Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy by Hutchens B.C.;

Author:Hutchens, B.C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3060916
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

The lack of pronounceable names for an infinitely dying God

In post-Nietzschean thought, the “death of God” has become a denial that a god could ever possibly be what “God” has been thought to be. “Death of God” theology and other forms of post-secular thought have usurped this proclamation in order to reinforce the imperative of faith and the equally pressing need to explore the conditions of that faith. However, for Nancy, this demonstrates only an incomplete comprehension of the absolute epistemological and moral foundation that “God” allegedly provides. He insists that the proclamation of the “death of God” is the genuine recognition that the god is locked into an “ontological paralysis” in which it cannot be born into life and, since death is an absolute event, cannot be resurrected (BP: 51, 55; BSP: 150). One might surmise, then, that the celebration of its “numinosity” or “alterity”, its saccharine “spirituality”, is the result of its own ineradicable absurdity: it is underdetermined in the sense that it lacks basic properties of life and death, and overdetermined in the sense that this lack produces a plethora of outrageous claims about divinity. An irresolvable difficulty, monotheism continues to be the crystallization of certain divine abandonments in collective wisdom that linger despite the devastation of “the spiritual”. It must be acknowledged that ‘the death of God is the final thought of philosophy, which thus proposes it as an end to religion’, a notion ceaselessly thought by the West but now achieving an ineradicable poignancy. This recognition entails that there can be no going back to any idyllic age of acceptance of this abandonment, nor even a more recent age in which there must be belief precisely despite this abandonment. There is now no single divine voice, but a plurality of differentiated voices that compose the “divine voice”, the sharing “of” and “in” that composes community and the very condition of interpretation (IC: 128; SV: 237). And that is no suitable “divinity” at all.

Confidence that religion is indefatigable, that it always offers spiritual resources and consolations to make its own abandonment bearable, is now shaken. Religion has exhausted all its options, and thus can no longer put off the question of divinity with rhetorical convolutions and conceptual permutations. All that is left is “destitution before the empty temples”, in which the god died because of the inseminating power of the West’s reason, poetry, cupidity, generosity and even the “love of God” itself. The idols in those temples are not even subject(ible) to criticism, since they no longer correspond to any intelligible idea: the idols are no longer idols; there is nothing left but the “serene and secret, the unmoving smile of the gods”. Of course, nothing is now sacrificed on their altars, and yet contemporary religion functions on the impossible presupposition that, in some loosely figurative sense, the altars represent sacrifice themselves. This is a sacrifice, it bears repeating, that we can no longer even conceive (IC: 141, 148; FT: 51–2). It might be concluded, then,

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