The Gnostic Politics of World Loss

Abstract

One of the harder lessons offered by history is that only the first half of the revolution seems worth carrying out. This study examines how, contra Christianity, which spells out the fate of revolution in its entirety, Gnosticism stands as a symbol for revolution arrested and immortalized in its most radical phase. It shows that Gnosticism is a revolution that structurally renounces the prospect of phenomenal victory in exchange for the eternal preservation and constant renewal of its revolutionary energy. I do so by examining how, rejecting worldly victory, the critical spirit of Gnosticism seeks its minimal and sole embodiment in the individual (the individuated, the indivisible, the residue). I argue that, by building the court of radical inwardness as its theater for enacting what I call the “politics of world loss,” Gnosticism invents the noumenal as that impossible space for enacting the quintessentially phenomenal, i.e., the political.

1. Introduction

The First Half of the Revolution

One of the harder lessons offered by history is that only the first half of the revolution seems worth carrying out. If Christianity, with its initial subversion and later officialization, spells out the fate of revolution in its entirety, Gnosticism stands as a symbol for revolution arrested and immortalized in its most radical phase—“the first half,” as it were—a revolution that structurally renounces the prospect of phenomenal victory, in exchange for the eternal preservation and constant renewal of its revolutionary energy—a continual incandescing of the mind that struggles to consume the world as darkness and demiurgic opposition. Gnosticism is the radicalization and culmination of the critical spirit unleashed by Christianity. It participates in the Christian critique of authority, universalizes it and directs it against Christianity itself—that is, against a Church consolidated, institutionalized and officialized, a church whose radical inwardness has been dissipated through its process of increasing phenomenalization—through its gaining and becoming of “world.”1 In the eyes not of the world but of the permanent social critic, the victory of the established Church speaks rather of the reason for its failure, just as the failure of Gnostic Christianity tells precisely the secret of its victory. Rejecting worldly victory and thereby escaping the failure that pursues it, worldly or otherwise, the critical spirit of Gnosticism seeks its minimal and sole embodiment in the individual—that is, in the individuated, the indivisible, the residue. Paradoxical enough, by building the court of radical inwardness as its theater for enacting what I shall call the “politics of world loss,” Gnosticism invents the noumenal as that impossible space for enacting the quintessentially phenomenal, i.e., the political.

The following study investigates how Gnosticism can be understood not merely as a religious heresy but as a distinct and enduring political philosophy. It asks the following: what are the core principles of this “Gnostic politics,” and how does it offer a model for revolutionary critique that structurally renounces worldly power? Using a methodology of conceptual analysis, this paper draws on Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment, Foucault’s genealogy of power and Kant’s definition of Enlightenment to construct Gnosticism as an “ideal type” of politics. It aims to contribute to the existing scholarship of political theory broadly construed by reframing Gnosticism as a political theory of permanent and inward revolution. This paper argues that the ultimate expression of Gnosticism and the revolution it effectuated is found not in action in the world but in what I call a “politics of writing” that has profound affinities with the modern critical ethos.

2. The Strategy of Double Retreat

Gnostic Ressentiment vs. Christian Ressentiment

In his polemic on the genealogy of morals, Nietzsche ruthlessly dissected the Christian moral heritage and exposed its driving force, what he called “ressentiment,” to be the motor for social change.2 The Gnostic politics of world loss, however, calls for the drawing of a distinction within “ressentiment” as an affect and a concept. I would like to claim that the critical spirit that animates the Gnostic politics of loss is born of a specific species of ressentiment, one different from that which animates organized Christianity. The latter is driven rather by a far less universalized and for that reason also less absolutized ressentiment, for the Christian source of anguish has been primarily inter-subjective;3 likewise the solution it has devised: both the Christian vision and its instrument of salvation are essentially other-regarding—which explains well why eternal love can—and indeed has to—create eternal hell. The will to punishment and the demand of retribution are directed toward someone.

The Gnostic, on the other hand, practices an ethics that is self-regarding. He cultivates a far more intense interest in his own individual salvation than in that of his acosmic brethren, whose salvation, viewed through a Gnostic lens, must be as individualized and solitary and thus can neither help nor be helped with. As to that voluptuous pleasure said to be afforded the Christians by the practice of and the urge to condemnation—a pleasure which few Christians are able to renounce, according to Nietzsche—the Gnostic is curiously immune. In him are an odd indifference toward and an inner aloofness (sometimes disguised as libertinism) from one’s neighbor, a veritable absence of the will to punish and the demand for retribution, as if the being of the Gnostic simply would not be touched. His attitude toward salvation is tinged with a shade of autism. Unlike the Christian ressentiment, which is discriminate and concentrative, specific and personal, the Gnostic ressentiment is monolithic and totalizing, abstract and impersonal—impersonal, since the Gnostic personification of the world and the stars belongs to an altogether different realm of being from one’s “neighbors,” the defining category in Christian theology. Call the Gnostic ressentiment ontological, existential, metaphysical, or what we will; it is not moral. Directed against the world itself as a demiurgic creation, it is unmediated by any qualitative differentiations within this demonized totality, as analyzed by Hans Jonas in his seminal study.4 In the drama of salvation, the Gnostic man sets himself (that is, his acosmic, divine Self) up as the hero and the world (including his own demonic psycho-physical realm) as the villain. The category of the neighbor receives no separate, immediate dramatic representation. Insofar as it plays any part at all in the drama of salvation, it plays as part of and is inseparable from the world.

