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Anacarnation and Returning
to the Lived Body with
Richard Kearney

Edited by Brian Treanor and

James L. Taylor
Cover image: “Song of Amergin/I Am The Wave (#1),” 2018,
Simone Kearney.
First published 2023
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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Treanor, Brian, editor. | Taylor, James, 1975- editor.
Title: Anacarnation and returning to the lived body with Richard
Kearney / edited by Brian Treanor and James L. Taylor.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022015713 (print) | LCCN 2022015714 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032259215 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032259192 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003285649 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Kearney, Richard. | Touch. | Human body (Philosophy)
| Hermeneutics. | Continental philosophy.
Classification: LCC B945.K384 A53 2023 (print) |
LCC B945.K384 (ebook) | DDC 128/.6--dc23/eng/20220810
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ISBN: 978-1-032-25921-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-25919-2 (pbk)
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DOI: 10.4324/9781003285649

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Contents

List of Contributors x
Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Re-touching Philosophy with

Richard Kearney 1
BR IAN TR E AN O R A N D JA ME S L. T AY LO R

PART I
Touching Nature 11

1 Thinking Like a Jaguar: Carnal Hermeneutics,

Touch, and the Limits of Language 13
BR IAN TR E AN O R

2 Sensing the Call of Other Animals: Carnal

Hermeneutics, and the Ethico-Moral Imagination 32
M ELISSA F IT ZP A TR I C K

3 The Embodied Human Being in Touch

with the World: Richard Kearney, and
Hedwig Conrad-Martius in Conversation 49
CHR ISTINA M . G SC H WA N D T NE R

PART II
Touching the Sacred 67

4 Carnal Sacrality: Phenomenology, the Sacred, and

Material Bodies in Richard Kearney 69
NEA L DERO O
viii Contents

5 Deep Calls to Deep 86

DA NIEL O ’D EA BRA D LEY

6 Strangers, Gods, and Demons: Toward a Carnal

Hermeneutics of the Demonic 107
BR IAN GR E G OR

PART III
Touching Imagination 127

7 Earth Creatures: Anacarnation in an Excarnate Age 129

M .E. LIT TLE JO H N

8 Richard Kearney, Terrence Malick, and the

Hidden Life of Sense 145
CHR ISTO PHER Y A T ES

9 Kearney’s Journey between Imagination, and

Touch—in Dialogue with Ricœur 163
EILE EN BR EN N A N

PART IV
Touching Flesh 177

10 Anaskesis: Retrieving Flesh in an Age of

Excarnation 179
JA ME S L. T A Y LO R

11 Female Nakedness in Protest: Tactile Reading 194

SA RIT LA R R Y

12 Touch Thyself: Kearney’s Anacarnational

Return to Plato’s Forgotten Wisdom 207
M ATT HEW C L EME N T E

13 No Longer a Spectator Only 215

TA MSIN JO N ES
 Contents ix

PART V
Finishing Touches 231

14 Anacarnation: Recovering Embodied Life 233

R ICHA RD KE AR N EY

Index 257
Contributors

Daniel O’Dea Bradley is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga

University. While valuing the intellectual asceticism and iconoclastic
rigor that marked 20th-century thought, Bradley’s research project
attempts to nurture a renewed appreciation of the beauty and sacredness
of being, thereby allowing for dialogue with liturgical and sacramental
religion, environmental philosophy, and Native American thought.
Eileen Brennan studied Philosophy in Dublin and Paris and is a lecturer in
Philosophy and Education at Dublin City University. She has written
widely in the field of hermeneutics with particular concentration on the
work of Paul Ricoeur. A former editor of Études Ricoeuriennes/
Ricoeur Studies, she has translated a number of books and papers
by contemporary French thinkers.
Matthew Clemente is a husband and father of four. He lives and writes in
Boston, Massachusetts where he holds teaching appointments at
Boston College and Boston University. He has published seven
books, most recently Eros Crucified: Death, Desire, and the Divine in
Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Religion (Routledge 2020), and is the
Assistant Editor of the Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion.
Neal DeRoo is Canada Research Chair in Phenomenology and
Philosophy of Religion and Professor of Philosophy at The King’s
University in Edmonton, Canada. He is the author of The Political
Logic of Experience (2022) and Futurity in Phenomenology (2013), and
has co-edited several volumes at the intersection of continental
philosophy and the philosophy of religion.
Melissa Fitzpatrick received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston College
in 2019 and is Assistant Professor of the Practice in Ethics in the
Carroll School of Management at BC. She teaches business ethics,
environmental ethics, animal ethics, social and political philosophy, and
philosophy of religion. She is the co-author (with Richard Kearney) of
Radical Hospitality: From Thought to Action (2021).
 Contributors xi

