http://tcs.sagepub.com/Theory, Culture & Society

http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/30/5/153The online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/0263276413486840 2013 30: 153 originally published online 20 June 2013Theory Culture Society

Jean-Luc NancyNotes on the Sacred

  

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of: 

The TCS Centre, Nottingham Trent University

can be found at:Theory, Culture & SocietyAdditional services and information for    

  http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

 

http://tcs.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:  

What is This? 

- Jun 20, 2013OnlineFirst Version of Record  

- Aug 1, 2013Version of Record >>

at TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIE on November 10, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from at TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIE on November 10, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Theory, Culture & Society

30(5) 153–158

! The Author(s) 2013

Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0263276413486840

tcs.sagepub.com

Article

Notes on the Sacred

Jean-Luc NancyUniversite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France

Abstract

In a sequence of aphorisms, Jean-Luc Nancy interrogates the speculative suture

between the sacred and truth. The sacred is indexed to an encounter or a point

of intensity via which the subject approaches what cannot be grasped in itself, but

solely in and as this unfinishable approach. The chance of this encounter is accorded

to every subject and no longer confiscated by a religion or an exclusive regime of

thought. In parallel, the sacred enters into a novel matrix with the ordinary wherein

neither supersedes the other. These aphorisms demonstrate that the ordinary sup-

plies a point of access to the sacred because the sacred is itself one of the nomadic

folds of the ordinary.

Keywords

life, philosophy, sacred, sacrifice, truth

Translator’s Introduction: Phenomenon and Immanence

The most rigorous definition of the sacred can be extracted from St. Paul: thesacred is what manifests itself by subtracting itself from experience; the void inthe phenomenal coming-forth of being. The truth of this void can only beaccessed by a privileged witness who lays claim to the phenomenon andannounces its univocal interpretation. This regime of phenomenal transcendenceheld sway over the history of philosophy until Nietzsche dethroned the Kantianthing-in-itself and proclaimed the advent of immanence. The witness gave wayto the reader, any subject whatever, who could now decrypt the phenomenon forhimself without the intermediary of an other. In Nietzsche, thought is still amatter of interpreting (phenomena) and evaluating (their degrees of difference),even if decoding is here a universal practice, and phenomenon and essence areone. The phenomenal subsists, but is now tethered to an immanence of signs.What is at stake in both regimes is differentiating, on the basis of their phenom-enality, the sacred from the ordinary; and differentiation requires a decoding ofdifferences, phenomena, signs. Yet, the second regime introduces a mutation ofsorts: the truth of the void that is the sacred is ultimately undecidable, because

Corresponding translator:

Alyosha Edlebi, Yale University, 142 York St., No. 5, New Haven, CT 06511, USA.

Email: alyosha.edlebi@gmail.com

http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

at TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIE on November 10, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

no one is precluded from laying claim to it (the problem of Plato’s Sophist). To

the universal truth delivered by the witness, this regime of phenomenal imma-

nence opposes the undecidability of equivocal decryptions by readers.

Undecidability means that each subject can claim its own sacred or, what

amounts to the same, that the sacred is singular and not absolute. It is clear,

in all of this, that any conception of the sacred implicates a correlative concep-

tion of the nature of thought and what it can do. For the regimes at issue,

thought is understood as the decipherment of difference.It is legitimate to ask whether a third regime could not be constituted that

would preserve the universality of the first and the immanence of the second.

