Raising Death

Abstract

In his philosophical project of a “deconstruction of monotheism,” Jean-Luc Nancy explores the hypothesis that the historical roots of secularization should be traced back to the beginnings of the monotheistic traditions. The secular is not exclusively a feature of modern culture. The complex connections and tensions between secularity and religion in recent decades can only be analyzed effectively if one rethinks the notion of the secular along these historical lines. The author offers a brief introduction into Nancy’s project, before focusing on a theme that is central to one of the monotheistic traditions, Christianity: that of the resurrection. He reads and comments on parts of Nancy’s essay Noli me tangere, an innovative interpretation of John 20.11–18. In dialogue with Nancy he then develops a new view on the resurrection, in which paradoxically death is given a central meaning. This also involves a new insight in the immanence of transcendence. In the resurrection, it is death itself that resurrects. The idea is criticized that death would be vanquished into a life after death – as dominant approach in Christian doctrine has it, thereby expanding the modest little epilogue that the tale of the “empty tomb” actually is in the gospels, to a massive foundation of Christian redemption. Resurrection is affirmed as a life in death as well as a death in life. The resurrection of the mortal, earthly and vulnerable God that Christ is, invites an affirmation of the here and now, of humanity and of the human body: a “yes” to the world, not to an afterworld. Parallel to this analysis, the author takes up Nancy’s suggestion that the resurrection, and in fact the entire gospel, is a parable, and that its “truth” is a parabolic truth: playing with the impossible and the miraculous, in which truth and falsehood become entangled with each other.

Keywords:

• deconstruction of Christianity
• resurrection
• death
• secularity/religion
• transcendence
• parable

1 introduction

The modern Western world is about to fulfill its secularization: that was the common description of the current era, from the 1960s toward the end of the last century. The protests against this development of a successful, fully achieved secular society that would also mark the “end of history,” were considered to be the last scraps of sectarian religious groups refusing to reduce the world to human existence and its activities and possibilities, in favor of their God.

In the meantime, in large parts of the world, supermarkets are open on all Sundays. Nevertheless, few people today, the twenty-first century being underway for two decades, would still speak of a “secularized” world. Christianity and in a broader sense the monotheistic religions have not disappeared at all. That does not mean that the orthodox mass of believers would suddenly have been exploded, nor that churches, mosques and synagogues are fuller than in 1990. It seems to be a much more complex intertwining of secularity and religion – an entanglement that was actually always there, that had never disappeared as secularism has; not in the modern, Western world, and not at all in the world outside the West.

This global, continuous intertwining complexity of a complicity of religion and secularity is thus not a recent whim of history, which would temporarily damage the achievements of the Enlightenment. On the contrary, the current discomfort and the current uncertainty about the self-evidence of both secularity and religion seems to be very old. They guide the history of monotheistic traditions from the outset.

In this context, Jean-Luc Nancy poses the question whether monotheism actually needs a God, and if so, what kind of God? Does monotheism need the existence of God or does it flourish at the death of God? Nancy raises such questions from his first works to his most recent studies on Christianity.

The innovative aspect of Nancy’s thinking lies in the fact that he links the analysis of secularization with its roots. According to him, these roots lie, among others, in Christianity and in the strange God of Christianity. In this sense Nancy is a “radical secularist”: he confronts the paradigm of secularization with its roots (radices, Latin) to break it open in this way and to provide it with new meanings after critical questioning. In parallel fashion, he confronts the theology of Christianity with its roots, that already, from its earliest history onward, announce a certain secularization.

In this article, I will further elaborate on Nancy’s questions regarding the relationship between religion and modern secularity, as they underlie his project of a “Deconstruction of Christianity.”² Deconstruction is not destruction. Deconstruction challenges the claim to the “naturality” of concepts, convictions, beliefs, desires, as well as of developments, histories, conditions. This claim dominant in modernity is rooted in a double assumption: that of the obvious and that of the essence. Deconstruction calls for de-naturalization, and searches for the absurd, unexpected and unthought elements in a tradition, a text, an oeuvre, an event, a generally shared opinion, et cetera. Moreover, deconstruction is not so much a technique, a method, an approach; deconstruction is an event, it “happens,” for instance, within Christianity. Nancy’s project is not so much a deconstruction of the Christian religion as such, but an exploration of the deconstructive elements that this religion contains, elements that can also be found in the other monotheistic religions.

