HeyJ XLVI (2005), pp.

314333

JEAN-YVES LACOSTE:
A PHENOMENOLOGY OF LITURGY*
JOERI SCHRIJVERS

Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium

The work of the Parisian theologian Jean-Yves Lacoste must be

situated in what Janicaud has called the theological turn of French
phenomenology.1 Most proponents of this movement Jean-Luc
Marion and Michel Henry for instance are nowadays well known.
Not so Lacoste. This article hopes therefore to draw attention to the
often original, but hitherto unfortunately neglected, work of this
author.2
From his earliest to his later works, Lacoste engages in a thorough
discussion with Martin Heidegger. Lacoste is somewhat suspicious of the
German philosophers overwhelming presence in contemporary philosophical and theological circles. This suspicion becomes fully manifest
in Lacostes most recent book: Le monde et labsence duvre (2000).
However, one can trace back the germs of these questions concerning
Heidegger to his earlier works, Note sur le temps (1990) and Experience
et Absolu (1994).3
En marge du monde et de la terre: laise, an article in his latest
book, opens with a discussion of the historical nature of Heideggers
being-in-the-world, a nature, we must keep in mind, that Heidegger
has never denied.4 Lacoste asks whether Dasein, and the hermeneutic
of its facticity is not merely a hermeneutics of secularization. Can and
must we assume that this being-in-the-world and its corresponding
anxiety is the most original and fundamental characteristic of human
existence? What about friendship, love and the experience of the work
of art?
The Heidegger of Sein und Zeit would be inclined to rank these
experiences and their corresponding primacy of the present as derivatives
(of, for example, Mitdasein) and consider them to be vulgar,
ontologically of no importance. Since a primacy of the present forgets
the temporal structure of being-in-the-world as care (Sorge), which is
always open to the future, for Heidegger the experiences of friendship and
love would probably fall under the they (Das Man), where people live
from day-to-day and, in this way, refuse to recognize their nitude.
Since love and friendship essentially consist in a joyful and restful present,

r The Editor/Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK and Boston, USA.

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one can hardly doubt that Heidegger would interpret these phenomena
primarily as instances of Das Man, for could it not also be in this manner
that the they provides a constant tranquillization about death.5
Lacoste however, who is as much inuenced by Husserl as he is by
Heidegger, maintains that these phenomena do tell us something of what
it means to be human. It could even be that these experiences reveal
something even more fundamental than Heideggers Angst. Lacoste asks
in Le monde et labsence duvre: If joy, love etc. dont need to enter the
brute and naked logic of being-in-the-world, does this immediately mean
that these phenomena have to be qualied as not original? Must one
infer from the fact that the time of joy and that of analogous phenomena
precariously supersede care, that these phenomena are absent from the
map of the original?6
In the book mentioned above, Lacoste wonders why art that soon
after Sein und Zeit would come to occupy a central place in Heideggers
thinking is absent from the analysis of Heideggers 1927 volume.
Lacoste hypothesizes that the work of art interrupts the relations that
constitute Heideggers being-in-the-world. A work of art demands our
undivided attention and, by doing so, installs a primacy of the present. It
is in the margins of the Heideggerian world7 that the interruptive work
of art opens us onto an other-than-world. Hence Lacostes question:
does Heideggers Sein zum Tode tell the whole story about what it means
to be human?
Lacoste is a phenomenologist. His works aim to explore the
human aptitude to experience. That capability could be greater than the
Heideggerian notions world and earth would allow for. Thus
Lacoste explores the humanity of man. But, as a theologian, the humanity
of man is for Lacoste inevitably intertwined with the divinity of
God. That is why I will focus on what Lacoste calls the liturgical
experience. Here liturgy is dened not only as the celebration of
Mass, but also, more generally, as the relation of human beings to God
(EA, 2; 22). What happens when the believer prays and praises?
To summarize this article: I will contend that in Experience et Absolu
Lacoste conceives of the liturgical experience in a somewhat Barthian
fashion. A huge gap exists between the religious being-there and
the human being-in-the-world. In later works, however, Lacoste
suggests a somewhat more worldly approach to the liturgy: faith can
be elucidated with the interruptive nature of the work of art in mind.
Liturgy therefore does not appear solely as a violent act of grace but also
as a genuine human possibility. I will go on to explain Lacostes turn by
exploring his analysis of the experience of the work of art and the
experience of resting. The conclusion of my text will consist in a few
critical remarks with respect to liturgical experience and to Lacostes
interpretation of Heidegger, the latter also being the topic of the rst
section.

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I. LACOSTE VS. HEIDEGGER: ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES

Lacoste opens Experience et Absolu by questioning Heideggers

introduction of the concept of earth (EA, 722). This concept yields
some remarkable consequences: where Dasein is considered to be
Unzuhause, people are now allowed to dwell upon the earth. Where Sein
und Zeit analyses angst as the most original affect, people are now capable
of serenity and can understand their dwelling on earth as peaceful.
Heideggers turn,8 according to Lacoste, amounts to a re-enchantment of
the world: if Dasein was without God in the world, mortals now
experience a certain familiarity with the sacred.
How to understand this turn? To avoid simply taking sides between
these two options, Lacoste proposes a dialectical bond between these
Heideggerian concepts. Both world and earth are possibilities that
appear before our place (lieu, avoir lieu). In consequence of our
corporeality, being-in-the-world as well as dwelling on the earth
presuppose the reality of our place. World and earth are, Lacoste
contends, possibilities offered to our placedness. This topology does not
want to judge which concept is the most original, but does solely afrm
that our relation to being is always and already dependent on our
corporeality. This placedness in Lacostes work is conceived of both in a
Husserlian and in a Heideggerian manner Heideggerian, in that the life
of the mind is dependent upon an affective and temporal encounter with
reality, and Husserlian, in that this placedness allows for a constitution of
a present and, in this sense, admits of a plurality of worlds. So the world
of fatigue9 entails a different relation to our placedness than does the
world of liturgy. It is the task of phenomenology to describe this variety
of affective encounters.
There is, according to Lacoste, a certain freedom towards these
transcendental gures of world and earth. Lacoste coins this freedom as
memory and project (NT, 27). Both concepts are of great importance to
understanding correctly the liturgical experience. Lacoste distinguishes
between the Heideggerian care (Sorge) and the project. Whereas care
means, according to Lacoste, the transcendental-existential relation to
the future, the project aims at appropriating this future. Since being-inthe-world as care relates itself to an uncertain future, the present cannot
be the sphere of sense and meaning. On the contrary, precisely because of
this openness towards the future, the present cannot be conceived of as a
singular moment; it must always be seen and interpreted in its relation
with this future. The project, on the other hand, brings an active decision
to the heart of every present. By doing so, the project aims at a certain
mastery over the future. It appropriates the future as its own. The
project, in this sense, opens up a space where one can regard the future as
ones own. My future becomes mine, and in this way, a genuine human
possibility. Take for instance preparing a meal for some friends. If I want

