T HE M OME NT OF DE C I S I V E

SI GNI F I C A NC E :
A HERESY


THE MOMENT OF
DECISIVE SIGNIFICANCE:
A HERESY

Lance Allan Kair

Lance A. Kair

2016

Copyright © 2016 Lance A. Kair

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be
reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express
written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations
in a book review, blog or scholarly journal.

The Second in the series The Philosophical Hack, “The Moment of

Decisive Significance: A Heresy” is a revised edition of the originally titled
book “Absolution: The Moment of Decisive Significance”, which can be read
for free at Scribd.com.

First Revised Printing: JUNE 2016

First paperback: JULY 2018

v.

ISBN 978-1-387-96299

Lance Allan Kair

Louisville, Colorado.

www.secondmusic.org

To my wife and daughter, without whom I would never have

lived.

T HE T A B L E O F C ONT E NT S

Acknowledgements .......................................................................... xiii

Preface ...................................................................................................... xix

Preface to the Introduction ......................................................... xxi

Introduction ....................................................................................... xxiii

A Note on Orientation ............................................................... xxx

PART ONE ................................................................................................. 1

Prelude ................................................................................................... 3

In The Beginning .............................................................................. 9

The Appropriation of Discourse ........................................... 21

PART TWO .............................................................................................. 27

The Virgin Birth .............................................................................. 45

The King of the Jews .................................................................... 57

The Ministry ...................................................................................... 67

The Passover ..................................................................................... 83

Thought: Of the Subject In-Itself ....................................... 105

The Disciple .................................................................................... 111

Gethsemane .................................................................................... 117

Doubt .................................................................................................. 125

Knowledge ....................................................................................... 141

The Departure ............................................................................... 181

The Wisdom of Peter ................................................................. 201

PART THREE ..................................................................................... 225

The Second Moment of Decisive Significance ........... 229

Afterword .............................................................................................. 241

Author’s Note ..................................................................................... 257

Notes ........................................................................................................ 261




Acknowledgements

There is an odd sort of being that entertains ideas. Often these

ideas have a quality of faith, and indeed it is these ideas that constitute
faith in its most original sense, a sense that has no object. A free-
floating anxiety, one might say. It is gained from experiences that
occur at a distance and so rely upon and amount to the individual on
a path, knowing and questioning and doubting and knowing. Through
this process a being can come unto itself, and thereby know itself,
without recourse to any sort of faith; that is, until the idea comes upon
its own completion, its own verification. Then even while one rallies to
assert its truth, here doubt come into play in a whole new way, for then
one realizes that indeed there was only an idea, at that, upheld by
faith.

To have people that merely repeat the same words and say ‘yes’
to the idea stated, do nothing for being. To be, one must not only have
had faith, but must be willing to test it and then in the end let it go,
no matter how the test went, for there was really no test but that of an
idea.

xiii
 xiv

I wish to thank four bloggers, though they probably wouldn’t

even know that they had a thanks coming.

o Dave at the extinct blog “In the Salt Mine”.

o Dave at “Big Story Guide” – bigstoryguide.wordpress.com
o S.C. Hickman at “Alien Ecologies” –
socialecologies.wordpress.com
o Terrence Blake at “Agent Swarm” –
terrenceblake@wordpress,com


xv


xvi



Preface

When undertaking any sort of venture, one is often persuaded

to prepare. In the case of this essay, one might be critically informed
and perhaps be educated upon certain academic or philosophical
issues. But beware; this kind of conventional approach might take on
water since through this essay we are often asked to stand on our
heads, to turn upside-down the notions by which we supposed to have
gained bearings, to put what seems first, last, and last, first. Yet for
sure; of what might constitute such prepared information we can be
pretty confident. Theologians might be drawn to this title, as well as
what we could call ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ philosophers, but these
should not exclude epistemologists nor ontologists, nor idealists nor
realists. Indeed, none would be amiss by gathering their theoretical
forces, but they might, in so doing, miss the argument if not the point.

This translation asks from no other authority than the book

itself, The Bible. Those not informed of, ignorant of or plain
antagonistic to the Western philosophical tradition, I might suggest
avoid the Introduction, the Prelude as well as the Afterword, and just
stick to the main body of the essay; you will have missed little by doing
so. The more strict academic philosophical considerations I put forth
do not add to nor detract anything from the meaning of this essay; they
merely enlarge the possible ways we might speak about the situation
at hand.

xix


Preface to the Introduction

What is absurd is not real. If there is a point behind the

writing of this essay, it is to not stop prematurely and to take to
absolute ends the real philosophical method, to call it out for its absurd
presumptions.

The foremost presumption is that it is capable of

addressing all that may be. This essay exhibits thus a mode that the
philosophical method may not be able to address because it does not
fall within its capacity to approximate: It does not rely upon an
invisible real given (except in as much as it is taken as real). The
contradiction inherent in the presentation of its meaning thus places
it in a meaningful arena that those who faithfully adhere to the
philosophical method will not be able to reconcile; which is to say that
the reconciliation will occur in some other manner. And this is to say
that the veracity of the meaning by which this essay is able to have
sense is by virtue of that fact that it is entirely not real. But it does
make sense, and, in fact, it reflects a total sense, so we thus can only
say that it is true.

The purpose of this essay is thus to expose what is false

by embracing it in its total ability to be true.

xxi
 xxii

Going forward; note that there is no irony in this essay

but the irony specifically pointed out. The reader should not read this
essay as if it is somehow saying things that are meant to be taken as
its opposite. The irony of the essay is the fact that its meaning is not
real.


Introduction

This essay exhibits a heretical view of the Gospels; but never

mind that.

This is an object oriented view through the Gospels. Just what

do we mean by ‘object oriented’?

Primarily and most pertinently, an object oriented view of the

Gospels takes up the yoke in plowing that for which a whole lineage of
philosophers has been working. More than Fredrich Nietzsche, the
‘death of God’ is merely one manner of phrasing (albeit crass and
reactionary) what many feel needs to occur. Michel Foucault, Nick
Land and Quentin Meillassoux are three others who suggest a similar
understanding; the destruction of the transcendent appears
philosophically necessary. As well, despite the traditional readings
and obvious ‘pre-dead-God’; even the early ones like Baruch Spinoza
and David Hume were already indicating how the issues might
revolve. This is the very very short list, but not the only and best list.

The same understanding can be heard through this essay, with

a caveat. There are authors who continue to attempt to show or
otherwise prove logically how the transcendent might be removed; for
example, Meillassoux suggests that ‘magical thinking’ should be
remedied in as much as reason is hampered by it; he thus suggested
xxiii
 xxiv

that some sort of mathematical based thinking should replace it1. This
essay does not attempt to convince or suggest that the effect of
transcendence can be removed or otherwise covered over by a move of
discourse. In stark contrast to that which would contribute to the
perpetuation and repetition of philosophical redundancy, I see that to
use discourse in an attempt to displace that by which discourse can
have any meaning whatsoever is a move of ignorance on one hand (so
far as philosophers figure they can do so), and deception on the other
(in that if they do not recognize the disorganization of their proposals
then they are deceiving themselves, and also in as much as they might
recognize the fault, they proceed ahead anyways).

I will take up this problem more thoroughly in book three of

this series2. Suffice it to say here that the solution to the problem that
philosophy has found itself in, is to back up, to cease positing distance
as intimacy and intimacy as distance. In other words, we need to begin
to be honest with not only what we are doing, but what that is based
upon. We should no longer afford hazy figments upon some actual
horizontal plane of existence 3 . The manner by which discourse is
apprehended is the issue, and, as opposed to many career philosophers
who want to (are made to) rush into proposals and arguments as part
of a given and invisible argument that supports the means for making
a living, I do not stretch discourse, thought and humanity across this
horizon as a common element; this is to say, discourse is not taken to
convey necessary meaning across a whole human situation.

For one; if we can be honest about what is proposed at various

times by various authors, then I do not always have the privilege of
finding out exactly what they really meant by studying their words
very closely. We must admit first that there is a particular maxim,


what we might call a certain ‘enforcement’ (assumption of given) of

propriety that relies upon what is for most purposes an involuntary
acquiescence by anyone who might think they have something
important to do. Two; if we can still be honest, then we need likewise
admit that at least some of the ideas that are put forth here and there
by various authors4 are misapplied as they misunderstood. And this
should be tempered with the acknowledgment that the maxim has
been in place as the one and only arena, the ‘only show in town’, where
things may be said to have any meaning at all.

At first glance, one might understand ‘object oriented’ to mean

‘goal oriented’, as in purpose; a person that has an agenda, something
that needs to be accomplished, can be said to be object oriented. We
might see this essay in this light, but then there could be a glaring
issue as to why I would need to state that this essay is attempting to
get something done. I could be an author who has written an object
oriented essay about the Gospels because I am trying to accomplish
some religious or spiritual transformation, but if this is the case then
I must qualify it by saying that if a transformation is called for then it
is due to it already having occurred. The issue then would not be to
arouse a transformation, but to tell those whom would have had a
transformation except that they are caught within a particular
philosophical form that tells them it is false or otherwise religious, that
no transformation is needed, that they do not have to choose between
alienation and spirituality. Such a choice is a false choice.

Nevertheless, again, I am not calling anyone toward some

transformation. All authors could be said to be object oriented in as
much as they write something and where the writing is supposed to
 xxvi

accomplish anything, whether it be to arouse a particular emotion or

merely entertain by some novel distraction. Reality is filled with all
sorts of ways to be transformed. Actually, the type of agency implicit
of this kind of interpretation is in stark contrast to the meaning
intended in the foregoing essay; in fact, if one might bring to her mind
this kind of purpose instilled in the act of production, they have
thereby begun to understand a particular teleological reason
(extension of purpose) that this essay moves away from. The stark and
utter truth is to be told, and it is not very nice nor welcoming to most.
This essay surely does not hold a hopeful and transformative message
for everyone; one could say that it is different because it is antagonistic
and challenges by confronting what is welcoming, expected and
methodologically comforting. By the act of reading this essay, we
attempt to shed light unto a teleology that is hidden, but entirely alien,
one that is nevertheless separated from the real purpose filled agency
of free will and creativity. If this essay touches a nerve, any nerve, then
it has succeeded.

An author of somewhat recent notoriety, Graham Harman, has

coined his work as Object Oriented Ontology (O.O.O.) or Object
Oriented Philosophy (O.O.P.). Without going into depth about his
ideas, here we need only touch upon one of his basic tenants: Real
objects withdraw from view. He has gotten so much flak for this
proposal that I like to think that this essay describes what is occurring
in the debate, or at least concerning this particular idea because it
offends regular sensibility. Even many really smart people think that
an object that withdraws from view cannot possibly have sense;
ironically, this seems to be the case, for with Harman real objects


appear to defy sensual objects. But where Harman may rely upon his
accreditation for the investment he has made in the institution of
modern thought, I think aside from what doubt he may contribute to
the record of the academic method by his Ontology, I may have gained
for him what he could not for himself – that is, in as much that his
career move could be insufficient for fulfillment when it comes to great
ideas. Maybe he is merely going through the motions because that it
is his job; who can really know.

It is also enough here to say that Harman is proposing an

ontology of real objects, how real objects are, how they ‘be’ (real objects
withdraw from view, and he proposes several ‘qualities’ that all real
objects exhibit) and he attempts to situate the meaning of this reversal
of intuition in real philosophical discourse.

Notice, though, that I am not saying that this essay is an

O.O.O. take through the Gospels. One of the points of this essay
actually accounts for Harman’s idea, but the point of this essay is not
founded in them, nor due to them, nor is or was it even informed by
his work. Likewise, as we said above, neither should I say this essay
is attempting to accomplish a real goal; this essay concerns one’s
orientation upon objects, and is not so much about specifying a
particular ontological view. So by this vacancy, I introduce the notion
where both the versions just mentioned (purpose and Harman’s
Ontology) are oriented upon the object, which is to say, the real,
empirical, material, actual (however one wants to say it using the most
usual and un-philosophical approach possible) object, that thing out
there that is traditionally and most commonly opposed to the subject.
Further, these indicate but one type of approach, one way to come upon
things, through reality, and because it is but one way, by the noticing
I mean to indicate this other way to approach things. This other way
concerns, thus, an orientation upon objects. Harman’s Object Ontology
 xxviii

proposes to be speaking about the reality of objects, and specifically

Being itself that is imbued in objects in themselves despite what
human conception might be imposed upon them. But I cannot imagine
that when he goes out for a beer with his friends that he preemptively
qualifies his order to the bartender offering him to read all his books
and to then enter a discussion with him to thereby find out and
designate exactly how it is he orders a beer, is able to drink it and get
intoxicated. By the juxtaposition of the notice we might see that his
approach not only concerns an object’s Being, but because he proposes
to be speaking of how and what real objects are, he is also involved
with a particular purpose, a particular extension of activity toward
ends that we usually call teleology; this is to say, a particular manner
of Being through a meaningful segregation of topical discussion. This
essay is thus not topically entertaining except in as much as its
meaning has significance, but then the topic will not have been
dismissed from the ordering of another round. So by the notice of this
essay, of an orientation upon objects, we can say that we are not as
much involved with positing an ontology of things, as we are involved
in situating a different teleology, and thus incidentally complementing
Harman and his O.O.P. by looking from the standpoint of the reflection
of reality.

In this essay, we look at the Gospels as an object telling the

story of objects, but human objects in this case. In the essay that
follows, I distinguish what will be called the True Object. Reality
involves True Objects; the real philosophical method is concerned with
situating real-true objects. In reality, the Bible is typically read to
involve the True Object that we usually call the subject, the human


being, and as well God, another True Object, and of course Jesus,
another True Object: True Objects exist in the potential of reality.
Hence it is safe to say that the usual reading of the Bible is not object
oriented in the manner intended for this essay; to be forthright, the
issue of the Bible is the orientation upon objects. Tradition and
conventionality is reality oriented, oriented upon the True Object, and
this has to do with subjects, objects, essays, human beings, planets,
gods, suns, temples, atoms, quarks, mountains, oceans, fish, goats,
chickens, computers, et cetera. In this way, this essay also is concerned
with what is not real, but nevertheless, true. It concerns the object that
withdraws from view because it is the Subject, at that, of a different
order of Being than the order of real things.


A Note on Orientation

This essay is a description of a situation, but also its example.

If it is possible to understand the intent behind this essay, then we will
know how orientation is significant in the interpretation of the Gospels
in particular, and the Bible in general, but everything besides. What
is at issue is reality and the limits its congregants understand as well
as prescribe by their designated proper philosophically rational
method, but just because it is at issue does not mean that there is any
argument that is capable of forming its negation; this is not argument
about proving or disproving. This is argument of describing, and
thereby, of verifying. It is possible then that in certain situations,
events that are usually held under the category of ‘spiritual’ become
normalized to a certain view, and that this view then can be
perpetuated by the lacking view that speaks of authoritative
interpretation, such that subsequent interpretations merely default to
that ‘first view’ by which to have their own view and make comments
upon it, the whole process viewed therein as a sorting out of the truth
of the matter. This essay thus works to destabilize such normative
view.

First we should notice the scholarly placement and order of the

Gospels. Admitting my scholarly lack, Wikipedia notes that the
Gospels were probably written 70 to 150 A.D. 5 One needs merely
reflect upon what may have occurred 50 years ago to gain a perspective
about what we are dealing with in the Gospels, their meaning and
commentary: With confidence we can say certain general things about
what may have occurred even 50 years ago, for example, JFK was
assassinated, civil rights was a major issue, but the details are often
xxx


already pretty vague and most always debated; who killed JFK, what
does civil rights really mean and have we gained anything in 50 years?
We have difficulty saying anything definite about 5 years ago let alone
50, and what we can say about it with any certainty really says nothing
at all but there being an undefined event6.

The Epistles of Paul, which cannot be excluded from the

written Gospels, and seem to have been written before the Gospels, is
dealt with more thoroughly elsewhere by other authors. Still, when we
read Paul’s letters, we do get a sneaking suspicion that we are dealing
more with an experience than we are with theological dogma. We see
with Paul that the terms of the situation not only are being developed,
but more; they seem to be based in a kind of understanding of reality
that is different than how we have it now. In the same way that Martin
Heidegger attempts to tell us how the ancient Greek understanding of
reality that is reflected in their language and writings is different than
what we moderns understand, and how they had a much more
nuanced intelligence about what exactly they were saying about
reality and human experience, so covered the Epistles now are with
institutional theology that it becomes exceedingly difficult to really get
at what Paul was talking about. He definitely was not talking about
the same situation that many modern day Christian commentators
and evangelists would like to use him for.

Similarly, we discuss the meaning of the Gospels, and propose

that the events and experience thereof that informed the writing of the
Gospels are not what modern psychology nor conventional religious
Christianity makes of it. It is the difference between eating an apple
and describing how it is supposed to taste and feel; there is a school
 xxxii

that is relating the eating of the apple in description so when someone

is eating an apple they know that it is indeed an apple they are eating,
and there is a school that is describing the description of the describing
of the taste and feel of an apple that understands its textual
conveyance as amounting to an equivalent experience that might be
called ‘eating an apple’; this latter is so prevalent as to promote as
assumption that a description of the inadequacy of that method allows
for an effect of disclaimer powerful enough to thereby be able to
continue unabated in its postures. To extend this analogy; our modern
state is plagued by the description of the apple filling the need for the
experience of the apple, and if there is a primary experience, it does
not seem to be able to breach the ubiquitous second hand truth to
thereby bring out for notice that there are two fundamentally different
orders of being that are being thrown about and dealt with as if they
are of the same order. The problem of our area, similarly though oddly
different, is that we are dealing with a situation that everyone likes to
believe they know something about; offer an apple and the case is
closed. Everyone exists in reality, they might say, and so we all have
equal access to what the Gospels are saying. Yet ask anyone who is not
already informed or has been taught to read the Marque de Sade’s
writings and discern where his satire begins and ends and what is
occurring within that satire; how many people will take what they are
taught about the Marque’s writings into the reading of them and miss
the experience of knowing what he was trying to convey though they
‘know’ what he is saying and means? There is a basic and fundamental
difference in what is occurring here, what is happening, as what
knowledge of experience is. So I ask, how is it that everyone already
has access to the meaning of the Gospels then, books that were written
1500 years prior to the Marque?


Nevertheless; it is a simple matter of considering whether the

early Christians that were put to death in the Roman coliseums, the
martyrs, were any different than the Christians of today. I would
venture that we would be hard pressed to find even one modern day
Christian who would stay their faith till the end; it is fortunate for
them that our (Christian based democratic capitalist?) society has
done away with such ‘savage barbarian’ displays and entertainments
so that we might test this hypothesis. To bring in what modern
martyrs we might have today into the fray: It is one thing to be a
suicide bomber and quite another to be persecuted and laughed at for
your belief, or better, even to be thrown into an arena with lions who
are going to eat you, where everyone is getting a good kick out of your
martyrdom – despite what politically correct critical thinking social
activists might want to argue. As my late esteemed undergraduate
Professor Gary Lease pointed out through a relating of an experiment
undertaken with his Northern California students: It is one thing to
speculate and theorize about ritual sacrifice and quite another to take
a goat up to a mountain and kill it. Yet, I would argue, that these early
Roman Christian martyrs (if I can really generalize all the early
Christian martyrs into a category) believed in nothing, for they had no
belief to hang onto. Quite the contrary: They only knew the truth.

The break that is typically indicated by the Western European

Renaissance should be noticed as a ’reversal of poles’ of meaning.
Instead of a direct ‘rediscovery’ of classical Greek works that may have
occurred at this time, we may find that they were indirectly
‘discovered’. The meaning of this discovery, the rift implemented by
the modern era, developed silently until it could no longer be ignored
and emerged as a pseudo-supernatural theme in the likes of the legend
 xxxiv

of Faust, and then capitalized upon and put a head on in the

Enlightenment a hundred or so years later.

The argument can be made that at least in philosophy there

was an attempt to realign knowledge to its proper bases. This proper
basis, though, as a part of the item movement called ‘the
Enlightenment’, had to perpetuate the mistake through the
ruminations of error in order to shed light upon the error itself; we had
to posit a post-modern as if we were getting somewhere in order to
understand what modern really encompasses, what it is, what modern
Being is. We had to posit an escape before we could really see that
there is no escaping it, to thereby have some conceptual purchase upon
what it lacks.

Accordingly, it is not very difficult to see the rift at work when

we consider Kant’s very own description of what enlightenment should
mean:
“Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred
tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding
without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage which its
cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to
use it without direction from another.”7

Evidenced by what is most often heard overtly about Kant, this

is taken to mean something in the nature of man ‘by himself’ without
a need for some transcendental teacher, or for another term, without
God. ‘Release from self-incurred tutelage’ can be taken to mean that
man is enlightened when he relies upon his own resources, namely,
intelligence and reason without recourse to some supernatural ‘spirit’.
Yet, if we read on in his short essay, we see that he is more concerned
with the imposition of law and social regulation. Enlightenment, he


sees, will come about if people are allowed to be free, free to do what
they want, but more so, free to think what they will. But it is also no
secret that Kant was religious, and he harbors no shame in advocating
that this freedom be from and within the religious domain, probably
in as much as ‘spirit’ is of a religious concern. Indeed, a whole history
of the globe came out of this idea, but a necessary misinterpretation
has plagued this spread of freedom, as we now see in the post-
Postmodern global situation.

When we look again at his writings, we might see that he was

immersed in history, and that this kind of immersion could not have
happened by choice; indeed, he must have been a part of a particular
manner of coming upon reality, integral to it. It is possible to read
Kant’s definition of enlightenment as really concerning a removal of
distance. We might then read this excerpt as saying
‘Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred inability
to make use of his understanding without direction given from a
distance…’

Which is to say, man’s inability to make use of his

understanding without relying upon something that is separate from
that understanding. Kant was attempting to reinstate a nuanced and
innate intelligence, but the reversal of meaning was already an
institution, already a state of reality. Hence, after Kant, with the
exception of a few authors here and there who were and are attempting
a realignment of knowledge, it is possible we have the next 200 years

of philosophy based upon a mistaken identity of what enlightenment

means.
 xxxvi

But if there was no mistake, then an entire different discussion

is heard arising from the darkness…


xxxvii
 Kair

PART ONE

For God,

gave his only begotten Son.

