By Way of Obstacles: A Pathway through a Work [Parcours d’embûches: S’expliquer] is the final volume in Emmanuel Falque’s methodological trilogy. Published in French in 2016 and translated by Sarah Horton, this text comprises Falque’s responses to contributors that were part of a colloquium on his thought in Paris in 2014 (these contributions are collected in a volume edited by Claude Brunier-Coulin entitled, Une analytique du passage: Rencontres et confrontations avec Emmanuel Falque [An Analytic of Passage: Encounters and Confrontations with Emmanuel Falque], Éditions franciscaines, 2016).
Whereas in the first book in the trilogy, Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology (Fordham University Press, 2016 [French 2013]), Falque measures himself alongside the border of philosophy and theology, and in the second, The Loving Struggle: Phenomenological and Theological Debates (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018 [French 2014]), he positions himself alongside some key thinkers in contemporary French philosophy, in this current text—which is a revised “American Edition”—Falque engages in intentional responses to friends and collaborators that offered critiques and challenges to his thinking. Indeed, although this is dropped in the American Edition, in the French version of the book Falque addresses each of the thirty sections to a specific person (e.g., À Jérôme de Gramont), highlighting the personal and intimate nature of Falque’s understanding of academic engagement. In By Way of Obstacles, Falque lays out an overview and trajectory of the themes and ideas in his other works.
Falque is adamant, in this work and especially in The Loving Struggle, that his method, and academic discourse generally (philosophy and theology for him), should always be done with others—never alone. However, it is important to him how this engagement is carried out. He does not seek to destroy or bring down his opponent or disputant; rather, he seeks to reveal more clearly what is at stake, which “always remains that of ‘the thing itself,’ whoever the partners, or even also the adversaries, may be” (xxxiv, emphasis in original). Thus, Falque responds to those in the colloquium not with polemics, but with thanks (xxix) and with generosity (xxxv). In this vein, he highlights the difference between war (polemos) and a clash or struggle (agon), the latter being his preferred approach. The obstacles in his pathway are not viewed as ambushes or traps (one meaning of the French embûches), but merely as hurdles to jump over or clear out of the way (another meaning of embûches) as one continually develops and revises their thinking. By Way of Obstacles should be read, then, as philosophy at its best: a philosopher humbly and graciously responding to his critics in the form of an active struggle, seeking to further our shared understanding of God, life, existence, our bodies, finitude, the relation between philosophy and theology, etc.
It is these key phenomena and themes that, beyond the how of Falque’s proceeding, comprise the what of his investigations. This book, like Falque’s work as a whole, finds its rooting, and so begins, in an existential dimension. For Falque this is his Catholicism, meant first adjectivally before doctrinally (2), and the material conditions and finitude of life, prizing experience over discourse and flesh over logos (3). Whereas for Aquinas and the Scholastics reason (ratio) was shared by all people, Falque argues that today the common starting point for all (philosophical and theological) discourse must be finitude. However, he makes clear that finitude is decoupled from sin (26), and thus is viewed in a positive light (35). Falque carries forward the emphasis on embodiment to his understanding of hermeneutics, which is grounded in the “body and voice” as opposed to emerging from a disembodied language or text (50).
The other main point of emphasis of this book, and on display in his other works, is Falque’s insistence that the border between philosophy and theology be crossed more often and more easily. His discussion of the border and its crossing is engaged fully in Crossing the Rubicon; here, he highlights that the crossing from philosophy and theology and back again is not necessarily an external crossing, but an internal one: “it is in oneself that the highest-intensity ‘internal clashes’ play out” (68, emphasis in original). Falque admits that he is, and will always remain, a philosopher first, yet he freely moves from philosophy to theology and back, and encourages others to do likewise—though he is adamant that they don’t have to. He does this largely because that which is sought in each discipline, die Sache selbst (the thing itself), is shared, and that a plural discursivity is needed to truly render intelligible that which is disclosed to us. Further, he claims that by thinking and writing theologically, one actually becomes a better philosopher, and so at times calls for a theological backlash against philosophy—for example, when it comes to the materiality affirmed in the Incarnation that is often overlooked in contemporary French phenomenology’s discussion of flesh.
Falque is a highly unique academic whose work is still in the process of being recognized and responded to in North America. His other works have been translated and his most recent two are in the process of being translated. Having By Way of Obstacles available to an English-speaking audience contributes to making the whole of Falque’s works accessible. This final volume in Falque’s methodological trilogy can be used as an introduction to his work—revealing to readers both how he thinks and what he thinks about—but it also includes glimpses and outlines of his future works, especially a “theological recapitulation” that focusses on Holy Saturday, the first day of creation, and the last day of the end of time. In that sense, in By Way of Obstacles readers join Falque in the midway point of his academic journey (parcours), getting to come alongside this homo viator (itinerant man) as he seeks to live and respond to the fact of our shared, material existence.
Mark Novak is a sessional instructor in the Department of Classics and Religion at the University of Calgary
Mark Novak
Date Of Review:
March 24, 2023