Faithful decides: contemporary French thought and the eternal return of religion

Thesis

At a time when religious fundamentalisms fight on all continents for the monopoly of religious truth, no definition seems as uncertain as that of religion. To be sure, the definitions proposed by Edward Burnett Tylor, William James and Emile Durkheim in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which all revolve around the notion of transcendent belief, have been used in social sciences for more than a century and still constitute the theoretical ground on which secularism rests in the modern West. In the past few decades, however, globalisation and the emergence of spiritual approaches to environmentalism and mindfulness in Western countries have raised the question of whether non-theistic devotion and ritual practices detached from supernatural belief should be considered as religious. Reformist currents of the Abrahamic religions have also contributed to challenging the idea that transcendent belief is conditio sine qua non of religion by emphasising ‘lived experienced’ and ‘reflective faith’. These definitional transformations go hand in hand with the urgency felt by political leaders and sociologists to distinguish religion from what is presented as its terrorist caricature. In this thesis, I argue that a way out of this definitional crisis may be found in the work of four of France’s most original contemporary philosophical voices. Through their respective non-dialectical engagements with the concept of the death of God, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Luc Nancy inaugurate a thinking of the religious that does not depend on transcendent belief, but rather unfolds as an open-ended trust in otherness. Over the course of four chapters, I demonstrate that, by designating faith in difference as the lowest common denominator of transcendent religions and immanent spiritualities found across the world, these thinkers lay the ground for a more inclusive approach to religious pluralism than the one currently secured by Western secularism.

Authors: Chabbert, M

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: French thought; eternal return; Georges Bataille; Jean-Luc Nancy; Jacques Derrida; deconstruction; continental philosophy; Gilles Deleuze; return of religion
• Subjects: Continental philosophy; French; Religion; Philosophy of religion