This is my new friend. His name is Hegel the Camel, we meditate together in the Saharan Desert the beautiful thoughts on Buddhism of Hegel in the Lessons on Philosophy of History. The camel is a post-metaphysical animal, he meditates more with his body than with his mind: all camels are natural phenomenologists but the reverse is not true. My new elegant has even allowed me to smoke a fat cigar. Thank you dear friend.
Merry Christmas to all! I got this absolute treasure for the bibliophile and the epistemophiliac that I unapologetically am. This is the lectures on Malebranche that Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1947-1948. We are able to read this because a student kept his notes that are published here. This is special to me because Malebranche is my favorite philosopher/theologian. When I was reading Malebranche I was surprised about how his theory of the union of the body and the soul was breaking so clearly with the platonism of Descartes who drastically separates both and also how this union announces the phenomenology of flesh of Merleau-Ponty. I was enchanted to discover through this book that the reason why I could not dissociate the two authors is because the second studied extensively the first. I continue to believe that Malebranche is revolutionary because his research implies that the manifestation of the sacred is more of a matter of states than a matter of belief. Which raises 3 questions still 3 centuries later if the religious emotion is grounded on states: 1 in what order these states manifest themselves for the sacred to actualize it self? 2 do the believer and the secularist can have a full contact with the sacred ? 3 is what we call the phenomenon of revelation a modification of those states?
Merry philosophical Christmas dear Friends! ❤️
Beautiful interview today of the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Sicily who acquired my triptych. Giuseppina is a remarkable woman and disciple of Jean Clair the former director of the Picasso Museum in Paris. They both fought all their life to restore the lost alliance between meaning and art. Click on the link for the full article below.
Sarah Kofman was one of the greatest Nietzsche scholars in the nineties and she was also my professor. As I was recently reading Gianni Vattimo who is one of the meaningful philosopher of our age and himself a great Nietzsche scholar, I noticed that he quotes Sarah Kofman often. I was pleased to see that 30 years latter her voice still counts for the great thinkers. Her books are still published in English even though she was French 30 years latter.She decided to take her life the 15 October 1994 purposely on the 150 anniversary of the birth of Nietzsche. We waited for her a little too long on this cold Parisian morning of October 16 1994. Read her books: Nietzsche and the Philosophical Scene, Nietzsche and Metaphor, Explosion 1 and Explosion 2. She was an extraordinary philosopher.
The place in which new theologies are fabricated, in which the sacred is resculpted and in which art dares to be one with meaning. You need only a chair to reimagine the world.
Extraordinary time at Oxford University where I was invited to a private lecture exploring the frontier between theology and phenomenology. The symposium on Truth and Contemplation was beautifully organized by researchers and fellows from the Faculty of Theology and Religion of Oxford. When a researcher starts with opening remarks that are both in English and in Sanskrit you know you have arrived in Oxford. After a powerful opening by Mark Wrathall ( our times authority on Heidegger read his book The Heidegger Lexicon ) with fascinating remarks on the De-godding of the world (Engotterung) Professor Kevin Hart who was honored for his life time work ( read his excellent Poetry and Revelation 2017 ) and Father Jean-Yves Lacoste one of the foremost theologian of our times ( who wrote Experience and the Absolute 2004 and the Phenomenality of God 2008 ) both started their lectures and a discussion followed. Professor Kevin Hart summarized brilliantly the question that reunited us on this day: this fundamental question is can God be found in immanence. I was moved to be introduced by the Fellow Lecturer of the Faculty of Theology and Religion as one who bridges aesthetics with theology. All my life I have been haunted by this question and will carry on trying to respond with sculptures, lectures, symbols and mystical gates. At the diner that followed the presence of camaraderie, collegiality and excellence never left the room. It was one of these days in which you feel perfectly at home in the world. On the question: is phenomenological reduction a method or an art Jean-Yves Lacoste concluded with great humor and great depth saying ‘’we need as much description as possible and as little prescription as possible’’ to keep the pre-epistemic truth in its purity.
A warm congratulation to Yann Legendre and Serge Lehman the authors of the graphic novel Vega in which I am featured as the enigmatic Alter Pongo is nominated for best science-fiction graphic novel of the year 2022 in Paris and for another award in Angouleme.
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About 2 years ago the insanely talented portraitist for the newspaper Le Monde in Paris who worked for George Lucas and revamped the logo of American express asked me to be the hero of his next science fiction graphic novel. Since yesterday the graphic novel graces the shelves of every bookstores in France as it is the biggest publication in graphic novel this september. His universe is somewhere between Blade Runner and the Matrix and my character is closer to Rutger Hauer than Harrison Ford. The title is Vega by Yann Legendre and Serge Lehman. Yann is building worlds that will define aesthetically the future of Blade Runner. For those who are not in France you can order the book on Amazon.fr ( amazon France ). Photo below Marc Vinciguerra and Yann Legendre having Aperol Spritz.
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After I finished my copy of Caravaggio for the church, I made some research and discovered painters who did also a copy of the same painting. It was fun for me to align them and compare. The first one is mine and the other below are from Gericault, Rubens and Cezanne.
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| Gericault |
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| Rubens |
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| Cezanne |
When we speak about resistance in the second world war we always speak about the French resistance but we must not forget that there was a German resistance as well against Nazi Germany made of refined German intellectuals, philosophers and avant garde theologians. Such was the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
While a German in the prison of Tegel he composed sublime letters on theology. He basically created a theological testament for the church of the future. In his cell he had the revelation of the concept of religionless religion.
He realized the growing religiouslessness of our age and therefore the urgency to preach religion in a non-religious way to be understood in a godless world. Therefore in the solitude of his cell he built another Christ for modernity that he called The Lord of the religionless.
Bonhoeffer set up the avant garde theology by asking the right questions such as= what is a secular God? Why to live without God is to live in him? How to speak of God in a Godless world? By being the first to speak of religionless religion he was the first to act on the great religious revolution of our times which is the apparition of God in religiouslessness.
Visiting the Sacra di San Michele where Umberto Eco filmed The Name of the Rose. It is moving to see this pulpit carved in the rock 3000 feet in the air on which William of Ockham might have preached his forbidden philosophy which is Nominalism. It is interesting that the most important religious revolutions have happened inside the church and not against the church. The legacy of Nominalism who raised against Scholasticism is enormous and inspired Luther, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, it is even considered by some as the father of phenomenology. What a legacy for a monk from the fourteen century!
William of Ockham showed that the appropriation by the church of the philosophical quest for universal essences by Aristotle and Plato was wrong. For Ockham the reality of essences is only nominal, meaning it is just a word, what exist is only subjectivity. Therefore if God were to be found anywhere it is not in knowledge but in experience.
What Umberto Eco does not say is that William of Ockham was the developer of Nominalism but not the inventor of it. The inventor of Nominalism was Roscelin de Compiegne a French Monk from the twelve century. His theory that God might be just a word got him persecuted by the church, he had to leave France and became protected by the University of Oxford.
The simple opposition between religion and atheism is intellectually very poor but on the other hand the opposition of religion against religion is fascinating. To enrich theology we need the religious opposing religion and a new atheism opposing the old atheism. Or even in contemporary philosophy I dream of a nihilism which could rise against nihilism.
