Jewish, Greek and Latin, Saint Paul united in his single person three of the ancient formats from which the West was born. A pious Pharisee, born in Tarsus into a family of the diaspora, educated in Jerusalem beside Gamaliel, he respected Mosaic Law and continually cited the Torah, Psalms and prophets learnedly. We imagine that he knew Greek philosophy, at least through Philo, for, in that language he wrote, spoke and whose authors he sometimes mentioned, he occasionally happened to say that he admired its wisdom and feared its reason. A Roman citizen like his father, he prided himself on this rank; he knew the law since, condemned, he appealed to the tribunals of the Empire. No one has better described this synthesis than Stanislas Breton.
Saint Paul doesn’t merely symbolize the cultural crossbreeding that was taking place around the Mediterranean during the pax romana among sailors, port merchants or a few rare persons of letters, but above all he achieves the total human constructed at that time by the law, logos and administration, three formats forged in the fires of Hebraic monotheism, Hellenic reason and Roman law, stemming respectively from rite in the temple, harmony in the cosmos and the city in the Empire. This triple belonging to an organized society, to a proportioned world, to an all-powerful God, promotes excellent behaviour. So three grandiose views forge Saint Paul’s body, life and thought: the projection of eternity onto the time of history; logos, the measurement of the world and the language spoken on the sea and in the inhabited world as well as by rigorous knowledge; citizenship, spread by imperial politics. Ritual, rational and juridical, three rules sculpt the universe of antiquity: uniting three perfect norms, they define Saul’s era, the name he bore before his conversion. Who hasn’t known such human masterpieces, hasn’t admired them, hasn’t feared their fundamentalism?
Triply formatted in this way, Saint Paul, newly named, suddenly left the trinity of his belongingnesses, travelled the inhabited world, invented the era to come and, in so doing, confronted three failures: his coreligionists persecuted him; gathered at the Areopagus of Athens, the Greek philosophers mocked his jabber; doubtless, Rome judged and executed him. In him and through him, the stem of the best and most lasting of what the Indo-European and Semitic traditions constructed bifurcated; in him was incarnated and through him was grafted the news he announced; in him, the branch of a new creature surged up. The old formats in fact presupposed that he belong to three communities: the new human doesn’t identify with any of these communities so as to create an original one. Which?
Belongingness and identity
In a previous work, I wrote: my identity does not reduce to my belongingnesses. So don’t call me old, male or a writer; instead place me in some subset grouping respectively age, sex or profession. Beyond these implications, who am I? Myself. All the rest, including what administration compels me to write on my so-called identity card, designates groups to which I belong. If you confuse belongingness and identity, you are making a logical error, a grave or a minor one, depending; but you are risking a murderous mistake, racism, which consists, precisely, in reducing a person to one of his collectives. I was unaware, in the book in which I discovered it, that we owe this distinction, so important I love to take it up again, to Saint Paul: both in theory (because he set it forth) and in his life (since the good news he announced breaks with the old formats, all three bound to collectives).
‘There is neither Jew nor Greek,’ he said, ‘neither slave nor free man, neither male nor female’ (Gal. 3.28). Taken from Joel, this sentence only mentions classes, sexes, languages or nations …, in sum, collectivities; it signifies that there is no longer any belonging in the sense of just now and that this disappearance leaves room for identity, I = I: ‘by the grace of God, I am what I am’ (1 Cor. 15.10). The ‘new creature’ remains: I, the adoptive son of God through faith in Jesus Christ; I, with faith and without any work by which there would be cause to glorify oneself; I, empty, poor and null: universal.
Who am I? I am I, that is all. Abandoning the subset definition of belongingness (x ∈ A), the principle of identity is stated here, not in the formal way, a = a, as with Aristotle, but regarding an individual singularity, whose just anyone, even minuscule character Saint Paul often emphasized. I shall return to this emptiness. Better yet, this principle defines this singularity, not arbitrarily in any way, but by a free gift of God. Transcendence had accorded, in its mercy, election to a group; it now gives identity in the singular.
The first quotation refers to Greek, Hebraic and Latin communities, to social classes and sexual roles; the second one refers to the initial event to which the self owes its emergence: the incarnation of Jesus Christ, death and resurrection. These two short sentences therefore distinguish belongingnesses and identity for the first time. Identity tears itself away from belongingnesses. The News becomes detached from their formats.
By the sinful flesh, from which only faith delivers us, Saint Paul doesn’t merely designate the body, needs and passions, but its being plunged in a collective whose fusion heat we love to feel, whose laws we love to be subjected to and whose reactive aggression we love to share. His Epistles thereby designate what I have recently called the libido of belongingness. We commit the majority of the sins of the flesh according to a mimetic impetus, out of peer pressure and in the blind enthusiasm of national, tribal, family … cohesion, out of corporatism or mafia. Who has the courage of the I? We commit them more often than I commit them, so much does sin concern the we, that is to say, the law, and not the personal I, which delivers us from it. When Saint Paul ‘released us from the Law’, he first and foremost liberated our own identities from this collective bond.1
The newness of the I
Did this I ever exist in the eras preceding the Epistles of Saint Paul? The citizens of Athens, democrats, that is to say, occupied with carefully distinguishing their elite team from slaves, metics, women and other barbarians, without work or profession, occupied themselves with the affairs of their city; by set rites, sacrificed to their eponymous goddess Athena; sometimes made war against Sparta or the Persians: therefore organized, honoured and defended their we. All of them together condemned those who observed, objectively, the stars, and S ocrates, who advised, subjectively, to know oneself. The collective excludes objective and subjective. How many Greek philosophers said I? These political animals – I am quoting Aristotle – readily excluded the object as well as the subject. Their measures, norms and formats originated in belongingness.