After a brief introduction to Nancy’s project, I elaborate on one of the themes central to the deconstruction of Christianity: that of resurrection. I discuss parts of Nancy’s essay Noli me tangere³ and provide it with interpretation and commentary. In doing so, I will comment on Nancy’s thesis that the “truth” of resurrection is a parabolic truth, and that therefore the resurrection story, and in fact the whole story of Christ’s life and death, as laid down in the four gospels, is a parable. In dialogue with Nancy, I then develop my own vision of the resurrection, in which death is given a central meaning in a paradoxical way. In this concentration on death, the resurrection appears in a new, modern-secular perspective. This deconstruction of the resurrection leads to the conclusion that it is not so much a life after death, but a life in death. The resurrection of Christ – of the mortal, earthly, vulnerable God – is an affirmation of life here and now, of the humanity and physicality of that life: a “yes” to the world.

2 the return of religion?

The phenomenon of our time usually referred to as the “return of religion” to the socio-political scene or as the development into a post-secular society, is complicated and ambiguous. Is it a return of what was temporarily lost? Or rather an ongoing tension between religion and secularity, a tension that is in a way productive, since in it religion and secularity are mutually transformed? This is the way Charles Taylor phrases it in his A Secular Age.⁴ Unlike many of his contemporaries, Nancy is not at ease with the term “return of religion,” nor with the concept of the post-secular.

However, Nancy refrains from any defense of secularization by proclaiming the “end of religion,” as contemporary atheist thinkers like Michel Onfray (Atheist Manifesto) or Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) do. He also finds a certain synthesis of secularism and religion in a post-secular society, as Jürgen Habermas (Between Naturalism and Religion) sees it, unfruitful. Instead, Nancy wants to get rid of a general understanding of religion. He proposes to concentrate on certain historical religious configurations – assemblages (assemblies) he calls them – and in particular that configuration that has given a stamp to the Western European world: the monotheistic traditions. These configurations have never disappeared in modernity, so it is pointless to speak of a “return” of them. He then tries not to understand monotheism and secularity as opposed philosophies of life that would follow each other in history. Like Taylor, he holds that they originate from the same source and are intertwined from the outset. In Dis-Enclosure and in Adoration he investigates the possibilities and consequences of this insight.

3 deconstructions of christianity

The first preparations for Nancy’s explorations in the borderland between Christianity and modernity can already be found in his early work. There he is interested in the hybrid and mostly de-institutionalized ways in which religion appears in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is the case in his reflections on “divine places,” or in his discussion with Nietzsche, Heidegger and Bataille about the role of the “sacred” in the secular world (see Nancy, “Of Divine Places”). Secondly, these indications can be found in his approach to art and literature and to the political-religious myths of the twentieth century (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe; Nancy, “Myth Interrupted”). More explicit announcements of Nancy’s project of a deconstruction of monotheism can be found – all in footnotes – in The Sense of the World (55n50), twice in Being Singular Plural (16n20, 60n52) and in La pensée dérobée (155).

Though not referring to a deconstruction of Christianity explicitly, all these publications contain the theoretical preliminary work for the two more detailed and concentrated studies, one about creation, the other about resurrection: The Creation of the World and the aforementioned Noli me tangere.

In Noli me tangere, which contains an analysis of John 20.11–18 (containing the famous “do not touch me!” (Noli me tangere) in verse 17, the words that Jesus speaks to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection) as well as of the ways in which this scene has been resumed in painting, Nancy draws attention to a fundamental dimension of “withdrawal” in the appearance of Christ at the empty tomb. He goes so far as to state that this is not so much about a resurrection from the dead, but that death itself would “rise” and claim its place in life. Not death is conquered in favor of a “life after death,” but death itself, and with it the dead, assert themselves in the resurrection, Nancy suggests. According to him, resurrection is not about eternal life as liberation from the limitations of death and mortality, as Christianity proclaimed it in its later, medieval phases. It is not about eternal life, but about the intertwining of life and death in life, something that was much later determined by Martin Heidegger as Sein zum Tode (being toward death).

