Political Theology

ISSN: 1462-317X (Print) 1743-1719 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ypot20

Political Phenomenology: Radical Democracy and

Truth

Rocco Gangle & Jason Smick

To cite this article: Rocco Gangle & Jason Smick (2009) Political Phenomenology: Radical
Democracy and Truth, Political Theology, 10:2, 341-363, DOI: 10.1558/poth.v10i2.341

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[PT 10.2 (2009) 341-363] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X
doi:10.1558/poth.v10i2.341 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

Political Phenomenology:
Radical Democracy and Truth

Rocco Gangle
Endicott College
Philosophy and Religion Department
376 Hale Street
Beverly, MA 01915
USA
rgangle@endicott.edu

Jason Smick
Santa Clara University
Religious Studies Department
500 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, CA 95053
USA
jsmick@scu.edu

Abstract
In light of the “theological turn” in recent phenomenology, a question arises
for contemporary thought of how the relationships among philosophy, reli-
gion, and democratic politics might be recontextualized and understood
from a specifically phenomenological perspective. Essential in addressing this
question is a critical examination of the method of reduction, or epoche insti-
tuted by Edmund Husserl as the original, core practice of phenomenology.
Reinterpreting the epoche in terms of its social, historical, and political dimen-
sions, later phenomenologists Enzo Paci and Jan Patocka demonstrate how
phenomenology’s conception of truth is necessarily coordinated with a com-
mitment to collective democratic praxis. In Paci, the practice of epoche initi-
ates critical resistance to ideological and idolatrous social and political forms
through contrast with the infinite openness of truth’s real universality. In
Patocka, phenomenological method as applied to historically-embedded reli-
gious and philosophical traditions helps to clarify what in particular distin-
guishes democratic from autocratic forms of life. By drawing the insights of
Paci and Patocka into conjunction, a new conception emerges of the unique
religio—the collective, existential commitment—of phenomenology as such:
to express the experience(s) of truth through democratic praxis in collabora-
tion with other analogous philosophical, religious and scientific traditions.

Keywords: democracy, epoche, Husserl, Paci, Patocka, phenomenology,

reduction.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW.
342 Political Theology

Introduction
What some have called the “theological turn” in contemporary phenom-
enology has generated significant debate.1 We feel that this effort within
phenomenology to re-engage theology and theological themes—for
example, “the infinite” and its link with the collective origins of worldly
sense and being—signals the return of a possible political theology, or a
theologico-political practice, in philosophy as such. Yet such a “political
theology” would no longer be coupled to any particular religious tradition,
whether Christian, Jewish, or Hindu. It would therefore not be a politi-
cal theology directed toward furthering the cause of a religion. Rather, a
theological practice—an explicit “binding” of thought and existential com-
mitment in infinite relation—would here be restored to the philosophical
tradition qua philosophy. Originating in philo-sophia, this philosophical
theology would be characterized by the love of wisdom evident in radical
and unlimited questioning regarding the world.2 We understand such a
distinctively philosophical political theology and the philosophical tradi-
tions to which it is or might be connected as coordinated with certain
scientific and religious ends while remaining in principle irreducible to
either science or religion themselves. It is the way such a philosophy
would conjoin the sense of democratic political practice with philosophi-
cal method which we mean to address in what follows. We will do so
specifically in relation to the phenomenological school of philosophy and
its unique method of epoche.
To illustrate our thesis the two sections below examine the work of
Enzo Paci and Jan Patocka, two thinkers not often considered part of the
“theological turn” in recent phenomenology. For both phenomenologists,
the transcendence of the subject is emphasized and explicitly connected to
a political praxis whose aim is to bind (ligare) philosophy to the phenom-
ena and to do so in a specific way, one guided by respect for the infinite
ends (teloi) granted and borne by humanity. It is this binding of philosophy

1. See, as a helpful starting point, Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and

the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham,
2000).
2. The project sketched here may thus be distinguished from phenomenology’s
“theological turn” noted above which involves thinkers such as Levinas, Henry, Chretien,
and Marion and with precursors in Rosenzweig, Dumery, and others. Rather than working
solely within philosophy (although with a eye perhaps towards the religions), these thinkers
explicitly link philosophical methods and themes to the religious traditions themselves, and
do so from the standpoint of a religion and for a religion. We want to suggest that it is pos-
sible to articulate theological themes and practices that serve the ends of philosophy rather
than a religion.

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 Gangle   Political Phenomenology 343

to the infinite that leads both Paci and Patocka to articulate phenomenolo-
gies linked to democratic practice and the critique of authoritarian and
totalitarian ideologies. Both thinkers radicalize what we would claim is
a democratizing tendency of phenomenology, its tendency, more or less
realized, to extend respect and the basic “right to be” to an ever-widening
circle of phenomena and phenomenality.
Before turning to the demonstration of our thesis, it will be helpful to
indicate first what we take to be distinctive about the phenomenological
school of philosophy. In the 1939 Crisis of European Sciences and Transcen-
dental Phenomenology, Husserl contrasts phenomenology with what he calls
“objective philosophy” by distinguishing the ways these two modes of
philosophy conceive of the ultimate ground of being. Whereas “objective
philosophy” would identify some one particular ground as final—whether
it be logic, God, efficient causation, or something else—phenomenology
would begin by (and consist in) calling any and all such grounds into
question. Yet, according to Husserl, the act of calling all final grounds into
question inaugurates in fact a new philosophical ground of an entirely
different order, one with the creative potential for transforming human
understanding and experience of the world. Husserl writes:
[R]ather than having a ground of things taken for granted and ready in
advance, as does objective philosophy, [phenomenology] excludes in prin-
ciple a ground of this or any other sort. Thus it must begin without any
underlying ground. But immediately it achieves the possibility of creating
a ground for itself through its own powers, namely, in mastering, through
original self-reflection, the naïve world as transformed into a phenomenon
or rather a universe of phenomena.3

As this passage suggests, the ground that emerges in Husserl’s phe-

nomenology is the world itself, the “universe of phenomena.” Not one
particular privileged and hegemonic phenomenon but rather each and
every phenomenon is the concern of phenomenology. Or rather, since
there is here certainly one phenomenon—the universe of phenomena—
acknowledged as a ground, we will say that the privileged and grounding
phenomenon in phenomenology is or can be understood to be open to all.
It is our thesis that in the difference between the alternative forms
of philosophy described here by Husserl—phenomenological on the
one hand and “objective,” or metaphysical, on the other—a possibility
emerges within philosophical reflection today for a distinct, construc-
tive interpretation of the sense of democratic praxis. Phenomenology

3. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology:

An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwest-
ern University Press, 1970), 181.

