political theology, Vol. 15 No.

5, September, 2014, 421–437

Capitalism — or Christianity: Creation

and Incarnation in Jean-Luc Nancy
Peter Joseph Fritz
College of the Holy Cross, USA

This article explores and critiques Jean-Luc Nancy’s alignment of capitalism and
Christianity. It exposes his idea that Christianity and capitalism share the same
genealogy, their common trait being a devaluation of the world. Next it shows how
the Christian-capitalist devaluation of the world is specified into a view of bodies,
which Nancy calls incarnation. It moves on to investigate Nancy’s revision of
creation as a concept and an act aimed at revaluating the world. Finally it suggests
that one could turn Nancy’s logic against him, thereby discovering how
Christianity diverges sharply from capitalism. Nancy fails to acknowledge that
capitalism and Christianity diverge on the issue of excess. Capitalism denies
excess, by assigning everything a monetary value. Christianity testifies to that
which exceeds value. Nancy’s schema of incarnation and creation, if carefully
inflected, can place significant philosophical force behind a deep theological
protest against the tendency to associate Christianity and capitalism.
keywords Nancy, creation, incarnation, deconstruction, capitalism
Jean-Luc Nancy’s proposed and already open project of a deconstruction of Christianity
presupposes about Christianity what numerous Christians maintain in our globalized
age: capitalism and Christianity are compatible — even complementary.1 Thus many
1
A significant example of this alignment of Christianity and capitalism occurred in US Catholicism, with the neo-
conservative adulation over Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Centessimus Annus (1991). Michael Novak, Richard John
Neuhaus, and George Weigel joined forces to claim the encyclical for capitalism, and capitalism for Catholicism. Novak’s
book, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is notable on at least two counts. First, he notes that Catholicism
approaches capitalism with reluctance. Second, he nevertheless asserts that Catholicism, most notably in Centessimus
Annus, has come to somewhat of an amicable understanding of capitalism. Were Novak more perceptive, he would have
noted that the first count outweighs the second to the point of eclipsing it. Likewise, the latter count is untrue, as a careful
reading of Centessimus Annus makes clear. See Novak, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Catholicism (Ann Arbor, Mich.:
Free Press; 1992). On this point, it is notable that Neuhaus cobbled together a ‘‘condensation’’ of Centessimus Annus for use
in the journal First Things, George Weigel’s edited volume on Centessimus Annus, and as an appendix in Neuhaus’s book,
Doing Well and Doing Good. The ‘‘condensation’’ is a glaring specimen of editorial violence — it removes text without
acknowledging where text was removed, and angles the entire document toward a pro-capitalist interpretation. See
Neuhaus, Doing Well and Doing Good: The Challenge to the Christian Capitalist (New York: Doubleday; 1992), p. 285-
304 and Weigel G, editor. A New Worldly Order: John Paul II and Human Freedom: A Centessimus Annus Reader
(Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center; 1992), p. 29-57. There is another apt example of how Neuhaus’s view of
the commensurability of Christianity and capitalism proceeds by assertion rather than argument. In The Naked Public
Square, he asserts that the statement, ‘‘Capitalism is inherently incompatible with Christianity,’’ is a ‘‘revolutionary’’ one. For
him, ‘‘revolutionary’’ is a label that merits immediate dismissal of any statement that the label fits. Neuhaus does not
substantiate, though, this particular ascription of the label. In fact, it may be the case that ‘‘Capitalism is inherently
incompatible with Christianity’’ is not revolutionary at all, but simply a truism. Neuhaus does not consider this possibility.
See Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (New York: Doubleday; 1984), p. 70.

ß W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014 DOI 10.1179/1462317X14Z.00000000087

422 FRITZ

contemporary Christians become bedfellows with a French thinker who believes that
even atheism retains too much Christian residue. While Christian supporters of
capitalism tender this support to insist on the mutually enhancing and enduring value of
capitalism and Christianity, Nancy insists that the capitalism-Christianity link consists
in the tendency of both toward dissolution. Thus Christian capitalists and Nancy, a
critic of capitalism and Christianity, make similar claims for capitalism and Christianity
for very different reasons. This article concerns Nancy’s argument that Christianity
is the genealogy of capitalism,2 and that a deconstruction of Christianity is a
deconstruction of capitalism.
Nancy develops this point by centering his inquiry into Christianity on what he
calls the Christian view of body. This view of body — any body and, for that
matter, soul — centers on the body of Jesus: the Incarnation, the Word made
flesh.3 Nancy objects to the Incarnation as a model for thinking about the body,
because it implies the hegemony of spirit over body. He proposes an alternative
thinking of body, to which he assigns the name ‘‘creation.’’4 He is quick to clarify
in various places that creation, in his lexicon, no longer means what Christians
think it means, the generation by God’s Word of the world and everything in it.5
Rather, creation signifies the world-forming activity of human beings, without
regard for eternity, some ‘‘other world,’’ or a Creator as the figurehead for eternity
and ‘‘heaven,’’6 that is, without spirit. A Christian view of creation falls under the
rubric of incarnation. It implicates a perspective on world-forming that Nancy
finds objectionable because it centers on spirit, instead of on body.
Nancy adds that capitalism derives from this Christian conception of world-
forming. Christianity views the world as a series of bodies that must be in-spired,
or as valueless until given value by spirit. So too does capitalism regard all things in
the world as in need of evaluation by, as it were, capitalist spirit. For capitalism,
everything is valueless until commodified.
Nancy deems it necessary to re-think the formation of the world. It is not given
form through evaluation, but rather through an enjoyment of bodies that lets them
arise as they please, without regard to spirit of any sort. Nancy’s idea of creation
articulates this type of world-forming.
The choice between two models of thinking the body, incarnation or creation, is
really the choice of what kind of world we want to make. Do we desire an un-
world (immonde) of misery and injustice, or a world of shared existence and
justice?7 Given the way Nancy draws his schema, Christianity opts for the former