It is important to analyze this focus on life in the here and now as a possibly secular feature of the Christian religion. There lies one of Nancy’s ambitions: in the end, Christianity should be read against the grain, as a form of atheism.⁵ Seen this way the incarnation, that is, the humanization of God and his death on the cross, is a secular element in Christianity, but also the resurrection: the emancipation of death within life. The combination of Good Friday and Easter is an indication of a certain secular impulse that makes Christianity what it is: an essentially modern religion.⁶

4 earthly resurrection, immanent transcendence

Having said that, the resurrection of Christ is the truth of Christianity: the main nourishment for a belief in a life after death and thus in the possibility of conquering death and leaving it behind. This belief has been preached and spread by Christianity from the first centuries of its history onward. It does so on the basis of the short account with which all synoptic gospels conclude: Christ was buried by friends after his humiliation and crucifixion, but after three days the grave is empty. It seems as if the monotheistic religions find their main attraction in this belief: human life on earth is important, but is only fulfilled in another, next life.⁷ The gnostic and apocalyptic position is then quickly taken: life in another world, life in another time are what matters. This life here and now is in darkness. Hans Blumenberg considers this the Weltverneinung (world denial) of monotheism and analyzes it as its unmodern aspect, and even presents it as the constant threat and delegitimization of modern culture.⁸

But does the short story about the empty grave necessarily lead to a belief in the victory over mortality? Nancy doubts this in the programmatic first chapter of Noli me tangere. According to him, the resurrection has little to do with a return to life after death. Christ does not return again, but he disappears, he just leaves (partance). His appearance is that of a disappearance, and his departure is a departure as a dead person. That is why Mary Magdalene, who first discovers the empty tomb, cannot touch Christ. “Christ does not want to be held back, for he is leaving […] To touch him or hold him back would be to adhere to immediate presence […]” (Nancy, Noli me tangere 15).

Nancy concentrates on this departure, and according to him it is only in departing that Christ is present. Hence, the appearance at the empty grave is an appearance between presence and absence, between life and death, in which these two extremes become intertwined. Christ lives as a dead man, and his “life” consists of constant dying. As he is coming, he has already left, which means that his “coming” consists of a constant departure. Nancy’s book must address a departure from the outset, already at his “departure point”: yes, the book itself must be a departure.

This departure, which I previously referred to as a dynamic of withdrawal, is applied to a theology of the resurrection, which must shed light on life in death (and vice versa), not life after death. According to Nancy, the touch (touche in French, tangere in Latin) follows this dynamic, because it is not just “grip,” “grasping” or “appropriating,” but also and above all the opposite: the fleeting contact that passes before it can become substantial.⁹ The touch must be thought beyond any form of clinging; her presence is never immediate, but it is midway between presence and absence.

To touch him or hold him back would be to adhere to immediate presence, and just as this would be to believe in touching (to believe in the presence of the present), it would be to miss the element of the departing according to which the touch and presence come to us. (Nancy, Noli me tangere 15)

Nancy then continues with the remarkable proposition that, understood this way, the resurrection acquires its “nonreligious,” that is, I would add, modern meaning.

But where does Christ go now? Back to the grave? Between which poles does the oscillation move? Between life and death, I just stated. In the text of John this oscillation is portrayed because Christ’s departure is described as “ascending to the Father.” The body that is raised, that wants to be touched without being held, that simple, human, mortal, body that has just died, stands up to “toward the Father” (John 20.17). But is this ascent a departure from earthly life and from the human state? A gesture of Weltverneinung? By no means. John hurries to assure the reader that Christ’s Father is also the Father (the God) of humans. Whoever ascends to the Father, leaves to the God who is the God of those who have not conquered death – and will never conquer it. The Father is the God of mortals. Whoever stands up to return to this Father does nothing but raise the mortal human body here and now, on the earth: “[…] the ‘Father’ is none other than the absent and the removed […] He [Christ] is departing for the absent, for the distant” (Nancy, Noli me tangere 17). However, this “absent,” “distant” Father is not transcendent nor elsewhere:

If he could say “Who has seen me has seen the Father,” then the latter is not an other, nor is he elsewhere. He is, here and now, what is not seen and what nonetheless shines with glory, what is not in the light but behind it.¹⁰ (Noli me tangere 17)

As a consequence, Nancy rightly emphasizes the importance of the physicality of the resurrection: hence the subtitle of the book, On the Raising of the Body. The “glory” of the resurrected body, as the Christian imagery has so often expressed it, is not some kind of spiritualization or deification. It only points in the direction of the vulnerable, earthly, dead body that stands up and “shines” as such. Nancy therefore speaks of two bodies at the end of his analysis:

Two bodies, the one of glory, the other of flesh, are distinguished in this departure, and in it they belong, partially but mutually, to each other. The one is the raising of the other; the other is the death of the one. (Noli me tangere 47)

