An Introduction To Jean Yves Lacoste

Downloaded by 181.114.27.
242 at 10:20 10 June 2017
An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste

And they concluded unanimously that, in this life, death
Downloaded by 181.114.27.242 at 10:20 10 June 2017
perhaps indeed was what is most important,

but, all in all, not that very important either.
Arto Paasilinna
An Introduction to
Jean-Yves Lacoste
Joeri Schrijvers
Faculty of Theology, KU Leuven
First Published 2012 by Ashgate Publisher
Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright Joeri Schrijvers 2012
Joeri Schrijvers has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Schrijvers, Joeri.
An introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste.
1. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. 2. Phenomenological theology.
I. Title
230.01-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schrijvers, Joeri.
An introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste / Joeri Schrijvers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-4158-8 (hardcover) 1. Lacoste,
Jean-Yves. 2. Phenomenological theology. I. Title.
BX4827.L14S37 2012
230.092--dc23
ISBN 978-1-4094-4158-8 (hbk) 2012001259

Contents
Preface vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
1 Phenomenology of Confession 15
2 Phenomenology of the Body 37
3 Phenomenology of Prayer 57
4 Phenomenology of Conversion 77
5 Phenomenology of the Fool 97
6 The Fate of Non-experience 115
7 The World and the Absence of Art 133
8 Life as Strong as Death? Of Being and Danger 157
Conclusion: A Phenomenology of (Spiritual) Life 177
Bibliography 191
Index195
Preface
A word of gratitude, first, to Jean-Yves Lacoste for supporting this and other
work of mine so generously: I hope he may find his phenomenological greetings
returned here. Thanks to Jason Wardley for his careful proofreading: all errors that
remain are obviously my own. My gratitude is offered to Chris Hackett and Jason,
again, for their many interesting comments on earlier versions of this text. Thanks
to Lieven Boeve at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies in Leuven

and my colleagues of the Research Group Theology in a Postmodern Context,
especially Patrick Cooper, Colby Dickinson and Justin Sands for taking so much
care with my English.
Finally, a word of thanks to FWO-Flanders for granting me the scholarship
enabling me to write this work.
Portions of the Introduction and Chapter 7 have been published as God and/
in Phenomenology? Jean-Yves Lacostes La phnomnalit de Dieu, Bijdragen
71 (2009) 8593 and as a compte rendu in Revue Philosophique de Louvain 107
(4), 74854. I thank Peeters Publishers for granting me permission to reprint this
material here. Thanks also to Sarah, Batrice, David, Katherine, Sophie and Matt
at Ashgate for their generous assistance.
List of Abbreviations
BHP Btir, habiter, prier, Revue Thomiste, 87 (1987) 35790 and 54778.
Carmel De la phnomnologie de lEsprit la monte du Carmel, Revue

Thomiste, 89 (1989) 539 and 56998.
EA Experience and the Absolute (New York, 2004).

ED tre en danger (Paris, 2011).
EeA Exprience et absolu (Paris,1994).
MO Le monde et labsence de luvre et autres tudes (Paris, 2000).
NT Note sur le temps (Paris, 1990).
PD La phnomnalit de Dieu. Neuf tudes (Paris, 2008).

PP Prsence et Parousie (Genve, 2006).
Introduction
Jean-Yves Lacoste (b. 1953), a scholar educated at the cole normale suprieure
in the days of Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida, has taught and lived in
Toulouse, Jerusalem, Lourdes, and Paris. He spent a few years as a guest professor
at the University of Chicago. Unfortunately, only one of his books Exprience et
Absolu has so far been translated into English.
This Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste tries to follow Lacostes trajectory from
the early, rather conventional, and at times somewhat conservative theological
approach, to the innovative and radical philosophy of Lacostes later works.

Accordingly, this book will not bother with any traditional distinction between the
disciplines of philosophy and theology. There are two reasons for this. First of all,
Lacostes conscious negligence of such a distinction gives his interpreters sufficient
reason to let philosophy fuse with theology: this is why the chapters on Exprience
et Absolu, a book of phenomenology, let the contours of liturgical experiences
merge with the theology developed in the earlier Note sur le temps. Secondly, it is
always good, if one wants to be a philosopher or a theologian, to be instructed and
informed about the tradition: even the newest of questions only ever arise out of
what happened in the diverse past tradition(s) of thought. All new constellations
of thought, adapted and attuned to the newness of the contemporary situation,
happen only through a novel figuration arising out of those already instituted and
constituted configurations. There is no new formation of thought and world if
there is no transformation of (all) the earlier sedimentations and configurations of
sense and signification. In short, the new happens only through the transformation
of the old.1 Both philosophy and theology are never in medias res.
In fact, this Introduction will already show that Lacoste as a thinker is
concerned with uniting the disciplines rather than separating them. This explains
the subheadings of this Introduction sufficiently: philosophy and theology, Husserl
and Heidegger, etc.
Philosophy and Theology
In a certain sense, one might argue, to repeat Heideggers assessment of

Augustine,2 that Lacostes uvre is neither philosophical nor theological. Lacoste
is ultimately and rightly so not all that bothered with a strict distinction
between the disciplines. This is not only evident from the Liminaire and the first
1
I have developed this claim in my What Comes after Christianity? Jean-Luc
Nancys Deconstruction of Christianity, Research in Phenomenology, 39 (2009): 26691.
2
Martin Heidegger, Der Begriff der Zeit (Frankfrt, 2004), p. 108.
2 An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste
study of La phnomnalit de Dieu (2008), La frontire absente, but also from

Lacostes work up till now. The liturgical experience presented in Exprience
et Absolu already took its distance not only from the philosophy of religion of
Schleiermacher and the like but also from all theological knowledge. Liturgical
experience, for Lacoste, must not be confused with worship; it denotes, rather, all
the acts and all the deeds a human being does or does not do when confronting
the Absolute, or in Lacostes words, the logic that presides over the encounter
between man3 and God writ large (EA 2/2).
A distance from the philosophy of religion is necessary for Lacoste, because
religion is, especially since Schleiermacher, inextricably bound with feeling,
and religious feeling proves more clearly mans relation to earth, sky, and
the deities, than it proves or calls into question his relation to God (EA 18
n.1/197 n.14). The distance from theology is perhaps more perplexing, but at least
Exprience et Absolu is consistent in this claim: the book is not to be considered as
the place to avail oneself of the contents of theological knowledge (EA 171/141).4
It is, then, from out of this double distance which is opened up, that a space that
Lacoste calls a border zone opens. Exprience et Absolu, for instance, opens
with the remark that the supposed border between these two kinds of knowledge
[i.e. philosophy and theology] tends to disappear in the present work (EA 1/1).
Prsence et Parousie (2006) elaborates on this concept of a border zone between
philosophy and theology by stating that this zone is exposed to that which haunts
perhaps every other borderland, namely, that the border area is defined [...] either
by a co-belonging or by an uncertain belonging (PP 194). Thus, either perspective
argues both philosophically and theologically, and the thesis put forward by
Lacoste is relevant to both disciplines (co-belonging). In other words, one is
never sure whether a statement belongs exclusively to the discipline of philosophy
rather than to theology (uncertain belonging). La phnomnalit de Dieu (2008)
explains it in the following way: such a border zone is a region where we do
not exactly know where we are, and where it matters little that we know: we are
at the same time here and there, or perhaps already there, or perhaps still here.
But no localization is allowed here (PD 10).5 This citation might reveal another
peculiarity of the border zone: if no localization is allowed here, this is so because
if one meticulously pinpoints this region rather than that, one is already doing
3
As is the case with many French writers, inclusive language is absent from Lacostes
work. This book will refrain, too, from such language, if only to avoid all too laborious
constructions and phrasings. I ensure the reader that no hurt or harm is intended by doing
so. Regarding the citations of EA: each time, the page numbers of the original French are
followed by the page numbers of the English translation.
4
For this rejection of philosophy of religion see also EA 123/101; for the distance
taken from theological knowledge see EA 100 n.1/203 n.4.
5
See also on this work Jean Greisch, Bulletin de philosophie et christianisme,
Recherches de sciences religieuses, 99 (2011): 43757, pp. 4525, although Greisch seems
to proceed from an order different from the studies published in PD.
Introduction 3
violence to just what is being said here: a statement that tries to speak to the two
disciplines at once is reduced to either a theological or philosophical statement
and one passes over the fact that such statements might speak to and for the other
domain as well. One might even argue that in Note sur le temps, a book which is
unashamedly theological (NT 8), as is acknowledged in Exprience et Absolu (EA
100 n.1/203 n.4), the outline of such a border zone was present already. Consider,
for instance, these sentences taken from its back cover: the book does not impose
philosophical categories on theological realities nor the inverse. But, by deepening
and enriching the two disciplines mutually, it sketches a temporal logic of the
Christian experience which poses fundamental questions. In effect, the border
zone of Christian experience does not only speak to and for the other domain,
namely philosophy, it also speaks out to domains other than its own, if only to
indicate some questions that might be otherwise forgotten, questions that might be
relevant to other domains as well.
La phnomnalit de Dieu, then, abolishes the few border posts still present
between philosophy and theology. In a short but important introduction, Lacoste
writes that his book situates itself beyond and above the division between the
philosophical and the theological (PD 9). Its first essay, La frontire absente, for
instance, has to be read as a long meditation on just why these borderlines between
philosophy and theology have to be abandoned. Here Lacoste asks why indeed
the Philosophical Fragments are labelled by Kierkegaard as philosophical, all the
while posing the question of salvation. The conclusion for Lacoste is as simple as
it is straightforward: it concerns here a philosophy pushed to its limits (PD 31).
Even philosophy cannot, according to Lacoste, decide a priori about its subject
and therefore has to comply in letting things, persons, and events appear from
themselves according to the logic proper to their appearance (PD 31) even if,
and perhaps especially if, what appears in this way turns out to be God.
Lacoste, siding with Kierkegaard here rather than Hegel, shows himself to
be a thinker so attentive to the minute differences in appearances that indeed the
difference between Gods appearing and the appearing of ordinary objects finds
itself somewhat blurred. Of course, the blurb from La phnomnalit de Dieu tells
us, God does not appear [...] as a cube appears. God differs to the point of being
the non-other. The difference, however, does not introduce a rupture in the field
of knowing. It only makes us, and this is not nothing, aware of the plurality of the
modes of appearing. This, one might say, is the third peculiarity of the border zone
between philosophy and theology: it is the phenomenological method pushed to its
limits to such an extent that it may no longer prescribe for the appearances what
exactly might show and give itself in and through them. Whether it is a God or a
cube, the phenomenological method should refrain from imposing its conditions
on the appearing of appearances and stick to minute descriptions as to just how
what there appears, in fact does appear: phenomenology is always concerned
more with the how of appearing rather than what appears. We will see Lacoste
increasingly turn to the plurality of appearances, but this, in a way, is a plurality
in and through a unity: no matter how different the appearances, they all appear
within being and to our being-in-the-world. The plurality of appearances, however

diverse, all share in being. For Lacoste, all thought of an otherwise than being
(Levinas) or a without being (Marion) will turn out to be unfaithful to the human
beings reception of being and beings in and through their existence as being-in-
a-world. This plurality therefore does not exclude but rather includes theologys
most intimate questions in the rationality proper to all phenomenality. In short, the
plurality of appearances and a phenomenology stretched to its most outward limits
might be capable of understanding something both of Gods coming to this or that
particular being (revelation) and of Gods coming to the world as precisely a finite
being (incarnation).
Husserl and Heidegger
There will still be plenty of time to discuss Lacostes theology. Let us, therefore,
first turn to the influence philosophy has had on his thought. It is hard to decide
whether it is Husserl or Heidegger who has had the most decisive influence on
Lacostes thought. By Lacostes own admittance, it is Heidegger who has given
[him] more to think than others (EA 1/1). Husserl, however, is no less present in
Lacostes work, although at times only obliquely. Many of the examples Lacoste
uses to develop his phenomenological claims originate in Husserls thought, for
example, the phenomenological case of listening to a symphony.6
However, what Lacoste takes from Heidegger, (almost) contra Husserl, is the
concept of Dasein or existence and its worldliness. There is no existence or Dasein
without a world. From the moment we are conscious, human beings are implicated
and thrown into a world. In Lacostes words, existence is to be interpreted
according to its perpetual interest in otherness (PP 67), that is, existence is unable
to not relate to what is outside itself. And what is outside itself is the world. Hence
Lacostes infamous reversal of Leibnizs phrase: Dasein is nothing but doors and
windows (EA 12/11).
The inverse, however, is true as well: there is no world without Dasein. Lacoste
proceeds by saying that there is [] no being-in-the-world that is not reflected
in a consciousness (ibid.). In short, there would not be a world, if there were
not a subject experiencing or living in this world. Without delving too much into
phenomenologys tendency to veer into idealism the tendency to see such a
subject as the sole motor of creating or constituting this very world one might
argue that Lacoste takes this from Husserl: for there to be world, or art, or anything
at all, it is necessary that this world, this work of art or anything at all, affects the
subject or the human being. Phenomena are always to be received by someone
if we are to speak meaningfully of them, even if it concerns those phenomena
(e.g. worldliness) that are not strictly speaking phenomena themselves, but rather
6
See, for instance, Edmund Husserl, Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins
(Hamburg, 1985), p. 4ff.
Introduction 5
function like the horizon out of which phenomena arise in the first place. So it is for
Lacoste as it is for Husserl, that it is out of the worlds reflection in consciousness
that one is able to speak of the world at all. One might put this another way: if the
problem with Husserl is that he reduces the world to a correlate of consciousness
Husserls egological method resulting in the world as a sum of monadic entities
the problem with Heidegger is, inversely, that the horizon of the world is posited
and imposed upon the particular human being in such a way that no room is left
for individual concrete lived experiences of the ego in receiving such a world. The
nothing but ego of Husserl is replaced by the nothing but world of Heidegger.
Whereas Heideggers thought of the world and of the earth displays totalizing
tendencies in that it refuses any signification to those phenomena in the margins
of the world, Husserls thought, for Lacoste, serves as a counter-balance: it is
through Husserl that an attentiveness to the differences in each appearing, to the

