When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.1
A fixed syntagm makes it easy to speak of “beatific adoration,” meaning bleating devotion, irresponsible submission, even insidiously masochistic allegiance. The fixed nature of this expression indicates that one can understand the noun after the adjective as simply redundant: adoration would be in essence “beatific.” And it would be contentedly imbecilic in its blind submission. But we do not know how things stand with beatitude here, nor with submission.
Beatitude, the state of “blessedness” [bienheureux] that is the sense of the word, is subject to the law stating that certain terms which should be understood as actions are understood as states: pleasure, charm, felicity, joy, jouissance (even happiness can perhaps be listed here). We tend too readily to consider the series of notions or representations that could be grouped together under the generic term “agreeable” as accomplished states rather than as things in the process of unfolding. (By contrast, what is “disagreeable” does not allow us to forget that the act continues to act: the torments of pain, difficulty, and unhappiness are unending.)
Here it’s like the logics of “jouissance” and “fulfillment,” which I shall discuss later: what fulfills itself [se comble] does not limit itself to completion [complétion], but overflows fulfillment [complétude] itself. Strictly speaking, beatitude cannot consist in being “beatific” [béat], given that homophony brings it close to a gaping [béant]: a contented, foolish sprawling (whether pious, voluptuous, or gluttonous, as you will). The truth of pleasure is in desire.2 The truth of beatitude is in a movement that responds to a call, and this response differs in nature from a response to a question. Indeed, the latter can satisfy or resolve the question, whereas the former launches the call still further, maintains it for longer.
As we know, Spinoza wrote in the last proposition of his Ethics: “Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself.” In demonstrating this proposition, he specifies that “blessedness consists in love towards God . . . [and] must be related to mind in so far as it acts.”3 In the same way, adoration is not (and has no) realization in any completion whatsoever. It consists entirely in tension, drive, impetus. Of course, it is familiar with rhythms, even the arhythmia of a heartbeat, but not with “beatific” appeasement.
On the contrary, evil can consist in such a completion—satisfaction, assuagement, contentedness, solution. Here one turns away from the infinite, one becomes complacent in immobility. This is what it means to condemn “idols.” An idol is an idol when its worshipper [adorateur] is satisfied with worshipping it [l’adorer]: any God or devil can become an idol in this way and perhaps always has the tendency to do so.
Yet the submission, veneration, and prostration toward which adoration can turn do not necessarily bear the sign of humiliation, renunciation of dignity. On the contrary, they can proceed from the noblest and proudest act. This is how, for example, the entire sense of Islam—of “trusting submission,” as we said above—is played out around the interpretation of this submission. That God’s will should be “you shall worship only Him,” can be understood as setting aside any allegiance to any powers or idols whatsoever, including God himself if worshipped as an idol.4
“Beyond silence”: it seemed possible to characterize adoration thus. But beyond silence lies no more profound or more silent silence. Instead, one must return to language. Silence is always more or less considered as a hyperbolic language, as a reserve of sense exceeding words and rich with its own secret, its own intimacy. In this sense, one speaks sometimes of “mute adoration,” being dumbstruck figuring the withheld, hesitant obverse of that to which silence gives an eloquent face. To return to a language beyond silence means cutting to the quick of language, to what within it neither declares nor names in a strict sense, without wilting at the approach of an Unnamable.
To the quick: where language speaks only in a paradoxical trust in its own uncertainty, in its own inadequacy, as we are accustomed to say. This trust—which is truly the very reason of language in all senses of the word reason—seems to go beyond any assurance in signification or in an ultimate Sense beyond all signs.
But language constantly makes significations shift, play, tremble. This is how it speaks, and this is how it knows it is a language: it subsists in approximation, in what shifts. Where does it come from? From the nonplace that opens in the midst of the world and beginning with which things open, shift, and happen, things constantly replay this coming, this approach, and this shifting, this trembling in which everything comes about: the world, life, sense, the thing, all of them fortuitous, uncertain, vibrating, unsteady.
Thus speech is addressed to what sovereignly exceeds it; its worth as speech is as access to this excess, an access that opens through “mankind” onto the totality of the world’s existents and to the outside that divides and shares [partage] them, that they divide and share among themselves; man, the one who speaks, exists in the name of, on behalf of, we could even say as a consequence of [en raison de] the totality of the world’s existents: he receives his reason for being as the one who must give accounts of or reasons for [rendre raison de] the world. He gives reasons for what is without reason—the fortuitous, the die as cast, our lot as shared: a reason that is not unreasonable, but perhaps without reason. Excessive speech is dedicated to this. Its proffering must indefinitely be taken up anew, remodulated, relaunched, repeated in interminable variations, because its theme—what is without reason, reason without reason—never appears outside of these variations or their profusion. Ibn Arabi writes: “All beings present in the world stand together equally in God, due to the store of trust that mankind possesses.”5 This store of trust is speech, it is the opening of sense—an opening that is not followed by any closure.
Excessive speech speaks indefinitely, in the exuberance of literary inventions, the profusion of fictions, and the proliferation of discourses, but it also speaks infinitely—and then one no longer hears it, there is nothing more to hear. It resonates only in the voice itself, in a murmur, a rubbing of the voice against itself, hesitating on the threshold of speech. This is the extreme intimacy of the voice, the buried heart of language, a groaning of suffering or of jouissance, a brushing up against sense. The two modes of speaking are created back to back with one another, and by one another: orality both oratory and adoring.
This means it is the gods who make us speak. Language is divine insofar as it comes from the outside and returns toward it (also turning itself around), toward this outside that it itself opens in us, by opening our mouths, and by opening this strange sign, “man,” in the midst of the world. But this also means that the “gods” are themselves language through and through: they are names, myths, calls. Monotheism (and with it, but quite differently, Buddhism) has represented god essentially, even exclusively, as something that speaks. God is therefore effaced in speech, confused with call and response, and thus becomes the unnamable.
But this means yet more. The unnamable is a function of language: there is only nomination against a backdrop of the unnamable, and the latter is nothing other than what is said in all nomination. One could say: the unnamable is not ineffable. Naming opens toward the unreachable, to the irreducibility of the thing, the real, the existent. Only language gives this opening, but it is also alone in designating this opening as a gaping toward the infinite, outside language and yet always repeated anew, demanded again in speech.
In this sense we must also understand that adoration creates its own “object.” No particular thing or being is given in the infinite distancing of everything that is given and to which we could relate at the limit of language. But there are speaking beings who make it evident that their speech speaks beyond itself; it does not speak about a beyond, it speaks beyond. Thus it does nothing other than create the world: it relates existences to the nothing that is the ground from which they detach themselves and relate to one another. The universe in its expansion, the profusion of beings, living beings impelled by their desire, the beating of all the signals that are exchanged, all of this is taken up by and is at play in the speaking drive that also makes it appear—because this drive names the universe, the living being, the sign—while also making it retreat further into the infinity of sense.
It is by speaking beyond itself and beyond sense that speech opens sense. In fact, speech receives itself from the beyond even before it speaks: it is what, in the speaking animal, has already animated it in order for it to speak. In the vocal cords, the tongue, the entire phonatory apparatus, as in the neuronal reticulations where symbolization is activated, “nature” has already addressed speech. Without finality: as the excess in it of the proper sense of speech, of the proper fact of its existence. A mystic expressed it thus: “I thought I was invoking Him, yet His invocation preceded my own; I thought I was soliciting Him and knew Him, but His knowledge preceded mine; I felt that I loved Him, and yet He loved me first, and I imagined that I adored him, whereas He had already put the creatures of the earth at my service.”6 “He” is unnamable, and the “service” that “creatures” perform is neither service to he who speaks here nor to mankind—but service to adoration itself, which, passing through “me,” infinitely returns from speech to speech.
