Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion – Serie

Continental philosophers of religion have been engaging with theological issues, concepts and questions for several decades, blurring the borders between the domains of philosophy and theology. Yet when Emmanuel Falque proclaims that both theologians and philosophers need not be afraid of crossing the Rubicon – the point of no return – between these often artificially separated disciplines, he scandalised both camps. Despite the scholarly reservations, the theological turn in French phenomenology has decisively happened. The challenge is now to interpret what this given fact of creative encounters between philosophy and theology means for these disciplines.In this collection, written by both theologians and philosophers, the question “Must we cross the Rubicon?” is central. However, rather than simply opposing or subscribing to Falque’s position, the individual chapters of this book interrogate and critically reflect on the relationship between theology and philosophy, offering novel perspectives and redrawing the outlines of their borderlands.

The thought of Jean-Louis Chrétien is most familiar to those who have taken up the theological turn in French phenomenology, yet it defies reduction to either phenomenology or theology, or for that matter spirituality, literature, or Greek thought. Written in beautiful French prose and argued with unsurpassed erudition, Chrétien’s works defy easy interpretation. One nonetheless finds a center of gravity in attempts to define and then elaborate an original account of human being in terms of call and response, from which there follow penetrating studies of language and body, as well as illuminating approaches to a range of themes including temporality, prayer, and religious reading. This volume gathers original work from leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, theology and poetics, including Chrétien’s collaborators, successors, and Anglophone interpreters. They engage his work along its main lines, at once presenting it in summary fashion and exploring its strengths and weaknesses for our understanding of some of the topics and problems that held his prolonged attention. Readers new to Chrétien will easily find a number of points of access, while more advanced readers will find that their understanding is both deepened and enriched.Contributors: Rudolf Bernet, Jeffrey Bloechl, Emmanuel Falque, Jérôme de Gramont, Crina Gshwandtner, Emmanuel Housset, Stephen E. Lewis, Jean-Luc Marion, Catherine Pickstock, Andrew Prevot

How porous is the border between life and death? How do the dead influence the living and in what way? What can Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and the two Limbos tell us of our contemporary world today? In The Mirror of Death, Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte explores the hermeneutical potential of the regions in the hereafter. After an exciting voyage through the emergence of the afterlife and of the constancy of death’s presence in the history of humanity, Vanhoutte shows, through the study of the nature and genealogy of the various realms in the beyond, how an invigoratingly new and critical perspective of a wide variety of contemporary phenomena is unveiled when reading them through the interpretative lens of these regions where the dead dwell. Modern politics, our fellow human beings, the times of our lives, the capitalistic economic system, medicalization, wokism, and living in crisis will never look the same.

Simone Weil is an often-overlooked thinker whose insights could radically reshape contemporary discourses on religion, nature, art, ethics, work, politics, and education. This collection of essays situates Simone Weil’s thought alongside prominent Continental thinkers and their philosophical concerns to show the ways in which she belongs to—but also stands outside—some of the major streams of 'Continental discourse', including phenomenology, ethics of embodied disposition and difference, and post-Marxian political thought. For the first time in a major work, intersections between the ideas of Weil and figures such as Nietzsche, Berdyaev, Foucault, Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Chrétien, Agamben, Fanon, and Rancière are closely examined. The volume is authored by an international team of leading scholars in Weil studies and in contemporary Continental philosophy of religion more broadly. Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy is not only an unprecedented resource for Weil scholars who seek to read her in broader (and more current) philosophical terms, but also an important addition to the libraries of scholars and students of Continental philosophy and theology engaged in thinking about some of the most pressing questions of our time.

Simone Weil is an often-overlooked thinker whose insights could radically reshape contemporary discourses on religion, nature, art, ethics, work, politics, and education. This collection of essays situates Simone Weil’s thought alongside prominent Continental thinkers and their philosophical concerns to show the ways in which she belongs to—but also stands outside—some of the major streams of 'Continental discourse', including phenomenology, ethics of embodied disposition and difference, and post-Marxian political thought. For the first time in a major work, intersections between the ideas of Weil and figures such as Nietzsche, Berdyaev, Foucault, Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Chrétien, Agamben, Fanon, and Rancière are closely examined. The volume is authored by an international team of leading scholars in Weil studies and in contemporary Continental philosophy of religion more broadly. Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy is not only an unprecedented resource for Weil scholars who seek to read her in broader (and more current) philosophical terms, but also an important addition to the libraries of scholars and students of Continental philosophy and theology engaged in thinking about some of the most pressing questions of our time.

Many in continental philosophy of religion aver that we are in a new moment, one where the intellectually marginalized and religiously bastardized traditions of mystical, intuitive, and esoteric apprehensions must be re-articulated and appreciated anew. In an era marked by catastrophic events and atrophied cultural institutions, what seems to be needed is an affirmation of the human potential to truck with non-human or even inhuman forces and intentions, at scales of speed, slowness, or intensity that break with consensual conceptions of human limitations. The essays in this volume outline patterns of mind and mortality, existence and ecstasy, creativity and expression, political possibility and religious matrix from a position that takes quite seriously possible relations with the absolute, however enigmatic, that modernity has denied and postmodernity has obscured in the name of academic skepticism and humanist reservations. Beyond post-modernist pastiche and post-secular nostalgia, these essays explore the potencies of archaic spiritual disciplines as well as the passions driving the mystical, heretical, and Gnostic intimations riddling contemporary relations with the absolute.

