Atheism and Monotheism

Monotheism is an atheism.

—Schelling

1

Not only is atheism an invention specific to the West, but it must also be considered the element in which the West invented itself as such. What we call “Greece” may well be traversed by, or mixed into, a considerable number of religious attitudes; it nonetheless remains true that, before all else, what distinguishes or even constitutes the “Greek” is a space of living and thinking that divine presence (barring that of the gods of the polis or those subject to speculation, who are precisely no longer presences) neither shapes nor marks out [balise]. The Greeks, here, are above all the descendants of Xenophanes, who, well before Plato, scoffed at the anthropomorphism of the gods and thus found himself already caught up in the invention of atheism. (In the meantime, to be sure, the gods of the mysteries pursued their underground fate—another story, which I will leave aside here but which will also come into close relation with monotheism [s’aboucher avec le monothéisme].)

This invention of atheism responds to a change in the general paradigm. In the place of a world order given and received in a destinal mode [sur un mode destinal] (whether we emphasize the sense of assignation or that of orientation in this term) is substituted a regime in which the world is constructed starting from a questioning concerning its principle or principles.1 That one starts to speak of “nature” in the sense of a system of elements, of principles and consequences, means that the world can no longer be divided among presences of qualities and diverse statuses (such as mortals, immortals, low, high, impure, or pure qualities). Instead, it must be divided between the totality of the given and the order of the conditions of what can no longer be its mere reception, but must, rather, on the basis of the given, provide its reason in turn. This reason may well be called “divine”; its divinity nevertheless derives solely from the excellence of its axiological position and not from an intrinsic difference [écart] in its nature. Contrariwise, this nature shows itself by right as accessible to mortals, even if only after their death (or again, contrariwise and preferably, insofar as their death became the royal road to this access). When Plato writes ho theos, as he sometimes does, this designation of the “god,” in the singular and lacking a proper name, makes its translation almost impossible for us, since we have to choose between abandoning the substantive and speaking of the “divine,” or keeping it and speaking of a “god” as a unique person, of which Plato has no idea—a fitting way to put it, in every sense of the word idea.

In Plato’s theos, we can say that the gods disappear (even if Plato himself can name them in the plural just a few lines after his singular theos). This is to say that the paradigm of the given, structured, and animate universe—the same one that will be called a mythology, so that a physiology and a cosmology may be substituted for it—has ceased to function. Its founding representations and stories are no longer recognized as flexible modelings of the world, but only as fictions. Gods are departing into their myths.

Yet if these fictions evince their value only thanks to their various figures, attributes, and scenarios, that is, thanks to the spectacular troop of divine characters enriched with their properties, genealogies, avatars, fury, and desires, then we can also say that the unique thos, deprived of appearance [figure] and name, really represents an invention, even the invention, of “god” in general. There is neither “the god” nor “the divine,” nor even perhaps “the gods”: these do not come first or, again, they do not quite exist so long as there are the people or the species of immortal figures. We find the mortals’ immortal partners, but not the ontological distance for which the word god will henceforth provide the measure. We must therefore suppose that the invention of “atheism” is contemporaneous and correlative with the invention of “theism.” Both terms, in effect, have their unity in the principial paradigm or premise [paradigme principiel]. Never did a god—where his or her name was Uranus, Isis, or Baal—hold the position or essence of a principle.

The gods acted, spoke, or watched from death’s other shore. They did not convey mortals to that shore, or if they did so, they invariably maintained, at the same time, the river that flowed between the shores. They maintained it gaping and threatening: just as it was when it flowed between Diana and Actæon, for example; just as it would continue to flow between men and their dead shadows.

On the contrary, the premise or premises (but the singular is necessary and required here in principle) has no other function than to bridge the gap between the shores. Such is the logical function that is substituted for the mythical fiction: the dual positing of a radical alterity (god and man are no longer together in the world) and of a relation from the same to the other (man is called toward god).

