The destruction of an illusion does not yield any truth, only a little more ignorance.1
The dis-enclosure of reason is the effect, or rather the remainder, of deconstructed Christianity, of religion’s having withdrawn from itself, pushed off from its observances and beliefs. Reason has moved away from the wish to give reasons [rendre raison]. Or rather, it knows that “giving a reason” goes beyond any reason that can be given. It knows that giving one’s reasons is an interminable process: one chases after the inexplicable and the unjustifiable, the fortuitous and the evil.
These last two are linked, for in one way or another evil always consists in refusing contingency. Evil introduces a necessity. If evil begins with murder, that is because a necessity emerges in murder: “You must cease to be!” The opposite is not—necessarily—“you must be,” but rather: we are ourselves the relation among all beings; this is how things are; this might not have come to be. But it did come to be, and there also came to be a sign according to which we are for one another and by one another. A sign according to which we are signs for one another, “we,” all the beings of the world.
Such a sign does not issue from necessity. Just like the coming about of all existences and their encounters, it is fortuitous. It is a sign of this contingency. It is a gaze, a gesture, a contact, a sonority. It is the fact that the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral signify to one another, not to mention the living and the inanimate, the speaking and the mute, the constructed and the spontaneous, the machine and the organ, one sex and the other, youth and old age, one language and another, one sense and another, and so on. Between these poles or points of reference, among which none is simply identical to itself or strictly consists in itself, circulate a polymorphous echoing and referring [renvoi] and a profusion of signs of contingency: the touching-one-another-together of this encounter through which there is a world and existence in the world.
This proliferating, unordered, overabundant signification forms the effect or rather the remainder of Christian “creation” and “salvation”: the effect or rather the remainder of the extreme withdrawal of “god” that forms the ground of “monotheism.” The same is true of the dis-enclosure of reason that opens onto the extreme withdrawal of any “given reason.” In other words, onto the extreme withdrawal of what we most often think we designate when speaking of “sense,” the sense of life or the sense of the world.
This dis-enclosure cannot be identified as a secularization. Indeed, in a way it is the opposite of one. Here “secularization” means a process supposed to convert religious values, rules, and configurations into secular values, rules, or configurations (whether lay or worldly, as you will: symptomatically, we lack any terms to describe our world save those taken from the religious lexicon). But as one knows, although the fact is constantly forgotten in hasty usages of the word secularization, nothing is less clear than the precise sense of the “conversion” that takes place in this way. The word conversion, here used deliberately to borrow once again from the religious lexicon, is itself only one of the possible terms for describing the terrain of this problem: Does it involve a metaphorical transferal? An analogical one? Is it merely a transposition of form, or also of content? And most of all, how are any of these terms to be understood? Let us take the most striking example of this phenomenon, that of the political secularization of divine sovereignty (as posed by Carl Schmitt). It is immediately obvious that the sovereign power of a State or within a State can only be thought as the transposition of a divine power by asking whether and how it is possible to convert the absolutely originary power of a god anterior to any law (or only obeying his own “law,” if one prefers to put it that way) into the power to decide on the exception in relation to a given law, which will itself have allowed for the possibility of such a decision. In moving from the first to the second register, everything is displaced, however insignificant this displacement might appear. The same is true when one says that the utopias, projections, or historical projects of various forms of “socialism” will have amounted to secularized messianisms, because in order to give this “secularization” a consistent content, the supposedly “worldly” messianisms must not be deprived of what is proper to religious messianism: the impossibility of designating the Messiah, his presence or absence, and what’s more, the necessity of believing at once that he has already come and that he will be always to come.
The idea of “secularization” is based on an optical illusion: the culture of the “century” only superficially adopts some aspects of the culture of the “beyond.” The latter is of another order, and profoundly so. In fact, what I am naming here “the culture of the beyond” relies on the dissociation of the two orders; it can open up only within the other order as strangeness and heterogeneity. This is why the thought of secularization in fact presupposes the reverse of what it proposes: it has already preinterpreted the world of the beyond in terms of this world, for instance, by representing God as a King. This mistake is present in the discourse of religion itself when it speaks of two kingdoms: but henceforth we must learn that the “other kingdom” is no kingdom, that it cannot be conceived according to the parameters of power, principles, authority, jurisdiction, and so on.
Religion doubtless always knew this, more or less confusedly: this knowledge surfaces here and there in spirituality and in mysticism. It can also be found via what can pass for the most esoteric dogma: I shall come to this presently. But it falls to us today to free up this knowledge as much as possible in order to give it its true reach, which is no more religious than it is, strictly speaking, philosophical: it is the knowledge of human experience, the knowledge of mankind alone insofar as it “infinitely surpasses mankind” or as it “ek-sists,” insofar as it is a “dancer above the abyss.” It does not involve secularizing, converting, or transposing, but rather opening ourselves up to what bears us, what pushes us, what stems from what, for man, is the experience that is the most profound, most deeply buried, and yet most to come: man insofar as he has engendered himself as “modern.” For “modern” has always meant: that for which nothing is given, not even itself.
The title of this chapter, “Mysteries and Virtues,” resounds in a particularly religious and even pious way. I am merely borrowing these terms from Christian theology and spirituality, but here I can propose a transcription of them that reveals what lies behind this borrowing. The title would then become: “Flashes [Éclairs] and Drives.”
Mystery, as we understand it in the wake of Christianity, does not designate a hidden, secret reality, buried in the arcana of an impenetrable divine knowledge. In truth, the word retains something of its Greek usage, where it corresponded to the final stage of an initiation into a “religion of mysteries”: to the revelation of an object or a sentence to which the initiate was permitted access only on completion of her journey.2 The revelation of Christian mystery is not the unveiling of some secret: on the contrary, it reveals what reveals itself on its own, what does nothing other than reveal itself. It is a flash revealing forms and presences that, rather than being hidden in the night, are simply available for the light to come and make visible [éclairer].
