THE CHRISTIC MATRIX AND ITS COMPOSITION
We shall call “christic matrix” the quantum-and-generic device that represents in vector form the possible “states” of Christ (called “Christ-in-person” to distinguish him from Jesus) and determines him in terms of a new economy of salvation, delivered from the theo-christo-logical doublet, emancipating in subjects messianity and faith. This matrix is a theoretical apparatus that goes beyond the persona of Jesus and his history, and functions as a theoretical, experimental, and lived vessel. It contains different elements represented vectorielly, among the best known of which are: (1) Materials: the data of his words and acts, with their accents of the Greek and Judaic, which are the two variables of his message. Theology and history are limited to organizing in various ways, but always within the theo-christo-logical horizon, these Greco-Judaic relations to which Jesus is reduced and to which they wish to reduce Christ. (2) The operations of conjugation, multiplication, and addition, carried out upon these variables, and that are necessary from the moment when Christ appears as a vessel or a unit of vectoriell procedures, relatively resolved or complete, but not closed or foreclosed. (3) Finally, and principally, going by the name of Messiah-factor, a special factor of underdetermination for the products of these variables, or in any case an index to which to relate them. This is a productive force of fiction or of a controlled imaginary, a force of rigorous insurrection in theology, at least once the latter is understood in its proper theoretical complexity as philosophy. This factor has certain affinities with (for example) the Real as “impossible” (Lacan) but it does not surround the signifier or the symbolic; instead, it is the symbolic that would surround it, as its margin of language or of world. The messianic-factor is the impossible for theological sufficiency (PST), but an impossible that, even so, algebra allows us ultimately to make possible, while also rendering it capable of transforming theo-christo-logical representation. The matrix uses means taken from quantum theory and from theology, but it is not a simple exporting or transfer of algebraic technique or of theological conceptuality. Certainly what is specific about it, and what will distinguish it from old uses of the concept, are this algebra and this geometry of the imaginary that it borrows from quantum physics along with its most general broad principles: superposition, noncommutativity, indetermination, and wave/particle complementarity. It is obviously not a question of a theology of quantum physics, still less a Far Eastern one. At most one could say that the complex imaginary number or, geometrically speaking, the quarter-turn find a functional equivalent in the messianic function, and that, inversely, the force of Christ’s insurrection in history and philosophy can be intuitively figured by the algebraic impossible.
As to the functioning of the matrix, the messianic-factor is in general the factor of underdetermination. Its generic aspect is that of its orientation toward humans, the function of the matrix being to produce faithful cognizance—that is to say, to produce faith that is a rigorous (which does not mean exact or determinate) cognizance of messianity. If we wish to think messianity a little more rigorously as the christic function for we who are contemporaries of our humanity and, in order to do so, substitute a contemporary science for the old purely conceptual and hyperspeculative theological science, there is hardly any other solution than this recourse to a quantum modelization of theology. It will be objected that faith cannot be modelized by physics, but only by a more “spiritual” transcendent discipline. However, physics reduces faith into the immanence of the human lived, whereas theology dissolves it into phantasms and beliefs that develop in every lived milieu as infinite and limitless.
AGAINST THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT THEOLOGY
The task is now to conceive this materiel (that is to say, lived) machine, capable of underdetermining or of determining in-the-last-instance theo-christo-logical difference, to place it under a complex condition that associates the quantum-theoretical model of thought with theology itself, without negating them, denying only their respective sufficiency in the name of man, whose content, in messianity and fidelity, was revealed by Christ.
To bring down the Principle of Sufficient Theology, it is no longer the theology of the Logos that must double itself, but quantum science itself, reduced to its generic usage. Faith has always been understood as a combination of Greek reason or science and christic experience: a belief. But this combination, generally speaking, must be generic and human-oriented. It must be determined at once which ultimate variables are necessary, and under what matrixial form. These latter components, as we have said, are the Jew and the Greek, but for us they are only variables within a matrix that is more important than them, and that conjugates them, the expected result being a faith that is no longer a mélange like belief, but the cognizance of Christ. These two components have always been recognized, but only as they have been mixed at the random behest of history and of theological variations, or in any case under the controlling domination of the Logos. Radicality obliges us to decompose the Logos itself into two aspects, science and philosophy. And to introduce quantum science as yet another term between the Jew and the Greek, which are themselves the ultimate components of theology as science. For this theoretical mass traditionally claimed as “science,” we substitute in theology its ultimate variables, in science a new concept (quantum thought), and in the general structure of combination another more generic type of conjugation.
