ABSTRACT
The mood of Emmanuel Falque's Parisian intellectual climate, still profoundly shaped by the existentialism and atheistic phenomenology that emerged after the Second World War, makes neglecting finitude impossible. If twentieth-century existentialism took anguish to be the hallmark of a sober atheism, Falque discerns the possibility of a reversal. The transformation of time, world, and ourselves produces an alteration in what, in language consciously Heideggerian, Falque describes as the "existentials" or categories of the lived. Though Friedrich Nietzsche might misinterpret Christianity's concept of the body, Falque does acknowledge that, at least within recent phenomenological circles, there arguably is a drift denying the body as Nietzsche alleges Saint Paul had. Falque's idea of a mode of interpretation that advances beyond mere interpretation of textuality will, for some, immediately raise questions as to whether he is flirting with metaphysics. In the flesh, the passions rule to the detriment of both the body and self.
