DOI: 10.1111/rec3.

12228

ARTICLE

JeanLuc Nancy and the exit from religion

Tenzan Eaghll

College of Religious Studies, Mahidol

University
Correspondence
Tenzan Eaghll, College of Religious Studies,
Mahidol University 999 Salaya,
Phutthamonthol 4, Nakhorn Prathom, 73170
Thailand
Email: tenzan.eag@mahidol.ac.th
Abstract
This article provides an introduction to JeanLuc Nancy's project on
the deconstruction of Christianity by situating his work philosoph-
ically and historically. The author explains that Nancy's work on reli-
gion does not provide a new theory for the study of religion but
shows how Western religious and philosophical foundations are
caught up in a process of decomposition that has been brought
about by Christianity. Strictly speaking, Nancy's work is not even
an analysis of religion but builds upon the broader critique of meta-
physical nihilism that thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and
Derrida have taken up in the past.

1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N

In On TouchingJeanLuc Nancy, Jacques Derrida (2005) bemoans the fact that JeanLuc Nancy's work has largely
been ignored by contemporary thinkers and makes a prophetic wager: Let us bet that this ignorance will not last
(p. 245). Since the turn of the millennium, when Derrida wrote these words,1 his wager has most certainly been
proven correct, for in English alone the last decade has seen three full length studies on Nancy's work (Hutchens,
2005; James, 2006; Morin, 2012) and many more volumes and journal issues (e.g. Alexandrova et al., 2012;
Armstrong, 2009; Kaplan & Ricco, 2010; Hutchens, 2005; Gratton & Morin, 2012, and Conley & Goh, 2014). In all
these works dedicated to Nancy, his project on the deconstruction of Christianity has been of growing interest.
This vast growth of secondary sources has in part been fueled by Nancy's own productivity. When Derrida wrote
On Touching, Nancy had only written a brief essay on Christianity (The Deconstruction of Christianity, originally
published in French in 1998), but since then, Nancy has released two volumes dedicated to the topic: DisEnclosure
(2008a) and Adoration (2013). He has also published several books and essays related to the wider project, including
Noli Me Tangere (2008b) and God, Justice, Love, and Beauty (2011). Additionally, one can find early reflections on the
deconstruction of Christianity already in the Sense of the World (Nancy, 1998, p. 183fn50) and more general com-
ments on religion in The Inoperative Community (Nancy, 1991). In fact, it is best to view Nancy's work on religion as
an openair construction site that has evolved throughout the past 40 years.2
Despite the growing mass of publications by Nancy and by scholars on his work, there still remains much confu-
sion regarding the viability, findings, and goals of the deconstruction of Christianity, and what all this implies about the
meaning of religion. In DisEnclosure, Nancy (2008a) embraces Marcel Gauchet's dictum that Christianity is the Reli-
gion of the Departure from Religion, yet he devotes all his energy to describing the unraveling of Christianity and the
Westand little time defining what he means by religion (p. 142).3 As I argue in this article, this ambiguity towards
religion is a reflection of the fact that the deconstruction of Christianity is a selfdeconstruction that is indebted to
the broader critique of metaphysics that philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques

Religion Compass. 2017;11:e12228. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/rec3 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1 of 11
https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12228
2 of 11 TENZAN