1
 Kair

2
 Kair

Prelude

We might be tempted to see this book as a type of

hermeneutical offering, or even Grammatological offering, and
likewise such an estimation would most likely not be far off the mark.
Jacques Derrida addresses Michel Foucault to the same question upon
criteria for the latter’s essay on madness; that is, the question of
authority8. See, though, that this is not some discussion of uncountable
references to various Derridian or even post-modernist, structuralist,
or post-structuralist scripts; the first intent of this essay is not
scholarly argument of comparison and reference. Through this essay I
am attempting to get to a heart of the matter, to clean up what I see
has become a cloudy philosophical arena; you will get little scholarly
court volley here. The problem with the usual scholarly method is any
such reference compounds upon itself the problem we treat, and
specifically detracts from the meaning of this essay; for, if indeed I
were using some sort of method, at that a hermeneutical method, I risk
being seen by many if not most to be referring to another authoritative
lexicon, to perhaps a more secular as opposed to religious, a liberality
opposed to conservatism, to this series of historical notes instead of
that, whereas I freely admit that I referred to no such scholarly
tradition but that which may have been of the privilege (or poverty)
having been raised Christian. Ironically, though, many theoreticians
in their various places will not have missed any of this. Indeed, the
impossible situation is that there is nothing beyond or outside of text.
3
 4 A Heresy

Nonetheless, I would say a better designation of the issue, even if it is

merely academic, is the ‘term’, for ‘text’ imagines that a mere mark
likewise ‘contains’. Where a mark may contain we have thereby
extrapolated knowledge into or against a sort of prehistory and
enforced an ideological propriety. Perhaps I am splitting hairs, but I
see the more proper rendering is more than the symbol; rather, what
moves beyond a particular ideological comprehensive paradigm is
meaning itself, and if there is some sort of communication taking place
then there must be some terms of agreement.

The first order must be that there is agreement, and in as much

as there is agreement, that this is indeed the case, we must then
consider not so much communication through its postmodern and post-
postmodern reductive avenues. Neither the type of Jean-Francois
Lyotard that asks how communication takes place, nor of Alain Badiou
and Francois Laruelle, that develops reductions toward particular
communicative passes, stem queries outside of the implicit assumption
of a projected common form; which is to say, the authors may not have
reflected upon their own positions of assertion sufficiently enough to
take to its end the issue of the text. Indeed, the situation of history put
forth in passing by this essay is that they could not take it to its end.
Instead, the move here is more toward Lyotard’s implication upon
whether the case can be made to a court that has no way of
understanding the communication that is offered, because thereby do
such philosophical situations become non-conventional historical
marks, at times even, desire-production hiatuses. Here then we need
only give up on the reduction and leave such ideological strides to the
Realist passes that stand upon conventional routes argued by the post-
postmoderns’ 9 . We must thereby consider agreement that does not
cohere in the common route.
 Kair 5

Admitting, then, that there is indeed only always discourse,

even without some traditional philosophical lineage, what reference I
do mention outside the Bible is usually for confirmation and or support
of an idea that I came upon as part of the same course by which I have
encountered the Bible itself, and that there is, has been and will be so
many more references that I could never hope of listing into any sort
of helpful bibliography, nor itemize such clauses to have any meaning
that would point to some learning that I gained from the whole,
effectively, infinite library of authors and ideas that I have
encountered in my time. Since if there is nothing outside discourse,
then there is nothing that I have learned due to some other person’s
idea, nothing that arises only out of the occasion of the text guided by
some teacher, some catalyzing agent. Nevertheless, everything that
has occurred does so by the course of the terms of meaning, and then
by extension, also by that which verifies that such a person of reference
may have been come upon by the same experience, nevermind that this
is impossible, given the situation that must be argued. The point here
is that no tradition is required; also, if we must, that the distinction
between secular and religious ideals are now made moot. It might be
evident by now, if not by the end of the foregoing essay, then, that the
issue we treat here was dealt with historically, this is to say,
traditionally, in automatic recourse to a transcendent effect that was
taken to indicate a thing in-itself, that the terms were granted and
given by a transcendent ‘object’, if you will, God, and despite what
some philosophers might want to say of Judaism, both the
philosophers and the topic would be seen wanting to hang onto this
essential privilege. Hence the imperative for a new way to approach
the situation.

If any tradition is needed to come to the forgoing conclusion,

which is to say, to have a particular experience upon this text, then it
is a tradition that must be ideological and so incorrect; hence the pass
offered at least by Badiou10. Yet more, when the terms are considered,
 6 A Heresy

then the incorrection will be seen in its confinement and the remaining
tradition would be one that is so broad as to include Judaic discourses,
but not so small as to exclude the phenomenon of merely being human
prior to the North African Middle-Eurasian continental cultural pause
or existential hiatus that Judaism represents as an historical moment
of the human creature. This is to say, we will have found the criterion
for exiting the ideological ubiquity posited by previous historical
discourses, since if we are to admit some ‘essentially’ knowable history
translated or transcribed into the history ‘that we know’ (regardless of
debate), then the phenomenon evidenced of Judaism has yielded a
subject inscribed by a particular meaning, of the word, as this meaning
does not unfold into a plethora of divergent protestations, even as
there might be an inscribed subject of multiple meanings; this is the
meaning behind the term ‘colonize’. On the contrary; it unfolds into
exactly two routes for meaning, as, again, Badiou, and indeed the
author of the blog “In The Salt Mine” has said, the issue is of ‘the two’11.

Similarly unfortunate and unavoidable, if I had not referred to

some traditional compendium of interpretation by which to
substantiate this proposal, I would have most likely lost the other half
of readership, since then this essay would leave open the possibility
that the Gospels, at least, recommend in their bare conventional
instance of meaning; which is to say, I would have no authority by
which to offer this essay but the disclaimer of fantasy and imagination.
This last then is the reason for the late 20th century’s obsession with
nihilism as well as the early 21st century ‘Object Oriented’, ‘post-
humanist’ and the like discourses12, for the usual philosophical route
is subject to the critique of this essay, as we might see.
 Kair 7

All the same and including the objections; the argument that
follows will be misinterpreted by many who wish to be included, who
wish to include all humanity.

So be it. I write what I write.

Besides; the interpretation I offer below might only differ in the

picture it presents, and not so much from the traditional meanings and
commentary that have been offered throughout the ages.
 Kair

In The Beginning

It may well be of humanity that we exist in a world that is

inconceivable in its absolution, that indeed, it is a world of our own
making. Singularly absent from any conception of what such a world
is, we may also have only that world that has been passed down from
the supposed beginning of our heritage in life, and this then would be
just as unknowable as the world. Then, from the contradiction of such
an unknown past, our heritage would be at root a mere living and not
a human life as we make it, but a life as that of a plant or a tree, in
that is grows, does what it does, and is as it is, making no real decision
for its future. It is thus this limit, that which proscribes its end as that
which must be, but cannot ever be, that reveals our lack, our effective
denial, and therefore, for the wise and truly free, the necessity for
absolution as well as its possibility.

The situation is intolerable to us, to our ever present

presumption of our own humanity, of our own preeminence.
Nevertheless, our rejection of this type of destiny arrives in the two
ways we may understand what humanity is. Negated in our inception,
our conception is the necessity of consciousness against that which
would be the basic life, of which we are not but the conception. It may
be that children retain this basic life as they come into the world,
ignorant, a tabula rasa, if you will, genetically determined, if we can
really say this, to live exactly the life that is life eternally
interconnected and correspondent with all else, determined and fixed
in its course. But in that they are human, human life, they become
9

10 A Heresy

that which is human, which is consciousness, which is human

consciousness. Perhaps we see this period of childhood as ignorance
but definitely with wonder, naive. Perhaps children come into the
world as a sort of nether-being, of the basic life but also human, and
the distinction that comes to be known is exactly that which is
knowledge, the human life being itself human. Maybe children are
joined to humanity in this way of knowledge and joined to life in being
attached and dependent upon their parents, having no opinion or novel
thought as we know it, but merely reflecting in their own being the life
that is humanity around them, their parents and family primarily.
That is, until the human life reaches a significant point in the human
life; perhaps this is puberty, perhaps a little earlier, perhaps a little
later, when the motion of creation of life for being human must become
more fully human, in contra-distinction to the basic life, to further
humanity, for that much is life’s maxim, to further itself. And perhaps
there is this point when the human being as such may part from the
basic life that is held within a child. This may amount to a decision,
but decision would account too much agency, for we are still dealing
here with the life itself, in a child at that – but a decision nevertheless,
that is the mark between the heritage that is present in the immediate
parents and the immediate life that is present in the child. We might
call this point the moment of decisive significance. Either way will
always yield the human, but hence we may have responsibility for the
variation called human individuality.

Such a significant event would have to do with the moment

when the human individual enters or becomes human consciousness,
that is conscious awareness of it’s humanity. This is not so much a
psychology of child development or cognitive science as it is an
indeterminable moment in existence when the human being comes
upon itself, whatever the scientific stages of mental development.
 Kair 11

One’s psychology has little to do with this moment, since psychology

takes manifestation as a means to determine an aggregate plausibility
of cause by which it can prescribe particular activity so to assert
control of a mental issue or problem and determine a future for an
individual, even as it implies the prescriptions, retroactively, as a
description of some truly real humanity, toward the future solution.
Such an endeavor excludes the exception where otherwise every cause
one would attribute to a state of affairs fails to account for the next
variation until it can determine another series of causes. Twin children
exposed to the same parenting can nevertheless develop drastically
different mentalities in one case, and similar mannerisms in another;
determination of causes for such diversion or confluence, diagnosis and
application, are made upon the end events and extrapolated into other
posited similar cases and say little of actual cause. We apply our best
knowledge to the healthy growth of our children, but how they actually
manifest themselves in the world is always based in chance and hope.

The weight of the world that is the greater general heritage of

humanity being human must be come upon by the child, and in this
time, also the life that is still dealing with what it is to be human.
Perhaps this is where the weight is distributed, diffused if you will,
such that Self and Other become present or are presented to
knowledge. The tendency of life in the human would have it be merely
life, so the vector for being of any of the created species will have its
difficulty in becoming itself apart from mere life, a separate entity in
itself. In humans, consciousness may come upon itself as it comes upon
the human world, when the heritage of the child’s parents becomes
situated in a polar awareness for identity. At this time, the life in the
child would be presented to its consciousness, and in this, also the
awareness of its heritage as the rule of the parents, the direction of the
parents; the child is presented itself and the heritage of the world, and

12 A Heresy

the problem of how to deal with the given world. The given human
world must likewise bifurcate; life becoming the human being as
consciousness, the world of life cannot remain in itself as itself, but
necessarily must become the consciousness of the human world. This
consciousness is only the world heritage as human and so would
otherwise miss what world there could be if it were only the life of the
world, since this basic state cannot be human. Consciousness has the
world that humanity may have a world by which to exist; it must have
its heritage, but this heritage, the heritage that is the basic life as
human, is insufficient to reveal itself as human, and so must dismiss
itself from itself again, as it did from the basic life to be human, and
bring the Other against itself to be itself human. In other words, for
there to be a human being, it is not sufficient that the creature arrived
in the world for this move amounts to mere life that may be human.
Humanity arrives with knowledge, but this initial knowledge is not
knowledge of the world, but merely the basic life as human in the
world, of which the child repeats in its conception, in its birth;
humanity must have more than consciousness, more than itself, it
must have knowledge of itself in the world. Even if this was a
simultaneous event, to our knowledge humanity must have arrived in
the world in this way, for, we, for meaning that has any sense as we
do know, could not have knowledge and then human consciousness
and we could not have the human world and then life.

At this point we have the child coming to terms with its

humanity, which is the replaying of consciousness coming upon itself,
away from the basic life, and toward the creation of the world.

The heritage of the world must reflect itself toward a heritage

of the human world; consciousness must take its own establishment
 Kair 13

and establish an Other against it, or it would fall back into the basic
life and humanity would never be. The growing child may embody a
significance through, what we might call, a decision; uphold the
residuum of the basic life from its childhood and deal with the world
by it’s Self, or release the remnants of the basic life and deal with the
world by the heritage of the parents. This is why we can say human
consciousness is the way of the Other, and why what is at issue, then,
is the nature of this Other. Yet the residuum of life never leaves its
manifestation, and the child is echoed in the adult. The child who takes
the parents’ heritage as the means to deal with the world thus can be
said to always deny itself, which is to say, distance itself from the echo
so the basic life becomes an echo, for the sake of being human, which
is the orientation of being human in a world that is not of its own
making. This is a problem of an ability of consciousness, its ability for
conception. A concept cannot in its inception over come the distance
implemented by its effect of coming to understand. Thus, the problems
of this route manifest as problems of relating objects to other objects
and thereby allows for psychology; such a science serves to ‘fill in the
gaps’ between objects, an explanation that arises out of the suture of
faith (see below). As well, this problem is compounded in that the
individual then comes upon the self, it’s Self, as an object, even as the
residuum of the basic life, the self, remains in the individual as its
foundations are denied in the taking the route of the parent’s heritage.
The self is then come upon as another object, a subject-object, the
separated element that is the move into the route of the objective world
of the fully human. This then becomes the only issue we deal with in
existence.

On the other hand, the child who opts itself as the way to deal
with the world is undertaking, what to be fully human is, an
‘unnatural’ venture, since to be 'naturally' human, one must relinquish
that which upholds the basic life reflected through consciousness as
the unity of the world. The route of the ‘Self’, or perhaps the ‘Subject’,

14 A Heresy

is thus fraught with problems of consciousness because the basic life

is both being expressed in the human consciousness and negotiating
with the heritage that differentiates the world through the object. The
problem here is relating the Self, which is the expressing of the basic
life in the human expression of life, and the object. So the child who
takes the route of the Self is never quite ‘wholly’ or ‘fully’ human
because human is that which has separated itself from, what could be
called, the heritage of the world, the consciousness of the basic life,
sufficiently enough to have the heritage of the parents, such that the
world becomes the Object – which is to say that the Object is never
‘fully substantiated’ in such a child – but likewise the child never is
able to quite become ‘fully’ itself human, since it is, nevertheless,
human.

The child has sided with the basic life that lay within it and so
proceeds upon this truth against that truth of the human heritage,
which has renounced the basic life for its humanity. Hence, the
situation is that compounded upon itself in the suggestion that there
may be a human derived knowledge of the world. The problem lay
therefore between these two elements of humanity; the human being
that has come upon its self in relation to the heritage of the world,
which is so because of consciousness and therefore knowledge, and the
human being that comes upon itself in relation to the heritage of
humanity, which rests in a rejection of the basis of knowledge, namely,
that the world exists ‘because’ of consciousness. In either we have an
irreducible condition, but by both we have a distinction that can be
acknowledged by one and not the other, since any view is always
forward, always of what is anterior, or ‘in front’. While what is found
in relation to the heritage of the world and retention of the basic life
has its fully established identity laid in front of it, as well as all the
problem it comes across but as well the history that becomes
 Kair 15

pronounced, for the human heritage what is in front has been placed
there through a displacement, which is, by denial of its actual place for
the sake of True Objects, namely, for the temporal segregation of
identity for past, present and future. This is the reason that certain
conventional (of the heritage of humanity) investigations lead to
nothing, because there is really nothing to see but its own projections
of meaning.

Both of these avenues, of the heritages of the world and the

human, reveal a movement of orientation: From creation, which is of
the ‘minimal’ human, or back to creation, which is the ‘fully’ human.
These movements are ironic: Both move towards a creation of the
world. The former is creation as the human consciousness of the basic
life, and thus sees correspondence with creation moving consciousness
(subject) and form (object), and so does not have the same separation
which allows the Object (matter) of the fully human. The minimal
human is seen as manifesting fate, as its inevitable activity, as moving
towards that which creation is moving in its movement; this is a priori
absolution, because the absolution is given prior to experience as
experience. The fully human looks upon or back upon creation as an
Object to gain and thus finds itself in the function of time as progress;
the past from which things (the subject-object and the Object) came
grants the present in choice that further grants an uncertain future
but which progresses in knowledge of what the moment of creation
was/is. Thus the fully human moves towards creation in that it seeks
itself in the (past) moment of creation and the future culmination of
purpose, both of which are always put off in seeking. Thus the fully
human is oriented upon a posteriori absolution, absolution that must
be gained and so will only occur after or because of experience.

One might then suspect that the a priori view would be

the disadvantaged position, since it has but one sight, and the a

16 A Heresy

posteriori that of a more comprehensive; this would seems the most

sensible of conclusions. Knowledge gained after the fact appears to
have more value than knowledge which informs the fact; that
experience may be created through an act of will by considering past
experience so as to procure a bettering of experience through
application of what has been learned is the common sensibility of
living. One, in this way, would only see the childishness of the a priori
view. So indeed, we have our situation where by we might see how
such a distinction is made, for the fully is the grown, is the actor, is the
decision maker, is the determinator of the future and thereby the past.
Yet this one can understand no a priori except within this scheme of
free activity, and thus is excluded from advantage, and is indeed
limited in its view in this manner. When one is subsumed in this
manner of coming upon reality, of the responsibility for acting, of
making proper decisions, he is removed from the basic life. This
separation is manifested through the terms of decision and such terms
limit what would otherwise be known as the individual’s freedom, for
such freedom is gained only through prior conditions which are denied
in the act of free choice, for the free choice extends itself into the past
such that I am and have been free. From the past she gains a beginning
upon which her activity may contribute or detract, this as history
offers the path and method by which her activity may be valuable
beyond her mere living, for mere living also has a value. Such a history
is de facto a priori, it grants the individual the proper relations
between objects prior to her existence and so it is the basic Object
known to which the individual may then relate her objectivity, her
subject-object, in order to gain purpose for herself in her activity. The
individual’s freedom stems from knowledge of the past, yet while this
knowledge of the past is determined in the present, the condition of
the past for absolute free choice must be stable, it must not fluctuate
with the contingency of the present, and the contradiction of this
history which eternally enfolds upon itself to hide its contingency
 Kair 17

shows the fallacy of a posteriori orientation: It is a priori. Further, such

a purpose based in this history, in a meaningful creation, is insufficient
to provide an absolute purpose (except the insufficiency of actual
freedom which allows for a proper ethics); to this end one must have a
justified future, and this future, as the necessary counterpart of the
known past, so far as the possible future cannot but exist without a
known past, is denied in the fully human’s route, or orientation, as it
is provided the tentative present, and the segregated reality given in
this scheme of knowledge is then reflected in the meaning of
absolution. The wholeness of a posterior absolution is suspended in
basic ignorance, which is the condition of the significant move away
from the basic life.

In this way we come upon a more precise meaning of the term

‘Absolute’. In human heritage, of the fully human, the absolute is
found always at arm’s length in the Object that is the basic life
renounced as such: A ‘moment of creation’ or ‘the beginning’ of the
universe in one sense, and ‘truth’ of the ‘objective of knowledge’ in the
other. The absolute, and thus human solvency, is seen as a point of
absolution, as a purpose, a goal, a sought after reconciliation of Self
and the object universe. But this activity is always thwarted in the
fully human. An Absolute thus manifests as hope, and as the attempt
to bring everyone ‘under one roof’ in the act of ‘helping’, of asserting
propriety, of promoting the best and correct way against the come upon
incorrection, and this assertion is understood, as a sort of disclaimer,
as an act of selflessness. But in this act, the fully human contradicts
itself (again) by negating life again, asserting as it does the object of
Self against what might be not the self, the Other, at once attempting
a reconciliation rooted in a state of separation, that which is the fully
human and not the basic life. Absolution, the effective arm of what is

18 A Heresy

understood as the Absolute, be it God or no-God, is peeled back upon

the object-self (it leaves the subject-object while covering it with a
distanced view), so that guilt (anxiety of being incorrect – which is the
condition of the fully human) is relieved (or at least suspended) –
again a selfish motive – so as to allow the human to remain in its
heritage; the object-self, consistently asserted against the Object,
becomes absolved into the Object through, not renunciation of the
Object, but denial of its own objectivity and thus asserts the
compromised subject, which is effectively the subject-object.

What the fully human is after with absolution is that which

cannot be: An absurdity, a contradiction of that by which humanity
exists. Just as its humanity comes about through the relinquishing of
the basic life and its correspondent ‘minimal humanity’, for the sake
of the heritage that is the establishment of the Object, absolution is
the relinquishing of the Object, which for the fully human, is
impossible, absurd; the fully human cannot understand what might
actually be meant in its relinquishment. Rather, in short, the route of
the fully human seeks in absolution, not so much acceptance of the
Object, but possession, ownership, retention, and control of the Object;
it seeks absolute knowledge that is absolute truth of the Object.
Whether it be some sort of ‘spiritual essence’, ‘illusion’, ‘only
knowledge’, ‘human model’ or a type of empirical or scientific control,
this method will see a relinquishing of something as the absolute
contrariety of that by which the fully human gains reality, because
there is no absence of things. Similarly, even when this endeavor (the
method of absolutely gaining or controlling the Object) is seen in its
implausibility, and the individual comes to accept a reality of the
Subject/Object duality, absolution is still seen in the method of
attaining the Object, and absolution becomes a manner of dealing with
life, with the Objects of life, of negotiating the terms of existing, and
 Kair 19

one of these terms is the essential segregation of the Subject and the
Object, which can only occur so long as – and is indeed the definition
which posits the method – the subject remains a subject-object. The
problem of absolution, then, has to do with the meaning involved with
avoiding the recursive reduction of the Subject to the subject-object.

