The Eternal Return of Religion

Abstract

At the opening of the first volume of his Deconstruction of Christianity, Nancy argues that “The much discussed ‘return of the religious,’ which denotes a real phenomenon, deserves no more attention than any other ‘return’” (1). This statement may seem paradoxical in light of Nancy’s extensive study of the logic of the return – including, of the divine – in texts such as “Of Divine Places,” Noli me tangere, Dis-Enclosure and Adoration. Nancy does pay considerable attention to something that, according to him, deserves none. In this paper, I examine Nancy’s critique of the “return of religion” in detail and argue that it would be a mistake to assume that Nancy’s understanding of the logic of the “return” is limited to the – largely uninteresting and even dangerous, indeed – return of the Same, just as it is a mistake to assume that the phenomenon known as the “return of religion” merely consists of the dialectical resurgence of a past religious fervour, a step backwards in history. According to Nancy, religion today returns in a way that radically breaks with the logic of the return of the Same and testifies to an eternal return of difference which, paraphrasing Nancy, opens religion to the limitlessness that constitutes its truth. It does, therefore, deserve our attention, yet only insofar as, paraphrasing Nancy, it opens religion to the limitlessness that constitutes its truth (Dis-Enclosure 1), thereby providing us with new resources to think religion in the singular-plural today.

Keywords:

• Jean-Luc Nancy
• the return of religion
• post(-)secularism
• the death of God

“How ‘to talk religion’? Of religion? Singularly of religion, today?” Derrida asks at the opening of “Faith and Knowledge.” “How dare we speak of it in the singular without fear and trembling, this very day? And so briefly and so quickly? Who would be so imprudent as to claim that the issue here is both identifiable and new?” (42).¹ At a time when religious fundamentalisms of all traditions and on all continents fight for the monopoly of religious truth, no definition seems as uncertain as that of religion. To be sure, the definitions proposed by Edward Burnett Tylor, William James and Emile Durkheim in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which all revolve around the notion of transcendent belief, never received a universal consensus. These have, nevertheless, been used in social sciences for more than a century and still constitute the theoretical ground on which secularism – and more generally any socio-political consideration of the religious – rests in the modern West. Over the past few decades, however, manifestations of the religious across the world have come as a challenge to these – overall widely accepted – definitions.

Globalisation and the emergence of New Age spirituality in Western countries, in particular, have raised the question of whether non-theistic devotion and ritual practices detached from supernatural belief can be described as religious. To this day, specialists remain divided on the question of whether Shintoism, Taoism, Buddhism and other non-Western forms of spirituality which globalisation has brought under the spotlight should be considered as religions, philosophical traditions or lifestyles.² As for spiritual approaches to environmentalism, vegetarianism and mindfulness developing at a fast pace across the West, governmental agencies such as the French Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Combat against Sectarian Aberrations are still to settle on whether these should be considered religious, sectarian or strictly profane.³ In Islam Faced with the Death of God [L’Islam face à la mort de Dieu], philosopher Abdennour Bidar suggests that they might be neither but rather testify to Westerners’ “fundamental spiritual dissatisfaction” (9) and longing for “a spiritual future somewhere beyond the ancient Divine and the present Nothingness, beyond the belief of some and the atheism of others” (37).⁴ Reformist currents of the three Abrahamic religions as well as recent work in the anthropology and the philosophy of religion however also contributed to challenging the idea that transcendent belief is conditio sine qua non of religion.⁵ Religious leaders and believers increasingly describe religion in terms of “lived experience” and “reflective faith,” arguably in reaction to the pressing need to distinguish religion from what is often presented – legitimately so or not – as its terrorist caricature; to sort the religious wheat from the chaff, as it were.

Far from confirming the traditional understanding of religion, then, the so-called “return of religion” at the forefront of international preoccupations – which belied the widely held belief in the pending disappearance of religion from the modern world – has blurred the boundaries of what was hitherto understood as religion. It has reshuffled the deck indeed, to the point that one may wonder not only whether it is justified to speak of current manifestations of religion across the world in terms of a return, but also whether it is necessary to keep speaking of religion in the singular, that is to say, by referring to a universal structure of religiosity distinct from politics, economics, art, and so on. That is the relativistic question over which contemporary philosophical, anthropological and sociological analysis of religion keeps stumbling. In Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Hent de Vries observes that religion “No longer [is] identifiable as a clearly demarcated field of research” (1), a tendency to which many scholars have contributed by re-evaluating the demarcation between theology and philosophy, revelation and reason, the sacred and the profane, in other words, between religion and its other. Exemplary studies include John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit’s Idolatry, Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion and Jean-Luc Marion’s Being Given, among other works from the so-called “theological turn of French phenomenology” (Janicaud). Yet, as anthropologist Michael Scott warns, because religion tends to become “a ‘floating signifier,’ a symbol emptied by a surfeit of possible and seemingly contradictory meanings […], [b]ecause ‘religion’ has the semantic capacity to capture aspects of almost anything, the concept threatens in many analytical contexts to disappear altogether” (860).

Why would that be an issue? Talal Asad calls for such a disappearance on the basis that considering religion as a determinate sphere of human reality is ethnocentric since it requires a transcendent divine relatively detachable from this-worldly matters (27–54). If this corresponds to Abrahamic religions – Christianity in particular, on which definitions of religion were modelled – , this contradicts immanent forms of spirituality, which do not conceive of religion as a separate institution. As Derrida observes in “Faith and Knowledge,”

There has not always been, […] nor is there always and everywhere, nor will there always and everywhere […] be something, a thing that is one and identifiable, identical with itself, which, whether religious or irreligious, all agree to call “religion.” (72–73)

This issue is most pertinent to secularism, a political principle which depends on the definition of religion as a determinate anthropological category. The secular separation of religion from the public sphere in order to guarantee the neutrality of the State and the freedom of consciousness fails to accommodate the variety of immanent spiritualities found across cultures and throughout history. No wonder Asad’s anti-essentialist position received wide attention and acclaim among anthropologists. “And yet, one tells oneself, one must still respond,” Derrida suggests (73). If essentialist definitions of religion may well be ethnocentric and, ultimately, unviable, according to Derrida, “one still must respond. And without waiting” (75). In today’s world of rampant religious violence, relativism remains weak in the face of the practical exigencies of peaceful coexistence: refusing to speak of religion in the singular does not make existing religious claims and violence any less real. Scholars and political leaders must be able to speak of – and better still, respectively study and organise their countries’ relation to – something that “is happening and so badly” (75).