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344 Political Theology

simultaneously discovers and creates a new kind of philosophical ground

through the decision to relate anew to the whole of what exists or might
exist. We argue that this philosophical decision and the experiential
transformations it evokes indicate at a formal level what is common to
genuinely democratic political practices as evident and possible in the
world today.
The transformation of our everyday disposition towards the world into
a transcendental standpoint through which the “naïve world” appears as
a “universe of phenomena” is the philosophical act which Husserl names
epoche, or suspension. This subjective act defines phenomenology’s essen-
tial method and practice. The epoche shifts the appearance of the world into
a new register—that of sheer phenomena—by altering in a fundamental
way the basic attitude towards being of the one who philosophizes. In this
revised subjective attitude, every phenomenon points beyond its immedi-
ate givenness towards its further unfolding and comprehension in an eidos,
or dynamical essence. The interwoven field of all such eidei—manifest
only as an unbound, untotalizable horizon—maps the infinite possibilities
of human meaning, or intentionality in general. Our question is: What
are the political ramifications of the subjective becoming-phenomenal and
becoming-eidetic of the world which the epoche realizes?
We will argue that the phenomenological epoche, or reduction, entails
democratic praxis. In a basic sense “democracy” refers to any social order
ruled (kratia) by “the people” (demos).4 In principle at least, such demo-
cratic forms of life resist the suppression of the voices of those who con-
stitute it. Democracy inhibits the tendency of political communities, and
of members of those communities, to permanently institute a single voice
over others, whether that voice be the voice of a monarch, a party, or an
oligarch. Ideally demos kratia equalizes the members of the community at a
foundational level. Whatever the relative differences in ability or birth, the
voice of every member constituting the political community—whether
that member be an individual or a community within the larger political
body—is seen and treated as legitimate, each offering its own perspective
and possessing rights to have its needs made known, considered, and met.
In accordance with this principle, the historical development of democ-
racy has involved a movement from forms of democratic life limiting
citizenship to one portion of the social body (e.g., free Athenian males) to
forms of democracy extending the rights of citizenship—the “right to be”
and be heard—to every member of society, giving even those who are not
yet full citizens (e.g., children) or may never be (e.g., the mentally infirm)
some degree of consideration and participation.

4. David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 1–11.

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 Gangle   Political Phenomenology 345

In what may be seen as a parallel development in philosophical method,

phenomenological reduction works to resist two related tendencies of
traditional metaphysics. First, in advancing the cause of all phenomena, it
undermines the metaphysical tendency to institute a single phenomenon
over others that excludes and, where it does not exclude, subjugates other
phenomena. This follows from the equalization of phenomena instituted
by the epoche of the “natural attitude.” Second, the reduction resists meta-
physics’ propensity to occlude the density and depth of the world’s various
phenomena and to privilege a single moment or aspect of their plural
modes of existence as being authoritative and exhaustive of their essence.
The tendency of post-metaphysical philosophies like phenomenology
acknowledges not only the basic “right to be” of every phenomenon that
has entered into the sphere of the visible, but asserts also the legitimacy,
the “right” of those aspects of the phenomena that metaphysical practice
tries to marginalize, suppress, deprioritize, and delegitimate. Post-meta-
physical philosophical thought and practice intends to undermine the
attempts, in metaphysics, to coordinate the arche with a delimited, proper
content justifying the exclusion of competing sense-contents. This is
one reason it deconstructs final grounds while at the same time con-
structing a praxis that means to invest experience with the unlimited and
ever-unfolding senses that in truth belong to it and which metaphysical
thought again and again excludes. Phenomenology attempts as much as
possible to let phenomena themselves—and their “twists and turns” (i.e.,
the unfolding of new perspectives and meanings)—govern its own life
and praxis.
In this respect, the phenomenological tradition may be conceived
through comparisons with scientific and religious traditions. On the
one hand, the presence of the ideal in the collective intentionalities of
history and culture reveals the basic teleological structure of phenom-
enology’s desire for truth, this teleological orientation being—as Husserl
has shown—the form of science as the orientation towards a convergence
of ideal, repeatable “accomplishments.” On the other hand, because the
stakes of phenomenological truth concern not only knowledge in the
narrow sense but also questions related to the destinies of human history
and meaning in their connection to the experience of infinitude (while at
the same time viewing these questions and the answers that can be given
to them as originating in a specific tradition) the objects and methods of
phenomenology are not easily separated from those of religion. Indeed the
paths of post-metaphysical thought as led by the innovations and recon-
structions of phenomenology have led in important instances to complex
and various rapprochements of philosophy and science on the one hand
and philosophy and religion on the other.

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346 Political Theology

We will examine certain of these relations as they appear in the work

of Paci and Patocka. In Paci’s case we will focus on the relation between
phenomenology and the scientific orientation to truth. We will see that
the notion of truth as a collective project necessarily entails political con-
siderations as well. Our discussion of Patocka will focus on his phenom-
enology of religion and philosophy as it relates to the articulation of what
we will call a “phenomenological religio.”5 We will show how Patocka’s
phenomenology implies that the religio of phenomenology must include
a commitment both to the infinite and to democracy. We hope that taken
together, the political reinterpretations of phenomenology offered in Paci
and Patocka may help to clarify and partially to confirm why Husserl
would claim in the 1939 Crisis:
Perhaps it will even become manifest that the total phenomenological atti-
tude and the epoche belonging to it are destined in essence to effect, at first,
a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a reli-
gious conversion, which then, however, over and above this, bears within
itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation which is
assigned as a task to mankind as such.6

Enzo Paci: Epoche of the Life-World and the Conversion to Praxis

Enzo Paci, like other phenomenologists of the 1960s and 70s, considered
the relationship between phenomenological method and political com-
mitment to be of paramount concern.7 The political questions raised in
Husserl’s late work had to be extended for this generation of thinkers in
light of a new global conjuncture and a different set of social crises. Paci’s
1963 study The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man organizes
an extended commentary on the political significance of Husserl’s Crisis.
More specifically, it elaborates the politically revolutionary consequences

