2
ON BEING CALLED DEAD
Splitting the Imperative of Being
I have been crucified with Christ and I live no longer. The life I am living …
—Galatians 2:19
IN THE LAST CHAPTER WE BEGAN TO DISCUSS THE SECRET SHARING of the Paulinism of Stanislas Breton and the aleatory materialism of Louis Althusser, tabling initially several ways in which such sharing indicates new ways to understand an apostle in the “underground current of materialism.” I want now to focus on the issue more directly by showing just what was the Paulinism of Stanislas Breton in relation to the implicit turn toward aleatory materialism in the late Althusser. My own work on both figures takes seriously something Breton once said about Christianity, something I think we should affirm in relationship to materialism as well: “We consequently relinquish the image of a simple body that the dream of a new alchemy would disengage under the sign of critique at the end of its effort. Authentic Christianity [sic] is not behind us: it is in front of us.”1 We should perhaps risk a fidelity to the project, gather round its table, particularly as to do otherwise is implicitly to give way to those inherited proprieties and property rights which continue to control most reflection on “religion” and “materialism” alike. As we have always said, to find Paul swimming in the underground current of materialism is to resist a tendency to place Paul otherwise. Moreover, I have also been making it clear that, in keeping with a radical reformulation, such resistance would need to be exerted against Paul’s critics as well as his curatorial friends. I have been particularly keen, for example, to point out that Nietzsche’s general diagnosis of Paulinism as a kind of “Platonism for the masses” (which hamstrings the affirmative, creative force of European culture) is missing a more radical way in this regard. Nietzsche was of course no idiot—and one of his roommates was a renowned historian of the early church—so he was aware that to place Paul among the materialists would be to go against an otherworldly and calculating apparatus of capture which overdetermined the Pauline legacy almost from the very start. So, perhaps—given that the second century “fathers” were relying on Plato rather than Lucretius in order to make Paul appear as an appropriate founder of a significant cultural movement—one needs to stick here with Breton in affirming two programmatic points. First, there is no alchemical process which effects the retrieval of a “simple body” in the past, as if we would uncover the past in order to invest it with fantasies of pristination. Rather, we found ourselves to have agreed to a genealogical struggle with which where we are going, where Paul is going, where Plato and the materialists are going all seem, strangely, “in front of us,” as if on the way by virtue of the strategies of thought that constitute our labors. Secondly, a wild openness within these recursitivies, all these intertwined and therefore displaced temporalities, appears as a kind of kairos or chance timeliness. In both respects, there will have been a kind of Paulinist messianism in the very way in which we think, what Marx in the last chapter referred to as the “chance of thought” itself or what he imagined as the subjective openness within material causality as such. Breton, as we will see, articulates an isomorphic ontological structure which he refers to as a form of swerve he imagines as a “wink.”
In any case, at a moment like ours, when forms of thought, modes of life, or readily defined identity groups defining the inside and outside of religion seem to be in flux, as if perplexed by an inheritance that has become too constrictive or predictable, Breton’s lectures on Paul become a significant interlocutor. Above all, for our purposes, Breton—among many other things a lifelong friend and intellectual ally in important respects of one of the great Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, Louis Althusser—presents us with a Paul, described in relation to Western philosophical, theological, and political history, that helps us to understand the fundamental paradox of recent readings of Paul: that the self-proclaimed apostle of a resurrected Christ would stand in as perhaps the best indication, the shortest pathway, to a theory of subjectivity that is avowedly materialist.2 If we are witnessing today a short-circuiting of distinctions between the “religious” and the “secular”—and how else would we understand the phenomenon of Paul returning as the great guarantor of an effort to think, to ground a contemporary philosophical material-ism?—then why has Paulinism reappeared as a particularly forceful index of this scrambling of received codes?
Breton’s own reading of Paul and Paulinism, I should point out, is decidedly singular, eclectic, variously philosophical, political, theological, and not always something I myself find useful to repeat. Just to mention something about the latter issue, it seems to me that Breton generally has no inkling about the way it is possible to historicize Paul more radically than Lutheran interpretations did for centuries, a historicization which could never escape variations of the “first Christian” or “Christian origins” stories. A more radical historicization would, as I argue in the introduction and elsewhere, subtract Paul from that great theological and, subsequently, modernist discursive machine we generally gloss as the quest for “Christian origins” in which Paul criticizes “Judaism,” universalizes it, and—by this gesture—founds Christianity on the ruin of a (now) hidebound, localist, ethnocentric Judaism.3 Put differently, Breton does not—despite himself—see how, at this level, his engagement with Paulinism might refuse or defuse or rewire the mechanics of the machinery of the Platonism for the masses. While Breton is alternately alarmed, mournful, and critical of the political implications of this well-worn theologico-modern machine, he does not yet realize the tools historical reconstruction affords him to participate (again, at that level) in its transformation.4 On my reading, Breton’s Paul is—like the Paul of Alain Badiou’s universalism book or (if I may say so) Daniel Boyarin’s earlier writings on Paul—one of the more importantly radicalized and politically significant in a largely Lutheran tradition of interpretation. (Just note the presence of Rudolf Bultmann in Breton and Badiou). More to the point (and as a spur for other fellow biblical scholars), while important indications of a genuinely post-Lutheran historical interpretation of Paul might be now appearing in pockets within academic biblical studies (this book not the least of them I like to think), philosophically and politically significant adventures with this new and post-Lutheran Paul have barely begun to see the light of day. In Breton, to be sure, one does not learn what the best recent historiography can tell us about the historical Paul. But one does begin to catch significant modes of reading a radicalized Lutheran Paul with Aristotle, with Aquinas, and with Platonic traditions, all of which are more “with” us, in us, constructing our modes of thinking (historical or otherwise), the more we fail to process them, slowly, carefully, patiently. So, perhaps, until recent historiography finds forceful and interdisciplinary modes of articulation, Breton’s Paul remains unique and uniquely illuminating for an encounter between Paul and the philosophers.
In keeping with Breton’s own model of approaching Paul, we could perhaps also approach Breton’s own reading laterally, by setting up intersections or multiple modes of encounter between thoughts whose comparability may not seem obvious, prefabricated, or culturally ready-made. Paulinism for Breton stood in for a kind of effective history of the Pauline legacy, a shifting, developing, and contested or ruptured legacy that, for all these reasons, affords an archive which, for the thinker (in both senses mentioned earlier), opens up a multiplicity of territories for expansive conceptual exploration and inventive affirmation. Breton of course knew very well that his is not an interpretive game emerging from strict historical method or history in the usual positivistic sense.5 This is not simply a point about Breton’s affinity for certain aspects of hermeneutics as a kind of fundamental philosophy, but also a simple statement about the concrete approach of Breton’s engagement with the apostle. When he speaks of Paul and allegory, for example, Breton uses two texts (from Ephesians and Hebrews respectively) that are, he fully acknowledges, not generally imagined by contemporary biblical scholars to be written by Paul himself.6 Nevertheless, he invites, can they not “seem to form a kind of preface to any introduction to the allegorical method”?7
By the same token, Breton’s reading of Paulinism is focused on the cross—he was a true Passionist after all—by way of both pre- and post-modern ontologies. Breton’s Paul is a kind of thinker of the cross as a productive subtraction at the origin of things. In the case of Paulinist allegory, for example, Breton’s caveats about historical authorship are immediately followed by a striking discussion of time plunging into eternity, of the Christ of Ephesians—caught up in such a plunge of the contingently historical into the permanency of the structural—becoming the “copula of the universe,” that originary mediation which scrambles both subjects and predicates in a rhapsodic movement of cosmic reconciliation which Breton calls (in the words of the letter to the Ephesians 1:23) the “all in all.” Breton’s philosophical reading of this passage solicits our consideration of the Christ of Ephesians in philosophical modes we might have otherwise missed. Of course, by wiring ancient metaphysical (and, I must repeat, sometimes anti- or postmetaphysical) axioms into the apocalyptic and mystical world of Paulinist insurgency, metaphysics (as well as the limits of metaphysical reasoning) lights up with a strangely Paulinist hew as well.
