God as a Word

If 'God' is just a word, do I mean by that it is only poetic? Well not quite. What I mean is that it can't be thought in terms of denotation (or even its supposed opposite connotation). An idea means something, which then has a reference to reality. Such a reference might be tortuous (which is what connotation is), but in the end it does refer to something. In Kant, for example, the idea of God has its ultimate reference in the subject. The word, however, does not denote or connote. It is not a reference, but a practice.

A Word

A word names a thing, but it not that thing; rather, it is the absence of the thing. As Mallarmé famously writes about the flower. 

I say: a flower! and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet.

So words have a way of maintaining the absence of something they name without at the same time as negating them. When Blanchot says that in literature the word 'cat' does not mean cat, he does not mean that it is something else, rather it isn't anything at all. What it denotes is ambiguous and indistinct, and this is what happens to language generally in literature. When I say that what it denotes is ambiguous, I do not mean that it has a ambiguous denotation, which can, in a second moment, be made clear and distinct, but that ambiguity ruins its denotation. The consequence of this is devastating. It would mean that every interpretation is false. There can be no truth of literature. As soon as we say literature means this (and for 'this' substitute any interpretation that stands outside of the text, like, for example, Kafka's The Trial is about modern alienation), then we have betrayed its unsettling absence. I imagine literature as a rat eating away at the heart of sense.

A Religion of Ethics

You can have a religion of ethics that is not a religion of morality, but it is really difficult to separate them out, and the closest I have come to say what it might mean is that in the religion of ethics God is a word and not an idea. The greatest difficulty is not distinguishing between a being and an idea, but between an idea and a word. Of course words and ideas are in some sense inseparable, but it depends on what one concentrates on. A word is not just an expression of something, it is also a performance, a ritual and a relation to others. It is the speaking rather than what is said that is the important thing.

Beyond Morality: Levinas and Ontology

It is one of the most important lessons to take from reading Levinas  that it is not directly about morality; that is to say, it has nothing at all to do with values. This does not mean that there is no relation between ethics and values, but it is not a foundational one. I do not think this is unique to Levinas. I would say the same about the Stoics, Spinoza or even Heidegger and Deleuze. Do not confuse ethics with morality. One way of making this explicit is to say that ethics is ontological. This might appear a curious statement in relation to Levinas, since one of this books is called Otherwise than Being, but one should be reminded that the source of his work is an explicit critique of Heidegger and more specifically Being and Time, which could have been called Ethics and Time. Some say this book has no ethics, but for me it is a profoundly ethical book, if one thinks ethics is about how one lives one's life, as the Stoics and Spinoza explain, and not about making judgements.  Because Levinas is writing against this ontology (which is an ontology of specific kind), he calls what he does an ethics beyond being, but I would say that it is another way of doing ontology (a kind of neo-Platonism) rather than against ontology completely.

The Second God

God is not a being. This is your beginning point. If this is so, then atheism rather than the opposite of theism, would be its highest expression. Or perhaps we need to speak of two kinds of atheism. One is an ontological atheism that is repeated in an age when God is dead. But the God that dies here is the God of being, a God that is no longer required by science and philosophy, and whose death, therefore, is only the end of a certain way of doing science and philosophy that famously no longer requires this hypothesis (a God that died in the pages of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and certainly did not need Dawkins et al. to kill it off). What would the other atheism be? It would be a moral atheism, atheism redoubled and intensified. It would be more than the assertion that we do not need God for science and philosophy, but that we do not need God for our values either. It is this God that is murdered for the second time by Nietzsche, and this murder is far more frightening and unsettling than the rather tame euthanasia of the God of science and philosophy. What happens when the second God dies? Do we know what this means?

Nietzsche

God as a being is transcendent and exterior. Its fundamental metaphysical avatar is substance, and it has a long history from Aristotle to Descartes. The God of the idea is immanent and transcendental. Its avatar is the idea, and it has its beginnings in Kant. Both these Gods are declared dead by Nietzsche. The transcendent God, because being is becoming, and the transcendental one, because morality is Will to Power.  

Atheism

Atheism and theism are not opposed to one another but belong together. Each theism has its own atheism, and every atheism its own theism.

