This article aims to explore the philosophical approach to faith after deconstruction as manifested in the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy. By taking the saturated phenomenon as its focus, the analysis seeks to demonstrate that whilst Marion’s thinking proves to be an innovative re-imagining of the possibilities of phenomenology, its problematic recourse to a supplementary hermeneutic means that saturation can never be adequately applied to faith without simultaneously compromising the excessive intuition upon which it relies. The article then (...) explores whether Nancy’s suggestion that saturation be re-framed as faith can offer a viable alternative approach. Whilst the post-phenomenological modality within which Nancy operates means it may be problematic to retain the term ‘saturation’ in the exact sense Marion gives it, it is argued that Nancy’s version of saturated faith allows us to approach the binary divide between philosophy and theology from a different direction, resulting in a vision of faith that cuts across theism and atheism, destabilising them from within. Although Nancy’s thought in this area certainly does nothing to respond to persistent questions surrounding the place of institutionalized religion within secular modernity, it nevertheless serves as a powerful tool for thinking the possibilities of faith in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In this article I explore how a philosophical conception of love may be used to draw debate on the death of God beyond the binary opposition between theology and philosophy through a comparative study of the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy. Although Marion’s reading of love—in both its theological and phenomenological guises—proposes an innovative phrasing of a non-metaphysical notion of divinity, I argue that it is ultimately unable to maintain its coherence in nominal discourse due to Marion’s insistence (...) on keeping love and being separate. In contrast, through his unique thinking on ontology, Nancy’s philosophy allows us to reposition love at the heart of being, from whence it may serve as a means of disrupting the very principle governing the atheist and theist world-views. Far from dismantling Marion’s core proposition, I conclude that the two thinkers may in fact be more closely aligned than previous scholarship has acknowledged, coming together in the need to affirm an experience of the impossible that takes place in the present rather than in any eschatological fulfillment to come. At this intersection between two nominally very different thinkers, love forms an ontological limit-point for thought that poses a challenge to both theology and philosophy alike as they continue to grapple with the question of religion in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The films of Bruno Dumont are tied to unwatchability, austerity, and a post-theological seriousness. Recently, however, Dumont has taken a surprising turn towards comedy; and yet these comedies are not without the post-theological despair that characterizes his earlier films. Taking Dumont's comedy seriously, this article frames Dumont's comedic turn not as a deviation but rather as a realignment that requires retroactive reconsideration of his oeuvre's post-theological orientation. We interrogate the philosophical implications of laughter in Dumont's work and argue that it (...) suggests a new trajectory for the post-theological project. The work of Georges Bataille anchors our analysis of violent laughter, while Jean-Luc Nancy's post-theology structures our central argument. We read Nancy's post-theology into the construction of space and subjectivity in Dumont's earlier works, which characterize both human characters and the landscapes they inhabit with a pervasive sense of depthlessness or blankness. These features of absence often lead spectators to project emotions onto Dumont's characters, but we stress this blankness as foregrounding the essential unknowingness of the subject – something which also drives Bataille's notion of laughter. For Bataille, laughter is rooted in nonknowledge, it is a non-productive expenditure that exposes the limits of human existence. It is this horizon of death and nothingness that drives Dumont's comedies. Understood through post-theological laughter, Dumont's comedic films and TV series provide new ways of accounting for the death of God. This laughter in turn operates retroactively to productively reframe post-theological violence in his work. In short, this article contends that none of Dumont's films are meant to be taken seriously. Confronting the ethical and philosophical implications of Dumont's comedic turn, this article investigates the implications of reading his oeuvre through this divinely absurdist, post-theological comedic lens and articulates a theory of post-theology that foregrounds the radicality of laughter. (shrink)

This thesis offers a naturalist revision of Alain Badiou’s philosophy. This goal is pursued through an encounter of Badiou’s mathematical ontology and theory of truth with contemporary trends in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. I take issue with Badiou’s inability to elucidate the link between the empirical and the ontological, and his residual reliance on a Heideggerian project of fundamental ontology, which undermines his own immanentist principles. I will argue for both a bottom-up naturalisation of Badiou’s philosophical approach (...) to mathematics and a top-down naturalisation. Articulating my particular understanding of what realism and naturalism should commit us to, I propose a creative fusion of Badiou’s attention to metamathematical results with a structural-informational metaphysics, proposing a ‘matherialism’ uniting the more daring speculative insights of the former with the naturalist and empiricist commitments motivating the latter. (shrink)