The irruption of light is neither authorized nor obtained through an initiatory procedure: light opens its eyes on mystery, which of itself allows itself to be seen, and which is in fact nothing other than light itself.
This also means that light opens the eyes of someone (of “mankind”) or that it opens its own eyes: for light is a gaze as well as a clarity, and the gaze is light. In this context, vision is not the relation of a seeing subject to the forms of visible objects, it is—as in the moment of awakening, before the distinction of forms and distances—the clarification of a presence. A “worldly presence,” as we have come to say, but that must not be understood as the conjunction of some being with a world that would lie outside it: the world is simply the presence of all those who are present. Light, the way in which this presence presents itself to itself, signals and salutes itself.
A sudden, instantaneous, brief light—always appearing suddenly in the night. A “flash” therefore, less in the sense of a dazzling than in that of fleeting clarity, of a spark. It is not the blaze of apocalypse but the renewal of dawn.3
It is as if this mystery were obvious [l’évidence]: one cannot not see it, and doubtless in a sense we all see it, even if not everyone looks out for it or pays attention to it. The flash of mystery is not ultimately of a nature different from the sudden appearance of the fiat lux, which is to say, the separation of light from darkness whereby a world begins. In the same way, the “divine” does not refer to anything but this separation between day (dies, divus) and night. The opening of the world is the first mystery, and doubtless the only one, or the one that contains all others. The world is the obvious [évidence] itself, and not only the obviousness of what comes before my eyes, but that whereby my eyes and the world open themselves together, the former included within the latter, which, at the same time, penetrates them.
Separation, distinction, opening—relation. We shall learn to discern how mystery is the mystery of relation.
For now, let us simply read what Pasolini has to say: “everything was contained in him, everything that was needed for love. And nothing closed, nothing unexpressed, obscured: his mystery like his gaze was resplendent with clarity.”4
As for the virtues, let us first say that we shall consider only those that theology names “theologal,” which is to say, those concerning the relation to God. There are three: faith, hope, and charity. Before looking at them, we should recall what the word virtue bears within it, not only in its Latin etymology—virtus, virile quality5—but also in all the signification that has remained attached to it, even though a certain moral—and moralistic—representation tends to cover it over. Often “virtue” is taken to mean a disposition that conforms to some contrastive distribution into “virtues” and “vices,” which is to say, a fixed definition of “good” and “evil.” Being “virtuous,” as used to be expected of a “pure” young girl or as is today of a “good” trader, consists in respecting values and norms that one is able to define. Even if one does not worry about searching after ultimate justifications, such definable values and norms are offered at times by a given state of mores, at others, by a demand to be prudent, balanced, wise.
This valuation [valeur] of the word entirely neglects the sense of force that is above all at work in virtus, a sense that we still recognize when we use an expression like the “relaxing virtues of a lullaby.” Virtue is above all vigor, a force straining toward . . . and capable of . . . : it is no accident that themes such as efficiency and even productivity recover this value for us. Here a term for an aim is substituted for the energy of aiming; a parallel substitution can be seen in the word valeur [meaning both “value” and valor”], in which what made the valeur of the “valorous” [valeureux] close to bravery has disappeared. The same thing is happening: instead of value [valeur] being brought back to the vigor of an affirmation that proves its value or worth [se fait valoir], or that constitutes the value of some plan, enterprise, or gesture, it is considered as being deposited in a repository [banque] of givens (e.g., “social justice” or, in a more complex way, “democracy”). In the same way, instead of virtue designating vigor, ardor turned toward an affirmation whose content cannot be separated from this very ardor, it names an available and determined content (thus one can speak of “the virtue of a citizen” without imagining that the virtus of the citizen could create a tension in the city via a demand for revolt and rupture).
“Virtue” is the impetus carried along, impelled or thrust onward, by a “value” that is not simply an available and determined “good” but that is valuable to the degree that this thrust carries one beyond what has been or could be determined. We shall not speak of the virtue of someone who accomplishes impeccably a task assigned to him, but we shall use the term for whoever takes “impeccable” to be a limited notion and who wishes for more, who longs to go further, who commits himself to a hyperbole of “value.” That is not limited to an item of work; it desires more than work, it wants to go to the impossible. One can imagine this movement equally well in the carrying out of a domestic or a professional task, in a commitment within the bonds of sociability, friendship, or love, in the carrying out of art or sport: everywhere there is, on the one hand, an order of impeccable accomplishment and, on the other, a going beyond that is de jure limitless, the order of a thrust that is infinite. We know full well how this thrust is indissociable from what we call “love,” “sport,” “art,” or “thought,” but we also know that in these registers an element of the impeccable and the satisfying can be established. We also know that the infinite thrust can become obsessive compulsion, perfectionism, mania: everything can be deformed and confined as an illness, but compulsion is not drive [pulsion].
For that is what we must name. We must say that virtue is above all drive. Because of the French translation of the Freudian Trieb, we have become accustomed to understanding drive as an obscure, uncontrollable, wild, and definitively threatening thrust. It is true that it is so: but this is because it appears where force(s) precede and follow us, where forces are not concerned with a subject’s calculation and projection but where one might rather say that a subject, by welcoming these forces, by espousing their impetus, might have some chance of shaping itself (at least, if one thinks that a “subject” should be “shaped”; we can also say: if one thinks that man is to have any chance of “infinitely surpassing man”).
