Today’s theme will be monotheism. Why? I imagine that the motives are clear: the names of God, utterable or not, are invoked everywhere—Allah akhbar! In God we trust! Yahweh Sabaoth! Dieu et mon droit!—like emblazoned shields in the furious assault for domination. This domination does not even hide its stakes behind religious pretexts, since it now seems clear that the security and the dignity of existence would have an interest in reference to religion, and that one god would be inseparable from the freedom of comfort just as another is from the cry of poverty, while a third would provide the guarantee of a state after having promised a territory.

The wars of old were the deeds of princes. Each one brandished his religious banner, but it happened at some distance from the people. I would even exaggerate and say: the parishes or the common people were not directly affected. Today, the technical and economic forces struggling for global mastery or servitude are reinforced by religious or spiritual forces in the sense that these words henceforth signify issues that no longer bear upon “nations,” “classes,” or “peoples”: life lived in spite of its harshness, the recognition of the self in spite of its uncertainty, in short, a condition not of “sense” but of a sustained decision to exist.

It was in fact this new phenomenon (or what seemed like a new phenomenon) that led Michel Foucault, twenty-three years ago, to salute the “will to renew the whole of one’s existence,” which he claimed had swept through the Iranian people when they rose up against their former regime. We must not be too quick to laugh at him; rather, we should closely reread his statements of this period. This does not mean, however, that he was able to think through what was being played out there in its implication for monotheism. On the contrary, the rather conventional Marxism that he relied on undoubtedly limited his perspectives.

Whatever we make of this episode, today we can no longer avoid examining this supposedly religious reference. Indeed, the more important it becomes, the less we know what we are saying when we speak of religion, monotheism, or God, whether it is said in fits of exaltation or of denunciation.

Two questions arise: (1) How can we analyze monotheism today? (2) How do we understand and judge the mobilizations of which it is the object—or the subject?

I will merely lay out a few indications.

First of all, and fundamentally: Monotheism in the strictly Western sense is not the religion of a single god. “Western” here means what the Qur’an designates inclusively as “the people of the Book,” Jews and Christians, together with Muslims, the spiritual stock of Abraham (still according to the Qur’an). It is not the religion of a single god as if it were a pantheon of gods reduced to a single entity. On the contrary, uniqueness eliminates every pantheon, as it does pantheism, and finally, strictly speaking, any theism. There is no more place for a particular being bearing the name “god,” present, in its own proper mode, somewhere in this world or in another. With uniqueness, god loses his distinction as Being [être] or as a being [étant]. This god is not another god—he is neither other nor, therefore, the same in relation to other gods. He is, inasmuch as he is, the one who is not present. Nor is he absent (far away, elsewhere). He responds or corresponds, if I can put it this way, to the departure of all gods. The departure of the gods—the end of a world of agrarian and sacrificial cults, by all and for all—opened up a world (that of the cities, of commerce, of the alphabet) where the multiplicity of singulars involves the question of what Ibn ’Arabi calls “the one within the one.” Man is henceforth alone, that is to say, strictly speaking, atheist, or godless. The ensemble of principles, both theistic and atheistic, is dismissed, for the sake of an anarchic position (in Schürmann’s sense) of the singular existent. We might call this absentheism.

It is man abandoned to himself, without any means of rescue, without even any recourse to mourning a tragic destiny. Alone and lonely together, human beings are left to a condition stranger than fate or assurance: to a staggering enigma. If there is something divine in this, it is as the sign of this enigma. A god infinitely withdrawn, or even dispersed, the name of God written under erasure.

The second question has to do with the various mobilizations of monotheism. The response is necessarily double.

On the one hand, monotheism, born out of the desertion of the gods, hastens to remake the religious at the gates of the desert. Yet it is different, for it posits itself as truth and not, like the others, as assistance or as threat. Truth entails universality and totality: hence the expansionist and colonizing attitudes at the very moment when a distinction is drawn between the political and the religious. This is a new principle for war.

But on the other hand, the same postulation contradicts the anarchism of the totality of singular beings, and finally denies absen-theism for the sake of a hoax that holds up as “salvation” the exposure to abandonment that ought to be assumed as our own. Monotheism is the religion par excellence whose exclusion is internal to itself.

My conclusion will be brief: what remains for us is not to destroy monotheism (it does so on its own, by tearing itself apart), but to deconstruct it. That is to say, to extract from it, in spite of itself, what it conceals through ignorance, repression, or denial. We must retrace and furrow out the erasure of the divine name. We must push forward with the irreversible alteration of this name.

27 December 2002