4
Finalement, j’aimerais mieux une vraie résurrection classique.
In the end, I would prefer a real classical resurrection.
—Jacques Derrida, quoted in Jean-Luc Nancy, “Reste, viens”
Resurrection, a central tenet of Abrahamic religions, in Christian worship denotes the return to life of Jesus Christ after the ascension to heaven of the body of light, the glorious body, while eternal life refers to continued life after the resurrection of the dead.1 Traditionally, both these notions have been considered as forms of salvation (salut) of the saved after death. As hope for a “second chance” at life and as refusal of the finality of death, the question of salvation after death has often been raised as a matter of faith. In his later work Jean-Luc Nancy has explored the themes of “resurrection” and “eternal life,” notions classically associated with a thinking of the hereafter, allowing him to delve into what he terms “a beyond of death” (Ad 128/88). What particularly interests Nancy is “the life of the dead,” a life withdrawn from time, in the world outside the world. Entertaining a relation to “the outside of time,” this “life” takes place—a “place” nonetheless—in an unnamable region. Nancy finds his observations about this beyond of death, about the dead one and the temporality specific to it, to belong somewhere between thought and sensibility, leading him to “a conduct that exceeds knowledge, wisdom, and consciousness” (137/95).
Resurrection
Judging by Nancy’s various writings on resurrection, it would not be too far-fetched to suggest that he conceives of resurrection as part of the deconstruction of death. What he calls “the resurrection of death” is a deepening of death, an uprising, “a stance,” a “raising [relèvement],” a “lifting [soulèvement]” (NMT 33/18). While Nancy considers the “historical” resurrection of the dead as a “fantastic” operation, he views the resurrection of death as its transformation. In various texts published in the first five years of this century and collected in La Déclosion, Nancy goes on to redefine all the terms involved in or associated with resurrection in its Christic form or what Derrida labels “classical resurrection.” Indeed, the deconstruction of resurrection could possibly be read as a response or rejoinder to Derrida’s remarks on resurrection in Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. In that text, Derrida praises Nancy’s work, “the probity of his signature,” and his exactitude—a word that he credits Nancy for “reinventing” and “reawakening”—a word that he believes is “rather new—like a resurrection” (LT 17/8).
Nancy’s first contribution toward rethinking a notion of resurrection for philosophical thought was a short text, Noli me tangere, published in April 2003. While discussing how a host of classical painters have depicted the famous scene from the Gospel of John and the “resurrection” announced in it, Noli me tangere undertakes to resuscitate a notion of resurrection. A few months after its appearance and approximately a year after Blanchot’s death in February 2003, Nancy presented a text entitled “Blanchot’s Resurrection” as the opener for a series of papers at the Pompidou Center in 2004 devoted to Blanchot bearing the same title. This essay was later included in Nancy’s book La Déclosion (2005) in which he devoted two chapters to Blanchot.
In Nancy’s view, resurrection, rather than a return to life or a process of regeneration, signifies a reconfiguration of death and dying (NMT 32/17). Discussing the resurrection of Christ, he claims that resurrection is not “a resuscitation [réanimation]” but “the infinite continuation of death that displaces and dismantles all the values of presence and absence, of animate and inanimate, of body and soul” (73/44, trans. mod.). Contrary to its dominant interpretation throughout Western history, in Nancy’s reading, resurrection is not a “reincarnation” or a “reanimation [reviviscence]” (33/18).
Nancy presents what he refers to as “the nonreligious meaning” of resurrection as “the departing into which presence actually withdraws […]. Just as it comes, so it goes: that is to say, it is not” (NMT 29/15). Resurrection is described as “the uprising [surrection], the sudden appearance of the unavailable, of the other and of the disappearing [le disparissant] in the body itself and as the body” (29/15, trans. mod.). Death is thus not won over or “vanquished,” but is “immeasurably extended [étendu], shielded [soustraite]” from being simply “a mere demise” (30/16). Referring to Christ, Nancy writes, this is because “He dies indefinitely,” he is the one who does not “cease to depart” for his “presence is that of a disappearance [la disparition] indefinitely renewed or prolonged” (31/16). It is as if, Nancy observes, the one who is departing is saying, “I am already going away; I am only in this departure [départ]; I am the parting [le partant] of this departure” (31/16, all italics in the original). “He is departing for the absent [il part pour l’absent],” Nancy elaborates, “for the distant, the remote” (31/17, trans. mod.).
Nancy does not consider resurrection to be in any way a “dialecticization” or a mediation of death, and he is careful to stress in Noli me tangere that the “raising [levée] of the body is not a ‘relève’ in the sense given to this word by Derrida to translate the Hegelian Aufhebung” (NMT 33/18). He deems it “incommensurable with every representation of a passage into another life” (34/18).2 Instead, appealing to the etymology of anastasis, Nancy describes resurrection as “an uprising [soulèvement],” “a stance [une tenue] before death” (33/18), “a standing upright [se-tenir-debout] before and in death” (34/18).3 What is affirmed in anastasis, then, is not only “the stance” but also “the reserve, [the] restraint [la retenue]” (33/18). As a much more earthbound and mundane affair, resurrection “designates the singularity of existence,” for “everyone resurrects, one by one and body for body” (76/46, trans. mod.). Moreover, anastasis “does not come from the self, from the subject proper”; it is not something that the self does but “comes to the self from the other or arises from the other within the self” (35/19). Thus, the statement “I am resurrected” does not signify the accomplishment of an I but rather denotes a passivity. This is why Nancy can claim that “I am dead” and “I am resurrected” say the same thing (35/19).
