Seven

THE TWO LAWS OF SUBSTANTIAL RELIGIOUS EXISTENCE, AND CHRIST AS MEDIATE-WITHOUT-MEDIATION

THE INVENTION OF CHRIST

The invention named “Christ” was not the foundation of a new religion to rival others; it was, rather, a form of corruption that came to augment and complicate the imaginary grounds of the “three monotheisms.” It was to determine, at last, the conditions of a somewhat rigorous cognizance of religions. Judaism and Greek thought utterly lacked the means to establish such a rigorous science of religions—an excess of monotheism and an excess of polytheism being their transcendent principles. These are religions that we shall call substantial, which are endowed, by way of religious content of multiple (possibly quite ancient) origins, with a form that Christianity, particularly plastic and adaptable, tends to avoid—not, of course, without certain tensions, since it too wound up as a vehicle for many old memories. We might say that Christianity has little or no substance, that its theological substance is a secondary spiritual production, or one that came after the fact. Torah and Logos are both too substantial and lack a relation of affinity in principle with modern science—they have no more than a circumstantial or occasional relation with it, they may have sought to engender it more or less easily but remained definitely severed from it in their principles. Christianity, for its part, supposes and yet goes on to dissimulate once again the discovery of a nondivine constant, which was not the case with other monotheisms or polytheisms, since substantial religion is precisely the refusal of radical discontinuity and the culture of an originary continuity with a mythological or even historico-political ground. The twofold religious material of Christianity, the two Laws from which it came, may give the appearance, let’s say, of a synthetic path, with the idea of a completion sketched out on the horizon. But since we sense in it a greater affinity with the possibility of a science that is neither Greek nor Judaic in its principles, we must ask why Christ is defined as Mediate-without-mediation, and snatch him from his putative parents, who abusively lay claim to that filiation. The christic messianity of every human is the new “foundation” of a knowledge that refuses the substantiality of the ancients. Our faith-without-belief is that of an atheism that makes use of Christianity, but within the limits of science.

MODERN KNOWLEDGES AND UNLEARNED KNOWING

The genius of a founder of science consists in finding a scientific stance, rather than a philosophical position, in correlating the objective constant that ensures an exit from the circle of the old religions, and the specific lived that it subjectivates: the scientific procedure and the subject that, in this case, is called faith. Between the evangelical-worldly Jesus and Christ as a type of “Christian” stance, there lies the corpus of fundamental sayings that the former enunciated in principle. But Jesus himself produced a rigorous, if not exact, theory of his stance. He is therefore not only the spontaneous inventor of this stance but its theorist as well. In this sense he is, for us, the way and the truth.

Three great differences, nonetheless, distinguish this christic knowledge related by the Gospels from what positive modernity and even theology call the spirit or orientation of “science.” The first is that the Gospels are clearly not the practical or epistemological treatment of a positive science, the reports or laboratory notes with which the hard and mathematized sciences have made us familiar. But nor are they a system of theology designed to crown faith, or a system of philosophy destined to ground it. They are what we call a generic science or a unified theory. The Gospels relate a lived experience of the world that has all the characteristics of an experiment concentrated on the Cross and the Tomb, but that has no meaning save through and in the Resurrection and the Ascension. They are therefore not a discourse that stands at a distance from its object. The Gospels are performative or subjectively experimental; in them, the subject is not severed from its object that stands before it, but stands in a relation of unilateral complementarity with this object, between a status of generic condition and a status of operator-observer. It is engaged twice, and in a unilateral or complementary manner, in what we call a generic stance that conjugates a science and a philosophy that are entangled with each other.

The second difference is that here a new distinction, gnostic in spirit, passes between the knowledge that one is or that one practices as a knowledge that is immanent to faith without knowing it, and the explicit and scientific cognizance that is produced by means of theoretical instruments that are put to work in the same faith, through their resumption or their reemployment. It is the gnostic distinction between the faith that is already, like messianity, a knowledge, but a secret and clandestine, unlearned one, and its explicit or theoretical resumption (rather than its repetition). For us, however, the knowledge that one is without having it is truly what it is, or would be, for modern nonreligious gnostics: the knowledge of the world such as it is given by the entirety of modern positive scientific knowledge, arts, and even theology. But the positive knowledges that are, at first sight, particularly “learned” are, on second glance, seen by us as forming an unlearned knowledge, a tradition which is that of modern knowledge in the sense that it knows nothing of its generic sense, leaving us with nothing but oppressive or harassing force, and not “human cognizance” at all.

This difference is overdetermined by a third: the procedural, experimental, and theoretical character that gnosis must possess when it is not overshadowed by religion. This distinction is no longer that of modern knowledge, but is instead sedimented in a tradition and its generic cognizance; it is that of a state vector as a preparation of the Christ-system, of its probability amplitude and its probability of presence (to take this vocabulary up once again), from its prepared state to the state where it is detected as present and actual by the theoretical cognizance of the faithful or the nontheological.

Is it a matter of working “within” philosophy and theology, of raising Christ’s foundational or inaugural formulae to the level of the concept? This return to the authority of the concept is prohibited for us by the very definition of our project, which is not to philosophize Christ yet again, but to philosophize “in” the science-according-to-Christ. We work with concepts, of course—it is impossible to do otherwise—but in the service of another thought entirely, reformulating the content of Jesus’s sayings by conceptual means, above all in regard to a certain Greek side of Jesus or of his Christianization. But these concepts themselves are underdetermined and placed in another “position” or “orientation,” given another function, precisely that of a scientific discourse, something we are authorized to do since from the outset we have exited from the game of hermeneutic constraints and the circle of religions and philosophy. Thus we neither thematize nor elucidate the meaning supposedly hidden in his words, unless it is to bring to theoretical discovery something that is simply implicit in them and already available to the simple—for Christ says everything clearly, with a self-evidence that is not accessible to worldly scholars but only to those who we call the “idemscient.” We do not see in them ultimately any philosophical or dogmatic meaning, as if we read the Gospels in a foundational or even fundamentalist manner; we read them, rather, against every philosophical and evangelical fundamentalism. We identify, in the form of subjective axioms or lived oraxioms (axioms in-the-last-instance), the nonphilosophical coherence of the popular logia, so easily captured by philosophy, which loves to take charge of popular sayings so as to “raise” them up. With those simple (not philosophical) words, Jesus became Christ without having any need of the Pauline dialectic; he expressed his “identification” with this exit from the religious, that of Christ “in” himself. What could it mean to speak of “philosophizing in Christ” if he is not the condition that determines his own words and subtracts them from Judaism no less than from Greek thought? He is the scientific-immanent cause, the generic cause of the kerygmatic sense of his words; everything else is the effect of a Christianization that took place after the fact.

THE INTERPRETATION OF MEANING AND THE MEANING OF INTERPRETATION

The rigorous interpretation of the words of Christ as the propositions of a science, or as the oraxioms belonging to such a science, is an experiment that requires a quasi-experimental “preparation”—like the preparation for the “sacrifice” on the Cross. A formula of Christ’s cannot be taken up like just any old discourse without being prepared, albeit under the general and “macroscopic” conditions of belief and theology. Such a formula is prepared, first of all, as a function of a certain device that enables the superposition of its interpretations or states, both Greek and Jewish, its only two possible contexts of reception and formulation. It is impossible to produce from the message of Christ and as a function of its local reception alone a meaning that is anything but blurred, suspended, or indeterminate and universal for all nations; this is what proselytism endeavors to do, all too happy to expand and protract Christ’s message. But what is at stake is the actualization of the promise or the messianity that the message contains, in the form of a probability amplitude to carry it out or fulfill it, to bring it to a probable form of presence.

