religions
Article
The Spread Body and the Affective Body: A Discussion with
Emmanuel Falque
Calvin D. Ullrich
Department of Historical and Constructive Theology, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of the Free
State, Bloemfontein 9301, South Africa; ullrichcd@ufs.ac.za
Abstract: This article presents a constructive dialogue between contemporary theological phenomenology and systematic theology. It considers the writings of the French phenomenologist
Emmanuel Falque by offering a precis of his unique approach to “crossing” the boundaries of theology and philosophy. This methodological innovation serves as an intervention into contemporary
theological phenomenology, which allows him to propose an overlooked dimension of human corporeality, what he calls the spread-body (corps épandu). Within the latter is embedded a conception of
bodily existence that escapes ratiocination and is comprised of chaotic forces, drives, desires, and
animality. The article challenges not so much this philosophical description but rather suggests that
Falque’s theological resolution to this subterranean dimension of corporeal life consists in a deus ex
machina that re-orders these corporeal forces without remainder through participation in the eucharist.
It argues that Falque’s notion of the spread body can be supplemented theologically by an account
of ‘affectivity’ that is distinguished from auto-affection, as in the case of Michel Henry, and which
also gleans from the field of affect theory. This supplementation is derived from current research in
systematic theology, which looks at the doctrines of pneumatology and sanctification to offer a more
plausible account of corporeality in light of the Christian experience of the affective body.
Keywords: Emmanuel Falque; spread body; affectivity; systematic theology; pneumatology
The wind (to pneuma) blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound
of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it
Citation: Ullrich, Calvin D.. 2024. The
is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
Spread Body and the Affective Body:
– John 3:8, NRSV trans
A Discussion with Emmanuel Falque.
Religions 15: 30. https://doi.org/
Man is a vast deep, whose hairs you, Lord, have numbered, and in
10.3390/rel15010030
you none can be lost. Yet it is easier to count his hairs than the
Academic Editors: Espen Dahl and
affections and motions of his heart.
Theodor Rolfsen
– St Augustine, Confessions, 4.14.22, Chadwick trans
Received: 25 November 2023
Revised: 15 December 2023
Accepted: 18 December 2023
Published: 23 December 2023
Copyright: © 2023 by the author.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
1. Introduction
This article presents a constructive dialogue between phenomenology and systematic
theology. Its primary interlocutor will be the French phenomenologist and theologian
Emmanuel Falque, whose principal contribution to systematics will come to be judged by
his philosophical description of human corporeality, a theme increasingly pronounced in
Christian dogmatics.1 Assessing this description, however, requires delineating Falque’s
relationship to theology in the first place, for it is only in the act of theologizing, he claims,
that a mature phenomenology of the body comes into view.2 Indeed, intervening in the
debate between phenomenology and theology, which has preoccupied the enclave of
reflection in the ‘theological turn’ ever since Dominique Janicaud’s critique, is central
to Falque’s program of embodiment, since, according to him, resisting the confusion
of these boundaries is in fact what engenders a proper and transformative encounter
between them. It is precisely on the basis of such confusion that a baptized phenomenology
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comes to determine descriptions of the body, which appear ultimately at odds not only
with the Scriptural tradition but also with what phenomenology can come to discover
when it acknowledges its own limit. Thus, given the manifold ways in which thinkers
of the theological turn have and continue to influence contemporary systematic theology
(predominantly in its Catholic mode), the broader aim of this article is to suggest that
Falque’s intervention deserves much-needed attention as an alternative to the dominant
obsession with phenomenological descriptions of transcendence in systematic theology.
Here it must be said that Falque’s reception has been felt most acutely within French
theological phenomenology,3 (the significance of which is outlined below), but with only
a limited reception outside of this arena. In a crucial respect, this article aims to test the
fecundity of his contribution to embodiment for discussions in Protestant systematics.
The article begins by following the methodological debate between phenomenology
and theology, illustrating its stakes as it pertains to the body in Falque’s critique of Michel
Henry, from where the theologization of phenomenology can be said to have reached
something of a climax, and importantly, with significant consequences for our conception
of corporeality.4 Following an encounter with Henry, the article moves to explicate Falque’s
own concept of embodiment, which undergoes development from his earlier writings to
his more recent reflections on the notion of the “spread body” (corps épandu).5 Through
this investigation, we discover in Falque’s vocabulary of the ‘spread body’ several features
that are attributed to disparate sources (theology, psychoanalysis, philosophy) and which
combine to contribute to a vision of embodiment encompassing a broad and unstructured
field of chaotic forces, desires, drives, sensations, raw organic matter, and animality.6
However, just as Falque (a philosopher first and foremost—a point which he never
fails to insist on)7 endeavors to persist within phenomenology (albeit at its limit), he
nevertheless also exhibits at key moments an encumbrance to his explicitly confessional
(Catholic) theological commitments. Thus, in the domain of philosophy and theology, he
treats this unstructured and chaotic situation of embodiment by offering an account of its
transformation, or “metamorphosis”, in the staging of the Last Supper, problematized in
terms of the movement from animality to humanity or eros to agape. While an accurate
reading of Falque’s methodology makes clear that a phenomenological explication of the
eucharist presents an opportunity for a deeper understanding of our material human
condition (and here especially for systematic theology), and thus is neither a mere usurping
of dogmatic concepts for a philosophical anthropology nor simply a theological apologetics
for Catholic faith, his distinctive confessional orientation nevertheless compels him to find
the unity of thought in the meaning of the sacraments. It is for this reason that Falque
subsequently obscures the phenomenological insights he makes on the very basis of this
Catholicity. Hence, for example, when Falque rightly concedes that we do not leave behind
the spread body’s eros, passions, animality, sensations, forces, and drives, he still advocates
for their conversion or transformation (from animality into humanity or eros into agape),
which takes place as a re-orientation of our being-in-the-world when Christ comes to dwell
with us in the eucharistic. This may be an appropriate phenomenological description of
doctrine (eucharist and resurrection), which begins to establish Christianity’s “credibility”
(as opposed to believability) in a secularizing world, but it could also be philosophically
and theologically extended. For, what this description still lacks is an explanatory force—that
is, an account of how the efficaciousness of grace comes to transform our orientation in the
world as embodied beings, or what is precisely happening ‘in’ or ‘to’ the spread body as it
is re-orientated. Therefore, the article suggests that the spread body needs to be joined by
“the affective body”.
Philosophically, on Falque’ own terms (following Deleuze), phenomenology cannot always be sufficient in attending to that which is constitutively outside of phenomenality.8 This
justifies his own forays into philosophies of immanence as well as psychoanalysis to explore
dimensions of our organic life that ‘weigh-down’ and come to influence our experience of
subjectivity but do not necessarily rise to levels of conscious reflection. From the perspective
of this article, which wishes to promote the phenomenological method as a means for dia-
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logical encounter with theology, the field of affect theory can thus be proposed as a suitable
“backlash” for phenomenology—since it takes for its object both a speculative metaphysics of
materiality and a theorization of pre-predicative forces (‘affects’) to which phenomenology has,
by definition, no access. The paradigm of affect theory becomes particularly apt for “supplementing” Falque’s notion of the spread body—with its emphasis on chaotic forces, drives, and
animality—but is also importantly distinct from the notion of auto-affection in Michel Henry.9
Since affect theories attempt precisely to theorize these forces, which appear in Falque’s texts
in a largely romantic register, reducing them to an anonymous yet necessary substrate of
human life, the “affective body” in the model proposed here does not shy away from these
forces but comes to understand them through concrete dynamics of structure and novelty.10
With this paradigm of the affective body—stimulated in response to Falque’s philosophical
investigations—the article moves finally to supplement Falque’s theological resolution of the
spread body in the eucharist through a discussion with contemporary systematic theology,
which treats the metamorphosis of the affective body through ‘sanctification’ (atonement) and
through the inner-working of the Holy Spirit (pneumatology). Through this discussion and
dialogue with Falque’s philosophy of embodiment, systematic theology not only continues its
rich exchange with (contemporary) theological phenomenology in so far as it gleans insights
into aspects of our corporeal condition, but it also demonstrates that the work being done
in systematics can also enhance phenomenology’s (Falque’s) desire to see finite humanity
described tout court as well as account for its possible transformation in light of the Christian
experience of faith.
