Caputo’s oversignt

A friend, Bret Saunders, writes the following in response to my post summarizing Caputo’s account of the “postmodern turns”:

“Caputo appears to have omitted the so-called ‘theological turn,’ such as is found in J.-L. Marion and J.-F. Courtine. Of course, this is because Caputo continues to deny that Marion’s work constitutes a genuine ‘turn,’ since his phenomenology supposedly lacks the rigor proper to the Husserlian tradition (Heidegger says one must be a practical atheist to do phenomenology). I say ‘continues’ because I was present at a lecture Caputo gave in April, where he asserted that Marion’s category of the ‘doubly-saturated phenomenon’ (whose primary example is revelation) is ‘empty,’ except for poetic flights of fancy (ie. literature). Marion is a fideist and a Catholic fundamentalist (ie., siding with Barth and Von Balthasar against Bultmann and Rahner).

“Of course the stakes are high for Caputo’s ‘religion- without-religion’ program, since Marion charges that its major exponents (Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida) are still too Cartesian, too modern. As Marion puts it with respect to Heidegger—ironically, in an essay edited by Caputo—, ‘The shadow of the Ego falls across Dasein.’”