Christo-Fiction: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem

FROM RESURRECTION TO MESSIANITY

Supposing that a “science of the resurrection” (Porphyry) is possible, how is it to be imagined and formalized? The Resurrection is the retroactively foundational myth of Christianity. Our project is to draw from it the possibility of a rigorous fiction, a christo-fiction. It is a condensate of Judaic preconceptions and Greek images, which Christianity has brought to an unequaled amplitude. Some of its interpretations are remarkable. Its interpretation can be an act that is variously empirico-imaginary, metaphorical, or mythological (this is the lowest degree of interpretation). Or else a spiritual act, an idealist and mystical interpretation between re-creation and renaissance. Or again, in topological terms of a subject-body incarnating an ideality, a materialist interpretation symmetrical with the above. These interpretations oscillate between the imagery of popular belief, the dialectic of conceptual sublation (Hegel), and topology. The interpretation proposed here intersects with all the others without being identical to them; it is said in human terms, “in-the-last-humanity,” in terms of lived materielity, but not in materialist terms; in terms of algebraic objectivity but not topological objectivity; and finally in dynamic terms of vectoriellity rather than static and corpuscular terms. This interpretation posits a concentrated hylomorphism in the state of fusion: it is not humanist but generic, not macroscopic but quantic, it does not make of resurrection an operation of dialectical sublation, but an insurrectional and generic event. We have to come back to the simplest notions. We lack a scientific, that is to say, quantum-theoretical, theory of death and resurrection. To resurrect can be said in Greek as either “to awaken,” “to rise up,” or “to recover.” It is a question, in these tiny nuances, of the difference between a vectoriell interpretation and a dialectical interpretation ultimately founded on the ontology of being and nothingness. The vectoriell is opposed to the idea of absolute death, nothingness-death, the tomb-as-absolute-void, and ultimately to the work of the negative that is the substance of the abstraction of these theories. It conceives it as radical death or “sickness unto death” (Kierkegaard), that from which Lazarus is rescued by Jesus’s ordering him to arise. Death must therefore be a less abyssal ground than philosophers (Hegel, Heidegger, Badiou) postulate—less an empty tomb than a crypt, a “tomb-as-void” inhabited by cadavers, occupied by victimized bodies. As to the awakening, rising, recovering, there is obviously very little to distinguish it from the gnostic or Christian awakening, or even revival, and from the Greek exit from the sleep of the dead. Between the sublation of concepts, the relieving of a guard, the relay of a race, the raising of children, or the removal of bodies, all of these amphibolies are possible. All these nuances have in common the form of an ascension, but only one has the vectoriell form and the simplicity of a phase, of a nonecstatic ascension as simple initiation of a transcendence that does not close, or of an open movement that can close up or sum over itself but not in itself. It must be recognized that there is something in this equivocity that has made philosophers and theologians rejoice in their common fetishist obsession, and not only because of the duality of operations of Aufhebung, maker of miracles and philosophical angels, phantoms, specters, diverse appearings. What we call the vectoriell or quantum interpretation can only reduce this variety to a dynamic factor, a transcending that on the one hand would be its essence or concentrate, and on the other hand will not be closed into an all or into a transcendent entity such as a thing-in-itself, a world, or a saturated divinity. This essence of all transcendence can only be a vector capable of being added continually to itself or to others, and of being multiplied without fundamentally changing in nature or genus, without itself sinking into a tomblike autoclosure. The vectoriell interpretation of the Resurrection finds what is dynamic in this operation, what is ascendant without ecstasis (√ − 1), that is to say, messianic. The messianity of the messiah-factor is the radical origin of the Resurrection, the Ur-transcendenz that is no longer the transcendence of “Dasein” nor of the “Ur” whence … Abraham set out.

Messianity is what there is of the continuous, if not the repeatable, in the subjective raising, in the emergence or the “relief” on the basis not of the bottom (fond) of the empty tomb but of the void as the resource (fonds) of the tomb. The ascent or the insurrection of the Resurrection is measured by the phase that separates it from the fund of the lived that is inert or deprived of reprise, and not by nothingness, which would never inhabit a tomb. We come back to the inert and “dead” tomb, but not nothingness, as is the belief of those creationists, theologians, and philosophers. The Resurrection is not a creation but a reprise or a resumption of the wave of the lived. The Ascension is the phenomenal meaning of the Resurrection, the vectoriell kernel of every raising and relief before it is closed up into itself or sinks into the enclosure of a historically saturated event. In other words, the Resurrection has no empirically imaginary or factual meaning; it is not even an event closed onto itself, but a transfinite process of phases. It is not even an event that brings itself about, except through its idempotent reprise, because it is the very-first beginning of the event, that which, with the flash of the Logos, exits from the tomb of the night, and the radicality of whose emergence makes for christophany. The Resurrection is certainly completed or terminated at every instant, but it continues in us without closing or being closed. It is not eternal like a current present: we shall say that it is futural.

However a correction, or another accent, must be added to our first impression of these rather precipitate statements. As the Gospels say, Christ is not seen or visible through an operation of subjects. He makes himself seen. And that which makes itself seen is less the Resurrection itself than the Resurrected in-person, if we might say so. We must accept that the Resurrected is a being that is doubtless “saturated,” but saturated like a clone, perhaps, like a christophanic figure that is perhaps particulate and not corpuscular, in a vectoriell state of emergence and ascendance. For very obviously the Resurrection follows the Resurrected and not the other way around; it is not an operation carried out upon a certain Jesus who has just been crucified between two thieves; the Resurrected underdetermines the images and concepts of Resurrection, whatever religious sphere they come from. This is why Resurrection is an operation that develops in a milieu of quantum but generic, vectoriell rather than spontaneously philosophical, objectivity. Fidelity does not consist in seeing so as to believe, nor in believing so as to see (we are no longer in the apophantic context of Greek representation), but in being subjects filled by the superposition of the image of Christ rather than being filled by an intentional act. The Resurrection is generic, and thus can be individual, but the inverse is not the case, and within these limits one can say that the faithful are “seers,” “voyands” in the sense that psychoanalysis speaks of “analysands.” Christ resurrected is more of an icon than an image perceived according to the supposition of the world—the noema of a generic, nonindividual intention.

VECTORIELL SUPERPOSITION AS ESSENCE OF ASCENSION

To begin to make the Resurrection and the Ascension minimally intelligible, we must distinguish carefully between the transcendence of opposed and mixed discourses that harbor an unintelligibility for the faithful and that are “finally” brought down, and the vectoriell “ascending” of the Son, which is incomparable with the image that philosophy gives of him, and which can only be the superposition of Father and Son, with the death of the authoritarian, persecuting, and sacrificing Father. With the empty Tomb and the Ascension, the scene of contrary interpretations is thus terminated or destroyed. The Ascension retroactively gives its meaning to the scene of the Crucifixion, and it is not an idealization like the “Ascension of Hegel,” as Marx says mockingly, or a return of Christ “alongside” his unchanged Father, an entirely theatrical, even comical scene. We oppose to it a materiel (rather than idealized or metaphorical) reading of this scene of the Cross—a christo-fiction, perhaps. Thus the greatest prudence is necessary in the cry “Christ is risen!” which responds to the declaration of Nietzsche’s madman, “God is dead, we have killed him!” The inclusion of subjects in this crime is most interesting. Unfortunately, the joy of the proclamation stifles the minimum of reflection that is necessary for this affirmation of the new faith. The popular belief in spirits, relayed by the silence of theologians avoiding having to respond to this philosophically impossible question on the real content of the Resurrection, has done the rest. Its mystery adds in an almost incommensurable manner to the enigma of the death of God; it has remained a slogan or a proclamation, at best a confession of faith. But we can be sure that the two formulae that enframe the Cross have the theoretical coherence of a system that apparently has the ring of a dialectic, toward which philosophy is often led. However, just as one can only kill God under certain theoretical conditions, in general replaced by reasons that are contingent upon history, Christ can only be “resurrected” under equally drastic theoretical conditions. We must be able to say not “Christ is risen, we have resurrected him!,” but “we are resurrected in-Christ.” This formula is obviously a nest of aporias and interpretations, just like the death of God, and risks remaining especially unintelligible. And yet, under pain of reconstituting a simple pagan belief, we cannot excuse man of all responsibility, unless we think according to philosophical belief the real process, which is that of a unilateral complementarity or an indivisibility of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. The risk is once more that of a vicious circle, since faith is the expression of the superposition of Father and Son under the Son in the Ascension—as if the idempotence of the Son replaced the omnipotence of the Father. The matrix as Cross and Resurrection is ultimately inclined generically, and underdetermines spontaneous belief rather than determining it in a rigid or circular mechanism. Messianity is the generic condition of the beginning of the process of faith, but not the beginning itself, which is why it is virtual or is a nonacting that underdetermines the occasions of acting—that is to say, the occasions of its immanent practice.

INSURRECTION RATHER THAN EXISTENCE

What is the effect of insurrection upon macroscopic bodies, what is their under-going as resurrected? Insurrection is a vectoriell phenomenon, a lived materielity structured algebraically, or again, more intuitively, an ascending or a nascent wavelike phenomenon. And it belongs to the wavelike to be an ascending without objective ecstasis. Insurrection is prior-to-first and places under condition the historical order of resurrection or revolution that would be primary. This is the task of the faithful: to raise up the world like a wave, and to exhale it like a breath. Revolutions are the way in which history breathes, and it often dies of suffocation. Messianity has never been a more or less direct diachrony, but always a raising-up whose effect is to reduce dominations and to lead them to their fall into immanence. Like the linearity of the trace and of the diachrony that it still thrives on, double transcendence is forced to precipitate in the simple transcendence of a clone or a faithful.

Philosophy conflates the ascending of immanence with the theological double transcending that covers or envelopes it and that is decomposed into a clone. The vectoriell model allows us to think pure raising-up without referring it to a site—it is not even the event as part of a named site, it is no more the outbreath of an e-vent than it is an ex-istence, the ex- that is a repetition of the ex nihilo of creation, a theological residue. Surrection is an ascendance or a phase that no longer goes to trans-cendence, the emergence of ex-istence insofar as it does not go to the ecstasis that loses itself in the object. The more existence closes up in itself and is saturated with the world, the more raising-up is not affirmation of existence but its bringing down. Raising-up is that which under-goes under the raising, which raises itself up without rising. Raising-up is neither ontological nor existential but human and generic; in any case, it is that which underdetermines and does not sublate. We shall not even speak of ex-surrection—for this would still be to think on the basis of nothingness, of coming back to the soil or to the earth from which the philosophical tree emerges—but of resurrection as in-surrection. No creation of an exteriority by the throwing of immanence that is content to in-surrect in-itself.

The immanence of the wave as simple ascending is not seen as the particle is seen; the angle of its phase or its inapparent thickness will only appear later with the fall of transcendence, and moreover will appear as inverted verticality, like the fall of the great idol. The fall of double transcendence is fundamental here as the effect of surrection. Messianity is an intentionality in reverse or against the grain, which displaces the philosophical subject by reducing it to the state of a clone in-immanence. The vectoriell ascent of immanence and the descent of corpuscular transcendence not in itself but in-immanence—these two phenomena go together. The Last Instance thus does not sublate transcendence one more time, does not mediate it, does not conserve it in the form of traces or interiorized phantoms. Its effect is the fall of the monotheisms that it underdetermines.

As to the Resurrection supposedly fulfilled in mythological or theological manner, taken as term or corpuscular entity, it flattens the wave and its superpositions with the soma-body, flattens the lived with the world, and takes a point of view called “macroscopic” or decoherent; this is to conflate the resurrected—that is, insurgent—body with the transcendent body of the world, living or dead, it matters little: “Arise!” Not “rise again,” like a bad repetition in place of the insurrectional reprise—such an injunction presupposes that one was standing, was then dead, then resurrected. Resurrection then risks being an ideal repetition of life if insurrection is not a reprise resuming the incessance of the lived. The generic body is philosophically indivisible between soul, spirit, body (soma), which are residues of the transcendent or “decoherent” divisions once their superpositions are destroyed. As to the “flesh” that is from the start “incarnation,” it is this nonseparability and this nonlocality of the clone as particle, borne or contributed by the wave of the lived. In other words, faith is the flesh itself qua correlate of messianity and underdetermined by it. The glorious body and the faithful flesh are one and the same.

SCHRÖDINGER’S LIVING AND DEAD CHRIST

Resurrection and Ascension are phenomena of materielity, and find their ultimate explanation in an ascending, an essentially vectoriell act of wavelike superposition that remains the Same as idempotent. Obviously this is not to suppress what there is of the “miraculous” in them, because the notion of an idempotent wavelike ascending, strong analytic and weak synthetic, is just as mysterious, but just as natural, as the algebra of quantum theory. Nonecstatic Ascension corresponds to the algebraic property of idempotence and it is a pure Surrection, which, like every scientific law, in a sense has no justification other than itself—it is ultimately axiomatic. The last “foundation” of the Ascension as Resurrection and of the Resurrection necessarily as Ascension is simply of an oraxiomatic order, or of-the-last-instance, and belongs to a strange logic of idempotence. If one is surprised at such a “materielist” and formal reduction of the Resurrection to a flat algebraic property, why not be just as surprised at that marvelous property of algebra that, once materielized, prescribes that every immanence is ascendance? That if there is a plane of immanence, it ascends, doubtless because of its nature, which is vectoriell or angular, and subjects it to a phase? This undermines the philosophical logic of identity with vectoriellity. Insofar as it is not a “reduction” but a fusion or a cloning by idempotence of the lived taken from the human subject, this is a question of materielity and not materialism, of a “real” rather than an empty formalism. Will we go so far as to say that the experience as such of the Resurrection is for the faithful an experience of cloning? Ascension and Resurrection are prior-to-first, this means to say that they do not determine themselves circularly, but underdetermine themselves, that they are the real condition of the Cross but that they themselves already suppose such a fusion. It may be that in order to think cloning one must conceive it as both operator and operated-on, but operated-on in-the-last-instance. And the theory of the Last Instance destroys the vicious circle or resolves it through the superposition or “resumption” of the matrix of the Cross.

The Resurrection is not a new creation or its repetition, but the very-first time where precisely there is finally a creation in this world that is not a repetition of a worldly procedure or of a phenomenon fallen back on thought. The gnostics began to think most rigorously but still religiously, they thought the divine creation as a failure; another was necessary, through Christ, in order to finally succeed where a failed God had been unsuccessful. But for quantum gnostics, there has never been a creation of the world or in the world—it is the world that is “wicked” or “evil,” and consequently also the God who claimed to have created it and yet hesitates to assume it. But Christ is the prior-to-first creation of novelty who takes the order of things the way it should be taken—through a futurality that is not of the order of time, except insofar as it haunts it as a Stranger, the only one who is not Eleatic. It is a question of establishing the order, not even of reestablishing or remaking it in its original, supposedly lost figure. And the determination of the order or the Last Instance is the Son who rises or ascends and brings down the Father. The Ascension is just capable of superposition; radical immanence is its work; above all it does not form a plane of immanence like a secularized form of the plan of salvation. It is prior-to-first in relation to the Cross that nevertheless comes first in the evangelical story.

As for the Tomb, it receives he who will ever be a living being and who will now receive the lived-without-life. Although empty, it is a tomb, not a cavity dug in the soil, but empty because reduced to a positive 0, a 0 that is not nothing. It is still life, but in a generic mode, not a life idealized or reduced to memory and its disappearance: the quantum problematic prohibits that idealization. The Ascension at once brings with it and abandons the cadaver (hence the cortege of simulated and phantomatic reappearances of Christ). If we contract, as indivisible, the phases of the Gospel stories, we obtain Schrödinger’s Christ, with the Resurrection and his cadaver superposed. But the Ascension is more intimately still under condition of the Resurrection insofar as it resumes the lived as subtracted from life, an absence that is not an idealization. The empty Tomb = 0 represents what we call the lived-without-life, delivered from the human subject and from the individual body. The lived itself is not a generalization attributed to a quantity of nonhuman so-called living phenomena; it is distinct from any life whatsoever, it is of the lived in the generic and thus human sense. The human is living, no doubt, but is life rendered human, as Marx said, and also death rendered human—that is to say, lived. And if the lived materializes ascending, the latter as superposition is the very form of the lived, and distinguishes “life” rendered human or generic from other forms of life.

As for the Resurrection, it is indeed a resurrection of “bodies,” which is a way of opposing it to all Greek idealism, although it is still a matter of a reading in terms of the world rather than in terms of the Ascension. It is certainly not the separation of the soul-as-Idea and the material body, nor even the doubling of a spiritual body and a worldly body, like the generation of phantoms or the living-dead. It is a separation of the abandoned life of the world and the lived that is raised up from it and superposed with itself for reasons that we know are now or never of a scientific or quantum order. Only the lived-without-life grasped by idempotence can ascend or make for ascension. Life is dead, the lived is resurrected, not re-created but separated from life-death. This undoes the unitary confusions and amphibolies of life and the lived. And this is why the concept that speaks best to this reprise or superposition of the lived with itself is “resurrection,” on the condition that we do not understand it via common sense and belief, any more than we should understand resumption as repetition or superposition as a new positing. “Re-surrection” is not a repetition of a living being or of creation, nor even of life, but a re-sumption of the lived, an insurrection of the generic Christ out of the world. Christ is the insurgent of the Tomb of the world.

THE ASCENSION OF CHRIST AND THE ABASEMENT OF GOD

We have distinguished the simple and transfinite Ascending of messianity and the ascending completed in itself or the double transcending that is always, in every theology, a double movement in opposite directions. Now, the effect of vectoriell Ascending is to abase transcendence in an entirely new way and definitively, reducing it to a simple or particulate form. The Ascension is thus also the abasement of the divinity (which theology supposed absolute) of Christ. It gives the Cross its meaning, renders it necessary as the bringing down of God. The Ascension of Christ does not suppress the divine dimension of Christ that would substitute itself for God or take God’s place, but abases this dimension or subtracts it from its specular image, thus destroying the theo-christo-logical doublet. Christ is the unilateral complementarity of messianic ascendancy and the abasement of the belief that besieges the faith of the faithful. The Ascension is the christic amplitude of thought, not an external, marvelous event. There is no dialectic of Ascension and of Abasement, but an ascending so as no longer to transcend indefinitely.

We have evoked a certain factor of a scientific order: the messiah-factor or factor of christo-fiction, capable of subtracting the lived from the order of life and making of it a generic subject. What is it that ascends without doubling, that superposes without doublet, and that destroys doublets where there are any? That which can ascend while superposing itself or adding itself to itself but remaining the Same is messianity as a phenomena that is vectoriell rather than positively vectorial or geometrical, and that must therefore be materielized, rather than schematized, in some human lived. But to understand vectoriellity we know that we must go all the way back to the quantum-theoretical understanding of it as quarter-turn or √ − 1. We perhaps understand better that the real or christic order does not “begin” historically with the immanent Ascension, but is nevertheless underdetermined by it, by that act of superposition that is valid for vectors and more profoundly for those materiel entities known as “complex.” From the quantum perspective, the Ascension is the superposition of Father and Son as vectoriell entities, or more exactly the superposition of the Son as vector of the quarter-turn and of the Father reduced to the Son, with what remains of the divine in the Resurrected—that is to say, generic messianity. Why, in vulgar terms, does the Son not engender the Father? Or more scientifically, why would the generic community of Children not be the immanent deduction from the life of the Father?

If we wish to think this in a quasi-theological way, here the negative or subtracted quarter-turn as √ − 1 must draw on the Logos and the Torah: with Greek immanence as its modulus aspect and Judaic transcendence as its phase aspect, aspects that become indiscernible in Christ as this always-resumed vector. Why, in the historical story, does the quarter-turn have no particular, genetic, or vectoriell function? Why does the Ascension disappear as a fundamental theoretical moment between the Crucifixion and the supposedly completed Resurrection? Precisely because the theological reading is historical, and is traced from the course of time or the course of the world, which traverses the circle of the Cross as already given positively, a circle repeated in completed and closed sacrifices, susceptible of repetition. But the negative or subtracted quarter, as √ − 1, defines the vectoriellity or the wave function that takes place outside of circular space, endowing it with its lived-without-life materielity. It alone can define the state vector of the Christ-event and rectify, include, and condition the course of the world in the futural direction of salvation. The quarter-turn brings into play a vector as module and phase. In relation to theological representation it is an “imaginary” and complex vector that is situated in a space other than the perceived and the geometrical, already algebraic but not yet reduced to generic immanence. However in theology, above all determinist theology, Aristotelian in the oldest cases, Newtonian in the most modern, positive geometry has been bolstered by the contribution of the Parmenidean conception of the Same as specular circularity. The quarter-turn as “impossible” dimension breaks with this object that is perceived, and above all frozen in its perceived-being, encysted in itself. The undermining of the circle of the world and its autoperception begins precisely with the replacement of the convexity of the circle by the convex cross: putting the Cross into convex relief necessitates the division into quarters, the first operation that announces the undermining of the old world and of the ancient archaic forms of sacrifice. But when perceived as convex or bulging, a fortiori as concave or recessed, the Cross is still a Greco-Judaic mixture dominating Christianity. When the quarter is finally understood in quantum terms, and no longer as convex but as itself concave or as √ − 1, when the theological power of the Cross is itself annihilated, the Cross brought down and the theological circle with it, deprived of its positive and deadly power as great object of belief, Christ will have accomplished his under-going, completed his migration out of the bosom of the Father. Messianity and Fidelity will have triumphed. What will remain, as the objective appearances of belief and theology, will be the sinister face-to-face of the ancient figures of authoritarian and barbarous domination that are God and the Cross of his Son as the Calvary he himself prepared.

THE MEDIATOR-IN-PERSON OR THE MEDIATE-WITHOUT-MEDIATION

Since Christ is a theoretical event without any classically religious or theological message, in order to give this event the message-form or the communication-form it was necessary to go back to the Greek and Jewish contexts of thought that were already formed and spontaneously presented themselves to be rendered “compossible” in their philosophical way—or to have recognized the great work of Paul and the theologian philosophers ancient and modern, the Greek Fathers in particular. It is thus that Christ became mediation, that Greek reading of Christ that we have had to reduce and transform into an axiom of mediate-without-mediation that is the generic itself. In the historical order there is always a time lag between the event and its entry into retroactive discourse in the field of the past. We had to place these discourses back into immanence, transforming them and making use of them as a function of the “instant” of Christ that is once-each-time.

One can see in Christianity a new foundation for human sciences (René Girard) on the basis of sacrifice, which annuls mimetic rivalry. Our interpretation is more quantum than sacrificial, and posits the radical primacy of Christ over a Christianity with which he is not commutable. This is the quantum and thus scientific principle of superposition, which annuls the old mimetic rivalry and assures the primacy of messianity over sacrifice. The emergence of Christ is the emergence of a necessary constant for the theological and human sciences; the messianic constant establishes the sciences of humans upon a “terrain” other than that of the world, on the basis of the last-instance of generic man. The principle of superposition contains the sacrifice of the operation of mediation and extends the messianic suspension to every religion, Christianity included—an explanation, and a consequence, that we distinguish from René Girard’s thesis. The sacrifice that annuls the combat of opposites produces not an intersubjectivity of atomic entities, but an interference of fluxes of lived, or an interreferential subjectivity. It is the christic invention not of the dialectical body but of the generic body “in my name.”

The principle that governs and orders mimetic duality, the ancient God of sacrifice, is sacrificed insofar as it is declined or brought down, but not reduced to nothingness. Becoming immanent in his Son, he is the prior-to-first of every instance as idempotent superposition of messianity, so that mediation as operation is flattened onto one term (the Messiah) and conflated with him, the Mediator. He is generic, universally valid as Same, not as the modality of All. God is sacrificed at least qua separate term: the Father is made Son, he was not sent as a request for pardon or as a message distinct from its messenger, like some kind of spokesman. The generic event does not resolve the problem of diplomacy, of “representation” (we couldn’t say it better) or a Jewish quarrel between God and men. The superposition of science and the lived only affects the ancient transcendent God and the equally transcendent subjects who accompany him. From one to the other, with one and the others, messianity is born as mediate-without-mediation.

THE DEFENSE OF HUMANS AND THE SACRIFICE OF GOD

The new Law is underway and at work in each of us, and as such, each of us is messiah. Messianity is in under-going to accomplish the Law in the person of Christ, and not externally. It incarnates the Law in faith, not as an external complement but as a separation of the mélange of faith and belief. God therefore takes on a new function: he is the mask that dissimulates the possibility of a science of religions, he prevents it from being able to establish itself. In his own way, he is an Evil Demon who would make science impossible and allow the psycho-religious imaginary to run free. In short, we must choose: either the religions, including Christianity, to which we give our usual belief, or Christ and faithful subjects; and this is not Kierkegaard’s “either … or.”

We arrive at the non-Christian subject-science through the sacrifice of divine transcendence, the sacrifice of God who, on the cross, abandons his transcendence by superposing himself initially, and thus as positively as possible, onto humans. There is a positivity and a materiality of crucifixion: it is the sacrifice of a God who would symbolize the metaphysical science and who from now on makes way for the christic science and its new constant inscribed in idempotence. It is not Christ who sacrifices himself, any more than it is God himself, who no doubt may well have considered suicide in contemplating his disastrous work. This sacrificial aspect is the effect of abasement or depotentialization by superposition—that is to say, of the transfinite under-going of the resurrected Christ. Is God “dead”? Transformed, rather, having lost his status as the great manipulator, but not because of the world and nihilist society, with which he reaches quite an understanding, and with which he can make contracts and concordats. A science of humans was invented, a generic constant discovered that took God’s place as a constant and shattered the theo-christo-logical doublet. Every science sacrifices its phantasms and the imaginary of its objects and procedures. Christ is now the name of a constant defined in the context of his field of objects available to “human” sciences. For our part, we see here nothing of a scientistic ideology; on the contrary it is for us testimony to the inevitable “historical” contingency of every thought oriented or dedicated to the sole imperative defense of humans. When Christ says that he has come to fulfill the Law, it is almost a banality: he cannot but transform a constant in order to propose another, fulfilling the Law as a new scientific procedure, incarnating it or subjectivating it in a more human way. And this generic constant would imply the “sacrificial suspension” of transcendence, God or Other. The “sacrifice of Christ” is a provisionally arrested representation of science but one that, as arrested or blocked as it may be, spontaneously proliferates and distributes itself through theological thought. We should not imagine that science can give birth to continual or repeated sacrificial acts of the type that religions thrive on. Certainly there is no sacrifice of sacrifice as a negation of negation, but only superposition or resumption of sacrifice in messianic immanence. We might call this the transcendence-in-immanence of sacrifice. To take up a term we know to be equivocal, the “sacrifice” of God allows humans to incarnate, in turn, the constant of the Law. This sacrifice of the old God—the gnostic type of interpretation in the encounter with Judaism—calls for another concept so as to understand that it allows a reinterpretation of the Law by freeing man as generic subject from the constant. God being dead or rather having become sterile, ineffective, or suspended, the constant can finally be superposed with the human lived, which ceases to be soaked up and impassioned by the jealous God. Christ is the superposition of the Law with the lived of subjects par excellence—this fulfillment of the Law has nothing to do with a dialectical operation, it is even profoundly antidialectical. On the basis of this, all men are equal, but generically; this is not an abstract equality like Pauline universality—they are equal in-the-last-humanity as generic subjects in science.

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE THEO-CHRISTO-LOGICAL DOUBLET AND THE END OF MIMETIC RIVALRY

The Jewish God is sacrificed for the under-going of the Son with whom he forms the Mediate, he who refused mediation and who, in this sense, was the opposite of the Greek gods. God come to earth, he is sacrificed in his transcendence or his separate and Jewish being. The Christ-science is obtained by using at once two discourses as superposed, Mediation and the Law, and this is the new Law as messianity becoming mediate-without-mediation. It is not an external, substantial, and synthetic combination, as the Church believes.

He can only give himself to the world rather than re-create it a second time if he makes himself idempotence, power of the Same. The Same is a simplified, binary, or dual repetition, a resumption or an overflowing in immanence. He fulfills the Law, meaning that as Son and God he superposes the Father with humans—but in order to carry out this operation, God must be sacrificed in favor of the Son, and must bend to the law of the immanence that science requires.

It is therefore the Father who is crucified, but there is no reason for the Son himself, once “fulfilled,” to be sacrificed: he is the one in which the mediation is consummated, the Mediate as hard and indivisible kernel of mediation. The Son is the indivisibility of the God he assumes as idempotence. He is neither sacrificed by the Father nor transformed like the world; he is the unilateral complementarity of messianity and faith, the generic duality made of two events unequal in nature and in function. The Son is the life that does not die—that is to say, the lived carried to the infinite and to eternity, but on the condition that God “dies” on the Cross as far as possible. God is dead so that generic man may accede to the lived, not to individual man or ego, which die along with God and his mythology.

Sacrifice thus annuls the mimetic rivalry that applies to the relations of God and Christ in the theo-christo-logical doublet, and not only those between humans. The interpretation of sacrifice must be scientific rather than “sacrificial” or autointerpretive. The principle of superposition contains sacrifice or the bringing down of its operation of mediation, which would suppose the independence of the first term of the doublet—that is, God. Sacrifice annuls the struggle between opposites, and produces not an intersubjectivity of atomic or egological entities, but a simple messianity fabricated in the interference that is fidelity. Mediation as an operation is flattened onto one term (the messiah-subject) and is conflated with it; it is immanence as the Mid-(of mediate)-without-mediation, in the sense that it is the latter and has no need of another term.

THEORY OF SUSPENDED SACRIFICE

A classical aspect of Christ is obviously of the order that we might call “sacrificial,” but what is the relation, exactly, between Christ and sacrifice? There have been too many interpretations going in the direction of the anthropological and archaic-religious imaginary for one not to be suspicious of this doxa.

Christ is the generic incarnation or the prior-to-first ultimation whose theoretical conditions we have already posited, among which are idempotence (the suspended sacrifice of Christ, the immanent completion, and the mediate-without-mediation). Now, idempotence includes a suspension, an immanent neutralization that belongs to it properly and that has the form of an abasement of transcendence. It is the condition, let us say for the moment the “sacrificial” condition, of the possibility of superposing the two Laws. Who is sacrificed? We have posited as an axiom that it is the function of God as Father that is sacrificed in Christ. It is not the son who is sacrificed, there is no reason for him to be—it would be a pure injustice, and the salvation of the world could not be acquired by way of an injustice. The sacrifice that has a true symbolic and foundational purport is not that of Jesus—even if a phenomenon of this type did take place, one that answered to a logic of the Roman State—but that of God on the Cross, of God “in” his Son if you like, not at all of the Son whose Father decides, aberrantly and cruelly, to sacrifice, as is often thought by religions that invert the process. The “sacrifice” of God is the condition for messianity or the christic flux to be able to constitute itself and to be valid for Jews and Pagans. If Christ is indivisible as generic immanence, it is impossible to discern in him in classical philosophical and atomist manner the components of “his” sacrifice. This sacrifice took place necessarily in Christ and constitutes him. But this does not at all mean that Christ “himself”—identified improperly with persons like God or Jesus, whereas he is the generic “Same”—is the sacrificed, and that we are involved in a bad dialectical fluidification of contraries, or even of substances.

Superposition is a sacrifice, if one insists on this term, but sacrifice as unilateral suspension of reciprocal mediation, of the exchange with God. God is suspended idempotently, or becomes Son. What is sacrificed is reciprocity or rivalry, the divine side of mediation, but only on the condition that God should be radically immanent, or should cease to be mediatizable. Two solutions must therefore be excluded.

1. The celebrated “death of God” of modern theologies is a metaphysical symptom of idempotent suspension. The suspension of the divine in favor of the engendering of Christ has almost nothing to do with modern metaphysics’s act of killing God, as if God were sacrificed in favor of the Greek law alone. The moral God does not die here, nor does the subject that corresponds to him just symmetrically disappear: it subsists as obedient to the new generic Law in which and through which it is transformed. The abasement of God here is not a belated theme of Christian modernity. It is the condition that is necessary for Jesus to acquire a dimension, a generic figure valid for Greek and Jew alike. The generic duality brings together God, having unilaterally sacrificed his transcendence, and the subject freed from the servitude of the Law but still (under)determined as obedient. God sacrificing his Son is a Jewish image of sacrifice; the Son killing the Father and sublimating him all the more is a Greek image of sacrifice; the Father sacrificed or abased so that the Son may be born—this is the gnostic but not necessarily “religious,” and still less familialist, truth. Christ signifies that there is a veritable immanent genesis of the Son, rather than those all too vicious philosophical geneses that are “family histories,” where the family is already present and anticipates the birth and the education of children.

2. Now it is difficult or dubious, as we have said, to speak of the “sacrifice” of the Cross. Here sacrifice takes the form of a decline as an abasement of divine transcendence. Still, the general structure of mediation demands greater precision. For divine transcendence has itself already been acquired by sacrifice, a sacrifice has in reality already taken place—this is the logic of double transcendence. Religions are devices with at least three terms, more or less objective and “wrought” transcendental structures. Now, there is always some transcendence, even in the transcendental forms of religious mediation. Here we find, once again, in relation to sacrifice, the doublet structure of theology. It is thus possible to explain that the term “transcendent(al)” is excluded from duality, like a scapegoat third term (tiers-émissaire) (Girard), an exclusion that permits the hierarchical organization of the duality and the constitution of a closed group. The transcendental always fulfills a negative and positive function of this type, its exclusion is constitutive of the group that it stifles and hierarchizes. Every religion therefore belongs to a sacrificial activity; but, to be precise, it is not certain whether the Cross, seen in terms of the Resurrection, corresponds really to such a phenomenon.

Christ, contrary to what Christianity reflects of him, does not tarry with this old, sufficient model of sacrifice. Current and theological Christianity, if that is what we are considering, does in fact trace divine transcendence from this implicit transcendental model; and, inversely, philosophy imitates religion by transcendentalizing it. But as for Christ as faithful scientific stance, the suspension of his double transcendence cannot be either religious or transcendental. It is now this structure of sacrifice that founded the transcendental and divine transcendence together that is suspended. A sacrifice was necessary to produce the transcendent/transcendental God, to constitute a religious community; but now we need an entirely other operation to suspend this device itself. This suspense can no longer be a sufficient sacrifice, even if Christianity would willingly content itself with this solution, thus falling back into pagan errors and vainglory. It must be a superposition.

Because Christ is the “Good God,” the ancient God does not need to be “sacrificed,” even in the metaphorized sense of a bloody religious rite, but only reduced or abased. The meaning of the sacrificial motif must be transformed, its imaginary depotentialized. The “emissary” God (Dieu «émissaire»), as we have said, resulted from a barbarous and religious sacrifice, a jealous and evil God, excluded and full of hatred. This primary sacrifice produces a transcendent(al) hatred, whereas the immanental reduction suspends the transcendental itself or depotentializes sacrifice. The sacrifice of the man “Christ” as it is thought in general is a way of accepting the exploitation by the third emissary (tiers émissaire), the transcendental organizer. Gnostic salvation as reduction to immanence is designed for the wicked, evil demons and other products of sacrifice, which benefit from it or exploit humans.

