Death of the Flesh: The Way of All Flesh as the Calling of Religious Community

The natural disposition of the flesh rejects non-self. Auto-immune disease results from the flesh's self mistaking itself for non-self: the flesh rejects itself. Since I provisionally accept that the body can become diseased, but we always suffer in the flesh, the self never finds itself in the body. The self and the flesh form a unity. Immunology, though, occludes the possibility of any kind of dualism in this state of affairs.

When we declare the death of the body, the body, or parts of the body often remain viable; transplant medicine bases its project on this condition. Transplantation poses problems for the flesh, as it sets up a collision of two selves. The donor's self remains in the organ (the graft) that survives the death of its body, and when transplanted into the body (the host) of another imbued with flesh, self and non-self reject each other, in the clashes of host versus graft and graft versus host. The solution to this problem is to alter the host (and graft), via immune-suppression, so that it does not recognize non-self.

As we keep the matters of the self (or selves) in mind, we can return to death. That the body, or parts of the body remains viable, we continue to note that the body experiences disease and dying, but only the flesh experiences death. Dying of the body implies cessations of functions, shutting down of systems resulting from disease. But death never completely comes to the body until every process within it ends. Such is death for the body: absolute cessation of processes. I think HAL had it right as it flashed: "life functions terminated."

The flesh suffers, and it eventually suffers death. This death is the death of the self, as the flesh and self saturate each other: there is no room for another flesh or self: relationality, saturated with the flesh, in its very excess precludes another self in the same place. Self rejects non-self.

Which is the richer phenomenon, the living on of the body, with all its life-processes and genetic coding for more function and more life, albeit in the flesh of another, or the "living on" of the flesh and self, in their excess of relationality, after the suffering of death? We cannot speak here of an "afterlife," for otherwise we would not be speaking of a saturated phenomenon: we speak therefore of the life of the flesh, and the death of the flesh. The saturated phenomenon of the flesh achieves a negative certainty that the death of the flesh and death of the body are different phenomena. Better we should speak of something like an "afterdeath," or come up with a more robust understanding of death as it applies to the flesh. The reader should abandon this reflection now if she expects a discussion of 'consciousness after death' to ensue.

The event of death forecloses on disclosure. We defer any exploration of the relationship between self and consciousness. Instead we maintain the location of consciousness in the flesh and body of living creatures. So our question[s]: does the givenness of death constitute the self of the recipient in the phenomenological moment? Is that constitution fatal, or does it itself impart 'mortality?' Because we do not experience death as the death of our own flesh as a counter-experience, we are open only to the experience of the death of the other as death of the flesh. This is not to say that we do not have some experience of some aspect of death as our own, and in this regard, imaginative variations of the reduction can be in play; but because of the foreclosure of the event to us, that is, the necessarily incomplete 'reportage' of this event, the reception of death has no place to project itself.

If the flesh grounds Dasein's being in the world and its authentication through its being toward death, then at least one response of the self to the givenness of death is expectation. This is the way of all flesh: to receive formation of the self from the givenness of death, not in its lethality but in its invitation to authenticity, albeit in the manner of a special case of expectation: of advent and a messianism. The givenness of death calls the self into being, the self into a formation. The community, grounded in the experience of the self as the witness of phenomenality of the death of the other, arises in response to the same call.

The death of the other discloses terror or hope; if terror then a community of magic and superstition arises. If hope, a community of advent, of a messianism of an anonymous religion, an unthematic religion, arises. The former community is poised for a pantheon, the latter for Mashiach. The former is poised for rejection of non-self; the latter is poised for the self of the other as another in the flesh that is the image and likeness of my flesh. In this manner the phenomenality of death, the event of death, recapitulates the call of a community into the event of religion in each and every death; as the 'called' community recapitulates the givenness of death in the phenomenological moment. It is through religion that expectation, the response to the givenness of death, opens upon the possibility of revelation.