We wrongly project, retrospectively, onto the generic Christ, or Christ-in-person, the measure that we take of him, when we should be thinking of him as indeterminate. Religions, especially those that have a founder, are supposed to be contingent or historical phenomena that take their meaning from a history that is appended to them. But the history of interpretations of Christ simply constitutes a reservoir of variables that enter into his state vector. The probability of his coming remains indeterminate; he shall come, but we know not where or when—for the Greeks, for the Jews, and for the cultural and mixed subjects that we are. Paul supposes a Christ-event that has already intervened, a resurrection that has already taken place, from which he builds a truth to declare, or that is declared like an event to be announced, as something that has already come and that shall come again. His problem is that of identifying himself with the Christ who is already dead-and-resurrected, and of living through the proxy of his representation, rather than living him through superposition in the matrix of the Cross. The whole theme of the “return” of Christ in each of his faithful is affected by this temporal determinism. If Christ is our contemporary, he is not so through a projection of the past onto the present, unless we want to make his contemporaneity a Greek reminiscence. The return can be neither from history nor into a history. It is an undercoming, a sub-venience, the “evolution” of a state vector in the direction of a cognizance of salvation, rather than a reconfirmation of ecclesio-centrism. Christian theology and its religion are something like an inversion of the real phenomena through consciousness and representation—a negation of the future, which is to say, of the authentic meaning of Christ. Kierkegaard justly accuses the dialectic of conceiving contraries only in terms of their past or future, of having already surveyed them from the perspective of eternal time, and of not confronting the experience of the arrival of contraries. For Kierkegaard, experience is transcendence, but for us it is the most simple transcending: that of radical immanence.

THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF THE UNINTELLIGIBLE KERYGMA

How else is Christ at least real, if not possible? By way of what oraxioms could we “posit” him as a secret immediately destructible by philosophy and theology? Christ’s message possesses an unintelligible aspect; it is, at the very least, a paradoxical fact according to the interpretation that Kierkegaard gave, still within the limits of his dialectic, which was already the most well-formed, most complex instrument of classical rationalism. It was therefore more than a datum or the factum of an existent reason. Perhaps we must forge a new simple (if grammatically difficult) term and say that Christ is the futurum of a kerygmatic reason that is still theologically inexistent, because it is essentially quantum in nature, and must be decided or invented each time anew on the basis of the oraxioms contained in the message. We must carefully distinguish the message from the kerygma. We cannot understand, beyond the message and its unintelligible intelligibility, what is announced, by way of an understanding (even a conceptual and dialectical understanding) of its dogmatic and past generalities. So we must grasp its kerygmatic amplitude as futural, sub-venient, not just as historical or as having taken place.

The paradoxical or unintelligible character is not, in general, primary; what is usually primary in the message is that it is comprehensible in the usual and more or less immediate, or even macroscopic, way. It is therefore an objective appearance that has its truth, but that should be generated from or within the compass of an experiment that brings another temporality into play. It must be admitted that historical causality exists, but what does not exist is a causal and linear determinism in which one may presume to inscribe the classical history of Christianity and the events that the message gave rise to and upon which Paul still grounded his interpretation. This interpretation is an objective, representative, or “decoherent” appearance that extends the primary unintelligibility of the message instead of yielding a nonunintelligible cognizance of this unintelligibility. No doubt it is, as the atheists say, a fable; but it should be rendered intelligible as an incomprehensible fable, or rather as a theoretical miracle. A science of miracles—that is what the science of Christ should be: a science that should invent the kind of intellection that does not rationally deny the miracle, but rather clarifies it in the only scientific manner adequate to it. The Christ-event is a theoretical miracle, which we are asked not to believe in but to actualize in faith. Belief is the basis of Paul’s classical Christian interpretation, but it is nothing but a belief. It is not the faith that is science itself and that is unbelievable in terms of the codes of belief and classical reason.

The non-Christian science may look like an idealism of language grounded in a christic realism. But the situation is quite different. It is a “non-”conceptual materiel formalism, which uses straightforwardly algebraic quantum-theoretical axioms, but uses them as oraxioms to define a science-subject. If there is a problem close to the one we evoke here, a problem of “empirical” interpretation, it is settled by treating the Gospels as a modelizing of this theory, and nothing more. But theology precisely refuses to take the Gospels as a mere religious modelizing of christic science. The counterproof of the oraxioms used earlier for idempotence and superposition is that a governing transcendence or transcendence in principle such as God converts the messianity/faith duality assumed by Christ as mediate-without-mediation into a macroscopic triad, thereby causing it to lose its proper consistency, destroying the vectoriell superposition of its axioms.

THE SCIENTIFIC DEFICIENCY OF THEOLOGIES

Polytheism and monotheism, Logos and Torah, have each contributed to the formation of something like the “scientific mind.” No defense of Logos’s right to this claim need be mounted, and, for its part, the Torah, with the invention of the studious Jew, has traced the outlines of modern science, or intersected it without, for all that, clearly penetrating it. The Most-High-Other is a mask for a science that asks only to be made manifest; science must come to be—this is the scientific side of the Law that a Jew must never refuse. This is what all of science owes to Judaism: the Law as constant, the Law as text, the Law as obedience. Almost the entirety of the scientific milieu is indebted to these three. Despite its historical conjugation with Logos, the science of God cannot be theology, which forms a vicious circle with its object and fails to satisfy the necessary conditions that depend on an appearance—conditions that are other than those of “philosophical science.” But theology serves as a material for us. God, from this point of view, is the set of discourses about him, about his power, his creation, his plan of salvation, his sacrifice, and his incomprehensibility, in all their theological variations. God as an object of science is the set of religions taken as the experimental field of his properties. This is to say that a somewhat rigorous and contemporary science of the Christ is to be built on the ruins of theology’s “scientific” pretensions.

In any case, the refusal of philosophical and theological representation is not a refusal of all logically organized discourse. Christian science is expressed by oraxioms (which utilize concepts while requalifying them as primary terms, precisely through a suspense or neutralization of their philosophical meaning, thus repeating the christic operation on the level of the word), a set of oraxiomatic but immanent statements, infinitely deployed as the phases of a flux. They are neither especially cataphatic nor apophatic, and they undo theology, whether positive or negative; they are the generic phases of messianity, of the messianic “wave function.”

However close philosophies may be to their theological offspring, a fundamental reason prevents them from having any status as contemporary to Christ. They are definitively disqualified by the quantum-theoretic procedure, which replaces the rationalist and determinist one, and which consigns them to antiquity and modernity, which is to say, to philosophical finalities—a fate that is avoided by the consideration of contemporary theoretical means, taken as simple productive forces with only a generic finality.

So it is that the kerygma of Christ, as given in his affirmations and exhortations, shall no longer be taken, in traditional fashion, as an object that could be submitted to a historian or an exegete. It will be submitted, rather, to a quantum-style experimentation. We shall therefore suppose that the kerygma comprises superposed states of language, of only apparently identifiable origin, and that it can be inserted into a quantum-style interpretative system or experimental apparatus, after the model of the so-called two slit experiment. In its output can be read either a Greek immanence or a Judaic transcendence, depending on the apparatus of measurement or output selected (the Churches), which can make one or the other appear. Thus the historian or exegete will define a Jewish Christ or a Greek Christ depending on which apparatus is selected—that is, depending on their criteria of interpretation. This is simply a vicious circle. We cannot deduce from this result an original definition of the kerygma as being in itself, really, either Greek or Jewish (Either/Or), or even as being a mélange of the two that could be analyzed and synthesized by a historian or an exegete. This possibility is now excluded, and we cannot imagine that there was formerly a mélange of the two, a hesitant combination. The message has no meaning in itself, to be recovered precisely in the form of a definition or a reproduction of the criteria of understanding; to assume this would be to neglect the transformative work of science. The kerygma of Christ, which is certainly indivisible, is not divided between Greek and Jewish origins, but distributed over the whole assemblage, which includes both the emitter and the receptor subject, and thus bears the mark of the apparatus’s finitude.

