Of Divine Places

The question of "What is God?" is classic question that is admissible and admitted in the strictest theologies. It is theological because it assumes the existence of God. We must say that God is but it is possible we may not be able to say what his being is made of. This proves to be the question of the withdrawing of God. St. Albert the Great postulates that it is possible to say that God has an essence, yet it can be said with greater force that God has no essence since he is undenable to us. Therefore, it can be said that God is not predictable. In regards to the question of the sole eminent God,it can be said that God is the very fact of his being which is inaccessible. It both answers and dees the question. In one way or another, the god offers himself in his concealed presence. If the god no longer offers his presence or no longer conceals himself, he leaves bare places where no essence remain.

1. The question "what is God?" is essentially a monotheistic one. Not because it names God in the singular, as that is a consequence of monotheism. Monotheism is not a reduction of gods but a positioning of the divine. The divine becomes parallel to being, and its qualities and actions are dependent on its fact of being. It supposes being is one by denition. The question "what is God?" presupposes "what God is" when we ask ourself what is the peculiar being of the god that is. His qualities may remain unknowable, but his quantity is certain. And this forms the primary quality of all divine quality. Therefore, God is god insofar that he is, in being, one. The idea of preeminence in being-in-one is the nature of monotheism. God is at least the preeminence of being. Polytheism posits that these gods are, and as such have in common with all things that are. However, this in common does not constitute a preeminence of being. What does distinguish the god is a quality unique to the race of gods (immortality) and not many qualities unique to each of them. The divine quality does not exist by itself, just as human beings do not exist by themselves. Instead, existing occurs in a mortal or immortal manner [it is an action and not a fact.] The divine exists only in the god insofar that he is this or that god that exists immortally. Therefore, it becomes a question of who is that god. It is a question of the distinctness of existence, and not the preeminence of existence. That is why the question occasions new gods, as gods can turn up.

2. We cannot escape a sense of futility that emerges from the fact there remains nothing to be said about god. The question of God no longer means anything to us. This means that the theme of Godhas already moved or been carried completely outside of him. It is as if God was in fragments, like an Osiris dismembered throughout all of our discourse [this renders the Christian God into tangible pieces instead of an incorporeal notion]. Wherever God thinks, it encounters something that once bore, at one time or another, a divine name. Jean-Luc Marion once argues the encounter between the modern age and theology can be understood in terms of the principle of insufficient reason with modernity recognizing insufficiency everywhere. Theology poses this insufficient reason, which Marion calls the gap or the distinction, or the difference between beings opposed to the fullness of metaphysical being. In being rediscovered, God dissapears even more and definitively through bearing all the names of a generalized and multiplied difference. Monotheism thus dissolves into polyatheism. This polyatheism is not the true word and the true pressence of God in his distance from the supreme Being of metaphysics. There is no theology that does not turn out here to be either ontological or anthropological. The modern age secretly corresponds to the true destination of a theology, as it indicates to a theology that, in order to speak of God, we have to speak of something other than the Other, the Abstruse, and their infinite remoteness. If we do not understand what is here made clear to us, we will never move beyond an interminable post-theology. In such a post-theology transcendence endlessly converts to immanence. In baptizing out abysses with the name of God, we fill in the abysses by attributing a bottom to them and we blaspheme the name of God by making it the name of

something. Lvinas argues that God is infinite in the sense of being unthematizable. One thus findsoneself wondering whether any discourse on God can deviate, however slightly, from that of Hegel (even where he revised), that is to say from the discourse of philosophy itself, or of ontotheology. This turns everything into a question o baptism. This baptism is not a metaphor, and thematizes the mystery of the Sacrament in various discourses on the name, the proper name, the property of names, on election, the symbolic, and so on. It is therefore not enough to ask oneself what God is. We would need to be capable of asking, instead, if there is a place for god, or if there is still room for him. This means a place where he does not become indistinguishable from something else, and where it is consequently still worth calling him by the name of God.

3. Question regarding the divine places. Bossuet argues these places are within yourself, but what are these places?

4. Jean-Marie Pontevia once argued that the cult of the Virgin is a major event in Western history and is, perhaps, the last birth of divinity. This signifies that divine birth is always possible, and thus could happen again. [This seems paradoxical, but the possibility of the last birth allowing for future births is that the birth of the divine occurred within the frame of Western history through Christianity, and thus, it is possible to happen again. The alternative would be the presence of the Hebrew God who we cannot plot on the timeframe of history and thus transcends history through his presence in pre-historic civilization.] Such a birth is not a return or a restoration of a past divinity. The Virgin's birth did not restore a past religion, but instead marked a new age of painting [representations] in which God disappeared into the Concept [God cannot be represented visually]. Therefore, the birth of the Virgin was a sign opposed to God. [This disappearance of God makes the last God] The "last God" that Heidegger speaks of argues that there is always a last god that has yet to be born. Whether heis coming or disappearing [in his emergence he is either moving towards or away] -- and perhaps his coming is a disappearing -- his passing marks a sign. In passing he has an essential mode of Being through the wink. The wink refers to a calling or seducing, yet this wink signifies nothing [a blank sign]. To give a sign is always divine, and the Virgin marks the first time a signing occurs beyond "the sacred."