Four changes must therefore be introduced into theological science to meet the criteria of nontheology. Given that philosophy is already a mixture of science and logos, and that it repeats or returns, in fact the generic matrix is analyzed not into three functions but into three or four. At this level of generality, it is a matter of very general categories or symbols. It goes without saying that neither Jewish thinkers nor philosophers, each attached to their particularity, would recognize their object, concern, or passion here, and would refuse this level of formalization. But it is important to grasp that the matrix puts into play minimal variables drawn from “Philosophy” and “Science” that must be purified of their (for example) theological mixity, through which they already mutually interpret each other or anticipate each other reflexively, leading straight into a vicious circle.
1. New variables to conjugate, the most fundamental ones given our object: Christ as “system” capable of passing through several states. On the one hand, Judaism as radical transcendence or Torah, the most hyperbolic type of which is given symbolically by Levinas. And then the Greek variable of the Logos, whose most hyperbolic type is given symbolically by a series of philosophers—Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel—who combine immanence and transcendence according to various relations, but in reality double transcendence in immanence, or submit immanence to transcendence. In its origins, the Logos is in fact a mixture and not a pure variable; it is already a mixture of (at first premature or anticipated, then Galilean and Newtonian) science and the philosophical decision necessary to theology; it is the rationality proper to classical theological science. But here as in theology the Logos is decomposed into an aspect of dominant philosophy as variable, and an aspect of subordinated science, which represents one of the only possible scientific models possible in this globally Greek context.
2. As to the science (rather than philosophy) side of things, it is hidden, qua telos or quest, in the Logos, and must be extracted from it, replaced by X, and inserted as such into the generic matrix as a variable. This function of a scientific model = X is fulfilled by a new, physico-quantum model, replacing Greek rationality, which was under massive philosophical dominance (and doubtless for this reason fascinated by its double, if not its doublet—in Plato, mathematics). Whereas the new model allows for a radical critique of the macroscopic essence of the concept and of philosophy.
3. Another type of combination is necessary, matrixial, and generic rather than dialectical and philosophical. The variables could have been combined by a classical science and its rationality. Now, in theology as in classical science, science is required twice over, as we have just seen in the mixture of the Logos as already-mixed science and philosophy. The doubling of science takes place under the impulsion of and controlled by philosophy, but
the generic matrix demands that we take this doubling itself outside of philosophy and conceive of it as scientific. Therefore it demands that we find a form of doubling that is proper to a science: this will be the idempotent reprise proper to quantum superposition, as opposed to a philosophical mode of repetition. Vectoriell superposition is the weakest “repetition,” the most “sterile” in a sense, as opposed to the profligacy of theological concepts; it is immanent and is invested in the conceptual-religious or in philosophical transcendence, which is itself doubled, is sufficiency. This simplification of science conserves it as an act of superposition affecting the variables, and delivers it from philosophical repetition, which doubles through transcendence. The genius of superposition consists in its simulating repetition without any recourse to the specular doublet; its principle is idempotence, which is neither identity nor difference nor their combination. And in the same gesture, we have acquired the response to the unknown X—it is quantum mechanics—and its double intervention as conjugation of variables and their superposition.
This device allows for an understanding of the possibility of a generic or faithful cognizance of Christ, the latter being what there is of the real in that cognizance that is faith. We have said that under the name of Christ it is a question at once but in-the-last-instance of faith as a real object, and of the cognizance (itself faithful) of that faith, or of the faith-in-person of the new faithful. The generic lived or the “Christ” whose cognizance we seek under the name of faith is itself a “function” of two variables: idempotence as the objectivity required by quantum thought, and the philosophical subject as occasional variable, this time across its entire generic form. The double intervention of quantum thought signifies that the Christ-subject is a function of a double variable, but that the “bound” variable is itself a function of the free variable (which is theological, philosophical, or “religious”) and at the same time identical to the function itself. In other words, quantum thought is twice in the state of a variable, which is the work of superposition.
The general properties of vectors are addition and multiplication. Their linear addition or “superposition” is fundamental for us: it is their capacity to yield, through simple addition of the two that they are, a new vector or a new unique wave phenomenon. Meanwhile, the amplitudes may be multiplied by any number whatsoever. Ultimately, since theological vectors will here be not simply positive-quantum but also generic or said of the human Real, we modify the terminology of our categories: we speak of the “vectoriell” and of “vectoriellity” rather than of the geometric vectorial. So the new category used to describe nontheology, the name of Christ, and its properties such as messianity and faith will be that of vectoriellity.