John’s emphasis on the earthly nature of the Father is not only reflected in Nancy’s focus on the body in his deconstruction of the resurrection. In Matthew’s version of the resurrection this is expressed in a similar way with regard to Christ. Matthew finishes his gospel with the promise given by Christ: “I am with you, every day, until the completion of the world” (Matthew 28.20). Christ says that all power is given in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28.18). When he leaves for the “heavenly Father,” that means that he, as someone who is transcendent – he transcends ordinary life – does so within the immanent world. He is dead, he is absent in full presence, among us, “with us,” with and among all humans, as if heaven were nothing but an opening, an interruption into the world from within that world. Heaven is like an event: the event of an appearance that is simultaneously disappearance. In other words, heaven is opened by the resurrection, not just that of Christ on Easter morning, but time and again, as an eternal revelation. Nancy formulates this as follows, referring to John 18.36:

What “is not of this world” is not elsewhere: it is the opening in the world, the separation, the parting and the raising. Thus “revelation” is not the sudden appearance of a celestial glory. To the contrary, it consists in the departure of the body raised into glory. It is in absenting, in going absent, that there is revelation […] (Noli me tangere 48)

5 resurrection from or of death?

The resurrection stories in the synoptic gospels are very short. John’s version covers the two final chapters of his text and is therefore the longest. They are modest epilogues that seem to fall outside the main line of the story. That main line consists of the Passion Story which forms the long and extended center of the narrative. Consistently, all four gospels work their way toward one point: the cross. John literally goes the furthest by putting these words into Christ’s mouth when he actually dies on the cross: “It is fulfilled” (John 19.30). The apotheosis seems to take place on the cross; what does that strange “encore” of the resurrection do after such a tragic culmination? Certainly, in contract with the enormous weight given to the doctrine of the resurrection in later Christianity, it seems rather of secondary value in the original texts of the gospels.

This epilogue character of the resurrection indicates that it does not undo death on the cross, but rather accompanies and intensifies this central event. An epilogue does not add a new theme to a story, but it interprets and resumes what has happened before. What has happened is […] the death of God in his Son. This holiest of all deaths cannot and should not simply be undone in a hypostasis in which life, preferably an eternal, henceforth immortal life would triumph. This death must be taken seriously. Maybe she tells something about life.

The resurrection is not a return to life. It is the glory at the heart of death: a dark glory, whose illumination merges with the darkness of the tomb. Rather than the continuum of life passing through death, it is a matter of the discontinuity of another life in or of death. (Nancy, Noli me tangere 17)

The death of God on the cross as a theological theme is mirrored here in death as an anthropological and ethical theme: as a constitutive albeit paradoxical element of human life. The death that “lives on,” that “survives” in the resurrected Christ is, as such, a critical, aporetic counterforce to a life that is self-sufficient and that ignores its constant vanishing point. “Die in order to live” is a key trope in the religious language and experience of the monotheistic traditions.

Nancy’s rather provocative thesis seems to have good grounds, so far, and not just because the essential coherence of death and life is strongly emphasized by all four evangelists. The good grounds can already be found in the proper vocabulary of the evangelists, of the book of Acts and of the Corpus Paulinum. After all, a “resurrection from/out of death” (anastasis ek thanatou) is never indicated, but the expression is mostly: resurrection of the dead (anastasis tōn nekrōn), where the “of” is a subjective genitive. The dead rise, and they rise as dead. Even when the variation “resurrection out of the dead” (anastasis ek nekrōn) is used, this does not mean “resurrection from the realm of the dead,” as it is often interpreted too easily. It can at most simply indicate that the resurrection comes from the dead – that they are the ones who set it in motion.

Death is not “vanquished” here, in the sense religion all too hastily wants to give this word. It is immeasurably expanded, shielded from the limitation of being a mere demise. The empty tomb un-limits death in the departing of the dead. (Nancy, Noli me tangere 16)

The resurrection of death is the death that rises in life. Nancy tries to sharpen this thesis by pointing out the parabolic nature of the resurrection story, and of the gospel in a broader sense.

6 resurrection as parable

Nancy opens his book with a prologue about the meaning of the parable in the gospels. The aforementioned first chapter begins with the thesis that the resurrection story, and in particular John’s version, is a parable: the concluding parable of the longer parables that are actually the four gospels.