This omission or neutralization of the irreducible Christian category of the neighbor, I would like to point out, along with the essentially impersonal and abstract character of Gnostic morality, betrays a strategic silence and deliberate indifference toward what I shall call the Christian moral colonization of the territory of the social. Here, I differ from the majority of modernist revivals of Gnosticism that see in this indifference to the social traces of the moral, ethical and intellectual superiority of Gnostic. Does the Gnostic know that the only way he can best the Christian in his dirty game of moral imperialization is by not playing it, by fostering an indifference and ostracizing the neighbor from his intra-personal community of the Self, the soul and the spirit? This question, asked on a psychological level, blurs the issue at stake on the existential level. If the mode of being of organized Christianity represents a retreat already from the historical Roman world, the being of the Gnostic represents a further retreat—a double one, that is, not only from the classical world but from the inter-subjective realm reclaimed by organized Christianity as well.

This explains for us why the being of the Gnostic resolutely excludes the category of the neighbor, why instead it upholds the rigorous discipline of solitude and devotes the sojourn in this world to the hermetic craft. It consists of conducting the self as an allegory of the divine whose meaning is veiled and whose message is communicated only in secrecy, as secret (See Wolfson 2013, pp. 113–14). Viewed from an inter-subjective perspective, these become his artillery on the battlefield of the social.5 As an essentialized social critique and a covert critique of the social, the Gnostic politics of world loss participates in the social realm by way of this strategy of double retreat. Since this strategy arose out of an experience of world-alienation one degree more radical than the Christian one, it signifies the launching of a critique more pungent and less compromisable, a totalizing critique that dethrones the creator-God and demonizes the summa of empirical reality. Its existential pathos notwithstanding, the Gnostic experience of world loss does not stop at a poetics of world loss but mobilizes itself into what may be described as a politics of world loss. Against the Christian occupation of the social by morality, the critical potential of the Gnostic being is unleashed through the ingenuous inversion of such a “narcissistic” turn. And therewith its outward sting assumes the guise of an inward gaze. By thus enacting the politics of world loss within his very self, the Gnostic man utilizes this inwardness as both the instrument and the plane of revolutionary happening.

The subversive individualism that underpins the Gnostic politics of world loss by no means storms all the way down the valley of anarchy. For all its indictment of institutionalized power and juridicized authority, it cannot claim to have indicted governmentality per se, for at the end of the day, the in-divisible, acosmic, absolute Self would emerge as the last barricade of governmentality and stand there as its strongest fort. Herein lies the triumph of the Gnostic ressentiment over the Christian one, a triumph of selfhood, or what I shall call the “ruse of authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit). The Gnostic self is distinct from the Gnostic person. The former emerges eschatologically out of the positivity of the latter. For the Gnostic, whatever evil that pertains to the psycho-physical realm of his person is not of his self but of the demiurgic world, and hence it is to be progressively disowned and dispossessed through an eschatological movement. What comes at the end of this movement, namely, the final authentication into the Self—that supreme act of owning and possessing—is not only the fulfillment of goodness but the restoration of divinity itself. Thus is the nothingness or nihilism of the Gnostic personhood sublated into the fullness of the Gnostic selfhood. “Sublated”—that is, what is prescribed on the doctrinal level to be a radical break is experienced by the phenomenological consciousness as a tragic continuity. The attribution of selfhood to the final form of the phenomenological consciousness propounds, de facto (though not de jure, to borrow a Kantian distinction), a narrative principle, by which is redeemed all previous forms of the phenomenological consciousness. Chained to time, they were permanently in the grip of the world, and they would have remained so, had they not been retrospectively liberated by the crowning of selfhood. This Gnostic ruse of authenticity amounts to a trick of time—against time: it surreptitiously exchanges the initial nothingness of the Gnostic person with the ultimate fullness of the Gnostic Self—never admitted on the doctrinal level, to be sure, but a lived one.