As Breton writes of the Christ of the letter to the Ephesians becoming the copula of a universal philosophical system: it is the energy of a circuit or “loop-like construction” of action that—narrative time plunging into structures of eternity—“mimes … the aseity of self-sufficiency of the Absolute,” as if the narration itself were positing its own presuppositions, retroactively “looping” into reality that from which it came.8 This fundamental operation of the “construction” of reality will be important for Breton, and here we should read Breton’s particular focus on the ontology of Paulinism alongside more recent efforts to rethink ontology in a hyper-capitalist era under the rubric of “quasi-causality” (Gilles Deleuze) or the objet petit a (Jacques Lacan) as a kind of surplus investment which itself produces the background economy it claims to serve, as if the “effect” had retroactively posited its cause. There are echoes here already, not only of Marx’s or Serres’s break with a subject-object dualism or the dualism of material causes and phenomenal effects which we considered in the last chapter. There are also echoes of that intellectual moment burbling up through the cultural economy in the late sixties and early seventies, evident in the writing of Althusser or in Breton’s philosophical interest in Lacan. As Slavoj Žižek writes: “The quasi-cause is not an illusory theatre of shadows, like that of the child who thinks he is magically making a toy move, unaware of the mechanical causality which actually does the work—on the contrary, the quasi-cause fills in the gap of corporeal causality. In this strict sense, and insofar as the Event is the Sense-Event, the quasi-cause is non-sense as inherent to Sense.”9 The background economy, if you will, does not itself exist without being posited by, precisely, the fetishistic, swerved, or ungrounded investments in “pieces” of it. In a world which continues to be dominated by finance capital and the fetishistic utopias of “little” consumerist investments, Žižek’s diagnosis is both compelling and an important supplement to the kind of (late) Althusserian Paulinism I describe in Breton.
In a description that is very much in keeping with what Breton does with allegory, Žižek brilliantly suggests that the very reversal of temporal or mechanical causality is what keeps pace with a contemporary ontology within a world of hypercapitalist economies of life, but also what makes us need to reverse simplistic reversals of Hegelian assumed idealism into a certain type of Marxist materialism:
From his early writings (the once famous “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” of 1844), Marx succumbs to the Feuerbachian temptation of formulating “alienation” and class society in terms of a mirror-reversal of the “proper” relation of causality: in capitalism, the subject is enslaved to its own product, “dead labor” (capital) rules over “living labor” (the workers’ productivity), the predicate becomes the subject of its own true subject, the effect becomes the cause of its own cause. What if, however, this “capitalist reversal” (the effect retroactively subsumes its cause, the process that generates capital appears as its own subordinated movement) is grounded in a more fundamental “reversal” constitutive of subjectivity as such? What if subjectivity is an effect which retroactively posits its cause, a “predicate reversed into subject”?10
Žižek’s Marx-become-a-Hegelian-Lacan is here very close to the scene I am constructing between Breton and the “underground current of materialism.” In his discussion of Ephesians 1:9–12, Breton imagines a teleological movement of divine intention, planning, and effective carrying through of an action to gather into God, by way of a cosmic Christ (Breton’s “copula of the universe”), ta panta (all things). As is typical of him, however, here we see Breton squeezing together mystical and philosophical texts tighter still, forcing each, as it were, to bleed into the other. Compressing his religio-philosophical construction further, Breton adds the all-important final twist: when religious narrative mimics ancient philosophical structure (and vice versa), readers are, Breton writes, confronted with a play of gestures in which a teleological reading of the structure of the universe explodes to life, precisely, as a “semantic order,” as if the “meaning of Being,” or the structures of ontology itself, could be read in the forceful imperative of a speech performance like “let there be light!”11 The narrative loop here is one in which power is produced immanently or retroactively in the spectacular doubling or affirmation of power itself. Power exists only in its subjective affirmation, a purely superficial or surfacy phenomenological space that is only “caused” by power after the excessive fact of its affirmation, a story that increasingly began to dominate Althusser’s rewiring of Marxist traditions of ideology.
I am unpacking this moment in Breton’s reading as it exemplifies an intensity of interpretive juxtaposition and mutual explication of intellectual traditions that characterizes Breton’s book on Paul generally. To keep up with Breton, readers must endeavor to be agile, for in forging such connections, quickly and schematically, this philosophical Paulinist takes us from statements of a Pauline disciple (say, the author of Ephesians), back into Paul (Romans), and then out again into classical Greek philosophy (Aristotle) and its mystical interpreters (Meister Eckhart), finally arriving at a subtle commentary not only on Martin Heidegger (“the meaning of Being”) but also on Louis Althusser (for whom emergence into being and subjection to the performative speech act of sovereign power occur simultaneously). To think with the Pauline legacy, Breton’s reader finds, is to grapple also with ontologies and theories of power and subjection in which a being in the world emerges only in, with, and through a yes-saying to a substance best understood in terms of a performative speech act—“Let there be light!”—or, as in Louis Althusser’s famous example of the policeman addressing someone in the street, “You there!” When the light switches on, or when that someone turns to the authority to answer, “You mean me?” then reality starts to appear as summoned (in Althusser’s terminology, interpellated) by the call that is itself the movement of self-reinforcing power.
At the instigation of Breton and Žižek, now listen to an Althusserian depiction of power’s revelatory function in the “call” of ideology, this time keeping predestinarian Pauline texts in mind. In an interview with Mexican philosopher Fernando Navarro, for example, Althusser describes:
There is a paradox here. It is as if, when I believe in a notion … I were not the one who recognizes it and, confronted by it, could say: “That’s it, there it is, and it’s true.” On the contrary, it is “as if,” when I believe in an idea, it were the idea that dominated me and obliged me to recognize its existence and truth, through its presence. It is “as if”—the roles having been reversed—it were the idea that interpellated me, in person, and obliged me to recognize its truth. This is how the ideas that make up an ideology impose themselves violently, abruptly, on the “free consciousness” of men [sic]: by interpellating individuals in such a way that they find themselves compelled “freely” to recognize that these ideas are true—compelled to constitute themselves as “free” “subjects” who are capable of recognizing the true wherever it is present, and of saying so, inwardly or outwardly, in the very form and content of the ideas constitutive of the ideology in question…. That is the basic mechanism that transforms individuals into subjects. Individuals are always-already subjects, that is to say, always-already-subject to an ideology [emphasis added].12
As Breton is pointing out so clearly by way of the discussions of Pauline “predestination,” the basic circuitry of Althusser’s construal of subjects as effects of power issuing as a call to individuals is comparable to the surprising Pauline move in Ephesians or Romans 9 to imagine the individuality and qualities of individuals as effects or machinations of sovereign power. Breton’s reading allows us to feel the rhythms of Althusserian notions of ideology in Paulinist conceptions of predestination. By the same token, of course, and perhaps more surprisingly, Breton invites us to intuit a form of Pauline sovereignty and Paulinist allegory (with their respective visions of the aseity of the divine) in Althusserian notions of ideology. Wiring all these links back into his construction of Paul, readers of Paulinist texts of predestination and mysticism are therefore led to the heart of a logic in which, as Meister Eckhart had it, “the being (of things) is the verb by which God speaks all things in speaking to them,” or, even, “(the creatures) are the adverb of the Verb” (59). Ontology shifts entirely into the space of Paulinist predestination and discussions of “calling,” part of a larger mode of thinking about the world in which performative speech act, the call and response of power, constitute the world as it is. Paul the apostle now converses with Althusser, the great inventor of an aleatory materialism in which “ideology” is no longer simple “false consciousness” (which would imply the existence of a world without summoning interpellation) but rather the mode in which worldhood exists, namely, as emerging from the practices of interpellated subjects. In keeping with our discussions of the previous chapter, Breton’s Paul, we might say, will be tailor-made for the society of the spectacle.
