Three

FROM THE THEO-CHRISTO-LOGICAL DOUBLET TO UNILATERAL COMPLEMENTARITY

THE THEO-CHRISTO-LOGICAL DOUBLET AND THE INVENTION OF CHRIST

Christ is said in many senses, and remains an equivocal name. Rather than adding yet another sense, we seek to give it the function of symbol for a scientific event that opens up a new field of research, and is capable of treating problems of theology—instead of doing the reverse, explaining for example why it bears these multiple significations. Theology has always claimed to be a science, but in a philosophical, Aristotelian sense, not in the experimental sense, which is at once more rigid and more supple, according to the style that modernity has established for it. Now, a science begins by cutting out its object so as to acquire a more rigorous rapport with it than that of common belief and theology, or even philosophy. “Christic nontheology” proposes to cut with the weapon of faith the theo-christic doublet that structures Christianity and engenders its ecclesio-centrism. The correlation of Christ and God is the object of an imaginary and religious science that has appropriated it and institutionalized it, a Greco-Judaic confusion that must be undone. Christ has given rise to an interminable exegesis, but we make Christ the name or the symbol of a science-in-person of religious phenomena. It is important to break all imaginary or theological continuity in christic causality, but without pronouncing their absolute incommunicability—that would be the philosophical temptation, and it would be a specular illusion. A science of theology breaks its bonds with theology without nostalgia (a decisive point), but brings with it, in its baggage, a certain part of theology that it will make use of as one of its means in the service of the scientific cause, but that will not be able to reciprocally determine it. This complex rapport, in which Christ breaks his bonds with theology yet conserves certain secondary links with it (as a material of symptoms and of productive forces), defies the logic of the theological understanding. We call it the unilateral complementarity of Christ and the discourses that are maintained about him. It is unthinkable to break radically (and not absolutely, like atheism) every link with theology and philosophy so as to better leave the latter to their autonomy and their sufficiency (Principle of Theological Sufficiency). It is a matter of abasing this double and no doubt unique religious and philosophical sufficiency, and of breaking with it only so as to make a better use of it. Christ is incommensurable (but incommensurable otherwise than is God) with those theological affirmations that vainly assure themselves of him. Christology is an apparent science, a sector of theology; but there is a science-in-Christ that is the science of christology itself. It is fundamental as a priority (we might even say a prior-to-priority) to desuture Christ and the theology that has specularly taken hold of him, to make of the former the cause or the true subject of science, a subject-science ultimately, and to dismiss theology, reducing it to its function as occasional material or variable. It is obvious that this nonrelation is difficult to think, incomprehensible to the classical, and in general philosophical, understanding. But it is incomprehensible because it is “imaginary” in a new, algebraic sense, which is not entirely cataphatic. Precisely, if theology is ultimately destined to a certain cataphasis whose mechanism of depotentialization must be reevaluated, this is the task of a science whose cause, Christ, is no longer an image of God, the deficiency or inequality of a Son in relation to his Father. In the Cross and above all in the Resurrection, we find concentrated the mechanism by which a generic science frees itself from its scientific and theological positivity as well as from its christological inversion (also supposedly sufficient). In other words, the Cross is a radical but not absolute desuturing of doublets; it is the form par excellence of the unilateral complementarity that must be brought into play on both of its two sides. The sacrifice of the Cross will be interpreted as a way of sacrificing the theo-christic doublet that is specular and belongs to a religious regime, and of assuring the invention of Christ as Resurrection and Ascension. Just as the invention of Christ is no absolute or philosophical gesture, the eviction of God is no “death of God” in the traditional sense (for example, a sense in which it would signify the triumph of the “man” of humanism). The objective is clear: to destroy the theo-christic doublet in order to save the kernel of the real within it, so that it may not destroy the messianity of Christ and refer it back to history once more. And equally, if God is thought as that omnipotent One-of-the-One, then his depotentialization takes place as the immanence of the One-in-One and of its residue of idempotence that is said of all his predicates and affects them all. The specular theo-christo-logical doublet is deconstructed by placing Christ prior-to-priority, as the factor that opens up the “imaginary” dimension of christo-fiction. The phenomenal or real content of this doublet is messianity, which henceforth forms a unilateral complementarity with the faith of the faithful. It is no longer with God alone that the soul speaks, it is through Christ that it allows itself to be underdetermined. The end of monotheisms understood as the end of theo/prophetico/christo/ecclesiastico-logics.

THE USAGE OF THEO-CHRISTO-LOGY AS VARIABLE

Theological erudition—the detailed knowledge of subtle discussions and distinctions relating to the Trinity, for example—is of no fundamental interest to our project, it may just have a certain utility. We put it aside here as being without any pertinence for understanding and undoing the doublet that imprisons faith. Its secret is elsewhere, very close to the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics (Heidegger) and that part of it which has passed into theology. Metaphysics and theology, as different as they might be in inclination, object, and history, and without posing the infinite problem of which has influenced the other, have the same structural constitution in all essential respects. Philosophers and theologians will balk at this simplification, but it is important in order for us to concentrate on the sole decisive problem for us, and to place it in opposition, or at least to distinguish in it a way of thinking that would be without doublet and of a scientific essence. What does the theo-christo-logical constitution stem from, if not from a certain chance, multiple identification—an identification of the two dualities that dominate our thought, that of Being and of beings, that of God and of the creature? For reasons of experimental manipulation or “preparation” as physicists say, the traditional ways of evoking them allusively, of locating them locally, of making them move by displacing them, of raising them by sublimating them, and finally of conserving them under their theoretical modalities, all these are important to us. But it must be understood that for a christic science, such dualities, as overdetermined as they may be, have no scientific meaning, still less a generic meaning. The fact that it is a matter of dualities in general is not the problem; the problem is their specular and macroscopic doublet form. The scholars of onto-theo-logy get lost in the minutiae of quibbles and byways that philosophers practice, when they refuse to realize what ought to be blindingly obvious: that all transversality, and even unilaterality (philosophy always provides some bait), is ultimately taken up again in a second movement of transcendence, a reversed or reversible unilaterality, completed but at the same time closed or reclosed, looped in a double turn on a globally transcendent(al) model. Transcendence always has the last word in these supposedly immanent affairs—a double transcendence, which innervates the transcendental through which it relates itself to experience, and prevails over it as the creation of the world prevails over its constitution. The problem of philosophy and theology is their naivety or spontaneity—they ceaselessly divide, distinguish, only to let the divisions close up again and become encysted in a unity that returns or that always comes back beneath them. They imprison themselves in an appearance that they practice without seeing—appearance and sufficiency. In other words, unilaterality does not exclude duality, but it must fuse with a milieu of radical immanence that we have always called the One-in-One or vision-in-One, on condition of their vectoriellization, and deliver itself from the enclosures of transcendence that are so many reclosures—a double, hardly a multiple, an indefinite hardship for humans.

