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In this article first appeared in 1997, Jean-Louis Chrétien examines the meaning of prayer in Kierkegaard’s writings and existence. By focusing on the difficulties of this task and with meticulous attention to the vast work of the Danish philosopher, Chrétien describes prayer as a tense and agonistic experience, akin to the evangelical struggle between Jacob and the angel. Just like in his well-known phenomenological analysis, “The Wounded Word: Phenomenology of Prayer”, the author identifies in prayer a paradoxical articulation of struggle and peace, gift and endeavour, speaking and listening, through which the human being is profoundly transformed and finally learns to truly say “thank you”.

In this article I argue not only for the value of hermeneutics today but also, and especially, how the crucial gesture of hermeneutics is that of changing the subject for the sake of our today. Surveying briefly the main lines of hermeneutical positions along its history and critiques, and connecting these critiques to the discrepancy between theory and practice, between interpretation and the need to change the world, the article proposes that our reality today, reshaped through globalization and the virtual, is performed as a hermeneutics of history. The challenge for today’s hermeneutics is to work out categories for understanding the present as on-going in a world that tends to capture and distort more and more the meaning of freedom of thought. In the final section, I propose a hermeneutics of the on-going, of gerundive time, partially under the inspiration of Paul Celan, as a response that develops the meaning of the freedom of thought. A defense of nearness and how to think in narrow nearness to the on-going is discussed.

Martin Heidegger notoriously linked industrial agriculture and the Holocaust in a lecture given at Bremen while he was still banned from teaching under denazification measures. What has largely been overlooked is that Derrida also compared the two: in 1997, in an address given at the third Cerisy conference devoted his work. This apparent repetition will be understood within the broader framework of his reading of Heidegger and, in particular, with what the latter says concerning technology. It will be argued that while Derrida views industrial agriculture as a series of technical issues, each demanding of particular attention, Heidegger sees its only as an instance of Technik. Most significantly, while the latter’s philosophy offers no resources for treating it as demanding an ethical response, for Derrida our relation to animals should be guided by compassion.

My goal is threefold. First, building on the basis of Husserl’s phenomenology of the imagination, I will argue that phantasy is a specific type of intentional experience, which intends its objects as neutralized presentifications (neutralisierte Vergegenwärtigungen). Second, I will turn to dreams and argue that non-lucid dreams are unconscious phantasies, which cannot be conceived in the above-mentioned way. This realization will bring us to the third task. When recognized as the most extreme form of unconscious phantasy, dreams compel us to raise anew the fundamental question: what is the nature of phantasy experience? According to the perspective I will here develop, phantasy is a specific field of experience that lies between two extremes: the fully translucent mode of the as if consciousness and the thoroughly opaque mode of absorption (Versunkenheit). Most of our phantasies, both conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, are lived somewhere between these two extremes.

In this article, I want to make the following points, none of which are totally new, but their constellation here is meant to be challenging. First, world is not a (Cartesian) thing but an event, the event of sense. This event is opening and meaning – verbal tense. God may be a philosophical name of this event. This is recognized by late-modern religious atheist thought. This thought differs from modern scientific rationalism in that the latter’s so-called areligious atheism is actually a hyperreligious theism. On the way, the alleged opposition between philosophy and theology, between thought and faith is seen to erode. The core matter of this philosophy of religion will be the absolute reference, the system of objectivity and the holiness of the name. All this because of a prefix a- that has its sense turned inside out by the death of God.

This paper offers a reflection on the complicated relationship between Derrida and Heidegger, particularly as concerns the issue of difference in their respective thoughts. Taking one of Geschlecht III’s most stunning passages as my point of departure, I walk the reader through some of Derrida’s own remarks on his relationship to Heidegger, before arriving at the différend that seems to exist between them as regards the notion of difference itself. I argue that the margins of Heidegger’s text inscribe a quite radical thinking of difference not at all incompatible with Derridean différance. In conclusion, I turn to Heidegger’s “Anaximander Fragment” where, in the margins of Heidegger’s text, we find a marginal note that, given its content, could surely have been written by Derrida himself.

The article pursues the theme of “the unborn” in the poetry of Georg Trakl and in the commentaries on Trakl’s poetry by Heidegger (in Unterwegs zur Sprache) and Derrida (in Geschlecht III). It continues a decades-long conversation with Trakl, Heidegger, and Derrida developed most recently in Phantoms of the Other: Four Generations of Derrida’s Geschlecht (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015) and in “Derrida, Heidegger, and the Magnetism of the Trakl House,” Philosophy Today, 64:2 (Spring 2020), 1–24.