Nancy expands his thoughts on resurrection when he reflects on Blanchot’s work, particularly his first novel, Thomas the Obscure. In “Blanchot’s Resurrection” Nancy claims that the motif of resurrection in Blanchot’s récits is “indissociable” from death and “dying” (Déc 135/89). In this essay he introduces a distinction between “resurrecting the dead [ressusciter les morts]” and “resurrecting death [ressusciter la mort].” To resurrect the dead, he explains, would be to bring the dead back to life, making “life reappear” where death had put an end to it. This would be nothing but “a prodigious, miraculous operation,” involving a supernatural intervention in the laws of nature (135).4 However, what Nancy refers to as “the difficult, strange and obstinately evasive thought of resurrection” (144), constitutes “an entirely other operation” than the traditional notion of resurrection (136). If resurrecting the dead is “a miraculous operation” and if the Lazarus of the Gospel is “a character of a miraculous story [récit]” (138), then, for Nancy, resurrection does not speak of a fantastic event or spectacle. This “miracle” is not a nature-defying operation or fabulous event that exceeds common sense—for the latter would be the work of the Hegelian negative (142).
Resurrection does not escape death or “come out of it [ne sort d’elle]” but forms, Nancy claims, “the extremity and truth of dying” (Déc 135). It “goes into death [elle va dans la mort] […] sinking irremissibly into it, to resuscitate death itself” (135/89). Nancy locates a source for his interpretation of death, dying, and resurrection in Blanchot in a passage from the first version of Thomas the Obscure, where the sole reference in Blanchot’s oeuvre to the expression mort ressuscité occurs in chapter 8 (137/91).5 If, in Nancy’s reading, it is death that is resurrected, then the subject is “neither ‘the resurrected one’ nor the corpse” but death itself—“ ‘death resurrected,’ as stretched out on the corpse and so raising it without sublating it [le dressant sans le relever]” (138). Hence, resurrection cannot be deemed as an escape or exit from death, but rather what Nancy calls “an upright stance.”
Nancy describes the story of Thomas in Blanchot’s first narrative not as “a crossing through [traversée] of death” but designating “death itself as a crossing [traversée], as transport and transformation”—a passage not to elsewhere but “from itself into itself” (Déc 139/93, trans. mod.). In his reading of Thomas the Obscure, Nancy writes that “the space of resurrection, the space that defines it and makes it possible, is the space outside sense [hors du sens]” (140/93). In this space outside of sense, anteriority and posteriority have no “chronological value” but point to “an outside-of-time [un hors-temps], as much interminable as it is instantaneous, eternity in its essential subtractive value [valeur de soustraction]” (140–141).6 The “subtractive value” of eternity, it seems, is meant to be understood as its removal from time. If, as Nancy writes in Noli me tangere, everyone resurrects, then “the space of resurrection,” this outside-of-time, referred to in La Déclosion, belongs to all those who die (140).
Nancy takes up Derrida’s objections to his portrayal of resurrection in “Consolation, désolation” and glossing the notion of resurrection discussed in his previous essays asserts that anastasis would designate nothing other than “redress [redressement] (anastasis),” a “raising up [levée] (and not sublation [‘relève’]).”7 In French redresser is “to set upright, to straighten (up)” but also “to rectify,” while in English “to redress” has a sense of “to remedy, restore, rectify, put right, set right, balance out.” Redressement as an “adjustment” or “recovery” may be Nancy’s attempt to remedy and rectify a tired traditional notion. Elaborating on the relation of salut to the one who is dead in “Consolation, désolation,” Nancy reserves safety for the dead one, arguing that it is the dead one who is intact and safe.
TRANSFORMATION OF DEATH
In a chapter entitled “Rilke et l’exigence de la mort” in L’espace littéraire, Blanchot notes that, for Rilke, dying “will not be to die, but to transform the fact of death” (EL 189/146). Blanchot, whose writings on death serve as a source of inspiration for Nancy, specifies that the shift in Rilke’s thought from a personal death to the “transmutation” of death “is only accomplished in us by death itself” (192/148). Indeed, “in this readier [plus prompte] death resurrection is expressed, the joy [l’allégresse] of a transfigured life” (189/146). Blanchot writes a bit further on of an “inward conversion,” “a purification of death by death,” a death to which no authentic relation is possible (195/150). By turning toward things, he avers, we learn “to feel the movement of transmutation and, in this movement, to transmute transmutation itself, to the point where it becomes the purity of death purified of dying” (200/154). Yet we soon realize that we “need to start from the depth of death in order to turn toward the intimacy of things” (201/155). Blanchot wonders whether Rilke may be judged to be “idealizing” the “ordeal of dying” in order “to purify it of its brutality” (201/154). Still beyond its “very accommodating extreme” that has its “reassuring side [côté rassurant],” he notes, there is also “a fearful side [côté effrayant]” (201/154). “If death’s true reality is not simply what from the outside we call leaving life [quitter la vie]—if death is something other than its worldly reality, if it eludes us, turning always away—then this movement makes us sense its profound unreality: death as abyss, not that which founds but the absence and the loss of all foundation” (202/154, trans. mod.). (Note here Blanchot’s displacement of the Heideggerian Abgrund. Perhaps, we can say that death itself is not an abyss, but each and every death is abyssal. Then, death would not be the absence of all foundation but the absence of a foundation every time.)
This movement of transmutation, Blanchot comments, is infinitely linked to the “metamorphosis” that “not only steers us toward death but also infinitely transmutes death itself, making of it the infinite movement of dying and of the one who dies the infinitely dead, as if in death’s intimacy it were for the latter a matter of dying always more [mourir toujours plus], immeasurably—of continuing inside death to make possible the movement of transformation which must not cease” (EL 205/157, trans. mod.). It is in this way—if one were able to overlook Blanchot’s pathos-ridden language—that it may be possible for Nancy to read resurrection as the transmutation or transfiguration of death.