2

It is indispensable that we provide ourselves with these initial givens if we do not want to misunderstand the vis-à-vis of “theism” and “atheism,” which is always more or less supposed. Assuredly, this vis-à-vis exists inso-far as one term is the negation of the other. But we should not overlook to what degree this negation retains the essence of what it negates. Atheism states the principle of the negation of the divine principle, that is, of the principle represented in the configuration of an entity [existant] that is distinct from the entire world of entities, and for which it would hold the first cause and the final end. It thus poses, in principle, either that the cause and the end belong to another, immanent order, or that these concepts must not be brought into play.

By the first hypothesis, immanence (whether we call it matter or life, history, society, or art), displaces nothing at all in the ideal statuses of cause and end. Further still, the hypothesis changes nothing about their practical statuses, because their principles have not the slightest reason not to become as restrictive, even as coercive, as those of some “divine will” or some “order of salvation.” The nineteenth- and twentieth-century West experienced those coercive possibilities to a point not hard to qualify as crucial. Henceforth, we know that atheism is a disaster in that sense. (If there were any need to be more precise, I would point out in passing that not all philosophies of “immanence” [pensées d’une “immanence”] place themselves under the atheist paradigm that I just evoked. Some philosophies of “immanence” foil the opposition “immanence”-“transcendence,” but this is not the place to discuss that.)

In a way that is paradoxical and worse than contrastive and discordant, we now know both that atheism is the only possible ethos, the only dignity of the subject (if I give this word the value of praxis rather than that of reflexivity), and that this same atheism leaves destitute or threatening the order of the in-common, the order of “culture,” of the “together.” It is a matter of nothing less here, ultimately (if there is an ultimately), than the unappeased demand that was called “communism.” But I will not tarry with that. The in-common finds itself orphaned of all religion, whether religious or civil. And, as a conjunction of atheism and individualism, it is even orphaned, consequently and obviously, in regard to capitalism—which ought to make us reflect.

As regards the second hypothesis—the disqualification of causes and ends—it is no doubt clear enough that a certain state of mind [état de la pensée], quite common today, asks no better than to welcome this hypothesis. We sense that “cause” and “end” should not, or no longer, be concepts acceptable outside of determinate technical spheres within which they carry the evidence of axioms. We sense this all the more in considering, not so much the technical systems identified, but the world regime that we could call “technology” (or again, “capital”). And it becomes clear that this regime never ceases dissolving, through its own unfolding, every possibility of finding, imputing, or inventing causes or ends for it. That is, unless we identify this regime more or less with phusis itself, insofar as techn comes, after all, from phusis, before redeploying it for its own purposes. But in doing this we would only end up with a tautological teleology of the world, without ever setting forth, for all that, the new mythology that this tautology should require …

We should thus be capable of a strictly anetiological (acausal) and ateleological thinking. It would be easy to show how much this demand has preoccupied philosophy since the beginning of the contemporary world. All things considered, Hegel—who passes for the model thinker of fulfillment processes—also asks to be understood (or again, Schelling, before and with him) as the first to think beyond all teleology. However, being capable of discerning this requirement of interpretation—which bears witness to our own expectations and experiences ever since the suspension of what is called “Hegelian history”—does not make us the more capable of anetiological and ateleological thinking. That is to say, in a word, that we are not now more capable of atheistic thinking—the thinking that we know we desire. This is because for us, up to now, such an orientation of thinking—thinking without end, finitude without end, in sum, the infinite—remains privative, subtractive, and, in sum, defective—in much the way that the main tone of every species of atheism also remains obstinately and deafly defective, even if against its own will. (We must, no doubt, hasten to add that this does not authorize any legitimation of the positive assurance of theism: that would only be to set back-to-back the two faces of the Western Janus.) Blanchot understood this perfectly.

3

The day will perhaps come, and perhaps it is not even so far away, when we shall characterize all contemporary thinking as a slow and heavy gravitational movement around the black sun of atheism. With the collapse of that premise—to which all of classical onto-theology bears witness, up to its Kantian dethronement and in its Nietzschean funeral ceremonies—there has followed no new understanding, no unforeseen grasp (revolutionary? creative? emancipatory? salvific?—how would we want to designate this?) of this collapse and of the void that has resulted from it, no new apprehension, namely, one that would be produced through prisms of thought other than those that words like collapse or void call so banally to mind.