Derrida have taken up in the past. Nancy is not offering a universal theory of religion, seeking a return to its origins,
nor trying to destroy it; his argument is neither atheist, theological, nor postsecular. Rather, what he offers is an inter-
rogation of Western religious and philosophical foundations to show how they are caught up in a process of decom-
position that has been brought about by Christianity. Fundamentally, what interests Nancy (2008a) is how Christianity
understands itself in a way that is less and less religious in the sense in which religion implies a mythology (a narrative,
a representation of divine actions and persons) (p. 37). In this vein, he suggests that Christianity not only invented
but also decomposes what we have agreed to call, in our culture, religions (2013, p. 26; 2008a, p. 43).
Thus far, scholars have done a decent job of articulating the general aims of the deconstruction of Christianity,
pointing out that Nancy's work is neither to be associated with the phenomenon known as the return to religion
nor with the theological turn in French phenomenology. The return to religion is that broad sociocultural move-
ment associated with the rise of various fundamentalisms and spiritualisms around the globe, from Evangelicalism in
the U.S. to Islam in Africa, and scholars have made it clear that Nancy's project has nothing to do with any reviv-
ification of religious experience.4 Similarly, they have pointed out that Nancy's work is to be distinguished from
those French phenomenologists who adopt a somewhat confessional stance in their philosophical analysis, such
as Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, JeanLuc Marion, JeanLouis Chrtien, and Michel Henry (Alexandrova et al.,
1
, pp. 3436).5 Indeed, the general consensus by Nancy scholars that seems to be emerging is that the deconstruc-
tion of Christianity is a deconstruction of metaphysics and is connected to Nancy's wider critique of nihilism. For
instance, in Marie Eve Morin's (2012) introduction to Nancy, she points out that the overarching goal of his work
on the subject is to overcome nihilism by showing how Christianity puts into play a nonmetaphysical view of God
(pp. 4849). Additionally, Christopher Watkin (2007, 2011) and Ian James (2012b) have situated Nancy's work in
relation to other contemporary Continental thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux,
Francois Laruelle, and Slavoj iek, each of whom return to Christian themes in order to critique contemporary ide-
ology and metaphysical limits.
Metaphysics, of course, is that branch of philosophy that involves the question of first principles, such as being,
God, substance, time, and identity, and philosophers from Nietzsche onwards have argued that it is important to dis-
assemble and unravel these first principles in order to open the world beyond theological, rational, political, economic,
and technological enclosure. For these thinkers, metaphysical assumptions are nihilistic because they reduce the het-
erogeneity of existence to homogenous paradigms and principles that have no foundation in the world, and they limit
the infinite value of each and every human relationship to a logic of equivalence that governs everything from doc-
trines of salvation to capitalist models of exchange. Nancy's work on Christianity belongs to this tradition because
he wants to break the limits and restraints that have characterized the West since it was first constructed around
the Mediterranean several millennia ago and to show how foundationalist modes of thinking give way to their own
exhaustion, or disenclosure (dclosion). Taking up where other philosophers have left off, Nancy connects the decon-
struction of metaphysics to the history of Christianity and argues that the expansion of our modern globalized and
atheized world has been made possible by a retreat of foundations that is implicit to Western monotheism. In this
light, the critique of religion that has taken place in the West from the Reformation onwards can be seen as part of
the internal unraveling of Christianity. As Nancy (2008a) puts it, Whether we take it from Paul or John, from Thomas
or Eckhart, Francis or Luther, Calvin or Fenelon, Hegel or Kierkegaard, Christianity thus disencloses in its essential
gesture the closure that it had constructed and that it perfects, lending to the metaphysics of presence its strongest
imaginary resource (p. 10).
Nancy's project on the deconstruction of Christianity is therefore his unique intervention into the problem of
metaphysical nihilism in Western religious and philosophical thought, and he proceeds by exposing the disenclosure
of this tradition. He begins by arguing that Nihilism means, in effect: making a premise of nothing; and then goes on
to show how various Christian notions empty this nothing of any quality as principle or thing (Nancy, 2008a, p. 24).
For Nancy, the only way out of nihilism is to think of the world as an infinite opening unto itself, for this disencloses
any transcendent principle of value or immanent notion of meaninglessness in the finite spacing of sense, and he finds
the resources to think this opening within Christianity. Tracing the dissolution of foundations that characterized the
TENZAN 3 of 11

transition from the ancient to the modern world, he suggests that deconstruction is that movement by which philos-
ophy deports, complicates, and dismantles its own closures and that Christianity is at the heart of this disenclosure
just as it is at the center of the enclosure [clture] (Nancy, 2008a, p. 10). Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, in their
own right, have also pointed out the connection between Christianity and the critique of metaphysics, but Nancy
(2008a) goes further in this pursuit by erasing any distinction between Christianity and the West and suggesting
that deconstruction is only possible from within Christianity:

My hypothesis is that the gesture of deconstruction, as a gesture neither critical nor perpetuating, and
testifying to a relation to history and tradition that is found in neither Husserl nor Hegel nor Kant, is
only possible within Christianity, even though it is not formulated intentionally from within it. Indeed, it
is only from within that which is in itself constituted by and setting out from the distension of an
opening that there can be a sense to seek and to disassemble. (p. 148)

By linking deconstruction and Christianity so closely, Nancy is not suggesting that the latter invented the formeras if
deconstruction was purely a Christian inventionbut that the history of the terms and the disappearance of religious
and philosophical foundations in the West are so linked as to render any clean distinction impossible. Moreover, he is
suggesting that there is a sense (sens) to seek and to disassemble contained within Christianity that is both its con-
dition of possibility and what proceeds, succeeds, and exceeds it. Philosophers in the past have tried to overcome
metaphysical illusion with various forms of Enlightenment reason, romanticism, or atheism, but Nancy argues that this
is only possible by showing how Christianity and the entire tradition from which it emerges is situated upon an open-
ing that unravels itself from within. This is a complicated formula, so let us summarize its essential components.

2 | T HE P H I L O S O P H I C A L C O N T E X T OF TH E D E C O N S T R U C T I O N O F
C H R I S TI A N I T Y

As Adam Kotsko (2005) points out in his review of DisEnclosure, one of the first in English, what has become clear as
Nancy's project has developed is that a full understanding of what it implies is going to require philosophical as well as
historical analysis (p. 91). In his first essay on the topic, Nancy (2008a) makes it clear that he is not interested in what
he calls the Christmas projection story, that one fine day Christianity comes along and changes everything (p. 145),
and neither is he interested in a certain Rousseauism that seeks to uncover a good original Christianity and then
mourn its loss with the development of modernity (p. 150). Rather, what interests him is how and why Classical antiq-
uity produced Christianity (Nancy, 2008a, p. 145) and the dimension of sense concealed in this production that
never ceases to open the West to its own decomposition (Nancy, 2008a, p. 147). Nancy sees a direct connection
between the fragmented Mediterranean world in which Christianity emerged and our modern globalized world, and
he suggests that both are caught up in the movement of deconstruction. From the rise of early Christianity in ancient
Rome and the eschatological calls for the second coming of Christ, to the expansion of globalization beyond our ter-
restrial limits through satellites and extraplanetary missions, he suggests that the West has been definable by nothing
other than its desire to gobeyonditself. In a paradoxical manner, this state of selfsurpassing (autodpassement) is
perhaps our deepest tradition in the West and prepares the way for the retreat from all metaphysical horizons (Nancy,
2008a, p. 141).
Historically, what this implies is that deconstruction is inseparable from Christianity and the critique of religious
and philosophical nihilismeven though it does not originate with them. Recall that deconstruction was a word made
famous by Derrida but as a function it existed before him. As Derrida (2005) reminds us in On Touching, he inherited it
from Heidegger who spoke of a Destruktion of Western metaphysics and Heidegger inherited it from Martin Luther
who advocated the destructio of pagan philosophy (p. 54). To discover where Luther encountered the impulse for
his destructio, we need only turn to the Book of Isaiah, where God proclaims the destruction of wisdom: so I will
again do amazing things with these people, shocking and amazing. The wisdom of their wise shall perish, the
4 of 11 TENZAN