The Gnostic relocation of divinity into the “acosmic Self” prefigures a distinctly modern intellectual drama, one that unfolds in two acts. The first act is the triumphant humanism articulated by Feuerbach and Marx. As Feuerbach famously argued, theology is merely a “withheld anthropology;” God is the projection of humanity’s own idealized essence. The task of the modern age, for him, was to re-appropriate this projected essence, to bring divinity back from the heavens and recognize it in Man. This is the very structure of the Gnostic drama of salvation, now secularized6: the divine spark, lost to an alien God (projection), must be recovered through gnosis (critical consciousness). Marx takes this a step further, transforming the project from a philosophical recovery into a historical one. The “self-determination” he champions is the overcoming of alienation, allowing humanity to finally realize its “species-being”—its own inherent, god-like potential for creative freedom. In this first act, the Gnostic elevation of the divine Anthropos finds its modern expression in the deification of Man as the sovereign author of his own destiny.

Yet, herein lies the dialectical twist that leads to the second act: the postmodern “death of Man.” The Gnostic Self, the prototype for this deified Man, is defined by what it is not: it is not the body, not the world, not history. It is a pure, abstract, acosmic principle. As Nietzsche foresaw, the “death of God” was not just the removal of a deity but the collapse of the entire metaphysical “true world” that guaranteed meaning and gave concepts like “the Soul” or “the Spirit” their value. The deified Man of humanism was placed into this now-empty throne, but his authority was built on the same unstable, otherworldly foundation. Foucault completes this trajectory by subjecting “Man” to the same genealogical critique that dispatched God. He shows that “Man”—as a stable, universal object of knowledge and ground of truth—was a recent invention of the Enlightenment, a placeholder as fragile as its predecessor. Because the Gnostic-humanist Man was defined against the phenomenal world, once his transcendental guarantee disappeared, he had no ground to fall back on. He could not be rediscovered in the body or in the world he had so thoroughly demonized. Thus, the very Gnostic move that empowered Man by abstracting him from the world ultimately led to his conceptual erasure. In this completion of the humanist project by its postmodern unraveling, the Gnostic politics of world loss is fully revealed: a frustrated anthropology whose radical act of self-deification contained the seed of its own dissolution.

In the above section, I distinguished between Christian and Gnostic ressentiment to lay the groundwork for the politics of world loss. Whereas Christian ressentiment is moral and inter-subjective, directed at the “neighbor,” Gnostic ressentiment is ontological and self-regarding, directed at the world itself. This results in a strategic “double retreat” from both the classical world and the Christian social realm. This inward turn is not an escape but a political strategy, culminating in the “ruse of authenticity,” which posits a divine inner Self against a corrupt outer person. This establishes an internal form of authority, recasting theology as a revolutionary anthropology that locates the principle of government within the individual.

3. The Narcissistic Machine

Theology as Anthropology

But here is a less optimal philosophical occasion for discussing the Gnosticism of Marx than for trying to understand the particular Marxism of Gnosticism. Before we can more fully gauge the revolutionary potential of the Gnostic politics of world loss, however, a closer examination of the narcissistic movement of the Gnostic theological–anthropological doublet is called for. God and Man, God–Man, the Man–God—this is the grand Narcissistic motif that structures the Gnostic divine drama as it does the cosmic one, and it structures the one as the other. The plot can be abridged into an initial alienation and a final recognition (Erkenntniss), history being that process which brings the one into the other—an education of the divine (trans-personalized into the pneumatic humanity) toward His own self-knowledge, which is precisely what gnosis means—a knowing of the self by the self, a mirror-comprehending, a recognition. The Gnostic apparatus of divine drama is a narcissistic machine. It is infantile, steeped in a de-spatialized experience of time—that is, an experience of time monopolized either by the atemporal simultaneity of eternity or by the temporal simultaneity of mystical ecstasy, both of which discount the experience of succession, which can only take “place” in space, in the world, in history. This Gnostic penchant for simultaneity (with its atemporalized double, eternity) discriminates against succession not so much by denying it but, more ingeniously, by subordinating it to and hence incorporating it within the hegemony of a time interiorized and de-spatialized. The Gnostic has a need for history, but he does not need it in the same way his Christian brethren do. While they need it as they need the Church and each other, he transforms both history and the Church into tropes of and metaphors for his own inwardness. To say that he purges history of space amounts to saying that he purges spatiality of its constitutive worldliness. It is deterritorialized, severing all the mundane ties to the world of demiurgic creation, the world of time and space, and “reterritorialized” through a politics of writing that partakes of eternity.7