This is why the Trieb is also the thrust internal to reason that Kant designates as the movement of reason toward the “unconditioned” (or the “undetermined,” das Unbestimmte). Kant is the first to attempt to give this drive its due, namely, a due exceeding the order of the “understanding” and knowledge of an object, a due that is regulated by nothing other than an opening to the infinite. Since the Kantian operation, thought has constantly been in relation to this opening, and Freud himself felt that, in discussing drive, he was touching on this: on what, in the psyche, infinitely surpasses any psychology. This is why he said “the drives are our myths,” meaning both, on the one hand, that they are not observable physical forces and, on the other, that they index our condition of being thrown, thrust, propelled without origin or end in a movement that arrives at no “sense”—neither of life, of death, of civilization, nor of love. In speaking of the “doctrine of the drives” as “our mythology,” Freud distances himself from every philosophy and more generally from every “doctrine,” just as he would like his “metapsychology” to be distanced from every metaphysics and from every psychology. But of course he does not do this in order to move toward a religion: it is a premonition of a way of considering existence and the world differently from any assignation of knowledge and representation.6 After Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, at the same time as Heidegger, Freud in his own way thinks a dis-enclosure of reason, and he thinks it expressly under the name of “drive”: the virtue of the relation to what can be accomplished by neither knowledge nor representation—and therefore by neither “sense” nor “truth,” according to one of those regimes.
The main consequence is ontological, or at least one that dis-encloses ontology: thrust is not first of all the relation of a “subject” to some “object”—it is in principle beyond the “object”—but it is the condition or nature of “being.” “Being,” understood as a verb, to be, means “to thrust or push” (or “to impel,” “to throw,” and even “to shake,” “to excite”). Being, to be, is drive [pulsion] and beating [pulsation] of the being in general. The drive of reason is its desire for the thing itself.
The essential mysteries, that is, those whose proper concern is “God,” are three: the trinity, the incarnation, and the resurrection. The link among them defines nothing other than the considerable—atheological—displacement that the thinking of “God” undergoes.
This displacement proceeds from an experience, an awaiting, and a disposition that stem from much further back than “religion,” than any religious filiation or transmission—and displacement is already, in this sense, initiated by Judaism. This is why it later leads toward an “exit from religion.” One could put it this way: the gods have always been the advocates or representatives of humans’ relation to the enigma that they are for themselves and, through this first enigma, to the enigma that the world in itself is. Whether one says enigma, question, or putting into play, what matters is destination to and by another dimension, one that is heterogeneous and exorbitant: that of “sense” insofar as it is a reference to [renvoià] another, works free from, shakes off and tosses aside, or throws away any consistency of “being.” The gods are born together with man and from him in order to designate what Heidegger’s formulation says, namely, that “the existent is a being for whom, in its being, being is in question.” The gods name the inequality or the inequivalence of being to itself, or its difference and its différance. (Once again, dies/divus, the difference between day and night.) They name it or signal it. The relation to the gods is a relation to this difference or, more precisely, a relation of mankind to itself (and through it, of the world to itself) according to its différance.
The first form of this relation is sacrifice: the “sacred” being the name of the heterogeneous, of the specific modes of conduct that threw out a bridge toward it. Their matrix and model is the act of putting a man to death, that is, his consacration, whereby other men in their turn communicate with the sacred. The progressive disappearance of human sacrifice in all of the Eastern Mediterranean, even if animal and plant sacrifices persisted for a long time afterward, represented the turning point whereby, at the same time as a civilization turned around (thanks to iron, writing, trade, detachment from the rural and the imperial), the relation to the gods underwent a metamorphosis. Where before the relation to their sacred presences prevailed, various forms of the relation between men begin to prevail: the deployment of exchanges in multiple ways, the formation of autonomous “cities” or “peoples,” defined by what they share [leurs partages] and by their own constitutions rather than by any belonging to a sacred heritage. This is the world of greekjew, jewgreek with which the history of our world opens up. Religion, its avatars, and even its metamorphosis and exit from itself all depend on the movement of culture or civilization. This is why deconstructing Christianity comes down to a close scrutiny of this movement and, correlatively, to disenclosing the reason that this movement produced.7
In this new world, where the relations of men among themselves gradually take over from the common or collective relation to divine powers, relation itself somehow comes to occupy the place of the sacred. Already the God of Israel is one of a “covenant,” a formula unknown to any other religion. Mohammed’s God will be one of an address and a convocation that calls for nothing other than for this call to be honored. Relation becomes pregnant in these two forms. The mystery of the trinity articulates “God” himself as relation. That is to say, it removes from him the property of “being” in the sense of a being [être] or being [étant] that is consistent in itself, of a subject that can be represented as a person or even as any “entity” whatsoever.
The divine trinity does not mean that God is divided into three, nor that he forms the union of the three. The generation of the son by the father should not be understood as a descendance but according to their identity of nature, within which opens up the possibility of “relation” as such, the “relation” that is an echoing and referring [renvoi] of sense from one to the other. This is how the son can be said to be “begotten, not made”: he is not exterior to the father but somehow opens in him the relational dimension. This dimension in its turn is called spirit.8 Spirit is relation, or sense, according to which subjects, which do not exist independently of relation, are able to present themselves to one another. Or rather, relation is the non-being according to which beings can make sense, beings that therefore cannot subsist outside this non-being.