As Paul Ricouer could still lecture in the 1975, it is perhaps surprising in light of some of Althusser’s earlier writings to see how Heideggerian his later reworking of materialism seems.13 Perhaps so. However, we should not miss the way in which, already in earlier statements about ideology like this one, Althusser was fascinated to think the relationship between economic base and superstructure—the former still providing “determination in the last instance” to the latter—in a way that was not merely “descriptive.” And, with this passing beyond analysis that is mere “description” of a state of affairs, Althusser’s thinking begins to be lured away from the noun to the verb (as it were), to the question of the modes of relation between these related structures, to an actively and essentially relational sphere in which related structures solicit and respond to one another. Consider Ricoeur, who misses very precisely the affinities I am diagnosing here: “Althusser reminds us of Heidegger in the hermeneutic circle, though I doubt he had that at all in mind. (Althusser hardly seems very much Heideggerian; Heidegger must be the worst of all ideologists for someone like Althusser.)”14 Ricoeur did not see the significance, precisely, of what seemed a kind of category mistake to the hermeneut, Althusser mistakenly presenting his work on ideology as a form of Heideggerian facticity. As noted previously, Giorgio Agamben reads Heideggerian “facticity,” or the thereness of the everyday, as a form of “passion,” which I further explicated in light of the “swerve” of clinamen, links that will mean a great deal to Breton.
Even in these earlier writings of Althusser, we should note, the sphere of a “mode” of production was better accessible to a mode of phenomenological description than to mechanistic or topological metaphors. Descriptive modes open up ways of matching effects (Althusser mentions censorious bans on cultural works as an example) to causes (a repressive state apparatus operating to maintain the status quo). But this possibility of matching layers or instances of the self-reproduction of the society is, strictly speaking, distinguishable from the emergence of what Althusser calls “a very special kind of obviousness,” that phenomenological space in which one declares, “Yes, that’s how it is, that’s really true!”15 To say the same thing somewhat differently, this move toward the “special kind of obviousness” inhering in new subjective forms can also be read as part of what Étienne Balibar describes as Althusser’s “conceptual break with any expressive causality, the decisive step towards materialism” or toward a kind of immanence in relation to the self-reproductive force of the social itself rather than to second order descriptions of it.16 Warren Montag describes similarly a movement in Althusser toward immanent critique and immanent description by showing Althusser’s deployment of Spinozist immanence against the hermeneutical tradition.17 Ironically (given the frequent hand-wringing and criticism about Althusser’s panoply of mechanistic, functional, or process metaphors), it is the move away from expressivist hermeneutics (in which ideology would be a symbol of structures appearing or existing elsewhere) that allows Althusser to afford a material density to ideology itself. This is the very density, I am suggesting, that Žižek wants to analyze as the retroactive positing of subjectivity as the quasi-cause or the objet petit a.
Or, put differently, do we not see here the exemplary way in which power as exteriority or transcendence is collapsing into something else, a society of the spectacle that works via immanent forms of prestige? The umbilical link between a society of the spectacle and the Spinozistic making-immanent of a God function occurs in the paradoxical intensification of the religious archive of the call and response of a “revelatory encounter.” The immanent cause becomes all the more blisteringly present in its (traditionally understood) causal absence, forcing us into a general reduction or epoché of causes under the name of their effects. As Althusser would write after his turn to an aleatory materialism: “No Cause that precedes its effects is to be found in it [i.e., aleatory materialism], no Principle of morality or theology (as in the whole Aristotelian political tradition: the good and bad forms of government, the degeneration of the good into the bad). One reasons here not in terms of the Necessity of the accomplished fact, but in terms of the contingency of the fact to be accomplished.”18 In light of Breton’s invitation to think Althusser with Paul, we should note the fundamental sense in which an exploration of the “obviousness of obviousness” is integrally related to Althusser’s desire to move from “descriptive theory to theory as such,” as if entering into the life of power rather than picturing it from the outside. The “return” of Paulinism here is, therefore, rather precisely in keeping with an effort to stay with the ungrounded or aleatory investments constituting the new “underground” materialism itself, something we must reflect on increasingly. For the moment, recall that the earlier Althusser himself referred to the Paul imagined in the New Testament book of Acts:
As St. Paul admirably put it, it is in the “Logos,” meaning in ideology, that we “live, move and have our being.” It follows that, for you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary “obviousness” (obviousnesses are always primary): it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc.). Like all obviousness, including those that make a word “name a thing” or “have a meaning” (therefore including the obviousness of the “transparency” of language), the “obviousness” that you and I are subjects—and that that does not cause any problems—is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are “obviousnesses”) obviousness as obviousness, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying aloud (aloud or in the “still, small voice of consciousness”): “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!”19
Like Heidegger’s efforts in his early Phenomenology of Religious Life to think everyday temporality as such apart from extraneous metaphysical models, Althusser also is led back to the religious archive for images able to keep pace with the machinations of immanent, everyday obviousness and the fetishistic or ungrounded investments constituting the economy of life. Contingency, the necessity of the “as if” which guards all everyday experiences of reality, begin to blur into a kind of Stoically or Spinozistically immanentized repetition of earlier tales of revelatory encounter, an encounter with radically exterior sovereignty which functions as a touchstone all the more dramatically for its having become immanent, as if democratized or universalized in the experience of the everyday. While they sometimes seem skittish about using the Pauline archive themselves, the basic paradox here is just what Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala explore as a form of (to mention the title of their book) Hermeneutical Communism. Heidegger, they write, “noticed how every statement, whether true or false, valid or invalid, good or evil, is always a derivative one, since the ‘apophantic as’ is only possible within the ‘hermeneutic’ as.” Generally preceded by, and therefore repeating, a disclosive or founding revelatory event, most of our oriented thinking operates as an effect of a (hidden or absent) cause.20
Just to fill out the sketch, this is of course the same dynamic that leads Giorgio Agamben, too, to explore a kind of phenomenology of the spectacle, which he construes in terms of ancient theologies of “glory.” In light of the mention of Althusser and Heidegger, Agamben’s framing of his own project needs to be cited:
Let us begin this investigation with an attempt to reconstruct the genealogy of a paradigm that has exercised a decisive influence on the development and the global arrangement of Western society, although it has rarely been thematized as such outside the strictly theological field. One of the theses that we shall try to demonstrate is that two broadly speaking political paradigms, antinomical but functionally related to one another, derive from Christian theology: political theology, which founds the transcendence of sovereign power on the single God, and economic theology, which replaces this transcendence with the idea of an oikonomia, conceived as an immanent ordering—domestic and not political in the strict sense—of both divine and human life. Political philosophy and the modern theory of sovereignty derive from the first paradigm; modern biopolitics up to the current triumph of economy and government over every other aspect of social life derive from the second period.21
As Agamben is quick to point out, not to be missed here are the echoes of Foucault’s project from Discipline and Punish onward, the effort to think power beyond the hegemony of sovereigns and states, power displaced into more immanent, if diffuse and dispersed, forms. Playing off of Kantorowicz’s classic study of The King’s Two Bodies, Santner shows how, as it were, the society of the spectacle—in which power is diffuse, dispersed, decentralized—seems to solicit repetitions of Paulinism. Importantly—and unlike Badiou, Žižek, and Breton alike—Santner does not locate this repetition so much in visions of a Lutheran Paul overcoming or universalizing inherited Jewish nomos discourse but rather in visions of a Paul who appropriates and subverts Roman discourses of the political body.22 Santner’s siding with Taubes here would, of course, be important to me as someone who argues that the imagined anti-Jewish founder of a new religion was precisely an early and epoch-making interpretive dispatching or repression of Paul (fitting him with the concrete shoes of a pop Platonism), a dispatching which, among other things, both functioned and continues to function to depoliticize Paul. Reading Paul against the backdrop of Roman imperial discourse with Santner is a task which remains to be carried through, and Santner’s work should be paired with Dale Martin’s The Corinthian Body, as perhaps theoretical and historical readings which would mutually electrify.
