One

A GENERIC REPETITION OF GNOSIS

To Desuture Christ from Theology

Our basic equation is as follows: Christ = science of Christ = gnosis, along with its corollary, gnosis vs. theology and christology. That Christ is simply the name of the science of Christ, that its other name is gnosis, and that “gnostic theology” therefore means that theology is abased (without being completely negated) as object of gnosis—nothing in these radical axioms belongs to any known Christianity. Christ is the name that tears gnosis from christology, leaving the latter to float in its indeterminate theological ground. We place all theology globally under the last instance of Christ.

Gnosis—that ancient name, still loaded with religious phantasms, abhorred by the “Old Believers” of the West; a name we take up once again, inscribing it entirely under the name of “Christ,” in so doing voiding it of certain aspects of its doctrinal and theological content from which, in its early historical forms, it did not manage to liberate itself. We understand it in a nontheological and even nonreligious sense, as the substitution, in another place and with other functions, of Christ for God. The dominant theological plan of salvation, the work of God and the basis of “Christianity,” borrows its essential definitions and philosophical foundations from Greek ontology. In this respect christology is a concentrate of those Greek philosophical prejudices from which we must tear away its kernel—a kernel that, for lack of a better term, we shall call “christic.” The principle is to desuture Christ from theology; we do not recognize christology understood as the domain of trinitarian theology, but only as a science-in-Christ that will replace such contexts, of which it is (in a sense that will become clear later) the real content. A science-in-Christ, however, cannot ignore theology, but instead assigns it an entirely new role. The Platonic reinvention of philosophy after early physics and then that of theology through its transition via Aristotle exalt it and sterilize it twice over: by placing it in a specular confrontation with mathematics, and by inserting it into a great “modern” planification of the orders of knowledge, orders it will be charged with dominating. This enthusiastic exaltation and this theological sterilization of philosophy are, for gnosis, only materials, material to be transformed in view of a more adequate knowledge and defense of humans. Doubtless, religious and theological phenomena precede humans, who are thrown into them; but then, humans precede the science of these phenomena. Better armed with rigor and humanity, radical (not absolute) gnosis is the real content (which does not at all mean to say the historical or textual content) of the science of humans as taught by Christ. Christology is therefore only a particular, indifferent material in this science-in-Christ, which is also a science of Christ. For this science, God, in any case, is no longer anything more than an object governed by the rules of a certain objectivity, what we may call a quasi-quantum-theoretical objectivity—God is both a variable and an “occasional” motif of this science. Atheism is, in all respects, a hasty, mediocre, and thoughtless solution, passive and naive, as is materialism itself. To put it in the most paradoxical way possible, gnosis as we conceive it is a new “Reformation” guided by contemporary science; it is relieved of what remained of transcendent religiosity in the protestation against it; it converts this mythology into philo-fiction or christo-fiction. It cuts more or less vigorously between Christ and God, dismembers the Trinity, undoes that too-tightly-knotted packet of Three Persons. Theology is the concern of the Father and of his substitutes, and goes by way of monarchy; gnosis is the concern of the Son, and thus of humans in their equality, and goes by way of the democracy of generic brothers. Its problem is the defense of humans, not just the question of what they themselves can make of the rest of the world into which they are thrown. Rather than a modern thought, it is a contemporary thought—one better suited, for example, to new forms of faith, possibly including evangelical ones, but more assuredly to the form of a thought that crosses science with philosophy, otherwise than evangelically.

GNOSIS, THOSE WHO VANQUISHED IT, AND THOSE WHO WERE VANQUISHED

To discuss a subject such as Christ, his death, and his resurrection, without any theological preparation, as we advocate doing, bracketing out the theological point of view as the dominant point of view but one that has no deciding role here—all of this evidently requires a good deal of naivety, and even unconscious humor. All that is demanded of us is a gnostic preparation that must place us in the correct stance, that of inventive fidelity. In this “epistemic” framework, gnosis represents the bringing together of positive knowledges, including philosophy, within a human-oriented cognizance of them.

How to conserve what is essential of the fundamental human and scientific ends of gnosis, at least reduced to their main invariant factors? For it is obvious that the introduction of relatively recent scientific means, unknown to ancient gnosis, such as quantum principles and nonphilosophy, will end up inflecting these ends themselves almost as much as the means of their implementation. Of humanity, of its defense, of the use it can make of contemporary sciences, we still know nothing solid—we have only contradictory philosophical and religious projections, in a certain sense only variables or properties of humanity. The wager of this renewal is founded precisely upon the person and the message of Christ as inventor of a science of humans (but not “the human sciences”). It is true that it is a tradition of early Christianity, and of certain currents of Christianity today, to conceive Christ as the founder of a new conception of man. It cannot, however, be a question of redoing, varying, or amending what has been tried a thousand times already, insofar as it was done at the whim of philosophies and religious systems. New means, such as quantum physics and nonstandard philosophy, authorize us to suspend these early attempts, insofar as they are impregnated with the ancient, metaphysical concept of science, and with the religious concept of Christ—at least to suspend their sufficiency, if not their materiality. This bracketing-out of the spirit of the ancient knowledge of Christ, and in particular that of the whole theological tradition, will seem scandalous and rather glib after the infinite debates of theologians and believers. Let it be understood that we do not intend to declare that everyone has been mistaken about the significance of Christ—in a sense, all of that must serve as materials for us. We propose another hypothesis—that of a Christ-science or a science “in-Christ” that appeals in principle to theology, at least as symptomal material. The only principled solution is to take up once more the problem of Christ as a scientific and human—that is to say, gnostic and generic—problem.

Gnosis is known for having been vanquished by the Church as dogma and as institution; it has about it that mystery of lost, ancient doctrines that lie at rest under the dogmatic marble, reduced to the aura they give off. Its theology has so often been condemned as heretical, its great thinkers forgotten or reviled, sometimes burned to death, that it is hard to imagine what a gnostic theology might be. Thus a work of updating, not only of rehabilitation, would have to be undertaken in order to prepare the notion of a more contemporary gnosis. Now, this work of exhumation began long ago—it is the achievement of those historians who dedicated themselves to the origins of Christianity. But it is a question of knowing whether it is a corpse that has been exhumed, to be delivered to the forensic pathologists of religion, or whether gnosis is “resurrected” and can “rise” into the heaven of theory as a new possibility. It has remained confined to specialists, to the historians whose highly erudite affair it was; and, on the public side, the impoverished understanding of it as a sect-like esoteric doctrine has never really been corrected. The old division of its reception between scholarly gnosis and popular, nefarious gnosis has been continually refined, but never overcome. Such is the usual destiny of the “mysteries” that religions cultivate in their practice and their theology, the difference being that the fate of gnosis seems to be sealed, despite the scholarly interest that has taken hold of it. In a certain way, it is impossible to crack open a doctrine that has always been opposed, and always for “good reasons”—reasons that in a sense remain pertinent, since they are the reasons of force, of theoretical domination and of dogmatism, of condemnation and of scorn, of institutionalization and of the norm. It is not a question of rehabilitating gnosis by reversing classic theological irreversibility, attempting a coup that would end up adopting the mistakes of its adversary. On the contrary, we must conserve the secret of gnosis, but at the same time find some way to make intelligible its unintelligibility and its unlearned character, we must discover the means to conserve and manifest its secret without destroying it qua secret with an inadequate, rationalist light. All of this is a part of what we hope to achieve theoretically: precisely a gnostic-type knowledge.

