About

Art and desire have been perennial objects of philosophical and theological questioning throughout the history of ideas in the West. Phenomenology in particular has proven itself uniquely equipped to explore these topics with its method of examining human experience. Thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Françoise Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Richard Kearney, and David Tracy, as well as those conventionally associated with the so-called theological turn in French phenomenology, such as Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Emmanuel Falque, frequently treat one or another of these topics. However, the relation between art and desire together in the human experience of the divine or Absolute broadly construed goes overlooked in contemporary academic discussions. The question remains: what is the role of the desire of/for God in art and aesthetic experience?

The exigency of broaching this question at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and art became all the more apparent in the diverse reactions to the partial burning of the Notre Dame Cathedral of Paris on April 15–16, 2019, which made manifest the multiple identities that religious art bears in our contemporary world. Both secular humanistic and religious discourses were deployed in the articulation of the importance of the restoration and preservation of the cathedral. Notre Dame de Paris was simultaneously cast as a historical and cultural symbol of the French Republic, a religious monument of both Roman Catholicism and global Christianity, as well as a work of art and human genius displaying the rich depths of humanity itself. While these various identities are not in themselves necessarily at odds with one another, the at times incendiary debates that followed the catastrophe frequently presupposed that they were and are incommensurate. Although the same desire for the restoration and preservation of this work of art united the differing positions, the meaning of traditionally religious art in a predominately secular context came under question. To the central question above, then, is added another: what, if anything, can phenomenological analysis of art, desire, and God shed on the political dimension of the relation between religion and secular culture?

"Art, Desire, and God: Phenomenological Perspectives" will be hosted virtually at the University of Notre Dame on the 2nd and 3rd of October, 2020. Theologians, philosophers, artists and others are invited to contribute to this collaborative and interdisciplinary reflection on the application of phenomenology to the investigation of these themes.