This thesis gives an account of Heidegger’s understanding of anxiety and death as it relates to the Christian theology of resurrection. It does so by investigating three primary accusations that Heidegger makes against Christianity with respect to its views on death and anxiety interpreted through a belief in an afterlife. In order to interact with Heidegger’s criticisms, Christian phenomenologist Emmanuel Falque’s work is explored for a more dialogical Heideggerian and Christian understanding of death. In doing so, this thesis picks up questions such as: can resurrection interpreted phenomenologically contribute something new to a Heideggerian view of Dasein as a Being-towards-death? as well as in what ways can Heidegger’s starting-point of finitude formulate new possibilities for interpreting Christ’s death and resurrection? Are these theological events necessary for an “authentic” understanding of death and finitude? These questions pertain to anxiety about what Heidegger calls the “to-come”, a concept mapped out in Heidegger’s own work on Christianity and then secularized in his fundamental ontology delineated in chapter one. Chapter two takes up Falque’s work on the death of Jesus and its correlations to Heideggerian views on death, while chapter three contemplates resurrection (and through this, birth) and the various modes of being that it opens up for human finitude. Chapter three concludes with a Levinasian reading of the New Testament resurrection accounts in order to consider how the Christian mode of Being-towards-resurrection can work alongside and, in a certain sense, within a Heideggerian view of human finitude as a Being-towards-death. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / This dissertation asks what it means to be faithful to the friend. From Aristotle onward friendship has often been taken as the foundation of political life, but as it is a private relation that excludes many fellow citizens, fidelity to the friend may conflict with the duties of citizenship and endanger the political realm. What is more, one can never be perfectly faithful to one’s friend, so is true friendship impossible? I argue that friendship, though always a risk, directs us toward a justice that is higher than the political. Moreover, friendship is a great good that is suited to our finitude. While our finitude renders perfect fidelity impossible, it is also the horizon within which alone friendship can take place. Friendship is possible for those who admit its impossibility, who love precisely that the other – whether the other person or a language – escapes them.Chapter 1 considers selected ancient and medieval examinations of friendship in order to clarify friendship’s unstable place in the borderlands of hostility and hospitality. Only the dispossession of the self opens it to alterity. Thus if friendship is possible, it is possible only between strangers, not citizens secure in their ipseity. To bind people into a community, it must also shatter open any community in which they believe themselves to be comfortably at home. Chapter 2 further explores, in light of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics, the conflict between friendship and one’s obligation to others. Levinas posits a self who is absolutely responsible for every other according to an asymmetrical ethical relation; how then can one prefer the friend to others? I reply that friendship serves as a forceful reminder of the singularity of the other and of the inadequacy of the comparisons among people that politics must employ to determine whose interests will win out. Friendship is not, however, only a signpost that points to ethics: it is a good that needs no justification to be worthwhile. Chapter 3 proposes that friendship arises from our finitude. Drawing on Emmanuel Falque’s work, I maintain that finitude is a positive good that is suited to humans. Friends translate the world for each other – but what of the fact that translation is always unfaithful? It is impossible, as Jacques Derrida has emphasized, to maintain infinite fidelity to the friend, but this impossibility is constitutive of friendship. Stepping beyond this horizon would not lead to better friendships but would destroy the possibility of friendship by taking us outside the limits that constitute humanity, when it is as humans that we love each other in friendship. Chapter 4 further investigates the possibility of friendship by taking up the suggestion, raised in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, that friendship is an illusion because it pretends to offer knowledge of another even though such knowledge is impossible. I argue that a careful reading of the Search reveals that writing itself functions as an act of friendship: the narrator discovers that through writing his world can encounter the worlds of others. True friendship is a relation across absence. Finally, chapter 5 shows how the promise of fidelity to the friend constitutes the self: the promise creates the very world that the self is called to translate for the friend. I conclude that although one can never achieve perfect fidelity to the friend, this is no reason to despair of fidelity: the very infidelity of the self’s witness to the friend may still bear witness to the friend’s irreplaceability. Bearing witness to the friend is a task to be undertaken in fear and trembling but also in gratitude and joy, for friendship is a great good of our existence within finitude. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

This thesis examines two French Catholic phenomenologists whose work engages in a serious manner with embodiment and theological phenomena. Michel Henry (1922-2002) and Emmanuel Falque (b. 1963) are both connected with the “theological turn” in French phenomenology. By using the tools of phenomenology, these thinkers take aim at the general phenomena of flesh and body and the religious phenomena of incarnation and resurrection. In this thesis I seek to uncover how their philosophical foundations inform their theological work, how they articulate a phenomenology of the body and the flesh in relation to incarnation and resurrection, and which thinker might provide a better account of these. I begin by providing a succinct overview of phenomenology—as articulated by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger—paying attention to the phenomenological distinction between flesh (Leib) and body (Körper) that is vital to Henry’s and Falque’s analysis of incarnation and resurrection. I then lay out Dominique Janicaud’s critical labelling of the “theological turn” in French phenomenology in 1991, as well as responses by those who continue to knowingly operate under that label. I then critically examine the work of Henry and Falque, first by laying out their philosophical approach and method, and then by working through each of their theological trilogies, showing how the former influences the latter. My analysis reveals that both Henry and Falque have a similar understanding of a phenomenology of resurrection, in that it is a move from body to flesh. What my analysis also shows is that although Falque is critical of Henry’s position on the incarnation for neglecting materiality and completely understanding the human being as flesh, Falque’s critical response to it ironically mirrors it: by turning to material forces and drives to better describe the body in his recent work, Falque recapitulates Henry’s understanding of flesh. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)