Such is, in effect, the theoretical line that Nancy deploys in his Notes on the

Sacred and his general oeuvre. It consists in unbinding phenomenon and

thought and setting forth an a-phenomenal immanence. Three postulates are

necessary: 1) If the sacred is undecidable, that is not for lack of a privileged or

univocal decryption, but because it is essentially undecidable: the sacred is

the ordinary; there can be no intelligible discernment between them. 2) By con-

sequence, the vocation of thought resides not in decoding phenomena and their

difference, but in thinking the universal intrication of the sacred and the ordin-

ary; in other words: not the decipherment of difference, but the construction of

an absolute. 3) In this construction, thought must carry the Pauline definition to

its limit: the void of phenomenality inheres not simply in the sacred but in all

things; at its heart, immanence is a-phenomenal. These three postulates convoke

a new figure beyond the witness and the reader: the thinker, the one who seizes

the sacred by thinking (that is: constructing as absolute) its indistinction from

the ordinary. Nancy’s notes, his philosophy, inasmuch as they fulfill this triptych

of postulates and its figure, merit the rubric ‘ordinary or non-Christly imma-

nence’, the veritable immanence of the sacred.

I. Sacred are the thing, the being, the thought which we cannot touchwithout trembling. This trembling could be minor, but it is always intim-ate: it seizes us in our very being. Before a grave, a desirable body, abirdsong. That to which we lack access, but which nevertheless drawsnear to us and makes us a sign. That whose approach is uncertain, dan-gerous and risky, necessary nevertheless. Dangerous because necessary.Necessary because we have to approach it in order to partake in someunfamiliar power which we know we need or desire. Which we know is insome sense destined to us as what concerns us, what interests us, whattouches us most intimately; in other words: on this or that side of everyintimacy. How then could there be no sacred, if nothing is more certain

154 Theory, Culture & Society 30(5)

at TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIE on November 10, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

than this destination or this postulation of our being: passing, surpassing,bypassing what confines us and, by confining us, revealing to us the wishof passage, the step beyond? The step towards what is not there, notwithin reach here or elsewhere, beyond reach but right here, close totouching us. In the gaze of an other, in the life and death of the other,the life and death of an animal as well, even in the plant, the star and fire,electricity, copper, carbon. In the existence of the world. In the possibilitythat the unbearable could intrude into it. The sacred thing and being arewithdrawn, situated at a distance, out of reach, because this distanceforms their whole truth. It is truth which does not let itself be verified,but verifies itself. Literally makes itself true. It shows itself and showsthus that it is – and that it is at a distance. It reveals itself: not unveilsitself, but heralds and attests to its isolated presence. The true cannot fallright into my hands; it has to be ahead of me. There, ahead, it glows.Its radiance is named ‘beauty’.

II. A dog gazes at me, a child, a tree, a rock, a work. In order to gainaccess to this verification, I have to turn myself towards it, to be capableof perceiving its sign, its advent. To separate myself in my turn from theprofane. An instant of reverence, of hospitality. I have to devote myself.‘Devote to me a little time’, says that which is not here, which is at adistance and yet nearby. I must sacri-fice something: make sacred a thing,my gaze itself or my hearing, my gesture, my hand which lets go of itspencil in order to caress or be caressed. Or even in order to wash so thatit be worthy of an encounter – even a simple handshake, perhaps. Thereis sacredness in the simplest exchanges, provided there is an exchange, atransformation, an alteration, something other than a transaction.We devote to each other some gestures, some manners, some attitudes.We proclaim sacred – withdrawn from transaction and every pricing –our exchanges, our relations, those that open us to the outside world,those which render us sensitive to its very existence, contingent and haz-ardous, improbable, exposed to worse dangers than what we ourselves ora blind sky can cause it.

III. Existence, nevertheless, cannot itself be sacrificed. Existing can con-sist in sacrificing, in devoting much (of time, forces, goods) but not asingle instant to sacrificing the existent as such – except if I know, withscientific certainty, that my life has to be given for a particular cause. Yet,this certain science will be a sacred science, revelation, knowledgereserved for a concealed access – for an amorous intelligence. In thisinstance, my existence will not be sacrificed: it will exist to the end.I cannot keep such a knowledge for others. It can never be the knowledgeof society or of the State. It can only ever be the knowledge of anotherlife, another existence as cause, as sufficient reason for my sacrifice.

