“Judeo-Christian” is a fragile designation. The word appears in the Littré dictionary with a historical definition that restricts it to the religion of the first Christian Jews, of those who considered that non-Jewish Christians should first “be associated with, or incorporated into, the nation of Israel.” This signification sets aside the partisans of the measures of the order taken in Jerusalem under James’s authority and reported in Acts 15. It is no longer the same meaning as in Harnack at the end of the century, which indicates only a preferential place for the Jewish people as the distinctive trait of the Judeo-Christians. Harnack thus distinguishes them from those whom he will call the “pagan-Christians” (who will also be called “Helleno-Christians” or “Hellenic-Christians”). Today, the use of the term Judeo-Christian is still less restrictive, as a function of complexities that historians have brought to light. At the same time, certain among them have expressed doubts about the validity of the category, if only because of the diversity of movements or stances that it is able to cover.
In the meantime, usage of the term has authorized a still broader and nonhistorical role when one speaks, for example, of Judeo-Christian culture or tradition to designate a certain interweaving, at the base of European civilization, of the two enemy sisters or, indeed, of the mother and the daughter, the Synagogue and the Church. In truth, this composite term so far has been taken to designate an imbrication or conjuncture essential in our identity or our thought, even “the most impenetrable abyss that Western thought conceals,” as Lyotard wrote of the trait d’union [hyphen]1 that holds this composition together or de-composes it at its core—which makes of its center a disunion.
The enigma of this noncomposable composition should interest us in more than one respect; in fact, it should interest us in five respects.
1. Insofar as the name Judeo-Christian can go so far as to posit a—or even the—salient characteristic, that is, the incisive and decisive, if not essential, characteristic of a civilization that will call itself “Western,” its stake is then nothing other than the composition and/or the decomposition, in and for itself, of this “civilization.”
2. Insofar as its name de-composes what we have agreed to call, in our culture, “religions,” it implies, within the determination of Western thought (and in its self-determination) a hyphen drawn between “religion” and “thought,” precisely where thought—in the name of “philosophy,” itself albeit otherwise self-composed—was determined as non-religious, even anti-religious, thereby drawing its line over religion, to destroy it or de-compose it. This name thus implies an irritation or a vexation of the West in itself and for itself.
3. Insofar as it implicates philosophy—if only in the guise of an offense or contradiction—this name communicates in some sense with that other composite: the Greek-Jew and/or Jew-Greek. This composite names nothing other (before becoming a name forged in Joyce’s language of decomposition) than the vis-à-vis of Judeo-Christianity, understood as pagan-Christianity or Christian Hellenism (and from the latter began properly the missionary expansion of Christianity, which may also be the fact of Jews speaking or thinking in Greek, and designating their new religion, moreover, as one more philosophy). For this motif, there is no Judeo-Christianity, under the circumstances, that is not also Judeo-Greco-Christianity, and philosophy cannot hold itself apart or stand free from this double mark of dis-union.
4. Insofar as this mark multiplies at least once by itself, its reduction [sa démultiplication] will not cease thereafter: it draws or traces from itself a general de-composition. This de-composition first dis-unites the three religions called “of the Book,” and thus composes with Islam another assemblage and another discontinuity relative to the West; an other dis-orientation and re-orientation (after all, as we know, the aftermath of historical Judeo-Christianity exerted very specific influences upon the birth of Islam, just as it had, a few centuries earlier, on the formation of Manichaeism). This reduction once again de-composes Judaisms, Christianisms, and Islamisms among themselves, setting in play each time a new form of contrariety with, or attraction to, philosophy. For its part, philosophy itself only presumes to be one insofar as (and at the least among other motives) across its extreme synchronic and diachronic disparity; it posits itself as distinct from religion (or again, within religion itself, as essentially distinguished from faith).
5. Insofar as the Judeo-Christian composition thus conceals or stimulates what we could call the general dis-position of the West (or indeed, what we should spell, in Greco-Latin, its dys-position), it so happens that this composition espouses formally a schema whose recurrence and extent/amplitude are not insignificant in our entire tradition of thought: this is the schema of coincidentia oppositorum, whose declensions include, among others, the oxymoron, Witz, the Hegelian dialectic, or mystical ecstasies. From which of these four species the Judeo-Christian composition comes is perhaps not the question to ask, for it may arise from all of them or compose them all. But it is a constant that the most general law of this schema (like the structure of the Kantian schematism, which forms a species of the same genre) is to contain at its center a gap [un écart] around which it is organized. The hyphen passes over a void that it does not fill. Upon what could this void open? That is the question that a consideration attentive to the Judeo-Christian composition cannot avoid posing. Such a consideration is perhaps virtually a reflection on the composition in general of our tradition and within our tradition; that is, ultimately, on the possibility of the cum [“with”] considered in itself. How could the cum, how could the communion—taken as a generic term (that term of Cicero, taken up later on in Christianity to absorb and sublate the koin
nia, the societas, and the communicatio)—include constitutively the voiding of its center or its heart? How, consequently, can this voiding call to the deconstruction of this composition: that is, the penetration in the midst of the possibility, which is a possibility of composition that is both contracted and combated?
