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in
Phenomenology
Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 brill.nl/rp

What Comes after Christianity?

Jean-Luc Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity

Joeri Schrijvers
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Abstract
This article aims to be a confrontation with Nancy’s ‘deconstruction of Christianity.’ Its argu-
ments are instructed by Derrida’s thesis in his On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, in which he speaks
of the ‘destructive effects’ of Nancy’s own thinking. One such effect is, according to Derrida,
Nancy’s complicity with some form of metaphysical thinking. The conclusion of this article
therefore aims to expound on just what sort of metaphysics returns in Nancy’s work and pro-
poses a more viable—and phenomenological—option with regard to the question of what is to
be done with the relics of the Christian tradition through forging an opening towards Levinas’
and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies.

Keywords
Jean-Luc Nancy, Christianity, Jacques Derrida, metaphysics, Emmanuel Levinas

1. Introduction: Deconstructing Christianity

The end of metaphysics is not the end of the world. This sentence aptly summa-
rizes, it seems, Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy. Now that the grand narratives
and the ultimate signifiers have withered away, we find ourselves in a world
that is not bereft of any sense—as nihilists or their adversaries would have
it—but, on the contrary, in a world where sense is always and already there.
The sense of the world, according to Nancy, is not to be sought in one or
the other transcendental signifier that would, once and for all, decide upon
the meaning of our preoccupations in this world; it is, rather, Nancy’s project
to make comprehensible the fact that, now that all origins and foundations
have fled, sense emerges and is present in any inner-worldly encounter think-
able. This sense, then, is not to be found in whatever grand narrative; it arises,
rather, from out of our everyday encounters with one another. That is why
ultimately Nancy has proposed, and still proposes, a “banal phenomenology”
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/156916409X448201
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 267

of our being-with-one-another.1 Such a banal phenomenology directs itself

mostly against Heidegger: over and against the latter’s supposed “disdain for
the ordinary,” Nancy advances what one can call a praise of everydayness.2
Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity squares with his phenomenological
ontology of ‘being-with’ in the very precise sense that Christianity has, from
time immemorial, according to Nancy at least, always been exposed both
to metaphysical structures and that which remained outside of it. In this
way Christianity, for Nancy, occupies an exceptional and paradigmatic place:
although it is metaphysical to its very core, it simultaneously has sown the
seeds of its (own) overcoming. Nancy is quite clear on this: for him, Christian-
ity and “monotheism [oppose], as much as [they comfort] the reign of the
principle.” (D 24).3 This is why commentators claim that “[Dis-Enclosure] is
not an exceptional excursion within Nancy’s œuvre, but rather exposes one of
its leading motifs.”4
The deconstruction of Christianity is, however, not to be taken as a provo-
cation (D 141, 149).5 Nancy, rather, asks how Christianity can still make sense
in a culture that is no longer Christian; that is, a culture that no longer shares
all Christian presuppositions (D 142–43). The deconstruction of Christianity
is thus a comportment towards what one can call the relics and the remainder

1)
Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2004), 222.
2)
Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. R. D. Richardson and A. E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000), 10, hereafter cited as BSP. Throughout the text, the following abbrevia-
tions are used for Nancy’s works: D = Dis-Enclosure. The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans.
B. Bergo, G. Malenfant, and M. B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); CW =
The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2007); NMT = Noli Me Tangere. On the Raising of the Body, trans. S. Clift, P.-A. Brault and
M. Naas (Fordham University Press, 2008); EF = The Experience of Freedom, trans. B. Mcdonald
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
3)
Translation modified, since the French has “le monothéisme contrarie le régime du prin-
cipe . . .” (Nancy, La déclosion. Déconstruction du christianisme [Paris: Galilée, 2005], 39). “Prin-
ciple”, most likely refers to R. Schürmann’s Heidegger on Being and Acting. From Principles to
Anarchy, trans. C.-M. Gros (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Nancy regularly
refers to Schürmann; see EF 13, 30, and esp. 187; also L. Fabbri, “Philosophy as Chance. An
Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 427–40, 435. Nancy seems to use
monotheism and Christianity interchangeably, although he most often prefers to speak of the
latter; see D 33. Helpful in this regard are Nancy’s definitions of the world religions in Des lieux
divins, suivi du calcul du poète (Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, 1997), 22–23.
4)
I. Devisch and A. Van Rooden, “Deconstruction, Dis-Enclosure and Christianity,” Bijdragen:
International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 69 (2008): 263.
5)
See also Nancy, Le sens du monde (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 91 n. 1.
268 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

of the Christian culture. It is, according to Nancy, precisely from out of Chris-
tianity’s vanishing that a thought of the world or of our being-with might
appear, for “already in the most classical metaphysical representations of . . .
God, nothing else was at stake, in the end, than the world itself ” (CW 41).
The attempt to grasp the world within one single worldview or to comprehend
the totality of beings from out of a highest being or principle, when faded
away, will give way to the thought of the world without principle, without
sufficient reason or one or the other given. If all historical highest beings—
God, nature, reason, history—have functioned as a sort of filling in the gaps
by, for instance, explaining that which could not and cannot be explained—
i.e., the existence of the world—then the deconstruction of Christianity aims
to attend to the nothingness, the void, and the gap left by ‘God’ and its avatars.
It is important to note that, for Nancy, Christianity vanishes in a quasi-
automatic way. Such an auto-deconstruction only ever occurs if the (metaphys-
ical) system of Christianity “has contained its fatal agent within itself ever
since its conception.”6 Such a ‘fatal agent,’ for Nancy, seems to be whatever
givenness has been posed, presupposed, or otherwise taken for granted: from
the very moment that the presupposition is made that God is the foundation
and ultimate unification of the world (ontotheology) or that such a unifica-
tion is left to the transcendental postulates (Kant and modernity), it must
be stated that such a “presupposition also contains the principle of its own
deposition” (CW 71). Concretely, this means that Christianity will break
under the pressure of the divides and the divisions that have constituted it in
the first place. One can therefore understand Nancy’s project as trying to
expose and disassemble those ‘internal divisions’ within Christianity that will
eventually cause the disintegration of its assembly and be the death of it.
Nancy mentions several examples of these divisions. One can, for instance,
think of the Christian quarrel over the prohibition of images, on the one
hand, and the right to represent the sacred, on the other. Derrida has noted
another division: the portrayal of the Gospel of Jesus as touching and touched
by human beings and Jesus’ own prohibition of any such touch (“Noli me
tangere”). Nancy added that it is precisely this paradox of Christianity—the
paradox connecting “hoc est corpus meum” and “noli me tangere”—that is at
issue (NMT 14).7 Most important is, however, the division between a Christianity
that lets itself be reduced to metaphysics and a Christianity that precisely

6)
The expression is Schürmann’s, see Heidegger on Being and Acting, 197.
7)
For Nancy, see La visitation (de la peinture chrétienne) (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 44ff. and also
D 144. For Derrida, see On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2005), 100–103; hereafter OT.
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 269

resists such a reduction. Christianity, for Nancy, would be at the heart of the
closure of metaphysics as well as at the heart of its overcoming.
For Nancy, then, the auto-deconstruction of Christianity seems to consist
in the (progressive) disappearance of power, of presence, of the givenness of
myths, due to the contingent character of Christianity’s composition and to
the internal divide on which it draws. One might exaggerate somewhat and
say that, for Nancy, Christianity cannot not disappear because it is, and has to
be, its own disappearance. Nancy indeed writes that “everything takes place
as though Christianity had developed . . . at once . . . an affirmation of power,
domination and exploitation and an inverted affirmation of the destitution
and abandonment of self whose vanishing point is its auto-disappearance”
(D 39; translation modified).

