Adoration by Nancy Jean-Luc McKeane John

Author:Nancy, Jean-Luc, McKeane, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2013-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

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The drive to sense—to sense and to the truth that is suspended in it—is in us and through us the only thing that can, beyond justice, or rather, as the very excellence (the hyperbolic value) of justice, displace the regime of power and money as we know it. Which is to say: it is the only thing that can displace what we designate by capital and technology, or what designates itself more and more visibly as the indefinite accumulation of ends in the generalized devastation of dignity. In still other words: it drifts beyond the “malaise” if not beyond the disaster of civilization.

What do the two other virtues attempt to do? They are simply at the service of the third. Faith is given as nothing other than the force of trust in that (or him, or her, or those) of which it is impossible for me to obtain any knowledge that would create any assurance or guarantee.24 Unlike belief, a weak knowledge that nonetheless arms itself with various guarantees, plausibilities, or non-impossibilities, faith exposes itself to non-knowledge: not to ignorance, but to the excess beyond knowledge. But without faith, we could not enter into the sphere of sense, which is to say, above all into that of language. To accede to speech is to have already been thrust forward by a trust in sense and in the fact that the other invites me to sense. Children do not learn languages by instinct or by mimicry: they learn because others have opened the space of this trust to them. This is what allowed Derrida to speak of “that which in faith acquiesces before or beyond all questioning, in the already common experience of a language and of a ‘we.’”25 For this reason, faith in “God” in the sense of all monotheism is a trust in a god that is unknown, unknowable, unappropriable in any form: neither master, nor king, nor judge, nor, finally, god.

Faith is perhaps best expressed in the following dialogue, where its sense is borne by the verb to believe:

TEMPLE: . . . Is there a heaven, Nancy?

NANCY: I don’t know. I believes.

TEMPLE: Believe what?

NANCY: I don’t know. But I believes.26

As for hope [espérance], it most properly designates the tension internal to the drive: not the hope [espoir] that something—an answer, a conclusion—might come about, but the tension retained in the trust that something or someone always comes. And that it will come not later but here and now—not coming in order to complete itself in a presence, but so that I come thanks to its coming. No analogy is more fitting here than that of sexual joy and jouissance: not satisfaction, not the easing of tension, not becoming replete, but the infinite relational tension between two bodies, which is to say, between two drives caught up in their contact, which is both sensitive and beyond sense.

Drive, a thrust coming from elsewhere, from outside, from nowhere, which opens up in us; which comes from there but which, at the

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