The appearance owes to the fact that every sacrifice produces some transcendence that has an aspect or an effect of (ultimately transcendental) immanence. But this is not to do with an immanental reduction by superposition, which is the affair of (and the good news of) Christ alone. God must be brought down, his sacrificial origin itself suspended—this is all that science can demand of religion and of him, not his metaphysical “death” nor his atheist and materialist refusal. The suspense or decline of sacrifice has been confused with sacrifice itself, as if it were a sacrifice of sacrifice, through a specular mirror effect. Christ exonerates victims, but he does more: he suspends the supposed bloody sacrifice of the Cross or shows its appearance. He exonerates the cruelty of the Jewish God by bringing him down from Sinai, to Golgotha. If the first sacrifice founds the community and stretches it all the way to the divine, Christ contracts the latter or superposes it, giving it a generic consistency. The more sacrifice is the affair of priests and of the anonymous and transcendent Law, or of transcendental philosophers who try to soften it up, the more its immanental suspension is the affair of Messiahs and of the milieu of existence of the Faithful. Strictly speaking, we could say that messianity is the immanence of sacrifice, or immanent and nonreligious sacrifice. The consequence is that the sacrifice of the third emissary founds a proselytism of heaven and earth, a militant and harassing proselytism, whereas messianity founds only an infinite defense of humans and nothing more. It is urgent, in any case, to pass from the conquering Christianity which is that of the “return” of Christ to a Christianity of the defense of the faithful in-the-last-instance against all religion. There will be no return, nor even a turn, of Christ to make him a generic subject or messiah. Our faith is eternal and actual, it suffers nothing of the passing and contingent nature of our beliefs.

HOW GNOSTICS RECEIVE THE BLOOD OF CHRIST

We do not need to decide, for our account, between a historical Jesus, who we well know was Jewish, and a Jesus become “Christian” and the involuntary founder of Churches—this is not our concern. However, gnosis appears to offer us another perspective that has long been subject to persecution. But it contains an ambiguity that is Platonic in origin. It evidently bears the trace of a conflict that will be treated by and will find a solution through quantum theory: the conflict between two types of representation, the wave of messianity and the corpuscle of belief. In its still mythological religious representation, gnosis is a spark lodged in the innermost depths of man, still an Idea at the end of an ecstatic albeit internal Transcendence, the contemplation of the Idea as of an ultimate atom of knowledge. Under an entirely other condition, that of the unilateral complementarity imposed on us by vectoriell thought, it would instead be a nonrepresentable knowledge, a knowledge that is nonecstatic through force of immanence, a messianic wave function acting upon the faithful, the ultimatum of faith that flows in the veins of Christ. Gnosis rediscovered the argument of the suture of science and Christ, a suture that can be opposed to all theology, against the Platonism from which it partly emerged. Christ is a generic knowledge—that is to say, one with no completeness or totality, a Law with neither substance nor logical form of messianity, but one that must be completed or fulfilled in relative occasional exteriority by the subject, by we-the-humans, as the flesh that must incarnate it and, moreover, the stance that must resume it.

Historical gnosis, at least qua Christianity become official, received the blood of Christ on the Cross, but did not welcome it as sufficient ontico-ontological substance, communicable to humans through a transubstantiation, like a process of ousiological metamorphosis. It welcomed it, as we have said, (1) as knowledge, not as substance, (2) as knowledge that is a constant or a quantum of messianity, a discrete flux that it was able to interpret as a Greek-style spark-flash. (3) And as generic, finally—that is to say, including its completion but not its closure in the faith of the faithful. For Christ can only bleed eternally with the blood of humans who are identified with the world or with God before becoming superposed with him. What permeates the body of the generic Christ is now the blood of the eternal suture that is messianity, the liquid element of the lived drawn from the subjects of the world. The blood of Christ is not that of a God offered up for sacrifice by religions. If it has been pressed, crushed, and tipped out, it is so as to be infused into humans, and it is their lived that flows out as the new generic blood.

THE SALVATION OF GOD

Obviously the good God of the gnostics, as we have long known, is not the God of the Old Testament, the jealous God who admits that he can or could have sacrificed his Son, that no other God could stay his hand. The good God under-goes as Messiah or equality in-the-last-instance of the Sons. We must nevertheless give the rigorous form of superposition to the gnostic suture and render it noncommutable with the world. One can imagine the sacrifice the old God had to consent to, in order to become messianic grace. The Other-God or the “Other-man” had to be able to superpose himself onto humans to transform them, to become principle of the Same, idempotence—that is to say, fidelity through every trial, to abandon his dreams of omnipotence and of the creation of the world. A forcing is needed, but an entirely immanent one. Against the philosophers of the universal God become generic, against the Jews, the Other-God relinquishes his hauteur, or, strictly speaking, refuses to send his Son to death. The Jewish God had to become immanent grace, the Other had to under-go as this Same that does not come back and for which his fidelity is enough. As generic, the Son is more than a dialectical “encounter,” he is the superposition of man and the old God that will permit world-man to participate in messianity. In his person, God bends to the law of the necessary immanence of science, men abandon their individuality and under-go, liberated from their ego. What is salvation if not under-going within generic immanence, that is to say, the immanence of Christ? Not so much the loss of his ego as the loss of the sufficiency of that ego, the obedience to the New Law of messianity.

If it is God who is sacrificed, and not at all the human aspect, except insofar as it derives from this theology, then is Christ the revenge of humans upon a God that they have decided to reduce or sacrifice—an obviously religious and excessive hypothesis? The choice is between the sacrifice either of the Son or of the Father, but there is always an operation of the “reduction” of duality to the immanent Same. One historical modality of the sacrifice of the Son is the persecution of the hostage-Jew by the Most-High. From this point of view, Levinas repeats the Jewish model in very classical-modern, and very ancient, terms—for the Jew has always been the elect hostage of his God in living under his Law. As to the Logos-God, the equivalent of the Jewish hostage is simply the celebrated “subject” later to be nuanced as the subject of “Christian freedom.” We oppose to these two figures the decline or the immanent abasement of the Father in and by the Son, and it is this that is undergone by the gnostics, who welcome the new knowledge as the Son or the mediate-without-mediation. The positive suspension of sacrifice is rather its placing under condition, not so much negative as underdetermining, in view of a messianic-oriented “Christianity.” Gnostic knowledge is the knowledge of the Son, of equal Sons affirming their equality, that of Ultimate or Last Instances. For the Sons are certainly not content to sacrifice the Father as if they wished to take his place; they have changed place and times, they are the Orphans or the Ultimata and consequently the Prior-to-first. The Last Instance is not a substitute for archaic paternity, but its generic “fulfillment.”

