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There Is No Sense of Sense

That Is Worthy of Adoration

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Could one dare to affirm in all seriousness that adoration is what is necessary in the world today?

One could not, and we shall not do so here, even if we feel a certain necessity to do so. We shall not do so partly because it would be grotesque to call for “adoration” in a world that perhaps lacks everything—justice, history, civility [cité], splendor, sense—except the idols, fetishes, gods, and celebrities that are proposed as objects of adoration. But this is not the only reason why we shall not simply affirm the necessity of adoration, however self-evident or sensible it might appear, because it is not the right reason.

It not the right reason on two grounds. First, such a reasoning presupposes that adoration could only be addressed to the shimmering and dubious population that has just been listed, those who occupy the altar or the circus ring for a moment only. In truth, we can only learn how things stand with adoration by beginning with a question.

The second ground concerns what it would mean to affirm a necessity. However distressed or anguished our world might be, however disoriented we might have been since we put an end to our sacred and profane eschatologies, the most urgent measure of vigor and truth must not be found in the proclamation of another necessity, merely of a different type. Nothing is necessary for what does not proceed from necessity—and our world proceeds only from its own fortuitousness, or, avoiding the brutality of that word, from its fortuitous character. It is barely acceptable, therefore, to say that it “proceeds from” at all. It takes place, it is there, it could not not be there or not be, it does not derive or stem from anything.

What is to be thought is nothing but this: how the contingent side of existence opens onto an adoration. Not an adoration of itself, as if the fortuitous, the accidental, the aleatory deserved to be set up as something glorious, in opposition to the old necessities, divinities, reasons, and destinations. But rather an adoration of what is not set up on any altar or throne, does not drape itself with glory, and whose setting up, if it takes place at all, is at most also a prostration, a deposition [déposition], an abandonment.

Nothing is more familiar to us than to lament the threat hanging over the world and existence—and this is more than just a characteristic of our tradition, even if it was considerably reinforced when Sophocles, in Hölderlin’s understanding of him, said that man is “monstrous . . . [he who] offends the laws of the World and of the faith/that is sworn to the Powers of Nature.”1 Since Sophocles, we have been excavating the monstrous and finding the absurd, and we have been losing laws, such as faith in all the Powers. We often repeat: “Sometimes I believe that nothing has meaning. On a minuscule planet that has been heading toward oblivion for millennia, we are born in pain, grow up, struggle, fall ill, suffer, cause suffering, cry out, and die: we die and at that very moment, others are born in order to start the useless comedy anew.”2

Even if this is familiar, Sophocles and Sabato wrote it anew. They wrote, and we take literature into consideration not because it is a transcription of data but because it opens and communicates possible, indeterminate, uncompletable meanings.

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The fortuitous character of existence—that of the world as well as that of each being [étant], whether speaking, living, or inert—is not the same as its contingency. The latter is still measured via the contrast it opens up with necessity. Contingency is a philosophical term, and as such it is already engaged in a dialectic whereby the totality of what is contingent can form a general order of the world. The “fortuitous” puts forward a notion less of a nature or a state than of a circumstance, a movement. In a fortuitous way, something happens, and something falters in its fortuitousness or in its fortuitude. It is a fortunate encounter (the same word is there, fors), which can be good or bad—and the good encounter at all times lays itself open to the off-beat of the bad.

Essentially, what is fortuitous responds to a discontinuous and fleeting conception of time. It responds to the discontinuity as much of singularities themselves as of the modes—space/time—according to which this discontinuity becomes singular.

This is nothing new: what is fortuitous, together with what is fleeting, elusive, ephemeral, and lacking in substance, composes the minor rhapsody of our system of references, whose major mode looks for what is stable, constant, and durable. This enables us all the more to have a pressentiment of the moment at which the fortuitous summons us: summons our adherence, which, however, finds nothing to which it can adhere.

