GRACE AND HUMANS, A UNILATERAL COMPLEMENTARITY
The “foundation” of the Christ-science cannot be the same foundation that religions, in all their transcendence, imagine for faith: illumination, revelation, vision, or “inspiration,” wind, breath, or light. Everything that is of the order of light, of the quasi-instantaneous flash, or of the spark is indeed a theoretical argument, but a corpuscular one that blinds itself: the theoretical as self-blinding. When light is made streaming and flowing, as with the mystics, the problem better reveals its true nature, its “wavelike” phenomenal content, even if this is often covered over, flattened, by the officialization of beliefs, images, and dogmas. The metaphor of revelation is a contraction of sensible phenomena that must be made explicit and rendered intelligible by means of an adequate science. Religious-type faith is a belief-with-closed-eyes, bad blindness rather than bad faith, and continues to project afterimages in transcendence—the shadows that people the celestial cave.
A fortiori, when it comes to making a claim to a science, and to thinking invention rather than revelation, what is needed—what has always been needed—is some scientific
model or other supposed given as more rigorous than others, or at least as implying a cut with anterior or ordinary experience. We find symptoms of this in Christ, who makes use of a certain formal rationality (the Judaic) in order to surpass it, just as he uses an element of Greek rationality, mediation. But the science capable of explaining the wavelike contracted aspect of revelation and, what is more, the statuified images and the dogmas that accompany it as the corpuscular material of religions were not yet within his reach. Once it becomes a means or an integral part of generic faith, and once the old rationalities have been brought down to the function of mere models or productive forces, the introduction of science into the material of beliefs creates a revelation-effect not entirely unlike that which we find in invention or discovery, but which is of a new type. This introduction is obviously not without its psychological and historical conditions, but they are solely of an occasional order and do not constitute the process of invention itself. The revelatory aspect, now under immanent scientific condition, is reduced in its most transcendent aspects to the preemption of the lived by idempotence, recalling divine rapture or mystical ecstasy. It tears the subject from its individuality and incorporates it into the generic stance, a mystical body of which humanity is capable through its own means or those it appropriates. This algebraic rapture of belief transforms the latter by way of a new rationality which is that of messianity, that of the strong analytic and weak synthetic, without this involving any medium whatsoever, any equilibrium operating through exchange and compensation. Strictly speaking, we must not mix these two aspects, as if they tended toward each other; they retain the specific autonomy of their natures and, if they function together, they do so only within the apparatus of salvation that is Christ. The “opposites” or the occurrences of the idempotent term—here, Christ—are superposed, and form a complementary duality or a messianic machine with a broken or complementary circuit. If there is a return of Christ, it is thus an immanent reprise by faith of messianity, rather than the repetition of a pretraced circuit or trajectory.
What is the subject, if there is one, that brings about this resumption? Revelation as preemption of the subject by idempotence is an immanent or generic formalization of the worldly subject. It is not caught up in a circuit of action/reaction. The idempotent nonact finds some lived offered up by the transcendence that it neutralizes or “formalizes,” which it thus manages to tear away from the world. Revelation is this tearing, which is consummated on the Cross, the Cross from which transcendence remains hanging like an old man’s rags. All of this becomes generic when the material is that of the philosophical mélange or religious doxa that sets itself about questioning, intervening with, and harassing humans. Then the individual subject has no power to choose or to will qua generic. At best, he wills this or that condition, and cooperates as an occasion. But he is gripped “automatically” by the weak force, by nonacting, the generic indifference of idempotence, and begins to flow “in” it as “in”-Christ, the only grace now conceivable. It is enough that the world manifests itself in its manner, and that there is thus some lived “available” to resume idempotence as superposition or the superposition that is in idempotence. Humans as inhabitants of the world cooperate in this immanent grace, awakening or activating it; but they are a reservoir of passive acts in-the-last-instance for its operation. Grace, also, is a unilateral complementarity, and exits from the antinomies of its unitary concept.
The result is the foreclosure of messianity, or its noncommutativity with the philo-theo-logical subject, which cannot return. Precisely the “return of Christ” is impossible, it is one of the shadows of the celestial cave; noncommutativity prohibits it and can only declare imaginary albeit objective the psychology of mystics and of believers insofar as it is authenticated by theologians.
REVELATION AND DISCOVERY: SUPERPOSITION AND SATURATION
Positive-scientific discoveries such as the laborious discovery of a new constant, which sometimes end in a jubilant illumination, have some characteristics in common with revelation as a supposedly divine operation within the subject. There is even an experience of grace involved in the greatest of such works. As to the science-in-Christ or the vision-in-One, how is it to be situated between these extremes? It is all the more important not to conflate these three ecstases—it is not the same light nor the same enthusiasm nor the same localization, at least if the revelation called “messianity” is understood through an immanence that implies a minimum of unilateral duality between the instances in play.
There is, however, a paradox that allows us to distinguish immanent scientific discovery from the philosophico-theological “revelation” of a marvelous and illuminating exteriority, two things that are very often confused for each other. It is partly linked to the vision-in-One, which, as we recall, has to do with the removal of principles of sufficiency. How can a discovery be made by means of immanent mechanisms, as is the case for the science-in-Christ? It requires a new classification or sequencing of transcendence in its various heterogeneous moments. It is a question of breaking with its supposedly double character, its doublet symmetry, its oversaturation, of distinguishing between a simple or vectoriell ascender without transcendent object, a nonecstatic and autonomous ascendance, which remains under what we shall call (without explaining here) a certain waterline that distinguishes simple vectoriell pulsion from transcendence or its apparent existence as double. This ascender as pure vector affects doubled transcendence, drawing it into a simplicity stripped bare or “discovered” “in its naked functioning.” What is discovered if not the simplicity of exteriority, the immanent or vectoriell essence of ecstasy become instasy? It is less an achievement or a fulfilling, or even a saturation, than a liberation—more an impoverishment than an enrichment. Scientific discovery is precisely not a revelation that would be re-covered by a second transcendence; strictly speaking, it is a recovering of the simple or nonecstatic vectoriell essence of transcendence.
Idempotent distance is thus distinguished from “phenomenological” or ecstatic “distance,” from the depths deployed at the behest of the subject; it is contracted into itself and full of interferences but not saturated, completed but not closed through a return into the circle of the same. Unilateral duality allows us no longer to conflate an immanent “saturation” of faith via idempotence, borne by the fluxes of messianity, with a divine saturation via double transcendence that would close off messianity and would make faith into a fortress. Thus, revelation understood as christic is not entirely foreign to generic theoretical discovery, to the vision-in-One, which, as we maintain elsewhere, is a characteristic of the lived of knowledge. When the lived is forced to rank alongside idempotence, it is grasped, surprised by its discovery of the immanent extent of the almost infinite phenomenal possibilities delivered by dis-covered religion.
The revelation of the “in-Itself-same” “in” the Same, which is therefore not a saturated given, explains the feeling of oceanic flux and of an interiority of grace according to which the lived flows, runs, or carries one along. But equally, it explains the affect of exteriority or the “shock” undergone by a transcendence that is stripped bare and that is thus no longer that of a force hitting an object, but of a fallen into-immanence, like an internal collapse. The messiah that “I” am is the generic feeling of flowing across one transcendence to another, across dogmas and beliefs, without stopping at any as “last,” since the generic is the movement that goes from man to man “under” the world or under the waterline, as if through a tunneling-effect. Such a superposition of discovery and of revelation in true invention is the secret of gnostic knowledge. It is the doing of generic automats that are neither singular-egological nor universal, but that we have called “quartial” rather than “partial.” The Messiah, still less messianity, is not a true Idea to be imitated, nor any other datum or factum of consciousness; it is a messianic wave in which float liveds and dogmas in the state of “particles” or “clones.” This continuum of the lived and of its multiple phases, certain thinkers or discoverers have managed to make it or have let it burst forth more than others. Messianity is the miracle of a logical (algebraic) form made entirely of the lived, a way to follow faithfully, a flowing objectivity such as Husserl, for example, sought for so long. Let us cease to await the Messiah a first or second time, and to imitate Christ…. Human intelligence does not imitate the divine understanding either in creation or in production; it is the ultimation and universion of these relations to the world.
