Search Results (14)

This article explores the possibility of conceiving political theology beyond its traditional metaphysical foundations. Starting from Carl Schmitt’s formulation of political theology as a domain rooted in analogical and representational transfers between the theological and the political, and drawing on Jean-Luc Marion’s critique of metaphysical theology, or onto-theology, this paper interrogates the foundational assumptions of Schmitt’s political theology and assesses the viability of a non-metaphysical theo-political discourse. The article has three main aims: to elucidate the representational logic at the core of Schmitt’s political theology; to examine postmetaphysical theo-political discourses in light of Marion’s deconstruction of onto-theology; and to vindicate the legitimacy and coherence of postmodern theological-political approaches. Taking inspiration from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s threefold theological method—affirmation, negation, and eminence—the article argues that contemporary political theology can be reframed accordingly: (1) the path of affirmation aligns with Vatter’s reading of Schmitt; (2) the path of negation resonates with Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive strategy; and (3) the path of eminence finds its expression in Marion’s phenomenology of givenness. Ultimately, this paper contends that Marion’s phenomenological approach opens a productive avenue for reconceiving theo-political discourse; it is argued that the phenomenology of givenness proposed by Marion to surpass the conceptual idols of metaphysics has significant implications for the theo-political field that remain unexplored. Full article

In this paper, I shall argue that the law of non-contradiction can be used to constructively reframe the univocalist debate. Duns Scotus argued famously that a term is univocal in two statements if its unity is sufficient for a contradiction. This logical definition was woven into his arguments against Henry of Ghent’s (and indirectly Thomas Aquinas’) view of analogy, arguing that all successful analogies must be built upon a univocal core. As early as the 1960s, this Scotist univocity had been singled out by French scholars and, by the turn of the century, had become the cherished whipping boy of Radical Orthodoxy, which claims that Scotus was the progenitor of modern onto-theology, nihilism, and secular immanence. While the genealogical critique in its fullness is beyond this paper’s scope, it illustrates the gravity of the question. If the doctrine of analogy is coherent—i.e., if Scotus turned to univocity without cause—then perhaps his condemnation is justified. However—in line with the principle quod est necessarium est licitum (that which is necessary is permissible)—if univocity is necessary for successful theological reference, then perhaps the doctrine of univocity can be defended regardless of its historical usage. This paper will argue that univocity is latent in all successful analogies, commencing with a fairly standard analysis of Scotus’ Ordinatio, then moving beyond Scotus to more constructively suggest that an expanded version of the argument from non-contradiction can help reframe the univocalist debate for today. Full article

This study investigates how Martin Heidegger’s notion of “the thing” (Das Ding) can help rescue modern disenchantment with regard to its root in the World, a concept developed from “being-in-the-world” presented in Being and Time, and later taken as a participant in the bilateral polemos illustrated in die Gestalt (signifying Being’s strife to disclose itself against the Earth: self-concealing concealment). In Section 1, I analyze the occurrence of disenchantment by critically reviewing several thinkers’ discussions of it, pointing out that “faciality”—which has structured the modern Western understanding of reality—is the cornerstone of ontotheology, as well as the collapse of it: disenchantment. In Section 2, to demonstrate how Heidegger’s rediscovery of usefulness in a de-subjectified discourse of signification has challenged the positivistic view attached to “faciality”, I examine Heidegger’s idea of “readiness-to-hand,” revealing the basic temporal–spatial units composing the “handiness” of categorical beings and its relation to Dasein, progressing thereon to the analysis of a thing-centered worldview of Heidegger’s phenomenology. In Section 3, I demonstrate how this thing-centered worldview has the potential to form a preparative stage for re-enchantment of the World by uncovering the concealed existentiality within things, aligning with Heidegger’s polemos in his philosophy of art. Full article

Maybe the most divisive topic of the Heideggerian reception is whether the question of God is part of the disclosure of being in Heidegger’s thinking, or if Heidegger rather obscures the phenomenological inquiry on God by way of his questions on being and his reinterpretation of the meaning of being as historical beyng. It is not accidental that Hedwig Conrad-Martius, the contemporary of Heidegger, writes in her critique on Being and Time that it is “like when, with tremendous force of wise prudence and unflagging tenacity, a door that has been closed for a long time and is almost impossible to open is blown open and then immediately slammed shut again, locked, and barricaded so tightly that it seems impossible to open it again.” (Cf. Heideggers ‘Sein und Zeit’). Unfortunately, the different stages of Heidegger’s thinking do not help further clarify the question of whether it is a conscious program of Heideggerian thinking to involve theological questions into the fundamental ontological analysis of being, if it follows from his theological background and from the relation to theology (as a positivistic science in Heidegger’s sense), or if that he includes theological knowledges into his thinking and shows a critical turn against the theological statements. Heidegger’s reflections on his own thinking in relation to theological questions and his influence on the Munich–Göttingen Phenomenology raises the present argumentation for the common phenomenological interpretation of God-Experiences. Full article

