Return of the repressed religion?

(A post in homage to Friedrich Nietzsche, born this day, 1844.)

Jean-Luc Marion wrote, in one of the earliest of his theological texts:

“The most hideous man killed God because God, who saw him with an eye that sees all, killed him with a glance. To return that glance, to see the God as such, is to kill him. For one then sees nothing but an idol. Or rather, what one sees gives rise in turn to this suspicion: ‘and what if God were not truth and it were precisely this which is proved? If he were vanity, the lust for power, the impatience, the terror, the enraptured and fearful illusion of men?’ (Daybreak, I, § 93.) In seeing God one immediately discovers his nature, his revocation, in a word, the quotation marks that, from this point on, must frame him in our text – ‘God.’ For illusion must be understood precisely as an idol seen too close. The madman, and therefore Zarathustra, has one eye too many, provisionally. … Thus Nietzsche does not only name ‘God’: he points out his idolatrous status through the addition of an intermediary: some concept or other. Because ‘God is a conjecture’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, ‘On the Afterworldly’) he can be approached, that is, attacked and sunk, only as a ‘concept of God.’ Man rejects only what he attains. … It is evident that the ‘critique of the Christian concept of God’ (Antichrist, § 16) maintains its pertinence only in being exerted on ‘God,’ the idol that it sees….”

Marion, “The Collapse of the Idols and Confrontation with the Divine: Nietzsche,” in The Idol and Distance, 30.

This maneuver – redirecting Nietzsche’s declaration away from God and toward the idol of God closest to God, “God” – has become infamous. It is the very foundation of Marion’s more famous subsequent theological work, God Without Being. The God that can be killed is the concept of God, an idolatrous double. God must be elevated out of the realm of ontic existence (where claims and predications concerning God can be made) and brought into the morphological beyond-Being of which, for instance, Lévinas will not cease speaking. In addition to supporting the later theological works, however, this central claim buttresses the much more controversial “theological turn” in phenomenology that was the subject of some debate in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The charges against Marion (and conspirators Michel Henry, Lévinas, Ricoeur, and so on) were that the latter had covertly or overtly reintroduced the divine into die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. Dominique Janicaud was the most vociferous of critics on this end, authoring the pamphlet-essay we now know him for, in addition to a rejoinder issued just before his death, called Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’, which reiterates the central complaints of the former pamphlet and updates them in accordance with recent developments. Janicaud has a bone to pick for good reason: Marion et al. and Janicaud himself consider themselves, at least to some extent, Heideggerians. This entire scene can be understood as dramatically unfolding the tension within Heidegger’s own body of thought: the expressly theological sources (and destinies) of central concepts in Heidegger’s earliest works (too many to enumerate) create a strange friction when juxtaposed with his Nietzscheanism, his persistent claims that Being is not God and that God has no place in philosophy (recall from the 1926 lecture course, a claim to the effect that “Philosophy is necessarily atheistic,” “Christian philosophy” is a squared circle), and so on. Janicaud effectively takes up the latter end of this conflict while his theist colleagues suit up in the black and white to defend the “theiologism” of the former strand.

That obscure object of idolatry, “God” (God-objectified), then, is the subject of the proclamation “God is dead.” The God that can die is not the true God, and so we ought to celebrate Nietzsche for the favor he has done Judeo-Christian philosophy. Janicaud’s polemic inspired several conferences and many papers on the topic, and what this entire paradigm means for the future of philosophy. Janicaud was not able to neutralize the threat from above, as it were, and in fact only ended up drawing more attention to the intra-phenomenological phenomenon. I think this is partially because of the alternative he’d offered: the problem with Janicaud’s position (as laid out in Phenomenology ‘Wide Open’), in my view, is that it retains Heidegger’s spirituality, thus obliquely granting the theologico-phenomenologists quite a bit of credence, as if the matter were one of doxa, simple difference of opinion with plausible arguments on either side. Janicaud argues for a reinvigoration of the late Heidegger’s phenomenology of the inapparent, with strong emphasis on Gelassenheit (the letting-be of things in their truth) as a methodological principle. The latter was food more for theological thought than for philosophical thought in its own prime, and has only become more mystical, more otherworldly in its inertia (or legacy). Moreover, Janicaud inherits the philosophico-theological concept of finitude from Heidegger, a concept he does not seem to notice he shares with Henry, Marion, and so on.

God and the gods remain a force to be reckoned with in Heidegger’s thought. Famously, “only a god can save us.” The gods have passed over and left our world disenchanted in the Beiträge, and we await their return. This is the meaning of finitude: we require salvation, re-enchantment. Janicaud’s polemic fails in the end because of a commitment to this position; once we uncover this stake at the heart of Janicaud’s own work, we realize his true place in the entire debate – he, too, is a theologian.

Let us turn to a more satisfying approach.

“I take the formula ‘God is dead’ literally. It has happened. Or, as Rimbaud said, it has passed. God is finished. And religion is finished, too. As Jean-Luc Nancy has strongly stated, there is something irreversible here. What is ultimately important in this is to figure out the subjective mechanism explaining how people can so easily believe that it is nothing of the sort and that religion prospers; or even, as it is so often said at this time, that religion returns. Admittedly, nothing returns, and we do not have to believe in specters. The Deceased drifts away solitary and forgotten in His anonymous, stateless tomb.”

Badiou, “God is Dead,” in Briefings on Existence, 23.

We would do well, first, to note that this “short treatise on ontology” has been translated into German as Gott ist Tot. As Badiou notes in this introductory essay, it sets the tone for the whole work, everything following it, as he puts it, operating in its clearing.

We shall put Badiou face to face with Marion. Both try to answer the question: what remains after the death of God? We’ve seen what remains for Marion: God. For Badiou, what remains is the drama of the decomposition, the theatre of the Dead God. This “ultimately bloody drama” is really an inertia, history catching up with the event. The dead God is not the God of metaphysics, or of poetry, but precisely Marion’s God, the God of religion.

Against our phenomenologists of religion, then, Badiou claims that the God of religion is the Dead God, and that the death of the God of metaphysics does not necessarily follow from this. This God is Man, the autonomous Man of secular humanisms here and abroad. This God has been deconstructed, reconstructed, and shown to have died with, alongside of, God. Against both Gods, Badiou evokes a god or divine principle more in line with Heidegger’s god or godhead, the god which alone can “save us.” This is the god of the poets, and it is not dead (but nor is it alive). This is the god of flight, the god that has taken flight and left the world in inertia, in a disenchanted state. This god offers the poet and, through the poet, us, the possibility of re-enchantment. This god of the poem – in truth, gods of the poem – must be, according to Badiou, snuffed out. These gods are the only remaining support for the philosophies of finitude, against which Badiou ceaselessly rails. Finitude as a philosophical construct operates to keep the divine door open, “the trace of an afterlife in the movement that entrusts the overcoming of the religion-God and the metaphysics-God to the poem-God” (“God is Dead,” 29). It is fitting that poetry’s task is that of putting its own God to death. Philosophy will work in a parallel manner on the concept of finitude. One is undoubtedly correct in seeing in this “mission” a military-religious charge. It is the final crusade: “troubl[ing] the real when being silent,” to pluck a line from “Here,” a poem by Guennadi Aigui that Badiou cites.

It thus appears that Nietzsche’s task has been taken up in no uncertain terms by Badiou, despite his previous claims to find in Nietzsche less of an ally that might be expected.