2
See Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, translated by: Bergo B, et al. (New York:
Fordham University Press; 2008), especially A Deconstruction of Monotheism, p. 29-41. I shall exegete this text in
Part One below.
3
From the opening shot in his deconstruction of Christianity, Corpus, Nancy centers his remarks on the Word made
flesh in the Eucharist: ‘‘Hoc est enim corpus meum.’’ Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, translated by: Rand RA (New York:
Fordham University Press; 2008), p. 3.
4
Again, a preliminary citation: ibid., p. 63-5.
5
On Nancy’s ‘‘radical critique’’ of this Christian, theological idea of creation, see Boyan Manchev, Ontology of
Creation: The Onto-aisthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy. In: Re-Treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc
Nancy, Alexandrova A, et al., editors. (New York: Fordham University Press; 2012), p. 261-74.
6
Nancy, Corpus, p. 97: ‘‘What creation starts with, creation without the presupposition of a creator.’’
7
See, among other places, Jean-Luc Nancy, Creation of the World — or Globalization, translated by: Raffoul F,
Pettigrew D (Albany, NY: SUNY Press; 2007), p. 34 and 111.
 CAPITALISM OR CHRISTIANITY 423

model of thinking the body, and thus the former type of world, a world dominated
by capitalism. Nancy intends a world of peace and justice. To his mind
Christianity cannot give such a world. It gives the opposite.
I shall risk granting Nancy’s schema some measure of authority, since I shall not
comprehensively revise it. Instead, the argument set forth below explores the
contours of Nancy’s reading of Christianity’s take on the body and his proposed
atheological alternative. The article’s thesis is as follows: Nancy provides a
diagnostic schema that presumes Christianity’s complicity with capitalism, but at
the same time and rather ironically, this schema provides grounds for separating
capitalism from Christianity. Nancy’s contribution — even if it is unwitting —
should hold our interest because he lays bare ways that in principle, not just in
practice, capitalism and Christianity are incommensurate with one another. He
leads one to ask which one should espouse: capitalism or Christianity?
The argument has four parts. The first introduces Nancy’s idea that Christianity
and capitalism share the same genealogy, with their main common trait being a
devaluation of the world. The second shows how the Christian-capitalist
devaluation of the world is specified into a view of bodies, which Nancy calls
incarnation. The third investigates Nancy’s characterization of creation as a
concept and an act aimed at revaluating the world’s (and bodies’) value. The
fourth examines an interesting dynamic in Nancy’s alignment of Christianity and
capitalism. By slightly altering Nancy’s logic, one can discover that Christianity
diverges sharply from capitalism. While capitalism insists upon assigning
everything a monetary value, Christianity testifies to that which exceeds value.
The article concludes with the suggestion that Nancy’s schema, if carefully
inflected, can place significant philosophical force behind a deep theological
protest against the tendency to associate Christianity and capitalism.

The Common Genealogy of Christianity and Capitalism

I must first substantiate the claim that for Nancy, Christianity and capitalism share
the same genealogy. This claim will prove important as I aim to show how, for
Nancy, ‘‘incarnation’’ stands for the common bond of Christianity and capitalism,
and how ‘‘creation’’ stands for a critique of this common bond. This first section
will identify and explain the main principle of Nancy’s proposal of a common
genealogy for Christianity and capitalism: ‘‘monovalence of value.’’
Nancy devotes the essay, ‘‘A Deconstruction of Monotheism,’’ to a preliminary
setting of bounds for re-assessing the history of the West. He argues for the
importance of such an inquiry: ‘‘Our time is … one in which it is urgent that the
West — or what remains of it — analyze its own becoming, turn back to examine
its provenance and its trajectory, and question itself concerning the process of
decomposition of sense to which it has given rise.’’8 This is so because the West has
bequeathed the world with an economic system that has, through globalization,
robbed virtually every part of the world of its sense — its purpose, meaning, and
orientation. As it stands, the sense of the world ‘‘appears to consist merely in the

8
Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, p. 30.
424 FRITZ

accumulation and circulation of capital.’’9 The question now is how this sense-less
world arrived.
It came, Nancy contends, through Christianity, since ‘‘Christianity has
structured the West through and through.’’10 He hypothesizes that the
contemporary world situation, in which a ‘‘monovalence of value’’ (i.e., the
‘‘general equivalency’’ of merchandise) reigns supreme, derives from a ‘‘mono-
culture’’ that in turn arises from ‘‘monotheism.’’11 A reading of the history of the
West, Nancy proposes, should center on ‘‘the character … of the value or
unidirectionality that is placed now in ‘God,’ now in ‘man,’ and now in the
tautology of value itself.’’12 In short, Nancy argues that the genealogy of a world
dominated by capitalism should trace itself back to structures of uniformity and
unanimity that cohere with belief in one God.
When discussing ‘‘monotheism,’’ one could easily examine Judaism, Islam, or
even the Greco-Roman philosophical-juridical heritage. Nancy knows that his
friend and close associate, Jacques Derrida, engaged in several such investigations,
perhaps most notably in his essay on Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘‘Violence and
Metaphysics,’’ which ends with a reference to the ‘‘jewgreek’’ heritage of
Western thinking.13 In ‘‘A Deconstruction of Monotheism,’’ Nancy cites
pragmatic concerns for considering Christianity alone,14 but in a different chapter
of Dis-Enclosure, ‘‘The Deconstruction of Christianity,’’ he contends that ‘‘the
Christian or Christianity is the thing itself that is to be thought’’ if one is to
understand the current situation of the West.15 Christianity would govern any
analysis of the other monotheisms.
Christianity effects an unprecedented and unparalleled mixture of Greco-
Roman and Jewish monotheistic concerns. From the first, Christianity adopts the
tension between ‘‘logico-technical-juridical universality’’ and an individual’s
private desire for salvation from the ambit of this universality.16 From the latter,
Christianity inherits the idea that the ‘‘divine unicity is the correlate of a presence
that can no longer be given in this world, but rather must be sought beyond it.’’17
In either case, Christianity appropriates the insight that accepting monotheism is
tantamount to affirming the existence of a world beyond this one. If God is
somewhere, then, God is not in the world,18 and Christians are not to be of the

9
Ibid.
10
François Raffoul, The Self-Deconstruction of Christianity. In: Re-Treating Religion, p. 46-62, here 52. Cf. Nancy,
Dis-Enclosure, p. 142: ‘‘Christianity is inseparable from the West.’’
11
Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, p. 31, 34.
12
Ibid., p. 31.
13
Jacques Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In: Writing and
Difference, translated by: Bass A (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1978), p. 79-153; Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, p.
140.
14
Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, p. 33.
15
Ibid., p. 140.
16
Ibid., p. 32.
17
Ibid., p. 32.
18
Nancy commences a lecture to a group of schoolchildren with the following words: ‘‘Yes, I am going to speak to you about
god, but first I am going to speak to you about heaven. You know why, of course. If god exists, he is in heaven.’’ Nancy, Noli
me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, translated by: Clift S, Brault P-A, and Naas M (New York: Fordham University
Press; 2008), p. 71. The ‘‘of course’’ here is telling. Surely Nancy is simplifying things a bit to appeal to children, but one must
ask the question of whether he oversimplifies Christianity without respect to the age of his audience.
 CAPITALISM OR CHRISTIANITY 425

world. Nancy writes, ‘‘Christianity indicates, in the most active way — and the
most ruinous for itself, the most nihilist in certain regards — how monotheism
shelters within itself … the principle of a world without God.’’19 This, for Nancy,
is a fundamental consequence of Christian belief: a godless world.
For this reason, Nancy proposes that ‘‘monotheism is in truth atheism.’’20 He
finds in the kenosis of Christ, his self-emptying of divine power, a denial of God’s
power over the world.21 The incarnation, which we shall examine in earnest in the
next section, is a privileged site of the Christian principle, which denies to God
‘‘the presence of the power that assembles the world and assures [its] sense.’’22
This crucial stage of Nancy’s argument contains three premises: (1) God, as creator
and sustainer, is for Christians the principle for the world’s value; (2) in Christ,
God removes from God’s self the power to create or to sustain; (3) in doing so,
God renders the world valueless. Thus Nancy outlines what he deems a self-
defeating tendency at Christianity’s heart.
There is one God and one value. The world’s value is single-sided —
monovalent. Nancy believes himself to have established that, for Christianity,
this value is null. If value is monovalent, then all the world has a value of zero.
Christianity thus makes way for a system that predicates itself upon assessing value
to things that are worthless in themselves. Capitalism fills this void by assessing a
value to things as commodities. We observed a quote above in which Nancy likens
Christianity to nihilism because of its dismissal of the divine from the world. Let us
read a key quote that, due to its dual mention of nihilism and capitalism,
corroborates my contention that for Nancy, Christianity and capitalism share the
same genealogy: ‘‘[T]he exit from capitalism … can only be envisaged as the exit
from nihilism.’’23 We shall see later in this article that Nancy’s deconstruction of
Christianity aims to find within Christianity an exit from it: a ‘‘beyond’’ of
Christianity. So too does he hope to locate in the beyond of Christianity an escape
hatch from capitalism.
In addition to (or as a result of) their common root in the monovalence of value,
Christianity and capitalism share a view of the body. The next subsection shows
how Nancy elaborates this view.

Incarnation
Throughout Corpus, Creation of the World, and a few other of his writings, Nancy
provides threads that we can weave into a fabric of his main accusation against
Christianity, which in turn leads to his substantive accusations against capitalism.
The general name for his critical account of Christianity is ‘‘incarnation,’’ which
for him signifies the constitutive Christian way of viewing bodies. The Christian
view of body augments the toxic elements of monotheism we have just described.
The paragraphs below schematize Nancy’s thoughts on incarnation. The schema
19
Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, p. 35.
20
Ibid.
21
See Ibid., p. 82: ‘‘[T]he Christian … god is the god who alienates himself. He is the god who atheizes himself and
who atheologizes himself.’’
22
Ibid., p. 36.
23
Ibid., p. 20.
426 FRITZ

consists of three important features. The following subsection will tell how Nancy
discovers three parallel features in capitalism.

Three Features of Incarnation

The first is ‘‘spirit into body.’’ Nancy contends that the Christian view of body
insists that a body must be ‘‘signified,’’ that is, marked by some spirit in order for
that body to have any reality or viability. As we have seen already, Nancy follows
Heidegger insofar as he believes that Christianity and the metaphysical tradition
are inseparable. Thus he argues that the requirement that bodies be spiritually
signified knots itself to the philosophical logic of non-contradiction: ‘‘The
signifying body … incarnates one thing only: the absolute contradiction of not
being able to be a body without being the body of a spirit, which disembodies
it.’’24 The definition of body on the incarnational view cannot but be an en-spirited
or en-souled body. Any other view would be a contradiction in terms. Nancy takes
exception to this definition and its attendant logic because he views it as not
allowing a body to be a body for itself. In other words, spirit takes over: ‘‘The
spirit is the substitution, the sublimation, the subtilizing of all forms of bodies.’’25
Bodies are only as good as the spirits by which they are signified. The body is
absolutized — ‘‘the body of the incarnation is the sign, absolutely’’26 — but not in
the sense of being upheld as highly dignified. More nearly, the body is dissolved by
spirit. This is ironic, of course, because, as we saw above, the Christian view of
body intends to lend the body some permanence. Instead, for Nancy, it destroys
the body.
The second feature Nancy names ‘‘concentration.’’27 This feature is a corollary
to the rule that all bodies must participate in spiritual signification. Christians,
Nancy avers, construct the body by privileging its center, in the sense of an interior
core. The surface of the body, its skin and outward bearing do not mean anything
near as much as the spirit concentrated in the body. When ‘‘the spirit is made
flesh’’ in incarnation, this amounts to saying that ‘‘flesh [is] subjectivized to
itself.’’28 The flesh is made ‘‘radiant,’’ or to speak more properly, the body is
outshined. Nancy condenses these points into a metaphor for the Christian view of
body: ‘‘an incandescent SELF.’’29 What matters for Christians is not the matter of
the body, but the light within.
The third feature bears the label ‘‘foundation,’’ or ‘‘founding circularity.’’30
Nancy’s referencing of the foundation of Christianity has rather little to do with
the way ‘‘foundation’’ is often utilized in philosophical discourse, where it carries
the sense of bedrock. It does include associations of one level building upon
another — as in St. Paul’s talk of one body made up of many unequal parts, in one
spirit. But the levels here are not akin to stories of a building resting on a

24
Nancy, Corpus, p. 69.
25
Ibid., p. 77.
26
Ibid., p. 67.
27
Ibid., p. 77-9.
28
Ibid., p. 87, emphasis original. Cf. Nancy, On the Soul. In: Ibid., p. 132-3, where Nancy links the ‘‘mystery of the
incarnation’’ to ‘‘all our thought on the subject,’’ i.e., Cartesian subjectivity.
29
Ibid., p. 77.
30
Ibid., p. 101, 73.
 CAPITALISM OR CHRISTIANITY 427

foundation of concrete, but rather to levels of energy in and around a supernova. The
foundation of the Christian view of body, then, is a founding circularity, a self-
absorbing vortex, a ‘‘black hole.’’ Nancy remarks that the fact ‘‘that the body of
incarnation and sense might finally be a hole is hardly unsurprising.’’31 ‘‘Hardly
unsurprising’’ because the body of incarnation is monodirectional: for Nancy, the
Christian view of bodies ends in a complete, unilateral suppression of the body by spirit.
On the incarnational view, ‘‘the body is the end of the signifier … the absolute crasis of
the sign.’’32 Spirit’s entrance into and concentration in body end in a hole of spirit,
where the body is oversignified, overmassed, overwhelmed. Nancy evokes Maurice
Blanchot’s dis-aster: the body, Christianly configured, is like the death of a star.33

Incarnation and Capital

In themselves, the three features of incarnation that Nancy isolates prove rather
vexing to him. Even more important, though, is how these features have played out
in the world. Specifically, the Christian view of bodies, incarnation, has had
economic consequences. Nancy’s diagnosis of the economic consequences of an
incarnational view of bodies is particularly sharp in the essay ‘‘Urbi et Orbi.’’34
This title (as in many of Nancy’s writings) is lifted directly from traditional
Catholicism. The ‘‘Urbi et Orbi’’ address is a papal blessing, given to the people of
the city of Rome and of the world. In his essay, Nancy remarks on the current state
of the city and the world. The city and the world have been changed into an
‘‘urban network.’’ The following words describe what this network yields:
The result can only be understood in terms of what is called an agglomeration, with its
senses of conglomeration, of piling up, with the sense of accumulation that, on the one
hand, simply concentrates (in a few neighborhoods, in a few houses, sometimes in a
few protected mini-cities) the well-being that used to be urban or civil, while on the
other hand, proliferates what bears the quite simple and unmerciful name of misery.35

A careful reader cannot help but sense the consonance between this diagnostic
passage and Nancy’s schematization of ‘‘incarnation.’’ Nancy hits with particular
force upon the dual themes of concentration and foundation, qua disaster.
Likewise, the invocation of the papal ‘‘Urbi et Orbi’’ blessing is a poetic way of
implicating Catholic Christianity in the current state of the city and the world. The
blessing Catholic Christianity has imparted upon the city and the world is the
result of ‘‘concentration’’ and ‘‘foundation,’’ an agglomeration of goods in some
sectors and an outpouring of misery in others. The Catholic Christian view of
spirit’s entrance into body has opened the door to a world of injustice.
To discover more specifically how Nancy argues for Christian incarnation’s
complicity with the world of injustice brought about by capitalism, we must
examine how capitalism shares the three central features of incarnation. First,
capital, like incarnation, depends upon signification:
31
Ibid., p. 75.
32
Ibid., p. 75.
33
Cf. Nancy, Blanchot’s Resurrection. In: Dis-Enclosure, p. 89-97. This text refers often to Blanchot’s Writing of the
Disaster.
34
Nancy, Creation of the World, p. 33-55.
35
Ibid., p. 33.
428 FRITZ

Capital means: a body marketed, transported, displaced, replaced, superseded, assigned

to a post and a posture, to the point of ruin, unemployment, famine, a Bengali body bent
over a car in Tokyo, a Turkish body in a Berlin trench, a black body loaded down with
white packages in Suresnes or San Francisco. Capital therefore also means: a system of
over-signified bodies.36

We find Nancy assessing the same charges to capitalism as to incarnation: just as

the latter weighs down bodies with the signification of spirit, so does the latter load
signification — market value — onto any body it meets. Nancy adds the following:
‘‘Capital … produces a banalizing generalization of the body and of the
neighbor.’’37 If each body and neighbor can be assigned a price, then no body is
ultimately unique. Again, signification reduces a body to something other than
itself. Capital’s over-signification of bodies is equivalent to incarnation’s over-
signification of bodies. No body bears its own value, but only that of a
transcendent other. Nancy sees this happening in all Judeo-Christian-Islamic talk
of the ‘‘neighbor,’’ which ‘‘doesn’t fail to end up in the universal.’’38 The generic
‘‘neighbor’’ is just around the corner from the body as commodity. Both capitalism
and Christianity render bodies — human bodies — utterly banal, poor in value.39
Second, capitalism over-signifies bodies by subjecting them to concentration.
Nancy writes,
[B]odies are going to work, coming home from work, waiting for rest, taking it and
promptly leaving it, and working, incorporating themselves into merchandise,
themselves merchandise, a work force, nonaccumulable capital, sellable, exhaustible
in the market of accumulated, accumulative capital.40

Bodies work for the system. They are made for the system. The raw material of the
system — ‘‘surplus-value capital’’41 — is concentrated within each body, not for
the body’s benefit, but for the system. Capital is the analogue of the spiritual light
Nancy discusses in connection with incarnation. What matters is not the body, but
capital concentrated in the body. Bodies are nonaccumulable capital, but capital
can accumulate within them. The Christian ‘‘incandescent self’’ — spiritual light
signifies the body — finds its analogue in capitalism’s self as merchandise.
Third, capitalism forces bodies to comply with a founding circularity.
Globalization has led to a situation where ‘‘the sense of this world appears to
consist merely in the accumulation and circulation of capital.’’42 The body of the
world is comprised only of accumulated capital. A circle has been closed. The
West, from which capital comes, dominates the world: ‘‘There is no elsewhere
left.’’43 Capitalism exists as world-wide ‘‘extortion.’’44 Nancy compares the