It is a matter to ponder that, among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam places the greatest ontotheological distance between the human and the divine. While God is the ground of being Muslim, Islam excludes theophany and prohibits any tangible association between the divine and anything in the material world. God’s mode of manifesting Himself to His creatures has consisted of the most fleeting and discorporate of all means of communication, namely, sound. His words gathered in the Qur’an thus form a non-solid verbal bridge crossing over that unfathomable distance. One could then think that the relationship between the unique Creator and His creatures relies only on the strength of a blind faith founded on a dry, discursive pact. Arguing his “idea of an anthropology of Islam”, Talal Asad did posit that this religion and its culture form “a discursive tradition”. Exclusively focused on the mental modes of knowledge acquisition, this cognitivist verbalist characterization has become a certitude in Islamic studies at large. Yet, it is only a half-truth, for it overlooks the emphatic involvement, in the definition of this tradition of Islam, of the non-linguistic phenomenality of experience that implicates the pre-logical non-cognitive double agency of affect and sensation in the pursuit of divine knowledge. This article expounds this phenomenology of the Qur’an in using an innovative combination of philosophical and literary conceptualities, and in addressing some hermeneutical problems posed by the established Quranic studies. Full article

The aim of this paper is to understand the reasons underlying Derrida’s interest in the phenomenon of prayer. The article traces the different directions taken by the topic in the over forty-year long reflection of the philosopher. I start off by highlighting the dichotomic structure around which Derrida lays out his entire analysis of prayer, describing it, in general terms, as an opposition between determination and indetermination: on the one side, the multiple concrete manifestations of prayer; on the other, the possibility of a pure address to the other as other, not marked by metaphysics. I proceed by examining the qualities of what Derrida calls the “pure prayer”, or “prayer in itself”, in direct contrast with the praising prayer. The issue concerning the autonomy and the specificity of this indeterminate act of addressing is especially taken into consideration. The fundamental question remains whether a pure prayer is truly conceivable, or whether its contamination is as inevitable as necessary for the actual possibility of religion, theology, and prayer itself. Full article

This article compares the mysticism of 4th-century Church Father Gregory of Nyssa to the nomadology of 20th century philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. In their book A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari returned to the figure of the nomad in order to free multiplicities from the “despotic unity” of modern Enlightenment thought. Though Deleuze and Guattari compare this nomadology to spiritual journeys, they claim that their nomad, unlike the mystic, resists a center, a homecoming, a destination. Yet Gregory of Nyssa, writing before the Church itself became a hegemonic power that would confine truth to a single reified code, described the Christian as a wandering nomad, for whom the path itself is the goal. Contrary to the static vision that would be developed in the onto-theological tradition that would lead Western metaphysics to interpret mysticism as the private experience of union with the divine, Gregory of Nyssa proposes a communal movement “from beginning to beginning” with no end, and no union in sight. By placing the postmodern secular nomad alongside the premodern Christian nomad, this article will draw on similarities between the two in order to accentuate the contemporary relevance of Gregory of Nyssa’s vision of mysticism. Full article

The Orthodox liturgy is a religious phenomenon that can be analyzed phenomenologically and theologically alike, given the emphasis that both phenomenology and Orthodox theology place on experience. By proposing the Kingdom of God instead of the natural world without being able to annihilate the latter in the name of the former, the liturgy seeks divine-human communion. Through the dialogue of prayer, through symbolic and iconic openings, as well as through apophatic theology, the liturgy emphasizes the horizon of mystery as a horizon essential to the way man positions himself before God. The present text attempts to demonstrate that apophaticism, understood as an experience of the mysterious presence of God, is one of the crucial dimensions of the Orthodox liturgy; and that this apophatic presence of God reveals a way of thinking which does not become onto-theology, not even when using concepts borrowed from metaphysics. The overcoming of onto-theology is achieved here not by abandoning concepts such as “being” and “cause” but by placing the language game in the field of prayer and apophatic theology. Full article

What might a sense of decolonisation (not)/be? Or, what comes after the logic of the coloniser? This question is at the centre of many debates in South Africa and extends to all countries worldwide who are faced with the challenge of self-determination by rethinking the world we live in after the domination of the world by the so-called “all enclosing Western world-view” incarnated in various oppressive political, economic, social and intellectual practices. The challenge of rethinking the world following the demotion of the West from its centre, as will be argued, is not only for those who are particularly living in a previously colonised world, but also for those who were/ still are in the position of dominance, which is a universal task. It is at this point where the various philosophical traditions meet, more precisely that of continental philosophy of religion and African philosophy. Accordingly, this article seeks to explore the question in two parts by way of an inter-cultural approach. Part one retraces the critique of (a certain) Western metaphysics in terms of its onto-theological constitution. Subsequently, this onto-theological constitution is discussed in relation to the notions of identity and political to outline what a sense of decolonisation might not be, that is a re-enforcement of the logic of the coloniser, which denies the full existence of an-other. In part two, four suggestions are made on what a sense of decolonisation might be in dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy and Achille Mbembe. The suggestions include a two-sided attitude of reticence/dissidence against falling back into the problematic logic. A move to consider decolonisation as the dis-enclosure of the world, which in turn, opens up a space for an alternative ontology that acknowledges our existence as always being-in-the-word with others. The fourth suggestion concerns the implications of this alternative ontology regarding a non-substantialist notion of identity as mêlée, which is the action of constant struggle within the re-opened space for what it means to live in the world. Finally, it is concluded that the alternative ontology of decolonisation as dis-enclosure implies a universal task of taking responsibility for the reparation of the dignity of the whole of humanity within our shared world. Full article