I do not mean that contemporary thought, in all that in it is most alive, has not engaged in disorganizing and delegitimizing those prisms. In fact, it does nothing else. Nevertheless, atheism continues—ultimately, in a very paradoxical way—to close the horizon. Or again, perhaps it is more accurate to say that it continues to form a horizon, precisely where it ought to be a question of something else. For horizons and principles are mutually complicit [ont partie liée].

The horizon of a subtraction, of a retreat, an absence, or even the horizon of what I once called “absentheism,” to oppose it to atheism, continues to form a horizon. That is to say, it forms a limit, a dead end, and an end of the world. That horizon surrounds our thinking all the more in that the world, in effect, everywhere touches its confines, and this in a physical mode as well as in a metaphysical one. It can no longer be a matter of getting out of the world, but that is not a reason to consider the world a horizon. In other words, finiteness does not limit infinity; on the contrary, finiteness should give it its expansion and its truth. That is what is at stake, and there are no other stakes today. (In a striking sense, physics appears to say something analogous today when it speaks of a finite universe in expansion, but I will not embark upon an analogy that is perhaps merely formal.)

Mutatis mutandis, it is really a matter of nothing other than the nihilism that Nietzsche understood. Atheism is nihilism, and if nihilism indicates at the same time that it is through nihilism, on the basis of it, and almost as if in nihilism that any question of “getting out” (if this term is appropriate) can arise, then it has nevertheless not surpassed up to now its own pointing toward something else, except to point toward a repetition of its own nihil. Assuredly, this is a repetition that is often powerful, courageous, functional, and inventive—this repetition that is played out around the bounds [repères] of the “void,” the “absence,” the “disaster,” the “without-end,” the “aporia,” or even, in a more ascetic way, around a more or less pronounced renunciation of something other than combinations of “forms of life” and the differentiated truth regimes (with perspectives, at times, more or less akin to Kant’s “regulation”).

It is always a matter, willy-nilly, of “introducing a new sense, knowing that this introduction is itself without sense,” as Nietzsche wrote more or less, expressing a paradox whose structure contains all the force of an injunction and all the difficulty, even the anxiety, of our situation. But how to lift this aporia, when forcing a sense beyond senses (senseless? an absent sense? a hyperbolic or hypertrophied sense?) has given us nothing less than exterminating horror, in so many forms—combined with humanistic impotence, it too in so many forms?

This last word thrusts us anew toward the black core of our vertigo. Humanism was atheism. It was its truth, its breadth, its expression, and its function. Because it turned the essence of god into the essence of man, it merely imprinted on the premise a pivoting or rotation on itself (a revolution?). Thus, on the one hand, it modified nothing in the onto-(a)-theological construction, nor could it situate, on the other hand, its own form as principle in a place worthy of it: “humanism does not think high enough the humanitas of man,” wrote Heidegger.

What does this so-called “height” mean? Above all, what does it mean if we consider the fact that Heidegger wrote this sentence after passing through his well-known blindness to the “grandeur” of what the word national-socialism now stigmatizes? Must we speak in terms of elevation, altitude, or size? That is not certain. But in what terms then? Pascal wrote that “man infinitely passes [passe] man.” What could this “passing” mean? Surpassing [dépasser]? Overcoming [surmonter]? Exceeding? Transporting? Transfiguring? Divinizing? Naturalizing? Technicizing? Exposing to the abyss? Annihilating? And still further: Dehumanizing? Inhumanizing? Overhumanizing? As we can see, over some two centuries, we have run through the whole gallery of these figures, rather like the Hegelian Spirit, and we are exhausted, nauseated by this, our Absolute Knowledge from which flows back to us (unlike the knowledge of Spirit) no “infinity” other than that of an infamy, according to which the “surpassing” of man takes the shape of an inexorable domination of humans by a total process that is not even their history anymore, but a mechanism indifferent to their fates and wholly engaged in its own exponential and exponentially tautological development.

