The God between

Jean-Luc Nancy is without doubt a post-Marxist, post-Heideggerian and-I would add-post-Arendtian thinker.¹ His ontology bears traces of all three, but this ontology flows, above all, from an attempt to think creation ex nihilo after the death of the creator God. Even now, so long after Nietzsche, and so very long after Descartes set the process of secularization in motion, it is a thinking that is only uneasily, hesitantly under way. We have gone beyond God, as Nancy puts it, but in a direction still too much determined by the thought of his death and by the necro-monotheist tradition when what is needed is an exploration of the direction-directions, rather-that are constantly newly opened by our rather than God's creative capacities. If we examine the movement of the deconstruction of Christianity insofar as it is the specific deconstruction of creation ex nihilo, Nancy's new ontology emerges as symbolic and poetic but also, as we will see, as a natal ontology.