In line with Derrida, I believe that the contemporary necessity to be more inclusive of the variety of spiritual experiences found across the world should not resolve itself in the dissolution of the concept of religion. One must be able to respond to the questions that the return of religion raises for us today. Not by falling into old traps, that is to say, by depicting the religious as a category sui generis overlooking the particularities of determinate historical religions (de Vries 3), but rather by attending to both its undeniable diversity and unshakeable singularity, simultaneously. It is out of this conviction that the present paper has been written, in order to outline one way in which one can still speak of religion in the singular today while taking into account the plurality of an issue that is, as Derrida rightly notes, both identifiable and new (9). To this end, I propose to think with Jean-Luc Nancy. This may seem surprising, considering that Nancy states at the opening of Dis-Enclosure that “The much discussed ‘return of the religious,’ which denotes a real phenomenon, deserves no more attention than any other ‘return’” (1). Does this mean that, for him, the “return of religion” is not worth considering, and that those questions which drive my paper are not worth asking? Absolutely not. In what follows, I demonstrate that Nancy’s point is far subtler, even providing us with new resources to think religion in the singular-plural today.

the return of the same

The first thing to note is that Nancy indexes the value and significance of the “return of religion” today to the logic of the return itself, a logic which he examines in “The Forgetting of Philosophy.” He observes that the latter depends on the interruption of a given state of equilibrium – a crisis – which is eventually overcome so that the lost equilibrium is found again. This means that the “return” comes with “two major implications. On the one hand, the crisis is deemed merely superficial, and, on the other hand, the return of some deep meaning must be understood as the return of the identical” (Nancy, “The Forgetting of Philosophy” 17). The logic of the return thus inscribes itself within a philosophical tradition which considers the principle of identity as the highest principle of thought, a tradition which Heidegger studies in Identity and Difference under the name of “ontotheology” (44). Ever since the first Greek philosophers, Heidegger observes, metaphysics has focused on identity and its correlates not only to the detriment of difference, but also to the point that difference has only ever been considered in its difference from identity. In other words, what matters to the Western eye is always identity first, then, Heidegger stresses, “what differs in the difference” (70). Yet even in that case, difference is usually considered as a superficial challenge to the status quo soon to give way to the return of a reinforced sense of identity. This is what Hegel theorised as dialectics. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel proposes that a subject’s sense of self-identity benefits from an exposure to negation (19). By extrapolating this dialectical logic to an approach to history, he contributed to presenting crises as minor challenges to the status quo giving access to higher degrees of identity. When considering the effects of crises, Western scholars are thus tempted to focus on what returns, rather than on what dramatically changed. Such is the case of the philosophical, anthropological or sociological studies evaluating the long-term effects of the death of God on religion in the West. These have so far focused on the crisis, followed by a resurgence, of past religious fervour – the return of the Same – rather than on the multiple changes in religiosity and its perception to which I have alluded. More precisely, these studies shed light on a dialectical re-centring on what is deemed essential in the traditional definition of religion, namely, transcendent belief, following trajectories which I respectively designate as post-secular and postsecular.⁶

On the one hand, the recent upsurge of fundamentalist currents in most religious traditions, from Islam to Protestantism, Judaism and Hinduism, is interpreted as the return of a devotion to transcendent beliefs which proponents of the “secularisation thesis” thought condemned to disappear. Much like the Freudian “return of the repressed,” whose violence is proportional to that of the repressive gesture,⁷ however, this return manifests as “a religious and hyperreligious upheaval or surrection,” as Nancy puts it in Dis-Enclosure (3). Secularism is violently rejected – a rupture symbolised by the hyphen in the term post-secular – in favour of the return, not simply of religion as it used to be understood before the rise of atheism, but to a purer version of religion. The latter, which comes down to an uncompromising reading of the dogma, even implies a rejection of the former. Salafism is an emblematic example with its pursuit of the supposedly lost pure religiosity of the first generations of Muslims. When coupled with Jihadism, this search for purity justifies the destruction of any “infidel,” whether atheist, of another religion than Islam or even Muslim but non-Salafi. Yet nothing guarantees that the fundamentalist interpretation of the Quran proposed by Salafism has anything to do with that of the first generations of Muslims, or that such a reading is “purer” than any other, whatever this means.

Fortunately, not all manifestations of the return of religion in the contemporary world prove so violent. Some are the result of efforts made by reformist currents at work within Abrahamic religions as well as by philosophers of religion to make space for religion in the secular age.⁸ Like post-secularism, however, this trajectory, which I refer to as “postsecular,” relies on a dialectical logic in that it attempts to save the perceived essence of religion, that is, the possibility of transcendent belief. To do so, the reformist currents and thinkers of this trajectory do not hesitate to transform, adapt, multiply and disseminate concepts such as the sacred, the divine, and their traditional sources so that they fit in a world dominated by the death of God. Contrary to what Michael Scott suggests, then, stretching the semantic capacity of religion does not necessarily end in the dissolution of the concept. Rather, I contend that such a gesture simultaneously re-centres on what is deemed most essential in religion while universalising it, an approach that is at least as ethnocentric as any approach to religion in the singular. I suspect that Jean-Luc Marion’s radicalisation of the phenomenological method developed by Husserl and Heidegger is exemplary of such a postsecular trajectory. According to Marion, whereas phenomenology is committed to exploring the thing in itself “while avoiding forging hypotheses, both on the relationship that links the phenomenon with the being of whom it is a phenomenon, and on the relationship that ties it with the I for whom it is a phenomenon,” as Lyotard’s definition goes (7),⁹ Husserl and Heidegger indexed the phenomenon and its appearance to the intentional horizon and the subject who “receives” the phenomenon, thereby failing to think the phenomenon as it appears. As Marion explains in Being Given, “the giving intuition does not yet authorize an absolutely unconditioned apparition, nor therefore the freedom of the phenomenon giving itself on its own basis” (185). He therefore proposes to re-centre phenomenology on unconditional phenomenality, that is to say, on revelation for, he writes, “the phenomenon, which happens as an event, takes on the figure of the revealed” (Marion, “L’événement, le phénomène et le révélé” 24).¹⁰ I argue that, by granting revelation such a primary phenomenological value, Marion participates in a postsecular return of religion. His radicalisation of phenomenology re-inscribes the possibility of revelation at the heart of every phenomenon, thereby guaranteeing its relevance in the modern secular world.¹¹