Sacrifice had been the form of the relation with an elsewhere or an outside whose sacred presences—the gods—were themselves caught up in a larger outside, which was named destiny, necessity, night, or primordial abyss. There was no relation with this outside. At most the gods were able to offer some form of mediation, but it was fragile and uncertain. Tragedy thus presented the possibility of somehow playing—setting into play by setting the scene [mettant en scène]—the impossibility of relation to this outside by making this very impossibility a type of relation. Tragedy has always appeared to be a heritage that we are incapable of truly appropriating because in certain respects it continues to draw on cult and ritual. On the one hand, it looks backward toward myth, and on the other, it is inscribed in what we can call a civil religion. A civil religion would be a relation among men, men who recognize themselves in its terms, between the autonomy of law and the indigenous nature [autochtonie] of the city. But the history of Antiquity—which is to say, the history of the anthropological mutation that we have inherited—is the history of the repeated failure of civil religions. The problems of democracy and the republic are born there and come down to us, at the same time as the inverse disposition appears there, namely, that which separates orders, kingdoms, and cities between “heaven” and “earth.”
What did not take place as civil religion—as the autonomous, selfenclosed sense of a human (“too human”?) world—comes about in the configuration, at once conjunctive and disjunctive, of a world order that takes its legitimacy from itself and from an opening in the midst of the world, an opening turned toward an outside that is not another world but what, in the bosom of the world, remains an excess. This excess is the “sense” of or in the relation among all the beings that make up, that are this world, and that “have” nothing but it, lacking the power of the Outside (destiny, night, abyss). The entire outside thus flows back into the world and this outgoing tide opens within the world the breach of a henceforth problematic, enigmatic, mysterious “sense.”
The mystery of the trinity strikes this spark: sense is relation itself, the outside of the world is therefore within the world without being of the world.
The two other mysteries proceed from this. This “god” who has already in himself renounced his being also renounces the separation of his divinity from mankind in order that it be “made flesh”; espousing the mortal character of this flesh, he opens up within death another life, an eternal life. “Incarnation” and “resurrection” are not and cannot be prodigious and, strictly speaking, incredible fables. What remains of them, what belongs to us or comes back to us, is the task of newly understanding their provenance and their destination: they come from the region of history where human culture grasps itself as a “world” in a sense detached from any cosmogony and where the ordering of a kosmos no longer could or should be looked for except beginning with “this world here.”
Incarnation and resurrection therefore say nothing other than this: the task of making sense falls to us humans, mortals, who have no gods or nature, who are technicians engaged in the indefinite production of “our” world. But since sense is not “made”—is not produced—it falls to us to recognize how it can take place. It can do so only in the relation that opens at once between us (us, both humans and all beings) and in us, which addresses us simultaneously to one another and—singly and severally—to an opening in us whereby is signaled an infinite referring and a referring to the infinite: yes, we are beings of sense; yes, the world’s sense is that we are charged with sense; and yes, the truth of sense is neither completion nor significant plenitude, but rather a suspense whereby sense is at once interrupted and infinitely relaunched.
Incarnation is not the provisional sojourn of god in flesh but the “word made flesh,” or flesh itself as sense. It is the body as the visible image of the invisible, the manifestation of what is not manifest. Resurrection is not a second life, but the self-righting movement [redressement] whereby the horizontal course of a life turns into a vertical signal. And this is also flesh, for this proper, irreplaceable life thus rights itself. This is also a manifestation of what is not manifest—of sense and of truth. Together incarnation and resurrection interpret a single thought: the body is the event of spirit. Its advent, its coming [venue] to the world, its unexpected arrival [survenue], its irruption, and its passage. This also means: spirit does not hold itself outside the world, it opens in its midst.
Does this create a greeting [salut]? Yes, the mystery that gathers the three mysteries is indeed that of the greeting. But this greeting is neither a saving [sauvetage] nor a salvation [salut]. It is not sheltered outside the world and beyond the reach of death. It takes place right here among us, it is in relation itself. Jacques Derrida was the first to address this “salut without salvation.”9 “Salut!”—as we say it and hurl it between us in order to salute one another, that is to say, not to save ourselves but to recognize one another as being responsible for sense, or a sense, or, more indistinctly, for senses. “Salut!” as a punctuation of truth: neither prolonging nor, even less, completing sense, at once holding it in suspense and opening its possibility.10
In such a situation, how are we to understand the “sin” that Christian salvation is supposed to atone for, pardon, redeem? First of all, sin is not defined by fault. It is less a question of the sin than of the sinner. That man should be charged with “original sin” is surely the Judeo-Christian invention that seems most foreign and unacceptable to modern consciousness (one could perhaps point to its Muslim echo: in Islam too, only faith saves). This consciousness persists in understanding sin as fault. But that is not what sin is; it is the condition of mankind closed in on itself.11 When recourse to sacrifice is unavailable and when tragedy no longer permits “joy in mourning” (which is perhaps in some way the sacrifice of oneself), fault—having failed to keep to the divine order(s), the order(s) of the world—becomes the very being of he who cannot absolve himself from it: absolution can come only from the opening of another relation, in another order, which is precisely the order of relation, of sense, of referring within the world to what exceeds the world in itself.
In this sense, sins are pardoned—Nietzsche justly perceived how Christianity was tied together by this certainty, whose somber flip side (the sinning consciousness and the improbable grace of moral Christianity12) twisted and even perverted the regime of subjectivity. It is not that no fault can be committed: but it no longer involves disobeying an order that sacrifice or tragic death could redeem. It is—more grave, in a sense, and opening the door to puritanisms—the refusal of relation, of “salut!” Not only is it no longer a matter of disobeying an order, but it gives way to the need to invent a relation where no cosmo-theological order is given. Pardoning sins goes hand in hand with the possibility of a voluntaristic evil, one sought in the closure of relation and sense, to the profit of an order supposedly fixed, given, and supplied with a completed meaning (with a truth supposedly full, like that of a model for man, for society, and finally for truth). Pardon means that the possibility of sense always remains open: but it does not mean that those who close it, those who condemn this opening, are pardoned. This is perhaps the meaning of the “sin against spirit,” which is the only one that will not be pardoned.13
Nietzsche again: “Everything breaketh, everything is integrated anew; eternally buildeth itself the same house of being. All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remaineth the ring of being.”14 The sense of “being” [l’être] or rather the sense of being [d’être] is nothing but sense itself: a separation and a salutation that is addressed, a separation that renders this address (or its refusal) possible.
