Being a compilation of essays, Nancy's Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, won't fit the normal format of review. Each essay will be reviewed individually, and published under the title In-Review."Opening", Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Trans. By Bettina Bergo.
"It so happens today that the so-called civilization of humanism is bankrupt or in its death-throes" (2).
Nancy is not proposing a return or revival of religion, and he is less concerned about recent indications of such a return than he is the waning of humanism. It would seem that humanism now faces the same sort of metaphysical closure previously endured by religion under Englightenment and Reformation rationalism. On the one hand, Christianity failed to refrain from an institutional form of metaphysics. On the other, humanism (abandoning reason and settling, instead, with understanding) has neither been able to deliver a decisive blow to metaphysics or provide a conclusive reason for metaphysics.
...
As a result of this double closure, Nancy anticipates the possibility of a (sur-)religious upheaval before us with an unprecedented politic, likely to redefine and redraw globalizing democracy--theocratically or as something new entirely. Nancy states, "It simply seems to me difficult to avoid recognizing the drying up of humanism and the correlative temptations of a spiritualizing deluge" (5).
...
The contemporary thinking of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Freud, Derrida, and Deleuze has underscored a sort of requirement of rationality, bolstered by their contemplation of that which is inaccesible, "to let the obscure emit its own clarity" (6). Furthermore, Nancy thinks it critical that this motion "be effected by way of a mutual dis-enclosure of the dual heritages of religion and philosophy" (6).
...
As for Christianity, it becomes a matter of opening up Christian alterity as opposed to discovering a "world-behind-the worlds"—opening up the Christian precept of living in the world as outside of it. An idea which is supplemented by Anselm’s paradoxical "majus quam cogitari possit" (thinking "greater that what can be thought"). And so, "Christianity is at the heart of the dis-enclosure just as it is at the center of the enclosure" (10).
...
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment