Crosscurrents

Jean-Luc Nancy and the Deconstruction of Christianity

Format

£19.99

About this book

Explores Jean-Luc Nancy's innovative engagement with the deconstructive tradition and its implications for thinking religion

  • Undertakes the first comprehensive book-length study of Nancy’s relationship to the deconstructive tradition, particularly the thinking of Derrida
  • Engages with French sources that are unavailable in English, including texts such as ‘Catéchisme de persévérance’ and Signaux sensibles: Entretiens à propos des arts, radio interviews broadcast on Radio France and newspaper articles published in Libération
  • Proposes new avenues for understanding the intersection between deconstruction and religion
  • Lays out a novel approach to religion within secular modernity in which the boundaries between theology and philosophy are redrawn

In dialogue with Derridean deconstruction, this book highlights Nancy's distinctive figurative philosophical style which emerges as a transformative force, one that radicalises différance and draws out its creative potential. Through this generative logic, Nancy reconfigures how we conceptualise Christianity—not as an entity apart from philosophical reflection, but as intricately intertwined with it. Ashok Collins offers a bold new perspective on the 'turn to religion' within deconstruction, charting fresh pathways for debate and reflection far beyond its established boundaries.

Reviews

Jean-Luc Nancy’s project for the deconstruction of Christianity is one of recent philosophy’s most challenging and controversial tasks. In this remarkable and lucidly argued study, Ashok Collins explores Nancy’s thinking in scrupulous detail, throwing new light in particular on its relationship with Derridean deconstruction. This is a work all readers concerned with reassessing the philosophical stakes of Christianity today will consult with enormous profit.
Ashok Collins offers us a meticulously argued and very compelling reading of Nancy’s texts on the “deconstruction of Christianity,” exploring their critical implications across Derrida’s writings, deconstruction, and the larger “theological turn” in Continental philosophy. The relations between philosophy, theology and religion are thought through to their decisive limits.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction – Christianity and the Origin
Caputo vs. Hägglund
Jean-Luc Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity
Luther and Heidegger
Does ‘Christianity’ Exist?
S’il y en a, or il n’y a pas?
Figuration
Outline

Chapter 1 – Creation Ex Nihilo: The Figurative Subject
God Without Being
Onto-theology
A Spinozan Rewriting of Being and Time
Invention
Who Comes After the Subject?
Ego Sum
Dardichtung
The Figurative Subject
Areality, or the ‘There’
The Fiction of Creation

Chapter 2 – Trinity: An Ontology of Relation
Alterity and Fraternity
Interior intimo meo
Singular Plurality
God as the Otherness of the World
The Renvoi and Resonance of Sense
Revelation and the Call
Caritas and Community
Adoration and the With

Chapter 3 – Incarnation: Writing the Tactile Body
Chrétien’s Spiritual Touch
Kenosis
The Body and Sense
Figuration, or Exscription
The Tactile Body
Eucharistic Touch

Chapter 4 – Resurrection: The Truth of Christianity
Hegelian Aufhebung
Salvation
Anastasis: Sight and Touch
Salutation and Relation
Testimony: Truth and Sense
Parousia: The Self-Overcoming of Revelation
The (Re)Birth of Christianity

Conclusion – The Future of Philosophy and Religion

Bibliography
Index

About the author

Ashok Collins

Ashok Collins is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the Australian National University. He has published his research in journals such as Research in Phenomenology, French Cultural Studies, Educational Philosophy and Theory and International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.

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