In “The Space of Death,” part of his chapter on Rilke, Blanchot quotes from a letter the poet sent to his Polish translator, Witold Hulewicz.8 In an aside Blanchot comments that the popularity of this letter shows the tendency of substituting poetry with ideas in prose. Blanchot begins this section by quoting from Rilke’s letter: “Death is that side [coté] of life that is not turned toward us, nor do we shed light upon it” (EL 169/133). At the end of the passage quoted by Blanchot, Rilke writes, “There is neither a here [en deça] nor a beyond” (169/133). Calling death “this region [cette région],” in the following subsection, entitled “The Other Side [L’autre côté],” Blanchot further expounds: “Thus it would be what essentially escapes us, a kind of transcendence, but of which we cannot say that it has value and reality, about which we know only this: “that we are ‘turned away from it’ [nous en sommes ‘détournés’]” (EL 170/133). Why, one might ask, are we “turned away”? We are turned away because of “our limits.” We are limited beings who when looking in front of us cannot see what is behind. “When we are here, it is on the condition of renouncing the over there [là-bas]” (171/133, trans. mod.). It is the limit that “makes of us beings who are turned away” (171/134, trans. mod.). It is important to realize that “the other side” is not a beyond and death is to be found on the same “side.” What “the other side” is, is the other of this side as well as being an other side. What is also significant is that, in our relation to death, we are turned away from it.
Blanchot’s reference to the other side, which Nancy makes no mention of, alludes to Heidegger’s discussion of death in §49 of Being and Time. Opposing all metaphysics of death, which is interested in the beyond, that is, in the other side (Jenseits), Heidegger reminds the reader that our methodological point of departure should be from this side (das Diesseits), “the point from which we can start” (A 99/53). “The decision is taken here”—an “irrecusable” and “uncontested” decision, according to Derrida (99/53). As Derrida observes in Aporias: “It is on this side, on the side of Dasein and of its here, which is our here, that the oppositions here and over there, this side and beyond, can be distinguished” (98/52). For Heidegger, this is “immediately justified” because one cannot do otherwise. Derrida does not find this choice of starting point so obvious or so unassailable and notes the enormity of “what is being decided” here (100/55). Heidegger “neutralizes the interest for the other side of a beyond” opposed to this side (102/55). But, rather than placing the blame on Heidegger’s decision to privilege “this side,” Derrida says that it is the very definition of “the originary and underivable character of death, as well as the finitude of the temporality in which death is rooted” that forces Heidegger to decide from here, “from this side here” (102/55). Accordingly, this demonstrates the “primordiality of being-toward-death” leaving us with no choice but to start from this side” (102/55). As a mortal, Dasein can only decide from his mortality.
As we have seen, Nancy’s depiction of death shares several features with Blanchot, who describes death as “the absolutely foreign” (EL 162/128). While the latter defines death as the absence and loss of all foundation, Nancy labels the abyss as the place that the dead one is already in. Dying, which Blanchot calls the transmutation of death or a purification of death by death, is to continue inside death, going deeper within it. In Nancy’s view, it is in resurrection that death is extended—one goes deeper and deeper into death.
THE DECONSTRUCTION OF DEATH
Nancy’s essay entitled “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” his first foray into what he calls the “operation” or project of deconstruction, can be read as an almost boastful, self-satisfied, triumphant manifesto on Christianity.9 Nancy wonders whether the “Jew-Greek” that Derrida refers to in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics” is not really “the Christian.” It is in this essay that Nancy originally argues that the Christian or Christianity is “the very thing, the thing itself [la chose même],” to be thought (“DC” 504). Christianity is itself and by itself in a “state of overcoming [dépassement],” Nancy asserts. This “self-overcoming [autodépassement] is perhaps very profoundly proper to it; it is perhaps its most profound tradition” (“DC” 505). Since Christianity is inseparable from the West, then “all our thinking is through and through Christian” (506); hence, “the modern world is itself the becoming of Christianity” (507).
As Nancy puts it, he is being guided by “the motif of the essence of Christianity as opening: the opening of the self and the self as opening” (“DC” 508). He proceeds to say of deconstruction that it “belongs to a tradition, to our modern tradition” (511). Undoubtedly, Derrida must have bristled at this “our (nous).” (Qui nous?) It is also Nancy’s contention that the “operation” of deconstruction is itself traversed through and through by Christianity (511). Thus, it must be said, he contends, that deconstruction “is itself Christian” and “the gesture of deconstruction” can be found only within Christianity (512). It is Christian because Christianity is, from its inception or “originally [d’origine],” deconstructive (512). Since deconstruction means “démontrer, to reveal, to show, to disassemble,” then the deconstruction of Christianity would be an “operation of désassemblage, disassembling and dismantling, focusing on the origin or the sense of deconstruction (512). Nancy then goes on to provide his assessments of some of the other creeds of Christianity, such as the Gospel, the “good news,” kerygma, evangelism, Christology, incarnation, faith, sin, and so on (513). In several texts devoted to the deconstruction of Christianity, collected in La Déclosion, he expands on the assessment expressed in his article “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” presenting his views on numerous themes such as atheism, monotheism, the messiah, belief [croyance]—which is linked to the spectacular and marked out from faith [foi]—the miraculous, the extraordinary, sacrifice, the spectral, the dead one, time outside time, the abyss, nothing, the safe and the intact, death as a departure, and so on.
