In this article, the author unveils the play between visibility and invisibility as it is captured in a phenomenology of the gift. The first part of the essay explores the tension between the fact of being given and the forgetting of its characters as a gift: its donor and the circumstances of it being given. In the process of becoming autonomous, free of its provenance, the gift loses its character of being given and becomes no more than a simple thing in someone’s possession. Subsequently, the essay draws on the figure of Christ as gift of God, illustrating this interpretation with particular reference to several illuminating passages from the Gospel of John. The central image is the phenomenon of gift as given in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Finally, this image is used to define the task of a hermeneutical approach to the gift.

This essays deals with Heidegger’s concept of “Thing”, as sketched in the 1950 lecture Das Ding.In Being and Time, Heidegger had worked out a concept of “tool”, Zeug, which vanished in later works. The Heideggerian “thing” is undeniably more than a “tool”. The author argues than beings viz. phenomena are actually given to us which oppose the logic of “thinghood” while transcending the logic of “toolhood”: Flemish painting is used as an example of phenomena which overcome the affective reality of being-in-the-world without respecting the mode of appearing proper to things. Another witness is summoned, sacramental experience: a phenomenological description of what is given to see and feel during the Eucharistic liturgy aims at showing that being-in-the-world and “being in the Fourfold” can be put into brackets in such an event, and that it must be the case for such an event to be understood.

The discourse on truth rarely takes into account the claim made by a few minds of being themselves not only in truth, or expressing the truth, but of being also truth itself. We seek first to demonstrate the phenomenological significance of this proposition. We then examine the divergent meanings this claim undertakes in three prominent figures: Jesus, Çankara and Hallâj. At this occasion, an investigation is conducted on the meaning of the copula in the formula: I am the truth, in dogmatic, philosophical and mystical realms.

As any science presupposes a certain “something” for its constitution as a discipline, the same applies also for philosophy and theology as discourses of a specific intentionality. However, pure phenomenological life relies on an originary self-donation, which precedes any manifestation of language or scientific knowledge, and implies a practical “original intelligibility”, pertaining to any human being as his “transcendental birth”. Relating to Michel Henry, this circumstance will be confronted with the self-revelation in Christianity, involving a discussion of the phenomenological status of the Scripture, as well as a delimitation from any Gnosis. Hence, the “word of life” (of God), preceding any manifestation of language, coincides with an immediate ethos, that can be illustrated by the “acts of compassion”. The text conceives itself as a preliminary work for a religious philosophy founded in the phenomenology of life.

“Sacramenta propter homines.” This classic statement situates sacraments within a human existential in which meaning and reality consort. Sacramental reality is meaningful reality. Sacraments signify, but they signify in an ecclesial or intersubjective context. Sacraments phenomenalise themselves ecclesially. Apposing Marion and Derrida on the nature of sign and signification gives the possibility of considering sacramental reality on the basis of ecclesial exteriority.

This paper intends to identify the functions of the French particle “comme” (“like” in opposition to “as”) and “comme si” (“as if”) in the work of French contemporary philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, especially in L’idole et la distance (American translation: The Idol and Distance), Dieu sans l’être (American translation: God without Being), Étant donné (American translation: Being given) and De surcroît (American translation: In excess). The author of this paper focuses on the relation between phenomenology and theology in order to demonstrate its complexity by an analysis of linguistic phenomenology. At the end of this analysis, the “saturated phenomenon”, as proposed by Jean-Luc Marion, becomes an important notion to understand the boundaries of both disciplines, phenomenology and theology.

Augustine is one of the favorite ancient thinkers of philosophical modernity. This statement proves itself to be true especially in the phenomenological field where two main thinkers seem to have developed a specific interest in Augustine: Heidegger and Jean-Louis Chrétien. The question will be asked what characterizes each phenomenological reception of the Bishop of Hippo. Our thesis will be that those receptions both are in the same time interpretations which are built on a very specific process of metaphorization. This process — in its various forms — will be the object of a dissection in order to understand what the Augustinian message undergoes and why it does it in such or such way.