For our present purposes, note the way that Santner’s reading of Paul in a moment of biopolitical immanence does two things that may, despite their differences, also be found here in Althusser and Breton. The pairing of Paulinism and immanence democratizes or (perhaps better?) universalizes Paulinist tropes, thus politicizing Paul for a society of the spectacle. On the other hand, and just as importantly, the society of the spectacle receives from the religious archive something of the utmost necessity: a comparative name for the obsessive persistence or stuckness of everyday life in its fractured certainties, its stupidly everyday (though perhaps ignored) facticities or as if’s. In Santner’s language the society of power via spectacle, immanence, or the “special kind of obviousness” receives from Paul a notion of “the flesh.” For Paul, he writes, “the flesh is the thorn in the body, the dimension of embodied subjectivity that registers an excess of the normative pressures that inform and potentially ‘deform’ a life lived in relation to agencies of authority and authorization.”23 Just to repeat the point about immanence of self-grounding swerve I have been pointing out in Althusser, note that Santner goes on to write (by way of a Paulinist tradition in Ephesians) that the problem of deformation as “the flesh” is precisely this: “The complex symbolic dynamic of the constitution of kingship itself comes ‘to a head’ precisely when the body of the king is posited as the head of the body politic.” Put differently, once the “special kind of obviousness” will become increasingly detached from mechanically causal institutional functions, the question of autonomia becomes all the more strangely opaque, soliciting a return of comparative tropes, metaphors, and structures of thinking which are able to keep pace with the peculiar repetitive intensity, aporia, and alterity endemic to self-grounding identity as such. Santner will name the set of issues as the problem of “a surplus of immanence within immanence.”24
A great deal remains to be said about Santner’s attempt to rewire discussions of Paul and the disclosive “event” to a history of the body and its excessive ticks and quirks and desires, all those “thorns in the flesh.”25 For the moment it is worth noting that it is precisely in the context of this juxtaposition of Paul and Althusser that Breton’s central reflections on the kenotic, emptying, or hollowing “call” that is a Pauline proclamation of a crucified messiah become significant as a mode of subverting the otherwise always already effective link between power and facticity. In Breton’s philosophical appropriation of Paul is the scandalously unsettling, even “stupid” (cf. mōria in 1 Corinthians 1) identification with the crucified messiah that names a potential detachment, unhinging, or bracketing of the “special kind of obviousness” by which our world, or any world, solicits our participation, incites affirmation, thereby becoming what it is.26
FOUNDING RUPTURE: PAULINISM AND VOID-TALK27
When I spoke above about Breton’s distance from the (academic) authorities on Paulinism and the Pauline legacies, I was not merely making evaluative claims. On the contrary, such an authorial stance was Breton’s effort not to play the docile philosophical transmitter of the authoritative word of experts from abroad, whether the theologians, the historicist biblical scholars, or pious ecclesiasts who also lurk here and there within Breton’s books, often to be subverted by way of a deft wiring of Pauline writings into various schemata of philosophical logic. Breton is almost always aware of the expert writings, but his singular encounter with Paul remains much more than the purveying of expert knowledge, and this because of a structural necessity. Breton’s own Paulinism is, after all, nothing less than an attempt to resituate thought itself—to question what counts as thought—by installing Paul as a figure and indication of some of those aporiae or deadlocks of theory that Breton found always and everywhere.
In this precise respect, we need to move to the topos of the crucified, which drove Breton’s lifelong philosophical Paulinism, in order to consider how Breton’s philosophy participates with Paulinist proclamations of the crucified messiah in indicating a peculiarly unpredictable gap or void in all knowledge, all identity, and all forms of cultural or political power. By trafficking in this radical image of stark dispossession within the heart of all possessive identity—a messiah dead on an apparatus of imperial control—Breton wants to bore a hole through the completion of all projects of expert knowledge. In this respect we may say of Breton’s oeuvre what he liked to say of Paul’s, namely, that, rather than the certainties of knowledge, his writing burns as a testimony to a “founding rupture (‘rupture instauratrice’).”28
Those accustomed to the usual platitudes about religion or theology being the last hope for modernity’s escape from an otherwise soul-searing nihilism will be surprised to see the way Breton finds in the apostle an exemplary thinker of “the nothing,” of all those hollows or voidances that creep into or magically appear within otherwise internally coherent structures of thought and cultural practice, all those modes of the “very special kind of obviousness” which makes worldhood and subjects. This category of the irrepressible void, however, was an integral part of Breton’s work throughout his career, and it is precisely as a participant in thinking through this category that Paul remained an obsession for the philosopher. Always interested in mathematics and set theory, for example, Breton’s early Theory of Ideologies orients a thinking for structures of thought around the way all countable elements within any given ensemble or category must necessarily participate in a kind of zero degree, an “empty part” that is inseparable from “the totality” of the set.29 The zero degree or empty part is “in the grammar of ensembles an indispensable sign for our operations.”30 Breton sometimes described this null, empty, or zero degree element within the ensemble as a kind of in-difference within the identity of the system, neither integrated inside nor safely outside of the system and yet utterly indispensable, a sine qua non of the countable ensemble in its hanging together as a system. The “neuter” or “neutral” part in the establishment of identity, this nullity forever disturbs all totalizing self-enclosure or self-grounding of identity as such.31
In a different context and much later, Breton summarized the same issues as a fundamental problem for any metaphysics oriented around identity. Indeed, the problem of the impossible but structurally necessary moment in the construction of identity is described by Breton as an “evil genius” within the system of identity:
What would be the logical formula for a statement as banal as the following: “There are French philosophers”? Retranslated into simple language, this equivalence would take the following form: “a determinate set,” described by the quality “French philosopher,” is not empty, or distinguishable from the set “zero.” Thus one has to pass through zero in order to arrive at an existential judgment. The zero set, however, is defined by the entire number of objects which, not being identical to themselves, can only be contradictory. Ontological difference [between Being and beings] only seems thinkable through this detour which confronts us with sheer nothingness. The impossible becomes a necessary condition. These strange propositions, which I will allow to develop freely here, join the by no means less strange metaphysics that controls the access to Being through its opposition to “nothing(ness),” which means its opposition to the absolutely absurd.32
Significantly, however, it is not simply that Breton reads set theory or that he finds the self-grounding of all countable sets, like “humanity is humanity,” to be perennially haunted by the supplementary assertion, “and nothing else.”33 There is in this haunting of or voidance within the ensemble “a minimum of division” in its very identity, and Breton suggests the haunting sense of this “minimal” gap in the identity of a given cultural setup can produce extraordinary effects. There can emerge, for example, an obsessive passion to purify “humanity” as if by way of a violent extension of this imperative to “nothing else,” identity becoming resolved only by way of a violent exclusion of what will count as “not” humanity. As Breton describes it, one way to cope with the ineluctable “empty part (la partie vide),” the “indispensable void (la vide indispensable)” within every system is to find in it a kind of intolerable “limit” internal to the ensemble.34 Ideology, or simply a representable ensemble or cultural setup, finds within itself an irreparable desire to pierce through appearances, the fragile stability of the ensemble’s identity, and this in order to encounter this “void” directly. As Breton puts it, this impulse can result in the demand to sacrifice the ensemble itself for the sake of a pure encounter with the excess “beyond” its limits, and in such instances those within the cultural ensemble may be driven to acts of profound “enthusiasm” in their desire to rid themselves of this minimal voidance within the ensemble, within the heart of their collective project. This “lucid folly” (whose status as either “satanic or divine is of little importance,” as Breton liked to say) is itself “incompatible with life” in the sense that the “enthusiasm” to rid oneself of this minimal gap in identity may well drive our lucid fools to a point of intransigence at which point “a diplomacy wearied with youth” may simply “nail them to the cross.”35 Whether or not this “lucid folly” drives one to acts of martyrdom or profoundly violent exclusion, Breton’s approach suggests that one is always or structurally liable to the lure of ecstatic, impossible moments.
