Stephen E. Lewis

The essay discusses the March 5, 1944 "Discussion on Sin," an event that was held between French intellectual Georges Bataille and the Jesuit priest and patristics scholar Jean Daniélou, along with other important Christian and non-Christian intellectuals. I argue that the event is the best recorded wartime intellectual encounter between the founders of contestation (subsequently so important in deconstructive thought) and serious practitioners of Christianity. Aspects of the thought of French thinker Maurice Blanchot and Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar are also profiled.

While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. One might wonder whether the discipline of philosophy even recognizes love. The word _philosophy _means “love of wisdom,” but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. So where did the love go? In _The Erotic Phenomenon,_ Jean-Luc Marion asks this fundamental question of philosophy, while reviving inquiry into the concept of love itself. Marion begins his profound and personal book with a critique of Descartes’ equation of the ego’s ability to doubt with the certainty that one exists—“I think, therefore I am”—arguing that this is worse than vain. We encounter being, he says, when we first experience love: I am loved, therefore I am; and this love is the reason I care whether I exist or not. This philosophical base allows Marion to probe several manifestations of love and its variations, including carnal excitement, self-hate, lying and perversion, fidelity, the generation of children, and the love of God. Throughout, Marion stresses that all erotic phenomena, including sentimentality, pornography, and even boasts about one’s sexual conquests, stem not from the ego as popularly understood but instead from love. A thoroughly enlightening and captivating philosophical investigation of a strangely neglected subject, _The Erotic Phenomenon _is certain to initiate feverish new dialogue about the philosophical meanings of that most desirable and mysterious of all concepts—love

During the last fifteen years of his life, Jean-Louis Chrétien († 2019) pursued, across several books, an exploration of “personal identity” as figured in the works of numerous authors, primarily but not exclusively belonging to the Christian tradition. Through these books’ diverse approaches to human interiority, there runs a single guiding thread: a constant reference to the biblical notion of the heart and its relationship to human embodied speech. The book that begins this project is the 2005 study of the Christian interpretation of the Song of Songs, entitled _Symbolique du corps. La tradition chrétienne du Cantique des Cantiques_. My contribution here isolates and explicates a particularly fundamental aspect of the project: its poetics. While the subsequent books in Chrétien’s project explore the heights, the dissolution, and even the reversal of certain additional schemata of human interiority, the philosopher’s conviction nevertheless remains that the symbolic language of the body is available to speech and thought as a viable means for the construction of images of the inner life of the human being, and that this construction is not merely metaphorical but heuristic, changing the languages and concepts it engages. The commentators on the Song of Songs have irreversibly translated the biblical understanding of the human being, particularly as presented by the heart and the Pauline body of Christ, into the symbolic human body. And yet, if it is to be spoken accurately and fluently, this language of the symbolic body must be freely taken up anew, by each speaker. Chrétien’s genealogical investigation invitingly makes this case over and over again.

Among the teachings Jesus delivers in the Gospel of Matthew following the Sermon on the Mount are important instructions concerning prayer. Just before teaching the "Our Father," Jesus speaks of the "inner room" into which one must retreat in order to pray. According to Jean-Louis Chrétien's multi-volume genealogy of "figures of interiority, and the way in which interiority becomes 'subjectivity,'" this inner room is one of two key biblical starting points for tracing the development of how we think about consciousness in the West, the other being the biblical "heart" in its relation to St. Paul's "inner man." Here I focus on Chrétien's investigations of the "inner room" and other spatial topoi or schemas that Christian writers and thinkers have employed in order to figure consciousness as a space in which the human being communes intimately with God, and which later writers, both Christian and non-Christian, have overturned by vacating God, transforming this inner space of divine encounter into a profane space of solitude. I explain how Chrétien makes the surprising connection between the inner room described by Jesus and related inner spaces developed in its wake, on the one hand, and, on the other, the modern narrative techniques for portraying human consciousness employed by such master of the modern novel as Gustave Flaubert and Henry James.