The following discussion was organized at the initiative of Alain Jugnon for an issue of the journal Contre-Attaque that was to be entitled ‘Why We Are Not Christians’.
I at first declined to participate in this issue, on the grounds that I did not agree with the question as formulated. Alain Jugnon then proposed that I write an article to defend this point of view, which I accepted.
A week later, he invited me to discuss it with Jean-Luc Nancy, which I agreed to do, as did Jean-Luc Nancy.
Alain Jugnon: The volume in which this discussion will appear is entitled ‘Why We Are Not Christians’. I have addressed this question to you, Bernard Stiegler, and to you, Jean-Luc Nancy, this question…
Bernard Stiegler: …and I wrote to you that, even if, in fact, I am not a Christian, I did not want to respond to this question. Indeed, I fear that this negation (‘we are not Christians’) is in reality a kind of denial that flees from the need to think another, more delicate question. Today, one talks about ‘cultural Christians’ to refer to and perhaps to conceal and above all to dispense with having to think the fact that, today, the whole world is Christian because of the market: along with its commodities, the market exports Christianity and its Latinity everywhere. Christianity is not just a faith. It is an economic, historical, political and even technological reality. This is what the globalization of Gestell, too, means, and it passes through what Sylvain Auroux describes as a process of grammatization – which the Jesuit missionaries made sure to carry out during colonization.
So I responded that I did not want to respond to this question, not because it is not a question that arises, but because, when a question is asked in philosophy, when we posit a question as being philosophical, we suppose that this question imposes itself in our time as what would, in the language of Heidegger, amount to what we could call, for example, its ‘epokhality’, overdetermining other questions in terms of priority. But I think that your question is too old to be philosophical today.
Some people would no doubt respond that they are not Christians by claiming that this non-belonging is the starting point of their way of living – and for a long time this was undoubtedly the case for me. Ten years ago [the discussion having taken place in 2008], I would have responded to your question without hesitation, and I would have argued with you, I mean, I would have told you why I am not a Christian. But today, this question is for me no longer a question. I think that today, it is no longer here that the real question lies (if it ever was an issue at any time throughout the twentieth century, for, in reality, it’s a nineteenth-century question, which Sarkozy, for example, would have us believe arises again in the twenty-first century, this being one deceptive strategy among many, and I’m afraid that you may fall into the trap set by this lure): the challenge today is not to emancipate ourselves from the question of God, from the presence of God; this is, unfortunately, not the issue, if I may say so. Because it is much more trivial than that. The big question today is that of marketing. This is obviously not entirely unrelated. But the relationship between them requires us to completely redefine the terms of the question, and the relations between these terms. The question does interest me from this point of view, but what at the same time does interest me is to say something about why this is not how I would have posed it.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Putting things into a little bit of order is complicated. I would say some things that are much the same as what Bernard has said, and then, at a certain point, things that are not at all the same. In the question: why are we not Christians, who is this ‘we’? You, Bernard, you have rather responded as if this question were addressed to you. At the same time, when you say ‘cultural Christian’, I was unaware of the existence of this expression. If it exists, therefore, then it immediately marks out another ‘we’: ‘we’ who? ‘We’ Westerners? Indeed, I agree that Christianity has been exported everywhere, and, moreover, that there is a delicate point here: when we refer to Christianity today, we are, for reasons we understand, immediately connected to the three monotheisms, and even Buddhism lies on the immediate horizon. So an adjacent question immediately arises: how to conceive and ask about Christianity in relation to, at least, Judaism and Islam? And here I would say, in fact, that it really is Christianity that is exported and that has shaped Western and now global civilization, and that this is undoubtedly partly tied to what we call capitalism. Furthermore, in what Derrida called ‘globalatinization’ [mondialatinisation], the word ‘Latin’ fundamentally covered Christianity. One of the things that makes this complicated is that I always feel the need to be scrupulous both about respecting others and about the theoretical as well as practical necessity of doing justice to the other great branches of monotheism, and to succeed in resolving what distinguishes Christianity within monotheism. I also find this very intricate and I have a lot of difficulty making this distinction, because I would tend to say that Judaism and Islam (even Buddhism) are accentuations, ways to bring out valences of something that is in Christianity anyway: for Islam, the infinite distance of an absolutely incomparable, unnameable God, one absolutely not human, and by taking into account everything that the Quran says against Christianity, against incarnation, against the Trinity in particular, all this Christianity can very well take into account. After that, I’m always slightly embarrassed because I feel as if I’m on the triumphalist side: Christianity, it’s the best religion! It is not at all clear that it is the best religion, but it certainly has the strongest theoretical, or