Synopses & Reviews
Adoration is the second volume of the Deconstruction of Christianity, following
Dis-Enclosure. The first volume attempted to demonstrate why it is necessary to open reason up not to a religious dimension but to one transcending reason as we have been accustomed to understanding it; the term "adoration" attempts to name the gesture of this dis-enclosed reason.
Adoration causes us to receive ignorance as truth: not a feigned ignorance, perhaps not even a "nonknowledge," nothing that would attempt to justify the negative again, but the simple, naked truth that there is nothing in the place of God, because there is no place for God. The outside of the world opens us in the midst of the world, and there is no first or final place. Each one of us is at once the first and the last. Each one, each name. And our ignorance is made worse by the fact that we do not know whether we ought to name this common and singular property of all names. We must remain in this suspense, hesitating between and stammering in various possible languages, ultimately learning to speak anew.
In this book, Jean-Luc Nancy goes beyond his earlier historical and philosophical thought and tries to think-or at least crack open a little to thinking-a stance or bearing that might be suitable to the retreat of God that results from the self-deconstruction of Christianity. Adoration may be a manner, a style of spirit for our time, a time when the "spiritual" seems to have become so absent, so dry, so adulterated.
The book is a major contribution to the important strand of attempts to think a "post-secular" situation of religion.
Review
"Nancy pursues his explorations of Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity by treating the old and complex Christian 'legacy' in an original and stimulating manner, thereby demonstrating a remarkable mastery of and erudition in the fields of Christian theology and of the philosophy of religion. But he also takes some important new steps in this trajectory that will fascinate the reader."-LAURENS TEN KATE, University for Humanistics, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Synopsis
This second volume in Nancy's The Deconstruction of Christianity explores the stance or bearing that would be appropriate for us now, in the wake of the dis-enclosure of religion and the retreat of God: that of adoration. Adoration is stretched out toward things, but without phenomenological intention. In our present historical time, we have come to see relation itself as the divine. The address and exclamation--the salut --that constitutes adoration celebrates this relation: both the relation among all beings that the world is and what is beyond relation, the outside of the world that opens us in the midst of the world. A major contribution to the contemporary philosophy of religion, Adoration clarifies and builds upon not only Dis-Enclosure, the first volume in this project, but also Nancy's other previous writings on sense, the world, and the singular plurality of being.
About the Author
JEAN-LUC NANCY is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Universit� Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. Among the most recent of his many books to be published in English are
Corpus;
The Ground of the Image;
Listening;
Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity;
Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body;
On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores; and
The Truth of Democracy (all Fordham).
JOHN McKEANE is Laming Junior Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. His thesis addressed the fragmentary writing of Maurice Blanchot, and he is the co-editor of Blanchot Romantique.