5. The questions "What is God?" and "who is this god?" are implied in one another. We cannot ask who this god is without knowing that we are dealing with a god or the divine. Similarly, we can only ask what is God when an existing being has presented himself to us as God. We recognize a god asdivine, not because we know what that means, but because god presents himself as divine. The divine is what manifests itself and can be recognized outside of its being. God does not propose himself as a new type of being that we must understand. He simply proposes himself, and that is all. This eliminatesthe question "what is God?" because this presentation makes it known. The question "what is God?" can only be asked when nothing makes itself known through its manifestations or wink, and all that remains of God is the name. Only then is it possible to ask what type of being this name signifies.

6. The question as to if God is a proper or common noun is a complicated one. A proper noun does not refer to the nature of being but to a particular being as a single subject. St. Thomas tells us thatGod is not a singular subject, though he is not a universal essence either. The common noun refers to the nature of a being, yet the nature of God's being is unknown to us. What remains is that the name God refers to his operations, and thats all that is knowable to us. This is a metaphorical name borrowed from one of its divine operations, as St. John of Damascene indicates. The more proper name for God is the name "He Is What He Is", yet the name God is superior in the task of signifying the divine. For St. Thomas, the more appropriate name is the Hebrew Tetragram which represents the very substance of God in a manner that is incommunicable and is singular [monotheism]. In this name, God is the preeminence of being but does so in a manner in which he is in some way singular while answering to an unpronounceable name. It is not a metaphor. The tetragram is the proper name for whose name

cannot be pronounced. Therefore, "God" -- what we call God and not the deity -- is the name of impropriety of the name. The tetragram is the common noun for this name. This is why treatises on God's name, from Pseudo-Dionysus and St. Thomas through to the present, repeat that God is unnameable. God is thus a common noun that becomes a proper name when it is addressed to a singular existence without a name.

7. The question "What is my God?" is not an appropriation, privatization, or subjectivization of God. "My God" says each time that I, alone, can call him. It is the act of someone who is singular calling upon and naming another singular being. When someone speaks they are addressing God. We say "my God" as we say "my friend" or "my lord." The possessiveness of this is an interpellative: you here are entering into a relationship with me. This does not ensure the relationship, but declares it and gives it a chance. Therefore, the question is a matter of entering into a singular relationship with the lack of a singular name. Therefore it must be asked: who has the right to ask what is my God?

8. God is not unnameable in the metaphysical sense that being is inaccessible to all name and, transcends all names (including Being itself) according to the tradition of onto-theo-logy. In that sense, unnameability is caused by an abundance and overflowing of names and language. The unnameability of God emerges from a lack of a name, and he is unnameable today because his name is lacking. It could be that the "unnameable" is never divine, and the divine is always named -- even if it's a want for a name. However, it is the proper name of God that is here wanted. This is the fate of all divine names. We can no longer use the name of gods to call upon them (Zeus, Indra, Yahweh, Jesus) [they are not though to influence the manifest world like Ancient Greek religion, or the invoking of Jesus's healing powers during the period of the gospels]. They are, as divine names, unpronounceable as they no longer call upon "my God." All divine names refer to the unpronounceable name, as seen in the tetragram. When Hlderlin argues sacred names are lacking, he is not implementing this treatise. Instead, this implies we know what such names are, not only peculiar to the divine, but shine light on the divine and make it known that it is the divine that is. These names are manifestations of the divine and are not far from being divine themselves. It is that these names are here and now lacking. With that said, there does still exist a mild sense of the divine that lingers when one says "My God" in a mode of relaxation. However, even this name is severely lacking. Hlderlin does not know himself what he is saying. Grammatically, all nouns must be capitalized in German, so it is unclear if when he says Der Gott if he means god or God. It names something divine that no longer has any identity, or else it names the unidentifiable.

9. It is not certain if the proper noun is a part of language in the way the common noun is. It may be that its nature is that of the Wink or a gesture that invites or calls. This means the lack of propernouns has nothing to do with the metaphysical register the sign has over the object, but instead refers tothe lack of the Wink's signifying gesture. It can only be judged in relation to gesture, and not sense. Forthis reason, there could be something of the divine in all proper names. It is not a lack of names, it is a lack of naming. Nancy turns to the example of Apuleisis's Isis, whose name details all previous names she has had in the past in different cultures [their perceptions of her/the divine being] before receiving the proper name Isis.

