Bradley Onishi

In 2013, the first reader of Jean-Luc Marion’s works appeared, Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings, meticulously edited by his friend and colleague Kevin Hart. Yet, if the appearance of volume marked Marion’s status as France’s most influential living philosopher, Hart’s Kingdoms of God marks the beginning of a systematic theology long in the making. In addition to serving as the prologemenon to his planned systematics, the work also serves to differentiate Hart’s phenomenological theology from Marion’s phenomenology of revelation and doctrine of revelation through the rendering of what Hart calls the basilaic reduction, on the basis of which Hart builds a twofold theological criticism of Marion. He first criticizes Marion’s claim that revelation can gain phenomenological status like ordinary phenomena, and second contests the notion that revelation is always characterized by a saturation that bedazzles its receiver. I explore each thinker’s approach to the relationship between philosophy and theology, using their engagements with the works of Jacques Derrida and Karl Barth as points of comparison in order to contextualize Hart’s theological criticisms of Marion. I conclude by arguing that Hart’s, rather than Marion’s, approach to the relationship between philosophy and theology corresponds to the core concerns of the second generation of the “theological turn” of French phenomenology.

Discussion of the posthuman has emerged in a wide set of fields through a diverse set of thinkers including Donna Haraway, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, N. Katherine Hayles, and Francis Fukuyama, just to name a few. Despite his extensive critique of technology, commentators have not explored the fruitfulness of Heidegger's work for deciphering the various strands of posthumanism recently formulated in response to contemporary technological developments. Here, I employ Heidegger's critique of technology to trace opposing visions of the posthuman, visions that are both tied intimately to new information technologies. For those seeking to extend humanist ideals, information technologies are employed to extend the vision of an ultra-humanist view of a ‘scientific posthuman’ that dangerously understands the body to be a forfeitable nuisance, rather than an inherent aspect of being human. Along Heideggerian lines, thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles and Thomas Carlson have developed an alternative trajectory related to Dasein's Being-in-the-world. This trajectory posits the self as constituted by a lack or abyss, enabling the formulation of a ‘mystical posthuman,’ celebrating, rather than forfeiting, humanity's embodied existence