UNILATERALITY AND MESSIANITY
In a certain way, unilateral complementarity is what, in theology, replaces the “union of two natures”—at least, one will be tempted to interpret it thus. But once this (rather philosophically trivial) generality is admitted, everything changes. The duality of the “two natures” is but an arithmetical duality relating to ontology and the transcendental. What traverses and unifies these two natures, whatever they may otherwise be, is a lived immanence whose vector traverses itself as if through a “tunneling” effect, and which, for this reason, we may call radical.
Traversing itself in this way without taking on any defined trajectory in philosophical space, it thus also traverses everything that believes or could believe itself able to exceed it, and that is at first of another nature—the macroscopic transcendence of theology. Messianic immanence is not a point or a circle internal to itself, but a radical superposition that makes an immanent tunnel, traverses transcendences thrown in its path, going beyond them without skirting around them as Being skirts around beings, as its horizon passes behind and not simply through the thing.
There are forms of unilaterality in all philosophies, but they are ultimately condemned to reversibility. We need a quantum and generic context in order to escape this. When transcendence is double, it exceeds itself as one exceeds a thing rather than traversing it. This excess of and in belief therefore believes itself able to exceed the wave of immanence; but this wave is “unsurpassable” or unlocalizable, as is the immanence of every site. The theoretical appearance of theology is to think this duality on the basis of each of its terms supposedly isolated from the other, as in-itselfs—that is to say, in corpuscular manner. In reality the “syntax” of unilaterality is neither synthetic nor analytic, because the “two” instances at issue are nonseparable on the side of “holistic” immanence but separable or local on the unilateral side of the transcendence of the world. Messianity is a flux that ceaselessly penetrates the world that tries to dam it up but that it swathes, as the night sky swathes its stars.
The messianic vector, in a sense, does not “surpass” according to the universal model of transcendence operative in all nineteenth-century philosophies, a model it does not share. With the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, we shall see that the immanent wave of messianity ascends or “insurrects,” but without transcending toward a being. Messianity is a vectoriellity with only one face. Phenomenologists would say that transcendence is “in” immanence, but in reality it is radical immanence that configures under vectoriell condition, or vectoriellizes, the received transcendence of the world. Christ’s Ascension contains one possible reduction of phenomenology in its Greco-Judaic version, and partially in its “material” version (Michel Henry’s transcendental philosophy of Life and incarnation). Messianity does not transcend ontologically toward God, except in theological belief.
The categories that issue from rationalism must therefore be subjected to a quantum deconstruction. To resume immanence rather than to acquire it a priori, an addition (not arithmetic but algebraic) is necessary. This addition of immanence to itself acts as a nonarithmetical subtraction of transcendence from its own doublet, which ends up adjoined to immanence. Such a retroactive transfer or seesaw movement between the “two natures,” which however do not communicate and exchange nothing, is only possible because immanence unifies itself tunnel-wise with that which is adjoined as coming from the world.
Continuity and nonseparability, locality and separability, make up unilateral complementarity. It will be said that this is to presuppose the problem resolved in the very positing of its conditions. But theology also supposes the problem resolved, in an entirely other manner that in reality makes this “solution” impossible and makes a vicious circle of it: it gives itself the conclusion in the premises, or gives the premises in the anticipated form of the conclusion to be obtained, and can neither generate it nor do the necessary work, since it contemplates the conclusion as solution. Strictly speaking, then, what is exchanged in the classical question of the “two natures” is unilaterality itself, or the generic constant that passes from man to the world, now investing the latter as water invests sand “from within” and comes to the surface. But nothing is exchanged in the interior of unilaterality, since the duality of the “two natures” is not an arithmetical transcendental duality or a modified ontological duality. Unilaterality is in no way a transcendental, still less a psychological, interiority.
“CHRIST” AS QUANTUM VECTORIELLITY
In accordance with our problematic, which may appear scandalous (not religiously but theoretically), we cannot take into account extreme protestations, whether Christian or materialist, and we will admit that “Christ” is the name of a lived wave that is materiel (not exactly material) and/or of an indivisible particle, message, or kerygma that has the force of the “imaginary” irruption of a “complex” entity whose indivisibility renders it philosophically unanalyzable, theologically indecipherable. To say that Christ is the name of a particle borne by a vector is not to make Christ a brute material force—on the contrary, insofar as, qua particle, Christ is also and right away a flux of messianity that guides or configures the particular character of its message. The christic science is far from being a sort of transcendental or dialectical synthesis that brings together conceptual contraries; it is a transformation of the latter through quantum means, means that anticipate their fusion or their superposition.
