The Fragile Skin of the World. Jean-Luc Nancy
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Mediterranean, from Egypt, and from the Etruscans. What develops there is a powerful catalyst from which emerges a new culture of mastery and enterprise, project and emancipation. Christianity is a double symptom of this: on the one hand, it transfers power outside of the world, situating glory and accomplishment in another kingdom (thus effectively slitting the throat of the terrestrial kingdom), and on the other hand, by inviting man to renew himself, it opens him to a liberty that is no longer that of status, but activity: the new man is a task to undertake. In this sense, Christianity at once diverts and galvanizes the energetic, achievement-oriented drive that the Roman mutation bore.
This does not immediately produce all of its effects, which require detours as long as those that preceded the Roman Empire. But when the mutation that initiates modern Europe begins, we already find the threefold characteristic of technique, domination, and wealth that will henceforth be at the heart of a heightened complexity of Christianity, which has at once installed itself as terrestrial power and, by this very fact, finds that it is obligated to call itself into question and to displace itself (if not to deconstruct itself) – just as it is always in the process of doing.
I will return below to this complexity. For the moment, I will conclude with the birth of what, in six or seven centuries, has become the West. (I will bypass here the part played in this history by Islam, which was initially a notable participant in this enterprise, before turning away from it and towards another history.)
Towards the fourteenth century, the sequence that is proper to the Western enterprise gets fully underway: technics, domination, and wealth arise from a single principle, one based on setting in motion and expanding. What we call capitalism represents the systematic development of this principle, for which one might propose the name investment. To ‘invest’ is to surround, to envelop (to ‘vest’) a specific object in order to appropriate it. Technics invests a specific operation (that of transporting, piercing, etc.); domination invests the exercise of control (of people, goods, techniques); wealth – considered here as tending completely towards that of use – invests the growth of its own capacity to invest (thanks to and for the purpose of every kind of technics and domination).
Almost a century ago, during the Second World War, Valéry was able to write:
Europe is coming to the end of an incredible, brilliant, and deplorable career, bequeathing to the world [. . .] the dark present of positive Science and the sad example of a wealth that nowhere before has taken such complete precedence over customs, traditions, and every possible thing.3
By ‘positive science’, Valéry means, as he says elsewhere, science as ‘power – that is, formula or recipe for action’, in other words what has come to be known as ‘techno-science’, which it suffices to call ‘technics’. As for wealth, Valéry is neither a social Christian nor a communist, which makes his judgement all the more striking. All that remains is to note the convergence of science and wealth, which he does elsewhere: ‘The power of action has conquered the domain of knowledge [. . .] along with its practical equivalent of wealth, and all the unstable properties of the latter.’4
We can hardly do more than add the following, which was not yet clearly visible for Valéry. One of the unstable properties of wealth lies in the way it transforms: on the one hand, it transforms social relations, to the point of dragging the greatest number into misery, reserving for an ever smaller majority an ever more insolent and powerful opulence; on the other hand, it transforms the relations of subsistence between man and the rest of the world into a paralysis of such a nature that subsistence exhausts itself within it.
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What exhausts itself is the West itself. This affirmation, to restate it once more, has nothing to do with a teleological or destiny-oriented vision: the succession of Western sequences obeys an investment the limit of which can consist only in a loss of the very possibilities of investing. This may be what is happening to us right now. But it would therefore not be a matter solely of energetic limits – whether one speaks of kinetic energy, of the appetite for domination, or of the exponential growth of wealth. If one or another of these registers, or more likely the weaving-together of all three, undergoes a serious collapse, it will only be to the extent that the investment underpinning the entire ensemble has begun to collapse: namely, that of a power that is unlimited – whose investment, in other words, consists of its own exercise.
At the horizon of an endless expansion of technics and its domination, it is no longer a matter of being ‘master and possessor of nature’ as Descartes wished it: it is a matter of taking an endless pleasure in oneself (somewhat in the manner of the Hegelian spirit), which also (endlessly) ends up in a complete self-exhaustion. It is no longer a matter of man, but of a self-sufficiency equal to his self-exhaustion.
It is extremely tempting at this point to protest that it makes no sense to think that man, and perhaps life and nature alongside him, might disappear in this passage to the limit of his own power. Why would it not make sense? The question can be asked. It is not clear that the value that we believe we attribute to man – and even the one we believe we attribute to life – is a value, in other words a sense worthy of this name. In fact, it may be that, if the sense of man and that of life were given by man himself, or indeed by life itself, they would remain far removed from what an infinite sense would demand! Hans Jonas assured us that our responsibility is ‘to ensure the permanence of an authentically human life on earth’.5 The term ‘authentically’ harbours a problem that paralyses from the outset the very idea of such a responsibility.
The idea of an authentic man or an authentic life can only be spoken of from a point of view that is neither human nor living, which is precisely what we lack.
It is impossible for us to decide in favour of an authenticity whose content is not indicated to us – or, on the contrary, if everything about this authenticity might lead us to consider that its content is to be found precisely in the endless deployment of an autonomous power, one that would have spread via man to the entire world. What if authentic man were the one by way of whom the final blaze of glory, and subsequent extinction of the ‘creative unconscious’, came to fruition?
One could do much worse than to consider the Heideggerian motif of the Brauch of man by being: the use of man by his own ex-istence – and thus the use of use itself, of its utilization, of its utility and its erosion [usure] as the erosion of sense itself. Because sense, after all, does not have to be interminable. It is rather infinite each time in the truth of its interruption: in an encounter, in a culture, in a work, in an existence. In this sense, it is interminable because it can always be interrupted and revive itself in or from its interruption (all of the issues concerning the ‘work’ come together in this point).
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What makes us indignant is the ignominy of an injustice and a denial of humanity in the irresistible deployment of power. There is no resistance to this irresistibility that is not obliged, if it is a real resistance, to proceed by way of a re-questioning of what we believed we were able to name the ‘authenticity of human life’. Coming back to the beginning of my remarks, I would say: just as the saturation and the anxiety of Rome triggered the rise of Christianity (in all its ambivalence), in the same way it is not impossible to imagine that the saturation and the anxiety of our time – which has lasted for more than a century – may trigger a tremor, one that is also unforeseen and unidentifiable, one that also brings with it a line of flight with regard to the chain of succession in which we feel trapped.
What is most important is that this tremor can only be of the order of what Marx calls ‘spirit’ when he excoriates religion (and along with it, basically everything that claims to give a sense to the world) as ‘the spirit of a world without spirit’. What does the word spirit mean? It is without fail that which always arises unexpectedly and without identity. It is without fail that which is without past and without future – as the Son of God and autonomous Man once were. And if our time tests us with an injustice deprived of any horizon, it is certain that the spirit to come is that of a justice that