Matthew Peterson

PhD Candidate, Divinity School

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Abstract:  

This article assesses the politics of the critical phenomenology of religion in contemporary France through a reading of the work of Jean Vioulac. Given that it has been nearly thirty years since the so-called theological turn in French phenomenology, the return to such a nexus could appear at best nostalgic, and at worst regressive. As I argue, however, Vioulac’s concept of apocalypse revitalizes the phenomenological epochē, the critical stance that suspends our everyday way of looking at things. By bracketing the world ordered by the “totalitarian logic” of Greek metaphysics, apocalypse accounts for a negativity that had been suppressed by philosophy. I first show how this perspective is mobilized by way of a materialist phenomenology of technology. I then unpack the ambiguity of an “apocalypse of truth” as both a philosophy of the concept and a philosophy of experience. On the basis of this project, I characterize Vioulac as a communist Cathar for whom the philosophy of religion consists in the archeological demystification of theological concepts. Finally, I consider the ways in which his method of “anarcheology” extends—but also risks reneging on—the insights of Foucauldian genealogy and Derridean deconstruction. On my reading, Vioulac’s project reminds us that philosophy wards off its dogmatic tendencies not by doing away with religion but by critically appropriating it.

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