let’s say metaphysical, elaboration. That I believe. I’m not saying that this elaboration contains anything better than Judaism or Islam, because I recognize that there are very strong things in the Talmud, just as there are very strong things in Ibn Arabi. But all this, for it to work, must at least be put through, I was going to say through the mill, by the Christian engine. But on the other hand, I myself, I would respond to this question, to return to it: how can we say we are not Christians, while we are nolens volens? But what does that mean? If I try to reply: it means that, regardless of any profession of faith, any ecclesiastical affiliation, any church whatsoever, we are Christians … but what makes us Christians? It is Pascal’s phrase: ‘Man infinitely surpasses man.’1 Voilà, that’s it. Perhaps even that the shift from the ancient world to the modern world, if we say the modern world began in the twelfth century (but I believe that indeed we must), that it is what effects this transition, and that until then, and even in the earliest Christianity that had not yet in the least developed its modern possibility, that is, as long as it had not yet entered into a relationship with history (until the year 1000, the Christians had awaited the end of the world), that before that, man had not infinitely surpassed man. In his human determination, which essentially assumed mortality, man was in a relationship with immortals, but immortals were themselves caught within the whole circumscription of the universe, and, in a way, completely within a finitude, within a good finitude, well-circumscribed, a circumscription of circumscriptions, sphere of spheres: there was no infinite surpassing. And, suddenly, there was hesitation between good infinity and bad infinity, opening onto an indeterminate. If Christianity has a kernel, it lies there. And in that regard, we are all Christians. We are all exposed to this call, demand or expectation, or to this anguish of having to deal with a bad infinity. The worst form of evil is undoubtedly given by the indefinite and indeterminate extension of both technology and commodities, that is, the proliferation of ends, to the infinity of every end, where this in turn suggests new ends. At the same time, and unlike you, Bernard, I would say that this is where our problem lies: what are we doing, today, with this infinite exposition? – of which we no longer know how to do anything in metaphysical or religious terms. This is why the whole return of the religious is not on this register, it is only a return to assurances, to securities, not at all to an infinity; we must still lend meaning, have meaning, find meaning, values, references, and then add a spoonful of love on top, whereas I think that by saying that Christianity is the religion of love we are also saying something about this infinity.
Bernard Stiegler: We agree much more than you think. If I say, ‘my question is not to know whether I am Christian or not’, it is precisely because the question is for me infinite. This question is more alive and more problematic now than it has ever been. Christianity is indeed the religion of love. The question that arises today – and which means that a question like the one you asked, Alain Jugnon, can be asked today (for even if I do not recognize myself in the question you have asked, I do indeed recognize a ‘we’ who is not Christian) – is the question of libidinal economy.
Today, the question – inasmuch as it is a philosophical question – is no longer, for ‘us’, to be or not to be Christians, and I include myself in this philosophical ‘we’ who wanted, on the one hand, to get rid of the Church, that is, a certain way that Christianity had of dominating public and noetic space, the space of the mind [esprit], spirituality, and wanted, on the other hand, to get rid of Christianity.
Today, the question is to rethink and reconstruct desire. Today, the question is the destructibility of desire, and, through desire, the destructibility of the unconscious, the super-ego and the id, that is, ultimately, of the intergenerational relationship.
Now, Christianity was a great intergenerational machine, as was, beyond that, all monotheism. But Christianity was so specifically as a discourse on the son, which is not the case for the others, and, beyond that, on the father. Moreover, I believe that it is by surpassing and displacing the place of the father that Christianity constitutes itself as a test or ordeal of love.
I further maintain – after Pasolini and his wonderful opening scene in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) – that Jesus became Christ by accident and through love. By accident, because he is only a natural son, adopted by his father, Joseph, who is not his father, and adopted out of love, because his father has adopted him for the love of Mary, as the son of Mary, as the child of Mary of whom he must take care. Christianity is this love story. It must have been said, however, in the town of Nazareth, that this child was not Joseph’s. So Joseph had to do all he could to make this child believe that he was Joseph’s child, so that he would not doubt his paternity, so that he could believe in his paternity; unfortunately, malicious tongues prevented this from working. Jesus then became the son of God. This is what I believe: it is my way both of not being Christian and of thinking that the question of not-being-Christian is not a philosophical question. For, in reality, the philosophical question is that of adoption (and this is what marketing does know how to think, whereas philosophers seriously ignore it). If we had time, I would also give some commentary here on Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud with respect to the adoption of Moses the Egyptian by the Jews – an adoption that constitutes Judaism – and I would point out how and why Islam, in claiming that filiation is by milk and not by blood, is also a religion of adoption.