(A parenthesis for two axioms. 1. A deconstruction is always a penetration; it is neither a destruction, nor a return to the archaic, nor, again, a suspension of adherence: a deconstruction is an intentionality of the to-come [l’à-venir], enclosed in the space through which the construction is articulated part by part. 2. Deconstruction thus belongs to a construction as its law or its proper schema: it does not come to it from elsewhere.)
Here, deconstruction is therefore none other than the logic, altogether historical and theoretical, of the construction of what one might readily call in the language of painting “short-stroke composition” [“la composition au trait d’union”].2 To be sure, composition, or the composed or composite characteristic, is not an exclusive trait of Christianity or the West. Nonetheless, Christianity never ceases designating, by itself and as itself, a communication or placing-in-common, a koinnia that appears according to circumstances as its essence or as its acme, and it is indeed Christianity that has marked the West, or even as what is Western itself, the intentional drive toward a “pleroma of peoples [pl
rma tn ethnn, plenitudo gentium; cf Romans 11:25]” whose restored community with Israel must be the touchstone, according to this text of Paul. Likewise, the pre- or para-Christian Judaism of the Qumran is a strain that considered the community to be the true Temple. From the religion of the Temple to communitarian or “communal” faith, from the religion of the sons to the religion of the brothers—all the way to republican fraternity and to the comparison Engels developed between the first communists and the first Christians or, more precisely, those Jews he called “still unconscious Christians” (referring, above all, to the John of Revelation)—from this passage, then, which also brings to its end a generalized abandonment of the Temples of antiquity and leads toward the constitution of a “church” which means, above all, an “assembly” (just like a “synagogue”), up to the question of what the koinnia of our globalization or becoming-global and its being-in-common in every sense of the term could mean, there is an insistent continuity of a composition that would carry in itself, in its cum itself, the law of a deconstruction: What is there beneath the hyphen and in the hollow of the assemblage?
Over what and from what is the hyphen drawn? And how is this hyphen drawn from the one to the other—from the one to the other edge and from the one to the other “self”? How is it drawn such that it might withdraw while at the same time remaining intact: not untouchable but intact, remaining intact throughout the entire Greco-Judeo-Christo-Islamo-Euro-planetary history, an intact spacing that has perhaps never yet come to light, having perhaps never to take form or substance, and to remain always residual, the uncomposable and undecomposable non-thought of our history?
I am drawing no conclusions, for the moment, from this enumeration of headings for the uncomposable composition that requires our attention. I propose today to examine only one of the most remarkable tendencies of Judeo-Christianity: that which was incorporated, ultimately, in the Christian canon of the “New Testament,” even at the price of remarkable doubts and resistances, which have persisted, in some cases, up to our day. I mean, here, the epistle attributed to James.
That letter is the first of those a very ancient tradition designates “catholic.” This name does not designate, at its origin, some particular orientation of these texts toward the Roman Church, but rather, as in the initial expression katholik ekklsia, their general or, if you will, universal destination. In this sense, rather than being addressed to a community, to a synagogue, or to a determinate church (like the Pauline epistles), they are addressed to a larger whole, which each time arises from the diaspora. That catholicity and diaspora might initially have to do with one another is something worth reflecting upon: do the “whole” and the “dispersion” produce a whole out of dispersion, a dispersion of the whole, or, indeed, a whole in dispersion? In a sense, the entire question lies there: I mean that the entire question of the West as totality and/or as dissemination resides therein.
Today, then, for us, the Judeo-Christian will be James. And it will be, in a manner that remains to be discerned, a secret thread or a hyphen that could tie the historic James to that other James [Jacques] around whom, or on whose pretext, we have come together here;3 and who is another Judeo-Christian, or indeed another Judeo-Helleno-Christian. This secret tie has nothing contrived or arbitrary about it; nor am I proposing it as an ad hoc rationalization. At the very least we should venture the risk, here, of its relevance. That relevance would be tied simply to this: if it is possible, at the end of the twentieth century, that a philosopher, and thus in principle a Greek, experience the necessity of re-interrogating a category of faith or of a faith act, or, again, that he or she speak of the real as resurrection—and if it is possible that this philosopher does so in a reference that might be at the same time Jewish (i.e., holiness, borrowed from Levinas) and Christian (i.e., a “miracle of witnessing”), then in what relationship can this take shape within the historical Judeo-Christianity and what could this allow us to discern, and deconstruct, in our own origin or provenance?
(Parenthesis: before reading the Epistle of James, I would like to make it clear that I am going to proceed without furnishing any erudite sources, for that could only be excessive here. Recent studies on the many Judeo-Christianities and on the messianisms of James’s time are multiplying. This is no doubt also a sign. But I neither want nor am able to do the work of a historian, no more than I intend a commentary on Derrida: I intend to work precisely between the two.)