Nancy 155

at TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIE on November 10, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

In order that I know, on the other hand, that an other has to be sacri-ficed, I must know that I have to be sacrificed with him: that we owe aduty to the cause. Tendentially, there will no longer be a cause. Failure ofthe Revolution, international or national: it demanded the sacrifice oflives for another life. That cannot be: there is no other life. It remainstrue that life must be transformed and that this imperative is sacred. Thatwhich alone has the right to sacrifice the life of others stems from lifeitself and is named death; but we have no knowledge of death. We cannotgive death, not even give it to ourselves, for its donation stems from lifealone, which we are not. We can only risk our existence to the end inorder to transform life, ours, that of an other, that of all of us. In the faceof death, not given but hurled in an order or a bomb, the sacred sinks ininfinite distress: tormented sacrifice. (Thanatos or Eros: impossible for usto give them. We must receive them.)

IV. The old world of sacrifice rendered possible the nearly perpetual andnearly integral passage from the profane to the sacred. There was, hence,no need to transform life. By sacrificing lives or what bore an image or asign of life, one gained access to the kingdom of the dead, to their noc-turnal forces. One reconciled oneself to them. The price was the inter-minable dread of not sacrificing sufficiently or adequately. Terror: thegods are thirsty. The hecatomb would thus take place: a hundred slaugh-tered eggs, a hundred captives, or a hundred virgins, rivers of blood,wine, honey. Holocaust: one burns everything. (We know what thisbecomes when gods are converted into the human race, when theymutate into phantasms of soil and blood: crushed, naturalized, exhaustedsacredness. Final end of the sacred, declared, established as such. It willno longer be possible to invoke this word.) Yet, our representation of aworld in which the sacred was present while it has deserted our own givesa proof of our present relation to the ‘sacred’. We represent to ourselvesthat elsewhere, formerly, the sacred was present, then lost. But we forgetwhat conditions of coercion and fear, of terrifying submission, accom-panied this alleged presence. We equally forget, in one and the sameforgetting, how much the sacred is close and familiar to us: familiar tous is unfamiliarity, the strangeness of the newly-born, of the unknown,the stranger, the beloved, the desired, the feared, the intruder. Nothingelse is sacred, nothing else is ‘the sacred’. The sacred or the holy. Holinessor the pure rupture with the world in the fullness of the world. The senseof the world – which is outside the world – open in the midst of it.Holiness, which is not ‘the good’, which is on the contrary the knowledgeof the good: that the good is not given. Thus the sacred is not ‘good’. Nor‘bad’ or ambivalent (high and low, auspicious and ill-fated sacredness).It is the approach of the distant, which remains at a distance in this veryapproach. It is the touching of the finite by the infinite. It is up to us tomake good or bad use of it – or to make nothing of it.

156 Theory, Culture & Society 30(5)

at TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIE on November 10, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

V. We say ‘the sacred’ as if it were a thing, even a being. This substanti-vation is modern. It arises from ethnological and sociological consider-ations that sought to construct the concept of what is never presented inperson, but as the attribute of objects, actions, or speeches. A tree, amask, an oath is sacred; but ‘the sacred’ does not identify itself. Bynaming it, we betray our illusory consciousness of having lost it andour desire to encounter it. The sacred in person is the god: but the godby its nature is concealed; it withdraws from the world, whether withinthe world, in its folding, or outside, in its unfolding. The god is veiled –not only deus absconditus, which doubtless bears this trait to its limit:every god has withdrawal, diversion, concealment or absence as its prop-erly divine trait. It is thus that gods are made: not fabricated by projec-tion, as one often said, but feigned, fictionalized as figures of what hasneither figure nor appearance of its own but which emanates, whichpropagates and communicates itself in singular effects of a particulargiven, circumstance or encounter. Gods are not holy. Holiness is thelimit of the divine, where gods – persons, figures, personae – unravel inthe very distancing, in the distinction and separation of the outside, in itsimprobable and real proximity, scarcely bearable and withstood, retainedby what exposes itself to it.