Whether post-secular or postsecular, then, there does seem to be a twofold return of religion in the contemporary world. What Nancy suggests, however, is that “it is not certain that an interpretation in terms of ‘return’ […] is sufficient, provided that thought is not too lazy” (“The Forgetting of Philosophy” 13). The definitional crisis evoked in the first section supports this claim: religion today, or at least our Western perception of it, does show signs of an irreversible change for which the ever-growing body of literature on the “return of religion” does not account. Nancy goes so far as to argue that the “return” on which Western scholars have been focusing over the past few decades consists less in a spontaneous return of religion than in an artificial fear-driven return to religion in reaction to these changes. As he remarks in “The Forgetting of Philosophy,” “All the modern problematics of difference attract the protestations of the thinkers of the return, who see in them a destruction or frustration of identity” (64). Out of fear of the unknown, proponents of the “return of religion” would artificially minimise the contemporary transformations of the religious in favour of the comforting – but simplistic – return to identity. Besides, given that identity is a determining principle of Western thought, one could suggest that this return to religion, which is but a retreat to identity, partakes of what Derrida calls “globalatinisation,” that is, of the ethnocentric diffusion of what is at root Latin and increasingly becomes “European-Anglo-American in its idiom” (“Faith and Knowledge” 79). That is what Nancy touches on in Dis-Enclosure where, looking at the contemporary confrontation between the West and Islamic fundamentalism, he argues that “th[e] Unifying, Unitary, and Universal model [of the former], also Unidimensional, and finally Unilateral […] has made possible the symmetrical and no less nihilistic mobilization of a monotheistic and no less unilateralist model [that is, Islamic fundamentalism]” (41).

the deaths of god

Against this fear-driven return to identity, Nancy argues – quite cryptically, admittedly – that “Among the phenomena of repetition, resurgence, revival, or haunting, it is not the identical but the different that invariably counts the most” (Dis-Enclosure 1). More specifically, he suggests that “the question should […] be asked, ceaselessly and with new risks, what ‘secularization’ might denote, inevitably, other than a mere transferal of the identical” (1).¹² Whereas discourses on the return of religion tend to depict secularisation as a momentary crisis and the death of God as “some past [event] that quite simply did not take place” (Nancy, “The Forgetting of Philosophy” 22), he suspects that this event has played a determining role in the transformations that have recently challenged the traditional definition of religion. This seems to be confirmed by Charles Taylor who, in A Secular Age, remarks that the diffusion of atheism in the West turned the hitherto axiomatic belief in a form of transcendence into a mere option. “The shift to secularity,” he explains “[…] consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others” (Taylor 3). Taylor describes this shift in terms of the installation of an “immanent frame” over Western minds, for the latter “come to understand [their] lives as taking place within a self-sufficient immanent order” (543).¹³ Because it seems to have first liberated thought from the hitherto axiomatic notion of transcendence, the death of God appears as a privileged starting point for any attempt at appreciating and accounting for the plurality of religion(s) today, beyond the sole limits of transcendence. A quick look at the history of the concept of the death of God however goes against this observation: God’s death does not seem to have really challenged the axiomatic value of transcendence. If anything, it has emphasised its dialectical resilience.

If the death of God is now generally associated with the emergence of atheism in a world previously dominated by theism, indeed, the concept was first theorised as part of the Christian doctrine. The death of Christ on the cross constitutes not only the birth-act of Christianity – what distinguishes it from Judaism – but also the heart of its dogma. It is only by exposing Himself to His negation that Christ may revive, and His sacrifice redeem humankind. God’s death is, therefore, not a threat to Christianity; rather the opposite, it takes part in and reinforces its moral order.¹⁴ It is this dialectical structure that one finds today in the postsecular return of religion. Drawing attention to the oecumenical efforts of reformist Christianity, Derrida observes in “Faith and Knowledge” that: “When one hears the official representatives of the religious hierarchy, beginning with […] the Pope, speak of this sort of ecumenical reconciliation, one also hears […] the announcement or reminder of a certain ‘death of God’” (79). In The Metamorphosis of Finitude, Emmanuel Falque makes a similar point about Marion’s treatment of God’s death. For Marion, Falque argues,

That God is dead is […] not, or is no longer, a simple profession of atheism, but it is the highest truth of a Christianity properly understood – that is to say, in one centered on the mystery of the death and the resurrection of Christ. (31)

“Some people, however,” Falque continues, “will see this recycling of the famous phrase as a kind of trick” (31). Is it not what dialectics as a whole is, a sleight of hand?

As Gilles Deleuze observes in Nietzsche and Philosophy, however, by staging for the first time the putting to death of God, Christianity did open thought to a world in which God is not. The Christian dogma thus “secretes its own atheism” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 154), a second death of God, thereby confirming Nietzsche’s statement in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that “When gods die, they always die many kinds of deaths” (211). This second death of God, however, proved no less dialectical than the first. As Deleuze explains in “On the Death of Man and Superman,” the disappearance of the Christian God threatened to exhaust the transcendent values that supported human existence. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thinkers such as Auguste Comte, Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Feuerbach therefore modelled new values based on human finitude (Deleuze, “On the Death of Man and Superman” 126–27). Thus was born the humanistic idea of Man in Western philosophy. Yet as Deleuze rhetorically asks, “by putting man in God’s place, do we abolish the essential, that is to say, the place?” (Nietzsche and Philosophy 88–89). In Difficult Atheism, Christopher Watkin highlights that the atheistic death of God merely replaced theological values with humanistic or rationalist ones, the God-Man with the Man-God, thereby “explicitly rejecting but implicitly imitating theology’s categories of thinking” (2). One may therefore criticise Taylor’s use of the concept of “immanent frame.” The “frame” of secularism is only immanent insofar as it does not depend on a belief in God but it does still appeal to atheistic figures of transcendence, as testified by the emergence of quasi-religious humanist or rationalist currents in most Western countries.¹⁵ Most emblematic of all is Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being and the installation in November 1793 of the “goddess of reason” on the altar of Notre Dame.¹⁶

