A revolutionary analysis of theistic religion

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	• Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) Jean-Luc Nancy Fordham University Press, 2008 - 200 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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A revolutionary analysis of theistic religion

Written by Jean-Luc Nancy (Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Universite Marc Bloch) and skillfully translated from the original French by the team of Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity most assuredly lives up to its subtitle as a methodical reverse-engineering of Christianity as a "religion that provided the exit from religion." Scrutinizing Christianity's constantly deferred proclamation of a forthcoming end times as a central tenet, and severely questioning the ramifications of such faith in today's demystified age, Dis-Enclosure suggests that the meaning to human existence is best searched for beyond the limiting constraints of dogma, though not necessarily beyond the mystery of faith itself. "The deconstruction of Christianity comes down to this: an operation of disassembling, focusing on the origin or the sense of deconstruction - a sense that does not belong to deconstructions, that makes it possible but does not belong to it, like an empty slot that makes the structure work (the question being to know how to fill the empty slot without overturning in the process the integrality of the integrity of the Christianity we are trying to disassemble)." An astutely reasoned philosophical text, offering a revolutionary analysis of theistic religion.

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Bon Mots

Magnificent, lyrical, probing, shifting, mesmerizing...this collection of essays is an utter masterpiece both in regards to content and form. Some of the best thought on religion to be shared in this, or for that matter any century. The conventional notions of what can be conceived with the words faith, hope, and belief are exploded, twisted, reversed and reformed...in a word reborn. This is the future.

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.

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