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Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity
This book is a profound and eagerly anticipated investigation into what is left of a monotheistic religious spirit--notably, a minimalist faith that is neither confessional nor credulous. Articulating this faith as works and as an objectless hope, Nancy deconstructs Christianity in search of the historical and reflective conditions that provided its initial energy. Working through Blanchot and Nietzsche, re-reading Heidegger and Derrida, Nancy turns to the Epistle of Saint James rather than those of Saint Paul, discerning in it the primitive essence of Christianity as hope.
The "religion that provided the exit from religion," as he terms Christianity, consists in the announcement of an end. It is the announcement that counts, however, rather than any finality. In this announcement there is a proximity to others and to what was once called parousia. But parousia is no longer presence; it is no longer the return of the Messiah. Rather, it is what is near us and does not cease to open and to close, a presence deferred yet imminent.
In a demystified age where we are left with a vision of a self-enclosed world--in which humans are no longer mortals facing an immortal being, but entities whose lives are accompanied by the time of their own decline--parousia stands as a question. Can we venture the risk of a decentered perspective, such that the meaning of the world can be found both inside and outside, within and without our so-immanent world?
The deconstruction of Christianity that Nancy proposes is neither a game nor a strategy. It is an invitation to imagine a strange faith that enacts the inadequation of life to itself. Our lives overflow the self-contained boundaries of their biological and sociological interpretations. Out of this excess, wells up a fragile, overlooked meaning that is beyond both confessionalism and humanism.
The "religion that provided the exit from religion," as he terms Christianity, consists in the announcement of an end. It is the announcement that counts, however, rather than any finality. In this announcement there is a proximity to others and to what was once called parousia. But parousia is no longer presence; it is no longer the return of the Messiah. Rather, it is what is near us and does not cease to open and to close, a presence deferred yet imminent.
In a demystified age where we are left with a vision of a self-enclosed world--in which humans are no longer mortals facing an immortal being, but entities whose lives are accompanied by the time of their own decline--parousia stands as a question. Can we venture the risk of a decentered perspective, such that the meaning of the world can be found both inside and outside, within and without our so-immanent world?
The deconstruction of Christianity that Nancy proposes is neither a game nor a strategy. It is an invitation to imagine a strange faith that enacts the inadequation of life to itself. Our lives overflow the self-contained boundaries of their biological and sociological interpretations. Out of this excess, wells up a fragile, overlooked meaning that is beyond both confessionalism and humanism.
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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About the author
Jean-Luc Nancy
370 books219 followersJean-Luc Nancy is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Stanford has published English translations of a number of his works, including The Muses (1996), The Experience of Freedom (1993), The Birth to Presence (1993), Being Singular Plural (2000), The Speculative Remark (2001), and A Finite Thinking (2003).
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 16, 2022
A lot going on here, some of it beyond my ability to assimilate for now.
One cool thing that comes away easily is that monotheism is one of atheism's conditions of possibility:
Ultimately the point seems to be that "Christianity is by itself and in itself a deconstruction and a self-deconstruction." That is, beyond the monotheist principle displacing the polytheist personalities, we see how "Christianity (and through this prism, monotheism) has been engaged from its beginning in a perpetual process (i.e., a process and a litigation) of self-rectification and self-surpassing." To wit, monotheism "is not reduction to 'one' of the number of gods in 'polytheism': its essence is the disappearance of presence, of that presence that the gods of the mythologies are." Though it is a collection of essays that overlap in interests, the whole is aptly summarized by the paired aphorisms: "The only Christianity that can be actual is one that contemplates the present possibility of its negation" and "The only thing that can be actual is an atheism that contemplates the reality of its Christian origins." By deconstruction, it is meant that
One cool thing that comes away easily is that monotheism is one of atheism's conditions of possibility:
unicity displaces or converts divinity. From a present power or person, it changes divinity into a principle, a basis, and/or a law, always by definition absent or withdrawn in the depths of being.The transcendent deity lacks the immanent pantheon's concrete personality, and exists simply, if at all, as abstraction. The final step of shrugging off the abstraction itself comes much more easily, as we have seen in the centuries since monotheism's dominance.