Derrida first refers to Nancy’s project, still in its infancy, in Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000), his tome celebrating the work of Nancy. He also discusses Nancy’s work and alludes to his project in interviews, seminars as well as in his publications, many times without directly mentioning him. In The Death Penalty seminar, without naming Nancy, Derrida shows his resistance to the idea of talking about death as a genre. Toward the end of the ninth session of the seminar, Derrida summarizes his observations on “the subject of death, the question, what is death?” (DP1 323/237). He wonders whether it is necessary to think death first before thinking the death penalty as a question derived from it, as philosophy in its entire history has done, or should things be the other way around? In his evaluation of the relationship of philosophy as a discipline to death, he remarks that all philosophies of death presuppose a “pre-comprehension of the meaning of the word ‘death’ ” (323/237) and place a reliance on “the alleged objective knowledge of what separates a state of death from a state of life” (324/238). This knowledge is based on “the supposed existence of an objectifiable instant that separates the living from the dying” (324/238). The “simple idea” of this sharp limit, he claims, organizes all these meditations on death, even that of a deconstruction of death, which he links to Heidegger as a predecessor to Nancy (324/238). Every calculation on the subject of death assumes “alleged access to this [so-called objective] knowledge,” supposing “the possibility of calculating and mastering the instant of death” (324/239).
Derrida, however, does not find the deconstruction of death to be sufficient. It is not enough to deconstruct death because “death is not one” (DP1 328/241) and “death in the singular no longer exists” (327/241). The deconstruction of death is insufficient because such a deconstruction “must not serve, on the pretext of dissolving the unity or the identity or the gravity of death,” to “banalize” or “relativize” the death penalty (344/253). It is not enough to deconstruct death, even if it is necessary, “in order to survive,” “to assure one’s own salvation” (344/254). It is not enough to deconstruct death because after the deconstruction of death, not only death but life will not come out unscathed. This deconstruction is a wish to master finitude, a wish to be indemnified, a desire to be immune and unscathed. However, what wishes to come out unscathed is auto-immune. In fact, Derrida remarks acidly, nothing will come out unscathed from the deconstruction of death.
(As an addendum to Nancy’s previous writings on death, already mentioned, and echoing some of the sentiments already expressed in Noli me tangere, it may be helpful here to open a parenthesis on his use of “parting” and “departure.” As part of the continuing series of talks called “Little Dialogues,” given to an audience of children, Nancy presented a talk under the title of Partir—le départ (Leaving—departure), which was published in 2011.10 Discussing the title given to the gathering, in his talk Nancy notes the occurrence of etymologically related words such as partir, disparition, part, partage, and partition. The words of this family, he explains, come from the Latin pars and partire, which means to divide, to separate. The latter, he adds, was the second meaning of partir in French, which is no longer in use. It is ourselves that we divide or share, Nancy glosses. He points out a connection to the word “somewhere [quelque part],” by saying that when “we die a part of us remains somewhere.” It is “an area [une partie],” a place, where something of the dead one “remains” (Pa 14–15).
Contrary to the teaching of most religions, Nancy asserts, the dead do not go anywhere (Pa 27). They do not go to another place, site, or to another world. In fact, they go “nowhere [nulle part]” (27). “A part of those who are dead, in us, with us, remains somewhere” because those who remain “are all a part of those who have left” (28). It is “in this way [sous cette forme]” that we can keep them (28). Those who have died have not gone anywhere but “have left the world” (28). Yet “non-visible traces of their presence and their departure” exist everywhere (29). We ourselves know that we are “always about to leave [en partance]” and “we are human because we are en partance,” outward bound, due to leave, about to leave (29–30).
Religious representations of what is beyond death seek to reassure us, but there can be no real representation of death (Pa 36). From the point of view of the dead one, she has not left because she does not exist elsewhere. She has simply died and disappeared—which is not necessarily departing (42). Nancy admits that we often say that dying is departing, but we are mistaken. For there to be a departure, there must be somewhere that we are going, and yet in the case of death this is not the case (42). We are always taking our leave, departing, departing for this nowhere, “entering into the movement of leave-taking [entrer dans le mouvement de partance]” (46). “We leave without return [partir sans retour]” and we never arrive (27). In an expression of what some may interpret as utter resignation or nihilistic despondency, he declares: “Death is nothing at all [rien du tout] (56). There is nothing to say about death, nothing to do” (56). I now close this parenthesis.)
Eternal Life
In his improvised remarks at the closing of an international conference devoted to Blanchot, held a month following his death in 2003, Nancy mistakenly invokes the notion of “universal life [la vie universelle]” (sic), which he attributes to Spinoza. In his comments pronounced directly following Derrida’s presentation, “Maurice Blanchot est mort,” which discussed, among other things, the notion of death in Blanchot’s writings, Nancy refers to a phrase, “joyous death, aleatory [la mort joyeuse, aléatoire],” taken from Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation.11 This joy, a liberation from the necessity of death, Nancy explains, is nothing less than an alleviation (allégement), “a life alleviated from life [une vie allegée de la vie],” a relieving from life defined (as classical philosophy defined it) as self-relation or auto-affection (“FC” 629). This “alleviated life [la vie allegée]” does not exclude another life, Nancy states, but is secretly linked to “the universal life of Spinoza, perhaps even also that of Leibniz, […] that of Spinoza which is not at all a life that excludes the death of individuals” (630). This life, Nancy further glosses, by no means excludes death, but “includes these deaths in it without sublating them” (630).