This sadness sums up atheism. Even the possibility of the tragic, or the tragic possibility—which may have been that of the Greeks finding themselves deprived, forsaken, or cursed by the gods—is refused us. This sadness retains nothing of the strange, tragic joy to which Nietzsche or the young Benjamin were still witness. This also means, more clearly than ever, that the exit from capitalism—here again, it is a matter of an “exit” (and yet in what valence of this word?)—can only be envisaged as the exit from nihilism. And this, in two ways that share a solidarity. On the one hand, the formal structure of the “exit” is the same (it is an exit from within, as Marx and Nietzsche understood). On the other hand, it turns on the same stake: the one I am designating here, for the time being, as the necessity of an effective modification of the tautology (or, indeed, the consequent necessity of a heterology).

4

If I am undertaking, at present, a meditation on monotheism, it is not to seek in it some way out, some remedy or salvation. “Salvation” represents, on the contrary, the confirmation of the world of nihilism by the necessity of redemption that it asserts. In that sense, monotheism will have represented nothing other than the theological confirmation of atheism: the reduction of the divine to the premise in a logic of dependence on the world. Correlatively, the tautology of the world is simply displaced there into the tautology of God: in effect, the one god is nothing other than the repetition of his immutable being. He does not have any history or form, and it is no accident that, in a decisive moment of his many redefinitions, he was designated and thought as the logos present n arch [“in the beginning”].

In reality, this moment responds to the conjunction of Greek atheism and Jewish monotheism in the elaboration of what, under the name of Christianity, constituted the major configuration of onto-(a)-theology (played out differently in Islam, which would obviously require, in order to be precise, supplementary consideration).

Through the religions of the Book (Judaism, Christianity, Manicheism, Islam), a particularly complex, even tortuous history unfolded. Its driving element or organizing core stands precisely at the point of conjunction of Joyce’s greekjew/jewgreek—but only insofar as this point forms, at the same time, a point of disjunction and insofar as that intimate disjunction at the heart of atheism itself still demands to be truly experienced and put to the test.

On the one hand, the conjunction conjoins, in effect, two formations of atheism. Jewish monotheism, understood in its unfolding and its spread throughout the Greek world, opens into Christian thought (which we could rightly call Stoic-Christian). It prepares nothing other than the simultaneous evaporation of all divine presences and powers, and the designation of a principle that no longer has as “divine” anything but the name—a name dispossessed of all personality, and even the ability to be uttered [prononçabilité].

Considered from this angle, the whole history of “God”—the “God” of the West—unfolds nothing less than the trial or process [procès] of atheism itself, in its most rigorous proceedings [progression]. To take note of a few indications, this passes through the idea of a “proof” of his existence (which supposes that one existence at least could be deduced a priori, on the basis of which all existence will be deduced, and the supposed proof falls back on an ontological tautology), or again through Spinoza’s deus sive natura (which, notwithstanding, leaves entirely open the question of what the unity of this deus consists in, since it exists only in the infinity of its modes). Or, finally, we can see that the process passes through Feuerbach’s God, of whom man need only leave aside the imaginary substance in order to reappropriate its predicates. To all this we could add a considerable number of traits, such as Descartes’ idea of the perfect being, or the logically necessitated freedom through which Leibniz’s God creates the best of all possible worlds. However that may be, we shall end up with this result: God denotes the premise or principle of a presupposed totality, founded in unity and in necessity.