The Gnostic hostility to space is typically shown by the symbolic position occupied by the image in the elaborate Gnostic myth—a narcissistic tale, “so full of tragic charm.”8 From the divine self-multiplication into the Pleroma and its pairs of aeons, to the divine creation of the Primal Man, down to the familiar identity of the seeker and the sought in Gnostic poetry, the mirror and its image have consistently assumed its particular potency and acted as a significant “narrative device for conveying the transmission of being from one level of creation to another.”9 This transmission of being is the result of a mirroring, so much so that the Gnostic image is not made, but reflected. It never becomes an artifact that finds its place within the world of man-made objects but rather hovers around in a perpetual movement of fleeing and disappearing (déjà disparu). The spirit does not dwell in the world but haunts it. This spectral character of the pneuma enables the Gnostic image to preserve its full ideality and ensures its transmissibility through an almost mechanical reproducibility. In other words, the ontological status and the mode of representation that belong to the Gnostic image are closer to those of a photograph than to those of a painting or an icon. The Gnostic image bears no traces of the human hand—it is not created but rather emerges—is emanated—out of the black box of the cosmogonic camera, a machine closed in upon itself and open only with a mysterious aperture to receive divine light. The Gnostic man is the divine, but entrapped in the world he remains only a negative of this “is” and needs that little bottle of resolution called history in order to be developed into a positive. This photographic procedure of the Gnostic eschatology literally requires an all-encompassing darkness—amply provided by the demiurgic world—as the dark room where the truth of a positive could be patiently developed in the resolution of history.

If the intricate mechanism of Gnostic salvation could thus be approximated via our photographic metaphor, the wider gate of Catholic salvation might be glimpsed through an architectural metaphor. While the former encapsulates its politics of world loss within the peculiar two-dimensionality of the photographic negative, the latter erects and preserves a three-dimensional quasi-public sphere with the actual corporeal presence of the cathedral. Contempt for such material conditions for political actions is what marks the Gnostic politics as one of radical and self-imposed world loss. It meticulously deconstructs any spatiality of the world where tangible human actions could be carried out. Human plurality, which can only be nurtured in that spatiality (if not a polis, then a church), withers into multiplied singularity and ceaseless doubling along a de-territorialized surface of spectrality. As the Gnostic politics of world loss has not even the material platform of a quasi-public sphere on which it could unfold, it resorts to the “private” sphere of one’s own inwardness, ontologizing this modus vivendi and making this rigorous separation into a doctrinal component. In a social sphere shrunk from the three-dimensional public space of a polis to the still three-dimensional yet quasi-public space of the Catholic cathedral, further into the two-dimensionality of the Gnostic photographic negative, one may encounter either oneself or the other, but no longer friends. Most typically, one encounters oneself as the other and the other as oneself, and neither as friends—an exemplary experience of alienation from which the Gnostic ressentiment forges his specific form of social critique. Through the idealization of space—the collapsing of space into the representation of space, the dismantling of the architectural space of the cathedral by the virtual space of the photograph, the Gnostic social critic locates within his own inwardness the topos of revolutionary happening (a taking-place, an event).

In this section, I have argued that the Gnostic theological–anthropological system functions as a “narcissistic machine,” where the divine drama is a process of self-recognition that de-spatializes history and transforms it into an internal event. Using the metaphor of photography to contrast with the “architecture” of the Catholic Church, I have shown how Gnosticism collapses the three-dimensional public sphere into the two-dimensional, virtual space of radical inwardness. Lacking a worldly platform, the Gnostic critic thus locates the revolutionary topos within the self, making this interiority the exclusive theater for a politics of world loss.

4. Events of Love

An Institutional Perspective

Like its Christian counterpart, the Gnostic revolutionary happening too is an event of love. But against the radically inter-subjective structure of Christian love, what the Gnostic event enacts is an intra-subjective “love,” an eros that forms and increases itself in the agonized striving from the nothingness of personhood toward the divinity of selfhood. The Gnostic God of love is not Christ, but Narcissus. Its imperative of self-love is readily manifest on the scriptural level, where narcissistic transferences are doctrinally embedded. It is a two-fold and two-way narcissistic transference, ontologically ensured by the inherent transmissibility of the idea or truth through the photographic negative that is the pneumatic humanity. The transparency of self-communion is achieved, on the one hand, in the communion of the Father with the acosmic Self—a “mirror transference which is the merger of the self with the idealized parent imago,” and on the other hand, as a “twinship or alter-ego transference,”10 manifested in the communion of the Son (or Savior/Prince/Messenger/Seeker) with the pneumatic humanity (the sought pearl lost in the filth of the world). The oscillation or two-way movement inherent in this double transference grants the Gnostic love an ultimately symmetrical structure—a symmetry unbroken by the ontological chasm of creatureliness. The absoluteness of this creatureliness, however, is what founds the very structure of Christian love and predetermines its movement. This ontological asymmetry of the creator and the creature with the corresponding structural asymmetry of Christian love make the Passion of Christ the highest and turning point in the event of Christian love. For the Christian, Christ is the mediator that bridges this ontological chasm of creatureliness and divinity. That is why this God of love has to be wholly creature in his Passion, at one with his tormented body and truly suffer. The suffering body—this is the rock over which the Christian tumbles and across which the Gnostic simply skips with one leg. It is the leg of the spirit.

