Our speech is therefore truer than we can imagine, unfathomably truer than the speech of the world itself can understand, forever separated (at least in the present, pre-eschatological conditions, the interposition of a “world” that determines our experience …) from its invisible but permanent ground in life. But this does not mean that any and all speech is equally true, although as Aquinas said, all speech, even the most false speech, and everything that exists insofar as it exists, necessarily bears within itself truth (1994, q. 10, a. 6). Rather, the truth of the world is most true when it becomes most transparent to its sole truth, the truth of life, when it rediscovers and uncovers itself as nothing but an expression, a manifestation, of the origin of life, the Life of God, and speaks this expression in the very words it speaks, as it does paradigmatically in Christ’s speech, the Word of God in human speech, the truth par excellence of the human condition.

Conclusion The conclusion of Michel Henry’s philosophy, the conclusion that he discovered present from the beginning of his life and thought, is that only “God” is radical enough to render justice to the plain and incontrovertible jouissance of our experience as living, and that the most divine—the most living—God is the God of Jesus Christ. Henry’s philosophy can therefore be understood as an extended Christological meditation on the mystery of creation, on the human as being-in-God, perpetually living out of the great abyss of the life of God that is its deepest secret and highest vocation (cf. Rivera 2013). Michel Henry had no formal theological training. He discovered through his own philosophical itinerary that the heart of his philosophy was found in the words of Christ and in the thought of the Church Fathers, all of whom he read in ways that make biblical specialists, historians of theology and theologians (along with

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the ideological philosophers) shake their heads. This distance from the academic establishment allowed him however to speak theologically as a philosopher (and vice versa) from outside of mainstream theology and philosophy. This distance is also one reason why Henry’s contribution to Western thought, whether philosophical or theological—or let us now say, at the end of our itinerary, both at once—remains far from being adequately understood, and even farther from being effected and carried forward in any significant manner. Though he died in 2002, Henry’s thought remains, appropriately, very much alive. And—if we are willing to feel the grip of life within ourselves, to embrace it and to live from it as the life of our thinking— that which partakes of life can only ever surprise us with its unseen, unthought and unanticipated disclosures: the truth about ourselves. This is what is at stake in the philosophy of Michel Henry; the fidelity of his account to this truth must be asked and answered by each one of us.

Notes 1 The mémoire de licence in the French academic system, equivalent more or less to the “senior thesis” in some Bachelor of Arts programs. The text is named Le bonheur de Spinoza, and was originally published in two issues of the Revue d’histoire de la philosophie et d’histoire générale de la civilisation in 1944 and 1946. It was finally edited and expanded and republished in book form in 1997 and in a new edition in 2004. 2 See the introduction to Henry (2008, 1–6), where he characterizes his thought as a “renewal” of the question that “determines” phenomenology “in its entirety” and therefore even of philosophy’s “raison d’être” (2). 3 See the bibliographical information below. Mention should also be made of the posthumous collection of his research in four volumes edited by Jean-Luc Marion, entitled Phénoménologie de la vie. Henry (2003–4): vol. 1: De la Phénoménologie, vol. 2: De la Subjectivité, vol. 3: De L’art et du Politique, vol. 4: Sur L’éthique et la Religion. 4 Henry concludes the main body of his second volume on Marx (Une Philosophie de L’économie) with the following famous remark: “Marx was certainly an atheist, a ‘materialist’, etc. But … what matters is not what Marx thought … it is what the texts he wrote think. What appears in them, in a way that is as evident as it is exception in the history of philosophy, is a metaphysics of the individual. Marx is one of the primary Christian thinkers of the West” (Henry 2009, 918–19). 5 “My whole life,” says Henry in an interview from 1976, “has been divided between philosophical research and this literary activity … What these two attitudes share in common is the intention to tell the truth, to detect something essential through events or forms of existence. This truth can be expressed in two ways … I love telling stories. My philosophical research has repressed this taste, pleasure, and need. My philosophical development itself helped me to appreciate that human existence is not thinking but sensibility, affectivity, bodily activity. These are singular events where the imagination also matters … Becoming a novelist, for me, was not an escape; it was the possibility to give a place in reality to what is essential” (“Une politique du vivant,” an interview with Jérôme Thabor found in Henry [2004, 225]). The English translation by Scott Davidson, quoted here, is found in “Michel Henry: Material Phenomenology,” an arrangement of extracts from Henry’s corpus of interviews by Jean Leclercq and Greg Jean, comprising chapter five of Dika and Hackett (2014). These novels, the composition of which spans most of life, closely paralleling his philosophical output, are: Le Jeune Officier (1954), L’Amour les Yeux Fermes (1976), Le Fils du Roi (1981) and Le Cadavre Indiscret (1996). They are collected together (minus Le Cadavre Indiscret) in a single volume with a preface by Anne Henry. See Henry (2009).

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  6 Mention should also be made of a long article, translated by Etzkorn, which appeared in Theology Today (Henry 1969), as well as, towards the end of this phase, the translation of Genealogy of Psychoanalysis in 1993.   7 It is important to recognize that this stance was willful on Henry’s part: as is well known, immediately after finishing The Essence of Manifestation, he was offered, repeatedly, a prestigious academic position in Paris. He refused, accepting instead a provincial post at Université Paul Valéry in Montpelier, on the coast. It is perhaps hard to understate the bravado and integrity that accords with this decision in the French context.   8 See the summary in “Phenomenology in the Last One Hundred Years” the appendix to a classic work, Sokolowski (2000, 211–27), a text which is perhaps the starting point for any student or thinker interested in understanding phenomenology.   9 See the introductory English-language bibliography appended to this volume. 10 Pp. 343–65. This text is from a paper he gave at a colloquium on his thought in 1996 at Cerisy. Its original French version can be found in David and Greisch (2001, 15–37). 11 See editor Anthony Steinbock’s “Preface” to the issue, 219–21. 12 For the designation of “new” to the tradition of French phenomenology in the last forty years—inasmuch as it is marked by a transformation of the concept of phenomenon, see Gondek and Tengyeli (2011). 13 A forthcoming book, Dika and Hackett (2014), attempts to set the “theological turn” more thoroughly in its context, understanding it in light of common aspirations that mark French phenomenology more broadly, of which the “theological turn” was and remains indeed the crucial moment. 14 This situation is quickly changing through the work of younger scholars like Jeffrey Hanson in Australia, Joseph Rivera in Ireland and Karl Hefty in the United States. 15 See Janicaud’s concluding remarks in Le Tournant Théologique; Janicaud et al. (2001, 103). 16 Yes, even greater than the question of being—thus goes the argument—since the question of God, far from closing down the questioning in advance by providing the answer, as Heidegger asserted, actually keeps the questioning itself more radically open since the gratuity of creation in the freedom of a loving creator is more “groundless” and full of “wonder” than the equally creedal assertion of an unqualified nothingness as the womb of finitude. See the concluding chapter of Balthasar (1991). 17 The first part of this thesis is argued at length in Marion (2010). 18 See Lacoste’s remark in his preface to Henry (2013b): The shift from (human) life to (divine) Life in Henry “does not indicate a theological ‘turn’: rather, it quite simply points out to phenomenology that, when it concerns itself with the words (and works) of Christ, it finally arrives at the arch-phenomenon that gives meaning to all other phenomena” (x). 19 See the interview appended to Alain and Greisch (2001, 495–6). 20 That is, that there are two basic modes of appearing of being, one pertaining to the external horizon of the world, transcendence, and one pertaining to the affective experience of the self as alive, immanence. See my comments above. Henry later will come to distinguish between them a little more rigorously by terming the first mode of phenomenal appearing, “manifestation,” while terming the second, “revelation.” 21 In this way Henry can be fruitfully juxtaposed with a thinker such as Sergei Bulgakov, for whom the task of theology is similarly to discern the conditions by which the fundamental confessions of Christianity, crystalized in dogma, make sense. What is it about creation, and human being in particular, that allows the incarnation to make intelligible sense? See Bulgakov (2008), esp. III.2, “The Foundations of the Incarnation,” 168–81. 22 The primarily “binitarian” reading of Henry, although Henry is certainly focused on the Father-Son relation, is not necessary, since the logic of his position can easily take into account the role of the Spirit. The Trinitarian reading in fact would show the close affiliation of Henry’s position with the patristic “monarchical” conception of the Trinity (still the basic form of eucharistic formulae East and West), for which the Father is “archē” or origin and sole first “cause” (aitios) in God and outside of God: here the logic of creation discloses the intelligibility of the life of God himself. See Nyssa (1893) for a classic explication.

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23 For Kierkegaard, much like Henry, it is the “single individual’s relation” to the god that is the unthinkable task of thought. See Kierkegaard (1985, 101). 24 For an explication of this “distinction” at the heart of Christian thought, see the masterful Sokolowski (1995). 25 Of course, there is a massive debate among Henry’s interpreters regarding the theological value of his thinking. I set myself against the general tide of opinion here. For variations on the alternative perspective see Hart (2009) and Rivera (2011). For an attempt to read Henry as generally sympathetic with (an interpretation of) orthodox Christianity, see Vidalin (2006). 26 See the introduction to Henry (2008, 4), where Henry considers this one of the two main objections perpetually raised against his thought. It is also worth observing that this is a typical question within mystical literature. See St John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, 4.10 (1991, 711). 27 I quote Thomas Aquinas here: Summa Theologica, q. 2, a. 2, obj. 3.

References Alweis, L., ed. 2009. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 17.3: 359–461 (special issue dedicated to Henry). Aquinas, St Thomas. 1994. De Veritate/Truth. Translated by R. Mulligan et al. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Aquinas, St Thomas. 1991. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1991. The Glory of the Lord vol. 5: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age. Translated by O. Davies, et al. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Bulgakov, Sergei. 2008. The Lamb of God. Translated by Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. David, Alain, and Jean Greisch. 2001. Michel Henry. L”épreuve de laVvie. Paris, France: Cerf. Dika, Tarek, and W. Chris Hackett. 2014. Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology. NY: Fordham University Press. Gondek, H.-D., and L. Tengyeli. 2011. Neue Phänomenologie in Frankreich. Berlin, Germany: Suhrkamp. Gschwandtner, Christina. 2013. “Michel Henry: A God of Truth and Life.” Postmodern Apologetics? New York, NY: Fordham University Press. 125–42. Hackett, W. Chris. 2013. “Les corps seront jugés: un premier ‘jugement dernier’ de Michel Henry.” Translated by Grégori Jean. In La vie et les vivants. (re-)lire Michel Henry. Edited by Jean Leclercq et al. Louvain-la-Neuve, France: Presses Universitaires de Louvain. 605–16. Hankey, Wayne. 2005. “Neoplatonism and Contemporary French Philosophy.” Dionysius 23: 161–90. Hanson, Jeffrey, and Michael R. Kelly, eds. 2012. Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought. New York, NY: Continuum. Hart, Kevin. 2009. “Without World: The Eschatology of Michel Henry.” Phenomenology and Eschatology. Edited by N. Deroo and J. P. Manoussakis. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 167–91. Hatem, Jad, and Rolf Kuehn, eds. 2009. Studia Phaenomenologica 9: Michel Henry’s Radical Phenomenology. Henry, Michel. 1969. “Does the Concept of Soul Mean Anything?” translated by Girard Eitzkorn. Philosophy Today 13: 94–114. Henry, Michel. 1973. The Essence of the Manifestation. Translated by Girard Etzkorn. The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff.

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Henry, Michel. 1975. Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body. Translated by Girard Etzkorn. The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff. Henry, Michel. 1991. Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Henry, Michel. 1993. The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Douglas Brick Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Henry, Michel. 1999. “Material phenomenology and language (or, pathos and language).” Translated by Leonard Lawlor. Continental Philosophy Review 32: 343–65. Henry, Michel. 2001. “Speech and Religion: The Word of God.” Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate. Dominique Janicaud et al. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. 217–41. Henry, Michel. 2002. I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Henry, Michel. 2003-4. Phénoménologie de la vie. J.-L. Marion (ed.): vol. 1: De la Phénoménologie, vol. 2: De la Subjectivité, vol. 3: De L’art et du Politique, vol. 4: Sur L’éthique et la Religion. Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France. Henry, Michel. 2004a. Auto-donation. Entretiens et Conférences. Paris, France: Beauchesne. Henry, Michel. 2004b. Le Bonheur de Spinoza. Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France. Henry, Michel. 2007. Entretiens. Arles, France: Sulliver. Henry, Michel. 2008. Material Phenomenology. Translated by Scott Davidson. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Henry, Michel. 2009a. Marx (Single volume edition with continual pagination). Paris, France: Gallimard. Henry, Michel. 2009b. Romans. Paris, France: Editions Les Belles Lettres. Henry, Michel. 2012. Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. Translated by Scott Davidson. New York, NY: Continuum. Henry, Michel. 2013. “Four Principles of Phenomenology.” Translated by J. M. Rivera. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. 12. Edited by B. Hopkins and J. Drummond. Durham, UK: Acumen. Henry, Michel. 2013a. Barbarism. Translated by Scott Davidson. London, UK: Continuum. Henry, Michel. 2013b. Words of Christ. Translated by Christina Gschwandtner. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Janicaud, Dominique. 2000. “The Surprises of Immanence.” Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, Dominique Janicaud et al. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. 70–86. Janicaud, Dominque, et al. 2001. Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. John of the Cross, St. 1991. The Living Flame of Love. In The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Translated by K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez, 633–717. Washington, DC: ICS Press. Kierkegaard, Soren. 1985. Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. 2014. From Theology to Theological Thinking. Translated by W. Chris Hackett. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Leclercq, Jean, et al., eds. 2013. La vie et les vivants. (re-)lire Michel Henry, Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain. Leclercq, Jean, and G. Jean. 2014. “Michel Henry: Material Phenomenology.” Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology. Edited by Tarek Dika and W. Chris Hackett. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

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Lubac, Henri de. 1988. Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2010. “On the Foundation of the Distinction Between Theology and Philosophy.” Philosophy, Religions and Transcendence. Edited by Philippe Capelle-Dumont. Manila, Philippines: Athlone University Press. 47–76. Mullarkey, John. 2006. “Henry and the Affects of Actual Immanence.” Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline. New York, NY: Continuum. 48–81. Nyssa, St Gregory. 1893. “On ‘Not Three Gods’: To Ablabius.” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5. Edited by P. Schaff and H. Wace. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Company. O’Sullivan, Michael. 2006. Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism and Belief. Broadway, NY: Peter Lang. Rebidoux, Michelle. 2012. The Philosophy of Michel Henry (1922–2002): A French Christian Phenomenology of Life. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Riches, A. 2014. The End of Humanism, Vol 1: Ecce Homo. On the Dogmatic Unity of Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Rivera, Joseph. 2011. “Generation, interiority and the phenomenology of Christianity in Michel Henry.” Continental Philosophy Review 44.2: 205–35. Rivera, Joseph. 2013. “The Night of Living Flesh and Sainthood in Michel Henry.” Postmodern Saints of France: Refiguring “the Holy” in Contemporary French Philosophy. Edited by Colby Dickinson. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. 217–29. Sebbah, Francois-David. 2012. Testing the Limit: Derrida, Henry, Levinas and the Phenomenological Tradition. Translated by Stephen Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sokolowski, Robert. 1995. The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Sokolowski, Robert. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. NY: Cambridge University Press. Steinbock, Anthony, ed. 1999. Continental Philosophy Review 32.3. Vidalin, Antoine. 2006. La Parole de la Vie: La Phénoménologie de Michel Henry et L’intelligence Chrétienne des Écritures. Paris, France: Parole et Silence. Wolfson, Harry A. 1970. The Philosophy of the Church Fathers: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation. Third Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

23 Jean-Luc Marion (1946–) Christina Gschwandtner

Jean-Luc Marion, born in 1946 outside of Paris, is one of the foremost living French philosophers and since 2008 has been a member of the illustrious Académie ­Française. He was trained in Cartesian philosophy by the preeminent Descartes scholar ­Ferdinand Alquié, exposed to Heidegger’s philosophy by the important French scholar Jean Beaufret, and formed by the mentoring and friendship of several influential theologians, such Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, Louis Bouyer and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Even as a young student, Marion was firmly committed to a religious outlook, arguing for Christian faith in a radio interview with fellow student Alain Benoist who represented an atheist perspective, helping to publish the lay theological journal Résurrection, and in 1975 becoming co-founder of the French edition of the Roman Catholic journal Communio.1 Both he and his wife, Corinne, have published frequently in it (she is now the main editor of a book series sponsored by Communio). From his student days onward, Marion maintained a friendship with the then future (and now late) Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, who married him and his wife Corinne (they have two sons and a couple of grandchildren).2 After earlier appointments at Poitiers and Nanterre, Marion occupied (until his retirement in 2012) a prestigious teaching post in metaphysics at the Sorbonne, where he also founded the Centre for Cartesian Studies. In the 1990s he started teaching at the University of Chicago on a regular basis on a visiting teaching post, took over Paul Ricoeur’s chair in 2003, and since 2012 has held David Tracy’s former chair as “Andrew Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Theology” at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He also holds a permanent affiliation with the Institut Catholique de Paris as Dominique Dubarle Chair of Philosophy. Besides his training in early modern philosophy and the various theological influences mentioned above, Marion was also profoundly shaped by the philosophy of his mentors and friends Emmanuel Levinas and Michel Henry, as well as

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phenomenology more generally, especially that of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Already his early works on Descartes are to some extent written with phenomenological concerns in mind, especially a Heideggerian definition of metaphysics as ontotheologically constituted that he finds useful for making sense of Descartes’ metaphysics. His later works, even those more theological in orientation or impetus, are even more heavily phenomenological.

Descartes, metaphysics and apophaticism Marion’s work on Descartes is absolutely essential for understanding his phenomenological concerns. In fact, his writings on Descartes are not limited to his early career, but constitute about half of his published work up to and including his 2013 Sur la Pensée Passive de Descartes. Although Marion’s reading of Descartes is often shaped by phenomenological concerns, his phenomenological work is also deeply grounded in assumptions worked out much more fully and carefully in his Cartesian writings. This is especially true of the definition of metaphysics with which he operates, assumptions about appropriate ways to talk about God (including the nature of the divine), and a particular conception of the self or subject that is worked out in conversation with the Cartesian ego cogito. Many critics (especially phenomenologists) have condemned Marion’s work as metaphysical or at least do not understand his claim of going beyond metaphysics, especially when it is coupled with a consideration of God or revelation.3 Theological critics, who often seem eager to hold on to metaphysics as an important category, also find this aspect of his work baffling.4 Marion operates with a very precise and narrow definition of metaphysics, which he works out in detail in his studies of Descartes. Metaphysics is limited for him to a particular period of and approach to philosophy, namely that of modernity from Descartes to Nietzsche or Heidegger (as we will see below, he perceives residues of metaphysical thinking in both these philosophers). To some extent he takes up Heidegger’s definition of metaphysics as ontotheology: a metaphysical project contains an ontology (a theory about beings) and a theology (a theory about a highest being) that are connected to each other and indeed mutually implicated (the highest being grounds the being of all other beings). Metaphysics is hence an epistemological project of grounding that derives from a first principle or being that functions as an axiomatic causa sui.5 Marion sees this project particularly exemplified by Descartes in a doubled way: first the ego functions as the ground of all being (the cogitata or thoughts of the ego), later God becomes the causa sui who holds in being even the being of the ego.6 Marion contends that ancient or medieval philosophy did not fit this definition of metaphysics (in fact the term ontology emerges in the early modern period), because it did not see the divine as subject to such a system or on a continuum with other kinds of being: The Christian religion does not think God starting from the causa sui, because it does not think God starting from the cause, or within the theoretical

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space defined by metaphysics, or even starting from the concept, but indeed ­starting from God alone, grasped to the extent that he inaugurates by himself the knowledge in which he yields himself—reveals himself (Marion 1991, 36) God is always assumed to be finally unknowable (at least in essence) by the medieval thinkers and claims about divine attributes are always understood to be at best analogous but certainly not univocal (i.e. terms like “being” or “goodness” do not mean exactly the same thing when they are applied to the divine as they do when applied to humans but only function by analogy). Metaphysics, in contrast, applies the same language to the divine and human and makes God subject to human logic or ontology, such as Kepler’s contention that he is thinking “God’s thoughts after him” or Galileo’s insistence that God is subject to the laws of geometry.7 The early modern period in particular makes God subject to being and to what are called the “eternal truths” of mathematics and logic and thereby turns the divine into a comprehensible principle subject to our thought. Marion contends throughout his work that this version of metaphysics should be overcome because its untenable project of grounding and need for certainty reduces everything to subject-object relations and places blasphemous restrictions on the divine. Theology (and indeed philosophy) ought to have nothing to do with such metaphysical thinking and should thus free itself from the metaphysical restrictions of modernity. For Marion, this goes along with a strong commitment to apophaticism or God’s utter alterity, which is grounded in his reading of Patristic theology (especially Dionysius and Gregory of Nyssa, read through Jean Daniélou and Hans Urs von Balthasar)8 and Levinas’ philosophy of alterity. Any restrictions placed on the divine are theologically unacceptable and hence a negative or “mystical” theology (Marion prefers the latter term) is more appropriate than an affirmative approach, although at times even the negative approach does not go far enough in its preservation of divine ineffability. In his early work, Idol and Distance, these contentions about divine ineffability are explored to develop a category of distance that might overcome the notion of “ontological difference” so central in Heidegger’s thought. While ontological difference and ontotheological metaphysics still speak of God as a “being” and make the divine subject to metaphysics, thus turning God into an idol, Marion seeks to think the divine outside of ontotheology, namely as an icon of the invisible. Such distance, Marion contends, is more appropriate for our encounter with the divine than speaking of the ontological difference between divine and human being. While ontological difference, according to Heidegger, is always “forgotten” and hence ignores relations that exist and must be reconciled, “distance,” so Marion contends, can only be crossed if it is properly acknowledged through respectful withdrawal and finally liturgical prayer. Otherwise it risks becoming a simple absence. In this book, he relies heavily on Dionysius who is treated in a third part after Nietzsche and Hölderlin who are posited as tentative but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to speak of distance.9

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The provocative God Without Being, the book which first made him famous and for a long time was the only work translated into English, insists even more stringently that the language of being is not appropriate for the divine. Marion asks: “With respect to being, does God have to behave like Hamlet?” (1991, xx). Nevertheless, he assures his readers in the preface to the English translation: “God is, exists, and that is the least of things. At issue here is not the possibility of God’s attaining to Being, but, quite the opposite, the possibility of Being’s attaining to God” (1991, xix–xx). This is articulated in the context of an argument about idolatry that accuses even Heidegger of idolatrous restrictions on the divine in his work. Heidegger’s is a “doubled idolatry,” more rigorous and more dangerous than earlier more explicitly metaphysical versions. This is the case, because Heidegger claims to be excluding God from being, as in his famous claim that if he ever were to write a theology, “the term being would not appear in it,” but simultaneously subjects the divine to being by making Dasein the entire frame of reference (the “clearing” in which Being appears or reveals itself) and enclosing the gods in the “Fourfold” (1991, 25–52). Heidegger ultimately remains metaphysical in Marion’s view because the new gods he announces (e.g. in the Fourfold), just like Nietzsche’s “new gods” who arrive in “the twilight of the idols,” remain subject to being and ontological difference; they are envisaged on the basis of a human aim or gaze (1991, 38–45). More generally, Marion distinguishes in this book between an “idolatrous” and an “iconic” way of imaging and thinking the divine. In an encounter with an idol, the gaze is entirely captured by it, it bedazzles us (as do our contemporary idols of sport and media), and serves as an invisible mirror of our own perception and capacity. To some extent this is precisely what renders it metaphysical: it becomes dependent upon our gaze. In contrast, in the case of the icon the gaze travels through the image and is held by an invisible gaze who in turn envisages it. This crossing of the icon enacts the distance outlined in Idol and Distance. The observer begins with a gaze proceeding from the subject but is turned into the recipient of another gaze, the gaze of love who gives being (and meaning) to the self. Love becomes the only appropriate name for God because it gives itself fully as gift to the other instead of constituting a “definition” that would enclose or limit the divine. Instead, it is pure expenditure, total self-givenness. Marion works this out even more fully in his meditation on art and image in The Crossing of the Visible. Its final chapter contrasts prayer before an icon to the image-obsessed media culture in which we find ourselves. Images function idolatrously, they define, enclose and limit the other, and become narcissistic reflections of the self’s ego. Icons, in contrast, function in kenotic fashion: through them we become emptied of ourselves and open to the other, transformed into loving gifts. Already throughout these early works, Marion seeks to find a way to speak of the divine non-metaphysically and on its own terms.

Phenomenology, givenness and gift After God Without Being, Marion turns increasingly to phenomenology as a method for overcoming the metaphysical restrictions of modernity. Taking his inspiration

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from Levinas, he contends that phenomenology can indeed give an account of what (or who) is utterly other if it returns more rigorously to “the things themselves” and gives phenomena free reign to give themselves to us on their own terms. Marion claims that phenomena continue to remain restricted in Husserl’s project of constitution, because a transcendent subject imposes its intentionality on objects that are seen (or apperceived) against a horizon. In Heidegger, phenomenology becomes a project obsessed with being, where the horizon of being determines the ways in which phenomena show themselves. Instead, Marion argues for a phenomenology of givenness, where phenomena would be free to give themselves entirely on their own terms without having restrictions or parameters imposed upon them (neither those of object-ness as in Husserl, nor those of being-ness as in Heidegger). He lays the groundwork for this phenomenology in Reduction and Givenness, which tries to develop the category of givenness and a more radical reduction out of a juxtaposition of Husserl and Heidegger (and their various conflicts). This project of givenness is worked out much more fully in Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. In this book, givenness is first explored as a phenomenological category, then Marion employs the notion of the gift as a guideline for speaking of phenomena as “given” to us. His treatment of the gift is rooted in the larger French conversation, which received its impetus from Marcel Mauss’ anthropological study of the economic dimensions of gift-giving in Polynesian societies and Derrida’s and Blanchot’s philosophical reflections on this topic. Mauss had shown that gift-giving and even exorbitant expenditure in many societies served important economic functions that ultimately came down to exchange. The gift is not purely gratuitous, but always already part of an economic structure of reciprocity and mutuality that tries to maintain a balance of economic and political power. In his work on the gift Derrida highlights an aporia between the very definition of the gift as pure gratuity and the economic reality of the gift as part of a cycle of exchange in which reciprocity is central. An entirely gratuitous giving without any connotations of reciprocity or expectations of return Derrida judges impossible in practice but essential to the very notion of the gift: while we know that we should give and receive freely without any obligation, we do always feel obligated to return the gift in some fashion, even just by an expression of gratitude, and we expect such response from others. And yet, even these reciprocal “gifts” depend in some way on the notion of gratuity and freedom to qualify as gifts at all. In Being Given Marion tries to resolve this aporia by bracketing various aspects of the gift-giving process: the giver, the recipient, or the gift-object, and by contending that we can think a gratuitous gift by suspending one of these poles of the exchange.10 Via his analysis of the notion of givenness, his critique of the transcendental ego’s strong intentionality and the example of the gift, Marion comes to speak of a range of phenomena. Some are poor or very basic such as mathematical concepts or technical objects. Such phenomena can be intended and constituted whether there is intuitive fulfilment or not; they are easily understood, can be predicted or even produced, and are fully comprehended. Other phenomena, such as complex historical events or works of art, are much more complex and rich. We can neither

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prepare for them nor fully comprehend them; they often come in surprising and indeed overwhelming ways. Such phenomena cannot necessarily be “intended” in the phenomenological sense and they give an abundance of intuitive data to the point that we are bedazzled and blinded by their overwhelming givenness. Marion calls such phenomena “saturated” and claims that they go to the very limit of or even beyond the phenomenological horizon—they cannot be explicated in terms of their context of appearing but transcend it. And yet, we can examine such phenomena with the tools of phenomenology by observing and explicating the impact they have on us. Here, Marion is obviously deeply influenced by Levinas who attempts to articulate a notion of the other that would not be reduced to a phenomenon of my consciousness but instead is encountered via the impact on the self who becomes much more passive and less a controlling subject. Marion has recourse to Kant’s categories for making sense of phenomena to articulate what it might mean for a phenomenon to be given as saturated. While Kant outlines the conditions for the kinds of phenomena to appear that can be comprehended (usually objects), saturated phenomena transgress such conditions in specific ways. Hence, the Kantian category of quantity makes sense of phenomena in terms of number and sequence, while the saturated phenomenon of the (historical or cultural) event cannot be counted or quantified; it is too large, too complex, gives too much information, is unpredictable in terms of its sequence. For example, a complex historical event such as Word War I is never fully understood, has multiple causes none of which can be identified securely, is of such complexity that we can never give a sufficient or satisfying account. The category of quality measures the intensity of a phenomenon, yet a work of art (Marion calls it an idol, now an entirely positive term11) is so bedazzling and brilliant that it exceeds any attempts to measure quality. For example, I must go and see a great work of art over and over again, can never exhaust it, and continue to be bedazzled by it. The category of relation establishes relation between phenomena, while the human flesh is so immediate to us that no distance is possible and no relation can be established. For example, I feel pain or joy immediately in my very flesh, it is not something external to me. Kant’s category of modality is suspended by the phenomenon of the face of other, especially that of the beloved, which is irregardable and irreducible (Marion calls this the icon, now devoid of its religious or even visual connotations12). Marion outlines these as distinct categories in Being Given and explores them more fully in In Excess, which devotes a chapter to each type of saturated phenomenon. Subsequently, however, he often treats the saturated phenomenon more indiscriminately as any overwhelming and excessive phenomenon.13 He also claims a wider role for each category in various places: all phenomena are characterised as events, the icon brings together the connotations of all four types, the painting or idol best exemplifies our attitude toward saturated phenomena more generally, all saturated phenomena are ultimately gifts given to us in abundance. In Being Given Marion introduces a final, more explicitly religious category, the phenomenon of revelation. Here he contends that such a phenomenon is a supreme paradox that pushes saturation to an even higher degree. While the “simply”

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saturated phenomena (event, idol, flesh, icon) go to the very edge of the ­phenomenal horizon, the phenomenon of revelation transcends all horizons altogether. It is even more excessive, abundant and bedazzling. Marion assures us that he is here making no claims about whether such a phenomenon of revelation, such as Christ’s transfiguration, has actually occurred—phenomenology suspends all such concerns with “actual existence” and this would be theology’s domain anyway—but instead is investigating a phenomenological possibility: if a phenomenon of revelation were to occur it would it give itself in this intensely saturated fashion and would have this sort of bedazzling impact upon us (2002b, 367). One should note here, that Marion’s presuppositions about God’s intense otherness and ineffability are congruent with his description of phenomena of revelation as utterly excessive and overwhelmingly abundant. It is precisely because God is so wholly other and so completely beyond understanding and description, that the description of the saturated phenomenon is one of utter unpredictability and immeasurable intensity. Only such a description can overcome the metaphysical determinations that attempt to limit the divine to causality or coherence or highest being or morality or some other particular definition or function. That is not to say, however, that this is a straight-forward description of transcendence. It is always only God’s immanence or appearance as a phenomenon (albeit a “negative” one in the sense of marking absence or overwhelming splendour that cannot be grasped) that is being investigated. If the divine were given as a phenomenon, and Christianity obviously contends that such has indeed occurred, what might be the phenomenological parameters of such revelation to human consciousness? This is the question Marion seeks to answer with phenomenological tools. God, then, becomes manifest as a supremely saturated phenomenon, a “paradox of paradoxa,” an excessive and bedazzling experience that completely overwhelms the recipient in an abundance of intuitive content that cannot possibly be comprehended or explained in conceptual categories. This is hence a claim not only about how God is manifested but also about how we are to receive such abundant givenness: not as a Cartesian subject but as a self devoted to the phenomenon. Marion’s critique of the Cartesian subject in charge of its object or even of the Husserlian transcendental ego constituting its phenomena via intentionality has already been mentioned. The study of phenomenal givenness and especially of saturated phenomena now enables him to develop a different sense of the self, not as dominant subject imposing restrictions on phenomena, but instead as recipient of the intuitive abundance. The self emerges as considerably more passive and receptive, as the one responding, the one given over, devoted or even addicted to the phenomenon (all these are connotations of the French term adonné that Marion employs for this new self). Marion contends that this leads to a “counter-intentionality,” according to which we are intended and constituted by the phenomenon. This is not to say, however, that the self now becomes the object of the phenomenon who is subject in a mere reversal of the Cartesian paradigm.14 Rather, if a phenomenon is to appear at all, even in its most intense and extreme version of saturation, it must be given to someone, be received by someone, intuited by someone, even if imperfectly

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and insufficiently. It is the recipient of the phenomenon who experiences it, who ­identifies and seeks to describe it. The responding self is hence both “master and servant of the given” (2002b, 319), on the one hand secondary and responding to the phenomenon that has the priority and initiative but on the other hand essential for it to become a phenomenon, that is, to be given to and experienced by someone. This devoted self is not a Cartesian subject but it does “phenomenalise” the phenomenon. In some contexts (especially aesthetic ones), Marion describes this recipient as a “gifted,” someone with special talent to “‘see” what was previously unseen or to bear the weight (or glory) of the abundant given. Such a recipient does often fall short: the saturated phenomenon gives so much that not all its weight can ever be borne or explicated. Yet, its bedazzling effect leads us to love it and want more of it; we become devoted or even addicted to it. Marion works out this aspect of love even more fully in his analysis of the “erotic” phenomenon, which has a special privilege in his work. Indeed, he repeatedly uses the importance of love to criticise Levinas’ exclusive emphasis on ethics, which he considers too narrow and unable to account for a true individuation of the other. The face in Levinas’ sense remains a generic or universal face. Love is needed to speak of a specific and particular other, a beloved (e.g. 2002c, 71–101). Marion also frequently refers to Pascal’s notion of a “third order” of charity, which is superior to the orders of nature and of certainty (1999b, 306–22; 2008, 73–79). Although deeply influenced by Cartesian thinking, Pascal posits a higher order of knowledge to which philosophy has no access and which is concerned with matters of the heart instead of the mind. This is, however, for both Pascal and Marion, still a kind of knowledge and one that is superior to the pure rationality of certainty. Marion employs this notion of alternative knowledge (often put in terms of love or charity) throughout to argue for the rationality of faith and religious experience, even if such knowledge is not always accessible to standard philosophical methods (e.g. 2008, 145–54). In that case, new methods must be found instead of giving up on such phenomena. Already in God without Being Marion had suggested that love goes beyond being and is a more appropriate way to speak of the divine (e.g. 1991, 135–38). This contention permeates his work and is worked out in much more general terms in his The Erotic Phenomenon. This book, especially, is set in explicit contrast to Descartes and posited as a way to gain assurance instead of certainty. We want to be assured that someone loves us, far more than we want to have certain knowledge about objects. We may try to love ourselves, but such self-assurance ultimately fails as does our insistence that someone “out there” love us. Instead, Marion suggests, we must learn to love first, reach out to the other in love without any assurance of return. Only in completely giving ourselves to the other in love do we ultimately discover ourselves loved also. Such love is pure gift, not a reciprocal exchange. The Erotic Phenomenon therefore works out more fully not only a phenomenological approach to love but also Marion’s repeated contention that love is a form of knowledge with equal or even higher validity than other forms of rationality.15

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This quasi-epistemological aspect of his project becomes even more evident in the book Negative Certainty, where Marion posits the category of “negative certainty” to articulate a kind of knowledge that is “certain” that a particular phenomenon can never be known exhaustively or in the Cartesian sense. Such phenomena include the human person, the divine, the gift, sacrifice, forgiveness and the event, all phenomena explored in the book. Here being given as a saturated phenomenon enables us to know the phenomenon in a particular way that excludes other kinds of knowing, namely those of certainty. Marion employs the imagery of quantum indeterminacy to argue that knowing some aspects of a phenomenon prohibits us from knowing other things about it and that we can determine this “negative knowledge” in fairly precise ways. He does not give very detailed analyses in this first exploration of the notion, but his analysis of sacrifice and forgiveness provide some initial pointers: unlike his earlier analysis of the gift, Marion here assumes that the gift does not and cannot become visible as a gift, but can be experienced “negatively” via the phenomena of sacrifice and forgiveness. Sacrifice reveals the phenomenon of the gift more fully from the point of view of the recipient, while forgiveness manifests the giver of the gift more clearly. To illustrate and confirm this, Marion employs several examples: Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac illustrates the phenomenon of sacrifice. Isaac was given to Abraham and Sarah as a gratuitous gift. Marion argues, however, that they had begun to appropriate Isaac as a possession, as theirs. In God’s request of Abraham to sacrifice his beloved child, Isaac’s “gift-character” is made apparent. Isaac need not be killed, as soon as Abraham recognises that Isaac is not his possession but God’s generous gift. Forgiveness is illustrated by the story of King Lear and his daughter Cordelia. Lear requires his children’s love as a sort of possession, defined by reciprocity: they must explain how much they value his love and weigh it. Cordelia refuses to do so, because the gift of her love is immeasurable. Lear does not recognise this until the very end of the play when he finally realises the gift of her love in his request for her forgiveness. Marion rounds this off with an analysis of the parable of the prodigal son where the gift of the father’s love is only recognised when the son asks the father’s forgiveness. Forgiveness first makes visible the giver’s love and abundant gift that had previously been refused, while sacrifice makes visible the gift that had been appropriated as possession. They therefore both constitute an expansion of knowledge about the gift, albeit of a particular (negative) kind. Marion insists that we can only know one or the other, not both, but that this constitutes a real enlargement of knowledge.

Philosophy, phenomenology and theology These examples have already highlighted Marion’s frequent use of biblical illustrations for his phenomenological work. Yet biblical and theological themes are not merely employed as examples for phenomenological claims. Marion also engages in detailed analyses of what might well be called religious experiences, such as prayer and the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a particularly prominent and important

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phenomenon, not only because it is so central to Christian identity and practices, but also because it has the very connotations of gift and God’s self-givenness that Marion stresses in his work more generally. The Eucharist encapsulates the various aspects of Marion’s phenomenology particularly well: it is a supremely rich and abundant phenomenon, given entirely from itself, coming to us without any conditions on our part, pure gift. It constitutes us as its recipients, we respond to the divine gift in love. Already in God Without Being Marion had analysed the Eucharist in two chapters, suggesting that we must do theology from the divine point of view that is provided in the giving of the word during the Eucharist (1991, 139–82). The final chapter of In Excess discusses the performative language of prayer or praise that is able to overcome predicative or metaphysical language and hence speaks to God instead of about God (2002a, 128–62). In subsequent articles, Marion applies his phenomenology more fully to the Eucharist as a sacrament and speaks of it as the given phenomenon par excellence.16 God is fully given in the Eucharist and we respond in love and devotion. As Christ abandons himself in kenotic love in the incarnation, so the Eucharist shows God’s abundant (and abandoned) self-givenness as a manifestation of the invisible. The Eucharist, then, is the phenomenon of the gift par excellence and hence the very paradigm of the given phenomenon for all phenomena. Much of the discussion surrounding Marion’s work is about the contested boundaries between philosophy and theology. Janicaud’s claim that French phenomenology has undergone a “theological turn” has become proverbial (2000), but many early treatments were primarily about this issue, either accusing Marion of subverting phenomenology for theological purposes (thus trying to preserve phenomenological purity) or of importing too much phenomenology into his theology (hence attempting to protect theology’s purity).17 As Jones points out (2011, 1), this is not always the most productive way to examine his work and the policing of boundaries is not necessarily a good context for evaluating a thinker’s work. More recent treatments have considered not so much whether a transgression of boundaries between the disciplines is permissible, but rather how such mutual influence or implication can become productive.18 It is clear, on the one hand, that Marion has profound theological commitments to the Christian tradition, especially in a particular Roman Catholic shape, but, on the other hand, that he employs philosophical tools and seeks to make a genuine contribution to phenomenology, especially in the form of a response to nihilism and a phenomenological analysis of art and of love, broadly conceived. While there is significant debate about the extent to which his phenomenology is viable within traditional phenomenological parameters, it has certainly been read widely and elicited significant response, which would seem to indicate that it is not entirely irrelevant to more strictly philosophical concerns.19 More important for this collection, however, is the theological import of Marion’s work, which is significant, although there is no lack of criticism even from this audience. Marion articulates a phenomenology that can take faith and religious experience seriously and provide philosophical justification for them. His work has a significant

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apologetic tenor: it seeks to give rationality to faith, to make sense of experiences of the divine, and hence attempts to give them validity and coherence, albeit as much on their own terms as possible instead of imposing foreign parameters on them.20 Religion is not Marion’s sole concern—he is very much interested in aesthetics and the question of love—but it is certainly one of his main interests. His phenomenology is not merely a way of making space for religious questions—it also seeks to advance the phenomenological project more generally—but it also has that important goal in mind. Marion, much more fully than probably any contemporary philosopher (with the possible exception of his student Emmanuel Falque), seeks to give philosophical coherence to Christian faith and enable rigorous philosophical talk about the possibility of experiencing the divine. At the same time, he also points out that his project can enable theology to make use of phenomenological tools in its own analysis of the reality of faith (e.g. 2002a, 27–29). While this is no longer a philosophical project, it recommends philosophical tools and methodology to theologians, who have, of course, for most of their history drawn on various philosophies for their articulation of theological truths and realities. Marion suggests that phenomenology might be particularly appropriate for such articulation.21 Be that as it may, his phenomenology opens up a new path beyond the sterile rationality of discussions about God’s omnipotence or omniscience and a way of taking scriptural, historical, and spiritual accounts of religious experience seriously. Much more work would have to be done to show how concrete accounts of religious experience can profitably be analysed using the categories of the saturated phenomenon or understanding them in terms of givenness, but Marion’s analyses of the Eucharist provide some indication of the rich potential of such a phenomenological approach for religious phenomena as they are experienced by religious believers.22

Notes 1 Marion discusses his theological formation and the history of his involvement with these journals in detail in the interviews with Dan Arbib in La Rigueur des Choses (2012), which obviously also cover his philosophical work extensively. This volume of interviews may well be the best introduction to Marion’s work currently available. An English translation is forthcoming with Fordham University Press. 2 Daniélou and Bouyer also attended the wedding—a testament to the close connection the couple had with them early on. It was actually Corinne who introduced her future husband to Cardinal Lustiger (Marion 2010, 74). 3 The most well-known of these is Janicaud’s accusation in “The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology” (2000) and the follow-up work that considers Marion’s more recent writings (2005). A similar critique is put forward by Sebbah in his Testing the Limit (2012) and, in a different vein, by Han in Faulconer (2003). Besides this more substantive criticism, many commentators (especially when they only consider the phenomenological work) make confused statements about Marion’s ­“metaphysics.” 4 Many early reviews of his works bring up this issue and it invariably comes up at any conference where he is a speaker or topic of discussion. I have yet to attend a session on Marion’s thought where someone does not ask a question or raise an objection related to the overcoming of metaphysics and have multiple times witnessed Marion patiently explaining the definition of metaphysics and its importance to varied audiences.

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  5 For a particularly clear discussion of this, see his article on Aquinas that is now printed as an addendum to God Without Being in the newest edition. Marion works this out for the case of Augustine in In the Self’s Place (2012).   6 This is worked out in the most detail in his On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism and Cartesian Questions. For a briefer and more succinct statement, see the final chapter of On the Ego and on God.   7 This (and the argument about the eternal truths) is his main subject of inquiry in Théologie Blanche, a detailed and important work that unfortunately is not yet translated. For a shorter discussion of metaphysics in regard to various late medieval and early modern thinkers, see Cartesian Questions and On the Ego and on God.   8 For a careful tracing and critique of these sources in Marion’s thought, see Jones (2011).   9 Marion works this out the most clearly in the conclusion to the book. The contrast between the categories of “ontological difference” and “distance” is explored in §17 (2001, 198–215). This is followed by a brief contrast of distance to Derridian différance and the Levinassian other (2001, 215–33). 10 This is laid out in detail in Part II of Being Given (2002b, 71–118). Although Marion’s earliest comments on the gift (in God Without Being) precede Derrida’s writing on the gift, his more detailed discussions in Being Given and Negative Certainties respond to the aporia outlined by Derrida. 11 Already in Idol and Distance and God Without Being, Marion had explained that the idol is a real experience of the divine, albeit one that fits exactly the particular vision or ability of the observer. In his later phenomenological work Marion applies the terminology of the idol more generally to works of art and not specifically to images or concepts of the divine. Most of the conceptual definitions he had given for the idol (e.g. as a “dazzling of the visible” and its functioning as a mirror) are transferred and also apply to this wider application to works of art more generally. 12 Like the broadening of the category of the idol, this shift is not necessarily a shift in substance but more in widening of application. Being envisaged by the divine gaze (as in The Crossing of the Visible) now becomes being envisaged by the gaze of the other. 13 This does not mean that he has abandoned the earlier distinctions. Although he often speaks of the saturated phenomenon per se as bedazzling, overwhelming, and so forth, he still mentions the four fundamental categories (excess of quantity, quality, relation, modality) in any summary of his work, such as the postscript to Negative Certainties, where he presents the saturated phenomenon as an expansion of phenomenology that must now be pushed even further with the category of “negative certainty.” In the book itself, however, the categories are not really mentioned but the terminology of saturated phenomenon applied more generally to a number and range of excessive phenomena. 14 This critique has been expressed by Mackinlay (2010), Schrijvers (2011), Zarader (in Faulconer, 2003), and by many others in different ways. Marion repeatedly stresses that this is not simply an issue of “activity” versus “passivity” and certainly not simply a reversal in which the phenomenon now becomes subject and the recipient object, but that phenomenalization of the phenomenon is only possible via the recipient, albeit how a recipient does not dominate or determine the phenomenon, but rather allows it to appear and give itself fully (e.g. 2008, 174). In White’s collection (2010), Lewis (226–44) and Morrow (72–98) both point to the important notion of the recipient’s capacity in Marion’s work, including his discussion (in Cartesian Questions) of the very change of the meaning of “capacitas” in late medieval and especially Cartesian texts. 15 He continues this argument in a similar vein, but now focused on a reading of Augustine’s Confessions in his In the Self’s Place (2012). 16 See his discussion of sacraments in Benson and Wirzba (2010: 89–102). 17 For example, Carlson (1991), Horner (2001), Smith (1999). Falque in Hart (2007) calls for more crossing of the boundaries and more explicit relation. 18 See, for example, Westphal (2006) and Burch (2010). For an important critique of Marion’s project from a phenomenological perspective that also takes it seriously, see Steinbock on the “poor phenomenon” in Benson and Wirzba (2010, 120–31).

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19 Besides Janicaud, Sebbah and several other (so far untranslated) French and German commentators; see, for example, Cooke (2004), Finegan (2009) and Forestier (2012). 20 Such as the categories of modernity; for example, proofs for God’s existence or ­arguments about the incompatibility between various attributes of the divine and the reality of evil—Marion has no use whatsoever for that particular approach, which he considers stuck in the metaphysical paradigms of modernity. 21 He certainly thinks it more important than hermeneutics, which has been a favoured method among theologians. Marion’s relationship to hermeneutics is ambivalent, see Mackinlay (2010) and Gschwandtner (2014). 22 For one recent example that applies Marion’s phenomenology to liturgy, see Myers (2013).

References Benson, Bruce Ellis. 2002. Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Benson, Bruce Ellis and Norman Wirzba, eds. 2010. Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Burch, Matthew I. 2010. “Blurred Vision: Marion on the ‘Possibility’ of Revelation.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 67 (3): 157–71. Carlson, Thomas A. 1999. Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ciocan, Christian, ed. 2009. Philosophical Concepts and Religious Metaphors: New Perspectives on Phenomenology and Theology. Special Issue of Studia Phaenomenologica. Bucharest, Romania: Zeta Books. Cooke, Alexander. “What Saturates? Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenological Theology.” Philosophy Today 48 (2): 179–87. Faulconer, James E., ed. 2003. Transcendence in Philosophy and Religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Finegan, Thomas. 2009. “Is the Compatibility of Jean-Luc Marion’s Philosophy with Husserlian Phenomenology a Matter of Faith?” Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society: Voices of Irish Philosophy. 133–49. Forestier, Florian. 2012. “The Phenomenon and the Transcendental: Jean-Luc Marion, Marc Richir, and the Issue of Phenomenalization.” Continental Philosophy Review 45 (3): 381–402. Gschwandtner, Christina M. 2007. Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gschwandtner, Christina M. 2014. Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hart, Kevin, ed. 2007. Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Horner, Robyn. 2001. Rethinking God as Gift: Derrida, Marion, and the Limits of Phenomenology. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Horner, Robyn. 2005. Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-logical Introduction. Hants, UK: Ashgate. Janicaud, Dominique, et al. 2000. Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Janicaud, Dominique. 2005. Phenomenology “Wide Open”: After the French Debate, Translated by C. N. Cabral. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Jones, Tamsin. 2011. A Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion: Apparent Darkness. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Leask, Ian and Eoin Cassidy, eds. 2005. Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

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Mackinlay, Shane. 2010. Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991. God Without Being. Translated by T. A. Carlson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1998. Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology. Translated by T. A. Carlson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1999a. Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1999b. On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought. Translated by J. L. Kosky. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2001. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated by T. A. Carlson. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002a. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by R. Horner and V. Berraud. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002b. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by J. L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002c. Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by S. E. Lewis. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2003. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by S. E. Lewis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2004. The Crossing of the Visible. Translated by J. K. A. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2007. On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions. Translated by C. M. Gschwandtner. 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. Discours de réception de Jean-Luc Marion a l’Académie francaise et réponse de Mgr Claude Dagens. Paris, France: Grasset. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2011. The Reason of the Gift. Edited and translated by S. E. Lewis. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2012. In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine. Translated by J. L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2013. Essential Writings. Edited by K. Hart. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2014. Negative Certainties. Tranlsated by S. E. Lewis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marion, Jean-Luc, and Dan Arbib. 2012. Les Riguer des choses. Paris, France: Flammarion. Morrow, Derek J. 2005. “The Love ‘Without Being’ That Opens (To) Distance, Part One: Exploring the Givenness of the Erotic Phenomenon with Jean-Luc Marion.” Heythrop Journal 46 (3): 281–98. Morrow, Derek J. 2005. “The Love ‘Without Being’ That Opens (To) Distance, Part Two: From the Icon of Distance to the Distance of the Icon in Marion’s Phenomenology of Love.” Heythrop Journal 46 (4): 493–511. Myers, Jacob D. 2013. “Toward an Erotic Liturgical Theology: Schmemann in Conversation with Contemporary Philosophy.” Worship 87 (5): 387–413. Schrijvers, Joeri. 2011. Ontotheological Turnings: The Decentering of the Modern Subject in Recent French Phenomenology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Sebbah, François-David. 2012. Testing the Limit: Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and the Phenomenological Tradition. Translated by S. Barker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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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. Westphal, Merold. 2006. “Vision and Voice: Phenomenology and Theology in the Work of Jean-Luc Marion.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 60 (1–3): 117–37. White, John R. 2010. Quaestiones Disputatae: Selected Papers on the Thought of Jean-Luc ­Marion 1 (1).