Ever since its covenant, the chosen people has likewise turned towards its law, respected it, honoured it, taught its children its holy history, fought, when necessary, against the Philistines or the Samaritans, expelled the εθνη [ethnē, gentiles] from its temple. The we became reality in its contract of chosenness with God, alone in saying the principle of identity: ‘I am who or what I am.’ As far as I know, Rome, in its immortal writing of the law, didn’t designate, with these laws, any other categories than paters familias, senators, tribunes of the plebs … citizens …, all of them representatives of a group. There were no more persons in Rome than in Greece.
So at the opening of the first century of our era, the idea and behaviour of belongingness was covering the Mediterranean. Greek culture taught one belongingness, political and cosmic at the same time; Israel’s tradition passed on a second one, holy; Rome’s did so for a third one, juridical. The entire inhabited world practised another one, economic and social, which separated slaves from humans said to be free and born as such; dominant males lastly claimed that nature inscribed a last one, sexual, in the body. Never, to my knowledge, saying Christian or Christianity, doubtless out of concern not to create any new pressure group, Saint Paul announced the disappearance of the ancient human, referred to its groups as well as to their genealogies. So abandoning these formats implied for him abandoning the corresponding belongingnesses. He also quit the laws that had formed them.
Hominization
This new enterprise of universally spreading a subjectivity that’s not referred to a culture, not tied to a language at least since the Pentecost, not attached to some genealogy, not obligated by any contract …, I’m not saying that Saint Paul had completely mastered it, nor that he didn’t have any predecessor, such as Socrates, Joel or the Stoics, nor that he had made it become reality immediately in the social and historical concrete, I am merely saying that I read the most powerful appearance of its project in his Epistles. A project that’s so originary and so long term that its gesture exceeds its local date and inscription so as to have participated in human destiny ever since its emergence; for the aforementioned ‘new creature’ bifurcated here from the past the way every branch of the Grand Narrative does. This advent participates, upstream, in the evolutionary time of hominization; downstream, its newness has always remained virgin for two thousand years, still and especially for our time, in which behaviour and discourse always overflow with the archaic libido of belongingness, so powerful, so blind that at the risk of racism, everyone refers to it by the name of identity!
By a cruel paradox, the Epistles spread under the name of those they were addressed to, Ephesians, Philippians, Romans, Thessalonians or Galatians …, therefore by appellations of belongingness, whereas the letters all implore to no longer take that social, political, sexual or ritual flesh into account, but to exist as individuals. We only quote the author accompanied with the appellations he urged us to abandon. Perhaps we don’t tolerate very well having to think a human race that’s globalized because uniquely made up of egos; no doubt we sorely feel the passion of this becoming-human, the pains of giving birth to hominization.
Worse, many accuse Saint Paul of anti-Semitism; why not call him, as well, anti-Greek, anti-Roman or praise him for anti-philosophy? A Pharisee, a speaker of Greek and a citizen, Saint Paul took up his origins, often proudly, and emphasized ten times that he remained Jewish and respected the tradition.
He even taught that one should not kill the father and, better still, that one should love him. Should we accuse Einstein of anti-scientism because he amended Newton’s laws? He took them up in quitting them; Saint Francis, Luther, Calvin, Lamennais … likewise tried to take up the spirit of Christianity in renewing it. The branch doesn’t kill the stem but is supported by it, even if it leaves it. Saint Paul himself invented the floral image of this book: ‘If you want to glorify yourself, you do not bear the root, but the root bears you’ (Rom. 11.16-18). Writing the Greek language and lodging an appeal based on his right as a Roman citizen, he remained this or that, but on condition, he said, of not glorifying oneself because of it, which means, in his language, not to ceaselessly refer to it in order to define oneself thereby.
The libido of belongingness incited the majority of crimes in history: once erased, peace can occur. Have we ever needed any other message than this one, irenic and liberating? It has to do with inventing a new humanity: humanity, simply.
Event, advent
The Acts and the Epistles say many times that Saint Paul was converted on the road to Damascus. Serious historians aren’t fond of the story of Archimedes’s bath or the one about Newton’s apple. Even so, narratives often speak better than systems. On the dusty route, from the vertical …, the light traced an unexpected crossroads, a sudden branching, one invisible to his companions. The bifurcation transformed the three-formatted Saul.
Prior to this event, whose memory twenty painters, musicians or poets have celebrated, we have the authentic advent, a historical one since Paul himself testified to it, decisive. Seated on the clothes of his accomplices, Saul witnessed the lynching of Stephen. The rocks flew; the victim cried ‘I see the heavens opened’ and, ripped apart by impacts, died. I won’t describe this spectacle in detail, so enticing for the hominids we still are, enjoying spilt blood; whether new or old, none of our formats has yet to erase this ancestor within us. With the distance his observer’s site gave him, Saul saw the consequences of the law, downstream, as well as upstream, the construction of belongingness on collective violence. What would Saint Paul soon write? I release you from the Law, he said, that is to say, from the Flesh, that is to say, in part, from social belongingness; free yourself from the Law, from the Flesh, that is to say, from Sin, that is to say, from Death … Resurrect … Quit these burning texts; return to what Saul would no longer see as an event, but as an advent; look, with your eyes wide open, at the bloody act I haven’t described – what do you see? Not merely persecutors enjoying the libido of belongingness, but above all the true beginning, yes, the primal scene of every collective and of every subjective. Violence organizes and welds a group together; in the middle, passion and death give rise to an individual subject. Everyone around Stephen: this is the we, according to a law whose letter in fact kills; as for the rocks, they conceal the subject, sub-j ectus, literally thrown underneath. The advent of the I under that of the we.
