8 research outputs found
Praying to a French God: liturgy, anthropology and phenomenology
No full textThis thesis aims to bring to wider attention the work of the Parisian theologian and
philosopher Jean-Yves Lacoste (part of the so-called ‘theological turn’ in French
phenomenology).
Lacoste (whose most recent work, Etre en Danger (2011), articulates what he
describes as a ‘phenomenology of the spiritual life’), has previously published
monographs in the phenomenology of liturgy (Expérience et l’absolu: Questions
disputées sur l'humanité de l'homme, 1994; ET: Experience and the Absolute:
Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, 2004); hope and eschatology (Note sur
le temps: essai sur les raisons de la mémoire et de l'espérance, 1990); philosophy and
aesthetics (Le monde et l'absence d'oeuvre, 2000); and phenomenology and theology
(Présence et parousie, 2006; Phénoménalité de Dieu, 2008). As a phenomenologist
Lacoste is concerned with investigating the human aptitude for experience; as
theologian Lacoste is interested in humanity’s potential for a relationship with the
divine, what he terms the ‘liturgical relationship’ (where ‘liturgical’ implies more than
simply worship writ large but refers instead to a specific anthropology, that of an
existence lived and conducted ‘before God’, coram Deo).
Beginning from the proposition that prayer is a theme that occurs throughout
Lacoste’s writing, the dissertation employs that as a heuristic through which to view,
interpret and critique his thought by offering a thematic study of prayer as it appears
in his published works. It will look at issues that impact upon the ‘spiritual life’ such
as boredom and fatigue, and include the following topics: ambiguity, rumour and the
absurd; utopia and fantasy; body, flesh and spirit; silence; time, anarchy and flux. The
dissertation is, in part, also an answer to the question as to what kind of theology might be written in response to and in dialogue with Lacoste, by examining some
previously overlooked themes in and influences upon his work
The Catholic Way of Death: Contemporary Reflections on Thanatology and Theology
No full texteSharp is a leading international gateway to academic publication for postgraduates. It encourages excellence in research through peer-reviewed publication and interdisciplinary exchange and enhances postgraduates' skills and employability by providing hands-on experience of journal management and editing, amongst many others.
http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/esharp/How can we adequately acknowledge the stranger in modern theology? Drawing on the work of post-Heideggerian theorist of language and death, Jacques Derrida, and his own creative re-reading of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, the Catholic theologian and phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion has attempted to reconstruct what he regards as a genuine Husserlian phenomenology; in doing so he has mapped out a phenomenology of love and a phenomenology of the (divine) gift of that love as 'being given as givenness', or a condition of life itself. In this attempt at a first philosophy he has in fact produced a work that lies on the boundary between theology and thanatology, the philosophy of our encounter with that most radical of strangers, death. In these reflections upon 'saturated phenomena' he exposes the interplay between the more traditional Christian topics of hope and death and more contemporary arguments on meaning, symbol and ritual. The Christian hope has always resided in a remembrance of death and Marion argues that the Eucharist is the site of human hope in its recollection of the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ; for him, only this crucial eucharistic move upwards and outwards can overcome the burden of Western metaphysics. This present essay will outline Marion's project and consider its value in informing our language in talking about and recognising the other
Jean-Yves Lacoste:The Experience of Transcendence
No full textThis paper will examine Lacoste’s treatment of ethics, transcendence and theology, beginning first of all with the rela¬tionship between phenomenology and transcendence in La¬coste’s work, specifically the issue of perception. As we shall see, for Lacoste, every phenomenon has the same right to be wel¬comed and described as any other: God does not differ from things in the world—both Deus and res can be semper maior. It will then discuss how, with reference to liturgy, the phenom¬enology of silence could relate to divine transcendence, ethics, and intersubjectivity
‘A Weariness of the Flesh’: Towards a Theology of Boredom and Fatigue
No full textThe aim of this volume is to break new ground in philosophical thinking on the concept of life. It captures a moment in which such thinking is regaining its force and attraction for scholars – and the relevance of thought to social, cultural, political and religious dilemmas about how and why to live.This essay follows two impulses: Jean-Yves Lacoste’s suggestion that philosophy and theology should speak about boredom and about fatigue, just as they do about anguish or joy, and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth’s contention that theological anthropology and philosophy of religion are incoherent without them. Above all, it will try and offer a tentative answer to the question as to what it means to pray when one is tired or bored. To this end, I shall begin by examining some of the traditional theological and philosophical readings of fatigue and boredom (beginning with Jewish and Christian scripture), before turning specifically to Martin Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben, and finally to recent phenomenological accounts, drawing from them some suggestions for a possible theology of boredom and fatigue
Learning to be silent: theological and philosophical reflections on silence and transcendence
No full textCulture and Transcendence: Shifting Religion and Spirituality in Philosophy, Theology, Art and Politics VU Amsterdam, 28-29th October 2010‘Libère-moi de la trop longue parole.’ (Maurice Blanchot, Le pas au-delà, 1973)
Michèle le Doeuff suggested that theology rests upon a prior silencing of philosophy; the work of Jean-Yves
Lacoste is unconcerned with any strict distinction between the disciplines where theology is an unsystematic,
fragmentary and, above all, ethical activity, reminiscent of Stoker’s account of Derrida and the fourth type of
messianic transcendence. While suffering can reduce theology to silence this does not mean that it reduces it
to nothingness: in being silenced theology finds itself reduced to its essentials: the theologia viatorum of man
and not the theology of angels; a way of existing rather than simply a province of transcendent knowledge.
