CrockettMalabou.plasticity

[PT 11.1 (2010) 15-34] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317Xdoi:10.1558/poth.v11i1.15 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.

Plasticity and the Future oF PhilosoPhy and theology

Clayton Crockett128 Harrin Hall

Department of Philosophy and ReligionUniversity of Central Arkansas

Conway, AR 72035USA

[email protected]

Catherine Malabou2 bis rue de l’Ermitage

75020 Paris

[email protected]

AbstrAct

This article develops a theoretical and political critique of the contem-porary notion of the deconstruction of Christianity, primarily in the later work of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The deconstruction of Christianity relies upon an understanding of temporality and messianicity derived from Heidegger and Benjamin, and we challenge this privileg-ing of messianism in contemporary philosophy and theology. Messianism is contrasted with plasticity, and plasticity is shown to have resources to overcome the impasses of contemporary thought in a counter-messianic way. To oppose messianism is not to oppose theological thinking, but to open a creative and productive political space for a radical theological and philosophical reflection.

Keywords: deconstruction of Christianity, Jacques Derrida, Catherine Mal-abou, messianism, plasticity.

Religion is conscientiousness. The holiness of the acceptance and the truth-fulness of what man must confess to himself. Confess to yourself. To have religion, the concept of God is not required (still less the postulate: ‘There is a God’).

Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

16 Political Theology

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

We confess, we are hesitant to place this work before your ‘eyes,’ you who already know what we are going to say, who can see (what is) to come (voir venir). To think is a work of mourning, a desire for approval as well as an anticipation of disappoint-ment. To think is to love, a love that is always in transference…

How can we establish the respective roles of the philosopher and the theologian, here of all places? Or any place? Are they strangers, enemies, partners, or lovers?

For the philosopher, her task is to create thought from within, an internal, intensive power that is primary. Philosophical thinking inaugurates the arrival of being. But what if thought has exhausted itself and being has withdrawn? Can postmetaphysi-cal thinking resign itself to piecing together gadgets with strands of thread and glue salvaged from the ruins of western metaphysics (Odradek)? Or would a genuine philosophical vision be possible in the wake of deconstruction?…

For the theologian, his task is completely derivative of the divine presence, the necessary and impossible task of expressing God’s Word about God, without any intermediary. The theologian is extrinsic, external to the self-generating truth of divinity, reduced ideally to the status of a pure vessel of transmission. But what if theology is cut off from all dogmatic or ecclesiastical bonds, from all positive revelation? Is theological thinking then at an end, without any purpose? Or could there be a radical theology freed from the possibility of revelation, a creative theological fashioning of conceptions of divinity?…

The Deconstruction of Christianity

One way to read some of the last writings of Jacques Derrida, as well as some of the most recent works of Jean-Luc Nancy, is to understand the end of deconstruction as the deconstruction of Christianity. That is, after deconstructing western metaphysics and onto-theology, one sees that the most pervasive, profound and problematic spirit of what we call the West is named Christianity, and the need for its deconstruction coincides with what has been called “the return of religion” in contemporary society and thought. An effect of what has been called postmodernism has been to under-mine the singularity of the Enlightenment, or the decisive break between European modernity and every other form of human culture. If the uniqueness of modernity is called into question, then there may exist as many continuities as discontinuities between European modernity and what preceded it. Thinkers such as Marcel Gauchet have articulated a trajectory that began in ancient Greece and/or ancient Israel, and it is this trajectory that is unique, rather than the specific Enlightenment

Crockett and Malabou Future of Philosophy and Theology 17


articulation of it.1 The trajectory is usually understood in its vulgar form as progressive, in a more modern way as dialectical, or sometimes, in its postmodern version, following Walter Benjamin, as messianic. For Derrida in Specters of Marx, the messianic refers to a poignant but revolu-tionary hope, “an urgency, imminence but, irreducible paradox, a waiting without horizon of expectation.”2

The recent emphasis upon messianicity reflects at least in part a strat-egy to defend Eurocentrism and western culture by linking it temporally with its history, and cutting off any spatial diffusion or contamination of separate cultures, even though scholars and historians know better and have demonstrated such transmissions in empirical and theoretical stud-ies.3 The spirit of Christianity is identified with the spirit of the West, and even if some of its forms are criticized as dangerous, superstitious, fundamentalist or malevolent, this spirit remains accessible to “us” in the form of time, or can be re-actualized at this time. In the context of the “deconstruction of Christianity,” Christianity as such is seen as a pharmakon, both poison and cure. As a cure, in its originary form as expressed by St. Paul, Christianity provides the oppor-tunity for an opening, a universality or a déclosion, beyond the enclosure that traps western metaphysics in its snare. According to Nancy, the heart of the western tradition is a Christian heart, and “the only current atheism is one that contemplates the reality of its Christian roots.”4 If Christianity is co-extensive with the West, and here Nancy agrees with the reading of Marcel Gauchet, then Christianity as such, “is in and through itself in a state of overcoming,” that is, a state of overcoming Christianity.5 The deconstruction of Christianity, then, would be to bring that self-overcoming of Christianity to an end. But would this be the end of Christianity, and if so, would it also be the triumph of Chris-tianity? Nancy reads the essence of Christianity in terms of Heidegger’s