differences in the how of the appearances, is to be gained.
Lacoste formulates the distinction between Heidegger and Husserl as follows:
there is between the Husserlian and the Heideggerian descriptions a distance
which distinguishes the seeing (the appearing) from the letting see (the
making appear, the bringing to light) (MO 81). In other words: Husserl was
content with sticking to the visible phenomenon as it shows itself in this particular,
individual phenomenon leibhaftig, Husserl says, the phenomenons appearing
in person or in the flesh.7 But Heidegger pursued what remains invisible in the
visibility of this particular phenomenon, the invisible horizon from out of which
particular beings first of all spring (it matters little here that he has many names
for such a horizon: world, earth, being, Ereignis, etc). The problem, for Lacoste,
is that this Heideggerian approach can at times be so massive that it completely
disregards and forgets the appearance of particular beings.
Something of the sort has, according to Lacoste, happened in Heideggers
famous description of Van Goghs peasant shoes.8 These shoes, according to
Heidegger, let the earth and the entire gathering of the Geviert the fourfold
of mortals and gods, heaven and earth appear. It fell to Schapiro and Derrida,
however, to make clear that these shoes were not the shoes of a peasant but rather
those of a city-dweller.9 Lacoste comments that it is a detail in the history of
art [that] forces us here to admit that the Heideggerian description is not only
interpretive, but well and truly over-interpretive and by over-interpretation
7
On the risk of so personifying the phenomenon, see Jacques Derrida, On Touching
Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford, 2005), p. 235ff;
8
See for this Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Basic Writings, D.F.
Krell (ed.), (London, 2002), pp. 139212, p. 158ff.
9
Derrida relies on the art historian Schapiro, see Derrida, The Truth in Painting
(Chicago, 1987) 255f.
one must understand a constraint that makes things say more than they say in
themselves.10
Such an over-interpretation occurs less in Husserls writings, who tries to let
phenomena speak for themselves rather than imposing an overall framework of
interpretation on them. It is thus from Husserl that Lacoste takes his cue when
describing the minute differences in appearances. It is Husserl, then, who leads
Lacoste to propose his phenomenological account of plurality and its recognition
of its partial and fragmentary character. This fragmentary character of all
phenomenological description also accounts for its existential character: it is, in
each case and each time, an individual who perceives this or that phenomenon.
Think here, too, of Kierkegaard.
Heidegger I and Heidegger II: The World under Proviso
Lacostes allergy to totalizing tendencies and breathtaking generalizations is also

clear from his approach to Heidegger I and II. The phenomenology of liturgical
experience has to be seen as a long and persistent meditation on just what is omitted
from Heideggers analytic of Dasein in Being and Time. The list of such omissions
is long, and we will encounter all of these in the chapters to follow: where is
love, joy, boredom, pleasure, or passion? Lacoste thus argues against Heideggers
reduction of the human beings access to the question of being through a single
fundamental mood: anxiety. Anxiety, for Heidegger, is the mood in which
everything that interposes between myself, like the busy-ness of the world and all
of my ordinary preoccupations with this world, and my ownmost possibility, stops
making sense. In other words, when anxious beings-within-the-world no longer
speak to us, and what shows itself in this way, is that it is in each case mine, my
own, to be my being. No one can exist in my place. But to exist for Heidegger
means, first of all, acknowledging the fact that existence is finite and that it sooner
or later will die.
But Dasein, for Heidegger, goes out of its way not to face the fact of its
mortality: it will flee towards the most ordinary things in life, such as magazines,
curiosity, chatter and so on. Dasein tries to forget about its dying and postpones
death: it will happen, yes, somewhere in the future, and first to someone other than
me. This is why anxiety is important for Heidegger: it brings Daseins tendency to
flee to a halt. For a moment, then, Dasein can realize both that it is in fact its world,
and that its world is there (da) only as long as Dasein is there too and that, in
fact, this correspondence between Dasein, being and world, and its temporality, is
finite as well.
Although Lacoste is in agreement with many of Heideggers analyses, liturgical
experience must be interpreted as a complement or a correction even to the analytic
10
Lacoste, The Work and the Complement of Appearing, in J. Bloechl, Religious
Experience and the End of Metaphysics (Bloomington, IN, 2003), pp. 6893, p. 82.
Introduction 7
of Dasein.11 It refuses, out of a demand to do justice to the plurality of the human

beings experiences, to let existence be governed by one single instance. Over
and against anxiety, then, liturgical experience explores the margins of being-in-
the-world in order to perceive what might insinuate itself there. It is perhaps only
at the limits of being-in-the-world that the stakes of existence can be seen, for it
might be only at these margins that the relation to the divine proposes itself to the
human being. Liturgical experience, as we will see, transgresses the world in order
to be and to exist for God only.
And yet, the temporality of liturgical experience is far from being inauthentic
and improper: uneigentlich is Heideggers term for the comportment of Dasein
in its flight from its own mortality. In this flight, Dasein constructs a life that tries
to be genuinely lively.12 This liveliness should be interpreted along two lines: not
only lively in the sense that is knows not of death but also in the sense that the very
construction of such a liveliness deliberately forgets all connections with both the past
and the future in order to retain a present that only knows ties to what is currently
present. Inauthentic temporality constructs time as a succession of now-moments:
it forgets both any effects that the past might have had on the present experience,
and, inversely, the present experience need not have any repercussions on future
experiences. For Heidegger, such a temporality is obvious in magazines, which feed
off of what is fashionable, curious and interesting at present, but which have, only
very rarely, an impact on the future of a human being. Authentic temporality, on the
contrary, gathers in its present experience both the past and the future: it is conscious
of the fact that its present possibilities are only possible out of an appropriation of
possibilities handed down through the past out of a directedness to the possibilities
offered by the future. In this temporality, death is the ultimate possibility, because
it is finitude and mortality that render all actual meaning, project and signification
insecure, and thus liberate one into the realm of the possible. As long as death is
present, Dasein can paradoxically be its being as a free and contingent existence
rather than as a necessary actualization of a predetermined and predestined essence.
This is also why Heidegger writes: the essence of Dasein [] is its existence.13
Although liturgical experience knows of a parousiacal moment which could
give the impression that an inauthentic primacy of a present moment is at issue
here, its temporality is, in fact, close to the temporality of an authentic existence.
For liturgical experience, too, gathers the past and the future. According to Lacoste,
liturgical experience has to be considered as both a memory of Christs coming
and an anticipation of Gods coming.14 Liturgical experience indeed lives in the
11
See Jean-Luc Marion, Lacoste, ou la correction de lanalytique existentiale,
Transversalits 110 (2009): 1715.
12
Heidegger, Being and Time (San Francisco, 1967), p. 217.
13
Ibid., 345, also 274.
14
The influence of Henri de Lubac on Lacostes understanding of liturgical experience
is clear. See Henri De Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the
Middle Ages (Bloomington, IN, 2006), p.55ff.
belief that Gods past salvatory acts are prolonged even until today and continue to
present themselves to the lived experience of the believer. Yet such a parousiacal
moment, where the believer thinks God is present in the here and now still requires
discernment between Gods presence and Gods parousia. This is why liturgical
experience is ultimately a non-experience: although it is not to be excluded that
here or there (PD 153) Gods presence can be enjoyed, one has to integrate the
parousiacal moment of liturgy into the general economy of a time in which
mans absolute future makes every present a restless present (EA 72/59mod.).
This is true even for the present that thinks it enjoys the presence of the divine
here and now already. In this way, liturgical present is a present that anticipates its
absolute future from the past. Yet there is hope here: the hope that the promises of
God in Christ redemption, reconciliation and resurrection will be the fate of
us all. Liturgical experience is an imitation of Christ, and one hopes that through
this imitation, one might participate in the being of Christ. In times where it has
become difficult to discern my proper human face, Lacoste writes, I can always
let the God who became face give me a face.15
Herein lie the stakes of liturgical experience: to propose an eschatology to
the human being different from the eschatology of death and finitude that rages
through contemporary philosophy. Although death may govern all relations and
all significations this side of the grave, it is, perhaps, not to be concluded from
this that all signification only ever arises out of our finite, human condition. This
is why Lacoste strives to show that the human being can be delivered from Dasein
and that it is precisely in the gap between what belongs to the human being and
that which belongs to Dasein that the human being finds its highest calling.
Yet when discussing the implications that Heideggers later philosophy might
have for theology, Lacostes answer, in the dictionary of theology of which he is
the editor, is as perplexing as it is straightforward: theology has nothing to learn
here.16 Although it will become clear that Lacoste takes a similar distance from
the later Heidegger as he does from the earlier one, one must admit just the same:
Lacostes phenomenology of liturgy was in fact instructed by Heideggers thinking
of the thing (in its difference from objects, or beings present-at-hand or ready-
to-hand). Commenting on Heideggers famous analysis of the jug, Lacoste writes:
one therefore needs to speak of an excess of apparition. That the thing does
not lose its status as a tool, but exceeds it is already important. But there is
more: when losing its status as an instrument, it also loses the horizon according
Lacoste, Le temps dtre homme, Communio, 8 (1982) 1927, p. 25.

15
Lacoste, Heidegger, in Lacoste (ed.) Encyclopedia of Christian Theology (3 vols,

16
London/New York, 2005), vol.2, pp. 6779, p. 679. See also the discussions of Lacostes
entry in Janicauds Heidegger en France II. Entretiens (Paris, 2001) and Peter Jonkers,
God in France. Heideggers Legacy, in P. Jonkers and R. Welten (eds) God in France.
Eight Contemporary French Thinkers on God (Leuven, 2005), pp. 142, p. 31 and p. 37.
Introduction 9
to which instruments appear. The question therefore inevitably is: is there an

ultimate horizon other than that of the world? (ED 98)
Liturgical experience, we will see, similarly exceeds the realms of the ends and
means of technological instrumentality: liturgy will instruct us in a possible use
of uselessness.
But, inversely, and this is why one should not take Lacostes statement in the
dictionary just mentioned too seriously or, in any case, too literally: [The fact]
remains [that] the liturgy is in need of a thinking of the thing, and that one is not
mistaken about the nature of the eucharistic gift if one states that the God present
there is present there as a thing (PP 31).
Simultaneously, however, the phenomenology of the liturgy takes its distance
from Heideggers thinking of the thing. The two phenomenologies of the