CONVERSION: ULTIMATION: UNIVERSION
For the Christ-science, conversion is a religious appearance—objective no doubt, but meaningful only from inside belief; it cannot engender the most faithful of faiths. Conversion in the classic sense is the law of commutativity that is valid for the macroreligious world: a reciprocal conversion of God and Man as experienced by the mystics in the form of a twofold ecstasy. To the conversion of God to Man in Christ, a second creation, responds that of Man into God. This circle is a kind of theological eternal return of the same, and occurs in the Christian context founded on the couplet sacrifice/conversion. But if the sacrifice is that of God, as we shall hypothesize, then the messianic man who is born of the sacrifice of God does not need to be converted; religion, however, must be uni-verted outside of itself. As decisive as the idempotent addition of the two knowledges (Logos and Torah) is, the second algebraic principle, that of noncommutativity, establishes this addition in the space of Prior-to-priority or Last Instance.
The Last Instance is posited via an operation of so-called ultimation. Three claimants may contend for this function, and we have retained all three qua symptoms, a little like the “three sources” of Marxism: quantum theory and its microphenomenology, Marxism and its last-instance, and gnosis and its human knowledge of the world. Who “decides,” then, to make the addition of two knowledges in view of the projected science if not, psychologically, a certain “subject” who is hesitating between philosophy and science, unsatisfied with epistemology, and who, exceeded by his own contingent hesitations and variations, ends up making the wager of a rigorous gnosis? This, in any case, relates to the psychological conditions of the christ-Science, and is not determining here. Moreover a science of theology contains, from the point of view of the latter, a more interesting movement of apparent conversion, which goes from philosophical or theological sufficiency to the scientific or generic stance. At this point, if neither science nor philosophy is problematic, being nothing other than what they are or claim to be, their combination, on the other hand, is problematic to the highest degree. But in this “turn” that would be the conversion to the generic, quantum theory imposes its principles from the outset, and takes hold of the conversion, which it transforms into a superposition. Superposition has an effect of uni-version—it tips philosophy out of sufficiency or makes it fall into-human-immanence. The subject has hardly operated this conversion before it is in effect already “turned” or uni-verted into a generic subject as an outcome of this addition. We say uni-version, but it is no longer a question of a “religious” and believing conversion to gnosis. If we suppose that a philosophico-religious subject decides to attempt this wager, it is itself immediately transformed, and cannot recognize itself exactly in the new man who emerges as the correlate of its operation. On the one hand it is displaced into-prior-to-priority, humanized—that is to say, generically formalized; and on the other hand it is deindividualized without losing all lived, losing just its egological sufficiency.
THE DETECTION OF THE MESSIANIC VECTOR: FROM WORLD-CIRCLE TO WORLD-SCREEN
Another aspect of this is the empirical, continuous, and slow invention of this science within the time of history, on the basis of the givens of theology and under its authority. But the wager of ultimation as superposition takes place in one single throw of the dice, where the subject is conserved only within its being-transformed as generic or messianic lived. Ultimation thus has two aspects: a contingent aspect as subject, and a necessary aspect, not in the sense of a sublation interiorizing contingency in the form of the fall of the dice, but in the sense of a superposition of the two religious Laws that produce a constant (the Same) including the contingent variable—in sum, generic man. The philosophical throw of dice as transcendental throw is replaced by the immanental throw or vector of messianity. It is the generic matrix as prior-to-first superposition that throws the dice of science and philosophy in such a way that they are added “quantically” (not arithmetically)—an immanental gesture, whose outcome is not a falling of the dice onto a table, but a throwing of messianic vectors in an imaginary quasi-Hilbertian space. Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Deleuze, and many other lovers of philosophical immanence and of dice throws trapped within the circle of the world have disregarded messianic vectoriellity, for fundamentally Greco-religious or pagan reasons. The Nietzschean gaming table is a sort of transcendent dark precursor of immanence, limited and entirely belonging to the transcendental gesture. In the generic matrix, our two dice, science and theology, do not fall upon that plane of immanence that would obviously be the world. They form a messianic vector that crosses the cosmic wall, grabs hold of transcendences, makes them interfere, and thus creates innumerable and indiscernible fluxes or lived guiding functions of these transcendences. Never totalized or closed by the world-all, by the world-point, they are added only on a world-screen that simply detects them without their falling locally upon it and globally within it.
