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CONTINGENCY; OR, COVENANTAL COMEDY

In Praise of Strange Paulinist Federations

If development is entirely animated by accident, by the obstacle of the tuché, it is in so far as the tuché brings us back to the same point at which pre-Socratic philosophy sought to motivate the world itself. It required a clinamen, an inclination, at some point. When Democritus tried to designate it, presenting himself as already the adversary of a pure function of negativity in order to introduce thought into it, he says, It is not the μηδεν that is essential, and adds—thus showing you that from what one of my pupils called the archaic stage of philosophy, the manipulation of words was used just as in the time of Heidegger—it is not a μηδεν, but a δεν, which, in Greek, is a coined word. He did not say ἑν, let alone ον. What, then, did he say? He said, answering the question I asked today, that of idealism, Nothing, perhaps?—not perhaps nothing, but not nothing.

—Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

And thereby that in which I live is not itself—in the flesh—present; and yet, it is not nothing, otherwise I could not say anything at all about it.

—Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life

For Heidegger, what remains unexplained in the conception of the intentionality as a relation between a subject and object is precisely what is in need of explanation, that is, the relation itself:

The vagueness of the relation falls back on the vagueness of that which stands in relation…. The most recent attempts conceive the subject-object relation as a “being relation” [Seinsbeziehung]…. Nothing is gained by the phrase “being relation,” as long as it is not stated what sort of being is meant, and as long as there is vagueness about the sort of being [Seinsart] of the beings between which this relation is supposed to obtain…. Being, even with Nicolai Hartmann and Max Scheler, is taken to mean being-on-hand [Vorhandensein]. This relation is not nothing, but is still not being as something on hand…. One of the main preparatory tasks of Being and Time is to bring this “relation” radically to light in its primordial essence and to do so with full intent.

—Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities (citing Heidegger)

We testify to messiah executed, which is only scandal and stupidity except for those interpellated by this testimony. Those so interpellated should look at their emergence as things which do not exist now assembling together for the destruction of what is.

—Gloss of Paul (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:18–28)

WE SHOULD REVIVE THE EARLY CHRISTIAN PRACTICE OF PRODUCING testimonia collections, little assemblages that effect the solicitation, repetition, and dissemination of new communal formulae, so many virtual constitutions of questionably political bodies. With the little collection above I want to flag some ways that to discover Paul floating within an underground current of a new materialism is to read in him an exemplary case of that perplexingly obtrusive enjoyment which constitutes our being—unsaved and unsafe—in the world. This enjoyment (Agamben will press the topos toward the word love) is obtrusive in the sense that it is constitutive, preceding or itself soliciting the emergence of subject and object. To say this, moreover, implies that it is an obtrusiveness also in the sense that, despite this enjoyment, this love, or this interpellation being the scene within which everything about the oriented subject-object relation plays out, for that reason it remains a kind of provocation or incitement emerging, as it were, from offstage. Cagey as we might be, we cannot quite lure this scene-making lure itself onto the actual stage of our performance. This is—to say the least—not a little perplexing, particularly in a world where it seems that explicable reality simply is an organizational, perfectly managerial, relation between means and ends. For a little testimonia book to conjure up such drama, replete with the indirection of an offstage directorial voice, we find ourselves naming a constitutive gap in self-ownership, the impossibility of properly, simply, intending ourselves. As the early Heidegger might have put it, eccentric actors such as these lose the capacity of ownership over themselves and their actions, all those capacities by which they might mean themselves. That which is closest to us is farthest away. Yet another witness to scribble into our archaic collection: “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” Where it was, I shall become.

It is in two senses that I say to situate Paul within an underground current of a new materialism is to find in him an exemplary case of that perplexingly obtrusive enjoyment which constitutes our being. On the one hand, I think that Nietzschean readings of Paul miss this crucial element when they read as if we might find in Paul a means-ends calculation machine, all those debts and payoffs constitutive of a “higher swindle.” Here—as I will explore in chapter 3 in relation to Foucault—Nietzsche always reads like the most traditional church theologian, never mind that they valued this reading in diametrically opposed fashions. But why would we ever allow the apostle to escape the odd revelation of an obtrusive facticity and its intensely invested symptoms, as if Paul were just what a triumphalist Christian tradition wanted him to be, namely, the sequestered founding father who transcends the logics that bind the rest of us? It is not enough to value the story of exceptionalism differently; we need to work it over entirely. On the other hand, if we consider Paulinism as another tale for our archive of subject-forming enjoyments, then there is no way around the comparative implication that we will discover to this same degree a Pauline stripe within our new materialist explorations of religion or of subjectivity. It is in this sense that I find the real forcefulness of the young Albert Schweitzer’s comment (which I described in the introduction) that Nietzsche failed to capitalize on the radicality of his critique of Paulinism precisely to the degree that he failed to become Paul. We should take the comparative problematic seriously. Mutually displaced by the elusive solicitations of an underground current of materialism, Paul and ourselves would participate in an oddly secret sharing that needs to be made clearer.

As I have already begun to suggest with my little testimonia book, one way to unfold this tale is to consider Pauline klēsis or calling as a mode of Epicurean parenklisis, translated by Lucretius into Latin as clinamen, a tilt or swerve that is intimately linked to important recent efforts to imagine both the materiality of our being in the world and also the peculiarly open or contingent ground of our emancipatory hope. As the quotation of Lacan here indicates, his psychoanalytic reception of ancient philosophy situates, precisely, an obtrusive or decentering desire at the place of a clinamen or swerve within the otherwise smooth functioning of organized functional systems, which Lacan sometimes describes as “homeostatic”: the swerve as a founding, and therefore fateful, accident of tūchē. Elsewhere Lacan will describe the decentering effect of clinamen as the essence of transferential love, the very ground of our forms of knowing.¹ Nor should we miss the way that on both occasions Lacan subtly links his story to the early Heidegger’s, a move some may at first find surprising.² Following this trajectory, Slavoj Žižek has gone further in his own early developments of these genealogical points into a political category wherein clinamen as the swerve of “enjoyment” operates as a “constitutive ontological excess,” a “pure excess” in the sense that it has “no presupposed normality.”³ We are bordering now on a discussion of a kind of excess constitutive of identity, a topic which will designate an important comparative exploration of Paul among the new materialists. Finally, and closely related, Derrida’s psychoanalytic commentary on Lucretius’s need for a declination, swerve, or clinamen within the otherwise orderly falling of atoms in the void could be an enlightening commentary on all of Žižek’s Lacanian work on political enjoyment:

Without this declension, “nature would never have produced anything.” Only this deviation can change the course of an imperturbable destination and an inflexible order. Such erring (I have called it elsewhere “destinerring”) can contravene the laws of destiny, conventions or contracts, agreements of fatum (fati foedera [2.254]). I emphasize the word “contract” for reasons that will become clear later. Allow me here a brief digression toward a classical philological problem concerning the indeterminate reading of the word voluptas or voluntas (2.257). The mere difference of a letter introduces a clinamen precisely at the point where Lucretius is explaining why the clinamen is the condition of freedom, of the will (voluntas) or the voluptuous pleasure (voluptas) wrested away from destiny (fatis avolsa). But in any case, the context leaves no doubt as to the link between clinamen, freedom, and pleasure. The clinamen of the elementary principle—that is, the atom, the law of the atom—would be the pleasure principle.⁴