unapparent, although related, are not to be identified: whereas Heidegger spoke of
the invisibility of the earth from out of the appearance of the thing, the Eucharistic
presence appears in the bread and the wine. Whereas the former flees from the
visibility of being-within-the-world (and all the risks of an over-interpretation
return here), the latter clings and sticks onto them and incarnates in the materiality
and particularity of the things present there in ways not particularly suited to our
contemporary addictions to virtual reality.17 Whereas the sacred appears around
the thing, the saint appears in person in Eucharistic realities, and where the former
is in need of an interpretation and so invites the sacred to appear, the latter takes
initiative of itself. All this forces one to conclude that liturgical experience is also
a transgression of all phenomenologies of thingness (PP 78)
Lacostes answer to the different Heideggers is thus twofold: over and against
the methodical atheism of the early Heidegger, Lacoste complains that Dasein is
without God in the world (EA 106/87); over and against the later mythical and
mystical Heidegger, Lacoste advances that this sort of paganism is always on the
verge of valorizing its company with the gods more than those gods themselves:
whereas theres too little of God in the case of Dasein, there are too many gods
surrounding the mortals.
Liturgical Experience
Liturgical experience puts both the world and the earth under proviso. Its
transgression of the world is made possible by a liturgical (EA 210/175),
theological or even eschatological reduction (NT 122 and 149). The reduction,
in its phenomenological version, is a method that can make appear what otherwise
does not appear or, in other words, a method making us aware of that which does
not appear in an appearance. It brackets everything that does not strictly belong
or pertain to the phenomenon in order to stick solely to the phenomenon as it gives
17
See for this PP 768 and ED 85102.
itself. It is in this way that one can notice that when seeing a cube, for instance, one
does not have to see all sides of it in order to still perceive a cube.
In the case of liturgical experience, what is bracketed, according to Lacoste
are the world and the earth, and everything in it that puts the human being at a
distance from God. Liturgical reduction, in this way, draws a dividing line between
everything the human being can give to himself and can dispose of, and that which
the human being cannot give to himself or is not at his disposal. This results in a
human being reduced to the essential (EA 224/186). The self-determination and
self-absorption of the human being is put out of play: the human being is forced to
receive that which he could not give to himself. While commonly human beings
and objects are at the human beings disposal, he now finds himself at the disposal
of the divine.
At first sight, liturgical experience must be read as the theological counterpart

of Heideggers existential analytic: it seeks to describe only that which is omitted
in Daseins existence in a world. Just as Heidegger aimed at describing those
properties or existentials accompanying atheistic Dasein, so too Lacoste wants
to portray the experience and the concepts of the one who places himself under
the protection of God (PD 9). Yet what is most remarkable in liturgical experience
is precisely that nothing is experienced there: the non-experience has to be
interpreted as literally as possible. Even if the believers longing for the Kingdom
is considerable, the believer might find himself in a tiresome Church. Even if the
believer wants to be affected by Gods presence, the believer is, more often than
not, refused such a sensible and affective satisfaction. And, finally, even if the
believers hope is to depart from Church as redeemed completely and transfigured
in Christs image, they still leave the Church visibly unaltered.18 If there were
a principal and fundamental mood for liturgical experience, it would be boredom
(EA 179/148).
Liturgical experience is, however, according to Lacoste, first and foremost a
sacramental experience: the historicity and materiality of the world always and
already is interposed between God and the human being, for instance, in the bread
that is broken and the wine that is shed. All immediate experience of God is thus
declared impossible. The plenitude of the eschatological is always mediated by
the conditions of being-in-the world. In this way, the non-experience is quite
common: it not only describes the boredom one feels when attending Church
but also the frustration one experiences when the object one is aiming for does
not give itself to intentional consciousness. This, in turn, leads to the frustration
which, for Lacoste, is of greater importance than the anticipated assuaging of the
desire (EA 231/192).
Yet liturgical experience remains a peculiar human possibility and the human
being enters into its presiding and overarching logic as soon as he decides to
pray or, to take an example from Jean Greisch, blesses himself with the Holy
18
Lacoste, Sacrements, Ethique, Eucharistie, Revue Thomiste, 84 (1984): 212242,
pp. 2278
Introduction 11
Water.19 Liturgical experience, in other words, is a free, deliberate project of the

human being. In its broadest form, liturgical experience has to be seen as mans
presentation of himself to the Absolute. Lacoste aims, then, at portraying the weal
and the woe of the believer in and through the confrontation with the Absolute to
the precise point where the believers intentional consciousness collapses and the
Absolute takes the human beings project out of hands: it is indeed when all
projects are disqualified I do not act nor effectuate myself in the Eucharist that
Gods project with the human being can be accomplished.20
It is here that one might again recognize the contours of the border zone:
for, even if liturgical experience accomplishes by its own free undertaking a
transgression of the world, it cannot put the demands and the presence of the world
permanently out of play. On the contrary, from out of the world, the believers
being seems susceptible not only to the Heideggerian accusation of fleeing from
authentic existence, i.e. being-toward-death, but also to every ethical accusation.
Both at a distance from the world and from the eschaton, liturgical experience
occupies a kind of no mans land, an extraterritoriality (PP 1314): the believer
dwells neither in the world nor in the Kingdom. It is not even sure whether the
believer can dwell or inhabit a place at all. This is what raises the just accusation
of ethics, for in this extraterritorial being-in-the-Church, the believer indeed
might appear incapable of existing in the world humanely (EA 83/689). We
shall therefore have to pay sufficient attention to the relation between ethical and
liturgical experience, but let it suffice for now that Lacostes answer to Levinas
as one of the most extreme examples of the primacy of ethics in our time
again displays Lacostes reluctance towards all totalizing efforts to grasp the
entirety of the human being from one single perspective or one principle affect.
Lacostes objection reads: by granting to ethics the status of first philosophy and
to its exigencies the status of immediate givens, Levinas is condemned to passing
over in silence everything that does not constitute being-in the-world as moral
obligation (EA 86/71). If liturgical experience informs us about the dangers of
all identifications between facticity and ethics, equally it warns us against the
domination of one or the other affect.
An Ontology of Affectivity
Lacoste has, however, for the most part refrained from long commentaries on
Levinass thought and the development of the ontology of affectivity is largely
in response to Husserl and Heidegger rather than to Levinas. Perhaps the best
way to introduce Lacostes thought of affective life is to turn to the topic of over-
Jean Greisch, Le buisson ardent et les lumires de la raison. Tome 2 (Paris, 2002),
19
p. 269.
Lacoste, Le temps dtre homme, p. 22 .
20
interpretation or, in any case, the overestimation present in Heideggers description

of the thing.
Suppose that one walks through the Metropolitan in New York to ponder one
of the paintings of shoes by Van Gogh, and that nothing really happens, or that,
in any case, I am not overwhelmed by the presence of the deities, not driven to
ponder the earth these shoes supposedly have walked upon, and not particularly
impressed by the mythological skies surrounding these peasant shoes. Lacoste
comments: to go beyond the thing,
one needs to speak of an interdiction to constitute. For the one welcoming the
thing on the basis of an interpretation (not everyone sees the jug as Heidegger
sees it), there clearly is constitution. However, when the thing passes to the
background and another being, thing or not, occupies the field of affection, there
is just as clearly deconstitution (ED 114).
One can easily be reminded of Heideggers over-interpretation of the peasant

shoes: both the jug and the shoes are examples of the earth and the things within.
Lacoste wants to focus upon two ideas: firstly, insofar as there is always someone
welcoming the thing in affectivity, one cannot avoid speaking of constitution, in
that particular interpretations of the phenomenon appearing will always preside
over others. Second, insofar as one single constitution cannot reign over others
the shoes do not always and everywhere demand that we see the earth one is,
in and through the affective response to art, drawn into the realm of affectivity
which is made up of an indeterminate play of constitutions, deconstitutions, and
reconstitutions (MO 95). It is this play that tre en danger will call life, in its
distinction with existence as Dasein. Life thus resists identifying one single
affect, for instance anxiety, as the basic mood of the human being and welcomes
the description of plural, conflictual even, affective responses to whatever happens
in world, earth and beyond. The attraction of the artwork already takes us to a
place where the reality of the world and the earth are superimposed by the realm
of the possible. It shows that which differs from the pressing preoccupations in
world and earth and teaches us that this difference might reveal what is possible
precisely if one abandons or transgresses the world.
If, then, experiences other than liturgical experience permit to take a distance
from world and earth, however, this does not yet allow us to move from the beyond
of world and earth to a phenomenology of the beyond (PD 199). Although
liturgical experience and the experience of art share numerous characteristics, in
the sense that liturgical experience, too, speaks of a possibility descending to and
proposing itself to the reality of the world by transposing us to a beginning of
experience [where there is] the possibility of the difference [between God and
the world] (EA 79/65), Lacoste will insist that liturgical experience is not one
case within a broader logic of anticipation (EA 70/57) and affectivity. This is
why La phnomnalit de Dieu ultimately tires of distinguishing between the
accomplishment and satisfaction reached when viewing a piece of art and the
Introduction 13
(realized) anticipation of Gods parousia: between an ending and the end (PD 153)
or between that which is beyond world and earth and the beyond.
tre en danger, then, stands out as Lacostes most eloquent and extensive
praise of the possibility that is life. If no constitution or phenomenon can indeed
take precedence over another, then all descriptions inevitably fall short over and
against the richness of the world as it appears to us. Over and against the constant
non-repeatable offering (PD 168) of the world, the human being can merely,
modestly, try to bring our experience to concept by putting a bit more order into
our experience of the world21 and by acquainting ourselves with the affective
chaos in which we slowly but surely find ourselves and in which we, as surely and
as slowly, gain knowledge about ourselves (ED 258).
It is this, then, that is the sole ambition of tre en danger: to describe the
world as it appears and is experienced by us in its distinction from the mere angst
of being-in-the-Heideggerian world, to portray life instead of existence. The
beyond of world and earth shows itself as the possibility of other constitutions
and interpretations of being-there than the Heideggerian version. The realm of
possibility speaks to us of a realm prior to world and earth, where possibility
does not merely stand[] higher than actuality, as Heidegger would have it, nor
does it speak of a possibility coming or descending towards reality this is the
Absolutes sole accomplishment (EA 79/65) but speaks of a possibility that most
properly belongs to reality.22 It is in this book, then, that Lacoste takes his leave
from Heidegger:
[T]he parsimony with which Heidegger delivers his descriptions can be

misleading. Now, if one is referred from these examples to others that Heidegger
does not provide, it shows that he does not silence phenomena or experiences
with a lesser power to reveal, but simply phenomena and experiences that harm
his interpretation of the thing (ED 107).
It is through these other experiences, notably through an analysis of a painting by

