Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers

On the Border

of Phenomenology and Theology

1

lászló tengelyi

In the 1960s and 70s, phenomenology played no prevalent role. Even
Ricœur and Levinas, who, at this time, wrote some of their major
works, were largely disregarded.^2 At the end of the 1970s, Vincent
Descombes presented a survey of the past forty-five years of French
philosophy, attempting to show how the era of Sartre and Merleau-
Ponty had been replaced by an epoch of structuralism and post-
structuralism.^3 Not surprisingly, the last section of this book was
entirely consecrated to Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. We can add
also the evidence of Alan Megill’s The Prophets of Extremity, which is
centered, after the two first chapters dedicated to Nietzsche and
Heidegger, entirely upon Foucault and Derrida.^4 Since the 1980s,
however, phenomenology has become, especially in France, once more
an influential current of thought. Meanwhile, it has been largely
reshaped and altered. The first to recognize the renewal and the
transformation of phenomenology in France was Dominique Janicaud.
In 1991, more than a decade after the appearance of Descombes’s

1. The following considerations contain an abridged version of a contribution to
   Phänomenologie und Theologie, eds Klaus Held and Thomas Söding, Freiburg im
   Breisgau: Herder, 2009.


2. This is true of Manfred Frank’s Was ist Neostrukturalismus?, Frankfurt am Main:
   Suhrkamp, 1984 [1983], as well as of Jürgen Habermas’s work Der philosophische
   Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988 [1985]. In Germany,
   there is, however, at least one significant exception to this rule: Bernhard Walden-
   fels’s Phänomenologie in Frankreich, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987 [1983].


3. Cf. Vincent Descombes, Le même et l’autre. Quarante-cinq ans de philosophie
   française, Paris: Minuit, 1979.


4. Allan Megill, The Prophets of Extremity, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: Univer-
   sity of California Press, 1985.