It finds nothing to which it can attach itself, to which it can hold, nothing in which to inscribe a profession of faith or a grounded assurance. It finds nothing but fortune, its turns, its obverses and reverses. Not Fortune as a blind goddess who plays with our destinies, but this fortune of our lots [sorts], which is to say, that of our existences thrown into the world just as what were called sortes, blocks of wood that were suddenly detached from a string, were thrown. Our existences, which we neither bear nor bear up, thrown for no reason across the void that alone unites them, that gathers them via its enigma—or via its very clear obviousness [évidence]. Our existences, all of them, those of humans and of other living beings, those of the elements that support them or provide them with an environment, with food or instruments—the air, minerals, water, fire, electrons, magnetic fields. These existences are linked only by their common projection, which creates a world and a world of differentiated worlds—which is to say, an ensemble or a network of possibilities of sense.

Sense is a referring [renvoi] (arelation, aratio, anaddress, a reception—a sensibility, a sentiment). A world is a totality of echoes, but it does not echo [renvoie] anything else. The worlds within the world—for example, the worlds of the polar circles or of classical Indian music, the worlds of Goya or of Wittgenstein, of caterpillars or of transistor radios—form “the” world by echoing and referring among themselves: but “the” world refers to nothing.

There is no other world, no world beyond, nor any “backworld” [“arrière-monde”] (Nietzsche). This means that there is no ultimate reference for the network of the world’s references, and that therefore there is no (ultimate) Sense of sense or of the senses.

There is no sense of sense: this is not, ultimately, a negative proposition. It is the affirmation of sense itself—of sensibility, sentiment, significance: the affirmation according to which the world’s existents, by referring to one another, open onto the inexhaustible play of their references, and not onto any kind of completion that might be called “the meaning [sens] of life,” “the meaning of history,” or even “salvation [salut],” “happiness,” “eternal life,” no more than it opens onto the supposed immortality of works of art, which are in themselves nothing other than forms and modes of reference. Yet our true immortality—or eternity—is given precisely by the world as the place of mutual, infinite referral.

Adoration speaks of this infinite that speaks to it, addresses it. It is, in a way, the praise of infinite sense.

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A praising that is itself without end, a praising commensurate with what it praises—and equal to what it praises, since it stems from there. Commensurate with an incommensurable.

For this reason it is neither possible nor desirable to discuss adoration in an organized, coherent way. But neither is it a case of privileging what is unorganized, fragmented, suspended. One can only attempt approaches—or follow glimpses—that might lead toward something that we cannot even classify as a “theme.”

Undoubtedly, adoration must not be thematized. And in any case, if this project—this meditation—is exploratory, this does not mean that it will explore the possibilities of a “theory” of adoration; rather, it will follow through those of nothing less than a praxis. This praxis bears an unexpected name: thinking. Indeed, thinking should not be conflated with intellectual activity—the establishment of relationships, the invention of nominations (concepts) and of arguments (reasons)—nor with individual activity (judgment, appreciation, evaluation). Thinking is a movement of bodies: it begins in the folded-over nerves [ce pli nerveux] of the body and is exposed to the infinite of a sense, which is to say, of affection coming from other bodies.

The body arouses thinking through all its sensitive modes of access [accès]—sensory, sentimental, sensible [sensés]—and thinking forms the supplementary access: the one that opens all the senses onto the infinite. This does not mean that all the senses feed into a unique sense that would subsume them all. The diversity of the sensory apparatus—as well as the difference between the sensory, the sentimental, and the sensible—remains in the infinite and thus keeps the infinite open, inexhaustible, and excessive [surexcédant].

Such is the incommensurable to which we are exposed: it is not merely incommensurable with us and with all other beings [étants], but also with itself. Such is the chance and the jouissance of thinking: that it should be essentially a relationship to excedence itself, to the absolute excedence that can be named “being” [l’ “être”] but also “world” or “sense.” Excedence of all that is given, but also of itself: excedence of the gift upstream from the given. The gift of this: that there are some things, things, all beings [étants]—but not “something rather than nothing,” since precisely nothing is what there is, in place of the gift.

