Of the One, of hierarchy

Jean-Luc Nancy, Cory Stockwell

Cultural Critique, 57, Spring 2004, pp. 108-110 (Article)
Published by University of Minnesota Press
DOI: 10.1353/cul.2004.0013
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Cultural Critique 57Spring 2004Copyright 2004 Regents of the University of Minnesota
OF THE ONE, OF HIERARCHY
TRANSLATED BY CORY STOCKWELL
Jean-Luc Nancy
If September 11 has made one thing clear, it is this: the
world is tearing itself apart along an intolerable division of wealth
and power. This division is intolerable because it does not rest on
any acceptable hierarchy of wealth or power. Ahierarchy signiWes,
according to etymology, a sacred character of principle or command-
ment. Now the world of techno-science, or the world of what I call
ecotechnicsthat is, a natural milieu made up entirely of the human
supplementation of a nature that has now withdrawnwhich is
also the world of democracy, of the universal rights of a man
assumed universal, the world of secularity or of religious, aesthetic,
and moral tolerance, not only prevents the establishment of differ-
ences of authority and legitimacy within a sacred system, but also
causes disparities or inequalities that openly violate its principles of
equality and justice to seem intolerable.
This is why our world is a world in which there can only be those
who dominate and those who are dominated, those who exploit and
those who are exploitedthere can only be this, and there cannot be
anything but this, from the moment that a general equivalency (the
Marxian name for money) begins to eat away at the truth of equality,
which is not equivalency but the parity of singular and singularly
incommensurable measures. In a way, equalityconceived of as the
parity of dignities that are singular and irreducible to an equivalent
contains a profoundly hierarchical principle: the fundamental (archic)
character [le caractre principiel (archique)] of a sacredness or sanctity
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of the singular (of multiple existence). A hierarchy without crown or
tiara, without dogma or sacrament, but not without truth and faith.
It must also be emphasized that what we call the instrumentation
of religions, or the deviation, perversion, or betrayal of this or that
religion (including the national theism of the United States), in no
way constitutes a sufWcient explanation. That which is instrumental-
ized or betrayed gives forth in and of itself the very elements of
instrumentalization or perversion. These elements are given, in a
paradoxical but obvious way, by the motif of the One: it is Unity,
Unicity, and Universality that are convoked on both sides of the
global confrontation, or rather in the world structured as a confron-
tation that is in no way that of a clash of civilizations (since Islam
is and always has been, even if not exclusively, part of the West).
Against the total mobilization (it is not by chance that I employ a
once fascist concept) proclaimed and remote-controlled in the name
of a single and unique God whose transcendental oneness brings
about an absolute hierarchization (God, the paradise of the believers,
the dust of all the restan all the rest that is also composed of a
great deal of dollars, missiles, and oil . . .), the total immobilization of
the situation (global capital) seeks to respond in the name of an
assumed universality whose Universal is named man, but which,
in its obvious abstraction, immediately gives itself over to another
God (in God we trust, in this God who blesses America [in English in
originalTrans.]).
The one and the other God are two opposed Wgures of the same
One, when this Oneness is understood as absolute Presence, consis-
tent in and of itself, like the invisible point (for a point is by deWnition
invisible) of the summit of a pyramid, whose essence this summit
resumes and reabsorbs. (One could say here: the value of the pyra-
mids of the Pharaohs lay not in the meaningless point of their
summit, but in the secret of death and life buried in their mass. Their
value lay in the profound retreat into a cryptic obscurity, not in the
point of an emphasized presence.) And one can say without being
anti-American (a ridiculous category) that it is the Uni-fying,
Unitary and Universal, Unidimensional, and Wnally (and this is its
internal contradiction) Unilateral model that made possible the sym-
metrical and no less nihilistic mobilization of a Monotheistic and no
OF THE ONE, OF HIERARCHY
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less unilateral model. We take the latter into consideration only be-
cause it has become the ideological instrument of the terrorism
with which we are familiar. But terrorism is the conjunction of
despair and a Uni-fying will that confronts the other face of the One.
This confrontation between the One and its substantiWed Unity
is none other than the internal confrontation of nihilism. Indeed, the
One has no more proven property than that of negating itself: either
it negates itself by limitlessly multiplying itself, or it negates itself by
turning itself into nothing.
Now what is thereby lost of the very essence of monotheism (in
all its forms) is precisely this: the one of god is in no way a One-
ness that is substantial, present, and uniWed in itself. On the contrary,
the oneness and the unity of this god (or the divinity of this one)
consist precisely in the fact that the One cannot be posed, presented,
or Wgured as united in itself. Whether he is in exile and diaspora, in
a becoming-man and in a being-triple-in-himself, or in the inWnite
retreat of the one who has neither equal nor likeness (nor even, there-
fore, any form of unity), this god (and in what way is he divine?
how is he so? this is what needs to be thought) excludes absolutely
his own presentationone would even have to say that he excludes
the very possibility of becoming a value or a presence.
The great mystics, the great believers, the great spiritualists of
the three monotheisms have always known this, in their exchanges
and their multiple confrontations with the philosophers with whom
they engaged, and for whom they remained, at the same time, out-
siders. Their thoughtthat is, their acts, their ethos, or their praxis
still awaits us. This does not mean that it awaits us in the future, but
that it is there, here, close at hand, if one can put it this way.
JEAN-LUC NANCY
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