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Preface: Why I A m Such a Good Christian
Is there such a thing as “the Christian Question”?1 What would it mean to ask it? What could it mean today to attend to “the enormous question mark called Christianity” and to ask, for instance, what Christianity is?2 The answer—so obvious, so unremarkable, and so resilient—is, of course, religion. Christianity is a religion.3 A religion like any other, then? Not by any means. Yet the claim, common to the point of banality, for the singularity of Christianity out of the fabled sources of theological reason (“theologians and everything with theologian blood in its veins,” as Nietzsche phrased it) could have led to a more strenuous interrogation, one not grounded in the tautological form: vera religio is—a religion.4 Before suggesting that Christianity might have persisted, is persisting still, as something else entirely than what it has called itself for some time now (belatedly and grudgingly extending the favor to others)5; before proposing that “the essence of Christianity” might not be reducible to its theological or religious dimensions nor indeed be so stable, so essentially identical to itself, as to answer to that term, religion, for the entire duration of its tumultuous, contested, and admittedly transformative history; before or aside from all that, there is the task of measuring or marking the boundaries and limits of Christianity.6 How far does Christianity go? How wide does it spread, and what depths does it reach? What divisions does it establish or undo, within and between? This is not merely a spatial or geographic matter—besides, only Western Christendom will be at stake here.7 The question is one of assignation and integration, of inner realms and outer regions, of distribution and motion, of measure, indeed, and limits.
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As I read and survey these limits, seeking to gauge the growth and expanse of oddly chartered domains, I shall have occasion to reiterate (interrogate and elaborate on) the following formulation, blatantly plagiarized from Carl Schmitt, which I offer here as a partial summary for the book that follows: All significant concepts of the history of the modern world are liquidated theological concepts. This is so not only because of their historical development—in which they circulated between theology and the operations of the modern world, whereby, for example, the blood of Christ became the flow of capital—but also because of their systematic fluidity, the recognition of which is necessary for a political consideration of these concepts. Three of these concepts will occupy me in particular. They are nation, state, and capital, more precisely, what Kojin Karatani magisterially—and transcritically—describes as “the trinity of Capital-Nation-State,” a trinity indeed, a conceptual triad that moves and circulates, derives and grows.8 It is an incomplete but significant triad, one that, to be precise, has rather ebbed and flowed, moved and morphed. It has been distributed and divided. It has traveled perhaps because of its form, a liquid and fluid shape in and through which each of the three concepts acquired a systematic if highly plastic and fluctuating structure and import. With these motions and circulations, through an impressive and effective capacity for change and transformation (of the person, for example, as “flesh and blood”), nay, for transubstantiation, nation, state, and capital become what they have been, hematological and hematopoietic, and for long enough, which is to say not always, I hope (and fear too). Liquidated, therefore: liquefied and dissolved and finally absolved. “Christ’s presence transmutes liquids,” writes Michel Serres cannily, but “the cycle loops back upon itself.”9 A political consideration of these concepts, the irresolute condition for comprehending, contesting, or opposing them, has little to do with “the new atheism,” God forbid; it is rather tantamount to a recognition that “the worst witness to truth,” blood flows still—in, under, and through these concepts. It is by way of blood, Christian blood, that these concepts have become available, sustainable, and readable in their multifarious structure and historical development, in their endurance, too, and cathected significance.10 A scholarly and, let us say, critical exploration of those concepts, the blood that runs through them, shall have to follow closely and fluently their motion and their flows. It shall adhere to blood, stick to it, heed to the presence of blood and to its absences, to its making and its fashioning, and to its differences (in philosophy and in medicine, from ancient Greece to Melville; in love and in melancholia; in poetry, history, and on TV; from economy to science; and from Jesus to Freud and beyond). For blood not only suffuses these concepts, regions, and more; it constitutes each as a clotted version of its currents. Not so long ago, one might have asserted that blood is a myth (“the Christian myth”) rather than a symbol—another commonplace of the alleged
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universal—incarnate and manifest as it is in its variable versions, discourses, or concepts.11 Blood is minimally mytheme, and it is meme, too. Blood is, at any rate, iterated and reiterated in and through these, with and beyond them. Blood functions as a mark, a citation, and a repetition. It moves, operates, and circulates to the extent that it is inscribed, co-agitated, repeated.12 And “in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.”13 It can so break and might therefore engender new contexts; it has, in the form of new notions of kinship and of race or of novel, massive, and massively hailed and barely interrogated practices (circulation, donation, and transfusion, for instance).14 Whether and how it has done so, whether or not the resilience and persistence of this mark— blood—testifies to change, novelty, or indeed repetition: such is what is at stake here. The reading I offer, the argument I ultimately propose, is that between presence and absence, blood is the element of Christianity, its voluminous mark (citation, context). It is the way in which and upon which Christianity made its mark. More broadly, a consideration of what blood reflects, produces, and sustains, what it engenders, must take—as one adopts—the form of a critique of Christianity.
