Circulus Vitiosus Deus: Merleau-Ponty's Ontology of Ontology

Author(s): Frank Chouraqui (Leiden University) Year: 2016 Type: Journal article (Studia Phaenomenologica XVI, pp. 469–487)

A focused journal-article treatment of the *circulus vitiosus deus* motif — specifically, Merleau-Ponty's appropriation of Nietzsche's phrase (BGE 56) in two February 1959 working notes to The Visible and the Invisible. Chouraqui reads the phrase as the figure of MP's "ontology of ontology": an ontology that must account for its own existence within the Being it describes. This is a focused extension of Chouraqui's 2014 book on the same theme, not a restatement. Where the 2014 book treats the circulus as a structural motif organizing the convergence between Nietzsche and MP on Being as self-falsification, the 2016 article goes deeper on four fronts: (1) the theological dimension (the Deus part of the phrase); (2) the philological background of MP's Nietzsche sources; (3) the formal double-circle structure (hyperdialectics / surreflexion); and (4) the political-ethical consequence — a formal definition of fanaticism.

Core Arguments

Claim: Both Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty face the same phenomenological problem — illusions resist dismissal, they must be accounted for. Simple rejection is incoherent because it cannot explain how what is rejected comes to be. The "problem" (Nietzsche's word, at KSA 10[192]) shifts from the essence of illusion to its being: "what is it to be an illusion?" Because: Phenomenology is committed to the given. If critique is a responsibility and illusions are given, critique is the responsibility to explain illusion ontologically, not dismiss it. This is the shared Nietzsche–MP starting point. Against: Skepticism and atheism-as-denial; the Parmenidian alternative of being / non-being; any critique that thinks calling an illusion "illusion" suffices. Chouraqui alludes to Plato's Sophist as the first attempt to open a new ontological category for "the being of illusion."
Claim: For both thinkers, absoluteness itself is the signature of illusion. Self-identical, fully determinate objects are always and in principle illusory. Any recuperation of illusion is therefore a recuperation of the absolute in a non-absolute form. Because: The PP Cogito chapter (PP 373) already argues that the absolute cogito leading to coincidence with God is precisely the impossibility: a fully self-identical subject lacks the distance needed for self-awareness. God as ens realissimum is contradictory. Full determinacy is the "death of consciousness" (PP 86). The impossibility of the absolute is not a defeat — it is the condition of phenomenological experience. Against: Sartre's ontology (absolute externality of being and nothingness); the Cartesian ontological argument; any dialectic that sees determinacy as achievement.
Claim: Phenomenology cannot abandon the sacred; it must elucidate it — but the elucidation is atheistic in form even when it is not in content. Faith is an intentional relation, and its object, if taken as absolute, is incompatible with the relation. Faith testifies not to any form of the absolute but to "faith as a (possibly empty) intentional relation." Because: MP's response to Henri de Lubac in Praise of Philosophy: "so little is this problem ignored by the philosopher that on the contrary, he radicalizes it and places it above those solutions that choke it to death" (Praise 49). Chouraqui reads this as MP's extension of the Cogito critique to the Cartesian ontological argument: whenever the absolute becomes an object of thought, it therefore ceases to be absolute. "Philosophy, which never places the sacred here or there, as a thing, but at the junction of things and words, shall always be exposed to [the accusation of atheism] without being able to touch upon it" (Praise 49). Against: De Lubac's Drama of Atheist Humanism (1944), which Chouraqui takes as a paradigmatic theistic critique of philosophers like MP.
Claim: The two February 1959 V&I working notes — "The Tacit Cogito and the Speaking Subject" and "Genealogy of Logic, History of Being, History of Sense" — are the texts in which MP radicalizes the PP Cogito into an ontological principle and introduces the circulus vitiosus Deus figure as its formal expression. Because: In these notes, MP urges himself to "say that I must show that what could be regarded as 'psychology' (Ph. of Perception) is really ontological" (VI 227). The cogito that in PP showed how transcendence constitutes our understanding of the world now gets radicalized to constitute being itself. With this shift, MP loses access to the traditional psychological explanation of the sacred (à la Freud's Future of an Illusion) and must constitute the sacred as an aspect of the flesh — structured by "Offenheit of the Umwelt" (VI 227). It is in the same note that the circulus vitiosus Deus first appears (VI 231), characterizing simultaneously three things: (a) the structure of Being; (b) the structure of any proper ontological account of being; and (c) the structure of the relations between being and the philosophy of being. Against: Readings of the PP Cogito as a psychological thesis that MP simply retracted. Chouraqui: the move from psychology to ontology is not a retraction but a radicalization.
Claim: MP's philological sources on Nietzsche are sparse but traceable. The only verifiable written sources are Henri de Lubac's Drama of Atheist Humanism (1944) — which translates circulus vitiosus Deus as "a vicious, circular God" — and Heidegger's Nietzsche Vol. II, which glosses the phrase as "the collective character of Being as a whole." The most important conduit, however, is probably Jean Wahl's Sorbonne course on late Nietzsche (1959–1961), which MP attended and which is contemporaneous with the Circulus notes. Because: Chouraqui's footnotes trace every one of MP's few Nietzsche references back to one of these sources. MP "did not develop first-hand knowledge of [Nietzsche] until the last months of his life." Consequence: Chouraqui's reading of MP on Nietzsche must go through Nietzsche directly rather than via MP's sources, since there is no rich intertextual record to follow.
Claim: Nietzsche himself connects absolute God to the Teufel (devil). At KSA 35[72], 1885, he writes: "a single God would only ever amount to a devil [Teufel]!" Combined with the German idiom Teufelskreis (literally "devil's circle," the ordinary German for "vicious circle"), this means Nietzsche's phrase circulus vitiosus Deus is philologically a "devil's circle" — and the God who becomes a devil when taken as absolute is precisely what the phrase names. Because: The aphorism at KSA 35[72] anticipates the logic of BGE 56 two years later. As soon as God is conceived as absolute, self-enclosed, lacking an outside, it becomes a devil: God's divinity is lost in its absolute status, for God is only conceivable if it has an outside. "Nietzsche eventually comes to see the godliness of God in relationality itself... God is what faith sees when it looks into a mirror and fails to recognize itself: God is reflexivity." Consequence: MP's borrowing of the phrase — whether or not he knew the KSA entry — picks up exactly the figure that names the self-subversion of the absolute into a devil's circle. Against: Readings that treat MP's quotation of Nietzsche as a philological curiosity. Chouraqui: the convergence is deeper than historical accident.
Claim: MP's "Syge, the abyss" reference in the V&I note is to Claudel's Art poétique, not to Heidegger's "Sige" (silence). Because: The reference is to a specific passage in Claudel (1984: 61): "Time is the invitation to death, an invitation sent out to every phrase to come and decompose itself within a total and explicative harmony to consummate the adoring speech by whispering it in the ears of Syge, the abyss." Chouraqui reads Claudel's "Syge" as the figure of "death by full determinacy" — consistent with MP's PP 86 on the "absolute positing of a single object [as] the death of consciousness, since it congeals the whole of existence, as a crystal placed in a solution suddenly crystallizes it." Consequence: The abyss is not Heidegger's quiet of Being but Claudel's "total and explicative harmony" that kills the phrase it completes. Determinacy is the abyss; the circle refuses the abyss by remaining open. Against: Readings that assume the reference is Heideggerian.
Claim: MP's "verticality" or "ascension sur place" (VI 177) is the mechanism that makes philosophical discourse an activity of being over itself, not an external commentary on being. Because: "The 'reflection' that I practice is not a return to the 'conditions of possibility' — and that is why it is an 'ascent on the spot'" (VI 177). Reflection is a layering of itself, a vertical process rather than a transcendental step outside. The accumulative activity of the constituting flesh is a layering of being over itself. It is precisely because of verticality that MP can describe the process in circular terms. The vertical and the circular are two figures for the same mechanism: philosophy as a moment of the sedimentation it describes. Against: The Kantian-transcendental model of reflection as stepping outside the conditions of experience.
Claim: Circularity is the only non-contradictory form the absolute can take, and the circle is "difference that never leads into the different" (VI 228) — the structural form of differentiation without differentiated terms. Because: Faith is always faith in something (intentional reference, VI 292), but if its object cannot be absolute, then faith and its object become two aspects of the same thing that constantly aim at each other in a circular fashion. The circle is the structural form of faith-without-an-absolute-object. The circle is also "the ground of the half-object" (VI 49) — it contains differentiation without committing to fully differentiated terms. Consequence: The circle, unlike polar dialectics, preserves both unity (generality) and difference (the movement of differentiation) without synthesis.
Claim: The circle doubles over — there are two circles, not one — and the doubling is the definitive mark of an "ontology of ontology." Because: Within V&I, circular ontology becomes aware of itself as circular. The first circle is the wandering of intentionality between its poles (determination of beings). The second circle is the ontological-awareness circle (determination of Being). Every point on the first is also a point on the second: the philosophical statement of the first circle is itself a sedimentation, and therefore an event of the second. Chouraqui gives a concrete example: when I perceive a vase and institute it as a vase, (a) I am making the vase a moment of the determination of the beings, and (b) I am making it a moment of the determination of Being — because by virtue of intra-ontology, Being is attained through the beings only. A single act is simultaneously on both circles. MP's own formulation (VI 229): "the intentional, circular implication [must be doubled over by the] Philosophy-History circularity." Against: Any ontology that stands outside its own object.
Claim: Hyperdialectics and surreflexion are the formal names for the double-circle structure — MP's terms for ontology that includes its own place in its object. Because: At VI 127, MP calls the double-circle move "hyperdialectics"; at VI 60 and 69, he calls it "surreflexion." Chouraqui identifies these as naming the ontology-of-ontology move. This is a refinement of how these concepts should be understood — they are not just "dialectic without synthesis" or "reflection taking its own genesis into account" but specifically the mechanism that makes the book V&I itself a moment of the Being it describes. Related: Kaushik 2013 gives further discussion of these concepts' implications for the place of ontology within Being.
Claim: The infinite regress problem ("does naming the double circle create a third circle, ad infinitum?") is solved by the Proustian model: The end of philosophy is the tale of its beginning (VI 229). MP explicitly models the closure of V&I on Proust's closure of the Recherche — the moment when the narrator decides to write the book we have just finished reading. Because: The circle is not closed by attainment (that would be the death of consciousness) but by narration of its own movement. Proust's Recherche closes when the narrator reaches the moment of its own beginning. Analogously, philosophy closes when it narrates its own genesis as part of the movement it described. The closure is the moment where the book's own existence becomes visible as part of the movement the book described. Against: Readings that take the regress as a defect. Chouraqui: the regress is the form of history itself, and the Proustian narration is the form closure takes in a world without an absolute endpoint.
Claim: Being is a failed circle — a circle that remains open, that cannot close onto itself, because every closure brings a new sedimentation and initiates a new circle. This "failure of thought to attain innocence" is the "point where reason culminates." Because: MP names three things with three words — "interrogation" (our perpetual awe), "research" (our walking in circle), and "Being" (that which never fully is) (Eye and Mind, 1960b: 92). The culmination of reason is the recognition of the circle's failure to close, not its overcoming.
Claim: MP's "great deceiver" — the recuperated God of the ontology of ontology — is the "absolute of appearance" he praises Nietzsche alongside Hegel for maintaining. Because: In the Notes de Cours, MP calls this absolute God "on the basis that it satisfies the true intuition that was always lodged within faith (the intuition of a generality), although of course, not in the way faith intended, not as an existing self-identical God." Faith's intuition is preserved; faith's object is reformulated. This God resembles an evil genius: "In a world bewitched, the question is not to know who is right, who follows the truest course, but who is a match for the great deceiver, and what action will be tough and supple enough to bring it to reason" (MP, Signs 55). The great deceiver is appearance itself, generative and self-producing, "making our world." Belief in any absolute outside the great deceiver — any ens realissimum — is "belief in nothing." Against: Theism in the classical sense; naturalistic atheism as mere denial.
Claim: The ethical-political consequence of the circle is a formal definition of fanaticism. A belief is fanatical not in virtue of its content but in virtue of the way it is held. Any belief that subjects itself to a crude truth/falsity alternative, or takes place within a univocal view of being, violates the structural interdiction against believing in self-identical objects. Because: Since self-identical objects are structurally contradictory, any belief held as absolute — independently of what it is about — violates the same structural constraint. This recasts the problem of fanaticism in an open society: the distinction is not between true beliefs and false beliefs, but between beliefs held as circles (faithful to intentional reference without absolutizing the object) and beliefs held as absolutes (fanatical). Consequence: Chouraqui connects this to Husserl's declaration in Ideen I §49 that the thing-in-itself is a contradiction. MP gives the ethical consequences of this phenomenological founding thesis. Against: Content-based criteria for fanaticism; naive defenses of religious belief as immune to formal critique.

Key Findings

The two V&I working notes at the focus are both from February 1959: "The Tacit Cogito and the Speaking Subject" and "Genealogy of Logic, History of Being, History of Sense." These are the texts where MP explicitly radicalizes the PP Cogito into an ontological principle — and where circulus vitiosus Deus appears as the figure for what this radicalization commits him to.
MP's Nietzsche is Wahl's Nietzsche. Chouraqui identifies Jean Wahl's 1959–1961 Sorbonne course as the most probable conduit for MP's late knowledge of Nietzsche. The Circulus notes are contemporaneous with the course. This is philologically important and previously under-noticed.
Claudel, not Heidegger, is the source of "Syge, the abyss". The reference in the V&I note is to Art poétique (Claudel 1984: 61), not to Heidegger's "Sige" (silence of Being). This is a specific philological correction.
Nietzsche's "single God would only ever amount to a devil" (KSA 35[72]) anticipates the logic of BGE 56. Combined with the German Teufelskreis pun, the phrase circulus vitiosus Deus is philologically a "devil's circle" — the absolute God becomes a devil; the circle is the form of that becoming.
The double-circle structure is the article's formal contribution: the first circle is perception's determination of beings; the second is ontology's determination of Being. Every point of the first is also a point of the second. Naming the second circle creates a third, ad infinitum — which the Proustian model resolves through narration rather than attainment.
Hyperdialectics and surreflexion are formally identified as the names for this double-circle structure. This is Chouraqui's refinement of these MP terms.
"Being" is defined by what never fully is (MP, Eye and Mind 92) — the failed circle, the walking-in-circle that MP calls "research," the perpetual awe he calls "interrogation."
The political consequence: fanaticism is defined formally, not contentfully. Any belief held as absolute is structurally contradictory.

Methodology

Close reading of two February 1959 working notes to The Visible and the Invisible ("The Tacit Cogito and the Speaking Subject" and "Genealogy of Logic, History of Being, History of Sense," in VI 1979 edition, pp. 177, 227, 229, 230–231, 292, 225, 228, 49). Chouraqui supplements this with (a) the PP Cogito chapter on God; (b) MP's response to Lubac in Praise of Philosophy; (c) the Notes de Cours from 1959–1961; (d) MP's "The Philosopher and the Sociologist" in Signs; (e) Eye and Mind; (f) a direct reading of Nietzsche's BGE 56 and the contemporaneous notebook entries (KSA 35[72], 38[12], 10[192], 7[62]). He does not engage primarily through MP's sources (Lubac, Heidegger, Wahl) but uses them to set the philological frame for a direct Nietzsche-to-MP comparison.

The method is what Chouraqui elsewhere calls "intra-ontology": reconstructing MP's argument through MP's own engagement with the texts MP was reading, while leaving space for readings MP himself did not explicitly make but that the texts warrant.