In terms of political life, then, the unconscionable or unconscious swerve—the invariant declination from the untilted according to Lucretius—would become a peculiar analytic category that would, by definition, not be transparent to or functional for itself, perhaps precisely because it would rest in itself as clinamen! This constituting or grounding pleasure, as a swerve, would therefore be a peculiar and peculiarly intransigent resistance to all such transparencies or functionalities, a structural oddness that has come to be nicely evoked—consider a young Heidegger’s discussion of Pauline temporality—by a biblical archive of “calling” and “expectancy.” Finally, with a tip of the hat to the reception of these tropes in Giorgio Agamben, the clinamen could thus become another name for the oddly paradoxical force of a performance of political power. As performance, power could just as well name a lack of power inasmuch as performance relies only on the spectacular aura or specular enjoyment of its own repetitions. In keeping with these other articulations, the identity of power is split, haunted by a spectral doubling which it itself is not. Initially and briefly, then, these testimonia indicate some of the paradoxes of performance, paradoxes of immanence, or paradoxes of singular phenomena that may all find their repetition or isomorphic indication in Pauline discussions of klēsis. In every case there is an excess, a kind of nonbeing shadowing the singular being in question, which is from the outside only a kind of comically weak foolishness—save for the identities precisely driven by it, constituted by it.

In order to press the genealogical point, we could assert that one could go further here without straying at all from the basic cluster of mutually reinforcing concepts, from the “absent cause” of the late Louis Althusser’s materialist philosophy to the development, in the work of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, of the singular emergences of hegemony.⁵ For my purposes I want to mention only two further genealogical interventions importantly related to my own efforts in this chapter to situate Paul within an underground current of materialism. Note that in an important archival development of these conversations, Eric Santner explores the topic of obtrusive, excessive, or self-grounding enjoyment as a key for unlocking a contemporary political theology, as it were, of (the unconscious) God.⁶ One could even say, perhaps, that a genealogy of the (unconscious) love of God, the history of singular loves constituting a knowledge beyond what God “knows,” is not unrelated to the project of releasing Paulinism from the calculations and certainties imagined to go hand in hand with most inherited Christian origins stories. Or, in yet another echo of Lacan, Giorgio Agamben finds in Heideggerian “facticity” a kind of “love” which itself excessively opens up the appearance of our lives as such.⁷ The ecstatic (dis)placement which is “facticity” becomes the swerve constitutive of worldhood, and another important genealogical counterpoint to the Pauline klēsis, as the early Heidegger himself already recognized.⁸

Note that my little testimonia book weaves together all these interrelated tropes with a Pauline gloss whereby a genuinely surprising “federation” or covenanted collective emerges from “the nothings” or “the nonbeings” (ta mē onta), disparate nothings knitted together into a social experience. To say that it is only in the “weakness” of a witness believed that unites them is to say that their evental emergence or consolidation differs in no respect from the self-grounding or performative strength of what we will soon hear described as interpellation. In the clinamen or parenklisis of klēsis something emerges from nothing, and Paul’s call indicates only the mysterious forcefulness of the, as it were, uncalled for organization of new community.

In each instance of the testimonia book, therefore, it is the resolute difficulty of maintaining oneself as a singularity that solicits the “return” of the archive of Paulinism. This is important to make clear in the sense that it is not incidentally but rather precisely, specifically that the new materialism invites a genealogical association between Pauline klēsis and Epicurean parenklisis or Lucretian clinamen. The issue is already the staple through these disparate quotations, and it is essential for the larger thrust of this book. Fastening these texts together (by staple or nail) will have been ultimately a political problem of existential—which is to say singularized and immanent—enjoyment, the topos becomingly increasingly, obsessively haunted by visions of Paul, law, desire, and emancipation.⁹ In a way, this entire book draws on those multiple comparative and genealogical threads linking texts of an ancient apostle to this decidedly modern effort of thought to stay with the immanent. Forget what everyone is saying about the “surprising” philosophical turn to Paul: the issue is to unpack the long-standing, deeply ingrained genealogical links between Paulinist discussions of call, excessive life, community formation, and decidedly modern emphases on immanent, singularized swerve as the very ground of existence. The links are not surprising, just daunting and—in the current state of academic formations—dauntingly “multidisciplinary.” So we begin by pointing out, simply, that this link is already true of Heidegger, Lacan, Žižek, Agamben, Santner (we should mention Alain Badiou, of course), as if the apostle were the site through which to construe power’s relation to the phenomena of the everyday. An “underground current” of a Paulinist new materialism, we might say, is already down there, waiting only for the otherwise assumed ground beneath our feet (which is also to say Paul’s feet) to tremble, perhaps to quake, but in any case to give way so that a new form of thinking—about “materialism” and about “religion”—may take the plunge.

Amidst tremors of this approaching turmoil, this chapter articulates a moment in earlier materialist philosophy which marked an important transition relevant to each of the turns to Paul mentioned above, namely, Louis Althusser’s step toward an “aleatory materialism.” I want to go on from there to suggest—by way of the Paulinism of Althusser’s intellectual ally Stanislas Breton—initial ways we could understand Paul and the vexing political problem of singular, immanent enjoyment, which I take to be the nail piercing the disparate texts in the epigraphs to this chapter. In placing Pauline klēsis at the center of the “underground current” of materialism, I also want to point out several moments in which Jacques Derrida, despite being such a good detective of the “material soul” and its symptoms, sometimes failed to see what I am trying to make clear here. On those occasions, I will suggest, it was Nietzsche who misled him. In Derrida’s peculiarly dogmatic repetition of Nietzsche on several occasions, Derrida makes of Paul the first Christian and the worst kind of pop Platonist. As I have already started to explain, as ironic as it may be, a new materialism must learn to read religion like the postfoundational materialists we claim to be rather than looking to it for indications of an idealism we want to designate as an enemy. In repeating Nietzsche, Derrida effectively leaves the real issue—the excess of phenomenal immanence that disturbs everyday life—outside his readerly frame. This, in turn, causes him to repeat tales of a mistakenly imagined two-tiered metaphysics or ontotheological Paulinism, which helps neither a “religion” that remains undisturbed in an imagined world of private, identitarian ownership nor a new materialism which continues to imagine that the archive of “religion” must be proscribed, prohibited as off limits to the life of thought. To repeat the odd line of Schweitzer: new analysis of the archival figure of Paul can show the way here; but only if we materialists are willing, in some sense, to become him by way of an analysis that reads Paul as, like the rest of us, subjected to the aleatory displacements and oddly enthusiastic movements of a material soul.

PREPARING THE WAY FOR A PAULINIST MATERIALISM: ALTHUSSER’S TURN TO THE ALEATORY

Just for the moment, let us turn away from my testimonia collection to the quotations with which this book begins. As we read there, late in his career Louis Althusser began to articulate a profound “turn” in his thinking about Marxism, about philosophy and the critique of ideology, and about the freedom of emancipatory political movements.¹⁰ In keeping with his earlier reading strategies of these traditions, Althusser described this transformation as the recognition of an “underground current” within a philosophical tradition he identified as “materialism.” As if to spice up the detective story—which at this point in his life and career was not at all simply relegated to questions of philosophy—Althusser describes this underground current as a shock of insight that was repeatedly “contested and repressed [in the philosophical tradition] as soon as it was stated” (167).