2. A (Christian) World?
The auto-deconstruction of Christianity in this way entails what Nancy calls
the “detheologization” of the world. Nancy distinguishes this ‘detheologiza-
tion’ carefully from “a secularization of the theological” (CW 44 and 51). The
latter would mean, indeed, that the world would again play a role in theo-
logical drama. What Nancy has in mind with the concept of a ‘detheologiza-
tion’ is, rather, a complete displacement of all things theological: no longer the
valuation of a Transcendent, but rather the absolute value of all things imma-
nent, of the world that is. Nancy notes that nowadays “there is no theology . . .
that says nothing of God which sooner or later cannot be said of something
else than of God: of ‘the event’, of ‘love’, of ‘poetry’ and what not?” Nancy
here explicitly mentions (the early) Jean-Luc Marion’s attempt to interpret
God in terms of God’s ‘distance’ (from the world and from being/beings) and
states that such a move, borrowing its vocabulary from the movement of
deconstruction, does not and cannot retrieve the divine God but rather rein-
forces the disappearance of God and the Gods. Nancy’s response to Marion is
indeed rather straightforward, even when it concerns Marion’s later phenom-
enological work: “[Marion’s]8 proposition does not emerge yet out of a ‘self-
giving’ (and of a ‘self-showing’) of the phenomenon, whereas I propose here,

8)
Nancy, Des lieux divins, 4–5, referring to Marion’s The Idol and Distance. Five Studies, trans.
T. A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). CW refers to Marion’s Being Given.
Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. J. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002). For a critical appraisal of Marion, see my “‘And there shall be no more boredom.’ Prob-
lems with Overcoming Metaphysics in Heidegger, Levinas, and Marion,” in Transcendence and
Phenomenology, ed. P. Candler Jr. and C. Cunningham (London: SCM Press, 2007), 50–83.
270 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

simply, that nothing gives itself and that nothing shows itself—and that is what
is” (CW 123 n. 24). Nancy’s thought, therefore, must be seen as an attempt to
cope with a world without givenness, without any principles being given, and to
stick to the world as it (now) worlds considered from the fact that it worlds
(and that it is only the world that worlds) (cf. BSP 165–69). This return to the
world and to the people living in it is summed up well in one of Nancy’s axi-
oms: “we who are no more than us in a world, which is itself no more than the
world” (BSP 17). With such sentences Nancy wants to convey the post-meta-
physical situation of our world. For Nancy, the fact that there is no longer
something given means that ‘we’ will have to live in a world for which there
are no longer any orienting guidelines (whether it be God or History)—a
world, so to say, for which there is no manual. Nancy thus emphatically
emphasizes that we stand in need of a thinking that is up to the task of think-
ing without a final or efficient cause, without a goal, in order to think without
end the endless finitude of everything that is (cf. D 17–18). The return to the
world, then, is for Nancy, a quest for the alterity of the world, for an otherness
within the immanence of the world.
This ‘immanent transcendence’ (cf. D 136, 177 n. 15) is thus nothing,
nothing given—nothing in particular: it is the ‘with’ of all beings-with-one-
another, the ‘ad’ of esse ad, a coram without Deo, if you like. Nancy’s rephrasing
of what ‘transcending’ means is the result of a long meditation on Heidegger’s
statement that modern humanism did not succeed in seeing the true ‘height’
of the human being.9 For Nancy, ‘transcending’ does not mean the movement
“towards a height, an altitude, or toward a summit (sovereign, ens summum),”
transcendence is rather always and already “transcending. It is passing-to-the-
outside, and passing to-the-other” (D 138; also EF 71). This transcending of
one being to another being, of all beings to one another, thus takes place within

9)
See Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”, in Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (London: Routledge,
1993), 233–34. For Nancy on this height, see D 19 and 28. Also BSP 70: “we are not up to the
height of the we” (translation modified). One might even contrast Levinas’ statement that “by
virtue of the human body raised upwards, [it is] committed in the direction of height” with
Nancy’s thinking of the ‘raising’ of the body that simply (?) opposes the verticality of the human
body with the horizontality of the dead, the buried. See for this, especially NMT 17–18. The
raised body is, for Nancy, the body of the one for whom the boundary between life and death
has been blurred, that is, the one who “sees life in death because [he or she] has seen death in life”
(NMT 42) and is still “standing upright” (NMT 18), while knowing that his or her existence is
nothing but the lament for and the unrest of “crossing through life for nothing” (D 103). Cita-
tion of Levinas is Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
2002), 117; hereafter TI.
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 271

the world: its otherness and transcendence has nothing to do with “an Other
(the inevitably ‘capitalized Other’) than the world; it is a question of the alter-
ity or alteration of the world” (BSP 11). From this follows, for Nancy, “that
the ‘divine’, from now on, does neither have a place in the world nor outside
the world because there is no other world. That which is ‘not of this world’
[i.e., transcendence—J. S.] is not elsewhere: it is the opening in the world”
(NMT 48). Such transcending is, in its own way, Nancy’s response to Schür-
mann’s question, ‘what is to be done at the end of metaphysics?’ For to live in
a world without any principles or guidelines given is, for Nancy, equal to the
question of a certain praxis—a sort of savoir-faire, a ‘know-how’ to cope with
the nothingness of the world (CW 60, 68–69). Such a comportment is there-
fore a transcending without a Transcendent, without anywhere or anyone to
transcend to, except for the gap that is the world. That is why, for Nancy,
“Christianity designates nothing other, essentially . . . than the demand to open
in this world an unconditional alterity or alienation . . . and can be summed
up . . . in the precept of living in this world as outside of it—in the sense that
this ‘outside’ is not, or is not an entity. It does not exist, but it . . . defines and
mobilizes ex-istence: the opening of the world to inaccessible alterity” (D 10).
Christianity’s contribution is thus to have introduced in the world the very
idea of a ‘beyond.’ It is only now, according to Nancy, that one is able to see
that this ‘beyond’ itself has not vanished. On the contrary, there is a ‘beyond’
(to) this world, but this ‘transcendence’ is not elsewhere than the world, and it
is not a supreme being. And yet it cannot be deconstructed.
At least this is what Nancy intends to convey in his discussion with Lyotard:
if for Lyotard it is a matter of advancing towards a judgment without criteria—
a judgment over a given, empirical, and particular case without a standard set
of universal criteria—for Nancy it is a matter of raising the stakes of Kant’s
reflective judgment—a judgment that has to decide (and decides) on the
empirical manifold in the absence even of any (empirical) intuition—in order
to do justice to what Nancy calls the singular plurality as such (in which all
beings receive and obtain their being in and through existing next to other
beings and, for which, consequently, no single form of intuition of an ‘essence’
suffices).10 Whereas for Lyotard, one might say, it is a matter of constructing a
concept with which to judge the plurality of diverse empirical cases and intu-
itions, for Nancy both the concepts and the intuitions are, so to say, ruled out:

10)
See Nancy, CW 60–61. See also I. James, The Fragmentary Demand. An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 235–36, and Raffoul’s
and Pettigrew’s lucid Introduction in Nancy, CW 25.
272 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

