The Pulse of Sense

Encounters with Jean-Luc Nancy

Marie Chabbert, Nikolaas Deketelaere, Marie Chabbert, Nikolaas Deketelaere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000564815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

This volume stages a series of encounters between the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and leading scholars of his work along four major themes of Nancy's thought: sense, experience, existence, and Christianity.

In doing so, the volume seeks to remind readers that Nancy's sens has many meanings in French: aside from those that easily carry over into English, i.e., everything to do with "meaning" and "the senses"; it also includes the "way" they are "conducted, " the "direction" they take, the "thrust" or "pulse" in which the circulation of sense exists. Faithful to this plural understanding of sens, the writings collected here aim to join Jean-Luc Nancy in the process of "making-sense" that animates his thinking, rather than to deliver a definitive summary of his position on any given issue. They are conceived of as notes "along the way, " documenting "encounters" as moments of "(re)direction" and recording the "pulse" of sense that animates them. In that spirit, Nancy himself has provided each contribution with an "echo" in which he, in turn, responds to each author and thereby continues their mutual encounter. Aside from these echoes, this volume includes an original essay in which Nancy reflects upon the international trajectory of his thinking; a trajectory that is to be and undoubtedly will be continued, in many different directions, across and around the world.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

The Emancipation of Christianity

Metamorphosis or Mutation?jean-luc nancy and the deconstruction of christianity

joeri schrijvers

introduction

In Nancy’s recent work on Christianity’s deconstruction, one can notice a certain hesitation in the metaphors Nancy uses to describe what is happening to Christianity: either one can understand the process of this auto-deconstruction as a metamorphosis, which seems to imply that an older form of the “same” phenomenon takes on a new shape, or this process is to be seen as a mutation, in which the new form only ever takes place at the expense of the old phenomenon (Adoration 32, 50, 55, 80, 111n7). Metamorphosis, then, seems to be a slow process and seems to imply a step forward, whereas mutation might be understood more as a leap, an instant change in which the newer form of a culture has nothing to do whatsoever with the older form. This article will seek to exploit this hesitation on Nancy’s part and relate it to Derrida’s critique of Nancy in his magnificent On Touching (2002).

the end of metaphysics: from a principle for the world to a world without principle

Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity squares with his phenomenological ontology of “being-with” in the very precise sense that Christianity has, from time immemorial, according to Nancy at least, always been exposed both to metaphysical structures and that which remained outside of it. In this way, Christianity, for Nancy, occupies an exceptional and paradigmatic place: although it is metaphysical to its very core, it simultaneously has sown the seeds of its (own) overcoming. Nancy is quite clear on this: for him, Christianity and “monotheism [oppose], as much as [they comfort] the reign of the principle” (Dis-Enclosure 24).

The deconstruction of Christianity is, however, not to be taken as a provocation; it is not against Christianity as a virulent atheism would be: Nancy rather asks how Christianity can still make sense in a culture which is no longer Christian; that is, a culture that no longer shares all Christian presuppositions (Dis-Enclosure 141–43)? The deconstruction of Christianity is thus a comportment toward what one can call the relics and the remainder of the Christian culture. It is, according to Nancy, precisely from out of Christianity’s vanishing that a thought of the world or of our being-with might appear, for “already in the most classical metaphysical representations of […] God, nothing else was at stake, in the end, than the world itself” (Creation 41). The attempt to grasp the world within one, single worldview or to comprehend the totality of beings from out of a highest being or principle will, when faded away, give way to the thought of the world without principle, without sufficient reason or any given – it will make us face the sheer presence of “world.” If all historical highest beings – God, nature, reason, history – have functioned as a way of filling in the gaps by, for instance, explaining that which could not and cannot be explained – i.e., the existence of the world – then the deconstruction of Christianity aims to attend to the nothingness, the void or the gap left after the flight of the gods. Nancy’s rather straightforward response to Marion is in this regard perhaps worth pointing out already: “[Marion’s] proposition does not emerge yet out of a ‘self-giving’ (and of ‘self-showing’ of the phenomenon, whereas I propose here, simply, that nothing gives itself and that nothing shows itself – and that is what is” (Creation 123n24). Nancy’s thought, therefore, must be seen as an attempt to cope with a world without givenness, without any principle being given, and to stick to the world as it (now) worlds considered from the fact that it worlds (and that it is only the world which worlds). This “worlding of the world” is ours: it is not regulated by something or someone “out there” nor is it regulated and controlled by an ideal somewhere “in” the world. Hence what can be called Nancy’s axiom: “we who are no more than us in a world, which is itself no more than the world” (Being Singular Plural 17)). Here Nancy joins a trend in contemporary French phenomenology: what is being investigated is not this or that phenomenon, this or that appearance; it concerns rather a phenomenology to the second degree for which what matters is not that which appears but the appearing of appearance itself, considered as an event. For Nancy, this event is the event of world.

