The Return of Religion in France: From Democratisation to Postmetaphysics

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The Return of Religion in France

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The Return of Religion in France From Democratisation to Postmetaphysics Enda McCaffrey Nottingham Trent University

© Enda McCaffrey 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–20519–2 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–20519–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 18

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Introduction

Part I

1

History and Context

1 The Return of Religion in France Esprit: a history of religious engagement The paradox of secularisation From modernity to postmodernity: a critical overview Laïcité and democracy Régis Debray: ‘teaching religion is not religious teaching’

13 17 28 31 37 39

2

Theology and Sexual Ethics Post-secular France Catholic sexual ethics The politics of gay marriage in France Ethics and theology in post-secular France

48 51 53 60 68

3

Post-secularism, Belief and Being as Event From secularism to post-secularism ‘L’anthropologie du croire’: De Certeau, Gauchet and Hervieu-Léger A philosophy of secularisation Being as Event Vattimo’s belief: a philosophy of actuality Vattimo and the Vatican: a literal difference Vattimo and Foucault

80 80

Part II

85 93 95 97 99 103

Philosophy and Concepts

4 The Postmetaphysical Philosophy and theology: a brief history The ‘concept’ of God The phenomenological breakthrough? Jean-Luc Marion and the concept of ‘givenness’ Phenomenology as affective transcendence: a Lévinas reading v

113 117 126 136 142

vi

Contents

5 Postsubjectivity Who comes after the subject? Michel Henry: ‘truth of the world’ versus ‘truth of life’ Phenomenological life Ipseity and transcendental life The radically immanent self The ‘I’/‘Me’ Ethics and the other

148 148 161 167 169 172 174 176

6 ‘Broken Cogito’ and Textual Subjectivity Faith, truth and philosophy: the case of Paul Ricoeur Hermeneutics of the self and faith texts Oneself as another

181 184 196 208

7 Posteventality Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: the event and universalism The divided subject Jean-François Lyotard: a phenomenology of the event Lyotard’s subject: a phenomenology of the flesh A semiotics of the event

214 216 224 233 238 241

Conclusion

248

Notes

251

Bibliography

273

Index

279

Introduction

Before the subject can constitute itself, the call to being has already exiled it. Jean-Luc Marion L’Interloqué This monograph examines how social change and philosophical crisis in the 1980s created the conditions for the return of religion to contemporary French intellectual life. Building on the democratisation of French society, coupled with the collapse of Heideggerian metaphysics and the emergence of new postsubjective paradigms, this book investigates a conjuncture in recent French history when religion was revitalised in French secularism as an expression of individual identity and resignified within a new strand of philosophical phenomenology. Divided into two parts (‘History and Context’ and ‘Philosophy and Concepts’), the text draws on two methodological approaches; socio-historical contextualisation to situate the return of religion within the unique binary of democracy and French republican universalism, and philosophical inquiry in which developments in Continental philosophy in the 1980s and beyond transformed the relationship between ‘subject’ (as cogito) and God, transcendence and revelation. The book’s fundamental premise is that the mid 1980s (and developments since) represented a pivotal shift in the way religious debate and philosophical theology were perceived in France. On the sociohistorical level, institutionalised religion had been relegated to the wings of official secularism since 1905. It was not really until the mid 1980s, as a consequence of wider socio-political and cultural liberalism (what I have called ‘democratisation’), that religion and religious identity were to return to public attention, legitimised and renewed, 1

2


within a democratic republicanism that was to privilege private interest over public concern, specificity over universalism, and religious belief over secular homogeneity. On a philosophical level, the end of the Enlightenment, predicated on Heideggerean postmetaphysics at the end of the 1950s, had already ushered in a period of philosophical crisis, symbolised by the philosophical critique of the subject in Lévinas’s Totality and Infinity (1961) and Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966). This philosophical crisis highlighted the shortcomings of a rational and metaphysical subject founded in Descartes’s cogito-sum and explored alternatives to the supremacy of the subject in the invocation of sensory, postsubjective and postmetaphysical possibilities. Comparisons and contrasts are drawn between these socio-historical and philosophical developments which, when viewed in their totality, testify to the profound changes in the religious and philosophical landscapes in France since the 1980s, in particular, the conflictual but pivotal role of the individual at the centre point of change. To this degree, philosophical crisis can be seen to run parallel to sociopolitical and institutional crisis, in the way the philosophical critique of the Enlightenment and of the supremacy of the subject in the post Second World War period undercuts the historical critique of French republican universalism and the emergence of the democratisation of difference and individualism particular to France at this time. My central argument, however, points to how, against the backdrop of these respective crises, the mid 1980s (and socio-historical and philosophical events thereafter) became a focal point both for the reconfiguration of religious debate in French laïcité and for a rethinking of theological thought in the philosophical canon. Official laïcité was under threat from rising individualism, globalisation, including claims for the legalisation of ethnic/religious and communitarian difference, as well as demands for the ‘privatisation’ of religious belief to be legally and publicly acknowledged. In short, social democratisation was challenging the traditional French secular model. At the same time, philosophy was going through a sea change in the way key thinkers were rethinking its traditional, antitheological presumptions and establishing new closer ties with theology via the rehabilitation of phenomenology. I analyse this resurgence of a new phenomenological method and other semiotic and declarative possibilities for the subject in the 1980s and beyond in the works of Jean-Luc Marion (God Without Being, 1982), Michel Henry (I Am the Truth: Towards a Philosophy of Christianity, 1996), Paul Ricoeur (From Text to Action, 1986 and Oneself as Another, 1990), Emmanuel Lévinas (Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, 1990), Jean-François Lyotard (The Confession of Augustine,

Introduction 3

2000), Alain Badiou (Being and Event, 1988 and Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 1997) and Gianni Vattimo (Belief, 1999 and After Christianity, 2002). In summary therefore, the methodology underpinning this monograph is primarily interdisciplinary. It incorporates detailed socio-historical analysis of the tensions within the secular tradition before and after the pivotal years of the mid 1980s in France with a specific focus on the phenomenon known as the ‘retour du religieux’ (the return of the religious). It also situates and explores the philosophical response to the return of religion within the re-emergence of phenomenology and the closer accommodation that was established between philosophy and theology. In his now celebrated article ‘Are you a Democrat or a Republican?’, the philosopher Régis Debray defined the 1980s as a time when France’s tectonic plates were realigned to reflect the impact of democratic change on French republicanism. The cherished principle of universalism, which prioritised equality of all regardless of difference, was under threat from an emerging individualism that privileged the choice and rights of the individual over collective being. For Debray, this realignment manifested itself primarily in social and political change, with individuals seeking to have their differences (particularly ethnic and sexual) recognised and enshrined in legislation. However, the impact of democratisation went much deeper and influenced a wider body of opinion. In a special issue of the journal Esprit called ‘La religion . . . sans retour ni détour’ from 1986, the editorial addressed the marginalisation of religious debate within secular modernity by turning its attention to the alienated figure of the ‘croyant’ (believer) as an individual with a legitimate claim for renewed specificity and right of expression. Of course, the right to religious expression had never been denied to individuals after the separation of Church and State in France. It was just that, like other ‘minority’ affiliations, religious expression was confined to operate inside the straitjacket of universalism which meant that the universal ‘benefits’ of secularism (as legitimised by the State) superseded any individual religious convictions. It is my contention, however, that the inspiration for the return of religion in France at this time, despite the imprimatur of republican universalism, emerged out of the democratic realignment of French socio-political culture in which the role of the State had changed from ‘universal emancipator’ and ‘regulator’ to that of ‘animator’ whose new-found responsibility was to respect the autonomy and identity of the individual including that of the religious believer.1 The winds of change were also blowing in from afar. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism in the late 1980s signalled the end of

4


secularism as a scientific experiment imposed on large populations. The example of people now free to express their religious convictions publicly without fear of repression was nothing short of revolutionary. However, while this defeat of secularism in the communist era represented on the one hand a triumph for religious freedom, it also meant a return to prominence for the grand institutions of religion. What had all the hallmarks of a revolution was in reality an ordinary changing of the guard with the individual and the State rejoined in a battle for control of their separate interests. In France today, the idea of laïcité being toppled and replaced by the authority of religious institutions is fanciful, but nor was it ever the case that the so-called return of religion would seek to undermine secularism. What is both unique and paradoxical about the French context at this time (and to a large extent now) is that democratisation (including the process of secularisation) was itself instrumental in bringing religious belief back in from the cold of anonymous universalism. Far from being a ruse to bring secularism to its knees, the democratisation of religion in France brought religion and secularism closer together by re-appropriating reason from secular modernity and deploying it to rebuild the twin spires of faith and reason. Furthermore, democratisation meant that religion was to be experienced in a new way as a heightened expression of individual right and personal conviction, and less as the embodiment of a collective institution. This is not to say that the institution of Catholicism, which is the main focus of this monograph, did not matter anymore. It was more the case that this institution, if it were to survive, had to adapt to new individual logics and a consensual relativism. The historical coverage of Part One (‘History and Context’) brings together two time frames. The first chapter lays down important ground with the analysis of key debates leading up to democratisation as the catalyst for the renewal of religion in the mid 1980s. With reference to prominent thinkers of the day (Jean-Louis Schlegel, Olivier Mongin, Marcel Gauchet, Danièle Hervieu-Léger and Jean-Paul Willaime to name but a few) and to special issues of the journal Esprit from the late 1960s through to the 1980s, I relate the crisis in Catholicism post Vatican II to the decline in Church-going and religious faith, and the fractious relationship between religious institutions and the laity, particularly with respect to Christian praxis. Special attention is afforded to critical religious debates that bear witness to the democratic ‘turn’ in the mid 1980s, in particular, the individualisation of belief outside the pale of orthodoxy, secularisation and its displacement of religious authority to individual convictions, hyper secularisation and ultramodernity, and the value of reason to the intellectual credibility of religious thinking. My aim at this

Introduction 5

juncture is to demonstrate that, prior to the democratisation of the believer in the 1980s, Catholicism in France was in freefall, devalued both symbolically and as an institutional structure for humanity. And so the notion of a return of religion in the 1980s did not mean the return of Catholic doctrine, tradition and religious communities; these had become the wastelands of the age of suspicion in the 1960s and 1970s.2 On the contrary, according to the religious historian Gauchet, the return of religion ushered in an era of ‘embodied tradition’3 and the proliferation of new beliefs in the diverse forms of spiritualism, New Ageism, Buddhism and Mysticism. In the main therefore, the impact of democratisation was twofold. The return of religion was viewed widely as a welcome development in principle, but not necessarily in the ways the established Churches had anticipated. Secondly, and most crucially, democratisation drew religion into an egalitarian mix alongside other claims for specific recognition (including gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity). The second time frame covers the impact of the return of religion in the 1990s and into the new millennium, a positive period often referred to as postmodernity but also, in the context of religious debate in France, a period of hyper secularisation, ultramodernity and the ‘secularisation of secularisation’.4 Willaime, for example, talks of the radicalisation of secularisation through which ultramodernity engenders a new bringing together of the secular and the religious. It is a time marked by the intensification of individualism where religion is experienced in increasingly diverse and privatised ways. Critically, it is a time where the impact of the secular tradition has the paradoxical effect of mutating religion to such an extent that secularisation is seen to generate a return to religion. Far from diminishing the effects of the return of religion, secularisation radicalises the individualisation of belief to the point of questioning legitimately established Catholic doctrine and State institutions such as laïcité and heterosexual marriage. In the case of laïcité, I discuss the 2004 Stasi Report on the application of the principle of secularity in the French republic. I also address Debray’s 2002 report to the Ministry of Education on plans to introduce the teaching of religion in the secular school. Debray’s argument in favour is based on the dual grounds of freedom of conscience and the acceptance that religion (faith/belief) is rationally linked to self-understanding (knowledge of self) and knowledge of human salvation. As for marriage, the recent campaign in France in favour of gay marriage bypasses religious institutions and conventional sexual ethics in order to politicise gay marriage as a ‘secular act’ that can be renegotiated. Both these examples demonstrate the extent to which the process of democratisation has

6


raised the profile of religion in French secular and political life. On the one hand, religious knowledge competes for equal status in the rationally controlled transmission of knowledge prescribed in the republican secular school. On the other hand, formal religious institutions are undermined by a pro-gay marriage campaign, born out of the politicisation and democratisation of sexual citizenship in the 1980s, which puts sexual and religious equality before the law over institutional allegiances. In this regard, I aim to explore the relationship between sexual diversity and radical religious thinking that takes responsibility for actions away from prescribed codes and norms and relocates them in different ethical and theological paradigms of intuitionism, pragmatism, technologies of self and Foucault’s ‘ascetic imperative’. In Part Two (‘Philosophy and Concepts’), the focus changes to address democratisation of the individual and the return of religion from the perspective of Continental philosophy. Democratisation redefined the republican subject as a self-reliant individual. It also couched the return of religion in the positive figure of the ‘croyant’ emerging out of universalism with renewed purpose and a sense of identity. In the 1980s, Continental philosophy was in the throes of a similar debate on issues concerning the roles of individual and religion. But there were important differences in respect of theoretical direction, methodology and terminology. One of the more obvious differences was that social democratisation appeared to promote the individual whereas philosophy had reached a crisis point in its representation of the individual as ‘subject’. A group of philosophers (among them Badiou, Henry, Lévinas, Lyotard, Marion, Nancy and Ricoeur) set out to question the primacy of the subject as cogito and as reference point for the metaphysics of Being and knowledge. By implication, they also challenged the capability of the subject in his present condition to ‘understand’ and relate to religious phenomena (whether it be God, transcendence, revelation or resurrection). Badiou’s concept of ‘demetaphysicalisation’ accompanied by a subject who is preceded by truth was echoed in Lévinas’s desire for a return to a life forgotten by thought and rationality. Lyotard in turn raised the profile of the subject ‘without intellect’. In these formulations (which undermined traditional Western philosophical ontology), the subject was being redefined outside metaphysical subjectivity and within new postmetaphysical and postsubjective constructions. The debate on the philosophical crisis of the subject opens with Vattimo’s definition of the end of the concept of Being as ontological structure and the emergence of being as ‘Event’. In other words, Being as metaphysical and rational cogito is challenged by ‘being’ as the outcome

Introduction 7

of an ‘initiative’, an ‘encounter’ and an ‘effect’ or being as ‘heir’. Similarly, revelation, resurrection and salvation as events are seen to undermine transcendence and thinking in absolute terms. As events, they are not reducible in absolute, real or actual terms but are defined by their irreducibility and unconditionality. Drawing on John D. Caputo’s theory of the event as ‘something not present but seeking to make itself felt in what is present [...], a stirring, calling or a potency that stirs’,5 I proceed to investigate the event as an alternative ‘condition of existence’ (what I call the postmetaphysical) where humans are implicated directly in events as descendants and respondents (or ‘interpreters’ as Vattimo states) of the meaning of an event. Vattimo’s specific idea of ‘being as Event’ sets in train a host of related philosophical theologies that share the ‘thinking’ of God and religion outside the metaphysics of Being in alternative sites of eventiveness. For example, I draw attention to specific debates on the ‘concept’ of God, theories of the fool and lunatic and how they challenge the supremacy of the metaphysics of ‘Being-in-the-world’, and developments in phenomenology that substitute reason and knowledge with notions of gift, givenness and self-revelation as new modes of communication. In this context, the wider implications of the ‘theological turn’ of French phenomenology also come under scrutiny. Phenomenology as a methodology disarms the metaphysical tradition by inferring that truth and meaning do not have to emerge out of the cogito but can be located in experience, as Lévinas maintains, or in the logic of the ‘sensus’, as Lyotard claims. In other words, phenomenology brings religion and the experience of it back into everyday life and locates it in the particularity of being (sensually, physically and socially), all of which take precedence over ontological relations to metaphysical Being or Self. The substitution of the cogito by an empire of the senses (phenomenological reductionism) and apodeicticity (the failure of the subject to attain adequation between what the subject perceives and the target of his perception) underpins my investigations into alternative phenomenologies of Christianity espoused by various theological philosophers. Using a methodology that opposes ‘the truth of the world’ and ‘the truth of life’, Henry undermines the former’s metaphysical foundation of separation between subject and truth and elevates the truth of life based on a truth that is prior to the world and irreducible to the cogito. This truth that is prior to the world connects humankind, according to Henry, to his phenomenological essence which is a living ancestry of the ‘First living’, the ‘Arch Son’ and the ‘Son of God’. In other words, Henry recasts the subject outside of Beingin-the-world and inside a Christian logos of phenomenological essence.

8


This rebirth of the subject is also explored in the textual hermeneutics of Ricoeur. While acknowledging the debt to phenomenology in his prioritisation of consciousness of something over self-consciousness, Ricoeur adopts a different approach to the cogito by replacing its reduction to the senses with its subordination to biblical textuality. With the twin ideas of the biblical text preceding life and being only possible as a product of the text, Ricoeur brings to life a textual hermeneutical subject that is founded on obedience and ‘hearkening’ to the call of God (very much akin to Vattimo’s ‘being as Event’). In the final chapter, I address another dimension of the theme of postsubjectivity in recent French philosophy with a critical revaluation of the reception of saints. Badiou’s treatment of Saint Paul is based on the subordination of the subject to an event. Specifically, he defines this subject as founded on a ‘subjective thought’ that declares itself in the event of the resurrection. As with Vattimo’s concept of being as inherited from an interpretation of the event, Badiou uses the example of Saint Paul and his subjective conviction as a template to link the birth (‘becoming’) of this subject in the event of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Badiou, the subject therefore emerges as universal subject out of Paul’s subjective singularity. While Henry locates the subject in a Christian logos via phenomenological essence, Badiou locates his subject outside axiomatic or structural ontologies in an evental and filial relationship with the resurrection. The final chapter concludes with Lyotard’s analysis of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. In his critique of the subject as a faithful register of an event’s immanence, Lyotard sets up a duality between the ‘I’ and the ‘ipse’ to measure the source of a phenomenological adequation between event and effect. He proceeds to extol the virtues of a phenomenology of the flesh (‘ipse’) which is seen to respond positively to the immanence of eventality. Although the context of Lyotard’s phenomenology is literary in which the confessional ‘I’ is perceived to be always ‘too late’ in capturing the ‘ipse’ of eventality, he brings to our attention, like his contemporaries, one of the central threads running through the wider debate on the return of religion; namely that access to religious truth is not conditional on conceptual understanding of philosophy in its metaphysical and ontological traditions. On the contrary, the return of religion (and religious truth) is accompanied by a profound anti-philosophy in the way it relies quite simply on what Badiou calls the subjective and declarative power of faith. In the words of Jean-Yves Lacoste: The fool is inferior to the philosopher, inferior to the scholar, inferior to the politician. He effaces himself behind them, and it comes

Introduction 9

as no surprise that he receives no mention when we try to think the insuperably human person. But he does not efface himself without burdening us with a problem; what if, liturgically reduced to the essential or even to almost less than the essential, the minimal man’s (fool’s) experience of himself and of the Absolute is an experience richer than the philosopher’s or the scholar’s? What if he has arrived at the truth of his being and has taken his (pre-eschatalogical) capacity for experience to the limit?6 The broader significance of this monograph is that the debate on the return of religion in France is a dual process involving both social change and philosophy. Clearly, philosophical developments have lent themselves favourably to what has become known as the ‘theological turn’ of contemporary French thought (and specifically phenomenology). But equally, philosophical change has mirrored socio-political change, at first glance in a seemingly reverse way. Democratisation post 1980 elevated the identity of the individual believer to a positive and credible place in France’s socio-political infrastructure. Phenomenology, on the other hand, ‘demoted’ the religious subject only in the process to restore him to what Lacoste calls his appropriate dwelling place of ‘naïveté’; a demotion of sorts one could say but, as we shall see, one that is clearly in the subject’s long-term interests. In the transition from the democratisation of the individual as self-sufficient and politically pragmatic to his philosophical counterpart in a new postsubjectivity, there is a shared narrative of having come through a set of crises: one historical in the name of French republican universalism, the other philosophical in the name of metaphysical ontology. The Return of Religion in France charts this dual trajectory with the aim of demonstrating how a new religious identity re-emerges as a respective social engineer and direct inheritor of the event of Christianity.


Part I History and Context

To claim that a trend can be inverted and that we will return to an immanent-transcendent dialectic or to a lost tradition would be not only reckless but wrong. We are not in the spring of monotheisms, nor of religion in general, whether it be in Europe or in the world, but in the triumph of immanence (even the re-enchantments are immanent), a time of pluralisation, of fluxes, of emergences, and of disappearances, all of which make life very difficult for monotheisms and the predilection for ‘Oneness’. Jean-Louis Schlegel, ‘Introduction: le nouveau débat entre monothéisme et paganisme; sortir de l’un sans le renier, consentir au pluralisme’, Effervesences religieuses dans le monde, Esprit, mars–avril, 2007: 234.


1 The Return of Religion in France

CREDO UT INTELLEGAM. John Paul II Fides et Ratio According to the religious historian Jean-Paul Willaime, one of the forgotten and ironic consequences of the laïcisation of religion in France has been the sacralisation of the political where the State has now been invested with the role of individual regeneration and the reform of society. For Willaime, the real heritage of the French Revolution has been the creation of a civic theocracy in France which has replaced traditional forms of religious belief. In other words, in republican France today, the State has become the new foyer of moral and collective unity, with traditional religious expression banished to the margins of communitarianism. However, as Willaime also maintains, this republican status quo has been threatened in recent times by a more radical politics, underpinned and reinforced by global demands for individual, ethnic, sexual and religious rights of expression. In response to this global agenda, the French State has adopted what he calls a ‘reasoned accommodation’ of individual rights. He states: ‘This reasoned accommodation serves first and foremost the State. It is a question of limiting individual rights in the interests of republican citizenship and the State. Hence, the political has more power than the judicial, even if the judicial is absent.’1 What is meant by the political is of course the politics of republicanism, its symbolic universalism and the mantra that everyone is equal regardless of difference. But there is a reasonable alternative to this republican politics, as Willaime outlines when he sums up the context of religion and religious expression in contemporary France: ‘A reasonable accommodation is an accommodation that serves individual rights. It is a question of finding a modality 13

14

History and Context

that legalises all individual claims to any religious practice, as long as they do not harm the rights of others or the State.’ In this reasoned/reasonable opposition, Willaime points to some of the key battle lines that define the substance of this chapter: republic versus democracy, general interest versus private interest, individual versus State, universalism versus relativism, modernity versus postmodernity, France versus globalisation and secularism versus pluralism. In 2005 France celebrated the centenary of the separation of Church and State. One of the principles of this separation was the protection of freedom of conscience over religious freedom, a principle which has since become the bedrock of what is known as laïcité. Religious ‘cultes’ have continued to exist freely in France but they have been shorn of legal and political influence. The swing to secularism over the twentieth century, and particularly during les trente glorieuses, modernised attitudes to sex, freedom and culture and provided a framework in which individuals, liberated from the shackles of the institution of the Catholic Church, were free to rationalise their own meanings of existence. In short, the rationale of secularism was seen to find a natural niche in modernity, and lay the foundations in France for a tradition of laïque exceptionalism in an otherwise religious and in some cases theocratic Europe. In Modernity and Ambivalence, Zygmunt Bauman wrote eloquently on the terrorism of reason in the structure of modernity. He questioned the ‘innateness’ of religion in the human condition and the very insertion of faith in the secular mindset.2 In his celebrated work Le Désenchantement du monde, Marcel Gauchet announced the end of the social role of religion in modernity, the collapse of the metaphysical and the beginning of a new era where individuals would be masters of their own destinies.3 However, this representation of secularisation as antithetical to religion has recently come under scrutiny from different quarters. Willaime’s recent work heralds a new age of ultramodernity where the separation of Church and State has actually produced a co-operation between the two leading to a laïcité where religion is socially recognised. Danièle HervieuLéger echoes this sentiment in her reassessment of secularisation as a new process in the restructuring of religious belief. We will also see in the work of Gianni Vattimo and John D. Caputo how secularisation can be a catalyst for religious renewal and redefinition and a friend of postmodernity in the ways it facilitates religious pluralism. In the same vein, recent debates in Britain, North America and France have challenged ways in which secularism has been seen to appropriate the logic of reason to justify itself and its relevance within secular modernity. John Milbank and Graham Ward in Britain, Hugo Meynel and Jeffrey Stout in the US and

The Return of Religion in France 15

Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Régis Debray and Paul Valadier in France have, in their different ways, sought to redress a perceived territorialisation of culture, politics and religious debates by the rationale of secularism. From their respective positions, each calls for the return of a meta-narrative of Christianity as an equally valid and more appropriate rationale for the indeterminacy of postmodernity. In contemporary France, as Willaime has outlined, it is fair to say that religion has been privatised under laïcité, so much so that the gap between ‘the institutions of religion and migrant religiosity’ has widened.4 If we take the example of Catholicism in France, the Catholic Church’s loss of status is not attributable solely to the effects of postmodernity and universal secularism, although their combined effects are considerable. Christophe Boureux has argued that the Church in France and beyond must accept that part of its decline is due to the way it has cut itself off from the broad net of Western culture and pursued a unilateral line of indiscriminate and doctrinal ‘inculturation’ of other cultures and ways of life.5 And yet, the decline of the Catholic Church and religious institutions in general since the 1960s has not eclipsed religious belief altogether. One of the ironies of our postmodern condition, as Willaime, HervieuLéger and Jean-Louis Schlegel testify, is that religious belief has flourished in the context of religious pluralism and cultural relativism. In fact, it is claimed that postmodernity has contributed to an increase in religious belief, albeit as Schlegel has said, in ‘beliefs that are less and less messianic’.6 Postmodernity, it would appear, has made religion more accessible and possibly more relevant to people’s lives, particularly in the way traditional forms of spiritual transcendence and metaphysics have been challenged and replaced by new compatible ‘religions of immanence’.7 One of the differences between the practice of religion in the 1960s and today is that today religion is expressed in less institutional contexts, and significantly in forms outside the Judeo–Christian binary. However, this cultivation of religion on the fringes of orthodoxy has not thwarted attempts among intellectuals, notably Christian ‘intellectual believers’, to try to reclaim the centre ground in order to re-engage with new religious and Christian discourse. In her response to a survey carried out by the journal Esprit in 1997 into the future of religion in postmodernity, Hervieu-Léger maintains that religion must ‘renew its foundational alliance with modernity, by working on the reconstruction of Christian discourse by means of and through the reconstruction of reason’.8 Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio, published in 1998, signalled an important step in Catholicism’s response to the debate on the return of

16

History and Context

religion. Distancing itself from the flurry of new religiosities and New Ageism that had captured the minds and spiritualities of the postmodern subject, Fides et Ratio underlined the essential link between faith and reason as interdependent components in the revelation of metaphysical truth. In other words, the former Pontiff argued that reason must be preserved as an autonomy with its own scope for action, but that ultimately reason must be guided by faith (which surpasses any knowledge proper to human reason). For John Paul II, faith liberates reason in so far as it ‘allows reason to attain correctly what it seeks to know and places it within the ultimate order of things’, an order that is constrained and limited by what happened as a consequence of original sin. While the Vatican’s position on reason seems rigid and metaphysically bound, it does nevertheless highlight the extent to which a rationalisation of religious discourse was critical to the Church’s exegesis, understanding and presentation of the debate on the return of religion. Reconnecting faith to reason would not only differentiate Catholicism from other self-oriented religions (Buddhism and Mysticism for example), but it would also provide an intellectual and philosophical foundation for Christianity, cement the relevance of Catholicism in a pluralist society and crucially validate the resurrection of metaphysics and reason as essential properties of religious faith. The main aim therefore of this chapter will be to analyse the relationship between faith and reason as the cornerstone of the Catholic Church’s response to secularisation, and as a key binary that underpins the emergence of the wider phenomenon of the return of religion and the challenges it presents to contemporary French republicanism. From the early 1960s, certain events have left a mark on the Catholic consciousness, let alone the French spiritual landscape. Vatican II set in train a process of change and modernisation that transformed the relationship between the institution of the Church and the way it communicated with its laity. The advances in media technology during the 1980s brought the Catholic Church, in the charismatic and global figure of John Paul II, directly into the living rooms of billions of Catholics worldwide. Other events, no less momentous in their historical significance, have had a more particular impact on the French mindset in recent years. I refer, for example, to the continuing and controversial role of laïcité and its recent centenary in 2005, the dramatic fall in Church-going in France after the millennium, the wider decline in faith among Catholics in general in France and the ongoing fractious relationship between Church and State. However, within this broad historical trajectory and as described in the journal Esprit and a number of its special issues devoted to key religious events


over this time, I propose to identify certain periods in recent French history (the mid 1980s, 1998 and 2002) as critical to the way religious debate inscribed itself anew in the French consciousness through a direct link between faith and reason. In the mid 1980s, Gauchet wrote of the ‘return of religion’ as an end to the social role of religion and the beginning of its privatisation. However, far from an indication of the withering of religion on the vine of modernity, the return of a religious discourse was resurrected by the democratisation of the ‘croyant’ (believer) in the mid 1980s. The ‘egalitarian age’, coupled with the specificity of the believer, created a platform on which to challenge the model of laïcité in contemporary France. This discourse sought to re-appropriate reason from the logic of secular objectivity and postmodern self-reliance and resignify it within a theological language of belief and faith. The transmission of religious ‘knowledge’ would also be seen to compete for intellectual equality with the forms and transmission of knowledge approved by laïcité in the republican school. Debray’s report to the Ministry of Education in 2002 on religious instruction in French schools advances this debate by defending the introduction of the study of religion in school from the perspectives of theological rigour, the indivisibility of knowledge (the co-existence of ‘témoin’ (believer/witness) and ‘savant’ (intellectual/bearer of knowledge) and the inextricable links between faith and reason in their production of knowledge with a valid claim for public consumption. By focusing on Debray’s report in the final section of this chapter, I want to highlight the rehabilitation of a religious discourse that challenges the rationale of laïcité, and particularly its production of knowledge, by locating in faith, belief and religious study a theological rigour and discipline that will contest the perceived segregation of knowledge under laïcité.

Esprit: a history of religious engagement In a special issue titled Nouveau monde et parole de Dieu in 1967, Esprit launched a debate into the relationship between Catholicism and society. This issue was also accompanied by a series of surveys inviting priests and laity to comment on this relationship. Two main concerns emerged which reflected the preoccupations of the time, and which were to go on to be debated over the course of the next half a century. The first was the relationship between the Church and the ‘temporal’ sphere, in particular the socio-political context of the day. In spite of the split between Church and State under laïcité, Esprit conveyed the impression that Catholics still sought a spiritual significance to the

18

History and Context

Church’s engagement with political culture. One interviewee described this desire in terms of a need for the ‘reinsertion of Christianity in daily life’.9 Another expressed the need to establish a Christian politics (‘politique chrétienne’) as opposed to a neutral political culture that happens to be made up of Christians (‘politique des Chrétiens’).10 The backdrop to what was to become known as the vexed issue of the ‘théologicopolitique’ was the volatile socio-political climate of the late 1960s and its aftermath. For Christians with an especially acute social conscience, May 1968 opened up the (fanciful) possibility of a politics founded on Christian principles and values that could arrest the individualistic and rebellious tendencies of a secularism out of control. Esprit however makes it clear in its editorial that such a prospect was beyond its more measured focus to re-situate religion less within the imposition of Catholic doctrine and values, and more in the context of ‘living of a faith’. By this it meant that religion should reflect and embrace positively the changes in lifestyle, mass communications and individual autonomy that were transforming the socio-cultural landscapes of French people at the time. This desire for religious pragmatism also scotched any idea that the ‘théologico-politique’ was a pretext for the establishment of an orthodox Christian political order. Editors believed this to be wholly unrealistic. Rather, Esprit raised the important idea that faith is not just an abstract, mystical concept but one that requires a sociological dimension in respect of individual action. Specifically, Esprit’s focus on the ‘théologico-politique’ reflected a wider debate about the role and function of Christianity (religion) in the ‘cité politique’ and in culture generally. Under the subtitle ‘Y a-t-il une politique chrétienne?’, this special issue split the debate into two camps; one claimed that the Church did not make politics and should remain outside the political process, the other argued that Christians can and must engage in ‘making politics’. This split was neatly summed up in the expression ‘What the Church says’ versus ‘What Christians can do’.11 While this special issue exercised the intellectual consciences of Catholics in respect of private and public actions and whether they should get involved in political action, it also brought to light another concern about what actually constituted a Christian community. If political commitment was seen to generate division, what was it that kept people and communities together? Clearly, a shared religious faith solidified togetherness but even this, we are told, could not be relied upon. Esprit identified problems that undermined Christian faith. Among these were the rise in atheism, the decline in Church-going and the emergence of a phenomenon called the Emmaus syndrome. This referred to the way in


which formal links to traditional religious institutions were being replaced by the informality of quick ‘conversions’ to spiritual paths devoid of biblical faith and foundation. In a related way, Esprit also drew attention to a perception that ‘real’ faith was the preserve of a religious and intellectual elite, with the rest of the Christian population ill-equipped intellectually to understand the meaning of faith. As a way of challenging some of these perceptions, this particular issue of Esprit proposed that faith be reconnected to language and literally to the ‘Word of God’. In other words, it would become Christian duty to embrace contemporary society equipped with the Word of God: We should be less preoccupied with adapting the message (of Emmaus), with modernising Church institutions, with taking hold again of history at the point where the Church failed, and act as though we are hearing the Word of God for the first time, and ask ourselves: if evangelisation were to start today, if the Church was to be found today, what would we do?12 The editorial went on to propose several hypotheses. By returning faith to its historical roots in the idea of hearing for the first time, the Word of God could be seen to cut through the social and cultural barriers that generate misguided perceptions. But if such an approach to faith were so simple, why, it asks, is faith not universally embraced? In other words, if the call to the Word of God has such positive and egalitarian effects, why doesn’t everyone respond positively to the call of faith? Michel de Certeau points to several reasons why the ‘problem of a mute faith’ has stunted Christian evangelisation. On the one hand, ‘the word of the Christian bears witness to someone who exists’ but this language also ‘becomes our life and the ideology of a country that does not exist anymore – or that is no longer ours’.13 For De Certeau, the language of faith and Christianity is a paradox because it represents ‘a word which was once the affirmation of the existence of someone’ but which in turn has become ‘a cause of distress and an object out of date: a word that was a form of communication has now become an obstacle to communication and the place of a rupture between us and in us’.14 The consequence of this paradox for De Certeau is a linguistic mutism, the solution to which is a theory of absence which he defines as a source of truth. De Certeau argues that in any linguistic exchange our interlocutors, like God, escape us. Such a moment of ‘weakness’ however is also a moment of truth for in

20

History and Context

being deprived of others, we experience a form of grace by virtue of an absence from them. De Certeau states: In the past, the spiritual authors used to see in ‘desolation’ and deprivation a grace that obliged one to distinguish God from what was felt or thought, in other words from what was possessed. Today, a new type of deprivation is a ‘grace’ which obliges us to distinguish others (or revelation) from the ideas and presumptions we have of them; this grace reveals the difference of others and of God; it manifests the existence of someone else through its resistance and its abstention.15 For De Certeau, truth (what he calls a ‘human truth’) and the real sense of language and exchange is to be found in resistance to the idea that others exist and that we are linked to them in order to exist ourselves. This veiled critique of existentialism belies an alternative philosophy based on De Certeau’s acknowledgement that it is only by admitting the radical otherness of others and our inability to connect with them that we admit their and our own existences, and the fundamental reciprocity between them and us. He continues: By accepting not to identify ourselves according to what they expect from us, and not to identify them according to the satisfaction and assurances that we expect from them, we will discover the sense of poverty which is the heart of all communication. This poverty signifies in fact both the desire which links us to others and the difference that separates us from them. This is the very structure of our faith in God.16 Faith for De Certeau is forged out of a realisation and an acceptance of the fact that as human beings we are disconnected from one another. This disconnection is however also proof of our link to others. The relationship is therefore one of mutual, if not willless, dependence. The less we invest in humanity, he argues, the more we will discover the poverty of human communication. However, this poverty reinforces both separation from others and our desire for them. In comparing faith in God to this ‘union in difference’, De Certeau frees faith from traditionally monolithic conceptions of unity, community, truth and obedience and grounds it in the metaphor of linguistic (non-)communication. While this 1967 issue addressed the specifics of the language of faith against the ideological backdrop of atheism and secularism, the 1971 issue titled Réinventer l’Église? extended the debate to take into consideration and question the common language of faith and whether it could command


the full support of Christians. In its editorial, Jacques Natanson identifies a crisis of faith. On the one hand, he claims that this crisis of faith is a language problem which stems from a wider suspicion about religious language and its cultural, social and psychological infrastructures. On the other hand, Natanson points to ‘a communitarian aspiration’ in Catholic ranks (perhaps an offshoot from 1968) that expresses itself in a critique of orthodox Catholicism and a refusal to recognise its institutions and structures.17 For Natanson, this communitarian aspiration is indicative of an existential doubt within Catholicism and of a lack of a common language on which all Christians can count. In fact, he compares the linguistic crisis effecting Catholicism in the early 1970s with earlier uncertainties in the mid 1960s in respect of the language of faith needing a social dimension and a political engagement. He states: If the structures are dead, it is because they no longer allowed one to lead a type of existence demanded by evangelical necessity, as seen for example in the first manifestations of Christian life described by the Acts of the Apostles. If we suspect religious language, it is not only because of the modern critique of language founded on the social sciences. It is also and especially because it is not the language of the people, of a community; it does not express real experience. This is even more the case in respect of liturgical and theological language [. . .]. It is only from living communities that creativity will spring forth.18 Natanson believes that communities can bear witness to the ‘Word’ only by becoming ‘places where the Word of God can come to language’. This requires ‘a Christian existence that is both communitarian and critical, political and lyrical. Critical communities will only be Christian if they are linked to daily, militant and everyday life, in short only if they remain open’.19 What is interesting to note here is Natanson’s apparent support for the new but politically controversial phenomenon of ‘community training camps’ that sprang up in France in the aftermath of 1968. These communities were primarily groups of Christian militants formed out of the failure of the Church to reach out beyond its sacramental straightjacket and ‘inculturate the world’. Their motivations were political and evangelical. They challenged the official institution of the Church and accused it of missing what they saw as the subversive potential of the messianic message. As hotspots of creative and militant action, they provided a platform on which to take the debate about language and faith to another level, to the emergence of a new critical Christian mindset that was not afraid to mix politics (militancy) and religion.

22

History and Context

Jean-Marie Domenach elaborates on this theme in his article ‘Le spirituel et le politique’. In what reads like a manifesto championing the relationship between faith and politics, Domenach begins his argument with the idea that one cannot exile faith from the political domain; Christianity, he claims, can and must penetrate politics ‘by modifying its foundations and its constitutive relations’.20 At the same time, he sounds a note of caution by saying that any rapprochement between faith and politics should not be corrupted by ‘radical evangelism’ leading to a mutual ‘love-in’ between Church and political orders. On the contrary, Domenach appeals to human and Christian values that underpin political, social and cultural exchange. He highlights the idea that ‘values’ produce and articulate political ideas. In a direct critique of tax laws, debt, policies on immigration, segregation and pollution, he suggests that the only way of tackling these issues is to ‘dare to trust in what is not quantifiable, and in what is dear to all of our lives: namely, friendship, joy, rest, contemplation, sport. These are not luxuries, they are the conditions on which society can be re-equilibrated’.21 Domenach’s exhortation to ‘spiritualise politics’ may sound utopian, but it is founded on two main principles. The first is his belief that Christians can no longer justify being disengaged from politics (‘keeping themselves pure’, as he calls it). The second is his prioritisation of a language of value that focuses not on issues or political strategy but ‘expresses itself in concrete objects, in groups, in militancy, in the energy of life’.22 We can see from this early trajectory of religious debate from the 1960s through to the early 1970s that post Vatican II and in the aftermath of 1968, the priorities for Catholic thinkers at this time were to address the decline in religious practice and faith and the rise of secularisation by re-situating and thus re-validating Catholicism within social praxis and political necessity. However, if religious institutions were being seen to fail Catholics, and if the way to rectify this failure was to embrace modernity via socio-political and cultural engagement, then what was unforeseen in this strategy was the diversifying nature of the social itself. By the mid 1980s and the publication in 1985 of the issue of Esprit titled Actualité de la religion, the familiar themes of a ‘deserted language’ and the accommodation of politics within a religious framework resurfaced. However, by now the stakes were higher. Secular modernity had embedded itself within the French mindset. Gauchet’s seminal study Le Désenchantement du monde, heralding the end of religion, was shaking the foundations of religious thinking in France. Most significantly, French politics and society were going through a metamorphosis in which democratic trends towards liberalism and individual rights were encroaching on traditional republicanism, with the consequence


that individualism, private interest and identarian ‘belonging’ were challenging the hegemony of republican universalism and general interest. The editorial of the 1985 issue of Esprit even pondered whether the very idea of alterity (transcendence) needed to be represented, so much had religion as a spiritual force been eroded and displaced to an expression of social immanence. From a religious perspective, this period is particularly important. On one level, the socio-political transformations forced Christianity and French Catholic thinkers in particular to look again at the relevance of institutional and collective expressions of religious belief in an increasingly individualised society. Gauchet’s dire prognosis of a future without religion made it a matter of urgency for Catholics not to expect change from a Church that was resistant to change, but to respond directly to ‘the private domain of the believer’ and to the wider ‘individualist logic’. On another level, and this was to prove a constant refrain through the 1980s, the religious ‘crisis’ produced by modernity would also be a challenge for religious thinkers to listen to the discourse of secular reason and to see in it a catalyst for redefinition and renewal. The idea of not opposing modernity and religion but thinking of religion with modernity is an idea voiced in this 1985 issue by HervieuLéger. In her article ‘Sécularisation et modernité religieuse’, she begins by saying that the arrival of the ‘secular city’ under modernity has undermined the power of religion. However, she also suggests that modernity has given rise to new religious movements which in turn contradict the idea that modernity has put an end to religion. What is clear from her initial diagnosis is the fact that religion is still in rude health and in her attempt to understand its constancy in the modern mindset, she offers a dual explanation. The first is that modernity (by dint of its self-sufficiency and secularism) testifies to a ‘need for religion’ which progress under modernity has temporarily eclipsed. The second explanation is that the widely acknowledged phenomenon of the ‘return of religion’ is itself evidence of a ‘pre-modern regression’ induced by political crises and global uncertainty.23 For Hervieu-Léger, the truth lies somewhere in between these two explanations. This ambivalence leads to a conclusion in which the paradox of modernity is expressed in the form of a question of how a movement (such as modernity) that ideologically and effectively excludes religion actually produces it: ‘Modernity’, she states, ‘abolishes religion as a system of signification and as a generator of human energy, but, at the same time, it creates the space-time of a utopia which, in its very structure, remains in close affinity with religious notions of fulfilment and salvation’.24

24

History and Context

On the one hand, modernity is seen to nourish the aspirations of humankind in all its reasoned, imaginative and technological potential. But, on the other hand, modernity is also perceived to be ‘in formal connivance with a religious identity’ that precedes it and which it cannot shake off. This paradox of modernity is also synonymous with Hervieu-Léger’s treatment of secularisation: ‘It [secularisation] is no longer the disappearance of religion when confronted with rationality; it is the process of a permanent reorganisation of the work of religion in a society that is structurally incapable of fulfilling the expectations needed to exist.’25 In the following year, Esprit published another special issue called La religion . . . sans retour ni détour. It revisited by now some familiar themes but this time within the context of modernity as paradox. The editorial raises the negative influences of secular modernity, with references to the ‘aphasia of the believer’ and how modernity as the new ‘age of suspicion’ has divested believers of a language of faith. But as with HervieuLéger’s comments previously, other commentators come out in a robust defence of the positives to emerge from modernity. Joseph Moingt defends the right of theological research to engage with modernity by highlighting the tradition within theology of embracing scientific research, and its links to understanding culture: ‘It is incumbent on theology to enter into a future partnership with our culture’.26 The idea that religion should not be construed as a counter-culture to modernity is developed in more detail under the theme of secularisation. HervieuLéger alludes to this in her quotation above, but Schlegel expounds on it in his aptly titled article ‘Revenir de la sécularisation’. Admitting, on the one hand, that secularisation is ‘irreversible’, he claims that this irreversibility does not, on the other hand, signify the end of religion. Rather, he maintains that secularisation installs a new set of relations between modernity and religion. In the same way that Moingt argues that secularisation of thought does not mean a loss of a theological identity or credibility but represents in fact the ‘property of Christianity’, Schlegel contends that secularisation represents a chance for religion to rediscover its true identity. He argues against the perception that secularisation has eroded religious practice and belief. Instead, Schlegel believes that we have underestimated the capacity of religion to ‘invent modern figures to adapt to the novelty of the technological age, and to redefine itself in the form of a postmodern opposition to modernity’.27 For Schlegel, religious pluralism, diversification of belief and individualism represent a new ‘plenitude’ for secularisation and its links between religion and postmodernity.


I will examine this link between religion and postmodernity in a later section of this chapter. But for the moment I want to follow up some of the immediate implications of Schlegel’s article. In a section at the back of this issue of Esprit and titled ‘Un nouvel espace public’, the editors situate modernity’s paradox and positive secularisation within the wider socio-political context of French ‘democratic’ republicanism. They cut to the chase in their prognosis for the future. Either the Catholic Church and religion generally risk inexorable disappearance from the ideological map, or they address as a matter of urgency the growing gap between the collective values of the institution of the Church and a changing socio-political culture that is promoting the rights of the individual. As a consequence of this growth in individualism, the editors maintain that belief and religious practice are no longer thought or expressed the way they used to be.28 New forms of socio-political and cultural ‘membership’ have changed the ways individuals relate to the French republican private/public binary: ‘Today, the language of belief passes through the filters of individualism’.29 In a veiled critique of the papacy of John Paul II, the editors also argue, as have Hervieu-Léger, Moingt and Schlegel argued, that simply countering individual values with collective values is not the way forward for Catholicism or Christianity. Instead, they suggest, as Willaime intimated in the opening section of this chapter, that there is a need for a ‘theological and philosophical plan – a modern anthropology’ which will inscribe itself inside modernity and in recognition of ‘the great drift towards the individualism of “modern” believers’. The dilemmas facing the Catholic Church in France at this time are multifaceted. Firstly, there is the question of individualism. On the one hand, Catholicism’s reluctance to accept the concept of individualism can be explained within a historical tradition of the universal Church and the Christian message of salvation for all. On the other hand, this reluctance is set against a democratic swing in French political culture in the mid 1980s which prioritised individual rights and equality of citizenship over conformity to a ‘one fits all’ republican mould. For Catholicism, individualism, or the tendency to ‘fold in on oneself’, is tantamount to a dereliction of religious duty, whereas, from a socio-political perspective, it represents freedom of expression and conscience. Secondly, there is the legacy of the separation of Church and State which has left Catholicism politically impotent and subject to narcissism and ideological entrenchment. The absence of any structured affiliation with the political establishment (as in other European countries like Ireland, Italy or Spain) through which to channel its concerns has meant that Catholicism in France and other

26

History and Context

religious voices exist in isolation from the political decision-making process. That said, it is also the case that religious institutions occupy a unique space inside republicanism; in spite of their marginalisation from political decision-making, these institutions still command considerable moral and spiritual attention from large swathes of the body politic. Against the backdrop of these religious tensions, Catholic thinkers in the mid 1980s took advantage of the democratic turn in French politics to advance a new offensive in the Church’s negotiation with modernity, its freedoms and the changes in French society. By relocating the figure of the ‘believer’, formerly arcane and without a voice outside his religious jurisdiction, within a system of democratic integration in which his ‘religious’ rights demand legitimate recognition alongside everyone else’s, Catholic intellectuals sought to articulate a public, social and political ‘inscription’ to religion in the new democratic dispensation. This strategy was successful in raising the profile of the believer on a public level. It also enabled religious thinkers to establish new lines of communication between religion and modernity/society. We have seen, for example, how Moingt used the debate on the history of theology as an impetus towards a reconciliation between modernity and theology. Martine Cohen in ‘Figures de l’indivdualisme moderne’ also restores faith to the idea that the return of religion is not a fear of the future or a world in evolution but a desire to engage with its progress.30 Guy Petitdemange sees in modernity the possibility of a new ‘memory dynamic’ that will secure the heritage of religion inside modernity.31 Jean-Claude Eslin ties the debate neatly to the specific connection between religion and democracy. Citing Alexis de Tocqueville, he argues that the real benefit of religion is that it favours intuitively and instinctively freedom. ‘Religion’, he claims, ‘instructs the art of being free’.32 However, wary of selling off religion to unfettered democratic laisser fairism, he also suggests that the ‘true’ art of being free is only learned through limitation: ‘How does religion favour freedom? Paradoxically, not so much by speaking of it but by limiting it’.33 Eslin’s suggestion that religion exercises a controlling influence over democracy and freedom has its roots in the Christian tradition. Specifically, the setting of limits to freedom is clearly informed by Catholic doctrine and theology. John Paul II discussed the issue at length in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor in which he claimed that humankind’s genuine autonomy (‘rightful autonomy’) is confined to the truth of revelation; in other words, ‘although each individual has a right to be respected in his own journey in search of the truth, there exists a prior moral obligation, and a grave one at that, to seek the truth


and adhere to it once it is known’.34 From a Catholic perspective therefore, any potential conflict between religion and freedom resolves itself on the side of an a priori adherence to Christian truth and revelation. And yet, in practice and within the public/private binary system of French republicanism, such a resolution can compromise the full integration of the Christian believer within French society. The options therefore are twofold; the believer continues to ‘practice’ his religion in a state of relative passivity and subservience to the general interest and republican universalism. Alternatively, by dint of his belief, he is forced to embrace a religious communitarianism which confirms his social exclusion and which also runs contrary to his universal Catholic ethics. In short, the downside of the democratic ‘egalitarian age’ for Catholicism is that as a specificity that seeks socio-political accommodation within the oxygen of democracy, it not only lacks the political channels through which to pursue such demands but, more fundamentally, it is forced to live with the dissatisfaction that its real raison’d’être resides elsewhere. The presumption therefore that socio-political democratisation could have been a form of salvation for religion in the 1980s is undermined and in fact seriously dented by the changing climate of the late 1990s. The very title of Esprit’s special issue on religion in 1997, Le temps des religions sans Dieu, heralds a different, postmodern age in which even the political has been atonomised and relativised. This change in political context is accompanied also by a shift in religious emphasis; the ‘return of religion’ has given way to the ‘emptiness of religion’, which in turn has been replaced by ‘religion in the plural’. In his article ‘Indépassable religion’, Eslin charts this shifting religious trajectory. His thesis is that religion, conceived as an event of the past, has been invalidated after the collapse of messianism. The same invalidation, he argues, applies to religion as a future of hope. With the simultaneous autonomisation of religion and politics under postmodernity, Eslin claims that we occupy a present in which hope as a ‘religious truth’ is an illusion, and in which ‘the climate of the times is one of neo-stoicism’.35 He adds also that postmodernity has had the effect of undermining ‘a classical articulation of religion and politics defined by the duality and the dual symbolic authority of Church and State’.36 In its place is a ‘liberalism without frontiers’ which Eslin describes as a postmodern individual spontaneity that can do without tradition, roots, community or institution. Postmodernity, it would appear, has borrowed and nurtured the perception of religion in the 1980s as an expression of a legitimate right ascribed to private interest. But in the process it has taken this privatisation to a new level, to the extent that religion is

28

History and Context

now measured exclusively in terms of an ‘action on to oneself’, a ‘practice’, an ‘art of living’ or a ‘rule of life’, as opposed to a body of knowledge (‘wisdom’) with a past, a tradition and intellectual and philosophical properties. While the effect of this new ‘Godless religiosity’ on French public space poses new problems for the capacity of laïcité to control the secular,37 Eslin’s focus is on the private expression of this new religiosity (in which he includes Buddhism, Mysticism and Jehovah’s Witnesses) and its non-transcendental, non-metaphysical and self-oriented ethos.

The paradox of secularisation From the mid 1980s, the trend towards the privatisation of religion (‘return of the private’) had been growing. However, while democratisation in the 1980s produced a new vision for the ‘integration’ of religion against the backdrop of modernity where religion had been officially banished from the French secular landscape, postmodernity advanced the privatisation of religion against a different backdrop altogether, one where religion had been rehabilitated and granted equal status to all other spiritual, ethnic and sexual specificities. Esprit, in one of its surveys carried out for the 1997 special issue, makes reference to postmodernity’s effect on the ‘relativisation of Christianity’ and the emergence of ‘religion à la carte’. Shoring up this postmodern vision is ongoing secularisation which is seen to endorse the freedom to choose religious options and formulate new existential and practical orientations of belief. As such, it would be inaccurate to rehearse a common misconception that secularisation is responsible for the decline of religion. Secularisation, like modernity, has been subject to a paradoxical process and one of the first aspects of this paradox has been to scotch the myth that secularisation is anti-religion. In the current debate on laïcité and secularisation, Olivier Mongin and Jean-Louis Schlegel make this abundantly clear in their joint article for Esprit in June 2005. They dismiss the temptation to prove collusion between official laïcité (an ideology) and secularisation (a sociological phenomenon). The co-authors highlight the fact that laïcité is afforded an official habitus which they define in the form of a public allergy to ostentatious religious signs. Secularisation, on the other hand, is characterised no longer as a loss of the religious but as a ‘dissemination [of religion], a flowering, an individualisation, a bricolage, a redeployment of bits and pieces for celebratory, aesthetic and reactionary effect – which in all cases is without any real anchoring in a tradition, without a conscience and without a desire to belong, in short with communitarian links’.38


The second key point in respect of the paradox of secularisation is that the aforementioned process of ‘dissemination’ has actually redefined religious specificity in what we could call a postmodern, hyper-democratised France. In a twofold argument, Willaime argues that secularisation nourished the idea that modernity had left religion behind, with the secular having replaced religion. But, as he goes on to say, it is now the ‘secularisation of secularisation’ that is characteristic of postmodernity, a turn of phrase that he defines in terms of the association of hypersecularisation and a certain return of the religious.39 In other words, for Willaime, modernity as such has not ended with postmodernity. It is more the case that modernity has been radicalised and problematised and in the process a new set of cultural conditions for the contemporary resurgence of religion has come about. Olivier Roy, again in the context of recent debates on secularisation, points to the positives in this process. Dismissing the assumption of religious erosion, he states that secularisation ‘entails necessarily a redefinition of religious belonging [...]. It entails a reconstitution of religious identity as a minority identity. It entails the disappearance of social evidence for religion and the explicit obligation to define oneself as believer (or non-believer)’.40 In effect, as we will see in a later chapter with Vattimo’s concept of Being as Event emerging out of secularisation (which he claimed to be the essence of Christianity), Roy and other religious thinkers argue that the return of religion is only relevant and in fact only makes sense against the backdrop of secularisation. This argument advances the idea of a ‘recomposition of the religious’ beyond the institutions of State and Church and within civil society. Recent religious debate in France has veered towards this issue of secularisation, primarily in response to the presence of Islam and the specific problems it poses for laïcité in respect of the way Muslims demand religious recognition in the public space. The secularisation of public space is a non-negotiable given under laïcité, and thus to seek religious inscription within it is problematic for all religious believers because it blurs the fundamental boundary in the republic between private and public expression. But beyond these statutory reasons, it may be worth asking why secularisation itself has become the focus of recent intellectual and religious scrutiny. Clearly, the return of religion in France, or to be more accurate the return of religiosities, has raised questions about the separation of Church and State and the relevance of laïcité in a France and Europe that are increasingly globalised. If laïcité is being challenged by greater Islamic integration and wider demands for religious recognition, and if religious institutions (Christian mainly) are no longer representative of the ways individuals are experiencing belief and faith, then we need to look at the question of religious

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authority, and the nature of the relationship between religious institutions and believers. In this respect, it is my contention that secularisation, in its paradoxical and disseminating manifestations, displaces the foundation of a religious ‘authority’ to a range of individual ‘convictions’ that are determined by their own moral and religious horizons. Secularisation skews the return of religion towards a different set of parameters whereby religious authority is renegotiated and made commensurate with the individual ‘freedom of the believer’. In the light of this and the recent centenary of 1905, the issue of authority, both of Church and of laïcité, has come in for stinging criticism in a series of articles published in Esprit during 2005 and 2006. I draw attention to one interview in the 2005 March issue between Stanislas Breton and Jean-Claude Eslin. Titled ‘L’autorité religieuse: entre foi et Église’, both commentators rehearse a familiar argument concerning the origin of religious authority, questioning whether it is located in ‘enunciative authority’ (literalism, Word of God), ‘institutional authority’ (doctrine) or ‘interpretative authority’ (interpretation). They juxtapose two possibilities. Either the Church must ‘reduce the authority of the Word of God’ in order to make it ‘adapt to more pragmatic and political demands’, or Christians must embrace a plurality of authorities (spiritual, scriptural, institutional, interpretative, etc.). Eslin proposes that diversity is actually a process of enrichment, not because of proliferation of choice and the cultural benefits of relativism, but precisely because ‘it [diversity] returns us to a foundational authority which, by remaining absent to us, authorises our freedom’.41 This is a view that echoes that of De Certeau in the context of his theory of the mutism of belief. In other words, Eslin, in an interesting twist to conventional thinking on secularisation as an authority-free zone, defends the diversity of religious traditions and experiences (which secularisation promotes) because paradoxically it invokes a return to an absent authority, in his case a metaphysical Christianity. The views of Eslin are worth closer attention. If we have established that secularisation functions paradoxically in the way it engenders the return of religion, then Eslin’s paradoxical idea that diversity and dissemination are liberating agents of authority casts a new light on the relationship between institution and believer. For Eslin, and let us be clear, diversity only hides the fact that there is a vacancy at the heart of secularisation which, for him, can only be filled by a return to the authority of Christianity; diversity per se is meaningless. However, in the absence of Eslin’s foundational authority in Christianity, we are presented with the possibility of an authority located in absence/loss or in diversity itself. For


editors of Esprit over the years, this is the starkest and bleakest of alternatives, the possibility of the return of religion without meaning, nostalgia or culture, a new phase in religious history that is ready to start all over again from scratch. And yet, these fears may be unjustified. If it is the case that the much-vaunted proximity between secularisation and the return of religion is a ruse to re-institute doctrinal monotheisms, then our suspicions are well founded. But, given the consensus across most commentators on this debate thus far, it is clear that secularisation has facilitated a rethink of the relationship between institutional authority and believer, not to the extent that the former is bypassed altogether, but more to the point that authority itself can be seen to be self-generative, indeed that authority can also be founded in loss and in forgetting: Forgetting is completely contrary to vacancy, for in each instance, it throws us and opens us to preoccupation with what lies before us [...]. There is in this forgetting of the past also something providential, where it reveals itself as authentically founding [...]. There is thus indeed a loss that founds us and this loss only gives and gives us. Access to the truth takes place only according to forgetting, overcome but not abolished, and thus the parousia of the truth is for us never either plenitude or coincidence.42 In short, this recent positive spin on secularisation (with its emphasis on human choice, historicity, contingency, the non-metaphysical, the absence of transcendence, the need to confront progress and evolution, the embrace of culture and modernity as intrinsic elements in a holistic response to the return of religion) is indicative of two significant trends. Firstly, secularisation has contributed to the re-invention of a context in which religion is produced in postmodernity, including the ways in which religion is practised. Secondly, and crucially, secularisation remains faithful to the search for a religious authenticity despite and by virtue of its embrace of eclecticism.

From modernity to postmodernity: a critical overview When Gauchet coined the phrase ‘the return of religion’ in 1985, the impact then and afterwards was profound. It provoked waves of debate in the pages of Esprit through the 1980s, 1990s and today. In the special issue Le temps des religions sans Dieu in 1997, Eslin couched this return within a ‘postmodern universe of unlimited individual rights, self-interest, comfort and well-being’, in short ‘the return of privacy’.43 For him, the return of

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religion ushered in an era not of religious tradition but of a crisis of Christianity in modernity. According to Alain Touraine in the same issue, secularisation had manufactured a new and different religious subject, one that had been undone by modernity and delivered to the fragilities of individualism and communitarianism.44 Touraine goes on to say that the traditional religious subject had been surpassed by a new political one for whom the ‘sacralisation of the social’ had become the new religion of society. Pierre-Olivier Monteil highlights the impact of this elevation of the social in the late 1990s, underlining the dangerous effects of pluralism, relativism and a polytheism of values. However, he (like Boureux in the same issue) draws attention to the idea that relativism does not imply the end of belief. While belief may have become displaced by materialism and relativism, Monteil defines belief as an eternal property of the mind, and as a need for alterity not to end. He describes belief as going through a process of ‘metabolisation’ and ‘substitution’ in secularisation,45 with the promise of its refinement in the longer term. This representation of postmodernity and the way it appears to have displaced religion across the socio-political canvas is in direct contrast to modernity’s dialectic with religion in previous decades. In the issue of Esprit in 1985 titled Actualité de la religion, the editorial asks its readers if, in the struggle against the fracturing effects of secular modernity, the nation’s collective memory might not be better served focusing on the past and those religious institutions that have formed collectively the nation’s religious heritage. In 1986, another special issue of Esprit (La religion . . . sans retour ni détour) also addresses religious displacement by proposing that religion might have a more constructive role at the conjuncture between individual and collective freedoms.46 It would seem that in the mid 1980s, the ambiguity of the term ‘return of religion’ crystallised the nature of the relationship between modernity and religion in France. This was a relationship characterised primarily by conjunctures between the individual and the social, past and present, memory and actuality. Over time, these conjunctures have intensified culminating in a ‘rationalisation’ of religion as a purely individualistic and private pursuit in late modernity and postmodernity. However, in the course of this trajectory, two constants continue to undermine postmodern relativism and secular modernity. The first is the invariant that religion is an eternal property of the mind and that, by implication, belief remains an unfulfilled absolute even in a hypersecularised, postmodern context. This, as we have seen, is Monteil’s conclusion. The second is the perception that secular modernity, in its pursuit of freedom of conscience, had in fact quarantined the believer, compromised


his affinity with a religious community and obstructed the transmission of a collective religious heritage. In 2003, La Revue du MAUSS devoted a special issue to this debate on religion titled Qu’est-ce que le religieux? The arguments played out in Esprit in the mid 1980s and in subsequent special issues are rehearsed in this issue of La Revue du MAUSS and specifically in an exchange of articles between Gauchet, Alain Caillé and others. Gauchet, in particular, revises his original thesis. He replaces the celebrated ‘return of religion’ with the phrase ‘coming out of religion’ (‘sortir du religieux’). This shift reflects his perception that postmodernity has finalised the end of religion as a ‘structure’, that history and tradition have vanished from the ideological map and that citizens can now do without religion without fear or regret. For Gauchet, there are new challenges in the postmodern age which involve organising society outside of religion and within what he calls the new universals of science, technology, politics and the judiciary. However, in a second separate article titled ‘Quelle conception politique de la religion?’, Gauchet appears to qualify this representation of religion by defending the ways in which it has helped humanity understand the collective and the social. He writes eloquently of humanity’s debt to the coherence offered by the ‘way religion has structured human communities’47 and of how religion has not only instructed the individual in subservience to power but also created the ambition within the individual to pursue power. The ironic twist, however, to Gauchet’s argument is that, for him, religion is blessed with a self-awareness that knows when it has run its course in the postmodern age, and when to pass on the baton of ‘self-reliance’ to future generations. In a later exchange of opinions between Gauchet and Debray in Le Débat, the latter responds to Gauchet on this point by claiming that to opt out of religion is tantamount to opting out of history. In stressing the permanence of religion in the world, Debray invokes (as did Gauchet) the structuring and communitarian influences of religion. He is critical of modernity and postmodernity and the roles they have played in removing religion from people’s lives. To this degree, he opposes the positive ‘anterior-centred’ focus of religion to the ‘future-centred’ ideology after/ without religion. In his defence of religion, Debray proceeds to attach to it an identifying structure which is centred on the use of the sacred as an ‘identity’.48 It is a theme developed by two other contributors to MAUSS. Jacques Dewitte conceptualises the return of religion as a need for a return to signs of sacredness and a cherished language which are perceived to bring back stability and coherence to what he characterises as postmodernity’s tyranny of difference: ‘inherited religious language, elaborated over the course of the centuries is without doubt the best access we have to

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truth and it would be unreasonable to deprive oneself of it’.49 This return of the sacred and a sacred language are also described as a welcome return to the transfiguring potential of overly politicised and fractured societies. Willaime extends this use of the sacred to a defence of religion as ‘a symbolic actuality’, and as a ‘culture’ where religion is perceived to structure identities (individual and collective) and produce alternative ways of understanding. ‘Religion as culture’ is justified, for Willaime, in respect of identity, coherence, tradition and autonomy of its determinants.50 We can see from this very brief outline that, for the period of les trente glorieuses, religion occupied what could be described as its natural place in the modern, secular and republican space – in other words, a private function of free thought. Postmodernity accentuated this privatisation through a process of relativism. But, critically, the democratisation of republicanism in recent decades has itself relativised the notion of privatisation in such a way that the traditional republican distinction between private and public has been undermined by the democratisation of the private in the public. In the context of contemporary secular France, this process has helped legitimise religious belief within laïcité. Not only that, but the emergence of a more structured discourse, around notions of identity, faith and ‘knowledge’ of a religious heritage, has staked a claim philosophically, culturally and, as will see now, politically, for its reinsertion into the domains of secularism and postmodernity. The 1986 special issue of Esprit is a critical document in the history of the relationship between laïcité and religion in France. Firstly, it heralded a crisis in laïcité in respect of the return of religion. Secondly, this return became an opportunity to draw up a different road map for religion, away from the notion of religion coming back miraculously from the past, and towards addressing the false equivalence of ‘modernity = enlightened secularism’.51 Schlegel was adamant that laïcité was here to stay, indeed ‘an irreversible fact’.52 But, critically, this irreversibility did not imply that laïcité could not and should not change. The challenge, as described by Schlegel, was to invent ‘revolutions of the believable’ that would eternalise the notion of belief as a constant thorn in the side of laïcité. However, more than this, the 1986 special issue brought together the religious and political projects in a way unforeseen up to that point. Out of the mix of equality of rights, individual freedoms and differences emerged a specific ‘democratic individualism’ of the believer. This new-found status was set in: a time when it appears that the crisis of the State, which is first and foremost a body of collective norms designed to group individuals


around common values, imposes the invention of new forms of collective deliberation that take into consideration individual demands. This is not to imply that laïcité has lost its authority, that political autonomy is being questioned, or that the separation of Church and State is under threat; rather, it suggests that public life is no longer determined by collective values (a republican ethics for example) according to which the individual or the citizen organises his choices and takes decisions.53 We have seen in Esprit examples of a desire for greater proximity between religion and politics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but it would appear that it was not until the mid 1980s that a more structured link between the two was established along the lines of the rights of a minority group within the republican/democratic dialectic. Debray’s ground-breaking article ‘Êtes-vous démocrate ou républicain?54 testified to a new realignment in France’s political tectonic plates. It would be my contention, therefore, that the post 1986 period represented a new departure for religion and religious debate in France. Beyond the historically organic solidarity between democratic politics and religious tolerance, the democratisation of the believer provided a platform from which to voice a legitimate opposition to laïcité. This democratisation did not involve the politicisation of a religious discourse per se. This discourse, as we shall see later in the case of Catholicism, was to assume doctrinal and theological dimensions. What had changed, however, was that this discourse was now being resignified in the light of a different socio-political narrative. As early as the special issue of Esprit in 1986, some contributors were fleshing out the possibility of a new religious language that could be offered as an olive branch to secularism. Schlegel speaks of secularism as not being a total void for religious debate, but potentially a place of plenitude: ‘secular society does not invoke the emptiness of religion but its fullness’.55 Petitdemange, as we have seen, is more specific in his identification of a different trend in religious thinking ‘whose dynamic is memory’ and whose language, while not of this world, ‘must operate in this world’.56 In its editorial, the search for a new ‘identity for itself . . . theologically and philosophically’ is carefully balanced against ‘a Christian grammar’ that respects the cultural, historical and aesthetic Christianity of the past. However, this duality between forging a new religious identity and an obligation to bow to the historical legacy of Christianity produced, I would argue, an immobilism that characterised the believer in the mid 1980s. He was caught between a

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new religious ‘right to speak’ gifted to him by democratisation, and a dutiful self-imposed ‘aphasia’ inherited from the past. I would suggest that this immobilism not only stunted the progress of a new religious identity but it has subsequently made it prey to social and cultural diversification. We can see that by 1997 and the special issue of Esprit called Le temps des religions sans Dieu, France is a place where traditional monotheisms have been marginalised by other forms of esoteric religiosity. The editorial underlines the further marginalisation of the symbolic and spiritual elements that have structured the lives of French generations. French and European democracies, it claims, have lost the spiritual and intellectual properties common to their histories. To compound this picture, a survey carried out on the privatisation of religion reveals that individualism is not solely a product of modernity and postmodernity, but is also a symptom of Christian oppression, which in turn has produced a spirit of rebellion in matters of the body, self-realisation and self-determination. According to the survey, there is the perception that the crisis of individualism is seen, at least by the Catholic Church, as much a crisis of its own making as a function of the postmodern age and a secular France. And clearly, as the survey confirms, laïcité has not helped in its creation of conditions of religious marginalisation and the decline of religious practice, rites, beliefs and the visibility of the Church. The vacuum created by the absence of a consensus on a specific religious identity in the 1980s has been filled by the fracturing effects of postmodernity. In the process, the lines of transmission by which faith, religious traditions and knowledge were traditionally acquired have become blurred. It is against this backdrop of an embryonic religious ‘identification’ in the mid 1980s and its apparent malfunction in the 1990s and beyond that a current crisis in the transmission of belief and faith has emerged.57 And yet, faced with this religious implosion, I would argue that in recent times the Catholic Church, and specifically the Vatican, has adopted an offensive strategy to re-educate Catholics, not by an accommodation of liberal progressiveness but by a return to strict theological doctrine, a trend which appears set to continue under the papacy of Benedict XVI. While this strategy has angered and alienated many progressive Catholics, its one positive effect has been to foreground important theological tenets, in particular the centrality of reason in the transmission of faith, knowledge and ethics, and how reason may represent the key to a reassessment of the values of laïcité in contemporary France.