1. See Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. O. Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 168. 3. See Mohammed Arkoun, Islam: To Reform or to Subvert? (London: Saqi Books, 2006), for careful methodological consideration of issues related to this idea that implicate both Islamic and western scholarship. Arkoun suggests that a conception of “Mediterra-nean space” would help deconstruct the “fundamental polarity of a substantialised Islam on one hand, and on the other (depending on the side of the divide), an ‘enlightened’ or Sata-nized West” (13). 4. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 113. Also included in La Déclosion: Déconstruction du christianisme, I (Paris: Galilée, 2005). 5. Ibid., 114.



notion of the Open, as “a transcendental absolute of opening up” that would admit of no closure or closing.6

Is Christianity as such an opening, or does it provide one? Can Chris-tianity be deconstructed, or is it deconstruction itself, and as such unde-constructible? In On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida grapples with the enormity of this task, and cautions Nancy about its possibility:

What Nancy announces today under the title “the Deconstruction of Chris-tianity” will no doubt be the test of a dechristianizing of the world—no doubt as necessary and fatal as it is impossible. Almost by definition, one can only acknowledge this. Only Christianity can do this work, that is, undo it while doing it. Heidegger, too—Heidegger already—has only succeeded in failing at this. Dechristianization will be a Christian victory.7

That is, self-deconstruction would be an essential part of the nature of Christianity from the beginning, and therefore the deconstruction of Christianity would be in a way the fulfillment of Christianity, and in this sense the triumph of Christianity. The thinking of the deconstruction of Christianity is important because it concerns the nature and possibility of deconstruction itself. Deconstruc-tion is Derrida’s translation of Heidegger’s term, Destruktion, into French. Heidegger used a Lutheran term, destructio, that in its original meaning carried an evangelical connotation—to destroy the outer shell in order to liberate the living kernel within.8 Furthermore, Heidegger’s early work in the 1920s on the Phenomenology of Religious Life that prefigured Being and Time was based upon a new understanding of Christian temporality, mainly in Saint Paul.9 Along with the engagement with religious topics and themes in Derrida’s later work, and including John D. Caputo’s

6. Ibid., 118. 7. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 54. 8. See ibid., 60: “Let us never forget that Christian, in fact, Lutheran, memory of Heideggerian deconstruction (Destruktion was first destructio by Luther, anxious to reactivate the originary sense of the Gospels by deconstructing theological sediments).” 9. See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). In this context, Alain Badiou’s reading of Paul in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) must be read as struc-turally similar to deconstruction, even though Badiou insists upon his atheism more unambiguously. For Badiou, Paul’s discourse is paradigmatic in that it represents “a pure fidelity to the possibility opened by the event” (45). The Resurrection of Christ is “pure event, opening of an epoch.” Even though Badiou does not “believe” in the Resurrec-tion event, he affirms the structure of Paul’s thought as a form of fidelity to an event in a way that is very close to deconstruction, shorn of Badiou’s set-theoretical mathematical ontology.



influential interpretation, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, we can ask seriously whether or not deconstruction has always been essentially a religious movement? We confess, however, that we do not believe in the movement called the “deconstruction of Christianity,” except insofar as it is symptomatic of a desperate effort to “save” the West by delinking a spirit of Christian-ity from western metaphysics in order to try unsuccessfully to configure Christianity as the paradigmatic event (Ereignis), opening or inauguration as such. To claim that a deconstruction of Christianity is necessary amounts to assuming that Christianity is irreducible to metaphysics—a decon-struction of metaphysics (Heidegger’s Destruktion as well as Derrida’s “deconstruction”) that would leave Christianity untouched. Heidegger thinks Christianity in terms of “Seins Weise,” epochs or guises of Being, or more accurately epochs or guises of the forgetting of Being. According to Heidegger, Christianity is an epoch of Being, but it is not the opening of Being as such. Understood as the being of all beings, the Christian God is another name for presence (Anwesenheit), which is not intrinsically different from the Greek concept of presence because it proceeds from the same confusion between Being and being. In this sense, the Christian conception of revelation would be simply a guise of aletheia, and there would not be any specificity of Christianity which would allow us to treat it differently from metaphysics. Deconstructing metaphysics would thus amount to deconstructing Christianity. Christianity is part of the history of Being. And we think that Derrida would agree with Heidegger on that point: the deconstruction of presence applies equally to philosophy, or metaphysics, and Christianity. To state, as Nancy does, that a specific, further deconstruction of Chris-tianity is needed, implies two major claims: first, that something essential in Christianity escapes the realm of metaphysics, that is, escapes the juris-diction of Being, the forgetting of Being, and the unfolding of aletheia. Second, it implies that the deconstruction of Christianity has an utterly other meaning than Heideggerian as well as Derridean deconstruction. For these two thinkers, however, deconstruction does not recognize any total independence of Christianity from metaphysics, that is, from the question of Being. It seems that Nancy does not clearly demonstrate (1) the singularity of Christianity in relation to metaphysics, and (2) the singularity of the deconstruction of Christianity in relation to deconstruction in general. To define Christianity as a total opening cannot be the answer, because Heidegger gives exactly the same definition of Being (Erschlossenheit) and Derrida exactly the same definition of differance (la trace ouvrante). It is



