MANDORLA
In the almond—what dwells in the almond?
Nothing.
What dwells in the almond is Nothing.
There it dwells and dwells.
—Paul Celan
Why speak of Christianity?
In truth, I’d like to speak of it as little as possible. I’d like to move toward an effacement of this name and of the whole corpus of references that follows it—a corpus that is already mostly effaced or has lost its vitality. But I do think it is important to follow the movement that this name has named: that of an exit from religion and of the expansion of the atheist world.
This world, our world, that of what used to be called “Western” civilization, which can now be distinguished as such only by vestiges of language or by divisions in which the “orient/occident” distinction plays only a small part—it is no accident that this world was first built up as “Christendom” [chrétienté]. Christianity was much more than a religion: it was the innervation of a Mediterranean space that was searching for a nervous system after it had put in place the morphological and physiological system of law, the city, and reason. Indeed this ternary—law, city, reason (we can also include art)—was a translation of the disappearance, with which the ternary itself was faced, of any assurance [assurance] concerning the foundation of existence. That is to say, any assurance concerning what we can also designate as the presence of the gods. It was the Greeks who perceived the absence of the gods in the place of this presence.1
We can say this in a different way, in order to move toward an essential characteristic of Christianity. The Greco-Roman world was the world of mortal mankind. Death was irreparable there; and whether one tried to think about it in terms of glory or in terms of deliverance, it was still the incompatible other of life. Other cultures have always affirmed death as another life, foreign yet close by, strange yet compatible in various ways. Irreparable and incompatible death struck life as an affliction. Christianity, reinterpreting an aspect of Judaism, proposed death as the truth of life and opened up in life itself the difference of death, whereby life could know itself as immortal and “saved.”2
That life can be saved, or better still, that its salvation should be a certainty has been interpreted in many ways—by martyrdom, by ascesis, by mysticism, by the mastery and possession of nature, by adventure and enterprise, by the search for happiness, by the “emancipation of human-kind”—and we will come back to what this “salvation” [salut] might still mean to us, what it still has to tell us. The turning point of civilization that reenergized “the West” was played out around what was called “eternal life.” However, eternal life is not life indefinitely prolonged, but life withdrawn from time in the very course of time. Whereas the life of ancient mankind was a life measured by its time, and the life of other cultures was a life in constant relation to the life of the dead, Christian life lives, in time, what is outside time. This characteristic seems to have an intimate relation to with what I am calling here adoration, which I could characterize as a relation to the outside of time (to the pure instant, to the ceasing of duration, to truth as an interruption of sense).
But before coming back to the motif of salvation [salut], we must lay out what is contained in this proposition: “Christianity” is life in the world outside of the world. Nietzsche (to invoke the best witness to this subject) understood it perfectly. This despiser of “backworlds” [arrièremondes] knew that Christianity (at least in a version of it to which no Gospel or Church ever truly conforms) consists in being in the world without being of the world. This is to say that it does not limit itself to adhering to inherence, to what is given (whether this is taken as the “real” or, on the contrary, as an “appearance”). Two of Nietzsche’s well-known figures illustrate what he sometimes claims to be the “experience at the heart” of Christianity: the tightrope dancer and the child playing with dice. Neither relates to the world as a given by which she is surrounded; on the contrary, they relate to that in the world which makes an opening, rift, abyss, game, or risk.
“Life in the world outside of the world” is so far from being an exclusively “Christian” formula that it finds an echo [répondant] in the statement by Wittgenstein that “the sense of the world must lie outside the world.”3 Of course, Wittgenstein is not calling on any representation or conception of “another world”: he is asking that the outside be thought and grasped in the midst of the world.
What is thus shown by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein could be shown by a thousand other references. The “spirit of Christianity” (to quote Hegel) is none other than the spirit of the West. The West (which—need it be said?—no longer has any distinct circumscription) is a mode of being in the world in such a way that the sense of the world opens up as a spacing [écartement] within the world itself and in relation to it. This mode can be distinguished both from the mode in which sense circulates in the world without discontinuity—death as another life—and from the mode whereby sense is circumscribed in the narrow space of a life that death dispatches to insignificance (a dispatch that can shine with the brief splendor of tragedy). Of course, the Western mode brings with it the great danger of an entire dissipation of sense when the world opens onto nothing but its own chasm. But this is precisely what concerns us.
Where initially there had been an uninterrupted circulation between life and death, then a tragic celebration of mortal life, what was produced and put an end to this—an end to what we call “Antiquity,” which is to say, the first epoch of the “West”—was what a historian describes as “the huge divide which all late antique thinkers, pagan, Jewish, and Christian alike, saw between the ‘upper’ and the ‘lower’ world.”4
For the moment, then, this: “Christianity” has developed and modulated the theme of this “immense fracture” and, on that basis, has engendered the intimate constitution of our “mundane,” atheist civilization, with its indefinitely dispersed ends [fins]. We exited from Christendom long ago, but that only serves to confirm this particular constitution. It is not a question, then, of being somehow interested in Christianity for itself, or for some religious, moral, spiritual, or saving virtue in any of the senses that the professions of Christian faith have left us with. In order to end, we give what remains of Christianity its leave, and this is why we can maintain that it is deconstructing itself.