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to invite guests and welcome them to my dinner table, I will have to buy
the necessary ingredients today. Today, the present, thus becomes an
area of signication. The project masters the possible threat of the future
by opening a place where one can anticipate the future. Thereby, however,
at once the aporia from which the project suffers is exposed. The project
wants to empower itself of that which, by denition, exceeds human
powers the future.
The paradigm for our powerlessness is, in Lacostes opinion, death.
Heidegger interpreted death as that which enables Dasein to take up its
existence in an authentic manner. The confrontation with its nitude is the
occasion for Dasein to take up its being in its own-most way. Lacoste,
however, following Levinas, considers death to be too big an enigma to
give any signication to. The death of the other (NT, 5758) serves as a
guide to understand this fundamental powerlessness. As embodied beings,
we are involved with one another. The death of a partner affects all
previously shared projects. Every meaning that I anticipated with him or
her is destroyed by the death of one of us. The meaning of death is revealed
only by the death of the other: death is that frontier which annihilates
every relation that the other and I might have. Lacoste thus points out that
every (worldly) relation, and most certainly the one towards my own
death, must be characterized by incompleteness. The death of the other
only conrms this ontological poverty. Death is that which interrupts every
(intersubjective) relation and puts even the meaning of being in question.
With the certainty of death looming over every relationship, all possession
is a mere illusion, and it is such a poverty that, according to Lacoste, might
very well be an ontological trait of human beings (NT, 102; EA, 170172).
All projects suffer this aporia: they tend to confuse the anticipation of the
future with the future an sich, in such a way that the future is, mistakenly,
understood as a project. Divertissement (NT, 39) consists in the refusal to
see signication as a given.
And yet the project encounters something like signication. We enjoy a
meal with our friends, the beauty of a work of art or the relation with the
ones we love, even though these experiences do not answer the meaning of
being in a denite way. Our projects are like a beginning (commencement), they hint at a signication of and in being that makes the future
appear not as a threat, but as an existential and exisentiel possibility.
According to Lacoste, one can never wonder enough about this strange
fact that we are capable of signication at all. As a free agent, capable of
signication, people become a question for themselves.

II. THE LITURGICAL EXPERIENCE

The liturgical experience is just such a project.10 It can be interpreted

along three structural moments: rst, an exodus out of the (Heideggerian)

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world; second, the conversion to the image of Christ, and in the third place
the ethical mission toward the other.
1. Exodus: being exposed to a non-experience
One must understand the liturgy as a violent transgression of, and rupture
with, the Heideggerian being-in-the-world. This rupture does not and
cannot, however, offer a total rupture with this world. A necessary,
though not sufcient, condition for this interruption is (Augustinian)
restlessness. Lacoste denes this restlessness as that mark of the
humanity of man which removes man from every satisfaction to which
world and earth hold the key (EA, 198 n. 20). Restlessness involves the
refusal of being our being as Dasein or as a mortal. Thus, this restlessness aptly describes our dissatisfaction and boredom over, and about,
being. Unrest makes one desire an other-than-being.
Such a restlessness appears as a specic kind of project. The project
tries to neutralize the threat of the future by anticipating this future. Since
the future never lives up to our expectations, restlessness awakens. The
eschatological restlessness is not related extrinsically to our worldliness.
The world, which manifests itself at every moment and every place of our
being, lures us into questioning and the corresponding restlessness.11
Restlessness is therefore correlative to being-in-the-world. The believers
free choice to expose him- or herself to a being-before-God, what Lacoste
calls exposition (EA, 4042), is not completely distinct from this
restlessness, but does establish a discontinuity with world and earth.
While restlessness is a desire that does not know what it really desires
(EA, 41), liturgy is an explicit choice for God. Theologically, one must
understand this as follows: while restlessness is the condition to receive
the Word of God,12 liturgy and exposition are those acts that, through
praying, answer to and praise that Word.
The liturgical transgression places the world and the earth between
brackets. Praying displays a different relation to the reality of our place: it
opens a nonplace (EA, 27) that is neither determined by the angst of and
for our being-in-the-world nor by the sacrality of the earth. This is so
because hearing and answering to the Word of God demands that one
leaves the world as world, where one is without God, behind. In this
non-place the desire of God is accompanied by the confession of Gods
presence.
Liturgy therefore desires to see and know God. In this respect, our
answer to the Word of God in praise and prayer is an anticipation of
the absolute future the coming of God, Gods kingdom. Lacoste is
convinced of the fact that not one prayer is without Gods proximity. This
proximity, however, needs to be distinguished from Gods presence, even
though the liturgy initially confuses presence and proximity in a
parousiacal moment (EA, 59). The non-place of prayer and of the
Eucharist opened up, we recall, a space wherein that which keeps us at a