The issue we face today is no longer at all that of struggling against some pre-emptive right claimed by the Church over intergenerational relations. If this was the case for a long time, and if the struggle against patriarchy, in which I more or less consciously and voluntarily participated when I was an adolescent, still belonged to this order of questions, which pass through the question of the place of the Church and religion in French society, and more generally modern society, this is no longer at all the issue. The question is the exclusion of intergenerational relations: it is the destruction of intergenerational relations, inasmuch as they are short-circuited by the relational technologies of marketing and control societies generally. Here, I would even be ready to defend the Church against the threat to it represented by these short-circuits. The Church and Christianity form a system of care. And there are things much worse than these systems, which can themselves obviously become awfully perverse: there is carelessness.
Religion, whether Christian or otherwise, is what knows how to organize practices of care as practices of a ‘we’: techniques of care are in general techniques of the ‘we’. Such care articulates a psychic self with a collective self. There are, of course, practices of the care of the self and others that are not religious, such as the techniques of the self on which Foucault focused at the end of his life. Religion is a major case, and Christianity is what organizes techniques of the self and others as a certain relation to the infinite, and according to a modality that was a dominant social system up until the nineteenth century. But generally speaking, a practice of care is what makes it possible to surpass the psychic in the collective and vice versa.
The problem is not at all to defend myself, today, from a religiosity or a Christianity that would threaten me: I do not feel threatened in any way by Christianity, or indeed by any religion. I have more of a feeling of responsibility to protect Christianity – and all forms of spirituality, which I consider to be extremely threatened, and in particular by the so-called ‘return of the religious’, which returns only in the way that Parc Astérix2 brings back the Gauls, and as this strategy of lures and deceptions that I mentioned at the outset.
Jean-Luc, you raise the question of practice in this text entitled ‘The Judeo-Christian’:3 you discuss the Epistle of James [in French, ‘Jacques’ – trans.] where the question of practice arises, which you refer to a faith, and you say that faith cannot be reduced to belief, in a discussion with another Jacques – Jacques Derrida… I would like to discuss with you the question of trust [confiance]: you say that faith is not reducible to belief, Derrida says the same thing by saying that justice is not reducible to belief. He says: there is no belief or faith without a justice that precedes or succeeds them. What you call faith, he calls absolute or messianic justice. However that may be, as for fidelity, confiance and faith have the same root, and fiduciary, too, shares this root. I have argued that Protestantism is the programme that transforms belief into trust, into calculability, into administrable belief. Belief must become calculable in the name of trust.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Here things get very complicated, because there occurs, perhaps, a kind of exchange of meanings, of the most profound values that we attach to both faith and to belief. You make faith slide towards trust [confiance] in the sense of calculability, hence at bottom from trust towards reliability [fiabilité], and towards fiduciary trust [fiduciarité]. If I understand you correctly, this is not so much on the side of systems of care… What I want to understand by faith is that which is based on the other, on what is indeed an absolute alterity, a non-calculable alterity, where I always take ‘belief’ as weak knowledge, yet on the side of knowledge. Belief, for me, is when I say: ‘I believe it will be a nice day tomorrow.’ This is what I said to Cluny at a conference. In everyday life, in religious doxa, when someone is said to believe in God, whoever the God may be, it is taken to be an operation of weak knowledge. And at the moment, this weak knowledge strongly leads straight to full metaphysics in the Nietzschean-Heideggerian sense of the term: that is to say, we make hypotheses about a being, in reality about a supreme being. Here, Kant’s destruction of ontological proof is, for me, always important: I say to myself that we may need one day to take up a commentary once again on the critique of the ontological proof in Kant, because it is worth doing; we don’t have this in mind enough; what Kant does is basically show that philosophy can do nothing other than (and it must do it, it is the greatness of thinking) receive the contingency of the world, and hence to end up with a search for a necessary cause involves a contradiction. All this is swept away from philosophy first of all, but the blow strikes all religious thought. For me, ‘faith’ comes from the Hebrew word amen, which means to affirm one’s trust, that trust is placed precisely where there is no assurance.