thus very difficult to see in what way there might be a specificity of the uniquely Christian “opening.” The same argument may be used against Nancy’s definition of Christianity as a “self-deconstructive” movement. “Self-destruction” or “self-deconstruction” also characterizes metaphysics as such, because Nancy completely identifies Christianity with “the West”: “Christianity is inseparable from the West.”10 How would that identifica-tion preclude or exclude western metaphysics, above all? Once again, we are not able to grasp the specificity of the Christian self-deconstruction, which alone would allow us to think of a possible deconstruction of Christianity. If, according to Heidegger, Christianity does not transgress the borders of metaphysics and does not, for this reason, merit special treatment, it is precisely because Christianity cannot be defined as an absolute opening. It is ultimately a consequence of the fundamental opening of Being, which is not specifically Christian. And this is also what Hegel states so power-fully: the openness (das Offenbare) understood as revelation (Offenbarung) is what inscribes Christianity in the development of Spirit. The openness is the one of presence, or parousia. Even if the concept of presence refers essentially to the being of the Christian god, it cannot be thought outside of its originally Greek determination. The last moment of absolute spirit in the Encyclopedia is not religion, but philosophy. We know that the Encyclopedia ends with a quote from Aristotle’s Metaphysics concerning the Prime Mover:

And thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and its objects are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e., the essence, is thought. But it is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the posses-sion rather than the receptivity is the divine element which thought seems to contain, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this com-pels our wonder; and if in a better state this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.11

10. Nancy, “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” 115. 11. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book VII, ch. 7, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aris-totle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 880. See Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), 316.



Messianic Time and its Remains

Far from escaping the definition of openness as an ontological instance, the thought of Christianity as an opening confirms it. This also explains why Heidegger does not ultimately insist upon the uniqueness of Chris-tian temporality. Messianic time is not intrinsically different from Greek time, that is, “vulgar time,” understood from the point of view of the “now.” A reader might claim that messianic time is authentic rather than vulgar time. How is messianic time not intrinsically different from Greek time? The answer is already implicit in Being and Time, and will appear later with the definition of metaphysics as “onto-theology.” Messianic time is in fact conceived as non-temporal, or eternal. Messianism coin-cides with the promise of eternity. In this sense, it is a negation of finitude and consequently of time and the future themselves. In §65 of Being and Time, Heidegger declares: “The temptation to overlook the finitude of the primordial and authentic future and thus the finitude of temporality, or to think a priori that finitude is impossible, arises from the constant intrusion of the vulgar understanding of time.”12 According to this conception, time is “endless.” The problem of messianic time is that it assumes this “infin-ity” of time. The God to come is thought as a being or a phenomenon who can only occur in an indefinite future, a future that belongs to an endless temporality. If such a thought “arises from the constant intrusion of the vulgar understanding of time,” it is time conceived as infinite that coincides with an endless succession of “nows” in which the future merely appears as the “just-now-not-yet.”13 In this sense, messianic time is only a repetition of the Aristotelian definition of time developed in Physics IV.14

Aristotle’s definition of time in Physics IV remains the only framework within which any further western concept of time can be developed. Christian messianicity does not, once again, displace or disrupt this con-ception. Heidegger may be wrong on this point, but it is clear that any attempt at thinking the specificity of messianic time has to answer this challenge. Heidegger places the traditional concept of time in opposition to what he calls “authentic temporality”: “Our existential analytic of Dasein, on the other hand, begins with the ‘concretion’ of factically thrown exis-tence, and reveals temporality as what makes such existence primordially

12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State of New York University Press, 1996), §65, 333. 13. §81, 386. 14. Cf. §82, where Heidegger analyzes Hegel’s concepts of time and of spirit’s “self-revelation.”



possible. ‘Spirit’ does not first fall into time, but exists as the primordial temporalizing of temporality.”15 As Derrida shows in Specters of Marx, this primordial time is based upon an originary disjointure, and not upon a formal succession of “leveled” nows.16 Does this redefinition allow us to think of an autonomy of messianic time as such? It seems that this central issue is not genuinely examined in itself by contemporary thinkers of messianicity. Even Derrida’s “messianicity without messianism” in Spec-ters of Marx lacks an explicit engagement with Heidegger’s concept of the “last God” as it appears in Contributions to Philosophy. To think of time as “disjointed” or as an originary disjointure rather than a joining or accord is perhaps not enough to help us decide whether the Heideggerian motif of the last god belongs to any “messianicity.”17

In Derrida’s eyes, the messianic event can only mean the coming of the “absolute ‘arrivant,’” which remains surprising, escaping all pre-visions and all horizon. There can only be “traces” of such a coming. For Derrida, following Levinas, traces, unlike Hegelian “forms” (Gestalten), are not visible. They are formless and exceed the domain of presence. For Derrida, the “absolute ‘arrivant’ ” is the most appropriate name for justice and for democracy. If justice and democracy impose themselves one day on earth, it won’t be by virtue of any dialectical motor, just by (and as) the “gift” of the “arrivant.”18

The gift of the messianic event is based upon a notion of infinity in Levinas and Derrida, which from a Hegelian and Heideggerian perspec-tive is ultimately based upon a vulgar Aristotelianism. Even if time is not a simple succession of “nows,” the emptying out of all presence projects the time of the Messiah outward and restricts it to an invisible horizon, from which it comes. At the same time, the messianic event can never arrive, because the condition of it being a messianic event, or an absolute arrivant, is that it never arrives. The complete suspension of presence

15. §82, 396. 16. On Heidegger’s conception of time in Being and Time and Time and Being, see Cath-erine Malabou, Le Change Heidegger (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2004), Part II, chapter I, “Changer le don.” 17. See Derrida, Specters of Marx, 27, where he criticizes Heidegger for thinking of jus-tice (Dike) in terms of “the jointure of the accord.” 18. See ibid., 65: “Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power…just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such…”; emphasis original.



precludes the taking place of the event, even as the event lives off of this infinite and indefinite deferral. On the other hand, one attempt to “save” messianicity from this cri-tique would be to distinguish between a Jewish messianicity that is based upon the infinity of time as described here, and a Christian messianicity, which is anchored in the occurrence of a determinate event, the Christ-event. This is one way to read Badiou’s book on Saint Paul, even though Badiou claims that his understanding of Paul is not messianic.19 Badiou argues that his reading of Paul is non-messianic because for Paul the event has already taken place, but we would suggest that it is messianic in terms of Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Paul. As a specific form of Christian messianicity, it is precisely because the event has happened, but it is also still occurring, fulfilling itself, coming to an end, that it is messianic, even though Badiou would characterize the ongoing character of the event more extrinsically as fidelity to an event. In Agamben’s commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, The Time That Remains, Paul attests to the ongoing nature of the Christ-event, which is stretched out towards its end. The Christian lives in the world “as not” (hos me ); for example, weeping as not weeping. Agamben claims that for Paul, “in pushing each thing toward itself through the as not, the messianic does not simply cancel out this figure, but it makes it pass, it prepares its end. This is not another figure or another world: it is the passing of the figure of the world.”20 The time in which Paul lives is the time between the event and its completion, the Resurrection and the return of the Messiah, which is the end of the world. In a more generalized sense, Agamben sees Paul expressing the paradigmatic form of messianic time: “messianic time is the time that it takes time to come to an end, or, more precisely, the

19. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). In a later book, Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2006), Badiou argues that: “With Paul, for example, we have a notion that is not contained in the idea of messianism, since at issue is the process of the coming of God himself, such as it has taken place”, 207; emphasis original. This is Agam-ben’s definition of Christian messianism—the event has taken place, but it has not yet been brought to an end. Badiou theorizes this situation less in terms of time, and more in terms of fidelity to an event that has taken place, but we argue that the event cannot be contained within or restricted to the literal moment of the resurrection, which does not take place in time, but explodes time itself in powerful, productive and destructive ways. 20. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 24–5. Agamben reads Benjamin as a modern-day Paul, which complicates any strict distinction between Chris-tian and Jewish messianicity. On Paul and Benjamin, see also Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).



