Whenever I breach etiquette, and do what everyone knows better than to do, and in the course of normal conversation actually make reference to religion or religious symbols or concepts, I sometimes pay the steep price of being asked if I am religious, or, worse, if I’m Christian. I find I just can’t answer that question. Or at least I cannot answer that question as asked. My views on what religion is (and what religion is supposed to do) have moved so far from the common ground of believers and atheists that my “yes” cannot mean the “yes!” I mean, nor can my “no” mean anything that should earn me an ally or enemy.

This is why reading Bruno Latour’s Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech is a relief. At least I know I’m not alone in this difficulty. And maybe I’ve never been, but that’s part of the difficulty…

…Why was there any conflict between the meandering courses of scientific reference and the paths of religious translation in the first place? Between the search for constants via production of viable information and the search for versions capable of recreating the original message? Those paths should never have crossed. You can’t begin to speak again without putting an end to this comedy of errors that has made science the very close enemy of religion. These two forms of utterance depend on hard work that produces very fragile results, leaves traces so small, occupies space-time so differently, creates such incommensurable ecological niches that they had no more reason to begin to do battle with each other than do moles with frogs. That this happened regardless meant not counting on a third thief who, in his clumsiness, got the reciprocal tasks of science and religion equally wrong, forcing them to enter into burlesque wars. We might call this particular madwoman in the attic double-click communication, in honour of the computer mouse.

The sciences, plural, the true sciences, the ones that allow us to study their laboratory life, teams and equipment, practise a risky form of meandering: everything they produce is paid for with a painful transformation, since the utterance never looks like the thing it refers to. But, for double-click communication, all difficulties vanish, all paths level out: information becomes faithful communication without any transformation whatsoever, through simple obvious likeness between the copy and the original. This is sheer fantasy, naturally: no science would be possible through imitation, transparency and faithfulness. And yet, because of a history that has no place here, the type of communication that comes under the heading ‘Science’, singular, has taken the place of the sciences, plural, thereby concealing their prodigious transformations. Double-click communication, this immediate and costless access, this conveyance that appears to demand no transformation, has itself become, for our contemporaries, the model of all possible communication, the ideal, the metric standard of all movement, the judge of all faithfulness, the guarantee of all truth. It is through association with such fabled transparency that we evaluate all other conveyances. Starting, of course, with religious speech, which becomes pitiful in comparison with this ideal, since it can’t convey anything without transforming it from top to bottom. But make no mistake: by this account the sciences themselves, those formidable products we’re so proud of, would, if we had to judge them, too, by the yardstick of double-click communication, become exactly as dishonest, unfaithful, opaque, manipulative, deformed and artificial as religious utterance. They were simply lucky enough, due to political reasons having to do with the very organization of the modern world, for no one ever to have got around to describing them – until very recently.

To talk about religion again, others, worthier than he, received inspiration from on high, secret wounds marked their flanks, or some kind of holy unction oiled their foreheads. But no one appointed him, nothing marked him out, if not the certainty that once we modify, as he has done (as he thinks he has done), the common version of the sciences, everything else can start to change – first and foremost, religion. The thing that allows him to speak, the thing that gives him the courage to undertake this impossible task, is that he has actually explored the sciences and their transformations where his predecessors saw only Science, singular, and double-click communication. In his opinion, there has never been, till now, any credible comparison between the scientific forms and the religious forms of utterance. The stage has always been taken by communication. Well, the latter has only ridiculed the forms of conveyance that were supposed to pay their way by immense and perilous transformations. And, in actual fact, in contrast to a form of truth that travels without paying, all the other forms of truth appear crude and falsifying, since they toil and sweat along stony paths, like real yokels, much like the little donkey loaded with wood that a high-speed train whistles past.

But what happens if we stop measuring them by the standard of double-click communication and compare these two modes of travel among themselves: the one used by science, involving transformation and information, and the one used by religion, involving transformation and translation? What place does religious speech take once we no longer compare it with Science, but with the sciences that the author has been studying for twenty-five years? In which new ecology can these two forms of practice deploy themselves and take their distance? He claims to be one of the only people who can talk about religion again because he remains just as agnostic when it comes to Science as he is when it comes to belief. Most other people (if they give a rat’s arse about the subject) hope to extend Science over religion’s territory through an offensive apologetics, or to protect religion’s territory from Science through a defensive apologetics. He – and only he? – doesn’t think there is any territory to extend because the sciences don’t take over the world with red or green patches, like empires on geography maps; they lodge themselves in the world quite differently: along narrow conduits that they drill through from the inside, digesting them like termites. On the other hand, he knows very well that the blind faith in Science felt by the naively trusting exercises such a powerful hold over people’s minds that he doesn’t have a chance of being heard. This is why, without a mandate, without authority, he stumbles on, moving abruptly, like any cyclothymic, from megalomania to ‘micromania’. A voice crying in the wilderness.

Happily, we all have daily experience of ways of talking that double-click communication doesn’t govern. Imagine a lover who answered the question ‘Do you love me?’ with this sentence: ‘Yes, but you already know that, I told you so last year.’ (We might even imagine he recorded this memorable sentence on a tape recorder and that, as his only answer, he’s happy just to press the replay button to produce the indisputable proof that he truly loves …). You’d be hard pressed to find more decisive evidence that he has stopped loving in earnest. He has taken the request for love as a request for information, as though he’d decided to carve out a path through space-time and, through the intermediary of a document, a map, to return to the distant territory of the day he officially declared his love. From the quality of his answer, any impartial observer would understand that the lover hasn’t understood a thing. The fact is his girlfriend didn’t ask him if he had loved her, but if he loves her now. That is her request, her entreaty, that is his challenge.

Now, it may well be that the lover brings off the linguistic act required of him, and by way of an answer utters a sentence that resembles word for word the one he did indeed say a year earlier. If we compared the two recordings, we wouldn’t detect any difference in form: the information content, to talk as computer scientists do, would be zero. Conversely, the lover might manage to express the same love, not through repetition of the formula now, but through something quite different that bears no relationship of resemblance to the sentence he is being asked to recapture: a gesture, an act of kindness, a look, a joke, a quivering of the glottis. In both cases, the relationship is no longer the one a map has with a territory across the stream of transformations that maintain a constant. Either it dissociates sentences that resemble each other word for word but mean quite different things through the movement that captures them, or it makes diverse expressions synonymous through word forms that don’t in any way resemble each other. As soon as we talk of love, the letter and the spirit part company.

And so it isn’t the sentence itself that the woman will closely follow, or the resemblance or dissimilitude between the two instances, but the tone, the manner, the way in which he, her lover, will revive that old, worn-out theme. With admirable precision, exact to the second, she will detect if the old refrain has captured the new meaning she was waiting for, if it has renewed in an instant the love that her lover feels for her, or if the weariness and boredom of a liaison long over show through the worn-out vocables. No information is conveyed by the sentence and yet she, the woman who loves, feels transported, transformed, slightly shaken up, changed, rearranged, or not, or the opposite, alienated, flattened, forgotten, mothballed, humiliated. There are sentences uttered every day, then, whose main object is not to map out references but which seek to produce something else entirely: the near and the far, closeness or distance. Who hasn’t had some experience of this?

How can we not feel that it would be fraudulent to judge this speech requirement solely in terms of undistorted communication? Clearly, a hint of a reference always clings to amorous talk; essential information is in fact provided on the inner state, the psychology and the sincerity of the interlocutors, just as, conversely, an offer of closeness or distance always circulates within the most rigorous information… But we need to heighten contrasts here, bring out what each regime of utterance – the scientific and the religious – specifically conveys, its specific wavelength, even if we later acknowledge interference and overtones. As overlapping as these utterances may be in everyday practice, their felicity conditions (as they say in the philosophy of language) remain incommensurable. Both regimes judge accurately and with merciless discernment the true and the false, but the fact is, they don’t define the true and the false the same way. What one takes for a truth, the other takes for an outrageous deformation, and the other way round. We can’t translate them, either, into some superior language that would give both their due, for their definition of what is meant by ‘transformation’, ‘deformation’, ‘lie’, ‘truth’, ‘transfer’, ‘faithfulness’, ‘unfaithfulness’ varies in terms of the regime of utterance, the key written at the start of the score (not to leave out the terms ‘comparison’, ‘superior’, and ‘understanding’, which also differ from one form to the other). This is why it is so hard to start talking again when the power of double-click communication reigns undivided: we no longer understand to what extent we don’t understand each other.

Far from trying to cover up this distinction surreptitiously, it would be better if, on the contrary, we heightened it, explored it, familiarized ourselves with it in every possible way, for that’s the only way not to scandalize when we have to draw from this difference between speech regimes its inevitable consequence: what we call religious speech has no reference – any more than amorous exchanges do. Of course, it has a server, in the old-fashioned sense of the term of one serving at mass; it does indeed register something essential; uttered judiciously, it is neither empty nor vain. It very definitely has some referent, then, in the ordinary sense of the term. But it doesn’t have a referent in the precise sense of the term that the study of the sciences has allowed us to define: it does not distil information through a chain of graduated documents, each of which serves as material for formatting the next one. The thing is that, with these sentences, which are as mysterious as they are banal, we hope to get closer and not move further away. They don’t provide any access. They don’t teach anything about anything. They don’t drive. They don’t form holds we can get any kind of grip on. You don’t go anywhere with them you don’t travel anywhere by taking the vehicle, the intermediary, of religious utterances, words, texts, rituals. There is no subscriber at the number you dialled.