Such it is that Christianity has been posed as the

paramount of religious knowledge. The problem that is most insistent
in humanity, whether it be philosophical or religious, is this subject-
object duality; the problem of human knowledge is how to reconcile the
individual human being and the world around it, and this determines
typically an ethical method. While technology, and its ideological
counterparts, philosophy, critical theory and anthropology, offers one
manner of dealing with the problem, Christianity, in so much as it
deals directly with the thought and consciousness itself, offers the
most solvent solution to this problem; it addresses the apparent
duality by offering absolution that itself speaks dualistically. It can be
no coincidence that Christ advocates becoming like a child in order to
enter the kingdom of heaven, and that Christians may be ‘born again’.
Yet, here we have issue put toward another object: Heaven, the
Kingdom, at that! Likewise, we have the double movement of
absolution.


20


The Appropriation of Discourse

For its namesake, the significance of Jesus Christ

would be that he was one who has retained the basic life as he
renounced the human heritage. He would therefore have been
speaking not of objects, but of himself, his Self, his own condition as
he was expressing the basic life within him, and thus true absolution.
Yet, in that he was speaking to humanity, they would only hear of the
Object, and he would thereby become, the object that is himself, the
means to absolution.

If Jesus Christ is an example of the ‘minimally human’ self, he

would have been speaking of his own relation as human to the basic
life, as well as his relation as it confers his humanity to the heritage of
humanity, the Object, and his gaze and words would have been then
cast ‘outward’, that is, in both directions, at once upon his own
‘distance’ from the basic life, as well as humanity’s ‘distance’ from the
Object. He would further see that his personal situation could not be
otherwise because the basic life is the limit of knowledge; which is to
say that the limit of being human is the basic life as human, or
knowledge as consciousness, but that this situation allowed him to see
that others’ situation could be otherwise. He would see that the fact
that he is human prevents the absolution he understands and that
precisely because of this paradox of human existence he is absolved13;
which is to say that not only the purpose, the object, of absolution
cannot be actualized, but that because of this reality, of his being
knowledge and acceptance of the fallacy of objective absolution, he is

21

22 A Heresy

absolved from the responsibility one’s being may have to the Object, as
this responsibility confers a particular method, and he would see also
the humanity which finds itself in that responsibility is therefore
trapped in an illusion that would claim the Object to be obtainable.
Thus we find ‘the one’ who saves humanity from itself, relieves the ‘sin’
of separation, the one who redeems, the one who reconciles the Self
with the Absolute, the one who absolves the distinction of duality,
which is the Subject and the Object; this distinction, that which posits
a duality within the possibility for absolution, thus becomes one of
purpose, a distinction that is indicative of orientation upon the world.

Jesus Christ, himself in his situation, seeing as he does

the situation of the World, acts according to the dictates of his
circumstance, which is reconciled, whereas the Object is never
reconciled absolutely. Christ is absolved from his responsibility to the
Object, but is human so his responsibility remains in his humanity:
Christ’s responsibility is to the Subject, which, oddly enough, is also
responsibility for the object. By this (his) nature, he sees his problem
but is reconciled in it (the problem that is his humanity) and sees
humanity’s problem of not being so reconciled. In the same way that
human activity is concerned with overcoming (purpose) or negotiating
(ethics) the duality, his reconciliation is the motion of his existence.
For himself, he has only to Be himself, one who is reconciled and does
not negotiate, that is, does not have a responsibility to objects, which
is the plight of the human who has renounced the human heritage for
the sake of the basic life. By this, he cannot be but an example of that
which is not the human heritage, not the fully human. He cannot
speak except through renunciation; the human populous that he
occupies thus cannot miss this, but they, the predominance of people,
likewise, but counter-punctually, cannot help but come upon him and
his words, his expressing of the renunciation, as pertaining to, that is,
 Kair 23

expressing, a method for appropriating the Object, albeit in a different

way than they are used to. Since his expression is exactly renunciation
of the Object, the fully human will not hear of this except in as much
as such expression will denote a method for negotiating objects, and
this deaf orientation is resolute in Being offended; this is to say that
the offense cannot be avoided. Yet Jesus knows of his objectivity and
being so oriented, as he is, he has already given it up. His life is only
that he lives, is only that he expresses what he is, as this is knowledge,
and this expression of knowledge, though conveyed in the objectivity
of the fully human, does not correspond with the knowledge of the
Object, but renounces it. So it is that the interaction of these polemics,
Jesus as reconciled to himself and Jesus as reflecting that which is of
the heritage and is not reconciled by the knowledge of the Object,
inevitably produces not only Jesus coming complete in his minimal
humanity by relinquishing to the basic life that last vestige of being
human, his physical body, but also indicates, indeed fulfills, that
knowledge of the Object which designates Jesus but so rejects him. The
knowledge which confers upon him his objectivity, which is the
reconciliation, redemption, and completion which Jesus himself is
because of knowledge that is the basic life, is that which so offends the
humanity of the Object. Hence, for the human heritage Jesus Christ
becomes a symbol of the human situation that refuses to admit, is
indeed incapable of acknowledging, it’s own basis of heritage as such.
Humanity therefore and thereby needs a redeemer, a savior, who can
absolve humanity from its ‘sin’, which is the contradiction in discourse
involved with a responsibility to the Object, that ‘worldly thing’, as
opposed to responsibility to, what we could say is, God. Jesus Christ
becomes that thing, that human being, that ‘son of god’, that sought
after Object, which can relieve humanity of its burden. The Absolution
which Jesus Christ (the subject-object) can bring creates and affirms
reflexively the condition of the world and God; that which may be the
basic life as an Object then, the thing to be attained, is God. And where
there is no admittance of a God as such, the purpose and efforts of

24 A Heresy

human knowledge, its heritage, carry over in to an effect that amounts

to the potential to gain absolute understanding of the World.


26


PART TWO

Did you say this yourself,

or did others tell you.

27


28


The situation in which we find our humanity is encompassed

in Part One. It is the situation that occurs when we have become fully
invested in uncovering the nature of the True Object. The result of
coming upon reality in such a way, for consciousness, is the silence
which accompanies the method. There will be those who will hear in
this essay the resonance of the Object, and there will be those who hear
another resonance, and together, by such knowledge, this essay rings
true. As long as the method remains viable as the one and only route,
the silence cannot be spoken about, for it is that which allows the effort
for the Object. Thus it is that the child returns the voice of essence to
its vault so that it might hold the world, such as its method is general
and non-essential; so there are those who acknowledge the silence and
beckon to its knowing, and those who leave the silence to its quietude
and reach out away into the void. The child comes to that moment of
significance which begins maturity, and from then on a silence
becomes him, in one way or another. The minimal human moves into
that which is most human in-itself. The fully human finds its voice
from the silence that allows for the knowing of the Object, and by this
he proposes to abolish the silence, as a purpose to know the True
Object in-itself, and thereby realize himself as an object; though the
silence remains, it is denied. But either way, it is from this silence that
we come upon the world.

29

30 A Heresy

In the ideas of the study of human mythology it has become

commonplace that the story of Jesus Christ (indeed, many Biblical
stories) is seen to mimic and reverberate the stories of other
mythologies. There are many similarities between Jesus’s birth and,
say, the Egyptian mythological stories. The comparisons between
mythologies are better taken up by other, more scholarly authors. If
there is some sort of common human theme which is reflected in the
various mythologies then I see that to speak of one is to speak of the
significance of the others, and that to address the specific theme in one
is likewise addressing the possibilities of the meaning of the themes in
the others. I am most familiar with Christianity and so will begin my
investigation here, if for the sake of convenience. I hope to sometime
be able to speak upon the other stories in the way I have here. Such a
view of Jesus Christ affords the perfection of the story in that it fulfills
not merely some mythological or religious belief, for such a story of a
redeemer is but one possibility for a problem found in life, but indeed
addresses the significant problem of human existence.

The story reveals a condition of human existence that cannot

be overcome but which constantly presents itself; it establishes the
present as the past projected into future. The story itself speaks of
itself as a present past while speaking of our present, and indicates by
this the eternal moment of human existence 14 . The coming of a
messiah takes from the past prophesies and accounts for it in the
present. As we read we come upon a history that informs ourselves as
of a past, but this is an Object of our humanity, informing us of a
history. At the same time an elusion is denied, one that works on us
as we put it off, informing us of what we would not know because we
have set aside the basic life for our humanity. This elusion is the story
I wish to explore here. For it is by the story that we avoid our selves
as fully human; it allows the individual to remain silent in-itself. The
 Kair 31

story becomes a mirror in to which we look, as fully human, and forget

our selves, identifying that which is our Being with the being of the
image. We then make our cause the speaking of the image. It is just
this image I wish to avoid in this essay, as I attempt to give voice to
that which has been essentially silent.

In reading the story of Christ, as with many Biblical stories, an

interesting issue arises; How can the author know this? And if this is
not known, who am I as the reader? For the believers, often this
question is not asked; the story is taken as a record of fact, of a history
that is true; the author and the reader are seen as complicit in a
method of conveyance of truth. But again, the exploration of this essay
attempts to avoid these more objective realities, because I might say
that indeed it is true, but then I beg the question of my being a believer
or a skeptic, and I would cause all sorts of confusion where I seek to be
clear. So I ask, first, how is this story coming to me? Through the
author and the scribes and the translators – yes, but this is not my
question either. As I read it, it has significance to me as it has had
significance to others and that it has a most significant significance in
this way. Even if I deny that the story is true, in a faithful way, that
is, a religious, institutional, way, I still have here, before me, the story
in its totality, of all the teachings about it, the history I indicate above,
and the text itself – and that I could have gotten it for free merely upon
the asking. Here is the story that has effected and influenced –
effecting and influencing – my life, my history as well as what I know
as American and European history, if not world history; here is the
story before me, in front of me in this book. The story is coming to me
as I have come upon it.

32 A Heresy

Then, going backwards, the Gospels of the New Testament are

presented to me. The narrators tell me the story. In so much as I may
doubt the veracity of the historical truth as a tenant of faith, I have to
ask how they knew this story. If there was a Jesus Christ, how did they
know of what happened at his birth? They were not there; how were
they privy to all the various circumstances and situations? Indeed,
here I must give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they
were there for at least some of it, but then how come they, the authors,
are not mentioned or implied in the story? Were they acting as
journalists? Even if they were merely recording the events, even if
some sort of cultural norm prescribed a certain anonymity, I cannot
but see that if they were there for the events of Jesus’s life, they most
likely were not there for his birth. Even behind the historian’s
revealing that the gospels were most likely written after Jesus’s death
and probably the death of the apostles, it is not difficult to understand
that the authors were probably given or accumulated the story
through a conglomerate of stories, such that the gospels themselves
were the closest rendition of what actual story was itself available,
and, then again, perhaps the event of Jesus’s life was so profound that
the story remained sufficiently viable to be brought to the authors
intact, but it may also be that the story had come to them in just that
particular way, baring little or no resemblance to an actual event. In
sum; at minimum it was a profoundly impactful story.

Three of the authors of the Gospels (Mathew, Mark and John)

are so moved that they speak without feeling they have to qualify their
authorship personally, but Luke grants readers purchase upon what
may be going on there. Luke gives us an insight to what may have been
actually occurring in the writing; right off in the first lines, he
qualifies:
 Kair 33

“Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order

a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,
even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were
eyewitnesses, and ministries of the word; it seemed good to me also,
having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to
write unto thee in order…that thou mightiest know the certainty of those
things, wherein thou hast been instructed.”15

The liberties I take upon the text may seem exaggerated to

some, but the reading put forth in this essay may just come to have a
more significant ring than traditional religious or historical
interpretations. It is obvious that Luke had heard this story as it was
passed down from those who were there and subsequent preachers. We
ask, why? So what if a story was passed down? There seems no need
for Luke to continue passing it along by taking the time to write it out;
all the traditionally significant stories were recorded by scribes; he is
not part of some unbroken oral lineage, in fact, this sect that will
become Christianity has no lineage at this point, or at least no claimed,
overt, lineage, no responsibility to the tradition that has come to him
intact; what will be Christianity is most likely a break (a
renunciation?) from what has been given to him; in fact, it is
exceedingly obvious that the most proximate and relevant cultural and
ideological tradition (Judaism) is at great odds with its progeny.
Granted, we may and should seek similarities all through the ancient
world as to what was going on culturally, locally and across the world,
to see how this story came about, but still, there was no vested
cultural-traditional (read: institutional) interest in his recording this
specific story. And, it is indeed that this story is linking what has come
to be seen as a ‘true’ history as prophesy to the actuality of its meaning
in the present, aside from what direct institutional or cultural heritage
has brought him. The story was not merely significant from some
historical sense, because, as this story came to Luke, he had a “perfect
understanding of all things [of Christ] from the very first”, and though
many before him “have set forth a declaration of what we surely
believe”, Luke thought it would be good to put it in writing “that thou
might know the certainty of those things, wherein thou has been

34 A Heresy

instructed”. It is not so much that here was a story which made sense
to him, but that Luke already knew ‘perfectly’ the meaning of what
had been brought to him. He again indicates his position in the matter
by stating his intensions for others: In that thou has been instructed
and know of these events, here I will tell you so you may know the
certainty of those things, as I, Luke, have had a perfect understanding
of these things from the very first.

The genealogy given in Mathew of the lineage of Jesus can be

seen as a justification of experience. Perhaps the author was given this
lineage that had been kept since the time of Abraham, but this seems
implausible since more contemporary authors have attempted the
same type of lineages to justify their faith; but it is possible. In any
case, such a recording must be seen in the context of the individual
attempting to reconcile the object of his faith to a reality so that his
faith rings actually true, instead of just faithfully true. No one would
attempt to draw a conclusion of this nature if something within the
person did not require it, did not compel the person to see such a
connection. He must have felt a need as well as a reason to propose a
lineage for Jesus. The author must have been, at once, attempting to
justify his own faith, in that, one, there was an impulsive sense about
the whole thing, two, the significance of Jesus must have some linkage
to the holy past, but also, three, that the author had such a significance
in his being of faith; he was compelled to let others know of the reality
of the significance. It seems unlikely that it is merely an intention for
propaganda, merely as some power play. The faith of the author was
enough, and in so much as faith makes true16, such a truth must also
be proven for others to know. The purpose is the same as Luke’s
 Kair 35

introduction, and indeed, in his third chapter, Luke also gives a

genealogy.

Yet, an analysis of this sort is neither here nor there; it tends

to argue over the True Object, which is the plight of more scholarly
endeavors. If the author was merely a scribe, a transcriptionist, then
we can set aside the meaning of the story in the impersonality that
occurs in the printing presses; the pressings merely indicate that
somehow the text seems important, so let us discuss it. For all this, we
could say that the latest issue of “People” is just as important. No; I,
as Luke, Matthew, Mark and John were presented, have been
presented with this story. The authors present us this story because
they are attempting to deal with an experience, to situate it in space,
to reconcile the Object to their experience of truth, by reconciling
human experience to such truth of the story. In this same way, I
attempt to diffuse the historical intent and infuse what meaning may
be gained by the attempt itself.

We have the authors of the Gospels telling us their own

experience through the authority of the story17. This feature, along
with the bare fact of any encountering it as such, indicates that the
actuality of which the story tells marks a point in the development of
humanity. If Jesus can be said to be an individual who renounced the
human heritage of the Object, for the sake of the basic life, then we can
see that the authors we speak of, by which the story of Christ comes to
us, understand what this move is but are unable to reconcile it entirely
with their being18 . Here exhibits the fault of the traditional Christ
narrative; it indicates the possibility of such an individual, but through
the individual who is not that possibility. But I have indicated above
in Part 1 that Jesus himself, as a renouncer of the Object, was likewise
caught in this same dilemma. We should see then that Jesus did not
write this story about himself, nor did he ask anyone to write it; in fact,

36 A Heresy

as we will see, he was appealing only to that experience which already

existed in his apostles because of the nature of his Being – and because
of this basic experience the story is written. So, if we also consider that
the story of Jesus contains elements that are similar and indeed carry
over from other earlier stories from other lands and cultures, it might
be seen that the story of Jesus may have been less a story about an
actual, single person, but an after the fact conflation of history
recording what had been come upon and being expressed as such by a
few people, exercising their own ‘minimally human’ existence in
correspondence with the actual human events which reflected and are
responsible for the resonance of stories prior and leading up to that
‘time of Christ’, and that the writers of the Gospels were likewise such
individuals.

To more fully describe this motion, I would like to draw an

analogy. I am not a scholar of contemporary popular culture and I am
sure the picture I pose here could be ripped apart in any number of
ways. Keep in mind that I am not attempting to draw a correspondence
between objects, but rather to indicate the process of meaning by
which such conflation may have occurred. Take the example of the
development of popular genres in Western music through the 20th
century; here we have a development that was long in the making
before such genres were established. One could easily make a cultural
analysis that stems from the Industrial Revolution a hundred years
prior to what became our current state of music, or mode of
presentation, which moves through the local cultures into, say, folk
music, such as the blues, country-western, bluegrass, swing, jazz then
rock and roll, to perhaps the more directly artistic music communities
 Kair 37

of the Beatniks, the close following with the Beat Writers, the ‘golden
eras’ of jazz and rock and roll itself, the Hippies, or counter cultural
movement of the 60’s, soul, funk, the emergence on the scene in the
70’s of ‘New Music’, Gospel, Funk, Punk Rock, Heavy Metal and New
Wave, Disco, Rap, Hip-Hop, these moving into ‘House’ or modern club
dance music and Grunge or Alternative music, to the ‘proper’ scenes
we have now, the genres so numerous and intermingling they seem to
defy their own distinctions. Of course, many would have their opinions
about what actually constitutes any of these genres or a history
thereof, and I’m sure many others could be found, but these that I have
listed most probably fit into a general, if not outdated, scheme that
most could recognize.

At root is the indication that a number of people, hardly

the majority, came upon an experience in themselves, and came
together by the mere circumstance of acting out of such an experience.
Each genre began in this loose association, if we can call it that, drew
others, who may or may not have had the same experience, and
somehow developed an articulation of what they were doing to thus
become a genre. By virtue of the nature of the originating experiences
and the phenomena of the meaningful subject, and in a manner of
speaking, the majority of people was looking for the experience, but
could not have it, and this is due exactly to the identification of the
genre as it simultaneously becomes a vehicle for the expression of
power. If there indeed was any group that could be said to have had
‘the same’ experience and who coincidentally were looking came to be
of the loose association, once it was defined, those who came after were
those, more and more, ‘who do not understand’. The defining of reality
in such a way that the group of such an experience became a group
and defined a genre, thereby excluded those who came after, even
though these subsequent individuals also contributed to the
establishment of the genre. Soon the experience that was the event of
the loose originating group had passed and left only the idea of the

38 A Heresy

experience in the definition of what it was, as if it still ‘is’. Still others

felt they too had the same experience but were excluded by the mere
fact of the genre defined as it is, but the experience could not be
dismissed, and thus what may be seen as similar experiences tending
toward unity in the same way were catalyzed into new forms of
expression, each ‘new’ experience drawing the included and defining
itself by the excluded a genre, new loose associations arose around the
rejection, creating further ‘new’ genres. Jazz and bluegrass, city and
rural music, gospel, soul, funk, to Rock and Roll, which became ‘rock’;
‘rock’ let to ‘Heavy Metal’ and ‘Punk’’; rhythm and blues; country;
‘Disco’ to ‘dance music’; ‘rap’ and ‘disco’ morphed into ‘house music’ and
‘Hip Hop’, which perhaps contributed to the ‘Rave’ scene; etcetera.
Despite what and where charting flows, the list of permutations goes
on. Neither can we leave out the music of the non-Western world, and
likewise for all the different types of music, as they might be
differentiated into national, regional, cultural, stylistic, rhythmic and
chordal classifications

This process is of the identification of things to relate the

experience, which grants the relation of objects to other objects, sounds
to sounds, looks to looks, and ‘draws out’ the labels, the genres, from
their more ‘organic’ bearings; as we hear often, for example: “They
were rap before there was rap”. The ‘solution’ people look for, the ‘real’
thing of the identified genre, is already dissolved in the label, and the
denial of this fact works to continue to re-establish it, coalesce what it
could have been that was missed into something that ‘others’ could
have; it thereby effects definition, ironically, the method for which,
producing the differentiation. Yet within this type of movement, there
are those who are drawn who indeed have had the experience and the
event, as such differentiation might be occurring, and thus do fall into
the attempt to find it in a thing, the labeled genre, and remain in the
 Kair 39

experience itself, as the event, as the movement for definition carries

on. Again, then, these ‘essential experiencers’ often reject the Object
that has been made of the previous moment that has been made
generic, and thus move into the new form of the basic experience,
lending as it happens to another definition of popular genre, all the
while continually falling away into silence19.

Again, this is so much only to indicate a process by which

humanity shows up in the world, and not necessarily a direct
comparison of things’ similarity of meaning. Yet, attending the
difference between the development of 20th century genres and the
development of sects of Christianity, we might see a difference in
orientation upon the world. The motion of differentiation occurs from
a most basic level from experience to definition. Genres are necessarily
fleeting and of the past, made into a history for history’s sake, by which
others may now establish the ‘new’, where by labels then occur
simultaneous with the experience, which are really the indicator of the
passed event. Christianity wants to mitigate this ‘secular’ quality for
success, but if we look at the Protestant Reformation we might see a
similar generic process occurring here too. Experience is often ‘set
aside’ for the definition; the continuing effervescent cycle of definition
emphasizes the Object as the pre-existence by which we may come into
the world; e.g. blues and jazz were pre-existing objects that allowed
rock and roll; Catholicism a pre-existing condition for Protestantism.
Thus often granted if not merely said is that there is no originating
experience, but that this too was itself a response to a definition, a
genre, a thing, an Object; the problem thus only concerns by where or
when we decide to ‘stop’ the cycle and begin to define. By this apparent
reality, might we say in its assumptive bias, the experience is
relegated to a ‘passing fashion’, a ‘generic fancy’, and the definition is
held for what is real and lasting, the definition holding within it as it
is passed along, what is essential and true.