One episode from the Gospel of John gives a particularly good example of this sudden appearance within which a vanishing played out [se joue]. It is not a parable spoken by Jesus; it is a scene from the general parable that his life and his mission make up. (Nancy, Noli me tangere 11)

Why is Christ’s entire life and death a parable? And why do parables form such an important narrative genre in the synoptic text traditions? Because in the parable a type of truth presents itself that has little to do with the closed forms of truth of the metaphysical traditions – truth as substance or essence – or of logical traditions – truth as an adequation of reason and reality: as an adequate statement. The truth of the parable is neither of these, nor is it true. She is parabolic because she plays a game with herself: a game that always seeks a place between true and false.

This play with truth and untruth follows the same structure of withdrawal as that of the resurrection itself. Truth is only true when it loses itself, gives it away, sacrifices itself. The truth must retreat in order to be what it is: it must “die in order to live,” and “live as a dying person.” This awkward “scandal” (skandalon), as Paul calls the event of loss that is the cross (Galatians 5.11), brings coming and disappearance, presence and absence together.

We also see this in an equally parabolic legend (not even a biblical one), that of Christ’s encounter with Veronica, in which he gives away his “true face” to Veronica’s sweat cloth. The resurrected Christ appears here, even before he has physically died, already as the “relinquished” Christ. His death has already taken place in the gift of himself, during his walk up the hill of Golgotha toward the cross. To be “true,” Christ must not keep his truth with him, but must give it away to the other, to Veronica.¹¹ Between the image itself (Christ’s face) and the recipient of the image that has become in turn the holy image (the cloth, kept in many churches in Europe as relic), the truth resides: that is the “scandalous” equation of copy and original, which according to Nancy is articulated in every parable, and in a general way in the parable of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. The image is no longer secondary, unreal, fiction (as one can say: “This was only imaginary” or “I only imagined it”), but together with the original it forms the space of truth. “The parable is thus not to be situated in the relation of the ‘figure’ to the ‘proper,’ or in the relation of ‘appearance’ to ‘reality,’ or in the mimetic relation […]” (Nancy, Noli me tangere 7).

Truth, also and precisely that of resurrection, is in this sense a dynamic, relational and in a certain sense excessive event, rather than a static state of affairs (Nancy, Noli me tangere 8). It is not of the order of being that rests within itself and enjoys its untouchable truth. On the contrary, truth is constantly touched by its “other,” the untrue, and in this game the truth gives itself away to that other, in order to be true again, in a different mode: true in the reception by the other. In sum, this is not a classical ontological truth. It is a “modal ontology” of truth, as Boyan Manchev has developed it in dialogue with Nancy’s work: no ens nor ratio, but modus.¹² The truth as a mode, as it is active in the parable, always changes, as in an infinite modulation: in the musical technique of modulation, keys, often associated with certain motifs and melodic lines, keep coming back, but appear in a different form and combination each time. Their “being” exists in their interaction with themselves and with other motives. In the interspace between all these modes the truth takes place, as in the story of the resurrection between the modes of death and life, of disappearance and appearance.

If parabolic truth is a game between giver and recipient, where she must give up her claim to truth, if she is an event that changes every time, as if in a structure of modulation, is there still a difference between this game of truth and the content, the “message” of the parable itself? We have discovered in our reading of the resurrection story that precisely this difference between form and content is at stake. Ultimately, we must note that the main character in the parabolic narrative, such as the risen Christ in the verses of John, himself has a parabolic status: he appears as the disappearing, and his disappearance (departure) is at the same time his presence, his coming. He himself becomes the embodiment of the game of truth: he is, as it were, the “sudden appearance within which a vanishing is played out,” as I cited Nancy above.

In other words, Christianity, read from its trope of the resurrection, distances itself from what Nancy calls croyance (belief), and opens itself up to the instability that has been given with every parabolic tradition: that of a foi (faith) in which the believer loses him- or herself, because the truth of this faith abides between appearance and disappearance, between life and death. In this sense it is a nonreligious faith, that does not give “solace,” that precludes reassuring identification: the end of religion.

