AGAINST UNITARY REPRESENTATION
To extract the christic kernel from its outer layers, which have been validated as Christian? Certainly the Church has seen other heresies, heresies great and small—philosophy, too. Among contemporary philosophical heresies, it was Derridean deconstruction that tried to think in terms of dissemination or Judaic punctuality; the Deleuzian construction, on the contrary, in terms of oscillatory fluency. But both remain caught within the philosophical horizon, within the conceptual and semantic atomism of the presupposed-and-defeated All. They remained within this framework without giving themselves a new paradigm of thought. In each case there are torsions, deviations, leftings, and rightings (
gauchissements et droitisations) of an orthodoxy of thought or a theological image of faith, an image that was put in place by forced marches, by a history entirely formed of discursive, physical, and mental violence through which the Church and the Academy constituted themselves, as a result piercing through this chaos of forces. But for us it is a matter of another project, of a science, an idemscient knowledge whose field is that of any religious object whatsoever, a field we have delimited by its extremes, the pagan Logos and the Judaic Torah. The kernel of the science-in-Christ is not any conceptual unity whatsoever, precisely not a conceptually atomic kernel. It is generic or duel, it cannot be said to be analytic or synthetic, or plural. It escapes these logics without having recourse to a negative theology since it transforms all of these predicates. Negative theology and philosophy have sometimes delivered Logos to self-hatred, rather than placing it under an idemscient procedure without negation or affirmation, under nonacting or nonbelief in some way. But whether affirmative or negative, they form mélanges, in the name of the All or the Absolute, of conceptual atomism and wavelike fusion, sometimes in real oscillatory machines (Deleuze). This mélange supposes the two styles to be separate and unitarily unified, whereas the quantum point of view also utilizes both of them, but without mixing or identifying them, rendering them indiscernible as superpositions. For example, we can no longer decide whether “Christ” marks an evental source-point in history and theory or instead outlines a transversal in philo-theological space. In reality, Christ is a vector of messianity that addresses itself to the world and that comes from humans into a “space” no longer defined by philosophical coordinates (ecstatic-horizontal transcendence and ecstatic-vertical transcendence, ontology and theology).
FROM THE CORPUSCULAR TO THE WAVELIKE: BELIEF AS THE DESTRUCTION OF THE MESSIAH
These retrospective theological and philosophical interpretations of Christ, his reduction to his “macroscopic” or worldly role as a founder of religion, are forms of the pure and simple destruction of the being of the superposition of Christ. All to a greater or lesser degree try to force the foreclosed-being of Christ and to theologize it. In quantum terms, messianity is not a flux that is numerically “one” and still corpuscular; it presents itself as a “unicity” but it is constituted through the superposition of liveds in a “wave packet,” in the classic expression. So that all of these interpretations represent a veritable “reduction” of the packet of liveds that constitute the Christ-event. The Church, in particular, is the sum of retrospective dogmas and macroscopic constructions that destroy the christic superposition. The development of dogma is the systematic takeover of the new messianic and subtheological world. It is not the Church that is eschaton, it is the actual Christ, his active actuality contradicting neither his virtuality nor his ultimacy. There is an actuality of existence or of the effect of the eschaton, and the generic Messiah is its content. Radical immanence is obviously not the actuality of the present of the Idea, of Pathos, or of Life, which are becomings rather than under-goings, but the actuality of the messianic coming, which uproots the mediatic actuality of religion.
We shall thus avoid reducing Christ as Messiah to an event, to a punctuality or a cut, whether multiple or single. Messianity is an idempotent over-flow (dé-bord), (an immanent binary), a vectoriell wave or force phenomenon, but not the phenomenon of a point in the milieu of transcendence. The “Messenger” is not a specular image of divine transcendence. On this point, Judaism, too bound up in its spatial and temporal diaspora, has remained within a certain mythology of transcendence and has invented little. A point-One is empty by definition; it is, strictly speaking, a concentrated repulsive or retroactive force. A science of messianity is more interested in its materielity as wavelike or interferent lived, the plenitude of its stance, which excludes punctuality and atomist representation. For we who formulate axioms using philosophy (but only as symptom), there is indeed an operation of philosophical interpretation, but one that is neutralized in its aspect of ecstatic transcendence.
The One that we have previously used to speak this immanence that escapes every ontological norm would not alone have allowed us to understand immanence in itself, or only across many hesitations in writing and the simplicity of a causality through simple retreat or subtraction. Already we had to rework the One in new idempotent equations such as One-in-One or One + One = One. We had to make of idempotence the immanental neutralization of transcendence, not its determinate negation or indeed its immediate negation (Henry). Speaking apophatically of the non-One or of immanence in general, we did not yet have at our disposal the algebraic matrix of messianic immanence in its autonomy and the positivity of the Same obtained as superposition. This “algebraic” matrix of idempotence must now be incarnated in the lived, in order to yield the christic constant or quantum of faith. This is to distinguish the prior-to-priority of the Same and the priority of the One and/or of the Multiple whose philosophies thrive on debates. We thus no longer prioritize the characterization of the “nontheological” science through the will to do for the One what Heidegger did for Being—this parallel may correspond well to the stage of interference affecting transcendences, but not to a true theory of the immanent or generic or messianic wave.
We may therefore make a distinction between the two aspects of unilateral duality: on the one hand, the lived immanence of the generic Same (the Last Instance or the subject-science) and, on the other hand, the transcendence that, from being theological, has unilateralized or fallen-into-immanence, having lost its corpuscular and ecstatic sufficiency, standardized in the notion of God as “omni-.” There is no doubt a transcendence in prior-to-priority of the generic stance; it is not denied absolutely, but is an ascending that is without ecstasis in its vectoriellity, and that only receives idempotence in the guise of a weak or generic transcendence.
Messianity is a type of event that is unique each time but is of the wave type or, strictly speaking, of the flash type, on the condition that we treat the philosophical flash as a transfinite flux of immanent light. It is symptomatic that the most radical immanence that the philosophy of Christ has imagined (in Michel Henry) is doubled into two equal aspects, an ego-point and an oscillatory flux of autoaffectivity that is closed up in this ego and that fills it—thus, between a conceptual atomism (the ego is semitranscendent or transcendental) and an oscillating matter, that of affective tonalities. Once more the ego or the center carries it on the messianic wave, whereas the property of idempotence makes of the immanence of messianity a vector, and not a circle, which it underdetermines; the immanence of that which does nothing but come messianically must be sought in the greatest depth of the “without-return” or of the Resurrection of Christ. The under-going of Christ is the only real possible content of his mythological “return,” the only memory of his messianity. The messianic wave contains no atomist reference or intuition, is not conflated with the closed-up oscillatory, with the symptoms of divine transcendence. It is all of classical theological representation, and in particular trinitarian representation, that is inadequate. Fallen back on messianity, it would destroy its very principle of idempotence. Idempotence (idemscience …) on the contrary suspends the reciprocal mediation of God and of man. One can add the same term to it, or an Other, but since it brackets out the operation, it remains the idempotent Same. Consequently, the sacrifice of God is programmed in the form of neutralization, of his bracketed-out sufficiency: God himself is reduced as variable of messianity.
THE ACT OF NONACTING AS ABASEMENT OF TRANSCENDENCE
Idempotence is thus the capacity of an operation to produce the “same” effect, which confirms its identity, whatever the applications may be; but this formula is eminently ambiguous, and is the occasion to distinguish Judaism from Christ once more, to differentiate two types of acting or of messianity. To remain the same despite external operations of the variation (addition and subtraction) of predicates, properties, or cases of which it is the object is the capacity of an invariant or a transcendent One, the point that, through its transcendence, resists, despite external variations. This can be said of the Jewish people as an invariant that survives all historical pogroms and theoretical programs, in short “final solutions,” but that at the same time condemns them to a waiting, a messianism that is empty and formal, as empirically concrete as it may sometimes be. But to remain the same also has an entirely other sense when it is a matter of Christ, who introduces a great disruption, or rather a Turn, which is that of generic messianity. It is no longer that which remains, or resists variations, and which is designated by these eternal historical variations as the Same, stubborn in its transcendence; it is the Same that resists because it remains “in-itself-same” through its superposition with itself, and that at the same time depotentializes adverse forces. Anti-Semitic variations serve to make that which resists appear, as an operation of glorious and stubborn transcendence, whereas messianity does not have to constitute itself in history as that which resists: it is from the start indifferent to whatever variations or operations may be added to it as its reprises. The Messiah does not resist aggressively, and yet Christ is our “hard-and-fast” fortress, a photon rather than a spark, reduced to vectoriell immanence.
