Dis-enclosure and the inaugural moment

By Carl Raschke

Why do I write one day after the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama about the significance, or possibly the ultimate inconsequence, of Jean-Luc Nancy's recently translated and immediately discussed book La Déclosion (Dis-enclosure)?  Both the book and the event (and, of course, both book and event often have reciprocal, overlapping if not co-extensive qualities) can be considered specific instances of an aporia in the Derridean sense. 

First, the event.  Inauguration day represented in many ways the deconstruction of the historic text of American presidential politics, as everyone across the political spectrum from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to Fox News' Bill O'Reilley seemed to acknowledge.  Contrary to much received opinion, Obama's presidency was indeed, as the former candidate himself said it was in effect, a deconstruction of the binary politics of right and left.  But the aporia itself, or what has at times been called the "moment of deconstruction", could be seen in the subtle disquietudes of the day.  Much of the inaugural crowd came to hear something approaching Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, and what they got instead was a mild version of Churchill's "Blood, sweat, and tears."  The day seemed not as "inaugural" as many had hoped, yet neither was it simply replay.  It represented not so much continuity and not so much discontinuity. 

Indeed, it can be considered aporetic.  Obama was sober but hopeful, challenging yet soothing, encouraging yet minatory.  It was not a good day for the politics of desire and simulation.   Obama spoke (intimately) to the American people, as presidents on inauguration hopefully do.  But he also spoke (homiletically) to the Other.  It was the Other (specifically, in this case, the Muslim world) that he was expected to make some kind of radical gesture toward.  But the gesture to the Other was, ironically, a gesture from within the syntax of the Same; it was a gesture of engagement (Einschaltung), not necessarily changeover (Umschaltung).   It was an interposition, a moment when something happens that can be called in today's American political argot a "game changer."  An aporia. But the game isn't really changed at all.  Noticeably, the discourse of "change" fades gradually from the political lexicion, because change - not really grand change- has happened. In the discontinuity is a strange sort of continuity with the past - Obama supposedly had a less exciting than expected inauguration speech because he studied and tried to connect up carefully with the gravity and loftiness of inauguration speeches in ages past.  

Second, the book.  Reading Nancy reminds me of my first take on Freud's Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and its Discontents).  Both are about what we might call "the problem of Christianity," which Continental thinkers since Heidegger, including Derrida, seem to write about in much the same manner.  Christianity become in Nancy the philosophical version of Paul's famous "thorn in the flesh," as it was in an extended sense for Freud as well.  The overfamiliarity, yet "strangeness" (Unheimlichkeit) of ohe "Christian" for pagan Europe since the time of the Greeks is Nancy's theme.  This sort of aporia is implicit in Nancy's very rhetorical question: "How did faith, one day, with the West start composing a decomposition of religion?" 

The answer of course is inseparable from the other question of why Heidegger in his project of the Destruktion of metaphysics did not consider either "religion" or "God" as philosophical problems, though he was obsessed with intimations of "divinity", not to mention a peculiar sort of eschatology developed in his Contributions to Philosophy, or the Beiträge. "Only a god can save us," Heidegger famously wrote, but salvation is from the "wink" of the so-called letzer Gott, the "last god."  The last god is not the Christian God.  The god's wink is in its withdrawal, which is at the same time a vanishing point in the Seinsgeschichte, the "history of being."  

In Heidegger, the wink is a "beckoning" (one of the more solid translations of the German word der Wink, which Heidegger uses).  For Nancy, the wink seems only possible because of a "discontent" within the Western history of metaphysics that is seeded and fomented by the Christian revelatory event, the strange and aporetic collocation of Greek piety and Semitic monotheism.  The "Christian" element in the thought of the West - Derrida's incommensurable "Jew-Greek" intertextuality - depends on this collocation. It is what makes this intertextuality unbehagen, literally "uneasy," a malaise.   There is Christian parousia in the Biblical sense (what is often rendered a "second coming"), but there is also Heidegger's which consists in the eschatological opening of Being to itself, when "all the gods have fled".  Such an opening Nancy reads as déclosion, dis-enclosure.  It is not religion without religion so much as eschatology without eschatology, or what he dubs "a faith that is nothing at all."  It is Kant's "interest of pure reason" that becomes a radical, yet finite distension, a catachresis, of the metaphysico-rational itself. 

