Desconstruccion Del Cristianismo La

by Jean-Luc Nancy

Deconstruir el ¿por qué, para qué? ¿No se está deconstruyendo, acaso, a sí mismo, desde el momento de su fundación? Nietzsche señalaba este movimiento de autosupresión y anulación del cristianismo a partir de la representación de lo mientras que el dios de las antiguas religiones había sido un dios pod

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Nonfiction, 21st Century, France, Theory

Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Jean-Luc Nancy is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Stanford has published English translations of a number of his works, including The Muses (1996), The Experience of Freedom (1993), The Birth to Presence (1993), Being Singular Plural (2000), The Speculative Remark (2001), and A Finite Thinking (2003).

Reviews

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot going on here, some of it beyond my ability to assimilate for now.

One cool thing that comes away easily is that monotheism is one of atheism's conditions of possibility:

unicity displaces or converts divinity. From a present power or person, it changes divinity into a principle, a basis, and/or a law, always by definition absent or withdrawn in the depths of being.

The transcendent deity lacks the immanent pantheon's concrete personality, and exists simply, if at all, as abstraction. The final step of shrugging off the abstraction itself comes much more easily, as we have seen in the centuries since monotheism's dominance.

Ultimately the point seems to be that "Christianity is by itself and in itself a deconstruction and a self-deconstruction." That is, beyond the monotheist principle displacing the polytheist personalities, we see how "Christianity (and through this prism, monotheism) has been engaged from its beginning in a perpetual process (i.e., a process and a litigation) of self-rectification and self-surpassing." To wit, monotheism "is not reduction to 'one' of the number of gods in 'polytheism': its essence is the disappearance of presence, of that presence that the gods of the mythologies are." Though it is a collection of essays that overlap in interests, the whole is aptly summarized by the paired aphorisms: "The only Christianity that can be actual is one that contemplates the present possibility of its negation" and "The only thing that can be actual is an atheism that contemplates the reality of its Christian origins." By deconstruction, it is meant that

deconstruction is always a penetration; it is neither a destruction, nor a return to the archaic, nor, again, a suspension of adherence: a deconstruction is an intentionality of the to-come [l’à-venir], enclosed in the space through which the construction is articulated part by part. 2. Deconstruction thus belongs to a construction as its law or its proper schema: it does not come to it from elsewhere.

Plenty more--politics, scriptural interpretation, and so on. It gets pretty cool sometimes:

unction signs not what will later be called a life eternal beyond death but the entry into death as into a finite parousia that is infinitely differed or deferred. This is the entry into incommensurable inadequation. In this sense, every dying one is a messiah, and every messiah a dying one. The dying one is no longer a mortal as distinct from the immortals. The dying one is the living one in the act of a presence that is incommensurable. All unction is thus extreme, and the extreme is always what is nigh: one never ceases drawing close to it, almost touching it.

Good times. Recommended for those interested in 'the double atheism of monotheism: the one it causes and the one it secretly bears within itself.'

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

an atheist grappling with the West's Christian origins. he is neither religious nor does he resent the Christian heritage of the West and of atheism. He spends much of the book deconstructing aspects and themes of Christianity to show their possibility for adaptation by atheism.

First of all, the essays are hit or miss. Also, for someone grappling with "Christianity", he makes minimal references to important figures who shape the tradition (Aquinas, Augustine, Cappadociean (?) Fathers, Luther, etc). Lastly, he might want to qualify his complete identification of Christianity with the West (and their mutual destiny) by considering the distinctiveness of the Eastern Orthodox Churches and Coptic Churches, and the adaptation of Christianity among post-colonial, non-Western nations.

Still a very admirable work in moving toward an atheism that is neither reactionary, fundamentalist, nor ignorant for its origins without falling back into piety.

[Hamletmaschine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lo primero que destaca es el fino diseño de interiores y el cuidado severo del aparato crítico (y siempre se agradece una edición bilingüe). Luego, el texto es excelente y no se puede decir más, por respeto a la formulación crítica que propone la deconstrucción. Este libro es oro molido.

[Sam Eccleston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent.

[Daniel Seifert]

Dis-enclosure turns out to be a critical text for seriously minded exegetes, close readers and process thinkers seeking to penetrate the illusions of post-religious and death-of-God era while realizing religious categories deconstruct themselves. It is a necessary endeavor that comes with dark warnings about a philosophical ‘turn to religion’ which, in Nancy's view, ‘can only sharpen … all the dangers that religion invariably poses to thought, to law, to freedom, and to human dignity’ (2).
Not only necessary but called for in religious text, for he implies that religious belief
is a kind of disease (21), is the province of the gullible (96), is akin to fascism (5, 40, 137) and
that the return to religion is, like all such returns, an ‘indecent’ ‘political correctness’ (85) elements of this current moral dark age.

Religious categories deconstruct themselves as shown in Nancy's own examples with the Epistle of James the notion of faith (pistis), the Judeo-Christian designation (fabrication) and monotheism itself [we are all atheist at the core].
Nancy shows us that [1] the kenosis of divinity, the ‘void-of-divinity’ (36), monotheism is thus already atheism; [2] a self-demythologizing, of Christianity which tends toward an eraser of distinctive religious signs in favor of a ‘symbolics deciphered within the human condition’; [3] Christianity provides a system of interpretation aimed which is distinguishable from its origins as well as in previous religious traditions thus elaborating a complex of philosophical concepts in the service of its theology; thus, it is thought rather than belief that is to be primacy {perhaps a post-belief and taking Socrates seriously and process thought]; [4] Christian Trinity indicates that monotheism is ‘less a body of doctrine’ than a way of depicting ‘a subject in relationship to itself in the midst of a search for self’ (38) and [5] Christianity and other monotheisms have developed through a history of self-revision and ‘self-surpassing’ (29), making them fundamentally similar to humanism. Simply, if the West, leaving Christianity behind through its inexorable secularization, is nothing other than ‘the unfolding of Christianity’ (143), since the West is Christian, then Christianity must itself be considered secular, humanist, atheist.

Jean-Luc Nancy's dis-enclosure supports a necessary turning missing in the broad conversation with the Christian 'church' at large, however found in the realm of academia. One can only resume caring for one's own soul in such dark moral times with a possibility of a surmounting a mystic-philosophical approach to art of life and a "resurrection of death" [Maurice Blanchot, 89ff]

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically, Christianity is atheism because of secular Greek influence. At least that’s what I got out of it.

[Fernando Pomar · Rating 4 out of 5]

good, illuminating, dense.