“It is quite possible that life’s splendor resides beside each being and always in its fullness, but that it is veiled, hidden in the depths, invisible . . ., yet that if it is invoked by the right word, by its true name, it will come forth.”7
Adoration is contrasted, above all, to reduction. I do not exempt here the “phenomenological reduction,” the suspension of the supposedly spontaneous and unreflecting attitude that allegedly prevents us from discerning what truly makes up our relation to the world and to ourselves. I am neither contesting nor criticizing this: I am deliberately starting from a different point, not face-to-face with the world, myself, or autrui, but in a being-in-the-world that, just like Heidegger’s in der Welt sein, which I have translated in this way in order to render its intention (which the German itself renders badly), is not a “being placed within” something that would contain it, but a belonging, or better, an inherence, or still better, a mutual intrication or enveloping, such that “I” am not “in” the world, but rather that I am the world and the world is me, just as it is you and us, the wolf and the lamb, nitrogen, iron, optical fibers, black holes, lichen, fantastical imagery, thought, and the thrust of “things” themselves. These things that are and make up the world are nothing other than the relations among all existents—these relations that we constantly diversify, complicate, multiply, modify, model, and modulate in the indefinite resumption of a song without melody, words, or even the timbre of a voice and that nonetheless we constantly—even as we lose it, suppress it, and find it anew—address to this: that there is the world, that it is given, given as abandoned, this singular admixture of being and non-being, of finite and infinite, of life and death, of sense and the senseless that is named “existence.”
The world of existence or existences is precisely the ensemble of relations that never make up “a” world, even less a world of objects facing subjects, but—if we are to stay with this terminology—a world that is itself “subject”: subject of the relations of which it is the general connectedness. A subject of relations means definitively a subject that in itself—like all subjects—is relation and nothing but relation: a being-to, to itself/to the same/to nothing, a being whose entire being consists in the to. Ultimately, the Destruktion of ontology that Heidegger desired can be transcribed in this way: there is no “being”; being designates an act or rather an indefinite complex of acts made up by the relations without which the very terms (or subjects) of these relations would not exist. A relation: an address, call, invitation, refusal, rejection, signal, desire, even an indifference, or an avoiding taking place through the abundance of existences. Which exist by dint of thus exposing themselves according to relation.
Thus, no difference between “being” [l’être] and “being” [l’étant] but this différance that Derrida named—or unnamed—which signals that the existent exposes itself and does only that: creates a gap from itself, not a distance that could defer its final advent, but rather a proximity whose open chink puts it into contact with the totality of beings and thus with the infinite of the opening that shares them all and reunites them all. It reunites them to nothing other than this opening itself: to the open of the world, to the open that is the world and about which all we can say is that we must attempt to adore it. That is, to address to it the witness of existence itself. Finally, what I am naming “to adore” here means: deciding to exist, deciding on existence, turning aside from non-existence, from the closure of the world on itself. (A world closed on itself is a Sense gained, an ultimate Goal [Fin], a world reduced to a something, to something far less than a pebble).
Our culture has dedicated itself to another reduction, seen in the maxim “Myths are fables,” that is, they are illusory and untruthful inventions. One called this “the thinking of suspicion”—namely, suspicion of any form of the absolute, the ideal, the unconditional. These three words themselves inevitably provoke suspicion. And yet they are necessary! By this I mean that we should be able to not reduce them.
There is little point in getting bogged down by demonstrating that we must not return to myth. The idea of a “new mythology” refuses to cease smoldering—and indeed sometimes rises up in terrifying flames. But we must avoid reducing what could be called a mythical but not mythifying function, and which would take up or put into play anew or otherwise the role that myths played in their cultures: not to give explanations relying on a state of knowledge different from our own, which would therefore be wrong and illusory for us, but expressing an experience (e.g., the presence of the dead, the fascinating power of fire, the begetting of children, etc.) that is ultimately an experience of unlimitedness, of incommensurability, of an extravagance experienced as being inscribed within nature, life, the exorbitant order of the world.
This is the sense in which Freud wrote “drives are our myths”: forces that thrust us from far before ourselves to far beyond ourselves—as far as life/death, intimacy/strangeness, absorbing/rejecting the outside. These forces cause us to experience, we are even the experience of them, without it being possible for us to assign them the status of physical or physiological forces, without our being able to identify them as instincts or intentions, without our being able to identify ourselves as tropistic organisms or as subjects gifted with consciousness. But in us, through us, and as us the power of what does not allow itself to be reduced to these identities (organism, consciousness) is in play: a relation to “self” as to an infinite outside.
“Our myths” also means: for us who no longer have myths. Drives are the mythology of a mankind without myths. A pure mythology in some way: without the figures of gods or of heroes, without marvelous events, being only the unfigurable thrust of what attempts to live by producing sense, relation, the world, and discovers that it is also a death drive, a drive to destroy beings and relationships. According to Freud, drives are essentially plastic: they can displace, transform, and lead astray their objects, and this is why we can speak of “drives,” the plurality of a unique, obscure, indefinite thrust.
But this thrust is nothing other than the repetition of the originary beating within us, of the opening of the world, only an “origin” in this beating which is always anterior and posterior to itself, retraction of necessity/expansion of fortuitousness, a throwing of existents into the world—birth and abandonment conjoined. Nothing other than this beating drives us, nothing else drives within us, through us. This is what is repeated as language: the beating of sense and its suspense, of its address and dissemination.
Universality and incarnation: no other civilization in the history of humanity has represented its own essence or destiny as the incarnation of the divine (history and humanity being themselves creations of this civilization, its products and its driving principles)—but incarnation also opens up an infinite pity, because it carries within it an ontological decline. This is not a decline in contrast to another status, but a “fall” as “being”: being as fall, which is to say, as a movement of what lacks a basis, a standpoint, ground. The West is without ground, it is the invention of the absence of grounds as an initial given, not even as an “absence” or privation, but the proposition of an outside as truth: not a truth “of the inside,” but a true exposition of the inside, ex-acting or ex-traction as the entire movement in principle.
At the same time, and if the whole of “creation” is indeed at stake in the economy said to pertain to “salvation” [salut] (some theologians have argued that the “mystical body of Christ” would incorporate all of nature), we must affirm that I touch the world in its entirety, in the totality of its force and its expansion. This touching engages neither interiority nor exteriority; it allows me neither to possess the world nor to lose myself within it; it establishes between “me” and “the world” a coincidence that is essentially that of the initial opening, of the ex nihilo, of its surprised start [sursaut] and jolt [soubresaut]. I come into the world with the world itself, and, in the history of nature, man is he who takes up and puts back into play all appearing. This is language. This is also technology, second nature, the supplementing—and then the supplanting—of nature. The indefinite multiplication of beginnings and ends: new eras constantly come to pass, whether with vaccines, steam, electricity, atomic energy—fission and perhaps one day fusion—cybernetics, and new ends are constantly dispersing and dissolving the very idea of an end to nature or to mankind. We are leaving the order of ends entirely behind us, if not that of the unending ends that are the accumulations of production, of “goods,” of means (to what ends?), of powers (of transmission, analysis, recombination), of longevity, of the observation of galaxies or of space travel, and at the same time of population, of hunger, of poverty, and of ever more visible tears in the surface of what makes our world a fabric drawn tighter and tighter: to the point where we suspect that we could, in fact, rip everything apart. That we are in a sort of general laceration, as if the regime of relation and of bonds could lead only to rupture, dispersion, and dislocation.
It is as if mankind were recreating in place of the world an ensemble at once more organic—interdependent, interlinked—and more and more accumulative (piled up, juxtaposed, heaped). A struction—that is to say, a piling up—without true construction, yet without total destruction. The motif of deconstruction does nothing but update this state of “struction.” With it, the contiguity between beings changes its meaning or becomes problematic: it is suspended between the passing by of a sense and the obstruction caused by a jumble. Something like a chaos that would both precede and follow the formation of “elements,” “kingdoms,” and “species.” That would both precede and follow the construction of nature and the instruction of humanity.
The import of the “with” is at stake here: Who desires the diversity of beings, languages, cultures, epochs, persons? It is not enough to have done with gathering them into a transcendental unity. We must know what to do with relation. We must know how to unfold and articulate the demand that Heidegger poses when, elliptically, he says that the “with” of “being with” (Mitsein) should not be understood as categorial but as existential (which is to say, not as a simple category of disposition, addition, or juxtaposition, but as an intrinsic condition of ek-sistence).
