‘WEAK’ SELF-INTEGRATION: JÜRGEN MOLTMANN’S ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE ‘POSTMODERN SELF’ ANTE JERONCIC Andrews University, Berrien Springs, MI, USA INTRODUCTION The principal concern of this article is to explore the correlation of Jürgen Moltmann’s theological anthropology and the idea of self-fragmentation as evidenced in postmodern nar- rations of human identity. To begin with, I will attend to two radically different valuations of self-fragmentation as exemplified, among others, by Jean Baudrillard and Gianni Vattimo respectively. While the former frames his account of the ‘death of self’ within a tragic vision of the hyperreal, the latter lauds the polymorphism of contemporary selfhood for embodying the syntax of emancipatory nihilism – the ultimate coup of pensiero debole (‘weak thought’), so to speak. My intention in setting up this broad taxonomy is to provide a specific exploratory angle from which to engage Moltmann’s conception of the promissory self in the context of the present problematic. More specifically, I will suggest that Moltmann’s particular account of ‘weak’ self-realization plays a mediating role between the stated approaches. That is to say, a particular dialectic of positive and negative valuation of self-fragmentation is operative in Moltmann’s anthropology, giving his approach a unique cast. While being mindful of the fact that Moltmann’s delineation of human identity is multi-faceted and thus resistant to simple reductionisms, I will delimit my discussion in this article by focusing on the mutually informing concepts of hope, Gestalt formation, and ‘spirituality of life’ in order to elaborate and further define important concepts found in his theological approach. THE HYPHENATED SELF Raymond Martin and John Baresi in their helpful study The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self present us with a punctilious account of intellectual and cultural factors that have precipitated the demise of the unified self in the post-Kantian era. For a variety of factors, not least of which had been the rapid rise of psychology, the need gradually emerged, so they argue, to refer to the self in mostly compound terms; terms such as ‘self-image, self-conception, self-discovery, . . . self-acceptance, self-reference, self-modeling, self-consciousness, self-interest, . . . and self- actualization’. 1 Martin and Baresi conclude that ‘by the end of the twentieth century the unified self had died the death if not of a thousand qualifications, then of a thousand hyphenations’. 2 To paraphrase a sentence from the iconic movie Matrix, ‘Welcome to the desert of the real (self).’ I don’t think that Martin and Baresi would want to intimate here that deconstructive con- struals of the self are universally shared; they plainly are not. What they do succeed in doing, HeyJ LV (2014), pp. 244–255 © 2012 The Author. The Heythrop Journal © 2012 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.