In all of this, God names only the tautology of the unitotality thereby presupposed. In Heideggerian terms, God names the consistency of being, understood as principial, founding, and essential. God represents, in the most patent way, being at and as the ground of beings: ens summum, verum, bonum. We should therefore not be surprised that Heidegger sees in Christianity (to say nothing of its two fellow religions [co-religionnaires]) little more than an epiphenomenon lacking any particular specificity with regard to the destinal and epochal history of being (where “being” itself is understood not as principle but, on the contrary, as a “principle of anarchy,” to content ourselves with Reiner Schürmann’s paradox, or, again. as a deconstruction of the logic of principles in general). However, as we know, the Christianity of onto-theology is not the Christianity with which Heidegger pursued his “silent elucidation.”2

It is thus abundantly clear that monotheism will have constituted, all in all, (a)theism’s second condition of possibility. The unicity of the god of monotheism must not be set into a numeric relationship with the plurality of gods in what we have called “polytheism.” Rather, unicity displaces or converts divinity. From a present power or person, it changes divinity into a principle, a basis, and/or a law, always by definition absent or withdrawn in the depths of being. Deus absconditum: we might as well say a “god” that draws into the “one” the entirety of its numen inasmuch as it tends to dissolve that nomen “god,” which, precisely, had never been a divine name!

If this is the situation, then we must nevertheless ask ourselves why the root of atheism should have had—or must have had—a double constitution. The disrepute of Christianity as epiphenomenon of metaphysics, as well as its reduction by Kant or Hegel to the status of a representative transcription of the logic of reason or Spirit, does not account for this phenomenon of lining or doubling [phénomène de doublure ou de doublage].

What we ought to say is that reason cannot give sufficient reason for its representations. The idea of a transcription, a travesty, or a religious hijacking of the functions of reason is an idea that definitively commands (with a host of variations on the themes of “representation,” “sentiment,” “illusion,” and “ideology”) all that is essential for philosophical denunciation. Now, if in many respects it accounts for the moral, political, and spiritual infamy that religions no doubt share (and especially monotheistic ones, a matter that should be examined elsewhere), it nevertheless cannot account for the peculiar dehiscence of the logos and the premise. It cannot account for that separation except by designating an inferior degree of reason, a lack to be raised to the heights of thought, or again by deploring still more directly in religion a veritable perversion or disease (of thought, of culture, of society).

It is strange to think that our civilization in its entirety posits, in principle, the weak, corrupted, or foreign (i.e., non-Greek …) essence of what has not ceased to constitute something like its internal lining—and this for more than twenty centuries. It all comes to pass as though atheism refused to consider the possibility that this doubling might be understood in a way other than through infirmity, disease, or even the perversity of priests.

There is no doubt that infirmity, even debility, sickness, and meanness are at work (in alternation or conjunction) from the moment that we attempt to assure ourselves a mastery over and presentation of the premise. The signal weakness of any logic of the premise (should we say, of logic tout court?) shows itself at the crucial point where theism and atheism prove to belong to each other [se coappartiennent]: insofar as the premise is asserted, or symmetrically denied, it can only collapse in its own positing or in being deposed. The decisive point is this—it ought to be the task of the principle, as we sketched it above, to exceed qua principle principiation itself. To put it otherwise and perhaps better, it ought to be the task of the premise to elude itself, to withdraw from itself, to pull away from itself, or again to deconstruct principiation on the basis of itself. A principle or principate [principat] (to appeal to this old word here) can only exempt or make exception of itself in regard to itself [s’excepter de luimême]. At least, this is one of the branches of the alternative before which this principate is ineluctably placed: either it confirms itself, infinitely, or it exempts itself by or from itself—and this, no less infinitely. (The politics of sovereignty as the power of the exception reproduces precisely this logic, with the extreme delicacy of its unstable equilibrium, ever balanced between the legitimacy of an illegitimate [prince] and the illegitimacy of a legitimate [prince].) To reuse our earlier terms, either the premise confirms its etiological and teleological tautology, or it is in itself exposed as heterogeneous to any tautology: fleeing into a heterology.

5

Is it not desirable, then, to ask whether the doubling and dehiscence of monotheism and atheism do not communicate with this heterogenesis? In other words, can we be that calmly assured, without further inquiry, that monotheism is but the other, feeble, and clerical side of atheism? After all, the one and the other are forever united in the rigidification of the premise (or of the One), which is also to say in the abandonment or dereliction that is nihilism.