“the judgement without criteria . . . is placed before . . . something which can-

not be constructed, which corresponds to an absence of intuition [and] which
moreover produces an absence of concept.” Furthermore, Nancy adds: “to
encounter the inconstructible in the Kantian sense, this is also and at the very
least is what ‘to deconstruct’ means. . . . This word would [thus] have led us
toward what is neither constructed nor constructible” (CW 60–61).
That which cannot be deconstructed is thus nothing less than the very hap-
pening of the world itself. One should not read Nancy here in nihilistic terms,
for with the gap or the nothingness that is left once metaphysics’ foundational
presence and absolute significations have reached their expiration date, an
opening to the sense of all that is becomes possible. ‘Sense’ for Nancy is nei-
ther the full-presence of (metaphysical) signification construed by a subject,
nor is it the passive reception of the ‘meaning’ that a supreme being would
bestow upon us; on the contrary, ‘sense’ is always and already there and always
only coming: it is the awareness that, even though full presence cannot be
achieved, this does not mean that all sense has abandoned us. Rather, it is that
we are abandoned to sense when (and even though) this sense can never attain
the level of a clear and distinct signification.11 Sense only ever occurs among
two (or more): it is the name of that which happens ‘between’ all beings. In
this way, Nancy thus describes the ontology of being-with as a worldwide web
of relationships in which all are dependent upon all, supplement one another,
and in which no relation takes precedence over another to the point of eclips-
ing all essence (substance, ousia, etc.). It is a relationality that in no way what-
soever can be reified: it is precisely because it escapes all the characteristics of
(a) being that Nancy terms it ‘nothing.’
In short, Nancy’s position is what one could call an ‘existential,’ ethical
even, version of Derrida’s différance. Nancy is envisioning the event of the
world (and of being) as the arrival of a surprise that surpasses our anticipations
and representations. In a certain way, then, one can say that we will have to be
this difference between sense and signification, since sense is precisely the very
retreat of signification—the retreating of full presence.

11)
For this difference between ‘sense’ and ‘signification,’ see M. Heikkilä’s remarkable study, At
the Limits of Presentation. Coming into Presence and its Aesthetic Relevance in Jean-Luc Nancy’s
Philosophy (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008), 33–34 and 159.
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 273

3. The Space of the Incarnation

Since a clear and distinct signification can no longer be attained, one will
nevertheless need to cope with some degree of obscurity when it comes to our
dealings with ‘sense.’ It is here that the theme of incarnation shows itself to be
one of the central themes of Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity. If, on the
one hand, the Incarnation, obviously, suggests a certain intertwining of the
divine and the human, then one might argue that it is precisely this problem
of intertwining, of mingling, and of mixture that is the main question of
Nancy’s philosophy. Nancy thus advances toward a thorough philosophical
understanding of incarnation. Such a conception seeks to understand just how
the intelligible dwells in the sensible. It is the awareness that at times the tran-
scendental is not the condition of possibility of the empirical at all, but rather
the other way around, how the empirical serves as the condition of possibility
of the transcendental in such a way that it is the transcendental itself which
takes on body, or becomes flesh.12
For Nancy, this means that philosophy “can only be materialistic,” albeit
that a sort of “transcendental materiality” is at issue (BSP 83; EF 103). The
‘obscurity’ of sense stems from the fact that it, in a certain way, is dependent
upon the muteness of matter. That is why Nancy corrects Heidegger’s analysis
of the stone which, according to Heidegger, would be “worldless.”13 Nancy
asks whether it is not exactly the impenetrability of this concrete stone here
that makes up the sense of the world. Instead of juxtaposing Dasein and mate-
rial things such as stones, as Heidegger does, Nancy sees the sense of the world
arising from out of their touching one another. Indeed: our world would
not be ‘our’ world (as we know it) without the very materiality of the stone,
without the impenetrability of this very stone over which we trip for instance,
without the door’s hardness against which we bump, etc. In a certain sense,
one can say that were it not for this materiality of the stone (or any other mate-
rial thing), we would not even know what ‘to trip’ would mean. That is
why Nancy states that “impenetrability [is necessary] for there to be access,
penetration”: it is only through this materiality and this hardness that one
can know what one’s ‘access,’ ecstasy, and openness towards beings might
mean.14

12)
Nancy elaborates on this in EF 87, 89 and 102–103; CW 49; BSP 55 and 76.
13)
See Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitude. Solitude, trans.
W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 176–78 and 196–
99. Nancy comments on this in Le sens du monde, 92 and 99–104.
14)
Nancy, Le sens du monde, 100.
274 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

Nancy says this in(de)constructible happening of the world in many

ways, the most important of which is: ‘espacement.’ This ‘spacing’ already indi-
cates the material component of Nancy’s thought of being—beings take place in
space. The transcendental component of this ‘espacement,’ however, resides in
a meditation upon the taking place of the very taking place of (all) beings, the
condition of possibility for anything to take place at all—which Nancy also
calls “the Being of Being” (BSP 118). This ‘spacing,’ then, the creation of “the
with of all things” (CW 73) and all beings, borders on being a-historical: it is
that which escapes history, the symbolic order, and all narratives, but makes
them nevertheless possible; it is, to use Schürmann’s words again, the a-historical
event that has neither history nor destiny but makes possible the coming-about
of all the historical epochs within history. Nancy’s account of this event of the
happening of the world is seemingly dependent upon a major distinction that
Heidegger drew between that which is man-made and that which is not.
Though the fact of, for instance, meeting you there, is within the power of
both of us, the very fact of us being able to meet anywhere at all, is something
which exceeds our powers.15
One should note, however, that on the question of the relation between this
philosophical understanding of incarnation and the theology of the Incarna-
tion, Nancy adopts a rather peculiar stance: whereas, for theologians, it is,
more often than not, the latter which justifies the former, for Nancy the former,
in fact, exceeds the latter to the point that the latter becomes but an illustra-
tion (albeit a paradigmatic one) of the former. One might ask, indeed, whether
such theological shortcuts are not begging the question, if only because they
miss the “rather troubling . . . duality” of the spacing within the Incarnation—
of the mute matter that crosses (theological) intelligibility (OT 262). To para-
phrase Nancy then: it is not the Christ with whom I am concerned; it is not
the Cross; it is only the question of the crossing, of the intersection, and of the
retreat in the middle of the world that is at issue here (BSP 95).
The deconstruction of Christianity, for Nancy, evolves around the question
of just what “secret . . . resource” (D 34) or fatal agent has accompanied it since
its inception. The ‘secret’ resource Nancy is looking for is something more
archaic than Christianity itself: it is that which reveals the possibility from
which Christianity proceeds. It is this possibility that Derrida has aptly called
‘the paganism within Christianity’ (OT 59, also 64).

15)
For Nancy on this distinction, see his commentary on Hegel’s distinction between Geschehen
and Geschichte in BSP 161–65. For Schürmann, see Heidegger on Being and Acting, 76 and 273.
For this distinction in Heidegger, see for example, Parmenides, trans. A. Schuwer & R. Rojcewicz
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 106.
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 275

In the most concise definition of the deconstruction of Christianity that

Nancy gives, one reads that this deconstruction is “the operation consisting in
disassembling the elements that constitute it, in order to attempt to discern . . .
that which made their assembly possible and which, perhaps, remains for us
to discover and to think as the beyond of monotheism” (D 32 and 34; transla-
tion modified). For such a deconstruction, then, it is necessary that one find
oneself at a crossroads. Let us listen to Nancy again on the twofold nature of
this deconstruction: deconstructing Christianity is a movement that is “both
an analysis of Christianity—from a position presumed to be capable of mov-
ing beyond it—as well as the displacement . . . proper to Christianity . . . inclin-
ing toward resources . . . that it both conceals and recuperates” (NMT 108 n. 4).
One can already surmise that the result of such a deconstruction of Christian-
ity would, according to Nancy, deliver the sense of deconstruction, a sense
that no longer belongs to deconstruction. In this way, the deconstruction of
Christianity would give rise to the indeconstructible (CW 60–61; D 149, 217).
And it is here, we will see, that Derrida and Nancy part ways. Derrida’s
assessment of Nancy’s deconstruction is rather complex. More than once, Der-
rida deems Nancy’s project both necessary and impossible (OT 220, 244). By
stating that the deconstruction of Christianity might be impossible, Derrida
is, with Bataille, pointing to the fact that every deconstruction of Christianity
might only bring us ever more Christianity, albeit in one or the other hyper-
bolic form. Nancy, however, has responded to this quite forcefully: if Christi-
anity is nothing else than that which opens the world onto an unconditional
alterity or alienation, then, Nancy notes, “‘unconditional’ means: not unde-
constructible. It must also denote the range, by right infinite, of the very
movement of deconstruction” (D 10).16

4. Nancy’s History of Salvation

As already indicated, Nancy signals several divisions within Christianity that
denote ever so many auto-deconstructive gestures that contest as well as com-
fort metaphysical thinking (D 23–26). In this section, these divisions are
addressed through Nancy’s version of the history of salvation.