At the beginning of his philosophical career (between 1918 and 1921), the young Heidegger analyzed various texts belonging to the field of the religious tradition: the Pauline Epistles, Augustinian writings and texts of the medieval mystics. Through these analyses, Heidegger formalized certain phenomena that we can find, a few years later, in Being and Time, illustrating the “warm” line of the existential analytic, the pathetic level of the ontology of Dasein: anxiety, death, consciousness, and guilt. My paper focuses on this process of ontologization of phenomena belonging to religious life, namely on the awaiting of Parousia which is used to elaborate the futural structure of being towards death. I finally argue that the keyword for the understanding of the phenomenological transfer from the religious life to the ontology of Dasein is the methodological idea of “formal indication”, whose meaning and role must be clarified.

The religious terminologies in Levinas’ philosophy are not used in frivolous way but transformed into his own philosophical notions. His concept of “paganism” is the one of the example of these reformulations. “Being pagan” is firstly a key concept for his critique of National Socialism in 1930’s, secondly for his phenomenological argument on the fundamental mode of being of human existence. In a philosophically subtle relationship with his master Heidegger, what we call “the mode of being pagan” functions as an important moment in Levinas’ thought before Otherwise than Being. In this paper, the seemingly peculiar notion of paganism and its role will be clarified in relation to a general character of his philosophy, from theological, historical and phenomenological point of view.

For Husserl excess is a part of any phenomenon. For Heidegger the horizon of the phenomenon is also excessive. Levinas and Marion ask us to think about what exceeds the horizon. I focus on Marion’s fifth kind of saturated (transcendent) phenomenon, revelation. How are we to understand it? Marion says he argues only for the possibility of revelation, but only Jesus could be the revelation for which he argues. The excess of the divine cannot remain merely a metaphysical beyond. It must reveal itself in the world as a possible phenomenon, as Flesh, for there is no excess without flesh, and no flesh without being. Excess is either enfleshed or thingly excess. For the Christian this being-together of flesh and word in God means the same being-together in us: Christian life is fully incarnate life, life as enspirited flesh rather than as dead body. Thus the being-together of flesh and word is “in the accusative”. Christian life is, prior to action, a life of submission. That, however, explicitly puts Christian belief and practice at odds with any unrecuperated, merely metaphysical metaphysics which undercuts not only the Christian dogma of Christ’s incarnation and incarnate resurrection, but also the Christian message that the divine life is found only in the life that bends its knee and seeks to bring about justice: dikaiosunae.

The following essay tackles Søren Kierkegaard’s view of temporality within a phenomenological vista. It proceeds by differentiating between an aesthetic, an ethical, and a religious relationality to time in step with Kierkegaard’s Christology and especially, with his notion of “sacred history,” largely unexplored in the scholarship. My fundamental hermeneutic assumption is that Kierkegaard’s stress on Christ’s historicity and the subsequent human task of imitation are properly understood only in a soteriological framework. That is why temporality should be conceived against the backdrop of the singular self’s pursuit of redemption. My thesis will be that, since one’s encounter with the God-man is essentially historical, whilst engaging human temporality in its wholeness (i.e., selfhood’s past, present, and future), Kierkegaard’s soteriology is highly relevant for a phenomenology of Christianity, which still awaits its philosophical unfolding.

While the notion of gift has received much scholarly attention in recent philosophical discussion, theology appears as being too strongly dependent on philosophy by being oblivious of its own resources within the rich theological tradition concerning the Trinitarian community of loving gift exchange. After considering the possibility of a transition from a faith-informed phenomenology to phenomenologically inspired theology, the essay examines two early tests cases, Hilary of Poitiers and Augustine of Hippo, where the relationship these authors saw between gift and love within the life of the economic and the immanent Trinity can be archeologically traced.

In this article I contend that although Michel Henry reproaches psychoanalysis to let the symbolic law rule over the unconscious, his concept of auto-affection as a direct experience of Life comes close to psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s idea of eros, in that they both turn away from representational logic in their search for “true”, unmediated forms of subjectivity. In her development of the concept of eros or narcissism, Kristeva is strongly inspired by the Plotinus. In his striving for unification with the One, man idealizes and identifies with the One. Kristeva replaces this idealizing love inside man’s psyche and thus defines the narcissistic structure as an identification with something that is not yet the subject itself. This process takes place in a non-representational domain, in what can be called the “consciousness of the flesh”. However, although the existence of a “bodily” consciousness is the condition of possibility for intersubjective love, not everything is simply absorbed by this consciousness of the flesh: both Kristeva and Plotinus draw upon a kind of dualism between representational and non-representational, maybe not in the experience, but in their explanation of love.