But in deconstructing itself, it dis-encloses our thinking: whereas Enlightenment reason, and following it the reason of the world of integral progress, judged it necessary to close itself off to all dimensions of the “outside,” what is called for now is to break the enclosure in order to understand that it is from reason and through reason that the pressure, the drive (this Trieb of reason that Kant wants to uphold)5 of the relation with the infinite outside comes about, and does so in this very place. Deconstructing Christianity means opening reason to its very own reason, and perhaps to its unreason.
A few words more about the other branches of Western monotheism, as well as, in a more lateral way, about Buddhism.
What I am saying about Christianity does not confer a privilege upon it, nor does it place Christianity at the top of some list of honors. Rather, it comes down to indicating Christianity as the least privileged of religions, the one that retains the least well, with the most difficulty, the energy that is strictly speaking religious, that is to say, the energy of a sense that is able to carry on from life to death and back again. And it is no accident, if what I have said above is granted, that Christianity has desacralized, demythologized, and secularized itself in such a constant and irreversible way for at least six centuries—if not for far longer. (Should we not say: from the moment Christendom existed, it entered into deconstruction and dis-enclosure?)
“Christianity” is nothing more than a name here—and a highly provisional one—for “us”: for what makes us the bearers of this being outside the world in the world. “We” who have borne the entire world to this “civilization” that not only knows “discontentedness” (Unbehagen; malaise), as Freud said, but henceforth recognizes itself precisely as discontentedness in the guise of civilization. Discontentedness: because we no longer know what makes us “civilized” or even what this word should indicate. Because we can no longer be sure that our civilization does not engender itself as barbarity.
During a certain period we believed that Christianity was the malady of the West. Not only did we think that reason would cure us of this malady, but we expected from reason the true flowering of what the Christian message had no sooner announced than betrayed: justice in fraternity, equality in the distribution of wealth and in a common destination, the election and dilection of the singular individual and of everyone together. In truth, everything that we called “humanity”—using a word that named both the species of speaking beings and the ideal of rational beings—proceeded from Christianity insofar as it was an assurance that the other life was opened up in life itself and in its death.
What we can understand today is that, if there is malaise or malady, it was not produced by a religion which would have infected the Western body. It is this body itself that is ill, if there is illness, and the task of treatment belongs entirely to it—a body henceforth extended to all humanity, and further, to all heaven and earth—whether we are thinking in terms of healing, conversion, metamorphosis, grafting, or mutation. It is necessary to extract from Christianity what bore us and produced us: it is necessary, if possible, to extract from a ground deeper than the ground of the religious thing [la chose religieuse] that of which religion will have been a form and a misrecognition [méconnaissance].
This is why I am not setting up any competition between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. Only Christianity produced itself as the “West,” and it alone diluted its confessional features and disintegrated its religious force in this West, for better or for worse. It is out of the question to deny the genius proper to each of the three other religions and their contributions to the thinking and splendor of mankind. What’s more, one could say that all three have withheld themselves from the process of “civilization”—by engaging in it either not at all or very little, or, alternatively, by instilling vital energies that, as they became detached from their religious sources, came to give nourishment to civilization (such as Arabic science and philosophy, Jewish meditations on speech and on the flesh, the Buddhist discipline of detachment and compassion).
To become detached from the source and observance of religion was to become detached from all the ways of relating to death as the outside of life, or as its extension: it was to adopt the possibility that the other of life could open up within life itself and unto life itself—to the point of running the risk, as we do from now on, that all that opens up is a chasm into which life plunges. As a religion, Christianity delivered the message of this opening in an equivocal way: it promised a life found anew in the afterworld, and it also proposed frequenting the dead via the communion of saints. The Christian religion mixed together all the characteristics of religion—and the other religions are by no means wrong about its impurity, which they denounced and which was also denounced from within Christianity. In truth, Christianity unceasingly reforged the sacred link and religious observance, because its destiny as a religion depended on them (all the more because Christianity had in fact invented the status of “religion” as an instance and institution of salvation, as distinct from civil religion as it was from philosophical atheism). There would be no end to a list of all the dogmatic contents and all the spiritual tonalities that reforge the link between life and death and turn away as much from “death opened in the midst of life”—another way of saying “life in the world outside the world”—as from incompatible (tragic) death.6 Certain moments or aspects of Christianity enable us to see this, such as the Orthodox tradition or the most initiatory or magical aspects of the Roman Catholic tradition (sacraments, ecclesiastical authority), or even the various puritanisms. Here and there, in various ways, it has always been a question of the promise and/or the calculation [calcul] of another life, replacing and remunerating this one—and not of an irruption opening up this life, in an outside-the-world forming a gaping chasm in this world.
Let us define things carefully here: we speak with some familiarity of “this world” in the sense of this world here, this “down-here,” this “mundane” world—but it is a way of speaking that is proper to the West. Whether with the biblical “flesh” or with the Platonic “sensible”—the differences between them being set aside here—the possibility that there should be two “worlds,” two regions or regimes of different nature, was given in a particular place (where “this world” is not completely “globalized”). In this place one only knew, or one still only knows, one ensemble to which heaven and earth belong, which is the dwelling of both mankind and gods, regardless of the distance that separates them. “This world” implies that there is another world: another order, another laying out of all things and of life or existence, rather than an “other life” beyond, at the distance of God or of devils. In a certain sense, with “this world” there is no longer any totality of beings or any internal distribution of the regions of the all: or rather, there is such an “all,” but it is in itself open, it is at the same time entirely consistent in itself, without outside, and open. The beyond is within [en-deçà].