Part 5

Structuralism, post-structuralism, and beyond

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24 Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) Aron Dunlap

Jacques Lacan was born in France in 1901, one year after Sigmund Freud revealed psychoanalysis to the world in his epochal The Interpretation of Dreams. Educated by Jesuits, Lacan excelled in languages and religion but shrugged off his bourgeois Catholic upbringing at the age of sixteen, replacing it with the philosophy of Spinoza. Like Freud, Lacan undertook a medical education before taking up psychoanalysis—for both men the vocation for which they became famous was something of a second career. Lacan did not become well-known until he was in his fifties, thanks to the weekly seminar he held for thirty years that, in its heyday, attracted the very cream of the Parisian intellectual crop. Lacan’s doctoral thesis (1933) was trumpeted by surrealists such as Salvador Dali and André Breton, who recognized in Lacan a kindred spirit, one for whom the unconscious was not a problem to be overcome but a mystery to be explored. Lacan attended Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, whose thought marks Lacan’s in profound ways; among his contemporaries Lacan was probably most influenced by Heidegger, whom he translated and who once pronounced, after a visit with Lacan, that “I think the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist” (Heidegger 2001, 350). In a way, he was right. Lacan ended as quickly as he could his own analysis, undertaken with Rudolf Lowenstein, and later claimed that if he was analysed at all it was through the ever-changing audience of his seminars. Like Freud’s own self-analysis (documented in The Interpretation of Dreams), Lacan’s induction into the profession was anything but orthodox. Among religious thinkers, Augustine and Pascal are often quoted by Lacan, who, though an atheist all his life, delighted in shocking his equally irreligious audience by claiming that, for example, Freud was “Christocentric” (1992, 175); and that one should opt for creation over evolution, for “a strictly atheist thought adopts no other perspective than that of ‘creationism’ (1992, 261). Perhaps the biggest surprise delivered by Lacan on this front can be found on the very first page of his doctoral thesis, which he dedicated to his brother, a lifelong monk:“To the Reverend Father Marc-Francois Lacan, Benedictine of the Congregation of France, my brother in religion” (in Roazen 1996, 325).1

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Religion and psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud famously considered neurosis to be an “individual religiosity” and religion itself to be a “universal obsessional neurosis” (1995, 435). It seemed clear to him that religion would fade as scientifically-grounded civilization progressed. He considered psychoanalysis itself to be properly scientific (or nearly so), and his own work to play a role in the unveiling of the true role of religion. Lacan, the “French Freud,” followed his master in many ways, but on the matter of religion he came to a position that is in certain respects the opposite of Freud’s. Like Freud, he had once hoped that psychoanalysis could be considered properly scientific, but as he grew older he came to consider his discipline to be closer to rhetoric than science (Lacan 1977–8, 11/15/77). He also came to recognize that religious belief was not something that could be shrugged off as mere illusion. Not only did he take the religious belief of his analysands (those undergoing analysis) very seriously, but, at the end of his life, he stated quite explicitly that religion would somehow overcome analysis, saying, “If psychoanalysis does not triumph over religion, it is because religion is unstoppable … It is not just psychoanalysis over which religion will triumph, but a whole lot of other things as well. One cannot imagine the power of religion” (Lacan 2005, 79). We can understand Lacan’s openness to religion in two ways. The first concerns the importance of religion in the life of the analysand, and the second involves the special role Lacan accorded to the Christian revelation. Concerning the first point, Lacan, from the beginning of his career, always paid very close attention to the religious culture and history of his analysands. We see this in his discussion of a Muslim analysand whose arm had become mysteriously paralyzed: He had already been in analysis with someone else before coming to me. He had quite peculiar symptoms connected with the use of the hand, an organ of some significance for those entertaining activities on which analysis has shed so much light. An analysis conducted along classical lines did its utmost, without success, to organize, at any cost, his various symptoms around, obviously, infantile masturbation, and the prohibitions and the repressions that it would have brought with it in his environment … Unfortunately, it explained nothing, nor did it resolve anything. (1991a, 196) What Lacan is rejecting here is the accepted—though Lacan would argue, not the orthodox—Freudian interpretation. The reason he rejects it is that such a reading does not even consider what is unique in the man’s case history, which in this case explicitly involves—for those who have ears to hear, as Lacan was wont to repeat— the religion in which he was raised: One of the most striking elements of the story of his subjective development was his estrangement from, his aversion to the Koranic law. Now, this law is something infinitely more complete than we can imagine, in our cultural

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sphere, defined as it is by Render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s. In the Islamic sphere on the contrary, the law has a totalitarian character which will on no account permit the isolation of the juridical from the religious plane. So, the subject manifested a failure to recognize the Koranic law. In a subject who belonged, through his ancestry, his functions, his future, to this cultural sphere, this was something which struck me in passing, in line with the idea, which I believe to be sound enough, that one should not fail to recognize the symbolic appurtenances of a subject. In fact, the Koranic law decrees the following, with respect to the person who is found guilty of theft—The hand will be cut off. Now, the subject had, in his childhood, been caught up in a whirlwind both private and public, which amounted to the following, that he had heard it said—and it was quite a scene, his father being a civil servant and having lost his position—that his father was a thief and must therefore have his hand cut off. (Lacan 1991a, 196–7) Lacan does not make mention of whether this man was a believer or not; what is important is to see clearly the man’s symbolic world—and in this case especially the way in which the religious decree underpins the criminal statute in that world— and how it constitutes a grammar of the individual’s psyche. Lacan does not dissolve the man’s neurotic symptom with a psychoanalytic interpretation, but grants that certain elements of a person’s history must be taken on their own terms—and that this may require a novel approach from the analyst. Lacan stresses not only the importance of the symbolic (a technical term for Lacan, which we will explain in some detail), but also the need for the analyst to interpret with a certain amount of spontaneity: “For every human being, everything personal which can happen to him is located in the relation to the law to which he is bound. His history is unified by the law, by his symbolic universe, which is not the same for everyone” (ibid., 197). Because of the “totalitarian character” of the Islamic conception of the law, Lacan seems to be suggesting that the analyst would have to treat the religious element of someone raised in this environment very differently from one raised in a civilization in which the legal, social and cultural ethos has been determined by Christianity, for whom the intersection between religion and politics is covered by the seeming absolute dualism of, “Render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s.”2 Much of what Lacan has to say about religion concerns Christianity and Judaism, simply because these religions most directly determined his milieu and the milieu of most of his patients. It is unfortunate, perhaps, that Lacan did not persistently engage with other religious traditions; yet, the intriguing comments he did make concerning such traditions will hopefully spur on his students to develop his thought beyond its more or less Western confines. Lacan’s comments after traveling to Japan in the 1960s are proof that he never was one to apply a psychoanalytic boilerplate to either analysands or the cultures in which they were raised. Lacan suggests that because written Japanese can be read and pronounced in two different ways (On-yomi and

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Kun-yomi, or, Chinese and Japanese readings), the Japanese relation to truth and repression may be such to preclude the possibility of analysis. While a Western person experiences a split between conscious and unconscious languages, and possesses a split subjectivity that can only be sutured through a process of exposing conscious language to unconscious truth, the Japanese person experiences this split prior to or within language, within the very process of decoding the Chinese characters, which partly constitute the Japanese written language. According to Lacanian commentator Kazushige Shingu, this linguistic duality “frustrates the process of true repression, or the aphanisis [fading] of the subject in relation to language” (Shingu 2005, 52–3). The dual sources of Japanese religious life—the native Shinto religion marked by a reverence for nature and a deep-rooted taboo of death, and the imported varieties of Buddhism with their “otherworldly” emphases on the extinguishing of desire—also mark the Japanese religious field in a way that is perhaps unique in world culture. When Lacan says that “not everyone has the good fortune of speaking Chinese in his language” (Ogasawara, 2) he refers to the fact that Japanese people have to translate back and forth, from foreign to native, Chinese to Japanese, Other to Self, within their own language. Merely by speaking, then, the Japanese person gains experience in crossing registers, from conscious to unconscious. In the above comment concerning the Muslim analysand, Lacan suggests that the relation between politics and religion for those raised in the Christian West could be covered by Christ’s saying: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”—meaning that, in the Christian world, religion does not have too much to do with politics (or taxes). However this may be, towards the end of his life Lacan made it clear that Christianity would eventually cause a “flooding” (2005, 82) of the divine into life, a complete penetration of the world of God into the world of man. I have already cited Lacan discussing the “triumph of religion”; when questioned further by an audience member on what he meant by this phrase, he specified that by religion he meant the Christian, or even more specifically, the “Roman one” (“la vraie religion, c’est la romaine” [ibid., 81]). He then goes on to say that this religion has the “resources” in which to “drown” the world in meaning— and this flood will sweep up the analyst as if he were merely a “symptom.” One of the resources named is the Apocalypse of St. John, that is, the book of Revelation, which concludes the Christian Bible, through which religion will make a “correspondence of all with all” (ibid., 82). Such a statement was clearly surprising to Lacan’s audience at the time, and I think it is no less surprising to most of us now, because we know Lacan as one who has critiqued the ancient religious view of the world in which everything in heaven has its counterpart on earth, and in which the sexual relation is the reigning metaphor for this harmony (1998, 128). Didn’t Lacan repeat endlessly, as a kind of mantra, that “there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship” (ibid., 144)? The late statements of Lacan on the “triumph of religion” in no way abrogate his life-long repudiation of the myth of harmony—which, in twentieth-century psychology is most clearly represented by the thought of C. G. Jung on the one hand, and the school of ego psychology on the other. Lacan strenuously critiqued both movements, for they are aimed at a world very different from the ancient one. They are aimed at a world

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that takes as its foundational myth the pursuit of knowledge, motivated by modern science and inaugurated by Galileo and Newton. When Lacan says that “religion is a little flash—between two worlds, if I can say, between a world that is passed and a world that is reorganizing itself as a superb world to come” (2005, 87), he is talking about the transition from our world—a world dominated by the necessarily meaningless pursuit of knowledge (in the sense that the experiments of modern science depend on a suspension of teleological considerations)—to a very different kind of world, one that, assumedly, would have found a place again for meaning. Our world—the symbolic/imaginary matrix that determines meaning and truth, or the lack thereof—is a world not of truth, but of knowledge in the form of “gadgets” that “eat into” us (Lacan 2005, 94) and set the world “topsy-turvy” (ibid., 79–80). We let these gadgets do their work—and Lacan here mentions television as something “devouring,” but he was also speaking of satellites, kitchen appliances and, we can surely assume, our own high-resolution handheld screens—because they interest us at an “elementary level” (ibid., 94). These gadgets are uniquely formed to isolate and tap into unconscious drives in a way that makes them almost impossible to resist, but which also drains them of their efficacy very quickly, which is why they must be constantly renovated and replaced. Our screens devour us because they captivate on one level while freezing out on another, as they bypass the body to access the drives via the openings of eye and ear. But Lacan is not worried about this state of things: “I am not among the alarmists, or those who are anxious, for when we’ve had our fill of them [the gadgets] we will turn to occupy our selves with the real thing, that is, the things of religion” (ibid., 95). So, although the book of the Apocalypse is one of the true religion’s great resources, Lacan’s eschatological view is not, it seems, apocalyptic. In fact, the flood of meaning that Lacan envisages may well be quite mundane.

The Borromean knot The Borromean knot pictured here is an image of the psyche according to Lacan (“Borromean” because it resembled the coat of arms of the noble Italian family). It is composed, fundamentally, of three strands, three psychic registers: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. These are the “three grand terms” (Lacan

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1991a, 73) that replace both of Freud’s topologies of the psyche (the first topology of pre-conscious, conscious and unconscious, and the second of id, ego and super-ego). It is already there in the beginning of Lacan’s teaching, emerging, as Lacan says, “with the birth of these seminars” (1962–3, 12/13). The fundamental characteristic of the Borromean knot is that “if you cut one [ring], every single one of the others becomes free and independent” (Lacan 1998, 124). The imaginary register is populated, we might say, with fantasies. For Freud, the fantasy has its origin in the ability of the child to produce the breast in his or her mind when it does not appear in the flesh. Lacan would not disagree with this account, though he expresses the situation differently. Lacan’s imaginary may be considered as the initial organizing structure that is imposed upon the disorganized primal real of the infant’s experience. The primal real refers to the inchoate urges, for warmth or nourishment or bodily caress, that the infant undergoes in an almost completely passive way. The confrontation of the primal real with the imaginary gives us a drama in which: Internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation— and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an ‘orthopaedic’ form of its totality—and to the finally donned armour of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. (Lacan 2006b, 78) Because “the subject becomes aware of his body as a totality” prior to being able to act on this awareness—this is how Lacan understands the phenomenon of prematuration—“the subject anticipates on the achievement of psychology mastery, and this anticipation will leave its mark on every subsequent exercise of effective motor mastery” (Lacan 1991a, 79). The initial fantasy for the child, then, is one of control, which, because of her inability to carry this out in her vulnerable body, is an imaginary power only. The young child is something like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, who, under the whispering influence of the serpent, imagined that they had powers of mastery which, in fact, only God had. And, just like this fantasy of theirs had its origin in an other, so it is with every child, who must often be propped up in his fantasies—set up in front of a mirror, or encouraged with smiles and cheers that, yes, this power is yours, this image is you: “The subject becomes aware of his desire in the other, through the intermediary of the image of the other which offers him the semblance of his own mastery” (ibid.,155). If the imaginary organizes the primal real, but in a way that is fundamentally (self-) deceptive, the symbolic provides a law for the subject which is dependable, and yet by going beyond the fantasies generated by the imaginary register, negates them. It is the symbolic order which is “constitutive for the subject” (2006c, 7), but, for the young child, the symbolic is also an imposition on the imaginary and a blow to the god of that register, the ego. Returning to the Garden of Eden,

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the symbolic moment in that story is when God destroys the dream of human domination and forces out the dejected couple from the paradise that was their home. While the imaginary is the realm of imitation (of the serpent) and jealousy (of God) the symbolic is the realm of obedience to the law (of a now absent God or, in Freud’s language, a dead father). That law has its origin in an other, just as the ego does, but the other of the symbolic is explicitly a religious one for Lacan: A creature needs some reference to the beyond of language, to a pact, to a commitment which constitutes him, strictly speaking, as another, a reference included in the general or, to be more exact, universal system of interhuman symbols … That is what we call the function of the sacred, which is beyond the imaginary relation. (Lacan 1991a, 174) In another place, he tells us that “the symbolic is the basis of what was made into God” (1998, 83). The religious, then, grounds the symbolic, and explains why Lacan could never agree with Freud that religion was mere illusion. Lacan often cited the first verse from the Gospel of John—“In the beginning was the Word”— as a kind of motto of the symbolic, such that the subject—for whom language is the “domain which the subject inhabits” (1991a, 77)—finds her birth not in an image but in a word. “If one has to define the moment at which man becomes human, we can say that it is the moment when, however little it be, he enters into the symbolic relation” (ibid., 155). Lacan reads the Islamic confession of faith—“There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet”—as another version of this entering into the symbolic relation: “There is no other God but God. There is no other word, no other solution to your problem, than the word” (1991b, 158). For “the emergence of the symbol creates, literally, a new order of being in the relations between men” (1991a, 239). The tension between imaginary and symbolic can be seen in the representations of Greek religion as depicted in the epics of Homer. The Olympian gods—Zeus, Athena and the rest of them—have an imaginary quality that shows itself in their feuds and in their status as, essentially, “souped up” men and women. They are the ego ideals of the ancient Greeks. The abode of the gods is described as a kind of child’s fantasy, “never rocked by galewinds, never drenched by rains, nor do the drifting snows assail it, no, the clear air stretches away without a cloud, and a great radiance plays across that world where the blithe gods live all their days in bliss” (The Odyssey, 6.48–51). But at key moments in Homer another register is heard, that of the symbolic law, and it is often Zeus (the god of boundaries) who delivers its message from the fault line between imaginary and symbolic: Achilles’ fate, in The Iliad, is to choose between fighting and dying or leaving and living, while in The Odyssey Odysseus must be released from the clasp of Calypso to achieve his destiny of a peaceful old age. In Sophocles’ version of the tragedy of Oedipus, it is the oracle of Delphi that is placed at this crucial juncture. And yet whence comes this authority? The oracle

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speaks for something other than itself, and Zeus also delivers a message from elsewhere, from the register of the real, or Fate (moira). At the moment, the oracle speaks, at the moment when Zeus reveals an unchangeable fate, we find ourselves at the intersection of Lacan’s three registers. The law (the message) is symbolic in that it imposes order on the imaginary realm—Zeus often comes in thundering just as the various feuds and jealousies are getting out of control on the mountain top— but the message itself comes from an invisible real, the empty mouth of the oracle or the eternally recurring circle traced by the constellations. The real, said Lacan, is that “which always comes back to the same place” (Lacan 1978, 49). If Zeus can be located at the crossing of imaginary and symbolic, Christianity impinges at the juncture of symbolic and real. The real of destiny flooded over, with the advent of the Christian religion, into the symbolic/imaginary realm of the human will. In this new world, the ultimate fate of a person (whether paradise or hell, whether remembrance or oblivion) was no longer in the hands of the gods but in the heart of each person. By partaking of the flesh of the world’s creator, in the sacrament of the Eucharist, one could participate in the life of that creator: one could internalize destiny. The old theological term for this translation from created to creator is apotheosis, literally, a becoming divine. This is perhaps the core of what Lacan gets from the Christian story: here, the individual partakes of the real that used to be outside of him. This is the role played by objet a in Lacan’s thought, the “little bit of the real” that becomes the driving force around which the subject endlessly circles. In truth, as Jacques-Alain Miller makes clear, the subject is objet a (in Milbank and Žižek, 2009, 128). In Christianity, the firmament holding back the real has been pierced, which is why, at the moment of Christ’s death, the veil of the Temple is torn in two. The seeds of Lacan’s understanding of Christianity can be found, oddly enough, in Freud’s mistrust of the so-called Greatest Commandment of Christianity, that is, to love thy neighbour as thyself. For Freud, who understands this commandment to be equivalent to that which compels Christians to “love your enemies,” this is a statute to be studiously avoided, as it endangers us with regard to those who do not attempt to follow it, and would cause the love we have for people who really deserve it to be devalued (Freud 1961, 65–9). Lacan explains Freud’s position in terms of the hatred and aggression that exists within the neighbour as well as the self: Every time that Freud stops short in horror at the consequences of the commandment to love one’s neighbor, we see evoked the presence of that fundamental evil which dwells within this neighbor. But if that is the case, then it also dwells within. And what is more of a neighbor to me than this heart within which is that of jouissance and which I don’t dare go near? For as soon as I go near, as Civilization and its Discontents makes clear, there rises up the unfathomable aggressivity from which I fell, that I turn against me, and which in the very place of the vanished Law adds its weight to that which prevents me from crossing a certain frontier at the limit of the Thing. (1992, 186)

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Christianity has not only placed the real of destiny in the heart of the believer, but it has put jouissance there as well. This French word is often translated as enjoyment, but, for Lacan, inasmuch as jouissance is actually pleasure in pain, it is just as easily the opposite of pleasure—it is more the primal real out of which both pleasure and pain, both love and hatred, rise up: “It is jouissance whose absence would render the universe vain” (1998, 694). And there is no doubt that the issue is explicitly theological as well, for “the chance for the existence of God is that He—with a capital H—enjoys, that He is jouissance” (2007, 66). Freud, then, points to the irrationality of the law of love and cautions distance from the real and the insatiable aggression which it reveals. Lacan agrees that Christian love exposes one to the horrors of the real, but, as we saw above, he is not worried about any apocalyptic consequences. We may explain this discrepancy by pointing out that Freud clearly misreads the way these commandments have been interpreted by the Christian theological tradition. They are not mandating a “universal” love, but in fact they are telling us to love the particular; they are telling us to limit our love. As the Anglican theologian/philosopher, John Milbank, reminds us, “the Augustinian tradition of the ordo amoris insists that, as finite creatures, we must love spouse, relations, friends, and guest more than mere strangers and certainly more than enemies” (2009, 122). What Freud misses is that Christianity is a religion of the particular over the universal. To love your neighbour, that unexceptional person you find yourself next to—smelling slightly rank on a bus, perhaps, or hogging your armrest in an airplane—is precisely not to love everyone—which option would, of course, be more welcome inasmuch as it is simply impossible and therefore dismissible. It is the aggravating fellow next to me, coughing too loud at a classical concert, that really makes me gnash my teeth, for he brings up an inexplicable aggression within me, and, worst of all, he reminds me—in his ignorance, in his dumb animality, in the very inconsequential nature of his being—of myself. Lacan, as we’ve noted above, is especially sensitive to the particular nature of religion in the life of the subject, and I think it is this sensitivity that allows him to avoid Freud’s mistake. For Lacan, what is crucial about this commandment is that it performs a condensation of the symbolic order in Christian civilization into one, strangely secular, command. Christianity elevates the crucifixion to the central place in world history, and puts in the place of its crucified god (and eviscerated symbolic order) the individual believer, for whom the command to love God and love neighbour are one and the same, and whose access to jouissance is framed absolutely by that command: We should note that only Christianity, through the drama of the passion, gives a full content to the naturalness of the truth we have called the death of God. Indeed, with a naturalness beside which the approaches to it represented by the bloody combats of the gladiator pale. Christianity, in effect offers a drama that literally incarnates that death of God. It is also Christianity that associates the death with what happened to the Law; namely, that without

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destroying that Law, we are told, but in substituting itself for it, in summarizing it, and raising it up in the very movement that abolishes it—thus offering the first weighty historical examples of the German notion of Aufhebung, i.e., the conservation of something destroyed at a different level—the only commandment is henceforth ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ’. (1992, 193) In reducing the divine law to one commandment Christianity, in one fell swoop, drained the Jewish Law of its symbolic power and depopulated the Greek sky of its constellated deities. It is this insight of Lacan’s that has caused the subsequent debate concerning his thought to revolve around the nature of atheism and materialism in the (post) Christian West.

Lacan: Christian materialist or the only true atheist? Theologians and philosophers currently fall into three camps regarding the question of Lacan and religion. Most Christian theologians who mention him are dismissive of his thought. While the Radical Orthodoxy movement within contemporary theology is notable for taking seriously modern atheistic thought, two of the founding members of this movement have little time for Lacan. John Milbank writes off Lacan and more when he says that “psychoanalysis is but the confessional box of atheism” (2010, 131), while in Graham Ward’s view desire, in the hands of Lacan, becomes merely a nihilistic “search for the nothing into which all that is folds” (2000, 107). Then there are the Christian thinkers who see Lacan as a kind of crypto-Christian. Marcus Pound, another scholar associated with Radical Orthodoxy, is the most prominent figure in this camp. The third important viewpoint in this debate is comprised of thinkers, such as the philosopher Adrian Johnston, who look to work out the atheistic underpinnings of Lacan’s thought while downplaying the religious element. Marcus Pound, in Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma, focuses on the Kierkegaardian background to certain key concepts in Lacan. According to Pound, Lacan should be understood as articulating a theory of trauma that explicitly depends on Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition, which concept Pound describes in the following way: First, repetition requires a genuine change, which implies that the subject moves from the position of untruth (sin) to truth (conversion), rather than discovering what he or she already was. Second, repetition makes time a premium; history is that site that registers change and Christianity the tradition that recognizes the historical significance of time by advocating a saviour who enters it. Third, repetition relies on a saviour to illuminate and redeem us, without which repetition would become a form of recollection, and for this reason repetition is not only an existential task, it is the decisive Christian category, delineating Christianity from Greek/paganism. (2007, 63)

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Lacanian analysis, for Pound, is a modern form of Kierkegaardian repetition in that it attempts to bring a subject back to a traumatic event, but in speech, and with a difference. The goal of this work is to “bring about a crisis of decision in the subject concerning the signifiers that determine the meaning of his or her life” (ibid., 130). This then allows Pound to consider the crucifixion as a world-traumatic event and the Eucharist a kind of analytic repetition of this event; or, as he says, “that transubstantiation is primarily a traumatic event and the Eucharistic community a traumatic community” (ibid., xiii). In other words, the death of Christ on the cross is the founding trauma for the believer who, in her sin, participates in this rejection of the Creator. The Eucharist returns one to the site of this event but, via the liturgy, supplies signifiers that allow the believer to reconfigure the meaning of this event—not death and guilt, but forgiveness and new life. If Pound, in his brilliant monograph, goes too far at times in his effort to save Lacan for Christianity—at one point he says that the “counter-trauma” of the liturgy is the “sine qua non of real analysis” (ibid., 23)—Adrian Johnston could be accused of the opposite tendency. Johnston’s explicitly stated project is to dissolve the “disguised un-worked-through Judeo-Christian heritage persisting within Lacan’s generally atheistic outlook” ( Johnston 2011, 1). For Johnston, there is a good atheistic Lacan, and a bad religious Lacan, and he aims to purify the former of the latter. According to Johnston, Lacan is marked by two “chains of equivalences … religious-philosophy-meaning (grounded and totalized in the ancient finite cosmos) versus psychoanalysis-antiphilosophy-meaninglessness ([un-]grounded and detotalized in the modern infinite universe)” (2010, 145). In the following paragraph, Johnston articulates what the workings of the Borromean psyche might look like from a “properly” materialistic vantage point: The big Other, as a non-natural symbolic order, precedes the birth of the individual, preparing in advance a place for him/her in a system obeying rules other than the law of nature. Thanks to these representational mediators and their central role in the processes of subjectification, the Lacanian subject exists as a (non-)being alienated from its corporeal material substratum … The Ideal of subjective thought arises from the Real of objective being [while also maintaining] that this thus-generated Ideal subjectivity thereafter achieves independence from the ground of its material sources and thereby starts to function as a set of possibility conditions for forms of reality irreducible to explanatory discourses allied to traditional versions of materialism. (2006) Whereas Lacan accepted that the symbolic power of language (or law or ethical mores) would most likely always have its root in a religious doctrine that “explained” or “justified” that apparent intrusion of these codes onto a world that would not naturally—or better, scientifically or empirically—produce them, Johnston gives a purely naturalistic account of the genesis of symbolic otherness, and the

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power that a subsequent development could have in determining a prior reality, or, as he states it, how “subjectivity as a transient transcendence [could be] made possible by an underlying ontology of an Otherless, barred Real” (ibid.)

Sinthome What is missing most of all in the English-language commentary on Lacan is an exploration of the religious connotations of Lacan’s sinthome. What is the sinthome? Superficially, it is simply the medieval French way of writing “symptom.” It is also a homonym (in French) for holy man, saint homme. In my book, Lacan and Religion, I enter into some of the complexities of this concept and its potential fecundity for religious scholars and theologians, but the simplest way to approach the sinthome is to say that, while the symptom is something that the analyst tries to cure the analysand of, the sinthome is something that the analysand has learned to live with, via, as Lacan says, a certain kind of savoir faire. The sinthome is the path of love as well, but not the love that is marked by the transference of the imaginary register, that love saturated with illusion (see Miller 2008), but a love that is more like a line threaded though the lacunae of the three registers. In his final seminars (especially Seminar XXIII, which is as of yet untranslated), Lacan spoke of the sinthome as a fourth register, but unlike the other three registers, it was not a ring, but a thread that repaired the breakage in the rings. From the standpoint of the Borromean knot, love is impossible, and there is no such thing as a sexual relationship—for the imaginary register is rooted in a deceptive ploy of the other, the pax symbolica, which in intervening to heal the mirroring vertigo of the imaginary is undermined by a real which it must obscure; yet, in the real, love cannot be distinguished from hatred, and pleasure merges with pain in jouissance. The Borromean knot, in other words, is one hell of a knot; ultimately, it is one that can’t be dissolved, undone or analysed. For Freud, religion was a symptom (both cultural and individual) that analysis could heal. For Lacan, religion also was a symptom; yet, as he brazenly added: “as for being relieved of a symptom, I promise them nothing” (Lacan 1975). True religion, then, is sinthome, a thread that holds together a broken knot in a broken world, that lets one live with it.

Notes 1 Michel de Certeau, a philosopher/historian and Jesuit priest who studied with Lacan, has this to say about the dedication: “Lacan knows what he says. ‘Religion’ here means the ‘religious congregation,’ and ‘brother in religion’ points to a brotherhood based not on blood but on a common sharing in the Order” (1983, 32). According to Marcus Pound, we see here “Lacan’s unconscious desire, hidden in full view” (2007, 24). 2 Slavoj Žižek suggests that the Islamic emphasis on the law is grounded in a belief/distrust in the “explosive power of feminine subjectivity” (2006). Woman must be veiled because she represents a Divine Truth that men cannot handle. Žižek suggests that the Islamic respect for the concept of prohibition is more promising and humane than the liberal Western mania for unveiling the truth.

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References Certeau, Michel de, with M. Rose-Logan. 1983. “Lacan: An Ethics of Speech.” Representations 3: 21–39. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey, vols 4–5. London, UK: Hogarth Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1995. “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices.” In The Freud Reader, translated by James Strachey, edited by Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. Zollikon Seminar Protocols - Conversation—Letters. Edited by Medard Boss, translated by Franz Mayr and R. Askay. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Homer. 1997. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York, NY: Penguin Classics. Johnston, Adrian. 2006. “Lightening Ontology: Slavoj Žižek and the Unbearable Lightness of Being Free”; www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/johnston8.html (accessed 30 November 2013). Johnston, Adrian. 2010. “This Philosophy which is Not One: Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou, and Lacanian Antiphilosophy.” S: Journal of the Jan Van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 3: 137–58. Johnston, Adrian. 2011. “On Deep History and Lacan.” European Journal of Psychoanalysis 32: 91–121. Lacan, Jacques. 1962–3. Le Séminaire X: L’angoisse. Unpublished notes from seminar, recorded anonymously; available at http://gaogoa.free.fr/SeminaireS.htm (accessed 9 December 2013). Lacan, Jacques. 1975. “11-24-1975 Yale University: Conversation with Students.” Translated by J. Stone; www.lacanianworks.net/?p=306 (accessed 29 November 2013). Lacan, Jacques. 1977–8. Le Séminaire XXV: Le Moment de Conclure. Unpublished notes from seminar, recorded anonymously; available at http://gaogoa.free.fr/SeminaireS.htm (accessed 9 December 2013). Lacan, Jacques. 1978. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis [Seminar XI]. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 1991a. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated with notes by John New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 1991b. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by S. Tomaselli, notes by John Forrester. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Dennis Porter. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 1998. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 2005. Le Triomphe de la Religion. Paris, France: Éditions du Seuil. Lacan, Jacques. 2006a. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 2006b. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function.” In Lacan (2006a), 75–81. Lacan, Jacques. 2006c. “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’.” In Lacan (2006a), 6–48.

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Lacan, Jacques. 2007. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Russell Grigg. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Milbank, John and Slajoj Žižek, S. 2009. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Edited by Creston Davis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Milbank, John. 2010. “Without Heaven there is only Hell on Earth: 15 Verdicts on Žižek’s Response.” Political Theology 11 (1): 126–135. Miller, Jacques Alain. 2008. “On Love”; www.lacan.com/symptom/?page_id=263 (accessed 30 November 2013). Ogasawara, S. 2009. The Instance of the Letter in the Japanese Unconscious. Translated by Jack Stone. Web.missouri.edu/~stonej/JapanUnc.pdf (accessed 22 February 2014). Pound, Marcus. 2007. Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma. London, UK: SCM Press. Roazen, Paul. 1996. “Lacan’s First Disciple.” Journal of Religion and Health 35(4): 321–36. Shingu, Kazushige. 2005. “Freud, Lacan and Japan”; www.discourseunit.com/matrix/ shingu_mpm_ paper.doc (accessed 30 November 2013). Ward, Graham. 2000. Cities of God. London, UK: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. “The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason”; http://www.lacan.com/ zizarchives.htm (accessed 11 June 2014).

25 Michel Foucault (1926–1984) Jeremy Carrette

In 1980, Michel Foucault (1926–1984) surprised the intellectual community by exploring the work of early Christianity in his annual Collège de France lecture. He focused on key figures of the early church, including Tertullian, Augustine and Cassian, and sought to explore the formation of subjectivity, the ethical relation of self to truth claims, through an examination of faith and confession. While Foucault’s subject matter was new, his wider underlying aim continued to be that of finding ways to “think differently” about historical and philosophical material to change practice and how we think about ourselves (Foucault 1984b, 9). His aim was to show a hidden order of knowledge, truth and subjectivity that would allow individuals to think and act in new ways. Foucault’s work seeks to question the “ready-made” object of knowledge and show its historical limit (Foucault 1969b, 22). His aim is to draw attention to something beneath the surface of knowledge. In this sense, what Foucault offers the philosophy of religion is not simply a series of reflections on religion or Christianity (which always remain part of his wider philosophical-historical studies), but rather a series of techniques to “displace” or “de-centre” the “apparatus” (dispositif  ) of knowledge. He questions the assumptions of knowledge by offering philosophicalhistorical readings of the given categories behind such thinking, such as madness, medicine, the human sciences, or sexuality. In this way, Foucault follows the Enlightenment idea of the “critique” of knowledge by seeking to “know knowledge” (Foucault 1978e, 36). Such a critical philosophical attitude is about exploring “interactions” and developing “strategies” that shift the intellectual assumptions. Even though Foucault was an atheist, his critical ethos does not refuse religion, but rather reveals how religion becomes a “political force” in legitimating or subverting authority (Foucault 1978d, 107). As a result, discussions of Foucault and religion pivot between exploring Foucault’s own texts for their engagements with religion and applying Foucauldian concepts to read the social and political contexts

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of religious thinking (see Bernauer 1990; Carrette 2000; Bernauer and Carrette 2005; McSweeney 2005 and 2013; Tran 2011). However, in Foucault’s world one should not seek to simply apply his thinking as a new method for the “philosophy of religion,” but rather attempt to challenge and question the interests, assumptions and values at play in the discourse of philosophy and religion for opening the possibility of new forms of living. This framing of ideas and practices is as much a political strategy as a philosophical one, because it reveals the way embodied and lived practices are fragile and changeable forms. The easiest way to understand Foucault’s thinking for the philosophy of religion is to see each phase of his work as offering a distinct “tool” to challenge the assumptions of philosophical and religious knowledge. Indeed, Foucault understood his own work as offering a set of “tools” and his books “scalpels” to uncover something. As he remarked in a 1978 interview: “Each of my books is a way of dismantling an object, and of constructing a method of analysis toward that end” (Foucault 1978a, 28). I will, therefore, map three phases of his thinking as three “tools” of critical thinking for the philosophy of religion: archaeology, genealogy and problematization. As Foucault always included religious and theological ideas in his work, I will show how each of these “tools” enabled Foucault to “think differently” about religion. In effect, I will suggest that after Foucault we can create a philosophy of religion as the practice of uncovering the silent and hidden dimensions of religious and philosophical knowledge. This also requires revealing the hidden power relations of the philosophy of religion as a disciplinary practice itself, and I will suggest in conclusion how Foucault’s critical thinking leads to the end of the domination of “European” philosophical thought about religion. However, before mapping these aspects of his work for a philosophy of religion, I wish to locate the historical moment of Foucault’s own thinking and explore the foundations of his own philosophical attitude.

Foucault’s background and intellectual context Foucault’s critique, as I have suggested, demands entertaining a reflexive suspicion about the philosophy of religion and the methods of positioning Foucault. For example, to position or locate Foucault through the promise of biography is to refuse Foucault’s own critical reading of the “author-function” and his suspicion of biography (Foucault 1969a, 130). In one interview, he stated: “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am” (Foucault 1982a, 9). He also delighted in the fact that he was positioned in so many different ways (Foucault 1984c, 383–4). Yet, at the same time, he conceded that his work was part of his “own biography” and that life and philosophy were bound together. “[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, 374). These apparent contradictions reflect the fact that in the mobile positions of knowledge,

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Foucault seeks to carry out different tasks and thus, like a move in judo, always engages different moves before interacting to create various new constellations of knowledge (see Baudrillard [1977] 1987, 65). In this sense, Foucault draws on different techniques to perform different kinds of work. According to David Macey, one of Foucault’s biographers, Foucault’s thinking brought together much of the intellectual life of France. As Macey explained: “There are few changes that are not reflected in his work, and there are few developments that he did not influence” (Macey 1993, xi). Born into the family of a doctor in Poitiers, in southwest France, and educated in a Catholic school and the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, the philosophical life of Foucault did reflect a certain privilege of French society. Although behind the scenes, he suffered much in his early life coming to terms with his sexuality, his academic success, coupled in part with negative attitudes to homosexuality in France and Germany, led him to take academic positions in various places around Europe and North Africa, before returning to France in 1970 to take the Chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the prestigious Collège de France. Biographers such as James Miller (1993) make much of Foucault’s personal life and his death from AIDS in terms of a Nietzschean quest of limits, but this narrative has been strongly challenged by David Halperin’s (1995) study of Foucault and gay politics—Saint Foucault—as fanciful, and showing little knowledge of the gay sadomasochism subculture in California and the exploration of the limits of the body and pleasure in new forms by the gay community. What is clear is that Foucault’s philosophical ethos did link life and thought, but often in a complex sense, because his critical attitude sought to question the very categories of ordering life and thought. Foucault’s critical attitude is shaped by a post-war philosophical and political context in France that responded to Kant, Heidegger and phenomenology, Nietzsche, the history of science, the avant-garde, structuralism and the history of religions. Through Heidegger he developed the sense of the historical “conditions of possibility” for thought and through Nietzsche, not only the genealogy of knowledge and the will to power, but the embodied nature of thought. It was, however, under the influence of his doctoral supervisor, Georges Canguilhem, who worked in the history and philosophy of science, that he grounded his thinking in the “philosophy of the concept,” which allowed him to move beyond the subjective nature of thought. Foucault was also influenced by successive waves of post-war French thought. He became interested in the French literary avant-garde, as seen in his work for the literary journal Tel Quel, and his exploration of themes in surrealism. Foucault (1968) wrote a short essay, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” on the work of Magritte. His interest in the experimental literary and artistic forms also led him to follow the work of Raymond Roussel, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, which explored the themes of language, excess, limit and rationality. Another wave of French thought that dominated his thinking for a time was structuralism, including Claude Lévi-Strauss. However, Foucault was never easy associating himself with this movement, and went to great lengths to separate his thinking from

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structuralism, famously stating: “I have never been a structuralist” (Foucault 1983c, 22). With more distance, we can at least assume, as Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, 53, 57) suggest, that his thinking “resembles structuralism.” If structuralism as a wider movement was problematic, Foucault did acknowledge a debt to the historian of religion Georges Dumézil and his work on the structure of ancient societies (see Dumézil [1966] 1996). In his 1970 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, “The Discourse of Language,” Foucault examined the way discourse was “controlled, selected, organized and redistributed” according to various procedures such as exclusions, divisions, rejections and oppositions. He was concerned with the “internal rules”—the hidden way disciplines of knowledge were organized, including those within religion and philosophy (Foucault 1970, 220). He recognized how the rules of discourse become a “system of control” for what can and cannot be said and the way propositions are marked out as either true or false (Foucault 1970, 224). This analysis reflected the correlation of knowledge with structures of power, something manifest in the political atmosphere of May 1968 and the student riots in Paris: students were rebelling against educational controls. The atmosphere illustrated how knowledge was not neutral, but linked to institutional, political and exclusionary tactics and practices. These lectures mapped Foucault’s program for future research at the Collège de France across medical, psychiatric and penal practices and exploration of the taboos and fears in the discourses of sexuality that would appear during the 1970s in his key published work and in his Collège de France lectures (published only after his death). His inaugural lecture also signalled new “critical perspectives” in his thinking, building on archaeology and establishing genealogy. To show how Foucault offers a set of critical “tools” for the philosophy of religion, we now need to turn to these two methods and his final studies on truth and subjectivity.

Three critical tools for the philosophy of religion 1  Archaeological critique: the unconscious of knowledge The first critical “tool” reveals the processes beneath the surface of knowledge and shows how knowledge is historically shaped. As Foucault explained in his 1969 work The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969b, 131), the archaeological method “describes discourses.” It explores the way discourses emerge through their historical conditions and in various practices. The idea of “discourse” is a group of “statements” (l’énoncé); “discourse,” then, does not refer to a sentence as such, but a combination of utterances that are spoken, written or displayed. Archaeology is thus wider than linguistics, in so far as it explores and maps the groups of statements and examines their “field of use” and “deployment” in the social field of analysis. As Foucault indicated: “Discursive practice is a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the enunciative function” (Foucault 1969b, 117). With its analysis of

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the “preconceptual level,” the uncovering of the “multiplicity” of relations within discourse, and negation of the modern figure of “man,” some have suggested there are elements of negative theology or a mystical apparatus behind his thinking (Foucault 1969b, 60, 72, 211; Clavel 1975; Bernauer 1990). However, while Maurice Blanchot’s enigmatic gestures of language are never far behind and the attempt to escape structuralism demanded an appreciation of mobility and flux, Foucault is working with the history of ideas and political engagements. As Foucault gestured in his 1980 Collège de France lectures, it is a “negative theory” revealing what is hidden in knowledge, as opposed to a “negative theology” revealing what we cannot see about God (see Foucault 1966b and Foucault 1979–1980). The archaeological method was drawn together in response to three earlier philosophical-historical studies: History of Madness (1961), which explored the development of psychiatry and the psychiatric hospital; The Birth of the Clinic (1963b), which explored the development of the history of medicine; and The Order of Things (1966), which explored the history of the human sciences. These studies were not simply historical and were not received well by historians (see Megill 1987). They combined history, philosophy, and an ethical commitment to a contemporary perspective to create what Foucault later called a “history of the present” (Foucault 1975, 31). It was a way of disrupting the “positivities” of knowledge, that is, the way in which knowledge is posited as real (Foucault 1969b, 175). Foucault achieved this by illustrating the transformations, ruptures, continuities, and discontinuities of ideas through history. But each of his histories was to bring about a social change in our way of thinking. Showing how something emerged within a historical process revealed how it was open to change. He sought to change the figure of madness by showing how it was dependent on constructions of rationality and irrationality in psychiatry; he sought to reveal the power of the medical gaze by showing how it anchored and fixed the body as a site of knowledge; and he sought to challenge the assumptions about “man” in the human sciences by revealing how it was a temporary historical form. It was his 1966 The Order of Things that brought Foucault to fame. At that time in France The Order of Things was perceived to be part of the wave of structuralism, as depicted in Maurice Henry’s 1967 cartoon in La Quinzaine Littérairé, which pictures Foucault, Barthes, Levi-Strauss and Lacan in grass skirts having a picnic in the long grass. As I have already explained, Foucault resisted this representation of his work, though it was often seen as structuralist because of Foucault’s distinct historical constellations of knowledge, what he called “epistemes.” These were “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period” (Foucualt 1969b, 191). The epistemic conditions shape what can be said or understood at any given time. The Order of Things explored the shifting nature of knowledge with respect to the human sciences. It explored the way systems of taxonomy shifted from wealth analysis, natural history and general grammar in the “Classical Period” (the sixteenth and seventeenth century) to notions of labour (economics), notions of the organic structure of life (biology) and notions of language (philology) in the modern period (eighteenth and nineteenth century). The aim of The Order of Things was

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to show that “man” was a “recent invention” (Foucault 1966a, 387). Foucault thus joined with Nietzsche in linking the death of God and the death of man, who were “engaged in a contest with more than one round” (Foucault 1966a, 385). These theological-anthropological gestures were a distinct feature in Foucault’s work, and arguably form a sub-text to his work composed of his Catholic background and the religious history of France. It is, nonetheless, important not to overplay the religious sub-text of Foucault, and to recognize that he saw religion as part of the wider “cultural facts” of an historical period (Foucault 1967, 91). For example, Foucault’s link between spirituality and sexuality in his essay on Bataille, illustrates the traditional Christian formation of spirituality as a discourse, even as it is being used outside of such a religious epistemology (Foucault 1963a). We might call this, following Bataille, an “atheological reading of spirituality” (see Bataille [1954] 1988). Foucault’s displacement and use of spirituality was part of his attempt “to determine what thought is without applying the old categories” (Foucault 1964, 74). In the attempt to reconfigure modernity, he used the modern concept of “spirituality” because it still echoed the history of what I call a “discourse of spirit,” a discourse that reads reality outside of the order of the modern governmental regimes of truth and falsity (see Carrette 2013a). As we will see, central to the critical nature of truth for Foucault was the nature of power and the body, which are important features of his later methodological concerns. In summary, the archaeological method offers the philosophy of religion a “tool” for examining the discourse of religion as an historical formation with intentions and interests, and with regularities and ruptures.

2  Genealogical critique: power and the body Foucault never provided the same level of methodological detail for genealogy as he did with archaeology, in part because genealogy remains part of archaeology rather than something that superseded it. It is a supplement to his work on discursive formations. Arguably, the underlying dimensions of genealogy are already apparent in The Archaeology of Knowledge, when he referred to the “pre-conceptual,” the “non-discursive,” and “non-discursive systems” as shaping discourse (Foucault 1969b, 63, 68, 162). In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, he introduces the “genealogical” as part of the scope of discourse and control. It refers to the “effective formation of the discourse,” not a new “object or field” (Foucault 1970, 233). The genealogical relates, as he says in this lecture, to “the power constituting domains of objects, in relation to which one can affirm or deny true or false propositions” (Foucault 1970, 234). Genealogy becomes most evident in his 1971 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” and in his subsequent work through the 1970s, including Discipline and Punish (1975), a study of the penal system, and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976). The Nietzschean dimension situates genealogy within power, the will, and the body, and through this analysis “disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified” (Foucault 1971,147). This means that concepts such as the prison or sexuality are situated in

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historical contexts that reveal how knowledge (savoir) is power (pouvoir), and how power shapes the body. Foucault redefined how we think about knowledge in social practice and revealed a “counter-memory” by focusing on how the body was imagined, moved and represented. “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” (Foucault 1971, 148). Discipline and Punish thus unfolds a distinct history of the body in military, educational, religious, and penal systems of correction and punishment. Foucault’s concept of power, then, challenged traditional Marxist ideas of ideological power by focusing on the body and moving beyond hierarchal notions of power, such as judicial or sovereign power. As Foucault made clear in his History of Sexuality, power is made up of “the multiplicity of force relations” (Foucault 1976a, 92). Power “is everywhere” and “exercised from innumerable points” (Foucault 1976a, 93, 94). The sense of power as “force relations” means that power operates at both micro-levels and macro-levels. It operates in disciplinary textbooks and courtrooms, in philosophical categories and medical regimes. The latter operate through what Foucault called “bio-power,” that is, the control of populations through the medical body, as seen in vaccination programs (Foucault 1976a, 139). Importantly, power is neither positive nor negative, but constitutive of the individual subject. As Foucault demonstrated in 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 1975, 27). We are “subjects” of power; it creates our subjectivity and shapes us as disciplinary subjects (Foucault 1982b). Foucault’s discussion of power engaged questions of religion more distinctly than other parts of his work, although the issue is present throughout (see Carrette 2000). In Discipline and Punish, he examined the power of religious education and the theological power of monasticism by showing how knowledge-practices are linked to control of the body, in such things as posture in the classroom and the regulation of time, the structure of the monastic cell, and the physical modes of submission in confession. These themes would increasingly occupy Foucault in his multi-volume History of Sexuality. Only three of these volumes would appear in his lifetime and the unpublished volume, Les Aveux de la Chair (Confession of the Flesh), has never been published, although fragments appear in various related lectures and have been partly gathered together (see Carrette 1999). The first introductory volume, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, examined the place of the confessional in Christian history and the putting of sex into speech (Foucault 1976a, 21). Foucault claimed this focus on speech and sexuality was “an archaeology of psychoanalysis” (Foucault 1976a, 130). Foucault’s aim was to show how sexuality was not a given throughout history, but something that emerged and was transformed through various tactical and strategic historical moments. “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).

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Foucault’s examination of power and religion resulted in two distinct religious concepts in his work, both of which related to his interest in governmentality and his understanding of religion as a “political force” (Foucault 1978c, 107): “pastoral power” and his reading of “political spirituality.” Pastoral power (the care of the individual based on the metaphor of the shepherd) is a complex development within Foucault’s thinking. It first emerges in his 1977–1978 Collège de France lectures, and is developed in a series of subsequent public lectures in Japan and the United States. While the idea held the sense of an “individualizing power” in social organization, it also showed how Foucault understood the importance of the theological dynamic between salvation, law, and truth in shaping conduct (e.g. confession) and counterconduct (e.g. resistance to authority through mystical experience) in the religious government of the self and society (see Carrette 2013b). Although there had been examples of pastoral power in Egyptian and Hebrew thought, it was intensified and institutionalized by Christianity as a way of shaping and managing the community. The notion of “political spirituality” is likewise concerned with issues of governing the self and society through religious discourse. Foucault first used the idea of “political spirituality” in a debate on his 1975 work Discipline and Punish and in lectures on governmentality in 1978 to refer to the way of governing oneself and society according to a new sense of truth, but it is in the context of his journalistic reports of the 1978–1979 Iranian revolution, for the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, that the term became more sharply focused and critically evaluated. Both in Foucault’s lifetime and in subsequent examinations, his reading of spirituality in revolutionary Iran has been strongly rebuked (see Afray and Anderson 2005). There are, in fact, two aspects to the notion of spirituality in the Iranian reports. First, coming from the work on governmentality, there is the fascination with spirituality in politics; and second, there is a concern with religion in the creation of subjectivity and truth (see Jambet 1989, 238–9 and O’Farrell 1989, 74). In his March 1979 essay “The Spirit of a World without Spirit” he was concerned with how religion could powerfully transform individuals to rise up against powerful regimes (Foucault 1979b). Foucault recognized in such a climate that the political message of Islam was motivating subjects. Religion was, as he recalled Marx’s two-edged appreciation, “the spirit of a world without spirit,” rather than just the “opium of the people” (Foucault 1979b, 218). Much of the discussion of Foucault’s idea of “political spirituality” has to be placed within the prior context of “pastoral power,” which is driven by emerging concerns about the subject and truth. Indeed, Foucault’s first introduction of the term operates on this basis. Foucault’s concern with history and politics is related to the “problem of truth,” and the idea of governmentality is connected to this distinction of truth and falsity as a set of practices. As Foucault argues: The search for a new foundation for each of these practices, in itself and relative to the other, the will to discover a different way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false—this is what I would call ‘political spiritualité’. (Foucault 1978c, 82)

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The questions of truth and government emerge in the final years of his Collège de France lectures from 1980 and the publication of the last two complete works of his History of Sexuality. Importantly, we can see pastoral power and political spirituality as part of Foucault’s displacement strategies in the philosophy of religion, because they show how he moves from accepting the manifest beliefs and practices of Christianity to a study of the hidden or underlying processes of power and truth.

3  Problematization: truth and the practices of life If archaeology shifted into genealogy, one can argue that genealogy shifts finally into “problematics.” Where archaeology emphasized “forms” (discourse), genealogy “formations” (power), problematics emphasized “practices”; and this focus can be seen as a third “tool” for rethinking the philosophy of religion (Foucault 1984b,12). Foucault was concerned, as he explained in the second volume of his History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure (1984b), with the way issues are identified and become concerns within different historical periods. The aim was “to define the conditions in which human beings ‘problematize’ what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live” (Foucault 1984b, 10). In this way, Foucault’s History of Sexuality changed focus to the ethical domain and “arts of existence” or “techniques of the self.” This, in turn, resulted in a shift in his style and his historical focus, moving towards more conventional historical analysis and examining the Greco-Roman period, under the influence of Pierre Hadot, Professor of Hellenistic and Roman thought. In this later work, Foucault turns to the ethical practices of the subject, to the way sexual pleasure was “problematized through practices of the self” and an “aesthetics of existence.” He moves from a focus on sexuality in terms of the body to sexuality as a set of “practices” of the self, from power as domination to power as formation. This shift eventually led him to be concerned with ideas related to the “care of the self ‘and questions of ’ subjectivity and truth.” These issues were the subject of his Collège de France lectures from 1980 to 1984 and the concerns of his final two works, The Use of Pleasure (1984b) and The Care of the Self (1984e). At this time, Foucault explores the constitution of an ethical-political subject. As he stated: 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 1984e, 67–68) Although most of his final works focused on the Greco-Roman period, they evolved from questions related to his unpublished “Christian book”; a text

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exploring the Christian formation of the subject in Tertullian, Augustine, and Cassian (see Carrette 1999). In his 1979–1980 Collège de France lecture, On the Government of Living, Foucault was concerned with the “techniques and procedures for directing human behaviour,” in both the state apparatus and individual subjectivity (Foucault 1980a, 154–7). The questions of individual self-government carried ­forward the theme of “transformation” introduced in the discussion of pastoral power. This “transformation” is seen to take place through techniques of “examination, confession, guidance [and] obedience” (Foucault 1979a, 143). In these lectures, he examined the writings of the Church Father Tertullian and the work of John Cassian (the founder of Western monasticism) on questions of confession, truth and verbalization. Foucault was fascinated with the obligation to speak the truth and explored the distinctive nature of “exagoreusis” (permanent verbalization) and “exomologesis” (penitential rite or dramatic act). These explorations of Christianity, which included discussion of the way Augustine and John Cassian shaped sex, truth and subjectivity, revealed the specific Christian technologies of self and the paradox of finding oneself through sacrifice (see Foucault 1979–1980; Foucault 1980b; Foucault 1980c; and Carrette 2007 and 2013c). Nonetheless, the final years of his Collège de France lectures reflect a move away from the “Christian book” that had been the focus of his concern in the late 1970s. In an attempt to understand how the Christian period was carrying forward established ethical frameworks Foucault began to explore the nature of ethical self-formation in the Greco-Roman world. One of the “unanticipated, even startling”—as Paul Rabinow (2013, 198) expressed it—aspects of his 1981–1982 Collège de France lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, was the introduction of the term “spirituality.” Although “spirituality” was a concept used in his earlier avant-garde work and, as we noted above, in his work on religion and politics, the later use attempted to establish a specific meaning of “transformation.” In these lectures, Foucault explored the idea of a philosophical askēsis (an exercise of oneself on oneself) that brings about transformation (Foucault 1984b, 9). Importantly, it was not something that just involved renunciation, as in Christian asceticism, but the positive formation of the self (Foucault 1981–1982, 416). Foucault was concerned that philosophy had lost touch—since Aquinas and the scholastics—with the link between thought and lived practices (the link between philosophy and spirituality as self-transformation). It was only thinkers like Nietzsche and traditions of reflection like psychoanalysis that continued the link. This thinking of Foucault reinvigorates “spiritual” practices and offers a way to read religion and philosophy as the way truth claims shape subjectivity. In this way, Foucault’s philosophy of religion returns religious and philosophical thought to the lived practices and powers behind them. In a similar way, Foucault’s final lectures explored themes of parrhesia (truthspeech) and included work on Cynicism as a way of life and as a capacity to speak truth as freedom, something he connected to Christian preaching (Foucault 1983b, 119–120). If previous work examined how “truth” was shaped by power, the later

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work showed the personal relationship to truth and the obligation or duty to speak the truth (Foucault 1976b, 131). It was not an “analytics of truth” (“how to ensure that a statement is true”), but a “critical” “tradition” (the “who,” “why” and “importance”) of truth for life (Foucault 1983b, 170). Foucault’s final work opens the given “behavior, habits, practices and institutions” to a choice and a freedom (Foucault 1983b, 74). As John Rajchman (1991, 109) confirms, Foucault’s “moments of critical ‘problematization’” established how “our freedom would not lie in our essence but in our historical contingent singularity.” This final “tool” of “problematization”—as applied to practices of the self—brings the philosophy of religion back not only to techniques of power and truth, but to a way of thinking of “philosophy-as-life.” It brings philosophy and religion back to “exercise, practice and training; askēsis not knowledge” (Foucault 1981–1982, 210). What this means is that the philosophy of religion should not be simply about academic knowledge, but about personal and social transformation.

