Adoration:The Deconstruction of Christianity II

The Deconstruction of Christianity II

Jean-Luc Nancy

Publication Year: 2012

Adoration is the second volume of the Deconstruction of Christianity, following Dis-Enclosure. The first volume attempted to demonstrate why it is necessary to open reason up not to a religious dimension but to one transcending reason as we have been accustomed to understanding it; the term "adoration" attempts to name the gesture of this dis-enclosed reason. Adoration causes us to receive ignorance as truth: not a feigned ignorance, perhaps not even a "nonknowledge," nothing that would attempt to justify the negative again, but the simple, naked truth that there is nothing in the place of God, because there is no place for God. The outside of the world opens us in the midst of the world, and there is no first or final place. Each one of us is at once the first and the last. Each one, each name. And our ignorance is made worse by the fact that we do not know whether we ought to name this common and singular property of all names. We must remain in this suspense, hesitating between and stammering in various possible languages, ultimately learning to speak anew. In this book, Jean-Luc Nancy goes beyond his earlier historical and philosophical thought and tries to think-or at least crack open a little to thinking-a stance or bearing that might be suitable to the retreat of God that results from the self-deconstruction of Christianity. Adoration may be a manner, a style of spirit for our time, a time when the "spiritual" seems to have become so absent, so dry, so adulterated. The book is a major contribution to the important strand of attempts to think a "post-secular" situation of religion.

Published by: Fordham University Press

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Title Page, Copyright

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pp. i-vi

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pp. vii-

Translator’s Note

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pp. ix-x

Let me address a few points of difficulty that recurred throughout the translation. L’homme can mean both the neutral ‘‘mankind’’ and ‘‘man,’’ and although the latter bears a strong whiff of gender determination, it has been chosen throughout in order to convey Nancy’s engagement with a historical discourse on the rights of the individual that predominantly referred...

Prologue

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pp. 1-9

Spirit as it awakes is doubtless nothing other than whoever is awaking: whoever has barely emerged from sleep or appeared out of non-existence. It is a spirit perhaps still offended by shadows, deep folds, all that it must set aside and reject in order to become what it is: less breath than penetration, the penetration of a very fine point, whose acuteness, without undoing the impenetrability of matter—the world, bodies, our common...

1 There Is No Sense of Sense: That Is Worthy of Adoration

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pp. 10-21

Could one dare to affirm in all seriousness that adoration is what is necessary in the world today? One could not, and we shall not do so here, even if we feel a certain necessity to do so.We shall not do so partly because it would be grotesque to call for ‘‘adoration’’ in a world that perhaps lacks everything—justice, history, civility [cité], splendor, sense—except the idols, fetishes, gods, and celebrities that are proposed as objects of adoration. But this is not the...

2 In the Midst of the World

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pp. 22-42

In truth, I’d like to speak of it as little as possible. I’d like to move toward an effacement of this name and of the whole corpus of references that follows it—a corpus that is already mostly effaced or has lost its vitality. But I do think it is important to follow the movement that this name has named: that of an exit from religion and of the expansion of the atheist world. ...

3 Mysteries and Virtues

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pp. 43-64

The dis-enclosure of reason is the effect, or rather the remainder, of deconstructed Christianity, of religion’s having withdrawn from itself, pushed off from its observances and beliefs. Reason has moved away from the wish to give reasons [rendre raison]. Or rather, it knows that ‘‘giving a reason’’ goes beyond any reason that can be given. It knows that giving one’s reasons is an interminable process: one chases after the inexplicable...

4 Complements, Supplements, Fragments

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pp. 65-97

A fixed syntagm makes it easy to speak of ‘‘beatific adoration,’’ meaning bleating devotion, irresponsible submission, even insidiously masochistic allegiance. The fixed nature of this expression indicates that one can understand the noun after the adjective as simply redundant: adoration would be in essence ‘‘beatific.’’ And it would be contentedly imbecilic in its blind submission. But we do not know how things stand with beatitude...

Appendix: Freud—So to Speak

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pp. 99-104

Today we are being asked—the times demand it—to reassess what is at stake in Freud’s intervention. We know more or less clearly that it did not arise from blending itself together with other bodies of recognized knowledge, nor did it add to them a new continent. Freud invented something other than knowledge—whether this is understood in the sense of a theoretical discipline or in that of a practical know-how. The very idea...

Notes

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pp. 105-117

Perspectives in Continental Philosophy

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pp. 119-122

E-ISBN-13: 9780823246359
Print-ISBN-13: 9780823242948
Print-ISBN-10: 0823242943

Page Count: 136
Publication Year: 2012

Series Title: Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (FUP)