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distance from Gods coming the world and history is put between
brackets. According to Lacoste, prayer interrupts the dialectics that
governs history; liturgy is capable of a rupture with the violence that
makes up (our) history. Thus, along with the non-place, the liturgical
experience installs a nontime (EA, 83). This non-time is a kairos that takes
over the chronos of history. To make this phenomenologically more
concrete, Lacoste points to the possibility that the (Hegelian) master and
slave pray together. Indeed, my foes are not refused entrance to the
church where I am praying. The non-place and non-time of the liturgical
experience therefore suggest that one sojourns in eschatological peace and
unity (EA, 51). The distance between the liturgical experience and the
world makes room for a fragile realization of the eschatological good. The
proximity of God in prayer gives the religious a present that knows not of
any shortcomings (EA, 59), and wherein the desire of God is temporarily
appeased. That is why one undergoes prayer as if Gods presence therein
coincides with Gods coming. Thus, the liturgical experience breaks with
the world and earth to lose itself in the enthusiastic vision of Gods
kingdom. However, the liturgical project, as every project, aims at more
than is in its power. The believer tries to appropriate the absolute future.
Man presents himself to God in the exposing prayer. However, God
does not present himself in the same sense as the pages of this text are
present. From the point of view of an intentional and desiring consciousness, one must conceive of the liturgical experience as a non-experience
(EA, 4054).
2. The nocturnal non-experience as locus of the gift and of conversion
We need to understand this non-experience phenomenologically as
follows: the liturgical project is eager to appropriate its object, the
absolute future of God, and therefore a space is opened wherein Gods
proximity is no longer differentiated from Gods presence. But God is in
this non-place, this being-in-the-Church, absent to both perception and to
affectivity. While the believer desires to dwell in the Kingdom, (s)he stays,
under guidance of the spirit, in the Church and this only for a moment,
kairologically (NT, 187202; EA, 131). The plenitude of the eschatological enters this world unnoticed and does so always in a fragile tension
with a worldly phenomenon (NT, 198, EA, 92). Between the believer and
God there is the materiality of the provisional: the bread that is broken
and the wine that is shed only the faithful will be able to recognize the
presence of their Lord therein. The desire is sobered by this worldly
appearance of the Absolute. This appearance appeals to the believers
patience. The world disturbs and hinders the believers in the rst
instance enthusiastic desire of God. The world draws a veil between
God and man (e.g., EA, 41).
Thus liturgical experience breaks with this world without giving
the believer a visible satisfaction. This non-experience for Lacoste

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consists of a violence that the faithful must undergo. God always has
more patience than the one who praises. Lacoste therefore wants to think
this non-experience as a night, close to that envisioned by John of the
Cross.
The nocturnal non-experience is the brutal confrontation with the
liturgical experiences own aporia: the intention to anticipate Gods
coming does not sufce to appropriate ones own absolute future. Where
an individual sees him- or herself as consciously desiring God, s/he stands
before God as a soul. When the eschatological enters into the world,
under the disguise of the Eucharistic bread and wine, it interrupts the
liturgical project and alerts this project of its limits. The desire of God is
sobered precisely because of this refusal of its satisfaction: the believer
desires Gods coming, but is confronted with the bread and the wine of
the Eucharist. It is this confrontation that will protect the liturgical
anticipation against divertissement in which the project would no longer
be aware of its precarious nature and understands itself as an autonomous affair.
According to Lacoste, this non-experience is foremost a frustrating
terror which provides a certain extenuation of being-in-the-world (EA,
188). It is a crisis of intentionality: nothing happens. Only faith can save
us now: sola de (EA, 146). If one wants to speak of intentionality in the
case of the liturgical experience one should say that the believer in this
experience becomes object of Gods intention. The liturgical experience
manifests the margins of our being-there: Dasein relates to the liturgical
being-there, this ecce homo of the religious person, as acting relates to
non-acting, sensing to non-sensing, and experience to non-experience. To
quote Lacoste once more: the liturgy is a transgression of every capacity
for experience that consciousness can avail itself of (EA, 152). The
effusion of the eschatological in the historical brings consciousness, and
thus the autonomous project, to its limits. The liturgy dismantles and
disorients the transcendental constitution of subjectivity and suggests
that both for intersubjective relations as for the relation coram Deo, the
carnal dimension of existence serves as a more appropriate paradigm
(EA, 156). We are exposed to God and the other in our corporeality, and
not primarily as a thinking thing.
It is through this crisis that God operates a liberating decentring of the
(autonomous) subject. The night reduces the liturgical project to its
essence: liturgy is putting oneself at the disposal of God,13 a desire to
deliver my being into Gods hands (EA, 156). God, in his turning to man,
expropriates the religious person of his dazzling desire for his (absolute)
future by revealing being as a gift. In praying the believer manifests
a visibly impoverished existence. He lives in an empty present and a
dead time (EA, 148). Thereby the liturgy enjoys the fruit of a being that
no longer can be characterized as a being that has to be its being.
Lacoste conceives of the being of the religious person as a being that

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321

neither desires nor acts and thereby is forced into a position where s/he
can only receive.
In praying and celebrating the believer incarnates a passivity that
precedes every conscious act, creation. But afrming being as the gift of
creation, we recall, requires the ascetic exodus out of the Heideggerian
world. This gift is a conrmation of the liturgical exodus. The liturgical
experience, in which the believer takes on an objective being-before-God
and resists every autonomous act of signication, is therefore put into a
position where signication can only be received. Indeed, this impoverished existence has as its reverse side the admission of the fact that being
truly is being-in-relation (NT, 180), in other words, that signication is
always dependent upon another, whether it be God, or a fellow human
being. It is in the relation to the other and the relation with God that the
signication of being is to be decided.
Lacostes phenomenological description of boredom explains this
well (Carmel, 588593; EA, 148149). The liturgical person restlessly
anticipates the coming of God. But when s/he realizes that this liturgical
project does not oblige God to respond either visibly or experientially, the
liturgical person might become bored with prayer. It is precisely this
boredom that Lacoste indicates as the experience of the gift: one learns
what giving means when there is hardly anything given back; true giving
does not demand reciprocation. The one who prays patiently gives his
time and thereby him- or herself to God. This abandoning of self teaches
a person about the essence of giving. In liturgical experience, human
beings turn over their lives to God in order to receive Gods Word. What
it is to be human, is now entirely in Gods hands. Only God can conrm
the being of the believer at this moment. Only when the other restores our
being do we begin to understand the meaning of being. The humanity of a
person is a question that only an other, namely God, can answer. Beingbored-before-God is an expression of the-putting-oneself-at-the-disposalof. It is exactly this abandoning of the self, which is conrmed through,
and incarnated before, the Word of God one hears in the Eucharist. This
conrmation and incarnation is, in the eyes of Lacoste, the eschatological
truth of our being-there. The truth of our being is our kenotic emptying of
ourselves for an other. Only an other can speak words of conrmation
over our being.
Theologically speaking, that other is Christ. It is Christ who offers us
the eschatological mode of our being-there. Prayer and Eucharist are
those instances where God, by turning to human beings, gives human
beings to themselves as those beings that have to be their vocation (NT,
117; 169; EA, 147). The believer is revealed to him- or herself as the being
that is called and promised to a being as (the being of) Christ. In the
liturgical experience the whole of existence, including death, is interpreted
as a promise. Existing means the anticipating and desiring of a not yet
that is always beyond our reach. The Word of God gives (again), as in a

