“It could be said, following a certain line of thought developed by Derrida in his work “Of Grammatology”, that the world presents itself to us as the idol of nothingness. No longer as a full presence, but as that which, in its very apparent consistency, veils and at the same time reveals a radical absence. In this sense, idolatry would not be limited to transcendent figures—the image of God, the sacralization of an absolute—but would insidiously extend to the most immediate: objectual reality itself, as it appears to us, as we inhabit it, and as we know it. We do not merely worship a fabricated god; we worship the very texture of the real, its inertia, its supposed ontological weight.
And yet, this worship is woven with the very fabric of a lack, of a deficiency. What we hold with faith—the “real”—becomes a fetish that conceals its own structural emptiness. The world thus becomes an object of devotion not because it possesses a fullness of its own, but precisely because it operates as a substitute, as a montage that conceals its original fracture. This is not a mistake of perception or a simple conceptual construction; it is a deeper phenomenon, a form of consented blindness, of fidelity not so much to being as to the appearance of being.
Idolatry, then, is not a marginal deviation of certain cultures or religions, but a structural mechanism: the tendency to absolutize that which, in its essence, is unstable, provisional, derivative. What Derrida seems to suggest in his “Of Grammatology”—without ever stating it directly, of course—is that the entire world, as we understand it, functions as an ultimate signifier that, far from referring to a full meaning, revolves in a vacuum, sustained by pure difference. Thus, “reality” is, more than a fact, an effect of meaning; and like every effect of meaning, it is sustained by a network of absences, displacements, silences.
To say that the world is the idol of nothingness is, in short, to point out that our deepest attachment is not directed toward something, but toward the way in which that something imposes itself on us as evident, as indisputable. It is worshiping not so much a content as the very gesture of believing in a content. One is not worshiping something—a figure, an idea, a concrete truth—but the very act of believing, of clinging to something as if it were indisputable and meaningful. What is venerated is not so much the “what” of the content, but the “how”: the mechanism, the habit, the psychological or cultural need to believe in something as if it were absolute. At that point, idolatry is not an accident: it is the very structure of thought that seeks to fix, close, and secure. By “fix,” I mean the mind that tries to stop the flow of reality, giving it form and limits, as if it were capable of capturing its essence by giving it form and limits. By “close,” we mean to shut down indeterminacy, to stop the play of ambiguity, to seal meaning with an ultimate and absolute meaning. By “securing,” I mean the effort to establish what is perceived as uncertain, to offer guarantees in the face of the open, the mobile, the uncertain. Because idolatrous thinking invents certainties where there are none, closing the open, freezing the dynamic, and systematizing mystery.
Against this compulsion to absolutize, deconstruction appears not as a negation of the world, but as an interruption of its idolization. The real does not disappear: what dissolves is its claim to be founded, its false necessity collapses. And this dissolution is not a loss, but an opening.
The world appears as a supplement to a nothingness that is represented by a desire to be.”
Prabhuji
