Drowning in the Rubicon?

Abstract This essay discusses Emmanuel Falque’s most recent works, Hors phénomène (2021), La chair de Dieu (2023) and Spiritualisme et phénoménologie (2024) in which Falque’s philosophy seems to have undergone considerable shifts. This essay is divided into two parts: the first part, “The question of the other” and the second part, “The question of God”. The main aim of the essay is to show how one can never have the one without the other in Falque’s work and that this is how something like ontotheology recurs in Falque. Apart from this general claim, the essay introduces Falque’s fascinating recent work. It does so, by examining the main critiques to date of Falque’s works on a number of themes: is Falque venturing outside phenomenology? Is this not a masked theology or even a crypto-christology? A simple question guides the essay: how can an author – and one the most refreshing ones of contemporary philosophy – who always has considered himself as ‘first and foremost’ a philosopher but who never eschewed theology and theological themes all of a sudden write a “pure philosophy”? To what would such a “pure philosophy” contrast? Would it make the earlier, rather theological work, works of “impure philosophy”? Or is it rather that Falque has succumbed to how he has interpreted Heidegger’s concept of ontotheology, namely as a somewhat desperate, impossible claim to “pure philosophy” without faith and belief precisely? One thing is sure: through and with Falque, we will learn to “inhabit” the shores between the land of philosophy and the land of theology.