This project immediately involves quantum-theoretical means, which must be adopted in order to be able to say that we are dealing with a science. It is a known principle that, in quantum-theoretical terms, to clarify a supposedly given or existent secret is automatically to undetermine it in and through this very knowledge. But in fact we must be less abrupt and dogmatic: it is possible to clarify a secret in a quantum-theoretical manner without absolutely destroying it (this would, rather, be the effect of philosophy) if one can establish the quantum “law” of that phenomenon—that is to say, what we shall call its “state vector.” And this is what we try to do with and in the science of Christ: to establish the state vector of Christ on the basis of his data or the data of his words in the “Logos” mode and the “Torah” mode. So it is not a question of reconciling, through some new mediation, scientists and simple ones¹ (the quantum formalism opposes this) but of finding the fusion point of simple ones and theory, where the masses of the gnostic faithful seize theology—and not only the theology of simple souls. The Churches detest this type of project, which does away with mediations and makes for “heretics”—a good sign for us, a pertinent criterion that allows us to identify the true adversaries.

Neither is it a matter of attempting a historical resurrection conforming to the great systems that illustrated ancient gnosis through a commentary on its “evangelists.” Our incompetence as historians is both confirmed and voluntary. The ancient gnostic systems, as grandiose as they may have been in comparison to our philosophical systems, are, like the latter, marked by Greek problematics that we intend, if not to do away with, at least to make only a controlled and limited use of. More generally it is a matter of elaborating a theology as a science that is directed, as a function of the gnostic orientation, toward the person of Christ and not toward God—without it being for all that a mere question of christology as domain of theology. Our problem is that of a theology placed under the christic condition of the “last instance,” a science of Christ radically distinct from theology, capable of using theological means even as it distinguishes itself formally from them. This science of Christ is the means of “humiliating” theology, of abasing it, of making it the servant of Christ and of humans. It is not (for example) the project of a “cultural” reeducation of philosophy by sending the masses to the school of mathematics. To reeducate theology does not necessarily entail abasing it, or making it a mere means for the science of Christ—it could just as well mean the affirmation of a haughty and solitary mastery. Inversely, to use theology while no longer making of it a discourse that glorifies the name of God is not necessarily to negate it; it is just to deprive it of its claims to omnipotence, as concentrated in the Principle of Sufficient Theology or of Theological Sufficiency. The conservation of the term “theology” in the expression “gnostic theology” is a little surprising, but hardly more than it is in Denys the Areopagite’s “mystical theology.” The formula is perhaps more direct than the equivalent terms “nontheology” and “nonstandard theology”; it has the virtue of making a gesture of acknowledgment to the vanquished of thought whose memory we intend to reawaken in “modernized” or, more exactly, “contemporary” forms. A gnostic theology of Christ, articulating the science of Christ and the decline of traditional theology, signifies the decline of theocentrism in favor of what can no longer be a christocentrism that leaves undisturbed the structure as a whole. We try to “reactivate” or resume (rélancer) the inspiration of gnosis using contemporary means, which, as we shall see, must therefore be (in accordance with this inspiration) scientific rather than religious, generic rather than philosophical.

Let us define the broad characteristics of a gnostic ethics without religious or metaphysical foundation, but with only a generic foundation. (1) It sutures ethics to a complex cognizance that cannot be defined by the dominant Logos or Reason, nor by the transcendence of the Other, and still less by man as biological animal. Ethics is not an effect or a predicate of reason or of life, but the operation of what humans-in-body can do; ethics belongs to the ultimate substance of humans. (2) If there is an ethics, then there must be evil, unhappiness, or malaise, evildoing, evil-thinking, evil-acting, evil-dwelling (for example)—this is the paradox of an ethics for the philosophers that we all are, virtually. It is not a question of their conversation or their logical argumentation, of their wisdom or heroism; it is an immanent therapeutics of man in the world by man qua open to the universe—not an autonomous therapeutics like that of philosophy, limiting, purifying, and improving itself. Its cause has its seat neither on Earth nor on High. (3) Unlike philosophy, which is attached to a dominant discipline and therefore to all disciplines without exception, it does not derive from a monodisciplinary knowledge, from biology or politics; and its apparently decisive relation to quantum physics is subject to special, very restrictive conditions. Generic ethics crosses local knowledges two by two, forms relations between disciplines (always with philosophy) in a state of collision; or, in any case, it affirms their nonseparability. It is an ethics and a politics of interdisciplines, of the most opposed heterogeneous knowledges that humans have acquired. (4) It is generic because it is oriented toward the a priori defense of all humans in all situations or all possible universes (not only in the world and outside the world), following the criminal experiences of the twentieth century, which gave ample proof of philosophy’s revisionism. (5) It renounces religious metaphysics, and the theology of the Good and of God. It is a gnostic trait to introduce into man a necessary ingredient of the non-Good, but a relative one—a trait that is perceived by the Church and the State, united together, as an evil—an evil in principle, even a willful heretical derangement of the natural philosophico-Christian order. It renounces the PST and finds in Christ the paradigm of the victim in the state of in-surrection, of the Sacrificed who is also the Resurrected; it extends the sacrifice to God and to sufficient theology, in favor of the Resurrected; it makes of Christ freed from God the nonsufficient or nontheological real, the necessary but nonsufficient cause of salvation. Gnostic-atheist salvation is, precisely, now assured by Christ-without-God alone; and this is a necessary but nonsufficient condition of salvation. Christ is this nonsufficient, nondivine condition of salvation—we need the cooperation of human subjects implicated in the operation at least as agents or actors. But our context is no longer that of the Christian faith, stuck in between the prescience of an omniscient God and the intervention of human decision. The quantum correlation or unique “state vector” is that of the underdetermining human condition of salvation and of the occasion of human will.

THE CONTEMPORARY ORIENTATION OF GNOSIS

In order to establish that “gnostic theology” must be scientific, we do not refer directly to the letter of gnostic systems—they are not our affair, we are not concerned with the historical—but to their broadest governing motifs, which appear immediately with the thesis of the generic-oriented character of the science of Christ. It is a question of reformulating the salvific character of gnostic knowledge using contemporary theoretical means, and of removing gnosis from its religious and even its Christian context—and of doing so by recentering it on Christ.

We call gnostic, in a broad or formalized sense, a thought that presents the following characteristic traits, whose enumeration should aid us in “modernizing” gnosis and removing its religious definition. (1) It defines man through the unique relation to a certain knowledge that has a complex status—both learned and unlearned, a knowledge that is his immanent substance—rather than through a more or less transcendent predicate such as rational, metaphysical, political animal, and so on. That kind of association philosophically divides generic humanity, its simple animality being definitively rejected as the obscure ground of life, while it is consigned, on the other hand, to the divine transcendence of the Logos—this is a doublet, not a duality by superposition. (2) This human knowledge is called generic because it conjugates, without syncretism but by means of a complex matrix, the most strongly opposed heterogeneous knowledges, those that form the framework of all disciplines: science and philosophy, which furnish it with its twofold model. In reality we treat gnosis as a necessary ingredient of the relative non-Good that belongs to the Good, and which is necessary in order to deploy the latter as generic.

