Six

CHRISTIC SCIENCE AND ITS OCCASIONS

THE GNOSTIC FUSION OF QUANTUM SCIENCE AND THE SUBJECT: FUSION AND SUTURE

Why quantum science? And why fusion rather than suture? The Greek philosophy that served as a milieu for the reception for the christic message, the Logos, is not simply a question of various objects, themes, ideas, or concepts, but is a representational form of thought that applies to almost all of its concepts, including those of theology. The deconstructive scrutiny of representation undertaken by philosophy itself is a necessary but unfinished task, which has still not been posed in the most effective terms. To think an event such as the messianic subject, other means and forces of production are needed. Idempotence means that the messianic lived is constant, whatever term may be adjoined to it as Other, since the term to which it is adjoined or added falls precisely under that invariant, to which it contributes only a complement. Such is the law of sterile excess, which does not destroy the Same qua messianic subject. The same goes for the diasporic punctuality of Jewishness. But it seems that quantum theory is the radical delimitation of representative thought, at least in the sciences, and its manner of organization—cosmos or diaspora—without, for all that, negating this thought. The phenomena to which it accedes are not “small” phenomena, but phenomena that obey a principle that is entirely other than that of representation. Philosophy is not equal to this other principle, however philosophical it might appear; only science is up to it. This capacity belongs to it, but it cannot be extracted from its physical application by philosophical-type means, or as an effect of philosophy, or imported into theology. It is capable of thinking religious phenomena such as flux, grace, advent, and return as taken up by the mystics and messianic phenomena in general—for example, by isolating their physical-type wavelike properties. The atomistic-conceptual style of theology cannot truly grasp these properties, yet they persist as symptoms in its heavily Greek discourse, a discourse that leaves these phenomena encysted in themselves. The notorious “metaphysical abstractions” are nothing but forms of thought that remain inadequate to their object. The quantum style possesses a generality that is in every sense ultraphysical, because it corresponds to the algebraic properties of suspense and neutralization that open up new perspectives through their characteristic type of universality.

This sort of intrinsic alliance between science and the lived is an immanent fusion, which is to say, a fusion by means of an immanence, and not a simple suture, in the sense of a transcendent operation merely “corrected” by immanence. In the case in point, it may be called a gnosis, a doctrine that is traditionally unwelcome amid philosophical dealings that seek to be “rationalist” and religious ones that seek to be “orthodox.” It turns out that gnosis, here, is scientific, and brings a certain materielity (but not a materialism) into play. It thus turns its back on the condemnations of rationalism, positivism, and dogmatism, which, when they do not lack sufficiency, simply lack a sense of history. We do not invoke gnosis as a religious formation of meaning, although certain of the effects of this generic science have a heretical aspect—but no more so than the context of Christ, from which it is impossible to eliminate every Jewish, Greek, or, precisely, Gnostic association. The logic of our gnosis is that of idempotence, the minimal immanent flux that constitutes the subject-science, or what we shall henceforth call messianity. We interpret the immanence of faith and thought “in-Christ” on the basis of two major principles, which form a “logic” that is used in quantum science but that we could also call “gnostic,” since certain properties of the algebra could also represent gnosis. It is not exactly that we seek to elevate historical gnosis to the status of logic; we simply identify a gnostic-oriented operation at work in algebraic logic: that of idempotence.

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE CIRCLE OF TRANSCENDENTAL ILLUSION

Generally speaking, philosophers begin with a combination of the means of truth and the reality of error. Some (Plato, Descartes, Fichte) insist on the error or illusion from which we must extract ourselves, while others (Spinoza, Kant, Badiou) instead insist on the truth-conditions, perhaps enveloped in illusion, that must triumph. Nonphilosophy makes use of yet another schema, which seems to combine these two types of solution without returning to the one offered by Nietzsche or Deleuze, who oscillate between the truth of illusion and Hegelian synthesis. The conditions of truth and illusion form a unilateral duality, with the former being not first, but prior-to-first or “last,” and the latter being first. It is apparently dogmatic, as in Spinoza and Kant (at the beginning), and apparently critical of illusion, as in Plato, Descartes, and Fichte. “Apparently” because the conditions of these characterizations have been profoundly altered. This is a problem that is altogether worthy of christic science: how should it “begin,” and what does “beginning” mean here?