It is therefore necessary simultaneously to follow to its last extreme Christianity’s movement of self-deconstruction and to reinforce the symmetrical movement of the dis-enclosure of reason. We must not return to the spirit of Christianity, or to the spirit of Europe or of the West. On the contrary, we must refuse every kind of “return,” and above all the “return of the religious”—the most threatening of all such returns—and go further into what brought about the invention of this civilization that from now on will be globalized and perhaps lost, that may be approaching its end but is perhaps also capable of another adventure. This invention is a world without God—without any assurance of sense, but without any desire for death.
Doubtless this also means: without Christ and without Socrates. But with what can be found at bottom in both Christ and Socrates, and is more powerful than them: the faculty of being in the world outside of the world, the force and tenderness necessary to salute [saluer] another life in the midst of this one. (To salute, not to save, that is what is at stake. It is Derrida’s “Salut!”)7
To salute a man other than the son of God—or his double, the son of man, the man of humanism. Another one, yes, opened in the midst of the same, another same man. And another same world. Or even salute an other than man, an other than the world.
But—to salute, here and now. For the outside of the world in the world is not “outside” according to the logic of a divorce, a rift, but according to that of an opening that belongs to the world, as the mouth belongs to the body. Better still: the mouth is, or is what makes, the eating and speaking body, just as the other openings are what make it the breathing, listening, seeing, eliminating body. The outside traverses the body in all these ways, and this is how it becomes a body: the exposure of a soul. Our bodies are thus entirely, in their turn, openings of the world, and so are other open bodies, those of animals and plants. They can all salute.
The possibility of atheism, if by this we mean at least the denial of any kind of afterworld extending this world in order to console it, is inscribed at the source of Christianity, precisely insofar as in itself it is not (only) a religion, or rather insofar as from the outset it had disarranged or destabilized the religion that it was nevertheless creating. This possibility is marked in two ways.
1. On the one hand, Christianity is inaugurated in the affirmation of the presence “down here” of divine otherness or of the other life; not after death, but in death: this is the moment when Lazarus must rise again, now that Christ is rising again. Down here is not a place from which supplications or hopes can be addressed to the beyond. In all its tonalities, adoration is “of here” and opens the here— onto no elsewhere.
2. On the other hand, in this affirmation Christianity replays that of philosophy: the death of Socrates is indeed not a passage into another world but the opening of the truth of this world. Where the “world of ideas” was still able to take on a religious hue—and was indeed indicated as the world “of the god” (ho theos, a singular that was utterly strange to the Greek ear and that in Plato comes to strike out all the names of the gods along with the entire mythology of their distinct sojourns). This “god” in the singular is only metaphorically elsewhere: it depends on the “right here” [ici même] of whoever pronounces it.
In this sense, Socrates and Christ are the same: their deaths open up in the midst of the world, opening the truth of this world as the outside that presents itself right here, an outside that is “divine,” if you like, that is in any case “true,” that is to say, causing the failure of the indefinite pursuit of any final “sense” that would take place in some paradise or other dwelling of the beyond.8
There is nothing original about qualifying Christianity as atheist—nor about qualifying Judaism, Islam, and, of course, Buddhism as such (the latter is always described as a “religion without God,” though it tends toward a divinization of the Buddha and his avatars). An entire tradition lies behind it, complex in itself and requiring long exposition. A vector of atheism does indeed cut across the great religions, not insofar as they are religious but insofar as they are all contemporary (to speak in very broad terms) with the exit from human sacrifice and with the Western turn in world history, and thus also in philosophy, which is atheism articulated for itself—these religions have witnessed a complete recasting of the “divine,” a recasting whose deep driving force pushes toward the removal, if not of the “divine,” then at least of “God.”
Although this recasting is undeniable and the tradition of atheism or of the becoming-atheist of these religions is well documented, we persistently refuse to know anything about it. Moreover, most of the currently proliferating attempts to reanimate and reevaluate the religious element proceed by ignoring or bypassing this perspective. This is why I feel it is important to emphasize that only an understanding and an accentuation of Christianity’s becoming-atheist (as well as that of other religions, but I shall say why I am limiting myself to Christianity) can give us access to a thought that I am indicating as a dis-enclosure of reason.
I am therefore calling “Christianity” the posture of thought whereby “God” demands to be effaced or to efface himself. Undoubtedly, this definition leaves little room for the contents of the expositions of theological and spiritual truths. However, there is nothing in it that does not originate in such expositions. Nothing—but on the condition that one is able to distill out of doctrine the salt that it carried along in hidden form, even if while dissolving it. And it is indeed a question here of not allowing the salt of the earth to become insipid: that is, quite precisely, what gives flavor to this world and to our existence in it: flavor, appreciable quality, a price, value, sense.