Brian Gregor is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at

California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is the author of
numerous articles in continental philosophy of religion, ethics, and
aesthetics, and his books include Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion:
Rebirth of the Capable Self (2019) and A Philosophical Anthropology of
the Cross: The Cruciform Self (2013).
Christina M. Gschwandtner teaches continental philosophy of religion at
Fordham University. She is the author of six books, most recently
Welcoming Finitude: Toward a Phenomenology of Orthodox Liturgy
(2019) and Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur: Between Fragility
and Hope (2021), as well as many articles and translations at the
intersection of phenomenology and religion.
Tamsin Jones is Associate Professor of Religion at Trinity College, CT,
where she teaches courses in the history of Christian thought, gender
and religion, and the philosophy of religion. She is the author of A
Genealogy of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion: Apparent Darkness
(2011) as well as many articles in continental philosophy of religion
and political theology.
Richard Kearney holds the Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston
College. He has published many works in continental philosophy, with
particular emphasis on narrative imagination, hospitality, and
embodiment. His most recent works include Touch: Recovering Our
Most Vital Sense (2021), Radical Hospitality (with Melissa Fitzpatrick
2021), and Carnal Hermeneutics (edited with Brian Treanor 2015). He
is also a published novelist and director of the Guestbook Project—
Hosting the Stranger.
Sarit Larry holds a Ph.D. from Boston College and is a lecturer at Sapir
College in Israel. She is interested in activism and social change as they
echo in continental philosophy. She was the Co-Director of
Mahapach-Taghir, a grassroots Palestinian-Israeli feminist social
change organization and is now leading The Diversity and Inclusion
in Academia Project at aChord Center in Israel.
M.E. Littlejohn is a professor of philosophy at the University of New
Brunswick. He is an invited researcher at the Sorbonne University.
James L. Taylor is Co-Director and Professor of Philosophy and
Peacemaking at the European Center for the Study of War and
Peace. He specializes in the ethics of transformation through
philosophy, politics, and religion, and is the editor, with Richard
Kearney, of Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions (2011).
xii Contributors

Brian Treanor is Professor of Philosophy and Charles S. Casassa SJ Chair

at Loyola Marymount University, where he also holds affiliate
appointments in environmental studies and Irish studies. His books
include Melancholic Joy (2021), Emplotting Virtue (SUNY 2014), and
Aspects of Alterity (2006), as well as a number of edited collections,
including, with Richard Kearney, Carnal Hermeneutics (2015).
Christopher Yates teaches philosophy at James Madison University and is
an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture,
the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Poetic Imagination
in Heidegger and Schelling (2013). His research concentrates primarily
on the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, the period of
German Idealism, and the intersections of these with currents in the
visual and literary arts.
Acknowledgments