These last lines already begin to suggest the relevance of Breton’s engagement with set theory as a theory of violence for his understanding of Paul. The relevance hinges on the way Breton’s own way of responding to the structural possibility of voidance is different from reactionary or revolutionary violence (both reactions to the same threat or lure of the directly encounterable void or the void as substratum). Crucially, Breton goes on in his theory of ideologies to propose that the “pale substratum,” the void both sustaining and haunting the ensemble, “does not exist.”36 This way of reading “nothing” here is critical, as it implies that all efforts to pierce through the identity of an ensemble, the appearance of a cultural form, in order to achieve the serenely self-subsisting essence of the beyond, are doomed to failure.37 There is no direct encounter with the nihil for the would-be revolutionary or reactionary sacrifice, as neither active nor passive sacrifice can save identity—past, present, or future—from this haunting void. It is not possible, for example, to eliminate the haunting of cultural mode or ensemble by the “nothing else” that lures cultural conservatives to supreme acts of suppressive violence in their efforts to fill the gap that seems constitutively to endanger the given cultural identity. The void into which one may throw threatening terrorists of all sorts is an abyss that can never be filled, as the constitutive threat of the negation of an ensemble is a wound that can never be healed. In this respect, Breton’s work is very close to the discussions of ideology in Slavoj Žižek, as both imagine that what the limit to identity prohibits—the access this limit also forecloses (to the new, the beyond, the purified, unscathed, or saved)—is reflective or internal to the system itself.38 Breton will suggest, therefore, that the martyrological or persecutorial passion of enthusiasm—the obsession with finally solving or grounding the ensemble in question, with finally conjuring it into full presence—is itself merely a form of the “death instinct,” a longing for the release of cultural life from its limits, in death or in a way that is (as Breton suggests above) “incompatible with life.”
MAD RHAPSODIES OF THE PAULINIST GOD
How then do we cut through ideology, once we read ideology as the very substance of subjectivity and that “very special kind of obviousness” we enjoy so much? Crucially, at pivotal moments in his early discussion of such structural models Breton’s theoretical structures elide themselves into a Paulinist narrative, and this as Breton proceeds with his elucidation of a theory of ideologies. (Of course, to return to my earlier point about the inability of the historical, narrative “Paul” to remain safe against the tides of philosophical thought, this is also to say, vice versa, that the religious narrative begins to slide into a theory of ensembles and their reliance on a “zero” level!). Moving somewhat closer to his full disclosure of a Paulinist critique of ideology, Breton writes that, within Paulinism, the cross signifies the pale void that renders inoperative the fullness of any ensemble or cultural form, that is, of all ideology tout court. In this respect, Breton’s emptying or kenotic function of the Paulinist cross functions in a similar way to the ineluctable “remainder” or remnant Giorgio Agamben finds in Paul, a topic that becomes operationalized in Agamben’s Paul through the messianic “call” that hollows, renders inoperative, or (following the Paul of 1 Corinthians 7) “as if it were not” (hōs mē).39
Given these underpinnings, it is no surprise that Breton’s Paulinism usually brings with it sharp critiques of triumphalist and repressive Christian institutions and culture, with the philosopher adding on this occasion that the void-function likewise renders inoperative both the all-consuming and self-enriching God of “integrative theologies” and the cultural tectonics of a Christian “hermeneutics” that has repressed “the poverty of its origin.”40 Those who would be faithful to the Paulinist logic of the cross, he asserts, must remain faithful to thinking all beings, and indeed being itself, in a way that is “meontological,” that is not (meontological) a science of self-grounding identity.41 With this move from harmonious self-possession to the “founding rupture” (rupture instauratrice), Breton begins to make clear the ontological revolution or “turning” involved in a Paulinist appropriation of the cross, as well as to make clear how it is that this Paulinism affords an inexhaustible source for the critique of ideologies. Ever deferring and subverting the ontological identity that could provide justification or warrant for the triumphalist “evolutions of the city of God” or the legitimizing ideologies of the state, the meontological cross will be for Breton the unsettling thought that is at once a Pauline story of the crucified messiah and also the indication of an immanent, universalizable voidance that plagues all identity. And it is perhaps the indeterminacy of the mutual affectation of this isomorphism that names something essential about reading Paul with the philosophers.42
More should be said about the critical function of Breton’s Paul, however. Notice the way Breton’s reading of the cross bleeds over into an Althusserian statement about the permanency of an ideological state’s “zero level” of repression and exclusion. Althusser once declared in relation to Heidegger that the zero level of an ideological state is the Heideggerian “there is” of factical being, always already thrown, specified, organized as a singular state of affairs which, for this very reason, seems to solicit a destruktion, a deconstruction, a revolution.43 And, just between these echoes, Breton insinuates the Pauline story of the crucified messiah, a kind of permanency of the crucified and a kind of eternity of that moment whereby, through identification with the crucified, the “nothings” would become “something,” thus “destroying” the paradeigmata of the world that first deprived them of their being in the first place (I am borrowing the Pauline language of 1 Corinthians 1 and Romans 12).44 Making similar connections, Breton writes:
At origin, and I have no doubt that it is a question of origin, “there is” (il y a) the judgment of the Cross. This judgment divides humanity in what would be, according to the etymology of Krisis translated again by the German Ur-teil, a decision-separation: on the one hand, those who exist according to the noble values of wisdom and power; on the other the anonymous and undifferentiated ensemble of those who, by reason of constraint and not of essence, do not accept those values. But Christ [sic: actually the argument works much better from Breton’s beloved 1 Corinthians 1] pronounced himself without equivocation for what does not exist. The God he evokes tolerates no wavering; this God can be spoken of or affirmed through neither classical philosophic categories nor in the traditional attributes discerned by a religion.45
One does not encounter the divine precipitate of this crisis, in other words, either by deduction from generalities or from the induction of particulars. Indeed, none of the “justifications,” so many niceties, of power’s knowledge and wisdom, will lead you to the (as it were, revelatory) encounter or stabilize you once you are there. What then? This is the encounter open only to the partisan, those who side with the “nothings” in a struggle against those wisdoms and powers which constitute themselves on the exclusion of these (now named, particularized, emerging) nothings. Two further aspects of Breton’s Paulinist critique of ideology should be pointed out here, as what has been said so far may suggest that it is a simple, formal paradox that implies (even as it disavows) a zero level within all cultural acts of counting as. Worse, such an easygoing formalism lends itself to a sense that the paradoxes in view are (just as simply) useful tools available for those already disposed to criticize formations of power. But this is to miss the almost anarchic and free forcefulness of cultural transformation Breton has in mind, a forcefulness he articulates in different ways on different occasions with depictions that are decidedly more visceral, gut-wrenching, and dark than mere formalisms might suggest. In this respect, we should not miss the way Breton’s darker modes (wherein, for example, “Christianity” has its original inspiration in a nightmare and where freedom is largely an illusory obfuscation of our real function within relations of power) are more decidedly Pauline modes (on the one hand) and hovering at the deep level of ontological commitments (on the other).46