The subterranean insight, ever articulated and always immediately forgotten, Althusser understands as a countermaterialism, a “completely different mode of thought” to the “various materialisms on record,” including (he tells us) that of Marx, Engels, and Lenin as these tend to be understood (167). In fact, Althusser finds the renewal and liberation of this subterranean materialism also in Heidegger, so it is no surprise that Althusser claims that this materialism eludes “the classical criteria of every materialism” and that, in this respect, “We continue to talk about a materialism of the encounter only for the sake of convenience” (171, my emphasis). More interesting still, in unearthing this countermaterialism from a repressive oblivion of forgetfulness, Althusser sees himself as subverting a “Western” mode of philosophy, that mode being a “destiny” which is ours as participants in a “logocentric” being in the world. We are the ones, after all, who are predisposed to think, talk, and act as if we could assume there is a “priority of Meaning over all reality.”

Althusser’s subversive genealogy of a philosophy of the encounter, written in the early eighties, situates the critique of logocentrism and the future of materialist analysis in important ways that invite several immediate questions. How, or from where, will a subterranean power arise that has the potential to transform a practical and theoretical “destiny” of Western thought? Similarly, how does one emancipate nonsense and nonmeaning, not simply as random and ephemeral moments of anarchic freedom but as an integral quality of communal invention, the formation of new communal forms? Finally, and to evoke Paul’s Corinthian echoes more explicitly, how would we describe that community afforded by disruptive mechanisms of a “materialism of the encounter” without repeating philosophical traditions of community founded on logos and the assumption of the priority of meaning and sense? Althusser’s late excavations attempt to expose the sheltering ground of community to an ungrounding or destabilizing encounter that cannot be fixed (or managed) either by “idealism” or, we might add, by a discourse ethics like that of Habermas. On what decentering event of rupture with meaning, then, will this serially repressed but nevertheless coming community be thus (un)grounded? And, if not by a discourse ethics in the usual sense, how would the organizing communications of this community testify to a community-forming encounter that itself must be subtracted from the tallies of logocentric system or the repetitions of identity constitutive of “idealism”? In a word, and to repeat the lines of Paul directly, what is it to have one’s communal subsistence consist in a nothing except a subtraction from preexisting structures?

THE NEED TO “PROCLAIM OBSTRUCTION (SKANDALON) AND STUPIDITY (MŌRIA)” AGAINST THE WISDOM OF ALTHUSSER’S DEFINITION OF RELIGION (CF. 1 CORINTHIANS 1.23)

As bearers and heralds of this subversive and subterranean “current” of thought, Althusser mentions Lucretius, Spinoza, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Heidegger, and Derrida. Althusser does not mention someone whom his life-long friend and interlocutor, the philosopher and Passionist priest Stanislas Breton, would no doubt have included in this list of bearers of an “underground current of the materialism of the encounter”: the ancient apostle Paul.¹¹ I want to develop in the next chapter several contributions of Breton’s reading of Paul for my own very different political project. But I want to argue, even more, that an underground vein of Paulinist materialism of the encounter is indeed buried away, even if a little deeper—which is to say more surprisingly—than that indicated by Althusser’s reference to Lucretius, Spinoza, or Heidegger. Without question, the most important stated reason the apostolic exemplar of Althusser’s “secret tradition” of philosophy would not be mentioned here is because Althusser is repeatedly at pains to suggest that “religion” is precisely the mode of thought which is rendered inoperable by a materialism of the encounter.¹² The gesture is typical enough, completely clichéd in fact, both in its association of “religion” with Western logocentrism and also in its abandonment of a figure like Paul to the hegemony of the same. As should be clear by now, everything I do is a refusal of these paths. It is the conservatism of the Nietzschean gesture that leaves “religion” on the imagined shore of an idealized life not subject to the material pressure of the absent cause operating behind the back of thought and political action. “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.” One either believes it or not, one sticks to it as an analytic agenda or not: where It was, there Paul (too) shall be.

For his part—and I think this is important—that obsessive Paulinist, Stanislas Breton, first added himself and his Paulinism of the crucified to the list of “aleatory materialists” only in a private letter. In this way, Breton operated as a kind of ecclesiastical obverse of the post-Christian Althusser, as if Breton, too, were reticent to let loose a destabilizing effect which might emerge from his association of “religion” with the “underground current of materialism.” Whatever the specifics, that Breton first kept the underground (as it were) under his hat is intriguing to me given the way the connections, links, and implications for Breton’s oddly postmodern and postfoundational neo-Platonism—not to mention Althusser’s “materialism of the encounter”—are all readily perceived once stated openly. Or, to put it with the focus and force the point deserves, these isomorphisms are all readily visible once one lives as if one does not know either what “religion” is, why a materialism of the encounter should not subsume religion more radically into its purview, or why—it would always amount to the same thing—“religion” should ever be allowed to save itself as an insulated “idealism.”¹³ In this light, Althusser and Breton alike (not to mention Derrida after them) are in my story still indications of the refusal of a Paulinist materialism which is peering at them through the very fault line and fissure of the clichéd and reified distinction between “religion” and “materialism.”

To refuse what amounts to an idealist distinction (we should not forget) between these two categories is to refuse docility before a massive genealogy and its carefully sequestered and policed archives. It is no small task to incite others to remain intentionally “stupid” in relation to the established wisdom about the inside and outside of religion or material phenomena. I understand more than most that this strategic mōria is usually taken to constitute a calculating effort (read: infuriating skandalon) to subsume either religion or materialism into its preestablished opponent. But the issue is to begin to articulate a Paulinist materialism of the encounter that opens up when we, Bartleby-like perhaps, prefer not to do the usual labor to render stable the ready-made accounts. Here I point only to the repetition of the word religion in the lines of the initially private letter of Breton to a slightly paranoid ecclesiastical friend about Althusser, a friend who had with evident annoyance questioned Breton’s relationship to the famously materialist Althusser. Breton responded with a repetition of the word religion that I read like a symptom of an underground current which will not remain forever repressed. Breton wrote: “To those who ask me about the religion of Althusser in his last moments, I respond that he had nothing to say except that (sinon que) I discussed with him what he called aleatory materialism.”¹⁴

Strange scene, the Passionist priest speaking with Althusser as he lay dying. Perhaps like Paul, who preferred to speak about “nothing but” the cross and the crossed out (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:2), Althusser determined with Breton to know nothing but an aleatory materialism. Breton’s letter goes on to describe how he understands that this late Althusserian “aleatory materialism” could be read next to certain aspects of the theology of John of the Cross, adding—intriguingly—that Breton’s own neo-Platonic philosophical theology and Althusser’s aleatory materialism were rather intimately related.¹⁵ I will return shortly to some of the comparisons to be discerned between Breton’s Paul and the late Althusser. But, for the moment I want to repeat very directly that it is a materialism of the encounter itself which, on its own terms, cannot allow either “religion” or Paulinism to remain unscathed or self-enclosed as the idealism they might even think themselves to be. One imagines the inverse discovery to the one I found in Breton’s archives, this one the (imagined) private letter of a dogmatic adherent of the underground current of materialism hoping—honestly and unabashedly hoping—that his priestly friend, in those final moments, hit upon the deep consolation and illumination of the singular pressure or excess of life that they were attempting to articulate and theorize. I imagine the question, “In that moment, did you discuss the vibrancy of a new materialism?” with the answer: “I can say that, in that final moment, we talked always of an apostle.”

