Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy: A Philosophical and Anthropological Critique

2.1 The ghost in the shell

The encrypted presence of Christian motifs in modern and contemporary thought has often been underlined. Thus, for example, Andrew Cole argues that to elaborate his theory on “The Fetishism of Commodity and Its Secret,” Marx drew not so much on Hegel’s philosophy of right, as Marcuse claimed long ago, as on Hegel’s early theological writings on the role of the eucharist in medieval Christianity.^[2] In turn, Sloterdijk suspects a crypto-Christian in Heidegger. By denouncing (like Pascal, Fichte, and Schelling) the relation between “egoism” and “malice,” writes Sloterdijk, “Heidegger argues in the tradition of an anti-narcissism or ‘anti-humanism’ […] coded in Augustinian terms and […] molded in a crypto-Catholic anti-modernism that does not need to be explained.”^[3] Actually, an explanation would be very helpful to persuade us that Pascal, Fichte, Schelling, and Heidegger are talking about the same thing and for the same reasons; for even if some similarities between Schelling and Heidegger, and more loosely perhaps between both of them and Fichte, can be drawn despite their many and important differences – of which Sloterdijk surely knows too – Sloterdijk’s claim looks to us – if it is about going into comparisons – like Schelling’s “absolute” in Hegel’s (in)famous words: “like the night, in which all cows are black,”^[4] which happens to be a Yiddish proverb without there being any need to deduce from it – or should we?  – that Hegel was a crypto-Jew.^[5] Furthermore, Sloterdijk assures us, both receptivity to being and language and the care of being, as endorsed by Heidegger, reflect too his crypto-Catholicism in such a way that “it would be pointless to enter into more details.”^[6] Yet here too we would be delighted to get at least some details. For we find a closer – if somewhat puzzling – parallelism between Heidegger’s take on the respect to language and the care of being and Davi Kopenawa’s conviction, as collected by Bruce Albert, that “to be able to make hereamuu [i.e. being-hypersensitive] speeches […] one must acquire the image of the kãokãoma loud-voiced falcon […] call[ed] Kãomari […] [which] gives the [essential] words […] their [due] strength”^[7] – those very words, he adds, that the “earth eaters”^[8] (read: the “white people,”^[9] whether “missionaries” or “garimpeiros”)^[10] seem to have forgotten,^[11] which explains the greed out of which they destroy forests and rivers and shows that their “thought” is “full of darkness”^[12] – or, one could venture in Heideggerian parlance, insensitive to being’s “clearing.”^[13] Now, Kopenawa, rather than a crypto-Catholic, is an extra-modern (Yanomami) shaman; perhaps, then, like Heidegger. Lastly, Sloterdijk interprets Heidegger’s conceptual merging of the verbs “thinking” and “thanking” as a “crypto-Catholic” move,^[14] thus omitting – distractedly, on purpose?  – that the semantic intersection of these two verbs, which is reflected in their mirroring phonetics and easily perceptible, is perfectly attested in Proto-Indo-European.^[15] One cannot but wonder, then, if it is not Sloterdijk who, paradoxically, “crypto-Christianises” their relation. Nevertheless, Sloterdijk is on the track of something intriguing here, to wit: the encrypted presence of Christian motifs in contemporary philosophy. He is right in pointing it out, that is. But – we think – he misses the target.

Thus, in the following pages, we will examine the presence of, in particular, a Pauline motif in Badiou, Vattimo, and Agamben as well as, more recently, Meillassoux. We are willing to call it “radical contingency.” As for its Pauline ascendence or, to put it in more forceful terms, “causality,” we are certain that it must be thought of in “structural” or “metonymic” terms, to use Althusser’s conceptual equivalence between both expressions, i.e. as the causality of a “cause” that is simultaneously “present” in its effects (and by its effects) and “absent” in itself (or as such) from them.^[16]

2.2 A new path in the history of philosophy? Putting Meillassoux into context

Undeniably, Meillassoux’s take on contingency goes beyond what the ancient Atomists fancied. In this sense, it could seem that it opens – as Badiou claims – “a new path in the history of philosophy.” Yet Bensusan opportunely reminds us that, within the ancient Sceptic tradition, Aenesidemus, unlike Sextus but like Pyrrho perhaps, did not merely endorse the “exercise of doubting” as a way “to cure people of [dogmatic] conviction[s],”^[111] but made of it an “ontology,” i.e. a thesis about the world’s “furniture.”^[112] Meillassoux’s stance is not very different from Aenesidemus’s and Pyrrho’s, then.

Yet Pyrrhonism must be viewed as an exception internal to ancient-Greek culture; or, even better, as an exception partly external to it, since Pyrrho’s ontological scepticism took shape through his contact with pre-sectarian Buddhism during Alexander’s campaign in India.^[113] There is actually something intrinsically modern in the “ontologisation” of doubt, which, Pyrrho’s “Buddhism” aside (but is Buddhism not an “a-theism,” anyway?),^[114] only makes sense once the world has been deprived of all consistency in favour of an other-worldly God and/or once that God has been declared dead. Experienced in a Greek way, τύχη – which we hasten to keep untranslated – meant instead something altogether different from modern “contingency:” not so much ontological indetermination as the “meaningful experience” of that whose “reason why” cannot be known, i.e. of the events and “encounters that either bless us or ruin us”^[115] in a world in which the “gods” (read: the shining-forth of its ever-living immanent forces) are “permanently present.”^[116] Besides, the Greeks generally assumed that if something can be indeed experienced as τύχη it is, precisely, because some kind of “order” (τάξις) prevails despite any possible exceptions to it:

we observe that some things always come to pass in the same way, and others for the most part. It is clearly of neither of these that chance, or the result of chance, is said to be the cause — neither of that which is by necessity and always, nor of that which is for the most part. But as there is a third class of events besides these two — events which all say are by chance — it is plain that there is such a thing as chance and spontaneity; for we know that things of this kind are due to chance and that things due to chance are of this kind.^[117]

