THE IDEMPOTENCE OF THE MESSIANIC LIVED
Idempotence (A + A = A) is the “protologic” of superposition and prepares its own superposition either with the microphysical world of waves or with the lived human world. As elementary form of superposition, it is capable of soaking up the lived, of forcing it, finally succeeding in this exploit of fusion—in short, of being not just immanent but immanental, or of being valid for the real of the subject. But how can a mere algebraic property suture itself (and more than this) to transcendence? Various solutions might be envisaged.
1. A given algebraic property in a science has no chance of encountering a lived subject as such; no suture is possible between them unless we presuppose the problem resolved, unless we presuppose in one way or another a suture, for example, by treating them as parallel spheres, whether specular or linked via torsion, one ontological, the other evental and already adumbrated in the first, thus returning to the fold of philosophy in the form of a generic materialism.
2. Given as manipulable and “calculable” in and by a machine, the subjectivation of the property will depend upon the complex nature of the machine. One might perhaps speak of a “subject,” or even of a “lived”—as one would speak of it not in terms of consciousness, but rather in terms of a lived of man, understood philosophically and religiously
since it is the material or the object that determines the relevance of our project. We are not bound by consciousness but, let’s say, by the practical subject qua act, a lived in a wider sense than the liveds of consciousness. There are amorous, artistic, practical liveds, liveds of affectivity, of religious belief, and so on. It is the lived in its generality that interests us.
3. Assumed as given in the world itself, algebra and the lived have some chance of encountering each other as transcendental fusion in and through a subject that is a captive of the world. We eliminate this purely philosophical solution, for it falls simply under our object or material.
4. Having eliminated these solutions, which are irrelevant, for various reasons—but in general because they fall under the transcendental interiority of a philosophical project—are we left with no solution, obliged to recognize a miraculous event in Christ?
Algebraic idempotence must be interpreted or translated philosophically and/or theologically in order to be utilizable in the matrix. A phenomenologically “discreet” description, which certainly makes use of concepts that clearly of philosophical extraction but that play a nonphilosophical role or fulfill a nonphilosophical function, is possible. The science we seek here is that of philosophy and theology as object; but we know that it must include an aspect of the latter in its apparatus. The science of philosophy is more complex than its strictly scientific means—by definition, we suspect—and the problem lies precisely in the possibility of this complexity. A science that constitutes itself is more complex than the local means it draws from other already-existing sciences. And what is more, no science can be reduced to its axiomatic, which is always precipitate, never sufficient to it, for it remains open to an outside—here, open to new mutations or new statements of philosophy. Abandoning the ideal of the axiomatic-all, we are obliged to admit that this science can only present its two major principles of quantum-theoretical extraction by interpreting them first in terms of the subject or the lived, which is thus supposed already to be included, albeit nonthematically, within the principles themselves. Superposition and noncommutativity cannot be mere “brute” algebraic properties, but are raised to the state of scientific
principles and must be understood as such. The idea of a science of religions borne by Christ is indeed a miracle of the highest and most straightforward order, like any scientific discovery that exceeds its axiomatic. But we must push as far as possible the analysis of the conditions of this immanental, and not merely transcendental, miracle. This is what we mean by saying that the axioms of this science are “oraxioms.” Idempotence can describe itself indirectly or in-the-last-instance with philosophy as a silent or semispeaking subject, underpracticing the concept. It is then described as strong analytic and as weak synthetic, or as mediate-without-mediation, as generic mi-lieu, midsite, which is not a median between the religious components of a science, but precisely the unilateral duality characteristic of the generic. As strong analytic, it fuses—such is its (“weak”) “force”—with the subject as external given, but on condition of reducing it analytically to the lived
alone, or reproducing it analytically solely as lived. As weak synthetic, it fuses with the subject but while adding to itself the lived alone, without adding to itself the philosophical ego, which falls from its great height into immanence. Fusion via idempotence requires both aspects, analytic and synthetic, under the form of their unilateral complementarity.