Writing as Counter-Experience: The Saturation of the Lacanian Real

Derrida concerned himself with the privileging of speech over writing, yet he did not have Jacques Lacan’s registers of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary ready at hand to interrogate the problem of the distance between speech and writing, or more exactly the distance between the movements within the pre-linguistic faculty to the linguistic gestures of speech and writing. In his God is Unconscious, Tad DeLay has introduced a productive plasticity in the Lacanian registers that might illuminate the saturated phenomenon of the givenness of pre-linguistic activity that shape the counter-experience of speaking and writing.

 

…[A]nything conscious is Imaginary…The Imaginary fuses with reality qua reality in perception…[T]he Imaginary is what is artificially produced. (GiU, 8)

 

By ‘plasticity’ I do not suggest a deformation or disfigurement of the pre-linguistic---what is going on in the register of the Real, but an immediate, constituting givenness whose suppleness and flexibility gives rise to the mediate realm, which results in a movement into the imaginary (but symbolic, too, as the register of the unconscious) order. As Delay notes, “Lacan calls the Real that which is unassimilable, the impasse of formalization, a knocking at the door that wakes us up before we have gathered our wits to interpret the knocking as a visitor” (GiU, 19). If what is given, knocks itself into our perception, gives itself unconditionally, on its own sui generis, de novo terms, outside all constitution of a priori categories, or a constituting self, then not only is givenness within the register of the Real, but of the same cloth as the Real: better yet, givenness is the Real.

The experience of writing is a rather ordinary, banal experience. But what precisely is writing, whence does it come? We automatically link writing to language, but how does language enter the imaginary order of writing, of text? It is only in the pre-linguistic, pre-textual, pre-intertextual Real that the stirrings of language have their unconditional antecedents. Hence, the experience of the Real, of the givenness of language, emerges in the counter-experience of speaking and writing, which are the produced artifacts of what moves in the pre-linguistic space. This mode of production involves the biological vocalizations, 'speech,' (in this case, of humans) and other symbolic (an unfortunate term here) representations that point to referents.

When I say ‘speech’ I refer to the behavior that uses phonation to effect a sign system which communicates (that is, incompletely translates) the Real to the Imaginary. I do not ever mean to imply ‘a speech,’ something that might be read from a text. That would simply be a sonic rendering of writing. I am talking about the simple behavior of speech which is the extemporaneous speaker’s quagmire, the campaign manager’s nightmare. The very distance between the Real and the imaginary orders underscores the possibilities of lapsus linguae, the imprecision of meaning, the “let me tell you what I meant by that,” the inherent dyslexia of the traversal of the pre-linguistic, pre-textual into marriage of the speaker with her speech, which ironically is the basis of the privilege. When phonation marries its source to the voice of the speaker, an authorization has taken place that is completely absent from writing, which comes from no one knows (at least for sure).

The dyslexic noise, the interference of mediation, (nearly?) detaches the Real from the symbolic. The fall into mediation reflects the distance between thought (or pre-thought) and the word. The imprecision of writing and speech in the symbolic order underscores the saturation of Real imposed on the intuition of language. Because the givenness of this saturated phenomena overwhelms the apparatus of the imaginary order, our experience of the saturated phenomenon of the Real can only enter into the side of the imaginary as a counter-experience. The Real is always ‘there’ completely, unconditionally, of itself by itself in a manner that always saturates the intuition, which in turn thwarts intentionality, in this case, speech and writing. “That is not what I meant, not what I meant at all.”

Back in the days when Noam Chomsky was better known (at least to linguists) as a neo-grammarian than as a political gadfly, a transformational-generative grammar observed rules of engagement that tended to generate less dyslexic surface structures. The new grammar had a kind of certainty and predictability built into it that could not account for a slip of the tongue beyond phonemic discreteness (that language employs sound-bytes that sometimes float away from the larger sound-bytes with which they associate more or less tenaciously). The neo-grammarians were the last structuralists, the last bastion of modernity that could not accommodate the onslaught of post-structuralism inaugurated by Jacques Derrida, who, with Lacan before him (alas, Lacan remained steadfastly a structuralist, as many of his apologists do today), demonstrated that no sign, no sign-system is not already constructed, and therefore deconstructible. Writing and speech then, are deconstructible,  whereas givenness and the Real are undeconstructible.

If writing as such describes a general experience for those who write, then the experience of writing as a mere approximation of the experience of pre-thinking, the movements that lead to writing, would meet the criteria for both the banality and counter-experience of a saturated phenomenon. Of course, not every experience of the movements that lead to writing, and even speech are saturated. They are often not only banal, but quite routine. Some of the simplest performative speech acts testify to this simple objectness of some thoughts: “fill ‘er up with the regular, please;” “move out of the way;” “buy me this.” The connectivity between a Real need and an act that satisfies that need automatizes the relationship between what is immediate, and its mediate expression, even if that Real need itself might be a saturated phenomenon. The automaticity in such simple expressions avoids the interrogation of the need itself, and simply gets something immediate done via the mediate. Of course, such automaticity also begs the question of the experience of the movements within the Real itself.

The Death of God and the Necessity of a New Phenomenology

God died at least twice, once on the Cross and at least once in the crosshairs of Altizer's (et al.) theology of the death of God. Perhaps in the last word, these are not two but simply the one death of the God who abandons the plaintive voices in the psalms and the God who does not arrive at the Cross to satisfy the sardonic and sadistic demands of the jeering crowd echoing the 22nd Psalm. The death of the God of being necessitates a phenomenology of a God without being, or at least one that might give an account of revelation. Jean-Luc Marion's project recognizes the death of this God, this ontotheological God, and strategizes just how a transition from theology to theology might occur; and, yes, even  how a phenomenology of the 'analogy of being' can move into a 'being of analogy'---an analogy from finitude (logos) to an analogy from infinity (theos).

What concerns me here is not so much the niceties of a pious development of a new phenomenology that somehow remains faithful to Husserl, but how religious phenomena can make an appearance in a similar way non-religious phenomena make their appearances. There should be a methodological continuity coursing through these kinds of experience. The genius of Marion's approach gives unprecedented priority (which is not to say privilege) to givenness. I wish to commit the great sin of conflating theology with phenomenology ( John Caputo, in his "Hyperbolization of Phenomenology" [in Kevin Hart's Counter-Experiences] has already charged Marion with just that intellectual, academic transgression---sin---and his argument is very sound on its own terms; so what the hell). I want to look at the givenness of revelation. I use the lower case 'r' here to underscore that my discussion will focus on the provisional character of the actuality of revelation (or simply the possibility of revelation) as opposed to the strictly theological actuality of Revelation (upper case 'R') in order to respect this crucial distinction that Marion maintains through the body of his work.

From time to time I float the idea of the 'hypostatic union' and I wish to examine that a bit more in this post. So, now, a little religion.

The disciples see Jesus for the very first time in the resurrection appearances, in which he is no mere Jesus of Nazareth, but the Christ. It is only in the experience of the risen Jesus that the Cross comes into focus, and it is from the Cross, the very blood and water issuing from the side of Christ, that Jesus can be constructed in the narrative novelty that we have come to call 'gospel.' A genre needed to arise that would 'contain' the good news that God had died. Mark, the likeliest candidate for the status of the 'first to write,' appropriates a political method of communication (the announcement of the sovereign) to communicate another kind of news of another kind of son of God; the evangelium takes on another kind of good.

I have always been fascinated that all four evangelists, despite their distinctive christologies, view the Cross through the kaleidoscope of the 22nd psalm. Of the four evangelists, only Luke sidesteps a direct quote from the 22nd Psalm. Mark and Matthew quote the line of abandonment (22:1); all four allude to the 'casting of the lots' for the garments, while John only quotes the incident directly (22:18). That all four evangelists appropriate the Psalm tells of the importance of this type of psalm in the psalter: the psalm of the deafness of God. Lamentation and complaint in these such psalms bring the holiness of God into relief: "yet you are holy and enthroned on the praise of Israel"(3). In these psalms, and of course in this 22nd psalm, the deafness of God is not a contradiction, but accepted as part of the mystery of holiness. For the evangelists, the resurrection has re-presented the psalter's holiness of God after the abandonment of the suffering servant. The difference is that for the psalmist the transition from plaintive abandonment to the holiness of God rests in hope for God to come; for the evangelists that hope is fulfilled in the event of the resurrection in an enactment of the mystery of holiness.


