Nancy: atheist?

Nancy's position concerning contemporary religion and post-secular theology is unequivocal. He attacks not only the resurgence of religion in the social and political discourse of the West, but also the post-secular effort to show that religion has never been vanquished by secularization and retains all its vital significance in Western culture (albeit somewhat discordant and fragmentary in nature). He categorically dismisses postsecular theology's gesture of refusing secularization and awaiting the coming of a god as merely an activity of reflective immanence that closes us off from the undecidability of the future. Moreover, unremitting efforts to render divinity un-representable by fragmenting its signification through all cultural discourse (philosophy, ethics, legality, poetry, etc.) have served only to corrode the very nature of representation and disseminate “the god” into every “spiritual” activity culture entertains.

Generally speaking, Nancy rarely looks to religion for respectable addresses of discourse and, moreover, suggests that Christianity is especially deserving of deconstruction. Although Nancy speaks of Christianity as “empty”, and deserving of further emptying, he does remark that the future of Christianity will be “the West coming out from the self-deconstruction of Christianity”, a “to-come” that will not resemble traditional or contemporary versions of this faith (SDC: 5). We should be open to whichever form of “coming” comes, but that is not to say that this awaiting should be eschatologically charged with redemptive values. It would be difficult to ignore the rebuke in his claim that a “sickening traffic has grown up around a so-called return of the spiritual and of the religious”, typified by the triumph of religion in post-Communist Poland, the demise of Communism, the emergence of Islam as a geopolitical force and so on (and one could add the religious revival at US universities).