Goldschmit, Marc
The End of Scripture and the Beginnings of the Book
- 2006.
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The place of monotheism, which is unthinkable without the translation of the Septuagint, is Greek monolingualism. But the translation of the “Scriptures” in book form also marks the interminable genesis of monotheism and the workings of its structure. This explains the depth of strategies to appropriate Abraham by “monotheistic” religions: the patriarch cannot be identified, similarly to what concerns the Father, the Jews, and the others. With Nietzsche, we have the analysis of the transformation of the inhabited God into a Universal God and the death of God in every sense. Such a mutation of the divine underpins the birth of Christianity as well as monotheism. It means the loss of the idea of choice or election. Monotheism—the transcendental expression of political life and the politics of life—is inseparable from a withdrawal of faith and an advance of belief, but also from the substitution of the idea of “equality” for that of “choice.” There cannot be any inhabited democracy without writing (such as Nietzsche’s) that goes beyond the monotheism of the book, i.e., a writing that is open to being traversed by a plural and different truth.