on the border of phenomenology and theology
Therefore, the thesis of a theological turn in French phenomenology
cannot be held to be generally valid, at least not without serious
qualifications. It is, however, true that a new interest in theological
problems — and in the problem of theology in general — is charac-
teristic of the approach to phenomenology that has been developed in
France since the 1980s. This assertion is true of the thinkers whom
Janicaud describes as “our new theologians,” but it is also true of other
phenomenologists who cannot be described in these terms. It is true
even of Marc Richir, whose concern with “political theology,” whose
enquiry into the “metaphysical and religious” meaning of a historical
phenomenon like the French Revolution,^19 and whose quest of an
“incarnation of community”^20 in modern ages is, as he himself points
out, related to a “theological problem” — even if only in a “very
enlarged and relatively undetermined sense of the word.”^21 Authors
like Henry and Marion, on the other hand, present works which are
theologically relevant also in a narrower and more precisely determined
sense of the word. However, the sense ascribed by these two thinkers
to theology is itself quite unorthodox and far from being identical
with the traditional one. It is a radically renewed sense of theology — a
sense made discernible only by phenomenology.
The following considerations are aimed at showing what this
renewal of theology by Marion and Henry amounts to. It is common
to both thinkers to bracket or suspend the transcendence of God and to
transpose theology on the basis of a radical idea of immanence. This idea
of immanence, made plausible by the phenomenological method, is
utilized by both thinkers in order to liberate theology from the impact of
the metaphysical tradition. This tendency is perceptible as early as
Marion’s Dieu sans l’être, a work published in 1982. That is why I begin
the present study with an analysis of this book. It is in the second part
of my paper that I shall consider, then, Henry’s turn to Christianity
in the 1990s.
- Marc Richir,. Marc Richir, Du sublime en politique, Paris: Payot, 1990, 468.
- Ibid., 476.. Ibid., 476.
- Ibid., 83.. Ibid., 83.