P.-P.J.: Since the beginning of this interview, we’ve acknowledged and reviewed two areas of thought: On the one hand, the original co-belonging of the philosophical and the political, to use the expression of Jacques Derrida that you and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe picked up in the ’80s, and on the other hand, concerning the notion of community, the co-belonging of the political and the religious. What remains to be looked at is how the philosophical, the religious, and the political interconnect. If one considers like you do that Christianity took charge of the conduct of the world for several centuries, what happens to thinking about the world and politics after the “death of God”? More precisely, what’s at stake in the “grave question” that’s enunciated in Adoration after recounting the etymology of the word “enthusiasm”: “ ‘enthusiasm’ means ‘passage to god’ or ‘sharing the divine’: How can enthusiasm be saved from the death of God?”1 This concern seems related to your writing strategy, in the way you borrow a theological category—an excellent example of this is “creation ex nihilo”—and take it out of context while also trying to find something helpful in it.
J.-L.N.: You’re asking a question that also has to be addressed to Gérard Granel. In the last article he published, “Far from Substance: Whither and to What Point? (Essay on the Ontological Kenosis of Thought Since Kant),”2 Granel borrows from the notion of “kenosis”—which appears in Paul3—in order to specify that from then on it must be understood as “assigned to an ontological index that is no longer theological.”4 I remember asking him back then: What’s this about? Can we leave the theological behind? Today, very briefly, and as a start, I’d say we can’t. When we speak about “secularization”—as Hans Blumenberg observed very well in the questions that he addressed to Carl Schmitt—what are we talking about? Is it the complete transfer of the same content but in another context? If one takes a fish and puts it in a dry place, it can no longer live. Is it a metaphorical displacement? But then what does metaphor signify? Concerning Carl Schmitt, I’m very grateful to Jean-François Kervégan for having clarified these questions in a recent book.5 When one speaks about political concepts in terms of secularized concepts like Schmitt, one borrows a schema from the Catholic Church and theological representation, the schema of the kingdom of God, one neglects any faith-based relationship to God, and one considers a certain organization. But then, we’re perhaps taken beyond what Blumenberg can make one induce; secularization is perhaps nothing more than the reprisal of an entire Christian conceptual apparatus, itself borrowed from models of theocratic sovereignty. Christianity would only be a passing place in time; what remains unknown is what really happens with Christianity. Very quickly, one can believe that one does make out the representation of a kingdom, but this representation is essentially the kingdom of God because the kingdom of the world was only constituted as a secularized kingdom after the fact, copying something from Christian representation. So one probably shouldn’t talk about theology because, in the beginning, what one extracts from it is an element of faith. Still, theology isn’t faith. There can be a theology of faith, but this kind of theology has never provided faith; a theologian of faith can be a complete non-believer or infidel in the end. If one takes an element out of religion, it may no longer have a sense. If one extracts “kenosis”6 from its context, as Gérard Granel suggested, is there any sense in speaking about God “being emptied” of its deity in order to become a man outside of Christ, who was precisely this god who joined humanity completely? More simply, can one hold on to the term kenosis outside the context of creation and incarnation?
Now as for the second part of the question: Isn’t there in the very principle of Christianity, that is, beneath what Christianity displays, beneath what one can read in the entire tradition that began with the crafting of the Christian texts such as the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles and Christ’s elaboration and representation, isn’t there, then, something that at the same time was shaking the entire philosophical edifice and taking over Christianity itself? Stoicism was already operative in Paul, for example. Christianity, in its beginning, was considered by many to be a philosophy, and thus a movement that separated itself from the entire philosophical edifice and from all the religious groups in their relationship to a higher power and a higher ability to receive the complaints and the offerings of man at the same time, that is, a power that belonged to a logic of sacrifice in one way or another. Is this not what’s at stake in Christianity, which is perhaps the sacrifice that puts an end to all sacrifices, in the words of René Girard? Certainly, abandoning human sacrifice in the entire Eastern Mediterranean arc between the thirteenth and the ninth centuries7 is a phenomenon that radically changed something in the culture, or civilization, of that part of the world at least.
P.-P.J.: Alongside these remarks, one might recall that the emperor Constantine did not forbid paganism, nor did he take measures against pagan practices. He always supported the values of Christianity through speech and he began to establish the power of the Church, not only by offering it material support, but also in his refusal to participate in the part of the ceremonies—which he was required to attend due to his position—that dealt with sacrifice and blood.8
J.-L.N.: A very interesting and impressive attitude to have …
P.-P.J.: If, according to Paul Veyne, Constantine was the “president of Christianity” who notably ensured that the fundamental points of the dogma were established, what gets forbidden was established after the entry into another dynasty, the dynasty of Theodosius.