The James to whom we attribute the letter in question has been distinguished as “the minor,” from James the major, whom all of Europe went to venerate at Compostello. The tradition also names him “the brother of Jesus,” and we believe we have finally identified him as the head of the Church of Jerusalem or of the “Holy Church of the Hebrews,” who brings down the decision, reported in Acts 15, in favor of the non-Jews by declaring that: “God chose for himself a people in his name … so that other men would seek the Lord, all those nations over which his name was invoked.” With these words, James confers his authority (and that of a citation from Amos) on the words that Peter had pronounced when he said: “God has borne witness to the nations in giving them the holy spirit just as he did for us.” God is a witness, that is, a martyr, for all men: the witness of their holiness or of their call to holiness (which is to say, to his proper holiness). Such was the message that the assembly sent Paul and Barnabas, along with a few others, to deliver to Antioch, where tempers had to be calmed in regard to what was due to the Jews, and what to the others. God bears witness for all men insofar as he is the one who “knows human hearts [ho kardiognosts].” Israel is thus the singular site chosen for this witness about hearts: the visible or visibly marked (by circumcision) site starting from which the Holy One attests to the invisible and uncircumcised holiness of all humanity, or of the pleroma of his peoples.
It is from this angle that I will approach the Epistle of James. In it one reads, at 1:18, that God sought “to engender us from a word of truth such that we might be the first-born of his creatures.” “We” here is first “the brothers” of the “twelve tribes of the dispersion,” to whom the letter is addressed. It is thus the Jews who must be the “first-born of the creatures.” The first-born represent the part reserved for the gods of a harvest or a herd. The relation of the Jewish churches to the rest of humanity stands, here, in this single verse. The Jews who have faith in Jesus consecrate to God his own creation. Now, the letter reminds us further on that “men are made in the image of God” (3:9). (No doubt, the “we” of this verse can just as well tend to designate all men as the first-born of creation in its entirety: we shall come back to that.)
The resemblance of men to God, and with this a thematic and problematic of the image that are infinitely complex, belongs to the essential core of biblical monotheism. This resemblance occupies an important place in the thought of Paul, for whom Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). But the Epistle of James stops at this mention of the well-known verse of Genesis and ventures nothing in particular about the relationship between man-as-image and Jesus. The mediation of this relation remains at a certain distance. As we shall see, it is not the economy of a Christo-centric salvation that organizes James’s thought: it is, as it were, directly, a certain relation of man to holiness that becomes an image in him.
Before proceeding we must make a remark about methodology. An absence of Christology, and even of theology in general, characterizes this text—which we could call more parenetic or spiritual than doctrinal—to the point that this has aroused suspicion about its authenticity, or about whether to consider it simply a Jewish text. In passing, it is remarkable that Harnack does not even mention James in his History of Dogma: in fact, one can grant him that this epistle doesn’t provide us much, by contrast to those of Paul, for the development of a discourse about the contents of faith (I would readily put it as the contents of a knowledge of faith, but that would be to anticipate too much). The epistle is wholly given over—as we shall show—to the act of faith.
I am not claiming to reconstitute (others have done so much better than I could) the backgrounds or the implicit thematic (Essene, in particular) of this text. I am taking it in the form in which it is given. Now it is given at once as a text rather thin in theological speculation (as Luther said, “an epistle of straw”) and as a text whose intention is not to oppose Paul but to correct a tendentious interpretation of Paul that tended to cut faith off from all action. James’s theological reserve seems therefore intentional. But that means we must look here not for theological thinness but for a retreat of theology, or for a theology in retreat, that is, a withdrawal of any representation of contents in favor of an active information by faith—which is also to say that we must look for that alone which activates the contents. It is not another theological position, even less an opposed thesis: it is the position that stands precisely between two theological elaborations, and thus perhaps also between two religions, the Jewish and the Christian, like their hyphen and their separation [trait d’union et d’écartment], but also of their com-possibility, whatever the status of this “com-” might be: like their construction and their deconstruction taken together. That is to say that this position is like one of those points, one of those situations, in which the construction in question, like any construction, according to the general law of constructions, exposes itself, constitutively and in itself, to its deconstruction.
Let us return, then, to the internal logic of this letter. If humans were engendered according to the image (gegonotes kath’omoisin theou), then what is this homoisis? To what or to whom are humans similar or homogeneous? The God of the letter is described rather briefly. He is unique, to be sure, but therein does not lie what is essential to the faith, which concerns more the works of man than the nature of God (James 2:19: “you believe that there is but one God, and you do well. The demons also believe this and they tremble,” which is to say, this is not enough to qualify your faith). This God is not the God of Israel in his jealous exclusivity, but neither is it properly speaking the God either of the Trinity or of love (nonetheless, the love of others plays a primordial role in the letter).
God is “Lord and Father” (James 3:9), and this is uttered in the same verse that mentions homoisis, just as in 1:17–18, where it is said that he “engendered us as the first-born of his creatures.” The father is father of and in his resemblance (we could even say that paternity and resemblance share a reciprocity here), just as in Genesis, in the second story of creation, the resemblance of Adam to God passes into the resemblance between Adam and his son Seth: in this way opens the genealogy that will lead through Noah to Shem, Ham, and Japheth. This resemblance distinguishes man in creation; it makes of him the first-born of creation, which is to say that it is (and that through it man also is) the mark or the homogeneous trace that dedicates the world to its creator. This resemblance therefore does not depend on generation (as we are accustomed to thinking); it is rather generation that consists in the transmission of the trace. The created world is less a produced world than a marked world, a world traced, simultaneously imprinted and traversed by a vestige (as Augustine will say later on), that is to say, traced by that which remains withdrawn and by the withdrawal of an origin.
