the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone
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part 1 – italics
Eventually, we would therefore like to link the question of religion to that of abstraction. To radical abstraction. Not to the figure of death, of evil or of the sickness of death, but to the forms of evil that are traditionally tied to radical extirpation and therefore to the deracination of abstraction, passing by way – but only much later – of those sites of abstraction that are the machine, technics, technoscience and above all the transcendence of tele-technology. ‘Religion and mechane’, ‘religion and cyberspace’, ‘religion and the numeric’, ‘religion and digitality’, ‘religion and virtual space-time’: in order to take the measure of these themes in a short treatise […]
Date: 28 February 1994. Place: an island, the isle of Capri. A hotel, a table around which we speak among friends, almost without any order, without agenda, without order of the day, no watchword save for a single word, the clearest and most obscure: religion.
Light takes place. And the day. The coincidence of the rays of the sun and topographical inscription will never be separated: phenomenology of religion, religion as phenomenology, enigma of the Orient, of the Levant and of the Mediterranean in the geography of appearing. Light (phos), wherever this arche commands or begins discourse and takes the initiative in general (phos, phainesthai, phantasma, hence spectre, etc.), as much in the discourse of philosophy as in the discourses of a revelation (Offenbarung) or of a revealability (Offenbarkeit), of a possibility more originary than manifestation. More originary, which is to say, closer to the source, to the sole and same source. Everywhere light dictates that which even yesterday was naively construed to be pure of all religion or even opposed to it and whose future must today be rethought (Aufklarung, Lumieres, Enlightenment, Illuminismo).
[see the next two sections for further reflections on light – pdf]
Before the island – and Capri will never be Patmos – there will have been the Promised Land. How not to fear and how not to tremble before the unfathomable immensity of this theme? The figure of the Promised Land – is it not also the essential bond between the promise of place and historicity? By historicity, we could understand today more than one thing. First of all, a sharpened specificity of the concept of religion, the history of its history, and of the genealogies intermingled in its languages and in its name.
[…]
In the definition of ‘reflecting faith’ [see above -pdf] and of what binds the idea of pure morality indissolubly to Christian revelation, Kant recurs to the logic of a simple principle, that which we cited a moment ago verbatim: in order to conduct oneself in a moral manner, one must act as though God did not exist or no longer concerned himself with our salvation. This shows who is moral and who is therefore Christian, assuming that a Christian owes it to himself to be moral: no longer turn towards God at the moment of acting in good faith; act as though God had abandoned us. In enabling us to think (but also to suspend in theory) the existence of God, the freedom or the immortality of the soul, the union of virtue and of happiness, the concept or ‘postulate’ of practical reason guarantees this radical dissociation and assumes ultimately rational and philosophical responsibility, the consequence here in this world, in experience, of this abandonment, Is this not another way of saying that Christianity can only answer to its moral calling and mortality, to its Christian calling if it endures in this world, in phenomenological history, the death of God, well beyond the figures of the Passion? That Christianity is the death of God thus announced and recalled by Kant to the modernity of the Enlightenment? Judaism and Islam would thus be perhaps the last two monotheisms to revolt against everything that, in the Christianising of our world, signifies the death of God, death in God, two non-pagan monotheisms that do not accept death any more than multiplicity ion God (the Passion, the Trinity etc.), two monotheisms still alien enough at the heart of Graeco-Christia, Pagano-Christian Europe, alienating themselves from a Europe that signifies the death of God, by recalling at all costs that ‘monotheism’ signifies no less faith in the One, and in the living One, than belief in a single God.
[…]
The law itself, a necessity that, it is clear, undoubtedly programmes an infinite spiral of outbidding, a maddening instability among these ‘positions’. The latter can be occupied successively or simultaneously by the same ‘subjects’. From one religion to the other, the ‘fundamentalisms’ and the ‘integrisms’ hyperbolize today this outbidding. They exacerbate a moment when – we shall return to this later – globalatinization (this strange alliance of Christianity, as the experience of the death of God, and tele-technoscientific capitalism) is at the same time hegemonic and finite, ultra-powerful and in the process of exhausting itself. Simply, those who are involved in this outbidding can pursue it from all angles, adopting all ‘positions’, either simultaneously or successively, to the uttermost limit.
Is this not the madness, the absolute anachrony of our time, the disjunction of all self-contemporaneity, the veiled and cloudy day of every today?