Doctrinally speaking, the separation of the God of creation from the God of love and salvation is what gives the Gnostic lover this leg of the spirit and enables him to see his body as totally demonized, steeped in the muck of the world and hence not so much beyond redemption as in fact below it. For in the fun business of salvation, all that matters is the spirit, and to save that you need not spill blood—all you need is knowledge. But as we all know, doctrinal speaking can only speak thus far. The Gnostic lover could dismiss the body as the prison of the spirit so nonchalantly, only because his body had not imposed itself upon him with such extremity and urgency, and with such a dire need for justification and re-interpretation, as did those tormented and lacerated bodies of the persecuted and the martyred. For the ironically apolitical individualist of the second century, the body had not cried out to be recognized in all its brutal corporeality as it did for our intensely politicized and victimized communitarians, who became their bodies through suffering and became—or so they believed, and had to believe thus—true Christians through this suffering body—identified with the suffering body of Christ. The Gnostic body, on the other hand, and on the fringe of history and politics, had never been thus compelled to be an immediate bearer of meaning. It never became dramatized under the limelight of salvation and hence never became an “event.” On the contrary, the Gnostic body was allowed to remain in the darkness of the private, and in that of the demiurgic world, whose demonization, when translated politically, seems both to presuppose and to promote a privatization. This privatization is what did for the Gnostic body the trick of traveling comfortably as a phantom of the spirit along the doctrinal plane, which is not—and neither will it be—invaded, broken, or re-configured by events that happen along the experiential plane, if only for the simple reason that nothing really happens in the phenomenal sense of the word. Thanks to this politics of world loss, the Gnostic body had been exempted from the scorch and scald of direct politicization and victimization that are expected to arise out of an actual confrontation with the coercive state power.

The Gnostic body politics is one that discreetly keeps its distance from any institutional fuss: the gradual dispossession of the body does not hang on any externally inflicted suffering and remains an essentially individualized techné. Whether through ascetic restraint or libertine abandon, its mode of resistance is strategically diffuse and scattered. Unlike the body politic of Catholic martyrdom, it keeps no standing army against the cosmic tyranny but puts up a guerilla’s fight now and then, here and there. The secret of Gnostic nonconformity seems to consist of this critical distance stringently administered and the autonomy subsequently won—the autonomy of “not to be governed quite so much” (Foucault 1997).11 The martyred body, via the participation of victimhood, inevitably establishes the ever-so intimate affective bond with its own perpetrator—the institutionalized power of the disciplinary regime of the Empire, thereby feeding into and ultimately overtaking the political juggernaut while being overtaken by it. The irreducible phenomenality of Catholic politics dictates the Church to play the card of martyrdom in order to consolidate its institutional structure in the face of persecution. By thus entering the game, the Church tacitly acknowledges the validity of a form of authority, even when it denounces the legitimacy of its historical manifestation. The Gnostic politics of world loss, by way of a principled suspicion of phenomenality, is free to espouse another form of authority, a discontinuous, fluid and polysemic one that effectively liberates it from the neediness for institutional and hierarchical organization. Similarly, the power it wields against its cosmic oppressor is heterogeneous from the kind of power which lords over it and which the Church tarries within its masquerade of martyrdom. The power vested in the Gnostic politics of world loss is the power of self-government, with the self understood not as the person of the sovereign but as the un-reified, un-incarnatable spirit which does not travel by the medium of the world. The forms of power enjoyed by the State and coveted by the Church, on the other hand, are continuous with each other through at least three common needs: for the medium of the world, for the body of the sovereign and for the condition of human plurality. Hence, the exhibitionism so often accused of the Catholic martyrs is after all not a totally unjust charge, for the theatricality thus implied is evidence of the irreducible worldliness of the Catholic politics, which, despite its claim of other-worldliness, lives off the phenomenality of the world theater far more than the Gnostic politics of world loss. It is strictly speaking not the martyrs that need the world as their stage but the Catholic Church, which, through organized suffering and the martyred body, turns the persecution into a courtship with power and authority.

To summarize, I have contrasted in this section the “events of love” from an institutional perspective. Christian love, founded on the ontological asymmetry between Creator and creature, politicized the suffering body of the martyr to build institutional power, thereby entering into a transaction with the very worldly authority it opposed. In contrast, Gnostic love is an intra-subjective, symmetrical and narcissistic transference that bypasses the need for a suffering body. By refusing to institutionalize and maintaining a strategic distance from worldly power, the Gnostic politics of world loss cultivates a guerrilla-like resistance, vesting its authority not in a church but in the self-governing spirit.