Would this not be what distinguishes faith from belief, without possible reconciliation of the two? While belief sets down or assumes a sameness of the other with which it identifies itself and in which it takes solace (he is good, he will save me), faith lets itself be addressed by a disconcerting appeal through the other, thrown into a listening that I myself do not know. (Nancy, Noli me tangere 10)

In his analysis of the parable as the basic structure of the gospel, Nancy also takes a personal critical interpretation of the common idea that the parable can only be “heard” by those who “have ears to hear,” “eyes to see.” Nancy refers here to the passages in Matthew 13, in which Christ is asked by his disciples why he speaks in parables. Nancy interprets the words that Christ quotes from Isaiah: “You will listen well, but you will understand nothing, and you will look well, but you will have no insight” (Matthew 13.14) as follows. The truth of the parable arises only in the act of listening, in the dynamics between giver/narrator and receiver/hearer, as mentioned above with reference to the Veronica legend.

[…] the parable might be expected to open their eyes, informing them of a proper meaning through its figurative system. But Jesus says nothing of the sort. To the contrary, he says that, for those who hear them, parables fulfill the words of Isaiah: “By hearing, ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see and shall not perceive.” (Nancy, Noli me tangere 5)

That explains Nancy’s emphasis on listening: a believing, insecure listening whereby the person who has faith is decentered, and by this does not achieve “proper meaning” but is, in a way, lost. This decentering consists in the fact that in the interplay of parabolic truth neither the narrator nor the listener knows what they are doing; they are not in command of the content of what is told/heard. This content remains untouchable, like Christ himself in the resurrection verses in John 20.

To conclude, my analyses indicate that Christianity’s holy texts point at something other than life after death. The resurrection portrays a different relation between life and death: that of death in life, that is, a vanishing point around which all life would revolve and from which that life would derive its sense. This strange death is more than physical death – it is daily present as “life,” as the absent in and of life – and it brings death back to the earthly, mortal body: no victory over the death in an eternal spiritual life. It is this death that Nancy spots in the resurrection.¹³

Nancy calls this death-in-life, as we saw, the “nonreligious” dimension of the Christian resurrection discourse, which he then analyzes as a parabolic discourse. It is death itself, and with it the dead, who rise without giving up their point of disappearance, their death. A rehabilitation of mortality? Yes and no. Of course, this parabolic truth of the story cannot be the final message of it. True to her game of truth, the text not only “plays” with the idea of appearing in disappearance, as Nancy suggests, but also with that of “appearing again after having disappeared”: of a life after death. In order to be parable, the parable must leave the reader/hearer in the dark and allow multiple interpretation options to resonate. This is true of almost all biblical parables.¹⁴ As soon as one reading method becomes evident, the vanishing point on which all appearances are focused, disappears itself. We can, however, conclude that the truth that Nancy detects in the text triggers the less obvious interpretation: that in which the text appears to deconstruct itself by articulating a fundamental paradox. The traditional Christian reading makes identification with the figure of Christ possible in view of salvation and redemption; this reading attempts to “touch” Christ, so to speak, as Mary demands: “He will redeem me!” The deconstructive reading places the reader before an enigma never to be solved: no identification is possible. Only in this way can Nancy pinpoint the ancient evangelical traditions as traditions that deconstruct themselves, and open themselves toward a modern, secular rephrasing.

7 resurrection in a modern novel – epilogue

This is also why Nancy can state that the Christian parable opens the way to modern literature and art. Noli me tangere “is attempting to clear the way, however slightly, for this hypothesis” (Nancy, Noli me tangere 8). It should be noted that Nancy does not seem to have the ambition, at least not in Noli me tangere, to substantiate this hypothesis, for his only example of modern literature is Maurice Blanchot’s novel Thomas the Obscure (1999).

With Blanchot, Nancy conducts a dialogue from his first publications onward. In Dis-Enclosure we find a short chapter about the theme of the resurrection in Blanchot’s stories: “Blanchot’s Resurrection.” That is remarkable, since this writer is known for his strong interest in the possible meaning of death, dying and mortality in his work. Using a particular phrase from Thomas the Obscure, Nancy shows how in this novel almost literally the notion of risen death in the resurrection parable is being re-articulated in a modern narrative, while maintaining the words and names of the biblical narrative. In the passage in question, the main character, Thomas, is compared to Lazarus, the protagonist of that other resurrection story in the Gospel of John (John 11): “He walked, the only true Lazarus, whose very death was resurrected” (Blanchot 74).

