3 Review(s)

This book offers the first comparative evaluation of Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Marion, two of the most important philosophers at work today."Badiou, Marion and St Paul" addresses the difficult question of whether it is possible to coherently think the notion of grace strictly in terms of immanence. The book develops a model for the thought of an immanent grace that avoids the traps of both obscurantism (the invocation of a wholly ineffably or transcendent ground for grace) and banality (the reduction of grace to nothing more than a variation of the established order).The conceptual resources needed for the development of such a model are gathered from sustained and original readings of St Paul's letter to the Romans, Jean-Luc Marion's "Being Given" and Alain Badiou's "Being and Event". As each thinker is taken up, their unique contributions to the model are elaborated and their positions are coordinated with each of the others in order to render a comparative evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses possible.The result of this triangulation is the emergence of a common conceptual strategy that simultaneously opens surprisingly direct paths into the heart of each of their disparate projects and, more importantly, a viable route to the thought of a genuinely immanent grace.