time we take to bring to an end, to achieve our representation of time.”21 Messianic time is therefore operational time, or “the time that the mind takes to realize a time-image.”22 As messianic or quasi-messianic time, Christianity would remain operative even as it disables, deconstructs or renders inoperable all determinate forms of time. Would this specifically Christian version of messianicity avoid our cri-tique, and therefore represent an authentic opening? No, we read these so-called Jewish and Christian forms of messianicity as distinct but essen-tially similar, and as not unrelated to Aristotelian conceptions of time. In the case of Agamben, his analysis of the fundamental messianic nature of Pauline temporality is based upon his previous notion of impotentiality, which he develops out of a reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Impotential-ity is “the actuality of the potentiality to not-be,” or the freedom to not do what one is capable of doing.23 Impotentiality is a special case of poten-tiality (dynamis) in general, which “is a welcoming of non-Being.”24 The fundamental passivity lies at the root of all human action, and it supplies the possibility for acting (acting as not acting) in relation to the messianic situation. Impotentiality enacts temporality as such, because “it preserves itself as such in actuality. What is truly potential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality in bringing it wholly into the act as such.”25 In impo-tentiality, potentiality does not simply lose itself in the passage to actual-ity, but conserves itself in actuality in a significant way. The opening of impotentiality at the heart of potentiality prefigures the discussion of the Christian messianic event, even though here Agamben does not explicitly use the language of time. A messianic event is an event that happens but does not exhaust itself in its happening, because it takes time, or creates time, in its striving towards its end. Here, too, the opening characteristic of messianicity is not unique to Christianity, but can be related back to a Greek inauguration.

Of Plasticity, Human and Divine

We contend that the notion of plasticity provides important resources with which to counter the deconstruction of Christianity and to critique contemporary messianicity. Plasticity concerns form, but it stretches our ordinary understanding of what form is and means. Plasticity has at least

21. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 67. 22. Ibid., 66. 23. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 183. 24. Ibid., 182. 25. Ibid., 183; emphasis original.



three implications: (1) the capacity to receive form in a passive sense; (2) the ability to give form in a more active manner; and (3) the power to annihilate form.26 As distinguished from ancient Greek plasticity, which related more specifically to the arts, modern plasticity concerns more pre-cisely the form of human subjectivity. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant struggled to articulate how human mental capacities could both give and receive form, and he ended up positing a duality between passive sensory intuitions and an active transcendental apperception. The latter, however, appeared secondary to the material form of human representations, so Kant conceptualized the transcendental imagination as a form-giving power that could re-present sense intuitions under the form of categories of understanding. Heidegger’s book on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics demonstrates the complex but fundamental status of the transcendental imagination in the First Critique. Heidegger argues that Kant shrinks back from his insight into the significance of the transcendental imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason, which is why he has to re-write it and relegate the transcen-dental imagination to an inferior position in the second edition of the First Critique.27

It is Hegel, however, who fully and successfully formulates the modern nature of human subjectivity, and he does this by modeling it on divine subjectivity. For Hegel, the process of representation (Vorstellung) “seals into one the divine kenosis and the kenosis of the transcendental subject.”28 What does this mean? Representation for Hegel functions in a way similar to the transcendental imagination in Kant, and it refers to a schematism, the providing of a schema, which is not an image in a literal sense. Whereas the transcendental imagination troubled Kant because it threatened to mix up the empirical and the transcendental, for Hegel the process of representation is more straightforwardly and productively a process of temporalization, a temporal formation. The key insight is that Hegel helps to fashion an understanding of modern subjectivity by reading human subjectivity in the same way that he reads divine subjectivity, as kenotic and self-othering. Hegel reads the Christian Trinity in an unorthodox way, according to which each persona consists of a progressive alienation that is not the manifestation of a lack,

26. See Catherine Malabou, La Plasticité au soir de l’écriture: Dialectique, destruction, décon-struction (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2005), 25 n. 1. 27. For a consideration of the transcendental imagination in Heidegger and Kant, as well as a theological reading of the Kantian sublime, see Clayton Crockett, A Theology of the Sublime (London: Routledge, 2001). 28. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth Durling (London: Routledge, 2005), 112.



but “the appearance of a new ontological guise of time.”29 Divine alien-ation is a manifestation of temporalization, a linear becoming of an event, the Incarnation, in which “God envisages himself as a moment,”30 a nec-essary moment, but also one that must pass. Hegel’s speculative reading of Christianity writes plasticity into the heart of the human subject as of God’s: his kenotic alienation is the same as God’s, and he sees himself as a moment of time in which he is a part, a manifestation of temporalization that achieves the fulfillment of his essence in history, even as it ends. Returning to the three significations of plasticity mentioned above, the active giving of form and the passive receiving of form both apply to the process of representation, Vorstellung, which is a dialectic of self (active shaping or forming, assimilating, consuming) and other (passively being shaped or formed, giving oneself up to another). The annihilation of form pertains to the Aufhebung itself. The alienation of human self-expression, as labor for instance, creates and projects a future, a linear “time in which the subject ‘sees itself as a passing moment.’ ”31 Sublation cancels and preserves, but it only preserves or constitutes a future by means of cancel-ing or destroying the present, a present moment it generates by means of giving itself a sense of a linear succession. Modern subjectivity is derived from Christian theology, here seen in Hegel. Is the deconstruction of modern subjectivity in some way a releasing or restoring of this original Christian essence? How could it be recouped? In or with what? And would we want to embrace it, or to bid it adieu? If plasticity can be seen to come in the wake of deconstruction, is this a dialectical movement, another shift in the strategy to “save” the modern western (white, male) subject? Or as an explosion in thinking, a subversion of what even deconstruction saves (justice, the Name of God)? In order to think the deconstruction of Christianity in a radical way, or ultimately to think beyond the deconstruction of Christianity, one must emphasize an essential difference between deconstruction and all forms of Heideggerian and Lutheran Destruktion. As Derrida avers, “a ‘decon-struction of Christianity,’ if it is ever possible, should therefore begin by untying itself from a Christian tradition of destructio.”32 If this untying or delinking is possible, then the difference between the Lutheran and Heide-ggerian and the Derridean forms of deconstruction had to do with time.