Conclusion: the end of the European philosophy of religion In his study of parrhesia (truth speaking), Foucault suggested that he wanted “to construct a genealogy of the critical attitude in Western philosophy” (Foucault 1983b, 170–171). While that critical attitude was born out of a Kantian idea of knowledge, it also sought to open Western philosophy to its “other.” It allowed the possibility of freeing thought from European—including “continental”— philosophy and its constructions. In this sense, Foucault’s identification, in the late 1970s, as a “specific intellectual” (one who seeks specific interventions on issues and concerns) rather than that of a “universal intellectual” (the one who desires a new philosophy or worldview), is significant (Foucault 1976b, 130; Foucault 1978f, 108). He was not seeking to put forward a “theory of the world,” but rather seeking to make changes or transformations. The critical perspectives were about opening philosophical thought—to echo his work on Blanchot—to its “outside” (Foucault 1966b). It presents a specific challenge to philosophy of religion in its cultivation of a Christian and European agenda. While Foucault had mainly explored Western systems of thought, in his desire to de-stabilize “imperial” relations and dominant forms of subjectivity, he became interested in non-Western forms of subjectivity, including Japanese Zen Buddhism as offering “new relationships between the body and the external world” through its practice of meditation (see Foucault 1978b, 112-113). This demonstrates how Foucault’s exploration of the limits of knowledge led to a critique of European philosophical thought and its own limits. 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

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of Europe or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe. (Foucault 1978b, 113) Foucault’s critical philosophical ethos, as he explained in his famous 1966 text The Order of Things (Foucault 1966a, xi), uncovers the “unconscious of knowledge.” It carries out specific interventions to reveal what is unseen and in that process, allows new possibilities. As we have seen, the three critical “tools”—archaeology, genealogy and problematization—are developed to “know knowledge” and its exclusions; they do not seek to celebrate irrationality, but rather use the power of knowledge to reveal its limits and commitments. After Foucault, continental philosophy of religion is required to carry out its own self-reflexive critique, one that demands a turn from European Christianity to other philosophical and religious traditions. As he wrote in 1984: “[W]hat is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known” (Foucault 1984b: 8–9).

References Afray, J. and K. B. Anderson. 2005. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Baudrillard, Jean. [1977] 1987. Forget Foucault. New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Bernauer, J.W. 1990 Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Towards an Ethics for Thought. London, UK: Humanities. Bernauer, J.W. and Carrette, J.R. 2004. Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Carrette, Jeremy. R. 1999. Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press/New York: Routledge. Carrette, Jeremy R. 2000. Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality. London, UK: Routledge. Carrette, Jeremy R. 2007. “Foucault, Monks and Masturbation.” The Flesh in the Text. Edited by T. Baldwin, J. Fowler and S. Weller. Oxford, UK: Berg. Carrette, Jeremy R. 2013a. “Rupture and Transformation: Foucault’s Concept of Spirituality Reconsidered.” Foucault Studies No.15, February 2013: 52–77. Carrette, Jeremy R. 2013b. “Foucault, Religion and Pastoral Power.” A Companion to Foucault. Edited by C. Falzon, T. O’Leary and Sawicki. Chichester, UK: WileyBlackwell. 368–83. Carrette, Jeremy R. 2013c. “Foucault, Michel.” The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine. Volume 2. Edited by Karla Pollman. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 1002–4. Clavel, M. 1975. Ce Que Je Crois. Paris, France: Grasset & Fasquelle. Dreyfus, H.L. and Paul Rabinow. 1982 Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. New York, NY: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. Dumézil, G. [1966] 1996. Archaic Roman Religion, Volumes 1 and 2. Translated by Philip Krapp. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

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Foucault, Michel. 1961. History of Madness. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London, UK: Routledge, 2005. Foucault, Michel. 1963a. “Preface to Transgression.” Translated by Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Edited by Jeremy Carrette. London, UK: Routledge. 57–71. Foucault, Michel. 1963b [1991]. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by Alan Sheridan Smith. London, UK: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1964. “The Debate on the Novel.” Translated by Elizabeth Ezra. In Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Edited by Jeremy Carrette. London, UK: Routledge. 72–4. Foucault, Michel. 1966a [1991]. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London, UK: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1966b. “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside.” Foucault/ Blanchot. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi. New York, NY: Zone Books. Foucault, Michel. 1967. “Who are you, Professor Foucault?” Translated by Lucille Cairns. Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Edited by Jeremy Carrette. London, UK: Routledge. 87–103. Foucault, Michel. 1968. “This is Not a Pipe.” Translated by James Harkness. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Foucault, Michel. 1969a. “What is an Author?” Translated by Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Language, Counter-Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited by D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 113–38. Foucault, Michel. 1969b [1991]. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by Alan Sheridan Smith. London, UK: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1970 [1972]. “The Discourse on Language.” Translated by Rupert Swyer. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Pantheon. 215–37. Foucault, Michel. 1971. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Translated by Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Language, Counter-Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited by D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 139–64. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London, UK: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 1976. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. London, UK: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 1976b. “Truth and Power.” Translated by Colin Gordan. In Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 109–33. Foucault, Michel. 1977–1978 [2007]. Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. Translated by Graham Burchell. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1978a. Translated by R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. Remarks on Marx. New York, NY: Semiotext(e). Foucault, Michel. 1978b. “Michel Foucault and Zen: A stay in a Zen temple.” Translated by Richard Townsend. In Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Edited by Jeremy Carrette. London, UK: Routledge. 110–14. Foucault, Michel. 1978c [1991]. “Question of Method” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Edited Graham Burchell. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 73–86. Foucault, Michel. 1978d. “On Religion.” Translated by Richard Townend. In Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Edited by Jeremy Carrette. London, UK: Routledge. 106–9. Foucault, Michel. 1978e [1997]. “What is Critique?” Translated by Lysa Hochroth. The Politics of Truth. Edited Sylvére Lotringer. New York, NY: Semiotext(e). 23–82.

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Foucault, Michel. 1978f. “On Power.” Translated by Alan Sheridan. Politics Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. London, UK: Routledge. 96–109. Foucault, Michel. 1979a. “Power and Political Reason.” Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Edited by Jeremy Carrette. London, UK: Routledge. 135–52. Foucault, Michel. 1979b. “Iran: The Spirit of a World Without Spirit.” Translated by Alan Sheridan. In Politics Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. London, UK: Routledge. 211–24. Foucault, Michel. 1979–1980 [2014]. On the Government of Living: Lectures at the Collège de France 1979– Translated by Graham Burchell. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1980a. “On the Government of Living.” Translated by Richard Townsend. Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Edited by Jeremy Carrette. London, UK: Routledge. 154–7. Foucault, Michel. 1980b. “About the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self.” Translated by Thomas Keenan and Mark Blasius. Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Edited by Jeremy Carrette. London, UK: Routledge. 158–81. Foucault, Michel. 1980c. “Sexuality and Solitude.” Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Edited by Jeremy Carrette. London, UK: Routledge. 182–7. Foucault, Michel. 1981 [1994]. “Foucault, Michel, 1926-.” Foucault: The Cambridge Companion. Edited by Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 314–319. Foucault, Michel. 1981–1982 [2005]. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982. Edited by Frédéric Gros. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York, NY: Palgrave, Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1982a [1988]. “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” Technologies of the Self. Edited by L. Martin, H. Gutman, H and P. Hutton. London, UK: Tavistock Publications. 9–15. Foucault, Michel. 1982b. “The Subject and Power.” 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Edited by H. L. Dreyfus, H. L. and P. Rabinow. New York, NY: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. 208–26. Foucault, Michel. 1983a. “Politics and Ethics: An Interview.” The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. London, UK: Penguin. 373–80. Foucault, Michel. 1983b. Fearless Speech. Edited by Joseph Pearson. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Foucualt, Michel. 1983c. “Critical Theory/Intellectual History.” Translated by Jeremy Harding. Politics Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. London, UK: Routledge. 17–46. Foucault, Michel. 1983d. “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress.” The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. London, UK: Penguin. 340–72. Foucault, Michel. 1984a. “What is Enlightenment?” Translated by Catherine Porter. The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. London, UK: Penguin. 32–50. Foucault, Michel. 1984b. The Uses of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley. London, UK: Penguin. Foucault, Michel. 1984c. “Polemics, Politics and Problemizations: An Interview.” Translated by Lydia Davies. The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. London, UK: Penguin. 381–90. Foucault, Michel. 1984d. “The Concern for Truth.” Translated by Alan Sheridan. Politics Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. London, UK: Routledge. 255–67. Foucault, Michel. 1984e. The Care of the Self. Translated by Robert Hurley. London, UK: Penguin.

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Hadot, Pierre. 1995 Philosophy as a Way of Life. Edited by A. I. Davidson. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Halperin, David. 1995 Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Jambet, Christian. 1989. “The Constitution of the Subject and Spiritual Practice.” Michel Foucault: Philosopher. Edited by T.J. Armstrong. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 233–47. Macey, D. 1993. The Lives of Michel Foucault. London, UK: Hutchinson. McSweeney, J. 2005. “Foucault and Theology.” Foucault Studies, No.2: 117–20. McSweeney, J. 2013. “Introduction: Foucault and Religion.” Foucault Studies, No.15: 4–8. Megill, A. 1987. “The Reception of Foucault by Historians.” Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 48, no.1: 117–41. Miller, J. 1993. The Passion of Michel Foucault. London, UK: Harper Collins. O’Farrell, C. 1989. Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? London, UK: Macmillan. Rabinow, Paul. 2013. “Foucault’s Untimely Struggle.” A Companion to Foucault. Edited by C. Falzon, T. O’Leary and Sawicki. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. 189–204. Rajchman, J. 1991. Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan and the Question of Ethics. London, UK: Routledge.

26 Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) Kristien Justaert

Connecting the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) with theology or religion is no easy task. Deleuze was born and died in Paris. He lived in the city with his wife and two children, where he also worked at the university of Paris XIII (Vincennes) from 1969 until his retirement in 1987. He was not much of a traveller, and he avoided big conferences and other academic events, claiming that thinking happens in writing rather than in debate or dialogue. Paris Vincennes, where Deleuze taught his weekly seminars until his retirement, is known as an experimental campus, founded in the aftermath of the May 1968 student revolts. Michel Foucault taught there, and during that period, Deleuze also met his longtime friend and later collaborator, Félix Guattari. After publishing books on Hume, Bergson and Nietzsche in the early 1960s, Deleuze wrote what is considered his principal works, Difference and Repetition (1968) and Logic of Sense (1969), coming out of the closet as an empiricist, a vitalist and a poststructuralist thinker of difference. Around the same time, he published two books on Spinoza, affirming his preference for philosophers of immanence in his study of the history of thought. The intense collaboration with Guattari resulted in two volumes titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia (subsequently published in 1972 as Anti-Oedipus and volume two in 1980 as A Thousand Plateaus), in which a critique of psychoanalysis and of capitalism, as well as any form of hierarchy and subjectivity, was combined with a positive alternative of nomadic subjectivity, rhizomatic thought, and immanent metaphysics. In his later works on literature, art and cinema, Deleuze continued to develop this metaphysics. It is thus no surprise that Deleuze himself despised theology, and when he refers to religion in his work, it is mainly in a negative fashion. Obviously, this can be understood in the context of Deleuze’s allergy to any form of transcendence. Indirectly, however, there seems to be a hidden spirituality in his work, a spirituality that has triggered a few scholars so far to reflect on the aforementioned

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assemblage, despite the obvious objections (see References). In my view, there are two conditions for a functioning assemblage between Deleuze’s thought and religion. First, one must acknowledge a certain perspective of salvation in Deleuze’s thought itself:1 there is in Deleuze’s writings a vision of what authentic life is. Second, one must rethink the concept of religious transcendence within an immanent metaphysics, and thus reshape one’s whole image of the divine (and of the human, for that matter). This could lead to the exciting and necessary rediscovery of certain marginal trends in theology and religion, trends that conceive of divine transcendence and human subjectivity in a way that is more akin to mystical tendencies within religion, than to mainstream institutional forms of religion, Christian and otherwise. Now that we’ve established that linking Deleuze to religion and theology is not some entirely impossible undertaking, we can ask: where will this lead us? From a Deleuzian perspective, however, this is a bad question. Strictly speaking, there is no teleology and no redemption in Deleuze’s philosophy. Nevertheless, I will show how Deleuze does in a way support a certain logic of redemption, although this is a non-representational and thus invisible logic. For now, it is better to ask, in a Spinozist fashion: what will this assemblage enable? Which becomings are possible? The guiding concept of this contribution will thus be “becoming,” and these becomings will form a patchwork of possible ways in which the encounter of Deleuze with religion can go. Remarkably, in Deleuze’s philosophy, not all becomings are equal, and at this point, his hidden project of redemption reveals itself. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words: “Only a minority is capable of serving as the active medium of becoming, but under such conditions that it ceases to be a definable aggregate in relation to the majority” (2004b, 321). Of course, one never becomes “‘something.” Identity can never be a goal in the context of Deleuze’s philosophy in which being is defined as difference. Becoming is always a process, but it is a process that moves in a certain direction, namely, away from identity, from representation, from hierarchy. In a short introduction on Gilles Deleuze as a philosopher, I mention the key concepts of his thought, highlighting those relevant for the discussion with theology and religion (indeed, for Deleuze, philosophy was all about inventing concepts that enable one to think creatively about problems), and eventually focusing on the concept of becoming, which occupies a central place in the rest of the text. In the second section, I will single out a few possible becomings that could flow out of the encounter of Deleuze and religion. I do this from the perspective of a (non-confessional) Christian theologian, and knowing that Deleuze’s is a vast body of work—the theological potential of which I cannot fully address in this contribution. So, this will be a sketch of ways that can and need to be explored further. Becoming-Buddhist seems fair in an immanent, non-teleological world in which no redemption is possible. Becoming-polytheist is not so irrational either, if you look at Deleuze’s theory on difference and multiplicities. A Deleuzian divinity is understood in terms of multiplicity and open-endedness, and affirmed by many theologians who critique the dominant “logic of the one” in the history of mono-

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theistic religions (Schneider 2008). When we think about how this divinity can be experienced, Deleuze’s work on the Irish painter Francis Bacon, and more specifically his reflections on Bacon’s triptychs, supports a kind of (heterodox) immanent, tri-une “God of the senses.” Following Deleuze’s passion for Spinoza (whom he called the “Christ of the philosophers” [1994, 60]), a third becoming can be named “becoming-divine.” A more philosophical conception of the divine will be elaborated on in this section. Last, Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari would ideally lead to a becoming-poor, a becoming that, from a liberation theological perspective of salvation, is not without potential either. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-minoritarian or becoming-woman lays the centre of gravity of life in the margins, as does Jesus Christ. To demonstrate not only the potential, but also the actual relevance, of these becomings of the Deleuze-religion encounter, each becoming will be linked to an existing strand in theology or religious studies. My approach here is rather practical and direct. It looks for immediate and concrete effects of Deleuzian thought on lived religion and theology. As such, it differs from more historical perspectives on the connection between Deleuze and theology (such as the interesting work of Brent Adkins and Paul R. Hinlicky, who trace the possible effect of Deleuze’s thought on both metaphysics and Christian theology in contrast to Kant’s influence). In my opinion, thinking through the consequences of Deleuze’s thought in theology requires an examination of the very margins of Christianity (the religion central to this text). However, in relating Deleuze to Christian thought, I differ somewhat from Daniel Colucciello Barber’s excellent Deleuze and the Naming of God (2014), in which Christianity or any other religious tradition is abandoned in favour of a post-secular “divinity.” Barber develops a Deleuzian critique of theodicy (mainly inspired by Deleuze’s works on Nietzsche) to reclaim the name of God in a post-secular fashion. My position can be seen as in between Barber’s and Christopher Ben Simpson’s, the latter seeing a lot of potential in Deleuzian thought in his Theology and Deleuze (2012), but ultimately rejecting Deleuze as valuable source for Christian theology because of the issue of transcendence. Joshua Delpech-Ramey (2012) uncovers Deleuze’s affinity with hermetic and esoteric traditions to fully understand Deleuze’s materialist and immanent spirituality. Starting from a similar conviction that Deleuze’s thought is in a way a project of salvation (or in Ramey’s words, a spiritual ordeal), a vitalism that aims at a “belief in this world” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 75), The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal explores the heterodox spirituality in Deleuze and its capacity to cross boundaries, uncovering the creative connections between thought, ethics, nature, and politics.

Gilles Deleuze: a life in concepts The one and only task of philosophy, for Deleuze, is the creation of concepts. Concepts need to be developed and problematized, but never is there a question to be answered. In Dialogues, an excellent introduction to his thought that Deleuze wrote with his student Claire Parnet (with whom he also recorded L’Abécédaire de

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Deleuze), he talks about escaping from questions and instead creating lines of flight out of the logic of representation that holds us all captive (see Deleuze 2006c, 1–19). For Deleuze, philosophical thinking has no beginning (the question), nor end (the answer), but starts in the middle, with an encounter. He contrasts philosophy as the creation of concepts with what he calls “the image of thought,” or representational thinking. Representational thought can never bring novelty, for it relies on presuppositions and forms and images that are always already known. Representation is grounded in a model of recognition which eventually paralyzes thinking altogether. Indeed, this model is based on unity and identity: something can be recognized only when the similarities with the already known exceed the differences. Real difference thus needs to be introduced into thought, if it wants to be creative. If there is one central concept to Deleuze’s philosophy, it is difference. Difference as opposed to identity, as distinct from diversity and alterity, and as connected to immanence instead of transcendence. “Difference is behind everything, but behind difference, there is nothing” (Deleuze 2004, 69). Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered Deleuze’s chief work, but also in his studies on other philosophers, a certain understanding of difference defined his choice for one author above another, as well as his particular reading of that author. His studies of Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Hume and Bergson, to name the best known, dynamize the author at hand through the perspective of difference Deleuze discerns in them. For Deleuze, difference is being: through beings, being reveals itself as difference. There is no negativity in the concept. “In its essence, difference is the object of affirmation or affirmation itself. In its essence, affirmation is itself difference” (Deleuze 2004, 52). Difference is an internal concept (otherwise, alterity and transcendence would be introduced)—it is not in between beings, but within them, as the way in which being expresses itself. However, being does not differ from beings; Deleuze has a univocal understanding of being. Independent of what they are, all beings are in the same way. Being has only one voice. On the level of ontology, all beings are one. Deleuze’s understanding of being as difference goes hand in hand with his conception of being as a plane of immanence on which multiple forces encounter one another, comparable to physical particles that also have a wave-character, as quantum physics has taught us. According to Deleuze, immanent thought offers us the most complete understanding of reality. Everything connected to categories and representation distinguishes between thinking and being, and as such, brings in transcendence again. Transcendence, to be sure, is no longer the opposite of immanence. Like difference, immanence must be thought in itself, independently from transcendence or identity. Absolute immanence is in itself: it is not in something, to something; it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject … When the subject or the object falling outside the plane of immanence is taken as a universal subject or as any object to which immanence is attributed … immanence is distorted, for it then finds itself enclosed in the transcendent. (Deleuze 1997, 389)

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Just like all other Deleuzian concepts, the plane of immanence does not tell us how reality must be conceived of, but rather creates a new perspective on reality. The collaboration with psychoanalyst and philosopher, Félix Guattari (1930– 1992), brought more concepts to the fore, like becoming, assemblage, force, de- and reterritorialization, but they can all be brought back to Deleuze’s ­primary understanding of being as difference. Becoming is the concept, however, that ­enlightens the stakes of Deleuze’s philosophy in a particular way: Deleuze stubbornly resists founding reality on a stable ground, such as Being, God or Reason. As said above, there is no identitarian finality in the process of becoming—it has neither ­beginning nor end, but it definitely has a direction: the most important ­becomings, according to Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, are becomingwoman, becoming-minoritarian, becoming-revolutionary, becoming-animal, and becoming-imperceptible. The terms accompanying a process of becoming give a clear indication of the direction of the process. Becoming, as the unfolding of difference and multiplicity, is directed at the minoritarian (this has nothing to do with a numerical minority, but with a position of non-power), at resistance against the state, against representation, against (male) subjectivity and dominance. Finally, at the risk of sounding banal, the concept of life should be mentioned as central to Deleuze’s philosophy and as especially meaningful in the dialogue with religion and theology. Indeed, the importance of “life” as a theological and religious category can hardly be overestimated: no matter how we define who or what God or the divine is, what counts in the end is to what extent believers succeed in attuning their lives to the divine life. Deleuze’s understanding of life as an impersonal force again reveals a salvific structure in his metaphysics. Life is primarily the life of being in which everything shares. It is creative, unforeseeable and univocal (equally expressed through all beings). If the divine is thought from a Deleuzian perspective, it will also be impersonal. Life, ultimately, would mean “becomingdivine.” Through the concept of life, immanence is made concrete, and more generally, Deleuze’s philosophy reveals itself as a praxis, as a way of life. “A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is power and beatitude, complete” (Deleuze 2007, 390). In what follows, I will consider several points of connection between this Deleuzian way of life and religion/theology, but this multiplicity in no way entails some sort of relativism, as if Deleuzian philosophy in all its vastness and complexity can be used for every purpose. Like in the case of becomings, there might not be a final destination of my proposals, but they go in a certain direction, the direction of a life beyond representation.

Becoming-Buddhist Although Deleuze refused to connect himself to one particular religion, or even to religion in general, he wrote sympathetically about Eastern patterns of thought, recognizing similarities between his metaphysics and their world view. He explicitly refers, for example, to the East, to Japanese culture, to Chinese or Zen Buddhism,

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when explaining the origins of the concept of the event (Deleuze 1990, 248; 2006b, 120) or when meditating on the concept of “becoming imperceptible” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, 308–316). In Logic of Sense, for example, Deleuze claims that he wants to sketch an image of philosophy that is “1/3th zen” (Deleuze 1990, 248). But also on a more fundamental level, the connection between Deleuze and Buddhism seems logical. Buddhist meditation could be very close to what Deleuze means with “radical empiricism”; it is a way to express openness towards the world (“mindfulness”) as a first step in the dissolution of the subject (because, Buddhism and Deleuze agree, the subject, as representational, is an illusion). Whereas Western philosophy often exclusively relies on reason to gain knowledge of and insight into reality, thought, for Deleuze, has little or nothing to do with rational argumentation. He calls his thinking “intuition” and “creation,” leading to an openness that is, both in Deleuze and Buddhism, not the goal or the result of the practice of meditation or thinking, but rather an effect of it. The effect of meditation (although strictly speaking, we may not speak of a goal) is the giving up of the “I” to let all sensitive impressions run through the body—without organizing them. In Deleuzian terms, we could say that the subject becomes a “body without organs”: a field where energetic interactions take place on all levels, without organizing principles (such as organs, or the face) that hierarchize those interactions. The nonteleological aspect of their metaphysics is another point of convergence: neither Deleuze’s concepts nor the teachings of Buddhism (dharma) offer ready-made answers to the questions and the problems of life. Both worldviews are e­ xperimental, a way of life rather than a system of abstract theories. One could object that Deleuze and Buddhism have fundamentally different stances toward “desire”: whereas Buddhism is known as a religion in which all desires need to be overcome, Deleuze pleads for a liberation of desire. Eventually, however, this seems to come down to the same objective: Deleuze rehabilitates desire as an impersonal stream, not bound to the particular needs of a subject, and Buddhism confirms that it is not desire that disappears, but the attachment of the subject to it. Slavoj Žižek has critiqued Deleuze for his affinities with a kind of Eastern logic, claiming that it is precisely the impersonal character of Deleuze’s “Western Buddhism” that makes it an ideal graft for capitalism to flourish. Or in Žižek’s words: The ‘Western Buddhist’ meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism. (Žižek 2001) This is indeed an important issue—connected to the question of ethics within an immanent worldview, which we will return to in the section on Deleuze and liberation theology (see “Becoming-Poor”).

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Becoming-polytheist: the multiplicity of the divine Whereas Buddhism represents a logic of salvation without a deity, focusing on the dynamic character of reality, on the process rather than the goal, the story of Deleuze and religion doesn’t end here. When Deleuze is connected to a God, it will be not the ordinary, classic (transcendent, omnipresent and/or omnipotent) God of monotheistic religions. Precisely from a univocal perspective, Deleuze critiques the “logic of the One” as belonging to the logic of representation. For him, becoming and multiplicity are core aspects of reality—becoming is the ultimate reality, and multiplicity is an affirmation of unity. There is only one, differentiating, being: For there is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity; neither multiplicity nor becoming are appearances or illusions. But neither are there multiple or eternal realities which would be, in turn, like essences beyond appearance. Multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, essential transformation and constant symptom of unity. Multiplicity is the affirmation of unity; becoming is the affirmation of being. (Deleuze 2006a, 22) A God, according to this worldview, can never be pinned down to one image. A theology of multiplicity is grounded in a metaphysics and an experience of a fluid universe that is marked by change. As Laurel Schneider has shown in Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity, this “logic of multiplicity” was always already present in Christian traditions. The history of mainstream Christianity is one of affirming and installing the logic of the one, up until the seventeenth century, when the very word “monotheism” first appeared in relation to Christianity (Schneider 2008, 19). Monotheism thus became the opposite of polytheism, and as the dominant part of this dualism, it also became the “trademark” of Western European religious superiority, affiliated with its colonial ideology. Originally, Christian ways of imagining divinity are influenced by Judaism, Greek philosophy and early Africa forms of Christianity (Tertullian, Augustine, et al.), and the “one God-doctrine” was formed as a result of identity crises caused by events such as the Babylonian exile, abstract Hellenist reasoning, and the African debates on the divine status of Christ, connected to the experience of a triune God. To be sure, multiplicity is not a synonym for a numerical “many”—it is rather a concept that indicates a different logic, a logic that is not fixed, that is differentiated, rhizomatic, and more akin to the complexity of reality. “Multiplicity is an ontological gesture rather than a mathematical equation and in which multiplicity indicates actual presences and relations. Multiplicity exceeds abstract principles” (Schneider 2008, 4). Schneider wishes to develop a theology close to concrete reality, that takes into account the multiplicities and complexities in our embodied experiences of reality. “The logic of the One is not wrong,” Schneider assures, “except, ironically, when it is taken to be the whole story. Rather than false, it is incomplete” (Schneider 2008, 1). Deleuze too affirms that multiplicity doesn’t rule out “the One,” but rather absorbs

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it in a more complex, unfinished whole: “A multiplicity certainly contains points of unification, centres of totalization, points of subjectivation, but these are factors that can prevent its growth and stop its lines. These factors are in the multiplicity they belong to, not the reverse” (Deleuze 2007, 305). The meaning of the One, when taken up in a different logic, is no longer ideological in the sense of dominant and all-encompassing. A theology of multiplicity recognizes that every tradition is, and should be, what can be called “polydox.” To make sense of the divine, or more precisely, of our experiences of the divine, multiplicity as an ontological and epistemological starting point leads to a non-reductive theology that is open to the ongoing presence of God in the world (see Keller and Scheider 2011).

Becoming-triune: encountering a sensual God in a triptych From a Deleuzian perspective, the question now remains how this impersonal God/ being is to be experienced in all its complexity. If we go further into the experience of a Deleuzian divine reality, Deleuze’s work on the Irish painter Francis Bacon could help us discover the multiple character of the divine through the senses. In this section, I stage an encounter between theology and Deleuze’s “logic of sensation,” to uncover a “sensual God.” This God is still impersonal (a mysterious force, says Deleuze in his book on Bacon), but seems to have a “triune,” sensual structure, expressed in Bacon’s triptychs as a “uniting-separating” force (Deleuze 2003, 45). First, the experience of this “mysterious force,” that “can only be captured or detected by triptychs” (Deleuze 2003, 45), engages the sensual trinity of ear, eye and body—with some good will associable with the father who speaks (the ear), the son who is seen (the eye) and the spirit who is the continuous presence connecting everything (the body). Making this somewhat artificial connection, I do not wish to “Christianize” Deleuze’s thought in any way, but simply point to the multiple character of (the experience of) divine reality, a reality also affirmed within Christianity. In Deleuze’s reading of Bacon’s paintings, art is about capturing forces. A force is always exerted on a body (Deleuze 2003, 40), and is therefore closely related to sensation. This body, continuously painted by Bacon in his peculiar way, distorting its characteristics and harmony, is, Deleuze says, a body without organs: it breaks out of the organs that “organize” and imprison the body: “organism is not life, it is what imprisons life. The body is completely living, and yet nonorganic” (Deleuze 2003, 33). At the same time, the body without organs, identified with Whitehead’s God by Steven Shaviro in his article on Deleuze and process thought (Shaviro n.d.) has a spirituality that “leads it to seek the elementary forces beyond the organic … But this spirituality is a spirituality of the body; the spirit is the body itself, the body without organs” (Deleuze 2003, 34). For Deleuze, there is no essential difference, let alone a dualism, between body and spirit. What we learn, theologically, from this connection of Deleuze’s sensual spirituality, in which he nevertheless discovers a triune “logic of sensation,” to Christian religion, is how an immanent divine can be experienced through the senses, and how the senses themselves are connected to this “body without organs.”

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Other than the apostle Paul’s account of the church as the body of Christ, a wellorganized hierarchy with Christ as head coordinating the rest of the body (1 Col 1:18), Deleuze’s body without organs is a non-hierarchical field of forces and intensities, “flesh and nerve” (Deleuze 2003, 33), beyond representation. The trinity associated with this immanent God is indeed a trinity rooted in the senses and connected through a “logic of sensation,” according to rhythms2 that form a “distributive unity,” which means that they are “‘separated, but not isolated” (Deleuze 2003, 60). God is both matter and spirit—it is the non-representable (part of) matter. Mayra Rivera speaks about “flesh” as distinct from “body” in this regard: “Body commonly denotes an entity complete in itself and visible to those around it. In contrast, flesh is conceived as formless and impermanent, crossing the boundaries between the individual body and the world” (Rivera 2015, 2). The least that this connection of Deleuze with religion through Bacon demonstrates to us is that an encounter with God can take place on the level of the flesh. In times when our senses are often extended or replaced by a mediating screen (and when ironically, Deleuze’s concept of the virtual is often wrongly interpreted on that level, as supporting online “life” and interactions), Deleuze’s “logic of sensation” brings us back to the possibility of embracing and touching reality.

Becoming-divine: Deleuze and the God of Spinoza Through his readings of Spinoza, it becomes fully clear that Deleuze, when connected to religion and theology, supports a kind of pantheism. Deleuze reads Spinoza in one line with Duns Scotus,3 equating Spinoza’s “immanence” with Duns Scotus’ “univocity”: “Immanence is the new figure that the theory of univocity takes on in Spinoza” (Deleuze 1992, 166). Both Spinoza and Duns Scotus posit the uniformity of all forms of being, thus giving rise to an immanent metaphysics in which, for Spinoza at least, Being is God. Immanence, in this context, is not an abstract concept, but a way of life in which thinking and being are completely intertwined: 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. (Deleuze 1998, 14) This life never belongs to a subject—even though it can be expressed by subjects, life will always remain impersonal. Deleuze mostly uses the term “a life,” with an indefinite article. Examples of instances where a life is expressed, according to Deleuze, are the dying man,4 or the baby as pure life, a bundle of possibilities. As a consequence of thinking life impersonally, immanence cannot be an object of thought. Levi Bryant formulates this insight as follows: “Immanence is no longer immanence to my consciousness, but rather where my consciousness discovers itself

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as one more element within a field of immanence” (Bryant 2008, 78). Immanence thus constitutes the horizon of thought, instead of being conceptualized within thought. Deleuze, following Spinoza, introduced concepts such as “encounter” and “affirmation” to create and imagine the path toward this immanent life. Although for Deleuze there is no God involved in this way of life and it is only being that needs to be affirmed, when one reads Deleuze’s books on Spinoza, it becomes difficult to distinguish between Spinoza’s God and Deleuze’s Being. An encounter breaks through the pattern of representation, allowing us to leap from (in Spinozist terms) the first to the second kind of knowledge, beyond representation. The third kind of knowledge, intuitive knowledge, leads to beatitude—God thinks through and in me, there is no difference anymore between God and creature. One lives from the standpoint of infinity, from the perspective of God, as it were. Deleuze created the concept of affirmation to depict this level of beatitude. Affirmation, to be clear, has nothing to do with an uncritical and passive acceptance of the situation—it has to do with liberation, as Deleuze writes in Nietzsche and Philosophy: To affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives. To affirm is to unburden: not to load life with the weight of higher values, but to create new values which are those of life, which make life light and active. (2006a, 185) Affirming life or being is a true act of belief. And that is what Deleuze tries to do: believe in life and in the possibilities of a non-teleological world.5 The question: “why would anyone care about liberation in an indifferent cosmos?” is the wrong question, posed from the first stage of (representational) knowledge. Thought from a Deleuzian point of view, we can only ask: how will we be liberated in this world, or from this world? The next section will deepen this problem by connecting Deleuze to liberation theology.

Becoming-poor: on Deleuze and liberation theology Given that politics and ethics occupy such a central place in Deleuze’s philosophy, to the extent that he and Guattari write that “politics precedes being” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b, 225), it should come as no surprise that to my view, the ultimate encounter of Deleuze and religion/theology leads to a dialogue with political and liberation theology. Deleuze and liberation theology share a vision on life that is connected to a (political) praxis. In this section, I will explain how this is the case on both a structural and substantive level. Liberation, for Deleuze, and to put it theoretically, is liberation from the world of representation. It is liberation from a fixed identity that is caught up in power dynamics. In a more political jargon, it is also liberation from “the state” and from the all-pervasive powers of capitalism, which install an infinite “culture of debt” (and thus of oppression). Indeed, the primary function of money, for Deleuze and Guattari (and they follow Nietzsche here), is

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not facilitating trade, but the creation of debt (also called anti-production). Only a continuous movement of deterritorialization (de-stabilization) can liberate us from this mechanism of debt. Even though capitalism is in fact a “regime of deterritorialization,” in the sense that money is liberated from any kind of object, capitalism will never bring about real liberation because of its anti-production through debts and other re-territorialising power mechanisms. What needs to be liberated from representation, identity, the state and capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari say, is desire, which for them is the intensity of life (and not a lack, as it is interpreted in psychoanalysis). Not only do Deleuze and liberation theology converge on the level of their analysis of “structural sin” or oppressive structures in society, also a certain “option for the poor” can be discerned in both Deleuze and liberation theology. As I already mentioned, the process of becoming has a certain direction: it goes in the direction of the margins, to the place where people don’t have identities that are represented and representable. Becoming-minoritarian is a call for solidarity with the poor. Deleuze thus supports liberation theology’s spirituality: both allow thinking God/the divine from and within the margins. In this sense, Deleuze could help liberation theology connect its socio-economic concerns (the analysis of capitalism’s structural sin, traditionally conducted with the help of Marx’s writings) to its theology of the margins. Deleuzian liberation is not a liberation from the margins, but a liberation from identity. On the level of impersonal intensities (because the process of becomingpoor leads to this), one can no longer talk about macro-politics. We have moved from the “molar” to the “molecular” level. The grand “binary” structures are undermined by lines of intensity that move in all directions on a plane of immanence. Look at it as a weed, Deleuze says, or as grass: at first it is not very visible and still small, but it is capable of eventually overgrowing everything. The subject has become an assemblage (agencement), a collectivity, a cluster of lines of intensity that operates on the level of micropolitics. It is clear that a liberation theology “after Deleuze” is very different from liberation theologies “as we know them.” Deleuze supports an anti-totalitarian philosophy that is against every form of dominance or hierarchy. Deleuze’s is a philosophy of the underdog or the outlaw, of those falling outside the law. This ethics of “becoming-poor,” however, entails a giving up of subjectivity, a potentially problematic move which makes the outcome of Deleuze’s political project uncertain.6 The concrete lives of those oppressed seem to disappear in the soup of intensities that the margins produce, and deterritorialisation seems to have become capitalism’s main characteristic these days.7 Are we not in need of more, instead of less, subjectivity to resist the oppressive power of capitalism? But even though questions can be asked about this improper connection between Deleuze and (liberation) theology, Deleuze’s philosophy is able to lay bare problematic characteristics of some forms of liberation theology (its tendency to separate the socio-economic from the spiritual/theological), and to inspire and renew liberation theology with the concepts of micropolitics and assemblage.

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Conclusion In times of crises, theology sometimes learns best from “outsiders,” and I think that this is particularly the case with Deleuze. In a time when people have difficulty discerning the divine in their lives, because it is covered up by all kinds of representations, expectations, and so on, or when people react to life’s uncertainties with fear, holding on to a clear-cut religious identity, Deleuze’s “theology” is a plea to return to the original inspiration of living a divine life, unmediated by religious institutions and not concerned with particularities and fixed identities. Moreover, Deleuze provides us with a strong conception of community/collectivity that is non-hierarchical and liberative, and that enables us to think, to live, and to resist spiritually.

Notes 1 A perspective first investigated by Peter Hallward (2006) in his Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. 2 Within a triptych, Deleuze discerns three rhythms, or three sensations, expressed in the Figures: an active rhythm (the father?), a passive rhythm (the son?) and the attendant rhythm (the spirit?). To be sure, the role of the rhythms is interchangeable: “there is a great mobility within the triptych, a great circulation” (2003, 55). 3 “I believe it takes nothing away from Spinoza’s originality to place him in a perspective that may already be found in Duns Scotus” (Deleuze 1992, 49). 4 “Between his life and his death, there is a moment where a life is merely playing with death. The life of the individual has given way to an impersonal and yet singular life, which foregrounds a pure event that has been liberated from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and the objectivity of what comes to pass: a ‘homo tantum’ with whom everyone sympathizes and who attains a kind of beatitude; or an ecceity, which is no longer an individuation, but a singularization, a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, since only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things made it good or bad. The life of such individuality is eclipsed by the singular immanent life of a man who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken for no other. A singular essence, a life” (Deleuze 2007, 390–391). 5 Belief, then is an “infinite movement independent of religion and traversing the new plane of immanence,” writes Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy? (1994, 53). See also What Is Philosophy? pp. 74–75: “On the new plane, it is possible that the problem now concerns the one who believes in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks. It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today.” 6 See Patton (2000, 8): “Such a political philosophy offers no guarantees: it is not a narrative of inevitable progress, nor does it offer the security of commitment to a single set of values against which progress may be judged.” 7 To the extent that Slavoj Žižek calls Deleuze the “ideologist of late capitalism.” Cf. Žižek (2004, 183–184).

References Bryant, Levi. 2008. Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Colucciello Barber, Daniel. 2014. Deleuze and the Naming of God. Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.

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Delpech-Ramey, Joshua. 2012. The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York, NY: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles. 1998. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Fransciso, CA: City Light Books. Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London, UK: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles, 2004. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London, UK: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004a. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. R. Lane. London, UK: Continuum, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004b. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London, UK: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. 2006a. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2006b. The Fold. Translated by Tom Conley. London, UK: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 2006c. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London, UK: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. 2007. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina. Edited by David Lapoujade. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Hallward, Peter 2006. Out of this World: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creation. London, UK: Verso. Keller, Catherine, and Laurel Schneider, eds. 2011. Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation. London, UK: Routledge. Patton, Paul. 2000. Deleuze and the Political. London, UK: Routledge. Rivera, Mayra. 2015. Poetics of the Flesh. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schneider, Laurel. 2008. Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity, London, UK: Routledge. Shaviro, Steven. n.d. “God, or the Body without Organs.” http://www.shaviro.com/ Othertexts/God.pdf. Simpson, Christopher Ben. 2012. Deleuze and Theology. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. “From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism.” http://www.cabinetmagazine.org /issues/2/ western.php. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York & London: Routledge.

27 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) Clayton Crockett

At his death in 2004, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida was the most famous philosopher in the world. Born in 1930 in El Biars, Algeria, Derrida was a Jewish child caught between Arab Muslim North Africa and European Christian France. Derrida never fully embraced his Jewish identity, calling himself ironically “the last of the Jews” (Peeters 2013, 503). He moved to France to matriculate at the École Normale Supérieure, and then lived and taught in France and the United States, writing complex, influential and important texts. Although his early work treated religious ideas and themes, it was only in the 1990s that he began more explicitly discussing religion in positive terms. In the late 1990s and 2000s, readers in English began reflecting and commenting on the significance of this interaction, with the most famous interpreter being John D. Caputo, who published The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida in 1997. In this essay, I will survey some of Derrida’s major writings, and draw out some of the primary religious themes. This survey will proceed chronologically, but it will not be exhaustive of Derrida’s extraordinary and wide-ranging work. Here I want to make two important claims. First, I think that Derrida has been fascinated by religion during his entire life, but he has never been interested in traditional religious identity, dogma or orthodoxy. His interest in religion is always balanced by a critical suspicion about the ways in which religion has been used to oppress people and obscure knowledge. Derrida’s philosophy maintains this delicate balance, thinking along the knife-edge between faith and doubt. His religion is a “religion without religion,” as Caputo puts it, because he wants to think about religion in itself as a pure possibility beyond any determinate or phenomenal form of religion. Derrida comes to name this first type of religion a kind of messianicity, but this messianicity cannot be equated with the presence of a Messiah. This messianicity is Jewish in a way, and a lot of work has discussed Derrida’s complicated relationship to Judaism, but it is not a simple Judaism, partly because Derrida does not think that

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one can avoid thinking about Christianity if one is thinking about religion (Derrida 2007). That does not mean one must be or become Christian, but rather that Christianity is always there to influence what we mean by religion, for good and for bad. Derrida wants to deconstruct or dislocate substantial religious identities, but he affirms a certain kind of faith that he believes is irreducible or undeconstructible. Derrida does not believe that you can simply have a generic, indeterminate religion without a specific, historical religion; he affirms that one never exists without the other. At the same time, he wants to think what religion means in excess or outside of this or that particular religious tradition, and that is what deconstruction is about. Deconstruction thinks that which exceeds any particular tradition or structure, and shows how that excess is both included within the tradition and excluded from it in its very formation. For Derrida, the pure possibility of religion concerns the promise, the possibility of making a promise and being responsible to and for another person. This responsibility is ethical in many respects, and Derrida is profoundly influenced by the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, but ethics is always at the same time religious and political, because these boundaries are not fixed but permeable. The second point I want to emphasize here concerns the idea of a “turn” in Derrida’s philosophy from early to late. Some readers of Derrida suggest that in his early work Derrida is critical of and hostile to religion, whereas in the 1990s he treats religion in much more positive terms, allying it with deconstruction in general terms. Here, the turn to religion corresponds with a turn to ethics and politics as well; the idea is that Derrida comes to view all three of these in positive rather than negative ways. This suggestion of a turn corresponds to the distinction between early and later Heidegger, as a shift from Dasein as the being who asks the question of being to being in itself that shows itself in an appropriating event, or Ereignis. I think that in the case of Derrida, this language of a turn is overstated. Yes, there is a definite shift in emphasis in Derrida’s philosophy after 1989, but this is already prefigured in his work in the 1970s, and the shift in emphasis does not imply any sort of repudiation of Derrida’s earlier work in the 1960s and 1970s. Derrida has always been interested in religion, but he comes to write about it more explicitly in relation to ethics and politics, and the coincidence of these three themes after 1989 become more prominent in his later work. It is in 1989 that he presented his important essay, “Force of Law: the ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” at a conference at Cardozo Law School in New York City. If there is a turn in Derrida’s philosophy towards an explicit engagement with religion, it can be traced to this essay. The later works dealing with religion all stem from this important paper, which I will discuss later in the chapter. If there is a turn in Derrida’s philosophy, there is not just one. At a conference devoted to his work in 1982, Derrida himself reflects on a shift in his own thought, from “guarding the question,” “insisting on the priority of an unanswerable question,” which is différance, to responding to a call to support the other, as “that which must be differed-deferred so that we can posit ourselves, as it were” (Spivak 1999, 425). This other is both wholly other and also at the same time a particular,

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historical concrete other. As Derrida expresses it in The Gift of Death, “tout autre est tout autre,” that is, every other (one) is every (bit) other. Even if there is this shift, though, it is not a repudiation of his earliest work on Husserl and grammatology, because this early work has always been engaged with liberating the otherness of phenomenology, grammatology and language. There is no question without the other, and no other without the posing of a profound question that implicates me. In his book Derrida and Theology, Steven Shakespeare claims that “Derrida’s thought invites the coming of the other, the address of the other, and this is an irreducibly religious motif” (Shakespeare 2009, 197). So, I resist the language of a strong turn in Derrida’s philosophy, especially a turn to religion. At the same time, there are important emphases in his later works to which I will attend. But first, I look at some of the religious resonances that animate his earlier texts. Derrida cut his teeth on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, and his first publication in 1962 was a translation of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, along with a long, critical introduction. In this work, Derrida develops his project of pushing philosophy through and beyond phenomenology, and this effort culminates in his longer work on Husserl, Voice and Phenomenon, published in French in 1967. Derrida wants to show the limits of phenomenology by noting its dependence on speech as a kind of living present, on which phenomenology bases its understanding of the Idea. An Idea is both historical and ahistorical at the same time, which means that it is divided from itself and cannot be a pure, consistent idea. Husserl’s Idea of God is equivalent to the Idea of Logos, and this Logos or Speech is at the same time constituted in and through history and provides history with its telos and transcendental meaning. Derrida writes: God speaks and passes through constituted history, he is beyond in relation to constituted history and all the constituted moments of transcendental life. But is only the Pole for itself of constituting historicity and constituting historical transcendental subjectivity. (Derrida 1989, 148; original emphasis) This is a complex argument, but Derrida is showing how an understanding of God animates Husserl’s phenomenology in a problematic way, because it is aligned with traditional understandings of God as Logos. Derrida’s early work is seen as more hostile to religion because he is showing how the opposition between speech and writing deconstructs, and how writing always already inhabits our notion of speech. In Of Grammatology, published in French in 1967, Derrida further develops his analysis of the interrelation between speech and writing by way of a reading of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages. Western philosophy is religious insofar as it desires pure self-presence in the form of speech or Logos, and it wants to segregate and separate writing as a form of corruption, decay and death. Writing is an external supplement that delays the self-presence of speech, that must be kept exterior to living speech. Derrida demonstrates that what we call writing already

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inhabits and animates speech. In Of Grammatology, he develops the conception of “archi-writing” as a name for that which makes speech and writing possible, and prevents them from ever fully closing in on themselves. Writing has to do with spacing, deferral and delay. It is what prevents full selfpresence, and it disrupts, deconstructs and opens up metaphysics to something other than itself. In the middle of the twentieth century, the sciences of anthropology, psychoanalysis and linguistics demonstrate the profound importance of the written signifier, and this renders philosophical logocentrism problematic, as Derrida shows in his work on Western philosophy from Plato to Heidegger. Derrida says that the “notion of the sign always implies within itself the distinction between signifier and signified” (Derrida 1976, 11). The problem is, however, that “fundamentally nothing escapes the movement of the signifier and that, in the last instance, the difference between signified and signifier is nothing” (Derrida 1976, 22–23). If there is no absolute difference between signifier (writing), and signified (concept, speech as a whole), then there is no transcendental signified, because there is no signified concept that stands outside the play of language, understood as the interaction between signifier and signified. The idea of a transcendental signified is here associated with God, or with what Heidegger calls onto-theology, where the idea of God governs and supports the totality of beings in a metaphysical way. Readers of Derrida who maintain a traditional conception of God as supreme being read this claim that “there is no transcendental signified” as declaring that there is no God. This conclusion is an interpretive leap, but Derrida does break with traditional concepts of God, and he shows how our linguistics and semiotics often invoke this logic of God as transcendental signified, even if we are atheists. If the difference between signifier and signified is not absolute, then Derrida claims that even categories like Heidegger’s ontological difference “are not absolutely originary. Differance by itself would be more ‘originary’, but one would no longer be able to call it ‘origin’ or ‘ground’, those notions belonging essentially to the history of onto-theology, to the system functioning as the effacing of difference” (Derrida 1976, 23). Here is Derrida’s famous neologism, the French word différance, which is simply the word difference spelled with an a instead of an e. In his famous essay “Différance,” included in Voice and Phenomenon as well as the later book Margins of Philosophy, Derrida claims that to differ is both to be different in a static sense and also to defer in a temporal sense. By distinguishing his word différance with a mark that can be read but not heard in oral speech, he is designating a “temporization” at work in difference. Différance is temporalization and spacing, and therefore it is “the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time” (Derrida 1982, 8). Différance is what disrupts self-presence, and it testifies to a trace of signification that leaves a mark which makes signification possible and refuses to allow it to come to any final completion. Language, history, philosophy, meaning and sense—these are all ongoing transforming and transformative processes that make us who we are and at the same time prevent us from ever fully being who we are as a final substantial identity. Différance is not a simple origin, because it means that there is no

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simple unified origin. Différance precedes God and makes God as Logos impossible in any pure or undivided way. This is why Derrida is seen as hostile to religion in his early works. If Derrida’s early work seems to dismiss traditional ideas of religion, the essay that introduced him as a rising star to an American audience expresses the important notion of an event, which later becomes infused with religious meaning. In 1966, Johns Hopkins University held a conference on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” featuring well-known theorists such as Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Jean Hyppolite and Jacques Lacan. This conference was intended to help introduce and clarify structuralism for intellectuals in the United States. In some ways, Derrida’s presentation, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” upstaged his elders and signalled a transition towards what became known as post-structuralism. The first sentence of Derrida’s talk, which was given in French, reads: “Perhaps something has occurred in the history and concept of structure that could be called an ‘event’” (Derrida 1978, 278). In the rest of his famous essay, Derrida develops some of the implications of this idea of an event. An event distorts and disrupts structure, even as it serves to make structures possible. An event is not simply an event contained within a structure, but more fundamentally an event that founds a structure. An event is not a simple origin, but a working of difference in and through events and structures. A structural field cannot be totalized, and this is because “this field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite.” There is no centre or transcendental signified “which arrests or grounds the play of substitutions” (Derrida 1978, 289). Even if there is no God who functions to arrest or ground the play of substitutions, the event offers a kind of religious interruption of systemic structures that animates and inspires post-structuralism. In his recent work, John D. Caputo takes up the idea of an event as a theological occurrence that manifests the insistence of God rather than the existence of God (Caputo 2013). Before turning to Derrida’s later work, to see where and how religion becomes more central to it, I will look briefly at another early essay by Derrida, his important engagement with Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics,” which was originally published in 1964 and is included in the collection Writing and Difference. This critical treatment of Levinas touches on religious themes, and later leads to associations and questions about the relation between deconstruction and negative theology. “Violence and Metaphysics” is an extraordinary encounter with Levinas, who in the early 1960s was not very well known even in France, and Derrida is incredibly affirmative of Levinas’ philosophy even as he criticizes it at certain points. Derrida begins by posing the question of the death of philosophy, and then moves to take on the challenge of Levinas’ thought as both a challenge to philosophy as well as a renewal of it. He claims that “this thought calls upon the ethical relationship—a nonviolent relationship to the infinite as infinitely other, to the Other—as the only one capable of opening the space of transcendence and of liberating metaphysics” (Derrida 1978, 83). Derrida questions whether Levinas can fully

