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The Mystery of Body: Nancy's Corpus and the Christian Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2020

Krešimir Šimić
Krešimir Šimić*
Affiliation:
Josip Juraj Strossmayer University
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Abstract

After the initial contextualization of the topic, by following Nancy's juxtaposition strategy, this article points to two senses of the body that, according to him, have defined the Western culture. The first one, logos (principle precedes the body and gives it meaning); the second, sarx (the meaning of the body comes from the body itself, so that the body comes out of itself, alienates itself, and deconstructs its own representative activities). Next, I give a more precise depiction of Nancy's deconstruction of the body through an analysis of Corpus because it is precisely with this work (in the chapter On the Soul, which is also the title of Aristotle's well-known treatise dealing first and foremost with the body, and in the chapter The Extension of the Soul) that Nancy most explicitly deconstructs hylomorphic somatology, which largely influenced the Christian theology of the body. Furthermore, I interpret Genesis 2:18–25 (in constant dialogue with Nancy) as a theological reaction on Nancy's deconstruction of the body. In other words, on the basis of biblical texts, the “mystery of the body” is depicted. Finally, the article ends with a comparison of Nancy's “inoperative community” (communauté désoeuvrée) and the Body of Christ (church).

Keywords

bodydeconstruction of bodybodily ontologyBody of Christ“mystery of body”

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , June 2020 , pp. 24 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © College Theology Society, 2020

I.

The turn from the classical understandings of logos (the cosmic principle that introduces order to the world, the creative mind, the emanation of eternal law) to a new, anti-metaphysical conception can be found in a well-known paragraph of Goethe's Faust. Namely, when Faust decides to translate the first sentence of the prologue to John's Gospels (Εν ἀρχῃ ἠν ὀ λόγος) into “his beloved German,” the philologist (rhetorician, logician, and metaphysician) cannot decide on the true meaning of the word “logos.” After rejecting Martin Luther's translation (“word” = Wort), his first thought is to translate it as “sense” (Sinn), then “power” (Kraft), but he ultimately opts for “act” (Tat); “Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat” (1237).Footnote 1 Faust—for whom all philological effort is dead knowledge and mere “parchment” (566)—considers himself a scholar full of useless old knowledge and reaches for the inspiration of “the Spirit of Earth” (Geist der Erde), thereby anticipating Nietzsche, for whom “there is no ‘being’ behind the doing, acting, becoming. ‘The doer’ is merely made up and added into the action—the act is everything.”Footnote 2 In turn, with his strong resistance to the idealistic reduction of the subject of physicality, the “tyranny of the mind and the condemnation of the body,”Footnote 3 Nietzsche anticipated Jean-Luc Nancy.Footnote 4 Yet, unlike Nietzsche's (psychological) genealogy of Christian-Platonic thought and turning to the pre-Socratic thought tradition as a source of Dionysian culture, Nancy seeks the source “deeper” than Christianity within Christianity itself. This project, which could lead to the emergence of a new resource, is the deconstruction of Christianity.Footnote 5

Nancy's project of the deconstruction of Christianity takes a certain form: that of bodily ontology. That such an ontology provokes Christian theologians is a well-known fact. To mention only two authors who have responded to Nancy's deconstruction of the Christian body/bodies from an orthodox perspective, Peter Joseph Fritz engages in Nancy's bodily ontology from an orthodox Catholic perspective (more precisely, he places Nancy in a critical dialogue with Karl Rahner),Footnote 6 while Christina Smerick does so from the set of creeds accepted by the vast majority of denominations and churches that call themselves Christian.Footnote 7 Both authors also gave a kind of “theological” introduction to Nancy on the issue of the body, wherein Smerick's work is more extensive (in her monograph, she explores Nancy's undoing, deconstructing, and reinventing of Christian motifs regarding the Body/Bodies of Christ, as well as various Christian traditions with regard to the topic of the body). This article follows their methodology (a presentation of Nancy's innovative thoughts followed by the theological response), but it will, of course, be a more concise portrayal of Nancy's thoughts. By contrasting Nancy's bodily ontology with the biblical theology of the body, the article suggests that a meaningful theological response to Nancy's project of deconstruction of Christianity is the theology of the “mystery of the body,” which is closely related to the theology of creation, ex nihilo, and the theology of resurrection.

In line with Nancy's juxtaposition strategy, the article first points out two senses of the body that have, according to Nancy, defined the Western culture: logos (principle precedes body and gives meaning to it) and sarx (the meaning of the body arises from the body, so that the body comes out of itself, alienates itself, and deconstructs its own representative activities). Next, through an analysis of Corpus, which Fritz calls the introduction to Nancy's project of deconstructing Christianity, the article tries to provide a closer depiction of Nancy's deconstruction of the body. It is precisely in Corpus (in the chapter On the Soul, which is also the title of Aristotle's well-known treatise dealing with the body,Footnote 8 and in the chapter The Extension of the Soul) that Nancy has most explicitly deconstructed the hylomorphic somatology and Cartesian dualism that has largely shaped the Christian theology of the body.Footnote 9 It is precisely the deconstruction of hylomorphism (and Cartesian dualism) that is challenging for a modern theology of the body.Footnote 10 The article further offers, based on exegesis of Genesis 2:18-25, the basic features of a “mystery of the body. The “mystery of the body” is exposed through extension, but not in Nancy's way of being outside the body, which is closely related to a project of “detheologizing the creation.” Instead the body's mystery is revealed through the extension of Adam's body, and so it is closely related to the theology of creation and the extension of the body of the “last Adam” and his resurrection. Finally, the article ends with a comparison of Nancy's “inoperative community” (communauté désoeuvrée) and the Body of Christ (church) because this most clearly reflects the contrasting consequences of Nancy's somatology and the Christian understanding of the body, the difference between Nancy's corpus and the Christian body.

II.

The opening words of Genesis in the Septuagint, “'Εν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς,” gain an enhanced theological sense in the fourteenth verse of the first chapter in John's Gospel: Καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. Nancy points out that the fourteenth line, which the Vulgate gives as verbum caro factum est, contains a twofold meaning that has defined Western culture whereby these two meanings or senses are mutually exclusive. In line with Nancy, when one says verbum caro factum est, it means that in one sense the flesh/body (caro) gives rise to verbum's glory and true coming, but yet in an entirely different sense, verbum (logos) gives rise to the true presence and sense of caro. Although these two versions in Western culture belong with each other, in the other sense they exclude each other. According to Nancy, they exclude each other when the concepts of logos and sarx in John's Gospel are understood to exclude each other. The Gospel says, “Εν ἀρχῃ ἦν ὁ λόγος (In principio erat verbum)”; in the beginning, there was a principle. This means that there is no in between: the interspace does not exist. In the beginning, there is no birth; therefore, there is no body. Who then, asks Nancy, initially articulates “Εν ἀρχῃ ἦν ὁ λόγος”? Is it not an angel, a messenger without a body? It is, he concludes, the angelic logic of annunciation. Because the antecedent (antécédence) has already been given, the body is the consequential (ἐγένετο). It is caught beforehand in filiation, and it effaces or at least reduces the enspacement of birth (l'espacement). Being a filius in the first place, the body is less given to space than to time, succession, and progression. The incarnation is a penetration and progression of the principle into the darkness of that which comes after, of what is found beneath. The body resides in darkness and it is darkness itself. The angelic logic and the entire corpus of philosophical bodies are subject to the signifying law in such a way that signification (or representation) gives sense to the body, making it a sign of sense. All bodies are signs, just as all signs are (signifying) bodies. The signifying body—the entire corpus of philosophical, theological, psychoanalytic, and semiological bodies—incarnates one thing only: the absolute contradiction of the inability to be a body without being the body of a spirit, which disembodies it.Footnote 11