Now, I’ll just add something else, which has nothing to do with it, but so as not to forget it.
Myself, I do not go to Mass at all, not at all. The last time I went was two years ago, to accompany a friend’s daughter in Strasbourg, who complained that she’d never seen it; moreover she had something to complain about, because her father, who is African, Burkinabe, is an ethnologist, who knows the religion of his people very well; so I took this girl to the cathedral; I was not at all happy to be in the Strasbourg cathedral on a Sunday morning, in this huge nave, with forty people, it was cold, the heating system wasn’t working properly, the people who were there did not know how to sing the few songs that had to be sung. I say all this to indicate that I still have a keen sensitivity for Catholic worship, for the Gregorian chant, for all sorts of things that, for twenty years, Philippe had laughed at…4
Here I might agree with you, but with a slight difference. I don’t want to advocate a return to Latin Mass, I don’t know what… to religious practice, but when I see what actual religious practice has become, I say to myself, this is sad. And I don’t know where to place, within my mental space, as well as in our social and cultural space, I don’t know where to place what I have had such a taste for, but as an aesthetic taste, that is, for church singing and all that… Almost every year, I get a strange feeling around the time of Holy Week, I recall that for me, as a child, it was something very serious… On Ash Wednesday, a cross of ashes was drawn on the forehead… I don’t know what to do with this.
Well I, unlike you, I have been marked some years ago as a ‘Catho’, as a former Catholic, even as a current Catholic, or crypto-Catho… After that, I’m embarrassed to say that I’m no longer on the inside…
Alain Jugnon: There is also the expectation of a second volume of your book on the deconstruction of Christianity: Dis-Enclosure…
Jean-Luc Nancy: The issue for this second volume is, for me, a highly complicated one, because from one day to the next I no longer know exactly how to put my finger on it… It shifts all the time… In fact, I have a title: Adoration.5 I really believe that I’m going to stick with this title. As a word that could indeed gather together a little of what can happen in worship and then also of the relationship to the infinite.
Let me just add this: I have the feeling that what we are talking about, you and I, is what Rousseau called ‘civil religion’.6 In The Social Contract, ‘civil religion’ relates to the foundation of democracy, of our democracy, that is, to the achieving, the flourishing and the ontological and metaphysical binding together of all theories of the contract: it is at the same time the production of man himself. The contract is what makes an intelligent being and a man, says Rousseau, and the whole machinery of the contract is the machinery of a system that would truly be good only for a people of gods; as we are not a people of gods, this requires civil religion; civil religion, according to Rousseau, is what must make the heart of the citizen sensitive to the system of government. And at this, it failed. The obsolescence of the French Republic, which without doubt inherited this, is the obsolescence of civil religion.
I have come to the conclusion that the break I mentioned between the ancient world and the modern world is the rupture of civil religion; when we talk about Athenian democracy, we end up forgetting that it was a system of civil religion; Athens is a great civil religion. The proof is that philosophy itself began with Socrates, that is, with a death sentence handed down for a breach of civil religion. Rome was the most successful civil religion, but the fact that the emperor was deified shows that Roman civility, and the republic itself as sacred, begins to fail, and it is not by chance that after this Christianity will take over. Christianity rightly does not bring with it another civil religion – it brings the separation of Caesar and God. It introduces the possibility of the gaping of the infinite that threatens every terrestrial polis. What follows, then, will be the state, sovereignty and, for Rousseau, democracy. But in coming into operation, civil religion was made impossible. Well this is where we are.
Bernard Stiegler: I would like to follow up on what you were just saying in terms of the question of the relationship between faith and trust. And firstly to clarify that like you, I think that faith obviously cannot be reduced to trust and calculability. On the other hand, what Weber described as disenchantment, rationalization and secularization is indeed the transformation of the power of faith into fiduciary instrumentality, and thus into systems of trust. That this leads to discredit is precisely what I argue in Disbelief and Discredit.7 This process of disenchantment is, however, possible, and it is possible only because Christian and monotheistic noesis – commonly referred to as ‘spirituality’ – is tied to the letter, depends on the letter, is à la lettre; you use the expression, ‘God à la lettre’. And I think that here, an essential issue is to reinvest the pharmacological question of the letter. The letter is a pharmakon. It is because it is a pharmakon that faith can be turned into calculable trust. This is what is at stake in Weber’s analysis of the Protestant origin of capitalism.