This understanding of the “with”—which Heidegger himself was able to grasp only in the dimension of a “people” and its “destiny,” even as “communism” simply made nothing of it, or rather, only the too-well-named “masses”—is very precisely that in relation to which the great, profound, unconscious decisions of relational civilization are played out: exchanges regulated via general equivalence, juridico-political equality, and individual liberty considered as ends in themselves, the vicious circle of ends becoming the means of other ends, which in their turn are means . . .
What I name adoration would be only the consideration of what in relation—relation among us, to oneself, to the world—opens to the infinite, without which there would be no relation in the full sense that this word alone, perhaps, can take on, but only rapport, liaison, connection. These and other terms presuppose subjects or entities between which is made a bond that is, in consequence, posterior and subordinated to being. Relation wins out over being, indeed it opens the sense of being, without offending “subjects” in any way: for it does not intervene between those that are already given; it makes them possible, creates them. Is not each one of us engendered by a relation, and should not the world be conceived of as a creation of relations rather than beings [êtres]? The difference between night and day, the difference between matters, forms, thoughts . . . The infinite difference of each re-absorption of these differences into a being uniformly reduced to itself.
Incarnation: that divine infinity should be at work in the relation among finite beings. That sense should be in essence finite: interrupted, suspended over empty truth in order to avoid the smothering completion of a conclusion.
Our suffering: we know that we are bereft of horizons and, with them, justifications for misfortune (maladies, injustices) and grounds for the punishment of crimes (for the designation of “those who are bad”). This is what is meant by the self-dissolution of the West in the deployment of its in-finite (i.e., lacking ends) logic, which forms the flip side of the logical infinite (where the end in itself is present at each moment: quite distinct from suicide, which affirms a given present as cessation, not as punctuation).
Against this suffering of the in-finite (capital, equivalence, the bad infinite), a differentiation, a different evaluation (Nietzsche), and thus an “adoration” are needed.
Evil, this evil that we now know belongs to our own capacity to turn against one another because we will not turn away toward the infinite, always and in all its forms consists in a closed identification, an idolatry, a figuration without remainder: as soon as I put forward this or that, put forward that this or that “are” the good or the truth of mankind or of the world, I enter into evil. But “relativizing” does not get us out of this situation, for the “relative” can be thought only against the backdrop of the “absolute.” The absolute must be affirmed without its relative counterpart, the absolute of each “one,” of each “here and now,” of each instant of eternity. This is how a different evaluation could be opened up: in the fact that there is no value besides what has absolute value.
This different evaluation must also proceed from what Nietzsche was perhaps close to understanding: adoration has no object and consists precisely in not having any object. This can be understood doubly: not addressing itself to anything, and having nothing facing it. Not addressing itself to anything, to any being [être] or being [étant], and thus addressing nothing, this minimal res (this “sweet nothing”) that is “reality” (not the majestic and overimposing Real of all ontotheologies): the nothing of the simple “here you are” [voici], “this is my body.” But addressing itself to this nothing, insofar as it is infinitesimal—fortuitous, in-significant, and thus an actual infinitude (opposed to its potential in-finity, to the endlessness of potentia as such)—flashes as the signal of an absolute outside, of a nihil in which all nihilism loses its “-ism” (its supposed completion without further reference) in order to open infinitely onto a non-completion delivered from any horizon of accomplishment. Addressing itself, therefore, to this outside which cannot be said “as such.”
As for having nothing facing it: neither as an object for a subject, nor as an objection to a thesis, nor as an objective to aim at. Therefore having the nothing of the infinitesimal-fortuitous-insignificant. Moreover, not having this infinitesimal-infinite thing facing it. Precisely not: it cannot face because there is no space that could be polarized according to a topology of the face-to-face. There is space turned in every part toward an outside that it does not face and that inhabits it rather than encountering it. That traverses it rather than surrounding it.
“L. responds that he is thinking about nothing.
Impossible, she must translate: the thing—nothing [rien] rebus real reify republic revendication—he is thinking about the thing.”8
“I suffer easily, I suffer at the drop of a hat. Sometimes for nothing. Often for nothing because for me nothing is already something; something that cannot be described but that exists. When I try to explain this, everyone laughs at me.”9
Unity in itself, intimacy without outside: by taking its fill of concentration, penetration, gathering in, and meditation (rumination, interminable return to the sole, fundamental impossibility of grasping “itself”), it becomes itself an outside and even an opening, then an exit, excess, generosity, or heroism, and then still later, abandon, escape, and even alienation, exclusion, exile.
But this takes place according to an unceasing persistence, in the bosom of values that are too often posed unilaterally, those of the absolutely one and intimate: what is absolutely one and intimate constantly affirms and intensifies itself in this movement to the outside, outside itself, outside everything.
To begin with: intimacy is always above all and perhaps always in absolute terms intimacy with an other, an intimacy among intimacies, and not the intimacy of one with herself alone. The intimate, the superlative of the “interior” (we have already quoted Augustine’s address to God: “interior intimo meo”), is a superlative that, in itself, still calls for a comparative. Because I am filled up with interiority, at the closest proximity to “myself”—and most secretly—to “this world,” to “the earth,” I touch on something further: on what touches me out of an elsewhere that I can consider indifferently as “in” me or “outside” me, as within this world or outside it, because I am touching the limit. But to touch the limit is inevitably also to pass it. And I pass it only by touching another—another person, another being, another living being, even a hard stone, whose opaque resistance carries me yet further outside myself.
All intimacy is “interior intimo meo.” Being the most profound, it is also what, for its part, is bottomless. For Augustine and in the long tradition beginning with him, “God” will have been the name of what is bottomless. To touch the bottomless is to touch what allows itself to be touched only in retreating further still—in a hyperbole, in effect, of the law of touching, which says that one can only touch across a gap. Otherwise, one penetrates, but one can penetrate only what has some substance: here there is nothing of the sort, there is the incommensurability of this flight of the bottom to the outside, to the absolute elsewhere.
This touching is what one calls “spiritual”: the breath that lightly brushes what is “origin-heterogeneous [hétérogène à l’origine].”10 Spirit comes and touches this outside, which is further “outside” than any coupled assemblage of “inside/outside”: it is even outside the outside. It is outside everything: it is nothing, which is to say, the reality of all things considered in itself, in absolute terms, which is to say, detached from everything. But a thing considered in absolute terms—as, perhaps, a musical chord, a nuance of color, an inflection of voice, a visage, a pebble, a tree—absorbs into this “nothing” the totality of consideration, whose spirit is then transported into this thing and changed into a sound, a color, a gaze or a smooth opacity. Such is adoration: the intimacy of this transport.
En diapheron eauto¯ (the one differing [différant] from itself):11 such is relation, insofar as it “is” or as “being” can designate anything beyond the One in-different in itself—which, truly, can be only by resonating as the verb to be [être] and not as a noun, being [l’être]. This, which Heidegger revealed, thereby initiating the deconstruction of ontology, has constantly preyed upon thought. Hegel says clearly that the one is its own negation, just as he says that being pure and simple abolishes itself as soon as it is posed. But what is Descartes himself doing, when he pronounces “I am,” other than opening a “being” that is neither substance nor position, but enunciation and declaration—what’s more, a declaration whose verb cannot exist without its subject, a subject inscribed in it in the form of “am” but also detached as “I,” a pronoun that is nothing other than the difference of the “am” from itself, the possibility that it might present, declare, and designate itself?12 “I am” is already in relation, if only in the relation of withdrawal from the rest of the world. This withdrawal is not at all solipsistic or closed off: on the contrary, it opens relation. “I” is a relation to the world, to others, to “you,” to “us.” It is also a relation to its proper being, which it only “is” insofar as it relates to it—but it relates only insofar as it relates to all the rest (a “thinking being” means one that feels, imagines, wants, conceives, loves). There is hardly a question of “consciousness” here, or of the “subject” as a depository of representations. It is a question of placing in relation.