16)
Translation modified. And Nancy proceeds in a note: “the indeconstructible . . . can have no
other form than that of the active infinite: thus, the act, the actual and active presence of the
nothing qua thing (res) of the opening itself ” (D 176 n. 12). Compare with CW 40, 46–47, and
D 75–80.
276 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

4.1. Creation
The auto-deconstruction of Christianity is not merely to be regarded as a his-
torical process. It also reveals something of the a-historical event of the cre-
ation of the world that I have outlined above. To understand this, it is necessary
to delve into one of the major differences between Nancy and Heidegger. This
difference is aptly summarized by Nancy when stating: “if one looks at meta-
physics carefully, there is not a God of metaphysics who simply and easily
conforms to the idea of a producer [of the world—J. S.]” (BSP 15). It is
wellknown that Heidegger rejected, throughout his career, the concept of cre-
ation, because, for Heidegger, creation was already too indebted to efficient
causality that would slowly and surely emerge out of the inception of meta-
physics in Greece and that would come to thrive in our technological times.
Metaphysics thus would have configured creation along the following lines:
one or the other pre-existing agent, in full possession of efficient causality, uses
the nothingness of the ‘tohu va bohu’ as a material cause in order to create the
world along the final cause he or she keeps in mind. Nancy is well aware that
the contradictions of such a consideration of creation are all too apparent, for
instance: from whence this matter? And what or who created this pre-existing
agent? . . . and so on (CW 67–68, 51). Heidegger’s reduction of creation to
such a ‘production’ is attacked vigorously by Nancy: it is, according to Nancy,
“the most banal, pejorative, and also erroneous interpretation” one can give of
monotheistic creation (D 186 n. 26).17
One should not underestimate the stakes of this disagreement with Hei-
degger. It is, in Nancy’s mind, an attack on everything in Heidegger’s thought
that has led the latter to prefer not only what is proper to Dasein but also that
through which one or the other Volk or people can relate, as if naturally, to the
destiny supposedly sent to it by being itself, and which allowed Heidegger to
single out those ‘people’ who have heard, and are able to hear, and thus
obey(ed), the call of being—the Greeks and the Germans—and those who
do not.18 It matters little here which people precisely are thus singled out by
Heidegger; rather, it matters that Heidegger seems to have presupposed that

17)
Nancy elsewhere nuances his stance; see D 24 and CW 68.
18)
One should note, however, that Heidegger has rejected this interpretation of his thinking,
which leans towards a perhaps too straightforward incorporation of his thought into national-
socialism; see Heidegger, Parmenides, 137, where Heidegger indicates that such a conception—
Nancy’s interpretation would be no exception—of the people (Volk) rests upon an entire
metaphysical understanding of subjectivity. Nancy’s counter-argument might be A Finite Think-
ing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 184, stating that whenever a guarding of the
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 277

one or the other being or gathering of beings is granted access and can attain
to—touches upon—that which is proper to it.
It might be precisely such a safe haven that Nancy wants to avoid when
rejecting Heidegger’s distinction between nature and technology, between
ϕύσις and τέχνη, that is, between that which is not man-made and that which
is. For, indeed, if one cannot avoid the impression that the later Heidegger
seemed to have preferred all things natural and rural, then Nancy’s refusal of
such a distinction entails some serious consequences. The disappearance of
any valid distinction between nature and technology would give rise indeed
to being as the ‘spacing’ of that which Nancy pointedly calls ‘eco-technics’
(BSP 129–42) Such a blurred boundary not only ridicules Heidegger’s wager
on the pre-Socratic Greeks, that is, on any touching of the origins, it also
seems to render any such wager inoperative. For, as much as there cannot be
delineated, according to Nancy, any clear and distinct ‘metaphysics,’ for exam-
ple the distinction between nature and creation as production (as Heidegger
portrayed it)—such a distinction would auto-deconstruct—so too there can-
not be any adequate view on that which supposedly ‘overcomes’ metaphysics,
for example by presupposing an entirely ‘natural’ access to what is proper to a
being or to several beings—such an access can be deconstructed. What Nancy
is aiming for is a complete chiasm between nature and technology: whenever
there is a human being, there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ natural state anymore;
likewise whenever there is something like ‘nature,’ a ‘pure’ human Other
becomes impossible.
In this sense, Nancy would inaugurate, along with Derrida, the end of “the
Heideggerian hope.” Heidegger’s hope, according to Derrida, lies in his nos-
talgia for a first and proper word, in attending to that which is proper to one’s
being or to attain to what is uniquely one’s own, mine, or ours.19 The debate
between Derrida and Nancy is, as we will see shortly, centered precisely on this
question as to whether or not Nancy has been able to eradicate all nostalgia.
In sum, the Christian representation of creation is, according to Nancy,
nothing other than a necessary (but now bygone) figuration and symboliza-
tion of the truth of the world. That is why Nancy states that which we are
witnessing now is the passage from creation as the end-result of a divine act to
a thinking of creation as an activity and, ultimately, incessant actuality of this
world in its singularity, to the “permanence without substance” (BSP 168) of

open is needed, emphasis will sooner or later be on the quality of the guardians rather than on
that which is to be guarded.
19)
Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 29; my translation.
278 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

the worlding of the world (cf. CW 65). Nancy’s ‘detheologization’ of the theme
of creation tries to conceive of the fact that the fallen nature of the world,
always at a distance from its salvation, has been assumed and taken up by
this global world itself—with one difference, however: the world is no longer
awaiting its satisfaction from whatever (theological) ‘outside’ one can imagine;
it now has to ‘be’ this lack, this fallenness, without a place from which to have
fallen in the first place; it has to transcend into nothing. Nancy adds: “But . . .
it is from a feature of ‘creation’ that an inscription is thus transmitted to the
global world” (CW 44).

4.2. Incarnation
In the text “Verbum caro factum” (D 81–84), Nancy outlines the novelty
Christianity brings to the understanding of incarnation. Whereas incarnation
is mostly understood as a transportation of a strange substance into the con-
tainer that would be the body, Nancy argues that nothing of the sort is at issue
in Christianity’s understanding of the Incarnation. In Christianity, it is not a
matter of God forging an entry into that which is first and foremost outside of
God—the body—but, almost the other way around, it is the flesh that has
become (the) divine: God enters the flesh from the inside-out as it were, divin-
izing it by taking it on from within. The Christian understanding of Incarna-
tion does not distinguish between the body and the divine; the body does not
differ from the divine, which abandons its absolute divinity in order to iden-
tify itself not with the human being but as a human being.20
The Christian God, then, for Nancy, is a God who alienates Godself in and
through this ‘passing to the outside’ and who is nothing but this alienation.
Nancy is quick here to identify this movement of God’s alienation from God-
self with the general strand of his deconstruction of Christianity, namely, that
of progressive disappearance of the divine, leaving us only with bodies that are
gathered in a world, gathered (but disjointed) with itself through their very
gathering of all with all—the between of being.