discernment of the discerning shall be hidden (Is. 29:14). Deconstruction therefore has literal roots within the history
of the West and is shot through with Christianity (Nancy, 2008a, p. 148).
Philosophically, what this implies is that deconstruction is always a process of selfdeconstruction. As Derrida
notes in A Letter to a Japanese Friend, when he searched for a word to translate the Heideggarian word Destruktion
into French, he decided against the literal translation precisely because it implied a negative reduction and demo-
lition. Derrida settled on the word deconstruction because what he wanted to convey was the importance of con-
sidering the structure, architecture, and ontology of the Western tradition. For Derrida (2003), the point of the
deconstruction of metaphysics is not to annihilate or negate some thing, but to expose how an object, a text, a theme,
etc ... deconstructs itself (p. 586).
As Nancy puts it in the introduction to DisEnclosure, metaphysics, in the sense given to it by Nietzsche and Hei-
degger, implies a certain systematicitya closure of thoughtand consists in the attempt to represent being (tre) as
beings (tant) and as being present (tant prsent). In this sense, Christianity can be considered a powerful confirma-
tion of metaphysical closure because it attempts to ground all beings in the selfreferentiality of God. Nancy (2008a)
accepts this definition of metaphysics and that Christianity is accomplished in nihilism; however, he also pushes fur-
ther than those who have preceded him by asserting that the unraveling of this systematicity involves the mutual dis
enclosure of the dual heritages of religion and philosophy (p. 6).6 Like Nietzsche and Heidegger before him, therefore,
Nancy also seeks to overcome the nihilist logic that governs Western history, and yet, unlike them, he does not do this
by attacking religion or by condemning Christianity as a source of metaphysical error. Rather, following Derrida, he
shows how the very principles and paradigms of Western religion and philosophy contribute to the overcoming of
nihilism.
Nancy therefore finds the resources to think the deconstruction of Christianity from within the unraveling of the
West. At the center of Nancy's project is an attempt to show how Christian notions such as God and creation ex
nihilo already expose the truth that the world is founded upon nothing and consists in nothing but its own spacing.
Drawing a distinction between nothing (rien) and nothingness (neant)which is a distinction between nothing as an
open space that is shared between beings and nothingness as a void of nothing or selfpositing and unilateral
existentand argues that the creation of the world takes place between beings, ex nihilo, and then goes on to show
how Christianity exposes this nothing in the movement of the world (Nancy, 2007, p. 102). In this endeavor, Nancy
reads concepts such as faith, sacrifice, incarnation, resurrection, and adoration along deconstructive lines and exposes
how Christianity produces a detheoligization of the divine. For instance, he suggests that the Christian doctrine of the
incarnation empties out the being of God in the consubstantialityhomoousiaof the Father and the Son (Nancy,
2008a, p. 151). The Christian doctrine of the trinity and the incarnation, he suggests, exposes relation (rapport), not
a selfsubsisting being (tant), as the very core of the divine (2013, p. 30). As we will discuss below, he finds traces
of this displacement of divine presence in the development of Greek atheism, Judaism, and Islam but suggests that
Christianity caries this deconstruction farthest.
Given Nancy's bold statements regarding Christianity, it is important to note that he is not attempting to define it
according to a particular set of doctrines but show how foundationalist modes of thinking are simultaneously invented
and deconstructed within a certain GrecoRomanJudeoChristian register that is caught up in an exit from religion
(2013, pp. 4950). In fact, Nancy claims that Christianity is merely a provisional name to describe our world, not a
bundle of theological or spiritual truths, and that defining it according to a particular branch of faith or dogmatic creed
is ultimately futile because the term Christianity is itself caught up in the history of deconstruction. It is in this pre-
cise sense that Nancy is not pursuing some essential quality contained within the religious thing that can rescue us,
but simply attempting to expose the tension of the gap, of the beating [pulsation] or drive [pulsion] that opens the
world to its own outside (2013, p. 14). He is not trying to destroy or revive Western religion but to expose the nihil
that is deeper than the ground of the religious thing [la chose religieuse] that of which religion will have been a form
and a misrecognition [mconnaissance] (2013, p. 26).
Nancy's (2008a) work is therefore deconstructive insofar as it seeks to lay bare the assembled structure in order
to give some play to the possibility from which it emerged but which, qua assembled structure, it still hides (p. 148).
TENZAN 5 of 11