40 A Heresy

We have the heritage of the human being. The fully human

sees itself in the Object through a denied effect, attempts to surmount
the denial and reconcile itself through a relation of objects; the
minimally human renounces the Object and is reconciled by the basic
life in experience as objects are integral to this experience. So it is upon
consideration of these two routes that a conflation of these two
humanities perhaps implies for Christianity, again, that there was no
individual person that was a singular Christ but that the term was
more an identifier of a motion, indeed, an experience come upon by a
few individuals reconciled in the basic life, who renounced the Object
as the means for absolution, that Jesus was perhaps one of these
individuals who was more vocal and overt in the experience. The more
fully human element, the majority, in the effort to reconcile their being
to the Object, thus defines the Object toward and upon a particular
path of truth that at best is fleeting but typically never found and the
basic experience of individuals is taken up and again conflated as an
Object, i.e. traditional religious and spiritual dogmatic incarnations
such as spirit and soul. Hence, what occurs is an ironic movement of
humanity where to speak about one is to speak about the other, and
where the meaning of the story of Christ becomes a desired object in
one, based in the hope for reconciliation, and for the other, a present
reconciled reality: A common history divided in the potential of denial.

As this process of essential and generic vacillation, where the

essential experience is always extricating itself from the developed
generic and the generic out of the essential, becomes more definitely
identified in the current discursive paradigm, the essential originating
experience itself becomes objectified as the process is defined. The
individual is gradually ‘pushed out’ of its ability for essential
experience, arises out of its identified being, of its subject-hood, and
 Kair 41

through this process becomes marginalized to the extreme, which can

be to say, to transcendence. Such extremity is eventually discounted
and excluded in the attempt to again inject it back into reality, into
the world of True Objects, and the essential motion of the individual
has no other option for its experience than to recoup the objectifying
element by rejoining with the traditional-conventional tropes – better
to join them if you can’t beat them, might be an appropriate expression
for this last ditch effort: This is the human process of history for
reality; the caveat is that the paradigm never truly succeeds in its
effort of identification, it always fails ‘in the last instance’, but stops
short of coming upon its object of desire20 Hence we have the types of
motion whereby history is wrought; for example, the moment of the
Western mode of pop-art in the 20th century leading to our current
state of social-art-media where one’s identity is specifically and
inextricably connected with an object-genre. In the opposite motion,
we have the example of a type of 'essentialist' Christian, say, Martin
Luther, precipitating from Catholicism in this way to form what would
come to be known as Lutheranism. And likewise, as the essential
nature of the experience avoids the generic position, we see in the 18th-
20th centuries Christianity that itself diversified, then, impotent in its
diffusion, was rejected for spiritualism and paganism that was then
recouped in the late 20th century in ‘New Age’ and 'Fundamentalism',
all of which definition lead to the extremity again, continually reifying
as it appears ‘again’, the ‘proof’ of a transcendent truth. Hopefully,
finally, we might now negotiate the objects in such a way where the
human being is recouped away from the Object in the explication
offered in this essay, a manner that establishes as it manifests again
an essential partition in meaning, an irreconcilable condition of being
human whereby reality upholds a firm universal definition of itself,
and only itself.

*

42 A Heresy

What we see in the introductions of the Gospels is an

exemplification of the kind of motion described above. The Gospels
evidence or tell of a significant moment in existence that not only
shows up in world history but in the single human life; the extrication
of either from the other is a non sequitur. They, including subsequent
New Testament books, tell of this motion; it is a motion of silence
wherein the individual may come upon the moment of decisive
significance; which is to say, if the moment is to occur then it is when
that which has been silent speaks – if it does not speak, then history
is reified in the heritage of the Object (the fully human heritage) and
the moment is dissolved into the infinity that is the potential of every
moment. Jesus presents that silent voice as Christ; the apostles the
reification of the Object and the recurrent extrication from it; together
they illustrate the human existential constant. That which is most
absurd, the silent voice, a denial of the human heritage, is either
vehemently enacted, or it retains its silence, that is, remains an invalid
object, and is enfolded into the sanity and sensibility of the heritage,
compromised as such, and thus unknown and un-ventured: It remains
silent21. So the ‘remaining’ silent is the issue, and is what I endeavor
to enlighten22. The guardian of the Object rests upon the silence as the
objective of knowledge, to uncover that which is ‘covered’ in silence,
that which is unknown in potential, so it has the world of Objects to
negotiate and information to learn. She is on the ‘new’ road, mapping
the path; yet she rides upon the silence that is never heard, even as
she sees the silence is gaining voice through her discovery. This is the
meaning of transcendence, of the transcendental clause. As she moves,
the silence thus remains silent at all times and decision has no
significance but against that which has been mapped; though she sees
toward the ‘new’ as an experience, she merely repeats the ‘old’ in
experience. The renouncer is of a different stature. The Object has
been mapped; the silence heard. His plight has to do with the silence;
 Kair 43

he is the speaker of the silence. Though he sees the ‘old’ as his

experience, he repeats the ‘new’ in his experience.

The problem of that which remains has to do with

distinguishing between these positions – it has to do with decisive
significance – since they (the positions) at once, again, describe both;
as each description of position taken on its own may apply to either
polemic, when the other is read the reader comes upon a paradox. The
problem for the reader must be in what place either clause-meaning
must fall, which clause-meaning sticks with which subject (which real
subject-object). If such a decision is not come upon then the reader has
the already-made decision of the heritage that sees the paradox as
merely interesting, but not significant. The human heritage will avoid
the significance of the moment: When one description is attached to a
specific identifying meaning (that is, one of the object-terms, or maybe
pre-positions), the other description then moves to describe its
counterpart, yet, when the clauses are separated, each describes the
same, but either, identity. Like chasing the end of a rainbow, the
reader ‘chases’ to define the one clause and inevitably only reveals the
‘other end’, as the one before her disappears. The reader typically,
usually, normally cannot but look at only one at a time, through one at
a time, the other always just out of sight in the periphery. As we move
to describe these two positions away from ambiguity between them, in
order to distinguish each, the minimal and the fully human, the
meanings drawn by the reader from the defining clauses conflate, and
it is this conflation which routinely identifies the Object, and that
which is silent routinely remains silent. Thus, that which we seek to
identify and to give voice to here is that periphery, that first and final
object, that meaning which cannot be held in its place but which is
always identified like an echo in the reserved clause. Yet, the fully
human will be stuck in the certitude of the object and will not
understand what has been given here as she will continue to seek the

44 A Heresy

truth in the generic. Hence, we have the polemics indicated, and we

have the route before us.


The Virgin Birth

The pervasiveness of the Object designates the meaning of

faith. Faith determines what is true; faith informs truth; faith makes
true. It is from the depth of the silence that we come upon our being in
the world. In so much as we understand our self in reference to a
history, we have faith in the Object and will explain away any
inconsistencies to avoid the passes by which we make the explanation
possible. Such inconsistencies we have indicated earlier in this essay.
Either the individual will ‘decide’ upon the ridiculousness, the
absurdity, of such a proposal, that it really indicates nothing other
than the inconsistency itself, or the meaning of the situation will
relieve the individual of the (prior, objectival, traditional, historical)
rational weight of decision upon the matter.

We come now upon the significance of the Virgin Birth. The

Virgin Birth is proposed to signify that Jesus was from the start not
merely human; which is to say, even as a child in the potential of his
being an adult, never could he be fully human. Let us look at this. He
was born of one without another, but by the other he was born; how
could Jesus speak of this? He was born unnaturally. How can one
speak of himself as having an unnatural origin and still be taken
seriously? And, though he might speak of it, it would be entirely
natural to him and it would only be in reference to what he comes upon
in others that he would know that his origin is unnatural. If he were
to believe these people who told him of his unnatural birth, it would
make no sense to him since to him it was entirely natural and thus, if

45

46 A Heresy

he were to speak of his being birthed by a virgin, he would, in every

case, be lying; which is to say, at odds with himself and asserting a
propriety over the truth of the matter since being conceived without
(at least) two people having had intercourse (discourse) is unnatrural.
For the meaning to be true, he would have to be speaking in a manner
that no one could understand; he would have to be speaking from a
place of contradiction, from a place that the fully human method for
understanding reality marks as false.

Let us unpack this situation. There is no human that could be

born that was not consummated by a man and a woman. Yet here
Jesus is; a human. He is a human who was born of a virgin, of a woman
who was never ‘known’ by a man. Of course this must be divine
intervention. Yet, if we have not been forthright in this essay so far,
then we should be clear: If here we are realizing the total situation,
that is, if Jesus is indeed human at some level and he is thoughtful as
such creatures are, then if he were to believe that he was born by
divine intervention and speak of it, at some level of his interest for
others he would also be lying, since every aspect of his humanity would
be incapable of overcoming the discrepancy that occurred in his
knowing that he was born of a virgin: A virgin does not give birth to a
child, and to repeat: By all natural conceptual rights, there is no
conception without a conventional history of previous concepts, of prior
ideas that inform the concept of a tradition, of a human interaction.
We cannot dismiss from what is able to have meaning that there are
fundamental bases of being human, and that these bases must have
some sort of foundation in sex, and by conventional default, gender.
Hence, where Christ was born of a virgin, there does conception arise
by an ‘unnatural’ route; and this is exactly the situation we have before
us. Where there may be what is natural, there do we have a particular
orientation upon the situation wherein we may find ourselves, a
 Kair 47

situation that is held within a particular conceptual frame of

reference. The paradox presented, then, which only occurs while
referencing the fully human scheme of meaning, is solved through
again imbuing an ability for a term to indicate something absolutely
true, seeing terms as evidence of truth self-evidently (in potential), but
albeit redundantly, this time, something supernatural, or something
that lay outside the capacity and or purview of our ability to know of
it. Likewise and correspondently we have an introduction of a kind of
paganism, which is to say, a kind of pluralistic knowing that is not
based in a monastic order of things; if there is a supernatural order
that lay outside the authority of what is natural, then a more liberal
application seems appropriate to what knowledge may be had of it.
Concepts reduce not to multiplicity, because the concept of multiple is
a unitary function; the term ‘multiple’ contains that which it is
supposed to indicate through meaning 23 . What is natural may be
singular, but its multiplicity lay in as much as its details convey
plurality. So against this potential for reaching out, evidently, that is,
apparently, which is to say, to refer to that which can be conveyed
honestly, there is no ‘one’ God, no possibility of an entity that is
separate from our known existing universe; every possibility of such
an entity collapses within the possibility involved in exactly what I
know as an extant, that any such entity becomes again another item
entirely contained with the knowledge of it. In this knowing, the terms
become the issue, and in this knowing, no divine intervention occurred
because divinity is always in reference to what is humanly known and
what is humanly known has been conceived as a condition of previous
ideas, previous historical terms. But in Jesus this is all there is: He
was born of a virgin – does he know? Again, in one sense, in order for
him to know this, he would have to have been told; he would not have
known this from experience except that his experience was becoming
a certain age so he could understand what it meant when he was told.
This would imply that his mother probably told him, or perhaps a close
family friend; but at all times he would already have a context to be
able to know anything at all. So this is not anything that we can really

48 A Heresy

imagine as a normal situation; this is not that Mary had a fling one
night or that she was raped. Indeed, if this was the case, she may have
well told Jesus that she was a virgin but conceived him; perhaps we
could then make a psychological correlation to Jesus during his
ministry associating with a whore. But this is great speculation; we
stick with the story that is come upon. Why would Jesus’s life be told
in the context of being born of a virgin if such an expression, an
expression which posits God, an actual divinity, is merely an
expression of a totally inclusive existence? Rather, the question
becomes: Can we see that the alternate explanation offered through
this essay, apart from religious faith, is at least equally plausible, and
in being so, thus more probable? That Christ Jesus was conceived
apart from the historical tradition of a prior ideal state, that state that
proscribed what is natural, and that arising within that real state he
was thus born of a virgin. It is the inclusivity that marks the place and
point of intervention of God, because what is not included by this
world, this traditional and conventional state of conception, is indeed
what the historicity of the matter produces, and what this essay
attempts to shed light upon.

Further, the story tells of Jesus's birth. There is nothing

written to conclude about what Jesus may have known about it. And
what we have said earlier: Was there a reporter who hung around
Jesus’s parents from the beginning and then caught up with him later?
Even if this were a story passed down intact, what single person or
group could or would have been so keen and open minded as to notice
Jesus’s and John’s parents’ strange events, and then to not say
anything about it to any one, even in support of the auspiciousness,
then to further follow them (in the margin, mind you) until Jesus was
born, and then even unto John's and Jesus meeting at the stream?
Even given our idea of the verbal traditions of ancient cultures, where
 Kair 49

in this case someone witnessing Mary, a virgin giving birth, the event
so miraculous, then passed it on and through 30 and more years the
story remained a faithful telling of the true event, we have to wonder
just how effective such a verbal tradition may be, since we must ask if
the the skills required of such a cultural memory might have faded as
the reliance upon book script had proved itself. If merely rumor or
what we might call ‘urban legend’, we should be even more skeptical
of the veracity of the actual event. Never mind that at the time there
was no way to verify that indeed Mary had the experience the Bible
tells; again, the same critique could be applied, i.e. was someone there
to witness Mary’s encounter with an angel? Indeed; the experience
such as proposed of Mary is also included in the subject of this essay.
It seems entirely far fetched to even imagine that the story of the
virgin birth could have stayed attached and consistent with a single
individual so as to constitute an autobiographical account. At best,
given what we know of verbal traditions and the tendency for fully
human attitudes to be impressed, we could have the seeds for the
emergence of a generic mythology of faith.

We must throw away such mythological suppositions and

investigations; we can no longer afford to rest our heads in speculative
logicking of what-ifs, and equally devious religious evidential
hearings. In order to remain consistent with what humanity is, then
in that a human is now and was a human at all times in history, we
should see that the conception of history as progress in understanding
occurs through words, and words, though they are seen or understood
to refer to an object, the issue of what such terms gain merely reveals
the exegesis of this essay: To wit, terms either gain the True Object, or
terms only gain other terms. Here we argue the latter, so in that there
may be a God, we must excise this term from our historical meaning
and bring it up to date: The effect of God is constant, but terms tend to
convey stability in history such that we see the term ‘God’ as changing
or becoming involved as an anachronistic idea24 against the progress

50 A Heresy

of knowledge 25 . There is the knowledge contained in the story, of

Jesus’s knowledge of himself; then there is the knowledge of Jesus that
others know. There are those who see this story as telling the truth of
the matter, but we leave this alone directly as the explication of this
essay concerning faith will fill this out. More pertinent is the truth
which allows for such manifestations. This may be called existential
knowledge, which is itself based in a faith that explains Jesus in the
way we have proposed: Jesus born of a virgin presents the absurdity
that some extra-universal element was involved, but also not able to
be involved. In truth, before anyone could speak of this situation they
would be struck dumb, incapable of speaking anything sensible about
it. If one were to say ‘God’, then he would be lying and covering this lie
through his own hypocrisy because the only way to prove it would be
to rely upon ‘God’ to prove it to whoever was listening. He could only
say ‘God’ in as much as he believed that such an entity existed, and
such a belief, in reference to the possibility of being known, manifests
as belief only the reflection in what is denied; if it has to be believed
then there is something about it that is missing, but what it is that is
missing in order for there to require belief is denied in the act of
believing: That which is denied (the space that belief overcomes) is the
same that offends the rationality of the Object. The Object always
depends upon a transcendental source, or creator of meaning, that not
only can supply to argue ‘first cause’ but also in the absence of ‘logic’,
ends upon supplying the basis of rationality that we call – as a catalyst
for rational thinking – intuition and/or inspired thought. What exactly
this ‘intuition’ is is never found, but we suspect it is involved with the
overcoming of the gap. This is to say, the notion of rationality being
based in having and inherent ‘blind spot’ is offensive26:

So much as Jesus has become human, God is denied. Belief

arises when one has to make a decision based upon a situation that is
 Kair 51

inexplicable, a rational choice within an absurd situation, and the

choice transforms the absurd into the rational, so that the terms of the
choice re-invent, re-establish and re-present what was absurd in terms
that relate True Objects of reality: Rationality, intuition, science, God.
None of these can do without the others, or without a scheme of belief
that places these terms in real meaning.

This is not a story written First Person, by Jesus about

himself. But it does implicate a person of significance: He who has been
born of a virgin has made the absurd decision that could not be made
because the Object has been rejected from birth. Again, the positions
conflate. The fully human makes the decision into the history of the
Object and so develops religion and ideology around the objective of a
woman who has not had sexual intercourse giving birth to a son. In so
taking this route the fully human could not have decided to consider
this situation any other way, that is, without considering the objective
truth, that we have, at least, a story about it, of the given virgin birth;
for example, it can be true or false, God did it, she had extra-marital
sex and lied about it, it is a story taken from another culture such as
Egypt and retold for the Jewish culture, et cetera. A decision not based
upon this truth is taken to be absurd, or in other words, not valid,
meaning, there is no decision to be had. Here, then we have the
minimal human who has renounced the Object through a moment of
significance and so makes the decision that could not be made because
it is absurd.

The significance of the virgin birth occurs in the distinction

between the fully and the minimal human, which is, as we find
ourselves in existence. The fully human will see this exegesis of the

52 A Heresy

virgin birth as interesting; the minimal human will not. The minimal
will find it significant. Hence, the minimal will be effected in
knowledge; such knowledge will be significant enough to be
accompanied by an experience, and this experience will amount to the
realization of the possibility of his own ‘virgin birth’. The fully human,
attached to his story, may find it curious, but will see the virgin birth
primarily as referring to the story of Jesus that we find in the mytho-
historical religious book we call the Bible, and will either merely be
interested in the curious idea presented in this essay, be offended and
move to spiritual-religious defense, or write it off as ridiculous.

If I am attempting to avoid the object of history as an Object of

faith and stay in the fact of history, in as much as I am addressing
absolution, that which reconciles the Object to existence27, I must then
be speaking not so much of Jesus’s objectivity as a man-god, nor his
mythological aspect; for, when I do this in an honest dialogue, I can
only reduce such things back in to the historical analysis and maintain
the Object as such that I recourse back into a religious faith. I must be
speaking about something else.

When I consider my place, my situation, here, reading about

this virgin birth, and couple it with the fact of the significance of this
story, as well as that it is somehow a ‘spiritual’ venture, I reflect upon
myself. I see then what may be the reflection and I become that which
I am with minimal qualification in knowledge. I remove myself from
the potential of my Self as the Object of history and I am come upon
myself, by myself, as a being that is separated from its birth; that is,
 Kair 53

the physical birth that I know of my history is exactly that: A story. I

have been removed from the actuality of my own birth and my ability
to remember it, and in this feature of my being, I am left with an
inevitability of knowing that at some point I came upon myself as
myself. As a child, I may have had some idea of self, but it was intact
as its own, in childish thinking and awareness of the world. At some
point in my life I became myself, the self I know, the self as a history,
the self that comes upon itself in decision and consideration of the
world. Then, with some awareness, at some point I can look back upon
my own life and see that I have been separated from my birth. Indeed,
this is what Jean-Paul Sartre indicates when he speaks of having been
“thrown” into existence; I am here, now, but I cannot, that is, I am
incapable, and I may not know exactly how I got here. I am not allowed
to ‘have’ a ‘past cause’, in the proper sense of being able to fully grasp
and hold a substantial and grounded past, because the limitation of
my knowing prevents me from going beyond a present; that is, unless
I reflect upon a history (an object in which I have faith that it is true)
of myself. But this must have been told to me through a number of
helpers (which, interestingly enough, whether it be from parents,
family, teachers, books or whatever, from my historical position of
childish ignorance, are ‘wise men’), and then I am left with the fact
that I am only that history to the extent that I am knowing that of me;
I am initiated and taught into the human heritage and associate what
knowledge I do gain of my own experience with that quality of
knowledge that I have learned from others of True Objects. I am thus
not separated from my birth nor thrown into any existence as I am
asserting myself as the Object of myself in relation to other Objects.

We have now the singular idea of the virgin birth of myself in

existence that speaks of difference in the same address. This is a
singular concept through which is organized a meaning of world so as
to necessitate a different world altogether, one that while offering a
particularly different view, which is to say, one that may be viewed as

54 A Heresy

taking place within a common one world, nevertheless likewise is

different, a view in which the whole world resides effectively. This
effect occurs upon a scheme of concepts the terms of which cannot be
implemented upon or towards an organization of True Objects, but can
only do the work within the historicity (the fact of history) wherein
such organization arises. So in speaking of the virgin birth, on one
hand, I am separated from myself as a newborn and am thus ‘here
suddenly’ being, and on the other hand, I am informed of my birth (the
time, the circumstances of the event, as well as the ‘nature’ of sex)
through others who tell me of it as if from nowhere; yet also, even as I
may come upon my own experience, their existence and their ability to
inform me comes to me as a pre-existing condition for myself. The
former informs Being itself to itself; the latter is informed of itself
Being by an other, and by virtue of this fact is being informed by a
relation of Objects. And although we are speaking very close to the
margin for distinction, in the attempt to be clear by definition, for the
dialectic, the former is of the ‘minimal human’, the latter, the ‘fully
human’. We might then be able to observe, in the relation of Objects,
that the history of the fully human individual is commensurate with
the Law, or in other terms, the voiced rules by which objects may be
related and remain real-true, and the minimal is the typically
marginalized human, which remains silent. It is when silence speaks
that its knowledge, appearing from seemingly nowhere, from an
‘unspoken’ history, as if from a ‘virginity’, brings reality into question.

The noted analogy to this (our) ‘virginal’ existential situation

is, indeed, the Story. All stories begin somewhere but at no time are
we to figure that the beginning of the story is The beginning of
 Kair 55

everything, as if there was nothing before the story began, but we have
only a real way to know what was before. So even in this way, any
story is not separate from the story, because the effect of the story is
that there can be no other story. The story begins as if from nowhere;
even if the story attempts to place itself in an historical context, this
also merely begins the story and no matter where or when the story
begins, it always supplies the story. Such historical contextualization
supplies a reasonable doubt for the story’s validity, but not of its, the
story itself, truth, for a story may be fiction or non-fiction, rather, the
validity of its truth as relevant to the history in which it is placed
thereby grants an implicit truthfulness for a history by virtue of its
being embedded within ‘the larger story’, which is then the truth of
history. This basis called history need not be an intact or identifiable
entity; its functioning supplies the unattainable Object, and thus the
sought but never attained absolution. In both cases, the story or the
history, the beginning arrives as if from nowhere, from no actual
beginning and only a beginning manifest of the story.


The King of the Jews

Three wise men came from the East to Herod asking where the
King of the Jews, Jesus, might be, that they may worship him, and
Herod sent them out to find Jesus and report back to him where he is.
Right from the start, we have an implicit double narrative. Herod is
the King of the Jews, yet the wise men come to him asking where the
King of the Jews may be, probably in all innocence and naivety,
figuring that Herod, a Jew, would understand the prophesies and
would likewise be eager to find the ‘true’ king. But Herod has a more
sinister motive; he is instead threatened by this and so will kill the
child Jesus; the wise men have a dream and do not report back to him.
In this we may see that what might be the King is but a ruler (a
sovereign, but also ‘the measure’), a ‘negotiator’ of Objects, or rather
subjects (subject-objects), the Jews, and Herod does not wish to lose
his place and purpose by conceding that such prophesies are true.
Perhaps this is merely because he is a power monger, but it could be
seen also, perhaps, that such prophesy has become institutionalized,
that the religion has become a civility, a modern social network of laws
and rules, that such a prophecy is given lip service for the sake of rule
and not so much because the prophesy may actually come true, or that
such worship of God is more than the state business. Indeed, the ‘real’
everyday life of the Object tends to discount miracles.

If we can see this, then we can see an opposition between the

wise men, who seek truth, and the King who maintains the rules over
Objects (and subject-objects), which are the asserted truth, and that
57

58 A Heresy

such polemics indicate the need for reconciliation that is the condition
of existence. The King of Objects wishes to find the true King of
Subjects so he can destroy him, and indeed the King of Objects sends
others – he does not go himself – to find the King of Subjects, but these
others do not report back to him when they do. Following the impetus
of this essay, we might see this part of the story reflecting our
existential situation28. Assuming we are indeed born of parents into
the world, we are thereby brought to our humanity by their heritage,
by the rules of the world that are definitions about relations between
objects; as children, we are subjects of the object, the ‘king’ that is the
rules of the relations, of how things are, the truth of reality. Similarly,
though, in so much as we live, grow and develop, at some point we
come upon ourselves somehow more than the rules which have
determined us. In this glimpse of ourselves, we may look out into the
world and wonder what this oddity is, and in this moment become the
king of objects in search for the king of subjects. It is a reflection of
that state of affairs in which we find ourselves. Perhaps we have heard
of spiritual things, or were taught them, but this only aggravates our
situation, for, to be honest, the emissaries of our thought, so
conditioned and permeated by the truth of the Object, the rule of
reality, though seeking what may be true beyond the unsettling arena
of objective rules, return to us only the results of the rules and not the
truth that was hoped for, or rather what is returned is indeed what we
hoped for. In effect, we have ‘killed’ the ‘child’ who would replace our
truth of the object, the rules, with new rules as yet unknown to us.
Where we are not able to be honest, thereby do we then retain and
uphold the truth of the rules as well as their ubiquity and we find
spirituality. But the story of Jesus, the one who has gained absolution,
or is otherwise absolved, tells us that the ‘emissaries’ do not return; so
also, paradoxically, the ‘emissaries’, our thoughts, the ‘wise men’ that
somehow see something more than the rules29, that we sent out to look
for this ‘new king’, “saw in a dream” – as thoughts betray motives that
 Kair 59

are perhaps unknown to the thoughts themselves and despite them

will defeat them and so must be denied as ‘actually real’ – that the
king will not receive its dethroning, so the emissaries do not return.
So it is when we are able to be honest and not stop short, then the fully
human situation of reality prevents the emissaries from returning
because of the insistence of its rules, which will effectively kill the
Subject-king if the emissaries were to return with information of him.
Further, in retrograde, assuming there are parents who are the de
facto effective kings of the object, the conveyors of the true heritage for
the children, the potential for the children to come upon that moment
of ‘decision’ discussed in the beginning of this essay, likewise repeats
this part of the story of Christ in the eternal repetition of human life
because typically the majority of humanity, the fully human, never
encounters the first moment of significance due to the decision involved
of being oriented upon the true history of the Object30.

Nevertheless, as we will hopefully see through this essay to

significance, even though the wise men do not return to Herod, he, the
King of Objects, dies anyways, and then the true king, the message at
the beginning that was not returned by the wise men, returns. The tale
of human existence reverberates in its own mythology; the story
cannot be extricated from our story. This returning occurs reflective of
the orientation, and can be designated as the first and second moment
of decisive significance. The first occurs consistent with experience
such that the person comes into their purpose as they were always of
it, and in the story, this is Jesus Christ. The second moment (termed
consecutively as an existential moment, not a human temporal
moment; for the benefactor of this second type, it appears as a ‘first’
moment, but it is categorically of the second type) occurs upon a
realization that the True Object has failed or its integrity has been
compromised. As we will see, this is represented by Pontius Pilate.

60 A Heresy

Joseph is told by God to leave their country until Herod

is dead. Joseph is the ‘surrogate’ father who is placed in the auspicious
position of being at once the human male figure in the triune family
nucleus, as this contains a ‘spiritual’ necessity, of the basic life, of being
human, but also the ‘objective’, that is, the ‘proper’, the ‘of the rules’,
father for the purposes of heritage in society31; Joseph is Jesus’s father
but he is not his father. This is indicated by there being in the story of
the virgin birth the ‘ethereal’ or maybe ‘heavenly’ father, God, and the
‘physical’ father, Joseph. He is a symbol of our existential situation, of
the significance of Jesus as the minimal human. He is to serve the
objective intent of the basic life contrary to the rules of the king in that
he is to take Jesus away from the land over which the king presides
until the king dies. Again, the figure of Joseph acts at once within two
purposes; he is to protect his son’s life as any father would, and
likewise Joseph ‘keeps’ the child from the dominion of the rules of the
object until such ruler is gone: He harbors the ‘king of subjects’.
Extended to the individual child becoming human, the human being
remains under the dominion of the Object until such time as the rules
of the object are gone, which is to say, the child under the heritage of
the parents ‘hides’ away until that time of the ‘decision’, whence we
find that there was no decision. So, not only the does the (minimal
human) child 'hide' away from its biological parents until such time
that he comes upon a decision of his Self, a decision that is come upon
but that is already made because of his existential orientation, but
also, Joseph and Mary as the parents 'unconsummated' of the child,
reflect another heritage, a separate 'kingdom', a different reality, a
different set of rules by which reality is true – they hide the child until
that same significant time when the King of the rules of (Object)
Reality has died – which is really that time when the child comes unto
 Kair 61

itself. The ‘father in heaven’ has held the child away from the rules of
the Object, such that when the heritage is come upon at that time of
decision, the rules of the Object, the ‘king’ of such arena of the fully
human, has ‘died’, thus no decision is found, no choice to be made. We
will see how this plays also later in the story of Peter and Judas. For
now, similarly, and ironically, to repeat, the individual will remain
under the dominion of the king of the Object, the rules that govern the
relations between real objects, until that time when the king has died.
This is the double sided imperative that runs through the story of the
existence of human Being.

The ‘wise men’ can be seen also as the ‘keepers of the gate’, so
to speak; those who lie within the silence and in speaking reveal its
dualistic nature are the ones who, to the individual child, somehow
know of our birth and tell us of its nature. The wise men bring
spiritually significant objects, incense, auspicious or otherwise 'holy'
objects as presents at Jesus's birth. When they speak the individual is
come upon mysteriously by his or her own existence, and this process
occurs in the child subtly, until it becomes knowledge that appears
from ‘nowhere’ yet intact for giving the child its humanity. Such
‘wisdom’ confers the individual the first moment of decisive
significance, and thus is told, unfolding as it is determined to occur, of
the Christ story. This is the mythology of our existence; ‘wise men’ only
appear within the context of a particular story. Either we come upon
no decision and so maintain the heritage of the Object, or we are come
upon by a decision that cannot be made and renounce the Object.

* *

Resuming with the narrative, when this moment has been

come upon by the individual, the time has come to repent of the Object;

62 A Heresy

to repent is to speak what has been heretofore silent32. So we see that

later, when Herod dies, John begins to preach that the time has
come33 . Now, when he speaks to the Pharisees and Sadducees who
have come to be baptized, he is telling them that there is almost no
need for them to be here seeking baptism “O generation of vipers,” and
that they should have left when they first heard. But they evidently
have not 'fleed' because they feel they might possibly have something
to gain from baptism, but John understands their motive, and
addresses it. When he calls them out in their own deception:

“Bring forth fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say

within yourselves, We have Abraham as our father...“34

he is saying that though indeed the priests have come for want
of repentance, the 'fruits' they bring to repent of, or rather, what they
see as repentance, are 'bad fruit'35. It is not sufficient to have Abraham
as their father; the heritage that is Abraham acting as their father,
the rule barer, and thus the implication of their being law abiding,
does not relate the reconciliation they preach in the ‘truth’ of the rules,
but moreso that “from these stones”, that is, the earth itself but also
the bad seeds of the bad fruit that the Jewish clergy produce, God
himself will ”raise up children unto Abraham”; God himself will ‘raise’
the children to maturity, will redeem those who have been submitted
to the rules of the Jewish temple. Repentance is implied in our context
as a means to reconciliation, to prepare oneself for absolution, and that
such preparedness does not come through the rules of the temple, what
we can say are the rules that grant real Objects. Thus, John baptizes
with water to cleanse those who are dirty from the stones, but, he says,
the one is coming who will baptize with the ‘Holy Spirit and with fire’.
So when Jesus arrives at the pool where John is baptizing, like Luke
who knew ‘perfectly from the start’, John is confirmed and validated
in his faith. That John has done all that he can do is verified and in
this moment, and Jesus is likewise confirmed in his destiny.
 Kair 63

The book of John confirms this interpretation, that baptism

without a relinquishing of the rules of the True Object, the heritage of
the fully human, is insufficient. Here, in the beginning of the story,
Jesus is foreshadowing Pilate through the interactions with one who
appears, in this beginning, as an officer of the Law who wishes to
understand Jesus, and as Jesus speaks to him he speaks of the Object
unto which he, a Pharisee, is subject, and thus is confronting them
with the emptiness of the Jewish law, a law which proclaims spirit but
which is invested only in material.

The third chapter of John36 has a Pharisee named Nicodemus

coming to Jesus the night before the baptismal scene with John,
because he feels Jesus must be a teacher from God, yet asking him how
this can be so. But Jesus denies him as John does the group of them
the next day, as we see in Matthew and Luke (which we can assume
happened the next day). Jesus pulls no punches and lays the problem
right out for him that he might know it, and identifies a catalyzing
statement for this essay.
“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
God.”

Nicodemus has come in askance of Jesus and Jesus answers

that his question is rooted in his own ignorance, that he is incapable
of understanding because he has not been born again. Exhibiting his
density, Nicodemus prods further and asks how can one

“be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his
mother's womb be born?”

And again, Jesus points to the discrepancy involved in his

attempt to understand; he is saying where the Object is true, likewise
spirit is attained through the law of the true object; thus you
(Nicodemus) should “marvel not that I said...Ye must be born again,”

64 A Heresy

for if you understood, Jesus in effect continuing, it would be

unnecessary for me to continue on in this way, for you would see that
what you understand as reality, flesh/object and spirit, prevents you
from understanding what I am saying.

Jesus then further exemplifies the discrepancy by describing a

state of being that is foreign to Nicodemus, as well as the nature of his
inability to understand.
“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound
thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is
everyone that is born of the spirit. “

And, of course, Nicodemus asks, how can this be? And Jesus
again confronts him with the ineptitude of the Law; he mocks him and
says,
“Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?”

It is obvious to Jesus that Nicodemus has come to speak with

him because he has been moved by what Jesus says, but is incapable
of receiving the true meaning. This is because no one who is not of
'heaven' can receive 'heaven', and only those who have come from
'heaven' will go to 'heaven'. Here then Jesus leads into stating the issue
that surrounds the discrepancy that defines the first and second
significant moments; in other words, in the context of this essay, there
is a minimal and fully human existence, where the minimal accepts
existence in its bare truth, and the fully denies it, but that the fully
human still may come to be able to repent of the Object: Thus is
required a significant moment to overcome this discrepancy.

The Son of man exists by his own inclusion and thereby knows
of heaven and earth, because he is from both. Yet, because this
 Kair 65

evidently is often not seen or noticed, and thus reveals that a (first)
significant moment is not in effect, then Jesus implicates a possibility
of a second moment in John 3:14; “And as Moses lifted up the serpent
in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man...” – he who is not
inclusive of himself, but who ironically has not come upon the
significant moment – “be lifted up,” – must come upon such a moment
– the staff that became a serpent did so not through some considerate
metamorphosis, but suddenly changed from staff to snake – “that
whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
(emphasis added). And likewise, the Son of God. In so much as there
is a distinction between the Son of man and the Son of God, and such
a discrepancy is relied upon, that is 'believed in', is seen and
understood as designating True Objects, objects that are set away from
the individual into reality such that the individual needs saving, just
so much is that person not saved, but rather, must ‘be lifted up’, must
be suddenly transformed. But this transformation must be solute,
must be from one substrate into another, from common to different37.
from staff into snake. The terms 'eternal' and 'everlasting' ring within
the dual voice, at once indicating those who do not understand as
evidenced by their assertion of its truth or fallacy, as well as those who
do, who have no need to discern such ever-presence as true of false.

We have here, in this beginning of the story, a statement of our

present existential situation that has played throughout history in
some manner for every human being38. In Mathew, Jesus is born and
then appears on the scene after an announcement from a prophet who
is preaching that the rules of religion, the rules which allow a
negotiation of Objects and determine our being as subjects (subject-
objects), are not sufficient for preparing oneself for absolution, that one
cannot abide by the rules and still repent; one cannot merely be a child

66 A Heresy

of Abraham, one that goes ignorantly and naively to be sacrificed39.

God himself, whom Abraham communed with, spoke with, will raise
those who repent, which is to say, renounce the rules that dictate what
it is to be (fully) human; but this preparation is indeed not sufficient.
It is not enough to renounce the rules for God himself to raise the child,
one must be a renouncer. John reluctantly baptizes Jesus so that
‘righteousness’ would be fulfilled, but this is the righteousness that is
not the ‘incorrect’ of the rules which maintain the separation of
humanity, that John would suffer his own baptizing through the
baptizing of the one who should baptize him. The rules have been
broken; that which had been held away for the sake of John in his
minimal humanity has been brought forward, such that John then
'suffers' Jesus who has now broken the rules by his direct occasion;
John's prophecy and purpose has come to an end. The King is but a
servant, needing of baptism, needing of his own removal from the
object for the sake of the object. By this action, God is pleased 40 .
Righteousness is not merely being correct with reference to the rules
of the relations between objects, but is rather ‘correct Being’ with
reference, but contrary, to the rules (heritage) by which one has gained
their full humanity.


The Ministry

Once such an Object has been renounced, once the human

being has repented and prepared itself for absolution, the belief has
passed and the world of rules has ‘disappeared’. This disappearance,
though, is not that which the modern sensibility 'being gone' would
equate to insanity, or a complete disassociation with the world, though
from a conventional disposition such a disappearance can be indeed
termed absurd if not insane41. The human being is always involved
with the actual world, as noted above. Such an event of renouncing the
object leaves the individual in an odd sort of state (also discussed
above). No object helps him in to the world; interactions with other
humans are strained; the individual goes ‘into’ himself, the reflection
of the basic life in humanity. The renouncer must come to terms with
how the world has disappeared and what that means to and in terms
of the human heritage.

Jesus proceeds to go out into the wilderness where he

encounters the ‘tempter’. He fasts for forty days and Jesus is mocked
for his faith. The devil tells him that if he is truly the son of God then
he should make bread out of stones, then that he should jump off the
roof of the temple, and then offers him the kingdoms of the world.
These are the temptations that plague human heritage at every turn.
One is always dependent upon food; one is plagued by depression or

67

68 A Heresy

unhappiness; one would like to be all powerful and get whatever he

wants. So it seems right that Jesus the human would have these
temptations, for they are not the objects that are the rules of humanity,
but are indeed the very bases of the rules that humanity encounters in
living that he fights against: Hunger, sadness, and powerlessness.
When one renounces the Objects by which he is human, what is left
are these simple elements. The temptations reflect the battle that the
minimal-human grown child comes upon; in that such a being is indeed
human, caught, in a manner of speaking, between the basic life and
the heritage of humanity, the infinity that is known because of the
definite heritage, that is, the basic life that is the unrenounced
humanity, develops the reflection of the basic life into a polemical
entity: The ‘tempter’, the ‘devil’, is presented within the whole Object
that has been renounced, the whole of human heritage, as that which
is able to grant the individual that which eludes him, namely, freedom
from hunger, everlasting life/happiness and power over the world. The
tempter is the ‘last’ Object that remains. One should also notice the
progression of these temptations; first Jesus is tempted on the ground,
then he is brought to one of the highest place in the city, the ‘pinnacle’
of the temple in the holy city, then to an ‘exceedingly high mountain’,
as if Jesus’s repentance in baptism which released him from the rules
of Objects, has catapulted him upward, toward heaven, in a movement
that could transcend the actual world itself, which is temptation at its
most. But Jesus is human, and so must deal with human things.
Likewise, but ironically, in that Jesus is human, such a rising
movement coincides with the exaltation of the individual that the
centric fully human subject-object advocates in the fulfillment of being
oneself in a relation of objects: Whether it be mundane or spiritual, one
should aspire to be the best object, to the higher order.

*
 Kair 69

Within the experience of the minimal human, there is always

an ‘announcer’ or ‘announcement’, that then speaks to what must
occur, what purpose or role that minimal human must play. This
event, of the announcement and the action, presents thus an alternate
reading of history that appears to account for a more factual basis of
movement for history itself. John the Baptists’ announcement we do
not hear of; we only know that his role is to ‘make the announcement’
that the time is ‘near’. The appearance in reality of the minimal human
always causes a reaction from the fully human, an offense that
eventually wants to bring about the removal of the figure. John being
arrested and put into prison, Jesus sees that he too will likely be
imprisoned if he returns to Judea, so he goes elsewhere and begins to
speak about the Object but in a way that is differentiated from the
rules.

The man that is Jesus is not blind nor dumb, nor ignorant or
stupid of the world, neither is he a renouncer of the world nor reclusive
like some sort of ascetic; he is a basic human. He must know that how
he speaks is taken as odd, and knows that the worldly powers that be
will not like what he has to say, what he has to be, for he who has
renounced the heritage of the fully human offends that which is of the
heritage. Though he may be a rebel, he is not rebellious in the typical,
human sense; he must see that he is come upon by others as rebellious
in his nature, that they will probably not hear him, offensive as his
way of being is to their humanity. He does not yell at people as if only
he knows something they must learn; rather, he speaks with people as
he knows what they know, but in a way that no one else does. So the
story goes, from then on he began to preach, and say – his message,
one by which he might find purchase beyond the offense that was his
being – 'repent; now is the time’42. At every moment the fully human
may renounce the object; yet in that the fully human has lost the

70 A Heresy

moment of significance by the decision that cannot be made, in history

the fully human must wait for the proper time to regain it – and here
Jesus has come again ironically to tell them now is the time.

Then it might seem, in time, his presence had gotten around

the community. By the time he comes upon Simon-Peter and his
brother, Andrew, he calls to them and they follow him. Here we gain
an insight into what it may be for a renouncer of the heritage of
humanity in the world. Jesus would find himself in a dilemma. It is
known that there were many ‘prophets’ around at that time; these
were most likely rebel-rousers, discontents and a general nuisance to
the authorities if not the general public. Maybe they were
revolutionaries using the words of the prophets to make their claim
against the establishment. So the problem for Jesus, who we shall
assume had a legitimate, essential experience of the basic life, of
renouncing the Object, is how to distinguish himself from this riff-raff.
But this was not a terrible problem, since he was legitimate; he had
not renounced the basic life and so his being could express nothing
else. Thus, when he tells Simon and Andrew “follow me”, it could not
be a command, and it could not be a suggestion, as if, if they want to
then they can. Jesus says to them “and I will make you fishers of men”.
It could have been that they were tired of fishing, but this would be
incidental; since they could have followed anyone, anytime. It must
have been something else which persuaded them so quickly and
absolutely. Maybe they heard of this guy Jesus and here he was now
asking them to follow him, and the thought of having some prestige
(fishers of men) was enticing. But this seems too small, too pedestrian;
such a story would never have come to us. Something more must have
grabbed their attention, something that caused them to know that
Jesus was not like other so-called prophets.
 Kair 71

When a human is oriented upon the True Object, has its being
based in the human heritage, one who has renounced the basic life,
communication is easily understood because it moves through a
medium of objectivity where what is being said identifies or implies a
known object, its truth firmly of potential. If one was to say “our people
are corrupted by this Roman society, we need to revolt”, everyone
would have a contextual object by which to understand him. Even
today, many people advocate getting back to basics (read, a return to
conservative traditional rules), and others say we need to change
everything, as a means to make everything ok. These are commonplace
assertions; maybe some people agree, but others don’t. Ironically,
Jesus’s message said just as much, but yet it said much more. He could
not just go out and recruit people, see if they dig his plight; such people
would not do. As implied by his birth in the story, yet also by the simple
fact of his renouncement, his life was determined; his life was destined
to go a particular, and particularly obtuse, way. With this in mind,
from one angle of seeing Jesus, he had to be sure that whomever he
found that it was not of his choosing (for he had no choice); the choice
had to be that of which people would find themselves (the others would
likewise have to have no choice in the matter, and God would have to
choose for them all, including Jesus). He had to know that they
understood what he was about, what he was up to. Jesus, himself, had
to ‘fish’ for men who would follow him, and in his own fishing for men,
Peter and Andrew themselves fishing could understand that Jesus was
he who they should follow.

The brothers were fishermen of the community; they used nets

which could grab a lot of fish in one haul. When they fished they were
trying to get as many fish as they could in one casting of the net. While
the riff-raff was proselytizing, such ‘false prophets’ were casting their
nets from a podium, attempting to gather as many people as they could
to take up their cause, so that in thinking of good for the whole
population they were really being selfish, proclaiming to the whole

72 A Heresy

what the ‘prophet’ himself thought best; they were offering,

proclaiming, a method of negotiating a new relation between objects,
that is, the object of rule of which they were subjects. Jesus was
concerned with the whole, but in this whole, understood that he had
no way of telling them what was best because he knew that he could
not, for them, overcome the Object because it already was informing
them what might be best; he could not tell them that the Object was
the problem they had to overcome for their absolution. He could not
cast a net; he had to cast a line, and this line was a way of speaking.
Jesus himself was fishing for those who would understand him, so, he
was a fisher of men. He had to cast a line that would indicate to those
who already knew the problem that here was a man who had solved
the problem for himself, or rather more significantly, that the problem
had been solved for him. He spoke to them in a way that said ‘…if you
know what I mean…’ as a subtext, and said “follow me, and I will make
you fishers of men”. He, in effect, spoke to them in a way that told them
that their experience of minimal humanity would be explained and
validated.

This story is the story of humanity and its absolution, the

reconciliation of the Subject and the Object. It is the story of the
Subject of existence, and by this, explains every aspect of the
experience of being absolved in existence. For fully human knowledge,
the story of Jesus can reconcile all stories of the individual to one
solution, indeed, one story. Yet, ironically, when such particular route
and method is understood, the story then has occurred inevitably as a
renouncement of the True Object. When we speak of Jesus, that he
was at once the embodiment as well as the means of this reconciliation
 Kair 73

– that he was himself the minimal human, which can be equated with
the Subject, the one who has been absolved, and that he was the
representation of the method for absolution, which is concordant with
the Object – we are in effect indicating that despite what he may have
been saying and being, he was apprehended, comprehended, come
upon, by the majority of those who did come across him, as The One,
The Object, by which a person may be absolved43. However, in that he
was Being, what he was saying was nothing more than what, we can
say, one says to oneself, one having renounced and therefore being
reconciled with, but not responsible to, the Object. This distinction is
made clearly in John 17:9; Jesus says, “I pray for them: I pray not for
the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine”.
For those so oriented upon the Object of Jesus, namely the subsequent
Christians, this passage speaks of those who believe that absolution
may be achieved through the object that is Jesus; indeed, it is a circular
argument of their faith. I submit an alternate reading, that Jesus is
not praying or speaking about the world of Objects (nor subject-
objects), which includes those fully human individuals of the world
who know by the Object; on the contrary, here Jesus is referring to
those who have become ‘fishers of men’, those whom Jesus has been
given because they were likewise minimally human and who, as Luke
expresses, “had perfect understanding of all things from the very first”,
namely, the disciples. And, to add further significance to my
distinction, Jesus is not so much being empathetic for his disciples, so
much as such believers might have a difficult time in the world of non-
believers. No; Jesus is speaking of the facts of the matter as this is his
experience, as this is their experience.

It is by this kind of selfishness that Jesus proceeds in his

ministry, and it it by this selfishness that he was able to do the works;
and it is only in his supreme selfishness that he may have compassion
upon humanity such that they might find a way through him. The
world is established in meaning, and where Jesus has renounced the

74 A Heresy

heritage that establishes the Real world, meaning is thus left to him
in as much as existence supplies meaning to him as true knowledge.
Hence, we reiterate the beginning of this essay; Jesus's works could be
nothing less than the human expression of existence for knowledge, as
knowledge is nothing more than the terms of discourse (see below)44
That which would appear as 'miracles' to those fully human, are but
'works', indeed, the working of existence as the human being. We are
elaborating upon how consciousness functions; the story thus
evidences the polemic of human existence: So foreign is reality to
existence that what is the 'run-of-the-mill' working of existence now
defies human reality such that it is seen as miraculous. In his
selfishness, through his works, he was emphatically self-absorbed
necessarily as the expression of the basic life in humanity, but a self
that is qualified by all possibility of exclusion, which is to say, all
meaning that stands against self such that self arises as a real object.
His expression is being the renunciation of the Object that is the
human heritage as the law of the world, of separate identity, and
therefore, in that the fully human reality is segregated into greater or
lesser meaning of circumstance and this meaning develops into true
reality, the world of existence cannot but be exactly the coincidence
and significance of all events, which in knowledge therefore
determines one’s ability to act as purpose. Further, in so much as Jesus
is such expression, his activity, though merely coinciding with the
motion of existence, might appear to the fully human to be guided or
informed by something 'other-worldly', and in fact it may just appear
as if Jesus was controlling aspects of reality. This means that it is not
so much a subjective ‘experience’ of Jesus and the disciples, as though
there is a reality where people have various type of experiences, the
minimal human being one of them; rather, it is more the answer, the
completion, to what Soren Kierkegaard asks: “Is there a teleological
suspension of the ethical?” As well, that other ‘spiritual’ texts of the
East, such as Buddhist, Hindu and Vedic texts address, that posits the
 Kair 75

universe not so much as a Husserlian phenomenalist reduction where

the rebuttal concerns real things that might ‘accidentally’ occur45, but
as an actual truth that cannot be dismissed through argumentative
proofs (since the proofs merely confirm their antitheses).

There are other possibilities of miracle, particularly

speculative possibilities, that are not discounted by the mythology of,
what we might call, modern rational science. A miracle occurs in the
motion of time as progress; a miracle occurs always in the past. This
is to say that a True Object has a history, a past, a heritage that
informs an identity to its reality, and thus what is miraculous is that
the past is suddenly viewed from its contingency in the present. The
past suddenly and momentarily loses its coherence as a substrate for
a present orientating meaning; this is then manifested as a present
shift, a mutation of sorts of the very same moment wherein is
consolidated a new kind of present. This new present turns upon this
generic term ‘miracle’ through a conflation of meaning arising out of
this debasement’s real counter, out of the denial of existence and the
assertion of real-true. A discernment between what could be some
‘actual’ object changing miraculously, like a couple loaves of bread into
enough to feel a multitude, and a sudden changing of the terms of
meaning of any event is a non sequitur; it is not even a contradiction
but more a point that can never have meaning itself beyond a
particularly transcendental effect of the terms themselves that would
rely upon a term-object identity46.

Further, the miracle can be a precipitate of truth as well as an

‘equal and opposite’ force; a frontier stronghold against which true
claims of reality may be made. History in this way is miraculous – in

76 A Heresy

a similar sense as some have said, in that there are so many events in
history that we can look to and say, “oh it was such a miracle that we
ever got through that”. The present moment is called the rational
moment, and thus conveys in interpretation exactly what has occurred
in reality: We say at times, “a miracle”. Our conception of reality
defines the present moment within a history that occurred in a
constant arena; that is, the same rules that apply today were in
operation and functioning in the past; it defines all moments. But then
we must ask the silly question that is always misinterpreted: How do
you know this? And set that discussion aside to then ask: Well if the
same rules were in effect, then why or how have we discovered new
rules? If classical mechanics works then how do we now have quantum
mechanics? Well, they say, the quantum was at work in the past too;
at the time, they just didn’t know it. Well, I say: How do you know this?

Though this last question can be taken any number of ways, I

mean specifically to refer the situation to the present state of
knowing47, that there is no way to know for sure that anything really
existed in the past in any particular way except that one has a faith
that it did. Here I will not draw this argument out, but merely suggest
that what it is we know at this point in our experience (nevermind that
'our' is likewise based in a kind of faith) is reflective of the state of the
universe presently: Reality48.

The next question that must be posed is about our inclusive

stature in the universe. Are we or are we not integral to the universe's
functioning? Are we separate from the universe? If we are separate,
then we have the typical inter-religious debate of who is correct, that
finds a polemic as a function in science; if we are not, then everything
that is thought and done must be universally correspondent49. For this
 Kair 77

essay I argue the latter, but only go so far in the discussion; I merely
throw suspicion about50. But, at least, I can say that if everything of
humanity is universally correspondent, then the constant is the
knowledge in and of humanity itself, and if this is the case, then
whatever was the state of knowledge about the universe at whatever
time was exactly how the universe was constituted at that time.

Of course, some would counter that there is no absolute

knowledge that constituted any period of knowledge or historical era,
that what is represented is an unharnessed motion of many
representations of knowledge; neither one individual's idea of a true
universe, nor one group's ideology or cosmology says anything about
how a true universe may be or have been constituted for any time, that
because of this we must negotiate what is truth for any time.
Nevertheless, it is a universally Object oriented scheme of knowledge
that points to particular things by which to argue that there is or is
not an absolute truth of the universe, as if this idea of negotiation is
not a proposal of absolute truth, and as if these particular things are
not functioning as absolute objects for the proposal51. In fact, such a
truth must have been negotiated as the process of history: We reduce
our fully human knowledge to ironic relativity. Instead, what we have,
what can only be the case given the facts of our current state of
knowledge, is that a total universe cannot be known, and this includes
the projection of time, that the projection of time, as a particular and
particularly scientific identifier of the true universe denies its own lack
and ability in the determination of truth just as it argues that we
cannot determine an absolute truth of the past. Science, in this way,
is the ‘esotericism’, the ‘kabbalah’ of modern faith. The truth of
existence must be that the universe does not and is not expanding from
any known point in time (except that 'time' is identified as an
absolutely True Object), as if the universe began at some point in the
distant past, and has been developing along particular constant
vectors that science 'uncovers', and that humanity has developed

78 A Heresy

likewise out of this constant arena of universal laws of actuality, such

that it was ignorant and superstitious, and history has been the
development of human knowledge of the true universe out of such
ignorance and arbitrarity – this scheme of knowledge itself is a
reflection of the universe as it is now, such that whatever the state of
the universe is, it is reflective in and informing to our knowledge of
exactly its actuality. What is missed or maybe (in)conspicuously set
aside, is the possibility that the constant itself, say time in this
instance, is itself ‘curved’, in a manner of speaking, changing with
reference to the view that supposes its stasis. Indeed, it is possible at
some point this description will be noticeably outdated and (also)
thereby judged incorrect, but it is just as probable that the place of
viewing has ‘moved’ as it is that ‘things have changed’. Esotericism,
then, could be said to be the arbitrary carrying of a meaningful point
of stasis. Math and science are other types of universal placeholders of
meaning, the stasis or True objectivity thereof, as some sort of actual
state or condition that is reflected by or of math, is likewise dependent
upon the state or condition of meaning whereby such a stasis is viewed:
There is no ground of scientific reduction but the ground that the
current condition of meaning grants. It’s like finding an absolutely
true value of the ratio of any circle’s diameter to its circumference; an
estimated value may allow for good values of a function but its
meaning depends always on the function itself (redundancy). This is
an aspect of the functioning of consciousness to grant a meaningful
reality; it is not that such a condition argues that reality is thereby
false or an illusion, it merely says that this is indeed how
consciousness functions, how it must function, how at least one part of
being human relies absolutely upon reality manifesting in just this
way.
 Kair 79

What this means is, in mind of the fully and minimal human
realities, the only way that we can know of this constant universe that
evidences a fallacy of miracles 2000 years ago is to deny the quality of
our currently understood state of conventional knowledge. If there is a
static plane of existence, if you will, upon which history and pre-
history takes place, and the future takes place, a universe that unfolds
with the development and dissolving of objects – planets, stars, atoms,
flowers, rocks, people – then in order for there to be any philosophical
positing, any metaphysical argument about what might constitute this
existential plane, there must be something that resides outside of its
ability to reckon it. For how can we know of something without taking
a position that is separate from it, to thereby be able to have any
definition upon it? Unfortunately for the current philosophical
paradigm of reality, for its reductive method, the situation wherein it
argues positions and proposals, contradicts at all moments that such
arguments have any validity whatsoever. Arguments and discursive
arrangements of transcendence and immanence, as if one is better
than the other for explaining our human situation, get us nowhere but
religious dogma, it outlines for our current rational paradigm the
parameters of the mythologically functioning logical defaults. The only
way that philosophical argument can possibly claim any sort of
veracity, is to recognize what for any purpose is, not some agentless
chaos suggested earlier in this essay, but an actual separate ‘extra-
real’ agent who communes with humanity to bring about its inspired
activity. This is the age-old issue of something from nothing: How can
a human agent come upon its sensible self of free activity and choice
and the implied and relied upon intuition, without a correspondent
that lay outside the arena wherein such choice is being made? Every
argument that would deny this reduction is itself relying upon the very
same extra-real agency. In short; The very idea that reason has
philosophically determined that ‘nothing’ exists outside of reality is
merely renaming ‘God’, ‘nothing’. So it is the displacement of terms
that philosophy ironically argues is thus manifesting the very true-
reality of its argument. This is redundancy in action. The

80 A Heresy

transformation that occurs through the traditional history suggests

that a larger reckoning of time and human placement in it is due.

This philosophical situation then argues, ironically, the point I

am making here, that it is reasonable that the works of Jesus should
not be reduced to our current rationale or scientific criterion for
truthfulness. And this is so much to say that the humanity of today is
involved, however global and standardized it is or is not, in a faith, an
intrinsic mythology, that grants the truth of the universe for the sake
of justifying our presence and being in the universe. Such mythology
is the condition of knowledge, allowing for the polemics of reality so
that it can be reality. The effort involved in discovering these objects
of truth by a particular method, assert and rely upon a projected
absolute truth by which we find our current truths, and for which we
proceed in the effort of the object: This absolute truth is based in
mythology (a story) that functions through knowledge by faith, and it
is the consolidation of the tenants of such catholic faith that
constitutes the historical reasons and efforts of at least some of new
‘Realisms’. Indeed, reality must constantly be proposed away from
truth upon such faith, and this is necessary.

So to be as clear as possible: Thus, as to this issue with Jesus's

miracles of healing and such, we can only say that he must have been
able to do things that was consistent and correspondent with the state
of knowledge of the time such that miraculous things did occur. We
need not (we can, and will, but we need not) reduce such miracles to
what was 'actually' occurring in some sort of 'real' universe because
the 'real' universe, that is, the functionally constant universe that has,
does and will exist by the same laws, forms and structures, only exists
as a current state of the universe such that our knowledge of the
 Kair 81

universe merely reflects the current state of the universe's functioning

now. Hence, faith, mythology and existence, and hence, the fully and
the minimal human: The fully human will emphasize the individual in
this type of reasoning and manifest superstition, irrationality,
religion, oppression, spirituality and ideology, rationality, good and
evil reduced to relative law, negotiation, and the truth of the object,
and the minimal will see how such rationalization, such willed
investigation for the True Object is itself an ethically compromised
venture that proposes absolutely sound ethical methods in its activity.
So we have argued only that what is known as true is thus true, but
that this fault of knowledge is not present in the appraisal of what may
be true; so, it may be said it is a miracle that we have even come this
far. Besides; no one ever elaborates or exaggerates about an event;
ever.


82


The Passover

Just as the Lord of the Old Testament went about about

‘finding out’ who among the Egyptians were indeed the Israelites, to
thereby ‘passover’ them, by Jesus’s miraculous existence Christ has
come into the world and been come upon by others whom God had
given him52 ; namely, the disciples. Concordantly, Jesus ‘the Son of
God’ sees that he has to find a way to distinguish who among the sheep
really will follow him. Jesus worked within an assumption that they
understood what was going on as he carried himself, his works, into
the world. Now Jesus is coming to the end of his being, the end of his
speaking the renunciation of the Object; he sees the state of affairs and
that he will now move into the actual reconciliation that is absolution.
As the basic life Jesus sees what is to happen; he is hated by the world
and is the lamb to be sacrificed, and he is and his life has been
reconciled in this purpose; as the minimal human, he has come upon
his humanity, his mortality and is beginning to reflect upon his life.

**

The chapters preceding John 17, the countdown to the

Passover of 13, then 14, 15 and 16, may be seen as Jesus attempting
to discern who among his disciples, if any, really understands him,
what has been going on all this time in his ministry and his association
with them. Jesus is sensing that they do not, but he is trying to get
them to make the move; Jesus is beginning to realize that his

83

84 A Heresy

experience is not duplicated in them, and is moving into his own hope,
his own desperation that his time here has been in vain. Yet, along
these lines, we might see that Judas is the only one (since John the
Baptist53) who has understood that the Subject must do what it is of
him to do. Judas thus validates Jesus in the same manner that Jesus
validated John; and all three die soon after they are validated. Here,
though, Judas and Jesus do not 'suffer' each other. Jesus expresses his
own human dismay at the irony of another’s experiencing the subject
to his own, Jesus’s, understanding, and he tells Judas “that thou doest,
do quickly”; it might be seen that the dipping of bread was symbolic of
the understanding between them – a significant moment – and Judas
left. Only Judas has comprehended – in a way of speaking, existence
has been fulfilled, all parts are in play – so concordantly, the divine
orchestration revealed, the human part must have its time. In the
motion that is death, things begin to fall apart; Jesus's ‘self-
centeredness’ has been upset by the revealing of Judas to his
knowledge, so for Jesus the punctual motion of a determined
contingency, which is, a fulfilling the prophets, must have another
Subject, because this one, Judas, goes to die – but who can it be?

Jesus thus enters into a moment that can be called the

first vacillation of doubt. So Jesus proclaims
“Now the Son of man be glorified, and God is glorified in him”,

and speaks more clearly of the issue at hand, of the Subject:

“If God be glorified in him, God shall also glorify him in himself,
and shall straightaway glorify him.”54

Again, the double movement of voice. In one, his proclamation

is manifest; the other, a pleading to the object-subject. This is to say,
now – expressing his own anxiety of the matter – the Son of man be
 Kair 85

glorified, as if to say, ‘please…my friends, see now; God is glorified in

he who is the Son of man’. If we can associate ‘man’ with the ‘fully
human’, we might see that the ‘son’ of man is the ‘minimally human’,
the ‘like a child’, the ‘born again’, the Subject itself. So further, Jesus
appeals to a logic, as if to persuade that Subject, that disciple, to come
out, to show himself, to Jesus’s knowing of himself. Who will continue
where Jesus is leaving off? Since Jesus is beginning to wonder if he is
alone in his understanding, he says, if God be glorified in the Son of
man (the Subject), then God shall also glorify him in himself; which is
to say that the individual Subject, the minimally human, shall know
of his own glory because of God’s glorifying the Subject, and thus, the
result, Jesus is saying, is that the Subject will straightaway – directly,
imminently, now – be de facto, effectively, glorified by God. Left unsaid
is Jesus’s appeal: ‘Who is it? God, let me know who it is.’ Continuing;
Jesus implores all of them since God has not let Jesus know who it
may be, and he rejoins in a sort of plea: “Little children, yet I am a
little while with you. Ye shall seek me: and as I have said unto the
Jews.” The Jews are of the Law, and so are of the world, and just like
Jesus has said to the Jews that they ‘will seek me’ in the Object that
is Jesus, he says to them, the disciples, yet still appealing to what they
have experienced of themselves that they followed him, and to the
things they have witnessed in their travels, that they, his disciples, if
anyone, ‘should know what I am saying here’: “Whither I go, ye cannot
come; so now I say to you.” – again the silence speaks: God, let me know
who it may be. And then he is defeated when Simon Peter, the first
disciple who came with him, “Lord, whither goest thou?” And Jesus
sees that God will grant him none; Jesus’s reply shows that he sees
this now, for sure. Now he changes his tone and tells them “whither I
go, thou canst not follow me now”. Now, no longer, do you follow me;
obviously (to Jesus), you do not understand, and are incapable of
following me as the Subject, for you are not, you are an Object of the
World; “but thou will follow me afterwards”, in other words, I go from
here to die (this physical body), and so also you shall die one day, but
also, in foreshadow, after I go then you will indeed follow, indeed will

86 A Heresy

carry on as the minimal human determined in its way. Peter then

denies that he will not follow him, for he feels he surely will. He asks
why he cannot, “I will surely lay down my life for thy sake”, and in
Matthew, Mark and Luke all the disciples express the same sentiment.
Jesus answers him, at once informing him of his ignorance of what
must come to pass shortly (the crucifixion, as well as their following
after), as well as the fact that he does not understand what their time
was about; he says in effect, so you will die for me? Oh, yeah? “The cock
will not crow, till thou hast denied me thrice.”55

This beginning of the vacillations of faith can be

described as the departure. Jesus is the expression of himself the basic
life and in this, he has no knowledge except of himself, but as we have
qualified this Self above, which is to say, the situation of the world; the
Object is absorbed into the experience of God in the significant
moment, such that the meaning of objects corresponds significantly
with the effect of God: It is God which has the plan. Now, in this
vacillation of doubt, though knowledge has been upon, within and as
Jesus in his experience, such a presumption of knowledge – as if now
God is obliged, because of His gift unto Jesus, to continue to bring
Jesus into His confidence and relieve Jesus of his anxious wish to know
that his own experience was not in vain by allowing Jesus confirmation
of his faith by the Object, which in this case are the disciples – denies
the basis of his knowledge. The contradiction is palpable; Jesus’s
humanity is evident in his inability to stay the true course.
Nevertheless, Jesus’s faith has never been with reference to the
Object; it referred to the Object because of the necessity of the heritage
of the world, but his faith was neither dependent upon nor responsible
to the Object. Now Jesus is appealing to God in the same breath as he
is appealing to his disciples to validate his whole life experience, and
neither do, as they are one in the same element in Jesus’s experience:
 Kair 87

They are not objects. So Jesus vacillates as he approaches the

completion of his absolution, which speaks ironically in a dual voice of
the removal of the physical, or, death. As the story goes, the movement
serves to verify to us that this was not any actual man-god-object-
subject, but, at least, a reflection of a very human being. The beginning
of the basic life is absolved through renunciation of the Object, in a
manner of speaking, a move that is founded in the absolute experience
of relation to the absolute; vacillation occurs at the end of the ministry.
The doubt and anxiety was left upon the fully human as Jesus
challenges the rules of the Object by his minimal humanity, Jesus’s
move large and social, involved with humanity in general. At the end,
the doubt and anxiety is his alone as Jesus is involved with the private
and personal, dealing one on one with people, his friends, his disciples,
and in correspondence, absolution will occur not psychically, but
physically. Thus Jesus replays this move by asking for the Object to
confirm his faith; he is thereby asking that his faith be annihilated.
This can only occur by the domination of the Object; the spirit
succumbs to the physical world. The confidence of the spirit is replaced
by the anxiety of the mind, but it is in this anxiety, the wax and wane
of which, that continues right up to the moment before death but is
resolved at his moment of death, that grants credence to Jesus’s plight
as the minimally human of faith56.

John sheds more light upon the reality of this situation. Before
they go to the garden where the guards then come to take him, Jesus
addresses his disciples. He speaks through the dialectic, of himself to
himself, for he is dismayed at the revelation at hand and the revealing
that to which he still will not acquiesce easily. He begins speaking as
he often does; as he speaks to his audience, God is speaking to Jesus,
his Self to himself, so God is speaking through him. He says,

88 A Heresy

“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God,

believe also in me”57.

The double voice involved in this invitation is one that a

believer of the Object will not admit. Jesus, as the Subject, the
minimally human, the expression of the basic life, as he is speaking to
the disciples and thus is consoling them, consoles himself as God is
consoling him. God says: Let not your heart be troubled, for you believe
in God, therefore believe also in me, believe that what you are telling
yourself is also true. Which is to say, Jesus is the Subject as he is the
expression of the basic life in humanity, but also he is the minimally
human in relation to the fully human: He is also an Object. As we see
this expression of his Being in the world, we then come across the
meaning of his invitation; the synopsis of the subject-object: God is
your expression as you believe, yet also believe that your expression is
of God as God is the totality of all that occurs: Believe in me, that what
has occurred so far is true58 . He then begins a synopsis of his true
position, the position of truth, the minimally human position, the
Subject.

Naively confirming to Jesus the depth of their ignorance,

Thomas then says,
“Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know
the way?” Jesus replies, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man
cometh to the Father, but by me.”59

The double voice resounds. Here we see the inclination of what

Jesus has been doing and being, and shows it in relief the distinctions
of orientation. Moses, the giver of the Law that Jesus does not come to
destroy but fulfill, came across God and asked his name, and God told
Moses “I am that I am”; God tells Moses to tell the children of Israel
that “I AM hath sent me to you”.
 Kair 89

We will do well here to take a look at Exodus 3.

“And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire
out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and behold, the bush burned
with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now
turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when
the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called unto him out of
the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.
And he said, Draw not hither: put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the
place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”

Probably the first thing to point out is that the term ‘bush’ is
the English translation for the Hebrew word which more closely
confers ‘bramble’ 60 . A bramble is a prickly shrub like that of a
blackberry or raspberry; it is not so much a bush. A bush tends to
convey a much more ‘cultivated’ or ‘shapely’ form. Indeed, a bush is
more similar to a small, low tree, whereas a bramble, like a blackberry
thicket, grows hardly like a tree and more like a large, sprawling,
invading, wandering vine. It is prickly, it has thorns; people do not
often wish to venture into a bramble. Though definitions might be
somewhat vague, it seems prudent to make this distinction here. There
are many pertinent issues in this small phrase. Recall, we are dealing
in this essay with the issue concerning the basic life, what I have
termed the ‘minimally human’, and the fully human, and in this I have
determined the former of the Subject and the latter the Object.

The symbolism and objective for meaning is instrumental in

understanding the problem we have for absolution. Keep in mind,
though, that this is not a proposal for understanding what it is to be;

90 A Heresy

this essay is not so concerned with positing some actual-fundamental

Being because that is an ontological issue, a real issue. The situation
we have before us is first a teleological issue, of purpose toward ends,
and is part of the Gospels granting us a view upon this other teleology,
another route for meaning. Many are the arguments that take the kind
of reduction toward real Being to recall a kind a presentism, or maybe
a kind of cosmic truth wherein the appearances of things are a kind an
illusion. This essay does not take a position within actual and illusory
things; on the contrary, it concerns an orientation upon objects, how
objects are appropriated and what they mean for Being; this is not
suggesting that what means has any necessarily essential content61,
for if it did then we relapse back into the negotiation and debate of
what is real-true, manifest with an advocating of a particular
spirituality, and we lose the significance of the Gospels this essay
attempts to show; we need no more spiritual gurus or religious
evangelists, we have enough and many more who will take up the call
of tradition. This tangent of the “I am” is dealing with the consistency
of meaning within the story.

First I would point out that ‘fire’ and ‘bramble’ appear to have
a consistency for each other that ‘fire’ and ‘bush’ does not convey. It is
a simple matter to reflect upon my own teaching concerning this
story62: I am in a certain awe and my belief in God is nestled primarily
in the mysteriousness of God speaking to Moses through a burning
bush that was not consumed. Right off, I am left with, basically, God,
as a mysterious powerful law-giver. The picture I have is like a tree on
fire, very neat, very cool, with a voice emitting from it to Moses
standing before it. If I am of the heritage of my parents such that my
course is the fully human, I have rules. I have limitations which are
laws placed upon me but more so inhabiting that which I come upon
as natural law in the sense that encompasses what could be also called
 Kair 91

‘real’, ‘sensible’, ‘common’, ‘normal’ and ‘regular’. It is against this

structure, which gains for me the True Object, that I find myself
considering Moses being commanded by God who is speaking through
a burning bush. I have substantial for my self the rules which stem
back to the ‘beginning’ which is placed before me as an object beyond
which I do not go. Indeed, we have in this version of the burning bush
Moses being told by God in just the same manner, reflecting just this
mode.

Alternately, we have a bramble. This structure is much more

difficult to discern; it wanders, its branches squirm and twist out and
into each other in no particular direction; it seems to grow from
nowhere to nowhere, take root at random contacts with the ground,
yet before me I have this thing that I can plainly see is a bramble; it is
an object but its basis as such gets tangled in my perception of it as I
attempt to form a conception of what it is; my investigation into it is
more difficult than my investigation in what a bush may be. Of the
bush I see its trunk, its branches, its shape, neatly and sensibly
established.

God himself has not appeared to Moses yet nor spoken

anything to him, rather, “an angel of the Lord appeared…in a flame of
fire out of the midst of a bush.” This is not a special bush, it is merely
a bush that happened to be there; it is not “The” burning bush, in fact
it was just some bramble. Moses was tending his flock and an angel of
the Lord appeared in a flame that was of a fire that was burning a
bramble which was not being consumed. Moses is not daunted, but is
rather fascinated, curious. It is a ‘great sight’ and he ‘turns aside’ to
find out about this interesting thing before him. He does not ‘look
straight’ at it. This is to say, when we come upon an Object of Law, an
object that is unquestioned and is taken as it is come upon as a True
Object, we look upon it ‘straight’. But Moses turns aside to investigate;

92 A Heresy

he does not take it for what it appears to be, he turns and moves in
closer to see.

Here is the double voicing of the minimal human that we find

with Jesus. Granted, I am not an etymological nor linguistic scholar –
hardly – but we should assume that whatever English translation is
indeed at least a somewhat accurate translation, after all these
centuries; maybe I’m too easy, but here I am coming upon this text as
I have been come upon by it. Moses has gone into the bramble, he
“turned aside to see”; we know this because God “called unto him out
of the midst of a bush”; Now God speaks. But we must ask: Was God
calling from the midst of the bramble to Moses, or was Moses in the
bramble and God called him to come out of it, or was Moses in the
bramble and God called to him from the bramble? The first thing
Moses hears of God – God called to him – “Moses, Moses,” and he said,
“here am I”. Again, did God call to Moses and Moses answered ‘here I
am’ or did God call to Moses and say ‘I (God) am here’? Further, he
said, “Draw not nigh hither,” which is, do not come now to me, but
rather, “put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the place whereon thou
standeth is holy ground”. In one view, it may be that we can infer that
God called Moses to stop and to not investigate the great sight, that
God, upon seeing that Moses went to investigate, commanded him to
stop, or come out, take off your shoes because Moses should not defile
holy ground with the wearing of shoes, nor, by implication, insult God
by investigating God’s pleasure. This would seem to be consistent with
the ‘burning bush’ version, which stems upon the True Object of
reality. Yet, just as sensible, if not more sensible, it seems that God
calls to Moses once he starts to investigate the bramble in which he now
finds himself. Moses went into the bramble to investigate and then
God called to him, saying Moses, Moses, here am I, that in the bramble
Moses encountered God, in all His eternal wandering and indefinity
 Kair 93

and God told him not to come to Him right just yet. Instead, God
indicates Moses’s minimal humanity and tells him to take his shoes
off, his shoes being a symbol, of the fully human heritage, the Object,
of what stands between Moses and God, and that through this symbol,
because of the Object, Moses is standing upon holy ground; holy
ground being, in this sense, that ground by which, though Moses is
separated from God because of the Object, is thereby not separated: It
is auspicious ground.

Moses, meeting God, would have come to God having left the
Objective world, but he is human, of the basic life, and so returns or is
called out from the bramble that is the angel speaking for God, such
that in having the Object removed, Moses now stands upon holy
ground from which he is to go into the world with purpose, that Moses
cannot but now do that he must do. Of this Moses is afraid; he “hid his
face; for he was afraid to look upon God”63. Again, from the perspective
that looks upon the True Object, Moses has been reprimanded by God
for investigating the bush and is now being commanded and instructed
about how things are and what he must do now, as if Moses is supposed
to do things because he has been commanded by God and that this –
in that he did not deny God’s command – is what makes him great64.

We have acknowledged and concede the question of how

anyone could have reported these events; yet, in reading, in
investigating, we begin to comprehend. By this comprehension, the
understanding by which we know what the story is saying, we are
called out of the story, and the versions are revealed. The first type of
this being called out places God as some sort of object of the story so
that as we read we come upon a meaning of God. As we are ‘called out’
into the first meaning, we have been called out of the bush and we read
and see ourselves in reference to this fact of God (whether used to
support or refute the claim, such that we might be religious or not,

94 A Heresy

theistic or atheist, psychological, etc...) as told through Moses’s

encounter, such that we gain the True Object, God, of which we do not
question, or have a choice upon whether we should question, and so we
are in effect commanded, as Moses is commanded, to refrain from
investigation of the matter at hand and rely upon what is given us65.
Moses thus becomes like Jesus, chosen, as we, the reader, are not
chosen; the irony never ends: We read and are placed in the relation
to God where He has been placed as an Object and we are likewise an
Object, the subject-object of God, God’s (the true object’s) subject.
Hence, as a subject of a ruler, we are properly not worthy and humble,
and so in receiving God’s command, we are embarrassed that he would
have chosen us to do his bidding and we defer our election to another.
In this first, it is sensible that Moses would ‘turn aside’ as well as ‘hide
his face’.

Equally the marginalized version shows itself. To see this

version, we must back up in the tale. Now, just as we read the story,
we are in a bramble, and this second meaning calls us out; it calls to
us from within the bramble. Moses is not afraid until God tells Moses
who he is, that is, who God is but likewise who Moses is. When God
calls out of the bramble “Moses, Moses”, wherein Moses is
investigating, the double voice sounds its consolidation: Here am I.
Moses is in (might we even propose as he is investigating that Moses
is invested in seeing) the vaguely definable bramble that is on fire but
is not being consumed. A possibly small but significant feature of this
initial call, again, is the reflection indicated in that Moses hears
“Moses, Moses”. This can be taken as colloquial expression of calling
to someone, as in ‘Johnny, Johnny, where are you?’, yet such intimacy
only adds to a further significance, for the next thing indicates the
consolidation of the reflection, “here am I”. The reader is in a bramble,
and in reading ‘turns aside’ from the Object that is proposed by the
 Kair 95

story, the bush, so he might ‘see this great sight’, but this sight is only
indicated by there first appearing an ‘angel of flame’, a silent vision. If
no angel appears then Moses has no great sight to see, but is merely
tending his flock near a bramble, and likewise the individual, the
reader merely is told a story of God that is really true (in the sense
that its veracity might be discussed or negotiated). But when an angel
does appear, so the reader turns aside from the story as an Object as
she is reading the story. Moses then is come upon by a call, which
indicates himself, as the minimal human, speaking to himself, yet from
an attitude or perspective that comes upon itself an an Other: “Moses,
Moses”; the answer to which is the moment of realization of God
expressed in the dual voicing that occurs in the truly reflected human
being, “Here am I”. Here am I, Moses, and here am I, God: Here am I
the reader of the story about the reader.

This existential consolidation of being is then enforced in the

realization of who God is:

“Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of

Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”66

In the same way Luke 'knew perfectly', this moment of Moses

is the realization of his Self, his Subject, upon itself in the human
heritage, a double movement of reflection. This situation is established
in its depth when God tells Moses, which is to say when Moses realizes,
that the object of his experience here is the same that occurred for his
forefathers. God then tells Moses of his being of the minimal humanity
in that God tells Moses what he is to do; what he will do, his purpose,
is laid before him.

The encounter in the bramble, entered into upon this great

sight of the angel, honestly, naively, ignorantly, curiously, has resulted
for Moses an odd predicament. He has encountered God, and therefore,

96 A Heresy

God has chosen him – but how can he know for sure? And Moses
doubts. This is to say, it seems impossible, ridiculous even, absurd. But
it also seems impossible to deny; he is incredulous. The significance of
hiding his face is continued in how Moses now asks God “who am I” to
do this67. He is not doubtful of the experience, but he is doubtful of
himself involved with God. In fact, Moses is relying and dependent
upon the experience; the reflection that is God is come upon by Moses
as a means to doubt himself. God does not answer Moses as to why he
has been chosen to do this, but only comforts his doubt. God answers
in terms of the intact experience and the results that will come,

“Certainly I will be with thee: and this shall be a token unto

thee: When thou hast brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall
serve God upon this mountain”68.

By this evasion, the fact of the experience is conveyed into the

future and returned to the experience itself. In other words, the
evidence that you are looking for is already found, and this will be
evidenced in your bringing the people out of Egypt. Moses has been
chosen; he will lead the people out of Egypt – and you will remember
our encounter here; he will have faith69. The minimal human does only
that he does.

In seeing that the experience will not be relieved, he is

becoming more resolved to the fact and he reflects upon his task and
how the people will perceive him, how ridiculous it is that one would
intend to move them from Egypt, or even be able to; they will say ‘oh
yeah; well, “what is his name?”’,

“And God said to Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, thus

shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you.”70
 Kair 97

God tells Moses to tell the Israelites “I Am” has sent him, and
also to tell them that it is the God of their forefathers, and then “this
is my name forever, and this is my memorial unto all generations”.

**

Jesus is beginning to understand his situation; the vacillations

are his own. He is becoming less desperate for the Object and more
tolerant of it. The fact for Jesus is that the disciples have missed what
Jesus has been talking about and there is no overcoming this. He says
to them
“If ye had known me, ye would have known my Father also;
and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.”71

Jesus is telling them that they should already know the way:
But it is obvious that you do not – and he says to Phillip ‘Ive been with
you so long, and still you do not know me’? He thus attempts to
reiterate the lesson of his life, the lesson that should have confirmed
to them their faith. The chapters of John 14 and 15 show Jesus in a
less desperate mode attempting to appeal intellectually to them.
Indeed, this move is again twofold. Of course Jesus must feel that what
he has is good for everyone, that everyone should know this great
knowledge. So he is attempting to get beyond the ignorance of his
disciples. But on the other hand, as we have seen, Jesus is in an effort
to attain the justification of the Object, if by a type of ‘reverse
psychology’72. In this movement he effectively grants us an even better
view into the minimal human experience.

*

98 A Heresy

One problem that can hold the fully human in its place of
defender of the Object with reference to the story of Jesus is the story’s
reference to various personas, if you will. Much of Christian
interpretation of the Gospels turn upon the situating of the Father, the
Son and Holy ghost.

For example, John 14:10;

“Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in
me? The words that I speak unto you, I speak not of myself: but the
Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.”

It is a simple thoughtlessness to believe in the trinity; it is a

simple faith. So simple, I must say, that it does not even reach
absurdity, but more often silliness. Indeed, it does not even qualify as
absurd because, first, Christians would hardly admit their faith is
absurd, and second, they go to great lengths to prove to others (and so
justify their belief) the sensibility of this scheme of reality; to them it
makes the most sense. It is a faith based in the ‘full knowledge’ of daily
life; it takes the obvious problems of living and existence and reconciles
it to God in an absolution that will come in heaven. As a Christian, I
can hardly go wrong no matter what I do. So simple; my attitudes of
life control my place, and I justify my place by my attitude in a
redundant motion where God as some super-ethical standard guides
my centric self, the center that is my thoughtful self, that is always
only manifest as a psychological one thing, as I am blinded by its
enfolding limitation. I thereby project and dismiss to invest myself in
a perfection to come through a comparison of objects; to the fully
human, Jesus Christ is founded in this simple solution: The Object
that is God, or God as the command of ethics and morality, (that which
I seek but never attain) allows me my coveting of the Object of my
world, which justifies my inability: Original sin justified.
 Kair 99

In as much as there is more than one object that I desire, I am

comforted in the spiritual intellectuality that presents a divine
paradox, and easily re-solved at that: God, the Father, Jesus, the Son,
and the Holy Ghost. The Father is the creator and justified benefactor
of worship. God places the world in a way that we may be tested worthy
or unworthy of blessing, or even worthy by being unworthy. God, the
seemingly growing-in-understanding judge (who is eternal and never-
changing), saw that his standards were too high, and so sent his Son
into the world so that humanity might have an easier time living up
to God’s standards – such miserable, incompetent wretches we are. I
suppose we are to assume that Jesus was or is the handicapper for the
game of eternal salvation. Then there is the Holy Ghost, who, again,
we are to surmise, is responsible for moving a soul to appreciate God
and Jesus, their worldly institution and its dogma, to want to do
goodness and consider heaven and hell a valid option. So simple; so
ridiculous. It completely avoids humanity all together, so invested one
should be in gaining heaven, humanity is far from existing and merely
is playing; humanity consists of game players, who are simultaneously
other game pieces; no wonder our Existentialist Post-modern situation
would have it that there is no god, but oddly enough, in the same
situation where we find the transcendental clause. Either I am always
justified in the potential to defer myself to God, or I am justified by
what I gain – and both occur for the fully human being; for this world
we should endeavor to gain Objects, and a measure of our faith will be
reflected in how much objects we have gained, but again, or how much
we are kept from gaining. Eventually God is unnecessary because we
still are just doing what we do and/or endeavoring to gain objects and
measure our existential stature by them in whatever manner, of excess
or poverty. No god needs to exist (absolutely) because the True Object
has gained such stature of goodness (god-ness) in itself – we need only
the rules of the game. Our place as a piece in the game matters little
against the transcending term, for the term and the place have

100 A Heresy

conflated in the subject-object. God is ever present whether we ‘believe’

or not. And Christianity is just one way of avoiding one’s self: It is an
assertion of my self upon the Object of my faith, of the subject-object
that is me avoided by a ‘holy ghost’, a ‘motivator’, upon the Object.

So this is how Christianity usually situates the triune godhead;

all are three but are one. This is the fully human take which has its
counter-partial meaning excised by an avoidance of the included
individual. ‘The Father is in Jesus and Jesus is in the Father’ is taken
as a description of the divine object. No reflection is made unto God; in
fact, reflection unto God is forbidden, one is supposed to only reflect
objectively, which is to say, ironically, upon the subject of
transcendence; the self is placed by God so no one has to really think
about their place, rather, they can objectively reflect upon themselves
as to their place in God’s universe and choose whether or not they want
to believe in any instance of trial. But little do they really have to
consider what they do because the Holy Ghost and Jesus will take care
of that responsibility: The fully human is responsible to the Object.
The terms and their meanings have no significance beyond a means to
place one correspondent, strategically, with other objects.