Concepts Developed

circulus-vitiosus-deus — the article's titular concept. Chouraqui gives a philologically thick reading that (a) identifies the self-subversion encoded in Deus/Teufel, (b) traces MP's sources to Lubac, Heidegger, and Wahl, and (c) formalizes the three things the phrase names: Being's structure, the structure of any ontological account, and the relation between them.
"Ontology of ontology" (the article's subtitle) — the ontological account that includes its own existence within the Being it describes. Distinct from traditional ontology (which stands outside its object) and from direct Heideggerian ontology (which Chouraqui sees as still claiming a view from nowhere).
Double circle: first circle = determination of beings (within perception); second circle = determination of Being (ontology itself). V&I is itself a moment of the second. Naming the second creates a third, ad infinitum — closed by the Proustian model of narration.
Verticality / ascension sur place (MP's VI 177): reflection as a layering of itself rather than a transcendental stepping outside. The vertical is how the circle gets its temporal thickness.
"Difference that never leads into the different" (VI 228): MP's formula for the circle; Chouraqui uses it as the structural characterization that distinguishes the circle from polar dialectics.
"The great deceiver" / "absolute of appearance": MP's recuperated God. Not an entity but a generality that "satisfies the true intuition that was always lodged within faith." Appearance itself is the abyss; its absoluteness is its generative deceit.
Formal definition of fanaticism: belief held as absolute, independent of content. The formal consequence of the structural interdiction against self-identical objects.

Concepts Referenced

flesh-as-element — the article assumes and refines MP's ontology of flesh, particularly through the verticality framing
hyper-dialectic — the 2016 article identifies hyperdialectics as the formal name for the double-circle structure; this is a refinement of the existing page's gloss
hyper-reflection — MP's surreflexion is the same structure; the 2016 article uses the French term and identifies it with hyperdialectics
self-falsification — the thesis from the 2014 book; the circulus is its structural figure
phenomenon-of-truth — the intentional-reference structure underlying faith
self-differentiation — the structural form that makes the circle possible
intercorporeity, chiasm, reversibility, visible-invisible, ecart — the apparatus of MP's late ontology, all presupposed
nonphilosophy — the relation between philosophy and its outside, given a circular structure here
interrogation — the name MP gives to the "perpetual awe" that is the culmination of reason

Key Passages

The three-fold characterization of the phrase (§1.2)

The circulus vitiosus Deus is meant to characterize at once:

The structure of being,
The structure of any proper ontological account of being, and
The structure of the relations between being and the philosophy of being.

This is Chouraqui's formal statement of what the phrase does.

MP's self-radicalization of the Cogito

"Say that I must show that what could be regarded as 'psychology' (Ph. of Perception) is really ontological. Show this by indicating that the being of science can neither be nor be conceived as selbständig." (MP, VI 227)

The circulus note itself

"I will be able to take a final position in ontology and to specify its theses in an exact manner only after the series of reductions that are developed in the book and that are all contained in the last one, this reversal itself — circulus vitiosus Deus — is not hesitation, bad faith and bad dialectic, but the return to Syge, the abyss." (MP, VI 230–231)

The vertical mechanism

"The 'reflection' that I practice is not a return to the 'conditions of possibility' — and that is why it is an 'ascent on the spot' [ascension sur place]." (MP, VI 177)

Nietzsche's devil

"a single God would only ever amount to a devil [Teufel]!" (Nietzsche, KSA 35[72], 1885) — note the German pun: Teufelskreis = vicious circle = literally "devil's circle"

Nietzsche's BGE 56 (as Chouraqui gives it in the article)

"Whoever has, like me, had to come to grips with a mysterious urge to think pessimism through to its depths and to redeem it [...] may have thereby opened his eyes to the opposite ideal [...] — what, and this wouldn't be — circulus vitiosus Deus?" (Nietzsche, BGE 56)

The nested epigraph (§1.2)

"This mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my Beyond Good and Evil, without goal unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal, without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself." (Nietzsche, KSA 38[12], 1885)

MP on the "problem" of the sacred (contra Lubac)

"So little is this problem ignored by the philosopher that on the contrary, he radicalizes it and places it above those solutions that choke it to death." (MP, Praise 49)

"[A]ny philosophy that defines the sacred differently [from a self-identical God] is bound to be called atheistic, and [...] philosophy, which never places the sacred here or there, as a thing, but at the junction of things and words, shall always be exposed to this accusation without being able to touch upon it." (MP, Praise 49)

