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Notes on the Sacred

Jean-Luc Nancy Theory Culture Society 2013 30: 153 originally published online 20 June 2013 DOI: 10.1177/0263276413486840 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/30/5/153

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Article

Notes on the Sacred

Jean-Luc Nancy
Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France Universite

Theory, Culture & Society 30(5) 153158 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276413486840 tcs.sagepub.com

Abstract In a sequence of aphorisms, Jean-Luc Nancy interrogates the speculative suture between the sacred and truth. The sacred is indexed to an encounter or a point of intensity via which the subject approaches what cannot be grasped in itself, but solely in and as this unfinishable approach. The chance of this encounter is accorded to every subject and no longer confiscated by a religion or an exclusive regime of thought. In parallel, the sacred enters into a novel matrix with the ordinary wherein neither supersedes the other. These aphorisms demonstrate that the ordinary supplies a point of access to the sacred because the sacred is itself one of the nomadic folds of the ordinary. Keywords life, philosophy, sacred, sacrifice, truth

Translators Introduction: Phenomenon and Immanence

The most rigorous denition of the sacred can be extracted from St. Paul: the sacred is what manifests itself by subtracting itself from experience; the void in the phenomenal coming-forth of being. The truth of this void can only be accessed by a privileged witness who lays claim to the phenomenon and announces its univocal interpretation. This regime of phenomenal transcendence held sway over the history of philosophy until Nietzsche dethroned the Kantian thing-in-itself and proclaimed the advent of immanence. The witness gave way to the reader, any subject whatever, who could now decrypt the phenomenon for himself without the intermediary of an other. In Nietzsche, thought is still a matter of interpreting (phenomena) and evaluating (their degrees of dierence), even if decoding is here a universal practice, and phenomenon and essence are one. The phenomenal subsists, but is now tethered to an immanence of signs. What is at stake in both regimes is dierentiating, on the basis of their phenomenality, the sacred from the ordinary; and dierentiation requires a decoding of dierences, phenomena, signs. Yet, the second regime introduces a mutation of sorts: the truth of the void that is the sacred is ultimately undecidable, because
Corresponding translator: Alyosha Edlebi, Yale University, 142 York St., No. 5, New Haven, CT 06511, USA. Email: alyosha.edlebi@gmail.com http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/
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no one is precluded from laying claim to it (the problem of Platos Sophist). To the universal truth delivered by the witness, this regime of phenomenal immanence opposes the undecidability of equivocal decryptions by readers. Undecidability means that each subject can claim its own sacred or, what amounts to the same, that the sacred is singular and not absolute. It is clear, in all of this, that any conception of the sacred implicates a correlative conception of the nature of thought and what it can do. For the regimes at issue, thought is understood as the decipherment of dierence. It is legitimate to ask whether a third regime could not be constituted that would preserve the universality of the rst and the immanence of the second. Such is, in eect, the theoretical line that Nancy deploys in his Notes on the Sacred and his general oeuvre. It consists in unbinding phenomenon and thought and setting forth an a-phenomenal immanence. Three postulates are necessary: 1) If the sacred is undecidable, that is not for lack of a privileged or univocal decryption, but because it is essentially undecidable: the sacred is the ordinary; there can be no intelligible discernment between them. 2) By consequence, the vocation of thought resides not in decoding phenomena and their dierence, but in thinking the universal intrication of the sacred and the ordinary; in other words: not the decipherment of dierence, but the construction of an absolute. 3) In this construction, thought must carry the Pauline denition to its limit: the void of phenomenality inheres not simply in the sacred but in all things; at its heart, immanence is a-phenomenal. These three postulates convoke a new gure beyond the witness and the reader: the thinker, the one who seizes the sacred by thinking (that is: constructing as absolute) its indistinction from the ordinary. Nancys notes, his philosophy, inasmuch as they fulll this triptych of postulates and its gure, merit the rubric ordinary or non-Christly immanence, the veritable immanence of the sacred.

I. Sacred are the thing, the being, the thought which we cannot touch without trembling. This trembling could be minor, but it is always intimate: it seizes us in our very being. Before a grave, a desirable body, a birdsong. That to which we lack access, but which nevertheless draws near to us and makes us a sign. That whose approach is uncertain, dangerous and risky, necessary nevertheless. Dangerous because necessary. Necessary because we have to approach it in order to partake in some unfamiliar power which we know we need or desire. Which we know is in some sense destined to us as what concerns us, what interests us, what touches us most intimately; in other words: on this or that side of every intimacy. How then could there be no sacred, if nothing is more certain