Furthermore, they did not necessarily view τύχη and “finality” (τέλος) in contradictory terms:

Of things that come to be, some come to be for the sake of something, others not. Again, some of the former class are in accordance with intention, others not, but both are in the class of things which are for the sake of something. Hence it is clear that even among the things which are outside what is necessary and what is for the most part, there are some in connexion with which the phrase “for the sake of something” is applicable. […] Things of this kind, then, when they come to pass accidentally are said to be by chance. […]

Example: A man is engaged in collecting subscriptions for a feast. He would have gone to such and such a place for the purpose of getting the money, if he had known. He actually went there for another purpose, and it was only accidentally that he got his money by going there; and this was not due to the fact that he went there as a rule or necessarily, nor is the end effected (getting the money) a cause present in himself – it belongs to the class of things that are objects of choice and the result of thought. It is when these conditions are satisfied that the man is said to have gone by chance. If he had chosen and gone for the sake of this – if he always or normally went there when he was collecting payments – he would not be said to have gone by chance.^[118]

Aristotle here limits contingency in two ways: on the one hand, its existence does not preclude that of regularity; on the other hand, contingency exists inside a complex causal web from which it cannot be isolated. Therefore, it is not to be absolutised.^[119] In other words, Aristotle, who is also the first philosopher to have addressed the notion of τύχη in a systematic manner, refuses to take an either/or approach to chance. Likewise, Plutarch will later attribute to most Greek philosophers from Anaxagoras to the Stoics the view that chance (regardless of whether one may take chance to be a type of cause or the name we give to what exceeds our knowledge) concurs with necessity, fate, choice, and spontaneity.^[120] In contrast, Meillassoux puts forward an either/or approach to chance. But with this he does not really open “a new path in the history of philosophy” – he merely reinstantiates Pyrrho’s and Aenesidemus’s somewhat marginal gesture.

Additionally, Meillassoux’s recourse to modern science – in particular, to the mathematical possibility of iteration without repetition – to prove his point on radical contingency, marginalises, in turn, recent developments in contemporary biology which we deem fair to briefly mention here. Not only is regularity intrinsically connected to genetics (so that from an egg fly there is no chance that a lizard or a turtle are born). Relationality, which over the past few years has become something like a leitmotif in theoretical biology, is based on regularity on two levels: interspecies alliance (symbiosis) and non-invasive distribution of the species that constitute a specific ecosystem: thus the recurrence of “mutualism,” when the relationship between two organisms is mutually beneficial (+, +), and “commensalism,” when the relationship between two organisms just benefits one of them (+, 0), in addition to competition (–, –) and predation (+, –); it can be argued that it is only exceptionally that one species puts at risk the survival of another one, be it in the form of “amensalism,” when the relationship between two organisms damages one of them without benefiting the other one (0, –), or in the form of “parasitism” (+, –). Furthermore, relationality is not limited two two-species interaction. As David George Haskell writes, “[l]ife is embodied network.”^[121] Similarly, Scott Gilbert comments:

When you think of a cow, you probably envision an animal grazing, eating grass, and perhaps producing methane at her other end. However, cows cannot do this. Their bovine genome does not encode proteins with the enzymatic activity needed to digest cellulose. What the cow does is chew the grass and maintain a symbiotic community of microorganisms in her gut. It is this population of gut symbionts that digests the grass and makes the cow possible.

The cow is an obvious example of what is called a holobiont, an organism plus its persistent communities of symbionts. The notion of the holobiont is important both within and beyond biology because it shows a radically new way of conceptualizing “individuals.” Recognizing the holobiont as a critical unit of life highlights process and reciprocal interactions, while challenging notions of genomic purity.^[122]

None of this is due to chance, even if contingency undeniably plays a role in the making of life’s network.^[123] Also, ethology is another important window to bio-regularity:

The part of the brain that stores spatial information gets larger and more complex, allowing the birds to remember the locations of the seeds and insects that they cache under bark and in clusters of lichen. […]

[Besides,] [i]f one bird should happen on a novel way of finding or processing food, other will learn from what they see.^[124]

And so, too, is chemistry, which does not only intervene in the formation of organisms but also in their behaviour in an extraordinarily complex way:

If the chemical signals and cell growth occur in the right sequence, root and fungus entangle and begin an exchange of sugars and minerals. In addition to food, the root chimera moves information from one plant to another in the form of chemical signals that travel through the fungus. These molecules carry messages about attacking insects and drying soil, the stressors of plant life […]

Decisions are made in these networks based on flows of information involving thousands of species.^[125]

Finally, to all this one must decidedly add teleo-dynamics, which is gaining prominence in evolutionary biological thought as a plausible explanation to what, as Terrence Deacon stresses, escapes both entropy and accidentality:

How [can] the chemistry of life embody the information necessary to instruct the development of organisms and maintain them on the path that defends them against the incessant increase of entropy? In other words, what controls and guides the formation and repair of organism structures to compensate for the ravages of thermodynamics and just plain accident, and what makes it possible for living processes to be organized with respect to specific ends, such as survival and reproduction?^[126]

“Teleodynamic organization,” Deacon goes on to say, opens for us the door to comprehend the essential part that the “virtual” plays in all life processes, thus “enabling the potentially indefinite to enable something intrinsically incomplete to bring itself into existence”^[127] – against any materialist reductionism, that is. Probably, we touch here upon a fundamental issue, namely, the relation between materialism and contingentism, both of which depend on a restricted (efficient, mechanicist) understanding of causality, be it that they portray it as necessary, as accidental, or, more often, as a combination of necessity and contingency.

