In Review: Dis-Enclosure, Atheism and Monotheism

"Atheism and Monotheism", Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. By Jean-Luc Nancy, Trans. by Gabriel Malenfant & Bettina Bergo.

Marking out atheism as invention and inventor of what is called Western-Greek thought, Nancy highlights the shifting paradigms (a superiority of reason over destiny or determinism) which constructed Plato's theos---uniquely lacking a proper name, appearance, and genealogy. Nancy states:

"In Plato's theos, we can say that the gods disappear...Gods are departing into their myths...that the invention of "atheism" is contemporaneous and correlative with the invention of "theism" (15).

In this unique theos (the essence of which is more a premise or principle than an immortal figure), alterity and relation between god and man are in revision. But what are we inferring by the term a-theism? What are we inferring by negating this principle? Furthermore, is atheistic thinking possible? "Atheism states the principle of the negation of the divine principle...the configuration of an entity that is distinct from the entire world of entities, and for which it would hold the first cause and the final end" (16, italics mine).
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Despite philosophical desires, Nancy does not believe us to be capable of this kind of strict anetiological and ateleological thinking. Such thinking is defective (though it does not constitute a legitimization theism). Defective, perhaps. Nevertheless, with the collapse of the premise in contemporary thought, there has followed no new understanding of the collapse. Thus, Nancy sees atheism continuing to form a horizon, "a limit, a dead-end, and an end of the world" (18). However, paradoxically, in this atheistic limitation, theism is given its expansion.
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Atheism qua nihilism is forming a boundary of thought in the world, while, at the same time, as nihilism, it is giving rise to the question of "getting out" or making an "exit"---pointing toward something else. This leaves us with an aporia of forcing sense beyond the senses.
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From here, Nancy directs more specific attention toward monotheism, tracing Jewish montheism's confrontation with the West, as it unfolded through Christianity:

"Jewish monotheism, understood in its unfolding and its spread throughout the Greek world, opens into Christian thought...It prepares nothing other than the simultaneous evaporation of all divine presences and powers, and the designation of a principle that no longer has a 'divine' anything but the name--a name dispossessed of all personality, and even the ability to be uttered. Considered from this angle, the whole history of 'God'---the 'God' of the West---unfolds nothing less than the trial or process of atheism." (21).

All this came to be confirmed in the onto-theological, a priori deductions of Anselm, the modes and attributes of Spinoza, and Descartes' idea of a 'perfect being', all of which resulted in 'God' denoting "the premise or principle of a presupposed totality, founded in unity and necessity" (21). Thus, Jewish monotheism, as unfolded through Christian thought, constitutes (a)theism's second condition of possibility---along side Greek atheism as described above---as it converts divinity from "a present power or person...into a principle, a basis, and/or a law" (22).
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Why should atheism have or need such a strong rooting in the West? Why a "double constitution" of Greek a-theism and Jewish>Christian monotheism? What does this heterogenous doubling communicate? We have here questions for which reason cannot account. Nancy states, "It is strange to think that our civilization in its entirety posits, in principle, the weak, corrupted, or foreign (i.e., non-Greek...) essence of what has not ceased to constitute something like its internal lining---and this for more than twenty centuries." Any atheistic logic attempting to master the premise, or overcome it or deny it, only denies itself. Rather, the premise will only collapse in its own positing. To put it simply, perhaps, this binding together of theism and atheism seems to reshape the task of each so that, in effect, the positing of one is but the positing of the other, the collapse of one is the collapse of the other.
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Nancy believes that the task of monotheism is "to elude itself, to withdraw from itself, to pull away from itself, or again to deconstruct principation on the basis of itself." For monotheism to exceed it must oppose that very premise itself. Monotheism must think and act atheistically (in the sense that has been describe so far). Nancy relates three traits of what this might look like, traits which are well grounded in the monotheistic tradition:

1. Creation (creatio ex nihilo which Nancy takes to mean the emptying of nothing of any quality as a principle. That is creation.)
2. Holiness (which is not a principle, but something that opens to man or in man.)
3. Faith (which Nancy describes as the firm fidelity of reason to its own atheology.)

"What the name 'God,' or that of the 'holy,' rigorously attempts to designate in this atheological regime...refers not only to a ruining of the premise but...to "something,' to 'someone,' or to 'a nothing'...of which faith is itself the birthplace or the creative event."

Before closing with futher questions and allusions, Nancy cites the rather obscure Makarios of Magnesia, who gives demonstration or form to these three traits in his Apocritus, 2.8, stating: "The one who does the will of my Father gives birth to me by participating in this act, and he is born with me. He who believes in effect that I am the only Son of God engenders me in some sense through his faith."

Nancy, Jean-Luc, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Trans. By Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, Ed. John Caputo. Fordham University Press, 2008.