jonna bornemark & hans ruinwhere philosophy and religion overlap, not least in questions on ethics
and justice. In his analysis of love and the gift he could not avoid
finding such overlaps between religious and philosophical language.
Joy suggests that the discussions of the relation between phenomenology
and religion would benefit from further readings of Ricoeur.
Both love and the gift are recurring themes in the turn to theology,
and are central to the phenomenology of Marion. In her article Rosa
Maria Lupo discusses Marion’s conception of God as an erotic phe-
nomena, and thus as the saturated phenomenon par excellence. This
saturated phenomenon, which exceeds every egological intuition,
shows itself as unconditioned and irreducible, and as a precondition
for all subjectivity. It is a phenomenon that can never be reduced to
the ego. Such a phenomenology thus brings about an inversion in the
structure of intentionality, where the given turns out to be primordial
to every ego. In the phenomenon of love the giving is the primary
event, a giving from a “God without Being”.
The relation between phenomenology and religion also has strong
Nietzschean roots. Ludger Hagedorn follows a Nietzschean line of
thinking and finds a twofold potentiality in religion: On one hand it
has a tendency to close itself off from worldly questions and to block
further questioning of its attempts to safeguard its own essence. But
this is a tendency that is also present in modernity. On the other hand
religion may allow us to rediscover the unthought side of rationality,
since religion can never be reduced to a rational totalizing of certain
worldviews. Here Hagedorn suggests that Jan Patočka offers a way to
develop the idea of transcendence as an undoing of pre-given orders and
static interpretations of the world. But this can only be done through
accepting otherness as an integral and irreducible part of one’s own
identity.
The dangers of bringing religion back into the philosophical discus-
sion are emphasized in the contribution of Fredrika Spindler. She
takes her starting-point in Gilles Deleuze and offers a critique of phe-
nomenology, and an alternative understanding of immanence and
transcendence. With Deleuze, she understands the plane of immanence
as the ground of all philosophy in its activity of creating concepts, an
immanence without any need for transcendent values. Instead of con-
trasting immanence with transcendence, she contrasts it with chaos,