Between 1934 and 1937 Maurice Blondel, the French Roman Catholic philosopher best known for his 1893 work, Action, published a trilogy of writings. Out of these writings came a theological ontology ...of tremendous force, creativity, and coherence. The purpose of the present dissertation is to reassess the viability of Blondel's ontology for contemporary theology. The retrieval begins with John Milbank's 1990 investigation of Blondel's early philosophy. While Milbank focuses on the strengths of Blondel, he also highlights some critical weaknesses. The dissertation argues that Blondel later came to recognize and correct these weaknesses in his trilogy. La pensée, the first volume of the trilogy, discusses the nature and development of thought. Recognizing the ontological structure of thought leads Blondel to present his doctrine of the transnatural élan for assimilation to God. The transnatural desire for God is compared with Henri de Lubac's notion of naturae desiderium and then applied to the modern problem of the relationship between nature and supernature. The second installment of the trilogy, L'être et les êtres , explores the mysterious relation of Being and beings. Blondel situates the discussion within the language of creation, identifying Being as Creator and beings as creatures. The analogy of creation allows him to forge the proper relationship between Being and beings. After Blondel's death, two different schools of thought emerged on the mystery of being: Karl Rahner's Thomism and Jean-Luc Marion's new phenomenology. Each school is reviewed and critiqued from a Blondelian perspective. The trilogy concludes with a long-awaited revision of L'action . It begins by distinguishing the idea of action from action itself and establishing the ontological difference of action. Action is presented ontologically as enacted power, which is investigated in its individual, social, and metaphysical forms. Individual action is identified as making, practicing, and contemplating. Social action is studied next, with the conclusion that the social being of enacted power is determined by either a philosophy of peace or violence. Finally, divine action is evaluated with regards to the language of causality and absolute power. Blondel proposes instead to describe God's activity in terms of pure action.
Enrique Dussel (1934-), professor of philosophy at the llniversidad Autónoma Metropolintana in Mexico, Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), the Lithuanian-born French philosopher and Talmudic scholar, and ...Frantz Fanon (1925 - 1961), a postcolonialist social theorist from the French island of Martinique. Levinas, whose name was made prominent by its association with Jacques Derrida, also had first-hand experience of discrimination and prejudice, spending four years in a German labor camp for being Jewish. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, assistant professor of ethnic studies at the llniversity of California, Berkeley, tries to link these three thinkers and their collective experiences of prejudice, oppression, and marginalization, but it is not clear by the end of the book that he really succeeds in doing so.
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