20)
One should be careful here, however, for the very understanding of Incarnation that Nancy
is portraying here has been contested several times from within Christianity itself—something
that Nancy does not note. One is reminded, for instance, of the adoptionist doctrine of Theodo-
tus of Byzantium (second century). According to this doctrine, Jesus was at first only human and
was granted his divinity by God only after the Resurrection. It matters little here that this doc-
trine has been condemned and deemed heretical; it matters that there might be some sort of a
stereo-theism within Christianity itself that does not lend itself so easily to the univocal approach
of Nancy’s deconstruction.
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 279

It is important to note that, for Nancy, the Christian account of the Incar-
nation was nothing but a foreshadowing—a prefiguration, if you like—of his
account of spacing as the intertwining of the empirical—the fact that beings
take place in space and time—and the transcendental realm—‘spacing’ as the
condition of possibility for anything to take place at all. It is this point that
Robert Esposito’s critique of Nancy’s understanding of Incarnation seems to
miss. When Esposito supposedly alludes “to the semantics of incarnation as
the place, the form, and the symbol of the union between the human and the
non-human” and states that he would even go as far as saying that “technology
is the non-Christian, post-Christian even, figure of the Incarnation,” there
seems to be nothing in this statement with which Nancy would disagree. It is,
therefore, not correct to state that Nancy’s concept of the body is in “frontal
opposition to the logic of incarnation.”21 Again, it is for Nancy a matter of
advancing his thesis of the (incarnational) spacing of the world as a fact that
exceeds the theological account of the Incarnation.
Though Esposito is right when pointing to Nancy’s reluctance towards the
concept of the flesh—since it misses the muteness and the materiality of the
body—his critique forgets that for Nancy it matters to understand just how
this excess of the already incarnational spacing towards Christianity’s under-
standing of the Incarnation can be assessed in and from within a Christian
culture. The Incarnation, which understands Christ as the mediator between
the divine and the human, is thus superseded by this spacing that is a media-
tion both without mediator and without mediating anything—no (clear and)
distinct entities (cf. BSP 94–95). It mediates, if anything, the nothingness of
all beings in order for beings to be able to come into being out of that very
nothingness and to differ from one another. It is in this sense that this infi-
nitely finite spacing of singulars accounts for the event of being. But the event
of being happens only in and to beings: it takes on body, materiality, place,
and space. It is of this, according to Nancy, that the Christian idea of Incarna-
tion was a foreshadowing.

4.3. Salvation
I have already indicated that Nancy somewhat ridicules Heidegger’s musings
on salvation. For Nancy, it appears that “to ‘save’ is not ‘to heal’. It is not a
process and it is not measured against an ultimate ‘health’ ” (D 27). On the

21)
See, for this, R. Esposito, “Chair et corps dans la déconstruction du christianisme,” in Sens en
tous sens: Autour de travaux de Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. F. Guibal and J.-C. Martin (Paris: Galilée,
2004), 153–64, 162, and 158, respectively.
280 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

contrary: salvation, for Nancy, does not abandon the abyss of sense but takes
place within it, just as it is not a matter to be saved from the world but, rather,
to see the world as that in which a salvation of sorts can take place. This, too,
is for Nancy one way to expel all Heideggerian hope. To play with a famous
Heideggerian phrase: for Nancy, ‘where the danger is,’ nothing is ‘growing’
indeed, the danger merely throws us back upon our incurable illness (D 9).
In this way, Nancy’s thought of creation has dropped every eventual satis-
faction of the fall. Yet the difference between the ‘secularizing of the theologi-
cal’ and Nancy’s account of ‘detheologization’ lies precisely in the fact that the
former would still reserve some sort of theological role to play for the world—
as when one is tempted to read into Heidegger’s Being and Time and its
emphasis on guilt and authenticity a secular version of Christianity’s narrative
of the fall and redemption—while the latter tries to conceive of the fact that
the fallen nature of the world has been assumed and taken up by this global
world itself while no longer awaiting its satisfaction from whatever ‘outside’
one can imagine. The inhabitant of the contemporary world must, at least in
Nancy’s mind, resign both from regarding its own existence as a fault as well
as from every salvation conceived as an abandonment of this very world (for
another world, for instance). Redemption, for Nancy, is nothing other than
no longer perceiving existence as a fault or as guilt. On the contrary: existence
consists of experiencing in the world that which is not of the world but which
is not of another world either (D 77–78).
Whether or not Nancy’s account of resurrection remains within the (Chris-
tian) reasons for hope will however not be discussed here—it would require a
long detour via (Nancy’s) Blanchot (D 89–103). The question of hope never-
theless returns in another way and is—again—raised by Derrida when speak-
ing of the “destructive effects” within Nancy’s discourse itself (OT 269). The
concluding sections of this article will therefore pay attention to just what
effects Derrida has in mind as well as prolong Derrida’s critique through the
investigation of some distinctions that Nancy draws and which seem to stand
in need of some deconstruction.

5. Deconstructing Nancy with Derrida

5.1. On an Apocalyptical Tone in Nancy’s Philosophy

‘Nancy’s hope,’ then, can be understood from out of the “destructive effects,”
namely, the strange mixture of hope and apocalypticism that Derrida has sig-
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 281

naled in Nancy’s works. In this section, I will ask of what precisely these ges-
tures are ‘destructive.’ First, however, some examples of this hope and of its
accompanying apocalypticism are provided.
A first example needs to focus on Nancy’s somewhat desperate call for a new
era. Consider, for instance, Nancy’s statement that doing justice to singular
plural event of beings is “one of the concerns left to us by that time which as
‘post’ could well be a first time, a time suspended in the preexistence of another
time, another beginning and another end” (CW 61, also 47). A second exam-
ple, then, needs to show that such a new era has already been inaugurated. The
Kingdom, so to say, ‘is near.’ Consider, for instance, this somewhat utopian
hope in Being Singular Plural where Nancy states that from the moment and
henceforth that the global space of the world is understood as spacing, “our
history comes upon . . . its greatest danger and its greatest opportunity. It is
here in the still poorly perceived imperative of a world that is in the process of
creating its global conditions, in order to render untenable and catastrophic
the sharing of riches and poverty, of integration and exclusion, of every North
and every South” (BSP 140). Such an inauguration needs, thirdly, to be accom-
panied with a sort of repentance—the invocation to change one’s wicked ways.
Hence Nancy’s apocalyptic tone in, for instance, Dis-Enclosure. Here Nancy
infuses the planetary and cosmic dimensions of the globalized world with a
peculiar kind of Heideggerian nostalgia for a time prior to our technological
age. It is said, for instance, that “for the first time” the expansion of the world
is not only the end-result of the technological means human beings employ
and control but also that these means and instruments take control them-
selves: they are “at once tools but also agents . . . of expansion” to the point
even that “space is not conquered space without space conquering its conquer-
ors as well” (D 159–160). Now is the time, according to Nancy that is, that
the spacing of space, so to say, rears its ugly head; it is “a new departure
for creation: nothing, which moves over to make a place or give occasion to
something”; for now that “the space-time is becoming that of the transmission
of satellite signals,” “locations are delocalized and put to flight by a spacing
that precedes them and only later will give rise to new places” (D 160, 161).
But for now, it seems, all this has “a character that is close to an explosion”
(D 161).
If Derrida directs us to this apocalyptical tone in Nancy’s thinking, then
this is the case because these somewhat morbid metaphors are by no means
innocent. Raffoul and Pettigrew, for instance, pointed out that the title of the
book The Creation of the World or Globalization has to be read in disjunctive
fashion, for “they reveal two distinct, if not opposite, meanings”: whereas
282 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