Posing this question, I want to go back to what you said about Kant, ontological proof and infinity. For centuries, and in its ‘onto-theological’ destiny, philosophy was structured by the question of the proof of the existence of God – even if this is not exactly a Greek question, in which case it is not a question that lies at the origin of philosophy. If philosophy can rid itself of this question – which is what leads me to think that the question of knowing why we are not Christians is not a philosophical question – it is because this question reaches philosophy only at a certain moment in its history (even if this moment comes quite quickly) and is not already present in its ‘initial conditions’. As for us, we have passed through the death of God. You stressed that Christianity is an experience of mortality in the most radical sense of the term, which for me is where we diverge: I have always conceived of Christianity as belonging to an onto-theology that, precisely, breaks with the tragic – with the tragic age of the Greeks, where there were mortals, immortals and those that ‘perish’, as Heidegger said. I have always thought that the forgetting of the tragic, that is, of an irreducibly mortal condition of mortals, of a mortality without remission, and that begins with Plato himself, this moment, which is to say this moment as the very origin of philosophy, was the catastrophe that led to the opposition of soul and body, and hence to metaphysics insofar as it essentially consists in a system of oppositions founded on this primordial opposition – which thus makes it possible, from the outset, for philosophy to become monotheistic and Christian, and therefore to pose the question of the proof of the existence of God.
Now, you come along to break this, or rather to make it more complex, which interests me, which in a way I’m delighted about… I have always thought that Christianity fundamentally involved an immortalization of the soul – and that Christian infinitization came at this price. You, on the other hand, mortalize the Christian soul, if I can put it like that. But I’m not sure that I’m quite convinced. And in particular, I still conceive Christianity as being essentially founded on the opposition of body and soul, and therefore of life and death, of the eternal and the temporal, and so on. Moreover, it is only in this way that I could respond positively to Alain’s question: if I can say that I am not a Christian, it is because I vehemently reject this opposition, and in particular inasmuch as, along with it, it necessarily implies guilt. But rather than say ‘why I am not Christian’, I prefer to state ‘why I am “Nietzschean”’ – to the extent that such a statement is not entirely ridiculous and out-of-place.
Be that as it may, what we call the death of God is the proof of the non-existence of God. God does not exist: ‘God is dead’ means that God does not exist. But for several years now, I have said – and I say – that the question is not existence. The question is ‘consistence’.8 Which is to say, the infinite. The problematic field within which, Alain, you can pose this question-affirmation, ‘why we are not Christians’, is constituted by the fact that others say: ‘why we are Christians’. If you have some need to say why we are not Christians, it is because others say, we are Christians. These questions, however, are too old. God being dead, the question that remains for us is to know what to do with the question of the infinite – without which there is no desire. Let’s leave these old dead questions to the necrophages, and put up with the life of what returns with the ghost of God, who evidently still haunts us all, as spectrality, as spirit, and with what returns, this returning, in all infinity, of some object of desire of which this infinity is the consistence, as long as it is indeed a matter of desire and of the power to infinitize in which, precisely, it consists.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Jacques Derrida, vis-à-vis faith, had the same mistrust [méfiance] that he had vis-à-vis his community; it was highly empirical and highly emotional, he just couldn’t stand them, that’s it; he couldn’t stand to put a kippah on his head, and yet, at the same time, he had his tallit and he touched it every evening… It’s quite a complicated business…
Bernard Stiegler: Here, I think there is something we have to defend, and, in what we have to defend, the division is not between Christian and non-Christian…
Alain Jugnon: But don’t we have to defend it today despite Christianity itself, as it has been historically and where it stands now?…
Bernard Stiegler: My current work, what I am doing right now, is rethinking systems of care. In this regard, I am trying to enter into a dialogue with Michel Foucault. The overarching question of systems of care has been greatly underestimated, and Foucault showed how this question is raised in Alcibiades, and how it is forgotten: how Plato will replace the question of epimelēsthai with that of epistēmē (and I believe that, in the end, Heidegger, against all appearances, repeats such a substitution – which amounts in him to a retreat, his retreat – in Being and Time). Now, religions are systems of care – where this also involves taking care of the pharmacological character of faith, which is to say of the letter, of hypomnēmata. A system of care is a therapeutics that tries to ‘deal with’ [faire avec] the pharmakon, which is to say to ‘handle’ its indissolubly poisonous and beneficial character. What Weber says is that when the printed letter is deployed for textual study, whether of the Bible or the Gospels, this also corresponds to the deploying of bookkeeping for accountants, and it is what will develop a new relationship to writing, which will introduce a new pharmacology – one in which logos has become ratio. Faith thereby leads to the development of its opposite: calculation. Here, we should talk about systems of care in the age of what Foucault called biopolitics, and about the transition from disciplinary society to control society, which is, I believe, a society that ultimately destroys care – which is also to say, desire.