Many in continental philosophy of religion aver that we are in a new moment, one where the intellectually marginalized and religiously bastardized traditions of mystical, intuitive, and esoteric apprehensions must be re-articulated and appreciated anew. In an era marked by catastrophic events and atrophied cultural institutions, what seems to be needed is an affirmation of the human potential to truck with non-human or even inhuman forces and intentions, at scales of speed, slowness, or intensity that break with consensual conceptions of human limitations. The essays in this volume outline patterns of mind and mortality, existence and ecstasy, creativity and expression, political possibility and religious matrix from a position that takes quite seriously possible relations with the absolute, however enigmatic, that modernity has denied and postmodernity has obscured in the name of academic skepticism and humanist reservations. Beyond post-modernist pastiche and post-secular nostalgia, these essays explore the potencies of archaic spiritual disciplines as well as the passions driving the mystical, heretical, and Gnostic intimations riddling contemporary relations with the absolute.

Theopoetics names the notion that the divine (theos) manifests itself as creative making (poiesis). Anatheism expresses the attendant claim that this making takes the form of a second creation – re-creation or creation again (ana) – where humanity and divinity collaborate in the coming of the Kingdom. The Art of Anatheism brings together philosophers, theologians, and artists to open up the question of the relationship between artistic creation and the divine.The book asks the question – how can God happen again after the death of God? It answers it by proposing an ‘art of anatheism’ which attends to the recreation and return of the divine through certain forms of literature, painting, liturgy, music, and performance. Engaging students, scholars, and interested readers across a wide range of disciplines – philosophy, theology, aesthetics, literary criticism, poetics – the volume includes contributions from both practising artists and professional academics. As such it brings together examples from ancient religious wisdom traditions and cutting-edge contemporary cultural practices to suggest that the sacred is often most potent and persuasive when recreating the everyday world of our secular experience.

Jacques Lacan was fascinated with forms of the "religious" throughout his life, from monotheism, which shaped his account of the signifier, to modern occultism, as he was well acquainted with the writings of figures such as Oskar Goldberg and René Guénon. Lacan also repeatedly turned to non-European religiosities to test the limits of psychoanalytic theory. In his yearly seminars he engaged with traditions such as Kabbalah and Taoism, going beyond the Western Christian, capitalist and postcolonial setting of the French university to search for a possible outside to psychoanalysis. But such a quest ultimately recapitulates Lacan's constant awareness of the desire for a new master, and the still open question regarding the names and meanings that this desire may yield. This anthology of eleven essays, which travel from gnosticism to sufism, from afro-pessimism to post-68 ex-Maoist apocalypticism, investigates these unresolved threads that Lacan left behind. Beneath the exoteric psychoanalytic apparatus of Lacan's thought, there is an esoteric Lacan who remains unexplored.

This book aims to put modern continental philosophy, specifically the sub-fields of phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, critical theory and genealogy, into conversation with the field of contemporary theology. Colby Dickinson demonstrates the way in which negative dialectics, or the negation of negation, may help us to grasp the thin (or non-existent) borders between continental philosophy and theology as the leading thinkers of both fields wrestle with their entrance into a new era. With the declining place of “the sacred” in the public sphere, we need to pay more attention than ever to how continental philosophy seems to be returning to distinctly theological roots. Through a genealogical mapping of 20th-century continental philosophers, Dickinson highlights the ever-present Judeo-Christian roots of modern Western philosophical thought. Opposing categories such as immanence/transcendence, finitude/infinitude, universal/particular, subject/object, are at the center of works by thinkers such as Agamben, Marion, Vattimo, Levinas, Latour, Caputo and Adorno. This book argues that utilizing a negative dialectic allows us to move beyond the apparent fixation with dichotomies present within those fields and begin to perform both philosophy and theology anew.

This book aims to put modern continental philosophy, specifically the sub-fields of phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, critical theory and genealogy, into conversation with the field of contemporary theology. Colby Dickinson demonstrates the way in which negative dialectics, or the negation of negation, may help us to grasp the thin (or non-existent) borders between continental philosophy and theology as the leading thinkers of both fields wrestle with their entrance into a new era. With the declining place of “the sacred” in the public sphere, we need to pay more attention than ever to how continental philosophy seems to be returning to distinctly theological roots. Through a genealogical mapping of 20th-century continental philosophers, Dickinson highlights the ever-present Judeo-Christian roots of modern Western philosophical thought. Opposing categories such as immanence/transcendence, finitude/infinitude, universal/particular, subject/object, are at the center of works by thinkers such as Agamben, Marion, Vattimo, Levinas, Latour, Caputo and Adorno. This book argues that utilizing a negative dialectic allows us to move beyond the apparent fixation with dichotomies present within those fields and begin to perform both philosophy and theology anew.