John Manoussakis

In the spring of 2019, the enigmatic philosopher John Panteleimon Manoussakis was invited to Fenwick University to give a series of prestigious lectures revolving around the Psalmist's question Quid est Homo? What is man? After delivering the lectures, Manoussakis abruptly disappeared from the public eye and has not been seen since. Now, for the first time, these dazzling Fenwick Lectures are being made available thanks to the dedicated work of the University's longtime archivist, Louis Light. In the pages of this book, readers will find Manoussakis at his best: erudite, insightful, in possession of the finest wit of his day. Indeed, if there had been any doubt, The Fenwick Lectures prove that Manoussakis deserves to be hailed as one of the great geniuses of the 21st century.

This paper explores the concept of the stranger within the framework of Greek mythology, particularly through the lens of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. It analyzes the relationship between identity, hospitality, and desire, emphasizing that the stranger represents both a social and existential enigma. The narrative reveals that for one to arrive at self-discovery and desire, a confrontation with one's origins and the societal laws governing hospitality is essential. The stranger's anonymity signifies a lack of legal and linguistic identity, which is crucial in understanding their role within the community.

The dialogue between Richard Kearney, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Marion delves into the implications of philosophical hermeneutics in the wake of significant events such as 9/11. It explores how individuals interpret reality through the lens of pre-understanding while embracing a methodological suspension of belief to widen perspectives. The discussion highlights the nature of saturated phenomena, emphasizing that as understanding deepens, these phenomena can either transform into ordinary objects or remain profoundly saturated, reflecting the complex dynamics of epistemological inquiry.

The original hermeneutics was theological, that is, theology was the origin of hermeneutics. This chapter examines the relationship between theology and hermeneutics so as to demonstrate how the origin of hermeneutics and thereby its character, regardless of its object, could not have been anything but theological. This can only be done if the remarks that fulfill this double imperative by being as much an exposition on theology as on hermeneutics. Christological hermeneutics are permeated with the paradox of affirming both continuity and discontinuity, both communion and difference. The Trinitarian affirmation of history assumes a particular significance as soon as one can turn to the hermeneutical site par excellence, namely, the Eucharist. The Greek term martyrion signifies witness, testimony, and also martyrdom. The testimonial character of testimony implies and necessitates an Other and even a Third, inscribing, the act of hermeneutics within a witnessing community that is founded upon such testimonies.

The Ethics of Time" explores a rather uncharted field in philosophy, namely the ethical implications of time. It does so by utilizing the resources of phenomenology and hermeneutics. On the one hand, its rigorous analyses of such phenomena as waiting, memory, and the body are carried out phenomenologically, while on the other hand, it engages in a hermeneutical reading of such classical texts as, Augustine's Confessions and Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, among others. Nevertheless, this book makes a claim to originality, as it does not provide a commentary on any single text or thinker. Even though a strictly philosophical endeavour, this book engages literature, theology and the arts more generally. It takes seriously phenomenology's claim of a consciousness both constituting time and being constituted by time. This claim has some important implications for the "ethical" self or, rather, for the ways in which such a self informed by time, might come to understand anew the problems of imperfection and ethical goodness.

Unconscious Incarnations considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, bringing Freud and Lacan into conversation with continental philosophy to explore the heterogeneity of embodied life. By doing so, the body is no longer merely an object of scientific inquiry but also a lived body, a source of excessive intuition and affectivity, and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality. The contributors to this volume consist of philosophers, psychoanalytic scholars, and practitioners whose interdisciplinary explorations reformulate traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as trauma, healing, desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. Collectively, they build toward the conclusion that phenomenologies of embodiment move psychoanalytic theory and practice away from representationalist models and toward an incarnational approach to psychic life. Under such a carnal horizon, trauma manifests as wounds and scars, therapy as touch, subjectivity as bodily boundedness, and the unconscious 'real' as an excessive remainder of flesh. Unconscious incarnations signal events where the unsignifiable appears among signifiers, the invisible within the visible, and absence within presence. In sum: where the flesh becomes word and the word retains its flesh. Unconscious Incarnations seeks to evoke this incarnational approach in order to break through tacit taboos toward the body in psychology and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars and clinical psychologists.

