The Uses and Abuses of Husserl's Doctrine of Immanence: The Specter of Spinozism in Phenomenology's Theological Turn

An assessment of the phenomenological soundness of the theological turn requires not only an understanding of the reduction and its relation to transcendence, but also an understanding of the several senses of immanence as Husserl understood them. Such an account, I shall argue, reveals a phenomenological sense of immanence hospitable to theological interests and a Spinozistic sense of immanence incompatible with phenomenology even if theologically interesting. For reasons quite different than Janicaud has advanced, I shall claim that Marion's proposal of radical immanence - one supported by Michel Henry's most unapologetic view of immanence in the theological turn - is unphenomenological because it amounts to a Spinozism that phenomenology cannot countenance. But this need not mean that a more charitable reading of Husserl's reduction and corresponding theory of phenomenological immanence may not be able to provide a portal for phenomenological theology.