Abstract
In this article, using the recent work by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age as my point of departure, I will argue that Jean-Luc Nancy enables us to think past the competing binary of atheistic and religious experience and allows us to surpass the present narratives of secularism. In A Secular Age, Taylor himself seeks a middle ground between atheism and religion, arguing that it is possible to open ourselves to the cross-pressures of modern existence that find us caught between scientific atheism and a need for spiritual and religious guidance. Here, Taylor finds a way of picturing ourselves within a secular age, remaining faithful to scientific rationalism, but still open to religion and a sense of a higher good. However, as I shall demonstrate, in his thesis Taylor misrepresents the Continental philosophical tradition (particularly Nietzsche and post-structuralism) that has itself sought to understand these cross-pressures of existence. Taking this misrepresentation, and specifically his reductive and colloquial analysis of Nietzsche, Camus, and Derrida, as my point of departure, I provide an alternative manner of thinking through the work of these writers, one that leads to a detailed analysis of Jean-Luc Nancy and his project the deconstruction of Christianity. In this analysis I argue that Nancy provides a manner of thinking that remains open and allows an experience of freedom, without seeking to close that sense of openness with explanation, nor maintaining that sense of openness with a conception of the divine.
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Notes
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2007), 21. Subsequent references are made in the text.
For example, when a person is beset by erratic and abnormal thoughts we understand this in terms of mental illness rather than as possession by some evil spirit (540).
One manner of conceiving this changed sense of self-identity is through the changing manner of relating to oneself through discursive practice that evolved from an intensification of the confession through Church history to the sphere of psychiatric medicine, as described by Foucault in The History of Sexuality: Volume One, trans. Hurley, R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). In this genealogical picture set out by Foucault we can see an increasingly individualizing set of disciplines and bio-power that worked upon the subject to create a ‘truth of the subject’ (70). For example, Foucault writes, ‘For a long time, the individual was vouched for by the reference of others and the demonstration of his ties to the commonweal (family, allegiance, protection); then he was authenticated by the discourse of truth he was able or obliged to pronounce concerning himself. The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power’ (59). I suggest this manner of picturing the change Taylor outlines in order to place this discourse within an alternative frame of reference, and I am not necessarily suggesting a correlation between the two notions of individualization.
In which what we believe is governed by choice, while the pursuit of human flourishing is largely unquestioned, and we come to understand ourselves as essentially ‘buffered’ individuals.
While this short ‘snapshot’ of Taylor’s notion of the ‘immanent frame’ provides a somewhat useful touchstone in the context of this article, it is by no means provides a complete picture of Taylor’s considerably well thought through and articulated thesis of the ‘immanent frame.’ I have provided it here in the context of this article in order to introduce one manner in which we might follow Taylor’s thought.
Taylor makes reference here and in other places to Wittgenstein’s picture theory, for example, he writes that ‘we have here what Wittgenstein calls a “picture,” a background to our thinking, within whose terms it is carried on, but which is often largely unformulated, and to which we can frequently, just for this reason, imagine no alternative. As he famously put it, “a picture held us captive”’ (549).
When Taylor first introduces the ‘death of God’ into his analysis of the immanent frame, he explicitly makes reference to Nietzsche without naming him in the text, but referring to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science in a footnote. He writes of his own version that it will not ‘be simply following the originator of the phrase (though I think my version is not too far from his)’ on p 560. He later argues that Nietzsche’s philosophy culminates in the doctrine of the will-to-power, in which ‘The main virtue stressed here is the imaginative courage to face the void, and to be energized by it to the creation of meaning…But how coherent is this view of the creation of meaning and value in face of the void [sic]’ on p 589.