This allows us to combat dogmatism. The Churches, in particular, are in a position to dogmatically capture the message and attempt to appropriate it as the sole authentic truth and to make it an in-itself. This supposed in-itself is like the dogmatic or natural attitude of which Husserl spoke. This projection of the reception or the measure onto the supposed in-itself of the message is an essentially religious scientific error, an interpretation that confuses the experimental vessel of the kerygma with history as presence. One cannot say in a determined and assured fashion who Christ was or what he meant to say. His formulae, such as “children of God” and so on, are intelligible in the first degree, for common or theological sense, but are thereby deprived of their pure kerygmatic character, which can be reached only through faith. The kerygma is the complex, indeterminate, or “fictional” sense of the message, that which is vectoriell in it. If there is a problem of interpretation, it must be understood to be one that unfolds in objective appearance and that is religious-philosophical. The kerygma is generically vectoriell, it sub-venes in a radically immanent fashion, or abandons double transcendence through the algebraic “quarter-turn” as immanent messianic opening.

THE SYMPTOMS OF THE MESSIANIC STANCE

What did Jesus, qua Christ, say? There are symptoms in the message of Christ, religious data necessary for the preparation of his quantum-theoretical treatment. This was not, as such, achieved in the Gospels, but we shall base our work on these symptoms in order to chance such an experiment. For the exegetes, he describes his mission in two different languages. Each time it is, apparently, an implicit identification, more practical than theoretical, in accordance with a Law: the Torah, of course, but also that other formal structure which is the Greek or philosophical Law, the Logos, which is perhaps more implicit, given the Jewish environment and origin of Jesus, but which is just as fundamental as the Torah, and which is too often forgotten when taking stock of the constitution of the christic achievement independently of the Greek Fathers. Pagan Logos and Jewish Torah are substantial religions, even if they can also be taken as forms of other cultural modalities. They are the forms of existence that Christianity will go on to inherit and with which it will mix itself, as if to bypass Christ and escape his radicality. They are consistent, forming a system or a plan of salvation, and they are structured according to three terms: the divine, the human, and the law that serves as an intermediary, whether this be the Logos as mediation or the Torah, which is another mediation in which the three terms enter into other relations. But the problem of Christ is, perhaps, radically simple, since it is precisely the problem of the Simple Ones, that of making a nonreligion with two terms out of the three of religions, simplifying them in their essence and their relations. In other words, Christ’s problem is not Pauline, still less Hegelian; it excludes every attempt to solve it by way of a triad of instances or a trinity.

On the one hand, Christ describes his mission in terms that evoke a mediation, to speak in Greek or philosophizable terms, a weak or distant mediation between God and men, crushed and as if having lost his divine side, which he does not “represent.” He does not re-present, a second time, his Father, but rigorously presents him; he says that it suffices to have seen him to have seen the Father. In his person, he fulfills this mediation, but on condition of suppressing the infinite, and a fortiori the finite distance from God (polytheism), short-circuiting this mediation, as if the middle term contracted the entire set of terms and took them upon itself. This fulfillment of a contracted mediation transforms the other (human) side, assures the salvation of men, of whom a new form of obedience is suddenly demanded. This is not, therefore, the developed mediation that Hegel would later see in him, but a mediate-without-mediation, which is to say, without a complete or triangular structure.

But he also says that he has come to fulfill the Law, to speak now in Hebrew—that he is this fulfillment of the Law in person. We can also understand this formula in Greek, because the Mosaic Law has certain appearances in common with mediation. But just as we earlier philosophized in Christ, we now Judaize in Christ, and in order to do so we have to have already Judaized as radically as possible. This mediation is altogether different from the Greek one. It is at once an immediation of subjects to the transcendence of the Law, by which the Law demands the greatest, most precise, maniacal obedience of humans, and also the greatest distance, because it testifies to the infinite separation whence God affects us with, precisely, the Law. An infinite proximity of obedience to the Law, but a proximity that is the same thing as an infinite distance from God.

There is therefore a double postulation of religious language with Jesus, and both times a fundamental structural modification is introduced, one that comes down to fulfilling in his person, and therefore assuming in an altogether novel fashion, the substantial Laws, which he partially empties of doctrinal and theological content. Christ is the concentrate or the contraction, the conjugation rather, of both Laws, because he is the one who generically incarnates them and who profoundly transforms them with respect to their forms of authority. An exclusively Greek intellect here risks straying toward Paul and the dialectic, while an exclusively Jewish one risks straying toward the prophets; but the two Laws alluded to have a general function or “common” aspect of mediation between God and men, even if one tends toward the automediation of God or Being and the other tend towards hetero-mediation, if we may say so, by and as the Other. It is once again necessary to put the proposed procedure to work, so as to verify what has been presented in this summary description.

THE PROCEDURES OF A RIGOROUS CHRISTO-FICTION

Messianic subjects, or the faithful, may also be called the “idemscient,” an idiomatic term that could be applied to the gnostics also. From the outset, they have knowledge of idempotent superposition and noncommutativity in general, the two principles of quantum-theoretical thought that govern the relations between Christ’s words in their immanence and the transcendent statements of theology. They allow us to obtain the oraxioms that describe and constitute christic science, which “prepare” it, as physicists say, for experimental measurement.

 

1.   One must “superpose,” in the quantum-theoretical sense of the word, on the one hand, the logia, all the statements on the Law and its fulfillment, on the relations between the Father and the Son, and Jesus’s countless formulas on life and the living, and on the other the Greco-Judaic theology that is a transcendent interpretation of all of this. The “addition” of the messianity of christic words and theology should (through transformed or axiomatized theological material, having lost the burden of sufficient theology) restore the messianic force of the christic sayings. Theological discourse is transformed, its internal philosophical structure bending to the principle of idempotence.

2.   It is a matter of eliminating not only a speculative sublation between these two types of statements, but also the simple reciprocal and specular imitation of commentary—gnosis is more than a gloss. The time and space of messianity do not belong to the same world, or even the same history, as those of theology, because messianity is not mythology extended into rational history. Christ produces the ultimate instance without producing a norm, since as Last Instance he remains the same ultimatum without allowing himself to be affected by theological discourse. The only transformation that takes place here is that of Judeo-Greek speech, as it is rendered adequate to the person of Christ and loses its sufficient theological transcendence.

3.   There is no commutativity between the words of Christ and Judeo-Greek theology, between belief and the cognizance of faith. This principle endows messianic immanence with its being-foreclosed, and its a priori defense against philosophy and its “corpuscular” or “atomistic” representation of the real. We must understand the words of Christ in such a way that there is no reversibility between their effect and the theology that is sutured to them. The “return” of Christ himself in the form of his theological intellection, since philosophy demands only the circle (albeit infinite) of the real and language, is impossible. Every theology is either of the order of the philosophico-religious imaginary, a formation that serves us as material, or else, if we elaborate an axiomatic principally according to Christ, with this imaginary as occasional material, it will no longer have any constitutive grasp of messianity but, rather, the latter will express itself through it and give rise to a new Gospel. Our science can therefore be called a rigorous christo-fiction, for it is no longer imaginary like the material from which it is fashioned. Theology, and Christianity in general, are thus engaged in a transformation that is deeper than a reform or even a “turn,” the last residue of the old circularity. This is what we call the unilateralization of Christianity, or even the a priori defense of Christ against Christianity.

 

FOLLY AND SCANDAL

We refuse the traditional theo-christic or theo-anthropological couple of the figures of Christ, welded together by the mechanism of mediatization or schematization. Christ is neither a simple historical datum reduced to the problematic figure of Jesus, nor the founding factum of a relatively rational belief, of a Church faith elaborated by Christian theologies. He is rather a “scientific given,” but one of a new type, a generic stance rather than an empirico-rational “fact,” but a generic constant that places its two main types of interpretation under an underdetermining condition, single-handedly transforming them into the statements of a science. We can always imagine a transcendental Christ, or rather a Christ reelaborated as existential; but what we seek are his vectoriell and immanent determinations, which make him underdetermine the Churches’ Principle of Sufficient Theology.