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creatio continua, the possibility to be our being in the mode of the

vocation. The believer is in liturgical experience reminded of the future
that the Absolute promised.
The non-experience that affects every prayer is thus a conversion to the
image of (the suffering) Christ in spite of the tendency of human beings to
understand themselves autonomously. But Lacoste also distinguishes a
more active moment in this movement of conversion called, with a term
of de Berulle, abnegation (EA, 160163). This abnegation is that aptitude
that knows how to live the liturgical experience not as a frustrating crisis,
but as a reconciliation. Abnegation is a gesture in which the believer
consents to the authentic being-there as (did) Christ and thereby marks
the point where the passive being converted is turned into an active
letting be converted of the self. Thus, abnegation is that attitude wherein
the believer surrenders completely to the liberation offered by the
Absolute. The abnegation is not the end of the project or desire, but
indicates their modication: the project wants and desires nothing other
than the will of Christ, while the erroneous attempt to appropriate ones
own absolute future is left behind.
To make matters more concrete, Lacoste reminds us of the Christian
images of the wandering hermit and the fool. This foolishness might not
be a universal demand; it confers on liturgy a visibility without which its
transgression would not really be a transgression (EA, 178). The fool thus
makes visible that which is present in every faithful confrontation with
the Absolute. In this way, liturgy operates a logic of imitation. The
liturgical experience turns the believer into a mimic of Christs death on
the Cross. Christs Cross is for Lacoste the climax of non-experience (EA,
191). The foolishness of the faithful thus isolates the foolishness of the
Cross. Only theology can take this experience into account. Indeed
theology will say that the only donation of signication in this case
comes from beyond, and that in the fools humiliated humanity . . . we
actually recognize the image of the humiliated humanity of God himself
(EA, 190, transl. modied). The one who patiently endures this nonexperience will share in and receive the joy of Easter. Lacoste interprets
the fool as the one who knows how to live the events of Good Friday with
reference to Easter, and who therefore knows that true joy only follows
from humiliation. This is the joy of the one who surrendered himself
completely to God and interprets his existence kenotically.14 The joy,
moreover, of the human being that arrives at what is most proper: the
existence in the image of the God who was Himself humiliated.
3. Mission ethics
Is the one who in this way incarnates authentic existence also able to call
others to incarnate their most proper existence? Is the believer, after his
or her exodus, sent back to the world to operate there as an illuminating
example for others? Such a moment of mission is indeed present in

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323

Lacostes works. The fool stirs up restlessness because of his frightening

alterity (EA, 190).15 The poor appearance of the fool exposes the
interpretations in which humanity usually lives and moves for instance
the interpretation of human beings as an animal rationale (cf. EA, 185
189). The prayer of the believer and the extreme ascesis of the fool remind
one of the scandal of the Cross. Precisely in this way, the ontological
restlessness of others, who desire something other-than-world but dont
know exactly what they desire, can be awakened and called forward to
that which is their most proper possibility: an existence that empties itself
of itself in the name of Christ to become an image of God.
Mission must on the other hand also incorporate an ethical element. If
the believer can call others to themselves, then this awakening must also
entail a love of the good. For Lacoste, however, the ethical experience
suffers the same aporias as the liturgical experience. The ethical
experience is frustrated by its own incompleteness. The ethical project
discovers in and by itself the appeal to do good everywhere and always
(NT, 5255). However, such a radical good can never nd its
accomplishment in the world. Only the liturgical transgression can
interpret the ethical exigencies correctly by the distance it takes from this
world. Ethics therefore becomes another type of liturgy (EA, 74). The
liturgical experience reminds one of ones worldly responsibilities because
of the worldly appearance of the Absolute. So the liturgical non-place
also constitutes an ethical conversion: the one who exposes him or herself
to God, is also exposed to Gods judgement (NT, 194). The believer
confesses in this non-place his inability to do good because sin stands
between him or her and God (BHP, 571).
Lacoste distinguishes between the beginning that is a possibility of the
liturgy such as the master and the slave praying together and the desire of
a new beginning (BHP, 573) that is aroused ` n liturgy. The believer asks
God for a liberation of his freedom, a freedom which in the world is
always seduced by evil and sin. It comes as no surprise that Lacoste labels
being-in-the-world more than once as sinful (EA, 31, 94). The ethical
reconciliation between the master and the slave, wherein they give a
beginning to each other, indeed cannot liberate them from their past,
where both, by doing evil, decided over themselves. The confessed sin is
not only something that one did, but also something that one is. Sin is an
ontological determination of human beings (BHP, 572). The believer
turns away from the world to ask God for a future which s/he cannot give
him or herself. The believer desires, then, for a new beginning in which
only God liberates him or her from sin.
Hence prayer is that symbolic place where God turns to men and
women to give them a new future and beginning. It is in this way that the
nocturnal liturgical experience is at the same time the rising of a new
dawn. Only the confrontation with the Absolute can free human beings of
their attachments with evil. The believer is sent back to the world to dwell

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there as a new human being who, hopefully, will never deny the exigencies
of ethics again (EA, 73). Hence the role of the liturgical non-place
functions as a case vide without which . . . neither the movement [of
signication] nor originality would be thinkable (EA, 96).
The liturgical experience is, however, not the only experience that
Lacoste indicates as a possible way of being there other than the
Heideggerian Dasein or mortal. Soon after the publication of Experience
et Absolu the work of that book was accompanied by an investigation of
the experience of resting and of the work of art and their opening to a
philosophy of liturgy.16 Surprisingly so, because the liturgical experience,
with its emphasis on the distance between the experiences of the world
and the experiences of liturgy, is certainly conceived of in a Barthian
manner. Other recent studies of Lacoste also seem to explore this more
worldly interpretation of liturgy and aim to give this new interpretation
its full ontological weight. The following sections demonstrate how
Lacoste proposes to elucidate the liturgical experience as analogous to the
experience of resting and to the experience of the work of art.