Fantasies of virtual letters notwithstanding, it is this underground current of “materialism” itself that must refuse the very distinction whereby this enemy, “religion,” would remain—safely and unscathed—an antagonistic opposite. The unfinished project of modern Epicureanism, so to speak, this is a pressure that a new materialism must engage, namely, the question whether or not it can encounter and account for religion without rehearsing the same fantasies about that entity which religion itself (sometimes, at least) peddles. With that specific pressure in mind, I begin not yet on the similarity between the late Althusser and the philosophical Paulinist, but between the late Althusser and the young Jacques Derrida.

WHO IS REFUSING PSYCHIC SYMPTOMS OF SWERVED COVENANT COMMUNITIES? READING DERRIDA, PAUL, AND EPICURUS

This only do I want to know: were you interpellated when you lived like the Jerusalem community or when we lived as we do in Galatia where we heard and believed? We the believing, we’re the real kids of Abraham.

—cf. Paul to the Galatians (3:2, 7)

One of the important things about Derrida’s genealogy of Epicurean clinamen in “My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies” is the way it inflects and avows the materialism of his early and career-making doctrines about writing and dissemination.¹⁶ Indeed, in this essay the young Derrida situates himself in a way very closely related to Althusser’s late “Underground Current” essay, and we should not forget that in that essay Althusser lists Derrida among the exemplars of this “secret” tradition. The respective essays of Althusser and Derrida share important characteristsics, in fact: Derrida presents us with a similar cast of repressed characters from Epicurus to Heidegger; a similar exposition of chance, encounter, and event; and a similar naming of this assemblage of characters, ideas, and overlaps as a repressed materialism. By the same token, the “materialism” of both essays will echo very forcefully psychoanalytic traditions of the decentring and transformative effects of the unconscious. Strikingly, one of Derrida’s suggestions (to a group of psychoanalysts in fact) is that it is the materialist who refuses to exclude from her analysis the aleatory, material marks that Derrida takes in turn to have been integral as well to ancient Epicurean considerations of the stoicheia or elements. Derrida’s genealogy therefore solicits a kind of community over time of materialist analysts, including in this virtual guild some Epicureans, some psychoanalysts, and the great detective Dupin of Edgar Allen Poe’s wonderful short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).

This diverse assemblage of ages, actions and personae are linked together to constitute a countergenealogy, all becoming exemplars of those for whom mediatic slips, misfires, and unintended affectations are essential, an analytic interest in what Derrida glosses as materiality. “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.” The philosopher even links the analytics of materiality strategically with the Epicurean teaching of a material soul. Against imagined self-enlosures of identities and idealisms, the material soul names a research project in which these ideal entities are incapable of remaining self-enclosedly preserved from slips of the pen, tears in parchment, or other marks of the material history of communicative media (352). That we tell the history of philosophy (or religion) as the history of ideas rather than the intimate imposition of these materialities, however, is not incidental: “But never forget this: the Democritian tradition, in which the names of Epicurus and his disciples are inscribed, has been subjected since its origin, and first of all under the violent authority of Plato, to a powerful repression throughout the history of Western culture. One can now follow its symptomatology, which begins with the erasure of the name of Democritus in the writings of Plato” (362). The an-archic and aleatory effects of these unconscious material agencies operate (as Gilles Deleuze might have put it) on a plane of immanence, in the precise sense that ideal entities and self-enclosed identities are not immune to their mutually transformative capacities. As Clayton Crockett explains in his excellent book on Deleuze and Badiou, Deleuze sometimes interchanged nominations of this deterritorialized territory, speaking of a “plane of consistency,” a “dark precursor,” and a “plane of immanence.”¹⁷ Indeed, with his own nomination of “materiality” here, Derrida is primarily interested in designating the mutual affectation, the constitutive co-agitation, of strata we tend to take as distinct: the realm of techne and the apparatus with all their merely contingent or senseless imbrications within historical worlds (on the one hand) and the realm of meaning, internalized sensibility or selfhood (on the other). The question of mediated, material souls articulates Derrida’s fascination in the essay with Epicurus’s ancient rejection of Herodotus’s dualistically split soul and body in favor of an analysis that tracks phenomena by focusing peri tēn psuchēn ta sumptōmata, a phrase Derrida glosses (for an audience of Freudian analysts) as “psychic symptoms” (352).

There will be a strange kind of freedom here—we might echo Althusser—which idealism cannot recuperate to itself, but to which idealisms of any sort will always remain exposed. Derrida’s text is generally much less oriented by modes in which the vicissitudes of the dice throw of chance turn up as unforeseen and unplanned emancipation, the very issue driving Althusser’s texts on “aleatory materialism.” But Derrida does explore the way Epicurean clinamen or swerve is precisely that an-archic force capable of scrambling, rendering inoperative, or setting on a different footing what the ancient philosopher already described as so many federations, but which we might just as well render covenants, a term I do not want to forget in the context of our virtual community of analysts of the material soul.

DERRIDA’S (NIETZSCHEAN) OBFUSCATION OF PAULINIST MATERIALISM

To say it bluntly, I hardly know why Paul should be the better trafficker in psychic symptoms of covenant federation than we are. That is, I hardly know why we would allow ourselves to imagine “religion” as a space of immunity to or refusal of aleatory or stochastic powers of material immanence. It is in this light that I very much miss Derrida’s earlier detective work—that eye and that ear for contingent clues, that inestimable and unruly passion to see where they lead—in a later text in which Derrida engages explicitly with Pauline texts. This missing, his and mine, is all the more striking inasmuch as that text, “A Silkworm of One’s Own” (1996), repeats an interest precisely in outdoing Paul on the topic of life. Derrida’s piece even concludes by linking precisely this worthy fantasy—the outdoing of Paul on resurrection or the creation of unexpected life—with another one, the final overcoming of a philosophical history of truth as veiling and unveiling. Saving Paulinism (or, which is to say the same, doing it one better) and being saved from the ontotheological cycles of Western thought: it’s not a bad day’s work. It will also always have been the question of how to negotiate Nietzsche’s tale of the West as the global expansion of Platonism by way of Pauline Christianity. Derrida writes: “Of course, I still dream of resurrection. But the resurrection I dream of, for my part, at the ends of the verdict, the resurrection I’m stretched out toward, would no longer have to be a miracle, but the reality of the real, quite simply, if it’s possible, ordinary reality finally rendered, beyond fantasy or hallucination” (87). The beatific conjuring of the final act of this dialogue, then, is one in which the textual persona of the philosopher, so wearied with the weaving and unweaving of discourses of truth as unveiling (cf. 39f.), finds himself happy in the everyday, not tormented by desire either to veil or to unveil but contented in the everyday as a “new finitude” (87, emphasis added). Here, too, he continues with a language whose psychoanalytic echoes are unmistakable: “What luck, this verdict, what feared chance: yes, now, there will be for me worse than death, I would never have believed it, and the enjoyment here nicknamed ‘resurrection,’ that is, the price to pay for the extraordinarily ordinary life toward which I should like to turn, without conversion, for some time still—such an enjoyment will be worth more than life itself” (87). To hit upon, and to remain with, an everyday enjoyment worth more than life itself will save miracle itself by redeeming it as the “extraordinarily ordinary.” That longing set, however, our detective on the plane of immanence confronts us with few surprises: no real intrigues of conspiratorial contingencies in the texts of Paul (of all people, what a media history, what a history of coverup, co-optation, contingent elisions and afterlives!); no new modes of analysis of those post-Pauline apparatuses (so many geological formations) which apprehend, lay bear, or give significance to the name of this apostle over time. On this occasion Derrida veers closer to Althusser’s “religion,” while Paul will be left alone, simply, as a version of the pop-Platonic self-same that confuses the real work of thought, as if thought, too, does not also want to work Paul over, to show him, as it were, how resurrection is done. Importantly, Derrida’s text leans on Nietzsche as an important figure in this escape from, waking up from, or (another of its nicknames) resurrection from the very dream of an escape from the everyday, a weaving together of names and philosophical issues which is not at all incidental. Indeed, we are told: “what I admire most in Nietzsche is his lucidity about Paul” (41). In other words, one of the tactics of the essay which seems fully operational, to the point that it is almost tritely repetitive, is precisely the deployment of a Nietzschean Paul in the great Nietzschean genealogy of Western thinking about truth. “What I admire most about Nietzsche is his lucidity about Paul.”

