We inhabit a time of crisis—totalitarianism, environmental collapse, and the unquestioned rule of neoliberal capitalism. Philosopher Jean Vioulac is invested in and worried by all of this, but his main concern lies with how these phenomena all represent a crisis within—and a threat to—thinking itself.         
In his first book to be translated into English, Vioulac radicalizes Heidegger’s understanding of truth as disclosure through the notion of truth as apocalypse. This “apocalypse of truth” works as an unveiling that reveals both the finitude and mystery of truth, allowing a full confrontation with truth-as-absence. Engaging with Heidegger, Marx, and St. Paul, as well as contemporary figures including Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek, Vioulac’s book presents a subtle, masterful exposition of his analysis before culminating in a powerful vision of “the abyss of the deity.” Here, Vioulac articulates a portrait of Christianity as a religion of mourning, waiting for a god who has already passed by, a form of ever-present eschatology whose end has always already taken place. With a preface by Jean-Luc Marion, Apocalypse of Truth presents a major contemporary French thinker to English-speaking audiences for the first time.
 

A timely new work by one of France’s premier philosophers, A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment offers insight into what “catholic” truly means. In this short, accessible book, Jean-Luc Marion braids the sense of catholic as all-embracing and universal into conversation about what it is to be Catholic in the present moment. A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment tackles complex issues surrounding church-state separation and addresses a larger Catholic audience that transcends national boundaries, social identities, and linguistic differences. Marion insists that Catholic universalism, with its core of communion and community, is not an outmoded worldview, but rather an outlook that has the potential to counter the positivist rationality and nihilism at the core of our current political moment, and can help us address questions surrounding liberalism and religion and what is often presented as tension between “Islam and the West.” As an inviting and sophisticated Catholic take on current political and social realities—realities that are not confined to France alone—A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment is a valuable contribution to a larger conversation.

At the end of the nineteenth century, German theologians and philosophers rediscovered the Renaissance cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). Immediately they hailed Cusanus as the first modern thinker, a brilliant German rival to the French Descartes. But since the founding of the Cusanus critical edition in 1927 up to its conclusion in 2005, historians have gradually learned that Nicholas was more of a medieval preacher and contemplative than a modern philosopher. Yet over the same century, modern German and French readers were already digging into Nicholas’s many works. There they encountered an exciting voice with fresh perspectives about God’s immanence in the cosmos and the awesome capacities of the human mind. Leading philosophers and theologians from Erich Przywara to Karl Jaspers to Hans-Georg Gadamer, and from Gilles Deleuze to Jacques Lacan to Michel de Certeau, found their own thinking stimulated by the cardinal’s innovative concepts and interdisciplinary style. Even as Nicholas shifted from modern to medieval among historians, he was emerging as a contemporary interlocutor for moderns and postmoderns. Who could have guessed that the first debate between Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falque would take place over the fifteenth-century mystical dialogue, De visione dei? If Meister Eckhart found his moment amidst Deconstruction in prior decades, Nicholas of Cusa is our thinker for today. His interests anticipate themes in continental philosophy of religion, whether alterity, invisibility, the fold, or the icon. His habit of interweaving philosophy and theology anticipates current debates on the thresholds of phenomenology. Our volume first maps the contours of modern receptions of Nicholas of Cusa in French and German spheres, and then beyond Europe to the Americas and Japan. It also hosts the next round of engagement by some of today’s most original Christian thinkers: Emmanuel Falque, John Milbank, and David Bentley Hart.

 Jean-Luc Marion is one of the world’s foremost philosophers of religion as well as one of the leading Catholic thinkers of modern times. In God Without Being, Marion challenges a fundamental premise of traditional philosophy, theology, and metaphysics: that God, before all else, must be. Taking a characteristically postmodern stance and engaging in passionate dialogue with Heidegger, he locates a “God without Being” in the realm of agape, or Christian charity and love. If God is love, Marion contends, then God loves before he actually is.