globalization stands for the global uniformity and its sometimes indeed disas-
trous effects, the creation of the world “is the possibility of an authentic world-
forming, that is, of a making of the world and of a making sense” (CW 1). It is,
therefore, in this way that Nancy’s statement in Being Singular Plural that
today “our history comes upon . . . its greatest dangers and its greatest oppor-
tunity” has to be understood: either the dawn of a new and just era or the
apocalypse. According to Derrida, then, it is precisely such a disjunction that
is destructive of Nancy’s thought, for it implies an absolute rupture between
our era and earlier metaphysical times. This already indicates that Nancy
might not so much be forging a way out of the (Christian) tradition from
within the tradition, but rather tries to operate from outside of the tradition
as if an absolute break with it is nevertheless possible, thus forgetting that “it
is not enough to ‘believe’ or believe oneself and declare oneself non-Christian
in order to utter a discourse, speak a language . . . safely sheltered from Christi-
anity” (OT 220).
One should thus ask, with regard to this ‘still poorly perceived imperative,’
not only whether Nancy does not make the same mistake that he reproached
Heidegger for—after all, is there any difference between the ones able to ‘hear’
the voice of Being and the ones able to perceive the imperative to create the
world?—but also whether the institution of an absolute cleft between our age
and the previous ones is philosophically valid at all—ultimately, Nancy is not
the first philosopher to proclaim the end and the fulfilment of history. The
point is, however, that if such a cleft would be valid—as the indications of
temporality in the quotes seem to indicate—then, by the same token, all pre-
vious eras are—to play Nancy against himself (cf. D 65)—taken en bloc, that
is, grasped as a totality. From this follows that one can oversee all of its history,
the entirety of its assembly, in short: all of it is (fully) present. Over and against
this totality one can then have—to use Nancy’s words—“all sorts of opinions.”
The conclusion thus seems to be that the ontological language Nancy is using
here for his account of the creation and ‘worlding of the world’ suddenly turns
very ontic and is on the verge of becoming a form of a metaphysical ideology.
In short, the mixture of hope and apocalypticism22 indicates that Nancy has
himself not yet been emancipated “from a certain thinking of emancipation”
(D 9) and flies the same flight as once did Hegel’s owl, viewing from above
all of its chances as well as its perils. This, finally, seems to be the reason why

22)
Another destructive gesture must be noted: whereas Nancy at one time claims that our time
reveals “the end of the self-surpassing of Christianity” (D 142), he elsewhere describes it as an
“incessant movement of auto-deconstruction” (NMT 41).
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 283

Derrida keeps pointing to a nostalgia and to a hope even in Nancy’s work. For
if there remains any hope for salvation and resurrection in Nancy’s work, then
Derrida’s closing address of On Touching 23 perhaps has to be read as a warning,
a warning about the destructive gestures of Nancy’s work, for even the one
without hope can make the error of ‘getting the others’ hopes up’ through
postulating a salvation that is always deferred as ‘yet to come.’

5.2. Otherwise than Metaphysics, or the Eclipse of Essence

The question therefore is whether metaphysics makes a return even in Nancy’s
work, for the hope of an entirely new beginning might simply repeat the ges-
ture with which Heidegger, for instance, wanted to be ‘in touch’ with the
origins (of being). Metaphysics means here simply the possibility of the pure
gaze, perceiving what it perceives in a clear and distinct manner, touching
whatever it touches upon in manners unmediated and untainted by history,
interpretative maneuvers, or (con)texts.
Derrida’s argument in this regard is quite complex, but it runs, if one turns
to the language of phenomenology, something like this: even though one
wants to escape the logic of immediacy or of intuitive fulfilment of intention-
ality by pointing to whatever resists such fulfilment—what remains absent or
does not give itself—this resistance itself will, in turn, give way to effects and
illusions of immediacy. It is as if Husserl’s break with the natural attitude in
order to attain the phenomenological attitude will inevitably pass into some
sort of natural and realist attitude. Let us listen to Derrida: “[The] dehiscence
of the outside and the other comes to inscribe an irreparable disorganization,
a spacing that dislocates, a non-coincidence (which also yields the chance
effects of full intuition, the fortune of immediacy effects) wherever Husserl
speaks of ‘coincidence’ ” (OT 181). In other words: even if one believes in the
interruption (or mediation) by the other or by otherness, chances are, still,
that this will “produce an illusory belief in immediacy of contact” (OT 253).
According to Derrida, it would thus be to such a metaphysics that we all fall
prey, and Nancy is no exception: “for it can also happen, it can moreover always
happen—we have to insist on it—that the intuitionistic . . . logic of immediacy
shows itself to be irrepressible . . . not only here and there in Nancy’s text, but
massively elsewhere” (OT 129). Such an ‘intuitive’ metaphysics, then, would
give rise to a realist naiveté—as if one can touch without remainder or residue

23)
See Derrida, OT 310: “a benediction without any hope for salvation. . . . Just salut . . . without
salvation.”
284 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

upon that which obstructs, hinders, and resists the immediate grasping of all
touching. Derrida again: “Nancy has written moreover: there is that there is:
creation of the world” (OT 288). In other words: it is as if, in the end, Nancy
sees himself able to answer the age-old metaphysical question—tóde ti ? What
is?—in a rather straightforward way: the world is what there is.24
To be sure, for Derrida, it is not a matter of denying this dehiscence, it is
rather to respect the fact both that this dehiscence will be denied—turn into
realism, declaring and prescribing what is real—and that one will have to
reckon with this dehiscence and interruption that is an “archi-facticity” pre-
cisely as “contingency”—and in this sense “real” (OT 232). To put it in phe-
nomenological terms again: it is not only a matter “to reintroduce a priori
what is constituted into what is constituting” (OT 181) or “the antecedence of
what I constitute to this very constitution” (TI 147), it is also, and above all, a
matter of knowing just how this contingent archifacticity crosses the very act
of constitution.25 And it is here, I contend, that Nancy’s thought shows itself
to be phenomenologically inadequate. Two examples will illustrate this.

5.2.1. Faith and/in Belief

The first example is Nancy’s utter separation between faith and belief. Nancy
asks rhetorically “whether faith has ever, in truth, been confused with belief ?”
(D 12).26 To be sure, Nancy is well aware that belief without faith is empty, for
one needs the personal stance of faith to put into practice one’s beliefs (D 48,
153). What Nancy does not take into account, however, is that, phenomeno-
logically speaking, reciprocally, faith without belief is—to stick to Kantian
terms—blind: for just as ‘it takes two to explain a thought’ (cf. TI 100, BSP 27),
so too it takes (at least) two things, statements, or propositions for faith to be
able to discern and discriminate between contents at all. The return to such a