To capture through faith the hazardous effect of generic messianity, the world must abandon its transcendence, and must itself also become immanent like a detector screen. The vector of messianity underdetermines the world, or at least its philosophico-theological form, as a detector screen that belongs entirely to the “Christ” apparatus. The apparatus of the measurement of messianity is not external to it; it also is deduced under occasion of the messianic wave function, and within the limits of the latter’s immanence. Generic immanence operates a nonvicious genesis through the transformation of this transcendence. It is an immanental deduction of the world-screen, not a transcendental deduction in the manner of philosophers—a thought without materialist topic, a radical base, a Last Instance without being a backworld. Evidently, the dice throw remains pagan; it is a conversion of dice to earth and heaven, to their reversibility as world; it affirms the primacy of the fall of the dice over their throwing, and forgets the prior-to-priority of the throwing as guiding vector of the dice that it makes interfere. Since the messianic Simple or the vector is not folded, but remains the unfolded that it under-goes, it has no need of a plane of immanence to prevent it from falling back into the void, but itself constitutes the radical basis, with neither plan(e) nor foundation. The generic messiah transforms the world-circle, the world-prison, into a world-screen that detects him by liberating him from the imaginary localizations and globalizations of religions, by transforming him as far as possible.
THE SUBVERSION OF THE MAN OF SCIENCE AS HUMAN TYPE: IDEMSCIENTS OR THE SIMPLE ONES
Philosophy is founded on the principles of identity and reason; what Christ contributes is of an entirely other nature—the principle of idempotence, or again, of simple or idemscient science; and a function or factor of the imaginary. Following the mystics, philosophers have also sought the “simple,” but the simple cannot be an anonymous, transcendent, and punctual entity, a point. The critique of ecstatic representation must be followed by a critique of the punctuality of egological immanence—the nonecstatic must be of a wavelike nature. As for the gnostics, they know that humans are the Simple Ones, and define them by way of idemscient knowledge, repetition suspended or neutralized by way of reprise. The Simple is not a glorious or stubborn invariant, but the flux of equality that flows into itself as through a tunnel, without going beyond itself, a factum for those who have a knowledge of which they are not, at the outset, the knowers. The Christ-factum is an Idemscient brother of the gnostics, a subject-knowledge as index and function of its own announcement as variable. Religious gnosis had a subject, a messianic one even, but in a religious context. The oracular/popular style of some christic gnosis or of that under-logos must be brought to its oraxiomatic form.
We distinguish the Jews of scholarship (rather than knowledge), the Greeks of thought (philosophers), and the simple ones of knowledge who are the Idemscients or gnostics. The Idemscients have a simple knowledge, in the sense that it cannot reflexively know itself. Paradoxically, they are, as irreflexive knowledge, the human type closest to the scientists of the future, the creators and manipulators of automata. The intuition of science as in-One, the affinity of science and generic immanence in-the-last-instance, has always been the quantum-oriented inspiration of nonphilosophy. Its initial “intuition” not being philosophical, it is now developed with the contribution of quantum theory and in the direction of a complex and generic affinity with philosophy. Perhaps we ought to abandon the term “scientific” as too positive and technical, troublesome and undignified, a being of mass control, and along with it that of the “scientist”; perhaps they are too archaic and ill suited to the contemporary type of the man of science and should be replaced by the more exact term “Idemscient.” “Idemscient” is the closest term to “man-(of)-science,” “man for science (
homme à science),”
homo sive scientia. The gnostic man of knowledge admits almost the reverse, a science-(of)-man. Man is defined not as individual subject, but as the function of a superposition of science and philosophy.
The generic bears with it the miracle of this encounter of a paradigm that will become scientific and a lived that opens the way to humans harassed by the world. It refuses the humanist notions that belong to a transcendent, Greek, hierarchical categorization, with its famous distinction between vita contemplativa and vita practica, and whose ultimate fulfillment is the Nietzschean typology of the overman. The Simple unify man and science according to a new relation such that science, for philosophy, contributes a lived-without-life and forms with it a function of generic humanity. The Simple Ones are not scientists, they seek neither glory nor gain from their knowledge; and yet, if there are “scientists” in the sense of idemscients, these indeed are they.