2. Falque, the Flesh, and the ‘Theological Turn’
The context in which Falque’s notion of the spread body takes shape (Section 4)
are the developments in the so-called ‘theological turn’. With much already written on
this movement that need not be repeated here,11 it is necessary and simply enough to
say with respect to Falque’s own place within its trajectory that he broadly agrees with
Dominique Janicaud that something has happened to phenomenology in its French mode,
particularly where phenomenology is inflected by theology and where the supposed
orthodoxy of phenomenology has been compromised by religious transcendence (Levinas,
Henry, Marion).12 But even a cursory overview of the intensely theological titles of Falque’s
series of monographs will immediately complicate—and perhaps mystify—his relationship
to theology as a phenomenologist. In short, Falque’s position is neither to simply dismiss the
religious (Janicaud) nor to confuse the boundaries between phenomenology and theology
(Marion, Henry, Levinas), but to argue for distinction with simultaneous irreducibility.
Philosophy and theology are different, but they cannot be separated; they are hospitable and
not hostile to one another, for they both should serve to return us “to the things themselves
[auf die ‘Sachen selbst’]”13 —and for the purposes of this investigation, the phenomenological
and theological exploration of the body.
Moreover, Falque, as a Christian thinker who maintains confessional commitments,
wants to understand how to think with Christianity in a philosophical way in a world
that is no longer exclusively Christian, or at least beset with new cultural conditions of
(post)secular life.14 These details are not incidental but central to understanding his position
within the ‘theological turn’ and the attempt to distinguish himself from it. Whereas
thinkers like Marion or Levinas begin with a gesture that posits the infinite and then
derives the finite, Falque begins with a positive account of the human as such. Following
Heidegger, this is not finite as privation but the positive position of “finitude”15 —the
inescapable mortality that is shared first of all and by all of humanity, i.e., before any
relation to the revelation of God.16 Insofar as “finitude” implies for Falque an approach
that begins with a methodological atheism, this does not preclude him from using the
means of theology to pursue his philosophical anthropology. This means that Falque’s
interest in Christ’s incarnation, for example, is not only something that reveals God’s
humanity but is also philosophically useful because it radically reveals humanity to itself.17
The stakes of this methodological delimitation could be approached in several ways and
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through different thinkers who populate Falque’s oeuvre, but our focus here will be on his
reading of Michel Henry,18 for it reveals both the way in which phenomenology has been
theologized—i.e., Henry’s collapsing of the philosophy of embodiment (Leibhaftigkeit) into
incarnation—and also points toward Falque’s broader passion for the body that escapes
modern phenomenology’s rendering of ‘flesh.’19
Falque accuses classical phenomenology from Husserl through Henry of renewing the
modern dichotomization of soul and body into the phenomenological distinction between
Leib (flesh) and Körper (body), not in the sense of a trivialized dichotomy but such that
it cannot provide an account of access to the body through the flesh.20 For Husserl, the
Leib is the medium of all perception and thus an imminent, subjective consciousness of
the body, which is distinct from the body (Körper) as an object of experience within the
mundane world of objects.21 Although things are more complicated in Husserl, it is for
Falque, particularly the French reception of this distinction and its ontologization, which
have captured phenomenological inquiry.22 In a translation heritage—crucially departing
from the early translations of Husserl (Levinas), which translated Leib as organic body or
living body (corps organique and corps vivant)—Leib, as the body-which-I-am (Merleau-Ponty)
and as the site of all givenness (Franck), becomes translated as flesh (chair).23 The result of
this is that flesh (chair) not only takes on a phenomenal meaning as that which exclusively
refers to Leib as subjective-body but, more problematically, when it comes into contact with
theology, the originary theological meaning (sarx) is paradoxically lost and taken over. This
is what Falque claims is at work in Michel Henry: a phenomenology of embodiment in terms of
flesh that determines the theological meaning of the incarnation.24
3. Michel Henry and the Impossible Incorporation
Henry’s account of flesh in a purported work of philosophy, but which culminates theologically (Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh [2000]), follows an a priori claim throughout his
texts in the development of what he calls ‘radical’ or “material phenomenology”:25 namely,
the need to avoid ontological dualisms that arise in the Western philosophical tradition
and particularly its latest iteration in “phenomenological monism.”26 Since this position
appears in direct tension with Falque’s protest against phenomenology’s rendering of Leib
and Körper, one needs to grasp how Henry’s flesh, on both phenomenological and theological grounds, becomes precisely what it rejects—“an astral, ‘psychic,’ or even ‘spiritual’
matter.”27 Phenomenologically, ever since his magnum opus, L’essence de la manifestation
(1963), the phenomenological method of reduction for Henry, which defines phenomenality
in terms of transcendence, alienation, or what is other or beyond consciousness (ek-static),
is seen as inadequate for revealing the ‘essence’ of subjectivity. Reversing Husserl’s distinction in §85 of Ideas I between sensile matter (hylé) and intentional form (morphé), the latter,
as noetic transcendence, no longer takes precedence and must undergo a (radical) reduction
to the original matter or hyletic impressional components that underwrite subjectivity. This
purely affective zone (Henry’s concept of Life)28 is an immanence without horizon and
intentionality, a dimension of auto-impressions/auto-affection that renders possible any
conscious activity.29 As will later become evident, it is this account of affectivity—where
hyletic impressions are not given intentionally, that is, to a transcendental consciousness,
but radically given in a more primordial givenness and thus, for Henry, remaining within
a genuine phenomenological project—that makes Falque resistant to any notion of an
‘affective body’ or ‘affects’ more generally. (Yet, as our discussion will demonstrate, it is
precisely Falque’s development of a so-called “extra-phenomenology” contra Henry that
provides the post-phenomenological link to the field of affect theory.)
For Henry, it is from this phenomenological standpoint that he interprets the incarnation as the revelation of Life itself, in contrast to the disclosure of the world ‘outside
of oneself’: “the revelation of life. . .does not have any separation within itself and never
differs from itself. Life reveals itself. Life is auto-revelation.”30 With this phenomenological
distinction between life and the world, the difference between body and flesh becomes
equally significant and pronounced. On the one hand, the phenomenological flesh takes
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the side of Life’s auto-revelation, appearing only within life itself, while on the other, the
body is constituted in the mundane world of objects, appearing only as a possibility ‘in the
world.’31 Therefore, the human condition modeled on the in-carnating of Christ for Henry is
to be regarded as one of flesh, which means that “an abyss separates forever material bodies
that fill the universe. . .and the body of an ‘incarnate’ being such as man.”32 The biological
material body becomes merely incidental for human existence, and to understand humanity
according to its inert matter is to render it ‘barbaric’: only the body-as-flesh, understood
as incarnation (Verleiblichung), can be reduced to a singular lived experience. This is where
Falque registers his first critique in terms of what he calls the “impossible incorporation”, a
formula he borrows from Didier Franck.33
According to the problem of the impossible incorporation, the question for phenomenology in general and Henry in particular is how to obtain a “genuine access to the
body through the flesh,”34 when the latter is “co-extensive with the world of ownness” and
the former remaining constitutively “outside-of-flesh [hors-chair]”.35 For Falque, Henry’s
new discovery of an originary flesh “retains no consideration of human thingliness and
therefore utterly neglects the ‘old body’”, which means that the dualism of Körper and Leib
is merely subsumed. “How and why do we continually attempt to conceive the flesh without
the body”, Falque asks rhetorically, “—or, at the very least, to conceive a self-experiencing
flesh independently from an ‘inert or exterior body’, upon which that very flesh depends
and touches without ever conceptualizing it as such?”36 This failure for Falque is connected
to what he sees as an impoverished view of the human condition, according to which
a fundamental hierarchization eliminates what is not only an incidental occurrence but
an essential and necessary feature, namely, animality. Indeed, Henry admits already in
his opening that a philosophy of the flesh will be prejudiced to the ‘human experience’
there-of: “we will make an initial decision to leave living beings other than human beings
outside the field of investigation”, for everyone “has the immediate experience of their
own body. . .while their relation to animal bodies. . .is of another order.”37 It is important to
note that Falque is not denying a phenomenology of flesh or its importance,38 but arguing
simply that its progressive priority misses a structural condition that makes the very experience of oneself possible. Including within the scope of human embodiment the animality
of our bodies (corps organique as hors-chair)—their organic, material, visceral, biological
quality—offers not only a more complete picture of our condition as continuous with the
non-human but is also the only way by which we can have any experience of our own flesh
(chair) in the first place.39
By rendering a philosophy of embodiment according to a phenomenological notion of
incarnation as the experience of one’s own flesh without the body, rejecting its biological
dimension, and thus repeating a dualistic ontology that subordinates the empirical-visceral
to the intentional, the figure of incarnation becomes its opposite: a dis-incarnated body
focused on “invisible phenomena” at the expense of the “visible.” Falque, by contrast,
inverts Henry’s phenomenological perspective, not to prioritize simple geometric extension
(barbarism), but to argue that the body must be “incorporated” or undergone—which is not
the same thing as either the originary experience of flesh or material extension. Whereas
Henry fails to achieve what Falque calls a “kenosis of the flesh”40 —i.e., an emptying of the
experience of flesh as an auto-affected in-carnation—Falque argues for the experience of
the impossibility of ‘incorporating’ my body into the flesh. This leads, as we will see, to
Falque’s notion of the ‘resistance of the body’ or the ‘spread body’ and what we will go on
to call later, in a modified way, the ‘affective body.’
