John Caruana

Massimo Cacciari’s re????lections on crisis (krisis) and its implications for Europe’s future are more urgent than ever. This article traces his shift from an early Marxist view of crisis as a historical condition to be overcome to his later engagement with pensiero negativo (negative thought), where crisis is seen as an ineradicable fissure at the heart of reality. Drawing on thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schopenhauer, as well as religious and mythological sources, Cacciari argues that crisis must be embraced rather than resolved. He extends this understanding of crisis beyond philosophy to his political re????lections, portraying Europe as an unresolved paradox—its identity shaped by the perpetual interplay of difference and belonging. Rejecting both reactionary nostalgia and technocratic homogenization, Cacciari envisions a Europe that must navigate its uncertainties through intellectual and cultural openness.

Modernist aesthetic theory has, since its emergence, often displayed indifference or even hostility toward Christianity. One of the most striking instances of this tendency in film criticism is found in the reception of André Bazin. Despite being one of the most influential figures in the history of film theory, Bazin’s frequent recourse to Christian imagery and ideas has frequently been treated with discomfort—by both his critics and defenders alike. These responses, however, tend to obscure the theological and philosophical background that informs Bazin’s references. His thinking is deeply marked by a Franciscan tradition that extends from St. Francis of Assisi and John Duns Scotus to the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier. Central to this lineage is a spiritual and philosophical intuition about the need to be fully present to the singularities of the world. Reading Bazin through this lens reveals not simply the influence of Christianity on his work, but more profoundly, the way in which a Franciscan philosophy of presence and love animates his philosophy of cinema. For Bazin, cinema’s revelatory power lies in its capacity to disclose, through attention, patience, and fidelity to the real, the presence of both visible and invisible dimensions of existence.

_Explores a growing number of films and filmmakers that challenge the strict boundaries between belief and unbelief._ For some time now, thinkers across the humanities and social sciences have increasingly called into question the once-dominant view of the relationship between modernity and secularism, prompting some to speak of a "postsecular turn." Until now, film studies has largely been silent about this development, even though cinema itself has been a major vehicle for such reflection. This fact became inescapable in 2011 when Terrence Malick's _The Tree of Life_ and Lars von Trier's _Melancholia_ were released within days of each other. While these two audacious and controversial films present seemingly opposite perspectives-the former a thoughtful meditation on faith, the latter a portrayal of nontriumphalist atheism-together they raise critical questions about transcendence and immanence in modern life. These films are, however, only the most conspicuous of a growing body of works that call forth similar and related questions-what this collection aptly calls "postsecular cinema." Taking the nearly simultaneous release of _The Tree of Life_ and _Melancholia_ as its starting point and framing device, this pioneering collection sets out to establish the idea of postsecular cinema as a distinct body of films and a viable critical category. Adopting a film-philosophy approach, one group of essays examines Malick's and von Trier's films, while another looks at works by Chantal Akerman, Denys Arcand, the Dardenne brothers, and John Michael McDonagh, among others. The volume closes with two important interviews with Luc Dardenne and Jean-Luc Nancy that invite us to reflect more deeply on some of the central concerns of postsecular cinema.

Massimo Cacciari’s re????lections on crisis (krisis) and its implications for Europe’s future are more urgent than ever. This article traces his shift from an early Marxist view of crisis as a historical condition to be overcome to his later engagement with pensiero negativo (negative thought), where crisis is seen as an ineradicable fissure at the heart of reality. Drawing on thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schopenhauer, as well as religious and mythological sources, Cacciari argues that crisis must be embraced rather than resolved. He extends this understanding of crisis beyond philosophy to his political re????lections, portraying Europe as an unresolved paradox—its identity shaped by the perpetual interplay of difference and belonging. Rejecting both reactionary nostalgia and technocratic homogenization, Cacciari envisions a Europe that must navigate its uncertainties through intellectual and cultural openness.