The theo-christo-logical doublet is, however, a correct provisional posing of the problem of Christ, even if it is as yet only a presentiment of science. The argument that the transcendental is only cut out or detached from a more encompassing “metaphysical” sphere is fruitless, for one can say nothing rigorous about this sphere without this detachment—one can only prosecute eternal wars, like God. The transcendental rationalization of experience and sometimes of religious belief undertaken by Kant and Husserl is an onto-theological projection onto experience, because the scientific model they have at their disposal sins either through its too mathematical and transcendent character (Husserl) or through its outdated model of physics—these models, what is more, being each time confiscated by a sufficient philosophical decision. To pursue more radically the transformation of the theo-christo-logical doublet, we must abandon the old rationality, itself mixed, and invent a generic device that proceeds in a quantum manner—that is to say, through the collision rather than the mélange of theological discourses—and that is capable of undoing their sufficiency and facing up to the problem of sacrifice, the Cross, and the Resurrection. In the meantime, we will have understood Christ as the name of the duality or the unilateral complementarity of messianity and faith that transforms our theological material.

With the unformed or amorphous milieu of an absolute and purely conceptual theology that seeks to be dimensionless or without transcendental cut, like an immediate and transparent reading of the Heavens, one can obviously achieve nothing scientific: it is the mystical kingdom of fictions and phantasms, the religious and mythical ground of the Heavens. On the other hand, when theology allows itself to be structured as a system of dualities, distinguishes a lower strata, a human relation to experience, and a higher strata occupied by God, then it begins to exhibit scientific intentions; but this staging is precisely the philosophical hierarchy, and not yet a true scientific distribution of instances. This placing into duality is a fundamental preparatory gesture that does not yet lead to the positing of a matrix or a scientific vessel. A science begins by positing a more or less closed site, be it a strata or a plane, or a system for the emission and detection of the phenomena to be studied—for example, channels to capture particles. For the Christ-science we must define the emission devices and above all the detection devices, along with their parameters, like those of the Logos and the Torah. If theology is an incomplete science, it must necessarily distinguish within itself a domain or a place reserved for experimental procedures, even those of disciplinary knowledges, and produce cognizances through the collision of philosophy under the two aspects that are important for Christ, the aspects of the Greek Logos and the Jewish Torah. To produce the unknown with the known rather than the known with the unknown—such is the operation of the generic matrix….

The end of sufficient theological representation is obviously not its absolute negation, nor even that of the religious, but the salvific critique of the Principle of Sufficient Theology, which here would also wish to be both encompassing and determining. We place theology under determining, or underdetermining, condition in-the-last-instance, using quantum theory but certainly not under positive quantum conditions. However, this is not a matter of mysticism properly speaking, but of a science that ends up not by falling absolutely into silence or, for example, into a stance of adoration, but by limiting theological sufficiency and its discourse. But if Greco-classical representation is undermined, then there is no longer any reason not to interrogate the theology that is the superior and systematic part of religion, and the christology that is its heart, as to their corpuscular way of thinking and their semantic mode of belief. Theology resists, just like the Church, like the Church-form of philosophical thought.

THE MATERIEL FORMALISM AND ITS INTERPRETATION OF CHRIST

We offer a “materiel,” but not at all materialist, interpretation of the central sequence of Christianity (from the Cross to the Resurrection). Materiel indicates a certain unity of matter and a priori form, in any case, but there are many interpretations of this general proposition. Let us begin by excluding three transcendent interpretations. (1) It is not materialist or reductive, finding its sense beneath phenomena, in ethno-historical events. And yet it is a sequence of lived-materiel events, but of such a nature that we might call them wave events, interfering wave events, events that must be able to explain why the Cross is perceived as a series of corpuscular events whose sense is always elsewhere than within them, according to the traditional linguistic model of decipherment. (2) Neither is it idealist or idealizing, locating sense beneath phenomena in a sphere of spiritual significations, as if they were a metaphor or symbol of a metahistorical event or of a plan of salvation fabricated elsewhere, an object of theology that would give it its spiritual meaning. (3) Finally it does not indicate the fusion of matter and sense in an a-priori-and-transcendental identity, the identification of empirical phenomena and their ideal sense, as in Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. However, this interpretation starts to exclude brute matter and myth, and even the duality between infrastructure and superstructure; it makes their identity alternate around syntaxes of difference. This identification with various transcendental degrees of formalism and materialism remains at the heart of philosophy, and may simulate the materiel effect we seek generically, as a quantum occurrence, but precisely not in a fusional identification, or even a Moebian alternation of the two sides of one unique surface.