From what, then, is this homoisis made, this trace of the creator as such? The letter names him “Father of lights” (1:17)—he who opens the world in the division of light from what it illuminates (according to a very ancient cosmogonic schema). Immediately thereafter, it is said that from him comes “every beautiful gift, every perfect donation [pasa dosis agath kai pan drma teleion]”: that is, every action of giving and all things given, the first being literally called “good,” and the second “fulfilled,” “completed.” God is first the giver. And it is as such that he is the “Father of lights, with whom there is nor change nor a shadow of variation.” He gives as light and what he gives is first, essentially, his light (the Latin allows us to specify: lux, illuminating light, not lumen, the glimmer of the illumined thing). He gives not so much some thing as the possibility of the clarity in which alone there can be things. If the logic of the gift is indeed, as the other James [Jacques] enjoys thinking, that the giver abandons him- or herself in his or her gift, then that is what is taking place here. In giving, in fulfilling the gift, God gives himself just as much as he remains in himself without shadows, since it is this dissipation of the shadow, this clearing of light that he gives, and since he “gives to all, simply” (James 1:5). To give and to withhold, to give oneself and to withhold oneself, these are not contradictories here and, correlatively, to be and to appear would be identical here: a phenomenology that is theological, but not theophanic.
The logic of the gift and the logic of the homoisis are superimposed: the homoios is of the same genos as that which engendered it (this theme, which displaces the pre-Greek and pre-Jewish relation of man to the divine, runs from Pythagoras via Plato up to Cleanthes, from whom Paul will borrow in addressing himself to the Athenians), and that which engenders or which engenders itself, gives itself, gives precisely its genos.
Further on, the letter names the thing given. In James 4:6 we read: “He gives a grace better than covetousness,” and again, “he gives this grace to the humble” (a citation from Proverbs 3:34). Grace is favor, that is, at once the election that favors and the pleasure or the joy that is thereby given. Grace is a gratuity (Émile Benveniste shows that gratia, which translates kharis, gave us both gratis and gratuitas).4 It is the gratuity of a pleasure given for itself. In verse 4:6, the kharis is opposed to the desire that is pros phthonon, the desire of envy or jealousy. The latter is associated with voluptuous pleasures (hdonai). But the logic of the text cannot be reduced to the condemnation of the philia tou kosmou (“the love of this world”). Or again, perhaps this condemnation should be understood according to the ampler and more complex logic in which it is inserted. James says, in effect, that the desire of envy proceeds from lack: “you covet and you have not, so you kill” (4:2). Phthonos is the envious desire for the good or for the happiness of the other (as we know, the phthonos of the Greek gods takes aim at the man whose success or happiness irritates them). Now, James continues: “but you have not because you ask not.” And then: “you ask and you receive not, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend for your sensuous pleasures.” There is thus a logic of lack and of jealous appropriation here, as well as a logic of asking in order to receive that which cannot be received other than by the gift or as the gift, that is, the favor of grace. This kharis is the opposite neither of desire nor of pleasure: it is desire and pleasure qua receptivity of and to this gift. This receptivity must equal the donation in gratuity.
This gift gives nothing that might be of the order of an appropriable good. (We must also remember, so as to come back to it again shortly, that this epistle is the most vehemently opposed to the rich in the entirety of the New Testament.) This gift gives itself, it gives its own gift’s favor, which is to say, a withdrawal into the grace of the giver and of the present itself. The homoisis is a homodsis. To be in the image of God is therefore to be asking for grace, to give oneself in turn to the gift. Far from coming out of an askesis, one may justifiably say that this logic of grace arises out of enjoyment, and this enjoyment itself comes out of an abandon. That supposes, no doubt, according to the letter of the text, “unhappiness” and “bereavement,” “weeping” and “humiliation,” but these are not a sacrifice: they are the disposition of abandon, in which joy is possible. To be sure, something is abandoned, and it is lack, along with the desire for appropriation. But that is not sacrificed: it is not offered and consecrated to God. James is not preaching renunciation here: he is laying bare a logic separated as much from envy as from renunciation. And this logic is that of what he calls faith.
As we know, the letter of James—while it may not be as opposed as one might think to the thought of Paul—is clearly distinguished from the latter, at least by its great insistence on the works of faith. (That was, moreover, the first reason for Luther’s severity toward this text.) But it is important to understand clearly that the works of faith in question here are not opposed to faith: they are, on the contrary, faith itself.
The relationship of faith to its works is set forth in chapter 2, whose most famous verse is the eighteenth: “show me your faith without works, and I will show you my faith by my works.” The injunction or the challenge does not concern the necessity of proving one’s faith. Besides, the preceding verse has just stated: “without works faith by itself is dead [kath’heauten, by itself, in itself, as to itself].” These works do not stand in the order of external manifestation, or in that of a demonstration through the phenomenon. And faith does not subsist in itself. This is why what is in question here is to show faith ek tn ergn, on the basis of works, and coming out of them. Instead of works proceeding from faith, and instead of works expressing it, faith here exists only in the works: in works that are its own and whose existence makes up the whole essence of faith, if we may put it that way. Verse 20 states that faith without works is arg, that is, vain, inefficient, and ineffective (curiously, the Vulgate translates this term by mortua, like the nekra of verse 17). Argos is a contraction of aergos, which is to say without ergon. James is thus stating a quasitautology. But it means: the ergon is here existence. That also means, then, that the ergon is understood in a general sense, as effectivity much more than as production; it is understood as being-in-act much more than as the operari of an opus.