But what of theology? According to Falque, Henry’s philosophy of flesh is tainted by
his theology of the incarnation, and thus the former’s methodology becomes apposite since
it will be the role of theology to assist phenomenology’s partial analysis—not to ‘complete’
it but to enact a “counterblow” of theology’s own unique perspective through what Falque
calls the “backlash” of theology on phenomenology.41 If, for Henry, “[t]o be incarnate is not
to have a body”42 but to be a flesh that is ubiquitous and admits of no outside-of-flesh,43
then the Incarnation of Christ on this account is also problematically not kenotic enough. By
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establishing as coterminous his own paradigmatic phenomenological description of flesh
(as auto-affection) with the theological notion of incarnation, Henry deprives what is of
utmost theological import for the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, namely, Christ’s
assumption of our full humanity (including its corporeity). For Henry, it is of course true
that the Word reveals itself by taking on the human condition,44 but this condition, which
is that of ‘flesh’, is the same flesh we saw above: a flesh that coincides with the Word
manifesting (revealing) Life. The incarnation, thus, concerns the body “in as much the body is
not a body but a flesh.”45 Perhaps most clearly, this spiritualized prejudice is seen in Henry’s
anti-patristic, or “parricide of Tertullian”.46 According to Henry, for Tertullian, the “Word
becomes-visible in the visible body”47 and this enacts a “banalization of Christ” that reduces
the Word to the exteriorization of the world, a material and thus an incognito presence,
who’s extra-ordinary quality as the “Word of Life” becomes indistinguishable from our
own.48 But this, Falque retorts, is to miss not only the point Tertullian makes against the
Gnostics or St. Paul, but the venerable tradition of Christian thought itself, which sees God
revealed precisely in this banality—in the ‘weakness of God’, as John Caputo might say.49
Falque writes: “What is truly extra-ordinary about the Word’s incarnation is precisely that
it took place in and through the most ordinary aspects of our human condition, specifically
that it gave itself in a body.”50 Coming into a body (incorporation), then, is the way in
which God reveals his divinity, which can only be known through faith, not through his
coming into flesh (Henry’s incarnation). Henry’s distortion of the theological by imposing
phenomenological categories (Leib for flesh) unknown to St. John (sarx), or Tertullian (caro
corpus) for that matter, means that paradoxically, a ‘better’ theology—Falque’s insistence
that incarnation means the Menschwerdung (“humanification”) of God and not simple
Inkarnation (“enfleshment”)51 in the Henrian sense—creates a fuller picture of the human
condition while explicating the limits of phenomenology.
4. The Spread Body at the Limits of Phenomenology
Thus far, we have encountered Falque’s methodology as well as a point of differentiation regarding contemporary theological phenomenology via his critique of Henry.
However, we have only briefly intimated a positive conception of embodiment through
a theology of the body that draws up the limits of phenomenology.52 To expand on the
latter, therefore, and eventually on its implications for the ‘affective’ body, we have to pass
through the former. For Falque, as we have seen, theology’s paradigm of embodiment
is one that should assume God fully taking on our human condition in its temporality,
visibility, historical, and material density.53 Divine kenosis involves the Menschwerdung of
Christ in order to make possible any salvation (theosis)—our being taken up into the Divine
life. If this seems uncontroversial theologically, then Falque’s latest work pushes the depths
of God’s assumption of our condition even further when he undertakes, among other
things, a phenomenology of the eucharist—the “this is my body” (Mark 14:22)—provoking
a more comprehensive philosophical understanding of our animality and organic humanity.54 For Falque, the eating of the sacrificial lamb of the Jewish Passover and the Lamb of
God offered at the Last Supper are both images of the divine assuming our animality, so
much so to transform it. The metaphor of the lamb points to the animality of our human
condition, which Christ comes to fully embrace. Its distinctive features, once again in
contrast to the Leib-Körper dualism in phenomenology and to the spiritualization of Christ’s
body in theology,55 consist in an existential “chaos” of the “underground” self56 and its
“forces, drives, desires,”57 which cannot be evacuated from our existence. Moreover, Falque
asks us to return to the organic matter of the body, the site for these forces and drives,
whose material density is both susceptible to decay but also denotes a certain thrust in the
“struggle for life” or, following an exposition of Spinoza and Nietzsche, a conatus or affectus
of the somatic origin of bodily power.58
For Falque, this theology of the eucharist moves philosophy, or rather phenomenology,
“to its limit,”59 for the chaotic, instinctual, organic materiality of the body, as revealed
in the eucharist, is that which lies beneath the phenomenological preoccupation with
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signification.60 The name he gives to this body is the spread body (corps épandu):61 “it is
not totally objective because it cannot be reduced to a geometric form. Nor is it totally
subjective, because it does not fully correspond to the ego when we examine it in terms
of consciousness.”62 Falque frequently uses the image of the body on the operating table,
and thus, in the context of suffering, he writes: “[t]he body extended on the operating table
is not there in length, breadth, and depth—as we might describe a Cartesian geometric
space. It is there in heartbeats, respiration, and intestinal rumbles—qualitative attributes
of biological life.”63 Between the lived body (Leib) and the extended body (Körper), then,
resides the spread body, which is an “abyss and mixture of passions and drives that our
biological flesh retains.”64 As the imagery of the notion already suggests, the spread body
emerged in the context of palliative care for Falque, where he wants to resist, on the one
hand, any technical reduction of the living body to a mechanical object (res extensa), while
on the other, to question the pure interiority of the subjective experience of suffering that
excludes the animality of the body (Henry). The concept of the spread body descends
“into the depths rather than making sense of it via narrative, acknowledging the thingly
strangeness of my own body rather than solely reducing it to the lived body, the struggle
for life, or the power of the organic rather than simply welcoming suffering.”65 The spread
body, therefore, brings us to an experience of the body that ‘resists’ being reduced to
a lived-experience: “I no longer live my body. In some way this body lives me.”66 The
description of this foreign other as the chaos of our physiology that feels invasive, Falque
further designates as a “limited phenomenon,”67 not because it is a nothingness or because
it saturates intentionality, but because it shows the limit of what is overflowed without ever
being received into consciousness.68
Through the ‘backlash’ of theology (phenomenology of the eucharist), phenomenology
begins to encounter its limits, thematized according to three ‘pitfalls’: “sense over nonsense,” “hypertrophy of the flesh over the body,” and the “primacy of passivity over
activity.”69 The non-sense of the body and its active quality form part of a resistance to the
“constant recourse to the lived experience of consciousness (or of the flesh), as opposed
to the solidity of the body in its biological dimensions and drives.”70 This organic body
nevertheless requires a phenomenological account, or rather an account of what is “outside
phenomenology” or “extra-phenomenal,”71 since, for Falque, there is an experience of the
body that is not simply reducible to an experience of the body-that-I-am. The body-thatI-have is also the body that can have me, and in a way that is foreign to me or in which I
do not even recognize myself or fail to experience myself in it. It is in this body’s sheer
“thereness” of “mute experience” of its chaos and drives that it points “toward that which
cannot be spoken, in terms that simple signification offers us—toward the Chaos that only
our human biological body encounters: the animal and the instinctual.”72
One can emphasize two responses to this challenge and at least one outcome that
will be taken further to develop what is being called ‘the affective body’. The first is that
what is required is not simply to “deploy some kind of physiology of the passions. . .one
that privileges the somatic over the psychic”, but to “seek, what is the foundation of our
embodiedness”, a line of thought that is later articulated as “the strength of the body.”73
Secondly, this should then be coupled with a resistance to any intentionality thesis by way
of Henry or Marion-esque counter-intentionality that privileges passivity over activity. The
outcome is, therefore, an attempt to avoid a mistaken reduction into the ontic sciences on
the one hand and to further abandon phenomenology’s priority of subjective intentionality
on the other, but, and here is the crucial point, to still maintain an account of subjectivity
that is founded by the organic body. In short, it is not for Falque the intentionality of
consciousness that brings the body into view for experience, but the intentionality of the body
that brings consciousness into view, or rather, that which “drives” it while withdrawing
from view and thus being irreducible.74
If Falque has taken us through the backlash of theology on phenomenology to the
spread body at the limits of phenomenology, and if phenomenology is thus “perhaps not
the last word in the ambitions of philosophy,”75 then does the pathway to a “philosophy
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of the organic”—which is ultimately about attending to “things themselves”—not invite
a consideration of affect theory that is distinguished from the conception of Henrian
auto-affection?76 This will be argued for below, but since not only is ‘affect’ in no way
clearly delineated within the field of affect studies itself, but also because the language of
‘affectivity’ is problematic in measure for Falque vis-à-vis Henry, one should articulate any
productive relation first by preparation and qualification.
