Invocation
François Laruelle
In Théologie clandestine pour les sans-religion: une confession de foi du non-philosophe (Paris: Kimé, 2019), 7-9.[1]
On what I do not know, the history and dogmas of religions (Christian or not), I will be silent. On faith too, but in another way, with another ignorance, I have nothing to say. By contrast, I will speak according to what faith-in-person forces me to say of dogmas and beliefs precisely with regard to faith and it alone. I practice faith as a lived experience foreclosed to theological knowing as much as to belief, or what I know-and/or-do-not-know without-knowing-it, as I do not know more concerning belief. I do not profess a faith. I confess or perform a faith as decision or secret which determines other secrets in order so that it remains what it is: a public secret. Faith is the clear secret which suspends the mysteries of belief. Yet, I will speak in the words that I know a bit of: the Christian religion, with the few concepts, dogmas and historical events that it provides me. Opposed to the spirit of modern and contemporary submission which is that of the sciences, philosophy and theology, some or other description of the historical state of things is not here in question one statement on the innumerable current geo-theological conflicts and undoubtedly those to come. Far from any philosophy like that of any history, I exercise a decision of faith where I hope that it is not in the sectarian way an auto-proclaimed faith and even less an attempt of taking power over the religious scene. I describe nothing of what exists as this is done almost everywhere. The religious facts that I sometimes invoke are not facts but symbols of a discourse which does not proceed towards up-to-date considerations and interpretations. It is a discourse of religion-fiction, theo-fiction against any theo-dicy, which must remain so at the risk and perils of the author and the reader.
Therefore, I confess a faith which has no respondent in religious beliefs, and which resists all philosophical (rational or Christian) explications, even when it finds in them the words to signify its transcendental theological appearance rather than to explicate it. Having received no mandate of any confession, exercising no priesthood or ministry consecrated in the name of a Church, foreign to the subtleties of theology but informed of those of philosophy which provide theology information [intelligence], finally considering the always renascent barbarism of religions and their destination of being the enemies of the human race, I authorize myself from this poverty and this solitude to give the symbols of a faith without authority rather than professing a philosophical opinion, and I only ask to what measure faith can raise the mountains of our beliefs and conformisms.
Apparently, this concerns a substitution of questions. I oppose what should I do as a Christian? with another question: what should Christianity do, or what is to be done with it? Making no exception to Christianity, the religions and the Churches are the work of works, the work-world, and must be measured by the yardstick of faith-without-world. Then, what is to be done with faith itself that the religions ask of me to profess and that they apologize for me and give me advice at worst, call on me at best, while faith has nothing of a belief and has primacy over any belief? There is a problem of use, a pragmatics of beliefs in accordance with faith-without-belief. Rightly, the fundamental religious and philosophical confusion of faith and belief submits faith to a foreign pragmatics at risk of losing it like currently in the labyrinth of individual practices of belief all distributed between the poles of conformism and sectarianism, conservative authoritarianism and anarchism.
We introduce the point of view called “generic,” in opposition to “theological,” within the problems of faith, religion and the non-religious distributed and conceptualized otherwise than by the religions and, among them, Christianity. This perspective poses the determinant primacy of Man-in-person over God, and faith, as being an immanent force without object, over the objects of belief, including religions. Primacy signifies unilateral duality rather than exclusion, and the symbol- or axiom-form of discourse rather than the concept. Faith can only be said in its effects with the help of a religious language which does not determine it but is associated to faith within axioms which form the real content of the theological Word. Whence the following theorem: there is something religious [il y a du religieux], but the religious is not real (real like faith) or is the symptom determined unilaterally as non-religious through the immanence of faith. The generic perspective introduces the subject to strictly human faith and introduces religions to non-religious democracy, the ensemble forming a religion-fiction. Theo-fiction is the real struggle against theo-dicy and true atheism. Theo-fiction is the a priori respect and a priori defense of Humans.
If deconstruction bears on the categories, for example, of faith without touching upon its intimate act (which is a theoreticism), dualysis intends to modify this act within its intimacy and transform it; it is precisely the practice of faith, and its fidelity comes not from concepts but rather from the life of the subject. There is no question of distinguishing what the discourse concerns and the inaccessible intimacy of the subject whose intimacy is precisely to utter the New Word.
[1] Any and all errors are my own. Please note that this three-page introduction is omitted from the translation of this book. Without including this introduction, the themes and approach that Laruelle takes throughout may seem unclear, including the role that theo-fiction plays against theodicy. The reader may consult my review of the translation in Arc 48. – Trans.
en-demic 