“I type very quickly, very badly, with many errors [fautes],” Jacques Derrida confessed in a late interview. This paper proposes that the typographical error – usually viewed as a mere “accident” – may in fact be understood as a productive site for deconstructive reading and thought. Drawing on Nietzsche’s suggestion that the typewriter acts as a “collaborator” in thinking, this paper examines Derrida’s use of the typewriter, with particular attention to his typos. Following Derrida’s reading in the Geschlecht series and his own typographical practice, this paper argues that the typo should be thought of as the condition of possibility of every type – and as a defining difference between Derrida and Heidegger.

The paper discusses the question as to whether, and in which way, Nietzsche is present in Derrida’s readings of Heidegger in the Geschlecht texts, and in the newly edited Geschlecht III specifically. In order to unfold the background of this question, the first part turns to earlier texts from the 1960s and 1970s and shows that Nietzsche is a key figure in Derrida’s takes on Heidegger, especially as regards the issue of Heidegger’s “belonging” to metaphysics. The second part then addresses the Geschlecht texts and makes the case that, despite their brevity and seeming marginality, the remarks on Nietzsche, most of all in Geschlecht III, are indeed illuminating, in mainly two regards: on the one hand, they shed some light on how Derrida reads and “dislocates” Heidegger in these texts overall, and on the other hand, they contribute to the question of a “continuity” in Derrida’s relations to Heidegger.

Merleau-Ponty’s late lecture course on Heidegger is primarily concerned with probing the possibility of a phenomenological ontology. Merleau-Ponty’s lectures provide a rather straightforward presentation of Heidegger’s later thought, without elaborate commentary or criticism. However, Merleau-Ponty does favor Heidegger’s later move toward an indirect expression of Being but does not think that he consistently maintains this view. By the time that we reach the end of Merleau-Ponty’s lecture course, we begin to see a number of differences between the two philosophers come into play, with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy solving more problems than that of his German counterpart.

Among the ancients, there was no proper conception of the I. Yet an I emerges in ancient Israel. I therefore inquire into the philosophical anthropology of ancient Israel. How did the I emerge? By interpreting the Song of Songs as political myth, from which a philosophical anthropology can be unearthed and reconstructed, I theorize that not only an I, but also a different kind of we emerged through gift-dynamics. Then I demonstrate that these gift-dynamics are compatible with the ancient Israelites’ religious-political institutions and manifest itself in their collective psyche.

In this concluding reflection, the editors of this special issue reflect on the significance that Heidegger has had for French philosophy, precisely because of the creative and critical engagement of many of the original thinkers demonstrated above. It is not insignificant that Christian thinkers were drawn to Heidegger, seeing promise in his expansion of philosophical questioning, above all an enrichment of the idea of truth. However it is equally important to recognize that Heidegger’s native Christian roots were stripped of their animating spirit, the question of God and the revelation of the Hebraic scriptures. It is thus notable that the criticisms from this conference originating from the side of faith frequently appeal to the Scriptures as they argue that there are truths which Heidegger himself simply does not seem to see.

In this article, Joseph S. O’Leary recounts the origin and inspirations behind the 1979 Colloquium Heidegger et la Question de Dieu, and reflects on why it became such a key moment in the development of many of those who took part in it. In addition to the contingent factors of a particular time and place, and the deep personal and intellectual significance that Heidegger bore for many of them, O’Leary identifies the perennial philosophical questions which the participants were able to address in original and controversial ways. O’Leary also reflects on the way this Colloquium served as a subsequent influence on his own original work as well as the critical dialogue he engaged in with many of the other participants, culminating in his most recent work on interreligious dialogue which further amplifies the central problematics here concerning the nature of the quest for truth.

In this interview, Jean-Luc Marion recalls the intellectual world of Paris in 1970s, reflecting on how his engagement with the ubiquitous “death of God” question led to the sketches of God without Being first presented at this 1979 Colloquium, and discusses the criticism it provoked not only from Heideggerians but also from Thomists. He discusses the reception history of phenomenology in France the reasons for the particular power it gained among thinkers of his generation. Finally, he recounts how his work has led from the 1979 Colloquium through the “Theological Turn” and up to his forthcoming D’ ailleurs, la révélation (Grasset, 2020), which he briefly previews here. Marion closes with words on originality, criticism, and the particular challenges of the contemporary world that await philosophical thinking today.