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than this destination or this postulation of our being: passing, surpassing, bypassing what connes us and, by conning us, revealing to us the wish of passage, the step beyond? The step towards what is not there, not within reach here or elsewhere, beyond reach but right here, close to touching us. In the gaze of an other, in the life and death of the other, the life and death of an animal as well, even in the plant, the star and re, electricity, copper, carbon. In the existence of the world. In the possibility that the unbearable could intrude into it. The sacred thing and being are withdrawn, situated at a distance, out of reach, because this distance forms their whole truth. It is truth which does not let itself be veried, but veries itself. Literally makes itself true. It shows itself and shows thus that it is and that it is at a distance. It reveals itself: not unveils itself, but heralds and attests to its isolated presence. The true cannot fall right into my hands; it has to be ahead of me. There, ahead, it glows. Its radiance is named beauty. II. A dog gazes at me, a child, a tree, a rock, a work. In order to gain access to this verication, I have to turn myself towards it, to be capable of perceiving its sign, its advent. To separate myself in my turn from the profane. An instant of reverence, of hospitality. I have to devote myself. Devote to me a little time, says that which is not here, which is at a distance and yet nearby. I must sacri-ce something: make sacred a thing, my gaze itself or my hearing, my gesture, my hand which lets go of its pencil in order to caress or be caressed. Or even in order to wash so that it be worthy of an encounter even a simple handshake, perhaps. There is sacredness in the simplest exchanges, provided there is an exchange, a transformation, an alteration, something other than a transaction. We devote to each other some gestures, some manners, some attitudes. We proclaim sacred withdrawn from transaction and every pricing our exchanges, our relations, those that open us to the outside world, those which render us sensitive to its very existence, contingent and hazardous, improbable, exposed to worse dangers than what we ourselves or a blind sky can cause it. III. Existence, nevertheless, cannot itself be sacriced. Existing can consist in sacricing, in devoting much (of time, forces, goods) but not a single instant to sacricing the existent as such except if I know, with scientic certainty, that my life has to be given for a particular cause. Yet, this certain science will be a sacred science, revelation, knowledge reserved for a concealed access for an amorous intelligence. In this instance, my existence will not be sacriced: it will exist to the end. I cannot keep such a knowledge for others. It can never be the knowledge of society or of the State. It can only ever be the knowledge of another life, another existence as cause, as sucient reason for my sacrice.