Judaism and Greco-paganism are routinely called upon by theology in order to analytically and/or synthetically (dialectically) comprehend the christic stance, or to “make sense of it.” These are the two extreme law-materials: Greek, on the one hand—the Logos strictly reduced to its own kind of immanence, the principle of the Eternal Return of the Same, for if there is a polytheist religious principle, it is indeed that of the Vicious Circle, there are no others. And on the other hand the Torah, which infinitely defers the coming of the Messiah. But Christ is unintelligible for both of these laws—law as vicious circle, law as infinite obedience—each of which, in their own way, decomposes or deconstructs the indivisible stance of Christ only to recompose it. We could give this an exclusively Greek reading, on the basis of the externality of the Son to God and of the Son to man, a reading in terms of mediation, therefore, with all the avatars and narratives that have accompanied the history of mediation up to and including Hegel. Or yet another reading, a more Judaic one this time, as a concession to the Greek, for which it is not a question of mediation but of the practical fulfillment of the Law, here again with all the interpretations that accompany the notion of the Law’s fulfillment, from Paul to Hegel. In presuming to render it intelligible through their combination, Christianity, which thereby believes that it has made some progress, falls victim to an “immanental” appearance, which causes it to confuse mélange with scientific superposition. Christianity ceaselessly murders or destroys Christ, whether by placing a transcendent messiah in a Jewish sort of waiting, or else with a philosophy of the messiah’s “return.” It should rather be said that Christ is the superposition or quantum-addition of the two laws, undecomposable into identifiable or measurable factors. How can we submit these two problematics (which are conjoined and entangled in the mélanges that, for theologians, form the fabric of Christianity) to the fundamental principles that are made use of in quantum physics, which serves as our guide or model; and through what transformations must those problematics pass in order to rejoin these principles? From these interpretations, which served as the bait for, or gave rise to, so many theological variations, superposition and noncommutativity strip from the first its Greek trait of the milieu or intermediary, and, from the second, its Judaic trait of extreme transcendence.

Christ does not propose another law that revises the Greek and Judaic laws, but instead a law-event, a generic law, which is that of superposition and noncommutativity. Christ is the law fulfilled, as the immanence of messianity, as idemmanent. This is not a sublation of the law, but its suspension and depotentialization, insofar as it belongs, through idempotence, to the Mediate, to the Mid-site, the milieu, of analysis and synthesis. Christ realizes or fulfills them (as materials, therefore) by “identifying” them, no longer with each other, but with an altogether other law, also double, but in another way: the law of the idempotence or the generic and messianic nature of his mission, and the law of the noncommutativity of that mission with existing religions. A victim of religious and philosophical appearance, Christianity will thus have grasped that the “fulfilled” law is still the Jewish Law or one of its modalities. But the new practice is foreclosed to the Jewish Law and the Greek Law, and can therefore transform them discontinuously into an altogether other principle, which is that of messianity. In what does the “folly of the Cross” and/or its “scandal” consist? Most certainly the fact that, in Christ, traditional opposites enter into collision. But Paul offers man a still rather classical combination, which bears the visible and ideal, corpuscular trace of the old materials, the quasi-dialectical mélange of an already too Greek and contemplative law of universal love, and an event of the empty tomb, which idealizes the Crucifixion and the Resurrection on an abstract basis. Paul is a “converted Jew,” and therefore a paradox and a contradiction in his own right. His doctrine is itself a “folly” from the point of view of rigorous thought: it is a coalition of determinations that will give rise to multiple interpretations. His universality is too “easy” for the Jews: the law of love, far from being generic, is a practical law—a law that is not given as an ideal, but that must be received and exercised as an ultimatum, in the act that takes the world as an object. Its function of mediation will even be understood in a Greek fashion, allowing for the reconciliation of all men in and through a universal mediation. But if Paul is the founder of universalism and of that intolerant abstraction that is the Church, then Christ is the inventor of the generic. He is the law as messianity, the law as faith and not as belief, the law of generic love, which is not indifferent confusion or the equality of universalism. In the two unfavorable interpretations, thought remains with a transcendent God delivered to his arbitrariness, grounding a generality of the law as jealous tyranny or even as universal love. Mediation must be reduced in a new way, or else it will remain automediation and will not be unilateral, and the fulfilled Law will remain mediatized and sublated, divided between objective belief in transcendence and sentimental, customary, or obedient faith.

THE KERYGMA AS SUPERPOSITION OF THE CONTEXTS OF THE “CHRIST” MATRIX

We shall not say that Christ is, in himself, a machine, though he is indeed one in certain senses—for example, insofar as his various moments are determined by the indivisible matrix that he forms. Perhaps we could speak of an algebraic machine. He is, at least, a matrix that functions through the addition and superposition of contexts of reception or interpretation.

Consider any one of Christ’s sayings under the form resulting from the scrambling of two interpretations, each containing its various possible properties, including certain mixed or ambiguous theoretical determinations. For the moment, it is nothing but information, and still not faith. We then enter it into the matrix or quantum apparatus formed of two channels that, in Christian theology, simplifying matters a great deal, are “Logos” and “Torah.” Coming out of this apparatus, this saying can be taken in a clearly defined either Greek or Jewish sense, as if the apparatus of reception had served to sort out those determinations. The chosen or detected result in such conditions strictly depends on the explicitly chosen medium of reception or detection channel. If the theoretical apparatus is Greek, one will obtain a formula with an obviously Greek and philosophically interpretable meaning. If the reception is conducted by a Judaic apparatus, one is then referred to an altogether other context to find the meaning of the formula. The same christic formula is susceptible to two heterogeneous meanings, two interpretations with no common measure, and apt to nourish wars between the religions that try to capture the message. This is, in general, what happens to theologies and even to exegeses of Christ’s message that spontaneously place themselves a priori at the output of their own interpretative apparatus and try, in their respective fashions, to clarify the equivocations, to find their way through a whole mess of amphibologies, analogies, and mélanges of traditions and influences, back to the unitary and univocal meaning of Christ’s words. They are involved only in the sterile reception of what has already been placed in the apparatus.

Those of us who forge a nondogmatic experience of faith, and who prepare it in a quasi-experimental fashion, do not have to place ourselves at the level of what is already an “output,” or a predetermined interpretation, folding it back upon itself to form a dogma, a simple duplication of information, but not a cognizance—strictly speaking, creating an item of theological knowledge but not a faith. In reality, we should give up on deducing, a priori, that which was sent, the conditions of messianity and its cognizance, on the basis of its channel of reception, falsifying a priori the effective meaning of the message by only considering the apparatus of detection and its a priori projection onto the vectoriell givens, and thereby presuming a knowledge of what has actually taken place in the Christ-matrix. We cannot draw any conclusions from historico-theological symptoms sent to us by religions or confessions, pertaining to faith as “authentic” cognizance. The theological states injected into the apparatus are no longer treated individually, each on their own behalf or in their mélange considered as an all, submitted to either an step-by-step physical causality or a metaphysical causality, in the sense of the creation and models of that type, and hence in a determinist spirit, mobilizing one of the “Aristotelian” forms of causality through which one can continuously follow the work of elaborating the data. The data are treated as vectors and superposed or added to one another as vectors. The latter cannot therefore recover either the input or the output data, or the results, which are macroscopic in every way and correspond to a destruction of the internal quantum operation. The outputs are measured through the output channel but are not measured “for” that channel—this stands for faith and its messianic content, for which Logos and Torah are the variables or productive forces but certainly not the ends or criteria. For the well-defined output channels are no doubt necessary, but are not sufficient for really determining the meaning of what is ipso facto detected in the matrix, which is to say, “in-Christ.” They function as interfering channels, whereas, in the output, they are themselves isolated and taken up again macroscopically. The great theoretical rule is to explain that we must be ready for what happens in the cognizance of Christ, because of or in virtue of the fact that we are transformed by the received faith of Christ. We shall come back to this complementarity of messianity and faith, which forms a unique vector, conjugating, in faith, the prescience that is generic messianity and individual decision.