This project was developed prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over three years, from 2018 to 2021, former students and scholars of
Richard Kearney wrote contributions that engage Kearney’s work
through a myriad of lenses and scholarly applications. The original
plan was for the contributors to meet in person and discuss chapter drafts
at a workshop on the island of Vis, Croatia in June of 2020; for obvious
reasons, this proved impossible, and our gathering was postponed.
However, the contributors continued to correspond with each other
and discuss their ideas during the long, dark months of the pandemic. In
January of 2021, another unanticipated but fortuitous event took place:
the publication of Richard Kearney’s latest book, Touch: Recovering Our
Most Vital Sense. With many of the contributors already engaging
themes of carnality, the publication of Touch inspired us to focus the
volume on touch and our other senses, incarnation and excarnation, and
our sensory immersion in our environment, among other related themes.
This project would not have been possible without the hospitality
extended by the European Center for the Study of War and Peace, a
groundbreaking organization that, in addition to facilitating study
abroad opportunities for colleges and universities in the United States,
hosts or facilitates a variety of events and symposia. ECSWP was the
organizer and host of our 2021 workshop, during which some
contributors were able to gather on Vis, while others “Zoomed” in
from around the world to discuss the papers. Particular thanks are due to
Petra Belković Taylor, the co-director of ECSWP, who in addition to
helping organize and coordinate the workshop, substantively engaged a
number of the authors and papers during the development of the volume.
A number of the essays were improved on the basis of her input. We are
indebted as well to Ana Pavković, ECSWP’s administrative and editorial
manager, who contributed her expertise to the project by compiling and
formatting the manuscript for submission.
xiv Acknowledgments

We are grateful to David Goodman, Director of Psychology and the

Other and the founder of the Psychology and the Other series at
Routledge. His early enthusiasm for the project and unwavering
support during pandemic-related delays were deeply appreciated.
Thanks are due as well to the incredibly responsive and efficient team
at Routledge—particularly Amanda Devine, Zoe Meyer, and Jana
Craddock—whose dedicated work helped to ensure that the publication
process was trouble-free.
An earlier version of “Thinking Like a Jaguar” appeared in the Journal
of the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition, vol. 4 (2021); we
appreciate the journal’s policies and structure, which allow for the
republication of a modified version of that essay here.
An earlier version of the first two parts of “Kearney’s Journey between
Imagination and Touch—in Dialogue with Ricœur” appears in Études
Ricœuriennes/Ricœur Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2021).
Introduction: Re-touching Philosophy
with Richard Kearney
Brian Treanor and James L. Taylor

Richard Kearney is the author of dozens of books, from Poétique du

possible (1984) to, most recently, Touch (2021). Alongside these mono-
graphs, we find a long list of edited collections, countless articles and book
chapters, three novels, as well as interdisciplinary artistic collaborations,
interviews, radio and television programs, and more. One can only guess as
to how many other projects are currently in various stages of development.
These works are so numerous and so diverse that it is difficult to keep them
all in view. Do we read Kearney as a hermeneut? A philosopher of nar-
rative? Of religion? Of imagination? As a distinctively Irish philosopher? Or
one of the prominent voices in contemporary “continental” philosophy?
Any one of these labels would be true, and each is inadequate.
Although any attempt to succinctly summarize or neatly categorize
such a prolific scholar is bound to come up short, given that the present
volume is inspired by and engaged with Kearney’s recent work on em-
bodiment and on touch, it is possible to give some account of his general
intellectual itinerary, and how it brought him to reflecting on embodi-
ment, excarnation, and touch.1

The Ana-Structure of the Fourth Reduction

Kearney first deploys the “ana-structure” of his diacritical hermeneutics—as
well as coining the term “anatheism”—in the 2006 essay “Epiphanies of the
Everyday: Toward a Micro-Eschatology” (Manoussakis 2006). The essay
opens with the question, “what if we were to return to epiphanies of the
everyday?” In it, Kearney proposes a fourth, “micro-eschatological” phe-
nomenological reduction, supplementing the transcendental reduction of
Husserl, the ontological reduction of Heidegger, and the “dosological” re-
duction of Marion.2 This fourth reduction leads us “back to the everyday:
that is, back to the natural world of simple, embodied life where we may
confront again the other ‘face-to-face’” (Manoussakis 2005, 6). That is to
say, this reduction is a return to our communal, incarnate, lived experience
of the world.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003285649-1
2 Brian Treanor and James L. Taylor