THE PREEMPTING OF THE LIVED AND THE MESSIANIC WAVE
The operation of the matrix is entirely immanent, even if it puts into play on one side of itself the most exacerbated theological transcendence, which it makes fall into-immanence. For there is never theology, even a theology in-Christ rather than in-Philosophy, without a transcendence now unleashed into belief, now abased into faith. Generally speaking, the matrix supposes a vectoriell reduction (to √−1) of the onto-theological and doubly transcendent One. But its effect is divided according to a duality or unilateral complementarity of aspects that flow from the transformation of the metaphysical One, always marked by a duality insofar as it becomes involved with philosophy. On the one hand, the One is now superposed with itself—it is what we call the One-in-One or the radical immanence of messianity. On the other hand its second aspect manifests itself as transcendence, but this time fallen into-immanence and simplified, contributed by messianity—this is what we call faith, or the faithful-existing-Messiah. It will be remarked that the matrixial conjugation and underdetermination of the variables given does not make of them a simple semantic table of various combinations, but a machine productive of the Christ-science with its two aspects, messianity and fidelity.
Its principle is quantum but generic in essence, essentially the superposition of idempotence, included or programmed in the latter, and of the lived preempted over phenomena of belief and transformed into a messianic lived. This conception is essentially concentrated in the phenomenal immanence rendered possible by superposition. We call “wavelike,” in general, waves of every nature that possess the property of being an algebraic structure of so-called idempotence. The wavelike is not said solely of material phenomena that pass for “hard”—water and its waves, the earth and its seismic movements, materials traversed by internal movements—but is just as valid for the sphere of decision, and that of affectivity and art, obviously. Just as even the hardest glass imparts a quivering to things seen through it, a fortiori there are quiverings of the soul, wild oscillations of the heart, a periodic swaying of beliefs and of opinions, great theoretical migrations and comings-and-goings, not just paradigmatically isolated summits. There is nothing to stop us from conceiving of musical waves of belief, and hence of a generic messianity as wave function or state vector of faith. Although to speak of a physics of messianity, of spirituality, and of faith does not scandalize us, as we shall see in the conception of the Cross as crucial experiment, too many misunderstandings are possible here; and yet theology may educate itself with the physicist school of mysticism, even the most Neoplatonic among them. Materiel, quantum, and generic physics has nothing to do with a “physicalism.” All of these phenomena, if they are to be understood and rendered intelligible as wavelike, must obey the property of certain operations of being idempotent, rather than being reduced to an inconsistent psychology. Idempotence is more or less distinct, but is not identified as such by perception, nor even necessarily by the equations of “wave functions.” But no christic science would be possible without this minimum of algebra. So statements such as the following should come as no surprise: that the messianity of Christ is of two “states,” the Greek state known as Logos and the Jewish state known as Torah, and that our task as quasi-physicists of faith is to establish the state vector of the christic state of faith, the wave function of a human or generic messianity.
An operation is therefore idempotent if the same term or the same component can be added or taken away from it without its truth-value changing. It remains the same whether there is addition or subtraction in the result. Idempotence gives immanence immediately in its linear and “wavelike” form, not in the form of a point or a circle, as philosophers suppose. It programs the identity of a term with itself as result or resultant, whatever may be the operation that serves as its mediation and that is therefore neutralized or suspended without being, for all that, forgotten or negated. The intermediary operation, which we might have taken for the transcendence of an arithmetical addition, is suspended in its effect. Idempotence simulates the identification that makes one term fall back upon another entirely, and makes them see each other in the mirror or according to the Moebius band. Whether total or even partial, identification remains an operation that overflies immanence, neutralizes nothing, or destroys everything. On the other hand, out of two terms—here, two Laws (Logos and Torah)—superposition makes one, one sole Law as interference, but on condition that it is immanence, of a lived nature, and wavelike, and that the mediations between them are neutralized, not suppressed or denied. Idempotence is a linear immanence, a Same that has as its condition the suspense of the operation of addition that would be understood as arithmetical and would posit terms in a space of exteriority or transcendence. Two entities in a theological space are not superposable, whereas an idempotent addition produces a “same” as flux and phases of flux. Idempotence signifies that the messianic lived is constant whatever term may be added to it; for this term, by being added or adjoined to it, falls precisely under this constancy to which it contributes a “supplement,” but which it leaves constant—it is therefore the law of a sterile excess that does not destroy the Same. Messianity must be understood as the unicity of superposition or addition of self to self without its nature changing. It is the vectoriellity of the Same that remains the Same as itself. It is not an empty algebraic form, but is capable of fusing, given its superpositional nature, with the lived property of subjects. As force of fusion, it finds its immediate matter in a form of the lived that belongs to religious beings, belief, which it preempts, and from which it samples the generic form of faith. Torn from belief, faith is of the lived, which is neither object nor subject, since the two poles are mixed in every belief. Messianity is “materiel” right up to the most extreme spirituality, lived and not empirical, as a constant of faith that remains the “same.”
UNIFACIALITY OR SATURATION OF THE REAL?
The second principle is that of the noncommutativity that brings about the necessity of a certain order. It assures the being-oriented or the sense of the “last instance” of messianity, and this by means of its being-foreclosed to the world, messianity not being commutable or exchangeable with any phenomenon of the philosophically intelligible world. The world is indeed first, but messianity is prior-to-first, and underdetermines priority. It transforms transcendence but is itself without ecstatic transcendence.
Idempotence is perceived under two aspects, like a relation that remains analytic despite all the complements that are contributed to it and that merely make it strong analytic and open, and like a weak synthetic or completed relation because the complements contributed do not modify it and complete it without closing it. This is a phenomenon that has no site in its terms, and that is a phenomenon neither of contradictories nor of opposites, as if it only frequented the margins of established and corpuscular things; it is not even “marginal” like the border of an instance or the exteriority of an interiority, like a nostalgic wandering. It frequents not the borders that face backward into the interiority of transcendence, but the very structure of the border or face insofar as there is no border-to-border or face-to-face. The border is a One-border, a uni-border, the face is a One-face, a uni-face. The idempotence of messianity is the pure bursting out of the face or the border, their throwing insofar as they have lost all reference of departure and arrival, the pure thrown that has no discobolus but that is facing. It is the uni-face that is the face-(of)-the-One, and the One is certainly not a subject that throws, but the movement without trajectory whose sole trace is not even left by it, but left as unique face.
Idempotence defeats the phenomenological distance inseparable from a subject opening or thrown “before itself.” The adjoined instance is thus not adjoined at the end of an annihilating distance that would, in any case, be destructive of the idempotent “packet” of liveds. Nor does it end up saturating this distance with too much sense, or transcendent alterity, with an Other either gaining a foothold directly in the lived, or manifesting itself in the call. We recognize the philosophico-religious problematic insofar as it functions on the invariant of phenomenological difference, with outbreaks of opposites, of more and of less, of saturation and of desaturation, whereas the science we require as a model functions on algebraic idempotence (and the imaginary number for vectoriellity) as engendering superposition and noncommutativity. Idempotence is a saturation but a sterile one, we might say—it is a radical immanence and not a transcendence
necessarily doubled if not reduced or simplified by its falling into-immanence—always the key problem for a complete analysis of philosophy as a transcendence in doublet. There is always an excess, but the transcendence of the lived phenomenon is transformed, the simple being here an excess via superposition rather than an excess via saturation. This is the whole difference between a religious phenomenology of the limits of transcendence and a quantum theory within the limits of the immanence that depotentializes theology. The ego is superposed generically rather than interpellated or placed once more in excess over itself by an excess of transcendence over itself. The problem of intersubjectivity is no longer posed for it; without being many or solitary, it is underdetermined in its relation to the world that has become its sole interlocutor. The couple Ego/Other has been traversed by the Same and redistributed according to a unilateral complementarity. The subject cannot be interlocuted or interpellated because there is no dominant interlocutor, but only a scientific Other as generic Same, an immanent body of Christ if you like, which charges itself with leading subjects to a revelation—that is, to faith.
IDEMPOTENCE AND THE TWO QUANTUM PRINCIPLES
Idempotence allows us to rediscover the two scientific principles that, intimately bound together, submit belief, transform it into faith, and produce the human intellection of Christianity.
Idempotence is that common root of the two principles required of faith or messianity, in order for it to become a constant, a certain type of determination governing the relations that it puts to work. It is an algebraic property or a proto-principle. Its first effect makes it function concretely in quantum physics as a “principle of superposition.” An idempotent operation produces the same result whether it is applied once or reapplied many times, for example, in the form of the flux or forces of the lived. It thus produces the unicity of the intermediary (what we shall call the “mediate-without-mediation”). It is half-analytic, half-synthetic, or more exactly, it is the analytic no longer as isolated or corpuscular philosophical operation, an analytic that “tends” to the synthetic or aims at it. Complementarily, it is the synthetic that fails to be as it is qua isolated or corpuscular operation in philosophical logic.