THE DEPLOYMENT OF GNOSIS: FROM POSITIVE KNOWLEDGES TO COGNIZANCE

We distinguish two states or two uses of any knowledge or epistemic material: an encyclopedic and sufficient use, which also includes philosophy; and a salvific use, which alone is a generic knowledge. Historical gnosis is by definition a doctrine that is difficult to identify, like philosophy itself, admitting of multiple variants, certain of which are of a scientific type. But it is a mixture with a unitary aim, known for its struggle against the ecclesio-centered Christianity of the tradition; it is clearly not a duality affecting the use or the destiny of knowledges (even empirical knowledge) or all epistemic material. Our so-called nonphilosophical or nonstandard use respects several of its typical tendencies but seeks to renew them, or even to found rigorously the distinction between their uses. In order to do so it will, paradoxically, submit this epistemic material to a science that is itself drawn from the contemporary encyclopedia but that will be used in a more complex, less encyclopedic manner than its initiators intended.

Generally speaking, gnosis is an unlearned or untaught knowledge that is supposed to inhabit the deepest heart of humans and to assure their salvation. But this definition is too totalizing, unitary, and religious, and disregards the theoretically complex conditions of salvation and its relations to the sciences. The concept of gnosis must be differentiated and displaced from its Greek basis, by way of the contemporary sciences. Its new basis or its primary stratum is thus the set of contemporary knowledges, simply transmitted, received, and practiced within their proper order, which is that of the world or of philosophy, a collective knowledge acquired by humanity or by individual workers subject to the laws of capital and its incessant accumulation. In this broader sense, encyclopedic gnosis contains a multiplicity of natural knowledges that, sedimented on the ground or the history of humanity, become “unlearned” or quasi-natural. Obviously they have been acquired, taught, and transmitted, but in the continuous form of a tradition, a sedimentation that belongs to global or world humanity, and thus also to the individual—but not at all to “subjects,” properly (generically) speaking.

This knowledge, which although primary is not especially or solely mathematical, in general has no use or finality outside of the world and its philosophical, theological form—which does not take us beyond the encyclopedic. But it can be taken into account instead as a simple means or productive force, stripped of its traditional finalities and its sufficiency, in view of the constitution of an entirely other knowing—a “cognizance” that cannot be called either philosophical or theological, but only generic, because it is related to the human genus, whose responsibility is to make the best use of it, a use that this time no longer concerns teaching and transmission, but instead the invention of the safeguarding of those beings living upon the earth. The form that governs its extraction and its consumption is thus no longer that of philosophy, but that of the human genus that is to be preserved. Knowledge gives rise to a cognizance of salvation—which is the reason why gnosis, which defends humans and, on this basis, living beings in general, is not at all “anthropocentric” in the usual sense. It is a cognizance of the last instance, the ultimatum in the face of which the destruction of human life may possibly not come to pass.

Of these two uses of the same knowledges, the first might be called actual in terms of production but virtual in usage—it is produced actually in history, but no longer serves the salvation of humans. The second is virtual—it is a cognizance that one is, no doubt, but that one must also have, or acquire. Renewed in a context that is more scientific than religious, more generic than philosophical, gnosis displaces the old division of knowledge between being and having, apparently inverting the old order while affirming that they are the same thing, since the knowledge one has of generic humanity is also a knowledge that one already is, but is yet to acquire cognizance of. It is a knowledge that one does not yet know as a cognizance of salvation; we shall oppose it to philosophy’s formula, which speaks of a “knowing that one does not know.” This formula really signifies a certain sufficiency, signifying that it is better to know “nothing” or to know the nothing of knowing than not to know at all. Philosophy makes of knowledge an absolute imperative that contains the knowledge of nonknowledge itself, as nonknowledge. Gnosis cuts down this absolute will to knowledge, and radicalizes or differentiates between knowledge and the cognizance of this knowledge.

EPISTEMIC REPETITION: CHANGING THE SCALE OF KNOWLEDGES

Gnosis is generally understood as a unitary and solid, almost Parmenidean body of knowledge, in which Platonic hierarchies and distinctions are laminated. But this is to forget the excesses of its imagination, the multiplicity of its mythological entities, of the sects through which it was disseminated, and the great theoretical systems to which it gave birth. It is above all to misunderstand its epistemic essence, which is that of a duality condensed in the formula “knowledge-of-salvation,” a soteriological cognizance that takes on its full meaning when confronted with the maxim of philosophical or worldly wisdom formulated thus: “take into care beings as a whole.” The more philosophy dedicates itself to ontology, turns around Being, and alienates itself in that which is, the more gnosis dedicates itself to man and to science, and turns around the axis that it forms with these two things, and that is called Christ.

We thus intend to change the paradigm of thought, admitting that our theological knowledge no longer has the force of legitimation; that, as regards the Christ we are concerned with, only his most simple sayings any longer have any force for us, the force of the philosophically unheard-of; that we have to invent, as rigorously and faithfully as possible, our Christ. At best we have a model in the Gospels, but no example. The error of Church theology is precisely to have made of the evangelical model, which could well have been a model in the scientific rather than the Platonic and philosophical sense, an example to imitate, in a stance of rivalry—as if Christ were not so much to be created as imitated. What is demanded of us is precisely a fidelity to his sayings in their simplicity, and the effort of inventing a thought that “goes with”—with Christ. This simplicity of Christ’s sayings is not necessarily defined by that of his listeners. It stems from the symbolic force which we shall say is that of the “superposition” of their expression and their meaning, a simplicity one finds in the resumed outbursts of certain mystics, or in “confessions of faith.” Our knowledge of Christ exists in a symptomal form that does not distinguish between the letter and the overentangled meaning of the apostles’ texts. For this nonseparability or nonlocalization to be recognized, the natural or quasi-physical ground of human being must be manifested, transformed into a generic (not anthropological or philosophical) cognizance. As a minimum we shall disregard, at least provisionally, Saint Paul’s commentaries and his planetary considerations, on the borders of the Judaism from which he issues and the universal Christianity that he tries to found.

The sense of this repetition of the fundamental features of gnosis is destined to be transformed into an “epistemic” experimentation in salvation that is (at least) performative: a practical and lived theology. Gnosis is not just a discourse to be conserved in the memory or in the museum of Christianity. We proceed with its repetition in the first place so as to verify our theoretical means, those that produce gnostic knowledge, and to prepare what will elsewhere be called an “operatory field” or “experimental vessel.” The theoretical matrix used here has a twofold implication: we are implicated in it as subject in such a way that it itself is implicated and transformed by our experiment. This twofold implication must however not remain in a vague state but must “turn generic.” Gnosis is the duality of a primary or positive knowledge implicated as a means for human transformation or self-cognizance. We must prepare ourselves for a cognizance of we-the-humans—but not so that this knowledge may exceed itself once more, gain power, and modelize itself, as happens in philosophy. On the contrary, it will have to subtract itself from its spontaneous reflection, to abase itself or be abased, removed from its self-cognizance as practiced by philosophy. For this is what it is about, against all dogmatisms and vain promises: evaluating the chances, the “probability,” of an epistemic salvation of humans.