10. There is no doubt that God and gods have names, and that these names are proper to themselves and are sacred. What must be asked is if the non-presence of these names represents a simple lack of the names, or if it is a lack that belongs to the sacred itself. Heidegger argues that this lack is probably hidden in a reserve of the sacred. The lack of sacred names would thus be a way for the sacred to keep itself in reserve and withhold itself, and thereby offer itself and do so as its reserve and withdrawal. [Something cannot be offered that is ingrained in ontology] There is no longer a latent divinity; that is, there is no divinity hidden by appearances and reveals itself as present in its latency. There is nothing latent, only the manifest, and what is manifest is nothing other than the lack of sacred

names, visible and legible everywhere. There is no longer a single name that can be said in the most profane and ordinary way. [Do not use the Lord's name in vain] We no longer blaspheme God. The divinity is not concealed by this lack, passing from latency to latency. Instead, this lack shows that divinity is suspended. We must be cautious of the dialectical reserve that Heidegger's words might allow. Nancy argues we should interpret him as saying it is the sacred itself that is lacking, wanting, falling, or withdrawn. It bars the way to the sacred, and the sacred as such never comes. The divine withdraws from itself.

11. Nancy here attempts to force together Lvinas and Heidegger to argue that the lack of sacred names is the -Dieu of the sacred. [both goodbye and a sending to God] This comes from the depths of its withdrawal, a thought that is for the moment impossible, and impossible in any case as a unified thought. Each of them knows that a waiting concerning the divine is inscribed at the heart of our experience and the heart of Western necessity. For Lvinas, this waiting/vigil perishes and pushes to consciousness, man, the self, being and philosophy to the breaking point. This is a breach of immanence where a presence comes. This presence is God, the in-finite or the beyond of being and turns transcendence into an ethical each-for-the-other. This breach delivers the -Dieu. For Heidegger, the beach of immanence is constitutive of ex-istence. The god is not a presence that could come there, and thus Dasein becomes a being-unto-death and not unto-a-god. This act of ontological constitution opens onto the possibility of waiting for the strangeness of the divine. This would be a strangeness strange to the in-finite breaching of existence and of the existent. Dasein could be exposed to the divine, not in death, but as it were at the same time as to death. Therefore, the possibility of a being-unto-God is opened up but not established. This is the sign (Wink) that is addressed to the thinking of our times.

12. The singular address to God is prayer in general. The lack of names suspends prayer. To celebrate the transcendence of the subject/immanence of the divine is not to pray/ is no longer to pray. This act is seen in the German mystics to whom we are descendants. They posited the sublimeness of God (today the sublime has taken shape as a negative theology). To pray is rst and foremost the naming of a singular god. Yet because there lacks a name, all that remains is a distant quotation/citationin memory. This memory sustains the reality of a lack of prayer. It is a recitation that prays for the wantof prayer. It is a litany [petitions for use in church services or processions recited by clergy and responded by the congregation] laid bare.

13. There is a tendency in contemporary culture that makes it difcult to speak of "god." There has been a so called return of the spiritual and religion that has occurred simultaneously with the rise ofreligion in Polish history, the end of Marxism, the recent assertiveness of Islam, the return to circulation of several strands of Jewish thought. All of these have been exploited and enlisted in the promotion of a new cultural value deemed necessary in a jaded Western world that has lost faith in all ideologies. The death of God called for and brought out a mode of thought that ventured out to where God no longer guarantees either being or the subject of the world. At these extremes, no god could existfor two reasons. First, no reason why the divine should baptize that which explores or confronts its withdrawal. Second, gods are always coming though they never arrive. [Kafka's the law] Forgetting thedeath of God is tantamount to forgetting thought. The return of religion presents itself at the same time and in the same colours as the return of empirico-liberal-pragmatism seen in Karl Popper that too forgets thought by reecting the actual "spiritual content" of the movements of opinions.

14. "What is God?" is a question of man wanting for prayer and divine names. Hlderin's question "who is god?" is a question taken up by Heidegger, and is a question to hard for man and has been asked too soon. The world is unknown for God. He is the invisible, and delegates/sends/destines himself in the visible as something foreign in which he is all the more invisible. God is therefore he who wishes to be unknown. He sends himself to the visible to be invisible. [No one can be unknown in

society, and thus delegates the unknown to god] God is therefore not the Hegelian Absolute who wishesto be close to us. When he sends himself to us, he does not want to be close to us. He wants to send himself to us as a mechanism of his being invisible. [His presence is acknowledged while he remains invisible] God is that which does not know the world and remains unknown to it, yet still penetrates it and sends itself to it. For Heidegger, God is thus manifest by the heavens and offered to us as such. However, this would mean that God is visible, which he is not. God is not manifest by the heavens, he is manifest as the heavens. This means he is a radiance opened and offered upon all. The radiance of the divine is equal to the heavens, but not manifest by it. It may be that God is manifest selfsame as everything that is open and offered and that he has dispatched himself in. But this is not a (re)presentation of the god. The heavens is the space of the divine, but it is not a visible image of the invisible. God does rest here, but it is a "here" that does not serve as a mediation for god. Here the god lets himself be seen manifestly invisible, and invisibly manifest. God reveals himself, and in doing so isalways a stranger in his manifestations and revelations. Revelation is not a manifestation or presentation. It is a revealing of a possibility of being-unto-god, and that this is possible through the ability to die in the face of God.