Such a (non-Christian) science is not a reigning or fulfilled Christianity, instituting a science of other religions. The condition is both that Christianity be treated in terms of its religious content, as one religion among others, and that the nontheological “foundation” of this science—or, more precisely, its principles—owe everything to the operation called “Christ,” and nothing, or almost nothing (only its raw material), to institutional Christianity. For Christ to be the invention of a constant that is specific to religions, or a formal trait that defines the possibility of a science, constituted Christianity cannot, in a sense, be anything more than one object among others. A “non-Christian science” of religions, on condition that we understand “non-Christian” not as a predicate but as an indivisible bloc, complementary to the subject and the law of this science. It is a matter of placing Christianity under condition of “non-Christianity,” and of understanding the “non-” as the witness of science, so that non-Christian = subject-science = faith-science. The Christian or faithful subject enters into a scientific procedure and, with it, forms a constant adequate to its object. Rather than entering into science as a subject in the classical sense, the Christian enters as a Christian, but as a deindividualized or neutralized subject who can recover a generic subjectivity. Even qua indifferent material, it is necessary that Christianity be interested in its science and that it not be treated solely as an indifferent object, or as a myth.

There is the risk of a vicious circle between the Christ that is the foundation of this science and the elaboration of his meaning on the basis of constituted Christianity. Another form of the same circle: How can Christ be both the inventor of a new faith and just one of the faithful? This type of circle is well known. It is the circle of autoanalysis, whether the “Cartesian” circle or some other. In order to exit it, a study of the scientific constant is fundamental, and we must reevaluate the situation as a function of the various interlocking degrees or steps that, together, form an exit from the circle.

 

1.   The positive scientific procedure has nothing philosophical about it, but demands the self-assurance proper to the spontaneous scientific stance, even if it be judged contingent. There is, already, this initial break from the circle by scientific positivity; already it is uncertain whether science posits itself or needs to posit itself—the very “transcendental” problem of a circle, as projected and then marveled at by the philosopher. Without being autonomous and consistent, like a philosophical subject, the initial scientific principle is inhabited by something like its own generic self-certainty, through a process of superposition, and has no need of an additional, philosophical certainty to confirm it.

2.   The scientific procedure is constituted as subject-science by including and generically deindividualizing the lived of the potential Christian—one who, for example, is interested in religions without explicitly being a “believer.” This doxic lived is raised to the dimension of a scientific subject, not the other way around. Science is not subjectivized under condition of philosophy. It is, rather, the lived that is desubjectivized under condition of science.

3.   Introduced into the philosophical circle of religion and theology, and proceeding correctly, the subject-science demonstrates, through its very existence, that the macroscopic and potentially philosophizable Christian All is an appearance or an illusion through which it believed itself capable of being the sole professor and legislator of the lived.

4.   There is no circle between the scientific presupposition of the science-subject, purely and simply foreign to philosophy, and Christian discourse, or even theological science, as there is between the principle of identity or general logic and the real. This is because superposition has never been a circle, but is instead, strictly speaking, a wave or even the quarter-circle that represents an “imaginary” or “complex” number, a function fulfilled here by the symbol “Christ.” The belief in a transcendental illusion present here is itself an illusion, but one that is immanental or of an altogether different degree. Philosophy is the sole positive cause of this belief in a circle, and the subject-science is only the negative cause of its manifestation. The circle is regulated by its depotentialization, by its dismissal into a particulate state and, in a sense, to a peripheral or seemingly marginal condition. The subject-science, placed under the underdeterminant or veritative condition of Christian theology, makes the philosophical or theological circle appear as such, spontaneous or specular with respect to the religions and theories that it engenders.

 