God who effaces himself is not only God who takes his leave, as he did of Job, or God who constantly refuses any analogy in this world, as for Mohammed. It is God who becomes man, abandoning his divinity to the point of plunging it into the mortal condition. Not in order to exit once again from death, but to reveal the immortality in it: very precisely, the immortality of the dead. In death, the definitive suspension of sense (of existence) eternally crystallizes the shattering brilliance [éclat] of this suspended sense. This does not reduce the pain of dying, even less that of seeing others die. It does not overcome mourning, resolve it as “work” that has been completed: but it does affirm the absolute singularity of the dead.
But the man into whom God “descends” and “empties himself” (Paul’s kenosis) is not rendered divine by this. On the contrary. God effaces himself in that man: he is this effacement, he is therefore a trace, he is an impalpable, imperceptible vestige of the emptied and abandoned divine. Mankind is the abandonment of God: the trace upon him, the trace that he is, constitutes him as a sign of this abandonment. A sign of this: that the effacement of God is the sense of the world. The effacement of the Name, of Sense fulfilled. The effacement of the singular name (and even the greatest of these tend to be doomed to effacement; this process is already at work as they become the names of works) contains the effacement of any name claiming to name the Unique (thus the hundredth name of Allah is silent).
Not effacement alone, however. Christianity wants more: not to dwell in the absence of God, in his infinite distance, but to affirm it “among us.” That is to say, he is “himself” the among: he is the with or the between of us, this with or between that we are insofar as we are in the proximity that defines the world. The world = all the beings [étants] that are near or neighboring one another, that hereby relate to one another, and to nothing else. In this way establishing relations between one another, and to nothing else. “God” was a name for the relation among all beings—therefore, for the world in the strongest sense of the word.
In order for this to happen, “God” effaces himself in yet another way: in the Trinity. It is a question neither of three gods, nor of a three-headed god. It is exclusively a question of this: God is relation. He is his own relation—which is not a reflexive relation, neither an aseity [aséité] nor an ipseity, one that does not relate itself but relates absolutely. The ternary structure or appearance goes from one of its aspects to the other via something that is other to each of them, which is the relation between them. What is other to each of them is breath, spirit: sense. (That each of the others should be “father” and “son” is not necessarily patriarchal, even though it has been: father and son means one after the other, life and death, proximity and distancing—it is one way among many of saying ourselves all together and as we are, and what’s more, not “we” men alone but all “we” beings, we the world, we the world without God).
In a word: the Christian “god” is atheist. In fact, “atheist” signifies the nonpositing of “God,” the deposing [déposition]9 of any god that can be posed as such—that is to say, as a “being” or “subject” to which one property or another is given (including the perfection of all properties): but the Christian “god,” insofar as we can name him as such, is not posed, not even self-posed. There is neither a ground nor a space for this: there is neither world nor afterworld, but an opening of sense that produces the spacing of the world and its relation to itself.
It is thus an elsewhere, an outside that opens in the world, or rather opens it to itself, opens it as such, as world. But this elsewhere, this outside is here—hic et nunc—because it is the excess of this “here” itself over itself, that is to say, over its simple positing. The non-positing of this God is also the non-positing of the world or of beings [étant] in general: the world is not posited; it is given, given from nothing and for nothing.
Given/nothing or non-given—such is the opposition, and not given/giver, since the latter opposition sends us back toward a giving of the giver itself. As Lévi-Strauss writes: “The fundamental opposition . . . is . . . between being and non-being. A mental effort consubstantial with its history [that of man], and which will cease only with his disappearance from the stage of the universe, compels him to accept the two self-evident and contradictory truths which, through their clash, set his thought in motion.”10 The first motion [branle] of thought is that of mythological constructions, which are Lévi-Strauss’s concern here. But the aftereffect or après-coup of myths that figured oppositions derived from a fundamental opposition (such as heaven and earth, night and day, etc.) leads toward a confrontation with this opposition as such: between the world—in our overdetermination of it in signs, systems, codes, and networks of artifacts—and nothing, a nothing in the provenance of nature and a nothing in the destination of technology. Between the two, our thought is set in motion [s’ébranle] once more.
It is important for us to take on this from nothing and for nothing: atheism, therefore, as the rigorous consequence and implication of what the Christian West has engendered and extended to the whole world (while dispersing itself in that world and losing its contours in it). A tremendous ambivalence: on the one hand, it can be nihilism; on the other, it can be sense itself, the sense of this—that sense is given outside.
However, it is not enough to understand that Christianity has deployed in this way the possibility of this most daring and elating relation of sense, that which exposes us to the non-positedness of the world and thus to non-entity [né-ant]: to what is not [le non étant], is not posited, but given, given by no one, by no giver, but is in itself entirely woven from the substance of the gift: gracious, generous, abandoned.
It is not enough to understand that Christianity by itself created its destiny of metamorphosis into atheism—its God having said everything or given everything from the moment that he opened this general deposing or de-positing [déposition]. We must understand that this movement goes beyond a metamorphosis. It is not an “ism” converting itself to another “ism.”11 There is neither post-Christianity nor any “renewal” of any sort.
There is not even “atheism”; “atheist” is not enough! It is the positing of the principle that must be emptied. It is not enough to say that God takes leave, withdraws, or is incommensurable. It is even less a question of placing another principle on his throne—Mankind, Reason, Society. It is instead a question of coming to grips with this: the world rests on nothing—and this is its keenest sense.
