General equivalent
J-L Nancy’s “Of the One, of Hierarchy” (Cultural Critique, 57, 2004):
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. A “hierarchy” signifies, according to etymology, a sacred character of principle or commandment. Now the world of techno-science, or the world of what I call ecotechnics — that is, a natural milieu made up entirely of the human supplementation of a “nature” that has now withdrawn — which is also the world of democracy, of the universal rights of a man assumed universal, the world of secularity or of religious, aesthetic, and moral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 differences 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 exploited — there 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, equality — conceived of as the parity of dignities that are singular and irreducible to an equivalent — contains a profoundly hierarchical principle: the fundamental (archic) character [le caractère principiel (archique)] of a sacredness or sanctity 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 sufficient explanation. That which is instrumentalized 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 confrontation 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 rest—an “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 original — Trans.]).
The one and the other God are two opposed figures of the same One, when this Oneness is understood as absolute Presence, consistent in and of itself, like the invisible point (for a point is by definition invisible) of the summit of a pyramid, whose essence this summit resumes and reabsorbs. (One could say here: the value of the pyramids 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 finally (and this is its internal contradiction) Unilateral model that made possible the symmetrical and no less nihilistic mobilization of a Monotheistic and no less unilateral model. We take the latter into consideration only because 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 substantified 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 Oneness that is substantial, present, and unified 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 figured 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 infinite retreat of the one who has neither equal nor likeness (nor even, therefore, 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 presentation — one 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, outsiders. Their thought — that 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.
(Trans. Cory Stockwell)