As Roberto Esposito stresses in “Flesh and Body in the Deconstruction of Christianity” [“Chair et corps dans la déconstruction du christianisme”], then, it appears that both the Christian and atheistic deaths of God are “of God, in both the objective and subjective sense of the genitive; these deaths, after all, if not above all, belong to him from the beginning in the figure of the God dying on the cross” (157).¹⁷ This confirms Nietzsche’s intuition that “God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow” (The Gay Science 109). The definitional crisis evoked earlier leaves no doubt, however: the notion of transcendence, as it is traditionally understood, is not sufficient to account for the plurality of religious experiences in the contemporary world, much like, as Derrida rightly notes in Paper Machine, “Church attendance aren’t the only way of measuring religion” (116). There must, therefore, be more to the death of God than what mainstream interpretations so far have suggested. By proposing that the “return of religion” deserves no more attention than any other “return,” Nancy calls us to finally realise that the death of God must be interpreted in a way that does not leave His shadow intact, but rather fosters non-recuperable difference. He argues, in other words, that it is now time to do justice to the second, often forgotten, part of Zarathustra’s exclamation: “God is dead! God remains dead!” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science 120).

the deconstruction of monotheism

To do so, Nancy turns to the successive episodes of death of God which facilitated the passage from polytheism to monotheism, as well as from monotheism to atheism, and remarks that, if these largely follow the schema of the return, they also “mar[k] out intaglio […] the place of what will finally have to abandon the simplistic alternative of theism or atheism” (Noli me tangere 108).

He observes that the flight of the gods of polytheism functioned as a retreat of the gods from effective presence in the world, a retreat which rendered truth unnarratable. “When the gods have withdrawn,” Nancy argues in “One Day, the Gods Withdraw … ,” “their history can no longer be simply true, nor their truth simply narrated. The presence that would attest to the existence of what is narrated as well as the veracity of the speech that narrates is lacking” (26). Truth and narration, logos and muthos thus emerge as distinct categories. Yet Nancy warns that the latter “separate in such a way that it’s their separation that establishes them both” (26). What one is left with is “a scene of mourning and desire” (27–28); humanity mourns the loss of (divine) truth, the loss of foundation. It is faced with a perceived finitude which Hegel terms “unhappy consciousness” (126). Thus started the disenchantment of the West: before the gods’ flight, the adequacy of logos and muthos allowed for the existence of magic, whose spells function as the unfolding of truth in language, and myth, which consists in the structuration in language of a cosmos seen as pure, proper, well-ordered – as per the etymology of mundus in Latin – , that is to say, as Logos. The withdrawal of divine presence, however, came with a loss of foundation which exhausted both magic and mythical speech. Or did it? The end of polytheism also marked the advent of monotheism. Nancy warns that this should not be interpreted as a mere numeric reduction of the number of the gods, but rather as a profound transformation of divinity itself. Westerners eager to find consolation for their finitude recuperated divine “absencing” by means of a dialectical gesture of abstraction and hyperessentialisation. “From a present power or person,” Nancy explains, “it changes divinity into a principle, a basis, and/or a law, always by definition absent or withdrawn in the depths of being” (Dis-Enclosure 22). This is exemplified by the “half-proper, half-common” name of the God of monotheism (Nancy, “Of Divine Places” 116). Whereas polytheist religions give proper names to their gods – whether it be Osiris, Zeus, Neptune, Quetzalcoatl or Amaterasu – , monotheist religions refer to God using the common name which designates all divine entities. As Nancy remarks, “It is as if we were to say that the name of a ‘poplar’ tree is simply tree […] [God] is not the proper name of someone, but names the divine as such” (God, Justice, Love, Beauty 11). The God of monotheism emerges as the alpha and omega of the world. It is, therefore, insufficient to suggest that the gods’ flight deprived the West of (divine) foundation.

Yet it is not sufficient to approach the advent of the monotheistic God as a mere transferal of the identical either, for in addition to referring to God using a common name, the three monotheisms deny the simple possibility of nomination (Nancy et al. 329). To be sure, in Judaism, God has a name, but this name cannot be spoken. In Islam, God even has a hundred names, but ninety-nine of these are mere superlatives while the hundredth designates God as the Unknowable. As for Christianity, the name “Jesus” only applies to a fraction of the Trinitarian divine. In “Of Divine Places,” Nancy warns that this lack of divine names should not be mistaken for “a surface lack concealing and manifesting the depths of a sacred held in reserve” (120). Terminological instability rather testifies to the inability of the divine to inaugurate itself as God-Logos. The divine “strangles itself […] with a literature that is its own impossible” (Nancy, “One Day, the Gods Withdraw … ” 29). It emerges as an open mouth choking on the word “God” as “the name of an impossible Name” (Nancy, “Dei Paralysis Progressiva” 52). The monotheistic sublation of divine “absencing” thus appears to fail to reach a point of closure. For Nancy, this is most visible in Christianity. Unlike in Judaism and Islam, the Christian God is literally put to death on the cross. The doctrine of God’s incarnation has also been read as a retreat of God from Himself, while God’s Trinitarian nature prevents Him from being viewed as a sufficient subject or an all-absorbing totality. Yet by withdrawing the ground under God’s feet, Christianity paves the way for its own exhaustion. That is what Nancy calls “the deconstruction of Christianity,” playing on both senses of the genitive: the deconstruction of Christianity (subjective genitive) leads to the deconstruction of Christianity (objective genitive). He therefore agrees with Marcel Gauchet: Christianity is “the religion of the egress from religion” (Nancy, Dis-Enclosure 146).

This self-deconstruction of the monotheistic divine should not come as a surprise. In “Atheism and Monotheism,” Nancy stresses that, insofar as it is not given but posited, a foundation such as the God-Logos can only be established as an exception to its own rule – contrary to everything that follows it, it cannot be accounted for on its own terms – or else it sinks into an infinite regression, constantly trying to confirm its principle, the principle of its principle, and so on and so forth (Dis-Enclosure 22–23). The unicity of the God of monotheism was therefore condemned to be subsumed by the unity of the principle, to withdraw in the depths of being, thereby facilitating the passage from monotheism to atheism. The sublation of divine “absencing” that gave rise to monotheism carried within itself the seeds of its own exhaustion, and more generally, to quote Noli me tangere again, “of what will finally have to abandon the simplistic alternative of theism or atheism” (108). Given that mainstream atheism has only replaced God with humanist and rationalist placeholders which similarly stand for the alpha and omega of the world, indeed, it similarly lacks a confirmation of their own principle. In turn, “the very principle of the premise […] collapses by itself and, in this collapse, signals the possibility, even the requirement of and the call for, a wholly other, anarchic configuration” (24). On Nancy’s account, then, if the history of religion in the West is driven by “the necessity of a resurrection that restores both man and God to a common immanence” (“Inoperative Community” 10), as testified by Westerners’ repeated attempt at self-founding, this resurrection – or transferal of the identical – however never quite takes place.¹⁸