This logic is so precise and so restrictive that it obliges us to set aside a certain comprehension of the ergon to which we are more habituated, and even our Platonic and Aristotelian understanding of poisis—a word that appears in 1:25, tied to ergon, and which everything makes us think, following several translators, in the sense of “practice” (thus, of “praxis”), that is, if praxis is indeed action in the sense of by or of an agent and not the praxis exerted upon an object.
One might say: pistis is the praxis that takes place in and as the poisis of the erga. If I wanted to write this in a Blanchotian idiom, I would say that faith is the inactivity or inoperativity [désœuvrement] that takes place in and as the work [dans et comme l’œuvre]. And if I wanted to pass from one James to the other [to Jacques Derrida], I would say that faith, as the praxis of poisis, opens in poisis the inadequation to self that alone can constitute “doing” [“faire”] and/or “acting” [l’ “agir”] (both concepts implying the difference within or unto self of every concept or the irreducible difference between a lexis and the praxis that would seek to effectuate it). Extrapolating from there, I would say that praxis is that which could not be the production of a work adequate to its concept (and thus, production of an object), but that praxis is in every work and it is ek tou ergou, that which exceeds the concept of it. This is not, as we commonly think, that which is lacking in the concept, but rather that which, in exceeding it, thrusts the concept out of itself and gives it more to conceive, or more to grasp and to think, more to touch and to indicate, than that which it itself conceives. Faith would thus be here the praxical excess of and in action or in operation, and this excess, insofar as it aligns itself with nothing other than itself, that is to say, also with the possibility for a “subject” (for an agent or for an actor) to be more, to be infinitely more and excessively more than what it is in itself and for itself.
In that sense, this faith can no more be a property of the subject than it can be the subject’s “work”: this faith must be asked for and received—which does not prevent it from being asked for with faith, quite the contrary. (In James 1:6, one must “ask with faith without turns or sidestepping”: there is at the heart of faith a decision of faith that precedes itself and exceeds itself.) In this sense, faith cannot be an adherence to some contents of belief. If belief must be understood as a weak form or an analogy of knowledge, then faith is not of the order of belief. It comes neither from a knowledge nor from a wisdom, not even by analogy. And it is also not in this sense that we should understand Paul’s opposition of Christian “madness” to the “wisdom” of the world: this “madness” is neither a super-wisdom nor something symmetrical to wisdom or to knowledge. What James, for his part, would have us understand is that faith is its own work. It is in works, it makes them, and the works make it. Taking a step further, even a short step, we could extrapolate from James a declaration like the following: “It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a ‘belief,’ for example, in the belief in redemption by the Christ, that which characterizes the Christian; only Christian practice is Christian, a life like that lived by him who died on the cross”—a declaration that we could read in Nietzsche.
Spinoza, for his part, asserts that “God demands, by the Prophets, of men no other knowledge of himself than that of his divine Justice and his Charity, that is to say those attributes which are such that men might imitate them by following a certain rule of life,” by which he is referring implicitly to the citation from James’s epistle, which he mentioned earlier in the same text.
That faith might consist in its practice is the certainty that commands James’s interpretation of Abraham’s act or of that of Rahab (Genesis 2:21–25). Contrary to Paul (Romans 4), James maintains that Abraham is justified by his work, designated as the offering of Isaac. For his part, Paul does not mention this episode, but rather that of Sarah’s sterility (in Hebrews 11:1 ff., the sacrifice is evoked, but the fundamental argument remains the same). According to Paul, what is important is that Abraham believed that God could give him a son, against all natural evidence. His act thus depended on a knowledge postulate (or it consisted in one; in the text of the letter to the Hebrews, we find the word logisamenos: Abraham judged that God could). For James, on the contrary, Abraham did. He offered up Isaac. It is not said there that he judged, considered, or believed. (Likewise, Rahab the prostitute saved the emissaries, and James says nothing, by contrast with Paul, about her belief in the promise the emissaries had made her, whereas the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that Rahab expected that her life would be saved.)
In a certain sense, James’s Abraham believes nothing, does not even hope (Paul says that he “hoped without hope”: even this dialectic is absent in James). James’s Abraham is not in the economy of assurances or substitutes for assurance. Abraham is neither persuaded nor convinced: his assent is not in the logismos. It is only in the ergon. If the notion of “faith” must be situated in the “logical” or “logistical” order (as the origin of pistis in peith would invite us to think: “to persuade,” “to convince”), then this faith resides in the inadequation of one’s own “logos” to itself. The reasons that this faith has “to believe” are not reasons. Thus it has nothing, in sum, with which to convince itself. This faith is but the “conviction” that gives itself over in act—not even to something “incomprehensible” (according to a logic of the “I cannot understand but I must or I may still believe,” and still less according to a logic of the credo quia absurdum), but to that which is another act: a commandment. Faith is not argumentative; it is the performative of the commandment—or it is homogeneous with it. Faith resides in inadequation to itself as a content of meaning. And it is in this precisely that it is truth qua truth of faith or faith as truth and verification. This is not sacrification but verification. That is, also, the contrary of a truth believed. This faith, above all, does not believe. It is neither credulous nor even believing in the current sense of the term. It is a faith not believed. It is a non-belief whose faith guarantees it as non-believable.