What is opposed to all these philosophical corpuscular solutions that go from identity to difference and to the dialectic is obviously the quantum act of vectoriell superposition, which responds to a logic other than that of dualities such as form and matter, all of which are inscribed in the doublet of transcendence such as it is reflected both in form and in matter. Superposition stems from a property of certain algebraic operations, it is idempotence (A + A = A) that escapes an analytic or even synthetic operation as classically defined. The dualities of instances, originally of the corpuscular, classically nonsuperposable type, are found under certain conditions in unilateral complementarities. There is superposition when immanence is the same through and through, and traverses the transcendences that it brings about rather than contains, but that do not change it by being added to it. Two terms can be superposed if they are of such a nature that they conserve the same unchanged immanence despite their adjunction or their addition, which reenters under or in immanence. Not just any matter whatsoever is susceptible to superposition, it must be of a wave type; and not just any logic works for it, it must be an idempotent logic, one that responds to the imaginary or complex number.

If, for example, two interpretations are classically and tendentially possible, Christ-according-to-the-Logos and Christ-according-to-the-Torah, there result two types of solution that in each case involve a certain conception of matter and a certain conception of syntax. Or else they are mixed in various proportions, but the resulting interpretation is therefore always of a philosophical, corpuscular, or macroscopic type, and the macroscopic entities form mixtures or amphibolies but do not superpose onto one another—this is the state of most theologies, even Trinitarian ones. Or else, without mixing or even combining, they are superposed and we must then suppose that they change their theoretical and physical status, and must be thought fully as quantum phenomena, at once wave and particle (no longer corpuscular). It will be objected that the leap from classical matter to quantum materiality is inadmissible, a metaphorical passage; but this is to forget that the atomistic and Newtonian “natural,” which philosophy largely adopts, is no more natural than quantum matter, and that it is precisely the latter that we can learn from, not the Newtonian version. We must therefore assume from the very beginning a preparatory theoretical and scientific “conversion,” a quantum-theoretical stance and not a philosophical position, admitting that theological concepts, utterances, and axioms are not “natural,” that their macrophysics is one possible state but is not normative nor the only state. The possible interpretations of Christ are those of superposable wave (and particle) phenomena, considered from the quantum-theoretical angle, something that is only metaphorical for the philosophy that impregnates theology, but not beyond its bounds. Insofar as they are superposed in the matrix (and thus, we shall say, superposed on the Cross), they obey another “logic,” an algebraic logic, one of idempotence—namely, their addition gives a unique interpretation in quantum-theoretical (and thus nontheological) terms, which “completes” both one and the other. This “completion” without materialist reduction or idealist elevation is what we call a generic reprise rather than a repetition. It signifies that the new interferent interpretation of Christ, his new “wavelength” or state vector, at once constructive and destructive, is the “Same” as each of the “incumbent” interpretations, but exceeds them from the point of view of their analytical content by forcing them to remain the same or sterilizing them from the point of view of their synthetic content. What happens in that matrix which is our unique point of view, that of the Resurrection, is the constitution of the vector of Christ as containing all possible information on its subject, that is to say, its amplitude of messianity—which leads us to say that we are assured of his indeterminate messianity, but not of his exact messianity.

We call materiel or immanental formalism this conception of the Real that allows us a new reading of the three phases of the foundational drama—the Cross, the Resurrection, and the Ascension (with Evangelization as the fourth moment). A sort of phenomenology without materialist or idealist position, but entirely immanent, flush with the events or transcendences that enrich it. These moments are thus, in reality, phases of the same process rather than dissociated stases linked together by a transcendent guiding thread that would be in the hands of God. Philosophy has made the Cross into a scene of sacrificial tragedy followed by a separate and, what is more, unintelligible conclusion; the Resurrection and Ascension are supposed to give a final but supplementary meaning added to sacrifice in the form of a marvelous or miraculous outcome. We understand that the Hegelian philosophy (but it was not the only one) grasped this determinist and already speculative interpretation as an unexpected boon, and gave birth to the great cohort of idealist or post-Hegelian christologies. From our point of view it is instead an experimental drama that must be interpreted as immanent, not as being organized and manipulated by a Great Planner. It finds a theoretical and physical model in quantum physics, but cannot be reduced to this model, nor refocused into a human or generic physics. The Ascension closes the great theological tale of creation, which must be doubled by a new scene of mediation, as Christ will be in his turn, in the echo or the repercussion of his return. The matrix we are constructing to replace this tale and to sketch out what we must call an experimental theology has to deal with the same ambivalence between a classical interpretation of its apparent and successive movement of preparation, production, and consummation and an interpretation according to a real movement in which it is obviously the Resurrection and the Ascension that are prior-to-first and explain the sacrifice of the Cross or the abasement of God. More exactly, it is so little a matter of inverting the apparent movement of history and theology into a real movement of determination in-the-last-instance by the Cross that in fact the Resurrection and the Ascension are prior-to-first and not simply first, as they may have been in a “first theology.” The distinction between prior-to-priority and priority is more than a simple inversion of the movement; it is the placing under underdetermining condition of all Christian theology. The prior-to-first Resurrection and the Ascension are less miraculous, more intelligible, than the supposedly sufficient sacrifice that succeeds only in continuing the ancient barbarism of religions.