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In order that I know, on the other hand, that an other has to be sacriced, I must know that I have to be sacriced with him: that we owe a duty to the cause. Tendentially, there will no longer be a cause. Failure of the Revolution, international or national: it demanded the sacrice of lives for another life. That cannot be: there is no other life. It remains true that life must be transformed and that this imperative is sacred. That which alone has the right to sacrice the life of others stems from life itself and is named death; but we have no knowledge of death. We cannot give death, not even give it to ourselves, for its donation stems from life alone, which we are not. We can only risk our existence to the end in order to transform life, ours, that of an other, that of all of us. In the face of death, not given but hurled in an order or a bomb, the sacred sinks in innite distress: tormented sacrice. (Thanatos or Eros: impossible for us to give them. We must receive them.) IV. The old world of sacrice rendered possible the nearly perpetual and nearly integral passage from the profane to the sacred. There was, hence, no need to transform life. By sacricing lives or what bore an image or a sign of life, one gained access to the kingdom of the dead, to their nocturnal forces. One reconciled oneself to them. The price was the interminable dread of not sacricing suciently or adequately. Terror: the gods are thirsty. The hecatomb would thus take place: a hundred slaughtered eggs, a hundred captives, or a hundred virgins, rivers of blood, wine, honey. Holocaust: one burns everything. (We know what this becomes when gods are converted into the human race, when they mutate into phantasms of soil and blood: crushed, naturalized, exhausted sacredness. Final end of the sacred, declared, established as such. It will no longer be possible to invoke this word.) Yet, our representation of a world in which the sacred was present while it has deserted our own gives a proof of our present relation to the sacred. We represent to ourselves that elsewhere, formerly, the sacred was present, then lost. But we forget what conditions of coercion and fear, of terrifying submission, accompanied this alleged presence. We equally forget, in one and the same forgetting, how much the sacred is close and familiar to us: familiar to us is unfamiliarity, the strangeness of the newly-born, of the unknown, the stranger, the beloved, the desired, the feared, the intruder. Nothing else is sacred, nothing else is the sacred. The sacred or the holy. Holiness or the pure rupture with the world in the fullness of the world. The sense of the world which is outside the world open in the midst of it. Holiness, which is not the good, which is on the contrary the knowledge of the good: that the good is not given. Thus the sacred is not good. Nor bad or ambivalent (high and low, auspicious and ill-fated sacredness). It is the approach of the distant, which remains at a distance in this very approach. It is the touching of the nite by the innite. It is up to us to make good or bad use of it or to make nothing of it.
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V. We say the sacred as if it were a thing, even a being. This substantivation is modern. It arises from ethnological and sociological considerations that sought to construct the concept of what is never presented in person, but as the attribute of objects, actions, or speeches. A tree, a mask, an oath is sacred; but the sacred does not identify itself. By naming it, we betray our illusory consciousness of having lost it and our desire to encounter it. The sacred in person is the god: but the god by its nature is concealed; it withdraws from the world, whether within the world, in its folding, or outside, in its unfolding. The god is veiled not only deus absconditus, which doubtless bears this trait to its limit: every god has withdrawal, diversion, concealment or absence as its properly divine trait. It is thus that gods are made: not fabricated by projection, as one often said, but feigned, ctionalized as gures of what has neither gure nor appearance of its own but which emanates, which propagates and communicates itself in singular eects of a particular given, circumstance or encounter. Gods are not holy. Holiness is the limit of the divine, where gods persons, gures, personae unravel in the very distancing, in the distinction and separation of the outside, in its improbable and real proximity, scarcely bearable and withstood, retained by what exposes itself to it. VI. Essentially, the sacred or the holy encounters us. The outside encounters. It has each time, through such form (gaze, tonality, rhythm or contact, haziness or clarity . . .), the force of the encounter: what one cannot evade. Someone in the street, or one of those I see every day, can consign me to this encounter. Or a tree or the movement, the style of a phrase. In a sense, it is trivial. The sacred is common, ordinary and always within reach not of the hand, no doubt, but of waiting and attention. This attention can be more or less deliberate; it can be awakened by the surprise of a call, a signal (like a furtive expression in a gaze), or mobilized by my thought, my desire to intercept such a signal. The sacred arrives in an encounter; it arrives through, in and as an encounter. It is nothing other than a communication with the outsides of the world. Nothing other than a disturbance introduced into the homogeneity of the world. A discontinuity. An interruption. Since we have spoken of communication, let us say: an interruption in communication is sacred. Not an interruption of communication, but an interruption that is communicated in the midst of the uninterrupted ux of our communication like a distraction. What we call art proceeds from such a distraction: the practices we classify today under this rubric divert themselves from the course of the world. They suspend participation in the continuity of the homogeneous. They step aside: halt over a trace, take a step or leap through the impetus of the body alone, make a voice resonate which forgets to speak, substitute for an object the presentation of this object, install which is to say stabilize a moment. This suspension
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or impetus, this attention that evades every occupation, that is only concerned with itself, is devoted to the approach of an outside but an outside that is open in the midst of the world. In strokes, in noise, marks, imprints or movements, tosses or falls, thicknesses or sharp edges. In being passed through or suspended. Which is opened and in opening is distinguished as outside: hence the rst stroke drawn, traced, inscribed, dirtied, charred on a rock face or a tree. To consecrate: to devote, to dedicate, to intend, to consign. To dedicate and to dedicate oneself to the withdrawn, situated at a distance, distinct from the order and reason of things distinct, more remote, more profound, more at the bottom of order and reason. As at the bottom of a gaze, as the singularity of an existence, as this truth which is only veried by itself. We say art but this word is inadequate in order to designate a gesture that consecrates par excellence. Art of pleasing or art of living, art of enjoying or art of aging, art of singing or of painting, it is not only a question of knowing how to go about it: it is a question of knowing how to make it with what does not let itself be made. With what does not let itself be produced. With what a work can no doubt carry, but not complete. To know how to do it by letting it happen: to let oneself be carried before truth, to let it shine as itself. As truth or holiness. To know how to bring about not its radiance, which only depends on it, but the opening by which to discern it. To know how to provide access to it, and to know how much this knowledge is not within our power. It requires labour, eort and attention: to be attentive to getting distracted. To getting caught up. Before a grave, a desirable body, a birdsong. That to which we lack access, but which nevertheless draws near to us and makes us a sign. That whose approach is uncertain, dangerous and risky, necessary nevertheless. Dangerous because necessary. Necessary because outside, and an outside more intimate than any supposed inside. Distant which remains far by drawing near to touch us. Translated by Alyosha Edlebi
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Jean-Luc Nancy for granting his permission for this translation. The text originally appeared in the French journal Mouvement (no47) in 2008.

Author Biographies

Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His books in English include The Universite Literary Absolute (with Philip Lacoue-Labarthe, 1988), The Inoperative Community (1991), Being Singular Plural (2000), Corpus (2008), and Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (2008). Alyosha Edlebi is a doctoral candidate at Yale University.
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