element, n. Etymology: < Old French element, < Latin elementum, a word of which the etymology and primary meaning are uncertain, but which was employed as translation of Greek στοιχεσον in the various senses < a component unit of a series; a constituent part of a complex whole (hence the “four elements”); a member of the planetary system; a letter of the alphabet; a fundamental principle of a science. A component part of a complex whole. . . . * of material things. 1. One of the simple substances of which all material bodies are compounded. †a. In ancient and mediaeval philosophy these were believed to be: Earth, water, air, and fire. †b. In pre-scientific chemistry the supposed “elements” were variously enumerated, the usual number being about five or six. †c. In modern chemistry applied to those substances (of which well over one hundred are now known) which have hitherto resisted analysis, and which are provisionally supposed to be simple bodies. . . . 2. In wider sense: One of the relatively simple substances of which a complex substance is composed; in pl. the “raw material” of which a thing is made. . . .
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x c Preface: Why I Am Such a Good Christian 3. The bread and wine used in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Chiefly pl. [The word elementa is used in late Latin in the sense of “articles of food and drink, the solid and liquid portions of a meal” (see Du Cange); but in the ecclesiastical use there is probably a reference to the philosophical sense of mere “matter” as apart from “form”; the “form,” by virtue of which the “elements” became Christ’s body and blood, being believed to be imparted by the act of consecration.] . . . ** of non-material things. 5. a. A constituent portion of an immaterial whole, as of a concept, character, state of things, community, etc. b. Often followed by of = “consisting of ”. . . . 6. One of the facts or conditions which “enter into” or determine the result of a process, calculation, deliberation, or inquiry. Also with of (cf. 5b). . . . II. The “four elements.” 9. a. Used as a general name for earth, water, air, and fire; originally in sense 1, to which many of the earlier instances have explicit reference; now merely as a matter of traditional custom. . . . 12. That one of the “four elements” which is the natural abode of any particular class of living beings; said chiefly of air and water. Hence transf. and fig. (a person’s) ordinary range of activity, the surroundings in which one feels at home; the appropriate sphere of operation of any agency. Phrases, in, out of (one’s) element. . . . III. 13. Primordial principle, source of origin. rare. . . . IV. 14. a. pl. †The letters of the alphabet (obs.). Hence, the rudiments of learning, the “A, B, C”; also, the first principles of an art or science. —Oxford English Dictionary
Thus this book offers no explanation. And certainly no historical explanation. After all, Pablo Neruda already explained a few things (algunas cosas), enough things, and blood is still running in the streets.15 A different exercise in resignation, the pages that follow laboriously linger in uncertain viscosity, contending instead with the fact that explanations are, if not a thing of the past, then a peculiar and peculiarly constricted struggle with finitude. “We do not seek to explain why things persist,” writes William Connolly, least of all ourselves, we scholars.16 Indeed, to acknowledge the finitude of the scholarly enterprise in confronting perdurance as well as transience could well mean welcoming its ends, one of which would be the irremediable failure (not just belatedness or irrelevance) of explanation. There is no history lesson, one might translate, no lesson learned, not from the victors.17 And
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there is no meta-image, which means that it is no longer clear, if it ever was, which is the medium and which the message (which the Christian, which the Jew), or whether an explanation would be forthcoming or even possible, let alone believable. The time of explanation may not be completely over—what ever is?—but explanations, particularly scholarly explanations, have no doubt reached a limit (they have an end somewhere, as Wittgenstein had it). Having proliferated further than every Ockhamian edge, they are past repair and beyond hope. Call it digital nihilism or obstinate retardation, “the last gasp of a dying discipline”18; call it speculative realism or negative pedagogy (“the teaching of language is not explaining,” Wittgenstein went on); or call it, as Sheldon Pollock did, “the death of Sanskrit.”19 But the recourse to name calling is here analogous to alleging that resoluteness in being toward death—with “the evening redness in the West” (or perhaps it is Twilight), is it not time?—can only be glossed as testifying to a suicidal inclination or to an apocalyptic imagination, as if these were what? This, in any case, is not to say that thought, learning, or reflection are at their end (although that is a distinct possibility), but that we are past sensing the futility of writing a scholarly book, doing it by the book (as if the book could do it, just do it; as if this was not the end of the book in the age of the world tweet-ure). Especially now, “when the history of the world has so terribly and so untidily expanded its endless successiveness.”20 The sheer weight of accumulation, fifty shades of clay and mountains of waste (not to mention, horribile dictu, footnotes), among other expansions and past all counts, nonetheless counts for something, that is, for nothing, if only because it accounts for and testifies to the victory of the quantitative—by attrition. Was it ever otherwise? This may or may not be a reason to stop writing books (though I suspect it is). Cunningly endorsing Marx’s take on the “gnawing criticism of the mice,” Lacan suggests somewhere that praise might be in order when producing a worst-seller. Have I not called this a book? Is it not one after all? To the extent that my opinion matters (having been exposed, just like anybody by now, to an inordinate number of opinions, I am less and less persuaded I should have or add any, much less that I am capable or in fact entitled to an opinion of my own), I will merely assert that I did not wish for this to be a book. Instead, one could imagine the whole thing as restless and otherwise bound, neither new science nor archaeology, but rather partaking of a different, older tradition of disputation—in its initial and final stages a reading, a measuring of the adversary, among whom one lives and whom one invariably emulates, however grudgingly. Think of it as an unfinished project of some premodernity. Early on, at any rate, the growing number of meandering pages now lying ahead impressed themselves upon me (no, seriously) as plausible candidates for a gathered volume, though I would have preferred otherwise. Like much else, the uptake is hardly mine—my fear is that I am but “full of goodwill, a devoted local government
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worker who has not earned the right to responsibility”—which is why worn caveats blissfully apply, regarding propriety, property, and indeed responsibility, the legal and financial kind in particular (going public, with block if not stock quotes).21 That being said, I beg you, please, delicate and obsolete monster, mon lecteur, ma soeur, copyleft and rearrange at will. Dispute and destroy. One late night, this story goes, a man is pacing under a streetlight. Another comes along. “Have you lost something?” “Yes,” answers the first, “my keys.” They search together for a while. “Are you sure you lost them here?” “Oh, no, no. I dropped them over there, but here is where the light is.” In the spirit of Witz, then, past the enlightenment and through a scanner darkly, blood illuminates, if nothing else, the chapters ahead. Blood, described by Wallace Stevens as “the more than human commonplace of blood / The breath that gushes upward and is gone,” marks a more specific trail, delineates a contained if expanding domain, and signals limits. A long way from here, out of sources that—neither Greek nor Jew, not quite, thankfully— bring the trail of repetitive iterations to a provisional end, an answer beckons (ah, but for the question!). All of which signals but another series of negations: blood is not found here as an object, nor is it a subject. It is neither a thing nor an idea. And blood is not a concept. It is not an operator, neither actor nor agent. Blood mobilizes and condenses, it singles out and constitutes, a shifting perspective (ebbing and flowing, later circulating) like one of those images and forms—elements, again, or complexes of culture—that fill the material imagination, of which Gaston Bachelard wrote in Water and Dreams.22 Blood could promisingly have served the function of a “signature,” which, Giorgio Agamben insists, is not a concept but “something that in a sign or concept marks and exceeds such a sign or concept referring it back to a determinate interpretation or field, without for this reason leaving the semiotic to constitute a new meaning or a new concept.”23 Blood is better intuited, I said, as an element. Part or whole, in any case, blood does not, cannot refer back to any privileged field, not even to theology, coming as it does to seize, occupy, and