QUANTUM ORIENTATION OF THE CHRIST-SCIENCE

Different formulations of this enterprise are possible: christic science or Christ-science, or, on the shortcut model of “nonstandard theology,” a non-Christian science or “nontheology.” To take account of its effects on theology, “nonstandard theology” can be used, or else “experimental theology” in memory of the passion of the mystics. A multiplicity of senses replacing the multiplicity of names of Christ. It is important not to define it by way of some part of philosophy, as if it were a question of an “ontology of Christ” extracted from the philosophical mass or a “christology” extracted from theology, when it really is a science that operates this desuturing. A science-according-to-Christ is in no way a part, a region, a domain, or a stratum of theology. This is its way of desuturing itself from the historical context in which it is adopted. On the other hand, elements of the latter are “input” as symptomal material into a “theoretical machine,” inscribed in an artificial space or a vessel sampled from a certain physical rather than mathematical model. Quantum theory may be—under certain restrictive conditions, those of the principles of its algebra—as operative for theological disciplines as it is for human disciplines in general. Recall that between Christianity and quantum physics, constituting the link between them rather than their still improbable “synthesis,” there is a great Christian thinker who had some influence over the constitution of this science: Kierkegaard. We cannot explore this affair in detail, but it is impossible for us not to see in it a sign or a symptom in respect of the qualitative leap, the antidialectical and antilogical discontinuity, proper to quantum paradoxes. Their extension to the “crucial” experiment of Christianity, to the Cross (including the Resurrection), will seem an unlikely provocation, as will the attempt at a christic physics. In the sacrifice on the Cross, in the empty tomb, and in the Ascension, which are the laboratory of Christianity, we meanwhile find an incalculable dialectical experiment underway, one that is philosophically impossible but relatively intelligible for an entirely other rationality. It is obvious that there is another leap between the critique of Hegel’s “logical” immanence in the name of the transcendence of faith and the quantum critique of transcendence in the name of a vectoriell immanence (a nonlogical leap, it is true). The inversion by quantum physics of the theoretical debate between Hegel and Kierkegaard, which remains internal to philosophical theology, takes place by means of algebra, whose property of idempotence and affinity with the imaginary number inverts the relations of immanence and transcendence.

In strict terms, in regard to this use of quantum physics as a model (in the scientific, nonphilosophical, or paradigmatic sense of the word) of the Christ-science, we may speak of a weak quantum or protoquantum theory, as have certain epistemologists in the human sciences. But more adequately, according to an expression that is not one of evaluation but one of structure and use, we may speak of a “quantum-oriented theory.” It is a question of a generic quantum theory: the use of quantum theory here is nonpositive and nonmathematically sufficient, even though it requires a minimum of algebra in order to have an objectivity. It implies the human “subject” and its operativity as observer in the very form of the objectivity of knowledge, its integration into a unique state vector. No longer an objectivity of knowledge in itself, but one that operates through entanglement or nonseparability, through the unilateral complementarity of the traditional actors of science, “subject” and “object.” In particular, if our use of quantum theory is placed under condition of its weakening in terms of its mathematical sufficiency, this weakening itself is not the doing of the quantum theory and of its mathematics reduced to several axioms; it is the doing of the generic conception of the quantum apparatus. The vessel into which we hurl theology demands that we also hurl into it classical quantum theory. The generic matrix such as we understand it supposes two variables—one theological, the other itself quantum—whose fusion or nonseparability must be ensured, but under quantum condition in the last instance, and not under theological condition (this may have been imaginable, but certainly would not be “imaginary,” and so was out of the question here). The generic matrix is precisely that operation that removes the positivity of quantum thought and the sufficiency of spontaneous theology, and this through the twofold means of their reciprocal multiplication or translation and their underdetermination by a specifically quantum act, superposition, and a generic one, idempotence. Whence a deobjectivated objectivity, a deindividualized subjectivity—that is to say, in both cases, generic. Being matrixial, our device conserves an algebraic (imaginary and complex) kernel, stripped of numerical calculation: this explains the quantum force, which is the force of a weakening of theological sufficiency. And what is more, it conjugates this kernel with a characteristic of the lived with which it is superposed and which testifies to the human and not solely “mathematical” nature of this generic.

We sum up the end of the identifications and specular doublets of theology and christology in the concept of “christic messianity” obtained through the quantum treatment of the theo-christic doublet. This is obviously not Judaic messianism, although it owes much to it; it is a generic or human messianity, a messianity of-the-last-instance that guides from within and configures the faith of the faithful, tearing them away from beliefs activated by the world. In its ultimate essence, faith is messianic: it is an immanent praxis for a deindividualized messiah, one that destroys the world-form beliefs of theology.

FROM FOUNDATION TO GENERIC CONSTANT: THE BEING-FOR-MAN OF THE CHRIST-SCIENCE

The principal or first act of a philosophy is that of “foundation.” It delimits and encloses a natural space that will be called a “foundation.” Qua “natural,” it is generally a projection onto the pregiven site par excellence, nature. The first act of a science is to delimit and close off an artificial space, a domain of objects circumscribed by a constant, for what will be called an experiment. To map out a pregiven site and to construct a vessel are very different acts of definition of a theoretical “site.” In a sense, epistemology, like philosophy of science, is founded on a confusion between these two acts undertaken in the name of a “site.” A science of theology, where the relation is apparently inverted, seems very close to this confusion—it demands at once the vessel and the constant of a science, and an already pregiven object. Thus it is both artificial and natural at the same time.

What distinguishes theology as a science practiced by the Churches or their theorists from a science of or for theology, as a “nontheology” must be? Certainly not the inversion of subject and object, since each of them is reflected in the other and each of them is both science and theology. This site at once natural and artificial, received from physics and constructed by history, this experimental vessel that founds quasi-theologically a new science, we call it the “matrix,” for reasons pertaining to mathematics and science fiction. And we posit that humans are not in this matrix in the same way that they are “in” the world, but that the matrix is “in” humans—that there is a “being-in-generic-man” of gnosis as science of Christ or as generic-oriented science. Humans are no longer defined philosophically as beings whose vocation is to be, but as identically natural and artificial—that is to say, “generic”—without our knowing, still, what is this obviously fundamental and enigmatic “at once” that is the object of the cognizance we seek. A generic matrix contains apparently complex relations that escape the logics of philosophy and science, supposedly separate as knowledges or disciplines in themselves. To simplify, such a matrix obeys two or three quantum principles: it undertakes the superposition of science and theology, it exploits their entanglement, and it acknowledges their noncommutability. There is thus no point in locating oneself in the “sites” or topoi of classical theological discourse, except qua clarifications or references (our quilting points with historical Christianity). We will still be detected, if not displaced, in them. To sum up, it is a question of redistributing the classical relations between science and theology into other relations or nonrelations that obey a thinking that is quantum-theoretical in spirit, even if it is not a thinking of physical matter.