Therein lies Christianity, according to Nancy, as "deconstruction."  "In other words, the parousia of the homousia, far from representing a difference in nature between theology and philosophy, in fact representing the infinite opening of the sense of ousia thought of as presence, a parousia of itself." That is dis-enclosure.  Nancy tries to find this new "essence" of Christianity, an exercise European philosophers and theologians have been conducting since the 18th century, in the Book of James.  As one commentator on Nancy has suggested, it comes down to "hope" without any distinguishable reason for hope. Obama reminded us too that in the midst of all the bad news we must rely on hope.  That is where we are left finally after "change."

Vattimo's "weak Christianity" now comes down descends one more notch: it becomes the West's "wink Christianity."  Perhaps we can follow Nancy's thread here and "deconstruct" Derrida himself in the former's deconstruction of Christianity.  Christianity is perhaps a metatext of the West in which its deconstruction serves as the leaven for the deconstruction of all others texts, ancient and novel.  Just as Derrida emerges through this process as a strange witness to the the both the ubiquitous operability and insuperability of khora, so through a deeper "re-Christianization" of the reading of deconstruction itself we come to its parousia, which is the same as the parousia of the West.   But isn't that what Nietzsche meant, in effect, when he declared in The Will to Power that "nihilism stands at the door" as the "strangest" (unheimlichste) of "guests?"  Contrary to Heidegger, in Nancy the nihil of nihilism is not harbored in the "forgetting" of what is kept hidden in the dialectical play of concepts throughout the tradition of Western philosohy.  The nihil is present from the beginning.   Here we have "negative theology", or perhaps a theologia crucis, written into the ontology of the West itself.  Christianity constitutes the great thread which, when pulled, rips all the other threads apart.  The death of God is not announced; is "present" ab origino.  Here ousia is "dis-enclosed", that is "crucified" in a Pauline sense (though Nancy wants to forget Paul), in its fateful parousia. 

La déclosion is, therefore, an inaugural moment, a permanent inauguration of parousia as the constant oscillation of a deconstructed politics, philosophy, theology, and all the representational structures and sign-chains in and beyond (not "outside") itself.  The "opening" of dis-enclosure, the "Open as such" - there is no "beyond" - remains a valency, for Nancy, of Deleuze's "pure immanence."   Nancy's book, however, can also be read as a kind of "dis-enclosure" of what we have come to know as the postmodern epoch.  That dis-enclosure, as in Washington, is both an eventful and somewhat less than eventful "gray morning" (in Nietzsche's phrase), an inaugural moment that wraps up so much and promises far less, promises only hope.

The only problem with such a parousia is that it remains totally "dis-enclosed" (and "enclosed" also) to itself, to the language and hopes of the West.  Nancy has committed a fateful error, which remains common among members of not just French but all the Western intelligentsia, when he declares that "Christianity is inseparable from the West."  That has already been historically disproved, particularly by Phillip Jenkins in such books as The Next Christendom.  Postmodernism is not, contra the narcissism of the new academy, a parousia in its own right, and that is why it is crucial we do, in fact, move beyond it.  I make that comment as one who has participated along with many others in an earlier "inauguration" process.   The "end" of the West may be quite visible on the horizon, as was Rome in Augustine's day, in an historical sense.  The current "global crisis" is a prophetic marker.  Nancy is wrong again when he identifies globalization with this parousia.  

Any "death of the West," which we will probably experience more fully in the next decade, constitutes simply an intertextual moment in a yet only barely glimpsed "deconstruction" of a series of texts yet to be read.  With its hyphenation the "post-modern" amounts less to the Big Kahuna of philosophy than its Big Lacuna.  And in that Lacuna a was sonst etwas, as the Germans say, is rising.  A singularity that is greater than any Heideggerian, or Nancyean, parousia.  It is not an event but an "event horizon".  That is what parousia in the "apocalyptic," if not the eschatological, sense has always meant.  Derrida understands the relationship between the spectral and the "to come" (avenir).  The West in this case is the specter, but the avenir is more, much much more.  The "discontent" (Unbehaglichkeit) of Dis-enclosure refers both to the spectrality of the specter and the venir of the avenir, its immediacy, if not its presence.  Philosophy, or any philosophical theology, is incapable of drawing the connection.

What is coming does not speak.  It rides in on the storm, as the lightning flashes from the east and goes as far as the West. 

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver and is the author of various books on postmodern philosophy and religion - most recently, GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008).  He can be contacted at craschke@du.edu.    

Comments

[suibne]

Ah yes, the event horizon. I see people grinning into the face of catastrophe just after they say...."we come in peace." And, the catastrophe is also "a wink."

[suibne]

Ah yes, the event horizon. I see people grinning into the face of catastrophe just after they say...."we come in peace." And, the catastrophe is also "a wink."

[Richard G. Lanzara, Ph.D.]

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