The time has come to understand our own history otherwise than it has heretofore sought to understand itself under the domination of its own principle or premise.

Greek atheism and Jewish monotheism met up at a point at which the unity of the premise and the unicity of the god comforted and opposed each other, reciprocally and at the same time. They did this through a dual and violent movement whose effects have never ceased innervating and irritating our history. On the one hand, the unicity of the god very clearly let itself be subsumed or absorbed by the unity of the premise. In this way Christianity became, by itself, a humanism, an atheism, and a nihilism. The ever more difficult preservation of its properly religious forms (its church, its practices, and its myths) ended up becoming the object of a struggle or of internal schisms. (How and whether this scheme functioned, or was overturned, in Judaism or Islam, as well as in the relation or non-relation between the three monotheisms, will have to be examined elsewhere.)

On the other hand, the unicity of the god refused to come under the sway of the premise. It is no accident if, in the heyday of modern rationality, Pascal, writing his “Memorial,” so violently felt the need to separate without reserve the God “of the philosophers and savants” from the “GOD of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the GOD of Jesus-Christ.” This separation and its resultant opposition or contradiction are together lodged at the heart of atheism, precisely at the place where the very principle of the premise (as I suggested above) collapses by itself and, in this collapse, signals the possibility, even the requirement of and the call for, a wholly other, anarchic configuration.

It is enough to recall some of the major traits by which monotheism opposes, as much as it comforts, the reign of the premise. (It is my hypothesis or my wager that these traits are at work, silently at least, in Heidegger, and, still more silently, in Wittgenstein; I note this here to point out that what is at stake really has to do with the necessity that has guided thought over the last century.)

In opposition to the relation that forms between a premise and its consequences (or between a condition and what it conditions) stands the relationship between the creator and the creature. Concerning this relationship we must first assert that it radically cuts off any ties with the preceding one, because the latter is a relation of identity, inherence, or consequence (if A, therefore B; if alpha, therefore omega). By contrast, creation entails a relation of alterity and contingence (if “God,” then there is no reason why he creates). The idea of creatio ex nihilo, inasmuch as it is clearly distinguished from any form of production or fabrication, essentially covers the dual motif of an absence of necessity and the existence of a given without reason, having neither foundation nor principle for its gift (a “gift” for which, doubtless, no concept of gift can prove to be adequate). Ex nihilo, which is to say: nothing in or as principle [rien au principe], a nothing of principle,3 nothing but that which is [rien que cela qui est], nothing but that which grows [rien que cela qui croît] (creo, cresco), lacking any growth principle, even (and especially not) the autonomous premise of a “nature” (unless we reevaluate this concept by way of Spinoza).

In the first place, we might say that the nihil is posited. Perhaps this is the only way seriously to get out of nihilism. “Nihilism” means, in effect: making a premise of nothing. But ex nihilo means: undoing any premise, including that of nothing. That means: to empty nothing [rien] (cf. rem, the thing) of any quality as principle. That is creation.4

Without examining further the implications or obligations of such an “undoing,” let us simply add two other traits.

First, the relationship of creation is doubled by the relationship between the saint and the sinner. Once again, not identity but alterity is at stake. The saint or the holy is the other of the sinner, in the sense that the sinner is constituted, in his being, by his relation to this alterity. He is a sinner for not being holy, but it is to holiness that he is beholden. Yet holiness is not a principle. Holiness is neither determinable, nor representable, nor prescribable. It opens to man or in man (unless we should say: it opens to the world or in the world, and not for man alone) the dimension and the movement, or gesture, of an “infinitely coming to pass” [d’un “se passer infiniment”]. It would not be impossible to interpret, playing on those two expressive possibilities in the French: “l’homme passe infiniment l’homme” [“man infinitely passes man”] and “l’homme se passe infiniment de l’homme” [“infinitely, man does without man”]. (Does “God,” or the saint, do without man, or not? As we know, this question has never ceased circulating in Christianity.)