24)
This is also the reason why Derrida reproaches Nancy for the very same thing as he, once,
criticized Levinas for: empiricism. See Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 151–53. The question of empiricism and realism pops up
regularly in OT 46, 116–17, but esp. 287. Derrida nuances his ‘reproach,’ however, on 307.
25)
A similar thought in M. Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard: 1960), 117.
26)
Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 12. ‘Belief ’ for Nancy is “a weak form of knowledge,” through adhering
to one or the other postulate—one can think of the dogmas of Christian faith—which allows the
‘believer’ to “suppose within the other a sameness which allows him or her to identify itself with
them and be comforted”—my belief in these dogmas is what will save me. Citations are, respec-
tively, D 52 and NMT 19. Christianity, for Nancy, is an exceptional religion because it eradicates
all forms of ‘belief ’ and myths. The theme is central to Dis-Enclosure, but is stated already in
Nancy, Des lieux divins, 35.
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 285

self-evidence is by no means a coincidence: for one to be able to have faith,

one has to be acquainted with the contents of a tradition from within, that is,
one has to be aware of the existing set of propositions to discriminate between
those propositions which are outdated, in need of recontextualization and
those that, perhaps, are not. At the same time, however, the act of faith actual-
izes such propositions if and only if this or that proposition can be taken as
true; but the fact remains that such an act is only possible if it is preceded, and
thus constituted, by some sort of acquaintance with the culture and proposi-
tions available.
An example might elucidate this. One can think, for instance, of the debate
between the anti-correlational theology of Karl Barth and the correlational
theology of Emil Brunner on the topic of the virgin birth—a proposition one
might deem ‘unbelievable’ in all senses of the word. This debate can be sum-
marized as follows: whereas Barth stressed the primacy of God’s revelation over
and against the human being’s capacity to receive God’s revelation, Brunner
insisted upon the necessity of some point of contact between God’s revelation
and the human condition in order for revelation to be received at all. Whereas
Barth, then, stresses the virgin birth as illustrative of the discontinuity between
God’s grace and the ‘capax Dei’ of the human being, James Smith, however,
argues the other way around: “while the central truth here is certainly God’s
gracious initiative, . . . it does not occur without reference to the ‘conditions of
the receiver’. For if God really wanted to demonstrate the utter incapacity of
humanity and assert his free (re)creative powers, should God not have impreg-
nated a man?”27 The point is that for a believer to have faith, discernments of
this kind are a prerequisite: only if one balances between, and has balanced,
the doctrine of virgin birth taken as a somewhat mythical proposition and an
understanding showing the—albeit theological—logic of it, can a faith arise
which actualizes its content: there is no faith if faith does not have anything to
activate in the first place. Such a mediation and entanglement of faith and
belief precludes both any primacy of faith over belief (Nancy) as well as any
primacy of belief over faith (as Nancy interprets ‘religion’).

5.2.2. Derrida’s and Nancy’s Shorthands

Another example. For, even if this was put in theological terms, it surely is not
a matter of theology alone. One finds, in Derrida’s On Touching, quite a reveal-
ing comment upon the two shorthands the two thinkers use to designate the

27)
J. Smith, Speech and Theology. Language and the Logic of Incarnation (London: Routledge,
2002), 167–68.
286 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

gesture of deconstruction (OT 287–88). Whereas Derrida’s “if there is any”

(s’il y en a) may be known, Nancy’s “there is no ‘the’ ” (il n’y a pas le/la . . .) per-
haps is not. And yet, the difference here, however minute, is of utmost impor-
tance. As we all can recognize the necessity of Nancy’s phrase, as Derrida does,
it is necessary as well to recognize, just as Derrida does, the limits of it. Imag-
ine a conversation in which someone says “all politicians are bad.” The response,
obviously, is that not all politicians are the same and that, thus, there is no
such thing as ‘the’ politician. And yet, for speech, communication, interac-
tions to occur at all between us, it is necessary just the same that both of us,
and all of us, do have a concept, an essence, of that which is understood as ‘the’
politician, otherwise a response to such a statement would not even be possi-
ble. In other words: one cannot do without representations, essences, concepts
etc. Il faut généraliser—one must generalize. In Derrida’s words: “Nancy knows
that one has to use cunning, make deals, and negotiate with it [since] the
definite or defining article is already engaged or required by the discourse that
disputes it” (OT 287).
This imperative is precisely what is left open in Derrida’s “if there is any”
and what Nancy’s shorthand forecloses. Derrida’s “if there is any” leaves room
for more interpretations: since we sometimes must generalize, however violent
towards this other here and that being there, however impossible in the face of
this singular existence and the plurality out there, one will have to recognize a
sort of soothing of such general concepts to reality, a sort of aspiring of the
concept towards the purity of that which it designates, an existence of ideality
and signification. If Derrida mentions time and again, for example, that a pure
hospitality is forever presupposed, his “if there is any” such hospitality indi-
cates not only, and simply, that one cannot speak of this general and absolute
hospitality without taking all the concrete and empirical forms of hospitalities
into account, but simultaneously admits that one will need to speak of a gen-
eral form of hospitality whenever and if—si’l en y a—such a concrete hospital-
ity has occurred. This is why Derrida explains his shorthand: “each time, it was
necessary to point to the possible (the condition of possibility) as to the impos-
sible itself. ‘If there is any’ does not say there is none.” The point is that Nancy,
and his tendency to dismantle and dislocate the possibility of concepts and
essences of all sorts, seems to reduce philosophical discourse to the singulari-
ties of all sorts of empirical events to the point of eclipsing essence. It would be
such an abandonment of signification and essences that Derrida has in mind
when commenting upon Nancy’s line of reasoning: for Nancy indeed, “it is
because there is some technical . . . that there isn’t this or that [‘there is no “the”
technical’] and that one can infinitely repeat. . . gestures that deconstruct the
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 287

very unity or the properness itself of all essences” (OT 287). In other words: it
is because there are these very different forms of hospitalities that one cannot
conclude to the one and single essence of hospitality—there is no such thing
as (the) hospitality.
We know that Derrida would not agree. On the contrary, Derrida would
write: it is necessary to say “the” hospitality in the singular again in order to
say it in the plural. Derrida, then, notes the difference between his “if there is
any” and Nancy’s “there is not ‘the’ ”: if the former turns to a conditional—
hence it can also be read: since, whenever and if there is such a thing as an act
of hospitality—the latter turns to a negative modality—there is no such thing
as Hospitality. Consider the difference, then, between “a good politician, if
there is any” (Derrida) and “there is no ‘the’ good politician” (Nancy): the
former speaks in a provisional manner—while it is highly unlikely that any
such thing will occur, one cannot exclude the fact that it might occur either.
The latter speaks in a negative and almost dogmatic matter: even if there would
be such a thing, one cannot and may not conclude to the fact that this would
be a general thing, a group of people that could be comprehended through an
essence. Nancy is thus already in denial of any factuality: there cannot be, and
never will be ‘the’ . . .

6. Coda: What Comes After Christianity?

The abandonment of all essences, their eclipse, that Nancy is looking for, in
this way comes close to that haunting picture Levinas once painted, namely,
that in a world without the Other “absolute silence . . . would reign”—one
would not know whom to speak to. It is to forget, moreover, that “to the inef-
fable ideality . . . there responds an echo of the world in which significations
are said”—in the world, one always and already speaks of something to some-
one.28 For Levinas, then, and since the social relation is “not produced outside
the world” (TI 173), it is in discourse that things acquire “fixity,” a “name” and
an “identity,” in short: an essence. It is only through this naming and this fix-
ity that we can speak of the same things in (more or less) the same way:
for instance, that “the same train is the train that leaves at the same hour”
(TI 139). What seems to be lacking in Nancy’s account of the world thus
seems to be a phenomenology of language, that is, a phenomenological