Lévinas’s harsh criticisms of the sacred have irked not just his critics but even some who sympathize with his work. Taken at face value, some of Lévinas’s comments concerning the sacred appear prejudicial towards non-monotheistic religions. But a closer reading of his analysis of the sacred shows that his preoccupation with the sacred has to do with a questionable “temptation” or disposition found in every human being. Drawing on the insights of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Lévy-Bruhl, Lévinas shows how this temptation involves a primitive wish to escape one’s responsibilities as a human being. For Lévinas, the phenomenon of the sacred promotes the illusion of a direct and immediate experience of the absolute or the Infinite. Genuine transcendence, for Lévinas, is possible only within the ethical drama of self and Other. The apex of human life involves not the eclipsing of the self—the fundamental motivation behind the sacred—but a heightening of the self’s radical uniqueness that only moral engagement makes possible.

The cinema of the Dardenne brothers represents a new kind of cinema, one that challenges a number of our conventional ways of thinking about the distinction between religion and secularism, belief and unbelief. Their films explore the intricacies of spiritual and ethical transformations as they are experienced within embodied, material life. These features of their cinema will be examined primarily through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the imbrication of the drama of existence and the ethical intrigue of self and Other. The work of the Dardenne brothers can be understood as an attempt to express what I describe as a “faith without faith”—a recognition of the absolute centrality of belief for the development of a responsible subject but in the absence of a traditional faith in a personal deity.

The motif of the ‘drama of being’ is a dominant thread that spans the entirety of Levinas's six decades of authorship. As we will see, from the start of his writing career, Levinas consciously frames the tension between ontology and ethics in a dramatic form. A careful exposition of this motif and other related theatrical metaphors in his work–-such as ‘intrigue,’ ‘plot,’ and ‘scene’–-can offer us not only a better appreciation of the evolution of Levinas's thought, but also of his proper place within the western philosophical tradition. Levinas accuses western philosophers of being exclusively attuned to what he calls the ‘drama of existence.’ And even then, philosophers have eluded the implications of the tragic fatalism that define this drama. Philosophers are generally unaware of an ‘other scene’ that radically alters the fatalistic logic of the ontological drama. Levinas calls this other scene the ‘ethical intrigue.’.

Levinas argues that tragic descriptions---from the Greeks to Nietzsche and Heidegger---rarely dare to draw the full implications of asserting that being is tragic. At the same time that it accurately attests to the irremediable character of being, the tragic position proposes a remedy that presupposes the self's capacity for transformation and meaningfulness. Heidegger, for example, holds that Dasein possesses as its highest possibility the capacity to embrace its finitude. For Levinas, however, the self is mired in a hopeless state of perpetual ambivalence---oscillating between moments of enjoyment and a horror of being. If the self lacks the means to rectify its condition in being, what is the genuine source of meaningfulness and purpose in our lives? Levinas attempts to respond to this question by inquiring into what he dubs the Desire for transcendence. Though western philosophy has at times voiced this Desire---for example, Plato's notion of a 'good beyond being' or Descartes's conception of the idea of the Infinite---ultimately, the philosophical tradition betrays the Good, because transcendence is almost always conceived in relation to anonymous being. For Levinas, the true 'site' of the Good is the face or presence of the other human being that speaks to me directly. The deepest level of the human drama takes place in what he calls the "ethical intrigue" that binds the self to the Other. The Other's plea for me to address the ruins of being affects me immediately. Integrity or moral wholeness involves the mature capacity to accept bad conscience---which always bears the Other's imprint---as fundamental to being human. The capacity to be responsible necessitates desacralization. Levinas awakens us to the importance of uprooting the sacred impulse at both the social and the individual level. The sacred is the attempt to bypass the ethical intrigue for direct communion with a supposed supernatural world. The sacred experience, like the tragic position, ultimately promotes moral evasiveness by undermining the Other's call to be responsible.

While much has been written about Levinas's conception of ethics, very little has been said about the connection between ethics and holiness in his work. Yet, throughout much of his corpus, Levinas consistently links the two. The first part of my article addresses the important distinction that Levinas establishes between the sacred (le sacré) and holiness (la sainteté). According to Levinas, several influential thinkers conflate these two categories. Holiness, Levinas suggests, represents a kind of antidote to the sacred. The second part examines the various ways that holiness is manifest in ethicality. The key, I suggest, for properly understanding the link between ethical regard and sanctification revolves around an appreciation of Levinas's frequent appeal to the notion of straightforwardness (droiture). For Levinas, the complex relations that bind the self, Other, and God, involve essential conditions of rectitude and uprightness