Christ has sovereignty over the Weak or the Simple, and a certain nonacting in action. Nonacting meaning that he does not have to act directly—that is to say, to re-act re-flexively—not that he does not act at all. He does not have to act mechanically or metaphysically, making use of double transcendence in order to resist it. The power of remaining the Same is the resumed messianity that depotentializes violence; it is not the power to bear the countertime of history and to suffer its avatars. All the more reason to include or exclude them, to make of them a philosophical machine, a synthesis in a great theologico-globalized system, or else a triumphant machine of vagaries and chance, including them by disjunction or by negation in an affirmative diaspora, like an eternal return of Judaism. Messianity is neither affirmative nor negative. Even its resistance is not direct or immediately addressed against exterior aggression, but is indirect and operates through suspense. The ultimate christic act, the act of ultimatum, passes by way of a nonacting that is neither a void nor a waiting. The incessance of salvation means, among other things, that theology has not elucidated, any more than philosophy, the essence of messianic causality.
At its root, messianity is thus no longer a circle that constitutes itself by reconstituting itself, a production that includes its reproduction, as philosophical circles do; it is a resumption foreclosed-to-variations and repetitions, which are, from the start, neutralized or vectorielly added, an immanent flux that is equal to itself no matter what the variations may be, and that in a certain way flows “into” itself. Nevertheless, when it is completed as generic constant through the insertion of the occasional transcendence of the world, it can be said that it constitutes “itself” as indifferentiation, neutralization through interference, affecting double transcendence or traversing it via a tunneling-effect. But even in this case where messianity is in some way effectuated, it is still distinguished from the Same of philosophy, which autoconstitutes itself as Eternal Return or overpowering.
Messianity is constituted not as power of return or of repetition but as duality of repetition suspended or resumed. It is one time each time one sole unilateral parenthesis, which now affects transcendence itself as transfinite. Among philosophers two parentheses are needed around the world; for Jews and Christians there is one, through the transcendent subtraction of the other; but Christ needs none, and thus he can always add one depending on the occasion, but if so it remains immanent. Messianity does not put itself, operationally, between parentheses, through a transcendent act of constitution. But as infinite as it may be, once it has to do with the world, it is completed by one sole parenthesis that opens it unifacially, as Stranger, onto the world.
Unlike the concept that determines in idealist manner the experience of the materialist void, which subtracts itself from it and conserves it specularly, messianity underdetermines events by putting the world to which they belong under condition of transformation. We are neighbors of idealists only in the same way as we are neighbors of materialist or Far Eastern philosophers of the void. The transformation here is one of ontological form, not one of material content. Doubtless under-going or underdetermination is an operation that does not directly affect reality in-itself, the Messiah has no goals internal to transcendence, but only an
immanent work upon it: he indirectly depotentializes or sterilizes the dominations and the doublets that make the world. In other words, the act of an idempotent nonacting does indeed have a content that is a neutralized materiality, one that has lost its macroscopic autopositionality through complex superpositions; it is not a material void or an empty set. In particular we must distinguish between the empty set and the idempotent wave that
neutralizes or underdetermines every positional content. This is the condition of the transformation of the occasion, which loses its sufficiency and becomes indiscernible or superposable. There is obviously a stratification of operations of this idempotent neutralization as a function of the structure of the object “philosophy,” but it is an occasional phenomenon distinct from superposition. Idempotent sterility transforms the structures of Christianity and its theology, whereas the absolute void of mathematical set theory and the void of the dialectic, not to mention the atomist void, all conserve them without transforming them, just purifying them ideally, suppressing them, and reproducing them specularly. It is quite understandable that according to this problematic, external to Christ, the only significant event in the sphere of Christianity would be the intervention of Saint Paul.