III. THE EXPERIENCE OF RESTING AND THE WORK OF ART

The analogy between the liturgical experience and the experiences of

resting and the work of art is based on the appeasement that these
experiences have in common. We recall that in liturgy, the restless desire
of God is temporarily appeased through prayer and Eucharist. En marge
du monde et de la terre: laise refers to the question that, even in
Experience et Absolu, pointed to a theology of the world: are there not
experiences in the world, other than liturgy, that can suggest the eschaton
(EA, 97)? In Experience et Absolu, however, this question is mostly
answered in the negative: it is only a saint for whom the liturgical
experience constantly determines his/her being-in-the-world. Only a
saint, in contrast to ordinary believers, would put the world permanently between brackets and be there only for God.
In En marge du monde et de la terre: laise, on the other hand, Lacoste
gives a positive answer to Experience et Absolus question. The liturgy is
no longer the only experience in which human beings break with world
and earth. There is, for instance, also the pause we take from our work.
This interruption, however, does not mean that I am no longer there.
It does mean on the other hand that my being there is no longer
determined by the Heideggerian world and earth, even though I rest in the
world and on the earth. Instead, a certain calmness and joy determines my
being there, which Lacoste calls the well-being-there.17 I know that this
pause cannot last forever and that I soon have to be concerned with my
work once again. During such interruption, Lacoste states, I am content
but in no means satised.18 I still have to care about my work or my life

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325

but these concerns are temporarily put between brackets. The pause is
simply the quiet enjoyment of a between (world and earth). What is at
stake in this resting experience is the real, albeit fragile, unconcernedness wherein world and earth are kept at a distance. My place of resting is
the place where I dwell. Therefore, Daseinss Unzuhause does not come
into question here. But my resting place does not remind me of my origins
or rootedness either. Thus, the experience of resting must be conceived of
as an excess and transgression of the transcendental expressions of our
being human, Dasein and mortal. Lacoste insists in interpreting this
interval theologically. The experience of resting is to be thought of as a
sabbathic experience.19
The experience of the work of art is very similar.20 The work of art
liberates human beings from their involvement with world and earth
because it puts the appearance of every phenomenon other than itself
between brackets. The work of art calls for our undivided attention and
its appearance is to be understood with reference to the joy and the rest
that it produces. Art promises and delivers an unconcerned present. Over
and against the care for our future, the work of art offers a joyful constitution of the present. Undivided attention, needed to see the work of
art, installs the primacy of the present.
Note that Lacoste has already pointed out four aptitudes to
experience. There is, rst, our place that appears from within the
horizons of world and earth. Within the horizon of the world our place
appears as that of an unheimlich Dasein; within the horizon of the earth it
appears as a rootedness in being and its sanctity. There is also the nonplace of the liturgy wherein our place and our being appears as a beingbefore-God and there are, to conclude, the sabbathical experiences of
resting and the work of art as a well-being-there. All this necessitates
further questioning of the affective nature of our placedness. It is on the
basis of this questioning that Lacoste will give full ontological weight to
these experiences that the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit would probably
have qualied as divertissement.

IV. ONTOLOGY AND AFFECTIVITY

One can already read Lacostes questions concerning affectivity in his

description of the differences between Heidegger and Husserl: There is
between the Husserlian and the Heideggerian descriptions a distance
which distinguishes the seeing (the appearing) from the letting see
(the making appear, the bringing to light).21 Being-in-the world for
instance is not a visible and objective being for an intentional ego, but
more like a horizon without which beings would not even appear. For this
reason, Heidegger reserves in Sein und Zeit an affective Grundbendlichkeit, angst, to indicate Daseins being-in-the-world.

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The earth is also a horizon rather than an objective being. So, for
example, in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes it is not what the work of art
shows, i.e., the shoes on Van Goghs painting, but what the work of art
makes appear that is important. However, this is not a simple matter.
Since it involves a certain hermeneutic, one cannot exclude the fact that
Heidegger could have fallen into the well-known trap of the interpreter
who, by wanting to show certain things, always risks disregarding others.
Lacostes question once again concerns the relation between the concept
of the world and the earth, the latter making its rst appearance in
Heideggers famous tract on art.
To retrieve Lacostes answer, let us return to the relation between the
perception of the work of art and the (rural) interpretation Heidegger
gave of it. Indeed, in his tract on the work of art, Heidegger does not tell
us how we can know of world or earth. Certainly it is not merely
perception that informs us about their existence, otherwise a look at the
painting would have sufced. Instructed by the lessons of Sein und Zeit,
Lacoste proposes that, to understand Heideggers lecture on art correctly,
one must return to Heideggers insight that it is only via affectivity that we
know what it is to be, or that we know what being is.22
This, however, raises another problem: is it necessary that our affective
response to Van Goghs painting should instruct us about what it is
to dwell on earth? How do we reconcile Heideggers philosophical
description of the earth with the affective response to the work of art?23
Is it not the case, Lacoste asks, that this response is plural and, therefore,
more ambiguous than Heidegger had allowed for? Recall that, for
Lacoste, arts mode of appearing is that of captivation: every other
phenomenon than the work of art itself is put between brackets. The
affective tonality appropriate to this captivation is joy, (almost) absent
from Heideggers Sein und Zeit.24 Hence Lacostes thesis that the work of
art distracts from being-in-the-world, or at least, from that which Sein
und Zeit considered to be most original. But, on the other hand, why
would the work of art necessarily deliver the earth to us?
Lacoste proceeds by asking what would happen if Heidegger were
mistaken in his interpretation of Van Goghs work? And indeed,
according to Derrida, Heidegger was mistaken: the shoes on the painting
of Van Gogh turned out to be, not the shoes of a peasant, as Heidegger
argued, but, on the contrary, those of a city-dweller.25 Therefore,
Heideggers rather rural description of the earth, in fact, was the
consequence of some over-interpretation on his part. Interpretation
always entails the risk of saying too much or too little. According to
Lacoste, Heidegger exposes himself to both.
On the other hand, nothing forbids Heideggers interpretation either.
Just as one cannot condemn someone for not seeing the work of art as a
work of art, one cannot judge Heidegger for not giving a correct
interpretation of what this particular work of art presents. It is precisely