Young, witnessing a similar lynching, out of post-war vengeance, I emerged from it newly good.
The three contingencies of universal consciousness
To construct this subject, the Epistles give a new meaning to three terms: a verb, a noun and a subject.
Credo no longer means to believe, in the sense of opinion, confidence or conjecture (πιστεύω, πίστισ) [pisteúō, pístis]. I wrote these two words in Greek and Latin in order to better specify that the verb ‘to believe’ does not translate them. So here is its meaning: supposing that 1 designates objective truth or, on the subjective side, the certainty or conviction this truth brings about; supposing as well that 0, on the contrary, designates objective falsity or the subjective rejection of such an error; then, ‘to believe’, in its new signification, will now signify travelling one’s entire life, hesitating and vibrating, the segment that separates and unites them. Faith ventures into this contingent trembling. ‘We walk in Faith, not in clear reason’ (2 Cor. 5.7). Fides no longer designates good faith or contractual confidence in the word given to or by others, a term from anthropology or Roman law, nor that bona fides revered by Latin religion, but a contingency in which are mixed certainty and doubt, conviction and its negation, light and dark, knowledge and ignorance, indeed, this trembling madness unknown to previous ages. Who can doubt like this more than the Son who, at the point of expiring, cried out his dereliction to the Father?
An act that’s irreducible to any collective reference, the new faith creates, in return, as it were, the ego that becomes its subject. Implied or understood (as though it still lay underneath the rocks), the first word of the Credo, (ego) credo, in the end defines the universal subjectivity brought about by this vibration and its perennial swinging. Who am I? The contingency of my faith. I am the one this faith is going to justify, cause to live and save. Again, who am I? The very opposite of assurance; a fear that trembles between being and non-being; in short, a consciousness. The exit from every belongingness. This is how modern consciousness, single, double, multiple, trembling, thrown into time and eternity …, was born. It reverses mastery. As a result, Saint Paul invented, as a writer, the admission of self, shy and without glory, and, before Saint Augustine, the confession of his life, or, at the same time as one or two others, contemporaries of his, the autobiographical novel. This I constitutes its existence through what are called the three theological virtues: faith, hope and charity, which precisely describe the three contingent constituents of the new Human. Faith constructs him first.
Hope moves him. No one understood hope better than Charles Péguy, who dressed it as a little girl running under the feet of the grown-ups during a walk and ceaselessly going from one to the other and in this way travelling the path twenty times. You adults are planning to go to some particular place; she comes and goes, moves forward and moves back, joyful, blind to the objectives of your wandering and full of a youthful energy. A driving force, hope impels and sweeps along. Where? Who can say? Does hope, without any doubt, guarantee access to the life triumphant? No, it only promises it, anticipates it certainly, but doesn’t ensure it. ‘Whoever plows should plow in hope’ (1 Cor. 9.10): does he know if he’ll harvest? Hope vibrates, like faith, and like it doubts heaven, and strives, timid, to live eternity today. It sculpts time, shapes it and stretches it out.
Faith and hope experience time as saturated with advents, events and beginnings. Faith and hope plunge the I into this time of advents. They take it out of every format so as to let it fly towards newnesses. Faith: the self becomes established, without any assurance, in contingency. Hope: the self moves, without any assurance, and lives, tense, in and from contingency. Thus contingency founds and forms modern consciousness.
In calling these first two constructors of the subject virtues, it would be better, in order to understand them, to move from the ethical and theological sense of this word to the sense of operators suitable for creating the radically new subject. Charity, lastly, fills relations with others with love. Reversing the political or juridical contractual connections of the old belongingnesses, this total bond to others is formed in complete doubt concerning reciprocity: whatever the response it may be given, aggression and spit, insults or rocks, indifference, scorn, enmity, amiability …, charity always loves, ‘pardons all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’ (1 Cor. 13.7). Its omnitude integrates faith and hope and plunges, with even less assurance, into the contingency, fluctuating and dangerous, proper to relations. Adventurous and generous (of the same family as genre humain [human race], the word ‘generosity’ repeats the term ‘gentile’, used in the expression that defines Saint Paul as the Apostle to the gentiles, that is so say, to foreigners), this integration allows the new I to be in relation with the universality of humans, whatever the origin that may be advertised by their belongingness.
The new self is constructed from a triple contingency: faith and doubt; hope that will be happy at an indeterminate time; bonds of unconditional Love. Three weaknesses, three strengths. Less than two millennia after Saint Paul, Descartes attempted to found the subject anew by seeking assurances. I doubt he could have succeeded since contingency and lack of assurance, in short, doubt itself, preside over its birth and its formation. Montaigne described its distraught tremors better. Faith, hope and charity describe the non-ontology of this new subject: its non-settling-into-a-home, its non-assurance, its non-being, its nothingness … the unbelongingness of the soul …
Credo and cogito
I don’t truly know what I am saying when I say ‘I think’, but I no longer know at all what I am saying when I say ‘I am’. The cogito departs from the uncertain so as to conclude with the obscure.