5. Toward the Affective Body
In one sense, affect or affectivity could be understood phenomenologically as a rendering of the German Befindlichkeit (crucially distinguished from ‘mood’, Stimmung) as
it appears in Martin Heidegger, for whom affective experiences are fundamental for revealing the ontological features of our own, human existence. In Heidegger, we know that
Befindlichkeit constitutes one of the four existentials alongside Verstehen, Verfallensein, and
Rede.77 However, there are some stark translation issues here: for example, Macquarrie
and Robinson (Heidegger [1962] 2016a) use the problematic phrase “state-of-mind,” which
is inadequate since Befindlichkeit is neither a state nor does it refer to a mind.78 Another
alternative is the Stambaugh (Heidegger 1996) translation, which renders Befindlichkeit
as “attunement,” capturing the ontological depth that Heidegger intends.79 The problem
with this translation, however, is that it is not uncommon to also translate Stimmung also
as attunement.80 One should rather follow Hubert Dreyfus’ translation of “affectedness”
or “affectivity”, the benefit of which is that it captures the notion that, as existing in the
world, we are always already affected by and feel things, as well as the sense in which in
Befindlichkeit things matter to us.81 The German expression “Wie befinden Sie sich?” which
literally means “how do you find yourself?” but which is also used as the common expression “how are you?” captures this well. Befindlichkeit is thus the basic ontological structure
of human existence that makes it possible for human beings to find themselves situated
in or attuned to the world in a way that is meaningful to them. It is one of the ways in
which Dasein’s existence in the world is disclosed to it. Crucially, Befindlichkeit, or affectivity,
is not itself the locus of meaningful content; it is an ontological disposition that makes
meaning possible and not a phenomenon that appears. There is thus a structural affinity in
this phenomenological understanding of affect with Falque’s conception of embodiment,
only insofar as the body for him is this existential condition for meaning. We might call
this, following Richard Kearney, a ‘carnal Beffindlichkeit’,82 which has less to do with the
intentionality of consciousness and more with the ‘intentionality of the body’83 —where the
former is orientated and driven by the body.
If there is precedence by way of phenomenology for ‘affectivity’, understood in terms
of this general structure, which Falque seems to assume, then it is possible, as we have
observed in the notion of the spread body, that affect is for him also paradoxically related
to the non-phenomenological. This structural notion of affectivity is filled-out or given
‘content’, in an important chapter in The Wedding Feast of the Lamb. Following a discussion
concerning ‘The Animality That Thus I Am’, drawing insights from Derrida to assist
phenomenology in searching not for the “route of pure humanity” but for the “animality
and affectivity”84 of our humanity, Falque then inaugurates a ‘Return to the Organic’.85 In
the introductory movement of this chapter, he states that what is at stake in the return is
the organicity—or “ensemble of phenomena associated with the organ”—and the organic
matter of the flesh. In particular, with reference to the organs, it is not the necessities of
life that ‘drive’ the organs but the organs that drive life. And then, in a move surprising
for the phenomenologist, indeed, outside-phenomenology, Falque turns to the SpinozisticNietzschean tradition to revise the struggle for life that Spinoza described as conatus: the
inclination for life that derives primarily from the body in the affections (Affectus). This
allows the envisioning of the animality of our bodies, their organicity, and materiality in
a way that highlights the body’s ‘power’ and ‘process’ not in denial of the psychic but to
enlarge its range of possibility.86 From Nietzsche is derived the “unconscious of the body”,
the flesh (Leib) that is not extended or subjective and which is, no doubt, connected to
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the psychic while preceding it. In marrying Spinoza and Nietzsche (and Deleuze also in
the background), Falque substantializes this power of life when he writes, “bodies derive
from forces or power—not forces or powers from bodies.”87 This comes to a head in the
adoption of the Deleuzian formula of the “body without organs”, where the advocation
is not to strip the body of its organs but to recognize what is “beneath” them: the ‘disorganized’, pressures, passions, and drives, “where the power of life is expressed without
being immediately integrated or technicized.”88 There is then an internal power to life in its
capacity to create forms, seek new ways of being, and “to be always becoming.”89
Falque later states, nevertheless, that this model of the affective life is still recovered
by a certain lucidity in a “manifesto of the flesh” which is not a simple return to subjective experience but a living through of the body (an embodying), which also weighs me
down. The (affective) body as understood by Falque is, in the end, not just a corporeal
substructure—even if this is the long detour he wants us to take—but still ostensibly related to the full phenomenological sense of flesh (Leib) as well as the body of non-thetic
lived-experience, formed by the habits that make up the habitus of our being-in-the-world.90
Despite these final and necessary phenomenological provisos, Falque’s rich and textured account of the limits of phenomenology takes us into the depths of the underground
of our experience and into the organic-organicity of our affective bodies. But is it not now
time for a second (or third) “backlash” of affective theory? For the citational tradition that
Falque deploys through the consonant terms of affectivity, conatus, power, and strength
of the body, as well as force, has found a home in this burgeoning field and thus invites
us to differentiate this sphere of our embodiment. Here it should be pointed out that this
is not just a matter of differentiating for its own sake but precisely because the power of
the body is also ethical, i.e., it makes a difference how we come to theorize this zone beyond
phenomenology. Indeed, as Falque has written, an ethics of the spread body is not the
search for norms or consensual values but of attending to an ethos or ethology that speaks
“the remainder of the flesh when the ‘signifying word’ has gone all but silent,” it speaks to
the “chaos of the body and by the body.”91
6. The Affective Body and Systematic Theology
We have now seen that Falque’s lexical diversity and conceptual range resists pinning
down a single position on what exactly the body ‘is’ or what it is capable of ‘doing’. This
would accord with the broader ‘loving struggle’ (le combat amoureux) of his approach,
a hermeneutical technique designed not to win-over or defeat but to seduce through
interlocution with multiple others, while at the same time relaying the discussion into a
plenitude of unthought directions. However, the preceding presentation has indeed given
us at least a structure of his conception of embodiment, and thus we can enter a ‘struggle’,
one that both appreciates and pushes beyond, or rather below, some of Falque’s theological
and philosophical positions.
Falque’s backlash through a phenomenology of the eucharist (but also his more recent
work in psychoanalysis) has asked phenomenology to reconsider its ‘hyper-technicality’
and obsession with defending its ‘private territory’ and return to ‘the things themselves’
by questioning its foundational axiom of ‘givenness’ (Gegebenheit) at the expense of the
non-given.92 This has placed an almost unmatched emphasis on the raw materiality of the
body in contemporary theological phenomenology, one from which subsequent theology
can retain insights concerning the body and its relation to the animal and the wider natural
world—often too easily relegated in theological discourse.93 Moreover, Falque has also, by
virtue of this questioning, opened phenomenology to other disciplines, celebrating the fact
that phenomenology does not necessarily have ‘the last word,’ while still maintaining its
integrity as a distinct discipline and not to be confused with theology. With respect to the
‘spread body’ then, we have seen that Falque seeks to promote an account of the body that
escapes intentional analysis, not because it exceeds but precedes the subjective lived-body
and ‘drives’ it by virtue of an intentionality of the body.