Why pursue such an enterprise? Because the philosophy that ultimately governs these relations is neither a sufficiently artificial nor a sufficiently natural element for what we want to do. It is not a good artificial and experimental milieu for science; it remains an arbitrary, barely even axiomatic decision. Nor is it a good natural milieu, for it flees into theological abstractions and substitutes for faith beliefs and images traced from idealized figures, it disregards the lived materielity of faith. More generally, the element of theology is an indeterminate generality, a poorly structured space where concepts go in every direction as in a divine doxa (the true content of the theological understanding) and are continually stopped for questioning and then put back in the race. It is understood that God supports this whirling narcissistic madness of philosophies, and perhaps he is the first to participate in it; but how could Christ bear to climb onto the carousel where theologians and priests hawk their beliefs—he who came to break up these mélanges and chase from the temple of the world the spirit of corruption that is its very principle? There is probably no point in opposing it with a sterile purity or, still worse, the ideal of a universal hybridizing, that new desirable purity of mélange. It is an entirely other solution, in a nonphilosophical spirit, that we seek: an entanglement that simulates this universal hybridization without being it. More precisely, generic entanglement—this is what we oppose to philosophical hybridization and, among other things, to the technological interpretation of Christ as a transcendent union of two natures. We define humans by way of properties that are neither purely natural (animal and physical) nor purely artificial (rational and cultural), not by remaking the mélanges, but instead through the three quantum-type properties that make the human being impure yet nonmixed, superposed yet nonidentical, entangled yet noncommutative.

To sum up, the inputs to the science-in-Christ are as follows. (1) On the one hand theo-christo-logy as final macroscopic object to be explained, and simultaneously (given the definition of this generic science) as a variable that enters into the cognizance of this generic science. This theological variable itself is decomposed into two subvariables that are here, for Christ, the Greek and the Jew as ingredients of christology. Thus the traditional element of the treatment of christological problems becomes a phenomenon to be explained, all the while conserving a function as a variable or parameter of the generic as testimony to its old, royal domination. (2) On the other hand, theo-christo-logy is conjugated with quantum physics itself, with its major principles, which are treated in turn as a necessary variable of the knowledge of generic humanity. Quantum physics itself is a scientific model designed to replace the Greco-philosophical, often Aristotelian rationalism that was presupposed in the old theology. The model, just like the object or the experiment, also functions as a parameter of generic idempotence, and must abandon its empirical-scientific sufficiency, just as theology must abandon the sufficiency of its spontaneous exercise.

So are there two or three variables in the problem of Christ? There could be many abstract versions of the quantum science of Christ, with Greek or Judaic variables that could subsequently be recombined. But for reasons of the limitation of our possibilities of manipulation, we examine immediately only the elementary relations of the Greek and Judaic that are to be found in the logia and utterances of Christ as a function of the phases or sequences of his mission, without dissolving them into a “plan for salvation.” This is the index of our finitude as contemporary quantum observers of Christ alone, of his sayings and his acts, not of his interpreters or indeed of a supposed plan of salvation that would wholly exceed, through a transcendent religion, Christ-in-person and his generic signification. It is a refusal of the phantasm of a total and planified view that unfolds between Christ and God within the theo-christo-logical doublet.

The alternative to “pure” spiritual experience or to the discourse of knowledge constitutes the materielity of this experience. There is no vague or abstract dogma separate from language. We must therefore decompose the Jew and the Greek into specific variables and treat many among them as materials of this science. By way of anticipation, we shall make the product of these two variables each time, but in reducing their transcendence through an immanent act of superposition, as the matrix requires. This procedure is the only one that will save us from both Jews and Greeks, the only way to extract the originality of Christ-thought that one might have thought a means or a weak combination of the Greek and Jew, or at best the schematization of transcendent God within the Greek and its immanence. Messianity is something other than the schematizing synthesis of opposed idioms. Levinas, Hegel, and Kierkegaard were such attempts to surpass schematism, to crack it open through an excess of transcendence—and even Hegel. Nontheology is another solution, which associates transcendence and immanence unilaterally.

Ultimately, the device of the generic vessel properly speaking prepares the fusion of these variables through their conjugation or reciprocal translation and through their underdetermination. This new term only forms a third objective or autonomous instance for theology, which supposes it as an in-itself; but it is not an independent instance or a third disciplinary source. In other words, the new quantum-theoretical rationality, far from being imposed from without upon the christic experience, or introduced in a forced, formal, and transcendent way into the christic matter, like logic into philosophical matter, is rather a state of immanent fusion with the theological experience of Christ. This immanence that does not at all prohibit its heteronomy to the theological subject that it affects and transforms. The generic is human immanence as principle of the transformation of the world, and thus of theology. Generic humans do not form a third term that one could imagine on the model of a transcendental triangularity articulating experience and rationality.