15. The essence of god is recognizable by two features. First, that man is not god. And second, that man and the god are together in an identical region of being (this region is not being itself; in Lvinas' language, it is a "beyond being"). Man and the god's radical difference is the opening of the sacred. They disclose themselves to each other, and perhaps as a means of each other. They are those who become disclosed in their strangeness. When man and god cease to disclose themselves as strangers and their strangeness, god ceases to exist [because god becomes something understandable to man, and this - by the logic of the bible - is impossible. Or, perhaps, it is because the god who is not strange would be a human]. Perhaps one day we will be forced to face the fact that the only thing that distinguishes god is his strangeness.

16. If God is God, his death is the supreme strangeness. Hegel cannot think of this except as the death of death, and this leads him dumbfounded as it is not something that he can comprehend. [Sublime?] This leaves him suspended [he cannot move past the death of god, thus leaving him suspended in the act of thought]. In the death of God, something is announced or called upon. It is true that gods are immortal and will rise again. Resurrection is the manifestation of the god insofar as he comes in his own withdrawing, leaving his mark in its own obliteration, and revealed through his own invisibility. God is invisibly manifest and manifestly invisible. What resurrection ultimately refers to the radiance of manifestation. This is not a dialectic, but that can only be revealed by God. This radiance -- like that of the heavens -- emerges from the shadows understood as the absence of the worldand god. Divine radiance is just as much a manifestation of this darkness, which is itself divine. This is not a dialectic because "death" and "resurrection" do not really apply to God -- gods are immortal. What gods do have in common with the heavens [and thus death and resurrection must pertain to the heavens] is the interplay between darkness and radiance. If humans have the possibility or freedom to be-unto-god, unto what or unto whom can God be? It cannot be unto anything unless it is divine manifestation itself. Therefore, the god is not the freedom to be-unto in general. He is pure radiance, which withdraws him.

17. Gilles Aillaud argues that the invisible does not conceal itself like an essential secret similar to the seed of a fruit. Freely displayed for all to see, and the hidden always protects the un-hidden. Nancy writes gods always protect mortals and expose to them what they really are. In doing so, he exposes himself for all to see, though in a manner that is withdrawn like the heavens. On this, Seneca wrote that many beings akin to the divine both ll our eyes and escape from them. Nancy argues this is our condition; eyes both lled and escaped by divinity.

18. Origen argues that if there is an image of the invisible God, it is invisible. [Image as

representation]

19. One might say that there is nothing more divine than a new god shining in all his young splendour. But this new god never comes in any temple. It instead appears in art. Art is sacred, and is sonot because it is the service of worship, but because it makes manifest the withdrawal of divine splendour and the manifestation of all its manifestation. This is clear in a passage from Hegel that shows the gods in a manner in which fate is shown offering their absence to us. It contains a young girl,who Nancy argues is herself a work of art as she is deprived of divine life, turning her into a goddess asshe is exposed to her own withdrawal.

20. All art is sacred and nothing but art is sacred least it is art or emerges through it. During the Reformation, Christianity forgot this though Catholicism forgot God and thus subsequently lost art, making them indistinguishable today. There is no profane art, and there is nothing sacred outside us. However this is only intelligible if we have done with aesthetics. The divine manifests itself at the limits of art, but without art, nothing would reach those limits. If we reject aesthetics, ought we not alsobe done with the divine?

21. Usener saw a primary species of gods in those he called the gods of the instant, which are divinities attached to nothing other than a momentary state, sensation, or isolated feeling. He is wrong to be content with what we might call the positivist and anthropocentric notion of divinization when describing this encounter and this nonconceptual designation of the god. However, he does unwittingly furnish the essence of all divine manifestation: the bare thing which you see before you, that and nothing else is the god. God is never anything other than a singular, bare presence. Therefore, all gods are gods of the instant, for as long as they can or wish to endure.

22. Nancy presents a series of binaries of gods, arguing that they are all the same. Most important of these is the binary between the god who approaches man to the extent of touching him, and the god who retreats from man to the extent of abandoning him infinitely. They are the same as the god who touches man touches him so as to leave him to himself [thus a movement away from god as the subject retreats inward], and not to take hold of him and detain him [binding them together, and thus not moving away]. Pascal's first dissertation follows from this.