Jean-Luc Nancy: I want to ask you about two things: I want to come back to God. And then I want to ask you about this business of systems of care. Firstly, do you differentiate, in the system of care, care for ‘social security’? That’s my question. And then, beyond that, and from a completely different angle, when you say that you agree on the subject of the infinite, it is true, but there is another aspect of the question for me, and that’s the name of God. Behind the issue, ‘why we are not Christians’, there is also the question, ‘why are we not theists?’, ‘why do we not believe in God?’ Perhaps, for me, the most vivid question is: can we or can we not simply scratch the name of God from the vocabulary? Can we be satisfied with talking about the infinite, with using a concept? This is a discussion I had with Jean-Christophe Bailly (now there’s someone who stands resolutely without God), who, in his book, The Animal Side,9 praised the Open. I said to him that it is very dangerous to say ‘the Open’. Especially with a capital letter. He told me that the capital is only to substantify a concept. The name of God has the advantage of being a substantified concept, turned into a proper noun, and hence does not say anything, but has the properties of a proper noun. The history of Christianity does this too, and it does it between two others who have names, unpronounceable names, but one is called Yahweh and the other is called Allah. In the middle, there is the one who has either the name of a man, Jesus, or else is called God. But this is also a Greek affair: it is Plato who first uses theos in the singular. The Jesuit translators of Theaetetus translated the passage where Plato says that we must flee towards theos, they translated it as ‘we must flee to God’.10 Plato did not at all invent God as proper noun, but he made something possible in philosophy, he made possible the singularization of God.
Putting all this together, what is left with this name of God? When I have an occasion to talk about this, I say something that is very very weak. I say: God remains in the language when everyone says ‘my God’. Even Alain Jugnon will on occasion say ‘my God’, I bet… But maybe he watches out for it … he might say ‘for God’s sake’ [nom de Dieu]…
Alain Jugnon: That’s what I was about to say: I do say ‘nom de Dieu’, never ‘mon Dieu’…
Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘Nom de dieu’ is much more loaded than ‘mon Dieu’! It’s a blasphemy, an expletive… No but does it make sense or not to pick out this little linguistic incident in order to ask if it is just a cultural remnant or if it is not a function of language, which says, as we say, ‘mon amour’…?
Bernard Stiegler: I would like to come back to the question of social security… A little earlier, I said that these questions have recently led me to attempt a dialogue with Foucault on the question of biopower. I am trying to show now, against Foucault, that this biopower is never simply a biopower: it is a psychopower, and even a noopower (precisely because care is not ‘social security’, even if it requires this type of care too), while contemporary capitalism tries to eliminate the noetic character of this noopower. In this work, I have been very interested in the figure of Jules Ferry and in the whole Enlightenment tradition, Ferry being engaged in a great struggle against the Christians – which at that time was very necessary – and intending to build a new system of care: a system of care founded by a majority, in Condorcet’s sense as well as Kant’s, a democratic majority, a majority that must be able to vote (as Jules Ferry says, one is not born French, one becomes French by going to school), but also a maturity in Kant’s sense – as becoming adult. And this is how I understand the question of care – an adult is someone who is capable of taking care of a minor, in a relation of intergenerational responsibility, an obligation bound by adoption or by kinship – and this is where I think we have to revisit Christianity, Judaism, Islam and monotheism in general as constituting other systems of care (which I believe are also systems of adoption). As for us, we are enduring the ordeal of the absence of care, of the carelessness produced by the crisis of desire in the capitalism of psychopower.
To come back to your question about therapeutics, we cannot take care of the bodies of individuals without taking care of their souls. In what Foucault describes as biopolitics, which is supposed to take care of producers insofar as they constitute a resource and an economic, proletarian and labour force function, it seems to me that Foucault does not see, in the history of capitalism, the consequences of the internal contradiction in this system of care that Marx called the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and which forces capitalism to develop, from the mid-twentieth century, this psychopower that we refer to as marketing, first implemented, it turns out, by Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. The latter bases his thought of what he called at that time ‘public relations’ on an instrumentalization of the libidinal economy theorized by his uncle.