True to the master, in Derrida’s text Paul appears as the “first Christian” and proponent of a concomitant pop Platonism, adding to Nietzsche’s basic story only a sensitivity to potential anti-Jewish or misogynistic elements in Paul (to say the least, two issues that did not seem to keep Nietzsche awake at night): “The one who wanted to veil the heads of the women and unveil those of men, that very one denounced Moses and the children of Israel” (77). Paul functions in Derrida’s essay as the perfect touchstone in the standard Nietzschean tale of a dominant Western discourse about truth: denigrating the everyday; promising a revelatory vision which circumvents the veil of everyday life and language. Derrida’s is without question the Paul of a “higher swindle” that is the functional dualization of a more immanent form of excessive “enjoyment” within the everyday.

One needs to be precise about the nature of my criticism here. My unease at Derrida’s engagement emerges not from a sense that Nietzsche was incorrect to argue that Paulinism had come to function as an exemplary “Platonism for the masses” in Western discourses about truth—anyone who does not agree with Nietzsche should speak more to those participating in dominant contemporary forms of Christianity. But neither does my criticism emerge from the fact that, here, Derrida follows a master rather directly and unsurprisingly. At one level, the arguments as such are all fair enough: for Nietzsche, for the Paulinism Nietzsche imagined to be nameable also as modern Christendom, and for the ancient apostle. The pressing issue for me at the moment, the real pressure we should feel when reading this piece, emerges from elsewhere. In a word, what is happening here to that contretemps to which Derrida also claims to want to witness, that accident and that contingency that is the primary mode in which the other will speak in and through—even despite—us? Put differently, where is the enjoyment that both subvents and subverts the everyday, all every days? The significance of the issue is easy to see: what happens, in relation to the analysis of the Pauline texts, to the basic structures of the Derridean promise, that heraldic opening to transformations and transvaluations which the structure of the promise harbors like so many fugitives from and of justice? Put differently, why is Derrida’s essay so docile in the face of Paul’s texts, even if this docility functions in the service of criticizing Paulinism as a discourse of (both) veiling and unveiling which—precisely—must be eluded as part the old epoch of “truth as onto-logical revelation” (83)? Derrida’s is here the same laziness or dogmatism we noted in Althusser’s text, a laziness or dogmatism—we should never forget—which is simply the obverse of the (initially) self-protective gesture of Breton as ecclesiastical gatekeeper of Paulinism.

Where, in other words, is the (psychoanalytic) detective who tracks so shrewdly the contrapuntal agency of the unconscious, all those hazards, happenstances, and accidents that would constitute—let’s say it—the “material soul” of our otherwise rather flatfootedly Western, veiling/ unveiling, or ontotheological apostle? Derrida’s Paul is here too simply given, and readers are essentially left with a Pauline soul which has no traffic peri tēn psuchēn ta sumptōmata—the apostle has become a great man if ever there were one, patriarch of a Western idealistic soul, exemplary guarantor of ontotheology, apparently free of “psychic symptoms.” There is something misleadingly polemical about a piece that would leave Paul—even as antagonist—as the great exception of all the analytic characteristics for which an earlier Derridean detective of material immanence had us cheering. The issue is not simply what has been, whether Paul was or was not an idealist or a veiling and unveiling dualist, is it?¹⁸ At one level, that question is simply so much the better or worse for a deceased apostle. But it seems an altogether different point in relation to our own thinking, or of Derrida’s, a matter of, precisely, an immanent material world of “souls” all bearing the marks and spurs of “psychic symptoms.” The issue is, in other words, not the Paul who was or who thought himself to be but rather the Paul—as it were—who must be, the one who will have been once diagnosed and analyzed. The point is that we cannot escape the encounter or the Paul who emerges once we name and track all those psychic symptoms by which the Pauline identity of even Nietzsche’s (or Derrida’s) anti-Paulinism becomes interrupted or run through an analytic ringer of a future from which Paul’s resurrections will have become otherwise and—why not cast our dice this way?—even redeemed.¹⁹ All of this, we might say, is primarily a problem for us, analysts of the material soul, rather than for Paul.

We should refuse, therefore, to participate in Derrida’s well-meaning apostolic exceptionalism which subtracts the name Paul from analysis, just as we should refuse every analysis which so easily forgets the magical and transformative quality of aleatory contingency, as if the Pauline soul—providentially or miraculously, perhaps—had no psychic symptoms. We should refuse both, and particularly so when the central philosophical persona of this piece presents himself, in both biographical and dialogical terms, as the very one who wants to save resurrection and its absurd performatives, all those as-if’s of being-dead and being-alive (25). Paul is here rather simply—without careful attention to texts, contexts, mediatic stagings, and therefore without much surprise—dispatched as the exemplary patriarch of onto(theo)logical authority, even as Derrida’s authorial persona presents himself rather eagerly as the one hoping to think of a pure site of revelation, as the teacher of an experience of a resurrection which is the manifestation of the “extraordinarily ordinary”? Far from a problematic “turn” to (or within) “religion,” the problem here is a lack of the very gamble on aleatory materialism that makes possible the early Derrida’s opening onto a future at all.

In this regard, I want to suggest that Michel Serres’s discussion of clinamen in The Birth of Physics is better attuned to the stakes of a Pauline future. Like the late Althusser and the early Derrida, Serres wonders about the modes in which we can think an “intelligent materialism” (again, on an immanent rather than dualistic plane). Serres wants to think an immanence within which differences of agencies, territories, strata, and informational processes are imagined as recursive, so many refrains that repeat themselves and each other just as they affect and are constituted by multiple outsides.²⁰ In light of Serres’s later reflection on Paulinist Angels, I would like to propose an Epicurean question for my fellow materialist philosophers of difference.

WHY ARE THERE CORPORATE CELEBRATIONS OF A DEAD HERO RATHER THAN NOTHING? (IDEOLOGY AS MATERIAL SWERVE)

Why is it that he [Epicurus, in his will] makes such precise and careful provision and stipulation [tam accurate tamque diligenter caveat et sanciat] that his heirs, Amynochus and Timocrates, shall after consultation with Hermarchus assign a sufficient sum to celebrate his birthday every year in the month of Gamelion, and also on the twentieth day of every month shall assign a sum for a banquet to his fellow-students of philosophy [itemque omnibus mensibus vicesimo die lunae dent ad eorum epulas qui una secum philosophati sint], in order to keep alive the memory of himself and of Metrodorus? That these are the words of as amiable and kindly a man a you like, I cannot deny; but what business has a philosopher, especially a natural philosopher, which Epicurus claims to be, to think that any day can be anybody’s birthday? What, can the identical day that has once occurred recur again and again [Quid? idemne potest esse dies saepius qui semel fuit?]? It is definitely not possible [Certe non potest]…. Is a person’s birthday to be observed when he is dead [etiamne post mortem coletur]? Such a provision ill became one whose “intellect had roamed” over unnumbered worlds and realms of infinite space, without shores or circumference [innumerabiles mundos infinitasque regiones, quarum nulla esset ora, nulla extremitas].