This article brings Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity, or sovereign decisionism, into conversation with the work of contemporary political theorist Giorgio Agamben, who argues that sovereign decisionism is the repressed theological foundation of authoritarian governments. As such, the article seeks to accomplish two goals. The first is to show that Sartre’s depiction of sovereign decisionism directly parallels how modern democratic governments conduct themselves during a state of emergency. The second is to show that Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity models, what Agamben calls, secularized theism. Through an ontotheological critique of Sartre’s professed atheism, the article concludes that an existential belief in sovereign decision represses, rather than profanes, the divine origins of authoritarian law. I frame the argument with a reading of Sartre’s 1943 play The Flies, which models the repressed theological underpinnings of Sartre’s theory. Full article

This article takes up the onto-theological critique of metaphysics and questions whether onto-theology is not something to evade or overcome, but is inevitable. Consequently, it furthers the exploration of onto-theology by asking, if it is inevitable, then what comes after onto-theology? For the past half-century, onto-theology has been a central concern for philosophy, particularly in phenomenology where one sees a theological turn in order to understand and incorporate what might be beyond, or within, consciousness that does not readily appear to the self. In this turn, one often sees philosophers (and theologians) attempt to craft a post-metaphysical understanding. Resultantly, many of these philosophers herald what I call the ‘end of everything,’ often due to their onto-theological character: from the ‘end’ of philosophy of religion, to the ‘end’ of metaphysics, to the ‘end’ of theology. However, when investigating their findings, one often sees these concepts arise from the grave, perhaps showing that some onto-theological construction is inevitable. This paper proceeds by first giving a brief overview of the philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy, Richard Kearney, John Caputo, and Merold Westphal to propose how onto-theology is still an issue for their philosophies by revealing a necessary link between ontology and empirical reality. It then builds off of this proposal through the work of Joeri Schrijvers to show what might lie ahead of philosophy (and philosophy of religion in particular), arguing that if onto-theology is inevitable then philosophy should turn further into theology to explore how theology deals with this inevitability on an empirical basis. Basically, since theology always already accepts being in default (through concepts like original sin), then how does it help believers cope with this inevitability and how does it focus upon the empirical reality of this ontological gesture. Finally, this paper investigates the work of Colby Dickinson in order to solidify this finding into a programmatic, philosophical framework. Full article

I examine what I call Eckhart’s doctrine of indistinction as a precursor to Heidegger’s approach to the worldhood of the world. Taking cues from textual evidence in various sections of Heidegger’s texts and lecture courses, I demonstrate that Heidegger’s ontology is at least partially inherited from Eckhart’s henology. As a result, there is an analogous logic of indistinction operative in Eckhart’s understanding of the relationship between God and creation, and the inseparability of Dasein and the world in Heidegger’s phenomenology. I conclude by suggesting that Heidegger’s reading of Eckhart is a microcosm of the relationship between continental philosophy and religion, because it demonstrates that turning one’s eyes to the logics of a different cosmology, anthropology, or ontology, may permit the eyes to see more fully what is at play in one’s own approach to the human, the world, and the relationship between them. In other words, the secular often illuminates theological blind spots, just as the theological has the power to transform, enlarge, or supplement the secular view of the consciously secular thinker, without converting philosophy to theology or vice versa. Full article

The debate on the possibility of re-thinking transcendence at the so-called end or closure of the metaphysical tradition and its relation to the political is situated at the heart of contemporary continental philosophy of religion. This article engages the debate by reviewing what is to be thought or anticipated at the closure. Firstly, the problem of engaging with transcendence at the closure of metaphysics is outlined as a discussion on what is possibly meant by the end of transcendence and onto-theology. Subsequently, the question concerning the political and its inseparable relation to transcendence is sketched and denoted by the phrase “the political/transcendence”. Secondly, Levinas’ and Nancy’s respective attempts at addressing the problem are explored in the form of a debate, with the outcome suggesting a possible gesture towards Nancy’s reconception of transcendence as transimmanence, found in his notion of “the promise of love”, on “how” to anticipate rather than “what” to anticipate in these end times. Full article

In the Third Session of his seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 2, Jacques Derrida turns from a close reading of Heidegger’s 1929–1930 seminar on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—the two books at the center of the seminar—to the question of what it means for a large and growing number of people in the Western world to have to decide, in a seemingly sovereign fashion, about how their bodies are to be treated after their deaths, that is, whether they are to be buried or cremated. This question marks a rather surprising turn to the present—even the autobiographical—in the seminar. This essay follows Derrida’s treatment of the question in the rest of the seminar. It considers, first, what Derrida calls the phantasms attendant upon all speculations regarding this supposedly binary alternative between inhumation and creation and then what this alternative might tell us about Greco-European modernity and certain modern conceptions of the subject and the subject’s putative autonomy and sovereignty over its life, its body, and its remains. Full article