What we call the “state” of a concept, for example, a theological concept, is a set of general and particular properties. General: a concept is a system that possesses a linguistic being or entity, and the function of transmitting or communicating a signification. Particulars: the position in the space of philosophical relations and its becoming, thus a variable positional and relational being presenting, in this case, Greek and Judaic traits in various mixtures. These simple determinations are valid for classical theological entities, whose space is defined by the coordinates of God and Christ traced from the philosophical, give or take a few variations or reorganizations. But the “state” of a concept, in the complete and quantum sense, inhabits a space that is distinct from that of classical theological representation. It is a space of vectoriell (rather than simply geometrical or vectorial) configuration, because the state is endowed with a factor that changes its nature and abstracts it from theological representation. We understand Christ, in a broad sense, as message or kerygma, but in the narrowest sense as the factor that introduces into the matrix the “imaginary” or “complex” dimension of fiction. To schematize Christ intuitively without returning to the spiritual, transcendental, or theological schematism, we represent him geometrically as the “quarter-turn” of the circle algebraically denoted √−1. A schematization that we shall, of course, discover once again in relation to the Cross and the Resurrection. The state of a concept, this set of its properties, is representable through a vector in what is called “Hilbert space,” a vector that characterizes the amplitude of a wave or an interferent phenomenon (the lived of messianity)—not a corpuscular phenomena, which has a position and relations to other corpuscles but no amplitude. The force of excess of such an imaginary factor, “Christ,” will henceforth accompany all of our statements of a theological nature. The sense of the apparently clear fabric of signifiers and signifieds is taken up and transformed by this imaginary factor, which renders possible their wave function or vector form. Christ is the negative quarter-turn subtracted from the theological circle that, however, he generates. In other words, Christ could be written One-in-One, on condition that this is schematized by √−1. As for the evangelical sayings of Christ in the “expanded” sense of kerygma, they are what we call oraxioms, wave functions of a message made of particles animated by a vectoriell force that relates the message to a “nontheological” space; they have no meaning in the typically accepted linguistic space in which we receive them as popular language, or indeed as “concepts.”
THE STATE VECTOR OF CHRIST AND ITS CONSTITUTION
Christ is the name of a particle of message or of a kerygma with no determinate trajectory (except in a presupposed determinist context), whose messianity is consequently a wave function or a state vector, containing the probability amplitude of the message being received. Let us make this formula more explicit.
Messianity acts by way of the most apparent messages of Christ that are the variables of signifier and signified, of meaning, in general; it is the state of Christ as system, the set of linguistic and theological determinations of the message. Except for a classical theological understanding that confuses cognizance with the conditions of cognizance or the object of cognizance with the real object, these conditions do not at all suffice (contrary to what is supposed by theologically sufficient belief) to give the “probability” amplitude that this message will pass through, will really arrive with humans, or that messianity will be transmissible in the form of faith.
As well as these general determinations of all discourse, we must suppose that this message is not empirico-linguistic, that it is endowed with a vectoriell (and no longer vectorial) dimension, an algebraic dimension of the “imaginary” factor that is precisely the christic factor as radically nontheological. This imaginary dimension, as we have said, can be schematized by a quarter-circle; the latter is the “negative” genetic or messianic element (algebraically denoted √−1) of the total circle formed by Christian theo-christo-logic.
One is tempted to say, following the metaphysical and classical model of the excess of transcendence as discussed by Levinas and the philosophers, that the “imaginary” or messianic Christ “pierces” the conceptual and representative closure of his message. But this is not the case: Christ is not essentially a piercing, which would suppose him to be conditioned after all by the existence of conditions of closure. The christo-algebraic condition is completed, certainly, as a new, abbreviated form of transcendence. But its positive operation is that of a simple ascending, an ascending without redoubling, an insurrection that is unifacial, endowed with a face in which it does not reflect or mirror itself. Instead, the insurrection “abases” the pride of theology and ecclesio-centrism as instituting signifiers and guardians of faith. This dimension only makes sense, only has a site, in a nonecstatic vectoriell space—this is not a thematic or semantic difference but a difference in the
reality condition of the christic message qua incomprehensible to the disciples who follow it blindly before having the revelation of its meaning, or more exactly of its reality, at the moment of the Resurrection, and then, in the Pentecost, of the probability of its effective presence or messianity. This dimension is necessarily the dimension of an excess, since it has taken hold over ecclesio-centrism, but of an excess that is weak and consequently all the more incomprehensible or scandalous. It is the specific, nonpsychological imaginary of messianity, which is fulfilled in an operation of the superposition of acts of faith as so many vectors added linearly. The simple and messianic ascending of vectoriell superposition that, as a repercussion, brings down the excess of the double transcendence of belief and reduces it to faith as noematic immanent object. The vectorial or geometrical conditions pass into a vectoriell or generic state with the superposition of algebraic or christic “imaginary” conditions and of the human lived. The vectoriell marks not the death of God but the end of the PST, as its geometrico-philosophical double transcendence is “abased” in the christic experiment. As for the experience of the Cross, it is perhaps not without its effects upon the
usage of mathematics.
