Christian parables have retained their force well beyond the sphere of religion; indeed, they share with much of modern literature their status as a form of address: “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.” There is no message without there first being—or, more subtly, without there also being in the message itself—an address to a capacity or an aptitude for listening. This is not an exhortation of the kind “Pay attention!” Rather, it is a warning: if you do not understand, the message will go away.
The scene in the Gospel of John in which the newly risen Christ enjoins the Magdalene, “Noli me tangere,” a key moment in the general parable made up of his life, is a particularly good example of this sudden appearance in which a vanishing plays itself out. Resurrected, he speaks, makes an appeal, and leaves.
“Do not touch me.” Beyond the Christ story, this everyday phrase says something important about touching in general. It points to the place where touching must not touch in order to carry out its touch (its art, its tact, its grace).
The title essay of this volume is both a contribution to Nancy’s project of a “deconstruction of Christianity” and an exemplum of his remarkable writings on art, in analyses of “Noli me tangere” paintings by such painters as Rembrandt, Dürer, Titian, Pontormo, Bronzino, and Correggio. It is also in tacit dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s monumental tribute to Nancy’s work in Le toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy.
For the English-language edition, Nancy has added an unpublished essay on the Magdalene and the English translation of “In Heaven and on the Earth,” a remarkable lecture he gave in a series designed to address children between six and twelve years of age. Closely aligned with his entire project of “the deconstruction of Christianity,’” this lecture may give the most accesible account of his ideas about God.

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was a French philosopher and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. He is especially known for works such as The Inoperative Community, The Experience of Freedom, Being Singular Plural, The Sense of the World, and The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translations of his later important works such as the two volumes of The Deconstruction of Christianity, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence have been published by Fordham University Press.

Jean-Luc Nancy's profile page

Sarah Clift is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Studies at the University of King's College, Halifax.

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Pascale-Anne Brault is Professor of French at DePaul University. She is the co-translator of several works of Jacques Derrida’s, most recently For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy (Fordham).

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Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His research covers the fields of philosophy and comparative literature, with a particular focus on ancient Greek thought and contemporary French philosophy and with a strong interest in the thinkers Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, and Levinas. He has edited and co-translated into English a number of Jacques Derrida’s texts: The Work of Mourning (2011), Learning to Live Finally (2007), Rogues (2005), and Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas (1999). His most recent publications are The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques
Derrida’s Final Seminar (2015), Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (2012), and Plato and the Invention of Life (2018).

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This collection presents some of Nancy's best thinking on the matter of Christianity and religion, from wide-ranging speculation in a give -and-take with 'the public' to the incisive title essay focused on a charged encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This latter is a particularly bold and searching reading, far more engaged than is the case with most Biblical interpretation by those who profess themselves attentive to scripture. The attention to painting's response to the scene is deeply impressive, certainly revelatory for the general reader and probably even for art historians. The deft and elegant translation, as a real bonus, captures the layered texture of Nancy's thinking in exemplary fashion.---—Ian Balfour, York University

Translation of writings by the French philosopher on Christianity.

—The Chronicle of Higher Education