Vermeer, that tre en danger endeavours to praise possibility and plurality.
While refusing to choose between the world or the earth as the most basic
experience of the human being, and acknowledging furthermore that what is
21
Lacoste, Homoousios et homoousios. La substance entre thologie et philosophie,
Recherches de science religieuse, 98 (2010): 85100, p. 97.
22
For Heideggers retrieval of this Aristotelian dictum, see Being and Time, p.
63. The distinction made here is based on an email Lacoste sent to this author, dated 4
November 2010: jai trouv prudent de tenir la fin le langage de la possibilit et non celui
de la factualit. Question: en quoi ce rel ne se contente-t-il pas dtre rel mais est-il du
possible ? (La question nest pas heideggerienne). In the end I found it prudent to retain
the language of possibility rather than that of factuality. The question remains how is it
that this reality does content itself with being real but is it [indebted to, JS] possibility?
(That is not a Heideggerian question).
fundamental to life might lie rather in the plurality of these experiences (and in
experiences such as liturgical experience which contradicts the sovereign presence
of both world and earth), Lacostes response is that the plurality of possibilities
is the foundation of all our experiences and that one can even say that this is
anarchic: the fact of existing is fundamentally plural, and this plurality is without
order (ED 162).
The anarchic appearance of the world in tre en danger entails serious
consequences. The book starts out by asking which experiences might grant
access to what is proper to the human being more than others. Lacoste questions
Heidegger here by means of Goodmans query for the fair sample: why would a
jug show more of being than a cup of tea would? Why should we look at Van Gogh
rather than Vermeer if we want to pose the question of being? With which example,
then, which sample, should one start and why, finally, would one example take
precedence over others?23 For Lacoste, it is not certain that only anxiety would be
able to show what being-in-the-world exactly is. It is certain, on the other hand,
that our encounter with this ever-new world always takes place in affective life: in
the beginning, there is affection. And [it is confirmed] that we gain knowledge of
ourselves, without confusion, at the rhythm of our affections (ED 256).
The being-affected by the world is plural and anarchic. And it is here, then, that
Lacoste encounters the trouble surrounding all thoughts of anarchy: it makes all
hierarchies and distinctions tumble to such an extent that it is no longer clear if and
how we should value one experience over others. The danger, thus, is that either
liturgical experience will have to be interpreted as one case in a broader logic, and
in so doing, lose its specific character and the call towards authenticity it entails,
or this experience has to be superimposed by force over all other experiences and
must substitute its modest praise of the margins of being-in-the-world for a rivalry
and competition with the world. This book will venture to show that both of these
tendencies are present in Lacostes work.
To conclude this brief survey of Lacostes works let us note once more that
this Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste will attempt to recount the path from Note
sur le temps (1990) to tre en danger (2011). It goes without saying that this
path is made up of numerous shifts, considerable displacements and quite a few
evolutions. This book, therefore, sets as its task to draw some of these transitions
out in order to ask what the consequences of these transitions are.
The question of the fair sample is present throughout ED and refers to Nelson
23
Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978), pp. 1337. Other texts of Lacoste
have posed similar questions: MO 6061 and PP 259.
Chapter 1
Phenomenology of Confession
There are many reasons to dislike the sacraments. First of all, they differ
considerably from the on-demand spiritualities so popular these days. Sacraments
are not available online, and they force you to go to places at times not always
suited to the ordinary occupations of ones life. In this sense, they entail an active
decision on the part of the human being to attend Mass. A second reason is that the
sacraments inform us about a truth that precedes our being and forces us to abandon
the comfortable and secure position of the autonomous subject. Infant baptism
may serve as an excellent example of this. Well before I could have decided to
enter the Church, the fact of my baptism was decided for me. Autonomy comes
afterwards. It is through this being placed in relation with the Absolute that I may,
later, sense that God indeed is the first on the scene and has loved me first before
I knew of such a love. What is more, were it not for this heteronomous moment,
I would perhaps not understand the basics of the sacramental experience, namely
that relating to God only ever happens when God has already turned towards
me. This is the religious truth that I intend to show throughout the portrayal of
Lacostes liturgical experience and through this will also explore the interplay
between activity and passivity that is at issue in this experience of sacramentality.
This chapter will explore Lacostes take on the various sacraments. This will
help to understand some of the peculiarities of the later liturgical experience,
most notably its individual-existential and often brutal, if not violent, character.
Lacoste will later write that liturgical experience is a sacramental experience (PP
131), although, perhaps, not all liturgical experiences need to be considered as
sacramental experiences. It is only proper then to begin with an understanding of
the sacraments. Only afterwards can we understand just how liturgical experience,
for Lacoste, might be one of those instances that might point to an overcoming of
metaphysics, if only because of its barely modern character and the response to
technology and the nihilism of our days that it entails. In short, liturgical experience
instructs us about the use of uselessness in and through its abandonment of all
efficient causality, of all means and ends. Methodically, this chapter will mainly
build upon the early work of Lacoste, if only to make evident just how much the
liturgical experience of Exprience et Absolu is in continuity with Lacostes view
on sacraments such as confession, baptism, marriage and others. Nevertheless,
if Exprience et Absolu speaks of a logic before God writ large (EA 2/2), one
still has to ponder just how large this writing is, and whether liturgical experience
indeed could dispense with its theological origins.1
In what follows, I will first sketch Lacostes early phenomenology of confession
in order to introduce the barely modern, and somewhat anti-anthropological,
elements of liturgical experience.
Phenomenology of Confession
The sacraments speak to us of a truth prior to our being. This truth counters that
which the autonomous individual configures as truth, for instance, a complete and
transparent possession of ones will, ones power and ones desire. The liturgical
sacramental experience will indeed contradict these abilities and aptitudes one
by one. Liturgical experience will convey a passivity prior to all activity. In
Lacostes words: the sacraments signify [] a divine project with the human
being before being a human project.2 If, however, as I will show, liturgical
experience nevertheless originates from a human project, it is to be noted that it
is the Absolute that in the end will take hold of this free human project, for it is
indeed when the order of the project is disqualified I do not do anything in the
Eucharist, and I do not actualize my self that the project of God with the human
being can accomplish itself.3
These two formulas may designate the later liturgical experience in a nutshell.
The reasons, moreover, for describing this experience as the experience of the one
placing himself under the protection of God (PD 9) are drawn from the theology of
the incarnation and of the sacraments as they are in opposition to a perhaps all too
rational approach to God: the theology of the incarnation and of the sacraments
function is [] to affirm the over-determination of Gods transcendence by Gods
condescension, of Gods omnipresence by his being-there, of Gods inaccessibility
by Gods proximity (Carmel 29). To confront the Absolute, then, is to confront
God as coming towards the human being condescension: Gods taking of flesh
means that God assumes a body and is to be encountered in certain particular
1
A word on the trajectory of Lacoste is at issue, especially with regard to the main
texts that this book will discuss. When I refer to these early works on the sacraments, I refer
to those texts published in the beginning of the 1980s. NT was published only in 1990, but
can be retraced to research conducted between 1980 and 1983 (NT 9). EA was published in
1994, but the very rough draft (EA 3/3), namely BHP and Carmel, had appeared already
in 1987 and 1989. This means, of course, that the sketch of the liturgical experience was
already present at the time of finishing NT, which is one of the reasons why this book will
combine the analysis of NT and EA.
2
Lacoste, Acquiescer au monde et au temps. Petite logique du consentement,
Communio, 4 (1979): 2532, p. 32.
3
Lacoste, Le temps dtre homme, Communio, 7 (1982): 1927, p. 22.
Phenomenology of Confession 17
places rather than others and is closer to the human being than a simple stress on
the divines transcendence supposes.
Liturgical experience is caught between the difference of creation and world
(NT 73142). This means above anything else that being-in-the-world first appears
as that which keeps the Absolute at a distance. This distance, Lacoste argues,
has to be named sin. Yet the distance between creation and world takes place
within the world. This allows liturgical experience to incorporate both a moment
continuous with being-in-the-world and some discontinuity and rupture with our
native condition. We will see Lacoste struggling with both moments throughout
this work, most notable in Chapter 3 continuity through an unrest underlying
our ontological constitution and discontinuity the ontic act of prayer and
of liturgy adding something new to ontology. This novelty is what we can call
a Christian worldview: once we have entered into the logic of the sacraments
and in the liturgy, it becomes unthinkable that God could not be present in that
very world. The sacraments speak to us of a between within the world and
creation: the sacraments create a passageway from the world to Gods grace to
such an extent that the boundaries between them tend to evaporate, or at least are
redefined (PP 110), and something like pure nature or pure world would reveal
itself unthinkable.
Yet in our search for the sacraments ability to speak to a non-Christian and
even secular worldview, or how liturgical experience can turn to a spiritual
experience shared by all, one must be prepared to face the reality of sin. Lacostes
phenomenological approach to confession is obvious: before assuming that, in a
world where reconciliation has a realistic, social and political face, its sacramental
side would be merely privatization of grace and inefficient; in short, before turning
it into ideology [] it could perhaps be convenient to see what [confession] says
of itself.4 One needs to hear the echo of Heideggers definition of the phenomenon
as that which shows itself from itself5 here. Lacoste proposes to direct the
phenomenological gaze to the practice of confessing in order to make it apparent
how this phenomenon shows itself without the interference of any for instance,
political or social interpretations.
The confession is a confession of ones sins. Confession starts with the intimate
examination of ones conscience6 and results in doing penance. Penance, then, is
the precise place where conscience can refine itself7 and aim at its conversion.
Penance, for Lacoste, has a peculiarity which it shares with baptism: it is, in
one way or another, a sacrament of the margins and of a transition through re-
integrating in [] the ecclesial being those who admit being more or less turned
4
Lacoste, Quatre thses thologiques sur la confession, Revue Thomiste, 82 (1982):
392413, p. 392.
5
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 58.
6
Lacoste, Quatre thses, p. 402.
7
Ibid., p. 395.
away.8 Second, the phenomenology of confession starts with an experience of

frontiers: I cannot forgive myself for my own sins all the while knowing that
the appeal to ethics, as the worldly realization of some sort of eschaton, is often
misheard or ignored. It is therefore necessary that the question of peace and
reconciliation is posed while presupposing the failure of the human being to be
human.9 Only liturgical experience will show us just how to be human.
The sacrament of confession brings the penitent to the margins of autonomy.
In these margins, the believer will encounter the limits of his willing, knowing and
desire and God is revealed as the instance who acts wherever we can no longer act,
who knows what we cannot know; in short, as the one who gives what we cannot
give to ourselves:10 grace, redemption, reconciliation, and authentic humanity.
The sacraments start from a lack: the lack of being sufficiently human. This
lack is obvious also from the point of the weal and the woe of conscience and
consciousness during confession. The examination of ones conscience is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for the phenomenon of confession. More
is at issue than that which consciousness can bring before itself: the sin committed
or considered is always and already a sin towards the other as well. It is, in any
case, not up to me to forgive my (own) sins; a third party is always involved,
whether I am conscious of it or not. Lacoste is arguing here for a retrieval of the
theory of the venial sin: although not all sins are to be considered as mortal sins,
my salvation from even the tiniest sin is not up to me only and it is this that makes
for the existential seriousness of the spiritual gaze directed to my sins.11
The sacrament of confession speaks to us about a lack of knowledge about God
and a lack of community. If it is not up to me to decide how grave my sins are,
or even to forgive myself (if such a thing were possible), then this is so because
of the complexity of sin. Sin is not just a dilemma in which one decides more or
less consciously whether one act is for or against the divine. More often than not,
one does not know whether ones actions are just and good. More often than not,
what seems good can entail consequences that defy our conception of the good. In
short, I know that I have sinned better than that I know what exactly my sin is.12
This, then, is the drama of sin: I know that it is me my salvation and my
well-being that is at stake, but the remedy, if one may call it that, is beyond me. I
know that my presence and my confession are required to be forgiven, but I do not
know what exactly is required of me. This is why Lacoste writes that sacramental
mysticism [] cannot separate itself easily from ethics here.13
This is why sin is always midway between knowledge and ignorance. The
spiritual gaze that I (or the priest) direct towards my sin is objective and subjective
8
Ibid., p. 410.
9
Lacoste, Vers le sacrement du pardon, Communio, 8 (1983) 524, p. 11.
10
Ibid., p. 7.
11
Lacoste, Quatre thses thologiques sur la confession, p. 397.
12
Ibid., p. 398.
13
Ibid., p. 399.
at the same time.14 It is objective in the sense that, through the distance created
between the sin and myself via penance, I am aware of myself as a sinner and
open myself to a future of grace. The distance created between my sin and myself
through confession distances me from what keeps me at a distance from God.
Yet the objectivity of my being a sinner does not resonate with a subjective
consideration of which sin is important or not. Subjectively, although I confess to
be a sinner, I have never repented enough for this or that sin simply because I am
not in a position to recognize the importance of these diverse sins. This ignorance
about salvation is what makes the situation of confessing a sure sign of the lack of
theological knowledge of the divine. This ignorance, too, is why Lacoste shows
himself to be a vehement opponent of all theories of collective absolution where
the confession of penance would be reserved for mortal sins: it ruins the most
severe existential aspect of penance.15