5. Events of Love

An Existential Perspective

It is true that the doctrinal valence of the suffering body is determined politically by the transaction between state persecution and the administrative opportunism of the Church, yet this tells only half of the story. Let us now zoom in from the institutional level to the existential level, from the organizational ambition of the Church to the personal ambition of the martyrs, whose zeal for salvation is not un-mingled with a lively presentiment of disillusionment (“dying in vain”). The stark reality of suffering, whether fervently volunteered or more modestly resigned, inundates the doctrinal question of the reality of the body with colossal existential stakes. The nihilistic threat that suffering might be gratuitous, and the horror of a death lived in the course of dying, are precisely what gave the doctrinal debate its relentless quality and fueled an exceptionally fierce animus against the “heretics,” whose docetist views seemed to invalidate the very real pain of the martyrs. The meaninglessness of suffering—this is the dark night that besieges the luminosity of the “meaning” of Passion—a Passion interpreted in a realist vein. The interpretation of Passion is a political statement and an existential manifesto before it is a hermeneutic act. The politically and existentially fueled mimetic urge, or the need of the sufferers for identification, makes the Passion the event of love. The crucified body can be the seat of meaning only to the extent that the crucified bodies take part in the production and reproduction of meaning. Either institutionally or existentially, the politicization of the body has conferred upon the body a worldly reality that has proven to be impossible to be bracketed (as in the case of the Gnostic “epoché”) in the event of salvation. The doctrinal reality of the body is the currency that converts the dust of personal suffering into the gold and glory of martyrdom. Without this realist interpretation of the doctrine of the body, that three-fold hermeneutic unity—of the dying of Christ, the redeeming of sin and the act of love that redeems through death—would threaten to topple into the pitiable incoherence of a merely historical fact, an emptied promise and a theological ineffectuality.12 The production of the suffering body and the propaganda of suffering are not footnotes to the Christian event of love but its posthumous author.

Moving to the Gnostic event of love, however, three things are instantly dropped out of the picture: the mandate of suffering, the reality of the body and the community of the suffering bodies (plus their communion in the body of Christ, which is real and not a mere appearance). Whether or not it was, or that it had to be—the real Christ, flesh and blood—who died on the Cross by no means breaks the continuity of Gnostic love. For love in the Gnostic de-politicized sense does not flower in the names and vanities of the world, but in the ether of the pneuma, that utopia of world loss, the deterritorialized spectrality of the abyss of inwardness, the maelstrom of its a-temporal becoming.

The Gnostic politics of world loss sets up its vertical symmetry of self-love against both the vertical asymmetry of a divine Christian love—incarnated in Christ’s Passion and emulated by the martyrs—as well as the horizontal asymmetry of Christian neighborly love, which, as a form of social critique, is perpetually on the verge of degenerating into a politics of pity. The Gnostic lover of self pursues a different line of social critique from the Christian lover of neighbor. Since his politics does not hang on a worldly spatiality, he has managed to keep aloof from both the virtues and the vices that crystallize and ferment in the in-between of the social realm. His strengths and weaknesses as a social critic unfold on a different plane and assume different guises, just as his ressentiment enjoys a different constitution, which often allows it to be invoked in other, nobler names, and hence to be accorded with another, intellectually more respectable reputation. Be that as it may, ressentiment has always been the prerequisite for and the motor of social critique, and all in all, the Gnostic Narcissus can boast of being a better critic and a wiser rebel of the law. Love is that most seductive name kept in the lexicon of ressentiment. As neighborly love best discloses the nature of Christian ressentiment, self-love most eloquently articulates the nature of Gnostic ressentiment. The Gnostic rhetoric of self-love is never naively meditative but always furtively polemical against cheap and sentimental forms of philanthropy. In no way does it resemble or aspire to be a “humanitarian” discourse; it does not even pretend to be humanist—for the Gnostic man is his own allegory: he is supposed to be the Gnostic Man, the divine Anthropos, unmarked by finitude and its cares. What this rhetoric in fact accomplishes is to have effectively torn away the sentimental veil of neighborly love and exposed the ideological root of Christian altruism: the need of collective structures to sustain and to reproduce itself at the expense of the individual, the need to socialize organic inter-personal relationships into institutional memberships, the need to universalize—catholicize—ethics into the abstraction of morality.

The egotism of Gnostic self-love draws the bottom line of resistance against this process of collectivization and socialization—against “society” per se. Its politics of world loss is inimical to the actualization of neighborly love in the politics of pity. For pity is an essentially abstract way of dealing with the “other.” It can only be born as the result of an obliteration of the individual characteristics of the recipient. What it requires is a formally bad but substantively jubilant conscience, which has to be capable of readily and happily working all the individual oddities which might call for further epistemological investigation into a clean formula (“suffering,” “misery,” “abjection,” etc.). It is quantifiable, easily manageable, almost honorably predictable—a perfect object of society’s affective disciplining of the individual, an exemplary “membership” feeling, a corollary of “common sense.” But more than all those, pity seeks out, feeds upon and savors suffering. Through its programmatic reduction, the inter-subjective realm becomes a theater of secret and most voluptuous cruelty. Its antenna would like to grope for and tickle the most hidden sores—pity respects no distance, as Nietzsche so convincingly discloses in his relentless investigation into morality. The Gnostic politics of world loss, despite the paradox of being simultaneously a form of the political while remaining worldless, maintains the presupposition of distance that conditions any genuine politics.13 The politics of pity could not be further from a politics of distance. Its banner of neighborly love claims to promote a politics of touch and intimacy (which itself amounts to a contradiction in terms), and it ends up (no surprise) enacting a politics of generalized touch and abstract intimacy. By reducing politics into morality, it seizes upon a worldliness and twists it into a prying, prowling inquisitiveness.

