Debating the Art of an Anatheistic Wager: Recent Perspectives on Richard Kearney’s “God After God”

Abstract

D’où parlez-vous? In the preface to his book Anatheism, Richard Kearney identifies this question as the first inquiry that Paul Ricoeur made of his seminar students.1 He wanted to know at the outset from where each one spoke, something of their own individual presuppositions and of their own cultural horizons of expectations. Kearney actually considers this Ricoeurean question to be “the standard hermeneutical question” and admits that his answer to it has persistently included a “theological” component, primarily because the desire of God has haunted him throughout his life.2 Indeed, he confesses that the “God” question became even more compulsory precisely because he focused his studies in contemporary French philosophy, specifically with thinkers such as Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Stanislas Breton, and Jacques Derrida. These thinkers grounded him so deeply in certain perspectives relative to traditional phenomenology and hermeneutics, perspectives alloyed with an intense attraction to imagination and story, that he remembers delightfully “sailing through multiple theories of narrative in phenomenology and the philosophy of history and religion.”3 Consequently, his intellectual life has consistently been cross-contaminated with various interpretations of philosophy and theology, of a certain “secular” appreciation of embodiment and a recognition of the sacred – as evidenced in works such as Carnal Hermeneutics and