ABSTRACT
Lacoste’s second book, Experience and the Absolute, articulated a theology of place, its predecessor, Note sur le temps, sought, by offering a theology of time, to invert another of the Kantian categories.1 While possessed of rather an anarchic character – conceived backwards from an eschatological referent (Parousia) that is always to come, and characterized by a phenomenology of anticipation – the act of prayer remains a temporal and ontic activity. Simply put, praying takes time; it may, if measured according to the economic criteria of the present nihilistic age, be considered ‘a waste of time’: that is, it represents an activity of surplus outwith the usual daily pattern of work, an activity that points towards a desire and a satisfaction other than the material or economic and thus to a different account of human flourishing. It is, though, according to the anarchic logic implicit in Lacoste’s work, nonetheless a worthwhile activity. When a thinker such as Marion suggests that Kant’s assertion that ‘all appearances are in time’2 depends upon presupposing time as a horizon against which all phenomena must appear, he contests this presupposition by arguing that saturated phenomena cannot be restricted to any particular horizon. Lacoste states that within a broad understanding of event-uality or event-ness [événementialité] ‘it is obvious that nothing appears to us outside of the horizon of time’ (ED 42).
