Nancy - Deconstruction of Monotheism
Nancy - Deconstruction of Monotheism
Nancy - Deconstruction of Monotheism
37–46, 2003
Deconstruction of monotheisma
JEAN-LUC NANCY
The West can no longer call itself the West from the moment it witnesses the
spread, across the entire world, of the form that could once have seemed to
constitute its distinguishing features. This form entails techno-science just as
much as it does the general outcomes of democracy and the rule of law, and just
as much a certain kind of discourse and argumentation, which are also
accompanied by a certain kind of representation in the broad sense of the word
(for instance, cinema and the whole family of post-rock and post-pop musics).
By this very fact, the West no longer knows itself as the keeper of a world view
or a sense of the world that would go hand-in-hand with this globalisation (its
globalisation), with the privileged role that it believed it could attach to what it
had called its ‘humanism’. Globalisation appears, on the contrary, for the most
part, to boil down essentially to what Marx had already perfectly well identified
as the production of the world market, and the meaning of this world seems to
consist in nothing but the accumulation and circulation of capital, accompanied
by a marked aggravation of the gap between the dominant rich and the
dominated poor, as by an indefinite technical expansion, which no longer
devotes itself, except very minimally, and worriedly or anxiously, to the ends of
‘progress’ and the improvement of the human condition. The outcome of
humanism is in inhumanity: that would be a crude summation of the situation.
And the West does not understand how it comes to be there. Yet, it is indeed
the West that came there: it is indeed the civilisation, as it is called, built first
around the Mediterranean by the Greeks and the Romans, the Jews and the
Arabs that has borne its fruits. To this extent, it cannot be enough to go looking
elsewhere for other forms or other values (as some would put it) that one might
seek to graft onto this henceforth global body. There no longer is an elsewhere,
or rather, in any case, there can no longer be an elsewhere in the former Western
sense (such as the elsewhere of an East passed through the prism of orientalism,
or such as the elsewhere of worlds represented as living in the ‘first’ immanence
of myth and ritual).
Our time is thus one where it is urgent for the West—or what remains of
it—to analyse its own future, to look back at and examine its provenance and its
trajectory, and to question itself about the process of the breaking-down of
meaning which it allows to take place.
For it is striking to observe that, within this former ‘West’, though it happens
relatively often that we question ourselves, in order to re-evaluate these things,
with respect to the Enlightenment (following the model of a continuous pro-
gression of human reason) or with respect to the will to power of the industrial
and conquering nineteenth century, or then again, differently, with respect to the
ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/03/010037–10 2003 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
DOI: 10.1080/1368879032000080393
JEAN-LUC NANCY
West’s internal dehiscences—in the direction of the Slavic and Orthodox world
just as much as in the direction of the Arab and Islamic world—with their
complexities and their missed opportunities, it happens that we question our-
selves very little on the body of thought that will have first organised, in a
formative or directive fashion, if not the West itself, at least its conditions of
possibility: I mean monotheism.
We know—how could one ignore it?—that the threefold monotheism of a
triple ‘religion of the Book’ (to which one could add on, as a reminder, the old
Manicheanism) defines a Mediterraneo-European specificity—and from it flows
various forms of global expansion, at least from the two younger branches,
Christianity and Islam. But we too often and too readily consider that the
religious dimension (or what we perhaps mistakenly believe is only ‘religious’)
behaves, all in all, as if it were an accident in relation to the facts and the
structures of civilisation. Or, to be more precise (since, of course, we all know
very well what I have just said), this dimension seems to be extrinsic from the
time when it is no longer the thing that, in a visible way, lends its face to the
globalised West—despite the fact that, yet again, this globalisation may also be,
in more ways than one, a globalisation of monotheism in one or other of its
guises.
In actual fact, ever since the fanning out of modern rationality and its most
recent modalities, always at least implicitly atheistic in the sense of being
indifferent to the question of ‘God’ (whether as a matter of knowledge or of law,
of aesthetics or of ethics), it may seem pointless to turn our minds to monothe-
ism in any but a secondarised way, either by referring the question to the realm
of ‘private’ convictions, or by the adoption of a purely historical perspective.
