On Seizing the Source: Toward a Phenomenology of Religious Violence

International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (5):744-782 (2016)
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Abstract

In this paper I argue that we need to analyze ‘religious violence’ in the ‘post-secular context’ in a twofold way: rather than simply viewing it in terms of mere irrationality, senselessness, atavism, or monstrosity – terms which, as we witness today on an immense scale, are strongly endorsed by the contemporary theater of cruelty committed in the name of religion – we also need to understand it in terms of an ‘originary supplement’ of ‘disengaged reason’. In order to confront its specificity beyond traditional explanations of violence, I propose an integrated phenomenological account of religion that traces the phenomenality of religion in terms of a correlation between the originary givenness of transcendence and capable man’s creative capacities to respond to it. Following Ricœur, I discuss ‘religious violence’ in terms of a monopolizing appropriation of the originary source of givenness that conflates man’s freedom to poetically respond to the appeal of the foundational with the surreptitiously claimed sovereignty to make it happen in a practical transfiguration of the everyday.

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Michael Staudigl
University of Vienna

Citations of this work

Of the Memory of the Past: Philosophy of History in Spiritual Crisis in the early Patočka and Ricoeur.Michael Funk Deckard - 2017 - Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 9 (2):560-583.
Phenomenology and Ritual Practice.Christina M. Gschwandtner - 2019 - Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion 1 (1):43-70.
Immediacy.Jason W. Alvis - 2020 - PhaenEx 13 (2):11-37.

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