This state of the “Christ” system constituted by the fundamental variables of the message, augmented with a vectoriell dimension, contains all possible information on the Christ-system. Every phrase or utterance of the message must be treated as a wave function, an assemblage of variables, and a complex dimension that makes of faith the amplitude of messianity, the amplitude of knowledge flush with language, in no way imaginary in the psychological sense. This amplitude of messianity contains the essential of what we can know here in this experience of Christ.
FROM MESSIANITY TO FAITH
If the insurrection of Christ as “resurrected” deconstructs belief in its duplicity or doublet of theo-christo-logical representation, a clarification of the great subjective categories linked to vectoriellity has become necessary. In the christic matrix that treats of the states of the Christ-system, materielity is constituted of two principal variables or properties, one of scientific origin, the other of philosophical or macrotheological origin. But one of them, as we have seen, must also serve as a calibrating index for the products of these variables. Whence, for each category, two opposed orientations. We shall distinguish four categories of vectoriellity: messianity, faith, fidelity, and belief.
Messianity is first of all the set of data or variables that form the Christ-system, which as we know contains superposed states. But the Christ-system was prepared in view of the experiment of faith. Reduced to the Christ-system, messianity is the condition of its cognizance as faith in the subject, but is not yet that cognizance as cognizance of messianity or result of the process of cognizance; messianity is only the probability amplitude of faith. In a more complete sense, messianity, which replaces a “divine plan of salvation,” is the prior-to-first grace that underdetermines the becoming of this system, including the individual subject, which latter is called faithful or unfaithful depending on the reception of faith, and which assures (or not) the reprise of messianity.
As fusion or interference of objectivity or algebraic “productivity” and the human lived, it constitutes the materiel substance of messianity, but a materiel that has already (retroactively) been the object of a reprise at the moment, one time each time, of the adjunction of a new phenomenon to integrate as vector into messianity, and that will resume it. This reprise is the christic praxis properly so called, or the praxis of the last instance. It is irreducible to the acts listed by the Gospels and collected as the “life of Jesus,” which are only the means and the occasions that messianity makes use of. Radical immanence via superposition of messianity with itself makes of the latter the Last Instance or the Christ-ultimatum required for action; its origin or immobile motor is the vectoriell quarter opening that alone permits the constitution of a vector of messianity, and subsequently of a noematic faith oriented toward the world as transcendence. Generic messianity in a sense has no object, or has the faithful subject as its primary object.
Two opposite orientations of the reprise are possible. One of them is made under the determining, or rather overdetermining, condition of the lived in its philosophical and thus transcendent provenance (spiritual, or even mystical, affects). It is a religious reprise that produces belief, and diverts messianity from its destination by wanting to impose a destination upon it, encysting it in the form of a Church or a transcendent ecclesiological body. The other resumes materielity, this time under determining, or rather underdetermining, algebraic condition; it is the reprise that we have called “gnostic” in a sense widened beyond its historical contours.
We distinguish the generic messianity that we posit as a set of conditions preparatory to the experience of faith and faith as “individual” experience determined in-the-last-instance by messianity. Faith is the individual assumption of generic messianity; it is the correlate, or rather the effect, as the reflection of messianity, and takes individuals as its supports without being conflated with them. Like messianity, faith defines the real object whose cognizance we seek; but it is not itself this object. The essence of faith is also the immanence of an ascending or of a radical but not absolute insurrection. The person of Christ named “Jesus” must also be treated as one of the faithful equal to the others, for we know that he was far from being exempt from all weakness in the assumption of his mission. As individual subject of the Christ-message, Jesus himself is also indexed to the Christ-factor.
Faith, on the other hand, is the probability of the presence of messianity in the individual subject, or cognizance of messianity. Faith is the form, the frequency, and the intensity with which messianity will get through to the individual subject, who is a macroscopic subject. This subject, the future faithful or unfaithful, is included in the unique vector that “resumes” the Christ-system + the faithful. As probability of the presence to individuals of messianity, faith is obtained by multiplying by itself the resultant of vectors; thus the purest or most radical faith is obtained by multiplying the vector of Christ by itself—it is Christ to the second power, and thus the sum of messianic reprises.