To sum up, we usually distinguish knowledge that one is from knowledge that one has. But there are two possible scales upon which this distinction may be made, one philosophically centered, the other nonphilosophically centered. From the latter point of view we consider the knowledge that is acquired by the positive sciences, and that forms the excess of our everyday context, as having become knowledge of the infused or ontological world; it loses its acquired and laborious character—even the most demanding experimental science is thus “frozen” and sedimented in a quasi-materiality that one is. This is the elementary and new level of our concept of gnosis, which does not overlap with the old one since it transcends and homogenizes the traditional divisions, even those of doxa, of positive science, and of the Idea, which are all parts of it.

What is more, there is the radical concept of a gnosis that is of the order of cognizance, perhaps of truth, rather than of knowledge. It is also acquired through an operation on elementary knowledge, treated this time as material or symptom, and it also becomes, in a sense, infused. But if one has or acquires the primary knowledge in the world so as to become it or be it, one has or one acquires cognizance as outside of the world, on the basis of this primary knowledge, and by treating it as a quantum-formalized raw material. It is a question, in this second phase, of gnosis as veritative knowledge of the salvation of humans such as it is determined in-the-last-instance by them and no longer by philosophy as form of the world. It also is infused, but indirectly so, and possesses even less immediacy than the first phase of gnosis. This is to expose acquired knowledges in the context of the world and of its validity for a certain human practice—to submit them not to the eternity of a divine gaze as Platonic philosophers do, but to a generic futurality. This is the meaning of gnosis, this exposure to messianity but not to God—an atheist, nonreligious, and non-Platonic gnosis, an act of the salvation of knowledges that tears them from their native milieu whence they draw their sufficiency. Their generic usage is not their absolute self-exposure to a dialectic, but their radical reprise in terms of a futurality commensurate with humans.

SUFFICIENT NONKNOWLEDGE AND NONSUFFICIENT KNOWLEDGE: FROM DIALECTICS TO QUANTUM THOUGHT

If gnosis is a knowledge that ensures salvation, what exactly are its objects and its means? Ancient gnosis holds that the response is self-evident since it is variously religious—Jewish, Platonic, or Persian. For we who have at our disposal other theoretical means more complex than those of the Greeks, their conjugation with a theology immediately penetrated by syncretic religious influences is of hardly any possible use—it is no more than a mysterious memory or an object for historians. How to “repeat” it, submit it to a reprise through procedures of knowledge that have gained in extension and in precision but are still capable of being centered on the person of Christ as it demands and still in view of a salvation through some cognizance? Gnosis operates on a duality condensed into the notion of a knowledge-that-saves. We have shown that it is a double knowledge, a duality, and not a unique knowledge, as it might seem in the overdetermined religious context that secretly plays the role of a second term, functioning as an unperceived material, this religious context that goes without saying. Remember that a fully deployed gnosis rests (1) on a ground of validated but contingent knowledge, (2) which provides the “natural” ground of humanity and assures it of what is, in a certain way, its primary substance (3) which does not know itself or which is not directly interested in man, (4) which must therefore be put to work for and by man as a means for his salvation. Obviously, both ancient and modern philosophical thought know of dualities that seem to be of the same type, to be deployed according to the same logic, until one examines them more closely: for example, the idea of knowing that one does not know, or that one knows nothing, the duality of knowledge and thought, faith and knowledge, manual work and intellectual work, intuition and concept, practice and theory, esoteric and exoteric, metaphysics and thinking thought. But finally, with this unitary concept, it will be a matter of thinking that which we know we do not know. To think or know that one does not know, to know that one does not know or knows nothing, one must nevertheless know implicitly that one does not know, at least via a third party like Socrates or a philosopher like Plato, before replacing this absolute nothingness with confirmed knowledge. The philosophical axiom underlying all of these solutions consists in postulating the implicit power of nonknowing as already being knowledge in the Other or in the Self, the postulation of the capacity of nonknowing to be deployed in the form of a higher-grade knowing. Let us call this claim the Principle of Sufficient Nonknowledge—it is the very heart of philosophy.

It is not enough to assert nonknowledge and to raise it into a standard—rather, a nonsufficient knowledge than a sufficient nonknowledge. Gnosis inverts the problem of philosophy, or formulates it more honestly. Why suppose, through bad faith and hypocrisy, that we do not know or that we know nothing, when manifestly we know far too many things, all of which burden the world into which we are thrown? Rather know for certain that one knows nothing or very little than claim not to know at all. More straightforwardly, let us admit that we have real primary knowledge, which includes that nonknowledge of which philosophers speak, and admit that the difference or the duality is always between two forms of knowing. This is not a contradiction, like Being and Nothingness, but a unilateral complementarity. If there must be a difference to produce, it will be that of the knowledge that we have as beings (thus, that knowledge that, in a sense, we are, but without having it for ourselves). The generic difference lies between that knowledge whose human destination remains unknown to us and a cognizance of that knowledge that we will be, or, far more exactly, that we will be by means of that “primary” knowledge.

So what does it mean to say, in the order of cognizance, “not to know this primary knowledge,” not to be cognizant of it? The subject does not need to have read Marx to know what it costs him not to have the means of existence, to have an “existence without means”—for example, theoretical contemplation with no means of invention. It is rather a matter of reducing this knowledge, even if it is “pure” like the matheme, to a means or a procedure stripped of its supposedly sufficient proper finalities. It is not sufficient to reflect, philosophically, this knowledge that one is without having it. Gnosis short-circuits transcendental or absolute reflection, which still belongs in every way to primary knowledge. Without reflecting it once more and potentiating it further, to infinity, it forces it to change destination, to bifurcate from its spontaneous finality which is philosophical idealism, to submit itself generically to humans rather than to a God. At this point we cannot yet understand how gnosis forces primary or positive knowledge to enter into a procedure that is not at all reflexive or in specular torsion, but “vectoriell (vectoriale),”² or how generic ex-sistence is not a trajectory in the void but an emergence at its root—a radical, not absolute, insurrection. Far from being a corpuscular knowledge like a spark or macroscopic like a pearl as the religious gnostics imagined, contenting themselves with doubling it with a specular and empty transcendence and therefore remaining within the unitary thematic of the philosophical flash, generic existence’s insurrectionary character subtracts it from such positivity. It inverts the religious schema. It is in essence primarily a vector rather than a thing or an object, but one that brings with it the equivalent of a microscopic or partial (we say “quartial”) object to which positive knowledge is reduced. Deployed gnosis is thus indeed double, but precisely without forming a doublet—it is instead something like a superposition or a complementarity. It is the duality of a primary ontico-ontological knowledge, given more or less positively by the different disciplines, and a veritative use of this knowledge in terms of man, a duality stemming from quantum properties such as superposition and, as we shall see, noncommutativity.

We shall call positive any knowledge that one does not yet know how to orient generically as a means of salvation, a knowledge learned or taught through a transcendent tradition that is materialized as immanent or in a becoming-unlearned. As to the cognizance of this knowledge, it is “radical,” not at all absolute like philosophy, but in a certain way “untaught,” just practiced. To say it rigorously through the nonphilosophical procedure, it is “nonlearned.” That which has not been taught to us yet which we know as in a mirror in Christianity must now be practiced by other means, quantum means, in this way conserving its secret status.