The generic matrix cuts short the necessity for the schematism and for the synthesis by the transcendental imagination (Kant) that are required by the empirico-rationalist hiatus, or for subtraction as specular planification required by the khôra as Platonic hiatus. One of the effects of the quantum matrix is to avoid the traditional solution to the problem of Christ, in the form of a schematization of the Jew in the Greek and vice versa (as attempted by Levinas, when he translates Judaic nonontology into Greek), mixing inverse translations of the two idioms or two principal historical references. Specifically, schematization is the attempt to insert the Jewish God in his transcendence into the immanence of the Greek ontology of man and the world. We prefer to eliminate the various mixtures that compose the spectrum of Christianity as unstable system of beliefs and images, dogmas and representations. We do not think on the basis of these historical modalities, which are at best materials or symptoms. We could call this a non-Christianity, taking the problem on its broadest level, but neither historically nor speculatively. Christ does not belong to an act of the transcendental imagination; he expresses the radical genius of man rather than that of a philosopher. There is an endless list of these mechanisms of suture or of the reciprocal mediation of science and experience, of being and thought, a suture present in all the hiatuses of philosophical (not to mention theological) dualisms, in the theo-christic doublet and its innumerable triads or trinities charged with operating the analyses and syntheses necessary to these dualisms. Two fundamental generic concepts will be substituted for these aporias that set theology wandering in the philosophical labyrinth. They are the concepts of “mediate-without-mediation,” which formulates the constitution of Christ as generic subject, and of determination-in-the-last-instance, which describes its function in this science, a function that can be summed up as the placing of theology and christology under underdetermining condition by Christ and his generic messianity. This science—invented rather than sought, discovered rather than hidden—is thus a science of unilateral duality on theological soil, the nonmetaphysical duality of messianity and of faith acting in the world according to a new type of complementarity, without the convertibility of the One and of Being. Ultimately “Christ” is the name of a unilateral duality, of the invention as much as the discovery of a generic constant that circumscribes the field of phenomena of discursive and spiritual belief localizable in the human sciences, but localizable under condition of a faith or a fidelity without belief, which will render them, this time, nonlocalizable. That which can be characterized, rather hastily, as a nontheological theory of theology could run the risk of a vicious circle between Christ and the science he determines; but since it is unilateral, this complementarity breaks with circular reasoning. The return of Christ, his Second Coming, then takes on an entirely different, no doubt more prosaic meaning, stripped of its mystery but more rigorous—it is simply the scientific and generic transformation of theology. It is not necessary, in the work to be done here, to distinguish the matrix as a general case (its invariants and its principles) from its particular concretization or effectuation in such and such a material. The particular or rather generic case of Christ must suffice for us because it is identical to the general case or the “ground” (as generic, not as a theologico-metaphysical abstraction). The operation of the observer included in the unique state vector that is valid for Christ and for the observer-his-contemporary is a resumption or a reprise, a new superposition of the science-in-Christ as, also, a generic science.

THE GENERIC FUSION OF CHRIST AND THEOLOGY “UNDER” CHRIST

Let us recapitulate the matrix of the christic science; it is the fusion, in the person of Christ, of messianity with theology, but under messianity—their superposition. We shall explore several effects of this in the domain of religious speech and the speech of faith.

In general, we place theology under an underdetermining or determining in-the-last-instance christic condition. This all-important nuance signifies that this condition is not affected by that which it determines, unlike what theological sufficiency postulates when it claims at least to codetermine faith by applying “understanding” or “explanation” to it. It is an extension of the quantum-theoretical principle of the noncommutativity of quantities measured from an “elementary” phenomenon.

Christ is an ultimatum for theological thought, an obstacle that cannot but impose a step backward upon it in the order of causality, sending it back to an appearance, if not an objective appearance, or to an occasional cause, but while extracting its properly christic kernel. Theology in almost all its forms, and in particular the “dogma,” is the theoretical armature that holds together institutions or Churches everywhere in their communitarian sufficiency, but that cannot claim to penetrate into the essence of the messianity of faith—and this for reasons that are not themselves theological, but generic. One of our most general objectives is to no longer discuss theological positions, but to change the paradigm or style of thought (that is, of faith), no longer doing anything more than mobilizing theology as material, rather than pouring faith into its mold. We make use of theology as of a necessary aid or an occasion to speak the faith or the “knowledge” that we are without knowing it, depending on theology only in order to create the theory of this ignorance, but no more. It is necessary to substitute for the concept as “macroscopic” form of thought that disperses faith into local and/or global representations—into molar or even molecular, but always corpuscular, entities, in short into phenomena of belief—a thought that would be the lived exploration of messianity, the affect of its invisible outflowing, of its entirely straightforward rigor. It is less a question of living the interiority of individual and, in short, egological faith, of being more “pietist” or indeed more obedient, than of following its immanence as flux. Christ is formally, or through his theoretical status, an indivisible wave of the lived that is neither historical nor worldly, and that no longer accumulates in the form of a dogmatic treasury, but that has a generic universality.

Generic means first of all that the faithful lived can absolutely not be singular, nor banally “common” or representable through institutional codes, but that it is valid a minima for two individuals. But this is still a very poor formulation; the generic is not the extension, under the same principle, of an ego to an intersubjectivity. It is not even a between- or interfaith crossover, but an inclusion of the Two of belief in the immanence of faith or of the One of messianity, a faithful inclusion of my ego in a messianity. More assuredly, a faithful drive supporting itself on this Last Instance, emerging from it, and carrying itself to meet us, the world-subjects, that it traverses or suspends in a “cloud of unknowing.” The generic is the unicity of a unifacial duality, one might say, a phenomenon of out-flowing or up-turning by faith of that which is belief. Here the mystics are our masters in language and experiment. But it must be admitted, in order simply to make our project intelligible, that in quantum physics we find a thinking of radical but generic immanence from which we extract the “quantum-rational kernel” so as to test it out in other spheres. The notion of “rational kernel” should not surprise us, since it is a question of establishing christic messianity or faith as the principle of a science of religions.

THE GNOSTIC ALLIANCE OF SCIENCE AND THE LIVED

This type of intrinsic alliance of science and the lived necessitates the invention of some new fundamental concepts. (1) It is an immanent fusion—that is to say, a fusion by means of an immanence, and thus by means of a mediate-without-mediation and of immanence, of an act of superposition as mediate-without-mediation, and not a mere suture as a transcendent operation between separate and “corrected” terms by an immanence (an external or internal relation to which we oppose unilateral complementarity).

The algebraic “logic” used here is that of idempotence, of the flux in immanent excess over itself that constitutes the subject-science—what we also call the lived of messianity. We thus interpret the immanence of faith and of thought “in-Christ” on the basis of our two principles that form a quantum-oriented thought but that we could also call “gnostic.” It is not exactly that we wish to give historical gnosis the status of a logic, but we identify, if not in logic then at least in algebra, a gnostic operation, idempotence, as used in quantum physics (but irreducible to the latter). Gnosis is traditionally an unacceptable doctrine in philosophical and especially religious matters. But we shall see that gnosis here is scientific, and brings into play a lived materielity—we do not say a materialism; it thus refuses the rationalist, positivist, or dogmatic condemnations that, so as not to lack sufficiency, end up simply lacking plasticity and freedom.