In response to an invitation to attend the International Documentary Film Festival in Marseille in 2005, Jean-Luc Nancy sends a letter to Jean-Pierre Rehm apologizing for not being able to be there in person. In this letter, Nancy provides an illuminating explanation of his debate with Derrida regarding the question of resurrection and eternal life.12
The long exchange that Jacques and I had regarding “resurrection” […] was, neither for him nor for me, a matter of a phantasmatic belief in the return of the dead. It was a matter of much more: of understanding what the eternity that Spinoza said we feel and experience as ours, means for us. Eternity, which is, the outside of time. Not what always endures but precisely what does not last at all. The vanishing instant in its disappearance—the inscribed trace in its very effacing […]. The great thoughts of resurrection are never fantasies of bodies come back to life. They are precisely thoughts without image. What resurrects, what sets upright the stretched-out body on the earth and soon combines with it, is the absence of image.13
SPINOZA
Nancy’s reference to Spinoza and eternity in the letter to Rehm is thought-provoking and worth detailed exploration. Even though “eternal life” is not considered as a concept that belongs to the philosophical tradition, it is a major tenet of Christian belief, which is centered on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.14 In the New Testament, “eternal life” may be defined as the blessed life freed from death or continued life after death.15 The first biblical reference to eternal life is in Daniel 12: 1–2. It appears in the New Testament forty-three times. In 1 Corinthians Paul states that eternal life cannot be obtained without resurrection. In the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) and the Pauline Letters, eternal life is a future experience, whereas in the Gospel of John eternal life also pertains to the present. It can be possessed “here and now” by those who have accepted Christ, passing “from death to life.” We are given assurance of eternal life instead of being provided with a description of what it would entail.16
Rather than referring to the Bible, Nancy initially appeals to Spinoza for an elaboration of the notion of eternal life. Even though no explicit reference to “eternal life” can be found in Spinoza’s texts,17 the notion of “la vie éternelle” attributed to him has been widely discussed by a number of Spinoza’s French interpreters.18 The pervasiveness of the notion of “eternal life” in Catholic France may have served as an influence on the translations and interpretations of Spinoza.19 According to one interpretation, the eternal life of the mind is the feeling and experience that we are eternal. This experience of eternity is to be distinguished from survival and immortality. In the view of another interpreter, eternal life, being the eternal idea by which God conceives the essence of our body, is described as the idea that we are eternal, not that we have eternal life.
A few examples from major interpretations of Spinoza should suffice to give us a sense of what Nancy may be referring to as eternal life. In 1893 Victor Delbos devoted a chapter of his La problème morale dans la philosophie de Spinoza et dans l’histoire du spinozisme to the notion of “La vie éternelle.”20 In chapter 9 Delbos writes that Spinoza’s doctrine “profoundly transforms” Aristotle’s “theory”—in which nous or pure understanding (l’entendement pur) is eternal—thus aspiring to affirm the eternal life of the individual (193). In each of us, Delbos writes at the end of his chapter, God reveals to himself and to us the “intimate union of infinite Being and our finite individuality that indissolubly constitutes our salvation and the Glory of God in eternal life” (199).
According to Ferdinand Alquié’s introduction in Le rationalisme de Spinoza, Spinoza can be distinguished from all other Western philosophers such as Malebranche, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, because by following Spinoza’s doctrine one can attain “eternal life [la vie éternelle]” and beatitude (beatitudo).21 In a brief commentary, Alquié writes, Spinoza takes up a very classically “religious” position at the same time as he vigorously refuses the idea of the existence of the soul after death.22 At times, according to Alquié, Spinoza speaks of the endurance of the soul without relation to the body when he declares that once the body is destroyed, something of the soul remains (remanet) that is eternal: Mens humana non potest cum corpore absolute destrui, sed eius aliquid remanet, quod aeternum est (Ethics V, 23). Elsewhere, Alquié notes, Spinoza holds that eternal life is not the survival of the soul after the body, that eternity cannot be defined by time and the soul can only be said to endure if it envelops the body (183). Spinoza uses the word “existence” to designate the life of the soul without relation to time (V, Proposition 23, Scholium). An idea is necessarily given in God (donner en Dieu, in Deo datur idea) that expresses the essence of such and such a human body “under the species of eternity” (V, 22). But it does not follow, Alquié argues, that I am myself eternal. “This is why,” he says frustratedly, “the Spinozist doctrine of eternity is so difficult to understand” (186).23
Marxist literary critic and student of Althusser Pierre Macherey, in his interpretation of Spinoza, Introduction à L’Ethique: La cinquieme partie, is of the view that Propositions 21–23 of Part V of the Ethics clear the way for the conditions of an eternal life of the mind (âme).24 Having already stated in Definition 8 of Part I at the beginning of the Ethics that eternity “cannot be explained by duration or time [per durationem au tempus explicari non potest],” Spinoza reemphasizes in Part V that “eternity cannot be defined by time or have any relation to time [nec aeternitas tempore definiri, nec ullam ad tempus relationem habere potest]” (V, Proposition 23, Scholium).25 What, then, allows the human mind to elude the conditions of time and duration? Spinoza introduces “duration of the mind without relation to the body [mentis duration sine relatione ad corpus]” in Proposition 20 and develops the idea of the eternity of the mind (âme) in Proposition 23. In the latter Proposition he states, “We do not attribute to the human mind [âme] any duration that could be defined by time” (119). In addition, he