THE CONJUGATION OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY

To make a generic science of ancient gnosis, three sources must be combined: philosophy and its theological modality as object or material; science in the form of quantum theory, no longer as their object but, on the contrary, to underdetermine them and take them in turn as object; and finally man as participant and stakeholder (“last instance”) in this combination, as interested in it. All of these general characteristics will see their own sphere of existence and action modified by their generic assemblage. Let us detail these conditions. What is necessary is:

 

1.   That science in the form of so-called objective, axiomatic, or deduced knowledge should intersect with philosophy, cutting it straightway and “orthogonally” from itself. Not in two more or less equal halves, but unilaterally, science fusing with a part of philosophy (the lived) that it carries with it, whereas the other part of philosophy (consisting in the structures that make it an ideal body) is at once indirectly dependent on this fusion and independent of it as appearance of sufficiency or of the in-itself.

2.   That this lived science should thus be subtractive or underdetermining of philosophy in itself qua spontaneous philosophy of science, upon which it would wish to impose its categories and its determinations, in particular that of the “all” and those which derive from it. Philosophy is a doublet of itself, a dominant double transcendence; it is to be abased or reduced to a simple transcendence.

3.   That its principal act (“superposition”) should be constitutive of a scientific subjectivity designed to replace in an entirely other site (that of the “last instance”) and with entirely other functions (those of underdetermination) philosophical, egological, and cogitative subjectivity.

4.   That this science should be capable, through its quantum orientation, not of determining philosophy reciprocally or simply inverting it, but of underdetermining it, subtracting it from (over)determination and thus rendering “philosophically” indeterminate the objects it treats of (including the subject). These objects continue to exist; they are not negated, but are simplified or reduced to a transcendence without doublet, which is true “vectoriell” immanence (insurrection).

5.   That man should have a fundamental interest in this science and its intersection with philosophy, in objectivity as much as in the lived; that, as science fusing with the lived, it appropriates not all of the individual or philosophical subject, but a part of it, and that it becomes a subject-science (science-sujet). This is the Feuerbach and Marx side of things: man is not just a part of nature, but makes nature human.

 

Ultimately, science as generic gnosis is the fusion of theology and quantum theory, a fusion quantum-theoretically (that is to say, generically) underdetermined.

THE GENERIC ORIENTATION OF GNOSIS

This complex device is capable of irretrievably tearing humans away from philosophy alone, precisely because it takes account of philosophy as one of their variables or properties. The generic, thanks to its quantum aspect, is noncommutable with the philosophical, although it does make use of it. Philosophy’s flippancy with regard to man is unfathomable—it oscillates between a narrowness of perspective, a reductive cosmic prejudice, and a stupid self-assurance pro and contra that caricature called “humanism.” It has never been made for man, but always for the world in which it incarcerates him, the being into which it throws him, the nature within which it inscribes him, the unconscious to which it subjects him or through which it shreds him up as “subject,” the society in which it dissolves him, the mathematics of which it makes him a “function”—here is the most profound alienation of humans, the one that governs all the others. Facile philosophies of alienation took the work only halfway; philosophical alienation would have had to have been excavated all the way down to generic man. Certain disciplines have really taken man into their care without necessarily placing him at the center of their theory—philosophers such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx, and primarily science fiction and gnosis, certain currents of the theology of the Eastern Church. Apart from that, all is world, chaos, substance, physis, eternal return, spirit, cogito and cogitat, consciousness, subjectum, truth. It is no longer a matter of contesting science, or even objectivity, which is not necessarily to say positivity, an access by right to the human lived; it is always philosophy or a philosophical position that takes up the means of science so as to submit man, and not only the individual, to it. Man is not commutable with philosophy, which is but one of his means.

As to the historical and religious gnosis of the Ancients, it must be corrected. It is often defined in terms of the importing of Greek and Platonic concepts into Christianity, the duality body/ideality or body/soul replacing the new Christian duality of flesh/spirit, far more positive and broader since the flesh includes the body and ideality in a positive order, to which it opposes that of spirit. We know that it is a deviation from “authentic” Christianity, which also affected the “world” with which the problem of the body had interfered. Here also the positive relation of heaven and the world created by God, a world that is but the contingent place and cause (and sometimes the sign) of sin but that is subject to redemption, was “hijacked” by gnosis (and not only the Manichean kind) into an irrevocable condemnation of the world and of bodies. For reasons that are, precisely, scientific (albeit physical rather than unilaterally mathematical), and for reasons of a finer description of bodies by phenomenologies—in other words, for reasons that are globally more “Aristotelian” than “Platonic”—this deviation of gnosis in relation to Christianity no longer makes sense for us, and we must deliver the old gnosis itself from these terms.

What we call generic gnosis is a reconfiguration of the old kind, against the Platonic deviation that in turn became “Christianity”—a return to Christ without Christianity. It has the twofold and yet quite unique task of being at once non-Christian and non-Platonic. Of conjugating the Platonic detestation of the world and the necessity of humans’ being forced to love it sufficiently to live in it and to transform it without being able to leave it or flee from it (this is what remains of Christianity), but equally without having faith in it (this is what remains of religious gnosis), according to it only what is called, precisely, “belief.” This conjugation takes place within a generic matrix that, to say it differently once more, multiplies the variables of Christianity and gnosis by each other, fuses them by underdetermining their unity through gnosis. It goes without saying that more than ever, and faithfully to the spirit of gnosis, our task is to invent the Christ who will be our contemporary. Must we add that, despite many barely discernable ambiguities, we do not entirely conflate free gnostic invention and sectarian servitude? Gnosis is a theory and a practice of the invention of life, which has until now been practiced in a religious context. It was itself invented for reasons of religion, combined with philosophy and Judaism; but it is necessary, now that many of our means have changed, to found it more rigorously as nonreligious gnosis. To found it insofar as it itself is not capable of founding a philosophy.

THE PHYSICS OF CHRIST AND THE PRINCIPLE OF NONSUFFICIENT SCIENCE

What science could respond to these demands and assure us of its pertinence for an object such as Christ and the phenomena in which he is given, if not a purely conceptual “science” like theology—that is to say, a false science? The sayings of Christ, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, faith, grace, the body, life, and so on—these phenomena are as concrete (physical, even) as one could hope for; there is nothing philosophical here—that is to say, nothing separated into opposites and then reconciled. All is truly “material-and-spiritual,” and precisely to rid us of philosophical positions, all is “materiel (matérial)”³ through superposition, not through dialectic. These phenomena are made for the “Simple” because they themselves are “simple,” even if they are destined to be grasped by a nonsufficient understanding, an understanding stripped of the Principles of Philosophical and Mathematical Sufficiency (PPS and PMS). There is a materiel phenomenality of Christ. His formulations and the vicissitudes of his history belong to a quantum “materielity” of a new type that escapes both the simplicity of analysis and the complexity of philosophical and transcendent syntheses. In any case, all that counts is the a priori under which the science is going to apprehend its object. To measure the science of Christ against the empirical appearances of history or against a Galilean epistemology, as did the classics (Hobbes, Spinoza), is now a fruitless procedure in relation to our instruments. To define him through philosophical positions such as materialism or idealism is almost as pointless, and comes down to simply entering into a vicious or hermeneutic circle. Now, a physics of christic phenomena could not resolve itself into a diversely nuanced philosophical hermeneutics, even if we say sometimes that this physics, in its own interpretation of the real, can be aided by and can use theology as an “input” and as a hermeneutic variable. This implies not only that it is this science alone that determines its object, but that it is necessarily a special science, a physics that is not positive—not exactly conceptual, but delivered from its positive, sufficient, or spontaneous use. For the great problem, what we shall call a nonepistemological problem, is that of a nonsufficient science. Just as there is a PPS, there is a PMS. A generic science must be capable of implicating its theoretical apparatus into its object rather than separating them. The science of Christ is nonseparable from Christ, it cannot objectivate him in just any manner, but remains a physics with a minimum of mathematical productive force, and does not become a hermeneutics even when it makes use of the theological discourses that have formed around Christ. It is possible to include theological materials in a physics if the latter has as its object a materiality of words and inseparably ideal (and) material events. It is obviously a question of that special physics that is quantum physics. We isolate the principles of a nonsufficient quantum thought, the rational or principial kernel of physics, and invest it in the christic materiality of some of the events and utterances of the Christ-being. Classical theology, like conceptual science in the philosophical manner, must be and can be replaced by a physics of bodies or of christic corporeality, and can borrow new procedures of more rigorous experimentation on these phenomena than the traditional and autoscopic hermeneutics of faith by faith. Gnostic theology, in short, is the rigorous knowledge of the christic phenomenon through a combinatorial of theology and physics, but one that is underdetermined by Christ as messianity. The messianity in which Christ is resolved is that always-complete never-closed opening called faith or fidelity. There was in gnosis a messianity that was lost or drowned under the accumulation of dogmas and mythological images, and that it is possible to resume or reactivate.