Yet the stress on the existential aspect of confession should not be overestimated
either, since the reality of the sin concerns, because of its interpersonal character,
the other, more than it does me. This is why the phenomenon of confession, after
a first moment of active engagement on my part, involves the participation of the
entire community through the third party that is the priest. Through the eyes of
the priest, one might say, the whole of the Christian community is present. The
lack of certainty with regard to my sins opens onto the lack of community. In a
footnote which captures Lacostes entire thinking of community, he writes: one
must not rush when speaking of communities there, where what is present is first
of all the desire for community.16 Sin is that which ruins every community and
encounter with the other: where sin is present, community is simply absent. In
this way, the confessions of sins express a desire for, more than anything else,
a restoration of the relationship with the other person. It is here as well that the
limits of intersubjective dialogue, for Lacoste, are encountered, for there might
be sins that simply exceed the forgiveness that I can give to the other or that the
other person can give to me. Both of us are, in the liturgical regime, bound to that
which the human being cannot give to itself, that is, absolution and reconciliation
in full knowledge.
Liturgical experiences first word is that of dispossession. Confession
introduces into a critique of common representations of intersubjective encounter.
Symmetry [] finds itself ruptured there.17 This is, in effect, what the curtain
or the screen which separates me from the priest symbolizes. It guarantees
the bracketing of all (too) personal relations and secures the anonymity of the
confession: the priest cannot see my face nor can I see his.
This anonymity, for Lacoste, must be interpreted as a return to the theological
self, absolved from all empirical and ontic peculiarities. During confession, it
14
See for this, ibid., p. 396.
15
Ibid., p. 399.
16
Ibid., p. 409 n. 15.
17
Ibid., p. 401.
does not matter how eloquent my tale of my sins is nor does it matter how the
priest emotionally reacts to my account. The priest does not appear in confession
as a friend and perhaps not even as a superior: brought back to the bare essentials,
he and I appear to one another through the naked face of a brother in Christ.18
If the priest is the minister of the sacrament, though, he gains this power only by
reducing the peculiarity and particularity of his person to the utmost extreme in
order to let Christ act through the person of the priest. Lacoste writes that the priest
lends his empirical self to Christ and is instrumentalised by Christ in order
to extend grace to the penitent.19 In this sense, the dialogical event with Christ
takes place through the reduction, if not destruction, of all symmetrical dialogue
between the priest and I.
In this way, the how of the phenomenon of confession shows, according to
Lacoste, the ambition of a radical anonymity of both the priest and the penitent. It
also shows the sheer powerlessness of both participants: I confess to being unable
not to sin or to forgive myself, and the priest, as this particular person here, has no
power whatsoever to absolve me from my sins. If there is any absolution, it comes
through Christ. The priest too undergoes a dispossession and is there only as a
representative of Christs offer of salvation.
It is paradoxically, Lacoste concludes, through the break with simple inter-
human relations that these relations can access their authenticity: on the condition
that it is Christ who reveals the other person to me, and the other person reveals
Christ, I accede to the truth of [these relations].20 In this way, a phenomenology
of confession opens, through the entry of authentic relations, onto the adventure
of authentic existential conversion. Yet Lacoste is already here stressing that the
continuity of the penitent before and after the confession needs to be taken into
account as well: it is not that an economy of grace comes there to simply and
purely abolish the economy of sin, but by consenting to die for my sin, and for
my badly led personal existence, it opens up the space of a re-creation.21 The
conversion must be seen as a permanent struggle between the worldly and the
theological self, between the I who sins and the I who is graced, trapped as is the
human being between being sufficiently saved and insufficiently human.
This space of re-creation, however, already indicates that a moment of
discontinuity with being-in-the-world is to be enjoyed. How does Lacoste
describe the moment in which the reception of salvation through the forgiveness
of sin happens? The sacrament of penance repeats that of baptism.22 Not without
recalling the importance of the fact that Christs offer of salvation (through the
18
Ibid., p. 401, for both quotes.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., p. 403.
21
Ibid., p. 408.
22
Ibid., p. 408.
forgiveness of sins) was uttered already before Easter,23 Lacoste writes that Christs
resurrection radicalizes the pre-paschal appeal to conversion: it inaugurates a
new relation and to be forgiven by Christ is to receive the vocation to exist solely
according to the true measure of the excess of humanity that is attested in the
coming of the Son in the flesh.24 The re-creation aimed for here is, of course, a
renewal of creation just as much as it can be the blissful and oftentimes blinding
reception of a momentary grace.
This vocation is to be seen as a task. It is, in effect, easy to be mistaken
about this moment of grace and act as if Christ had assumed all that there is to
be assumed of humanity to such a point, that the concept of sin can appear pre-
Christian.25 This would be to take the task of vocation a bit too lightly and to
forget that the resurrection is a fait accompli only for Christ and remains for us
a task. In these early texts, Lacoste distinguishes three human responses to the
offer of salvation: first, one must accept and consent to the proposal of salvation
in Christ through, say, prayer and baptism; second, one must accept to receive
the injunction to concretize the pardon granted through, say, ethical behaviour
and the sacraments as a way to still confer salvation on this world; and third, since
the demands of the Kingdom surpass the demands of worldly ethics and politics,
one must acknowledge that through Christ the possibility is given to humankind
not to sin again. The offer of salvation, after Easter, turns into the possibility of
saintliness and shows that salvation is not solely to be determined from out of the
world and its measures.26
Though this account of sin may seem somewhat radical, it can serve to correct
Pickstocks complaint that Lacostes liturgical experience too much emphasizes
the liturgical journey as solitary and unicursal.27 Lacoste would in effect counter
this claim by stating that too much emphasis on the community as in the case
of collective absolution takes away the sting of the distance that sin installs
between God, the community and myself through the belief that ones sins have
been remitted on a whim.
The reality of sin is such, according to Lacoste, that its essence is anti-relational:
it puts me at a distance from my fellow human beings and from God. This is
why the liturgical journey is solitary and must first pass through the ontic and
existential seriousness of confession and prayer. It is not that liturgical experience,
as Pickstock suggests, neglects the relational status of the gift;28 it is that it starts
out with the humble recognition of the fact that such a relationality is most often
23
See for this Lacoste, Du droit de lhistoire au droit de Dieu: sur la rsurrection de
Jsus, Nouvelle revue thologique, 104 (1982): 495531.
24
Lacoste, Vers le sacrement du pardon, pp. 1415.
25
Ibid., p. 17.
26
See for this ibid., pp. 1415 and 223. The quote is p. 15.
27
Pickstock, After Writing. On the Liturgical Communication of Philosophy (Oxford,
1998), p. 233.
28
Ibid., p. 250.
lacking, for sin is the ruin of the very idea of community. Sin, then, is the refusal
of relation to such an extent that my sins do not simply hurt a spiritual reality,
they also harm the local community29 if we are to believe that the Eucharistic
koinonia is a communion of saints. This is why, finally, for Lacoste, it is good
that I confess all alone, so that my gaze can be purified, and that I only then can
find the face of my brother again.30 What Pickstock neglects is that one first needs
to come to terms with ones own comportment coram Deo before one is able to
contemplate and celebrate with others.
Against Religious Experience

Liturgy, as portrayed in Exprience et Absolu, is known for its critique of all kinds
of religious experience. Yet the problem with such an experience originates earlier
in Lacostes work. In our age of nihilism, the question of the human being what is
it for the human being to be? is for Lacoste one of the most pressing. One knows,
Lacoste writes, what the human being is and plenty of reductive answers to this
question are available to resolve this question: the human being is nothing but its
genetic make-up, it is nothing but the side-effect of sociological or political factors
and so on. But one does not know any longer who man is, not simply insofar as he
is (the flower is too), but insofar as he singularly exists.31 In theology, attempts
are made as well to secure its analyses on the basis of anthropologies provided
for us by Schleiermacher and the like, but these approaches can no longer aim
beyond the mere anthropology: if the anthropological gaze stops at man, and
does not know how to look for God, it is perhaps because it does not know how
to see man.32 With this question of the human beings existence, theology and
philosophy might perhaps find one of the common task[s] Lacoste is sketching
in his later work.33
Liturgical experience adds yet one more query to these what-questions
and who-questions: where are you in relation to God, considering that this
relationality is for the most part lacking? Here it finds its theological focus and
the reason why the opening pages of Exprience et Absolu turn to a topology
of human existence rather than an ontological stance la Heidegger.34 In effect,
theology agrees that the question of who the human being is can only be answered
once consideration is taken of where this human being stands in relation to God,
29

All quotes Lacoste, Quatre thses thologiques, p. 411
30

Ibid., p. 412.
31

Lacoste, Vers le sacrement du pardon, p. 6.
32

Ibid., p. 6.
33

Lacoste, La thologie et la tche de la pense, in P. Gibert and C. Theobald (eds),
Thologies et vrit au dfi de lhistoire (Leuven, 2010), 21326, p. 223.
34
Greisch, Le buisson ardent et les lumires de la raison. Tome II (Paris, 2002), pp.
26691, pp. 2667, first pointed to this topological question, Adam, where are you?
bearing in mind the fact that, in the words of the previous section, all of us are
more or less turned away from God. It is this topological dimension, where the
human being is always and already more or less coram Deo, which lies prior to
all queries in anthropology or ontology.
As far as Exprience et Absolu is concerned, the human being knows of two
primary places: it exists as Dasein in the world and it dwells as a mortal on
the earth. Whereas the first knows no other limit to its being than the limits of the
world, the latter opens onto a larger realm where the mortals arise co-dependently
with all sorts of pagan divinities, but, for Lacoste, the Heideggerian fourfold does
not allow one to pronounce the name of God without ambiguity (EA21/18). It will
fall to a description of the pilgrim and of the wanderer to insinuate that liturgy
may hold the secrets of topology (EA 27/22).
It holds this secret, however, in an inconspicuous way: no religious experience

will tell us in a clear and distinct way that it is God we are experiencing, nor can
it function as a proof of the existence of such religious realities (PP 19). Rather,
religious experience will tell us inevitably more about ourselves than one would
first allow for: religious feeling proves more clearly mans relation to earth
[] than it proves [] his relation to God (EA20 n.1/198 n.17). Any religious
experience tells us more about the subject of experience the human being than
about its object God. Such an experience, moreover, is closer to contemporary
paganism and its concomitant complacency in which the subject of experience
remains for the most part unaltered.
Religious experience is what issues from what one could call a strong ego:
the ego does not find anything genuine at the end of such an experience other
than its self. In the words of Lacoste: this ego does not even reckon with the
possibility that its relation with God could also be called into question in and
through liturgy. The strong ego does not risk anything and finds itself firmly seated
and confirmed in its secure position. Therefore, the self of religious experience
resembles the certainty of the transcendental ego that rests calmly in its stance and
quietly contemplates its experience of the world from the outside. It does not know
the existential seriousness that accompanies the liturgical and disregards the ontic
action of prayer that necessarily accompanies it. I will later explain in more detail
why this re-description of the ontic act is of such importance for Lacoste.
For now, it may suffice to state that the main reason to reject religious
experience is that it leaves its subject unaffected, unaltered and untouched by that
which happens (or does not happen) face to face with God. This too might be
understood along Heideggerian lines. Christopher Fynsk writes:
when we speak of undergoing an experience, Heidegger says, we designate not

an occurrence of which we are and remain the subject but rather an event by
which something comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us: To undergo
here means to endure, to suffer, to receive perceptively what strikes us and to
accede to it insofar as we conform to it.35
It is along these lines that we may appreciate the brutality and somewhat violent
character of liturgical experience: it is the phenomenological description of what
actually happens to the human being when confronting the Absolute rather than
the peaceful observation of the scientific subject gathering data from the object it
experiences.
Such is religious experience: it remains unaffected by its own experience and
in this way incarnates the distance and detachment proper to the transcendental
subject. It is an experience that does not cost anything and in which no one is put
at risk: the need for God becomes the norm of my presence before God rather
than the reception of the appeal to present oneself to the presence of God.36 The
modern subject can appear as a monster it does not know how to live, tre
en danger will say, and forgets the burden and the ordeal that life at times can
be. This is also the reason why Lacoste, in this article and elsewhere, links such
a subjectivity to sin: by refusing the liturgical de-centring and dispossession of
the individual gesture of the subsisting self, it refuses the negation of the self
enclosed in its substantiality that is the sinful self.37
Liturgy, Nihilism and Modernity
Yet liturgical experience has something to say to the modern domination by

concepts of usefulness and efficiency. Here it is necessary to appreciate liturgical
protest against modern velocity, uniformity and efficiency. The anti-modern
character of liturgy is illustrated nicely in one of the first texts of Prsence et
Parousie, which argues for a theological surplus to metaphysics (PP 28) precisely
because liturgy and theology are scarcely modern in nature. Of what does this anti-
modernity consist?
Lacoste does not reject modernity as such. Rather, the anti-modernity of liturgy
allows one to liken it to the phenomenological enterprise, because liturgical things,
as the Eucharistic presence for instance, are analogous to the phenomenon as is
shown in phenomenology, where phenomena make a difference simply by coming
to appearance. What makes this phenomenon a singular phenomenon is precisely
that it cannot and may not be reduced to a sort of modern atom, which in all places
See Christopher Fynsk, Language and Relation That There is Language

35
(Stanford, 1996), p. 39, quoting Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York, 1971),
p. 57.
36
Lacoste, Le temps dtre homme, Communio, 7 (1982): 1927, pp. 20 and 24
respectively.
37
Ibid., pp. 21 and 27 respectively.
and all times would be of the same extension, just as on a map all local spaces and
places are reduced to a point amidst all other points and geometrical coordinates.
One can also think of the phenomenology of the sacraments as indicated earlier,
when considering that the attendance at sacraments such as the Eucharist forces
one to move from wherever we are to that very particular place of the Church. In
this sense, liturgical and the phenomenological meet in their attention to the very
particular and contingent manners in which things and phenomena appear.
Liturgy, for instance, having the paradoxical combination of celebrating
a presence here rather than there, which it nevertheless believes is also to be
considered an omnipresence, speaks to us from out of an irreducible particularity,
bound as it is to the limits of liturgical actions and gestures in the limits of a
space (PP 28). If the gift advenes here rather than there (PP 28), one must agree
that the donation of presence is linked to the particularity of certain places and
certain times (PP 29).
The contingent and quasi-empirical nature of liturgy allows for a spiritual
gaze as much as it allows rigorous for phenomenological description. Is not the
phenomenologist immersed in a similar discipline to that of the one praying, of
whom Lacoste writes, he is less the man of the rule that can be fixed. He is the
man of what gives itself here and not there, of what can be prayed here but not
elsewhere (PP 30), by seeing what gives and shows itself here in this phenomenon
rather than another, by what can be seen here in this particular phenomenon but
perhaps not in another. Both the phenomenologist and the liturgist are involved in
a quest [which is] immersed in the particular (PP 30). One must, in any case, agree
that it is, because of the combination of phenomenology a modern discipline!
and liturgy, only a specific modernity is under attack by liturgys anti-modernity.
Lacoste concedes that one modernity and only one, as such able to be dated and
placed as such in our chronologies [is an] idea that does not resist a serious reading
of history.38 It convenes, then, to consider in what aspects modernity is to be
resisted.
It is here that liturgy and phenomenology meet one more time. The nihilism
issuing from modernity and the sheer domination by technology and its metaphysics,
to the extent that the human being and its world are obscured, are common ground
for the quest of theology and philosophy towards post-metaphysical thinking.
Theology, too, for Lacoste, can have an idea or two about what an exit from
metaphysics could be.39
Of what then does the modern metaphysics of technology consist? Lacoste
defines the object as that which is seen and perceived but from which does not
arise a particular affect, in which perception does not necessarily lead to affection
(ED 49). The description of the mathematical object can be done by anyone at
any time and does not involve the particular person as such. These objects can be
38
Lacoste, La thologie et la tche de la pense, p. 215. For ED, see Chapter 8.
39
Lacoste, Homoousios et homoousios. La substance entre thologie et philosophie,
Recherches de science religieuse, 98(2010): 85100, p. 94.
instrumentalized, categorized and dated ad infinitum. The danger of technology is