J.-L.N.: Yet what does “abstaining from sacrifice” and even “abstaining from blood” suggest if not recognizing the possibility of establishing a bond with another world that’s held to be sacred? It seems to me that from that moment on, in the depths of Christianity, there is something like the germ of the disappearance of the sacred that had its roots in Judaism perhaps; here one can refer to what Levinas talks about in the passage from the sacred to the holy.9 The sacred is the separated, delimited order, which one can only access through certain procedures that are actually of a sacrificial nature. On the contrary, the holy, in a certain way, is not a separate order at all; this almost brings us back to the question of immanence. In Christian terms, the saint or holy person is the sinner who knows themself to be a complete sinner and confides in God as such. Confiding in God, this person becomes holy, and participates in the divine condition.
P.-P.J.: Still, taking up Levinas, one can find another character, the “Messiah.” In one of his talmudic readings, Levinas, after having commented on a text concerning messianism, comes to this conclusion: “The Messiah is Myself; to be Myself is to be the Messiah.”10 I understand that the Messiah, in a certain way, is anyone.
J.-L.N.: That the messiah may be anyone is consistent with the thought of Christ as a man among others, like all the others, nothing more than the others; there’s an entire vein of “demythologized” Christology, which amounts to saying that Jesus Christ is every one of us. One could then say that Christianity does constitute a movement, an operation that completely leaves religion behind—if religion must involve a relationship to the sacred. It’s completely desacralized religion, which in a sense has been understood by modern society because it’s secular. But, on the other hand, we’re confronted by a difficult problem: Can we be satisfied with desacralizing in this way? Is Christian behavior tenable as something that completely abstains from any relationship with the sacred? Is what was tenable for Constantine tenable for entire peoples and crowds? These are questions one could obsess about … Because I see very clearly that the religious seeps in from everywhere; I’m conscious of the fact that we’re always somehow failing the millions of people who are unable to live in anything but religious society whether they be Muslims or Catholics, especially the Catholics of South America, who, living in very different circumstances and political regimes, feel this need. We know, of course, that a thought such as “liberation theology”11 could appear within these populations. Nevertheless, the rather awkward question is asking whether this is always an intellectual exercise that’s feasible for people constituting a certain elite and not for others …
What’s an intellectual, then? In the positive sense of the word, it’s someone in the realm of what we call thought, but who finds themself extremely lively, I’d even say corporeal, within it—it’s someone for whom words and ideas are not only words and ideas but the circulation of the real. Perhaps it’s typical that this movement cannot be put into social, general circulation without any intermediary? A big question then … It remains the case that, in spite of everything we’ve just said, one hardly sees how humankind could simply go back to the sacred now. In the modern human’s general relationship to the world and to itself, there is, despite it all, a technicity, an implied objectivity, which is attested to by what we call science, and which can neither be overthrown nor suppressed. Perhaps the very grasping of what we call technology, reason, rationality, and so on will be transformed, but if this is the case, I don’t think that it will be in order to go back to some form of the sacred. It can only be a transformation that gives place to something truly unprecedented, and it seems to me that at this moment this emergence would take place in what Christianity would conceal as its obscure content, that is, in the vein of the divine that becomes entirely human, which has to be understood as an opening in the human being of the human being to itself and to a dimension that completely exceeds what we call the worldly, material, sensible, etc. dimension, but exceeding the human from within, making understandable, as Wittgenstein says, that creation is the world existing. In another sense, one could say that within this lies an opportunity to recover the possibility of admiring, of adoring that the world exists, and the fact that I exist, that you exist.
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II, trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 78.
2. Gérard Granel, “Far from Substance: Whither and to What Point? (Essay on the Ontological Kenosis of Thought Since Kant),” in Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 163–74.
3. Philippians 2:7.
4. Granel, “Far from Substance: Whither and to What Point?” in Dis-Enclosure, 163.
5. Jean-François Kervégan, Hegel, Carl Schmitt: La politique entre spéculation et positivité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005).
6. Kenos, in Greek, signifies “empty”; Kenosis, “emptying out.” Paul teaches (Philippians 2:7) that Jesus, named Lord, “emptied himself” (heauton ekenōsen), annihilated himself to the obedience of death on the cross. In Luther’s Bible, kenōsis is Entäusserung; this term was credited to Hegel in philosophy: The absolute Idea empties itself like the Verb does, one could say.
7. Some of these practices had survived up until the time of classical Greece, which is indicated by laws forbidding them. Yet from then on sacrifice belonged to what was banned.
8. Veyne, When Our World Became Christian: 312–94.
9. Emmanuel Levinas, “From the Sacred to the Holy: Five New Talmudic Readings,” in Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
10. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 89.
11. In 1968, at the occasion of a plenary meeting of the bishops of Latin America that took place in Medellín, Gustavo Gutierrez used the expression “liberation theology” for the first time, which was later used as the title of his 1969 essay “Toward a Theology of Liberation” (in Liberation Theology: A Documentary History, ed. trans. Alfred T. Hennelly, S. J. [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1990], 62–77) and his 1971 work A Theology of Liberation.