C. Marie

Abstract:This paper sheds light on the relation of mutual exclusion and implication that binds Derridean ethics with the figure of God. In rupture with existing scholarship that categorizes Derridean ethics as either radically atheistic or dialectically pertaining to the Judeo-Christian moral order, I put forward the argument that Derrida’s ethical thinking is best considered outside of the dialectics of a/theism. I demonstrate that, far from plainly disproving or falling within the bounds of existing religious discourses, Derrida inaugurates a new way of relating to the absolute – whether it be named God, the infinitely other, or justice – beyond nihilism and idealism, atheism and theism, or more precisely between the two, in a space Derrida refers to as the space of spectrality. I thereby hope to finally do justice to the subtlety of Derridean ethics and foster the recognition that, twenty years after Derrida’s death, his ghosts can be of use in tackling some of the greatest ethical and political challenges of the twenty-first century, including the pursuit of peaceful pluralism in the context of rampant violence carried out in the name of God.

The question of the body spans across the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, from Noli me tangere, to Corpus and Jacques Derrida’s dialogue with Nancy in On Touching. In constant conversation with Christianity (“This is my body” or Dis-Enclosure), corporeality in Nancy can be summarised using the figure of the “exposed body (corps ex-peausé)”: a demonstration of the surface of the skin (peau) and an exposition of the self to the other in the sense of a “staging” (Corpus). In my work, the concept of the “spread body,” situated between Descartes’ “extended body” and Husserl’s “lived body,” is also one of a confrontation with the “This is my body” of Christianity (The Wedding Feast of the Lamb). In confronting one with the other, it is a matter of seeing how my expansion of the body, says something different than, or articulates differently, Jean-Luc Nancy’s exposition of the body, this time drawn from the biological side though nevertheless without ceasing to be intentional. It is certainly a matter of philosophy, but also of ethics, in the possibility of describing such a body, especially in the suffering situation of palliative care (Ethics of the Spread Body).

This paper seeks to elucidate Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s shared understanding of faith by providing a phenomenology of faith. This is accomplished by applying Nancy’s conception of experience to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, of which this paper thus offers a phenomenological reading in order to analyse the experience of faith its pseudonymous author relates. In doing so, however, we will discover that faith belongs to a realm of experience that is more fundamental than, and thus takes priority over, the lived-experience of classical phenomenology: it is an experience of life as a whole that as such forms the basis on which things are subsequently lived in experience. Faith is therefore held up as the prime example of the phenomenologically primary sense of “experience”: namely, the experience in which a life lived consists, the experience of undergoing life itself; the experience that, as Nancy puts it enigmatically, is existence. Since classical phenomenology fails to think this experience that makes its lived-experiences possible, the paper suggests that phenomenology should turn itself into poetics: namely, a discourse on the creative forms of life that constitute all lived-experiences. To that end, the paper proceeds in four steps: the first step consists in an exposition of the phenomenological framework used ; the second and third steps consist in applications of said framework to Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith; the fourth and final step draws on Nancy to spell out the consequences of the preceding analysis.

This paper seeks to elucidate Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s shared understanding of faith by providing a phenomenology of faith. This is accomplished by applying Nancy’s conception of experience to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, of which this paper thus offers a phenomenological reading in order to analyse the experience of faith its pseudonymous author relates. In doing so, however, we will discover that faith belongs to a realm of experience that is more fundamental than, and thus takes priority over, the lived-experience of classical phenomenology: it is an experience of life as a whole that as such forms the basis on which things are subsequently lived in experience. Faith is therefore held up as the prime example of the phenomenologically primary sense of “experience”: namely, the experience in which a life lived consists, the experience of undergoing life itself; the experience that, as Nancy puts it enigmatically, is existence. Since classical phenomenology fails to think this experience that makes its lived-experiences possible, the paper suggests that phenomenology should turn itself into poetics: namely, a discourse on the creative forms of life that constitute all lived-experiences. To that end, the paper proceeds in four steps: the first step consists in an exposition of the phenomenological framework used ; the second and third steps consist in applications of said framework to Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith; the fourth and final step draws on Nancy to spell out the consequences of the preceding analysis.

This paper seeks to elucidate Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s shared understanding of faith by providing a phenomenology of faith. This is accomplished by applying Nancy’s conception of experience to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, of which this paper thus offers a phenomenological reading in order to analyse the experience of faith its pseudonymous author relates. In doing so, however, we will discover that faith belongs to a realm of experience that is more fundamental than, and thus takes priority over, the lived-experience of classical phenomenology: it is an experience of life as a whole that as such forms the basis on which things are subsequently lived in experience. Faith is therefore held up as the prime example of the phenomenologically primary sense of “experience”: namely, the experience in which a life lived consists, the experience of undergoing life itself; the experience that, as Nancy puts it enigmatically, is existence. Since classical phenomenology fails to think this experience that makes its lived-experiences possible, the paper suggests that phenomenology should turn itself into poetics: namely, a discourse on the creative forms of life that constitute all lived-experiences. To that end, the paper proceeds in four steps: the first step consists in an exposition of the phenomenological framework used ; the second and third steps consist in applications of said framework to Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith; the fourth and final step draws on Nancy to spell out the consequences of the preceding analysis.