When the first Christians said ‘I believe’, they suddenly knew, whether slaves or senators, metics, women, Jews, Greeks, sailors or farmers …, that they no longer belonged to this or that class … but rather existed as singular individu als, alone before God and everyone equally by the grace of Jesus Christ. Moving in this way from a category to universal subjectivity, they were resurrected. Burning with charity, they hoped and believed in he who recreated them. The Credo, effective, precedes the cogito, vague. The latter doesn’t conclude as much as the former.
The evaluation of the I
Courage alone separates I am from I have value. ‘I don’t know who I am’ is most often understood as ‘I don’t matter to anyone.’ Quitting the isolation of pure identity, the I throws itself into the network of relations of belongingness. Through these, I can evaluate if the fortune of this person surpasses my own; in the arena, the fight decides if the strength of one person wins out over the strength of some other …, but we will always find, elsewhere or tomorrow, some third person who is more powerful, richer, more intelligent and beautiful …; next, cheating often crops up in the counting, the pugilism, the judgement: some prize crowns the one chosen by a pressure group more often than for his value, which is assessed by comparison.
Amid the fluctuating network of these relations, where are we to find the yardstick, the unit – gold, the metre … – objective references of measurement? In brief, does a format exist? Nowhere. The only things to run along these tangled links are comparatives and superlatives, always relative. The only way to evaluate, relation opens up to this relativity; measurement depends on comparison, from which comes all the evil in the world. All value reduces to a size established by society. The scale collapses. Value, vapour. We fight one another for a shadow.
Thus the absence of format is demonstrated for the I. The true measure says and means: zero, nothingness. In the expression ‘I am’, neither the subject nor the verb signifies anything. To say ‘I am who I am’, I = I, only repeats or says the null relation. I am nothing and am worth nothing. The virtue of humility, the first virtue according this de facto truth, shoots forth from the principle of identity, founding all formal truth. To say ‘I am great’ is the mistake, one later founding a vice. Satan is. Diabolical ontology. In me, I feel humility to be a first virtue, doubly true. Ethics has its source in the first principles of cognition.
Achilles, stronger than ten soldiers beneath the Trojan walls, Ulysses, more cunning than the Cyclops …, I’m not aware that any of this lot had ever discovered, known or practised the radical solitude of the singular ego. The Nicomachean Ethics begins by describing a pair of scales: antiquity compared. When the shepherd Gyges discovered, alone, in a deep cave, the ring whose stone rendered him invisible, he profited from the windfall to act without showing himself to kill the king, sleep with the queen and seize the crown; as soon as he became radically alone, he sacrificed to collective values, wealth and hierarchy. Solitary, all the more institutional for being isolated, he immediately jumped into social relation, quitting a possible identity so as to launch himself into belongingness. But, in becoming rich and powerful, did he improve? Plato noticed the opposite instead: the person whose morality is no longer regulated by society becomes the worst of social bastards. Is it better to never stop living in collectivity?
With the Credo, the ego is born from an inexpressible transcendence, that of the Father, in comparison to which no one nor anything greater can be thought, absolute superlative. From this unit of measurement, we cannot conclude anything except the nothingness of the one who appears to stand its judgement: the relation to infinity reduces the one who compares himself to it to nothing. I can’t be the Father. I only exist by grace. Yet, here is the news: from the Father an event of filiation ensues. Coming about like me, his Son resembles me in contingency, unexpectedness, poverty: born on straw, wandering like the homeless, condemned to the lowest of tortures, descending the scale of every collective value all the way down to zero. The incarnation makes the assessment from just now reality: the abstract zero accompanies the lake fishermen in flesh and blood and dies between two thieves. Ego equals zero. At first calculated quantitatively, non-ontology thus passes, as true, to real existence.
Let’s return to relations. They are no longer used to measure value since this latter remains definitively null; Saint Paul constantly called himself an abortion, rubbish, debris; when I glorify myself, I may only glorify myself in the resurrected Lord. Abandoning all comparison, and therefore assessment and competition, the relation to others, freed, sees another flow run: charity. This latter presupposes the extinguishing of comparison, of the scale by which values are measured, as a necessary but certainly not sufficient condition. ‘Patient, helpful, charity does not envy, boast or puff itself up, does not seek its own interest …, pardons all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’ (1 Cor. 13.4-7). Its omnitude includes everything.
As for the null residual value, if God, infinite, gives me his grace, it can become infinite. Freely infinite. In its emptiness, zero becomes capable of receiving the infinite: I am nothing, but I can defeat death. And since I am now no longer afraid of it, humility initiates courage, that is to say, ethics in its entirety. Infinite, ethics is constructed starting from zero. ‘We carry this treasure in jars of clay, so that such a great power may be attributed to God and not to us’ (2 Cor. 4.7). Made of humus dried with humility, my earthen pot, immanent and contingent, contains a value without scale or format, stemming from transcendence, which demands I take care of this treasure.