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It is because there is nothing else I believe there is something else.3

The gift of the world calls for adoration. It invites us to adoration, commits us to it, arouses it. But what’s more, this gift opens the possibility—if not the necessity—of adoration. Not that it obliges us, as a giver can oblige the receiver. But this gift without giver, this gift that in itself is simply equal to the event of the world, already in itself constitutes a gesture of adoration: this gift turns towards the infinite, or rather, it bears to the infinite the real of the nothing of which it is the dis-enclosure.

Here it could be shown how this realization of nothing does nothing but gloss the doctrine of “creation ex nihilo.” But it is not necessary to make a detour through this theology, which might always appear to be pulling us obstinately toward a divine omnipotence.4

It is sufficient to say: rigorously, a “creator” of course is conflated with his act of creation, and this act is conflated with a fortuitous rupture in nothingness. Ex does not mean “beginning with,” but rather “outside of,” “at a distance from.” A distance comes about [survient], comes into play within homogeneous, undifferentiated nothingness. Whether it comes about “at a given moment” or “during all eternity” comes down to the same thing, and yet it comes about. It is the very fact of coming about. This gap opens the world.

To the objection that a gap is produced “within” something, one could reply that indeed nihil and something—the undifferentiated thing, the “void” of which metaphysicians speak, the datum that is archepremier, subatomic, or however one wants to describe matter5—are identical. Nihil would thus be spacing itself, the tension of the gap, the beating [pulsation] or drive [pulsion] that causes it to open up. In this view, then, there is no difference between a full understanding of well-known theologies (perhaps mystical ones . . . ) of creation and the affirmation of the atemporal permanence of a matter—or an energy—that is always already given, always already there. At each instant of time this there is there, opened as an ex.

This world that opens up is not a “possible world,” since no projection of possibilities has preceded it: nothing, in the heart of nothingness, draws up the plans or the hypotheses of any kind of world. Instead, the world is the improbable rupture, the separation of day from night, of waters from earth, of this molecule from that, of this existence from that. Ex nihilo is each configuration of crystals, each convolution of the nervous system, each physiological rhythm, each combination of thought, of machines, of computational systems, or of musical compositions.

What is produced is a gap, a rupture from what could have remained within an inherent, closed identity—in truth, one should not say “identity” but idiocy: closed on itself, but without any inside nor outside, bogged down in itself. Rupture opens identity by way of difference and the inside by way of the outside, day by night, and nothing by things. But in itself it is nothing, nothing but a gap, an opening. The infinitesimal reality (res, nothing [rien]) of opening. And therefore also of relationship, transport, transformation, or exchange, of the fortunate or unfortunate encounter. The opening is as risky, as adventurous as it is fortuitous, as dangerous as it is precious.

Adoration is addressed to this opening. Adoration consists in holding onto the nothing—without reason or origin—of the opening. It is the very fact of this holding on.

Adoration therefore carries itself with a certain humility. As the tradition knows in various ways, “ex nihilo” also means that God makes something of the most humble, of almost nothing, with no regard for what is powerful and remarkable. Humility, whether it be Jewish (Job), Christian (“for he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden”/“respexit humilitatem ancillae suae”; Luke 1:48), or Muslim (“Islam”: a trusting submission) has nothing to do with humiliation. It measures an infinite distance, nothing else.

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There is something in this thought—the extreme point of all thought—that belongs to all forms and all epochs of culture, religion, and philosophy. (It is the point at which each touches the other, yet spaces itself at the moment of doing so, since religion fills in the nothing.) But there is also a characteristic that becomes sharper and more accentuated in the modern age.

This is shown in a text by Kant—a text that of course still bears the marks of an age preceding modernity but which we can transpose in order to bring it closer to us.