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liberate metaphysics, but he does affirm the value of making ethics and metaphysics “flow into other streams at their source,” namely Jewish streams (Derrida 1978, 83). Levinas is deeply engaged with philosophy, and he is opposing philosophy in the name of ethics and religion. Derrida states that “the ethical relation is a religious relation. Not a religion, but the religion, the religiosity of the religious” (Derrida 1978, 96; original emphasis). Religion names the ethical relation between the human and God, or the human and the face of the Other, which is a relation of asymmetry and radical alterity. Derrida questions the ability of Levinas to completely free his philosophy from Heideggerian Being. Derrida claims that “not only is the thought of Being not ethical violence,” as Levinas charges, “but it seems that no ethics—in Levinas’s sense—can be opened without it” (Derrida 1978, 132). There must be an ontological “letting-be” of an existent Other for ethics in the way that Levinas describes it to be possible. Despite his criticism of Levinas, Derrida does argue that he offers a thinking of divinity within the context of language and history rather than one that is solely outside of it in the manner of negative theology. Derrida says that “negative theology never undertook a Discourse with God in the face to face, and breath to breath, of two free speeches,” in the way that Levinas does (Derrida 1978, 116). Philosophy is caught “between original tragedy and messianic triumph,” and the tension of this questioning animates Levinas’ philosophy even as he struggles to free himself from the Greek, tragic pole (Derrida 1978, 131). Levinas appeals to a language of God that would found or sustain a pure empiricism of the pure thought of pure difference, but he must pass through language to do this. In some ways, Levinas tries to do what negative theology does, but Derrida judges Levinas’ attempt in more positive terms. Levinas must borrow Greek logic to flesh out Jewish experience, and this is not an impurification but a necessity, a necessity that makes history, and makes us subjects of this history where we no longer know whether we are simply Greeks or Jews. Despite Derrida’s clear demarcation of the distance of his philosophy from that of negative theology, in the 1970s and 1980s many readers suspected some sort of connection. In an address given in Jerusalem in 1986, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” Derrida argues that deconstruction is not a type of negative theology, because negative theologies generally appeal to some sort of hyper-being beyond being. Derrida’s essay is partly a response to and an implicit critique of Jean-Luc Marion’s book God Without Being, and Derrida suggests that Marion appeals to a God beyond or above Being in a way that accords with classical negative theology such as that of Pseudo-Dionysus. Despite the desire to move beyond being, there remains an “analogical continuity in the rhetoric, grammar, and logic of all the discourses on the Good and on what is beyond Being” (Derrida 1992, 103). Although Derrida refuses any conventional theological identification of deconstruction, he also suggests provocatively that deconstruction in the form of khora is at work within these more traditional theological discourses, including that of negative theology. Khora is a term taken from Plato’s Timaeus that indicates a material receptacle, a matrix or place that exists as a third element in addition to Platonic forms and

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material things. Derrida suggests that this idea of khora as the space where anything at all can take place occurs in prayer, both apophatic and kataphatic prayer (Derrida 1992, 110). Khora is the locus of prayer that is addressed to an other or Other. This denial of negative theology is not a simple denial, but in French a de-negation, which dislocates and displaces the denial-affirmation structure in the name of khora. During the later 1980s two controversial intellectual events occurred that I think helped encourage Derrida to be clearer about his ethical and political commitments. One was the continuing controversy over Heidegger’s association with Nazism in the 1930s. Derrida was heavily influenced by Heidegger’s philosophy, but he was always critical of Heidegger’s politics. Much of the historical work on Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazi party had already been established, but a book by Victor Farias on Heidegger and Nazism was published in French in 1987 that created a new storm of accusations. Also in 1987, a scandal erupted due to the posthumous discovery of a number of writings by Paul de Man for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper in the 1940s, some of which were explicitly anti-Semitic. Derrida was a close friend of de Man, and he was stung by the fury of the scandal and the way that it was abused to demonize postmodern literary criticism. I speculate that these controversies surrounding Heidegger and de Man are part of the context for the writing of “Force of Law.” In 1989, Derrida was invited to give an address at the Cardozo Law School by Drucilla Cornell, on the topic of “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice.” His essay, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” distinguishes justice from law, and affirms that “deconstruction is justice” (Derrida 2002, 243; original emphasis). Law is something determinate, and law is always instituted in the name of justice, but it can never exhaust justice. Justice is not a determinate thing; it is not deconstructible because it does not exist as such. According to Derrida, “deconstruction takes place in the interval that separates the undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructibility of law. Deconstruction is possible as an experience of the impossible, there where, even if it does not exist, if it is not present, not yet or never, there is justice” (Derrida 2002, 243; original emphasis). Here Derrida aligns deconstruction with the experience, promise, or invocation of justice, which takes place beyond the literal existence of the law. There is never law without justice, just as there can never be justice without any law, but they cannot be collapsed into each other. The affirmation of deconstruction as justice and of justice as undeconstructible is an ethical and a political affirmation. The experience of justice is an aporia, a paradox or impassable passage that has no simple solution. This shift of emphasis in Derrida’s philosophy opens up a new period of work in which he writes more explicitly and affirmatively about ethics and politics, which cannot be completely separated from one another. At the same time, this affirmation of the ethical and political aspects of deconstruction is tied to an acknowledgement of the religious nature of deconstruction. Why is this the case? For Derrida, it has to do with the subtitle of the essay, “The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” which is a line from Montaigne that is applied

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to an essay by Walter Benjamin. In “Force of Law,” Derrida is writing about a famous essay of Benjamin’s, called “Critique of Violence.” The German word for violence, however, is Gewalt, which also means force. In his essay, Benjamin distinguishes between different kinds of force or violence: law-making violence and law-preserving violence. Benjamin calls law-making violence a kind of mythic violence, because it founds a new order or way of living. Most determinate laws are law-preserving insofar as they protect and preserve already established frameworks. At the same time, Benjamin talks about a kind of divine force that would be more destructive, a force that exists outside the law and takes place as “revolutionary violence” (Benjamin 1996, 252). I think Derrida sees deconstruction as a kind of revolutionary force, but he does not separate it from the law-making, mythic force to the extent that Benjamin does. The point is that in any new law-making, or any institution of a new authority, there is a “mythic” positive violence and a “divine” negative violence. Derrida argues that we should identify the divine force of law-making institution as justice, and see deconstruction as a non-violent force that accompanies the violence of any law-making institution. Any new foundation of law occurs in the name of justice, and justice always has a mystical element to it. Religion, ethics and politics are intertwined in a complex web of practices and significations. The distinction between determinate-deconstructible law and aporetic-undeconstructible justice is repeated in religious terms in Derrida’s formulations of “messianicity without messianism” in Specters of Marx and “religion without religion” in The Gift of Death, culminating in the lecture on “Faith and Knowledge.” In The Gift of Death, published in French in 1992, Derrida reflects on the religious nature of contemporary philosophical discourse. He considers Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as a retelling of a story that concerns a gift of death from Abraham to Isaac and from God to Abraham. In his interpretation of Fear and Trembling, Derrida generalizes Abraham’s situation in response to God’s call to sacrifice Isaac. He writes: As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me also to respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others. I offer a gift of death, I betray, I don’t need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah for that. (Derrida 1995, 68) Our ethical obligations to each other require that we sacrifice someone else to fulfil them, which is the paradox and ruin of conventional ethics. Kierkegaard posits a religious category beyond ethics, where absolute relation to the single individual holds, but Derrida wants to universalize Kierkegaard’s idea of the religious. Derrida says that “tout autre est tout autre,” which means that “every (other) one is every (bit) other” (Derrida 1995, 82). He explains that “if every human is wholly other, if everyone else, or every other one, is every bit other, then one

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can no longer distinguish between a claimed generality of ethics that would need to be sacrificed in sacrifice, and the faith that turns towards God alone, as wholly other, turning away from human duty” (Derrida 1995, 84). This means that any absolute opposition between God as wholly other and the human being as a distinct other person deconstructs, and so does any ultimate separation of religion and ethics. Derrida argues that neither Kierkegaard nor Levinas can maintain a consistent distinction between ethics and religion. “In the two cases the border between the ethical and the religious becomes more than problematic, as do all attendant discourses,” he writes. And “this applies all the more to political or legal matters” (Derrida 1995, 84). The point is that the religious, the ethical and the political are imbricated in Derrida’s writings in the 1990s. Furthermore, in each case Derrida wants to think the possibility of a religion without religion, a pure promise, and a democracy to come, in a way that subtracts from the determinate instantiations of these discourses. At the same time, we can never free ourselves from the determinations of these political, ethical and religious histories, laws and effects. In Specters of Marx, published in French in 1993, Derrida provides a rereading of Marx, and shows how his thought still haunts our world despite the collapse of socialism and the apparent triumph of global capitalism. He points out the gap between liberal democracy and the ideal of democracy, and argues that this gap is irreducible because democracy means for Derrida a democracy to come, which is not a future present but an infinite promise of justice. Democracy to come names “the opening of this gap between an infinite promise … and the determined, necessary, but necessarily inadequate forms of what has to be measured against this promise” (Derrida 1994, 65). There is a quasi-mystical or religious nature of this gap and this promise, which Derrida calls spectral and connects to the “strange concept of messianism without content, of the messianic without messianism, that guides us here like the blind” (Derrida 1994, 65). Messianism possesses too much content, so it is determinate and deconstructible. What is worse, it collapses the gap between the infinite promise of justice, democracy, or religion, and its actual present form. Derrida invokes a stripped-down, deserted messianicity as a perspective through which to read Marx’s eschatology, which does not work as a prediction of a future communist present. Still, Marx’s work continues to haunt us in its messianic spectrality, calling us to a different, just future. This work on Levinas, Kierkegaard and Marx in the early 1990s lies in the background of Derrida’s famous Capri lecture of 1994, published as “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Derrida wants to think about the pure possibility of religion apart from any and every determinate religion, while recognizing that Christianity is the religion that produces the idea and concept of religion in general and applies it to itself and other religions. Religion plays a role in what Derrida calls “globalatinization,” which is a mash-up of globalization and latinization, or what we call the West. According to Derrida, religion names “the convergence of two experiences that are generally held to be equally religious: the experience of belief, on the one

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hand…; and the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or of holiness, on the other” (Derrida 1998, 33). These two sources make up what we call religion, and the division into two sources already complicates the idea of the unscathed, which implies a certain unity or lack of division. Derrida is suspicious of this second source, and he suggests that our desire for the sacred is significant but not ultimately fulfilled. When we desire the sacred as the unscathed, we resist anything that appears to threaten this experience, and this sets up a situation that Derrida calls autoimmunity: here a social body reacts to reject what it believes threatens it from outside, but this very reaction is actually more dangerous and destructive to the body than the so-called disease. This is just like an auto-immune disease that destroys an organic body when the immune system gets out of control. So, there is a “space where all self-protection of the unscathed, of the safe and sound, of the sacred (heilig, holy) must protect itself against its own protection, its own power of rejection, in short against its own, which is to say, against its own immunity” (Derrida 1998, 44). Here reactionary religious fundamentalism is aligned with science and technology, or what Derrida calls tele-technoscience. These conservative forms of religion oppose modern science and reason and, at the same time, make use of the tools of science and technology to oppose modern reason and to advance their own sense of the sacred as unscathed. An example would be the ways in which ­conservative Christians have embraced radio, television and the Internet as ­technologies to spread the gospel while strongly opposing scientific theories like evolution that challenge their worldview. Although Derrida is critical of the second source of religion, the experience of the unscathed or the holy, he is less critical of the first source, the experience of belief, even though he wants to be extremely careful about belief as well. There is something about belief as trust that accompanies every relationship and every encounter; it is irreducible and ineliminable. Derrida is suspicious of simple, straight-forward belief, but when belief is crossed with a complex understanding of the unscathed (the understanding that the sacred is never purely unscathed or undivided) it can produce a kind of faith that Derrida affirms. There is something religious about every conception of community, and it is both negative and positive for Derrida. Religious faith is composed of the two sources, belief and the unscathed, and cannot be reduced simply to either one. Religion is ambiguous and ambivalent: on the one hand, religion as auto-immunity threatens to shut down and close off community; on the other hand, religion as the bond of belief, or in Kantian terms dignity, is an absolute value of life “above and beyond the living, whose life has absolute value by being worth more than life” (Derrida 1998, 51). The exposure of life to what is more than life is not a simple belief, but a complex and contested experience of faith that tests and contests itself. According to Derrida, “this self-contesting attestation keeps the auto-immune community alive, which is to say, open to something other and more than itself” (Derrida 1998, 51). Religion also indicates the convergence of these two sources in what Derrida calls witnessing, which is at stake in “every address to the other”

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(Derrida 1998, 63). Ultimately, I do not think Derrida sees the two sources as equal, preferring the experience of belief as fiduciary trust, while at the same time complicating this trust by recognizing that we can only trust something or someone if it is possible for this trust to break down or not be reciprocated. In his book, Miracle and Machine, Michael Naas examines Derrida’s entire philosophy through the lens of his essay “Faith and Knowledge.” Naas quotes Derrida as saying that “there is no social bond without faith,” but then explains that for Derrida faith is not just a positive determinate relation but fundamentally a disruption or interruption (Naas 2012, 94). Derrida claims that he believes in faith, but at the same time “Derrida is quite clear about the disruptive nature of this faith” (Naas 2012, 95). Derrida’s faith contests itself, and this self-contestation is the essence of faith, at least of responsible faith. In his book Radical Atheism, Martin Hägglund argues that Derrida’s affirmation of life and the living in its temporal becoming leads to a critique of immortality as the absolute immunity of life withdrawn from any exposure to death. Certainly, Hägglund is correct to state that Derrida does not affirm traditional faith in religion in a conventional, otherworldly sense. He argues, however, that Caputo figures Derrida’s notion of the impossible as an ideal kingdom of God, which is incorrect. According to Hägglund, “the spacing of time makes X possible while making it impossible for X to be in itself. Such spacing is quite incompatible with the religious ideal of absolute immunity” (Hägglund 2008, 121). Hägglund understands Derrida’s critique of the second source, the unscathed. Derrida argues that the unscathed, as that which is unaffected by anything other than itself, is incompatible with his affirmation of the temporization and spacing of language and life that marks the contamination of existence with otherness. The problem with Hägglund’s reading, however, is that it conflates Derrida’s critique of the unscathed in terms of auto-immunity with his entire conception of religion, which includes belief, trust or faith. Hägglund neglects the equivocation and partial affirmation of faith in Derrida’s work, which leads Hägglund to view religion in entirely negative and atheistic terms, whereas Derrida himself is much more complicated. In addition, Hägglund assimilates Caputo’s interpretation of Derrida to a very simplistic and traditional view of religion, and fails to recognize that Caputo is elaborating upon Derrida’s complex notion of faith. For Caputo, Derrida’s equivocation and careful affirmation becomes a more robust affirmation of religion without religion. Caputo develops his understanding of Derrida’s philosophy in his The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, and elaborates it further in terms of a radical theology in The Weakness of God and The Insistence of God (Caputo 1997, 2006 and 2013). Derrida always stresses the contestation, the ambivalence and ambiguous nature of religion, while Caputo wagers on the unconditional celebration of what Derrida carefully and hesitantly suggests. Caputo imagines a radical, ethical, self-contesting faith beyond any surety of the immunity of the unscathed, and this is not a betrayal or distortion of Derrida but a development of a full-throated Derridean theology. Derrida always resisted theology and distanced himself from it, and so did Caputo up until The Weakness of God. Radi-

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cal, non-confessional and unorthodox theology, however, offers Caputo a way to express Derrida’s insights in more explicitly theological ways. Caputo is the most widely known interpreter of Derrida and religion, and his work deserves this status, although it does not exhaust the significance of religion in and for Derrida, as others including Michael Naas, Steven Shakespeare, Kevin Hart, Yvonne Sherwood and Hent de Vries have shown (Naas 2012; Shakespeare 2009; Hart 1989; de Vries 1999; and Sherwood and Hart 2005). Jacques Derrida is one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the thinking of religion occupies a significant portion of his work. Derrida’s understanding of religion is complex, ambiguous and ambivalent. Religion is always contested, and it is bound up with the ethics of our responsibility to the other, as well as the politics of our living together with each other. Derrida does not endorse a particular form of religion, but he also does not renounce the religious as an integral part of what it means to be human.

References Benjamin, Walter. 1996. “Critique of Violence.” Selected Writings, Volume I, 1913–1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael. W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bergo, Bettina, ed. 2007. Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida. Translated by Bettina Bergo and Michael. B. Smith. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Caputo, John D. 1997. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Caputo, John D. 2006. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Caputo, John D. 2013. The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Translated by John. P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” Translated by K. Frieden. Derrida and Negative Theology. Edited by Harold Coward and Toby Foshay. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. London, UK: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone.” Translated by Sam Weber. In Religion. Edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1–78.

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Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority.” Translated by M. Quaintance. Acts of Religion. Edited by Gil Anidjar. New York, NY: Routledge. 230–98. Hägglund, Martin. 2008. Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hart, Kevin. 1989. The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Naas, Michael. 2013. Miracle and Machine. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Peeters, Benoit. 2013. Derrida: A Biography. Translated by A. Brown. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Shakespeare, Steven. 2009. Derrida and Theology. London, UK: Continuum. Sherwood, Yvonne and Kevin Hart, eds. 2005. Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments. London, UK: Routledge, 2005. Spivak, Gayatri. C. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of Our Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. de Vries, Hent. 1999. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

28 Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–) Joeri Schrijvers

Few thinkers receive as much attention today as Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–), an ­ ancy’s ­emeritus professor of philosophy of the Université de Strasbourg in France. N prominence on the international intellectual scene may be the result of his prolific authorship, but also the fact that his (French) works are translated rapidly into English may have contributed to this. Nevertheless, Nancy’s interest in Christianity or theology is rather scarce. By his own account, he wants to speak of Christianity “as little as possible” (Nancy 2013, 22) and, if so moved, only in an indirect manner. Nancy’s project, the deconstruction of Christianity, does not take place for or against Christianity. He shows no interest in “what remains” of Christianity in our secular age, nor does he query what form/s of Christianity could possibly survive such a secular stance (Nancy 2013, 24). Rather, Nancy’s dealings with the Christian religion are philosophical if not transcendental: he seeks to show and lay bare the condition of possibility of the phenomenon of Christianity itself. In the process, Nancy reveals that Christianity itself is possible only as somehow fractured from within as the reconciliation of contradictory tendencies. Think, for instance, of the tension between hoc est corpus meum (“this is my body”), and all the hints of immediacy, touch and grasping it entails, and the noli me tangere (“do not touch me”) that Christ, supposedly, addressed to Mary Magdalene after his Resurrection. It is such a double bind that, for Nancy, means that Christianity ultimately auto-deconstructs. Philosophically, this means that Christianity will no longer be able to unite its own conflicting tendencies and, as a result, will no longer be able to unite societies, people and confessions under one, single Christian banner. If one may speak like Derrida—and Nancy is no stranger to Derrida’s corpus—the condition of possibility of Christianity will prove to be the condition of its impossibility: Christianity, for Nancy, breaks under its own weight. Nancy’s attention to the phenomenon of religion goes back at least to the 1980s (see Nancy 2006 [1987]) and accords nicely, as we will see, with his work on a

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social ontology adequate to our times, which is Nancy’s attempt to extend and to correct Heidegger’s analysis of being-with (see especially Nancy 2000). Nevertheless, Nancy’s stance on the question of Christianity and religion remains an ambivalent one. Already in his most recent work on Christianity’s deconstruction (Nancy 2013), one may notice a hesitation in the metaphors used to describe what is happening to Christianity: either one can understand the process of this autodeconstruction as a metamorphosis, which seems to imply that an older form of the “same” phenomenon takes on a new shape; or this process is to be seen as a mutation, in which the new form only ever takes place at the expense of the old phenomenon (Nancy 2013, 32, 50, 55, 80, 111n.7). It is this hesitation, on Nancy’s part, that this chapter seeks to explore. Can what is happening to Christianity be understood as a metamorphosis, as a continuation and transformation of the Christian tradition, or is it a mutation, so that the events of today will rather alter the face and form of this tradition completely?

Secularization and modernity Although Nancy’s account of a deconstruction of Christianity is in consequence of secularization, it by no means seeks to convey that such secularization is the (entire) truth of religion. Quite to the contrary: Nancy’s thought reacts as much to modernity’s tendency to “dogmatize” atheism and its critiques of religion as it does to contemporary claims about any supposed “return of religion” (Nancy 2008a, 1). Nancy wants to find a thinking that is beyond both theism and atheism. Atheism, according to Nancy, posits a metaphysical principle when it comes to (the) reality (of the divine) as much as theism does. Whereas the former simply states “God does not exist,” the latter—put simply—says that “God exists.” For Nancy, however, what matters “after” metaphysics and “after” modernity is to think being-in-the-world without any (metaphysical) principles whatsoever. The world, for Nancy, is what there is and it is all that there is. But this thinking of world wants neither to fall into an atheist materialism nor a “spiritualized” idealism that wants to return to a state before modernity. In a less commented upon passage, Nancy in effect writes that the latter is indeed the form a deconstruction of Christianity most often takes: the nostalgic longing for and return to a “pure” origin of Christianity, not yet tainted with metaphysical—scholastic or modern—impurities (Nancy 2008a, 39): the topic of a c­ ontemporary return of religion, for instance, is in large part motivated by the presence of religious fundamentalisms and nationalisms of various kinds. Nancy’s account of Christianity’s deconstruction differs from this version, in that it assumes that there never has been such an origin. From the very start, not to say “in the beginning,” there was mixture, intertwining and confusion between “Christianity” and its pagan predecessors. In this regard, there is no “essence” of Christianity if this means that Christianity is isolated from all cultural and contextual developments. “In the beginning,” then, there is not one (arche or principle) but two: a Christianity always and already impure enough to insert itself in the Greek-Roman

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world of its time and wed this world with what would become Judeo-Christianity (Nancy 2008a, 33). Even now, for Nancy, there is nothing outside the West and Christianity: the very nerve of our cultures is Christian (Nancy 2008a, 29; Nancy 2013, 21-22).1 Far from the classic accounts of secularization, which interpreted modernity as a liberation from the dark Christian ages, and far similarly from those authors who long for a Christianity untainted with metaphysical, all-too-rational or scholastic impulses (Nancy thinks of Nietzsche here but Heidegger is just as well a candidate), Nancy regards modernity, in line with the thinking of Marcel Gauchet, as the culmination of a thoroughly Christian culture. Yet, he does so in odd way. Consider the following quotation: During a certain period we believed that Christianity was the malady of the West. Not only did we think that reason would cure us of this malady, but we expected from reason the true flowering of what the Christian message has no sooner announced than betrayed: justice in fraternity, equality in the distribution of wealth and in a common destination. (Nancy 2013, 25) For Nancy, however, the rise of Christianity was not the introduction of a malady in an otherwise healthy body—recall that there is no pure original; rather, the body of a culture is always and already infected, prone to maladies and in no way immune from intrusion: “‘We’ who have borne the entire world to this ‘civilization’ that … henceforth recognizes itself precisely as discontentedness [Freud’s malaise or Unbehagen, JS] in the guise of civilization” (Nancy 2013, 25). Nancy’s aim, then, is not to get rid of Christianity, nor is it to deplore the fact that this religion has been contaminated with supposedly foreign accents; it is, rather, to recognize that today’s culture, its metaphysics, its nihilism and its atheism, is (still) a Christian one. Far from opposing nihilism and Christianity, as is often fashionable in theological circles, Nancy writes that “Christianity is accomplished in nihilism and as nihilism” (Nancy 2008a, 147). The Christian religion, precisely because of its historical and worldly dimensions, tends to evaporate in that very world and, in the process, lets the question of world, and how to deal with it, evaporate as well. Nancy’s apocalyptic pessimism should be questioned,2 even when it is hard to deny that we are today living and existing in a world that is rapidly becoming inhospitable to human and all other beings. Nancy first points to both the crisis of capitalism, where consumerism makes for a flattened and levelled but nonetheless utopian domination of growth, causing in turn a disruption of all relations between the North and the South (with the crisis of Greece and Spain, one might say, the South is happening in Europe and, thus, that there is no longer any such thing as “the West”), and a concomitant sense of inequality globally (Nancy 2013, 82; Nancy 2000, 140). For such an uninhabitable and inhospitable world, Nancy points secondly to the ecological crisis which, for him, is a metaphysical problem just the same, since it is life itself which puts all life at risk (Nancy 2013, 17). This is thus where we are today:

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[H]istory believed that it could understand itself as “rationality” [and] p­ rogress of humanity. But we are now discovering that this reason still needs to disenclose itself in order to welcome everything that was not “progress”—not regression either—but that was thrusting the mutation forward out of the most archaic … depths … of the event called “world.” [The] very fact that we must now think a destruction of mankind and of the world testifies to the amplitude of the mutation. (Nancy 2013, 55–56; emphasis added) It is, for our post-war generation, not easy to believe these “cold war kids.” And the problems we have taking the ecological crisis seriously enough might only ­testify to this. Yet, the very fact of envisioning something like “the end of the world” shows Nancy’s debt to Heidegger. For Heidegger too spoke of the possibility of a Verwüstung der Erde, an annihilation of the earth (Heidegger 1971, 11). Just as Nancy will indicate that contemporary times will have to deal with a conflation and a “conversion of quantity in quality” (Nancy 2012, 56), Heidegger too had argued that “now quantity becomes a special kind of quality” (Heidegger 1977, 135). Pessimism or not, where Heidegger and Nancy differ is in their respective handling of such a crisis: where in the former’s work a longing for a pure origin (Greece) and/or a purer future (Germany) can still be detected, no such longing haunts Nancy’s work. On the contrary, his work starts from the simple (?) observation that now there is, first, no such thing as “nature” that would not be tainted with “nurture,” and that technics is what today makes for even what we would like to see as the most natural of natural phenomena—consider for instance pills for birth control. Second, for Nancy there never has been as pure an origin (of thinking, of physis/ nature) as Heidegger believed and neither will there ever be a telos to which we are all headed, as modernity and even (a certain) Heidegger seems to have believed. In their stead, we live in a world whose possible destruction goes hand in hand with a possible re-invention, where all risks are simultaneously chances. It is such an entwinement—the one and/in with the other—that Christianity has engendered for us, and for which its thought of the Incarnation, where it is the logos itself that seeks flesh pro nobis, will have figured as a pre-figuration. It is, in effect, not all bad news. The reference to the Enlightenment’s cri de coeur, namely liberty, fraternity and equality, may already indicate that these are for Nancy the lasting contribution and “durable sediment” of Christianity to culture and civilization (Nancy 2008a, 37). It is perhaps no coincidence that some of Nancy’s most important early works centre around just these themes (see Nancy 1993 and 2006) and that some of his most recent works aim to provide an ontology of democracy and the fundamental equality of all beings (Nancy 2010a).

Christianity and its condition of (im)possibility Christianity, then, will have given us (the thought of) world. If modernity and the death of God—the death of all afterworlds and afterlives—are to be seen as

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thoroughly Christian phenomena, then even modernity’s atheism and its criticism of religion is to be interpreted in and as ever so many forms of Christianity. Nancy indeed seeks to counter a current atheism that can be as dogmatic as the religion it seeks to overthrow. For Nancy, atheism “close[s] [ ferme]” as much as it “forms [forme]” the horizon of the contemporary world (Nancy 2008a, 18; Nancy 2005: 32). In fact, its stress on finitude and its denial of infinity is, according to Nancy, but one more way not to deal with the world that has been transmitted to us—if only because it seeks to dismiss and disregard the “bad infinity” of consumerism and general equivalence where n+1 products are awaiting purchase. For Nancy, if atheism forms a horizon—and finitude conditions as it were all thought of infinity—it is on the contrary necessary to liberate ourselves from such (modern) limitations on all thinking of infinity and world. To be more precise: the task of thinking is to restore infinity and restore it in such a manner that it takes up the dimension of world. This means that the existence and event of world itself, however finite, knows none of the borders and limitations that thought has given the world: the world simply does not fit into the conceptual schemes that modern and metaphysical significations have constructed for it. However finite this world and its beings may be, this finitude itself is endless and infinite (Nancy 1997, 29–33): its finitude goes all the way up and all the way down and stretches from the past towards our future and beyond—the future of others and other generations. But all this, for Nancy, means that this world does not stop to make sense and is always and already meaningful, and it is this happening of sense that needs to be thought. Nancy’s interest in Christianity, its theology and its religion, is only indirect, that is, only insofar it is the Christian religion that has delivered us into this situation in which no horizons for the world any longer subsist. This is, in fact, what his play with fermer and former the horizon here indicates: atheism can close and form a horizon as much as a religious return to one or the other Golden Age does—as present in, for instance, conservative theologians pleading for a return to pre-Vatican II times. Both atheism and a return to theism, then, close the horizon, whereas, in fact and in reality, there is no such horizon for the thinking of world: the absence of any horizon (of a golden age as much as a determined telos) is precisely what is real. This is what (post)modernity and its criticism of religion have shown. But this Enlightened criticism of religion is for Nancy Christian to the very core. In line with Marcel Gauchet, Nancy argues that Christianity is the “religion of the exit from religion”: God’s transcendence is such that God is outside and above the world, and what happens in the world is to be explained by natural causes and the sciences alone. In this way, modernity’s critique of the Christian religion is part and parcel of Christianity, part and parcel, that is, of a “religion” cleansing itself of “religious” elements and well on its way to leaving the world to the world. In one of his most important works on Christianity—oddly enough separated from the titles in his project of a “deconstruction of Christianity”—Nancy formulates it thus: “Already in the most classical metaphysical representations of … God, nothing else was at stake, in the end, than the world itself” (Nancy 2007, 41). In this way, Christianity for Nancy, due to its essential intertwining of “flesh” and

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“word” in its teaching of the Incarnation, has been the prefiguration of an ontological intertwining of materiality and meaning that extends to all things. Christianity takes place at a crossroads, in that it values matter as well as meaning and logos: its “‘system” will have put us on the track of an ontology of “the with,” where the one is always with the other, where there is no word that cannot become flesh and no flesh that is not already fused with meaning(s) and (metaphysical)ignification(s). For Nancy, the “essence” of Christianity is such, however, that it will have given way to the existence of multiple incarnations, where every incarnation (of meaning) touches other meanings, in such a way that there will never have been a pure origin or telos (of Christianity or of anything else). This multiplicity is what Nancy calls singular plural: there is not one form of Christianity unrelated to all other forms of this phenomenon; rather, these other forms constitute as well as contaminate the idea and concept one has of this one particular, singular form of Christianity from within one’s own tradition and understanding. In more philosophical terms: the Same will have been divested of the Other as much as the Other is invested in any thought of the Same. For Nancy, Christianity has arisen from, on the one hand, “the conjunction of Greek atheism [the evolution from mythology to philosophy in Ancient Greece and the concomitant displacement of polytheism, JS] and Jewish monotheism [positing God firmly outside the world, JS]” (Nancy 2008a, 20). Yet, on the other hand, it is precisely this conjunction which we now see fade away because, as Nancy argues, this conjunction and this intertwining never succeeded in a proper manner. How so? Because this complexion of the greekjew is what simultaneously makes possible (Christian) ontotheology or metaphysics, which posits God as a principle in and of the world, and the undoing of any such metaphysics, since the very idea of God resists such a reduction to a principle. This is what Nancy will call the autodeconstruction of Christianity. Such an ontotheology will, on the one hand, posit God as a substance or being outside the world that will serve as the guarantor and gatherer of all meaning(s) within the world or as the totalizing instance that turns the making sense of this world into a metaphysical signification that once and for all establishes the “meaning of this meaning” (by, for instance, directing it to a divine source or end). Yet, on the other hand and simultaneously—this is the ontological entwinement that Nancy has in mind—the erection of such a metaphysical system is contested from within: for the very idea of God resists any such principle or metaphysical idea. This is why a great many of Christian authors, starting with Augustine, could say that “if you have comprehended this idea, then it is not God” and why such a metaphysical idea may very well seem idolatrous. Christianity, in its metaphysical guise, has been both, “for more than twenty centuries” the reign and rule of the principle as well as that which pointed us to a “wholly other, anarchic configuration” (Nancy 2008a, 22, 24). The latter will serve as a point of departure for Nancy’s thinking of the event of world. Nancy replaces the “tautology of God,” as an immutable substance that only ever repeats itself as “the one who is what he or she is,” with a “heterology of world,” where the event of world is thought from its multiple, ever-changing configurations without there being a “principle” or

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“idea” guiding this world (see Nancy 2008a, 20): one “is what one is” only through the happening of the other. I receive “my” self, for instance, through being born from an other. What happens to “God” as the outside of the world once the world dispels the idea that God would be the one name for this outside of the world? This is, according to Nancy, where we now stand. On the one hand, we have come a long way: from the world as created by God “by separating the days from the nights” to the awareness that it is up to us to create the world from nothing. The only necessity present is that we must either create a world hospitable to “the nations” or watch (the possibility of) its destruction through the expansion of capitalism and globalization (Nancy 2007). But such a creation evidently testifies to our Christian provenance, in that it retains from this tradition precisely the idea of a creatio ex nihilo. This is Nancy’s sense of secularization: it is a “feature of creation that is now “transmitted” and inscribed in the global world (Nancy 2007, 44).

The creation and the revelation of world Our contemporary world is, then, within and without Christianity at the same time. “Within,” because Christianity has made this thinking of world possible and still transmits and inscribes itself there, for good or bad. Whether it be the tautology of money in capitalism—a “tautology” that survived the death of God, but is no less than God once the alpha and omega of the contemporary world—or the very idea and possibility of creating a new world from scratch, the fact remains that “the West is Christian in its depths” (Nancy 2008a, 34). “Without” Christianity, since even though Christianity has made possible a thinking of world, it remains to be conceived just how this world removes, and will have removed, any idea of an “outside of world” that would be divine, that is, to “[grasp] how we are already outside the religious” (Nancy 2008a, 34). It is here that Nancy proceeds toward a transcendental quest for the condition of possibility of such an (impossible) phenomenon as the Christian religion. Here is what one could call Nancy’s transcendental reflex, which looks for the “pagan heart” of Christianity (cf. Derrida 2005, 59, 64) that has made possible the uncanny connection between monotheism, capitalism, and nihilism revealed today: We must ask … what it is that, without denying Christianity but without returning to it, could lead us toward a point—toward a resource—hidden beneath Christianity[,] monotheism, and … the West. [This] point would open up a future for the world that would no longer be either Christian or anti-Christian [but] would advance beyond all these categories (after having made all them possible). (Nancy 2008a, 34) What is it that would thus be revealed, what resource would be detected, and how would this help in creating the conditions for a world hospitable to all? It is on this

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point that Nancy is at his most constructive. For, beyond all the post-secular philosophies and theologies that amount to a “renunciation” of reason and settle for a “combination of ‘forms of life’,” in which all forms and cultures would have a right to be simply because no neutral vantage-point would ever be given—an approach that can be found in many neoconservative theologies—and beyond all atheisms that revel in aporias, absences and voids, an approach often present in theologies following Derrida, Žižek and others (cf. Nancy 2008a, 18–19), Nancy quite explicitly seeks to recover those concepts that matter the most to the Christian worldview (although these will have been, for Nancy as for Heidegger, a world-picture rather than a thorough fundamental ontology of the event of world: concepts that represent the world from out of a principle or idea, rather than think from out of the worlding of world, its event). Nancy writes: “Our culture has dedicated itself to another reduction. [One] called this ‘the thinking of suspicion’—namely suspicion of any form of the absolute, the ideal, the unconditional. These three words themselves inevitably provoke suspicion. And yet they are necessary” (Nancy 2013, 70). Even in a post-Christian world, one is in need of the Absolute and the unconditional. Yet, one must ask as well, what happens to a culture when the absolute and the unconditional is no longer to be called God or even “that which all call God”? What happens when “God” as a being outside the world is substituted, replaced and/or abandoned for a world that does not, for all that, turn into an immanent frame but rather has to deal with an “outside,” a “beyond” and an “unconditional” within the very fabric that is world? The entire outside thus flows back into the world and this outgoing tide [reflux] opens within the world the breach of a henceforth problematic, enigmatic, mysterious sense. The mystery of the trinity strikes this spark. Sense is relation itself, the outside of the world, is therefore within the world without being of the world. (Nancy 2013, 52l; 2010b, 77; emphasis added) This calls for several remarks, for here Nancy narrates that it is from within Christianity that it becomes clear just how to proceed without Christianity. First, once the old ontotheologies have faded away, and their respective claims to comprehend the “outside,” this outside remains as an empty place within the world. Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity will point to this very happening of world as infinite, unconditional and eternal. Second, this outside does not take place anywhere else than in the world, and it is this that Christianity has revealed to thought. The trinity, for instance, reveals God as a relation among three persons who are nothing but this relation and nowhere else than in this relation to one another. No metaphysical substance is, in effect, to be found here. Nancy comments: “God effaces himself in the Trinity. [It is] a question of this: God is relation. He is his own relation [which] does not relate itself [God is not a being that decides for or against relations with the world, JS] but relates absolutely [‘God’ is but a name for that which makes for ‘world’: relations, JS]” (Nancy 2013, 30; emphasis added). Nancy interprets this

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later in the following way: “God is nothing other than this with itself. There once were ‘gods and mankind’, then there was ‘god with us’, there henceforth is ‘we with ourselves’” (Nancy 2013, 40–41). Third, once modern metaphysics has withered away and claims to comprehend consciousness and subjectivity in a clear and distinct way are met with irony, what remains is no longer the Signification(s) and concepts that would once and for all understand being and history but rather the mobile, fleeting and opaque happening of sense—from one event to the next, one meeting to the other, always different and always new. It is this renewed thinking of materiality—there is no one-time only ultimate Signifier, there only is the “sense” and “meaning,” which extends contingency and temporality, where everything that happens, happens one-time only, to all events within and of the world— that is missed in the translation above and why we have added the reflux. For, if no concept can determine and fulfil the intuition of sense (phenomenologically) there remains a meaningfulness of materiality: although materiality does not permit the full-fledged Signification of metaphysics, it is not entirely without meaning either. To be sure, there remains some sort of muteness to this matter, since it will never give us its meaning once and for all and refuses the grasp of reason’s drive for comprehension. It is for this reason that meaning itself only ever happens in relations to the other and to otherness, which can never be fully signified. Nancy retrieves such brute materiality in the image of the mouth, as an opening belonging to the body as the outside belongs to the world (Nancy 2013, 128).3 Yet, fourth, it is this ultimate relationality (without the Ultimate) that Nancy sees as the positive counterpart of his deconstruction of Christianity. For what remains of its “salvation history” is precisely this (ontological) salutation within being, extending to all beings high and low (Nancy 2013, 4). Insisting that every word is a greeting (Nancy 111, 10), a hailing of the other, Nancy is close to ­Levinas’ “curvature of intersubjective space” that Totality and Infinity sought to establish. Nancy, however, unmoors this curvature from its ethical underpinnings and substitutes the Levinasian accusative for a sheer vocative, a “salut sans salvation” of which the later Derrida also spoke (and to which Nancy regularly refers): in the world, the ego does not stand accused by the Other, but rather all call out for and to all other others. Yet, Nancy takes his distance from Derrida as well, and in particular from the latter’s tendency to see aporias pretty much everywhere. For Nancy, this is equivalent to the renunciation of reason that goes hand in hand with post-secularism as discussed above. Nancy’s plea is not for a différance considered as “a distance that could defer its final advent” but rather as the pulse of life and of being which “proximity puts [into] contact with the totality of being [and the opening] that reunites them all” (Nancy 2013, 70). It is for this reason also that, finally, the dis-enclosure or the deconstruction of Christianity is a dis-enclosure of reason and rationality: it is the thought of a reason that from within itself finds sufficient reason to open itself again to the outside and be turned “inside-out” as it were, to the infinite and the unconditional. Whereas modernity and postmodernity—the Enlightenment and Heidegger’s Gestell—in effect “closed itself off to … the Outside” (Nancy 2013, 25, 84), we now have insufficient reason to believe that

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rationality and technology overlap with “what is real” and that we can comprehend reality and materiality. Reason no longer believes that reality is (entirely) rational, and rationality is so exposed to its limits and to what inhabits it from the outside: faith. Nancy’s thought seeks, with rational means to be sure, to address, salute and embrace the singular event of the happening of the other and otherness. And this singularity (of world, of others) is what is to be adored (Nancy 2013, 59; 2012, 66)—and for which one can (almost) kneel and pray: “Only a reason that adores is fully rational” (Nancy 2013, 79). Nancy thus arrives at a reason without belief (in causality, for instance, as an ultimate rationality) as well as a faith without reason (no knowledge assists this leap of faith or would otherwise serve as some sort of ancilla). But such reason and such faith here collide precisely because both are brought to some sort of threshold, namely that of a scene of being, history and world whose event is truly without principle—neither arche nor telos: adoration is “anarchic,” it only knows of a “world saluting itself,” a world that is where everything—justice— remains to be done, from scratch or ex nihilo (Nancy 2013, 64). This, then, is what remains of the Christian revelation and what is revealed with world: “a revelation that reveals that there is nothing to reveal” (Nancy 2012, 39).

Conclusion Nancy’s deconstruction delivers us from the God who created the world by separating the day and night into the world whose passage and procession from night to day is itself to be seen as divine. It is not clear whether theology can correlate with such a philosophy, whether, despite it all, theology could see such a philosophy as a renewed thinking of immanence open to the Transcendent that it holds dear. But, for theology too, it is perhaps best to keep an open mind when it comes to new developments in contemporary philosophy and applaud a philosophy that seeks to re-open a thought of infinity and unconditionality. Similarly, it is clear that Nancy’s philosophy could have benefited from a more thorough reading of theology—one might think of both Overbeck’s rather peculiar version of an autodeconstructive Christianity or Barth’s distinction between the Christian faith and “worldly” religion. Yet, our worries with Nancy’s thinking lie elsewhere, namely that at crucial stages of his deconstruction Nancy seems to omit a deconstructive spirit and erects dualistic (for lack of a better word) alternatives and bifurcations that nevertheless seem to evaporate from within. This is especially clear when it comes to Nancy’s thinking of the compound that is Christianity: either it is the possibility of a destruction of world that is coming to us or it is the creation of a new world ex nihilo; either it is the sin and evil of “closing in on [one]self” (Nancy 2013, 53) through one or the other (religious, political) identity or it is the adoration of an openness to the openness of “the Outside”; either it the faith of a reason that so adores or it is the particular beliefs of all sorts of “religion”; either it is to remain with these (dogmatic and institutional) forms of religion and Christianity of which “it is difficult to see how they could be ‘secularized’” (Nancy 2013: 35) or it is Nancy’s own paganism without paganism that salutes the sheer happening of being and “divinizes” the ­passing of

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each and every one of us. Finally, it is either the banal Jemeingötterung (Nancy 2008a, 116)—brought to us by the “oh my God’s” of American sitcoms through which we turn the God who died pro nobis inevitably into a Gott mit uns—or the name of God remains and is nowhere else than in our greeting one another, in the calling out of all to all, for which “God” is but one name—the German gruß Gott is a nice example, since “God” here is but in our “hello and goodbyes.” Suddenly, it seems as if all lines of communication between these alternatives are closed and the “dissipation” of religious “observance in adoration” (Nancy 2013, 35) is a one-way street in a manner close to the most classic of secularization theories. In short, what Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity omits here is the back and forth between these beliefs and a faith of the deconstructive sort, between dogmatic coagulation as Signification and anarchic mobility of meaning. If we are to follow Derrida, and deem Nancy too hopeful, not to say naive and idealistic (cf. Nancy 2012, 62n.), it is because this empty space, this anarchic happening and history of being into which we are thrown, will always be occupied anew, even if it “must not be occupied” (Nancy 2013, 33; emphasis added). It is this that Heidegger (and Derrida) knew all too well (Heidegger 1977, 69). It is about this domestication and occupation, and how (not) to avoid it, about why, when and how the anarchic happening always and already turns into a principled authoritative happening in which one religious observance or political identity takes precedence over others (or, more simply, where a view on humanity becomes the view on humanity) and why the deconstruction of Christianity despite everything most often takes the form of a cry for a lost supposedly pure origin that Nancy remains all too silent. It is clear that no matter how much one wishes for a mutation of our culture, it is a metamorphosis that is happening, where—if we forget the bad name the “– isms” have received as of late—“an ‘ism’ converts itself to another ‘ism’” (Nancy 2013, 32). If the novelty of world-forming never seems to occur ex nihilo, but only ever through a transformation of the old, then it is exactly from Christianism to Christianism that we are still proceeding. We, and Nancy, would do well realizing that this is not necessarily a bad thing. The compound that our Christian culture still is would show us then that we are neither secularized properly nor properly Christian. Perhaps it is this between that we would need to think today.

Notes 1 Nancy writes: “the West no longer exists: finding itself everywhere, it is no longer anywhere in particular” (Nancy 2013, 21). But this seems to be true only to a certain extent: “the West is indeed everywhere” in a culture where the products of globalization can be purchased even in what used to be “foreign” cultures. Yet, it is not clear whether this would not just be the superlative form of (modern) Eurocentrism. 2 In a text clearly written at the time of completing L’adoration, Nancy even ventures that his philosophy aims at “answering the question: do we still want a civilization? One worthy of the name?” (Nancy 2012, 62n.). Questions, however, multiply around such a pessimism: first, might it be a rhetorical exaggeration? (Schrijvers 2009); second, might it still be a remnant of Christian pessimism à la Calvin and Luther that can see in the human

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animal only a corrupted being (Derrida 2009, 44–5); and, third, what are the implications of such a pessimism politically, that is, when crises rule and the concomitant primacy of fear is always on the verge of being misused? (Krell 2013, 11–13 and 146–47). 3 The mouth, obviously, is part and parcel of the body, yet at the same time it is no body as it is not anything material. The mouth, then, figures as a sort of nothing, no thing that is the beyond-within being. One should not underestimate Nancy’s phenomenological critique of phenomenology here, for a large part of phenomenology proceeds from some sort of interiority and, through this, some immediate presence of self. Famous is the Merleau-Pontean slogan “I do not have a body: I am (a) body.” But Nancy responds: Am I the sweating of my hand, my liver or my heart—because since his heart transplant Nancy lives with the heart of an other? It is this that his concept of exscription is trying to depict: “when I sense my stomach [it’s] from the outside” (Nancy 2008b, 129) as an intrusion by an other that hinders my supposed presence to my self. The “outside” of world and of body is some sort of “inside-out,” similar to the way in which clothes worn inside-out still fit but do not fit “properly.”

References Derrida, Jacques. 2005. On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by Christine Irizarry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2009. The Beast and The Sovereign. Volume 1. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Was Heisst Denken? Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row. Krell, David Farrell. 2013. Derrida and Our Animal Others. Derrida’s Final Seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign.” Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993. The Experience of Freedom. Translated by Bridgett McDonald. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1997. The Sense of the World. Translated by J. Librett. Minnesota, MN: Minnesota University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc., 2005. La Déclosion. Déconstruction de la christianisme I. Paris, France: Galilée. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2006. “Of Divine Places.” The Inoperative Community. Translated by P. Connor. Minnesota, MN: Minnesota University Press. 11–150. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translated by Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008a. Dis-Enclosure. The Deconstruction of Christianity I. Translated by Bettina Bergo, et al. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008b. Corpus. Translated by Richard Rand. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2010a. The Truth of Democracy. Translated by Pascalle-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2010b. L’adoration. Déconstruction du Christianisme II. Paris, France: Galilée. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2012. L’équivalence des Catastrophes (Après Fukushima). Paris, France: Galilée. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2013. Adoration. The Deconstruction of Christianity II. Translated by John Mckeane. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Schrijvers, Joeri. 2009. “What Comes after Christianity? Jean-Luc Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity.” Research in Phenomenology 39 (2): 266–91.

29 Julia Kristeva (1941–) Catherine Tomas

In this essay, we will explore the work of the contemporary European philosopher Julia Kristeva, with specific reference to those writings of most interest to scholars of theology and religion. It is possible to argue that Kristeva is in fact a theological thinker more than a political one, but she would most likely first question the intention of doing so, and second, reject the idea that either one excludes the other. That is to say, for Kristeva, religious thought and theology are necessarily political. She is a contentious and challenging thinker, both in terms of the content of her writing and the way in which this content is presented. She is known for her poetic, complex and sometimes verbose prose and more than a few critics accuse her of writing in a way that makes her ideas impenetrable.1 Kristeva herself may well find such criticism amusing because much of her work is focused on looking at the language we use and how the hidden or unconscious meanings of language often express what we really mean. Consciously or not, when we use terms such as “impenetrable,” for instance, we are placed in a field of associations with sex, penetration and the phallus. It would be a mistake to dismiss Kristeva’s writings on the basis of their apparent opacity, not least of all because to do so would be to miss out on some very valuable content. Moreover, Kristeva does not write with the intention of being hard to understand. Rather, her style of writing is in part a product of her academic training as a scholar of Russian literature, and the roots of the careful and particular writing style she is now known for can be found there. Her style is challenging for those who do not have grounding in this genre, but it is a style worth persevering and becoming familiar with. Kristeva is a writer with a broad and varied canon; she has written novels, short stories and complex philosophical treatises, as well as biographies of important female thinkers. Here, we will focus on her philosophy, because it is in this that the most important issues regarding religion and theology reside.

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Biography Kristeva’s life experience has direct and important relation to her writing and thought. That this is the case is testament to her theory that lived experience shapes how we as individuals employ language, words and create meaning, and as we will go on to see, her work demonstrates this quite explicitly for better and worse. Born in Bulgaria under a communist regime, after completing her first degree, she won a research scholarship to study philosophy in France. She went on to study philosophy further as well as psychoanalysis, and gained a degree in the latter in 1979. Themes throughout her work are that of exile, revolution and the creation of identity, as well as the philosophical questions these experiences bring up. Kristeva carved a new identity for herself in France after leaving Bulgaria, and developed a keen interest in these subjects. She understands exile, revolution and identity creation to be present throughout the lives of all peoples, not only those explicitly and directly caught up in political and personal revolution and geographic re-location. Kristeva’s writings have always been political. As a young woman in Paris she was part of the left-wing group Tel Quel, and regularly contributed to the magazine of the same name, which published Maoist-leaning political stories and articles. She went on to teach philosophy in Paris and Harvard, and published her first major work, Semeiotike: Recherches pour une Sémanalyse (Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Language and Art), in 1969. This is still considered to be a groundbreaking text, and it is here that Kristeva wrote about her theories of the semiotic and the symbolic for the first time—theories that were to become the backbone of her writing, and that we will explore in more depth later in the chapter. Desire in Language placed her within the group of philosophers which would become known as the post-structuralists, a group including thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. Post-structuralism is a philosophical approach that grew and was named in response to the view that the key to understanding cultural phenomena lies in underlying structures and systems of social organization (structuralism). Post-structuralist thinkers challenge the idea that all behaviour is part of an over-arching structure. They resist the desire to create a meta-narrative or “big picture” of human life and instead want to explore those dimensions of existence which resist systematization, whether these are unpredictable or unique events, or, as in Kristeva’s case, the individual’s ability to react and respond differently to events. Due to her appropriation of Jacques Lacan’s2 psycholinguistic theories, Kristeva has in the past been described as a structuralist, despite the fact that she has criticized Lacan’s concepts such as that of the phallus. Although Kristeva is informed by structuralist thinkers, in this way, she is decidedly post-structuralist. But Kristeva herself has never been comfortable with any such branding. In the 1980s and 1990s Kristeva was labelled—together with Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray—as a “French post-structuralist feminist.” Each of the parts of this term is contestable. Although her writings are in French and she has made Paris her home, Kristeva is not French, but Bulgarian. As mentioned above, the term “poststructuralist” is also something she has resisted, because this philosophical categori-

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zation still links her thinking to a philosophical movement—­structuralism—which she does not adopt. Finally, and perhaps most contentiously of all, Kristeva has claimed that she is not comfortable to be labelled a “feminist,” despite much of her work focusing on the lives and experiences of women, and writing on the need for female liberation. Kristeva may reject the label but she does not reject the desire for the liberation of women or of the belief in the fundamental equality of men and women. As Kelly Oliver succinctly puts it, when Kristeva rejects the label feminist, “What she is rejecting is a specific movement in France that she thinks engages in, and merely replicates, oppressive bourgeois logics and strategies for gaining power” (Oliver 1993, 111). We can begin to see here a characteristic of Julia Kristeva—that she questions labels of almost all kinds. This questioning and rejecting of certain commonly-accepted labels fits with Kristeva’s approach to philosophy more generally. She is no traditionalist. Since Desire in Language, Kristeva has published over 25 books, including numerous novels, articles and plays. Her concerns have remained political and psychoanalytic, with more recent publications exploring ideas of revolt, the transgression of boundaries, and the formation of political and personal identity with reference to religion.

Kristevan themes It is possible to identify a collection of themes in the work of Kristeva, many of which hold valuable material for those attentive to religious or theological issues. She has a preoccupation with language and the creation of meaning, as well as an interest in the formation of identity or subjectivity. These intersect with her consideration of how religious themes, discourses and narratives create meaning and form identity. For Kristeva, understanding language and the meaning creation that occurs when we use language, is at the heart of being able to understand our psyches. She is both a philosopher and psychoanalyst, and her canon of work spans discussions of the development of the individual: from the taking up of language in childhood; through the use of language and the effect this has on language meaning; to the role of archetypal figures in Western culture. We must always consider Kristeva’s practice as a psychoanalyst if we are to understand her writings. Kristeva is not simply concerned with the theoretical exploration of why it is that individuals act and think in particular ways. She is interested in exploring these things so as to be able to alleviate psychological suffering. In this way, her work can be seen as a form of secular soteriology: she is concerned with salvation, but does not rely upon any transcendental being to achieve this.