notes, “the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, there remains something eternal in it [sed ejus aliquid remanet quod aeternum est]” (Proposition 23) (127). As Macherey explains, there remains “something eternal [quelque chose d’éternel] that concerns the essence of the mind [qui touche à l’essence de l’âme]” (mens), because its functioning has structurally no relation to the duration (durée) of the body (129). Thus, “we feel and experience that we are eternal [Nous sentons et expérimentons que nous sommes éternels; sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse]” (V, Proposition 23, Scholium) (131).26 This is a genuine experience of eternity. The eternity to which the mind accedes via this experience, Macherey notes, is an actual eternity (132). Thus this “something eternal that remains” should not be interpreted in terms of survival or immortality, in other words, as indefinitely prolonged duration, but “concerns the proper life of the mind [la vie propre de l’âme]” (133). Eternity does not describe “a possible state,” Macherey explains, but refers to “actual practice [pratique effective], here and now” (203). This allows Macherey to expand the Scholium of Proposition 23 in his commentary as: “we feel and experience (in the present) and we feel and experience (always in the present) eternal [nous expérimentons et nous sentons (au présent) que nous sentons (toujours au present) éternels]” (203). The second half of Part V of the Ethics (Propositions 21–41) explains that “beatitude consists at first of seeing things sub specie aeternitatis, from the point of view [au point de vue] of eternity” (199). In agreement with Martial Gueroult, Macherey writes that sub specie aeternitatis should not consistently be translated in a restrictive sense as “sous une espèce d’éternité” (133).27
Alexandre Matheron devotes his article, “La vie éternelle et le corps selon Spinoza,” to an explication of Proposition 39 of Part V, which he translates as “Qui a un corps apte à un très grand nombre de choses a un esprit dont la plus grande partie est éternelle” (27).28 This could be rendered as: “He who has a body that is capable of a great number of things, has a mind [esprit] whose greatest part is eternal” (this translation would be closest to Edwin Curley’s but is not exactly verbatim).29 For Matheron, Proposition 23 displays that the eternal idea by which God conceives the essence of our body is nothing other than our mind (esprit) (35). There is “something eternal in our mind itself” (35). However, Matheron notes that this does not prove that “we have an eternal life [une vie éternelle].” This eternal idea refers only to “the idea that we are” and not “the ideas that we have” (35). If the Propositions that follow (24–28) show that we have eternal ideas, then, Matheron asks, where can we draw the notion of eternity from? Since eternity cannot be explained by duration, he suggests, this idea can only come to us from “the aspect of ourselves that is the eternal idea of our essence” (37). To conceive the essence of a thing from the aspect [sous l’aspect] of eternity […] is to conceive the thing itself, as real, starting from [à partir] the essence of God” (38).
By Nancy’s own admission, the inspiration for a thought of eternal life in his own writings comes from a reading of Spinoza, but the notion of “eternal life” that Nancy attributes to Spinoza hardly appears as such in Spinoza’s own writings. The only reference to vita aeterna in the Lexicon Spinozanum is to the “Annotations” to the Theological-Political Treatise. Annotation 5 reads: “It is clear from Mark 10.21 that to win eternal life it is not enough to keep the commandments of the Old Testament” (262).30 In referring to eternal life Nancy may very well be following the French tradition of commentary on Spinoza, which has employed this notion with roots in the New Testament.
However, eternal life may be a reference to the late biblical period notion of “everlasting life [chayei olam]” (Daniel 12: 1–2).31 In his important book on belief in the afterlife in Jewish thought, Spinoza’s thoughts on immortality and their possible influence on his cherem or expulsion, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind, Steven Nadler further explains that Daniel’s conception of “the final judgment seems to involve immortality as the proper reward for the righteous” (48). Nadler comments that there exists no single Jewish doctrine or unified view of the immortality of the soul (44). The existence of contradictory viewpoints with no unanimity among Jewish doctrines, he believes, makes it impossible to find a unified view. There is no unambiguous reference in the Torah to an immortal soul.
It is worth bearing in mind that a metaphysical dualism between mind and body is absent in the Torah: the nefesh (sometimes translated as the “soul” or “spirit”), the whole individual being, thus the identity of the person, seems to be essentially bound up with the body (44). The existence of Sheol, apparently an underground resting place for the dead, is mentioned for the first time in Genesis 42: 36 (45). To be sure, the conception of Sheol changed over time as theological belief and external circumstances changed. The later Proverbs states that Sheol was populated with rephaim, “shrunken ones,” usually translated as “shades” or “ghosts” (45). When a person dies, he or she simply dies and has become one of the rephaim in Sheol, there is no hope of a return to life: “The dead will not live again, those long in their graves [rephaim] will not rise” (Isaiah 26: 14) (47).
Even though the Apocrypha have “no authoritative status in the Jewish canon,” they afford some insight regarding views about the afterlife (in particular, the apocalyptic works such as 1 Enoch) (49). As Nadler writes, “The doctrine of the resurrection of the body will become a standard,” indeed a nearly unanimous nonnegotiable belief (53). In later Hellenistic Jewish thought, the soul or nefesh (or, in some cases, ruach) survives as a conscious being with memory and contemplates its eternal condition (55). Spinoza’s views on the postmortem persistence of the soul (the word “immortality” occurs only once in the Ethics), for Nadler, can be considered as simply “the logical culmination of what the medievalists Maimonides and Gersonides claimed about the soul and immortality” (95).32 It should be noted that it is impossible to avoid the inevitable historicist gestures that an account, such as the one previously given, entails.