the anastasis of the dead god

It is here that Noli me tangere can be seen to be of key significance. In this 2003 essay, Nancy stresses that resurrection need not to be reduced to the return of the Same. He draws attention to an episode from the Gospel of John in which the arisen Jesus instructs Mary Magdalene not to touch him. This instruction is surprising considering that Jesus had never refused to be touched before. Nancy therefore suggests that death must have altered Christ’s body, rendering it untouchable. He even wonders: “Is it not thus that the dead appear? […] – [as] the appearing of that which or of he who can no longer properly appear[?]” (Nancy, Noli me tangere 28). Evoking Zarathustra’s cry that “God remains dead!,” Nancy argues that Christ’s “noli me tangere” testifies to the fact that the dead God remains dead, which leads to a recasting of the Christian thinking of resurrection. The latter should not be seen as death vanquished, that is to say, as the return of the Same, but rather as the raising up – anastasis, in Greek – of the dead God. In “Dei Paralysis Progressiva,” Nancy had already interpreted Nietzsche’s paralysis as the anastasis of the one who has passed: “the scene in Turin, shows us someone who ‘attended his own funeral twice’” (50). Both the paralysed and arisen body signal the appearing of the disappearing; not the rebirth of the one who has passed, but “the raising of a salute, of an ‘adieu’” (Nancy, Dis-Enclosure 102).

To be sure, Nancy makes a rod for his own back by using the term Wink to speak of this salute. While this term designates a farewell gesture, as illustrated by the “Winke, Winke” of German children saying goodbye (Nancy, Dis-Enclosure 184), it is also imbued with redemptive potential. Heidegger argues, indeed, that the Wink signals the passing of the “last god” (Contributions to Philosophy 288). Despite his assertion that “Here no redemption takes place” (290), however, Nancy is quick to note that the passing of God unfolds as a mere transferal of a self-identical divine from presence to absence, from life to death, thereby dialectically guaranteeing its survival (Dis-Enclosure 115).¹⁹ In Nancy’s thinking, by contrast, what waves at us is not God Himself but the dead God. Death is the true subject of resurrection. Unlike Heidegger, then, Nancy speaks of the passing of God in both senses of the genitive: God passes and is Himself passed. Playing on the French word “pas,” which refers both to a step and a gesture of negation, he writes that “God is the passerby and the step [pas] of the passerby […] which, in passing, winkt and differentiates itself from itself” (Nancy, Dis-Enclosure 115). If God, in Nancy’s thinking, may still be referred to as the last god, then, it is only “in the sense of extreme, and that extremity, being the extremity of the divine, delivers [délivre] the divine from itself in both senses of the expression: it frees it from the theological and disengages it from its own gesture” (114). Nancy thereby breaks with dialectical approaches to the death of God focusing rather on the movement by which God surpasses Himself according to a transcendence “that does not go outside itself in transcending” (The Muses 34–35), a transimmanence.

Such a return of the Same to its own differentiation resonates with the rewriting of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return as a radical contestation of identity popularised by thinkers of the so-called second and third “French moment of Nietzsche” (Le Rider).²⁰ In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche describes eternal recurrence as a working hypothesis encouraging human beings to live their lives in such a way that they would not want anything to be different should they have to relive it (178). As Jeremy Biles elucidates in Ecce Monstrum, Nietzsche thus lays the ground for “the rationally motivated production of an identity” (65). In the twentieth century, a number of French thinkers, starting with Pierre Klossowski and Georges Bataille, have however reworked the concept in terms of the return of a differentiating gesture.²¹ I argue that Nancy follows in their footsteps by approaching the resurrection of Christ as a metaphor for the fact that nothing ever returns but what does not return, which is another way of saying that nothing remains self-identical in its own return or that, as he stressed as early as in “The Forgetting of Philosophy,” “difference is what makes identity possible” (64). By locating the divine in the “pas” of the passerby, indeed, Nancy sheds light on the fact that the sense of unity that allows one to speak of the divine in the singular occurs in and as the passing, through the anastasis of the step (Dis-Enclosure 115); its continuity unfolds as the Rimbaldian eternity found again through the return of each passing instant (120). A helpful illustration is found in The Evidence of the Film, in which Nancy highlights that the continuity of a film arises from the discontinuation of images coming one after the other (60). I contend that the divine, in Nancy’s thinking, similarly unfolds as the eternally recurring step not beyond [pas au-delà] God.

Nancy thereby shares Foucault’s assessment in “Preface to Transgression” that God’s death in the modern world “should [not] be understood as the end of his historical reign or as the finally delivered judgement of his nonexistence, but as the now constant space of our experience” (31–32), a constancy which should only ever be understood as the eternal return of the discontinuous, as infinite inconstancy. For Nancy, indeed, the Western history of religion unfolds as a process of secularisation through successive unsuccessful dialectical deaths of God. Far from offering some consolation for unhappy consciousness by identifying a foundation on to which humanity can hold, these episodes highlight that gestures of self-founding always carry within themselves “a gesture of an opening or reopening in the direction of what must have preceded all construction” (189). For François Raffoul, this gesture which Nancy calls “dis-enclosure” is extrapolated from Heidegger’s Destruktion: far from proposing a dialectical ascent towards higher truths, dis-enclosure unfold as “a ‘descent,’ as Heidegger would write in his ‘Letter on Humanism,’ into the poverty of essence” (50). Crucially, by exposing the difference or finitude that always already prevents the return of identity, Nancy points at “a future for the world that would no longer be either Christian or anti-Christian, either monotheist or atheist or even polytheist, but that would advance precisely beyond all these categories” (Dis-Enclosure 34), beyond all -theisms. Hence his assertion that “It is not our concern to save religion, even less to return to it” (1).

postsecular temptations

Nancy’s insistence that dis-enclosure is found exemplarily in the self-deconstruction of the Christian God however threatens to circumscribe his thinking within a postsecular horizon of determination. As Derrida observes in On Touching, following Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity, “Dechristianization will be a Christian victory” (54), thereby guaranteeing Christianity’s relevance in the modern world. The fact that Nancy illustrates his rewriting of resurrection by turning to an episode from the Gospel of John also raises the question of whether his approach to the anastasis of the dead God should be considered as yet another Christian parabola. This accusation finds strength in the fact that, though Nancy asserts that he stands “completely outside any religion” (God, Justice, Love, Beauty 12), he received a Jesuit education and has been involved in the Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne. To be sure, his relationship with Christianity hit a wall in 1956, when Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne was condemned by the Pope for its support of the decolonisation of Algeria. “It was an earthquake for all of the activists,” Nancy recalls. “The question then became whether to stay or leave” (The Possibility of a World 10). Though he claims to have chosen neither option to focus, instead, on the study of “[h]ow and to what degree […] we hold to Christianity” (Nancy, Dis-Enclosure 139), his suggestion that “all our thought is Christian through and through” (142) seems enough to justify accusations of residual Christianism.