28)
Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 189 n. 21. Derrida has, moreover, commended a similar thought to Nancy,
see OT 117.
288 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

account of the echo between the (ideal) signification of the word and the
world in which these significations and essences are already used, of the fact
that language is, at any rate, always the speaking of something to someone.29
The consequences that need to be drawn from this discussion are severe.
Should one conclude, for instance, that, contrary to appearances, Nancy’s
ontology occurs, unlike Levinas’, ‘outside the world’? In a certain sense, yes.
For if one follows Derrida’s contention that the eclipse of essence in a way
obscures the “archifacticity of contingency” because it is always and already on
the verge of reifying this very eclipse by bordering on realism, and if one fol-
lows Levinas’ conclusion that the Saying or the address of the Other occurs
always and already in, and from out of, the said or that which is being
addressed—then one cannot not conclude that Nancy’s thought of ‘the crea-
tion of the world’ forgets that even this speaking of the world happens from
out of a determinate, definite world, culture or being-with-one-another.30
Thus, the irrepressibility of essence we are advancing here, because of the
noted return of metaphysics and some sort of ‘essence’ and ideality, implies
that Nancy’s thought of the world in some sort of way posits a point outside
the world that, even in his case, functions as the postulation of a sort of given-
ness, a concept(ion), albeit the givenness of the nothingness of sense. It is such
an ‘outside’ that accounts for the fact that Nancy’s thought of the world nev-
ertheless seems to merge with a (subjective) ‘worldview’ in the Heideggerian
sense. Since Nancy’s proposed eclipse of essence shows itself impossible, it
becomes thus legitimate to ask whether Nancy’s project on Christianity really
takes place from within this determinate and definite Christian culture that is
ours—however ‘post-’ we are—that is, whether it can take into account the
peculiarities, the differences and the contexts that determine, precisely, this
culture. For just as the distinction between faith and belief does not hold, so
too Nancy’s attempt to deconstruct Christianity—speaking of it as if already

29)
To be sure, Nancy advances his thought as an “ontology of the address” and knows that
“being is communication,” but the address never occurs, according to Levinas at least, without
something being addressed in the first place, always and already the one with the other. Citations
of Nancy are BSP xvi and 28.
30)
The reference to Heidegger’s thrownness is deliberate, see Heidegger, Being and Time, trans.
J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 264: “Dasein . . . is
already in a definite world and alongside a definite range of definite entities within-the-world.”
Note also, that on this topic at least, Levinas and Heidegger are quite close, see for instance
Heidegger, Einleitung in der Philosophie (Frankfurt a. M: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), 139:
“every being uncovered of present-at-hand entities is therefore also already given away and shared,
since the disclosing of Dasein, that is being-there, is necessarily being-with” (my italics).
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 289

outside of it, to have surpassed or overcome it, to dwell beyond its essence—
seems to lack the means to confront the relics of the culture, that is, the prop-
ositions and the discourse that constitute it, to discriminate between, or even
to deconstruct, its ruling distinctions, demarcations, and so on. One might
thus wonder whether Nancy’s distinction between the ‘creation’ of the world
and its alternative, which he calls the ‘unworld’ of globalization, has not
already deconstructed itself, because in his account of this creation already
there is the ‘unworldly’ lure of absolute silence and muteness.
What, then, comes after Christianity? The question deserves to be posed, even
though Derrida has deemed it impossible. This article only ever wanted to
utter a warning about the terms of this debate. “The test of a de-christianizing
of the world,” for Derrida, is destined to fail because “only Christianity can do
this work, that is, undoing it while doing it. Heidegger, too . . . has only suc-
ceeded in failing at this. Dechristianization will be a Christian victory” (OT 54).
The de-christianization or detheologization, then, would be destined to come
up with evermore Christianities and crypto-theologies. Likewise, the theolo-
gians decry the loss of bits and pieces of the Christian tradition. Nancy’s
“wrestling match of thinking” (OT 287), however, and this is what is indicated
here, might be fighting an invisible opponent, for it should not matter who
wins and who loses here, and even less what is lost and what is won; it matters
what is to be done: ‘after’ Christianity, ‘after’ metaphysics, ‘after’ the spectating
subject indeed.
Nancy’s mis-take on essence and on metaphysics—not its eclipse, but its
haunting, like a ghost—should shed light on just how to proceed here. Con-
sider, for instance, Nancy’s approach to Levinas’ beyond of essence: “many
pages and accentuations in Levinas can lead one to belief that there is a ‘God’
or some form of capitalized ‘Other’—and hence [that Levinas is] at the risk of
essence [au risque d’essence] with the foundation of this unground.”31 One
should thus wonder whether this risk of essence is really to be avoided and
even whether it can be avoided at all. The suggestion is therefore that the
demarcation line should not run between either a thought of the world or
the lure of essence, the question is how this given set of essences merges with
the facticity of ‘already’ being-thrown-in-a-world and so contributes to any
thinking of world.
Thus, even when it comes to the deconstruction of Christianity, then,
being-in-the-world is communication if and only if we know what we are

31)
Nancy, “Hors tout,” in Emmanuel Levinas et les territoires de pensée, ed. D. Cohen-Levinas and
B. Clément (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), 382–92, 387.
290 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291

saying. Speaking of the world is possible à condition de s’entendre.32 This also

means that there indeed is a condition (of possibility) for us to understand one
another, and it is because of this ‘echo’ of, this ‘link’ with, and ‘attachment’ to
the world in which essences are used that one can criticize Nancy for not
enough having thought with Merleau-Ponty, that is, for not having recognized
that “without the necessities by essence . . . there would be neither a world, nor
something in general, nor Being.”33 For Merleau-Ponty, then, these essences,
these constitutions of ideality, are rooted in our encounter with the world and
therefore their, albeit unstable, authority is always and already conditioned,
(co-)constituted and “borne by the tree of my duration and other durations.”34
In short, the newness and the novelty of our contemporary situation—the
‘creating’ of the world—that Nancy wants to convey cannot be attained at the
expense of everything that has occurred before. The rigorous cleft that Nancy
enforces between our age and everything that preceded it seems phenomeno-
logically untenable: just as one cannot have a ‘faith’ entirely bereft of belief,35
so too the novelty Nancy wants to inform us about cannot do without a rigor-
ous taking into account of what showed itself, so to say, previously on the
happening of the world. This is exactly the point where Merleau-Ponty’s
thought would touch, to my mind, Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy: all new
constellations of thought only ever happen through a novel figuration arising
out of the already instituted and constituted configurations. There is no new
formation of thought and world if there is no transformation of (all) the ear-
lier sedimentations and configurations of sense and signification—the new

32)
I am alluding here to Nancy’s discussion with Lyotard in CW that ends in the following way:
“The Lyotardian question . . . leads toward . . . the question of ‘creation.’ ” The next section opens
with “A condition de s’entendre, cela va de soi.” Now, this literally means: “on the condition that
we understand one another, this much goes without saying”; see La création du monde (Paris:
Galilée, 2002), 86; CW, 67.
33)
Derrida, OT 184, rightly remarks the following, “Merleau-Ponty: Nancy does not cite him
often.” Derrida comes up with one reference. Another allusion, though, might be found in
Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée, 231, where Nancy states that we belong to or ‘bathe’ in sense:
“le sens, j’en suis.” Compare Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 127; for the retrieval of essence and ideality,
see 107–21 and 149–55; citation is 109. On the link with language, see esp. 117, 125–27 and
144–45.
34)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 111, also 152.
35)
One should not underestimate the consensus between a great many of contemporary thinkers
here; see Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 152; Heidegger takes a similar stance in Introduction to
Metaphysics, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 7; finally,
Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 33–34.
 J. Schrijvers / Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 266–291 291

happens only through the transformation of the old.36 It is on this intertwin-

ing between the contemporary constitution or creation of the world and its
older configurations that Nancy remains silent, perhaps all too silent. It seems,
then, that, even ‘after’ Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity, one is not done
with the i/Incarnation. That is why one might salute Nancy, as Derrida seems
to have done somewhat, with the advice Ignatius of Loyola37 once gave to his
pupils, that is, not “to turn or incline to one side or the other,” but “to find
[oneself ] as in the middle of a balance.”*

36)
Merleau-Ponty’s thought on the matter seems not to have changed during his career, see
Signes, 113, 115, 120–21, and also Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945),
210, 217, and 229.
37)
Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, trans. E. Mullan, taken from the online Christian Clas-
sics Ethereal Library (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ignatius/exercises.toc.html), Second Week, Pre-
lude for Making Election, The First Way.
*) The author is Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO-V).