5. Religio can refer to a relation to something characterized by “exactness,” “scrupu-

lousness,” or “meticulous care.” It is thought to be closely related to another Latin word,
religare. This term can mean “to tie fast” or “bind.” It also means “to re-read.” While its
origin is Latin, religare has also been traced back to the Greek ale-gein, which can mean “to
heed” or “to care for.” Drawing on the history of the term, but also creatively reinterpreting
that history, religio will be used here to refer to a devotion or commitment that includes at
once the act of binding, the meticulous care for what one is bound to, and the ongoing re-
reading of that to which one is bound.
6. Husserl, Crisis, 137.
7. Among others, Merleau-Ponty, Lukacs, Sartre, and Tran Duc Thao engaged in
parallel investigations at around the same time. Unlike these often more familiar think-
ers, however, Paci’s phenomenological work develops primarily within a long and distin-
guished tradition of Italian humanism which, inflected through the Marxism of Labriola
and Gramsci, passes through Paci to contemporary figures such as Antonio Negri.

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 Gangle   Political Phenomenology 347

of sections 35 through 44 of the Crisis which revise the notion of transcen-

dental epoche with respect to its basis in the common life-world (Lebenswelt).
Paci understands this crucial shift in Husserl’s thinking of the epoche to
reveal a twofold political imperative for phenomenology: (1) the actual
practice of epoche must be reinterpreted in historical terms as a collective
“temporal operation inserted between conditioning and freedom”—thus
phenomenology has to become political; and (2) in a corresponding way,
the infinite eidetic field disclosed by epoche needs to be conceived starting
from its concrete, social realization in creative praxis—thus politics must
become phenomenological.8 As indicated by the title of Paci’s work, it is
to be the function of science as realized in the diversity of human, natural,
and formal sciences to undergird and carry through this reciprocal activity
of phenomenology and politics.
Paci’s reading of Husserl leads the practice of epoche itself back to its
origins in the concrete, elemental, and inescapable nature of human expe-
rience. Paci thus shows that phenomenology, correctly understood, is far
from being an esoteric or abstract method artificially imposed on the world
in the name of systematic, objective knowledge. Instead, phenomenology
works to make evident how the life-world is itself already phenomeno-
logically (and not only phenomenally) structured. The human Lebenswelt
must be understood as essentially epochal. The philosophical discipline of
phenomenology only makes explicit at a higher order of reflection and
rigor what is taking place always already in human social activity as such,
namely the creative unfolding of complex networks of theoretical and
practical intentionalities. Due to its essential continuity with Lebenswelt
processes, phenomenology must be understood as a natural outgrowth of
the very form of common social life.9
It is important to note that Paci—by emphasizing the continuity of
phenomenological method with the common life-world—is in no way
reducing phenomenological experience to the everyday. Instead, Paci
should be understood as attributing the transcendental-eidetic character

8. Enzo Paci, The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, trans. Paul Piccone
and James E. Hansen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 252.
9. Husserl’s conception of the a priori primacy of the life-world to all possible objects
and systems of science is made explicit in passages such as the following: “A certain ideal-
izing accomplishment is what brings about the higher-level meaning-formation and ontic
validity of the mathematical and every other objective a priori on the basis of the life-
world a priori. Thus the latter ought first to become a subject of scientific investigation in
its peculiarity and purity, and then one ought to set the systematic task of understanding
how, on this basis and in what manners of new meaning-formation, the objective a priori
comes about as a mediated theoretical accomplishment.” Crisis, 140. Paci argues that this
foundational Husserlian science of the life-world is political critique and transformation.

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348 Political Theology

of phenomenological experience and its potential for radical subjective

transformation to the reality of everyday life and its collective forms of
organization. The transcendental epoche thus reaches fulfillment in and
through the life-world since the life-world, charged and suffused with
powerful idealizations and active projects, must be recognized as both the
real source and the ultimate end of phenomenological theory and practice.
What, then, distinguishes phenomenology “proper” from life simply lived
“as is”? Phenomenology as a specific form of philosophical practice brings
to light the world itself in its essential being as the common creative
work of all. Paci recognizes elements, tendencies, and characteristics of
phenomenological praxis in all human activity; phenomenology proper
simply makes the essentially universal orientation of such praxis rigor-
ously explicit. Human activity points to the universality of the common
life-world as to a goal: “The transcendental attitude does not negate the
Lebenswelt and the pregiven world. Rather, it denies that it should be
accepted as already done and accomplished.”10 Phenomenology thus
raises the unrealized political teleology of the life-world to disciplined and
universal consideration.
The passage from phenomenological epoche to the revisioning of the
life-world in light of universal praxis may be schematized as a movement
internal to the epoche itself. We will outline this movement here in terms
of a succession of four stages: contact, suspension, reflection, and praxis.
While the terms of this schema are not Paci’s own, it is hoped that such
a (re)construction will be helpful for delineating how and why in Paci’s
thought the development of phenomenology should invoke a coming-
to-awareness of revolutionary exigency in the passage from the naïve life-
world to the struggles of a philosophically-informed politics. The Pacian
epoche properly understood would include and unite the four stages or
elements offered here, and thus the essential continuity of these stages
should be carefully thought through.
(1) Contact—The phenomenological epoche begins in the encounter
with some phenomenon, the “touch” that summons awareness,
the experiential X of a determinate though indefinite “something.”
In further experiential acts elaborating this “something,” aware-
ness becomes sharpened and a meaningful phenomenon thereby
comes into view. The importance of this initial stage rests in the
recognition that all subsequent “reduction” of phenomena origi-
nates necessarily in a realm of “precategorial” experience which
points in turn to an ineluctable rootedness of reflective thought in
presubjective, prepersonal being and its internal forces.

