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This chapter sets forth and critiques Alain Badiou’s account of the death of the God of metaphysics, setting it alongside Jean-Luc Nancy’s critique of the metaphysics of the death of God. Whereas, for Badiou, we do not have the means to be atheist so long as the theme of finitude governs our thinking, Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity questions Badiou’s recourse to the infinite in his account of the birth of philosophy as what Nancy calls a ‘Christmas projection’. The Badiouian actual infinite and Nancy’s finite thinking present two different ways of seeking to move beyond the poles of imitative and residual atheism. This difference raises the question of the coexistence of plural atheisms.

The concluding chapter argues that the differences identified between the three post-theological positions represented by Badiou, Nancy and Meillassoux take us to the heart of what is at stake in the divergence of fundamental orientations in French thought today, namely the divergence between Badiou’s axiom and Idea, Nancy’s deconstruction and the ‘yet without’, and Meillassoux’s demonstration and factiality. For Nancy, post-theological thinking demands an atheology that disengages from the logic of principles and ends; for Badiou an atheism of the Idea must overcome the parasitic One and ascetic finitude with an axiomatised mathematical ontology for which nothing is inaccessible; for Meillassoux the attempt to demonstrate the principle of factiality seeks to liberate him from imitative atheism, while the ‘philosophical divine’ seeks to found a radical hope for future justice on hyperchaos. The conclusion finishes with a meditation on the fundamental orientation of each of the three thinkers, characterised as Badiouian decision, Nancean dis-enclosure and Meillassouxian demonstration.

One of the most innovative and productive readings of Kierkegaard in the 20^th century is offered by Sylviane Agacinski in Aparté. How and why has this book remained separate, apart from the mainstream of Kierkegaard studies? What is the hidden place of Maurice Blanchot within Agacinski's readings of Kierkegaard? What is the relation between Aparté and work Agacinski has done on Kierkegaard since? This chapter responds by noting a discrepancy within Kierkegaard's writings between their meaning and their mode of meaning. The discrepancy results from the function of the image and its relation to all philosophical conceptualization, for instance, as it is enacted in Either/Or. To the degree that the image remains recalcitrant to philosophical thematization it repeats itself everywhere in Kierkegaard's writing in the mode of a secret. Up to a point, Agacinski's reading of Kierkegaard shares this secret. That point—finitude—reaches its limit when she re-encounters Abraham and his faith for the last time.

Any attempt to reinvigorate an Ars moriendi in the twenty-first century requires the acknowledgment and acceptance of human finitude. In this chapter, Jeffrey Bishop demonstrates how finitude threatens both the dying and their doctors. He tells the story of a young patient named Elaine, whose misdiagnosis leads to her early death. Elaine’s story highlights that human beings as well as medical science know limits. Our finitude both brings into focus the things we value most and takes them from us. Finitude demands of us, Bishop argues, a kind of humility before the complexity that characterizes the human being, a humility that seems a prerequisite for the recovery of an Ars moriendi.

In the concluding chapter, the volume editor Lydia Dugdale collects the themes that emerge from the preceding chapters and shows how together they might contribute to the rediscovery of an art of dying. She responds to the concerns raised by Lysaught in chapter 5, and, after reconsidering whether bioethics is in fact suited to the task, concludes that only a very robust bioethics could foster both the contemplation of finitude and the cultivation of community that would be necessary for a present-day Ars moriendi. Returning to the rich complexities of finitude and community, Dugdale outlines the obstacles that impede progress. She concludes by identifying the areas that remain to be explored, recognizing that the contours of this exploration must themselves continue to shift as the needs of dying generations change.

The Bible, taken in its ancient historical context, says little explicitly about the nature of the human being, certainly not in any kind of scientific or philosophical way. It provides no explicit “theological anthropology.” Yet the New Testament, if read with care and creativity, may be seen to teach that the human person is a product of social and cultural construction; that the body, though a unity in some sense, is also made of various parts; that the self is social. The New Testament may help Christians accept the necessary finitude of human beings as a good, not as a flaw of human existence. It may come as a surprise to many people to see what may be learned from an innovative reading of the Bible about human sexuality and desire. Moreover, the value of some very traditional doctrines not popular with most modern people, such as the doctrines of original sin and predestination, may also be rediscovered for our time. And certainly the New Testament is rich for imagining the meaning of salvation and the resurrection of the body—even the “deification” of human beings—for Christians in the 21st century.

This chapter argues that although Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophy has been received as a scientistic realism, its fundamental commitments are shaped by political opposition to Hegelian historicism. By drawing on published fragments of his long-awaited book, The Divine Inexistence, the chapter shows that it is Meillassoux’s rejection of the historical symbol of modernity and its collective politics that leads him to propose replacing it with an individual, ethical orientation guided by speculative philosophy. Read in the context of this wider body of work, Meillassoux’s After Finitude realises the authoritative trajectory set in motion by Althusser and Badiou.