One can manipulate the libidinal economy just as faith can be manipulated. And here we find pharmacological questions, wherein faith becomes one instance of libidinal economy, which, in being transformed into calculable trust, engenders an absolute infidelity. For Freud’s nephew, it is a matter of teaching capital how to capture the desire of consumers, and how to build a system for capturing libidinal and sublimatory investment – it is a matter of channelling the life of the spirit in totality, which inevitably leads to the destruction of all spirituality, and to what I have elsewhere called spiritual poverty [misère spirituelle]. To answer your question, all this falls within a general therapeutics. Questions of the religious, or if we prefer the post-religious, are cases of a general therapeutics: today, we have to pose the question of a general therapeutics that could face up to the industrial development of a general pharmacology. The question of Christianity, and more generally of the deconstruction of Christianity or of monotheism, is a question of the regional pharmacology of religion. Today, we inherit this pharmacology, and this is why it is so interesting when Derrida analyses what he calls globalatinization. The Christian pharmakon leaves indelible traces in the industrial pharmakon.
I’ll add a word about the infinite. For me, God, what we call God, is the object of desire. It is the object of all desires. It is the desire of all desires. And consequently, it is the object of all attentions. What is named by the name of God is the object of all attentions: the absolute expectation [attente] of an absolute future that contains all desires. Whether we want to give this the name of God or whether we don’t, it’s all the same to me.
All of this raises the question of sublimation – and there is no system of care without sublimation: whether a religion, a state or a capitalist industrial society, if it does not take care of this infinite desire for the infinite, it is not viable. Nor it is reliable [fiable]: it is doomed to death. Today, I have come to the point of saying that I defend capitalism against itself, or Christianity against itself, because we live in a terrible age of Christianity transformed into capitalism. As a result, we have the responsibility to revisit and re-evaluate all of this. It is not a question of saying: I am not Christian. I’m not, actually, myself, Stiegler, but I am ready to work with Christians. My problem is not that of struggling against Christians, it is that of struggling without God against misbelief [mécréance] – and the lures and dubious beliefs11 that are its lot. In ‘mécréance’, there is no ‘faith’, but there is ‘créance’, which also means debt, and so many other things that go into forming systems of credit, which are all systems of care, and which, subject as they are to a capturing of desire that is exhausting, today turn into systems of discredit and confront us with the trial and ordeal of exhaustion – long after the death of God, who in any case will not be resurrected.
Jean-Luc Nancy: I understand… But then here, we diverge infinitely… Myself, I would not take up all these things in terms of care: why do we have to start from care? From this perspective, Foucault, too, bothers me because of this care for the self, in which, moreover, he very carefully skirts around Christianity. For him, the model instead lies between stoicism and epicureanism. All those practices that do indeed make up a system of care. I say to myself that the issue precisely does not lie there, it is not in care, it is rather in risk, it is in this that Christianity contains resources, that is, in the exposure to the infinite, to God. For me, this is not a matter of taking care: it is a matter of letting it be exposed… For what is capitalism? Fundamentally, it is still the erecting of a general rule, which is that of general equivalence: it is a profound choice of civilization. Modern civilization is the one that has chosen general equivalence. And this goes back to your business about pharmacology, because this choice was a choice of difference of value: the first large-scale commerce, and even the institution of credit and loans, were created within a regime of difference, of values, of forces, of intensities, but what they ultimately generated was the exchange of universal fluidity, of which that marketing to which you referred is, for me, more of a side effect than a threatening cause. The question this raises is: how might another civilization be created on the basis of another fundamental choice, which would be the choice of absolute difference?
Bernard Stiegler: I do not believe that capitalism amounts solely to general equivalence. Capitalism is that, clearly, but it is also and above all investment. And there is no capitalism without investors. Where Marx is very strong is when he says that capitalism will destroy itself because it will be forced to speculate rather than invest. This is where it becomes very interesting to read Weber with Marx, and not against Marx. We must combine the two of them. What does Weber say? He says that there is no capitalism without investment and that investment is noetically charged. The capitalist investor is not just a speculator. He is someone who invests himself in what he does. Investment is essential to the capitalist machine. What a combined reading of Weber and Marx shows is that general equivalence does not work without that which exceeds all equivalence. Capitalism is obliged to have a spirit. This spirit came from Christianity. Capitalism is the spirit of Christianity.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Yes, but it is the bad infinity version of the spirit of capitalism…
Bernard Stiegler: I agree with you, but this too is the spirit of Christianity.
