{"id":769,"date":"2016-09-24T15:26:31","date_gmt":"2016-09-24T19:26:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=769"},"modified":"2016-09-24T15:26:31","modified_gmt":"2016-09-24T19:26:31","slug":"jesus-r-velasco-atheologies-of-communication-bataille-and-theological-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/jesus-r-velasco-atheologies-of-communication-bataille-and-theological-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Jes\u00fas R. Velasco: Atheologies of Communication (Bataille and Theological Thinking)"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jes\u00fas R. Velasco<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Rosalind Morris<\/a> suggested, Bataille \u201ctalks about communication as continuity of loss.\u201d Indeed, one of the central moments in which he theorizes about communication is when he glosses the Nietzschean fragment \u201cThe crucified Christ is the most sublime of all symbols \u2013even at present.\u201d It is interesting that he speaks about this fragment, which Bataille also demonstrates in different ways, including the cover of Ac\u00e9phale<\/em><\/a>: isn\u2019t that cover an emblem of a crucifix, holding in the right had the sacred heart of Jesus<\/a>, and the sword of divine justice<\/a> in the left hand? Of course, this demonstration points in the direction of a different theology<\/em>, maybe an atheology<\/em>, in which the crucified Christ does not have a head \u2013thus lacking the very origin of sovereign power used in all corporative political metaphors (the body politic, in which the head is the sovereign, and the members, organs, etc., are the other sections of society, or, better yet, of the ecclesia<\/em>, the community of people under the power of the church).<\/p>\n

This Nietzschean fragment glossed by Bataille is a piece of the original fragment from 1885 or 1886: \u201cDie christlichen Werthurtheile sind damit absolut nicht \u00fcberwunden. \u201eChristus am Kreuze\u201c ist das erhabenste Symbol \u2014 immer noch,\u201d that is something like \u201cThe Christian system of value judgment has not been superseded in all its terms. \u201cChrist on the Cross\u201d is the most sublime symbol \u2013even now.\u201d The aphorism comes, in Nietzsche, after he has established a main difference between Christ and the Buddha (they started to be likened in the 13th<\/sup> century), and right before the fragment in which Nietzsche gives the list of the \u201cvier grossen Demokraten,\u201d composed by Socrates, Christ, Luther, and Rousseau \u2013a lineage of virility indeed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no more than a small detail, but maybe it is important, that Nietzsche does not say that the crucified Christ is a symbol, but that \u201cChrist on the Cross\u201d is a symbol. Note that the symbol appears as a single thing in quotation marks, as a synchronic object, something more like christonthecross<\/em>, that is, a crucifix, rather than a crucified.\u00a0 What is a symbol, therefore, is not a process, or a result, but an image, even a mental image to meditate upon.<\/p>\n

Bataille does not analyze the image, the iconography of \u201cChrist on the Cross,\u201d but rather the process of the crucifixion of the Christ. Part II of On Nietzsche<\/em> begins with a historical exegesis of the crucifixion of the Christ. Historical exegesis<\/em> is one very specific technique of biblical commentary that involves re-establishing the literal logic of a given biblical passage.<\/p>\n

In Christian theology, the history of the Christ begins with the baptism (the birth), and the passion of the Christ concludes with the sacrament of communion. Communion is what allows somebody to become a member of the community, of the ecclesia<\/em>, of the church, of the body of Christ. It is, indeed, the miracle (as it is not a symbol) according to which one eats the body of Christ. Eats, digests, loves.<\/p>\n

If you read closely Bataille\u2019s text, you will see how his history of the crucifixion, his exegesis, gives rise to the concept of communication. Bataille was not only a medievalist, but more specifically a chartiste<\/em>, and therefore an expert in Latin, with specific attention to ecclesiastical Latin. He knew that the lexical root of \u201ccommunication\u201d is the same as in the word \u201ccommunion\u201d. By the same token, he also knew that the idea of ecclesia<\/em>, from Greek \u1f10\u03ba\u03ba\u03bb\u03b7\u03c3\u03af\u03b1 means \u201ccongregation\u201d or \u201ccollectivity\u201d. Communication, communion, community or collectivity seem to be here deeply interconnected.<\/p>\n