Kant writes:

Thus the consideration of the profound wisdom of divine creation in the smallest things and of its majesty in the great whole, such as was indeed already available to human beings in the past but in more recent times has widened into the widest admiration—this consideration not only has such a power as to transport the mind into that sinking mood, called adoration, in which the human being is as it were nothing in his own eyes, but is also, with respect to the human moral determination, such a soul-elevating power, that in comparison words, even if they were those of King David in prayer . . ., would have to vanish as empty sound, because the feeling arising from such a vision of the hand of God is inexpressible.6

This can be transposed as follows:

Confronting a world in which he can see no finality, man has always been struck by the sentiment of an organized cohesion, both in the smallest details and in the majestic scale of the universe and its history. This admiring astonishment grew with modern science’s penetration into all dimensions of the world, though at the same time science withdrew infinitely any kind of sufficient reason. Thus it is that, when confronting his own place and his own role in the unending ecotechnical transformation of the world, man feels this sentiment. This contemplation or consideration harbors a force that plunges us into the sentiment of our own nothingness at the same time as it asks that we be equal to this excedence of ourselves and of all worldly significations.

Adoration is a relationship to excess where ends and reasons are concerned, a relationship to existence as this excess itself—just as much for the existence of the world as for the existence of life, thought, and any kind of tension going beyond intention. Where Kant was able to name the hand of God—in order to declare it inexpressible—we name a tension without intention: the fortuitous as our fortune, the contingency of the gap opened in nothing and making a world without a purpose, without a destination, but giving us a destiny by that very token—and what a powerful destination, with what a dispatching force [force d’envoi]!—the destiny to take up this tension without intention, this potential for an existence without essence.

Perhaps what Derrida named “destinerrance” should be understood in this way: destination is not to go anywhere in particular, but to displace ourselves on the spot in this place of all taking place, where we exist with the totality of existents, to displace ourselves along (or around, in the proximity of) this tension, this ex-tension and this thrust (drive, beating, rhythm) that orders and organizes the very fortuitousness of a “taking place” without reason or end. From the crystal to logic, there is an ordering and an organization for which no design can account but whose very tension—crystalline, organic, living, thinking—tightens toward our attention: not in order to resolve it, but in order to come to meet it, in order to experience it. This is what we call “thinking.”

Or “adoring.” Which is to say, standing in relation to this nothing of reason or ends, of substance or the subject, of caution or accomplishment.

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This emptying out of the principle and the end also intimates that we must not be content with thinking “creation” as an initial event, nor as a single event. Creation is constantly taking place, as could be illustrated by speaking of particles coming into contact with one another or of exploding stars, of living species, or of human inventions. What takes place at every moment is what Descartes called “continuous creation”: the putting into play [jeu], if one might say so, of the game [jeu] itself, this game that throws and throws again the dice of a “taking place” that is always resumed in new metamorphoses. Undoubtedly, we must then ask ourselves how human inventions pursue this game, or whether they reverse its sense, if they endanger the creativity of living beings and the equilibria of their vital milieus. In this sense, the question of ecology is as metaphysical as it is practical. But precisely the fact that this question is being asked and that we cannot avoid worrying about “the greenhouse effect,” deforestation, and overfishing means two things: on the one hand, that “nature” itself—because mankind issues from it—can engender a “denaturing” and that no law or “natural” or “providential” design can be invoked to regulate the course of a creation capable of turning against itself; on the other hand, that technology [la technique] can rightfully be considered to be the renewal of creation and of its absence of fixed ends. The contradiction between these two envelops the necessity, now starkly revealed, of thinking the absence of any metaphysical necessity—and how this absence commits us.

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Adoratio: the word as it is addressed. Oratio: a solemn word, a word maintained [tenue] before anything else, a tension of the voice, of the mouth, and of the entire speaking body. A word whose content is inseparable, if not indiscernible, from the address. An elevated language that is distinguished from sermo, ordinary language.7 A prayer, invocation, address, appeal, plea, imploring, celebration, dedication, salutation. And more precisely, not one or another of these registers, but a composition formed from them all. And lastly, or first of all, a salutation [salut]. Yes, the simple “hi!” [“salut!”] participates in adoration. When Derrida writes, or rather cries out, with all his might, “salut!—a salutation without salvation,”8 he indicates the following: that the word addressed, the address that barely contains anything beyond itself, bears the recognition and affirmation of the existence of the other. It does nothing more than that, nothing that could be taken up or sublimated into a superior order of sense or of dignity: for this existence is sufficient in itself, it is “safe” [“sauve”] in itself, without needing to exit from the world.