29. Ibid., 113. See also Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (New York: State Univer-sity of New York Press, 1994). 30. Ibid., 119. 31. Ibid., 128. 32. Derrida, On Touching, 60.



Destruktion is linked to the form of linear time paradigmatically elaborated by Hegel. Deconstruction for Derrida is spacing, or a time conceived as spacing, that articulates “the becoming-time of space and the becoming-space of time.”33 To think time as spacing, or the spacing of time, which is not simply a reduction of time to space, is to see where deconstruction separates itself from Destruktion and ultimately becomes plasticity. The only way to displace both Heidegger’s Destruktion and Derrida’s deconstruction (displace here does not mean to criticize nor to supersede, but aims at a fertile following up of these two fundamental and irreducible thoughts, of a way of keeping them in motion) is perhaps to claim that an originary plastic tendency is at work in the opening of Being, and conse-quently in the opening of time. This tendency determines spacing and temporalization in general. It may be characterized as an original capacity of modification inscribed in Being, and in a certain way older than it. This tendency is what allows philosophical categories to change, modify or enlarge their meanings. Let’s think, for example, of Being in Heidegger as it emerges out of traditional “being present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit), or of “arche-writing” in Derrida coming out of the traditional concept of writing. The plasticity of concepts is the condition of possibility for their deconstruction, and not the other way around.

Philosophy, Theology and the Brain

The spacing of time, which in the work of Gilles Deleuze becomes a time-image, involves the multiplication or proliferation of forms of temporal-ization in non-coincident moments. This proliferation, this branching, this plasticity of time understood as spacing, stretches beyond the horizon of Christianity and modern philosophy, offering new possibilities for con-figuring God and humanity, male and female, animality and machine. The importance of plasticity also concerns the organization of the brain. Neurobiological research, particularly the phenomenon of neu-roplasticity, offers important resources for a non-reductive philosophical and theological materialism.34 In recent Continental philosophy, Deleuze is the main thinker of the brain. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guat-tari suggest that brain replaces or becomes subject: “It is the brain that thinks and not man—the latter being only a cerebral crystallization.”35

33. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 68. 34. See Catherine Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau? (Paris: Bayard, 2004). 35. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 210.



In the process of instantiating itself as subject, we could say, following Deleuze, that the spacing of temporality is becoming a brain, and brain is the incarnation of time in a body. Here we could sketch three forms of time:

The first is circular time, time as eternal return. Every circle pre-1. supposes a center, around with everything rotates. The absolute center is the unmoved mover, God as that around which every-thing turns. In a more particular sense, the form that time takes is its receptacle, khora, which is a relatively more passive configura-tion of form.The second form of time is the line, as discussed above. Linear 2. time is active in that it seizes itself in consciousness as a moment, but it can be grasped only in its passing. Linear time is paradig-matically Christian and then given its modern expression by Hegel.Finally, time is plasticity itself, absolute plasticity. Here is time 3. in its explosive capacity, understood as spacing (Derrida) or as time-image (Deleuze). The form of plastic time is bifurcation, which leads to a fractalizing of temporalization, an unfathomable involution. Here the proliferation of multiple forms of temporal-ity exceeds the ability of a subject to seize them as moment and construct a linear sequentiality. The ability to function as a brain depends upon the ability to set up parallel networks, loosely con-nected inference-systems that do not run through a central pro-cessor or programmer. There is no ghost or god in the machine; the machine is not just a machine, however, but an adaptive system of such incredible complexity that it generates new forms of complexity, or additional layers of plasticity.

“Our brain is plastic and we don’t know it.”36 We are neuronal people but we have no idea how to negotiate the gap that separates the neuronal network within the brain from the mental one seemingly outside of it. One of the most vital areas of contemporary research is taking place in the neurosciences, and even when we are made aware of its findings, we do not yet possess the theoretical tools to incorporate them. We remain trapped within insipid frameworks and presuppositions that ask questions like whether or not there exists a “god-gene,” or if not, then how did our religious beliefs evolve?37

36. Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?, 14. 37. See Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes (New York: Anchor, 2005); Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).