Consider, for example, a kind of introspective self-examination and summary of his work that appeared in 1990, when Breton drew an explicit link between “meontology” and the (Heideggerian) “ontological difference,” that philosophy of thinking the difference between being and beings as, precisely, difference, a gap from which representable beings cannot be saved.47 Here Breton goes one step further in his theory of these pluriform “signs” of the “cross,” reading Paulinism in light of the work of Rudolf Bultmann, early twentieth-century biblical studies colleague of philosopher Martin Heidegger. For Breton, the important thing about Bultmann is the way he suggests that the voidance of the Paulinist cross is that which makes possible a critique of reification, fetishization, or the “magical instrumentalization” (through “ritual technique”) of all representations of the Absolute. The cross, as Breton explains Bultmann, is that which renders the Absolute inoperative, unavailable for all such economic gestures, and this because of its own “subtraction” from all determinate contexts.48 As such, the cross is the name of that which escapes a modern system where, increasingly, the only mode in which anything can exist is by way of effective production, an activity modernity accomplishes by organizing ends through measured means, this being the modern mode of being Breton glosses as the “will to power.” Repeating his earlier definition of both cross and set theory, and this in his own book about ideology and the critique of power, Breton summarizes these ideas as Bultmann’s “heroic meontology.” As we will see, one of the reasons it is “heroic” for Breton is because Bultmann was (theoretically at least) willing to sacrifice for this thought of the Paulinist cross a “possessive instinct,” a rendering inoperative of the culture of private property that Breton takes very seriously in all his writings.49
Breton is clear about such a dynamic throughout his own expansive and diverse “meontological” writings. On the one hand, the cross annuls sacrifice. He already suggested as much in his discussions of the lure of the metaphyisical “pale substratum,” for which adherence to ideological formations will sacrifice either the formation itself (in revolutionary violence) or all those who seem to threaten it (in an endless conservative sacrifice of “terrorists”). In either case, one is only attempting to localize and annihilate the specter of the void that haunts the formation, thus making fully present and fully safe the identity of the system as such, finally avoiding its void. In this respect, Breton’s Paul explores similar political logics as does Alain Badiou’s remarkable work of theater, The Incident at Antioch.50 Thus, in a striking repetition of the haunting early Christian line, whoever saves life in this (sacrificial) way only loses it: one finds that the kingdom or revolutionary utopia does not arrive, despite the execution of all those “obstructions” thought to have blocked it, or one finds that the systemic place of the executable “terrorist” is itself never sacrificable, despite the sacrificial execution of countless terrorists. To put it differently, the placeless and unrepresentable nihil that haunts a structure cannot be exorcised by any effort to localize this threat, to place this placeless space in Guantánamo Bay or to concretize its unrepresentable trauma by filling it with unrepresented—and it still seems, (legally) unrepresentable—human beings.
At the same time, however, the unsacrificeable sacrifice does make difficult demands of a different sort for Breton. He speaks frequently of the gapping or “distancing” effects of the voidance of “the cross” in all its guises. Following an aged philosophical tradition of “training for death,” Breton’s “nothing” urges us to see beyond the “reification” of subjects and objects as they have come to exist in our time or that of others.51 This necessarily ascetic openness to seeing our world “negated” in this way, this form of losing of our lives for the sake of the inaugural rupture, however, is also a way of gaining a sense of a creative pulsation of life yet to come, indeed a pulsation Breton describes as “the auto-construction of the spirit, the specific autonomy of the [world] soul and of the birth of the world.”52
This is important to say, as this productive movement, this dispossessed life, is what Breton sometimes calls “the rigor of the negative,” the paradoxes of which (between loss and excess, death and life) are unavoidable.53 In ways reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s “messianic” figures, in Breton the minimal difference indicated by reference to a “void” within the field of the visible may be read as a kind of wink, a slight alteration in appearance that is also an indication that the world of appearances is or could yet be otherwise. Like Benjamin’s messianic time, the revolutionary transvaluation of all values, the changing of everything, is a potential of a minimal, evanescent tweak of appearance.54 In the thinker’s (and, more aptly, as it is the figure Breton almost always has in mind, the cultural critic’s) openness to the messageless message of the wink, however, a truly excessive being may yet donate what Breton often designates as “that which it neither is nor owns.” To return to the issue of the “peculiar kind of obviousness” that is our more or less prescripted place within a given world, here we see Breton exploring modes of thinking “cross” as that which insinuates—weakly, with a mere wink or even as only a form of dreamy madness—a solicitation to a world in which everything will be changed.
But we must say more still here in order to make the depth of Breton’s commitment to a Paulinist ontology of the crucified clear. For Breton, in other words, the scandal and stupidity of the failed messiah in the first two chapters of 1 Corinthians (which organized Breton’s thinking so profoundly) was not simply a tactical inversion of worldly categories, with apparent or reified wisdom being brought low by way of the excluded. It was, more profoundly for Breton, how divinity, or how truth, appears as such. And, with that simple gesture of intensification or generalization of the Pauline statements about the crucified in 1 Corinthians 1, 2, we open up the door to an ontology (and perhaps a meontology) from which no one remains unscathed. One must say emphatically, for example, that for Breton the Paulinist divinity does not remain outside such assertions or the wrenching exertions of paradoxical inversions of value. The identification of the divine with the crucified for Breton then names the crossing of multiple intersections. In its pathological attachment to the moment of a crucified messiah, divinity finds itself inflicted with the most hair-raising case of what Breton sometimes calls “mad love,” impassioned attachment that unhinges the coordinates of preestablished identity. At the same moment of this intensely erotic investment, however, there is for Breton an uncanny distancing effect that settles into the otherwise personal attachment, this dual and paradoxical movement summarized perfectly by Breton as a “shadow cast by a personal relation converted into the a priori of generalized perception.” There is thus a strange, simultaneous dual movement: a “mad love” that distends and transforms the desiring self in relation to the beloved; and—at the same time—a settling back of this singular love into a “distanced” or formal structure. Breton goes on to further elaborate this strange double movement constitutive of his philosophical reading of Paulinism by adding: “The paradox, if there is one, is the coincidence of a mad love and another folly, also divine, which strips that love of its too-human resonances or consolations” (emphasis added). Echoing Paul’s peculiarly paradoxical pronouncement that “I no longer live but Christ lives in me,” Breton generalizes the Paulinist cross and its crossing or dispossessing of identities as that “sublime point where man [sic] ceases in some way to be man” and “where God in some way ceases to be the God common to religions.”