The subject as subject of a relation—we should say subject in a relation—is itself according to the relation. Thus it is unity via its difference, the unity of a tension and a rhythm, a unity that is mobile in itself and whose mobility creates tension, drive, aspiration, contradiction, opposition, loss and pardon, alliance and rupture, opening and closing. Deferring [différant] in itself, different [différent] from itself and differing [différant] itself: opening itself as a voice, as a mouth.
Exclaiming. “I adore,” “I adore you [t’adore],” “I adore you [vous]” are exclamations. A free-for-all of acclaim [Mêlée d’acclamation]. But without clamor. It can be proffered noiselessly just as well as dramatically. It can efface itself in order to slip completely into a proper name, whose meaning then becomes “since you are there!” Perhaps the name “god,” coming in place of all the names of the gods, came to concern the pure beating of exclamation. The beat of beating itself, one could say, the redoubling of erotic impetus, of amorous love, of the invocation of all sorts of greatness, beauty, and transport—transports the beat itself. “God” could be understood as “what joy!” or “what grandeur!”—a salutation to the incommensurable not designating any sort of being, designating only itself as salutation. But this is a surprised salutation, caught in speech by surprise, lower than any formulation [phrase], borne by voice rather than speech stricto sensu, a nomination of the unnamable or of what is namable par excellence—through excess, through the profusion hidden within each name. A salutation of pure resonance, carrying salutation to jouissance, to a joying [jouir] that joys in saying or in being said.
Religions were full of exclamations—hallelujah, evoe, hosannah, om, Jesus, Allah . . . —exclamations that overflow any sense the words bearing them might have had. It always involves a voice that clamors, exclaims, acclaims, and thus proclaims. But it does not declaim or demand anything. If this is what is meant by “religious sentiment,” then we are far from religion as observance and belief. We are simply, if one can say so, in the realm of emotion—the emotion of infinite relation. Of course, this emotion can be exploited, and doubtless all cultures know such exploitation, which becomes the business of priests, gurus, and sorcerers. Of itself, emotion is as ready to submit as to exalt itself, and thus it gives a handle for religious manipulation as we know it only too well (not to speak of the traffic that ensures when emotion is accompanied by a demand for salvation . . . ). However, this is not a sufficient reason to hold the fervor of adoration in suspicion and to class it as illusion: the dis-enclosure of reason also has to open toward a fervor.
The various fascisms were not deceived about this, and it was not by chance that they had recourse to emotion: not only did they know what force it made available, but they knew that this force was seeking to discharge itself, seeking expression in a world that it experienced as dessicated. In Greek, “enthusiasm” means “passage to god” or “sharing the divine”: How can enthusiasm be saved from the death of God? This is a serious question.
We should begin by not confusing the fervor of enthusiasm with fascistic fury: the latter is always concerned with a determinate, closed figure (whether people or party, leader or idea, vision or conception). A configured, closed figure without an outside. It is received as such, full, circumscribed, accomplished: one submits to it. This is adulation, not adoration. The fervor of adoration, by contrast, is given by choice [élection], in the dilection whereby a unique, priceless price is agreed upon and/or recognized. The fervor that choice carries with it does not simply carry a single loved being to the incandescence of an absolute. At the same time, and without contradiction, this fervor desires this incandescence for everything (all beings). It is a fervor for multiple and singular existence: for each one, therefore, in turn, for each one excluding all others, and yet also for all, at least for the many who respond to the many modes of this unique and polymorphous “love.”
“God” could be the name that, as a proper noun [nom], names the unnamable and, as a common noun, designates the division dies/nox, day and night, opening the rhythm of the world, the possibility of distinctions in general, and therefore of relation and of passage.
But we can erase this sign if it begins to dominate, take control, subjugate: it then becomes contradictory, in effect, as it annuls passage, annuls us as passers-by, attempts to fix us permanently before altars, temples, books. This is what happens, perhaps unavoidably, in all the theological and metaphysical determinations of “God,” and it is perhaps impossible for this name, as for any other, not to be determined in some way. It is perhaps impossible for this name to retain the movement, the trembling of the gap and the passage.
“God” should only be named in passing, and as a passer-by.
Man: the pace [pas] of the passer-by in whom the world surpasses all its limits or conditions: the beginning and the end, the limit and the unlimited, unity and dispersion, totality and particularity. This step beyond [pas au-delà] is the doing of sense—or language—which is, in all of its forms, a referring [renvoi] to the outside. Man is the being of sense: he is through and through a referring.
Exceeding all conditions, without its own condition (the “human condition” is beyond conditions), man is the unconditioned: at once without condition, without conditioning, without determination, and absolute, constituting a sovereign principle, demand, and commandment. But this is the sovereignty of nothing, or of passage.
Passage and referring are themselves indefinitely multiplied—as are the senses (the five, and all the others, whether electric, magnetic, kinetic . . . ), and as are the “senses” of the word sense—precisely because this concerns referring: each register refers to the outside, to what lies outside everything and is formed both by the very ensemble of referrings and by the complete suspension of all referring.
Thus knowledge and imagination, language and sensation, sex and childbirth, technology and nature, solitude and relation are so many registers that are at once crossing one another and heterogeneous. Nothing is taken up into a totality. This is precisely what invites adoration: what unfurls rather than gathers back in.
Adoration: a gesture recognizing a passage that infinitely surpasses, passes beyond. Therefore a gesture recognizing that there can be no recognition proper of infinite surpassing. To recognize an infinite is to finitize it, to de-fine it. What is at stake here is the recognition of what cannot be recognized. And of the fact that it obliges me to bow down. In bowing down, I open the finite to the infinite.
“Adoration” makes us think of “prostration.” Prostration is formidably ambiguous: it attests to the incommensurability of that before which it prostrates itself, and it allows this abasement to be exploited: the permanent little scheme of religions. But religion—let us say, the religious, observant disposition—is finally alone in opening the possibility of prostration. Perhaps we should see here the sense of Hegel’s phrase, that “religion must remain for all, including those for whom it has been elevated to a concept.” The philosopher, he who understands in conceptual terms the truth that only religion represents, knows how to do everything except prostrate himself. This follows from there being for him neither god nor master: this is the condition of thinking. Yet the philosopher must prostrate himself: as a philosopher, he must know that reason prostrates itself before what in itself surpasses it infinitely. He therefore needs to know that only a reason that adores is fully rational and reasonable. Kant prostrates himself: “Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” By this we are to understand that the starry sky and the moral law are two names for the infinite opening of reason.
Thus one never prostrates oneself before “something” or before “someone.” One does not adore something or someone—no more than one is properly the subject or the agent of one’s adoration—rather, it always involves opening as movement and passage, or the infinite insofar as it is transitive: as it transfixes [transit] us.
Sense: not the sending [envoi] of a signification to an addressee, but sending as making sense, carrying it off with it, displacing it—sense always displaced, being displaced. A passer-by, a passenger, furtive insofar as it is fortuitous. Always a sign made in passing, a “salut!” Therefore always also interrupted, incomplete: a failure of sense (in the weighty sense full of significance) alone renders possible the lightness demanded by sending, referring [renvoi], the passage of sense in its aerial sense of breath, of palpable, sensual light contact, which is always a little senseless.
In this failure also lodges the possible impulse to an insurrection: a refusal of the given world, an impetus to alter this world (not to transform it but to break it open), an affirmation of another (of the) world here and now.
The mutation from which monotheism and Christianity issued was a mutation of civilization in the fullest sense of the word (of this word produced par excellence by this “civilization”): mutation in its manner and sense of presence in the world. A metamorphosis in how one inhabited the world—without doubt the third great mutation after that of the Neolithic age and that of Empires—a transformation of the oikos, of the house (dwelling, hearth, kin, domesticity) and of its running, oikonomia. The Mediterranean world enters into a new economy—commercial, monetary, entrepreneurial, and expansive—which, after a delay (or incubation?) of several centuries, took on its full dimensions with the Renaissance.