Philosophy also has its own ‘moment silencieux’ in which its theorizing collapses and com-passion is perhaps
the only response. This paper examines the philosophical and theological implications of “being silent”, and
the relationship between silence and solitude, and the difficulty or even the necessity of keeping silent.
It argues that keeping silent is an immanent activity conducted in the ‘mundane reality’ of this world; an
activity of kenosis. Silence indicates the concealment of self and the individual’s withdrawal from society
and yet, in a religious or liturgical setting, one often – paradoxically – keeps silence in company, an act
which aims to reinforce human solidarity. Contemplation is, in economic terms, a “waste of time” that
confounds models of work and industry and represents the interruption of the everyday and the delimitation
of an alternative (ethical) space and time, one given over to contemplation of oneself and one another.
For Blanchot silence provided “the space of literature”: language risked destroying the singularity of being,
while preserving its being in general, which for Hegel revealed the “divine nature” of and the Cartesian
contented understanding that all thought is language. And yet ‘silence exists; “it is not death and it is not
speech”…something that is neither indifference nor discourse’, a ‘frozen analysis’ that can be suddenly
‘tempted by song’ reminiscent of the ‘Silent music, Sounding solitude, The supper that refreshes, and
deepens love’ found in Christian spirituality.
Silence has as many different possibilities as speech; although representative of Stoker’s radical second type,
through his pseudonyms Kierkegaard explored particular forms of silence. Silence is the cessation of speech,
not for the lack of anything to say, but deliberately and intentionally. Such muteness is not simply the
negation of speech; it can be an occasion for a listening that respects the integrity (finitude) of matter, the
individual, and the Other. Silence is rich and varied – and perhaps “being silent” speaks most of all about
transcendence. Silence is also then an act of ascesis, a stripping away of attitudes, mental images and ideas
that cuts across notions of radical immanence and transcendence, of a purely textual reality and into nonlinguistic
forms of culture
Les Discours Édifiants et la connaissance liturgique : Kierkegaard and a phenomenology of theological language
No full textPaper presented at Oxford Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought: International Conference on Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses 16–18 April, 2010All theologians are hypocrites. Such is the inescapable conclusion of phenomenologist and theologian Jean-Yves Lacoste's reading of Kierkegaard. Theology attempts to trap God inside an impossible prison of propositional language; Lacoste seeks an alternative in the Upbuilding Discourses, where ‘theology loses all of its didactic ambition and instead attempts to offer only an introduction to the knowledge of God’. The Discourses, suggests Lacoste, teach us how get to know him rather than telling us about God. Since the God-man, as Kierkegaard stated in Practice in Christianity, is a sign of contradiction, this truth – contra Hegel – can therefore never be directly transmitted through any human system or even be theologically “exact”. Truth (and crucially, its telling), therefore hinges upon the question of the appearance of that God-man, of his phenomenality.
This paper looks at the extent to which Kierkegaard informs Lacoste’s discussion of the phénoménalité de Dieu and how it motivates Lacoste's own “liturgical reasoning” and to a move away from the conservative paganism of the Geivert of Heidegger towards the radical Christianity of Kierkegaard.
And while Lacoste has been persuaded that Heidegger might be useful in developing a constructive liturgical theology, where the logic of love, and its affect upon us, is crucial, that same logic forms the basis for a disagreement with Kierkegaard: whilst for Kierkegaard the human-God relation occurs almost exclusively through love, Lacoste is sensitive to the partiality and plurality of our affective lives and their capacity to obscure as much as they reveal. For Lacoste, speaking about God demands that we have to enter into the field of the indirect communication, and allow that someone else had an experience of Him about which we speak – “liturgically” – (to Him) in order to have that experience ourselves; therefore to allow that words lead to a way of existing, and not simply to a manner of speaking; in short, to use language to go beyond language, reminiscent of the Philosophical Fragments, where – amongst the emphatic declarations by ‘Johannes Climacus’ that the hypothetical Guden is completely unknown – he concedes that God’s purpose ‘cannot be to walk through the world in such a way that not one single person would come to know it. Presumably he will allow something about himself to be understood’.
Lacoste, it seems, exposes the tension between Kierkegaard’s own direct and indirect communication, between the Discourses and the Fragments