[…]
How then to think – within the limits of reason alone – a religion which, without again becoming ‘natural religion’, would today be effectively universal? And which, for that matter, would no longer be restricted to a paradigm that was Christian or even Abrahamic?
What would be the prospects of such a ‘book’?
2 temptations:
[…] one would be ‘Hegelian’: ontotheology which determines absolute knowledge as the truth of religion, in the course of the final movement described in the conclusions of The Phenomenology of Spirit or of Faith and Knowledge, which announces in effect a ‘religion of modern times’ founded on the sentiment that ‘God himself is dead’.
Distinct from faith, from prayer or from sacrifice, ontotheology destroys religion, but, yet another paradox, it is also perhaps what informs, on the contrary, the theological and ecclesiastical, even religious, development of faith.
The other temptation […] would be ‘Heideggerian’: beyond such ontotheology, where the latter ignores both prayer and sacrifice. It would accordingly be necessary that a ‘revealability’ (Offenbarkeit) be allowed to reveal itself, with a light that would manifest (itself) more originarily than all revelation (Offenbarung).
In its most abstract form, then, the aporia within which we are struggling would perhaps be the following: is revealability (Offenbarkeit) more originary than revelation (Offenbarung), and hence independent of all religion?
Or rather, inversely, would the event of revelation have consisted in revealing revealability itself, and the origin of light, the originary light, the very invisibility of visibility? [16]
[see also here]
Nocturnal light, therefore, more and more obscure. Let us step up the pace in order to finish: in view of a third place that could well have been more than archi-originary, the most anarchic and anarchivable place possible, not the island nor the Promised Land, but a certain desert, that which makes possible, opens, hollows or infinitizes the other.
That which would orient here ‘in’ this desert, without pathway and without interior, would still be the possibility of a religion and of a relegere, to be sure, but before the ‘link’ of religare, problematic etymology and doubtless reconstructed, before the link between men as such or between man and the divinity of the god it would also be like the condition of the ‘link’ reduced to its minimal semantic determination […]
Even if it is called the social nexus, link to the other in general, this fiduciary ‘link’ would precede all determinate community, all positive religion, every onto-anthropo-theological horizon. It would link pure singularities prior to any social or political determination, prior to all intersubjectivity, prior even to the opposition between the sacred (or the holy) and the profane.
[radical title as the origin of community and law]
Since everything has to be said in two words, let us give 2 names to the duplicity of these origins. For here the origin is duplicity itself, the one and the other.
Let us name these two sources, these two fountains or these two tracks that are still invisible in the desert. Let us lend them two names that are still ‘historical’, there where a certain concept of history itself becomes inappropriate. To do this, let us refer – provisionally, I emphasise this, and for pedagogical or rhetorical reasons – first to the ‘messianic‘, and second to the chora, as I have tried to do more minutely, more patiently and, I hope, more rigorously elsewhere. [see Khora in On the Name, and spectres of Marx, and ‘Force of Law’ in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice].
the messianic
First name: the messianic, or messianicity without messianism.
This would be the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without the horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration.
The coming of the other can only emerge as a singular event when no anticipation sees it coming, when the other and death – and radical evil – can come as a surprise at any moment.
Possibilities that both open and can always interrupt history, or at least the ordinary course of history. But this ordinary course is that of which philosophers, historians and often also the classical theoreticians of the revolution speak.
Interrupting or tearing history itself apart, doing by deciding, in a decision that can consist in letting the other come and that can take the apparently passive form of the other’s decision: even there where it appears in itself, in me, the decision is moreover always that of the other, which does not exonerate me of responsibility. The messianic exposes itself to absolute surprise and, even if it always takes the phenomenal form of peace or of justice, it ought, exposing itself so abstractly, be prepared (waiting without awaiting itself) for the best as for the worst, the one never coming without opening the possibility of the other.
At issue is a ‘general structure of experience’. This messianic dimension does not depend on any messianism, it follows no determinate revelation, it belongs properly to no Abrahamic religion (even if I am obliged here, ‘among ourselves’, for essential reasons of language and of place, of culture, of a provisional rhetoric and a historical strategy of which I will speak later, to continue giving it names marked by the Abrahamic religions).
An invincible desire for justice is linked to this expectation. By definition, the latter is not and ought not to be certain of anything, either through knowledge, consciousness, conscience, foreseeability or any kind of programme as such.