QUANTUM PREPARATION

Traditional theology seeks to be a conceptual science. It immediately finds itself caught up in the distinctions between the conceptual and the intuitive, and in their confusions and mélanges, as illustrated philosophically by Leibniz. These latter are pursued in Kant despite his efforts to make a distinction between intuition and concept. For Kant tries at once to maintain and to overcome this distinction in the transcendental imagination and the schematism, but will never have really overcome it by way of the latter, which represents what we could call an amphiboly of the transcendental itself, albeit one superior to those of reflection. Classical theology thrives on this type of amphiboly, mediated by the transcendental or by the Hegelian concept as self-mediation. It is of the greatest importance to perceive the complexity of these philosophical solutions, whether Kantian-schematizing or Hegelian-mediatizing. Even nineteenth-century philosophical christologies, which drove on further into this Hegelian and more broadly speaking philosophical terrain, did not surpass this type of transcendent complexity. The thesis that we oppose to this type of solution is as follows: the various melanges of intuition and concept, of given and intelligibility, of empiricism and rationalism (Kant)—whether analytic or synthetic, it matters little here—all belong to the corpuscular or macroscopic style, to take up these old indicative terms of physics; they are neither wave nor particle. The classic duality between intuition and concept, illustrated by the memorable essays of Leibniz and Kant, and schematism and self-mediation along with them fall entirely under the corpuscular model of reality, which is but one side of the latter, its Newtonian side. A physics of Christ, if it does not wish to risk giving rise to a physicalism, can no longer treat the wave/particle complementarity like a schematism that, as can easily be appreciated, is a macroscopic duality with a certain affinity with the religious and philosophical context of Christianity, its sensible/spiritual dualities and its psychological imaginary. God and Christ, the sayings and the events of the Apostles, the dogmas to which they give rise—all of this material must be treated in the form of dualities or complementarities of a quantum type, or more precisely a vectoriell or unilateral type. The christic science that replaces christology at once changes the face of theology as science. Insofar as it is built on principles drawn from the quantum-theoretical model, it is constructed on the one hand from algebraic properties such as idempotence and the imaginary number represented geometrically by vectors, and it ceases to be logico-formal and gives rise to an algebraic formalism, without PMS; and on the other hand, it is constructed on a matter of the lived, which is no longer given intuitively, but is given materielly by wave and by particle, this lived being the substance of christic phenomena. It would be dangerous to invert this materiel formalism into a formal materialism that conjugated a materialist position and a mathematico-logical model, and was inscribed entirely within philosophy.

We must, then, extract from positive quantum physics, with the aid of the philosophical variable (the two being conjugated in a generic matrix) the kernel of “quantum thought,” not with computer software (logiciel) but with “quantware” (quantiel), a vectoriellity for new thoughts. Quantum thought does not mean that science can “think” (an absurd formula), but that it becomes a means for thought, once we make use of philosophy for this extraction—an operation that is the inverse of the typical procedure of philosophy, with science cutting the corpuscle of philosophy, slicing through the All, and demanding that both be superposed so that philosophy is able to not become “science” (another absurdity symmetrical with the first one), but become a means for the science of Christ, or enter into its service. It is in this way that science and philosophy enter into a common labor as means of a nonstandard thought. In other words, one cannot exit from the amphiboly of traditional theology, which mixes science and philosophy to the benefit of philosophy, abusively idealizing or indeed materializing Christ, except through their conjugation as variables of the object = X named “Christ.”

It is true that if one stops at this stage, with the inverse products of science and philosophy, one has indeed entered into a matrixial and noncommutative conception of theology, but not yet a generic conception. Here the conjugation is not a mediatization or a schematization, but it must be submitted to a special condition that is the “reprise” (rather than the repetition) of quantum thought that will henceforth find itself prior-to-priority, as before-the-forefront through this operation of reprise, but that nonetheless remains inseparable from the philosophy that it makes use of and that makes use of it, each as means for the other. One might have been able to think, up until now, that these multiplications were mere “partial identifications” between quantum physics and theology, but it is no longer a matter of this once the quantum variable itself is resumed. For this resumption, far from being a repetition, difference, or identification (all of which are philosophical operators), is a “superposition” in the algebraic and quantum sense of the term. A superposition produced ontologically from the idempotent, algebraic, and nonmetaphysical One, which is capable of supporting an addition to itself while remaining “itself” or forming a vectoriell immanence, without becoming a doublet. The sterile addition of a synthesis that passes via an analysis without sinking into it, of an analysis that passes via a synthesis without stopping at it. It is valid only as vectoriell immanence, not as philosophical transcendence. It makes the One and only the One-in-One with some Being or with some Other. The One that is but One, addable or superposable with itself, is underdetermined in relation to its doubling and its metaphysical identifications as Being and Other as overdetermining instances in the face of the One that underdetermines them. It is the decline or the generic abasement of theological transcendence, its underpowering that is idempotence in relation to omnipotence.

INCARNATION: SCHEMATIZATION OR CLONING?

God “made” man—doesn’t this great axiom borrow its real content from an operation of the cloning of Christ and the faithful that takes place in the matrix? The real or phenomenal content of the macroscopic schematization of God in man by Christ is what we might call a cloning, realized by an immanent act, acting on and in a material of transcendent origin like the lived of the subject or of philosophical belief, and reducing its doublet to simplicity. The Christian version of the schematization of God in human nature is the bad transcendent fusion of terms, a macroscopic fusion with a spectacular and repetitive result. Whether it is the hyper-macroscopic God or whether it is the apparently more modest and immanent transcendental imagination, these operators still borrow from the schema of Christ, or from the human, worldly, and psychological predicates in which they alienate themselves, the better to save the humanity of these predicates. In this operation, Christ remains God, or rather becomes the God who was and remains God—he rejoins a Father who is not really alienated but subsists as he is. The sinful transcendence of man has doubtless been humiliated and abased, but not that of God, who has only apparently been abased; there has been no real “alienation” of God, or “objectivation” of him as Marx would say. This is a macroscopic game that changes almost nothing. The result risks being tautological, or at best giving rise to a reinforcement of power: that of God, and that of the transcendental imagination—that little God hidden in the depths of the soul, that operator secluded in the shadows with which it enshrouds itself. The Moderns have their mythology, for sure more “rational” than that of the gnostics: they have boosted power and domination; to the traditional quadripartite of causes they have added that of a new demiurge, the transcendental imagination, the anthropological mirror and doublet of God.

Incarnation is a dialectical concept beyond all human comprehension, which is why this miracle fascinates the multitudes who do not understand it. For it to become intelligible, as faith and fidelity are, it must be reduced to a physical order, and physics already has enough paradoxes of its own, which it is able to recognize as such, without needing to add to them the supplement of belief. The “generic matrix” is that device, sufficiently “miraculous” in its order, in which vectorial (vectorielle) algebra turns into or rather is “made” into generic or human vectoriellity (vectorialité), a fusion with a materielity that it informs without first having to resolve the problem of its validity for matter. It is only if the matter of the phenomenon (as Kant would say) is given empirically that the problem of the schematism of the concept poses itself—that is to say, only within the corpuscular or macroscopic framework of rationalism. However, in the generic matrix (and this is where it differs from the transcendental aesthetic), vectoriellity acts as a subtraction or abasement of transcendence (of the complete or doubled circle of philosophy) through the imaginary or complex number or through the quarter-turn. In general it is easier to subtract a predicate from matter than to numerically add a form to it, addition and superposition being a subtraction from both matter and philosophical form.

We must therefore read the effectiveness of the matrix in the complex of Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension not in a historical manner—that is to say, according to an operation of superposition hardly visible in the Ascension—but as that which retroactively clones the lived of the human subject. No analytic or synthetic construction of the matrix—that is, of the complex of the Cross in all its dimensions. The Cross thus understood is a machine that is already running before our interpretation takes place; and it is this machine that produces the clone of the generic subject or the fusion, as Christ, of contraries, of the vector as the simple transcending of the human lived. The cloning is the work of the generic matrix (as immanent operation of the production of Christ or of the Faithful as mediate-without-mediation) or of the underdetermined fusion of the variables that are the Forces of Production and Relations of Production submitted to the concreteness of the matrix. Cloning is a physical concept of Incarnation, and cannot be explained by way of philosophical or theological operations of divine transcendence.

God “made” man: this enigma of enigmas is too mysterious not to have been interpreted by the shortest routes—both those of myth and of those aspects of myth that are imported into theology, and those of science, certain of whose statements, rigorous as they may be, remain in the neighborhood of myth and are capable of reducing it without, for all that, tipping into a “Voltairean” reduction. The generic matrix furnishes a general principle of the intelligibility of Christ-thought, a principle we shall find again in regard to those other great foundational mysteries that are the Cross and the Resurrection, alongside the Incarnation. The at once quantum and generic explanation necessitates a special methodological precaution as to the time of explanation in relation to the phenomena to be explained. An “explanation” that follows the course of the time or of the history recounted by these mysteries will surely be just as mysterious as its objects. It will be a fantastic story, like theology, which traces itself from the stories of the Gospels and sublimates them. A science does not have the right to mime its object or to specularly reproduce it give or take certain explanations, variations, or conceptual commentaries, even if they be speculative doublets, which are perfectly sterile beliefs. “Demystification” must be radical to also be, very simply, a demystification of the philosophical substance of theology. This is truer yet for a science of the quantum order than for the predominantly anthropological and determinist sciences of the age of Enlightenment and of what subsists of the “philosophical” in Heideggerian phenomenology and right up to Derridean deconstruction. To tear out the last roots of temporal and historical determinism that support theology, we must agree not to judge belief by belief, but faith by faith, or more exactly by the last-instance messianity of Christ. We shall utilize the “imaginary” of the Apostles, qua historical story and spontaneous foundation of faith, in another space proper to science, specifically the science of Christ, which, we should recall, is not a purely historical experience, one of empirical testimony documented by disciples who will “scholarize” the “teaching” of Christ by spreading it throughout the world. And even more so, it is not that transcendental history to which German christologies have habituated us. This space is that of an experience of Christ; it is an experimental, that is to say, performative, space that implies our own faith, and that calls for relatively precise procedures. One of the first precautions to take is to note that the temporality of the real of Christ and the Apostles is not deterministic, otherwise it would become an abyss of theological aporias—that is to say, precisely an abyss of dialectical mysteries. To uproot the imaginary of the Apostles and extract its kernel of generic human reality, it is necessary not simply to invert the course of the history that is recounted (that would hardly gain us anything) but to think this history (that is to say, the proven knowledge we may have of it) as underdetermined precisely by Christ, organized and ordered by futurality or messianity. There will be no hermeneutic circle of faith of a philosophical or believing subject that ultimately founds itself, but only the objective appearance of a circle of faith determined in-the-last-instance by Christ’s messianity. Thus the Resurrection and the Ascension will be the phenomena whose futurality justifies or explains the Cross, doing away with its aspect of barbarous sacrifice.

Understood as superposition and as mediate-without-mediation, not as identification or schematization, Christ escapes the mastery of theology and the concupiscence of priests who always have the macroscopic resources to recrucify him by seeking to penetrate his so clearly evident secret. Christ under-goes as his body-on-the-cross, visible to all and yet secret; the Cross is idempotence as potency of the Same; it is the superposition of the horizontality of Logos and the verticality of Judaism, their orthogonality—more entangled than a knot, for a knot can always be untied, at least locally.