Thus the theologal virtues are the forces that are at work in relation. This is unambiguously signaled by their disposition or declension in three modes—faith, hope, and charity—of which the third, which can also be named love (we shall come to this), is the most important, the one that definitively assures the true stakes of all three, which is to say, the true stakes of the relation to “God.”15
In order to understand how the commandment to love—the originality, the bizarrerie, the scandal of Christianity—could appear as the keystone of the entire construction, more novel than any other, we must attempt to understand what could have called it forth, and from what region completely different from that of “religion” strictly construed. Christian love did not spring up from the ground as a mushroom (whether edible or poisonous) might. It arrived unexpectedly in a world where a considerable metamorphosis of the cosmic, natural, political, economic, and cultural orders had endangered and perhaps brought to breaking point the possibility of a relation of people to each other and to the world. The order of Rome, however imposing its success might have been, ended up no longer recognizing itself as a possibility of sense. If the fall of the Roman Empire has passed into history and legend as such a considerable and profoundly disquieting phenomenon, that is because it testified to a disruption whose depth and anthropological stakes (or existential or civilizational ones, so to speak) were without precedent in human memory. At the time there was little memory of the fall of the great pre-Greek empires, of an entire succession of upheavals that culture had archived only sparingly—and to which the fulminations of the God of Israel against the empires of Egypt and Babylon bore witness, in a semi-mythological way. But the fall of Rome undoubtedly appeared, visibly and expressly, as, for the first time, the end of a whole world.
This world had been, in a manner constant since the most ancient times, across empires and across agrarian and civil religions, a world of observance—that is to say, of what defines, in the most proper way, religio, the scrupulous observance (of rules, of rituals) of which Rome provided, in that word, the most precise image (to the point of mania . . . ). What had been coming to the surface since the slow pre-Greek and pre-Jewish evolutions and revolutions, if one can put it this way, was what I shall risk characterizing by a single trait: the substitution of a world of relation for the world of observance. Of course, relation does not simply exclude observance: but it subordinates it. What with alphabetic writing, coinage, commercial and especially maritime practices (journeys, trading posts), then with cities, the techniques of logos and of law, and mathematics practiced for itself, the regime of observance was being overwhelmed on all sides. It was also being overwhelmed insofar as it properly comprised domination by the principles of observance and their representatives. A hierarchical world, in the full sense of the term, was being called into question. What the Greeks named “philosophy” attempted to respond to this state of affairs, while, in a completely different vein, the exodus from Egypt invented trust in a covenant set apart from such domination: all of which is to say that our history was beginning, the one that we are attempting to grasp in order to understand better what it wants from us.
(We know that twenty centuries of history did not proceed in a linear fashion. They passed through many variations in the sharing [partage], contrast, and antinomy of what I have gathered under the words observance and relation. But this history began with the mutation that I am attempting to characterize, and the “flight of the gods,” then the monotheisms, and especially Christianity, have been its echo chamber. Between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, this history believed that it could understand itself as “rationality” and thus account for its history as the progress of humanity. But we are now discovering that this reason still needs to dis-enclose itself in order to welcome everything that was not “progress”—nor regression either—but that was thrusting the mutation forward out of the most archaic or neglected depths of the “human” phenomenon and, by way of it, of the event called “world.” Here we are only at the beginning—at least if dis-enclosure is not, to the contrary, the end of the same event. But the very fact that we must now think a destruction of mankind and of the world testifies to the amplitude of the mutation.)
Two phenomena, which the Christian invention echoes, stand out in the general transformation of the Mediterranean world, where the unheard-of possibility of thinking a “world” in its totality was being sketched out (something of “globalization” was latent in Rome). They are the phenomena of violence and riches set apart from regimes of observance. Relations of force and property relations are present and active everywhere: but when the cultures of observance and hierarchy break down, these two registers of relation (“social,” if you will, but also profoundly human, existential) are emancipated, so to speak, and take on characteristics that distinguish them from their previous states.
Why are violence and riches—non-violence and poverty—salient motifs in Christianity, just as they had started to be in philosophy?16 Why is the evangelists’ condemnation of riches so pitiless? Why does Jesus chase the merchants out of the Temple? Why does he speak of “turning the other cheek”? The later involvement of the Christian religions with power and money is of little consequence, for with it they entered into a grave selfcontradiction and were constrained to hear themselves accused, always anew, by their faithful, even if the churches themselves didn’t want to know about it. The important thing to understand is that, in the mutation we are discussing, power and money—and the two as buttressing one another—took off in an autonomous deployment, one of whose later names would be “capitalism” (Marx calls Antiquity “pre-capitalism”), and another “imperialism” (which essentially refers to a mode of domination different from that of the Empires of long ago).
In this way appears a naked poverty, a poverty of injustice and exclusion that nothing justifies—where, previously, appeared an exaltation of riches (monuments, treasure, the pomp of courts and temples from Memphis or Susa to Athens and Jerusalem) that did not signify, or not simply, the despoilment of someone else.17 In the same way, a naked, unarmed weakness appears, exposed to blows but claiming another kind of confident force. Nietzsche is not wrong to discern a thrusting forward of the weak in the Judeo-Christian mind, but he does not perceive clearly enough the transformation force undergoes when weakness is proclaimed in a way that cannot be reduced to resentment: in the absence of a legitimation, if not a transfiguration into divine glory—that would require the whole apparatus of an observance—force and riches captured and accumulated for themselves gravely wound the relation in whose bosom they are deployed.