Claudel's Syge

"Time is the invitation to death, an invitation sent out to every phrase to come and decompose itself within a total and explicative harmony to consummate the adoring speech by whispering it in the ears of Syge, the abyss." (Claudel, Art poétique, 1984: 61)

The double circle

"The intentional, circular implication [must be doubled over by the] Philosophy-History circularity." (MP, VI 229)

"We shall close the circle after the study of the logos and of history just as Proust closes the circle when he comes to the moment when the narrator decides to write. The end of philosophy is the tale of its beginning." (MP, VI 229)

"the importance that this Besinnung possesses for the physis" (MP, VI 229) — philosophical reflection is consequential for physical being

On philosophy as an event of its own object

"Philosophy is irreplaceable because it reveals to us the movement through which lives become truths, and the circularity of this peculiar being which, in a certain sense, is already everything it will come to think." (MP, "The Philosopher and the Sociologist," Signs 122)

Interrogation, research, Being

"[the] point where reason culminates [by] recognizing this slipping of the ground below our footsteps, by pompously calling 'interrogation' our state of perpetual awe, calling 'research' our walking in circle [cheminement en cercle], and calling 'Being' this that never fully is [ce qui n'est jamais tout-à-fait]." (MP, Eye and Mind, OE 92)

The great deceiver

"In a world bewitched, the question is not to know who is right, who follows the truest course, but who is a match for the great deceiver, and what action will be tough and supple enough to bring it to reason." (MP, Signs 55)

What's Not Obvious

Three claims that would not appear in a conventional summary of this article:

The German Teufelskreis pun is philosophically load-bearing, not just a philological curiosity. Chouraqui's footnote 26 buries an observation that reorganizes the entire reading of BGE 56: the ordinary German for "vicious circle" is Teufelskreis, which literally means "devil's circle." Combined with Nietzsche's KSA 35[72] assertion that "a single God would only ever amount to a devil [Teufel]!", Nietzsche's circulus vitiosus Deus is philologically a "devil's circle" of the Deus-become-Teufel. The phrase encodes its own self-subversion: as soon as God is taken as absolute, it becomes a devil; the circle is the form of that becoming. A conventional summary would treat the footnote as a linguistic aside; Chouraqui uses it to establish that the convergence between Nietzsche and MP is deeper than historical accident. MP borrows — possibly without knowing the KSA entry — exactly the phrase that names the self-subversion of the absolute. This reframes the article's central question: what MP quotes, via Lubac and Heidegger, is a figure that names its own undoing.
The Proustian solution to the infinite regress is not an analogy — it is MP's explicit structural model. A superficial reading of §2.3 would treat the Proust reference as illustrative: "like Proust's Recherche, MP's book closes by narrating its own beginning." Chouraqui's point is stronger: MP explicitly models the closure of V&I on Proust's closure of the Recherche (VI 229, cited by Chouraqui as the answer to the infinite regress question raised in §2.3). "We shall close the circle after the study of the logos and of history just as Proust closes the circle when he comes to the moment when the narrator decides to write." The Proustian model solves the regress because closure is not attainment but narration of movement — the book is the moment in which its own movement becomes visible as part of the movement it described. This is not analogy; it is the structural claim that narrative closure is the only non-contradictory form of ontological closure under the double-circle structure. Readers who miss this will think Chouraqui has surrendered the regress problem.
The political consequence is not an afterthought — it is the article's payoff, and it is more radical than it looks. The one paragraph in §3 on fanaticism is easy to read as MP giving a token contemporary application of an otherwise technical argument. Chouraqui's framing is stronger: fanaticism is defined formally, not contentfully, which means that the distinction between "reasonable belief" and "fanatical belief" cannot be drawn by examining what a belief is about. The distinction is drawn by examining how the belief is held — specifically, whether it is held within the circle (faith as intentional reference, honoring the non-absoluteness of its object) or as an absolute (violating the structural interdiction against self-identical objects). This recasts the whole problem of an open society: the defense of free belief does not protect content but form. A belief held as absolute is structurally contradictory regardless of whether its content is true. This is Chouraqui taking Husserl's Ideen I §49 declaration that the thing-in-itself is a contradiction and cashing it out as an ethics of how one relates to one's own beliefs. A conventional summary would file this under "further implications"; Chouraqui lets it stand as the article's culmination.