The plasticity of the brain is so radical that we create our brains, and making a brain is not simply a mechanical or even an organic process, because our brain is us—contemporary subjectivity is being a brain. We think that our brain is just a tool for use by the mind, or else that brains determine us as subjects in a positivist manner, forgetting that we also make our brains, and never even glimpsing the possibility of becoming-brain, brain as subject, which is a pure time-image, a “little bit of time in its pure state,” as Deleuze writes.38 “The plasticity of time is inscribed in the brain.”39 Plasticity refers to the incredible resilience of form of adult brain cells, not only infant or fetus stem cells.40 Furthermore, this plastic-ity of modulation extends beyond our solely physiological account of the brain, into the initial representation of the self, or “proto-Self,” which is unconscious, and finally into the conscious self. Plasticity indicates the productive giving of cellular and mental forms, the reception of form in and on the body and mind, and ultimately the annihilation of form, the dying of neurons that is required in order to generate a self, or the forgetting of experiences that is necessary in order to continue to have an identity. Brain plasticity is the material example of the originary ontologi-cal plasticity: there is no Being outside an originary fashioning of Being. We have to think of the priority of the fashioning of form upon Being. The challenge is that we can think the absolute or pure form of time in terms of messianicity (Benjamin, Agamben, Badiou, Derrida) or as plastic-ity (Deleuze, Derrida, Malabou). Here is the confrontation, the payoff, the stakes of the confrontation over the deconstruction of Christianity. So long as time is understood as literally formless, it inevitably takes the form of the messianic, which is a pure force, even if it is thought as a weak force rather than a strong force (a messianicity without messianism). Plasticity allows the necessary form to be thought as giving, taking and destruction of form, in a branching that is creative rather than simply responsive or passive. Contrary to what Levinas asserts, all traces are convertible into forms, even though we cannot think of form in terms of “presence” any longer.41 By “form,” we understood the form of philosophy after its deconstruction.

38. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 17. 39. Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?, 83. 40. Stem cells exhibit plasticity in a striking and powerful way. Stem cells possess the capacity to differentiate themselves into additional cells of the same kind of tissue, as well as the ability to develop into cells of other types of tissue. Plasticity here refers to the ability of stem cells to shift or modulate between one and the other, between self-differentiation and trans-differentiation. Ibid., 38–9. 41. The trace, Levinas says, is “inconvertible into forms.” Emmanuel Levinas, Other-wise than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 90.



To return to Nancy, in La Déclosion he provides resources to think the deconstruction of Christianity both as messianic destruction, which never comes to an end so long as the West continues, and, in a way that exceeds the specific deconstruction of Christianity, the same phenom-enon as spacing, or more precisely in terms of plasticity. Nancy says that the éclosion (hatching) of the world is ultimately a déclosion (opening, or dis-enclosure), which is the éclosion of éclosion itself. Déclosion is an absolute opening because it is the “spacing of space itself.”42 Déclosion thought in terms of absolute hatching and absolute spacing can be read differently than a simple messianic temporality. The distinction seems to depend upon an understanding of time. So long as time is thought in terms of end, ending, the status of temporality stretched between an event and its end is messianic, at least in a Christian sense. This reading is both Pauline and structurally messianic, as Agamben has shown in The Time That Remains, and for Benjamin the messianic has a similar structure, whether or not the event is entirely unforeseeable as in Derrida or already essentially revealed as in Paul. So long as one thinks time in relation to its end—the end of metaphysics, the end of the West, the end of Christianity, the end of time itself—it is thoroughly messianic and inherently Christian. And furthermore, deconstruction has shown that this end never arrives; it is infinitely and indefinitely deferred, and we live off of the messianic power that forever takes time to its end. On the other hand, if time is thought as spacing, and as birthing or hatch-ing, this is a plastic understanding of time that is, we suggest, non-messi-anic. It brings nothing to an end. Messianism as ending, and in a sense the entire structure of Christian and western thought, is obsessed with death. For Derrida, as for any thinker responsible to the enormity of the western tradition, whether one is trying to reform, transform or renew it, the world wears and weighs upon a thinker. This is an enormous and extraordinary burden, and Derrida experiences the death in and of the West as mourning. We do not want to trivialize this mourning or this responsibility. At the same time, quoting from a novel by Margaret Atwood: “they think I should be filled with death, I should be in mourning. But nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive.”43

Plastic time concerns the synaptic gap that is not an absolute break but rather a threshold. In all plastic generation of form, there is an energetic explosion, because transformation requires “a rupture, the violence of a gap that interrupts all continuity.”44 According to Leonard Lawlor, Derrida