If the word (verbum) has become the flesh/body (caro), however, it needed not to penetrate the body. In fact, it becomes the very flesh. Nancy notes that theology has made superhuman efforts to think through this becoming of the word as the body, that is, the coexistence of two heterogeneous natures in one person. In this sense, the Christian body is completely different from the body serving as the envelope, prison, or tomb to the soul. This Christian body is none other than the self-exiting “spirit” or its pure identity that did not identify with a man but as a man. Thus, the Christian divine spirit is already outside itself (that is its Trinitarian nature).Footnote 12 In this sense, the Christian (monotheistic) god is a god who alienates himself, who atheizes himself, and atheologizes himself. Atheology as the conceptualization of the body is the thought that “god” made a “body” of himself, by emptying himself of self. The “body” thus becomes the name of a-theos in the sense of “not-of-god,” which means not the immediate self-sufficiency of man or the world, but this: no founding presence. The “body” of the “incarnation” is, therefore, the place, or rather the taking place, the event, of that disappearance. In that sense, the body is neither the prison of the soul, nor the expression of inner self, nor pure presence, but an extension, enspacement, disappearance, a syncope of appearance and disappearance, a syncope of utterance and sense, a syncope of desire—which is not a melancholic yearning for a lacking object, but a yearning for the syncope itself. The body is open toward the syncopated truth. Here, the Socratic erotic, concludes Nancy, passes through the Christic incarnation as if it were an internal folding toward logos.Footnote 13 Clearly, the latter “sense” (sarx) is the basis of Nancy's bodily ontology.

Nancy argues that Freud's most remarkable phrase is the following: “Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it” (“Psyche ist ausgedehnt; weiss nichts davon”).Footnote 14 Immediately after that, he provocatively asserts that psyche is the body!Footnote 15 Psyche is the name of the body.Footnote 16 Obviously, Nancy cuts the ties with the so-called Cartesian dualism (an ontological cut between res extensa and res cogitans). The body, Nancy believes, is not that which is enclosed. What is enclosed is actually a kind of mass, that which assembles in itself, which is impenetrable, based (se fonde) within itself, and which divides itself (fond) within the self; in the philosophical tradition, it is called the substance (the underlying thing, Aristotelian hypokeimenon). The body is not something substantive, but extensive. The substance itself does not have an extension. The body is, therefore, an extension, as well as exposure. However, the body is not only exposed, but it is being exposed. The body is exposure, and being exposed means being extended. If it is not the substance, the mass, something contained within itself, it is the body outside of itself. That is exactly what is meant by the soul. The soul is the differentiation of the body from itself, the relation toward the outward that is a body of its own. In other words, the soul is the difference in relation to itself, which creates the body and what Aristotle discusses when he defines the soul as the form of the living body.Footnote 17

The form is not an exterior in relation to the interior. The form of the body is above all the body itself. The body is without form of pure mass, pure substance. The shape of the body is nothing but the body itself. The form of the body is not opposite to the matter. Form means that the body is not articulated in the sense of articulating parts, but as a relation to something other than itself. The body is a relation to another body—or a relation to itself.Footnote 18 The body is a certain alterity—but not in terms of the ethical position of the other, but simply of the other body. In following Aristotle (more specifically, his categorization of organic, animal, and human body), Nancy states that soul, as the form of the body, indicates that the body is sensual. The body senses and is sensed. The matter of the body is the sensing matter. If we penetrate the form, the body, we destroy it. Finally, Nancy reviews Aristotle's opinion that the soul is an entelechy of a naturally organized body. The soul is the primal entelechy of the body, Nancy emphasizes—this body (singular determination is essential to the body). Entelechy of the body is therefore the fact that the body is matter as form and form as matter—a sensuality/substance.Footnote 19

The soul is the presence of the body, its position, its persistence as being out-side (ex). The body touches the outside, but at the same time (this is more than a mere correlation, it is a co-appurtenance) it touches itself as outside. “I” am outside of myself. “I” touches itself from the outside, not from the inside. The phenomenological analyses of self-touching, Nancy believes, always returns to the primary interiority. I am exposed to myself by touching myself; therefore, the body is always outside. The body is always outside the intimacy of the body itself. Nancy, therefore, uses the word “soul” to point to the exteriority of the body, the outside that is the body itself. The soul is being outside the body, and it is in this very being outside that it has its inside.Footnote 20

Starting from Descartes’ Second Meditation (a celebrated imaginary experiment with a piece of wax)—on the one hand, pure extension and, on the other hand, pure cogitation (entirely outside the self and entirely inside the self) with its mutual “touching”—Nancy emphasizes that in Descartes’ corpus there are places that point to an understanding different from the common interpretation of the soul and the body in terms of the ontological cut.Footnote 21 For Descartes, Nancy points out, thought is sensing, and as such, it touches upon the extended thing. This is the touching of the extension. Moreover, Nancy claims: “For Descartes, the res cogitans is the body.”Footnote 22 The body is the ego that senses itself to be other than ego. “I,” body, I do not touch nor am “I” touched; rather, “I” am the touch.Footnote 23 “I” is nothing but the singularity of a touch, at once active and passive. The possibility of touching the body is the matter—which is not a mere density in itself, but rather the difference on the basis of which some thing (quelque chose) is possible as a thing (chose) and as some (quelque).Footnote 24 The body writes by touching. It is thus a corpus that is neither discourse nor a narrative, but a catalogue, enumeration, a listing of body parts and operations.Footnote 25 The body is neither the signified nor the signifier, but the writing of a being.Footnote 26 To return to Descartes, Nancy interprets what we most often call Cartesian dualism as the ontology of the “in between.” Between bodies there is nothing, nothing but the extension that is the res itself.Footnote 27

Nancy's deconstruction of the hylomorphic and Cartesian interpretation of the body is to a certain extent similar to Antonin Artaud's and Gilles Deleuze's concepts of the “body without organs.”Footnote 28 It is a matter of body existence, an intense body made up of borders, points, particles; a body whose structure is a composition of relations in the body; a body that integrates body parts to produce indeterminate organs; a body that is formless, disorganized, and transformative. In fact, Nancy's Corpus, as claimed by Graham Ward, is a modern (more precisely, poststructuralist) attempt to present “transcorporality” that is “removed from any mystery” (Nancy). Far from trying to reify a kind of ontotheology or coopting Nancy, which would too easily lead to overlooking that his project of the deconstruction of Christianity is the destruction of Christianity (and not, as Derrida claims, merely “hyperbole”), the article offers a kind of exegesis of Genesis 2:18-25 in constant polemical dialogue with Nancy, and thus tries as a theological response to Nancy's deconstruction of the Christian body to point to what is defined as the “mystery of the body.”Footnote 29 This, of course, does not exist for Nancy because “There is nothing to decipher in a body—except for the fact that the body's cipher is the body itself, not ciphered, just extended. The sight of bodies does not penetrate anything invisible: it is the accomplice of the visible—of the ostentation and extension that the visible is.”Footnote 30

III.

