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  • The End of the World and the Finitude of the World(World, Christianity, and Finitude in Nancy and Blanchot)
  • Aïcha Liviana Messina (bio)

Conceived either in religious or secular terms, the topic of the end of the world strictly correlates with the problem of the limit. In the Christian apocalypse, the end of the world is literally a revelation (apocalipsis). The end that arrives effectuates the division between Good and Evil. Goodness reigns in what separates it from eternal hell. Taken in its secular sense, the end of the world entails the destruction of the earth, the passage from being to nonbeing. This conception of the end is the one that is in play, for instance, each time the notion of the world is confused with that of the biosphere, namely, each time the limit that separates life from its opposite is at play. For these reasons, taken either in its religious or its secular sense, the announcement of the end of the world always correlates with a kind of salvation. One wants to belong to the biosphere, to the living world, or to the reign of Goodness. One wants to be saved. [End Page 63]

Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot have, each in his own way, assumed the event or the advent of the end of the world. "It's the end of the world" (Nancy 1997, 4), Nancy writes in The Sense of the World; "the end arrives, something is coming, the end is beginning" (Blanchot 1981, 24), writes Blanchot in The Madness of the Day. If they have not prophesized the end as a future that would arrive for sure, we can at least say that their thought is located at the end as at a certain limit. Indeed, what is at stake in their thought is the experience, or rather ordeal (épreuve), of a certain end or certain limit. Now, for Nancy and Blanchot, the limit is precisely not something that can be posited as what could finish, terminate, the end that is arriving. Rather, the limit's ordeal is the ordeal of what is endless in the end. For Nancy, the limit is what happens not as an end or a termination but as an affection, as a being-to. For Blanchot, the limit is what can never be traced because it is what can never be completed. The line that the limit requires to be inscribed is an infinity that deprives the limit's idea of its end, namely, of the term that defines it and therefore makes it possible. For the latter, the end that arrives always arrives as a certain impossibility of ending. For the former, rather than talking of the end, one would have to talk of finitude, of infinite finitude, of a being that is not limited but opened by the limit that pierces it (transir).

The nuances distinguishing Blanchot's and Nancy's thoughts are numerous, tiny, and decisive. They belong to a common topos: the one of the end that arrives in a context of infinite finitude, the one in which the end of the world and the finitude of the world complicate each other, overlap, do and undo each other.

My purpose is to reflect upon an aspect of this imbrication between the topics of the end of the world and of finitude in Nancy and Blanchot. It is intriguing to observe that the topics of infinite finitude and of the impossibility to end, in Nancy and Blanchot, give birth to another way of thinking the secular and religious topic of the end of the world. In both of them, they open to a "deconstruction of Christianity." Yet, what interests me is to show that whereas for Nancy the end of the world is part of our experience of the world, of what opens to the singularity of a world, Blanchot's thought rather seems to lead to a refusal of the world. Therefore, in the very similarity of their gestures, their understandings of finitude and of Christianity part ways on the question of the world. [End Page 64]

Finitude as the Operator of the "deconstruction of Christianity"

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