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Yet this account of the body should now be placed under suspicion; that is, of courting
an excess, not of a transcendent beyond but of a romantic surplus of the subterranean,
one which Falque insists does not denote a sinful state (the slide from animality to bestiality)94 but rather an ontological condition of our being-human (animality, from which
humanity is drawn). Through the ‘chaos’ of the spread body, “the darkness of humankind,
made up of passions and drives”95 which bracket the semiotic and reflexive, there is a
somatic abyss. Here, as William Connelly suggests, this “romanticism of the flesh”—where
all the themes of which coalesce in a more recent project devoted to taking up Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s late work, radicalizing Freud, and injecting Nietzsche96 —leaves Falque
vulnerable to “subtracting the ontological value” of the body, “tending to strip it of any
inherent intelligibility. . .without any place for a subsisting order or structure—save for
a super-added theological account.”97 It is this latter account, which Connelly does not
expand upon, taking the form in Falque’s system of a theological deus ex machina through
an interpretation of ‘conversion’ or ‘transformation’, which, in my reading, is deployed
precisely in order to resolve this problem of romantic excess. For Falque—despite the
insistence that we do not escape our animality—when philosophy encounters theology,
we nonetheless learn that animality can be transformed into humanity and finally into
God (theosis). There is thus something of an enigma here: on the one hand, animality
must be maintained and is fully assumed by the incarnate Word, and on the other, it must
necessarily be converted into something else.98 In a sense, one could understand this as a
natural consequence of Falque’s confessional commitment, namely: that the body of Christ
given in the eucharist is to effectuate an altered life that begins to order our passions and
drives (the animal), in the same way that the eucharistic scene of the wedding feast reconfigures the erotic (of sexual difference) into the agapeic love of the Trinitarian perichoresis.
But this solution seems not only to undermine the work that Falque’s phenomenological
investigation has illuminated regarding the animality and organicity of the spread body
and thereby re-open some of the oppositions between the human and the animal that he
seeks to circumvent,99 but it also culminates in a theological resolution that does not do
justice to the ‘how’ of this transformation.
Indeed, Falque’s Catholic account seems to border on the literal—namely, that it is
through the eating of the consecrated bread and drinking of the wine in the eucharist
that “his body [is] branched into ours” and “his blood flowing through our veins” is to
be understood as a kind of “organic transplant—a sharing of powers. . .by which I live
through his true corporeal power.”100 This body, in its organicity, which is shared with
Christ, becomes a base through which the power of the spirit enacts a metamorphosis
that conforms it to an “internal power of life”, derived not from the body as substance
but flowing from the “force of the Holy Spirit.”101 Nevertheless, the question that remains
unanswered by Falque is: exactly how does this transformation take place? Or rather,
while there is an ontological change in the human being’s disposition to the world by
means of the power of the Spirit, as it is taken into the life of God through eucharistic
transubstantiation, incorporation, consecration, and adoration102 —there is still a major
gap between the experiential effects of this change. We may ask: What is happening to
the material body after it is ‘incorporated into God’ and how is it conformed to God’s
nature? The final constructive pivot of this article is to suggest that a ‘backlash’ of affect
theory in discussion with contemporary systematics allows one not only to continue to
acknowledge the density of the body and its forces but more precisely to differentiate
the materiality of the body in such a way that (1) avoids subterranean excess through a
theorization of affectivity in terms of novelty and structure, and (2), as a consequence, is
able to offer a more complete or alternative theological picture of transformation without
Falque’s unaccountable supernatural infusion based on an exclusively Catholic doctrine of
the eucharist.
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6.1. Differentiating Bodily Affect
The study of affects appeared in the nineties out of a series of theoretical positions
developed from psychology and gender studies but also later incorporating insights from
evolutionary biology and the neurosciences.103 The field is delineated across several of
these theoretical trajectories and thus resists any singular generalizable approach. What
marks its distinctive contribution is that it stands in sharp contrast to overly cognitive
modes of appraisal and the anti-biologism that exists in theory circles by situating features
of embodied life outside of purely discursive regimes or transcendental approaches to
knowledge. It concerns itself with studying how bodies are moved by forces, blurring
the lines between the pre- or sub-phenomenological (or what we can call here the “extraphenomenal”),104 and the rising-up of these forces into embodied affective forms (which
include crucial distinctions between feeling and emotion).105 One can speak primarily of
two vectors that diverge and intersect across the broad approaches to affect in this sense;
the first follows an inside-out directionality where affects are linked to psychobiological
differentials that pertain to certain evolutionary hardwiring and can also be associated
with a broadly critical development of the ‘motivational tradition’ of the philosophy of
emotion.106 The second, in a reverse flow (outside-in), takes a Deleuzian–Spinozan route,
where affects occur in an immanent complex of relations that compose bodies and worlds.
To augment what Falque calls the “distance between the vitalist and organic tradition of
the nineteenth century. . .and the phenomenological and auto-affective tradition of the
twentieth”, we can situate a middle position with respect to affect, following the affect
theorist Donovan Schaefer, between the broadly Deleuzian-Spinozist tradition on the one
hand and the psychological-phenomenological position on the other. Since it is here that
what emerges is a theoretical status of the affective body accounting for its power, forces,
and drives, left either to the chaos of the subterranean or differentiated in its multiplicity
and thus integrated as part of a concrete dynamics of structure and novelty.
To understand how the ‘affective body’ indexes forces that accumulate and release
from it in such a way that avoids the romanticism of excess, we can distinguish two
readings of Deleuzian affect, one that is primed by the tension between Spinoza and the
other by Bergson. Following Schaefer’s reading of this interpretative dialectic, there is, on
the one hand, a Spinozistic Deleuze, which emphasizes a continuum of substance (from
affects to the affections), and a more Bergsonian Deleuze, where there is a realm of pure
affective creativity preceding representation and is stressed according to a “provisional
dualism” of “differences in kind.”107 Where the latter promotes affects existing on the
register of intensity ‘beneath’ human subjectivity, the former sees affects as structured
along a continuum that is shared between animal and human, although ‘felt’ differently
and embodied in particular correspondences to different but related suites of affects.108
The more Bergsonian Deleuze has become dominant in Schaefer’s view, due in part to
its promotion by Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) translator, Brian Massumi.109 For Massumi, a
Deleuzian account of affect operates in a pure zone of possibility that forms the background
for experience, which precisely allows the body to be an open system. The consequences of
this are that the body becomes the horizon exclusively for transformation, since affects as a
feature of forces and power are “autonomous” and transmissible, and the body can thus
be taken up by the affective forces that may (or may not) come to work upon it.110 On this
reading, the affective body not only can become a property in a political strategy, but the
specificity of its embodied experience is also erased. Or, in short, the phenomenological
subject is completely dissolved insofar as affect comes to direct experience but is itself not
taken up in experience.
Opposed to this romantic view of affect—its anti-intentionality and emphasis on
fluidity, plasticity, openness, and chaos, which research in contemporary neuroscience and
evolutionary biology seems to contradict111 —an interpretation that sees affect as part of
a continuum with animality and not as a zone of pure becoming, and possibility suggests
that the operation of a “return to the perception of the flesh”112 must be kept in tension.
The possibility of this affective theorization of the body is filled-out by the innovations
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of the American psychologist and philosopher, Silvan Tomkins. In contrast to a reading
of Freudian drives as always attached to fixed objects (which are then sublimated into
other activities and interests), Tomkins argued that prior to drives, there was an affect
system. Crucially, this ‘foundation’ of the affective system is not to be viewed as a single
deterministic stream of vital energy but as a finite multiplicity,113 where, “in contrast to
the instrumentality of drives and their direct orientation toward an aim different from
themselves, the affects can be autotelic.”114 Schaefer summarizes Tomkin’s contribution to
affects as “emphasizing the felt life of desire, power, and thought in congress with language,
but phylogenetically prior to it,”115 meaning that the model of affect being proposed here
might not be so different from a phenomenological sense. On this schema, even though
affects can be attached to objects, i.e., can be intended as felt emotional states, they also
bring their own agency that we feel but cannot always account for.