The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called ‘woman,’

for she was taken out of man.”

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame. (Gen 2:18-25 NIV)

Theology traditionally viewed the statement: “It is not good that the man should be alone …” as human differentia specifica: the man is different from all other creatures. This specific difference was mainly found on the “inside.” Nevertheless, in the biblical text, one can notice that the original human is not a mere substance closed in upon itself. This human is not simply interiority, but is an ultimately relational phenomenon, the body.Footnote 31 In order to create a woman, as one reads in the Bible, God-YHWH “uses” the human's body. This is a matter of a coming out, of a self that is closed upon itself, toward another. It is a matter of the exposition of the woman's body as well. This is not a departure wherein telos is a departure itself, nor is a woman's body mere exposition of something that has previously been hidden, closed off. It is not, in Nancy's terms, an exposition as being, existing in itself. It is not, to use Nancy's term, expeausition (ex-skin-position, to-position-ex-skin), or the signature of the skin itself. It is not the existence that is its own tattoo.Footnote 32 The departure happens through God-YHWH. It is, thus, not a sheer τέχνη of the body, but a divine ποίησις.

In order to create a woman, YHWH-Elohim “used” Adam's body, wherein he caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam. The Hebrew term tardemah refers to the kind of dream in which a person is unconscious and does not dream; therefore, one can conclude that this is not the transition of consciousness to subconsciousness.Footnote 33 It is a certain kind of “death.” In the Septuagint, tardemah is translated as ἔκστασιv. Though at first it may seem that both expressions, tardemah and ἔκστασιv, invoke Freud, the broader biblical context does not give a more serious basis to his interpretations. Because God-YHWH created a woman, the original human is no longer just ha-‘adam but also ish; and the woman is ishah. Humanity is now dual: male and female, but in spite of the gender gap between ish and ishah, there is deep somatic homogeneity: they are “one body”—which Nancy sees as impossible because the “two” are engaged in a constant game of distancing and touching.Footnote 34 For Nancy, male and female are only an index for a “polymorphous swerve.”Footnote 35 His thinking about the body leads to a conclusion that the body is simply the body before any “sex” touches it, and sexuality is a fully exposed relation.Footnote 36 For Nancy sex is not just its own difference but also, each time, an infinite process of its own differentiation—there are no sexes, only the sexual game of difference, deferment, and motion: enspacement of the intimate. In hope of not being too presumptuous, it is possible to claim that Levinas’ view to some extent corresponds to the intent of the biblical writer. Namely, Levinas claims that through sexuality a subject enters a relation with the other, but the other is not known to the formal logic with that which stays other in a relation and never becomes mine. And the other, whose presence is discreetly an absence, with which is accomplished the primary hospitable welcome, is the woman—she is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the home and inhabitation.Footnote 37

At first glance, the biblical text ends with an unusual statement: “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (Gen 2:25). In the biblical texts, however, nakedness is not understood as Nancy understands it: something true as skin, skin as the truth; revelation, but without revealing; what it actually reveals is that there is nothing to reveal, that is, there is nothing but the discovery of the self.Footnote 38 The biblical sentence that states that man and woman were “naked” and yet “did not feel shame” describes, as John Paul II notes, the reciprocal experience of the body—the man's experience of femininity and, reciprocally, the analogous masculinity experienced by the woman. Man and woman are recognized as a gift for each other.Footnote 39 The dimension of the gift is decisive for biblical theology and the mystery of creation—because, as an action of God, creation thus means not only calling from nothing to existence but it also signifies a gift, a fundamental or “radical” gift, that is, an act of giving in which the gift comes into being from nothing (of course, not understood as Nancy's nihil).Footnote 40 Hence, the biblical nakedness does not signify a simple, inadequate, nonsensical detail; it is not a negligible detail introduced in the text about the creation of man.Footnote 41

In Genesis 2:18–25, one can realize that the body does not have its telos in matrimonial love and procreation, that to “be one body” in a sense “hides” the mystery of “the wedding of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7) and points to the “new creation,” creation with the body that is not the τέχνη of the body, but the divine kenotic ποίησις. This is outlined in the simple yet fundamental “classic text” of Ephesians 5:22-23. After the paraenetic part, in which the writer wants to explain to spouses how they need to establish their relationships and overall behavior, the text refers to Genesis 2:24: “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” Then the author points out: “This is a profound mystery (μυστήριον τουτο μέγα)—but I am talking about Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31-32). In the Epistle, it is also stated that the church is “his body (σωμα αὐτοῦ)” (Eph 1:23). In order to be able to understand the mystery of the “wedding of the Lamb,” that is, the “great mystery”—to be one body with Christ—it is necessary to consider the central part of the wedding: “the feast of the Lamb,” the Eucharist.

The sixteenth-century theological discussions focused on the verb έστιν showed that Jesus’ words “This is truly my body” (τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ σῶμά μου) [Matt 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24] were always scandalous. Does the word έστιν (is) truly signify σῶμά /σαρξ (body/flesh), or does it merely point to an image? Do the words “This is my body” in fact mean: “This signifies my body”? Graham Ward notes that the verb έστιν does not contain elements of substitution nor of proportion that would indicate synecdoche or metonymy. Therefore, logical positivists consider the demonstrative identification “This is my body” with a piece of bread to be simply nonsensical, a misidentification. The isomorphism body = bread violates the logic according to which A = A represents tautology, that is, a grammatical logic by which the pronominal object (“this”) relates to the possessive subject (“my body”) by way of copula (“is”).Footnote 42 In the background of this “scandal,” there is an understanding that the body is an isolated, measurable biological organism (res extensa). Obviously, the guidelines for the posed question cannot be found in the word έστιν itself, but in the understanding of the peak of biblical narrative: the “Resurrection,” that is, the new creation.Footnote 43 Ward, for whom the “Resurrection” sums up all previous “displacements” of Jesus’ body, emphasizes that “Resurrection” is not a rejection of what happened on the cross, but a continuation of the kenotic movement of “displacement” of Jesus’ body, a kenosis that is not emptying into nothing (à la Jacques Lacan), but a fracturing that is the sine qua non of salvation. “Resurrection” is a radical extension of (Christ's) body!Footnote 44 The Resurrection, one could almost succinctly argue, means that the body is not something preventing us from true giving, it is not a boundary; on the contrary, it is the possibility of a radical giving—not in a Nancy-like way, of course. Through resurrection, Jesus has become the ultimate self-giver—the giver of the body: “This is my body” (τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ σῶμά μου)—“given for you” (1 Cor 11:24, τὸ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν; Luke 22:19, τὸ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν διδόμενον). I will use Nancy's ingenious words: opposite Nancy's Hoc est enim absentia corporis et tamen corpus ipse Footnote 45 (For this is the absence of the body yet still the body itself), there is a Christian Hoc est enim corpus meum. The Eucharist is not absentia corporis, but the presence of the body that is not foreign to itself or to others, the body that makes “two into one” without distorting the difference, and the body that allows forgiveness, the body that creates the sense, the body that ultimately allows freedom and frees itself from nihilism.