The last trait that we retain here will be that of faith. If the premise must be known or well known, just as the gods must have been, moreover—and if, additionally, religion is a form of knowledge (the knowledge of observance and scruples)—it is to faith that the saint turns. Faith is not weak, hypothetical, or subjective knowledge. It is neither unverifiable nor received through submission, nor even through reason. It is not a belief in the ordinary sense of the term. On the contrary, it is the act of the reason that relates, itself, to that which, in it, passes it infinitely: faith stands precisely at the point of an altogether consequent atheism. This is to say that it stands at the point where atheism is dispossessed of belief in the premise or principle and in principate, in general. This is the point Kant already recognized formally when he spoke, for example, of “the incapacity in which reason finds itself, to satisfy by itself its own needs.”⁵ Reason does not suffice unto itself: for itself it is not a sufficient reason. But it is in the acknowledgment of this insufficiency that it fully justifies itself. For in this way it recognizes, not a lack or a flaw for which it should expect reparations from an other, but rather the following: the logic of sufficiency and/or lack is not the logic appropriate to it.

This is why what Kant called a “moral faith” (not a “metaphysical,” “speculative,” or “doctrinal” one) has its essence not in a failure of reason but, on the contrary, in the firmness with which reason confronts its own dissatisfaction. Not seeing therein an insufficiency, a failing, or a lack that might condemn it to nihilism, moral faith there discovers “non-sufficiency.” I use this term in the precise sense in which, henceforth, it is no longer a question of “sufficing” or of “satisfying,” for there is neither sufficiency nor satisfaction possible if there is also no principle to which satisfaction must be granted. Faith is then the firm fidelity of reason to its own atheology.

What the name “God,” or that of the “holy,” rigorously attempts to designate in this atheological regime—if we accept using Bataille’s term to designate an atheism clearly freed from the schema of an inverted theism—refers not only to a ruining of the premise but, in a way still more contrary to principial logic, refers to “something,” to “someone,” or to “a nothing” (perhaps to the same nihil ex quo …) of which faith is itself the birthplace or the creative event. That “God” himself may be the fruit of faith, which at the same time depends only on his grace (that is, exempts itself from necessity and obligation), is a thought profoundly foreign—perhaps it is the most foreign—to the theism/atheism pair. It is the thinking of alterity opened by and exposed outside of sameness, as that which exceeds thinking infinitely without in any way being principial to it. Yet this thinking is not foreign to Christian reflection—no more so than to reflection in Judaism or Islam. Let us cite only Makarios of Magnesia. “The one who does the will of my Father gives birth to me by participating in this act, and he is born with me. He who believes in effect that I am the only Son of God engenders me in some sense through his faith.”6

I will close here with the following observation: the Platonic precept was to “liken oneself to the divine,” whereas the monotheistic precept was to look within for our divine similitude. Homoisis, mimesis, and methexis all together. Now, there are two possible modes by which to liken oneself: either one appropriates the attributes of a subject supposed to be other and principial, or one alters the same into a properly infinite alterity, which proves unappropriable, imprescribable, and an-archic. There remains the question of knowing whether “God” or “the holy” can or do represent names (and on what grounds) for this alterity of reason. While it is established that “atheism” remains a term both equivocal and without a future, no response of this sort has yet been given to the question we have just posed.

Coda

In an abrupt manner, I will introduce in closing the following question: Should we therefore understand today—and if so, in what way—the word that was in a sense Heidegger’s last: “Only a god can save us now”?

It is not politically correct to treat this sentence without contempt. Yet it is philosophically necessary. Cut and dried, what does it tell us, then?

First, it states a tautology: if there is some reason “to save” anything, then certainly “only a god” can do so, if “salvation” indeed belongs to a divine order. A tautology then, and empty, inasmuch as reflection on salvation is not developed. Now, “to save” is not something that is thought. But “to save” is not “to heal.” It is not a process, and it is not measured against some ultimate “health” (salvus and sanus are not the same terms). It is a unique and instantaneous act, through which one who is already in the abyss is held back or recovered. “To save” does not annul the abyss; it takes place in it. (Perhaps Buddhist “awakening” takes place in a comparable fashion, if it takes place, right in the middle of the world and not outside of it.)