Laïcité and democracy The resignation of the European Minister for Justice Rocco Buttiglione in 2003 because of his views on women and homosexuals throws a contemporary light on an old but complex issue, notably the place of religion within democratic societies. The example of Buttiglione is particularly apt given recent pronouncements by the Vatican which have called upon Catholics globally to oppose legislation that jeopardises the doctrines of the Magisterium, and specifically the conjugality of marriage.58 Buttiglione’s situation also echoes recent debates in MAUSS between Gauchet and Caillé, and in Le Débat between Debray and Gauchet about the complexity of the ever-present and thorny relationship between religion and politics. For Gauchet, postmodernity has enabled politics to stand on its own and create its own governing structures. In his exchanges with Caillé, he highlights the polarity between religion and politics, claiming for example that religion is secondary to the political and therefore responsible for constituting humans as dependants rather than initiators. He summarises this assessment in the phrase: ‘Politics institutes. Religion does not. It is institutionalising’.59 Caillé is less categorical and advocates a closer affiliation between religion and politics.60 Debray and Gauchet continue the debate in Le Débat. Debray contests the idea that a democracy needs to or indeed can divorce itself from religious ideas. He wants to minimise the political ‘modulations’ that militate against the participation of religion in democracy. Gauchet, on the other hand, wants to maximise them as forms of control over religious enchantment. In his recent work Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout, writing within the context of American political culture, criticises the view that modern democracies are secularised spheres from which the ‘believer’ must withdraw. He opposes the view of other political scientists, notably John Rawls and Richard Rorty, who claim that democratic participation effectively excludes religious reasoning.61 One could say that the laïque tradition in France resembles the Rorty and Rawls models. However, we have seen recently that the affaire du foulard in France has threatened to compromise the neutrality of French secularism. Among many things, the affaire demonstrates that it is inaccurate to depict laïcité as wholly immune to religion or as a place of secular utopia. Stout makes the following apt observation in this regard: Secularisation entails neither the denial of theological assumptions nor the expulsion of theological expression from the public sphere. And it leaves believers free to view both the state and democratic culture as

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domains standing ultimately under divine judgement and authority. That believers view the political sphere in this way does not entail that others will.62 The criteria according to which the French republic in secular modernity has confined religion to a private expression are being reassessed. As a private and exclusive practice, religion under republicanism knew its place and the limits of its functionality. But with the emergence of individualist, mobile, non-institutional and non-intellectual ‘religiosities’, the boundaries between public and private expression are less clear and the role of laïcité in regulating these boundaries has been brought into question. Even in the context of Catholicism, I think it would be misleading to paint a picture of complete secular objectivity in a laïque but Christian, Catholic France, where Vatican encyclicals and letters from Bishops are read aloud regularly at Catholic Mass on Sundays. Similarly, as our brief historical analysis has demonstrated, the Catholic Church (with and without the imprimatur of the Vatican) has a tradition of defending religious/political alliances. In one of its recent letters63, the Vatican calls for Catholics to challenge actively the secular traditions of France. Invoking reason and rightness, it claims that ethical pluralism and cultural relativism have undermined the central theological link between reason and revelation. It questions the idea that political freedom is founded on the thesis of relativism in which all conceptions of common good have the same truth and the same value. And crucially, it defends the right and duty of the believer to intervene in political decisions that undermine Catholic faith and codes of morality. In particular, the Vatican challenges the legitimacy of laïcité by contesting its separation of ‘civil and political autonomous space’ from ‘religious and ecclesiastical space’. In so doing, it defends what it sees as the inextricable link between ‘living and acting politically’. This critique of laïcité is not confined to the Vatican. In a letter to the President of the Republic, the Catholic Bishops of France have addressed problems with laïcité in respect of the affaire du foulard.64 Intimating Debray’s subsequent report to the Ministry of Education on religious instruction in French schools, the Bishops confirm, on the one hand, their respect for the laïque vision but, on the other hand, claim that laïcité has been responsible for ‘constituting’ spaces (the school for example) that have been consciously emptied of religious dialogue, a claim which raises accusations of innate intolerance and discrimination within secularism. As a consequence, the debate on the role and future of laïcité has intensified today. Schlegel and Mongin advocate a complete overhaul of the ‘culture


of laïcité’ in preference to what they see as the current state of immobilism and the dangers of communitarianism.65 Nicolas Sarkozy, the new President, is in favour of maintaining the absolute separation of Church and State, but has expressed a willingness to enter into dialogue and new relations between religious bodies and the State, even to the extent of courting controversy by using public monies to fund religious institutions. His concern that political instability and wider disenchantment are the products of a religious vacuum is indicative of the importance of religion in French cultural life, its impact on the nation’s well-being and of the urgent need to re-evaluate laïcité in the light of social change.66 Roy confirms this prognosis in his claim that the goalposts for laïcité have now changed. He asserts that religion, whether sanctioned by laïcité or not, has become ‘integral’ in modern-day France, part of the nation’s ‘public being’. For Roy, religion represents a new form of belonging, not ghettoised or compromised, but integralised in such a way that ‘we have two juxtaposed spaces that are no longer separate: the believer lives his religion in the same space as the non-believer, but he inhabits this space differently’.67

Régis Debray: ‘teaching religion is not religious teaching’ In an earlier part of this chapter, I argue that one of the main ways Catholicism (under recent papacies) has risen to the challenges of secularism has been to elevate reason in the articulation of faith, and in the process dispel a misconception that faith is based on irrational belief and human insecurity. One of Catholicism’s key strategies in this regard has been to take reason away from the hold secularism has exercised over it and re-appropriate reason for its own theological purposes. It is in the context of this wider debate that I want to bring this opening chapter to a close by focusing on a related issue that goes to the heart of current conceptions of French laïcité. In 2002, Debray submitted a report to the Ministry of Education titled L’enseignement du fait religieux dans l’école laïque.68 In very general terms, the report made a case for the teaching of religion in French schools on the basis that there is an apparently broad public consensus for it, and also because there is a perception that many young French school-goers are growing up in a non-religious context where they know little about their country’s religious traditions. As a result, the report claims that their knowledge of the present and future is severely impoverished. Among the report’s 12 recommendations, Debray calls for the establishment of an Institut européen en sciences et religions and, most controversially, for the

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introduction of two compulsory modules (‘laïcité and religion’, and ‘philosophy of laïcité and history of religions’) to be taken by prospective teachers as part of their teacher training. From a secular perspective, the report was heavily criticised for compromising the laïque principle of freedom of thought over religious freedom.69 It comes as no surprise that Debray’s report was not well received by secularists. However, his report needs to be evaluated within the broader context we sketched earlier of a theological religious discourse, a boundary-free postmodernity, and how religion might become a natural and reasoned ally of laïcité. The report involves a subtle and complex argument, democratic and republican in direction, and weaves a labyrinthine path between the virtues of laïcité and their simultaneous erosion. It opens with an appeal to laïcité’s tradition of objectivity and tolerance, and a concern for the loss of religious tradition, values and morality in contemporary secular culture. Religious knowledge is invoked as a potential enhancement of laïcité, but, in the same breath, Debray is careful to allay laïque fears of hidden agendas. He advances his argument tentatively by suggesting that religion and laïcité could become partners. This ‘reasonable’ hypothesis is explored through a correlation Debray makes between laïcité’s objectivity and reason itself. Critically, reason is identified in its links to revelation.70 This identification is an important element in Debray’s argument because it locates reason and religion in a context that is alien to laïcité’s understanding of their mutual exclusivity, but intrinsic to a Catholic theological tradition. Former Pope John Paul II, arguably the most philosophical of recent Pontiffs, wrote extensively on this link. His 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio is a pivotal document for several reasons. As a precursor to Debray’s report, it addresses the issue of the return of religion from the position of Catholicism. In this respect, it sets the tone and the manner in which Catholicism was to respond to the critical theological issues of the day. The encyclical opposes radically the pervasive trend towards historicist, pragmatic and eclectic philosophies of religion which seek to displace religion from its metaphysical and absolutist ‘truths’ and relocate it in reality, culture and language. A year after its publication, Moingt, writing in Esprit, underlined the importance of the encyclical by saying that it restored a philosophical status to Catholicism and demonstrated the philosophical and theological interdependence between faith and reason in the Catholic tradition. And while Moingt also exposes some of the problems with the encyclical’s exclusive and absolutist conceptions of truth and autonomy, he still acknowledges its


essential significance and the way it embeds Catholicism in a tradition of rational thought, cause and effect and their salvific justification.71 Fides et Ratio establishes a twofold order of knowledge, natural reason and divine faith; faith in God’s revelation surpasses all knowledge proper to human reason. John Paul II characterises reason as having its own autonomy and scope for action, but reason is defined as being constrained and limited by original sin. Faith, however, not based on human reason but unable to dispense without it, is seen to liberate reason in so far as it allows reason to ‘attain correctly what it seeks to know and place it within the ultimate order of God’s revelation’.72 Debray’s report invokes reason in its defence of teaching religious knowledge but Debray is quick to dismiss any suggestion that the rational justification for teaching religious knowledge in French schools is designed to undermine laïcité or secular modernity. However, by its very suggestion early in the report, Debray has carefully planted a theory of religious ‘knowledge’ within laïcité. From the outset, he wishes to dispel a myth that religion and laïcité are not good partners. On the contrary, as readers, we are made aware that Debray wants to cultivate their connection; to link religious knowledge to the objective ‘transmission of knowledge’ in laïcité is a rationale that laïcité will have difficulty eschewing.73 The tradition of linking reason to revelation is well established. Reason is used to forge a very specific type of religious discourse linked to the concept of truth in the revelation of the resurrection. On the basis of this theological and Catholic rationale, Debray is able to advance his theory that religion cannot be excluded from laïcité on the basis that it cannot participate in the rationally controlled, public transmission of knowledge in the republican school: ‘To relegate religious knowledge from the rational and publicly controlled transmission of knowledge encourages a pathology of control rather than one of healthy relations [. . .]. To abstain is not to cure’.74 The second main thrust of Debray’s report is the link he establishes between religious faith and knowledge. Much is made in the report and among critics of the need for a separation between religious faith and general knowledge, and specifically, that the instruction of knowledge in the republican school should be free from any possibility of religious influence. Debray contests this assumption. One of the ways he does this is through a discussion of culture. The laïque tradition, he claims, is suffering from ‘religious ignorance’. An equally worrying concern is what he calls the ‘culture of extension’. This refers to a form of ‘knowledge’ that is achieved through overexposure to the media and television zapping, symptoms of the technological age that privilege space over time. This temporal/spatial opposition is a theme used throughout

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the report to indicate a different approach to forms of knowledge acquired either immediately through the ‘culture of extension’ or through culture as a ‘cumulative continuity’.75 The horizontal and pejorative association of spatial knowledge is contrasted with the temporal and positive association of vertical knowledge, a form of knowledge that embraces transcendence and reflection, and therefore a knowledge to which religious instruction is linked positively. By means of this conceptualisation of knowledge, Debray wants to erase the presupposition that faith and knowledge cannot co-exist in laïcité: In the same way that the wise man and the believer do not invalidate each other, so the objective approach and the confessional approach should not compete with each other, providing the two can exist and prosper simultaneously [. . .]. There is sufficient proof that the two can co-exist in any one individual (an interpreter can be a critic).76 Debray’s argument for the co-existence between wise man (‘savant’) and believer (‘témoin’) is at the heart of this report. But as an idea it also reaches out to previous debates in this chapter on the spiritualisation of politics, on the role of the believer in a democracy, on ‘Christian praxis’ and on the politics/religion axis in general. We should not forget, of course, that this co-existence is played out in the school and personified in the school teacher. And yet, for Debray, the school, distinct from the relatively free space of the university, exemplifies the uniqueness of the laïque tradition with its dual and incongruous emphasis on ‘free thought’ and ‘the suppression of personal convictions’.77 Debray articulates this dilemma of the teacher in laïcité as follows: ‘Allowing a doctrine or a reality to be known is one thing, promoting a norm or an ideal is another thing altogether.’78 The critical issue, for Debray, comes down to the transmission of knowledge; the teacher (and by implication the concept of knowledge in the republican school) has laboured under a private/public division. On the one hand, there is the private knowledge associated with religious belief. It is defined by a self-reflexive (‘internal’) discourse; cloistered and self-referential, it is a discourse without external referent or need for public dissemination. It is further defined by its self-worth and its intellectual consciousness and it is a discourse cultivated by the believer. On the other hand, there is knowledge that is defined by the fact that it is a common, shared knowledge. For Debray, this is objective (wise) knowledge, approved and standardised by laïcité and by the school as having a valid public function ‘at introductory, intermediate and advanced levels of the teaching curriculum’.


Debray charges laïcité with constructing a purity of knowledge. Onedimensional, selective and homogeneous, laïcité is perceived as defending the incompatibility of religious knowledge with a knowledge fit for public consumption. It is a perception grounded on two controversial notions, firstly, that religious belief can prejudice the objective transmission of knowledge and, secondly, that belief is without conceptual rigour and intellectual rationale. In defence of laïcité, the notion of the incorruptibility of knowledge at the point of delivery to the school child is intellectually honest and laudable. Supporters of laïcité point to its rational, scientific basis, the benefits of universalism over particularism and the dangers of dogmatic belief.79 But the relative pros and cons of laïcité are relative to one’s location on the political spectrum. Laïcité can be viewed either democratically, that is where the school is seen as a mirror image of civil society80 or from a republican perspective in which case society resembles the school as a space of public and private separation.81 Debray takes a different approach. For him, the debate has more to do with knowledge and how laïcité’s claim to objectivity is founded on the idea that religious belief compromises this objectivity on the grounds that belief is an irrational discourse. Debray, in the tradition of Catholic theology, contests the artificial construction of a divided (private/public) knowledge by claiming metaphorically that these two representations of knowledge are ‘the two blades of the same pair of scissors’.82 John Paul II was more precise in his summary of this dialectic: ‘CREDO UT INTELLEGAM’.83 And Benedict XVI has reinforced the indivisibility of rationalist faith (‘Fides quaerens intellectum’) in his 2008 speech at Ratisbonne where he sides with the Pascalian interpretation of the faith/reason binary, summed up in the phrase: ‘The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing at all’.84 Debray proffers his alternative model of indivisible knowledge, intimating that for laïcité to oppose the rational link between believer and wise man would indicate intolerance and discrimination. In short, Debray appeals to the democratic credentials of laïcité to accommodate the instruction of religious knowledge with an argument that seeks to make laïcité more laïque than it already is. What Debray understands by religious knowledge and its specific role in laïcité reaches a climax towards the end of the report. He puts laïcité on its well-established pedestal, with freedom of conscience in pride of place. But he challenges laïcité’s definition of liberty by suggesting that liberty has a responsibility (in the interests of ‘human experience’) to safeguard young people and future generations from ‘religious illiteracy’.85 In effect, Debray appeals directly to the principle of freedom of conscience in laïcité to validate the study of religion, by

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underlining his perception that laïcité and religion are not opposites. ‘How can one’, he asks, ‘not see the study of religious knowledge as a principle of laïcité?’86 Debray goes on to reinforce his argument by allaying the fears of suspicious laïcs through an appeal to belief and reason. Religious belief, he implies, is not a mystical pursuit; rather, it is one in which reason is closely allied to its understanding. By its association with reason, belief becomes synonymous with self-awareness, cultural heritage and the triumph of ‘light over darkness’. To reject this association is, for Debray, to invoke a form of laïcité that is ‘scarred by the conditions of its birth’; in other words, a laïcité that sees religious belief as a ‘folly’, and a laïcité that is steeped in a culture of ‘militant anti-religious fervour’.87 Instead, Debray argues for the inclusion of the study of religion in schools on the dual grounds that it is a principle of laïcité (freedom of conscience) and that belief (faith) is linked rationally and intellectually to self-understanding and the meaning of salvation (in other words self-knowledge and human knowledge in general). In the first instance, Debray appeals to the democratic tendency in laïcité which, he claims, has its origins in the early foundations of the republican school: ‘To teach in this fashion is to recapture the golden age of republican and secular law that began with the establishment of an independent section of the school in 1886 with the unique purpose of studying in a non-theological way, religious phenomena’ (my italics).88 In the second instance, he highlights the inextricability of the relationship that can exist between believer and wise man, and how its opposition and denial is tantamount to intellectual fascism. The teaching of ‘religious phenomena’ in a non-theological way is Debray’s compromise with laïcité in the republican school, in that it ensures that religious ‘phenomena’ will be taught but without any theological or partial inflection. But it is a subtle compromise because, for Debray, the term ‘religious phenomena’ implies the study of the historical contextualisation of religion; in short, religious study is underpinned by necessary intellectual and rigorous discipline. As a compromise couched in the language of a return to the republican ideals of the Third Republic, Debray assuages the concerns of his secular readers by saying that there is no need for modernisation or democratisation of laïcité. Instead, it is a question of ‘resources’ and of laïcité being ‘refounded, rejuvenated, reassured in itself and in its own values’.89 In defending the ‘republican’ traditions of the French school, we might ask with justification whether Debray extends this defence to embrace a wider republican agenda of a universal and indivisible concept of knowledge. This cannot be discounted, but it would be my view that a republican interpretation is overridden by a


theological defence of knowledge. Debray’s defence of the republican school has a democratic logic in that he is actually defending the democratisation of religion in the instruction of religious studies. This is an argument for the rationalisation of religion (as ‘phenomenon’) in laïcité, an argument that laïcité has thus far been unwilling to countenance. Within religious circles, Debray’s report has been naturally well received. Roy has welcomed the debate as part of a wider revaluation of religion within laïcité.90 Diana Pinto sees the report as a step in the right direction but argues that more needs to be done from a republican perspective to make laïcité ‘a space of welcome and non-exclusion’. She states: ‘It is not a question of understanding religious knowledge as though religion were a biological or psychic given. Rather, it is a question of entering into a dialogue with religious realities in all their historical and cultural richness.’91 Sarkozy has been less enthusiastic in his response to the report and has raised some concerns about the effects on teachers of forcing them to teach religion in schools. He also has reservations about the critical aptitude of school children to discern the difference between religious knowledge as ‘phenomenon’ and ‘religious instruction’. Other commentators have responded in detail to the report in the way they address specifically the critical issues of the study of religion as historical discipline and in the context of the transmission of knowledge. Xavier Boniface, for instance, endorses the report’s historical focus. Citing Debray, Boniface states: ‘Religions have a history [...]. To talk about a historical context, without reference to the spirituality that energises it, is to run the risk of taking the life out of that context’.92 In a thesis that broaches the study of religion from three historical perspectives (‘history of the Church’, ‘history of religions’ and ‘religious history’), Boniface defends the historical significance of the study of religion in schools on the basis that history is seen as part of a methodology in which the development of knowledge (in its analytical, comparative and disciplinary expressions) is the primary intellectual objective. The fact that the subject taught happens to be religion is ultimately besides the point. Jean-François Barbier-Bouvet shares many of Debray’s concerns about the culture of television zapping and illiteracy and their effects on school children. He also highlights the trend towards postmodern relativism, ‘self-spirituality’, ‘the logic of efficacy’ and immediate gratification (the ‘religion of the present’ as he calls it) which militate against the reception of knowledge as a cumulative, substance-based and historical process. Barbier-Bouvet’s principal concern is the fear of ‘misrecognition’ which he defines in terms of a breakdown in the mechanism (mainly linguistic) by which knowledge is transmitted. Even established categories of acquiring

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knowledge (books, study, research and apprenticeship), he claims, are being replaced by new categories of instant knowledge access (the Internet for example). The consequences for religion, according to Barbier-Bouvet, are equally stark where instant ‘salvation’ is seen to be attainable without an understanding of religion as a ‘construction and organisation of knowledge’.93 Clearly, Debray’s and Barbier-Bouvet’s theses are addressed to different audiences, one to the political establishment, the other to the academic and religious community. However, their conclusions are the same; religious ignorance is not only a failure on the part of the institution of the school but a function of a wider crisis in the transmission of knowledge. On an optimistic note, both infer that this state of affairs can be changed through, as Debray intimates, a reconciliation between history and religious knowledge. Barbier-Bouvet concurs: If you transmit history without knowledge, you reduce religious culture to a simple reminiscence, to a dead culture, to a methodology, and you bypass what is essential. If you transmit knowledge without history, that is if you approach religion without memory, you leave people open to the manipulation of their own emotions, you weaken their resistance to gurus and underground ‘psycho rituals’. In truth, the real challenge in the transmission of a religious culture is this: to manage to hold the two ends of the chain at the same time.94 As Esprit has been the main research resource for these issues and for this chapter, it seems appropriate to return to a recent article in this journal as part of my conclusion. Philippe Capelle and Henry-Jérôme Gagey also respond to Debray’s report by setting up the university (with its emphasis on an epistemological approach to religious study) as a comparative space where religion and the study of it are embedded in a rational, disciplined and scientific discourse. Clearly, the republican school and university operate under different rules, but these co-authors use the university model as a parallel structure in order to highlight the artificiality (as they see it) in the laïque school of the division between ‘confessant’ and laïc. In a tightly argued article that attests to the historical institutionalisation of the French university based on the reciprocity between faith and reason, the authors rise in part to the challenge of Debray’s report, which is to answer the question whether one can, in an educational environment, be a university Professor and a believer at the same time? The authors are keen to underline the fact that one can teach ‘religious phenomena’95 and also express a personal religious belief, neither of which should compromise laïcité nor one’s professionalism. And the key to their argument, as it


is with Debray’s report, is that, in the context of ‘the rational and publicly controlled transmission of knowledge’ (which is the criterion by which laïcité is seen to operate in the school), religious belief (Catholicism in particular) has a legitimate, objective and intellectual rationale that justifies its equal ‘transmission’ as knowledge in the school.96 The crux of the debate therefore is not about whether belief and religion should be private concerns under modernity or postmodernity, or whether they prejudice public knowledge, but about whether belief constitutes a knowledge and whether it can be defined rationally. Capelle and Gagey call for new spaces of ‘objectivity’ removed from the ‘single and official voice’ of laïque objectivity. But they also call for a rethink of the concept of knowledge. Debray’s articulation of knowledge as the union of wisdom and belief (two parts of the same scissors) is reinforced by Capelle and Gagey who state that to be a university Professor and a believer constitutes ‘an indispensable dialogical element’.97 Debray and these co-authors reject the apartheid of knowledge in the republican school. It is seen to promote a ‘laïcité of incompetence’. By contrast, they see in faith, belief and religious instruction a tradition of religious knowledge grounded in Catholic theology and philosophy, and in a current socio-political context that promotes the democratisation of this knowledge in the form of a ‘laïcité of intelligence’.

2 Theology and Sexual Ethics

This creation would be our opportunity, from the humblest detail of everyday life to the ‘grandest’, by means of the opening of a sensible transcendental that comes into being through us, of which we would be the mediators and the bridges. Not only in mourning for the Dead god of Nietzsche, not waiting passively for the god to come, but by conjuring him up among us, within us, as resurrection and transfiguration of blood, of flesh, through a language and an ethics that is ours. Luce Irigaray An Ethics of Sexual Difference One of the main conclusions we can draw from Chapter 1 in respect of recent religious history in France is that Catholicism has clearly revised its thinking in response to the diversifying effects of postmodernity and the attractions of New Ageism and post-secularism. It has done so, not as one might have thought, by diluting its Christian doctrine, but, on the contrary, by reinforcing its own intellectual credentials. It could be argued that the new-found ‘attraction’ of Catholicism today (evidenced in the favourable reception of Benedict XVI in France in September 2008) is its rediscovery of theological rigour, the reconnection it seeks to underline between faith and reason, the philosophical indivisibility it espouses of knowledge and Christian revelation (the ‘savant’/‘témoin’ dialectic) and the wider challenges it presents to French laïcité in the instruction of religion in French schools. However, in other areas and perhaps as a consequence of its doctrinal rigour, Catholicism has alienated many believers. In matters of individual conscience (with respect to sexuality, abortion, gay adoption and euthanasia), Catholic steadfastness has come under extreme pressure with the consequence that many Catholics feel isolated and 48

Theology and Sexual Ethics 49

misrepresented within the Catholic fold. It would appear that it is at this level of the individual and his personal interface with socio-political culture that the real battle for the hearts and minds of Catholics resides. This chapter will deal with one contentious issue that underscores the complexity of this interface in present times. The debate on gay marriage has gathered pace globally and particularly in France where the secularisation of marriage as an ‘acte laïque’ (secular act) has furthered progress towards a political and juridic recognition of gay marriage. The Catholic Church (and the Vatican) has opposed this development in its re-enforcement of Catholic sexual ethics and the clear distinction it draws between religious and secular definitions of marriage. It is no surprise that the Catholic Church resists the introduction of gay marriage on ethical grounds, despite the fact that the emphasis on individual rights of equality within democratic French republicanism makes the eventual juridic approval of gay marriage a strong probability down the line. This bipolar picture, however, is complicated by a trend in recent times towards the post-secular where religion, not in any orthodox, institutional or doctrinal sense, is re-inserting itself in the public consciousness. In Chapter 1, commentators described this trend as a growing need felt by individuals to fill a religious vacuum left by secular modernity. This is not to say that Churches have suddenly become full and that vocations to the priesthood have soared. On the contrary, Church attendance has continued to drop in France in recent decades and the influence of the Catholic Church on cultural values is marginal to say the least. However, whether it be celebrities suddenly finding God or being converted to new religions, or whether it be young girls insisting on wearing headscarves to school or in the workplace, there is a perceptible change in the way religion is being received and experienced in France and elsewhere today. With Catholicism’s sacred jewels of marriage and family under threat, I would argue that religion (not in any denominational sense) is reconnecting with people at new levels of individuality, gender, citizenship and identity. On one level, this combination of religion and individualism has all the hallmarks of a heady and explosive mix, with all too obvious consequences in radicalisation and even terrorism. But I have a more constructive remit in this chapter. Post-secularism is not just about a return of religion outside the pale of orthodoxy. It is the creation of new conditions in which the expression of a religious conscience is not at odds with the emergence of individual autonomies (political, cultural and sexual) or the re-routing of transcendence away from alterity towards the practices of daily life and human experience. My aim therefore is to show that post-secularism has given rise to a

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particular identity problematic in which religion and specifically sexuality (former arch-rivals under secular modernity) are being reshaped in a new accommodation. In particular, and against this post-secular backdrop, I want to examine alternative discourses that open up new ways of configuring the possibility of gay marriage in France through an examination of concepts of integrity, immanence, asceticism and friendship, and critically the ethical and theological relationship between autonomy and norms. The question I want to answer is whether there is a valid theological ethic to gay marriage in France. Gay marriage, both in France and indeed across the world, has become a focal point for many lesbian and gay people, sympathisers and political movements. In contemporary France, one could argue that gay marriage has now become the endgame in a longer historical struggle which began with the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1982 and concluded with the implementation of the PaCS (Pacte civil de solidarité – Civil Partnership) in 1999. Socially and culturally, gay marriage has been gaining in acceptance in Western Europe.1 Politically and legally, there is an ongoing and increasingly stronger case for the legalisation of gay marriage on the grounds of equality and anti-discrimination legislation. Significantly, recent challenges to French laïcité from a resurgence in religious belief are part of a wider challenge to French democratic republicanism in which new autonomies of individualism and particularism are being seen to make public ‘usage’ out of new legalised private interests. It is therefore in this context of the perceived ‘triumph’ of private interest over public interest that gay marriage is making significant inroads into French cultural and socio-political life. It is my contention, however, that the debate on gay of marriage has reached a levelling off in recent times. If the goal of lesbian and gay activism in France is the holy grail of marriage, then this is surely not inconceivable, at least in the context of marriage as an ‘acte laïque’, dependent on civil law. But from a religious or theological perspective, the situation is very different. For the Vatican, gay marriage is a non-starter; Catholicism and other religions reject homosexuality, let alone gay marriage, on very specific grounds. However, does this Magisterial rejectionism represent the final nail in the coffin for a theological dimension to gay marriage? Assuming that marriage is still a desirable goal for lesbians and gays,2 the first part of this chapter outlines the new climate underpinning French laïcité and examines how trends towards post-secularism may help articulate new lines of understanding gay sexuality and marriage. In the second and third parts, I contextualise


the issue of gay marriage within a wider analysis of Catholic sexual ethics of marriage and the social politics of gay marriage in France. In the final section, I argue that recent and current debates on sexual ethics (Irigaray, Foucault and Müller) challenge established conceptions of ethics founded on norms, codes and universals, and point to alternative ethical paradigms (of immanence, self-mastery and responsibility) in which to determine the motivations of human behaviour. These ethical alternatives will also be seen to mirror in their sensitivities and nuances some aspects of Christian sexual ethics, without the latter’s preconditions on certain universals and a priori norms.

Post-secular France In 1985, the sociologist Marcel Gauchet announced the end of religion and the emergence of civil society as the new utopia into which humankind could channel any lingering thoughts of alterity or transcendence.3 However, according to Gauchet, given the way republican values of universalism and general interest have been systematically undermined by democratisation and multiculturalism, he has since revised his thinking to reflect a loss of faith in the social as a legitimate site of moral and collective unity.4 As Agnès Antoine confirms in her assessment of Gauchet’s revisionism, the substitution of religion by society (and an increasingly unrepublican society) has been accompanied by a loss in gravitas for the function of the public.5 The effects of this ‘dumbing down’ of republican universalism in France are considerable and, some would argue, long overdue. On the back of gains secured by democratisation and egalitarianism in the mid 1980s, there is a greater acceptance today of different religious expressions. According to Antoine, the danger for laïcité of this return of religion is that individuals increasingly want their specific religious allegiance recognised (legally, politically and culturally) at the expense of the universal and general interest. This is not to say that the particular rides roughshod over the public interest. It is more the case, as Danièle Hervieu-Léger has suggested, that the trend towards individualism and autonomous decision making is on the rise, and while the awareness of the sense of a general interest is ever-present, there is equally no sense of an obligation to embrace it.6 Compounding this decline in consensual republicanism is the perception that laïcité in France today is under threat from a broad-based and intellectually potent religious lobby that wants to challenge laïcité’s authority, particularly in schools.7 At a deeper level, Hervieu-Léger also points to a more serious reason why religion has

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made a return to the public consciousness. She maintains that religion satisfies a deeper human and eternal search for absolutes and truth which are beyond the tried, tested and unfulfilling rationales of modern political systems. Religion, she claims, answers a yearning for ‘an absolutism located in a radical otherness far removed from any connection with society’.8 What is also significant about the return to religion, according to Gauchet and Antoine, is that transcendence is no longer seen to be located in a spiritual exteriority. Rather, they describe transcendence as now emanating from within individual experience. Antoine claims that individuals are less interested in seeking truth from transcendence in a spiritual other and more concerned about experiencing ‘personally a feeling that has immediate effects in the here and now’.9 The implications of this thinking are noteworthy in the light of current debates on gay marriage in France. Politically and juridically, the debate in favour of gay marriage has gained considerable momentum over recent years, culminating in 2004 with the civic marriage of two gay men in the south-western town of Bègles, a ceremony approved and overseen by the town Mayor Noël Mamère. Even though the marriage was subsequently annulled and the mayor temporarily suspended from duty, this civic marriage enjoyed widespread support, even from unexpected quarters.10 As a disputed and controversial ‘legal’ act in a secular context,11 this ceremony is nonetheless indicative of a cultural shift in sexual mores in France towards greater tolerance of gay marriage. It also reveals the relative ease with which the pro-gay marriage debate in secular France can further its cause by couching its argument in a legal context and thus push for antidiscrimination legislation without having to answer directly to the philosophical heavyweights of anthropology, psychoanalysis and the Vatican.12 In equal measure, there is a body of opinion within the legal profession and political classes that is receptive to gay marriage, which makes legalisation a long-term but realistic possibility. Clearly, the same cannot be said of religious and particularly Catholic intransigence towards any couplings outside of marriage. However, as Antoine has intimated above, the conditions for a meaningful religious and sexual rapprochement in France are facilitated by Gauchet’s characterisation of the new challenges facing laïcité today. Post-secularism, in which religion can be defined outside religious institutions by selfregulating individuals in contexts where they have the possibilities to create their own truths and forms of transcendence, is reshaping the inter-relationship between religion and sexual ethics.


Catholic sexual ethics In an article published in Le Monde on 2 May 2004, the lawyer and progay marriage campaigner Daniel Borrillo stated that his campaign in favour of gay marriage was founded exclusively on politics and on the law, and not on religion. While recognising that the Catholic Church had a played a significant role in the history of French society and politics in the creation of a heritage of common values, he clearly located his argument in favour of gay marriage within the secularisation of the marriage act after the Revolution: ‘Marriage no longer depends on religious law but exclusively on civil law’.13 Furthermore, he wrote that it was in the context of ‘this civil act that lesbians and gays need to proceed in recognition of the principles of equality before the law and the universality of the rule of law’.14 As a strategy designed to secure the legalisation of gay marriage as a civil act in France, this move makes obvious and shrewd sense in that it provides the best way of achieving its political and legal goal. But it also throws into question the function of religious marriage in secular France. Clearly, the implication of Borrillo’s strategy is that religious marriage is outdated, if not an irrelevance, and therefore does not really figure in the political and legal ‘consecration’ of gay marriage in a secular society. However, his need to defend civil marriage against religious marriage belies some lingering suspicion of the wider significance of religious marriage in a country that is still Catholic in its Christian roots (although not in practice any more), and which still cultivates in its ecclesiastical hierarchy ultramontaine allegiance to Rome. Religious marriage enjoys a considerable cachet in most Catholic countries, and while political and social expediency may carry more weight among certain pockets of the population in respect of the practical and contractual obligations underpinning marriage, it is still a common perception that religious marriage holds a symbolic and mythical sway over Catholics, Christians and people in general. And yet, there is more to Borrillo’s strategy to distinguish gay marriage as a civil act from its religious corollary. From a Christian, and specifically Vatican, perspective, sexual ethics are defined within specific parameters and are anathema to the ethos, logic and contemporary expressions of sexuality and gender. Catholic sexual ethics are determined principally by what are described as objective standards based on the finality of the sexual act. In other words, sexual ethics are not an issue of personal, subjective and cultural experience or whim, but are defined by Divine (natural) law which is absolute and immutable, and

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which has as its dual meaning the unitive (man and woman) and procreative (family) functions of the conjugal act. In this sense, the Vatican sees its role today, in the context of sexual ethics, to promote the hierarchy of human sexuality within marriage by focusing ‘on the finality of the sexual act and on the principal criterion of its morality’.15 Before we address the nature of the conjugal act, let us examine some of the other relevant discourse on Catholic sexual ethics, which relates directly to Borrillo’s political and legal strategy and which also highlights why, at least on the surface, there appears little room for a reconciliation between the two civil and religious positions. The Vatican’s emphasis on the immutability of Divine law in the determination of sexual ethics is a critical point of difference. The Vatican emphasises the fact that its teaching on sexual ethics is related to principles and norms that ‘in no way owe their origin to a certain type of culture, but rather to knowledge of the Divine Law and of human nature. They therefore cannot be considered as having become out of date or doubtful under the pretext that a new cultural situation has arisen’.16 As such, culture and politics are perceived as transient phenomena, if not ineffectual historical by-products, in the eternal and religious significance of sexual ethics; culture specifically, the Vatican claims, distorts sexuality by separating it from its essential reference to the person.17 It is significant that the Vatican in its defence of sexual ethics places considerable faith in this apolitical, acultural argument. This not only reinforces its hold on the keys of sexual ethics, but it is also an argument that is difficult to undermine, if not counteract. Its defence is founded on an unequivocal resistance to change and is shored up by an unqualified allegiance to scripture and an unquestioning faith in the infallibility of Divine law. As a defence, it appears full-proof from criticism because of the perception of its mythic primordiality and the totality of its authority on sexual mores. Another but connected critical difference between Borrillo and the Vatican is the latter’s creation of a hierarchy of orders relating to subjective and objective acts. Freedom and consent are, as intimated earlier, not the true determinants of personal action from the perspective of the Curia. As such, freely chosen acts are classed as subjective and disordered acts, as opposed to objective acts that are predicated on self-denial, selfcontrol and the alienation of acts based on emotion or sincerity: The moral goodness of the acts proper to conjugal life, acts which are ordered according to true human dignity, ‘does not depend solely on sincere intentions or on an evaluation of motives. It must


be determined by objective standards. These, based on the nature of the human person and his acts, preserve the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love’.18 As with its claim to historical ownership of the origins of sexual ethics, the Vatican also hits out against those who try to justify sexual ethics based on subjective reasoning and not principled norms. In short, the Vatican opposes what it sees to be the excessive attention in contemporary society on individualism and the implicit focus on the individual subject in his self-determination, without necessary reference to social and objective standards and responsibilities. The former Pontiff John Paul II was instrumental in taking the debate on sexual ethics to a new level. His predecessor, Paul VI, had outlined the fundamentals of sexual ethics in Humanae Vitae, emphasising that conjugal love has its origin in reference to God, that marriage is of divine origin and as such marriage represents the union of Christ and the Church. With strong adherence to scriptural exegesis, John Paul II developed a theology of the body, which had at its core three interlocking key concepts: the ‘nuptial meaning’ of the body, sexual complementarity and the gift of oneself. The first concept advances the bride/bridegroom metaphor by establishing a closer physical and existential link between marriage and Church/Christ. In effect, men and women are seen to ‘exist’ together as bridegroom and bride, and are therefore designed to fulfil this function. The second concept, closely linked to the first, underlines the importance of gender complementarity in this binary. There are essential differences between maleness and femaleness, but these differences are part of their mutual completeness in relation to each other and to the fundamental unitive and procreative function of marriage. The third concept highlights the connection between sexual union and the gift of oneself. The latter is defined as the gift of fertility, ‘of one’s capacity for procreation. In giving his body, himself, to the woman, the man gives her the potential gift of motherhood; in giving her body, herself to the man, the woman gives him the potential of fatherhood.’19 James P. Hanigan goes on to describe male sexuality as ‘spousal’ in that it is ‘ordered to interpersonal union’ and ‘paternal’ in its ‘ordination to the maternal and to the raising up of new life’. Similarly, female sexuality is ‘spousal’ and ‘maternal’ according to the same criteria. The differences between the Vatican and the views of Borrillo are equally stark, but there are also areas where we can draw some common reflections and useful comparisons. Taking the differences first, sexual

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complementarity (alterity) is the defining feature of religious marriage. For the Vatican, the ‘genital’ act only has a meaning within the framework of marriage between a man and a woman, with its attendant final procreative function. Without this, the moral agents of sincerity and fidelity are not ensured. Similarly, ‘real’ love finds its safeguard in religious marriage. Without this safeguard, there can be no approved paternal or maternal love for children. Equally, ‘real’ freedom of action in the Vatican sense, maligned in secular society because of the perceived constraint placed on it by the fidelity of marriage, is on the contrary defined and guaranteed within the objective standard of marriage and fidelity. To this degree, the Vatican is keen to downgrade consent and freedom as arbiters of personal agency outside the pale of objective order; hence it has created the supremacy of the ‘loi de l’esprit’ (‘objective order’) over the ‘loi du péché’ (‘subjective order’). In addition, complementarity of the sexes is crucially that which distinguishes religious heterosexual marriage from gay marriage. This anthropological principle underpins all Vatican thinking on marriage. And linked to its primordiality is the relationship it forms with society; complementarity (leading to heterosexual marriage and the family) is considered a ‘social good’. This differentiates the union of heterosexual marriage from all other factual unions (concubinage for example) which are described in the private interest and not of benefit to social progress. However, beyond these normative and exclusive definitions of marriage and its universal and immutable preconditions, ‘amor coniugalis’ is also defined by the Vatican in more general terms as ‘essentially a relationship’, ‘a common and stable arrangement’ and also as ‘an issue worthy of recognition in justice’.20 While these terms, on a first reading, open up more generous comparisons with gay couples and other sexual couplings, they represent no more than a preamble to the more doctrinal pre-conditions for religious marriage, and particularly the final reference made to justice. The use of the term ‘justice’ is significant because it raises concerns about what form this justice might take, and how it might shadow the juridic concept of justice in the argument of Borrillo. I think it is safe to say here that the justice to which the Vatican is referring is justice linked to natural law and its absolute and immutable value, as well as the contractual and legal foundation in law of religious marriage: ‘This is a basic principle: in order to be real and free, conjugal love must be transformed into one that is due in justice through the free act of marital consent’.21 The Vatican’s position on this issue needs some further clarification. We have seen up to this point that the Vatican undermines the subjective


element in the binary of objective and subjective acts. This, however, is not designed to devalue the category per se of the subjective or the ‘interpersonal reality’ of marriage.22 The juridic dimension to marriage, the Vatican claims, is not ‘juxtaposed as something foreign to the interpersonal reality of marriage, but constitutes a truly intrinsic dimension of it’.23 In other words, and as a consequence of Vatican II, the Vatican is keen to dispel the notion that the juridic dimension of marriage (in its Divine law interpretation) is opposed to or unconnected with the dignity of the personal. On the contrary, the Vatican adheres to the enshrinement in law of the personal (through marriage, fidelity and the sanctity of the body), but crucially this enshrinement is overridden by the power invested in it by the higher order of Divine law. With justice connected to ‘true’ freedom of choice and authenticity in the objective order, the Vatican reinforces its argument of exclusive rights on the original template of human relations defined through marriage. It uses this argument to deflect attention away from the potential validity of other types of union created either by State or by public consensus: ‘This would be an arbitrary use of power which does not contribute to the common good because the original nature of marriage and the family proceeds and exceeds, in an absolute and radical way, the sovereign power of the State’.24 By virtue of believing it has the original design on human life, prescribed by Divine Law, the Vatican enjoys a privileged, exclusive but problematic role in denying other types of human arrangements any equivalence with heterosexual marriage. We can see from this analysis of the Vatican’s stance on sexual ethics that the political and legal case for gay marriage made by Borrillo (and others) faces a difficult challenge to compete on the same playing field as the Vatican. I will address shortly some of the counter-arguments and strategies advanced by Borrillo and the wider pro-gay marriage campaigners in France. But at this juncture, I want to raise some of the ethical implications of the Vatican position on sexual ethics, and point to some areas where current theological and ethical debates can shed new insights. In the context of orthodox Catholic sexual ethics, there is clearly no room for manoeuvre in debating the case for gay marriage. Firstly, marriage is locked into the axis of complementarity. Secondly, individualism and expressions of personal autonomy/specificity are overridden by invariable universals. Thirdly, the idea of gender, the cornerstone of contemporary shifts in concepts of sexuality and sexual difference, is described by the Vatican as part of a ‘process of cultural and human destruction of the institution of marriage’.25 Defined also (and pejoratively) as an ‘ideology’, the Vatican perceives ‘gender’ as being

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mainly responsible for the socio-political advances in equality of rights between gay marriage (and concubinage) and heterosexual marriage. The religious implications of the Vatican’s stance are considerable, particularly in the light of Gauchet’s earlier characterisation of a post-laïque France, with the rise in religious belief and the triumph of what he calls the ‘metaphysics of autonomy’.26 But, even within theological circles and current religious debate, concerns have been raised about the relevance and exegetical rigour of the Vatican’s position. Susan A. Ross, for example, questions the relevance of the nuptial metaphor; not only does she perceive it to be patriarchal but it also excludes lesbians and gays from the Christian message by inferring that they are ineligible persons and are incapable of the gift of self.27 Jon Nilson highlights a more fundamental concern with Catholic sexual ethics in the relationship between the Church and homosexuality. Through an analysis of Bernard Lonergan’s approach to moral theology, Nilson concludes that the Catholic Church has consciously refused to acknowledge the broader social and cultural findings of the social sciences in relation to sexuality (including genetic, hormonal and psychological discoveries), and as a result has compromised one of its key pastoral obligations. He states: The problem is not with the Church’s motive, then, but with the ways in which it expresses its concern for human well-being when it comes to homosexuality [ . . . ]. As a result, the gap between the Magisterium on one side, and the people and many moral theologians on the other side, grows dangerously wider and wider as their mutual trust breaks down.28 In short, the questions underpinning these concerns reflect important ethical issues relating to the role of human experience in the establishment of norms, the nature of the role that lesbians and gays play (or do not play) in the exclusive nature of complementarity and the role of the self (in its modern and postmodern associations) as an organising focus of the person. I think we could say with some certainty that the Vatican would welcome any measure that would put religion at the forefront of an individual’s priorities. That said, it is worth bearing in mind that the Vatican draws the line at forms of New Ageism and other ‘do-it-yourself’ (Pope Benedict XVI’s phrase) styles of religious expression. Whether this can be interpreted as a desire for greater control of the religious landscape or a symptom of fear that Catholicism might be losing its moral authority is another debate. My concern here is that there is a tendency to denigrate


expressions of religious feeling that are not structured, organised or affiliated with traditional monotheisms. In other words, to admit to ‘being spiritual’ or to believe in a God without any foundation on which to advocate such a belief does not often command the same level of attention and respect as that given to one whose belief is articulated and enshrined in a theological tradition. And yet, post-secularism embraces this non-affiliated religiosity because of its dissociation from institutional structures and also because of the ways it opens up new ways of thinking and relating to others. Antoine, we recall, highlighted the post-secular trend towards the experience of transcendence in the form of social and personal immanence, with greater degrees of flexibility in respect of sexual and religious citizenship. Clearly, with religion playing a more prominent role in the debates of the day and in the daily lives of individual citizens,29 there is a case to be made that the return of religion is indicative of a dual trend towards the pursuit of greater individual and human fulfilment on the one hand, and the well-being of social democracy on the other. Equally, in the case of Catholic sexual ethics, and the perception of a return to theological rigour under Bendict XVI, it could be argued that a more orthodox approach to sexual mores may also be what citizens are calling for to redress some of the excesses of postmodern relativism. I think, however, that the situation is more complex. I estimate that the return of religion in France and beyond is part of a more profound postsecular phenomenon in which religion (as opposed to Catholic doctrine) has re-appropriated ‘truth’ from secularism and postmodern nihilism in the form of a rational possibility of an indeterminacy that is not chaos but an infinite order in which humanity in all its diversity participates. In this sense, the Vatican’s cherished concept of finitude in the context of marriage is radicalised by a post-secularism that reveals the possibilities of infinity in the finite, which in turn opens out doctrine to human and an authentically different religious hermeneutic. A related feature of this different hermeneutic for sexual ethics is that sexual diversity, normally the antithesis to orthodoxy, is invested with new meaning, celebrated within the wider realm of infinity and seen to be compatible with new radical and theological thinking.30 Similarly, sex (in both its agapeistic and erotic dimensions) is reconnected in a way that sexual difference ‘has some meaning in the Trinitarian differentiation with God [ . . . ]. We can see divinely grounded difference within the homosexual because the difference between the sexes does not exhaust theologically significant difference.’31 In short, in the wider socio-political and cultural contexts of rights to private interest and

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autonomous individualism, citizens want to be able to feel integrated not only socially but theologically in respect of their sexual identities, and free to live in a space where sexual diversity is not in opposition to religious thinking but finds meaning and fulfilment in it. Such shifts in perception in the contemporary French cultural and religious landscape have been reinforced by new ethical and theological insights, with innovative thinking in a range of matters including the value of ethical intuitionism/pragmatism over Kantian imperative, the questioning of the relevance of a priori norms and moral codification and the increasing accommodation of a reconstruction of ethical responsibility around notions of particularism, asceticism, friendship and ethical intention. I will come to these issues later in this chapter specifically as a way of exploring how they might facilitate a different understanding of gay marriage. But I want to turn my attention now to an assessment of the key socio-political debates on gay marriage in France.

The politics of gay marriage in France In February 2006, the French government published a report into the future of the family called ‘L’Enfant d’abord’ (‘Put the child first’). This report was much anticipated by lesbian and gay activists who, since the advent of the PaCS in 1999, had been calling for changes, amendments and improvements to the legislation, particularly in respect of rights to gay adoption and gay marriage. Co-written by Patrick Bloche and Valérie Pécresse, the report’s central message was to put the child first and prioritise their rights over the rights of adults, including in this case the rights of gay parents. In this sense, the report went against the recommendations of lesbian and gay groups, and wider public opinion it should be said, by refusing to endorse homoparental families. A second issue raised in the report addressed gay marriage per se. The report concluded that, based on evidence from other European countries, the legalisation of gay marriage was a contributory factor to the legalisation of gay adoption, and therefore it would be unwise in this context to recommend the legalisation of gay marriage. In short, the government wanted to avoid a situation in which, by legalising gay marriage, it would be pushed reluctantly (and inevitably) into legalising gay adoption. The government’s official position on gay adoption was that ‘the law should not be seen to support a position that is so far removed from biological reproduction and which does not respect the truth of the biological origin of the child’.32 While the report went on to introduce some important and positive changes to the PaCS legislation itself (particularly in


respect of financial assets, taxes and a general realignment between ‘PaCSed’ relationships and heterosexual marriage), most lesbian and gay groups were disappointed by its outcomes, not least because of the numerous campaigns mounted over several years by pro-gay marriage and gay adoption campaigners. However, what is most significant about this report is that it highlights one of the key issues at the heart of gay marriage, namely, and perhaps surprisingly, children. From the early debates pre 1999 leading up to the implementation of the PaCS, the Socialist government (under the premiership of Lionel Jospin) and leading politicians on the political right made a clear distinction between legal recognition of lesbian and gay couples and heterosexual marriage; the latter was perceived to be the sacred ground, not of the couple, but of the family to which access by lesbians and gays had to be denied. In other words, the issue of the legalisation of the gay couple had to be treated separately from that of parenthood (and adoption). Parenthood, according to Jospin, was an ‘institution’ too far for lesbian and gay campaigners. As time elapsed since the PaCS in 1999 and as lesbian and gay ‘lifestyle’ became more visible and perceptibly less of a threat to heterosexuality, a rapprochement between the State and gay couples on gay issues seemed possible (as evidenced in open negotiations between government and the group L’Inter-LGBT prior to the report’s publication). It would appear, however, that the publication of the 2006 Bloche/Pécresse report not only put an abrupt end to this rapprochement, but it also reopened political and ideological divisions between two distinct ‘cultures’, the ‘droit à’ culture (a term used to designate a rights to everything ‘democratic’ culture) and the ‘droit de’ culture (a term that is seen to safeguard the ‘republican’ rights of citizens). Generally, the debate on gay marriage in France has been conducted on three levels. On the first level are those who question the very need for gay marriage. When Mayor Mamère sanctioned the first civil gay marriage in France in 2004, he received unqualified support from the majority of gay associations on the point of principle that gay marriage is an act of justice and that his actions represented a much-needed ‘gesture of civil disobedience’.33 Some, however, were critical of the means by which he chose to advance the case for gay marriage, particularly the way he reduced the issue to a juridic debate on the interpretation of the civil code.34 There were other and more prominent dissenting voices, most notably from Denis Quinqueton (Président du Collectif PaCS) and JanPaul Pouliquen (Initiateur du PaCS). In a joint statement titled ‘Rien ne sert de marier, il faut pacser à point’, they denounced the way marriage

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seemed to be forced on the gay ‘community’ and criticised the gay marriage strategy as weak and not ‘relevant to modern times’.35 Both concurred that the best way forward for equality of rights for lesbians and gays was not to revert to an outdated strategy from the 1970s (i.e. a mythic right of equivalence defined in marriage) but to ‘forge ahead with improvements to the PaCS’.36 The ideas underpinning the Quinqueton and Pouliquen statement are part of a wider currency of opinion that sees gay marriage as a sop to heteronormativity, an indication of dependence on heterosexual marriage and part of a trend towards a culture of normalisation that many prominent academics in French gay and queer studies want to dispel in the interests of promoting a more self-sufficient and subversive gay identity.37 Another dissenting voice at the time took a similar line when Benoît Duteurtre advanced the thesis (perhaps overlooked today) that ‘one of the advantages of homosexuality is that it represents an alternative to the established norms of marriage and the family’.38 The point of his article is not to downplay any of the arguments in favour of gay marriage or gay families (‘All the arguments are good ones’, he confirms), but rather to lament the passing of an identity synonymous with sexual freedom: ‘Rather than let sexual freedom prosper and flourish, gays today are trying to make it fit into old boxes’. Duteurtre joins ranks with a group of critics who questions the need for gay marriage in the first place. He suggests that gay marriage does not really make a lot of sense. He describes it as a ‘non sens’ and an illustration of a minority movement that needs to invent a cause to justify its existence. Critically, at the heart of Duteurtre’s argument is the deeply republican notion that he does not believe that lesbians and gays have a right to be homosexual, no less than straight people have a right to be heterosexual. This argument is not meant to undermine homosexuals as persons within the republican space (he believes they have the same rights as everybody else has). What he is saying, however, is that gay militancy (in his view the unelected wing of gay opinion) has hijacked the voice of lesbians and gays in France. He argues that militancy does not serve the best interests of the wider gay community, and that the confrontational stance adopted by the militant side of gay activism flies in the face of a conciliatory, republican society. It also verges, he suggests, on a minifascism where gay activists are seen to be patrolling language, behaviour and free speech. Duteurtre’s argument against gay marriage is articulated within a consensual universal republicanism where everyone is equal regardless of difference. But, two points emerge from his comments. Firstly, we should not lose sight of the fact that Duteurtre, like


Quinqueton and Pouliquen, sides with the PaCS as a sensible way forward for lesbians and gays (including rights to gay adoption), and while he questions ultimately how marriage can be of benefit to lesbians and gays, he does make a valid case for an opt-out clause to gay marriage. Secondly, despite his support for the PaCS, Duteurtre’s republican stance clearly positions him within a trend that militates against any political accommodation of a gay marriage strategy. On the second level, and linked to the first, is the political gay lobby for whom the normalisation of gayness and gay lifestyle via gay marriage is a valid political goal. As we saw with Borrillo, the political debate in favour of gay marriage is based on equality of rights and the right to a family, the end to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, the right to full representation of lesbians and gays as individuals and communities within participatory universalism, the historical democratisation of the institution of marriage and the growing global consensus on the accession of lesbians and gays to marriage.39 The force of the political argument is not only grounded in the logic of equality and democratic citizenship, but this logic has acquired a momentum that is having a dual effect. Firstly, there is the growing impression that gay marriage is so widely approved within secular society that it is only a matter of time before it becomes legal. Secondly, there is also the perception that the political and legal case for gay marriage has overshadowed in priority and in relevance the religious objections to it, relegating the role of the Churches and particularly Catholicism to that of an audible but isolated conscientious objector. These perceptions are reinforced by the ways in which religion has been systematically cleansed from the pro-gay marriage debate. Borrillo, in particular, has secularised and legalised marriage as an act and subsequently stripped it as an ‘institution’ of its familial, symbolic and reproductive links with filiation.40 In contrast to Duteurtre’s criticism of the pro-gay marriage campaign as the whim of a minority and a self-serving militancy setting its own agenda, there is a strong body of opinion that sees in the debate on gay marriage a progressive way forward for all couples (gay and straight), an absolute condition of equality, the survival of democracy and the creation of new relational rights that reflect evolutionary changes in French society and culture. In the summer of 2004, the newspaper Libération launched a national debate in its Rebonds section into ‘Questions de famille’. From parenting and gay marriage to divorce and recomposed families, it invited contributions from specialists in social sciences, sociology, gender studies, psychology, history and the legal profession. In the cluster of contributions on issues relating to gay marriage, Marcela

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Iacub advanced one of the more adventurous insights into why gay marriage matters. While agreeing on the one hand with the equality and anti-discrimination arguments (which I will discuss shortly), she also argues that gay marriage can be justified in terms of the benefits it can bring to the symbolic representation of the couple in general. In other words, she claims that the model of gay marriage can be used to liberate heterosexual couples from stereotypical, psychological and socially constructed roles imposed on them (whether it be the domesticated woman/wife who may be subject to violence or abuse, or the violent, abusive male/husband who is conditioned to use women for sexual gratification). ‘Gay marriage’, she states, ‘would introduce into the same symbolic space an alternative which would perhaps remove conjugality from the alien and ritualised sacrifice that it is today’.41 Iacub’s argument fits neatly into a wider consensus that gay marriage can serve as a template for heterosexuals and for new ways of configuring the couple.42 She suggests, for example, that ‘gay couples will be able to impose progressively on current social and juridic practices new forms of behaviour which are more egalitarian’. In short, ‘the gay model can be used to develop a heterosexual pride’. This consensus on new ways of imagining the couple is shared by Eric Fassin and Michel Foucault (whose contribution I will assess in the final section of this chapter). Fassin, for instance, heralds gay marriage as not incompatible with the PaCS. In fact, he states that gay marriage can be conceived as an ‘informal form’ (a type of PaCS for both heterosexuals and homosexuals) that ‘could become the inventive link to new ways of living that are, while not spectacular, at least “accommodating”’.43 Iacub’s use of gay marriage to challenge the symbolic hegemony of stereotypical representations of male and female behaviour underlines the importance of marriage as a symbolic referent, even for lesbian and gay people. While the nature of this symbolism and its mythic associations have been disputed and debated, not least by myself in my previous book,44 the particular symbolic usage I want to highlight here is the way the symbolic substance of marriage can unite people in a host of human ways, and thus advance the argument why marriage matters for many lesbians and gays. In his illuminating chapter titled ‘Intimacy and Equality: The Question of Lesbian and Gay Marriage’, Morris B. Kaplan highlights the dangers of limiting marriage to heterosexuals because it creates a caste system based on gender. The need to challenge this hierarchy, he claims, is founded on equality of citizenship and equal protection before the law. While Kaplan is speaking from an American context, he makes some universal points that underscore the


human dimensions of marriage which, he argues, are essential to all citizens, regardless of sexual orientation and socio-political context: ‘Marriage affirms a deeply felt human desire to establish intimacy as part of the ongoing conduct of life, culminating in the desire to bear and raise children’.45 Marriage for Kaplan provides a common structure for affection and intimacy. His views, we should bear in mind, are not shared by a lot of lesbians and gay critics, particularly those, whom we have seen, question the institutionalisation of the couple and see it as a replication of the heterosexual model and a denial of new forms of relating.46 I will address these new relational possibilities later but suffice to say for the moment that Kaplan’s position on marriage is that it has benefits for all types of couple and this view is shared by many lesbians and gays. But he is also quick to qualify his position by claiming that moves towards gender equality through the advocacy of gay marriage should not eclipse the specificity of lesbian and gay expression. Where he appears to draw the line, however, is in his entrenched view that alternatives to marriage are not acceptable: ‘The assertion of a right to marry derives ethical and political force through its appeal to ideals of equal citizenship.’47 In essence, gay marriage matters for Kaplan because it is a fundamental human right. In a related context, another key and potent argument in favour of gay marriage is founded on equality. Borrillo has championed this cause over many years. The main tenets of his numerous articles on the subject outline the injustices done to homosexuals in the equality stakes with heterosexuals. For him, the simple reality is that denial of gay marriage is a denial of equality which has its origin in the preservation of a hierarchy of heterosexuality and in marriage between a man and a woman.48 Fassin has also argued the case for gay marriage on the grounds of equality, but specifically from the perspective of choice. He argues that heterosexuals have three choices when it comes to relationships: marriage, union libre and the PaCS. Lesbians and gays have two. He contests the charge that gay marriage would signal the end of the PaCS by saying that ‘gay marriage would in effect give sense to the PaCS; not as a lesser evil but as a solution, both provisional and durable, to all those who want to organise their lives as couples without going through marriage’.49 The choice element is critical in Fassin’s argument, and it underpins much of his wider approach to the debate on gay marriage. As his latest book reveals, if marriage as an institution is to survive at all, it must be seen to be open to all citizens regardless of sexual orientation.50

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The third level on which the gay marriage debate has been discussed in France is the theoretical level, and notably the implications of gay marriage for wider debates on the difference between the sexes and symbolic order. Again, Borrillo and Fassin have addressed this debate in different ways. However, before I outline their thinking in this regard, I would like to draw attention to the importance of this theoretical level because it brings us back to the central issue that has underpinned gay marriage from the time when the PaCS was being first debated in the National Assembly. Familiarly known as the ‘Par contre’ argument, the legalisation of gay couples, as we have seen, had widespread support across the political spectrum and public opinion, until, that is, marriage and the family were mentioned in the same context. In short, the procreative and filial links that distinguish marriage institutionally from all other unions have continued to play an essential role in defining the uniqueness of marriage, and in counteracting the claims to equal representation from lesbian and gay groups. And yet, this essential role of marriage, while supported by the political right and left, and shored up by Catholic sexual ethics, is under continual threat not only from lesbian and gay activists but from deeper and wider socio-cultural changes. The 2006 Bloche/Pécresse report revealed that there was a 30% drop in marriages between 1970 and 2005. In addition, in the 1970s, 12 of every 100 marriages ended in divorce, compared with 42 in 2005. The report also points to a shift in the way marriage is perceived today. From being once an obligation and a duty, marriage is now considered more of a choice, and an issue of personal conscience. These statistics and cultural perceptions are also shared by some sociologists. In his insightful article for the Libération special on the future of the family and marriage, the sociologist Serge Chaumier criticises marriage from three theoretical perspectives. Firstly, he dismisses the equation that marriage is inextricably linked to the family; this is ‘myth and not reality’.51 Secondly, he defends this assertion on the grounds that the individual today, who is, as the statistics above indicate, a (dys)function of different parental, amorous and sexual relations, ‘inhabits several identities’. In the light of this, Chaumier argues that marriage, as the only affective solution for the entirety of an existence, is wholly unrealistic. Linked to this observation is his claim that notions of sharing and mutual dependence, often perceived as the lynchpins of a stable marriage, have been replaced by increasing individualisation and the emancipation of women. He states that ‘the couple today is discovering that three stories (that of each individual and their common story) are necessary for self and mutual fulfilment and real equality [ . . . ]. Marriage is no


longer synonymous with dominance or with the effacement of one for the benefit of the other’. The third pillar in Chaumier’s argument is his call for the abolition of civil marriage. He believes that the State plays too big a role in the regulation of individual lives. While acknowledging the centrality of the State in respect of taxes and public affairs, he contests the inherited historical and Christian legacy of marriage which, in his view, runs contrary to the ‘logic’ of the French Revolution; marriage, for Chaumier, is overburdened by the ‘communitarian’ values of Christianity, which in turn make the case for alternatives to marriage more difficult to argue. Alongside these statistical, cultural and sociopolitical commentaries on marriage, Chaumier’s sociological insights add support to the case for revisionism in respect of the essentialism of heterosexual marriage. It is a case championed publicly by the standard-bearers of gay marriage, namely Borrillo and Fassin.52 In his article ‘Pour un débat sur le mariage hétérosexuel’,53 Borrillo outlines part of his strategic approach to the debate on gay marriage, namely the attempt to expose some of the inconsistencies in heterosexual religious marriage on issues relating to procreation, sterility, impotence and the menopause, which he then uses to undermine the ‘authority’ of heterosexual marriage and its function as a benchmark for gay marriage. His argument raises a host of crucial and debatable issues outside the remit of this chapter on the political implications for French society of an equivalence between homosexuality and heterosexuality, and the role of the (gay) family.54 Fassin presents his case for the promotion of gay marriage also in the context of this equivalence. His argument (essentially a political one, although its substance involves wider definitions of sex and sexuality) is that the only way to challenge the difference between the sexes is to shift the goalposts from essential difference to gendered difference, and advance the debate on gay marriage as a struggle for equality between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Strategically, this has proved very effective in highlighting gay marriage as a debate around equality, gender and justice, and as an issue that, for Fassin, raises critically the fears and insecurities that accompany ‘the anthropological risk that comes with blurring the boundaries between the sexes’.55 In effect, Fassin’s approach reveals the intrinsic value of addressing gay marriage from a political perspective; politics is seen to embrace equality, democracy and justice as arbiters of change, and Fassin underlines the consensuality within politics as a challenge to sexual, symbolic and psychoanalytic norms. In short, Fassin’s use of the politics of gay marriage acquires a legitimacy that responds with effectiveness to the Catholic

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sexual ethics of complementarity, justice ordained in Divine law and the pre-established norms of finitude and social benefit.

Ethics and theology in post-secular France The politics of gay marriage shakes the hegemony of complementarity, challenges concepts of justice, gives greater credence and legitimacy to autonomous action and also facilitates greater flexibility between universal norms and individual behaviour. However, we have seen that Catholic sexual ethics refute the transience of politics and its claims to moral legitimacy and demote the subjectivity of personal decision making. But, on closer inspection, we can see that within strands of broader Christian sexual ethics and contemporary theological debates on norms and pragmatics there are areas of innovative thinking that can shed a different light on the gay marriage debate. In this final section, I want to sketch some of this thinking and its consequences for gay marriage in France. In the first instance, I will address the accommodation of gay marriage within a radical lesbian and gay Christian hermeneutic. Then, I want to outline the ‘Christian’ dimensions of Irigaray’s and Foucault’s sexual ethics, and how these may serve to widen the parameters within which we perceive conventional sexual relations. Finally, I conclude with a wide-ranging discussion on ethics in the context of norms, sexual difference and the critical relationship between transcendence and immanence. In the US, Eugene Rogers Jr, one of the leading exponents of Christian gay marriage, has taken the debate to unprecedented limits.56 The central thematic of Rogers’s thesis is the move away from an understanding of natural law as founded in Divine Revelation towards natural law as human knowledge of God’s will. This transference shifts the parameters of the debate on the relationship between person and God away from human subservience to God’s will to that of the human exploration of what constitutes God’s will. Clearly, such a shift bestows considerable autonomy on human knowledge and intuition. For Rogers, it also opens up a hermeneutic that incorporates lesbians and gays into what he terms God’s ‘triune life’.57 David Matzko McCarthy argues that if lesbians and gays are persons loved by God, then ‘God is committed, in unmerited grace, to take their bodies – somehow – as means rather than impediments to that communion’.58 The implications of this thesis, of which there are many, are that bodies are described as communicative signs open to meaning, redefinition and salvation. Similarly, marriage, in the Christian tradition, is viewed as a


form of redemption, and ‘gay and lesbian couples are called to give over their bodies, not only to each other, but also to the Church as communicative signs. This donation of the body is the hermeneutical [meaning-bearing or significant] version of gaining one’s life by losing it, the core of Christianity’s understanding of giving oneself over to God’s creative activity’.59 I have used the examples of Rogers and McCarthy for several reasons. They give a meaning to gay marriage within the Christian terms of a triune understanding of God, sacrifice and redemption. But they also draw on a central thread of not only their own theological constructions of marriage but also that of Catholic sexual ethics, namely celibacy (and chastity). In ‘Familiaris Consortio’, the Vatican refers to celibacy as a charism. Chastity, it states, is the virtue that expresses capability of respecting the nuptial meaning of the body. Significantly, the Vatican also describes celibacy as the supreme form of self-giving, the very meaning of sexuality and higher in standing to marriage: ‘It is for this reason that the Church, throughout her history, has always defended the superiority of this charism to that of marriage, by reason of the wholly singular link which it has with the Kingdom of God.’60 For the Vatican, the celibate is clearly defined in terms of a body waiting the ‘the eschatological marriage of Christ with the Church, giving himself or herself completely to the Church in the hope that Christ may give Himself to the Church in the full truth of eternal life. The celibate person thus anticipates in his or her flesh the new world of the future resurrection.’61 The celibate acts as a guardian of the consciousness of the mystery of marriage and defends it from any reduction or impoverishment. Celibacy, from this perspective, is a state of suspended asexuality, in which the body is desexualised of any physical or human desire. However, Rogers extends this function of celibacy/asceticism to an interpretation of marriage. For him, the aim of the ascetic life in ‘marriage’ is to imitate the suffering of God’s human love and God’s will to liberate human beings for love. As such, ascetic practice, while a discipline of self-denial, does not eclipse the sexuality of the individual. On the contrary, for Rogers, God transforms and transfigures the sex and sexuality of the ascetic. In the same way, marriage as an ascetic practice transforms the sexuality (heterosexual or homosexual) of the couple so as to allow the couple to model the love between Christ and Church. In this way, God is seen to use these bodies to redeem them (and their sexuality) and sanctify them. In short, for Rogers, neither marriage nor celibacy can proceed without taking up sexual desire into ‘honest ascetic practice’. In human

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terms, therefore, sexuality cannot be passed by; it must be ‘assumed’ and ‘transfigured’.62 The value of Rogers’s contribution to the sexual ethics and theological significance of gay marriage is considerable on multiple levels. Firstly, his rewriting of natural law inspires a discourse of communication between respective human and godly wills. Natural law is not therefore exclusively based on scripture, or conditional on divine revelation. Secondly, in his promotion of a theological vision of gay marriage, Rogers identifies the centrality of desire and sexuality within the divine will of God to redeem and bring all persons into His triune life. This recognition of desire (eros) and its direct connection with love (agape) reinforces not only the key role for desire in his theology of marriage but also how desire and sexuality have theological meaning outside the Catholic norm of complementarity. Thirdly, his definition of marriage as an ascetic practice in the Christian tradition is critical because it embraces and transfigures without discrimination the sexual dimension of the human being in the pursuit of a higher marriage with Christ who offers full redemption and grace. In this context, Rogers’s theology of gay marriage overrides the Vatican condition that heterosexual marriage represents the only framework in which the finality of the specific function of sexuality (i.e. procreation) can take place. Rogers defines marriage beyond the finality of the procreative act in the infinite redemption and sanctification of Christ. In short, Rogers, in attempting to build bridges between theology and the ethically charged postmodern discourse of sexual orientation, gender and identity, offers a theological model for gay marriage which thrives on the diversity of human nature and sexuality for its salvific and redemptive function. Rogers’s argument is couched in a Christian tradition and carries significant weight for practising lesbian and gay Christians who seek integration within the institution of the Church. However, it is of interest also to examine how other thinkers use Christian narratives and terminology, not to promote Christian messages, but to explore human sexual experience, the construction of the self and wider sexual relations. In a French context, Irigaray has expounded the notion of the divine as not something fixed and absolute but as a fluid process. In other words, basing her interpretation of the divine on the embodiment of Jesus, she establishes a vision of the divine in which all humans actively participate. The value of what she calls ‘becoming divine’ is that perfection of the human being is possible, warts and all, within this becoming process: ‘God forces us to do nothing except become. The only task, the only obligation laid upon us 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’.63 Grace M. Jantzen interprets this definition of the divine as ‘multiform’: It does not construct the world from outside, as an absence to be overcome by a reason which masters the one truth. Rather, this divine is within us and between us. We are not awaiting the god passively, but bringing the god of life through us, embodied in all our differences in the projection and reclamation of ultimate value, becoming divine.64 While not wishing to draw strong Christian comparisons between Rogers and Irigaray, it is obvious that both share a conceptual framework in which the divine is relativised and humanised, and where the human exploration of God’s will, on the one hand, and the divine, on the other hand, is privileged at the expense of any pre-ordained absolute. As I will discuss in more detail later, both these visions pave the way for ‘theologies of difference’ in which transcendence is not perceived as immutable Other but as an immanence that can be fashioned according to human experience. The contribution of Foucault to the debate on gay marriage is significantly more problematic than that of Rogers and Irigaray, not least because he disapproves of the idea of gay marriage and because his appropriation of religious concepts is designed to create an entirely non-religious sexual ethics. Foucault uses the institution of marriage to critique all institutions that have ‘impoverished the relational world’;65 thus to view progress for lesbians and gays in the replication of the heterosexual institution of marriage is a falsehood for Foucault and a capitulation not merely to heterosexual normativity but to Western societies’ attempts to validate relations within what he sees as discredited law-making bodies. This Foucauldian resistance to institutionalisation forms part of a wider need to go beyond the political agenda of lesbian and gay rights and identity formation and ‘create a new cultural life underneath the ground of our sexual choices’.66 In the context of gay marriage, therefore, same-sex relations for Foucault are not a matter of integrating into other ways of life in order to become accepted or normalised. They are about establishing, firstly, gayness as a way of life with its own culture and ethics, and then creating new forms, both cultural and relational (Foucault uses the word ‘institutions’ for gays) that facilitate the process of ‘becoming gay’. He says: I mean a culture in the large sense, a culture that invents ways of relating, types of existence, types of values, types of exchanges between individuals which are really new and are neither the same

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as, nor superimposed on, existing cultural forms [ . . . ]. Let’s escape as much as possible from the type of relations that society proposes for us and try to create in the empty space where we are new relational possibilities. By proposing a new relational right, we will see that non homosexual people can enrich their lives by changing their own schema of relations.67 Two points emerge from this quotation. The first is Foucault’s conviction in the potential benefits that homosexual relations can have for heterosexual relations, a sentiment, we have already seen, he shares with other commentators. Secondly, there is a question about what is meant by relational right. If this is a legally bound right, part of an embryonic and wider socio-political consciousness (to which, it must be stressed, Foucault was not adverse), then there is a case that some binding same-sex union may underpin this right. That is not to say however that Foucault is advocating gay marriage. It is merely to suggest that a legal union between same-sex couples may have strengthened the more cultural and ethical arguments Foucault makes for a gay way of life. I say this because Foucault was formulating his thinking in the early 1980s long before the PaCS, gay adoption and pro-gay marriage campaigns had been formulated, and at a time when homosexuality was still criminalised. It is plausible, therefore, to envisage that at that time Foucault may have been thinking along these lines. He does hint at such thinking in one interview: M.F. We should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric. We should secure recognition for relations of provisional coexistence, adoption . . . G.B. Of children. M.F. Or – whyx not? – of one adult by another. Why shouldn’t I adopt a friend who’s ten years younger than I am? And even if he’s ten years older? Rather than arguing that rights are fundamental and natural to the individual, we should try to imagine and create a new relational right that permits all possible types of relations to exist and not to be prevented, blocked, or annulled by impoverished relational institutions.68 However, running contrary to the perception of a legal right (marital or institutional) is Foucault’s focus on sexual behaviour as not defined by laws or even natural instincts, but by a consciousness of what one is doing, the evaluation made of the experience and the value attached to it. In other words, for Foucault, gay sexuality is unique to the identity of the individual and


not to a mythical common identity shared with other lesbians and gays. Common identarian perceptions of sexuality, for Foucault, have a way of locking one into a form of behaviour that is finite, fatal and restrictive, and which detract from the creative potential to design (aesthetically) an individual sexuality. If we pursue this thinking further, we can see how deliberately indefinable Foucault’s concept of sexuality is, and also how alien it is from the more mainstream definitions of sexuality we have discussed thus far. It also places Foucault at the far end of the ‘theological’ spectrum; whereas Rogers’s thesis, for example, is designed to incorporate homo(sexuality) in a theological justification of gay marriage, Foucault’s task is to be liberated from what he sees as the tyranny of sexuality, including Christianity. And yet, while the differences can be extreme, there are some useful comparisons to be drawn between Foucault’s deployment of Christian terminology and Rogers’s Christian interpretation of gay marriage. Borrowing from the Christian tradition of monasticism, Foucault builds a technology of the self around the notion of asceticism. He distances himself from its renunciative and penitential connotations to construct a duty of mastery over the self, what he describes as ‘an exercise of the self on the self’.69 This view of asceticism therefore is designed to ‘develop and transform oneself, and to attain a certain mode of being’ which he equates with the acquisition and assimilation of truth. Asceticism for Foucault is a form of pre-requisite training (involving control of thought, action and writing) in the formation of the self and sexual behaviour. In short, the value of Christian asceticism for Foucault is not measured in deference to a purifying alterity,70 but in the knowledge acquired through the techniques of self-analysis that allow one to create ‘an ethos of creative renunciation’71 in the art of living. Asceticism, he claims, provides a framework in which to self-manage sexuality and rechannel sexual energies towards new types of affective relations and friendships.72 In this sense, sexual ethics for Foucault, predicated on what he calls the ascetic imperative, target primarily the self and not other people or a superior other. For Rogers, on the other hand, asceticism in marriage paves the way for the transfiguration of human sexuality. Critically, he sees in the ascetic of marriage a process of theological inclusion for lesbians and gays and the redemption of their sexuality through subjugation to a Higher alterity. One of the differences therefore between Foucault and Rogers in their uses of the ascetic is the power each (dis)invests respectively in alterity. For Rogers, alterity is theologically and sexually transformative; for Foucault, alterity is a form of blackmail that lures one into a comfort zone of reliance on otherness, whereas the