I argue, however, that this interpretation does not withstand an examination of Nancy’s recent works. In Adoration, in particular, Nancy nuances his position with regards to Christianity by clarifying sentences from Dis-Enclosure which he recognises as misleading, such as that which states that “the gesture of deconstruction […] is only possible within Christianity” (148). He explains that he never meant to imply that deconstruction is essentially Christian but rather wanted to suggest that it is a deeper truth than Christianity found within the latter. Building on the Bible study training he received as a youth, which presented the Bible as an infinite reserve of sense, including of sense exceeding institutional teachings, he suggested in one of his first published essays, “Catechism of Perseverance” [“Cathéchisme de persévérance”], that “beyond belonging to the Church, there remain[s] something for which one should persevere” (Nancy, The Possibility of a World 12). Four decades later, Nancy continues to draw attention to “the movement that this name [of Christianity] has covered” (Adoration 22),²² in both senses of the term, that is to say, what Christianity, through its ambiguous combination of gestures of self-deconstruction and dialectical attempts at self-founding, included and masked, indicated and obscured, namely, the fact that the divine fails to inaugurate itself as founding and essential, and that humanity is thereby abandoned to finitude without any possibility of consolation. Nancy’s clarification has however largely failed to convince for, as Watkin observes in Difficult Atheism, “the very move of discerning in Christianity a truth deeper than itself once more repeats a Christian move, namely the opposition between the outward appearance and the heart (kardia) and a preference for the latter” (40). That is not to say that Nancy’s “catechism of perseverance” should be seen as a post-secular “Rousseauism of Christianity” seeking to return to a “purer” version of Christianity (Dis-Enclosure 150), but rather that he extrapolates the dis-enclosing gesture from the internal logic of Christianity, as per his Christian education.

One should keep in mind, however, that Nancy identifies deconstruction in other religions than Christianity. As early as in “Of Divine Places,” he remarks that Judaism and Islam deny the possibility of naming God in much the same way as Christianity. From the mid-1990s, he even describes dis-enclosure as a general structure of religiosity running through every religion, a term which he reserves for institutions of salvation. Commenting on a draft of this paper, he has confirmed that, when it comes to the religious, “I am increasingly telling myself that there is indeed something identical with itself (to speak against Derrida on this point) which returns everywhere and always” (unpublished).²³ This intuition was already visible in “Of Divine Places,” where Nancy draws attention to Marion’s postsecular dissemination of the divine so that it fits into the modern world and argues that this gesture dissolves into “polyatheism,” one being left without “any statement about the divine that can henceforth be distinguished, strictly speaking, from another about ‘the subject’ (or its ‘absence’), ‘desire,’ ‘history,’ ‘others,’ ‘the Other,’ ‘being,’ ‘speech,’ ‘the sublime,’ ‘community,’ and so on and so forth” (112). Marion preserves God under an infinite number of names, his definition of the religious thereby “show[ing] by its breadth its insufficiency operating the partition that we expect” (Nancy, “Religion Without Past nor Future” [“Religion sans passé ni avenir”] 2).²⁴ Yet by criticising Marion’s dissolution of the concept of religion, Nancy demonstrates a desire for a definition of the religious in the singular.

Crucially, whereas this definition is usually framed in terms of transcendent belief, that is to say, in terms of adherence to a signifying message, albeit without proof, Nancy focuses on faith understood as trust without postulation, as per the Latin etymology fides, which also gave “fidelity.” In “The Judeo-Christian,” he illustrates the distinction between “faith” and “belief” by drawing attention to two different readings of the story of Abraham, by Paul and James the Less. Paul, Nancy observes, focuses on the fact that Abraham believed that God could give him a son, “[h]is act thus depended on a knowledge postulate” (Dis-Enclosure 53). James, by contrast, emphasises the fact that Abraham decided to offer Isaac in sacrifice without postulating anything. “In a certain sense,” Nancy notes, “James’s Abraham believes nothing” (53). Unlike belief, faith is about being disposed to trust what remains unavailable, to let go of assurance. This recalls Christ’s instruction to Mary Magdalene. Turning to the Greek of John, Nancy remarks in Noli me tangere that the phrase “Me mou haptou” implies a refusal of being held back from passing. Christ’s instruction may therefore be translated thus: “don’t try to touch or to hold back what essentially distances itself” (16). Christ calls Mary Magdalene to respect the infinite passing of the identical. In “Religion Without Past nor Future” [“Religion sans passé ni avenir”], Nancy argues that this “somehow non-religious truth of religion” (3), “is unknown to no form of religion in the West, including Islam, nor to Buddhism, Hinduism or Shintoism” (4). He even identifies faith in activities as diverse as the practice of music, the commitment to a social cause or the raising of a child. To be sure, these activities may be performed according to calculating determinations, much as religions tend to obscure their faithful heart with gestures of self-founding, such as the establishment of transcendent beliefs. Only when these activities come with a withdrawal of assurance, opening “a world without religion if we understand by this word the observance of behaviours and representations that respond to a claim for […] assurance, destination, accomplishment” (Nancy, Adoration 39), may they be considered as faith-ful. From this, Derrida should have deduced that there can be no “victory” in Nancy’s thinking. There is no religion to return to, only the opening to the withdrawal of ground.

