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Abstract
Jean-Luc Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity views the current crisis of globalization as a mutation of our Christian culture and heritage. After outlining the basic premises of Nancy’s philosophy, this article situates Jacques Derrida’s critique of Nancy in his groundbreaking On Touching: whereas Nancy sees contemporary culture as a rupture (or indeed mutation) with the former Christian culture, Derrida argues that we are still dealing with the remnants and relics of precisely culture and are at best witnessing a metamorphosis of this culture. This dialogue between Nancy and Derrida allows us to assess the critique of metaphysics in both thinkers.
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Notes
1 See, for instance, Gaudium et Spes, no. 41, “[The Church] knows that man is constantly worked upon by God’s spirit, and hence can never be altogether indifferent to the problems of religion.”
2 This is also the reason why one should not underestimate the fact that Derrida points to the very same reproach as the one he, once, famously criticized Levinas for: empiricism. The question of empiricism and realism pops up regularly in On Touching, see page 46 on Nancy’s “absolute realism,” also pages 116–17 and above all page 287 on why Nancy risks to hand philosophy’s discourse over to “the most irresponsible empiricism.”
3 Derrida has, moreover, commended a similar thought to Nancy when saying that still “there are so many questions to be asked about the history of the idea […] and about the irrepressible and undeniable constitution of ideality […] and the obscure trafficking between sense, common sense and the senses” (117).