To conclude: the “mystery of the body,” according to biblical theology, is exposed through the extension, but not in Nancy's way of being outside (ex), which is closely related to a project of “detheologizing the creation.”Footnote 46 Adam's extension is the revelation of the mystery of the body, closely related to revealing the created as a gift, along with revealing that nihil is not at the beginning as the creator, but as the Father who “empties” himself in the Son by the Spirit to be the “presence” that can be “touched.” In other words, the Word incarnated (Καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο, John 1:14)—the exact one that was in the beginning (Εν ἀρχῃ ἦν ὁ λόγος)—empties itself (ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν, Phil 2:7). This emptying does not imply emptying until reaching nihil, without foundation, divine self-alienation, the emptying of God himself from himself, but rather the extension of the body of the “last Adam” until the life-giving spirit (ἔσχατος Ἀδὰμ—πνεῦμα ζωοποιοῦν, 1 Cor 15:45) and absolute parousia of the Father in the Son by the Spirit.Footnote 47 This means that the logic of incarnation is not similar to the concept of logos, nor the concept of sarx, but to the kenosis of the Word-Body. Furthermore, if the telos of Adam's and Eve's body is “to be one” with the resurrected Christ, one can claim that in the center of the “economy of (Adam's and Eve's) body” is not Nancy's syncopated desire that comes from nowhere, and that makes me feel strange to myself, a desire wanting its own strangeness rather than some kind of object, knowledge, or representation.Footnote 48 Of course, at the center of the “economy of (Adam's and Eve's) body,” there is not a desire for the other/Other—a mere “constructivist externality,” or, as in the constructivist model, that which a cognitive subject needs in order to build a higher, intersubjective reality. The desire at the center of the “economy of (Adam's and Eve's) body” is not an endless game of “producing” new things, a never-satisfied desire, a desire that leads to the “aporetics of lack”—actually a Freudian and Lacanian model of desire. The desire of Adam's and Eve's body is the desire for the body of the resurrected Christ, the body that desires Adam's and Eve's body, in which true communion takes place, the overcoming of solitude and becoming of “one flesh.”Footnote 49 The “first” feast of humanity is not a “totemic meal,” through which the united brothers’ act of absorption (they ate the father's dead body) enabled them to identify with the father and obtain a part of his strength, but the “feast of the Lamb” by which isolated individuals become the “limbs” of the Body of Christ—the church. “The people of God”—the Body of Christ is not founded in the freedom that is a result of God's disappearance, or common substance,Footnote 50 but in partaking in the body of the crucified and resurrected Christ.Footnote 51

IV.

By claiming that every body exists as a multitude of its own singular appearances, that is, every time as such and such, but that at the same time, every time, it comes into such and such contact—relation with other bodies, Nancy sets the foundation for building his theory of community.Footnote 52 Singular plural of the body is the very community, the community of those who do not have a mutual affiliation or essence: “I'll always know others as bodies. An other is body because only a body is an other.”Footnote 53 The concept of common being is impossible according to Nancy because there is no subject of an invariable essence that constitutes it, whereas being in common (êtren-commun) represents the fundamental part we share, a relation that does not signify a closeness or attachment to one another. Relation is a simultaneous presence and absence because it is likewise possible in leaving. Being in common can be defined as existing, each time in a different way, with one another through a multitude of current and always possible relations. In such a type of existence, there is nothing in common that connects because the relation is always both the actuality and possibility. Inoperativeness is what experiences interruption, fragmentation, suspension. Nancy's concept of an inoperative community resembles Derrida's notion of “departing community,” a community that constantly defers its concrete form. In turn, sense is something that occurs as a difference. It cannot be covered by any categorical apparatus. The sense is every moment of existence: multitude, community, singular appearance, the world. It is always “suspended” (Derrida).

Nancy understands the singularity of existence as the singularity of the very being. Being is singular each time, and because it is singular each time, this singularity is plural. For Nancy, plurality does not only signify that we are living with each other or that we are always together, but that singularities are plural because each time they are defined by a different sense. The concept of community emphasizes that there is not only one “true and genuine” relation. Such relational exclusivity is not possible because our existence is plural. The subject simply shares something with another subject, but also with a third subject, and so on, thus creating a network of a multitude of relations. Because the existence incessantly enters various relations through sharing, it is also different each time. In that sense, the existence represents the constantly fluid community.

Nancy claims that common body, the organic body of the community, is produced and constituted by politics. Politics strive to subjugate, discipline, and make bodies uniform. Therefore, the bodies oppose politics through the political (questioning of politics).Footnote 54 This is a matter of plurality of our existence that opposes the unifying power of politics. Through the concept of nonsignified bodies, Nancy advocates the resistance toward sovereignty (as something that rises above the body) and representativeness, seeing them as characteristics of the classical “metaphysical” politics in which there is a significant distance between a nonsovereign people and the “elevated” divine administrator—the sovereign. Hence, he advocates the idea of nonrepresentativeness and nontranscedental sovereignty, that is, a sovereignty that would belong to the community, not to a certain sovereign or representative body. According to Nancy, the sovereign people are the people who constitute themselves subjects in every sense, meaning the “self-relation of each in the relations of all to the others and as the subjection of all to this relation.”Footnote 55

