Abstract

The thought of Maurice Blondel has been read (representatively by Emmanuel Falque) as the theological aspirational movement of human action towards the divine, and therefore as the pre-emptive presence of the infinite to human experience. In this reading, absent has been the appreciation of an original Blondelian account of finitude as the essential experience of a human being-toward-death. Against this approach, this essay explores Blondel’s notion of human finitude as a ‘metaphysical experience’ of the existentially revelatory function of death. To this extent, Blondel’s account of finitude positions the philosopher of Aix, beyond the usual contexts of twentieth-century Catholic apologetic philosophy, squarely within Continental philosophical proposals of finitude as seen in Heidegger, Foucault, and Deleuze. Blondel brings to prominence a French Spiritualist account of the positive value of endurance and resistance against death as the revelatory site of a finitude that is neither determined by an a priori closed boundary nor theologically overdetermined as an aspiration to the infinite.