Contemporary Philosophical “Faith” without “Belief”: A Case of Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract

One of the characteristics of contemporary philosophy, at least in its phenomenological-poststructuralist lineage, is a kind of re/turn to religion. However, this re/turn itself is not properly religious; rather, it represents a “religion without religion”; it is a religion of exit from religion, a religion without belief – as it explores religious themes in a-religious, a-theological modes. At the same time, contemporary philosophy retains a discourse somehow related to “faith”, even if it is a kind of strange “faith”, if one can say so – “faith” in an impossible possibility of some inaccessible alterity opening up within the very limits of infinite finitude of human reason and worldly immanence. It can be deemed faith vis-à-vis religious belief as it is the act of reason relating itself to that which, in it, passes it infinitely, but on a-theological premises, i.e. in the absence of any metaphysical/theological principle, such as “God”, for example.
For exploring the theme of this paper – the contemporary philosophical reflection on “faith” – I will draw upon texts of a French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. His thinking is especially enlightening in this regard, for he has reflected on the subject of faith particularly, interpreting religious/Christian faith in his own fashion and then recognising these elements of faith in his own thinking when it reaches the very limits of the im/possible. Since Nancy’s understanding of faith cannot be viewed and understood separately from his project of the so-called “deconstruction of Christianity”, before explicating Nancy’s understanding of faith, interpreting it in Lutheran, Spinozian and Kantian terms in contemporary rendering, and also questioning it, I will first lay out and systematise some basic relevant, interrelated themes within this larger context, such as dis-enclosure of metaphysics, dialectic/identity of theism and atheism, auto-deconstruction of Christianity to the sense-of-the-world etc.