Nancy's resistance toward the “totalizing” community and the criticism of classical theories of community, as well as resistance and criticism of other, similar thinkers such as Derrida and Rorty, has a certain value. Moreover, Nancy's claim that “God is dead,” meaning that God no longer has a body, should be taken seriously by theologians.Footnote 56 Nevertheless, is Oliver Marchart not somewhat right when he asks what a man truly is if he does not have at least a minimal “solid position,” noting that Nancy's “man” is nothing but “a severe case of personality disorder, a case of psychosis, where no stabilization of meaning can be constructed and no identity can be forged out of the pure dispersal of elements”?Footnote 57 Is Todd May also not right to a certain extent when claiming that Nancy's “conception of community proves too much against totalitarianism,” simultaneously eliminating not only totalitarianism, but also any foundation to counter it?Footnote 58 Starting with the “mystery of the body,” whose fundamental characteristics are outlined in the biblical text of Genesis 2:18-25, reaching its pinnacle in the evangelical texts on the resurrection of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth, one can say that by “eating of the body,” man becomes the “limb” of the Body of Christ, and thus completely abandons “solitude,” becoming one with the One who became “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). He becomes “one” with the One whose bones and flesh were transformed by the power of the Spirit (which is not Nancy's substitution, sublimation, subtilizing of all forms of bodies, nor Hegel's stage in the dialectic development of the “idea,” Aktuosität, Energeia, nor Heidegger's Flamme, Flammende) to become “the food of grown man.”Footnote 59 The isolated “I” thus becomes “we,” whereby it obtains a perichoretic existence: being in and through the other/Other within the body. By “touching” other bodies, it touches the crucified-resurrected Word-Body. Relations in the body, in the space of “we,” are not networks of contingent relations, nor the ever-new senses, nor the constantly flowing community, but relations, senses, and community in the One who is the very “We.” The subjects in the body are not mere “social constructs” because they are constituted in the crucified and resurrected Jesus of Nazareth. The Body of Jesus Christ is permeable, within it all other bodies are situated and gain their significance within it.Footnote 60 There is an interruption of the dis-corporated sense in the body that ought to give meaning to everything else—but not in a way it alienates itself, or self-destructs its own representations.Footnote 61

There are “multiple tongues” spoken in the Body of Jesus Christ, which is not a mere “multiplicity of idioms” given by God as an answer to the “colonial violence” of the builders of the tower of Babel (Gen 11:1–9), along with the necessary yet impossible task of translation.Footnote 62 God did not condemn humanity to “incompletion, impossibility of finishing.”Footnote 63 “Multiple languages” are not subjects speaking to themselves, nor are they structured as the unconscious; they are not the “deconstructing” language that eventually leads to I not being equal to self, to being a mere fiction; they are not a “frame” of any kind functioning as Kant's a priori, all-encompassing interpretative scheme “embodied” in the ecclesiastical narrative and ritual; they are not the “language-game”—they are the gift of the Spirit that “spills” itself from the body of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. Languages are used by everyone in the body. They are understood by everyone in the body (Acts 2:1–41). They are the true lingua Adamica—the language that Adam used to express his adoration for Eve's body (Gen 2:23). Adam's words are not a “praise of infinite sense,” the “opening,” the dehiscence, the breach, or the breaking out of the “here” itself, nihil, but words of adoration in the Spirit (John 4:23).Footnote 64 Those are the words of “touch” that broke the bonds of the Babylon (language) hegemony.

To conclude: although Nancy claims that the world is neither “the spacing of God” nor the spacing in God, but that the world has become the world of bodies,Footnote 65 one could agree with Ward when he claims that Nancy's attempt, although indebted to the Christian doctrine of incarnation, is more fundamentally indebted to Spinoza's and Hegel's secularization of the Christian doctrine.Footnote 66 It is not surprising therefore that Nancy often refers to Spinoza, who is, he believes, the first thinker of the world because by equalizing god with nature he did not provide two names for one thing, but he showed that the thing itself has its outside inside.Footnote 67 In contrast to such tendencies, namely Nancy's ontology of the body, I think that a meaningful theological response is the biblical theology of the “mystery of the body.”

References

1 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, Der Tragödie, erster Teil, Herausgegeben von Wolf Dieter Hellberg (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2017), 24.

2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, trans. Samuel, Horace B. (Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis, 1913), 46Google Scholar.

3 See Elders, Leo, The Philosophy of Nature of St. Thomas Aquinas (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 247–48Google Scholar.

4 In one of his earliest articles, “Nietzsche: Mais où sont les yeux pour le voir?” Esprit 3 (1968), 482–503, Nancy points to Nietzsche's importance in terms of contemporary thought. Namely, contrary to Heidegger's claim that Nietzsche is the last metaphysician, Nancy claims: “Nietzsche escapes from the theoretical space of metaphysics” (500) and offers the philosophers the means of doing so. Cf. James, Ian, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 17–21Google Scholar.

5 Nancy conducts his project of the deconstruction of Christianity through an interpretive scheme in accordance with Heidegger's concept of Destruktion, which does not imply destruction (Zerstörung), but is characterized by dismantling (Abbau, démontage). Hence, deconstruction, remarks Nancy, is not destruction, nor is it a return to the archaic, nor a suspension of adherence, but the intent of the incoming (l’à-venir), the penetration. It is enclosed in a space through which the construction is articulated piece by piece. Deconstruction is, therefore, a law, a logic, a scheme of the construction. To deconstruct means to disassemble, decompose, introduce into the game the very assembly, in order to extract a certain possibility between the parts from which the assembly arises, but which the assembly itself conceals. Deconstruction, which is neither critical nor perpetuating and which witnesses the relation to history and tradition, cannot be found in Kant, Hegel, or Husserl but only, according to Nancy, within the framework of Christianity. The deconstruction of Christianity therefore means a disintegration process directed to the source or the meaning of deconstruction, which does not belong to deconstruction itself. In other words, the entire process is about realizing whether we can, in Christianity itself, indicate a certain source “deeper” than Christianity, a source that could lead to the emergence of a completely different resource. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Dis-Enclosure. The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bergo, Bettina, Malenfant, Gabriel, and Smith, Michael B. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 10Google Scholar. See also Alexandrova, Alena, Devisch, Ignaas, Kate, Laurens ten, and Rooden, Aukje van, eds., Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 22–40Google Scholar; Schrijvers, Joeri, “What Comes after Christianity? Jean-Luc Nancy's Deconstruction of Christianity,” Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009): 266–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watkin, Christopher, Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Quentin Meillassoux (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 38–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cariolato, Alfonso, “Christianity's Other Resource: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Deconstruction of Faith,” in Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense, eds. Gratton, Peter and Morin, Marie-Eve (Albany: State of New York University Press, 2012), 27–42Google Scholar; Hutchens, B. C., Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; James, The Fragmentary Demand; Morin, Marie-Eve, Jean-Luc Nancy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012)Google Scholar. Additionally, Benjamin C. Hutchens, Ian James, and Marie-Eve Morin provide comprehensive and systematic accounts of Nancy's philosophy; see Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy; James, The Fragmentary Demand; and Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy.

6 Peter Fritz, Joseph, “Keeping Sense Open: Jean-Luc Nancy, Karl Rahner, and Bodies,” Horizons 43 (2016): 257–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Fritz furthermore discusses Nancy in “On the V(I)Erge: Jean-Luc Nancy, Christianity, and Incompletion,” Heythrop Journal 4 (2014): 620–34, and “Capitalism—or Christianity: Creation and Incarnation in Jean-Luc Nancy,” Political Theology 5 (2014): 421–37.

7 Smerick, Christina M., Jean-Luc Nancy and Christian Thought: Deconstruction of the Bodies of Christ (London: Lexington Books, 2017)Google Scholar.

8 Garrido, Juan Manuel, “Jean-Luc Nancy's Concept of Body,” Epoché, 1 (2009): 189Google Scholar.

9 For an example, see Summa contra gentiles II, 57, 68–69, 86; Summa theologiae I q. 8, a. 1 ad 2; ST I, q. 76, a. 1, a. 5; ST I, q. 98 a. 1; Quasestiones disputatae de anima, 1. According to Aquinas, were we to ask ourselves if the soul is identical to the body, we should, as Leo Elders suggests, respond by following this distinction: the term “body” normally implies an organized, organic body extending into space. In this sense, the body contains accidentals, which are not identical to the substantial form of the human person. If we understand the body as a substance, it follows that the body is “composed” of matter and form. The form is the (spiritual) soul, therefore it can be said that the difference between body and soul is inadequate or partial. However, Elders notes that we must bear in mind that the soul is more than just the bodily form. The soul performs its own activity—thought. In turn, the person must be understood—Elders concludes—first and foremost from the perspective of soul, meaning that a person is a person because of being endowed with “a mind.” Elders, The Philosophy of Nature of St. Thomas Aquinas, 259–60.

10 In his Himmelska kroppar (2007), Ola Sigurdson asserts that theological tradition lacks a critical somatology. He strives to establish it upon phenomenological hermeneutics (which, according to him, offers a methodology for interpreting the body without objectivization) and a postliberal theological cultural-linguistic approach. Sigurdson mentions Nancy only incidentally, when speaking of “transcorporeality.” Sigurdson, Ola, Heavenly Bodies: Incarnation, the Gaze, and Embodiment in Christian Theology, trans. Olsen, Carl (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 350–51Google Scholar.

11 Nancy, Jean-Luc, Corpus, vol. 1, trans. Rand, Richard A. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 65–69Google Scholar.

12 After claiming that the divine Trinity does not mean that God is divided into three, nor that he forms the union of the three, Nancy continues: The “generation” of the Son by the Father should not be understood as a descendance, but according to their identity of nature, within which opens up the possibility of “relation” as such, the “relation” that is an echoing and referring (renvoi) of sense from one to the other. This is how the Son can be said to be “begotten, not made”: he is not exterior to the Father, but somehow opens in him the relational dimension. This dimension, in its turn, is called the Spirit. Spirit is relation, or sense, according to which subjects, which do not exist independently of relation, are able to present themselves to one another. Or rather, relation is the nonbeing according to which beings can make sense, beings that therefore cannot subsist outside of this nonbeing. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity, vol. 2, trans. McKeane, John (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 51Google Scholar.

13 See Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 81–84.

14 The sentence is borrowed from Freud's notes written on August 22, 1938, comprising only four lines. Derrida, Jacques, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Irizarry, Christine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11–12Google Scholar.

15 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 21.

16 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 95.

17 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 123–26.

18 Starting with Lacan's assertion, il n'y pas de rapport sexuel (Livre 17, L'Envers de la psychanalyse [1969–1970]), Nancy wrote an article, L’ “il y a” du rapport sexuel, in which he depicts a kind of relation ontology. After reviewing Kant's division of judgments and categories, whereby relation is one of four categories, Nancy concludes: “It is important that this logic of relation [rapport] is not the same as the logic of substance or predicate (including the relationship of predication). The difference lies in what is known as relation ontology: relation is not a being, it is between beings” (italics in original). This then means that the relation is disembodied, and the disembodiment, according to the Stoics, determines the space, time, void, and lekton (exposed, pronounced, known). These four instances of disembodiment are four conditions of relation: the relation assumes the difference between place, time (including what is known as simultaneousness), empty space between the body, and the possibility of emitting and receiving the statement (which is optional). According to Nancy, the relation is a relation if there is no relation; it is a “non-relation relation.” The relation and separation of subjects are one and the same. The sameness itself is the same as the difference from itself and the shifting of itself, that is, to want or to love oneself—which is foreign to the symmetrical logic of the constituent lack of separation. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Corpus: Writings on Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. O'Byrne, Anne (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 6–8Google Scholar.

19 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 127–28. Elsewhere (in Corpus, vol. 2) Nancy notes that to say that the soul is the form of the body means that the body contains nothing, that its inside is not a spirit (which cannot be content because it has no extension, nor dimension, nor form) nor an inside that would be a kind of inside of the very body; hence, it is only a multiply-folded area of exposure or existence. To say that the soul is the form of the body means in fact that the whole body is exposed to exteriority, that its outside and inside are mutually conditioned. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 2, 84.

20 See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 129.

21 One such place is Descartes’ letter to Princess Elizabeth of June 28, 1643, which is, according to Nancy, undoubtedly the most important text of Descartes on the unity of the soul and the body (this unity is contemplated in view of everyday activities, not in view of thought and imagination as separate powers). See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 136–44.

22 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 131.

23 For Nancy, the touch is obviously not a contact between the touching and the touched, between an active and passive surface, but the interval between two syncopated “strokes” of presentation and withdrawal. Nancy, Jean-Luc, Le Discours de la syncope: I. Logodeadalus (Paris: Flammarion, 1976), 14Google Scholar. Syncope simultaneously binds and separates. The touch is a syncopated contact and a contact in syncope. It is, therefore, a touch beyond the touch. It is a critique of the classical haptic theory presented as a metaphysical privilege of presence (classical metaphysics considers the touch, tactus, as the sense of direct perception ensured by the certainty of the empirical knowledge).

24 Nancy emphasizes that the matter is always singular and designated (materia signata)—it is not determined by the meaning, but identified as singular. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 131.

25 See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 51, 53.

26 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 19, 25. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak considers that Nancy is vague when it comes to the matter of cataloguing the body because the corpus as a catalogue remains in the domain of logos, that is, it remains logocentric. Catalogue, according to Spivak, becomes, in fact, the example of the subordination of the body to logos, that is, a group of signs for each and every part of the body and bodily operation, which means that the body is signified. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Response to Jean-Luc Nancy,” in Thinking Bodies, eds. MacCannell, Juliet Flower and Zakarin, Laura (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 32–51Google Scholar.

27 See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 121.

28 Artaud, Antonin, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” in Selected Writings, ed. Sontag, Susan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 571Google Scholar; Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, Brian (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 40Google Scholar.

29 Nancy's project of deconstructing Christianity, as well as other similar perspectives, emphasizes Hutchens, have often been utilized in an effort to “rejuvenate religious philosophy.” Hutchens uses Graham Ward as an example, according to whom Nancy's critical atheism could aid the post-secular opinion. As Hutchens points out, however, co-opting Nancy in this way would be the result of a rather serious miscontextualization. In short, theology would need to violate Nancy's thought, to ignore its “nihilistic” tone. Post-secular efforts to “fragment” the notion of “God” and disseminate its meaning through “traces” in secular discourse and practice, Hutchens emphasizes, result only in a polyatheism, a lack of reference for the many empty names of “God.” Nancy is not merely offering yet another secular discourse of “the body” that can be taken up and put to religious use. On the contrary, it is precisely such an appropriation that Nancy insists would forbid any inquiry into the singularity of the sense of the body in plurality, or into the sense of the body's singularity. See Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy, 99–102. James asserts that it is arguable that Nancy's fragmentary philosophical writing is highly resistant to any possible co-option into a school or method. See James, The Fragmentary Demand, 4. Derrida notes that only Christianity can deconstruct itself. Dechristianization of Christianity would therefore be its own victory, its “hyperbole.” “Deconstruction of Christianity,” says Derrida (if it is even possible), should commence by separating Christianity from its own destructio tradition. See Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 54, 60, 220. In referring to Derrida (in particular to his evocation of Luther and Heidegger), Nancy notes it is true that Martin Luther spoke about destructio as a form of ecclesial tradition, but before the more prominent mention of Luther's use of this term and also before the possible reexamination of Heidegger's Destruktion/Zerstörung/Abbau (or Husserl's Abbau) one should limit oneself to what is important: the gesture of opening or reopening in the direction of what must precede each construction. This is by no means destruction. See Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 189n8.

30 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 47.

31 Even though Boethius’ definition of the person as naturae rationalis individua substantia predominates in the Western philosophical tradition, one must mention the Cappadocians who laid the groundwork for an “ontology of person” in the book of Genesis. They identified “hypostasis” (ὑπόστασις, substantia) and “person” (πρόσώπον, persona) with a concept to which ontological content could be attributed within the framework of a particular thinking being, leading to an understanding that a person is no longer an adjunct to the hypostasis, but is itself the hypostasis of the being. In the Trinitarian postulate, μία ούσία, τρία πρόσώπα (one substance, three persons), God is not one persisting as three persons, but God constitutes the divine substance. This substance is not an “I” in self-isolation, but a relation: a divine communio. Scholastic theological tradition emphasized the relational nature of the person as well (Summa theologica I, q. 40, 2).

32 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 33–5.

33 The expression tardemah appears only once more in the Torah, after Abraham complains to YHWH for having no offspring (Gen 15:12). In other texts of the Hebrew Bible, this expression appears several times, whenever unusual things occur, either during sleep or immediately upon awakening (1 Sam 26:12; Isa 29:10; Job 4:13; 33:15).

34 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 2, 9.

35 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 37.

36 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 2, 9.

37 See Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 155Google Scholar.

38 See Nancy, Jean-Luc and Ferrari, Frederico, Being Nude: The Skin of Images, trans. O'Byrne, Anne and Anglemire, Carlie (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 2–3Google Scholar. Corpus ego, unlike ego-corps (I-body), has no propriety, no “ego-ness.” In that sense, the body is always foreign. There is no “one's own” body. The body is always the other, a stranger. It is appropriated. There is no mere body as such, but only the exteriority, the otherness, the relation to another body. This is nakedness, for Nancy (Corpus, vol. 1, 154). The “naked existence” is an existence without a world—beyond and without essence. See Nancy, Adoration, 58.

39 See John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006), 159. The book contains 129 catechetical talks delivered by John Paul II between 1979 and 1984, with a pause due to the assassination attempt on the pope in 1981. These talks were soon given a recognizable and popular name, the “theology of the body.” As emphasized by John Paul II, they speak of the reconstruction of “authentic anthropology,” mainly by considering human corporeality. In the thirteenth catechesis, the pope writes about “authentic anthropology.” “This concept [essentially human experience] determines the very principle of reduction, characteristic of the philosophy of man, indicates the limit of this principle, and indirectly excludes the possibility of going beyond this limit. An adequate anthropology rests on essentially ‘human’ experience, opposed to the reductionism of the naturalistic type, which often goes hand in hand with the evolutionistic theory about the beginnings of man.”

40 Thus, the body is “a witness” to creation as a fundamental gift, and therefore a witness “to Love as the source from which this same giving springs.” John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 233. The entire “Kantian revolution” rests on nothing other than a question of “creation,” claims Nancy. Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. Raffoul, François and Pettigrew, David (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 66, 122n12Google Scholar. From Kant onward, nature no longer constitutes a given order and becomes the “order—or always possible disorder—of an enigma of ends,” Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, 63. The origin of the world ceased to be sought in creative causality, which led to a completely new understanding of “creation.” Nancy claims that the world is neither given nor set, but only present. This presence neither differs nor is derived from any other presupposed presence, any more than from an absence that would be the negative of a presence. See Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, 71. Furthermore, Nancy writes, “Presence is impossible except as co-presence. If I say that the Unique is present, I have already given it presence as a companion (even if such presence constitutes the Unique, and I have split it in two). The co- of co-presence is the unpresentable par excellence, but it is nothing other than—and not the Other of—presentation, the existence which co-appears.” Nancy, , Being Singular Plural, trans. Richardson, Robert D. and O'Byrne, Anne E. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 62Google Scholar. When writing about the “coexistence of presence,” Nancy mentions that they (coexistent presences) do not come from the dispersion of a presence; they are existing, disposed together, and exposed to each other. The co- is implicated in the ex-. Nothing exists unless with, because nothing exists unless ex nihilo. The first feature of the creation of the world is that it creates the with of all things; that is to say the world, namely, the nihil as that which opens (ouvre) and forms (oeuvre) the world. See Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, 73. So, what we know as the “creation of the world” Nancy considers, “is not the production of a pure something from nothing—which would not, at the same time, implode into the nothing out of which it could never have come—but is the explosion of presence in the original multiplicity of its division. It is the explosion of nothing; in fact, it is the spacing of meaning, spacing as meaning and circulation. The nihil of creation is the truth of meaning, but meaning is the original sharing of this truth. It could be expressed in the following way: Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.” Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 2–3. If creation is ex nihilo—Nancy is playing with a classical theological term—this does not signify that the creator operates “starting from nothing.” This signifies that, on the one hand, the “creator” himself is nihil, and, on the other hand, this nihil is not something “from which” that which is created would come, but it is the very origin and destination of something in general, and of everything. Not only is the nihil nothing prior but there is no “nothing” that preexists the creation—it is the act of appearing (surgissment), it is the very origin insofar as it is understood only as what is designated by the verb “to originate.” If this “nothing” is not anything prior, Nancy concludes, what remains is only the ex, which determines this creation-in-action. There is only appearing or arrival (venue) in nothing. Nothing is, therefore, the dis-position of the appearing. The creation is “this singular ex-position of being,” which means that its real name is existence. “Existence is creation—our creation; it is the beginning and the end of what we are.” Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 16–17. Therefore, creation is the creation without the creator, empirical logos, random variety, permanent modalization, the absence of plan and end—the creation alone would be the end. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 99. Creation is the τέχνη of bodies. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 89.

