There is a new move in French philosophy today to come to terms with the death of God more rigorously than ever, and it cannot be understood under the banner of ‘atheism’. No longer can we think in terms of a monolytic atheism or of a single agenda of thinking ‘without God’, for what we see developing is a plurality of perhaps incommensurable approaches to thinking after God. We must not mistake this for a return to God after God, or for the growth of a new postsecular or postreligious philosophy; it is a thinking that tries more fully than ever to have done with God, that tries to remake itself fundamentally as ‘without God’, and on this basis moves beyond the simple term ‘atheism’. This new thinking casts doubt on the claims of all previous atheisms to be without God and its contours indicate the possible future trajectory of French philosophy more broadly. This book will comparatively analyse its different branches and ask whether French thought has yet attained a thinking that is truly without God.

THE OLD GAME: IMITATIVE AND RESIDUAL ATHEISMS

As a prolegomenon to understanding this novelty, we shall begin by briefly sketching two dominant tendencies in post-Enlightenment French atheism, tendencies that are by no means mutually exclusive.