10. Paci, Function, 66.

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 Gangle   Political Phenomenology 349

(1) Suspension—Husserl took the Greek word epoche, meaning “pause”

or “suspension,” to name the basic act of phenomenological con-
sciousness, echoing while radicalizing the Cartesian method of
systematic, subjective doubt. With this methodologically rigorous
act of suspension emerges the phenomenological “I.”11 At the same
time, the eidos of whatever “contacted” phenomenon is revealed
according to its own unique self-giving character on the basis of
the correlative structure of intentional consciousness. No longer
precategorial, an experiential science of the life-world becomes
possible at least in outline at this stage in conjunction with the
appearance of a subject who for the first time “can comprehend
and desire the meaning of the truth of life.”12 As entailing such an
orientation to truth, the moment of suspension already indicates
a necessary path through and towards collective, teleologically-
directed transformation.
(2) Reflection—Revealed from the standpoint of the epoche is a new cat-
egory of thought sui generis—that of intentional relations as such,
thus opening the field of the eidetic and its corresponding infinite
tasks. The world itself appears transformed now into a concrete
nexus of meaningful intentions. Reflection notes that these inten-
tions have been always already at work, operative constitutively
throughout the life-world’s past in myriad concrete ways. Various
forms of actual subjectivity appear now in terms of the complex
networks of forces and habits that have structured individual and
collective bodies. Among these, the personal ego is seen to have
emerged from the conditioned matrices of already constituted
social and political practices.13 In this light, Paci emphasizes how
in contemporary life the ideological structures of commodi-
fication may now appear as negating and objectifying forms of
intentionality that have circulated virally throughout the social
field, inhibiting dynamic and creative powers still latent in the
life-world itself. Reflecting on this truth, the subject of phenom-
enological epoche is thus called to critical responsibility, and such
coming-to-consciousness of the self-responsible subject holds an

11. Paci writes, “The aim of the epoche is to make everyone recognize himself for what
he really is. It is the epoche that compels every ego to free himself from the theory of the ego
or subject, so that he can discover himself in the first person” (Function, 94).
12. Paci, Function, 253.
13. See, for instance, Paci, Function, 373. For Paci the subject of the epoche appears as
“the ego rooted in the empirical life-world where it performs all its operations. These are
the operations of social and historical praxis upon which science and philosophy are based”
(Function, 247).

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intrinsic political orientation; it is, for Paci, “a necessary moment

in the revolutionary movement.”14
(3) Praxis—The world itself becomes manifest in the epoche through
what Husserl calls “universal correlation,” namely the insight that
all experiences are ultimately common in the practical and intentional
eidei they involve and that they are thus in the last instance coordi-
nated to a universal aim.15 This implies for Paci that what begins in
individual experience tends, through the transformations of epoche,
towards collective expression and action. The structure of collec-
tive subjectivity thereby appears on the basis of a praxis passing
from individual “presence” to the “index” of a common eidos.16
Potentially, this passage then becomes the generative moment of a
revolutionarily cooperative politics of truth in common.
The four stages of epoche sketched here thus culminate in a constructive
image of revolutionary democratic praxis oriented towards truth. While
the liberal conception of democracy would take democratic praxis to be
essentially coordinated with compromises required by conflictual finite
desires, for Paci phenomenologically democratic praxis appears instead
in light of the epoche as a virtual, veritable, and teleological presencing
of the infinite within conditions of finitude. On such a basis, democ-
racy becomes critical of conceptual idolatry and consumerist fetishism
through a positive experience of the infinite which shares nothing
whatsoever in common with irrationalist enthusiasms—indeed, to the
contrary.17
Science itself—both its essential impulse as well as the habits, practices,
and institutions to which it gives rise—are here brought into relation with
the ideals and norms governing social and political praxis. Paci shows that
phenomenology coordinates a philosophical critique of “idolatry” not to
the properties of some given object, but to the very form of the human
need and experience of truth. Phenomenology thus understood manifests
a “religious” dimension whose faith is not blind but rather is oriented

14. Paci, Function, 335.

15. See Husserl’s discussion in sections 46 and 48 of the Crisis, 159–60, 165–7.
16. See Paci, Function, 468: “All that I experience is correlated and can be assumed
as a model. Every individual implies the others and, although unique, is connected to all
real and possible relations. The analysis of the relations starts from an individual presence
which, as such, is non-repeatable, but which, as an index, is typical and essential.”
17. This includes in particular a critique of the fetishization of the nation-state. See
Paci, Function, 270. In this regard, the United States in particular may indeed be ready for its
“Third Great Awakening” which would be rational and philosophical at its core. See Paci’s
remarks on the “foundations for a phenomenology of religion” in Marx’s own work, in
Function, 393.

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in a critical and scientific spirit to understanding the actual and potential

meanings of the manifest world:
Generally speaking—or, better yet, phenomenologically speaking—[scienti­
fic] comprehension itself is a religion. It teaches man that each action and
part contains a meaning, or a negation of a meaning, even if no part—and this
is essential—can ever exhaust the meaning and present itself as the whole.18

Paci calls this guiding principle for phenomenological praxis “faith in

intentional rationality.”19 To this principle corresponds an anthropology
Paci expresses in the following way: “Each man contains the principle
of truth. Yet no man can ever be the truth; this would be idolatry.”20 By
distinguishing the universal character of truth’s principle from every
particular ontic, or existent truth, Paci thus maintains a commitment to
Husserl’s notion of scientific truth as an “infinite task.” To contain and
to express the principle of truth essentially while just as essentially to
reject the possibility of truth’s final instantiation in any single historical
or cultural form—such for Paci is at once the universal human eidos and
humanity’s critical-creative telos. Human being concerns truth, and the
idea of science expresses this concern in a way that links finite reality to
infinite idealization.
What is at stake is not only the content of the human telos but, more
importantly, the relation between that telos and the forms of praxis towards
which it disposes human beings. The critical and scientific disposition
is rightly understood as “religious” insofar as it guides collective action
and cultivates a commitment to truth in excess of any possible finite
instantiation. Science, like religion, pursues an infinite telos. How does the
infinite character of the scientific telos imprint itself on the political activi-
ties it might inspire? The answer is: through a necessary consequence of
self-critique. Political praxis, like science, must be critical, open, and
self-correcting. Posited here is thus an “infinite dialectic” of weakness and
strength as it appears within scientific and political practice in light of
phenomenology.
As the later Italian thinker Gianni Vattimo has argued, philosophy in
the wake of phenomenology and hermeneutics entails a “weak ontology.”21
Yet such weakness is far from surrender; it is rather a weakness that is both
openly declared and declared openly as universal. Thus the “strength” of a
weak ontology entails that self-critique extends to other-critique within

18. Paci, Function, 345.

19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. See Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 85–8.