This predation of the Christian love upon suffering extends from the neighborly love to the Passion of Christ. About the doctrinal fixity of the latter upon the reality of suffering we have already examined in previous analysis. What needs to be called to attention, now that we have before our eyes the juxtaposition of the vertical and the horizontal asymmetries of Christian love, is that this two-fold dogmatism (or even vampirism) of suffering has left the Gnostic lover terribly unimpressed. He may well be familiar with other, uncanonized, less overtly politicized, un-paradigmatic experiences of suffering (as we all are), but he does make it clear that he never wants to be infected with the value of suffering as such. The Gnostic lover refuses to make suffering the productive engine of his salvational economy, which is a different economy from the Catholic one of sacrificial corporeality. The notion of “sacrifice” rings pretentious in his ear, maybe even a bit farcical. While analogies drawn from the economic sphere (“purchase,” “exchange,” “discharge the debt,” etc.) act as a major vehicle of meaning in the realist interpretation of Christ’s Passion—His supreme suffering (Leidenschaft)—the Gnostic soteriology refuses to be just such a sacrificial economy. Neither will the Gnostic love condescend to bargaining with the world, nor will it barter away its worldless autonomy in exchange for an abstract phenomenality of the politics of pity. Pity, which basically seeks its political principle in the human heart, sooner wreaks perversions on the heart than soliciting out of it something with which to guide political action. The heart is not a political faculty—this the Gnostic lover knows better. His love, notwithstanding the same name attributed to it as to the catholicized philanthropy, has a different tonality. The Gnostic critic Narcissus is not a starry-eyed lover, in for the crooked timber of humanity. He is aware that it is not the deep recesses of the human heart but the distanciation and refraction of the hardness of the Spirit that could yield for him a viable political principle.14 The Spirit is the political faculty par excellence for the Gnostic lover.

In the above section, I have examined the Gnostic and Christian events of love from an existential standpoint. The Christian valorization of the suffering body is shown to be an existential necessity, providing meaning in the face of persecution. Gnosticism, however, rejects this mandate of suffering, and its concept of self-love functions as a polemical critique of Christian neighborly love, which it exposes as a “politics of pity.” By rejecting the abstract moralism of pity and maintaining a critical distance, the Gnostic politics of world loss identifies the hard, refractive Spirit—not the sentimental heart—as the genuine faculty for political action.

6. Becoming Author

Toward a Politics of Writing

The Gnostic politics of world loss is more than an oxymoron. It is not only consistently worldless but also genuinely political. Through its apparently aporetic commitment to world loss, it expands the political beyond the pale of its own historical possibilities. Just as it cultivates the Spirit as the new political faculty, it strives to found within the entrails of the text a new realm of the political. The relation of the Gnostic reader to his text is a political one, probably in a far more literal sense than twentieth century literary criticism is ready to imagine for its own politicizing of the text. For the self-exiled intelligentsia of the second century, the text provides that last form of worldliness left for the inveterate solitaire. It affords him a durability into which he is willing to exteriorize his radical inwardness, which would have fallen into the transience and the muteness of a negative, non-productive worldlessness. In this philological sense, the Gnostic politics of world loss too can be said to be participatory—it is participation in the mediated and mimetic worldliness of textuality. The Gnostic reader approaches his Scripture in a less hermeneutic than critical vein, for he reads in order to write. And to write means for him more than to understand and to find reconciliation in understanding. The gnosis he is after does not fall into his lap as a piece of autumnal knowledge; the recognition he seeks cannot be found in the Sabbath of reconciliation. In striving to become an author, he throws himself into a turbulent process of political becoming. For this purpose, it is not enough to do away the scraps of reified meaning that accumulate over the surface of the text, as the truth content concealed by layers of time cannot simply be unearthed. Truth does not disclose itself but only comes into being again—and for the first time—when re-invented anew. This is presupposed by the critical rather than hermeneutic method of the Gnostic reader–author. For him, truth can be truly originary only through an event of re-authentication. Its primordiality is the primordiality of the present moment. In thus seeking origin in the act of re-founding, the Gnostic critic remains faithful to the initial meaning of revolution.

