Seite - 142 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Band 2:2

143 | www.limina-graz.eu Laurens ten Kate | Strange Freedom already announced in the heart of monotheism’s doctrine of creation since God “necessarily” has to disappear, to die as a stable entity, as an existing power. Although Nancy develops this rather daring exegesis in quite strong and certain formulations (“decisive”, “nothing but…”, “most intrinsic and proper…”), I hold that his efforts to re-read the creation story open up a productive new realm of research on the ambiguities of freedom: “The creator necessarily disappears in the very midst of its act, and with this disappearance a decisive episode of the entire movement that I have sometimes named the ‘deconstruction of Christianity’ occurs, a move- ment that is nothing but the most intrinsic and proper movement of monotheism as the integral absenting of God […].” (Nancy 2007, 68) This deconstruction is not only one of Nancy’s research projects over the last twenty years, it is part of a history in which humankind deconstructs and thus reinvents itself: a historical break line in the axial process we briefly discussed above. The ex nihilo pinpoints the disappearance of the gods into the distant, invisible, transcendent God of monotheism… the dis- appearance of God in his act of creation. I will return to this complex con- nection between creation and beginning in the next section. 4 Freedom and Play: Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Humanity We need to obtain a clearer insight into the value of these theories of crea- tion as theories of the connection between acting and ‘being acted’ – the paradoxical structure of imaginaries that lies at the basis of our explora- tions into the strangeness of freedom. In order to do so, I propose to take a closer look at Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical anthropology, in par- ticular in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Here, we encounter an idea new to our train of thought so far: imaginaries are of the order of play. Hence, we need a theory of play. The Camel, the Lion, the Child Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) consists of a long series of hymn-like “dis- courses” [Reden]: sermons or reflections, mostly in prose, sometimes in poetic form. Every hymn finishes with the solemn words “Thus Spoke