The cognizance of messianity—that is to say, faith—is distinct from the knowledges injected into the matrix, knowledges that we presume to form a linear and deterministic continuum of causality with the output channel. Theological knowledge does not definitively yield any cognizance of the kerygmatic essence of Christ. Macroscopic or doctrinal interpretations, be they Greek or Jewish, through their continuity destroy this essence, which carries various vectors through addition or superposition, and which forbids us from fixing, a priori, what really takes place in the black box that is Christ at work, or what the essence or the real of Christ might be—something we only come to through the effects of faith, as the probable cognizance of messianity. It is therefore a question of rendering intelligible, even if in the form of a nonknowledge internal to science, the internal and properly quantum trajectory of the superposition of the state vectors of the christic message, and hence its detection as messianity and as faith. Just as the superposition of state vectors cannot be confused with the simple data that are still not vectoriellized since they lack precisely the vector-form or complex number, so the detection of what the vectors have become cannot be confused with the “corpuscular” results that repeat certain more or less theological variations. Superposition and messianic detection are original phenomena that have no common measure with a brute, experimental science of faith or even with a spiritualist theology. They are operations hidden in the hearts of the faithful, precisely the unintelligible or unlearned knowledge hidden from the philosophers and theologians that are the eyes of the world.

THE FULFILLMENT OF THE TWO LAWS

Let us draw out the structural implications of the result obtained from the output of the apparatus. We shall leave aside for now the fact that this output is, if not aleatory, at least marked by theological probability, and shall call it “faith” as underdetermined by messianity. The fulfillment of the Mosaic Law to which Christ, in his person, lays claim is a way of transforming it, and the Greek Law with it, by assuming it. How does this fulfillment take place? By suppressing this time the proximity of the Torah, just as, before, the Greek Law was fulfilled through the suppression of transcendence. He liberates men, this time, from the infinite, crushing proximity of the Law, and, in order to do so, replaces it with the faith that leaves men free to choose between the absolute obstinacy of the subjugating Law and free obedience to Christ.

At the heart of all this is the immanent fulfillment, the transformation bearing not, at first, upon the infinitude but upon the transcendence of God and the absolute proximity of the Law that demands obedience. The mediation of three terms becomes a duality. The Law no longer divides me as a subject, as Christianity and, for example, psychoanalysis (Lacan) would have it, but distributes the entity “Jesus” in another way, as a generic or (ascending-) man without transcendence or messianic Last Instance and as a subject determined in-the-last-instance. It is the obedient ascension of the faithful. The Christ-Law is generic; it does not divide but distributes and dispenses, within messianic immanence itself, the immanence of faith and the transcendence of the Law—a transcendence that is, moreover, liberated insofar as it is now submitted to faith. The fulfillment of the Law by its being placed under christic condition is not its negation, its abrogation, or its sublation; it is the creation of faith and, simultaneously, the transformation of every man into a messiah. And the messiah is the stripping-bare of man of all the predicates that situate him in the world and impose upon him his coordinates, trajectories, theological positions, and relations, his being as a sinner and his becoming redeemed. Such is generic universality: in-the-last-instance he is no longer either man or woman, neither master nor servant—neither Torah nor Word.

IN-THE-LAST-INSTANCE THERE IS NEITHER TORAH NOR WORD

We can arrive at the same result in a quicker and above all more positive fashion by showing that the theory named “Christ” results from a superposition by idempotence of the two Laws or two forms of mediation, grounded respectively in the double transcendence that supports the Torah and the Word. Superposition through idempotence has strict conditions of application or use that are not those of a pure and simple identification, which would present that blurry image of Christ presented by Christian solutions, Greco-Judaic mélanges. In order to be superposed, the two Laws, with their information content on Christ, must be reduced to phenomena of vectoriellity, lest we go no further than the signified or the signifier (that is to say, no further than corpuscular languages) and relapse into the philosophical spirit of mélanges and doublets. A superposition produces, precisely, a generic image—not a mélange, but the generic form of the mediation that is Christ, a mediation that is neither Greek nor Jewish, but that, qua generic, can stand as an a priori for both religions.

We have posited the “Christ-message” as a discursive system with two “states,” or two classically discernible, perhaps dialectizable, properties, Logos and Torah. Now, their vectoriell addition (Logos + Torah) is still a state of the message or one of the properties of Christ. Christ remains Christ in each of these three states, no less so in the last of them. This is his generic universality, but with the decisive difference that he is thereby conceived as the superposition or addition, Logos + Torah, with neither of his properties being discernible or isolable. Conversely, if we were to try to identify them individually and separately, we would destroy the superposition that is always called “Christ.” Christ is not a subject-point like God or the ego, an atom or a corpuscle that can be identified by the coordinates of a theological space; he is an interference, Greco-Judaic in origin, but one whose components are no longer identifiable. Superposition is not a synthesis, and least of all is it a mélange in which those components are simply scrambled together but relatively recoverable. On the contrary, any attempt to “unscramble” them is enough to destroy Christ, and lose that in which his indivisible messianic nature consists, which is no longer anything like a temporal or evental source-point, a history in a space, but something of an immanent and transfinite messianic flux. Logos-Christ and Torah-Christ, the Word and the Law, are henceforth only one in him, which is to say, in-One. They are indiscernible and occupy the entire space of messianity, which they ceaselessly open up. It is fundamental for faith to no longer consider Christ historically as deployed in the divided space of world-history, as an object of the Churches’ belief. He is a radical interference who ceaselessly comes to us before the theological wall that he has already breached.

THE GREEK LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATION: THE MEDIATE-WITHOUT-MEDIATION

What has happened? What has become of the common Law of the two discourses, which renders those two types of mediation immanent? Recall, for a moment, that superposition as the immanence of the Same has as its condition the suspension of an arithmetical operation of addition that can hardly be understood as numerical, and that posits its terms in a space of exteriority or transcendence. Two entities in a theological space are not superposable, while an idempotent addition produces a Same as wave and wave function. Idempotence is therefore immediately generic insofar as it programs the equivalence of a term with itself as a result, whatever the operation serving as mediation might be. Bracketing out the excess, it is the instrument of immanence through the suspension of every organizing and dominating transcendence. This indiscernible vectoriellity will, obviously, be the messianity that philosophy would rather decompose into atomic entities and external relations, or into substantial entities and internal relations, only to recompose them into a dialectical trajectory at the stroke of the operations of negation or affirmation, each time putting to death the unbearable indifference and devastating nonaction of the Messiah.

From the simultaneously Greek and Jewish side of God, there is a suppression, through his sacrifice, of his transcendence as distance, while the infinite is conserved and internalized in the immanence or “in-person” of Christ. And from the other side, that of obedience to the Law, there is a suppression not of the infinite but of the subjugating proximity to the Law, the contrary of transcendence. Christ is not located midway between the two Laws, between Logos and Torah, like Buridan’s ass, like their in-between—the ass of a new Trinity, concentrating Law and man into neither a living Ego (Henry) nor a living Law (Derrida) but a new kind of duality. On the one hand this duality is an immanence, but one that is infinite; and on the other it is a rediscovered transcendence of man, but a weakened or abased transcendence entirely imbued with the infinite immanence of this new Law. Instead of mediation and triplicity, a new duality that neither divides nor synthesizes the human lived, but unilaterally distributes the latter between its immanence as the infinite Christ-Law in which it participates and its ancient transcendence, now rooted in christic immanence. This duality will henceforth, under the auspices of an im-mediation, unify that which will have been abridged or deprived of the doublet of divine transcendence and proximity, but which remains infinite as immanence. We must understand that the heart of the matter is immanent fulfillment, and that the modification bears not upon the infinite itself, but upon the transcendence of God and the absolute proximity of the Law that demands obedience. The mediation of three terms becomes a duality. In short, the Law does not divide me as a subject, as Christianity and, again, psychoanalysis (Lacan) would have it, but distributes “me” otherwise, without division, as the Man or Last Instance that “I” am and as subject determined in-the-last-instance or in obedient transcendence. The Christ-Law is generic, being neither Logos nor Torah, and it does not divide but concatenates its phases, first as vectoriell (wavelike) immanence, and then as (particulate) transcendence, within infinite immanence. Generic universality has the form of a unilateral duality, and not the form of a divided Whole returning to itself. In both cases mediation is transformed but not totally suppressed. Something of transcendence remains, but it is simple or unilateral—the transcendence of the obedient subject of proximity no longer playing its mirror-game with the divine.

On the side of transcendence, the divine infinite is sacrificed in favor of Christ. But the transformed Law remains the Law, now neither Greek nor Jewish; obedience remains the obedience of man who gains his “Christian freedom,” a certain autonomy; it is an obedience determined in-the-last-instance as infinite obedience to immanent Law. Christ does not make us renounce the Law, but only its Jewish and Greek forms. He is its immanence, he fulfills it in his person and “at the same time” or rather “in the last instance” obeys it as undivided subject.

What, then, becomes of the mediation obtained and generically transformed, the New Law that results from it, but that is indiscernible, and that is Christ? The divine infinite is separated from its transcendence and returns to immanence, or is transfinitely contracted in idempotence. Christ, the Son, generic kernel of mediation, is immanent Same as quasi-infinite vectoriell flux. And this Same is the Law, which is destroyed when interpreted after the fact as Word or as Torah. The idempotent fulfillment of the Law is not its “suppression,” but the generic way of “internalizing” the Law, or rather of unfolding it as immanent while conserving it as infinite. So there is a transformed obedience of the subject here. For, as we have said, Christ is the immanence of a duality without division, a unilateral or generic duality. This is, therefore, no longer the infinite obedience to the tyrannical that, in its proximity, is also transcendent, nor the Greek obedience to cosmic Reason, even as internalized into the subject; it is obedience to the transfinite immanence of the Same or the messianity called “Christ.” The immanence of the Same has the form of a messianic flux, and fidelity is obedience to the messianity that guides the subject without either persecuting or commanding him, without turning him into a hostage or a subjugated subject. Instead, messianity is that which defends subjects against both Jewish and Greek forms of religious harassment.

“GOD MADE MAN”: THE SACRIFICE OF MEDIATION

Take this formula, “God made man.” What does “made” mean here? The belief that God has metamorphosed himself and decided to clothe himself in human form lies at the origin of the anthropomorphisms and trinitarian theologies of the Church, and of its aporias, to which intra-Christian heresies testify. But it is also the origin, to a large extent, of the modern dialectical philosophies or christologies at the margins of Christianity. It signifies that there is an immanent “becoming” of Christ as subject or, more rigorously, a sub-venience of the two religious laws into the genericity of science as lived—into the subject-science as true science and true subject. Christ is a scientific procedure that has found a lived use. Rather than becoming, the Messiah is coming; but he is not coming from the heavens or from the earth—he “under-comes” or sub-venes as generic, and therefore has no place in the world, precisely because for him the world is a complementary “object” to be transformed. To be “made,” here, is neither emanation nor procession, neither their medium nor their synthesis; Christ (and, with him, each of the faithful) is said duelly (se dit au duel). The faithful is an unlocalizable duality grasped in immanence, the duality of a conjugation or a complementarity, a unilateral duality as a procedure of idempotence—that is, of the indivisible excess of the Same in the Same, on the one hand, and as the materielity of a lived, on the other.

Now, an idempotent term or operation, to quickly recap, remains the same, and is not modified as a result of adding or retracting the same term. What one may have been able to see as the transcendence of an arithmetical addition is suspended in its effects. Mediation is neutralized and ineffective, which does not mean that it fails to register, since it should be an idempotence and not an analytic identity. The lived logic of messianity is not the onto-logic that grounds logic in beings and that traditionally serves as a mediation in philosophies. Lived logic is generic and overflows the coupling that associates logic with beings, or even with being. Idempotence is, in general, the milieu or midsite, or the complementarity of the analytic and the synthetic—but what kind of “milieu” is it?

Idempotence can only be said of immanence, but it is a form capable of harboring a simple transcendence. Suspending its internal mediation, it is the nonmediatized and nonmediatizable element of Christ, the Same. But in the form of a Mediate-without-mediation it is also the element of … or for … transcendence, even though it is not itself mediatized with the latter. The generic is now complete: it is a Mediate-without-mediation = mid(site) = element, which mediatizes the other term, by which it is not mediatizable in turn. The generic Christ mediatizes-without-mediation the world, but is not himself mediated by the world. Here we will recognize the true nondialectical mediation effected by Christ.

At this level of principles, the milieu of the analytic and the synthetic is not an analytic identity. The generic mediates for the world but is not itself mediatizable. Thus, so that the nonmediatized mediate, the first A of A + A = A, can serve as a Mediate-for … or generic element for the other term, the former must necessarily be immanent. Idempotence and superposition comprehend each other, when they are lived, as a sacrifice of reciprocal mediation, of exchange with God, a unilateral sacrifice of mediation, on condition that God make himself generic man, the Son or element of the Milieu or Mid(site), the just, unequal, or unilateral measure. What is sacrificed is reciprocity or rivalry, the divine side of mediation, but on condition that God be radically immanent or himself nonmediatizable. But it is precisely immanence that is found or is realized by the suspension of his internal mediation of the two sides, and becomes an external unilateral mediation with the introduction of transcendence.

To disengage the kernel of mediation as unilateral implies that the messiah, as generic, is in becoming (which could stand for Judaic waiting …) and depends on the encounter-without-creation, on the “collision” that is Christ, the collision of God and the World and their superposition without synthesis. Messianity is in progress in the sense of its preemption over men, because the Christ-factor serves as an index for the human variable. Their addition suffices, as the intervention of God, not as creator of the world (the Messiah is not a new creation) but as Christ-factor of superposition, or as something that can be added. The Christ-event can be interpreted in terms of the concepts of superposition or quantum-theoretic addition, and therefore in terms of grace, but certainly not in terms of re-creation. It is not a question of a refund or an exchange, of his taking upon himself the sin of the world, but of bringing about the only genealogy possible, not a genealogy of the world but of its salvation, from and within radical humanity. Thus transformed, the new Sons or messiahs cannot be cognized or recognized for what they once were. They are messiah-existing-Strangers.

THE JUDAIC LAW AND ITS TRANSFORMATION: MESSIANIC NONCOMMUTATIVITY

We have already dealt with the two Laws and their messianic sub-venience as Christ, but from the angle of the Greek Law insofar as it has a more obvious affinity, at first glance, with the principle of idempotence, of which it is the philosophical symptom. We shall now deal with the two Laws from the angle of the Judaic Law, insofar as it has more of an affinity with the second principle, the noncommutativity of the Same and the other, of which Judaic unilaterality is the religious symptom.

