Joeri Schrijvers’ latest study in contemporary Continental philosophy and the possibility of the religious steers immediately toward very familiar terrain: the possibility of atheism, the phenomenon of secularism, and the “return of religion” in recent Continental thought. Considering a number of popular writers, such as John Caputo, Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Sloterdijk, and Jean-Luc Marion, to name only the most prominent, Schrijvers not only looks to how their arguments are rooted in the nuanced philosophies of Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, but also begins to critique the narrow interests they maintain in attempting to overcome ontotheology and metaphysics once and for all (the subject too of his earlier study, Ontotheological Turnings, also with SUNY Press). Such efforts, according to Schrijvers, are really a matter of philosophical hubris—that is, of presenting a totalizing narrative that really cannot be declared as such to exist as an enclosed space. By focusing on lesser-known figures such as Reiner Schürmann and Ludwig Binswanger, Schrijvers deftly parses the arguments given for moving beyond Christianity in the work of several of the aforementioned authors, and advances a position that faith without belief is “phenomenologically impossible,” as this formulation leaves our embodied existence out of the picture. In short, these critiques of metaphysics attempt to present a world without love and a love without world.

Schrijvers mounts a subtle criticism but also defense of tradition in this book through the turn to love and life as they “outwit” tradition, while simultaneously grounding themselves in it. It is the task of the book as a whole to preserve metaphysics as a possibility through a philosophical account of incarnation developed alongside Binswanger's phenomenology of love. By contrasting Binswanger with Heidegger, in order to elucidate a phenomenology of religious life, Schrijvers promotes a more robust, intersubjective way of being in the world that can more adequately account for the role of love in one's life—an acknowledgment too of the necessity for being with others (and otherness itself) that describes how we, ontically, do exist in our world, and in the lived institutions and religions that comprise it. We cannot simply abandon such ways of being in the world in favor of a purely abstracted critique of every institutional order.

The other before us gives us something that we cannot give ourselves, and, to put things rather bluntly, this matters a good deal in terms of how we experience life and love. To abstractly develop an anarchic, gnostic, or antinomian critique of all institutional, systematic, ordered, and religious ways of being in our world without acknowledging our embodied (“incarnational”) reality of needing such forms (such as he charges Caputo, Nancy, and Sloterdijk of aiding) is to miss a major feature of what it means to be human. Though this may sound like an overly simplistic account of Schrijvers’ rigorous treatment of a much more complex argumentation as it is pursued in each thinker's works, it is a major strength of the book that he is able to distill matters into such clear lines of thought.

What struck me time and again while reading this book was its entirely readable quality, as if I were listening to someone who wasn't trying to hastily dispatch a difficult argument but has such a strong grasp of the field as to render their commentary in crisp and lucid prose. This book is a reliable guide to a series of ongoing debates in Continental thought that have seemed for some time to be at an impasse. My intuition is that this impasse has mainly resulted from somewhat partisan entrenchments (phenomenology versus deconstruction) that refuse to engage with the connections between diverse methodologies. Schrijvers’ fine work navigates this impasse with precision and fairness, and thereby gives us a path forward for maintaining embodied religious practice in our world today.