22. Absent from the World
Let us conflate the results of these two analyses. The Roman world—Romanity as world—thus carries out the generalized diffusion of two contributions, one Greek and the other Jewish, and we may characterize them as follows: the Greek contribution as the idea of the transcendence of beingness [l’étant] (that which is); the Jewish contribution as the narrative, or law, of the transcendence of the common.127 These two positions, or suppositions, henceforth cohabit in the Roman world, the world as Roman.
The transcendence of, or rather toward beingness is what Patočka meant as transcendence toward the world (HE, p. 49).128 But in the setup proposed here, as mentioned, the concept of “world” [monde] is not suitable to designate precisely what the Greek invention of philosophy has attained or delivered. That toward which philosophy has carried itself, that before which it has constituted itself as pure gaze, or further, that which it has freed or bared, is that which had been the object of practical appropriation, captured by ritual, mythical, or worshipping interest or grasping, which is to say (to keep the anachronism), rather this piece of the world inasmuch as it is; and it is there that one has had to clear the position of being [être] from any bewitching, spell, or consummation. It is therefore more exact to say that it is beingness that has been the object of this gaze, this liberation, or this baring. The invention of the philosophical comes about as transcendence toward beingness, as a movement of transporting oneself toward beingness, by way of the gaze, without capture or appropriation. Rémi Brague opens his book Aristote et la question du monde (Aristote and the Question of the World) by announcing from the start that it is built around a concept (the world) absent as such from Aristotle’s works.129 And he adds, “To say it with Heidegger, it is even . . . the conspicuously missing element of classical Greek thought.”130
If the Greeks did not know “the world” in this sense, is it perhaps because it had not yet eventuated? Greek philosophy thematizes the celestial universe (ouranos) or the cosmos, “ordered totality of the reality forming the universe,”131 origin or receptacle for the city—order or constitution of the universe as locus or origin of the city132—environment, celestial circumscription of the assembly of humans; and further, oikoumenē, which is to say, inhabited land—the part of the land that is inhabited, or the land insofar as it is inhabited. None of these concepts corresponds exactly to our idea of world. Our world is a unified idea of all beingness (all that is). We are not suggesting that the Greeks had not thought about “all that is,” or that they had not engaged with the question of its totality. What I mean to say is that we are held and involved by a certain postulation of the unity of this totality, as world. Philosophy, Husserl writes, is the “science of the universe, of the all-encompassing unity of all that is.”133 The specific schema or mode of unity of this totality, which allows us to designate it as the world, is not Greek. As “that which is” or beingness, no doubt Greek thinking provides it, and probably as totality, too. But as this (worldwide global) unity of all that is—unitary model and regime of globality of all that is—the idea comes from elsewhere, and from a later time.134
Let us recall the proposition or hypothesis formulated about this topic:135 the worldly mode appropriate to the unity of all that is is the mode of imperial unification. The world is that which the empire subjugates. The unity of the world is thus this totalized unity under a single sovereignty, the unity of the totality in the mode of submission. Rome is that which transmutes and transforms the transcendence-toward-beingness into the transcendence of the world. The (philosophical) idea of the (transcendent) unity of the world is produced in and from the era of Romanity. Its formalization as such (and the idea of universality resulting from it) may be what is specific in the contribution of Stoicism. The Stoics process the Hellenic transcendence-toward-beingness to universalize it into the transcendence of the unified world. The emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–80 C.E.) was a Stoic, and not the least among them.136 Thus it is Rome that institutes the now radical ambiguity of this agency of the world—since what is subjected is also, structurally, the very thing that potentially gives resistance. Submission produces resistance; it subjects only that which resists, insofar as it resists or can resist. That which neither does nor can resist in any way is not to be subjugated, but will only be crushed, absorbed, or ingested. What submission dominates is a resistance. In this way, if the world is that which is subjected to the empire, it is also that which resists this submission. (It is another question whether this resistance might allow one to think of an alternative to the empire, or, on the contrary, whether it is too closely bound up with imperial domination to make this possible—a matter of strategic choice: resistance or insubordination.)
. . .