that it will inaugurate an era in which the human being eventually knows nothing
besides objects and will, in effect, be taken as or consider himself as an object itself.
Heideggers Machenschaft speaks of the fear that all that will be left is production
and construction and that the reality of the unconstructed and what is irreducible
to production will be forgotten. This is ultimately what a phenomenology of the
unapparent seeks to counter when it speaks of the appearing of appearing itself as
an instance that escapes all human reckoning.
Contrary to such a phenomenology of the unapparent, the constitution of
objects is interpreted as a sign of the control and the domination that the human
being wants to exercise over particular beings. Beings cannot appear as other than
their representation or their essence. It is to such a problem that philosophy today
points when it speaks of the problem of metaphysics. The shortest description

of metaphysics is perhaps that it complicates the transition from philosophy to
theology by indicating where and when the latter speaks of God too quickly and too
easily, that is, by reaching out to one or the other highest being that is in control
of all other beings. Heidegger delivered what could be described as the blueprint
of such an ontotheology in Identity and Difference, but its mode of procedure
is better illustrated in Heideggers second volume on Nietzsche.40 Whereas the
reduction to the subjects representations seems to be a modern affair mostly
lamented by Levinas the reduction to the essence of a being can be dated back,
if we are to believe Heidegger, to Ancient Greece. In any case, it might be safer
to conclude that such a want of a hold (R. Schrmann) or want of control over
beings belongs to every era. This is, at least, what Lacoste argues for in tre en
danger (ED 75).
How does the reduction to object and ontotheology operate? Heidegger argues
that the question of the essence of a being has always been answered in a certain
not incorrect way. This essence of a being emerges out of the quest for a quiddity
of the being at issue. This quiddity or essence is thought from out of what the
diverse beings have in common. If I say that a table is a plateau with four legs,
then this means that I extracted this essence from my perception of diverse tables
and what they have in common. The essence arises out of perception, but does not
stop there. The differences between the different empirical tables add up to another
question: which one of all beings amongst all the beings answers the most for that
which is determined as the what of this being? A designer table, for example,
that does not correspond to the essence of a table as a plateau with four legs will
not be incorporated in this quest for, one might say, the being that corresponds to
the quiddity of this being as such and which therefore might be deemed as truly
existing. Since the designer table does not live up to the measure of the essence
of table, it lacks in being and existence over and against the table that adequately
corresponds to this essence.
Heidegger, Nietzsche II (Stuttgart, 2008), pp. 31013, for all following quotes.
40
The beingness of a being is answered from out of its essential quiddity or

whatness by (somewhat disregarding) its contingent thatness: in any case, one
must have first seen some kind of table to be able to extract the essence of a table.
In metaphysics, Heidegger argues, the question of being itself remains out of the
picture: metaphysics in this sense is a forgetting of being. Yet the question of
whatness does not totally disregard the question of being: it speaks, first, of beings
in their very being beingness is whatness and thatness and, second, taking
beings as its points of departure, it will necessarily answer the question why are
there beings at all? by proposing another being: metaphysics [] misplaces
being yet again in a being, be it the highest being as the most efficient cause or be
it the exceptional being in the sense of the subject of subjectivity as the condition
of possibility of all objectivity.
This quest for the highest being, then, arises out of the particular question of
metaphysics into the whatness of a being: just as one will wonder which table
most resembles the essence of a table, so too the highest idea of a table will
eventually appear; and just when this idea in a Platonic sense appears, a more
common grounding of all these diverse ideas will be necessary: this function will
be performed by the highest being of metaphysics. God, as the highest being,
becomes the warrantor of the essence and idea of all diverse empirical beings.
Once we have lost faith in such a common ground of all beings, it seems that
the question of the divine flees as well. Ontology, in the metaphysical era, is
also and necessarily theology and this is why the transition from philosophy to
theology has been complicated when metaphysics is slowly but surely ending.
While our era no longer seems to need a metaphysical superstructure over and
above beings, the control over essences which it inherited from the metaphysical
days is very much present in modern technology.
It is this predominance of technology that contemporary philosophers and
theologians try to ward off: its call for efficiency stretches inappropriately towards
not only the divine and the human being, but also seems to inaugurate an epoch in
which nothing but efficiency matters. Technology, in this sense, entails a certain
kind of nihilism. Nihilism, obviously, dawns when the metaphysical superstructure
has faded away and people are no longer concerned about that which was once
considered as the most high; it also comes into view if the values of efficiency
and production ultimately relegate the question of truth and meaning to the realm
of the unimportant. Lacoste can therefore correctly argue that nihilism is the
impossibility of a final word.41
It is against such a metaphysical and nihilistic technology that liturgical
experience protests. It does so in a double way: on the one hand, its logic surpasses
the logic of what is necessary in contemporary life and, on the other, instructs
about the use of a certain uselessness. These two points might be indicative of
41
Chris Hackett, Interview with Jean-Yves Lacoste, in C. Hackett and T. Dika (eds),
What is Living and What is Dead in French Phenomenology, forthcoming with Stanford
University Press 2013, p. 12.
the most optimistic strand of liturgical experience and might explain why Lacoste
in an interview recalls the positive reading of unconcernedness42 of the 1990
book and why liturgical experience shares some features with such re-creational
activities as resting and enjoying a work of art.43
The surplus character of liturgical experience must be combined with its
usefulness of uselessness. Its ability to defy the principle of sufficient reason
makes liturgical experience counter todays technological dominance. In the
first text to use liturgy in its technical meaning, liturgy intervenes to rupture the
relations between human beings and the world. Philosophies of labour have said
that the human being makes the world more human through work. But Lacoste,
instructed by Heideggers account of technology, announces the distinction
between the world and creation that will serve as a main conceptual strategy in
his later work: the world is not simply another name for creation, and one has
to learn from technology that the modality in which the human being is creator
here does not manifest but rather obscures the modality in which God is creator
the technological human being creates while dominating, and God creates while
letting be and respecting.44 In this sense, being capable of liturgy is first of all
being accustomed to losing ones time, in any case to distract ones time form all
economy of means and ends.45 The distance liturgy thus takes from human affairs
might of course arouse the suspicion that liturgy itself is a form of divertissement
and that it possibly distracts from urgent intersubjective matters.
All this of course pertains to the question of just how liturgical liturgical
experience is; that is, exactly how should one read the small letters of the contract
that stipulates a logic writ large.
How Liturgical is liturgical Experience? Some Thoughts on the Eucharist
BC/AD: Christs Coming
In consequence of ontotheologys shying away from all things contingent and

empirical, both Exprience et Absolu and Note sur le temps stress the contingent
nature of Gods revelation in Christ. Liturgical experience ultimately does not
Ibid., p. 17.
42
One should note here the provenance of liturgys critique of technology in

43
sacramental theology. If baptism seems to be the sole thing necessary for salvation, the
sacrament of confirmation seems supportive of the superfluity of grace and testifies to a
[] theology [which] does not content itself with assuring salvation through the principle
of sufficient reason, but [tries to think] a grace redoubling grace. All quotes from Lacoste,
La surabondance. Baptme, confirmation, eucharistie, Communio, 7 (1982): 4860, pp.
50 and 59.
44
Lacoste, De la technique la liturgie, Communio, 9 (1984): 2637, p. 33.
45
Ibid., p. 34.
have a transcendental character. The human being is not always and already, at all
times, placed before God: world and earth occlude Gods presence. The question
then arises as to how one is able to know that Dasein does not depict the entirety
of the being of the human being. The break with the transcendental nature of the
human being comes to us through the violence of a fact. If God is not known to
us transcendentally, then our knowledge of God has its origins in history, and is,
in other words, historical. What we initially do not have, and is not already part
of our being, should be given to us as historical: the life and death of Jesus Christ
(EA 128/105).
In order to see how liturgical liturgical experience is, I will focus on the
differences Lacoste mentions between Christ and the times prior to His coming.
Lacoste indeed sketches the possibility of a memory which would be neither
christological nor Eucharistic (NT 117). Although it remains somewhat unclear

what exactly Lacoste is aiming at, the most obvious explanation seems to be
situated in the Jewish experience, interpreted as an experience of creation and of
the covenant between God and human beings.
Lacoste seems to think of such a covenant without christology as a covenant
marked by a promise suited to, and perhaps even measured by, history. Such a
covenant would be acquainted with God as the subject and the promise of
relationship (EA 229/191). The Jewish God is a God who speaks to his people
of the promises of land and liberation (NT 117). A promise suited to history,
however, has to deal with the weal and the woe of history: even the Promised
Land showed itself not to be a good appropriated once and for all. What once may
have seemed definitive showed itself to be merely provisional. This, according to
Lacoste, reveals these promises as a stage on a way (NT 129) and, because of
their provisional nature, caught in the shadow of death.
Lacoste casts this experience primarily as an ethical experience. If Gods
promise here seems to be only provisional, then it is only out of respect for the
law that it allows for a legitimate forgetting of mortality and finitude (NT 118): I
do not have time to ponder my death when attending to the other. The covenant
is inevitably connected with the law, so that whoever acts ethically undertakes a
genuine transgression of being-in-the-world: the ethical act is [regression] from
the world towards creation (NT 111).
The only problem is that the ethical project can never reach its completion the
human being is not able to do good always and everywhere as it is unable indeed
to yield from itself a new beginning46 and therefore always remains rooted in the
ambiguity of the difference between creation and the world.
The eschatology envisioned in and through ethics therefore remains
undetermined. The ethical in-between reveals human being as always and already
caught between a good and an ill will. The eschatological demand of the good
reveals itself amidst all things provisional and therefore always and already has
46
Lacoste will indeed trace a difference between the beginning of the ethical project
and the new beginning offered in liturgical experience, see Chapter 7.
to deal with conflicting significations (EA 78/65; NT 68). But the ethical project
does, for Lacoste, intimate the beginning of creation and so appears to perform
a theological reduction (NT 122): the ethical transgression makes the immediacy
of the world disappear, so that what was hidden within the world, creation, is able
to appear.
Christs action in history, for Lacoste, completes and complements creation
(NT 120). The entry of Christ in history determines Gods promise (NT 166) as
resurrection, revealing a mode of being that should no longer be considered solely
as being-toward-death. From then on, restlessness, a desire which at first does not
know what it yearns for, knows the term of its desire. From then on, too, Gods
(second) coming will be clearly defined:
the passage of God in history authorizes the believing consciousness to remember

a presence that will not be exceeded by a parousia [] From that moment
onwards, parousia does no longer need to be thought of as the eschatological
interruption of an unknown God, but as a return and the institution of that which
has [] taken place in the human history of Jesus (NT 157, also EA 174/144).
Since the eschatological realities were still undetermined in the Old Covenant,
Lacoste apparently opines that such a being-in-the-covenant could not always resist
the temptation to fabricate images and idols of the eschaton by itself. In principle,
however, the human being is delivered from idolatry once Christ has come. In
Lacostes words: Holy Saturday marks the border between an eschatology which
every human being for himself devises, and an eschatology of which God is the
author (NT 120). Just as Christs appearance in history qualifies and determines
Gods promise, so too the appearance of Christ for Lacoste marks the completion
of history. History, and its provisional character, is to be seen as the realm of the
question. The ethical project, as we have seen, is a project in which the human
being becomes a question to itself, for it is in such a project that the human being
encounters an eschatology which, however, does not give a satisfying answer to
the question of ones humanity.
With the appearance of Christ in history, the Christian has nothing more to wait
for: no other name is to be expected. On the other hand, the immediate expectations
of the first Christians for the Kingdom were not fulfilled. The Christian thus lives
in the middle of the postponement of Gods coming. The result of Christs first
coming in history is therefore a disenchanted history (NT 157). History becomes an
empty space, as it were, in which only repetition and tautology take place (NT 165).
Therefore, after Christs first coming, the provisional character of history
is termed by Lacoste as pre-eschatological. Christ heralded a new time and re-
signified the old. It is not that the difference between Jesus and Christ or between
the Cross and the Resurrection equals the difference between the historical and the
eschatological. Rather it must be assumed that even during the pre-paschal period
of Jesus, lived in the shadow of death, the eschatological was already announcing
itself, if only through Jesuss ability to forgive sinful behaviour. Jesuss time
among us was not simply or solely historical or provisional: Jesuss time was pre-
eschatological and therefore already acquainted with the crossing of the historical
and the eschatological.
Christ did not extinguish the contingency of death, but through his Resurrection
gave death a new meaning. It is, finally, to such a pre-eschatological structure
that one is granted access in prayer and in the Eucharist. If God has revealed, in
Jesus, the definitive realities, then the knowledge that we have ofthe Christ-event
possesses an eschatological status too (NT 154). The appearance of Christ therefore
shows just who the human being ultimately is. If God manifests Godself in and as a
human being, Lacoste argues, it is also clear what the humanity of the human being
aspires to (NT 148 and 185).
Eucharistic Presence
The Eucharistic remembrance is then no longer determined by hearing the echo of