For our canonical evangelists, the content of the form characterizes the new genre and distinguishes it from its antecedent. Only the experience of the resurrection could power such memory. That power drives the making visible of Jesus, who until the resurrection, was invisible. Memory brings Jesus into focus, allowing him to appear in the flesh. Apart from  the resurrection, such memories could become lethal; dead messiahs must stay dead, which up to then, was the way of things. To remember a failed messiah, one whose fate and memory was forever sealed by Roman sovereignty, was not about resurrection but insurrection, which leads to more blood and the numbing boredom of the banality of crosses.

But this Cross inaugurated a kingdom unknown to contemporary sovereignty; it is the crux of memory, Eucharistic, liturgical, political, phenomenological. As I used to say back in my apologetics days, the gospels answer the question, "who was that masked man?" Not masked in the sense of persona, but in the sense of the hidden, the yet to be made unhidden, revealed, and true. The Gospels discover the truth of a God with us. It reminds us of something forgotten, something lost in memory. The river Lethe washes away memory, but aletheia, is the washing away of forgetfulness; it is the discovery of something once known: it is the truth.

The resurrection washes away what was forgotten about the resurrected one. So who did the masked man think he was? He was who memory of him says who he said he was. The gospels are the evangelists' discovery of Jesus within the memory jogged by the first Easter morning (allow me the anachronism's logical privilege). 'The Father and I are one' (John 10:30). The Johannine statement of the identity of the father with the son is the first theological formality of what would later emerge as the hypostatic union.

So what could the hypostatic union mean for us today? If the ontotheological God died with good riddance, then to what is Jesus united? He is fully human and fully divine united at the level of the single divine person of Christ Jesus. So here is my maneuever: substitute revelation or the revealed (aletheia) for divine in the Chalcedonian formula and see what makes an appearance. We are bracketing off 'divinity' so that ontotheology doesn't come in through the back door of the phenomenological moment of the saturated phenomenon of Christ, the union of the visible with the invisible in the visibility of Christ. The hypostatic union then sees in the single revealed person of Christ the unity of revelation with existent human flesh. "I and the Father are one" tells us that in the person of Christ a living Jesus understands himself to be in perfect relation to revelation as Revelation.

The hypostatic union understood in this way constructs theosis (an abbreviation of theopoeisis) as the approximation to Jesus' own self-understanding as being the one whose self is that self in perfect relation to the givenness of revelation. Theosis then can never mean the actually becoming 'divine' (it never meant this), but rather approaching asymptotically Jesus' reception of revelation as adonne receiving donation, but now writ as Revelation, the theology. The hypostatic union then is a crystallization of a phenomenological moment---the precipitating out of an existing entity from a saturated solution (the saturated phenomenon of the givenness of Revelation). But instead of a counter-experience of a saturated phenomenon, we have the crystallized, sui generis, God-man.

Caputo's critique looms large over this kind of formalization. He persuasively locates the phenomenological moment not in actual historical occurrences, but in the event harbored in the biblical narratives. He rightly distinguishes the experience of the first followers of The Way, from the experiences of the communities for whom our evangelists write. For the former, he posits a phenomenality of  [the Holy] Spirit; for the latter, he posits the event of faith released from the sacred narratives. Yet the horizons for each of these seemingly distinct experiences blur and transgress each other. Caputo could not articulate just how the Spirit was at work for the first disciples because he had not developed his memory-constituted hauntology of It Spooks. He might after all meet Marion in the mutuality of the 'pure call.'

The conviction the first disciples had of the resurrection was certainly of a different character than the convictions of faith experienced by the later communities united by their gospels, but they were not of a different order. The phenomena each group experienced was different, but not the phenomenality of the event. The Cross was already memory for the first disciples at the time of the resurrection. But the power of the gospel narratives to suspend time brings a phenomenological immediacy to both groups, and the discovery that issues forth from the Cross is an aletheia that is indistinguishable for either. Alethos anesti.