As for the Jews, are they capable of changing their infinite, and giving themselves over to the transfinite of the Messiah, to the unilateral or immanent opening? As with all conversions, with their dramatic weight, this would be a religion-fiction and not a christo-fiction. It would not be asked of them to admit an autoconstitution of the Same and thus an ethos of immanence, but to admit that God has for too long dissimulated through jealousy an ultimate property of thought, an “idemscient” property, an objective knowledge or gnosis that must be assumed by a lived in order to constitute a wave of messianity. It would be asked of them to choose between a God of servitude and a Christ of ultimatum. We are on gnostic terrain here.

God has changed states with Christ; he is borne by a new vector. Religions never emphasize enough that God and gods, like humans, must be saved, that “redemption” goes for them as much as for the humans who face them. If God himself has need of salvation, we can imagine the type of sacrifice to which the ancient Gods must consent in order to be accessible to messianic grace. The universal God of the philosophers must become generic, the Other-God of the Jews must sacrifice himself and not just remain in his heights, an entirely Christian god, strictly speaking, satisfied with sending his Son. The Other-God must be able to superpose himself with humans in order to transform them, to become faithful idempotence, to abandon his dreams of omnipotence. Through the act of faith the Jewish God becomes immanent grace, the Other under-goes like this Same that does not return. Salvation is not the repetition of creation, but just its suspended repetition, its christic resumption.

The frame of reference has changed. Substantial religions busy themselves with “triangulating” humans and their God, but Christ introduces another correlate, the world, and establishes a messianic axis, a unilateral complementarity, with it. Messianity is a vector or that transfinite throw for the world, not for Being or for a Logos better understood, not for a Torah better obeyed. God come into the world, his separate, Jewish transcendence reduced to christic immanence, it is the essence of salvation that changes. Christ accomplishes the “plan of salvation,” which above all does not mean that he “realizes” or effectuates it, but that he submits it to its real condition, which underdetermines or “transforms” it. The old God was an organizer of hopes and a manager of expectations, in any case a redoubtable planner, which is the foundation upon which Churches establish themselves. What the separate and omnipotent God plans out like a transcendent or even transcendental captain of industry as salvation promised to humans, submitted to restrictive and selective conditions, Christ makes actual or active in its virtuality.

THE IMPOSSIBLE RETURN: TO REPEAT CHRIST THROUGH THE SCIENCE-IN-CHRIST

If traditional Christian faith is a belief founded on the resurrection and the re-turn of Christ, for us this repetition is highly problematic and must be clarified on the prior-to-first basis of messianity and its vectoriell ascending. Far from being a re-turn, a re-commencement, or a re-volution entire or in itself, it is instead articulated as and in terms of an imaginary quarter-turn, which explains the emergent origin but not the return, except as religious appearance. As superposition or interference of liveds that make up the “bloc” of unlocalizable messianity and faith, it is a question of the “complex” quarter-turns of a wave rather than one of the “thousand detours” from which Nietzsche composes the Eternal Return of the Same.

No doubt Christianity cannot do without a certain “return” that is combined with Judaic waiting and is designed to allow belief to test itself. The Law of monotheism in relation to which Christ is almost exclusively situated is not the only one, as we have said—there is also the Logos-Law of pure polytheism, which is consummated in the Eternal Return and which is necessary for a christic science. It would be wrong to underestimate the horizonal function of the constitution of this theologeme as pagan religion. Greeks, as the Apostles partly were (even Paul), cannot not think return rather than incessant under-going. Christ was understood as he who had come, but he was substantially understood as having to be reprised twice in order to assure the full salvation of the world. The Eternal Return of the Same is a question of memory or of that which comes back on a ground of forgetting, a return as forgetting or a forgetting as a turning. What could be more Greek and pagan, less Jewish, than the eternity of the actual present, the return of the Same as identical (or indeed as difference), the individual as proof and recollection of all experiences, of all divinities? The Christian return of Christ is a mixture between the unilateral coming of the Jewish messiah and his eternal return: the messiah must re-turn one last time. On the one hand, then, the messiah of the Jews would actually already have come once: this justifies Judaism for the Christian, and annuls it or renders it otiose. But it is necessary that he come back a second time: this justifies polytheist paganism and at the same time annuls it. The first coming of Christ is excessive in relation to Judaism, the second coming is excessive in relation to the eternal return of the messiah that the Greeks were able to imagine. Christianity as a religion is the synthetic, not quantum, midsite between the Jewish Law given to signify an infinite waiting, and the Greek law that is the program of a virtual return, through a forgetting of the “self” in its actuality.

The Christian Christ thus suffers for two different reasons: both the impatient hope for the second coming and the infinite waiting with which Judaism impregnates it. It has been concluded from this that we must replace the failing or differing actuality of the Messiah with that substitute which is the Church or the actual community of believers. Because it very quickly tired of waiting for him, and became that monster of an instituted waiting, a calcified return of waiting, an institutionalized messiah, a mystified body of believers. The Church is built on a bad, too-historical understanding of Christ, upon a failure of theoretical analysis and rigorous thought. The Church has opportunistically filled this void, Dogma has taken the place of messianity and faith. Dogma is faith congealed into belief, closed up on itself like a world gone bad that diverts messianity into the exploitation of humans.

If the Messiah is in under-going, it is as superposition or continuation, or strictly speaking as “return” in the form of a Christ-thought, a gnostic faith or knowledge. The science-in-Christ is the only “return,” the only “repetition” that is authorized for us, and it is a knowledge that resumes messianity as faith rather than creating a new history or a fantastic image. In the person of the Son superposing God and humans, a suspended superposition, the former bends to the law of the necessary immanence of science, and the latter abandon their sufficient individuality and under-go as generic. What is the real content of salvation if not the under-going of Christ within generic immanence rather than within the Church? Not so much the loss of his ego as that of the sufficiency of that ego through obedience to the New Law of messianity. If the pagan Law of return and that of waiting now give way to messianity as their superposition (and not their identification), another distribution of the advent succeeds its theological economy—what we have called the vectoriellity of messianity, or futurality. The idempotence of Christ is the constancy of an under-going, of an event that is resumed vectorielly, rather than being repeated, as the Same, despite the addition of a transcendent term that constrains it to become the Same. It is resumed without disjoining from itself or becoming multiple; it is the Same in a superpositional manner and not via inclusive disjunction. There are not two comings of the Messiah separated by infinite history, but only one, always the same incessantly and without making a thousand detours in order to come back to itself. He does not re-turn a second time (something that is also refused by Judaism) but comes actually (something that Judaism does not want, since it confines itself to waiting). He insists on under-going one-time-each-time. The incessance of the Same is not the platitude of belief, but the simplicity of messianity.

Still, the “actuality” of the Messiah, actual in relation to philosophy and to faith as the belief proper to Christian mystics, is in itself virtual—namely, that the Messiah ceaselessly under-goes, this incessance being his actuality. Actuality signifies that the kerygmatic revelation takes place one-time-each-time but never ceases. The immanent messianic law is thus the law of nonreturn, the law of not being at home with oneself of humans forced to make do with the means that they have. The idea of a glorious return of Christ is prohibited by his noncommutativity with religions; it comes back once more to mixing the ancient and the new world, belief and faith—this would be to destroy the christic superstition of Logos and Torah, which would then coalesce as forces of repression. Noncommutativity is precisely the refusal of a double game, the certainty of the actuality of the Messiah for a science of religions that would not be a doxa adjoined to the religious imaginary, or the positive science of a spontaneously given object.