Ultimately the point seems to be that "Christianity is by itself and in itself a deconstruction and a self-deconstruction." That is, beyond the monotheist principle displacing the polytheist personalities, we see how "Christianity (and through this prism, monotheism) has been engaged from its beginning in a perpetual process (i.e., a process and a litigation) of self-rectification and self-surpassing." To wit, monotheism "is not reduction to 'one' of the number of gods in 'polytheism': its essence is the disappearance of presence, of that presence that the gods of the mythologies are." Though it is a collection of essays that overlap in interests, the whole is aptly summarized by the paired aphorisms: "The only Christianity that can be actual is one that contemplates the present possibility of its negation" and "The only thing that can be actual is an atheism that contemplates the reality of its Christian origins." By deconstruction, it is meant that
deconstruction is always a penetration; it is neither a destruction, nor a return to the archaic, nor, again, a suspension of adherence: a deconstruction is an intentionality of the to-come [l’à-venir], enclosed in the space through which the construction is articulated part by part. 2. Deconstruction thus belongs to a construction as its law or its proper schema: it does not come to it from elsewhere.Plenty more--politics, scriptural interpretation, and so on. It gets pretty cool sometimes:
unction signs not what will later be called a life eternal beyond death but the entry into death as into a finite parousia that is infinitely differed or deferred. This is the entry into incommensurable inadequation. In this sense, every dying one is a messiah, and every messiah a dying one. The dying one is no longer a mortal as distinct from the immortals. The dying one is the living one in the act of a presence that is incommensurable. All unction is thus extreme, and the extreme is always what is nigh: one never ceases drawing close to it, almost touching it.Good times. Recommended for those interested in 'the double atheism of monotheism: the one it causes and the one it secretly bears within itself.'
April 17, 2012
an atheist grappling with the West's Christian origins. he is neither religious nor does he resent the Christian heritage of the West and of atheism. He spends much of the book deconstructing aspects and themes of Christianity to show their possibility for adaptation by atheism.
First of all, the essays are hit or miss. Also, for someone grappling with "Christianity", he makes minimal references to important figures who shape the tradition (Aquinas, Augustine, Cappadociean (?) Fathers, Luther, etc). Lastly, he might want to qualify his complete identification of Christianity with the West (and their mutual destiny) by considering the distinctiveness of the Eastern Orthodox Churches and Coptic Churches, and the adaptation of Christianity among post-colonial, non-Western nations.
Still a very admirable work in moving toward an atheism that is neither reactionary, fundamentalist, nor ignorant for its origins without falling back into piety.
First of all, the essays are hit or miss. Also, for someone grappling with "Christianity", he makes minimal references to important figures who shape the tradition (Aquinas, Augustine, Cappadociean (?) Fathers, Luther, etc). Lastly, he might want to qualify his complete identification of Christianity with the West (and their mutual destiny) by considering the distinctiveness of the Eastern Orthodox Churches and Coptic Churches, and the adaptation of Christianity among post-colonial, non-Western nations.
Still a very admirable work in moving toward an atheism that is neither reactionary, fundamentalist, nor ignorant for its origins without falling back into piety.
December 24, 2007
Lo primero que destaca es el fino diseño de interiores y el cuidado severo del aparato crítico (y siempre se agradece una edición bilingüe). Luego, el texto es excelente y no se puede decir más, por respeto a la formulación crítica que propone la deconstrucción. Este libro es oro molido.
May 9, 2021
Magnificent.
Read
September 27, 2025Dis-enclosure turns out to be a critical text for seriously minded exegetes, close readers and process thinkers seeking to penetrate the illusions of post-religious and death-of-God era while realizing religious categories deconstruct themselves. It is a necessary endeavor that comes with dark warnings about a philosophical ‘turn to religion’ which, in Nancy's view, ‘can only sharpen … all the dangers that religion invariably poses to thought, to law, to freedom, and to human dignity’ (2).
