Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard, and Slavoj Žižek by Frederiek Depoortere (review)

666 BOOK REVIEWS natural inclinations. Practical reason is at work in the "integration of every one of these inclinations and their goals into a unified whole of all natural human strivings" (113). The natural inclinations themselves only become practical goods as they are informed and ordered by practical reason. Rhonheimer thus accounts for the fact that the natural inclinations have a practical and normative relevance, for they are normative not in their mere natural givenness, but as informed by practical reason. It is thus that the "truth of sexuality," for example, is to be found not in the blind pursuit of the sex drive, but in the ordering of the natural inclination for the preservation of the species by practical reason (111-15). My discussion of the book, although incomplete, has nevertheless shown, I hope, that Rhonheimer intelligently engages some of the most difficult topics of ethics in general and of Aquinas's moral thought in particular. Engaging in his writings can only be profitable to the reader. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. TOBIAS HOFFMANN Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, Rene Girard, and Slavoj Zizek. By FREDERIEKDEPOORTERE. London and New York: T & T Clark International, 2008. Pp. 159. $21.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-567-03332-1. Frederiek Depoortere is a postdoctoral fellow and member of Lieven Boeve's "Theology in a Postmodern Context" research group at the Catholic University of Leuven. The present book explores the work of three continental European intellectuals, each of whom turned, at some point in his career, from criticism of religion to the caritas of the incarnate God as the only power capable of overcoming the violence inherent in human history. The three-Vattimo, Girard, and Zizek-have been selected by Depoortere as representatives of distinct possibilities for postmetaphysical thinking about "Christ" as signifier of the divine. Despite their differences, they share a common interest in the Christian theme of divine embodiment or "immanence" in contrast to theologians who emphasize the radical otherness of God in the wake of Heidegger's apophatic ontology. Depoortere wants to explore, and ultimately test, their respective interpretations of theological "immanence" in connection with the themes of divine transcendence and Christian particularity. The opening chapter introduces the Christology of Gianni Vattimo, with attention to its articulation in his Belief (1999) and After Christianity (2002). Here we learn how Nietzsche and Heidegger functioned as pedagogues on his way to Christ. The Teutonic lessons on the violence of metaphysical thinking prepared the Italian ex-Catholic for Christ's way of kenosis and ii pensiero debole BOOK REVIEWS 667 ("weak thought"), in which, according to Vattimo, the nihilistic destiny of hermeneutics is announced as the heart of the gospel message. Vattimo's Christ saves by desacralizing the world and releasing the process of secular political emancipation into a history purified of any trace of transcendence. In this way, Vattimo rejects the apophatics, like Caputo and Levinas, who appropriate Heidegger to reintroduce to Western civilization the God who is "wholly other." Vattimo's eschatology is immanent, though not fully realized, for the arrival of the secular-Christie order awaits the dissolution of the remnants of metaphysical violence embedded in the dogmatic and moral doctrines of the Church. At that time, divine caritas alone will govern the radically historical process of interpreting Christ's message according to the rule of Augustine, "dilige, et quad vis fac." The trenchant quality of Depoortere's criticism of Vattimo is matched only by its breadth. Among other concerns, he questions Vattimo's sweeping and unsubstantiated association of metaphysics and Christian dogma with violence, and interprets his kenotic Christology of the total self-emptying of divine transcendence into immanence as a "legitimation for the abandonment of Christianity" (60) in the tradition ofAltizer's "Christian atheism." At the root of the material insufficiency of Vattimo's Christology lies a one-sided methodological commitment to the reconciliation ("correlation") of Christian tradition and modern secularization. As such, Vattimo seems not to have fully awakened to the contemporary postmodern situation of radical religious and ideological pluralism and the chorus of critics of the late-modern metanarrative of universal secular emancipation. For Depoortere, pluralism, not secularization, presents the more basic challenge for...