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  • The Return of Religion in France: From Democratisation to Postmetaphysics
  • Christopher Watkin
The Return of Religion in France: From Democratisation to Postmetaphysics. By Enda McCaffrey. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. vi + 286 pp. Hb £55.00.

Enda McCaffrey sets out to examine ‘how social change and philosophical crisis in the 1980s created the conditions for the return of religion to contemporary French intellectual life’ (p. 1), where religion means Christianity, and Christianity frequently means Roman Catholicism. He approaches this task in two distinct but interrelated ways. ‘History and Context’, the first half of the book, deals with sociopolitical developments, and the second half, ‘Philosophy and Concepts’, works through French philosophy’s ‘theological turn’. In the first half, Régis Debray’s distinction between the ‘republican’ and ‘democratic’ approaches to equality plays a significant structuring role, allowing a diverse range of thinkers — de Certeau, Foucault, Irigaray, Gauchet, Vattimo, Debray himself — to be handled without unwieldiness or a lack of clarity. McCaffrey is a brilliant synthesizer of sociopolitical comment, with a keen sense for highlighting turning points and important moments in the evolving debate over religion in the public sphere. For his own part, he argues that the return of religion in France is ‘part of a more profound post-secular phenomenon’ (p. 59), a negation of secularism’s negation that remains outside the strictures of orthodoxy and organized religions. The major axis of the book’s second half is the destitution of the cogito and a number of responses to the question ‘who comes after the subject?’. McCaffrey takes the reader through studies of Henry’s C’est moi la vérité, Ricœur’s ‘Le Soi dans le miroir des Écritures’ and ‘Le Sujet convoqué’, Badiou’s Saint Paul, and Lyotard’s La Confession d’Augustin, sprinkled with brief discussions of papal encyclicals. Though illuminating, this second half is a little less sure-footed than the first. It is problematic that Badiou appears in this company, despite McCaffrey’s care to stress that Saint Paul is not a theological accommodation. Nevertheless, the absence of any reference to Badiou’s materialism of the Idea in Logiques des mondes, to his atheism in Court traité d’ontologie transitoire, or to his set-theoretical ontology in L’Être et l’événement, in addition to ambiguous references to Badiouian ‘givenness’ and the claim that in his thought we find ‘the divine or transcendent revealing itself in the material or subjective world’ (p. 102), risks giving a misleading picture of his thought and the philosophical company he keeps. Despite McCafferey’s caveats, it remains questionable whether Badiou’s thought represents the same shift in religious debate and philosophical theology as that discussed in relation to Henry, Lyotard, and the rest. A small but significant number of welcome cross-references are made from the second half back to the first. This rich and impressively broad-ranging book does live up to its interdisciplinary billing, and succeeds in making its powerful case: it is a myth that secular modernity represents the end of religion, and a misconception that it excludes religious belief. [End Page 127]

Christopher Watkin
Murray Edwards College, Cambridge
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