Paul, son
Let’s return to relations. Who dictates this error-free law, with hundreds of clauses, whose rule formats gestures and the minutes of the day? Who states this exception-free truth attached to thought, to behaviour, to the universe, to the global system of things and humans? Who says this injustice-free jurisdiction and this politics, both applied from the City all the way to the furthest reaches of the inhabited world? Who therefore can obligate the just, the true and the powerful in this way, if not the just, the veridical and the all-powerful: the prophet and God the Father; the wise Father and philosopher; the judge Emperor and Father? Paul carries a universal trinity of universal fathers on his shoulders. Right before saying ‘I am what I am’, Paul didn’t say ‘abortion’ for no reason (1 Cor. 15.8). He also repeated ‘adoptive son’ (Gal. 4.5), not as a rhetorical figure of speech, but in pure truth. For by releasing us from the law, wisdom and jurisdiction, he quit the corresponding fathers and wanted us to free ourselves from them. Contingent, grace and faith replace necessary law; madness and weakness replace wisdom and strength.
Who, consequently, appears gracious and non-legal, mad and unwise, weak and not powerful? The son. Ill-born, after having collaborated in Stephen’s execution; born of a Pharisean father and Roman citizen; born again at the feet of Gamaliel; born once more in the middle of the road to Damascus, where he saw the Son. Aborted, adopted, a prodigal son, a traveller, wandering even, he abandoned the powers and veracity of fathers …; yes, I read, dazzled, the Epistles stating, for the first and one of the rarest times in our history, the discourse of a philosopher-son. Before him, prophets, sages, scholars, jurisconsults … played, on the stage of the universal, the role of father; regard with what enthusiasm Plato rushed to the home of the tyrant in Sicily and Diderot to the home of the Czarina Catherine … But also, after them, philosophers and scientists, intellectuals and pontificators …, all of them, over and over again, as fast as they possibly could, took over the place and figure of the father, possibly after having killed their own fathers. Being right, seizing power, judging; conversely, criticizing, destroying, let nothing remain of texts but ashes. Always power, never knowledge. I have never read anyone but exemplary fathers; I have been educated from childhood by words that were never wrong … I never heard anything but reason and terror.
I have encountered the abortion and adopted one with gratitude. I resemble him at least regarding the weakest points: the son is not always right, doesn’t know everything, seeks, stumbles, wanders, makes mistakes, retraces his steps, risks error, blunders, the whip, the rocks under stoning, storms and shipwreck, hunger and thirst, prison, solitude, being let down in a basket along a wall of confinement …, a fragile clay jar pressed from all sides and not crushed; persecuted, abandoned, only knowing how to hope, not in despair; knocked to the ground, but not annihilated … Saint Paul lived as a son, thought as a son, acted as a son, at least three times over, in relation to his three fathers, before whom his failures piled up, persecutions, derisions, tribunals. The son’s faith replaces the father’s law and truth; the son’s hope replaces the father’s assured certainty; the son’s charity replaces the father’s power. But far from killing him, he listens to him and prays to him: ‘For the Spirit you have received does not make you slaves so that you will fall back into fear. It makes you adoptive sons and allows you to address God by calling him: Abba, Father’ (Rom. 8.15).
We live, suffer, think, wander, learn, invent as sons …; here we see the universality of the ego-son, which even Descartes wouldn’t know, for it plunges into the trembling of faith, hope and love. The philosopher-son haunts the tent of contingency, whose edges flap in the wind. I didn’t understand why we lived in the era of the son, I couldn’t enter into the theology of the son … before finally encountering a philosophy that I had never grasped, quite precisely because its author didn’t present himself as a father. Paulus, weak, little: son.
The adoptive son
Not the family son, but the adoptive son. Genealogy totters: content with his foster father role, Saint Joseph didn’t beget; Jesus invoked his and our Father, in the heavens. Father and Son quit their place, their tie, I was going to say their rivalry. We hardly hear the brotherhood of James spoken of, whether metaphorical or carnal; erudite historians will continue to passionately debate it – but what does it matter, really? As far as the mother is concerned, carnally inescapable, but remaining virgin after giving birth, scandalizing many, this innocence partly erases her motherhood. Renewed, the natural scenario of generation turns into adoption, in which dilection’s choice replaces blood ties (Hominescence, pp. 134–8). For a philosophy, let’s say daughter, to come about and think, genealogy must be rethought. This undoing of the ties of blood by adoption, an arrangement legalized by Roman law, favoured the universalization to the human race of the promise made by God to the patriarch Abraham: in order for everyone to participate in chosenness, it couldn’t only flow from Sarah’s breast.
Conversely, returning to blood ties recently caused us to regress towards archaic illnesses. For modern Western thought has counted its time, from the origin, starting from this adoptive genealogy. Thenceforth we were born neither from the land nor the flesh, but from free will and adoptive dilection. Upon this time-counting is founded a new era, a new consciousness, another cognitive mode: science. In the interminable process of hominization, we stop defining humanity; we adopt it. Truly, we fabricate it.
The Prodigal Son
A long time ago, the son had quit the Father. Maybe this latter had even chased him out, him and his companion, from the first paradise because they had sinned. Felix culpa, a happy fault: Eve liberated us from a formatted paradise. She and he, since then, have travelled in a thousand countries in which different languages were spoken and strange rites practised, have learned foreign knowledge and changed skins beneath harsh horizons. Toiling by the sweat of their brow, suffering, childbirths in pain, adaptations, wanderings … They return.
Moved, deeply affected to see everything again without recognizing it all and that they had been more or less forgotten, except by the Father, always there, grown old, attentive, as flustered as they were. Festive joy, jubilation and reconciliation. The erasure of old hatreds, never mentioned, reigns. So much does it condition and signify life, forgetting goes without saying. No more sin, no more law, let’s kill the fatted calf. Isaac returns to Abraham’s bosom, and both of them sacrifice a ram whose horns were tangled in the stems of a neighbouring bush. Following the lines of the Prodigal Son (Lk. 15.20-32), Eve and Adam return to the paradisiacal farm and to the Father who forgives and presides at the Feast.
Ecclesia
A family feast. Conceived by the first Christians in the first century, did the Church not want to generalize Roman citizenship, already widespread, since legally and politically historical, to the universality of the human race by adding to this citizenship the relations of adoption and love distinctive of this adoptive family, under the eye of God the Father and of Christ, his Son, our brother? Jews plus Latins plus Greeks plus Barbarians from all nations, all men, all women, children and slaves, free men and metics …, new egos thus invited, without exclusion, into the set of all the subsets … and entering it easily since they were null and had no properties …, with property always defining a particular subset, that is to say, a belongingness …, all of them, as I was saying, whatever the language they might speak or all of them speaking in tongues … entered then into the chosen people, re-melted under the sign of his promise into the family and love of a Father, both melted into Roman citizenship, law and city, a citizenship itself lastly melted into citizenship of the world, a totality already advocated by the Stoics. Under charity’s tongue of fire, Saint Paul liquefied, if I may, the ancient formats in order to let the new branch emerge from them.
Is this universal concept not preparation for what we now need in order to advance towards what we arrogantly call, as though we had invented it, globalization? The disappearance of properties in it erases all the libidos of belongingness. But how are we to found without passion what every passion fights for?
The power of death and the resurrection
So having returned, is the son going to take the father’s place? No doubt, for reasons of age, of responsibility, as to others through love of a woman, fatherhood comes to him. By adoptive dilection, he has ‘children’ in Corinth and Philippi, among the Galatians and the Romans; he feels a paternal love for them that inspires real tears when they wander in their turn. He is a father here. Has he, for all that, quit the place of the son?
No, he never tries to kill the father. Neither Jesus nor Paul, both of them sons, the one in flesh and blood, the other in theory, both of them adoptive in some way, advises parricide, the way Plato subjected Parmenides to it or Oedipus did Laius, the way we believe this act to be inscribed somewhere in our bodies. Each of them teaches to love the father the way the father loves the son. ‘Existing in the form of God, Jesus Christ did not consider being equal with God as something to be used to his advantage, but stripped himself of it by taking the form of a servant, by becoming similar to humans, and, having appeared as a simple man, he humbled himself, making himself obedient unto death, even unto death on the cross, which is why God sovereignly raised him up …’ (Phil. 2.6-9). Forgiving each other, the son and the father love one another; seated eternally with the one to the right-hand side of the other, they honour and glorify each other mutually. Paul exits the format according to which becoming father means killing one’s father and behaving like him afterwards. Before reading him, I hadn’t understood, cognitively, how a philosopher-son thought nor what the religion of the Son signified; the entirety of the West descends from him and finds itself in him.
Enslaved to the formats of reason, the master repeats. Regulated by the dialectic, like mechanical dolls, the master and the slave, in an apparent struggle, in reality obey the empire of death, each of them behaving like its slave. The master only rules through death and will only dominate through the terror induced by it. Saint Paul saw the death beneath the law, flushed it out, wanted life and therefore desired never to reign as master. As its divine model, he underwent death and didn’t give it. If there is a Lord, here he is a son, like me, like you, like everyone. If a father exists, he is absent from here. In transcendence and eternity. The real world only knows sons. There, abandoning rule, law, format, necessity …, the sons abandon the death implied by them. Therefore they resurrect. How do you become son? By doing away with the law of death. Resurrection, the end of the rule of death. The proof: the Torah and biblical prophetism, Greek logos and science, Roman law, lastly, persist and didn’t die, like all the rest of antiquity. Paul releases from formats but doesn’t destroy them.
The Acts recount that Paul escaped from Damascus by having himself lowered down the city walls in a wicker basket; that he fled safe and sound from many cities of Asia or Europe, condemned, sometimes stoned, often flogged, excluded and driven out; that an earthquake freed him from his prison; that he disembarked in Malta after tempest and shipwreck …; all of them stories in which the Apostle to the gentiles escaped death. Thus the novel of his life describes, in acts and reduced models, what he professed in words: the Resurrection. His and our lives fight against death. His faith says that this struggle will succeed. ‘Death, where is your victory? Where is your sting?’ (1 Cor. 13.55). Did the narrative of the Acts stop without warning in order to avoid announcing his martyrdom and his disappearance forever? I believe so. This absence of end fits too well with these repeated announcements of ever new beginnings for the Acts and Paul to finish.
Dead object
Or us. For we gradually became the humans that we are becoming as soon as, thrown in front of us, death became our single object. Whether Neandertal or sapiens, we buried our ancestors in places where the house was founded by the tomb and the metropolis by the necropolis; there can be no habitat without penates … Let’s temporarily define humanity as a subject that throws the dead object in front of itself.
Far from fleeing death, we shaped it in Statues. Condemned men, repressed murderers, fascinated by death, we turn it into spectacle and story; it incessantly haunts our representations; maybe there is no representation except of it. Priests, we preside over funeral ceremonies; warriors, conquerors, defenders, we kill; farmers, we bury grain; shepherds, we raise lambs to sacrifice them. Prayers, conflicts, food, our practices concern death. Our knowledge as well: would any knowledge have ever taken place without us holding in front of ourselves, prisoners of our hands, an immobilized object, the skeleton of a schema, a ghostly concept …, without us passing its shade and shadow down from generation to generation? Corpses follow us in such a way that at every moment they haunt, in the cave of our rooms, our screens.
Object: death, tomb, statue, idea, ghost.
The renascent subject
The subject: it is split into mortal, thrown under, like Stephen, and immortal, resurrected. Death freezes our formats, schematizes them, purifies them …; immortality launches our branches. We live in the grip of mortal necessity. Individuals, cultures, humanity, there is no known exception to its rule. We have always known that every human is mortal. I will die. Who am I? This proscribed man, thrown under its law. Condemned, I am only concerned with pardon. We feel and experience ourselves as eternal. We survive as double; strangled by death, striving to breathe, to free ourselves from its herring barrel, having no rest until we dominate it. At least and at the outset, by defying it, with daring bravery, with insolent audacity, with laughter, heroism and self-abnegation. It alone is our object, our emotion and concern, our enemy, partner and adversary; we set ourselves immortality as our goal.
Every human invention has always had this stubborn project as its motor. Every courageous heart, every gathering of plants, every hunting of animals, every travelling, relation, whether one of love or war, celebration, poem, theorem … is undertaken to survive, either as a person or as a group; every structure we raise, cairn, tumulus, hovel, wall, city and port, refuge from death2 … wil l remain as marks after us since, all around us, only these traces, manuscripts or graffiti remain human. In the tomb, the corpse; on the stele, the immortal. Every engraved word presupposes or projects immortality. We count every transmission (passing on tradition or memory, practice or theory …) as a piece of this victory. Programmed, plants and animals strike the colours; we hoist them up. They obey, we rebel. Even if partial, this triumph contributes to humanity’s adoption, to its continuous fabrication. Every duty of remembrance is supported by nothing but a project of immortality.
Who am I? A subject under the rocks and a project of resurrection, in front of the object, a dead statue and a trace of immortality. Ashes and works; death pangs and recovery; obedience and revolt; ignoble pride and noble humility; Requiem and hope …: a branch with a soon inert trunk and with ever-green twigs. Self-consciousness is woven from a lethal weft and an immortal warp, from a stiff oldness followed by an ever-virgin youth; chance and necessity, memory and remembrance, knowledge and ignorance. My knowledge itself is split between format and invention.
Who am I? This bifurcation. The pairle of the escutcheon, a figure crossing in chiasm. Exhausted, indefatigable. Spurned, passionately in love. Unconscious, keenly penetrating. Earth and air, crawling, flying. Water and fire, incandescent frost. Enthusiastic-indifferent. An athlete and an abortion, living, full of resources. Weight and grace. Headstrong, scatterbrained. Dormant-inert-carnal and awake-nascent-carnal. Lying, standing; pathetic, enterprising. Emotion and abstraction. Me and always other. Mixed-race, completed lefty, Educated-Third. Hermaphrodite. Angel and animal. Statue and music. On balance, crying with joy.
This is the escutcheon of our practices and our knowledge, which are regulated by necessity, defined by impossibilities, worried about contingency, launched into open possibilities, ramified in the square of modality: from the middle of the first diagonal, uniting the two sides of the necessary and the impossible, the second half-diagonal shoots out towards the point where the other two sides, the possible and the contingent, meet. In neither the subject nor its actions, whether practical actions or theoretical ones, can formats and inventions be separated.
The project of immortality
En route. We only have one project, one future, one hope: the inventive victory over necessary and formatted death. Philosophy’s project is to succeed in this combat. We have dreamt of this from our origins, ever since we learned how to produce children, dance, sing, talk, make fire and cook, domesticate species that reproduce, make cheese and jams, criss-cross batter boards over foundations, compose music, write, count, measure. Gilgamesh rose up to defy his end; Ulysses and Orpheus, a few returning ghosts, shining with glory, crossed the Hellenic Underworld’s river of forgetfulness in the other direction; Thales abstracted geometry from Egyptian tombs, towards the eternity of forms; Jesus Christ resurrected and will return among us … Our entire past history, dreams, beliefs, gestures and actions, faith, hope and knowledge … worked at this. Through passing on, technology, science …, we have already – influenced by religions – taken several advance bastions of its entrenchments. It took us millennia before we read in texts, nonetheless reread a thousand times and venerated, the ‘you shall not kill’ in its evident, concrete, merciful sense. Woken to the evidence, some of us want to abolish this penalty before the courts, in everyday life and gradually in relations between groups, in which the libido of belongingness still causes as much male rage as in rats; some of us try to extinguish nuclear weapons and seek to pacify wars between fathers. Upon reaching an adult age, sons pardon their father and, through a new revenge, no longer want to kill their sons. So who am I? Son and father. Taking the branch of the road that is reconciliation. A new victory over this last death.
Our species became, is becoming and will become such for having mastered, more than space and things, time. In concrete technologies as well as in the unfolding of the Grand Narrative. At the furthest extremity of this long trip, here and today, the crossroads between death and immortality opens again. On the one side, our own works, with global risks, doubled with competition and comparison, with wealth and poverty …, on the other and once again, repetition and the newness Saint Paul called Resurrection. Like him, I’m looking for a rupture without death.