Faith, as knowledge of messianity, is not an individual ego, but the restriction of generic messianity to its reception by individuals. Despite the close relations they maintain, we shall not conflate faith as particle of messianity and the individual who is the form of the matter of the world and who is transited by this particle of faith. The individual assumes this particle, is seized by it, and thus becomes (or does not) a Christ or one of the faithful. The individual is a being of the macroscopic world, he is seized by messianity and becomes one of the faithful rather than a believer or, on the contrary, turns faith against fidelity in favor of belief. The individual who receives or captures messianity becomes a noema or a clone of the old individual as believer in the world, a clone under-Christ or in-Christ who strips man of the old belief.
In relation to belief, faith proceeds through a reprise of superposition, and this reprise is not a reflection, it is a new immanent ascending, a vector that subtracts itself from theological representation. Messianity, and thus faith, is positive, and possesses its own actuality as immanent praxis in relation to belief. As for belief, it is ecstatically collapsed into the world. The death of Christ perhaps signifies the sacrifice of all worldly knowledge; to “believe in him” is to be faithful in-immanence to his abased transcendence. Faith, under the effect of superposed messianity, is always a subtraction of macroscopic belief from itself. It has an object and also manifests religion as faith in a trompe l’oeil, wherein the objective appearance of faith is grasped spontaneously and doubled onto itself. To think faith rigorously, first with rational and algebraic instruments, and then to transform them through a generic or radical becoming—these are the two stages necessary for the immanent opening of messianity to give onto the noema of faith that replaces the old individual ego. The deindividualized ego, traversed by messianity, is the faithful-existing-subject.
FAITH, THE INDETERMINATE KNOWLEDGE OF MESSIANITY
Is it a question of a quantum-theoretical secularization of faith, after so many other secularizations? But many secularizations are merely critical and ultimately materialist reductions that consist in a refusal, without the least recognition of theo-christo-logy and its own type of positivity. The quantum-theoretical and generic reduction of faith must be capable of generating at least ideally the orthodox or Christian forms of faith and its institutionalization in the Church. This is why our enterprise ends not with the experience of a pure and simple negation of Christianity, that is to say, of belief, but with an objective uncertainty of faith that we oppose to belief, our material, an experience oscillating between the demand for fidelity and the indeterminacy of faith at least as cognizance of messianity or of grace.
Messianity, even if it ultimately conditions it, cannot be its own cognizance qua divine “plan of salvation” (with its conflicts between freedom and divine prescience), as the theo-christo-logical circle necessarily must conclude. The distinction is, more generally, that which is implied by an experimental process of knowledge in which the real object to be known and the object of knowledge produced at the end of the process cannot be philosophically confused with each other. The phenomenal or real content of faith can be none other than Christ as messianity. Faith is the reprise of messianity, and it also divides itself in two directions—either it is diverted from itself as belief and closes itself up in objects, acts, or speech that it intends in the world that is, in any case, the noematic content of faith, or it only intends them indirectly, as does the generic subject that it is in-the-last-instance.
If the knowledge of messianity remains indeterminate or is not firmly assured of itself or of being “faithful,” it hesitates objectively between faith and belief, which are the ultimate opposed becomings of faith and cognizance. The Superposition realized by the Ascension and the Resurrection, which are a reprise of messianity, permits a dissociation of belief and faith, even if belief is a faith diverted from itself, perverted by theological transcendence. By which we understand that the disaster that is the Church, attached to the conservation of faith as the belief that it holds together with an armature of dogmas. Faith is given us by messianity, but this gift is the greatest of risks—that of the reception that does not understand, or that reduces itself to its worldly conditions of existence. For the faithful or the “newly converted,” the danger is that of not understanding one’s own faith or absence of faith, about which one can interrogate oneself, and the conditions under which it is given or indeed refused, of interpreting it as completely determined and assured, whether present or absent: ultimately, the danger of not knowing that, as faithful, one is implicated in messianity, rather than being its believing observer or its theologian. The Church is the subject of antigrace, the grasping reception of a gift that it persists in wanting to deserve. Such is the self-justification of the works that have diverted faith from its immanent work. Faith as fidelity admits this ultimate uncertainty, and as far as possible avoids reifying it in dogmas of belief or of atheism. Owing to its status and the conditions of its production, faith as cognizance oscillates between aleatory or theoretical probability and the worldly contingency of miracles. If messianity is vectoriellity, faith is the probability of the presence of the messianic message realizing itself and being received by individual subjects. From the point of view of theology, and still, in part, that of faith, messianity remains vague, detained, like the undecidable essence of Christ, between the pure immanent phenomenon of faith and the corpuscular object of belief—it remains ambiguous. In particular, christology claims to discern the predicates of Christ or to know messianity, but in doing so obtains only that which corresponds to the instrument of reception. One cannot define or interpret messianity in Greek or Jewish terms, before having reprised or lived it; to treat it as received or present in the world is to extract it or withdraw its entire essence and replace it with the transcendent religious form that is belief. One cannot at the same time identify the sources of Christianity and think messianity or Christ correctly according to the practical ignorance of its essence and its becoming. The Christian-Religious type, the man of belief, claims, with a certainty peppered with a grain of salt of doubt, that he has or does not have faith. But to “have it”
in all uncertainty, one of the faithful must have “rechristened” his life, operated a reprise of immanence that makes him generic human or Christ. There are qualitatively different uncertainties: the uncertainty that comes from the lived essence of faith, of messianity, and that hesitates in uncertainty rather than in ignorance of itself; and that of the theological-historical knowledge of Christ, of the belief that
believes it must be in a position to solve all problems. Believer? No. Faithful? Yes, but fidelity does not assure us definitively that our faith will never again be a belief.