Yet we know—or rather, we should know, but through an active and
mobilising knowledge, a knowledge that is ‘deconstructive’ in the way that I will
attempt to articulate it—just to what extent the most salient characteristics of the
modern grasping of the world, and sometimes its most visibly atheistic or
atheological characteristics, can and must be analysed according to their strictly
and fundamentally monotheistic provenance (thus, to put it very briefly, the
universal, the law, the individual, or again, in a more subtle way, the motif of
a surpassing of man and within man through an infinite transcendence). Hence
a ‘provenance’, in this case or any other, is never simply a past: it informs the
present; it ceaselessly produces its own effects. It is therefore important, perhaps,
to know how monotheism—all the while it is busily reproducing itself or
surviving itself (sometimes by a process of self-radicalisation) in religious
figures—is the West’s provenance, just as much in the globalisation, upon which
all else seems to hover, as in a divine providence, namely the sombre wing of
nihilism.
I will give the name, ‘deconstruction of monotheism’ to the operation
consisting of a dismantling of the elements that constitute that thing, in order to
attempt to discern, amongst them and as if behind them, set back a little from
the construction, what has made their assemblage possible, and what perhaps
remains for us, paradoxically, to discover and think as the beyond of mono-
theism in as much as it has itself been responsible for its globalisation and its
atheisation.
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DECONSTRUCTION OF MONOTHEISM
• first of all, finally to make a break with the unilateral schema of a certain kind
of rationalism, according to which the modern West is supposed to have
gained dominion over itself in the battle against Christianity, by dragging
itself out of its own obscurantism (curiously, Heidegger himself rehearsed, in
his fashion, something drawn from this schema): for it is a question of
grasping just how monotheism in general and Christianity in particular have
engendered the West;
• but also, to block all attempts to ‘heal’ the ‘ills’ of the world today (its intense
lack of meaning) through a return to Christianity in particular or religion in
general: for it is a question of grasping how it is that we have already quit the
religious;
• and thus, to ask ourselves all over again what might lead us, without either
rejecting Christianity or returning to it, toward a point—toward a resource—
buried beneath Christianity, beneath monotheism and beneath the West, and
which should henceforth be brought into the light: for this point would, in
short, open out upon a future for the world that would be neither Christian nor
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DECONSTRUCTION OF MONOTHEISM
divided unity of self characteristic of monotheism makes most strictly and thus
also most paradoxically the unity of the unique god. One could say, with all the
possible resonances, that this god splits itself—truly, atheises itself—at the
crossroads of monotheism/s.
4. Under these conditions, Christianity is less a body of doctrine than it is itself
a subject in relation with itself in a search for self, in a state of restlessness, a
state of awaiting or a state of desiring its own identity (consider the major theme
of the announcement and the wait, recurrent in the three monotheisms, paradox-
ically put to work in Christianity in the hoped-for event that has come to pass).
This is why, just as Christianity conceives of a god in three persons whose
divinity consists in the relation to itself, so too it splits itself historically at least
in three (splitting of the community that must ultimately regroup itself) and so
too, again, perhaps, it thus provides the logic of the threefold monotheism as a
subject split from itself (religion of the Father, religion of the Son, religion of
the Sacred in the Islamic sense).
The relation to self defines the subject. The structure of the subject appears as
if it were the cesura between the ancient world and the Western-Christian world.
(It would be useful to pause here to discuss Christianity’s Greek provenance, its
Augustinian, Avicennan, Cartesian, Hegelian developments, and the fact that it
is the history of all the meanings and all the figures for what is called ‘spirit’.)
This subject is the self as an instance of identity, of certainty and of responsi-
bility. But the law of its structure is that it cannot be given to itself before having
itself related itself back to itself: its relation to itself—or ‘the self’ in general—
can not but be infinite. Being infinite, on the one hand it takes on a temporal
dimension (it sets about acquiring a history, past and future as dimensions of
meaning and presence—or even: presence is not simply in the present tense),
and, on the other hand, it can do nothing but slip away from itself in the last
instance. This escape from self defines conjointly, in this area of thought, the life
of the creator and the death of the creature. But it is thus one and the other, and
one in the other or through the other, which are affected by the in-finite, in the
sense of finitude.
5. Christianity (and once again, via this prism, monotheism) is, from its very
beginning, engaged in a perpetual action (a process and a litigation) of auto-
rectification or auto-surpassing, most often in the form of an auto-retrospection
with a view to a return to a purer origin—a process to be found coming right
down the years to, remarkable example that it is, Nietzsche himself, and it
persists today, but it begins already between the Gospels and Paul, between Paul
and John, in the origins of monasticism, and then, it goes without saying, in the
various Reforms, etc. It all happens as if Christianity had developed, as no other,
a simultaneous affirmation of power, of theologico-economico-political domi-
nation and exploitation, of which Rome was to be the weighty symbol as much
as it was a part of the reality, and an opposite affirmation of relinquishment and
self-abandonment for which the vanishing point would be self-evanescence. The
question must then be, of course, that of the nature and structure of this
self-evanescence: dialectical surpassing, nihilistic decomposition, an opening up
of the ancient to the absolutely new … In one way or another, the matter is none
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other than this: how does monotheism engender itself as humanism and how
does humanism confront the finitude which thus enters into history?