In this article, Jean-Yves Lacoste lays out the central moments of Heidegger’s complicated relationship to Christian thinking, from his earliest studies under Carl Braig up to his death in 1976. With careful attention to personal letters, scholarly reviews, conferences, as well as major texts, Lacoste shows that this influence was mostly in one direction: despite the eagerness of theology to engage with Heidegger, Heidegger continually demonstrated reticence to approach theology except strictly on his own terms. The article closes with a retrospective evaluation of the central themes of the original Heidegger et la Question de Dieu volume, which took up this investigation in France in 1979. Despite the fact that its publication predated many of Heidegger’s essential texts on this theme, these essays, in Lacoste’s estimation, remain a “perfectly timeless” resource for those seeking to understand the place of God within phenomenology.

This essay celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Research in Phenomenology by reimagining or rethinking the speech act (whether explicit or implicit) that would have launched or inaugurated the journal back in 1971. It does this by rereading Derrida’s signature text on speech act theory, “Signature Event Context,” a text first presented by Derrida in the very year of the journal’s founding. The essay takes Derrida’s theses regarding the speech act’s fundamental relationship to writing, absence, death, and testimony in order to reread some of the first issues of Research in Phenomenology, including the memorial essays contained within them. The essay concludes by suggesting that Research in Phenomenology has done as much as any journal over the last half century to live up to the promise of that original speech act.

In La Agonia de Europa, María Zambrano writes: “Europe is not dead, Europe cannot die completely; it agonizes. For Europe is perhaps the only thing—in history—that cannot die; it is the only thing capable of resurrection.” How to understand this provocative statement? What must Europe be for it not being able to completely die, but only to agonize? How to understand the mode of being Europe as one of continuous agonization? What kind of resurrection does European life refer to, and what is its significance in the context of Zambrano’s heretical Christianity? These are among the questions raised in the paper.

Retracing the way I have followed since the beginning of my philosophical studies, I focus on the main issues that have guided my teaching and research: Time, Death, and Nothingness, all of which take place in the domain of what I have called “negative philosophy”. My first interest was in the problem of language and logic in their relation to temporality, a special privilege being granted in this respect to poetry; subsequently I concentrated my work on the thematic of death and finitude, in order to show that mourning and relation to absence are what establish a fundamental difference between the human being and the animal; and finally, the critique of Western ontology has brought me to concentrate my research on Eastern thinking, with a special engagement with the thematic of nothingness in Indian and Japanese Buddhism. All my work in philosophy has been guided by Heidegger’s question of the relation between Being and Time.

The article discusses three research projects that I may never undertake: (1) a genealogy of Nietzsche interpretations devolving from Bataille and Heidegger; (2) a discussion of Derrida’s strange mix of biology and biography in his work on Nietzsche; and (3) an account of meetings I had on various occasions with Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida.

Attention to the role of phenomenology in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is fundamental to an appreciation of the book’s progressive structure. And it is through an appreciation of this structure that it becomes apparent that the book’s engagement with phenomenology amounts to an enrichment, not a critique, of existential phenomenology, although the latter might appear to be the case at first sight, given Fanon’s rejection of certain aspects of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus.” This is demonstrated through an examination of Fanon’s references to Sartre, Günther Anders, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the book’s final crucial pages on temporality. His largely neglected relation to Karl Jaspers and the concept of historicity is also explored.

This essay explores Aristotle’s discovery of touch as the most universal and philosophical of the senses. It analyses his central insight in the De Anima that tactile flesh is a “medium not an organ,” unpacking both its metaphysical and ethical implications. The essay concludes with a discussion of how contemporary phenomenology—from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray—re-describes Aristotle’s seminal intuition regarding the model of “double reversible sensation.”

The purpose of this article is to take up the largely unthought challenge of Kant’s celebrated remark about how “two things”—the starry sky above and the moral law within—fill the mind with wonder the more one reflects upon them. After briefly discussing the role of the image of the stars in early Greek thought, and then taking account of what we know about the heavens today, I ask if we have yet come to understand just what our relation to the heavens means. The conclusion is that taking the image of the stars seriously and making the effort to understand what we see in that image humbles us. It brings us before a profound limit regarding our understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to live on the earth.

The Anthropocene has become an umbrella term for the disastrous transgression of ecological safety boundaries by human societies. The impact of this new reality is yet to be fully registered by political theorists. In an attempt to recalibrate the categories of political thought, this article brings Hannah Arendt’s framework of The Human Condition (labor, work, action) into the gravitational pull of the Anthropocene and current knowledge about the Earth System. It elaborates the historical emergence of our capacity to “act in the mode of laboring” during fossil-fueled capitalist modernity, a form of agency relating to our collectively organized laboring processes reminiscent of the capacity of modern sciences to “act into nature” discussed by Arendt. I argue that once read from an energy/ecology-centric perspective, The Human Condition can help us make sense of the Anthropocene predicament, and rethink the modes of collectively organizing the activities of labor, work, and action.