Jean-Luc Nancy: Sure, this is basically the ambivalence of Christianity itself. Myself, I kind of want to get back to Christianity and to ‘why we are not Christians’… in order to reply that, if we are Christians – because we still are, capitalism or not – then we are always, in one way or another, connected to love. And to the commandment of love. We can do whatever we want… It’s a bit like when Kant says that even a villain is still connected to moral law, he knows very well that the law is there. He does not want to respect it, but he is connected to it. In the same way, I would say: despite everything, we are still connected to love, even if we do not know what to do with it. I refer to love very precisely in the way that Freud refers to the Christian commandment of love in Civilization and Its Discontents, when he says that the only answer to the depths of human violence is Christian love.12 Of course, he says that it is not possible. For me, the question becomes: what is implied in the fact that Christianity has, in full knowledge of the facts, put forward this impossible commandment? I say indeed: in full knowledge of the facts [connaissance de causes]. So there is a criterion that separates the good from the bad infinity: the bad is what presents universal love as possible, and the good is what knows that it is impossible. And which also knows that, in the love for one person, what is at stake is the impossible. This, for me, is not care.
Bernard Stiegler: Actually … for me, it is the same thing, care. To take care of my wife is to live with this, and even thanks [grâce] to it – and it is also to take care of myself. Care is a grace, if not ‘grace’. What I call care is what you call practice. One needs practice. But if there is practice, this means that there is a prosthesis – a pharmakon, always between good infinity and bad infinity. There are no practices without prostheses: there is always a moment when we must trust in the rosary, that is, habit, assisted by what can become a fetish. Every morning, I make myself do writing and reading exercises just as others go to morning prayer or to vespers. I know that I must submit to this decree – without God, by God [sans Dieu, nom de Dieu]! I know this, but I know it like a believer who no longer believes and who goes to church because he knows that he is absolutely exposed to misbelief [mécréance].
Jean-Luc Nancy: Here, no… I cannot even feel that. I’m a little too marked, maybe, by what I see happening in Judaism … and a bit in Islam. That is, by a kind of system of security. My doctor is Jewish, and, in the twenty-five years that I’ve spent with him, I’ve seen him become more and more Jewish. Now that he has retired, he has gone to Israel. When I told him one day that I didn’t understand why he was getting back into ritual to such an extent, he said to me: my dear old friend, ritual is reassuring.
Bernard Stiegler: That’s precisely it, Jean-Luc, the pharmakon. And the bad infinity consists precisely in the belief that we can escape the pharmakon, turning the remedy into poison, and what I once referred to as the prostheses of faith as the condition of any faith. The bad infinity is the belief that it is possible to escape the bad infinity, as you said: it is to believe, in other words, that something exists which in fact only consists. I have tried to describe this as the intermittence of actuality, by commenting on Simonides’ famous sentence evoked by Aristotle13 (and before him by Socrates14), and by Heidegger15 commenting on Aristotle: ‘God alone has this privilege.’16
As for Foucault’s techniques of the self, and more generally for what I call systems of care, they are not at all techniques of reassurance. They are quite the opposite of systems of security, they are techniques of the exposure to risk, to alteration. That they can turn into ritual, mania, habit or obsession is precisely what one cannot escape, and that is exactly what your bad infinity would want: to be able to escape it, for it to be possible to escape it, in total safety [sécurité].
The question of care is the question of what Heidegger called Sorge. This is precisely because the Catholic Heidegger wanted to think care – solicitude, attention, this is the meaning of what I call care, cura, therapeuma, epimelēsthai – without pharmacology, without exposing it to epimelēia (a word that comes from meletē, which is the question of discipline and rule), without this pharmacology based on the letter, hypomnēmaton, and everything that can always be turned into an ‘ontic’ instrument of calculation, coming to ‘determine the indeterminate’. It is for this reason that ‘fundamental ontology’, which wants to deconstruct the history of being, is ultimately a hyper-metaphysics – it still ‘belongs’ to ‘metaphysics’, that is, to ‘onto-theology’.