The question remains, however, whether this faithful gesture is guilty of establishing itself as a new foundation. We have already noted that referring to the religious as a universal anthropological category is an ethnocentric move which flattens out the plurality of the religious through an artificial but comforting privileging of the principle of identity. The question therefore arises whether, by dodging one postsecular bullet, namely, the recuperation within the limits of a given religious revelation (here, Christianity), Nancy is hit by another one, namely, the identification, like Heidegger before him, of a general structure of revealability found at the heart of, and conditioning, every revelation. As Derrida explains, according to Heidegger, “[f]or some revelation to take place, Dasein must be able to open itself to revelation and this revealability [Offenbarkeit, in German] is, let’s say, ontologically – not chronologically, not logically – prior to Offenbarung, to revelation” (Sherwood and Hart 43). Derrida denounces this move as a dialectical return to religion by means of “a theology with and without God” (“How to Avoid Speaking” 128), without the God of Offenbarung, but with the prime mover that is Offenbarkeit, whom Heidegger associates with the figure of the “last god” (Contributions to Philosophy 289). Derrida warned Nancy against this trap: “Are you not, in some way, replacing the fullness of the unique god of monotheism by the opening to which this god must himself yield?” (Derrida and Nancy 76). In line with Heidegger, Nancy does describe faith as openness to the unavailable and even writes in Dis-Enclosure that, through the self-deconstruction of God, “what is revealed is the revealable” (148).²⁵ Does his approach to faith in the singular fall guilty of erecting a new natural religion of the Open with a capital O, then?

a singular plurality

I argue that an answer to this question is found in “The Judeo-Christian.” Insofar as he approaches faith as trust without postulation, Nancy decisively breaks with both Offenbarkeit and Offenbarung as structures of unveiling. Faith, in Nancy’s thinking, is not even between or before the decision for the primacy of Offenbarung or Offenbarkeit, as Derrida’s khôra arguably still is through the suspension of these two poles in undecidability.²⁶ Rather, it is otherwise than this decision; it is the act of decision itself, the authentically free act of decision that breaks with presupposition and all criteria of decision, which Nancy has called “the decision of existence” (“The Decision of Existence” 82). Nancy’s thinking, much as James’s epistle, does not postulate anything, including about the supposed essence of faith. It does even not carry within itself the possibility, albeit suspended, of an unveiling to come. Rather, it is “wholly given over […] to the act of faith” (Nancy, Dis-Enclosure 48).

Nancy does however still speak of faith in the singular. This should not come as a surprise given that, as an attitude of fidelity to the infinite passing of the identical, Nancean faith necessarily shares the latter’s continuous discontinuity. I contend that the sense of continuity that justifies Nancy’s approach to faith in the singular arises from the recurring performation of singular acts of faith – in the plural. In Being Singular Plural, Nancy does remark that, in Latin, singuli only exists in the plural for singularity “designates the ‘one’ as belonging to ‘one by one.’ The singular is primarily each one and, therefore, also with and among all the others” (32). This resonates with his refusal to subsume singular artforms, from photography and poetry to music, portraiture and dance, into a unified theory of Art with a capital A. If one cannot deny that a sense of continuity emerges from the plurality of singular artforms, Nancy remarks in “Arts Make Themselves Against Each Other” [“Les arts se font les uns contre les autres”] that “this identity […] is only formed by the ensemble of practices in all their differences, without this ‘ensemble’ absorbing even a little bit their heterogeneity” (164).²⁷ I argue that this may be extrapolated to Nancy’s thinking of faith. He did recently admit that, for him, the religious in the singular is “something identical with itself […] which returns everywhere and always” (unpublished).²⁸ Nancean faith does not, therefore, carry the possibility of redemption: it does not “save” God from passing by establishing the primacy of Offenbarkeit, the Open with a capital O, but rather accompanies God’s infinite passage through the eternal recurrence of singular acts of faith, in the plural. It thereby proves faithful to – and echoes – the divine adieu, waving goodbye in turn, in the form of what Derrida has called a “salut […] without salvation” (On Touching 310).

This explains Nancy’s assertion in “Of Divine Places” that, in his thinking, “There is no return of the religious: there are the contortions and the turgescence of its exhaustion” (136). In Difficult Atheism, Watkin reads this sentence stands as an assertion that there will or should be a complete exhaustion of religion and argues that “Nancy […] must finally acknowledge the impossibility of atheism’s ‘last step’ to completion and consistency, and thereby come up short of a post-theological integration” (123). It should now be clear, however, that completion and consistency were never what Nancy looked for. He has recently clarified that, though he stands by his assertion that “an open world is […] a world without religion” (Nancy, Adoration 39), he understands that one may feel the need to use the name “God.” “Why even outside of religion is it not so easy to do without naming god in one way or another?” Nancy asks in God, Justice, Love, Beauty (16). “Because it […] is necessary to be able to address oneself to or to relate to this dimension [i.e., the passing of the identical]” (16). Far from vouching for the disappearance of all transcendent religions, then, Nancy admits that there must still be institutions, structures and scaffoldings (Forestier).²⁹ Yet he calls us to cultivate the continuously discontinuous experience of the religious exhaustion of religion from within these institutional constructions through the repeated performation of singular acts of faith. By shedding light on the fact that difference is what makes identity possible, Nancy draws our attention to the struction in “construction”: “it is not ‘construction’ if the ‘con-’ designates architectonic reason […] It is a jumble or an ‘agglomeration’ […] in which all goes in every direction” (Forestier). Constructions including institutional religions are only ever the sum of a plurality of singular acts of faith that always already – and must unceasingly again – challenge what is too often perceived as the unity of their edifice. For Nancy, then, one should never take values, dogmas or institutions for granted for:

the truth of “god” awaits us elsewhere than in fetishism […], truly elsewhere, to the infinite […] The “infinite” is nothing huge or unreachable. It is simply this: to settle for nothing determined, fixed, identified, named with a supposedly proper name. (“God, Charlie, Nobody” [“Dieu, Charlie, Personne”])^30,31

I argue that Nancy thus offers a way out of the definitional impasse evoked in the introduction: one can still speak of religion in the singular(-plural), without compromising its diversity. Both immanent and transcendent forms of religiosity do have a place in Nancy’s thinking, yet only to the extent that one keeps acting in such a way that they are not left to close in on themselves, whether on a dogmatic structure or a supposed “essence” of religion. Nancy thereby lays the ground for an inclusive religious coexistence, at least more so than that currently secured by secularism – he provides us with “an elementary guide for the use of all in a secular regime of denominational plurality,” as he puts it in “God, Charlie, Nobody” [“Dieu, Charlie, Personne”] – while countering the dogmatism and universalism that feeds post(-)secular currents today.