Over the years, many scholars have focused on the hierarchical and overpowering influence of Martin Heidegger upon Hannah Arendt’s thought. This view follows the stereotype concerning philosophical influence in which an all-knowing teacher affects the thought of the student, particularly if the student is a woman. In this paper, I argue that the story of philosophical influence is more complicated. In this case, the biographical archive establishes how Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt mutually influenced one another throughout their lives and careers. This evidence contests the typical view of philosophical influence which is hierarchical and often gendered and suggests a new model for understanding philosophical influences as dynamic and reciprocal.

Arendt was famously dismissive of the work of psychologists, claiming that they did nothing more than reveal the pervasive ugliness and monotony of the psyche. If we want to know who people are, she argued, we should observe what they do and say rather than delving into the turmoil of their inner lives; if we want to understand humanity, we would be better off reading Oedipus Rex than hearing about someone’s Oedipus complex. The rejection has a certain coherence in the context of her understanding of public life as the realm of appearance and opinion, but examining it through the specific question of ugliness complicates that understanding. While beauty invites us to contemplate the world and admire it, ugliness repels our attention and sows the seed of a worry that the world might not want to be known. Working with Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, the Kant lectures and a striking Denktagebuch entry in which she reacts with revulsion to Matisse’s Heads of Jeannette, I argue that Arendt’s response to the ugly psyche requires a re-examination of the sensus communis. If the psyche does not want to be known, and if not all points of view are open to imaginative occupation, the ideal and practice of enlarged mentality must reckon with a right to opacity.

In this paper, I use Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of noesis and noema to investigate the connection between experience and place, a relation which I call “geographical experience,” using a term coined by Edward Relph. Following the correlative structure of lived experience, geographical experience is enabled by the lived body as the noetic part and place as the respective noematic part. Both parts belong together necessarily. However, in this experiential field, distortions and an eluding aspect of place appear in the relationship between body and place. These distortions point to an aspect of geographical experience that cannot be fully grasped by the noetic-noematic structure of experience. They indicate that the reality of place is not completely constituted by this correlative structure but nevertheless becomes apparent in and through it.

This article argues that Arendt’s rich account of the political necessarily involves an implicit, but never fully worked out, phenomenological articulation of justice in her work. Arendt’s unique articulation of the role of judgment in political action provides us with the outline of an Arendtian principle of justice that relieves the tension between idealist and realist theories of justice. Building on this role of judgment, I aim to emphasize the phenomenological premise of identifying the conditions for the possibility of the political in empirico-historical events rooted in her ideas of plurality and freedom. By showing that, for Arendt, justice is a phenomenon like power and equality, we can make progress on an implicit account of justice in her work. Taking seriously Arendt’s articulation of freedom-manifesting and principled political action, I will show that a principle of justice guides political action based on political judgment that is affectively oriented to the world.

This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to recent debate concerning the urgency of Martin Heidegger’s original ethics. To this end, I turn to Arendt’s existential interpretation of birth as this takes shape in her discourse on the miracle. Though recent commentators have criticized Arendt’s emphasis on the miracle, I argue that she deepens a conversation about birth that Dennis Schmidt, following Jacques Derrida, has set in motion in his efforts to contribute to a more original ethics. Whereas Schmidt prioritizes the helplessness of the newborn, Arendt’s interpretation of the miracle suggests that birth reminds us not simply of our responsibility to help the helpless, but also of our responsibility to prepare the world for the incalculable possibilities of the newcomer. In this, I argue that Arendt brings into focus the ground of our responsibility to make space in the world for what cannot be reduced and decided on in advance by calculative procedure, thereby opening new paths to thinking the task of original ethics.

This paper aims to explore and expand Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the body as a mass as he drafted it in his “On the Soul” lecture. He conceptualizes the soul as the (however minimal) reflection of the fact that we have (or we are) a body, thus the conception of the body as a mass may offer possibilities to think the body outside or prior to this reflection. In the article, I expand on three types of bodies. The first of these possibilities is an abstracted body Nancy ascribed to St. Augustine, a body which has been criticized by feminist scholars like Judith Butler. The second one is a hypothetical pre-body proposed by the object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman that may have existed before the actual body emerges. The last one is the disintegrated rotting body in two different contexts: European baroque imagery and asubha kammaṭṭhāna, a Thai meditational practice. All three types of bodies-as-a-mass are legitimate conceptualizations of what Nancy indicates. However, the mass quality is the very nonconceptuality, which is therefore the ultimate outcome that I had to reach.