It is in this world that Christianity is auto-deconstructing. And it is important to note that for Nancy Christianity vanishes in a quasi-automatic way. Such an auto-deconstruction only ever occurs if the (metaphysical) system of Christianity “has contained its fatal agent within itself ever since its conception,” as Reiner Schürmann wrote (197). Such a “fatal agent,” for Nancy, seems to be whatever givenness has been posed, presupposed or otherwise taken for granted: from the very moment that the presupposition is made that God is the foundation and ultimate unification of the world (ontotheology) or that such a unification is left to the transcendental postulates (Kant and modernity), it must be stated that such a “presupposition also contains the principle of its own deposition” (Creation 71). The Christian community, too, has been (mis)guided by the reign of the principle, by metaphysics: this community, too, was “thought as bound by a transcendent or mystical bond and the bond itself as a reunion lifted into a unity” (Nancy, “The Confronted Community” 28). Christianity was perhaps the greatest idea of community to date: it imagined a communion of saints and sinners, of the living and the dead. This bond was then conceived as a “way”: all are on their way to God. In a sense, everything is on its way to God. And here is Nancy’s caveat: nothing remains outside of this history of salvation, nothing is outside the givenness (or creation) of this God. Yet we can witness a deconstruction of this narrative: one might say that what remained outside of this narrative, what perhaps was repressed, is now resurfacing as reflux.

Concretely, this means that Christianity will break under the pressure of the separations and the divisions that constituted it in the first place. One can therefore understand Nancy’s project as trying to expose and disassemble those “internal divisions” within Christianity which will eventually cause the disintegration of its assembly and be the death of it. Nancy mentions several examples of these divisions. One can, for instance, think of the Christian quarrel over, on the one hand, the prohibition of images and the right to represent the sacred on the other. Derrida has noted another division: the portrayal of the Gospel of Jesus as touching and touched by human beings and Jesus’ own prohibition of any such touch (100–03). Nancy added that it is precisely this paradox of Christianity – the paradox connecting “hoc est corpus meum” and “noli me tangere” – is at issue (Noli me tangere 14). Most important is, however, the division between a Christianity that lets itself be reduced to metaphysics and a Christianity that precisely resists such a reduction.

what is metaphysics? marion and kant

Jean-Luc Marion begins his exposition of ontotheology with the claim that concepts too can function as idols, as “the making available of the divine” (9) in that it produces a “concept that makes a claim to equivalence with God” (13). Marion thinks of the Greeks: the idea of the Good (Plato), the divine self-thinking (Aristotle), and of the One (Plotinus) (cf. 10). Then Marion discusses Aquinas’ five ways to prove the existence of God, and comments that:

the question of the existence of God is posed less before the proof than at its end, when it is no longer a question of simply establishing that some concept can be called God […] but more radically that that concept or that being coincides with God himself. (ibid.)

Here Marion hints at the devastation that took place in the transition to modernity, when the consensus that this being indeed has to be called God is lost. Marion’s answer is as unsettling as it is correct: “the consensus of ‘all’ is replaced by the idiomatic phrase ‘by [God] I mean […]’” (11). Nancy will add the “Jemeingötterung” brought to us by American soap operas (Dis-Enclosure 116; “Mon Dieu!” 271–78). Understood in this way, the transition from modernity to postmodernity might hint at an even more profound loss. For, just as Marion describes the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity as the loss of consensus in matters divine, the transition from modernity to postmodernity could be described as the loss of consensus of precisely those postulates that Kant used to redefine the limits of knowledge at the dawn of modernity. So, for instance, whereas the modern subject was that instance that remained the same despite the variations of its lived experiences, the postmodern subject is shattered, schizophrenic, and, according to Levinas and Marion, in a permanent state of alteration rather than remaining the same (Levinas, Totality and Infinity 36). Whereas the postulate of the world was, for Kant, used to assure the unity and the coherence of the world amidst all the subject’s diverse experiences, postmodernity’s plurality presupposes a multitude of worlds that altogether seem to forbid the thought of a unity underlying all these different worlds. Whereas the postulate of God’s existence assured the coincidence of virtue and happiness, it now sometimes seems as if happiness is what is to be obtained at all costs, and perhaps especially that of virtue.