Besides, from a strictly philosophical perspective, Hilan Bensusan has recently shown the problematic (in the sense of too-far-reaching) nature of Meillassoux’s radical contingentism. Even if “contingency is what we should primarily look at in order to ultimately come to terms with the sensible or the concrete,” he writes, the “accident itself” cannot be seen as “an absolute principle or an ultimate element to which everything else is to be reduced.”^[128] Accordingly, Bensusan’s purpose is “not to state the sovereignty of contingency […] but rather to spell out the details that makes possible its governance,” inasmuch as contingency “is not the upper hand, but […] a primary component of what there is.”^[129] Put differently: one needs not so much to affirm contingency as to “investigate it with care” considering its many names and aspects.^[130] Contra Meillassoux’s, Bensusan rightly recalls Iain Hamilton Grant’s far-more nuanced model for thinking accidentality.^[131] Contingency, for Grant – says Bensusan – “is not a principle that assures the lightness of everything,” as it does not compromise “substantiality.”^[132] Nature – to employ a common term for the sake of simplicity – is both unconditioned, i.e. “not sponsored by anything – except itself,”^[133] and substantial, “albeit ever-changing and built on non-necessities.”^[134] But it is mostly on Leibniz that Bensusan relies.^[135] For Leibniz, he underlines, substances (“monads”) have no substrata: “nothing assures their identity but the infinite discernible predicates that indicate the events they go through;”^[136] that is to say, monads are permanently exposed to otherness even if they have “no windows:”^[137]

Leibniz understands perception in the broader context of how different entities co-exist while taking into consideration the others. His monads need no windows because what they ought to perceive is already within their inner constitution; and still they perceive and the act of perception is itself an event. […]

On the other hand, no entity is disconnected from its world-mates. Interconnectedness of all monads is achieved through perception: every monad perceives others that in turn perceive others. Interconnectedness is therefore experience-based. Leibniz considers that for whatever is concrete, existence depends on being perception. There can be no worldly vacuous actuality; that is, there is no worldly actuality that fails to affect (or have an effect on) anything.^[138]

Therefore, Leibniz’s monadology can be defined as an “ontology of perception” in which “all entities perceive others.”^[139] Plus the fact that it presupposes and articulates interconnectedness makes of “compossibility” its subject: “the most important modality in a monadology is compossibility,” as “no monad is strictly necessary and none is possible on its own.”^[140] Furthermore, “[c]ompossibility is the monadological tactic to deal with contingency:” insofar as they are not possible on their own or by themselves, “things are contingent on other things to their bones,” so that “events happen because it is compossible for them to happen.”^[141] This, though, brings back regularity into the picture: “nothing subsists without sponsoring and those sponsors are, ultimately, what explain both regularities and whatever lies behind them.”^[142] Hence, “monadologies” can also be said to be “ontologies of agency” and interaction, concludes Bensusan.^[143] Thus too his proposal to re-think contingency in terms not only of “fragments” but also of “rhythms”^[144] and even “series,”^[145] to which we are sympathetic. In fact, towards the end of this study, we shall return to the notion of “compossibility,” which we find much more suitable than that of “radical contingency” in the context of a post-metaphysical philosophy.

2.3 Transition

We have surveyed contingency’s three adventures in contemporary thought, from Vattimo to Badiou, Agamben, and Meillassoux, who, despite his philosophical originality, prolongs Badiou in the quest for radical contingency. Now, throughout our survey we have repeatedly encountered Paul, since Vattimo, Badiou, and Agamben refer to him insistently, and build expressly, if variously, on his thought. In the sections that follow we examine and contextualise Paul’s plea for contingency, whose roots are less theological than political. We argue that Paul bequeathed a false disjunctive to Western thought by opposing one form of universalism to another: an all-inclusive oneness that privileged contingency, to Rome’s all-exclusive oneness that privileged authority. And we try to identify a possible alternative to it.

3.1 Ἀρχή as terror – or, the serpent’s egg

Our thesis is that even if the amalgamation of ancient Atomism (stripped of any ἀνάγκη), ancient Scepticism (conveniently ontologised), and modern materialism (of a non-necessitarian type) can partly explain the rise of “radical contingency” to the firmament of today’s philosophical categories, it would be hard to ignore Paul’s ongoing influence in Western culture and thought as an exceptionally salient factor thereof. Furthermore, Paul is also indirectly responsible of the modern disenchantment born from the ashes of the God that Paul himself asked everyone to believe in as the antidote to any pretended security one would be tempted to seek in this world. Contingency, then, was Paul’s ally from the very beginning.

There are five crucial passages in this sense in Paul’s correspondence with the Galatians, the Corinthians, and the Romans – an interesting ethnocultural landscape indeed, as in what follows we will be talking about those whom Rome tried to civilise (including the Gauls and thereby too the Galatians of Anatolia), those whose culture Rome allegedly bettered (the Greeks), and the Romans themselves:

• No. 1 – 1 Cor 15:24: “Then comes the end, when he [=Christ] hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed all dominion [ἀρχή] and all authority^[146] and power.”^[147]

• No. 2 – Gal 3:13 “Christ redeemed us from the curse [κατάρα] of the law [νόμος].”^[148]

• No. 3 – Rom 10:4 “Christ is the end [τέλος] of the law so that there may be righteousness [δικαιοσύνη] for everyone who believes [πιστεύοντι].”^[149]

• No. 4 – Rom 3:21-24: “²¹But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed […]²² the righteousness of God through faith [πίστις] in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction [διαστολή],²³ since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God;²⁴ they are now justified by his grace [χάρις] as a gift [δωρεάν], through the redemption [ἀπολύτρωσις] that is in Christ Jesus.”^[150]

• No. 5 – Gal 3:28 “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one [ἕν] in Christ Jesus.”^[151]

Paul preaches, then, the destruction – the abolishment – of all ἀρχή (No. 1) and νόμος (No. 2), which are to be seen as a “curse” (No. 2): Christ brings an “end” to any law (No. 3) so that God’s “justice” (Nos. 3, 4) may be “graciously” and “gratuitously” (No. 4) extended to those who “believe” (Nos. 3, 4) regardless of “who” they are (Nos. 4, 5); only by thus becoming “one” (No. 5) they will be “delivered” (No. 4) from Rome’s oppressive “power” (No. 1) and become something else than what the Roman law (with its distinction between “slaves” and “free men” [No. 5]) and the Jewish law (with its distinction between “Jews” and “Greeks”) determine they are (No. 1).