—Cicero, On Ends, 101 (II.xxxi)

From this perspective, the meals of early Christians (and other Hellenistic groups) appear as a series of bold social and spiritual experiments. They allowed early Christians [sic] (and other Hellenistic groups) to try out new behaviors in dialogue with their social visions. On one level, these social visions were described at meals as participating in “the realm of God,” “the body of Christ,” “koinonia with God,” “the heavenly court,” or “the heavenly city.” On another level, as noted in this chapter’s close assessment of meal gestures and constituencies, the meals became a laboratory in which a range of expressive nonverbal “vocabularies” explored alternative social visions. The vocabularies consisted of alternative social relationships at the meals, complex ritual gestures, body postures, and actual food elements.

These meals need to be conceived as spiritual experiments as well. By this is not meant that they were occasions for mystification of real-life issues, retreat from social realities or intellectual quests, or some kind of prototype for later Christian liturgy. Rather, the meals enacted new social alternatives so vividly that the meal participants experienced themselves as actually a part of a new social order. Both as groups and as individuals, many of those at the meal felt as if they were living in a different world.

—Hal Taussig, In the Beginning Was the Meal²¹

I confess I love these two textual witnesses, that I have wanted to mention them both—and side by side—for some time now. On the one hand, our essential Roman, Cicero, playing the polemicist on behalf of his school and in a philosophical treatise on functional ends expressing that not even for a second would he tolerate a community that does not understand that memorializing must be controlled, reasoned, delimited. Note here what becomes the interchangeability of spaces and times, Cicero’s anxiety about calendars becoming a philosophical anxiety about proper limits, appropriate borders. How much better if Epicurus would die, stay dead, that his death would not become a kind of unplaceable banquet of philosophical friendship. My God, as if any day could be your birthday? Even worse, do the dead have celebrations of birth? One is, above all, struck—dumbstruck even—by the way Cicero’s evidently sarcastic remark begins to look, in the context of such anxieties, like a frank admission of a world—its spaces and times—reduced to single measurements, measurements without unconscious declination for a new comedy of covenantal federations of rogue friendships. Cicero’s philosophical slip of the tongue, therefore: could someone who so confuses the finality of death and the finitude of ongoing life be one whose “‘intellect had roamed’ over unnumbered worlds and realms of infinite space, without shores or circumference”? Indeed! And is it not the interest to control the impudently roguish afterlives of Epicurus which here spurs a philosophical slur against the processual infinity of an Epicurean universe? That very Roman philosopher here gives us an important clue: we should consider the genealogical link between philosophical immanence, philosophy without a stabilizing “outside” to guarantee or judge its relational phenomena, and the perversely destabilizing capacities of swerved communities to inhibit the measurable or operative distinctions between life and death, atoms and communities.

This oddly undying life—life’s unexpectedly free participation in death—this life without shores or circumference, here solicits comparison with the equally obtrusive calendrical misfires and banquet performances of a life that is undead, living on as a communion of and in the absent founder who is nevertheless not not present either.²² Further echoes of our testimonia book from the beginning of the chapter. Or we should consider that these two tales of illicit sharing of meals in the name of the undead are part of the repression of an underground current of a new materialism, a repression that—on all sides, it seems—seems to legitimize itself by reference to a founding functional dualism between “religion” and “material” philosophy. Along that track it is fun also to see in Cicero’s measurements and judgments of the good in relation to an end some early echoes or foreshadowings of the anxieties that the imperial governor of colonial Bithynia, Pliny, would pose to Trajan almost seventy years later. Of what sort of guilt is an association which does not observe the proper boundary between death of a hero and the ongoing communal life of the participants in his ideas? “I do not know,” Pliny writes, “what is customarily punished.”²³ How to measure deviation? It’s the really vexing political problem for most, and after an examination Pliny trots out virtual Christians who swore that “the sum of their guilt or error (summam vel culpae suae vel erroris) amounted to this, that they used to gather on a stated day before dawn and sing to Christ as if he were a god.” The same might-be-Christians further assured Pliny that in doing so they were not committing themselves to the performance of crime, but rather only to some perfectly acceptable Roman virtues. As if not to be easily duped, you might recall, Pliny claims to have tortured two slaves (who held church office, apparently, perhaps another confusion of proprietorial social limit) to see if he could learn otherwise.²⁴ Once the deviating rift or transgressive decline comes to be read as declination or transgression, suddenly “anonymous” lists of potential deviants start to circulate, neighbors naming neighbors as potential Christians.

Not inclined to remain deviants, of course, Christianity would eventually learn the lessons of Roman philosophy, the tactics of its governance, and it would soon enough forget the peculiar instability of boundaries which constituted the vibrancy of its Paulinist precursors. As if summarizing our genealogical tale, Aquinas speaks perfectly in an imaginary dialogue that perhaps should have struck him as being more hauntingly odd than it seemed to have done:

Q: What human action is right?

A: I answer that evil is more comprehensive than sin, as also is good than right. For every privation of good, in whatever subject, is an evil: whereas sin consists properly in an action done for a certain end, and lacking due order to that end. Now the due order to an end is measured by some rule. In things that act according to nature, this rule is the natural force that inclines them to that end. When therefore an action proceeds from a natural force, in accord with the natural inclination to an end, then the action is said to be right: since the mean does not exceed its limits, viz. the action does not swerve from the order of its active principle to the end. But when an action strays from this rectitude, it comes under the notion of sin (Summa Theologica 1).

Cicero could not have said it better. Ruled. Human action, above all, as ruled, judged, submitted to the measurement, and this hierarchizing relation fantasized as the very force of force and nature of nature as such. Christianity has, very decidedly, learned a particular sort of philosophy, and from no uncertain cultural source and with no uncertain political consequences. What is forgotten in the new constellation, perhaps, is the way Hal Taussig’s work invites us to read the way the Pauline theologoumena, all those antitheses of “good and evil” (to borrow from Cicero and Aquinas alike), were conjured in order to blow a bubble of protection around what was essentially an experimental (re)enactment of decidedly swerved “federations” (to borrow from Epicurus) or “covenants” (to borrow from Paul) for a risky politics of friendship that seems to be indistinguishable from a kind of forgetting of specific instances of death. In order to keep pace with the phenomenon in its enactment, Taussig finds himself speaking of a utopian “social laboratory,” with the banquets themselves becoming the testy testing ground whereby a deviation from the cultural norms was able to emerge, to come to a sense of itself, and to be memorialized as a federation without inherited ends and means (cf. 20, 35).

As a kind of genealogical counter to Aquinas’s foreclosure of such a reading, we might mention a young Marx—that stalwart of our underground current—puzzling over the difference between Democritean and Epicurean structures of materialism and causality. As you may recall, in a foreshadowing of Pierre Hadot, the later Michel Foucault, and Peter Sloterdijk, the young Marx takes up Hellenistic philosophy for its significance as an indication of the “subjective form” (rather than “metaphysical content”) of the philosophical enterprise. For Marx, as for the later thinkers, this period of philosophy becomes important, above all, for its indications of—one might say—spiritual exercises. Marx finds in the philosophical archive pointers about the possibility of thought as a disciplined “way” of life in practice, practicing at life. Indeed, it is this aspect of the practice of philosophy that, Marx argues, constitutes the often elided chasm of difference between the philosophical systems of Democritus and Epicurus. In Marx’s genealogy, Democritus thinks that subjective appearance is mere appearance, a merely subjective effect of causal structures that constitute a systematic whole in their own right. Radically different, according to Marx, is the Epicurean view that the subjective is itself grounded without reserve in the movement of atoms in a way that precludes any dualism of the phenomena, quilting together more primordially natural ground and phenomenal perspective on the same.