The concept of “trusting oneself to” [“sefier à”] or “confiding in” [“se confier à”] opens on two sides: on the one hand, it is a matter of a kind of assurance, of a postulated certainty, something wagered, by a confidence poised upon some anticipation risked toward an end (analogous to the Kantian postulates, which are precisely those of a rational or reasonable belief into which Christian faith metamorphosed or by which it was eclipsed). But faith, according to James, is effected entirely in the inadequation of its enactment to any concept of that act even if it be a concept formed by analogy, by symbols, or by as an “as if.” The work of Abraham is the acting or the doing of this inadequation: a praxis whose poisis is the incommensurability of an action (to offer Isaac up) and of its representation or its meaning (to immolate his son).
Faith as work could very well be knowledge—or nescience—of the incommensurability of acting with itself, that is, of the incommensurability of the agent, of the actor, or of the acting entity insofar as it exceeds itself and makes itself in the act, or makes itself exceed itself, or be exceeded by itself therein: thus, radically, absolutely, and necessarily, it proves to be the being-unto-the-other of its being-unto-self. In this, faith would be the very act of a homoisis with the gift itself, understood in the sense of its act. Homoisis as heteroisis, the identity of the concept (of “knowledge” or of “thought”) qua the incommensurability of the conceiving in act. This incommensurability would be tied to the following: this faith (“persuasion,” “wager of confidence,” or “assurance of faithfulness”) must come from the other, this faith must come from outside, it is the outside opening in itself a passage toward the inside.
This faith would be—or, again, the Judeo-Christian and Islamic faith would be—the act of a non-knowledge as non-knowledge of the necessity of the other in every act and in every knowledge of the act that could stand at the level of what James here calls (5:21, 24–25) “justification”: that which makes just, that which creates a just one (which could never be, could above all not be in the adequation of the knowledge of its own justice). This act would be tied first to faith in the other—which the other James, or Jacques [Derrida] calls “the relation to the other as the secret of testimonial experience,” if by “testimony” we mean, as he does, the attestation of truth that all words postulate in the other or from the other, and in me qua other to myself (just as, Platonically, I “dialogue with myself”). The just one or the justified one would be he who lets himself be attested, borne witness to, in the other.
This truth and this justice open most precisely where it is no longer a sacred presence that assures and guarantees, but the fact itself—the act and the work—of not being assured by any presence that might not be of the other, and other than itself, other than the presence of sacred gods: in a sense, or if one wishes, the sacred itself or the holy (to fuse them for an instant), but as not given, not posited, not presented in an order of divine presence—on the contrary, “God” “himself” as unlike any god, as gift and as the gift of the faith that is given to the other and that believes in nothing. With this, then, the Judeo-Christianism of James as deconstruction of religion and, consequently, also as self-deconstruction: leaving nothing subsisting, if this is indeed subsistence at all, but the hyphen and its spacing.
This is why the work of faith, the poisis-praxis of pistis, presents itself in the letter under three aspects: the love of the neighbor, the discrediting of wealth, and the truthful and decided word. In these three forms, in question each time is an exposition to what cannot be appropriated, to what has outside itself, and infinitely outside itself, the justice and truth of itself.
In question is what the letter calls “the perfect law of freedom” (James 1:25 and 2:12). Unlike Paul, James does not sublate the law (supposedly ancient) into freedom and/or into a law (reputedly new). The “law of freedom”—of which no precept is really foreign to Judaism—is the arrangement or framework that would have it that acting should expose itself to the other and be nothing other than this very exposition: it is the acting of relationship or proximity rather than the doing of desire or appropriation; the acting of the word and the truth, rather than the “logistical” doing of representation and meaning. This formula—“law of freedom” (nomos ts leuthrias), which is perhaps a hapax in the Scriptures—could be understood with a Stoic resonance, and we would have, in that case, one of the marks of the implication of philosophy in this Christianity in statu nascendi. If something like this could be attested, then that should refer us to the deepest level of Stoicism’s understanding: not the submissive acceptance of an order that escapes me, but the sharing (nomos) of the event as the opportunity of a becoming-self. In this we can hear Jacques Derrida’s text on Abraham resonate with Deleuze’s lines on Stoicism: “to become worthy of what befalls us, thus to want it and to set it forth in its event, to become the son of one’s own events … and not of one’s works. For the work is itself only produced by the son of the event.” The nomos is thus the following: that we are only liberated by the truth that does not belong to us, that does not devolve to us, and that makes us act according to the inadequation and the inappropriation of its coming.
It would be outside the scope of this conference to analyze the triple determination of the “law of freedom” according to love, the word, and poverty. I will therefore not attempt to do so today and I will conclude simply with that which can no longer be deferred: namely, Jesus Christ.