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352 Political Theology

the bounds of a rigorous parity: other traditions may and must be called
to account for claims extending beyond the bounds of phenomenality,
just as phenomenology itself must be called to account when and where
it exceeds its epochal limits.22 It is only within such a horizon of common
accountability to truth that democratic ideals of human dignity and equal-
ity become understandable in the first place. On this view it is not status
which confers human value, but rather an act of critical and creative
ek-stasis, a recognition of the intrinsic limits of finite forms combined
with a re-ordering of such forms relative to infinite ideals. It is in light of
such ideals that we commit ourselves to the following practical truth: the
idols of our world need not necessarily be destroyed, but their power to
inhibit collective questioning and creative revision must be compelled to
withdraw.
In Paci’s reading of the late Husserl, the transcendental character and
function of the epoche is made at once the essential element of historical
humanity and the basic, counter-ideological structure of creative praxis.
Here, the Hobbesian homo homini lupus [man as wolf to man] becomes the
phenomenologico-democratic homo homini mundus [man as world to man].
The human world as such becomes understood as co-constituted through
collaborative praxis and as therefore essentially open and untotalizable.23
In Paci there is thus a convergence of phenomenology, science, and socio-
political praxis: not only is phenomenological science conceived as intrin-
sically practical; more importantly, creative praxis is seen to be essentially
phenomenological and thereby coordinated to the (philosophical) infinite.
Such an orientation entails a necessarily open future of potentially unend-
ing collective transformation:
Essentially, since truth as the meaningful direction of being can never be
possessed, intentionality is infinite and its goal is unreachable. The goal has
always been, is, and always will be present as a demand in the world; but it
is not the world. It is the meaning of truth that is inexhaustible in the world.
The inexhaustible demand is such that the movement is perennial and the
becoming immortal.24

22. Indicating the need for phenomenological self-critique and its link to epoche, Paci
writes: “Phenomenology is neither an ideology nor a world-view, but this does not exempt
it from the analysis of its origin and its function as a world-view. The analysis is all the more
necessary if each philosopher must begin anew” (Function, 241).
23. One might compare this line of thought constructively to that pursued by Jean-
Luc Nancy in The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1997) and The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. Francois Raf-
foul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007).
24. Paci, Function, 202–3, emphasis his.

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 Gangle   Political Phenomenology 353

Jan Patocka: The Religio of Phenomenology

The work of the Czech philosopher and phenomenologist Jan Patocka
can be understood as an analysis of Husserl’s claim, cited earlier, that “the
total phenomenological attitude and the epoche belonging to it are destined
in essence to effect…[an] existential transformation” of humanity on a
philosophical basis.25 However, the implication of Patocka’s work is that
the religious traditions also bear within themselves analogous resources
to effect such a transformation. His work reveals important lines of con-
vergence and bases for dialogue and cooperative action among the philo-
sophical and scientific traditions and the religious traditions. We will argue
that the line of convergence Patocka makes manifest that is most relevant
to the question of religion, philosophy, and politics is that of democratic
praxis. Though inflected differently by different traditions, for Patocka the
existential transformation that Husserl envisioned can be said to come by
way of the promotion of democratic practices in theoretical and practical
contexts so as to counter the autocratic, or monological, tendencies of
cultures, whether those cultures take religious, philosophico-scientific, or
other forms.
In this section we will draw on Patocka in order to elaborate more fully
what we will refer to as the “religio” of phenomenology. Phenomenological
religio, we will argue, entails a commitment to democracy and democratic
practice. However, in order to understand the specificity of phenomeno-
logical religio and its connection to democracy and democratic practice,
we first need to gain a sense for Patocka’s understanding of religion and
philosophy per se.
Patocka’s democratic phenomenological practice is closely related to
his phenomenology of religion and philosophy. He argued that democ-
racy emerges, in varying degrees of radicality, with religion and philoso-
phy and the histories they unfold.26 Yet this is not the only possibility that

25. Patocka devoted a number of important studies to Husserl’s work. See, e.g., his An
Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. James Dodd (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1999);
“Masaryk’s and Husserl’s Conception of the Spiritual Crisis of European Humanity,” “Hus-
serl’s Transcendental Turn: The Phenomenological Reduction in The Idea of Phenomenology
and in Ideas I,” “Edmund Husserl’s Philosophy of the Crisis of the Sciences and His Con-
ception of the Phenomenology of the ‘Life-world’ (Warsaw Lecture, 1971),” “The Natural
World and Phenomenology,” “Cartesianism and Phenomenology,” and “The Dangers of
Technicization in Science according to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger
according to M. Heidegger (Varna Lecture, 1970),” all in Jan Patocka: Philosophy and Selected
Writings, ed. and trans. Erazim Kohak (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
26. Though Patocka attributes the birth of democracy per se to the time in which
philosophy was born—in ancient Greece—his phenomenology of religion clearly implies

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354 Political Theology

emerges with them. They too—they perhaps more than any other set of
traditions—unfold autocratic and monological histories. This is in no way
due to their being wholly and irredeemably autocratic. Rather, Patocka’s
work implies that philosophical and religious autocratism is the result of
complex historical decisions that have seen both forms of tradition mar-
ginalize their own democratic possibilities. We will show that Patocka’s
phenomenological religio is an extension and radicalization of religious
and philosophical forms of life. More specifically, we will argue that his
phenomenology can be seen as an attempt to recollect the democratic
impulses of philosophy and the religions as against the autocratic.27
In order to demonstrate these claims, we first need to gain a sense for
several key aspects of Patocka’s phenomenology. The first is what might
be called his phenomenology of cultural life. For Patocka, the life of a
culture is defined by three movements. The first movement is related
to the acceptance of life as a project with all the difficulties attendant on
this project. The second is defense. This refers to the production and
reproduction of human life and what it needs in order to continue to be
relayed (traditio) over time. Taken together, Patocka’s elaboration of these
two movements constitutes a reinterpretation of the natural, everyday
world as Husserl and Heidegger conceived it. The movements of accep-
tance and defense consolidate and protect a given social, intellectual,
and political order. Within any distinct cultural world, they presuppose