Nancy’s Eternal Life
Aside from the letter to Jean-Pierre Rehm and his remarks at the Blanchot conference, Nancy also appeals to a notion of “eternal life” on several other occasions. In a chapter in Adoration, the second volume of his “Deconstruction of Christianity” project, Nancy refers to “eternal life,” this time without directly relating it to Spinoza or providing any textual references (Ad 37, 129, 131).33 In his chapter “In the Midst of the World,” he writes that the eternal life is “not indefinitely prolonged life, but life withdrawn from time [soustraite au temps] in the very course [dans le cours même] of time” (37/23). If the life of ancient mankind were a life measured by its time, Nancy observes, Christian life lives in time, “the outside of time [vit dans le temps le dehors du temps]” (37/23, trans. mod.). This characteristic has an “intimate relation” to what Nancy calls “adoration,” which he characterizes as “a relation to the outside of time (to the pure instant, to the cessation of duration, to truth as interruption of sense)” (37). Thus, “Christianity,” in Nancy’s definition, is “life in the world outside the world [la vie dans le monde hors du monde]” (37). To have faith would be “to believe in a beyond of death [croire à un au-delà de la mort]” (128/88, trans. mod.). For Nancy, belief is to be understood as “a weak knowledge [un savoir faible], a sort of supposition,” but faith is assurance, “trust in the strongest sense” in other words, a trust that can never be justified (128/88, trans. mod.).
In a letter to the filmmaker Hugo Santiago, published in the chapter “Complements, Supplements, Fragments” of Adoration, Nancy attempts to clarify topics that he first broached in Noli me tangere. In this reworking and rethinking of terms first invoked in Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign, 2 (to be discussed more fully in chapter 7), Nancy in his letter to Hugo Santiago uses his own, at times ontological, terminology while developing an interpretation of Spinoza.34 He writes that there can be no representation of death: while the dead person can be represented, the “I” who was alive cannot be. In death, “I” disappear (Ad 128/88).
The other who is dead is unreachable. In his letter Nancy explains that he wanted to put forward a different sense of resurrection, a sense unlike the common definitions of anastasis as rebirth, regeneration, and a new beginning to life (Ad 129/89). Resurrection, for Nancy, is not a simple beginning anew in “another life,” which would only be a projection of the life that has been lived by the dead one. He associates this projection with “hallucination,” linking it with “the phantom and the apparition, etc.” In contrast, Nancy describes anastasis, the “raising” of the body, as a “tipping up [basculement]” or a rising up of sense (129/89). He is searching for a “contact point [un point de contact],” Nancy says, between thought and sentiment or sensation, a kind of perception that he distinguishes from the “hallucinatory perception of the phantom” (130/90). As soon as I name the dead one, Nancy comments, I grant her another life, “the other of life [l’autre de la vie] in the world of the living, that is, the life of the dead [la vie des morts], and therefore still a life” (131/90, trans. mod.). Nancy’s eternal life of the dead one is still a life, but a life outside time—“the life of the dead” (131/90). Nancy claims that he is “touching on a region” that “seems to me to be suspended between representation, thought, sentiment, and sensation”—a region he is unable to name (131/91). He goes on to explain: “This life of the dead is at the same time their non-life, the pure ceasing of their being as ‘I,’ and the life whose imprint is in us and continues living there with a life that cannot be reduced to representation” (131/91). This life is “what I know and feel of the presence, allure, and voice of the dead one […] a living trace” of the other “incorporated in me” (131/91, trans. mod.).
At this point, Nancy finds himself “between pure thought and representation” (Ad 131/91). “I am in a sensibility” that is neither strictly speaking mine nor that of the dead one (who feels nothing any longer) but is “the sensibility of our meeting [la sensibilité de notre rencontre], of what we lived through together” (131/91, trans. mod). Perhaps one should not submit the dead entirely to death, Nancy asserts. Thinking death while also thinking the dead, Nancy believes that the dead are “well and truly in the world, in molecules or atoms caught up in different combinations” (132/91). They are linked together in what Freud called the id (ça) (132/91). Thus, the dead one “still lives such a life [vit encore de cette vie]” made up of all the relations that she was a part of (132/91, trans. mod.). For, Nancy believes, “relationships do not die [les rapports ne meurent pas] and, after all, what is “at stake” is “relation [rapport]” (132/92, trans. mod.). To think this, Nancy says, taking a page out of Derrida’s book, is to be concerned with the phantasm.
Nancy’s aim, he reveals, is to think “an utterly other site [un lieu tout autre],” a place completely other, perhaps the site alluded to by Derrida in his last words (“I love you and I am smiling at you wherever I might be [d’où je suis]”) (Ad 133/92, trans. mod.). In Nancy’s view, Derrida’s phrase may have implied a “wherever” and “perhaps ‘nowhere’ ” (133/92). A completely other place, but nonetheless a place. The dead may no longer be here, Nancy continues, but “we live, we survive ‘our dead’ [nous survivons à ‘nos morts’]” (133/92). This is nothing but, Nancy writes, with a nod to the use of “awaiting” and “approach” in Derrida’s Aporias, “the continuation of relation, and it can be the awaiting [l’attente] and the approach [l’approche] of a happy encounter [retrouvaille] in an unheard-of place [lieu inouï] and according to an unknown mode of being [un mode d’être inouï]” (133/92). (Nancy’s reliance on a notion of being, existence, or life for the manner in which the dead one appears cannot go unremarked here.) Is this the same thing as saying that the dead one “remains” or “survives”?