That same being in or unto the abyss (Geworfensein, “poverty,” “dereliction,”7 “sin”) is not that from which one returns by way of a dialectic, nor that of which we might give ourselves a mimetico-cathartic representation. It is rather that within which (more so than from which) there is “salvation.” At least it is in this direction that we should be able to think.

I will gladly indicate this direction using the words of Rachel Bespaloff (who was, among other things, an astonishing reader of Heidegger): “We must not call God our powerlessness and our despair” (a citation from Nietzsche), nor seek therein a “remedy,” but rather expose ourselves “to the peril of salvation.”⁸

But how shall we so much as approach such a thought? Surely not with philosophy understood as the “science of first principles,” as “rational knowledge,” or as a production of representations of the world. Heidegger indicates this in the context of the same interview with Der Spiegel (i.e., “Philosophy is at its end”). And the “god” of which he is speaking designates, before all this, the “nothing other” for which philosophy is neither the site nor the regime. That god, that “last god,” as he puts it elsewhere—that “god,” insofar as every god is the “last one,” which is to say that every god dissipates and dissolves the very essence of the divine—is a god that beckons [winkt]. That means, it makes a sign without sense, a signal of approach, of invitation, and of departure.⁹ This god has its essence in winken. And that sign-making, that blink of the eye comes to pass, starting from and in the direction of the Ereignis—the appropriating event through which man, appropriated to or by being, may be disappropriated (ent-eignet) of an identity closed in on its humanity. Man may thus “propriate” himself, address himself and dedicate himself (zu-eignet) to what is infinitely more than him-“self” [lui-“même”].

Perhaps it is simply that this e-levation [ex-haussement] of man, of which the all-too-human man cannot so much as dream and to which no philosophical essence of man can be compared (but was there ever a “philosophic essence” of man? Perhaps not; perhaps philosophy always surpasses its own end …). Perhaps it is simply that which the word god names, or rather signals, “winks at.”

Heidegger thus means at least this, that the e-levation takes place without knowledge and outside of sense. Neither firm knowledge (science), nor weak knowledge (belief). Neither belief in God, nor belief in man, nor belief in knowledge, nor even in art. Yet a firmness, yes, and a fidelity, even a devotion [dévouement] in an extraordinarily strong sense of the word (an act of “vowing or -voting oneself” the way one de-votes oneself to a task or to a devil).10

Yet, in this way we would be led back to something that strongly resembles Kant’s “practical faith,” evoked earlier. This is why it is not without interest to propose here the following, wholly provisional conclusion.

The sentence “Only a god …”—or whatever sentence at all that today names “a god” or “the divine”—is nothing other than a reformulation, risky but necessary, imperious even (and neither riskier nor less necessary, when we think about it, than what it reformulates), of a famous sentence:

I therefore had to abrogate knowledge in order to make room for faith, and the dogmatism of metaphysics, that is to say the prejudice according to which one might progress, without a critique of pure reason, is the true source of that incredulity that struggles with morality—an incredulity that is, in turn, always very dogmatic, in fact.¹¹

What Kant’s expression holds open for us is none other than this: a critique of reason, that is to say, a demanding and non-complacent examination of reason by reason, makes unconditionally requisite, within reason itself, an opening and an e-levation of reason. It is not a question of “religion,” here, but rather of a “faith” as a sign of the fidelity of reason to that which in and of itself exceeds reason’s phantasm of justifying itself [rendre raison de soi] as much as the world and man.

That the signal “a god”—or again, the “signal of a god”—might be necessary or not here remains once again undecided. That will perhaps remain undecidable—or not. But, for the moment, it is at least beyond all doubt that a signal, whatever it may be, addresses us from the site of our atheist reason.

Translated by Gabriel Malenfant and Bettina Bergo