Psychoanalytic theories and the role of religion Kristeva writes on the role of religion, specifically Catholicism, in shaping the identity of people in the West, and how religion effects and affects3 how people

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engage with words and ideas. Although she focuses on Catholicism, the religion of her parents, Kristeva has also written on Islam and Chinese religion, although not without controversy. Indeed, contemporary critics have accused Kristeva of Orientalism and even outright racism (see Rubinstein 2010: 666–9). Kristeva places herself within the tradition of psychoanalysis and psychology initiated by Sigmund Freud and developed by Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein. But she engages with this tradition in a critical manner, and rejects many of its conclusions. Her later writings respond to, and desire to correct, Lacanian and Freudian models. Arguably, the rest of her work develops Kleinian concepts such as the maternal and her key theoretical models, such as the abject, are based upon Kleinian psycholinguistics.4 Kristeva argues that psychoanalysis frequently replaces religion in European cultures and that it is the dominant origin of theories about the formation of subject identity. In In the Beginning Was Love, she writes: As theology, that once vast continent, vanished between the time of Descartes and the end of the nineteenth century, psychoanalysis (along with linguistics and sociology) became the last of the scientific disciplines to set itself up as a rational approach to the understanding of human behavior and its always enigmatic “meaning.” (Kristeva 1987, 1) In the 1980s, Kristeva discussed “theology” in the past tense, as the lens through which human behaviour had been viewed and understood. Now, however, it is psychoanalysis that performs this role. Science—to which psychoanalysis belongs— and theology or religion, are thus the two forces most powerfully at work as influences in Western culture. Nevertheless, an ever-present theme in her work is that of a lament over the fact that the two influences of science and theology have produced such limited narratives from which we are able draw when forming our identities.5 A large amount of her work therefore, is concerned with attempting to reconceive themes and issues that have previously been purely “theological” in order to assist a healthier understanding of the self. For this reason, there is much for theologians and philosophers of religion in the work of Kristeva. She offers rich and complicated ideas with which they can engage, and many have done so profitably (see Chopp 1992; O’Grady 2003; Walton 2000). Religion in general, and theology as a discipline of academic study, both hold key positions in all of Kristeva’s writing, although some of her works engage with theological and religious themes more explicitly than others.

The maternal One of the most important topics Kristeva has written on at length is the concept and role of the maternal. Her discussion of the maternal and the role of the mother

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is one of the most controversial elements of her work. She is accused of a form of gender and sex essentialism by scholars who argue that her understanding of the maternal body does nothing other than cement patriarchal and sexist ideas of the female body as primarily a producer, either physically or through the role the mother plays in the formation of the subjectivity of the child. Judith Butler is perhaps the most well-known and vocal of these critics (Butler 1989, 104–18). Kristeva’s concept of the maternal is influenced more than anything by Christianity and Christian models of motherhood. The implications of her concept for both how women conceive of themselves, as well as how mothers engage with their children, are significant. But the role she gives to the maternal is not only important for this reason: the maternal is central to the development of the individual. Kristeva discusses the maternal in two ways: first, she argues that Western concepts of maternity are detrimentally affected by Christian narratives of an impossible maternity. Because the most significant cultural image of motherhood is that of the virgin birth of Jesus—a physical impossibility for human mothers—she claims this leads to a situation whereby the subconscious understanding of maternity and motherhood is one in which women are pre-destined to fail. For Kristeva, no word is simply a word. When we use language we not only utilize symbolic tools (words); we also create new meaning for these tools, so that the next time that a word or combination of words are used, the meaning they hold is slightly changed. The meaning we associate with words and language is directly linked to the signifying dimension of language: she calls this “the symbolic.” In this way, when we say “mother,” we signify a relation to the subject. In the West, it is the Catholic tradition that places values and other meanings on the relations of “mother” to “child,” and these signifying relations make up the narratives of culture. She argues that we suffer from a paucity of resources and models of maternity and motherhood, leading to a very narrow understanding of meaning connected to this word. This narrowness of understanding is problematic because it does not allow for the reality of women’s lived experiences as mothers. Women have only one model of motherhood, and it is an impossible one. This critique of the paucity of narratives within the Catholic tradition can be extended beyond motherhood. Kristeva argues that the Catholic tradition offers men a multitude of models of subjectivity—men can be anything they like and still be legitimate men—but for women the same is not the case. Female subjectivity, according to Kristeva, is limited by the Catholic tradition—women have few options for legitimacy and that one option is an impossibility. Women are taught that the “blessed amongst women” is the Virgin mother—something that women can never be, and in this way female sacrality is impossible. The role of the mother is also an important element of Kristeva’s theory of subject formation. It is the mother that is abjected by the child in order for the child to gain subjectivity. The theory of abjection is perhaps the central theme in Kristeva’s work, and we will explore it below.

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The semiotic and the symbolic Another important aspect of Kristeva’s thought is the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic. Kristeva writes: “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” (1987, 22). In Séméiôtiké: Recherches pour une Sémanalyse, later translated into English as Desire in Language, we first see Kristeva’s use of the terms semiotic and symbolic together to create a model of meaning-making. The semiotic is variously understood as a field, a space and a realm. These location-related words may seem rather imprecise—and these are criticisms of Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic and symbolic—but they are carefully chosen. The semiotic is best understood as a stage of development, but Kristeva understands and writes about this stage of development as a space. It is this space in which the developing psyche of the child (most often but not always) enters, or finds herself. It is closely related to the pre-Oedipal stage of development described by Freud, and is located before the “Mirror-stage” described by Lacan. Importantly, this stage or realm is pre-linguistic—it occurs before the developing child or individual has access to language, and as such, is associated with sensational, rhythmic, and basic, unconscious drives and desires. Nothing in the semiotic has meaning alone because it is in engagement with the symbolic—the second part of Kristeva’s model of meaning creation—that meaning is created. The semiotic and the symbolic are two inextricable parts of a whole process which leads to meaning. Without the semiotic there would be no content and without the symbolic that content would have no meaning. It is only in combination that meaning exists. For this reason, it is erroneous to think of either the semiotic or the symbolic as having a purpose alone—as only together is the concept of “purpose” meaningful. The symbolic is the space of language, and it is when the child enters this stage of development—of “taking up language” as Kristeva puts it—that it is able to distinguish itself from its mother, and subsequently other individuals. This distinguishing itself from the maternal is the particular event that Kristeva terms abjection. Abjection is the process through which this eruption of the semiotic into the symbolic occurs, thereby making meaning, and at the same time forming the subjectivity of the child.

The abject The process by which the child enters the realm of language and moves from the semiotic into the symbolic is through abjection of the mother. The theory of abjection is developed by Kristeva in Powers of Horror, and it is a key theory that she has developed throughout her career as psychoanalyst and philosopher. It is important to note that it is here, perhaps especially, that much of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory is influenced by the work of Melanie Klein, one of the most influential psychoanalysts of the twentieth century. Abjection is a theory that Kristeva developed from the writings and practice of Klein, expanding its ­application and use as

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a concept. Klein described the relationship between the mother and child as part of the Oedipal trio (Mother, Father, Child) as “ab-ject.” Kristeva expands on this relationship, calling it “abject” (Kristeva 2002, 73). Abjection is a pushing away of something or someone that in the expelling, allows the subject to form identity. It is not a conscious action. Disgust, revulsion and horror are all important characteristics of this event or act. In the Kristevan model, the first thing to be abjected is the maternal. It is when the developing child pushes away and against the mother in revulsion—here linked to the realm of the semiotic—that the child recognizes itself as an individual being. This abjection and its corresponding rejection of the semiotic, moves the child into the realm of the symbolic with its corresponding realm of language. Subjectivity, according to the Kristevan model, is formed only when the child takes up language and becomes what she calls a “speaking subject,” through the process of abjection. But abjection is much more complex than a simple rejection of the maternal manifest through a rejection of the mother and a new independence sought by the child. That which is made abject—the maternal—now plays an important new role in the formation of the individual child as a subject. Kristeva talks about “abjection” as a process in the development of a child and in subject formation, as well as “the abject” as a concept to mean anything that has been expelled or made “other” in order to define something else. In this way, communities can “abject” individuals to define themselves. An example of this would be the Roman Catholic Church abjecting heretics so that through the persecution and expulsion of those individuals who did not fit its definition of Catholic, it strengthened the definition of what it is to be Catholic. The abject as a concept grew out of Kristeva’s model of abjection as a process of subject formation. In Powers of Horror, she develops this concept, and it is here that we learn that a central characteristic of the abject is that of liminality. The liminal is that which is neither one thing nor another—an in-between space. The word comes from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold, and is a term used initially in anthropology to describe the space of ambiguity found in the middle of rituals, where a subject is neither initiated nor uninitiated. Their status is ambiguous, that is, they inhabit a liminal space. Examples of liminal spaces include doorways, spaces between words on a page, or the space between the clearly defined boundaries between one thing and another. Because of this ambiguity, the liminal can elicit reactions of disgust, revulsion and fear or horror. According to Kristeva, the abject is liminal. Those things that are abject lie on the borders of experience and rupture the clearly defined boundaries between who we are and who we are not. In Powers of Horror, the abject is “what does not respect borders, positions, rules.” It is “The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 1982, 4). Examples of the abject are dead bodies (something not alive, something that is not and yet still exists as a physical presence) and faeces (something that is not a part of one and yet is of one). The abject are those things that inhabit the space between certainties; they are liminal entities that are neither subject nor object. Why are things that inhabit this

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uncategorizable space typically so repellent? Because they show up spaces where meaning has no sure footing: “In short, the abject is everything that threatens the collapse of order by threatening the collapse of meaning and the annihilation of the self ” (Goodnow 2010, 30).

Mysticism Mysticism, specifically female mysticism, is the religious and theological theme that repeatedly emerges in Kristeva’s work. This interest of hers can be traced from In the Beginning Was Love and up through many of her other texts, perhaps culminating in a study-cum-biography-cum-novel based on the life of Teresa Avila, Teresa Mon Amour. Although some scholars talk about a “theological turn” in Kristeva’s work, there is really no such thing; right from the very beginning, Kristeva demonstrated a concern and interest in the theological that is focused upon the mystical. It is fair to say that her writings take on an explicit interest in the mystical and its role within theological dialogues, but the general concern with theological issues can be easily traced to her very earliest lectures and publications. So why, out of all the various religious and theological themes and manifestations of the religious, is Kristeva so interested in mysticism? If we remind ourselves that for Kristeva, the quest to better understand and reconcile the various unconscious drives and motivations we have is the aim of everything, we can begin to see why she devotes so much of her work and thought to mysticism. She understands mysticism as being at the heart of the feminine6 experience of the sacred. And she understands the role of the sacred to be key to our experience as humans. Whether we are believers in a particular God or confirmed atheists, according to Kristeva, the concept of the divine has a profound influence on our identity and sense of self. How we relate to the divine and the sacred will affect how we engage with the world. Because Kristeva is concerned with reducing suffering, specifically psychological and mental suffering, and because she is particularly interested in the alleviation of female suffering, a special interest in female engagement with the sacred and divine is important to her. The first time we see her interest in how the concepts of the divine and sacred interact with the formation of identity is in In the Beginning Was Love. In this text, Kristeva writes about the relationship between faith and psychoanalysis. This is one of her most accessible and engaging texts because it was written as a lecture given to high-school children at a Catholic school. It is no doubt because of this young audience that this text presents many of Kristeva’s theories and ideas on religion in such a clear way. Although she was writing for a Catholic audience, Kristeva states right from the very beginning of the text that she “is not a believer” (1987, 23). But not being a “believer” does not mean that Kristeva does not give real value to the role and importance of religion. Like Freud, Kristeva understands the figure of God the Father to inhabit a particular role in the psyche of all those brought up in the West. This role, following Freud, is one that has a phantom-like influ-

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ence on our actions. We need the figure of God to understand our own actions and give meaning to our drives and desires. In this way, God can function as the symbolic.

The feminine and the sacred Religious feeling, faith and particularly mystical events are all “semiotic,” because they do not recognize the individual as separate from the divine or, indeed, the world. They are all what “Freud saw [as] a ‘direct and immediate transference’ of the nascent ego to the ‘father of individual prehistory’” (Kristeva 1987, 23). That is, God. Faith and mystical events are forms of the individual associating herself with God, or rather, of seeing no separation between herself and the divine. Rather than something problematic, Kristeva sees this association with the divine as an important part of subject development. But this does not mean that she sees the maintenance of faith as important. She writes: In order for faith to be possible, this “semiotic” leap toward the other, this primary identification with the primitive parental poles close to the maternal container, must not be either repressed or displaced in the construction of a knowledge which, by understanding the mechanism of faith, would bury it. Repression can be atheist; atheism is repressive, whereas the experience of psychoanalysis can lead to renunciation of faith with clear understanding. (Kristeva 1987, 26) Here she is saying that ultimately and ideally, one is to move beyond faith but that it is important that one achieves a “clear understanding” of the role that it plays in one’s life. “The construction of knowledge” as she puts it—learning facts about the world that negate religious doctrine for example—will simply bury faith. Only the process of psychoanalysis, in which the individual experiences the role faith plays in her identity, has the tools to lead to a healthy renunciation of faith that is not simply a repression. Most often and most ideally, this renunciation happens through transference-love, whereby the analysand transfers this faith onto the analyst, and the analyst works with the analysand to return this faith back to them as faith in themselves. There are more than a few problems with this. Not least that this is available only to the few—psychoanalysis is very expensive and only available to those who are not only financially rich but also time-rich. Her interest in mysticism is not limited to the role it plays as a form of faith, supporting the individual’s psychic development. Instead, she sees in mysticism something else much more important and interesting. Mysticism is unique because it subverts the desire to associate with divinity outside the subject (God the Father as an external being), and instead locates divinity within. What has been described as a form of narcissistic spirituality7 now becomes a bridge between theological thinking and psychoanalysis. As Arthur Bradley puts it, according to Kristeva, “Teresa of Avila, Angela of Foligno and other female mystics progressively affirm an other

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within the subject as opposed to the divine other that supposedly lies outside it” (Bradley 2008, 280).

Controversies This Incredible Need to Believe is Kristeva’s only book devoted entirely to religion. A collection of essays and interviews, it brings together her thinking on religion and its relationship to culture and the human psyche in a way that allows space for a more in-depth analysis. There are considerable problems with it. Kristeva is concerned, she says, with addressing what she sees as a move towards an increasingly violent religious culture. Using psychoanalytic tools to explore why this might be, the premise of the book is that of attempting to shed light on the unconscious motivations at play within religion, and to explore the relationship between religion and culture. However, the book manifests some pernicious racism and is shockingly hostile towards Islam. Here, Islam is argued to have a fundamental flaw in its key narrative. She presents Islam as violent (a claim she makes again and again) because unlike Christianity, it has no narrative of the murder of God. Because the God of Islam is still alive, this God acts as an all-powerful tyrant, demanding obedience from His followers. Moreover, the murderous Oedipal impulse that Freud writes about at length, is, according to Kristeva, never resolved in Islam, leading to a religion that acts out violence as an expression of piety (Kristeva 2009, 66). In the book, Islam is thus associated with extremist violence, to the extent that if one only read This Incredible Need to Believe, one would be forgiven for thinking that it is only Muslims who ever committed violent acts in the name of God. As Mary Jane Rubinstein puts it in her review of the book, “For all of the rigor and sophistication we have come to expect from Kristeva, then, the argumentative core of this book is that the problem with the world today is Islam, and the solution is Christianity” (Rubenstein 2010, 666). The problems found in This Incredible Need to Believe may also suggest a racism underlying Kristeva’s thinking in The Feminine and The Sacred. Here, in conversation with Catherine Clement, a French anthropologist, Kristeva explores the two themes of femininity (or femaleness depending on the translation) and the sacred. The book is a record of correspondence between the two scholars, both interested in religion and cultural manifestations of religion, over the course of some years. In these letters, they explore the role of women in religions across the world and across different cultures. It is a challenging read, not because the theories they discuss are overly c­ omplex— they are not—but because in these pages we see how both women are products of a particularly unpleasant imperialist culture and seem totally unaware of this. The women Clement and Kristeva discuss in their letters to one another are treated as mere means towards an end by the writers—and not as people. Passages from the letters are unambiguously racist. The Black women in Senegal that Clement describes as “throw[ing] fits” (Clement and Kristeva 2001, 6) at a ­Catholic Mass,

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are compared by Kristeva to the Black women she has encountered in New York, invoking a shocking description: As for me, I still have a vision of American “Africanness” before me. With every trip, New York seems more black and more ethnically mixed. But, curiously, it’s the female bodies—often so heavy and awkward—that give that mutant humanity its most reassuring—appeased, even—aspect of indelible serenity. (Clement and Kristeva 2001, 11) Both Clement and Kristeva go on, here; in a letter to Clement, Kristeva writes: Whether chance or necessity, I don’t know—your stay in Dakar on the one hand, the fascination that Africa has exerted on ethnologists and writers for centuries on the other—but here we find ourselves fixed on a “sacred” that is increasingly “black”! Black women, black religions: our journey continues to link the three enigmas—the feminine, the sacred, and the various fates of Africanness—in a metaphor that becomes more substantial as we write, and which further complicates, if need be, what Freud in his time called the “dark”—that is, the black—continent. (Clement and Kristeva 2001, 21) In a move that should be deeply troubling to readers, Kristeva and Clement appear to be gifting sacrality, almost exclusively and without a sense of colonial irony, to “black women.” These pages manifest a surprisingly crude orientalism. In speaking of a “black continent,” Kristeva withholds the critical sensibility she so readily mobilizes in considering the fate of white European society. Here her writing is brittle, essentialist and undifferentiated, as if Africa itself is a monolithic country. Senegal is apparently singularly representative for the whole of Africa, and the Platonic blackness of that entire continent is also apparently visible, unaltered, in New York. Kristeva moves beyond an essentialism of African culture to an essentialism of all “black women,” whether they are Senegalese or American. In its particularity, these remarks evidence Kristeva’s blindness to the colonial resonances of her inquiry. In their generality, these remarks are one instance of Kristeva’s failure to define the terms she uses, a failure that makes it difficult to evaluate her arguments, and perhaps contextualize the uglier aspects of her writing. This is perhaps most disappointing because so much of Kristeva’s own work and theories can (and should) be used to combat such essentialism and such limited, narrow definitions of race, identity and the sacred. Social psychologists such as Derek Hook have used Kristeva’s theory of abjection to take account of prediscursive racism (racism that is “bodily, affective, pre-symbolic”) (Hook 2006) with good effect, and much is made of the theory of abjection by those interested in debates regarding nationalism and national identity (see Ziorek 1995; Kinnvall 2005).

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Kristeva herself has written at some length in Strangers to Ourselves and Nations without Nationalism on the politics of multiculturalism, racism and nationalism, but in these texts, she understands racism purely as a fear of the other, a xenophobia. This fear of the other “springs out of the unwillingness or capacity to recognize the mechanism of the projection and introjection motivating hatred and resentment” (Sjoholm 2005, 48), but Kristeva fails to see that she suffers from this very failure herself. When she casts all “black women” as being manifestations of “Africanness” (whatever that might mean), she is projecting onto these women her issues regarding her own identity as a white post-colonial woman. It does not matter that she imbues those she projects onto with so-called sacredness. This is, again, a problematic projection. No matter how interesting the discussion of various instances of the feminine and the sacred are between the two “leaders of European feminist thought” (according to the book’s dust jacket) may be, there is no getting away from this problem. It is perhaps ironic that a thinker so concerned with pointing out how women in the West have suffered from limited models of the feminine, is so unaware of her own lack of models of femaleness. When Kristeva speaks of “American ‘Africanness’” she betrays her own very limited conceptual framework. There is nothing to link the “peasant women” of Senegal whom Clement writes of with the New Yorkers Kristeva compares them to, other than the colour of their skin, though even this, most likely, is not in common.8 Sentences like the above demonstrate how ­Kristeva’s concern is not with the alleviation of the suffering of the psyches of women, but specifically of white women. In this instance, Black women are simply a canvas upon which Clement and Kristeva throw their theories. It is sadly ironic that the thinker who developed the model of abjection should be so blind to her own abjection of a whole race of people. All of this illustrates a useful point—that no thinker and her work is ever unambiguously good, and like many other “greats” of European philosophy,9 Kristeva and her writings have more than their fair share of ethical problems. The question each reader must ask of herself when encountering significant problems of the type found in This Incredible Need to Believe and The Feminine and The Sacred is this: to what extent can the value of a thinker’s theories and work be extricated from personal bigotry? The careful sifting of theories from prejudice is a slow and painful process, the value of which is contestable. Much like many notable scholars10 who regard the work of Martin Heidegger as fundamentally soiled by his political (and personal) views, there will be people who legitimately decide that the psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva cannot be engaged with safely, due to her racism. Ultimately, a decision as to how to engage with any controversial thinker will be a personal one. Despite the shocking and often unconscious racism displayed in some of Kristeva’s work, I think it is possible to separate out the good from the bad, and moreover, that it is important to do so. This means maintaining vigilance while reading, and a hermeneutics of suspicion towards the text—things which one ought to maintain with any scholarly work. More than this, Kristeva’s work can

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actually be used to combat racism such as the type displayed in her own writing, as demonstrated by those working on issues of nationalism, as cited above.

Conclusion Three clear threads can be drawn throughout the canon of the work of Julia ­Kristeva. First, a preoccupation with reducing psychological suffering, perhaps specifically of (white) women in the West. Second, she argues that religion, and specifically Catholicism, plays the largest role in shaping the psyche and subject identity of women, and that this has, and continues to have, damaging effects. Third, Kristeva believes—without hesitation or doubt—that the only way of achieving anything close to liberation and peace is by engaging head-on with the influences that have shaped one’s subjectivity. She creates theories as to how these influences take effect on the individual, which can and have been applied to situations outside of psychoanalysis, although she is clear to elevate psychoanalysis as the optimal method. There are of course problems with this. It must be noted that only the very wealthy, both in time and money, can afford to engage in years of psychoanalytic practice. In this regard, Kristeva can legitimately be accused of elitism. There are also issues to be considered regarding the prominent position she gives to the role of Catholicism in the shaping of the psyche of those in the West. Her view seems to negate or ignore the influence of globalization and multiculturalism. Would a British Hindu or Sikh necessarily have the same issues regarding motherhood and the maternal as a Catholic? If the prime role of the maternal is to be something abjected, in part due to its impossibility, where does this leave people who do not share this Catholic tradition of the Virgin birth? Kristeva remains a challenging thinker. But the challenges are not due only to the obscurity of her prose. As we have seen in this essay, she is seemingly unaware of her own racism and the problems this throws up for her theories and thought. So much of the work of Kristeva is concerned with thresholds, liminality, borders and those things and individuals who cross them and blur boundaries. It is a shame that so much of her work seems to point towards the maintenance of limitation.

Notes 1 Clare O’Farrell (1990, 2) writes: “Although her recent work is fairly readable (if one excludes certain psychoanalytic excesses), the earlier work often places a wall of impenetrable technical jargon before the reader.” 2 The psycholinguist Jacques Lacan was a student of Freud, and considered himself to be his “natural intellectual heir.” Lacan’s theories of child development are complex and not always considered helpful or even sensical. He is considered by some to be phobic and hateful of women, an accusation supported by his phallocentric theories and antifemale texts. Although there are many problems with his work, much of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic models have emerged in response to Lacan’s, and his legacy is wide ranging.

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 3 Kristeva is interested in the practical effects of religion (such as how rules about ­contraception impact the daily life of religious people) as well as the emotional and affective implications such rules have (such as how women feel about their role in creation, and body autonomy).   4 Kristeva’s biography of Melanie Klein, as part of her trilogy on female genius, locates her own theories in response to those of Klein and is essential reading to understand how the two theorists relate.  5 The “we” and the “our” here are perhaps specifically white Western women. This problem is addressed later.  6 In English, the word “feminine” is a gendered term; it refers to the culturally constructed behaviours, experiences and characteristics associated often—but importantly not always—with the female sex. We distinguish between “female”—meaning a collection of biological markers such as genitals and chromosomes that place individuals into a certain scientifically ordained category—and “feminine.” The importance of separating sex from gender has been long argued by feminists (Rubin 1975; Millet 1971; Haslanger 2000) who consider the cementing of the two together to be a major cause of oppression to both women and men, because it is a form of biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny. In the French language, there is no such distinction: the French word “feminine” can be, and is, translated as either female or feminine. This causes much confusion and opens up many questions. For a comprehensive and interesting discussion of the difficulties found when discussing sex and gender in European languages without clear distinctions between the two, see Braidotti (2002, 285–307).  7 In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir claims that one of the three ways a woman can be “inauthentic” is to be “the Mystic.” She claims there are two forms of mysticism; masculine and feminine. The feminine is, according to Beauvoir, a form of love of the self-turned in (de Beauvoir 2011, 276). Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Vintage, 2011) xxv, 822 p. at 276+.   8 A frequent manifestation of racism is the idea that Black people “all look the same.” The tonal difference in skin colour between peoples from different parts of the world is huge. To speak of “black women” based on their skin colour, as a homogeneous group is impossible, and is in effect what Kristeva is attempting to do here.   9 Martin Heidegger is an example of this, as a supporter of Nazism. 10 Scholars such as Jürgen Habermas, Theodore Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas all claim that Heidegger’s Nazism is inseparable from his thought, and that it highlights fundamental flaws with the latter.

References Beauvoir, Simone. 2011. The Second Sex. London, UK: Vintage. Bradley, Arthur. 2008. “‘Mystic Atheism’: Julia Kristeva’s Negative Theology.” Theology & Sexuality 14(3): 279–92. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. “The Uses and Abuses of the Sex / Gender Distinction in European Feminist Practices.” Thinking Differently: A Reader in European Women’s Studies. Edited by Gabrielle Griffin and Rosi Braidotti. London, UK: Zed Books. 285–307. Butler, Judith. 1989. “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva.” Hypatia, 3(3): 104–18. Chopp, Rebbeca. 1992. Body/Text in Julia Kristeva: Religion, Women, and Psychoanalysis. New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Clement, Catherine and Julia Kristeva. 2001. The Feminine and the Sacred. New York, NY: Palgrave. Goodnow, Katherine J. 2010. Kristeva in Focus: From Theory to Film Analysis. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

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Haslanger, Sally. 2002. “Gender and Race: (What) are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?” Noûs, 34(1): 31–55. Hook, Derek. 2006. “‘Pre-discursive’ racism.” Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 16(3): 207–32. Kinnvall, Catarina. 2005. “Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security.” Political Psychology, 5(5): 741–67. Kristeva, Julia. 1977. About Chinese Women. London, UK: Boyars. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1987. In the Beginning Was Love. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1991a. Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words: Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette: A Trilogy. 3 Volumes. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1991b. Strangers to Ourselves. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1993. Nations without Nationalism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Melanie Klein. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 2011. This Incredible Need to Believe. Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Millett, Kate. 1971. Sexual Politics. London, UK: Granada Publishing Ltd. O’Farrell, Clare. “Review of John Lechte, Julia Kristeva.” http://www.michelfoucault.com/ ecrits/kristeva.pdf (accessed January 2014). O’Grady, Kathleen. 2003. “The Tower and the Chalice: Julia Kristeva and the Story of Santa Barbar.” Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives Contents. Edited by Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady and Judith L. Poxon. London, UK: Routledge. 85–101. Oliver, Kelly. 1993. “Julia Kristeva’s Feminist Revolutions.” Hypatia, 8(3): 94–114. Plonowska Ziorek, Ewa. 1995. “The Uncanny Style of Kristeva’s Critique of Nationalism.” Postmodern Culture, 5(2). Rubenstein, Mary Jane. 2010. “This Incredible Need to Believe—by Julia Kristeva.” Modern Theology 26(4): 666–9. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Edited by Rayna Reiter. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. 157–210. Walton, Heather, ed. 2000. Self/Same/Other: Re-visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology (Playing the Texts). Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press.

30 Luce Irigaray (1930–) Patrice Haynes

Born in Belgium in the early 1930s and a French national since the late 1960s, Irigaray holds doctorates in linguistics and philosophy, and is a trained Lacanian psychoanalyst. In the backlash arising from her doctoral thesis published as Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), which damningly critiqued the androcentrism of both philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Irigaray lost her academic post in the Department of Psychoanalysis at Vincennes. However, the very same work propelled her to the forefront of the women’s movement in Europe and she has since gained international renown in academia. That Luce Irigaray’s work resists easy labelling is no doubt a reflection of her interdisciplinary training. It is not surprising that theorists and practitioners from fields as wide-ranging as gender studies, philosophy, theology, politics, pedagogy, dance, architecture and film have found her writings a fruitful, provocative resource. Yet for all their ambiguity and variety, the “organizing thread” running throughout Irigaray’s corpus is the need to rethink western discourse in terms of the two of sexual difference, rather than the one of sexual indifference (R. Jones 2011, 8). It is this insistence on rethinking subjectivity (as well as being and thought more generally) in terms of twoness rather than oneness, or even multiplicity, that provides Irigaray’s works with an underlying continuity, even as they vary in style and shift their points of focus. Perhaps due in part to her Catholic upbringing—she was baptized into the Catholic Church and educated in a Christian context—questions concerning religion and the divine have been of interest to Irigaray since her earliest writings (see 1985a, 191–202; 1985b, 86–105). This is noteworthy because feminist theory, especially feminist philosophy, tends to shun the topic of religion, dismissing it as hopelessly patriarchal, and thus inimical to women’s liberation. For sure, Irigaray’s work directs incisive criticisms towards the Christian tradition. However, she also views religion (particularly, Christianity and Indic traditions) as a resource containing latent insights that can help foster a culture of, as well as between,

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sexual difference. Significantly, it is not simply that Irigaray resists the anti-religious tenor typical of much feminist theory. More interestingly and contentiously, as Penelope Deutscher observes, she insists that the task of securing women’s becoming as women (rather than as man’s abject other) actually requires, among other things, substantial re-conceptions of the divine (1994, 89). Thus, for Irigaray, feminists cannot simply bypass God-talk, for such talk, she maintains, is central to any feminist theorizing which aims to motivate and inform the work of socio-cultural transformations that oppose patriarchal oppression. The main aim of this chapter is to offer a preliminary sketch of Irigaray’s reflections on religion and the notion of divinity. It first outlines Irigaray’s critique of monotheism before going on to discuss how her paradoxical notion of a sensible transcendental, which refuses the schism between divine transcendence and worldly immanence, is key to her development, particularly in her later writings, of what I will call a “religious humanism.”

The blind spot of monotheism: God and the forgetting of sexuate difference1 One of the signature moves in Irigaray’s authorship, particularly in her early, deconstructive phase, is to expose what she calls the “blind spot” of western discourse: its (unconscious) repression of the female body. In Speculum, she famously writes, “any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the ‘masculine’” (1985a, 133). For Irigaray, it is not simply that the subject of western discourse is referred to by male pronouns—man or mankind—despite supposedly representing both men and women but that subjectivity per se is male. In other words, maleness is inextricably bound up with what it is to be a subject. The problem with this, Irigaray contends, alongside feminists informed by Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work The Second Sex, is that the subject’s male identity can only be achieved given the disavowal of the other, namely, the female-feminine2 and all that is traditionally associated with it: bodiliness, materiality, immanence. It is thus “a logic of sacrifice and exclusion” (Weir 1996, 3) that founds the male subject and his “economy of the same.” There are two important consequences of such a sacrificial logic. First, there is no space available for women to exist as women. While western discourse presents “language,” “reason,” “subjectivity” and “being” as terms that are neutral with respect to sex and gender, and thus applicable to all human beings regardless of their sex, feminists like Irigaray are at pains to point out that the neutrality and universality said to characterize those terms are ultimately illusory. For on closer inspection it turns out—according to feminist analyses such as Irigaray’s, which take their cue from psychoanalytic theory (especially Jacques Lacan’s) and Derridean deconstruction—that language, reason, subjectivity and being are conceived in a way that uncritically assume the normative status of the male sex. The inherent maleness of western discourse can be described as “phallocentric.” This phrase enables feminists to articulate how the western symbolic order—its

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s­ ystem of meaning and representation as this includes language, socio-cultural values, and a model of subjectivity—is based upon the “law of the father,” or the phallus. Notoriously, phallocentric thought produces a series of binary ­oppositions—mind/ body, culture/nature, transcendence/immanence, male/female, God/world, and so on—which are construed hierarchically, such that one of the terms of the binary is privileged by virtue of its association with the (male) phallus. Given the phallocentrism of the western symbolic order it must follow that the only place from which to speak and think is from the male subject position. The female-feminine perspective cannot be articulated for it necessarily stands outside the symbolic order as its other and, thus, can only ever denote lack (of the phallus) or, conversely, a vertiginous excess that defies all intelligibility. Sexuate difference is thereby unacknowledged by the western symbolic, which is thoroughly monosexual, recognizing only one sex: the male. In a moment, we will highlight some of the ways in which she charges theological discourse with phallocentrism. But before doing so let us note the second consequence of the logic of sacrifice which Irigaray claims is characteristic of western discourse. Try as it might to bury the female-feminine without trace, the western symbolic order, Irigaray maintains, is never entirely successful in its repression of the female body. On close scrutiny, it can be shown that it is an order plagued by blind spots—silences, aporias and tensions—that betray its apparent coherence and totality. This is because such blind spots hint at an otherness that is not merely the passive, innocuous underside of male identity but a potentially productive power capable of creating a quite different symbolic order: one that asserts and acclaims the female sex in ways attuned to the life of the female body. Because the male subject is (historically) founded in opposition to what he is not, in other words, the femalefeminine, it is vital that this negated otherness is held to carry no meaning apart from representing a negativity that falls short of male normativity. But this leaves man in a rather perilous position. For there is always the dangerous prospect that the other might start to speak with her own voice, thus destabilizing the primacy of the male subject (Irigaray 1985a, 135). Irigaray’s work seeks to enact a Copernican revolution, whereby the female-feminine ground of western discourse begins to find cultural symbols and images by which to represent itself in positive terms, thus paving the way for an ethics and a spirituality of sexuate difference. According to Irigaray, “Man has been the subject of discourse … And the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and every discourse, is always masculine and paternal, in the West” (2004a, 8). For Irigaray, the economy of the same discussed above is underwritten by God the Father. As we might expect then, Irigaray’s critical eye identifies a whole host of ways in which Christian discourse (particularly those of the Catholic tradition) serves to blot out the constitutive role of the maternal body, and in doing so facilitate the demeaning of actual women. These include the overshadowing of mother-daughter relations by the patrilineal trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost (1993, 62); the doctrine and ritual of the Eucharist, which is celebrated by father and son in the absence of women (Ibid., 26); and even the intense experiences of medieval female mystics, which, though alluding to

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an indeterminate yet pregnant space where female otherness and divine otherness coincide, only ever unsettle male discourse rather than inaugurate a female, nonphallocentric subjectivity (1985a, 191–202).3 Driving Irigaray’s deconstruction of various aspects of the Christian tradition is her critique of its conception of God, who is not only upheld as male but is pictured as a transcendent Absolute, wholly divorced from the (female-feminine) material world. Indeed, Irigaray wonders, “Doesn’t ‘original sin’ consist in dissociating human and divine?” (1991a, 173). For Irigaray, there are three main problems arising from positing God as a super-sensible being. First, the maternal-material origin of life and subjectivity is denied in favour of an idealized, otherworldly origin, and so the Genesis story can be told: “man originates from God and woman from man” (Irigaray 1996, 64). The second issue is related to Irigaray’s understanding of God as the guarantor of man’s identity. Drawing on Lacan’s account of subject formation, Irigaray holds that God provides man with a mirror with which to identify himself—God is man’s ideal ego, the image of his perfection. The trouble is, of course, that man inevitably fails to live up to this ideal: man is not fully independent, autonomous and perfectly wise; he is not immutable, transcendent and immortal. God the Father is thus a mirror which reflects all that man aspires to be and brings into stark relief his all-too human limits. The transcendent God of monotheism is, to use Deutscher’s words, an “impossible ideal” (1994, 94) in view of which man will always fall short. Deutscher goes on to note that it is precisely this “falling short” which necessitates the role of woman as man’s negative, fallen image (Ibid., 95). All that man does not want to admit of himself, insofar as it highlights his distance from God and thereby undermines his identity as self-same, he projects onto woman: bodiliness, becoming, evil, and so on. Caught between the idealised other of God and the abject otherness of the female-feminine, man, without realizing it, finds himself trapped “in a prison of self-sufficiency and a clarity made of the shadows of denial” (Irigaray 1985a, 192). Indeed, Irigaray writes, “Only the dead see God” (Ibid., 306), for one must strive to transcend the maternal-material reality that gives and sustains life, to ascend towards the unmoving, immovable One. Following on from this, the final, and quite tragic, problem Irigaray associates with the rupture between God and the world is the estrangement it produces between the two of sexuate difference. In her most recent book, In the Beginning, She Was, Irigaray summarizes this point well. “The cultural fecundity of the meeting between man and woman has remained unknown [in western culture since the ancient Greeks] … It has been extrapolated into God, the origin of all that is” (2013, 53). Along rather Nietzschean lines, Irigaray criticizes man’s fidelity to a transcendent God who stands in contradistinction to worldly immanence and effectively robs it of all goodness, truth and beauty, since these qualities are attributed to God. Contra Nietzsche, and neo-Nietzscheans such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Irigaray is wary of affirming a pure becoming because she believes that this too elides sexuate difference. Certainly, it might seem like Irigaray misses a trick here.

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In the attempt to subvert the phallocratic order a more promising approach might be to deconstruct sexual difference altogether in favour of multiplicity, which, following Deleuze and Guattari, may be understood as differential forces prior to any identity, sexed or otherwise.4 But Irigaray suspects that the affirmation of sheer multiplicity is yet another expression of man’s desire to refuse his corporeal limits, this time by seemingly losing himself on the one hand to a ferment of indeterminate creative powers and, on the other, finding himself commensurate with those powers such that he can become any body whatsoever. For Irigaray, the dream of disembodiment sneaks behind any materialist or deconstructivist vision that does not begin with sexual difference. Rather than espouse an ontology characterized by “disintegrations, explosions, splits, or multiplicities” (1994, 33), which she believes to be abstractions that forget human bodies and corporeal life more generally, Irigaray’s constructive project begins with what she contends is the fundamental reality of the two of sexual difference. Thus, the universal, according to Irigaray, is not one. Nor is it dissolved into a flux of multiplicity, which, Irigaray maintains, turns out to be no more than the multiplication of the (male) one (2000b, 145). Instead, the universal is two: female and male. Importantly, for Irigaray, fidelity to the reality of sexual difference calls for the affirmation of what she labels a “sensible transcendental.” With this intriguing figure Irigaray seeks to re-conceive transcendence as that which is continuous with the world rather than severed from it. In short, a sensible transcendental implies an immanent transcendence, and with this a different kind of spirituality and understanding of divinity.

Irigaray’s sensible transcendental Irigaray’s sensible transcendental is a rich and polysemic term that has garnered much commentary by her readers, particularly as it relates to her feminist re-envisioning of religion (Haynes 2012, 87–125; Kerr 1997, 89–112; and Lorraine 1999, 67–89). For the purpose of this chapter, I will concentrate on three of its salient aspects: an emphasis on humanity’s corporeal origins; sexuate difference as a limit in nature; and the spiritualization of nature. Before discussing these, it is worth quoting Irigaray at length on the idea of transcendence as a this-worldly phenomenon: Transcendence in this case escapes fabrication … It results from a respect and a cultivation of the real, a natural real: the mine and this of the other, but also the real of nature itself and all the living beings. Articulation between nature or life and transcendence becomes a new task incumbent on us. A transcendence which now remains alive, sensible and even carnal. A transcendence that cannot be reduced to a mental idea or belief, but is incarnate, also in another. Transcendence in this way always remains a mystery for us, but not only because it stays beyond our earthly sojourn, rather because it remains irreducibly other, with respect to us. (2004b, 148; emphases added)

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An important stress in the above passage is the idea of transcendence as that which is intimately wedded to the earth, to nature. When Irigaray juxtaposes two seemingly antithetical categories, “sensible” and “transcendental,” she does so precisely to reject the attempt to enforce their total separation by phallocentric thought. To pick up on the first aspect mentioned earlier, Irigaray’s notion of a sensible transcendental seeks to preserve for philosophy and theology a “memory of the flesh” (2004a, 159, 178, 179) precisely by ensuring that the subject never loses sight of its maternal-material conditions5—that is, its beginnings in pregnancy and birth, and sexuate nature more widely. This takes us on to the second aspect of Irigaray’s sensible transcendental: sexuate difference as a limit in nature. Rather controversially, Irigaray claims that “The natural … is at least two: male and female. This division is not secondary nor unique to human kind. It cuts across all realms of the living which, without it, would not exist” (1996, 37; see also 1993, 108). The reason why many feminists would find statements such as this alarming is their suggestion that sexuate difference is rooted in nature and, therefore, determines the psycho-social lives and capabilities of men and women. Here we find ourselves confronting the vexed question of Irigaray’s essentialism.6 Is it the case that—and here is the essentialist charge—Irigaray believes there is a pre-discursive femalefeminine reality which women universally and invariably share? The problem with an essentialist ontology of sexual difference is that it (arguably) elides differences between women and justifies their subordinate status in society as simply the outworking of nature. Without entering into the finer points regarding where to position Irigaray in relation to the perennial dispute over essentialism in feminist theory, in this chapter I will share Alison Stone’s view that, in her later works, Irigaray advances a “realist” essentialism whereby she holds that sexuate difference is the most basic ontological distinction: being (or nature) is two, male and female (Stone 2006, 1-17ff).7 On this interpretation, Irigaray conceives nature itself as sexed in the sense that it is characterized by two basic rhythms or dynamics that correspond to the structure of sexuate difference in human beings. Importantly, Irigaray does not view being in terms of a fixed substance but as creative, open-ended becomings that are nevertheless distinctively sexed. These points concerning Irigaray’s metaphysical conception of sexuate difference are not, I would argue, merely incidental to the religious elements of her work. Indeed, I believe they are integral to her concept of a sensible transcendental. This is because, for Irigaray, sexuate difference inscribes an insuperable limit in nature that ought to be respected, such that no one subject (male or female) appropriates nature for itself, declaring narcissistically “I am the whole” (1996, 36). Moreover, the limit of sexuate difference, which Irigaray also refers to as an “interval,” “the negative” or even “abyss,” establishes an irreducible otherness between men and women who are thereby rendered “each transcendent to the other” (2000a, 84–93). But Irigaray is keen to stress that the transcendence between the two of sexuate difference is a “horizontal transcendence” (2004b, 178 and 189–190) based on an incarnate and living (even if repressed) difference. She writes, “The mystery [of the sexuate other]—here also horizontal, rather than located in the vertical rela-

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tion between man and his God—permits women and men to go along their own spiritual path” (2004b, 182). While the idea of going along one’s own spiritual path might raise fears that Irigaray is advocating some sort of spiritual autism, which would see women and men developing spiritual lives entirely isolated from each other (as man is isolated from a transcendent God), this is certainly not what she intends, as we will see in the next section. Let us now turn to the third aspect of Irigaray’s sensible transcendental I identified: the spiritualization of nature. While de Beauvoir famously asserts, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1997, 295), Irigaray maintains “I am born a woman, but I must still become that woman that I am by nature” (1996, 107). Distancing herself from de Beauvoir, Irigaray urges women to cultivate a distinctly female way of life—of speaking, thinking and relating—which remains faithful to their sexuate nature. She writes, “It is a matter of demanding a culture, of wanting and elaborating a spirituality, a subjectivity and an alterity appropriate to this gender: the female” (Ibid., 107). Once again, the spectre of essentialism begins to loom and we will return to this prickly topic in the following section. But for now, it is important to appreciate that, for Irigaray, sexuate difference is a reality that must be cultivated, that is, given symbolic expression which would usher in a culture of sexuate difference. Such cultivation is a movement of transcendence or spirit. But not one which requires us to overcome the (sexed) body, or nature more broadly; rather it is a movement that spiritualizes, we might even say divinizes, the corporeal. Once the limit of sexuate difference is respected, nature need not be “abolished in the spiritual, rather the concrete spiritual consists in the cultivation of the natural” (Ibid., 51). In conceiving a sensible transcendental as that which confounds any sharp distinctions between body and spirit, nature and culture, divine and world, envisaging these as dynamically entangled with each other, Irigaray appeals to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation and to eastern traditions. The former refers to the Christian belief that Jesus is God made flesh. Of course, Irigaray is fully aware of how Jesus’ maleness has been used to justify women’s spiritual inferiority. However, she argues that his maleness should not be downplayed precisely because it emphasizes his sexed bodiliness, which is thereby divinized. For Irigaray, Christianity promises “the respect for the incarnation of all bodies (men’s and women’s) as potentially divine; nothing more nor less than each man and each woman being virtually gods” (1997, 202). But she is clear that it can only make good this promise if it recognizes that Jesus represents only a partial incarnation of the divine in the human; a full one would require the becoming divine of women upheld by a symbolic exalting of mother-daughter relations (Ibid., 209). When Irigaray turns to the teaching of eastern religious philosophies she is very much inspired by the attention given to the breath and breathing in Buddhist and Tantric practices of meditation.8 Reflecting on these practices she writes, “Breath ensures the joining between body and soul … Indispensible for life, breath is also the means, the medium to accede to spiritual life as an irreducible dimension of human subjectivity” (Irigaray 2002, 149). Breath is that which spiritualizes the sexed body but breath is always a living, elemental energy, not some otherworldly spirit.9

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Becoming divine: spiritualizing the human In her influential essay “Divine Women,” Irigaray boldly asserts that “The only task, the only obligation laid upon us [by the idea of God]: is to become divine men and women, to become perfectly, to refuse to allow parts of ourselves to shrivel and die that have the potential for growth and fulfilment” (1993, 68–9; emphasis added). This is an audacious invitation that sometimes outrages but typically inspires her readership. But what does she mean when she declares that women need a divine in their own image (Ibid., 63)? And how does this relate to becoming divine men and women? In responding to the first question we will inevitably address the second since the two are related. One thing Irigaray does not wish to suggest with her call for a divine in the feminine is “resurrecting or creating female goddesses from a mythic prehistory” (Grosz 1993, 203; see also Irigaray 1993, 60 and 81). The trouble with contemporary western Goddess movements is, as Morny Joy explains, that they all too easily slide into reactionary accounts of women’s “special bond with nature” (Joy 2006, 118–19). Irigaray’s idea of a female divine is a subtle one. It aims to describe something like a horizon of ideality or perfectibility that both encourages and guides a woman’s self-transcendence or becoming. According to Irigaray, “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” (Irigaray 1993, 64). Here we must introduce two important qualifications. First, this horizon is not supposed to be a static telos representing an eternal ideal of “woman” that actual women are supposed to realize. Judith Poxon worries that Irigaray’s divine ends up repeating a Platonic move whereby “woman” is posited as a transcendent, normative ideal that is the goal of women’s becoming (Poxon 2003, 45). The issue underlying fears such as Poxon’s is that Irigaray’s appeal to a female divine assumes an essentialist view of women, thus reproducing the very logic of “saming” that she finds so objectionable in the phallocentric system. I do not think arguments such as Poxon’s can be easily dismissed. However, Irigaray is not unaware of the dangers. This is why she is keen to stress that the focus is always on becoming divine, for “The becoming of women is never over and done with, is always in gestation” (1993, 63). Irigaray is willing to run the risk of essentialism because as we have seen she does not want to advocate a pure becoming, à la Nietzsche. For Irigaray, becoming divine women and men requires respect for the limit that demarcates our “sexuate belonging” (2004b, 148), thus ensuring that one’s self-transcendence is not at the expense of the other, especially the other of sexuate difference. God, she says, “helps us and leads us in the path of becoming … [and] keeps track of our limits and our infinite possibilities” (1993, 67). The second qualification is that Irigaray’s female divine is not severed from the sensible world. For sure, it is a figure of ideality that points to what is not (yet) and in that respect can be deemed a “vertical” transcendence. But divinity, for Irigaray, must always be understood in terms of a sensible transcendental: that which is not yet is not some otherworldly consummation but a historical p­ ossibility.

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Thus, self-transcendence, as Irigaray sees it, is never a process of disincarnation but one that is always “in and through the body” (2004a, 124). Irigaray’s essay “Divine Women” productively engages with Ludwig ­Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841). In this work, the Left Hegelian philosopher argues that “Theology is Anthropology … there is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and consequently, no distinction between the divine and human subject” (Feuerbach 1989, xvii). For Feuerbach, God is not an objective reality independent of human minds but is a human projection of ideals and qualities that actually express the highest human accomplishments. The point for Feuerbach is that humanity must come to recognize that God is no more than a human creation, yet one that offers a mirror or image by which humanity can discern a path for its own self-realization and fulfilment. Irigaray accepts Feuerbach’s functionalist approach to the divine and religion. However, unlike Feuerbach she emphasizes that humanity comprises two genders—men and women—and that to date God has only served as a mirror for the male sex, thus enabling the confirmation of his subjectivity. Irigaray contends, “Woman has no mirror wherewith to become woman. Having a God and becoming one’s gender go hand in hand … A female god is still to come” (1993, 67). And this will only be realized, she believes, if women imagine a divine for themselves. Several feminist theologians have objected to Irigaray’s adoption of Feuerbach’s anthropological theism. The chief problem centres on her non-realist construal of God since, for Irigaray, God is denied any ontological reality outside of female (or male) subjectivity. Serene Jones, for example, cautions against such a move precisely because it offers no space for divine otherness. She fears that with Irigaray “female desire has consumed God” (S. Jones 1993, 138): a female divine is no more than a projection of woman’s desire and hopes for what she might become. On this picture, love of God is equivalent to love of self. Clearly for those feminists wishing to retain an orthodox Christian understanding of God as a transcendent reality, incommensurably other to the human, the journey with Irigaray can only go so far (see also Bacon 2007, 229; Daggers 2010, 203–4). In writings subsequent to “Divine Women,” Irigaray increasingly invokes what we might call a “religious” or “‘spiritual humanism,” which plainly advances a non-realist view of God. In an essay titled “Fulfilling Our Humanity” she writes: The religious aspect of our becoming has not been envisioned enough as a way to achieve a greater perfection of our humanity. Human identity and divine identity have been artificially separated. And we generally fail to recognize that becoming divine corresponds to becoming perfectly human. (2004, 193; emphasis added) The vital point Irigaray tirelessly reiterates is that humanity is fundamentally two not one: men and women, who are qualitatively different but have equal dignity. In her critique of Irigaray’s interpretation of divinity, Jones does not simply highlight the incompatibility of a non-realist God with orthodox Christianity, she

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also questions how differences between human persons can be embraced “if the difference between God and humanity cannot be affirmed” (S. Jones 1993, 141), particularly since the divine-human relation is held, by Irigaray’s own admission, to carry highly potent normative significance (Ibid.,138). However, I believe that Irigaray’s spiritual humanism does not simply rehash Feuerbach’s projection thesis, albeit extended to include women as well as men. Her account of a sensible transcendental enables her to develop a metaphysics of sexuate difference that provides the cosmic scene for a spiritual humanism that resists reducing the (sexuate) other to the same, even as it jettisons a realist depiction of God. For Irigaray, sexuate difference names an ontological limit running through the entire cosmos. But, as we saw earlier, she insists that sexuate difference is a reality that must be cultivated. Creating a female divine, one that reflects an always provisional and multifaceted image of female accomplishment, thus offering women a basic orientation in their becoming as women, is part of this work of cultivation. Notably, that cultivation which tentatively guides sexuate becoming according to the divine—in other words, open-ended ideals—is related to what Irigaray calls a “vertical transcendence” (2000a, 18; 2004b, 189)10 and is a form of self-transcendence or becoming-divine. Once again, we must appreciate that Irigaray rehabilitates the concept of transcendence so that it always remains “rooted in the earth” (1993, 69) while promising creative renewal in the here and now. In addition to revising the idea of a vertical transcendence, we have seen that Irigaray also emphasizes a horizontal transcendence: the irreducible otherness between the two of sexuate difference. Crucially, for Irigaray, the cultivation of one’s sexuate belonging (a vertical transcendence) must always occur alongside the cultivation of one’s relations with the sexuate other (a horizontal transcendence). This dual cultivation defines the “spiritual task of our age” (2004b, 171–85), and is the very spiritualization of humanity and even nature itself. According to Irigaray, the other, especially the sexuate other, presents one with a “mystery.” Respecting this mystery means appreciating that “some part of lived experience will remain incomprehensible, inaccessible to affect or thought, strange and even foreign” (2004b, 182). In western discourse the notion of “limit” often carries pejorative overtones denoting, for example, incompleteness and impediment. But Irigaray seeks to rethink “limit” in positive ways: Renouncing possession of the other becomes not just a simple ascetic privation, but the means of achieving a kind of relation we do yet know, one that is more religious and at the same time more likely to attain beatitude in the here and now. A beatitude not granted to those who make the way alone, but rather to those who try to share the way with the other, in the respect for different identities and journeys. (Ibid., 182) Serene Jones fears that, by renouncing divine otherness as that which is genuinely distinct from the human subject, Irigaray ends up advocating a logic of the same

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despite herself. But this is not quite the whole story because Irigaray preserves the idea of an otherness irreducible to the self—namely, the other of sexuate difference, a this-worldly transcendence. As the above quotation highlights, for Irigaray, becoming-divine is never an entirely subjective project since it is always intersubjective, a journey for women and men in relation to each other, without the one seeking to take over the place of the other. Becoming-divine is thus a double gesture, “While I become me, I remember you” (2000a, 43). Indeed, Irigaray suggests that there is something divine about a certain way of relating to the sexuate other. When a woman and a man approach each other as two differently embodied subjects (rather than turning the other into an object), when they safeguard each other’s mystery (rather than seeking to appropriate it) and delight in the other’s flourishing precisely as an irreducible other, then they spiritualize the relation between them. It is in this way that love between the two of sexuate difference may be “cultivated and made divine” (1996, 139). With Irigaray, then, divinity is not merely a projection enabling the subject’s self-aggrandizement, nor is it even the otherness of the sexuate other. Rather, she tells us, “What we have to envision as absolute is the perfection of the relation [between the self and the other, especially the other who differs from me sexually]” (2004b, 183). According to Irigaray, “the highest human value” (Ibid., 183), which we can thereby consider divine, is precisely non-assimilative and mutually enhancing relations between women and men. Analyses of Irigaray’s account of the divine, which overly focus on her use of Feuerbach, such as Serene Jones’, underplay the import of her relational conception of subjectivity, which in turn is underpinned by a unique metaphysics of sexuate difference. Interestingly, Irigaray makes sporadic references to what she calls a “third term” (see, for example, 2004a, 13, 20 and 25). This is a rather elusive idea; however, it seems to articulate that which exceeds the woman-man dyad insofar as it cannot be collapsed into either one or both of the two. The third term thus names the interval between the two of sexuate difference. This is not an arid space simply marking the formal limit that maintains two distinct sexuate identities. Rather it is “a creative and generative locus” (1996, 46), enabling the two of sexuate difference to encounter each other in sensuous, affective exchanges that engender creative transformations in both, without, however, obliterating their respective sexuate being. A further, related way in which the third term can also be understood is as “a vital intermediary … an accessible transcendental that remains alive” (2004, 25). The third term is thus material, a sensible transcendental, which in this particular context refers to the materiality of sexuate nature preceding human life, namely, the cosmic ecology that is both the condition of, and sustains, all life. Irigaray considers the element air to be a sensible transcendental par excellence, for it is the “indispensible matter for life and for its transubstantiation in spirit” (1996, 148)—nothing can live without air and, given a religious attentiveness to breathing, it is air that affords the spiritualization of sexuate embodiment. For some feminist theologians, Irigaray’s third term is very much welcomed since it alludes to a divine beyond the two of sexuate difference. According to Mayra

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Rivera, God beyond the transcendence of interhuman encounters is a “radically inclusive reality” that gives all creatures, in their irreducible singularity, their space to be while opening them to “a relational infinity” such that they touch divinity itself (Rivera 2007, 137). While it may be possible to push Irigaray’s notion of the third in directions increasingly approaching Christian orthodoxy, Irigaray herself is clear about the basic parameters of her own position. For her, the religious objective must shift from adoration of a transcendent God-Father “towards the spirtualization of our living bodies, especially in the way we love nature, ourselves, our fellow humans and the other half of the human genus: those (masculine or feminine) who are different from us” (2000b, 58). Accordingly, spirituality for Irigaray is not to be found in attempts to flee the material world but in cultivating the experiences of everyday life: listening to music, contemplating nature and art, tasting foods and breathing perfumes (Irigaray 2004b, 187). Moreover, the spiritual becoming of humanity must centre on cultivating relations between the two of sexuate difference which can produce a love that is divine. But it must be appreciated that “It takes two to love. To know how to separate and how to come back together” (2004a, 61; emphasis added).