Juan Manuel Garrido’s Chances de la pensée: A partir de Jean-Luc Nancy may provide a helpful explication of Nancy’s views.35 Garrido notes that Nancy’s project of the deconstruction of Christianity is a philosophical investigation of the conceptuality and genealogy of Christianity in order to reinvent new philosophical possibilities (76). Using examples from three of Nancy’s texts, “Psyche,” “Sur le seuil,” and Noli me tangere, Garrido argues that the “idea” of ‘eternal life’ ”—but why is it an “idea”? Could any term be more classically metaphysical than an “idea” or a “concept”?—is found in the interpretation of Freud’s dead Psyche, the dead body of the virgin in Caravaggio’s painting or again in the interpretation of “the idea of resurrection.”36 “ ‘Eternal life,’ ” Garrido explains, “is nothing other than the mode of being or appearing of the one who is dead,” in other words, of “the one who has ceased to be and to appear” (11). The dead one (le mort) is the one who has “ceased to be ‘I [je]’ […] the one who has lost the self [le soi]” (40). Yet the dead one does not represent death as a general essence (40). “The other—the dead one—is not an other ego [moi], an other like me [l’autre comme moi], the living other, the other perceiving body or the existing other” (41). It “is neither living nor non-living, neither stone, nor animal, nor human […]. It is to be found nowhere in this world or in another world” (41). In fact, it simply cannot “be found” (41). “The dead one quite simply ‘is’ not; that is, it does not live” (41). She is neither in a “here” nor in a “there.” She comes to speak to us “from where she may be: outside every site, outside locality itself, outside space or time.” It is only from some “over there [là-bas] that an other worthy of the name comes and can speak” (41). Perhaps, Garrido adds, “we are entrusted to the task of rethinking ‘life’ itself beyond being, in the figure of a dead one [un mort]” (42). “Not as being, appearance, comprehension or perception, presence or representation—but as the inaccessibility of the other” (42). This reference to life echoes Nancy’s thinking in Adoration of “another life”—“the life of the dead” (Ad 131). “Of the dead one,” Garrido continues, “we only have traces” (43). The dead one “ ‘is’ in a time that will have already preceded the presence of all expression [verbalité], process, flux, or becoming” (43).
Nancy’s marginal notes on Alfonso Cariolato’s text, “Le Geste de Dieu” Sur un lieu de l’Ethique de Spinoza, a book based on a phrase from Spinoza (“God’s gesture [Dei nutu]”), may substantiate Garrido’s interpretation.37 Nancy comments that the “body that feels eternal” is not ‘never ending [sempiternel],’ not of unlimited duration, and not immortal, but separated from duration [separé de la durée].”38 “The dead one ‘rises [se redresse]’ against all that seeks to summon it into [faire venir] the flow of time—the flow of perception, meaning, care, project, history, future, living, speaking, being, the world” (43). It “ ‘stands upright [se redresse]’ in the midst of the world against the world and outside the world. The ‘life’ of the dead one is being-outside-the-world [être-dehors-le-monde]” (43). Our life, however, cannot be eternal—it is “infinitely mortal” (44).
Toward the end of the chapter “Complements, Supplements, Fragments,” Nancy states that he is searching for “what passes between the two regimes” of thought and sentiment, his remarks being “concerned with affect and not the concept” (Ad 133/92). For, what he is searching for is affect, and indeed, “affect is relation” (133/92). In thinking about the dead one we are led to think—with a thinking that is “also poetic”—and with a sensibility that feels “the continuation of relation,” “the unheard-of place where my unheard-of being, which will no longer be ‘mine,’ will be back among ‘its own’ [retrouvera ‘les siens’]” (134/93). Nancy is fully aware that everything we feel is felt in time whereas affect is, by definition, related to life and can be interrupted by death. Thus, it seems, there can be no affect as far as the dead are concerned. Yet we are affected, Nancy claims, just where affect should not be possible. Nancy also admits that “all of this, I know and I say it again, is untenable for both thinking and sensibility” (136/95). Moreover, Nancy is also attempting to think a conduct that exceeds thinking, a thinking that is sensibility. We conduct ourselves [nous tenons] […] in a conduct [une tenue] that exceeds knowledge, wisdom, and consciousness” (137/95).
We have seen that Nancy affirms the Spinozist reading of eternity as eluding the conditions of time and duration. Eternal life, he maintains, is what belongs to the dead: the dead one is safe from any harm and, as dead, has eternal life. And by extension, the resurrected are also eternal (since, according to Nancy, we all resurrect). Salvation is there for the dead one who belongs to a time outside time—the time of the dead. This time is also, Nancy contends, the time of Christian life in the present and the future. As he points out, Christianity is “a relation with the outside of time,” “the life in the world outside of the world,” in the same way that eternal life is (Ad 37/23). In contrast, Juan Manuel Garrido in his provocative book reserves eternal life only for the dead one. Eternal life—the mode of appearing of the dead one—allows us to rethink life in the figure of the dead one, the inaccessible other.
Would it be a strange hypothesis to suggest that Nancy’s notion of “eternal life,” his remarks in the “Complements, Supplements, Fragments” chapter of Adoration, and other related texts, are a reading of Derrida’s seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, 2? Nancy is not thinking a new life but life anew, life withdrawn from time. Outstretched in an almost unthinkable relation to the outside of time, Nancy is exploring the other of life—the life of the dead. Finding himself in an unnamable region between thought and sensation, a site or “place” akin to the id, in which there is a relationship between atoms and molecules linked together, Nancy’s thought is a probing of what it means to believe in a beyond of death. To assess Nancy’s “poetic” thinking, I will turn in the final chapter to a more detailed examination of Derrida’s thoughts in The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, about what he labels the phantasm of “dying alive.”
Since “I have no certain knowledge whether or not there can be spirit, spectral survival [la survie spectrale] in the living dead [la mort-vivant] or after death” then, I will always be telling myself a story, I will be making as if “and yielding to the phantasm according to which all is not over and in which moreover so-called death does not consist in an end” (BSII 236–237/163–164).