This is the daunting ambiguity of the mutation: the relation that it promotes is also what it threatens. Where observance and belonging provided linkages (even if we judge these bonds to be painful, their most gripping form for us being slavery), the blossoming of relation breaks down links in two antithetical ways: it detaches itself from observance and belonging, and it also distends the relation that it must form.18 Capitalized force and riches, if we can use the expression, lead to the call of weakness and injustice for a different justice. We know only too well that we have not finished with the expansion of this movement, and we also know how much “human rights” and “socialisms” are the inheritors of Christianity. But with “right” [droit] and “society,” we find ourselves back within reason’s enclosure.
Charity attempts to respond otherwise than through law and society. It has quite rightly been judged vile because of the hypocrisy that can hide beneath it to escape the demands of justice. Can one imagine how its power, its impulsion, might be given (back) to it?
Meditating on human violence as he saw it unleashed in the First World War—the beginning, perhaps, of what is perhaps the last phase of the mutation—Freud declares that he can name only one response equal to these stakes: the Christian commandment to love.19 Of course, he judges it to be impracticable, sees in it the exorbitant demand of the “Superego of civilization,” and finds nothing there capable of dampening his pessimism in the face of the gravity of civilization’s malady, or that civilization itself is—a malady that, precisely, is not a “malady,” does not lend itself to a therapeutic schema, but well and truly represents “evil” [mal] and “unhappiness” [malheur]. But he nonetheless underlines the unique character of love’s response, as if, on the one hand, he had a premonition that the possibility of modern violence was already given in the epoch that produced Christianity, and, on the other, he could recognize in this impracticable “love” at least the justness of a sign, a signal, even if not that of an instrument.
What does the word caritas say? It states the fact of attaching a price, of treating something as dear [cher] (carus). This Latin transcription of Greek agap¯ keeps the latter’s quality of a favorable welcome, of a considerateness or elective benevolence even as it inscribes itself in the lexicon of prices and value.20 Contrary to riches as an end in themselves, charity affirms a unique, exclusive, and incommensurable price, which must be the price of everyone. (What else have we been affirming in speaking since Kant of human “dignity”? But as soon as it was enunciated, this evaporated into abstraction).
Perhaps all this is indeed impracticable, certainly so if we mix up with it the values of tenderness and desire also understood to be part of “love.” But perhaps here the impossible is the very index of truth: that relation—and I shall risk adding the relation with all beings—has no sense unless each one of its terms (“subjects”) can be allocated an exclusive, singular value. That only desire and tenderness, only eros innervating agap¯ can manifest this exclusivity, and only in an exclusive manner, between specific beings, is one thing, but there is no doubt that this exclusivity is due to all. Lovers are outside the world: but whether it shows or not, they are charged with this “outside” on behalf of everyone. Without that, we would have to renounce conceiving of mankind and the world, we would have to give everything over again to observances—for example, to castes, to the juxtaposed states dignity and indignity, and so on.
If love declares the impossible itself (“madness,” says Christianity), if it puts forward a gesture as exorbitant for the one who receives it as for the one who gives—if this distinction is even possible—and if it definitively escapes the mastery that would, strictly speaking, allow “giving” and “receiving,” this “madness,” which extends from erotic fury to spiritual fervor, consists entirely in this: in it relation becomes incandescent by addressing me to what, in the other, is incommensurable with me, and it also does so by starting out with what is incommensurable in me. Thus love attests that everyone is unique, but with a unicity that exceeds the “one” of everyone. This attestation is properly impossible, it cannot be presented or realized, but it is what naked existence calls for, existence without a world-beyond and without essence.21
If one does not give up on conceiving of mankind and the world, without reducing them to the observances that civilization has taken apart—at the cost of its “malaise,” but also gaining in the same movement a sense of the exclusive worth of each existence—then we must understand that the civilization that for a time called itself “Christian” called for a commandment of universal love in response to a demand come from further away than a religion, come from a mutation in civilization itself. On this view, “love” is neither a penchant nor an affection, even if it can create space for penchants, affections, and passions: love is first of all a way of thinking. It is of the order of those “thoughts that do not return to the self—pure élans” that Levinas discusses and that think through the experience of the other [autrui].22 There is not even any need to invoke the ethical visage of autrui: it is enough to feel the power of the “outside” that is borne by, or bears, autrui. Love is always, even in erotic love, a way of thinking in the sense of the experience of something real, if “real” always means “outside”: this is what it is, it must be “outside” for us, above all in the sense of the experience of this real, which is the relation among all existents that, strictly speaking, makes the world, as soon as this world lacks any other world. This is what renders this experience everyone’s due.
This is why the love called “Christian” is strictly indissociable from equality. Kierkegaard puts it rigorously: “since the neighbour is every human being, unconditionally every human being, all dissimilarities are indeed removed from the object, and therefore this love is recognizable precisely by this, that its object is without any of the more precise specifications of dissimilarity, which means that this love is recognizable only by love.”23 This love is therefore due to everyone, not via a tender sentiment extended toward each and every one, by turns or en masse, but because in itself it is essentially and, in effect, uniquely the position of equality.