Parallel to his approach to the resurrection story, Nancy searches here for the connection between resurrection and death:

The resurrection in question does not escape death, nor recover from it, nor dialecticize it. On the contrary, it constitutes the extremity and the truth of the phenomenon of dying. It goes into death not to pass through it but, sinking irremissibly into it, to resuscitate death itself. To resuscitate death is entirely different from resuscitating the dead. (“Blanchot’s Resurrection” 89)

Then, Nancy applies Blanchot’s vision of death as a central feature of human life in his exegesis of Lazarus’s revival – thereby deconstructively reading the old verses of John 11 into secular modernity. The “truth” of Lazarus’s resurrection “resides in the simultaneity of death and a life within it that does not come back to life, but that makes death live qua death. Or yet again: the true Lazarus lives his dying as he dies his living” (Nancy, “Blanchot’s Resurrection” 91–92).

In the biblical story, Christ comes too late to save Lazarus from dying. He has other activities, and although he knows that Lazarus is sick, he stays away “two days” (11.6). When he finally arrives, Lazarus has died; Christ can only announce his resurrection. “Your brother will stand up” (11.23), he tells Martha; the words “from death” or “from the dead,” although the reader expects them, are not added. Martha thinks Christ is talking about the end of time (“the last day”; 11.24), but the latter corrects it, and draws the resurrection into the here and now: “I am the resurrection and the life” (11.25). As strange as Nancy’s proclamation of resurrected death may seem, the “life” that Christ embodies here (“I am […]”) is the experience of the night that the “dark,” “obscure” Thomas in Blanchot’s novel wants to enlighten: live your death, die your life. But the night cannot be illuminated unless it is turned into a day. Death cannot be lived unless it is turned into a life again. Christianity demands the impossible from us. Perhaps it is herein that it finds its challenging actuality.

echo by jean-luc nancy

With the precaution I have to take whenever I read a text written in English – a reading that is for me uncertain and incomplete – , I can say that Laurens ten Kate takes the reflections on the Christian resurrection I sketched out a step further. Indeed, it seemed impossible to me to leave this representation at the heart of the Christian message a mere fantastical projection of an afterlife. This project certainly exists, it is shared by some and has its authorizing texts in the Gospels. The latter, however, carry a message that, it should be noted, places little emphasis on the “return to life” – as is evident above all in the resurrection of Lazarus, i.e., in one of the three resurrections and within the Gospels the one operated by Jesus (after all, that isn’t much, all the more so since two of them are each only to be found in one of the four authors – this requires interpretation, but I am not going to attempt it here). But the resurrection that takes place on or from Jesus himself, without any thaumaturgy, there are many signs of the absence of the arisen in his very presence. It is not someone who is brought back to life again – as one can be revived after a terrible accident – , but someone who lives differently. Who lives “here” elsewhere than “here.” Which precisely raises the question of the being-here.

The way in which Laurens ten Kate understands this other life – as the life of death or as death in life – seems to me to be carrying the meaning of this “message” further (as well as the very fact that this is a message, angelon). I am struck by a connection that I had not made at the time of writing the book he is basing himself on. It is a connection to the famous passage from the Phenomenology of Spirit where Hegel writes that the spirit does not recoil before death but dwells within it. (It is certain that Hegel is thinking of Jesus at the tomb.) This dwelling, Hegel adds, is the magical force that converts the negative into being. The spring of the (all too) famous Aufhebung is given here as “magic.” What does this word mean? Since it cannot be explained in the Hegelian context (it’s a hapax in the Phenomenology), it must be understood as mysterious in the strongest sense (i.e., what is illuminated by itself).

We would of course have to reread the latter passage analyzing the resurrection – shortly before we come to “absolute knowledge.” That has no place here either; I only want to point out that this is an essential stage in the deconstruction of Christianity: the egress from “survivalist” representation and at the same time the return – or new arrival – to mystery in excess of signification.

As a thank you, I offer Laurens ten Kate this little Hegelian exercise … 

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 An early version of this study was published in Dutch in Tijdschrift voor Theologie (Journal of Theology) 53.1 (2013): 26–43.

2 For a recent overview and detailed commentary on this project, see Ten Kate et al.

3 Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: Essai sur la levée du corps (Paris, 2003). Five years later it appeared in an English translation: Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body. In the following, I will refer to the English edition. For scripture passages I basically follow the edition used by the translator of Noli me tangere: The Authorized King James Version (Oxford, 1997).

4 Taylor develops this insight throughout A Secular Age, whenever he distinguishes between political and social secularity as the secularization of the public sphere, psychological secularity (the need to believe in a God gradually decreases), and what he coins as secularity 3: new relations between immanence and transcendence, new “conditions of belief” that mark the modern world.