This existence makes sense or is sense, and with it the whole world can make sense, from “salut!” to “salut!,” from one to another. Do not the morning sun, the plant pushing out of the soil, address a “salut!” to us? Or the gaze of an animal? And as for us, how do we salute one another? Is there not salutation in the dispatches, the addresses that we exchange with one another—for example, in the signals formed by buildings, towns, clothes, or objects? And of course in the signals found in the delivery of a piece of information, in establishing communication, whether by telephone, radio, television, or the Internet? There is no reason to think otherwise. We interpret technology as a combination of instruments: but it is just as much an exchange and a propagation of salutations.

If we think, however, that we ought to save technology or save ourselves from it, that is because we are unable to distinguish between its submission to ends and its independence from those ends. Whenever there is a project, a program, or an indefinite accumulation of always-renewed ends that share a common profitability or productivity, there is also an instrument. One cannot salute whatever is produced, insofar as the product enters into general exchange, into the circulation where all “products” are equal on some level, when they act as merchandise and therefore as currency, as something that can be multiplied and invested, but not saluted. That is what “capitalism” is: the substitution of invested, productive riches for glorious, unproductive ones.

Civilization chose this substitution, unconsciously of course, a choice that was not decided by one person, but which has engaged the history of the world for at least six centuries. And to remain with our current topic: this choice implies a sort of turning away from the principle of adoration. It is not by chance that, from the “golden calf” to the outdated miser and up to the present entrancement of traders with the profits made possible by the movement of huge virtual bodies of money, certain elements of a caricatural adoration appear: admiration, veneration, fascination, alienation in all senses of the word—for it is all a question of madness. This madness falls into a pattern that is exactly the reverse of the other madness present in adoration: the madness of relating to a value without equivalent, to a sense outside of sense. Which is to say, to the world and to existence.

The indefinite proliferation of technological ends—speed, digitalization, the command of space, the culturing of stem-cells, genetic modification and all that this appears to threaten—can be related to nothing other than its own indefiniteness or that of the profits that can be made from this proliferation. But what is necessary above all, at the heart of civilization, is the opening provided by what can today no longer be called a “transcendence” without seeming to turn toward a God that is dead and toward “backworlds” [“arrière-mondes”].

Nonetheless, “transcendence” is what is at issue, however little the uniquely dynamic nature of this term is understood: it does not designate the status of a “being” [“être”] that would be supreme to a greater or lesser degree, but rather the movement whereby an existent leaves behind its simple equality to itself. Which means: to ex-ist in the full sense of the word.

But it is true that the word transcendence is burdened with centuries of usage in a static, non-dynamic sense, and hence it can be abandoned. Indeed, it must be, because it is by changing words that thinking can be dislocated—and in dislocating thinking, what I have given the burdensome name of “civilization” can also be dislocated. The resulting weighing down of words, the burden of meanings, and the ensuing kind of paralysis of language are themselves signs that a culture is becoming enclosed within a homogeneity that renders it insignificant for itself (or that means it is significant only for itself: technology equals technology, money equals money, law equals law, and being equals being, etc.). “To adore”—I am aware that this word is even more burdened than others, overburdened with dubious piety and with worldly frivolity—must also and perhaps most of all be a way of addressing differently words that we can only rarely change or replace as we might like. A neologism is technically a bright idea, a useful tool, but it only enters into language if it is taken up by usage.9 And usage depends on the dispositions and deep currents in “culture” or “civilization.” Neologism or the reuse of a word—“paleonymy,” as Derrida said—always involves an attempt to move within language, to move language, but it is only language that can truly move. Language alone: thought, culture, their imperceptible movements, the dislocations and the metamorphoses of sense and how it appears.