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327

this diversity of affective answers that makes Lacoste wonder. His

hypothesis is that on the relation between interpretation and affectivity
Heidegger might not have said enough.
This too much and too little admits, according to Lacoste, of a rst
conclusion: since the earth does not necessarily arise from the perception
of the pair of shoes of Van Gogh, one should try to determine to what sort
of a realm or horizon the work of art ravishes us. From the fact that
Heideggers interpretation is not necessary, follows the thesis that other
descriptions are equally possible: one could be reminded of the angst for
and of being-in-the-world.26 From the fact that Heideggers earth is
nevertheless a possible determination of Van Goghs painting, Lacoste
infers that there never can be a pure assessment of that earth and that
every interpretative determination of the affective answer to the work of
art is always only partial.
It is, nally, this partiality that needs to be examined. Lacoste agrees
with Heidegger that the work of art offers an excessive presence; he
disagrees with him in that it is not primarily the earth that the work of
art discloses. According to Lacoste, there is inevitably a discrepancy
between the excessive presence offered by the work of art itself, that is
encountered only affectively, and the interpretation given of it. Therefore,
to evoke the pure presence of the earth, Lacoste contends, is to err about
the logic of affectivity. Rather, one should speak of a fundamental
duplicity between world and earth, and dare to say that this ambiguity
can be the truth.27 The meaning of being thus lies, according to Lacoste,
in the ambiguous, but perpetual double presence28 of world and earth.
Every affective answer always prepares an only partial determination of
the excessive presence, felt only affectively. The problem then is, for
Lacoste, that affectivity is older than, or, at least more rich than the
constitutions in which it takes its form.29 The attraction of the artwork
interrupts the Heideggerian being-in-the-world and delivers us into the
moving outline of an [affective, JS] eld30 where free affective
constitutions, deconstitutions and reconstitutions succeed one another
without deciding which constitution is the most original, and wherein
world and earth are made to appear only as possibilities.31 It is this
plurality of affective answers that Lacoste regards as original. Of course
the world and its all too apparent nitude is inevitable, and of course one
is always rooted in the earth in one way or another, but, since these
determinations are to be considered as only partial over against an
overwhelming and joyful presence, it is easy to imagine not only how the
liturgical experience gains a legitimate place in this ontology of affectivity
but also how experiences such as friendship and love which, like the work
of art, presuppose a joyful constitution of the present, become ontologically signicant.
Lacoste thus acknowledges in his later work that the liturgical
experience is not the only experience that can manifest a rupture with

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being-in-the world. The believer can effectively elucidate his existence to

non-believers, for instance, by pointing to those analogous experiences of
resting and enjoying a work of art. Human beings are not bound to the
atheistic horizon that Heidegger, according to Lacoste, outlined in Sein
und Zeit. Resting as well as the experience of a work of art both show a
certain freedom over and against the transcendental expressions of being
human. We recall that the experience of the work of art disclosed the
differend between world and earth and, by doing so, revealed a certain
freedom with regard to the dialectical interplay of those two concepts.
Human beings are allowed to pause in the between in which neither the
world nor the earth appear purely. It is precisely with this worldly
between that the liturgical between can align itself. When it is only with
the mere possibility of world and earth that one is confronted in the joyful
contemplation of the work of art, and when these determinations never
do justice to this excessive presence, liturgy might as well be a legitimate
rupture with being-in-the-world. We recall that the liturgical experience
emerged out of a quest into the human aptitude to experience. Lacoste
believes to have found in the affective encounter with the work of art a
genuine ontological foundation of his thesis that this aptitude is not
limited to Heideggers world and earth. One can therefore hardly be
surprised when Le monde et labsence duvre concludes with the very
same words with which Experience et Absolu opens: our aptitudes to
experience in fact exceed our aptitude to experience the world.32

V. CONCLUSION

In this conclusion I will address two problems: rst, I will examine

Lacostes insistence on the difference between world and creation, and the
consequences thereof for the relation between philosophy and theology,
and second, Ill try to discern, with the help of Heideggers and Levinas
thought, a certain metaphysical nostalgia in Lacostes conception of the
decentring of modern subjectivity in the liturgical experience.
1. Philosophy and theology
We have seen that the experiences of resting and that of the work of art
receive a theological qualication: their respective well-being-there
correspond to a sabbathic experience. The liturgical experience is caught
up in a similar creational logic. The leave we can take of the world in
liturgy reminds us of our status as created beings. The passivity of this
experience is older than any autonomous intentionality and conrms the
fundamental passivity issuing from creation. According to Lacoste, there
is a differend between the (Heideggerian) world and creation (EA, 94; NT,
8991), and though this differend seems somewhat lessened in his later
works, one still needs to question the structural move Lacoste undertakes

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329

to justify this distinction. One recalls that the liturgical experience

originates in the project, wherein one, by reexively appropriating the
Heideggerian care, encounters signication in this world of nitude. It
is therefore clearly stated by Lacoste that one can encounter signication in a philosophical account of facticity.33 The problem here is that
Lacoste immediately qualies these signicant experiences, for instance
the ethical project, as creation. In this way, the world is immediately
forced into a difference with creation: if everything that is good and
meaning-ful must be conceived of as creation, all that there is to the world
can only be the negativity of death and sin. This negative evaluation of the
world34 means, of course, that Lacoste never really takes into account our
being-in-the-world as such. Though philosophy is able to encounter
signication in our worldly projects, only the theological concept of
creation removes the discrepancy between signication and facticity,
between the excess of signication with regard to its condition (NT, 101;
201), for instance between the ethical appeal to do good always and
everywhere and being-in-the-world. Hence Lacostes presupposition
that the distance theology takes from (philosophical) facticity, or the
distance liturgy takes from the world, is necessary for a true vantage
point (EA, 7374).35 This ungrounded thesis of course has as a result that
facticity cannot interpret itself (NT, 84). In the words of Lacoste: If one
not even knows of what the sketch [of signication, JS] wants to be a
sketch, one cannot even perceive the sketch as such (NT, 84). Every
encounter with signication in the world is a sketch of something to which
philosophy is not granted access. Philosophy understands neither the
sketch of signication as such nor the encounter with signication as a
sketch. The difference between the world and creation therefore gives way
to a similar mechanism of exclusion in the relation between philosophy
and theology. What is at stake here is that the philosophical enterprise,
and perhaps not just that of Heidegger, is being misused here as a
preparation of theological discourse.
Philosophy serves theology, but only to see its realizations crossed by
theology. Consider for instance the following analogies between the
formal structure of the liturgical experience and Heideggers Sein und
Zeit: where Sein und Zeits being-in-the-world consists in existentials
that have their antidotes in existentiel modes. Lacostes being-in-theChurch is constituted in the same formal way: it has existentials, e.g.,
ontological restlessness, and its modes, e.g., mission, imitation. And the
analogy not only holds at this formal level. Where in Sein und Zeit the
confrontation with ones own death is the occasion to assume ones
authenticity, in the liturgical experience the confrontation with the events
surrounding the death of Christ is the kairos in which authentic being
human begins to appear. Where in Sein und Zeit the confrontation with
nitude takes place in angst, the liturgical person has to reckon with the
terror of the non-experience. Where in Sein und Zeit this anxious relation

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to death singularizes Dasein, the believer experiences a solipsism

analogous to Heideggers existential solipsism: in the liturgical nonexperience one remains alone with ones faith. Where in Sein und Zeit
death discloses Daseins temporality, the liturgical persons historiality,
i.e., historys grip on human existence, is revealed (EA, 62; 153). When
Heideggers book states time and again that the They interposes itself
between Dasein and its authenticity, this structural element also found its
way into the liturgical experience, albeit that therein world interposes
itself between God and the individual. Finally, where in Sein und Zeit
angst removes the veils with which the They covers up Dasein and leaves
Dasein with the naked fact that it has to be its being, there seems to be little
difference with Lacostes liturgical experience in which God kairologically
removes all masks with which human beings cover themselves up, to leave
them with the humiliation of their nudity and poverty.

2. Decentring
It is worth noting that this negative evaluation of being-in-the-world also
bears on Lacostes description of the liturgical decentring of modern
subjectivity. There are two instances in which he elaborates on this
decentring. Whereas, at rst, Lacoste states that the liturgical experience
suggests that, for the relation coram Deo, our carnal presence serves as a
more appropriate paradigm (EA, 156),36 he immediately goes on to say
that of this liturgical passivity before God, it would be by no means
aberrant to say that [its] objectivity is, then, yet more radical than that of
the esh, and is similar to the objectivity of the thing to say, therefore,
that [one] is in Gods hands as clay . . . is in the hands of the potter (EA,
156).37
Thus, the negative light thrown upon being, suspected to be a
hindrance for the relationship to God, is mirrored by a negative light
thrown upon our embodiment: the body must be detached from itself to
become an object. Far from being a genuine decentring of modern
subjectivity, the liturgical experience turns out to be a simple inversion of
the terms that constitute this subjectivity. This inversion of intentionality,
of course, remains trapped in that which it tried to overcome: whereas the
projects divertissement consisted in the refusal to see signication as
given, a refusal that results in seeing the future as the (controllable) object
of my intention, the solution Lacoste proposes still adheres to the
problem it wanted to resolve: Gods gaze upon human beings is
equivalent to the projective gaze of human beings towards objects. It
may be no longer people that exercise power and control over objects, it is
God who, like a modern subject, encounters nothing other than
objectivity and makes us the object of Gods intention (EA, 150).38
Activity versus passivity, subject versus object, these are the terms that
are used by Lacoste and other French phenomenologists to think the

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331

decentring of modern subjectivity. It is Heidegger who alerts us here to a

certain metaphysical nostalgia: But the reversal of a metaphysical
statement remains a metaphysical statement.39 Why? If being and
world, in the light of a theological horizon, are to be conceived of as only
sketches of a signication, or as, in Lacostes words, pre-eschatological
(EA, 139), then one can suspect the liturgical experience to be indebted to
what is now known as a metaphysics of presence.40 And indeed, not only
does the term pre-eschatological already indicate that it awaits its
fullment, but also the liturgical experience still hinges on what it wanted
to reject: the desire to see and experience God. Indeed, this desire for a
full-presence of God is never left altogether, it is only postponed: patience
is the liturgical virtue par excellence (EA, 91). It is, therefore, in the
liturgical experience that being is conceived of negatively: only if one
assumes that an eschatological presence of God will liberate the liturgical
experience from its (worldly) constraints, being as such appears as a
sketch or even as a facticity that cannot interpret itself. Whilst it need not
be problematic to believe in Gods coming, it remains to be considered
whether this coming can and must be inscribed as the telos of the
relationship between humankind and God.
Should we not turn, perhaps, to Levinas both to conceive of God not
as the onto-theological telos of the relationship between God and human
beings and to conceive of this encounter as an encounter between
singularities, i.e., as free and embodied agents? After all, it is Levinas who
seems to be well aware of the problem we have tried to describe
throughout this article. According to Levinas, the signication that arises
in the encounter with otherness is not a signication by relation to
another term.41 The face of the other signies of itself. This otherness,
therefore, cannot and must not be described as, to use Lacostes words, a
sketch of signication relating to a full-presence of that signication. If
relationality is depicted in this way, relationship, according to Levinas,
is conceived of theoretically, i.e., logically or dialectically, and thought
remains in the onto-(theo)logical and metaphysical objectivity characteristic of relations.42 To Levinas mind, such a relationality always
strips at least one of the terms of the relationship of its singularity. Hence
Levinas attempt to think the other as other by means of a defense of
subjectivity.43 Thus, Levinas conception of a relation without relation
seems to counter the problems one can perceive in the works of Lacoste
and others wherein Gods subjectivity is conceived of in relation to the
objectivity of the believers body.

Notes
*I would like to thank my promoter Prof. Dr. Lieven Boeve. It was his care and support that
made this article possible. A word of gratitude also to Laurence Paul Hemming, for enabling me