UNTRACEABLE MESSIANITY
The event that we are concerned with bears the singular name of “Christ.” But by definition of the idempotent fluxes that guide or mobilize innumerable particles of kerygma, of transcendence of religious extraction, messianity is a wave packet of liveds, or a complex of messianic vectors. Like every wavelike phenomenon, messianity is a set of pathways, innumerable and undecidable ways, possible pathways that are hazardous to pursue, without any identified traceability, or that leave traces only after the fact, once they have been detected or received in the so-called conscious element or the element of belief. Monotheistic religions, including the Christian religion, are encumbered with local Christs or imaginary prophets who are like discernable macroscopic representations of those messiahs who are the ultimate and indiscernible faithful—but become warlike rivals. The immanent packet of fluxes is also one and multiple, but belongs to the microscopic order, with neither analysis nor synthesis, without passing by way of a “Platonic” interlacing of forms. It is not one and multiple in the macroscopic order of metaphysics and its entities: the generic disregards genera in favor solely of man. From macroscopic anarchy to the unknowing of superposed messianic waves—gnostic knowledge that does not know—there are doubtless effects of resemblance between the orders. But we do not know the possible pathways of the messianic vector and of the kerygma (its “Feynman paths”), and this unknowing is a well-determined ignorance, which does not result from mélange and confusion.
Messianity has no mask (Nietzsche) and, inversely, no interiority (Kierkegaard), but only a vectoriell immanence. It is also not identifiable by the Churches except in the “eyes of the world.” Neither time nor place can be parameters of it. There is no traceability of the messiah—this is a great achievement of Judaism that Catholicism, above all, has forgotten through paganism. But Judaism has multiplied and rendered apocryphal messianic advents, the better to exacerbate waiting and make it passionate. When Levinas philosophizes the trace, and Derrida follows him, it is a matter of what remains of it as memory and as past eternally present in the self. They do not venture into the most solitary desert of the soul, a desert of unknowing that accompanies the knowledge that we are, and whose cognizance does not suppose a prior trace via a remainder of Platonism. All that remains is the occasion of “theology” rather than the after-the-fact trace left by a trauma. Just as there are philosophers who refuse to break with opinion and common sense, there are religious confessions that refuse to break with pagan doxa, that are still nostalgic for polytheism in the form of “polychristic” representations.
The philosophico-religious problematic can be recognized by the way in which it functions on the invariant of phenomenological distance in alternating contrary ways, of more or less, of saturation or desaturation, whereas the least positive science that we require as a model functions on idempotence and noncommutativity. The immanental phenomenon of the generic lived is found at the end neither of an annihilating (and “desaturating”) destructive distance—destructive, more exactly, of the idempotent “packet” of liveds—nor of one saturated with an overplenitude of sense or alterity, as if the distance were that of an alterity or of a transcendence, of an Other getting a foothold directly on either the lived or the claimant (the “interloquant”). The lived phenomenon is simplified and transformed, the simple in this case being superposition rather than saturation. The ego is reduced generically rather than interpellated, and the problem of intersubjectivity is no longer posed for it since, without being many or solitary, it is duel, the identity of a binary. The couplet Ego/Other is traversed by the Same and redistributed according to a unilateral duality. The subject cannot be interlocuted or interpellated, because there is no interlocutor, but only an Other fallen-into-Same but despite that always Other, albeit a weakened Other.
The faithful of-last-instance perhaps do not come forth like knights of faith but, for sure, like probable, indiscernible, or quantum thieves. Their probability is a probability in principle, because the religions that cultivate mystery so well have perhaps lost the secret of the secret—namely, that the most real of faith has been revealed to them as underexistence, as the under-going of an ontologically wavelike rather than substantial nature. If the messianity that is declared in the sayings of Christ is established on the ruins of theological sufficiency, it falls to us as the faithful to make it known—that is, to make of it a scandal, a paradox, and a folly.