The second effect of idempotence is the principle that subtracts this determination from its always active or threatening philosophical reprisal. The algebraic property of noncommutativity is raised to the status of a principle in quantum theory (for which the inverse products of two variables are not equal), and here to the principle of the noncommutability of messianic faith with religious belief.
Analytic and synthetic, thus delivered from their philosophical combination, reduced to their operatory algebraic kernel, together form what we shall call a unilateral (and not “dialectical,” as in positive physics à la Bohr) complementarity. The immanental principle par excellence of idempotence breaks from the start with classical logic and the philosophy that it supports in “relations” between science and philosophy—in this case, that of objectivity and of the lived of belief, that is to say, in the constitution in-the-last-instance of faith. In a perhaps too condensed formula, idempotence is the messianic criteria of faith and that which distinguishes it from belief. It is still necessary to fix more precisely the type of real or of lived that makes messianity and its vectoriellity out of idempotence, and tears it away from the world or from “reality.” But in any case, built on these two principles as upon the pillars that make for generic humanity, messianic faith is the condition of the ruin of theological sufficiency, and the condition of the intelligibility of religions. As difficult as it is to recognize the affinity of the Christian invention, for example, with the Marxian foundation of a science of history (Michel Henry), its affinity with a physical science like quantum theory is yet more surprising. Still, we have distinguished in the christic operation these two principles from quantum mechanics that give it its generic universality. They are both decisive for the definition of messianity as vectoriell.
THE GENERIC CONCEPT OF THE UNIFICATION OF THEORIES
Idempotence contributes toward defining the generic matrix, it plays a part in the superposition of science and philosophy; but in order to be effectuated for the two disciplines, it must itself also be incarnated in philosophy or in the lived of a subject. Generic means a nontotalizing validity for the two disciplines, or a universality that does not double back on itself, which disappears even as reflected All, and is therefore an indiscernible universality. The key to the problem lies in the idempotence of science and philosophy, which are the same generically or in-the-last-instance. We finally have the rigorous concept or the equation Unified Theory = the Same as idempotent superposition. We obviously oppose this matrix to that of Parmenides, the matrix that structures philosophy. Any science or philosophy whatsoever can add itself to itself, but only on condition that this takes place under the principle of superposition. But the latter is usually replaced by a transcendent principle of identification, and this type of unified theory thus remains on the order of the symptom. Only quantum science in the order of physics, and the christic science of religion in the order of human sciences or of theology, satisfy the immanental rather than transcendent(al) form of unified theory.
The most general principles of science, those that pass over frontiers between disciplines and even between theories within a given discipline, are of a mathematical and in particular an algebraic order. In philosophy, they are only transcendental principles, but when they become immanental principles, quantum physics is endowed with an intelligibility amplitude higher than that of classical physics. What is more, they are transferable, qua principles of a nonpositive quantum theory, to nonphysical properties, but ones that possess a certain materielity, such as religious phenomena or the liveds of belief. If a science must be possible in-Christ and valid for all religions, it will be realizable with these operations which, taken together, form a rationality that is not logical but, as we say, “quantial.” It is important that these are principles of great amplitude, and therefore algebraic, and that in order to become principles they must be detached from physical properties and must be transferable into another context of objects, into the matter of faith and of religions, without for all that being universal in the philosophical sense, universal via hierarchy and domination. Marx, in his own way, had an inkling of their use for the science of history, with his theory of determination-in-the-last-instance. This is the example of the fusion of (revolutionary) theory and the (proletarian) masses—or, for us, that of theology and the faithful of Christ.
Idempotence is the scientific matrix of the generic. It is valid for the superposition of science and philosophy, but remains to be effectuated or realized in the two disciplines. Science and philosophy are the same generically but only in-the-last-instance—this is the rigorous concept of unified Theory. Kant, for example, with “the same” of the experience of the object and of its representation, remains in the state of a symptom, as indeed is indicated well enough by the way he internalizes Newton into classical metaphysics.