With this distinction, Marx concludes, appears the distinction between a Democritean fall into dualism and an accompanying Democritean empiricism, which heralds in turn a docile passivity of thought excluded from a reified natural reality. For Marx, Democritus is thus no longer capable of theorizing the affective, empassioned, or phenomenal links between the objective and subjective spheres. Small wonder, Marx jokes, that Democritus traveled obsessively, as if desperate to hit upon more and more external facts that might offer some form of escape, whereas Epicurus scorned such a way of life, preferring instead to live—and write—“unknown,” free of the desire to quest about for guarantors and guarantees of phenomenal causality as such. Marx intuits here overall a profound difference in modes of thought which are not themselves reducible to distinctions in content, pointing to the concepts “necessity” and “luck” (anangkē and tūchē) as fissured right down the middle of a parting of the ways between these two philosophers.

In siding with Epicurus against Democritus, Marx wants to remain faithful to a thought of contingency, read as subjective openness to being otherwise, as itself internal to the system of causality itself. In doing so, Marx argues, we remain faithful to a strange thought of freedom in causal relations themselves. Indeed, by thinking in a more immanent mode of relationality what Democritus wanted to imagine as an external or dualistic relation of causality, we hit upon the possibility of thinking, Marx writes, “the chance of thought itself,” the eventalness we might say in which our contingent freedom participates.²⁵

Moreover, as if himself sitting down at the Epicurean or Pauline table of contrafactual enactments of undead teachers and illicit philosophical solidarities, the young Marx writes: “Lucretius therefore is correct when he maintains that the swerve breaks the fati foedera, [bonds of fate] and, since he applies this immediately to consciousness, it can be said of the atom that the declination is that something in its breast that can fight back and resist.”²⁶ Internal to immanent, causal realities from which we will not be saved by another world or outside agency, there is nevertheless a chance, the very chance of thought itself, which is indicative of a minor freedom, a minimal swerve, a line around which we might spin ourselves in a metanoia that will itself feed back into the otherwise ironclad ground from which it emerged.

PAUL AMONG THE VORTICISTS

It may be, therefore, that to cut against the grain of traditions (which are never merely philosophical, political, or theological) toward a Paulinist materiality will demand of us intensive reworking of inherited models of myth and ideology. Forget Nietzsche’s imagined Paulinism, vacuous tricks as promises of a life by and by for those who will agree to sacrifice their trying or risky freedom in the present, the entire panoply of Nietzsche’s Platonic/Paulinist “higher swindle.” For the moment, forget too Nietzsche’s flat-footed readings of resentment or what the young Marx liked to call repulsion. We need rather to stage a virtual encounter and mutual explication of the celebratory conjurings of Paul and Epicurus to come to grips with the Pauline klisis toward an undead messianic figure, this obtrusive tilting toward some third space of life and death that sets off a paroxysm of new oppositions, uncharted territorialities, and—we should remember Lucretius’s fascinations as much as Paul’s—strange “federations” as so many queer contracts and covenants. Even in posing the comparative situation this way one begins immediately to see the significance of the fact that Nietzsche read Paul always already as caught up in a virtual encounter between Paul and Plato. But the appropriation of, the Auseindandersetzung with, another philosophical tradition, indeed with the “underground current of materialism,” sets our thinking in very different directions. At this level, in fact, Nietzsche was always a fairly docile repeater of strategic and intentional early church receptions of Paul within a clunkily Platonic framework. The Platonic glasses Nietzsche borrowed from the ecclesiasts of the second century onward enabled him only ever to see Pauline topics—like Paul’s irruptive “future” in the “now,” Paul’s undead among (and now dwelling in and as) the living, refracted ethnic inheritances, and so on—as stable entities functioning as guarantors of empty promises and sacrificial (or, if you prefer, idealist) economies. How unfortunate that Nietzsche did not rather cut against the grain of the Platonic machinery which, despite so many loose threads, tried to weave the apostle into the same pattern Nietzsche later discovered as if ready-made: the first Christian and Platonic popularizer. One cannot be too hard on Nietzsche, of course. After all, how telling of the sheer power of the ontotheological tradition that it has taken so long to read the apostle with Epicurus in hand, that it would take so long to name a Paul of the “underground current” in order to explore his topoi in light of those ancient thinkers of flux, vortex, and the true as the off-kilter!²⁷ Again, the problem is not how one ought to be polite to “religion.” The pressure or more pressing issue emerges from whether we do or do not think there are “psychic symptoms” in that paradigmatic “soul” of the Western tradition. Is our thinking faithful to the Epicurean legacy (better yet, the legacy of the “underground current”), and does the clinamen of our immanent vision see how our truth is true in the transformed inscription of the apostolic name?

Even that thinker of parenklisis and ecstatic projection who was the young Heidegger rightly corrected Nietzschean readings of Paul only to come to another version of a Christian origins story whereby Paul was read as yielding some kind of extralegal advance beyond Judaism.²⁸ In Heidegger, after all, the rupture of temporality and ecstatic facticity with which the young philosopher was so obsessed was still the owned material of an explicit Christian origins story—and to that degree still a version of the Christian exceptionalism story which really does not at all escape the fundamental operation rightly uncovered by Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the “higher swindle.” As I say, it may be that the underground current will be most significant when it starts by reflecting further on the materiality of myths and movements of resurrection. Neither Nietzschean lies and false promises nor even Heidegger’s much better intrusions of a break with time, we would intuit rather the effects, the representations, of a Paulinist vortex giving rise to a pressure, a declination or tilt that revalues an instance of death or catastrophe, and which itself consolidates—for a while, always only and ever a while—a new bestiary of divine and human or (ambiguously, curiously) divine and human bodies of political or social solidarity.

Nietzsche tried to convince himself that the emergence of new mystico-political bodies in Paul should be read as fully bonded and secured (and therefore impossibly obfuscating mythologies, guarantors of docility). But should we not count Paul among the producers of a kind of thinking Michel Serres refers to as “statics”? Could we not say of the proliferation of divine, human, and animal bodies in and around Paul what Serres could say of the “concept of deviation” in Archimedes, namely, that it is a kind of “theorem of statics”? Note that Serres is not far here from our aleatory materialism, not to mention our evocation of a Lacanian Democritus at the beginning of the chapter:

The idea goes to the heart of philosophy, that is, metaphysics. If we had only the principle of identity, we would be mute, motionless, passive, and the world would have no existence: nothing new under the sun of sameness. We call it the principle of reason that there exists something rather than nothing. From which it follows that the world is present, that we work here and that we speak. Now this principle is never explained or taken up except in terms of substantives; the thing, being and nothingness, the void. For it says: exist rather than. Which is almost a pleonasm, since existence denotes a stability, plus a deviation from the fixed position. To exist rather than is to be in deviation from equilibrium. Exist rather. And the principle of reason is, strictly speaking, a theorem of statics. If things exist and if there is a world, they are displaced in relation to zero. And if there is a reason, it is this inclined proportion. If there is a science, it is its evaluation. If there is a discourse, it speaks of inclination. If there is a practice, it is its tool. We do not exist, do not speak and do not work, with reason, science or hands, except through and by this deviation from equilibrium. Everything is deviation from equilibrium, except Nothing. That is to say, Identity.²⁹