In a certain sense, the only indubitable attestation of the Judeo-Christian composition of James’s letter is his mention of Jesus. This mention is made from the first verse, in the formula, also used by Paul, “James, servant of God and of the lord Jesus Christ.” Then, in the first verse of chapter 2: “my brothers, you who have faith in our Lord Jesus the Christ of glory.” On the one hand, as I have already noted, this mention of the Christ stands withdrawn from any Christology. On the other hand, and at the same time, this mention alone determines faith, no longer according to its (praxical or operative) nature, but according to its reference, its scaffolding, its support or its guarantee. Mere faith in the uniqueness of God, as we have seen, is not, by itself alone, truly faith. Faith, in order to be, that is, in order to act, draws its consistency from somewhere else: from a proper name. Being the carrier of no specific theology, the proper name does not turn into a concept. This proper name is no introduction to a logic of the mysteries of incarnation and redemption. At the most, we may suppose, beneath the name Jesus, an implicit reference to the teaching transmitted by the gospels, especially that of the “Sermon on the Mount.” For everything else, this name only serves to identify Christ, that is, the messiah. If the messiah is named, it is because he is come, because he is present in one way or another. He has presented himself. The name states this presence come to pass. A reader unaware of this would have no reason to think that this Jesus is no longer of this world. This presence is not that of a witness who would give reasons to believe, or some example of faith. The presence named here refers only to the messianic quality.
The expression “messiah of glory” could be, itself, a hapax. The messiah is the anointed one. Anointing is, in Israel—which inherited it from other cultures—the gesture that confers and signs the royal, sacerdotal, or prophetic function (a later Christology will attribute these three functions to Jesus). To be sure, whoever says “messiah,” in Israel, understands this triple function, and foremost, the first one, that of the reign—which verse 2:5 names here, speaking of the “reign that God promised to those who love him” (four verses after the “Christ of glory”). A reflection on messianism cannot forego consideration of this royalty or kingship. (Without wanting to go into details here, I would say that the somewhat biased reduction of the meaning of messiah to the idea of a “savior” overlooks the functions implied by anointment and the fact that this “salvation” requires these functions—which also implies, eventually, a dehiscence or a disparity between these functions, like that between priesthood and prophecy.) A messiah “of glory,” whether he be anointed with glory or glory be the splendor of his unction, is an absolutely royal messiah: resplendent with the magnificence that the Scripture never ceases to attribute to God, and which the oil, luminous and perfumed, reflects as it flows over the hair and onto the beard of the anointed one. Royalty according to glory is not first of the order of power. Or again, it is not of that order without being identically in and of the order of light and dispensation, the order of the “beautiful gift and perfect donation.”
(Glory, éclat, or splendor is a very ancient attribute, divine and/or royal, in Assyrian and Babylonian representations, in whose context one also finds it allied with seduction and pleasure, especially on the part of feminine deities: this is the splendor associated with favor. In this regard, a great Hellenist once wrote: “It is with the Greek notion of charis that the rapprochement is unavoidable between charm, external grace, power of seduction, but also the luminous sparkling of jewels and materials, bodily beauty, physical wholeness, sensual delight, the gift that woman makes of herself to man.”)
Ultimately, there would no longer be messianism here, but charisma, an inappropriable gift.
Glory purely and simply gives itself, and precisely as that which is not appropriable—not even by the one from whom it emanates—it is only admirable, and perhaps admirable to the point of not being able to be contemplated. Faith in glory or faith of glory (pistis tou Kuriou Isou Christou ts doxas) is faith in the inappropriable: and once again, as the inadequation of the work or the inadequation at work. This faith receives itself from inappropriable glory, it is in glory in the sense that it comes from glory, where that glory provides faith its assurance, which is not a belief. The doxa of Jesus is his appearing: the fact that he is come, that the glory of his reign has appeared, already given as faith. Jesus is thus the name of this appearing—and he is this doxa qua name: the proper name of the inappropriable (that is, as we know, the very property of the name or, if you prefer, its divinity). And it is thus a name for any name, for all names, for the name of every other. The whole verse says: “take no account of persons in your faith in the Lord Jesus the Christ of glory,” in order to introduce considerations about the poor. In a certain sense, we can only attempt to understand, likewise, that it is a matter of not taking account of the person of Jesus (either his face, his prospon, or his persona).
Thus a deconstruction comes to pass even before construction, or during construction and at its very heart. The deconstruction does not annul the construction, and I have no intention to reject, in James’s name, the subsequent study of Christian construction—I don’t want to take out the gesture of “returning to the sources” and of “purification” of the origin, so obsessive in Christianity, monotheism, and the West. But this deconstruction—which will not be a retrocessive gesture, aimed at some sort of morning light—henceforth belongs to the principle and plan of construction. Deconstruction lies in its cement: it is in the hyphen, indeed it is of that hyphen.
For the present, here, of the hyphen in “Jesus-Christ” there remains but the dash that ties a name to glory. There remains this dash or hyphen, like a schema, in the sense of the conjunction of a concept and an intuition, but above all, in the more precise sense according to which, in this conjunction, each of the edges, exceeding the other, remains incommensurable with it. And so there remains the schema like a name, which is always the name of an other, the way the name James is the name of more than one James (as the other would say), always the name of an other, even if it were my own—and the doxa of what shows itself, the fame of the name so far as it puts faith to work, and a faith that creates a work, as at first blush, the deconstruction of religion as of the onto-theology that awaits it in its history—that awaits it to deconstruct itself therein.