Being, Nancy (2000) suggests, is not a graspable immediacy nor an ungraspable neoplatonic transcendence but a
movement, an interruption, and a spacing (cartement) between beings that does not have the quality of a principle
or foundation (p. 38), and this is something he finds evidence for within Christianity. Of course, it was Heidegger
who first argued that any foundation for being itself is without foundation but Nancy adds to this formulation the idea
that the ground overflows and exhausts itself in the creation of the world, ex nihilo. This implies that he does not seek
to uncover the primordiality (Ursprnglichkeit) of being, as does Heidegger,7 but to lay bare the empty slot, or gap
that is shared (partage) between finite beings, infinitely.8 It is true that this involves a close analysis of the rise and fall
of this civilization that once called itself Christendom, but only to disassemble its parts and expose how it opens up
beyond itself. Nancy (2008a) puts the matter succinctly:

The deconstruction of Christianity comes down to this: an operation of disassembling, focusing on the origin
or the sense of deconstructiona sense that does not belong to deconstruction, that makes it possible but
does not belong to it, like an empty slot that makes the structure work .... (p. 149)

This is comparable to Derrida's statement above that an object, theme, or text deconstructs itself, but, as we have seen,
Nancy adds to this formulation the idea that the deconstruction of metaphysics is only possible from within Chris-
tianity. This is why Nancy (2008a) goes back to the origins of Christianity to find in its dogmatic edifice a certain
slack [jeu] or opening in the origin (p. 149), because what he hopes to uncover is the very disjointing and disman-
tling [dsajointement] that constitutes the sense of deconstruction (p. 11).9
Fundamentally, what interests Nancy is how Christianity has produced itself as the West, and has diluted its
confessional features and disintegrated its religious force in this West, not any universal religious qualities, and this
is very close to Derrida's respective analysis of Christianity and religion but with a more worldly focus (2013, p. 26).
On the one hand, Derrida (2005) argues in On Touching that if there is deconstructing to do it is Christianity (p. 60)
and that Christianity is the most plastic, the most open religion,10 but on the other hand, he warns Nancy that the
deconstruction of Christianity would be a near impossible task and that it would have its work cut out for it, to
infinity (Derrida, 2005, p. 59). Nancy's (2008b, 2008c) response to this interrogation is to show how deconstruction
presents itself at the heart of the Christian corpus, locating diffrance on the very inside of sense, touch, and bodies, as
well as Christian dogmas. Although the difference between Derrida and Nancy largely boils down to a dissimilarity in
philosophical style (e.g. see Derrida, 2014, p. 59), Nancy goes further than Derrida by arguing that deconstruction is
not an endless (messianic) process of deferral but takes place right here (ici mme) in the midst of the world and leaving
behind no indeconstructible terms. As Ian James (2012a) notes, this difference forms the basis of the disagreement
between Derrida and Nancy in their various interactions and is what makes for the slight difference between their
work, as Nancy is willing to read deconstruction into Christological formulations such as Hoc est emin corpus meum
and Noli Me Tangere (pp. 257259).11 By shifting the question of deconstruction from signs, signifiers, and the aporia
of sense to the infinite spacing of sense and bodies in the finite world, Nancy finds deconstruction at work in the dis-
solution of Western metaphysics.

3 | T H E H I S T O R I C A L C O N T E X T O F T H E D E C O N S TR U C T I O N OF
C H R I S TI A N I T Y

In order to expose how the West is in a state of selfdeconstruction, Nancy traces out not just the historical origins of
Christianity but monotheism, atheism, philosophy, and even globalization and shows how each gives way to its own
exhaustion. Nancy recounts this movement unsystematically and in broad strokes, and we cannot possibly summarize
all of his arguments here, but we will discuss the absenting of foundations that he calls the exit from religion and
how it is connected to the emergence of Christianity.
To begin, it needs to be noted that Nancy (2008a) defines the West as that civilization that initially constructed
itself around the Mediterranean by the Greeks, the Romans, the Jews, and the Arabs (p. 30), that subsequently
6 of 11 TENZAN

represented itself as the bearer of universal truth and reason (Nancy, 2007, p. 34), and which no longer exists in any
definite sense (Nancy, 2008a, p. 29). From one angle, what he provides is a story of decomposition by following the
disappearance of metaphysical foundations in the West, but from another angle, he exposes how there was never any
foundation for the world to begin with. Most classical readings of Western history situate it upon some metaphysical
ground, whether this be God, man, reason, or value itself. Or, alternatively, they provide some horizon by which
to measure the development of history, such as politics, religion, secularism, power, or being. In contrast, Nancy seeks
to show how the West is inaugurated by an interruption of given mythological ends and the disenclosure of any rea-
son or end for existence. It is in this manner that he connects the deconstruction of metaphysics with the history of
religion.
Nancy's views on the relationship between polytheism, monotheism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity should be
understood in this selfreflexive and deconstructive sense. What he is recounting in the history he provides is a view
from within the very unraveling of the West, not a universal description of religious development or decline, and this is
what separates Nancy from any contemporary reading of Western history, whether it be theological, secular human-
ist, or postsecular. As he puts it, his analysis of our origins should be understood in the sense of an arch and not of
historical beginning (Nancy, 2008a, p. 143).12 That is, what he is interested in exposing is the sense of deconstruction
that unravels our philosophical and religious closures from within.
Of course, because Nancy sees Christianity and the West, as well as religion and secularism, as developments
that have a synonymous origin and trajectory, his work does share similarities with postsecular theorists, but only
to an extent.13 Like Karl Lwith, Hans Blumenberg, Charles Taylor, and Gauchet, Nancy also tries to rethink the
emergence of the West in relation to its Christian provenance.14 For these thinkers, the generative seeds of
modernity do not necessarily begin with developments in science and philosophy but with various JudeoChristian
influences, and this is a sentiment Nancy shares. In DisEnclosure, he calls the edifying tale about the liberation
of modern reason from religious illusion at the dawn of the Reformation the most tenacious and insidious illusion
ever to be concealed in the nooks of our many discourses (Nancy, 2008a, p. 7). However, it needs to be said that
Nancy is critical of the way these postsecular theorists use religion and modernity to structure the horizon of
world history.15
For Nancy, it is not a question of what religion is (something theorists have never been able to agree upon) or its
influence upon the formation of modernity but what is involved in our understanding of religion and its relation to
deconstruction.16 Nancy is interested in exposing the very spacing/disenclosure of existence and philosophical
thought and is not attempting to provide a universal theory of religion or even a crosscultural analysis of religious
history. When Nancy uses the term religion, he is very careful to situate the term contextually and to emphasize that
Christianity both invented, reinvented, and dissolved its status in the West. He acknowledges that, historically, the Latin
word religio was first being defined and debated by philosophers such as Cicero before the birth of Christ (or, at least
before the author of the Book of Acts provides the first recorded use of the word Christian) but suggests that the
invention of religion as an institution of salvation, as distinct from civil religion as it was from philosophical atheism
took shape within Christianity (2013, p. 26).17 Let us unpack this.
Quite simply, Nancy asserts that the West begins with a question: What is the fundamental foundation of soci-
ety? At the beginning of the West lies not a great myth but a question of institution, foundation, and an interrogation
of given ends (The Ister, 2004). Unlike the various empires that existed prior to the WestEgyptian, Assyrian, Assyrio
Babylonian, and even the Hittite empirethe West begins with a rejection of mythic foundations. The various empires
that preceded the West all had clear foundations in the myths of the gods, and all spoke of communication with the
gods (or the forces and presences in the world, such as plants and animals; 2013, p. 55). As historians of ancient Med-
iterranean religions suggest, thanatology in the ancient world was characterized by an absolute cut between the realm
of the divine and the realm of the humans. The role of gods (and the rituals associated with them) was not to bridge
these realms but to hold them intact (Davies, 1999, p. 3). In these ancient cultures, the gods provided both an origin
and an end for human existence, and death was widely portrayed as an irrecoverable curse and affliction that could
not be overcome (Nancy, 2008a, pp. 1516).
TENZAN 7 of 11

Nancy argues that the shift from observance to relation that broke apart this world of myth arrived unexpectedly
and signifies a fundamental metamorphosis of the cosmic, natural, political, economic, and cultural orders ... (2013, p.
54). He begins to see signs of this transformation between 1200 and 800 BCE, right around the time that alphabetic
writing and new technologies for commerce begin to emerge all over the ancient world; however, he argues that this
transformation was not completed until the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity. In this manner, Nancy links devel-
opments in calculation, economics, trade, transport, and navigationtechn in generalwith the disappearance of
mythological foundations. Moreover, he claims that philosophical atheism, Judaism, and Christianity all emerged from
this flight (chappe) of the gods as new forms of technology emerged in the ancient world, which is turn gave rise to
the exit from religion. As he puts it, the collapse of the Ancient Mediterranean world brought to the breaking point
what had defined, in the most proper way, the Roman word religio: the scrupulous observance of rules and rituals
(2013, p. 55).
Importantly, by detailing how the West emerged from the collapse of a world in which the gods and mankind
were maintained by various forms of observance and how this gave way to a world in which the relation between
beings became primary, Nancy is not recounting the secularization of the world but trying to show how it is created
ex nihilo, according to its sharing (partage; 2013, p. 41). The collapse of the ancient world of observance coincided with
the rise of various techniques in logos, law, and mathematics, which gave way to a world of relation, and he suggests
that monotheism as we know it today is but the dead remnantthe echo chamberof this exit from religion (2013,
p. 55).18 With these developments, the Mediterranean world entered a new period of growthcommercial, mone-
tary, entrepreneurial, and expansive that did not take on its full dimensions until after the European Reformation
(2013, p. 55).
Provocatively, Nancy suggests that the form of monotheism that emerged from this ancient technological revo-
lution was fundamentally atheistic. Monotheism, in both its philosophical and religious forms, makes being and God
equivalent by asserting the prevalence of the being of the divine, and thereby erases any transcendent foundation
for the gods. Monotheism, like atheism, considers the foundation for the world not as a being but being itself. This is
why the fundamental distinction between monotheism and polytheism is not in the reduction of gods but in making
God's qualities and actions depend upon the fact of its being. As Nancy (1991) writes, Contrary to a vague and
widespread belief, monotheism definitely does not arise out of a reduction in the number of the gods . It signifies
another position of the divine altogether, or an altogether different way of looking at it: here the divine is equivalent
to being, and its qualities and actions depend upon the fact of its being (p. 111). Monotheism replaces the gods of
polytheism with a foundation, an arch, that is itself withdrawn, and calls this beingasone (l'treun). This is what
is so radical about monotheism and why it is contemporaneous with the development of atheism, for it claims that
the polytheistic world of idols is dead and then posits that the world is created by a transcendent being that is absent
from the world (Nancy, 1991, p. 111). By embracing this displacement of mythic foundations, all three Western
branches of monotheism are caught up in the retreat from religion because they are inseparable from philosophy:
that is to say from the ontotheological endthe aim and cessationof religion (IC 128).
Christianity plays such a pivotal role in Nancy's work because it takes this disenclosure furthest (2013, p. 34). The
displacement of the divine that Christianity harbors is not simply the God who is absent from the world, as he was
for Job or Muhammad, but a God who becomes man, abandoning his divinity to the point of plunging it into the
mortal condition (2013, p. 30). It is because of this abandoning of divinity in the midst of the world that Christianity
furthers the transition from observance to relation that started with the rise of techn. What is revealed by the incar-
nation is not simply an atheist conception of God, but the deposing or depositing of any divinity or rationality as a
basis for the world:

In this sense, the Christian (or even the monotheistic) god is the god who alienates himself. He is the god
who atheizes himself and who atheologizes himself, if I may for the moment forge these terms (It is
Bataille, who, for his own purposes, created the term atheological) Atheology as a conceptualization of
the body is the thought that god made himself body in emptying himself of himself (another Christian
8 of 11 TENZAN

motif, that of the Pauline kenosis: the emptyingout of God, or his emptyinghimself outofhimself).
(2008a, pp. 8283)

If, as noted above, deconstruction takes place in the interruption and spacing of any construction, then it can be
seen here how the Christian notion of the incarnation exposes the divine as nothing more than an opening or void in
the midst of the world. In this manner, if monotheism and atheism attempt to occupy the space left in the wake of the
flight of the gods in the name of a united principlebeingasone (l'treun)then the Christian incarnation exposes
this space in the finite distention of materiality, showing that the world is reliant on noentity (nant; 2013, p. 32).
This is what Nancy (2008a) means when he states that the essence of Christianity is that of opening, because it is
constituted by its own selfdistention; it is an opening of self, and of self as opening (p. 145). To put this in the
context of what was discussed in the previous section, this opening, or nihil, at the heart of Christianity is the
archispatiality of deconstruction as such; it is the excessive spacing that continually opens the world beyond meta-
physical closure.
For Nancy, this is what fundamentally distinguishes Christianity from ancient cultic piety, civil religion, and from
philosophical atheism: Christianity opens the difference of death in life and shatters the distinction between the realm
of the spirits and the realm of man, opening a space within time that is outside time (2013, p. 23). Citing the historian
Peter Brown, Nancy notes how the early Christian cult of the saints completely broke down the ancient barrier
between heaven and earth (Brown, 1981). Nancy uses this development to suggest that whereas ancient civil religion
and philosophical atheism focused on the relation between men in terms of the autonomy of law and the indigenous
nature [autochtonie] of the cityfirmly distinguishing between heaven and earthChristianity exposes heaven (le
ciel) as the nothing that is nowhere and everywhere and prepares the way for the worldly adoration of finite sense
in its infinite passing and retreat (2013, p. 24; p. 51; Nancy, 2011, pp. 811).
To make a long story short, it is this exhaustion of the divine in the midst of the world that Nancy uses to show
how the West is caught up in a selfdeconstruction and exit from religion, from the fall of Rome up to our modern
globalized world. The opening left in the wake of this divine departure exposes the incommensurable difference of
death in life and the sense of being displaced that characterizes the modern world. In his various works, Nancy traces
how this inoperative space informs our shared existence and disencloses any theological, rational, political, economic,
or technological closure. Because Christianity is the bearer of a god who atheizes himself and who atheologizes himself,
its history is characterized by its selftranscendence, and this can be seen in the various theological and philosophical
attempts to locate the Old Law in the New Law, the logos in the Word, the civitas in the civitas Dei, and so on (Nancy,
2008a, p. 145). In its Augustinian, Avicennian, Cartesian, and Hegelian elaborations, Christianity presents itself as a
perpetual process of constructing and deconstructing its own foundationsa process that reaches up to Nietzsche
and continues today (Nancy, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, p. 3839).
What all this implies is not that Christianity is the privileged site of ancient divine wisdom, the purveyor of abso-
lute reason, nor even the site for some new disclosure of being, but simply that it exposes the truth that the world is
founded upon nothing and consists in nothing but its own spacing. Philosophers from the 19th century onwards have
deconstructed metaphysics and shown how there is no foundation for the world, yet they have also put forth new
rational, subjective, and aesthetic figures to replace the gods of the past. In contrast, what Nancy (2000) calls for is
a retreat from every form, figure, or value that might guide the world, and he finds the resources to think this retreat
within Christianity (p. 47). He tries to show that despite the fact that being is without foundation or common measure,
it does not collapse in upon itself in an abyss of nothingness but continually opens up towards the space we share
between us.

4 | C O N CL U S I O N

Another way to say all this, in quite simple terms, is that for Nancy, Western religion is caught up in the deconstruction
of metaphysics. He invites us to think of religion as an exhausted nihilistic shadow that the West projects upon the
TENZAN 9 of 11

world via Christianity and its globalization, not some crosscultural/historical phenomenon that the West leaves
behind on the road towards modernization. For far too long, religion has been treated as an object of analysis out
in the world fit for classification, scrutiny, and surpassing, but Nancy invites us to presuppose its retreat from the out-
set. In this manner, religion was not only invented in the West, it was one of the registers in which the West invented
itself through the deconstruction of Christianity; it was one of the registers in which the West found itself globalized,
atheized, and displaced. Nancy invites us to think through the decomposition of this world because he wants to
expose the opening left in its wake.

