It Takes Two to Make a Thing Go Right: Phenomenology, Theology, and Janicaud

In his influential essay, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” Dominique Janicaud suggests that phenomenology and theology “make two.” On the thirtieth anniversary of that essay, here we consider some of the main lines of response that have been offered to his account. We suggest that there are three general approaches that have been the most prominent: indifferentism, integrationism, and pluralism. The indifferentists implicitly suggest that Janicaud is right about the divide between phenomenology and theology. The integrationists think that Janicaud is wrong about the divide because theology and philosophy are unable to be strictly distinguished. The pluralists suggest that Janicaud is right about the division, but wrong about how it works. For pluralists, philosophy and theology are distinguished due to the immediate evidential authorities that operate in the two discourses. As such, phenomenological theology and phenomenological philosophy of religion are importantly different. Defending pluralism as the best of the three options, we argue that it avoids the potential reductionism that is present in the other two. We conclude by turning to the ways in which, precisely because phenomenological philosophy and phenomenological theology make two, they can both benefit from being put into robust engagement with the other.

Trans/Criptions

Phenomenological theology can provide a helpful reframing of the bodily rituals of transgender and disabled experience, embracing the ways in which they waste time and energy and sacralizing this waste as a microtactic of resistance to oppression and a site for the in-breaking of the transcendent in the everyday. Using Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's model of the misfit, trans and disabled experience can be understood as a temporal misfitting under the cis and abled norms of neoliberal capitalism, which seeks to contain, suppress, or eliminate their inefficient, flexible, and waste time. A coalitional politics of trans/crip misfitting must resist the capacitating imperatives of normative time, instead leaning into the rupture created by trans/crip time as a space-time of potentiality and openness to alterity. The theological thought of Jean-Yves Lacoste can help frame the little rituals and bodily practices of trans and crip life as de Certeauvian microtactics that embody resistance to the coercions of neoliberal capitalism and, through their very frustration and difficulty, as sites of possibility for true liturgical experience.