Neil Elliot and Brigitte Kahl provide the setting of Paul’s insurgent preaching. The Romans attributed the “destinies” of the peoples to the “meritorious piety of their ancestors,”^[152] and the “fact” that Aeneas – by bringing safely his father, his son, and his ancestral gods to Ilium after the destruction of Troy, as the legend has it – could be said to have been the most “pious” of all ethnic ancestors, granted them legitimacy to dominate those peoples whom they conquered. Roman domination was therefore based on division (we and the others), division on uniqueness (we above all others, i.e. the same type of uniqueness Christianity would later reclaim for itself), and this implied putting forth a subordinative oneness (others have no choice but submit to Rome). Paul opposes to it a universalist or all-inclusive κήρυγμα established upon a counter-legend, namely, the biblical legend of Abraham,^[153] who, unlike Aeneas, abandoned his father and his father’s gods “to follow God in trust that he would receive a new posterity.”^[154] In like manner, Paul opposes Christ, “whose death [and resurrection] made possible the incorporation of ‘many nations’ as Abraham’s descendants,”^[155] to Augustus, the prototype of all Roman emperors^[156] “whose vengeance against his father’s murderers secured peace for all who share[d] ritually in his sacrifice.”^[157] Kahl writes:

That Jesus “gave himself” for a sinful other […] and that it was precisely as an inferior and unworthy other condemned to death, [that] he was raised by God […] to represent lordship (kyrios, […]) and universal power according to the true will and image of God the Father – all this profoundly disturbs, confuses, and disorders the clear-cut constructs of enmity and antagonism, identity and alliance underlying the semiotic “battle square” of empire […] [thus making possible] a movement out of the battle order.^[158]

A movement of which “love” (ἀγάπη rather than ἔρως) is the “driving power that throws the combat square into an irreversible spin of messianic ‘revolution;’”^[159] or, in other words, into “a metamorphosis that does not simply replace one empire with another empire, the kingdom of Caesar with a counter-kingdom of God,”^[160] but brings “the perpetual war of civilization,” i.e. the fight of the One against the Many, to a “halt” by means of a “messianic revolution”^[161] which turns the Many into an even-more-powerful One.

The crucial point is the premise on which the whole κήρυγμα stands: Paul’s dismissal of any ἀρχή, i.e. of any “ruling principle,” but also (as we shall see in the next section) of any “bedrock” or “footing,” and ultimately too of any “beginning” or “starting point” (since ἀρχή is also the “end of a rope”) and of any “base” or “place” on which to stand (χώρα). The implications are huge. For no world can lack an ἀρχή. A world (any world) is, as Patrice Maniglier puts it, “a possible way of making identity and difference”^[162] (night/day, war/peace, up/down, inside/outside, etc.) or, as Lévi-Strauss says, a possible “classification”^[163] or a collection of many intersecting classifications that “proceed by [and hence are based upon the articulation of] pairs of contrasts […] [and which] cease when it is no longer possible to establish [any further] oppositions.”^[164] Furthermore, behind each term of any given opposition there is always a principle that inspires it,^[165] that is to say, a particular ἀρχή. This means, first, that any possible world stands upon a collection of ἀρχαί; and, secondly, that the logic of any possible world is binary. Yet unlike the one Paul fights against, the purpose of this binary logic is not meant to divide and subordinate, but to divide in order to incorporate, so that “opposition, instead of being an obstacle to integration, serve[s] rather to produce it”^[166] – thus its designation as “union of opposites,”^[167] which is not the same as the “dissolution” and “subsumption” of these into an empty oneness. No ἀρχή (no ἀρχαί), no world. Therefore, Paul’s “anarchism” – or, even better, Paul’s un-archeology, to adopt and reuse in a different context Bensusan’s excellent term^[168] – must be seen as the serpent’s egg of Western “Worldlessness” – and as one of the poles between which Western history oscillates, for in it numberless permutations of Paul’s u-topia have been essayed only to be betrayed by the dys-topian resurgence of new Roman-like forms of “imperial” power.

There is, of course, a trick in all this: insofar as it relies on the view that God’s ἀγάπη is the sole principle by virtue of which everyone (i.e. anyone) is justified, Paul’s anarchism is pseudo-ἀρχή-less, i.e. it makes of God’s ἀγάπη a sort of an-archic (and earthbound-less) ἀρχή; therefore, it proves self-refuting in logical terms (like Vattimo’s claim against any “single foundation” and Lyotard’s against any “totality”). But it is in practical terms all the more corrosive, as it rests on a negative (and, again, earthbound-less) principle capable of melting all differences, of turning them into nothing. In Paul, then, not only does the negative become positive: anarchism and nihilism mirror each another.

3.2 Pleading for contingency in Antiquity: from Antisthenes to Paul

Formulated in Greek, which, while not being the official language of the Roman Empire, was, nevertheless, the κοινή of the eastern imperial territories and the language of philosophy, Paul’s κήρυγμα both targets one of the key notions of Greek philosophical discourse (the notion of ἀρχή) and represents the culmination of an eroding logic that, as Felipe Martínez Marzoa observes,^[169] had already made its way into Greek philosophy with Antisthenes (about a hundred years before the “birth” of Pyrrhonism, then) and haunted it ever since: the logic of contingency. To understand this, we must briefly go back to Plato – and Socrates. As Sean Kirkland contends, Plato’s presentation of Socratic philosophizing in the Apology is the key with which to interpret Socrates’s approach to philosophy (as seen by Plato, but this means it could be viewed thus):

In the Apology, Socrates focuses upon, […] explains and defends, his own expressly elenctic and aporetic philosophical activity, that very same activity we find repeatedly and more or less consistently portrayed [in Plato’s early dialogues]. […] That is, here and here alone Socrates’ questioning and searching way of discourse is itself thematized and treated extensively. Moreover, this self-presentation by Socrates is directed toward the everyday attitude, i.e. toward that understanding of our world, including ourselves and one another, prior to philosophy’s interrogation of our unarticulated principles and values. [Thus] Plato names this pre-philosophical attitude by reference to those who are largely confined to it, “the many (hoi polloi),” and his term for the mode in which we relate to the world when immersed in our everyday lives (and indistinguishable from “the many”) is “doxa.” [Hence], we can say that the Apology thematizes Socratic philosophizing most centrally in its problematic relation to the everyday attitude and doxa, insofar as it is here that Socrates attempts to bring himself to light qua philosopher before “the many,” embodied by a jury of (likely) 501 of his fellow Athenian citizens.^[170]

Socrates’s method is elenctic because it aims at opening the possibility of questioning that which is otherwise always-already too-quickly and too-uncritically taken for granted or at face value, and thus answered, beforehand. And it is aporetic because far from attempting to reach a clear-cut response about that which it questions – a response that could be thereupon employed in a dogmatic way – it aims at underlining the need to think it rather than to know it in advance,^[171] i.e. the need to keep reflecting on how x, y, and z appear to us and pondering how we can better inquire into their being.^[172] Yet in Antisthenes this changes dramatically. For Antisthenes makes of Socrates’s propaedeutic negativeness something positive instead.^[173] As a result any “rule” capable of supplying any indication (no matter how provisional) on how the questioning should be carried out (so as to not fall back into the particularity of the departing δόχαι) is voluntarily abandoned.^[174] In other words, knowledge becomes deictic and the world contingent.

But with this – as Martínez Marzoa sees very well – the domain of any philosophical questioning is “disqualified” as such.^[175] If no “rules” can be set, no “limits” can be fixed either. Hence subjectivism wins over the philosophical terrain, turning it into a desert. And since “limits” are by definition two-sided (“A is what not-A is not,”^[176] “things ought to be approached not like that but like this,” etc.) the binary logic that also helps to distinguish the “necessary” from the “contingent” vanishes, which means that the latter can claim prevalence over the former, or rather be made identical to it and hence turned absolute. There are only three possibilities before this. (1) One is to say that things are fine in this way. (2) Another one is to not give up and pursue the work of philosophy. (3) Finally, there is the option of placing elsewhere a ground that may bring consistency to an otherwise radically contingent (un-)world. Cynics and skeptics chose 1. Aristotle and the Stoics clang to 2. The Epicureans remained in between 1 and 2. The Neoplatonists, between 2 and 3. When Christianity reached Greek culture, it place itself within the third option: a Christian is someone who is in this world to give testimony of a truth which is not from this world. And when the truth – which is no longer experienced as “disclosure” but as “norm” – is put elsewhere but wants to be reached, there are two possible ways of reaching it: to extend ourselves towards it, as the Gnostics fancied, or to contract it so that it may reach us, as Paul’s followers taught instead. And how can the truth contract itself? By lowering itself to the point of becoming entirely contingent, e.g. by becoming dependent on, and in rigour identical to, a contingent event: Jesus’s death and resurrection. In this way too, the contingent becomes absolute, only that, now, “the absurd becomes thesis.”^[177] Notice that Paul chooses very carefully his words: his κήρυγμα is a “scandal” (σκάνδαλον) for his fellow Jews, who could have never imagined their God die, let alone be humiliated on the cross; and it is “foolishness” (μωρία) for the non-Jews, i.e. for the Greeks – and their philosophy.^[178]

3.3 Re-wording ἀρχή – or, how to combine Heidegger with Pierre Clastres

But what is it that Paul leaves behind with his dismissal of the notion of ἀρχή? We would like to venture a response to this question by means of combining two apparently unrelated conceptual tools, namely, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and in particular his warning concerning the danger of Romanising ancient-Greek terms by projecting onto them the interpretative shadow of Roman imperialism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Clastres’s ethnographically-based concept of “society against the state,” through whose lens – we think – it is possible to interpret the nature of the ancient-Greek πόλις. But if we are correct, this means, then, that “savage” indivision and ancient-Greek “justice” mirror one another. This is the first point we would like to make in this section, which, nonetheless, we open with a few etymological remarks. Subsequently, we will try to show that the aforementioned coincident political model (“savage” and “ancient Greek”) can be thought with recourse to the notion of ἀρχή, provided the latter is reinterpreted according to its etymology, in opposition both to the Roman imperial ideal and to Paul’s anarchism.

Let us begin with a few diverging etymologies. In his course on Parmenides, Heidegger warns about the “appropriation of Greek words by Roman-Latin thought,” which, he says, entails “a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking;”^[179] and he adds: “The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.”^[180] Thus Γαῖα, the “Earth” that shelters all the living, is different from tellus, the dry element on which to build.^[181] Ἀληθής, i.e. “true” in the sense of “dis-closed,” is the opposite of verum, which denotes instead something “closed,” “concealed.”^[182] Ψεῦδος, the “dissembling” capable of deceiving, has nothing to do with falsum, which means “fallen,” i.e. that which is no longer rectum.^[183] In turn, in rectum the proper meaning of ὀρθός: “on and along the way,” is lost, as rectum denotes “that which is directed toward what is above because it directs from above and commands and ‘rules’ from above.”^[184] Lastly, from the “political,” i.e. from that which is relative to the πόλις, any notion of imperium or “command” must be decidedly removed.^[185]