Taylor engages in a dramatic reduction of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger’s philosophy in order to explain how one might engage in a ‘deconstruction of epistemology;’ see pp 558–9. Taylor then argues that, ‘Once you shift to the deconstructing point of view, the CWS [Closed World System, in other words, a closed spin on the immanent frame] can no longer operate as such. It seemed to offer a neutral point of view from which we could problematize certain values – e.g., “transcendent” ones – more than others. But now it appears that it is driven by its own set of values. Its ‘neutrality’ appears bogus’ (560). I agree, in a broad sense, with the cut and thrust of Taylor’s argument. The issue is that Taylor does not refer to the philosophical tradition that is part of the methodology he is using here, a methodology that quickly morphs when he begins referring to his task as one of deconstructing the death of God view (see, for example, p 567). One might refer to this as Heidegger’s ‘destruction,’ Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, and furthermore, Derrida’s notion of deconstruction – in any case, the reason why Taylor seems compelled to conflate these various philosophical traditions deserves further analysis, of which I hope this article may form a part.
As Taylor states, he is here referring to the manner in which the ‘master narrative’ (a ‘closed-spin’ to the ‘immanent frame’) provides these ‘constructions’ with the sense of a ‘coming of age.’ Which is to say we are, in the present milieu of the Western world, ethically growing up (836 fn32). This relates directly to the argument made regarding ‘exclusive humanism,’ which forms an important part of how Taylor understands the ‘immanent frame.’ For Taylor these ‘new constructions’ are not ‘unarbitrable by reason. . . their arbitration is much more complicated, like that between Kuhnian paradigms, and also involves issues of hermeneutical adequacy’ (565).
Taylor is here arguing that the closed world system creates the conditions for explaining and hence ignoring our sense of wonder at the world, and hence disavowing the ‘open stance’ that Taylor is advocating here. As he writes, ‘one’s thinking is clouded or cramped by a powerful picture which prevents one seeing important aspects of reality. I want to argue that those who think the closed reading of immanence is ‘natural’ and obvious are suffering from this kind of disability’ (551). Importantly, and in a manner that strengthens his argument, Taylor also points out that this works in the same way for those who think that the ‘open reading is obvious and inescapable;’ however, as he puts it, ‘such people…cannot approach the intellectual hegemony their opponents enjoy’ (551). It should be noted that this ‘intellectual hegemony’ refers to ‘Western secularism.’
Charles Taylor, ‘Foreword’ in Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 4.
A Secular Age, 564–5. Subsequent references are made in the text.
C.f. Taylor’s discussion of Nussbaum’s ‘warning against attempts to “transcend humanity”’ (625), 625–34.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (Penguin Books, 1975), 26. Translation modified and cited in A Secular Age, 584.
As Jean-Philippe Deranty writes in his paper, ‘The Tender Indifference of the World: Camus’ Theory of the Flesh’ Sophia (2011), 50:513–525, ‘Camus’ position could be mistaken as being akin to the classical ethical positions of the Greek philosophers, one he might have learnt to appreciate during his work for his dissertation on “Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism.” In fact, the acceptance and recognition of the world’s inhuman beauty occur through sensuous experience, not through moral reasoning’ (518).
Deranty presents a succinct and lucid introduction to this difficult and enigmatic notion of the ‘flesh’ in Merleau-Ponty in the aforementioned article; he writes that the flesh is indicative of ‘Merleau-Ponty’s “chiasmatic” scheme, that is, the idea that we can see and touch the world only because the world, as it were, sees and touches us’ (515).
Deranty, 517. As will be apparent to those familiar with Jean-Luc Nancy, and recent discussion of his work by Roberto Esposito, Nancy resists engaging in discussions of the ‘flesh,’ preferring to use the mediation of a ‘limit’ to reconcile not simply self and world, but self and self, or indeed, self and the other.
Deranty, 517.
It is important to note here that Nancy has been criticized for not engaging in a theory of the flesh; indeed, it is fair to say that Nancy does avoid a theory of the flesh in the terms outlined in this paragraph. Nancy prefers to work within an ontology of the body in relation to the touch of thinking upon the strangeness of the body, focusing his thinking upon the limit touched by both essentialism and nominalism; see, for example, in his work Corpus, trans. Rand, R.A. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). However, I think the disparity in Taylor’s analysis in comparison to Deranty’s opens the way for re-thinking the ‘normative abyss’ described by Taylor in his analysis of Nietzsche et al.
I am led to this conclusion by a footnote inserted by the translator on the occasion of the translation into English of Jean-Luc Nancy’s work Dis-Enclosure: The deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bergo, B. et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 6.