We could conjoin or suture a positive hard science and the subject—for example, mathematics and the religious subject—but then there would be no possible science of religions, just a sort of vague and dogmatic confirmation of Christianity through mathematics, just as the latter already indirectly confirms philosophy. On the other hand, the insertion of the subject into the quantum principle is possible and, in truth, necessary. Quantum science makes possible or plausible a nonpositive concept of science as the alliance of scientific procedures and of a generic subjectivity that inhabits these same procedures. They do not suppress the latter, but transform it by obliging it to distribute itself across the whole space of its procedures. Quantum physics as rational body of work can then serve as a scientific model for the Christ-advent. Again the two principles invoked must be detachable from their original discipline and transposable into a subjective science, a science without dialectic and without individual ego, both of which would bring it back into the lap of the world or of philosophy.

CONTEMPORARY OF CHRIST THROUGH GENERIC SCIENCE

Since it is a question of the doublet, let us straightaway resolve in principle the problem: In what way are we contemporaries of Christ?—a problem we shall rediscover later. Contemporaries of what or whom exactly: of Christianity, of Greek philosophy, of Judaism, of their histories or their institutions? Is Christ himself their contemporary, as was Jesus? We are not the contemporaries of these ancient and modern knowledges, but too often the victims of it. The fact that Christ is not their contemporary but their salvation allows us to be his contemporary, and his alone.

The point of view of Christ-in-person as generic being and of our being-contemporary-with-him allows us to liquidate the mythological representations of Creation and Incarnation, and in general the aporias linked to the necessity of a schematization of the theo-christo-logical doublet. We insist that here we find distinct problems with their own solutions. We must not confuse the variety of expressions and conditions of existence of the problems with their general form and their invariants, even if philosophy is accustomed to do so, precisely according to the redundant logic of the doublet. The problem of the man-God relation must be settled otherwise than through religions and the vagueness of the theological terms of Creation, the philosophical terms of Schematization, and sometimes the physical terms of Incarnation. These are often borrowed clothes: theology is a garment that is too vast, too transcendent for the generic Christ. His being-contemporary with himself and henceforth with us too, or his being-superposed with himself, and therefore with us too, is the sole measure of our common and future incarnation. We are contemporary through his messianity, not through a supposedly common historical past or present.

THE QUANTUM OF FAITH AND THE OCCIDENTAL-ORIENTATION OF THE SCIENCE-IN-CHRIST

The “Christ” event is in each of us, we harassed believers of the world. So the generic fusion of science and subject is involved in a messianic undergoing. Each of the faithful in-the-last-instance is under-going in suspense the weak ultimatum that can be opposed to History, the Good News that is practiced prior-to-priority of every ecclesial and dogmatic elaboration, and that underdetermines them. Christ is not the founder of a religious tradition except insofar as he himself is, prior-to-priority, the name of a lived science made of oraxioms that will come to invest this Greco-Judaic tradition and transform it into an occasional material.

We no longer confuse faith with a belief instrumentalized by the Churches. Belief is representation or its equivalent in religion; it is ecclesio-molar or sectarian-molecular. So the confusion of faith with belief is of the same type as the confusion of invisible vectoriell immanence with the corpuscular object. From the point of view of philosophy, faith, with neither a macroscopic object nor a subject, is perceived as an apparent abstraction of belief. But belief is ultimately what destroys faith in its superpositional essence, and the Messiah himself.

The generic messiah is not a telos of the All of world-history, but a force for its transformation. He functions like an algebraic-style idempotent addition. Messianity introduces a perspective that is a wave rather than a corpuscular perspective; but it is very much a question of tying together, independent of the combination of a Far Eastern–style quantum thinking, the alliance of a Christian-Western quantum science that is equally opposed to a philosophical marginality that is a corpuscular falsification of the messianic and that must be overthrown and displaced. It is the means to establish not a quantum Christianity but a “non-Christian” quantum science, we could say, limited to theology’s Western horizon, quite unlike its Far Eastern absolute and unlimited “wisdom.” We do not confuse philosophy, which is certainly an infinite form, but one delimited in itself and upon which a science can therefore be grafted, with that vaguely outlined wisdom, with margins and lines of flight, too close to a doxa. Philosophy and the theology that crowns it—and this is what distinguishes them from this wisdom—are the form of the world, which itself can be treated as an object of science; this is precisely the first act of limitation and determination demanded by a non-Christian science.

Physicists have already “tied together” quantum science and the Tao as human wisdom, but without operating a “quantum science of the Tao,” which would be our true scientific project, rather than a “Tao of quantum physics.” So it also cannot be a question of a Western and Christian repetition of the Tao of physics as if through the superposition, practiced since Schrödinger, of the wisdom of a Far Eastern religion like the Tao and quantum physics, a superposition under the tutelage of the “All.” Our attempt may have a similar allure, but two enormous differences distinguish it. On the one hand, the observed phenomenon is the Christ-event, and not some already-constituted religious wisdom. The discourse with which quantum science is superposed or to which it is added is Western theological discourse, a religious philosophy whose outlines are relatively well defined. The difference is between a radical determinate science of the All (even when it recognizes its imaginary unlimitedness) and an absolute thought of the All, the philosophical, which works in the All as its intraterritorial element—that is to say, nowhere—and thus repeats its initial presupposition. The quantum of faith or Christ-quantum is the necessary condition for delimiting these religious discourses and showing their limits, or those of Judeo-Greek theology. And on the other hand (a second difference), we manipulate the superposition and the state vector as a function of a certain philosophical precision. This is a necessary prudence if we wish to distinguish firmly between the philosophical and the generic. We call quantum of faith the Christ-event, the inevitable minimum of new faith, the minimal definition of thought-as-faith that no longer relates as belief, sentiment, or concept to an external object or event. It is the constant that science must observe in its examination of humans as a faithful condemned to belief and bound by the world.