NO RETURN OF CHRIST, BUT A CHRISTO-FICTION
The first effects of the two principles’ investment in our problem are visible as the transformation of theology and the production of a christo-fiction that replaces the “return of Christ” as object of belief.
1. The superposition of Christ (of his sayings) and of Greco-Judaic theology, the addition of christic sayings to theology, must yield the kernel of the christic discourse, but in its theological version. Whereas inversely, the theological discourse is transformed, folded, or ordered according to this principle or operation.
2. Why is it not a simple reciprocal, specular imitation, a simultaneous transformation; why does Christ become law and in this operation remain the same without letting himself be affected by theological discourse; why is there a transformation of Judeo-Greek speech alone, in order to become adequate to the person of Christ? Another principle accompanies that of superposition, giving it its sense and its limits, making explicit its consequences—it is the principle of the noncommutativity of Christ and Judeo-Greek philosophy or theology. In other words, either all theology is of the order of the philosophico-religious imaginary, an imaginary formation that serves as our material, or else, if we elaborate a new formation as a function of Christ and of this imaginary as material, it will not belong to that imaginary but it will thus remain without any traction on the foreclosed Christ; it will be exactly what we might call a christo-fiction. Theology, and Christianity in general, are thus involved in a transformation more profound than any reformation. It is what we call the unilateralization of Christianity, which ensures, on the other hand, the defense of Christ against Christianity. Noncommutativity allows us to understand the foreclosure of messianity in the course of the world and of history.
The Christ-event is the emergence of a new science, the science of the world as object of belief, a world of which Being, the One, and the Idea are the modalities. The world is the gnostic object par excellence, with or without globalization. The confusion of faith and belief, of messianity and of the world, is the great disaster that affects the faith revealed by Christ, and of which Christian confessions are the agents and the consumers. Of course, this destructive confusion is the real content of “original sin,” which is its mythical projection. Just as lived and subjective faith does not belong to a subject but first of all to a subject-science, faith does not refer back to an object, even an interiorized and idealized one; it is of an immanent nature, which is neither an all nor a singularity, but a superposition. And superposition is messianity as fidelity to/of vectoriell immanence.
FROM INDIVIDUAL RESISTANCE TO GENERIC DEFENSE
The messianic wave contains no atomist or corpuscular intuition: the particle of the message or the kerygma is not even “partial” but instead “quartial,” as we have explained elsewhere. It is all of classic theological representation that is inadequate; fallen back on messianity, it destroys its principle of idempotence. Radical messianity is a wavelike flux that excludes the individual and the all, the symptoms of divine transcendence. Idempotence is that matrix of a linearity that is algebraic rather than geometrical. It suspends the reciprocal mediation of God and man and makes no circle. One can add to it the same term or an Other since it brackets out the operation without denying it. In consequence, the sacrifice of God is programmed in the form of his neutralization, his suspended presence. Idempotence is a term’s power to remain the same across, through (not in spite of), the crossing of the operations of which it is the object.
But in relation to history, the under-going Christ introduces a great disruption. Messianity is no longer that which remains or resists, and whose stubbornness defines the Same as residue of History; it is the Same that resists or remains because it is prior-to-first or the last-instance. It is Christ that is our fortress, our reduced interior, and unleashes the destructive fury of the Adversary. The variations serve to make appear that which resists—an operation of glorious and stubborn transcendence. Whereas here the Same does not have to constitute itself as that which resists; it is content to move in itself and to oscillate at the whim of variations, operations, and differences, not in spite of them. The Messiah has the sovereignty of the weak, a welcoming or unmoved Indifference. The nonact of the Idempotent does not enter in a body-to-body or a face-to-face, does not have to react reflexively in order to resist. This power of being and of remaining the Same without having to kill the Adversary is messianity. It is not just the power to resist variations and avatars, to include or exclude them, or at best to make a synthesis of them, in a great theologico-worldly system. It is what distinguishes, from our point of view, the defense of humans from the resistance that can only be a combat whose horizon is death. Neither affirmative nor negative, defense includes a moment of transformation, rather than the putting to death of the Adversary; it does not, for example, have to constitute itself through the diasporic or unitary triumphant resistance of contingencies, including them by negation in an affirmative diaspora (just imagine) like an Eternal Return of the Jew, or in a system designed to pick them out. From the Same of philosophy, which constitutes itself as surpotence and omnipotence, to the Same of messianity constituted not as power of return or of repetition but as the impotence of idempotence. The Same of messianity is not placed between two parentheses through an act of constitution; it is constituted by one sole parenthesis and thus is open to the transfinite.