36
Nancy, Corpus, p. 109-11.
37
Ibid., p. 91.
38
Ibid.
39
Nancy writes in Creation of the World, ‘‘Today, wealth as a quantity that can be capitalized is identical to the
infinite poverty of the calculable quantities of the market’’ (p. 48).
40
Nancy, Corpus, p. 109.
41
Ibid.
42
Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, p. 30.
43
Ibid.
44
Nancy, Creation of the World, p. 46, 53.
 CAPITALISM OR CHRISTIANITY 429

movement of capital to the ‘‘bad infinite’’ in Hegel, an indeterminate cycle that grows
indefinitely — this, Nancy points out, is ‘‘rightly called ‘deregulation’ in free-market
thinking.’’45 Nancy returns to an astronomical metaphor to describe capital further as
an unleashing of the bad infinite. He compares it to a ‘‘centrifugal spiral behaving like
the expanding universe described in astrophysics.’’46 The concentration of capital,
which predicates itself upon the loosening of financial controls, disarticulates the
world. Thus capitalism brings with it a paradoxical combination of iron-fisted global
control and a laissez-faire hand that sets the world adrift. Though the metaphor of the
expanding universe differs slightly from the ‘‘black hole’’ to which Nancy likened the
Christian view of body, the song remains largely the same. A black hole effects
destruction by collapsing upon itself. The expanding universe brings destruction by a
dissolution of all that is. In either case, the result is disaster.
Nancy comprehends Christianity as having two distinguishing characteristics: (1)
it circumscribes the world, using the principle of a God that stands outside the
world, and (2) it banalizes the world, by insisting on the essential ‘‘poverty’’ of all
that is not God. Christianity insists that this world is a vale of tears, but that wealth
is to come in the next life. Nancy believes that at the beginning of modernity,
Christianity emptied itself of God, and thus hope for another world. When this
happened, capitalism arose. He comprehends capitalism as having two character-
istics parallel to Christianity’s: (1) it circumscribes the world by subsuming it to the
power of wealth’s accumulation, and (2) it banalizes the world by seeing all things in
terms of ‘‘general equivalence.’’47 Thus, the world as a vale of tears becomes a world
of merchandise, and the hope of richness to come becomes a hope for acquisition of
material wealth. Christianity is the genealogy of capitalism.

Creation
Nancy claims to find in a revised idea of creation an antidote to Christianity and
capitalism. The revision of creation has a storied history. Creation becomes a rather
vexed term in the Heideggerian lexicon, most famously in Introduction to
Metaphysics.48 Even further back creation gains remarkable fluidity in the tradition
extending from Immanuel Kant49 through Karl Marx50 and Friedrich Nietzsche.51

45
Ibid., p. 46.
46
Ibid., p. 47.
47
Ibid., p. 52.
48
The locus classicus is Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by: Fried G, Polt R (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2000), p. 7-8. See also idem, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, translated by: Emad
P, Maly K (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press; 1999), p. 77; and idem, Nietzsche I: The Will to Power as Art,
translated by: Krell DF (New York: HarperCollins; 1979), p. 72-75, 115ff., 131ff., 139-40.
49
Nancy writes, ‘‘By destituting the creating God and the ens summum — sufficient reason of the world — Kant also
makes clear that the reason of the world pertains to a producing causality. He opens implicitly and outside of theology
a new question of ‘creation …’’’ (Nancy, Creation of the World, p. 66, Nancy’s ellipsis). Nancy even goes so far as to
say that ‘‘the Kantian revolution in its entirety rests on nothing other than a question of creation’’ (Ibid., p. 122 n. 12).
50
On Marx and creation, see Mark Cauchi, Creation and the Critique of Capitalism in Marx, Nancy, and Zizek.
Political Theology. 2011;12(4): 531-52.
51
For Nietzsche, as for Nancy, Heidegger, and Kant, creation should be placed under human, not divine, aegis.
Consider this statement: ‘‘And what you have called world, that shall be created only by you: your reason, your image,
your will, your love shall thus be realized.’’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, translated by: Kaufmann W
[New York: Penguin; 1978], p. 86).
430 FRITZ

Nancy poses anew the question of creation in the wake of these formidable
predecessors. In re-posing the question, Nancy believes he identifies a key concept
for thinking about the world in a post-Christian, post-capitalist, and even post-
atheist, world situation. If Christian monotheism robs the world of its value, thus
initiating capitalism’s rise, Nancy hopes to turn the tide away from Christianity’s
heritage and to reclaim, or to claim for the first time, that value. Creation is the
conduit for this revaluation of values.

Without a Creator
Nancy sees two major, simultaneous moves made throughout the metaphysical
tradition that are diagnosed and distilled in the sub-tradition from Kant through
Heidegger:
[1] On the one hand, the creator necessarily disappears in the very midst of its act, and
with this disappearance a decisive episode of the entire movement that I have
sometimes named the ‘‘deconstruction of Christianity’’ occurs, a movement that is
nothing but the most intrinsic and proper movement of monotheism as the integral
absenting of God in the unity that reduces it in and where it dissolves;
[2] On the other hand, and correlatively, Being falls completely outside of any
presupposed position and integrally displaces itself into a transitivity by which it is,
and is only, in any existence, the infinitive of a ‘‘to exist,’’ and the conjugation of this
verb (Being is not the basis [of] the existent, or its cause, but it ‘‘is’’ or it ‘‘exists’’ it).52