Dis-Enclosure, 8. Thus, Nancy argues that, ‘As such, the alogon can be understood as the extreme, excessive, and necessary dimension of the logos’ (8), which leads Alexandrova et al. (2012) to conclude that, ‘By means of his deconstructive analyses, Nancy insists that reason is not only the key notion to go against the grain of the religious, as secularism generally has it, but that reason keeps at it heart, and even depends upon, an element that exceeds it – the a-logon, the allos’ (25) .
Nancy writes in the Philosophical Chronicles, trans. Manjali, F. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) that ‘philosophy, in whatever manner we envisage it, aspires to be removed from specialization as well as from subjectivity. From the beginning and in principle, it demands the universal and the objective. That is to say, it asks how the universal can be an object of thought and how any object, whatever it may be, can be thought according to the universal. Thus, even if thought adopts the principle of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and the incommensurability of being, it still thus posits a form of universal object. Kant had a word for this: “the unconditional.” Reason demands the unconditional. That is its passion. It demands that which does not depend on anything prior, on any condition already posited. If I admit a condition, a prior given, I cannot begin to philosophize’ (1–2).
As Schopenhauer writes in The World as Will and Representation.
For example, in the The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, W. (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), where Nietzsche writes that, ‘The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos – in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms…Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man’ (s109).
Frederick Nietzsche, ‘Genealogy of Morals,’ in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Kaufmann, W. (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 599.
As Aristotle wrote in the Metaphysics, anticipating the desire to sense that would become indicative of the notion of the will to will. ‘All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves.’ (1)
The Gay Science, s355.
For example, in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and other essays, trans. Lovitt, W. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 53, ‘Through the overturning of metaphysics accomplished by Nietzsche, there remains for metaphysics nothing but a turning aside into its own inessentiality and disarray.’ Heidegger argues that Nietzsche is caught within the paradigm he sought to overturn, opening the path for Heidegger to create his own fundamental ontology. In this article I leave aside this nonetheless important departure Heidegger makes from Nietzsche.
The Gay Science, s355. We are here reminded of the ontic-ontological divide first portrayed by Heidegger in Being and Time and discussed in detail by Derrida in the ‘The Ends of Man’ Margins of Philosophy. This is not the place to elaborate this connection.
For example, the preference of speech over writing and the logocentrism outlined by Derrida in Of Grammatology.
For example, the ‘secret’ at work in ‘the incitement to discourse’ described by Foucault in The History of Sexuality, Vol 1 (22–35)
Nancy discusses the manner in which the paradigme principiel replaced the myth of polytheism in the simultaneous creation of atheism with monotheism; see, for example, ‘Atheism and Monotheism’ in Dis-Enclosure (14–28).
The Question Concerning Technology, 54.
See, for example, in Jean-Luc Nancy A Finite Thinking (Stanford: SUP, 2003), 6. Here Nancy describes this chiasmus in the following terms, ‘what senses in sense is the fact that it includes what it senses, and what produces sense in sense is the fact that it senses itself producing sense.’
See, for example, Nancy’s engagement with Nietzsche in ‘An Experience at Heart’ in Dis-Enclosure, where Nancy considers this lack of distinction as precisely what overturns the tradition of a metaphysics of presence such that presence itself becomes the opening. Nancy describes the experience of the death of God as the ‘destitution, of representation in general,’ where ‘Presence no longer breaks free from its ground; it does not disappear into it either: presence stands, vacillating, at the edge of appearing in a world where there is no longer a rupture or opening between being and appearing. It has itself become presence, this rupture…What thus occurs to presence is what occurs to the order of the world itself. Without a principle, the world no longer provides justification to the order that organized its significations (what is above, what is below, the known, the unknown)’ (76).
The Question Concerning Technology, 63.
The Question Concerning Technology, 61.
The Question Concerning Technology, 64.
The Question Concerning Technology, 63.
The Question Concerning Technology, 62, 67.
The Gay Science, s143.
The Gay Science, s357.
The Gay Science, s357.
The Gay Science, s125.
Dis-Enclosure, 1.
Slavoj Žižek, & John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009), 95.