that these tendencies are at work in an inchoate form in religion, both before and after
the emergence of the philosophical form of life. What religion manifests and sets to work
through myth, philosophy clarifies and sets out in concepts. But what both do is explicitly
mark, preserve, and promote the experience of possibility. More importantly, both religion
and philosophy experience new possibilities of life in such a way that the foreclosure of the
democratic process through which they become manifest cannot be undertaken in good
conscience. Or, more precisely, with the emergence in the world of religion and philosophy,
sub-traditions within these traditions simultaneously emerge that attempt to continually
reveal the democratic nature of the movement of truth and articulate practices that preserve
it. We should note that here and throughout we will substitute “democracy” for “politics.”
It is politics that Patocka wants to argue is born simultaneously with philosophy. But since
what he means is that a form of life emerged which was able to realize the philosophi-
cal necessity of listening to a diversity of voices and creating a context within which these
voices could enact dialogues, we will instead construe him as claiming a close association
between philosophy and democracy. See Patocka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History,
trans. James Dodd (Chicago, IL: Open Court Press,1996), 139–44.
27. Though Patocka primarily has in mind the Abrahamic traditions when he dis-
cusses religion, we believe that the democratic practices and ideas that he finds in them can
also be discerned in Eastern traditions. For example, the Buddhist notion of sunyata or the
plethora of divine names in Hinduism suggest a fundamental equality among the determi-
nations of any being (Buddhism) or of the highest being Brahman (Hinduism).

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 Gangle   Political Phenomenology 355

an opening to possibility. This is to say that the birth of cultural worlds

requires an experience that opens up a possibility of life. If this possibil-
ity of life is affirmed and taken up, and if it differs significantly from the
form of life within which it first emerges, such an experience can even-
tuate a departure from an existing world and give rise to the creation of
a new one.
The process whereby possibilities of life become manifest and open
up new forms of life is the third movement of human cultural worlds.
Patocka calls this movement the movement of truth. He is here drawing
on Heidegger’s claim that truth is linked to disclosure.28 For Heidegger,
histories are constituted by events of truth. Within the context of the cre-
ation of a culture, an event of truth signals that a distinct and sometimes
new set of ideas and practices has been disclosed. A given cultural world’s
status as “taken for granted” is disrupted when the ways of a world are
called into question by other ways of organizing life. These other pos-
sibilities of life are themselves revealed through events of disclosure. The
disclosure of new forms of life then sets in motion processes of determi-
nation. Should a world remain as it is? Should it open itself to another
form of life? Answering such questions entails a process of determining
which possibility or set of possibilities ought to be pursued. Such large-
scale, communal decisions are ordinarily exclusionary. The devotees of
the existing order seek, as it were, to marginalize and suppress whatever
threatens those aspects of its culture which are regarded as sacred. Like-
wise, the devotees of the world that has newly emerged attempt to undo
the existing order and exclude what inhibits the realization of the emer-
gent form of life and the sacred phenomena attached to it. What both sets
of devotees presuppose is the movement of truth.
For Patocka, only certain types of cultural worlds actually catch sight
of and integrate the movement of truth explicitly into a form of life. The
difference between a world that explicitly recognizes the movement of
truth and one that does not can be understood as the difference between
a world whose experience of the sacred leads to a positive valuation of
possibility as such and one that instead attempts to institute one determi-
nate and exclusionary possibility over others. It is this positive valuation
of possibility—and the transcendence and freedom that open humanity
to possibility—that, in Patocka’s view, distinguishes religious and philo-
sophical worlds from other cultural worlds. In phenomenological terms,

28. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 5–8, 50–51; see also his Plato
and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 20–26. Com-
pare Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 256–69.

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356 Political Theology

prior to religion and philosophy the natural attitude’s tendency toward

consolidation and exclusion and the experience of the sacred as ultimate
and absolute mutually reinforce one another. The result is that much
of what is offered in and through the movement of truth is concealed,
repressed, or destroyed in the interest of creating and/or preserving a uni-
vocal cultural order.
Patocka argues that the birth of religions is coextensive with the emer-
gence of worlds linking the experience of the sacred to responsibility. For
him this means that religion is given figures of the divine which rather
than causing humanity to abdicate responsibility to its own mode of
being, call on it to care for this mode of being. Since this mode of being
includes above all a capacity for truth, this means that religion is religious
to the extent that it identifies and cultivates the human capacity for freeing
itself from existing possibilities through a movement of transcendence. As
Patocka says in relation to religion, this
bringing into relation to responsibility…is probably the kernel of the history
of all religions. Religion is not the sacred, nor does it arise directly from the
experience of the sacral orgies and rites; rather, it is where the sacred qua
demonic is being explicitly overcome.29

The demonic here can be understood as a “being-possessed” by a single,

closed vision of the universe of phenomena that dissimulates the world’s
inherently plurivocal character. For Patocka, religious and non-religious
cultural worlds are born out of and borne along by an experience that
gives rise to a possession.30
Patocka’s phenomenology of religion asserts that the distinctive nature
of religious traditions lies in their attempt to overcome what we would
call autocratic or monological possessions. By this we mean a way of being
committed to a form of life that does not include a commitment to the
movement of truth but rather to merely one instance of what the move-
ment of truth produces. With the birth of religion, a new way of relating to
those sacred phenomena comprising a given cultural possession emerges.
Religious traditions are distinctive in that they bear within themselves
the possibility of “being-possessed” of a vision of the phenomena that is
plurivocal and democratic in character. Hence, religion makes possible a
new relation to the sacred and to humanity. This new relation, and the
world it creates, cultivates transcendence and freedom for possibility as
ends in themselves. And it does so because the sacred is interpreted as
itself calling for or requiring that the human capacity for freedom and

29. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 101.

30. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 98–100.

