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246 cosmopoetics: the insistence of the world t w e l v e the grace of the world What is going to come, perhaps, is not only this or that; it is at last the thought of the perhaps, the perhaps itself . . . the arrivant could also be the perhaps itself, the unheard of, totally new experience of the perhaps. —Jacques Derrida The Promise of the World So we come to stand on the ground of a certain materialism but of an odd sort, the groundless ground of a certain religious materialism. Likewise we stand on the ground of a certain religion, but it too is an odd sort of religion, a religion without religion,1 with a weak theology not a strong, a theology of insistence not existence, of “perhaps” not of an ens necessarium . There is grace, grace happens, but it is the grace of the world. There is salvation, but we are “saved” only for an instant, in the instant, saved without salvation by a faith that does not keep us safe. This insistence upon time and mortality is poorly described as a form of radical atheism because it is a way we have come upon to reconfigure what we mean by God and to break the grip not only of a strong theology but no less of a violent atheism and above all of the tiresome wars between the two. There is salvation, but being saved is a matter of time, of saving time, of a time that saves. There is faith, but we have reconfigured faith to be a faith in time, in love, in life, a way of standing up for life, a passion for life, having faith in what Heidegger called the worlding of the world. There is resurrection, but it is only for a moment, granting more mortal life not eternal life, for which Martha, the sister of Lazarus, pressed a tardy Jesus. There is transcendence but it is the transcendence that happens on “this side” because after all there only is one side. In the terms of the classical distinction, which I am trying to redescribe, transcendence happens as the immanence of transcendence in immanence, on this side, this life, this mortal life. the grace of the world 247 My entire idea is to reclaim religion as an event of this world, to reclaim religion for the world and the world for religion. I have not annulled the religious character of our life but identified its content and extended its reach, by treating it as a name for the event by which life is nourished. In so doing we have redescribed and marked off religion within the boundaries of the world. Religion emerges in response to the promise of the world, to the promise/threat that threads its way through the goods and evils, the joys and sorrows, the loves and enmities of everyday life and knits them together into an inextricable weave. The promise of the world is not extinguished by evil, not suffocated by suffering and setbacks, not abolished by the cosmic forces, but grows like a root that makes its way through rocks to find a nourishing soil. It is the hope, the chance, the faith that the future is always better, not because it is, but because that is what we hope and that is what hope means. This religion, which finds a voice in theopoetics, this religion without the diversion of otherworldly religion is a religion of a mundane grace, of the grace of this world. A grace is a gift, and life is a gift of time and death, the grace of an instant, a mortal grace, not an otherworldly one, a grace that finds words in a weak theology of the world. This world does not want for miracles. In the “graced” (graciée) world what we take for granted, the givenness of the world, emerges as a gift given, and the otherwise uneventful sequence of settled possibilities is exposed to the possibility of transformation . The world becomes something miraculous, something impossible , the way the world was opened up for Proust by a little cake and a cup of tea. If we assume that with God nothing is impossible, that God is the possibility of the impossible, which is the meaning of the name (of) “God” set by the terms of strong theology, then this theopoetics does not want for God, for gods, who are all around us. Time and death permit the impossible in...

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