CHRISTIC INSURRECTION AND THE ABASEMENT OF GOD

What is the most general effect of the gnostic reprise, and not just of the philosophical repetition of gnosis, of its texts and its history, a hermeneutics that does not concern us here? It is a non-Christian deplanification of the history of salvation, an insurrection in the very principles. Not a simple inversion of the relation of Father and Son, as dreamed of by certain millenarian movements within the Christian religion, it is a matter of the promotion of the Son to the status of the prior-to-first cause or “last instance” of a new history which would finally be that of humans and consequently that of the abasement of the sufficiency of God, placed in turn under condition of Christ. This insurrection is prosecuted against the Principle of Sufficient God, or the Principle of Sufficient Theology. The Christian Good News does nothing more than reensure the priority (an almost natural priority) of Christ as son and as sacrificial substitute for sinful humanity. The outcome testifies, as (much later) will the revolutionary outcome of Marxism, to its failure in regard to its theoretical conditions, in the absence of a new global problematic capable of succeeding Greco-Judaic thought by taking stock of it. It is almost impossible for a “cultural revolution” to succeed if it is not accompanied—preceded, perhaps—by a real theoretical “insurrection” or a new, adequate framework of thought. All we can say is that Christ is not responsible for the disaster that followed him, and that he succeeded exactly insofar as Christianity foundered in its worldly ossification. There is no revolution “in” history as long as history itself is not “revolutionized” or revolted against. Like Kierkegaard, we think that Christ is the “absolute fact.” However, we are content to say “radical fact,” which should put history back on a human footing by proposing another intelligibility for it, obviously not an empirical one, but one of second degree. It is a matter, first, of identifying, otherwise than by following the thread of historical determinism or of the “life of Jesus,” the quasi-scientific significance of his message, and of discovering within it a new paradigm of faith, of action, and of the stance of the faithful when they are in a generic body and engaged with the world. The Acts of the Cross, above all that of Resurrection, have no spiritual sense except a materiel or lived one, and the faithful must imitate them in an adequate way. In Christ as in the behavior of the faithful, we must elucidate the immanent phenomenon of the Resurrection not by way of the philosophical model of repetition or revolution, but as a revolt or insurrection whose immediate effect is the bringing down or “decline” of God. The phenomenal content of the Resurrection is a generic reprise, an immanent leap, rather than the old transcendent leap; and its correlate is the fall of the God of the Old Testament into human generic immanence. From the macroscopic and omnipotent that he believed himself to be (monotheist mythology), he becomes (or, better still, undergoes as) particulate, as quartial God, reduced to a negative quarter of his old omniscience and power. To put God under determining condition is not to negate God purely and simply (a gesture of thought just as hasty as the simple refusal of theology and philosophy); it is to give oneself a chance to raise theology to what it has always claimed to be: a science of God that treats God as the generic object it is. Christ is our revelation as faithful humans, and God the revelation of the correlative object of this fidelity. The abasement of God and the revolt of Christ or of messianity correspond to the fall of philosophy or theology. The gnostic repetition finds its content and purport in this human insurrection and in the correlative abasement of the old God. Such is the meaning of a properly gnostic “atheism,” the refusal of the “sufficient” goodness of God.

BEYOND ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

We defend the concept of a gnosis broadened beyond its historical and theoretical delimitation, a gnosis we might call a gnosis of the Last-Humanity. There are two “evil gods” and not just one: the ancient Jewish God whose exorbitant pretensions justify his having featured in the first rank of our enemies. There is also a Greek logos-God facing him. Greek paganism is not the absence of religion, just the absence of absolute monotheism; it is the affirmation of a multiple God, an affirmation that we reject through the broadened gnostic refusal set out by what we might call christic or generic gnosis. That Logos is a God and a Law was recognized much later and in a temporality other than that of the Torah, but it contributes nonetheless to constituting Christianity as a heritage. To consider the Eternal Return of the Same, the culmination of a unique and pagan God as multiple, as a mere concept or an ancient mythical oddity of Nietzsche’s, as he brings together the essence of Western philosophy as “theology,” seems to us to smack of an academic superficiality and an irresponsibility that barely counter the Church’s claims of a Greek source or reason. We shall have to interpret Christ as a generic matrix that gives the Cross its true meaning, at least so long as the latter is understood as an effect of the Resurrection, rather than the Resurrection being understood as an effect or consequence of the Cross. If the Cross relates to the theo-christo-logical doublet and signifies God’s omnipotence, the victory of Christ on the Cross signifies that he is of another nature, that he must be understood otherwise, through categories at once more rigorous (scientific, even) and more generic—for example, as a collider for those two rationalities that he makes interfere and vibrate, producing messianity and faith. They have been interpreted by Christianity in a way we might well call primitive and “noncivilized,” through a scene of crucifixion, of sacrifice, which can only lead us to expect the downfall of their omnipotence and that of the Cross itself. This gnosis is of a christic interpretation: it is no longer Christ who will be a mere object of historical gnosis. The concept of gnosis must itself also be reworked in the direction of a quantum and generic amplitude.

STRUGGLE AND FIDELITY

We are fighting on two fronts: against Socratic theoreticism and ontological wisdom, and against Judaic ethics and the Law. These foundational religious legacies, the Real as Idea or as Law, do not have the same meaning now, as if one could choose one or the other indifferently. But the struggle against Christianity is another thing altogether, a little different and more complex, and with it is initiated the steepest decline of transcendence into mediation, a sort of regression to immanence (and one that will have political or “gnostic” effects). The ideal and the possibility of an immanent “life” no doubt emerged within a religious context, but Christianity is perhaps the sole religion that can negate itself, immanentize itself, interiorize itself to the point of denying its divine transcendence via incarnation as the death of the transcendent god, as sacrifice of the ancient religious ground in favor of the Christ-subject delivered to solitude and abandonment. From this radical immanentization that “returns” as positive undergoing, we can (like certain contemporary historians of science) draw out the possibility of a modern, non-Greek science, but more broadly, the possibility of a non-Judaism and a non-Christianity—in sum, a nonphilosophy. We have seen, however, without drawing any other consequence than its Hegelian and dialectical (that is to say, Judaeo-Greek) reappropriation, that with this new paradigm of scientific immanence Christianity demanded a redefinition of thought itself in its very foundations. It became possible to reformulate it according to a causality neither Greek nor Jewish, to transform its usage of science and of religion, mélanges of which it would no longer tolerate as a style of thought. The problem of “philosophizing in Christ” is not resolved so long as to philosophize is not “in-Christ” but remains within the priority of the Idea. Incarnation is the model or (more precisely) modelization of a true prior-to-priority of the Real so immanent that it separates itself from the All. Christianity and Judaism are only relatively opposed to philosophy—one through an immanence without any true means, the other through an excess of transcendence. The in-Christ supposes the dissolution of religious pagan mixtures that are revived in philosophical christologies. The new governing formula is to philosophize, to Judaize, and perhaps to “mathematize” (if this formula is understood correctly) in-Christ as in-One. The true formula, that which will have filled a space or a void abusively hidden and filled in by philosophy, is thus to “underphilosophize in-Christ.” We do not understand the “in-” as transcendent incarnation but as a lived-(of)-immanence that is the real of incarnation. It is not a matter of a historical Christ or of a Christ idealized by religion or Platonized by philosophy, but of Christ as Stranger-subject or Son of Man-in-person. To draw something new from Christianity itself, and to do so “in-Christ,” we must understand the story of the Gospels as a modelization of a radically immanent Christ, and must double Christianity in a generic christo-fiction and a christo-centrism that will be its religious modelization.

Christ offers the chance of a defection from the positivity of religion, but also from that of the philosopher, because there is indeed one, even if Paul diverted the christic message from its meaning, rejudaized it too quickly without truly Judaizing-in-Christ. Christ announced the end not of Judaism but of all religion, and perhaps of monotheism, for a generic monohumanism. Not even a Protestant reduction of religion in favor of Scripture, for this is a last remainder of fetishism and of the quest for consensus. Christ is not the critic of religions, he is their consummation as immanent and lived, who leaves them in the state of residues—that is to say, symptoms and models with secondary functions. He is not even the deconstructor of philosophies, since he calls into question the ultimate presuppositions of deconstruction. This is why the great problem now plays out, at best, between christo-centrism and christo-fiction, the latter not being a negation of the historical Christ but his devaluation so that he is relevant exclusively as a modelization. The passage from the interiority of Incarnation to the immanent cloning of the Son of Man allows for the positing of a new Real for philosophy and for Judaism. Radical incarnation obliges the separation of the Real as prior-to-priority, more than ex-sistant (Lacan) to the Gospels, from “his” thought. The messianic lived neither thinks nor speaks; it is the world or philosophy that think, and hence the Christ-subject, whose essence is no longer the Idea, the Law, the Other, Scripture.