This aspect of the mutation closely corresponds to what has been characterized as the passage from a culture of observance to a culture of relation. “Correspondence” does not imply any unilateral determination—neither of economy by the sphere of representations and institutions nor, conversely, of this sphere by economy. One can clearly see, in their transformation, how these spheres or registers belong to one another in a tight, symbiotic way and signal above all their belonging to a general schema of one “civilization” rather than another. These schemata take shape in the most secret depths of human history, in an invisible movement that is neither progressive nor regressive, but simply metamorphic. This history has no sense, no directing or orienting sense, apart from the sense of finally having been brought to the point of laying bare the concern for “sense” itself.
The schema of reproduction gave way to the schema of production. Reproduction does not simply involve consecrating wealth to maintaining given conditions, but at the same time reproduces a way of life and the life of observances and hierarchies.13 As was stated above, here violence and riches—always linked—are turned toward glorious possession. By contrast, in the regime of production they are turned toward fruitful possession. What is to be produced no longer lies, by definition, within given conditions but surpasses them, deranges them, carries them off. In the place of life, observance, and hierarchy are produced existence, enterprise, and law—or rather, they are at once subjects and objects of production—three forms or three dimensions offered straightaway in the element of becoming, of transformation, of the in-finite. This is how one enters into what can be called in the most general terms relation.
Before the regime of production is truly deployed in the Renaissance, and thus in the contemporaneous deployment of relation (society in its modern concept—or problem: credit, the cost of risk, organization, transport, exploration, etc.), there are two intermediate stages, both marked by a singular relation to religion. The first is Antiquity, which started off “pre-capitalism,” but within the framework, maintained for a while, of “civil religion,” an observance that eventually was revealed to be powerless to account for this world in transformation. Following after it, feudalism, which is not a Mediterranean but a Nordic configuration, seemed to return to reproduction, but within a framework still defined by the distinction between two worlds or two kingdoms. While the feudal system was closely tied up with Christian practices, the division between the seigneury of the world and the seigneury of the heavens remained clear.
The production of existence leads to that of the subject and of the individual—of he who is supposed to be the subject of his own interests. One could say that the schema of production opens onto a new problematic of the “proper” in general: of property, whether private or collective,14 but also of the property/ies of the more and more autonomous techniques of production (from enterprise to industry, to the machine, then to cybernetics and IT), and at the same time of the rights of property or appropriation—those of society, of the State, of the regime designated as that of “human rights,” which supposes a possible (and yet unlocatable) determination of what the “human” properly is.
This ensemble of the “proper,” expanding or indefinitely in flight—which also becomes the ensemble of the proper “needs” and proper “ends” that a civilization can or should offer—started off the process of what is called unlimited “growth,” which corresponds to an increase in what we (“we,” the very actors and instruments of the process) can only consider as expropriations or disappropriations (of goods, cultures, or identities), as what “alienates” us or gets us stuck in the “inauthentic.”
Today we know how this growth runs up against, not only the objections and anxiety occasioned by a general feeling that the only proper thing remaining to us is to serve a process that is assumed to be autonomous and irreversible—and with this service, this servitude, to accept an unlimited domination by profit, which has become the essential object of production—but also ecological imbalances, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, and the formidable complexity of technical possibilities in medicine, in space exploration, in the control of bodies and minds, and in the transformation of cultures, to say nothing of financial manipulations.
The necessity of taking back or taking up a regulatory and interventionary authority over this “growth” is undeniable. It obliges us to invent or alter codes, institutions, guidelines. As has often been repeated, we must make capitalism “moral.” But this morality, understood as that of the individual and the entirety of his interests—as the morality that is proper to a “man” whose metaphysical situation, as it were, remains un-changed—has every chance of remaining powerless, since it either proceeds from the same point as the problem itself, namely, “man” as de jure individual-producer-subject ..., or, in its revolutionary form, brings us back to the presupposition, merely in a less clearly determined way, that “man” is a given. Marx thinks the “total man” as the integral, non-alienated producer of his own social and individual existence, but this pure production value (which in Marx in fact underpins the very idea of “value,” in the pure sense that it attempts to oppose to market value) covers over and obliterates the simple question: What man, what humanity ought to be produced?
When one turns toward a form of regulation interior to capitalism, as today it is doubtless necessary for us to do—for instance, the form best represented by Keynes—the same question reappears in a different form. Here is an strong, courageous affirmation by Keynes, which has a lively resonance today:
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.15
The evangelical reference could be analyzed at length, insofar as it invokes the Judeo-Christian—and philosophical—relation to money, but let us leave that to one side and ask: When this reference is just a memory (as it must be for Keynes), how can the “direct enjoyment in things” be sketched with any precision? How, in general terms, can the “ends” and the “good,” which everyone agrees must be preferred to the “means” and the “useful,” be determined? This questioning comment does not contain the least irony: I only want to underline how Keynes, just as much as Marx or anyone else—so far as I know—who could be called upon with the aim of transforming the economy, shows very clearly that we should not start with the economy itself or with its regulation, but with “ends,” or rather, “sense”—let us therefore say simply with metaphysics, or, if one prefers, with the terms mysticism or poetics. But whichever name one chooses, we must start with the work of thinking through these names, this regime of names, the relation to infinite sense.
Doubtless what is called the “market” should be set right [régler], regularized, and regulated. However, so long as it is seen in these terms, we will remain subject to a play of forces that must be controlled. This play depends upon a profound choice, ungraspable in itself, of “civilization,” just as “capitalism” and “industry” depended upon underground, secular, anonymous movements, whose thrust defied any prescription of consciousness and even of “reason.” We can no longer decide consciously and reasonably on a choice that could reverse or overturn the previous one—a choice that is perhaps already at work, unknown to us. It is not a question of preaching voluntarism. It is a question of making oneself as little unsuited as possible to perceiving and receiving the tectonic shudderings that are rocking “civilization.”
This means that we must admit with Heidegger that “humanism does not set the humanitas of man high enough”16—a humanitas that, on the contrary, has ended up being thought as the essence of a subject of interests and rights in place of being turned toward the non-essence of an “eksistence”—and distance ourselves from the thinking of the same Heidegger when it more or less expressly refers the “inspection” [arraisonnement] of the world17 to an “oblivion” (whether we say “of being” or of something else matters little here), what we should be learning to think is that nothing is forgotten, nothing is lost, no authenticity of the world or of mankind has been alienated, but rather that the reason of “inspection” must be dis-enclosed.
Does this mean that, as Heidegger said, “only a god can save us”? Undoubtedly, we must understand instead the divinity of this “god,” on the one hand, and, on the other, no longer speak of “salvation” (saving, Rettung), but learn how to salute, to salute one another, as we have already seen.18
A condition of adoration: anteriority to “I”; not simply to “me” and its masses (the masses that a “me” is and the masses of “me’s”), but also to “I” itself and to its punctual location, which remains a position nonetheless, though fleeting and without dimension. This takes place further upstream: the opening opens behind me, before I open my mouth. “I” could happen in this opening, but does not yet appear, not for the moment; there is only the circle or ellipsis of the mouth, which has not yet spoken, which precedes not only the sound of words but silent intention, too. The sense of adoration is not to be found in intention, or perhaps we should say, taking up Derrida’s analysis, that it carries intention to the point where it is abandoned: it is stretched out by the desire to let go—to cry out—but this very desire is carried, paradoxically thrust forward by an abandon, not a renouncement but an intimate trust and assent—interior intimo. . . —given to a movement older and broader than subjectivity and identity.
It is not me and it is not even “one” who adores. Everyone passing through this one and this “everyone” gradually designates a contact, a contagion of all beings. This “everyone” is no assembly or social bond, but neither is it an organic or fusional incorporation. It is a “with” that is experienced and known in a proximity that is neither exterior (like “bond” or “relationship”) nor interior (like symbiosis or absorption). It is what I am in the eyes of an attentive other, or what a form or color—of a tree, a tool—is when I allow it to enter and go through me, to not remain before me.