The community\u2014argues Bataille\u2014is the result of a crime, of the impossibility of keeping the collective integrity; it is this impossibility that elicits \u201cA night of death wherein Creator and creatures bled together and lacerated each other and on all sides, were challenged at the extreme limits of shame: that is what was required for their communion.\u201d (ON<\/em> 18) Communion, indeed, is what is the formation of a wounded series of bodies\u2014the death of god\u2019s son, the criminal mark of humankind. Within the community, communion is communication. Bataille concludes that \u201cThe \u2018communication\u2019 without which nothing exists for us, is guaranteed by crime. \u2018Communication is love, and love taints those whom it unites.\u201d (ON<\/em>, 18). While communication is guaranteed by a \u201csummit of evil,\u201d \u201can absence of communication\u2014empty loneliness\u2014would certainly be the greater evil,\u201d that he characterizes, afterwards, as \u201can egotistic folding back into self.\u201d However, he says, \u201ccommunication cannot take place without wounding\u2026 our humanity,\u201d and therefore \u201ccommunication itself is guilty.\u201d He then concludes that<\/p>\n

\u201cCommunication cannot proceed from one full and intact individual to another. It requires individuals whose separate existence in themselves is risked<\/em>, placed at the limit of death and nothingness; the moral summit is the moment of risk taking, it is a being suspended in the beyond of oneself, at the limit of nothingness.\u201d (ON<\/em> 19).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With this demonstration in mind, Bataille indicates that \u201cwith \u2018communication\u2019 or physical lovemaking, desire takes nothingness as its object.\u201d The argument that he is making here is that there is no radical separation between good and evil, and that these terms must be changed with those of summit and decline. If the summit of evil, or the definitive decline, is the absence of communication, the moral summit is the moment in which risk challenges this absence of communication\u2014and that facilitates, makes possible communication.<\/p>\n

I am not going to go on, but you see that there is a painstaking construction of the concept of communication that seems to be at the center of Bataille\u2019s philosophy of evil and decline, of pain, of crime and violence, maybe of war, and definitely of sacrifice, and indeed the question of the closeness between love and crime or wound. Communication is at the center of the question of defining desire and the very object of desire.<\/p>\n

All those terms\u2014with desire as their gravitational center, as radix omnium malorum is cupiditas <\/em>(\u201cthe root of all sins is desire\u201d)\u2014are central to any theology, and Bataille\u2019s thinking is a thinking with<\/em> theology: with the moral, political, violent, and erotic underpinnings of theological thinking that pervade the very formation of the science of theology during the Middle Ages, and that reach their summit with the Summa Theologiae<\/em> of saint Thomas\u2014with the history of theology becoming an academic discipline in several universities, and especially in Paris.<\/p>\n

All those are notions, I feel, that sound very contemporary to me, and that seem, as well, central to the interventions at Nietzsche 2\/13. And they raise these important questions: How can one explore the critical productivity of this concept of \u201ccommunication.\u201d Did Bataille need Nietzsche to develop his concept of communication? Did he use Nietzsche as an object of contemplation in order to develop his own production of aphoristic and dialectical thinking about communication?<\/p>\n

At times, it does not appear that Bataille was actually commenting Nietzsche, or basing his reasoning on Nietzsche. He used a theological reasoning to come up with the concept of communication, not because it was central for Nietzsche, but because Nietzsche, like Bataille himself, had been immersed in theological thinking, and one of the ways of going beyond theology was to explore the limits of political theologies.<\/p>\n

Bataille\u2019s political theologies are not a legal model (like that of Schmitt) of projection of one thing (theological concepts) onto another (politics) by means of an operator (secularization). These political theologies are much more fluid, even chaotic. In a certain way, they are more Spinozian, in the sense in which Bataille explores the limits of the discipline of theology in order to build an atheology<\/em> (that is still formally a theology). It is a much more complex sort of political theological thinking insofar as it produces very specific and unpredictable concepts (communication, experience, risk, sovereignty) that investigate the constellation-like relationship between theology and politics (politics, here, understood as moral philosophy in general).<\/p>\n

We would prefer, I suspect, to rid ourselves from theology. We are secular today, especially in this age of fundamentalism. Theology, however, does not want to get rid of us. It is pervasive in contemporary thought, in contemporary politics. It is on the face of the dollar bill, in the birther polemics, in gender studies, in queer studies (Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve), and so on. Thinking outside this chaotic activity of political theologies is, perhaps, a way to avoid engaging with important critical questions we should be addressing.<\/p>\n

Maybe Bataille\u2019s concept of communication, and his way of building it, could be productive for returning to this kind of research. Perhaps it could fuel a debate on the question of the critical, contemporary interest of reading Bataille in communication with \u201chis only companion,\u201d Nietzsche.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jes\u00fas R. Velasco As Rosalind Morris suggested, Bataille \u201ctalks about communication as continuity of loss.\u201d Indeed, one of the central moments in which he theorizes about communication is when he glosses the Nietzschean fragment \u201cThe crucified Christ is the… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1644,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[51803],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-2-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1644"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}