This latter issue is especially relevant for our purpose here. For indeed the πόλις – and with this we transit from the domain of compared etymology to that of compared politics – is not a place of command. It is reminiscent instead, we should like to argue, of the extra-modern societies studied by Pierre Clastres (in the Paraguayan Chaco, but the argument is extensive to most extra-modern societies in America, Africa, Australia, Oceania, and part of Asia), in which “the chiefs are not there to command” but to “prevent [everyone] from fulfilling an[y] eventual desire for power,” so as to “ward off the irruption of division into the social body.”^[186] Myth, language, and ritual coalesce around that goal. Myth provides a normative foundation at once “immediate” and “exterior” to the undivided social body: it is the “ancestors” and the “gods,” whose time is the ground of every presently-lived time, that decree the law on which the living together of the community relies.^[187] In turn, the mission of the chiefs is to look after the myth by perpetuating its words, which they must not only transmit with their speeches, but also know when to apply so as to make justice, i.e. non-division, prevail there where conflicts may eventually arise.^[188] For “language is the very opposite of violence.”^[189] In consequence too, the chief must also be generous, as otherwise he himself would promote social division;^[190] and if he does, “the village or band will simply abandon him and throw in a leader more faithful in his duties.”^[191] In short then, “generosity” and “talent as a speaker” go hand in hand.^[192] Yet “[a]s the purveyor of wealth and messages the chief conveys nothing but his dependence on the group, and the obligation to exhibit at every moment, the innocence of his office.”^[193] Besides, speaking – which is therefore the privilege of the chief – is less a privilege than a duty,^[194] which means the chief remains by all means “the group’s prisoner.”^[195] Finally, the ritual inscribes the law on the body of all the members of the group, indistinctly; and painfully enough^[196] so that its signs remains forever on their skin (as scarifications, mutilations, tattoos, etc.):

“You are one of us. Each one of you is like us; each one of you is like the others. You are called by the same name, and you will not change your name. Each one of you occupies the same space and the same place among us: you will keep them. None of you is less than us; none of you is more than us. And you will never be able to forget it. You will not cease to remember the same marks that we have left on your bodies.”

[…] The mark on the body, on all bodies alike, declares: You will not have the desire for power; you will not have the desire for submission. ^[197]

We can draw from this one provisional conclusion: the extra-modern chieftainship matches neither the model of the ancient Oriental kings nor that of the Roman emperors; clearly the ancient-Greek “ruler” (ἀρχός, ἄρχων) offers a closer analogy. Thus, in Homer, the fact that the “rulers” hold the “scepter,” which they serve rather than use to be served by others,^[198] means, first and foremost, that they have the duty to “speak”^[199] to administer “justice,” which is considered to be “divine”^[200] – Heraclitus will later suggest that justice stands above the gods,^[201] and Sophocles identifies its source with that of the noblest speech.^[202] Likewise, when the “elders” sit to decide about something according to “justice,” they do so on “polished stones” in a “sacred circle,” holding their “scepters” and respecting their “turns.”^[203] The essence of the πόλις is there in nuce. Justice (δίκη) lies at its core – as it lies at the core of Plato’s Πολιτεία – and language (λόγος) is its vehicle. For without the proper words, there can be no justice; without justice there is no peace; and without peace life becomes a homeless wandering around. Hence Sophocles’s term for the one who indulges in ὕβρις or “excess” – of which Heraclitus says that “it needs to be put out more than a house on fire”^[204] – and therefore acts unjustly: s/he is ἄ-πολις.^[205]

How to define the πόλις, then? Drawing on Plato and Aristotle, Heidegger says that it is both “the ‘where’ to which man as ζῷν λόγον ἔχον belongs” and “the ‘where’ from which alone order is ordained.”^[206] There is little mystery in the reciprocity of the two parts of this definition, since, thought in a Greek rather than Roman way, “order” is but another name for the “justice” (δίκη)^[207] before which all are evenly brought by the λόγος – which, as Heraclitus says, is “one” (ἕν), “wise” (σοφόν), and “common” (κοινόν) to all.^[208] The parallelism with what Clastres describes is extraordinary: the Guarani

god Namandu […] first creates the Word, the substance common to the divine and the human. He assigns to humanity the destiny of collecting the Word, of existing in it and protecting it. Humans, all equally chosen by the deities, are Protectors of the Word, and protected by it. Society is the enjoyment of the common good that is the Word. Instituted as equal by divine decision […] society assembles as a whole, that is, an undivided whole […] so that the men of this society are all one.^[209]

Let us quickly add: not in the Pauline sense, as, untamed, their “savage thought” still responds to the strict binary logic – in terms of exogamous alliances,^[210] lineage distribution,^[211] totemic classifications,^[212] and/or mythopoiesis^[213] – on which, as we have stressed following Lévi-Strauss and Patrice Maniglier, any true world is ultimately based.^[214]

Furthermore, we should like to stress that what Clastres calls the equalitarian “law” that grants its non-division to the extra-modern group, and the justice glowing at the heart of the Greek πόλις, may be thought with recourse to the original meaning of the term ἀρχή.

Back then to etymology, if shortly. As it is known, the semantics of the term ἀρχή is twofold. On the one hand, it means “beginning” – in connection to ἀρχαῖος, “original,” “ancient,” “old.” On the other hand, it means “reign” – in connection to ἀρχικός, “to put into power.” Yet from these two meanings the former one (attested in Homer) is also the oldest one (for ἀρχή as “reign” is first documented in Pindar). In fact, ἀρχή is a verbal noun of ἄρχω, which means “to be the first,” thence “to begin” (and only derivatively “to rule”).^[215] Additionally, the Proto-Indo-European semantic field in which ἀρχή belongs includes, too, the root *h₂erǵ-, which carries with it the meaning “glittering,” whence terms like “silver” (Avestic

So far so good. But how can ἀρχή, thus understood, be τὸ ἄπειρον, as Anaximander seems to have held? Once more, Heidegger proves helpful. “[O]ne translates, [and] that already means one ‘interprets,’ τὸ ἄπειρον with ‘the limitless,’ the ‘infinite,’”^[222] remarks Heidegger. “The translation is correct,” he adds. “However, it says nothing.”^[223] It says nothing because τὸ ἄπειρον cannot be an “ens” (Seiende), i.e. a particular “being;” nor can it be the “universal cosmic matter” (allgemeine Weltstoff)^[224] out of which everything would be made, because this would be a non-early Greek way of understanding what ἀρχή means. “τὸ ἄπειρον,” writes Heidegger, “is the ἀρχή of being [and in this sense] τὸ ἄπειρον is the repelling of limitation. It relates itself to being […] and that means, in Greek, to the presencing of what presences.”^[225] It can be argued, therefore, that τὸ ἄπειρον is, qua being’s ἀρχή, something active: the action of impeding any limits. But what does this mean? If Anaximander is not thinking here in some-thing infinite, what, then, are the limits thus impeded by what we are told that consists in impeding them? Clearly, they cannot be the limits imposed from within by the presencing (i.e. by the being, since “being” and “presence” are one and the same thing) of that which is brought into presence each time,^[226] for that which shines forth into unconcealment becomes present as such and such, i.e. it enters the region of being in an aspectual and hence delimited way, thus receiving its own “portion” (μέτρον) and “gleam” (κόσμος),^[227] which it cannot overstep, as that would entail indulging in ὕβρις. Consequently, the limits that τὸ ἄπειρον impedes must be those that what shines forth into unconcealment may eventually try to unfairly impose on other beings against their own right to shine, they too, into the open. Put differently: Anaximander’s limits are any particular, hence arbitrary, abusive restrictions imposed on being’s inherent justice, no matter which and made by no matter whom.^[228] Finally, it should be noted that if δίκη lies at the core of the πόλις as its transcendental condition, a non-delimited space likewise lies at its geographic centre: the ἀγορά or, in Sparta, the ἀπέλλα (which means literally “stoneless:” ἀ-πέλλα); another name for it is ἐκκλησία, which names the place where those who are “called” (καλέω) “out” (εκ-) from their own homes and concerns gather – unlike the Christian ecclesia, which is the “common place of gathering” where everyone acquires, by means of the eucharist, an even greater degree of personal intimacy with God.

“None of you is less than us; none of you is more than us. Hence you will not have the desire for power; you will not have the desire for submission.” Invoked in the ἀγορά, inscribed in the body, pronounced by the chief or the elder: these are the words of old of “savages” and Greeks alike. This is their ἀρχή and their law – one that demands that a difference be made between those who comply to it and those who transgress it; for the world, any world, is based on the identification of opposite ontological categories into which everything fits: bright and pale, bow and basket, enemy and friend.

3.4 Becoming “savage”: The other way out of the imperial frontier

Rome had perverted the very notion of ἀρχή by transforming it into imperium: “with Rome or against Rome, to which you will sooner or later submit all the same,” which means that sooner or later everything will become “One.” Paul adds another twist to this very perversion: there is no difference between enemy and friend, we are all equally justified by God, we are all “One.”^[229] In other words, Paul’s all-inclusive oneness replaces Rome’s all-exclusive oneness – one type of oneness substitutes for another one. In one case (Rome), One results from privileging, of Two terms, One over the Other to the extent of declaring that Other inexistent in the short or the long run, i.e. from corrupting an originally Binary structure (“we, Romans, and everyone else”) and making it Univocal instead (“we, Romans, and everyone else like us”). In the other case (Paul), it results from declaring that everything is One to begin with (“we are all justified by God in the same way”).

It is clear, though, that there was/is another possibility of contesting imperial domination – a possibility that has remained insufficiently explored due to the fact that Western history has basically oscillated between Roman (and later Christian and modern) imperialisms and their Pauline (and later anti-Christian and postmodern) subversions, i.e. (to repeat it once more) between the many permutations of Paul’s u-topia and the many dys-topian resurgences of its denial. We are not thinking, however, in the alternative: against the One – whether an a priori One (Paul) or an a posteriori One (Rome) – the Many understood as the One’s numberless virtual transpositions: “this,” and “that,” and “that” too, etc. Nor are we thinking in the negative rendering of such formula: “neither this,” “nor that,” etc., so that any identity is subverted and made impossible beforehand. For, as we shall see, no world can be established upon these premises either.

Suppose, then, that we could move out of the Roman frontier in an altogether different direction: either via Greece or via the forest (silva) inhabited by those silvatici whom the Romans thought deprived of any social organisation. What would we find there? Again: a binary logic. But we would find it too if we move backwards along the history of human evolution. Thus in Gesture and Speech – which, originally published in 1984, is one of the earliest, most original, and successful attempts to elaborate a theory of human biocultural evolution – Leroi-Gourhan asserts that all “reference systems” of “Paleolithic thought,” as we find them displayed in what is often if improperly called Paleolithic “art,” were “ultimately based on the alternation of opposites – day/night, heat/cold, fire/water, man/woman, and so on.”^[230] Leroi-Gourhan talks of “binary complementarity”^[231] and explains through it as well, among other things, spatial distributions,^[232] social cooperation,^[233] and the “dynamic equilibrium” between security and freedom.^[234] In his “Introduction” to the English edition of Leroi-Gourhan’s book, Randall White speaks in turn of the “basic binary oppositions” implicit in the “operational sequences” – which are always, he adds, “more-or-less subconscious,” “unverbalized,” and “unrecognized” – that guided the creation of earliest human “material culture,” “social organization,” and “cosmology.”^[235] It is relatively easy to figure out why: bipedalism entailed the liberation of the forearms and this, in turn, brought about a very wide range of both potential “un-focusness” and potential “multi-tasking,” as Leroi-Gourhan suggests. Put otherwise: everything became excessive for those-who-we-seem-no-longer-to-be-but-still-are. Herder makes a similar argument in his Essay on the Origin of Language.^[236] Now, before excess and un-focusness there is only one chance to make it through, namely, to turn the Multiplicity of what can be sensed (which is practically infinite) into a world, i.e. into a de-limited Multiplicity; and this means to structure it. Language serves no other purpose, in the sense that naming permits us to identify this and that.^[237] But everything named must then be distributed somehow. And the most immediate and, ultimately too, effective way of doing it is in pairs of opposites: “day/night, heat/cold, fire/water, man/woman, and so on.” First, because our own body – and the mind can be said to be its idea^[238] – is organised (not systematically but often enough) in dual terms: we have two eyes, two arms, two legs, etc. And second, because our experience reports to us about the recurrence of dual phenomena – or in any event we map them thus: above and below, in and out, in front of and behind, right and left, concave and convex, striated and smooth, absent and present, dark and bright, etc.