This abstract messianicity belongs from the very beginning to the experience of faith, of believing, of a credit that is irreducible to knowledge and of a trust that ‘founds’ all relation to the other in testemony. This justice, which I distinguish from right, alone allows the hope, beyond all ‘messianisms’, of a universalizable culture of singularities, a culture in which the abstract possibility of the impossible translation could nevertheless be announced.
[see here for another reflection on messianic time (agamben) – derrida’s messianicity would open with the breakdown of messianic time in agamben (hypothesis)]
This justice inscribes itself in advance in the promise, in the act of faith or in the appeal to faith that inhabits every act of language and every address to the other.
The universalizable culture of this faith, and not of another or before all others, alone permits a ‘rational’ and universal discourse on the subject of ‘religion’.
This messianicity, stripped of everything, as it should, this faith without dogma which makes its way through the risks if absolute night, cannot be contained in any traditional opposition, for example between reason and mysticism.
It is announced wherever, reflecting without flinching, a purely rational analysis brings the following paradox to light: that the foundation of law – law of the law, institution of the institution, origin of the constitution – is a ‘performative’ event that cannot belong to the set that it founds, inaugurates or justifies. Such an event is unjustifiable within the logic of what it will have opened. It is the decision of the other in the undecidable.
[nb. on the origin of the law, see schmitt on land appropriation, radical title]
Henceforth, reason ought to recognise there what Montaigne and Pascal call an undeniable ‘mystical foundation of authority’.
Wherever this foundation founds in foundering, wherever it steals away under the ground of what it founds, at the very instant when, losing itself thus in the desert, it loses the very trace of itself and the memory of a secret, ‘religion’ can only begin and begin again: quasi-automatically, mechanically, machine-like, spontaneously. Spontaneously, which is to say, as the word indicates, both as the origin of what flows from the source, sponte sua, and with the automaticity of the machine.
Without this desert in the desert, there would be neither act of faith, nor promise, nor future, nor expectancy without expectation of death and of the other, nor relation to the singularity of the other.
The chance of this desert in the desert (as of that which resembles to a fault, but without reducing itself to, that via negative which makes its way from a Greaco-Judeo-Christian tradition) is that in uprooting the tradition that bears it, in atheologising it, this abstraction, without denying faith, liberates a universal rationality and the political democracy that cannot be dissociated from it.
chora
[further notes on khora]
The second name (or first name prior to all naming), would be chora, such as Plato designates it in the Timaeus without being able to reappropriate it in a consistent self-interpretation.
From the open interior of a corpus, of a system, of a language or a culture, chora would situate the abstract spacing, place itself, the place of absolute exteriority, but also the place of a bifurcation between two approaches to the desert.
Bifurcation between a tradition of the ‘via negativa’ which, in spite of or within its Christian act of birth, accords its possibility to a Greek – Platonic or Plotonian – traditon ehat persists until Heidegger and beyond: the thought of that which is beyond being (epekeina tes ousias). This Greaco-Abrahamic hybridization remains anthropo-theological.
In the figures of it known to us, in its culture and in its culture and in its history, its ‘idiom’ is not universalisable. It speaks solely at the borders or in view of the Middle-Eastern desert, at the source of monotheistic revelations and of Greece.
If we insist […] upon the names that are given to us as our heritage, it is because, in respect of this borderline place, a new war of religions is redeploying as never before to this day, in an event that is at the same time both interior and exterior. It inscribes its seismic turbulence directly upon the fiduciary globality of the technoscientific, of the economic, of the political and of international right, of nationality, of the subjectivity of citizenry, of the sovereignty of states. These hegemonic concepts tend to reign over a world, but only from their finitude: the growing tension of their power is not incompatible […] with their precariousness […]
Chora, the ‘ordeal of chora’, would be, al least according to the interpretation I believed justified in attempting, the name for a place, a place name, and a rather singular one at that, for that spacing which, not allowing itself to be dominated by any theological, ontological or anthropological instance, without age, without history and more ‘ancient’ than all oppositions (for example, that of sensible/intelligible), does not even announce itself as ‘beyond being’ in accordance with a path of negation, a via negativa.
As a result, chora remains absolutely impassible and heterogeneous to all the processes of historical revelation or of anthropo-theological experience, which at the very least suppose its abstraction.
It will never have entered religion and will never permit itself to be sacralised, sanctified, humanised, theologised, cultivated, historicised. Radically heterogeneous to the safe and sound, to the holy and the sacred, it never admits of any indemnification. This cannot even be formulated in the present, for chora never presents itself as such. It is neither Being, nor the Good, nor God, nor Man, nor History. It will always resist them, will have always been […] the very place of an infinite resistance, of an infinitely impassible persistence: an utterly faceless other.
