INTRODUCTIONchanges and the true exit from the religious has occurred: ‘‘He came, nothing has
changed, so it’s up to you from here on out.’’ God leaves humans their freedom for good:
‘‘He henceforth relies on them to disentangle the political from the religious, while He
withdraws’’ (p. 669).
The contemporary ‘‘excess of visibility’’ of Christian iconography (p. 670), a typical
manifestation of the increased spectacularization of the public sphere, has the paradoxical
result of creating a certain blindness on our part. In their simulation of religiosity, icons
and idols lead us to forget that the exit from the religious took place long ago, and in the
heart of religion—or, at least, Christianity—itself. De Duve’s and Gauchet’s paradoxical
formulation of this (irrevocable?) trend is revealing in its own terms. Speaking of ‘‘the
religion of the exit from religion’’ (p. 653), it leaves open the possibility that the exit from
religion is still or yet again religious (religious in an alternative, perhaps superlative sense
of the term). The exit from religion would thus signal the—true or genuine—entry into
it. The ‘‘antireligious virtualities’’ of Christianity would, in this view, be merely its ‘‘other-
religious’’ or ‘‘otherwise-religious’’ potentialities, its affirmation rather than its negation,
its continuation much more than its discontinuation.^180 In de Duve’s definition, the soci-
ety of the spectacle is ‘‘the form taken by religion when society has exited from the reli-
gious. It starts with Golgotha, and with what luster!’’ (p. 670). But then, it is also clear
that the fact that it shrouds itself is hardly ‘‘a smokescreen that can be dispersed.’’ Reli-
giousness, the desire for mediation with the invisible, is all the more defended the more
it seems overcome. Paradoxically, de Duve concludes, the contemporary form of society,
with its ‘‘blinding, dazzling excess of visibility of the spectacle is there to conceal that
there are things that remain invisible and that between the visible and the invisible there
is no mediation’’ (p. 670).
In his concluding contribution, Werner Hamacher engages the historical and philo-
sophical debates surrounding the concept and articulation of human rights, from the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 and the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1948 up to present-day concerns, and teases out their conceptual and
political consequences for our dealings with sovereignty and democracy, with the internal
and external other or stranger, with generations gone and to come, with the natural and
the technical. Starting with a consideration of the strict meaning of ‘‘rights’’ and the
‘‘human’’ in their declarative-performative (their ‘‘impredicable’’ and hence ‘‘afforma-
tive’’) and metaphysical-ontological-phenomenological form—suggesting that they refer
‘‘neither to the empirical totality of a bio- or zoological species nor to any individuals as
the privileged (because exemplary) instances of such a species’’ but rather to the human
‘‘as such’’ or ‘‘in truth’’ (p. 671)—Hamacher follows the lead of Plato, Aristotle, Locke,
Marx, Kant, Arendt, Benjamin, and Levinas to suggest that there is a structural openness
and promissory character to the law, just as there is—before, beyond, and around law—a
possible-impossible pre-, post-, and para-juridical reserve for the beings that we and
others are.
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