41 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 159.

42 See Ward, Graham, Cities of God (New York: Routledge, 2000), 82–83Google Scholar.

43 “Resurrection,” writes Nancy, “is the uprising (surrection), the sudden appearance of the unavailable, of the other, and of the one disappearing in the body itself and as the body.” Nancy, Jean-Luc, Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Clift, Sarah (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 15Google Scholar. The resurrection is the extension of a body to the measure of the world and of the space in which all bodies meet (côtoiement). Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, 44.

44 Jacques Lacan, Ward believes, returns the subject to the nihil. In turn, the crucifix reminds Christians of creation—the state of being given ex nihilo. See Ward, Graham, “Bodies: The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ,” in Radical Orthodoxy, eds. Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine, and Ward, Graham (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 172–75Google Scholar.

45 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 33.

46 Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, 51.

47 After quoting Jesus in Latin, the language which shaped the “Christian culture,” that is, his speech delivered during Pesach (Hoc est enim corpus meum), Nancy claimed that Jesus’ body is the Holy Spirit embodied. The Spirit is, writes Nancy, the nonform (non-forme) or the ultra-form (l'outre-forme) of the “hole” into which the body throws itself. Spirit is the substitution, the sublimation, the subtilizing of all forms of bodies. The Spirit is the body of sense, or sense in the body. Spirit is the organ of sense, or the true body (vrai corps), the transfigured body (le corps transfiguré). Spirit is also that which is without extension, without exposition, thus the Spirit is in fact the body in the sense that body is a substance, mass, impenetrable. The Spirit is a presence without the representation, without the image. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 75–77, 124.

48 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 2, 90–91.

49 See Ward, Cities of God, 101–02. Ward emphasizes that human desire is not reserved for man only, but that there is also God's desire for humanity. Ward, Cities of God, 107. In fact, one could say that “the image of God,” the divine in humanity, is the very desire to “be-one-body.”

50 Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Experience of Freedom, trans. McDonald, Bridget (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 66Google Scholar.

51 The Eucharist is therefore not a mere ritual of the community, nor it is a matter of a certain transsignification, that is, prefunctioning, but it is “new creation”: “I am making everything new” (Rev 21:5). Thinking about the Eucharist, Saint Augustine had rightly exclaimed: O signum unitatis! O vinculum caritatis! (In Ioannem 26, 13). By emphasizing the matrimonial structure of “being-one-body,” we are emphasizing that “being-one-body” is not an undistinguishing mystical fusion of the resurrected Christ and the community of believers (the head, which is Christ, and the body, which is the church). In other words, “being-one-body” does not happen by the extinction of one's “self” nor by the identification as “consuming the other,” but by “eating” the body of the one who gives his resurrected body without losing it.

52 Apart from the body, fundamental notions that Nancy uses to think about community are existence, being in common, inoperativeness (désoeuvrement), sense, being singular plural, sharing (partager), and the political. Nancy begins the analysis of the existence by using Heidegger's thinking position, deeming that death is one of its designations and that human existence is finite. For Nancy, however, finality does not represent a definite end of our existence, but the fact that we exist according to a multitude of various senses, situations, contexts, and that we are defined by space and time. No moment is eternal or universal, but singular and thus finite. The existence is simply not defined by beginning and end. The sense of existence is a multitude of singular senses, one of which is death. Death is primarily a relation toward the other and, in a certain way, presents the constitution of the relation. In that sense, Nancy rejects Heidegger's solipsistic understanding of death. Although death is “only mine,” it is also an announcement “that I am dead,” therefore in speaking of one's death, we come across a certain form of communication by way of announcing death. Only another can say: “He is dead.” Hence, the experience of community is first and foremost the experience of announcing death. Moreover, the existence signifies the inability to give or sacrifice—which, for Nancy, is always something theological-political, pretending at the truth and rejecting finality. It is only an exposition to another existence and through this exposition that the community is formed.

53 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 31.

54 In differentiating between “politics” and “the political,” authors such as Derrida, Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri—to mention the most famous ones—work to consider politics not as a ruling instrument, but as a structural condition of human relations that cannot be reduced to multiple categories.

55 Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, 100–01.

56 Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 59.

57 Marchart, Oliver, Post-Foundational Political Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 May, Todd, Reconsidering Difference: Nancy, Derrida, Levinas and Deleuze (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 41Google Scholar.

59 After a sort of vision, St. Augustine wrote, “I am the food of grown men, grow, and thou shalt feed upon Me; nor shalt thou convert Me, like the food of thy flesh into thee, but thou shalt be converted into Me.” The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. Edward B. Pusey (New York: Modern Library, 1949), 88–89. The beginning of Augustine's profound insight is, in fact, reminiscent of Psalm 78:25: “Human beings ate the bread of angels; he sent them all the food they could eat.”

60 See Ward, Cities of God, 113. Because the Body of Christ is the telos of salvation—to mention this as well—the question of feminist criticism, “Can a male saviour save women?” (R. Radford Ruether) seems wrong. Namely, as Ward incisively notices, all attempts at determining the gender of Jesus’ body are nothing but contemporary symptoms of the “new quest” for the so-called “historical Jesus.” That such a quest is flawed has long been shown by Albert Schweitzer. It is misguided, Ward believes, because it strives to interpret the “big mystery” by relying on a narrowed empirical verifiability and “metaphysics” based on atomism, positivism, atemporality, immanentism, and subjectivism. Ward, Cities of God, 113. It is misguided because it neglects the mystery of the body.

61 Nancy believes that when speaking on the subject of the body (de corpore), we always have to speak from the body (ex corpore). Speaking about the body should be projected out of the body. A discourse about the body should always be a discourse ex corpore, coming out of the body, but also exposing the body, in such a way that the body would come out of itself, alienate itself, to self-destruct its own representations—which means it does not have a constant and stable meaning. The problem of the discourse about the body, concludes Nancy, is that the incorporeality of the discourse should nonetheless touch the body. A discourse on the body or of the body, continues Nancy, is both touched by and touches upon something that is not discourse at all. This means that the body's discourse cannot produce a sense of the body; it cannot give sense to it. A discourse of the body has to touch on what, by the body, interrupts the sense of discourse. The interruption of the incorporeal sense ought to give sense to everything else. See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 124–25.

62 Derrida, Jacques, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, ed. F. Graham, Joseph (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 171Google Scholar.

63 Ibid., 165.

64 See Nancy, Adoration, 5, 9, 13, 46.

65 See Nancy, Corpus, vol. 1, 59.

66 See Ward, Cities of God, 93.

67 See Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 33. Manchev asserts that although the thesis developed in Corpus indicates a Spinozist tendency, it is a radical, paradoxical Spinozism: a Spinozism with no substance. See Manchev, Boyan, “Ontology of Creation: The Onto-Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy,” in Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 273Google Scholar.