How does the sacrifice of God and gods condition messianic idempotence itself? We are going to exhibit the stance of the subject-science in the figure of Christ. Meanwhile, we have examined the question of this science’s potential philosophical circle, and have settled it by showing that the subject-science is an emergent structure that owes nothing to philosophy, that Christ is an emergent event that owes nothing to the Greek and the Jew (except, perhaps, retroactively), and nothing, moreover, to its abusive “Christianization.” For philosophy and religions try to capture the generic stance of truth, and thereby create an apparent circle. Noncommutativity is decisive for explaining the possibility of christic idempotence, and its immanental reduction to religions. It imposes a prior-to-priority character on this reduction, and protects Christ from every return to a first theology, governed once again by the transcendence of God, around whom it is organized. Christic science is not a canon but, strictly speaking, an organon for faith. Nothing, no order, precedes Christ, who is precisely not first but the “last instance” of salvation, the prior-to-first ultimatum. The genius of Christ—yes, the genius—is for the simple and is made to suit them; it is not “the genius of Christianity,” which is, again, just a minor symptom. It consists in the intertwining of another principle with that of idempotence, the principle of a certain noncommutativity. As a principle, and not simply a law, noncommutativity amounts to placing irreversibility at the heart of the beginning and of priority (at the heart of first philosophy and its “principles”), rather than throughout a temporal sequence that would reencompass it in its circle. Inserted into priority, it doubles the latter, without creating a philosophical or specular doublet; it is a prior-to-priority that does not fall into an order so as to submit itself to it, but rather establishes an order for philosophies and religions themselves. Noncommutativity has a precise meaning: two axioms on Christ and his sub-venience combined in a sense that does not yield the same result as the reverse combination of those axioms. In a broad and qualitative sense, philosophical priority can only presume to commute with science at the price of any appearance of truth. The Christian stance is not first (it motivates no science), but prior-to-first. Truth, like philosophy itself, is a first thing, but the true-without-truth is prior-to-first. Philosophy and religions do not furnish truths in the strict sense, but dogmas, amphibolies, and objective appearances, sure enough: material to be dealt with. Instead of truths, what Churches have are Dogmas.

Noncommutativity determines messianity as a unifacial wave or a unilateral-oriented throwing. The New Law is in progress in each of us—we who are, in virtue of this fact, the messiah—and the messiah thereby sub-venes in the fulfillment of the Law in his person, not externally. He incarnates the Law of the Same in faith, which is not an external complement, but a redistribution of the manifest mélange of faith and belief. In this interpretation, faith is of the immanent lived, more generic than individual. It is foreclosed to the anonymous Law, which it reinscribes in the ledger of the world.

The unilaterality of the Judaic “Most-High-Other” now appears for what it really is: generically, a symptom or occasion of messianic noncommutativity or complementarity. The generic is the new status of the Law that underdetermines the obedient subject who it preempts (the generic concept of election) and structures, through its scientific but not positive nature. The Law whose proximity was the act of a God too distant to intervene among his subjects is concentrated and unilateralized between quantum-theoretic principles and the lived, impregnated by idempotence and rescued from philosophy and the pagan world. With the immanental reduction of the Torah, only this Law remains, and the prohibition is made (or, rather, the impossibility is signified) against religions and their theologies returning to Christ or interpreting him, he with whom they cannot be commuted or exchanged. The principle of idempotence allows the Jewish God (the One or the Other) to be superposed with subject-man, to realize a mediate-without-mediation (but certainly not an identification or a confusion) between the One-God and the human subject.

Linear superposition materially avoids a potential circle of messianity, and noncommutativity avoids it formally. Together they explain the wondrous emergence of the Christ-event and the creation of the science of religions that Christ ceaselessly formulates in his nonphilosophical fashion. It is obvious that he sets the being-foreclosed of his words, even those closest to philosophy, in opposition to a Greco-Judaic givenness of meaning. Noncommutativity must a priori protect or defend his popular or figurative formulas, and give them an axiomatic function. The intuitiveness proper to the vector of messianity is offset by the impossibility of givenness in the theological sense. Instead of treating the logia of Jesus with the hermeneutic suspicion that is explicit in philosophers, and carried out in secret among priests, who recapitulate it in the most insipid fashion, one would do better to treat them (and, with them, those many speeches of his that have not been authenticated by the Church and the official gospels) as axioms of a new kind, as oraxioms uttered under condition of the subject-science. On this basis one might hope for a renewal of the theories of interpretation and exegesis of the christological, or even Christian, corpus.

MESSIANIC ADDITION OR THE MEDIATE-WITHOUT-MEDIATION

Christ deserves the name of Mediate even though lacking all mediation—this is obviously a paradox. Jew and Greek could be combined only through the mediation of Christianity, and not prior to it. What was required was a law of mediation that Paul and the philosophers (Hegel) interpreted as “transcendental” in a broad sense, a law organizing the Jew and the Greek, but with the Greek mode dominant (despite the recognition of Jesus’s Judaism)—whence the Jewish revolt against institutional Christianity, which had ultimately made the Greek element dominant. Jew and Greek were “superposed” by a poorly understood form of Christian superposition. It was already compromised, the superposed elements being already reflected in the superposition itself, conceived as trinitarian. There is indeed a nonsubstantial and subjective thought-event at the origin of Christianity, but one that has been recuperated as the simple logical form of the Logos or the Word, still permeable to substantial religions. Christianity tried to redistribute the Judeo-Greek according to what it believed to be a new law of mediation, which in reality was only ever trinitarian. This ensured that the Christ-event would go on to give rise to prodigious philosophical developments.

But the force of the Jewish rebellion now reversed the hierarchy, and subjected the Same to the breach of an infinite transcendence, the extreme form of which we find, for example, in Levinas. How could this Jewish reversal of the Same by a transcendent messiah be partially recaptured as the Same or as the Mediate that we call “Christ,” given that the transcendent One has been thus been foreclosed to the Greek? How could Christ be the transcendent One who has become Mediate? How could God become Christ? He is, on the one hand, without mediation, torn from the Greek. He is the Jewish messiah turned mediate, and therefore forever without mediation. Idempotence is the property that suspends his operation of mediation and recovers the Same. It is the operation of the Same, but contains the neutralizing suspension of its mediating nature. It is indeed the Same that conquers the Other, or the Other that can be “quantum-theoretically” added to it, that remains the Same, without taking stock of the mediation. The transcendence of the One or of the Jewish Messiah is recaptured in the law of the Same, in its immanence, with the Messiah becoming immanent or lived and ceasing to be divine, transcendent, or absolute Law—that is messianity.

The meaning of the Christ-event was probably falsified by Paul, or profoundly transformed so as to give rise to a tradition. The Mediate or Christ involves a mediation that could never be an auto- or even hetero-mediation; instead it falls into-immanence. To speak of the generic Christ, one must forge the concept of the Idemmediate or Mediate-without-mediation, like that of the Idemscient. The Mediate is the Same, neither identity nor alterity. For the first time, on the borders of philosophy, the Same finds a dignity that protects it from its traditional avatars, from Parmenides up to Nietzsche and the thinking of difference. For the first time, the Same does not return, but is deployed in itself, in its own immanence—this is messianity.

No transcendence can be correctly opposed to messianity, as a law of the world, because messianity strikes it down or depotentializes it. At once less formal and less empirically diasporic than the Jew, more immanent and less circular than the Greek, it is a semiformal legality woven into the lived that it includes and suspends, a materiel formalism. Neither singular nor a modality of the all, it sub-venes as an exteriority immanent to the world-subject, and it can be added to the entire ontico-ontological sphere while implying its transformation. The generic Christ is universal-without-totality, and for this reason inter-venes in the Greco-Jewish differend laterally, and can be added to it without negating it. Christ is the addition or superposition of messianity to history, which, through indiscernible interference, transforms but does not destroy. The unilateral way of Christ is, therefore, not exactly a formal method for resolving all problems, but an algebraic operation that includes them, so as to submit them to interference and render them indiscernible.

FROM THE LOGIA OF JESUS TO THE ORAXIOMS: THE MESSIANIC PROGRAM AND DOGMA

The logia of Jesus Christ, to which we could now add the apocryphal Gospels, have been ontologically “overinterpreted” by the philosophers who already inhabited the Greek Church Fathers and referred back to rustic, popular wisdom with disdain. A good framework for interpretation was not at hand; it was either sagely-Greek or popular-Jewish, and Christianity had invented rhetorical techniques to support both at once, even though Christ was not the result of this mélange. Even recently, in an infinitely less Greek fashion, Jesus’s formulae on living creatures have been grasped as having to do with individual egos (M. Henry), though the only new sense they have is as generic, for the interfering and transindividual liveds that we are qua faithful in-the-last-instance. Let us change our hypothesis and treat those utterances as spoken rather than written, lived rather than logical—and yet transmissible—oraxioms, brief and fragmentary and thus indisputable and prior-to-first.