The Gnostic process of becoming author is the proto-Enlightenment event in that precise Kantian sense of sapere aude, dare to know.15 The courage for authorship—the Gnostic form of “daring to know,” and to own up to this knowing too—denotes the peculiar mode of political action generic to a politics of world loss. In the course of philological and political becoming, the Gnostic reader–author shakes off the yoke of external authority in the movement of cultivating an internal one, authentic, ownmost, his. He is to emerge out of the minority condition of his spiritual apprenticeship and come “of age” under his own authorship—his own authority—or shall we say, his sovereignty. His mind strives to consume all impediments and become incandescent in the event of writing as a relating to the divine—fiery enlightenment. In this sense, the courage of the Gnostic Aufklärer is akin to that of Empedocles before the crater of Mount Etna. But for the Gnostic, the volcano is the abyss within, and while he struggles to catch fire, the incandescence is never complete, all-consuming. Hence, the Gnostic courage, a will of the mind to its own incandescence, is shaped and accompanied by a philological humility—an apprehension of finitude triggered philologically—manifested at once as a fidelity to language and an awareness of its boundaries, defined by the ineffability of the unknown Father. Language, that grand keeper of finitude, figures in the Gnostic textual practice both as an educator of finitude and as a rebel against it. Transformed, however, is language’s modality of worldliness from a discursive spokenness to a poetic writtenness. Moving from speech to a writing that is no longer reminiscently dialectic and hence more autonomously and purely “writing,” language gains self-awareness and becomes self-reflective and critical. Thus is established by the Gnostic authorial becoming the critically revolutionary tradition of philology (masked as negative theology). Viewed in this light, the Gnostic textual practice not only foreshadows the event of Enlightenment but also gives an initial expression to the sensibility which is later to be developed and over-developed by literary modernism (by virtue of this double lineage is drawn out the comradeship between the critical programs of Kantian Enlightenment and literary modernism as well).

The Gnostic politics of world loss thus boils down to this politics of writing—the constitution of authority/authorship in the revolutionizing and re-founding of the text. This philological and critical authority that is to be founded and re-founded over and again is the Gnostic answer to the question of authority, raised by the legitimation crisis of both the juridical authority of the Empire State and the episcopal authority of the Catholic Church. As we have noted before, the text sublates the world as the topos for the Gnostic revolutionary happening. If textuality thus serves as the Gnostic form of worldliness, intertextuality emerges as the Gnostic form of plurality. It is the inter-subjective ballast of a form of authority that seems to have come about solely through singular readings and sovereign writings. The Gnostic form of fraternity, eclipsed on the level of daily interaction, is inscribed most forcibly upon the evolving body of texts as the dialectic of sovereignty and non-sovereignty. Within this philological space of reading and writing, a political community comes into being, a political community that eschews the worldly space of speaking and acting and defies the institution of temporality and finitude through its founding of a supra-temporal, supra-historical realm of action. The critical Gnostic ethos is the truly modern ethos. It is forever conjuring up a supra-historical “now,” aspiring to live forever in the aura of its own contemporaneity. This ethos resonates with the call to “blast open the continuum of history” through revolutionary action. For the Gnostic, the act of writing—of re-founding the text—is that blast. It creates a moment of pure sovereignty that stands outside the flow of tradition and institutional time, an aspiration to live permanently in the incandescence of its own founding moment. The Catholic ethos, by contrast, loses this critical edge the moment it becomes ecclesiastical and historical. It reconciles with time, purchasing its authority from tradition and investing it back in the durability of a historical world. A status quo is once more established out of the restored continuity of time. The Gnostic social critic is self-exiled from this kind of seamlessness. His politics of world loss is in fact a politics of incandescing, a repeated dynamiting of the continuum of history, a mortal flame ablaze at the non-place of the abyss thus opened.

In this section, I have argued that the Gnostic politics of world loss is ultimately realized as a politics of writing. For the Gnostic, the text becomes the last vestige of worldliness, and the critical act of reading in order to become an author is a political mode of being, an act of re-founding authority akin to the Kantian sapere aude. This philological practice establishes a new political realm where the text is the world, intertextuality is the community, and the ever-present, revolutionary act of writing constitutes a critical authority that stands in direct opposition to the historical, institutional power of both Church and Empire.

7. Conclusions

In the above study, I have traced the contours of a “Gnostic politics of world loss.” I began by differentiating the totalizing, metaphysical ressentiment of the Gnostic from its inter-subjective Christian counterpart. I then analyzed the “narcissistic machine” of Gnostic theology as the engine for this inward turn, contrasting its spectral, photographic nature with the solid, architectural worldliness of the Catholic Church. By examining the Gnostic rejection of the politics of suffering and pity, the argument revealed a critique aimed at preserving individual autonomy from institutional power. Ultimately, this politics finds its true arena not in the world but in the text. The Gnostic as author, in a proto-Enlightenment act of sapere aude, establishes a revolutionary authority grounded in the constant re-founding of meaning. Gnosticism, therefore, offers a durable model of revolution as a permanent, self-consuming and incandescent critical act, arrested in its most radical phase and thereby immortalized.