ENDNOTES
1
On Touching was originally published in French in 2000 by ditions Galile.
2
The phrase openair construction site is used by Nancy in the introduction to DisEnclosure to describe the contents of
the volume, but I think it applies to his oeuvre as a whole on the topic of religion (2008a, p. 12).
3
See Gauchet's (1997) The Disenchantment of the World (pp. 101106). We do not have the space in this essay to discuss
the difference between Gauchet and Nancy, a topic that has thus far been underemphasized in scholarship. However, it
needs to be said that Gauchet defines religion in very Feuerbachian terms and that this is inconsistent with Nancy's subtle
philosophical work. For Gauchet's definition of religion, see the introduction to The Disenchantment of the World. For
Nancy's critique of Gauchet's definition, see the interview with him in Retreating Religion (Alexandrova et al. 2012, 306).
4
Basically, all scholarship on Nancy acknowledges this point, as it is very clear in his work. For instance, see his comments
on religion in Of Divine Places (Nancy, 1991, p. 136).
5
For a thorough exploration of these thinkers and how they relate to deconstruction more broadly, see Dominique
Janicaud's (2000) study, French Phenomenology and the Theological Turn.
6
This is not to suggest that there are no similarities between Heidegger on Nancy on the meaning of disenclosure. In
fact, the French dclosion is the usual translation of Heidegger's Erschlieung in Being and Time, which implies that some-
thing has been disclosed or laid open (Nancy, 2008a, p. x).
7
As Heidegger writes in Being and Time: Thus the kind of being of Dasein requires of an ontological interpretation that has
set as its goal the primordiality of the phenomenal demonstration that it be in charge of the being of this being in spite of this
being's own tendency to cover things over (1996, p. 288). For Heidegger, overcoming metaphysics is a matter of uncovering
this primordiality in the origin of philosophy. In contrast, for Nancy, it is not a matter of uncovering the origin of philos-
ophy but an opening in the origin.
8
The French verb partager, which is a key term from Nancy's lexicon, means both to share and to divide, and points
towards the fact that we are first together before we are alone. Partage simply means that nothing is ever created outside
of or beyond the spacing of each share (Fr. part), which in turn cannot be appropriated but only shared or destroyed; it
means that shared space is the only type of space there is. (Nancy, 2000, p. 60).
9
Nancy (2008a) refers to this as gazing towards the nothing [choserien] of the void, which constitutes the very move-
ment of deconstruction (p. 11).
10
This comment was made in an interview with the editors of Derrida and Religion (Sherwood and Kevin, 2005, p. 33).
11
As James notes, in DisEnclosure, Nancy distances himself from Derrida's notion of the negative infinite (particularly
Derrida's notion of the indeconstructible [Indconstructible]), by suggesting that the negative distends and disencloses
substance (or any representational logic) in the active and actual presence of the nothing qua thing (res) of the opening
itself. What this implies is that deconstruction is an actual infinite that distends texts, bodies, and matter in a prolongation
of sense and that there are no indeconstructible terms. Whereas Derrida tends to conceive of deconstruction as an end-
less and messianic process of deferral (what Hegel called a bad infinite), Nancy wants to locate this deferral right in the
midst of the world as the nothing (nihil) of creation (aligning himself with the good infinite). Nancy (2008a) is trying to
think the infinite as a kenotic opening without closure and therefore claims that the right infinite is the very movement
of deconstruction and disenclosure (p. 10; p. 176n12). For more on this, see Ian James's (2012a) chapter Incarnation
and Infinity in Retreating Religion (pp. 257259).
12
As Derrida (1978) argues in Violence and Metaphysics, the question of our historical origins (precisely our jewgreek
origins) should be understood as a prelogical question, not a chronological progression (p. 192).
13
The term postsecular is itself highly contested and I do not want to weigh into the debates concerning its meaning. I am
using the term lightly here to refer to those theorists who try to develop a new understanding of the relationship between
religion, secularism, and modernity. Excluded from my list in the following sentence is Jrgen Habermas, but that is only
because Nancy's work radically differs from him. Whereas Habermas tries to reconcile religion and secularism in peaceful
dialogue, Nancy seeks to expose their synonymous origins. See Habermas (2008).
10 of 11 TENZAN

14
Each of these thinkers interprets the relation between the ancient and the modern world differently but all reject the
emancipatory model that one find day science and reason came along and changed everything. Blumenberg, for instance,
stresses a fairly sharp distinction between the two. He presents the legitimacy of the modern world as a series of devel-
opments that cannot be wholly reduced to Christianity (Blumenberg, 1983). On the other hand, Taylor suggests that the
modern secular age was brought about by developments in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Like Nancy, he even sug-
gests that Western culture in fact created a modern world in which religion was retreating in public space (Taylor, 2007,
A Secular Age, 15).
15
As the editors suggest in Retreating Religion, Although postsecularism is part of the philosophical context for the decon-
struction of Christianity we are exploring, Nancy's attitude toward it seems predominantly critical (Alexandrova et al.,
2012, p. 33).
16
I am here paraphrasing a comment from Nancy (1991) about myth made in The Inoperative Community and applying it to
religion (p. 47).
17
This point has been made by numerous scholars of religion. For instance, Talal Asad (1993) claims the notion of religion as
a universal phenomenon emerged during the 17th century in a European context and is specific to Christian theology at a
particular historical juncture (p. 4243). Nancy never gives a specific genealogy of the term like these scholars of religion
but the subtlety of his work does take into account the general insight that religion is a Western construct.
18
For Nancy's extended comments on the complex process brutally summarized here, see Nancy's chapter Mysteries and
Virtues in Adoration (Nancy, 2013) or the section Of Creation in The Creation of the World or Globalization (Nancy, 2007).

