Theology and Contemporary Continental Philosophy: The Centrality of a Negative Dialectic

171 Pages·2019·7.388 MB·English

by  Colby Dickinson

Theology and
Contemporary
Continental Philosophy
REFRAMING CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Series Editors:
Steven Shakespeare, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Liverpool Hope University
Duane Williams, Senior Lecturer, Liverpool Hope University
Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion aims to revitalize continental
philosophy of religion. It challenges the standard Western Christian frame-
work that has dominated philosophy of religion in the academy. It provides
a platform for voices, theories, and traditions that have been suppressed or
marginalized by that framework and offers genuinely new and constructive
openings in the field. It is motivated by an imperative to liberate original
thinking about religion from the legacy of Empire.
The series is experimental, creative, subversive, and risky. It promotes
work that brings continental philosophy of religion into fruitful dialogue with
postcolonial theory; Islamic studies; heretical, esoteric, or mystical or other-
wise marginalized Western traditions; non-Western philosophical traditions;
and critical studies of power, race, gender, and sexuality. Taking seriously the
fertility of European philosophy, it does not, however, merely subject “other”
discourses to a European gaze but also allows different discourses to interact
and mutate one another on a mutual basis.
Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion will not leave continental
philosophy of religion as it finds it.
The series is published in partnership with the Association for Continental
Philosophy of Religion at Liverpool Hope University.
Titles in the series:
Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The
Enigmatic Absolute
Edited by Joshua Ramey and Matthew S. Haar Farris
Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy
Edited by A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone
The Art of Anatheism
Edited by Matthew Clemente and Richard Kearney
Theology and Contemporary Continental Philosophy: The Centrality of a Negative
Dialectic
Colby Dickinson
Theology and
Contemporary
Continental Philosophy
The Centrality of a
Negative Dialectic
Colby Dickinson
London • New York
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
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Copyright © 2019 by Colby Dickinson
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passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-1059-1
PB 978-1-7866-1060-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dickinson, Colby, author.
Title: Theology and contemporary Continental philosophy : the centrality of a negative
dialectic / Colby Dickinson.
Description: New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019. | Series: Reframing
Continental philosophy of religion | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018044861 (print) | LCCN 2018053703 (ebook) | ISBN
9781786610614 (electronic) | ISBN 9781786610591 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781786610607 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Continental philosophy. | Political theology | Dialectic.
Classification: LCC B804 (ebook) | LCC B804 .D485 2019 (print) | DDC 261.5/1--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044861
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to Rowan
Bayley, my beautiful son.

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 On the Relationship of Continental Philosophy to Theology 9
2 Toward a Negative Dialectic 33
3 The Gap within Existence as Theological Motif 69
4 The Phenomenological (Re)turn 107
Conclusion 129
Bibliography 133
Index 153
About the Author 159
vii

Acknowledgments
I was very grateful to Stephan van Erp for the invitation to write the following
introductory study for a series of monographs, as it proved to be an immense
joy for me to undertake. Though my manuscript quickly exceeded the bound-
aries of what the publisher could ultimately allow, it was this invitation that
spawned the present project. For the context within which to take up these
themes, however, Stephan could have given me no better topic in which to
situate my thoughts. I am immensely thankful to him for this challenge.

I have learned a good deal over the past several years from many people
with whom I have been in conversation and whose names appear, or lie firmly
behind, the research I have undertaken in this book. In particular, I have
benefited so much from my talks with, in no specific order: Adam Kotsko,
Kristien Justaert, Jack Caputo, Lieven Boeve, Bruce Ellis Benson, Clayton
Crockett, Richard Kearney, Marianne Moyaert, Hille Haker, Stephan van Erp,
Joeri Schrijvers, Andrew Cutrofello, Peter Fenves, Adriaan Peperzak, Giorgio
Agamben, Hugh Miller, Robyn Horner, Phyllis Kaminski, Ward Blanton,
Anthony Godzieba, Justin Sands, Danelle Fourie, Dan Minch, Joe Drexler-
Dries, Stéphane Symons, Marcos Norris, Elisabeth Bayley, Willem Styfhals,
John McCarthy, Silas Morgan, Hanne Jacobs, Michael Deckard, Tom Jacobs,
David Ingram, Martin Koči, Anné Verhoef, and Mark Bosco. I wish to
express my gratitude to each of these people for stimulating my research and
writing on various occasions.

Though he is certainly not aware of it, a dinner conversation with Jean-Luc
Marion at the close of a conference I helped organize in spring 2016 (“The
Challenge of God”) at Loyola University Chicago was perhaps the biggest
single influence upon the present work. Our talk, for me, constituted a spe-
cific point of reentry into the world of phenomenological thought. I have been
consistently reexamining a number of texts since that time in light of our
ix