Not only necessary but called for in religious text, for he implies that religious belief
is a kind of disease (21), is the province of the gullible (96), is akin to fascism (5, 40, 137) and
that the return to religion is, like all such returns, an ‘indecent’ ‘political correctness’ (85) elements of this current moral dark age.
Religious categories deconstruct themselves as shown in Nancy's own examples with the Epistle of James the notion of faith (pistis), the Judeo-Christian designation (fabrication) and monotheism itself [we are all atheist at the core].
Nancy shows us that [1] the kenosis of divinity, the ‘void-of-divinity’ (36), monotheism is thus already atheism; [2] a self-demythologizing, of Christianity which tends toward an eraser of distinctive religious signs in favor of a ‘symbolics deciphered within the human condition’; [3] Christianity provides a system of interpretation aimed which is distinguishable from its origins as well as in previous religious traditions thus elaborating a complex of philosophical concepts in the service of its theology; thus, it is thought rather than belief that is to be primacy {perhaps a post-belief and taking Socrates seriously and process thought]; [4] Christian Trinity indicates that monotheism is ‘less a body of doctrine’ than a way of depicting ‘a subject in relationship to itself in the midst of a search for self’ (38) and [5] Christianity and other monotheisms have developed through a history of self-revision and ‘self-surpassing’ (29), making them fundamentally similar to humanism. Simply, if the West, leaving Christianity behind through its inexorable secularization, is nothing other than ‘the unfolding of Christianity’ (143), since the West is Christian, then Christianity must itself be considered secular, humanist, atheist.
Jean-Luc Nancy's dis-enclosure supports a necessary turning missing in the broad conversation with the Christian 'church' at large, however found in the realm of academia. One can only resume caring for one's own soul in such dark moral times with a possibility of a surmounting a mystic-philosophical approach to art of life and a "resurrection of death" [Maurice Blanchot, 89ff]
Not only necessary but called for in religious text, for he implies that religious belief
is a kind of disease (21), is the province of the gullible (96), is akin to fascism (5, 40, 137) and
that the return to religion is, like all such returns, an ‘indecent’ ‘political correctness’ (85) elements of this current moral dark age.
Religious categories deconstruct themselves as shown in Nancy's own examples with the Epistle of James the notion of faith (pistis), the Judeo-Christian designation (fabrication) and monotheism itself [we are all atheist at the core].
Nancy shows us that [1] the kenosis of divinity, the ‘void-of-divinity’ (36), monotheism is thus already atheism; [2] a self-demythologizing, of Christianity which tends toward an eraser of distinctive religious signs in favor of a ‘symbolics deciphered within the human condition’; [3] Christianity provides a system of interpretation aimed which is distinguishable from its origins as well as in previous religious traditions thus elaborating a complex of philosophical concepts in the service of its theology; thus, it is thought rather than belief that is to be primacy {perhaps a post-belief and taking Socrates seriously and process thought]; [4] Christian Trinity indicates that monotheism is ‘less a body of doctrine’ than a way of depicting ‘a subject in relationship to itself in the midst of a search for self’ (38) and [5] Christianity and other monotheisms have developed through a history of self-revision and ‘self-surpassing’ (29), making them fundamentally similar to humanism. Simply, if the West, leaving Christianity behind through its inexorable secularization, is nothing other than ‘the unfolding of Christianity’ (143), since the West is Christian, then Christianity must itself be considered secular, humanist, atheist.
Jean-Luc Nancy's dis-enclosure supports a necessary turning missing in the broad conversation with the Christian 'church' at large, however found in the realm of academia. One can only resume caring for one's own soul in such dark moral times with a possibility of a surmounting a mystic-philosophical approach to art of life and a "resurrection of death" [Maurice Blanchot, 89ff]
August 6, 2023
Basically, Christianity is atheism because of secular Greek influence. At least that’s what I got out of it.
August 12, 2016
good, illuminating, dense.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews