Christo-Fiction: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem

The second mystery has to do with its symbolic status. It is most often understood as a conjunction of two essences or two historical natures, of two beliefs, Greek and Judaic. This conjunction makes of the Christian either a “converted Jew” or a “converted Greek,” either of whom must, for their part, reconcile or render compossible the two authorities. Do not this differend and the compromise solutions to it form the greater part of twentieth-century philosophy? We have the choice of converting ourselves to the other side, either to Judaism or to ontology—such is the misery of this hybridization of thought that remains in a state of division and hesitation that exports its own war.

Christ is the condition under which the believer can be uni-verted to faith, torn away from his sufficiency as Jew or indeed as Greek. Paul is cast down as Jew, illuminated as Greek—such is the folly of a collision that remains transcendent, like that of two worlds. He privileges the two sides alternately, but posits them together within a simultaneity for which the Logos is necessary, and which constitutes a matrixial duality. This is therefore already the multiplication, perhaps even the reciprocal multiplication, of languages, as a translation of two idioms into each other. But the dialectic remains solely an affair of a mélange that adjusts itself between languages that are contradictory at worst, opposed at best, and that does not bring into play the “real,” but only logic, as Kierkegaard would say. The Cross lived in this way represents a transcendent logical or dialectical interpretation of what really happens in it qua generic matrix: doubtless already a multiplication of variables, but one that remains reciprocally commutative, because it remains within a philosophical horizon and does not become generic or follow any scientific model. In this form, the Cross represents the incomplete beginnings, still given over to religious transcendence, of the generic matrix. It is the ultimate triumph of God over Christ, of Father over Son, and not yet the becoming human or immanent of the Cross. Paul remains Jewish through the Greek and Greek through the Jewish. Having lacked quantification, he will lend himself, at best, to a deconstruction. Instead, uni-version or ultimation would be what we call the superposition of a being-overwhelmed or blinded and of a being-illuminated, far from being that weak collision of dialectic that will resolve itself, as usual, through a flux of new “didactic” writings and a planetary evangelization.

In interpreting the Cross, it is essential to no longer think historically, in a determinist or macroscopic manner. It is an indivisible phenomenal bloc. We maintain on the one hand that it is a question of a double death—the death of God through the death of the singular individual Jesus; and on the other hand we do not separate as two historical sequences the Crucifixion, leading to the Tomb, and what is usually called the Resurrection or the “rising” of the Son to the Father, the Ascension. It is a question of thinking these phenomena in the “holistic” spirit of quantum nonseparability, and according to unilateral complementarity. This drama is made of continuous or entangled phases that the theological imaginary tends to dissociate or atomize into moments, according to the corpuscular logic of theology. This is quite understandable: the point of view of each of the two religious contexts and their theology presupposes itself in itself, and hence can only apprehend autonomous denumerable or discernable events, so as then to bind them back together, cause to consequent, according to an extraordinarily trivial and “literary” temporal determinism. Whereas the ensemble of the Cross and the Resurrection interpreted as a complex matrix rather than as a final synthesis or sublation is indeed that which tears the Cross from its barbarous “religious” meaning and underdetermines it as what we call a suspended sacrifice.

Although it is therefore not just a raw material like any other for a science, and although its generic content is manifest in a scientific way, the Cross is an ideality but a materiel one, a materiel(–)a priori phenomenon, a fusion or superposition of a priori matter and significations less historical or empirical than the traditional ones. Logos and Torah are ideal structures that function a priori but immanently, in vectoriell and materiel conditions. We must not idealize and separate symbols in a transcendent way and speak of metaphor—this is to conflate the immanent lived of the experience of the Cross with spiritual and metaphysical realities. Without this materielity, moreover, one can understand nothing of the passion of the mystics, of the imitation of the Cross, nor of the fetishism of the Catholico-pagan Church. We must constitute the a priori and concrete sense of all of these phenomena, such as the descent from the Cross. When materialized, the deathly effect of the Crucifixion will no doubt take on a banal and pictorial form, but one that must be deciphered, not just represented. The body of Christ penetrated by thorns and nails, crucified, arms wide, offered up to the world that he abandons and to the God who has abandoned him, losing his unity as an individual, a wavelike unity of breath and a corpuscular unity of blood that ceases to circulate within the interior form of a living creature, to be diffused as life diffuses outside of itself: will he not bleed eternally? Is this not a physical body raised to the state of a fiction-body?

It is here that the historical determinism of theology must be called into question. It transforms the sacrifice of Christ into a “first cause” of the Christianity of the Church. This still-macroscopic image of the Cross in fact only initiates a sort of becoming-Dionysus of the crucified who has not yet attained his threshold of generic quantification. If we admit that the formula of the “converted Jew” translates the reception of Judaism into the terms of Logos, then what would the interpretation of the reception of Logos in Judaic terms be, if not closure within being, a transcendence closed up in the immanence of the tomb? But the process of the Cross cannot stop at this antinomy, otherwise it will see nothing in it but a scene, a theater. Something else however, an unprecedented event, had to be produced virtually or is in the process of under-going: the resurrection of Christ and his ascension, a new amplitude of history. Descent to the Tomb, Resurrection, and Ascension can only be phases of the same event and must be able to be read, but they precisely are not read, in the very emptiness of the tomb. If the Cross is understood on the model of what takes place in the generic matrix, it is more complex than an enshrouding rite, and does not belong to the logic of temporal sequences isolated or linked together by the imaginary of a “sense” that would ultimately be in the hands of God. As indivisible or global experiment, it contains a vessel that is closed but capable of being reopened, which tries to “trap” Christ as one traps a particle in the void. Christ is trapped in the void of the Tomb as in a black box—he descends into it alive, he arises from it alive, Christ is dead (and) alive! What has happened, what paradox worthy of Schrödinger, but with an opposite meaning to his? In a sense, we shall never know what happens here, whatever projections we might make of it. And yet there has been no lack of efforts to distribute the events one after another, to establish an intelligible causal order at the price of the unintelligible paradoxes that we try to totalize, war-weary, in “the Mystery of the Cross.” The Empty Tomb is an experimental vessel that belongs to the Cross—that is to say, to the process of Resurrection—not a foundation. It would contain, in the state of an axiom, the program of the under-going of the living Christ, were it not for the fact that Christianity hastens to partition this coming and to flatten it onto the “good sense” of a story to tell believers. The Resurrection itself as historical event is threatened if we take it as a historical event via the fundamental axiom of faith; and whereas its importance can hardly be denied, its isolation from the other moments, its institutionalization as the fundamental and founding dogma of faith, risks inverting its futurality and relegating the Ascension to the rank of a terminal effect, a consequence, like the result of a process, and transforming it into an object of fantastical belief. From our point of view, the Ascension, which is often passed over in silence, or is accentuated least, regarded as an effect that follows the Resurrection, is, along with the latter, the more than fundamental (prior-to-first) operation that underdetermines the sacrifice and the obscure night of the Tomb—but why? After all, theology is storytelling.

To exit from this symbolic, sublimating, and christo-centric vision, we must first take seriously this torture device, perceive it with the intensity of mystics on the verge of hallucination, grasp this material support otherwise than as a wooden support for an operation whose political and spiritual meaning unfolds elsewhere. The wood of the cross is an a priori materielity, as we have said—even its form is invested with an a priori that is not empty, its figure swiftly makes sense of its crossing: it is not only the crossing of a double operation or of a symbolic event. It is also prompt and clean in imitation and repetition. Just as there is a materiel formalism in the generic science of humans, so the Cross is the intimacy of an affect, a formalism, or an operator of materielity: we are tempted to say a nonmathematical algorithm for a stance, rather than a foundational tale or a theater, as certain “believers” have felt it to be.

Let us remark then that two types of hesitation or oscillation are possible in grasping the phenomena of the Cross. The first is macroscopic: interpretation hesitates between intuition and theological concept, image and sense, the two faces of the symbol, one in which sense is rooted or schematized in intuition, the other in which it aims at an ideal sense. We have hardly left the level of a phenomenological or quasi-linguistic apprehension here. The second hesitation is deeper and does not entirely overlap with the rationalist and critical duality of intuition and concept: it is the hesitation between the macroscopic apprehension and another more secret apprehension, still macroscopic, but that opens the way to a quantum apprehension of the phenomenon, and this in two ways: First, on the quantum model of the perception of a cube. The Cross is a whole precisely centered on the central position of Christ, who himself is inscribed in a circle. The pictorial perception of the Cross takes this ambiguity into account, but theological thought seems to take less notice of it. Now, this ambiguous figure is a whole given in transparent perception, but is now convex (the cross brought to the fore or in relief, protruding into the foreground), now concave (the cross receding back into the circle). This oscillation of perception as it hesitates between relief and withdrawal is a phenomenological topos that has taken many forms, some dialectical, but it gives rise to a quantum interpretation once it is a question of explaining in what way the perception of the sense of the figure is aleatory, hesitant, unexpected, and only probable. It is obvious that in ordinary theological perception the Cross is a corpuscular rather than a wavelike or interfering object, which confirms its reading in terms of scandal or folly whose element is transcendence. But it must be taken in all of its phenomenological aspects, in particular, the internal oscillation of its perceived-being. All the more so given that then the conditions are in place for another, nonphenomenological and nontheological mystery to appear in the form of a circularity of the Cross distributed in an entirely internal quadripartite, in four sections or quarter-turns. Here again the paradox is reinforced by the insistence upon the torsion or the crossing of an opening and a closing through which it is reflected in itself, and turns to a cruci-centrism that is perhaps not its “last” word, even if it is the last word of its transparent circle. From this point of view, which initiates a quantum theory but a still-corpuscular one, reduced to its two axes, which break up the circle into its four quarters, it is the bars upon which Christ is crucified or dismembered that appear: the horizontal bar of the Logos, the vertical bar of Judaism.

Messianity is the real content of the Crucifixion. The real content of the Gospel is not its apparent content: it must be understood according to an algebraic or quartial (rather than “partial”) “logic,” as an event that is neither total nor partial. It is less a turn or a conversion of thought that is necessitated here than a negative, “impossible,” or “irrational” quarter-turn, a futural uni-version or an entry into the sphere of vectoriellity. The quarter-turn is not an abstraction of the theological circle. It is a vector identifiable in the Ascension, which is often the moment that is forsaken, the least visible moment in the christic phenomenon, the least empirical or the least historical. We understand the Cross in terms of the Resurrection and the Ascension, not the inverse, which is the confusion of the real or futural movement of Christ with the apparent movement of Christianity. This is why when we speak of the Cross we do not separate the Crucifixion, the Descent and the Entombment, the Resurrection and the Ascension, treating them as an analytically indivisible phenomenal bloc, but also as synthetically indecomposable in terms of Logos and Torah. And to make messianity and faith entirely intelligible, we must once more consider the vessel that these three moments form, and treat it as a site for the experimentation and the performativity of faith. Otherwise the Cross will remain a philosophical matrix—that is, a matrix that is interpreted twice philosophically, by variables both theological and ultimately religious as well as scientific, and then by the inevitable doubling of philosophy rather than the superposition of science with itself.

To sum up, the Crucifixion is first from the point of view of experimental appearances and the subject that is implicated in them, but the Ascension and the Resurrection together form a prior-to-priority: more than a “beginning,” the very condition of the functioning of the matrix, what we call its Last Instance. This is why Christ is not a new foundation within a history in progress, but the Last Instance that abases history as a point of view. Neither the Resurrection nor the Ascension are objects of belief, because everything in belief is opposed in them, or makes of them miraculous events worthy of “fools for Christ.” They are the objects of faith as messianic in-the-last-instance. But together they form an act of emergence that Christianity has understood as source-event, positive or indeed negative certainty, reducing their prior-to-priority to a more banal historical priority. Ultimately, Christ does not invert the course of history, but uni-verts it or includes it in himself, without for all that reconstituting a finality—but only an orientation, cognizance of which, or faith in which, will only ever be “probable.”