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real task of sexuality is to ‘produce oneself’ outside conventional categorisations of sex and alterity. In ethical terms, Rogers’s asceticism of gay marriage is an ethics of sexual sacrifice. For Foucault, the ascetic imperative is an ethics of self-discovery. I have used this discussion between Rogers and Foucault because at its heart is the key role and function of alterity in human experience and this has important implications for current ethical and theological debates. One of the central tenets of Foucault’s sexual ethics in this regard is the way in which the focus on asceticism has removed any external agents in self-formation. Foucault states: ‘The main question of sexual ethics has moved from relations to people, and from the penetration model, to the relations to oneself and to the erection problem’.73 In other words, Foucault erases the existence of alterity (both Christian and relational) in the determination of sexual ethics and confines the parameters of sexual ethics to the internal (the battle between voluntary and involuntary) movements of the body. As we have seen, on the one hand, Foucault’s denial of alterity flies in the face of Christian and Catholic sexual ethics where transcendence and procreation are central ethical concerns. But, on the other hand, this denial fits neatly into postmodern ethical debates on sexuality that focus on individualisation, and also into alternative theological debates that problematise the relationship between individual and collective responsibility. In what has been described as our post-secular context, where the profile of religion has been enhanced, not diminished, ethics and theology have acquired a new prominence and urgency against a backdrop where the parameters within which religious discourse is expressed have changed. In Gauchet’s portrait of contemporary France, individual autonomies have eclipsed the perspective of a universal morality. He states that the loss of an overview on morality has itself nourished a distrust in the function of morality; hence the emergence of what he calls diverse forms of moral behaviour and their independence. In short, while the balance in the perspective on moral behaviour has shifted towards independence and individualism, Gauchet characterises the situation as the co-existence of two horizons, one individual and one collective. However, in spite of this perception of co-existence, it is clear from the language he uses that individual existence (now ‘integrally autonomised’74) is dictating the moral landscape: ‘A new space opens up – where, for the first time, individual existence is integrally autonomised as a space with its own end in itself and without any other horizon than its own – alongside the space of co-existence.’75 Gauchet goes on to fill out the profile of this postmodern autonomous individual by saying that he represents the end of the


previous and heroic modern individual who tried to personalise social rules and acquire a measure of responsibility to the social space. On the contrary, postmodern man does not recognise the general/collective, but accepts its existence alongside him. Clearly, Gauchet laments this changing of the guard because it augurs in an era of excessive individualism which has been anathema to his vision of society replacing religion, and democracy being the new alterity in which citizens would find all the answers to their needs in the social production of equality of conditions for all. But what is especially significant about Gauchet’s depiction of contemporary France is the way in which the metaphysics of autonomy (Gauchet’s terminology) have effectively banished the notion of alterity as an unrealisable and unattainable other and relocated it in the integral autonomy of the individual, in essentially a form of Foucauldian self-determination. Gay marriage, we can safely assume, is non-negotiable in the context of current Catholic and Christian ethics and theology. But more radical thinking has served to widen the parameters of the ethical and theological debate and open up new ground in which a serious case for gay marriage is possible. In particular, the implications of Gauchet’s analysis reflect a broader consensus within current ethical and alternative theological thinking in respect of the suspension of alterity as a conditional other. Significantly, however, this suspension of alterity invokes an adherence to religion, not as a transcendent other to which meaning is exclusively attached, but as a transcendence in practice; in other words, an end to the hegemony of alterity as expressed in God’s will, doctrinal orthodoxy, norm and universal code, and the beginning of an expression of alterity shaped by human needs and values. Irigaray echoes a similar sentiment in her characterisation of the ‘sensible transcendental’: This creation would be our opportunity, from the humblest detail of everyday life to the ‘grandest’, by means of the opening of a sensible transcendental that comes into being through us, of which we would be the mediators and the bridges. Not only in mourning for the Dead god of Nietzsche, not waiting passively for the god to come, but by conjuring him up among us, within us, as resurrection and transfiguration of blood, of flesh, through a language and an ethics that is ours.76 Denis Müller has also argued for this type of religious practice in his ethics of responsibility where individuals respond integrally to their acts. What this means for Müller is that individuals bring the power, integrity and commitment, traditionally invested in transcendence, to bear on the immanence of daily experience, a notion he calls ‘an authentic experience

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of transcendence-in-and-for immanence’.77 Müller’s concept is useful in that it provides a framework in which to take control of ethical decision making in respect of individual lives and behaviour (responding integrally to acts) and reconfigure it within a discourse that does not rely on God as an alibi in the event of failure or excuses. In short, from Müller’s perspective, transcendence only works as a discourse if individuals deepen and radicalise their responsibility to their own actions; in this sense, transcendence does not disappear, it is democratised. Müller’s democratisation of transcendence informs a wider argument about the relationship between norms and ethics. Müller, in the context of bioethics, challenges the dominance of the ‘bioethical paradigm’ and its exclusive scientific basis, by introducing a theological dimension into the debate. This is not done in order to open up an argument between laïcité and Christian confessionalism in France, but rather to highlight what he terms a more essential and necessary ‘renovated theological ethics’.78 This renovated ethics forms part of his integral approach to transcendence. Müller is careful not to interpret his ‘theological ethics’ as encouraging the promotion of truth in the form of a universal common morality. It is aimed rather at enlightening what he calls ‘the sense of moral value and the direction of ethical intention’.79 Theological ethics for Müller are not dictates. They relate to a procedural repositioning of religious values and a philosophical reinstatement of the necessity of a theological dimension to ethics. Crucially, however, this theological ethics is also couched within two important wider phenomena. The first is the growing consensus around the implications of a new interface between post-secularism and postmodernity. The second is the emerging hypothesis (which Müller shares) that ethical intention precedes the institutional process of moral codification and normativity: ‘ethical intention [ . . . ] specifically in the way it invokes a self-constitution of the subject and is not solely determined by its intentional target, precedes the process of moral codification (normativity, relation to the law)’.80 There are several strands to this hypothesis on ethical intention that need clarification before we reach any conclusions on its relevance to the religious debate on gay marriage. In speaking of Foucault, Müller concurs generally with the Foucauldian position of morals oriented on ethics as opposed to morals oriented on code. But it is the relationship between ethics and norms that raises concerns for Müller. As we recall, Foucault’s sexual ethics is an ethics of creative self-denial and a rejection of alterity, including to a degree the human/relational other (as his ascetic imperative suggests). In short, for Foucault, sexual ethics exist independent of norms and judicial systems. This independence is key to Foucault’s argument of a


sexual ethics that can be created outside of parameters. Müller disputes this dissociation, claiming that the relationship between ethics and norms (code) cannot be negated or deferred. The critical distinction between Müller and Foucault, and important for us, is that Müller founds his ethics on an equal acknowledgement of the human other, a recognition of the ‘alterity that is immanent to oneself, like a dimension of one’s “ipséité”’,81 and which necessitates mutual reciprocity. In the case of Foucault, Müller claims that ‘respect for the other seems subordinate to a logic of the “Same”’,82 which may appear individualistic but which, for Müller, represents a break with an a priori binary interdependence between ethic and norm. For Müller, this difference is vital. In his case, it confirms his central thesis that ethical intention and moral norm ‘do not exclude one another, but reciprocate and complete each other’.83 On the other hand, Foucault’s position is predicated on the dualism of self-awareness (‘rapport à soi’ (‘relation to oneself’) and ‘souci de soi’ (‘taking care of the self’)) as an ethical condition of any opening or engagement with a respect for the other. What is important to understand in Foucault’s sexual ethics is not so much its independence of norms but its coherence within a broader genealogy of sexual experience, ascetic training and focus on self-discipline. For Foucault, ethics has little to do with others or norms; rather sexual ethics is that which ‘determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself as a moral subject of his own actions’.84 Looking at the bigger picture, the real consequences of Foucault’s sexual ethics for gay marriage are emphatically negative. Marriage, gay or straight, and with its own institutional norms imposed from without, cannot work in the Foucauldian imagination. Foucault may set up the possibility of friendship as a way of avoiding the replication of the heterosexual model of marriage and as a way of addressing the relational and affective aspects of homosexuality. But even within his examination of friendship, there is a perception that homosexual relations are, by definition, outside any institutional or coupling reference. They are more a matter of ‘existence’ which require defining and developing according to their own history and intelligibility: to want guys was to want relations with guys [...]. Not necessarily in the form of a couple but as matter of existence: how is it possible for men to be together? To live together, to share their time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief, their knowledge, their confidences? What is it to be ‘naked’ among men, outside of institutional relations, family, profession, and obligatory camaraderie? It’s a desire, an uneasiness, a desire-in-uneasiness that exists among a lot of people.85

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It could be argued that gay marriage satiates in part some of this desire, but it is my contention that Foucault has left ‘the mode of life’ deliberately open and sufficiently disinstitutional. His use of language (including ‘manner of being that is still improbable’, ‘matter of existence’, ‘way of life’ and ‘relational virtualities’) not only forgoes any attempts at definition, but guarantees the creative and inventive potential at the core of his sexual ethics. Returning briefly to the debate on ethics and norms, both Müller and Foucault recognise the existence of the other as norm but to different degrees and with divergent performative functions. Both, however, place value on the independent role of ethical intention, its autonomous function in the ethical process and its critical power as counter agent to normativity. Importantly, intention (‘ethical aim’86) has become a key element of a wider and more radical theological binary in which universal code is paired against autonomous action. Eric Fuchs discusses this relationship in a series of articles.87 His premise is that ethics is a universal obligation for everyone, and thus he argues for a universal ethics and not a return to a Foucauldian subjectivity of personal convictions. In this sense, he puts forward a strong case for the defence of an ‘ethical universalism’ against pluralism, modernity and postmodernity. However, part of Fuchs’s defence is a pragmatic approach to the renunciation of any systematic ‘Christian morality’ imposed from without, and the promotion of an ethics beyond the pale of norms and codes. Fuchs acknowledges, however, that the universal approach to ethics has led to a crisis in contemporary ethical debate, and particularly to the abstraction of the individual whom he describes as cut off from history, culture and context. Fuchs’s compromise, therefore, is to strike a balance between a respect for difference and specificity (and its theological inclusion) and the ‘corrective’ influence of a ‘defence of a moral universal’.88 This may not seem the most honourable of balances, but it does represent a wider revisionist trend towards a rapprochement between ethics as pragmatics/intuition and objective rationality. For other thinkers, this balance is often articulated at the point of a search for the ‘just solution’89 or the advancement of a universal ethics that inscribes itself within the broad brush of pluralism.90 Post-secularism poses a unique dilemma for the Catholic Church, Christianity and religion in general in contemporary France. In advocating the return of religion, albeit outside the confines of orthodoxy and institutionalism, the post-secular thesis cannot expect to overturn centuries of doctrine and Catholic sexual ethics, despite the pull of evolution and progress. Its methodology is more progressive and democratic, bringing into a closer proximity the vertical aspirations towards transcendence and


the horizontal forces of citizenship, gender and social reality. To this degree, politically and democratically, the case for gay marriage is well advanced in France, if not an immanent fait accompli. Ironically, however, in religious circles where one might have expected the impact of post-secularism to offer chinks of insight into a meaningful accommodation between established norm and sexual diversity, gay marriage is still denounced as a pathological disorder and a grave error. And yet, we have discovered in the course of this chapter that the broad outlines of a template for religious gay marriage are visible, not only in the socio-political debates in contemporary France but also in branches of ethical debate and theological thinking. Post-secularism has brought religion in from the cold of modernity, conferring on it a new democratic halo. But this is not to imply that Catholicism will follow suit and democratise its institutions. The unique thrust of the post-secular thesis has been its capacity to advance unilaterally beyond this ‘waiting game’ and ignite its own fire in the hearts and minds of individual citizens regardless of denomination, ethnicity, sexual orientation or difference. In practically theological terms, the transfer of attention away from transcendence as other to its immanent connectedness with daily life and experience informs us that individuals are calling for a religious corroboration to their diverse social and sexual experiences, whether in the form of gay marriage or women priests or in the use of condoms for the prevention of AIDS in Africa. Underpinning many of these experiences is the critical but controversial reinstatement of individual will at the heart of post-secularism and new ethical debate, and its demand for recognition as an agent of responsibility, integrity and authenticity, and not whim and uncontrolled autonomy. This demand represents one of the fundamental shifts in perception in the new sexual, ethical and theological landscape of today both in France and beyond. Individual will and its authenticity, currently the scourge of Catholic doctrine, has now become the new and entrusted arbiter of ethical and theological negotiation. As many of the commentators cited here have suggested, the relationship between ethics and norms is moving towards an accommodation between universal code and autonomous action, and a need to negotiate diverse sexual desire in new ethical and theological forms and paradigms. Foucault’s emphasis, albeit in a non-Christian context, on the ethics of self-control as a way of knowing oneself and the limitations of sexuality is a salutary reminder of the value not only of celibacy (as a sexual alternative to marriage as well as a possible sexual condition of marriage), but also of the transformative value and transfigurative power of individual will.

3 Post-secularism, Belief and Being as Event

It was very early on the first day of the week and still dark, when Mary of Magdala came to the tomb. She saw that the stone had been moved away from the tomb and came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved. ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb’ she said ‘and we don’t know where they have put him’. So Peter set out with the other disciple to go to the tomb. They ran together, but the other disciple, running faster than Peter, reached the tomb first; he bent down and saw the linen cloths lying on the ground, but he did not go in. Simon Peter who was following now came up, went right into the tomb, saw the linen cloths on the ground, and also the cloth that had been over his head; this was not with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple who had reached the tomb first also went in; he saw and he believed. Till this moment they had failed to understand the teaching of scripture that he must rise from the dead. John 20: 1–9

From secularism to post-secularism In The Twilight of Atheism. The Rise and Fall of Belief in the Modern World, Alister McGrath identifies some of the central ‘failures’ of secularism: Yet there is a deeper failure – a failure noted by Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, in his 2002 Raymond Williams memorial lecture, delivered at the Hay-on-Wye book festival. The archbishop points out that secularism, in common with modernity in general, 80

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‘leaves us linguistically bereaved.’ For Williams, the secular tendency to set limits to what may be known, spoken, and depicted truncates the human potential by failing to ‘allow for the inaccessible in what we perceive.’ The prohibition of even an attempt to engage with ‘agencies or presences beyond the tangible’ seriously impoverishes humanity, which leads people to seek (illicitly, in the view of the atheist) a ‘spiritual’ dimension to existence in the face of secularist protests that cannot, or should not, be done. ‘Secularism fails to sustain the imaginative life and so can be said to fail; its failure may (does) produce a fascination with the spiritual’ [my italics].1 Within the broad spectrum of secularist thought, from the beginning of the Enlightenment to postmodernity, this characterisation of secularism as limited and restricted in scope may appear over-simplistic, particularly given the expanses of ‘imaginative’ thinking in the philosophies of positivism, scientism, existentialism and nihilism, all of which have helped shape the landscape of twentieth-century ideas. These philosophies attested to humankind’s capacity to affirm its own ‘transcendence’ (imagination) without reference to God or the need for a spiritual other; scientific progress, existence before essence and the absurd defined new parameters by which humankind could conceive and experience reality. And yet, according to some commentators, the ‘high noon’ of atheism, concomitant with the rise in intellectualism and modernity’s self-determination, is today thought to be descending into a twilight zone. McGrath, for example, argues that the intellectual case against God has stalled and that the imaginative failure of atheistic rationalism has been exposed as intolerant and discredited.2 As a consequence, the end of Enlightenment’s rational framework and the collapse of communism have created a vacuum that has been filled by the ‘unexpected resurgence of religion’.3 In the light of cultural changes produced by postmodernity, in particular the respect for diversity and religious pluralism, McGrath contends that religion and religious belief are not only participating actively in new global citizenship stakes but they are also reshaping the relevance of Christianity in what has been called today the post-secular age. In contemporary France, the return of religion has had a similar impact. The sociologist Shmuel Trigano concurs in part with McGrath and Williams that modernity and secularism have displaced religion to the social arena and in the process propelled the disappearance of transcendence from the world.4 Marcel Gauchet, whose ideas will figure prominently in this chapter and beyond, has also argued that one of the key functions of modernity was to complete the end of religion as a structural

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and institutional form.5 For Gauchet, secularism was primarily a social thesis that took no account of God nor needed to; it was enough that modernity and secularism had transformed society into the ‘cité de l’homme’ in which ‘we had become metaphysically democratic’.6 However, as I have argued consistently throughout, neither secular modernity nor the decline of religious practice signalled the death knell for faith or belief; on the contrary, faith would always continue in a new social context outside the orthodox religious pale and be subject to new and unprecedented influences. The religious historian Paul Valadier flags up some of these new challenges. For him, 1989 represented the end of secularism, by which he means the end of the role of Leninism and Marxism in the former Soviet Union to impose order scientifically on society.7 Valadier’s resistance to ‘scientific’ secularism is extended to a critique of new technologies and capitalist frameworks that seek to explain contemporary society by rejecting religion and spirituality. On the contrary, for Valadier, 1989 and the symbolic collapse of the Berlin Wall signalled not only a new era for religion but also the emergence of religion as a new force of resistance against globalisation and totalitarianism. Furthermore, Valadier sees the end of the 1980s as a new philosophical, political and theological conjuncture in which religion is resurrected from its private past to assume a revitalised public and social role. This said, in his work Un Christianisme d’avenir. Pour une nouvelle alliance entre raison et foi, Valadier is less enthusiastic about the role of Catholicism in the transition from secularism to post-secularism. He claims that the Catholic Church is still suffering from a ‘décalage’ between its insistence on moral objectivity and its reticence to embrace new links between freedom and truth forged in the postmodern democratic era. In particular, he argues that the combined effects of Vatican II, Humanae Vitae and Gaudium et Spes, despite the laudable intention towards greater aggiornamento (modernisation), have been in fact to harden the lines of difference between the institution of the Church and society. As a consequence, Catholicism is perceived to be in religious freefall and symbolically devalued. The contiguous trend towards autonomy in wider socio-political and cultural arenas has reinforced the perception that Catholicism is out of touch with society and demonstrates an intransigence in its condemnation of alternative forms of religious practice. Valadier’s prognosis is twofold. Firstly, Catholicism must shed its intellectual, universalist and moralising tendencies if it is to play a positive role in the post-secular environment. Secondly, Valadier maintains that Catholicism is in need of a structural makeover in which the vertical structure of transcendence is brought into closer alignment with


real lines of human engagement. In short, he advocates a more holistic Catholicism in which key oppositions (‘sense’/‘non-sense’, ‘life’/‘death’, ‘health’/‘illness’, ‘being’/‘becoming’, ‘unity’/‘duality’) inform a pragmatic religious mindset. The religious context in France needs some further contextualisation because it does throw up some exceptional circumstances that are different from those in other European religious and secular countries. The main difference is that secularism in France (laïcité) is institutional. The recent Stasi report into the role of laïcité in France identifies three key ‘indissociable’ values underpinning laïcité; ‘freedom of conscience’, ‘equality before the law of all spiritual and religious choices’ and ‘the neutrality of political power’.8 The backdrop to this report has been the perception that laïcité and religious freedom (particularly in the light of the headscarf affair and Régis Debray’s 2002 report to the Ministry of Education on religious reforms in French schools) have become dangerously indistinguishable, so much so that respect for religious freedom is undermining the function of laïcité. There is a perception that laïcité is becoming synonymous with an unconditional tolerance of all religious expression. This is not a negative perception in itself, and tolerance of religious expression and difference is central to the secular project. Nicolas Sarkozy, in his recent book La République, les religions, l’espérance, has underlined this tolerance by claiming that ‘secularism defends and respects the inalienable right to choose and practise one’s religion [ . . . ]. Secularism is at the service of religion’.9 He is also keen to clarify the independence of belief from any organisational association. However, the critical issue for the Stasi report is to redress the balance in respect of what laïcité actually stands for. Its mission therefore to ‘recentre secularism’ and ‘bring it back to its specificity’ (by highlighting liberty of conscience, equality before the law of all religious forms of worship and the neutrality of the political institutions in respect of religious expression) has served to remind French people that there are dangers in confusing laïcité with its effects and consequences. There is also more than a hint of suspicion that the report was commissioned to address, indirectly, the trend towards what has been referred to as the post-secular, defined not as the end of religion but, on the contrary, as the return of religion outside the traditional religious structures of the Church and formal religious doctrine. In other words, and this is central to Gauchet’s argument in Le Désenchantement du monde, the return of religion is accompanied by a simultaneous decline in religious structures and the ascendancy of the (religious) self in the construction of individual, social, sexual and religious life. Religious faith is still seen to

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persist but only in so far as it finds its expression less in the institutions of the Church and sacred texts, and more in personal experience. In this light, France is a unique example of a modern democratic republic where institutional secularism under laïcité is being challenged actively by a return of religion as public manifestation and as renewed personal identity. This has implications not only for laïcité itself, as we have seen, but also for cherished republican principles of universalism, the private/public binary and the circumscribed boundary between (democratic) communitarianism and (republican) inclusion. The headscarf affair, religious education reforms and gay marriage, to name but three, are revealing examples of the way religion is influencing current socio-political debate in France in respect of rights of citizenship, identity and sexuality. Similarly, the increasing democratisation of structures of diversity, tolerance and sexual difference is challenging traditional republican institutions of liberty, equality and fraternity, as illustrated graphically in the social fracture caused by recent riots over ethnic exclusion and new employment legislation. Identity construction in contemporary France is shifting; it is now more internally referenced and reflexively organised. As such, the slow mutation from republican institutional authority to self-authority is being supported by values of social justice, human rights, personal responsibility and freedom. And one of the consequences of this mutation is the way in which religious expression is both challenging internally its own hierarchical structures and deriving its motivation, credibility and relevance from the wider democratic consensus. Two points are worthy of note in this respect. Firstly, this return of religion is concomitant with an ascendancy of the self both as a religious expression and as part of the wider construction of individual, social and sexual experience. Secondly, secularisation, far from being the polar opposite of religious life, is seen as the birth place for the reintegration and revaluation of religion in postmodern society. In this context, Williams’s earlier identification of secularism with a denial of access to the spiritual, both linguistically and formally, must be treated with some reservation, considering that past and current theories of secularisation are in effect challenging this perception by relocating the resurgence of Christianity from inside secular modernity. His analysis also flies in the face of the importance attached to the immanent/transcendent dialectic at the heart of contemporary religious and theological debate. Williams acknowledges in part the first of these trends when he speaks of secularism’s ‘fascination’ with the spiritual. However, he argues that this fascination is a by-product of secularism’s perceived


‘failure’ (‘prohibition’, ‘protest’ and impoverishment). Critically, what we will see in the course of this chapter is the way in which secularism and secularisation are positivised, thus allowing for new connections to be drawn between their evolving progressive consensus and new religious ontologies. This chapter therefore will map out three distinct but interconnected trajectories as a response to the idea of the return of religion. I begin with a socio-political and cultural contextualisation of the concept of belief as a value system in contemporary France, from its institutionalisation under secular modernity to its individualisation in postmodernity. I proceed to address the implications of a revitalised belief system and the return of religion within a paradigm of philosophical revisionism espoused principally by the philosopher Gianni Vattimo. Key concepts such as a philosophy of actuality, historicity as salvation, Being as Event, the dissolution of metaphysics and belief as a ‘leap into tradition’ will lay important ground in the revaluation of religion and Christianity in the post-secular age. Finally, Vattimo’s positive ontotheology will be set against an alternative Foucauldian ‘human’ theology where belief and transcendence are measured, not in their salvific potential, but in their practical, discursive and historical finitude.

‘L’anthropologie du croire’: De Certeau, Gauchet and Hervieu-Léger In contemporary France, where the uniqueness of the republican/democratic binary raises special circumstances for religious practice and ‘belonging’, the revival of religion (and the practice of belief) is divided along institutional and individual lines. On an institutional level, religious belief is characterised as collective (mainly Catholic) and traditional, underscored by doctrine, absolutes and a pre-ordained conception of the truth. The Catholic Church and the Vatican are the principal exponents of this institutional belief system. Patrick Michel has explored the nature of belief and its institutionalisation in his work Politique et religion. La grande mutation. For him, ‘the crisis in faith is not one of believing, but of believing together, which raises the central question of the institution’.10 For Michel, the main crisis effecting belief is the process of deinstitutionalisation itself. Michel de Certeau also distinguishes between individual ‘belief’ and the collective idea of ‘to make believe’, the latter being an allusion to the ‘the law of the real’ which citizens in one way or another feel forced to adopt.11 Michel, in particular, remarks that ‘we are embarking, beyond secularism, on a road to deinstitutionalisation that will affect all instituted

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forms of belief’.12 He claims that relativism, coupled with a perceived mutation from ‘the quest for sense’ to ‘the quest’ itself (in short practice over meaning), is challenging the entire process by which belief and faith are inscribed within established traditions, movements and systems. This is not to mention the wider trend towards a religious hyper autonomy described by Michel: ‘a modern idea of religion...is being rewritten entirely under the sign of a new fluidity and mobility at the heart of the cultural, political, social and economic universe’.13 This latter idea, referred to in other contexts as ‘individualised belief’, is defined less in relation to an objective other, and more as a ‘practice’: ‘individualised belief only expresses itself in the pure, direct and immediate practice of the other. It is only fundamentally validated through and in a practice, and not by reference to an institution that defines its framework and context before controlling its dissemination.’14 This emphasis on belief as practice has the effect of taking religion out of the institutional framework of received knowledge and relocating it in the ‘discovery of historicity... as a process through which humanity constitutes itself and takes conscience of itself’.15 The connections forged therefore between the collapse of institutionalisation, cultural relativism and the individualisation of belief are subsequently appropriated and validated within a postmodern ethos of diversification and, in the case of France, democratisation. Before we examine in more detail this debate on the individualisation of belief, it may prove fruitful to explore some ideas which have contributed to the process. Clearly, the collapse of belief as an institutional and traditional system owes much to wider social, cultural and global phenomena, including representations of belief as defined by the Church and other religious bodies. The sociologist Gauchet, who defends the separation of Church and State but laments the disappearance of a ‘transcendent’ influence within the republican order, expresses nostalgia for a return to the traditional and community ties through which belief was formally channelled and which the institution of Catholicism helped cultivate over the course of the twentieth century. He describes this bygone era as a time when the individual belonged to a collective space: ‘a really traditional order, an order lived as though it were integrally received, is an a-subjective order from the point of view of those who live it and put it into practice’.16 For Gauchet, this era of unconditional religious devotion and unquestioning belief is now threatened by the onset of postmodern relativism and religious pluralism. That said, we can detect a certain republican unease in Gauchet’s acceptance of traditional religious belief and practice. It is interesting, in this respect, to see the way in which his acceptance of religion is couched in a universal and


republican lexicon that respects general interest over private interest and collective solidarity over subjective individualism. Perhaps this tolerance is partly a reluctant acknowledgement of the way democratisation, according to Gauchet, has sought to ‘dignify religion’ in contemporary French society. He clearly sees the need for religion in society in a general sense and defends its right to a ‘comprehensive functionality’ within political democracy. But in a subtle and perhaps perverse way, it could be argued also that Gauchet, in extolling the virtues of Catholicism in particular, is transferring solidarity and structure (traditional emblems of the republic) to a new and emerging religious relativism. Nevertheless, if we are to locate a point in recent history when institutions began to lose control over this process, then the decade of the 1960s is a critical era. I referred earlier, in the context of Valadier, to the well-intentioned but ultimately self-destructive attempts by the Catholic Church in particular to address the challenges of modernity in Vatican II. There is also an argument that the Catholic Church’s (over) emphasis on a moral critique of the negative influences of consumerism and the decline in Christian values diverted attention away from serious reflection on the potential root cause of these changes, namely the decline in the idea of belief itself as a consequence of a personal, ideological and philosophical dislocation between individual and State, at the heart of which was the concept of trust. De Certeau’s seminal study ‘The Revolution of the “Believable”’,17 published a year after 1968, bears witness to the internal trauma that punctured all systems of individual trust, value and conviction in the institutions of State and reality in France at this historical juncture. In a dense polemic, his main thesis is that traditional value systems (conveyed via dogma, knowledge, political programs and philosophies) have lost credibility; this loss of credibility, he suggests, infects all frames of reference, which in turn points to a ‘mutation of the believable’. In a religious context, he describes this period as one of ‘spiritual emigration’. De Certeau expounds on this ‘evaporation of belief’ in his subsequent work The Practice of Everyday Life, in which belief is characterised as a commodity to be manipulated and produced in order to satisfy consumers. Two main points emerge from his analysis. Firstly, consumption of belief leads to an individualisation of belief which De Certeau believes is mirrored in the ebbing away of belief from the spiritual domain to the political and cultural arenas. Secondly, in a scathing critique of the ‘institution of the real’ (a narrated reality constructed on news, information, debate and events that tell what is to be believed), De Certeau argues that these narratives not only fabricate realities which become believable, but they also transform seeing into

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believing, so much so that the ‘new postulate’ of the age is ‘the belief that the real is visible’.18 De Certeau’s critique of the artificial construction of belief, both religious and systemic, reveals problems of credibility at the heart of the concept of belief. How, he ruminates, does one authenticate belief? De Certeau suggests that belief must reside in an ‘invisible alterity hidden behind signs’.19 One could argue that this religious and traditional interpretation of belief in what cannot be seen, coming as it does from a devout Catholic in De Certeau, is both a reaction to and a commentary on the consumer society of the 1960s and the socio-political upheaval of the period. Clearly, belief in an invisible, transcendent and divine order represented a safe and consolatory alternative to the corruption of visible ‘reality. It is interesting to note nonetheless, and I will address this later in more detail, that De Certeau’s equivalence between visible negative and invisible positive at the height of secular modernity is in direct contrast to Vattimo’s embrace of the visible as a positive and sensual response to the return of religion in the post-secular, postmodern context.20 As the opening quotation of this chapter infers, belief founded in seeing and believing in the invisible has been the bedrock of Catholic faith from time immemorial. It has also been the sustenance of belief through secular modernity, as well as one of the reasons for suspicion and ridicule among atheists and agnostics. Despite such doubts, for Vattimo, the invisible positive equivalence as a condition of belief is still valid, even though he goes on to define belief in the invisible as a ‘risky wager’ (but one ultimately worth taking). Vattimo takes some of the doubt out of the invisible in two ways. Firstly, he claims that postmodernity has itself aided the cause of the return of religion by foregrounding its visibility within relative religious pluralism. Secondly, and crucially, he argues that invisibility is founded on a ‘leap of faith’ into a tradition and a historicity which has more than a modicum of insurance: The point is to take a leap of faith in the liberating abyss of tradition. It is a liberating leap because it stakes the claim of the order of beings to be held as the eternal and objective order of Being. The leap does not give us more truthful or more complete knowledge of what Being objectively is; it only manifests itself as an event with respect to which we are always engaged as interpreters somehow ‘on the way’ (Being and man’).21 To return briefly to De Certeau, his description of the evaporation of collective belief, its emerging individualistic manifestations and the


consequent loss of social cohesion in the 1960s bears useful comparison with Gauchet’s sociological analysis of belief in the 1990s. Gauchet’s republican credentials clearly determine his negative interpretation of individualism, which he sees as an external imposition rather than any organically cultural, philosophical or reflexive change. Referred to as ‘an imposed individualism’, Gauchet states that ‘it [individualism] is more like a fine imposed from the outside than any sudden or mysterious redoubling of energy inside people’.22 This critique of individualism (and not just its religious manifestation) is part of a wider concern about the way French society has been overly democratised at the expense, as he sees it, of its republican ethos. This concern is felt most acutely at the level of the individual. For Gauchet, the balance of the private/public binary, one of the cherished principles of republican universalism, has been tipped dangerously in favour of the private. His perception is that individual rights have taken precedence over ‘les droits de l’homme’; the individual appears to have replaced the citizen as the centre of socio-political and cultural gravity, and what were formerly considered concerns of private interest (sexuality, religion) are now displayed openly for ‘public usage’. While recognising that society and citizenship have changed in the face of globalisation, multiculturalism and democratisation, Gauchet would appear to concede that change is a necessary consequence of these transformations. But his reluctance to cede his republican identity in the face of change is encapsulated in his critique of citizenship. Citizenship, he claims, resided formerly on a conjunction between the general and the specific, with every citizen being required to ‘appropriate the collective point of view’.23 In what he describes as the new ‘configuration’ of citizenship, there is now a disjunction of the above with every individual ‘valuing his particularity over that of the general interest, and not having to answer in any way for it’.24 Gauchet’s analysis of the changes in citizenship points to the new ways private concerns are addressed in French democratic republicanism. We have seen over the years not only how the debate on lesbian and gay rights, for example, has radicalised public opinion in favour of rights for gay couples with the advent of the PaCS, but also how sexuality itself has emerged out of the straitjacket of sex, to stake a claim for new ‘identity’ constructions. Religious belief and beliefs, it would appear, are also following a similar trajectory. For Gauchet, the implications are varied. On the one hand, he suggests that the mutation of belief into ‘identity’ construction means that in order to become a French citizen ‘all that is required of someone . . . is to be themselves’.25 The implication is that if you don’t have a ‘specificity’ to make public, then your status

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as citizen is somehow diminished within the republican space. On the other hand, and more alarmingly, Gauchet highlights the way the concept of individualism (the ‘self’ as he calls it) has changed from a strictly internal and personal ‘unity’ to a tripartite construction involving the intra-personal, the inter-personal and the civic. In other words, individualism is no longer perceived as a discrete subjectivity; it has acquired the status of an enunciative ‘belonging’ which requires public and sometimes legal recognition. From Gauchet’s republican perspective, such ‘identity belongings’ are not only an instrument of disconnection from global society, but they are also a product of the increasing sophistication of the democratic system. Pursuing this line of argumentation, Gauchet views the individualisation of religious faith and belief as indicative of an emerging intransigence and imperialism of the self. He argues that this self is expressed as a unique, exclusive and individual religious truth, and as a choice that he sees being imposed on the universal republic. If, however, we set to one side some of Gauchet’s ideological and republican predilections, we can detect chinks of objective insight into what he calls ‘revolutions of belief’. We have seen up to now how he has privileged tradition (even in its religious associations) over the vagaries of religious pluralism. Indeed, in an attempt to undermine postmodern relativism, he defends the presence of a religious heritage even amid the proliferation of other religious ‘traditions’. He champions the fixity of an ‘objective existence of a given, the presence of a heritage, the fact of a tradition among other traditions’.26 But, beyond this and despite his strong political beliefs, Gauchet respects the centrality of the individual and the importance of individual responses to issues of life and existence; the return to the self for answers to life’s ‘big questions’ is, for him, ‘a legitimate end in itself’. In the process, he also draws our attention to an important revaluation of the role of tradition in the light of individualism. He states: ‘Tradition matters in as much as it belongs to me, in as much as it constitutes me in my own singular identity.’27 Here, tradition is expressed singularly as a space where ‘I can subjectively get to know myself and a heritage that I can appropriate for myself’.28 But, in a further acknowledgement of the positive effects of postmodernity, he charts the way the destination of belief and faith is changing. We recall how he emphasised the notion of ‘practice’ and ‘quest’ as the new criteria underpinning faith and belief. He pursues a connected idea in the notion of destination: ‘[belief] is not a matter of priority oriented towards the beyond. Its primordial inspiration is the identification of the self here below.’29 In a direct allusion to the critical immanent/transcendent debate which I will discuss in detail later,


Gauchet sheds light on the current mutating form of belief that seeks justification, on the one hand, in the material reality of lived experience, and corroboration, on the other hand, in its ‘public inscription’ guaranteed by democracy. While some of these mutations may appear, for Gauchet, as unwelcome concessions to democracy’s encroachment on republican space, there is a hint of consolation for Gauchet in that the new ‘functionality’ of belief owes its inspiration directly to individuals, and not to the Churches (traditional enemies of republicanism). To this degree, the freedom to believe for Gauchet is a legitimate and acceptable ‘right’, the functionality of which spares republicans the ignominy of it being viewed as an offering from on high. One of Gauchet’s contemporaries, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, concurs on the new ‘functionality’ of belief. On a general point, she subscribes to the commonly held thesis that there is a paradox at the core of modernity, and at the centre of this paradox is the fact that modernity removes the need for and sense of religion (what she characterises as amnesia), but that in its utopian format this same modernity cannot but stay in touch with the religious (or at least the need for a religious future). So, in the specific context of belief and believing, this ‘utopian format’ has the effect of transforming belief and believing, away from a traditional, formalised and rational expression to a process of belief as restructured according to the socio-cultural climate of the day (i.e. where the individual is king). She says: Modernity has deconstructed the traditional systems of believing, but has not forgotten belief. Believing finds expression in an individualised, subjective and diffuse form, and resolves into a multiplicity of combinations and orderings or meanings which are elaborated independently of control of institutions of believing, by religious institutions in particular.30 This individualisation of belief and the dilution of transcendence as alterity into immanence are debates with which institutional Catholicism has had to wrestle in recent times. For the most part, it has resisted such attempts to change its ethos. But, while it has managed to defend high principles in respect of marriage, euthanasia and the use of condoms in Africa, there is a growing consensus among thinkers on Catholic issues that if its credibility and relevance are to be maintained, it will need to adapt to changes in contemporary society, politics and culture. One of these key thinkers is Hervieu-Léger. In her commendable tome Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde, she highlights three conflicts facing

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Catholicism in modern France; its reluctant acceptance of the separation of Church and State, the contentious relations between science and faith and the problematic future of Catholic missions abroad. She proceeds to echo some of the same concerns expressed earlier by Gauchet, particularly in relation to the emergence of ‘new moral subjects’ in an ‘ultramodern’ society. However, the significant difference between Gauchet’s analysis and that of Hervieu-Léger is that the latter has embraced democratic consensus and sees the future health and credibility of the Catholic Church within a full acknowledgement and reflection of democratic practice. On the point of individualism therefore, she accepts the importance of the individual’s right to seek self-fulfilment within his own subjectivity and furthermore his right to realise this socially and politically. She states: ‘the fulfilment of the self (the exaltation of subjectivity) . . . is part of an individual who wants to be considered in the singularity of his aspirations, determinations, interests and personal conflicts’.31 As such, individuals are free agents in the creation of new moral subjectivities in an ultramodern society. The critical issue for the Catholic Church, according to Hervieu-Léger, is whether it can address this ‘mutation in regimes of authority’, interact with them and reconcile itself with them; if not, the institution of the Church will have difficulty shaking off, what she calls, a ‘cold and normative’ image. This, of course, is easier said than done, particularly for a Catholic Church that relies heavily, if not exclusively, on doctrinal tenets of time, space and natural order. Eternal time sits uneasily alongside postmodern instantaneity; space, by which we can invoke the history of Christian tradition through the centuries, is an anxious bedfellow next to the erosion of territorial roots and religious communities in the ultramodern world. Similarly, the natural order of life, a pre-ordained divine order which confers a transcendent and sacred character on humankind, is uncomfortable beside a democratic model that undermines any hierarchical authority and seeks to relocate truth in man and in the material world. At a micro level, and indeed challenging these religious meta-narratives, is the increasing trend towards what Hervieu-Léger calls ‘the pilgrim model of religiosity’. While Gauchet flagged up the dangers of social fragmentation caused by the mutation of religious belief into identarian ‘belonging’ with a special claim for public recognition, Hervieu-Léger targets a ‘full-blown religious sociability which establishes itself in the form of mobility and casual acquaintance’.32 In other words, for her, belief is part of a wider currency of indistinguishable beliefs, all competing for attention in the rapidly mobile and fluid social maelstrom. Hervieu-Léger is positive about this trend towards diversification, particularly in the way it liberates the


individual to ‘evaluate his personal, spiritual truth based on expectations that are his own’.33 In fact, she nails her colours to the mast of democratic republicanism by affirming that ‘the right to personal, spiritual growth has priority over the affirmation of a common truth’.34 In privileging personal truths over universal truth as the inspiration for this ‘pilgrim’ model, Hervieu-Léger claims that mobility of belief escapes the rigid control of Catholic time and space. She readily admits that the fluidity of belief represents a destabilising factor in the context of rural religious practice and parochial civilisation, but she argues strongly that it satisfies the growing and wider social trend of individual ‘displacement’ to which the Church must inevitably adapt.

A philosophy of secularisation At this juncture, I would like to return briefly to the comments by Williams that opened this chapter. He argued that secularism was the antithesis of the spiritual and the imaginative, and that it denied the possibility of transcendental experience. While this vision of secularism and its association with the rise of atheism has shaped philosophical thinking over the course of the twentieth century, notably in Western Europe, the return of religion in late modernity has cast a shadow over previous philosophical nihilism. Let us recall some of the reasons for this revival. Principally, the return of religion in contemporary culture is a response to an interpretation of the present that is no longer grounded in the legacy of the Enlightenment. It is also an acknowledgment of the end of modernity, its philosophies of scientism, Hegelian and Marxist historicism, as well as the decline of atheistic rationalism. The renewal of religion is also a rebuff to ‘some theories of secularisation which maintained that religion would be wiped out by the modern process of rationalisation’.35 However, most critically the return of religion in France and beyond is a testament to the idea that secularisation (and we can include postmodernity in this process) does not spell the absence of religion but is, as John D. Caputo suggests, a new ‘enlightened Enlightenment’ that has done away with the illusion of pure objectivity and where the secular and the religious are forever refamiliarised.36 In his study titled Belief, the Italian philosopher Vattimo fleshes out this central thesis. His main philosophical idea, far removed from the scepticism of Williams and McGrath, is that modernity (and by implication secularism and secularisation) is in fact essential to the recovery of religion in the post-secular age. In a powerful argument, which will run as a leitmotif through the rest of this chapter, Vattimo defines secularisation as

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an integral component in the return of religion and Christianity. Specifically, he states that secularisation ‘means a relation of provenance from a sacred core from which one has moved away but which remains active even in its fallen distorted version, reduced to pure worldly terms’.37 In other words, secularisation is perceived as a mere ‘drifting from a sacral origin’, the recollection of which is sufficient to ensure religion’s ‘realisation’, return and eternal permanence. As a philosophical insight that Vattimo develops, this interpretation of secularisation has its particular merits which we will analyse shortly. But, as a sociological analysis, it lacks the type of methodological rigour espoused by HervieuLéger, for whom the religious links with the past are circumscribed by community, schools, unions, tradition and the incumbent mythology of the soil and peasant life. Her aim to reinvent the chain of religious memory takes a very different direction: The draining of memory (or gouging of memory) is contradicted by the duration felt by individuals [ . . . ]. It is a contradiction that must be resolved by invoking substitute memories, multiple, fragmentary, diffuse and dissociated as they are, but which promise that something of collective identification, on what the production and reproduction of social bonds depends, can be saved.38 For Vattimo, by contrast, secularisation is a key element in the more abstract and philosophical process of the revaluation of religion in a postmodern, post-secular and non-metaphysical context; secularisation therefore is not just the recollection of a sacral origin but the re-continuation of the relevance of this origin. As such, secularisation, as the dissolution of sacral structures of Christian society, and the transition to an ethics of autonomy, to a lay state, of flexible liberalism in interpretation of dogma and precepts, should be understood not as the failure of or a departure from Christianity but as a fuller realisation of its birth, which is the kenosis, the abasement of God, which undermines the natural features of divinity.39 This aspect of Vattimo’s philosophical thesis is grounded in a ‘natural’ reintegration of Christianity within secular ideology: ‘out of secularisation comes the essence of modernity and Christianity itself’. In effect, what emerges out of this reintegration is not only the revival of religion but also the reconnection of religion with its origin and its relevance to a new social order.


Secularisation therefore is a source of positivity that takes as its point of departure the nihilism of secular ideology which it proceeds to reinvent philosophically and artistically. This reinvention incorporates several key thematics. The first is the renunciation of the project of absolute knowledge or foundational principles, as determined by orthodox Catholicism or biblical scripture. Secondly, and linked to the first, reinvention involves a ‘philosophy of actuality’ that embraces an analysis of existence and reality in the technological age. With norms open to renegotiation in the light of the postmodern subject, Vattimo links this actuality to a historicity that defines the core essence of the meaning of a return of religion, namely incarnation: ‘Incarnation or kenosis (the self-emptying and selfabasing of God in Jesus Christ)...is less to do with doctrine and more to do with understanding secularisation, as the elimination of the violence of the transcendent principle.’40 Vattimo argues that kenosis reveals that the divine is actually and fully involved with historicity, so much so that incarnation removes the imperative of a transcendence, relocates it in a postmetaphysical epoch which has as ‘its distinctive trait the very vocation of weakening of Being’.41 The presumption that exposure to secularisation produces paradoxically an illumination of God’s transcendence is scotched by Vattimo in favour of a secularisation defined as ‘the way in which kenosis...continues to realise itself more and more clearly by furthering the education of mankind concerning the overcoming of originary violence essential to the sacred and to social life itself’.42

Being as Event The concept of Being alluded to above is another key thematic underpinning Vattimo’s positive reinvention of Christianity. In order to grasp its significance, we need to examine the first part of Vattimo’s thesis. Vattimo argues for the dissolution of metaphysics, by which he means the end of dogmatic objectivist philosophies that describe God as absolute, omnipotent and transcendent. On the contrary, for Vattimo, the real task of religion in the non-metaphysical age is to overcome the myth of transcendence through a philosophy of actuality that places emphasis on key Christian ideas (incarnation, provenance, kenosis, secularisation as the history of salvation and the dissolution of the sacred). In particular, Vattimo constructs a ‘theology of secularisation’ that enables one to rethink revelation and incarnation in secularised terms ‘in order to live in accord with one’s age’.43 With the collapse of metaphysics and the rediscovery of secularisation as a foundation on which to resurrect the kenotic connection between humankind and salvation, Vattimo replaces the concept of Being,

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defined as an eternal structure, with Being as Event (which he describes as ‘something begun by an initiative that is not one’s own’44). In other words, Being as Event ‘is the outcome of an initiative, of which I am an “effect”, an heir, an addressee’.45 He continues: ‘The historicity of my existence is provenance, and emancipation – salvation or redemption – consists in recognising that Being is Event, a recognition that enables me to enter actively into history, instead of passively contemplating its necessary laws.’46 The implications of this concept of Being as Event are significant for the return of religion. As we have characterised the return of religion in terms of a decline of the structures of religious authority and the re-personalisation of religious faith within the social order, Being as Event responds positively to this return in three ways. Firstly, it connects to the ideas of revelation and salvation as events which undermine absolutes and the transcendent. Secondly, it implicates humankind directly in these events as a natural inheritor of these events’ ongoing meaning. And thirdly, as the ‘weakening of Being’ (the deconstruction of Being as structure and its mutation into a fluid and historically determined event) gives way ultimately to Being as Event, personal authority is passed on to individuals within secular contexts to interpret the meaning of the Christian message. The relevance of Vattimo’s philosophy and the importance of his ideas for this chapter and beyond can be summed up in the concept of Being as Event and its creative potential. Vattimo underlines the artistic and positive effects of this potential by linking Being as Event to the creative space facilitated by postmodernity. Postmodernity offers a theoretical paradigm in which clearly defined distinctions and categories of identity and self are placed under the spotlight of historicity, contingency and self-construction. For Vattimo, there is a vital connection between this creative space of postmodernity and the post-secular (nonmetaphysical) context whereby the return of religion is disinvested of centuries of structure and reduced to a degree zero of creation that is fresh and open to being reheard. He states: Moreover, in the postmodern end of the absolute philosophies, we become aware that once we discover that the vision of Being as eternal structure of objectivist metaphysics is untenable, we are left with the notion of creation, namely with the contingency and historicity of our existing [ . . . ]; it is above all because of the experience of postmodern pluralism that we can think of Being only as Event, and of truth not as the reflection of reality’s eternal


structure but rather as a historical message that must be heard and to which we are called to respond.47 The centrality of the Christian message of salvation and redemption remains intact for Vattimo. His innovation is that it is configured in a way that eschews the structured channels of transcendence as alterity, and reinterprets this message through a phenomenology of the material world. As such, concepts of eternal time, absolute knowledge, the sacred and divine are open to renegotiation in the form of chronological time, interpretation, waiting, historicity and becoming. Vattimo achieves this conceptual shift by identifying key Christian themes (incarnation, kenosis and salvation) and linking their material (human) significance and provenance to the present and future. Material reality is re-activated in this process, providing a direct participation of the individual in the meaning of his historical existence. Vattimo shares this philosophical treatment of secularisation with other commentators on the return of religion in postmodernity, notably Caputo. While Vattimo relocates in the ‘death of God’ view of secularisation the essence of faith, Caputo, for example, sees in the undecidability of postmodernity the affirmation of faith without (the need for) knowledge. As such, both see Being as a metaphysical structure being replaced by the concept of ‘weak thought’ (essentially a Pauline construction) which does away with the intelligible, rationalisation of God and ‘opens the door to another way of thinking about faith and reason which translates into a heightened sense of the contingency and responsibility of constructions, not the jettisoning of reason but a re-description of reason, one that is a lot more reasonable than the bill of goods about an over-arching, transhistorical Rationality that the Enlightenment tried to sell us’.48 In short, for Vattimo, out of secularisation and nihilism there comes emancipation and a reconstruction of rationality. For Caputo, out of secularisation and the ‘death of God’ there comes the ‘death of the death of God.’

Vattimo’s belief: a philosophy of actuality Before we examine how Vattimo’s ‘philosophy of actuality’ translates specifically into the arena of culture, society and sexual discourse with the possibility of new sexual moralities, we need to lay to rest some potential misapprehensions. Firstly, let us be clear what the return of religion is not in the case of Vattimo. The return of religion is not a new claim to any ultimate religious truth. It is not to be construed as a religious ‘leap of faith’ in the mystical or devotional sense, nor is it

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designed to undermine philosophical atheism. Equally, the return of religion ‘cannot be limited to simply a defence of pluralism for its own sake or to the legitimization of proliferating narratives’.49 The return of religion is not a return to a new transcendence, nor does it seek verification and authenticity in the ‘normative’ Church. Rather, the return of religion is the capacity to think of Being as Event not as objective structure, but to recover God ‘handed over in historically changing forms . . . to the continuing reinterpretation of the community of believers’.50 The return of religion is the living of this Event through a ‘liberation of metaphors’ (incarnation, revelation, transfiguration and salvation) that allows for individuals to experience God again and again in the pluralism of postmodernity. Significantly, the return of religion is the return to the here and now, and an active engagement with culture, politics and what Vattimo calls the ‘technological destiny of Being’. For Vattimo, postmodernity has conferred visibility to the return of religion and this visibility is experienced primarily as a sensual experience: ‘the world becomes truly the dwelling of man . . . only if man becomes, in multiple senses, spirit; spirit as pneuma, breath, the lightest breath that moves the air around’.51 Vattimo’s sensual connection with the material world is, on the one hand, a way of overcoming the metaphysical and, on the other hand, a means of exploring the possibility of alternative non-metaphysical ontologies through which the postmodern subject can experience Being as Event. He speaks of the postmodern age as rich in aesthetic, cultural and technological production which the individual can harness and use sensually in the cultural and political integration of the non-metaphysical: The West calls attention to the fact that today the human being has at his disposal the technological, conceptual and political possibilities to begin to realise the Kingdom of the Sense. The simultaneity in which the world of generalized communication makes available, at least in principle, ‘all’ that human culture has produced or produces, as in a sort of imaginary museum, orients us toward weakening. If we do not welcome the appeal of aesthetic emancipation offered to us by the new condition of existence, it is because we are still oppressed by the letter – the literalism of the sacred texts [ . . . ]. Although we can only catch a glimpse of this possibility, the epoch of spirit announces itself to us with specific strength, which is bound up with the postmodern condition. To hear of this announcement, if only in theory, is already a way of preparing for its realisation.52


Vattimo hones in on new non-metaphysical paradigms such as horizons and light, sensuality, historicity, existence and contingency through which to transmit, as opposed to impose, his version of the Christian message. These paradigms represent different ways of ‘encountering’ truth and interpreting ‘the signs of the times’. The above quotation serves as a useful example of this paradigmatic shift. The ‘Kingdom of the Sense’ is described as an experience to be realised sensually, ‘glimpsed’ and ‘heard’. Vattimo is clearly making a distinction between the reception of Christianity in the non-metaphysical age as sensory perception and its reception via reasoned intelligence. The implication of this distinction is to show that the significance of Being as Event is not literal, dogmatic or subject to demonstrative proof, but rather an experience of faith ‘that has the look of a conjecture, a risky wager, and ultimately a loving acceptance, devotion, and pietas’.53 Also, and most critically, Vattimo wants to show that lived experience, as opposed to intellectual thought, is pivotal to the actuality of his philosophy and to the immediacy of its relevance. It represents the only real way into Being as Event: Mortality, pain, prayer help one experience the radical contingency of existence, ways of experiencing a ‘belonging’ that is also a provenance, and in some almost ineffable sense that we none the less live out in the very experience of return, fallenness – at least in so far as the return also seems always to be the recovery of a condition from which we have ‘lapsed’.54 The value of the sensory in this context is its tangible connection with Being as Event in which physical sensation and provenance coalesce in a recollection of origin.

Vattimo and the Vatican: a literal difference Part of the appeal of Vattimo’s philosophy of actuality to the return of religion and to a new articulation of belief is the way in which the literal (doctrinal and dogmatic) is airbrushed from the historical canvas. Vattimo relies exclusively on a humanisation and physicality of the condition of existence to create meaning. There is no surprise therefore that the outcome of Vattimo’s philosophy is expressed in physical acts of charity, hospitality, forgiveness, inculturation and cultural dialogue. These acts represent the positive culmination of not only his philosophy,

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but also Being as Event. ‘The essence of revelation’ he writes, ‘is reduced to charity’,55 and ‘charity is the norm of secularization’.56 Vattimo uses acts of human altruism as metaphors to respond to modernity and its crises, as well as to facilitate modernity’s transition towards the pluralist effects of postmodernity. He shares this and other humanist features of his philosophy with some aspects of current Vatican thinking. For example, Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical published in 2006 was titled Deus Caritas Est in which the comparisons with Vattimo’s philosophy are striking. The encyclical opens: ‘Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.’57 The Vatican’s articulation of Christianity as a physical encounter with an event signals the priority given to human identification over metaphysical transference. Equally, the first section of this encyclical subtitled The Unity of Love in Creation and in Salvation History echoes Vattimo’s Being as Event defined in history, provenance and salvation, and again points to the redemptive significance of life as primarily a historical identification. The current Pontiff also builds a consensus around the lived experience of the incarnation and the eucharist as forms of kenotic ‘self-oblation’ in which the sacrament is perceived as an event via the sociality of communion. In the context of charity and human generosity, Pope Benedict XVI also reinforces the roots of charity at the heart of the Christian heritage: ‘Charity is not a kind of welfare . . . but [for the Church] is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being.’ Another approximation between Vattimo and the Vatican is at the level of cultural dialogue. We have discussed thus far the ways in which Vattimo grounds his Christianity in the crises of modernity and secularisation, out of which comes an awareness of the importance of religion within the cultural arena. Vattimo states: ‘The religion that presents itself anew in our culture . . . is realised not in the vacuum of individual wills but by claiming reasons that are less absolute and more historically defined. It is a process forged through the mobilisation of a shared culture and of its critique on the basis of criteria inherent within it.’58 For Vattimo, Christianity must interact, embrace and ‘become an interlocutor in a cultural dialogue’. In the case of the Vatican, the establishment in 1983 of the Pontifical Council for Culture (PCC) under the aegis of Pope John Paul II heralded a new relationship between Church and culture. Vatican II had recognised (but failed to address the fact) that ‘a dramatic gap had established itself between the Church and culture’59 and therefore the aim of this new Council was to ‘help the Church to become a creator of culture in its relationship with the modern world’. It was not


however until 1990 and the end of the communist era that a new and more urgent tone was adopted by the Council: The cultural upheavals of our times invite us to return to the essentials and to rediscover the fundamental concern which is man in all his political and social dimensions, to be sure, but the cultural, moral and spiritual ones as well [ . . . ]. It is with full spiritual courage that we insert the force of the Gospel leaven, and its newness, which is younger than anything modern, into the very heart of the profound disturbances of our time, to give life to new modes of thinking, acting and living.60 As a new Europe was taking shape, John Paul II argued that secular ethics had reached an endpoint, that spiritual needs were being rekindled and that the impending new century ‘aspires to a fully human culture’. In his 1992 address Letting the Gospel take root in every culture, he expounded on this humanisation of culture in the face of science and technological application: ‘The challenge of the 21st century is to humanize society and its institutions through the Gospel.’61 The primary Catholic thesis therefore of faith in Christ and his incarnation in history as a principle of regeneration of people and culture represents a key point of convergence between Vatican thinking and that of Vattimo, particularly in respect of viewing cultural change in its positivity, historicity and Event-likeness. But the decisive difference between the two is on the level of doctrine and the literal. For Vattimo, ‘religion . . . in our culture must abandon the project of grounding religious ethics upon knowledge of natural essences that are taken as norms, observing instead the freedom of dialogic mediation [ . . . ]. It [religion] must play down its preaching, doctrinal, disciplinary specificity’.62 In this regard, Vattimo’s philosophy of actuality distances itself significantly from the theological metaphysics of the Magisterium and other ‘radical orthodoxies’, which, while similar in their participatory ontologies, are contingent on an overarching transcendence and on the hard grammar of Christian dogma. Vattimo’s importance to the return of religion and to the broader aims of this chapter and book is precisely his thesis of the dissolution of metaphysics and the definition of transcendence as a binary between provenance and event. Whereas Catholicism defines transcendence as ‘a thirst for the absolute’ (divine) without which ‘man encounters the dissatisfaction of materialism and the loss of the meaning of moral values’,63 Vattimo sees transcendence incarnated in historicity and, by implication, in language, acts of generosity and the

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revaluation of embodiment as a medium of revelation. Vattimo shares this historical, immanentist and transmissive function of transcendence with other thinkers, notably Aldo Gargani who speaks of the return of religion as ‘an experience that brings religion nearer again to immanence, picking out its symbols in the figures of our life’.64 He continues: ‘Religious transcendence achieves its meaning in the fold of a reflection that reconstructs the immanence of its terms. Transcendence immanences itself.’ This idea of the divine or transcendent revealing itself in the material or subjective world is one embraced by a number of French thinkers, including Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Luc Marion and Paul Ricoeur. In the second part of this book, I will explore in more detail their contributions to this and related debates; suffice to say for now that Irigaray, as we saw in a previous discussion on theological ethics, speaks of a ‘sensible transcendental’ in which human beings are the physical mediators, and which is experienced ‘among us, within us, as resurrection and transfiguration of blood, of flesh, through a language and an ethics that is ours’.65 For Marion and Jean-Yves Lacoste, transcendence is seen to occur in all visibility, the example par excellence being the Cross. For Lévinas, transcendence is located not outside in an external phenomenon but in the heart of subjectivity itself. It is described as an ‘event that is not defined by or limited to anything other than the experience of the irruption of otherness in human life’.66 As suggested earlier, the distinctive feature of this transcendent/immanent dialectic, and which distinguishes it from other positions that describe immanence or materialism as ‘suspended’ from a higher transcendence, is the origin of transcendence in the visual, material and immediate. This original transcendence takes us back to the opening quotation for this chapter and the story of the discovery of the empty tomb as told in John’s Gospel. Mary Magdala’s statement ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have put him’ represents a literal but understandably deceptive reading of the visual. Simon Peter, who significantly enters the tomb first, ‘sees’ everything (including the layout of the tomb and the displacement of the linens) but his belief is suspended and then dissolves, not to be mentioned again. It falls to the beloved ‘other’ disciple to experience transcendence (belief) in the immanence of ‘seeing’ the linen cloths on the ground without the need to go into to the tomb and try to understand what had happened. Here, belief takes shape in the pre-immanence of seeing for the first time, with corroboration coming later in the phrase: ‘He saw and he believed’. Here, transcendence is sourced in the visual and material


signifier of linen, personified in the ‘other’ disciple and justified by divine love (‘the other disciple, the one Jesus loved’). In much of the discussion above, what has distinguished Vattimo from the Vatican on issues of culture, Being as Event and transcendence is the letter, the literal and literalism. In his removal of the conditions imposed by literality, Vattimo has opened out theological debate through concepts such as Being as Event, the Kingdom of the Sense, the non-metaphysical, historicity, contingency and transcendence as a direct heir of provenance. Next, I want to show how some of this thinking can be redirected towards new non-metaphysical ontologies and potentially radical theologies.

Vattimo and Foucault Vattimo’s philosophy has a clear religious derivation and ontology. Specifically, it has a vested interest in securing the relevance of the Christian message in the postmodern era. The return of religion, within the wider socio-cultural space, reinforces Vattimo’s philosophical currency and his continuing relevance to a contemporary post-secular French context. I would also contend that Vattimo’s ‘philosophy of actuality’ reflects a growing trend in Continental philosophy in which philosophers (some of whom I have mentioned above) have begun to engage with Christianity and its ideas in new ways. It is also the case, I would suggest, that this trend has inspired new ‘Christian’ readings of philosophers whom we don’t normally associate with Christianity. In recent years, and largely because of the pioneering work of Jeremy Carrette, connections have been made between Michel Foucault’s work and Christianity. In the conclusion to his work Foucault and Religion. Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality, Carrette identifies five ways of relating religion to Foucault: the integration of religion and culture, immanence and not transcendence, prioritisation of the body and sexuality, mechanisms of power and technologies of the self (by which he means religious government of the self).67 In view of what we have examined thus far in the philosophy of Vattimo, there are valuable comparisons to be drawn here with Foucault. But before looking at some of these similarities, I would first like to highlight the important differences which are primarily methodological and ontological. On a methodological level, and we need to be careful in this respect because of the developmental stages in Foucault’s treatment of religion from the 1960s through to the 1980s, Foucault’s central aim was to question the absolute authority of Christian discourse, particularly in the ways Christianity and institutional power and knowledge have been perceived to control humankind. This specific objective

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coincided with a wider one to free thought and knowledge from a perceived subjection to transcendence. However, it is important to recognise that Foucault’s critique of Christian discourse also bears witness to the centrality of Christianity in Western thought and ways of living. In this respect, his critique is also an investigation into the ways Christian practices (of confession, interiorisation, self-examination, austerity and selfrenunciation) have shaped (positively and negatively) modern concepts of the self and identity. To this degree, Foucault’s methodology is archaeological and historical, with history being seen not as something that imprisons subjectivity or consciousness, but rather as a vehicle to ‘show up, transform and reverse the systems which quietly order us about’.68 Foucault, we need to underline, was not addressing the return of religion as a new form of ontological salvation. In fact, Vattimo’s positive idea of Being as Event, inscribed in its historical, metaphorical and kenotic contexts, is erased by Foucault’s decentring of the subject and its ‘infinite becoming’, and by his critique of belief as a form of obedience and opening to transcendental otherness. For Foucault, belief has no significance other than as a practice that involves a power dynamic between subject and alterity; in short, transcendence for Foucault is simply about the here and now. However, Foucault’s apparent raw and material treatment of religion belies some revealing connections with Vattimo which in turn can help us build a consensus on which to advance alternative theological thinking. On the overarching philosophical point as regards the value of metaphysical thought, Vattimo and Foucault concur, with a subtle difference. They agree that the end of modernity has been accompanied by the end of metaphysics. But they differ in the focal point of this end and the consequences of it. For Vattimo, the focus is religion; for Foucault, the focus is humankind. Vattimo borrows from Nietzsche’s death of God on which he proceeds to build a positive and artistic revaluation of secularisation. Foucault replaces the death of God with the death of man, on which he proceeds to delete metaphysical thought as a consequence of the dissolution of the subject in modernity. Whereas Vattimo resignifies man within his Christian historicity as a fill-up to the vacuum of modernity, Foucault does not signify any Christian ontology in modernity’s dissolution, save the value of historical events as mechanisms of power (‘servants’) in the production of dependence. Methodologically therefore, Vattimo and Foucault share a common foundation in which they acknowledge in principle the death of modernity. But for Vattimo, the death of modernity becomes the reason for the rebirth of Christianity and man’s salvation, while, for Foucault, the death of modernity is the death of man and his exposure to the raw realities of power. In a similar debate


on reason, Vattimo explains the return of religion in the context of the decline of Enlightenment rationality and atheistic rationalism. Foucault concurs with an argument that highlights the illusion of reason in modernity’s attempt to divinise man. But their respective focus is again different. Vattimo sees the end of Enlightenment rationality as a justification for the return of religion. Foucault sees it as nothing more than the critique of reason as an uncontested form of knowledge and authority. As we have discussed, critical to Vattimo’s thesis is the argument that secularisation is the ‘essence’ of Christianity, in other words that out of dissolution, consumerism and sacralisation come kenosis and Christianity. For Vattimo, this amounts to a theology of secularisation, and this is central to the experiential, sensory and actual realisation of his philosophy. Foucault makes similar noises in his historical, practical and embodied approach to Christianity and belief, with the strong implication, as Carrette underlines, that ‘a sharp distinction between the secular and modernity cannot be sustained’.69 In fact, religious discourse for Foucault is located ‘in the very fabric of the secular’.70 However, as Carrette goes on to say, this ‘engagement in religious analysis’ is not designed to advocate a return of religion but is inspired ‘because he [Foucault] came to appreciate that the forms of knowledge, power and subjectivity animating western culture are constructed in decisive ways in argument with or acceptance of religious practices and concerns’.71 In fact, the fundamentally antiChristian message of Foucault is in stark contrast to that of Vattimo. And yet, while the respective philosophical ends are different, the means often converge, notably at the human level. The humanisation of theological debate, from the Vatican to Vattimo, also undergirds Foucault’s philosophy of religion. Henrique Pinto claims that theology for Foucault has little to do with a reality beyond, but is ‘about the politics of human living at the limits of knowing and at the limits of life itself’.72 James Bernauer highlights Foucault’s human theology in his representation of the pastoral (as opposed to doctrinal) role of religious discourse. He discusses the way the pastoral combines the embodiment of an ‘individualising power’ that is productive and not repressive, and also a confessional element in the way the pastoral operates as a self-scrutinising agent.73 For Bernauer, the reflexive imprint of Foucault’s human theology is central because it goes right to the heart of the ‘agonistic’ relationship between the human being and the forms of religious knowledge and power ‘that are allowed to operate on us’.74 This human level preserves the immediacy of resistance to knowledge (religious and other); in this, Foucault affirms the constancy of religion in its human but also political and cultural dimensions. But in no sense is the

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human a metaphor for kenotic identification with incarnational theology, as we have seen with Vattimo. On the contrary, the human for Foucault endorses the historicity and finitude of the decentred subject with the aim of erasing any higher or transcendental identification. In fact, the embodied ‘decentred’ self connotes what Foucault calls an ‘infinite becoming’ in the here and now. This particular notion is played out in Foucault’s analysis of discourse. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault disconnects discourse as a discursive and totalising field constructed on forms of continuity, influence, transmission and synthesis, and explores the idea that discourse is made up of a succession of dispersed events that are unique in their finitude, occurrence and contingency. There are several reasons for this methodology. One is to ‘rid ourselves’, as Foucault states, of the ‘reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative values, institutionalized types’ that underpin discourse. Also, Foucault seeks to deprive the ‘sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right’75 of control over discourse. For our purposes, however, the significance of his archaeology of discourse is to ‘reconstitute another discourse, rediscover the silent murmuring, the inexhaustible speech that animates from within the voice that one hears, re-establish the tiny, invisible text that runs between and sometimes collides with them’.76 And critically, the aim of this reconstitution is not just the unearthing of a new discourse, but rather the discovery of the actual essentiality of this discourse. Foucault states: ‘We must show why it could not be other than it was, in what respect it is exclusive of any other, how it assumes, in the midst of others and in relation to them, a place that no other could occupy.’77 The relevance of Foucault’s discourse analysis to religious debate is the way it opens up, via discourse as event, the historical contingency of discursive statement, the possibility of the irruption of the other underneath what we say (and thus in human life) and also the embodied nature of this relation to otherness. In other words, for Foucault, religion is not externalised as transcendence, but is assigned a limitless space as an event-like statement in dialogical practice and within the finite infinity of discourse. Religion, for Foucault, can be defined therefore as a state of eternal preparedness for its potential arrival, but crucially its existence in its occurrence only has legitimacy in its circumstantial conditionality, and not in its religious substance. Foucault states: We must be ready to receive every moment of discourse in its sudden irruption; in that punctuality in which it appears, and in that temporal dispersion that enables it to be repeated, known, forgotten,


transformed, utterly erased, and hidden, far from all view, in the dust of books. Discourse must not be referred to the distant presence of the origin, but treated as and when it occurs.78 A religious discourse, for Foucault, has the potential (and only the potential) to transform human beings. But, he is careful to guard against any form of substitution of one discourse for another, and, as I have suggested earlier, any validation of a return of religion in a salvific sense is outside his philosophical remit. However, it may be worth positing (as a testament to the constancy of the religious horizon and not its temporary return) a discursive and performative alternative to divine transcendence in Foucault in the pure description of discursive events. Whether in form of Being as Event or discourse as event, both Vattimo and Foucault agree unequivocally on the idea of a history of the present. As a concept that juxtaposes archaic past and present past, thought and practice, tradition and change and incarnation and kenosis, history of the present has a transformative, interpretive and restructuring function. One of its central uses, as we have seen, is to take history out of its literal and totalising discourse, and to review, in Graham Ward’s terminology, ‘the gathering of the differential logoi into the Logos’.79 In the context of theological debate, Vattimo and Foucault have opened up a way for a reinterpretation of theology in the history of human living and struggle. As a consequence, their reinterpretations of theology as historicity and discourse event challenge conventional and Christian representations of the body and sexual identity. Diverse notions such as ‘Being-in-the-World’, ‘Kingdom of the Sense’, Foucault’s aesthetic technologies of self-control and Radical Orthodoxy’s view of incarnation as a revaluation of gendered embodiment point to ways in which historicity and event can create a different discourse ‘about what individuals do with their sexed and gendered bodies, “with whom and where they are doing it”’.80 Foucault’s claim that sexuality is a cultural product and that it is discursively produced overlaps with Vattimo’s concept of Being as Event as a fluid structure that finds its significance in cultural and historical occurrence. However, whereas Foucault’s ideas have influenced directly radical theories of sexuality, Vattimo’s relevance to alternative sexual discourses is decidedly less obvious, although, at a push, his idea of the event-like character of Being does have some possible applications in the wider debate between constructivist and biological ‘knowledges’ of sexuality. Foucault’s legacy has been appropriated in more recent times by queer theologies. Jeremy Carrette claims that ‘Christianity and sexuality are anchored in the same religious symbolic of dualism and monotheism’.81

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He explores the way Christianity has established a definition of the self and truth ‘where truth of what we are is related to sex’. However, Carrette proceeds to subvert the Christian correlation between a single truth and a single sex (heterosexuality) by deploying the Foucauldian notion of sex as a cultural product and then queering it to disrupt foundations of the self, in order to create multiplicities of both self and desire. In the process, he inserts Foucauldian notions of historicity, contingency and the link between theology and cultural occurrence to question (queer) religion by undermining its monosexuality. Other queer theologies, again in debt to Foucault, seek to liberate sexuality from the perceived tyranny of ‘scientia sexualis’, by seeing in sexuality a form of subjugated knowledge that resists Christian ‘oppression’.82 In this context, Robert Goss, for example, takes Jesus’s identification with the victim and oppressed as a form of transgressive practice that challenges authority and representations of normativity.83 Carter Heyward links God and Eros in an attempt to create a proximity between the divine and its erotic immanence in human experience. In contrast to these sexually queer theologies where sexuality is active, positivised and inscribed in the body politic are other more passive theologies in which homosexuality is desexualised and the possibility of new relational forms are opened up. The ‘Foucault effect’ (as it has been described) is again evident in such queer theologies, of which Vasey, Heyward and Stuart are some of the key exponents, and where the promotion of friendship as a different type of relationship is a means by which gay people can inscribe themselves into a rewriting of Christian tradition. For Foucault, friendship offered a new relation for masculinity; as a ‘formless relationship’, friendship nevertheless proffered a ‘manner of being’ that was open to new possibilities. This ‘manner of being that is still improbable’84 coincided on a wider level with Foucault’s desire to create a gay life, ‘to become’ gay. Building on a radical reinterpretation of Christianity that eschews sexual categorisation (‘There can be neither male nor female – for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 2:3)) and sees in baptism a means of becoming ‘new people, with a new and radically different ontology’,85 combined with a queer theoretical reading that privileges fluidity and becoming over all forms of fixed or essentialised identities, we can see how Foucault’s concept of friendship as ‘a possibility for creative life’ can lend itself to theological queering. Key Foucauldian ideas underpin the queering of these theologies. Christianity as monotheism and monosexuality is set against a reinterpretation of sexuality as a power relation between ‘ars erotica’ and ‘scientia’, eros and God, friendship and formal relations. Critically,


however, at the centre of this and other queer theologies is the idea that the body in its fluid, sexually mobile, contingent and cultural historicity reconciles itself with the displaced, material and human body of Jesus Christ. As a process of embodiment and becoming in which all humanity can participate anew, queer theology is thus seen to transform culture, theology and who we are. From a Foucauldian perspective, this can only be a positive in that the legitimacy of the ‘unity’ of Christian discourse is suspended and dispersed. For Vattimo, queer can only but enhance the redemption and salvation of all humanity in Being as Event.