What one should learn from Nancy’s thinking up to its most recent developments, then, is not that the so-called “return of religion” in the contemporary world does not deserve much attention. It would be a mistake to assume that Nancy’s understanding of the “return” is limited to the return to identity, just as it is a mistake to assume that the phenomenon referred to as the “return of religion” merely consists of the dialectical resurgence of the Same, a step backwards in history. Nancy makes really clear that the “return of religion” should be carefully studied and appreciated for the way in which it breaks with the logic of the return of the Same and testifies to an eternal return of difference which, paraphrasing Nancy, open religion to the limitlessness that constitutes its truth (Dis-Enclosure 1). I argue that recognising this is necessary in order to understand that contemporary spiritual developments – and the secularisation of which they are a manifestation – participate in a radical transformation of the Western understanding of the term “religion.” I therefore make the case that Nancy should be considered as a most rigorous thinker of the (eternal) return of religion, in the singular-plural.

echo by jean-luc nancy

I am infinitely grateful to Marie Chabbert for having grasped so well the finest and sharpest extremity of the effort which consists in continuing to pursue – to persevere, I would say, using a term formerly used by the “catechism of perseverance” (the catechism of those who wished to pursue further instruction after completing the formation required in preparation for communion and subsequently confirmation, i.e., complete integration into the church – the Catholic as well as the Protestant one, with a few variations). To persevere, not in staging a return, but in the tension and desire for an “eternal return” of nothing less than – if I may say so – eternity itself. The one that Rimbaud says was found again in “the sea mingled with the sun.” In other words, perhaps a night and an engulfment – but isn’t it precisely to a night, a non-knowledge, a sensibility of the insensible that one must be waking up?

If what disappeared with “God” is the representation of a power (puissance) and origin – so, stripped of this representation and with it of all representation, we reach an abandonment that cannot but have to do with the mystical demands of triple monotheism (and, mutatis mutandis, of Buddhism, which could very well be its oriental version). I indeed mean demands, not necessarily outpourings. When Meister Eckhart prays to keep us “free of God,” he is less adopting an approach centred around outpouring than one of rigour. To be delivered from God means to experience that “something other than thought itself can be manifested in thought” (according to a formula by Valéry, a non-religious spirit if ever there was one). In a sense, this sentence takes up or replays Anselm’s argument, from which the absurd “proof for the existence of God” was drawn and so well dismantled by Kant.

We are no longer in the order of predicating anything of the subject by way of attributes, we are beyond language and conceptuality but at the heart of what animates and drives them: an experience, not of transcendence, but of being pushed, projected beyond what can be grasped and beyond being, we are instead ourselves grasped and carried away.

Now, the situation today – for Western man, but what is not Western nowadays? – is the impossibility of this experience; or rather, and this is more serious, its transformation into the experience of man being surpassed in a “transhuman,” designating nothing other than the techno-economic expansion of a self-productive and self-consuming – in other words, self-destructive – machine.

Of course, this could mean that human experience has had its time, and with it all that has suffered its misery. But even that, even a last breath could still let itself be carried away divinely … nowhere.

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All emphases in quotes are in the original sources, except where indicated otherwise.

2 See Billington 1–8.

3 On the question of whether the appellation “New Age” should be reserved for the spiritual movement which developed in the 1970s and disappeared twenty years later or should be extended to these recent forms of spiritual commitments, see MacKian 7 and Kemp 179.

4 I translate all the quotes from Bidar’s work.

5 See, for instance, Lopez, Taylor, Latour, Benkirane, and Feneuil and Schmitt.

6 A similar play on hyphenation has been used to distinguish the “post-colonial” from the “postcolonial” (see Hiddleston 3–4 and Shohat 101), and in relation to other “posts,” including post(-)modernism and post(-)structuralism (see Bennington and Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms”).

7 On the parallel between the Freudian “return of the repressed” and the return of religion, see Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” 62 and Mercier.

8 See McCaffrey.

9 My translation.

10 My translation.

11 As many have noted – and criticised – Marion identifies the phenomenological regime of revelation with Christian theophany by designating the latter as universally accessible (see, for instance, Janicaud and Caputo); a dangerous move which threatens to redirect Marion’s trajectory from postsecularism to post-secularism.

12 Translation altered.

13 In secular societies, this frame is kept ajar: one is free to believe in a transcendent divine, provided that this remains a private matter. Not everyone agrees on what the private sphere includes in this specific case, though, as demonstrated by the debates surrounding the right for women to wear a veil when accompanying school trips in France.

14 See Hegel 475–76.

15 See Kapferer 341–44 and Engelke 292–301.

16 See Watkin 2.

17 My translation.

18 See The Speculative Remark 17.

19 Heidegger’s residual attachment to the possibility of redemption is visible in his assertion in 1966 that “Only a god can save us” (“Only a God Can Save Us” 57; see Greisch 261). It might also account for the banality of Heidegger’s drift towards Nazism’s project to facilitate the restoration of the supposedly lost pure Aryan community, as Nancy puts it using Arendt’s terms (The Banality of Heidegger).

20 My translation.

21 For more details, see Le Rider 194–99.

22 Translation altered. I contend that John McKeane’s translation of the original “recouvert” in French by “named” fails to account for the twofold meaning of the term in French, which is however intended to reflect the ambiguity of Christianity’s position “at the heart of the dis-enclosure just as it is at the center of the enclosure” (Nancy, Dis-Enclosure 10).

23 My translation. See Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge” 72–73.

24 All the quotes from Nancy’s “Religion Without Past nor Future” [“Religion sans passé ni avenir”] article are mine.

25 Also see Derrida and Nancy 81.

26 For more details on Nancy’s critique of Derrida’s undecidability, see “Of Divine Places” 120 and Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy 93–94.

27 My translation.

28 My emphasis.

29 I translate all the quotes from Forestier’s interview.

30 I translate all the quotes from Nancy’s article.

31 That is no easy task, however. Nancy himself has been accused of cultivating Christian exemplarism (see, for instance, Watkin 120). To be sure, that Nancy mainly focuses on Christianity is understandable given his intellectual background. Yet that it took him no less than twenty-three years – from 1995, when the first article later collected in Dis-Enclosure, namely, “The Deconstruction of Christianity” was published, to the publication of “Religion Without Past nor Future” [“Religion sans passé ni avenir”] in 2018 – to extend his conclusions regarding the deconstruction of Christianity and the gesture of dis-enclosure to non-Abrahamic traditions testifies to his unavowed – and perhaps even unconscious – willingness to keep a certain place for the monotheistic – a fortiori Christian – divine.