Chora is nothing (no being, nothing present), but not the Nothing in which the anxiety of Dasein would still open the question of being. This Greek noun says in our memory that which is not reappropriable, even by our memory, even by our ‘Greek’ memory; it says the immemoriality of a desert in the desert of which it is neither a threshold nor a mourning. The question remains open, and with it that of knowing whether this desert can be thought and left to announce itself ‘before’ the desert that we know (that of the revelations and the retreats, of the lives and deaths of God, of all the figures of kenosis or of transcendence, of religion or of historical ‘religions’); or whether, ‘on the contrary’, it is ‘from’ this last desert that we can glimpse that which proceeds the first (l’avant-premier), what I call the desert in the desert.
[…]
Another ‘tolerance’ would be in accord with the thinking of the ‘desert in the desert’, it would respect the distance of infinite alterity as singularity. And this respect would still be religio, religio as scruple or reticence, distance, dissociation, disjunction, coming from the threshold of all religion in the link of repetition to itself, the threshold of every social or communitarian link.
of the ‘world’, of ‘history’, of the ‘day’ and of the ‘present’
Religion?
One would not be speaking of it if one were to speak in its name, if one were to settle for reflecting religion as in a mirror, specularly, religiously.
One must in any case take into account, if possible in an areligious, or even irreligious manner, what religion at present might be, as well as what is said and done, what is happening at this very moment, in the world, in history, in its name.
And one should not say lightly, as though in passing, ‘this very day’, ‘at this very moment’ and ‘in the world’, ‘in history’ […]
What happens to us there concerns precisely the experience and radical interpretation of everything that these words are felt to mean: the unity of a ‘world’ and of a ‘being in the world’, the concept of world or of history in its Western tradition (Christian or Graeco-Christian, extending to Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger), and no less that of day as well as that of the present.
Like others before, the new ‘wars of religion’ are unleashed over the human earth […] and struggle even today to control sky with finger and eye: digital systems and virtually immediate panoptical visualisation, ‘air space’, telecommunications satellites, information highways, concentration of capitalistic-mediatic power – in three words, digital culture, jet and TV without which there could be no religious manifestation today […]
Given this, the cyberspatialised or cyberspace wars of religion have no stakes other than this determination of the ‘world’, of ‘history’, of the ‘day’ and of the ‘present’.
[…] what is the ‘world’, the ‘day’, the ‘present’ (hence, all of history, the earth, the humanity of man, the rights of man, the rights of man and of woman, the political and cultural organisation of society, the difference between man, god or animal, the phenomenality of the day, the value or ‘indemnity’ of life, the right to life, the treatment of death, etc.)?
What is the present, which is to say: what is history? time? being? being in its purity?
political theology
[…] it is not certain that in addition to or in face of the most spectacular and most barbarous crimes of certain ‘fundamentalisms’ (of the present or of the past), other over-armed forces are not also leading ‘wars of religion’, albeit unavowed.
Wars or military ‘interventions’, led by the Judaeo-Christian West in the name of the best causes (of international law, democracy, the sovereignty of peoples, of nations or of states, even of humanitarian imperatives), are they not also, from a certain side, wars of religion?
The hypothesis would not necessarily be defamatory, nor even very original, except in the eyes of those who hasten to believe tha all these just causes are not only secular but pure of all religiosity.
[…] The fundamental concepts that often permit us to isolate or to pretend to isolate the political […] remain religious or in any case theologico-political.
A single example:
In one of the most rigorous attempts to isolate in its purity the sphere of the political (notably by separating it from the economic and the religious), in order to identify the political and the political enemy in wars of religion, such as Crusades, Carl Schmitt was obliged to acknowledge that the ostensibly purely political catregories to which he resorted were the product of a secularisation or of a theologico-political heritage.
Henceforth, despite the ethical and political urgencies that do not permit the response to be put opff, reflection upon the Latin noun ‘religion’ will no longer be held for an academic exercise, a philological embelishment or an eymological luxury […]
globalatinization
Religion, in the singular? Response: ‘Religion is the response‘.
Is it not there, perhaps, that we must seek the beginning of a response?
[…] we must formally take note that we are already speaking Latin.
[…]
For the Capri meeting, the ‘theme’ I believed myself constrained to propose, religion, was named in Latin, let us never forget it.
Does not ‘the question of religio‘, however, quite simply merge, one could say, with the question of Latin?