Part II Philosophy and Concepts

For Christ did not send me to baptise, but to preach the Good News, and not to preach that in the terms of philosophy in which the crucifixion of Christ cannot be expressed. St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 1: 10–13.17


4 The Postmetaphysical

True theology needs, therefore, ‘God without Being’. Theology needs to cease being modern theo-logy in order to become again theo-logy. Jean-Luc Marion God Without Being The example of Gianni Vattimo provides a fluid transition to the second part of this monograph. His work sheds lights on the reality of secularisation as a lived-in, historicist contingency, which at the same time offers a philosophical route out of secularisation in a philosophy of actuality founded on the kenotic incarnation of being. This real : philosophical trajectory mirrors the overarching contours of this book, from the sociopolitical and cultural effects of secularisation on religion in their republican, democratic, modern, postmodern, individualised and collective manifestations, to the sea change in Continental philosophy (mainly in France) that brought religion back into the fold of philosophical discourse. At the centre of this transition from reality to philosophy, from Part 1 to Part 2, is the critical conjuncture between the supremacy of the individual citizen (believer) in the 1980s and beyond, elevated by democratisation, relocated in post-secularism and renewed in his religious identity, and the philosophical erosion of this subject as cogito, only for this to lead to his salvific appropriation by new theo-logies. In Chapter 3, Vattimo demonstrated that, by means of what he called a ‘philosophy of actuality’, Christianity takes on a renewed, historicised significance that makes it accessible and reliveable to all humanity regardless of time, space or historical context. One of the key aspects of this kenotic philosophy is Vattimo’s critique of Heideggerian metaphysics which privileges a conception of Being over being, the idea that any comprehension of the world (finitude) or of religion (God/Infinity) is filtered through a 113

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presupposed and existing supremacy of a horizon of Being and its referential status as the benchmark for thought, reason and the primacy of knowledge. This concept of the horizon of Being has underpinned much Western philosophy over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, but, equally, according to some thinkers, it has served to widen the gap between philosophy (and its reliance on scientific rigour of proof and evidence) and theology (and the pre-existence of faith and belief). I will come to the specifics of this debate in more detail later in this chapter. But for the moment, I want to draw attention to it in a more general way. We recall, for example, how Régis Debray argued strongly for the link between faith and reason, albeit in a political context, in his recommendations to the French government on the teaching of religion in French schools. He also used this link as part of a connected argument to promote the professional and religious integrity of the French school-teacher as an integrated champion of the indivisibility of ‘témoin’ and ‘savant’. Similarly, John Paul II’s aptly titled encyclical Fides et Ratio and current Vatican thinking have also sought to underline the unique correlation between faith and reason. And yet, a situation has presented itself in which a significant number of contemporary theologians and philosophers of religion (Vattimo, Marion and Lévinas to name but a few) have sought to challenge the authority of this correlation by announcing the beginning of a postmetaphysical era where the primacy of the cogito and, by extension, reason is threatened by revelation- and phenomenology-based theologies. It is a debate that Pope Benedict XVI touched on in his speech at Ratisbonne in 2008 and which Michael Foëssel discusses at length in a recent article in Esprit.1 The historical context for the debate is the fractious relationship between theology and philosophy which I will discuss in detail shortly. In brief, the Pontiff defends what Foëssel calls a position based on ‘rationalist faith’ in which faith requires its own comprehension without any need for reason’s clarification. In the opposite camp, Foëssel highlights Hegel’s seminal 1802 text Faith and Knowledge, the aim of which was to reconcile revelation and philosophy within what Foëssel describes as a ‘absolute knowledge’ or ‘philosophical knowledge’. Pope Benedict has rejected Hegel’s attempt at reconciliation because, according to Foëssel, Hegel’s philosophy, along with that of Kant and Luther, sought to distinguish radically between faith and reason based on an interpretation of reason founded in science and proof. Unsurprisingly, the Pope’s point of reference in this debate is not the Enlightenment but the unchallenged unity of faith and reason under the Reformation. Foëssel, however, introduces the more problematic philosophical reasoning of Kant as a potential

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challenge to Pontifical indifference. Like Pascal, who recognised faith but could not access this faith via metaphysics or rationality, Kant believed in faith but this faith could only be authorised by theoretical reason (i.e. what cannot be known – God, for example). For Foëssel, Kant represents not an irreligious tendency in the debate on reason and faith but a potentially more worrying anti-theological trend where faith is seen to have a different object to reason; as such, faith is seen to go beyond experience whereas reason exhausts itself in the act of knowing. The significance, therefore, of Kant’s position for Foëssel is that, of all the theories influenced by Enlightenment rationalism, Kant’s is the most problematic for the Pope and Catholicism because it seeks to disconnect faith from truth. In short, the unity of faith and reason in Catholicism is questioned by the notion that faith may be good and valid but the truth of faith is inaccessible to the logical procedures followed by reason. Besides the potentially serious implications of Kant’s findings for Roman Catholicism, what concerns us are the immediate implications for the relationship between philosophy and theology. Foëssel concludes that philosophy is by essence agnostic and should renounce all ties with revelation- and reason-based theologies. This and subsequent chapters will contest this conclusion. In the process, we will try to answer the question why recent Continental (French) philosophy has ‘turned’ theologically and what is the philosophical reasoning (if any) underpinning this turn. As Vattimo has suggested, one of the reasons for this shift towards the postmetaphysical is the advent of postmodernity in which the hegemony of reason under secular modernity has not only been dethroned but also been displaced across a more diversified and egalitarian landscape. In a religious context, as we have seen, this has led to the growth of new religiosities. But it has also led to a split in the way reason and faith correlate in theological discourse in postmodernity. In the foreword to his work God Without Being, Jean-Luc Marion identifies two main strategies in contemporary theology:

One classic modern theological strategy wants to correlate the claims of reason and the disclosures of revelation. The other strategy believes that reason functions best in theology by developing rigorous concepts and categories to clarify theology’s sole foundation in revelation. On this second view, since revelation alone is theology’s foundation, any attempt at correlation is at best a category mistake – at worst, an attempt to domesticate the reality of God by means of reason and being.2

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Marion’s implied critique of a reason-based theology is multifaceted, but one of its principal concerns is the established link between reason and metaphysics. In the preface to God Without Being, David Tracey argues that ‘Reason, for Marion, is capable of thinking Being. But reason is not capable of iconically disclosing God, except within the confinements of Being. For Marion, true theology, focussed iconically on God’s excessive self-revelation as Love, needs to abandon all the metaphysics of the subject which have defined modernity.’3 On the one hand, Marion acknowledges a debt to metaphysics as a philosophical method, but, on the other hand, he denies both reason and Being in correlation with revelation. I will address in more detail Marion’s phenomenological alternative and the importance of the critical distinction between icon and idol for his theology in my section on the ‘concept’ of God. For now, it may be useful to see how Marion can be situated within a wider postmodern, postmetaphysical and post-Heideggerian attempt to ‘think’ religion and God outside the traditional horizon of Being, and inside the horizon of God’s own self-revelation as Agape. This prelude to Marion’s theological method sets the tone for this chapter because it identifies in the separation of metaphysics from the postmetaphysical the distinction often drawn between philosophy and theology. In the opening section of this chapter, therefore, I will explore this relationship from two perspectives. Firstly, I propose to outline the reasons for the perceived separation of these two disciplines, with a particular focus on the proceedings of a conference held at the Sorbonne in 1931 under the auspices of the Société Française de Philosophie on ‘La notion de philosophie chrétienne’. Secondly, from a more recent context, I examine the differences of opinion between key theologians and philosophers of religion on the relevance of the metaphysical tradition, with the ironic eventuality of established theologians defending the value of metaphysics in an attempt to reconcile faith and philosophy, and other philosophers (like Marion and Lévinas) encouraging their dissociation. This discussion will form the basis for a more detailed analysis of a current debate in France, inspired by a recent 2006 issue of Critique titled DIEU, on the ‘concept’ of God. The question to be addressed in this second section is whether God can be developed outside of a doctrine of Being (reason, explanation, in short metaphysics) or whether there are other modes of communication beyond the so-called limits of metaphysics (via notions of gift, givenness, faith, self-sufficiency of revelation and the Other). In the third section, I develop the insights of a postmetaphysical engagement with God by looking at how contemporary French thinkers have embraced, in different ways, phenomenology (as method


and as content) as a way out of metaphysics. This development has, in itself, ignited a debate in France on the use of phenomenology for theological purposes. In the final section, this relationship between phenomenology and the postmetaphysical reaches its complete expression in an analysis of the work of Lévinas.

Philosophy and theology: a brief history In his article ‘Religion after Detraditonalisation: Christian Faith in a PostSecular Europe’, Lieven Boeve discusses the ‘new visibility of religion in Europe’.4 By this, he means the multifaceted religiosity of our times and the changes that have taken place in the way individuals are engaging with God. He argues that religion in contemporary Europe is aligned with a metamorphosis of God, specifically in the way God is seen to relate to history and society, and also how ideas of holiness are being revealed in new ways. We have seen examples of this metamorphosis in Vattimo’s historicised approach to Christianity. Boeve’s thesis is to examine how this new transformation of religion sits alongside traditional theology. His main concept of ‘interruption theology’ (the notion that continuity and discontinuity are in correlation) is based on the idea that there cannot be a reconciliation between past and present, but that both need to be kept in equal tension, and on the condition of a ‘new self-consciousness and profiled Christian faith open to dialogue and challenged by otherness’.5 While careful not to disparage traditional theology and doctrine, Boeve, like Karl Rahner (whom he cites regularly as an exponent of religious diversity), wants to balance the virtues of traditional theology in respect of the givens of grace and faith against the need to embrace what postmodernity can offer in respect of ‘laying bare the traces of God, of “divine Presence”, in the religiosity of our times’.6 However, Boeve’s ‘interruption theology’ points to tensions, other than those posed by postmodernity, which are more endemic to the history of theology itself. Traditionally, theology has been seen as a sub-category of philosophy, having lingered under what Lévinas has called the ‘vassalage’ of metaphysics and its conceptualisation of God.7 Joeri Schrijvers in ‘On Doing Theology “After” Ontotheology: Notes on a French Debate’ outlines philosophy’s historical tendency to think God metaphysically. Philosophy, he says, prefers controllable, foreseeable and present objects. Theology and ontotheology (a more ‘philosophical’ and advanced version of the former) deal traditionally with belief, faith and invisible things. However, Schrijvers brings to light a deep-seated division between philosophy and theology at the centre of which is not only the primacy

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of Being as a methodological premise but the very existence (condition) of a philosophical premise within theology. Philosophy has traditionally undermined (onto)theological ‘speculation’ by implying that, if theology is to be taken seriously as a methodology with claims to truth, it must firstly recognise/encounter the horizon of Being (cogito) through which it can then reasonably claim to explain God. (Onto)theology, however, by its very nature, implies a forgetting of Being because it defers all meaning and being to God Himself and Revelation. For Schrijvers therefore, what is at stake here is the freedom of (onto)theology to set its own revelationbased strategy outside the historical tutelage of philosophy. In the second part of the article, he also describes how philosophy has historically claimed exclusive rights to ownership of reality. He charts how the trajectory of philosophical enquiry (deciding in advance – from its base in finitude : infinitude) not only privileges the immanence of reality and lived experience as benchmarks for philosophical and religious reflection, but also how it has used God (specifically the ‘concept’ of God) to found and justify finitude, as well as give reason to the horizon of Being. He states: ‘God saves the finite system from its own contingency and incoherence’.8 (Onto)theology, on the other hand, is perceived to obviate finitude in projecting meaning directly towards God and Infinity. The clear implication of Schrijver’s article is that philosophy appears to have a monopoly on Being, immanence and finitude, and that (onto)theology does not take Being, reality and finitude seriously. However, this implication is scotched by a series of examples drawn by Schrijver from the works of Marion, Lacoste and in particular Lévinas. It is an important article in this respect because it exposes a philosophical myth that the trajectory of (onto)theology is exclusively transcendent. Schrijver’s conclusion helps redress this perception by demonstrating that transcendence is not that which occurs in spite of or outside of finitude, but rather that finitude can be a vital starting point in the way it signals transcendence. To this degree, the common denominator among new philosophers of theology like Marion, Lacoste and Lévinas is their attempt to redo theology by ‘refiguring the subject’s adherence to being as a decentering that is not contaminated or as a transcendence...without residue or perturbation by Being or immanence’.9 Schrijver’s article confirms the wider perception about the way philosophy, under the yoke of metaphysics, has (mis)represented theology in tow to transcendence. But as Boeve suggests above, the metaphysical tradition may need to be reviewed in the light of post-secularism and postmodernity. It could be argued for instance that postmodernity has brought about a correction to the rule of metaphysics in philosophy.


Traditionally, metaphysics has placed not only the ‘is’ of Being but also the ‘Godhead’ of God under the control of Reason, whether in the form of a cogito or in the form of an Idea or a Concept. This metaphysical presupposition has been rendered powerless and empty by postmodern attempts to deconstruct reason and equalise difference. Klaus Hedwig, for example, in his article ‘The Philosophical Presuppositions of Postmodernity’, points to the way this metaphysical collapse has been turned into a positive. He claims that for the postmoderns, this ‘“metaphysical emptiness” is the affirmatively accepted “room for existence” in which one can plan and live out one’s life in a plurality of ways without being hemmed in by a central meaning or by boundaries’.10 In their different and muted ways, Boeve, Schrijvers and Hedwig are calling for a new accommodation between philosophy and theology. In sketching the broad contours of a new theological direction (in phenomenology, as we shall see) as exemplified in their treatment of contemporary philosophers of religion, they present their respective cases based on two key observations; the emergence of postmodernity (in which metaphysics appears to have lost its authority), coupled with the re-routing of transcendence away from its exclusively infinite focus towards inside immanent reality. We will see more clearly examples of this in the next section when the debate on the conceptualisation of God, formerly a classic division between philosophical scepticism and theological faith, is redressed from new philosophical (postmetaphyiscal) and phenomenological perspectives. We have thus far represented philosophy and theology as opposites based on perceived irreconcilable differences between faith and reason, seeing and believing, and a metaphysical tradition that has consistently devalued notions of faith and subjective passivity. The history of this split has been well documented by eminent theologians (including former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) and flagged up in multiple preambles to academic guide books on philosophy. The new phenomenologies that I will examine in the course of this chapter and beyond will, for the large part, continue this historical split between philosophy and theology, specifically at the level of a rejection of Western philosophical thought and its presuppositions on meaning, intelligibility, rationality and, as Lévinas says, ‘not having to think beyond what belongs to “being’s move”’.11 But they will also advance beyond this split by espousing new philosophical (phenomenological) methods for theological purposes. In other words, the accommodation that we will discuss between philosophy and theology will be validated more so at the point of methodology and less so at the point of content (without of course

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diminishing the substance of the content). This will allow Lévinas and others to explore philosophically (as method) the relation between being (in its particular and present consciousness dimensions) and the Other (as human partner and Infinity) without the burden of a metaphysical (content) filter through which this relation must pass. The idea therefore that metaphysics is seen to get in the way between philosophy and theology by privileging Universal Being over particular being is one of the overarching concerns of this chapter and of what I call the postmetaphysical. However, it is also important to point out for historical reasons that theology has not always rejected metaphysics. Indeed, prior to what has been coined the recent ‘theological turn’ of French phenomenology, there were attempts, even among Catholic theologians at the height of secular modernity, to defend the role of metaphysics in theological discourse. Cardinal Ratzinger (the current Roman Pontiff) was one of the key exponents of this defence while a regular contributor to the Catholic journal Communio during the mid 1980s. In an article titled ‘Faith, Philosophy and Theology’, he outlines the early origins of the opposition between philosophy and theology and rehearses the standard differences in respect of philosophy’s attachment to reason and its ‘natural’ foundation, while theology (faith and revelation based) is oriented towards a ‘supernatural’ foundation. He writes that in philosophy, knowledge can be gathered from reason and as such can be gathered without the teaching of revelation. It achieves its certainty exclusively from argumentation, and its statements have only the value of the arguments presented in their defence. Theology is the examination of God’s revelation in an attempt to understand. It is faith which seeks insight [ . . . ]. Philosophy has been assigned to the area of pure reason and theology to the area of revelation. This distinction has left its impact on the understanding of both the one and the other until this day.12 Further differences highlighted by Ratzinger include philosophy’s rejection of an a priori to thought (i.e. faith), while theology is seen to reject the a priori of philosophical knowledge because it can be viewed as a threat to the purity and newness of faith. Ratzinger argues in favour of a ‘methodological inter-relationship’ between the two in order to dispel some of the preconceived myths (generated, he claims, by Martin Luther and Karl Barth) about philosophy’s incapacity to ‘believe’ and its corruptive influence on theology. In effect, Ratzinger argues that theology


needs the methodology of philosophy and in particular the horizon of metaphysics, while philosophy needs to be open to faith and ‘oriented from within to enter into dialogue with the message of faith’.13 In a threefold defence of their mutual dependence, Ratzinger claims firstly that theology and philosophy are supported in their joint orientation towards the fundamental questions about man ‘which are posed by the phenomenon of death’.14 Death, articulated by faith in terms of resurrection, is described by Ratzinger as part of a wider response to ‘understanding the being of man in the totality of reality’.15 In other terms, Ratzinger implies that theology’s (faith’s) questioning of life and death only gets an answer if it tries to direct the answer towards an intelligible relationship to the original question and ‘not some abstruse utterance about some unknown place in some unknown future’.16 For Ratzinger, this involves the relationship between the action of man and the immutability of reality and between ‘history and ethos’. In short, Ratzinger claims that there needs to be dialogue between human thought and the a priori of faith if one is to avoid the separation of both into ‘rigidly philosophical or theological treatises’. The second defence advances the idea that faith makes a philosophical assertion when it confesses to the existence of God, an assertion that goes beyond any religious ‘community’ or denomination, and which represents a statement about ‘reality in and of itself’. What this means is that faith is not seen as simply about subjectivism or withdrawal, but makes sense when it goes beyond the mere symbolism of religion and connects with the ‘common reason of humanity’.17 Finally, Ratzinger brings reason and faith together as integral components in a philosophical and theological reciprocity: It follows that faith must be open to philosophical debate, starting with the question of God. When it abandons its claim to reasonableness in its fundamental expressions, it does not become a purer form of belief but betrays one of its fundamental characteristics. The same is true for philosophy if it wishes to be true to its own task: it must respond to the demands of faith about the ultimate questions of the nature of death and the meaning of life.18 Ratzinger’s stance against the conventional theological opposition to metaphysics and his argument to link faith with philosophical enquiry have overtones in the work of the French philosopher Maurice Blondel. In his celebrated work Qu’est-ce que la foi?, Blondel, like Ratzinger, exposes the myths of faith as trust in some indemonstrable truth and as something that cannot be known scientifically. On the contrary, faith is

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described as part of a combination of subjectivism and method in which there is a need to balance what he calls the intellectual and the voluntary. He writes: Belief is no longer founded only upon indirect arguments or an entirely subjective decision. It simultaneously results from the nature of real being and the method of our thought. For, on the one hand, “by advancing in our reflections we find that being as such is not knowable by pure reason and that this deficiency is not due to a failure of thought”. This is so whether in itself and in its interior plenitude being transcends what our knowledge can define and measure (and in fact, none of us yet knows all that he is, it has not yet appeared what we are), or whether “the implicit [knowledge] being the law for all that is living, imperfect and finite, there cannot be explicit knowledge of it for us except in the abstract”. On the other hand, belief expresses the natural and vital operation, the total orientation of the thinking and the acting being “who goes for the truth with all his soul – or better still, of the being who knows and assimilates being with all his being, spirit, heart and body”.19 And he continues: By this doctrine which deepens and restores the full notion of faith we are led to understand the diversity, the balance of elements which enter into this form of knowledge, a form infinitely more rich, more rational, more realist than abstract rationalism would allow one to suppose. It is by faith that, in the present conditions of our reasonable activity, we enter, if it can be so expressed, into the intimacy of other beings, beings no longer considered as simple objects defined by logical contours, but as subjects endowed themselves with interiority, full of potentialities, originators of action, and, with regard to us, sources of obligations and possessors of rights. All the more is this so if it be a question of the Being of beings, of the first cause, of God whom reason proves and knows with certitude that he is.20 I have quoted Blondel at length because his ‘definition’ of faith highlights, more than Ratzinger’s more general assessment, the complex depth of the relationship between faith and reason (theology and philosophy) and, also crucially for Blondel, the origin and dynamics of the relationship. It is clear that Blondel identifies on the side of theology (faith) the inspiration for a greater understanding of God, an inspiration


endowed with its own reasoning capacity (superseding any abstract philosophical rationalism) which in turn leads to its own ‘form of knowledge’. Blondel rationalises faith, not in an abstract sense, but in a practical way that allows the believer to enter into both the real world of other people and also the ‘invisible world, to realise the presence of God, to wait for his visit, to deliver oneself over to him, to abandon oneself into his hands’.21 But for Blondel, it is not sufficient to adhere reasonably to God: ‘Let it not be said here that we have a certain knowledge of God by reason and that our faith can find a beginning of support in this natural notion.’22 Blondel dismisses the simple invocation of a metaphysical trust in the God of reason. Two things must complement this ‘natural notion’ for it to bear fruit. The first is a natural adherence to the supernatural, which Blondel describes in terms of an openness to recognisable ‘signs’ from God, ‘divine facts which have a meaning . . . which refer to the invisible intention of their author’,23 and which warrant a welcoming from all one’s being to the unseen divine reality, ‘to the grace that is refused to no one’.24 Secondly, it is necessary that will intervenes not only to consent to a judgement already made, but in order to bring about the assent of the mind and contribute intrinsically to the certitude of the affirmation of faith. In this light, he defines faith as the ‘certitude of the mind voluntarily inclining itself’.25 Writing just after the turn of the twentieth century, Blondel’s vision is a prime example of an earlier tradition in which theology in the form of faith and philosophy in the shape of intellectual and moral process find common purpose. I would point out however that in Blondel’s definition of faith the balance between what he calls ‘interiority’ (where God makes himself present in the person) and method of thought is heavily skewed in favour of the former, with greater emphasis on faith incorporating its own indigenous knowledge and will playing a pre-eminent role in guiding faith towards reason. On the one hand, Blondel’s definition is prudent in that he does not tinker with the fundamental notion (a theological given) of faith as an expression of truth that comes not only from beyond but also from within the self; on the other hand, he engages with metaphysical discourse that sees faith as part of a synthesis of supernatural gift and reason (without the latter ‘being rationally deducible’).26 Blondel was to become a key figure in a national debate between theology and philosophy at this time. At a conference in the Sorbonne hosted by the Société Française de Philosophie in 1931 on the question of a ‘Christian Philosophy’, Blondel along with other participants (Fernand Van Steenberghen and Emile Bréhier in particular) questioned the very

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premise of the conference. There was little disagreement over Christian philosophy existing ‘accidentally’ or ‘coincidentally’. But to propose a Christian philosophy with a tradition of established links between philosophy and Christian revelation was a different matter altogether. Unfortunately, I do not have enough space in this chapter to examine in detail individual contributions from the conference. Suffice to say, however, that the debate was addressed from a wide range of perspectives (Scripture, ecclesiastical authority, thematic analysis and historical exegesis). Bréhier argued against the proposition, claiming that Christianity had never contributed to the evolution of philosophy, and thus any attempted rapprochement between the two was invalid right from the start. Blondel and Van Steenberghen, for their parts, insisted in principle on a separation between Christian belief and philosophy on the grounds of methodological incompatibility. In the wider sense, what this conference reveals is that, while the passions have long since cooled, the implications of the debate in respect of a possible reconciliation between philosophy and theology have continued. Furthermore, it is from the perspective of theology and its attempts to resurrect the metaphysical link between the two that closer affinities have been made possible. In his article ‘The Terms of the Debate over “Christian Philosophy”’, Mark Jordan subverts the terms in which the debate was originally addressed by saying, firstly, that the debate about ‘Christian Philosophy’ became in fact a debate more about the status of philosophy than it did about Christianity. In other words, for Jordan, the debate actually highlighted certain presuppositions about philosophy (ambiguity over the word ‘philosophy’ and the way philosophy had historically undermined theology) which may have clouded judgements and ultimately prejudiced outcomes in respect of an objective response to the debate. Secondly, the detail of his argument consists of deferring any solution to the ‘problem of the unity of philosophy’ by reversing the original terms of the binary (what philosophy can bring to theology) and proposing to come at the question of ‘Christian Philosophy’ from the angle of Christianity. We have seen in Ratzinger’s analysis how the differences between philosophy and theology have not only characterised historical relations but also undermined any recent attempts to bring the two together. However, like Ratzinger, although in more substantial detail, Jordan argues that there is nothing to be gained in pursuing Christianity’s supposed anti-metaphysical ‘bias’ against philosophy. For Jordan, it becomes an obligation of theology (Christianity) to broach the two disciplines. For example, he claims that ‘Christianity presents an alternate way-of-life which promises to fulfil philosophy’s own desires better than


philosophy itself ever could’.27 ‘Christianity’, he goes on to say, ‘undoes the delicate limitation of the Greek philosophies in the promise of an eternal possession of beatitude by divine gift’. He continues: What philosophy promised but could not provide, that is now given forth in the person of Christ. Christianity is the fulfilment of philosophy, but thus also the decisive rejection of philosophy as an end in itself. Christianity heals and completes the work of the mind, thus rendering philosophy no longer an end, but an intermediary, a pedagogue on the way to a higher truth. Greek philosophy had always treated the liberal arts as propaedeutic to revelation. The end of philosophy, judged by philosophy’s own promises, is to be found in Christianity.28 Jordan’s interpretation of Christianity as extending the life of philosophy, transmuting it and redefining it as no longer final, is part of Jordan’s wider mission for a new theological/philosophical relationship which ‘re-inscribes the concerns of philosophy within an expanded and actual teleology’.29 Jordan calls this a process of ‘overcoming’ where Christianity transforms the teleology of philosophy at three levels: personal expectation (‘the believer comes to philosophy with the hope of a personal, immortal contemplation of God’), personal motivation (‘the believer undertakes philosophy in response to God’s will, as a means of sanctification’) and at the level of the discourse of philosophy itself (‘the believer can no longer regard philosophy as the final discipline in the hierarchy of knowledge’)30. It is a process, however, not without its difficulties because, as Jordan indicates, there is a perception that philosophical ‘truths’ are subject to or denied by Christianity’s newly acquired ‘philosophical dogmatism’, or that ‘the human authorship of philosophy is superseded by the divine authorship at the origin of theology’.31 But Jordan does qualify his defence of Christian philosophy by underlining the need to strike a balance between acknowledgement of the debt to philosophy and the confession of ‘the final disclosure in Christ’. This balance, he states, cannot be reached ‘without entering into philosophical enquiry’. In other words, as we have demonstrated throughout this section, theology is not self-sufficient nor can it rely solely on blind faith. Theology commands reflection insofar as it demands faithful acceptance by an intelligent creature. Jordan concludes: What theology has in faithful certainty from revelation, Christian philosophy has in the character of its contemplative inquiry. Theology

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wants constantly to have the cognitive character of philosophy; philosophy wants always to know the objects set forth in theology. The two partial pedagogies move towards one another in their different ways.32 Jordan’s re-assessment of the 1931 Christian Philosophy debate, and his new rapprochement between theology and philosophy, reverses a trend which once reified the differences between these disciplines. By progressing beyond them through what he calls ‘the unitary love for wisdom, which is the origin in human constitution of philosophy, theology, and every other knowledge’, Jordan paves the way for alternative (postmodern and postmetaphysical) approaches to the theological/philosophical binary. However, we need to bear in mind that Jordan’s stance is a personal one, and one inspired by a Christian ethos, and its impact on the wider debate may be minimal. In fact, in my next section on the recent debate in France on the ‘concept’ of God, divisions between theology and philosophy have resurfaced to challenge this new-found reciprocity. In particular, these divisions have brought into question the integrity of the philosophical method, with the effect that there is a growing perception that philosophy has been (mis)appropriated by new phenomenologies designed to override scientific rigour in the exclusive service of (onto)theology.

The ‘concept’ of God The idea of the ‘concept’ of God is inextricably linked to Nietzsche’s death of God as recounted in Thus Spake Zarathustra. In this text, Zarathustra’s pronouncement that ‘God is Dead’ means that the alleged transcendent God had never existed except as an idea in the human mind. As such, God is no longer meaningful to human beings because they are now aware that this belief is the product of their own needs, desires and imagination. The conventional interpretation of Zarathustra’s legacy to twentieth-century philosophy is that of the supremacy of human reason over transcendence: ‘I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the overman may hereafter survive’.33 For Nietzsche, human reason becomes a by-product for a newfound trust in ‘ego’, the ‘body’ and the ‘earth’, all of which represent ‘the measure and value of things’.34 Zarathustra’s atheism is founded not only on human reflective creativity and its own values but also on a metaphysical authority that privileges a negative conceptualisation of God


based on reason. This conceptualisation derives its authority from the primacy of the horizon of Being. Christianity and theology have naturally contested Nietzsche’s vision. However, a recent issue of the journal Critique in 2006, titled DIEU, brought together a series of articles that shed a different light on the standard Nietzschean legacy, while also serving as a useful barometer of recent changes in theology and philosophy on the question of God. ‘God is not the question but the response’ is the opening line of its editorial, and this line sets the tone for an enquiry into two possible interpretations of its significance. One is that the existence of God presupposes his pre-existence which in turn implies that God is ‘anterior’, ‘given’, ‘in the already there of his Presence’.35 The second view posits God ‘after the fact’, a reaction to an event or trauma, or an invocation that comes after an experience of emotional or physical pain. The first is a religious interpretation, the second is materialist. Regardless of the respective interpretative value, the co-editors Pedro Cordoba and Alain de Libera concur that both interpretations suppose ‘the already thereness’ of God and therefore ask their contributors for ‘a response to this response’. Starting from the position that modernity, as the era of the metaphysics of secularisation and the rationalisation of the divine, has been overtaken by a new re-legitimisation of the question of God, Olivier Boulnois in his article ‘Dieu: raison ou religion’ calls for an end to the conceptualisation of God based on reason. The ‘concept’ of God, he maintains, is still a valid question (indeed he suggests there is a need for a concept of what religion calls God), but only in as much as this conceptualisation serves to dissipate lies and facilitate the recognition of a God that is beyond conceptualisation. For Boulnois, beyond conceptualisation implies a knowledge of God as Revelation which can only be understood in the context of pre-existence: ‘Knowledge of God . . . can only be understood from this idea: a return to the source of my being whilst recognising that this source exceeds my possibilities, that it constitutes me, and that it is through another that my being arrives in me’.36 This knowledge can only be achieved via a dialogue between reason and faith, with faith being the linchpin (or response) to the transcendence of a call and a promise that precedes it (i.e. God). In other words, for Boulnois, it is faith that connects us to the invisible God that precedes us. In this, Boulnois adheres to the first interpretation presented by Critique in its editorial; but equally, Boulnois’s response undermines radically the conventional Nietzschean legacy of God’s reception not only by positing the existence and pre-existence of God, but also by using reason to argue for the necessity of a concept of

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God in order to ultimately surpass reason: ‘One can no longer debate the question of religion “within the limits of reason”, or from the point of view of the single autonomy of a rational subject. Rather, one must realise that the subject is instituted as a free being by other people, by law and by the transcendence that precedes him’.37 Boulnois’s advocation of a ‘concept’ of God in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of conceptual thinking of God is a variation on a theme in this issue of Critique. Cyrille Michon in his article ‘Il nous faut bien un concept de Dieu’ defends, on the one hand, the relevance of a concept of God on the grounds of common sense, of the need to ‘name’ God and of the notion that God’s very possibility supposes a concept. He argues that the atheist also depends on a concept of God in order to confound the latter’s existence. On the other hand, he raises concerns about a ‘concept’ of God in the context of proof of existence, empiricism and how conceptual thinking is based on the human apprehension of ‘things’. Michon goes on to draw two conclusions. The first is that reason-based concepts of God are inadequate to the ideas that some believers have of God, which usually fit into the omniscient, all-powerful and mighty categories. The second, which draws on detailed exegesis on Aquinas’s understanding of God via negation and relation, situates God in between ‘a concept of a faultless God and a concept that makes way for limits, deprivation, in truth loss’.38 This second conclusion (‘a kenosis’) places God within a thought system of incarnation. Michon describes this ‘concept’ of God as ‘a thought like that of a creative God who chooses to limit himself...a thought of the incarnation of God made man’.39 For Michon, God lies somewhere in between the two ‘concepts’ of faultless perfection and human imperfection. Common to both Boulnois and Michon is a dissatisfaction with purely reason-based (metaphysical) concepts of God. Boulnois insists on a faith supplement that preserves the link to pre-existence. Michon places emphasis on the kenotic recognition of God’s fallibility as human. Quentin Meillassoux adopts a different and radical ‘conceptualisation’ of God that ties in neatly with the non-metaphysical and with the editorial’s call for a response. Meillassoux’s thesis is based on ‘divine inexistence’. Divine inexistence implies two things: the inexistence of a religious God (a metaphysical concept in fact) and the divine quality of inexistence. The latter vision, a variation on Irigaray’s divine immanence, opens up the idea that reality discloses the virtual possibility of a God yet to come. Meillassoux’s approach is inspired by his aim to move away from the stagnating duality of a debate on whether God exists or not, and reconnect God to a virtual God who can exist. He writes: ‘It is a


matter of claiming that God is possible – not in a subjective and real sense (in the way that I would claim that it is possible, although uncertain, that God really exists), but in an objective and future sense (in the way I would say that God can really be produced in the future)’.40 God, he goes to say, must be ‘thought’ as a contingent effect of chaos and as eternally possible. However, critical to Meillassoux’s thesis is the distance he establishes between a concept of God based on a metaphysical philosophy (‘founded on the principle of reason that alone gives access to the absolute’) and a speculative philosophy (‘a divinology’) ‘that bestows on thought the capacity to access the absolute’.41 The subtle difference is the way metaphysics relies on the principle of reason to access God, while speculative philosophy leaves the path to God open. If we take a step back and situate these responses in the context of Nietzschean legacy, we can see how contemporary thinking in France has reopened the ‘God is dead’ debate, contested its significance on the basis of its metaphysical and conceptual authority and actually proposed alternative ‘concepts’ of God based on faith, kenosis and virtuality. But there remains one area where the Nietzschean legacy has come up against a backlash. Meillassoux’s theory of divine inexistence (in its first interpretation) has echoes of Nietzsche’s concept of the divine as value. Zarathustra spoke: ‘Yes, for the game of creating values, my brothers, there is needed a holy Yes to life: its own will, will now the spirit; his own word wins the world’s outcast.’42 In retaining the divine (devoid of God), Nietzsche intended to use it as a value to create his own ‘terrestrial’ meaning to life: ‘You look aloft when you long for exaltation; and I look downward because I am exalted.’43 But some contemporary thinkers have taken issue with Nietzsche’s substitution of the divine with value, and in the process his reduction of the divine to human form. Barbara Stiegler challenges the implications of a divine humanity that rids transcendence of its divinity and which precludes a different experience of the divine (beyond morality, good and evil, and beyond reason). In her article ‘Réceptions de la mort de Dieu’, she identifies a trend towards ‘the anthropocentric reduction of the divine’44 that sustains man’s presumptuous self-sufficiency (founded on reason and metaphysics) and his will to power. She argues that Nietzsche’s death of God and his desire to preserve the divine as value have led towards a weakening, a ‘moralisation’ and the ultimate death of the divine, for which, she says, the Nietzschean legacy is partially to blame. But lest we forget, the Nietzschean legacy has also enjoyed a close history and affinity with recent French philosophical movements, notably deconstruction and its critique of logocentrism. Nietzsche’s death of

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God heralded not only a long period of atheism in Western culture but it reinforced the deconstructionist critique of the transcendental signified at the heart of logocentrism. However, as David Schindler has pointed out in his article ‘On the Meaning and the Death of God in the Academy’, this signified (God), while ‘dead’, still lingers on in new intelligible forms. Quoting Derrida, he states: The intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the word and the face of God. Of course, it is not a question of “rejecting” these notions; they are necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them [ . . . ]. The sign and the divinity have the same place and time of birth. The age of the sign is essentially theological. Perhaps it will never end.45 In associating the logos with the face of God, Derrida implies that intelligibility and meaning cannot outlive God but this does not prevent him from pursuing the death of God ‘as through an infinite nothing’.46 For Schindler, the point of his diversion via logocentrism and Derrida (traditional standard-bearer of the ‘death of God’) is to re-establish God as the foundation of meaning. But there are different ways of going about this, depending, for Schindler, on one’s interpretation of the word ‘foundation’. One meaning is ‘as it were, after the manner of the foundation for a house: that is, as something which is necessary for the support, but which nonetheless remains simply outside of or external to what it is that is supported’.47 However, this concept of foundation is flawed because it is mechanical and because ‘it remains essentially indifferent to – because simply outside of – the meanings, the inner structure or logic of the cosmos’.48 Schindler uses this critique of a ‘mechanical’ foundation of God to undermine liberal Christians who defend logocentrism and who ‘risk reinstating a God whose relation to the world will remain merely external’. The risk, he goes on to say, is that ‘these persons will continue to give both the sign and its theology the form of a machine, however much that machine might be refined and polished and dressed up’.49 Schindler describes this God as the mechanistic God who has truly died and who has ‘taken meaning with him to the grave’. On the one hand, Schindler’s critique of the mechanistic foundation of God has deconstructionist and Nietzschean overtones. On the other hand, it provides a platform on which to build an alternative meaning to the idea of ‘foundation’. Schindler’s concern from whence meaning will emerge projects him towards a new Christian creationism and


infinitism. Founded principally on an acceptance of the death of the mechanical God as Achievement, creationism and infinitism respectively resurrect a God who is creator and infinite in terms of providing a new form or logic: ‘God affects all of our meanings by giving them the form or logic of love [ . . . ]. What an authentic Christian creationism and infinitism requires is that the meaning whose identity has been assumed to be that proper to a machine be transformed into a meaning whose identity is rather that proper to love’.50 If meaning is to find its logos in love, Schindler qualifies this by claiming that it is only ‘from within relation’ that this love is expressible. What he means is that in the new meaning whose identity is now to be found in love, finite beings are no longer perceived as disconnected or self-sufficient identities. On the contrary, they are related to God and this ‘relation to God is “constitutive” of their finite being’.51 Schindler summarises the difference between the logic of the machine (with its paradigm in Descartes) and the logic of love (Mary’s fiat) as follows: What Mary’s fiat teaches us, in the context of Christian creationism and infinitism sketched above, is that all intellectual activity takes its origin, most fundamentally, in the “letting it be done according to the Word”: in letting it be, in helping being to be, in relation to the Word. Calling the logic of love Marian reminds us that its principle of relation is first and above all theological – Christological in meaning: all entities are relational because of – in and through – the relation to God the Father established in Jesus Christ. But that principle of relation is at once ontological in its reach, and thereby founds a comprehensive analogy in and of being; for the relation to the Father in Jesus Christ has been utterly freely passed on by Christ (through his Church in the Holy Spirit) to all of creation. In short, what we learn from within the Marian fiat is not only that the meaning of being is love, but that, in order fully to see this, we must ourselves be in love.52 What is apparent in many of these new responses to the question (death) of God, whether it be relationism, Marianism, faith, pre-existence, love or divinology, is, firstly, that they manage successfully to fly under the metaphysical radar. Contributions to Critique reveal the possibility of using a ‘concept’ of God to go beyond conceptualisation. In similar fashion, Schindler writing in Communio extends deconstructionism to ward off the dangers of logocentrism in order to redeploy a new logocentrism of love. Secondly, these responses have a common denominator that roots

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them in a pre-Nietzschean, premodern faith base which has the positive effect of ensuring religious significance in a constitutive sense. In this context, these responses serve as antidotes to postmodern nihilism and validate one of the central arguments of this book, namely the new-found and meaningful contribution of religion in its return to post-secular France. That said, the criterion of ‘responding to a response’ established by the editors of Critique for this particular issue does preclude any response other than the confirmation of a pre-existent God. It becomes merely a question for contributors of how this pre-existence manifests itself. At the outset of this section, one of our objectives was to ascertain whether an idea/concept of God could be developed outside metaphysics and the horizon of Being. The responses outlined above have shown that this is possible in various ways. However, as responses, they belie the extent to which they represent valid and sustainable philosophical methods. The aim for the remainder of this section (and chapter), is to investigate the credibility of a philosophical methodology (namely phenomenology) that, on the one hand, eschews the conventions (pitfalls) of reason, metaphysics and the horizon of Being, but, on the other hand, combines scientific rigour and theological truth. By way of transition, I would like to turn first to Jean-Luc Marion’s article in Critique titled ‘L’irréductible’. Here, Marion spells out in simple terms his ‘response’ to the question of God. He begins: ‘Every visible or conceptual representation, every spoken word, every definition of or on which one bases the name “God” has no access to God, and, at the same time, offers a perfect view of the person who produces and receives such ideas. In other words, everything comes back to the idea of the idol.’53 This notion of the idol (and its opposite, icon) is central to Marion’s phenomenology and theology. The idol limits the concept of God to a face, to the visible and to limits imposed by human reasoning: ‘the idol therefore always unveils a truth’.54 As such, Marion sees the idol as a concept that defines the presence of the divine or God without the necessary distance. It is a concept of God that reflects back to us our own experience and thought. Marion says: ‘It is always a question of keeping the foreignness of the divine out of play through the idolatrous filter of the concept or through the facelike conception of an idol.’55 The self-reflecting quality of the concept of God as idol has far-reaching implications for Marion’s critique of metaphysics. In the same way that conceptual idolatry of God says nothing about God and everything about the one who thinks in such a way, Marion extends the application to the ‘idolatrous character of metaphysics’ and the presumption of the ego to define God via a concept conceived by its own self-reflecting limitations.


In a related swipe, he takes issue with Western philosophy’s reliance on the idea or concept of God derived from the gravity of Being, its existence and its cogito through which conceptual vision is filtered. Marion contests this dependence on Being: If God ever reveals himself in our world, he will reveal that he is not there and that he no more exists there than he is not there. What God (and he alone) accomplishes under the names of creation and resurrection consists precisely in nullifying difference between being and not being, in overturning what is into what is not, in overturning what is not important into what is. Not only can the idea of ‘God’ undo itself from existence, but disqualification from existence qualifies God as such. So, whether it be he who denies ‘God’ or he who confirms him, both will get closer to God if they dispense him from existence. Because God surpasses all existence in himself and thus the idea of God puts existence in parentheses.56 Having exposed the dependence on Being through a vision of God indifferent to existence/being and in fact beyond existence, Marion continues to demystify human presumption to conceptualise God. He removes the parentheses from the word God as a way of reducing its idolatrous mythology. More significantly, in this ‘reconduction of “God” to God’, Marion is content to write about God in a language that reflects greater permanence, presence and history, but which at the same time resists reduction or comprehension: ‘The idea of God imposes itself and therefore remains’; ‘one must presuppose that a God without being is God’;57 ‘the irreducible imposes itself as irremediable, by virtue of the “impossibility of escaping God”’.58 Marion’s description of God as irreducible is linked to the other side of the idolatrous binary, namely icon. If idol abolishes distance between self and God through the availability of a God who is placed permanently within the fixity of a visible face, icon ‘preserves and highlights that distance in the invisible depth of an unsurpassable and open figure’.59 The difference between the two is not only between visibility and invisibility in relation to God. What is key is the nature of the distance which idol abolishes and icon maintains. While idol erases distance in favour of the face of God (which Marion has undermined as conceptually flawed and narcissistic), icon privileges distance as a space (both poetic and divine) where it is possible to discover oneself and the possibility of and longing for God. Marion’s iconic vision bears some similarities with Schindler’s relationism as a conduit between finite beings finding their identity constituted in

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relation with God. But Marion goes much further, particularly in his critique of a conceptual and metaphysical approach to God. In The Idol and the Distance, we see a more sustained critique of the role of metaphysics in philosophy. This critique is linked initially to his analysis of the identification of God with a discourse of proof, which, as we have seen above, attempts to appropriate God through scientific rigour and demonstration. It is also linked to a critique of philosophy, understood primarily in its essence as metaphysics, which Marion defines as ‘thinking Being, which coincides with no being’.60 In other words, philosophy’s preoccupation with Being (‘être’) over being (‘étant’) allows philosophy itself to be ‘thought’ in place of being. Metaphysics is also seen to privilege beings in their Being in a distinct way; it delivers the privilege of Being as presence, whereas being can only find its beingness in how Being is ‘bound up and expressed’.61 This leads Marion to question a philosophical method underpinned by metaphysics. He states: To take seriously that philosophy is a folly means, for us, first (although not exclusively) taking seriously that the “God” of ontotheology is rigorously equivalent to an idol, that which is presented by the Being of beings thought metaphysically; and therefore it means that the seriousness of God cannot begin to appear and grab hold of us unless, through a radical reversal, we claim to advance outside of onto-theology. One should give us credit for being fully aware that this undertaking is a folly and a danger, pretension, and vanity. It is not a question, as with everyone, of “overcoming metaphysics”, but of at least posing the question correctly: does the onto-theological idol, triumphant or ruined (it does not matter here) close all access to the icon of God as ‘icon of the invisible God’?62 Marion maintains that onto-theology, by which he means theology that is governed by conceptual thinking in relation to God (as in the statement ‘I believe in God’) and which is thus undergirded by a metaphysical foundation in Being, is not adequate for the way he wants to develop his alternative philosophical/theological method. This is not to imply that Marion dismisses philosophical metaphysics altogether. In fact, he guards against his own method being seen as a triumph over metaphysics. In other words, if we follow the implications of these two statements, we can see how Marion’s new methodology incorporates important elements essential to both philosophy and theology. On the onto-theological level (that is metaphysics applied to the understanding of God), Marion admits that its ‘territory’, its ‘marches’, its ‘borders’


and its ‘fortifications’ are entrenched in the traditional religious and theological mindset of Christianity, in respect of doctrine, dogma and the whole ethos of how God is perceived. To this degree, Marion’s strategy is not to discount onto-theology but to ‘advance outside it’, ‘travel through’ it and ‘take onto-theology tangentially, from the angle of its lines of defences’, with the aim of exposing ‘oneself to what already no longer belongs to it’.63 In layman’s terms, this strategy amounts to embracing theology from inside its own space and language by appropriating key theological ideas in order to take theological insight to new levels. It is a strategy that relies on Marion’s use of phenomenology to complete his alternative theological methodology. Before I examine how phenomenology can be seen (not only for Marion but also for Lévinas and others) as a way out of the metaphysics of Being and presence, I want to illustrate conceptually and linguistically some of Marion’s theological appropriations. The central one, from which the others take their ‘meaning’, is the figure of the icon. It is a figure accessible only through distance and filial relation, and is immune to idolatrous subjection of the divine to human experience. Once onto-theology’s conceptual idols are removed, this clears the space for the icon of God defined as an ‘encounter with the visibility of the invisible’.64 God, in this context, is self-showing; as such, God is not reliant on a metaphysical God or a transcendent ego, but only on that which appears truly as itself. God therefore is not seen as a concept by Marion but is seen more as an infinite, a possibility and an ability to be (not Be), in short a God Without Being. Another key appropriation is revelation. In the foreword to Marion’s work God Without Being, David Tracy states: ‘For Marion, revelation is the only possible and necessary foundation of any theology worthy of the name.’65 But crucially, revelation is traditionally harnessed to metaphysics. Marion’s understanding of revelation as ‘gift’, ‘excess’ and ‘selfrevelation’ reorients theology away from the onto-theological horizon towards a ‘revelation-centered . . . postmetaphysical theology’.66 Marion, in his preface, situates revelation, as he did the figure of the icon, outside of onto-theology and outside of Being and inside and unto itself: ‘God gives himself to be known insofar as He gives Himself – according to the horizon of the gift itself. The gift constitutes at once the mode and the body of his revelation. In the end the gift gives only itself, but in this way it gives absolutely everything.’67 In themselves, icon, revelation and gift provide only a brief measure of the contours of the post onto-theological territory for Marion and his methodology. But within each appropriation we can see the logic of his philosophical response,

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in particular the way appropriations are set up to juxtapose the respective values of Marion’s theological phenomenology and onto-theology (gift over concept, given over identity, receiving over metaphysics, present consciousness over collective self, passive subject over active autonomous subject and other over self).

The phenomenological breakthrough? Jean-Luc Marion and the concept of ‘givenness’ In a recent interview, Marion was asked whether there was really a need, given the historical weight attributed to philosophical investigation into the conceptualisation of God, to abandon metaphysics, and whether in fact a new metaphysical vision would not have been preferable to his theological phenomenology. His response was decisive: ‘I doubt that we should use the name “metaphysics” again – because “metaphysics” is directly connected to the question of Being, to the question of Being according to the privilege of the ousia.’68 He went on qualify this judgement by saying: ‘A metaphysical desire for God, yes. But not as a need to form a system, with grounds and causes and reasons and concepts that tend towards a “pantheism”’.69 With metaphysics as a philosophical system firmly rejected, Marion was free to think God beyond Being and subjectivity. Specifically, Marion locates thought in the idea of ‘givenness’ which he defines as the source and force of what is. ‘Givenness’ precedes subjectivity but it also gives identity; in this way, ‘givenness’ is seen to bestow being, not in the metaphysical sense as primary, but as secondary to the source and primacy of ‘givenness’. As John O’Donohue points out, critical to this idea of ‘givenness’ is ‘the capacity for response [ . . . ]; the deeper the response, the more fully the “givenness” shows itself’.70 In this important way, Marion develops the phenomenological possibility of a source in ‘givenness’ that has its own self, autonomy and ‘transitive reflexivity’; ‘givenness’ awakens in a subject his own autonomy and epistemology, with the depth of response to ‘givenness’ the ultimate measure of a subject’s epistemological veracity. Two early but vital events occur in the transition to phenomenology which have profound implications for the postmetaphysical. Being has been relocated away from the metaphysical subject to a ‘givenness’ that has its own activity/subjectivity from which new being will take its cue. Also, this phenomenon of ‘givenness’ ‘constitutes its own, unconditional, and irreducible self-showing [ . . . ]. The phenomenon is that alone which “appears truly as itself, of itself, and starting from itself, since it alone appears without the limits of a horizon, nor the reduction


to an I and constitutes itself, to the point of giving itself as a self”’.71 Phenomenology, for Marion, attaches itself to that which (historically) precedes subjectivity, what Thomas Carlson calls ‘the me that precedes the I’.72 This pre-subject is called to be (to birth) by the unconditional givenness of phenomenology, which in turn bestows upon him name and logos in the form of ‘gifts’. Phenomenologically, therefore, ‘givenness’ (and being) is founded on a call (or a ‘naïveté’ in the terminology of Jean-Yves Lacoste) to which there is a delayed response. Equally, theologically, a subject is born in response to a call of love from God ‘whom the subject can never identify or define in a name, but whom for this very reason the subject will name over and again’.73 One of the interesting corollaries of this exchange between ‘givenness’ and subject (and commensurate with our postmetaphysical trajectory) is the necessarily postmetaphysical nature of the language of exchange; in receiving language as a gift in response to the call, the subject’s capacity for discourse is controlled by its sender (‘givenness’), limited in message (if not dispossessed of meaning) and oriented exclusively towards the glorification of God. Carlson writes: ‘The subject who receives language fundamentally as gift never masters in language the fact of such givenness itself [ . . . ]. The subjectivity born in relation to that gift undergoes linguistically the Christological trial of a dispossession, death, and silence that open to a resurrection in the nonpredicative discourse of praise or prayer’.74 In effect, language signals the gift of ‘givenness’, but it also signals the distance between call and response. For Marion, this is another critical stage in his phenomenological method. Distance is given in order to be received, and in this exchange goodness, charity and love are received from God. But distance is also the space where metaphysics and concept are erased (‘distance escapes the ultimate avatar of a language of the object – the closure of discourse and the disappearance of the referent’)75 and where the theological subject, reborn, is delivered to himself. In the absence of metaphysics in distance, Marion champions it as a space of the unthinkable (the unknowable), where comprehension is replaced by a pure reception of ‘givenness’. Crucially, therefore, what happens through the receiving of the giving act is that the theological subject welcomes the act of giving, but this is only rendered fulfilling through the repetition of giving of oneself (to others).76 Phenomenologically, ‘givenness’ chooses us unconditionally; theologically, ‘givenness’ is received kenotically and repeated. This schematic description of Marion’s phenomenology and theology does however belie some tensions, which themselves have become the

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subject of a wider debate in contemporary French philosophy. These tensions do not relate to Marion’s separate treatment of phenomenology and theology (I will continue with the example of Marion for now, although other philosophers have been implicated) but specifically to their joint application. At a first glance, there are obvious structural similarities between Marion’s phenomenology and theology in the way ‘givenness’ as a phenomenon can be applied theologically. In his Introduction to Marion’s The Idol and the Distance, Carlson highlights one of these similarities: If I see the givenness of the phenomenon, which means if I give myself to it by repeating the act of giving, this is only because that givenness first gave me to myself and moved me to receive givenness in my very being; if I love God, which means if I give myself to him in the love that gives me to others, this is only because God first loved me even when I was not, and moved me to love in my very being.77 In the same way that the givenness of a phenomenon appears to determine the self and its external relations, so the givenness of God is seen to determine the love of God by the self and the self’s subsequent love of others. But beyond the immediacy of this philosophical/theological application, there is a broader concern which relates to the process by which and the reasons why theology appears to have been grafted on to phenomenology. To answer this, we need to return to some of phenomenology’s basic principles. In his work Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, Richard Kearney invokes Edmund Husserl to shed light on key aspects of phenomenological methodology. Husserl’s modus operandi was to return philosophy to things themselves, in other words ‘the phenomena of meaning as constituted by human consciousness’.78 With consciousness (in its metaphysical sense) challenged by alternative ways of describing and intuiting consciousness, Husserl developed the notion of consciousness as an activity of intentionality, by which he meant consciousness as an awareness of something other than itself. But linked to intentionality was the discovery that consciousness ‘as a reflective logical operation already presupposes a pre-reflective lived experience of the world’.79 Kearney states: ‘Only by returning to and investigating this creative nexus between consciousness and the world, where reality originally and primordially appears to us (qua phenomenon) in our intentional and lived experience, can we ultimately arrive at an intuition of essential truth: the true essences of things themselves.’80 As such, consciousness is a simultaneous reflective/pre-reflective binary, with the former deployed to


break through metaphysical and conceptual thought to get to the prereflective, primordial lived experience of being-in-the-world. Given these basic criteria, can we speak in terms of a phenomenology of God or religion? From Husserl’s perspective, a religious consciousness is a different form of intentionality that is faith-based and directed towards a meaning in God. For Kearney, Husserl does not contest intentionality in faith but infers reservations about an absolute given of God arguing that ‘religious intuition presupposes the most universal intuition of absolute givens’.81 Clearly, Marion would embrace this intuitive response to ‘givenness’, but Husserl sets faith and what he calls ‘phenomenological reason’ (God) apart. For Husserl, the latter approximates an Idea/Infinity ‘that directs the various intentions of consciousness’82 but which reinforces presuppositions and prejudices. Kearney goes on to suggest that Husserl’s phenomenology, while not opposed to the possibility of religion and God, distinguishes between a God of faith and a God of reason. He also suggests that for Husserl ‘a certain methodical agnosticism or atheism is a necessary prelude to the disclosure of neglected aspects of divinity’.83 Husserl’s phenomenological method forecloses any concept of ‘givenness’ in God, except expressed as a distinctive intentionality in faith. And the pivotal reason for this is that phenomenology in its methodology of reduction and free variation must be seen to lead to an essential intuition of truth, not to a presupposed given or absolute truth. The question we need to ask therefore is whether Marion’s phenomenology, for example, is a corruption of the formal phenomenological method in its premise of ‘givenness’ of God, or whether it represents a new and innovative adaptation of phenomenology. This question has given rise to a wide-ranging debate in contemporary France, culminating in the publication of two important works by Dominique Janicaud, the first titled Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’. The French Debate (2000),84 and the second Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’. After the French Debate (2005). The importance of this debate is twofold. Firstly, the credibility and reputation of Marion’s corpus and that of other eminent thinkers are at stake. Secondly, if the marriage between phenomenology and theology is seriously flawed, then there is a question mark over the progression of our postmetaphysical project in its phenomenological and theological associations. For example, Bernard G. Prusak claims that for Janicaud ‘recent French phenomenology has subordinated the description of phenomena to the quest for the “essence of phenomenality”, and has surrendered a positive phenomenological project to make way for the advent of the

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“originary”’.85 This notion of the ‘originary’ is a clear reference to Marion’s concept of ‘givenness’ in God. As an opening gambit, it cuts straight to the important questions of whether phenomenology and theology can be reconciled, whether phenomenology can intuit God as origin and whether philosophical method can actually account for theology. In this context, we may want to recall Husserl’s distinction between a God of faith and a God of reason, with faith being something unique, selfsufficient and without contest (phenomenologically possible on its own terms). Let me begin by outlining the main points of Janicaud’s critique. Janicaud challenges the unconditional nature of ‘givenness’ as a phenomenon that is not reducible to levels of experience and knowledge. The crux of this critique, therefore, is what he describes as the ‘swerve’ towards theology at the very heart of phenomenal immanence: Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, whatever liberties they had taken in regard to the Husserlian methodological prescriptions, at least remained faithful to this fundamental Husserlian inspiration: the essence of intentionality is to be sought, by the phenomenological reduction, in phenomenal immanence. If there is an intentional transcendence, it is to be grasped as it is given itself in the world. The suspension of the natural attitude ought not to lead to a flight to another world or to a restoration of absolute idealism, but to a deepening of the transcendental regard vis-à-vis experience and for it.86 Janicaud implies that Marion and others have not only put aside a phenomenological concern for rigour and scientificity but deliberately undermined the fundamentals of phenomenology by seeing ‘the paradoxical revelation of Transcendence at the heart of phenomenality’.87 If phenomenology is concerned with what appears as phenomenon, then Janicaud challenges Marion’s ‘phenomenology of the unapparent’. He asks: ‘In what way does this reduction – purported to unfold a givenness the more originary as it is radical – remain phenomenological? What sense can we make of a call so pure that it claims only a response, without flesh or bones?’88 I will limit Janicaud’s critique to these key questions, while recognising that there are other substantive concerns worthy of attention. We can deduce from the above however that the common denominator in his critique is the very idea on which the journal Critique established the premise for its special issue on DIEU, namely the pre-existence of God. For Janicaud, Marion and, by implication, phenomenology have also acquiesced to the model of pre-existence. It could be argued, perhaps simplistically, that Marion has gone beyond


Sartre’s phenomenology of ‘existence precedes essence’ to advocate a ‘pre-existence precedes existence’ model. In response, Marion contends that the phenomenological purity of his theology is founded not so much on the widening of intuitive capacity within phenomenology but on ‘the unconditioned primacy of the givenness of the phenomenon – that is, in the realisation that both signification and the categorical intuition of being give themselves, and it is this “givenness” that calls first and foremost to be thought’.89 The critical point here for Marion, which signals his philosophical difference from Hussserlian phenomenology, is that the phenomenon is essentially a gift and that phenomenology is a process of ‘donation’; as such, while the gift of God can be understood in abstract terms, it can never be made present, known or experienced in real terms. Later in his chapter on the ‘Saturated Phenomenon’, Marion reinforces this point by saying: Thus, in giving itself absolutely, the saturated phenomenon gives itself also as absolute: free from any analogy with the experience that is already seen, objectivised, and comprehended. It frees itself therefore because it depends on no horizon. On the contrary, the saturated phenomenon either simply saturates the horizon, or it multiplies the horizon in order to saturate it that much more, or it exceeds the horizon and finds itself cast out from it. But this very disfiguration remains a manifestation. In every case, it does not depend on that condition of possibility par excellence – a horizon, whatever it may be. We will therefore call this phenomenon unconditioned.90 Marion’s phenomenology is different from the original template in the way it frees the phenomenon from any experiential or lived-in quality. Its unconditionality is predicated neither on immanence nor on Husserlian ‘reflective logic’ (in Marion’s language, ‘signification’ or ‘categorical intuition’). The saturated phenomenon is a purification of phenomenology in its invisibility (God), unbearability (saturated), unconditionality (without horizon) and irreducibility (no being can comprehend it). In short, Marion’s defence is robust. And yet, I would like to pencil in some qualifications. Marion’s theological phenomenology hinges on the unconditionality of the gift of ‘givenness’ of God. The absolute and transcendental nature of this concept causes concern over the extent to which, as Janicaud has intimated, Marion himself (as believer) has given in to ‘givenness’ instead of resisting or circumscribing it as a phenomenon within phenomenological limits. Equally, there is a perception that, in the development of his theological phenomenology, Marion’s desire to erase all traces of metaphysical Being and horizon in the defence of the

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absoluteness of ‘givenness’ to which he is receptive (personally?) has deflected attention away from his respect for the foundational principles of any phenomenon as that which shows itself to the subject in a pre-rational and free state. These ‘qualifications’ are redressed by Marion, in the case of the first, by the saturated phenomenon which, lest we forget, ‘gives itself’, ‘is itself attested through itself’ and itself bestows being. There is an argument here that the saturated phenomenon’s irresistibility is in fact the irrefutable meaning of the ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology. In the case of the second and important qualification, Carlson leaves us in no doubt over the objectivity of the Marion methodology: If I move by choice or decision from pre-phenomenological obscurity to the light of phenomenal givenness, that choice or decision itself must not become an a priori condition of such givenness, for this would contradict Marion’s entire project to free the unconditional from subjection to any subject or first principle; the choice, then, to see givenness must itself already be a function or gift of givenness itself: “Nothing of what gives itself can show itself except to the adonné and through it. Not through constitution, anticipatory decision or exposure to the other, but through the will to indeed see, [which is] originally derived from givenness itself” [ . . . ]. Phenomenological vision, then, is founded originally in a prephenomenological act that looks something like faith for which the Christ’s divinity appears ‘evidently’ – but only ‘to those who have eyes to see’.91

Phenomenology as affective transcendence: a Lévinas reading Marion’s ‘theological phenomenology’ has thrown into question phenomenology as immanence and as method. It has raised questions about the veracity of a ‘theological’ phenomenon and the primacy of the ego’s intentionality. It has also reopened the keen debate between philosophy and theology, particularly with regard to whether philosophical discourse can or should admit religious phenomena. In the preface to the second half of Janicaud’s Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’. The French Debate, Jeffrey L. Kosky offers a positive response to these concerns in the context of an alternative phenomenology. This new phenomenology questions the primacy of the ‘I’ and the promotion of a horizon of Being. It advocates a closer relationship between philosophy and


theology. More specifically, it advances the notion of a phenomenology of donation (‘givenness’) or what he calls a ‘phenomenology of life’ which is ‘able to describe religious phenomena without sacrificing their claim to absoluteness and irreducibility’.92 Implicit in this comment is the idea that absoluteness and irreducibility remain intact, which in turn begs the question of how this new phenomenology addresses the principle of immanence in this absoluteness. This is the crucial stumbling block in the transition from a ‘pure’ (Husserlian) phenomenology to a new phenomenology. Kosky argues that the principle of immanence is respected within the mention of God and transcendence by means of ‘a radically immanent analysis’.93 This analysis (and we have seen examples of it in the case of Marion in his concepts of gift, givenness and eucharist, and in Jean-François Courtine elsewhere in his concept of prayer) opposes intentional activity with alternative passive states (nonintentional immanence, the autoaffectivity of life and reversed intentionality) where the ego finds itself ‘subject to and not subject of a gaze of givenness. The I no longer precedes the phenomena that it constitutes, but is instead called into being or born as the one who receives or suffers this intentionality.’94 In short, the justification for immanence by a new phenomenology is founded in the ‘inward turn’ of transcendence. Kosky also highlights the fact that advocates of this new phenomenology, while open to the charge of promoting a phenomenology of religion which has little to do with formal principles of phenomenology, are nevertheless committed to demonstrating ‘a phenomenology of religion that is now aware of itself as phenomenology and that has elaborated the concepts that make it possible to address the very foundation of a phenomenology of religion’.95 This new phenomenology, he argues, is laying down a challenge to the principles of phenomenology, ‘posing a question for phenomenology . . . and a question of phenomenology itself’.96 Janicaud’s work contextualises and examines in considerable detail the substance of this French debate. However, it is only in his second work Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’. After the French Debate that he takes up more directly his own reservations about the new phenomenology, in particular Marion’s objectives (misguided according to Janicaud) of separating metaphysics from phenomenology, and of over-‘theologising’ phenomenology. I do not have the space in this chapter to explore these concerns now, suffice to say at this juncture that the charge of taking phenomenology too far leaves Marion and phenomenology ‘wide open’ to criticism which Marion, as we have seen thus far, has successfully rebuked. Nevertheless, the criticism persists and at the heart of it are two important notions. The first is that phenomenology as a method has been

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usurped by phenomenology as a content. The second, and linked to the first, is the way a phenomenology of ‘givenness’ for example (or God, the absolute or transcendence) exists in and of itself as ‘appearance’, appears self-sufficient and rests assured that in its pre-metaphysical and philosophical completeness it has no reason to reconnect with lived experience. Lévinas also questions this lack of finitude in this new phenomenology when he states: ‘Phenomenology is a philosophical method, but phenomenology – comprehension by bringing to the light – does not constitute the ultimate event of being itself. ’97 Here Lévinas exposes the crucial difference between his phenomenological method and that of Marion. For Lévinas, the event of being (finite being) leads the subject beyond the limits of phenomenology to construct an ethics of transcendence based on the primacy of the other person, his face and one’s ultimate responsibility to him. Lévinas’s use of phenomenology brings us back to earth by not eschewing transcendence but by relocating it in being and in social relations. In his 1951 work Is Ontology Fundamental?, Lévinas sets himself apart from the Heideggerian ontological tradition in which there is the presupposition of a horizon of Being that understands all being. This search for totalisation which reduces the universe to an originary and ultimate unity is overturned by Lévinas in his desire to think beyond ontology and its perceived dangers of comprehension, conceptualisation, intelligibility and rationalisation. This desire entails a critique that takes as its starting point phenomena as they present themselves (i.e. human beings, their faces and speech). Lévinas’s focus on particular being, as opposed to an absolute or universal Being, is pivotal for several reasons. Firstly, it posits the existence and acceptance of the other prior to any conceptualisation or comprehension of the other as Being: ‘To comprehend being as being is to exist here below’,98 states Lévinas. Secondly, in rooting being in existence, Lévinas’s philosophical point of departure is the person and the encounter between two persons as the new criteria for comprehension and knowledge. Thirdly, through the development of a series of key related ideas (‘event of being’, ‘being as such’ and ‘move of being’) Lévinas establishes a new relation with the other (what he in fact calls ‘a religion’) founded on ethical responsibility and answerability to the other that take precedence over any ontological relation to or meaning in the self: The person with whom I am in relation I call being, but in so calling him, I call to him. I do not only think that he is, I speak to him. He is my partner in the heart of a relation which ought only have made


him present to me. I have spoken to him, that is to say, I have neglected the universal being that he incarnates in order to remain with the particular being that he is.99 What this quotation demonstrates is that Lévinas discovers meaning within lived experience (not ontology), and specifically in the act of speech. He discovers consciousness to be an intentionality in contact with objects (the other) outside of itself, capable of finding meaning through engagement with the other. This concern for the other is core to Lévinas’s philosophical (phenomenological) method, particularly at the level of how he deals with theology (the transcendent). Marion places his faith in the absolute ‘concept’ of ‘givenness’ from which he receives being and which he then gives as gift to others. Lévinas’s phenomenological method starts from the reverse position; concern for others acts as the springboard to his approach to God. Even the act of speaking represents for Lévinas an ethical openness to the other. He says: ‘I can only go towards God by being ethically concerned by and for the other person.’100 Underpinning this phenomenology of God is the consistency of Lévinas’s methodology in which at every point the particular being (in his immanence), at the expense of universal Being, is not only the source of transcendence but that that transcendence finds its expression and meaning in the lived experience of that being. This binary between particularity and universality also influences the way Lévinas treats the wider and conflictual relationship between philosophy and God. In God and Philosophy, Lévinas outlines the ‘limitations’ in the way Western philosophy has traditionally dealt with God, whether through rationalism, conceptualisation or from the ‘domain of Being’. As part of an extensive argument that traces the ‘dangerous’ implications for meaning and knowledge of philosophical rationalism’s hold over the ‘conceptualisation’ of God, Lévinas proposes a move away from the ‘idea’ of God (and its attendant cogito) towards a ‘thematisation’ of God in religious experience that can be evoked ‘otherwise’, and through a philosophy (phenomenology) of presence. Presence is linked closely to the particularity of being and to consciousness described as the ‘presence of being, the presence of presence.’101 Lévinas evokes God otherwise than through idea and concept by means of trace and desire. He says: ‘God thus reveals himself as a trace, not as an ontological presence which Aristotle defined as a Self-Thinking-Thought [ . . . ]. It is not by superlatives that we can think of God, but by trying to identify the particular interhuman events which open towards transcendence and reveal the traces where God has passed.’102 ‘Trace’, ‘desire’ and

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‘interhuman events’ form part of the ‘thematisation’ of God which comes to its apogée in the redefinition of God as Goodness and Ethics. However, before this final stage, Lévinas explores the important transition from the end of the ‘idea’ of God to what he calls Infinity as an ‘idea put into us’.103 Lévinas links God to this idea of Infinity in terms of an antecedence to which we are passively awoken after the collapse of the ‘philosophical’ ‘idea’ of God. The space vacated by the ‘idea’ of God developed a posteriori by Being is already occupied by ‘an idea put into us . . . which overturns that presence to self which consciousness is, forcing its way through the barrier and the checkpoint’.104 The unstoppable nature of this idea ‘put into us’ a priori is not only an ancient call but a new and traumatic awakening of consciousness (what Lévinas calls the ‘insomnia of consciousness’) ‘in which the “more in the less” awakens by its most ardent flame a thought given over to thinking more than it thinks’.105 Infinity (God) is only measurable in its immeasurable moreness and beyondness as a ‘desire that is beyond satisfaction, and unlike a need, does not identify a term or an end. This endless desire for what is beyond being is disinterestedness, transcendence – the desire for the Good [ . . . ]. Infinity deserves the name Good.’106 Significantly, for Lévinas, it is not good enough to leave God and Infinity lingering in immeasurability. If beyond Being is goodness, then God is open to redefinition: ‘God is drawn out of objectivity, presence and being. He is neither an object nor an interlocutor. His absolute remoteness, his transcendence turns into my responsibility for the other’.107 As such, God becomes inextricably linked (phenomenologically bound, one could say) to the process of ethical responsibility which Lévinas characterises in multiple but related ways: ‘a subjectivity to the proximity of the other (neighbour)’, a ‘pledge to the other’, ‘a responsibility for the other comes from what is prior to my freedom’, a ‘responsibility in spite of myself’, ‘to be one’s brother’s keeper is to be his hostage’. But the key to this sublimation of God into ethical responsibility is the way the respondent is ousted from his inwardness as an ego and a ‘being with two sides’, and made at one in his self-acceptance at the mercy of the other. To chart Lévinas’s phenomenology of transcendence is to come full circle in a journey that begins with the end of the primacy of Being and concludes with the primacy of the Other in being. It takes as a guiding principle the need to move away from the formal structure of transcendence found in traditional metaphysics and the ego’s objective conceptualisation of the other. Transcendence is accomplished for Lévinas in the ethical relation to the other and specifically in an ‘affectivity of transcendence’ expressed in love, emotion, the vulnerability of a face and


the wider interhuman intrigue of life. Within this thematisation of transcendence, Lévinas discloses the human intelligibility of transcendence and of God. It is a phenomenology that Lévinas sums up as follows: To do phenomenology is not only to guarantee the signifyingness of a language threatened in its abstraction or in its isolation. It is not only to control language by interrogating the thoughts which offend it and make it forget. It is above all to search for and recall, in the horizons which open around the first “intentions” of the abstractly given, the human or interhuman intrigue which is the concreteness of its unthought, which is the necessary “staging” (“mise en scène”) from which the abstractions are detached in the said of words and propositions. It is to search for the human or interhuman intrigue as the fabric of ultimate intelligibility. And perhaps it is also the way for the wisdom of heaven to return to earth.108 In this chapter, we set ourselves the task of how to ‘think’ God. Philosophy has based its thinking on reason, theology on revelation. The essential difference between the two, as history has informed us, is the reliance by the former on a metaphysical foundation for the conceptualisation of God, and the rejection of this foundation by the latter. History has also revealed attempts at a rapprochement between the two. In the early and mid twentieth century, Blondel, Ratzinger and wider debates on ‘Christian Philosophy’ showed that theology is engaged in serious efforts to bridge the gap between theology and philosophy (metaphysics). Within the last 20 years or so, philosophy and some of its religious thinkers have sought to look again at the impact of theology on philosophical refection. In France, the journals Critique and Esprit have kept this debate alive with a wide range of special issues. However, it has been within the philosophical ranks of phenomenology that we have seen the most visible signs of a ‘turn’ towards theology. Paradoxically, out of a methodology founded on the essence of intentionality as sought, by phenomenological reduction, in phenomenal immanence, Marion and Lévinas (in particular) have redefined phenomenology by bringing religion (transcendence) back into the ranks of philosophy. They have done so in three important ways. The ‘burden’ of metaphysics has been overcome by a philosophical shift towards new nonintentional, passive subjectivities liberated from the horizon of Being. Transcendence has been dethroned from its place in the firmament and is reproduced in its immanent reality. And God is seen as not just a gift of ‘givenness’ to humanity but as one Who exists in the real acts of love, charity and generosity that we show each other.