But now, glory is only what it is insofar as it does not shine like gold or silver (unlike the jewels and the clothes of the rich man in verse 2:2). Glory is monstration, the exhibition of faith in the act (the deixon of the “show me your faith” carries the same semantic root as doxa), and yet for all that, glory is the exhibition of inadequation or incommensurability. It is in that way that glory is the anointing of the messiah: that is, the messiah exhibits the withdrawal of that with which he is anointed. This withdrawal is not a sacred separation: it is, quite precisely, the withdrawal of the sacred and the exhibition of the world to the world. To be sure, anointment is a consecration. But it is the non-sacrificial consecration that is not attached to offering the transgression of sacred separation, but which pours upon the world, in the world and as the world—as the work of creation—the very withdrawal of the divine.
James’s letter says, toward the end (5:8), that “the coming of the Lord is near [literally: has approached, has become near].” The parousia is nigh: this is to say that parousia is and is not in proximity. Proximity is what never ceases closing and opening itself, opening itself in closing (it is not promiscuity, which would be a mixture). Parousia is—to be set apart from the very thing that approaches, to be a gap with and in itself [l’écart de soi]. Parousia—or presence close to—differs and is deferred: in this way it is there, imminent, like death in life.
What is changing, in the instituting configuration of the West, is that man is no longer the mortal who stands before the immortal. He is becoming the dying one in a dying that doubles or lines the whole time of his life. The divine withdraws from its dwelling sites—whether these be the peaks of Mount Olympus or of Sinai—and from every type of temple. It becomes, in so withdrawing, the perpetual imminence of dying. Death, as the natural end of a mode of existence, is itself finite: dying becomes the theme of existence according to the always suspended imminence of parousia.
The conclusion of James’s letter recommends anointing the sick with the “prayer of faith” and the mutual confession of sins. The Catholic Church will found what it calls the sacrament of extreme unction on precisely this text, albeit much later. We must understand that the unction supposed to “heal,” as the text says, heals the soul and not the body (“the prayer of faith will save the ailing one, the Lord will pick him up, and the sins he committed will be forgiven him” 5:15). This is to say that unction signs not what will later be called a life eternal beyond death but the entry into death as into a finite parousia that is infinitely differed or deferred. This is the entry into incommensurable inadequation. In this sense, every dying one is a messiah, and every messiah a dying one. The dying one is no longer a mortal as distinct from the immortals. The dying one is the living one in the act of a presence that is incommensurable. All unction is thus extreme, and the extreme is always what is nigh: one never ceases drawing close to it, almost touching it. Death is tied to sin: that is, tied to the deficiency of a life that does not practice faith—that cannot practice it without failing or fainting—at the incommensurable height of dying. Yet despite this, faith gives; it gives dying precisely in its incommensurability (“to give death,” “the gift of death,” he says):5 a gift that it is not a matter of receiving in order to keep, any more than is love, or poverty, or even veridicity (which are, ultimately, the same thing as dying).
Not sacrifice, or tragedy, or resurrection—or, to be more precise, no one of these three schemas, insofar as it would give to death (one way or another) a proper density or consistency, whereas death is absolute inconsistency, if it is at all. (Hegel writes: “Death, if we would give a name to this non-effectivity.”) Each of these schemas gives consistency to death: sacrifice seals in blood the reconciliation of a sacred order; tragedy soaks in death the bloodied iron of destiny (the utter rending of the irreconcilable); resurrection heals and glorifies death within death itself. Whether in one mode or another, each of these schemas gives a figure to the defunct and substance to death itself.
No doubt, each of these schemas can be understood differently. Each one, or all three together, in some composition that remains to be set forth and that could well be, precisely, Christianity in its most elaborate form.
But we can draw from these still another thread or splinter; that is, an inconsistency of death that would be such that the mortal does not “sink” into it, and still less escapes into it or from it,6 but rather, remains safe from it at the precise point where he disappears qua mortal (and thus disappears “in death,” if you will: but in death there is nothing, no inside, no domain). At this point where he dies, the mortal touches, making the only possible contact, upon the sole immortality possible, which is precisely that of death: it is inconsistent, inappropriable. It is the proximity of presence. The only consistency is that of the finite so far as it finishes and finishes itself.7 For this reason, death can do nothing to the existent—except that, in its irreconcilable, inadequate way, it makes that existent exist, after a birth expelled it into death. Death thus puts the existent in the presence of existing itself.
In the Epistle of James, everything unfolds as though faith, far from being a belief in another life, that is, some belief in an infinite adequation between life and itself, were the setting in act [la mise en œuvre] of the inadequation in which and as which existence exists. How did faith, one day, with the West, start composing a decomposition of religion? That is what places that curious day still before us, ever before us, ahead of us, like a day that would be neither Jewish, nor Christian, nor Muslim—but rather like a trace or hyphen drawn to set space between every union, to untie every religion from itself.
Translated by Bettina Bergo