WHAT IS A GENERIC SCIENCE?

The sayings of Christ express a stance that, from an external point of view—to the categories of historians and exegetes, for example—seems interpretable alternately upon the basis of either Greek or Judaic notions. But it is the whole of this oscillation that must be taken as a nonseparable albeit unthinkable whole, as an indivisible wave of speech whose secret we perpetually seek. It testifies to a stance that is unilaterally indifferent to the objects that his sayings bring into play yet that, on the other hand, are the corpuscular obsession of belief. His force, which certain mystics have experienced as a sort of experiment, consists in fusing a practical rigor of thought with a faithful or messianic lived.

What is important in the sayings of Christ, and what is irreducible to the letter of the logia of Jesus and to the positive criteria that allow us to collect and compare them, is their at once immanent and messianic emission, which is no longer that of a prophet relaying a divine word, but the vectoriell and physical body of this word that brings with it the seal or the mark of its authenticity. Messianity is the index that distinguishes faith from belief, at the same time rendering them nonseparable in a different way each time. It is an immanent indexation of the logia as variables to the “logic” of their superposition; it puts an end to the transcendent age of the Jewish prophets by heralding the age of the faithful, beyond that of the Apostles.

It is through the vectoriell reduction of these variables taken from Jesus’s logia that our stance can be called generic, distanced from any theological position. We define the generic through a certain type of conjugation of science and of the lived of belief, a superposition that creates another state called faith or fidelity. This new state, a state of affect as much as of thought, is not a third state alongside the two others—as if one could count them and, for example, imagine a minor form of the triad that can be seen to grow macroscopically, like a Trinity. The age of fidelity makes it impossible to enumerate divine persons or to theologically calculate salvation. Not only theologians but even God finds it impossible to plan out a plan of salvation.

The generic stance is the stance of humans no longer believing but finally knowing their faith or their nonreligious messianity. The genius of Christ, if not of Christianity, is to have revealed the generic essence of sciences that can only claim to be “human” but that do not engage the lived in a radically immanent manner, in their stance and not only in their object. The lived has nothing egological about it, it is part of the protocols that prepare the science-in-Christ, it paves the way for the procedure of idempotence that, for its part, neutralizes it generically or suspends its philosophical characteristics. There is a lived that is neither an All like life nor a singularity like the living creature, but that adheres to a scientific procedure of idempotence—it is generic faith. The theoretical novelty lies in this generic quantum-type fusion of science and the lived that is the sign of the discovery not of a new soil, terrain, or foundation, but of a stance of-last-instance. To say it more simply, it is a new practice of fidelity as “in-the-last-instance.” And the discovery is that there is not a subject of science, in the modern manner, whether that of Descartes or of Lacan, as if science were already the predicate of a preexisting subject that would be Christ, nor even a post-Lacanian subject transited by the materialist void, but only a science “for” the subject (science «à» sujet) or a subjective science, where it is Christ who is, to say it too quickly, the predicate of this “subject”—all terms that we doubt can be transformed, their logic becoming immanent. In particular, strictly speaking, we must admit, if science is to combat the fetishism of belief, that “Christ” as Son of Man is the name that each time supports a variable in the generic matrix of science. That is to say that the new alliance can be conceived neither in the Greek manner as a heroic alliance of man and Logos in the form of philosophy nor in the Judaic manner as the exceptional alliance of God and his people, but only as generic, as an alliance of science and belief conjugated under science, that is to say, as faith or fidelity. Ultimately, if philosophy takes into care beings as a whole, God included, the generic takes its whole being, God and man included, as a function of man, but this time as generic.

THE SCIENCE OF RELIGIONS AS THE DEPOTENTIALIZATION OR DEBASING OF BELIEFS

We know that quantum physics, being a mathematical “formalism” capable of predicting indeterminate events, is inseparable from another whole theory of its interpretation in terms of reality (realist, idealist, pragmatic, and so on). From our point of view it is less “positive” than classical mathematics and physics, for it already implies a subject—only a physical subject, certainly—as observer, though one who prepares it to be a science not only of particles as natural phenomena but also of the entities of classical physics that it proposes to “cognize.” Just as we treat the Christ-event as that of a science of religions, but are obliged to begin from these religions as symptoms, since the religious subject is this time included in principle in the objective apparatus, as if the operation of measurement were an integral part of the objects of this science. Whence a hermeneutic appearance of the “reading” and “interpretation” of the meaning of religions that will force us to enter into our science and to disrupt its axiomatic. Given the inclusion of the observer subject, a generic science is submitted to the constraints of a nonpositive objectivity yet more difficult than that of quantum physics. Anyhow, a science of religions cannot help but also be a critique of the illusions of the theological, not only of the religious. Yet it submits the critique of appearances of the object to their knowledge: this is not the all-critique or criticism; it makes of the knowledge obtained a transformation of its object, something that was already obviously the case for Marxism. We fight against religions with the weapon of atheism as an external accomplice. Atheism and materialism are rather trivial philosophical positions without any great importance: they form an integral part of religious wars or wars “for” religion.

Neither do we have the right to an all-interpretation in regard to Christ. This is the abusive right claimed by theologians and philosophers, who certainly fix certain limits to their arbitrary will, but only within their “principles” or within the limits of their “axioms.” Another right to interpretation is demanded and governed by the materiel formalism of faith, between the generic apparatus with its axioms and the chosen religious material, which is not without a reverberation in the axioms of this formalization of Christ. The believing subject of diverse religious or confessional extraction cannot but make his own accent heard, despite his becoming-generic. In this tract will be heard, for example, many reformed or still gnostic nuances—for some readers, Judaic nuances; above all, the accent is placed on the struggle against institutional forms of religion. But the Christ-science remains a weapon for the weakening of the harassment of all religions, all deadly to various degrees.