This is all to say that post-Kantian philosophy prepares the ground for a full
treatment of creation apart from: (1) the doctrine of the creator God causing all
that is, and (2) the implication that creation is a closed system bounded by God.
Nancy reminds the reader: ‘‘[I]t is theology itself that has stripped itself of a God
distinct from the world.’’53 Theology itself renders God absent from ‘‘creation’’ as
world. The ‘‘absentheism’’54 that grows after Kant is merely the other shoe
dropping. Following on these ‘‘absentheistic’’ moves, then, Nancy commences his
attempt at dis/closing55 the Christian closure — and denigration — of creation.
The idea of creation opens, Nancy avers, to the extent that, like Kant, one
relinquishes the thought that creation inevitably involves an ‘‘Idea, form, model, or
preliminary tracing.’’56 The created thing (ens creatum) is not, first and foremost,
some ‘‘content’’ hungering for a ‘‘form’’ to be snapped onto it. Rather, ‘‘the body is
the plastic material of spacing, without form or Idea.’’57 In traditional Christian-
metaphysical thinking, the ‘‘Idea,’’ or a movement of spirit, aims to render a
created body permanent. But on Nancy’s ‘‘plastic’’ view of the body,58 the body
resists any permanence. Instead, it is evanescent, like the images that flash and

52
Nancy, Creation of the World, p. 68.
53
Ibid., p. 50.
54
Ibid., p. 51. Nancy defines ‘‘absentheism’’ as ‘‘an absence of God and an absence in place of God’’ (p. 120 n. 23).
55
Nancy’s word is ‘‘déclosion’’ (and its relative forms), which the translators of Dis-Enclosure render as, of course,
‘‘dis-enclosure.’’ The rendering ‘‘dis/closing,’’ which I prefer, derives from Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and
Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press; 1996), passim.
56
Nancy, Corpus, p. 63.
57
Ibid., p. 63.
58
Nancy often avails himself, as we shall see, of language of ‘‘plasticity,’’ which he borrows from Catherine Malabou.
 CAPITALISM OR CHRISTIANITY 431

disappear on a TV screen.59 Creation does not mean the fixing of bodies by a

transcendent other (the Creator) but instead the auto-modification of bodies. The
plasticity of the body derives from its origin in nothing, its creatio ex nihilo. Nancy
works to give this phrase a different sense from its Christian one.60 An opening of
this phrase, which he takes to stand for a quintessential Christian belief, is the
central move of dis/closing Christianity, and the world with it.
Nancy’s reconfiguration of creatio ex nihilo cannot happen if one has the wrong
idea of ‘‘nothing.’’ Ian James summarizes Nancy’s version of creatio ex nihilo as
follows:
Creation here does not mean the production of something from nothing, whereby
‘‘nothing,’’ as the material cause of ‘‘something,’’ necessarily supposes a prodigious
efficient cause and the prior existence of a creating subject who would be the agent of
this efficient causality, an agent who would create with a view to a certain end or
purpose.61

‘‘Nothing’’ is not a substrate to be shaped by another. Rather, ‘‘nothing’’ is the

name of that which forms itself. Nancy explains: ‘‘This means that ‘creation’ isn’t
the production of a world from some unknown matter of nothingness but consists
in the fact that the matter (only that which there is) essentially modifies itself.’’62
Nancy finds in the Christian, theological view of creation a masking of the real
emergence that happens in the world. We need not and we ought not to conceive
of a Creator who manipulates the ‘‘nothing’’ from outside, giving rise to
something. ‘‘Nothing’’ is the means of its own arising — into something.

Creation v. Incarnation (and Capitalism)

Nancy writes of three constitutive features of his view of creation. First, creation
involves the birthing and sharing of bodies. To use more traditional language,
creation concerns materiality only. In contrast to a Christian view of creation,
spirit is not a factor. ‘‘Spirit’’ has outstayed its welcome in Western thought. Nancy
concerns himself instead with ‘‘the multitude of bodies, which no spirit has made
or engendered.’’63 Second, creation concerns ‘‘density.’’ Nancy uses this word
rather idiosyncratically. According to Nancy, the term density privileges surface, it
connotes a gathering at the level of the skin, and, again, it has no regard for
interiority, the alleged realm of spirit and soul.64 Third, creation inscribes a certain
type of transcendence, which Nancy calls ‘‘extension.’’65 Nancy uses this term
privatively. Extension implies an absence of hierarchy. ‘‘Levels’’ are no longer in
play. There is no ‘‘chain of being,’’ no Jacob’s ladder, as it were. Instead, bodies

59
One might ask Nancy whether this evanescence or plasticity is precisely what gives capitalism its power.
Capitalism’s adaptability is, perhaps, its most pernicious feature.
60
On Nancy and creatio ex nihilo, see Mark Cauchi, Creation and the Critique of Capitalism in Marx, Nancy, and
Zizek, p. 531-3, 539-41.
61
Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford
University Press; 2006), p. 233.
62
Nancy, Corpus, p. 61, Nancy’s emphasis.
63
Ibid., p. 87.
64
Ibid., p. 85.
65
Ibid., p. 95.
432 FRITZ

relate in a manner more in the vein of juxtaposition. Bodies play through space,
move in different, or occasionally the same, directions. One recognizes bodies not by
their reaching toward a spiritual telos, but rather by their continuous discontinuity
in the world, without end.66 Creation, then, connotes materiality unshadowed by
spirit, a privileging of surface, and a transcendence that refers itself to the space of
the world, without heaven or hell. In short, creation is of the world.
Creation opposes the constitutive elements of both Christianity and capitalism as
enumerated above. Nancy sets forth creation as a program for action against capitalism
and Christianity: ‘‘To create the world means: immediately, without delay, reopening
each possible struggle for a world, that is, for what must form the contrary of a global
injustice against the background of general equivalence.’’67 This struggle seeks to
propagate ‘‘an enjoyment that, in turn, would not be a satisfaction acquired in a
signification of the world, but the insatiable and infinitely finite exercise that is the being
in act of meaning brought forth in the world.’’68 He sums up the contrast he wishes to
draw: ‘‘Bodies demand, yet again, their creation. Not an incarnation inflating the
spiritual life of the sign, but a birthing and sharing of bodies.’’69 Christian Incarnation
and capitalism have led to injustice and misery, an inhibition of the lives of bodies in
favor of an overriding concern for signification and evaluation. Nancy seeks another
path, for which he hears bodies crying out — a path of justice, of enjoyment, of an
exposition of bodies rather than a covering of them with signs.
At this point it is clear that creation struggles against capitalism, and against
incarnation as Nancy conceives of it, but we must at this point re-open the question
of whether Nancy’s description of incarnation really fits Christianity. Is Christianity
fundamentally a religion of flight from the world, as Nancy says? Does Christianity
really devalue the world? Does it really banalize the body? Is Christianity in
principle extortionist? Is, then, Nancy’s brand of creation necessarily preferable to
Christian Incarnation, which promotes its own view of creation?
Before moving to the next section, which will address these and other questions,
a graphic presentation of Nancy’s schema might be helpful:

Creation Incarnation/Capitalism
Birthing/sharing Signification
Density Concentration
Extension Foundation/Founding Circularity
Mondialisation (World-forming) Globalization
World Immonde (Un-world)
Justice Injustice
Jouissance (Enjoyment) Misery
Exposition Extortion

66
Ibid., p. 99. Cf. Nancy, Creation of the World, p. 59-67, on the renewal of the question of creation as a ‘‘formative
power’’ without regard to teleology or given ends.
67
Ibid., p. 54.
68
Ibid., p. 55.
69
Nancy, Corpus, p. 83.
 CAPITALISM OR CHRISTIANITY 433

The hope by now is that the reader has some idea of what each of these words
means in Nancy’s lexicon. The contents of the right-hand column will generate for
us grounds for approving of Nancy’s diagnosis of the constitutive features of
capitalism. The contents of the left-hand column can assist us in developing a
preliminary re-articulation of Christianity’s characteristics in response to Nancy’s
critical strikes against it.

Differentiating Capitalism and Christianity: Evaluation’s Excess

Amid his efforts to lay the faults of capitalism at the feet of Christianity, Nancy
opens an interstice between the two. This fourth and final part will argue that
point. By the end, I shall indicate that Nancy not only distances capitalism and
Christianity, but provides raw material for disassociating them, thus provoking a
choice between them. He will deny this, insisting on the ineluctable genealogical
tie that binds them. But we shall find within Nancy’s logic a different approach to
the question. As with Part One, Part Four will center on Nancy’s thinking about
value. He uses ‘‘monovalence of value’’ to associate capitalism and Christianity;
we shall use that which exceeds value to dissociate them.
Let us begin with a quote from ‘‘A Deconstruction of Monotheism,’’ which sets
out the agenda for this deconstruction:
[W]e must ask ourselves anew what it is that, without denying Christianity but without
returning to it, could lead us toward a point — toward a resource — hidden beneath
Christianity, beneath monotheism, and beneath the West, which we must henceforth
bring to light, for this point would open upon a future for the world that would no
longer be either Christian or anti-Christian, either monotheist or atheist or even
polytheist, but that would advance precisely beyond all these categories.70

As I remarked above, Nancy looks for a ‘‘beyond’’ of Christianity, here articulated

in the term ‘‘beneath.’’ He has a certain confidence that a passage through
Christianity’s history, which we must recall is coextensive with the history of the
West, will reveal hidden potential for a history that never was, but could be. One
might ask oneself, ‘‘Wherefore this confidence?’’
It comes from Nancy’s rather distinctive view of Christianity. He avers that the
essence of Christianity lies in its constant self-surpassing.71 Put another way, ‘‘My
inquiry is guided by [the] motif of the essence of Christianity as opening: an
opening of self, and of self as opening.’’72 Despite Nancy’s conviction that the
history of Christianity involves a massive foreclosure of the meaning and value of
the world, he also wishes to maintain that Christianity keeps in reserve the
opposite impulse: to dis/close the meaning and value of the world. In a manner
similar to what we described above, where Christianity gives rise to atheism,

70
Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, p. 34; cf. Ibid., p. 143: ‘‘[T]he question is to find out whether we can, by revisiting our
Christian provenance, designate in the heart of Christianity a provenance of Christianity deeper than Christianity
itself, a provenance that might bring out another resource.’’
71
Ibid., p. 39.
72
Ibid., p. 145.
434 FRITZ

Christianity makes way for its replacement — a different replacement than

atheism — creation. This is all by virtue of Christianity’s character as self-opening,
which invites the project of deconstruction: ‘‘Christianity is by itself and in itself a
deconstruction and a self-deconstruction.’’73
By way of deconstruction, then, Nancy seeks a resource that lies at the heart,
base, or even beyond Christianity. He identifies this resource as consciousness of a
‘‘world whose sense is given in the mode of not being given.’’74 Then as a
fascinating end to a trenchant post-script regarding 9/11, Nancy intimates that the
resource for which he searches might manifest itself in the ‘‘great mystics, the great
believers, the great ‘spiritualists’ of all three monotheisms,’’ that is, those who
attend to the unpresentability of God.75 Given his antipathy to incarnation’s
alleged over-spiritualization of bodies, it is rather odd to witness Nancy
recommending ‘‘spiritualists’’ as models of the ‘‘ethos’’ and the ‘‘praxis’’ that
‘‘still await us.’’76 How does their ‘‘spirituality’’ differ in its openness from the
openness of ordinary Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam)? Nancy does not pursue
this idea any further in Dis-Enclosure.
Some comments from Creation of the World might assist us in extrapolating an
answer to this question, and thus indicating a fundamental deficiency in Nancy’s
reading of Christianity, while his account of capitalism remains intact. Nancy
offers that creation intends to express ‘‘the excess by which the world stands by
itself, configures itself, and exposes itself in itself.’’77 Creation is a movement, a
transcendence,78 an excessus that lets the world be world. It would be a slight
stretch to call creation a spiritual praxis, but it would not be entirely far from the
truth. After all, Nancean creation might easily be placed on the same trajectory as
Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, which appeals for a worldly (never other-worldly)
spirituality of letting things be.79 One could say, then, that Nancy advocates a
modified spirituality that focuses on allowing the value of things in the world to
arise spontaneously. The great sin for this spirituality would be forcing a value
upon any given thing. This is the sin of which capitalism is continuously and
originally guilty.
Capitalism inevitably unmasks itself as prone to this sin and thus as ultimately
impotent. Capital comes up against ‘‘a value that [it] is not able, in spite of
everything, to commodify without remainder: the value of the world.’’80 Where it
counts, i.e., on a fundamental level, capitalism falls short. The consummate
promise of capitalism lies in its claimed ability to evaluate everything, to give
everything a price — because nothing inherently has a price until it is

73
Ibid., p. 35.
74
Ibid.
75
Ibid., p. 41.
76
Ibid.
77
Nancy, Creation of the World, p. 47.
78
Elsewhere, Nancy uses the term ‘‘transimmanence’’ to indicate a transcendence that never leaves the world nor
conceives of another world. See Nancy, Sense of the World, translated by: Librett J (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press; 1997), p. 55; idem, The Muses, translated by: Kamuf P (Stanford: Stanford University Press; 1996), p. 35.
79
See Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, translated by: Anderson JM, Freund EH (New York: Harper & Row;
1966). Nancy’s appeals at key points to Meister Eckhart (Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, p. 36, 178 n. 2) and Angelus Silesius
(Nancy, Creation of the World, p. 47), two ‘‘spiritual’’ favorites of Heidegger’s, grease the wheels for this comparison.
80
Nancy, Creation of the World, p. 47.
 CAPITALISM OR CHRISTIANITY 435

commodified. Capitalism cannot deliver on its overarching promise, because not

everything can be quantified. No matter how hard one tries, being-in-the-world
cannot be made into a product. Capitalism cannot touch that which exceeds
evaluation. Thus capitalism is a system in spiritual default.
Considering that capitalism and Christianity share the same genealogy, one
might infer that capitalism’s failure will have an analogue in Christianity. We can
concede to Nancy that when Christians foreclose the world’s value, they sin in a
comparable way to capitalism. However, Nancy’s remark about the ‘‘spiritualists’’
suggests the possibility that some Christians might attend properly to the excess of
the world. This is a common move among postmodern philosophers: a fascination
with ‘‘mystics’’ as supposed fringe figures.
But it bears asking whether the mystics lay bare not the limit-experience of
Christianity, but rather the very heart of Christianity for which Nancy’s
deconstruction aims. When Angelus Silesius proclaims, ‘‘The rose grows without
reason,’’81 is he placing himself on the margins of Christianity, or speaking from its
center? For one attuned to the spirit of Christianity, the ‘‘spiritualists,’’ the
‘‘mystics,’’ the Eckhartians and Silesians reveal the normative ethos of Christianity,
not divergence from it. The Christian faith holds that not everything can be
evaluated. Classical beliefs in God’s incomprehensibility, the beauty and goodness
of creation, and the enduring significance of the body in the resurrection preclude
any totalizing system of value based on quantity and sufficiency, à la capitalism. In
other words, Christianity’s self-surpassing derives from an experience of excess —
that which exceeds value. The key to Christianity is not some hegemony of spirit
over body, but rather this experience of excess, or to be more traditional, an
encounter with mystery.
Mark Cauchi concludes a recent article, which unconditionally affirms Nancy’s
view of creation, with these words:
Only an act or an event that breaks with the calculative logic that equalizes everything
with everything else may properly allow and elicit the commitment of all. If the world
is not to destroy itself, then those of us for whom the world is the world — which is, by
definition, all of us — must work to conceive worldhood differently than the way that
globalization is currently defining it for us.82

One does not need Nancy’s creation to overcome the calculative, evaluative logic
of globalized capitalism. By Nancy’s logic, which includes an affirmation of the
‘‘spiritualists’’ of monotheism, one could just as well re-appropriate Christianity’s
constitutive ethos, which bases itself in logic beyond evaluation.
Nancy critiques capitalism out of a concern for justice. This we should admire.
He dismisses Christianity for the same reason. This we should reject. Nancy’s
deconstructionist fatalism, which breeds a spirit of non-cooperation with
Christians is, to put it mildly, distasteful. Per Cauchi’s suggestion, it seems it
would be better to find a strategy that could elicit a wider commitment to justice,
rather than a narrower one. From the Christian side, Nancy’s insight into excess

81
Nancy quotes this saying on ibid., p. 47.
82
Cauchi, Creation and the Critique of Capitalism, p. 550.
436 FRITZ

merits appropriation, as Christian theology transcends the limited political and

economic options our world presents and reaches toward something more.

Conclusion
The preface to Nancy’s Creation of the World — or Globalization meditates on the
word ‘‘or.’’ Nancy lists three possible connotations of this word as it conspicuously
occupies the center of the book’s title. ‘‘Or’’ can imply three things: mutual
exclusion, equivalence, or indifference between two terms.83 May the reader indulge
me as I play off of Nancy’s preface in explicating this article’s title: ‘‘Capitalism — or
Christianity.’’ One could understand the two words conjoined by the ‘‘or’’ as
roughly equivalent, thus taking the side both of Nancy and the type of American
Christians mentioned at the outset: capitalism, or, in other words, Christianity.
Likewise, one could view the ‘‘or’’ as expressing indifference: capitalism or
Christianity, you will get to the same place whichever you choose. Finally, one
could, as this article would have it, read the ‘‘or’’ as intimating a mutual exclusion
between capitalism and Christianity: capitalism, or, to name an entirely different
reality, Christianity. This ‘‘or’’ is not merely a semantic or syntactic operator. The
‘‘or’’ concerns injustice or justice, mammon or God, death or life.84

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83
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Thank you to my colleagues, Matthew Eggemeier, Robert Green, and George Pattery, SJ, for their generosity in
reading, commenting upon, and immensely improving this article.
 CAPITALISM OR CHRISTIANITY 437

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Notes on contributor
Peter Joseph Fritz holds a PhD in systematic theology from the University of Notre
Dame. He is assistant professor and Edward Bennett Williams Fellow in the
Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester,
Massachusetts, USA. He is author of Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics
(Catholic University of America Press; 2014) and ‘‘On the V(i)erge: Jean-Luc
Nancy, Christianity, and Incompletion,’’ Heythrop Journal 54 (2014), and several
other essays and book chapters.
Correspondence to: Peter Joseph Fritz, email pfritz@holycross.edu
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