It is at this point that reason is most conspicuously called into play: atheism consisted essentially in substituting a Reason for a God. In fact, it consisted in substituting a reason—cause, principle, finality—of the world for a god who was himself conceived of as a reason, merely a superior reason, equipped with extraordinary properties of omnipotence and omniscience. The death of this God—and it is only this God who is dead, as Nietzsche says—is nothing other than the death of any Reason endowed with the attributes of necessity and of the completeness of the foundation-production of the totality of beings. This reason did not see that it was putting itself to death in erecting this idol of itself, which was nothing but a God for atheists.
At the same time, in the time of the triumph of this supposed Worldly Reason, the “principle of reason” demanded by Leibniz (everything must have its sufficient reason) came to deploy itself and encountered its own uncertainty, trembled on its own foundation.12 One can even say: the “principle of reason” became an express philosophical demand because the model of rationality that had been constructed was already aware of, or was already touching, its own limit: Did not Newton imply this in his “I feign no hypotheses”—which is to say, I am constructing an order of rational physical laws, but there is no question of using them to provide a reason for [rendre raison de] the existence of the world as such?
Kant drew a lesson from this, tracing the circumscription of what he names “understanding” (cognitive reason) and bringing down any imaginable rationality of a “proof of God,” which is to say, of an evidencing of the first Reason of the world. From then on, a place was empty. It was occupied by many vicarious instances, for example, Hegelian Reason as a deployment of Spirit. But already with Hegel himself, and even more from his time to ours, what became manifest was that the empty place must not be occupied.
Materialisms, positivisms, scientisms, irrationalisms, fascisms or collectivisms, utilitarianisms, individualisms, historicisms, legalisms, and even democratisms, without mentioning all the relativisms, skepticisms, logicisms—all duly atheist—will have been attempts, more or less pitiful or frightening, to occupy this place, with greater or lesser dissimulation of the effort to do so, for one had, after all, become somewhat aware that this was not what needed to be done.
Such is still, and on a renewed basis, our responsibility: to keep the place empty, or better still, perhaps, to ensure that there shall be no more place for an instance or for a question of a “reason given” [“raison rendue”], of foundation, origin, and end. Let there be no more place for God—and in this way, let an opening, which we can discuss elsewhere whether to call “divine,” open.
Having thus drawn Christianity out of itself and even beyond atheism, I may have given the impression that, though I have noted some converging traits in the two other Western monotheisms, I am placing them at a lesser level of power or interest in the enterprise that concerns me.
On the one hand, I hold—as should be obvious—that this triple monotheism, in its profound and secret unity, carries the certainty, paradoxical for a religion, that I have just formulated: “The world rests on nothing.” No pillars, no turtle, no ocean, not even an abyss or yawning gulf: for the world is the gulf that swallows every type of backworld. The world is strangeness itself, absolute strangeness: the strangeness of the real, the quite tangible reality of this anomaly or of this exception devoid of all attachment. Each god says this in his own way: he says “Listen!” or he says “Love!” or he says “Read!” Of course, this extreme triple contradiction does not claim to sum up anything: it merely suggests that these three gods neither posit nor found, but essentially do something else. This triple God is not, first of all, he who made the world (and in any case, he makes it from nothing, which is to say without foundation or material: he does not make the world, he makes there be a world), rather he is first of all, or even uniquely, he who addresses. He is the one who calls, who interpellates. He is a god of speech. Without entering further here into the implications of this formula, I will limit myself to saying: the nature and law of language is to be addressed, both well on the hither side and far beyond all signification. Adoration responds to this address, or rather, resonates with it.
On the other hand, and to the contrary, I hold that, of the three religions, only one has undone itself as a religion and has in some way transformed itself into an irrigation system for the culture of the modern world (its morals, its law, its humanism, and its nihilism). We must say it precisely, though I cannot linger on this point—only one of the veins of Christianity flowed in this direction. This was the Reformation and the part of Catholicism that took inspiration from it, as well as at least a part of Christian mysticism (particularly Eckhart) but not Catholicism stricto sensu, no more than the Orthodox churches. This is to say not only that the Christianity that I claim is deconstructing itself and entering into a relation of mutual dis-enclosure with modern reason is far from being one with the ensemble of dogmas, institutions, and sociopolitical behavior of the different churches, but that it even breaks with them. This break is not new; it doubtless opens from the beginning of Christianity (e.g., between James and Paul, but perhaps also in Paul himself, or else in the difference between John and the Synoptic Gospels), and it can be found down the ages (Anselm, Eckhart, Francis of Assisi, Fénelon, and, of course, the great Reformers up to Barth, Bultmann, and Benhoeffer; more subtly, it traverses Augustine or Pascal—and these are only a few names at random). I do not wish to linger here: I only wish to emphasize that it is not the entirety of the Christian religion that is disenclosing itself, outside religion and outside Christianity. Not even, and in some way, the entirety of the reformed confessions, as certain conflicts (particularly around homosexuality) have shown. But the presence of this disposition is proper to Christianity, to what under the name of “Christendom” for a time structured what one could already have named “Europe,” with its knowledge, its law, its expansion, its humanism, its art.
But comparison with the two other monotheisms is what interests us here. In a way, and starting with the least obvious thing, insofar as we are considering Judaism and Islam as religions, the disposition which I have just declared proper to Christianity is also present in the two other confessions. Doubtless each of them possesses a vein exceeding religion, that is to say, a vein that dissipates observance in adoration. More than one mystic from each tradition confirms this for us.
