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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Particular thinkers and their work seem to create significant intellectual waves at particular times and thus determine and define subsequent inquiry. We all know of the powerful consequences of Kant’s reading of Hume, but even more startling is the effect that Hegel had on the seventeen year old Ernst Bloch: ‘I read the Phenomenology of Spirit erotically—as I wrote at the time “the spiritual nightingale is singing within” in this park, this wilderness—and that is how I understood the Phenomenology as I have never understood it since’. One could respond to Bloch’s experience of the Phenomenology with the suggestion that he would have been better off reading Freud, but there is no doubting the excitement of an intellectual encounter that transforms our way of seeing the world. While Jean-Luc Marion’s book, God Without Being, cannot be placed in the same league as Hegel’s Phenomenology, it has nevertheless, in recent years, attracted much attention in English-speaking theological circles and for good reason. God Without Being, the first of Marion’s books to be translated into English, is a beautifully written book that blends a postmodern concern to overcome the impasse of ontotheology with a sensibility for things premodern—especially negative theology and the mystical tradition. This intellectual fusion of metaphysical and post-metaphysical themes is evident in one question which summarises Marion’s study: ‘Does God give himself to be known according to the horizon of Being or according to a more radical horizon?’ (xxiv) Thus the quest for a God without Being; a journey which Marion undertakes in order to expose that more radical horizon which is characterised by God’s ‘most theological name—charity’.
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