23. Judaism is an atheism with God. Protestantism is a theism without God. Catholicism is the worship of all gods in God, or the loss of God in all gods. Islam is the pure proclamation of God to the point where it becomes an empty clamour. Buddhism is the worship of God in all gods or the loss of allgods in God. Philosophy thinks the communication beyond its confines and the absolute alienation of the infinite substance of God. This brings the universe in which God has been the pain and fervour of infinite separation comes to an end. All religions are inseparable from philosophy as they share the onto-theo-logical end of religion. Paganism can only be grasped as an extremity where the death of godis already offered to us. The death of God is the final thought of philosophy, which thus proposes it as an end to the religion. It is toward this thought that the west will have tended. The death of God does not mean the god dis in that thought, since he rises again there endlessly. Instead, he is abandoned there or he abandons us there. He abandons us to our philosophy and our religion of the death of god.

24. We must not jump to the conclusion that the god of the philosophers is nothing but a vanity. Every philosopher, in their own way (but always through the order and the ordeal of thought), experiences the approach or the flight of the divine. There is at the heart of every great philosophy a mystery concerning God or the gods. This is not to say that the mystery is the heart of philosophy that bares it. Instead, it is placed in the heart of philosophy, though it has no place there. In divine understanding there is a system, though God himself is not a system, but a life. There is a deep-rooted equivalence between system and life, and this makes a statement seen in Schelling that contradicts itself. It tends or pretends to something that is not exhausted by that equivalence and that testifies here

to the ordeal of thought. It makes the god or the gods the concern of the God of philosophers by his own doing.

25. Despite their link, the art and the divine are two distinct things. The thing which the divine manifests is placed in the sphere of art. This reduces art as such to nothing. Then, art sets what it puts towork in the sphere of he divine, because it is always a god that offers us art. Bait because it is art and aslong as it's art, it keeps the divine at a distance. Therefore, art is profane -- just as science and thought are, and no less than those two. There exist two kinds of the sublime, and the division is equal to that ofthe distinction between art and the divine. There is the sublime of art seen in Kant, Benjamin, and up tothe present. This refers to the fainting away of the sensible, to the farthest extreme of presentation, and the extreme where the outside of presentation offers itself, and the offering up of the subject to this offer. The other is the divine sublimity, which Hegel seeks to characterize the Jewish moment in religion. In this case, the presence of God overwhelms the sensible. [God as the inconceivable, seen in Moses] The coming of God reduces the phenomenon to nothing. The sublime is here no longer found atthe furthest extreme of presentation where presentation is transformed into offering. The sublime, instead of the gesture of offering, becomes the imposition of glory. It is the light that disperses the visible, instead of the limit of forms and figures. God imposes his presence outside of all presentation. He comes in the ruin of all appearing. Art, instead, infinitely incises the edges of appearance, but keeps it intact. [The cutting of crossing?] Between the sublime thing of art and sublime thing of the divine, there is an infinitesimal difference that lies between presentation at the limit and naked presence. Each can offer the other, but also it is impossible to confuse one from the other.

26. Who ever speaks of god runs the risk of sacrilization of discourse. The language that namesGod is always well on the way to taking on some semblance of his glory. Alternatively, it is the prophetic bombast that threatens sacred words like God, the divine, Holy, and sacred itself. They have a mystic intensity. In each case, discourse appropriates to its own advantage the hierophany (manifestation of the sacred) behind which it ought to disappear. We must not be blind to the danger today of a certain spiritual posturing of a particular bland or sublime tone with which a Sacred dimension is rediscovered. It is one of the best signs of the absence of the gods. When the god is there, his presence is close, familiar, simple and unobtrusive, even though it is strange, disconcerting, and inaccessible.

27. The essence of art is to be offered, and it is a god or goddess who offers us art. However,art does not lead to god. Indeed nothing leads to god. The gods come or do not come. They impose their presence or they withdraw.

28. Alain argues that the god is almost always the imminence of a god, or the possibility of a god. It is a resolute gesture of welcome to the divine to keep the possibility for man to have a being-unto-god. It is as if this undecidedness alone i already unto-the-god. However, it is not by definition, and that is why Alain is wrong.

29. Being is not God in any way. Being is the being of beings, or, what is. It is what it is about a being that that being is. [ontology] The god, on the contrary, is. If he is not, then there is no god. If there is no being, however, then there is being. The god therefore is a beng, and in that respect he is onebeing among all other beings. Being is the being of the god, as it is the being of every other being, [all exists through good, i.e modalities in Spinoza] but the god is not the god of being. God is not the supreme being. God is the being we are not, but which is not a being at our disposal in the world around us either. God is the being we are not, which is not at our disposal either, but which appears or disappears before the face of the existing, mortal beings we are. From here we can understand why Godis the creator [since all being is a mode of being under his[. Yet God the creator is not he who makes being, as nothing and no one makes beings be. Instead, being makes the being of beings, and this isnot a making but rather a being. Therefore, God is a creator through simply being. Beings appear

before him, emerging from the nothingness of their being. They are summoned and appear before him, who manifests himself or conceals himself before their face in the visible. It is not that invents light in Genesis, but that light appears before him and he sends himself through them. Nothing can be summoned to appear bfore being, for being has no face and utters nothing. Being, by not being, delivers beins up to what they are. Being detaches itself from the nothingness it is. Being does not make beings, but it finishes them off. There can exist relations like god to man, or man to god. Beings, on the other hand, have no relation to being [impossibility of ontology in actualized life]. Nothing otherthan the act that beings are exists. The divine is that, or he, with which or with whom man finds himselfinvolved in a certain relation, be it one of presence or of absence, appearance or disappearance. He involves the star in it with him. This is why the gods just like a person, star, or a bird have places. Being has no place. It is the disposition or spacing out of beings according to their place. It is not, and this not-being consists in the fact that beings are dis-posed through their places and their times. The gods have their places and their times. They are immortal and they have a history and a geography.

30. The propositions God exists, God does not exist, and the proposition 'God exists' (and the opposing proposition too) has no meaning have all been proven. These have demonstrated nothing other than the fact that being both is and is not. Therefore, these proofs are based on a confusion, in it's discourse and between being and God. There is necessarily being and God both. There is necessarily being, or some being, as soon as we admit that there is something. Then it was demonstrated that this there is of being is in itself nothing that is. On the other hand, if the advancing or thinking of these proofs there was anything that was at the same time preserved from this confusion and that truly had to do with the divine as such, it must be a totally different type of concern. It cannot be the concern to show that God ( = necessary being) is, but the concern to intimate that God exists. To intimate that God exists means that he cannot be according to the mode of what we know and grasp as positions of being,and that this is quite a different existence and ordeal of existing. On this subject, proofs and counter proofs have doubtless always concurred. The proof of the existence of God corresponds to the ordeal ofhis im-mediacy. The critique of this proof again corresponds in its turn to this experience of being overwhelmed. We thus need to ask some quite different questions. Not where God exists, but how he withdraws from existence and how he is not where we expect him to be, how he does not duplicate in another world the mode of existence of our own, but is in ours the existence of that other world, or else how his existence is strictly inseparable from that of the world, an animal or a star, a person or a poem, and how it unceasingly remains beyond the reach of all these existences, and so forth.

31. Wherever divine service takes place, we cannot be sure that it is not merely the pious and ridiculous repetition of what it once was, or else that it is not confined to being the exercising of a social convention or a social obligation. We can only say where and when true worship takes place when god is present at the ceremony. But in that case, we are not far from saying that the presence of god replaces the mimicry of worship. We feel that there must be worship, or divine service. We feel thatthere must be celebration of the glory of God. Yet, we can say nothing about worship. We can say there are men and women who observe rituals, but we also have to take account the possibility of gods wandering from place to place without allotted temples or established rituals. It could be that it is henceforth a wandering of the gods that divine worship and its permanent locations must be adapted. It is a wandering and not a straying of the gods. There is no ritual of wandering. However, in the divine wandering a ritual remains to be invented or forgotten.

32. Just as former materialists or former freethinkers began intoning the mumbo jumbo of a return of the spiritual, theologians were getting down to reading the Scriptures and understanding the message of faith in terms of all the codes of sciences of this world: semiology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, sociology and so on. General anthropology was called upon with the sole end of converting the word of God into human speech, so that men might better grasp its divine import. It is now

necessary that we learn that no Scripture can be of any help to us, either as a decoded message or a mystery held in reserve. This is not to say there is no longer a Book, as there undeniably is. However, the book is no longer as we ought to know, as seen in Mallarm, Joyce, Blanchot and Derrida. The text has proliferated, but has become scattered and fragmented in all our writings. The writing we practice which obligates us and is infinite to us. Scripture is undone and swept away in it, without end, without god, definitively without God or his word toward nowhere except this carrying away, and this disaster and this fervour bereft of faith and piety. Writing and its trace lie outside of Holy Scripture along its outer edge which they contribute endlessly to fraying and breaking down. Writing will no longer speak of the divine. It no longer speaks of anything but its own insistence which is neither human nor divine. Face to face, but without seeing each other from now on, the gods and men are abandoned to writing.