“Adoration” simply means: attention to the movement of sense, to the possibility of an address that would be utterly new, neither philosophical nor religious, neither practical nor political nor loving—but attentive.

Attentive, for example, to the fact—one of thousands that could be cited—that whereas the Qu’ran states that God created mankind in order to be adored, modern man is ready to condemn the nullity of this vain operation, the exorbitant presumptuousness of such a Narcissus.10 But what if we were called upon to understand the Qu’ran’s statement altogether differently? What if it meant that “God” is only the name adopted by a pure excess—indeed vain, indeed exorbitant—of the world and existence over themselves, in themselves? Of a purely and simply infinite relationship to infinity?

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To adore is not to pray in the sense of asking for something or in those of imploring or supplicating, commending, confiding, dedicating, or devoting; neither is it to honor, praise, celebrate, or idealize; neither is it to glorify or to exult; it is not to sing, even though singing is to pray twice (Augustine); it is none of the above, nor what praying might appear to be in any other way. But it is also all of the above, indistinctly, augmented—or rather modulated—by a breath, an aspiration, an inspiration, and an expiration whose three motions come to constitute, most simply, breathing. The model of pneumatic prayer practiced by some Orthodox monks comes to mind. And doubtless we should consider the pneuma. We could begin by saying that pneuma is what does not speak, without being silent either. Not words, but the breath that carries them. And the trace of this breath in us, in the other. A word of breath [parole de souffle].

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Adoration is addressed to what exceeds address. Or rather: it is addressed without seeking to reach, without any intention at all. It can accept to not even be addressed: to be unable to aim, or designate, or recognize the outside to which it is dispatched. It can even be unable to identify it as an outside, since it takes place here, nowhere else, but here in the open. Nothing but an open mouth, or perhaps an eye, an ear: nothing but an open body. Bodies are adoration in all their openings.

“Here in the open”: this is henceforth the world, our world. Open to nothing other than to itself. Transcendent in its own immanence. Invited, called, no longer to consider its reason for being but rather to confront the dis-enclosure of all reasons—and of all cynical, skeptical, or absurd unreason—in order to measure itself against this: that this world alone, our world, provides the measure of the incommensurable. Its contingency, its fortuitousness, its errancy are only fragile names, linked to the regime of sufficient reason, that attempt to say a reason that is not insufficient (it is not an abyss, though it has no bottom), but rather overflows all sufficiency, exceeding all satisfaction.

This world is indeed ours, everyone’s. Here I speak starting out from what is called the Western tradition—Greek, Latin, Jewish, Christian, Muslim—without forgetting that henceforth the “West” no longer exists: finding itself everywhere, it is no longer anywhere in particular. The propagation of its reason throughout the whole world annuls—broadly speaking, but it is precisely a question of broadness—what was its domination. Domination henceforth takes on different forms, and the division of the weak and the strong—which was, of course, given structure by the economic and technical rationality of the West—is articulated in a wholly different and more complex way than any domination of the world by one part of it. Globalization is also a deterritorialization—in this sense, it undoes the “world” in the latter’s accomplished, ordered, cosmic, and cosmetic senses—and this deterritorialization gives us cause to think, beyond any representation of the relationships, conflictual or otherwise, between civilizations, about the stakes of a mutation that affects the world as such, in any sense we could give to that expression.

Do other traditions—Buddhism, Taoism, for example—provide different resources with which to face the same stakes? Some want to believe so, but their disposition often appears so voluntaristic as to seem dreamy. If the stakes are the same for everyone and if they are based in a rationality—fortuitously—formed in the regions of the setting sun, one might think that it is difficult not to take into account the genealogy of this “reason.” Can we, for example, pass up something recognized as a right by all? In commerce it is impossible, and it will become so in other domains, for other modes of commerce (although this does not mean that “human rights” will always refer to the same “man” as conceived by the same “Enlightenment”). But it will refer to a humanity whose at once fortuitous, ungraspable, and infinite nature we need to think about more. In any case, I can only speak from the position of the old European humanism as it questions itself.