5 See, e.g., Dis-Enclosure, “Atheism and Monotheism” 14–28.

6 The question of whether these secular traces have found their way into Christianity (and in a broader sense in all monotheistic religions) despite the global socio-political success of this religion (a success that has been possible through submission, the hierarchy, the violence, exclusion, fear, discipline, moral overdetermination of life, etc.), or thanks to this success, is the challenge for further research. Nancy’s project also only indirectly meets this demand.

7 Islam has also put the belief in the hereafter in a massively central position, albeit on the basis of other text traditions not related to the figure of Christ. Only Judaism is for the most part silent about life after death. The belief in this is limited here to a confidence that God will take care of his people – not of the individual soul – even after death.

8 See Blumenberg, in particular Part II, chapters 1 and 2. For my discussion of Blumenberg’s analyses of world denial in relation with the Christian legacy in modernity, involving also Nancy’s deconstructions of Christianity, see “To World or not to World.”

9 On the notion of “passing by,” see my analysis in Re-treating Religion, “God Passing By: Presence and Absence in Monotheism and Atheism” 132–44.

10 Nancy quotes John 14.9.

11 See also my analysis in “De afgestane Christus.” In Dutch, there is the wordplay with opstaan (to resurrect) and afstaan (to relinquish, to yield) – of course untranslatable. The name Veronica is usually traced back to the Latin vera and the Greek icon: “the true image.” This etymology from two different linguistic regions is no more than a corruption of a later date; the name must actually be traced to berenikè, Greek for “bearer of victory.”

12 See Ten Kate et al., Re-treating Religion, “The Ontology of Creation: The Onto-Aisthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy” 261–74, in particular 266–67 and 271–72. Manchev bases his search for a “modal ontology” on, among other things, Nancy’s views on Christian themes such as creatio ex nihilo, incarnation, and death and resurrection, as elaborated in Corpus. For Nancy, the body that stands up in its mortality is pre-eminently modular: it changes its mode every time and is never “substance.” But it is precisely that modular body that God has chosen for himself to be “truly God, truly human” (vere deus vere homo as Christian theology has formulated in dogmatic form): God gives up and loses his divine status in order to “modify” himself into a human being “in Christ.” “God made himself body […] consisting entirely of modalizing, or modification, rather than substance […] God modalized or modified himself, but his self in itself is only the extension and indefinite expansion of modes” (Nancy, Corpus 61).

13 In this sense Nancy contrasts the Christian experience of death with that of mythical antiquity as well as with “other” cultures, such as so-called natural religions, or with religions based on reincarnation such as Hinduism:

The Greco-Roman world was the world of mortal mankind. Death was irreparable there; and whether one tried to think about it in terms of glory or in terms of deliverance, it was still the incompatible other of life. Other cultures always have affirmed death as another life, foreign yet close by, strange yet compatible in various ways […] Christianity, reinterpreting an aspect of Judaism, proposed death as the truth of life and opened up in life itself, the difference of death. (Nancy, Adoration 23)

This genealogy of ways in which death is experienced also has consequences for our conception of “eternal life”; the opposition between “in” life and “outside” or “beyond” life is deconstructed here:

Eternal life is not life indefinitely extended, but life withdrawn from time in the very course of time. Considering the life of ancient mankind [the Greco-Roman world – LtK] was a life measured by its time, and the life of other cultures was a life in constant relationship to the life of the dead, Christian life lives, in time, what is outside of time. (Nancy, Adoration 23)

See also my analysis in “De wereld tussen ja en nee. Monotheïsme als modern problem bij Assmann, Nancy en Blumenberg” (The World between Yes and No: Monotheism as a Modern Problem in Assmann, Nancy and Blumenberg).

14 Think of Luke 15.11–32, the famous parable of the “lost son.” In it, the narrator, Christ, deliberately leaves in the dark who this son is after all who takes off with the “life” of his father (usually translated with “legacy” or “possession,” but that is not stated in Greek), give everything away (“wasted”?) and then return to the father. An excessive party is the father’s response to this disappearance action, because “this son of mine was dead and has come to life again” (Luke 15.24). Is this son the prototype of the “sinner” and the “publican,” with whom Christ “eats,” as the prelude to this parable – to the anger of the Pharisees and scribes? (Luke 15.2). Is he the derailed criminal who nevertheless receives forgiveness? Or does the “death” he sought have Christological implications? Is the son perhaps Christ himself? The parable does not reveal anything.