Gods words expressed in the creation of the world when all promised to be good,
but is, on top of that,47 determined by understanding Gods final word in Christ
(NT 144). The Eucharist is the (non-)place wherein the human being is instructed
about his or her humanity, for it is there that a space is opened in which Gods last
word can still resound. Thus, according to Lacoste, the questionable character of
history (or history as the realm of questions) is interrupted. The Eucharist thus
knows how to transgress history just as it temporarily brackets the question the
human being is to itself and proposes an answer to this question through the life
of Christ.
The Eucharist centres upon the particular and contingent events surrounding
the birth and death of Jesus of Nazareth. The Eucharist thus commemorates an
event in the past. Gods proposal of salvation may indeed belong to facticity;
salvation itself does not. The human being is not, from the outset and from time
immemorial, saved. The factual, particular proposal of salvation makes Lacoste
write about Christs Cross as a fact (for example NT 183).48 The fundamental
historicity (NT 128) of the Incarnation, then, is the assumption of time in God
47
Christs coming obviously does not annul the memory of creation, but rather
overdetermines it. The fact that the memory of the words of creation when all promised
to be good is not rendered inoperative is also testified to by EAs analysis of prayer which
is based almost exclusively on creation and its rejection of a Christological or sacramental
interpretation of prayer (EA 55/45). It remains unclear just how to conceive the relation
between prayer and the sacraments in Lacostes work, except if one would want to concur
with the fact that creation is already a Christological event, see NT 827.
48
Even Christs resurrection has for Lacoste a factual character (NT 167), albeit a
somewhat illegal fact, see Du droit de lhistoire, p. 499.
himself or, to be precise, the experience that God has of human temporality []
rather than the experience the human being has of eternity.49
Yet if the Absolute commits himself to the hazards of history to manifest what
there is to him, then we are forced, if we are interested in what matters definitively,
to make an exodus out of our transcendental certitudes (NT 145). The risk that
God takes by entering into human history is met with the human being also risking
to venture outside of his ontological make-up through entering into the ontic and
contingent acts of prayer and of attending the Eucharist. Such a radical particular
nature of Christian revelation in a past event leads, however, to the question of
how the faithful can still encounter Christ in the event of the Eucharist: is not
the Eucharist, as every memory, bound to certain limits and possibly distorted by
an excess of interpretations? And would anyone be willing to risk his life for an
historical event?
The Eucharistic presence, for Lacoste, is assured of its kairological character
through the work of the Holy Spirit. Kairos, here, means the occasion in which
memory and hope coincide, in which, moreover, the believer acknowledges that
the border between history and eschatology runs through the present experience
of the believer. Kairos is, then, the element through which temporality receives a
sort of elasticity and stretches to such an extent that the believer of today can still
be present before God. If the memory (of Gods past words) and hope (of a future
promised by God) coincide, then such a kairological moment has to be conceived
as a memory of a future (NT 187): in the Eucharist, God presents himself to the
believers present as to remind them of the future he once promised to them.
As such, the temporality of this coinciding of memory and hope Lacoste
calls this a mmoire heureuse (NT 195) a happy memory can only be given
by God. The kairos, which causes liturgical memory to succeed, must therefore
be thought primarily as issuing from a divine initiative through which it is God
who dispels the chiaroscuro of the world. And yet, it is precisely this chiaroscuro
of the world which makes for the fact that the memory of the historian reducing
Jesus to an historical object will always have to deal with merely a hypothesis,
one subject to verification and falsification. Over and against the uncertainty of
such a hypothetical memory stands the kairological certainty of Gods promise
to Gods people. God thus serves as the condition of possibility for a happy
memory, in which the chiaroscuro of all things worldly no longer disturbs the
act of remembrance and of commemorating. This condition, according to Lacoste,
is the gift of the Spirit during Pentecost. The Spirit is present to ones prayer or
ones attending the Eucharist as the very presence of the divine which assures the
proper access to Gods words and deeds in Jesus (NT 196). Whereas the memory
of the historian presents the past in the representation consciousness makes of that
past, the happy memory of the liturgy opens the space in which God allows the
human being to receive Gods words as the word of a living person: not as a word
49
Lacoste, Laltration. Lautre histoire, Communio, 7 (1982): 8395, pp. 86 and
87 respectively.
represented by consciousness, but rather a word that determines the one listening
through its surplus of reality (NT 1489).
It may already be clear that the place for such a happy memory is the Church.
First of all, this means that this happy memory only ever occurs in a mode of
being that can be shared by others (NT 14950). The Church, secondly, need not be
interpreted in an empirical manner, but rather as a mode of being (NT 190). This
being-in-the-Church entertains a peculiar comportment towards time: its present is
completely determined in the play of remembering and hoping. Its place is, from
the perspective of the world, a non-place: being-in-the-Church is that particular
non-place in which the eschatological fraternity of all with all can appear.
All of this, obviously, confirms the connection between the sacrament and
prayer which I am forging here. Both are to be considered as anticipations of the
definitive from within the provisional. Both are to be considered as parousiacal

moments in which the desire for God is temporarily appeased (EA 184/153; NT
103; Carmel 32). If, finally, Lacoste ascribes to being-in-the-Church the possibility
of eschatological fraternity, then one must conclude that by the same token prayer
is a mode of being-in-the-Church and able to perform the theological reduction,
if we understand by the latter minimally that it lets something other than finitude
and world appear. This would mean that liturgical (non)experience of Exprience et
Absolu (if it is indeed not to be confused with a sacramental experience and refuses
the knowledge of faith coming from theology), is closer to the spiritual experience
of prayer than the theological (in)experience described in Note sur le temps.
The sacramental presence sketched in Note sur le temps shows us how to
understand Gods proximity in the sacraments and the conflation of the definitive
and provisional. The sacrament is to be seen as a continued being-there of Christ
(NT 197) or even the taking place of the eschaton in history (NT 103). In and
through the sacrament, God presences, so to speak, in the world. This presencing
of God is always mediated: the sacrament is a border zone (NT 193/195) between
the sacramentum and the res. Res, the eschatological truth of the sacrament,
is given through the element of the provisional (sacramentum) and in the
visible sign that the provisional temporarily becomes of this invisible gift. The
sacraments in this way operate according to a logic of concealment. God is not
present in the sacraments, in the same way as this text is present to its readers.
The sacraments, in a certain way, hide the eschatological in the provisional: the
reality of Gods proximity is precisely what cannot be seen or felt. Yet, what is
valid for the anticipation of prayer is valid too for the anticipation of Gods coming
in the sacraments, namely that Gods presence here is no longer criticized by Gods
parousia: if, in the sacraments, there is still a distance between the creator and the
creature, then this distance is accompanied with an even greater proximity (NT 198).
The Experience of Liturgy
The Eucharist is, for Lacoste, the highest transgression of being-in-the-world

(NT 211) because it entails an eschatological reduction (NT 201): where the world
disappears, the eschaton appears.
First, the believer speaks in the Eucharist true words: the words with which
the human being praises God in the Eucharist are verified by Gods turn to the
praising human being. In this way, liturgical celebration is the place where the
truth comes towards and turns to the human being. The gift of truth in the liturgy
does not only pertain to liturgical things, through which the believer can attend to
the eschatological res in and through the sacramentum, but also to the words used
in liturgy to such an extent that these, too, participate in the truth by virtue of the
one presencing there. This happens, according to Lacoste, at the exact moment
when the word turns into song (PP 78).
Second, in the liturgy the human being is capable of true deeds. Attending
the sacrament is in effect a corporeal event: ones hands are opened, arms are
raised towards the heavens, and so on. These events, identified by Lacoste earlier
as a token of the human transcendence towards God, are confirmed in liturgical
celebration and endowed with an eschatological signification (PD 2217).
Liturgical experience calls for a mobilization of human corporeality. Lacoste
mentions the dance before God (EA 468/379). The gift of Gods presence
speaks to the human play of authentic movement, dance. When the human
being dances before God, this is to be interpreted as a celebration of liturgical
excess over against being-in-the-world. Such a dance is an expression of the joy
that accompanies Gods presence. It is important to note that the relation to the
Absolute does not pass by the corporeality of the human being. The body, too, can
temporarily exceed the bounds of its place within the world and earth.
This anticipation of the resurrection of the body would not be complete if
the Eucharist did not also show the truth about death (NT 209). The Eucharist
remembers the death of God in the events surrounding Jesus Christ. This memory
is centred upon the fact of the death on the Cross and the factual promise of
resurrection issuing from it. The Eucharist and the sacraments, far from annulling
them, bring death and being-in-the-world to mind. The relation to God is, in this
world, always and already tainted by the shadow of death. It, however, also recalls
a trans-signification of death (NT 207): death is not annulled once and for all,
but is given a new meaning. Indeed, the believer cannot forget mortality, but will
no longer interpret death as the sole eschatological event worthy of the name.
Death itself becomes inscribed in the pre-eschatological reality that is the world
(in liturgical experience): it is granted a signification which facticity alone could
not guarantee. This is the reason why, for the believer, death will appear as part
and parcel of the promises God makes to humankind. Existence is, in and after
liturgical anticipations, understood in its entirety as a promise.
The Eucharist, finally, accomplishes an authentic being-with. As already noted,
the happy memory of the liturgy always has an intersubjective character. The
relation to God in the Eucharist will offer this completion in anticipating manner.
The Eucharist grants access to a totality and a community a communio of the
living and a communio of the dead and the living which knows no exclusion and
thus ridicules any empirical border (PP 545).
From this, it may be obvious that no matter how much liturgical experience
protests against a suspected theological influence, it still draws its inspiration
from an experience of liturgy. Although Lacostes claim to refuse theological
knowledge could be deconstructed, such a deconstruction will not be attempted
here. In the conclusion of this chapter, an opening of phenomenology onto some
form of spirituality will be sketched and, conversely, an attempt to open up
liturgical experience to spiritual experience, which in principle could be shared by
non-Christians as well, will be made.
Conclusion
We have seen in this chapter that phenomenology and liturgy meet in their
immersion in the particularity and peculiarity of all diverse appearances. Jean-Luc
Marion even suggested that phenomenology itself might be a spiritual affair when
arguing that the hermeneutical as, the decision to see something as this rather
than that, is in the last resort a spiritual as, the decision to see all things in their
relation to God.50
But the connection between phenomenology and spirituality might lie elsewhere
too: in the very practice of the reduction. The phenomenological reduction is a
reduction to a certain gaze. It withdraws from the natural attitude only in order to
see better the thing as it gives itself in the very act with which it gives itself.
In this way, the practice of the reduction might be said to border upon the
movement that liturgical experience makes in Lacostes work: an exodus out of
the Heideggerian world and earth in order for a conversion of the gaze of Christs
presence to, finally, a mission towards the world and the other. It is hard not to
notice the similarity with the phenomenological reduction: a fall out of the natural
attitude in order to be instructed by the phenomenological gaze to finally see better
the things of the world, once the call to see the things themselves is heeded and
one is returned to the world of the natural posture (PD 18). This similarity, suffice
to say, suggests that the phenomenologist is and can be well acquainted with the
call stemming from Scripture that one needs to live in the world as if one is not
from the world.
Some indication of the tendency of liturgy to open onto a spiritual (and less
theologically) inspired experience might already be gathered from this chapter
on Lacostes early work, for if we have seen how liturgy opposes itself to being-
in-the-world, the spirituality of tre en danger nicely accommodates and adjusts
50
Jean-Luc Marion, Au lieu de soi. Lapproche de Saint Augustin (Paris, 2008),
p. 33 n.1
Bibliography
Bloechl, Jeffrey, A Response to Jean-Yves Lacoste, in K. Hart and B. Wall

(eds), The Experience of God. A Postmodern Response (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2005), 10412.
De Lubac, Henri, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle
Ages (Bloomington, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2006), translated by G.
Simmonds.
Derrida, Jacques, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1987), translated by G. Bennington and I. Mcleod.
________, A-dieu Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galile, 1998).
________, On Touching Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005), translated by M. Irizarray.
Falque, Emmanuel, La facticit visite, Transversalits, 110 (2009):197222.
Farrelly M. John, Review of Prsence et Parousie, Theological Studies, 68
(2007): 700701.
Fynsk, Christopher, Language and Relation That There is Language (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996).
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Heideggers Ways (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994).
Goodman, Nelson, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1978).
Gramont, de, Jrme, Le monde muet et la patrie de la phnomnologie,
Transversalits 110 (2009):17795.
Greisch, Jean, Le buisson ardent et les lumires de la raison. Tome 2 (Paris: Cerf,
2002).
Greisch, Jean, Bulletin de philosophie et christianisme, Recherches de Sciences
Religieuses, 99 (2011): 43757.
Hackett, Chris, Interview with Jean-Yves Lacoste, in C. Hackett and T. Dika (eds),
What is Living and What is Dead in French Phenomenology?, forthcoming
with Stanford University Press, 2013.
Hart, Kevin, Religious Experience and the Phenomenality of God, in L. Boeve
and C. Brabant (eds), Between Philosophy and Theology. Contemporary
Interpretations of Christianity (London: Ashgate, 2010), 12746.
Heidegger, Martin, Einfhrung in die Metaphysik (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1958).
________, Being and Time (San Franscisco: Harper and Row, 1967), translated by
J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson.
________, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
________, The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York:
Harper and Row, 1977), translated by W. Lovitt.
________, Zollikoner Seminre, ed. M. Boss (Frankfrt a. M.: Klostermann, 1987).