THE UNILATERAL DUALITIES OF VECTORIELLITY
The christic stance defined as vectoriell and generic testifies to a curious, complex, syntactically nonphilosophical duality, one that we might call “unilateral.”
1.
The components, idempotence and the lived, neither foundation nor subject, of vectoriellity. On the one hand an objectivity of a type unknown in philosophy, a strictly algebraic idempotence; and on the other hand, fused with it, a lived that is inseparable from it, their hylomorphic combination constituting the substance of those vectors that might be called either messianity or faith, depending on the level of analysis—in any case, a generic property of humans not as religious beings but as beings who know their faith as nonreligious messianity. Thus a scientific rule and nothing else; not a metaphysical foundation or a first cause, but a scientific principle of “transfinite” continuity, the idempotence of algebraic origin. And a lived neutralized by its fusion with the scientific procedure—not a subject, but a lived that
could be said according to the domain of objects, either faithful or of faith, if not of belief, if it is a matter of a science of religions, or an amorous lived if it is a matter of a science of eros, or a creative or artistic vector if it is a science of art and aesthetics, or an vector of action or an act if it is a matter of a science of power. There is, for example, a quantum of faith-without-belief or a quantum of acting-without-action, a neutralized belief or act. In all of these cases, this lived has nothing egological about it. It is a part of a protocol that constitutes the subject-science and paves the way for the procedure that generically neutralizes it. In short, there is a lived that is neither that of a whole, such as life, nor that of a singularity, such as a particular living being, but that adheres to a scientific procedure. Thus, the composition of a vector requires a law of immanent objective consistency
plus a quality drawn from the domain of the objects treated, but generically neutralized.
2.
The aspects of vectoriellity, messianity and faith. This fusion of two indissociable components gives rise, depending on the degree of analysis, to a duality of aspects in the so-called unilateral form. On the one hand, the two components of every vector form a flux that is immanent through and through—this is messianity properly so called. On the other hand, it opens up and has complex repercussions (unilaterality) upon the lived from which is drawn the subjective side or the faith side of messianity, and which thus has an origin or provenance other than idempotence as law of messianity. (A) From the point of view of messianity, the “Christian” lived of belief changes in nature and finally becomes a faith without-belief. (B) From the point of view of faith, which can be isolated under condition of the world, a duality retroactively emerges, that of faith and of messianity, which now can in no way be confused with each other. Messianity thus risks being understood as a projection or an image of faith. The constants of generic disciplines always have two unilaterally discernable destinations that are deployed in one direction, toward the world, or contract in the other, toward messianity. This other duality, unlike that of the components, is not entirely traced from the exteriority of the world. Under a now determinant messianity it becomes “ambiguous,” with two possible interpretations. On the basis of this ambivalent situation of faith, which is an effect of nontheology, but not at all its essence or its “last instance,” we can understand how easy it is to pass from messianity to the world, through the knot of faith, how the grace of messianity can flip into the hell of theology, never to return, or end up making messianity the genesis of this hell. This is how generic man comes once again to be gripped by the original sin to which he consents via a confusion that can itself also be understood in-the-last-instance or generically. There is ultimately a double duality (messianity/faith, messianic faith/faith fallen into the world or belief), given the fact that the unilateral duality extends as far as the world as the domain of theological, religious, and philosophizable objects, which leads its sufficient existence independently, while being affected by immanence. In other words, Christ as subject-science is not commutable with the Christianity it may generate; this, moreover, is what allows us to treat Christianity and its theology as mere materials for this science.