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to write fewer errors. This text is a translation, and substantially re-worked version, of one
published in Bijdragen. International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 64 (2003) pp. 6894.
It is republished here with the permission of the Editor.
1 Dominique Janicaud, Le tournant theologique de la phenomenologie francaise (Paris:
Edition. de lEclat Combas, 1991).
2 A few exceptions, of course: I. Verhack, Eindigheidservaring en absoluutheid, Tijdschrift
voor Filosofie 58 (1996), pp. 142153; Ph. Capelle, Phenomenologie et liturgie, La Maison-Dieu
209 (1997), pp. 121126; Jeffrey Bloechl, Dialectical Approaches to Retrieving God after
Heidegger (Lacoste and Marion), Pacifica 13 (2000), pp. 288298; and finally J. Greisch, Le
buisson ardent et les lumie`res de la raison. Linvention de la philosophie de la religion. Tome 2: Les
approches phenomenologiques et analytiques (Paris: CERF, 2002), pp. 266291. See also the
discussion of Lacostes entry on Heidegger in his Dictionnaire critique de theologie (Paris: PUF,
2002), pp. 522524 by C. Geffre, J. Greisch and J.-L. Marion, in D. Janicaud (ed.), Heidegger en
France. II. Entretiens (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001).
3 J.-Y. Lacoste, Experience et Absolu. Questions disputees sur lhumanite de lhomme (Paris:
PUF, 1994), translated as: Experience and the Absolute. Disputed Questions on the Humanity of
Man, by M. Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Abbreviated as EA
unless otherwise noted, all references will be to the English edition. Lacoste, Note sur le temps.
Essai sur les raisons de la memoire et de lesperance (Paris: PUF, 1990). Abbreviated as NT.
Lacoste, Le monde et labsence duvre et autres etudes (Paris: PUF, 2000).
4 Lacoste, En marge du monde et de la terre: laise in Lacoste, Le monde et labsence duvre
et autres etudes, pp. 522. As for Heidegger, see for instance his Being and Time, translated by
J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), p. 42: [T]he inquiry into being
. . . is itself characterized by historicality.
5 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 298. Last three words have italics in Heideggers text.
6 Lacoste, Le monde et labsence duvre in Lacoste, Le monde et labsence duvre et
autres etudes, pp. 57106, pp. 82 and 83.
7 I will use world and being-in-the-world throughout this article in the same sense.
8 Note that Lacoste is not thinking here of Heideggers (in)famous Kehre but of a turning in
Heideggers work with the emergence of the concept of the earth, from Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerkes (1935) on. Lacostes remarks on this point can be found in EA, pp. 1318. The
question of such a topology already emerges in his NT, see p. 124.
9 See Lacostes most recent article Petite phenomenologie de la fatigue, Conference 16
(2003).
10 Although Lacoste only considers the project in NT, it is not difcult to notice the
structure of the project in the liturgical experience of EA. Moreover, in the latter Lacoste
explicitly denotes the liturgical experience as a project. See pp. 33, 161, 163 and 189.
11 J.-Y. Lacoste, De la phenomenologie de lEsprit a` la montee du Carmel, Revue Thomiste,
89 (1989), pp. 539 and pp. 569598, p. 15, hereafter abbreviated as Carmel. Compare,
concerning the existential status of liturgy, EA, p. 105, Liturgy has, therefore, no existential
status other than that which a restlessness . . . can precariously offer it.
12 Lacoste, Batir, habiter, prier, Revue Thomiste 87 (1987), pp. 357390 and pp. 547578,
p. 383. Hereafter BHP.
13 See Experience et Absolu, p. 182, nous pouvons nous mettre a` la disposition de Dieu. The
translation has the weaker sense: we can make ourselves available to God, p. 151.
14 For this joy, one best also consult Lacoste, Presence et affection, in L. Boeve and
L. Leijssen (eds.), Sacramental Presence in a Postmodern Context (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), pp.
206225. Hence, also, Lacostes description of liturgy as the anticipated space of a resurrection,
in Lacoste, The Work and Complement of Appearing, in J. Bloechl (ed.), Religious Experience
and the End of Metaphysics (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 6893, p. 92.
15 See also, the French edition of Experience et Absolu, p. 214, lasce`se inquie`te legitimement
. . . and p. 222, le fol nous inquie`te . . .
16 The citation is taken from Lacoste, The Work and Complement of Appearing, p. 70.
17 Lacoste, En marge du monde et de la terre: laise, p. 19, my translation of bien-etre-la`.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 21. Note the continuity with NT, p. 93.
20 Lacoste, Le monde et labsence duvre, pp. 6872.
21 Ibid., p. 81.

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333

22 Of course, Lacoste is conscious of the fact that Heidegger, in Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerkes, is not concerned with the question of affectivity and that what he, Lacoste, is
proposing is absent from the letter of the text. However, there are hints of it in Heideggers text so
that Lacostes proposal is not entirely awkward. See, for instance, M. Heidegger, The Origin of
the Work of Art, in Heidegger, Basic Writings, edited by D. F. Krell (London: Routledge, 1994),
pp. 139212, p. 151, Perhaps, however, what we call feeling or mood, here and in similar
instances, is more reasonable that is, more intelligently perceptive because more open to
Being than all that reason which, having meanwhile become ratio, was misinterpreted as being
rational.
23 Lacoste, The Work and Complement of Appearing, pp. 77 and 80.
24 An intriguing exception, of course, is Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 358: Along with the
sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-Being, there
goes an unshakable joy in this possibility.
25 See Jacques Derrida, Restitutions. On the Truth in Painting, in The Truth in Painting,
translated by G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp.
255f, as cited in Lacoste, The Work and Complement of Appearing, p. 93.
26 Compare Lacoste, The Work and Complement of Appearing, p. 84: If the work
manifests our relation to our native earth, it will not manifest what else it could manifest for
example the pathetic fate of the mortal of whom there remains for us only a pair of shoes. See
also p. 87.
27 Ibid., p. 86.
28 Ibid., p. 88.
29 Lacoste, Le monde et labsence duvre, p. 101.
30 Lacoste, The Work and Complement of Appearing, p. 84.
31 Lacoste, Le monde et labsence duvre, pp. 85101.
32 Ibid., p. 101.
33 See, for instance, NT, p. 50 on the a priori openness toward the moral good.
34 Compare Jeffrey Bloechl, Dialectical Approaches, p. 293.
35 A similar objection can be raised against Jean-Luc Marion who tells us that the liberation
of and from being can only occur through a view instituted at and in a certain distance, see God
without Being. Hors-Texte, translated by T. A. Carlson (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1995), p. 84.
36 See also, Lacoste, La connaissance silencieuse. Des evidences antepredicatives a` une
critique de lapophase, Laval theologique et philosophiques 58 (2002), pp. 137153, at p. 147.
37 Compare also Lacoste, EA, p. 151 and NT, p. 171.
38 Lacoste seems to align himself here once again with Jean-Luc Marion, who sometimes
seems to think of the decentring of the subject in a similar way. Indeed, Marions phenomenology
of givenness is in a strange way akin to Lacostes phenomenology of liturgy. To receive the
phenomenon as it gives itself, Marions donation requires a powerless subject, at least a subject
that does not distort the given phenomena with its intentions. Hence in a phrase that might just
as easily have been written by Lacoste: [I]ntentionality is inverted: I become the objective of the
object, J.-L. Marion, Being Given. Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, translated by J. L.
Kosky (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 146.
39 Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, in Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 213265, p. 232.
40 For a full version of this argument, see my Phenomenology, Liturgy, and Metaphysics: the
Thought of Jean-Yves Lacoste, in P. Jonkers and R. Welten (eds.), God in France. Eight
Contemporary French Thinkers on God (Leuven: Peeters, forthcoming 2005).
41 E. Levinas, Totality and Innity. An Essay on Exteriority, translated by A. Lingis
(Pittsburgh PA: Duquesne University Press, 2002), p. 261. For a discussion of this problem
which integrates Marions and Levinas works, see my Ontotheological Turnings? Marion,
Lacoste and Levinas on the Decentring of Modern Subjectivity, Modern Theology, forthcoming
2005.
42 E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, translated by A. Lingis (Pittsburgh
PA: Duquesne University press, 2002), p. 82.
43 Levinas, Totality and Innity, p. 26.