It is less a “relation without relation” than relation itself, in absolute terms, as opening and passage, but above all as opening and passage affect and touch what [cela] is open and toward which things [ça] pass.19 This concerns above all what opens affect in general: a receptivity, passivity, or capacity for sensation that must already be given, and given as already open, in order for something like affection to take place. Receptivity—sensibility, excitability—is nothing other than the plurality of existences and the real heterogeneity between them that is the corollary of the absence of another world or world beyond, where an ultimate homogeneity would hold sway. Beings affect one another—even minerals do—and the world, or the sense of the world, is nothing other than the general communication of this emotion: the shaking of creation.
If adoration, in this communication, abolishes relationship [relation] without turning into fusion—or effusion . . .—if it exceeds both relation and non-relation in the sense of identification, assimilation (devouring, absorption, etc.), perhaps one can say that it touches the fulfillment [comble] of relation: where it realizes, exposes, or delivers its sense.
Sense as a fulfilling [comblement]. The sense of adoration as a fulfilling of its impetus, its movement, its desire.
Roland Barthes dares to talk about the fulfillment of love. He dares to think, posit, and, as he says, risk this serious infringement of the psychoanalytical doxa of a necessary lack. In any case, as he says, he dares to try to do so. This trying, as he also says, is that of love. It is what young love (or love insofar as it is young) tries to do: to fill and to be filled.
Which is to say, to overflow. One might well begin with lack, a gap to fill, as Barthes does, but one proceeds, as he knows, toward overflowing. In this fulfillment is deployed a logic of filling up [comble]: an extremity that surpasses, insofar as it surpasses. The issue is no longer that of a lack to be filled, but rather of a desire that overflows. This is, after all, the essence of desire, of the pleasure that desire gathers to itself, to its infinite setting back into play.
Such is jouissance, or rather joying, jouir: not a state but an act, and an act that overflows itself. Not a satisfaction, as if the hollow that is filled up were cancelled out, not even a saturation—even though what is saturated always exudes what saturates and overflows it. But something that would be like the expansion of the hollow beyond its filling up, and thanks to this fulfillment. It is not that lack always outlasts what sates it. But the hollow, in being filled up, reveals how it is not lack but power: the capacity to welcome in order to desire anew. It is not yawning emptiness, but opening, call, impetus.
Thinking doesn’t happen any differently; it affirms what exceeds any power of thinking. It affirms itself, in effect, as the power of its very powerlessness. It knows to think that there is something it cannot think: not only that nothing greater can be thought, but that there is still a thought greater than all that can be thought. This is Anselm’s argument, which another doxa made into an ontological proof. But what exceeds thought is neither a being [être], nor of being [de l’être]. Doubtless, it “is” not. This is why the supposed ontological proof falls down so easily, even as what “is” not carries thought further onward.
What gives a film its power, grandeur, and beauty is not on the screen. It breaks through the screen. It is the desire, the love carried by the film, which is precisely what allows one to speak of the film otherwise than as an object, a work, or a production.
The process of filling up operates at once as an overflowing and a withdrawal: art, or love, is poured out there and then gathered back again, more tightly, more rigorously. Joying becomes ascetic, a meditation on the essential, a thought of what does not allow itself to be thought. A joy of knowing that one is before what is ever greater.
Overflowing need not be either a ferment or a disgorging. It can simply, imperceptibly, surpass the brim, as water completely filling up a cup forms a slight bulge, a thin convergent meniscus that rises higher than the edges of the glass. The filling up trembles, it is fragile.20
This fragility is that of the “sense of the world [that] must lie outside the world.”21
How are we to name the regime or the register according to which “adoration” is to be conceived? It is quite clear that this is not politics.22 Neither are we in the arena of morality, ethics, or aesthetics: instead the point seems to be, in relation to these categories, to exceed their boundaries. Nor are we in the arena of philosophy, since the register is one of conduct rather than of reflection and analysis. We find ourselves visibly in a space that everything today would lead us to call “spiritual,” using a term that reappears slowly and timidly, as a bruised survivor of spiritualist effusions and masquerades. In these very pages I have used this word several times. But it nonetheless remains difficult, it continues to weigh us down, because we still hear there the tone of its idealist or mystical unction.
What threatens the lexicon of spirit is an overdetermination based on “breath” [souffle], despite what it tells us about respiration—rhythm, inspiration, expiration—we fear that the word might still be attached to the image of a sort of magical breath [haleine], with which it might inflate anew the values of a pneumaticism (which does not mean that I take back what I said earlier about the “holy spirit”). Thinking about breath alone leads toward immediate, inarticulate, and, as it were, inaudible exhalation. But in “adoration” the voice chimes. Which is to say, speech or song do, and in them, before or beyond signification, sense as call, address, and therefore also as relation. The relation of a “salut!”
For there is relation, there is only that. Its terms matter fairly little—whether they be based on content or subjects of knowledge or representation, whether they be “men” or other beings—and only the relation that is divided/shared, in both senses of the word partage, between all the world’s existents, matters. An infinite relation that does not relate anything—no senses caught in a net—and that opens everything and everyone. An infinite relation that only finitude knows.
Adoration is stretched out toward things and by them. Stretched out [tendue] without intention. Phenomenological intentionality toward the world is replaced by—or joined to, it comes down to the same thing—an extension toward the outside. Or rather: an extension of the inside, its dilatation, sometimes to the point of exasperation and rupture. To that of death. But also to that of the excess of life, to excessive life.
Opening, expansion, dis-enclosure: the world dis-enclosed, unmade [défait], delivered, un-worlded.
This is the deployment and (perhaps) the leading astray of the as if. Relation to an inexistent, mimesis without model.
This is a relation to an inexistent because there is nothing to be reached: not that it is the “void” or an infinite flight, but simply that what is involved, what is “adored,” is not “something,” is not a “being” [être] (or a “being” [étant]). Adoration goes toward the faraway as such, toward a distancing that is not distance from an object, from a goal, but the distancing that adoration itself creates, that it opens. I do not adore “someone” or some “work.” But I adore, and thus a distancing that is properly the expansion of adoration opens up. It does not put at a distance “the” person or “the” thing adored: it carries them off into this distancing that distances us infinitely from one another and that also distances everyone from himself.
Distance here does not mean a distance between two points (subjects or objects). Its value is as an opening or a distention that places things beyond reach. That removes the possibility of designating points, subjects, objects, or distances. Distancing simply distances those who are close, those who are the closest, and thus opens the incommensurable.
In truth, adoration is addressed to distancing, it turns toward the faraway, because this faraway renders all proximity possible.
But this faraway remains at a distance, leaves us to our fragility. There is something of the inexorable, and adoration cannot change into exoration. It is no accident that the God of the monotheisms is called “merciful”: one expects him to be exorable to our imploring. But adoration does not ask for that. It carries imploring within it, or rather, deploration: we are pitiful—but adoration recognizes that this state of misery is not a degeneration. Instead it is the condition of being abandoned in a fortuitous world. This abandonment hides within it both weakness and strength, finitude and infinitude intertwined. Thus the “salut!” is exchanged without any call to be saved—and, in being exchanged, it also presents what keeps us “virtuous”: not renouncing our impetus, our desire, without thinking that we can assuage them, either. Accepting that they always open us anew.
Dear Hugo,23
So to have faith is to believe in something lying beyond death.
I can go along with this. One can only have faith in what exceeds all possibilities of grasping by reason and by whatever sense it might be.
Above all, I would like to recall that faith is not belief. Not in its essence, at least, as this difference turns out to be complicated. Belief is a weak faith, a sort of supposition, a projection to which one adheres not by proof but because one needs to put up a show of knowledge where none can be found. Faith is trust, and trust in the strongest sense, which is to say, a trust that cannot ultimately be explained or justified. A trust that is justified is assured [assurée], guaranteed: it is not really “trust.” And yet all trust is somehow justified, because otherwise there would be no reason to trust one thing rather than another: but the ultimate perspective of this logic remains that of an absence of reason(s) . . .