However, the Jewish and the Muslim religions remain religions, very rich and complex systems of representation and observance, and it is difficult to see how they could be “secularized” (whatever the precise concept of the word might be). This is because they have no reason to enter into tension or conflict with institutions comparable to those of Christian Churches. The absence of such “Churches” obviously plays an important role here, one that has often been commented upon. But there is a reason for this absence: Christianity hastened to build a Church—to conceive of itself as a Church—because from the beginning it understood itself as an “assembly” (this is the meaning of the word) distinct de jure from any other assembly in the world, and therefore first of all political or sociopolitical.
It is starting from this point that it seems to me most possible to elucidate the relations among the three monotheisms—of course, in two rigorously different ways.
First of all, the relation between Christianity and Judaism. If one does not forget that Christianity is Judeo-Christian by birth—and in a sense, as we shall see, does not cease to be that—then one must remember that the Jewish currents in which it was born were tending toward a radical difference between “kingdoms.” Judaism was undergoing the experience—which, in truth, began in it long ago—of a separation between kingdoms, that is, an experience of the “not of this world” in the midst of the world.13 On the one hand, this experience takes the Christian form that will become, in a few centuries, the ambiguous, eminently debatable form in which a Church that is quite distinct from any Kingdom or Empire will nonetheless mix up its destiny in a thousand ways with those of kingdoms and empires, at times (often) to the point of apostasizing itself by becoming a power in the world.14 On the other hand, it takes the form of the dispersion of Israel, a diaspora that is precisely the carrying of this affirmation of the separateness of “kingdoms” into any possible place, whether kingdom or empire. (It is remarkable that, in certain respects, Paul should be the one who, on the one hand, suppresses the difference between Jews, Greeks, and “nations” in general, who is so strongly opposed to those who wish to withdraw into small formations that historians call “Judeo-Christian,” and, on the other hand, who emphasizes in so many ways the congenital Judaism of Christianity, if only because he speaks of a “circumcision of the heart.” With him perhaps emerges the first condition of possibility for what will much later provoke the Christian hatred of Jews, which I shall attempt to characterize as a form of self-hatred.)
Much later still, in a history that has been transformed, “Zionism” will be invented and, after it, what led to the State of Israel as we know it. I will not enter into this history: I merely note that it originates at least to a large degree in the exacerbation of what one names “antisemitism.”
What is antisemitism (extremely poorly named, since Arabs are Semites)? I hazard the following hypothesis: it is the hatred of Jews developed by Christians, for whom they represent an upholding of the distinction between the kingdoms, from which the Catholic, Reformed, and Orthodox Churches have constantly departed.15 The Jew is the witness to what Christianity, in this respect, ought to be, and this respect is not indifferent, or a detail of theology, because it engages nothing less than the confusion, sometimes of the most hypocritical sort, between spiritual testimony and sociopolitical domination. The hatred of Jews is a hatred because it proceeds from a conscience that feels guilty about itself, and this hatred attempts to destroy the testimony to what Christians have a duty to be. This is also why, as history could show, the Christians who were least touched by games of power were also the least antisemitic. (What the hatred of Jews becomes with Nazism is not Christian in principle, although many did find precedents in the existing tradition. Yet Nazism is the affirmation par excellence of an unique and exclusive Reich: it does not wish to and cannot know anything of another “kingdom” opened in the midst of the world.)
It is not as a religion that Judaism provoked the hatred of Christians: it is insofar as this religion, but also at times a Jewish thought entirely withdrawn from religion, represents what Christians were all too aware of—and all too ready to deny—that they had developed from a Judaism becoming detached from the kingdom of Israel, a Judaism that was deconstructing itself.16
The case of Islam is obviously quite different. It came after Christianity, in a context where the latter could only appear completely linked to Empire—to the two Empires of the West and the East.17 Thus from the beginning Islam took on a political as well as a religious figure, and the great division between Sunni and Shi’a itself proceeds from a political struggle, which removes nothing from the importance of their doctrinal differences. Still, the question of the caliphate, and of the distinction between a political power and a religious authority (never for its part taking on the form of a Church), has been posed more than once and in several ways. But this is not a subject I can properly address.18
One must remark, however, that Islam implies, in a highly singular way, the coexistence of an intrication of and a distinction between the profane and religious orders. On the one hand, everything is under the attentive gaze of God; on the other, his absolute incommensurability demands nothing of the believer other than to affirm it according to the forms prescribed to him, without mixing it with worldly affairs in any way. There is, in sum, neither one nor two kingdoms: there is the register of human affairs and that of the unique affair of the believer as such, which is to confess the “All-Powerful, Merciful.”
In a sense, Islam is dedicated to adoration, even as it deploys an empire. This is why Christendom ended up wanting to repel this empire, as a rival to the one it was beginning once again to develop. But even if this relation of political force was accompanied by the accusation of being “infidel” and by large-scale confrontations, never have Christians hated Muslims. The former did not see in the latter a mirror of their own malfeasance. On the contrary, the Christians who are most disengaged from the Churches can without difficulty recognize the proximity of their traditions to those of the great Muslim Sufis, like Ibn Arabi, or those of the mystics like Al-Hallaj.
Some Sufis have even gone so far as to declare that nothing exists except God. Such an affirmation—seemingly quite Spinozist—obviously does not signify that only a unique “One” exists, which, resting only on itself, could also only collapse into itself, but on the contrary that everything only is in and according to its relation to what or who is thus named, to this unnamable incommensurable who or which is not, for his or its part (but he or it has no “part” that is apart) an existent, but rather the measurelessness of existing.
It remains that, for reasons different from those in the case of Judaism, but also in conditions quite other than those of the kingdoms, empires, or sultanates of long ago, Islam today forms states founded on a reference to religion. I shall not venture into this territory. One cannot, however, avoid remarking that, in a world that has emerged from a major transformation in the very midst of which there is at play what I have designated in the Christian mode as the “difference between kingdoms,” now understood as the opening of the world onto its own absence of a world beyond and as the necessary dis-enclosure of its reason—in such a world, one cannot be content with what until now has appeared self-evident regarding the relations between “religion” and “politics,” whether they be relations of exclusion or inclusion. Everything in this regard will have to be reworked.
I do not wish to take these suggestions any further, so I will stop with this. On the one hand, (Judeo-)Christianity—and, to a degree, Islam too—has deconstructed itself in a culture of science, democracy, and the rights and the emancipation of mankind. But along the way it has never stopped making the identity of the “mankind” in question more opaque or more slippery; this could, in fact, mean that (Judeo-)Christianity asks whether it is not from itself that it should deliver itself. On the other hand, triple monotheism—which is to say, this profound shock to the religious order or to the relation to the sacred, to the ground of sacrality itself—has disenclosed itself by telling us that Reason cannot be satisfied with explanations or “reasons given” [raisons rendues] but pushes toward an incommensurable and an unnamable of sense—or toward a truth without concept or figure. If it fails to give this push or drive its due, reason wilts and sinks into general commensurability and an interminable nomination in which all names are interchangeable.
What remains of religion—Jewish, Christian, Muslim—can now only provide a formal testimony for this drive (which I am naming adoration). (I say nothing about the world’s other religious forms, those from Asia and Africa in particular. At times, some people evoke them as possible modes of recourse by invoking forms of meditation and mental exercise or spiritual practice: they forget that one cannot easily transplant cultural elements and that, for many reasons, we are not capable of reflecting on the possible or impossible relations such forms might assume with modern rationality. This is because in Asia, Africa, or Oceania either they have already been transformed or contact with the rationality that came from the “West” is still not, for certain portions of the population, sufficiently pronounced to allow us to judge.)
This is why my interest is not in gathering together some sort of remainder, neither of Christianity nor of the entire Western monotheist complex. It is in understanding how the civilization that propagated itself throughout the world in the forms of scientific, legal, and moral rationality has arrived at a sort of confinement both of reason and of the world that makes us despair of ourselves. For we know that this confinement is contrary to the drive—to the pressure, the impetus, or, why not, the instinct—that searches, in us, for contact with the “open”: because this open, we ourselves are it, language is it, the world itself is it.
(Saying “the open” is already an abuse of language. One ought to avoid this substantive as well as what pulls it toward either a concept or a name. It [ça] opens up precisely at a distance from both.)
An open world is a world without myths and without idols, a world without religion if we understand by this word the observance of behaviors and representations that respond to a claim for sense as a claim for assurance, destination, accomplishment. This does not mean that in what one calls “the religions” it should be a question only of myths and idols, nor that it should be easy to decide what is and what is not “myth” and “idol” in the critical sense of these words (senses that were decided, we must remember, in the send-off or coup d’ envoi of Western history, between the Greeks and the Jews). At the very least, it is possible to say that what constitutes the myth and the idol in these senses has to do with the assurance that each one—the mythical tale [récit] or the figure as idol—assures a presence and responds to a demand. In other words, it “gives reasons for [rend raison de] existence. In a paradoxical way, it is in its desire to “rationalize,” to provide a ground or account, to “give reasons” that religion can exhaust itself, becoming nothing more than mythology and idolatry. On the contrary, it can exhaust myths and idols—and it can do so in itself—from the moment when it no longer seeks to give reasons, or no longer claims to do so.
But this is just as much the affair of Reason itself—that of this pressure or drive (Kant’s Trieb), directed toward the “unconditioned” or toward the unlocalizable outside of the world, in the world itself.
For this reason, the separation of the “kingdoms” or the “worlds” is decisive here.19 It is not that one must be subordinated to the other—which would still be for one to reign over the other—nor is it that their reigning powers should be in opposition, which would put them in the condition of kingdoms “of this world.” Rather, they are to each other as vertical is to horizontal: heterogeneous, heterotopic dimensions, which cross at one point. This point, lacking dimension as do all points, forms the opening of the world, the opening of sense in the world. Through this opening, sense penetrates and escapes at the same time, in the same movement and in “making sense” just as much by the penetration as by the escape.