Atheism of the Word

There are three ways I can see of speaking about God: as a being, an idea or a word. That there are very important distinctions and differences within and not just between these ways of speaking goes without saying. Think of what Aquinas does with Aristotle's proofs of the existence of God, for example, where he speaks of God in terms of existence rather than essence, even though He is still a being.  Moreover, there are always minor writers within them  (all the mystical traditions within the religions, to name but one type of minor writing)  that cut across these traditions both conceptually and historically. What I am particularly interested in is the third way of speaking about God, because it is closest to my problem. What if God were only a word and neither a being nor an idea? In one sense one would say that this is the sign of the disappearance of God, but in an other,  perhaps not. Hasn't religious belief, or a least a certain kind, only every related to God as a word (a mysterious magical one), and not as a being or an idea? It is only philosophy that has entertained the latter definitions and its atheism has been maintained by their destruction. Is there an atheism of the word? My supposition is maybe not.

My Own Stupidity

It is about my mistake that I want to write to you about today, but don't let that fool you. Don't think that I now have the answer I lacked previously. When it comes to God, I keep feeling that I come to a point and I can't go any further. It just drops away from me. Not because I think there is some mysterious mystical meaning I can't fathom or am unwilling to make the leap for, but quite the contrary. There is something I cannot think here, something I cannot see, and this is all because of my own personal stupidity.

Religion and Philosophy

This is a particular problem for me, because my own entry into philosophy (entirely fortuitous, as anyone's), rather than just knowing about the history of philosophy, is Levinas. I believe it is completely impossible (though some think you can, and maybe even he did at one stage of his work) to separate his philosophical from his religious writings. When I had given this up, I thought about it negatively and naively, and their inseparability meant that he was susceptible to the same Nietzschean critique as Kant, but now I think that I am entirely wrong about that, because it puts the meaning of God in Levinas in completely the wrong place conceptually and historically.

Stupidity

Perhaps you should only think where you are the most stupid, for only there are the most interesting problems going to lie for you. 'Interesting', because you don't know the answer to them. Of course your stupidity is a very personal matter. One person's stupidity can be an embarrassment for another, but for them it might be their hidden strength. 'Why are you being so stupid,' they might irritatingly remark, 'can you not see the answer to the question?' But your relation to your own stupidity is a far different affair. It is not enough that you are stupid, as seen from the position of the other, you have to feel your own stupidity. This means that you know there is something missing in your response. My stupidity lies with entirely within the word 'God'. I do not understand why people believe in God, but at the same time, my absence of belief seems entirely stupid to me. I don't have the insouciance of those who quite happily call themselves atheists. I don't know what it means. I have more time for those who think the entire discussion is useless, that you shouldn't talk about God at all, whether you believe in Him or not, than those who either assert his existence or don't. For example, when Jean Luc Marion defends himself in his preface to the English translation of God without Being against the theologians that he didn't mean that God did not exist and that He certainly does, I find his ability to simply pronounce that God exists entirely baffling (I know his book explains why he can say that, but it doesn't help me). At the same time, militant atheists like Dawkins and his ilk, are entirely laughable. They haven't even read Kant or Nietzsche. It's as though we have been transported in a time machine to the 17th C, and yet the proclaim themselves to the most up to date, the most modern, knights of reason against the oncoming hoards of irrational believers, be they Christian, Muslim or whatever.

The History of God

You imagine writing a history of God. Not a history of religion, nor even a mythical person (if you can speak like that), but of a philosophical concept. You see this history as the story of a disappearance. The more philosophical, the more rational, the concept of God becomes, the more God actually vanishes to become finally nothing more than a thin vapour and then nothing. The truth of the philosophical concept of God is atheism. You think then that Nietzsche's famous 'Death of God' is not outside this history but its proper culmination. And yet, after all this, when this history comes to an end, something remains. It is this remainder that interests you. Nonetheless, it still seems absurd that anyone would write about this now. What possible reason would there be to write a philosophy of religion today? Your only reply is that it is in the face of the question of God that you feel the most stupid and inadequate. Your own atheism is a paltry thing in comparison.

The Infinite and the Indefinite

You need to distinguish between the indefinite and the infinite. The indefinite is the bad infinite. It is the infinite of capitalism, the endless repetition of the present. What is the other infinite? It is the infinite as the emptying of the future into the present, the explosion of time. As though water would flow back into a pouring vessel until it bursts.

In the indefinite, the future is merely what persists. It is the endless repetition of the present without change or difference. The infinite future, on the other hand, is the creative power of the present. The present as a productive ontological power; the new, as opposed to the endless repetition of the same.