By which should be understood, beyond a ‘question of language and of culture’, the strange phenomenon of Latinity and of its globalisation.
We are not speaking here of universality, even of an idea of universality, only of a process of universalisation that is finite but enigmatic.
It is rarely investigated in its geopolitical and ethico-juridical scope, precisely where such a power finds itself overtaken, deployed, its paradoxical heritage revived by the global and still irresistible hegemony of a ‘language’, which is to say, also of a culture that in part is not Latin but Anglo-American.
For everything that touches religion in particular, for everything that speaks ‘religion’, for whoever speaks religiously or about religion, Anglo-American remains Latin.
Religion circulates in the world, one might say, like an English word that has been to Rome and taken a detour to the United States.
Well beyond its strictly capitalist or politico-military figures, a hyper-imperialist appropriation has been underway now for centuries.
It imposes itself in a particularly palpable manner with the conceptual apparatus of international law and of global political rhetoric.
[…] by ineluctable contagion, no semantic cell can remain alien, I dare not say ‘safe and sound’, ‘unscathed’, in this apparently borderless process.
Golbalatinization (essentially Christian, to be sure), this word names a unique event to which a meta-language seems incapable of acceding, although such a language remains, all the same, of the greatest necessity here.
For at the same time that we no longer perceive its limits, we know that such globalization is finite and only projected.
What is involved here is a Latinization and, rather than globality, a globalization that is running out of breath (essouflée), however irresistible and imperial it still may be.
What are we to think of this running out of breath?
Whether it holds a future or is held in store for it, we do not know and by definition cannot know. But at the bottom of such non-knowing, this expiring breath is blasting the ether of the world.
The co-extensiveness of the two questions (religion and worldwide Latinization) marks the dimensions of what henceforth cannot be reduced to a question of language, culture, semantics, nor even, without doubt, to one of anthropology or of history.
religion – the untranslatable? – the two sources
And if religio remained untranslatable? And if this question, and a fortiori the response to which it appeals, were to inscribe us already in an idiom whose translation remains problematic? What does it mean to respond?
Benveniste: Together with spondeo, we must consider re-spondero. The proper meaning of respondeo and the relation with spondeo emerge literally from a dialogue of Plautus. The parasite Ergasilus brings Hegion good news: his son, long disappeared, is about to return. Hegion promises Ergasilus to feed him all his days, if what he says is true.
This exchange of guarantees gives rise to the meaning, already well established in Latin, ‘respond’.
[…] Thus we can determine precisely, in the prehistory of Greek and of Latin, the meaning of a term that is of the greatest importance in religious vocabulary […]
[…]
When we speak, we Europeans, so ordinarily and so confusedly today about a ‘return of the religious’, what do we thereby name? To what do we refer? The ‘religious’, the religiosity that is vaguely associated with the experience of the sacredness of the divine, of the holy, of the saved or of the unscathed – is it religion?
In what and to what extent does a ‘sworn faith’, a belief have to be committed or engaged?
[…] two experiences that are generally held to be equally religious:
- the experience of belief, on the one hand (believing or credit, the fiduciary or the trustworthy in the act of faith, fidelity, the appeal to blind confidence, the testimonial that is always beyond proof, demonstrative reason, intuition); and
- the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or of holiness […]
These two veins (two strata or two sources) of the religious should be distinguished from one another. They can doubtless be associated with each other and certain of their possible complications analysed, but they should never be confused or reduced to one another as is almost always done.
[…]
‘What is…?’, which is to say, on the one hand, what is it in its essence? And on the other, what is it (present indicative) at present? What is it doing, what is being done with it at present, today, today in the world?
[…] why should the concept of religion be solely Christian? Why, in any case, does te question deserve to be posed and the hypothesis taken seriously?
There has not always been, therefore, nor is there always and everywhere, nor will there always and everywhere (‘with humans’ or elsewhere) be something, a thing that is one and identifiable, identical with itself, which whether religious or irreligious, all agree to call ‘religion’.
And yet, one tells oneself, one still must respond.
[…]
on the title
In the beginning, the title will have been my first aphorism. It condenses two traditional titles, entering into a contract with them.
I had insisted on the light, the relation of all religion to fire and to light. There is the light of revelation and the light of the Enlightenment. Light, phos, revelation, orient and origin of our religions, photographic instantaneity.