Existing at the intersection of two forms of madness, at this crossing of a dual movement in the Paulinist cross God is no more a coherent identity than the human. This is an important point, as, unlike a long history of Christian theologizing, for Breton’s Paulinist faith in the crucified divinity is not a realm of security against the dispossessing movements of mad love, an inflection of a metaphysical tradition with serious political implications. Representing neither the transient human nor the stable ground of metaphysical structure—but rather caught between two forms of mad-ness—for the Paulinist there remains only a lived surging of a transformative insurgency into the paradeigmata of a cultural setup. Not (predictably, safely) representational, with the Paulinist there is rather a singular process of cultural transformation that is a riskier, if freer, kind of gamble. Pressing these aspects of Paulinist narrative back into the philosophical structures of the unavoidable void of the neutral, Breton brings together all the strands of our discussion by summarizing Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 1 this way:
To press the Greek text, which uses two substantive adjectives in the neuter, it would be helpful to translate the passage in the following way: “underneath the Apollonian face we give God [i.e., “wisdom”], there is a nocturnal passion putting him ‘outside himself’ by madness (to moron tou theou) and impelling him toward the ‘infirmity’ of an abasement (to asthenēs tou theou). Under these dramatic images there breaks through a free energy separating them from all our thoughts of divinity, whether common or learned. The faith whose infirmity participates in that of the Crucified puts the sign of the Cross over all our too-facile beliefs. Yet Paul declares without a little enthusiasm that that infirmity and that madness liberate a power that is stronger than that of men and a wisdom wiser than their wisdom. He could have added that ‘she who has ears to hear’ will wonder about her capacity for understanding.”
The dispossessing madness of love within Paulinist divinity—that which, Breton tells us, names the cessation of a sort of God—finds an answer to its own echo in the Paulinist believer who measures the neutrally unhinged and therefore unmeasurable expression of God in the only way possible: intensive, self-forgetful enthusiasm. If there is a freedom of a decidedly Pauline thought of the cross, a freedom in the impossible naming of the execution of a messiah as a revelation of the strength of the divine, it is in the explosion of this space of a void, the dispossessed, unmeasured, or unjustified nature of which does not temper its forceful emergence. This moment of freedom is inextricable, therefore, from that writhing tangle of limbs and identities Breton will, throughout his work, name only the “nocturnal passion” or “nocturnal upsurge” of God, nights and movements from which no one in the Paulinist universe emerges unchanged.
And is not the most important issue in Breton’s philosophical encounter with Paul the intersection of these two aspects of his work? On the one hand we have the formal-structural models of ideology and its exploitable gaps and also a neo-Platonic ontology whereby the One unfolds itself always and already by way of negation and self-othering. On the other hand, we have the texts of Paul, whereby Paul organizes a movement of those who will look upon the abject failure of an imperially executed messiah and find therein a sign of the movement’s own triumph. The real forcefulness of Breton’s reading of Paul only emerges when these two aspects of Breton’s work are viewed as the same moment, and particularly when one reads 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 not as doctrinal or rhetorical representation of an event of dispossessing identification but as this act of “mad love” itself.55
Once such an interpretive move is made, however, the entire archive of Paul and the philosophers leeches out into another sphere entirely. The pressing question, in this sense, is never really one of the universal validity of notions of resurrection, first-century christological or pneumatological conviction, or the Jewish orthodoxy (or otherwise) of Paulinism. The real trial of Paulinism as explicated by Breton is the simple question with which it faces us: are similarly dispossessing, value-inverting moments—in short, a radical and effective critique of ideology—possible? Can the catastrophic wreck of liberatory hopes be subsumed by a fierce enthusiasm in which the very matrix of the play of identities is transformed, whether of the remaining or newly faithful, the named catastrophe, the divine, or that “world” in which all alike find their space of a no longer atomized encounter? Is there a reality, a hope for, irruptions of freedom as “nocturnal passion,” sovereignly opaque because ungrounding the very ground of all judgments about them? In that respect (we could summarize self-consciously in a Bultmannian vein) the krisis that was Paul’s own is no different from our own. Is there, for us (and that with or without this name of an apostle), the possibility that we can avail ourselves of the freedom of the unsurveilled? One is tempted to repeat the lines of Jacob Taubes, that great defender of a Paulinist skandalon: “The horns of the dilemma cannot be escaped. Either messianism is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that, but the historic study of messianism is a scientific pursuit … or messianism, and not only the historic research of the ‘messianic idea,’ is meaningful inasmuch as it discloses a significant facet of human experience.”56
DISPOSSESSING PRIVATE PROPERTY
The subterranean surprise and promising forcefulness of Breton’s philosophical Paulinism now begin to peer through the ideological fault lines constitutive of culture. Several summary ideas—critical punch lines in Breton’s critique of power and ideology—should be stated outright at this point, all the more so as they situate a critical space for Paulinism that seems all but foreclosed by Christendom’s current function to baptize capitalism and neoliberal empire. First, it is clear that the Paulinist stance constitutes a critique of Christian identity. Breton’s term for this tends to be that there is an “originary poverty” about the founding of Paulinist identity, rooted as it is in the crossed out messiah or murdered divinity. This is particularly important to remember when it comes to Breton’s grandiose inflation of the Pauline story of the cross as another name or similar “sign” of that drama to which all ideological forms or countable sets must be subject. In other words, it is a very peculiar universalizing of Paulinism that is being advocated here, as Breton’s generalization or globalization of the cross universalizes a particular thought of the dispossession and failure of identity. Put bluntly, and directly to the contrary of that hegemonic ethos which continues to dominate both popular and academic discussions of “religion,” Christian identity is not imagined by Breton to be private property (or, to put it differently, as either private or property). Remarkably, the resources afforded by Breton’s Paulinism are free for all because they dispossess everyone. It is in this respect that Breton speaks frequently of the meontological cross as the name of a constitutive possibility of exodus from self-enclosed or self-grounding identity, and this structure of voidance is Breton’s central challenge to any leveraging of identitarian habitations against the “outsider.” In this case, Breton’s communism, as it were, the universal ownership of this “sign” of dispossession, necessarily condemns the history of all those attempts to designate oneself as the border guard (and, invariably, the toll collector) of the identity in question. The triumphalism of the ecclesiasts or hermeneuts collapses into the void of the cross.
No doubt, such language of a universalizable dispossession, rather than an occidentally governed identity, was poignant in recent decades even as it remains so today amid a frightening paroxysm of identitarian bids to power in the name of this or that religious identity. Finding a profound similarity in the seventies critiques of philosophy as ideology and modern humanism’s assertion that all must overcome theology, Breton declares that the “colonial empire” of earlier metaphysics and the worldly practices that undergirded them “had crumbled,” leaving the “disciplines” this empire once made mandatory “emancipated.”57 This emancipation of formerly ordered hierarchies of discipline must, therefore (and in another striking repetition of his reading of early Christianity), attempt to think through this kenosis of the imagined self-enclosed system of authority. This kenotic emptying of a former mode of cultural power invites a rethinking of the Paulinist cross, and Breton’s effort to create a postcolonial critique of ideologies was indistinguishable from his efforts to think of that strange “nothingness” or “null element” that was, for him, also Paul’s crucified messiah (116f).