I will limit myself, in this presentation, to this very brief characterisation. I draw
no conclusion from it. It seems to me that it points toward a train of thought
without which it is impossible to seriously consider, henceforth, the question of
the meaning of the world as the West bequeathes it to us—or leaves without
heirs.
This train of thought amounts, at the very least (confining these remarks to
a bare, schematised minimum), to this: our task is not to bring to pass a new
divine realm, either in this world or another; nor is it to rediscover the immanent
unity proper to a world of myth that has fallen apart in the Westernisation-
monotheisation of the world; rather, our task is to think a ‘world-meaning’ in a
world split from its own being-world, in an acosmic and atheological world,
which is nevetheless still a ‘world’ in some fashion, still ours and that of the
totality of beings, thus still a totality of possible meanings—it being understood
that this particular possibility is always also, of itself, exposed to the impossible.
tion (God, the paradise of the believers, the dust of all the rest—all the rest
comprising also many dollars, missiles and petrol …), the total immobilisation of
the situation (global capital) invokes the name of a supposed universality whose
Universal is called ‘man’, but in its obvious abstraction immediately entrusts
itself to another God (‘in God we trust’, in this God who will ‘bless America’).
This God and that God are two figures confronted with the identical Unique
when its Unicity is seized upon as an absolute Presence, solid in itself and
through itself, as the pinpoint and thus invisible summit of a pyramid whose
essence it sums up and reabsorbs. (One could say something here, and seeing as
I am continuing a talk given in Cairo: the worth of the pyramids of the Pharaohs
did not lie in the null point of their summits, but in the secret of life and death
enshrouded in their bulk. Their worth was in a profound withdrawal into a
cryptic obscurity, not in the tip of a presence erected in full view.) And it is
certainly permissible to say, without being ‘anti-American’ (ridiculous category)
that it is the Uni-fying, Unitary and Universal, also Unidimensional and finally
Unilateral model (which is its internal contradiction) that has made possible the
symmetrical and no less nihilistic mobilisation of a Monotheistic and no less
unilateral model. Attention is finally being paid to the latter only because it has
become the ideological instrument of the ‘terrorism’ that we have come to know.
But ‘terrorism’ is the conjunction of despair and a certain Uni-fying will that
confronts the other face of the One.
Now, what is thus lost from the very essence of monotheism in all its forms
is precisely the following: that, in these forms, the ‘One’ of ‘God’ is not at all
Unicity as a substantial thing, present and joined to itself: on the contrary, the
unicity and the unity of this ‘god’ (or the divinity of this ‘one’) consist precisely
in the fact that the One can be neither posited, presented nor figured as conjoined
in itself. Be it in exile and diaspora, be it in the becoming-man and in a
being-threefold-in-itself, or be it in the infinite backing away of the one who has
neither equal nor like (therefore not even unity in one of its forms), this ‘god’
(and in what way is it divine? how is it divine? this is what we must think
through) absolutely excludes its own presentation—and we should even say: its
own mise en value as much as its mise en presence.
This, the great mystics, the great believers, the great spiritual figures of the
three monotheisms knew, and they knew it in exchanges and confrontations
plentifully generated with the philosophers whom they faced up to even as they
were foreign to them. Their thoughts, that is to say, their acts, their ethos or their
praxis, await us still.
Notes
1
Cf. Eckhart, ‘De la pauvreté en esprit’ [‘Of poverty in spirit’], Hallaj, Diwan (ed) Massignon, p. 83.
[Translator’s note: the citations from Eckart and Hallaj are translated directly from Nancy’s text; references
are as supplied in the original.]
2
L’Essence du christianisme, [The Essence of Christianity] trad. J.P.Osier, Paris, Maspero, 1968, p. 328
(reproduction 1992, Gallimard). [Translator’s note: the citations from Kant and Feuerbach are translated
directly from Nancy’s text; references are as supplied in the original.]
a
Translator’s note: this article, based on a lecture delivered in Cairo in 2000, first appeared in French as
‘Déconstruction du monothéisme’, in the journal, Dédale. The post-script has been added more recently. It
is translated with the author’s permission.
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