THE GENERIC SCIENCES AND THE HERMENEUTIC OCCASION

Human phenomena, including the phenomena of religion, demand a generic, not a positive, science. A science of philosophy, for example, requires the subject to set itself in a stance that can only be scientific and not philosophical, but that, as a stance, involves or implicates a potentially philosophizable, if not philosophizing, subject that, as lived, is condemned to pass through the objectivity of scientific principles and that, however individual it may be at the outset, is neutralized in its particular subjectivity. This does not mean that we must return to hermeneutics, that we must be Christians and believers in order to understand the faith, must be philosophers to understand philosophy, or artists to understand art. The lived experiences of faith, of art, of love, and so on are generic and are not marked by the singularity/totality of the philosophical or theological subject. The matter is somewhat more complicated: every generic lived produces a philosophizable, if not a philosophy, and this is the origin of the appearance of the circle. The lived is philosophizable according to philosophical generality, but is also underdetermined. The lived is subjectivity-without-subjectivation, without there being a fold of subjectivity and subjectivation, because it is identified with a scientific principle, assuming a certain stance and, as subject, submitting itself to an idempotent formation. Taken in its state as an ordinary, potentially Christian lived, science submits it to a uni-version, as if subjectivity were smoothed out and ejected from itself—a generic neutralization that snatches it away from both singularity and totality. The science that becomes generic thus takes up a genuine rebellion against epistemology. It is prior-to-priority, lived idempotently, even if philosophy attempts to appropriate it for its own purposes, at the risk of ending up transformed itself. It is in this sense of the lived, always philosophizable after the fact by the religious appearance, that it must have had to have been Christian or have been capable of assuming the Christian faith in order to set itself in the right stance for a science of religions.

THE TRADITIONAL CHRIST AND THE CHRIST-SUBJECT

We have distinguished various meanings of Christ on the basis of that of the science-in-Christ or the Christ-matrix, and, elsewhere, that of the historical and religious Jesus Christ.

 

1.   A non-Christian science must eliminate the philosophical foundation, at once object and subject, in order to be a true science, cognizant of its contingency. It contains a procedure that prevents objectivity from justifying itself through itself in a program of autofoundation: the Christ-factor, the factor of christo-fiction, replaces this function.

2.   As a science of human stances—religious stances, for example—it must include a lived, which the procedure borrows, and which counts as any subject’s faith and/or belief, with Jesus Christ himself being one of the faithful. This unilateral complement never gives way to a philosophical All through a division that would reconstitute it. From this angle, we should treat Christ himself also as being just one of the faithful, we should treat the Messiah as an ordinary and nonexceptional man, but a man guided by messianity, not only as one fulfilling his apparently singular or even paradigmatic function in the invention of the principles of this science. This is the problem of the “suture” of science according to Christ, at once its inventor and preparer, its generic subject and its object.

3.   The generic stance possesses an operative and subjective aspect, a preparation of and for experiment, an aspect of promise, and a way of rendering-vigilant that is shared with Saint John the Baptist, perhaps the prophets, and Jesus, when he demanded of his disciples that they “prepare” for the Cross, the Resurrection, and his return.

 

In such a science, every subject is therefore dual or complementary without being doubled in its unity. On the one hand, there is a generic lived, preempted over the philosophical subject and neutralized, carried into idempotence by its fusion with science. And on the other hand there is an original subject, the subject of the theological or epistemological occasion, transcendent or given and then reduced to the status of one of the faithful. The latter may play the role of the famous observer or experimenter included in the scientific condition. This messiah-subject or faithful is not itself divided into two states, microscopic and macroscopic, but the principle of idempotence draws it in and fuses in part with it, idempotence being nothing but this fusion itself, an immanental and not a transcendental operator. We shall say that the generically lived sampled from the Christian subject is “non-Christian” or faithful, which clearly does not mean anti-Christian. Along with generic messianity, it forms a unilateral complementarity, contracted onto its immanence, and a transcendence that is simple, particulate, or “fallen into-immanence.”

This formalization gives a somewhat different meaning to Lacan’s “subject of science,” here non-Christian science. There is no point in deducing it from the Cartesian Cogito, which could not deliver it from its metaphysical placenta. But there is something of the lived in its generic status, and a complementary subject operator that helps to constitute the scientific stance. Finally, there is not, in science, a subject in the classical sense, but only a subject-science that we can invest with the givens of Christianity.

In order to clarify the relations between Christ qua subject of science and Christ qua founder of a religious tradition, let us reiterate the structures of unilaterality over Christ, in particular, no longer as generic messianity but as faithful subject and messiah.

 