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 Gangle   Political Phenomenology 357

self-transcendence in relation to the plurivocity of the world is identified,

valued, and cultivated.31
Patocka’s phenomenology of philosophy moves along similar lines.
The inception of philosophy also signals the birth of a tradition that is
devoted to transcendence, freedom, and truth. But where religion pri-
marily articulates the movement of truth through mythical narratives
and ritual, philosophy realizes this movement in concepts and political
life.32 According to Patocka, philosophy is born out of a “shaking” of all
possessions as well as the certainty of those possessions with respect to
the meaning of the world as such and as a whole.33 In philosophy the
movement of transcendence, freedom, and truth that emerges out of this
shaking is universal and, in principle at least, infinite. Philosophy expresses
the project of realizing transcendence, freedom, and truth in the world as
“care for the soul.” For the soul is that in us “which is capable of truth.”34
In Patocka’s view, care for the soul was realized in the social realm in
ancient Greece as democratic openness to the voices of the citizens that
constituted the polis.35 Thus, philosophy’s effort to articulate an explicit
conceptual understanding of transcendence, freedom, and truth occurs
at the same time that a form of politics emerges encouraging inquiry and
dialogue among competing voices, namely democracy.
Care for the soul can be understood as a philosophical practice oriented
to cultivating a capacity and desire for transcendence, freedom, and truth.

31. Patocka has in mind here the way in which the Abrahamic understanding of God
articulates a relation to humanity that does not, in principle, subject it arbitrarily to the
will of God. Rather, that will cares for humanity in each of its different forms since every
human being and every human culture is understood as a child of God. It is in this sense
that religion is, in Patocka’s view, structurally democratic. See Patocka’s Heretical Essays in
the Philosophy of History, 106–9.
32. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 43, 63–5. Patocka’s view of reli-
gion is in this respect somewhat traditional. It does not take into account, and could not,
recent developments in both the religions and philosophy that undermine a sharp differ-
ence, at least in this respect, between religion and philosophy. We have in mind the work
of the Society of Scriptural Reasoning and the Radical Orthodoxy movement, and Der-
rida’s discussion in his “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits
of Reason Alone,” of the sense of faith in philosophy. See Religion, eds Jacques Derrida and
Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–78.
33. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 141.
34. Patocka, Plato and Europe, 36–7.
35. Of course, in ancient Greece not all members of the community were citizens.
Patocka’s claim is not that democracy flourished there in its most radical and inclusive
form but rather that the possibility of a form of life that incorporated the desire for truth,
its attainment through free dialogue and research, and political freedom for a group of indi-
viduals whose voices were regarded as fundamentally equal was born at the time.

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358 Political Theology

This practice of freedom and transcendence in connection with recogni-

tion of the movement of truth is, we would argue, a transmutation of
phenomenological epoche. For Patocka, worlds can be said to emerge out
of an experience of contact with the sacred. If this contact shakes the cer-
tainty and accepted character of the world, such experience suspends the
hold of a given world-view on at least certain members of that world. This
leads to reflection. If reflection leads to the affirmation of newly emergent
possibilities of life, it can lead to the re-evaluation and, in varying degrees
of radicality, the rejection of an existing cultural world. This, in turn, can
set in motion a reconstruction of the world on the basis of the set of sacred
ideas, figures, and texts that have become visible through the event of
disclosure. In other words, the construction of a new world requires the
deactivation of an existing possession and the birth of a new possession
with a corresponding set of practices and institutions that realize and
maintain it.
Following Patocka’s lead, we would suggest that democracy is the politi-
cal form that corresponds to human being understood as a being open to
possibility. It is never a question of humanity being closed off entirely to
possibility. The question is how a community responds to the movement
of transcendence that opens up new possibilities of life. Historically, many
cultural traditions respond by suppressing what is given through an event
of truth. Autocratic cultural worlds reassert the completeness of the exist-
ing order and the adequacy of its way of understanding and relating to
what possesses it. They do not see, or do not want to see, that humanity is
constituted by freedom, the ability to transcend a given political and social
order in pursuit of another one. This is what religion and philosophy see,
preserve, and cultivate in different ways.
However, philosophy, like the religions, has tended to regard the
movement of truth as a project that must issue in truths valid in per-
petuity. Philosophy can itself create closed worlds defined by autocratic
and monological possessions that try to silence the structural plurivocity
of human life. This is to say, in a different idiom, that philosophy has
metaphysical tendencies. Patocka discusses what recent Continental phi-
losophy has stigmatized as metaphysical philosophy under the heading of
positive Platonism.36 So understood, the metaphysical form of philosophy,
like its cultural and religious analogues, takes the desire for truth to be a
desire for a truth—the truth—rather than a commitment to the movement
of truth as such. This monologism in the theoretical domain also implies

36. Patocka, “Negative Platonism: Reflections Concerning the Rise, the Scope, and
the Demise of Metaphysics—and Whether Philosophy Can Survive It,” in Jan Patocka: Phi-
losophy and Selected Writings, 181–2, 195–7.

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the desertion of democracy and democratic praxis in favor of the stability

of a political order that strives for univocity. This twofold desertion marks
philosophy’s abandonment to its own autocratic tendencies.
What distinguishes autocratic from democratic forms of philosophy
is neither the experience of contact, nor the occurrence of epoche. It lies
rather in how each of these philosophical forms of life responds to the
shaking of certitude induced by contact and epoche. Whether it is enacted
by an individual or small group, or set to work by the shaking of a world
as a whole, the epoche is an experience of both transcendence and freedom.
It marks the possibility of transcending a given order of thought and life.
Metaphysical philosophies attempt to resolve the disquiet of the epoche
by way of an autocratic assertion of one possibility over others. More
precisely, they try to set one possibility that recognizes no other possibili-
ties over others, whether that possibility be one possible object of cultural
veneration, or one possible understanding of a phenomenon accepted as
sacred and ultimate.37 Phenomenology, by contrast, wants to preserve this
experience of uncertainty and the need for dialogue and openness made
possible by the shaking of a world.
For Patocka, transcendence and freedom can only be adequately realized
in the world if human being and its capacity for transcendence, freedom,
and truth is recognized, preserved, and cultivated within a democratic
political order that respects different voices. This is why Patocka claims
that democracy and the non-metaphysical form of philosophy imply one
another.38 Only where you have a social order that permits inquiry and
open dialogue do you have a political order that recognizes, preserves,
and cultivates democratic praxis. Patocka contrasts the Greek polis with
what he calls the “household.” Household here refers to the traditional,
hierarchically-ordered family whose primary mission is the preservation
of a figure of truth and a form of life produced by the movement of truth.
The birth of a politics founded on dialogue and the creative, peaceable
conflict of voices (i.e., democracy and democratic praxis) undermines the
household model of social and political life. Through it monologism is
stigmatized and resisted through the assertion of the values of care for the
soul, freedom, transcendence, and the movement of truth.39
The implication of Patocka’s phenomenology, like that of Paci, is that
philosophy is not simply an intellectual technique or form of discourse.
Though philosophy is theoretical in character, philosophical theory is

37. The democratic form of life is of course one possible form of life. But it is one that
is constitutively plurivocal—this is its ironic univocity.
38. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 41–3, 142.
39. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 15–26, 36–8.