But this is no mere return, a retreat back to naive realism, as if we

could dismiss the first three phenomenological reductions; it is, rather, a
creative “repetition forward” that returns to the everyday in a new way.
As such, it recalls Kearney’s mentor, Paul Ricoeur, who described how
the loss of innocent faith could lead, at least in some circumstances, to a
new faith, a “second naivete” voluntarily adopted in the wake of critique
or doubt. A return to faith after wandering in the wilderness or a dark
night of the soul. But the faith of second naivete is not a simple return to
the faith of first naivete, which would be impossible. Wrestling with
difference and doubt makes simple return impossible, or at least patho-
logical. Once we lose the naivete of innocence, it is gone forever. The faith
of second naivete is, rather, a voluntary repetition forward of faith—in
God, in another person, in a way of life—that takes account of both the
initial faith and the trouble or critique that cast doubt on it. Thus, we can
see that while in “Epiphanies of the Everyday” Kearney places a marker
of sorts on the ana-structure of his hermeneutic project, this wager is not
without precedent. First, while the essay coins the term “anatheism,” in
some sense it is simply giving name to a methodological commitment that
had long characterized Kearney’s work. Second, Kearney himself ob-
serves that he is directing our attention to something that other thinkers
have also described or done, but without having thematized it. He sees
allies and fellow-travelers in diverse figures including Ricoeur, Duns
Scotus, Paul Cézanne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Patrick Kavanaugh, and
Wallace Stevens, to name only a handful.
In drawing our attention to the ana-structure of his hermeneutics,
Kearney emphasizes ana-theism, a vision he would develop much more
thoroughly four years later in a book of the same name. “Epiphanies of the
Everyday” appears in After God (2005), a volume dedicated to Kearney’s
work in philosophy of religion; so, it is no surprise that he draws our at-
tention to the “religious” character of the fourth reduction. However, the
ana-structure of Kearney’s philosophy is not limited to religion, and there
are intimations, even in this early essay, that his thinking was becoming
more and more incarnate, embodied, and tactile. This is evident not only in
the emphasis on the everyday, or even incarnation. He writes of “touching
beyond the tangible (ana-pathos)” and a “new way of saying, seeing, and
feeling over again—of sensing otherwise, anew, for a second time.” It’s
clear not only that incarnation is an essential aspect of ana-theism, but also
that incarnation itself—enfleshment, tactility, contact—is a theme of on-
going, and growing, importance to Kearney. In the years immediately
following “Epiphanies of the Everyday,” he further developed the religious
nature of the fourth reduction in Anatheism (Kearney 2011a) and
Reimagining the Sacred (Zimmerman and Kearney 2015). However, more
recently, Kearney’s work has turned to focus squarely on the carnal and
tactile nature of the fourth reduction in Carnal Hermeneutics (Kearney and
 Introduction 3

Treanor 2015) and Touch (Kearney 2021). It is the latter two texts that are
the provocation for and focus of the current volume.

