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5.0
Masha Tupitsyn writes:
Lecturing about God in a series of dialogues for children called, God, Justice, Love, Beauty, Jean-Luc Nancy states:
“God is perhaps a way of answering: there is no point, no rhyme or reason, and that’s why it is good. It is open, it is available. Available for any number of things, but at the same time for nothing. Sometimes what we do best is nothing, doing nothing, letting things be… Now I am not telling you to do nothing… But, more deeply, when one really thinks about one’s life, about what one does. A little while ago, when I spoke to you about joy or love, even about justice in the sense I tried to describe, what is all that about? It is really nothing. What do people who love each other do? Nothing, nothing but love each other. That doesn’t mean that we must do nothing.”
The nothing that Nancy is describing is really everything, in the same way that when Morrissey sings, “William, it was really nothing” in the great Smiths song by the same name, we know that what was, or is, between him and William, was/is really everything. That even if it amounted to nothing, came to nothing, sometimes nothing is worth it because it is important (everything) to risk everything. Knocked down by someone or something, like the Great Dane that knocks Rousseau down in Reveries of A Solitary Walker. We also know that everything that currently runs the world, and gets heralded as good and great—important—is mostly really nothing. Really nothing. But in the song, Morrissey is also telling William that all this nothing (the sacrifice, the risk, the love) was worth it. That the everything he gave William, that was between them (“It was his life”), was really nothing. In other words, he is telling William (bitterly, lovingly), “Don’t mention it.”
This idea (or reading) of nothing is particularly important for Western culture, especially in our 21st Century moment, which constantly tells us that whatever you can’t see; whatever you aren’t doing or showing; whatever isn’t being seen or heard about you, doesn’t exist. Doesn’t count. Isn’t really there. Is nothing. But our contemporary understanding of nothing is really the problem. In the Tarot’s Hanged Man, nothing is not nothing because without knowing how to be in the nothing, without knowing what to do with the nothing that you are privately assigned to work through, you will never get (understand) anything. In contemporary American culture, something is only something if it is SOMETHING. Loud. Silence is empty, non-active. Failure. But to hear nothing, to be in the nothing, to feel what the nothing has to say, to tell you, is maybe more powerful than to hear what is strictly meant to be heard. What pronounces itself directly, without glitches or stutters.
When Nancy says that people who love each other do “nothing, nothing but love each other,” it’s an ironic play on the everything of nothing because, as we all know, nothing is more challenging, difficult, or important than truly loving someone. For Nancy and others, faith is not a question of knowing or being sure (belief). It’s a question of being faithful to someone or something despite not knowing whether your faith will be rewarded. You have faith in the face of not-knowing. As I have pointed out in other posts, Derrida says this about forgiveness, and Nancy says this about both God and love: You love anyway. You forgive the unforgiveable. You forgive because you can’t. All these thinkers are talking about faith, which means they are also talking about risk.
Lecturing about God in a series of dialogues for children called, God, Justice, Love, Beauty, Jean-Luc Nancy states:
“God is perhaps a way of answering: there is no point, no rhyme or reason, and that’s why it is good. It is open, it is available. Available for any number of things, but at the same time for nothing. Sometimes what we do best is nothing, doing nothing, letting things be… Now I am not telling you to do nothing… But, more deeply, when one really thinks about one’s life, about what one does. A little while ago, when I spoke to you about joy or love, even about justice in the sense I tried to describe, what is all that about? It is really nothing. What do people who love each other do? Nothing, nothing but love each other. That doesn’t mean that we must do nothing.”
The nothing that Nancy is describing is really everything, in the same way that when Morrissey sings, “William, it was really nothing” in the great Smiths song by the same name, we know that what was, or is, between him and William, was/is really everything. That even if it amounted to nothing, came to nothing, sometimes nothing is worth it because it is important (everything) to risk everything. Knocked down by someone or something, like the Great Dane that knocks Rousseau down in Reveries of A Solitary Walker. We also know that everything that currently runs the world, and gets heralded as good and great—important—is mostly really nothing. Really nothing. But in the song, Morrissey is also telling William that all this nothing (the sacrifice, the risk, the love) was worth it. That the everything he gave William, that was between them (“It was his life”), was really nothing. In other words, he is telling William (bitterly, lovingly), “Don’t mention it.”
This idea (or reading) of nothing is particularly important for Western culture, especially in our 21st Century moment, which constantly tells us that whatever you can’t see; whatever you aren’t doing or showing; whatever isn’t being seen or heard about you, doesn’t exist. Doesn’t count. Isn’t really there. Is nothing. But our contemporary understanding of nothing is really the problem. In the Tarot’s Hanged Man, nothing is not nothing because without knowing how to be in the nothing, without knowing what to do with the nothing that you are privately assigned to work through, you will never get (understand) anything. In contemporary American culture, something is only something if it is SOMETHING. Loud. Silence is empty, non-active. Failure. But to hear nothing, to be in the nothing, to feel what the nothing has to say, to tell you, is maybe more powerful than to hear what is strictly meant to be heard. What pronounces itself directly, without glitches or stutters.
When Nancy says that people who love each other do “nothing, nothing but love each other,” it’s an ironic play on the everything of nothing because, as we all know, nothing is more challenging, difficult, or important than truly loving someone. For Nancy and others, faith is not a question of knowing or being sure (belief). It’s a question of being faithful to someone or something despite not knowing whether your faith will be rewarded. You have faith in the face of not-knowing. As I have pointed out in other posts, Derrida says this about forgiveness, and Nancy says this about both God and love: You love anyway. You forgive the unforgiveable. You forgive because you can’t. All these thinkers are talking about faith, which means they are also talking about risk.
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