1.   Their Christian confusion. We first posit the distinction between the science-for-generic-subject and Christianity supposing itself in itself (Principle of Sufficient Theology), which is the condition sine qua non for establishing an objective science of Christian subjectivity and avoiding the appearances of theology. As the “founder” of a science, here, turns out to also be—but how does this happen?—the founder of what will become a religion, these are two heterogeneous senses of foundation whose apparent unity feeds into theology. They are nevertheless to be distinguished. The “founder” of science is unilaterally implicated as objective subject within—well and truly within—its scientific procedures, which are prior-to-first. For this reason, he cannot be assimilated by any tradition he might give rise to. The founder of religion is implicated as subject-object in that which he founds, and which retroactively defines him as theological subject. It is no longer the same Christ, the same character, in these two functions, but philosophy and theology make it seem as if the two were the same, thus fueling a great confusion. That Christ should be a dual or unilateral subject may come as a surprise; it is the distinction and the complementarity of inassimilable messianity and of the “master” who is taken in by what his work has become and who is reinterpreted by it. Partly as incarnating the new science, forging an alliance with that of which he is a generic subject, and partly as phantasmatic object of the tradition that has been founded on it and that capitalizes on it, along with plenty of other elements. Only Christ, as science-for-subject but not as subject of science, forever escapes being the simple object of a tradition. In the Christian tradition, all distinctions between Jesus and the theologically “formatted” faithful that we are capable of being are exceedingly weak and reversible, and are insufficiently discriminating, since they have developed in the environment of continuous philosophical appearances, and therefore within a vicious circle. Subjects are always also objects for a thought that seeks to be science; but in the principles of this science gathered together under the name of Christ, the subject is also said in a new sense, as a predicate in superposition with science, generic rather than philosophical. Christ is not under Christian condition; it is rather Christianity that is under condition of Christ. We must subtract him from the involuntary founder of religion that he has become.

2.   Their unilateral complementarity as a disentanglement and new entanglement. A subject is generally required as an operator, but one that often (not always) is effaced in the universal subject, and thus maintains the role played by “we philosophers” in the idealists (Fichte or Hegel). It is inevitable that the lived operator belonging to the context should be attached to what amounts to an experimentation (the function performed by the evangelist disciples) and contribute to its materielity. But it is the two quantum principles, superposition and noncommutativity, that produce the general form of generic subjectivity, and in this sense these principles are subjective principles in the generic sense, without ever being subjects in the philosophical sense.

 

AGAINST “CHRISTIAN SCIENCE,” “JEWISH SCIENCE,” “PROLETARIAN SCIENCE,” AND SO ON

There is therefore no subject-of-science but only a generically lived subject-science completed by an occasional subject. Whence the concept of what must indeed be called (cautiously) “non-Christian science,” and which Christ practiced in a precise sense. On the one hand it is a science of religions—of Judaism, paganism (polytheism), and Christianity itself (to the extent that it has become a constituted religion). There is no Christian science save in a religious or ideological sense, no more than there is a proletarian or Jewish science in the sense in which those words have been used in recent history—a science of any object whatsoever, but ideologically marked by its ethnic and psychological origins. To confuse the object of a generic science—the world and its subject—with a particular theological and philosophical belief, and to pursue that confusion in the determination of a subject in the psychological and positive sense, is a form of theoretical “racism.” We must accept that those confusions are of a philosophical order, and that only the generic point of view is capable of enduring the inclusion of a lived that is neutralized, depsychologized, or deethnologized. It is because it is generic that gnosis avoids the confusions that customarily appear in the form of so-called Jewish science, proletarian science, or Christian science that we are burdened with. But there is a non-Christian and non-Jewish science in the sense that within them the religious determination, the religious predicate, is submitted to the scientific cause or procedure, which imposes upon it the generic “non-” rather than its inverse. A Christian, Jewish, Greek, or Islamic ego does not belong to the science of religions itself. If the religious lived intervenes there, it is an entirely deindividualized one. By virtue of this generic lived, a science of religions cannot be purely objective or positive, nor given over to the phantasms and resentments of one party or another. The idempotent insertion of a generic subject into scientific procedures is the only radical means for eliminating positivity from the sciences without handing them over to a transcendental subject.

The predicate “Christian,” or “proletarian” and the like, does not, therefore, touch on science save through the extraction of its subject, through the unspecified lived that may be that of a man of faith, a militant, or a lover. It does not touch on science itself, for there is nothing in science that can immediately be said to be bourgeois, Jewish, or proletarian. These predicates simply cannot be said, by way of some philosophical return or appearance, of a science that has nothing to do with any of this; they can be said only of the subject, and the subject is destined to become generic through its superposition with science, and thus to become nonproletarian, non-Christian, and so on. So it comes to pass that there is a subject that originates as Christian or faithful, but that is generic and nonindividual, a proletarian lived issuing from the anticapitalist struggle, but generic and not at all individual or collective, a playful and freely enjoying subject of art, but generic rather than individual. The subject and its directly worldly predicates complete the generic constant, but they are no longer the individual agent or the technician of philosophy that double the conceptual persona.