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Verbum Caro Factum

by Jean-Luc Nancy (2002)


trans. Timothy Lavenz (2014)
In the time of a brief note, for the moment, lets analyse this proposition central to Christianity:
verbum caro factum est (in the Greek text of Johns 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.)
*
Lets 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).
*
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 from 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.
*
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.

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