The return of religion in France : from democratisation to postmetaphysics / Enda McCaffrey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McCaffrey, Enda.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Philosophy and religion--France.

Philosophy and religion.

Democratization--France.

Democratization.

Democracy--Religious aspects--Christianity.

Democracy.

France--Religion.

France.

Religion.

Physical Description:

vi, 286 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Summary:

Philosophical developments in the 1980s lent themselves favourably to what has become known as the 'theological turn' of contemporary French thought (and specifically phenomenology). But philosophical change was also mirrored in socio-political change, sometimes in paradoxical ways. Democratisation post 1980 elevated the identity of the individual believer to a positive and credible place in France's socio-political infrastructure. Phenomenology, on the other hand, 'demoted' the religious subject only in the process to restore him to what Jean-Yves Lacoste calls his appropriate dwelling place of 'naïveté'. In the transition from the democratisation of the individual as self-sufficient and politically pragmatic to his (anti) philosophical counterpart in a new postsubjectivity, there is a shared narrative of having come through a set of crises: one historical in the name of French republican universalism, the other philosophical in the name of metaphysical ontology. The Return of Religion in France charts this dual trajectory with the aim of demonstrating how a new religious identity re-emerges as a respective social engineer and a direct inheritor of the event of Christianity.

Contents:

Part I History and Context

1 The Return of Religion in France 13

Esprit: a history of religious engagement 17

The paradox of secularisation 28

From modernity to postmodernity: a critical overview 31

Laïcité and democracy 37

Régis Debray: 'teaching religion is not religious teaching' 39

2 Theology and Sexual Ethics 48

Post-secular France 51

Catholic sexual ethics 53

The politics of gay marriage in France 60

Ethics and theology in post-secular France 68

3 Post-secularism, Belief and Being as Event 80

From secularism to post-secularism 80

'L'anthropologie du croire': De Certeau, Gauchet and Hervieu-Léger 85

A philosophy of secularisation 93

Being as Event 95

Vattimo's belief: a philosophy of actuality 97

Vattimo and the Vatican: a literal difference 99

Vattimo and Foucault 103

Part II Philosophy and Concepts

4 The Postmetaphysical 113

Philosophy and theology: a brief history 117

The 'concept' of God 126

The phenomenological breakthrough? Jean-Luc Marion and the concept of 'givenness' 136

Phenomenology as affective transcendence: a Lévinas reading 142

5 Postsubjectivity 148

Who comes after the subject? 148

Michel Henry: 'truth of the world' versus 'truth of life' 161

Phenomenological life 167

Ipseity and transcendental life 169

The radically immanent self 172

The 'I'/'Me' 174

Ethics and the other 176

6 'Broken Cogito' and Textual Subjectivity 181

Faith, truth and philosophy: the case of Paul Ricoeur 184

Hermeneutics of the self and faith texts 196

Oneself as another 208

7 Posteventality 214

Alain Badiou's Saint Paul: the event and universalism 216

The divided subject 224

Jean-François Lyotard: a phenomenology of the event 233

Lyotard's subject: a phenomenology of the flesh 238

A semiotics of the event 241.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780230205192

0230205194

OCLC:

298778372