Concluding words Irigaray’s attempts to craft a model of divinity, religion and spirituality that challenges the phallocentric order anchored by western monotheistic traditions have very much been welcome by those feminists unwilling to cast, and consequently dismiss, religion as necessarily patriarchal. But, as to be expected, several critical reservations have been raised in response to Irigaray’s work on religion. In this chapter we have already touched on two significant issues, namely, the problem of essentialism and her non-realist, anthropological understanding of God. I have already suggested possible replies to these issues but they remain very much up for debate. Further problems arising from Irigaray’s treatment of religion include: the attribution of sexual difference to the divine given that divine transcendence may be said to exceed such categories (D’Costa 2000, 42–3); the possibility of belief in a consciously constructed divinity (Hollywood 1994, 175); the prioritization of sexual difference over other differences; and the apparent privileging of heterosexuality insofar as it would seem that “Irigaray excludes same-sex relationships … from participating in the realisation of spirit” ( Joy 2006, 97). Even if we find ourselves, in the end, unable to endorse Irigaray’s notion of a female divine as this would institute “the reign of lover couple-gods, divinized he’s and she’s, males and females” (2000b, 64), there is no doubt that her meditations on religion have richly irrigated the fields of theology and philosophy of religion, particularly as feminists engage with these. By tracing the link between subjectivity and the divine drawing on both Feuerbach and Lacan, Irigaray is able to disclose a deep symbolic level of male bias that cannot simply be sidestepped by either totally abandoning all references to the divine or by a preoccupation with more inclusive names for God. Her notion of a sensible transcendental indicates a way to refuse

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the rupture between mind and body, culture and nature, divine and human in ways that foster spiritualities focused on the flourishing of humanity, men and women, and living nature more generally. Most importantly, as Elizabeth Grosz rightly observes, Irigaray’s constructive interventions in thinking religion is less a demand for “religious conversion” and more “a political and textual strategy for the positive reinscription of women’s bodies, identities, and futures in relation to and in exchange with the other sex” (1993, 214). For this reason, Irigaray’s thoughts on religion are of vital import for those seeking to outwit the economy of the same, for the sake of a socio-cultural transformation that would see equitable relations between irreducible, embodied subjects.

Notes 1 The term “sexuate” translates Irigaray’s “sexué.” For Irigaray, the terms “sexuate” and “sexual” are more or less interchangeable; however, they refer to an ontological, rather than biological, difference and, moreover, do not signify a person’s sexual preferences. 2 I use the term “female-feminine” to capture the French word “féminin,” which covers both the English word “female” and “feminine.” I will sometimes use the words “female” and “feminine” separately (mostly for ease of reading) but it must always be seen to abbreviate “female-feminine.” Importantly, Irigaray does not make a sharp distinction between sex and gender, unlike much Anglophone feminist theory. 3 For a critique of Irigaray’s reading of female mystics see Hollywood (1994). 4 For a feminist reading of Deleuze and Guattari, see Grosz (1994, 187–210). 5 The word “transcendental” is a technical one in modern philosophy. Kant uses it to refer (baldly put) to the conditions for the possibility of experience. For Kant, these conditions are necessarily a priori, logical, and could not be sensible as Irigaray proposes. 6 For a helpful discussion on the issue of essentialism in Irigaray’s work see Schor (1994, 57–78). 7 “[B]etween a man and a woman the negativity [i.e. difference] is … of an ontological, irreducible type” (Irigaray 1995, 110). 8 For a useful summary of Irigaray’s “eastern turn” see Joy (2006, 124–41). 9 As Rachel Jones observes, the image of breath allows Irigaray to begin a rapprochement between eastern and western philosophical and religious traditions, for it recalls how the Greek term for soul or spirit, psych, also meant breath (R. Jones 2011, 128). Notably, Irigaray diverges from non-duality schools of eastern thought because they are at odds with her insistence on the twoness of sexual difference. For Irigaray’s comments on “oneness” and “being-two” in the practice and culture of yoga see (2008, 37–52). 10 Irigaray’s vertical transcendence is also linked to a female (as well as male) genealogy and to interrelations between women at a socio-cultural level (2000b, 61).

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Irigaray, Luce. 2004a [1984]. Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Catherine Burke and Gillian Gill. London and New York: Continuum. Originally published in French in 1984. Irigaray, Luce. 2004b. Key Writings. London, UK: Continuum. Irigaray, Luce. 2008. Conversations. London, UK: Continuum. Irigaray, Luce. 2014. In the Beginning She Was. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Jones, Rachel. 2011. Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. London, UK: Polity Press. Jones, Serene. 1993. “This God Which is Not One: Irigaray and Barth on the Divine.” Transfigurations: Theology and the French Feminists. Edited by C.W. Maggie Kim, Susan M. St. Ville and Susan M. Simonatisis. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. 199–214; 109-141. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Jones, Serene. 1995. “Divining Women: Irigaray and Feminist Theologies.” Yale French Studies 87: 42–67. Joy, Morny. 2006. Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender and Religion. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Kerr, Fergus. 1997. Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity. London, UK: SPCK. Lorraine, Tasmin. 1999. Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Poxon, Judith L. 2003. “Corporeality and Divinity: Irigaray and the Problem of the Ideal.” Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives. Edited by Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady and Judith L. Poxon. London and New York: Routledge. 41–50. Rivera, Mayra. 2009. The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God. Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1983. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Schor, Naomi. 1994. “This Essentialism Which is Not One: Coming to Grips With Irigaray.” Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought. Edited by Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor and Maggie Whitford. New York, Chichester: Columbia University Press. 57–78. Stone, Alison. 2006. Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Weir, Allison. 1996. Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity. London and New York, Routledge. Whitford, Margaret. 1991. Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. London and New York: Routledge.

31 Alain Badiou (1937–) Hollis Phelps

Those approaching Alain Badiou’s philosophy for the first time might, at first glance, find his thought somewhat out of place among contemporary intellectual trends. Whereas the English-language reception of recent European philosophy has, to a large extent, been dominated by figures and themes that can roughly be labelled as poststructural, Badiou’s project, at least since the publication of his magnum opus, Being and Event, can be understood as an attempt to develop a rational, systematic philosophy, centred on the development of a mathematical, deductive ontology and a non-objective theory of truth and the subject. Although squarely rooted in the French and German philosophical traditions, he also takes up themes and analyses associated more with the Anglophone analytic traditions. A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens have thus referred to his philosophy as constituting a “postpoststructural moment” (Bartlett and Clemens 2010, 1). This is not to say that Badiou is by any means an outsider. Educated at the École Normale Supérieure, where he would later become chair of philosophy, Badiou’s intellectual trajectory is squarely rooted within the norms of French intellectual life. Like many of his contemporaries, his thought and political commitments were indelibly shaped by the student uprisings of May 1968. Indeed, the implications of this “event,” coupled with his penchant for mathematical formalization, serve as the backdrop for much of his early work, which was largely concerned with developing a materialist theory of the subject and historical change in light of radical political practice. It is with the publication of Being and Event in 1988, however, that Badiou’s philosophy finds mature expression, and it remains essential, albeit difficult, reading for anyone looking to gain entry into Badiou’s philosophy. In what follows, I provide a basic introduction to Badiou’s philosophy, focusing on the themes of being, truth and the subject, as these are articulated in Being and Event and, to some extent, the more recent Logics of Worlds, with an eye toward how these themes relate to religion and theology. I then discuss the

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place that Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism plays within Badiou’s ­philosophy. Although Badiou himself is an atheist, I suggest throughout that his thought r­ecapitulates key religious and theological notions, especially those found in Christianity.

Badiou’s ontology Following the path reopened by Heidegger, Badiou takes the question of being as primary for thought. Ontology, the science of being as such, is thus fundamental to philosophy. What distinguishes Badiou’s own ontology, however, is that it approaches the question of being from outside of philosophy itself. Philosophy certainly raises the question of being, but it cannot on its own terms provide an “answer” to that question. Badiou’s wager is that only mathematics can adequately address the question of being as such. Hence, Badiou’s somewhat infamous claim in the opening pages to Being and Event that “mathematics is ontology” (Badiou 2005, 4). Since understanding the sense of the identification of ontology with mathematics is crucial for grasping Badiou’s philosophy, it is helpful to briefly delineate the scope of the claim. To begin with, it is important to emphasize that when Badiou claims that mathematics is ontology, he means it literally rather than metaphorically: the claim “mathematics is ontology” expresses a real identification. Yet, it is also important to emphasize that the claim “mathematics is ontology” is a claim about discourse rather than being, or what there is; it is a claim about ontology, the science of being as such, rather than being itself. Badiou thus stresses, “The thesis that I support does not in any way declare that being is mathematical, which is to say composed of mathematical objectivities. It is not a thesis about the world but about discourse” (Badiou 2005, 8). Nevertheless, mathematics is, according to Badiou, perfectly suited as the discourse of being as such both in form and content, in how it thinks being and what it is able to grasp of being through the manner in which it thinks. Regarding form, mathematics is, as Justin Clemens and Jon Roffe observe, “as pure as reason gets” (Clemens and Roffe 2008, 350). Mathematics, in other words, thinks according to the universal rather than the particular, the general rather than the specific, the infinite rather than the finite; as a form of discourse, it is completely abstract, and for this reason it is the best language that we have for thinking being as such. But, as we will see in more detail below, for Badiou the identification of ontology with mathematics—and in Being and Event he identifies it with axiomatic set theory—is a claim about content as well: mathematics actually grasps or inscribes being qua being in its operations, because mathematics in Badiou’s hands is fundamentally concerned with the infinite. Before discussing this point in more detail in relation to the main themes of Badiou’s ontology, it is important to point out that Badiou’s call for a mathematical ontology is far from neutral. We should not, that is, confuse mathematical abstraction for dispassion when it comes to the investigation of being as such. Badiou

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insists that mathematics “provides philosophy with a weapon, a fearsome machine of thought, a catapult aimed at the bastions of ignorance, superstition, and mental servitude” (Badiou, 2004b, 16). Mathematics has “interrupted the sovereignty of myth. We owe to it the first form of self-sufficient thinking, independent of any sacred form of enunciation; in other words, the first form of an entirely secularized thinking” (Badiou 2004b, 22; emphasis in original). Badiou’s articulation of mathematics as a polemical enterprise is partly directed against what he sees as the tendency of “poetic” ontologies, such as Heidegger’s, to lapse into quasi-mythical discourse centred on a desire for the presence of being in the midst of its withdrawal. But the articulation is also directed against the tendency of many “normal” language ontologies to run aground on that which supposedly lies beyond thought, language, and experience. Included on this list of “ontologies of presence,” as Badiou calls them, is theology, especially in its apophatic guise. Because the tendency of these “ontologies of presence” is, in this sense, toward the religious, Badiou’s reliance on mathematics can be understood as an anti-religious or anti-theological gesture. I will return to the implications of this gesture below, since it poses a significant challenge to theology, and religion more generally. That challenge is especially acute when it is combined with the actual themes of Badiou’s ontology, as these are entangled with the mathematical gesture. Space limits the ability to provide a copious discussion of Badiou’s ontology, but there are many good resources available for the interested reader.1 For our purposes, it will suffice to focus on three interrelated loci: the inexistence of the one, the void, and the infinite. These loci are foundational to Badiou’s entire ontological and philosophical edifice but, not accidently, are also the most pertinent for theology. One of the main threads that runs through the Western philosophical t­radition is the relationship between unity and difference, the one and multiplicity. ­Badiou’s ontology is not different in this respect, and the opening meditation of Being and Event begins with an inaugural decision on this relationship: “the one is not” (Badiou 2005, 23; original emphasis). There are, of course, good mathematical and philosophical reasons for holding as much, some of which we will explore in what follows, and Badiou’s decision on the inexistence of the one puts him in line with the anti-metaphysical thrust of much contemporary philosophy. But we should not underestimate the polemical nature of this decision against the existence of the one. Elsewhere, Badiou makes clear the anti-theological nature of the claim, which is consistent with his use of mathematics: “Let us posit our axioms. There is no God. Which also means: the One is not. The multiple ‘without-one’—every multiple being in its turn nothing other than a multiple of multiples—is the law of being” (Badiou 2001, 25; original emphasis). Although, ontologically speaking, the one is not, this of course does not mean that we do not experience the world as unified, as one. Any oneness that we do encounter is, nevertheless, secondary to multiplicity, the result of organizing or structuring, consciously or not, multiplicity in a particular way. Badiou thus insists that “the one, which is not, solely exists as an operation. In other words: there is no one, only the count-as-one. The one, being an operation, is never a presenta-

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tion” (Badiou 2005, 24). Prior to the count-as-one, then, is pure or inconsistent ­multiplicity; however, we normally only experience that multiplicity as presented as one, as organized into a structured situation. Part of the goal of Badiou’s ontology is to understand this operation itself, that is, the movement from inconsistent multiplicity to consistent multiplicity. But since we normally find ourselves on the side of consistent multiplicity, we must understand this movement in reverse, or retroactively; we must, that is, subtract inconsistent multiplicity from consistent multiplicity, and this is what the basic axioms of set theory allow us to do. To understand ontology as “the presentation of presentation” (Badiou 2005, 27), then, means understanding ontology as a fundamentally subtractive enterprise. Badiou organizes this task in Being and Event around a series of axioms, which he draws primarily from Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZFC): the axiom of extensionality, the axiom of the power set, the axiom of union, the axiom of infinity, the axiom of the void or null set, the axiom of foundation, the axiom of replacement, the axiom of separation and the axiom of choice.2 The basic operations that these axioms allow for is the presentation of multiplicity without reference to the one; that is, “what is presented in the ontological situation is the multiple without any other predicate than its multiplicity” (Badiou 2005, 28). Put differently, Badiou’s ontology is concerned with the multiple and sets of multiples, but it does not seek to determine the properties of the multiples in question, since to do so would reintroduce the one through a definition. Rather, Badiou understands multiplicity and its organization into sets or situations in purely extensional terms: a consistent multiplicity is the result of a count-as-one and has nothing to do with the application of a concept (see Hallward 2003, 33). Instead of proceeding conceptually, Badiou determines what constitutes a set and its internal and external relations through the notion of belonging, written formally as Î. A multiple only is through its belonging to another multiple, and it only is what it is through it being counted as such. As Badiou puts it, “To exist as a multiple is always to belong to a multiplicity. To exist is to be an element of. There is no other possible predicate of existence as such” (Badiou and Hallward 1998, 130; emphasis in original). Nevertheless, from within the relationship of belonging, which in Badiou’s ontology constitutes the only form of predication, we can speak of another relationship, that of inclusion. If belonging determines the relationship between multiples, that is, how a multiple is presented by another multiple, inclusion refers to the relationship that obtains among the parts or subsets of multiples. The distinction between belonging and inclusion is not substantial, in the sense that it refers to a specific, differentiating property. Since both have to do with pure multiplicity, the difference between them is operational rather than essential; belonging and inclusion refer to “two distinct operators of counting, and not two different ways to think the being of the multiple” (Badiou 2005, 83). These two distinct, but complimentary and often shifting, ways of counting are a consequence of the axiom of the power set, which is one of the axioms that governs Badiou’s ontology:

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the axiom “guarantees that if a set exists, then another set also exists that counts as one all the subsets of the first” (Badiou 2005, 83; emphasis in original). Intuitively, this makes perfect sense, but it would be hard to overestimate its importance for Badiou’s ontology and, as we will discuss in more detail below, his theory of truth and the subject. What the distinction entails is that inclusion is always in excess over belonging; that is, taking the set of the subsets or the power set of a given multiple always produces a multiple larger than the multiple to which it belongs. Badiou refers to this as the “theorem of the point of excess,” which indicates that it is “literally impossible to assign a ‘measure’ to this superiority in size. In other words, the ‘passage’ to the set of subsets is an operation in absolute excess of the situation itself” (Badiou 2005, 84; emphasis in original). If there are actually two relationships (belonging and inclusion) at work in situations, then there are also at least two counts operative in situations: an initial count-as-one that structures multiples at the level of belonging and a second, count-of-the-count that structures the various parts of the original multiples at the level of inclusion. Badiou refers to the second count as the state or metastructure of a situation, and it is particularly important since its role is to provide order to the excess in a situation. The state or metastructure is a re-presentation of the multiple that attempts to ensure that the one-count applies to subsets and parts as well; as Badiou says, it attempts to guarantee that what “is included in a situation belongs to its state” (Badiou 2005, 97). What the state or metastructure of a situation ultimately attempts to do is foreclose the errancy of the void, which is the second main theme of Badiou’s ontology. The void is a somewhat difficult concept to grasp in Badiou’s ontology, as it takes on different valences throughout his work. At the most basic level, however, the void anchors a situation to its being. We mentioned above that all situations are divided into consistent or structured multiplicity and inconsistent or unstructured multiplicity. Since the one is not, inconsistent multiplicity is what really constitutes a situation, but it is unpresentable therein as inconsistent; by definition, a situation is always already submitted to the count-as-one. Negatively speaking, the void is the gap between inconsistent multiplicity and consistent multiplicity in a situation, but put in positive terms it accounts for the passage from the former to the latter. Badiou speaks of the void as “the suture” of a situation “to its being” (Badiou 2005, 55). The void is thus included in any situation and, because it names the passage from inconsistency to consistency, it accounts existentially for the situation itself at a basic level. More specifically, the void names inconsistency for a situation, making inconsistency available for the count-as-one. In this sense, all the other operations and relationships of Badiou’s set-theoretical ontology, such as belonging and inclusion, depend on the void. Nevertheless, and crucially, from the perspective of the count-as-one, the void itself is literally nothing, since to be “something” for a situation is to be presented and thus no longer inconsistent. The void is, in this sense, “the latent errancy of the being of presentation” (Badiou 2005, 76). Given the void’s status in Badiou’s ontology (he describes it as “the primary theme of ontology” [2005, 58]), it is tempting to take it in quasi-theological terms, as some sort

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of “hidden God” at work in Badiou’s otherwise secular ontology.3 Badiou himself, however, posits the void against theology: it replaces the promise of presence with un-presentation, signalling that “God is dead at the heart of presentation” (Badiou 2004b, 37). The void is, then, the initial, un-presentable point of existence in any situation, the name of the excess that haunts the latter. We can also, however, speak of another point of existence regarding multiples, and that is the infinite. The notion of infinity has, in one way or another, usually been understood as a limit-concept in philosophical reflection. The infinite is what is not finite, meaning that it is, strictly speaking, outside the realm of thought, pushed off onto the potential of a never-ending series or concentrated in a metaphysical doctrine of the absolute or God. Badiou suggests that the history of infinity is largely a theological history, in that infinity itself has been taken as coterminous with the one. We have already said that for Badiou the one is not, but if this is so, then we must also think the infinite outside the one. In Badiou’s words, we must unbind or “unseal the infinite from its millenary collusion with the one” (Badiou 2006, 30). It became possible to do this, mathematically speaking, through the work of George Cantor, the founder of modern set theory. Although we cannot discuss his innovations in detail, suffice it to say that Cantor began from the assumption that the infinite could be understood as actual rather than merely potential. Working from this assumption, Cantor developed a way to measure the size of infinite sets, by placing the elements of an infinite set and its parts or subsets into a one-to-one correspondence with each other. What is most significant for Badiou is that Cantor also was able to show that there is more than one infinite set. If we take the power set axiom seriously, which indicates the excess of parts or subsets over the original elements of the set, then it becomes possible to conceive of infinite sets of different sizes, whether these are denumerable or not. Although Cantor himself attempted to contain the implications of these transfinite sets by putting them in contrast to an absolute infinity, which he associated with God, Badiou draws the conclusion that the infinite admits of no such thing. If we can produce different infinite sets by taking the power set of an initial infinite set, then what set theory points to is an infinity of infinities, to the existence of “infinite multiples that can be differentiated from each other to infinity” (Badiou 2005, 145; emphasis in original). Otherwise put, the infinite is radically without-one and, importantly, this without-one is thinkable through mathematics. When this notion of the infinite is combined with the other themes of Badiou’s ontology discussed above, the result is a rational, immanent, and infinite conception of being, which is substantially without-one. It is, Badiou maintains, a post-theological ontology.

Truth and the subject Badiou’s ontology is significant in its own right, and it can, in this sense, be taken on its own terms. To a certain extent, however, Badiou’s identification of ontology

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and mathematics is designed to limit the scope of ontology, to delineate its proper sphere to clear the way for a theory of truth and the subject. It is this theory, which Badiou identifies with “what-is-not-being-qua-being,” that Badiou considers the domain of philosophy proper. On the surface, Badiou’s concern to provide a contemporary theory of truth and the subject seems far afield from the basic assumptions on which his ontology rests. We said above that Badiou’s ontology endeavours to be post-theological, which means that it takes for granted and attempts to push through what Nietzsche called the death of God. However, it is usually thought that the death of God also entails the liquidation of truth and the subject, on the assumption that these depend on “God” for their being. Badiou certainly has no designs for overturning God’s death, but he continues to think that truth and the subject provide the themes of philosophy proper. Any denial that they do amounts to an anti-philosophy. These themes, however, will have to be significantly reworked, in line with the basic conditions of Badiou’s ontology. Otherwise put, a post-theological ontology entails an equally post-­ theological theory of truth and the subject. To get at the latter, the best place to begin is with Badiou’s notion of an event. Ontology, as we said above, is the presentation of presentation; it is a general theory of situations and how they are organized. To grasp the being of situations, in this respect, ontology has to assume order, structure, and stasis, even as it works backwards toward inconsistent multiplicity; otherwise, there would be nothing to grasp. The same can be said, of course, for situations themselves. We also know, however, that inclusion, or the parts or subsets of a situation, is always in excess of the situation itself. The state or the metastructure of a situation tries to control this excess through re-presenting or re-counting it for the situation, but that excess can never be fully contained because it is, as we said above, ultimately void. What this uncontainable excess signals is that situations are always open, subject to radical interruptions and, ultimately, change. Badiou will refer the potential for such change to an event. Badiou refers to the event in numerous ways throughout his writings, but in basic terms we can say that an event is a source of novelty for a situation, one that, because it is on the side of excess, has the potential to alter a situation from within. If ontology, and the situations it describes, is on the side of consistency, the event is on the side of inconsistency, the breakdown of the count-as-one. Badiou thus says that an event is irreducible to the situation in which it occurs. It is a “‘supplement … committed to chance. It is unpredictable, incalculable. It is beyond what is” (2004a, 62). To emphasize the equation of an event with change, Badiou often describes the event as a “radical novelty” (2003, 33) or something “absolutely new” (2003, 43), a “pure beginning” (2003, 49) or “absolute beginning” (2000, 90), “a pure cut in becoming” (2009, 384), an “exception” (2009, 360) to what there is. It is in this sense that we should understand Badiou’s claim that the event constitutes “what-is-not-being-qua-being.” Although all situations contain excess, this excess does not always result in an event.There is nothing in situations that necessarily entails that an event occurs and,

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indeed, unlike other event-based philosophies, such as Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s, Badiou’s events are rare, associated with macro shifts in historical sequences. Moreover, even if an event does occur, there is no guarantee that a situation will shift to the extent that we can speak of something novel, a new occurrence and sequence in history. Badiou associates the latter with truth or, more appropriately, truths, and what is needed for the production of such truths from the occurrence of an event is a subject. Badiou’s subject, then, should not be understood in individualist or essentialist terms, however we might parse these. Badiou’s subject is, rather, a formal category that links an event with its consequences, with the militant yet fragile production of truth. Although the individual pre-exists an evental production of truth, a subject does not: a subject is always the subject of an event and only continues to exist in the work of producing truth, a work constituted through fidelity to or faith in the event and its consequences. Badiou’s subject is, in this sense, the bearer of truth. In more technical language, Badiou’s subject is “any local configuration of a generic procedure from which a truth is supported” (Badiou 2005, 391); the subject is “local status of a procedure, a configuration in excess of the situation” (Badiou, 2005, 392; emphasis in original). Badiou provides more complexity to this understanding of the subject in Logics of Worlds, where he qualifies the subject into three types. The faithful subject, which functions as the model for the other two subjective types, organizes the production of truth in the present; this subject is the bearer of truth, as mentioned above. In addition to the faithful subject, however, is the reactive subject, which attenuates or flatly denies the novelty introduced by the event and its consequences. The reactive subject does this not so much through direct opposition as through a seemingly benign relativism that, when it comes to potential change, favours reform rather revolution. The third subjective type, the obscure subject, actively fights against or occults the production of truth, opposing it not through machinations of reformism but rather through an appeal to some all-encompassing, transcendent principle that denies the reality of the present. Badiou says that the obscure subject appeals to “an atemporal fetish: the incorruptible and invisible over-body, be it City, God, or Race. Similarly, Fate for love, the True without admissible image for art and Revelation for science correspond to the three types of obscure subject which are possessive fusion, iconoclasm and obscurantism” (Badiou 2009, 60). To put the matter in religious terms, Badiou’s obscure subject would correspond to various fundamentalisms. In addition to these three types, however, Badiou also introduces another species of the faithful subject. Although truths are fragile and rare, truths when they disappear from the world are never entirely lost. It is always possible, Badiou insists, to “resurrect” them (Badiou 2009, 65). This possibility corresponds with a faithful subject that does not so much produce a new truth as reactivate or resurrect an old truth for the production of something new in the present. To resurrect a truth, then, is to put that truth to a new use in the present, in an entirely different context. This is what Badiou essentially does with Paul’s thought in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, as we will see below.

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Badiou’s conception of truth is equally as formal as that of the subject. Although Badiou often gives examples of truths, his philosophy does not legislate on the past, present, or future content of truths. Doing so would not only violate the basic principles of Badiou’s ontology by reinstating the one. It also would overstep the role of philosophy itself. Although philosophy must work on the assumption that there are truths, philosophy does not actually produce these truths. Truths are produced, rather, in four domains: art, science, politics, and love. Thus, we can speak of artistic subjects producing artistic truths, scientific subjects producing scientific truths, political subjects producing political truths, and amorous subjects producing amorous truths. What truth looks like thus depends on the type of truth and the activity of its corresponding subject. Philosophy takes its leads from these truths, and seeks to understand the formal conditions of their production in art, science, politics, and love.

Badiou and Christianity Thus far, we have focused on Badiou’s ontology and his theory of truth and the subject, with an eye toward the main ways in which these are constituted on posttheological lines. Badiou’s philosophy, then, would seem to leave theology behind and, indeed, in this sense it is telling that religion remains absent from Badiou’s four domains of truth. Yet, it is also the case that Badiou does not leave religion entirely behind. In the remaining space of this essay, I want to suggest that Badiou’s philosophy remains structurally indebted to religion, and specifically Christian theology, which raises questions about the extent to which Badiou’s philosophy can be viewed as post-theological. Perhaps the best place to begin to make such a claim is to focus on the role of faith or fidelity in Badiou’s theory of the subject. Badiou’s subject, as we said above, is constituted through fidelity to an event, through the activity of faithfulness in the production of truth. Like most concepts in Badiou’s philosophy, the notion of fidelity as outlined in Being and Event is understood in formal rather than substantial terms. Although the term has an obvious though not necessarily exclusive religious ring to it, fidelity, or faith, simply names the set of procedures which discern, within a situation, those multiples whose existence depends upon the introduction into circulation … of an evental multiple. In sum, a fidelity is the apparatus which separates out, within the set of presented multiples, those which depend upon an event. To be faithful is to gather together and distinguish the becoming legal of a chance. (Badiou 2005, 232) Badiou goes on to claim that the term “fidelity” is one that he has borrowed from the amorous relationship or procedure, “the world of love” (Badiou 2005, 232). We should also emphasize, however, that the term resonates with a religious, and specifically Christian, notion of faith. Although Badiou may well have borrowed

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the term from the amorous sphere, the term itself is overdetermined, and in this sense, it is difficult to untangle it from its religious sense. To point this out is not to introduce a foreign element into Badiou’s philosophy. Such over-determination is present in Badiou’s philosophy itself. In Logics of Worlds, we saw that the notion of faithfulness is connected with the notion of resurrection, a term clearly drawn from Christianity. The connection with Christianity becomes even clearer if we turn to Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. The apostle Paul’s thought has been the subject of much interest among contemporary philosophers, and Badiou’s own interpretation of it is one of the best known.4 Badiou’s reading of Paul is, however, very much a philosophical reading, one that ostensibly falls in line with the rest of his project. Badiou makes it clear from the beginning that, for him, “Paul is not an apostle or a saint. I care nothing for the Good News he declares, or the cult dedicated to him” (Badiou 2003, 1). Indeed, the idea around which all of Paul’s thought revolves, the resurrection of the crucified, is for Badiou nothing more that “a fable” that “fails to touch on any Real”: “so far as we are concerned it is rigorously impossible to believe in the resurrection of the crucified” (Badiou 2003, 4–5). Paul is, nevertheless, “a subjective figure of primary importance” (Badiou 2003, 1), and it is this theme on which Badiou focuses his attention throughout the book. Although Badiou’s reading of Paul has all the markings of a normal, critical commentary, it is important not to reduce it to a mere interpretation. Badiou claims, instead, that his reading is “a reactivation of Paul” (Badiou 2003, 2). This is the same terminology that Badiou uses in Logics of Worlds to describe the operation of the faithful subject that resurrects a truth from oblivion, rearticulating it in a different logic or world. Badiou’s reading of Paul, then, can be read as such an operation: Badiou does not simply want to interpret Paul but resurrect his thought, albeit in a secular—that is, non-religious or non-theological—mode. The question is, of course, why. Why resurrect Paul, this architect of Christian theology, and his thought? Fabulous elements aside, Badiou claims that “Paul is a founder, in that he is one of the very first theoreticians of the universal” (Badiou 2003, 108). Badiou insists that what “Paul must be given exclusive credit for … that the fidelity to such an event exists only through the termination of communitarian particularisms and the determination of a subject-for-truth who indistinguishes the One and the for-all” (Badiou 2003, 108). Otherwise put, Paul is one of the first to think the relationship between event, subject, and truth, thereby establishing the general conditions for grasping how something new—a universal truth—is produced in the world. Once we sift through Paul’s letters, we see that Paul’s thought hinges on the creation of a new subject, a subject that forms itself at a distance from the main subjective types or discourses that govern his situation, the Greek and the Jew. On Badiou’s account, Greek discourse is cosmic in scope, in the sense that it conceives of the subject in terms of being, totality, and wisdom. Speaking of this cosmic—or, we could say, logocentric—dimension, Badiou notes that Greek discourse deploys “the subject within the reason of a natural totality. Greek discourse is essentially a

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discourse of totality, insofar as it upholds the Sophia (wisdom as internal state) of a knowledge of phusis (nature as ordered and accomplished deployment of being)” (Badiou 2003, 41). Jewish discourse is, in contrast, a discourse of the exception to this totality, “because the prophetic sign, the miracle, election, designate transcendence as that which lies beyond the natural totality” (Badiou 2003, 41). As Badiou points out, both of these discourses are really two sides of the same coin. Not only do they reinforce each other through the negative relation that each maintains with the other (the Greek is not the Jew and the Jew is not the Greek); it is also the case, argues Badiou, that both are figures of law or discourses of the Father. Paul institutes Christian discourse as “a-cosmic and illegal,” as a discourse of the Son rather than a discourse of the Father. Christian discourse thus cannot be identified with Jewish discourse or Greek discourse, but is also not a synthesis of the two: Christian discourse is a “rupture,” something “absolutely new” (Badiou 2003, 43). Otherwise put, Christian discourse is of the order of an event, specifically the Christ-event, which Badiou associates with the resurrection. The Christ-event institutes a new subject in its situation, one that finds its impetus in Christ’s resurrection but that only becomes what it is and will be through faithfulness or fidelity. This means, on the one hand, that the development of Christian “truth,” at least as Paul conceives it, is “entirely subjective” (Badiou 2003, 15). To label Christian “truth” as “subjective” does not mean that it can be reduced to the individual and his or her private illumination (Badiou 2003, 51–2). Rather, it means that because the Christian discourse is something new, its validity and trajectory cannot be adjudicated through the means or resources that already exist in the situation. Paul neither appeals to reason (Greek discourse) or miracle or prophecy (Jewish discourse): the “truth” of the resurrection–event is internal or immanent to its own trajectory. This is why, on Badiou’s account, Paul claims that his is a discourse of “weakness, folly, and nonbeing” (Badiou 2003, 49). Since the fidelity or faithfulness of the subject follows a constitutive trajectory, Christian “truth” is a process rather than a deposit, something that the subject produces through the activities of faith, hope, and love. Badiou interprets these “theological virtues” in terms of the activity of the subject in relation to the event and its truth: “Faith would be the opening to the true; love, the universalizing effectiveness of its trajectory; hope, lastly, a maxim enjoining us to persevere in its trajectory” (Badiou 2003, 93). The entanglement of these virtues in the work of fidelity allows the Christian subject to painstakingly produce its “truth” through the labour of the “not … but,” which is the form of the creation of the new or, in more technical terms, of generic universality. That is, fidelity labours within its situation to produce its truth through a process of separation from the logic that governs its situation. For Paul, this involves separating the old from the new, to articulate the novelty of the resurrection-event and its trajectory: not works but faith, not law but grace, not flesh but spirit, not death but life, not particularity but universality. Badiou emphasizes, however, that this work is an “endless process” (Badiou 2003, 64), meaning that the subject must always labour on these separations to determine what the resurrection-event means, will mean, and will have meant.

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All told, what Badiou is ostensibly interested in is the form of Paul’s thought, to the extent that it provides a model for understanding the relationship between event, subject, and truth. Badiou, in effect, resurrects Paul’s discourse in our context, supposedly dropping the theological content by rereading the key operations and terms that structure Paul’s thought in a generic fashion. Badiou’s use of Paul, in other words, endeavours to be wholly secular. Nevertheless, it raises questions about the relationship that Badiou’s philosophy has to theology, and the extent to which his philosophy relies on theology for its structure. If we take seriously Badiou’s claim that Paul is the indispensible founder of thinking the generic universality of truth and its subject, then Paul remains foundational to that thinking. Sure, he and his thought remain in a secularized mode, but here it is important to emphasize that secularization does not so much get rid of theology as transfer it to another sphere, where it remains as the latter’s repressed content (see Agamben 2007, 73–94). Despite Badiou’s claims to the contrary, Badiou’s “reactivation” of Paul shows that theology remains an essential ingredient to Badiou’s theory of truth and the subject. This is not to say that it is the only ingredient or that we can reduce Badiou’s theory of truth and the subject to theology. It is rather to say that theology continues to exert its influence on Badiou’s thought, in conversation with a host of other influences. Indeed, this remains the case even if we move beyond Saint Paul, as a careful reading of Badiou’s works shows a varied and often effortless use of the structure of Paul’s thought and its attending terms and concepts. Perhaps this is why in Being and Event, Badiou can claim, “Lacan used to say that if no religion were true, Christianity, nevertheless, was the religion that came closest to the question of truth.” This is because, Badiou maintains, “All the parameters of the doctrine of the event are … disposed within Christianity” (Badiou 2005, 212). Disposed, of course, within an outdated ontology of presence, but disposed nonetheless.

Conclusion Much of the engagement with Badiou’s philosophy from the disciplines of religious studies, theology and biblical studies has focused largely on Saint Paul, although there are, of course exceptions. That focus is understandable—it is among the easier of Badiou’s works, and it deals explicitly with themes that hold immediate interest for scholars working in these areas. Although it is important for those representing such disciplines to continue to engage, appropriate, and criticize Badiou’s reading of Saint Paul, the broader implications of Badiou’s theory of truth and the subject remains relatively unexplored among students of religion. On the one hand, this is unfortunate, since that theory may prove useful for understanding religious and theological truth claims in relation to other claims, along with the subjects of these claims. On the other hand, it may also be the case that Badiou’s theory of truth and the subject remains limited, to the extent that it continues to rely on a rather explicit Christian paradigm. In itself, there is nothing wrong with that, but we should hesitate to apply it across the board. It would be interesting, in this sense, to read Badiou both critically and constructively in relation to other religious traditions.

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Nevertheless, perhaps the biggest challenge that Badiou’s philosophy holds for constructive theological work is found in his ontology. Readers of Badiou’s philosophy will certainly and rightly find much to argue with over the particulars of Badiou’s ontology. This is no less the case for the theologically-minded reader. Indeed, given the ostensibly post-theological form and content of Badiou’s ontology, the temptation among such readers may be to push back and reassert traditional categories over against Badiou’s own. Doing so too quickly, however, may miss the ways in which Badiou’s ontology allows for a rethinking of traditional theological categories, particularly when it comes to the notion of infinity. Like all good philosophy, then, Badiou’s own incites us to think differently and otherwise— and that includes our thinking regarding religion and theology.

Notes 1 The best introduction for the general reader is still, to my mind, Peter Hallward’s Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Hallward 2003). See also Gillespie (2008) and Norris (2009). For a more technical discussion of the mathematics, see Baki (2015). 2 A full discussion of each of these axioms is not necessary for a basic grasp of Badiou’s ontology. I discuss those that are necessary later in the chapter, as pertinent. For Badiou’s own discussion, see Meditation 5 of Being and Event (2005, 60–9). 3 Kenneth Ryenhout (2008) makes such a claim in “Alain Badiou: Hidden Theologian of the Void?” 4 For other treatments of Paul along similar lines, see, for instance, Taubes (2003), Breton (2011), Žižek (2003), Blanton (2014), Agamben (2005) and Blanton and de Vries (2013).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. In Praise of Profanation. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York, NY: Zone Books. Badiou, Alain. 2000. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Translated by Louise Burchill. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics. Translated by Peter Hallward. London, UK: Verso. Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Badiou, Alain. 2004a. Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy. Edited and Translated by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London, UK: Continuum. Badiou, Alain. 2004b. Theoretical Writings. Edited and translated by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano. London, UK: Continuum. Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London, UK: Continuum. Badiou, Alain. 2006. Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology. Translated by Norman Madarasz. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Badiou, Alain. 2009. Logics of Worlds. Translated by Alberto Toscano. London, UK: Continuum. Badiou, Alain and Peter Hallward. 1998. “Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Alain Badiou.” Angelaki 3(3): 113–33.

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Baki, Burhanuddin. 2015. Badiou’s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Bartlett, A.J. and Justin Clemens, eds. 2010. Alain Badiou: Key Concepts. Durham, UK: Acumen. Blanton, Ward. 2014. A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Blanton, Ward and Hent de Vries, eds. 2013. Paul and the Philosophers. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Breton, Stanislas. 2011. A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul. Translated by Joseph N. Ballan. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Clemens, Justin and Jon Roffe. 2008. “Philosophy as Anti-Religion in the Work of Alain Badiou.” Sophia 47: 345-58. Gillespie, Sam. 2008. The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou’s Minimalist Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press. Hallward, Peter. 2003. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Norris, Christopher. 2009. Badiou’s Being and Event: A Reader’s Guide. London, UK: Continuum. Reynhout, Kenneth. 2008. “Alain Badiou: Hidden Theologian of the Void?” The Heythrop Journal 52(2): 219-33. Taubes, Jacob. 2003. The Political Theology of Paul. Translated by Dana Hollander. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

32 Giorgio Agamben (1942–) Adam Kotsko

Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher whose body of work ranges widely over questions of ontology, aesthetics and politics. In recent years, he has emerged as one of the most deeply theologically informed of contemporary thinkers. Not only has he carried out genealogical investigations in the history of theology, but he has engaged with contemporary theologians and even entered into dialogue with Roman Catholic officials on some occasions, most notably in the lecture published as The Church and the Kingdom (Agamben 2012). Nevertheless, it would be misleading to characterize Agamben as a Catholic or even a Christian philosopher. It is more accurate to say that for him, theology is simply one area of inquiry among others, an important part of the cultural heritage and of contemporary life that does not require a qualitatively different approach from his investigations into philosophy, literature, or any other topic. Agamben inherits this “flattened” approach to religion and theology from his two most significant intellectual influences: Martin Heidegger and Walter ­Benjamin. Both thinkers refuse any kind of religious/secular dyad, albeit in different ways and with different consequences. Heidegger, whose seminars the young Agamben attended, views Christian thought as determinative for “the history of Being,” that is, for the development of Western ontology. The Christian influence was, in his opinion, ambivalent—reinforcing certain misleading conceptualizations, covering over some key questions, but nevertheless providing important “clues” that inform Heidegger’s own investigations. Agamben views his own project as, at least in part, a continuation and revision of Heidegger’s “history of Being,” and so he naturally undertakes a series of investigations into the ontological implications of Christian patterns of thought. Walter Benjamin’s influence on Agamben is, if anything, even more decisive. Agamben encountered Benjamin’s writings at around the time he was studying with Heidegger, and he threw himself into the study of Benjamin’s fragmentary

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oeuvre, ultimately serving as the editor of Benjamin’s complete works in an Italian translation and discovering important manuscripts of Benjamin’s unpublished writings, including the manuscripts for the book on Baudelaire that he was working on at the time of his death. Benjamin’s work seems to have inspired Agamben’s vast interdisciplinary ambitions as well as his aphoristic style. In connection with theology, it also required him to engage with Jewish thought and specifically with Jewish messianism, which have proved to be an important point of reference for Agamben’s research, even when dealing with Christian texts. Agamben is able to treat rabbinic debates as an integral part of Western intellectual history, and also to read Western texts in Jewish terms, so that Aristotle, for example, can sometimes appear to be a “messianic” thinker. In an era when many thinkers are engaging with Christianity, much of the distinctiveness of Agamben’s approach stems from the access that Benjamin’s work gives him to the Jewish tradition. The combination of Heidegger and Benjamin allows Agamben to see theology as both reinforcing and challenging Western ontological and political systems. Indeed, theology provides the “point of contact” for his systematic work on politics, as many of his key terms—sovereignty, sacredness, messianism—are irreducibly theological and political at once. In this, he is building on one of Benjamin’s key interlocutors, who has emerged as a central point of reference for much of Agamben’s recent work as well: the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. In his book, Political Theology, Schmitt gave birth to a discipline when he claimed that political and theological concepts are in some sense homologous or convertible with one another. Yet, where Schmitt sought ways to reinforce the political-theological order against the forces of chaos, Agamben traces that order’s fault lines and contradictions in the hope of finding some way to stop it. To put it differently, where Schmitt believes that the political machinery of the West must keep going lest we lose an important part of what it means to be human, Agamben hopes that bringing it to a halt will make room for us to become human in a new and different way. My discussion in this chapter will focus on the Homo Sacer project and related works. While religion and theology come up throughout Agamben’s oeuvre, his earlier works are generally more fragmentary and occasional than the Homo Sacer volumes, which aspire to a greater systematicity and thus provide a clearer view of Agamben’s distinctive methodological commitments.

The Homo Sacer series: phase one Agamben’s Homo Sacer series attempts to map out the structure of Western political forms, using as his guidelines two paradoxical figures: the sovereign ruler and the excluded homo sacer (the sacred man, an enigmatic concept from Roman law that indicated someone who had been expelled from the political community and thus could be killed with impunity, but not sacrificed or submitted to legal punishment). Both figures share the distinction of being irreducibly both inside and outside the political field. The sovereign, as defined by Schmitt, is the one who is legally authorized to use extra-legal force under emergency conditions, so that

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his actions fall outside the sphere of law while being legitimated by it. The homo sacer, by c­ ontrast, is deprived of all legal protection, and yet this exclusion from the sphere of law is nonetheless a legally administered punishment. On a certain level the two figures constitute the greatest extremes of power and vulnerability, and so they seem to stand at the greatest possible distance from each other. Nevertheless, they also strangely overlap: “At the extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (Agamben 1998, 84). Agamben views this paradoxical relationship both as providing the overall framework within which Western political forms unfold and as revealing its greatest contradiction—and perhaps its greatest vulnerability. The project is divided into four volumes. The first, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, sets out the initial problem, while the second and third treat of sovereign power and bare life, respectively. The fourth and final volume develops the concept of “form-of-life,” which is meant to offer some kind of alternative to the Western political machine. The first phase of the project consisted of the introductory volume, followed by the third (Remnants of Auschwitz) and then the second (State of Exception). Remnants of Auschwitz explored the most thoroughly dehumanized victims of the Western political machine, those who had lost all human dignity and agency in the Nazi concentration camps and so were reduced to bare biological life (nicknamed Muselmänner in the concentration camp at Auschwitz due to their total resignation to fate), while State of Exception traced the use of emergency powers in the West from Roman times up to the contemporary “War on Terror.” The second phase began when Agamben vastly expanded the second volume, publishing three further books (The Kingdom and the Glory, The Sacrament of Language and Opus Dei) that were presented as sub-parts of the volume begun with State of Exception. Only then did he finally move on to the fourth volume, which consists of two books, The Highest Poverty and L’Uso dei Corpi (The Use of Bodies). While the second phase includes much more detailed discussions of theology and religious institutions, the first phase provides the general framework in which those analyses take place. Agamben sets the tone in the eponymous first volume in two ways. First, he implicitly expands the purview of the discipline of political theology by shifting the focus away from Schmitt’s famous parallel between the sovereign ruler and the sovereign God and instead concentrates on a more enigmatic overlap between the political and the theological: the concept of the sacred. Here he shows both his Benjaminian and Heideggerian heritage. His investigation follows up on Benjamin’s suggestion that “it might be well worth while to track down the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life” (Benjamin 1978, 299), an origin that Agamben will track down by using the Heideggerian method of determining the etymology of the word “sacred” and claiming that its earliest etymological roots reflect the most originary meaning of the word.

