Christo-Fiction: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem

The fusion of the quantum principles and the subject, that which we also call Christ as ultimatum, eschaton, or Last-Instance, is a phenomenon conceivable in a rigorous rather than miraculous manner or in the manner of a divine creation. It supposes an encounter not of the Jew and the Greek—that was valid before for the discursive material necessary for the operation of its cognizance—but of the idempotence of vectoriell origin and of subject-belief, with the christic generic redistributing or transforming unilaterally Greco-Judaic mixtures. The generic hybrid is far from being the first in history, initiating a new, or last, historical sequence—all of this is specular and circular. It is rather the prior-to-first event that reorients reverse-wise temporality, the arrow of time imposed by the world. Christ is the Last Instance, or, better still, the prior-to-first generic element as condition of every relation to the world. The world is the proper object of Christ that philosophy (Heidegger, for example) diverted and inserted into ontology. This event of generic fusion involves religions, obviously, but also the science that, historically, has not yet effectuated it in its mode, and that now serves as a model for the science of religions. For us it is a question of inventing, strictly speaking, a Christ who would cease to be imaginary in the religious, transcendent sense, who would not be an event in history (his anticipated or nostalgic repetition) but a new interpretation made possible by quantum theory. Our task, as faithful rather than as Christians, is to grasp, in the name of “Christ,” this scientific or “idemscient” possibility, the real content of what is meant by his “imitation” as practiced by the mystics. We imitate a christic science rather than the historical Christ who serves as our “material.”

We might examine the problem first from the side of philosophy, which, before being occasional but necessary material, is given as sufficient. Now, in the philosophical mélange of logic and the human lived, one can identify symptoms of this fusion as a simple suture in a transcendental form, a form imposed by an overseeing agent or a transcendent supersubject, a divine operator or theologian who ultimately conditions the transcendental and its false immanence. In this framework, ultimation appears as a simple redistribution of an All, but certainly not as a prior-to-first redistribution that would limit its authority radically. The immanental fusion that creates the generic is prepared or “facilitated” in philosophy, but is not realized within it.

On the one hand, there is the prior-to-first Christ as generic subject-science or Last Instance, as superposition of the minimal algebraic condition, idempotence, and the lived that it neutralizes. This lived is of an indifferent doxic origin, but becomes generic or nonegological, nonindividual; it has passed into the state of immanent messianity. Its generic form excludes the consciousness-form or the ego-form, which are rejected as worldly representations, or representations contrary to the wavelike nature of messianity. There is thus a generic lived of Christ as science: Christ is not a singular individual of the world nor an ontological entity; his universality which takes humans in charge is of an other nature than that of philosophy, which “takes into care beings as a whole.” But it can always be conflated, by philosophy itself, with the transcendent subject of philosophy. Philosophy has every interest in conflating the two states, messianic and philosophical, generic and general, in the name of the “subject,” and hence identifying it with man in general, or abstract humanity.

But between these two “subjects,” one as fully generic Christ, or messianity, the other as simple occasion of generic salvation, there is the faithful subject configured by messianity, the messiah that haunts the world. This subject is what is transformed into a symptom by messianic immanence. It is the faithful subject or the subject-in-struggle against the beliefs of the world. Now, it is principally this subject-in-struggle, this faithful grappling with the world, that bears within it all the ambiguity of a double interpretation. This subject is the one that is saved and therefore can once more be caught up in the world and its attraction. Salvation cannot be an absolute or “religious” act, without premises, as creation ex nihilo claims to be. It is indeed a grace, but we distinguish between an absolute, authoritarian grace fabricated with Greco-Judaic presuppositions and a radical grace that takes humans at their vectoriell root. How could we be “saved” if we are not already saved in knowledge, without being this knowledge of a salvation that does not yet actually know itself? If messianity boasts a certain action, it is that of saving humans and making messiahs of them. We do not conceive a divine and individual messiah coming into the world, or, a little differently, a historical Christ making his return at the end of history or of time. To be damned is to believe that nothing can save us because we do not know how, by what means and through whom, we are saved. We are the test of a salvation of which we know almost nothing. However, we have the feeling of having been saved despite our long-maintained ignorance of the means necessary to have been saved. “God made man” or “man made messiah”?

Now, how is this underdetermination as particulate of a transcendence of corpuscular origin possible, this obtaining of a particle through bringing down or simplification of its transcendence, now included in the immanence of messianity? We know that messianity is a wavelike phenomenon that traverses immanently, in a “tunneling” manner, and thus by ascending, but without transcending a second time or once more, the infinite mountains of transcendence, not in the way that demons or sheep who have escaped their enclosure might have done. We shall call tunneling-effect, in general, the action-without-transcendence or the vectoriell ascending of immanence across transcendence. But the effect of messianity is not summed up in this passage alone, this passage of vectoriell immanence across transcendence detaches from the latter a simplified form that does not add itself to transcendence; it is instead its transformation through subtraction or through the bringing down of its doublet nature. Messianity is wavelike and thus belongs to vectoriellity and to the imaginary number denoted by √ − 1, which has a subtractive effect. The effect of this immanent passage is to reduce the corpuscle to a simple transcendence, to suppress the original doublet. We shall say that simple transcendence is the clone-form of double transcendence, that the faithful-subject is the clone of the transcendent(al) subject of the philosopher. Cloning is a repetition, itself immanent, of transcendence, and is thus subtractive or depotentializing. Rather than being spontaneously overpotentialized as philosophical repetition is, it “repeats” its material givens at an apparently lesser power, as simple and weak. It is a question of a cloning, and six differences can be remarked between this and a wordly being.

However, it is still possible to formulate oraxioms concerning the nonbeing of messianity in which we participate, its inexistence, and its secret, since the secret can be oraxiomatically formulated even though it is foreclosed to theology. This is why we say that it under-goes as generic rather than be-coming it philosophically, rather than over-coming like a hero or a “savior,” and also that it does not intervene like “providence” in the course of the world. Nor us—for in reality it is a question of us, we “Christians”: we do not have to become or be in the substantial or indeed subjective sense of these philosophemes, as one is or becomes a philosopher. We have to under-go as what we are, faithful who can sometimes be “without-religion.” If there is a law that messianity does not follow, being unlocalizable, neither local nor global, it is that of the course of the world or of history. Given its actuality, which is not historico-worldly but entirely an actuality of immanence, and despite its underexistence, subjects drawn from the world cannot say what happens in the mind of a Father who would send them, or in those of the sent—all the “whys” that would motivate an anthropomorphic finality—but only how he acts, that is, how he refrains from acting or existing, the better to act through this immanent retention, this underexistence of the vector in which he is held and which suffices to act on the faithful that it extracts from the world. It is a problem to resolve through its own transformation by each of the faithful, not a philosophical question addressed universally to individuals, or an existential one.

But one must complete or accomplish this prior-to-first decision and make of it a constant, and the rest will come of itself, or will take place, for the essential, according to its mode of necessity. This completion of the subject-science as constant signifies that it vectoriellizes and unilateralizes as messiah the transcendent subject that is proper to this domain of objects, and that proves to be existentially involved but without this being determinant. Prior-to-priority, some lived, wandering the world, must be carried to idempotence as immanent messianity and to the noncommutativity that make it generic subject, as faithful, amorous, dominant, and so on lived. The generic sciences have need of a lived that is each time specific; politics needs a proletariat or an acting subject, erotics needs an amorous subject but cannot be reduced to it, aesthetics needs an artist subject—all subjects philosophically neutralized so as to become generic. It is thus not necessary to be philosophers in order to establish in principle if not in fact a science of philosophy, except obviously for the knowledge of technical details. And hermeneutic all-faith is not necessary to explain the religions or the Gospels and to reduce them to a constant. These generic subjects, and above all Christ, we must conceive them as quanta of lived algebra—that is to say, quanta of the force of fidelity.

As soon as he is regrasped and statuified by the religious, Christ as emergence of this science of salvation seems to leave his work in some way incomplete, as something that has been able to arouse the hope or the imagination of a return, of a second, no longer militant but triumphant attempt. But if the faithful are necessary in order to make intelligible this knowledge that they are, the faithful are also necessary insofar as they complete through their fidelity this science-in-Christ without bringing it to a close, insofar as they sum these vectors without exhausting it. The generic duality of Christ, this immanent and rigorous messianity that acts on the faithful without passing via the world, if it is badly interpreted or grasped externally from the point of view of philosophy, simulates a return or a doubling in the mirror of Christ and of messiahs as individuals extended to the dimensions of world-history. As if there could be a doublet of Christ, or as if he were a doublet of himself. The famous “plan of God” comes from the myth of return and its worldly and apocalyptic horrors. What Christ teaches is not a hope of return, to put an end to an unfinished task, a creation that remains “broken down,” a first unhappy effort, as the divine creation of the ancient gnostics may have suggested. There will be no return, nor even a new apocalyptic turn of History. Messianity understood rigorously, with the means of an order more scientific than mythological, exhausts its essence one time each time, and only multiplies its effects as a function of occasions. However, the science-in-Christ necessitates that we no longer go into the world other than through it, that is to say, through faith; and its strength is entirely that of a straight and unifrontal momentum. In view of making oneself a generic subject—but this is not a transcendent project or a program of Providence—messianity, being prior-to-primary, is necessarily “completed” by the faithful under the law of immanence that acts on them, the faithful that it subtracts from the world, without mechanically or transcendentally constraining them. The messianity of-last-instance underdetermines the faith of the faithful, extends itself into the world and beyond the effectiveness of the messianic under-going. We the humans, we are the unique face of messianity, we are unifacial messiahs and not individual messiahs, founders of sects. It is up to we the faithful to complete or actualize messianity; we are the faithful of-last-instance because we are acted upon, no doubt, but by the christic nonact.

The addition via superposition and, moreover, noncommutativity of the Last Instance creates the inevitable or “objective” appearance of a vectoriell subtraction (an “apophasis”) or of an underexistence of messianity in relation to philosophical and theological control. But the prior-to-priority of messianity, perhaps unlike that of the subject-in-struggle or the faithful subject, is not originally a contingent decision that could be interpreted dialectically in two opposite ways. Messianity is a form that is a priori through ultimation or the decided-without-decision in which all of our acts, whether scientific or faithful, are immersed. The retreat of messianity from and in relation to scientific positivity and philosophical spontaneity is an apophatic appearance that is itself philosophical. The positive essence of subtraction is rather, in its origin, an under-going that “ontologically” brings down philosophy or theology to the state of clones or particles, pushes back their priority, even though they in fact do not at all abandon this priority, conserving it in the form of an appearance. Cataphatic and apophatic, this classical duality of mystical theology that developed in the unique milieu of double transcendence is now understood through an entirely other context than that which it is enveloped in, and whose aspect is at first sight brutal and physical—the wavelike and the particulate, both terms that display a certain crossing of theological opposites. The duality that is substituted for that of philosophy overthrows the Christian logic of the rising and the descent of the discourse on God or indeed Grace. Vectoriellity is a christic and not a theo-christic device; it is formed of the simple ascending of vectors superposing themselves on others, but this creates a bringing down of double transcendence or of every possible Logos, to which the phase tends or which invites it, but which is arrested and fallen-into-immanence.

Why is this equality of Christ and the faithful in messianity or in faith not a general common-being? The principle of noncommutativity obliges us to distinguish and to name Christ in his science otherwise than as “simply” faithful. He is the faithful of-last-instance, or the prior-to-first faithful. And every faithful, if he follows Christ, on the one hand, is no longer any faithful whatsoever, but feels himself to be community and generic body—this is the stance of faith liberated from the hierarchy consubstantial with ecclesio-centrism, from churches and sects—and on the other hand he himself also deserves the name of faithful of-the-last-instance. To say it in yet another way, Christ and the faithful are an ultimatum posed as the ultimation of faith or as the faithful-in-struggle. An ultimatum that is the content of the new kerygma as an announcement made to the world of a “sterilization” through fidelity of the great spiritual cities, the stubborn Jerusalem, the transcendental Athens, the mystical Byzantium, and the Catholic Rome that reunites them. The eschatological faithful is the messiah, and any faithful speech is an ultimatum nailed to the doors of the Churches.