3. The generated duality, faith and belief. The duality of messianity and faith is extended into exteriority by that of faith and belief, which is faith cut off from its origins, a conclusion without premises, encysted in itself and positing itself as sufficient. Belief is the great confusion entertained by churches and sects; it is the outcome of the confusion between messianity as origin of faith and the world. If we compare it to ontological difference, it is parallel to the confusion of the meaning of Being with that of beings, admitting the distinction, of course, between Being and the One-in-One of messianity, between philosophical and generic contexts. The genealogy of belief on the basis of messianic immanence and the “noematic” faith that inhabits it renders intelligible the phenomenon of belief that we have had to admit a priori, but without any vicious circle, as “theological symptom,” in order to be able to treat it as mere material. This “reification” or “substantialization” of faith into belief is the destruction of the constitution of Christ as superposition of states in every man. Rather fidelity of the last-instance than faith, rather the faith of the faithful existent-Stranger than religious belief. If there is a guiding slogan to this work, it is indeed the former that makes the “Christ” matrix and its dualities function. The invention of Christ is nothing to do with personal individuality; it has an irreducible double aspect, which can be opposed to every unitary and/or trinitary theology precisely insofar as it requires it in order to constitute itself.
REPETITION OF THE MESSIANIC WAVE FUNCTION
The Christ-science is constituted of many strata, concatenated like phases. (1) Christ as generic subject is first constituted by a formal principle of algebraic origin that is used in quantum science—the property of idempotence or the form of a vectoriell immanence, a flux of immanence that is the form of all messianity and generic grace. (2) This flux of messianic immanence is not an empty logical form. It has an intrinsic idempotent content in the form of a materiel or generic lived. (3) Their ensemble, that is to say, the superposition of the scientific element and the lived, constitutes the vector of transfinite immanence, the messianity that is for itself, without ego, like a nonindividual subjectivity. But it is necessarily accompanied on its worldly pole by a messiah or a faithful, of individual or worldly origin as is Jesus himself qua man, but transformed into messiah-existent-Stranger, stripped of all belief and all individual transcendent ego—this is a unifrontal or unifacial faith, a faith without opposed object and without individual subject. Thus the immanent messianic vector possesses not only a form (messianity), and a content (the materiel and messianic lived), but also an intentional content (the faith that is in its origin alone doubly transcendent). (4) This doublet-transcendence is the general form of the religious sphere, a corpuscular form of the world (beliefs, rites, meaning, symbols). It is itself reduced or split, it has a double status, at once extrinsic or in-itself and hence apparent, and also immanent precisely as messianic or faithful ego. It is therefore a transformed transcendence, simplified or unilateralized by the flux of immanence that traverses it and in which it is rooted. But it has a “double” that is the grasping of it as a sufficient or in-itself thing—that is to say, belief.
It is important to distinguish, in the form of their unilateral duality, messianity, which is not a historical or theological abstraction but a generic or real essence, from the messiahs that it configures and guides at a distance and indirectly in their fidelity. Almost all theo-christo-logy is founded on the unitary and amphibolous conception of the Messiah, on the identification rather than the superposition of messianity and the messiah in the religious notion of “messianism.” Messianism betrays its neutrality and its philosophical anonymity; it is a mere historical coalescence of Judaic notions reappropriated by Christianity, a generality that can withstand every possible indignity of textual deconstruction (messianism-without-messiah). Its quantum deconstruction is not founded in a metaphysical dualism but in a weakened, unilateral duality, which agrees with another principle, the immanence of messianity proper to the generic or to its reprise. The radical critique of unitary theology and of its plan of salvation consists in “extracting” methodically, by way of the so-called imaginary Christ-factor, the original christic contribution (with which it cannot be wholly conflated) from the milieu of double—that is to say, ultimately, Greek and Jewish—transcendence. Through this, we gain the possibility of an explanation of christo-theological difference by dualyzing this macroscopic unity, introducing the Christ-vector-form that is not macroscopic reflection but quantum superposition. Faith must also be quantified or “measured,” torn away from the bad indeterminacy of the theological imaginary. In other words, we are dealing with a passage from the psycho-metaphysical imaginary to a more rigorous imaginary represented by the negative quarter-turn. The latter is the Christ-index necessary to messianity as flux in a nonworldly or nontheological space. For there to be superposition or interference but not identification, and thus for there to be vectoriellity or messianity rather than the imitation of an external, transcendent figure, we need the Christ-factor that forces the real into messianic wave-immanence.