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This method ultimately leads to a highly counter-intuitive and even d­ isturbing definition of the “sacredness of life,” which, far from indicating the extremely high value of human life as it seems to have been intended to do, instead denotes the exposure of bare life to sovereign power. Justifying this reading of the concept of sacredness leads him to a harsh critique of the mainstream of modern theories of religion, whose attempt to cordon religion off into its own autonomous zone has, in Agamben’s view, left modern thinkers completely unable to understand the phenomena in question. Indeed, he believes that such theories do more than simply misunderstand religion—they trivialize it: “That the religious belongs entirely to the sphere of psychological emotion, that it essentially has to do with shivers and goose bumps—this is the triviality that the neologism ‘numinous’ had to dress up as science” (Agamben 1998, 78). While the type of work Agamben critiques here is often regarded as outdated in contemporary religious studies, it was undeniably formative in the development of the discipline and the conception of its purview, and so Agamben’s critique calls much of the enterprise of religious studies into question. Throughout State of Exception and Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben maintains a similar focus on concepts that straddle the supposed boundary between the political and the religious, though without making this practice a major theme of either work. Important examples include witness, authority—and even the very concept of law itself. This latter point opens up the space for the most explicit discussion of messianism in the early Homo Sacer books. Drawing on Benjamin’s reading of the Kafka short story “The New Advocate,” where Alexander the Great’s warhorse retires from the military and becomes a lawyer, Agamben clarifies that what is at stake in his analysis is neither the complete overthrow of the law nor the return to the “normal” law as opposed to the ever-expanding scope of executive emergency powers. Instead, he is aiming to find a new use for the law that will not be entangled with violence and exclusion. As he puts it in State of Exception: One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good … This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical. (Agamben 2005b, 64)

The kingdom and the glory The implicit promise of the fourth and final volume of the Homo Sacer series is to outline what that new use of the law might look like. As noted above, however, instead of continuing to that volume, Agamben took the unexpected step of appending new part-volumes to the exploration of the structure of sovereignty

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that had begun with State of Exception. The first such addition, The Kingdom and the Glory, was nearly as long as the previous three volumes of the series combined, and after the appearance of The Sacrament of Language and Opus Dei, the supplementary sections of volume two had grown to a bulk of nearly two-thirds of the entire project. One can understand the supplemental volumes as a way of filling in the structure that he had designated by tracing out the extreme limits of extra-legal sovereign power and excluded bare life. Even if we concede Agamben’s point that Western political structures are always pregnant with the possibility of the extreme violence encapsulated by the confrontation between sovereign and homo sacer, it also seems undeniable that for the most part, Western political structures do not rely on sheer brute force to stake their claim over human life. A complete account of the Western political machine must include the day-to-day workings of the machine under “normal” circumstances as well. Yet, if Agamben’s shift in emphasis from coercive violence to questions of authority and obligation makes sense as a way of continuing his investigation, his way of pursuing those questions is in many ways counter-intuitive. Whereas the entire project was structured around Schmitt’s notion of political theology, one might characterize the shift from the early volumes to the supplemental volumes as a shift from political theology to political theology. Why theology? From a certain perspective, that is the very question motivating these investigations. Agamben is not merely applying the method of political theology, but attempting to understand why the discipline of political theology is possible in the first place. How are the fields of the political and the theological, of power and authority, linked together such that concepts can slip from one field to the other or even straddle the two? And if the two fields are so intimately connected, why do they nonetheless appear to us also to be separated? The Kingdom and the Glory is Agamben’s most ambitious attempt to answer these questions. It is at once his most substantial contribution to the field of theology, his most decisive settling of accounts with Schmitt—and his most convoluted and confusing book. Given its unique combination of unwieldiness and importance, it will be necessary to devote considerable space to an outline of the argument of The Kingdom and the Glory to orient readers and enable them to make a more informed assessment of its achievement. Agamben begins the book by positing two paradigms that structure the Western political machine: “political theology, which founds the transcendence of sovereign power on the single God, and economic theology, which replaces this transcendence with the idea of an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent o ­ rdering— domestic and not political in a strict sense—of both divine and human life” (Agamben 2011, 1). Broadly speaking, the political-theological paradigm corresponds to absolute monarchy or dictatorship, and the economic-theological paradigm corresponds to liberal democracy. Yet, Agamben does not begin by directly counter posing the two paradigms, but instead approaches it indirectly by recounting the debate between Carl Schmitt

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and Erik Peterson about the possibility of political theology. In his most famous work, “Monotheism as a Political Problem,” Peterson claims that Christianity has rendered any connection between God and worldly rulers fundamentally impossible because there is no possible analogy between the unique Trinitarian structure of the divine life and any political system. As Agamben points out, it is far from self-evident how this claim about the role of the Trinity would render the enterprise of political theology impossible. Peterson’s reliance on the doctrine of the Trinity is all the more problematic when one considers the fact that Peterson excludes—seemingly systematically—any consideration of the oikonomia or “economy of salvation” when discussing the Trinity, despite the fact that it is a topic of extended discussion in the very patristic writings that Peterson quotes in most detail. Here Peterson shares Schmitt’s bias against economic modes of thought, which Schmitt identifies with the scourges of liberal democracy, capitalism, and communism. Having excluded the economic, Peterson puts forward the church’s liturgy as the distinctively Christian form of political action that escapes the logic of political theology. The rest of the book assesses Peterson’s argumentative strategy in detail, starting with the excluded economy (chapters 2–5) and ending with an assessment of Peterson’s claim that liturgy offers a viable alternative to political theology (chapters 6–8). The four chapters on economy consist of detailed philological and theological investigations that trace the fate of the term oikonomia (and its Latin equivalent, dispositio) in Greek philosophy and Christian theology. He claims that oikonomia is not a concept, but rather a “signature,” which is to say a recurring semantic core that persists even as it moves through heterogeneous conceptual fields. The term oikonomia originally refers to the management of the oikos, the household, where the paterfamilias was required to coordinate the heterogeneous needs of his wife, children, slaves, livestock, and crops. This type of management necessarily exceeded any simple rules and instead required a kind of flexible, ad hoc coordination of competing demands to promote the sustainable prosperity of the household. The term later migrated into rhetoric, where one finds the same kind of emphasis on flexibility and the same justification through effectiveness rather than through conformity with set rules or precepts. When St Paul picked up the term in his epistles, Agamben argues, it maintained its semantic core. As the administrator of God’s plan of salvation, Paul had to make flexible use of the means and opportunities at his disposal. Paul describes his task as the oikonomia (management, carrying out) of the mystery (the plan that God has chosen, for reasons known only to him), but as Christian theology develops, the phrase is increasingly reversed into the “mystery of the economy.” This shift, in Agamben’s view, reflects two developments: first, the increasing use of the term oikonomia to describe the management of God’s own divine life (i.e. the relationships among the Father, Son and Holy Spirit); and second, the increasing problems that theologians ran into in attempting to describe God’s interaction with his creation. As time goes on, it is no longer the matter of flexibly carrying out a plan that, while perhaps not transparent in its motivations, at least makes possible a clear

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course of action—instead, the mystery is the very fact that God is able to interact with the world at all. Subsequent chapters detail the migration of the term oikonomia from the relatively narrow sphere of Trinitarian theology to the more wide-ranging and ambitious theory of divine providence, which attempts to give an account of God’s management of the entire arc of world history. The trend is to place ever greater emphasis on the indirect and mediated mode of God’s action, to the point that God comes to seem more and more superfluous to the entire process. This economictheological paradigm certainly does undermine the political-theological one, insofar as it reduces the sovereign, who in the political-theological scheme is identified with pure unmediated activity, to an idle figurehead. Yet, this does not mean that the sovereign is dispensable. Instead, he legitimates the entire system, with its unceasing activity and endless hierarchical layers of providential bureaucracy—it all exists for the sake of the sovereign and his glory. This connection between economy and glory is visible above all in the theological role of angels, who serve as the “middle management” of divine providence and at the same time exist solely to praise and glorify God. In what is arguably the most satisfying chapter in The Kingdom and the Glory, “Angelology and Bureaucracy,” Agamben explores various theological attempts to answer the question of what angels will do once the Last Judgment has brought the providential plan of salvation to an end, relieving them of their management role. What emerges is a separation between economy and glory corresponding to the separation between hell (where the demons, who are fallen angels, will carry out God’s providential plan by punishing the damned for all eternity) and heaven (where the angels and saints will have nothing to do but praise and glorify God for all eternity). Agamben claims that Christian theologians would recognize our modern political paradigm, which consists of economic management that will in principle never end, as “hellish” and hence dismisses the notion that the economic holds any inherent redemptive possibilities. His stance toward glory is more ambivalent, however. While he devotes a chapter to detailing the intimate relationship between ceremony, imperial power, and modern fascism—hence dismissing Peterson’s implicit claim that liturgical glorification of God offers any kind of alternative to Schmitt’s paradigm of political theology—he nevertheless finds a kernel of truth in the Christian tradition’s claim that glory without economy represents paradise. The chapter in which Agamben attempts to isolate the “positive” kernel of glory, “The Archeology of Glory,” is one of the most varied and puzzling of the book, jumping among Judaism, Christianity, and (very surprisingly) Indian religions as investigated by Marcel Mauss. The central point is that the human act of glorification actually creates and sustains the gods, something that is explicit in Judaism (at least according to Agamben’s reading of certain key texts) and that Agamben claims even Christian theology implicitly admits in emphasizing God’s need for praise and glorification. The end goal of the analysis, however, is not to undermine traditional religion, but to gain access to the divine inoperativity that the machinery of the glorious

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economy covers over. Inoperativity is one of Agamben’s most enigmatic concepts, rooted in his analysis of Aristotle as read by Heidegger, but here it is not necessary to delve into the technical and philological questions at play in his use of the term (for which see the essays in Agamben 2000). Briefly stated, inoperativity does not indicate a simple lack of activity, but the potentiality of human beings to stop what they are doing and hence open up the space to do otherwise. The machinery of glory and economy exists to separate us from our own inoperativity, hiding it behind the veil of divine glory so as to trap us in a vicious circle of limited possibilities. While glory covers over this inoperativity, it at the same time brings us into the closest possible proximity to it—hence Agamben’s lengthy investigation of the phenomenon. Before turning to Agamben’s subsequent work, I would like to pause and consider The Kingdom and the Glory’s contribution to the discipline of theology. While the ultimate goal of his analysis is not a theological one, Agamben effectively rewrites the history of theology to show the deep connections among the seemingly disparate doctrines of the Trinity, divine providence, and angelology. Hence his contribution is both historical and systematic in nature, making The Kingdom and the Glory a uniquely fruitful volume for theologians—and one that can be used more or less “directly,” with no need to translate philosophical terms into theological ones, or vice versa.

The concluding Homo Sacer volumes Overall, The Kingdom and the Glory provides us with an account of the everyday workings of the Western political-theological machine (i.e. in non-emergency situations). Yet, it only hints at the ways in which the subject is actually drawn into this system. That task falls to The Sacrament of Language and Opus Dei, which lay the groundwork for the fourth and final volume of the series, consisting of The Highest Poverty and The Use of Bodies. In this section, I will treat these volumes in turn (with the exception of The Use of Bodies, which had not yet been published in Italian at the time this article was written). At the time of its appearance, The Sacrament of Language, subtitled An Archeology of the Oath, seemed like a strange digression within the overall Homo Sacer project. Reinforcing that impression is the fact that it is perhaps the most self-contained of all the Homo Sacer books. In retrospect, it is clear that the theme of the oath was suggested by the analysis of monasticism that Agamben had decided to undertake in The Highest Poverty, where one of his primary concerns is to distinguish a monastic vow from a binding legal oath. However, viewed prospectively, its achievement is twofold. First, it fleshes out Agamben’s critique of traditional theories of religion and puts forth a positive alternative. Second, it develops a theory of language centred not on truth or expression but on ethics and obligation—implicitly putting forward the Western stance toward language as the key mechanism for binding the subject to the theological-political machine he had described in previous volumes. These two tasks are deeply related:

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Agamben finds that the oath confounds all our common-sense divisions between religion and politics—it invokes God and at the same time produces civil obligations, for instance—and argues that this is because the oath reflects the moment in our becoming human or “anthropogenesis” when the political and the religious were not yet separated. Agamben emphasizes that the experience that the oath recalls is centrally a matter of the human being taking responsibility for language by enforcing its claim on reality. In swearing an oath, one is attesting to the correspondence between one’s words and reality—either in relation to an objective situation or a promised action over which the oath-giver has control. If one speaks in such a way as to undermine language’s claim on reality, that is, if one swears falsely, then one becomes subject to a curse, to some kind of punishment or sanction. The claim of language over reality is basically identical in structure to the sovereign’s claim over life: the claim is total, and that which falls outside of it is rendered homo sacer and hence subject to destruction. Thus, the entire Western machine grows out of a certain experience of meaning and responsibility, but Agamben emphasizes that this experience is not the only one possible. Even if we cannot pinpoint a concrete historical moment when “anthropogenesis” occurred, it is still “historical” in the sense of being contingent—and retrievable. Throughout The Sacrament of Language, therefore, he highlights the ways in which messianic thought (both St. Paul and the synoptic traditions about Jesus) and at least some forms of philosophy hold out the promise of returning to that moment of anthropogenesis to become human again, in a new and different way. The approach of Opus Dei is broadly similar to the discussion of economy in The Kingdom and the Glory. Agamben begins by drawing on the Greek roots of the concept of liturgy (leitourgia, translated into Latin as officium) and tracing its mutation in Christian circles. Yet, while The Kingdom and the Glory had consigned the contemporary fate of “economy” to a brief appendix, here the modern outworking of “liturgy” or “office” is a much more integral part of the project. The key point of connection here is the polyvalent meaning of officium, which can refer to the proper performance of one’s “office” or station in life, to religious observances, or to the more general moral concept of duty. This etymological connection allows Agamben to claim a connection between Kantian ethics and Christian liturgical theory. Yet, the parallel is not a simple matter of words, because Christian accounts of priestly action increasingly divorced the effectiveness of the priest’s sacramental performance from his moral character or intentions. Once a priest was duly ordained, he became what Aquinas called an “animate instrument” of Christ, who is the real author of the priest’s actions—and yet Christ’s actions nonetheless require the mediation of a human priest (Agamben 2013a, 22). Christian theology keeps the agent separated from his action while Kantian ethics wishes to reunite the two (insofar as it posits a subject that legislates for itself and then submits to its own law), but both strategies start from that fundamental division.

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Hence the paradigm of modern ethics is a subject who is constitutively s­ eparated from his own action, just as the subject of the oath has been separated from the effectiveness of his words and the subject of the economic machine has been separated from his own inoperativity. For Agamben, the Western machine runs on these divisions, simultaneously holding out the promise of overcoming them— through the self-legislated moral act, through perfectly carrying out one’s oath, through glorifying God to gain contact with God’s glory—and endlessly deferring the moment of fulfilment. The paradoxical inclusive exclusion or exclusive inclusion attested at the extreme boundaries of the machine, the sovereign ruler and the vulnerable homo sacer, actually saturates the entire apparatus and provides its motive force. From the beginning of the Homo Sacer series, Agamben has characterized this division as most fundamentally one of bios (the form of life, that is to say, the institutional, legal, and linguistic structures that render life intelligible and meaningful) and zoē (life itself or bare life). Instead of closing the gap or instituting a permanent separation, however, Agamben wishes to find what he calls a form-of-life, an alternative formation that never institutes the division in the first place—a way of being in the world wherein life and its form cannot be distinguished. The Highest Poverty puts forward Christian monasticism as a concrete attempt to develop this kind of form-of-life. Monastic communities originally formed around isolated hermits who reacted to the alliance between Christianity and empire by retreating from mainstream society. Hence, they provide a promising case study insofar as they do not attempt to subvert or overthrow the system, but simply withdraw from it and attempt to create something new. The first half of the book details the ways in which monasticism mostly escaped the structures of the law. The monastic rule, Agamben claims, is not a law in that it is not “enforced” upon the monk but is instead supposed to grow out of the monk’s life itself, as a kind of commentary. Monastic punishments, including even the ultimate punishment of expulsion from the community, are not strictly punitive so much as therapeutic. Further, monastic vows are not binding oaths that subject the monk to a curse if he should violate the monastic rule—indeed, in most early monastic communities, there was nothing like a vow involved at all. The temptation faced by these early monastic communities, according to Agamben, was not legalism but liturgy. As time went on, the monk’s life was increasingly articulated into a series of liturgical observances that were intended to bring constant glorification to God. This liturgical glorification was what allowed the political authorities, here represented primarily by the Church, to integrate monastic communities into the overarching theological-political apparatus. The second half of The Highest Poverty discusses the Franciscans, who for Agamben represent the most radical and promising monastic movement. They evade the liturgical temptation through the radical simplicity of their rule, which asks the monk fundamentally to live the gospel—hence rule and life are identified to the greatest possible degree. Yet, they fall into the trap of the law through the very principle meant to evade it, namely, the Franciscan claim that monastic poverty is

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so radical that it implies not simply a factual lack of possessions, but a lack of the very ability to own anything in the first place. Agamben provides a detailed account of the ways that Franciscan theorists were ultimately undermined by papal authorities in the debate about the concrete meaning of this “highest poverty,” but the overall point is that the Franciscans were already in principle defeated when they defined their position negatively in reference to the law. They were so caught up in emphasizing that they do not own anything that they failed to give a convincing account of what it is that they positively do with things. In short, they did not stop to ask what it means to simply use things without the intermediation of legal structures of ownership. That is the task that Agamben has set himself in the forthcoming final volume of the Homo Sacer series.

Other works on theology As noted above, references to theology abound in nearly all Agamben’s works, but it is only in the period of the Homo Sacer series that theology became a systematically developed theme. Alongside the Homo Sacer books, Agamben published a number of shorter books and essay collections that sometimes seem to be preparatory exercises for his primary research project or else research findings that could not be fully integrated into the series. The most important of these books for our purposes is The Time That Remains, which is a detailed commentary on the first few words of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. Inspired by Jacob Taubes’s Political Theology of St. Paul, The Time That Remains is a wide-ranging exploration of the distinctiveness of Paul’s messianism and of the ways his thought has been used and misused in Christian theology and modern thought. It is Agamben’s most detailed exploration of his idiosyncratic notion of messianism, which he sharply contrasts from any apocalyptic conviction that the end of the world is coming at some determinate date. Instead, he maintains that Paul gives us a theory of the human experience of time that allows for a fundamentally new relationship to our station in life and to the course of history more generally. This work has understandably received more attention from biblical scholars and theologians than Agamben’s other writings, given its topic and its relevance to the recent “Paul and philosophy” trend. What is perhaps most remarkable about the book, however, is the ways that it foreshadows and condenses nearly all the themes that Agamben has been grappling with in the years since its publication—including passages that summarize in advance entire volumes of the Homo Sacer series. Thus, we can view the whole series, and not just this one book, as fundamentally responding to Paul’s messianic message. Three books from the Homo Sacer period explore questions of methodology, all with explicit attention to theological and religious concepts. The Signature of All Things explores the concept of the “‘signature,” which plays a major role in The Kingdom and the Glory and serves as a lens for investigating Agamben’s debt to Michel Foucault. The title essay of “What is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays further elaborates the connection between Agamben and Foucault, explicitly tracing the roots of the Foucauldian “apparatus” (dispositif  ) back to the Greek concept of

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oikonomia by means of its Latin translation, dispositio. Profanations explores the ways in which the simultaneously religious and legal category of the “profane” might provide a model for deactivating the Western theological-political machine. Another recent work, Nudities, collects miscellaneous essays on legal and theological themes, most notably “The Glorious Body.” Like the concluding chapters of The Kingdom and the Glory, this essay uses Christian eschatological concepts as clues to help him trace the outlines of an alternative to the Western machine and may turn out to be a brief preview of The Use of Bodies. The Open, which explores the vexed question of the relationship of humanity and animality, does similar work, although with greater attention to Jewish eschatology. The Church and the Kingdom, the text of a speech given by Agamben to a group of bishops, critiques the historical Church from the standpoint of Christian eschatology and particularly Pauline messianism. Perhaps the most striking recent short work of Agamben, however, is Pilato e Gesú (Pilate and Jesus), which presents the encounter between its title characters as a model for the relationship between the political order and the messianic. Overall, Agamben is unique among contemporary philosophers for the depth and breadth of his engagement with the Christian theological tradition and with the central problems of the discipline of religious studies. His approach is also notable in that he directly addresses the Jewish tradition on its own terms (and to a much more limited extent, the Islamic tradition; see, for example, the concluding essay in Agamben 2000), rather than simply taking Christian claims about Judaism at their word. All this makes him an invaluable resource for rethinking the most crucial questions of both constructive and historical theology and for re-examining the fraught relationship between theology and philosophy. At the same time, the fact that Agamben can probe Christian sources with such rigor and urgency without being a believer gives us occasion to rethink received ideas about the relationships among institutional affiliation, personal faith, and the intellectual work of theology.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Translated by D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005a. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York, NY: Zone Books. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005b. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005c. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York, NY: Zone Books. Agamben, Giorgio. 2009a. The Signature of All Things: On Method. Translated by Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell. New York, NY: Zone Books.

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Agamben, Giorgio. 2009b. “What is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2010a. Nudities. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2010b. The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2011. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2012. The Church and the Kingdom. Translated by Leland de la Duryante. Chicago, IL: Seagull Books. Agamben, Giorgio. 2013a. Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2013b. Pilato e Gesú. Rome, Italy: Nottetempo. Agamben, Giorgio. 2013c. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn. New York, NY: Schocken. Benjamin, Walter. 1978. “Critique of Violence.” Reflections. Edited by Peter Demetz. New York, NY: Schocken. Benjamin, Walter. 2013. Origins of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. New York, NY: Verso. Heidegger, Martin. 1993. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. New York, NY: Harper. Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Peterson, Erik. 2011. Theological Tractates. Translated by Michael Hollerich. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 2004. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George D. Schwab. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Taubes, Jacob. 2003. The Political Theology of Paul. Translated by Dana Hollander. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

33 François Laruelle (1937–) Anthony Paul Smith

François Laruelle was born on 22 August 1937 in Chavelot, a village in the ­Northeast of France. Born to a Calvinist family, Laruelle found himself part of a minority in Catholic France, though a minority that historically has been seen as heretical rather than as other in the way that Jews or Muslims have historically been cast. Though he has described his family as religious (“they were very strong believers”; his brother is a Protestant pastor) and he received “a rather strict religious education,” there does not appear to be an explicit influence of Calvinism on his work, even as he goes on to claim that this religious education was “a Kantian education!—there the sensible world and the intelligible world, invisible things … doubtless I retained something from that” (Laruelle 2013a, 3). While this generally dualist position can be seen throughout his work, it was also his family’s position as a heretical minority within a broader culture that is taken up by Laruelle and generalized. While he has jokingly declared that, of the European philosophers, only he and Fichte have shepherded cows—Laruelle doing so for his grandparents and as part of a family very different from the stereotypical image of the cultured French bourgeoisie—he eventually moved to Paris to attend the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV, a preparatory sixth-form college, from the ages of sixteen to nineteen. He has remarked that during this time he did not always take his studies seriously, but excelled in literature and philosophy, oscillating between which attracted him the most. He came to choose philosophy and studied at the Sorbonne and the École Normale Supérieure at Saint-Cloud. He began his professional career teaching at Nanterre (University of Paris X, now called Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense) in 1967 and completed a doctoral dissertation under the guidance of Paul Ricoeur on the general economy of hermeneutics and a minor thesis on Félix Ravaisson. Along with Paul Ricoeur, among those on his thesis committee familiar to Anglophone readers of French philosophy was the Catholic phenomenologist Michel Henry. Despite his seemingly conventional path through

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the French phenomenological tradition dominant at the time, he quickly moved to the avant-garde wing of French philosophy with works of political philosophy (Nietzsche Contra Heidegger [1977] and Au-delà de Principe de Pouvoir [1978]) and deconstruction (Machines Textuelles. Déconstruction et Libido D’écriture [1976] and Le Declin D’ecriture [1977]).  With tongue firmly in cheek, Laruelle breaks up his work into (at this time) five distinct phases (labelled Philosophy I-V). While the first period was taken up with the works already mentioned, which were relatively conventional when compared with the other popular works of “Continental philosophy” in the Anglophone world of theology and religious studies, he soon began work on his true project, which he calls non-philosophy. This project begins in the phase he labels Philosophy II, when he began to develop a critique of “philosophical faith” and continued through the third when he refined the methodological approach. Philosophy and Non-Philosophy (originally published in 1989) bridges the second and third phases, while Principles of Non-Philosophy (originally published in 1995) is the most developed but abstract presentation of the project in the third and fourth phases. For those interested in theology and religious studies the fourth phase offers the most interesting set of texts, for during this time he turned to explicitly religious questions in the books Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy (originally published in 2002), Non-Philosophical Mysticism for Today (originally published in 2007), and Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy (originally published in 2004). His current phase has offered a new statement of the principles of non-philosophy that engages with quantum physics and philosophy of science, along with an engagement with the concept of messianity in Philosophie non-standard (2010), and a new work exclusively on religious problems, Christo-Fiction: In the Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem (originally published in 2014), which uses concepts developed through the exchange in Philosophie non-standard with quantum physics and cosmology.  Recognition of Laruelle’s work in the Anglophone world has come late in his career through an association made with “speculative Realism” owing to Ray Brassier’s early translations and use of Laruelle in his 2007 Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. While Brassier has rejected the term Speculative Realism as a descriptor of his work and though Laruelle has never described his work in these terms, many in the 2000s assumed that Laruelle’s non-philosophy shared Brassier’s antipathy towards the influence of religious discourse upon European philosophy. It is interesting to note that Laruelle does not make it onto either side of the ledger in a revealing footnote where Brassier separates the secularizing sheep of the Enlightenment from those goats who smuggle in the pathogen of religion (Brassier 2007, 256 n. 13). While Laruelle is useful to Brassier at this stage of Brassier’s project, Laruelle’s engagement with religion is passed over in silence. Yet, over the entire course of Laruelle’s career religious and theological themes have been at play in important ways (see Smith 2013a, 95–111 for an overview of the importance of religion and theology for Laruelle’s methodology). For example, the concept of messianity (which he contrasts with both messianism and the messianic) and its bearing on his understanding and casting of the relationship between philosophy

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and science is one of the most profound aspects of Laruelle’s non-philosophy for understanding science and shows how deeply ingrained religious problematics and concepts are within non-philosophy.1 In a complementary way, Laruelle’s engagement with gnosticism has also been important for his critique of traditional epistemology (see Laruelle 2015b and Laruelle 2014b). His understanding of the subject, and the subject’s role in science and philosophy, is also formed with near constant reference to the figure of Christ (see Smith 2013b and Smith 2013c; Laruelle 2010b and Laruelle 2013c). I have elsewhere already traced in more detail many of these themes, as well as the general shape of non-philosophy, including why it takes on this name. In summary, non-philosophy takes as its model non-Euclidean geometry. Just as non-Euclidean geometry does not negate Euclidean geometry but generalizes its practices through the suspension of one of its guiding axioms, non-philosophy does not act as a negation of philosophy but aims to generalize philosophical practice through a change in axiom. If (Western) philosophy has been guided by a thinking of Being or the Other, non-philosophy relativizes both in relation to the One or the Real. This move towards greater abstraction has the effect of disempowering philosophy’s faith in itself to affect and frame the Real. But here I will offer only a short précis of the themes of non-philosophy, before turning to a discussion of Laruelle’s direct engagement with particular religious traditions and the methodology behind it.

Major religious and theological themes From messianism to messianity Laruelle often makes use of terms that are intentionally strange. While this has left him open to charges of being intentionally obscure, it arises out of a deep sense that our standard philosophical forms of thinking are saturated with concepts that lend themselves to a kind of philosophical faith in their sufficiency. Thus, to break that hallucination of sufficiency, Laruelle intentionally deploys terms that aim to express the usual standard philosophical concept, but as lived, in flesh-and-blood, rather than as something “lived experience” (or “the lived”) [vécu] is subject to. This is the case with his re-casting of standard philosophical conceptions of messianism and the messianic. Messianity translates the French neologism messianité and indicates an activity, or something that is enacted. In Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, Laruelle develops a general non-philosophy of messianism that will lead him to his conception of messianity. There the messiah is explained as the “Future Christ,” which is not a figure that is awaited or even a proclamation, but an ultimatum given to the World (see Laruelle 2010b, 120–122). The World, which Laruelle nearly always capitalizes, is another concept partially drawn from religious discourses and names that complex of sufficiency and authoritarianism that oppresses human beings. The messiah, as Future Christ, is the subject that opposes the World and reveals that what lies behind its expression as a subject is a human being that is foreign to or a stranger of the World (this dual sense

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of “foreign,” often deployed as a political term circulating around the status of and threat to a “national identity” in the face of immigration, and “stranger,” a more generic term, are both captured in the single French term étranger). We will look in more detail at this conception of the subject later, but what messianity names is the action of such a subject that is strange and separated from the World. In an essay written at the same time as his Philosophie Non-Standard, Laruelle develops this move from his “special messianism” of Future Christ to messianity: I call messianity the form of strictly human causality that is exerted as a generic practice and I distinguish messianity from messianism. Rather than a transcendent event, expected but received as unexpected, it is an unexpected or under-expected process of placing the events that happen within the world’s horizon under a condition or under-determination. Given its constitution, the subject becomes what it virtually is, it is involved in an ever-changing permanent transformation of means within the limits of their generic use. (Laruelle 2014c, 21) In other words, messianity names a specific kind of causality that messianic subjects enact using the material of the World but without those subjects being of that World. In Philosophie Non-Standard, Laruelle compares this conception of messianity to his earlier development of determination-in-the-last-instance. This concept, taken from Marx and Engels, usually names the way in which a real, material base defines some projection or aspect of the superstructure such that “in the last instance” the substance of that projection or the reality of that superstructure is reducible to the real material base, at least as regards how to effect change in that superstructure. Perhaps the most salient example in Marx of this understanding of causality is the understanding of religion as a symptom of some underlying real suffering, such that religion (which for Marx is an illusion) will only disappear if and when that real suffering is addressed. Laruelle’s mutation of determination-in-the-last-instance, especially as elucidated through the comparison with messianity, takes this Marxist conception and generalizes it such that even a philosophy like Marxism is shown to have the character of a superstructure. For, in Laruelle’s understanding, Marxism as a theory that is philosophical and scientific at the same time has as its real base the human beings who think it and develop it. It is human beings who come to the World as subjects that enact and carry out some kind of a solution to a “problem that only they can solve: what to do with the World (Laruelle 2010b, 113)?” Messianity is the human action of coming to answer that question.

Subject and the world If messianity names the action, then Future Christ names the subject that carries out that action and the World names the realm in which such action is carried out or snuffed out. Laruelle works out this theory of the subject over several books,

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though a constant theme is that the subject is something that is separated or s­ eparable from the human in his or her radical immanence. Laruelle names this irreducible core “Man-in-Man” or, when attempting to address the gender bias, “Human-inHuman” (which I follow). A subject is thus different from the lived experience of a human being’s radical immanence. While a formalism of his theory of the subject is presented in Principles of NonPhilosophy (Laruelle 2013b, 79–120), the way in which an engagement with religion modifies his understanding of the subject is best seen in his description of the Future Christ: With the cloning of every man as subject, humans, despite or because of their in-sufficiency, take up existing under the form of an organon, precisely the Future Christ, the authentic relationship to the World and to history in totality rather than in the manner of their phenomena. The old Christ had been conceived in transcendence and the World (in sin?), he was without doubt an organon but still on the model of mediation or instrument (for a reaction or rebirth). Christianity cannot overcome its failing of identity and faith by a profusion of churches and orders, of dogmas and authorities, saints and priests, actions and ritual operations. The Future Christ rather signifies that each man is a Christ-organon, that is to say, of course, the Messiah, but simple and unique once each time. This is minimal Christianity. We the Without-religion, the Without-church, the heretics of the future, we are, each-and-everyone, a Christ or Messiah. […] By its practice, this is only a half-programme, only unilateral, of a constitution of the Christ-subject giving aid to the World and against it. (Laruelle 2010b, 117) Laruelle summarizes in this passage his view of the subject as a material construction, rather than the immanent identity of a human being. In the background of this claim is that the radical immanence of the human being is foreclosed to philosophy and thus ultimately foreclosed to alienation, so that the subject is what is actually able to be alienated or constructed in such a way as to work against worldly alienation. For Laruelle, it was the World that crucified the “historical Christ” as an instance of the form of Christ that each and every human being may be. Following again standard Christological discourse, Laruelle sees the messiah coming for the World, but as always separate from the World. Ultimately, this religious casting of the Christ or messiah as a subject position that anyone may occupy and that can only be understood in terms of the causality of determination-in-the-last-instance or unilateral duality commits Laruelle to a generic Docetic Christology (see Smith 2013b). By saying that the subject and the Human-in-Human have a relationship elucidated only by determination-inthe-last-instance or unilateral duality Laruelle is claiming that there is a duality of subject (Future Christ) and Human-in-Human, but only from the perspective of the subject. In the last instance, the subject is dependent upon the human in flesh

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and blood. This Docetic position is generalized by Laruelle such that not only does it apply to the Christ, but to every human being as well. This does not downplay the realities of subjects or the process of subjectivation, but sees these subject positions as ultimately plastic and able to be transformed as they are based upon a “real” kernel (and not simply a “rational” one) of the Human-in-Human.

Gnosis What perhaps differentiates Laruelle’s philosophical engagement with religious traditions is his constant reference, nearly always positive, to the so-called “Gnostic tradition.”2 Laruelle is aware that the term “Gnostic” does not identify any particular tradition, but is a term developed by Christian heresiology. What attracts Laruelle to this tradition is in part that the Gnostics were given the status of heretics by a dominant Christianity and were thus made into victims. While he also credits the Mandaeans with developing one of the greatest conceptions of Life (Laruelle 2010b, 38), his attraction to Gnosticism is primarily the ways in which these traditions focused upon knowledge or gnosis and in particular the knowledge of an ultimate separation, or “being-separated,” of human beings from “the World.” Again, in this sense the World names the projected transcendental relations that end up turning objects of knowledge into mirrors of those transcendental relations, and so we are never able to think these objects in their radical immanence. Thus, gnosis becomes an important concept outside of his work on religion and is instead a general ­concept that he uses even to elucidate his reading of Marxism without claiming, as some conservative political philosophers have, that Marxism is a form of modern Gnosticism (see Laruelle 2014c). Instead, the gnosis of being-separated, particularly the being-separated of the base from the superstructure, helps him to elucidate Althusser’s “practical cognitive appropriation” of the World, bringing together this notion of knowledge about being-separated with the Marxist notion that knowledge is a concrete work and a practice upon and within the World. This generalization of gnosis beyond its historical instantiation in specific religious communities is part and parcel of Laruelle’s methodology when engaging with religious discourses. Rather than seeking to provide the criteria upon which a religion could be judged true or false, which repeats the structure of Christian heresiology, Laruelle engages with religious material that treats it as in some sense equal to or equivalent to philosophical material. This equality (despite one being cast as particular and another being cast as universal or a transcendental condition for thought) is dependent upon the very concept of gnosis he has taken up. For what makes all forms of thought equal are their unilateral separation from what he calls the Real or the One. This concept is developed over the course of his career (for a summary see Ó Maoilearca and Smith 2012, 19–41), but it refers to the irreducible base or immanence upon which all thought depends. That irreducible base is named the radical identity of the human being or “Human-in-Human” (see Laruelle 2014d and Kolozova 2014, 13–50).

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Both the emphasis that human beings’ salvation is found through a knowledge that they are separate from the World and the fact of this knowledge being propagated by victims brings together epistemology and ethics in Laruelle’s work. In other words, Laruelle’s reading of gnosis is a kind of bringing together or, more accurately, a unified theory of epistemology and ethics. This may be seen especially in the presentation of the historical Gnostics in Future Christ, where their status as absolute victims without even memory figures so radically. Consider the interplay of knowledge and ethics when Laruelle writes of those who may count as Gnostics today or are “new Gnostics”: If it is necessary to start again completely differently from that failed knowledge that is philosophy, we do not simply reject it on religious grounds like ancient gnosis rejected the World as evil and illusion. It is our only material, and the science that the Moderns have acquired meanwhile gives us a means of knowing, that is to say of modelling, that complex object, failed knowledge, and a means of making use of it on the basis of Man-in-person who is not modern or ancient. We are the new Gnostics who think that there is a salvation even from evil. Philosophy, form of the World, is our prison but the prison has the form of a hallucination and a transcendental illusion, not the form of flesh—it is itself knowable. (Laruelle 2010b, 41) Readers may be surprised to see that here philosophy comes to be another name for the World, though a certain form of philosophy rooted in a kind of self-sufficiency or philosophical faith that Laruelle sees as a form of authoritarianism which nonphilosophy may disempower or impoverish through a heretical practice or usage of philosophical materials.

Heresy The preceding themes affect Laruelle’s project, that is, he does not practice philosophy of religion in the usual sense of setting down frameworks for religious claims or even primarily as advocating against religion in the name of a philosophy claiming to be universal. Instead the themes of messianity are taken up as properly part of the non-philosophical project. However, no religious theme goes to the heart of the practice of non-philosophy like heresy. Indeed, even in the short précises sketched above, one can see a heretical thread running through them. This is recognized by Laruelle himself, as he variously calls heresy a principle, a cause, and a general style of non-philosophy: “If non-philosophy takes its material from philosophy, it takes its principle—its cause rather, and its general style—from a stance we shall call purely heretical or heretical as such to distinguish it from the specified forms of heresy” (2013a, 267). So why is heresy given such a privileged space within Laruelle’s project? After all, some may object, is not heresy the orthodoxy of our day? Laruelle rejects such

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a reversibility, at least in terms of a heretical practice, for the true relationship of ­heresy and orthodoxy ultimately comes down to a question of sufficiency and domination.3 The real heretic declares their separation, their irreducible immanence. Such separation from the World as a hallucinatory complex of sufficiency takes place regardless of whether the identity separated is as a “we” or an “I” (both can be forms of sufficiency and sites of an immanence which need not make claims to sufficiency). In this way, Laruelle’s heresy is very different from the vision of “individualistic heresy” that may rightly be seen as a contemporary ideology (something to be taken as a “right opinion” or orthodoxy) of our individualistic and atomized culture within the largely corporatist globalized space of capital multi-nationals and their imposed political economy. For Laruelle’s heresy refuses to see itself as somehow transcendent to whatever tradition it may find itself within, while simultaneously declaring its being-separated from that tradition.4 It is precisely in this way that Laruelle claims non-philosophy as a heresy within the realm of philosophy: Non-Philosophy is a theory of the real subject for philosophy, but a theory that represents in itself a certain rigorous practice of its object. Without at all neglecting the traditions that serve as its materials, it is thoroughly nontraditionalist—this goes without saying—and even ‘non-traditional’ in the sense that we understand this ‘non-,’ namely as cumulating the forces of what we call heresy rather than the false, the non-power of hairesis rather than the powers of pseudos. (Laruelle 2013a, 259–260) As this quote evidences, the point of non-philosophy is not the negation of philosophy, not the casting off of this or that tradition, but a certain working with whatever tradition, without any claim to sufficiency or, ultimately, the authority of the tradition. The tradition itself just becomes material. The term hairesis, from which our term “heresy” is derived, is of a Greek origin, and we know that its meaning has changed over time. Originally meaning “choice” and applied without any negative connotation to a group marked by some commonality, through the development of early Christian heresiology it came to name negatively a group standing outside, and so standing antagonistically, to some established or recognized tradition (Boyarin 2004, 3–4). In other words, heresy names separation, indeed the very separation witnessed to by gnosis. So, what does it mean to be separated, but actually separate and not simply the creation of some new sufficiency, some new vision of a World that casts itself as an All? Ultimately it means that heresy is separated from that World without separation. But what can such a seemingly paradoxical statement mean? That one is in the World but not of it. Laruelle claims: The ungraspable force of heresy’s rebellion is to be, like immanence, as if it were completely inside the All from which it emerges and from what it separates itself; but also completely external to it, already separated from it,

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because it does not shatter, deconstruct or break down—without this interior and exterior forming a process at equilibrium, but instead an identity-inthe-last-instance. It is only of the heretic, of the Stranger in the radical sense in which we understand it, that one can say that they did not need to ‘exit’ philosophy because they never ‘entered’ it with hands, feet and soul bound, but that they took responsibility in transforming it. (Laruelle 2013a, 273) In other words, while heresy names a certain separation from the World (that is from tradition as sufficient), it also names a certain responsibility, imposed form nowhere, to mutate that tradition.5

Laruelle’s method of mutation This short look at the importance of heresy for Laruelle’s project leads us finally to a wider question about the religious materials Laruelle engages with and his method for doing so. As already stated, Laruelle treats traditions as materials. Traditions encapsulate both religious traditions as well as the Western philosophical tradition and the traditional practices of science. Laruelle in turn treats each of these materials as equivalent in terms of their materiality, since none of them are the Real as such but instead only are effectuations of the Real (again, one should think here of the Marxist distinction between base and superstructure or the logic of determinationin-the-last-instance). But this raises a question regarding how non-philosophy sees itself with regard to this equality. Some might wonder if the claim by Laruelle to be able to engage with each of these materials suggests a kind of universal gaze akin to Kant’s critical project or Hegel’s dialectical project, which both delineated in various ways the proper place of various forms of knowledge, thereby setting their philosophies up as a kind of transcendent universal language or discourse. And indeed, with regard to religion, Laruelle does suggest such a universality for non-philosophy when he writes, “Non-Philosophy affirms a ‘secularity’ [laïcité] by principle, as universal as it or philosophy can be” (Laruelle 2012, 250). But the conditional “can be” makes all the difference here. For what is aimed for is a kind of generic nature that allows for the non-philosopher to mingle with many codes, to practice a kind of interparticularity, rather than reduce all particularities to a single code.6 Their only reduction is to an equal insufficiency as regards the Real for which no discourse is allowed sufficiency, even a discourse of insufficiency like non-philosophy. What can then be done with these traditions and discourses? Well, one must build with them, mutating them within non-philosophy, not overturning them but acting as heretics within their space. Laruelle sums up this stance writing, “In all fields of knowledge, non-philosophy is an instigator of rebellion, not revolution; an operation of revolt and separation, not direct resistance. It introduces into the relation to philosophy or the world a practice of heresy rather than apocalypse, of transmutation or transvaluation” (Laruelle 2013a, 280).

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From a post-secular and even postcolonial perspective, much of this is laudable in relation to the usual practices of philosophy towards religion. For most of its history philosophy has distinguished itself from doxa and cast religion as a primary carrier of such doxa. Non-Philosophy, despite its attempt to be “as universal as it can be,” does not cast religion as a particularly egregious form of authoritarianism or selfsufficiency. Instead, there is a general duality to religion, just like every tradition, and a general equality as material before the Real which allows for that mutation. However, in Laruelle’s near exclusive use of Jewish and Christian materials, and in a way where the first is too often overdetermined by the second, he limits and perhaps repeats a certain kind of Christian logic (see Barber 2014 for a subtle and productive critique). However, despite this limitation within Laruelle’s work, non-philosophy itself may be useful for engagements outside of Judeao-Christianity. For example, I have tried to show the ways in which Islam and non-philosophy may interact, and Glenn Wallis has developed what he calls a non-Buddhism in dialogue with Laruelle’s works (Smith 2013c, Smith 2014b, Wallis 2012). Indeed, such uses of nonphilosophy are encouraged by Laruelle, even if he does not himself carry them out. However, other critics, though less engaged with non-philosophy and less informed about religious studies and theology than Barber, have cast aspersions on Laruelle’s project for characterizing the philosophy of Derrida and Levinas as part of a “Judaic turn” (McGettigan 2012). McGettigan’s generally negative appraisal of Laruelle largely misses the mark in his criticism, as evidenced by his claiming that historical works like Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou offer better philosophical engagements with heresy than Future Christ. Despite the fact that these are rather standard books for those in religious studies seeking to understand heresy in the Middle Ages (and only the Middle Ages), McGettigan misses the point that Laruelle quite explicitly does not seek to write a history (philosophical or otherwise) of heresy, but to think through heresy as a transhistorical theoretical and practical concept that may affect philosophy’s practices itself. McGettigan’s more serious criticism, though ultimately in my view lacking sufficient argumentation or understanding of Laruelle’s project, regards his claims about Laruelle’s seeming “essentialism” in naming certain things as Jewish. The charge of essentialism misses the point that for Laruelle all traditions are ultimately ungrounded and are in a unilateral relationship to the Real (the Humanin-Human). In more direct terms, religion, Jewish or otherwise, would not exist if not for human beings—and that does not point to some irreality or irrationalism of those traditions, but simply their insufficiency or the ultimate separateness of the Human from this or that tradition. Thus, for Laruelle, there is no “essence” of a religion, Jewish or otherwise, but there is an identity, some shape or form that has actual effects and actual characteristics even as relative to the Real. Indeed, ­McGettigan at times seems to fall into a strangely racist logic common in liberal attempts at anti-racism where to name something as X (Jewish, Black, Indian, etc.) is to immediately fall into racism, like the humorous but sad example of wellmeaning liberals expressing shock when one refers to someone as a Mexican when that person’s nationality is Mexican. That is, in their attempt to not name someone

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a Mexican who is a Mexican they have cast being a Mexican an insult in itself: “Don’t call him that!” as if being Mexican or Jewish (or both!) was to be something bad or wrong. There is no essence of Judaism for Laruelle that would be akin to the usual assumed essences that circulate in anti-Semitism. But there is something Jewish, and affirmed by Laruelle, in the challenge to Greek philosophy found within Levinas and the ways in which Derrida takes up Levinas in his own ruminations on the nature of the Jewgreek/Greekjew (a reference that Derrida of course takes from Joyce’s Ulysses), which constitute Western philosophy. McGettigan’s smear of Laruelle is couched in a liberal attempt at anti-racism that ends up erasing the importance of the Jewish intellectual tradition in and anything specific to it in Levinas’ philosophy. McGettigan then, paradoxically, carries out a racist logic by instead claiming that Levinas is ultimately just a European philosopher that other non-Jewish philosophers may communicate clearly with: Levinas sits within a neo-Kantian framework, whereby phenomenology describes being, the given, the same, but the teaching of the religious tradition is transmuted, distilled, into (atheist) philosophical ideas which orient practical philosophy. Levinas is comprehensible within classical and contemporary philosophy. (McGettigan 2012, 38) In other words, Levinas is not a “Jewish Other,” whom the philosopher would not find comprehensible, but “one of us.” It is the erasing of difference that is part and parcel of a liberal “post-racial racism,” whereas Laruelle’s method attempts to think both the ultimately immanent and generic nature of the human and any name given to that person as bestowed by the complex interplay of traditions. After all, Jewish identity is constituted in dialogue with other identities, just as European identity is constituted in dialogue with the Greek and Jewish traditions of thought (amongst others, like the Islamic, which Laruelle passes over in silence) and vice versa (see Laruelle 2015b for an in-depth investigation of this relationship and Laruelle 2013a, 265–6 for a summary). Laruelle’s method allows for the recognition of alterity as actual alterity (  Jew and Greek are actual but not the Real as such), but insufficient or in-the-lastinstance dependent upon the Human-in-Human. Unlike the universal philosophical position represented by McGettigan this is built upon an actual anti-racism that runs from Laruelle’s early political works up through his rumination on thinking “in the ruins of Athens and Jerusalem,” where the power of various traditions is affirmed but affirmed as insufficient, where no tradition can set itself up as the Tradition-with-a-capital-T to which all others must submit. The only real authority, for Laruelle, is the Human, and the only way to think the reality of that authority is to think the insufficiency of the Human as evidenced most powerfully in the Victim (Laruelle 2014a, Laruelle 2015a), which could be any human being that finds himself or herself burned up, enslaved, nailed to or hung from a tree, cast as subaltern, or ultimately forgotten by the World. Non-Philosophy aims to

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mutate philosophy as the World’s truncheon into an instrument that amplifies the ­ultimatum of the Victim to the World. Not giving the Victim voice, but amplifying the voice of the Victim qua Victim, a Victim irreversible with the victor or unilaterally related to the victor. So, while Laruelle’s work is often noted for its difficulty and strangeness, that difficulty and strangeness exists as equal to the task it has set itself: to disempower philosophy as authoritarian machine and allow for the equality of discourses within thought, a true democracy of thought that is built upon the radical being-separated of human beings from those same affirmed traditions given relative autonomy. Laruelle’s non-philosophy is arguably unique in the realm of European philosophy for the fearless ways in which it allows itself to be truly transformed by its engagement with religious materials.

Notes 1 I have traced that influence elsewhere and so will not repeat the analysis here: see Smith 2013c, Laruelle 2010a and Laruelle 2013c. 2 Though Laruelle does not use a robust system of citation, his stance regarding the Gnostic tradition is largely in accord with contemporary research. For example, while recognizing that much of the specifics of Gnostic beliefs and practices were distorted via Christian hereisology, he also recognizes and exploits an identity that escapes this dialectic putting him firmly in line with the studies of King (2003) and Brakke (2010). 3 While there is no reason to believe that Laruelle has read the work of Daniel Boyarin, an important scholar of religion and the construction of a separation between Christianity and Judaism it is remarkable how close Laruelle’s own understanding of heresy and orthodoxy mirrors Boyarin’s; see Boyarin (2004). 4 While the space does not exist here to fully explain this practice, Laruelle prefers past participle form of verbs to express immanence, here “separated” or “being-separated,” rather than a noun form, like separation. The reason being that a noun implies some distance from actor and action, whereas the past participle of the verb does not. For more on this practice see Smith 2015, chapter 3. 5 See Smith (2014b) for a longer discussion of the relationships between traditions and heresy. There I argue for a non-dialectical form of relation between traditions and heresy by putting Laruelle into a critical dialogue with the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. I argue that this non-dialectical relationship allows us to see the ways in which heresy relativizes traditions, allowing them to function and be put to human use, but without allowing them to become overwhelming powers that dominate human beings. 6 See Barber (2012, 30–61) for the conception of interparticularity that runs in parallel to Laruelle’s own project. Barber’s work is invaluable for correcting the remnants of Eurocentrism present in Laruelle’s work as he takes Laruelle’s critique of philosophical self-­ sufficiency to its limit as a critique of the wily form European universalism takes. In Barber’s reworking of post-secularism, the relativization of philosophical codes must involve a relativization of non-philosophy’s claim to act as a universal translator of those codes.

References Barber, Daniel C. 2011. On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, Secularity. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Barber, Daniel C. 2014. “Mediation, Religion, and Non-Consistency in-One.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 19.2, 161-174.

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Boyarin, Daniel. 2004, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Brassier, Ray. 2007. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Bassingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Brakke, David. 2010. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Galloway, Alexander R., Eugene Thacker and MacKenzie Wark. 2013. Excommunication: Three Inquires in Media and Mediation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Galloway, Alexander R. 2014. Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. King, Karen. 2003. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kolozova, Katerina. 2014. The Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Laruelle, François. 1976. Machines textuelles. Déconstruction et libido d’écriture. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Laruelle, François. 1977a. Le Déclin de l’écriture. Paris, France: Aubier-Flammarion. Laruelle, François. 1977b. Nietzsche contra Heidegger. Thèses pour une politique nietzschéenne. Paris, France: Payot. Laruelle, François. 1978. Au-delà de principe de pouvoir. Paris, France: Payot. Laruelle, François. 2007. Mystique non-philosophique à l”usage des contemporains. Paris, France: L’Harmattan. Laruelle, François. 2010a. Philosophie non-standard. Générique, quantique, philo-fiction. Paris, France: Kimé. Laruelle, François. 2010b. Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy. Translated by Anthony Paul Smith. London and New York: Continuum. Laruelle, François. 2010c. Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy. Translated by Rocco Gangle. London and New York: Continuum. Laruelle, François. 2012. Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy. Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing. Laruelle, François. 2013a. From Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-Standard Thought. Edited by Robin Mackay. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic. Laruelle, François. 2013b. Principles of Non-Philosophy. Translated by Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Laruelle, François. 2013c. Anti-Badiou: Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy. Translated by Robin Mackay. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Laruelle, François. 2013d. Philosophy and Non-Philosophy. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing. Laruelle, François. 2014a. Intellectuals and Power: The Insurrection of the Victim. Translated by Anthony Paul Smith. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Laruelle, François. 2014b. Introduction to Non-Marxism. Translated by Anthony Paul Smith. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing. Laruelle, François. 2014c. “Principles for a Generic Ethics.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 19.2: 13–23. Laruelle, François. 2015a. General Theory of Victims. Translated by Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Laruelle, François. 2015b. Christo-Fiction: In the Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem. Translated by Robin Mackay. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. McGettigan, Andrew. 2012. “Fabrication Defect: François Laruelle’s Philosophical Materials.” Radical Philosophy 175: 33–42. Ó Maoilearca/Mullarkey, John. 2006. Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline. London and New York: Routledge.

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Ó Maoilearca/Mullarkey, John. 2008. Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality. Bassingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Ó Maoilearca/Mullarkey, John. 2015. All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ó Maoilearca/Mullarkey, John and Anthony Paul Smith, eds. 2012. Laruelle and NonPhilosophy. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Smith, Anthony Paul. 2013a. A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, Anthony Paul. 2013b. “‘Who do you say that I am?’: Secular Christologies in Contemporary French Philosophy.” Analecta Hermeneutica 4; journals.library.mun.ca/ojs/ index.php/analecta/article/view/703/603 (accessed May 2014). Smith, Anthony Paul. 2013c. “Laruelle and the Messiah before the Saints.” Postmodern Saints of France: Refiguring “the Holy” in Contemporary French Philosophy. Edited by Colby Dickinson. London and New York: Bloomsbury. 249–60. Smith, Anthony Paul. 2014a. François Laruelle’s Principles of Non-Philosophy: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Smith, Anthony Paul. 2014b. “Against Tradition to Liberate Tradition: Weaponized Apophaticism and Gnostic Refusal.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 19.2: 161–74. Smith, Anthony Paul. 2015. Laruelle: A Stranger Thought. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Wallis, Glenn. 2012. “Speculative Non-Buddhism: x-Buddhist Hallucination and Its Decimation.” Cruel Theory—Sublime Practice: Towards a Reevluation of Buddhism. Roskilde, Denmark: EyeCorner Press. 87–156.

34 Slavoj Žižek (1949–) Marcus Pound

One of the most deplorable aspects of the postmodern era and its so-called ‘thought’ is the return of the religious dimension in all its different guises: From Christian and other fundamentalisms, through the multitude of New Age spiritualisms, up to the emerging religious sensitivity within deconstruction itself (the so-called ‘post-secular’ thought). (Žižek 2001, 1) If not for the opening to a book that argues for the continued relevance of Christianity at the turn of the twenty-first century, such a statement from philosopher Slavoj Žižek might sit well alongside currents of secular atheism.1 Born during 1949 in Ljubljana, the former northern republic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Žižek grew up under the rule of Marshal Tito and developed his thought in the theoretical currents that arose in the political ferment of central Europe during the 1970s. According to Žižek, the big philosophical and political debates in Slovenia during that time were twofold. On the one hand, an official Marxist philosophy was prevalent, and on the other, a dissident branch that took its intellectual trajectory from Heidegger and the phenomenological tradition. Žižek situated his early work as a reaction to both: a non-Heideggerian approach that remained dissident, or critical theory (Žižek 1991, 26). His Master of Arts thesis, completed in 1975 on French structuralism, was deemed ideologically suspect, a point that cost him a teaching post. However, it also afforded him a degree of intellectual freedom. Abandoned in a professional wilderness, Žižek became part of a significant group of Slovenian scholars who engaged with the theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), and with whom he founded the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis in Ljubljana. Despite being barred from a university teaching post, he eventually was appointed to a research position at the Ljubljana Institute for Sociology, where he completed a

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Doctor of Arts degree in 1981 on German idealism. Upon completing this degree, he moved to Paris, where he attended the seminars of Jacques Alain-Miller, Lacan’s son-in-law, and with whom he also underwent analysis. In Paris, he completed a second doctoral dissertation, which focused on the works of Lacan, Hegel, Marx and Kripke (Khader 2013, 3–16). The eventual publication of his dissertation in English during 1989 was entitled The Sublime Object of Ideology, and earned him an international reputation.

