Cassandra Falke

This article investigates the role of love in revelation, building on Jean-Luc Marion’s assertion that love precedes and forms us beyond knowledge and being. I argue that love has the capacity to manifest the kingdom of God, although it is never immediately revealed that we are part of such a manifestation. The article begins with a definition of love as primary, constitutive, divine, and always new. It then addresses manifestation and revelation in relation to the kingdom of God, looking closely at the parable of the sower (Mark 4:1–20) and the passage in Isaiah to which it refers (Is. 6:9–10). The article concludes by suggesting that when people act in love they manifest the kingdom of God. This claim extends Kevin Hart’s writing on the kingdom of God accepting, in contrast to Hart, Tamsin Jones’s understanding of divine action as preceding kenosis and enabling epektasis.

Some fundamental aspects of the lived body only become evident when it breaks down through illness, weakness or pain. From a phenomenological point of view, various breakdowns are worth analyzing for their own sake, and discussing them also opens up overlooked dimensions of our bodily constitution. This book brings together different approaches that shed light on the phenomenology of the lived body—its normality and abnormality, health and sickness, its activity as well as its passivity. The contributors integrate phenomenological insights with discussions about bodily brokenness in philosophy, theology, medical science and literary theory. Phenomenology of the Broken Body demonstrates how the broken body sheds fresh light on the nuances of embodied experience in ordinary life and ultimately questions phenomenology’s preunderstanding of the body.

Phenomenological literary criticism has long taken the one-on-one exchange with an other as the model for thinking about the reader-to-text relationship. However, new novels portraying genocides and civil wars are more likely to position readers as witnesses. Drawing on Jean-Luc Marion’s description of the subject as witness as well as works by Kelly Oliver and Jacques Derrida, this article offers a phenomenological description of the reader as witness. As witness, the reader is situated both by the literary text and also by his or her particular embodied and intersubjective relations to the world. Constituted and no longer constituting, the reader/subject as witness finds herself a site in which other’s decisions have already been made, and her responsibility arises from the decisions she makes possible for others in the future.

The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything-more than cognition and more than being itself. Cassandra Falke shows how reading can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in love´s habits-attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Confounding our expectations, literature equips us for the confounding events of love, which, Falke suggests, are not rare and fleeting, but rather constitute the most meaningful and durable part of our everyday life.