VI. Essentially, the sacred or the holy encounters us. The outside encoun-ters. It has each time, through such form (gaze, tonality, rhythm orcontact, haziness or clarity . . .), the force of the encounter: what onecannot evade. Someone in the street, or one of those I see every day,can consign me to this encounter. Or a tree or the movement, the style ofa phrase. In a sense, it is trivial. The sacred is common, ordinary andalways within reach – not of the hand, no doubt, but of waiting andattention. This attention can be more or less deliberate; it can be awa-kened by the surprise of a call, a signal (like a furtive expression in agaze), or mobilized by my thought, my desire to intercept such a signal.The sacred arrives in an encounter; it arrives through, in and as anencounter. It is nothing other than a communication with the ‘outsides’of the world. Nothing other than a disturbance introduced into thehomogeneity of the world. A discontinuity. An interruption. Since wehave spoken of ‘communication’, let us say: an interruption in commu-nication is sacred. Not an interruption of communication, but an inter-ruption that is communicated in the midst of the uninterrupted flux ofour communication – like a distraction. What we call ‘art’ proceeds fromsuch a distraction: the practices we classify today under this rubric divertthemselves from the course of the world. They suspend participation inthe continuity of the homogeneous. They step aside: halt over a trace,take a step or leap through the impetus of the body alone, make a voiceresonate which forgets to speak, substitute for an object the presentationof this object, install which is to say stabilize a moment. This suspension

Nancy 157

at TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIE on November 10, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

or impetus, this attention that evades every occupation, that is only con-cerned with itself, is devoted to the approach of an outside – but anoutside that is open in the midst of the world. In strokes, in noise,marks, imprints or movements, tosses or falls, thicknesses or sharpedges. In being passed through or suspended. Which is opened and inopening is distinguished as outside: hence the first stroke drawn, traced,inscribed, dirtied, charred on a rock face or a tree. To consecrate: todevote, to dedicate, to intend, to consign. To dedicate and to dedicateoneself to the withdrawn, situated at a distance, distinct from the orderand reason of things – distinct, more remote, more profound, more at thebottom of order and reason. As at the bottom of a gaze, as the singularityof an existence, as this truth which is only verified by itself. We say ‘art’ –but this word is inadequate – in order to designate a gesture that conse-crates par excellence. Art of pleasing or art of living, art of enjoying or artof aging, art of singing or of painting, it is not only a question of knowinghow to go about it: it is a question of knowing how to make it with whatdoes not let itself be made. With what does not let itself be produced.With what a work can no doubt carry, but not complete. To know howto do it by letting it happen: to let oneself be carried before truth, to let itshine as itself. As truth or holiness. To know how to bring about not itsradiance, which only depends on it, but the opening by which to discernit. To know how to provide access to it, and to know how much thisknowledge is not within our power. It requires labour, effort and atten-tion: to be attentive to getting distracted. To getting caught up. Before agrave, a desirable body, a birdsong. That to which we lack access, butwhich nevertheless draws near to us and makes us a sign. That whoseapproach is uncertain, dangerous and risky, necessary nevertheless.Dangerous because necessary. Necessary because outside, and an outsidemore intimate than any supposed inside. Distant which remains far bydrawing near to touch us.

Translated by Alyosha Edlebi

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Jean-Luc Nancy for granting his permission for this translation.The text originally appeared in the French journal Mouvement (no47) in 2008.

Author Biographies

Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at theUniversite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His books in English include TheLiterary Absolute (with Philip Lacoue-Labarthe, 1988), The InoperativeCommunity (1991), Being Singular Plural (2000), Corpus (2008), andDis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (2008).

Alyosha Edlebi is a doctoral candidate at Yale University.

158 Theory, Culture & Society 30(5)

at TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIE on November 10, 2013tcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from