5 Postsubjectivity

It is impossible to enter into relation with any other – Greek, Jew, master, slave, man or woman – if we do not enter into relation with the One who has given this Self to itself in the original Ipseity in which life is given to itself, thus giving itself potentially to any conceivable living. What gives each self to itself, making it a Self, as we have said, is its flesh, is pathe-tik and living flesh. But this flesh that is its own has itself a Flesh that is not its own, the Flesh of the giving to Self of absolute phenomenological Life in the Arch-Son – the Flesh of Christ. Michel Henry I Am the Truth. Towards a Philosophy of Christianity

Who comes after the subject? Régis Debray shook the tectonic plates of French republicanism in 1985 when he asked the question: ‘Are you a democrat or a republican?’1 The question posed a challenge for the republican mindset in the way it perceived the individual within French universalism. The republican mantra of ‘Français d’abord’ (‘French First’) was now being threatened by new claims to belonging exemplified in identarianism, multiculturalism and sexual citizenship. However, the 1980s was not only a time of socio-political crisis in France. Continental philosophy was also going through a sea change. As we have seen in Chapter 4, the Western philosophical tradition, founded on Descartes’s ego cogito, ergo sum, has relied on the supremacy of metaphysics and on the capacity of the subject to rationalise the world in which he lives. But this tradition has also come under scrutiny from postmetaphysical thinkers and phenomenologists, 148

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particularly in the area of theology. I have already examined some of their contributions and, more generally, the advances of French phenomenology in the re-emergence of religion in post-secular France. In this chapter, however, I want to go back to where I believe the return of religion as a credible ‘philosophical’ phenomenon started, namely the crisis in subjectivity at the heart of Continental philosophy in the mid 1980s. My aim is to demonstrate how the crisis in subjectivity post 1980 opened up new ways (principally phenomenological) of redefining the subject in the light of theological insights into transcendence, radical self-immanence, pathos and Ipseity. One of the presumptions of the metaphysical subject is that he is and always has been without predicate; the subject is the first point of reference. Subjectivity grounds the subject as an existence-subject in the here and now. The question of what it means to say ‘I’ or ‘who’ not only underpins the identity of this subject but legitimises their authority as a unique source of rationality and knowledge. The Heideggerian critique of this metaphysics of subjectivity found its first application in the destruction of the ego cogito, ergo sum by pointing out that the determination of the subject had to be borrowed from something that not only preceded it but would always be ahead of it. Hence, Descartes’s institution of the ego as the ultimate self-sufficient subject was countered by Heidegger’s institution of Dasein, a being-in-the-world who has come before the subject, renounced the self-constitution of the ‘I’ and is an eternal presence in the world. The contentious status of the subject (‘who comes after the subject?’) gave rise to a sustained debate in French philosophical circles about the future direction of the subject as a philosophical entity. Jean-Luc Nancy outlined some of the key issues at stake: The inaugurating decisions of contemporary thought – whether they took place under the sign of a break with metaphysics and its poorly pitched questions, under the sign of a “deconstruction” of this metaphysics, under that of a transference of the thinking of Being to the thinking of life, or of the Other, or of language, etc. – have all involved putting subjectivity on trial. A widespread discourse of recent date proclaimed the subject’s simple liquidation. Everything seems, however, to point to the necessity, not of a “return to the subject” (proclaimed by those who would like to think that nothing has happened, and that there is nothing new to be thought except maybe variations or modifications of the subject), but, on the contrary, of a move forward toward someone – some one-else in its

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place . . . Who would it be? How would s/he present him/herself? Can we name him/her? Is the question “who” suitable? . . . In other words, is it appropriate to assign something like a punctuality, a singularity, or a hereness as the place of emission, reception, or transition (of affect, of action, of language, etc.), how would one designate its specificity? Or would the question need to be transformed – or is it in fact out of place to ask it?2 Nancy clarifies some of the historical background to the debate and points to some general future directions for the subject. In essence, however, the thesis is clear. The subject’s metaphysical grounding has been superseded by its deconstruction which, we can see, takes various forms. Alain Badiou’s response to the ‘de-metaphysicalisation’ of the subject is to de-objectivy the space of the subject by subtracting from him any object or reflexive jurisdiction. The subject is therefore not substance, origin, point of reference or result. For Badiou, the subject is preceded by a truth and as such the subject is woven out of this truth. Truth passes through the passivity of Badiou’s subject, constructing him in its progress: The “subject” thus ceases to be the inaugural or conditioning point of legitimate statements. It is no longer – and here we see the cancellation of the object, as objective this time – that for which there is truth, nor even the desirous eclipse of its surrection [ . . . ]. A subject is that which a truth passes through, or this finite point through which, in its infinite being, truth itself passes. This transit excludes every interior moment.3 In similar fashion, Nancy writes of an ‘age of rupture’ where the subject as subjectivity, self-presence, consciousness, authority and value has been eroded. In its place, is a presence, ‘the presence of an existent’, not in the form of Being or essence but a presence in the form of an occupation of space. ‘Presence’, claims Nancy, ‘takes place, that is to say it comes into presence [ . . . ]. The place is place – site, situation, disposition – in the coming into space of a time, in a spacing that allows that something come into presence, in a unique time that engenders itself in this point in space, as its spacing’.4 Crucially, this presence is described as an ‘ipseity of presence . . . that engenders itself into presence: presence to itself, in a sense, but where this “self” itself is only the to of presence’.5 For Nancy, the subject as ‘I’ does not pre-exist this schematization, nor does it come after it either. It is it.


The phenomenological nuances of Nancy’s subject as ipseity of presence are shared by the contributions of Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Henry, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Luc Marion to this volume. In the case of Lévinas, the very correlation between subject and object (which Badiou dethroned) is at the heart of the crisis in subjectivity in Continental philosophy. He writes: ‘Perception, science, narration, with their ontic structure of correlation between a subject and an object to which the subject conforms, no longer convey the model of truth; they constitute determined moments, peripeties of the dialectic.’6 For Lévinas, truth is still constrained within the rationality of received philosophy, the narrative movement of rationality towards the ‘graspable’ and the understanding of knowledge as concept. Opposing this is phenomenology and the return ‘to the things themselves, to the truth of the manifestness with which things show themselves in their original character’.7 Lévinas questions the lucidity, consciousness and truth value that emerge from the subject as cogito sum, including its capacity to adequately reflect human experience. In the same breath, he questions why it is that life is interpreted more often than not from this standpoint. Lévinas proposes a way of approaching the subject via an alternative subjectivity of experience, sensibility and what he terms the apodeictic. He differentiates between experience as a product of thought/subject (adequation) and experience as a product of reductionism (inadequation). In reference to the first, he states: The latter is always experience of being or presence in the world, thought that, even if it begins in astonishment, remains adequation of the given to the “signative”, thought on the scale of the subject and that, precisely as such, is experience, the fact of a conscious subject, the fact of a unity held fast in its position, like the unity of transcendental apperception in which diverse elements come together under a stable rule. But this is not the only nor even the initial modality of the subjective.8 This subject, whose experience is conditioned by thought, is characterised as rational, intelligent, of clear conscience, lucid, with an untroubled and objective gaze. But Lévinas hypothezises an inverse subject situation where reason and knowledge go daydreaming, and where the objective gaze is rendered naive. For Lévinas, it becomes a question for the subject of making his way back from the exteriority of the world to the life betrayed by knowledge; it becomes a question of ‘becoming mute and anonymous’. He describes this return to the life that is forgotten or weakened by thought and rationality as the revolution of phenomenological reductionism, a

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passage from a ‘natural’ attitude to a ‘transcendental’ attitude. This transcendental attitude differs from the conditioned adequacy of the subject’s experience of the world by liberating sensible thought ‘from the world itself, from norms of adequation, from obedience to the completed work of identification, from the being that is only possible as an assemblage complete within a theme’.9 Transcendental reductionism is not therefore another substratum of the cogito but a new standard of meaning adequate to thought and realisable despite the failure to achieve objective rationality and ‘knowledge’. This first strand in Lévinas’s approach to the subject pinpoints adequate registers for the awakening of a new subjectivity. The second interlocking strand is apodeicticity. Apodeicticity admits to the ‘failure’ of the subject to be able to attain total adequation between what the subject perceives and the target of his perception. Lévinas’s use of the word ‘failure’ carries no judgemental significance; on the contrary, it testifies positively to the fundamental impossibility of the principle of perfect adequation. Apodeicticity registers this failure of adequation in the form of an ‘inadequate intuition’. As such, apodeicticity is the recognition that in the process of rational reflection between subject and object only a part or ‘limited portion’ of consciousness is activated. But crucially, for Lévinas, it is within this ‘core of the field of consciousness’ which was ‘inadequate’ that he locates what is ‘properly adequate’. Lévinas defines this core in terms of the living present, similar to that of the present in Bergsonian duration; it is the liveliness of life, the unforeseeable and ‘the living manifestness of the I am’. He continues: ‘The living present of the cogito-sum is not uniquely based on the model of self-consciousness, or absolute knowledge: it is the rupture of the equality of the “equal soul”, the rupture of the Same of immanence: awakening and life.’10 The living present of the I am therefore founds its essence not in the adequate fulfilment of knowledge acquired between subject and object, nor in the prioritisation of the Cartesian cogito and its source of knowledge. The living present of the I am is the expression of the mode of the subject. This living present (a ‘self-presence’ as opposed to a self-consciousness) is produced out of a rupture ‘to the extent that the lived is lived for a self that within immanence distinguishes itself from it’.11 What is significant here is the emergence of two parts of the one ‘Self’ (one lived, the other living) in which lies ‘an avowal of difference between the same and the same, a disphasure, a difference at the heart of intmacy’.12 For Lévinas, this difference is not reducible and as a consequence its irreducibility forms the final strand in the subject’s subjectivity. The subjectivity (identity) of the new subject ‘shows up there in the traumatism of awakening’.13 But what confronts this newly formed


subjectivity is the permanence of the lived self and ‘the meaning that a self other than myself has for me – for my primordial self’. This internal binary between lived self and living presence offers a final, but vital, meaning to the Lévinas subject. He writes: The Other tears me from my hypostasy, from the here, at the heart of being or at the center of the world where, privileged and in this sense primordial, I posit myself. But, in this tearing, the ultimate meaning of my “me-ness” is revealed. In the collation of meaning between ‘me’ and the other and also in my alterity to myself, an alterity through which I can confer on the other the meaning of myself, the here and there come to invert their respective meanings [...]. I see myself on the basis of the other, I expose myself to the other, I have accounts to render.14 Lévinas defines this relation with the other as event. Firstly, it is a nongnoseological event necessary to reflection itself, by which he means that the origin of this understanding of the relation with the other is indigenous to human subjectivity and not a product of social construction. The relation with the other constitutes the subject’s emergence out of an egological sphere of dogmatic slumber (egoism, egotism and the Same) and into a self whose existence is contingent on a transcendence to the other man. This transcendence is also described as an event because it assumes, for Lévinas, the core ethical condition of life: ‘A transcendence that does not amount to an experience of transcendence, for palpably prior to any position of the subject and to any perceived or assimilated content. A transcendence or awakening that is the very life of the human’.15 The starting point for Lévinas’s theory of the subject, as it was with Badiou and Nancy, is the abolition of the subject as a metaphysical presence of being. Lyotard picks up this theme in his notion of the subject in ‘statu nascendi’. He writes: Unpreparedness is the very fact of my subject, sensus communis, which demands it. It demands that the intellect be at a loss. That it has got nothing ready. Without a show of readiness, something of which it is incapable, because it is spontaneous activity, Selbsttätigkeit. This sensus and this communis appear to be ungraspable in their exposition. The other of the concept.16 The first part of Lyotard’s discussion situates the debate on the ‘sensus’ (sense) alongside its ‘logical’ partner ‘communis’ (common). The notion of ‘common sense’ is often associated with general intelligence or a

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commonly shared knowledge to which we all adhere. For Lyotard, it is a flawed concept because in its Latin formulation (‘sensus communis’ – sense of the community) the community per se is rendered devoid of any intelligence by the word sense which is more associated with sensibility than with intelligence: ‘It is a question of a community that is still – but that still presents a problem – unintelligent’.17 Lyotard implies here that the ‘sensus communis’ is not a concept in the way that ‘intellectio communis’ is (whereby an intelligence is attributed to the concept of the community). On the contrary, the ‘sensus communis’ is a ‘statu nascendi’ (an evolving state) that opposes the concept of ‘intellectio communis’. By virtue of this opposition, Lyotard sets up an alternative standard-bearer of ‘knowledge’, one that emanates from non-conceptual, intelligent forms. He states: And if we are condemned to think it, to think of it, by means of the concept (this is required by the exposé, the exposition, the Kantian Exponieren: “to reduce a representation of the imagination to concepts”), then the said “community” of sense, and through sense alone, can only be situated or put in place in the field of the intellectio negatively in my exposé in the mode of critical thought whenever it deals with taste: pleasure but without interest, universality but without concept, finality but without representation of an end, necessity but without argument.18 Having stripped the word community of intellectual status, Lyotard goes on to dissociate the subject of ‘sensus’ from conceptual knowledge and intelligence. His subject proceeds without intellect. The ‘sensus’ therefore, akin to Lévinas’s notions of sensibility and experience, is the subject’s authority. Lyotard describes this authority emanating from two sources. The first is the immunization of the ‘sensus’ from the intellect, ‘letting itself touch and be touched’. The second is the self-sourcing of the ‘sensus’ in its capacity to make meaning: ‘Its “spontaneity”, that activity whose principle is only in itself, its authoritarian munificence, the generosity of its office, of its munus – which is to synthesize by itself, off its own bat – cannot accept the sharing out of the munitions, the putting into common ownership of syntheses’.19 The self-sufficiency of the subject as unintelligent ‘sensus’ carries with it the wider philosophical critique, shared by many contributors in their redefinition of the subject, of the relation between knowledge and conceptual thinking. Lyotard constructs an argument in which the ‘sensus’ is set up in opposition to philosophical method on several levels. Philosophy, for a start, is deemed unable to ‘handle’ the ‘sensus’ because the latter is ‘insensible to the intellectus’. Philosophy, according to Lyotard, despite having difficulty in making contact with the


‘sensus’, wants to prevent the ‘sensus’ from going off on a tangent. Equally, Lyotard expresses his frustration with philosophy’s desire ‘to think everything, to think according to its rule, intellection, including therefore the unintelligent and the untouchable’.20 Thus, opposing philosophical presumption is the ‘logic’ of the ‘sensus’ that operates according to a different universality and a different ‘finality’ than that prescribed by knowledge. Lyotard advances the theory of the ‘sensus’ as synthesis between judgement and feeling; not a pure and selfassured cogito-sum but an amalgam of the capacities of judgement and the voluntary. He expounds on this theory through different formulations. It is described as a ‘sentimental synthesis’ and a ‘state of mind’: ‘It has nothing whatsoever to do with an end or purpose. It is finality, purposiveness itself, which has no end, no purpose in front of it and no lack behind it. So an instantaneous purposiveness, immediate, not even mediated by the diachronic form of the internal sense, nor by way of our remembering or anticipating’.21 The ‘sensus’ is ‘an animation or an anima there on the spot, which is not moving toward anything. It is as if the mind were discovering that it can do something other than will and understand. Be happy without ever having asked for it nor conceived it’.22 Tapping into this ‘sensus’ is not achieved via a philosophy of the intellect; it is without concept of its end and is resistant to the clock, its timekeeping and the synthesis of ‘matters in space-time’. Rather, it is occasioned (‘The occasion is the case’) by an appreciation (a pleasurable experience) of its ‘statu nascendi’. In other words, and critically, as with Lévinas’s subject as living present and Badiou’s subject whom truth passes through, Lyotard’s subject is only graspable in its immediate state of being born. As such, the subject forms an early but vitally strong resistance to conceptual thinking, the imposition of a cogito, social inscription and a multiplicity of conditioning factors: The sentiment of the beautiful is the subject being born [ . . . ]. This feeling escapes being mastered by concept and will. It extends itself underneath and beyond their intrigues and their closure. This is what Kant understands by “natural substratum” that he takes, deductively, as his beginning. Thus it is a region of resistance to institutions and establishments where there is inscribed and hidden that which happens “before” we know what it is and before we want to make it into anything at all. This pleasure is an inscription without support, and without a code by which it can be read off.23 The challenge therefore for Nancy, Lévinas, Badiou and Lyotard is to establish parameters for a postsubjectivity, based on living presence,

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sensibility and experience, by deconstructing the subject of its cogito, its self-consciousness and its seat at the high chair of reason and knowledge. The consensus thus far is that this is possible but the divergence of approaches undermines the search for a universal methodology. However, in the contributions from Lévinas and Henry, phenomenology has emerged as a methodology sufficiently equipped to disarm the main supports of the metaphysical tradition, in particular the structure of re-presentation, the relation of consciousness to identified entities and consciousness as thought. For instance, Lévinas states: Phenomenology itself disengages these structures by reflection, which is an internal perception in which the descriptive operation “synchronizes” the flux of consciousness, in knowledge. Phenomenology, in its philosophic act of the ultimate Nachdenken, thus remains faithful to the ontic model of truth’.24 Henry, in a more direct way, offers a detailed critique of man/subject conceived as a specific and autonomous reality. Deconstructing the presumption of Philosophy as Philosophy of the Subject, Henry highlights the ‘inanity’ of Philosophy’s ‘re-presentation’ of being in the condition of object. Removing being from that which could confer meaning on its ‘concept’, Henry offers a subject ‘which in making appearance appear, in this same gesture, makes be everything that is’.25 I will discuss the recent phenomenological work of Henry later in this chapter, but I would like to round off the debate about a phenomenological postsubjectivity in the context of the 1980s by turning to the contribution of Marion, whose work has featured in Chapter 4 of this book. In his chapter titled ‘L’Interloqué’, Marion goes straight to the point: ‘Does phenomenology offer a path that leads to the overcoming of the subject?’26 The simple answer is yes, but the analysis is complex. Marion begins with an exposition of the value of Heidegger’s Dasein which itself has been hailed as the abolition of the metaphysical subject. Dasein erased the metaphysical bridge between subjectivity and its objective (the objectivisation of the object) by replacing, via intentionality, subjectivity’s goal in the constitution of an object with the goal of an ‘opening of a world’. Marion states: The intentionality constitutive of the an object remains, but it is limited to the status of a particular case of the fundamental determination of the Being-in-the world of the one who, from then on,


renounces the title of “subject”, since he abandons the objective of the objectivisation of the object, in favour of the title Dasein.27 But, for Marion, Dasein is incapable of attaining its being in any other way than by ‘staging itself’ (naming himself) in the first person, thus running the risk of self-exposure as an ‘I’. This does not mean, however, Dasein’s subjection of being to the figure of the ‘I’ as ego; the subject of ego has been surpassed already. It means that being is only disclosed to Dasein as first person; the ‘I’ of ego (overcome) has been replaced by an ‘I’ who answers a call that claims him for being. It is in this answer (or lack of it) to the call that Marion exploits the possibility of a phenomenological postsubjectivity. He states: Dasein comes after the subject by renouncing the self-constitution of the transcendental I, but it still claims itself by the autarky of resoluteness; it remains for Dasein to let itself be claimed by an agency other than itself (here, Being), in order to finally succeed the subject without still inheriting subjecti(vi)ty. Only the one who is interpellated breaks with the subject, but Dasein does not yet abandon itself to interpellation.28 What is significant about the call to being for Marion is that the call summons a me as ‘me’, not an ‘I’. This is a crucial difference because it opens up the possibility of Dasein, in its postsubjective state, to be claimed by the new agency of phenomenology. Marion designates the ‘me’ in terms of an ‘interloqué’ who experiences himself, in the accusative, of being interpellated as ‘suspect’ and not as ‘subject’. The ‘interloqué’ fulfils the essential criteria of phenomenology on three fronts. Firstly, in its condition of being summoned by the claim to being, the ‘interloqué’ denies the autonomy of a subject constituting itself in its atomic substantiality. Secondly, the ‘me’ experiences surprise (for Lévinas it was awakening and trauma, for Lyotard ‘animation’). This surprise seizes the ‘interloqué’ to the extent that it is deprived of any polarity of its own, and in the sense that it seizes all polarity of subjectivity in the ‘me’. Thirdly, and critically, the ‘interloqué, by virtue of its constant state of readiness and response to the call of being, not only precedes the subject but succeeds in abolishing it: ‘before the subject can constitute itself, the call to being has already exiled it’.29 In the light of Marion’s phenomenology of the call, the question ‘who comes after the subject?’ could well be reframed as ‘who or what comes before the subject?’ In the first instance, can we really speak of a someone

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(person) replacing the subject? Nancy, we recall, intimated such a possibility in his invitation letter: ‘Everything seems, however, to point to the necessity, not of a “return to the subject” . . . but, on the contrary, of a move forward toward someone – some one-else in its place’. Is this an oblique reference to God (Infinity), the Other or the diverse phenomenological responses he envisaged for his edited collection and which we have examined thus far? Equally, when Lévinas suggested the possibility that out of the transcendence of life (the event of the subject’s ethical relation with the other) we might ‘think the idea of God’, did he, in fact, identify the ulimate post(pre)subject ‘who’ which is ‘the idea of God in us, surpassing our capacity as finite beings’?30 We have discussed several examples of how the subject can be defined, what it can be and what it can become. But the remarks by Nancy and Lévinas, no matter how off the cuff in the context of their overall arguments, merit closer examination particularly in the light of postsubjectivity and what has been called the theological ‘turn’ of French phenomenology. I plan to proceed therefore by exploring the interconnection between subject, God and phenomenology in the recent work by Michel Henry titled I Am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. But before I do, I would like to sketch in some important caveats. Underpinning many of the postmetaphysical and phenomenological theories of the subject outlined thus far, is the key question whether the subject actually requires a metaphysical foundation and, if not, whether the construction of a new subjectivity is possible without metaphysics? Nancy, whose deconstruction and ‘liquidisation’ of the subject we have discussed, has elsewhere called for the return of reason, most notably in his recent work on Christianity titled Dis-enclosure. He writes: ‘It is not a question of compensating for a deficiency in reason, but of liberating reason unreservedly and then seeing what is left after this restitution.’31 By highlighting the internal conflicts inside Christian doctrine, Nancy heralds the importance of making use of reason (what he calls ‘the faith of reason’) to not only understand man’s relationship to the absolute but crucially to deconstruct Christianity by revealing its internal phenomenological nihilism. In an expansive argument, Nancy begins by listing the more obvious reasons for the decline in Christianity in the second half of the twentieth century: the legacy of Marxism, the return of science, the apparent irrelevance of religion in secular society, the global decline in faith etc. However, the crux of his argument is the deployment of a phenomenological methodology to break down Christianity into a religion of ‘non-sens’. Christianity for Nancy has all the potential and opening towards making sense but in the end it is


sense ‘that is somehow empty, empty of all sense’.32 In other words, Christianity is described as awash with sense but it is sense for sense’s sake, sense trapped in sense and sense without making sense. He says: Christianity is not at all . . . the despair of sense; it is the pretension towards sense, the sense of sense, stretched to extremity, aglow in its last lights and extinguishing itself in this final incandescence. It is sense that orders and activates nothing any more, or nothing more than itself; sense whose total value is itself, pure sense, in other words the end revealed for itself, indefinitely and definitively. This is the complete idea of Christian revelation.33 And elsewhere, he says: The idea of Christian revelation is that, at the end of the day, nothing is revealed, nothing except the end of revelation itself, nothing except the fact that revelation means that sense unveils itself purely as sense in one person, but in such a way that the whole sense of this person consists in being revealed. Sense reveals itself and reveals nothing, or rather reveals its own infinity . . .; what is revealed is the revelation, the Wide Open as such.34 Nancy’s critique of Christianity is founded on an analysis of sense collapsing in on itself and not producing an end product in the form of an object of revelation. His argument testifies in part to his attempt to rationalise Christian revelation in the figure of Christ or God. What is striking about his approach is that it is in its essence phenomenological particularly in the way he conceives of revelation as a self-showing phenomenon. However, the approach falls short of its true and intended phenomenological purpose, which is not to objectify revelation from the standpoint of reason’s cogito but in fact to see in the tautology of ‘what is revealed is the revealable’ a demonstration of how (and in what ‘form’) truth can appear to the subject and how he can respond to it. Of course, when we speak about abandoning metaphysics, this does not mean that we suppress our capacity to reason and think objectively at a discursive level, nor does it imply that such an abandonment is in fact possible. In a quite different context, the philosopher Dominique Janicaud hails the return of a new humanism in the face of technology and new forms of the inhuman. He challenges the perception that technological advancement and the drive towards the ‘superhuman’ have been accomplished in large measure by an overcoming of metaphysics

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and humankind’s capacity to regulate progress and innovation. Part of his thesis is that ‘a regard for metaphysics stills prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics’.35 In other words, for Janicaud, metaphysics still exists and so it is in the interests of humanity to use rationality and not dispense with it. His solution is a form of re-appropriation of metaphysics for creative purposes. Critchley comments: All the talk of the overcoming of metaphysics in Heidegger has to be linked to the idea of the Verwindung of metaphysics, that is, a reappropriation of metaphysics in terms of its unthought essence, what Janicaud translates as “rémission”, a sort of re-sending or repeat transmission of what Heidegger calls the original sending of being.36 And he continues: What interests me here is precisely the possibility, the potential, for thinking about rationality as a call, an appeal, a new source of creativity, a human creativity that allows, in turn, for new forms of inventiveness of the human. That is, if Janicaud’s overcoming of overcoming invites us to give up the fantasies of the overcoming of metaphysics or rationality, then it is also a question of giving up the fantasies of the overcoming of the human in the post-human, superman or overman. On the contrary, it is a question of creating new possibilities or potentialities for the human: new forms of humanization.37 Admittedly, Janicaud’s frame of reference and audience is different from our immediate one but as a wider debate on the human condition I think we can draw some relevant insights. Firstly, Janicaud makes it clear that his version of humanisation is not a phenomenology so it would be misguided of us to try to adapt it so. Neither is it a return to a Sartrean humanism and its retreat into its own subjectivity, nor a return to a Heideggerian humanism of the Dasein. In both these respects, Janicaud wants to preserve the truth of being as definitely not emanating from a Sartrean subjectivity nor a Dasein that puts being before thought. Rather, his intention is to keep thought active and creative, but in ways that are different. And yet, there are aspects of this humanisation that appeal. For example, his notion of the re-appropriation of metaphysics in terms of its ‘unthought essence’ lends itself aptly to the shifts in thinking, perception and the return to the things in themselves (the different ‘state of mind’ as Lyotard calls it) of phenomenology. Humanisation and phenomenology, at a general methodological level, share a common principle that


questions the metaphysics of subjectivity. But their respective aims are very different. Janicaud uses humanisation to critique metaphysics in order to establish a new cautious humanism that can, on the one hand, ward off inhuman scientific development and, on the other hand, placate responsible ‘superhuman’ progress. Janicaud’s humanisation is very much couched in the non-phenomenological world of material objectives, outcomes and results. Phenomenology, in its purest sense, is an attitude, a way of seeing, summarised neatly by Henry to whom we now turn: It concerns us not what shows itself but the fact of self-showing, not what appears but the way of its appearing, not what is manifest but the pure manifestation, in itself and as such – or, to put it another way, not the phenomenon but phenomenality [ . . . ]. As soon as concepts of truth, manifestation, or revelation are understood in their pure phenomenological signification, a crucial question arises: What within them makes true, makes manifest, reveals? It is not a power situated behind manifestation, behind revelation, behind truth . . . because such a background power does not exist. It is truth itself in its very deployment that makes something true; it is manifestation as it itself manifests itself that makes manifest; it is revelation in revealing itself that reveals.38

Michel Henry: ‘truth of the world’ versus ‘truth of life’ In his 2003 work I Am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, Henry addresses the relevance of Christianity in the world today. He does this not by asking whether Christianity is ‘true’ or ‘false’ but by asking what Christianity considers as truth. He questions what kind of truth Christianity offers to people and what it endeavours to communicate to them, not as a theoretical or defineable truth, but as the essential truth that ‘by some mysterious affinity’ is suitable for them, to the point that it alone is capable of ensuring them salvation. His essential thesis, based on a philosophy of Christianity founded itself on a phenomenology of Christ, is that Christ undoes ‘the truth of the world’ by providing a different access to the infinity of self-love, to a radical subjectivity that admits no outside, and to the immanence of affective life located prior to the disjunction attached to all objectifying thought. Before we examine Henry’s phenomenology in depth, I want to explain his unique understanding of phenomenality because its significance impacts on the distinction he draws between ‘truth of the world’

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and ‘truth of life’, and on other debates relating to life and the subject. Firstly, truth for Henry is a twofold concept, designating what shows itself and the fact of self-showing. He uses the following example to explain the difference: ‘What shows itself is the grey sky [ . . . ]. But the fact of self-showing has nothing to do with what shows itself, with the grey of the sky . . . and is even totally indifferent to what shows itself’.39 What shows itself as grey sky and its ‘truth’ as threatening owes its truth to a prior state of things, a previous relation with which the grey sky interacts and derives sense and meaning as threatening. It is this fact of the sky showing itself that constitutes the ‘truth in the world’. This is how the phenomenon works for Henry. An object designates that which is placed before and the fact of being placed before renders the object manifest. On one level, consciousness is this manifestation of being placed before. On another level, being placed before is for Henry the same as being placed outside, that is the external relation between consciousness and object. This is the framework for the ‘truth of the world’, whose truth is defined as a placing outside itself, ‘casting the thing outside itself’.40 Henry states: What is placed before is the object, that which is true, that which shows itself, the phenomenon. The fact of being placed before is the truth, the manifestation, pure consciousness. The fact of being placed before is equally well the fact of being placed outside; it is the ‘outside’ as such. The ‘outside’ as such is the world.41 By comparison, the fact of self-showing (as opposed to what shows itself) is ‘by its nature’ different. Taking the example of the grey sky again, if we were to isolate that grey sky from previous grey skies to which it naturally relates then we would view this proposition for what it is, reduced to itself, conferring on itself its own truth. Henry makes two points based on this reduction. The fact of self-showing is also a phenomenon, something that appears and is true. But importantly also, ‘the fact of self-showing, considered in itself and as such – that is the essence of truth. Inasmuch as it consists of the pure fact of showing itself, or else of appearing, of manifesting itself, of revealing itself, we can just as well call the truth “monstration”, “apparition”, “manifestation”, “revelation”’.42 Self-showing therefore designates the concept of truth in its pure phenomenological signification. Having prepared this essential ground, we can now safely advance in the thesis that Henry’s phenomenology is founded on a binary between what he describes as the ‘truth of the world’ and the ‘truth of


life’. We were given an inkling of the difference between these two worlds (in linguistics terms) in the quotation at the end of the first section where Henry evaluates truth according to the innate property of a phenomenon rather than its transitive function. But, in a broader context, the ‘truth of the world’ is a term used to designate the level of separation between subject (thing) and ‘truth’ in the world of material objects, as opposed to the ‘truth of life’ where the truth of Christianity (the question at hand) attests to itself without the hindrance of separation. It is separation therefore that, for Henry, is the divisive element in the ‘truth of the world’, and this is revealed at historical, linguistic/textual levels (as we have seen) and at the level of consciousness. On the historical level, Henry claims that the reason for scepticism of Christianity in the modern world can be attributed to the fallibility of historical truth (and history) and its incapacity to testify for or against the truth of Christianity. He goes on to clarify this position by saying that this inability to ‘testify’ is due to the ‘incapacity of texts themselves’.43 In other words, Henry’s construction of the ‘truth of the world’ as a world founded on separation, objectivisation and difference has prevented the true phenomenological transmission of the truth of Christianity. In fact, in spite of the evidence of the Scriptures and the Gospels and their record of the existence of Christ and the Word of God, Henry argues that the text as representation of the ‘truth of the world’ is nothing more than a text, unable ‘to posit through itself the reality that it utters [ . . . ]. Within history, the powerlessness of the written document to posit the reality of the event to which it wants to testify in fact reiterates the powerlessness of the event itself to posit itself within being’.44 To grasp more clearly what Henry means here we need to link his idea of the phenomenon with the function of language. At the centre of the powerlessness of the aforementioned written document is the powerlessness of language. Henry states: Language has become the universal evil. And we can certainly see why. What characterises any word is its difference from the thing – the fact that taken in itself, in its own reality, language contains nothing of the reality of the thing, its properties. This difference from the thing explains its indifference to the thing [ . . . ]. But because, in and of itself, the word contains nothing that is real and ignores everything about that reality, it could just as well bring reality back to itself, identify with it, define it in such a way that everything the word says becomes reality, and pretends to stand for it.45

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For Henry, language (in the ‘truth of the world’) is the great illusion. On the one hand, it passes as the means par excellence of communication and the transmission of truth. On the other hand, the truth it conveys and, most crucially, the way language imparts this truth is bound by the temporal and visible limitations of the ‘truth of the world’. Time destroys everything it exhibits in the ‘truth of the world’ because ‘in time, things come into appearance, but this coming-into-appearance consists in coming-outside where things are torn from themselves, emptied of their being, already dead’.46 Equally, the things that are deprived of themselves and emptied of themselves in their very appearing ‘never give their own reality but only the image of that reality that annihilates itself in the moment they are given. They are given in such a way that their appearance is also their disappearance’.47 Language strips things of their true meaning, and creates a fake reality of things ‘being given outside themselves’. The description therefore of language as an ‘evil’ indicates its centrality for Henry at the root of the representative logic of before and outside in the ‘truth of the world’ and of the condition of pure consciousness (and its relation to the object) of which being is a priori. However, as we see from the extended quotation above on language as the universal evil, Henry turns the logic of the ‘truth of the world’ on its head. He empowers language by collapsing the difference between word and object and by locating reality in the word itself. The powerlessness of language is thus transformed into the powerlessness of language to posit a reality other than its own. But in order for this transformation to take effect a certain key ‘truth’ must already be in place, namely the Truth of Christianity. Access to this truth is by Truth and Truth alone. Henry is in the first instance categorical about the phenomenological essence of the Truth of Christianity. He states: This is one of the most essential affirmations of Christianity: that the truth that is its own can testify only to itself. Only Truth can attest to itself – reveal itself in and through itself. This Truth that alone has the power to reveal itself is God’s truth. It is God himself who is revealed, or Christ as God. More radically, divine essence consists in Revelation as self-revelation of itself on the basis of itself [ . . . ]. That the absolute Truth revealing itself to itself also reveals itself to someone to whom it is given to hear it – that is what makes the person who hears it the son of that truth, the son of God.48


The Truth of Christianity becomes the starting point for the establishment of the second part of Henry’s truth binary, namely the ‘truth of Life’. Before we look at this in more detail, it may prove fruitful to compare how the Truth of Christianity differs from the ‘truth of the world’. This will help us understand better the concept of the ‘truth of Life’. We have ascertained that the ‘truth of the world’ makes each thing seen by placing that thing outside itself. The issue, according to Henry, is that when truth is understood as that of the world a division in the concept of Truth is opened up creating a difference between truth itself (which we can now call the Truth of Christianity) and what truth shows or makes true (in the ‘truth of the world’). Again, the distinction Henry describes here is not only conceptual but purely phenomenological and it leads him to establish a first ‘decisive characteristic’ of the Truth of Christianity: The Truth of Christianity in no way differs from what it makes true. Within it there is no separation between the seeing and what is seen, between the light and what it illuminates. And this is because there is in that Truth neither Seeing nor seen, no Light like that of the world. From the start, the Christian concept of truth is given as irreducible to the concept of truth that dominates the history of Western thought.49 Henry proceeds to build on the differences between the ‘truth of the world’ and the Truth of Christianity. While the former consists in what shows itself, the latter is a fact of ‘self-showing’. The former produces truth based on ‘what it makes true’, the latter is a Truth that is prior to the ‘truth of the world’ and prior to language. The former produces truth from a philosophy of language founded on separation where the object is placed ‘outside’, ‘before’ or ‘opposite us’. The latter constitutes its Truth not in separation but in a phenomenological conjunction between the seeing and what is seen, between what shows itself and self-showing. The former transmits its truth, the latter ‘is Truth itself in its very deployment’.50 Understanding the Truth of Christianity therefore in its phenomenological essence is the pre-requisite to the ‘truth of Life’. As the expression suggests, ‘the truth of Life’ is in direct opposition to the ‘truth of the world’, to which it owes nothing. Henry constructs the second main plank of his phenomenology of Christianity on this second part of the ‘truth’ binary. It is a critical point in Henry’s argument and it brings together key issues in the wider postsubjectivity debate. The first of these is Henry’s analysis of how one gets access to the ‘truth of Life’.

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Part of the response lies in what Henry mentioned above in respect of the ‘irreducibility’ of the concept of Truth to its worldly counterpart. He expounds on this idea in the following statement: ‘The irreducibility of the Truth of Christianity to thought, or to any form of knowledge or science, is one of the major themes of Christianity itself.’51 That access to the Truth of Christianity is irreducible to the cogito-sum and to the intellect begs two simple but important questions: Why do we get access to Truth? And how do we get access to Truth? The answer to the first question can be found in the first section of this chapter and the debate in the 1980s on ‘who comes after the subject?’ We recall from that debate how the deconstruction of the metaphysics of subjectivity in Continental philosophy paved the way for the re-emergence of phenomenology and the re-discovery of sensibility, sensus and the living present as the subject’s new sphere of reception. Henry is not only part of this new phenomenological movement, but he adds another dimension to it in his thesis of the phenomenological essence of the Truth of Christianity. But what he also does systematically in this work is undercut the binary between ‘the truth of the world’ and the ‘truth of Life’ with a scathing critique of biology and science, and their inflated status as harbingers of knowledge of humankind in the ‘truth of the world’. Biology, he claims, is ‘wholly foreign to phenomenality’ and owes its ‘capacity to be shown, and thus to become the object of possible knowledge, to a power of manifestation foreign to it – whereas in itself it is “blind”’.52 The important point Henry goes on to make about biology and science (also undermined because of its restriction to the ‘real universe’) and their relation to knowledge and the cogito is that both exclude sensibility and the ‘phenomenological Life that defines the Truth of Christianity’.53 This quotation offers some further insights. Biology and science are related to the world of phenomenality as they pertain to the ‘truth of the world’. But in the properties and qualities of objects that they describe, these disciplines are not phenomenological in practice. For Henry, this is problematic because as the quotation above suggests they function ‘outside’ ‘phenomenological Life’. Henry explains that there is ‘impotence in any knowledge that opens unto a world, or more profoundly, in any form of experience that demands and borrows its phenomenality from that of the world, from the world’s truth’.54 Implicit here is the impotence that comes with trying to ‘think’ the Truth of Christianity. For Henry, thought is only one mode of relation to the world, but it is also a condition of that world and as such a hindrance to understanding Truth. Henry illustrates the ‘irreducibility’ of the Truth of Christianity to


thought and to any other form of knowledge in the Christian reference (in Matthew’s Gospel) to wisdom and the fact it is revealed only to little children. He argues that the phenomenality of that which shows itself to thought is itself incapable of making manifest the divine revelation of Truth ‘because the phenomenality of this Revelation is never phenomenalized as “outside” the world’.55 The connection therefore between thought and the process of phenomenality as it relates to the ‘truth of the world’ deprives thought of access to Truth. But Henry qualifies this position by making it clear that the denial of access to Truth is not because of a lack in thought. The core issue, which takes us back to the 1980s debate and even more recently to Janicaud’s reference to ‘unthought essense’ that is in need of rewiring, is that thought has to ‘default’ in order for access to the ‘truth of Life’ be granted. Henry claims: ‘It is only when thought defaults, because the truth of the world is absent, that what is at stake be achieved: the self-revelation of God – the self-phenomenalization of pure phenomenality against the background of a phenomenality that is not that of the world.’56

Phenomenological life Little children, undeveloped in thought, linguistic and reasoning capacity, embody, on the one hand, Henry’s phenomenological ‘subject’ and, on the other hand, point to how access to Truth is secured. Truth is accessed through its irreducibility to the cogito and through what Henry calls ‘phenomenological Life’. This concept of Life is critical. Firstly, we need to clarify what Life is not. It has nothing to do with the ‘truth of the world’. The latter is not what gives access to or what shows or reveals Truth. Life is not a process of revelation. It is not an entity or an external appearance. It is not a metaphysical principle of the universe. In contrast to all these properties of life in the ‘truth of the world’, Life is ‘the Truth of Life’. If we assume, as Henry encourages us to do so above, that what is ‘at stake’ in the Truth of Christianity is the self-revelation of God (the self-phenomenalisation of pure phenomenality), then access to this self-revelation can only be achieved through Life. He explains: If the Revelation of God is a self-revelation that owes nothing to the truth of the world, and if we ask where such a self-revelation is achieved, the answer is unequivocal: in Life and in Life alone. Therefore we are in the presence of the first fundamental equation of Christianity: God is Life – he is the essence of Life, or if one prefers, the essence of Life is God. Saying this we already know what God is, but we do not know it

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through the effect of some knowledge or learning – we do not know it through thought, against the background of the truth of the world. Rather, we know it, and can know it, only in and through Life itself.57 In the equation of Life with God, Henry takes his phenomenology of Christianity to another level. The understanding of God as a Being, defined in the logic of the ‘truth of the world’ and conceptualised according to its thinking, is superseded by God as Life, access to whom is through a phenomenology of Life distinct from the phenomenality of the world. In other words, a phenomenology of Life allows God to reveal Himself in the same way that Life reveals itself. But what is a phenomenology of Life and how does it differ from the phenomenality of the world? To the extent that the phenomenality of the world and its truth manifests itself in its own exteriority to itself (outside), ‘emptied of its own substance, unreal’, phenomenological Life does not cast outside itself what it reveals but holds itself inside itself, retains it in so close an embrace that what it holds and reveals is itself. It is only because it holds what it reveals in this embrace, which nothing can pull apart, that it is and can be life. Life embraces, experiences without distance or difference. Solely on this condition can it experience itself, be itself what it experiences.58 If God is Life and He reveals Himself in Life, then the Christian phenomenological essence of Life is that one experiences oneself in one’s living. This is a fundamental facet of phenomenological reductionism for Henry. It cements Henry’s move away from the ‘truth of the world’ and significantly the living as being in that world. But this transition from world to phenomenological Life depends also on the clarification of an opposition between Living and Life. Living is primarily associated, for Henry, with living in the world. Life, on the other hand, is Truth and Revelation. Not only does Life precede living, but Life is also capable of generating its own living. With real living not possible in the world, Henry takes Living in Life as the starting point for a new postsubjectivity. With Life the place to experience oneself as Living in Life, Henry side steps humankind as being (thought) and reference point of the world and replaces him with Life and Living Life as the new experiential knowledge of the postsubject. Lest we forget, of course, a vital part of this intricate jigsaw is the fact that Life is not just Life, and not just the Living of it. Life’s phenomenological essence is God and therefore the Living aspect of Life is commensurate with experiencing God Himself.


Ipseity and transcendental life In order to highlight the uniqueness of this Life–Living–God trilogy and how it manifests itself in an experience (knowledge) of oneself, Henry introduces two new concepts which give his phenomenology its original theological focus. The first concept is Life’s self-generation, otherwise defined as Ipseity. The condition of Life is that Life engenders itself: ‘Life is not what gives access, what clears a path to [ . . . ]. It is not life that gives access to itself ’.59 This is because life is not a power of revelation. Life, for Henry, comes forth in itself. Whereas life in the ‘truth of the world’ is endowed with a capacity to give and reveal, in the ‘truth of Life’ it is Life itself that achieves revelation and it is Life that is revealed. Henry states: Ipseity belongs to the essence of Life and to its phenomenality as well. It is born in the process of Life’s phenomenalization [...]. Ipseity belongs to the transcendental Arch-Son and exists only in him, as what Life necessarily engenders by engendering itself. Ipseity is with Life from the first; it belongs to the first birth. It is contained in this Archbirth, makes it possible, is only intelligible within its phenomenology. Ipseity is the Logos of Life, that in which and as which Life reveals itself by revealing itself to itself. Ipseity is there in the beginning and comes before any transcendental ‘me’, before any Individual.60 There are some key aspects to Ipseity highlighted here which I will come to shortly. But I want to underline at this moment the important equation between Ipseity as self-generation (‘the coming-into-itself of Life’) and the Logos (knowledge, ‘the coming into the experiencingof-oneself’). For Henry, Life’s self-generation as Revelation of God is concomitant with man’s knowing of this as the essence of his own life. This is an essential equation for two reasons. In a single gesture, Henry abolishes relation between ‘truth of the world’ and the cogito as the template for knowledge and for the subject. In addition, Ipseity, as the quotation above confirms, engenders an ancestry access to which is open via the second concept of transcendental Life. Transcendental Life is the life that does not exist in the world. However, as a Life absent from the life of the world, it is also the only Life that truly exists and which we share, in its phenomenological essentiality, with God. By means of transcendental Life, Henry constructs a transcendental pathway of living that connects man in his phenomenological essence to a living ancestry of the First Living, the Arch Son, Son

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of God and Son within the Son of God. The point of this transcendental addendum to Life is twofold. First, its transcendence ensures its phenomenological permanence and truthful longevity. Secondly, as an absent but true Life that differs from the ‘truth of the world’, transcendental Life allows Henry to advance his thesis about access to the ‘truth of Life’. Henry differentiates between being born into the world as a physical entity or being with a name, a father and a mother and being born into Life. For Henry, to be born into Life is to come into Life which means to come from Life, ‘starting from it in such a way that Life is not birth’s point of arrival, as it were, but its point of departure’.61 By subverting the conventional understanding of birth into the world and transforming it into Life as the giver of Life, Henry connects man to a genealogy of the Life of God that offers new philosophical applications for his phenomenology of Christian Life. If we look at how this transcendental Life actually works itself through, it is founded on the joint principle of being born into Life from Life and the phenomenological essence of Life as God: ‘To come to Life from Life, and in this way alone, meaning to come to Life out of that self-engendering of absolute life that is the Father.’62 Henry develops a genealogy of the subject along parallel lines. On one level, there is man, born from man and woman, defined as conscious being and material inhabitant of the world and endowed with thought and intellect. On another level, transcendental Life overrides the ‘truth of the world’ and creates in the process Sons of Life who are, by implication, Sons of God. Specifically, man as subject is not just traced back to Christ but is intimately affiliated to the first born Christ, whom Henry calls the transcendental Arch-Son: ‘The First born, the transcendental Arch-Son, proves capable of conferring upon birth its true meaning. Now every birth finds itself understood as transcendental, generated within and by means of absolute Life’.63 Superficially, this transcendental meaning to birth and the Christological heritage of man’s identification with the son of God does not push too radically the boundaries of theological thinking. But to isolate this one (simplistic) deduction of the concept of transcendental Life from the wider phenomenological thesis is to underestimate Henry’s philosophical insight. Intrinsic to his transcendental and genealogical investigation is the phenomenological essence of Life as God (Ipseity). We have explored in some detail what Henry means by the phenomenology of Life, but not what is meant by a phenomenology of God (Christ) and its implications for transcendental birth and its ‘true meaning’. Henry devotes a full chapter to ‘The Phenomenology of


Christ’ in which he differentiates between Christ’s meaning in the ‘truth of world’ and in the ‘truth of Life’. According to the former, he is merely a man among others. In the latter, Christ is the reason ‘for the original co-belonging of Life and the First Living’.64 If transcendental Life is the means by which Henry incorporates us into this original co-belonging, then it becomes pivotal in connecting us to the essential Ispeity of Life. Henry explains: Not only is Christ not separated from the life in which he lives while it also lives in him, but he is the essential reason for the original cobelonging of Life and the First Living. The Son’s generation co-belongs to Life’s self-generation as what this self-generation accomplishes, as the essential Ispeity in which Life, in its self-embrace, becomes Life. Thus there is no way of reaching the Son other than in the course of Life’s self-embrace, in the same way as there is no other way for life to embrace itself except in this essential Ipseity of the First Living – no other way for it to reveal itself except in the Word.65 Henry’s logic is as follows: transcendental Life equates man with Christ as First Living, with Life’s self-embrace and with his experiencing of himself in the phenomenological essence of Life. Transcendental Life opens up for Henry a way of re-casting subjectivity outside of Being-in-the world and inside a Christian Logos of Arch-Son, Christ, Son and Son of Son. The subject’s newly acquired transcendental Life overturns traditional ‘worldly’ conceptions of man in respect of birth and lineage and resignifies them according to their new Christian transcendental phenomenology. And by extending this transcendental lineage of the subject as he does, Henry is able to expound a more profound and original phenomenology. Let us take as an example the idea of man as the ‘Son of God’. It is a title reserved for Christ but Henry has already reduced Christ to a transcendental equation with man, not in the sense that man is God or Christ. The reductionism conveys the phenomenological essence of Life as God in which man co-belongs and has his essence through his transcendental heritage. In simpler terminology, Henry subscribes to the idea that Life has the same meaning for God, for Christ and for man. And this is so because there is a single essence of Life that self-generates itself in God and that generates the transcendental Arch-Son as the essential Ipseity. We now know that it is from this co-belonging to Life that man takes his transcendental birth; simultaneously he becomes both the Son of Life and the Son of God. This is not to say that God somehow hands man the title of Son of God. Henry avoids any

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difference, separation or power of conferral because Life itself is the only measure of conferral. Henry concedes, naturally, that God ‘created’ man but his ‘creation’ is his essence in the sense that, his own essence being the self-engendering of Life in which is engendered the Ipseity of all the living, then in giving his own essence God gave man the living condition, the happiness of experiencing himself in this experiencing of self that is Life and in the radical immanence of this experiencing, where there is neither ‘outside’ nor ‘world’.66

The radically immanent self The essence given by God to man and consubstantial with man as Son of God is interpreted by Henry in the form of a living transcendental Self that experiences itself in Life. This is the point at which Henry’s analysis engages with the complex issue of the self and how it experiences itself in Life. It represents another key stage in Henry’s phenomenology because the self becomes the register of perception, feeling and experience as applied to the self. And it is from the self that Henry proceeds to establish a wider Christian ethics. The self emerges out of the selfengendering of Life but, significantly, it emerges as a ‘me’ and through the concept of self-affection. Firstly, let us take a closer look first at what is meant by the self being derived from the self-engendering of Life. For Henry, the self is inextricably formed in Life’s self-movement; Life’s selfmovement is its revelation of God in which transcendental man in his Ipseity experiences himself. Therefore, the self is a composite of Life’s movement, its self-giving, God’s self-revelation, Ipseity, an amalgamation of flesh (his own) and that of his Arch birth – Christ. Henry refers to this composition as a pathe-tik; the sensory point at which the self experiences its self. Henry states: The self is only possible as pathetically submerged in itself without ever posing itself in some visible form (intelligible) or another. Such a Self, foreign to any apparition of itself in the world, is what we are calling a radically immanent Self, a Self neither constituted by nor the object of thought, without any image of self, without nothing that might assume the aspect of its reality.67 The self therefore experiences itself as a ‘me’ (in the accusative case) because it eschews confusion with the self as an ‘I’ (metaphysical cogito).


Henry says: ‘I experience myself...and the fact of experiencing myself constitutes my “me”. But I have not brought myself into this condition [...]. I experience myself without being the source of this experience’.68 In the same way that Henry’s concept of self experiences itself as a passive ‘me’, what is specific to Life is that it affects itself (reflexively). Henry draws a distinction between affection (in the ‘truth of the world’) that designates something that affects one via a sound or an image, and self-affection which has no external (worldly) referent and is therefore defined, in the context of the ‘truth of Life’, by Life that affects itself and is not affected by anything other than itself: The concept of self-affection as Life’s essence implies its acosmic character, the fact that being affected by nothing other, nothing external or radically foreign to the world, it comes about in itself in the absolute sufficiency of its radical interiority – experiencing only itself, being affected only by itself, prior to any possible world and independently of it.69 The self (mode of experience) and self-affection (Life’s mode of experiencing itself) are mutually inclusive. If Life is not affected by anything other than by itself (in other words, Life is the content of its affection), and if, as we have explained, that man’s Christian essence is defined in phenomenological Life, then the self experiences itself not only in Life’s self-affection but also in the Self’s Life. The Self’s Life ‘expresses itself in the accusative because it holds fast to its own experience, what is not that of being affected but of being constantly self-affected, within itself, in a self-affection that is independent of external affecting or any relation with the world’.70 The Self’s Life (that is man defined as coming into the condition of a transcendental living ‘me’ that expresses itself in Life’s self-affection) is only possible (if not truly fulfilled from Henry’s perspective) through the original Ipseity of Life (the process by which Life’s self-revelation engenders in it the First Living which places man in the presence of his Arch birth). This essential pre-condition to the condition of man (subject/Self’s Life) undercuts all that follows in respect of man’s Christian, ethical and social communication, and gives Henry’s phenomenology its original theological dimension. Henry is insistent on this pre-condition of Ipseity: ‘There can be no self without the phenomenological substance and flesh of the Arch-Son’;71 ‘Man comes into his condition . . . only insofar as Life, in generating itself, has generated the originary Ipseity of the First Living’.72 It is also a pre-condition that

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extends beyond the self to his interaction with others. In what could be interpreted as the beginnings of an ethics of Christian transcendental man, Henry makes two observations: Without this Ipseity . . . no one would ever be. So if I have something to do with me, I first have to do with Christ. And if I have something to do with another, I first have to do with him in Christ.73 And Only Life originally ipseized can make living the livings that we are – livings who are transcendental me’s capable of growing in their flesh, of expanding at each moment in their being, in this Self that they received at the same time as Life. Only one who has passed under the triumphal Arch of Arch-Ipseity can come and go out and find pastures, be one of those sheep grazing in the field.74

The ‘I’/‘Me’ The primordiality of Ipseity predetermines the governance of the self and the subsequent actions of the self. In the first case, the governance of the self is described within the parameters of the ‘truth of the world’ and the ‘truth of Life’, and as a function of the internal dialectic between ‘me’ and ‘I’. We have established the fact that ‘me’ in the ‘truth of Life’ experiences power phenomenologically (as purely interior), whereas the ‘I’ in the ‘truth of the world’ possesses and exercises power actively. Naturally, both ‘me’ and ‘I’ coexist but Henry clearly attaches greater significance to the ‘me’ than he does to the ‘I’ because the ‘me’ experiences its power in Life’s Ipseity (entering into possession of it), whereas the power of the ‘I’ (meaning ‘I can’) is undermined by the fiction of the ‘I’ that bestows power on its action: ‘it is the absolute powerlessness of the “I” with respect to the fact that it finds itself in possession of this power, able to exercise it’.75 So much so that Henry proceeds to usurp the possessive logic of the ‘truth of the world’ by suggesting that ‘power and action cannot be deployed unless previously given to themselves in the self-givenness of Absolute Life’.76 Henry clarifies this power dialectic in the following way: The “me” is engendered in the self-affecting of absolute Life and experiences itself passively against the background of the original Ipseity of Life, which gives this ‘me’ to itself and makes of it what


is at every moment; therefore this “me” finds itself at the same time much more than what is designated as a “me” [ . . . ]. It enters into possession of itself at the same time as it enters into possession of each of its powers. Entering into possession of these powers, it is able to exercise them.77 The implication of this newly acquired ipseized power of the ‘me’ is that the ‘I’ of power and action is rendered subordinate to the absolute phenomenology of Life, which in turn allows Henry to advance the notion that the ‘I’ is dependent on the ‘me’. This argument works until the ‘I’, forgetting its phenomenological condition as an ipseized transcendental ‘me’, gets ahead of itself in the form of a transcendental illusion that it can concern itself directly again with the world. The power struggle inside the ‘I’ between its real self (‘me’) and its ghostly self (‘I’) remains essentially unresolved for Henry, as it is in the ‘truth of the world’ and the ‘truth of Life’. But he remains assured of how it could be resolved: ‘The life of the ego must be changed into the Life of the Absolute if there is to be salvation’.78 This suppression of the ego echoes the subordination of Western philosophical ontology to phenomenology. Access to God, as Henry’s phenomenology has consistently demonstrated, is not possible through rational thought, proof of God’s existence, biology or scientific knowledge. Rather, it is only possible in Life and the truth that belongs to it. The phenomenology of the ‘me’ nullifies the presumption of the ego. In this light, the actions of the Christian transcendental man (‘me’) towards others place that other into the Absolute ipseized Life that has preceded him and ‘me’. This is the pre-condition of Christian action (doing as opposed to knowing) which I will address shortly. But integral to this process of Christian action is the dual signification Henry gives to the notion of forgetting. The ‘I’, as we have discussed, is a construct of the ego that seeks to manipulate the ‘truth of the world’ by performing (from its own power base) Christian acts of mercy. For Henry, this ego acts only with a view to itself and is therefore abolished (forgotten). But, critically, in this abolition of the ego, its power is transmuted to ‘the hyper-power of absolute Life’: ‘In such a transmutation, the ego forgets itself, so that in and through this forgetting an essential Ipseity is revealed – not its own Self but precisely what gives this self to itself by making it a Self, absolute Life’s self-giving in the Ipseity of which this Life gives itself’.79 The forgetting of the ego therefore gives expression not to the Self of Ipseity but to that which gives this self to itself, namely Life’s self-giving.

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The important point Henry makes here is that Life’s self-giving is the ultimate arbiter in the construction of the self. There is no self other than what Henry calls that radically immanent self ‘whose relation to self excludes any distancing, any putting at a difference, any “outside”, any possible “world”’.80 In the context therefore of forgetting, it is not just the implications of the abolition of the ego for the emergence of Life’s essential self-giving that concern Henry. Forgetting casts a wider net over the self and Christian ethics. If the radically immanent self designates a self that is not concerned with itself and does not think of itself, then this relation to self is one of ‘Forgetting’. Henry reinforces the centrality of this point as a fundamental of the relation between self and the Ipseity of Life: ‘the Immemorial of its (self’s) relation to self in the Ipseity of absolute Life’.81 It also implies that the self renounces itself in its worldly manifestation and expresses itself in its true sense: It is only with the elimination of the worldly self shown in the world and of the worldly relation to self in which the Self sees itself, that the advent comes of the true Self, which experiences itself within the Ipseity of absolute Life and is nothing more than that.82

Ethics and the other Forgetting the self (self-effacement of the self) in order to give way to Life’s self-giving is the condition of Henry’s ethical man. It is a position he shares to a degree with his contemporary Jean-Louis Chrétien for whom ‘forgetting produces an ignorance of self that is positive [ . . . ]. It is the most proper name of our earthly conditions, its restlessness and its impermanence’.83 But how does this selfeffacement play itself out in concrete conditions? Let us take the relation with the other. Henry argues that putting others first is a fundamental given of the recognition of originary Ipseity in the other, and entails the necessary forgetting of oneself, not only as an ‘I’ but as a transcendental ‘me’ whose self has been immemorialsed in Life’s pure self-giving. Henry defends the move on the basis of its ethical purity and as an example of what he calls the ‘genius of the Christian ethic’.84 His argument is that in the process of forgetting both ‘I’ and ‘me’ (and the latter’s ipseized Self) what emerges is that ‘an essential Ipseity is revealed’ that places itself in the other and is recognisable therein. Power is thus transmuted away from the ‘I’ and


also from the ‘me’s Self towards the absolute power of absolute Life as the engendering of ethical empathy: Only the work of mercy practices the forgetting of self in which, all interest for the Self (right down to the idea of what we call a self or a me) now removed, no obstacle is now posed to the unfurling of life in this Self extended to its original essence.85 On another level, Henry’s ethical stance may reveal some inadequacies particularly if we draw a comparison with the ethics of otherness espoused by one of his leading contemporaries, Lévinas. The comparison is selfevident at a structural level where the very existence of the other throws into question the priority of the self and in the process opens up a new ethical relationship between self and other. But the generality of this comparison belies some profound differences. For Henry, the forgetting of self (both ‘I’ and ‘me’) for the sake of the other is carried out in such a way that it has no direct bearing on the self as a ‘me’ (who is forgotten safely in his own Ipseity) other than to repeat the idea that it is ‘no longer me who acts but the Arch-Son who acts in me’.86 We know already that this idea will find a safe haven in the other who is equally self-contained as an ipseized other. Put more simply, it would appear that the forgetting of self (‘me’) in Henry’s ethical phenomenology is designed to allow for the other to also reveal even more visibly and gloriously the self-sufficient Ipseity of Life itself. This is laudable in itself and wholly consistent within Henry’s methodology. Clearly, the transcendental ‘me’ is Henry’s preferred mode of explanation for this ethical stance and it fits in with his phenomenology of Life. But, in the context of merciful acts and concrete situations, one cannot help but feel some concern for the banished ‘I’ (‘transcendental ego’) whose reality and action have been sacrificed on the altar of Ipseity. What becomes of the transcendental ‘I’ ‘me’ outside the safety net of a Christian phenomenology? To simply abolish it may well work in the context of Henry’s Christian ethics. For a comparative response, we might want to turn to Lévinas, for whom the existence of the other actually liberates the self from a slumber (trauma) of primordiality and egoism, making him confront as a matter of reciprocal ethical obligation the other’s and, by extension, his own self’s existence. The nearest Lévinas comes to the consolation of a self-contained orginary Ipseity is in the ‘me-ness’ of the self. But unlike Henry who can afford to forget the ‘me’ because of the automatic arrival of essential Ipseity in the other and, in the process, not forgo his ethical integrity, Lévinas, as we see from the

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quotation below, is obliged to redefine his self in relation with the other because of the visible effect produced by the other: The Other tears me from my hypostasy, from the here, at the heart of being or at the center of the world where, privileged and in this sense primordial, I posit myself. But, in this tearing, the ultimate meaning of my “me-ness” is revealed. In the collation of meaning between “me” and the other and also in my alterity to myself, an alterity through which I can confer on the other the meaning of myself, the here and there come to invert their respective meanings. It is not the homogenization of space that thus constitutes itself: it is I – however manifestly primordial and hegemonic, however identical to myself, in what is “proper” to me, however comfortable in my own skin, in my hic et nunc – who pass to the second level: I see myself on the basis of the other, I expose myself to the other, I have accounts to render.87 Lévinas’s phenomenological methodology reveals a mutual dependence of self and other outside Ipseity. Henry’s phenomenology reveals their mutual exclusivity inside and because of Ipseity. In fact, it is because of Life’s Ipseity that Henry is able to develop his original programme of ethical Christian action. Defined in the language of ‘genius’ and ‘second birth’, Christian ethical man is distinct because of the difference Henry highlights between doing in ‘the truth of the world’ and doing in ‘the truth of Life’. As he has done consistently throughout this work, Henry’s phenomenology determines that action of any sort is predicated on the power or lack of it attributed respectively to the agent (‘I’) or to the passive subject (‘me’). In the ‘truth of the world’, doing is described as leading to something objective: it is doing performed by an external Being/Individual who does in the knowledge given to him that he can. In the ‘truth of Life’, doing is situated in the dimension of Life: as such, to do is Life’s doing. It is an action of transcendence that one does in the invisibility of Life. To do is also to make an effort in the sense that doing takes pains to do. In this idea of pain and suffering, Henry literally fleshes out a phenomenology of the flesh to which I referred in the quotation opening this chapter and which is the essential essence of Henry’s phenomenological Life. Whereas in the ‘truth of the world’, the world appears as an outside and one can experience an ecstatic truth belonging to that world, this reality seems to pale in comparison to Life in the ‘truth of Life’ where Life simply appears, ‘grasping itself in its own pathos without ever putting itself at a distance’,88 and where truth is in-ecstatic-Life.


Furthermore, for Henry, it is at this level of pathos (pathe-tik) that Life is revealed by feeling itself in the ‘flesh of its own pathos’. Ethical man, through his radically immanent self that is immemorial in its originary Ipseity, submits wilfully to the pathos of Life as his natural condition ‘because “suffer oneself” is the structure of life’ and because the ‘phenomenological substance of Life is pathos’.89 Man is therefore privileged to experience the in-ecstatic Life Truth of his Self and that of Life because ‘this flesh that is its own has itself a Flesh that is not its own, the Flesh of the giving to self of absolute phenomenological Life in the ArchSon – the Flesh of Christ’.90 And far from being an experience of pain and suffering, it is for Henry one of joy and the culmination of phenomenological Life: Suffering appears to be the path that leads to enjoying, and thus its condition. It is only in experiencing oneself in the “suffer oneself” that the life of the living Self comes into itself, such that suffering is veritably a path and a way. It is the test that life must pass so that, in and through that test, it attains itself and comes into itself in that coming that is the essence of any life, the process of its selfrevelation [ . . . ]. This is the antinomic structure of life, its division into the dichotomy, between the opposed tonalities of suffering and happiness, such that the former can only lead to the latter, inasmuch as suffering takes place and does not stop taking place within happiness, as what gives it to itself, as its internal and insurmountable condition.91 Henry’s contribution to the ‘who comes after the subject?’ debate brings together some interesting observations. As part of a wider reflection on the return of religion to a post-secular France, it is timely, provocative and defiant. One of the aims of his work I Am the Truth, beyond its immediate phenomenological exposition, is to redress the decline of Christianity in the modern world. Against a backdrop of scientific knowledge, the legacy of Marxism, Galileo’s geometrics, antihumanism and the loss of what a ‘beyond’ means, Henry launches a steely defence of Christianity’s credentials in the modern world, based on a fundamental binary between the illusory ‘truth of the world’ and the genuine ‘truth of Life’. His response to the decline of Christianity is to propose that there is one invisible reality (Life) which is phenomenological Life. This is the Life that does not show itself in the ‘world’, that eludes its ‘truth’ and that only reveals itself to itself in its pathe-tik selfrevelation. Access to the truth of this Life is through a combination of

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transcendental self-generation (Ipseity) with the First Living (Christ), and submission of the self to its radical self-immanence in the flesh. As for 1980s debate on the future of the subject, Henry incorporates into his phenomenology some of its main insights, particularly those relating to sensibility, experience and the living present, traces of which can be detected in his general phenomenological methodology and specifically in his use of concepts such as Ipseity and the pathe-tik. He also endorses the seminal critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity which lies at the heart of the debate on the subject and which has become the catalyst for new postsubjective innovations, including the rehabilitation of phenomenology in recent philosophical enquiry. In fact, I would venture that it is within the trajectory of Henry’s phenomenology that we can look for his response to the debate on the subject. The 1980s debate reflected an age of suspicion about the metaphysics of subjectivity but implicit in the question ‘who comes after the subject?’ was the presumption of a concrete response, a ‘some-one else’ (as Nancy intimated), even the possibility of a replacement for the subject. We have traced in the course of this chapter how this debate took shape, particularly the theoretical advances made in unthinking the subject and redefining at its core the idea of a subject in waiting. The age of suspicion and secular liberalism of the 1980s, while still prevalent in various manifestations today, has been tempered by the return of religion to postmodernity. And it is within this new religious climate that Henry’s response to the subject debate finds its real significance. The originality of Henry’s phenomenology is its theological focus. In this, Henry replies to Nancy’s call for a ‘some-one else’ to come after the subject by identifying ‘him’ in the self-generation of Life as God and man, in short in Ipseity. But Henry’s God is not only the one who comes after the subject, He comes before the subject too and is in fact consubstantial with the subject. Man and God in their Ipseity are revealed in the subject of Life. Henry achieves this by one simple methodological principle: the return to the thing in itself in its invisible immanence.

6 ‘Broken Cogito’ and Textual Subjectivity

Shall I tolerate the fact that thinking, which aims at what is universal and necessary, is linked in a contingent way to individual events and particular texts that report them? Yes, I shall assume this contingency, so scandalous for thinking, as one aspect of the presupposition attached to listening. For I hope that once I enter into the movement of comprehending faith, I shall discover the very reason for that contingency, if it is true that the increase in comprehension that I expect is indissolubly linked to testimonies to the truth, which are contingent in every instance and rendered through certain acts, lives, and beings. Paul Ricoeur ‘Naming God’ In my conclusion to Chapter 1 on ‘The Return of Religion in France’, I raised the currently controversial issue concerning public expression of religious faith in France today. While the republican secular school denies ostentatious displays of religious affiliation, the university, by contrast, is a tolerant and free space where religious identity is freely embraced by student and staff, both privately and publicly. Philippe Capelle and Henry-Jérôme Cagey use this distinction to reinforce the idea that intellectual rigour (in this instance, academic endeavour and professionalism) should not be seen to be incompatible with public religious expression. In fact, for these co-authors, the co-habitation of what they call ‘savant’ and ‘témoin’ reflects a more accurate picture of a contemporary French mindset that embraces faith rationally. Their argument is of course a response to the wider debate, initiated by Régis Debray, into the need to reshape the space of the republican school in order to make religious instruction a more integral part of the French educational curriculum for young people. 181

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In a different context but from a connected perspective, the ‘philosopher’ of religion Paul Ricoeur challenges Debray’s complementary approach to faith and reason. In an unpublished sermon from 1984 called ‘Whoever Loses Their Life for My Sake Will Find it’, Ricoeur not only sheds a different light on the relation between faith and reason but he also casts a different eye on the role of a university academic: To take up the cross of Jesus, for me, a member of the university, the community of knowledge, means not to overevaluate my knowledge, caught up as it is in questions of proof and guarantees, before this necessity – higher than any logical necessity: “It was necessary that the Son of Man should suffer and be crucified.” For all God’s power, God only gives Christians the signs of divine weakness, which is the sign of God’s love. To allow myself to be helped by the weakness of this love is, for the question of making sense of my faith, to accept that God can be thought of only by means of the symbol of the Suffering Servant and by the incarnation of this symbol in the eminently contingent event of the cross of Jesus.1 In simple terms, Ricoeur puts faith before reason. In fact, he subordinates reason to the ‘higher necessity’ of faith in the symbol of the Suffering Servant. Faith, however, is not totally devoid of reasoning capacity because Ricoeur makes it clear that this symbolisation of suffering ‘can only be thought’ through and made ‘sense of’ according to God’s weakness. It is a view that Ricoeur shares, as we have seen, with Gianni Vattimo and John D. Caputo in their conceptualisation of the ‘weakness of thought’, but particularly with Caputo and the connection he draws between the suffering of Christ and eventiveness: ‘The crucified body of Jesus is a site – one among many – of divine eventiveness, through which there courses a stream of events that traverse our bodies and shock the world under the name of the weakness of God, and we are to make ourselves worthy of the event.’2 My reason for introducing Ricoeur in the context of faith and philosophy (and specifically against the backdrop of the academic community) is to underline a central dialectic at the heart of his corpus which has courted much controversy right up to his death in 2005 (particularly with the publication of his last work Memory, History, Forgetting3), and which will form the basis of the first part of this chapter. Ricoeur, as the university analogy illustrates, has steered a consistent path between biblical faith and philosophy, even to the extent that certain of his texts have been emended deliberately so as to avoid the perception of one tradition undermining or obscuring the other.

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Crucially, what is behind Ricoeur’s aversion to ambiguity is the belief that there are two types of self/subject, a self that is faith-based and wholly compatible with Christian revelation as illustrated above, and another construction of self (subject) that is outside the pale of religion, not dependent on biblical faith and whose identity is measured in social and ethical relations with others. While this appears a perfectly objective and tolerant philosophical response to the concept of self in which faith and philosophy, defined separately, are given legitimate expression, my criticism (which I will address in more detail in the opening section of this chapter titled ‘Faith, Truth and Philosophy’) centres on Ricoeur himself and where he stands on this divided self. After all, as a committed Christian, it could be argued that his self-confessed allegiance to the supremacy of faith (and hence a faith-based conception of self) renders the other self/subject a philosophical experiment confined within socio-ethical parameters. Indeed, if we consider in more detail the extract from the unpublished sermon outlined above, it is clear that the self defined in relation to biblical faith triumphs unquestionably over the other self. Of course, one unpublished quotation from a sermon in the 1980s should not outweigh a body of critical work extending over a period of half a century which attests to the unambiguous distinction between faith and philosophy. And, it would be remiss not to stress the fact that the mass of Ricoeur’s critical and intellectual energy has been deployed in the philosophical exploration of the self in its ethical, moral and pragmatic dimensions. Equally, to infer that Ricoeur developed a notion of a divided self to court critical controversy or as an abstraction to work through his Christianity philosophically and artistically would be to undermine a daring and original philosophical project that reveals hidden intersubjectivities between faith and philosophy. However, in the context of a self defined in relation to biblical faith, I argue that the key to understanding the reason for Ricoeur’s separation of faith and philosophy is that, for him, philosophy as truth is limited in understanding faith and Christianity. In principle therefore, philosophy as a presupposition of truth is invalid. But as methodology in pursuit of truth that can help elucidate what Ricoeur calls ‘la pensée biblique’ (biblical thought), philosophical exegesis plays a significant role. In this, Ricoeur follows in the tradition of Blondel and others (Ratzinger) who refuse to alienate philosophy from theological reasoning. But, more significantly, Ricoeur’s work can be more accurately contextualised in a post-Enlightenment tradition where faith and reason are distinguishable by origin and by object. We will see this exegesis played out in his

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development of different types of faith self, for example the prophet, the inner teacher, conscience and attestation. This subordination of philosophy as truth/wisdom to faith, as Ricoeur the academic attests to above, defines therefore the faith self of the divided self. However, Ricoeur also articulates a philosophical alternative to the faith self that emerges out of a hermeneutical confrontation with literature and textuality. In my second section called ‘Hermeneutics of the Self and Faith Texts’, I examine how this hermeneutical self fosters self-understanding through the internal dynamics of a text. The matter of the text as a place of unfolding, where the text becomes the horizon of being for the self, introduces a new interpretation of the self outside the parameters of biblical faith. In the important wider debate on the philosophical role of subjectivity and the cogito, what is significant about Ricoeur’s contribution to this debate is that the cogito in both instances (faith and hermeneutics) is erased. Both defer the role of subjectivity by undermining the presumption of self-responsibility in the mediating subject. In the case of faith, human will is subordinate to God’s will. As for hermeneutics, subjectivity is subordinate to the matter of the text. In my final section called ‘Oneself as Another’, I open up this debate to take on board the implications of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical construction of self as a dialectic of otherness, and how this has applications in the real world of ethics and Christian relations.

Faith, truth and philosophy: the case of Paul Ricoeur It seems unfair and incongruous that Ricoeur has been criticised for letting his Christianity guide his philosophy when in fact his faith-based texts represent only a fraction of his extensive oeuvre.4 With the exception of what are known as the Gifford Lectures (‘The Self in the Mirror of Scripture’ and ‘The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation’) and a handful of essays (notably ‘Naming God’ and ‘The Logic of Jesus, The Logic of God’), Ricoeur’s work has eschewed theological contemplation and embraced a trajectory steeped in Husserlian phenomenology and ethical responsibility. And yet, one cannot but be struck by the fact that it is the religious works that continue to command today an attention seemingly incommensurate with their place in Ricoeur’s overall corpus. Why is this the case? Firstly, I would argue that Ricoeur, perhaps unintentionally, has invited controversy over these texts because of their pronounced separateness from his other philosophical reflections on the self. They are distinct as texts that advocate a hermeneutics of the self originating in the summoning of the subject as a call from God. As such,


they stand in radical opposition to Ricoeur’s central and consistently philosophical position on selfhood as a dialectic of alterity (recognisable in the celebrated phrase ‘as myself I am an other’). Secondly, and in connection with the above, I would suggest that the controversy over the faith texts is partially self-inflicted in the way Ricoeur appears to apologise for their very existence. For example, in the opening chapter of Oneself as Another called ‘Question of Selfhood’, in which he admits it would have been appropriate to include the aforementioned Gifford lectures, he apologises for their omission, firstly because the book would have been too long, and secondly because he wishes to pursue an autonomous philosophical discourse. Objectively, Ricoeur makes a valid case for bracketing biblical faith from the more philosophical and ethical reflections on the self that make up Oneself as Another, but in doing so he appears to court controversy on several fronts. He confirms, on the one hand, that there are two selves in his philosophical universe, a faith self and a socially ethical self, as we have intimated above. Indeed, these two selves are so disconnected from each other that they cannot even be discussed in the same volume. On the other hand, Ricoeur’s apologetic tone suggests that this division is problematic because it has the potential of raising the awkward question (even if he tries to obfuscate it) of the supremacy of one self over the other: It will be observed that this asceticism of the argument which marks, I believe, all my philosophical work, leads to a type of philosophy from which the actual mention of God is absent and in which the question of God, as a philosophical question, itself remains in a suspension that could be called agnostic, as the final lines of the tenth study will attest. It is in an effort not to make an exception to this suspension that the sole extension given to the nine studies conducted within the dimensions of a philosophical hermeneutics consists in an ontological investigation that involves no ontotheological amalgamations.5 We can deduce from this that the faith texts are not ‘philosophical’ texts, that the ontological and the ontotheological are distinct investigations and that a faith text involves a different mindset to a philosophical text. Is Ricoeur arguing that faith and philosophy have their own separate discourses and never the twain should meet? Ricoeur’s faith texts are not devoid of philosophical exegesis but their understanding is dependent on biblical faith. To this degree, the discussion of a self founded on biblical traditions of call and response does not sit easily with a philosophical project of selfhood; faith discourse is an altogether separate response to the self from that offered by the self to the socius. Let us be clear therefore on

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this point. Ricoeur does not deny his Christian heritage. In fact, he speaks and writes openly and convincingly about his faith. But it would seem that this happens deliberately outside the pale of philosophy, as a separate discourse and in a different context. Nevertheless, and in spite of these clarifications, it is my contention that whatever conclusion we may choose to draw from the faith/philosophy binary, one cannot help but be left with an overriding impression that, regardless of the particular sermon text mentioned above, Ricoeur’s relationship to (his) faith, set alongside his philosophical project, is secondary. This would account for the balance in favour of philosophical texts over religious texts within his overall corpus, and their deliberate separation from each other. It would also go some way to help explain why ‘ontotheological’ and other religious interventions are cast as obstacles to philosophical ‘asceticism’. The perception that faith might somehow get in the way of philosophical reflection underpins, I would suggest, a concern to differentiate between the two. It is a concern, furthermore, that goes back to his earliest writings and has led to a dichotomy at the heart of his work and his posthumous reception among contemporary critics. Some of these, as we shall see later, have not failed to exploit an ambiguity that belies the unresolved complexity of a thinker torn between theology and philosophy. Based even on the evidence produced thus far, there may be a case that, for Ricoeur, philosophy represented a more expansive and accommodating format in which to explore the philosophical potential of the self, in contrast to the relative simplicity (even philosophical defeatism) of self-subordination to ‘the event of the Cross’, no matter how personally salutary and salvific that may have proved to have been. Of course, for Ricoeur personally, such an interpretation flies in the face of the proud academic who wilfully succumbs to the image of the Suffering Servant as demonstrated above. But there is a logic to this interpretation because as I mentioned earlier, while Ricoeur’s dissatisfaction with philosophy is based on its presupposition as truth, he still holds philosophy in the highest esteem as methodology. In other words, as we will see in his treatment of the faith-based texts, Ricoeur retains some key tenets of philosophical analysis and uses them to establish a foundation of faith in subjectivity based on notions of listening, hearkening, word as event and the central role of the reader in the hermeneutics of the self. If we are to get to the root of Ricoeur’s distinction between philosophy as truth and philosophy as methodology in the pursuit of faith, we need to go back to some of his earlier writings on the subject. Before we do so, let us summarise some key ideas. For Ricoeur, the self is a twofold construction: there is the self based on biblical faith and a hermeneutical self that is a


dialectic of otherness. Critics have applauded this division in the spirit of objectivity and tolerance. Any mention of God or Revelation is therefore reserved for the faith self and should not feature in definitions or speculation on the abstract self. Even Ricoeur has said as much in his reference to the dangers of interference from ‘ontotheological amalgamations’. And, in the spirit of reciprocity, he is equally protective of biblical faith and the dangers presented by a ‘cryptophilosophical function’. All in all, therefore, this stance seems eminently sensible. But as a complete representation of the faith/philosophy binary, it is only partially revealing. In their introduction to the special issue of Esprit in 2006 devoted to the memory of Ricoeur, Michaël Foessel and Olivier Mongin defend Ricoeur’s division of the self along the lines outlined above, but they also allude to the longstanding Ricoeurean distinction between philosophy as truth and philosophy as a methodology that can be used to understand God. They state: Is it therefore a matter once again of “abolishing knowledge in order to pave the way for belief” and of pushing the limits of philosophy in order to better feel the necessity of God? In response, one can only say that that which Ricoeur placed beyond the “frontiers” of philosophy was but a matter for him and those readers who followed him in these debates.6 The implication, echoing the earlier statement by Ricoeur the academic who subordinates all knowledge to the event of the Cross, is that philosophical knowledge when equated with truth is futile before the power invested by God’s will in faith. But crucially, this futility of knowledge does not spell the end for philosophy as methodology because the latter is deployed effectively in fleshing out the ‘necessity of God’. We will see this philosophical method tested in the pursuit of faith in the faith-based texts later in this chapter. But as a recurring leitmotif in Ricoeur’s thinking, it can be traced back to works dating from the mid to late 1960s, and within this trajectory we can detect a shift in philosophical emphasis. In the chapter ‘Christianity and the Meaning of History’ from his 1965 work History and Truth, Ricoeur indulges at the outset in the privileged position of the Christian who, in spite of living in the ‘ambiguity’ of secular history, is sustained by the invaluable treasure of a sacred history whose meaning he alone ‘knows’. Ricoeur maintains that the meaning of living in history for the Christian (salvation in effect) is hidden and as such it is a mystery. But, nourished by a faith in this mystery, Ricoeur launches an attack on philosophy: ‘Christianity has an instinctive distrust of systematic philosophies of history that would like to provide us with the key to

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intelligibility. One has to choose between system or mystery. The mystery of history puts me on guard against the theoretical, practical, intellectual, and political fanaticisms.’7 Clearly, Ricoeur chooses mystery over philosophy as a system but this does not imply that the choice of mystery is irrational or without philosophical underpinning. Ricoeur proceeds to rationalise the Christian meaning of history through hope, meaning and faith. He argues in particular that meaning and mystery are the contrasting language of hope. While meaning implies unity and understanding, mystery (the other side of meaning) hides meaning from humankind. Meaning, in other words, can be hidden, and as much as it (meaning) cannot be relied on, Ricoeur in Pascalian mode ventures that ‘one must risk it on signs’. What are these signs and what authorises the Christian to speak of risking meaning in signs when he takes shelter in mystery? Ricoeur replies that faith in the Lordship of God provides this authority: I think that this Lordship constitutes a “meaning”, and not a supreme farce, a prodigious caprice, or a last “absurdity”, because the great events that I recognize as Revelation have a certain pattern, constitute a global form, and are not given as pure discontinuity. Revelation has a kind of bearing which is not an absurdity for us, for we may discern in it a certain pedagogical plan in going from the Old Testament to the New Testament. The great Christian events – death and resurrection – constitute an order open to what Saint Paul calls “the understanding of faith”.8 For Ricoeur, the meaning that allows the Christian to go beyond the ambiguity and disconnectedness of lived history is the ‘fact that this history is imbued with another history whose meaning is not inaccessible to him and which may be understood’.9 Such understanding is nevertheless limited in time and by human history that has not run its full course. And so faith provides the reassurance. As much as Ricoeur develops a rationale for this mysterious meaning of Christianity in history, he cannot evade an acknowledgement of the prerequisite of faith. And faith becomes the critical linchpin in seeing through the meaning that Christianity may have as a whole: The meaning of history . . . is an object of faith. It is not an object of reason, as is instrumental progress, because what is in question is the global meaning which this form may take on in the process of being delineated by the actions of man. This meaning cannot be established or concluded; one can only wait for it with a powerful grace.10


And yet the waiting associated with faith is not a state of indolence. Ricoeur says that faith becomes ‘an attempt to construct comprehensive schemata, to embrace the terms of a philosophy of history at least as an [sic] hypothesis’.11 Ricoeur’s early attempts to bring philosophical method closer to theology can also be seen in one of his early ground-breaking works The Conflict of Interpretations. In the chapter titled ‘Freedom in the Light of Hope’, Ricoeur opens his argument by drawing a distinction between the way the theologian and the philosopher deal with religious freedom. The theologian develops the kerygma according to its own conceptual system and ‘has the duty of reorganizing it in a meaningful framework, in a discourse of its own kind, corresponding to the internal coherence of the kerygma itself’.12 In short, the theologian reinterprets scripture for a contemporary audience, while never drifting far from its essential message. The philosopher’s role is different. Ricoeur states: The philosopher, even the Christian one, has a distinct task; I am not inclined to say that he brackets what he has heard and what he believes, for how could he philosophize in such a state of abstraction with respect to what is essential? But neither am I of the opinion that he should subordinate his philosophy to theology, in an ancillary relation. Between abstention and capitulation, there is the autonomous way which I have located under the heading “the philosophical approach”.13 Ricoeur describes this philosophical approach as approximation whereby the philosopher attempts to put philosophical discourse into a relation of proximity with kerygmatic and theological discourse. Importantly, Ricoeur’s emphasis within philosophical discourse is on ‘responsible thought’, by which he means the deployment of reason to understand the Christian logos. It is significant to highlight here that the theological discourse remains intact; it does not change and the theologian is not expected to move his ground on this. It falls rather to the philosopher to ‘convert’ not to theology in the form of capitulation but to convert his philosophy to approximate theological discourse. Again, Ricoeur states: The “conversion” of the philosopher is a conversion within philosophy and to philosophy according to its internal exigencies. If there is only one logos, the logos of Christ requires of me as a philosopher nothing else than a more complete and more perfect activation of reason; not more than reason, but whole reason. Let us repeat this phrase: whole reason.14

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This explanation appears to reflect Ricoeur’s enduring position as outlined in respect of faith and philosophy. Firstly, the power dynamic is symbolic; the philosopher is powerless before the kerygma. He either abstains or capitulates. And not wishing to abstain, Ricoeur seeks a facesaving approximation. Except that, in his own case, Ricoeur is a Christian believer himself, which makes his job as philosopher to find common ground with theology easier. Given that the kerygma is incontrovertible for the Christian philosopher, the objective (un-Christian) philosopher, who cannot deny it or abstain from it, is consigned to going into overdrive to understand it; hence the application of ‘whole reason’. In short, Ricoeur subscribes not to the capitulation of philosophy to theology (nor abstention) but to the reasoned enhancement and reconfirmation of theology via philosophy. In the context of The Conflict of Interpretations, this deployment of philosophy as methodology in the pursuit of faith translates into a ‘philosophical approximation of freedom in the light of hope’. Specifically, Ricoeur detects in hope an innovation of meaning and a demand for intelligibility which ‘create the measure and the task of approximation’.15 Hope, for Ricoeur, begins as an ‘alogical’ concept but within the context of the ‘logic of Jesus’, the Revelation and the ‘the denial of the reality of death’ in the Resurrection, hope is valorised as a super abundance of meaning that undermines the abundance of doubt and non-sense. It leads Ricoeur to reflect on an exegesis of hope by means of freedom as a ‘way of thinking’: ‘The passion for the possible must graft itself onto real tendencies, the mission onto a sensed history, the super abundance onto signs of the Resurrection, wherever they can be deciphered.’16 With hope reinstated as justifiable meaning in approximation with the kerygma, Ricoeur is free to philosophise hope within the Kantian concept of the transcendental illusion. According to this illusion, hope does not proceed from the unconditioned projection of the human into the divine but, on the contrary, from ‘the filling-in of the thought of the unconditioned according to the mode of the empirical object’.17 In other words, Ricoeur, in this text from 1969 (its original French date of publication), advances a discourse of hope (and faith) grounded in a logic that is not only close to the kerygma but is also within the limits of reason. It would appear that in these early texts, Ricoeur’s strategy was to juxtapose the respective functions of theologian and philosopher with the aim of bridging a gap between the two disciplines. Without abdicating their respective responsibilities, specifically the responsibility of the philosopher to think rationally, Ricoeur sought to bring philosophical method to bear on the way theology could be understood. A clear pattern was to


emerge in these texts. As with the theologian/philosopher juxtaposition and the capitulation/abstention opposition (the parameters of Ricoeur’s ‘philosophical approach’), so in ‘Religion, Atheism and Faith’ Ricoeur embarks on a similar set of binaries between philosopher and prophet, atheism and faith. Before we examine these binaries, Ricoeur’s central thesis is to revaluate religion in atheism. Via an exegesis of atheism (Nietzschean nihilism and the Freudean libido, both of which according to Ricoeur have advanced the religious debate positively away from the dogmatic confines of commandments and supreme will), Ricoeur aims to demonstrate that atheism is not devoid of religious significance and that it is effectively through confronting it that faith can be given new expression: ‘An idol must die so that a symbol of being may begin to speak’.18 However, in the introduction to this thesis, Ricoeur outlines the parameters of his own brief as philosopher. In customary mode, he separates the role of philosopher from that of preacher: I believe, however, that such is the unavoidable situation of the philosopher when he is confronted by the dialectic, such as it exists, between religion, atheism, and faith. The philosopher is not a preacher. He may listen to preaching, as I do; but insofar as he is a professional and responsible thinker, he remains a beginner, and his discourse always remains a preparatory discourse.19 The similarities with the opening lines from ‘Freedom in the Light of Hope’ are remarkable. On the one hand, Ricoeur opens up a division between theologian and philosopher and philosopher and preacher respectively on the grounds that the philosopher is a ‘thinker’ and the theologian a ‘witness’. On the other hand, he muddies the waters in both contexts by claiming that he is a Christian and he listens to preaching (the significance of which I will address later). In effect, Ricoeur is a Christian philosopher. But this assimilation does not sit easily with him, hence his numerous efforts to treat the two separately. It would appear that part of the unease with this assimilation is the perception of the unthinking theologian/preacher. The latter is seen as an uncritical vessel of God’s will, whereas the philosopher assumes a more objective and critical distance. While it is still my estimation that on a personal level this may have been a source of considerable angst for Ricoeur, we have seen that he has managed it in such a way by putting philosophy, where possible, at the service of theology. I would suggest that this has been a deliberate strategy by Ricoeur to bring philosophy and theology/preaching closer together in order to show

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that, while there are important and irreconcilable differences between the two, there are also still (and nevertheless) useful and productive overlaps between them. Let us look at some of these in the context of his chapter on atheism. In the course of the discussion, Ricoeur speculates on how faith can be made meaningful in the post-Nietzschean universe. Two responses present themselves. The first is that of the prophetic preacher: ‘Only a preacher . . . with the power and the freedom of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra would be able to make a radical return to the origins of Jewish and Christian faith and, at the same time, make of this return an event which speaks to our own time’.20 The preacher is therefore the embodiment of faith. He is the person who incorporates the kerygma and is empowered to transmit it over time. The second response comes from the philosopher who is described as a dreamer of what the prophet can actually achieve, and whose dream would be complete where that prophet to not only preach the message of the Cross and the Resurrection but also throw in some intellectual discussion on the ‘contemporary significance of the Pauline antimony between the Gospel and the Law’.21 The differences between prophet and philosopher are clear; the former is content in his belief, the latter would like to believe (and may even do but not with the same intensity), plus the latter cannot do without the necessary intellectual stimulus to satisfy his own natural curiosity. Ricoeur continues to draw distinctions between the two, with the apparent effect of privileging the status of philosopher whose objectivity and open-mindedness are applauded. In fact, he identifies three reasons why it is better that the philosopher is not a preacher. The first reason is because the time ‘is not right’. The 1960s represented a period of spiritual decline for Christianity as sexual liberation and individualism captured the global imagination. Secondly, and related to the first, the philosophical and social contexts of post-existential nihilism and growing secularity from the 1960s onwards opened up a window of reflection which, for Ricoeur, was not only ‘proper’ in that it gave pause for thought, but it also revealed the importance of the role of philosopher on whom it fell to try to make sense of socio-cultural and philosophical change: ‘The period of mourning for the gods who have died is not yet over, and it is in this intermediate time that the philosopher does his thinking.’22 Thirdly, Ricoeur suggests that the intellectual position of the philosopher, ‘suspended between atheism and faith’, requires him, not to capitulate to a ‘reductive hermeneutics’ of nihilism or the ‘positive hermeneutics’ of the biblical kerygma, but to think: ‘The philosopher’s responsibility is to think, that is, to dig beneath the surface of the


present antimony until he has discovered the level of questioning that makes possible a mediation between religion and faith by means of atheism’.23 However, what we need to bear in mind in relation to this idea of thinking is that while philosophical method may serve a positive function in the immediate context of the deconstruction of atheism as a precursor of faith, philosophy per se (i.e. as a precursor of truth) is found wanting when set alongside the insight of the prophet. Critically for Ricoeur (and I would argue that this is the reason for his continued juxtaposition of philosophy and theology), the significance of the prophet’s faith and its transmission is interconnected and conditional on a philosophical methodology. On a surface reading, the prophetic analogy is similar to the capitulation position described above in which all philosophy is subordinate to theology. But on closer inspection, Ricoeur takes the prophet’s obedience to the ‘word’ (of God) as a way of developing a philosophy of theology in which listening to the word reveals a mode of being that is unique to the believer. We will see this developed in substantial detail in the next section of this chapter in the context of the faith texts, but I would like to highlight now how Ricoeur, even at this early stage in his philosophical corpus, conveys the ‘word’ as a philosophical concept. He defines words in the context of parole, that is as spoken word. When parole is viewed from a theological perspective, it takes on a slightly different origin in the sense that the word is not at human disposal but is seen to come to one (as a gift). Ricoeur’s relationship to the spoken word implies a total obedience ‘that is entirely devoid of ethical implications’.24 As a consequence, this non-ethical obedience to the word spares the philosopher any ethical misgivings concerning the socio-political values ensuing from such obedience. With this first principle intact, Ricoeur proceeds to construct a pre-ethical situation in which hearkening (listening to the word) contributes to a special definition of being. He writes: In hearkening there is revealed a mode of being which is not yet a mode of doing and which thus avoids the alternative of subjection and revolt [ . . . ]. When word says something, when it reveals not only something about the meaning of beings but something about Being itself, as is the case with the poet, we are then confronted by what could be called the occurrence of word: something is said of which I am neither the source nor the master. Word is not at my disposition, as are the instruments of work and production or the goods of consumption. In the occurrence of the word, I do not have anything at my command; I do not impose myself; I am no longer

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the master; I am led beyond the feelings of anxiety and concern. This situation or nonmastery is the origin of both obedience and freedom.25 Ricoeur’s philosophy of the occurrence of the word works on three levels: the cogito, ethics and existence. Obedience to the word divests the subject of the supremacy of the cogito. In its place, Ricoeur establishes different modes of understanding from the ‘I’ in hearing, listening and silence, all of which are ‘existentially prior to obeying’ but linked theoretically to obedience to the word. In its pre-existential form, hearkening implies a new ‘belonging-to’ the word which for Ricoeur is vital in that it removes the value-laden implications underpinning the socially placed cogito. This new relationship to the word announces its own ethics ‘that exist prior to the morality of obligation and duty’ and which Ricoeur defines as ‘an ethics of the desire to be or the effort to exist’ (I will come back to this in the final section of this chapter on the dialectic of selfhood and otherness). In this pre-existential state where being in relation to hearkening of the word is in its very formation, Ricoeur takes us back prior to the Cartesian ethics of ‘I am’ to Spinoza’s essence of ethics defined in effort and desire (‘conatus’). In other words, Ricoeur grounds his ethical stance in the raw but affirmative power to exist which, conjoined with the new belonging-to the word, opens up new creative possibilities for existence. He states: When we speak of word as a positive, vital reality, we are suggesting an underlying connection between word and the active core of our existence. Word has the power to change our understanding of ourselves. This power does not originally take the form of an imperative. Before addressing itself to the will as an order that must be obeyed, word addresses itself to what I have called our existence as effort and desire. We are changed, not because a will is imposed on our own will; we are changed by the “listening that understands”. Word reaches us on the level of the symbolic structures of our existence, the dynamic schemes that express the way in which we understand our situation and the way in which we project ourselves into this situation. Consequently, there is something that precedes the will and the principle of obligation, which, according to Kant, is the a priori structure of this will. This something else is our existence itself insofar as it is capable of being modified by word. This intimate connection between our desire to be and the power of word is a consequence of what we have referred to above as the act of hearkening, of paying attention, of obeying.26


In Ricoeur’s wider schema, obedience to the word represents the first step in a more expansive philosophical methodology. It is a step he refers to as ‘resignation’; this is resignation to the word that appeals to existence as ‘conatus’ and pre-will. It is resignation to the word that transforms existence via listening and understanding. The second step (how resignation constitutes consolation) brings together word and being. For Ricoeur, word and being are one and the same thing. The unity of word and being makes it possible for humankind to belong to being insofar as he is a speaking being: ‘Because my own speech belongs to word, because the speaking of my own language belongs to the saying of being . . . in this sort of belonging resides the origin not only of obedience beyond fear, but of consent beyond desire’.27 With word the possession of being and vice versa, hearkening to the word becomes a source of consolation for Ricoeur; firstly, in the way that language becomes less and less of our own making but is that which appropriates us (‘we can be “gathered”, that is, joined to that which gathers’28). And secondly, in resigning oneself to being gathered by the logos, Ricoeur claims that there is consolation in letting things be revealed. In resignation, he says: ‘I return to a realm of meaning in which there is no longer a question of myself but only of being as such. The totality of being is manifested in the forgetting of my own desires and interests.’29 One of the significant conclusions to be drawn from the prophetic preacher and his obedience to the word which impacts on our forthcoming analysis of the faith texts and Ricoeur’s future philosophical approach is the radical break with metaphysics. Ricoeur uses the perfect symmetry achieved by the unfolding of being in the fullness of the word to put pay to any determination of being as the objectivity of a representation and the emergence of man as an objective subject. This philosophical departure coincides with how Ricoeur proceeds to define the subject in the context of the faith texts. If we are to pursue the analogy with the prophet, the subject is subordinate to the word and within that subordination lies a stratum of comprehension and being. Ricoeur proceeds to consolidate this approach in the form of philosophical hermeneutics. But before we examine the contribution of hermeneutics to the redefinition of the subject, we need to make a point of clarification. Ricoeur uses philosophical hermeneutics in two ways, textual and dialectical. In the next section, I will examine the textual dimension to hermeneutics, with particular emphasis on the way the subject, devoid of cogito, is given the means to resurrect a new self by confronting the specificity of the biblical text. Later in the chapter, I will return to Ricoeur’s construction of the subject in its dialectical dimensions as they pertain to the ethics of otherness.

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Hermeneutics of the self and faith texts In his 1986 work From Text to Action, Ricoeur defines hermeneutics as a reflexive philosophy. He elaborates on this definition in two ways; it is a philosophy in which he sees hermeneutics as a variation of Husserlian phenomenology to which Ricoeur owes his early philosophical development. It is also reflexive in the sense that Ricoeur is looking for a new transparency in the aftermath of phenomenology. This transparency comes in the form of consciousness of self, or as he states ‘in the perfect coincidence of self with itself’.30 But how can this perfect coincidence of self with itself be achieved? Ricoeur maintains that hermeneutics, as the pursuit of self-understanding, is partially indebted to phenomenology in the way the latter redefines intentionality by prioritising consciousness of something over self-consciousness. However, Ricoeur argues that mere consciousness of something, intuitive or sensory, does not provide full cognition, which for Ricoeur has been one of phenomenology’s failings. Phenomenology, for Ricoeur, has always privileged coincidence of self with itself as a sensory phenomenon and not one founded in a radical self-grounding. He states: ‘In its effective practice phenomenology already displays its distance from – rather than its realization of – the dream of such a radical grounding in the transparence of the subject to itself.’31 It could be argued that the philosophical import of phenomenology is that it devalued the cogito in order to do away with its authority over the representation of objects, and so deliver greater autonomy to the appearance of the thing in itself. Whether true or not, as Ricoeur highlights, the real debate has to do with the degree of consciousness of the cogito and to what extent this consciousness is fully cognitive. The real point of this diversion into the dissociation of the cogito and phenomenology is that there is a similar debate within Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. The potential problem with the issue of (self-)grounding as part of Ricoeur’s search for a new transparency of subject with itself in hermeneutics is that it flirts dangerously with the Cartesian cogito in the process. What we need to be able to determine from the outset is whether this is just a mere flirtation and Ricoeur will eventually turn to an alternative hermeneutical device to preserve his working premise of the ‘broken cogito’, or whether in fact it is a clever flirtation designed to use the cogito to undermine its presupposed subjective hegemony: A reflexive philosophy considers the most radical philosophical problems to those that concern the possibility of self-understanding as the subject of the operations of knowing, willing, evaluating, and so


on. Reflexion is that act of turning back upon itself by which a subject grasps, in a moment of intellectual clarity and moral responsibility, the unifying principle of the operations among which it is dispersed and forgets itself as subject. “The ‘I think’”, says Kant, “must be able to accommodate all my representations”. All reflexive philosophers would recognize themselves in this formula.32 Some unsettling questions spring to mind here. Are we to assume that the cogito holds pride of place in Ricoeurean reflexive hermeneutics? If so, how do we reconcile this rehabilitation of the cogito with the self-effacing obedience of the prophet to the word in the chapter ‘Religion, Atheism and Faith? In answer to the first question, the answer is yes and no. But as part of an explanation we need to clarify what is understood by the cogito. Ricoeur draws a distinction between the cogito and its implication for reflexive hermeneutics and its use in the faith texts. In the context of hermeneutics, the function of the cogito, as alluded to above, is to rescue subjectivity from the phenomenological ‘empire of the senses’ and relocate the subject firmly in history and the human sciences. In doing so, hermeneutics subverts key phenomenological principles. For example, the relationship between sense and self is replaced with a relationship between intelligibility and self. Sense reduction, a primordial given of phenomenology, is made subordinate to an ontological ‘being-in-the-world’ that precedes sense. The reason for these shifts in principle is because at the heart of hermeneutics is the fundamental understanding of a sense of being in the world that precedes all else. Ricoeur states: It is because we find ourselves first of all in a world in which we belong and in which we cannot but participate that we are then able, in a second movement, to set up objects in opposition to ourselves, objects that we claim to constitute and to master intellectually.33 In privileging belonging to the world (being-in-the-world) over phenomenological adequation between subject and object, hermeneutics imparts authority to the cogito as the means by which belonging as being is understood. Therefore, it is accurate to say that the cogito as the precondition to understanding the world and the prior condition of being occupies a significant place in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. But Ricoeur distinguishes between the function of the cogito as the philosophical grounding of belonging as being and the function of the cogito in relation to the subject in the context of the faith text. In establishing a new ontology of understanding in hermeneutics, Ricoeur maintains that

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self-understanding is only possible through the mediation of signs, symbols and texts. What this means is that understanding of being is confined in its articulation to language in a textual context: ‘Language . . . is the primary condition of all human experience. Perception is articulated, desire is articulated’.34 This may happen via signs, symbols, metaphors etc. but what is significant is that it happens in a context and specifically at the level of texts. The consequence of this self-understanding for the hermeneutical self is the textual conditionality of the subject. In fact, we can claim that whereas the cogito is primary in the grounding of belonging as being in the wider philosophy of hermeneutics, its actual role is subordinate to the text in practice: It is to hermeneutics that falls the task of exploring the implications of this becoming-text for the work of interpretation. The most important consequence of all this is that an end is put once and for all to the Cartesian and Fichtean – and to extent the Husserlian – ideal of the subject’s transparence to itself. To understand oneself is to understand oneself as one confronts the text and to receive from it the conditions for a self other than that which first undertakes the reading. Neither of the two subjectivities, neither that of the author nor that of the reader, is thus primary in the sense of an originary presence of the self to itself.35 Textual hermeneutics, as opposed to the philosophy of hermeneutics, frees itself from the primacy of subjectivity and the cogito, and it is in this context that the obedience of the prophet to the word is not at odds with the deferral of the cogito to the text of the word. Resonating throughout biblical scripture, the ‘word’ (of God) assumes a unique textual significance inviting listening, contemplation, comprehension and action. In the transition from being as cogito to text as cogito, textual hermeneutics for Ricoeur incorporates special functions that can be summarised as both textual and interpretative. On the textual side, it is critical to reconstruct the internal dynamic of the text, the interconnected significance of its symbols, signs and metaphors and how the text structures them. A related textual function is to restore to the text its (not the author’s or reader’s) ability to convey its own ‘other worldliness’. Hermeneutical textual strategies defer meaning to the performance of the text itself, not in a structuralist sense where sign systems contribute to a textual objectivity independent of both author and reader. Speaking of the task of textual hermeneutics, Ricoeur says: ‘It is, in my opinion, to seek in the text itself, on the one hand, the internal dynamic


that governs the structuring of the work and, on the other hand, the power that the work possesses to project itself outside itself and to give birth to a world that would truly be the “thing” referred by the text’.36 However, this textual task is only complete with the inclusion of an interpretative function. The understanding of a text is mediated by interpretation and is described as the ‘second-order operation’ grafted onto understanding; interpretation brings to light the codes underlying the work of structuring in a text. However, Ricoeur lays down some conditions for interpretation, some of which we have highlighted in a different context. Interpretation should respect the sense that is immanent in a text (the outside ‘thing’ to which it refers, as mentioned above). Also, Ricoeur emphasises the fact that interpretation should take into consideration the primary philosophical premise of hermeneutics, namely the condition of being-in-the-world as participative belonging. In doing this, Ricoeur seals the fact that, particularly in the context of faith texts to which we will turn shortly, the world that the faith text projects beyond itself is in fact a real and inhabitable world and not a fictitious one without any relevance for being as belonging. Neither, says Ricoeur, should the reader put himself in place of the author nor should the reader attempt to recover the lost intentions of the author in a text. With these guidelines in mind, and insofar as the meaning of a text is rendered autonomous with respect to the subjective intention of the author, it falls to the reader to facilitate the unfolding ‘in front of the text, of the “world” it opens up and discloses’.37 Ricoeur’s interpretation of being in the world as emerging out of the horizon of the text has the immediate effect of removing subjectivity as an origin. He claims that ‘subjectivity must be lost as radical origin if it is to be recovered in a more modest role’.38 Subjectivity is therefore subordinate to the matter of the text not in the form of total self-abandon; a ‘more modest role’ is implied for subjectivity in the reciprocal exchange between self and text. Ricoeur elaborates: If it remains true that hermeneutics terminates in self-understanding, then the subjectivism of this proposition must be rectified by saying that to understand oneself is to understand oneself in front of the text. Consequently, what is appropriation from one point of view is disappropriation from another. To appropriate is to make what was alien become one’s own. What is appropriated is indeed the matter of the text. But the matter of the text becomes my own only if I disappropriate myself, in order to let the matter of the text be. So I exchange the me, master of itself, for the self, disciple of the text.39

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Ricoeur’s hermeneutics spells the end of the cogito’s pretension to constitute itself as ultimate origin, and its restart as a response to what literature and the text can engender. ‘The Self in the Mirror of Scripture’ (1986) and ‘The Summoned Subject...’ (1988) represent what were to be known collectively as the Gifford Lectures and which I drew attention to earlier because of Ricoeur’s apology for omitting them from his seminal work on the self called Oneself as Another. Ricoeur, let us recall, justified their omission on the grounds that his interest in the debate on the self was primarily philosophical and he wanted to preserve intellectual rigour (the asceticism of the argument, as he called it) over any concerns or otherwise for biblical faith. In fact, he went on to say that any mention of the ‘question of God’ in his philosophical work ‘itself remains in a suspension that could be called agnostic’.40 The Gifford Lectures constitute what I have called up to this point faith texts (although there are a number of others in the same mould) because Ricoeur examines the hermeneutics of self specifically in the context of biblical faith. Unfortunately for our present purposes, the first lecture/text has remained unpublished, and so in the interest of critical mass I have chosen a related essay published in 1979 called ‘Naming God’. The question that comes to mind immediately when considering these faith texts is whether Ricoeur is writing from the standpoint of a believer himself or from that of the philosopher. The answer is not clear. On one level, he has a personal investment in the theological import of Christianity as a believer but, on the other hand, he is adamant that he wants to maintain philosophical objectivity. A certain ambiguity, not unfamiliar to Ricoeur on this issue, arises over the justification of his position. He writes in the opening page of ‘Naming God’: To confess that one is a listener is from the very beginning to break with the project dear to many, and even perhaps all, philosophers: to begin discourse without any presuppositions [...]. Yet, it is in terms of one certain presupposition that I stand in the position of a listener to Christian preaching: I assume that this speaking is meaningful, that it is worthy of consideration, and that examining it may accompany and guide the transfer from the text to life where it will verify itself fully.41 There are several ways of interpreting this position. Ricoeur cannot confess openly and unambiguously that he is a believer because it might mean compromising his philosophical integrity; in the process he could run the risk of being accused of committing a cardinal philosophical sin of letting presuppositions dictate discourse. So, hedging his bets perhaps, he ‘confesses’ that he is a ‘listener’ to ‘preaching’ and that


preaching has a special (philosophical) significance that he wants to expand on by demonstrating a text life connection where the truth of God, as it were, will be revealed. Whether Ricoeur is a believer or not, or whether he has to confess this publicly may not be of ultimate concern to us. But I would suggest that the issue surrounding his obvious reticence creates an impression of inauthenticity in respect of the public acknowledgement of his faith. It would appear that Ricoeur is stranded between not wanting to offend philosophy on the one hand and not wanting not to be seen as a ‘confessant’ on the other. A different way of interpreting this position, and the one I tend to subscribe to, is that we take Ricoeur’s statements at face value. In other words, the idea of the presupposition of listening to Christian preaching is a worthy philosophical position, regardless of one’s personal belief. And, as we have emphasised throughout this chapter in the context of Ricoeur, while the principle of philosophy as the embodiment of truth may be secondary to the role of Christian belief (even though Ricoeur may not openly confess as much), the real value of philosophy for theology is the insight (methodological and exegetical) it brings to biblical faith. As I have argued, I believe that it is in this spirit that Ricoeur seeks to ‘examine’ and ‘consider’ the relationship between philosophy and theology. His honesty is therefore to be applauded: But if what I presuppose precedes everything that I can choose to think about, how do I avoid the famous circle of believing in order to understand and understanding in order to believe? I do not seek to avoid it. I boldly stay within this circle in the hope that, through the transfer from text to life, what I have risked will be returned a hundredfold as an increase in comprehension, valor, and joy.42 If we draw a line under the earlier and now suspect interpretation of the listener whom Ricoeur may have used to placate schools of philosophy, it is possible to advance an alternative interpretation based on philosophical presupposition and an analogy with the function of the prophet. Listening to God, which is founded according to Ricoeur on the ‘naming of God’ in biblical scripture, assumes the status of philosophical presupposition. What distinguishes this presupposition of God, which Ricoeur admits is synonymous with faith, is that it is articulated within language and that it has a textual foundation: ‘I can name God in my faith because the texts preached to me have already named God’.43 The presupposition of God and, as a consequence, faith ‘inasmuch as it is lived experience, is instructed – in the sense of being formed, clarified, and educated – within

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the network of texts that in each instance preaching brings back to living speech. This presupposition of the textuality of faith distinguishes biblical faith’.44 The implication of this presupposition of the textuality of faith is that the text not only precedes life but instructs it. The naming of God as a textual given provides the basis for the constancy of faith but crucial to this constancy is the fact that listening to the preaching of the word resonates the living significance of this naming (presupposition) in speech and in real life. The text therefore in which naming first takes place is part of a communicative chain that begins with the naming of God in language, then in discourse (writing and speech): ‘Writing, in its turn, is restored to living speech by means of various acts of discourse that reactualize the text. Reading and preaching are such actualizations of writing into speech. A text, in this regard, is like a musical score that requires execution’.45 In essence, Ricoeur maintains that in the relationship between the naming of God and its actualisation in living speech, the latter automatically pronounces its obedience to the written word as testament to the truth. Ricoeur also implies that this relationship is alive at the time of writing and reading the text. In this way, the text assumes a constant immanence in its capacity to live the naming of God. The text is word of God but it is also a speech event and it is in the transfer from text to speech event that hermeneutics plays its most important role. As speech event, the text acquires an immanent independence being placed in a new context; as such the text breaks away from the control of the author and its original context and becomes open to recontextualisation without losing the significance of the word. This is consistent with how Ricoeur perceives hermeneutics generally; hermeneutics privileges ‘being-in-the-world’ over phenomenological intuition or sense and so it is imperative that beingness is reflected historically and contextually. Furthermore, Ricoeur views hermeneutics as liberating the text from authorial intention and letting it become what it becomes. We suggested earlier that for Ricoeur the key to interpretation under hermeneutics was unfolding, in front of the text, the world the text opens up. We discussed this notion in the general context of the end of subjectivity as origin. The same hermeneutical principle applies in the essay ‘The Naming of God’; only this time the stakes are different and potentially higher because the consequence of the end of subjectivity is its deferral to God. This would be wholly consistent with a hermeneutics of the text where the text as cogito defines subjectivity in its textual self. It would also explain the concept of ‘naming of God’ hermeneutically as an act that the text first performs (biblically) and which it is necessary


that it does because it is from this conditionality that an ‘I’ (in the form of living speech) can become capable of uttering the word: Hence, naming God, before being an act of which I am capable, is what the texts of my predilection do when they escape from their authors, their redactional setting, and their first audience, when they deploy their world, when they poetically manifest and thereby reveal a world we might inhabit.46 In one sense, it could be argued that the idea of the text that names God echoes that of the unconditional obedience of the prophet to the word of God, and in a wider sense raises the more controversial point that, based on textuality, God (and the condition for faith) is incontrovertible; to such an extent that, as Ricoeur has intimated in Oneself as Another, God is either ‘in us’ or his existence is an open debate for the cogito. This schism in subjectivity has been a constant feature of Ricoeur’s work; theology versus philosophy, believer versus sceptic. On a positive note, it is a division that offers choice between two definitions of the self. On a negative note, it raises concerns over which comes first in the pecking order. The ambiguity, as we have seen, has invited criticism even after his death. I have no desire to rake over old ground now, but what is noteworthy in the light of our treatment of hermeneutics is that Ricoeur’s hermeneutical methodology (particularly in relation to the authority of the text over subjectivity) also works as a consolation in the way it has the potential to absolve subjectivity (the individual and the author) from responsibility for actions, decisions or, in the case of Ricoeur, the philosophical presupposition of God. I am not saying that textual hermeneutics provides a convenient smokescreen for Ricoeur to conceal his unwillingness to confess publicly his Christianity and divert attention away from the theological/philosophical dialectic. But for Ricoeur to project the notion that God and faith in him rests within the power of textuality, as his hermeneutics purports, carries with it questions that impact seriously on this dialectic. For example, as exemplified in ‘Naming God’, the textual naming of God commits one, providing it is the Christian self that is being addressed, to believe in God. The textlife synchrony determines it; there can be no room for backing off. How then, we might ask, can Ricoeur reconcile this textual truth with his confessional reservations? This situation, it would appear, is compounded when we examine Ricoeur’s hermeneutics in relation to textuality and God, and specifically the emphasis placed on the word ‘God’ and the act of listening

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to it. We have already underscored the importance of textual attestation to God before that of the ‘I’ (as both subject and cogito). The Ricoeurean mantra of text before life spells out literally the fact that the word ‘God’ is ‘originary’ to which there is no contestation. Except that the philosopher, and this may be why Ricoeur sustains the dialectic between philosopher and theologian, has a role to play in the response to the word and to listening. In a complex argument, Ricoeur begins: For the philosopher, to listen to Christian preaching is first of all to let go (se dépouiller) of every form of onto-theological knowledge [ . . . ]. Modern philosophy accomplishes this letting go of knowledge about God in a certain fashion with its own resources. I am thinking principally of Kant and his general conception of philosophy as knowing our limits. There the index of this letting go is the idea of a ‘transcendental illusion’ that reason necessarily produces whenever it undertakes to forge a knowledge of God by way of ‘objects’.47 Philosophical methodology or exegesis, what Ricoeur calls ‘critical resources’ and what Jean-Marc Tétaz refers to as the inscription of philosophy in ‘la pensée biblique’,48 carries the debate to theology by insisting on the fact that the philosopher can contribute to theological discourse in a listening capacity by first of all renouncing any theological presuppositions in what he listens to, and focussing on the capacities of reason to forge a ‘knowledge of God’. However, as Ricoeur goes on to describe with considerable irony, to forge a ‘knowledge of God’ based on reason and the cogito amounts to the necessary abandonment of one theological presupposition and its replacement by the ‘unfounded foundation’ of the subject and its deceptive hubris. Ricoeur’s argument is serpentine but he finally reaches his point: Listening to Christian preaching also stands in the order of presuppositions, but in a sense where presupposition is no longer selffounding, the beginning of the self from and by the self, but rather the assumption of an antecedent meaning that has always preceded me. Listening excludes founding oneself. The movement towards listening requires, therefore, a second letting go, the abandoning of a more subtle and more tenacious pretension than that of onto-theological knowledge. It requires giving up (déssaissement) the human self in its will to mastery, sufficiency, and autonomy. The Gospels’ statement that ‘Whoever would save his life will lose it’ applies to this giving up.49


For Ricoeur, the role of philosophy in this series of letting go’s is to show the process by which the double collapse of presuppositions of knowledge (of God) and the self ‘is the price that must be paid to enter into a radically non-speculative and pre-philosophical mode of language’.50 What Ricoeur seeks to achieve in this double renunciation is an edenic return to ‘originary modalities of language’ by which the ‘naming of God’ is experienced in diverse and pre-linguistic ways by people in their individual consciousnesses. On one level, this diversity (prophetic, narrative, prescriptive and individual) bears witness to the human dilemma with the naming of God, particularly in the pre-philosophical and pre-knowledge of God contexts in which Ricoeur’s philosophical hermeneutic has placed us. On another level, however, this originary context forces on us a certain ‘philosophical’ reality which is that the naming of God cannot be reduced to a form of knowledge. Specifically, the naming of God cannot be subject to a form of knowledge over which the cogito has authority. The logic of Ricoeur’s argument leads him to the conclusion that the naming of God is by necessity unnameable; in other words, God resists being named by any one designation. This conclusion suits Ricoeur’s analysis on two important fronts. Firstly, it allows him to protect the infinity of the undesignated referent ‘God’: ‘Far, therefore, from the declaration “I am who I am” authorizing a positive ontology capable of capping off the narrative and other namings, instead it protects the secret of the “in-itself” of God’.51 Secondly, the diversity of the expressions and contexts (parable, proverb, psalm etc.) in which ‘God’ is referred opens up the possibility that naming God is not a name in itself but an amalgamation in which narration, metaphor and language constitute together ‘a short summary of the naming of God’. For Ricoeur, the partial significance of the unnameability of the word ‘God’ is that one avoids the logics of identity and difference that the subject is quick to attach to any name, and so the unnameable ‘God’ becomes more culturally appealing in our postmodern and post-secular contexts. Tétaz challenges this assessment by claiming that the very naming of God as a presupposition constitutes in itself an identity and by extension a community of affiliates, but only insofar as the naming of God ‘exists’ in the text and nowhere else. The text therefore, we might conclude, becomes a space where one can potentially belong to God. But, for Tétaz, this is not in fact the case. He maintains that the name of God may circulate in biblical texts but this is not to say that the name belongs to anyone. In fact, he goes a step further and claims that the significance of the name of God escapes everyone despite its naming. Tétaz’s overall argument, and Ricoeur’s as well I would contend, is that in order for the

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naming of God as textuality to have any real meaning (excluding the relative limitations of unnameability) the hermeneutical principle of text life needs to be enacted. Text life invites the text to unfold independently the world it projects, but in the process it is vital that the self as cogito that has been transformed into a ‘disciple of the text’ is aware of his responsibility as an acting and capable self. Before we look at how this acting, practical self operates over and above the subject as cogito, it makes sense, as we shall see, to situate this debate in the context of the second of the Gifford lectures, namely ‘The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation’. In this text, Ricoeur defines the summoned subject in opposition to the cogito (‘the subject naming itself’). Whereas the latter has a presumption to absoluteness in its own self, the summoned self by contrast is a self ‘in relation’, that is a self in the position of a respondent. This respondent self answers a prophetic call but his ‘crisis’, as Ricoeur refers to it, is the fact this respondent self is constituted by a ‘pair’; the self that answers the call (of God) which makes him exceptional, and his ensuing commission (the community to which he must answer). The summoned subject assumes the status therefore of a prophetic ‘I’: ‘It belongs to the essence of prophetic speech to conjoin an exceptional ipseity to a traditional community. Through this conjunction, the prophetic “I” is “established” and “commanded”’.52 Why does Ricoeur open this text with a definition of the summoned subject in this way? The first reason is that it takes away from the cogito any authority over the self by decentering the subject and uprooting its foundation base. The second and key reason is that the summoned subject incorporates a critical duality that ascribes him, on the one side, to the call of a ‘divine pole’ and, on the other side, to the response of a ‘human pole’. The call of the ‘divine pole’ takes the form of a conformity to the Christ figure in which this mandated self is an heir of the ‘Christomorphic self’. The response of the ‘human pole’ invites the subject to find truth in himself based on the theory that if truth is assimilated in Christ to whom the subject has already conformed, then the ‘human pole’ represents a conduit to this truth. Ricoeur invokes Saint Augustine and his metaphor of the ‘inner teacher’ to elucidate the internalisation of this response. But on a more theoretical level, he draws attention to the importance of conscience as an expression of the responding self. Ricoeur devotes considerable discussion to this theme in his overall work, notably in Oneself as Another (pages 203–39) and also in this text. However, he makes it clear that his engagement with conscience in this text is not in opposition to the


post-Enlightenment (Kantian and Hegelian) autonomy acquired by conscience. What is of particular interest to Ricoeur and to us in the context of the ‘Summoned Subject . . . ’ is his attempt to interpret conscience in the ‘dialogic structure of Christian existence’, a focus that is absent from his other work. The initial significance of conscience to my line of argument (the responding self) is the way Ricoeur defines it in the context of calling and testimony, and as an act of bearing witness: ‘Through the conscience, the self bears witness to its ownmost power of being before measuring and in order to measure the inadequation of its action to its most profound being’.53 As a definition, this is quite general but it establishes importantly conscience as an honest broker of authentic reflection between action and being. If we are to apply the implications of such a definition to ‘Christian existence’, then Ricoeur claims that a process of ‘grafting’ is necessary between the call of divinity and the response of humanity. I will quote him extensively on this point: If a theological interpretation of conscience is to be possible, it will precisely presuppose this intimacy of self and conscience. It is to the dialogue of the self with self that the response of the prophetic and the christomorphic self is grafted. In this graft, the two living organs are changed into each other: on the one side, the call of the self to itself is intensified and transformed by the figure that serves as its model and archetype; on the other side, the transcendent figure is internalized by the moment of appropriation that transmutes it into another voice.54 And he continues: Saint Paul was undoubtedly the first to have caught sight of this connection between a non-specifically religious phenomenon...which he called suneidesis – knowledge shared with itself – and the kerygma about Christ that he interpreted in terms of “justification by faith”. It is essential that this “justification”, which does not come from us, should be able to be received within the intimacy of a conscience that already offers by itself the dual structure of a voice that calls and a self that responds, and that moreover is already constituted as an instance of testimony and of judgement. Conscience is thus the anthropological presupposition without which “justification by faith” would remain an event marked by a radical extrinsicness. In this sense, conscience becomes the organ of the reception of the kerygma, in a perspective that remains profoundly Pauline.55

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In the conclusion to ‘The Summoned Subject . . . ’, Ricoeur defines the condition of the mandated self as divided between obedience to faith and autonomy of conscience. In fact, he identifies this as the specific tension affecting the responding self. Tétaz acknowledges this tension in the ‘disproportion’ felt by the responding self ‘in his very being’.56 In other words, the response of the self can be measured in the gap between the immensity of the task to which he has been called, and the relative weakness he feels at the core of his being to answer this call. But as the quotations above demonstrate, the responding self is able to judge itself ‘in conscience’ and respond in a responsible way, with the help of biblical textuality, to what is his Christian destiny. In a strictly theological context, conscience as described above is founded on a presupposition of the honest brokerage between self and conscience. This intimacy is a priori. But as Ricoeur defines the self as a duality in which the call of divinity is intrinsic, conscience is therefore not just linked to this divine self but it assumes it as integral to its status as presupposition and as part of its internal dialogue with itself. Conscience thus incorporates the kerygma as a given so much so that Ricoeur sees conscience as the ‘organ’, the touchstone, the ‘without which’ the other half of the divine self (the responding self) cannot do if justification by faith is to be full and complete. Both divine call and human response are seen to work in tandem, with conscience the barometer by which the transition from call to response is verified. To act therefore according to one’s conscience becomes the raison d’être of the responding self. And yet, such a course of action is fraught with difficulties, none more so than in conscience itself and its potential veering towards autonomy. Ricoeur addresses this to a degree in the way he rallies philosophical method, faith and hermeneutics (of the self and of the text) to defend Christian conscience against accusations of risk and folly. He rests his case with the lines: ‘The Christian is someone who discerns “conformity to the image of Christ” in the call of conscience. This discernment is an interpretation. And this interpretation is the outcome of a struggle for veracity and intellectual honesty.’57

Oneself as another For Christians, this discernment translates in simple and practical terms into bearing witness to the Cross, the Resurrection and Revelation. However, Tétaz argues that the conscience of the summoned subject should also demand an ethical response beyond purely theological concerns. In fact, he suggests that conscience should invite the subject


to ‘remake the world’ and in the process provoke the subject into what on the surface seems like a type of ‘practical’ action in which ‘he attests to himself as a practical self, a self whose being is an act in progress, an acting being’.58 If this means that Christianity on a broader scale should not lose sight of its universal mission of spreading the Word of God and doing charitable and missionary work, then the emphasis on practical action makes perfect sense. But the phraseology, ‘attest to himself as a practical self’, has important overtones in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self in the way subjectivity as cogito can be challenged by notions of attestation and self-attestation, and particularly in the ethical responsibilities of the self in respect of otherness. For Ricoeur, bearing witness to the Cross and the Resurrection is not simply a matter of recognition, acknowledgement and worship but a philosophical ‘act’ of selfhood. In the final pages of this chapter, I want to show what Ricoeur’s theories of selfhood and attestation can bring to our debate on faith, conscience and the responding self. Ricoeur’s theories on selfhood and attestation are best explained in his work Oneself as Another. However, as I have mentioned earlier in this chapter, Ricoeur chose deliberately not to include certain essays in this work that discuss the self in relation to biblical faith. I have made a case throughout this chapter, and the composition of Ricoeur’s corpus reflects my argument, that the unique relation between self and religious faith raises a special dimension of the self separate to the wider theoretical debate on selfhood. So why should I choose to bring them together at this point? The answer lies in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics (and its intrinsic duality). In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur defines hermeneutics of the self differently from the textual and interpretative hermeneutics of the self as we have seen applied to the faith texts. The significance of textual hermeneutics is the way it opens up the possibility for a ‘christomorphic’ and ‘responding’ self to be founded and the way it emerges out of biblical textuality. In Oneself as Another, however, hermeneutics of the self is defined abstractly as having three key distinctly ‘philosophical’ features; reflective analysis, and two dialectics, the dialectic between sameness and selfhood, and the dialectic between selfhood and otherness. It would appear from this philosophical framework that Ricoeur has a separate hermeneutical approach depending on the self (religious or ethical) under consideration. On one level, there are clear advantages to this difference of approach. From a faith perspective particularly, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics has provided new and original insights for the believer, and demonstrated the value of philosophical application in theology. On another level, I feel that some connections may have been overlooked in

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this dual approach. For example, closer analysis of the dialectic of selfhood and otherness reveals essential affinities with theology in respect of ethics, bearing witness, self and being. I would argue it is worth looking at some of these in more detail. By way of a start, I want to return to the quotation by Tétaz that launched this debate: ‘He attests to himself as a practical self, a self whose being is an act in progress, an acting being’. If we can disentangle this highly charged quotation we may get to the core of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and be better equipped to assess its theological import. Ricoeur’s concept of self is split between sameness (‘idem’) and selfhood (‘ipse’). The former defines the self as a static phenomenon, the latter defines the self as temporal and thus evolving over time. By privileging the latter in his hermeneutical scheme, Ricoeur understands the self as particular, as a subjectivity with a specificity and as a bridge to real and ethical life; in short, as a selfhood. In a broader context, in which Ricoeur reinforces the lived-in subjectivity of the ‘ipse’, he assigns to selfhood a narrative identity that has a range of historical, social and cultural applications. For our immediate purposes however, we can see how Tétaz’s reference to the self as ‘practical’ makes sense. The self referred to is a real, living entity, and not necessarily a self that is engaged in physical, practical works with outcomes. The self’s practicality is its livingness. This is important in itself because for Ricoeur it establishes a key hermeneutical principle which is that selfhood imparts its own ontological ‘mode of being’; self (selfhood) is acting/being. Ricoeur states: ‘If there is a being of the self – in other words, if an ontology of selfhood is possible – this is in conjunction with a ground starting from which the self can be said to be acting.’59 Practicality and acting have their correlation in self and being, and together they form what Ricoeur terms the conatus (a term he borrows from Spinoza). The conatus is the power, dynamism, desire and perseverance that is characteristic of all living beings. The significance of the Tétaz quotation lies therefore in laying down a philosophical premise that the self is a thinking being that has both reflexive and outward capabilities. This is important in two ways. Firstly, as indicated by the reflexive verb ‘attest to oneself’, Ricoeur is careful not to represent the self as an ‘I’ characteristic of cogito philosophies. Instead, as Tétaz observes, the self attests to itself in such a way that authority is displaced from the cogito as the primary source of knowledge to another authority implied in the word attestation. Secondly, the outward potential of the self relates to Ricoeur’s second hermeneutical dialectic where selfhood as being is a pre-requisite to otherness. Let us examine these two developments more closely. Attestation displaces belief and verification


to a third party, usually a testimony (whether verbal or written). The implications of this act of displacement for selfhood are numerous. At the forefront is the fact that selfhood as being entrusts another being to be the guarantor of belief or truth. The self is thus spared the suspicion of enouncing a belief based on the authority of its own selfhood. As a premise of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy, this reliance on otherness throws down the gauntlet to the presumptions of self-assurance and absolute knowledge implied in Cartesian metaphysics by implying that selfhood and the concept of belief can be products of intersubjectivity, historical situatedness and human dependence. There are echoes here of Ricoeur’s textual hermeneutics in which he prioritises belonging (in the world) as being over phenomenology’s intuitiveness. The centrality therefore of the intersubjectivity of selfhood imparts a new determination to selfhood as attestation in the way ‘certainty’ and ‘verification’ are understood. Dan R. Stiver outlines a variety of ways in which a ‘hermeneutics of testimony’ can rewrite the rules of how belief is evaluated. Stiver, for instance, claims that testimony as the gauge of belief has historical density on its side, as well as empirical and juridical evidence.60 Similarly, the figure of the witness is elevated as an icon of selfhood in the way he is seen to ‘back’ what he believes based on the evidence available or on his own convictions. Of course, as Stiver rightly confirms, there is in this form of attestation no absolute certainty of truth, and indeed Ricoeur embeds this qualification in his own introduction to Oneself as Another when he says that his dialectics of selfhood and otherness ‘will resist temptations of arriving at ultimate foundations’.61 But what we can say with some certainty is that testimony means the testimony of an other, and it is this otherness that selfhood must appropriate in its interpretation of truth. In turning to the second capability of the self (outwardness), we have already ascertained that the supremacy of the self as cogito has been undermined by the need for attestation as a testimony of truth. But Ricoeur advances this hermeneutics of testimony a step further by claiming that the cogito is also undermined by a self that is abandoned to the other. In other words, intrinsic to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self is the idea that otherness actually constitutes selfhood: ‘one passes into the other’, as he says in his Introduction. There is not enough room left in this chapter to investigate the different ways in which Ricoeur describes otherness as belonging to the ontological constitution of selfhood, in particular the phenomenological role ascribed to the body and the flesh as centres of passivity and gravity of otherness. What I would draw attention to however in the context of our theological debate are the ethical implications

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of selfhood and otherness for Christian behaviour. One of the key facets of Ricoeur’s dialectic of selfhood, which (he claims) distinguishes his philosophy from that of Edmund Husserl (his philosophical mentor) and Emmanuel Lévinas, one of his contemporaries in the debate on otherness, is the bilateral way in which selfhood and otherness is constructed. For Ricoeur, there is an unnegotiable ‘givenness of the other’; otherness, in other words, is always presupposed. The self does not oppose the other; it passes into the other ‘as a subject of discourse, of action, of narrative and of ethical engagement’.62 According to Ricoeur, Husserl concurs in part with his idea that the self is ‘woven out of a network of intersubjectivity’63 but Husserl does not advance from this position, as Ricoeur does, to claim reciprocally that intersubjectivity in turn contributes to the founding of selfhood. The same reservation is laid at the door of Lévinas whom Ricoeur claims opposes his concept of otherness to the identity of the self; ‘he [Lévinas] reserves for the Other the exclusive initiative for assigning responsibility to the self’.64 Ricoeur suggests that Lévinas’s concept of self (ego) is enclosed in its own ontological totality; putting oneself in the place of the other (the Lévinasian position) is different from living/‘acting’ the being of the other in oneself. The reciprocity at the core of the Ricoeurean dialectic implies that agent and patient (Ricoeur often uses these more practical terms to refer to self and other) are in principle reversible: in fact ‘because of the reversibility of the roles, each agent is the patient of the other’.65 Reciprocity is therefore invested with a responsibility on behalf of both self and other to love one another. It is an ethical responsibility that has equality and justice at heart, and it is also a responsibility that finds a religious equivalence in the Christian notion of ‘to do onto others as one would do onto oneself’. Ricoeur’s dialectic of selfhood and otherness in the ontological totality of its reversibility and reciprocity approximates this Christian ideal. It can be summed up in the very simple idea of ‘there is always someone like me’.66 In conclusion, I would like to return briefly to my unfinished treatment of the idea of attestation. What is attested to by Ricouer in the final analysis is selfhood itself (‘ipse’) as a living, acting being, and selfhood in its dialectical relation with otherness. As such, attestation represents for Ricoeur ‘the alethic (vertitative) mode of the style appropriate to . . . the hermeneutics of the self’.67 Appropriate or not, the claims of attestation to veracity, as we have discussed, are often undermined by suspicion and social fragility. And as Ricoeur has pointedly remarked, attestation should not be seen as an alternative foundational claim to truth. He prefers instead the idea that attestation is a ‘kind of belief’, a ‘believing-in’ rather than a ‘believing that’.68 Ricoeur embraces the idea that attestation is a


type of ‘assurance of being oneself acting and suffering’,69 and in this respect his hermeneutics cuts a more realistic shape. What I mean is that attestation, with scripture and resoluteness of conscience as its hard drive in the event of system failure, provides, in its testimonial form, one of the most reliable accesses to full Christian knowledge available, inasmuch as knowledge can be proven. For sure, attestation is a risk but access to full knowledge of this type inevitably involves risk. In the end, Ricoeur sees in attestation the best bet, based, that is, on a combination of risk and sound, critical judgement. But more than anything else, attestation is an acknowledgement of being in the world and being with others. This philosophical grounding, coupled with the consolation of the testimony of the event of the Cross and the Resurrection, represents an open invitation to the responding self to answer the call of his conscience. This humanist hermeneutics of hope is Ricoeur’s lasting legacy.

7 Posteventality

How would such a memorandum, without body, testify to the presence of the Other? Not upon the standing of the I, well-trained to think, nor in the soft-tissue of the spongy ipse, but in those vacuomes full of you, in you, then, on the hybrid edge that you weave, in a web of sophistry, for me above my head; there alone, you fall upon me, you despoil me, you transport me away. True life, happiness, jump like flying fishes in my lapses of memory, pockets for your ocean, breaks in the cloud for your sky. Jean-François Lyotard The Confession of Augustine In Chapter 5, Alain Badiou identified the ‘objectless subject’ as one of the ways out of the crisis in subjectivity that preoccupied Continental philosophy in the mid 1980s. Like other contributors to the debate, Badiou sought to question the subject as the ‘inaugural or conditioning point of legitimate statements’.1 In contrast, however, to the sensory and phenomenological alternatives (splits) proposed by Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-François Lyotard, Badiou did not view the crisis as an opportunity to break radically with the past. In his article titled ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’, Badiou maintains that his hypothesis is ‘an additional step in the modern’ and an investigation into what ‘concept of the subject succeeds the one whose trajectory can be traced out from Descartes to Husserl’.2 At a first glance, Badiou’s holistic approach seems eminently sensible in the way it bases modern thinking on a ‘continuation’. But under closer inspection, his hypothesis belies a radical trajectory that correlates the ‘destitution of the subject’ (the crux of the debate and the thesis underpinning Part 2 of this monograph) with the ‘destitution of the object’.3 He goes on to 214

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propose that the succession of the subject is conditional on a form of the object that cannot ‘in any away sustain the enterprise of truth’.4 In effect, by de-objectifying the space of the subject, Badiou replaces the object as a place for truth with truth as a procedure through which the subject must pass. He states: The “subject” . . . is no longer – and here we see the cancellation of the object, as objective this time – that for which there is truth, not even the desirous eclipse of its surrection. A truth always precedes it. Not that a truth exists “before” it, for a truth is forever suspended upon an indiscernible future. The subject is woven out of a truth, it is what exists of truth in limited fragments. A subject is that which a truth passes through, or this finite point which, in its infinite being, truth itself passes. This transit excludes every interior moment.5 Badiou’s theory of a de-objectivied subject for whom truth is a procedure underpins a revised understanding and reception of Christianity, as reflected in his study of Saint Paul in Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism.6 For Badiou, Saint Paul delineates a new figure of the subject who is the bearer of a universal truth that simultaneously shatters the strictures of Judaic Law and the conventions of the Greek Logos. But the real focus of Badiou’s study is to demonstrate that Saint Paul does not owe his saintliness and universalism to an adherence to the historical biography of Christ, to the promise of a Kingdom of Heaven or to a truth that could be identified in a commandment or in a miracle. Rather, Paul’s universalism is founded on a subjective thought that declares itself in the event of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In other words, Saint Paul epitomises the subject who emerges universal (along with the truth of the Christ-event) out of his subjective singularity, and not out of objective determination. It is in this light that I propose in the first section of this chapter to analyse Badiou’s development of the inter-relationship between subject and truth as it pertains to the relevance of Christianity in our postmetaphysical and postphilosophical age. Specifically, I want to draw attention to Badiou’s treatment of the subject and truth within two defining markers, the notions of the event and universalism. In the second part of the chapter, I turn my attention to one of Badiou’s contemporaries, Jean-François Lyotard, who also devoted a recent (posthumous) study to a saint, The Confession of Augustine. From a critique of the determination of the subject and its Cartesian normativity, Lyotard returns to a phenomenology of the subject (and specifically a phenomenology of the body as opposed to

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Michel Henry’s phenomenology of Life) as a point of convergence between subject and God. In the process, Lyotard reveals the origins of phenomenology in Augustine’s narrative and its connections to the origins of semiotics as a mode of expression that overhauls conventional ‘autobiographical’ practice. In his treatment of Augustine’s Confessions Lyotard also offers some valuable insights and comparisons with Badiou’s Saint Paul in the respective ways they approach key ideas of event and the divided subject.

Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: the event and universalism In the prologue to Saint Paul, Badiou states why Paul is important to him and how he fits into his study of the subject: For me, Paul is a poet-thinker of the event, as well as one who practices and states the invariant traits of what can be called the militant figure. He brings forth the entirely human connection, whose destiny fascinates me, between the general idea of a rupture, an overturning, and that of a thought-practice that is this rupture’s subjective materiality.7 Badiou’s interest in Paul, as we will see repeated throughout this chapter, is not based on the author’s own faith (or lack of it), or on a selfish attempt to rehabilitate Christianity in the post-secular age. Neither is it based on Paul’s status as Saint or Christian ‘philosopher’. Badiou’s interest is less lofty and less influenced by reputation or canonical importance. Paul is simply a thinker and a doer, whose real importance can be attributed to the human (subjective) way he took on the authorities around him at the time and in that process carved out a Christian ‘thought-practice’ whose relevance is both universal and timely. Part of Badiou’s fascination therefore with Paul is his humanity and his accessibility as a figure with whom it is possible to identify. But central to this ‘human connection’ is Paul’s oblation to the event of the Christ resurrection. In other words, the critical relevance of Paul to Badiou’s theory of the subject is the way Paul subordinates his own existence to the aleatory dimension of the event of the resurrection. Let us start however with some preliminary observations on Badiou’s concept of the event. An event is first of all declared by someone. It does not owe its truth to history or to miracle. On the contrary, the truth of an event emerges out of an act of conviction. For Badiou, truth is therefore evental, which is to say that it has no structure, or axiom or law to

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account for it. As a declaration, the truth of an event is subjective and is based on the conviction relative to the event. Importantly, this does not mean that truth emerges out of a conviction founded on communitarian belonging or particularism; on the contrary, the singularity that is proper to the subject of truth is itself a universality. One of the consequences of this relationship between event and truth (which I highlighted in John D. Caputo’s interpretation of the ‘irreducibility’ of the event), and to which I alluded in the opening lines of this chapter, is that the ‘object’ of the subject (in this case, truth) is not defined in terms that designate an end-point or a concept. As evental, and linked to the subjectivity of thought out of which the subject is resurrected, truth is characterised as a procedural process in which the subject declares truth and the consequences of it. In short, Badiou summarises truth’s dependency on the event in three ways: Fidelity to the declaration is crucial, for truth is a process, and not an illumination. In order to think it, one requires three concepts: one that names the subject at the point of declaration (pistis, generally translated as “faith” but which is more appropriately rendered as “conviction”); one that names the subject at the point of his militant address (agape-, generally translated as “charity” but more appropriately rendered as “love”); lastly, one that names the subject according to the force of displacement conferred upon him through the assumption of the truth procedure’s completed [achevé] character (elpis, generally translated as ‘hope’, but more appropriately rendered as “certainty”).8 Turning our attention to the event as defined by Christ’s resurrection, we can deduce some important points from what we have just quoted. Firstly, if the event is the becoming of the subject, then clearly the Christian subject does not pre-exist the event he declares: ‘Thus, the extrinsic conditions of his existence or identity will be argued against’.9 Secondly, the event of Christ’s resurrection has no signification for Badiou other than that, for Paul, it happened and in it Paul became a subject through the event: ‘The event – “it happened”, purely and simply, in the anonymity of the road – is the subjective sign of the event proper that is the Resurrection of the Christ. Within Paul himself, it is the (re)surgence [(ré)surrection] of the subject.’10 In fact, Badiou goes much further in claiming that, beyond the event of the resurrection (which in itself as a historical ‘truth’ matters little to him), ‘the rest (what Jesus said and did) is not what is real in conviction, but obstructs, or even falsifies it’.11 The implication here is that the truth of the event of Christ’s resurrection

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is not measured by fact, history or that which is falsifiable, demonstrable or proven. Rather, the event to which Paul is faithful (Christ who died on the cross and was resurrected) is measurable only by his (Paul’s) subjective disposition (conviction), the singular universal direction of his conviction and the purity of the event itself. Caputo echoes this view when he claims that ‘affirmation of an event is the response of a subject to a visitation by something that overtakes it’.12 ‘Jesus’, claims Badiou, ‘is pure event’. This declaration is self-sufficient in itself and stands alone by itself. As such, it distances itself from any dilution of the purity of the event as mediation. In seeing in Christ ‘a coming who is, in himself and for himself, what happens to us’,13 Badiou links directly the immanence of Christ as event to ‘what happens to us’. Pure event is therefore not a function of something else. Similarly, Jesus Christ is not a function of knowledge or revelation. Christ happens to one. Badiou writes: ‘The event has not come to prove or reveal anything. It is pure beginning. Christ’s resurrection is neither an argument nor an accomplishment. There is no proof of the event: nor is the event a proof.’14 Not defined by their historical accuracy nor their temporality, events can be characterised more as agents of happening, soliciting, drawing and calling. After the declaration of an event, Badiou’s next concern is how the declaration relates to the ‘universality of postevental truth’.15 As the title of Badiou’s work describes, Paul is the foundation of universalism. But what does universalism mean in the context of Paul? I suggested earlier that Paul’s subjective disposition (his fidelity to the event and his conviction to the pure event of Jesus) is the catalyst for his universalism. This is in part the foundation of his universalism but there are other dimensions to it. The particular/universal binary is also linked to the political and cultural tensions Paul experienced between Jews and Greeks postevent, and his conviction to carry both these constituents beyond their differences. Badiou refers throughout his text to Paul’s desire to ‘traverse’, ‘transcend’ worldly differences indifferently: It is imperative that universality not present itself under the aspect of a particularity. Differences can be transcended only if benevolence with regard to customs and opinions presents itself as an indifference that tolerates differences, one whose sole material test lies, as Paul says, in being able and knowing how to practice them oneself.16 From a French socio-political perspective, it would appear that this characterisation of Paul’s universalism has strong republican overtones, and

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given the space devoted to universalism in Badiou’s text (and his chapter title ‘Paul: Our Contemporary’), it could be argued that Badiou sees in Paul an example that society and post-secularism may want to emulate more closely. In previous chapters, I have made reference to Régis Debray’s statement in which he defined the French mindset according to its republican or democratic tendencies. Since the mid 1980s, French society, politics and culture have reflected, as in most of Western Europe, changes in attitudes on issues such as ethnicity, citizenship, gay rights and environmentalism. But this democratisation of French culture has also been strongly resisted by conservative thinking. French republicanism, for example, has been seen to stand firm against inroads (democratic and multicultural) into some of the nation’s cherished universal principles. In particular, republicans have sought to protect the secular ethos of the republican school from ‘ostentatious’ religious displays. Republican députés have formed alliances (with the Catholic Church and in some cases the Far Right) to protect the heterosexual foundation of marriage from any gay equivalent. To choose (as Debray would have us do) between a France divided between republicanism and democracy would be to underestimate the complexity of the internal relationship. Republican ideology tends to side with the nation, its heritage and universalist tradition; it puts equality of all before difference of any particular one. Democracy also shares many of these ideals but, in broad terms, what differentiates republicanism from democracy is that the latter takes its ideological reference point from a different position on the socio-political and philosophical spectrum; critically, democracy sees in individual difference the starting point for a revaluation of the French notion of universal equality. The relevance of Badiou’s Saint Paul to our contemporary ideological debate has implications far beyond the evental significance of the resurrection. As readers, we are entitled and indeed encouraged by Badiou to make the connection between postevental truths and universalism. But, in our haste to label Badiou a staunch republican, let us first examine in more detail the nature of Paul’s universalism and the truths it expounds. On one level, the quotation above smacks of quintessential republican universalism founded on ‘an indifference that tolerates difference’. On another level, the quotation also makes it clear that at the heart of indifference is benevolence and a ‘knowledge’ and ‘practice’ of the differences inferred. In other words, indifference is not non-knowledge or dispassionate objectivity but actually the knowledge and practice of difference. Badiou not only acknowledges differences, he advocates that difference be ‘traversed’ in order for universalism to be constructed: ‘Paul undertakes to accommodate differences, not stigmatize them, so that the process of their subjective

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disqualification might pass through them, within them.’17 What is significant here is that acknowledgement of difference is itself founded on a subjective disposition that comes from Paul’s experience of declarative difference in the event of the resurrection that differentiated him from others. Again, it is worth pointing out that Badiou does not attach any moral or historical truth to the resurrection or to whether Paul’s subjective declaration has any truth beyond its declarative conviction. However, Badiou is making a serious point here about differences; Paul’s separation from others through his declaration (his singularity and difference) has no value other than the fact that it is not equal with other declarative fidelities. Difference therefore is not a value that in a moral and ethical world deserves recognition or special privilege. Difference is simply a function of inequality which, if experienced (‘declared’ in Badiou’s terminology), can be undone only by virtue of what Badiou calls ‘universalizing egalitarianism’.18 To give proper justice to Badiou’s thought here, let me quote him in full: ‘Paul consists in making universalizing egalitarianism pass through the reversibility of an inegalitarian rule’. I would make three points in relation to this quotation. The first is to stress the point that Badiou sees difference as the levelling out of ‘inegalitarian rule’ which is, crucially, reversible. Hence, difference is not a reflection of a state of permanence but is subject to modification and change. This is important in Paul’s mission not to differentiate between Jew, Greek, woman, man or slave. Secondly, Badiou eschews the modern tendency of opposing universalism and particularism, with the former seen as the imposing, conforming and threatening structure. Badiou has consistently couched universalism in a language of ‘traversal’. Above, for instance, universalising egalitarianism is described passing through difference with the capacity of being able to ‘affect particularizing differences’.19 Badiou in fact overturns conventional wisdom on the universal/particular binary by proposing a quite radical subversion of their respective trajectories: The Universal is not the negation of particularity. It is the measured advance across a distance relative to perpetually subsisting particularity. Every particularity is a conformation, a conformism. It is a question of maintaining a non-conformity with regard to that which is always conforming us. Thought is subject to the ordeal of conformity and only the universal, through an uninterrupted labor, an inventive traversal, relieves it. The universal is non-conformity.20 Thirdly, and vitally, it is clear that Badiou’s subtle argument on universal truth is designed to deconstruct, via a language of accommodation and

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affection, the myth of specificity as the sole register of difference, subjectivity and identity. On a broader level, his argument is founded on two key paradoxes. In the first instance, Badiou’s subject emerges as a universal subject out of his declarative singularity and fidelity to the event of the resurrection. Paul, he claims, ‘orients a thought towards the universal in his suddenly emerging singularity’.21 In other words, singularity in its very subjective disposition points outwards: ‘It is the “for all” that allows me to be counted as one [ . . . ]; the One is inaccessible without the “for all”’.22 Through a combination of the power of subjective weakness, oblatory love and grace (themes to be addressed shortly under the subheading of ‘Divided Subject’), Badiou describes Paul ‘weaving a subjectivity of salvation . . . as a universality that is present in each ordeal, in each personal victory; each victory won, however localised, is universal’.23 The second paradox, which links with the first, is the claim to be able to construct a universalism out a Christ-event that, according to Badiou, has no historical veracity. However, the positive originality of this paradox for Badiou is that Paul takes his ‘consciousness’ of truth from the pure event ‘detached from every objectivist assignation to the particular laws of the world or society, yet concretely destined to become inscribed within a world’.24 In both paradoxes, it is the primacy of subjective and singular truth to the event which determines, over and above any societal, political or cultural allegiance, the universalism of truth. Badiou goes even further by stating that fidelity to the event exists ‘only through the termination of communitarian particularism and the determination of the subject-of-truth who indistinguishes the One and the ‘for all’.25 In summary therefore, Badiou argues that the universal traverses the particular, affecting particularising difference to such an extent that the particular is in a position to welcome the universal truth that traverses it. This traversal is only possible because of a universal truth that emerges from the subject’s (particularism’s) declarative fidelity to the event as truth of the resurrection. In short, the event and its universal truth sublate differences to the point of their indifference before a higher truth which, in the truth procedure that ensues, makes differences carry within them the power of the universal. Badiou states: Differences are indifferent, and the universality of the true collapses them. With regard to the world in which truth proceeds, universality must expose itself to all differences and show, through the ordeal of their division, that they are capable of welcoming the truth that

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traverses them. What matters, man or woman, Jew or Greek, slave or free man, is that differences carry the universal that happens to them like a grace. Inversely, only by recognizing in differences their capacity for carrying the universal that comes upon them can the universal itself verify its own reality.26 The question one might ask at this juncture is whether Badiou’s concept of universalism as an agent of grace that affects and erases difference is real (and thus practical) or whether it pertains to a utopian idealism. It is in fact the key question that Badiou’s hypothesis demands at this point. It is theoretically unproblematic for Badiou to advance his idea of a universalising egalitarianism because, as he admits himself, he is dealing with nonbeings and a mythological truth of the event. He calls Paul an ‘antiphilosophical theoretician of universality’, after all. But while theory may be construed as a weakness in his hypothesis of universalism per se because of its lack of a socio-political application, we must not lose sight of Badiou’s clear intentions in Saint Paul. His primary interests are in the event as a truth procedure (not a reality) and in the postevental truth of universalism as a thought (not an object). In the same way, his discussion of the subject is that of a thought disposition, not an individual identity. To criticise his theory of universalism on the basis of its lack of real effects (what he calls disparagingly the ‘effective truths’ of politics) would be to miss the point altogether. Badiou is operating at a theoretical level where he believes opinions, customs and real differences would entangle the truth procedure he wants to develop, and in the process compromise his theories of universal thought and subject. With these important caveats on board, we can now take a more informed look at some of the postevental truths that Badiou attributes to Paul. In the knowledge that particularity is dissolved in the universal, and that thought (not reality) is the only procedural pathway forward, Badiou pursues some of the finer implications of fidelity to the event and Paul’s universalism. As discussed briefly earlier, one of the important consequences of the pure event of Jesus Christ is that the purity of the event belongs to the absence of any mediation factors. With God, knowledge, revelation, scripture and the like removed from the event as signifiers of dependence on the ‘legality’ of the Father, Badiou sees in Paul’s declarative fidelity and subjective disposition an affinity with a ‘universal becoming-son’. The subject as ‘son’, born of the event and the bearer of its universal truth, enters into ‘filial equality’ with God himself. But this can only happen through a second consequence of the pure event of Jesus Christ which is his resurrection. Badiou makes it clear thus: ‘When

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Christ dies, we, mankind, shall cease to be separated from God, since by filiating Himself with the Sending of his Son, He enters into the most intimate proximity to our thinking composition’.27 Filial equality, leading to divine equality and salvation, is conditional on a critical distinction between death and Christ’s death (resurrection). Death for Paul (according to Badiou) is real and biological; it is of the flesh. The law (Judaic law of Paul’s time) is also perceived as a ‘figure of death’ in the way it structures and constrains the subject. Badiou develops a subthesis on the law as that which controls the subject’s desire ‘binding him to it regardless of the subject’s will’.28 The law is seen to accomplish itself as an ‘automatism of desire’, subjecting the subject to its literal logic and leading the subject along ‘the path of death’. Badiou counters the law (in the same way as he did the perceived hegemony of universalism over particularity) by challenging its literality and by remaining faithful to the Christ-event as a truth/thought procedure. In the case of literality, Badiou distinguishes between a legalising subjectivisation (subject to the letter of the law), which he equates with the power of death, and a ‘law raised by faith’ which he equates with Life. This ‘law raised by faith’ is a ‘transliteral’ law (compare the traversal thematic of universalism) which, on the one hand, deliteralises the subject who is bound traditionally to conform to automatic legalities and, on the other hand, orients the subject to think beyond the law and be guided by the universal truth of the event: Just as under the law, the subject, decentered from the automatic life of desire, accepted the place of the dead, and sin enjoyed an autonomous life in him, similarly, having been sprung from death by resurrection, the subject participates in a new life whose name is Christ.29 Badiou, through his analysis of Paul, is not advocating that the law be broken (in a real sense) in order for there to be changes. The event of Christ’s resurrection and the subjective disposition it has set in place in Paul empowers him to think an alternative meaning to the real death of the flesh and the law. The important concept here is to think. Badiou is asking us to think differently about death and about life: ‘Death and Life are thoughts, interwoven dimensions of the global subject’.30 He wants us to think of death not as flesh but as resurrection. In doing so, Badiou engages us in a twofold operation. Death is the end of flesh, biologically speaking. Resurrection is the return of flesh, biologically speaking. But to think the return of flesh in the resurrection is to think death as life, pure and simple.

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What Badiou is careful not to imply in this thought procedure is any dialectical thinking that would convey the idea that the resurrection is the negation of death. To pursue dialectical or interpretative thinking would be to undermine the purity of the declarative event of the resurrection. It would also ‘dissolve the resurrection (death and life) into a rational protocol’.31 In Badiou’s thinking, there needs to be death for the resurrection to have any universal truth. As such, the resurrection happens, not out of an overcoming of death or its sublation, but out of the powerlessness of death. To think death as life is to embark on a thought procedure that has its own law: ‘Through this thought of the flesh, whose real is death, is dispensed to us in grace that fact of being in the same element as God himself. Death here names a renunciation of transcendence. Let us say that Christ’s death sets up an immanentization of the spirit’.32 Badiou’s thinking therefore runs like this: based on the evental declaration of Christ’s resurrection as Life, and the universal truth of this event emanating from ‘Jesus, the name for what happens to us universally’ (not miracles, history or scriptural evidence), Badiou maintains that the subject enters into a thought relationship with God that is defined by grace and givenness, and which offers in return the end of ‘inegalitarian’ transcendence through filiation: ‘Through Christ’s death, God renounces his transcendent separation: he unseparates himself through filiation and shares in a constitutive dimension of the divided human subject’.33 In turn, the prize of filiation with God provides the justification for the event of the resurrection as the basis for universalism: the resurrection, by virtue of the filiation of us all as ‘sons’ of the event, suspends difference once and ‘for all’.

The divided subject Transcendence (in the Father), according to Badiou, denies the Christevent because it disempowers the thought of flesh as the modus operandi of life in death, and delimits divine equality through filiation. This position is in stark contrast to that advocated by Henry, for example, for whom transcendence, as a counter to the cogito-sum and the ‘truth of the world’, is in fact a means of equating himself phenomenologically inside Ipseity with God and Life. But what is of particular interest in the case of Badiou, as mentioned above, is that the end of transcendence through filiation paves the way for a new accommodation between God and a divided human subject. What does Badiou mean by divided? For an answer, he takes us back to Paul’s time and context, and specifically the subject pre-event. As a

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result of the call to the event of the resurrection, the idea of a subject is first problematised as follows: ‘In the background the question is: Who is called? What is to be called? Is the call indexed by visible signs? And finally: Who is a subject? What marks a subject?’34 The fascination with signs and markings is an obvious reference to circumcision that set Jews apart from Gentiles as God’s people. But signs (or the need for a discernible mark) testified to the importance of particularism as an indicator of subject difference and possible subject definition at the time. This communitarian ‘definition’ of the subject forms part of Badiou’s early thesis on the subject. On the one hand, there is a subject still part of Judeo–Christian tradition for whom the event of the resurrection serves only to reinforce the law and the old order. In other words, the event does nothing to shake the traditional subject out of its present condition. On the other hand, as we have discussed thus far, there is a new subject who emerges out of the Christ-event and who challenges the old order and its privileges with a new universalism. It is at this interface between the old and the new, between the intellectual heavyweights of Jewish law (coupled with Greek wisdom) and Paul’s personal conviction declared in the Christ-event, where Badiou fleshes out the contours of the divided subject. It is a process that begins with Badiou’s establishment of Paul (subject) as an apostle of antiphilosophy. From both Jewish and Greek perspectives, the event of the resurrection is explained within a set of discourses that attempt to rationalise the event respectively as a ‘sign’ or as an example of cosmic exceptionalism. For Badiou, both traditions form part of the ‘same figure of mastery’ (prophetic sign for Jewish, natural totality for Greek) that ties explanation of God to the universe and its laws, authorities and knowledge. In the process, Badiou claims that the real point of the Christevent (the universality of its announcement) is lost: It is impossible that the starting point be the whole (Greek), but just as impossible that it can be an exception to the whole. Neither totality nor sign will do. One must proceed from the event, which is acosmic and illegal, refusing interpretation into any totality and signaling nothing.35 Badiou’s alternative to the Jew and the Greek and their discourses is the subject of the ‘son’ who derives his origin from a Christian discourse. The figure of the son is important on several levels. We have examined already its intrinsic link to filiation and salvation. Its filiative association also serves to deconstruct the architecture of transcendence, mastery, legality and authority that have shored up both Jewish and Greek

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discourses. But for Badiou, Christian discourse, by maintaining fidelity to the son, duplicates this filiative narrative in the subject of the apostle. The apostle is a witness (not materially) to the Christ-event, but his witness is a certain type of intuitive ‘knowledge’. It is not knowledge founded on surety, presumption or philosophical logos. It is a knowledge born out of a conviction to the possibility of the event: ‘The apostle knows the univocal sense of what will come’.36 It is well established, of course, that Christian discourse is not a discourse of knowledge but of the advent of the subject as son. That said, Badiou is not content to simply plough a single furrow of filiative intuition ad infinitum. Through Christian discourse and its ‘subjective path of the flesh’, he also launches a systematic attack on philosophy’s fraudulent call to ‘imagine that one knows, when [in fact] it is a question of subjective possibilities’.37 This antiphilosophical attack is sustained throughout Badiou’s text and it is a key theme, of course, that has underpinned many of my postmetaphysical and postsubjective directions in the second part of this book. In the case of Saint Paul however, it has a special relevance. We recall Badiou’s aversion to any dialectical corruption of Paul’s death/life ‘thought’ in case it contaminated the event of the resurrection as pure encounter. In the same vein, Badiou’s description of Paul as the ‘antiphilosophical theoretician of universality’ taps into a profound belief that philosophy, when confronted with the event, is powerless. For example, Badiou claims that philosophical truth, based on conceptual generalities, cannot access the ‘mythological’ order of the event and its universal truth. In short, for Badiou, philosophy falls short both as method and as truth when it comes to declaring the power of the Christ-event. The apostle as son therefore not only continues the theme of filiative equality, but extends the antiphilosophical foundation of Paul’s universalism. Badiou contrasts philosophy and its cultivation of disciples into its ranks, and the event’s generation of sons. In the first case, the authority of philosophy as knowledge to which the disciple is in awe defines this relationship as one of inequality. In the second instance, and as a consequence of the power of the thought of flesh, the Christ-event creates sons of the event who supersede the Father, knowledge and philosophical logos: ‘It is by consenting himself to the figure of the son, as expressed by the enigmatic term “sending” that the Father causes us ourselves to come forth universally as sons.’38 On one level, the Father’s act of consent (self-giving) generates the birth of new heirs of universalism. On another level, the term ‘son’ carries in it the abolition of transcendence and its associated figures of mastery: ‘The resurrected son filiates all humanity. This constitutes the uselessness of the figure of knowledge and

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its transmission. New knowledge is founded on the “equality of sons”’.39 As a son of the event, the subject is relieved of knowledge and of the law, and enters into a ‘shared egalitarian endeavour’.40 As philosophy parades its tools of wisdom and rhetorical superiority, the antiphilosophical apostle resorts to a show of ‘spirit (pneuma, breath) and power (duanimis)’ to declare the power of the Christ-event. For Badiou, it becomes a question of inventing a language ‘without the wisdom of language’ which is not capable of being understood by philosophy. The opening quotation to Part 2 highlights this aphilosophy, and Badiou also cites Saint Paul as a further example: When I came to you brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.41 Without proof of the Christ-event and bereft of a language to convey its universal truth, Paul defies Jewish and Greek discourses (and their dependence on signs), including the traditional Christian discourse of miracles, to project wilfully a knowledge of nothing, coupled with his weakness. For Badiou (and we include Gianni Vattimo and Caputo in their notion of ‘weak thought’), the exhibition of weakness is Paul’s supreme proof of the Christ-event, the non-linguistic demonstration of a power that is fulfilled in weakness itself. It is a form of weakness that is subjection to the power of the event, as well as an ethically sound and coherent weakness that refuses capitulation to the other powers of signs and miracles, and to philosophy itself: Paul firmly holds to the militant discourse of weakness. The declaration will have no other force than the one it declares and will not presume to convince through the apparel of prophetic reckoning, of the miraculous exception, or of the ineffable personal revelation. It is not the singularity of the subject that validates what the subject says; it is what he says that founds the singularity of the subject.42 What Badiou tries to prove here is that a subjective upsurge, no matter if founded in subjective weakness, has a power that confounds philosophical scrutiny because the origin of the upsurge and the terms and manner in

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which it is sustained defy conceptual reasoning. As a philosopher himself, Badiou puts up a valiant defence of philosophy by saying that philosophy is not at fault in this regard. And part of his defence is to draw a clear distinction between the respective discourses of Christianity and philosophy. The former rests on conviction, subjective weakness, foolishness and evental grace. The latter tends to rely on reason and concept. In Chapter 4, we have seen examples of the problematic history between the two ‘adversaries’ of Christianity and philosophy, notably in a French context with half-baked attempts at reconciliation in the form of a ‘Christian philosophy’ in the mid twentieth century. More recently however, theology and philosophy have shown signs of a rapprochement in the ways reason and faith are deployed in ‘reason-based’ and ‘revelation-based’ philosophies of theology, not to mention of course the phenomenological advances of recent times. But Badiou is not a phenomenologist and, to all intents and purposes, religion as a personal form of salvation seems of little interest to him. Unlike his phenomenological contemporaries, Badiou has no personal investment in the veracity of the Christ-event he writes about. In fact, it is, as he claims, a fable like any other: ‘It will be objected that, in the present case, for us “truth” designates a mere fable. Granted, but what is important is the subjective gesture grasped in its founding power with respect to the generic conditions of universality.’43 In point of fact, as the concessionary tone offered by ‘granted’ suggests, the mythology of the Christ-event suits Badiou’s strictly philosophical methodology and his aim to explore the thought practice of subjectivity and its universal potentiality. The ‘problem’ for philosophy (and perhaps Badiou), or the achievement of Christianity, or the essence of Paul’s universalism (depending on how one reads Badiou’s text), is to fully grasp the articulation of a subjectivity that is resurrected in the abrupt happening of an event and the power that is generated in this resurrection through declarative fidelity. In reality, philosophy is not just caught cold or on the back foot. It is rendered obsolete by the evental power of the Christ-event and its subjective discourse. But before we look more closely at the nature of this discourse and its resistance to philosophy, it is important to underline what Badiou means by the divided subject. The event produces a subject who is divided between the figures of death (law, real flesh) and life (spirit, thought). To speak of the subject as the law is to define the subject within a particularity. For Badiou, the law is predicative, partial and is underpinned by the logic of rights and duty. On the contrary, to speak of the subject of the event is to define the subject in tow to universality, to the transcendence of particularity and to an evental One

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‘who undoes every particular or communitarian incorporation of the subject’.44 Nevertheless, it is as a divided condition that the subject remains throughout the process of his subjectivity. It is also a necessary condition of the subject because, for Badiou, it enables the subject to deal simultaneously with the particularities of the real and the ‘unheard of’ possibilities of the event. The divided subject therefore forms an integral part of the universal in the sense that the balance of the power of the event over the law of death ensures the truth of the universality of the event and the end of particularity as a subject. Badiou writes: With a divided subject, the effect is to end the distinction between Greek and Jew. To declare the nondifference between Greek and Jew establishes Christianity’s potential universality; to found the subject as division, rather than as perpetuation of a tradition, renders the subjective element adequate to this universality by terminating the predicative particularity of cultural subjects.45 In other words, Badiou avoids the description of the subject as a totality (on the side of either law or life), and sees divided subjectivity as the most ‘adequate’ way of representing universal truth. It is a form of divided subjectivity that is quite distinct from the type we have discussed in respect of Paul Ricoeur and Lévinas. In the case of Ricoeur, divided subjectivity is defined in terms of selfhood and otherness, where the self ‘passes into the other’ as a subject of discourse, of action and of ethical engagement. This in turn leads to his Christian ideal of the inter-subjective, reciprocal and reversible self. Lévinas, on the other hand, establishes a similar divided subjectivity in the form of self/other, but unlike the reciprocal reversibility of Ricoeur’s thesis, Lévinas privileges the other as the agent of responsibility to the self, and the condition of the self’s ethics. For Badiou, divided subjectivity operates as a dual procedural mechanism in the manipulation of the self towards universalism. Law and life, as thoughts, are in conflict with each other in universal truth: ‘Death (law) is that part of the subject that must, again and again, say “no” to the flesh and maintain itself in the precarious becoming of the spirit’s “but”’.46 The universal is not therefore on the side of either death (law) or life. Badiou is only saying that the divided subject is the guarantee of universality (‘it is precisely this form that bears the universal’47), and it is for the two subjective paths to negotiate their separate ways: If the event is able to enter into the constitution of the subject declaring it, it is precisely because through it, and irrespective of the particularity

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of the persons, it ceaselessly redivides the two paths, distributing the “not...but” [not law but life], which, through an endless process, sets aside the law the better to enter into grace.48 [My brackets] The ‘constituting weave’, as Badiou refers to it, through which the subject is related to the event reaches its conclusion in a series of defining themes. Christian discourse, as we have seen, moves through different stages, from conviction and subjective weakness to divided subject and then finally to stages of grace, love and hope. For Badiou, the chasm between philosophy and Christian discourse is more than ever exposed in these moments. Badiou intensifies the relationship between event and subject by cementing it in the concept of grace (‘evental grace’ and a ‘materialism of grace’). Grace is ‘evental’ in the sense of the unfathomable power of the event as a ‘happening to us’, defined by Badiou as ‘senseless overabundance’.49 As grace, the event is neither a tradition nor a teaching. It is pure givenness. The main consequence for Badiou of this event as grace is that ‘we are henceforth constituted by evental grace’.50 Grace is also a material process through which the event imbues its ‘law’ in opposition to the law of the world. The law of grace is the law of the universality of a truth; in this sense it is the law ‘for all’. As such, Badiou describes it as ‘our’ law. In contrast, there is ‘statist law, the law that controls parts’, what Badiou calls the ‘particular law’. By endowing grace with the power of a law that is ‘organically bound’ to the universality of the event, Badiou elevates the ‘truth’ of the event to immeasurable, overabundant proportions: ‘It is the event alone, as illegal contingency, which causes a multiplicity in excess of itself to come forth, and thus allows for the possibility of overstepping finitude’.51 On the one hand, the materialism of grace is a legal (or illegal) process that traverses particularity in the founding of universality; on the other hand, it is a necessary process of excess (linguistic and philosophical) in which the uncontrollable truth that surges forth ‘eventally’ requires an overdetermination in grace. If the law of particularity is derived from the logic of rights and duty, the law of grace happens to everyone without reason: ‘This is precisely what Paul calls grace: that which occurs without being couched in any predicate, that which is translegal, that which happens to everyone without an assignable reason. Grace is the opposite of law insofar as it is what comes without being due.’52 Grace fits into Badiou’s thought procedure methodology in a unique way. It is what emerges as an evental given of the subjective disposition. It comes without cause and without object. The power of grace is its

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excessive overabundance. In short, the trajectory of grace is antiphilosophical; it defies conceptualisation and rational thinking. And it shares this antiphilosophical ‘gratuity’ with a close associate: charisma: Every subject is initiated on the basis of a charisma; every subject is charismatic. Since the subjectivating point is the declaration of the event, rather than the work that demands a wage or reward, the declaring subject exists according to the charisma proper to him. Every subjectivity confronts its division within the element of an essential gratuitousness proper to its purpose. The redemptive operation consists in the occurrence of a charisma.53 The significance of grace and charisma to subjective ‘résurgence’ is their respective and positive unquantifiability. Grace is overdetermined to the point of senselessness and charisma is gratuitousness. But both reflect the way the event first enters into subjectivity, and crucially both determine how the event shapes universalism. We have resolved thus far that universality, in the form of the divided subject, traverses particularity in the foundation of nondifference. But predicating universality and the divided subject are the initiating roles of grace and charisma in the way they enable the subject to exceed his legal limitations in the foundation of universalism. Universalism supposes the idea of being able to think the multiple as a whole and not as a part; the law fulfils the latter function. For Badiou, the achievement of grace is to foresee, in spite of the law, the capacity to govern ‘a multiplicity in excess of itself, one that is indescribable, superabundant relative to itself as well as with respect to the fixed distributions of the law’.54 Grace is therefore limitless, endless and conditionless in its capacity to envisage a universalism well in excess of itself, even ‘out of place’, ‘a nomadism of gratuitousness’.55 But what this means for universalism in the immediate term is that grace’s virtual designation of a ‘multiplicity in excess of itself’, rather than surpassing universalism, actually preserves it: ‘Superabundance cannot be assigned to any Whole. That is precisely why it legitimates the destitution of difference, a destitution that is the very process of excess.’56 If grace saves universalism through excess, charisma follows a similar path: The subject constituted by charisma through the gratuitous practice of the universal address necessarily maintains that there are no differences. Only what is charismatic, thus absolutely without cause,

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possesses this power of being in excess of the law, of collapsing established differences.57 While grace invokes ‘multiplicity in excess of itself’ in the abolition of difference, charisma (itself a form of excess) invokes the gratuitous address of universalism to end difference. The essence of the gratuitous address is that it is ‘without cause’ and maybe even ‘in vain’. This signals, on the one hand, the necessarily precarious nature of the event’s universal truth, but, on the other hand, it testifies to the fact that if truth is to have any universality it must first, in its declarative eventality, run the risk of failure. Such a possibility leads Badiou to assert that ‘only what is absolutely gratuitous can be addressed to all’.58 Faith, love and hope follow grace and charisma as servants of Badiou’s thought practice: ‘Faith would be opening to the true; love, the universalizing effectiveness of its trajectory; hope, lastly, a maxim enjoining us to persevere in this trajectory’.59 But Badiou also sees them as servants of subjectivity with real applications outside the parameters of excess, gratuitousness and effectiveness. Thought practice is therefore not just a methodological principle for Badiou, it is also thought in practice, thought subjected to the ordeals of living. The law of grace, for instance, enjoins its subjects as co-workers in ‘egalitarian endeavour’ and ‘faithful labor’. To this degree, grace and charisma are an invitation to all to answer the call of the event in human ways of striving, patience and perseverance. This is particularly the case in love: When the subject as thought accords with the grace of the event – this is subjectivation (faith, conviction) – he, who was dead, returns to the place of life. He regains those attributes of power that had fallen onto the side of the law and whose subjective figure was sin. He rediscovers the living unity of thinking and doing. This recovery turns life itself into a universal law. Law returns as life’s articulation for everyone, path of faith, law beyond law. This is what Paul calls love.60 Badiou names love as the nonliteral law that inscribes itself in the world. Founded first on the love that comes from fidelity to the Christ-event, love opens out from love of self to be deployed in the love of others. It is the nonliteral law of love that unites thinking and doing, subjectivity and subjectivity, thought and salvation: ‘Love is what makes of thought a power which is why love alone . . . bears the force of salvation’.61

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Jean-François Lyotard: a phenomenology of the event For Badiou, the event is an exercise in thought procedure, from its emergence as a happening to its universal truth in love. For Lyotard, the event is real (a physical experience) and it is situated within the literary context of autobiography. In a dense study involving original quotation and complex exegesis, Lyotard takes The Confession of Augustine62 as a way of returning to the relationship between event (spiritual visitation) and the subject. Lyotard’s vantage point is inside the confessant’s world which enables him to articulate the intense point of conjuncture between the sensual and the spiritual, the erotic and the platonic and sin and salvation. However, beyond the immediate concerns of event and subjectivity, the relevance of Lyotard’s study to the broader aims of this book can be measured in his unique analysis of the phenomenology of the body, which bears valuable comparison with Henry’s phenomenology of Life. In addition, Lyotard’s early phenomenological training brings him within the radius of a corpus of philosophers (whom we have discussed) with a predisposition to theological debate, and who, it could be argued, have inherited the mantle of the postmetaphysical age. Lyotard’s Confession, for example, is a subtle critique of Western philosophical ontology and its Cartesian legacy. In particular, he undermines the supremacy of the cogito as the point of departure for all reflection and the condition of possibility for all experience. To this extent, the Confession is an attempt to demonstrate the vulnerability of the cogito and its condition of being ‘too late’ in response to the immanence of eventality. Designated clearly as an event (‘A fore-echo, at the beginning of Book X, has anticipated the event’63), Lyotard’s central thesis in the Confession is the event (visitation and encounter are other bywords used) between subject (confessant) and God. We need first to look at how Lyotard introduces the event to us. It is described at the outset without history, space or time: ‘The ecstatic pleasure provided by it, that it constitutes, has no history’.64 The event is a visit that ‘is both an encounter and not. Since the trance never draws to an end, it did not begin’.65 Clearly, there is difficulty in pinning the event down to actual space and time, let alone language. Lyotard speculates: ‘Where can an absolute visit be situated or placed in relation, in a biography? How can it be related?’66 Whereas Badiou is able to circumvent this obstacle by simply labelling the event as a thought happening on which he constructs his foundation of Paul’s universalism, Lyotard is confined to a text and its specific literariness. The early pages of the Confession therefore bear witness to the frantic search for an appropriate adequation between the event and its

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effect (primarily linguistic). This search takes Lyotard into a host of comparisons. The event ‘invites a fairy-story, a fable, not a discourse’.67 It even has poetic overtones: ‘Coming from the farthest Near East, reaching out to us, to Rimbaud, through the courtly canto, the ancient figure of the erotic blazon lends itself to words, that they may confess holy copulation’.68 All these options, it would appear, fall short of the challenge of adequation because they defer the event from an expressive immanence by ciphering experience through consciousness, language, memory or poetic discourse. Lyotard finally fixes on the human being, in its ‘inner human’ and bodily dimensions as the point of adequation. He states: The inner human does not bear witness to a fact, to a violent event that it would have seen, that it would have heard, tasted or touched. It does not give testimony, it is the testimony. It is the vision, the scent, the listening, the taste, the contact, each violated and metamorphosed [ . . . ]. The inner human does not evoke an absence. It is not there for the other; it is the Other of the there, who is there, there where light takes place without place, there where sound resounds without duration, and so forth.69 The inner human is the domain of the senses which have their own knowledge of the event’s impact. Consequently, Lyotard explains that there can be no ‘witness’ to the event for two reasons. Firstly, the inner human (the ‘ipse’, as he calls it) has no formal mechanism of witnessing other than feeling pure givenness. In other words, the inner human does not and cannot do anything about the event; it is the event in the way it expresses itself. Secondly, the event is experienced physiologically as a blow, an assault or a cut to which there is equally no witness because the cut ‘occurs’, not in real time, but in ‘n-dimensional space theory’ time. While the cut may not be visible, its effects are felt at the more profound level of the ‘soul-flesh’: ‘Such is the flesh visited, co-penetrated by your space-time, disturbed and confused with this blow; but steeped in infinity. Impregnated and pregnant with your overabundant liquid’.70 The event therefore finds its visit ‘accentuated’ at the point of the flesh where feeling, as opposed to thinking, is the principle of acknowledgement of the event. But this feeling/thinking binary raises concerns for the incumbent confessant (as subject) and for the writing process. We cannot lose sight of this dual nature of the confessant who undergoes physically the event’s charge but who also writes ‘in auctoritas’ of the duality per se.

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It is a duality with which the event is very closely related. Objectively, Saint Augustine’s Confessions represent the Saint’s personal journey of confession. They are part of the genre of confessional autobiography. Lyotard has lifted sections from the original text and inserted them into his own Confession, to which he has added an ongoing commentary on the sections. His commentary in fact joins with the original sections of text to form a new Confession, as opposed to Confessions. As we have seen above, his ‘additions’ throw a new light on the nature of visitation as an event. They also elucidate what, for Lyotard, are the key problems with confession as a form of writing. From Lyotard’s unique standpoint inside the confessional enterprise, he is able to identify the particular struggles experienced by Saint Augustine. One of these struggles is the way the inner human (and its soul-flesh) can respond positively to the event, but the ‘confessing I’ cannot: ‘The confessing I looks for words, and contrary to all expectations, those that come to him are those that make physiology work to the point of pushing the body’s sensorial and hence sensual powers to the infinite.’71 From this early point in the text, Lyotard has highlighted a central opposition between the ‘I’ (of real life and the biographical present) and the ‘ipse’ of the inner human. Importantly for our sake, Lyotard keeps a keen eye on both, particularly in their respective reception of the event. The opposition between ‘I’ and ‘ipse’ structures and subsequently valorises the event through the concept of delay. The ‘I’ is the time of writing for the confessant. It is by its very function post-event. But the ‘I’, by virtue of memory and other powers of retrieval, is endowed with the capacity to recapture the moment of the event and its effects. The ‘I’ is therefore the ‘I’ of reassurance and self-assurance. The ‘I’ belongs to a way of thinking that presumes that it is only post-event, in the calm after the storm (so to speak), that reflective, conscious writing is at its most effective. This may be the case in some forms of essay and critical writing, but Lyotard exposes the weakness of this thinking as it pertains to autobiography, confession and more widely to how we deal with the past, the present, memory and forgetting. For Lyotard, the ‘I’ of the confessor is also the ‘I’ of vainglory; ‘He had to write to save himself from oblivion, and yet through writing, he forgets himself.’72 Linked to this critique of the Cartesian cogito is a phenomenological critique of consciousness, at the heart of which is the temporal dislocation between writing and its object. Lyotard stresses this point: It is not of the mind itself, as it is written, ipsius animi, that time turns out to be a threefold distentio but, within the mind, of the desire that bears three times the mourning of its thing. When he

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expects it, expectat, the distentio pre-poses and proposes to come; when he seeks to apprehend it, by dint of attention, adtendit, it is ex-posed and supposed in the present; when he gives it to himself in such a way that it is retained, meminit, it is deposed and reposes in the past. These object positions are never posed, but indisposed, apt to slip away, since dis-propriation gives them birth. The object is only there to the extent that it is not there, it passes in transit, its present nickname does nothing but streak with the tiniest of flashes the interface between two clouds of non-existence, the not yet and the already no longer. Impatience, boredom, haste, or suffering lengthens time, pleasure or surprise shortens it. Time is measured by affectio, in the singular mode in which things touch us in their eclipse, affectio quam res praetereuntes in nos faciunt.73 Lyotard clearly takes some linguistic pleasure in undermining the mind’s (‘I’) arrogance to try to outdo time in capturing the object of its various expectations, suppositions and appropriations. The fact of the matter is that his italicisation serves to accentuate the distance between thought and object and defer the deliverance of immanence that the event necessitates. For Lyotard, the event is on the side of surprise and pleasure and so the best way of capturing this element of surprise is in the abolition of time through affectio as the space-time of phenomenological immanence. As it is, however, the event, as structured by the opposition between ‘I’ and ‘ipse’, is played out, at least for the time being, on the stage of delay. The logic is that because of the confessing ‘I’ and its distance from its object, the ‘encounter with the act is missed from the beginning. The event comes before writing bears witness, and writing sets down once the event has passed’.74 Writing (confession), it would seem, is doomed to play catch up to the event’s happening. In short, writing for Lyotard is a posthumous act. Delay is the theme that undermines the immanence of the confession. In the Confession, the ‘I’ who writes and confesses with the intention of revealing his true self is caught in a bind of temporal proportions that impact on the nature of the self revealed. If, as Lyotard claims, confession is written ‘posthumously, in search of the anthume’,75 there is a sense that nothing the present confessional ‘I’ does or says will carry any legitimacy in respect of the actuality of the events recorded or the veracity of the self revealed. As a consequence, the legitimacy of the written confession as a valid testament is undermined. It is a point Lyotard expands upon in his ‘Pencil Sketches’ that accompany the Confession when he addresses the temporal intrigue of Augustine’s Confessions and the respective

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virtues of written and oral confessions. On the temporal intrigue, Lyotard reconfirms the incommensurability of a present ‘I’ trying to re-live his past ‘I’, both of whom exist in different time and space zones. As for oral confession, it is described as a physical act of vomiting after which one experiences relief. As such, it is seen as an act of truth in which, crucially, forgiveness can be made available on the spot. With written confession, on the other hand, the confessant is obliged to negotiate with language (‘the terror of the written word’) and this, as we have seen, can lead to sham and fictitious recall. Lyotard concludes that confession is only possible, both in oral and in written form, if ‘something withholds, is maintained, immutable’.76 This is to say that the essence of the Confessions and the Confession, for that matter, is not to be found in the narration of external events, or even in the dubious pronouncements of the confessing ‘I’, but in capturing an eternal present that is impervious to past, present and future: ‘This present, immanent to internal consciousness, this umbilic, from which signs become readable to me, this present, then, is like the echo in temporality of the divine Present, of his eternal today’.77 Referred to at different points in the text as ‘the trance of life’ or the ‘relapses of memory’, Lyotard identifies in these moments of non-time a phenomenological and semiotic potentiality where the event of the ‘effusion’ of God can be adequately ‘confessed’. One example of this potential is located in a phenomenology of the human body, as flesh and source of sensorial power. But before I turn to this, I would like to evaluate in brief the contribution of the other part of the ‘I’ opposition, namely the ‘ipse’ and its ‘claim’ to phenomenological status. The expectation is that the ‘ipse’, the opposite of the ‘I’ and the inner human’s internal mechanism, will bring about the desired adequation between event and effect. However, it only half fulfils this function because Lyotard limits its full phenomenological effect by assigning it a ‘consciousness’, not on a par with that of the self-sufficiency of the ‘I’ but a consciousness nevertheless that belies conformity to thought/object correlation and self-reliance. Lyotard demonstrates this in two ways. The first time we detect a problem with the ‘ipse’ is in relation to the phenomenological maxim relating to thought and object, as discussed above. Whereas the ‘I’ is described as clearly out of sync in the delay between thought and object, the ‘ipse’ is seen as potentially more devious in the way it uses thought (as a way of depriving thought) to control its objects of desire: The ipse shall not have, does not have, and did not have what it desires. It lacks being, and drugs its privation in temporal mode. It

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lives a mortal life, it survives, outlives itself, arranges it such that it is never on time for its objects, it temporizes. Temporality is its settling down, to ipse, its away of getting on with the unaccomplished, with custom, with the deferment of the act.78 The ‘ipse’s consciousness has a soporific effect on desire. It languishes expressly and tactfully in its own privation. This is particularly the case in the second of Lyotard’s examples, sexual temptation. For Lyotard, Saint Augustine’s Confessions reveal the power of sex as a force that structures the ‘entire course of human experience’,79 so much so that they outline ‘a libidinal-ontological constitution of temporality’.80 Specifically, Lyotard defines the sexual, in the context of levels of consciousness, by its ‘flaccidity’. In other words, the sexual is seen to move effortlessly in between the ‘I’ and ‘the ‘ipse’, controlling both in different ways. The ‘I’, despite its vigilance, is unable to ward off the ‘rout’ of concupiscence. As for the ‘ipse’, it ‘comfortably nestles its fatigue into this time of lifeless relapse’.81 Crucially however, the ‘ipse’ is described as ‘unable to face the adventure of an unknown future, to envisage it in itself, by itself, for itself’.82 The ‘ipse’ cannot usurp the authority of the ‘I’ because it does not have the self-control to take charge of its own destiny. But therein lies the deviance of the ‘ipse’. For Lyotard, the ‘ipse’, unlike the ‘I’ that is seen to acquiesce to the desires of the flesh, takes pleasure in avoiding doing anything to offset sexual temptation. The particular danger of this, for Lyotard, is that it is a conscious act of denial that is founded not only in deferral but in wilful oblivion. The upshot is that the ‘ipse’ misses out on the opportunity of real phenomenological ipseity in a future ‘in itself, by itself, for itself’.

Lyotard’s subject: a phenomenology of the flesh For this future, Lyotard suggests that we return to the subject, not as ‘I’ or ‘ipse’ but as flesh. With the ‘I’ too well-trained and the ‘ipse’ too ‘spongy’, the body as flesh and sense brings subjectivity back to its primary contact point. For Lyotard, the visitation of the event on the body manifests itself in diverse ways. The primary effect is sensual. It effects the five senses in a ‘fivefold ferocity’: ‘The flesh, forced five times, violated in its five senses, does not cry out, but chants, brings to each assault rhythm and rhyme’.83 The event is also described sexually, and violently: ‘With what ecstatic pleasure is enacted the rape perpetrated by the Other’.84 Underpinning both these sensual and sexual ‘assaults’ is the fact that the event is felt (undergone) and not thought.

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There are no witnesses to the ‘convulsion’, ‘spasm’ and ‘turning inside out’ of sexual/evental gratification. The flesh attests only ‘ab intestat’, renouncing ‘outward thought’ production. Gratification of the event and the triumph of flesh over thought are enhanced by Lyotard’s deployment of a phenomenological grammar to erase the ‘I’, open up a non-time of memory relapse, oblivion and anamnesis where the flesh and the event find common purpose. There is one part of the Confession where Lyotard highlights this flesh/event communion to maximum effect. Under the section aptly titled ‘Trance’, ‘Lyotard’, the commentator inside the textual confession, proposes a challenge for mind and soul to find out who can get close to God. He dismisses the idea proposed by the animus (mind) that God can be conceptualised in the ‘stores of memory’. Turning to the anima (soul), he speculates whether the anima could embody the form of an angel to burst through the firmament and ‘see God in the light of God’. The animus gives up on the challenge, whereas the anima allows itself to be swept along by the intrigue. The anima, in her trance-like state, recounts four interweaving encounters. In the first, the soul is seduced by a poetic ‘Thou’ and ‘burns to enjoy thy peace’. In the second, access to God is only granted in anamnesis. The location is a primal scene. The soul is the subject of a violent assault, where it is ravished and ‘forced through . . . five estuaries’.85 The soul yearns for a return of this ‘joy’ and the ‘unnatural peace’ it has delivered. The third encounter is described as follows: The scene is primitive, not locatable in memory. The absolute eye watched us, Augustine says, he looked through the lattice of our flesh, he caressed us with his voice, and we hasten on his scent like drunk hounds. We believe we take hold of the divine, but then, all of a sudden, his calm enraptures us, and uncovered, lashed, outside ourselves, for one moment we find ourselves gaping in his beatitude.86 And in the fourth and final encounter, Lyotard writes: The majestic one takes the schoolboy like a woman, opens him, turns him inside out, turns his closest intimacy into his shrine, penetrale meum, his shrine in me. The absolute, absolutely irrelative, outside space and time, so absolutely far – there he is for one moment lodged in the most intimate part of this man. Limits are reversed, the inside and the outside, the before and the after, these miseries of the mind.87

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On a first reading, these encounters share common themes. Two take place in primitive locations. The other is in a far distant space. The Other/event/God appears to exploit the anima in a violently sexual manner. The anima takes pleasure in the sexual assault and finds peace in it. If we look more closely however, we can read something different. The primitive nature of the location indicates that events happen in a different space and time, out on the extreme fringes of the universe, far removed from our world and what we consider normal moral and sexual behaviour. There is rape (both female and male), physically brutal sexual exploitation and the implication of a God with a voyeuristic and predatory eye. How can this be the place and form of the anima’s encounter with God? The key to Lyotard’s description of these encounters is their other-worldliness. As such, they invoke no moral or judgemental reservations; in fact, the images of rape are an indication of the indiscriminate power of the visitation of God for whom sex is not just lust but total physical occupation and spiritual repossession. Lyotard sees God retaking control of the body sexually and in the processes of stripping, overturning and ‘lashing’, he returns the body to a state of primitive vulnerability. Demoted as ‘human being’ and as ‘I’, reduced to a state of physical and mental destitution, the angel can burn with peace and gape in awe the beatitude of God. Lyotard seems to infer that in these moments of event/flesh communion, humanity must be outside itself (dehumanised) to find itself and peace in God. The seemingly incomprehensible nature of these encounters is measured only by the fact that they cannot be fathomed in our normal realm of thought. But this does not diminish their existence or significance. Their creative reality bears witness to the fact that they are encounters, as Lyotard says, ‘absolutely irrelative, outside space and time, absolutely far’. What they reveal is that the event of God’s visitation takes place as a surprise, outside our chronological temporality, outside our moral compass and outside of language. They also reveal that the event occurs unbeknownst to us; in the same way that rape or sexual predatory behaviour surprises its victim, so the event comes unexpectedly, like a thief in the night. Lyotard uses two images to convey this state of unawares. In the first, he deploys a sexual image, ‘taking from behind’ (‘a dorso mussitanates’), to signify the event’s predatory advance. In the second, he returns to the figure of the anima, who having encountered the absolute, admits that it does not know it did: ‘The soul has not penetrated into the angelic spheres, but a little of the absolute – is it thinkable? – has encrypted itself within it, and the soul knows nothing of it’.88

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A semiotics of the event Of course, the critical point here is that knowledge is of no use in either anticipating the event or preventing it from happening. The course of the event cannot be ‘submitted to the tribunal of ideas’;89 it belongs to an atemporality, a primitivity and an idiolect extraneous to reason and knowledge. Lyotard, as internal commentator, has been at pains to underline this point in his critique of the ‘I’, the delay between thought and object, and the ‘smug’, ‘false’ and ‘deceptive’ attempts to ‘name’ God. In addition, the entire genre of confessional writing implicitly comes under fire from this critique. But, lest we forget, there is an important instructive aspect to this critique. Lyotard wants to educate his readers on how to read differently by deconstructing the Cartesian-based metaphysics of subjectivity, its intentional consciousness based in thought/object designation and the general sociolect of communicative language. Phenomenology achieves this aim in part. But in his ‘Pencil Sketches’, Lyotard also advocates a semiotic reading of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and, in fact, Lyotard’s internal commentary in the Confession operates along these semiotic lines in several instances. I do not propose to trace the semiotics of the Confession in the remainder of this chapter. My principal aim has been to demonstrate Lyotard’s phenomenology of the event and its link to the subject as body, flesh and senses. However, I readily concede that in Lyotard’s presentation of some evental moments in the Confession, the understanding of the significance of those moments owes as much to semiotics as it does to phenomenology. Phenomenology, let me be clear, plays a critical methodological role in the Confession, and particularly in the contexts of Augustine’s sensory universe, the adequation between event and flesh, confessional writing and deferral, and the ‘verb as pure act’. But I would like to address in these final pages how semiotics also contributes to a different relationship with the event. Lyotard states that the confession is only possible ‘if opera, things as they are given, also constitute signa’.90 In this statement, he embraces a philosophical leap from the phenomenological ipseity of the ‘thing in itself’ to the ‘sign’ that bears value for something other than itself. It is an important leap because it allows Lyotard to approach the event within a ‘system’ that is different, for example, to Badiou’s interpretation of the event as happening. Michael Riffaterre, one of the eminent architects of semiotics in the recent French tradition, based his semiotic system on certain key principles of mimesis, catachresis (nongrammaticality), intertextuality, literariness and artifice.91 In summary, Riffaterre proposed that any literary text, in particular poetry, ‘threatens the literary representation of

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reality, or mimesis’.92 Mimesis is thus undermined by a series of internal textual mechanisms that, on one level, distort the reader’s understanding of the text (reality), but which, on another level, make sense within a different (semiotic) system. Riffaterre states: The sign has two faces: textually ungrammatical, intertextually grammatical; displaced and distorted in the mimesis system, but in the semiotic grid appropriate and rightly placed. This coincidence of catachresis and propriety influences the hermeneutic process by making reading at once restrictive and unstable.93 Ungrammaticality in a literary text is a sign of grammaticality somewhere else, which, for Riffaterre, is a positive thing because it means that intertextual belonging (as a system) helps confer significance, and it also reinforces the idea that a text’s ungrammaticality is not gratuitous but has its own imperative (inter) textual truth. As the quotation above also underlines, one of the consequences of mimetic displacement is its impact on the reader who, far from being free to interpret diverse textual possibilities, is in fact limited by a ‘new hierarchy of words, a new grammar whose very novelty or strangeness makes it harder to ignore or bypass’.94 All of which leaves the reader in a complex position. On the one hand, the reader is in the ultimately privileged position of making the connections between text and intertext, of participating in the semiotic transfer from sign to sign. On the other hand, as Riffaterre concurs, it is an unstable position because, in the event that ungrammaticalities prove insurmountable and resistant to hermeneutics, the reader can often revert back to mimesis for relief. It is a process described by Riffaterre as ‘semiotic circularity’ which he defines ironically as the essence of literature (and poetry): ‘In the reader’s mind, it means a continual recommencing, an indecisiveness resolved one moment and lost the next with each reliving of revealed significance.’95 Riffaterre’s semiotics is a semiotics of poetry, to which he adds prose poetry. In other critical works, he extended his field of reference to other literary formats.96 But for Riffaterre, semiotics is best served in literary analysis because literature by its nature challenges the mimetic representation of reality. While Lyotard’s Confession is a critique of Western philosophy, it is also a literary text in two fundamental ways. Its formal layout on the page is in continuous verse. Indeed, the text reads like verse. Also, its present confessant (Lyotard) joins Augustine as confessant in a literary and mutual metaconfession which, admittedly,

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incorporates elements of critique. That said, it is a discourse charged with poetic language, imagery and a semiotic indecipherability particularly in those moments of memory relapse or trance. In addition, by its very structure, the text is intertextual, even blatantly so with Lyotard signalling in the margins of the text the sections in Augustine’s Confessions to which he is referring. I would argue that these indicators lend themselves to a semiotic reading of parts of the Confession, and I propose therefore that we return to the four encounters between anima and God, as previously discussed, in order to see if semiotics might shed a different light on their significance. We concluded earlier, for example, that the event of God’s visitation is communicated indirectly as a surprise, as an event of which we are made unaware. The context of other-worldliness explains the fact that God can do things indiscriminately and in the process take control of humanity and reshape it for His and our benefit. This reading is still entirely valid. But it is a reading that pays homage to the event as external in two important ways; firstly, in the sense of a visitation (God coming to man) that arrives externally (unexpectedly or not), and secondly as a meaning that is also external to the text in which it is placed. In respect of the first, the idea of God’s direct intervention in humanity has no Christian foundation. Intervention belongs to the sending by God of his only Son into the world out of love, and it is on the basis of this ‘sending of the son’ and events surrounding him, as we have seen, that Badiou founds Paul’s universalism and Henry constructs a phenomenology of Life. If we are to pursue the idea of God in people’s lives (which I think we should in the context of the semiotics of these encounters), it is not via direct intervention but in the concept of inhabitation that God relates to humanity. In Christian discourse, the idea of inhabitation takes its inspiration from the theology of grace. Grace has different meanings depending on what part of scripture is invoked. Catechism defines grace according to its Greek root charis, namely a gift. Hence, the Synoptic Gospels interpret grace principally as a form of benevolence from God to humankind. More complex theologies of grace emerge in the writings of Saint John (where grace is founded on the relationship between Father and Son, and on the inheritance of eternal Life), and Paul, for whom grace is justification by faith as opposed to the law. For my purposes, I will proceed with grace as the gift of God, but it is how this gift is ‘received’ that is of importance. In the writings of Saint Augustine, grace (gratia inhabitationis, as he calls it) is the presence of the divine will in all of humanity, and this presence is

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intensified as sanctifying grace in the case of the believer. Gratia inhabitationis is essentially a static concept that bears witness to God’s presence in man, as opposed to variations of the concept that build on it through acts of charity and virtue (as seen in the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas). This short digression into the theology of grace serves to contextualise Augustine’s experience of the relationship between God and humankind as an internal divine presence and not as an exteriority. A semiotic reading of the aforementioned encounters could therefore proceed from the intertextuality of grace as inhabitation in Christian discourse. If we take another look at the encounters themselves, the event of the inhabitation of God in man works on several levels. The grammatical foundation of certain sentences and phrases in these encounters is unsafe, at least from a mimetic perspective: ‘The majestic one takes the schoolboy like a woman, opens him, turns him inside out, turns his closest intimacy into his shrine’; ‘his calm enraptures us, and uncovered, lashed, outside ourselves, for one moment we find ourselves gaping in his beatitude’; ‘in the course of the anamnesis the primal scene is discovered’. However, the ungrammaticality of these descriptions is overturned by retroactive reading and the intertextuality of grace as God’s inhabitation inside man. Confounding thought and logic, memory relapse (anamnesis) is the appropriate place where grammatical overturning and inhabitation are valorised in the form of God’s intimate enshrinement inside humankind. The formalities of ‘Thou’ and ‘I’ of the blazon in the first encounter are deconstructed and equalised by the sharing of senses between God and man: ‘I tasted thee, and now do hunger and thirst after thee. Thou didst touch me, and I burned to enjoy thy peace.’97 This reciprocity is sustained sexually; the presence of God in man is signified in the lover maximising his lover’s ‘five estuaries’ and ‘five mouths’ in a ‘fivefold ferocity’. Here, inhabitation, a synaesthesia of intoxication, is all-consuming with ‘God . . . immersing the creature in his presence’. In the final encounter, the notion of an external God is finally erased with God having ‘made his shrine in me’ (another overturning of the logic of mimetic representation): ‘You were within, but I was outside . . . You were with me, but I was not with you. Irreversible handicap’.98 In this reversal of roles, Lyotard shares with us this fleeting image of God: ‘There he is for one moment lodged in the most intimate part of this man. Limits reversed, the inside and the outside, the before and the after, these miseries of the mind.’99 In this insemination of the absolute inside humankind, the implication is that one does not have to look externally for the presence of God. Accordingly, our understanding of the event as

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an encounter with God is transformed into our encounter with God in ourselves. Badiou limits the event to an incidental happening in which the subjective disposition is given birth. For phenomenologists, like Marion and Henry, the event of God is a gift (of excess or givenness) which is impossible to resist. In the case of Lyotard, the event of God is always internally and eternally possible, but the subject/reader must play an active role in revealing its significance. This leads us directly to semiotics and the meaning of the event as it relates to the text. It is clear that for the semiotician the meaning of the event does not lie in itself or in its self-revelation, as in phenomenology, but in its becoming possible. For Lyotard, the figure of the semiotician reflects the duality of a subject who, on the one hand, wants to see the fullness of things but, on the other hand, is confined to see them only in half measure. That said, the purgatory in which the semiotician finds himself does not undermine the skills with which he is equipped to satisfy his curiosity. This duality manifests itself in two interlocking ways. The first is geographical; the Confession takes place in a cosmic landscape divided up into earth, sky and firmament. The second is subjective. There are two figures who represent the aspirations and realities of the semiotician; the angel and the child. The angel occupies the space of the firmament. The fact of being in the presence of God is sufficient for the angel to understand God. It is an understanding that comes from the equality of presence, rather than from learning, philosophy or reading. In fact, it is in their capacity as non-readers of events that the angels are described by Lyotard as perfection personified: The angelic beings have no need, like us, to gaze up at the enigmas of this firmament, and by reading to attain the knowledge of thy Word. For they always behold thy face, and there do they read, without any syllables measurable by time, what the meaning is of thy eternal will. O marvel, wonderful act of reading, without meditation.100 Unlike the angels who can ‘read the immutable in an immutable way’, the child is defined by his mortal condition. This limits him in what he can see and what he can know. In terms of seeing, he is consigned to half seeing; the limit of his sight is the sky, and he falls under the dubious authority of the sign (in its temporality and evanescence) to help him understand the world. As for knowledge, Lyotard distances himself radically from the positions adopted by Badiou and Henry, for whom the child is a naïve hero of antiphilosophy and the innocent embodiment of wisdom. On the contrary, the child in the Confession is limited in reading

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skills and knowledge for him is diffusion rather than totality. But the child is content in the restriction of what he knows. However, it is within this polarity of the child’s innocent curiosity and the diffusion of letters across the sky that Lyotard establishes a model for semiotics, and by extension for a way of reading the Confession. At different points in the text, the sky is not just a geographical feature but is described as a book or a ‘breviary dedicated by God to the edification of mortal beings’.101 On the one hand, the sky as book confirms the authorship of God as Supreme Being. On the other hand, it confirms His children as entrusted decipherers of its significance: ‘Chased out of the paradise of your intimacy, we are left for memory by you the collection of your works, the world, a text of which we form as much a part as its readers. Decipherable decipherers in the library of shadows.’102 It could be argued that the mortal condition of the child condemns him and semiotics to a purgatory which bears no advantage to either. Images abound in the text of a destitute child condemned to seeing ‘through a filter’ and ‘living in a night of sin’. But, in truth, Lyotard extols the virtues of handicaps, be they a consequence of childhood or of perception. For him, there is no shame in not seeing the world and God fully: ‘If we received it all at once, it would contort our eyes, would unfix the orbit of our eyes, would turn us into a white-hot firebrand, subsiding quickly into ashes.’103 In what amounts to an apologia of semiotics, Lyotard takes pleasure in having the book of the sky closed to him because, in escaping the library of angelic immutability, he is free to explore the polyvalent possibilities of meaning outside the confines of linearity and sequentiality. Despite being subject to temporality, alteration and evanescence, the sign, as a merciful gift from the firmament, still ‘inspires’ Lyotard to invite readers to read the ‘fissures’ that run across writing: A fissure zigzags across all that lends itself to writing, to the great vexation of the animus, whose binary clarity is humiliated. The caesura does not take place, has not the time. The here and now, the stretches of time, the places, the lives, and the I present themselves as fissured, or rather fissure continually. The field of reality, discourse included, fissures in its entirety, like a struck glass.104 The sign opens up a new pathway for Lyotard to challenge the authority of the animus and the mimetic representativeness of language (what he calls its condition of ‘being too late’). The sign, however, like the child, is vulnerable. The sign is untrustworthy. It too defers meaning. Both

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child and sign are subject to impaired vision; both can only see chinks of insight. But, for Lyotard, it is a vulnerability that is positive and preferable to the deceptive totality of mimesis and the fake formulas of the written confession. It may, in fact, explain why Lyotard ends his Confession with a narration of a young lady from Ascoli seeking absolution in a confessional box: If God forgives, she will hear it before penitence is over. She is certain that God will not dawdle. He recognizes the truth in the very moment that, with one stroke, she strips off the sedimented layers of her silence. Under the soft, modest, short, impassive voice, the devil of the written word, of the already written retracts, folds up its baggage of words and obscene idols that mutter aside.105 Confession here is quick and forgiveness is on the spot. It is confession in its purifying and disappearing (italicised) immanence. This oral confession is the eternal fissure that zigzags its way across the written confessions of both Lyotard and Augustine. It bears silent witness to the umbilic between mimesis and artifice, between demonstration and enigma and between what Riffaterre calls the heuristic reader and the hermeneutic one.106

Conclusion The Return of Religion in France helps dispel a common perception, if not a myth, that secular modernity represents the end of religion. The legacy of secular modernity is closely aligned with Enlightenment rationalism, the rise of atheism and the marginalisation of Christianity, all of which have helped shape the ideological landscape of twentieth-century Europe. Like most nations, France has not been immune to this historical legacy; indeed many of its celebrated writers and philosophers have championed the ‘freedoms’ of secular modernity. But also, like most European nations, religion has not gone away in the secular age nor in France. In fact, it has managed to continue, and often flourish, notably in democracies where the Church and State have shared close historical ties. Officially, this was the case in France until 1905, but since then the separation of Church and State and the creation of a laïque (secular) republic has neutralised the expression of religious adherence from the public space and recast it as an expression of private interest. In the post Vatican II era, the most obvious effects of this separation have been the onset of a series of crises in the transmission of faith, the decline of Churchgoing, the dearth of entries to the priesthood, the need to re-establish links between Christianity and politics and the more recent attempts to revalidate Catholicism in the context of social praxis and political necessity. However, as The Return of Religion in France underlines, while Catholicism has continued to wither under secularism and secularisation during this time, there has been a more positive shift in the broader relationship between secularism and religion. The impact of the secular tradition on modernity has had the paradoxical effect of mutating religion to the degree that secularisation is seen to encourage a return of religion. In fact, some commentators refer to this paradoxical relationship as the true property of Christianity, the timely redefinition of religious belonging in the democratic age and the recomposition of religion outside traditional institutions and within civil society. Out of a tradition that excluded religion comes the autoproduction of religion, with modernity working with religion to create new sets of religious, ethical and social relations. The democratisation of French society in the 1980s onwards is the backdrop to the ways in which secularisation has been positivised. Democratisation is the birth place for the reintegration and revaluation of religion in the laïque tradition, as we see in Régis Debray’s Report on the proposal to teach religion in French schools and the recent controversies over gay marriage in France. The first example demonstrates how the democratic challenge to French republican universalism shores up the defence of religious instruction in its demands for parity in the secular school, and the second highlights, in somewhat combustible fashion, the demands for sexual and religious equality before the law. Underpinning this social democratisation is the democratisation of the individual citizen as an ethnic, sexual and religious identity. The individual religious self emerges out of republican universalism and secular modernity to be championed by secularisation and takes its rightful place in a new socio-political dispensation and in a new consensual and self-fulfilling postmodernity. Secularisation facilitates the transition of religious belief from its 248

Conclusion 249 institutionalised and collective formats to its individualised and functional expressions, and in this process advances the return of religion outside the pale of orthodoxy and in line with new individual autonomies. I characterise this process as the post-secular; it builds on the positive paradoxes of secularisation and goes further in the way it offers up alternative religious, theological and ethical paradigms to calibrate human experience (notably in the context of sexual diversity, asceticism, authenticity and gay marriage). The post-secular invites us to reroute transcendence away from alterity towards the practices of daily and human life. This rerouting brings into sharp focus another key paradox of secularisation encapsulated in the work of Gianni Vattimo and which announces the second part of the book. Secularisation enriches democratic diversity and individualisation. In the religious context described by Vattimo, it also serves a dual purpose; on the one hand, it is integral to the recovery of Christianity in its strictly lived-in historicity. On the other hand, Vattimo’s theory of secularisation offers a philosophical way out of the deadlock of secular modernity (founded on Reason) in his construction of a ‘philosophy of actuality’ founded in the kenotic incarnation of being. What Vattimo’s ‘theology of secularisation’ tells us is that the return of religion can be articulated authentically outside of metaphysics and its principles of absolute knowledge, transcendence and the supremacy of the cogito. In effect, Vattimo’s paradoxical secularisation mirrors the trajectory of this monograph, from the socio-political and cultural effects of secularisation on religion in their republican, democratic, modern, postmodern, individual and collective manifestations, to the sea change in Continental French philosophy in the 1980s and beyond that rediscovered religion as a credible philosophical discourse. At the centre of this transition is the pivotal conjuncture between the supremacy of the individual, citizen, believer in the 1980s, elevated by democratisation and re-accommodated in post-secularism, and the philosophical erosion of the subject as cogito, only for the latter to be subsequently resurrected by new revelation-based theologies. The primary effect, therefore, of this paradoxical secularisation is the paradoxical splitting of the self, from, on the one hand, democratic promotion to, on the other hand, philosophical subordination. Either way, the ‘theological turn’ of French society and philosophy not only remains in place but is enhanced. The second part of the monograph demonstrates how the philosophical erosion of the cogito is expressed in a variety of formats, all of which are connected in one way or another to the collapse of transcendental metaphysics. The special issue of Critique in 2006 titled ‘DIEU’ invites us to develop alternative ideas of God or ‘think’ outside metaphysics and the horizon of Being in relationism, theories of pre-existence and faith, and Marianism. Jean-Luc Marion deconstructs the idolatrous nature of metaphysics and its over-reliance on ‘concepts’ of God and religion derived from the gravity of Being, privileging instead an iconic relationship that preserves distance in the ‘invisible depth of an unsurpassable and open figure’. What connects many of these insights to what I call the postmetaphysical is the desire to remove the subject’s metaphysical grounding as origin or point of reference and release new ways of receiving religion into an unconditional postsubjectivity. Alain Badiou’s ‘subject’ is one for whom ‘truth passes through’; as such the event (in Badiou’s case the event of the Resurrection) is the becoming of the subject. The subject therefore is a vessel for what has preceded it but is equally formed as a consequence of it. There are echoes here of Marion’s

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‘call’ of God where ‘before the subject can constitute itself, the call to real being has already exiled it’. In the same way, Jean-François Lyotard’s subject in ‘statu nascendi’ defies any form of grounding and evolves in opposition to received knowledge and a priori conditioning. Theories of the Event and eventiveness reinforce postmetaphysical and postsubjective strategies of the subject and the cogito. Badiou, Caputo, Lyotard and Vattimo see in the irreducibility of the Event an escape from the totality of meaning subsumed in the name of an Event; alternative intuitive, hermeneutical and intertextual readings are deployed to represent the ‘stirring’ and ‘provocations’ that underlie eventiveness. As Michel Henry claims, ‘thought must default itself’ before truth can be realised. Henry’s vision is also one of a number of phenomenological contributions that relies on reductionism (including transcendental) to circumvent the subject as origin and locate life/things in their own ipseity. Marion’s God as self-showing obviates reliance on a metaphysics of God or a transcendental ego and justifies itself in that which appears truly as itself. Self-revelation of God therefore becomes the fundamental essence of phenomenological reductionism for both Marion and Henry. Variations of this phenomenological reductionism are found in Emmanuel Lévinas’s phenomenology of transcendence where God’s transcendence is turned into (reduced to) a personal responsibility for the other. Here the primacy of the other in being demotes the subject in a broader but significant process of ethical responsibility. Lévinas shares in part this philosophical erosion of the subject with Paul Ricoeur, for whom one half of his divided subject (the hermeneutical self) is a dialectic of otherness. With degrees of difference in their respective definitions of the relationship between subject and other, the critical point in the case of Ricoeur is that both halves of his divided self are subordinate, on the one hand, to the matter of the biblical text as an alternative horizon of being, and, on the other hand, to an ethical reciprocity (as opposed to Lévinas’s responsibility) between subject and other. The Return of Religion in France dispels a misconception that secular modernity excludes religious belief. In the same way, the democratisation of the believer and his enhanced profile in the post-secular age does not equate to a self-promoting arrogance and dilution of reverence for religious authority. Even at the high watermark of socio-political and hyper secularised debate on the return of religion in the 1980s and 1990s, belief (individualised, deinstitutionalised or embodied in diversity) is still, first and foremost, an expression of personal humility. A common thread linking the two parts of this book is the idea that personal humility, born out of belief, conjoins with a philosophical weakness of thought to produce a (self)fulfilment that is subject only to the power of the Event of Christ.

Notes Introduction 1. In this context, see Jean-Paul Willaime, ‘Religion et politique en France dans le contexte de la construction européenne’, French Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 25, no. 3, Winter 2007: 37–61. 2. In her work Religion as a Chain of Memory (Polity Press, 2000), Danièle HervieuLéger discusses the collapse of religious traditions and communities at this time as part of a thesis in which the problem with modern societies is closely linked to the end of memory. 3. Marcel Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie. Parcours de la laïcité. Paris: Gallimard, 1998, p. 125. 4. Jean-Paul Willaime, ‘Reconfigurations ultramodernes’, Esprit, Effervescences religieuses dans le monde, mars–avril 2007: 146–55. 5. John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, ‘Spectral Hermeneutics: On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event’, in After the Death of God. Edited by Jeffrey Robbins, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 47–85. 6. Jean-Yves Lacoste, ‘Towards a Kenotic Treatment of the Question of Man’, Experience and the Absolute: Disputable Questions on the Humanity of Man. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004, p. 187.

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1. Jean-Paul Willaime, ‘Religion et politique en France dans le contexte de la construction européenne’, French Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 25, no. 3, Winter 2007: 41. 2. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. 3. Marcel Gauchet, Le Désenchantement du monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. 4. Pierre Gisel, ‘LE NEW AGE. Entre institutionnalisant de la religion et “religiosité vagabonde”. Un regard de théologien’, Revue de théologie et de philosophie, 130 (1998): 51. 5. Christophe Boureux, ‘La sécularisation, le “retour de Dieu” et après . . .’, Le temps des religions sans Dieu, Esprit, juin 1997: 253–66. The use of the word ‘culture’ in connection with religion is problematic. In particular, it raises debates about the use of derivative terms (‘inculturation’ and ‘acculturation’). Pope John Paul II deployed the term ‘inculturation’ in both his encyclicals Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio to indicate the evangelisation of a transcendent, universal culture of truth in revelation, and therefore a culture that is not circumscribed by time or place. For more on this and related terms, see the article ‘Beyond Liturgical Inculturation: Transforming the Deep Structures of Faith’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 69 (2004): 47–72. 6. Jean-Louis Schlegel, ‘La Cité de Dieu et la Cité des hommes: quand les frontières se brouillent’, Le temps des religions sans Dieu, Esprit, juin 1997: 5. 251

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7. Zygmunt Bauman describes this process as ‘this-worldly transcendence’ in ‘Postmodern Religion’, Postmodernity and its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. 8. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Vers un nouveau christianisme?. Paris: Le Cerf, 1985, p. 360. 9. Esprit, ‘Y a-t-il une politique chrétienne’, Nouveau monde et parole de Dieu, 364, octobre 1967: 613. 10. Esprit, ‘Y a-t-il une politique chrétienne’, Nouveau monde et parole de Dieu, 364, octobre 1967: 613. 11. Esprit, ‘Y a-t-il une politique chrétienne’, Nouveau monde et parole de Dieu, 364, octobre 1967: 630–31. 12. Jean-Marie Domenach, ‘Nouveau monde et parole de Dieu’, 364, octobre 1967: 357. 13. Michel de Certeau, ‘La parole du croyant dans le langage de l’homme’, Nouveau monde et parole de Dieu, Esprit, 364, octobre 1967: 456. 14. De Certeau, ‘La parole du croyant dans le langage de l’homme’, p. 456. 15. De Certeau, ‘La parole du croyant dans le langage de l’homme’, p. 466. 16. De Certeau, ‘La parole du croyant dans le langage de l’homme’, pp. 466–67. 17. Jacques Natanson, ‘Langage, existence, communauté’, Réinventer l’Église, Esprit, 408, novembre 1971: 596–605. 18. Natanson, ‘Langage, existence, communauté’, p. 603. 19. Natanson, ‘Langage, existence, communauté’, p. 605. 20. Jean-Marie Domenach, ‘Le spirituel et le politique’, Réinventer l’Église, Esprit, 408, novembre 1971: 788. 21. Domenach, ‘Le spirituel et le politique’, p. 790. 22. Domenach, ‘Le spirituel et le politique’, p. 790. 23. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, ‘Sécularisation et modernité religieuse’, Actualité de la religion, Esprit, 106, octobre 1985: 60–62. 24. Hervieu-Léger, ‘Sécularisation et modernité religieuse’, p. 60. 25. Hervieu-Léger, ‘Sécularisation et modernité religieuse’, p. 62. These paradoxes of modernity are developed in substantial detail in her work Religion as a Chain of Memory. Translated by Simon Lee. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. 26. Joseph Moingt, ‘Théologie en recherche’, La religion . . . sans retour ni détour, Esprit, 113–14, avril–mai 1986: 181–99. 27. Jean-Louis Schlegel, ‘Revenir de la sécularisation?’, La religion . . . sans retour ni détour, Esprit, 113–14, avril–mai 1986: 14. 28. For more on this, see the chapters called ‘Fragmentation of Modern Societies’ and ‘Questions of Tradition’ in Religion as a Chain of Memory by Hervieu-Léger. 29. Esprit, ‘Un nouvel espace public’, 113–14, avril–mai 1986: 7–8. 30. Martine Cohen, ‘Figures de l’individualisme moderne’, Esprit, 113–14, avril–mai 1986: 47–68. 31. Guy Petitdemange, ‘Le “Chrétien imaginaire”’ Esprit, 113–14, avril–mai 1986: 83–89. 32. Jean-Claude Eslin, ‘Trois variantes de la séparation religion/politique’, Esprit, 113–14, avril–mai 1986: 35. 33. Eslin, ‘Trois variantes de la séparation religion/politique’, p. 36. 34. Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor. London: Catholic Truth Society, p. 34. 35. Jean-Claude Eslin, ‘Indépassable religion’, Le temps des religions sans Dieu, Esprit, 12–13, juin 1997: 11.

Notes 253 36. Eslin, ‘Indépassable religion’, p. 11. 37. For more on this theme see the following articles: Olivier Roy, ‘La crise de l’État laïque et les nouvelles formes de religiosités’, Esprit, 312, février 2005: 27–44; Olivier Abel, ‘Vers une politique des religions? L’horizon Sarkozy’, Esprit, 315, juin 2005: 100–5; Diana Pinto, ‘La France et ses quatre religions’, Esprit, 302, février 2004: 78–89. 38. Olivier Mongin and Jean-Louis Schlegel, ‘Les questions de 1905’, Esprit, 315, juin 2005: 89. 39. Jean-Paul Willaime, ‘Reconfigurations ultramodernes’, Esprit, Effervescences religieuses dans le monde, mars–avril 2007: 146–55. 40. Olivier Roy, ‘La crise de l’État laïque et les nouvelles formes de religiosités’, Esprit, 312, février 2005: 28. 41. Entretien avec Stanislas Breton and Jean-Claude Eslin, ‘L’autorité religieuse: entre foi et Église’, Esprit, 313, mars–avril 2005: 181. 42. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped for. Translated by Jeffrey Bloechl. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002, pp. 35–37. 43. Jean-Claude Eslin, ‘Indépassable religion’, pp. 11–12. 44. Alain Touraine, ‘Réponses à l’enquête (I)’, Le temps des religions sans Dieu, Esprit, juin 1997: 60. 45. Pierre-Olivier Monteil, ‘Quand la religion cherche ses mots’, Le temps des religions sans Dieu, Esprit, juin 1997: 269. 46. Jean-Claude Eslin, Olivier Mongin and Jean-Louis Schlegel, ‘Un nouvel espace public’, La religion . . . sans retour ni détour, Esprit, 113–14, avril–mai 1986: 8. 47. Marcel Gauchet, ‘Quelle conception politique de la religion?’, Qu’est-ce que le religieux? Revue du MAUSS, 22, second semestre 2003: 313. 48. Marcel Gauchet, ‘Du religieux, de sa permanence et de la possibilité d’en sortir: Régis Debray et Marcel Gauchet, un échange’, Le Débat, 127, novembre– décembre 2003: 3–19. 49. Jacques Dewitte, ‘Croire ce que l’on croit’, Revue du MAUSS, 22, second semestre 2003: 87. 50. Jean-Paul Willaime, ‘La religion: un lieu social articulé au don’, Revue du MAUSS, 22, second semestre 2003: 247–67. 51. Eslin, Mongin and Schlegel, ‘Un nouvel espace public’, p. 8. 52. Eslin, Mongin and Schlegel, ‘Un nouvel espace public’, p. 9. 53. Eslin, Mongin and Schlegel, ‘Un nouvel espace public’, p. 3. 54. Régis Debray, ‘Êtes-vous démocrate ou républicain?’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 novembre–6 décembre 1989: 49–55. 55. Jean-Louis Schlegel, ‘Revenir de la sécularisation?’, La religion . . . sans retour ni détour, Esprit, 113–14, avril–mai 1986: 23. 56. Guy Petitdemange, ‘Le “Chrétien imaginaire”’ Esprit, 113–14, avril–mai 1986: 87. 57. For more on this failure in transmission, see Jean-François Barbier-Bouvet, ‘Connaissances, méconnaissance et ignorance religieuses aujourd’hui’, Esprit, 308, octobre 2004: 69–79. 58. In recent years, the Vatican has published a host of documents relating to sexual mores, the couple, the family and the role of Catholics in public life: Lettre aux évêques de l’Église catholique sur la pastorale à l’égard des personnes homosexuelles (1 octobre 1986); Famille, mariage et ‘unions de faits’ (26 juillet 2000); Note doctrinale à propos de questions sur l’engagement et le comportement

254 Notes

59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

des Catholiques dans la vie publique (24 novembre 2002); Considérations à propos de projets de reconnaissance juridique des unions entre personnes homosexuelles (3 juin 2003). Marcel Gauchet, ‘Le politique et la religion; douze propositions en réponse à Alain Caillé’, Revue du MAUSS, 22, second semestre 2003: 326. Alain Caillé, ‘Nouvelles thèses sur la religion’ Revue du MAUSS, 22: 315–24. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Also see Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 93. Vatican City, Note doctrinale à propos de questions sur l’engagement et le comportement des Catholiques dans la vie politique. Congrégation pour la Doctrine de la foi, novembre 2002. Lettre des trois co-présidents du Conseil d’Églises chrétiennes en France sur la laïcité, au Président de la République, M. Jacques Chirac, 8 décembre 2003. For more on the Catholic Church in France, see the official Web site: cef.fr. Olivier Mongin and Jean-Louis Schlegel, ‘Les questions de 1905’, Esprit, 315, juin 2005: 85–91. Nicolas Sarkozy, La République, les religions, l’espérance. Paris: Le Cerf, 2004. Olivier Roy, ‘La crise de l’État laïque et les nouvelles formes de religiosités’, Esprit, 312, février 2005: 39. Régis Debray, Rapport de mission – L’enseignement du fait religieux dans l’école laïque, février 2002. Benoît Mély criticised the report for being biased towards Catholic/Protestant and state perceptions of what ‘religieux’ is (Benoît Mély, ‘Est-ce à l’école laïque de valoriser “le religieux”? Observations critiques sur le rapport Debray’, Cahiers Rationnalistes, 560, septembre–octobre 2002). He questioned one of Debray’s postulates that belief in transcendence is an ‘invariant’ of the human condition, without which the individual is in a state of ‘incompleteness’. In an ironic twist, Mély calls for compulsory modules on ‘secular ignorance’ and ‘the history of disbelief’ which protect free examination, critical independence and the free assessment of other religious figures in the nation’s collective memory. Jean LeFranc in ‘Quel fait? Quelles religions?’ sees Debray’s real agenda in this report as an attempt to address intolerance in France and restore civil peace to a society fractured along religious lines. Nadine Wainer in ‘Laïcité et le rapport Debray’ accuses Debray of trying to re-enchant the world, and of having a paternalistic attitude to teachers. She not only highlights the end of the role of school as a place of liberation, but also points out its failure to construct an autonomous space of thought. These texts were consulted in November 2006 at the following Web sites: www.appep.net/ lefranc.pdf and www.appep.net/wainer.pdf. Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio are two of Pope John Paul II’s most philosophical texts. They set out in particular his views on reason, faith and their inseparability. Faith is seen to liberate reason. Reason is perceived to have some autonomy and scope for action but the freedom of reason is predisposed to revelation. Interestingly, the editorial of Esprit (A la croisée des religions) in 1999, while welcoming the advent of rational thought into recent Vatican thinking, questions some aspects of the

Notes 255

71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96.

97.

encyclical Fides et Ratio, in particular the ‘propédeutique’ relationship between reason and revelation. Joseph Moingt, ‘Réenchantement ou crépuscule du christianisme?’, A la croisée des religions, Esprit, octobre 1999: 116–33. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio. London: Catholic Truth Society, 1998, p. 20. In his article ‘Le “problème théologico-politique” au XXe siècle’ (A la croisée des religions, Esprit, février 1999: 179–92), Jean-Claude Monod comments on the state of laïcité in France today, and particularly the fears about the precarious state of the separation of Church and State. He voices concerns about the return of religion and other theocratic and ‘integrist’ forms of religion. Régis Debray, Rapport de mission, p. 12. Debray, Rapport de mission, p. 5. Debray, Rapport de mission, p. 13. Debray, Rapport de mission, p. 14. Debray, Rapport de mission, p. 14. Brigitte Frelat-Khan, Le Savoir, l’école et la démocratie. Paris: Hachette, 1996. Paul Valadier, Vers un christianisme d’avenir; pour une nouvelle alliance entre raison et foi. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Henri Pé˜ na-Ruiz, La Laïcité. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. Debray, Rapport de mission, p. 18. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, p. 27. For more on this debate, see Michael Foëssel, ‘Les trois modèles philosophiques du rapport entre foi et raison’, Effervesences religieuses dans le monde, Esprit, mars–avril 2007: 279–81. Debray, Rapport de mission, p. 19. Debray, Rapport de mission, p. 19. Debray, Rapport de mission, p. 21. Debray, Rapport de mission, p. 21. Debray, Rapport de mission, p. 22. Olivier Roy, ‘La crise de l’État laïque et les nouvelles formes de religiosités’, Esprit, 312, février 2005: 27–44. Diana Pinto, ‘La France et ses quatre religions’, Esprit, 302, février 2004: 87. Xavier Boniface, ‘Histoire de l’Église, histoire des religions, histoire religieuse’, Esprit, 315, juin 2005: 106. Jean-François Barbier-Bouvet, ‘Connaissances, méconnaissance et ignorance religieuses aujourd’hui’, Esprit, 308, octobre 2004: 75. Barbier-Bouvet, ‘Connaissances, méconnaissance et ignorance religieuses aujourd’hui’, p. 78. Their use of ‘religious phenomena’ as opposed to ‘religious knowledge’ is a qualification to Debray’s report. They see the use of the term ‘religious knowledge’ as a weak link in Debray’s argument. ‘Religious phenomena’ point to time, place and circumstance that need critical and rational evaluation in the perception of religious belief and study. Debray’s approach to the equality of transmission of knowledge exposes him to the charge of promoting a secularised conception of knowledge. I think this charge undervalues the rational and theological argument underpinning the specificity of religious knowledge. Philippe Capelle and Henri-Jérôme Gagey, ‘Une tradition universitaire de rencontre entre foi et raison’, Esprit, 308, octobre 2004: 64.

256

2

Notes

Theology and Sexual Ethics

1. In two polls conducted by the popular magazine Elle (10 May 2004) and Têtu (17 May 2004), 64% and 57% respectively of respondents were in favour of gay marriage. 2. Denis Quinqueton and Jan-Paul Pouliquen, who drew up the legislation for the PaCS legislation, have claimed consistently that marriage does not represent progress for lesbian and gay couples. They see progress in improving the PaCS legislation. In this respect, see the article by Stéphanie Noblet, ‘L’intensité du débat satisfait les associations de défense des gays’, Le Monde, 4 juin 2004, p. 16. 3. Marcel Gauchet, Le Désenchantement du monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. 4. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie. Parcours de la laïcité. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. 5. Agnès Antoine, ‘La conscience religieuse dans l’ère de la laïcité’, French Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 20, no. 3, Fall 2002: 115–20. 6. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, ‘Sortie de la religion et recours à la transcendance’, French Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 20, no. 3, Fall 2002: 126–31. Marcel Gauchet also characterises this trend in a similar fashion: ‘Our individual agrees voluntarily with this splitting: he accepts the interpersonal norm as an order unto itself; he does not contest its general validity; he merely asks something else from it, a second order which doubles the first without interfering with it’, in ‘Religion, éthique et démocratie’, Revue de théologie et de philosophie, 133 (2001): 464. 7. Enda McCaffrey, ‘The Return of Faith and Reason to Laïcité: Régis Debray and “le fait religieux”’, French Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 3 (2005): 273–90. 8. Hervieu-Léger, ‘Sortie de la religion et recours à la transcendance’, p. 130. 9. Antoine, ‘La conscience religieuse dans l’ère de la laïcité’, p. 117. 10. The former Front National leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, welcomed the marriage of Bernard Charpentier and Sébastien Chapin with the phrase: ‘That there are men who love each other, well, why not?’ in Le Monde, 4 juin 2004. 11. Much has been made in current debates in favour of gay marriage that the French Civil Code does not specifically describe marriage as between a man and a woman. Pro-gay marriage campaigners have highlighted this fact in their numerous campaigns and manifestos. Article 75 of the Civil Code states that a mayor ‘will receive from each party a declaration that they want to be husband or wife; he will pronounce, in the name of the law, that they are united in marriage, and the marriage act will be drawn up on the spot’. President Jacques Chirac called for a national debate on the issue of gay marriage. 12. I should qualify this remark by saying that those opposed to the legalisation of gay marriage often use experts from these areas to support their arguments against the legalisation of gay marriage. Also, the political, legal and institutional pressure brought to bear by these agents should not be underestimated. 13. Daniel Borrillo, ‘Pourquoi le mariage homosexuel?’, published in Le Monde, 2 mai 2004. Consulted in August 2006 at the following Web site under the title ‘Pour le droit au mariage homosexuel’: www.lmsi.net. 14. Borrillo, ‘Pour le droit au mariage homosexuel’.

Notes 257 15. ‘Persona Humana’ (5), Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics. Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Vatican, 29 December 1975. 16. ‘Persona Humana’ (5). 17. ‘Familiaris Consortio’ (32), Apostolic Exhortation of John Paul II to the Episcopate, to the Clergy and to the Faithful of the Whole Catholic Church on the Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World, Vatican, 22 November 1981. 18. ‘Persona Humana’ (5). 19. James P. Hanigan, ‘Unitive and Procreative Meaning: The Inseparable Link’ in Patricia Beattie Jung and Joseph Andrew Coray (eds) Sexual Diversity and Catholicism: Toward the Development of Moral Theology. Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2001, pp. 22–38. 20. ‘Family, Marriage and “De Facto” Unions’, The Pontifical Council for the Family, Vatican, 26 July 2000. 21. ‘Family, Marriage and “De Facto” Unions’, III (22). 22. ‘Dignitas connubii’, On the Dignity of Marriage. Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts. The Catholic Truth Society, 2005, p. 6. 23. ‘Dignitas connubii’, p. 6. 24. ‘Family, Marriage and “De Facto” Unions’, II (9). 25. ‘Family, Marriage and “De Facto” Unions’, I (8). 26. Gauchet, ‘Religion, éthique et démocratie’, p. 457. 27. Susan A. Ross, ‘The Bridegroom and the Bride: The Theological Anthropology of John Paul II and its Relation to the Bible and Homosexuality’, in Sexual Diversity and Catholicism: Toward the Development of Moral Theology. Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2001, pp. 39–59. 28. Jon Nilson, ‘The Church and Homosexuality: A Lonerganian Approach’ in Sexual Diversity and Catholicism: Toward the Development of Moral Theology. Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2001, p. 68. 29. Hervieu-Léger, ‘Sortie de la religion et recours à la transcendance’, p. 130. 30. These are the main ideas underpinning the radical theologies of the British academics John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward in their co-edited work Radical Orthodoxy: Suspending the Material. London: Routledge, 1998. 31. McLoughlin in Milbank, Pickstock and Ward (eds) Radical Orthodoxy: Suspending the Material. London: Routledge, 1998. 32. Patrick Roger, ‘Blocage sur l’adoption par les couples homosexuels’, Le Monde, 27 janvier 2006, p. 24. 33. Stéphanie Noblet, ‘L’intensité du débat satisfait les associations de défense des gays’, Le Monde, 4 juin 2004, p. 16. 34. Noblet, ‘L’intensité du débat . . .’, p. 16. 35. Noblet, ‘L’intensité du débat . . .’, p. 16. 36. Noblet, ‘L’intensité du débat . . .’, p. 16. 37. For more on this subversive trend in French gay studies, see my book The Gay Republic: Citizenship, Sexuality and Subversion in France. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. 38. Benoît Duteurtre, ‘Noce gay pour petits-bourgeois’, Libération, 2 juin 2004, p. 35. 39. ‘Belgium (2003), the Netherlands (2000) and soon Sweden and Spain allow homosexuals to marry in Church. In Canada, gay marriages have been

258

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

Notes celebrated in Ontario and British Columbia since 2003. In the USA, thanks to a decision by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, mayors cannot refuse to marry gays from May 2004’, Libération, 7 juin 2004, p. 20. Legislation in the US has changed since then. Nevertheless, I should point out that this is marriage in a civil context, not in a religious context, although there are in some of the above countries religious blessings that accompany/follow the civil contract. Borrillo, ‘Pour le droit au mariage homosexuel’. Marcela Iacub, ‘Mariage gay, hétéros libérés’, Libération, 29 juin 2004, p. 36. The consensus that gay marriage (or the ways homosexuals are obliged to create new relational rights) can serve as a model for heterosexual couples was one shared by Foucault. In defining gay culture, Foucault states: ‘If that’s possible, then gay culture will be not only a choice of homosexuals for homosexuals – it would create relations that are, at certain points, transferable to heterosexuals’ in ‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will’, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Translated by Robert J. Hurley. Allen Lane: Penguin Press, 1998, p. 160. Eric Fassin and Clarisse Fabre, Libertés, égalités, sexualités. Paris: Belfond, 2003, p. 305. Enda McCaffrey, The Gay Republic: Citizenship, Sexuality and Subversion in France. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Morris B. Kaplan, ‘Intimacy and Equality: The Question of Lesbian and Gay Marriage’ in Sexual Justice, Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1997, p. 211. We can include among these critics the historian Marie-Jo Bonnet who denounces the process of normalisation of gay marriage which, according to her, only serves to profit men, and claims that gay desire (via gay marriage) is only oriented towards its own institutionalisation. See her article ‘Libérons la mariée’, Libération, 9 août 2004, p. 27. Kaplan, ‘Intimacy and Equality: The Question of Lesbian and Gay Marriage’, p. 235. Daniel Borrillo, ‘Les Socialistes, le mariage et les homosexuels’, Politis, 27 mai 2004, p. 17. Eric Fassin and Clarisse Fabre, Libertés, égalités, sexualités, p. 305. Eric Fassin, L’Inversion de la question homosexuelle. Editions Amsterdam, 2005. Serge Chaumier, ‘A quoi sert le mariage?’, Libération, 6 août 2004, p. 29. See in this respect Fassin’s seminal co-edited work with Daniel Borrillo and Marcela Iacub Au-delà du PaCS. L’expertise familiale à l’épreuve de l’homosexualité. Paris: PUF, 1999. Borrillo, ‘Pour un débat sur le mariage hétérosexuel’, Libération, 2 juin 2004, p. 36. I address some of these issues in my book The Gay Republic: Citizenship, Sexuality and Subversion in France. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Eric Fassin, ‘Le mariage des homosexuels. Politique comparée des normes franco-américaines’, French Politics, Culture and Society, vol.17, no. 3–4, Summer/Fall 1999: 173. Eugene F. Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Also see Theology and Sexuality. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Rogers, ‘Sanctification, Homosexuality and God’s Triune Life’, Theology and Sexuality, p. 201.

Notes 259 58. David Matzko McCarthy, ‘The Relationship of Bodies: A Nuptial Hermeneutics of Same-Sex Unions’ in E. Rogers (ed.) Theology and Sexuality, pp. 210–11. 59. McCarthy, ‘The Relationship of Bodies: A Nuptial Hermeneutics of Same-Sex Unions’, p. 218. 60. ‘Familiaris Consortio’, II (16). 61. ‘Familiaris Consortio’, II (16). 62. Rogers, ‘Sanctification, Homosexuality and God’s Triune Life’, Theology and Sexuality, pp. 223–25. 63. Luce Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’, in Sexes and Genealogies. Translated by G. C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 68. 64. Grace M. Jantzen, ‘Contours of a Queer Theology’, Literature and Theology, vol. 15, no. 3, September 2001: 87. 65. Michel Foucault, ‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will’, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Edited by Paul Rabinow. Allen Lane: Penguin Press, p. 158. 66. Foucault, ‘Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity’, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, p. 164. 67. Foucault, ‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will’, p. 160. 68. Foucault, ‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will’, p. 158. 69. Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, p. 282. 70. In his writings on the Hermeneutics of the Self (Political Theory, 21 (1993): 198–227), Sexualité et solitiude (Dits et écrits, vol. 4. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp. 168–78) and Le Combat de la chasteté (Communications, no. 35; Sexualités occidentales, edited by Philippe Ariès and André Béjin, May 1982, pp. 15–25), Foucault defines sexual ethics in terms of self-control and self-knowledge. In this sense, he uses the model of the Christian ascetic as a way of exploring the stages towards the disinvolvement of the will, and as a way of managing sexuality by ridding oneself of the power of the other. This involves a ‘task’ that each person has to undergo in order to overcome the construction of sexuality imposed from without as part of a process of self-reinvention. 71. Mark Vernon, ‘“I am not what I am” – Foucault, Christian Asceticism and a “way out” of sexuality’, in Jeremy R. Carrette (ed.) Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault. Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 201. 72. Mark Vernon, ‘“I am not what I am” – Foucault, Christian Asceticism and a “way out” of sexuality’, pp. 200–10. 73. Foucault, ‘Sexuality and Solitude’, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, p. 183. 74. Gauchet, ‘Religion, éthique et démocratie’, p. 464. 75. Gauchet, ‘Religion, éthique et démocratie’, p. 464. 76. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated from French by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1993, p. 129. 77. Denis Müller, ‘La bioéthique au péril de Dieu: pour une critique théologique de la maîtrise éthique sur le vivant’, Revue de théologie et de philosophie, 134 (2002): 339. Müller refuses to be forced to choose between transcendence and immanence. He is particularly aware of the dangers of siding exclusively with transcendence over immanence (and the implicit accusations of suspension of intelligence and reason). Hence, his strategy is to formulate an expression that highlights the aims and objectives of a ‘transcendence in immanence’ compromise.

260 Notes 78. Müller, ‘La bioéthique au péril de Dieu: pour une critique théologique de la maîtrise éthique sur le vivant’, p. 331. 79. Denis Müller, ‘L’acceuil de l’autre et le souci de soi: la dialectique de la subjectivité et de l’alterité comme thème de l’éthique’, Revue de théologie et de philosophie, 123 (1991): 199. 80. Müller, ‘L’acceuil de l’autre et le souci de soi . . .’, p. 203. 81. Müller, ‘L’acceuil de l’autre et le souci de soi . . .’, p. 205. 82. Müller, ‘L’acceuil de l’autre et le souci de soi . . .’, p. 206. 83. Müller, ‘L’acceuil de l’autre et le souci de soi . . .’, p. 206. 84. Foucault, ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, p. 263. 85. Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, p. 136. 86. Müller, ‘L’acceuil de l’autre et le souci de soi . . .’, p. 195. 87. Eric Fuchs, ‘Entre raison et conviction: la place de l’éthique dans la société moderne’, Revue de théologie et de philosophie, 120 (1988): 453–63; ‘Quelle universalité pour l’éthique dans une société pluraliste: une réflexion théologique’, Revue de théologie et de philosophie, 128 (1996): 357–66. 88. Fuchs, ‘Quelle universalité pour l’éthique dans une société pluraliste: une réflexion théologique’, p. 365. 89. Hugues Poltier, ‘Le pragmatisme: solution au problème moral de la modernité’, Revue de théologie et de philosophie, 126 (1994): 357. 90. This approach is the one advocated by Eugene F. Rogers and some American scholars. Their idea is that norms are too absolute and prescriptive. They prefer a relative approach to debates on norms in which ethics are more character-oriented, and where norms are transferable, flexible and based on praxis and human interaction.

3

Post-secularism, Belief and Being as Event

1. Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism. The Rise and Fall of Belief in the Modern World. London: Random House, 2004, p. 187. 2. McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism, p. 179. 3. McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism, p. 189. 4. Shmuel Trigano, Qu’est-ce que la religion? La transcendance des sociologies. Paris: Flammarion, 2001. 5. Marcel Gauchet, Le Désenchantement du monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1985; La Religion dans la démocratie. Parcours de la laïcité. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. 6. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, p. 11. 7. Paul Valadier, Un Christianisme d’avenir. Pour une nouvelle alliance entre raison et foi. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999. See also his work L’E´ glise en procès. Catholicisme et société moderne. Paris: Flammarion, 1989. 8. Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la république, 11 décembre 2003. See also Maurice Barbier, ‘Pour une définition de la laïcité française’, Le Débat, 134 (2005): 129–41. 9. Nicolas Sarkozy, La République, les religions, l’espérance. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2004, pp. 16–18. 10. Patrick Michel, Politique et religion. La grande mutation. Paris: Albin Michel, 1994, p. 112. 11. See in this respect De Certeau’s work Culture in the Plural. Edited and with an Introduction by Luce Giard. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Notes 261 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

Michel, Politique et religion. La grande mutation, p. 22. Michel, Politique et religion. La grande mutation, p. 22. Michel, Politique et religion. La grande mutation, p. 125. Michel, Politique et religion. La grande mutation, p. 125. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, p. 125. Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural. University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press, 1984, p. 187. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 188. Gianni Vattimo, Belief. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 22. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, p. 105. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, p. 115. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, p. 115. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, p. 123. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, p. 130. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, p. 131. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, p. 131. Gauchet, La Religion dans la démocratie, p. 132. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, ‘Religion as Way of Believing’, Religion as a Chain of Memory. Translated by Simon Lee. Polity Press, 2000, p. 74. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde. Paris: Bayard, 2003, p. 86. Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde, p. 278. Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde, p. 285. Hervieu-Léger, Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde, p. 286. Vattimo, Belief, p. 10. John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God. Edited by Jeffrey Robbins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 20. Vattimo, Belief, pp. 21–22. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, p. 141. Vattimo, Belief, p. 47. Vattimo, Belief, p. 10. Vattimo, Belief, p. 39. Vattimo, Belief, p. 48. Vattimo, Belief, p. 75. Vattimo, Belief, p. 78. Vattimo, Belief, p. 88. Vattimo, Belief, p. 78. Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 6. John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, p. 63. Vattimo, After Christianity, pp. 20–21. Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 8. Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 54. Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 56. Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 8. Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 87. Vattimo, Belief, p. 77. Vattimo, Belief, p. 88.

262

Notes

57. Encyclical Letter Deus Caritas Est of the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI to the Bishops, Priests and Deacons, Men and Women, Religious, and All the Lay Faithful on Christian Love, Vatican City, 25 December 2005. 58. Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 90. 59. The Holy Father’s Addresses to the Members of the Pontifical Council for Culture, The Church and Culture, Vatican City, 18 January 1983. 60. The Holy Father’s Addresses to the Members of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Evangelising Cultures and Inculturating the Gospel, Vatican City, 13 January 1989. 61. The Holy Father’s Addresses to the Members of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Letting the Gospel Take Root in Every Culture, Vatican City, 10 January 1992. 62. Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 90. 63. The Holy Father’s Addresses to the Members of the Pontifical Council for Culture, The Gospel Is Good News for Cultures, Vatican City, 14 March 1997. 64. Aldo Gargani, ‘Religious Experience as Event and Interpretation’, in J. Derrida and G. Vattimo (eds), Religion. Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 115. 65. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated from French by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. London: Athlone Press, p. 129. 66. For more on the relationship between Lévinas and phenomenology, see Philip Blond (ed.) Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology. London: Routledge, 1998 (Chapter 7). 67. Jeremy R. Carrette, Foucault and Religion. Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality. London: Routledge, 2000. 68. ‘A Conversation with Michel Foucault’, conducted by John Simpson in Partisan Review, 38 (1971): 192–201. 69. Jermey R. Carrette and James Bernauer (eds), Michel Foucault and Theology. The Politics of Religious Experience. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, p. 2. 70. Henrique Pinto, ‘The More Which Exceeds Us: Foucault, Roman Catholicism and Inter-Faith Dialogue’, in J. Carrette and J. Bernauer (eds), Michel Foucault and Theology. The Politics of Religious Experience, p. 199. 71. Jermey R. Carrette and James Bernauer (eds), Michel Foucault and Theology. The Politics of Religious Experience, p. 2. 72. Pinto, ‘The More Which Exceeds Us: Foucault, Roman Catholicism and Inter-Faith Dialogue’, p. 198. 73. James Bernauer, ‘Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life’, in J. Carrette and J. Bernauer (eds), Michel Foucault and Theology. The Politics of Religious Experience, p. 91. 74. Bernauer, ‘Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life’, pp. 89–90. 75. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock Publications, 1982, p. 209. 76. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 27. 77. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 28. 78. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 25. 79. Graham Ward, ‘Radical Orthodoxy and/as Cultural Politics’, in Laurence Paul Hemming (ed.), Radical Orthodoxy? – A Catholic Enquiry. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, p. 103. 80. Pinto, ‘The More Which Exceeds Us: Foucault, Roman Catholicism and Inter-Faith Dialogue’, p. 197.

Notes 263 81. Jeremy Carrette, ‘Beyond Theology and Sexuality: Foucault, the Self and the Que(e)rying of Monotheistic Truth’ in J. Carrette and J. Bernauer (eds), Michel Foucault and Theology. The Politics of Religious Experience, pp. 217–18. 82. See Elisabeth Stuart, Gay and Lesbian Theologies. Repetitions with Critical Difference. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. 83. Elisabeth Stuart, ‘Queer Theology’, in Gay and Lesbian Theologies. Repetitions with Critical Difference, pp. 89–104. 84. Michel Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. Allen Lane: The Penguin Press, 1994, p. 137. 85. Elisabeth Stuart, ‘Queer Theology’, p. 94.

4

The Postmetaphysical

1. Michael Foëssel, ‘Les Trois modèles philosophiques du rapport entre foi et raison’, Effervesences religieuses dans le monde, Esprit, mars–avril 2007: 279–81. 2. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-texte. Preface by David Tracy. University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. x. 3. David Tracy, ‘Foreword’ in God Without Being, p. xi. 4. Lieven Boeve, ‘Religion after Detraditionalisation: Christian Faith in a PostSecular Europe’, Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 2 (2005): 99–122. 5. Boeve, ‘Religion after Detraditionalisation: . . .’, p. 114. 6. Boeve, ‘Religion after Detraditionalisation: . . .’, p. 111. 7. Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, in A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds), Emmanuel Lévinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975, pp. 129–30. 8. Joeri Schrijvers, ‘On Doing Theology “After” Ontotheology: Notes on a French Debate’, New Blackfriars, vol. 87, no. 1009 (2006): 303. 9. Schrijvers, ‘On Doing Theology “After” Ontotheology: . . .’, pp. 311–12. 10. Klaus Hedwig, ‘The Philosophical Presuppositions of Postmodernity’, Communio, Summer 1990: 175. 11. Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, p. 130. 12. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Faith, Philosophy and Theology’, Communio, Winter 1984: 353. 13. Ratzinger, ‘Faith, Philosophy and Theology’, p. 359. 14. Ratzinger, ‘Faith, Philosophy and Theology’, p. 358. 15. Ratzinger, ‘Faith, Philosophy and Theology’, p. 358. 16. Ratzinger, ‘Faith, Philosophy and Theology’, p. 358. 17. Ratzinger, ‘Faith, Philosophy and Theology’, p. 359. 18. Ratzinger, ‘Faith, Philosophy and Theology’, p. 360. 19. Maurice Blondel, ‘What is Faith?’, Communio, Summer 1987: 162–92. 20. Blondel, ‘What is Faith?’, p. 173. 21. Blondel, ‘What is Faith?’, p. 173. 22. Blondel, ‘What is Faith?’, p. 183. 23. Blondel, ‘What is Faith?’, p. 179. 24. Blondel, ‘What is Faith?’, p. 187. 25. Blondel, ‘What is Faith?’, p. 189. 26. Blondel, ‘What is Faith?’, p. 166. 27. Mark D. Jordan, ‘The Terms of the Debate over “Christian Philosophy”’, Communio, Fall 1985: 303.

264 Notes 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

Jordan, ‘The Terms of the Debate over “Christian Philosophy”’, p. 303. Jordan, ‘The Terms of the Debate over “Christian Philosophy”’, pp. 303–4. Jordan, ‘The Terms of the Debate over “Christian Philosophy”’, p. 304. Jordan, ‘The Terms of the Debate over “Christian Philosophy”’, p. 308. Jordan, ‘The Terms of the Debate over “Christian Philosophy”’, p. 309. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Prometheus Books, 1995, p. 38. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 57. ‘DIEU’, Critique, Tome LXII, no. 704–5, janvier–février 2006, p. 3. Olivier Boulnois, ‘Dieu: raison ou religion’, Critique, janvier–février 2006, p. 74. Boulnois, ‘Dieu: raison ou religion’, p. 74. Cyrille Michon, ‘Il nous faut bien un concept de Dieu’, Critique, janvier–février 2006, p. 103. Michon, ‘Il nous faut bien un concept de Dieu’, p. 103. Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Deuil à venir, dieu à venir’, Critique, janvier–février 2006, p. 110. Meillassoux, ‘Deuil à venir, dieu à venir’, p. 115. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 53. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 65. Barbara Stiegler, ‘Réceptions de la mort de Dieu’, Critique, janvier–février 2006, pp. 116–28. David Schindler, ‘On the Meaning and the Death of God in the Academy’, Communio, Summer 1990, p. 194. Schindler, ‘On the Meaning and the Death of God . . .’, p. 195. Schindler, ‘On the Meaning and the Death of God . . .’, p. 196. Schindler, ‘On the Meaning and the Death of God . . .’, p. 197. Schindler, ‘On the Meaning and the Death of God . . .’, p. 199. Schindler, ‘On the Meaning and the Death of God . . .’, p. 200. Schindler, ‘On the Meaning and the Death of God . . .’, p. 201. Schindler, ‘On the Meaning and the Death of God . . .’, p. 205. Jean-Luc Marion, ‘L’irréductible’, Critique, janvier–février 2006, p. 81. Marion, ‘L’irréductible’, p. 81. Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and the Distance. Translated and with an Introduction by Thomas A. Carlson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2001, p. 9. Marion, ‘L’irréductible’, p. 86. Marion, ‘L’irréductible’, p. 86. Marion, ‘L’irréductible’, p. 91. Marion, The Idol and the Distance, p. 9. Marion, The Idol and the Distance, p. 13. Marion, The Idol and the Distance, p. 14. Marion, The Idol and the Distance, p. 18. Marion, The Idol and the Distance, p. 19. Thomas A. Carlson, ‘Converting the Given into the Seen: Introductory Remarks on Theological and Phenomenological Vision’, in The Idol and the Distance, p. xviii. David Tracy, ‘Foreword’, God Without Being. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. xi. Tracy, ‘Foreword’, p. xii. Marion, God Without Being, p. xxiv.

Notes 265 68. Jean-Luc Marion, ‘Giving More’ in I. Leask and E. Cassidy (eds), Givenness and God. Questions of Jean-Luc Marion. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 245. 69. Marion, ‘Giving More’, p. 246. 70. John O’Donohue, ‘The Absent Threshold: An Eckhartian Afterword’, in I. Leask and E. Cassidy (eds), Givenness and God. Questions of Jean-Luc Marion. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 279. 71. Carlson, ‘Converting the Given into the Seen: . . .’, p. xix. 72. Carlson, ‘Converting the Given into the Seen: . . .’, p. xxi. 73. Carlson, ‘Converting the Given into the Seen: . . .’, p. xxiv. 74. Carlson, ‘Converting the Given into the Seen: . . .’, p. xxv. 75. Marion, The Idol and the Distance, p. 140. 76. This is where Emmanuel Lévinas goes further than Marion in his ethical phenomenology. 77. Carlson, ‘Converting the Given into the Seen: . . .’, p. xxxi. 78. Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers. The Phenomenological Heritage. Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 3. 79. Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, p. 3. 80. Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, pp. 3–4. 81. Richard Kearney, ‘Hermeneutics of the Possible God’ in I. Leask and E. Cassidy (eds), Givenness and God. Questions of Jean-Luc Marion. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 222. 82. Kearney, ‘Hermeneutics of the Possible God’, p. 221. 83. Kearney, ‘Hermeneutics of the Possible God’, p. 224. 84. In setting out the parameters of the French debate, Janicaud uses the first half of the book to explain his own reservations with the perceived ‘theological turn’ of French phenomenology. In the second half of the book, with a second preface by Janicaud, he draws together key texts from philosophers close to the debate, including Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry and Paul Ricoeur. This second half of the text represents in its totality not only a response to the first half but is also an insight into new departures for phenomenology. 85. Bernard G. Prusak, ‘Introduction’ in D. Janicaud (ed.), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’. The French Debate. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000, p. 5. 86. Janicaud, ‘The Swerve’, Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’, p. 35. 87. Janicaud, ‘Contours of the Turn’, Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’, p. 23. 88. Janicaud, ‘Contours of the Turn’, p. 32. 89. Prusak, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. 90. Jean-Luc Marion, ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’, p. 208. 91. Carlson, ‘Converting the Given into the Seen: . . .’, pp. xxix–xxx. 92. Jeffrey L. Kosky, ‘The Phenomenology of Religion: New Possibilities for Philosophy and for Religion’, in D. Janicaud (ed.), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’, p. 113. 93. Kosky, ‘The Phenomenology of Religion: . . .’, p. 115. 94. Kosky, ‘The Phenomenology of Religion: . . .’, p. 116. 95. Kosky, ‘The Phenomenology of Religion: . . .’, p. 112.

266

Notes

96. Kosky, ‘The Phenomenology of Religion: . . .’, p. 113. 97. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999, p. 28. 98. Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’ in A. T. Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds), Emmanuel Lévinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975, p. 3. 99. Lévinas, ‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’, p. 7. 100. Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘Ethics of the Infinite’, in R. Kearney (ed.), Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers. The Phenomenological Heritage. Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 59. 101. Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, p. 133. 102. Lévinas, ‘Ethics of the Infinite’, p. 67. 103. Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, p. 137. 104. Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, p. 137. 105. Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, p. 138. 106. Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, p. 139. 107. Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, p. 140. 108. Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, p. 158.

5

Postsubjectivity

1. Régis Debray, ‘Êtes-vous démocrate ou républicain?’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 novembre–6 décembre, 1989, pp. 49–55. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Introduction’, in E. Cadava, P. Conor and J.-L. Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject?. New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 5. 3. Alain Badiou, ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’, Who Comes After the Subject?, p. 25. 4. Nancy, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 5. Nancy, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 6. Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, Who Comes After the Subject?, p. 207. 7. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 208. 8. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 209. 9. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 211. 10. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 212. 11. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 212. 12. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 212. 13. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 213. 14. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 213. 15. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 215. 16. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis: The Subject in statu nascendi’, Who Comes After the Subject?, p. 217. 17. Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis: . . .’, p. 217. 18. Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis: . . .’, p. 217. 19. Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis: . . .’, p. 218. 20. Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis: . . .’, p. 218. 21. Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis: . . .’, p. 218. 22. Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis: . . .’, p. 218. 23. Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis: . . .’, p. 235.

Notes 267 24. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 209. 25. Michel Henry, ‘The Critique of the Subject’, Who Comes After the Subject?, p. 165. 26. Jean-Luc Marion, ‘L’Interloqué’, Who Comes After the Subject?, p. 236. 27. Marion, ‘L’Interloqué’, p. 237. 28. Marion, ‘L’Interloqué’, p. 242. 29. Marion, ‘L’Interloqué’, p. 244. 30. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 215. 31. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. Translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant and Michael B. Smith. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 9. 32. Nancy, Dis-enclosure, p. 215. 33. Nancy, Dis-enclosure, p. 214. 34. Nancy, Dis-enclosure, p. 214. 35. Simon Critchley, ‘The Overcoming of Overcoming. On Dominique Janicaud’, in On the Human Condition by Dominique Janicaud. Translated by Eileen Brennan. London: Routledge, 2005, p. viii. 36. Critchley, ‘The Overcoming of Overcoming’, p. ix. 37. Critchley, ‘The Overcoming of Overcoming’, p. xvii. 38. Michel Henry, I Am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Translated by Susan Emmanuel. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003, pp. 24–25. 39. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 13. 40. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 18. 41. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 15. 42. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 13. 43. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 7. 44. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 7. 45. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 9. 46. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 19. 47. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 19. 48. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 10. 49. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 24. 50. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 23. 51. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 26. 52. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 34. 53. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 37. 54. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 41. 55. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 27. 56. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 27. 57. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 27. 58. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 30. 59. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 45. 60. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 124. 61. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 60. 62. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 64. 63. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 72. 64. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 88. 65. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 88. 66. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 103.

268 Notes 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 149. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 107. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 105. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 108. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 116. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 112. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 117. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 125. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 137. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 138. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 136. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 165. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 169. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 169. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 169. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 169. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped for. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002, pp. 33–34. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 166. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 170. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 169. Lévinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’, p. 213. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 194. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 199. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 252. Henry, I Am the Truth, p. 201.

6

‘Broken Cogito’ and Textual Subjectivity

1. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Whoever Loses Their Life for My Sake Will Find It’ in Figuring The Sacred. Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995, p. 288. 2. John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, ‘Spectral Hermeneutics: On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event’, in After the Death of God. Edited by Jeffrey Robbins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 66. 3. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 4. I would draw the reader’s attention to the recent special issue of Esprit (no. 323, mars–avril 2006) in which Jean-Louis Schlegel, in his article ‘Chrétien, forcément Chrétien’, debates Alain Badiou’s criticism of Ricoeur as a thinker who has consciously and manipulatively concealed his Christianity behind his philosophy. 5. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Question of Selfhood’ in Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 24. 6. Michael Foëssel and Olivier Mongin, ‘L’obstination philosophique de Paul Ricoeur’, Esprit, no. 323, mars–avril 2006: 8–9. 7. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Christianity and the Meaning of History’, History and Truth. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965, p. 95. 8. Ricoeur, ‘Christianity and the Meaning of History’, p. 93.

Notes 269 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Ricoeur, ‘Christianity and the Meaning of History’, p. 94. Ricoeur, ‘Christianity and the Meaning of History’, p. 95. Ricoeur, ‘Christianity and the Meaning of History’, p. 95. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Freedom in the Light of Hope’, The Conflict of Interpretations. Essays in Hermeneutics. Edited by Don Hide. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, p. 403. Ricoeur, ‘Freedom in the Light of Hope’, p. 403. Ricoeur, ‘Freedom in the Light of Hope’, p. 403. Ricoeur, ‘Freedom in the Light of Hope’, p. 411. Ricoeur, ‘Freedom in the Light of Hope’, p. 412. Ricoeur, ‘Freedom in the Light of Hope’, p. 415. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, The Conflict of Interpretations. Essays in Hermeneutics, p. 467. Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, p. 441. Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, pp. 447–48. Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, p. 448. Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, p. 448. Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, p. 448. Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, p. 449. Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, pp. 449–50. Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, p. 454. Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, p. 462. Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, p. 465. Ricoeur, ‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith’, p. 461. Paul Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics II. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. London: Athlone Press, 1991, p. 12. Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, p. 13. Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, p. 13. Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, p. 14. Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, p. 16. Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, p. 17. Ricoeur, ‘On Interpretation’, p. 17. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics II, p. 35. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, p. 37. Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, p. 37. Ricoeur, ‘The Question of Selfhood’, p. 24. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Naming God’, Figuring The Sacred. Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995, p. 217. Ricoeur, ‘Naming God’, p. 217. Ricoeur, ‘Naming God’, p. 218. Ricoeur, ‘Naming God’, p. 218. Ricoeur, ‘Naming God’, p. 219. Ricoeur, ‘Naming God’, p. 223. Ricoeur, ‘Naming God’, p. 223. Jean-Marc Tétaz, ‘Vérité et convocation. L’herméneutique biblique comme problème philosophique’, Esprit, no. 323, mars–avril 2006: 145. Ricoeur, ‘Naming God’, p. 224.

270

Notes

50. Ricoeur, ‘Naming God’, p. 224. 51. Ricoeur, ‘Naming God’, p. 228. 52. Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Summoned Subject in the School of the Narratives of the Prophetic Vocation’, Figuring The Sacred. Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995, p. 267. 53. Ricoeur, ‘The Summoned Subject . . .’, p. 271. 54. Ricoeur, ‘The Summoned Subject . . .’, p. 271. 55. Ricoeur, ‘The Summoned Subject . . .’, pp. 271–72. 56. Tétaz, ‘Vérité et convocation’, p. 154. 57. Ricoeur, ‘The Summoned Subject . . .’, pp. 274–75. 58. Tétaz, ‘Vérité et convocation’, p. 152. 59. Ricoeur, ‘What Ontology in View?’ in Oneself as Another, p. 308. 60. Dan R. Stiver, ‘Truth and Attestation’, Theology After Ricoeur. New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, p. 197. 61. Ricoeur, ‘The Question of Selfhood’, p. 21. 62. Ricoeur, ‘What Ontology in View?’, p. 387. 63. Ricoeur, ‘What Ontology in View?’, p. 326. 64. Ricoeur, ‘What Ontology in View?’, p. 331. 65. Ricoeur, ‘What Ontology in View?’, p. 330. 66. Ricoeur, ‘What Ontology in View?’, p. 335. 67. Ricoeur, ‘The Question of Selfhood’, p. 21. 68. Ricoeur, ‘The Question of Selfhood’, p. 21. 69. Ricoeur, ‘The Question of Selfhood’, p. 22.

7

Posteventality

1. Alain Badiou, ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’, in E. Cadava, P. Conor and J.-L. Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject?. New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 25. 2. Badiou, ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’, p. 24. 3. Badiou, ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’, p. 24. 4. Badiou, ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’, p. 25. 5. Badiou, ‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’, p. 25. 6. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 7. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 2. 8. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 15. 9. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 14. 10. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 17. 11. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 33. 12. John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, ‘Spectral Hermeneutics: On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event’, in After the Death of God. Edited by Jeffrey Robbins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 54. 13. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 48. 14. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 49. 15. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 22. 16. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 99. 17. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 98. 18. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 104.

Notes 271 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 105. Badiou, Saint Paul, pp. 110–11. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 36. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 97. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 96. Badiou, Saint Paul, pp. 107–8. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 108. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 106. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 69. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 79. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 86. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 68. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 65. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 69. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 70. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 22. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 42. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 45. Badiou, Saint Paul, pp. 45–46. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 59. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 59. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 60. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 27. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 53. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 6. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 77. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 57. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 68. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 64. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 64. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 81. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 63. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 81. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 77. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 77. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 78. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 78. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 78. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 78. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 77. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 93. Badiou, Saint Paul, pp. 87–88. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 90. Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine. Translated by Richard Beardsworth. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 4. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 5. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, pp. 5–6. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 6.

272 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

Notes Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 6. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 6. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, pp. 7–8. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 11. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 11. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 29. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 32. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 27. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 28. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 72. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 74. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, pp. 32–33. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 19. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 19. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 24. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 25. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 3. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 23. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 52. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 53. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 53. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 53. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 4. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 72. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, p. 2. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, p. 165. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, p. 165. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, p. 166. Michael Riffaterre, Text Production. Translated by Térèse Lyons. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 52. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 55. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 53. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 42. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 39. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 41. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, pp. 40–41. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 49. Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine, p. 94. In Semiotics of Poetry, Riffaterre makes a distinction between the heuristic reader for whom language is referential in the way words relate to things and the hermeneutic reader who hurdles mimesis in the performance of a ‘structural decoding’ of the text (p. 6).

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Index Actualité de la religion (Esprit), 22, 32 actuality, philosophy of, 85, 95, 97, 99, 103, 113 affaire du foulard (headscarf affair), 37–8, 83–4 agape-, 59, 70, 116, 217 alterity, 23, 32, 49, 51, 56, 73–7, 91, 97, 104, 153, 178, 185 amor coniugalis, Vatican definition, 56 Antoine, Agnès, 51–2, 59 ‘aphasia’, 24, 36 apodeicticity, 152 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), 106 Arch-Son, 169, 171, 173, 177, 179 ‘Are you a Democrat or a Republican?’ (Debray), 3 Aristotle, 145 asceticism, 50, 60, 73–4, 185–6, 200 atheism, 18, 20, 80–1, 93, 130, 139, 191–3, 197 attestation, 184, 209–13 Augustine, Saint, 2, 206, 215–16, 233, 235–6, 238–9, 241–4, 247 autonomy, 3, 16, 18, 26, 34, 40–1, 49–50, 68, 74–5, 82, 94, 136, 157, 196, 204, 207–8 Badiou, Alain, 3, 6, 8, 102, 150–1, 153, 155, 214–33, 245 Barbier-Bouvet, Jean-François, 45–6 Barth, Karl, 120 Bauman, Zygmunt, 14 Bègles, 52 Being horizon of, 114, 116, 118, 127, 132, 142, 144, 147, 184 Lévinas on, 144–5 Being as Event Foucauldian perspective, 104 possibilities for experiencing, 98 in queer theology, 109

and sexuality, 107 significance of, 99 belief Blondel on, 122 dangers of dogmatic, 43 Debray on, 44 Foucauldian perspective, 104–5 implications of a revitalised system, 99–103 and institutionalisation, 85–6 Monteil’s definition, 32 Nietzsche on, 126 rationality of, 43, 47 relativism and, 30, 32 Schlegel on, 15, 34 socio-political and cultural contextualisation, 85–93 testimony as the gauge of, 211 Belief (Vattimo), 93 Benedict XVI, Pope (Joseph Ratzinger), 36, 43, 48, 58–9, 100, 114, 119–22, 124, 147, 183 Bernauer, James, 105 Bloche, Patrick, 60 Blondel, Maurice, 121–3, 147, 183 Boeve, Lieven, 117–19 Boniface, Xavier, 45 Borrillo, Daniel, 53–7, 63, 65–7 Boulnois, Olivier, 127–8 Boureux, Christophe, 15, 32 Bréhier, Emile, 123–4 Breton, Stanislas, 30 Buttiglione, Rocco, 37 Caillé, Alain, 33, 37 Capelle, Philippe, 46–7, 181 Caputo, John D., 14, 93, 97, 182, 217–18, 227 Carlson, Thomas, 137–8, 142 Carrette, Jeremy, 103, 105, 107–8 Catholic Church bipolarism, 49 critical issues for the, 92

279

280

Index

Catholic Church (continued) decline of the, 15, 49 dilemmas facing the, 25, 78 and homosexuality, 49, 58 outdatedness, 82 perception of crisis of individualism, 36 re-education strategies, 36 Catholicism communitarian aspirations, 21 downside of the democratic ‘egalitarian age’ for, 27 and individualism, 25 Kantian perspectives, 115 legacy of separation of Church and State, 25 new-found ‘attraction’ of, 48 role in transition from secularism to post-secularism, 82 Catholicisme, la fin d’un monde (Hervieu-Léger), 91 Catholic sexual ethics celibacy, 69, 79 and complementarity, 55–8, 68, 70 and the juridic dimension of marriage, 56–7 key concepts, 55 and marriage, 49 and the perception of a return to theological rigour, 59 principal determinants, 53–4 celibacy, 69, 79 Chaumier, Serge, 66–7 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 18, 116, 176 Christian Philosophy, 123–6, 147, 228 Church attendance, 49 Church and State, 3, 14, 16–17, 25, 27, 29, 35, 39, 86, 92 citizenship, 25, 49, 64, 79, 84, 89, 219 cogito, 1, 113–14, 118–19, 133, 152, 155–6, 166–7, 169, 172, 184, 194–8, 202–6, 209–11, 233, 235 Communio (journal), 120, 131 communitarianism, 2, 13, 21, 27, 32, 39, 67, 84, 217, 225 complementarity, 55–8, 68, 70 condoms, 79, 91 The Confession of Augustine (Lyotard), 2, 214–16, 233–40, 241

The Conflict of Interpretations (Ricoeur), 189–90 contingency, 96–7, 99, 103, 106, 108, 118, 181 Cordoba, Pedro, 127 Courtine, Jean-François, 143 Critchley, S., 160 Critique (journal), 116, 127–8, 131–2, 140, 147 Dasein, 149, 156–7, 160 death, 83, 104, 121, 130–1, 137, 182, 188, 190, 203, 223–4, 228–9 Debray, Régis, 3, 15, 33, 35, 37, 39–47, 83, 114, 148, 181, 219 de Certeau, Michel, 19–20, 30, 85, 87–8 deinstitutionalisation, 85–6 Democracy and Tradition (Stout), 37 democratisation of the believer, 17, 35–6 and the experience of religion, 4 Gauchet on, 87, 89 impact of, 3–4 new vision for ‘integration’ of religion, 28 of the private in the public, 34 of republicanism, 34 republican resistance to, 219 Derrida, J., 130 Descartes, René, 2, 131, 148–9, 214 Dewitte, Jacques, 33 Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Kearney), 138 DIEU (Critique), 116, 127, 140 ‘Dieu: raison ou religion’ (Boulnois), 127 Dis-enclosure (Nancy), 158 dissemination, 28–30, 86 diversification, 24, 86, 92 ‘On Doing Theology “After” Ontotheology: Notes on a French Debate’ (Schrijvers), 117 Domenach, Jean-Marie, 22 Duteurtre, Benoît, 62–3 elpis, 217 Emmaus syndrome, 18–19

Index 281 encyclicals, 13, 15–16, 26, 38, 40–1, 55, 82, 100, 114 Eslin, Jean-Claude, 26–8, 30–1 Esprit (journal), 3, 15, 16, 17–28, 30–6, 40, 46, 114, 147, 187 ‘Êtes-vous démocrate ou républicain?’ (Debray), 35 ethics of otherness, 176–80, 195 European Minister for Justice, resignation, 37 euthanasia, 48, 91 evangelisation, 19 event Badiou’s concept of the, 216–18, 230 Being as, see Being as Event Lyotard’s concept of the, 233–40 resurrection as, 215, 216–22, 224–6, 228 semiotics of the, 241–7 faith Badiou on, 232 Blondel’s ‘definition’, 121–3 co-existence with knowledge, 42, 97 crisis of, 21, 36, 85 Esprit’s approach, 18–19 Husserl’s perspective, 139–40 language of, 19–21, 24 metaphysics and reason as essential properties of religious, 16 paradox of, 19–20 and politics, 22 rationality of, 181 Ratzinger on, 120–1 and reason, 4, 16–17, 36, 39–41, 46, 48, 97, 114–15, 119, 122, 127, 182–3, 228 Ricoeur’s perspective of truth, philosophy and, 182–3, 184–95, 201 textuality of, 196–208 Faith and Knowledge (Hegel), 114 ‘Faith, Philosophy and Theology’ (Ratzinger), 120 ‘Familiaris Consortio’ (apostolic exhortation), 69 Fassin, Eric, 64–7 Fides et Ratio (encyclical), 13, 15–16, 40–1, 114

‘On a Finally Objectless Subject’ (Badiou), 214 Foëssel, Michael, 114–15 Foucauldian perspectives on belief, 104–5 Carrette’s appropriation, 107 discourse analysis, 106–7 gay marriage, 71–4, 76–9 human theology, 105, 107 queer theologies, 107–9 Foucault, Michel, 2, 51, 64, 71–4, 76–9, 103–8 foulard, affaire du (headscarf affair), 37–8, 83–4 Gagey, Henry-Jérôme, 46–7 Gauchet, Marcel, 14, 17, 22–3, 31, 33, 37, 51–2, 58, 74–5, 81–3, 85–7, 89–92 Gaudium et spes (Vatican Council), 82 gay adoption, 48, 60–1, 63, 72 gay marriage 2004 ceremony, 52, 61 Borrillo’s campaign, 53–7, 63, 65, 67 Christian, 68–9 compatibility with PaCS, 64 Duteurtre’s criticism of procampaign, 62–3 and equality, 49–50, 53, 63–5, 67 Fassin’s wider approach, 65–6 Foucauldian perspective, 71–4, 76–9 as fundamental human right, 64–5 and gender equality, 64–5 global debate, 49 as goal of activism, 50 implications of Gauchet’s analysis, 75 ‘Par contre’ argument, 66 politics of, 60–8 post-secular perspective, 52 as template for heterosexual unions, 64 theological vision of, 68–70 value of Rogers’ interpretation, 69–70 Gifford Lectures (Ricoeur), 184–5, 200, 206 ‘givenness’, the concept of, 136–42 globalisation, 2, 14, 82, 89

282

Index

God the ‘concept’ of, 116, 118, 126–36 ‘conceptualisation’ of, 145 death of, 97, 104, 126, 129–30 equation of Life with, 168 naming of, 201–3, 205–6 ‘thematisation’ of, 145–6 Godless religiosity, 28 God and Philosophy (Lévinas), 145 God Without Being (Marion), 115–16 Goss, Robert, 108 grace, 20, 70, 117, 123, 188, 221–2, 224, 230–2, 243–4 gratia inhabitationis, 243–4 Hanigan, James P., 55 headscarf affair affaire du foulard, 37–8, 83–4 Hedwig, Klaus, 119 Hegel, G. W. F., 114 Heidegger, Martin, 149, 156, 160 Henry, Michel, 2, 102, 148, 151, 156, 158, 161–80, 224, 245 hermeneutics, 59, 68, 184, 186, 195–200, 202–3, 208–9, 211–13, 242, 247 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, 14–15, 23–5, 51, 85, 91–4 Heyward, Carter, 108 historicity, 85–6, 88, 95–7, 99, 101, 103, 106–8 homosexuality decriminalisation of, 50 relationship between Catholic Church and, 58 Humanae Vitae (encyclical), 55, 82 humanism, 159–61, 179 human reason, 16, 41, 126 Husserl, Edmund, 138–40, 212, 214 Iacub, Marcela, 63–4 I Am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (Henry), 2, 148, 158, 161, 179 identity constructions, 84, 89 The Idol and the Distance (Marion), 138 ‘Il nous faut bien un concept de Dieu’ (Michon), 128 inculturation, 15, 99

‘Indépassable religion’ (Eslin), 27 individualisation of belief, 28, 74, 85–7, 90–1 individualism, 2–3, 23–5, 32, 36, 49–51, 55, 57, 74, 89–90, 92, 192 Infinity, 2, 113, 118, 120, 139, 146, 158 Ipseity, 150–1, 169–80, 206, 224, 238, 241 Irigaray, Luce, 51, 68, 70–1, 75, 102, 128 Is Ontology Fundamental? (Lévinas), 144 Janicaud, Dominique, 139–43, 159–61, 167 John Paul II, Pope, 15–16, 25–6, 40–1, 43, 55, 101, 114 Jordan, Mark, 124–6 Kant, Immanuel, 114–15, 155, 194, 197, 204 Kaplan, Morris B., 64–5 Kearney, Richard, 138–9 kenosis, 94–5, 97, 104–5, 107, 113, 128–9 kerygma, 189–90, 192, 207–8 Kosky, Jeffrey L., 142–3 Lacoste, Jean-Yves, 102, 118, 137 laïcité argument for the rationalisation of religion in, 45 crisis in, 34 in Debray’s theory, 17, 40–4 and democracy, 37–9 dilemma of the teacher in, 42 key values, 83 Mongin and Schlegel on, 28 Pinto on, 45 principles of, 14 Schlegel on, 34 threats to, 51 La religion...sans retour ni détour (Esprit), 3, 24, 32 La Revue du MAUSS, 33, 37 ‘L’autorité religieuse: entre foi et Église’ (Esprit), 30 Le Désenchantement du monde (Gauchet), 14, 22, 83

Index 283 ‘L’Enfant d’abord’ (government report), 60 L’enseignement du fait religieux dans l’école laïque (Debray), 38–47 Le temps des religions sans Dieu (Esprit), 27, 31, 36 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 2, 102, 114, 116–20, 135, 142, 144–7, 151–8, 177, 212, 214, 229 Libera, Alain de, 127 life Ipseity and transcendental, 169–72 phenomenological, 167–8 truth of the world vs truth of, 161–7 ‘The Logic of Jesus, The Logic of God’ (Ricoeur), 184 Lonergan, Bernard, 58 Luther, Martin, 114, 120 Lyotard, Jean-François, 2, 151, 153–5, 157, 160, 214–16, 233–42, 245–7 McCarthy, David Matzko, 68–9 McGrath, Alister, 80–1, 93 Marion, Jean-Luc, 2, 102, 113–16, 118, 132–45, 147, 151, 156–7, 214, 245 marriage conjugality of, 37, 54 divineness, 55 and fidelity, 56 juridic dimension, 57 procreative function of, 55–6 secularisation of, 49 see also gay marriage Marxism, 82, 158, 179 MAUSS, La Revue du, 33, 37 media technology, impact on Catholic Church’s communications, 16 Meillassoux, Quentin, 128–9 Memory, History, Forgetting (Ricoeur), 182 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 140 messianism, 15, 21, 27 metaphysics of autonomy, 58, 75 dissolution of, 85, 95, 101, 104, 137 and the horizon of Being, 132, 147 Janicaud’s perspective, 159–60 Marion’s critique, 116–17, 132, 134, 136–7, 143

in post-modernity, 118–20 Ratzinger’s defence of, 120–1 re-appropriation of, 160 reason and, 116, 129 and revelation, 135 of subjectivity, 149, 161, 166, 180 Meynel, Hugo, 14 Michel, Patrick, 85–6 Michon, Cyrille, 128 Milbank, John, 14 mimesis, 241–2, 244, 247 modernity Catholic Church’s attempt to address the challenges of, 87 Hervieu-Léger on, 23–4, 91 key functions of, 81 Schlegel on, 24 Willaime on, 29 Modernity and Ambivalence (Bauman), 14 Moingt, Joseph, 24–6, 40 Mongin, Olivier, 28, 38, 187 Monteil, Pierre-Olivier, 32 Müller, Denis, 51, 75–8 multiculturalism, 51, 89, 148 ‘Naming God’ (Ricoeur), 181, 184, 200, 202–3 naming of God, 201–3, 205–6 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 149–51, 153, 155, 158–9, 180 Natanson, Jacques, 21 New Ageism, 16, 48, 58 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 48, 75, 104, 126, 129, 192 Nilson, Jon, 58 Nouveau monde et parole de Dieu (Esprit), 17 Oneself as another, 2, 184–5, 200, 203, 206, 208–9, 211 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 2 Other, Lévinas on the relation with the, 153 otherness ethics of, 176–80, 195 irruption of, 102, 106 Ricoeur’s dialectics of selfhood and, 209–12, 229

284

Index

PaCS (Pacte civil de solidarité–Civil Partnership), 50, 60–6, 72, 89 pathe-tik, 148, 172, 179–80 Paul, Saint, 3, 188, 207, 215–16, 219, 222, 226–7 Pécresse, Valérie, 60 ‘Pencil Sketches’ (Lyotard), 236, 241 Petitdemange, Guy, 26, 35 phenomenology as affective transcendence, 142–7 Henry’s, 161–3, 165–9, 172–3, 175, 177–8, 180, 233 humanisation and, 160–1 Husserl’s, 139 Lévinas’s, 142–7, 156, 178 Lyotard’s, 233–40, 241 Marion’s, 137, 139, 141–3, 156 method vs content, 143–4 origins in Augustine’s narrative, 216 Sartre’s, 140–1 Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’. The French Debate (Janicaud), 139, 142 Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’. After the French Debate (Janicaud), 139, 143 philosophy of actuality, 85, 95, 97, 99, 103, 113 Pinto, Diana, 45 Pinto, Henrique, 105 pistis, 217 pluralism, 14–15, 24, 32, 38, 78, 81, 86, 88, 90, 96, 98 political, sacralisation of the, 13 politique chrétienne, 18 Politique et religion. La grande mutation (Michel), 85 postmodernity Gauchet’s acknowledgement of the positive effects of, 90 impact on the perception of religion, 27–8 impact on religion, 15 from modernity to, 31–6 post-secularism, 48 embrace of non-affiliated religiosity, 59 from secularism to, 80–5 term analysis, 49 Pouliquen, Jan-Paul, 61, 63

privatisation of religion, 2, 17, 27–8, 34, 36 Prusak, Bernard G., 139 queer theologies, 107–9 ‘Quelle conception politique de la religion?’ (Gauchet), 33 Qu’est-ce que la foi? (Blondel), 121 Quinqueton, Denis, 61, 63 radical immanence, 143, 149, 172–4, 176, 179–80 Rahner, Karl, 117 Ratzinger, Joseph (Benedict XVI), 36, 43, 48, 58–9, 100, 114, 119–22, 124, 147, 183 Rawls, John, 37 reason faith and, 4, 16–17, 36, 39–41, 46, 48, 97, 114–15, 119, 122, 127, 182–3, 228 human, 16, 41, 126 and metaphysics, 116, 129 resurrection and, 41 revelation and, 41, 114–16, 120, 147 Vatican’s position, 16 reductionism, 151–2, 171 Réinventer l’Église? (Esprit), 20 relativism, 14, 30, 32, 34, 38, 86 ‘Religion after Detraditonalisation: Christian Faith in a Post-Secular Europe’ (Boeve), 117 religious authority, origin of, 30 religious identity, 1, 24, 29, 35–6, 113, 181 religious instruction, Debray’s report, 38–47 religious marriage, vs civil marriage, 53 republicanism, 2–3, 13, 16, 22, 25–7, 34, 38, 49–51, 62, 89, 91, 93, 148, 219 republican universalism, 3, 23, 27, 51, 89, 218–19 resurrection in Badiou’s Saint Paul, 215, 216–21, 223–6, 228 and celibacy, 69 as event, 215, 216–22, 224–6, 228

Index 285 and hope, 190 and reason, 41 revelation of God, 167, 169, 172 Henry’s perspective, 161, 167 Marion’s perspective, 135 Nancy’s perspective, 159 and reason, 41, 114–16, 120, 147 Ricoeur’s perspective, 188, 190 ‘Revenir de la sécularisation’ (Schlegel), 24 Ricoeur, Paul, 2, 102, 181–213, 229 Riffaterre, Michael, 241–2, 247 Roger, Patrick, 257 Rogers, Eugene, Jr, 68–71, 73–4 Rorty, Richard, 37 Ross, Susan A., 58 Roy, Olivier, 29, 39, 45 Saint Augustine, 2, 206, 214–16, 233, 235–6, 238–9, 241–4, 247 Saint Paul, 3, 188, 207, 215–16, 219, 222, 226–7 Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism (Badiou), 215, 216–24 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 39, 45, 83 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 140–1, 160 ‘savant’/‘témoin’, 17, 42, 48, 114, 181 Schlegel, Jean-Louis, 11, 15, 24–5, 28, 34–5, 38 Schrijvers, Joeri, 117–19 secularisation Hervieu-Léger’s treatment, 23–4 irreversibility, 24 Mongin and Schlegel on, 28 paradox of, 28–31 a philosophy of, 93–5 Schlegel’s perspective, 24 Vattimo’s theology of, 105 Willaime’s perspective, 29 secularism Catholicism’s strategies, 39 central ‘failures’ of, 80–1 and the democratisation of religion, 4 Gauchet’s perspective, 82 rationale of, 14–15 Rowan Williams’ vision, 84, 93

Sarkozy’s defence, 83 Schlegel on, 35 secular modernity, 3–4, 14, 22, 24, 32, 38, 49–50, 82, 84–5, 88, 115, 120 self forgetting of, 177 the radically immanent, 172–6 Ricoeur’s examinations of the hermeneutics of, 200 selfhood, Ricoeur’s dialectic, 185, 210–12 ‘The Self in the Mirror of Scripture’ (Ricoeur), 184, 200 ‘sensus’, 153–5, 166 separation of Church and State centenary of, 14 legacy, 25 principles, 14 relevance of laïcité, 29, 35 and the right to religious expression, 3 under Sarkozy, 39 sexuality, post-secular reshaping, 50 Son of God, man as, 170–2 Stiver, Dan R., 211 Stout, Jeffrey, 14, 37 Stuart, Elisabeth, 108 the subject in Badiou’s Saint Paul, 214–17, 222–3, 224–32 Foucauldian perspective, 104, 106 in Henry, 162, 166, 169–71, 179–80 in Lyotard, 233, 238–40 in Ricoeur, 194–8, 204–6 supremacy of, 2 Tétaz’s argument, 208–9 who comes after, 148–61 ‘The Summoned Subject..’ (Ricoeur), 184, 200, 206–8 teaching of religion, Debray’s report on, 38–47 ‘témoin’/‘savant’, 17, 42, 48, 114, 181 ‘The Terms of the Debate over “Christian Philosophy”’ (Jordan), 124 Tétaz, Jean-Marc, 204–5, 208, 210 text before life, 201, 204, 206

286

Index

theology, a brief history of philosophy and, 117–26 Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 126, 129, 192 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 26 Totality and Infinity (Lévinas), 2 Touraine, Alain, 32 Tracey, David, 116 transcendence Badiou’s perspective, 224 as emanating from within individual experience, 52, 59 humankind’s capacity to affirm its own, 81 Müller’s democratisation of, 75–6 phenomenology as affective, 142–7 transfer of attention away from, 79 transcendental Life, 169–71 Trigano, Shmuel, 81 truth in Badiou’s subject, 150–1 De Certeau’s perspective, 19–20 Henry on, 161–7 John Paul II on, 26 Kantian disconnection of faith from, 115 in Lévinas, 151 of Life, 161–3, 165–7, 169–71, 173–5, 178–9 and phenomenology, 156 religion’s re-appropriation, 59

in the revelation of the resurrection, 41 and sex, 108 of the world, 161–71, 173–5, 178–9, 224 The Twilight of Atheism. The Rise and Fall of Belief in the Modern World (McGrath), 80 Un Christianisme d’avenir. Pour une nouvelle alliance entre raison et foi (Valadier), 82 universalism in Badiou’s Saint Paul, 215, 216–24 republican, 3, 23, 27, 51, 89, 218–19 universal truth, 93, 215, 220–4, 226–7, 229, 232–3 ‘Un nouvel espace public’ (Esprit), 25 Valadier, Paul, 14–15, 82–3, 87 Van Steenberghen, Fernand, 123–4 Vatican II, 16, 22, 57, 82, 87, 100 Vattimo, Gianni, 3, 14, 29, 85, 88, 93–107, 109, 113–15, 117, 182, 227 Veritatis Splendor (encyclical), 26 Ward, Graham, 14, 107 Willaime, Jean-Paul, 4–5, 13–15, 25, 29, 34 Williams, Rowan, 80–1, 84, 93 Word of God, 19, 21, 30, 163, 209

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