Hospitality and Healing

If Kearney’s diacritical hermeneutics is characterized by the ana-structure
of “repetition forward,” both before and after its explicit thematization in
2006, what is the focus or goal of such a retrieval-remembering-repeating
forward? That is to ask, are there themes that unify Kearney’s diverse
body of work, from the Poétique du possible (1984) to, most recently,
Touch (2021)? Or, again, what is it that motivates Kearney’s thinking?
There are, to be sure, many ways to answer such questions, as attested to
by the wide ranges of scholarship taking up or commenting on some of
the abiding foci of Kearney’s work. Imagination (Littlejohn 2020), the
sacred (Zimmerman 2015), possibility (Kearney 2001), and otherness
(Veldsman and Steenkamp 2018) all offer themselves as legitimate pos-
sibilities; and there are others besides. However, we would not be far from
the mark if we identified hospitality as the center of gravity around which
orbit the diverse satellites of Kearney’s philosophical concerns. By
“hospitality,” we mean that act or “moment when the self opens to the
stranger and welcomes what is foreign and unfamiliar into its home”
(Kearney and Taylor 2011, 1).3 This commitment to hospitality and
healing informs the treatment of a wide range of subjects in Kearney’s
published work.
Carnal Hermeneutics, published in 2015, was a collaborative project that
gathered together contributions from a range of philosophers, proposing
that—despite their diverse agendas and foci—they shared a certain concern
with the lived body that marked them out from some of their con-
temporaries. This collection was part of larger trends in contemporary
philosophy working to correct what was increasingly felt to be an over-
emphasis on the linguistic, constructed nature of reality in late 20th-century
continental philosophy. But the philosophers brought together under the
banner of carnal hermeneutics were, and are, not of a single mind. It’s clear,
for example, that thinkers like Emmanuel Falque and Ted Toadvine, or
Julia Kristeva and Emmanuel Alloa, are pursuing substantially different
projects. Some contributors to Carnal Hermeneutics were motivated by
religious questions about the body, others by questions of ethics and vul-
nerability, and yet others by environmental concerns. Carnal hermeneutics
is, at best, a kind of broad genus in which we find diverse philosophical
species.
What, then, is distinctive about Kearney’s own approach to carnal
hermeneutics when compared with Falque, Nancy, Kristeva, or any of
the other contributors to Carnal Hermeneutics? What themes orient his
thinking? What questions is he trying to answer? To what realities is he
4 Brian Treanor and James L. Taylor

bearing witness? Clearly, one way we must answer these questions is

to say that Kearney’s thinking is concerned with the primacy, and re-
versibility, of touch. In the early and programmatic “What is Carnal
Hermeneutics?” Kearney makes clear that touch is his preferred way of
thinking through incarnation and materiality, something he developed in
significantly more detail in his follow-up monograph, Touch: Recovering
Our Most Vital Sense (Kearney 2021b). So, one thing we can say about
Kearney’s particular approach to carnal hermeneutics is that it is focused
on touch. Well and good. However, his treatment of touch is not an
abstract, neutral, disinterested account of tactility; rather, touch itself
serves to sharpen the focus on additional themes that Kearney finds
significant. It would be very difficult to read Kearney’s most recent
work—indeed, to read extensively any of his work—and fail to come
away with a deep appreciation for the role that hospitality and healing
play in framing and forming his thinking.
This is evident, first, in Carnal Hermeneutics itself. While “The Wager
of Carnal Hermeneutics” includes a careful analysis—both historical and
phenomenological—of the sense of touch, otherness, reversibility, double
sensation, and intertwining, it also develops these themes as they relate to
host and guest, hospitality and hostility, and therapeutic hermeneutics.
Second, in his work after Carnal Hermeneutics, Kearney has focused even
more clearly and overtly on hospitality and healing. Fully one third of
Touch is explicitly devoted to trauma, tactile healing, and recovery; and
themes like tactful touching, handshakes, caressing, empathy, forgive-
ness, and the like leap from every other chapter and section. Radical
Hospitality makes this emphasis even more clear. More, in looking ret-
rospectively at Kearney’s body of work, hospitality proves a useful fra-
mework for thinking about many of the other overt foci of his
philosophy: narrative hospitality (Kearney 2002b), religious hospitality
(Kearney 2011a), cultural hospitality (Kearney 2002a), and national
hospitality (Kearney 1996), as well as carnal hospitality (Kearney 2021;
Kearney and Fitzpatrick 2021). Finally, we can look to Kearney’s work
as a public intellectual, in which he argued for postnationalist forms of
identity in which people could identify as “British, or Irish, or both,”
insisted that interreligious hospitality is the way forward in thinking
about our widely shared experiences of the sacred, and founded the in-
ternational Guestbook Project, which is dedicated to “turning hostility
into hospitality” through the exchange of narratives. Thus, without being
reductive or simplistic, it seems clear that hospitality is one appropriate
thread with which we might link the diverse ethical, political, religious,
and incarnational themes at work in Kearney’s thinking.
Richard Kearney is then, at heart, a philosopher of radical hospitality.4
This is evident not only in his scholarship. Many of the contributors to
this volume were Kearney’s students at one point or another in their own