________, Parmenides (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1992).
________, Grundfragen der Philosophie (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1992).
________, Einleitung in der Philosophie (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1996).
________, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1998).
________, Metaphysik und Nihilismus (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1999).
________, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven/London: Yale University
Press, 2000), translated by R. Polt and G. Freid.
________, Zollikon Seminars, M. Boss (ed.), (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2001).
________, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Basic Writings, D.F. Krell (ed.)
(London: Routledge, 2002), 139212.
_________, Building, Dwelling, Thinking, in Basic Writings, D.F. Krell (ed.)

(London: Routledge, 2002), 34763.
_________, Holzwege (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2003).
_________, Der Begriff der Zeit (Frankfrt a. M.: Klostermann, 2004).
_________, Nietzsche II (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 2008).
_________, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language (Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 2009), translated by W.T. Gregory and Y. Unna.
Husserl, Edmund, Phnomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner Verlag, 1985).
________, Lorigine de la gomtrie, J. Derrida (ed.), (Paris: PUF, 2004).
________, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893
1912), T. Vongehr and R. Guiliani (eds), (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004).
Janicaud, Dominique, Heidegger en France II. Entretiens (Paris: Albin Michel,
2001).
Jonkers, Peter, God in France. Heideggers Legacy, P. Jonkers and R. Welten
(eds), God in France. Eight Contemporary French Thinkers on God (Leuven:
Peeters, 2005), 142.
Lacoste, Jean-Yves, Acquiescer au monde et au temps. Petite logique du
consentement, Communio, 4 (1979): 2532.
________, Le temps dtre homme, Communio, 7 (1982): 1927.
________, La surabondance. Baptme, confirmation, eucharistie, Communio, 7
(1982): 4860.
________, Quatre thses thologiques sur la confession, Revue Thomiste, 82
(1982): 392413.
________, Laltration. Lautre histoire, Communio, 7 (1982): 8395.
________, Du droit de lhistoire au droit de Dieu: sur la rsurrection de Jsus,
Nouvelle Revue Thologique, 104 (1982): 495531.
________, Vers le sacrement du pardon, Communio, 8 (1983): 524.
________, Sacrements, Ethique, Eucharistie, Revue Thomiste, 84 (1984): 21242.
________, De la technique la liturgie, Communio, 9 (1984): 2637.
________, Btir, habiter, prier, Revue Thomiste, 87 (1987): 35790 and 54778.
Bibliography 193
________, La thologie et lEsprit, Nouvelle Revue Thologique, 109 (1987):

66071.
________, De la phnomnologie de lEsprit la monte du Carmel, Revue
Thomiste, 89 (1989): 539 and 56998.
________, Note sur le temps. Essai sur les raisons de la mmoire et de lesprance
(Paris: PUF, 1990).
________, De la certitude au dnuement: Descartes et Jean de la Croix, in
Nouvelle Revue Thologique, 113 (1991): 51634.
________, tre, vivre, exister: le commencement de lhomme, Revue de
Mtaphysique et de Morale, 98 (1993): 34766.
________, Exprience et absolu. Questions disputes sur lhumanit de lhomme
(Paris: PUF, 1994).
________, En marge du monde et de la terre: laise, Revue de Mtaphysique et

de Morale, 100 (1995): 185200.
________, Le monde et labsence de luvre et autres tudes (Paris: PUF, 2000).
________, The Work and the Complement of Appearing, in J. Bloechl (ed.),
Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2003): 6893.
________, Experience and the Absolute. Disputed Questions on the Humanity of
Man (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), translated by M. Raftery-
Skehan.
________, Heidegger, in J-Y. Lacoste (ed.) Encyclopedia of Christian Theology,
vol. II (3 vols, London/New York: Routledge, 2005), vol. 2, 6779.
________, Narnia, monde thologique? (Genve: Ad Solem, 2005).
________, Prsence et Parousie (Genve: Ad Solem, 2006).
________, Perception, Transcendence and the Experience of God, in C.
Cunningham and P. Candler (eds), Transcendence and Phenomenology
(London: SCM Press, 2007), 120.
________, Continental Philosophy, in C. Meister and P. Copan (eds), Routledge
Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Oxon: Routledge, 2010 [2007]), 65158.
________, La phnomnalit de Dieu. Neuf tudes (Paris: CERF, 2008).
________,La thologie au XIXXXime sicle, in J-Y. Lacoste (ed.) Histoire de
la thologie (Paris: Seuil, 2009), 365469.
________, Homoousios et homoousios. La substance entre thologie et
philosophie, Recherches de Science Religieuse, 98 (2010): 85100.
________, La thologie et la tche de la pense, in P. Gibert and C. Theobald
(eds), Thologies et vrit au dfi de lhistoire (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 21326.
________, tre en danger (Paris: Cerf: 2011).
Levinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (Duquesne:
Duquesne University Press, 2002), translated by A. Lingis.
Marion, Jean-Luc, God without Being. Hors Texte (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1995), translated by T.A. Carlson.
________, Reduction and Givenness. Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and

Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), translated
by T.A. Carlson.
________, Being Given. Toward A Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), translated by J. Kosky.
________, Au lieu de soi. Lapproche de saint Augustin (Paris: PUF, 2008).
________, Lacoste, ou la correction de lanalytique existentiale, Transversalits
110 (2009): 1715.
Meillassoux, Quentin, Spectral Dilemma, Collapse, 4 (2010): 26175.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1964), translated by H. Dreyfus and P.A. Dreyfus.
________, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2002.

Nancy, Jean-Luc, La pense drobe (Paris: Galile, 2001).
Pickstock, Catherine, After Writing. On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
Schrijvers, Joeri, Jean-Yves Lacoste: A Phenomenology of Liturgy, Heythrop
Journal, 46 (2005): 31433.
________, Anarchistic Tendencies in Contemporary Philosophy. R. Schrmann
and the Hybris of Philosophy, Research in Phenomenology, 37 (2007): 41739.
________,What Comes after Christianity? Jean-Luc Nancys Deconstruction of
Christianity, Research in Phenomenology, 39 (2009): 26691.
________, In (the) Place of the Self, Modern Theology, 26 (2009): 66081.
________, Orthodoxy: Process nor Product. Truth and its History, in M. Lamberigts
(ed.), Orthodoxy. Process and Product (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 4560.
________, God and/in Phenomenology? Introducing Jean-Yves Lacostes La
phnomnalit de Dieu, Bijdragen. International Journal for Philosophy and
Theology, 71 (2009): 8593.
________, Marion, Levinas, and Heidegger on The Question concerning
Ontotheology, Continental Philosophy Review, 43 (2010): 20739.
________, Ontotheological Turnings? The Decentering of Modern Subjectivity in
Recent French Phenomenology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011).
Verhack, Ignace, Eindigheidservaring en absoluutheid, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie,
58 (1996): 14253.
Visker, Rudi, Art and Junk. Heidegger on Transition, Phnomenologische
Forschungen, 10 (2007): 3959.
Wardley, Kenneth Jason, Jean-Yves Lacoste: The Experience of Transcendence,
in W. Stoker and W.L. van der Merwe (eds) Looking Beyond? Shifting Views
of Transcendence in Philosophy, Theology, Art, and Politics (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2012), pp. 193207.
Wardley, Kenneth Jason, A Weariness of the Flesh: Towards a Theology of
Boredom and Fatigue, in S. Shakespeare and K. Moody (eds), Intensities:
Philosophy, Religion and the Affirmation of Life (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012),
forthcoming.

An Introduction To Jean Yves Lacoste

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

An Introduction To Jean Yves Lacoste

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Downloaded by 181.114.27.

242 at 10:20 10 June 2017

An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste

perhaps indeed was what is most important,

Published 2016 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright Joeri Schrijvers 2012

to be identified as the author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-4094-4158-8 (hbk) 2012001259

2 Phenomenology of the Body 37

5 Phenomenology of the Fool 97

6 The Fate of Non-experience 115

7 The World and the Absence of Art 133

8 Life as Strong as Death? Of Being and Danger 157

Conclusion: A Phenomenology of (Spiritual) Life 177

to Lieven Boeve at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies in Leuven

Carmel De la phnomnologie de lEsprit la monte du Carmel, Revue

EA Experience and the Absolute (New York, 2004).

MO Le monde et labsence de luvre et autres tudes (Paris, 2000).

NT Note sur le temps (Paris, 1990).

PD La phnomnalit de Dieu. Neuf tudes (Paris, 2008).

approach, to the innovative and radical philosophy of Lacostes later works.

Philosophy and Theology

In a certain sense, one might argue, to repeat Heideggers assessment of

study of La phnomnalit de Dieu (2008), La frontire absente, but also from

within being and to our being-in-the-world. The plurality of appearances, however

Husserl and Heidegger

through Husserl that an attentiveness to the differences in each appearing, to the

Heidegger I and Heidegger II: The World under Proviso

Lacostes allergy to totalizing tendencies and breathtaking generalizations is also

of Dasein.11 It refuses, out of a demand to do justice to the plurality of the human

Lacoste, Le temps dtre homme, Communio, 8 (1982) 1927, p. 25.

Lacoste, Heidegger, in Lacoste (ed.) Encyclopedia of Christian Theology (3 vols,

to which instruments appear. The question therefore inevitably is: is there an

from Heideggers thinking of the thing. The two phenomenologies of the

At first sight, liturgical experience must be read as the theological counterpart

Water.19 Liturgical experience, in other words, is a free, deliberate project of the

interpretation or, in any case, the overestimation present in Heideggers description

One can easily be reminded of Heideggers over-interpretation of the peasant

[T]he parsimony with which Heidegger delivers his descriptions can be

It is through these other experiences, notably through an analysis of a painting by

away.8 Second, the phenomenology of confession starts with an experience of

severe existential aspect of penance.15

Against Religious Experience

It holds this secret, however, in an inconspicuous way: no religious experience

when we speak of undergoing an experience, Heidegger says, we designate not

Liturgy, Nihilism and Modernity

Yet liturgical experience has something to say to the modern domination by

See Christopher Fynsk, Language and Relation That There is Language

instrumentalized, categorized and dated ad infinitum. The danger of technology is

points when it speaks of the problem of metaphysics. The shortest description

The beingness of a being is answered from out of its essential quiddity or

How Liturgical is liturgical Experience? Some Thoughts on the Eucharist

BC/AD: Christs Coming

In consequence of ontotheologys shying away from all things contingent and

One should note here the provenance of liturgys critique of technology in

christological nor Eucharistic (NT 117). Although it remains somewhat unclear

the passage of God in history authorizes the believing consciousness to remember

The Eucharistic remembrance is then no longer determined by hearing the echo of

definitive from within the provisional. Both are to be considered as parousiacal

The Experience of Liturgy

ISBN 978-1-4094-4158-8 (hbk) 2012001259

2 Phenomenology of the Body 37

5 Phenomenology of the Fool 97

6 The Fate of Non-experience 115

7 The World and the Absence of Art 133

8 Life as Strong as Death? Of Being and Danger 157

Conclusion: A Phenomenology of (Spiritual) Life 177