Even if this death of death, already prophesied by Hosea (13.14), occurs like a thief in the night, my hearing, sharper than it, hears it coming with much noise … on the day we understand that there is no death except the one that’s organized, desired, decided, celebrated, repeated by formats like those of the recent fundamentalist convulsions that are killing each other …, on the day when hope for life, through our works, breaks out …
On the day after that day, we will have to learn how to inhabit the new world projected by our labours and this book.
Charles Péguy, Brunetière, Fall 1906
When in a tree, generally in a plant, whether bush or arborescent, for some reason – frozen, a freeze, a gust, trauma, drought – a bud aborts, a growth fails, a secondary treetop or the main one withers, arborescent nature all the same doesn’t desperately strive to make life come out of death, sap out of dryness and sterility, riches, abundance, affluence – and poverty – out of poverty and destitution and, as the ancients once said, the humid out of the dry; rather this nature abandons the dying treetop to its sterile fate; it performs a subsumption, an intussusception, an absumption, a reprise; it takes up again more profoundly; a new bud is born, under the first one, often very far under, as far under the first one as is necessary to reach the sources of sap that have remained alive; a new bud, lower, a new bud silently pierces the hard bark, a bud come from the interior and the profound, from the enduring insides of the tree. A secret emissary.
From the Nymphs that lived under the hard bark,3
a new branch is being born at the axil of the abandoned branch, a new treetop is being prepared.
In this way and only in this way do trees restore themselves and continue.
The treetop that will wither can still be entirely leafy, entirely proud with leaves like a plume. It has nonetheless been marked by disease. If it has been so marked, if it is infected, it has nonetheless been condemned. And yet it is still full of leaves. But these leaves will wither. In comparison with this treetop, this poor little bud, this little bit of red nose peeping out, which underneath is piercing the hard bark, doesn’t look like much of anything. Yet it is this bud that has become the representative, that has been set up as the sole representative of Great Pan in this business. It is from this that salvation will come, that survival and rebirth will come forth.
Particularly, it is for reasons of the same type that, when one takes a cutting, one must indeed keep oneself from keeping all this bushy verdure, all this pile of foliage that seems to form the luxuriance and strength of the plant, that doubtless formed the luxuriance and strength of the old plant, that wouldn’t form the strength, that wouldn’t form anything but the withering of the new plant, for a cutting is an artificial replacement of the treetop. On the contrary, all of that must be pruned off, and the floor must be given to these quite little buds that are quite ready, in addition: to these anonymous possible buds that are going to commence.
One can see what consequences would result from these observations – we will perhaps examine them one day – in the order of morality, of the social, of work, of productivity, of appropriation, of every culture and generally of all humanity.
What is abandoned is abandoned. No longer comes back. Let’s not talk about it anymore. Let’s leave that to someone else.
An abandoned treetop is abandoned. Eternally. No regret, no remorse, no emotion. Nature is perfectly unaware of any type of consideration of that order.
Such behaviour is so truly nature’s behaviour that it can be confirmed everywhere and down to the smallest detail: for example – and to confine ourselves to this particular case – it can particularly be confirmed – in art, in letters, in philosophy – in the formation, in the birth, in the growth, in the development, in the culmination, in the decline, in the mode of succession of what we have called genres. Far from genres evolving, as has been said by a hasty, cursory, brutal and maybe even a little crude application of a modern metaphysics claimed to be naturalistic – itself forced from a modest natural naturalistic hypothesis that didn’t contain it – on to this history of genres, far from having to speak about an evolution of genres, genres, like all the humanities, arboresce, and one never has to speak about anything but an arborescence of genres. 4 When a genre has been achieved, like a humanity, when it has been exhausted, when it has been crowned, no evolution, no transformation, no deformation, no reformation will derive anything from it ever again. No miracle – for this would still be a miracle, clearly a miracle, the perpetual shameful modern miracle – no miracle will make anything come out of it ever again. The place belongs to another, the old place in the sun. Another will come out, another will be born, grow, another will live, a genre bud, a genre budding, starting small or coming out in an eruption, will come out freshly, will boldly and directly make its way, its truth, its life. Arborescent nature is not the art of making use of the leftovers. The new branch, the new treetop, the new genre is not from the old branch, the old treetop, the old kneaded, filtered, triturated, manipulated genre. Redone, reprised, corrected, revised, augmented, diminished. No, it’s new. Quite simply a new genre. It’s a new thing.
It no longer has, it doesn’t have in it the old elements, tinkered-with, of the old genre. Those who do such tinkerings are highly gifted men, inordinately intelligent, clever devils, people who have enormous talent. Genius doesn’t proceed in this way. Genius doesn’t proceed by such tinkerings.
It doesn’t proceed by kneadings, decantations, triturations or detritus. By macerations or preserves.
Genius proceeds much more simply. Or rather it proceeds absolutely simply. It proceeds with an absolute, total, infinite simplicity. In no way by transmutations, cookings or residues – or the selling and buying of the inedible offal coming from food supply services – but by constant renewals, refreshings, reinventions, reintuitions, re-sourcings. Genius being of the order of nature, genius’s work is of the order of nature’s work; every elaboration of genius is a natural elaboration; every invention, every renewal of genius comes by means of this arborescence we have recognized …
Œuvres en prose complètes, tome II, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1988; pp. 583–5.