fragilekeys

“Verbum caro Factum,” by Jean-Luc Nancy (2002)
translation by Timothy Lavenz (2014)

In the time of a brief note, for the moment, let’s analyse this proposition central to Christianity: verbum caro factum est (in the Greek text of John’s Gospel: logos sarx egeneto). This is the formula for the “incarnation” through which God is made man, and this humanity of God is indeed the decisive trait of Christianity, and through it a determinant trait for the entire culture of the West– right to the heart of its “humanism,” which it marks ineffaceably, even if it does not ground it (thanks to a reversal in the “divinisation” of man, to remain very summary).

The term “incarnation” is usually understood in the sense of the entry of some non-corporeal entity (spirit, god, idea) into a body, and more rarely as the penetration of one part of the body into another, or of a substance, in principle foreign, as one speaks of an “ingrown toenail.” It is a change of place, the occupation of a body like a space that was initially non connatural to the added reality, and this sense easily extends to “figuration” (the actor “incarnates” the character). According to this current acceptation (which is certainly not the major theological one), incarnation is a mode of transposition and representation. One is in the space of a thought for which the body is necessarily in a position of exteriority and sensible manifestation, by distinction with a soul or with a spirit given in interiority, and not directly figurable.

It suffices to read  the formula of the Christian credo literally to realize that it does not at all, in and of itself, bear in the direction of this interpretation. If the verb was made flesh, or if (in Greek) it became it, or if it was engendered or engendered itself as flesh, it is not because it penetrated into the interior of a flesh that was at first there outside of it: it is the verb itself that became flesh. (Theology deployed superhuman efforts– now is the time to say so– to think this becoming that produces, in one single person, two heterogeneous natures.)

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Let’s add here — reserving it for analyses to come later — two supplementary facts that it is not pointless to recall: even with the nuances and important differences between “Catholic,” “Orthodox,” and “Reformed” Christianities, the human maternity of the logos (with or without the virginity of the mother) and the “transsubstantiation” (real or symbolic, either way) of the body of Christ into the bread and wine of a “communion” represent two developments or two intensifications of incarnation: the one, by giving the god-man a provenance, already, in the human body, and in the body of a woman (in one sense, the incarnation takes account of the sexes), and, with the other, by giving to his divine body the capacity of converting itself back into inorganic material (thereby investing a tiny parcel of space-time with “god”, as well as a reality — bread and wine — that comes from a transformation of nature through human technique).

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In this sense, the Christian body is totally other than a body serving as an envelop (or prison, or tomb) for the soul. It is nothing but the logos itself that is made body as logos and according to its most proper logic. This body is nothing but the “spirit” going out of itself or of its pure identity so as to identify itself not even with man but as man (and woman, and material). But this exit of the spirit from itself is not an accident that befalls it (we will allow ourselves here a vast ellipsis around the question of sin and salvation, which we can provisionally hold aside). In itself, the divine Christian spirit is already outside of itself (this is its trinitarian nature), and undoubtedly one must go all the way back to the monotheistic god common to the three religions “of the Book” to consider how he is already, himself, essentially a god who is put outside himself through and in a “creation” (which is by no means a production, but precisely the putting-outside-of-self).

In this sense, the Christian (even monotheistic) god is the god that is alienated: he is the god who is atheised or who atheologises himself, if we can for an instant forge these words. (It is Bataille who, for his account, created the word “atheological”). Atheology as a thinking of the body will then be a thinking of this: that “god” was made “body” inasmuch as he was emptied of himself (another Christian motif, the Pauline kenosis: the becoming-empty of God, or his “being emptied of himself”). “Body” becomes the name of the a-theos, in the sense of “not-of-God.” But “not-of-God” does not mean the immediate self-sufficiency of man or the world, but rather this: no founding presence. (In a very general way, “monotheism” is not the reduction to “one” of a number of gods in “polytheism”: its essence is the passing out of presence, of this presence that the gods of mythology are.) The “body” of the “incarnation” is thus the place, or even the taking-place, the event of this passing out.

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Neither the prison of the soul (sensible or fallen body), then, nor the expression of an interiority (“proper” or “signifying” body, which I would even call the “raised” body of a certain “modernity”), nor however pure presence (statue-body, sculpted body, re-divinised body in the polytheistic mode where the statue is itself the whole divine presence): but extension, spacing, gap of the passing out itself. The body as the truth of a “soul” that slips away (concealed, robe dropped: baring an infinite breakaway).

But this syncope that the body is — and it is one of a singular dress, taut between a cry of birth and a sigh of death, a flair that is modulated in a singular phrasing, the discourse of a “life” — is not simply a loss: it is, as in music, a beat; it joins (syn-) in cutting (-cope). It joins the body to itself and the bodies between them. Syncope of appearance and disappearance, syncope of enunciation and sense, it is also the syncope of desire.

Desire is not a melancholic tension toward a missing object. It is a tension toward what is not an object: namely, the syncope itself, as it takes place in the other, and that is only “proper” by being in the other and of the other. But the other is only the other body so far as it, in its distance with mine, makes touch at the gap itself, to the body open over the syncopated truth.

A (Socratic) erotics passes through the (Christic) incarnation here as by a fold internal to the logos: this erotic wants the love of bodies to lead us to “conceiving the beauty in itself,” which is nothing other, in Plato, than to catch — or to be caught by — the only one of the Ideas that would of itself be visible.