For Marion, the concept then prescribes for God his being: God has to be the cause that causes everything else without itself being caused. For Heidegger and Nietzsche (and in a certain sense Nancy), the principle, because of its unifying tendencies, prescribes for the world its being. In the mechanical and mathematical universe that issued from the thoughts of Descartes and Kant, this means that the piece of wax has to be the res extensa that this mathematical worldview prescribes for it. And yet, the fact that, for instance, the smell of this particular piece of wax can also serve as a sort of Proustean reminder of days spent with my grandmother is thereby forgotten or, who knows, repressed.

what is metaphysics ii: nietzsche and heidegger

The response to the problem has mainly consisted in identifying this or that figure as responsible for the beginning of metaphysics – was it Suarez or rather Duns Scotus? Such a response, obviously, always runs the risk of being less concerned with ontotheology than with safeguarding other thinkers from precisely this problem. Fréderic Nef’s rather blunt response has been to regard ontotheology as inexistent or as such nowhere to be found in the history of thinking (224). This latter thesis has provoked Jean-Yves Lacoste to respond that it “at the least has proven that [ontotheology] is not omnipresent in the history of philosophy” (Danger 18n1). It could also be, in a third response that we claim as our own, inexistent in the sense somewhat of a fathom, a ghost, or illusion. In this case, ontotheology is but a “thought-experiment”; yet one that is particularly hard to avoid and its ghostly existence might have more traction in reality than we would like to admit.

For Heidegger, the end of metaphysics has given rise to technology and, through technology, to nihilism. Let us begin, then, with the nihilism that we all know and we all experience. This is the nihilism which, for Lacoste, “is associated with the mathematization of being in its totality” (Theological Thinking 79). In effect, one of Heidegger’s insights which seems particularly true a good sixty years later, is that “the quantitative becomes a special quality and thus a remarkable kind of greatness” (Question Concerning Technology 135): the quantitative becomes its own kind of quality and perhaps the only one we can still think. Nancy, moreover, has almost word for word repeated this observation when speaking of “the conversion of quantity into quality” (Fukushima 34).

What separates Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity from a great many Christian theologians is his recognition that today’s culture, its metaphysics, its nihilism and its atheism, is (still) a Christian one. Far from opposing nihilism and Christianity, as is often fashionable in theological circles, Nancy writes that “Christianity is accomplished in nihilism and as nihilism” (Dis-Enclosure 147). The Christian religion, precisely because of its historical and worldly dimensions, tends to evaporate in that very world and, in the process, let the question of world, and how to deal with it, evaporate into nihilism just as well. Christianity is not what saves us from nihilism, it is its accomplice.

First, then, we should note what Heidegger regards as the distinctive “element” in which Nietzsche’s nihilism arises: Nietzsche is “the first to pose the thoughtful question[:] is the man of today in his metaphysical nature ready to assume dominion over the earth?” (Thinking 65). Can humanity take up its responsibility for the earth without the back-up of the principle? One has to know very little of Nietzsche’s fate to come to the conclusion that it is likely Heidegger would have responded in the negative. The contemporary debates about global warming might perhaps again testify to this.

Yet, this possibility of an “Erdregierung” faces us as a task (and perhaps not only one of thinking) once the causa sui, or whatever we called the highest being, stopped securing and safeguarding (the being of) all other beings. What remains after Nietzsche, according to the Heideggerian plot, is a situation in which all beings value, rank and categorize all other beings with no other standard than this valuing itself. This is how what is “best” and “better” gets increasingly confused with what is “more,” or how, in contemporary capitalism, the highest good is confused with the greatest amount of riches.

In his course on thinking, Heidegger focused on the relation of such valuing to the present, rather than its relation to the past or the future. The will to power, one might say, only ever wants the present. It wants the present because that which appears here and now, before us, can and will be controlled and dominated in its very appearing. Phenomenologically, the appearing of appearances will be reduced to what can be contained objectively of this appearance here before me. It is no coincidence that what can be thus contained are above all mathematical and geometrical features: what can be counted, ranked and categorized.

If...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Conduct of Existence
• The Fragility of Sense
• The Poetics of Experience
• The Corporeality of Existence
• The Emancipation of Christianity
• Coda
• Index