THE UNIVERSAL PHILOSOPHICAL CHURCH

We know that the Church was dogmatically constituted in its original struggle against gnosis; it forged the great majority of its weapons in the process of confronting the heresies that marked out its “development.” It bears in its manner of thinking indelible traces of these repressive and conquering origins. As for gnosis, it is condemned by its very principles to an entirely other stance, a defensive stance, the acting of a nonact against the assaults of orthodoxies. But it possesses a freedom of theoretical means to defend itself and to deconstruct the appearances of ecclesio-centrism. We have demonstrated through its very exercise the theoretical right, the necessary axioms, to interpret Christ, interpretation being a discipline apart, not only in a science like quantum science but in gnosis qua power of invention. We seek the most fruitful and innovative interpretation, and here it is to invent Christ within gnostic faith. And it is a weapon in our hands, a weapon of defense or of resistance to the harassment of religions, all deadly to various degrees.

Many criteria may be taken into account for this thesis. One alone will suffice for us but it includes all the others. The generic always goes not by way of any coupling whatsoever with a unity, but in binary manner from one unilateral complementarity to another, on the model of messianity and faith, from the subject-science to the faithful, from the Last Instance and from the theology that it underdetermines or brings down. This complementarity of the resurrected Christ and the faithful is the generic quantum of christic humanity. Measured by this yardstick, some ancient or recent solutions of theology can be brought back to their appearance. Gnosis has always had some very determined and impressive theoretical adversaries, but it judges that there are, to various degrees, interpretations at once inhuman and philosophical (the same thing) of the generic. They make the human real into a transcendent conception, because their theoretical means are those of the exacerbation of the omnipotence of God and the bringing down of man. Greek philosophy and Christian theology, it is almost the same combat, with nuances that permit one or the other to assure themselves of a community welded together by their conflicts of interest.

The extremely diverse theological interpretations are well known, and are grouped into several major groups, each with their own glosses. There is the authoritarian universalism of Paul, the classical Greco-Christian dialectic of the Church Fathers with its ecclesio-centric and Aristotelian becoming, and for us the most problematic divergence, that of scholarly theology. Also the way of dialectical christologies around and after Hegel. And finally the phenomenological zone, with the existentiell path of Heidegger, the path of called subjects (Marion), and finally the transcendental path of life and living beings (Michel Henry). This latter is a christo-centrism that brushes up against the generic human, but wastes no time in recuperating, without any true spirit of sacrifice, transcendence and the Trinity. Of course the latter is submitted to the immanence of the ego, but since this immanence is absolute and transcendental, it is not completely grasped as unilaterality or noncommutativity, and returns to an old-fashioned Trinity. These theological interpretations, all in the form of mélanges, are philosophical, neither quantum-theoretical nor (of course) particularly human. The Christ of faith cannot be the center of history but only the subtractive quarter of the Ascending, on pain of reestablishing implicitly the pagan circle of ecclesio-centrism.

In the conquest of dogmatic power, this was very quickly used against gnosis. Paul appears as the initiator of a falsification that was to open the way to the philosophical capture of the generic. It is he who is the founder or the “first” of Christianity—certainly not Christ, who is before-first, that is to say that he is the condition under which the foundation itself can be laid. He is the originary legislator of the Church in the forms of abstract universalism and egalitarianism—not Christ, who is at best his “Lord.” Paul thinks the mélange of life and death, or at best their parallelism, whence the passage to the dialectic, whence his transcendent universalism.

It will obviously be asked how the construction of this christo-fiction is possible, or rather how it is real. The Resurrected of the Ascension is the mediate-without-mediation that produces the decline rather than the death of God. The lived does not sublate death immediately, as we might think, but uses it to abase God—it is generic, not universal; it is the Same and not the All. In the complementarity without the correlation life/death, Christ is the affirmation that two terms suffice, their unity not being a third term or their dialectic, but being rejected as evil or as world. The discourse of Christ is not that of life in general, it is the immanent messianic vector that contains death as its border or its Other repressing the excess of power.

The superposition of idempotence with the lived, the encounter of science and philosophy, of generic finitude and its sufficiency, these sutures justify themselves once they have taken place, but it has to have been done—it is a work, the work of faith. Quantum science on one side, Christ on the other, have realized it in an almost miraculous manner, even if the result legitimates itself only after the fact. Christ is given as Last Instance of human history or as messiah, but nothing justifies analytically or synthetically this construction that tears men messianically from themselves. Still, it must be seen whether idempotence does not prepare its superposition either with the human world or with the physical world, if as form or matrix of superposition, in any case, it is not capable of soaking up the lived, of forcing it, finally succeeding in this exploit. But how can a simple property of algebraic operations be sutured to transcendence? It is a work, a first work, already done, an initial “decoherence” that will only receive its meaning from prior-to-first messianity. This first suture is given along with philosophy itself as occasional but necessary material; it is the philosophical mélange of logic and of the real human lived or of the very world itself, which already virtually contains this suture (the latter is not just artificially imposed to justify gnosis). Evil is first, it is its own legitimacy; our task is different.

What is more, this suture also implies the harassing “deviations” against which we must rise up. The most constant is the conflation of Christ with a universal apostle of love, or even a theological “conceptual persona,” the disastrous effect of his forced insertion into Christianity. Another, equally constant, is the recourse to Paul for reasons that have nothing to do with Christ. One might say that Christianity has not “flown,” that this is a correct return of things, these old or recent recuperations of Paul and of his worst aspects by philosophers who make him the messiah of authoritarian militants, and found in principle the usurpation of Christ by the Church or by certain of its masked forms. This is an exacerbated invention of a second Christ by militants of a transcendent cause, of a truth that has lost its unilateral or lived force of the generic.

During all of this, Christianity, for its part, never ceases to “re-turn” as religion of mediation on the way to dispersion. It aspires to globalization because it is in essence or in principle co-constituted by the world-form, and is thus also less closed and vindictive than other monotheistic religions, being more formal than substantial. As institutionalized, as Church, it has received the transcendent side of the heritage (it has, precisely, made a heritage of it) without the power to transform it, contenting itself with the “development of dogma.” As to ecumenicism, it is a laborious attempt to control the globalization, “evangelical” or otherwise, of the religious. But Christianity, like others, does not at all wish to liquidate its worldly heritage or its privileges, to pass them through the screen of the science of the idemscient faithful. It is incapable of delivering itself to the Law that, meanwhile, consigns it to an uncomfortable waiting, and to the Logos that delivers it to all the compromises with the world—it is on the Cross and has not yet risen or “ascended” to the side of Christ and with him. Whence this mentality of a religious heir, the need to assure oneself of a capital of ready resources. Not to forget that this twofold Greco-Judaic memory, encumbered with a thousand theological combinations, allows it to seal a new ideological alliance against Islam, which for its part demands only the subjection of an adversary. This is why we have need of gnosis, which knows only too well what the world is, and knows it through christic knowledge.