Question, demand: in view of the Enlightenment of today and of tomorrow, in the light of the Enlightenment […] how to think religion in the daylight of today without breaking with the philosophical tradition? In our ‘modernity’, the said tradition demarcates itself in an exemplary manner – it will have to be shown why – in basically Latin titles that name religion.
First of all in a book by Kant, in the epoch and in the spirit of the Aufklarung, if not of the Lumieres. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793) was also a book on radical evil […]
Then, the book of Bergson, that great Judaeo-Christian, The Two Sources of Morality and of Religion (1932), between the two world wars and on the eve of events of which one knows that one does not yet know how to think them, and to which no religion, no religious institution in the world remained foreign or survived unscathed, immune, safe and sound. In both cases, was the issue not, as today, that of thinking religion, the possibility of religion, and hence of its interminable and ineluctable return?
The book’s [Bergson] concluding remarks are memorable: ‘the effort required to accomplish, down to our refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods’.
What would happen if Bergson were made to say something entirely different from what he believed he wanted to say but perhaps was surreptitiously dictated to him?
[…]
‘Mechanical’ would have to be understood here in a meaning that is rather ‘mystical’. Mystical or secret because contradictory and distracting, both inaccessible, disconcerting and familiar, unheimlich, uncanny to the very extent that this machinality, this ineluctable automatisation produces and re-produces what at the same time detaches and reattaches to the family, to the familiar, to the domestic, to the proper, to the oikos of the ecological and of the economic, to the ethos, to the place of dwelling.
This quasi-spontaneous automaticity, as irreflexive as a reflex, repeats again and again the double movement of abstraction and attraction that at the same time detaches and reattaches to the country, the idiom, the literal or to everything confusedly collected today under the terms ‘identity’ or ‘identitarian’; in two words, that which ex-propriates and re-appropriates, de-racinates and re-enracinates, ex-appropriates according to a logic that we will later have to formalise, that of auto-immune and auto-indemnification.
[…]
2 things have to be explained in 1:
- the said ‘return of the religious’ […] is not a simple return, for its globality and its figures (tele-techno-media-scientific, capitalistic and politico-economic) remain original and unprecedented. It is not a simple return of the religious, for it comports as one of its two tendencies, a radical destruction of the religious […]
[…] another self-destructive affirmation of religion, I would dare to call it auto-immune, could well be at work n all the projects known as ‘pacifist’ and economic, ‘catholic’ or not, which appeal to universal fraternization, to the reconciliation of ‘men, sons of the same God’, and above all when these brothers belong to the monotheistic tradition of the Abrahamic religions. It will always be difficult extricating this pacifying movement from a double horizon:
a. the kenotic horizon of the death of God and the anthropological re-immanentization (the rights of man and of human life above all obligation towards absolute and transcendent truth of commitment before the divine order […])
b. this declaration of peace can also, pursuing war by other means, dissimulate a pacifying gesture, in the most European-colonial sense possible. Inasmuch as it comes from Rome, as is often the case, it would try first, and first in Europe, upon Europe, to impose surreptitiously a discourse, a culture, a politics and a right, to impose them on all the other monotheist religions, including the non-catholic Christian religions. Beyond Europe, through the same schemes and the same juridico-theologico-political culture, the aim would be to impose, in the name of peace, a globaliatinisation.
The latter becomes henceforth European-Anglo-American in its idiom, as we said above.
The task seems all the more urgent and problematic (incalculable calculation of religion for our times) as the demographic disproportion will not cease henceforth to threaten external hegemony, leaving the latter no strategems other than internalisation. The field of this war or of this pacification is henceforth without limit […].
At stake in the struggle is thus the access to world (transnational or trans-state) networks of telecommunication and of tele-technoscience.
tele-technoscience
Henceforth religion ‘in the singular’ accompanies and even precedes the critical and tele-technoscientific reason, it watches over it as its shadow. It is its wake, the shadow of light itself, the pledge of faith, the guarantee of trustworthiness, the fiduciary experience presupposed by all production of shared knowledge, the testimonial performativity engaged in all technoscientific performance as in the entire capitalist economy indissociable from it.
The same movement that renders indissociable religion and tele-technoscientific reason in its most critical aspect reacts inevitably to itself. It secretes its own antidote but also its own power of auto-immunity. We are here in a space where all self-protection of the unscathed, of the safe and sound, of the sacred (heilig, holy) must protect itself against its own power of rejection, in short against its own, which is to say, against its own immunity. It is this terrifying but fatal logic of the autoimmunity of the unscathed that will always associate Science and Religion.