Theoretical background Žižek’s critical theory turns upon a synthesis of Lacanian, Hegelian and Marxist ideas. Briefly put, by reading Hegel through the lens of Lacan, Žižek is able to render dialectics as a way of thinking—a way which resists the closure of thought often imputed to Hegelian dialectics. This understanding serves as the basis for ­re-thinking the revolutionary imperative of Marx in light of mass-consumerism. From Lacan, Žižek inherits a “meta-psychology,” three orders or registers that provide a structural framework for thinking through subjectivity: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The Imaginary is the foundational order that forms the ego through specular identifications, that is, identifications with images that bestow a sense, albeit a false sense, of wholeness on the subject. The symbolic register is the differential field of signs through which subjectivity is constituted. The symbolic order is analogous to the type of code that organizes a field of relations, for example, the rules of a game as opposed to the actual pieces employed in the game (i.e. the Imaginary). Signs impart meaning, but because the Symbolic is a field of relations, any meaning implied in signification is merely a product of relations within the field. Hence, what we experience as meaningful includes an aspect of something that nonetheless resists symbolisation (i.e. the Real) (Wood 2012, 7). The Real is the negative manifestation of lack within the Symbolic. To explain another way, the Real is not unlike a black hole, whose effect on surrounding celestial bodies can be determined but not seen since light cannot escape its gravitational pull. The Real is a void that prevents the subject’s total identification with the Symbolic. Indeed, it is the Real of existence in which the subject is principally located. The Real accounts for the motive force of desire, a lack that renders psychoanalysis a practice concerned with the ways one substantiates imaginary objects in place of the Real of symbolic existence. The Real is the standpoint from which critique is generated. What allows for consistency within the symbolic register is the Master Signifier or Big Other,2 the fundamental deadlock that unifies a field of meaning such that if it were to be unlocked, the whole field would fall apart. However, the Master Signifier has no signified content itself, which is precisely why it can unify a field. What grounds the authority of the Master Signifier is not some key underlying meaning but simply the fidelity to a sign under which a subjective position is established toward the Symbolic.

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In Lacanian psychoanalysis, what is at stake is the way a Master Signifier (or Big Other) organizes the field of desire, structuring what Lacan calls a neurotic disposition, that is to say, the particular way in which being poses a question for the subject: what am I for the Other? Analysis is the process by which the analysand is reconciled with the non-­ existence of the Big Other through an encounter with the Real, which opens up the possibility of a new subjective relationship within the Symbolic. In developing the theoretical resources of the Real toward a critique of ideology, Žižek champions the Lacanian “act”—an act which is undertaken on the part of the subject within the register of the Real, involving a mode of identification by the subject with that which is excluded from the socio-symbolic. Because the act identifies with the Real, it cannot be founded in any political call for unity around a given identity (e.g. gender, race); it is founded in fidelity to a signifier which has no place within the existing socio-symbolic structure, and hence cannot but appear as an absent cause as such.

Lacan and Hegel Lacan often construed his project in terms of Heidegger’s critique of onto-­theology, which translates God into a first principle, the causa sui or first chain in a link that sustains beings. So understood, onto-theology reduces philosophy to epistemology, to the question of what we can know of Being. Lacan wants to challenge the metaphysical structures that sustain subjectivity as a whole, that is, the Big Other as the organizing principle and locus of support of a subjective field. This is the meaning he imputes to the claim there is no Other of the Other. While bearing elements of this critique, it is Hegel that Žižek re-reads on the basis of the Lacanian Real, but it is a non-foundational reading of Hegel that resists the standard interpretation of the dialectical method, according to which given opposites are reconciled in a higher synthesis or unified whole. Rather, as Žižek puts it, in the synthesis “difference is posited as such, in the form of an inconsistent totality” (Wood 2012, 13; original emphasis). This is developed in later writings into what Adrian Johnston calls a “transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity“ (Johnston 2008). At the heart of Žižek’s approach to materialism is a rejection of the given choices between adopting scientific rationalism or a postmodern linguistic paradigm. In both cases, the “stuff” of reality is radically reduced, implicitly becoming either dumb matter or deemed irrelevant given the socio-symbolic role language plays. This leaves the only apparent alternative—a turn to super-sensible reality somewhere in the order of t­ ranscendence. By way of contrast to this alternative, he posits reality as incomplete as such: any part of reality is not a part of a projected whole, there are merely parts. In the parlance of Lacan reality is “non-All.” The use of the word “non-All” involves the positive predication of a non-predicate. A “lack” is positively predicated of reality. In this way, Žižek underlines the constitutive role that absence plays in the

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establishment of life. Hence, when we encounter a blind spot in reality, rather than view it as an obfuscation of a prior unity or promised end, thereby presupposing at an ontological level the prior givenness of a harmonious whole, Žižek invites us to consider these blind spots as constitutive of life (Žižek 2009, 95). Hence, the choice is not between materialism or transcendence, but a materialism that remains ontologically incomplete, a more radical form of dialectical materialism according to which a materialist can “joyously assume the ‘disappearance of matter’, the fact there is only void” (Žižek 2009, 93). Žižek often underlines this conceptual shift with reference to the “un-dead” (Žižek 2006, 122). To say that someone is “undead” is not the same as saying he or she is “alive.” The use of “un” negates our understanding of death, while retaining the sense that death remains inherent within its dialectical opposite, “life.” The undead gives voice to the Real of life. In Žižek’s metapsychology, the “undead” or Real is the mark of the inherent and excessive core from which humanity springs. In this way, Žižek gives novel expression to the Freudian drive: it no longer names nostalgia to return to a presupposed state of fusion with the mother; rather it names the lack that persists within us, the dimension of a “spectral life which insists beyond (biological) death” (Žižek 2003, 93), and hence makes us irreducible to mere biology.

Žižek and theology Theology appears to have played little role in his early work, surfacing only later in a concerted set of three principal works: The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (2000); On Belief (2001); and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003). More recent works include, with John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ (2009) and with Boris Gunjevic, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (2012). According to Adam Kotsko, the increased role of theology within Žižek’s work follows his turn from a broad support of liberal democracy—which characterised his earlier writings—to a more critical and assertive political stance (Kotsko 2008, 6–7). As Johnston (2008, 16) and Sharpe and Boucher (2010) point out, the initial transition occurred around 1996–1998, during which Žižek appeared to take a brief respite from publishing, immersing himself instead in the literature of German Idealism, in particular the work of F. W. Schelling. What role does Schelling play in this regard? Schelling’s mythical and poetic account of creation in Ages of the World charts the passage from the Eternal Idea to corruptible reality. In the first stage, Shelling posits the Ungrund—an abyss prior to material grounding in which God is taken to be a pure impersonal Will that wills Nothingness and “rejoices in its non-being” (Žižek 1997, 16). However, because God is pure potential, a desire is generated for which there is no satisfaction, and which is quickly turned in on itself. In the second stage, God—the Abyss of Freedom—contracts into itself such that the Ungrund becomes a divine vortex of madness, the Real of freedom, thereby negating its own essence and freedom. In the third stage, God’s contraction and

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self-emptying is countered by an act of expansion in which the Absolute breaks out of the divine vortex of madness through the imposition of a word: the Logos, that is, a Master Signifier (Žižek 1997, 14). For Žižek, Hegel carries through this logic in his kenotic reading of the incarnation. According to Hegel, God is contracted into man and then finally self-emptied on the cross. What dies on the cross is indeed God himself, the God of the beyond, not just his “finite container“ (Žižek 2009b, 257). Yet it is precisely the death of Christ (God’s contraction) that allows the moment of Spirit to pass (the moment of expansion) as it comes to name the community of believers, that is, the Church, through the Word. Spirit thus refers directly to the corporal body of the faithful, “[the] Holy Spirit of their community” (Žižek 2009b, 282–3). What unites the moments of creation and incarnation is the theological tradition of kenosis, where God’s act of creation and subsequent incarnation is understood in terms of God’s self-emptying. Žižek’s theology is, then, a theology that draws upon Schelling and Hegel respectively, thereby imbuing it with a radical sense of negativity missing from more participatory models of theology which borrow their philosophical roots from Platonism. In subsequent years, Žižek has come to draw significantly upon the work of Alain Badiou to develop this theological reading into a radical politics. If Žižek’s prior concern was how to subvert a political order, it now becomes how political communities are formed in the first place. Badiou formulates the process by which an event, in particular the event of Christ, becomes the basis for a political community by subtracting from the existing Judaic and Greco-Roman cultures into which it was born. Like Žižek, Badiou is not interested in the “Truth” of Christ as such, merely the process through which Christ is established as the foundation for a Universal Truth, which serves as the basis of the Christian community. At the heart of the procedure is an event, an encounter with something that remains unaccountable from within the existing situation. The event is the impossible Real, which escapes representation as such, yet is manifest precisely by way of its negativity. In Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (2003), Badiou takes the declarative power of Christ’s resurrection for St. Paul, a claim that could not have been accommodated by the existing Jewish and Greek thought, to constitute the event. Hence the event of Christ is marked by a profound lack, one upon which a subject must rest through conviction, and in doing so, he or she becomes a subject as such, that is, he or she is only a subject to the degree he or she maintains fidelity to the event. There is much at stake in Žižek’s reading of Badiou. In the first place, he brings in tandem Lacan’s account of subjectivity with a theory that furnishes more directly a political philosophy of truth. In the second place, in The Fragile Absolute, Žižek employs the structure of the event to describe the relationship between eternity and time. Eternity is not atemporal in the sense that it persists outside of time. Rather, eternity is “the name for the event or Cut that sustains, opens up, the dimension of temporality as the series/succession of failed attempts to grasp it” (Žižek 2000, 95).

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In this regard, Žižek is able to mobilize Christian theology in his critique of the traditional distinction between transcendence and immanence. Where Christianity differs from pre-Christian religions is that the latter “remain(s) at the level of ‘wisdom’” (Žižek 2000, 96), either emphasising the transitory state of objects and instilling moderation or withdrawing from the temporary world into a mystical endeavour of union. By contrast, Christianity invites one to believe in the temporal event of the incarnation as the means to eternal salvation. In other words, “conversion is a temporal event which changes eternity itself” (Žižek 2000, 97; original emphasis). This distinctive feature of Christianity accounts for Žižek’s rejection of Buddhism as a theoretical resource: “Buddhism remains indebted to the pagan notion of the Great Chain of Being” (Žižek 2001a, 53). To the extent that in Buddhist cosmology one cannot escape the consequences of one’s acts, thereby rendering life tragic, existence itself becomes the ultimate proof of our sin, something that disturbs the “cosmic balance.” By contrast, Christianity separates the ontological from the ethical: “the Great Chain of Being can be broken on the ethical level; sins can not only be pardoned, but retroactively erased with no traces left: a New Beginning is possible” (Žižek 2001a, 53). Herein one finds the link with psychoanalysis. The name for the event in psychoanalysis is trauma, which is also the point—the Real—that the subject cannot integrate into the Symbolic. Nonetheless, it is precisely the non-integrative aspect of the Real which sustains the symbolic structure—the unpresentable point from the standpoint of a system at which that system came into being—such that an encounter with the Real of the subject’s symbolic world would implode into a strange timelessness (Žižek 2000, 96). Hence Žižek says: Without the Divine act of Grace, our destiny would remain immovable, forever fixed by this eternal act of choice; the ‘good news’ of Christianity, however, is that, in a genuine Conversion, one can ‘recreate’ oneself, that is repeat this act, and thus change (undo the effects of) eternity itself. (Žižek 2000, 97) Christ is the irruptive event that allows a subjective field to reproduce itself, or as Žižek puts it: “Christ’s ‘death’ is not overcome, but ELEVATED into Spirit’s negativity” (Žižek 2006b). If a distinction remains between Badiou and Žižek, it is first the relative place each awards to life or death in their schemes. According to Žižek, Badiou fails to integrate properly a dialectical relationship between death and resurrection in his thought. In Badiou’s work, there is only resurrection. The truth-event is simply a radically new beginning (Žižek 1999, 146). In Žižek’s work, however, it is the cross that maintains centrality. Christ’s death stands not simply as the passing of earthly life, but more radically, as the “night of the world,” “the self-withdrawal, the absolute contradiction of subjectivity, and the severing of its links with ‘­reality’—this is the ‘wiping the slate clean’ that opens up the domain of the symbolic New Beginning” (Žižek 1999, 154; original emphasis).

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Secondly, where Badiou employs St Paul as an example of an event, Žižek claims that the Christian event is the paradigmatic event, thereby awarding Christianity a far wider significance than Badiou’s narrow focus on St Paul allows: My claim here is not merely that I am a materialist through and through, and that the subversive kernel of Christianity is accessible also to a materialist approach; my thesis is much stronger: this kernel is accessible only to a materialist approach—and vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience. (Žižek 2003: 6) Another example of this is from “The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Readings of Christianity”: while orthodox theologies still cling to the notion of God as a “transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our acts, the guarantee of historical teleology” (Žižek 2009a, 55), Hegelian Idealism is the “only philosophy” that takes the monstrosity of the incarnation seriously (Žižek 2009a, 26). The relevance of the event of the cross is not that it points to transcendence in the manner that Nietzsche critiqued Christianity, that is, as an evasion of material life; it means the very opposite—the promise of Christianity is that it releases us from transcendence. The Christian God risks madness in creation and self-dereliction upon the cross but in doing so strangely privileges the material world in its incompleteness and thereby becomes the exemplar of a materialist theology.

Marx and Job In Marxist terms, the logic of kenosis brings to an end “obfuscation and fetishization, and liberation into the inexplicable joy and suffering of the world” (O’Regan 2010, 283). Christianity offers the logic which releases the “believer” not out of the world but into the world, which redefines Christian materialism as the path through which Marxism must pass in the name of revolutionary practice (O’Regan 2010, 283). In this way, theology is shown to be crucial to thinking through Marx’s materialist dialectics. In some respects, Žižek’s turn to theology adheres to the Marxist principle that social criticism begins with the criticism of religion. However, he inverts the argument in that he claims that it is theology that offers the first critique of ideology in the story of Job (Žižek 2003, 124). Job, upon encountering seemingly unending suffering, refuses to find refuge in the arguments of his three theological friends. Their answers attempt to give meaning to his suffering by offering a causal argument in favour of a metaphysical justification. For example, Job’s suffering is said to be the result of a prior sin Job committed; or the suffering Job incurred deserves greater punishment than he received. By contrast, Job asserts the very meaninglessness of suffering such that even God is unable to account for it. Because Žižek reads Job as the precursor to Christ (Žižek 2003, 122), he is able to develop the argument in the light of Christ’s cry of dereliction upon the cross:

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“My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46). This, according to Žižek, is the point at which God comes up against his own powerlessness, the point at which “God is an atheist” (Žižek 2003, 14): We are not FIRST separated from God and THEN miraculously united with him; the point of Christianity is that the very separation unites us. It is in this separation that we are ‘like God’, like Christ on the cross, thus the separation of us from God is transposed into God himself. The same goes for ethics. A radical act of good HAS to appear first as ‘evil’, as disturbing the substantial stability of traditional mores. This is why we find in Christianity opposing features attributed to Christ: he brings peace, love, etc. AND he brings sword, not peace …This is ONE AND THE SAME gesture, not a logic of ‘first divide in order then to unite’. (Žižek 2006b) Žižek’s argument can be put in the following way. First, we must transpose the given gap between creature/Creator into both the creature and the Creator because it is not enough for us to stop believing in God; God has to stop believing in God’s self, which when transposed into the struggle against consumer hegemony reads: it is not enough for us to stop believing in capitalism, capitalism has to stop believing in itself. Second, God’s radical act of madness invites us to rethink the imperative of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Marx 1976, 66). A genuine political act will, by virtue of challenging the socio-symbolic order from the perspective of the Real, necessarily appear above the ethical. Arguably there is a danger that Žižek’s theory lends itself to the form of religious violence exemplified by 9/11: an act not justified by the prevailing order but an extreme attack upon the order as such.Yet Žižek is quick to point out, the defence of terrorist acts is precisely the rejection of Christ’s command to love one’s enemies, which leads to a fascist identification with one’s own ethnic community. Žižek’s work can then be said to develop a meta-psychological theory of the political act, which, while drawing on Christianity, refuses the type of theological reasoning that entertains “a closed circuit of harmonious and balanced exchange between God and his creation,” a position that Žižek associates with a pagan mentality. That being so, the “divine incarnation” would lose its traumatic character as the “radical antagonism at the very heart of divinity” (Žižek 2009b, 253). Likewise, a political act cannot be aimed at restoring the political community; it issues from the Real of the Symbolic, as a traumatic act that brings the economy into question.

Orthodoxy In Žižek’s later work, he increasingly sought to ground his reading of Christianity within a stream of orthodox Catholicism, represented by Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton, and for whom “the final revelation—that God himself suffers even more

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than us mortals—brings us to the fundamental insight of Orthodoxy … a much darker insight into the central mystery of Christianity” (Žižek 2009a, 48):“The atheists will find only one divinity who ever uttered his isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist” (Chesterton 1995, 145). Adam Kotsko’s Žižek and Theology makes the case that Žižek’s approach belongs more fittingly within a steam of Protestant theology which came to prominence in the 1960s—“the Death-of-God theology,” which likewise posited God as having historically “died” or celebrated his non-existence in the first place as liberation from theism (Kotsko 2008, 149–55). Despite Žižek’s basic endorsement of the work of Thomas Altizer in this regard, he is careful to delineate his own position. Žižek resists taking the death-of-God as an event by which one can reassert the “true abyss of Divinity as a spectral promise” (Žižek 2009b, 260). Žižek has in his sights here the work of Jacques Derrida and theologies that adopt deconstruction. For Derrida, the messianic hope, expressed in theological works, translates into the expectation of the arrival of a spectral “Other,” which remains constantly deferred. In contrast, Žižek assumes the more immanent claim that the Messiah (i.e. the incarnation) has already happened; the Messiah has arrived, and yet we still live with uncertainty. This modality of faith in an event offers a more genuine form of openness—not simply that of undecidability, but that of living in the wake of the event and drawing out its consequences through fidelity to the event as such. “Faith” therefore names a mode of commitment to the Real of the incarnation and resurrection, to an event which found no place within the existing symbolic order but invited an attempt to rethink the social order in such a way as to include others also dispossessed by the Symbolic. Hence, Žižek’s atheism is not simply a reductive disbelief in God, but a more positive form of unbelief, so that unlike a negative theology, which presupposes the prior positivity of God, Žižek’s “negation of the negation” offers a negative theology of the void. Žižek’s theology thereby exhibits a strange tension; on the one hand, his Christology demands a degree of orthodox belief and on the other, the Christian claim is merely exemplary—God’s kenotic outpouring amounts to the subjective task of emptying the subject of the illusion of a substantial self. To take the former position, Christ must actually be God to push the consequences of the logic to its extreme. In this regard, John Milbank has argued that despite Žižek’s claims, his thought is not representative of orthodox Christian belief (Milbank 2009, 111). For example, Milbank claims that Žižek collapses the immanent Trinity (i.e. the synchronic Trinity) into the economic Trinity (i.e. the diachronic Trinity) (Milbank 2009, 186; Žižek 2009b, 253–254): the birth of Jesus is the death of the Father, and the birth of the Holy Spirit is the death of Jesus (Žižek 2009a, 33). According to Milbank, this follows from a broadly Joachimite schematization adopted by Hegel, as the basis of his radicalization of Christian orthodoxy. In accordance with this genealogy, the historical passage of Christianity differentiates itself over time. The first stage of Christianity, with its emphasis on the Father (or Big “Other”), develops through its medieval form (in which primacy is

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awarded to the Son) to an eventual arrival at Protestantism, for which the ­principle meaning of God’s Sonship is finally and definitively disclosed as Spirit. At this point, Christianity becomes exemplary—what matters now is not the person of Christ, but the meaning attributed to Christ in the spirit of the community or, as Žižek prefers, “the collective” (Žižek 2009a, 73). Despite the orthodox foundation, incarnation becomes ultimately for Žižek the model for the subjective task, that is, the destitution of the self. Arguably Žižek offers a more problematic dialectical take on the triad Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity, inviting charges of supersessionism. The modality of Paganism corresponds to the Imaginary, and works on the basis of recovering to full meaning some lost potential. In Judaism, the modality of relation corresponds to the Symbolic. Like psychoanalysis, it is predicated on an encounter with the God as the traumatic Other with God as the transcendent and non-representable Other, that is, the master signifier. Christianity, by contrast, renounces and transposes the split between humanity and God/Other into God himself. For example, in On Belief (2001, 89), Žižek writes that in contrast to Judaism, the religion of sublimity: [Christianity] renounces this God of Beyond, the Real behind the curtain of phenomena; it acknowledges that there is NOTHING beyond the appearance—nothing BUT the imperceptible X that changes Christ, this ordinary man, into God. In the ABSOULTE identity of man and God, the Divine is the pure Schein of another dimension that shines through Christ, this miserable creature … Judaism remains at the level of the enigma of God, while Christianity moves to the enigma in God himself. (Žižek 2001, 145; original emphasis) Moreover, Žižek affirms Freud’s argument in Moses and Monotheism: the Jewish people repressed their founding murder of Moses the Egyptian whereas Christians fully assumed the guilt in the claim that they have killed God. Žižek argues that in Christianity, God’s impotence, as signalled in The Book of Job, is finally embraced head on in Christ because Christ represents fully the lack within God, while Spirit becomes the mode of universal sociality: one can participate in Spirit’s universal dimension regardless of one’s social standing.

Agape In The Fragile Absolute, Žižek’s Lacanian/Hegelian framework becomes the interpretative basis for re-reading the Christian notion of agape: “The death of God, the secularization of modern Europe, clears the slate by obliterating the moral metaphysical God of onto-theology, and thus paradoxically opens up the space for the new authentic post-metaphysical religion, a Christianity focused on Agape” (Žižek 2009b, 255). Žižek, taking his cue from Lacan, draws out the psychological implications of St Paul’s observation that the Law invites its own transgression because it is mediated by sin. Christianity, however, offers a way out of this dialectic, through love, which

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is non-All. “Love is not the exception to the All of knowledge, but p­ recisely that ‘nothing’ which makes even the complete series/field of knowledge incomplete” (Žižek 2000, 146). In other words, Christianity makes incompleteness higher than completeness (Žižek 2001, 147). Love, then, does not denote the sense of unity where “two become one” as the popular expression goes: “As every true Christian knows, love is the work of love—the hard and arduous task of repeated uncoupling in which, again and again, we have to disengage ourselves from the inertia that constrain us to identify with the particular order we were born into” (Žižek 2000, 129). Love is thus a modality of “uncoupling” for Žižek and this, as the above quotation indicates, is the modality of the “authentic revolutionary stance […] the community of believers qua ‘uncoupled’ outcasts from the social order—with ideally, authentic psychoanalytic and revolutionary political collectives as its two main forms” (Žižek 2000, 160).

Islam As Bruno Bosteels has shown, Žižek acknowledges the awkward question that Islam poses for his theoretical endeavours (Bosteels 2013, 61–3). Where does Islam sit in regard to the triad of monotheistic religions? To what extent can it be said to represent the dialectical sublation of Judaism and Christianity? On the one hand Žižek appears to suggest that Islam represents the worst of both: The common reproach of Christians to Jews is that their religion is that of a cruel superego, while the common reproach of Jews to Christians is that, unable to endure in pure monotheism, they regress to a mythical narrative (of Christ’s martyrdom, etc.) and is it not that, in Islam we find BOTH, n ­ arrative and superego? (Žižek 2001, 165, n40) On the other hand, Žižek poses the relationship in a way that brings his own ­Hegelian framework into question: Even the logic of Hegel’s triads seem to get stuck in a deadlock here: the triad that offers itself, but that Hegel cannot admit, of course, is that of JudaismChristianity-Islam: first the immediate/abstract monotheism which, as the price to be paid for its immediate character, has to be embodied in a particular ethic group […]; then Christianity with its trinity; finally Islam, the truly universal monotheism. (Žižek 2009a: 106 n25) In short, one might consider Islam the Real of Žižek’s theoretical standpoint. It remains the obscene underside of the largely Judaeo-Christian Europe that he critically explores, and the least theorized of the three monotheisms in his work. And yet, as the quotation suggests, it has the potential to call into question the very framework he presupposes.

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Kierkegaard Despite the basic Hegelian-Lacanian framework, which underpins Žižek’s theology, he recognises the proximity to which his reading brings him to theologians like Kierkegaard. For example, he adopts the language of Kierkegaard when he says that Christ “opens up the possibility” for us to free ourselves through a “leap of faith” whereby we “REPEAT Christ’s gesture of freely assuming the excess of Life, instead of projecting/displacing it onto some figure of the Other” (Žižek 2001, 105). In Kierkegaard’s work, religion (the Real) is higher than ethics (the Symbolic), while the subjective approach to Christianity renders God “strictly correlative to the ontological openness of reality, to our relating to reality as unfinished … God is beyond the order of Being, he is nothing but the mode of how we relate to him” (Žižek 2006a, 79). Indeed, Žižek’s work can be situated in terms of the paradoxical point at which the two opposing philosophers/theologians, Hegel and Kierkegaard, intersect. Žižek’s atheism also affirms a form which stands for both the completion and negation of Christianity, just as Christianity completed and overcame Judaism (Žižek 2009b, 287–8). As Žižek says, “Today theists no longer despise … today, it is perhaps only atheists who truly pray”(Žižek 2006a, 103; original emphasis). However, the irony of Žižek remains. He is an example, perhaps, of what Kierkegaard called a “humourist,” that is, someone who sits on the boundary between the ethical and the religious, someone who grasps Christianity intellectually if not ­subjectively.

Conclusion Arguably the attraction of Žižek’s theological atheism is that he is able to embrace an ontology which upholds the incompleteness of materiality, love, and knowledge, and his claim that the Holy Spirit arises out of that gap (the constitutive void) and serves to bind a universal community echoes Alain Badiou’s militant reading of St Paul. In short, Žižek reads Christian theology as the only standpoint to critique the current hegemony of mass-consumerism. So, while his work is largely critical of much Christian theology/philosophy, he also develops a theological reading which proposes the mutual form that both Christianity and politics must take if they are to survive, arriving at a kind of theo-political radicalism.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Michele Freyhauf for her decisive comments on this text. 2 While these terms are not synonymous, aspects of them overlap in Lacan’s work, with the difference pertaining to the structural position from which they are viewed.

References Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Bosteels, Bruno. 2013. “Žižek and Christianity: Or the Critique of Religion after Marx and Freud.” Žižek Now: Current Perspectives in Žižek Studies. Edited by J. Khader and M. Rothenburg. Cambridge, UK: Polity. 54–83. Chesterton, G. K. 1995. Orthodoxy. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Johnston, Adrian. 2008. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Khader, Jamil. 2013. “Žižek Now or Never.” Žižek Now: Current Perspectives in Žižek Studies. Edited by J. Khader and M. Rothenburg. Cambridge, UK: Polity. 3–15. Kotsko, Adam. 2008. Žižek and Theology. London and New York: T & T Clark. Marx, Karl. 1976. “Thesis on Feuerbach.” From Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press. Milbank, John. 2009. “The Double Glory, or Paradox verses Dialectics: On not quite agreeing with Slavoj Žižek.” The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Edited by S. Žižek, J. Milbank and Creston Davis. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. O’Regan, Cyril. 2010. “Žižek’s and Milbank and the Hegelian Death of God.” Modern Theology 26(2): 278–86. Pound, Marcus. 2008. Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction. Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans. Sharpe, Matthew and Geoff Boucher. 2010. Žižek and Politics: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Wood, Kelsey. 2012. Žižek: A Reader’s Guide. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Žižek, Slavoj. 1991. “Lacan in Slovenia.” Radical Philosophy 58: 25–31. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York, NY: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London, UK: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. On Belief. London, UK: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001a. Did Someone Say Totalitarianism?: 5 Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion. New York, UK: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006a. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006b. “Hegel–Chesterton: German Idealism and Christianity.” The Symptom 17; www.lacan.com/zizhegche.htm (accessed October 2013). Žižek, Slavoj. 2009a. “The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity.” The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Edited by S. Žižek, J. Milbank and Creston Davis. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009b. “Dialectical Clarity versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox.” The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Edited by S. Žižek, J. Milbank and Creston Davis. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj and Boris Gunjevic. 2012. God in Pain. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. Žižek, Slavoj and F. W. J. Schelling. 1997. The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press.

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Index

abject, the 224, 411–15, 418–20, 424, 426 Abraham 161–7, 275, 332, 390 absence of God 207, 231 absolute religion 35 absolute, the 31–40, 47–8, 116, 200, 309, 403, 443, 483 abyss, the 169–70, 182, 228, 316–18, 428, 482, 487 Adam 68, 71, 105, 190, 192 aesthetics 279, 310, 334, 363, 452 affect 62, 205, 224, 276, 278, 287, 295, 300–4, 308–10, 316–17, 418, 432–3 affliction 207, 213–18, 251 agency 54, 145–9, 165, 238–51, 283, 289, 454 agnosticism 60, 64, 149 alien God, the 119 alienation 31, 40, 46, 77–8, 83, 92, 112, 287, 197, 469 allegory 66–9 alterity 266, 271–3, 276, 282, 326, 373, 388, 429, 475 amor fati 175, 181, 224 analogy 29, 51–3, 132, 286, 318, 326, 457 analytic philosophy 196, 219, 237, 270, 294, 311, 438 anamnesis 286 anarchism/anarchic 55, 90, 118, 120, 125, 193, 401, 405–6 androcentism 423 angel(s) 124–5, 161–2, 458 animals/animality 33, 67, 213, 224, 226–7, 231, 247, 349, 374, 463 anthropocentrism/anthropocentric 74

anthropology 75–6, 80, 82, 95, 222, 276, 284, 386, 414, 431 anthropomorphism/anthropomorphic 62, 67, 173, 200, 202 anthropotheism 76 antinomianism/antinomian 116–18, 121, 123 anti-philosophy 351, 444 anti-rationalism 230 anti-Semitism 271, 475 anxiety 63, 159, 164, 171, 266, 271, 303 apocalypticism/apocalyptic 102, 117–25, 163, 193–4, 345, 349, 398, 462 apologetics 261, 312, 334 apophaticism/apophatic 61, 116, 290, 325–6, 389, 440 apotheosis 45, 227, 348 apparatus 355, 359, 363, 446, 461–2 archaeology/archeological method 356–66 archaic religions 224 arguments for the existence of God 23–4, 30, 200 art 33–4, 126, 142, 168, 222, 230, 282, 286, 298, 310, 327–9, 333, 370, 377, 434, 445–6 asceticism 63, 69, 71, 207, 295, 364 atheism 19, 60–1, 71, 81, 88, 90, 104–6, 149–50, 232, 295, 298, 304, 350, 393, 397–401, 416, 479, 487, 490 atheology 222–4, 232 Augustine 150, 167, 255, 256–8, 341, 355, 363–4, 376, 401 authorial intention 279, 282, 356 auto-immunity 392–3

494  Index

autonomy 47, 50–6, 109, 152, 230, 286 avant-garde 357, 364, 466 bare life 454–6, 461 beatific vision 218, 256–7 becoming 52, 120, 125, 130, 165, 190, 244, 310, 371–80, 386, 393, 424, 426, 429–34, 444–6, 460 Bhagavad Gita 210 biblical criticism 174 biology/biological 48, 199–200, 284, 303, 309, 359, 421, 435, 454, 482 biopower 361 body without organs 375, 377–8 bourgeois/bourgeoisie 77, 88, 102, 109, 341, 410, 465 Brahma 67 Buddhism 38, 61, 66–8, 71, 344, 365, 374–6, 474, 484 Calvinism 465 capitalism 8, 81, 88–9, 93, 95–8, 103, 310, 370, 375, 379–81, 391, 398, 402, 457, 486 categorical imperative, the 148, 208 Catholicism/Catholic Christianity 202, 223, 410, 420, 486 causa sui 325, 481 charity 79, 331 Chinese religion 38, 411 Christ 68, 77, 88, 90, 95, 131–5, 166–7, 176–82, 213, 222, 227–8, 255, 256, 315, 317–18, 333, 351, 372, 376, 378, 396, 448, 460, 466–71, 474, 483–90 Christology 66, 76, 131–2, 167, 469, 487 Church, the 34, 70, 88, 90, 178, 254, 378, 461, 483 Church Fathers 315, 318 class, socio-economic 83, 91, 105, 171, 208, 267, 299 communicative rationality 141, 146 communism 81, 103, 267, 310, 457 confession 36, 39, 45, 170, 347, 355, 361–2, 364 Confucianism 61 consciousness 3, 33–41, 46, 51, 62, 74, 78, 90, 102, 142, 146–7, 162, 165, 168, 196–205, 230, 231, 238–51, 279, 283–4, 297–9, 308–10, 329–30, 378, 404 Consumerism 398, 400, 480, 490 consummate religion 38–9 conversion 185, 202, 208, 223, 350, 435, 484 creatio ex nihilo 402 creation, divine 53, 55, 67–70, 105, 119, 124–5, 143, 162, 187–8, 191–4, 205, 217–18, 248, 303, 341, 402, 405, 457, 482–6

creation myths 67 cross, the 35, 166, 180, 217, 227–8, 232, 258, 351, 483–6 crucifixion 41, 177, 217, 227, 349, 351 Daoism 61 Darwinism 48 death 64, 67–8, 72, 110, 121–2, 174, 177, 186–193, 202, 213, 217, 225–32, 249, 251, 261–4, 296, 344, 351, 385, 390, 393, 448, 482–4, 487 death of God 4–7, 133, 176, 224, 228, 231–2, 274, 349, 360, 399, 402, 444, 487–8 Death-of-God theology 487 debt 68, 125, 379 deconstruction 126, 167, 195, 384, 387–90, 396–7, 400, 403–7, 424, 426, 466, 479, 487 deism 88 democracy 88, 90, 141, 267, 391, 399, 456–7, 476, 482 demythologization 288–9 deontology/deontological 17, 142 Desein 165, 255, 258–60, 262–4, 271–2, 279, 296, 327, 384 determinate religion 37–8, 391 determinism 25, 198, 421 devotion 28, 79, 167, 174, 290, 333 dialectic/dialectical method 22, 93, 109–11, 127–8, 164, 230, 289, 488 dialectical materialism 93, 482 dialogue 145, 152, 186, 278, 281, 285–91, 370, 374, 379, 475 différance 384, 386–7, 404 Dionysus 174–5, 180, 182 discourse theory of ethics 141–2 divine violence 117, 121–2 doctrine, religious 34–9, 51, 54–5, 66–7, 126, 180, 205, 351, 416, 425, 429, 457 dread 159, 224, 231 dreams 101, 103, 106–8, 162, 270, 341 drives 345, 413, 415–16 dualism/dualistic 53, 93, 210, 230, 343, 376–7, 405 duration 23, 26, 198–205 duty, moral concept of 203, 275, 364, 391, 460 ecclesiology 56, 276 ecological crisis 398–9 ecology 433 economics 89, 91, 222, 310, 359 ecstasy 228 Eden 68, 105–6, 303–4, 346 ego 90–1, 147, 203, 308, 325, 327, 330, 344, 346–7, 404, 416, 426, 480

Index  495  

embodiment 62, 147, 188, 433 empiricism 47, 375, 388 end of history 230 Enlightenment, The 4, 31, 47, 69, 70, 98, 127, 134–6, 142, 150, 279–80, 283–4, 355, 404, 466 entelechy 247–9 eroticism 226–7, 231, 331 eschatology 101, 391, 463 eschaton 264 essentialism 412, 418, 428–30, 434–5, 474 eternal/eternity 37, 54–5, 67, 119–20, 174–5, 192, 200, 202, 248–9, 261, 264, 295–6, 317, 326, 376, 403, 430, 458, 482–4 Eucharist, the 332–4, 348, 351, 425 Eurocentrism 406, 476 Eve 105, 303, 346 evil 27–8, 50, 53–4, 56, 64, 70, 105, 120, 181, 213, 215, 219, 227, 300–5, 348, 405, 426, 471, 486 excess 128–31, 134, 149, 223–5, 230, 232, 317, 329, 333, 357, 384, 425, 442–5, 490 exchange 95, 225–6, 328, 331 excremental 223–4, 232 exegesis 294 exile 103–4, 127, 218, 303–4, 376, 409 exisistentialism/existentialist 40, 142, 159, 237, 250 Exodus: biblical book of 112; concept of 106–7, 111, 186, 188 expectation 198, 487 expenditure 225, 228, 230–1, 327–8 face, of the other 145, 266–7, 272–4, 329, 331, 388 facticity/factical life 151, 243, 245–7, 254–8, 260, 301 Fall, the 116–17, 303–4 false consciousness 299 fantasy 101, 104, 107, 346–7 fate 121, 145, 186, 188, 249, 348, 454 Father, God the 34–5, 62, 315–17, 415, 425–6, 434, 448, 457, 487 father, in psychoanalysis 299, 347, 416, 425 feeling 62, 66–7, 78, 83, 167, 179, 198, 201, 204–5, 231, 308–9, 315, 416 feminine, the/femininity 416–19, 425–6, 430, 434 feminism/feminist theory 79, 409–10, 419, 423–4, 428 fetish/fetishism 87, 89, 93–8, 445 finitude 18, 261, 263, 272, 285, 289, 291, 295–6, 301–4, 400 flesh 223, 231, 257, 273, 275, 309, 315, 329, 348, 378, 399–401, 428, 448, 469, 471

forgiveness 36, 39, 76, 79, 166, 332, 351 form of life 39, 180, 189, 454, 461 Frankfurt School, the 103, 126–7, 141–2, 149, 159 freedom 18, 24–9, 50, 52–6, 69, 146–7, 151, 168, 176, 179, 189, 191, 196–9, 271, 317, 328, 364–5, 482 French Revolution 31, 81, 88 fundamentalism/fundamentalist religion 6, 48, 169, 392, 397, 445, 479 genealogy/genealogical method 232, 310, 356–67, 487 general economy 225–6, 465 Genesis, biblical book of 67–8, 105, 161–2, 303, 426 gift 70, 163–5, 168, 225–6, 296, 317, 327–35, 390 givenness 238–9, 283, 327–30, 333–4, 482 globalization 391, 402, 420 glory 80, 218, 331, 455–63 Gnosticism/Gnostic 104, 115, 117, 119, 124, 228, 467, 470 good, the 18, 26–8, 39, 145, 152, 210–12, 216, 248, 250, 285, 388 Gospel 47, 165, 177, 281, 288–9, 347, 392, 447, 461 Governmentality 362 grace 17, 27–9, 120, 174, 192, 208–9, 212, 215, 219, 241, 250, 258, 448, 484 grammatology 2, 385–6 Greek philosophy 186, 258, 300, 376, 457, 475 Greek religion 31, 34, 38, 347 Greeks, the 60, 177, 187, 209, 347, 388, 426 Guilt 18, 67, 121–2, 125, 178, 188–90, 224, 259, 260, 351, 378, 488 habit/habits 28, 32, 198–9, 202–3, 364 Hebrews, the 186–7 Hegelianism 310 henotheism/henotheistic 67 heresy 466–7, 471–6 heterosexuality 434 hierarchy 88, 370–1, 378, 380 Hinduism 38, 61, 67–8 historical faith 51 historical materialism 90–3 historicity 123, 254–65, 284, 385 Holocaust, the 142, 266, 269 Holy Spirit, God the 34–6, 457, 483, 487, 490 hope 18, 25–9, 94, 105, 108–12, 119, 125, 133–4, 145, 149, 159, 161, 163–4, 169, 184, 188, 212, 256, 448, 453, 487

496  Index

hospitality 269, 274 humanism 77–80, 261, 269, 424, 431–2 icon 326–30 id 346 idealism 11, 44, 50–2, 62, 67, 79, 81, 93, 145, 147, 175, 187, 195, 230, 237–8, 397, 480, 482, 485 identity, individual or personal 168, 203, 214, 227, 232, 346, 379–81, 410–11, 414–20, 424–7, 431, 470–5 identity, philosophical concept of 108, 128–33, 228, 241, 247, 291, 371, 373, 386, 405 ideology 77, 106, 297, 299, 304, 376, 472, 481, 485 idol/idolatry 95, 133, 135, 326–30 image of God/imago Dei 133 imaginary, the 345–8, 352, 480, 488 imagination 17, 23, 66, 111, 134, 204 immanence 40, 45, 47–8, 116–17, 122, 226–7, 238, 240, 245, 248, 308–9, 314–17, 330, 370, 373–4, 378, 380, 405, 424–6, 469–70, 472, 484 immortality 18, 29, 75, 77, 119, 171, 176, 191, 216, 393 inauthenticity 257 incarnation 6, 35, 47, 126, 133, 167, 178, 185, 218, 315, 333, 399, 401, 429, 483–8 Indic traditions 423 ineffability 223, 290, 326, 330 infinity 19–23, 52, 78, 168–9, 216, 242, 247–8, 261, 270–4, 285, 304, 315–18, 379, 400, 404–5, 434, 441, 443, 450 inoperativity 458–9, 461 instrumental reason 142, 204 intersubjectivity 79, 147–8, 247–9, 273–4, 309 introspection 62, 197–200, 228 intuition 20–1, 47, 198–204, 269, 274, 308–9, 375, 404 irony 159, 164–6, 170, 490 irrationality 135, 162, 247, 349, 359, 366 Israel/Israelite(s) 38, 95, 105–6, 273 I-Thou relationship 79 Jerusalem 186, 275, 388, 475 Jesus 88, 91, 106, 167, 173, 177–81, 318, 372, 412, 429, 460, 463, 487 job 162, 188–9, 217, 485 jouissance 318, 348–9, 352 joy 164, 166, 170, 174, 209, 228, 301–4, 309, 329, 485 Judaism 11, 38, 61, 68, 70, 98, 115, 132, 133, 135, 178, 184–6, 192–5, 275, 300, 343, 376, 383, 458, 463, 475, 488–90

Judgment Day 125 justice 19, 116, 120–6, 162, 168, 189, 190, 211, 213, 215, 273–4, 294, 389–91, 398, 405, 455 Kabbalah/Kabbalism 55, 118 kairos 124 karma 68 kenosis 6, 35, 483, 485; see also self-emptying khora 388–9 Kingdom of God 26, 177, 180, 393 knight of faith 163, 169–70 law 25–7, 52, 116–17, 121–2, 177, 192–4, 204, 211, 216, 342–3, 346–52, 362, 380, 384, 389–90, 425, 440, 448, 453–5, 460–2, 488 liberation theology 101, 375, 379–80 lingustics 142, 358, 386, 411, 423 liturgy/liturgical 88, 326, 351, 457–8, 460–1 logocentrism 386 logos 186–7, 247, 385, 387, 399, 401, 483 love 25, 27, 45, 54–6, 75–6, 79, 81, 109, 120, 159, 163, 166, 168, 170, 174–5, 186, 190–94, 204–5, 211–20, 227, 316, 318, 327–34, 348–52, 390, 416, 431, 433–4, 445–8, 486, 488–90 Marcion/Marcionism 44, 118 Marxism 93, 104, 115, 127, 237, 310, 468, 470, 485 master signifier 480–3, 488 master-slave dialectic 230 materialism 19, 60, 81, 90–3, 109, 129, 131–4, 197, 200, 211, 230, 350–1, 397, 481–2, 484 maternal, the 411–16, 420, 425–6, 428 mathematics 326, 439–40, 443–4 meditation, practice of 228, 251, 365, 375, 429 memory 104, 110, 124, 143, 164, 198–205, 361, 428, 471 Messiah, the 102, 117–20, 123, 383, 467, 469, 487 messianic life 184 messianism 115–17, 122, 125–6, 194, 390–1, 453, 455, 462–3, 466–8 messianity 466–8 metaphysical need 63–8 miracle(s) 29, 47, 65, 77, 213–14, 241, 276, 289, 448 mirror-stage 413 modernity 4, 9, 47, 126, 134, 141–50, 277, 284, 298, 313, 325–7, 360, 397–400, 404

Index  497  

modes of production 91, 299 monarchy/monarchical 8, 76, 77, 88, 456 monasticism 361, 364, 459, 461 money 95–7, 379, 402, 420 monism/monistic 49, 93, 308 monotheism/monotheistic 60–1, 67, 71, 143, 299, 376, 401–2, 424, 426, 457, 488–9 Moses 106–7, 122, 162, 488 motherhood 412, 420 multiculturalism 419–20 multiplicity 288, 359, 371, 374, 376–7, 401, 423, 427, 440–4 Muslim 342, 344, 383 mysticism 44, 61, 205, 231, 275, 415–16, 466 myth 67, 75, 117, 121–5, 134–5, 151, 189, 203–4, 279, 286, 440 mythic violence 117, 121–2, 390 nationalism 418, 420 natural attitude 238, 242–4 natural religion 33–4 naturalism 45, 48–9, 53, 60, 64, 239, 255 Nazism 159, 389 negation 21–2, 29, 55–6, 62, 111, 128–36, 178, 200–2, 230, 310, 359, 389, 467, 472, 487, 490 negative theology 116, 132, 147, 222, 359, 387–9, 487 negativity 55, 127–37, 230–1, 373, 425, 483–4 neighbour 190–1, 194, 348–9 Neoplatonism 256, 313 neurosis 342 nihilism 90, 119, 160, 178–9, 224, 333, 398, 402 non-philosophy 48, 82, 466–76 nostalgia 189, 482 nothingness 120, 167, 182, 201, 227, 248, 482 obligation 25, 125, 203–5, 226, 275, 299–302, 328, 364, 430, 456, 459 Oedipus 189, 347, 370 Oikonomia 456–8, 463 Olympian gods 121, 347 one, the 50, 248, 371–2, 376–7, 440–7 ontological argument 243 ontological difference 326–7, 386 ontotheology 260, 289, 300, 325–6, 401 oppression 106, 120, 185, 208, 379, 424 optimism 67, 110 Orientalism 411, 418 original sin 44, 69, 71, 303, 426 orthodox/orthodoxy 32, 47–8, 66, 103, 115, 178–9, 187, 250, 317, 350, 383, 431, 434, 471–2, 486–8

Other, the 147, 227, 266–76, 287, 327, 329, 331, 384–5, 387–94, 399, 401–5, 416, 419, 424, 428–35, 466–7, 479–81, 490 pagan/paganism 167, 185, 187–8, 264, 350, 397, 402, 405, 484, 486, 488 pain 63, 67, 70, 179, 285, 329, 349, 352 pantheism 52, 56, 71, 316, 378 paradox 166–7, 210, 215, 219, 273, 329–30, 364, 389–90 passivity 118, 165, 211, 299, 309, 316 patriarchy 412, 423–4, 434 patristic theology 326 penance 39 pessimism 63, 67–8, 398–9 phallocentrism 425 phallus 408–9, 425 phenomenological reduction 269–70, 274 Pietism/Pietist 17, 174–5, 179–182 Plato 197, 210, 254, 290, 386 Platonism 178, 483 political theology 7, 453–8, 462 polytheism/polytheistic 67, 71, 376, 401 possible worlds 63, 202, 248 post-modernism/post-modernist 48, 90 post-secularism 8, 404 post-structuralism 387, 409 potentiality 123, 247, 263, 459 potlatch 225–6 practical reason 18, 24–6, 30, 145, 149, 150, 250 practical wisdom 285 prayer 28, 173–5, 326–7, 332–3, 389 predestination 69 preferential option for the poor 380 priest(s) 17, 65, 105, 165, 178, 202, 209, 224, 460, 469 profane, the 82, 118, 120, 222, 224–30, 463 projection 40, 77–81, 173, 419, 431–3 promise 47, 124, 189, 228, 352, 384, 389, 391, 443, 460, 485, 487 prophecy/prophecies, biblical understanding of 111, 189–90, 276, 448 Protestantism/Protestant Christianity 30, 39, 40, 75, 258, 317, 487–8 providence 211, 269, 276, 458–9 psyche 142, 190, 199, 343, 345, 346, 351, 413, 415, 417, 435 psychoanalysis 225, 310, 341–52, 361, 364, 370, 380, 386, 409, 411, 415–16, 420, 423, 479–81, 484, 488 Qu’ran, the 104, 342–3 racism 411, 417–20, 474–5 Radical Orthodoxy 350

498  Index

radical theology 393 rationalism 69, 75, 230, 481 real, the 345, 427, 467, 470, 473–5, 480–90 rebirth 6, 68, 258–9, 469 reconciliation 18, 36, 39, 128, 135, 137, 149, 180, 188, 230 redemption 55, 117–20, 123–5, 175, 178, 182, 184–7, 192–5, 371 relativism 20, 160, 298, 374, 445 religion of art 33–4 religion without religion 383, 390–3 religious turn, the; return of the religious 1, 3, 8, 250, 310–13, 333, 384, 479 renunciation 217–18, 364, 403–4, 416 repetition 160, 163–4, 168, 198, 274, 350–1 repression 146, 200, 344, 416, 424–5 responsibility 61, 161, 243, 266, 271–4, 379, 384, 394, 460, 473 ressentiment 179, 181 resurrection 17, 36, 47, 103, 178, 217, 315, 396, 447–8, 483–4, 487 revealed religion 33–6, 39, 116 revelation 28, 44, 47, 51, 55, 65, 70, 116–17, 163–4, 186–94, 228, 249, 258–9, 274, 282, 294, 309, 313, 315, 325, 329–30, 342, 344, 402, 405, 445, 486 ritual 60, 106, 149, 151, 194, 205, 228, 425, 469 Romanticism 46 sacrament(s)/sacramental practice 333, 348 sacred, the 6, 143–4, 151, 222–9, 231–2, 302, 304, 347, 392, 415–19, 453–4 sacrifice 36, 79, 95, 122, 125, 162, 214, 222, 224, 226–7, 276, 332, 364, 390–1, 424–5 saint/saints 63, 179, 194, 204, 207, 231, 250, 290, 447, 458, 469 St Paul 255, 447–9, 457, 460, 462, 483–5 salvation 6, 8, 17, 27–9, 69, 70, 77, 117, 135, 290, 299, 307, 315, 362, 371–2, 376, 404, 410, 457–8, 471, 484, Satan 162 scepticism 31, 60, 64, 159, 239, 289 scientific revolution 310 scientism 108, 145, 147, 251 scripture 115, 173–4, 276, 282, 288–9, 298 secularism 3, 8, 11, 88, 232, 404 secularization 3–7, 135–6, 397–8, 402, 406, 449, 488 secularization thesis 3–4 self-emptying 218, 483 semiotics 386 sensualism 75 sexual relationship 344, 352 sexual/sexuate difference 423–34

sexuality 227, 231, 355, 357–8, 360–3 Shinto religion 344 signifier 62, 386, 404, 490–1, 488 sin 44, 69, 71, 75, 164, 166, 177–8, 216, 224, 250, 258–9, 302–3, 350–1, 380, 405, 426, 469, 484–5 solipsism 78, 160 Son, God the 34–6, 62, 315, 316, 425, 448, 457, 488 soteriology 410 soul 93, 122, 168, 178–9, 190–3, 202, 205, 213–14, 217, 249, 429, 473 sovereignty 92, 125, 223, 227, 231, 440, 453, 455 speculative realism 466 speech 79, 187, 191, 204, 317–18, 351, 361, 385–6 Spirit 31–7, 119–20, 124, 132, 230, 289, 316, 362, 483, 487–8 spirituality 209, 219, 276, 360–6, 370, 372, 377, 380, 425, 427, 429, 434 State, the 7, 77, 92, 105–6, 116, 143, 363, 374, 379–80, 442, 444 structuralism 357–9, 387, 409–10, 479 sublime, the 290 suffering 45, 63–4, 70, 72, 93, 104, 120, 131–6, 149, 162–3, 178, 207–9, 213–15, 267, 271, 273, 277, 299, 309, 316, 410, 415, 419, 420, 468, 485 superego 299, 489 supernatural/supernaturalism 28–9, 69, 203, 212, 214–15, 245–6, 289 supersessionism 132, 488 superstition 19, 29, 133, 204, 440 superstructure 468, 470, 473 surrealism 357 symbol/symbolism 7, 121, 227–8, 301–2, 347 symbolic, the 5, 343, 345–51, 409, 412–14, 416, 418, 424–5, 429, 434, 480–1, 484, 486–90 symptom/sinthome 343–52, 468 taboo(s) 226, 344, 358 Talmud, the 104, 269, 271, 275–6 teleology/teleological 50, 117, 161, 239–42, 246–8, 345, 371, 375, 379, 485 theism 47, 53, 61, 284, 299, 300, 397, 400, 431, 487 theodicy 70, 218, 300–1, 372 theological virtues 448 Thomism 250, 254 throwness 259 tragedy/tragic/tragic world view 34, 121, 165, 180, 184, 186, 188–9, 191, 347, 388, 484

Index  499  

tragic hero 185, 188–9 transcendence 8, 45, 48, 79, 116–17, 132, 149, 152, 189, 240, 245, 246, 248, 250, 261, 286, 308, 317–18, 330, 352, 370–3, 387, 400, 424–5, 427–54, 448, 456, 469, 481–2, 484–5 transcendental ideas 22–3 transcendental subject 8, 17, 148 transgression 68, 108, 109, 133, 189, 226, 228, 230–2, 333, 410, 488 trauma 217, 350–1, 484 Trinity, the 35, 66, 96, 132, 378, 403, 425, 457, 459, 487, 489 tsimtsum 53–5 unconscious, the 107, 200, 203, 280, 283, 310, 341, 344–6, 358, 365, 408, 413, 415, 417, 419, 424 universalism 78, 147, 275

univocity 378 utopia 101–12, 134 victim(s) 227, 271, 475–6 violence 117, 118, 121–2, 215, 225, 227, 231, 266, 271, 287, 387, 388, 390, 417, 455–6, 486 virgin birth 412, 420 vitalism 309, 372 void 200, 207–8, 215–17, 440–4, 480, 482, 487, 490 weak thought 5 worship 34, 39, 106, 151 xenophobia 419 yoga 435 Zen Buddhism 66, 167, 365, 374

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