Through this differentiation of affects, one which is not anti-intentional but neither
insisting that there is no relationship between affects and their objects, Schaefer finally
proposes the animality of affect in conjunction with a (Merleau-Pontian) phenomenological
perspective, where bodies both human and animal are made of constituent parts with
evolutionary histories that make up the instruments of perception. The consummation of
these perspectives leads Schaefer to suggest that in the attempt to describe the power and
forces that make up the body, we cannot collapse that for which subjective experience is
unable to account into an exclusive flow of vital becoming or novelty/Chaos—rather, the
affective body should also be indexed according to an encounter with this novelty, which
carries with it our embodied layers of structured, finite experience, which means we are
not always overwhelmed but able to adjust to limited changes. In what Jacques Derrida
called the “heterogenous multiplicity”116 of our animality, we are then, as feeling bodies,
always emerging out of textured and evolutionary histories, producing outliers but always
within the context of coalesced formations of bodily affectivity.
6.2. Augustinian Affectivity
In terms of our discussion with Emmanuel Falque and theological phenomenology,
we can see that there are further options afield within the realm of affect studies. Taking up
the pulsating forces of the body that the notion of the ‘spread body’ sought to accentuate,
though now in a differentiated way that does not consign them to a subterranean underground of chaotic excess, one can propose a constructive theological approach with this
view of the affective body. This will be developed by way of conclusion in terms of its deployment in recent studies in systematic theology, which avoid a super-theologically added
infusion of grace and thus importantly maintain the integrity of the bodily dimensions of
human existence in light of the experience of faith and sanctification. This emphasis on
affect within theology as part of the wider ‘material turn’ is a new discussion, although, as
already noted, the themes of embodiment, sensation, materiality, and desire in Christology
and Trinitarian theology have been adjacent developments in constructive theology and
are still being examined and filled out.117 For our purposes, we will focus on the most
complete and integrated attempt to engage with affect theory in systematic theology from
a Protestant perspective, namely, the work of Simeon Zahl and, in particular, his recent
monograph The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience (2020).118
At the heart of Zahl’s book is the claim that contrary to the often maligned category
of ‘experience’ in Protestant theology (a line traced from Luther to Barth),119 Christian
doctrine both ‘implicitly’ resources its content from the experience of our embodied realities
and, conversely, doctrine also comes to influence these very experiences in the felt reality of
the body.120 In a retrieval of Augustine, Luther, and Melanchthon, Zahl positions himself
in opposition to prevailing assumptions in Anglophone theology; for example, he argues
against the claim that central Protestant doctrines like justification operate only according
to cerebral assent or in their molding of Christian experience through cultural and linguistic
forms.121 For him, an alternative approach should be offered through an account of the
work of the Holy Spirit resourced by affect theory, where doctrines like justification involve
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intensely charged affective experiences of transformation and intransigence, simmering
below the discursive-cultural level and, thus, inextricable from systematic reflection. The
special relevance of including affect theory in this approach is its ability to account for why
doctrinal claims often do not align with the experiences that Christians encounter.122 Here,
the theoretical vocabulary provided by affect theory—‘animality’, ‘intransigence’, ‘power’,
‘plasticity’, ‘non-discursivity’—assists Christian theology to articulate these dynamics at
the level of the body and does so in a way that resists constructivism or essentialism.123
What this means is that a specifically Christian experience of grace, not just a religious
experience more generally, is bound to the doctrine of pneumatology, since it is by virtue
of the Spirit’s material operation that a thick connection can be established between the
experiences of the affective body and the various works of the Spirit in justification, salvation, and sanctification. In other words, there are “affective effects” that are concretely
and practically evident (or “affectively salient”) that follow from the doctrinal claims made
about the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian.124 On one level, it seems
theologically intuitive to suggest that there are practical and embodied changes to one’s
life under grace, but what makes Zahl’s intervention useful with respect to affect theory is
that this model is able to account—at the level of embodied reality—how these changes are
activated and also resisted. To conclude our discussion with Emmanuel Falque, we turn to
Zahl’s retrieval of Augustine’s pneumatology in the anti-Pelagian writings,125 since it is
here where the account of the affective body in a Protestant systematic key supplements
Falque’s notion of the ‘spread body’ and, in particular, the way in which the Christian life
is transformed and sanctified by the indwelling of the Spirit.
To recall: in Falque’s account of transformation, the work of sanctifying grace can be
reduced to the moment where the sacrament of the Eucharist is consumed, conforming
the ‘animality’ of our bodies to the ‘internal power of life’ of the Spirit. Here it is assumed
that the renewed powers we receive from the Spirit in the sacrament enact changes physiologically as we are incorporated into the life of God (animality-humanity-theosis). But
how this facilitation of power comes to move our bodies in the ‘right’ direction is left to
the mystery of the Spirit at work in the sacrament and is only answered in ontological
and metaphysical terms, even if it has subjective material effects. For Zahl, in response
to other accounts of sanctification adjacent to Falque, this leads to a pneumatologically
deficient theology with important consequences.126 Firstly, as we have already referred
to, the process of transformation in the work of the Spirit through the Eucharist functions
as a deus ex machina, or, in Zahl’s words, a “pneumatological version of Descartes’ pineal
gland”127 —a pious cover for a (Catholic) sacramentalism that is theologically inconsistent.
Secondly, by locating this key moment in the Eucharist, one runs the risk of assuming a
relative progression of moral piety, a position that not only distances the Christian from
the non-Christian but also from oneself insofar as animality becomes further displaced
on the journey to full humanity and finally theosis. In our reading, Zahl’s “affective Augustinianism” repristinates a theological account of transformation by affirming its reality
within the material site of bodily experience, while at the same time without superseding
the affective-animality dimension, which makes up the complexity of human existence that
Falque’s theological phenomenology has rightly emphasized.
A solution is found in the account of transformation given by Augustine and his deployment of the affective category of delight (delectatio). For Augustine, “the transformation
of desire does not take place simply by divine fiat,” but rather involves a “providentially
ordered process” by which God attracts and persuades us to leave behind sinful attachments and to pursue righteousness—that is, to delight in the immutable good that is God.
While it is true that the love of God in Christians cannot only be reduced to the affective, it
cannot be refuted that to love what we delight in must also be an activity that is activated
by the Spirit in bodies in time.128 To be free in Christ, then, is to be motivated to pursue the
good out of love and delight rather than fear, which means that the motivation to follow
God’s will has an affective character that is ‘practically recognizable’. There are two points
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to be made here with respect to this affective Augustinianism, and which directly come to
bear on our discussion with Falque and the limitations of his account.
First, the way in which the Spirit fosters delight for holiness in bodies is not by an irruption or super-infusion but “through a psychological sequence of affective predicates.”129
What does this mean? For Augustine, following Paul, it is the encounter with the law that
reveals the disordered desire that brings death, and death names the outcome of disordered
desire consisting of affective predicates, which, for Zahl, are those experiences and feelings
associated with the fear of death, plight, or relational alienation (from God or others).130
The critical function of the law, then, whose agent is the Spirit, is to reveal the manifold
symptoms of sin to us, as well as the affective predicates with which they are associated.
It is these predicates that are in turn not only generated but also intensified through the
law’s critical function, so that they can then be transformed insofar as our desiderative attachments are drawn-in by the delight that is generated in the encounter with divine grace.