You need to distinguish between fate and redemption. Fate is synonymous with cynicism. Dead time and cynicism belong together. Time is at the heart of all moods. The time of cynicism is the endless repetition of the present. What will happen has already happened and will happen again. This is why it is fatalistic. Why bother with anything since it has already happened. The difference between fate and redemption is both one of time and moods. The time of redemption is one of the future to come, as opposed to the endless dead repetition of the present, and its mood is one of hope, rather than cynicism.

Capitalism and Life

On the one hand, the time of life, and on the other, the time of capital, though this is not a dialectical opposition. Capital does not rise out of life and transcend it, but is always immanent to life. It distorts this relation by making itself appear as though it were the origin of life. Thus the businessman thinks without him there would be no life, whereas in fact it is he who is the parasite. Today we see this thinking everywhere. We cannot think of life except as the result of economic necessity. 'There is no alternative,' they say over and over again. The absence of possibilities is the end of life, for life is the possible and nothing else.

Two Futures

Begin with the two futures: the future of capital - the Futures Market and Messianic future - these are two very different temporalities. What conceptions of time are hidden there - the future of capital is the endless repetition of the same - the same instant again and again. The future of the Messianic is the interruption of the present by the future - the interruption of time - but the endless future of capital (which is its particular form of secular redemption) isn't really a future at all, but merely hides the real future which is the future of the disaster - human and natural catastrophe.

Messianic Prophetism

Religion as redemption that is what interests me and not as a belief in a world beyond this world. What are the resources of a language of redemption still left within religion? How do I measure the world against the possibility of justice for all and not just for the few?

Time is a Relation

The present contains within itself the past, and is pregnant with the future.

Cassier

The elements of time (past, present and future) are not counter-posed to one another as though they were hermetically sealed segments on an infinite line. Rather than the past and the future being opposed to the present from the outside, they are contained in the present. They are part of the present, however, only as excessive. Both the possibilities of the past and the future exceed what has been actualised in the present. What could have been is always greater than what has been, and events of the past can announce the possibility of a different future.

The past and the future are virtual in relation to the present. This means that their real possibilities are not determined in advance by the actuality of the present. This is why the real future, as opposed to the endless repetition of the present, is always a surprise.

Kant's Antinomies

A good place to start is Kant's antinomies. Basically they are lesson in what goes wrong if you start with the common sense view of reality and then apply it to experience, rather than applying experience to our perception of things. Take the idea of the world. The antinomy is that either in the world every substance is simple or composite, and every composite substance is composed of parts, or there are no composite substances consisting of parts and everything is simple. The solution to this antinomy, as we know, is not to show that one view is false and the other not, but that contained in both is a reification of the idea of the world. The world as a whole is not something that I can experience either as a simple or composite, because it is not a substance at all, but an idea. But if the world is an idea, what kind of idea is it? It is not an idea as essence (as it would be in Plato), but a relation. It precedes the experience of things as such. Each thing I experience is related to another thing and so on, and without this network I would not be able to experience any individual thing, but it itself is not a thing, nor could it ever be a thing. It is the non-perceptible openness in which each thing exists, suspended beyond itself in reaching out to another infinitely. I do not know the world, if you mean by know, experience some thing, rather I have to be it.

God

God is not a thing, being or substance. But nor is God an idea, thought, or consciousness. God is first of all a relation. From this relation, we might then think of things and ideas, but first of all we have to think of the relation on its own terms. But what does it mean to think of the relation first of all? It means that we have to start with the relation and not the terms of the relation. Or, the terms are an effect and not the cause of the relation. The relation is a condition of the terms of the relation and not the other way around.

God is not a thing. This is what Kant teaches us. But what does it mean to say beyond Kant that God is not an idea? This is what I am trying to answer when I say that God is a relation. Neither dogmatic nor transcendental metaphysics; you have to pick your way between these two.

In the Beginning is the Relation

In the beginning is the relation, not the word or the deed. There is no thing that is given first of all without context, relation or function. Without these, I could not experience or perceive anything, but they are not themselves perceptible. This does not mean they are pure ideas floating above experience. Experience is neither real nor ideal, but an admixture of both. What is ideal is real; what is real is ideal. This is why the old divisions between idealism and materialism, or rationalism and empiricism, no longer make sense.