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Maybe, Maybe Not: Richard Kearney and God W I L L I A M D E S M O N D I. Richard Kearney displays an enviable range of concerns in the embarrassment of riches that he offers to us with his three most recent books.1 Each book asks for careful attention in its own right, though each contributes in a distinctive register to a larger project which goes under the title Philosophy at the Limit. Not unexpectedly, there is some seepage among the three books, for the sense of limit that emerges is a porous one. Thus the emphasis on stories is evident in all three books, while the themes treated in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters appear in some of the stories told in On Stories. His discussion of the nature and indispensability of stories often zones in on stories dealing with a kind of ‘‘between,’’ and seepage is unavoidable in this porous middle. Then, further, the hermeneutical approach to religion adopted in The God Who May Be obviously bears on the storied character of biblical religion. It is not incidental that Kearney is a storyteller himself, and his fine novels are sometimes revealing in a richer vein of what academic commentary alone tends to make duller. So, too, his novels can be seen as religious quests, or quests of the religious . The space between these works and his more scholarly work is also porous. We find the desire not just simply to talk about the poetics of the possible but to enact something of it imaginatively. Given present limitations of space, I will confine myself to some remarks on what I understand of Kearney’s sense of the God of pos55 sibility that emerges from The God Who May Be. This is a complex and rich book, and not amenable to simple summary. There are many excellent things in it, among which I number a passionate engagement with the question of God; a subtle touch in his phenomenology of the persona, as well as his readings of Exodus and the Song of Songs; wide-ranging familiarity with and ease of reference to resources , especially in contemporary Continental thought. Needless to say, I am pleased that he aligns himself with something of the spirit of my own efforts to do philosophy in a metaxological manner. I have learned from his stress on eschatological possibility, for my own work tends more to stress a certain ‘‘archaeology.’’ My conviction is that we cannot think last things without first thinking first things, there being no re-creation and eschatology without first creation. I put questions in friendship, and with immense admiration for his work. If I sometimes get a bit cranky with the question of God, maybe I need some penitential time on Croagh Patrick. I may have to get my ears scoured to hear the angel of Patrick’s Hill. In relation to the quest(ion) of God, one might broadly distinguish those who are ‘‘lovers’’ and those who are ‘‘theorists.’’ When I mention love, I mean to call to mind, at least at first, erōs. When I say ‘‘theory,’’ I mean something of its older meaning of ‘‘delight in seeing,’’ not the modern sense of an instrumental hypothesis. The ‘‘theorists’’ often find themselves more at home with the God of the philosophers; the ‘‘lovers,’’ with the God of religion (including the gods of paganism, as with Nietzsche). Many of the great philosophers were ‘‘theorists’’ in one sense, but one could also say that they were sometimes strange lovers. Often it is a matter of whether love or theory is in the ascendancy. A theory might well kill the love that is in it, a love at work without a by-your-leave from explicit rationality . Love, too, can be a kind of knowing, and most especially in being religious. We may love the divine, even if we do not know ‘‘theoretically .’’ I mean delight even in not seeing, and even seeing in this sightless delight. I think Richard Kearney falls first into the class of ‘‘lovers’’ rather than ‘‘theorists,’’ evident in a number of ways. It is evident in his choice of the Song of Songs for special consideration. It is evident in his philosophical option for a hermeneutical approach rather than a philosophical way that is more in love with systematic strategies. It is evident in his agreement with those who are critical, sometimes too critical, of what they denominate, following Heidegger, as ‘‘ontotheology ’’ or, following...

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