Dis-Enclosure, 1. Subsequent references are made in the text.
The following note from Nancy guides our reading: ‘This essay was first delivered as a lecture at the University of Montpellier in 1995. It was recorded, transcribed, and then edited by Emmanuelle Soler, Vincent Chekib, and Pierre Rodrigo, to whom I express my gratitude for having been willing, in the urgency of the moment, to carry out the thankless and delicate task. It has retained the marks of a certain improvisation, the spoken language, and a very tentative stage of the work. Only the last two paragraphs were added after the fact. It was published in Etudes philosophiques, no. 4 (Paris, 1998). I have left this text in its original state (barring a few minor corrections), as a witness to the first moment in a questioning’ (188). Throughout this essay, Nancy has not used the term dis-enclosure, an omission I read as indicative of the role this essay has played in the formation and sedimentation of that concept in Nancy’s oeuvre.
Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Burge, O. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 4.
Dis-Enclosure, 141.
Dis-Enclosure, 143.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Conner, P. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxxviii. At this point in his essay, Nancy argues that the only worth to be found in logos is in and through a shared exposure.
Dis-Enclosure, 142. Subsequent references are made in the text.
Roberto Esposito, ‘Flesh and Body in the Deconstruction of Christianity’, trans. Watson, J. in Minnesota Review (2010) Fall, 75; 90. In this paper, Esposito apropos Derrida’s work On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy argues that Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity is stifled in its attempts to surpass the essence of Christianity because this deconstruction is Christianity. One manner for forcing this surpassing, Esposito argues, is by revising Nancy’s attitude toward the flesh, as Esposito writes, ‘If, as Nancy explained with inimitable theoretical force, the primary characteristic of our global world is its lack of a face or figure, then the impossibility of it being figured in a sense other than that of the evacuation of all general sense and therefore of the infinite scattering of sense, then there is nothing like the notion of the flesh for forcing us to confront our present’ (97). While this is not the place to answer this fundamental question posed by Esposito, his paper does illustrate the manner in which Nancy opposes the ontology of the flesh.
An essence that in Dis-Enclosure Nancy describes as ‘the disappearance of presence, of that presence that the gods of the mythologies are’ (83).
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Librett, J.S. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 149.
Dis-Enclosure, 128. Subsequent references are made in the text.
This discussion revolves around Nancy’s particular notion of sense (sens), which we might contrast with the notion of sense as signification. Most notably, this distinction is thought through by Jean-Luc Nancy in his work The Sense of the World, or indeed in ‘Responding to Existence’ from A Finite Thinking, in which Nancy discusses the chiasmus of responsibility and sense in remaining open to futurity (the ‘to come’): ‘Sense is only guaranteed by its own movement of expansion or flight – or, if you prefer, its own imminent contagion or its own transcendent excess’ (295).
Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’ Acts of Religion, ed. Anidjar, G. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 67.
Dis-Enclosure, 148.
Dis-Enclosure, 157.
Dis-Enclosure, 12.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. McDonald, B. (Stanford: SUP, 1993), 59.
Dis-Enclosure, 157.
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. Wallace, W. (Oxford: OUP, 1971), § 482.
Nancy elaborates his position in relation to Hegel in two places, The Speculative Remark: One of Hegel’s Bons Mots (Stanford: SUP, 2001) and in Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). It would require more space to illustrate this position in relation to what I am discussing here; however, in the later work there is a taste of this relation in the following quote, ‘Sensibility is nothing other than the relation of manifestation to itself; there is no nonsensible manifestation, and thus all truth is in the sensible: but it is there as negativity…Knowing does not come into the world from elsewhere than from the world itself – as the relation of the thing to the negativity of its manifestation, of its “coming from itself”’ (34).
The Experience of Freedom, 59.
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I wish to acknowledge and sincerely thank Dr Fiona Jenkins (Australian National University) for reading and commenting on an early draft of this paper. Without her insights and help this paper would not have been possible.
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Karolis, A.C. Sense in Competing Narratives of Secularization: Charles Taylor and Jean-Luc Nancy. SOPHIA 52, 673–694 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-013-0360-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-013-0360-6