Through this “soteriological pattern”, the affective body that we are comes to experience
sin as debilitating rather than delightful and can thus begin to recognize a transformed
sequence whereby the gift of grace delivers a delight in the “sweetness of righteousness”,
as Augustine says.131
This leads to the second point, where the dynamics of an affective Augustinianism
also provide for a complexity with respect to the work of the Spirit, one that does not
reduce these affective structures and patterns to an overdetermined account of human
experience. If one of Falque’s (non)phenomenological insights was to detect a chaotic and
inscrutable realm of forces and drives, then, like a differentiated approach to bodily affects,
this affective Augustinianism maintains a patterned structure but also a novelty of both the
Self and the work of the Spirit. Zahl rightly stresses that there are degrees of variability in
human experience, especially in what Schleiermacher called a “spectrum of excitement”
in the encounter with divine grace, such that what might be a felt affective intensity for
one might be less so for another.132 Moreover, if biblical texts like John 3:8 preserve a
dynamism and unpredictability on the side of the Spirit (“The wind blows where it chooses”),
then it is perhaps Augustine more than anyone else in the history of Christian thought
who recognized the unknown psychological depths on the side of the human heart—
“Man is a vast deep,” (grande profundum est ipse homo) and “I have become a problem to
myself” (quaestio mihi factus sum).133 This apophatic tradition, which is well-known through
medieval mysticism from Eckhart to phenomenology (Heidegger) and postmodernism
(Derrida), thus can also be detected here in affective theology. Nevertheless, Zahl concludes
on this point that affective complexity “does not mean such experience is entirely shapeless
and mysterious” and “for theology in a pneumatological key, a degree of apophaticism
can be complemented by a set of constructive affirmations...even as they are ultimately
provisional.”134 The outcome of these admissions is that, to some extent, there will always
be an inherent tension between our attempt to understand the complexities of the affective
body in the work of the Spirit and the providential role of God in the transformation
of desire.
In this way, an affective Augustinian approach to sanctification takes seriously the
physiological-psychological (material) changes that accompany the transformed life of the
Christian via the categories of desire and delight. It at once affirms the animality (passions,
desires, forces, and drives) of our bodily existence (the spread body), accounting for them
in structured patterns but also not eliminating a degree of mystery and inscrutability. The
consequences of this are that we can say the encounter with divine grace is a theologically
embodied activity, as well as that the gap between Christian and non-Christian is not one
that can be taken for granted.
Funding: This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft UL 552/1-1.
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
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Data Availability Statement: No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is
not applicable to this article.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
Notes
1
By way of example, see (Sigurdsson 2016; Etzelmüller and Weissenrieder 2016; Etzelmüller 2021; Coakley 2013; Coakley and
Gavrilyuk 2012). The theme of embodiment is a guiding thread throughout Graham Ward’s systematic theology, see (Ward
2016) and (Ward 2020). See Simeon Zahl’s emphasis on ‘affect’ in his recent and widely disseminated text, to which we will refer
extensively below: (Zahl 2020b).
2
(Falque 2016a).
3
There are, of course, exceptions: for example, Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere tries to read Falque as outside of this tradition, as a
type of ‘post-phenomenologist’, via Jean-Luc Nancy, though still committed to French phenomenology. See (Cassidy-Deketelaere
2020). And there are also others of Protestant orientation who have engaged his work critically, for example, see the essays by
Jakub Čapek and Katerina Koçi, respectively, in (Koči and Alvis 2020).
4
(Falque 2002). A later English translation of this text appeared as (Falque 2016b). An updated version of the text appeared as
chapter 5 in (Falque 2018c).
5
(Falque 2018a). English translation: (Falque 2019).
6
As we will see, Falque deploys the ‘spread body’ in the unique context of palliative care, but it is also the term he uses to situate
a more general phenomenology of the body between “the subjective flesh of the phenomenologist and the objective body of the
scientist.” Falque’s diverse reflections on embodiment, therefore, can be read under this singular term, which I take as his attempt
to search for an “existential analytic of the body”. See (Falque 2019, p. 91), and (Falque 2016c, pp. 12–13).
7
(Falque 2016a, p. 25).
8
(Falque 2016c, pp. 12–15).
9
To talk of ‘supplement’ here is not to invoke a Derridean motif that follows the logic of inversion or subversion, it is to follow
Falque, as Cyril O’Regan has written, where it has to do with “an adding to the goods that phenomenology supplies in the
interest of bolstering thinking that does not simply think the multiple but is itself multiple.” See (O’Regan 2022, p. xvi).
10
I will borrow this argument from (Schaefer 2019).
11
See inter alia the recent volume edited by (Koči and Alvis 2020).
12
(Janicaud 2000, p. 37). Janicaud particularly had Husserl’s §58 of Ideas I in mind.
13
See (Falque 2015, pp. 9, 279). One should also note that ‘hospitality’ does not preclude disagreement—that Falque invites an open
and hospitable dialogue between phenomenology and theology, in no way distracts him from exercising exacting criticisms of
one by the other, as the case of Henry amply demonstrates.
14
(Falque 2012, pp. 30–40).
15
The category of ‘finitude’ is arguably the central concept in French philosophy from the 1940s onward, with almost all the thinkers
who use the category referring to Heidegger, who develops it positively without the requirement of an infinite. See (Dika 2017).
16
(Falque 2012, pp. 16–19; Falque 2018c, pp. 104, 129).
17
For a lucid introduction, see (Cassidy-Deketelaere 2021).
18
Much has been made of Falque’s critique of his Doktorvater, Jean-Luc Marion and the notion of the saturated phenomenon which
identifies givenness (Gegebenheit) with revelation, for example, owing perhaps to the latter’s sheer influence in both contemporary
philosophy and theology. See (Falque 2007).
19
Apart from what Falque calls the “swerve of flesh” in Wedding Feast of the Lamb, 1–4, see also Claude Romano’s chapter, (Romano
2016, pp. 114–48).
20
(Falque 2016c, p. 1; Falque 2018c, p. 144).
21
See (Husserl 1989, pp. 56/61, 105–7/111–14).
22
Husserl’s texts are at times ambiguous, but the common assumption is that he ultimately prioritizes the subjective-lived experience
of the body over the objective. See for example his comments on the “owness” and “I-can” of the Ego in the transcendental
attitude, in (Husserl 1999, pp. 128/96–97). While Falque predominantly directs his attention to this French reception, there is
still a question to be answered to what extent the German discourse moves in a parallel way. For a beginning discussion see
(Krüger 2010).
23
Falque, in fact, claims that Paul Ricoeur is the first to enact this translation in his famous reading of the fifth Cartesian Meditation.
See Emmanuel Falque and Richard Kearney, “Embrace and Differentiation: A Phenomenology of Eros,” Somatic Desire, 76–77.
24
(Falque 2018c, chap. 5).
25
(Henry 2016).
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26
“At the time, I called it ontological monism, but instead it should be called phenomenological monism.” Michel Henry, “Material
Phenomenology”, 121; (Henry 2015b, pp. 39, 124, 136).
27
Henry, Incarnation, 10.
28
(Henry 2003, chap. 3).
29
(Henry 2008, pp. 7–9).
30
(Henry 2015a, p. 129).
31
(Henry 2015a, pp. 130–31).
32
Henry, Incarnation, 3.
33
(Franck 2014, p. 90; Falque 2018c, pp. 164–66).
34
(Falque 2018c, p. 144).
35
Frank, Flesh and Body, 84.
36
(Falque 2018c, p. 166).
37
See note 32 above.
(Falque 2016c, p. 118).
38
39
(Falque 2018c, p. 166): “we are constituted more fundamentally by the by our organicity and thingliness than by our
fleshly affectivity.”
40
Ibid., p. 169.
41
(Falque 2016a, pp. 149–50).
42
Henry, Incarnation, 4.
43
For the ubiquity of ‘flesh’ but with reference to Merleau-Ponty see (Romano 2016, p. 141), which Falque cites approvingly.
(Falque 2016c, pp. 14, 240).
44
Henry, Incarnation, 11.
45
Ibid., p. 256.
46
(Falque 2018c, p. 169).
47
Henry, Incarnation, 16
48
Ibid., 17.
See (Caputo 2006). For a discussion of Caputo and this material dimension, see (Ullrich 2021). For the ‘visibility’ and ‘solidity’ of
‘flesh’ in Irenaeus and Tertullian, respectively, see Falque’s earlier account developed in his habilitation thesis, Dieu, la chair et
l’autre: D’Irénee à Duns Scot, published in English as, (Falque 2015).
49
50
(Falque 2018c, p. 170).
51
Ibid., p. 145.
52
Falque writes: “where phenomenology uses ‘flesh’ of the ‘lived experience of the body’ unilaterally. . . I give more weight to a
‘philosophy of the organic’”. Wedding Feast of the Lamb, 3.
53
Ibid., p. 172.
