Page - 141 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 2:2

142 | www.limina-graz.eu Laurens ten Kate | Strange Freedom Sloterdijk suggests that a theory of autoplastic action is imminent here. This theory is based on the axiom that “being human means existing in an op- eratively curved space in which actions return to affect the actor, works the worker, communications the communicator, thoughts the thinker and feelings the feeler.” (2013, 110) Creator Created – Creatio ex Nihilo revisited Nancy’s research, too, is fully involved in the insight that acting and being acted coincide in our being-in-the world. He re-reads Heidegger’s Being and Time with this perspective: being is never that of a human subject ex- ternal to the world, but being is always already in the world, as Dasein. This world, this Da acts on us as Dasein. But Nancy also proposes to deconstruct the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the creatio ex nihilo along these lines. Ac- cording to him, the ex nihilo does not mean, as Christian theism has it, that a pre-existing creator would suddenly create man and the world out of nothing. The “beginning” that the creation is (Gen. 1:1) is a radical begin- ning: the creator only becomes someone in the act of creating and in the encounter with his creature, humanity, which is imagined to be his partner, his fellow creator. God ‘begins’ with the creation. A possible extrapolation of this re-interpretation of the ex nihilo – Nancy does not go this far – may be that creation can be defined as imagination, whereby the imagined creature is a creator in return. Is this the meaning of the famous phrase “So God created man in his own image,  in the image of God he created him […]” (Gen. 1:27)? If this is feasible, then the creator was no one before this beginning, he was nihil. This strange God only becomes a god when he enters into relation with the world, with humankind, with adam. And the creative beginning will begin again and again; this is why the Hebrew text (Gen. 1:1) speaks of “In a beginning,” not using the definite article. The creator coincides with his act of creating; outside this act “God is nothing,” and only in this way, between God and man, something new can happen: a world can be created. Nancy even considers this counter-interpretation of the ex nihilo the start- ing point for his project of a “deconstruction of monotheism,” and in par- ticular of the Christian heritage in the modern world. The death of God is “So God created man in his own image,  in the image of God he created him […]”