linger in and across regions, dissolving between and beyond signs. The extracts I use from the Oxford English Dictionary begin to delineate this spread and proliferation of blood through multiple fields and meanings that, clotted or liquidated, speak to its place and instantiations as the element of Christianity. Blood is not, I repeat, an explanation, though it may be so misunderstood—what ever has not? Blood has no identity to speak of, and its integrity or agency, its “internal consistency,” is not what I am after.24 There will be bloods, in other words, but more precisely, multiple iterations of blood—medical and anthropological, juridical and theological, political and economic, rhetorical and philosophical, in disorder of appearance and disappearance. Like other marks, like other signatures or events, these iterations engender, as I have said, a context (or contexts, but the very notion
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of context silently undoes the significance of this plurality). And therein lies the issue. For I have also been forced to acknowledge that, along with a widespread dissemination and series of distinctions (bloods rather than blood), a definite coagulation in “the restricted permeability of global culture,”25 a special and spatial concentration, the marking of a fluid but integrated domain, all have taken place and settled in a definite somewhere (“we seek rather to increase knowledge of how things stabilize in a world of becoming,” concludes Connolly). Think of politics, Dotan Leshem suggests, the transformations and distortions of that Greek word in its rapport to economics and beyond, the pertinacity of its framing and stabilizing effects.26 Think of the Latin religion if you will (a different and more opaque history on the margins of which much of this book is written). And then think of blood. There will be bloods, then, but also and finally, retroprospectively, blood.27 And this precisely because what has left us with no alternative to speak of these days seamlessly and relentlessly moves on to and around the plural form. “To pluralize,” Derrida pointed out, “is always to provide oneself with an emergency exit, up until the moment when it’s the plural that kills you.”28 Or, as the case often is, someone else. For now, and until then, everything remains as if nothing existed as long as unity and oneness can be disproved and dismissed (they can, always). A strange assumption as the plural (histories, modernities, capitalisms, races) is hardly the mark of nothingness or the foundering of integration: only a sign of “misdescription,” a problem of “compositeness [Zusammensetzung]” (Wittgenstein again), a missing and shrunken perspective on, say, the West, which, Talal Asad reminds us, long consisted of “many faces at home” while presenting “a single face abroad.” 29 Who is the subject, then? “Who is the subject? None other than the circulation. None other than the object of this circulation. None other than the cup that circulates and the very object that is drunk. The wine, object, is the subject. The blood of the body’s circulation has become, for one moment, unanimous, the blood of a new subject—eternal, doubtless, like the bonds uniting the group. Through circulation and the rupture of the principium individuationis the object becomes subject, the wine becomes blood, personality becomes unanimity, and death immortality. Constitution of a unanimous body.”30 Blood for bloods, in other words, and vice versa; no explanation but critique, as my title advertises—blood ebbing, Kant’s dove flying—the marking of limits (expansion and depth, divisions and transformations), the acknowledgment of boundaries (for people “do not construct their walls in the same places as do their counterparts. . . . They draw incongruent border lines around their respective communities and establish different kinds of barriers along these borders because they imagine the proper social order in fundamentally different ways”), and inevitably perhaps the policing of borders and flows, at the very least the writing on the wall.31 But remember, there is no hope for the hopeless,
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and music says it best: “Blood is worthless.” That, at least, is how Life in a Blender stays away from “blood music” (and “blood makes noise,” as Suzanne Vega shows), and the point from which we might extend our imagination—or something.32 I mean by this that blood is nothing, nothing much really, and that, reading blood, “we will discover a burden unsuspected and even actively excluded . . . that blood does not matter at all, and to think otherwise is to think like a vampire.”33 And no, not everyone is like that.