Par bien des aspects, Nietzsche peut être considéré comme un philosophe prophétique, même s'il n'emploie lui-même pour se caractériser que la formule « poète-prophète ». Mais, au regard de la conséquence nécessaire de sa conception de la volonté de puissance — à savoir, la doctrine de l'éternel retour —, il devient difficile de maintenir un statut de prophétisme réel dans la mesure où Nietzsche, avec cette doctrine, entend saisir l'unique dynamique possible de l'histoire comme succession de conversions de valeurs, (...) et sauver tout le passé devenu tout aussi nécessaire que l'avenir est prévisible. In good many aspects, Nietzsche could be considered as a prophetic philosopher, even if he uses for characterizing himself only « poet-prophet » formula. But in view of the necessary consequences of his will to power conception, i. e. the eternal return doctrine, a status of real prophetism could be hardly maintained insofar as Nietzsche, with this doctrine, means to understand the only possible dynamics of history as a succession of transvaluations, and to save all the past, turned as necessary as the future is forseable. (shrink)

Résumé Après un échantillon des définitions que propose Tillich de la mystique, cet article analyse les deux tensions qui la caractérisent : celle avec le sacramentalisme ; celle avec le prophétisme. Il s’interroge sur le rapport entre protestantisme et mystique et conclut en se demandant si la mystique est fondamentale ou dérivée.Following a review of Paul Tillich’s definitions of mysticism, this paper analyses the dual tension that characterizes it : firstly in regard to sacramentalism, secondly in regard to prophetism. (...) The author ponders over the relation between protestantism and mysticism, and concludes with the question whether mysticism is a fundamental or derivative phenomenon. (shrink)

Alors que l'eschatologie courante des religions archaïques se situe dans la croyance au retour éternel, au recommencement sans fin d'un monde sans issue, le Dieu d'Israël ouvre un avenir à la foi. Abraham découvre un commencement de l'histoire, un Dieu attentif et plus fort que la mort. Constamment menacé de périr, Israël apprend des prophètes à reconnaître le jugement de Dieu et à reprendre vie dans la foi. À l'horizon d'une histoire de violence, une espérance se profile. L'apocalyptique sera la (...) rencontre du prophétisme avec la sagesse, découverte de l'histoire et de l'univers, attente d'un accomplissement. En parlant ou en faisant parler de lui sous le nom de Fils de l'homme, Jésus définit sa mission d'incarner l'espérance d'Israël étendue à toute l'humanité : en lui l'eschatologie est actuellement présente dans la création de Dieu. While the common eschatology of archaic religions is based on the belief in an eternal return, and endless recommencement of a no-exit world, the God of Israel opens a future to faith. Abraham discovered a beginning to history, an attentive God who is stronger than death. Israel, constantly threatened by destruction, learned from the prophets to recognize the judgement of God and to take up life in faith again. On the horizon of a history of violence, a hope takes form. The apocalyptic will be the encounter of prophetism with wisdom, a discovery of history and the universe, an awaiting for fulfillment. In speaking or in seeing that he is spoken about as Son of Man, Jesus defined his mission to incarnate the hope of Israel, spread to all humanity : in him eschatology is now present in the creation of God. (shrink)

Cet article envisage l’hypothèse révolutionnaire saisie par le vodou dans le contexte actuel d’un mimétisme magico-religieux où le modèle eschatologique pentecôtiste a pris un statut hégémonique. Une lecture du livre Un Arc-en-ciel de René Depestre (1967) permet d’analyser plus finement le risque de voir une poïétique jadis révolutionnaire émanant d’un certain sens commun lié à la représentation du vodou en arriver aujourd’hui à favoriser un prophétisme du pire et à neutraliser la puissance d’agir politique.