Given the resurgence of eschatological thought in contemporary theology and the continued relevance of phenomenology in philosophy, this book brings together leading thinkers such as Lacoste, Romano, Kearney and Hart to explore the ways in which these two seemingly unrelated disciplines illuminate each other. Through a series of phenomenological analyses of key eschatological concepts and detailed readings in some of the key figures of both disciplines, this text reveals that phenomenology and eschatology are fundamentally inter-related, and that neither can be fully understood without the other: without eschatology, phenomenology would not have developed the ethical and temporal aspects that characterize it today; without phenomenology, eschatology would remain relegated to the sidelines of serious theological discourse. Along the way, such diverse themes as time, death, parousia, and the call are re-examined and redefined.

In this essay we attempt a redefining of the phenomenological method as this has been developed mainly through three ''reductions'' 1 represented by three thinkers whose work advanced phenomenological research in novel ways: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Marion. Our rehearsal of the phenomenological tradition aims at formulating a set of controversial questions: Is it, perhaps, time for a fourth reduction that would better serve the sensibilities of the so-called phenomenology of the apparent? And if so, what might be its guiding principles, its ways of operating, its scope and aim? Such a fourth reduction, we believe, would not seek to overcome or discard the preceding movements of reduction; rather, it would strive to complete them by rehearsing, retrieving, and repeating them. In some sense, a fourth reduction could be a corrective recapitulation of the transcendent, ontological, and dosological 2 reductions. In the following pages we will try to flesh out what the basic principles of a fourth reduction might be by clarifying further the definition of the prosopon and its pertinence for a phenomenology of the experience of God. Husserl's transcendental reduction called for a return ''to the things themselves,'' where consciousness refocuses on the phenomena as they appear in themselves and by themselves (eidetically), cutting through, as it were, the layers of preassigned signification that common usage has accumulated over them.

Near is andDifficult to grasp, the God.Religion, too, perhaps religion even more, seems to be “near” enough; for it is such proximity, it would seem, that allows us to make all kinds of statements about it—whether in defense of it or against it. Yet were we to be asked, “What is religion?” and what makes an experience “religious,” or rather, what makes us append this characterization to any particular experience, we would find that, in Hölderlin’s words, religion is “difficult to grasp”. To paraphrase one famous passage: “We know perfectly well what we mean when we speak of [religion] and understand just as well when we hear someone else refer to it. What, then, is [religion]? If no one asks me, I...

This paper traces the seminal notion of khora back to its birthplace text of Plato's Timaeus. At the same time, it develops a critique of Jacques Derrida's reading of khora in the context of apophatism, or negative theology. John Caputo's reading as well as Richard Kearney's criticism of the latter are presented and discussed in this text. Finally, the article suggests that the image of khora could provide continental philosophy with an example of wliat the author calls "Hermeneutics of Hyphenation", where an attempt to overcome the binary structure of traditional metaphysics, especially in our thinking of God, is accomplished. /// O presente artigo traça a genealogia da noção seminal de khora até ao seu local de nascimento no Timeu de Platão. Para além disso, o autor apresenta uma crítica da leitura que Jacques Derrida faz da noção de khora no contexto do apofatistmo, ou teologia negativa. A leitura que desta noção faz John Caputo bem como a crítica que desta por sua vez faz Ri-chard Kearney são igualmente apresentadas e discutidas no presente texto. Por fim, o autor sugere que a imagem de khora pode dotar a filosofia continental europeia com um exemplo daquilo a que neste texto se designa por "Hermenêutica da hifenização", na qual se procede justamente a uma tentativa de superação da estrutura binária própría da metafísica tradicional, particularmente no que se refere ao nosso pensamento acerca de Deus.

In recent years, Richard Kearney has emerged as a leading figure in the field of continental philosophy, widely recognized for his work in the areas of philosophical and religious hermeneutics, theory and practice of the imagination, and political thought. This much-anticipated--and long overdue--study is the first to reflect the full range and impact of Kearney's extensive contributions to contemporary philosophy. The book opens with Kearney's own "prelude" in which he traces his intellectual itinerary as it traverses the three imaginaries explored in the volume: the dialogical, the political, and the narrative. The interviews that follow the first section allow readers to listen in on conversations between Kearney and some of the most interesting and respected thinkers of our time--Noam Chomsky, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricouer, and Martha Nussbaum--as they reveal new and unexpected aspects of their thought on stories and mourning, ethics and narrative, terror and religion, intellectuals and ideology. The next section, on the political imaginary, looks at Kearney's distinctive contribution to the political situation in Ireland and in Europe more generally; and in the last, on narrative, writers including David Wood, Terry Eagleton, and Mark Dooley focus on Kearney's novels as instances of narrative theory put into literary practice. Concluding with Kearney's postscript, an essay on "Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust," the volume comes full circle, encompassing the full extent of Richard Kearney's engagement and offerings as a philosopher