This explains, among other things (including the binary code of modern computer programming), the system of synonyms and antonyms on which the vocabulary of any language is based, gender roles – which need neither be rigid nor hierarchical^[239] – like e.g. those studied by Clastres among the Aché (“basquet” and “bow”),^[240] and binary classifications of all sorts. (a) Totemic classifications, for instance; for, as Radcliffe-Brown – who defines “association by contrariety” as “a universal feature of human thinking”^[241] – suspected,^[242] and as Lévi-Strauss shows, these display “theorical associations”^[243] based on the characteristics of “symmetrically-opposed species.”^[244] Or, more broadly, (b) social organisations, which totemic alliances, in turn, help to vertebrate: thus social groups are often divided into two exogamous moieties to which opposite symbolic qualities and roles are attributed,^[245] so that, for example, the shaman of the group belongs in one moiety whereas the chief belongs in the other moiety – something similar, then, to the two kings (ἀρχαγέται) of Sparta, which belonged in the Agiad and Eurypontid families that carried with them the lineages of the mythical twins Eurysthenes and Procles, respectively. This additionally means that extra-modern systems of kinship (and kinship in general) are (is) based on a binary logic, i.e. on the distinction between affinity and consanguinity, and, therefore too, that a “living person is not an individual but dividual, a [composite] singularity of body and soul internally constituted by the self/other, consanguine/affine polarity”^[246] – a singularity that is “decomposed at death, which separates a principle of affinal alterity, the soul, from a principle of consaguineal identity, the body, […] [thus] releas[ing] the tension [.] between affinity and consanguinity that impels the kinship process.”^[247] So we have not only totemic classifications and social organisations, but also (c) individuals (which are no longer individuals but “dividuals,” to use once more Marilyn Strathern’s term) affected by a binary logic that Lévi-Strauss hesitates to define as being co-substantial to human thought; still, he says, “many peoples” have “chosen” it,^[248] which seems to us to be a subtle way of affirming that it is co-substantial indeed to human thought – for where and when were those “many peoples” given the choice to choose it, and how did they make their choice thereof? Add to this list (d) myths, like those of the aforementioned legendary great–great–great grandsons of Heracles and the widespread American twin-myths like those of lynx and coyote among the Nimiipuu and their neighbours,^[249] to which one could add just as well the Proto-Indo-European myth recently reconstructed by James Mallory and Douglas Adams in which “the universe is created from a primeval giant [man] […] who is sacrificed and dismembered, the various parts of his anatomy serving to provide a different element of nature,”^[250] i.e. one of the oldest myths we know of about the reciprocal articulation of nature and culture. And add also (e) rituals, like those which, from South-East Africa to Central and Western Australia (notice the geographical disparity!), reflect a bemusing regularity when it comes to the binary chromatics (e.g. red/white, red/black, 0/white and black) employed in funeral and fertility rites.^[251]

Three important nuances are in order here before we continue. First, “contrariety” means something else than “complementarity,” in the sense that it means something more complex which, in rigour, must be formulated neither as 1/2 + 1/2 = 1 (i.e. as a “unity”) nor as 1 + 1 = 2 (i.e. as a “duality”). For, as Viveiros de Castro observes apropos extra-modern binary social organisations, “each moiety […] is the inverse of the opposite moiety,”^[252] with which it thereby forms “neither [a] unity nor [a] duality but something almost exactly in the middle”^[253] that is better mathematically transcribed as √2, given that √2, he goes on to say, “is such a number that its multiplicative inverse is equal to its half, i.e.: 1/√2 = √2/2,” so that “[t]he inverse of the ratio between the terms is equal to half of the ratio.”^[254] Second, to avoid falling into inertia dual organisations often imprint on their binary structure a principle of “permanent” or “dynamic disequilibrium.”^[255] In this way, commonality and competition, cooperation and rivalry, reinforce one another and help to avoid each other’s risks (for example, a feast can include dance contests which nobody wins and shared meals which everybody enjoys). Aside: is this not Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s blind spot? Third, binary structures – we have already alluded to it – are anything but closed systems. On the one hand, they are always flexible enough to admit changes; on the other hand, they do not overdetermine but from the distance, so to speak, the events in which life consists. We find Roy Wagner’s ethnography particularly interesting in this regard. “If Americans and other Westerners create the incidental world by constantly trying to predict, rationalize, and order it,” he writes:

then tribal, religious, and peasant peoples create their universe of innate convention by constantly trying to change, readjust, and impinge upon it. Our concern is that of bringing things into an ordered and consistent relation – whether one of logically organized “knowledge” or practically organized “application” – and we call the summation of our efforts Culture. Their concern might be thought of as an effort to “knock the conventional off balance,” and so make themselves powerful and unique in relation to it. […]

The conventionally prescribed tasks of everyday life, what one “should” do in such a society, are guided by a vast, continually changing and constantly augmented set of differentiating controls […] These include all manner of kin and productive roles, magical and practical techniques, possible modes of conduct for personal deportment. And if the ethnographer finds it difficult to standardize these controls, or catch a “native” in the act of explicitly “performing” one of them, it is because their very nature and intent defies the kind of literalness that “standardization” or “performance” (as well as the ethnographer’s own professional ethic of consistency) implies. They are not Culture, they are not intended to be “performed” or followed as a “code,” but rather used as the basis of inventive improvisation. […] The person who is able to do this well – even to the point of inventing wholly new controls – is admired and often emulated. The controls are themes to be “played upon” and varied, rather in the way that jazz lives in a constant improvisation of its subject matter.

And so we can speak of this form of action as a continual adventure in “unpredicting” the world^[256]

– in between the lines of unconscious binary structures, that is.^[257]

And how else but as negotiation can this inventive improvisation be thought of in political terms? Yet for negotiation to be possible there must be two, not one: friend and enemy, same and other. Contingency may well dictate when, where, and even who might be in position to negotiate, but the structure according to which the two positions ought to be distributed cannot be declared contingent in turn.