[note 27. The ‘immune’ (immunis) is freed or exempted from the charges, the service, the taxes, the obligations (munus root of the common of community). This freedom or this exemption was subsequently transported into the domains of constitutional or international law (parliamentary or diplomatic immunity), but it also belongs to the history of the Christian Church and to canon law; the immunity of temples also involved in the inviolability of the asylum that could be found there (Voltaire indignantly attacked this ‘immunity of temples’ as a ‘revolting example’ of ‘contempt for the laws’ and of ‘ecclesiastical ambition’); Urban VIII created a congregation of ecclesiastical immunity: against taxes and military service, against common justice (privilege designated as that of the for) and against police searches, etc. It is especially in the domain of biology that the lexical resources of immunity have developed their authority. The immunitary reaction protects the ‘indemn-ty’ of the body proper in producing antibodies against foreign antigens.
As for the process of auto-immunisation, which interests us here, it consists for a living organism […] of protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system. […] It seems indispensable to us today for thinking the relations between faith and knowledge, science and religion, as well as the duplicity of sources in general.]
On the one hand, the ‘lights’ and Enlightenment of tele-technoscientific critique and reason can only suppose trustworthiness. They are obliged to put into play an irreducible ‘faith’, that of a ‘social bond’ or of a ‘sworn faith’, of a testimony (I promise to tell you the truth beyond all proof and all theoretical demonstration, believe me, etc.’), that is of a performative of promising at work even in lying or perjury and without which no address to the other would be possible.
Without the performative experience of this elementary act of faith, there would be neither ‘social bond’ nor address to the other, nor any performativity in general: neither convention, nor institution, nor constitution, nor sovereign state, nor law, nor above all, here, that structural performativity of the productive performance that binds from its very inception the knowledge of the scientific community to doing, and science to technics.
[Q: what then is the relation of this elementary structure to what we call radical title, the foundational act of community that appropriates a territory and opens the possibility of law, &c., &c.? time and space: the temporal structure of the promise + the originary spacing of the world. What is their relation to technics? technics in the origin [see here]]
If we regularly speak here of technoscience, it is not in order to cede to a contemporary stereotype, but in order to recall that, more clearly than ever before, we know that the scientific act is, through and through, a practical intervention and a technical performativity in the very energy of its essence.
And for this very reason it plays with place, putting distances and speeds to work. It delocalises, removes or brings close, actualises or virtualises, accelerates or decelerates.
But wherever this tele-technoscientific critique develops, it brings into play and confirms the fiduciary credit of an elementary faith which is, at least in its essence or calling, religious (the elementary condition, the milieu of the religious if not religion itself).
We speak of trust and of credit or of trustworthiness in order to underscore that this elementary act of faith also underlies the essentially economic and capitalistic rationality of the tele-technoscientific.
No calculation, no assurance will ever be able to reduce its ultimate necessity, that of the testimonial signature […]
To take note of this is to give oneself the means of understanding why, in principle, today, there is no incompatibility, in the said ‘return of the religious’, between the ‘fundamentalisms, the ‘integrisms’ or their ‘politics’ and, on the other hand, rationality, which is to say, the tele-techno-capitalistico-scientific fiduciarity, in all its mediatic and globalising dimensions.
As for the phenomena of ignorance, of irrationality or of ‘obscurantism’ that are so often emphasised and denounced, so easily and with good reason, they are often residues, surface effects, the reactive slag of immunitary, idemnificatory or auto-immunitary reactivity.
They mask a deep structure or rather (but also at the same time) a fear of self, a reaction against that with which it is partially linked: the dislocation, expropriation, delocalization, deracination, deidiomatization and dispossession (in all their dimensions, particularly sexual –phallic) that the tele-technoscientific machine does not fail to produce.
[tele effects are in the origin. distancing is always already at work. originary technics]
The reactivity of resentment opposes this movement to itself by dividing it. It indemnifies itself thus in a movement that is at once immunitary and auto-immune.
The reaction to the machine is as automatic (and thus machinal) as life itself.
Such an internal splitting, which opens distance, is also peculiar or ‘proper’ to religion, appropriating religion for the ‘proper’ (inasmuch as it is also the unscathed: heilig, holy, sacred, saved, immune and so on), appropriating religious indemnification to all forms of property, from the linguistic idiom in its ‘letter’, to blood and soil, to the family and the nation.
This internal and immediate reactivity, at once immunitary and auto-immune, can alone account for what will be called the religious resurgence in its double and contradictory phenomenon.