No wonder that Nietzsche’s critique of Paul needed to be so hysterically repetitive about Paul’s calculating intentions in the manufacture and broadcasting of his promises. That is, Nietzsche needed to forget, at the very moment of his critique, his own version of Spinozist conatus, the way egos are not in charge, in control, lucid because detached calculators, but rather ecstatically swept up and carried off by forces working through them. Nietzsche had to become what he himself rejected in order to see it in Paulinism. In order to banish the imagined origin of the bourgeois ego and its calculating values, Nietzsche had to think like one, as if sacrificing himself to redeem us from the sin of an imagined calculatingly bourgeois Paul. And once the iconoclast agrees to have such lenses fitted, Nietzsche himself became part of what Derrida describes as the “powerful repression” that governs the destiny of erstwhile thinkers of “statics.”³⁰ To the psychiatrists, Derrida spoke: “By exaggerating only slightly, one could say that Freud simultaneously identifies and transfers a symptom that could be called: the disciple of Epicurus and the forgetting of his name. I leave it to you to pursue this further. But never forget this: the Democritean tradition, in which the names of Epicurus and his disciples are inscribed, has been subjected since its origin, and first of all under the violent authority of Plato, to a powerful repression throughout the history of Western culture.”³¹

In a world of contingent vortices contracting multiplicities in a void or—it amounts to the same—a swerving world without end, there are no stable subjects and objects, leaving us therefore with experiences or perceptions which could only elude the standard measurements of the deviations of “ideology.” The point, ultimately the point of the early Marx, is critical. The irreality of ghosts, for example those indwelling spooks of the lowborn in Corinth, cannot be made in the vorticist universe to testify against their reality, as if by answering to a stable judgment. Cicero and Aquinas alike must not be given Roman instrumental control over these celebratory sessions. Serres summarizes the point by reference to the simulacra numinum of Lucretius, those simulations or images which cut across vectors of space and time like so many nomads, rogue wanderers (recall, precisely, Cicero’s joking sarcasm about Epicurus’s mind) along fragments of time.³² Such ghosts, such simulacra, are as real, as material, as anything (and everything).

As our inclinations, our little tilts, are always already playing themselves out in unexpected ways (or as the repressed is always returning in surprising ways to elude our intentions), what do we find in Nietzsche except a materialist Paulinism on its way, pointing to the liberation of free spirits, but this time with only a change of name and identity card: Zarathustra. My concern here is not that Nietzsche attempts to subvert Christianity by way of a repetition and immanent intensification of a Lutheran Paulinism: cast out the calculating laborers in order to herald the freedom of the uncalculating! In the larger political trajectory of the higher swindle Nietzsche just replaces Luther’s “Jews” for the upwardly mobile classes of modern capitalist economies. That is a different tale, but what needs to be pointed out at the moment is the way the difference between a philosophy of identity and a philosophy of “statics” and stochastic emergence of ungrounded difference insinuates itself not in Nietzsche’s rejection of Paulinism, but in his reception of it as already a form of Platonic guarantee.

We need to attune ourselves to a new model of myth production, one where religion is not (apparently) always guarantee, pop metaphysics, Platonism for the masses. As Serres writes in a line we will need to learn to take seriously at the level of our understanding of religion: “The beam no longer has a balance point. Here or there, yesterday or tomorrow, deviations appear stochastically. Or differential angles of inclination. Here is something rather than nothing, here is existence, here are vortices, spirals, volutes, all models out of equilibrium.”³³ Why are there celebratory banquets for the undead rather than nothing? To understand, we will need a new model of myth that will have nothing to do with the need of the critics of “ontotheology” always and ever to imagine religion as wanting to be thought of as a stable doubling structure of the world in another one. Rather, as Serres writes, these stochastic emergences “are brought back to zero by deterioration, ruin and death. But, temporarily, they form” (22). Indeed, and so did Paulinism, for a while until its expectations and desires faded and his curators therefore pretended as though he had been teaching the stabilities of a pop Platonic universe.

As Hanjo Berressem points out, Serres’s Lucretian physics of fluxes, declinations, vortices, and flows are essential for Serres’s entire corpus of writing.³⁴ Most importantly for our purposes, Serres leads the way when, in Angels: A Modern Myth, he presents Pia and Pantope, those wonderful Roissy transients, discussing Lucretius as the conduit of an aleatory materialism for the information age. As a moment of the repetitive short-circuiting of science and myth that this virtual conversation enacts, it is worth noting that Paul as “apostle” appears in the text alongside Serres’s “angel” as a figural instance of, precisely, the short-circuiting of these two practices of thought. Paul comes back once the conversation turns to the aleatory materialism of matter and mind: “I find that the process of thought is rather like a large, unitary, fortuitous moment of being carried away, which is broken down in to little squalls and flurries which have no particular relation to each other but which all come together in a greater overriding movement. At a level above the myriad angels, puffing away with their chubby cheeks and creating chaos and confusion, a great archangel advances, flying with the wind behind him, and it is his will that pushes me in the direction in which I wish to go.”³⁵

A force emerging from what Marx might have called the “chance of thought”—or from what Gilles Deleuze might call the “disjunctive synthesis” of multiple or aleatory fields of forces—thinking this mythical power of enunciation behind thought frightens Pantope who prefers to imagine “that we’re the only intelligent beings in this world” or, at the very least, that our wishes remain our own. Pantope responds accordingly, as if anxious that he is becoming, in Pia’s discourse—and by way of Serres’s Lucretius—an apostle: “I’m rather alarmed at the idea that thinking might end up being like the destructive seizure that had St Paul falling off his horse. In the same way that a sudden gust of wind and the pitching of a boat can send us sprawling on the deck. A slap in the face, a sharp, heavy blow, exactly applied, which makes the body unsettled, makes it lose its balance, and draws our attention to the proximity of death” (33).

What, then, is this material thinking? It is the après coup loss of balance and the overwhelming fascination of a new thought, a new life, that is indistinguishable from our lack of resistance to it. There are echoes here, as we will see in the next chapter, of the “passion” of Heidegger’s “facticity” and the potential importance of phenomenology for the question of a critique of ideology. Serres summarizes with utter clarity his discussions of Lucretius and the singularizing encounter that is the swerve or clinamen, such moments of giving up our lives to have them back new, when he describes them, perfectly, as a threshold at which “something other” begins. The movement of thought and things, thought-things, evokes once more the apostolic burden: “the emergence of something new … of life, of good tidings” (34). Early ecclesiasts eager to conjure a superiority of Christianity over Judaism, and to save a fading Paulinist ethnic experimentation with undead solidarities by way of Plato, are not the only ones anxious about everyone being able to be a true Paulinist. Serres is too, but his is a more useful comparative game of borrowed naming than the endless repetition of the same old story about the exceptionalism and stable metaphysical identities of Plato and that saintly Paul who was retrofitted with the concrete shoes of a foundational ontotheology. With Michel Serres’s disconcerting good news in our ears, in the following chapter we will expand on the emerging comparative Paulinisms of Louis Althusser and Stanislas Breton.