42. Nancy, La Déclosion, 230. 43. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Random House, 1998 [1972]), 160. 44. Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?, 149.



and Foucault, as well as Deleuze, provide a way “to move along the path from the deconstruction of Christianity to life; it provides the only way to move beyond Heidegger.”45 Lawlor reads Foucault and Derrida in detail, and suggests that Derridean spacing is a gap (écart) that can be read in conformity with Foucault’s analysis of “man and his doubles.” Foucault claims that these doubles or doublets are produced by “ ‘un écart infime, mais invincible,’ ‘a hiatus, miniscule and yet invincible.’ ”46 The minute but impassible gap is both a limit and a passage, to life, to a new concept of life that Lawlor calls a neo-vitalism. We would resist this term neo-vitalism, and insist that what Deleuze calls “a life” in his last essay, “Immanence: A Life” extends far more broadly than what we usually think of as life in a biological sense. Life thought as “conflict,” “battleground” and “place of the dead” at the end of Lawlor’s book refers to a certain powerless-ness and finitude that is itself in continuity with major themes in western metaphysics.47

The écart infime must be thought synaptically, plastically, and in terms of éclosion. In this sense, the gap is a border, a threshold. The gap extends infi-nitely along the border, but it is not itself uncrossable, just ineliminable. In terms of vision, the gap or border is between the eye seeing a thought coming and the eye of the thought that gazes upon the seer: “the impos-sible face-to-face encounter between the eye on the edge of discourse that looks and the eye that tries to look to see the thought.”48 What is important is that the thought is born along a border that constitutes an écart infime between the seer and the object of thinking, “the eye of language…at the edge of discourse.”49 At the same time, this écart is not strictly speaking formless—there cannot be an écart without form.

Conclusion

If Christianity is co-extensive with the conception of the “West,” then there is no possibility of rigorously separating philosophy and theology. Most forms of theology would be dedicated to preserving and continuing some form of Christianity, even if at times in the name of overcoming it. Most forms of (western) philosophy would be dedicated to preserving western logic and discourse, if not western culture and hegemony, whether or not

45. Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 43. 46. Ibid., 53. 47. Ibid., 146. 48. Catherine Malabou, “An Eye at the Edge of Discourse” (trans. Carolyn Shread) Communication Theory 17 (2007): 22. 49. Ibid., 16.



they are aware of how deeply Christian this logic and discourse are. Why would a radical theology and a radical philosophy think or desire to let go of Christianity, even the deconstruction of Christianity? So long as this is not a repression, a Verwindung or twisting free of Christianity remains the only creative alternative for (western) thinking.50

A task in which a radical philosophy and a radical theology can col-laborate is to create a new brain for our species, based upon a shared insight into the plasticity of form, both material and immaterial. This is also an urgent political, or perhaps even a post-political task. Here theol-ogy would remain, as Bergson claims, “a machine for making gods,” but these gods would be plastic gods, and the theological machine would be a brain: “it is there that the possibility of religion persists: the religious bond (scrupulous, respectful, modest, reticent, inhibited) between the value of life, its absolute ‘dignity,’ and the theological machine, the ‘machine for making gods’.”51 Lacan claims that “only theologians can be truly atheistic, namely those who speak of God,” because God is the locus of speech, and “as long as things are said, the God hypothesis will persist.”52 At the same time, so long as theism and atheism remain questions of conscious belief, they remain superficial in relation to a psychoanalytic understand-ing of the unconscious, and secondary in terms of human motivations and desires.53

Can the concept of creation (creation of forms in particular) be thought outside the realm of theology? This issue constitutes one of the main questions of Hegelian philosophy, and by extension any significant post-Hegelian philosophy, because it can only be answered by “No.” But this “no” has a great future, at least in part because plasticity is “the form of a possible other world.”54

50. On Verwindung, see Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), chapter 10, “Nihilism and the Post-Modern in Philosophy,” 164–81. Vattimo contrasts Verwindung with Überwinding in Heide-gger, and claims that rather than a straightforward overcoming, Verwindung constitutes an acceptance that is a convalescence, which Vattimo also translates as “secularization” (179). 51. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limit of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 51. 52. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge Book XX Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 45. 53. See Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), for a radical theological discussion of psy-choanalytic theory from Freud to Lacan and Žižek. 54. Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?, 161. In terms of neuroplasticity, this possible other world constitutes a biological “altermondialisme.”



Clayton Crockett is associate professor and director of religious studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, and a co-editor, along with Creston Davis and Slavoj Žižek, of Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics and the Dialectic. Both titles are forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Catherine Malabou is is a member of the philosophy faculty at the Université Paris-X Nanterre and visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York in Buffalo. Her books in English include Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction; What Should We Do with Our Brain? and The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic.

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