DISPOSSESSING BEAUTY: THE “CRITICAL INSTANCE”
Second, Breton notes with admiration here and elsewhere the absence of “humanism” in the Paulinism of Bultmann. The crucifixion of the messianic figure heralds the impossibility of closing off onto a purely immanent, identitarian sphere, the cosmos or humanity, as if to reduce such things to their recognizable theoretical or practical role (in Heideggerian terms, of the Vorhanden and Zuhanden of a culture). Without affording new definitions, and even without “declaring war” against the specific everyday routines undergirding such recognitions (as if to counter one routine with a specified other), Breton’s Bultmann presents a cross that nevertheless, and universally, declares a “judgment” against the constituted or everyday world (95).
Finally, and in the third twist of the single screw that is the null part, Breton presents Bultmann in a favorable light inasmuch as the biblical scholar opposed the cross to “private property” as a variation of the humanist egocentrism and its world of consumable (or, readily available) identities and actions. This entire ensemble of subjects and objects Breton, following Bultmann, designates as a “possessive humanism” (cf. 94–98). In a world where will to power projects its measurements on the being of everything, Breton praises Bultmann’s “heroic ‘meontology’” and its “subtractive” intervention for making thinkable diverse bands of “all those who resemble the four winds of heaven” in their ephemeral refusals of the “idol” of that which is. The philosopher discovers a collective of all those possessing no power besides “this null element, without density or prestige, which the Christians symbolize by the sign of contradiction, the sign par excellence: that of the cross” (95).
Here again is Breton’s intensification or universalization of the Pauline story of the cross, and its political qualities should not be missed (particularly when articulated by way of Bultmann). In Breton’s inflation of the story, the story itself loses its own identity as the name or form of political critique that may just as reasonably be symbolized by set theory or neo-Platonic reflections on the accursed share of the “pale substratum.” As Breton goes on to say, the null part is “secreted” with every delimitable ensemble, unnameable, unowned (or, rather, dispossessed and dispossessing), and therefore always liable to found those who without “density or prestige” sweep through a fixed ensemble or state with the powerless power of the “null part.” As such it is a potential that does not exist in any way within any localizable, repeatable cultural sphere—indeed, one should not really say it exists in any way at all—so much as it is strangely “secreted” by any ensemble or cultural set. For this very reason, however, Breton states that it is “universal or omnipresent” (98). For Breton, therefore, the Pauline cross is a part of a much larger, indeed universal, archive of which he dreams, a massive study “of the concrete forms taken by this operator of transcendence” (my emphasis). This “systematic” archiving of world culture would search “in every system of thought or action” for “a critical instance,” a moment which perhaps could never become a rule for further critique but that, nevertheless, signifies lacunae, lacks, or questions attending the operativity of the given system. This “neuter” space within all ideologies Breton calls an “element so strange that we reserve the name ‘operator of transcendence’” for it (96). Adding nothing, neither a positive nor a negative determination, this operator appears, as a wink, as a gap, as a “critical instance,” the extreme preciousness of which is not verifiable or calculable. Here again the Paulinist cross is universalized as “the signification of the neuter element or of the empty ensemble on the interior of ideologies” (48).
In his 1989 Philosophie Buisonniere (Truant philosophy), Breton offers a reflection on his visit to the Turner exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. The essay, “Portrait de rien” (Portrait of nothing) elaborates Breton’s negative anthropology, offering the audience thoughts about the ontology of spectatorship by playing on questions of “event” and “visitation” in terms of the museum and art industry.58 (What is it that inclines us to visit a museum? What do we expect to find there?) Breton likewise offers not unsurprising renderings of the work of art as the appearance of a “singular” value which establishes itself as a new standard for a new category. Thus, it would be ridiculous to try to quantify and measure the beauty of one work of art against another, as such an enterprise could only operate successfully were there to be a uniform table of comparable beauties. If, however, the work of art appears as that which has a kind of unknown beauty that nevertheless demands respect, then things are otherwise. Breton’s standard reading here is spiced throughout with intriguing (and rhetorically shrewd, given the audience) jabs at the museum industry by comparing it to the institutionalization and “sainting” operations of the Catholic Church. For the moment, however, what is important to notice is the way Breton concludes the reflection on the nature of the work of art with a gesture to those aspects of Paulinism that obsessed Breton in every sphere of his work. “The ‘portrait of nothing’ reminds me (and how would I be able to forget it), of this otherwise than wisdom and power that inspires us, in the face of the cross, in the infirmity of madness and weakness, the new sign of the divine.”59 Like the work of art, the cross would therefore “subtract” itself from preexisting categories, thereby refusing (or simply not needing) the justification they could afford. As such, cross and work of art both solicit an exodus from “our measures and estimations” that constitute the current economies of life, inasmuch as they testify to a nonsurveilled, nonincorporated “excess” of being that testifies to an “otherwise” than the reigning wisdom and power.60 Without guarantee or justification for its existence, therefore, this “wink” (clin d’oeil) on the surface of the world’s appearance says nothing because it speaks “by nothing” or ex nihilo, as if repeating only that rupture instauratrice or chaotic excess “before the world was formed.”61 The whimsical gesture of the wink, moreover, is not accidental, inasmuch as the indication of an “otherwise” is not only the mortality of the age or the solicitation to go beyond the limits of the age’s modes of action and recognition. With the wink, we catch a sense of the rien par excess (a nothing by way of excess [rather than lack]), not a negation of limit so much as an excess of alterity from which the present order emerges and toward which it may yet be propelled in further creation.
One should perhaps be clear here, as the “excess” in this case does not point back to the world “before the creation” in any temporal sense, as if there is a static fund of excessive white noise out there from which and into which all creation or all orders of words and things must flow. Rather, the excess of the wink is here immanent to the order itself. As Breton likes to say at points, the order itself “secretes” a “gap” in its own smooth functioning from which the order cannot be saved, a kind of irredeemable wound to self-identity as such.62 A wink, we might say, is always insinuated into some particular conversation.
And here, with a wink, is the appropriate place to break off from our discussion of Breton’s philosophical encounter with Paul, an encounter that gives rise to a particularly forceful negative anthropology. It is easy to see why I consider him an important interlocutor for my project to reconfigure Paul as part of the “underground current of materialism,” and this perhaps as the only way to escape his co-optation (and all this represents) back into the tale of ontotheology, with Paul as (always both) the supersessionist “first Christian” and the instigator of the “higher swindle” of pop Platonism that Nietzsche rightly criticized. For me, Breton becomes rather an invitation to think for ourselves about the Pauline texts and those philosophical traditions with which they have been, are, or may yet become intertwined. With this concluding wink, Breton’s work invites us to think about Paul and the philosophers in the light of a poverty of origin that cuts against the grain of two thousand years of Western valorization of Paul, that proverbial “man-mountain” who becomes a “classic” sufficient to ground, found, and set the agenda for a West that follows.63 The significant political question invited by the wink, however is not: what does Paul found? What does he ground? Is the man-mountain a worthy founding figure? (and on such questions go). It is rather an invitation to wonder about what, in relation to these texts or under the repetition of this name—in (or out of) our own time—might subtract itself, absent itself from the economies within which words and things are what they are for us. And, having subtracted themselves from these cultural ensembles, what might be the forcefulness of an event in which such nothings might appear, so many “four winds” sweeping through the world, heralding very specifically scandalous modes of an impossibly unscripted, unsurveilled, and therefore risky newness? This dispossessed and dispossessing wind, this new life, is the unpredictable and unmeasurable measure around which Breton’s reading of Paul invites a necessarily vertiginous form of meditation. At a moment when variously prescripted and ready-made identities claim to determine theory or always already to have oriented freedom like so many safely gated communities, Breton’s philosophical encounter with Paul invites us to think otherwise and, in thinking otherwise, to find ourselves living “a more difficult freedom.”