And just as well, since that’s not what it’s about. Nothing has made religious speech more inaudible, more unsayable than the ungodly habit of behaving as if it could follow the path of reference, just a bit less neatly, a bit less clearly, a bit less demonstrably.

. . .

The machine must be made to tick over again. ..The choice is never just whether to keep on repeating like a parrot or to invent everything every time from scratch, ab ovo. And still less to modernize, adapt, localize. It’s more a matter of understanding anew, based on present experience, what the tradition might well be able to say, lending us as it then does the words, the same words, but said differently. We don’t have to innovate, but to represent the same. The repetition of harping on the same old thing is opposed by the repetition of renewal: the first seems faithful but isn’t, the second seems unfaithful, yet it alone preserves the treasure that the other squanders while believing it’s preserving it.

Lovers, for instance, don’t judge the form of their words according to their degree of oldness or newness. There’s nothing more repetitive than the music of lovers; they always annotate the same story – theirs – but according to two modes, two tonalities that the crisis radically differentiates. Their story resembles two contradictory concatenations that become enmeshed like the arcades of a long street where, after a storm, puddles turn their quivering, shifting image upside down. Sometimes, they re-read the whole of their past as if it were merely the story of an ever-growing incomprehension tumbling down from the past to the present and thereby bringing indisputable proof that the future must part them forever. Sometimes, twisting, hedging, shifting, redressing, reinterpreting the same episodes, the same gestures, the same words, they weave a different, completely opposed story, threaded through the first, which proves, starting from now, through equally indisputable proofs, that they’ve always loved one another as they did the first day, better than the first day, and that the only future they have is to grow old together, ever closer. And each story exists inside the other one in the manner of a remorse, a risk, a heady presence – so much so that we can never take for granted what the present instant proves. Like those fun images in which the form and content are reversed according to the way you’re accustomed to looking at them or the angle at which you approach them, these two narratives coexist so comfortably that the same present instant can become either the end of an affair that is finishing today, or the starting point of an affair that is resuming afresh. All the episodes are the same, none is similar. Hic est saltus, this is where you have to jump.

Why have we remained so skilled at the gymnastics involved in the lovers’ crisis when we have become so rigid whenever we try to use it as a template for understanding the religious experience afresh? Is it because of the lack of resemblance between the private history of couples and sacred history? Yet the only difference between them might well be the scale of the group, the ambition of redemption, the choice of the people to be saved. Let’s have another go at capturing the big by the small, the sacred by the profane, the unacceptable by the familiar. It’s as if the same tradition could appear in either of two states: solid or gaseous.

A word received that is addressed to another time and to another place immediately loses its initial freshness, its efficacy; by construction, it appears to us now as no more than an artificial obstacle to understanding what it’s about. There is nothing to be done. By opening our minds, we can indeed believe that it had the power to transform for good those it was addressed to once upon a time, but we don’t really give a hoot about that anymore. Such is the solid state of the tradition, its mortal weight. Yes, but the thing is: as soon as I finally understand, for myself, what it’s about, I also begin to understand what it was that so deeply moved those people, too. The same way that lovers, when they emerge from their crisis, reinterpret their life together, here we, in turn, are again gripped by the same retroactive movement of time that flows from the present and heads for the past, illuminating opaque writings by the bright light of day: ‘Everything has become clear, I was reading them without understanding.’ Yet, every one of those now intelligible expressions remains foreign, exotic, none resemble those we employ, they are all untruthful through the sole fact that each is addressed to a place, to a moment in time, to a different person from history. Yes, but in every one of those places, in every one of those moments, on every one of those individuals they had the same effect, which I finally understand for the first time the same way the contemporaries of the Pentecost were affected by it: ‘So, that’s what they were trying to say? How come I didn’t get it earlier?’ As this dazzling sequence spreads, all the moments of redress in a way link up, one by one, adding another story to the story of different places and times – no, it’s the same one, the story of being brought face to face with the same revelation and the same redress. As far back as the revelation of this sameness goes, so goes the feeling of forming a people with those you then discover, with amazement, to have been addressed, despite the distance that separates them from us, as we are, in the same terms – which nonetheless don’t formally resemble each other in the slightest, since the definition of the ‘same’ has also changed. The tradition has changed state, it has gone from solid to gaseous, light, we could even say spiritual if the meaning of the word had itself been renewed.

I very strongly doubt anyone who has not had the concrete experience of metanoia will understand any of what Latour is saying, but those who have will be comforted and fortified by it.