MESSIANITY AND THE FAITHFUL, THEIR UNILATERAL COMPLEMENTARITY
We have distinguished between various significations of the symbol “Christ,” as message-system and as factor-(of)-fiction or “imaginary” factor. A third modality that conjoins these two is the Christ-operator or agent. In every science there is at least one operator-observer of the research procedures that are the true “subject.” In the positive sciences this functional subject is external and is an “agent” of the laboratory, the physicist as operator or “preparer” of corpuscles put into a quantum superposed state. But in any case it is not the subject-cause of science. In disciplines like psychoanalysis and Marxism, and as tends to be partly the case in philosophy and the truly “human” sciences, a fortiori, a functional operator is required, but is not the cause of science here either: it is an individual nonfree “lived,” placed under generic condition. The lived is at once knotted together with the scientific project or principles, and at the same time and in complementary manner also an effect of their power of configuration. A subject that remained in itself or macroscopic, as a subject of the operation of measurement or of constitution, would instead destroy the physical superposition, just as a priest would destroy the reality of messianity by transforming it back into belief in the form of the world. What matters, therefore, is that some lived, some operator or manipulator of variables, must be superposed with the two principles and included in a unique state vector. What to call this subjectivity or this individual faith that is underdetermined generically if not “messiah” or subject-existent-Stranger? A science, even a christic or “non-Christian” one, must eliminate the philosophical subject-foundation, must be a true science that recognizes its contingency, a procedure whose objectivity cannot justify itself through a program of autofoundation. And at the same time as a science of human stances (religious stances, for example), it must include a subjective complement to the procedures. The Messianity of-last-instance and the messiah of individual origin, but stripped of its individual predicates, forming a unilateral complementarity.
Certain sciences, perhaps all sciences, merit subjects that are included in them rather than being solely their object—sciences that introduce constants into the intimacy of thought, a constant of salvation, an indivisible messianic ultimatum. The “last things” are not fabulous, cataclysmic cosmic events. Only generic subjects (rather than those who return) are “last” in the eschatological sense, that is to say, “prior-to-first.” The name of Christ does not introduce a fundamental discontinuity “into” the present of history, but something of the “futural” prior-to-present into this present of history itself. Far from “breaking history in two” (Nietzsche) according to the old philosophical schema, it brings to light a prior-to-priority that allows history and religions their priority but places them under underdetermining condition in-the-last-instance.
Rather than reducing Christ to the rank of any faithful whatsoever—that is to say, a “Christian” or “believing” one—we shall admit that Christ is not “Christian” like Jesus, in that belated sense, still less a “believer,” but that, on the one hand, any one of the faithful whatsoever must be put on an equal standing with Christ, equal among equals, freeing himself from the Christianity-world, and must be a modality of generic science or of the faithful of-the-last-instance, not subjected to messianity but generically subjectivated by it. All of the faithful break as far as possible from the yoke of Christianity instituted as religion, the yoke of the vicious circle.
A subject of the classical form—ego, consciousness, or singular ipseity—there can be nothing of this in the human sciences if they are really to be sciences, and in particular in the science we seek here. Faith excludes them but does not deny them; it transforms them. But on the one hand we have subjectivity in the interferent or wavelike state, and thus on the other hand we also have subjectivity in the deindividualized form of messiahs expected with certainty but with indiscernible trajectories and unforeseeable effects. They act without being localized in predetermined theological spaces and times, entangled messiahs proceeding not through encroachment or through a play of frontiers, but through effects of grace at a distance that go through the obstacles of the world. There is no subject of science, but only a subject-science that, invested in the givens of worldly Christianity, produces unlocalizable multiplicities of faithful acting indirectly, not at the far end of an onto-theological distance. Such a distance reproduces philosophy and in particular the Logos. The mode of action that is opposed to this confusion is probably essentially vectoriell. On the basis of philosophical subjects as believers, messianity configures messiahs—but without a relation of mechanical or dialectical causation. Messiahs are vectors whose essence is onto-vectoriell rather than geometrically vectorial.