A circle thus brings us back without end from the visibility of the Idea– or, from the manifestation of sense– to the syncope of the soul– or, to the breakaway moment of the truth. The one in the other and the one through the other, in a hand-to-hand whose body trembles and suffers and comes.

One would like to distill a warning from the mad dash of arbitrary words; to halt the progress of time in the newsreel; to better linger with the instants that punctuate the mortal march; to repeal the lie of advertisement; to give back to language its genetic potency; to strike from pain and possession all semblance of ownership; to broaden the act beyond its personal stakes; to give oneself implicitly with each gesture, as a face gives all humanity; to break the animosity between alien and host, mistaken and correct; to quote back to the world its own anguish, its own envy and manipulation, in inverted form, to rouse it to states less certain, more vulnerable; to incite a riot in the soul of every being, reflecting its violent outlook, its critique of the world, back upon itself; and to determine then whether or not there is any justice in our ways…

But the past weighs too heavily. Our will to forget embraces us, shelters us, from horrors too pungent for consciousness to take in. Overburdened by a guilt inexpressible in the language of things, we capitulate to habits of exaggeration and distraction, the one giving an air of disturbance and concern, the other liquidating it on the command of light pleasures. All are complicit in the general denial, all have their strategy to attend and look away. Our barbarity is to spectate while pretending to know the essential, without preparation or inquiry, to argue our points like priggish pundits, without philosophy or history. The hodgepodge of concepts making social reality possible remains unprocessed, unquestioned at its roots; convention drives everyone, without a thought for the “commons.” Thus self-preservation enshrines itself, finding its opium in a den of gossip and gadgetry. We parade unaware of the alienation our individualism perpetrates and represents; and with neither the tools nor the willingness to investigate the matter closely, we’re caught spreading rumors, the truth of which we can’t perceive and so fail to disprove. Our capitulations and our laziness combine to condone murder, and we hoard away whatever they don’t take.

And so the saving phrase will never find its way– not after the endless deluge of words molested now and forever by the indifferent arms of technology, which immodestly decides their fate immediately as forgotten: points on a list of grievances too long to be read, let alone to publish. Never again will words of admonishment or salvation come. Never again will a message come without falling into the disrepute of all commentary, its active properties cordoned off, its fervency reduced to platitude; or into comedy, the destiny of bare thought. We can only feign allegiance to the real of an engagement, now that everything has been sucked up in the ritual of ignominies that characterizes the virtual world– which has so gripped us, so cleverly, with the mirage of our own prodigiousness, that we have not even noticed the distress on the face of that world, which lies there, sawed into pieces, pushed off into unseen corners, while the maestro waves his hand, making everything disappear.

The audience falls asleep clapping, their fate sealed by an earlier visit to the teller’s booth, where, like God incarnate, an operative, well-placed man told them about their dreams and their future in such a forthright manner, in so caring a tone– like fathers who never strike the child but wield through their suggestions a power to outweigh all misgivings, if not through assurance, then through fear, both of which he wields equally, for his task is to expiate their guilt– that they had forgotten he’d made them sign before leaving for the theater: a contract to be themselves for the rest of their lives.

But with the curtain closed, the maestro lulled backstage against bookshelves housing the vivisected dame, certain of the audience members drew awake from their snooze and, with a flutter so light not even science could register it, walked away from the parquet in silence. They knew it was by chance that they were there. Instantly they took notice of each other, no longer as individuals, but in the manner of ghosts: hollow outlines representing holy absences, apparitions gliding, in time with the maestro’s prostration (time thus ended), not to the back doors, but to the stage, where it had become visible to all, with reticent consciousness, how much blood had been spilled in the act. They knew it would not be enough to conceal the stains, and that there was no way to clean them up now. As for the assistant, with whom they all felt “connected” (they assumed she’d played no willing part in the dealings, having presumably signed a contract), she was going to stay there, dazzling, scattered, accursed, however she was.

The maestro precipitated as his snoring grew tremendous. The only light left beamed on him with a stale, unwavering brightness. They thought to themselves, Here is the first indifferent Angel– for its light, though undirected, was enough for them to peer back into the crowd, to notice other figures rising from their seats, like young turtles from a summer spent baking under sand, crawling from the night to the sea.

For it was on stage that they were made to assemble, at least that much they knew. But the show was over now, the whole scene positively irreparable. In this, their strange afterlife, which had resurrected them to the same evils they’d faced in life earlier, but now that the act was over they could see, they had melted out of existence, staying with it; and although this impression made it impossible to verify themselves or the others– for none of them, nor their numbers, could be counted, escaping as bodies do their place among numerable things, being never in one room, but always between two–, it was beyond proof that they were there together. They had seen their eternal aspect, and now it was all they could see. And thus the posthumous commission was ordered: take note of the evils that the living wouldn’t dare to, and wait for the rest to come to.

If I go forward now, it’s only because I didn’t die, because for no reason some time remains for me. And because there is something more to say? Doubtful— whatever “more” is left will drown in the same silence that drowned it yesterday, that drowns even now all speech. Oh friends, there are no friends…

But I won’t be incarnating that silence— nor the ungraspability of being, nor the real of the impossible. Who could do so without laughing? Who would be innocent enough to try? And yet it’s true that I laugh, that I go on laughing, as time… And isn’t this the impossible itself, the simple, profane impossible we strive after every day— to go on laughing? Behind the curtain God attends, just past the Door of the Law, a toilet flushes, a pimple splits, a heart is broken, a mother sobs… Continue reading →