The doctrine of the pregivenness of the world features prominently in Husserl’s numerous phenomenological analyses and descriptions of the role the world plays in our experience. Properly evaluating its function within the overall system of transcendental phenomenology is, however, by no means a straightforward task, as evidenced by many manuscripts from the 1930s. These detail various epistemological and metaphysical difficulties and potential paradoxes encumbering the notion of the pre-given world. This paper contends that some of these difficulties can be alleviated by revisiting Husserl’s late concept of the earth and, more specifically, disclosing its transcendental function in the constitution of pregivenness. To test this claim, I turn to Husserl’s 1931 manuscript describing the paradox of “the originary acquisition of the world.” I argue that the paradox is dissolved by introducing the transcendental-phenomenological concept of the earth.

This article analyzes the complex relation of phenomenology and literature in the work of Husserl and Derrida. In the first part, I show that the limited ideality of the literary object necessarily situates it in a derivative region of phenomenology. In the second part, however, I problematize the regional status of literature by elaborating a brief but important footnote in which Husserl broadens the concept of literature to embrace all cultural products whatsoever. Yet, because even this broadened concept of literature ultimately remains secondary for the phenomenologist, it only redoubles and ratifies the submission of literature to the more ideal objectivities of mathematical disciplines like geometry. The third part, finally, mobilizes Derrida’s notion of “dissemination,” prepared in and unintelligible apart from his early engagement with Husserlian phenomenology, in order to broach a notion of literature that the phenomenologist can neither circumscribe nor describe.

This essay imagines the shape a phenomenology of betrayal would assume at the limits of phenomenology. With Caravaggio’s 1602 painting Cattura di Cristo for an aesthetic backdrop, I consider the paradoxical structure of betrayal with its interwoven strands of a surplus disclosure and a breach of trust. I go on to elaborate the relation of this complex term, at once positive and negative, to time, conceptuality, and truth. Ultimately, I am interested in how betrayal as a limit of phenomenology, where the coherence of intentionality and its correlations or of intuition and its fulfillments break down, underwrites the very possibility of phenomenological endeavor.

This paper will discuss how the theological turn within phenomenology has contributed to the further development of discussions concerning Husserl’s distinction between the lived body (Leib) of the “flesh” and the extrinsically manifest “seen” body (Körper) by re-appropriating Christianity’s emphasis upon incarnation, as exemplified in the work of Michel Henry and Emmanuel Falque. For Henry, an additional “reduction to the flesh” must be enacted in order to overcome the dualistic opposition between “phenomenal body” on the one hand, and the living medium of flesh on the other, for the sake of returning to the original givenness of life. Yet, Falque criticizes Henry’s position as a kind of monism, just as problematic as the very dichotomy which it aims to criticize. Falque argues instead that the flesh must always be incorporated, “given back” to the body as a unity, possessing not only affect and life, but also solidity and visibility.

We have no other experience of God but the human experience, claims Emmanuel Falque. We – human beings – are in the world. Whatever we do, whatever we think and whatever we experience happens in the world and is mediated by the manner of the world. This also includes religious experience. Reflection on the possibility of religious experience – the experience of God – suggests that the world is interrupted by someone or something that is not of the world. The Christian worldview makes the tension explicit, which is perhaps why theology neglects the concept and fails in any proper sense to address the world. Through following the phenomenologist Jan Patočka, critiquing the theologian Johann B. Metz and exploring the theological turn in phenomenology, I will face the challenge and argue for a genuine engagement with the world as a theological problem.

Though the problem of conceptual idolatry has captivated contemporary scholarship on the relationship between philosophy and theology, these discussions’ doctrinal consequences remain underdeveloped. I intervene in these debates by engaging and elucidating Martin Luther’s critique of scholastic metaphysics, a critique which foregrounds ontotheology’s spiritual and ecclesial detriments. Luther’s reforming works, from his pivotal 1525 De servo arbitrio to his last major project, the 1545 Genesis commentaries, reveal how a metaphysical theology based on natural reason leads to Pelagianism by generalizing faith to a rational conceptual norm, the moral Law. Returning, however, to Scripture’s “grammar” – which, when read plainly (simpliciter), deconstructs natural reason’s vanity – allows us to encounter Christ ‘in person’ rather than in the concept. Luther thus suggests sola scriptura as a method for resisting ontotheology, but with dramatic dogmatic consequences, such as justification by faith alone. These consequences complicate modernity’s, and especially modern philosophy’s, theological origins and implications.