This paper explicates and connects two of Haugeland’s most controversial philosophical claims: his puzzling claim that the characteristic form of intentionality and human understanding is love, and his revisionist interpretation of Heidegger’s account of “existential death” in Being and Time. The former claim responds to Haugeland’s implicit classification and telling criticisms of the predominant alternative conceptions of intentionality. Haugeland argues that these alternatives actually fit different phenomena (“ersatz” or “lapsed” intentionality) that fall short of even the most ordinary human comportments. The latter claim treats “death” as concerned not with human mortality, but with the objective accountability of entire domains of human activity and understanding. Heidegger thereby has a deeper, more adequate account of intentionality and understanding directly complementing Haugeland’s re-conception of intentionality as a form of love. This reading also brings Being and Time into closer critical engagement with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This juxtaposition further illuminates Heidegger’s Kantian emphasis upon the finitude of human understanding, and brings out the political significance of Being and Time in constructively revealing ways despite Heidegger’s own later disastrous political involvement.

This chapter draws on texts by Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt to establish the framework of the book as a whole. For both Arendt and Benjamin, the narrative form is the predominant expression of historical memory, and this chapter emphasizes how both thinkers articulate its relation to the finitude of human experience by virtue of its having a beginning, middle, and an end. While Arendt argues that this structure has been lost in the open-endedness of modern conceptions of progress and Benjamin suggests that its loss has contributed to the demise of storytelling as individual remembrance, the latter nonetheless suggests that something of human finitude has been retained in modernity, even within its commitment to never-ending progress. In the course of the exploration, the chapter argues that this structure of open-endedness can provide a resource for theorizing historical narratives in terms of their withheld endings, or as an experience of reading about the past that is charged with a future-oriented suspense. It pursues this jarring experience of reading the past as one which has the potential to suspend or interrupt a straight-forward conception of linear time.

This chapter examines Spinoza’s declaration that “humility is not a virtue.” Contrary to the claims of the seventeenth-century anti-Spinoza polemic, this declaration does not rehabilitate pride. Indeed, Spinoza is a fierce critic of pride, as demonstrated by his analysis of the affect opposed to humility, acquiescentia in se ipso. As a critic of humility, Spinoza recasts finitude’s emotional valence, making finitude a source of strength, rather than an occasion for self-reproach. As Spinoza demonstrates, reservations about humility need not express delusions of omnipotence. Spinoza is not persuasively cast as a modernist revolutionary, or as a partisan of robust self-esteem.

The conclusion enumerates the conundrums that ensue when theorists try to observe protocols of anonymity consistent with their commitment to modesty as a philosophical virtue. This story about the ironic twists and turns of modesty’s modern career shows how hard it is for early modern philosophers to avoid the temptations of sovereignty. The chapter concludes with a meditation on the implications, for contemporary democratic theory, of the book’s historical argument. Through an engagement with Steven White’s ethos of finitude, the chapter argues that contemporary theorists must beware of contesting sovereignty in ways that reinforce Augustinian assumptions.

This essay compares the work of Jacques Derrida and Henri Birault. Birault was one of the most important French readers of Martin Heidegger in the 1950s and 60s and his work was an significant influence on Derrida's own. Placing Birault's work in the broader reception of Heidegger in France, the essay examines his analysis of finitude and appeal to the ontological difference, showing how Birault related his reading of Heidegger to his Christian beliefs. In showing how Derrida drew on this work in essays and unpublished courses from the early 1960s, the essay provides insight into his early readings of Heidegger and Nietzsche, his understanding of the relationship between ontology and theology, and his concept of “play” [jeu].

This chapter develops a humanistic hermeneutics of the body that points toward the development of a new “Scotist” ethics based on the incommensurable singularity (haecceitas) of each person. Challenging traditional ontologies in which disability is viewed only in terms of privation, and the disabled primarily as objects of care, the author argues that because disability draws our attention to haecceitas in a unique way. Disability is the difference that most clearly and directly confronts us with mortality and the limitations of finitude, whether we are disabled or not.

Although Royce and James are wary of permitting moral holidays (the former forbidding them and the latter recommending against them), Lachs argues that downtime is both needed by finite creatures like us and justifiable, given our plural natures and diverse goods. Rather than supposing our obligations are infinite, we should acknowledge our limits, for this enables us to set clear achievable objectives and to hope for some degree of completion. Consequently, we can justifiably take a moral holiday when it is needed and circumstances permit, though determining when each of these conditions is met requires careful judgment.