Now, it so happens that a process of religious unification of the common answers this imperial unification of the world, as in a dialogue. Why so? Because “Judaism,” spread and transmitted to the outer limits of the world, will soon be called upon—by one determination of its developments—to become the religion of the Roman world, the religion of Romanity as the world. Christianity is this mutation of the Jewish contribution that makes it suitable to constitute itself as the religion of the empire—even if it is not only that. This necessarily leads to the intersection and the encounter of the Jewish contribution with the Greek one, since the very idea of empire is a development or extension of the polis, expanded into a republic and then into the world.137 The first task in conforming Christianity as a religion138 and a body of doctrines (from Paul to John to Augustine) essentially consisted in the elaboration of this relationship—of Greek philosophy with biblical narratives, and the thinking that arose as a consequence. The framework of this elaboration was the empire as such.139 In this sense, it is not because it becomes the religion of the emperors that Christianity is the religion of the empire. It is so—potentially, beforehand—as the religion of the age of the empire, and what this connection contains is precisely constituted by the fact that Christianity represents the juncture of Hebraism and Hellenism, the two main materials supplied to Roman intellectuality, which will ensure their worldwide globalization.140 A certain worldwide religious unification of the common thus answers the imperial unification of the world. The name of this worldwide, para-imperial religious unity will be Catholicity.141
Catholicity is an answer to the worldhood of the empire. The “formula” (similar to an algebraic or chemical formula) of Catholicity is “one single people,” answering the empire’s “one single world.” Little by little, a linking formula—key formula, mediating operator—has introduced itself between the two, namely, “one single god,” the monotheistic formula. For I am contending here that the invention of the narrative (or the thought) of exodus is not monotheism. The exodus sets the common free from the place, freeing up the autonomy of a commonality extracted from the locus, of a community of the common, which goes beyond its boundaries and escapes its locality. The god of the exodus is the god who goes out, moves across, and sets free: “I am Yahweh, Your God: It is I who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house where you were a slave.” Nothing in this characterization, at this very determined point, is monotheistic.142 The god of the exodus, as such, shows no solidarity with any monotheism. Instead, he rather shares in an exotheism, so to speak. Monotheism is something else altogether, since the position of the single god does not necessarily set the common free from the place. On the contrary, mono-theism can very well re-posit the locality of the god, but only in positing the formula “one single place”; all that is needed is that all places merge into a single and unique, all-encompassing locus. Now, the unique place that includes and abolishes all places is doubtless that which makes possible the idea of world. Unique all-encompassing locus: one single place, because of one single world. The world bears the uniqueness and thus the unity of the locus. The worldwide global totalization of that-which-is is its local totalization. The local unity of the world, all-encompassing unity of the place of all places, which dissolves and abolishes them in their difference, is made possible from the starting point of the project of the empire. Monotheism is its expression; it is an imperial theism. Exodus was setting one free from the place and inventing a god who steps forth and across, and moves onward,143 whereas monotheism formalizes a unifying and overlooking god, who is as localized as the ancient gods of rivers, mountains, or the household. The house of the monotheos—his mountain, his river—is the world. A question of size. What makes possible (or translates) the passage from the narratives of exodus to the religion of the empire is the production of monotheism, as the uniqueness and unity of the god answering the unity of the common place (place of the common). Exodus steps across (and sets free); monotheism answers to the empire. They do not carry the same thinking.
Note also:
(1) It is not a question of taking “Judaism” for a religion of freedom and its counterpart “Christianity” for a religion of imperial domination, but rather of questioning the historical process that leads from exodus to Catholicity. It is a complex process: (a) it comprises events and narratives, real sequences and meanings. My view here—like Ernst Bloch’s, even if it is within a different setup—is that Christianity integrates, transports, and even accentuates certain “exodic” elements—liberating ones, in any case. Conversely, “Judaism,” in the way it forms and reforms itself from the Roman constitution of the empire onward, is in no way foreign to its world. The Diaspora, for example, is a structure that is closely dependent on imperial organization: arranged throughout the surface of imperial territories, it can only keep up the system of its connections, the form of its unity, and the force of its cohesion thanks to the means of communication and transportation of the Roman world, as well as its judicial and transactional unity. (b) But also, this process of passing across (from the exodus to the “Roman Catholic” Church), in its median phase, goes through the extreme complexity of the Christic sequence itself. In this, it is important to distinguish the events and texts produced around the Christ of the constitution of the Christian religion. Numerous relations, transports, and filiations are perceptible, between the texts and events on the one hand, and the constitution of the religion on the other. But one cannot mix them up: they are the distinct moments of a becoming. The Gospel narratives and their commentaries relate facts and words linked to Jesus, but they also bear witness to the constitution of a corpus of references for Christianity as a religion. In this complex, the life and the teaching of Jesus are equally distant from the exodus and from Catholicity, as it were. Jesus produces a certain development—a certain transformation—of exodic thinking, and it is important to understand how these elements will be taken up again and reorganized to constitute Christianity, starting with Paul, whose actions and project are clearly linked to the (imperial) evolution of the Roman world.
(2) Freud clearly sets forth the link between monotheism and imperiality in Moses and Monotheism. Indeed, Freud considers that it was Moses the Egyptian who transferred monotheism to the Jewish people from the religion of Akhenaten the reformer, after the latter's failed reform of the Egyptian belief system. When Freud asks himself why Akhenaten came to propose this religious reform, at several points he suggests as the only explanation the connection between monotheism and the form of the empire:
In the glorious Eighteenth Dynasty, under which Egypt first became a world power, a young Pharaoh came to the throne. . . . This king set about forcing a new religion on his Egyptian subjects. . . . The political conditions in Egypt had begun at this time to exercise a lasting influence on the Egyptian religion. As a result of the military exploits of the great conqueror, Tuthmosis III, Egypt had become a world power. . . . This imperialism was reflected in religion as universalism and monotheism. Since the Pharaoh’s responsibilities now embraced not only Egypt but Nubia and Syria as well, deity too was obliged to abandon its national limitation144 and, just as the Pharaoh was the sole and unrestricted ruler of the world known to the Egyptians, this must also apply to the Egyptians’ new deity.145
If, for Freud, the exodus was indeed linked to the assertion of monotheism (and its transfer to a population of rebelling slaves), it is because manifestly, for him, worldliness is the only possible way of setting oneself free with regard to the local. A respectable hypothesis: a unique all-encompassing locus may be a necessary stage for any exit away from the place. But such a freeing does not provide a liberation from locality as such, but rather from plurality and multiplicity: it is polytheism, then, that is rejected. Monotheism is a monotopism. Exotheism is something else: it is an exotopia, the exit or way out of the locus as such—and thus, in a certain sense, out of the god.146
And so, a coherent, linked structure constitutes itself, associating empire and Catholicity; it is a union tied to the unity of a place (the world) and ensured by the unity of a god. But this (horizontal) unity remains split (vertically) by its very duality: the distinction between locus and god, empire and Catholicity, the world and the people, and thus in the end the distinction between the world and the hereafter or otherworldly world. The worldwide global unification of the empire and the church is “paid for” by the division between empire and church. The price of worldhood is what was earlier (somewhat awkwardly) termed the theologico-political difference. The price of global worldhood is the duality of worlds. The structure firmly associates union and division: local union of the (imperial) world and the (monotheistic) church, and “ontological” difference, one might venture to say, between beings (of the world) and being (in common).
What one thus notices in this scission or fission is its dual heritage, its double Greco-Judaic provenance—on one hand, the empire, extended city, widening to the dimensions of a world;147 on the other, the church, extended resumption of the schema of the people, as it asserts itself during the exodus—a Pauline work of substitution, which institutes the faithful as one people, the continuation and transmutation of what had been the chosen people. One evidently should not consider these two ancestries as disjoined legacies or patrimonies that were dissociated during Roman times—as if the empire were “purely” Greek and the church “purely” Hebraic. There are crossbreedings and chiasmuses in this filiation: the church borrows the “model” and even the name of its assembly from Greek politics; and the empire, throughout its constitution, never stops seeking the theological model that may guarantee its worldwide unity. That is why thinking of the “theologico-political” was unsatisfying: the political side of the couple is permeated with theology, as has repeatedly been said ever since it was noted by Carl Schmitt. But the theological pole, for its part, is also thoroughly politicized.
. . .
It is a commonplace that what we have become accustomed to calling “Christianity” formed at the junction of the Greek and Jewish legacies. What is “Christianity”? It is a religion, in the sense discussed earlier,148 defined at the same time by a set of institutions and by the corpus of texts (prescriptions and narratives) that circumscribes its limits and strengthens its unity. Christianity is not the supposedly defined contents of the teaching or the life of Christ; it is the whole apparatus that structures it, which is as practical, concrete, and institutional as it is textual, with texts and institutions as mutual guarantees. It is true that Christianity displays the peculiarity (which it shares with other religions, though perhaps not with all of them) that within the body of its texts, it tells the story of its own formation as a religion: this is the singular object of the Acts of the Apostles, and also, in a different mode, of the Epistles, especially Paul’s. But this narrative itself was constituted as a report about origins—translated, selected, and recognized. The story itself is the outcome of an institutional process.
In this sense, Christianity as a religion is indeed an imperial religion: the establishment of its institutions and its corpus is exactly contemporaneous with the assertion of the imperial regime—taking into account a slight lag of ideologies behind actualities.149 Above all, the formation of the empire and of this religion are connected by all kinds of threads: by relations of transitivity, metaphorization, reciprocal pledges and guarantees, circulation, commerce, intersecting evictions and their failures, and finally of course by the conversion of emperors and the accession of Christianity to the rank of state religion, which is—literally—the crowning moment of the process, though it only forms its most visible—and quite belated—manifestation, occurring at a point in time when things were beginning to change, if not in nature, at least from one phase to the next.
Christianity thus constitutes the junction between the Greek and “Jewish” sequences.150 But is it just that, in itself? Does all that it contains come down to a com-position of Judaism and Hellenism, and could one deconstruct its whole structure and find nothing but the deposited sediments of these two provenances? Not so. Christianity does tie Judaism and Hellenism together, but with this bond it produces a very singular operation, which takes a new turn with very new effects, making possible the—new—development of the ensuing history. What is this operation and what is new? It seems to me that there are two ways of describing this, linked to two sequences in the story of Christ, at his birth and at his death. The first of these thematics, as we shall see, may be philosophically more familiar to us than the second—at least in the sense in which we would understand it here. And yet it is the second one that seems more open. Let us try to spell out this double question.
The idea, in itself, of the birth of Christ is not a religious innovation—neither as a human birth, at first inspection at least, nor as a divine filiation: gods usually have sons—heroes, gods, or demigods, of mixed human and divine origin—and these sons are usually born, no matter what their place in the hierarchy of beings might be. In Greek or Roman stories, for example, gods have a birth: they are born as sons of gods or of places, but their coming to life is a common event. This is not to say that there is no mystery or innovative thinking whatsoever in the Christic birth of this god-man: particularly, as soon as there is an attempt to recast the God of the Jews with Greek categories, as being, plenitude of being or absolute being, the possibility of a genesis, a procreation, or a birth is certain to pose a problem for any theorization—as much for the begetting father as for the begotten son. We know to what extent these questions will have generated a deep, slow, and at times tortuous elaboration before finding their theological equilibrium. Nevertheless the “mystery” of the birth of Christ has generally not been thought of from the starting point of this setup but rather as a question of incarnation: as a question of the passage of the divine into the human, into human flesh and a body, which is to say, into the world. The incarnation is the very radical operation by which God gives himself to the world, worldifies himself, so to speak, gives himself over, to reach the status of worldly being. This proposition, which philosophy (Hegel in particular) has commented on at length, is in fact theologically worked out by the Gospel of John, in multiple developments proposed by this text, whose most familiar and famous words are: “For God so loved [ēgapēsen] the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”151 This is the content of the incarnation first of all: the delivery of the divine to the world, its intromission or incorporation into worldly beingness.
If one accepts the proposition advanced earlier about the divine,152 it follows that incarnation is the common given over to the world. But in the world the common does not give itself over by keeping its divine difference—its incorruptibility, immutability, and divine immortality. It truly gives itself over, without reservation; it becomes world, penetrates the beingness of the world. And so, the world is changed by this coming: entranced and suffused with divinity and commonality. The divine that is born, put into the world, is the hypothesis of a putting in common, of a community of the world. In this perspective what the birth and the advent of Christ signify is the world in common put to the test: supposing or proposing that the common as such is in the world, or that it becomes the world, and thereby is the becoming of the world, the world that has become—starting at the point of this entrance, or trance. The world turned into our common, our being-common or being-in-common—this is the hypothesis of the incarnation. It is a communism of the world, a worldwide or worldly communism, which is experienced and incarnated in this incorporation. Any theology (or philosophy) that centers and concentrates on the mystery of incarnation tries to think of the world as that which has become common for us, and as the terrain, the territory, or locus, of our community. Incarnation tells the advent of the divine in the world as the delivery of the common to the place—unique and global—and thus to the local unity of the totality of beingness. What we have in common is the place of the totality of the world: incarnation requires a communism of the beingness of that which is. A theological appellation pertains to this operation, and it is salvation (of the world). According to this view, Christ came to the world to save it. Much in the Gospel of John attests to this.153
Now, this advent is a failure, and the facts are mentioned from the very beginning: “[The Word] was the true light. . . . He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not” (John 1:9–10). This realization is repeated: “O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee” (John 17:25). The test of the incarnation took the form of a conflict, irredeemably heterogeneous: “. . . but me [the world] hateth, because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil” (John 7:7). In this perspective (wholly related to his birth), the death of Christ signifies nothing less than the failure of the undertaking to communize (that is, save) the world. This death thus seals the exit of Christ (therefore of the divine, and therefore of the common) from the world, ensuring that the common henceforth is torn from the world in an unmendable way, and that the world as world is decommunized—which is to say, it seals the proclamation of salvation outside of the world. “Whither I go, ye cannot come . . . ye are of this world; I am not of this world” (John 8:21–23). The people (the assembly, as the assembly of disciples) becomes the people outside of the world: “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you” (John 15:18–19). Indeed, he does proclaim, “I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). But this victory is an exit—it occurs as an exit, and therefore sanctions the impossibility of saving the world as such: “And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee” (John 17:11).154 In this sense, the death of Christ is the reverse of the incarnation—its turnaround and retreat: “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father” (John 16:28). If then the birth of Christ has delivered God into the world and has put him into the world in the process of incarnation, his death (reduced solely to this dimension) takes him away, undelivers and absents him from the world. The death of Christ is the disincarnation of the divine. The world splits. The divine absents itself in it. Henceforth in the world, the common is what is absent. That is why the tomb is empty: the divine (the common) is no longer in the world. Nothing of him—not even his body—has been left.
. . .
And yet. The death of Christ would hardly be anything if it were only that. Now, the death of Christ is a tremendous event, and its aftershock has kept reverberating. Why? We do know, perhaps obscurely, that the (hardly challengeable) novelty of Christianity does not stem so much from the birth of Christ (the birth of a god; as we pointed out, all gods are born) as from his death. Yes, an event occurred, and the sudden appearance of something new in the history of religions. God—a god—is dead. This was not an everyday occurrence.155 Yes, it was tremendous news, and it took a long time for it to be apprehended, or simply formulated, as such—from Hegel to Nietzsche’s proclamation.156 But what does this piece of news say that has not been said elsewhere or earlier? The death of a god is not his (or her) relinquishment, obliteration, or oblivion—since there had in fact already been other relinquished gods; while this one, precisely, because of his death, was not at all forgotten. The Christ who dies does not fade away. What does he do, then? What exactly does the dying Christ do, when he dies? This requires the question of how he can die. A god can only die if he (or she) has or is a body. Death is always death of the body. I do not mean to say here that the death of Christ has not affected, for a while at least (three nights? two days?), his whole being, body and soul. But this death, in its completeness, was only possible inasmuch as this being was circumscribed and contained in a body. A soul on its own cannot die: if it dies, it is because it is caught up in the mortality of a body, and that it is held or contained in it. In this sense, the death of Christ does agree with his birth: a physical and corporeal birth. And there the mystery of incarnation does find that which ensures its newness: if incarnation is a new event, a sudden appearance in the history of religions, it is inasmuch as it makes the death of God possible. What is new in the birth of Christ is that it opens up the possibility—even the ineluctable character—of his death.
The divine gives itself over to death in the same way in which it was delivered and given to the world, namely, through his or its body. Of the divine itself, something dies, and that is what the divine has delivered to the world. What dies with the death of Christ is the worldliness of the divine, the undertaking to save the world as world, as this world. In this the world is overcome—one might also say undone: “For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith” (1 John 5:4). It is in this sense that the “world passeth away” (1 John 2:17), or, as Paul puts it, the schema or figure “of this world passeth away” (1 Cor. 7:31).157 Thus, if God dies, it is through his body, as a body—as this worldly being into which the divine was incarnated. And yet the grave is empty: this death, this body was removed from the world, spirited away, withdrawn from the economy of the world that had received and integrated it into the inmost structure of its fabric. Where then did the body of the dead god go? This is the question that will keep haunting the aftermath of this death, as we are going to understand it little by little. This is why the Easter mystery, in its strict sense, strictly is the mystery of the empty tomb, much before being the mystery of resurrection (which, as such, is not so mysterious after all, but rather a kind of response to the mystery, its elucidation). This is what first becomes apparent to humans: the tomb is empty. This is the narrative sequence that pertains to the narrative of Easter. The resurrection, Christ’s ascent to heaven, his arrival at the side of the Father—all this will only be manifested or told, as such, later on. Easter is the manifestation, the irruption into the phenomenality of the world, or the epiphany in its strict sense, of this: the grave is empty; the body was removed. Now there is a hole in the world; there is a hole in the beingness of the world—a void, an absence. Something of the world was transferred—where to?
Indeed, one may imagine that the body (of the dead god) was transported into pure ideality, that is, into the nonworldliness, nonactuality, or nonreality of images or ideas. And it is undeniable that something like this has occurred at certain times or in certain tendencies of Christianity: an ideal, nonworldly Christ, so fully ushered into the other world that this world is rid of him, as it were, driven toward the autonomy of its purely worldly regime, and thus, if you will, deprived of its hole. The hole in the world that is the empty tomb, the black hole of the world, is thus obstructed, plugged, and filled in, as it were; or at least it would pretend or feign to be so, in the garb of semblance or make-believe. The ideality of the divine is an obturation of the mystery; it is the tendency of a Greek absorption of Christianity, the temptation of a purely Greek Christianity,158 from which the singularity of the Judeo-Hellenic encounter is reduced—and so is the fruit—unheard-of and new—of this encounter, the death of god incarnate. This, of course, is not the story of Easter; it is not this trans-position and hypo- or hyperstasis of the divine in the ideal or the imaginary. The story of Easter tells something else.
Something else: the Eucharist. Christ gives his body (his body and his blood: his flesh and his life), and his disciples eat it and drink it. What does this mean? That the body of Christ, the body of the God who dies or is going to die (the meal takes place immediately before the capture, the trial, the execution, and the death; it is carried out with a view toward their imminence), is ingested and absorbed by the disciples.159 Where is the body of Christ, henceforth? It is in the body of the disciples. The body is in the body—this is the first consequence of the Eucharist. That is why he is no longer in the grave: he is absent from it because he has gone into the body of the disciples, leaving no residue. There is nothing left in the grave. The body is (henceforth) in the body and thus it is no longer in the world. This transmutation and this transfer indicate that henceforth the body is not the world, the thinking of the body is not the thinking of the world, and that a kind of alternative—a fork branching out, for the divine and thus for the common—makes body and world diverge from one another.160 The body is another model of beingness than the world: the body requires a way of thinking different from the thinking of the world; strictly, the body is not worldly. Or, since the Eucharist, strictly, it no longer is. There is a (physical) beingness other than the world. The world is no longer the totality of beingness. Here is something new.161
Now, this transfer takes place during a meal. The meal is the major figure of the common. Meals eaten in common are the institution of commonality as such—meeting, assembling, and sharing. In its later history, in fact, the celebration (recollection and repetition) of the Eucharistic meal will be conceived of as the foundation or re-foundation of the community. Henceforth, where is the body of the dead god? It is within the common. But what did we say the divine itself was? The common, simply enough. And what does the Eucharist mean, in this sense? The Eucharist means: the common is within the common. Henceforth, the common is entirely within the common, only and wholly within it—and as a body: the divine is now no longer the sole spirit of the common. Since the Eucharist, the divine has been the body of the common, the corporeity, physicalness, physical and corporeal being of the common. It is the (physical) being-in-common. The theology of the incarnation may have established a communism of the world, in at least one of its construals (the Johannine one?). The theology of the Eucharist establishes a communism of the common, or what one could term a communionism, since this transfer of the common to the body of the common itself bears the theological name communion. Communion is the becoming-common of the common, as a body.
Now, as I have been proposing all along, the world can be understood as totalization and imperial unification of beingness. The world is that which the empire subjects—all that it subjects, and thus everything, inasmuch as everything is what it subjects. If this is how it is, then the Eucharist means that there is no longer any need to look for commonality within worldliness—within imperiality. There is nothing common in imperiality. There is commonality only of the common, and not of the world. The common is irrevocably (within) itself; it is to be thought of within the autonomous regime of the community, as such, and not as a community of place, or worldly community. There is no longer any monotheism. The common (the divine) is no longer to be grasped within the local unity of the world, but in sharing out. The meal is this shared commonality. What the common shares out (sharing itself) is no longer the world but the common itself. The common is within the common, and it is (in) common—nothing else. Christ says to his disciples, Henceforth, as I die and absent myself from the world, you are the common, that’s all. Nothing other than you. Everything in you, altogether among you.
Among you: this Eucharistic hypothesis agrees with other statements made by Christ. “[Lo] there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). Or, “For where two or three are gathered together [Gk., sunēgmenoi] in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20), which Luther at one point pushes further by translating: “Where two are gathered as one on earth, there I am in their midst.”162 He does so by omitting “in my name” [Gk., to emon onoma], and reinforcing his words toward the sense of a pure theory of the assembly, or a theory of the “pure” assembly:163 Christ, present at every gathering, at every reunion as such—without making the invocation of the name necessary. Among or “in the midst” of you then means that the divine (the common) is there, in the middle of the reunion, between and among the ones and the others, standing in-between, just as Christ is among and between (Gk., en mesō: in the middle) the two or three who are gathering. Christ (the divine, the kingdom—the common) is between you, in the empty space in-between, which extends between those who are gathered. The common is in-between, there, in the cleared emptiness, so that the reunion may be held, between the one and the other—not in springs or scrubby vegetation, and not in heaven, but simply in-between and among them.
To this the Eucharist then adds, the common is within you.164 “Within” you means: in the body of each of you. In your body: you have shared it, eaten, and drunk it. And this can henceforth be explained in this way: the in-between you is within you. The in-between you is nowhere but in you, in the most singular and shared-out effectivity of your body. One should not even think of the in-between you (this emptiness) as being in the emptiness of the place as place, in this void that is there as a there, cleared for the assembly that is gathered in it and around it. The emptiness of the common is nothing of the world—not even this local vacuum of the world that is there. The common is within you, that is to say, in each of you, in the effectivity of singular bodies, where each of you is set and contained. This is the flattest and most prosaic (most atheist) way of putting into words the mystery of the Eucharist, which is doubtless a great incorporated, deposited, and transferred mystery in the singular effectivity of each body: the in-between you is within you. And this means: the determined circumscription of your body does not delimit a being shuttered onto itself, since the body contains within it this emptiness, this interstice, this relation that is between him or her and the others—the common. The in-between you is within you: the singular is open to the common; the singular is (henceforth) no longer thinkable in the closed circumscription of a determined beingness. The finite is open. There is something new.
. . .
The Eucharist thus institutes the assembly as the depositary and nonlocal locus of the divine—from now on incarnated—that is to say, of the common and being-in-common. This transfer will rule over the theologico-political question as a whole, which ultimately will ask, “Where is the body of the dead god—the body of the common?” Concurrently or successively, there are three answers one can bring to it.
First, the body of the dead god is constituted as assembly, ecclesia, and church. This is the canonical thesis according to which the church is the body of Christ—corpus christi. This constitution recurs and reproduces itself at each celebration of the mass, and is at stake in the debate over his real presence: during mass, the church receives and shares the corporeal actuality of the divine presence, and not only the effusion of its spirit, or the legendary retransmission of the episode of Jesus’s death. But what is the church? What is this assembly constituted in Eucharistic sharing? There are two clashing conceptions of it: the church is all the faithful as a whole—but it is also the separate body of priests, a body that is consecrated (through ordination) and separated, in the flesh—bodily, physically—through the vow of chastity, a separation that the communion under two kinds re-marks. The church then becomes (at least in one sense, which habitual usage has kept up) the separated body of persons dedicated to clerical activities, to the clergy, which is a body, too. This is a theologico-political thesis: the existence of the church in its separation is at the basis of the institution of the papacy, the authority that doubles, and competes against, the political agency in general and the imperial one more particularly.
In the second hypothesis, the assembly that receives the body of the dead god is simply the assembly, as assembly—a hypothesis that rules Lutheran thinking and the institutional transformations of the Reformation. Like the previous hypothesis, it conceives of the transmission of the body of Christ as a continuation, an uninterrupted chain from the first Eucharistic meal, from one sharing to the next, guaranteeing the real presence of the divine in the assembly. But Lutheran theology holds that the assembly itself (the assembly of the faithful, of the baptized)165 receives the complete divine body and becomes its depositary, so that any appropriation of ecclesiality by anyone—any order or body—is a usurpation.166 The body of Christ again is the church, here, but as the community of the assembled faithful, without reservation. This assembly has its organization, its sponsors, its ministers, who are always revocable: it can in no way be dispossessed of its constitution; it remains the ultimate ecclesial agency, and therefore the locus of the Christic body, which cannot be deported.
There are extreme political consequences for this hypothesis, which in a general way is at the origin of any position of the body politic, which is to say, the unity of the political as a body. The corporeality of this body is only thinkable (on the basis of Paul’s indications)167 as the transfer of the divine body into the assembly, that is, into the bodies that have received the Eucharist and have shared the physical donation of the divine during the paschal meal. In one of its more determined senses, this hypothesis will direct thoughts about the inviolability, unrepresentability, holy and sacred character of the assembly as such. The Reformation is thus at the start of a major revolutionary tendency (Rousseauist, and later council-based, in a very broad sense), which merely pushes its first intuition to its ultimate consequences, and radicalizes it: the divine is the assembly—inviolable, unrepresentable, sacred—because it is the depositary of the dead god. It can only convene continually, never suspending or negating itself. Its convocation is paschal and exodic: exiting, taking one step across, out of the world of servitude.
A third theologico-political hypothesis will still remain available, for quite some time. Indeed, the body of Christ having been transferred to the assembly, and thus to the church, the church in its turn would deposit it into the hands (or the body), so to speak, of the—imperial or royal—sovereign. This, in fact, is the radical and ultimate “mystery” of the sacrament of the consecration: when the divine (the common) has been positioned or deposited onto the physical singularity of the king or the emperor, the latter has become holy and sacred, and he then carries on or in himself something of the corporeality of the dead god. What one can see is that this hypothesis is continually competing against the church’s ecclesiality (the body of Christ then finding itself in two places at once, not because it is ubiquitous but because there is a rivalry between two deposits). On account of a radical fidelity to Eucharistic transfer and sharing, the holiness or sacredness of the empire is strictly incompatible with the church’s. But we can see that this incompatibility is not only a matter of two claims of legacy fighting over their inheritance. It more deeply has to do with the fact that the consecration of the emperor (or of the king who inherits the dislocation of the empire) comes down to returning the Eucharistic legacy (the sacredness of the assembly) to the empire, and thus to the world. The Eucharist had to do with a commonality or community of the common radically asserting itself as such, in physically sharing or distributing itself among the bodies of assembled individuals, and thus with a new way of grasping the common in themselves, between and among themselves. The sacrament of the consecration returns the common to the king, and therefore to a piece or place in the world, an imperial region. The consecration subjugates the common—to the kingdom, to the empire and the world. It subjects it.