33. All gods are odious and all sacrality is oppressive either through terror or through guilt. All sacrifice is traffic in victims and indulgences. Christ's sacrifice sums it all up: mankind redeemed as if it were a band of slaves, at the cost of the most precious blood. The gods are odious to the extent that they saturate the universe and exhaust mankind. This is always measured by religion, and religion and the sacred are always the measure of the divine. The god who deserted religion would no longer be a god. The gods prevent the supreme undecidedness of man. They close off his humanity and prevent him from becoming unhinged, from measuring up to the incommensurable. In the end God sets the measure. The gods forbid that man should be risked further than man. And most serious of all, they take away his death. That is to say they take away his sacrifice as understood as his abandonment. There is an abandonment that is not traffic, but that is an offering, an oblation, a libation. There is that: a generosity and a freedom outside of religion. Nancy is not sure whether this abandonment is still to gods, to another god said to be coming, or to no god. But it has death as its generic name, and an infinite number of forms and occasions throughout our lives. No doubt this abandonment has always forged a path for itself through the religions. Religious experience is exhausted. It is an immense exhaustion. There is no return of the religion. There are the contortions and the turgescence of its exhaustion instead (protestantism in America, Islam in Africa, the Catholic church in Poland or South America, etc). No god would be unrelated to atheism. No god would mean God's place really wide open and vacant [in atheism the place does not exist]. It could be the god so close that we can no longer see him. Not because he has disappeared inside us, but because in coming closer and disappearing the closer he comes, he has made all our subjectivity disappear with him. He would be so close that he would not be ither before us or in us. He would be the absolute closeness to ourselves. This is a naked presence, or a presence itself as such. But presence itself as such does not constitute asubject. It oes not constitute a substance, and that is why there is no god in it. The accomplishment of the divine would be no god's presence. God in this sense has always signified the very idea of the Subject, the death of death, truth and life in the suppression of existence and of singular exposure in theworld, in the suppression of place and instant. The presence of no god would be its suspension, that is, life suspended at each instant suspended in its exposure to things, to others, to itself. This is existence as the presence of no subject, but the presence to an entire world. An invisible presence everywhere offered selfsame with being-there, selfsame with the there of being, irrefutable and naked like the brilliance of the sun on the sea. The presence of no god could, however, carry with it the enticement, the call, or the wink of an -Dieu. Perhaps this is written between the lines of the very principle of onto-theo-logy.

34. Nothing new came from Christianity, apart from a new configuration for the Western world. St. Paul drains from the language of Hellenistic mystery religions a trace of Jewish baptisms and offers it in the imperious style of Roman activism to a world given totally to morals. By morals, Nancy fuses Hegel and Nietzsche. Morals did not come from Christianity, but Christianity originated in morals. Morals are neither religious not philosophical. What was new with Christianity was simply the roman order which provided morals within a frame. In that sense, Christianity was the Empire depoliticized

and rendered moral, which is also to say unburdened of strictly Roman sacrality. It rendered morals imperial. But what was radically new was the opening out of humanism and atheism and simultaneous invention of theodicy considered as the general matrix of modern historical thinking of technology or politics. Theodicy can only emerge when the god is in decline and finds himself tangled up as he declines in the affairs of the world. It is thinking about meaning and the guarantee of meaning. It is the truth of Christianity, of that religion that abolishes all religions and itself, having completed the task of making the gods odious. The man-god himself abandoned by God is the last species of odious gods. This marked the return in the modern guise of dialectical thinking of the old ordeal of the religion of the God who abandons the religion that the Western world looks upon as that of the Jewish people, the people whom God had kept aside to be the age-old Anguish of the world, and that was destined to witness the agony of the end of the world of the gods, as Hegel says. With Judeo-Christian religion, moral assurance and anguish at the passing of the gods progressed side y side. If we are to pass beyond our atheism one day, it will be because we no longer even pray to God to deliver us from God.

35. Christian faith exposed something Christ. Christ here represents a mystery of the man-god corresponding to the fact that the essence or the instant or presence of the man-god union of two natures through subsistence. This is not a fusion but a single place of subsistence or presence, a place where the god appears entirely in man, and man appears entirely in God. This is how man appears to the god, in the god, how the god appears to man, in man, and how that itself is totally unapparent. In this unapparent appearing, faith and theology somewhere link up, while religion and philosophy turn away from this point. What the mystery of Christ borders on is this point of their im-mediacy that can no longer be preserved as if it belonged to an order of faith distinct from an order of reason and of institution. On the contrary, this is what we must affirm. Faith, as long as it is faith, belongs neither to the inwardness nor to the feelings of the faithful. Faith is entirely an outward act of presence of the order of presence and of manifestation, because it is faith in god, it is like clearly turning one's face toward the manifest heavens. There is no faith in a vanished god. As he withdrew he took faith with him, s faith never relates to darkness, but solely to the radiance of the divine. Therefore, what puts us face to face with the no-god cannot be faith. Faith is faith in mystery which god made evident. Along with the god and with faith, mystery has withdrawn. There is no more mysterious revelation, no more mystical revelation not even the soberest, most reserved sort, the sort most given up to its own darkness or its own unapparentness. There is a zero mystery inscribed in the margins of holy books andat the close of the prayers of those who still meditate before the mystery. This is much more and much less than the mystery of the death of god. Zero mystery means no mystery, and the mystery of there being none. There exists a zero mystery about the clarity regarding the nature of the things among which and to which our existence appears. It is a zero mystery and thus there is nothing to seek, nor to believe. But it is a mystery in that this manifest world is precisely what conceals itself.