W ORK S CI TED
Alexandrova, A., Devisch, I., ten Kate, L., & van Rooden, A. (Eds.) (2012). Retreating religion: Deconstructing Christianity with
JeanLuc Nancy. New York: Fordham University Press.
Armstrong, P. (2009). Reticulations: JeanLuc Nancy and the networks of the political. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Asad, T. (1993). The construction of religion as an anthropological category. In Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of
power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1993.
Blumenberg, H. (1983). The legitimacy of the modern age. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Brown, P. (1981). The cult of the saints: Its rise and function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Conley, V. A., & Goh, I. (Eds) (2014). Nancy Now. Cambridge: Polity.
Davies, J. (1999). Death, burial, and rebirth in the religions of antiquity. New York: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1978). In A. Bass (Ed.), (trans.). Writing and difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (2003). Letter to a Japanese friend. In C. Olson (Ed.), Theory and method in the study of religion: A selection of critical
readings (pp. 354358). Toronto: Thomson Wadsworth.
Derrida, J. (2005). In C. Irizarry (Ed.), (trans.). On touchingJeanLuc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2014). In P. A. Brault & Naas M. For strasbourg: Conversations of friendship and philosophy. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Gauchet, M. (1997). In O. Burge (Ed.), (trans.). The disenchantment of the world: A political history of religion. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Gratton, P., & Morin, M.E. (Eds.) (2012). JeanLuc Nancy and plural thinking: Expositions of world, ontology, politics, and sense.
Albany: SUNY Press.
Habermas, J. (2008). Secularism's crisis of faith: Notes on postsecular society. New Perspectives Quarterly, 25, 1729.
Hutchens, B. (2005). JeanLuc Nancy and the future of philosophy. Montreal: McGill Queens/Acumen.
James, I. (2006). The fragmentary demand: An introduction to the philosophy of JeanLuc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
James, I. (2012a). Incarnation and infinity. In A. Alexandrova, I. Devisch, L. ten Kate, & A. van Rooden (Eds.), Retreating reli-
gion: Deconstructing Christianity with JeanLuc Nancy (pp. 246260). New York: Fordham University Press.
James, I. (2012b). The new French philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Janicaud, D. (2000). French phenomenology and the theological turn. New York: Fordham University Press.
Kaplan, L., & Ricco, J. P. (2010). Regarding JeanLuc Nancy. Special Issue ofJournal of Visual Culture, 9(1).
Kotsko, A. (2005). Already, not yet. Review of La Dclosion: Dconstruction du christianisme, JCRT, 6(3), 8795.
Morin, M.E. (2012). JeanLuc Nancy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
TENZAN 11 of 11

Naas, M. (2012). Miracle and machine: Jacques Derrida and the two sources of religion, science, and the media. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Nancy, J.L. (1991). In P. Conor (Ed.), The inoperative community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, J.L. (1996). In P. Kamuf (Ed.), (trans.). The muses. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, J.L. (1998). In J. S. Librett (Ed.), (trans.). The sense of the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, J.L. (2000). In R. Richardson, & A. O'Byrne (Eds.), (trans.). Being singular plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press
2000.
Nancy, J.L. (2007). In F. Raffoul, & D. Pettigrew (Eds.), (trans.). The creation of the world, or globalization ). Albany NY: Suny
Press.
Nancy, J.L. (2008a). In B. Bergo, G. Malenfant, & M. B. Smith (Eds.), (trans.). Disenclosure: The deconstruction of christianity.
New York: Fordham University Press.
Nancy, J.L. (2008b). In S. Clift, P.A. Brault, & M. Naas (Eds.), (trans.). Noli me tangere: On the raising of the body. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Nancy, J.L. (2008c). In R. A. Rand (Ed.), (trans.). Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press.
Nancy, J.L. (2011). God, justice, love, beauty: Four little dialogues. New York: Fordham University Press.
Nancy, J.L. (2013). In J. McKeane (Ed.), (trans.). Adoration: The deconstruction of Christianity II. New York: Fordham University
Press.
Shakespeare, S. (2013). The word became machine: Derrida's technology of incarnation. Special Issue of Derrida Today, 6(1),
3657.
Sherwood, Y., & Kevin, H. (Eds.) (2005). Derrida and religion: Other testaments. New York: Routledge.
Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
The Ister. (2004). D. Barison & D. Ross, dirs. Produced by Icarus Films.
Watkin, C. (2007). Neither/Nor: JeanLuc Nancy's deconstruction of Christianity. Research in Phenomenology, 37(1), 136143.
Watkin, C. (2011). Difficult atheism: Posttheological thinking in Alain Badiou, JeanLuc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Tenzan Eaghll completed his doctoral research at the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of
Toronto, 2016. He is currently a Lecturer at the College of Religious Studies at Mahidol University, Thailand.
His research focuses on the intersection of continental philosophy and method and theory in the study of religion,
with a special focus on contemporary French thought.

How to cite this article: Tenzan E. JeanLuc Nancy and the exit from religion. Religion Compass. 2017;11:
e12228. https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12228