Due to everyone, but not only “by right” [en droit]. As soon as one stands within the law or limits oneself to law—whose necessity is not in any doubt, of course—one risks losing a certain power. I do not mean the power to appeal to a charitable impulse or generosity. It does not involve sentiments but making sense. It thus always concerns feeling [sentir], but feeling insofar as we enter into relation only by also relating to the incommensurable that is designated by the “dignity,” the “worth,” and the singular “value” of each existence. Only at this price, this priceless price, will we be able to honor the stakes of relation: the stakes of being in the world shared among men and among all beings.
Adoration is addressed to this worth, to this inestimable value: it is the evaluation of what cannot be evaluated. Because we are swept up there, thrust there, this is why we must understand virtue as the energy of the drive. Why this thrust? Because mankind is the being of sense and because sense—which we can also name value—cannot be evaluated. It is absolute value. The “love of others,” in its apparently sentimental silliness and in its impossibility as a real disposition—for psychology as much as for sociology—simply indicates the value toward which we are turned by the simple fact of our fortuitous existence, whether we wish so or not, whether we believe in it or not, insofar as we are taken up in sense or as our being is a being of sense. This value is absolute because it has the plurality of all existences themselves. It is the “value” in itself of the echoing, the referring of all existences among themselves. The being of the world is a being of sense—and it is so either in itself or through us, which comes down to the same thing, since we are ourselves of the world, but we are what in the world opens as its outside—an outside that, alone, gives the world its true “worldly” dimension: the possibility, the power, and the dynamics of relation.
The drive to sense—to sense and to the truth that is suspended in it—is in us and through us the only thing that can, beyond justice, or rather, as the very excellence (the hyperbolic value) of justice, displace the regime of power and money as we know it. Which is to say: it is the only thing that can displace what we designate by capital and technology, or what designates itself more and more visibly as the indefinite accumulation of ends in the generalized devastation of dignity. In still other words: it drifts beyond the “malaise” if not beyond the disaster of civilization.
What do the two other virtues attempt to do? They are simply at the service of the third. Faith is given as nothing other than the force of trust in that (or him, or her, or those) of which it is impossible for me to obtain any knowledge that would create any assurance or guarantee.24 Unlike belief, a weak knowledge that nonetheless arms itself with various guarantees, plausibilities, or non-impossibilities, faith exposes itself to non-knowledge: not to ignorance, but to the excess beyond knowledge. But without faith, we could not enter into the sphere of sense, which is to say, above all into that of language. To accede to speech is to have already been thrust forward by a trust in sense and in the fact that the other invites me to sense. Children do not learn languages by instinct or by mimicry: they learn because others have opened the space of this trust to them. This is what allowed Derrida to speak of “that which in faith acquiesces before or beyond all questioning, in the already common experience of a language and of a ‘we.’”25 For this reason, faith in “God” in the sense of all monotheism is a trust in a god that is unknown, unknowable, unappropriable in any form: neither master, nor king, nor judge, nor, finally, god.
Faith is perhaps best expressed in the following dialogue, where its sense is borne by the verb to believe:
TEMPLE: . . . Is there a heaven, Nancy?
NANCY: I don’t know. I believes.
TEMPLE: Believe what?
NANCY: I don’t know. But I believes.26
As for hope [espérance], it most properly designates the tension internal to the drive: not the hope [espoir] that something—an answer, a conclusion—might come about, but the tension retained in the trust that something or someone always comes. And that it will come not later but here and now—not coming in order to complete itself in a presence, but so that I come thanks to its coming. No analogy is more fitting here than that of sexual joy and jouissance: not satisfaction, not the easing of tension, not becoming replete, but the infinite relational tension between two bodies, which is to say, between two drives caught up in their contact, which is both sensitive and beyond sense.
Drive, a thrust coming from elsewhere, from outside, from nowhere, which opens up in us; which comes from there but which, at the same time, opens up this unlocalizable place; which comes from mystery and produces it, which triggers its flash and goes back into its night: to the absence of solution, to the dis-solution where truth resides. But in this truth is kept and saluted the existence of everyone; the impulsion of relation and the pulsation of sense: it comes and goes from one to the other, from some to others, without establishing any continuity of being but rhythming our common presence—our co-appearance [comparution] and our exposure [exposition].
Definitively, the drive is us. It is the movement, the coming, the unexpected arrival, the life, the existence that we are. Its beating, its breathing, are the displacement, plasticity, and mutation that we are. It is our inequality, our heterogeneity to “ourselves,” the tension and thrust coming from the force that separates the world from elsewhere, separates something from nothing: a drive of being, being as a drive in whose charge we find ourselves, an infinite gap from any being posed in itself. Sense, language, sentiment of existing.
Truth: not a being [être], nor of a being [être], but true existence. Without signification but endowed with the sense of being saluted. To conclude, it is a name. Just as “God” is or was a name, the unnamable name of the Jewish and Muslim gods, a common noun [nom], which took on the capital letter of a proper noun with the Christian God, but which also took the name of a man. It thus became all names, became the unpronounceable part of all names, what remains unnamable in each “proper” noun because it does not signify—and perhaps not only men but also all beings have a name?
Drive: an attraction, a desire, a pleasure. Simply to relate to one another, simply to name one another and to glimpse one another in passing in this world, and this world itself passing between nothing and nothing. “Each perceiving being feels joy in perceiving what it perceives.”27 In the impetus that pushes it toward this joy, there is more than a force that simply thrusts: this force goes beyond itself; in other words, “drive” names what in a general force inscribes it within a difference from itself. Not only does a difference between forces belong to force in itself, but the thrust of force is what carries it beyond itself. A drive goes toward something other than itself, which is not to say that it has an “object” in the normal sense of the term: it goes toward what cannot feature as an object. One could say: it is a subject that goes toward greater being or greater sense, toward the increase [surcroît] that it truly “is” itself. Insofar as it regards the world, for example, it feels itself regarded by it; insofar as it speaks, as it feels itself thrust in and by language beyond language—and beyond silence too.