Critique / Limitations

The Claudel / Heidegger / Sige question is not fully resolved. Chouraqui asserts that MP's "Syge, the abyss" reference is to Claudel's Art poétique, not to Heidegger's "Sige" (silence of Being). But "Syge" is a transliteration of the Greek sigē (silence), a term Heidegger discusses in his later writings on the Seinsfrage, and the Heideggerian resonance is hard to filter out. Chouraqui's philological claim is probably right about MP's immediate source, but the claim that Heidegger is not involved at all is a simplification. A Claudel-reading of MP's reference does not exclude a Heidegger-reading of the Greek root the Claudel text itself is drawing on.
The Proust analogy is elegant but not demonstrated as philosophically sound. The move from "Proust's Recherche closes by narrating its own beginning" to "MP's V&I closes the same way" relies on an analogy that is suggestive rather than rigorous. Chouraqui does not examine whether narrative closure can actually solve an ontological regress, or whether the analogy smuggles a literary solution into an ontological problem. The question of whether MP's model can support the weight placed on it is not examined.
The assumed commensurability of Nietzsche's and MP's "series of reductions". Chouraqui moves from Nietzsche's "series of reductions" (his reading of BGE 56) to MP's "series of reductions" in V&I without arguing that the two uses of "reduction" are commensurable. Nietzsche's is a genealogy of concepts; MP's is a phenomenological method. The identification is plausible but not defended.
The political consequence is thin. The one-paragraph formal definition of fanaticism in §3 is gestured at rather than developed. Operationalizing "the way a belief is held" without contentful criteria is hard, and the article does not show how this would work in actual cases.
The article relies heavily on secondary scholarship for its non-philological claims (Saint Aubert on God-Being equivalence; Kaushik on hyperdialectics/surreflexion). These references are load-bearing but not independently argued.

Connections

extends chouraqui-2014-ambiguity-and-absolute — the 2016 article is a focused extension of the 2014 book's treatment of the circulus-vitiosus-deus motif, deepening the theological dimension and the formal double-circle structure that the book treats more compressedly in its Conclusion. This is the same author's follow-up on a theme he introduced two years earlier
reads as companion to chouraqui-2016-order-of-the-earth — both are Chouraqui 2016, same series of late-MP readings, same concern with the relation between ontology and its own conditions of possibility
builds on merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — the article's primary text is two February 1959 working notes from V&I
critiques Heidegger's reading of circulus vitiosus Deus as "the collective character of Being as a whole" (Nietzsche II) — Chouraqui proposes that the phrase does more than Heidegger's gloss allows
critiques De Lubac's Drama of Atheist Humanism (1944) — via MP's Praise of Philosophy response — as a theistic critique of philosophers that "chokes to death" the problem of the sacred
reinterprets hyper-dialectic and hyper-reflection as formal names for the double-circle structure — a refinement of the standard glosses
is a case of phenomenology-as-ontology beyond Husserl and Heidegger — the article's secret organizing project, continuous with the 2014 book
applies Nietzsche's KSA 35[72] and 38[12] notebook entries as philological anchors for a reading MP could not have had direct access to — Chouraqui's move of reading MP through Nietzsche directly rather than through MP's sources

Sources

merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — the primary text. The February 1959 working notes "The Tacit Cogito and the Speaking Subject" and "Genealogy of Logic, History of Being, History of Sense" are the focus. Specific page references in VI 1979 ed.: 49, 60, 69, 103, 127, 177, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230–231, 292
chouraqui-2014-ambiguity-and-absolute — Chouraqui's own earlier book-length treatment of the same theme. The 2016 article is a focused extension of the 2014 book's Conclusion subsection on the circulus vitiosus Deus
chouraqui-2016-order-of-the-earth — Chouraqui's companion 2016 article on MP's late ontology, developing the intra-ontology theme from a different angle (precession, Husserl's earth-Boden)