Faith is holding to an assurance about which nothing is sure, which can be neither perceived nor comprehended. Belief is an assurance that somehow gives itself a perception or quasi-perception and quasi-comprehension of the “reason” for my assurance. Belief therefore comes down to a representation, even if it is indistinct, hazy, badly determined. Faith, strictly speaking, does not rely on any representation at all.
Death is that whereof there is no possible representation. In it the “subject of representation” disappears: in it, “I” disappear. In it, the other who disappears withdraws beyond any way in which I might be able to reach “him,” that is, the “I” that he was when alive. The dead person [le mort] can indeed be represented—in memories, via the presence of a corpse: but in both cases, only representation is before me and not the “I” of the other.24
In Noli me tangere,25 since that’s where your letter begins, I tried to say two things, which in truth the book does not sufficiently distinguish from one another.
The first: in insisting on the meaning of anastasis, which comes from Hebrew, and on the “raising” of the body, I wanted to set up an opposition to resurrection as rebirth, regeneration, a new beginning to life, which is to say, to the representation of a simple beginning anew in “another life.” For this “other life,” represented in this way, is only the projection of this life, the one that has been lived by the dead person, or, in my own case, that I am now living. Broadly, this projection is hallucination (it goes in the direction of the phantom, the apparition, etc.). In opposition to this, I wanted to index resurrection as a tipping up [basculement] of sense: the horizontal of the dead body tips up to the vertical. The dead person is not living once more, but the sense of his life—namely, his sense, the sense of being “I” swerves: instead of continuing to “go toward,” it stops, rises up, becoming at once the ultimate end and completed representation of this “sense of being me.” In such a representation, which is at the same time a closure, and a closure lacking the possibility of being legitimized as an “accomplishment” (even when one can say that this was a rich life, “lived to the full,” etc.), the following presents itself: that the sense of “being me” itself has no sense. That it does not undergo any assumption or raising up as part of a sense that would be global, divine, and so on, but that it makes sense or is sense in just this way: not by being infused with a grand cosmic signification, but by being kept at a distance, separated, within the crisp contours of its completed “life.”
This is what Heidegger names the “possibility of impossibility” and the “highest possibility” of existence. But as Derrida shows, this possibility undermines itself as a possibility; it cannot even be grasped as “possible,” let alone appropriated as the “highest possibility,” in the way that Heidegger’s discourse renders it completely appropriable. There is an expropriation by way of principle, which can be stated simply: I remain without access to my own death, just as I have no access to that of the other insofar as he is an “I” (i.e., insofar as he is, strictly speaking, an other to me). Purely and simply, without access. In other words, “the sense of ‘being has no sense itself’” is an untenable proposition because it annuls the sense of “sense.”
Nonetheless, I persist in saying that in “comprehending” sense in this way—as relation to or dispatching toward an annulment of “sense”—we can touch on something, without for all that “acceding,” and therefore without “comprehending,” either. Holding oneself in this relation without comprehension, without conclusion, without representation, deprived of sense, therefore also within this relation to “I” (whether my own or another’s), insofar as it is deprived of sense or is an eclipse of itself, is all that we can name “faith” insofar as it supposes the annulment of all kinds of knowledge and representation.
This was what the tipping up to the vertical axis (which was followed in Noli me tangere by the Ascension, by departure without return) meant, above all.
But I also know that “this” is entirely dependent on the discourse of which it is a part, which articulates it. And that this discourse is nothing next to death, to the pain, even the horror, of death (once again, my own or that of others). This remains a thought in the irresistibly “abstract” or immaterial sense of the word. I am not looking for any path of consolation that would reintroduce representations, assurances of a return to life, and so on, but for a point where thought—which I am convinced is material, palpable, concrete—and the experience of fright, anguish, and dereliction before death, whether mine or that of others, might come into contact.
A contact point: here we come back to “do not touch me.” I ought to have realized this and developed this further. But it was underlying, half-conscious . . .
In any case, the second intention or field of resonance of what I was attempting is: that the same thought—let us say, that of the impossible or of sense eclipsed—is also, can only also be thought as palpable, sentiment, sensation itself. It brings with it a sort of perception, which, however, is not the hallucinatory perception of the phantom—since hallucination is the end of thought. This perception is not of death or of the dead person. As soon as I name the dead person—whether me or another—he is removed from the abstraction of death [“la” mort] (of “this unreality,” to speak like Hegel). I begin to grant him another life: not another life in another world, but the other of life in the world of the living, and therefore still a life. The life of the dead—finally, what a good number of beliefs have set up and staged in all sorts of cultures. (And doubtless here the limits, crossings, and contacts between cultures are also at issue).
Now, we like to give life to the dead, to think that they are present, as we like to think that we could be present beyond our own death. (It isn’t the same thing, but for the moment let us keep them together.) But this is not simply to make “them” live, this is not simply a representation. Or rather, this touches on a region that I am unable to name, that seems to me to be suspended between representation, thought, sentiment, and sensation. For this life of the dead is at the same time their non-life, the pure ceasing of their being as “I,” and the life whose imprint is in us and continues living there with a life that cannot be reduced to representation. This life is what I know and feel of the presence, allure, and voice of a dead person and is a true trace of him, a living trace incorporated in me. And this is why it is so hard to feel this presence and its complete absence at the same time.
Here I am no longer within faith as I have defined it. Not that I am in belief as weak knowledge. Or rather: I am between pure thought and representation. I am in a sensibility that, in the final analysis, is perhaps neither strictly speaking mine nor that of the dead person (who feels nothing any longer) but is the sensibility of our meeting, of what we lived through together (which can be stretched to more than one meeting, to more than one “whole,” but with all the differences in intensity and intimacy of these encounters).
Perhaps one should not think death without also thinking the dead, or perhaps one should not submit the dead entirely to death. Just as—and this “just as” is not only analogical, it is real—they are well and truly in the world, in molecules or in atoms caught up in different combinations, different crystallizations; they are also in the community, if I dare to put this word forward. I mean the community that shares this small part of being that is the contingency of the world. This community is nothing other, if you will, than what Freud names the id, which is ultimately the common part of the unconscious. Under this name or another, or without any name, what is at stake is what links us together, indeed, not only us humans but the totality of beings—the animal within us, and even the vegetable, the mineral . . .
Everything is played out here around individuation: death is individual; it is not equal to the totality of being [l’étant] (this is indeed Spinoza, and the question is perhaps that of finding a new Spinozism . . . ). But the dead person, for his part, is neither an individual nor a simple pulverization of molecules via the totality of being [l’étant]. The living individual is never simply the individual stricto sensu, closed off in his independence. He is also—“I” am, in each moment—made up of all the relations of which I am a part, from my sensations to my thoughts, passing through my friendships, my readings, and so on, my entire imaginary and all that makes “sense.” Can we think that the dead person lives on with such a life, yet without representing the seat of an “I” and its relation to self?
To think this is to be concerned with representation, therefore with belief, and even with imagination—with fantasy, if you will, with the phantasm—but at the same time it proceeds from both thought and the experience of life. In any case, thought must not refuse to approach what, being only illusion with regard to all that we can posit about the real, nonetheless says something true: at least this, that the plurality of relation does not die.
For relation is at stake here. My mother once told me, by way of ending a conversation on resurrection several years after the death of my father: “Allow me to think that there is a place where I shall find him again.” She was right, since she was not implying that this place was a place within the space of the world or even in a beyond-space extrapolated from that of the world. A completely different place, but a place. (Perhaps the one Jacques indicated by saying “I love you and I am smiling at you from wherever I might be”—which implied “wherever” and perhaps “nowhere” and yet an “I might be”.26) A place and a being as a place and a being of relation, of encounter or a happy encounter.
Of course, the dead are definitively, irreversibly, and unbearably absent, and more than absent: disappeared, abolished. Of course, no work of mourning ever reduces this abolition. Yet if we do not sink into melancholy, which is to die in our turn in the midst of life—becoming one of the living dead but not rejoining the life of the dead person for all that, instead petrifying our relation to him—we live, we survive “our dead” (as one says), and this cannot be reduced to an egotistical instinct. It is the continuation of relation, and it can be the awaiting and the approach of a happy encounter in an unheard-of place and according to an unknown mode of being.