Adoration: the movement and the joy of recognizing ourselves as existents in the world. Not that this existence is not tough, thankless, shot through with grief. Yet this grief is not the price we pay in order to reach another world. It redeems nothing, but at least we can, insofar as we do not give up on living, salute and name some beings from time to time. To adore passes through naming, saluting the unnamable that the name hides within it and that is nothing other than the fortuitousness of the world.
If the destruction of an illusion only creates a little more ignorance, as the epigraph to this chapter has it, then once the illusion of God is destroyed, the ignorance created is the ignorance of all that there could be in God’s place. And yet adoration causes us to receive this ignorance as truth: not a docta ignorantia, perhaps not even a “non-knowledge,” nothing that would still attempt to regain assurance in the negative, but the simple, naked truth that there is nothing in the place of God because there is no place for God. The outside of the world opens us in the midst of the world, and there is no first or final place. Each one of us is at once the first and the last. Each one, each name. And our ignorance is aggravated by the fact that we do not know whether or not we ought to name this common and singular property of all names—for instance, by naming it “God” once again (another, a totally other god? . . . ). Or indeed by giving it all our names. Or indeed by risking the word unnamable, which not by chance with Beckett has become a master-word—even a master-name—but which is always creating the conditions necessary to project us either toward a vile sort of discharge or toward an ineffable beyond that would reproduce lost illusions. It is in this suspense that we must hold ourselves for the moment, hesitating and stammering between various possible languages, in sum, learning to speak anew.
Nietzsche writes: “Supposing that faith in God has disappeared, the question is asked anew: ‘Who is speaking?’” He continues: “My response is taken not from metaphysics but from animal physiology: the herd instinct is speaking.”28
Doubtless Nietzsche was not wrong, because we have not known how to make anything speak other than democracy, law, and the automaton’s addition of one technique to another. Henceforth it falls to us to be capable of another response. Not the herd, but us—an unsituateable subject that appears each time in an I, but an I that can, that knows how to—whatever the nature of this knowledge may be—speak for us (which is to say, at once “in our name” and “addressing us”). And the speech in question must be addressed—only being able to be addressed to us if it is above all outside—to the immensity of the outside that opens up in the very midst of our world and that therefore tells us something about the senseless sense of this world.
This response would not be opposed to Nietzsche’s. But it would attempt to overcome what was an obstacle for him: the representation of democracy as a general regime of equalization, not of men but of “values,” which is to say, a regime of a leveling of sense. This requires above all that we understand that “democracy” carries with it more than a political form, that it is more than the assumption of all the spheres of existence into politics. I shall not dwell here on what I have sketched out elsewhere.29 All that matters is to affirm that adoration, the addressing of speech to what lies outside any possible speech, is a condition of “democratic” existence understood as the existence of equal subjects. For the equality of “subjects”—to give them this name in the absence of any better one—is not that of individuals. The equality of individuals can concern a juridical equivalence and an economic equity, but from the outset it is exposed not to inequality but to the intrinsic heterogeneity of all singular relations to the incommensurable. For the latter, one could never propose any rule of equalization or unequalization.
The adorent [adorant] is not a worshipper [adorateur]: he does not commit to venerating an idol. In the idol, one imagines that one recognizes, feels, and respects a power (from which one can expect some sort of protective, charitable, or salutary effect). The adorent holds himself within an address that comes to him from somewhere other than an imposition of power and that goes somewhere other than toward homage to the powerful and the quest for favors. His address is already a response, and it responds neither to order nor to authority. It is speech that somehow responds only to itself: to its own opening, to the possibility given within language of going to the limit of significations and as far as silence—and even further than silence, as far as song, as music. Which is to say, it goes toward what holds the present open, infinitely open to a coming that no present or presence can contain and that for this reason is constantly returning. Music: the eternal return of the beginning and the end, of one in the other, the return of the eternal as such, which is to say, as what opens and suspends time. I repeat that Augustine says to sing is to pray twice: the second time raises prayer beyond any demand or expectation.
Indeed, it is adoration that carries and holds the adorent, and not the other way around. It does not lay down a respect or an allegiance—it may well involve respect and allegiance, but not in the first instance: for above all, adoration lies within an impetus that does not measure anything in a hierarchical way. It can even be said to be anarchic and to get carried away, lifted up by something lying well beyond any measure, any distribution of roles. It is nothing other, at least in the form in which it is born, than the movement of singing that comes to the throat and the lips for no reason, from nowhere, in an uncertain cadence, in a tune still lacking precise melody, and in an issuing that is withdrawn from the formed, speaking voice.
This song would be held and stretched between the full, worked-out form of the oratorio and the formlessness of humming [fredonnement]—whose name takes us back to babbling or spluttering and even to the chirping of birds and the thrumming of cicadas. The murmur and stammering of a celebration and an invocation, of an exclamation that comes from before language and outlasts it. A salutation without salvation, which salutes existence, a stranger to the opposition between the saved and the lost, the blessed and the damned. Or again: the world saluting itself, via all of “nature” up to “mankind” and its “technology,” engendered by nature in order to get to the end of its creation [art]: a know-how of the impossible, the incommensurable, and the infinite—the revelation that the world is not there in order to remain there, laid down on itself, but on the contrary in order to open this “there” onto unheard-of, exalting or catastrophic, sublime or monstrous distancings, and perhaps all of this comes down to a single coming. A sole, unique, trembling coming, perilous and yet resolved, which is also the coming of song itself, its beating.