Towards a phenomenology of resurrection and of ghosts

Peter Costello

pp. 159-186

in: Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (ed), The problem of religious experience, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstract

In this paper, I work to situate the reading and writing that constitute a phenomenology of religion, especially with respect to the stories of the Resurrection of Jesus. First, I use the descriptions of lived embodiment by Husserl in Cartesian Meditations (1970) and by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible (1968) in order to inaugurate a phenomenological reading of the Resurrection of Jesus by the Gospel authors Luke and John. Then I use Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (1994) and John Caputo's "Bodies Still Unrisen, Events Still Unsaid" (2007) to account for the deeper phenomenological problem of how to distinguish the uniqueness of the Resurrection from that of the reappearance of a ghost. Finally, in light of the literary and conceptual analyses of the first two sections, I establish the method of a phenomenology of religion as a peculiar kind of epoché, an epoché of "obvious' political moves within a religious attitude, that allows us to practice a relation with the text not simply as literary or as conceptual but as the conscience of a community. Ultimately, the paper works to describe the Resurrection of Jesus as an event that pushes toward the very practice of textuality within the communities-to-come.

Cited authors

Merleau-Ponty Maurice

Husserl Edmund

Derrida Jacques

Marx Karl