The word resurgence [deferlement] imposes itself upon us to suggest the doubling of a wave that appropriates even that to which, enfolding itself, it seemed opposed [teletechnics?] – and simultaneously gets carried away itself, sometimes in terror and terrorism, taking with it precisely that which protects it, its own antibodies.
[…]
Religion today allies itself with tele-technoscience, to which it reacts with all its forces. It is, on the one hand, globalisation; it produces, weds, exploits the capital and knowledge of tele-mediatization: neither the trips and global spectacularizing of the Pope, nor the interstate dimensions of the ‘Rushdie affair’, nor planetary terrorism would otherwise be possible, at this rhythm – and we could multiply such indications ad infinitum.
But, on the other hand, it reacts immediately, simultaneously, declaring war against that which gives it this new power only at the cost of dislodging it from all its proper places, in truth from place itself, from the taking-place of its truth.
It conducts a terrible war against that which protects it only by threatening it, according to this double and contradictory structure: immunitary and auto-immunitary.
The relation between these two motions or these two sources is ineluctable, and therefore automatic and mechanical, between one which has the form of the machine (mechanisation, automatisation, machinations or mechane), and the other, that of living spontaneity, of the unscathed property of life, that is to say, of another (claimed) self-determination.
But the auto-immunitary haunts the community and its system of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of its own possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of auto-immunity.
…and pomegranates
[…] fifteen final propositions in a form that is even more granulated, grainy, disseminated, aphoristic, discontinuous, juxtapositional, dogmatic, indicative or virtual, economic; in a word, more than ever telegraphic.
(38) Of a discourse to come – on the to-come and repetition.
Axiom: no to-come without heritage and the possibility of repeating.
No to-come without some sort of iterability, at least in the form of a covenant with oneself and confirmation of the originary yes.
No to-come without some sort of messianic memory and promise, of a messianicity older than all religion, more originary than all messianism.
[messianism as an originary structure]
No discourse or address of the other without the possibility of an elementary promise. Perjury and broken promises require the same possibility.
No promise, therefore, without the promise of a confirmation of the yes.
This yes will have implied and will always imply the trustworthiness and fidelity of a faith.
No faith, therefore, nor future without everything technical, automatic, machine-like supposed by iterability. In this sense, the technical is the possibility of faith, indeed its very chance. A chance that entails the greatest risk, even the menace of radical evil.
[nb. these are the stakes when we talk about the technical, about technics.]
Otherwise, that of which it is the chance would not be faith but rather programme or proof, predictability or providence, pure knowledge and pure know-how, which is to say annulment of the future.
Instead of opposing them, as is almost always done, they ought to be thought together, as one and the same possibility: the machine-like and faith, and the same holds for all the values entailed in the sacrosanct (heilig, holy, safe and sound, unscathed, intact, immune, free, vital, fecund, fertile, strong, and above all, as we will soon see, ‘swollen’_ -more precisely in the sacrosanctity of the phallic effect.
[…] The phallic – is it not also, as distinct from the penis and once detached from the body, the marionette that is erected, exhibited, fetishised and paraded in processions? Is this not where one grasps, virtuality of virtuality, the power or potency of a logic powerful enough to account for (logon didonai) -counting on calculating the incalculable – everything that binds the tele-technoscientific machine, this enemy of life in the service of life, to the very source and resource of the religious: to faith in the most living as dead and automatically sur-viving, resuscitated in its spectral phantasma, the holy, safe and sound, unscathed, immune, sacred – helieg?
Matrix, once again, of a cult or a culture of the generalised fetish, of an unlimited fetishism, of a fetishising adoration of the Thing itself.
One could, without being arbitrary, read, select, connect everything in the semantic genealogy of the unscathed – ‘saintly, sacred, safe and sound, heilig, holy‘ – that speaks of force, life-force, fertility, growth, augmentation, and above all, swelling, in the spontaneity of erection or of pregnancy.
To be brief, it does not suffice to recall here all the phallic cults and their well-known phenomena at the core of so many religions.
[…]
The religion of the living – is this not a tautology? Absolute imperative, holy law, law of salvation: saving the living intact, the unscathed, the safe and sound (heilig) that has the right to absolute respect, restraint, modesty.
Whence the necessity of an enormous task: reconstituting the chain of analogous motifs […] (heilig, living, strong and fertile, erect and fecund: safe, whole, unscathed, immune, sacred, holy and so on).