54
While the ‘this worldly reality’ of the body—it’s materiality, ‘solidity’, ‘visibility’ (fn. 48), fleshly ‘suffering’, ‘corruptibility’,
and the phenomenological importance of a ‘physical resurrection’—is developed in Falque’s earlier works from Dieu, la chair et
l’autre to the first two volumes of his triptych, something more radical is underway in the third volume (Les noces de l’agneau)
and subsequent philosophical works like Hors phénomène: Essai aux confins de la phénomènalité (2021), which delve into the
‘underground’ and ‘outside’ of our condition. For a helpful, yet somewhat unsystematic, critical summary of these developments
up until Les noces de l’agneau, see (Gschwandtner 2012). For a recent text translated into English of Falque’s philosophical account
of the ‘extra-phenomenon’, see his (Falque 2022a).
55
(Falque 2016c, pp. 84–90).
56
Ibid., pp. 5–10. A “phenomenology of the underground” is developed through a reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty which pushes
phenomenology to its limit, toward a notion of alterity in Merleau-Ponty that draws less on his phenomenological influences
than it does on existentialism, French spiritualism, and psychoanalysis. See (Falque 2018c, pp. 47–48).
57
Here to quote the title of (Bernet 2013), which Falque cites approvingly elsewhere: (Falque 2020), 116 fn. 6.
58
(Falque 2016c, pp. 104–109).
59
Ibid., p. 11
60
Ibid., p. 15.
61
(Falque 2019). See Gschwandtner’s translators note pg. 112: “The French term ‘épandu’ can mean ‘stretched out,’ ‘spread out,’
‘splayed out,’ (as on a bed), ‘expanded’ (over an entire area), or even ‘extended’ (as in water covering a flooded plain).”
62
Ibid., p. 13.
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63
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64
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 16.
65
Falque, “Towards an Ethics of the Spread Body”, 92.
66
Ibid., p. 97.
67
(Falque 2016c, pp. 18–24).
68
Ibid., p. 22.
69
Ibid., p. 23.
70
Ibid., p. 21.
71
For Falque’s account of both these notions, see respectively: (Falque 2018b, 2022b). In both cases Falque is increasingly interested
in a purely philosophical account without any recourse to theology; the former in dialogue with Henri Maldiney and the latter
with Immanuel Kant.
Ibid., p. 24.
72
73
Ibid., p. 106.
74
(Falque 2020). Sartre calls this a non-thetic intentionality for lived-experience. See (Sartre 2004, p. 6).
75
(Falque 2016c, p. 3).
76
For an initial attempt at this connection see, Bradley B. Onishi’s, “Introduction the English Translation: Is the Theological Turn
Still Relevant? Finitude, Affect, and Embodiment”, in (Falque 2018c, pp. xi–xxix).
77
(Heidegger [1927] 2006b, p. 335).
78
(Heidegger [1962] 2016a, p. 384).
79
See (Heidegger 1996, p. 126).
80
On the relationship between Befindlichkeit and Stimmung, see (Elpidorou and Freeman 2015).
81
See (Dreyfus 1991, chap. 10).
82
Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics”, 21.
83
See (Franck 2001, pp. 105–23).
84
(Falque 2016c, p. 87).
85
Ibid., chap. 5.
86
See (Falque 2021, chap. 4).
87
(Falque 2016c, p. 111).
88
Ibid., p. 114.
89
Ibid., p. 110.
90
Ibid., p. 118.
91
(Falque 2019, p. 101).
92
Falque, “Outside Phenomenology?” 317.
93
Although more recently, see the Barthian inspired project of (Clough 2012).
94
(Falque 2016c, p. xx).
95
See note 60 above.
Falque, Nothing To It (2020).
96
97
(Connelly 2020, pp. 155–62, 159). Connelly’s solution is for a ‘backlash’ of nineteenth century French Spiritualism, the key figures
of which (Blondel, Bergson, Ravaisson, de Biran etc.) were all concerned with force, the body, and consciousness. While analyzing
what this backlash might consist of remains outside the purview of this study, it is noteworthy that the broad field of ‘affect theory’
also draws its intellectual heritage from thinkers growing out of this tradition of French thought, particularly Gilles Deleuze.
98
There textual evidence of this move is found in several places in Wedding Feast of the Lamb: “it is by taking on and transforming
animality into humanity that recognizes its filiation that bestiality or sin will be eradicated,” xx. See also: xxi, xxiii, xxiv, 7,
99
Christina Gschwandtner and Richard Kearney raise similar concerns, respectively. (Gschwandtner 2012, pp. 11–16); Emmanuel
Falque and Richard Kearney, “Embrace and Differentiation,” pp. 78–83.
100
(Falque 2016c, p. 109).
101
Ibid., pp. 110–11.
102
Ibid., pp. 199–217.
103
See (Sedgwick and Frank 1995; Massumi 1995; Gregg and Seigworth 2010).
104
Falque, “The Extra-Phenomenal”.
105
In this respect, emotions take objects, that is, they are intentionally directed. See (Deonna and Teroni 2012, pp. 4–5). While
feelings can be said to consist of the ‘what-it-is-like’-ness of the emotion being felt. See also (Du Toit 2014, Art. #2692, 9 pages).
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106
See the seminal introduction to affect theory by (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, pp. 1–25; 5–9).
107
Schaefer, The Evolution of Affect Theory, pp. 11–15. This part of Schaefer’s text is a concisely argued reading of Deleuze, one which
subject to further interrogation in the vast field of Deleuzian studies would surely render further debate outside of the bounds of
this article. Nevertheless, our goal here is not to debate affect theories, but merely to bring them to light as a productive source
for theoretical reflection.
Ibid., pp. 9–10.
108
109
110
See (Massumi 2002).
Schaefer, The Evolution of Affect, pp. 19–22; See Brian Massumi’s famous 1995 essay, “The Autonomy of Affect” in Parables for the
Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 23–45.
111
See a critique of anti-intentionality, see (Leys 2017), critical positions in neuroscience, see (Papoulias and Callard 2010; Damasio
1999), and evolutionary biology: (Pigluicci and Müller 2010, pp. 3–17).
112
113
See note 38 above.
(Sedgwick 2003, p. 108).
114
Ibid., 19 quoted in Schaefer, The Evolution of Affect, p. 39.
115
Schaefer, The Evolution of Affect, p. 40.
116
(Derrida 2008, p. 31).
117
Apart from the sources already noted in fn.1, see also inter alia: (Harvey 2006; Burrus and Keller 2006; Pickstock 2013; Keller 2015).
118
Many of the theses in this book are continuations and constructive deployments of arguments developed elsewhere and are
well-worth consulting: see e.g., (Zahl 2014, 2017a, 2017b, 2019, 2020a).
119
(Zahl 2020b, pp. 10–47).
120
Ibid., pp. 2–3.
121
Ibid., pp. 33–47; 148–53.
122
Zahl usefully interprets this through the law-gospel dynamic in Luther. Affect theory explains precisely how it becomes so
difficult to effect transformation to negative affects (like shame, fear, alienation) despite the encounter with gospel; this is
because affects are not simply manipulable through discursive regimes, they are stubborn and reside in the deep “desires of the
flesh”, which is why the work of the Spirit to transform “affective intransigence” becomes so important to articulate. See Ibid.,
pp. 171–77.
123
Ibid., p. 147.
124
Ibid., pp. 3–4; 37–40. See also (Zahl 2015).
125
Zahl refers to several of Augustine’s texts, but the most important here are On the Spirit and the Letter, To Simplicianus On Different
Questions, On the Grace of Christ and Original Sin, and On Nature and Grace.
126
Zahl singles out T.F. Torrance, John Webster, and Romanus Cessario. See Ibid., pp. 184–87.
127
Ibid., p. 187.
128
Ibid., pp. 190, 192.
129
Ibid., p. 194.
130
See Zahl’s section on “Affective Predicates” and the “experience of Sin”, which is less to do with discursive judgements about
moral culpability, and more to do with an affective experience which has trans-historical value. Ibid., pp. 153–63.
131
Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter, quoted in Ibid., p. 196.
132
Ibid., pp. 200–1.
133
Augustine, Confessiones, 4.14.22 and 10.33.50 respectively. English translations are from the Chadwick edition: Augustine
134
(Zahl 2020b, p. 203).
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