This opening is nothing other than the gaping that has been characterized as an “immense fracture” between a high and a low but that is equally at the common root of Western monotheism, what one can designate as “the prophecy of Abraham,” which represents “a new conception of heritage and of history, a new filiation, a new definition of land and of blood.” For “the land of all the nations shall be the promised land for the sons of Abraham. A land without land, however, without divisible, assignable territories, without countries, without nations. It is a desert land where a son of Abraham can be born from every rock.”20
That from every rock could be born one who inherits the promise that promises nothing but this dis-enclosure of the territory and of all circumscription of sense, this is what the opening I am speaking of signifies—far beyond any religious or philosophical representation or conception.
To avoid misunderstanding, we must also emphasize that the point of sense does indeed belong to the world, to “this world here,” just as the rock belongs to the desert and the point of intersection belongs to the horizontal as much as to the vertical line. Being in the world without being of the world—this condition that a certain Christian monarchism sought to incarnate—is not to live in the world while abstaining from it, holding oneself in some retreat, even if entirely “interior” and “spiritual.” It is to think and feel the world according to its opening. Which is to say, first of all, according to an irreducibility to all relations defined by a common measure of forces and values. But it is to think a value and a force that are incommensurable, and consequently also to think an unfigurable form.
“A” force, “a” value—yes, in the sense that the monotheisms introduced the “one” not as a numerical index but rather as something external to all numeration, to any counting. This “one” embraces the multiple without unifying it. Its unity lies in the fact that it is essentially withdrawn from all that can posit equivalences—between beings, between forces, between forms. It is precisely the sort of unity that is that of everyone [chacun]: of each singular, whether one understands this as a “subject” or as any kind of discernable singularity, the leaf of a tree or the crest of a wave.21
Perhaps it is not impossible to bring together and focus the stakes by saying this: what has prevailed in triple monotheism, and in its finally “globalized” expression (which is to say, in the strong sense: what has been driven out of its birthplace to the point of both traversing the world and making itself a world, to the point of making itself the new age of the world and therefore of man) is the thought of a “God” who is with and not beyond or above. That God is with us is doubtless the most profoundly shared and constant thought of triple monotheism. It ultimately says this: that in the decomposition of his religious figures, above all of the Christian figure that opened this dissolution, “God” is nothing other—if we are dealing with a thing at all, and it is perhaps the thing itself—than this with itself.
There once were “gods and mankind,” then there was “God with us,” there is henceforth “we with ourselves [entre nous]”—and to say it once again, this “we” becomes the pronoun of all beings, allowing what “mankind” is or does in the bosom of this universal coexistence to appear in a new—uncertain, disquieting—light. There is no “secularization” in this narrative, but instead transformations of the world’s being world, which is not something given once and for all, but which replays and relaunches the ex nihilo that is its sharing [partage].
This is what must be understood in the motif of “revelation.” The so-called “revealed” religions distinguished themselves from others only in this way: the sign of the infinite, which is itself infinite, sends itself of itself [s’envoie]. It is certain that all religions are traversed by a motion, an impetus of this sort. All religions and ultimately all kinds of knowledge, science, or philosophy: for we could not even be within the movement of any knowing whatsoever if the desire for the infinite did not thrust us there. Finite knowledge is a kind of information, an instruction; it is not what opens itself to the inexhaustible bottom of things. If we are “finite” insofar as we are mortal, this finitude configures our access to the infinite. There are or there have been mythological, shamanical, esoteric, metaphysical, and gnostic versions of this configuration, as well as others. What “revelation” introduces is ultimately a disconfiguration. Revelation is not a doctrine. What is revealed is not concerned with content-based principles, articles of faith, and revelation does not unveil anything that is hidden: it reveals insofar as it addresses, and this address constitutes what is revealed. God calls Abraham, Mary, Mohammed. The call calls for a response, which is another call. It is not a question of learning a doctrinal corpus, but of responding. Call and response (which also means: the responsibility to respond) of all to all, of everyone to everyone, as if only to salute one another: nothing more, nothing less, but in this way clearing endless paths [voies] and voices [voix] between fortuitous existences.
Truth revealed is truth that contains no doctrine or preaching. It is not the truth of any adequation or unveiling. It is the simple, infinite truth of the suspension of sense: an interruption, for sense cannot be completed, and an overflowing, for it does not cease.
This is also why our world is the world of literature: what this term designates in a dangerously insufficient, decorative, and idle way is nothing other than the opening of the voices of the “with.” On the same site where what we call myth gave voice to the origin, literature tunes in to the innumerable voices of our sharing [partage]. We share the withdrawal of the origin, and literature speaks starting from the interruption of myth and in some way in that interruption: it is in that interruption that literature makes it possible for us to make sense.22 This sense is the sense of fiction: that is to say, neither mythical nor scientific, but giving itself in creation, in the fashioning (fingo, fictum) of forms that are themselves mobile, plastic, ductile, and according to which the “with” configures itself indefinitely.
What we must say about literature in this way is valid for all that constitutes “art,” all the irreducibly plural—singular/plural—ways of fashioning and exchanging sense outside of signification (for even the art of language and literary fiction do not signify: they carry significations away into another realm, where signs refer [renvoient] to the infinite).
By way of a final cadence:
Who knows who she was, his model that day: a woman from the street? the wife of a patron? The atmosphere in the studio electric, but with what? Erotic energy? The penises of all those men, their verges, tingling? Undoubtedly. Yet something else in the air too. Adoration. The brush pauses as they adore the mystery that is manifested to them: from the body of the woman, life flowing in a stream.23