36. In the end the prayer which is judged to be perfect resists. It is a mark that is difficult to toatally erase, and a generous abandonment to divine generosity. The title Father appears suspect to us. We see only to well what this god is modeled on. But perhaps we see very badly. Perhaps the father, for those who made up this prayer and for those who prayed it, was not something paternal on the lines of our petty family affairs; perhaps paternity was nothing more, but also nothing less, than the obscure evidence of a naming.

37. The highest and most demanding idea of God, or the absence of all idols, emerges at the limits of criticisms of the idols. In opposition to the idol there is no idea from which we can form God or his absence in a metaphysical sense. Idols are only idols with regard to the idea. However, it could be that beyond idea or idol we seen God's smile like an idea imprinted on an idol. This would not be a representation of God but an exposure. The place of gods has no place. It is delineated by the smile of the gods. Where God presents himself, he withholds his name and divine knowledge. However, this

withholding is imprinted upon an idol as God's smile.

38. Hallelujah once was a word or shout for the god whose life was nothing but joy. Now joy and the thought of joy keep the,selves secret. When we are concerned with the gods or no god, we are concerned with joy.

39.A dual temptation is always present. On the one hand there is a temptation to baptize every obscure connes of our experience. On the other hand there is a temptation to reject such a baptism as asuperstitious metaphor. In the history of Western thought no argument concerning God has avoided oneor both of these temptations. God is not a manner of speaking. Men and women are gods, as they are distinct and cannot exist. Occupying the same world, they come to face with each other at a dividing and retreating line. In this face to face encounter where their unreserved appearing of one to another, they are engaged in an irredeemable strangeness. They thus have no names for each other, as gods do not have names for mankind. Thre are no names in the language of the gods [there is no name that expresses their singleness as a being]. The name of God is the lack of the sacred in names. Therefore, men and women come together face to face unnameable and perhaps incompatibly.

40. God is of the community. If there is no more god, there is no more community. This is why community has been capable of becoming destructive of its members. It cannot be brought back face toface with its vanished gods. Therefore God is not for the community. Community indicates the gods have taken their leave. We should instead say the god is always for several people together. We should lead community to the disappearance of the gods. In place of communion there is no place.

41. God is indistinguishable from his own essence. A god is a presence, or a some one presentor absent that is outside itself. This means it does not have God or the divine as its essence. Essence becomes indistinguishable from the mode of presence or absence from that singular mode of manifesting.

42. I am God presupposes God is a Subject. Yet A god signifies something other than a subjet but another sort of thought which can no longer think itself identical or consubstantial with the divine that it questions or that questions it.

43. Gods went away a long time ago, according to Cercidas of Megalopolis. Our history beginswith their departure or after it, or, when we stopped knowing they were present. They cannot ever return.

44. The divine is a smile.

45. The body of the god is not a presence in the sense of a here or there, but rather as a body that comes. Its presence is the face that we are offered.

46. Naming or calling the gods does not reside in the name, but in whole phrases with rhythms and tones.

47. God expels man. From both inside and outside itself, man is in state of destitution. It is in destitution or abandonment man dates God. This is not the magnicence of worship.

48. Ritual exposes us to the divine mystery and nakedness of God. This is an act of touching thesacred and is thus obscene. All experience of the temple is experience of the obscene. Obscenity is the deriliction of dasein and disquieting essence of power. It is no longer possible as the temples are deserted and our experience of the divine is that of desertion. It is that a God may come. That space is left open.

49. All that remains is destitution, and we are offered in destitution. Yet there are no obligations,so we need not so this. God has no part in the law. This takes place nowhere as there is no longer a

place of the gods.

50. The possibility of God returning exists. The divine is an emptying of God of himself, his separation from man, and his absoluteness. It is the negation of his own particularity into a universality of radiance.

51. Divine places without gods are all around us. They are open to us and offer new spaces.

Questions:

The idea of God as intangible is not new, but has actually always been the argument dating back to Judaism. What about Nancy is new and/or radical? On 124, they are together in radical difference.

Is our subjectivity as conditioned by religion and Christianity as Nancy suggests? What about our morality?

In part 49, Nancy says God has no place in the law. The law, of course, is central to Judaism and is divine. I am reminded of Kafka, who - when read in a religious light - Is seen to argue divinity is lacking from the meaning of the law, as there is an innite space between man and God, and thus the meaning never arrived. In Kabbalah, the law is thus an interpretation of what the law would say if this message were to arrive. Earlier, in Shattered Love, Nancy references Kafka, so we know he is on his radar. Is Nancy building on Kafka?

Is the lack of places of the gods tied to humanism in a turn away from God to the human potential?

Part 51 says the divine places without God is an opening up of new spaces. Is this related to making one's own meaning in Nietzsche following from nihilism and the death of God?

Of Divine Places