Creation ex nihilo (Materialist, Nancy)

Nancy's redeployment of the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo as a materialist doctrine. It does not mean that the world is produced out of some pre-existing nothing by a powerful artisan-God; rather, it means the world has no presupposition or precondition, no ground, no reason, no origin, no end. The canonical formula is at Dis-Enclosure 24 (D 24): "Ex nihilo, which is to say: . . . nothing but that which is [rien que cela qui est], nothing but that which grows [rien que cela qui croît] (creo, cresco), lacking any growth principle." And at Creation of the World 51 (CW 51): "radical materialism, materialism without roots."

Key Points

No artisan-God, no transcendent ground: the doctrine is secularised but in a precise way — not by removing the ex nihilo in favour of natural cosmogony, but by retaining the ex nihilo and removing the Creator. What remains is the free dissemination of being (EF 13) — coexistence with no ground.
Etymology — creo / cresco: Latin creo (to create) is etymologically tied to cresco (to grow). Nancy reads the ex nihilo through this etymology: creation = growth-without-growth-principle.
Connection to the freedom of the stone: per freedom-of-the-stone and Morin Ch 6 §1, the ex nihilo is what makes intelligible Nancy's claim that all beings are free — they grow / roll without "why," abandoned to existence without being abandoned by anything.
Connection to coexistence: Nancy at BSP 86: "some thing is free to be a stone, a tree, a ball . . . with the reseda, the eglantine, and the thistle — as well as with crystals, seahorses, humans, and their inventions." Creation ex nihilo is the coexistence of singularities without a higher principle.
NOT pantheism or scientific materialism: the doctrine is not a deification of matter (pantheism) nor a reduction of being to matter-in-motion (scientific materialism). It is radical materialism, materialism without roots — without an underlying substrate, without a transcendent principle.

Details

Three things removed

The doctrine functions by removing three things from the traditional / metaphysical world-picture:

The Creator (Christian theology): no transcendent God external to the world.
The transcendental Subject (Kant, Husserl): no constituting consciousness bestowing meaning.
Pre-existing matter or prima materia (Aristotle, scholasticism): no substrate underlying determinate things.

What remains: the coming-to-presence of singularities, each time other, each time with others, coming and going without coming from or going anywhere — the ex nihilo of the world.

How it grounds Nancy's materialism

Per Morin Ch 6 §1, creation ex nihilo materialistically read is the precondition for:

freedom-of-the-stone: only because the world has no ground can the stone be free in Nancy's de-subjectivised sense.
whateverness-quelconque: only because there is no transcendent principle determining what kind a thing must be is the thing quelconque.
inorganic-body-of-sense: only because sense is not added to an underlying matter is the body-of-sense inorganic.
*rien*: only because the thing has no transcendent essence can it be the rien (thing-emptied-of-essence).

Distinct from "creation" as making

Nancy emphasises that the ex nihilo should not be read as "producing out of nothing" (which still requires a producer). Rather: "It is the expression of a 'radical materialism', a materialism 'without roots'" (CW 51). The world is in this sense uncreated in the sense of "not produced," yet created in the sense of "growing without principle."

Connections

foundational for freedom-of-the-stone — without groundlessness, the freedom-of-the-stone is unintelligible.
foundational for whateverness-quelconque — without absence-of-essential-determination, quelconque is unintelligible.
foundational for inorganic-body-of-sense — sense is "right at" being, not added to a substrate.
parallels *rien* — both operators of the thing-without-transcendent-determination.
secularisation of Christian creation ex nihilo — Nancy's "deconstruction of Christianity" project (the Dis-Enclosure / Adoration sequence).
contrasts with Sartrian for-itself / in-itself (the latter has a definite mode of being); also contrasts with Heideggerian Seinsgeschick (still a giving / gewähren).
contrasts with Mounier's theological reading of ex nihilo in *Personalism* Informal Introduction p. xii — for Mounier, creation ex nihilo means each person is brought into existence by a supreme Being who eternally destines that person; multiplicity-of-persons "proceeding from superabundance" bears "superabundance in itself as an illimitable interchange of love." This is the opposite register from Nancy's materialist deconstruction: Mounier retains the Creator-and-creature structure; Nancy removes both the Creator and the produced-from-nothing structure. The two pages should cross-reference precisely because they read the same Christian doctrine as theological resource (Mounier) and as resource for materialist atheism (Nancy). The structural pivot is the same — ex nihilo names a world without prior ground / pre-existing matter — but the directional reading is opposite. See personalism §"What Christianity Imports" for Mounier's full six-point catechesis.

Open Questions

Is Nancy's ex nihilo materialism compatible with contemporary physics (which has a very different relation to "nothing" — quantum vacuum, big bang, etc.)? The structural claim and the physical claim are at different registers; Nancy's claim is metaphysical, not cosmological.
Does the "deconstruction of Christianity" project (Nancy's Dis-Enclosure / Adoration) require the materialist reading of ex nihilo, or is it one possible reading? Nancy's broader project depends on it; whether the ex nihilo survives in non-Christian secularising frameworks is open.
What is the relation between Nancy's ex nihilo and Meillassoux's "contingency of laws of nature"? Both refuse a transcendent ground; the structural overlap is worth investigating.

Late-Political-Cosmogonic Register (Nancy 2020)

In *The Fragile Skin of the World* I §6 (raw 318–320), Nancy re-cites his own 2003 Creation of the World or Globalization (pp. 54–55) in a political-cosmogonic register that extends the doctrine's deployment beyond ontology and theology proper:

"To create the world means: immediately, without delay, reopening each possible struggle for a world, that is, for what must form the contrary of a global injustice against the background of general equivalence. And to conduct this struggle precisely in the name of this: that this world is coming out of nothing, that it is without preconditions and without models, without any given principle or end, and that it is precisely this that forms the justice and the sense of a world."

The 2020 self-citation makes three additional moves: (i) the ex nihilo is not just the ontological-structure of the world but a practical-political operator — the struggle against global injustice and general equivalence is itself the creating-of-the-world in the ex nihilo sense; (ii) the no-given-principle-and-no-end (the ontological feature of materialist ex nihilo) is what forms justice and the sense of a world (the political-cosmogonic feature); (iii) the Anthropocene / climate / globalization register is operative: the creating-of-the-world is now thought against the background of the world's possible unmaking.

This 2020 register is not a redefinition of the concept but a primary-source attestation of its late-political-philosophical synthesis — Nancy showing that the doctrine he developed in the Dis-Enclosure / Creation of the World sequence (early 2000s) is operative in his last decade. Cf. fragile-skin-of-the-world for the figural-cosmogonic synthesis that follows.

Sources

morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being — Ch 6 §1 (the freedom-of-the-stone / ex nihilo connection); references to CW 51, D 24, BSP 83–6, EF 13.
nancy-2021-fragile-skin-of-the-world — I §6 (raw 311–320, the spirit-of-a-world-without-spirit framing + the self-citation of Creation of the World pp. 54–55). Late-political-cosmogonic register.