A science is obliged to build its foundations on a constant that defines a domain of objectivity, whether this be a logic and whether logical principles for philosophy itself should it wish to be a science, one or several natural properties for the various physics, an axiom-form or set-form as constant for mathematics, or a lived constant for a human science of religions founded in-Christ. We know that practically, for this science, we need (1) prior-to-firstly, a form that is not logico-Aristotelian but algebraic and determinative, idempotence, and the imaginary number; (2) a lived materielity (the materiel substance of messianity and of faith); (3) likewise a logical form, since it implicates some philosophy; (4) an axiomatic form since it implicates a rigorous science in its means. These various aspects are indivisibly interwoven in the statements of this science, which we have generally designated as lived axioms or oraxioms, and which are the faithful sayings, the “faithful axioms” of messianity. In-the-last-instance they express messianity while having recourse to the theologico-philosophical language that they transform. Each of these oraxioms is a generic quantum of expression or enunciation, not a conceptual or discursive entity, an atom in the transcendent sense, but a discrete and indivisible quantum of messianity. It is at once a drive, the raising of a cry, and the clamor of faith, the exclamation of a mystic. We shall not give examples, having treated more concretely cases drawn from mysticism, in Mystique nonphilosophique à l’usage des contemporains (Nonphilosophical Mysticism and its Contemporary Usage).¹

We can now specify the essence, as messianic axioms in-the-last-instance, obtained by idempotent superposition, as has been noted, of the words of Christ and of theology. They are not logico-mathematical axioms, precisely delimited in a formal space; they are generically lived, having as their content the transcendent terms of Greco-Judaic theology, but transformed into the state of waves or interference, and therefore indiscernible. Into a wavelike state? One must not let oneself be taken in by the too-familiar physical or material intuition of a wave. Wavelike here designates a schema or a form that is not necessarily a visible phenomenon of the sonorous or liquid flow of concepts, even though speech may be just such a phenomenon of flow and streaming, especially if one modifies or varies the speeds of physical flow in the manner known to mystics and ritualistic priests. The phenomenal mark of the wavelike as a schema that can sustain superposition is, above all, the interference of meanings or concepts. It is a matter of projecting or making use of the conceptual kernels, and especially theoretical kernels since it is theology that is at stake, so as to bring them into superposition and interference, and of thereby creating new blocs of unlocalizable or indiscernible meaning. Interference is above all the interference of syntagms or of the corpuscules of signification that are statements. Now, the mystics (the Russians, in particular, rather than the Rhinish), the Hesychasts or Glorifiers of the Name, take the emission of thought and even of words to the limit of the discernible, for example, repeating the name “Jesus” or controlling the emission of breath. Speech obviously does not have the same power to synchronize and “spectralize” voices that we find in music. But perhaps it is from this general perspective on the interference of gestures and words, of gestures and speech contracted in time or even in space by the repetition of the same formulas, that one must understand an entire microritual dimension, and not only the macroritual of liturgies. On the condition that we distinguish at once between the mythological or macroscopic origin of rites and their properly microritual destination, which bears witness to an entirely other perspective. But the most fundamental thing, and what distinguishes our axioms from mathematical axioms, is that they are messianic in-the-last-instance or prior-to-priority. Our axioms are not only first from the point of view of their objective content; they are also prior-to-first from the lived-formal point of view. It is a question no longer of speaking conceptually of messianity in an atomist fashion, but of speaking in a “wavelike” fashion, with waves configuring concepts. Given their prior-to-first root or source, which is idempotence, they are “oraxioms,” axioms generated as the oracles of this algebraic Pythia that is messianity. That science has an oracular and not only an axiomatico-deductive aspect is something that will be admitted by all those who practice axiomatic freedom extended to quantum, “wavelike,” flowing idempotence, no longer lamenting an irrationalism that is meaningless here. An idemscient statement, at once lived and generic, the oraxiom is the indivisible duel, the generic quantum of unilateral formulation that is the property of no ego, but strictly speaking only of a “we” as quantum of expression or unilateral formulation that puts an end to a still atomistic axiomatic of mathematics or philosophy. Messianic immanence speaks through oraxioms that are distinct from the geometrico-transcendent axioms of Spinoza or of Judaic verses, from the conceptual atomism of the axiomatic (Fichte or the young Wittgenstein), and from the logical atomism of their avatars, and perhaps even, in part, metaphysical tautologies, from the first Greeks up to Heidegger. From this perspective, Jesus’s logia, which is to say, the collection of his words for the poor, should be understood as formulae that are emptied of the sufficiency of the Logos, and that express an “impotence” of the Greco-Judaic, as duel (or binary-indivisible) quanta. They are sub-veniences, or, in quantum-theoretical terms, “Feynman histories” or “paths,” philosophically incomprehensible—oracles in the memory of the humans to come—infinite and indiscernible words that traverse history and the world like an eternity that is no longer against the times.

If their formal aspect is wavelike, it is not just a matter of no longer speaking of the event or the meaning or the message in well-formed conceptual sequences, in an atomist and mechanist fashion. These axioms must be liberated from the Greco-Judaic, by their very emergence, which is not meta-Greek or meta-Judaic but rather “non”-Greek and “non”-Judaic, obtained through a quarter-turn or as an imaginary number. Quantum thought is a nonpositive act of thought—not only a set of discontinuous algebraic operations, but a real action rather than a structure of being, an immanence rather than an uncertain transcendence. In sum, we could say that superposition is superpositional-(of)-itself, which is to say that it is without-relation, without even a transcendental relation, to itself. It does indeed form a consistent though generic self, a Last Instance, and not a derived modality of consciousness or of the autopositional ego. The superposition of states yields a thickness that is incarnate rather than incorporated, a new, altogether immanent state, a materiel rather than a materialist spirituality.

The axiom as quantum of expression or unilateral formulation thus puts an end to the still atomistic axiomatic of mathematics, philosophy, and theology, with its axioms of the Trinity. From this perspective, the logoi or logia of Jesus Christ can always be taken as simple and popular figures of speech, ways of making a potentially complex message understood. There is therefore always a risk in rephilosophizing them at will, giving them a retrospectively explicable meaning in a theological fashion. But even more profoundly, theology is just a hermeneutic aid or a variable for oraxioms to be produced, these words being grasped as formulae that indicate in negative a debased word, emptied of its sufficiency, and that in fact express an ever-present Greco-Judaic “impotence.” They are duel quanta, and in this sense should also be read as apocryphal formulations.

Finally, what does it mean to “philosophize in Christ”? To ordain Christian philosophical discourse to Christ-in-person, but on the condition that we make Christ the point where the Christian discourse to which he is foreclosed becomes irrelevant or impossible. In this way the Lutheran formula acquires its full force, and can be reworked into that of a “science-in-Christ.” Christ is the source of life or the lived of the axioms, not a lived abstraction but an abstract lived, “formalized” (unilateralized) with respect to the Logos and the Torah. Christic science is thus a practice or rather a messianic “underpractice” of evangelical statements and their transformation into oraxioms, the constitution, via its very weakness, of an ultimatum-gospel that will have definitively ceased to presume to represent the world for the faithful or the “living.” Cease treating the Scriptures, whatever they may be (Hebraic, Islamic, Christian, Philosophical), as sacred and fetishized texts. Invent your Gospels, those that the Churches ignore or that they are obliged to bury in the desert. The force of the Gospels is not “evangelical.” Do not arbitrarily and viciously interpret the texts, but adequately transform them as a function of the christic constant, make them the vectors of a nonaction that is entirely one of messianity, rather than the means of a constricting proselytism. Fundamentalism in all of its forms, texts, dogmas, sects, and churches, with its parochialism, communitarianism, nationalism, and sectarian dissemination—here is the Enemy of Enemies, the Great Harasser, the Universal Inquisitor.