With a hammer in the hand, Phidias, Michelangelo, Houdon, Rodin sculpted; Polyeuctus along with Nearchus and every other iconoclast broke the statues of the idols into tiny pieces, hammer in hand. Nietzsche wanted to philosophize by hammer blows.1
Nothing is more difficult to succeed in than the hypocritical enterprise of destroying. Mosander, according to Symeon Metaphrastes, before Corneille, recounted that Polyeuctus had taken the edict of the emperor Decius condemning the Christians and tore it into bits in order to throw them to the winds; on the same day of wrath, the Armenian prince snatched the idols away from the people who were carrying them to adore them, smashed them against the ground and trampled their pieces, stunning the crowd just as in the tragedy.2 His father-in-law Felix had him beaten in the face by his torturers and ordered that his head be cut off. The limbs of the martyr were then going to rejoin the fragments of the statues and the pieces of the page. For the impiety concerned things and texts. Without any other baptism than that of blood, Saint Polyeuctus then entered into the glory that God had promised the victims: a crowd of pious Christians, during the era that was beginning, will kneel before his effigy. The statue has returned. The iconoclast works in the same direction as the iconolater and much better than this latter, hypocritically. This word means: below critique or upstream from decision, before debate.
The gods acquired their divinity from the violence that opposes the gods against each other. What statues did Polyeuctus and Nearchus break or overturn? That of Dionysus dismembered? That of Orpheus losing his head? Or of Hephaestus chased from Olympus, broken from his fall from the sky, limping badly? Or of Athena Parthenos, a piece of her father’s thigh? An image of Osiris scattered to the four corners of the horizon? What god of paganism, of the polytheistic page, is not already reduced, on its pedestal, to a fragment? In other words, by destroying the idols, the holy martyr entered backwards into the process of their construction and by advancing into the history of saintliness did likewise. The pieces of the gods, broken, become deified.
Scattered over four different places in Europe—Stuttgart, Milan, Paris, Lugarno—the holy story of Stephen, the first deacon, painted by Carpaccio, represents him speaking to the learned, commenting on texts, entering into the diaconate under the benediction of Saint Peter, perched on the pedestal of a statue he just destroyed and haranguing the people with stiff necks in the center of a square, in Jerusalem lastly lying under the flurry of stones held in the hand or flung by the executioners. You can reverse the order of the series at your leisure, as though the lives of the saints were composed of pieces that are combinable and readable in any direction. Likewise, the statue of Saint Polyeuctus substitutes for that of Athena or Dionysus, and the process will begin again when new iconoclasts, hating saintliness, arise. The petrifaction of the martyred body can, for example, be recognized in the execution by stoning: you are rock and on this rock the Church will be built; or the scattered limbs of the deacon himself split up under the stoners’ cruel volley can be recognized in the fragments of the idol below the new statue of Stephen. You get the impression of a reversible time or of an intense fabrication of gods: the executioners, the catechumens, the saints, the pompously dressed popes, all in the end ceaselessly carve statues, as though each of them was making the abrupt gesture of the sculptor.
Polyeuctus, Nearchus, Stephen wielded hammers, and their executioners hurled stones. In a pinch, you can break idols by stone blows or even pick up pieces of a broken statue in order to break statues into pieces; you can stone or fabricate by hammer blows.
Phidias, Houdon, Rodin wielded hammers. Phidias sculpted Athena Parthenos and Houdon the beautiful Diana; Rodin decapitated bodies: he started the fragmentation. A headless statue remains a statue: Venus is more beautiful without arms. A foot cut off at the malleolus still remains a sculpture. The same goes for the mere head of Orpheus or of The Thinker. Successors will work away furiously, in the literal sense of the verb: the limbs will fly. Any fragment can substitute for the statue. Even formless mass. But this mass does not differ from the first—raw—stones that our ancestors left us from Karnak to Stonehenge. We don’t know whether this absence of cutting up marks the end of a process of dismemberment or the beginning of a long approach toward form, but we suspect that these two moments exactly overlap in the history of aesthetics, about which one can think that it recommences, imitates, follows or equals the history of religion. A circle is drawn there and recommences.
Nothing is more stable than statuary, language itself wants it that way. Something exists that ceaselessly comes back. As in the myth of Sisyphus, the dead philosopher pushes back again, forces back, moves the same rock away that rolls again along the same thalweg, right at his feet. Does a stronger presumption for the existence of things exist? Ancient menhirs, cairns repeated on the roads, meteors fallen from the sky, contemporary sculptures, the same things come back, that is, the thing itself, whose return testifies to reality.
I’m speaking here in three languages: Sisyphus’s rock that’s always there, the statues that are reborn from the pedestal after their destruction and fragmentation, and the stability of the sculpture express in three discourses, mythic, religious and aesthetic, or, rather, in a single anthropological language, the inevitable reality of the things that the physical sciences express, in turn, via equilibria or constants: vis viva, energy or mass, from which they draw different perpetual motions, other circles or returns. This book speaks of statues, aesthetically; of gods, idols and God, religiously; it above all seeks to say the things, metaphysically. The inevitable, constant, balanced reality of the things themselves. Every anthropology that it brings up, through myths, arts and religions, precedes and conditions science and philosophy. Sisyphus, Phidias, Rodin, Polyeuctus, or Stephen contribute to an anthropology of the sciences, here of physics and, since the gate sculpted by Rodin, of mass, the fundamental reality of science, neglected by philosophy.
The philosophy by hammer blows therefore cannot do without the Eternal Return. Destroying makes the methodical detail of the construction explicit, from the left to the right along a circle in which the process can equally pour from the right to the left. The philosophy in fragments spreads even better in space and therefore preserves the theology it analyzes in order to obliterate it. Suppress anthropology, and it always comes back. Destroy philosophy by blows of anthropology, and it always comes back. The real comes back.
These logics by reversal, invariant across spectacular variations, like that of the parasite as well, are often presented as new through ignorance of ancient processes but are only thought to be so by everyone’s unawareness with regard to what he holds in his hand.
Phidias, Rodin, Polyeuctus, Stephen, his stoners, lastly Nietzsche and his chorists wield the same hammer. But what is this hammer? Some hard and fashioned mass. Hard, no doubt. Less solid or dense, and it would fly into pieces. Into limbs, pieces and fragments. Heavier, it sculpts and destroys a mass, fashions or builds it. In the violent contact with the thing it hammers, this hammer must be thought, calculated, fashioned, built for the relation to the thing itself. What then is a hammer if not a fragment of a thing? A piece of the statue, a limb of the idol, and therefore the idol or the statue or the thing itself. A mass, it is sometimes said, quite aptly.3 Only a diamond can shape a diamond. The stone thrown at the idol becomes the idol itself, and this latter in turn becomes a thrown stone. During the Stone Age, stone shaped stone and during the Iron or Bronze Ages, iron and bronze worked bronze and iron. The hammer hits the hammer; the thing destroys or constructs the thing. In the Eternal Return of the thing to the thing and of the hammer to the hammer, critique becomes magic, religion, fetishism; analysis changes into unanalyzed dogma.
The hammer is equivalent to the thing hammered.
Together, a few myths or narratives, the disrupted religious festivity, the judiciary rite and the masterpiece of art describe, as though in parallel and each after its own manner, the emergence of the thing as such, of the thing in itself, here of mass. Realism, the philosophic option or global attitude of the modern scholarly physicist, plunges long anthropological roots into antecedents that are rightly repugnant to metaphysics and the exact sciences: ungrateful, the evolved children don’t always like being reminded of their father and mother who remained poor and uneducated. What’s bred, however, in the bone will often come out in the flesh. Atomic mass, at Hiroshima, brutally returned to magma. One sees that languages, sometimes, the old texts and the silent works also restore the deep lineage cut off by precision, rigor and the abstract. Genealogy fills these gaps little by little.
By the same word masse [mass], the French language names the artisan who works it: it calls him maçon [mason]. The word renews ties with the German machen and the English “to make,” both stemming from the same masse. The anthropological genesis of the thing accompanies or rediscovers that of homo faber, who has just received various proper names: Phidias, Rodin, Polyeuctus, Nearchus, Stephen’s lapidaters, Peter himself, lastly Nietzsche, geniuses, saints or philosophers by the hammer. Wielding projectiles or masses for breaking masses, they come from afar, and remain our contemporaries. They make us understand how fabrication came to man. For the activity of homo faber isn’t derived from the definition of homo sapiens, as in a transcendental deduction, an easy school exercise, a facility by means of those theory classes that dispense with acquiring knowledge and experience over a long period of time. No definition of this sapiens sapiens is known there: without nature, essence or destiny, he learns and becomes. He becomes what he learns. Man when he speaks, man when he fabricates, or when he thinks and loves, rarely. He is not born homo faber; he becomes a mason. How? We don’t know, but these rites and religions, these fables and myths, these works said to be beautiful, these rolled, broken, adored, wielded, carved, polished stones still preserve the silent memory of that genesis. Nothing is stable like this set of masses, nothing more ancient therefore than their stock of memories.
We will perhaps never know how to order these fragments into a single narrative, fragments scattered like the stones themselves, which bear witness to beginning hominity and whose scattering is multiplied by our social sciences, but we think we hear with the same ear the holy fury of Polyeuctus and Nietzsche, of the Jerusalemites rushing upon Stephen and of Michelangelo hurling his chisel at a finished work, shouting himself hoarse: “Now speak!”
The Pieta answers Michelangelo.
The virgin rests on a rock that perhaps represents a wooden support; that’s of no import. The word “mass” comes from a verb that describes the act of kneading, as masons do with earth, clay, brick paste or cob, cement, concrete, and plaster. Molding the first Adam, God, in our languages, ought to have to called himself mason. The word “matter,” it has been said, refers to the mother: the beam [madrier] comes from the tree that produces offshoots, as though stemming from the genealogic tree.4 Madrier, matrice [womb], matter. The Virgin Mother seated on the scarcely molded mass supports the dead body of the only son in her lap.
The Word comes from the womb [matrice], which for its part, comes from mass. Dead and mute, the word returns to the flesh, which returns to the mother, which returns to matter, which returns to mass or the earth. The stone is a bone of my mother, the earth. Striking, staggering, immobile, silent, our hominid genealogy is summarized in the Pieta. The perfect work of art always says the essence of its art, of its matter and its form. The sculpture expresses this genesis without saying it.
Life and death: involution of the Word toward flesh and toward death, toward matter and mass; evolution, resurrection of these latter toward the Former.
Creating the family of the gods and men in stone, was it possible for the sculptor not to succumb to the temptation of believing himself God? Only the dead Word answers to Michelangelo’s command.
Do the holes in the dead Christ’s hands and feet, the gaping wound in his side, traces of the lance or nails driven in by hammer, differ from the injuries inflicted by hammer on the face of the marble mother by a dangerous madman on Pentecost Sunday, 1972 or from the blow dealt to Moses by the sculptor himself, flinging hammer and chisel at him and enjoining him to speak?5 Or from the impacts that carved it?