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360 Political Theology

bound to social and political life. In its phenomenological form, philoso-

phy is devotion to the movement of truth, transcendence, and freedom.
At the same time it is devoted to their realization in the world through the
construction of democratic forms of life. We believe the exhibition of these
aspects of human life as well as their transmission and practical realization
constitute the basic impulse and task of the religio of phenomenology.

Conclusion: Of and For a Democratic

Praxis in Religion and Philosophy
What constellation of philosophy, religion, and politics becomes visible
in Paci and Patocka taken together? Paci links the scientific impulse to
truth—both its origin in the processes of the common life-world and its
end in the creative transformation of humankind—to a uniquely philo-
sophical understanding of traditionally theological notions such as faith,
the infinite, and the critique of idolatry. Patocka demonstrates an intimate
link between philosophy and democratic politics, doing so with explicit
reference to what philosophy and religion hold in common as well as
what differentiates them. Importantly, both philosophers coordinate their
theses with and within the particular philosophical tradition of phenom-
enology, a tradition they thereby reinterpret politically. Philosophy as
phenomenology appears in both thinkers in terms of a practical project, a
devotion, commitment, or, as we have called it, a religio. Taken in conjunc-
tion, the thought of Paci and Patocka reveal what could be described as the
scientifico-religious character of phenomenological philosophy manifest
as such in the political commitment to democratic praxis.
Phenomenological praxis involves responsibility to the experience of
the movement of truth so as to avoid ideological fixation on any single
truth. In this regard, phenomenology has its own distinctive relation to
a phenomenon that bears all the traits of Otto’s theologically-inflected
mysterium tremendum et fascinans. For phenomenology this mysterium is the
world itself. This phenomenon is greater than us, withdraws from us
yet perpetually fascinates philosophical attention. Here lies no doubt the
impulse to science and to the charitable regard for the phenomena, includ-
ing other traditions, that characterizes philosophy at its best. In its care for
the given world’s phenomena, philosophy as phenomenology appears as
a praxis in the ancient sense—a form of life that is not only, to paraphrase
Pierre Hadot’s formulation, a form of discourse but a collective form of
life that acts on and shapes the world.40

40. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford and Cam-
bridge: Blackwell, 1995), 56–61.

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 Gangle   Political Phenomenology 361

In our view, one of the most significant implications of this study is

that if philosophy is to remain faithful to the movement of truth, its mode
of being in the world requires a commitment to democratic praxis at the
same time that it requires a reconsideration of the sense of such praxis.
The key to understanding this complex relation between philosophy and
democracy may be found—as in both Paci and Patocka—in the practi-
cal reinterpretation of phenomenological method. Paci demonstrates the
steps of the process through which phenomenological epoche eventuates
in political praxis. Patocka inscribes phenomenological method—contact,
epoche, reflection, and praxis—onto the terrain of history itself. In both
thinkers, phenomenological practice reproduces the distinctive features of
human life lived in the common world, and where thematized and set to
work in various theoretical and practical contexts, it has the potential for
democratizing humanity’s relation to itself and to the world.
A model of phenomenological practice has thus been articulated
that is devoted to the cultivation of a subject (individual and collective)
seeking to heighten its engagement with the sense of the world—its plural
truth—rather than to diminish it via metaphysical reductions to univocity
understood as the proper end of political life. Understood as a creative,
infinite praxis devoted to the movement of truth, phenomenology has
been revealed as one sub-tradition within Western philosophy that may
bear relevant structural resemblances to other such “democratizing”
philosophical, scientific, and religious sub-traditions.
We believe it is in terms of such formal similarities that an opening
may be made today for the constructive transformation of inter-religious
and cross-cultural praxis. For it is in the recognition of this most basic of
possibilities and this most basic of struggles—autocracy vs. democracy—
that a solidarity becomes possible of those who, to paraphrase Patocka,
have been shaken of their certainty. A “solidarity of the shaken” is one
way of conceiving a relation among those varied philosophical, religious,
scientific, and cultural sub-traditions that seek, each in its own way (some
in theoretical contexts, some in practical ones, some in both) to cultivate
democratic practices so as to ensure that the attempts to resolve uncertain-
ties produced by the movement of truth do not end in the marginalization,
suppression, or destruction of the communities that constitute humani-
ty.41 The meaning of truth, as Paci might say, must become a practice of
idolatry-critique and infinitely creative telos. It is, we believe, by cultivating
such critical-creative praxis that the religio of phenomenology may con-
tribute to a genuinely democratic politics in cooperation with other tradi-
tions. It is through its commitment to truth that phenomenology may

41. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 134–5.

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362 Political Theology

help to address and to mitigate in its own way and within its own limits
the current conflicts between democratic practices in the sense indicated
here and those autocratic, monological forms of life that threaten defini-
tively to undo the plural possibilities of life given today in and for our
common world.

Rocco Gangle has a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of

Virginia, and his publications include work on early modern and con-
temporary Continental philosophy, political philosophy and theology, and
philosophy of science. His translation of François Laruelle’s Les Philoso-
phies de la Différence will appear in 2010, published by Continuum. He is a
co-founder of the philosophical organization Synousia.

Jason Smick is an Academic Year Lecturer in the Department of Religious

Studies at Santa Clara University. He holds degrees in Philosophy (AB,
University of California, Berkeley), Theology (MA, Graduate Theological
Union), and Religious Studies (PhD, University of Virginia). He special-
izes in philosophical and sociological theories of religion, nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Continental philosophy, phenomenology of religion,
modern religious thought, and sociology of religion. His current work
focuses on outlining a rationale for incorporating the history of philoso-
phy into the history and phenomenology of religions. Along with Rocco
Gangle and J. Thomas Higgins, he is co-founder of Synousia.

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