Parallèlement à ses ouvrages de philosophe fondamentale dont Soi-même comme un autre représente la dernière étape, Paul Ricoeur n'a cessé de publier des articles dans des revues, mais aussi des préfaces dont la vertu pédagogique n'enlève rien à l'acuité de la pensée. Après lecture 1, consacré à la pensée politique, et Lecture 2, une galerie de portraits où défilent les grandes figures de la pensée du XXe siècle, Lecture 3 s'aventure aux " frontières de la philosophie ". Après une enquête (...) préliminaire sur le rôle de la philosophie de la religion dans les systèmes philosophiques de Kant et de Hegel, il traverse ces deux massifs de la pensée post-hégélienne que représente l'Etoile de la Rédemption de Franz Rosenzweig et l'œuvre d'Emmanuel Lévinas, en laquelle il voit d'abord une méditation vigoureuse sur le " témoignage ". S'écartant progressivement du logos philosophique ou de pensées qui ont entrepris de le déborder, Paul Ricoeur traite ensuite du prophétisme, du tragique et du mal. Autant d'interrogations qui fragilisent la spéculation et résistent à une appréhension conceptuelle, mais jamais Ricoeur ne franchit indûment les frontières entre philosophie et non-philosophie, entre philosophie et théologie. Plus que tout autre objet de réflexion, le mal se présente comme un défi décisif pour le philosophe et donc comme une invitation à relancer le travail de la pensée. Parallèlement à son œuvre philosophique, Ricoeur a beaucoup lu et interprété à la Bible, ce récit dont les " essais d'herméneutique " réunis ici montrent l'ampleur des réflexions qu'il suscite. Complètement indispensable de Temps et Récit et de Soi-même comme un autre, Lecture 3 témoigne d'un autre " régime de la pensée " qui souligne l'importance de l'œuvre de Paul Ricoeur. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Rhetoric of Romantic ProphecySara GuyerThe Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Ian BalfourStanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Pp. 368. $70.00, cloth; $29.95, paperback.Not insignificantly, Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot are the first two names to appear in Ian Balfour's excellent study The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Benjamin and Blanchot are authors of two of the most influential essays on romanticism, essays that, it just so happens, Ian Balfour is (...) responsible for introducing to an English-reading audience. 1 Thus, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is not only a long awaited, prize-winning book by a major theorist of romanticism, it is also a book written by the first English translator of Benjamin's and Blanchot's essays. Both Blanchot's "The Athenaeum" and Benjamin's "On the Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" expose the incompletion of the romantic project and unsettle the relation between the past and the present. They also provide a context for understanding the kind of book that Ian Balfour has written. Like its eminent predecessors, this book focuses on local phenomena, yet its force far exceeds the field that it so thoughtfully treats. In it, Balfour shows how a turn to the past (to a set of historical texts) has the effect of unsettling the present, and he argues that an apparent turn to the future (prophecy) has as its issue the present.The book's introduction, entitled "The Call of Prophecy and the Future (After Benjamin)," alerts us to the fact that Benjamin and Blanchot, who have written extensively on language, also have written compellingly on the prophetic. While the prophetic today most often seems to signify religion's naive or violent claims on the future (and by implication on the present), in Benjamin's and Blanchot's work—and in Balfour's work—"the prophetic" (by which Balfour means not a genre, but a "mode") poses problems of referentiality and interpretation. Benjamin's treatment of messianism and allegory in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" offers Balfour a clear framework for undertaking this examination. And, in style and approach, Benjamin is the thinker with whom Balfour has the closest kinship. Like Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Balfour's The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy is a historical study that is not historicist, that is, it does not aim to account for a historical phenomenon, but is a philosophical and rhetorical investigation into language.However, it is Blanchot's brief essay "Prophetic Speech"—a review of André Neher's L'essence du prophétisme—that informs Balfour's thinking about the prophetic. Indeed, Balfour's book can be read as a meditation on the rhetorical implications of Blanchot's suggestion that: [End Page 257]Prophetic speech announces an impossible future, or makes the future it announces, because it announces it, something impossible, a future one would not know how to live and that must upset all the sure givens of existence. When speech becomes prophetic it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence. 2With this passage, Blanchot not only recasts the conventional account of prophecy (and, implicitly, the symbolic reading upon which prophecy relies), but also shows that if prophecy turns the future into a referent—and hence becomes history—the present is lost. Balfour's transfer of Blanchot's account of the prophetic to romanticism is broadly explained by the debates within romanticism (and contemporary criticism of romanticism) about referentiality and the primacy of symbol over allegory, debates that today are most well-known to non-romanticists through Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality."Balfour offers a lucid account of his project—and its relation to history and historicist criticism—when he explains:If there is a historical force to the analysis here, it lies not in the attempt to show how representative these texts were of some larger, pervasive phenomenon—although they sometimes are—but rather to mark what was possible to be thought and done at a given moment. More than that, the analysis implicitly and sometimes explicitly confronts... (shrink)

England in the 1650s was the scene of a long series of prophetic and protest exhibitions of naked men and women in public places (streets, churches, universities...), causing scandal and misunderstanding among most of the public. These women and men went naked “as a sign”, thus renewing an episode of the Old Testament (Isaiah 20.2-3) by which they denounced the spiritual “nudity”, of those before whom they were exhibiting themselves. This practice sought to demonstrate what God was about to inflict (...) on them : a laying bare, a complete stripping of all their possessions, powers and social prerogatives. A gendered approach to these exhibitions of nudity reveals the theological-political and social stakes of a phenomenon that accompanied the birth and development of the Quaker movement and spread as far as New England. (shrink)