Insofar as I think it is important to keep faith apart from belief, I think one can say that. It does not proceed from an illusion or from an assurance in the complete absence of any representation. And what passes between the two regimes is concerned with affect, not with the concept. And affect is relation, one could say.
Now you are going to ask me: What about my own death? You will perhaps reproach me for placing all the emphasis on the side of the other’s death. It’s true. But I have done so because, ultimately, it seems that my death can only be envisaged in the terms whereby I envisage that of others. At the same time it is true, with Heidegger, that in my death “I” disappear in such a way that it is not even “mine,” and it is true to insist, as Blanchot did, on the absolute inappropriability of my death and on the unending churning of the dying [le mourir] whereby I am constantly taking leave of myself or making sense absent, and absolutely so. But at the same time, and precisely apropos of Blanchot (one could also come back to Proust, to the death of Bergotte), if some people write—and others make films, compose, paint, and so on—it is in order to give form, always anew, to this: that we communicate this dying to one another. Which is to say, that we share the sense of the absence of sense and the relation to what has neither reason, nor end, nor assurance, meaning ultimately that we are all within faith and that we all communicate in it, without knowing it or wanting it.
(Here I am leaving aside how the works of those who write, compose, etc. communicate with those who do nothing of the sort and even with those who remain without relation to these “works.” That is another matter, but one must emphasize that there is communication, and that there is communication always of the same relation to the without-reason-without-end, and therefore to death. The same relation of dying. Of course, one can find all that one can imagine attempting to deny or suppress this, to cover it up: all beliefs, superstitions, and enterprises of autosuggestion. But finally, those who truly hallucinate are rare; the majority know without knowing the non-knowledge that makes up relation. Without which there would be no civilization, literature, music, etc.).
On the topic of my death, I can only replay the same counterpoint between faith and belief—yes, the same fugue, whose theme is precisely a flight that is infinite and without conclusion. This flight at once allows my thinking to be held in an affirmation of the eclipse of the “subject of sense” that “I” am, and allows my sensibility to feel the continuation of relation, of relations—the “awaiting one another” that Jacques talks about. To think, therefore, with a dreamy or naïve thought, but one that is also poetic—and this word should take on here all the power of which it is capable—the unheard-of place where my unheard-of being, which will no longer be “mine,” will be back among “its own” [retrouvera “les siens”].
Ultimately, to think these things without entering into the embarrassment of a strange interweaving of reason and naïveté, or rather, without placing faith under the control of belief, one would have to say that “I” is not—that I am not—the only relation to me, punctual and separated (absolute in the strict sense), but that I am the totality of relations according to which only I can relate to myself, beginning, of course, with language (beginning, yet without establishing any order in stringing together language and gaze, gesture, and touch, all the feeling of the other beings, the other “I’s,” and the others who are not “I’s” or do not bear witness to being so). This would be nothing more than to probe more seriously, I could almost say more gravely, than we normally do into all the thinking of the distance from self in the relation to self: the most pregnant being Jacques’s, since différance responds to nothing other than this—with which one can also associate Deleuze and his “becoming-x” (animal, woman, imperceptible). These ways of thinking originated in Hegel on self-consciousness and alienation, whom Nietzsche follows with the illusion of the “subject,” and doubtless Spinoza provides another model, anterior to subjectivity, in which “God,” that is to say, the “totality of beings” [totalité de l’étant], consists precisely in “conceiving things under the aspect of eternity”:27 there, the relation to self is not indexed to identity, but to the pleasure or joy of knowledge according to an “aspect of eternity,” a knowledge that is therefore also that of our own eternity and, indissociably, of our community with other men and with the rest of the world.
If Spinoza can say that “we feel and know from experience that we are eternal,” that is because this experience is that of our relation, which is “to itself” only insofar as it is to the entirety of the rest of beings [l’étant] and thus to the incommensurable (which Spinoza names “God”), from which we can receive joy but which we cannot know. From this, one understands that “joy” here is not very different from “faith” as I think it should be understood. Or from what Spinoza names “intellectual love.”
“Intellectual love,” undoubtedly this cuts to the quick (if I dare say so) of the problem: How and at what point can we join together “love” and “intellect”? In contemporary terms, I would say: How, at what point, can we understand that the différance of identity is indeed a drive to and desire for the other (of an other, of all alterity)? If we are able to respond, then we are also able to reduce—a little . . .—the fracture between the possible thought of our eternity—or immortality—and the impossible sensation or affect of it. We would then also know how to surmount the opposition between faith and knowledge, which is to say, between faith and belief.
But we are incapable of doing this, which is why, when religious fervor no longer carries us along (supposing that it was ever capable of what is involved), all the thinking of which we are capable cannot remove anything, not a single atom, from the mourning for oneself and thus from the fear or terror in which we cannot avoid existing. I would not want what I have said to seem to be looking for a new form of consolation. But perhaps we need to go beyond consolation/desolation, in the same way that the sentiment or the sense of irreparable loss—the mourning that no work can resolve—lies beyond the couple melancholy/forgetting. For the sense of the irreparable can be joined to an affirmation of life that does not offer any reparation but that, in living, also continues to live with the dead and perhaps, in certain cases, for certain temperaments—or indeed secretly for everyone? . . .—to go toward them both now, in life, and later, in dying in our turn.
All of this, I know and I say it again, is untenable for both thinking and sensibility. An impossibility for one and an infinite sorrow for the other. But we conduct [tenons] ourselves, the immense majority of mankind conducts itself in this untenable situation.28 This is not simply done by instinct, or in a stupor, or in superstitious illusion. The humanity of mankind merits further consideration. This is why I think that—here again, between faith and belief—we all share, in mourning others and ourselves, a conduct that exceeds knowledge, wisdom, and consciousness too.
A conduct that exceeds thinking, just as does another, symmetrical phenomenon, that of birth—these are the two sides of our fortuitousness—but whose excess precisely engages thought. Not only does our birth-death make us think, give us matter to think, but it truly opens thinking insofar as the latter is relation to the incommensurable, insofar as language constantly names the unnamable. In all its appearances, whether intellectual or artistic, practical or affective, thinking is sensibility to the unnamable: to what exceeds it and makes it possible. The unnamable is as terrible as it is dazzling, and its justice smacks of injustice. But it is definitively our drive—life-and death-drive, drive of desire and of pleasure. Drive of suffering and of jouissance. Thinking, language, affect: a thrusting that overflows itself. Sense, sensation, sentiment.
Between faith and belief, or more precisely, in the hollowing out of a triangle formed between faith, belief, and knowledge; in this hollowing out is suspended, undecided, trembling, a category that is not a true category, yet a real and consistent mode of feeling nonetheless: we should call it “belief without belief” or Freud’s “disowning” (the translation of Verleugnung), but a disowning intertwined with an “as if.” I know full well that there is no other world, but I believe, I want to believe, I allow the sketch of something possible, or rather not impossible, to form, of an unheard-of way of making sense, or not even sense but simply a way of conducting oneself and of caring for [de se tenir et de tenir à]—nothing, nothing but this desire or this nothing as this very desire to believe. Not an unhappy belief reduced to a pious wishing for itself, but the force of an impetus that does not take itself to be an imitation of knowledge but that opens within the impossible the possibility of relating to it. After all, is this not how we read literature and how it gives itself to be read? We believe in a tale [récit] that we know to be unreal and unbelievable. Thus we respond to the invitation of fiction, which proposes that we confect [fictionner], shape, figure (all the same concept) the unfigurable truth. But in fiction, truth is not figured as if by an impudent allegory: it is figured insofar as it is unfigurable. The infinite receives its finition, it opens within the finite.
And if the Adoration goes away, rings, his promise rings: “Away with these superstitions, these ancient bodies, these households and these ages. It is this epoch which has foundered!”
He will not go away, he will not redescend from a heaven, he will not accomplish the redemption of women’s rages and of men’s gaieties and all of this sin: for it is done, because of his being, and being loved.”29