But what if I read and include my reading of it, the act thereof,
in the reading of it? What if we include all participants of the story?
Jesus and the disciples as a whole presentation of the situation, and,
the reader and the situation of the story included in this situation;
which is to say, what if I include myself responsibly into the thought
that is enacted in my coming upon the story? Then we will have
significance. Then we may have the voice of the renouncer, the
minimal human.
 Kair 101

Jesus is attempting to gain for his own understanding that

they, his disciples, are having the same experience that he is having,
and Jesus is realizing and coming to terms with the fact that they are
not. He is in wonder at the disciples' wonder and says
“if you have seen me then you must also have seen the
Father”73,

which is so much that Jesus finds it incredible that they would

have stuck with him all this time and not have had the Father in them
also; but yet
“how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?”74

Jesus cannot believe what he is coming upon, but it is this

which shows Jesus returning, in vacillation, to his knowledge. Jesus
comes back to his strength in that he is all the more sustained by the
reflection of the Object of his disciples, that the fact of the matter is
that they cannot because the Object cannot justify the minimal
human. The minimal human is not responsible to the Object; the
responsibility is a reciprocation, not a mediation. So Jesus is
incredulous; he confronts them with what they should already know.
He is saying, in effect, ‘do not you already know that I and my father
are the same? He is in me as I am in Him? This is such the case that I
do not speak but the father speaks; indeed, he does the works’75. His
works are not only miracles of healing but the work of speaking76, in
that the way he speaks speaks or has spoken to the disciples such that
they became disciples. Jesus's words are the works – but not along a
conventional vector as though we can reduce ‘works’ to ‘words’, as a
kind of interpretation that means misinterpretation. Reality is
situated in a particular appropriation of terms, but also, Jesus as the
minimal human is expressing existence for knowledge itself, of
existence, he cannot then but help do this expressing through his

102 A Heresy

humanity he thus coincides such expression, indeed is the coincidence,

of the motion of existence by his being the expression of knowledge and
thus the miraculous reality of the fully human. So it is he is telling
them that even if the concept is not sufficient to have you believe such
that it is thus knowledge, then believe what is your experience by the
fact that I (Jesus) called and you followed, for it was not me (Jesus)
that called you – it was no True Objective case – rather it was the
Father that gave you to me and thus to Himself. John 14:11,
“Believe that I am in the father, and the father in me: or else
believe me for the very works' sake.”

Jesus asks in this way, speaking of himself, holding himself up

as the example of the situation that the disciples should already
understand in and of themselves, just in case they are not yet
comfortable with the presence of voice that is the Father in them. If
they understood him then they too would have the Father speaking to
them, through them, such that when Jesus spoke, his individual
humanity would be discarded in his speaking, in his doing the work,
for the experience each disciple would be having is the Father indeed
speaking to them but from, or through, Jesus. In this way, the
experience that Jesus is beginning to see is unique to him, would not
be, since the evidence of the disciples following Jesus was supposed as
evidence that Jesus was only as special as his disciples. Jesus is saying
‘the words that I speak are not my own, but of the Father’, expressing
the fact of his being, as well as asking the disciples if they understand
this, and if they do, then granting them permission to not be
embarrassed or shy in expressing the father in them, as Jesus already
does. Then Jesus steps from the disbelief into the role of teacher again;
he says “(please) believe…”77, and again calls upon their experience
that he has difficulty believing is not of them, that they have not or are
not having such an experience; he beckons to their knowledge that he
knows must be in them. “He that believeth on me”– if you see me, since
 Kair 103

you have followed me, then you must be having the same
understanding – “the works that I do he shall do also.” He is asking
them no longer to verify his faith, since he is in strength again, but is
appealing to their faith78, in essence saying ‘we are the same. Believe
it!’

Now Jesus steps back into himself further to be a guide for his
disciples, since he has come to terms with his self, his Being, his plight.
Jesus has weaned himself (or rather, has been weaned by the
vacillations) from the temptation of the Object and leaves them to their
own, yet offers them, again, an explanation of not only the situation,
but their situation, in that he knows that the father is in them, but
that it is thereby up to the Father to move them as they would be
moved. He offers comfort for their plight to come.

“If ye love me, keep my commandments.” 79

But this is not a recalling the Laws of Moses, nor any Laws;
Jesus commandments are that by which he who is in the Father, and
the Father in him, knows what to do; in fact, he who 'loves me' cannot
but do what it meant for him to do. It is the double voice; the one
speaking a question of choice, the other a statement of fact: If you do
love me then you will keep my commandments80; he who loves Jesus
thereby loves the Father, and by this fact is in the Father and the
Father in him, as is with Jesus. Yet since Jesus has come to terms with
the reality of fulfillment of righteousness, of absolution, which is to say
the completion of the motion of his Being in this world, death, he has
done so by seeing the real temptation of reaching for validation in the
Object, and through this vacillating motion he comes upon the
possibility of the disciples: They are ‘caught’ by the Object of Jesus.
And Jesus is leaving them. The voice that is Jesus but not Jesus, the
Father but not the Father emanates not from any single knowable
source; the Father is that source reduced to a manner of speaking, as
the point of reduction. In so much as his disciples are in the Father,

104 A Heresy

but are possibly ‘caught’ upon the Object of Jesus, as he leaves, Jesus
might see that they will have been renounced from the Object, as if by
the will of God, since Jesus can do nothing more, be nothing more, than
that he exists. Jesus will pray that the Father (in them) thereby will
bring his knowledge unto them as renouncers, and in so much as they
have had the Object of Jesus to prevent them from the responsibility
that is their own being in the world81, minimal human, John 14:16-19
(emphasis added.):

“…he shall give you another Comforter…” Jesus but not Jesus;
“…the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost… the Father will send in
my name…I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.” The
personas and pronouns do not have responsibility to the rules of the
True Object; they refer to an experience of the self and the ways that
discourse may be situated in the minimal human experience – “…that
he may abide with you forever…Even the Spirit of Truth; whom the
world cannot receive,” because of the fully human’s responsibility to
the True Object, “because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but
ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you… Yet a
little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I
live, ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my
Father, and you in me, and I in you.” If Jesus is in the Father, and
Jesus is in you, then the Father is in you: I am in my Father.


Thought: Of the Subject In-Itself82

Jesus is resolved again; the first vacillation has resolved in his

Being, and he steps back further from his friends, his disciples. He
reflects upon his own experience and projects it into their experience
to come, since they will be renouncers as they are in the Father and he
in them. Jesus thus outlines the potential obstacles that come for the
minimal human in faith.

See this movement for what it is: A story has to have a

beginning, but the beginning here, as we have encountered earlier in
this essay, is really merely an arbitrary starting point that has been
deemed Jesus Christ, the object-subject, that must be an Object if we
are to have a beginning. This point may not be an historical point of a
single individual called Jesus, but more likely, a ‘plot-line’, if you will,
a scenario linking all experience that was come upon by many
individuals in themselves, and spoken about and then recorded in a
manner that indicates the decisive significance establishing the
discrepancy between the fully and the minimal human, such that those
so marginalized may know that they have indeed come upon
something 'significantly significant', so to speak. The plot line, here, of
sorts, this story of more Christ than Jesus, but Jesus Christ in the
holistic human sense, tells of the problem of existence as it conflates
with reality. Because it deals with a true humanity that exists, the
world, which is to say the heritage of the fully human, will apprehend
its meaning in a particular manner, that is relatively, objectively, or of
individualized (subject-object) meaning, and the ‘Subject’, or rather,
105

106 A Heresy

the ‘disciple’, the minimal human, will apprehend its meaning likewise
in a particular, but significantly different – but not relatively; rather
particularly – manner. Where such distinction is not understood, we
have the dominion of the True Object and the diminishing Subject,
that relativity of the subject-object, and the necessary impetus for
placement of this essay.

Where the distinction is understood, we have experience of the

minimal human who has no responsibility to the Object, for the
distinction is the significant element in understanding the Object.
Thus when Jesus is speaking to his disciples, as they are involved in
the experience of the minimal humanity, he uses consistent titles to
refer to specific but changing ‘placements’ of his (Jesus, or, the subject)
singular Being-of-existence (existential Being83), so to speak, as such
positions are reflected in his discourse.

John 15 begins in this way. Here is the first part of what could
be called the parameters of renunciation:
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every
branch in me that bareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that
bareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit… I am the
vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same
bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing…If ye abide
in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it will
be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit;
so shall ye be my disciples. As the Father hath loved me, so I have loved
you; continue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide
in my love, even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide
in his love.”84

Such as it is, Jesus is granting his disciples a glimpse of what

is surely to come, and the best way to negotiate it, which is really just
 Kair 107

a stating of the facts of the matter. The 'fruits' here must be seen as
'works', and we should keep in mind that the distinction between what
is said, the terms, and what is done, as activity, is only made for the
fully human who sees terms as relating to singular and specific things
in (potentially) an absolute manner, and as such that a thing in-itself
may be known as True and yet relinquish that truth at the application
of a segregate autonomous power85. Hence, for the fully human, works
must be particularly miracles of healing86, such as leprosy, and magic,
such as the water to wine, the feeding of the 5000, and the resurrecting
of Lazarus. The fully human searches the world of True Objects for the
possibility of such miracles having occurred; he thus reduces all
possibilities of existence to his one reality that is absolutely true87.
This is to say that (miraculous) works must adhere to a particular
vector of activity, the meaning of which prescribes the force involved
and occurs in a manner that defies the specific dynamic of meaningful
term-object organization; ironically, what this essay is describing.

The fruits to which Jesus is referring are the 'fruits of labor', so

to speak, or more, proof that one's knowledge is absolutely true. Such
proof is established through the works, which are of the Father. Such
works 'work upon the soul', so to speak, as described in the beginning
of this essay, where because the fully human and the minimal human
are both human, and because the fully has denied its minimal
existence, whereas the minimal has accepted all that may be
humanity, when Jesus does the works, even the fully human are
impacted, find it significant, and indeed miraculous (that Jesus could
have such an effect upon their Being).

With this in mind, the 'fruit' can refer to a number of meanings

in one motion, as come upon as a significant moment.

108 A Heresy

We have explored the significance of 'I am' that

corresponds the Subject to that which may be said to be the Self in a
relation with itself in reflection, and this reflection thus can be said to
be God, the expression of existence as human knowledge. When 'I am'
is situated along its true bearings, it is understood that the situation
that is presented cannot be expressed more properly; the subject is
indeed subject to a Lord, and this lord is not a True Object because it
does not exist in accordance with the fully human Law of True Objects
that proscribes for reality what may be truly real. The Subject (of
discourse) is left only with itself since it cannot describe the actuality
of its situation of reflection due to the limiting (conventional) discourse
that abides by the Law of True Objects. The process of revealing the
Subject in conventional knowledge (discourse) appears thus the actual
movement of history88. To the Subject, all things are known and there
is nothing that is not known since the truth of the matter of existence
is manifest. In this way, the Subject is the true vine; the vine is the
unfolding movement of existence expressed in the subject. Yet, all of
this knowledge is not expressible; if it were, as someone said, the
person would open its mouth to speak and a sound louder than the
loudest possible noise would be emitted, filling every last corner of
creation, and she would speak forever, never stopping, yet never
beginning. Hence the only knowledge that may be expressed is that
knowledge which is conveyable dependent upon the condition of
conventional, fully human, discourse for any time89; and this is thus
'true' knowledge, knowledge of what is absolutely true of human
existence and reality, since there is no thing that is excluded, there is
no effective segregation to be able to say ‘the individual’ as opposed to
everyone any anything else, aka the subject and object. The question
then is, how would one know if such knowledge is conveyable?
Typically, though, for those who see self reflection as subjective (of the
subject-object), the question is how does one know if the knowledge is
true; hence the real conventional need for negotiation, because the
 Kair 109

subject-object has had no self reflection by which to know what is true;

she can only know what other individuals might think and then come
to an opinion that she hopes will pan out so that she might be
recognized as a true object herself, that which is called individual
identity. The usual conventional method, then, would take this and
draw its logical method upon it to conclude that where this point is
made it is thus indicating its fallacy or at least its compromise, to then
conclude a ‘world’ without individual identity is nonsensical and
absurd, meaning, it cannot be real, hence again verifying our point of
two irreducible routes for world.

“I am the true vine, and my father is the husbandman.” The

relation of the self to 'God' is the relation that informs the Subject as
to what knowledge is conveyable for any moment, but there is no
wondering, no question about it. “Every branch in me that bareth not
fruit he taketh away: and every branch that bareth fruit, he purgeth
it, that it may bring forth more fruit...” Knowledge of all things is
tempered by thought; knowing and thinking are not idenitical. Such
thought is the consolidation of knowledge of all things into
consciousness for any moment; this is the true vine. In the same way,
all such thought (that which is true) that may be conveyed is the
branches; in effect ‘you are the branches’ as ‘I am’ thought may be
conveyed in this instance through the limit of Law, and that which is
conveyed is the good fruit. Those thoughts that are not conveyed
because it is not the proper time are 'taken away'. Thereby the
husbandman 'purgeth' the good fruit, he is the catalyst as well as the
impetus for the conveyance of truth, so that the branch may bring forth
more good fruit, that what knowledge may be conveyed is conveyed
such that other knowledge might be ready in its proper time, and that
knowledge which was known but was not of the proper time is taken
away. “I am the vine,” the Subject is existence as human knowledge,
“and ye are the branches,” in as much as the Subject reflects, the object
is that knowledge that is 'transcribed' from the subject at the proper

110 A Heresy

time so that “ye”, that is 'that which is not me': The Object (since the
human reflection of the minimal human moves at once toward and
away from its self), is the branches in that the disciples are the
examples for Jesus of his 'good fruit' – and this reiterates the situation
at this moment in the story.


The Disciple

In so much as Jesus may be instructing the disciples, we are to

assume, on one hand, that Jesus is still doubting – hoping but doubting
– that his disciples really understand him, doubting whether they are
‘on board’, so to speak, but as well that Jesus is telling them what to
expect because Jesus has come to terms with his experience, his Being
not required to have validation from the Object, and he has thereby
understood that indeed they are ‘on board’ but in exactly the manner
and time that God would have them; indeed, in John 16:7, Jesus
expresses just this: “…if I do not go away, the Comforter will not come
unto you,” and is therefore speaking in ‘resonance’ with the experience
that they are all having and thus is really just iterating what is
occurring in all of their experience, though the disciples do not yet
realize the full extent of their situation.

The instruction is simple. The defender of the Object will see

this passage as indication of the mytho-religious, the traditional real-
truth. The facts of the matter are likewise simple, but in that they have
a different correspondence with the Object, in that they express the
determination of the basic life, the explanation according to the rules
of the Object are a little more involved. We might see in that I (the
disciple) exist, born of a ‘virgin’ into this world (and as possibly this
world is the vessel in which I have conception, in which I have been
conceived), being as I am determined in this way, I could not arise from
nowhere; the copula ‘is’ is equivocal with coming into being as being is
this irreducible integrated condition. The culmination of effect that is

111

112 A Heresy

the present moment where and as I am being, along with the conflation
of occurrences that arrive at only my self, these taken as a whole,
against all of which I come upon myself, undivided into objective
knowledge, is itself that by which my Being is informed. This is not
the ‘mother’ since I am here conceived already: It is the Father; if
merely by a colloquial meaning, the Father is that which ‘causes’ the
experience of the minimal human. Thus we have the sensibility of the
parameters: ‘I am the vine’; in so much as Jesus hangs meaning upon
the dual voice of Being (I am), that which exists and is Being grows
necessarily the only way it can; how this can grow, the phenomenon of
life growing as well as the vector or direction or manner in which an
existent grows, is absolutely determined by that aspect of reality that
is not immediately “I”; indeed, how Being grows is exactly, but by an
echo, “am”, heard in the next clause. It is all that is counterposed in
existence, so much that “my Father is the husbandman” that grants
the determination of reality. That which I am cannot be the
undistinguished wholeness of existence, it can only be that which is
distinguished of the wholeness of reality in that ‘I’ may be the vine,
and ‘the Father’ the husbandman; I am the life that ‘bares the fruit’,
and that which is, not me, distinguishes me by the very fact of there
Being reality in existence. That which ‘is’ is that by which I can only
bare fruit because I am the expression of the basic life in humanity.
The Father is thus not Humanity, but I am ‘in the Father’ and the
Father is ‘in me’; every branch that does not bare fruit is taken away
by the Father, and so that branch does not bare fruit, de facto: He who
is not of the basic life, but rather of the fully human heritage, bares no
‘fruit’, but only ‘seeks’ the ‘fruit’, of the Object.

‘I am’ the vine. Jesus in his place as the Object for the disciples
is that which allows for the occasion of the experience, wherein the
disciples ‘are’ I am the vine, and the Father is that by which ‘I’ move
 Kair 113

and speak: The Father does the works. In that Jesus, at this point,
may be ‘the’ vine, the Object of the disciples’ faith, they are the
branches which stem from the vine; but this I not a tree, indeed it is
more a bramble, and the Father is the husbandman who makes it such
that there is a vine with branches. So the disciples, as minimal human
in their own right, too can say they bring forth fruit because they
“abideth in me, and I in him...”; the minimal human cannot be nor is
not separate from the activity of the basic life; the minimal human
expresses the basic life at all times; “...the same bringeth forth much
fruit”. The disciples will hear the Father in them and then will remove
themselves, or will be removed, from the possibility that they did not
understand, because when they come upon the significant moment,
which is the ‘decision’ to renounce the Object, they will see how their
life has been determined in its entirety. Jesus will be leaving. They
will ask “what ye will” and “it shall be done unto you” because what
they ask is innately of the basic life determined such that what ‘ye’
asks will be done unto you because it is already being done such that
‘ye’ had to have asked. Jesus says, “the Father has loved me, so I love
you and you continue in my love” because the Father is in them as he
is in Jesus. That Jesus is the Object, the Object is leaving them, and
they will have the Father because they have had the Object that they
will have been renounced by when Jesus leaves.

“These things I have spoken unto you, that joy may remain in
you, and that your joy may be full.”90

The disciples are justified by the Object of Jesus as Jesus

expresses only what he can express, that this is what occurs for the
minimal human, the renouncer of the Object, and that Jesus too has
encountered the vacillation of faith in the seeking of the validation of
the Object, as they might feel sorrow when Jesus (their justifying
Object) leaves them. The joy remains because of the experience, and
remains full in so much as it is not found through the verification of
the Object, but in the true experience, the “Spirit of truth”91, as the

114 A Heresy

reflection of self upon such an experience is granted by “the

Comforter”, that which verifies that their experience is valid and true.

The minimal human is determined; John 15:16 says, “Ye have

not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” And because of this, in so much
as “ye love one another” the disciples will not falter in the face of the
world that {15:19} “hateth you”. This will occur for the disciples
because “ye have been with me from the very beginning”; and so this
is the fact of the matter: The fully human is offended by the disciple’s
presence of Being, and so will point their discomfort upon them, as
they are soon to upon Jesus. The 16th chapter of John begins with the
summary of how the world of objects will hate them: {16:3} “yea, the
time cometh, that whosoever killith you will think that he doeth God
service.” This is the representation of the orientation of the fully
human upon what God and reality is allowed to be {16:3} “…because
they have not known the Father, nor me.”92 Jesus is telling them this
so they will know that their experience was not in vain and {16:1} “that
ye should not be offended” themselves at such a turning of events upon
them, for otherwise they might doubt and worry about what bad
decision they may have made in following Jesus, but it indeed is as it
should be, for they did not choose, but were chosen, as Jesus was
likewise. Then the chapter goes on to explain the situation at hand as
it is their situation now that Jesus is leaving them, and as this will go
with them in the future. It finishes, again explaining, {16:33} “These
things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace… In
the world [while] ye shall have tribulation.” And he reassures them
that in the same way that he has overcome the world (of True Objects),
so shall they: Because they already have by virtue of the nature of their
Being.
 Kair 115

The second trial of his existence has come complete. Jesus

moved through the doubt which attempts to gain justification from the
Object, into the realization of the nature of experience, and the
summation in comfort of the actuality of the situation at hand,
speaking to his disciples as friends. Having traversed the real
vacillation, he is centered and resolute in what is to come. He has been
speaking to his disciples, but in that he is minimally human he can do
nothing but speak and act by virtue of the basic life, and so was also
speaking to himself, of himself, in the movement of the effect of God;
the discrepancy reveals his humanity, the humanity that is going to
end soon. Now he has come back to this presence, and he speaks within
the confidence of his Being, in communion with existence, in
supplication, to himself, to his disciples, to no one in particular, to
everyone everywhere:
“These words spake Jesus, and lift up his eyes to heaven and
said, Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may
glorify thee…”93

In in John 17, verse 6, Jesus grants further credence to the

heart of this essay:

“I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou hast
gavest me out of the world: thine they were,” – already, before Jesus
called them, they had, like Luke, perfect understanding from the very
start – “and thou gavest them me,” so they would not be offended, so
they could come into and remain in joy and peace, so they could “[know]
that all things…thou has given me is of thee;” Of Jesus, of God, and as
they are of the basic life, of themselves. Jesus, as if summing up the
essay of his ministry, finishes it, on one hand proclaiming the facts of

116 A Heresy

the matter, and on the other, consoling himself by the inevitability of

existence94.


Gethsemane

We should take a moment and see that the next part of the
story beckons us back to the virgin birth, for we must ask, again: How
can we know this? If only the four were there, how does this story come
to us; and, how could we know what Jesus did or thought when he was
alone? The answer to these questions give further support to the idea
that this is not a story about one necessary person only (Jesus), but
more about an experience that individuals were coming upon, common
between them, and that these separate experiences of separate people
occurred along the same ‘storyline’ (Christ); the individuals had the
same types of experiences individually, and that individually they
were secret, mysterious, even from others, but that indeed there was
more than one who had the experience.

Jesus’s apprehension is confirmed in Gethsemane. Though he

has reached through the first vacillations, the last will lead Jesus to
the reality of his life. Knowing of the pattern a reason for the
vacillations, Jesus now must confront them on a different level.
Instead of seeking an identical validation, he is now looking still for
signs of the continuation of the ministry. Continuing in the effort to
discover who will follow him, Jesus is growing weary and retires to the
garden, for he “began to be very sorrowful and very heavy”95, along
with those that might seem to be the best candidates, still, the first
three whom God had given Jesus, Peter, or whom Jesus names
‘Cephas’, which is the ‘rock’ or ‘stone’, and the two son’s of Zebedee,
117

118 A Heresy

James and John. He asks the three to keep watch while he goes to pray
because his “soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death”. He is
expressing his worry about who will follow him in understanding as
this is combined in his anxiety over his imminent death; otherwise,
one would think that he would be glad to be returning to his father in
heaven. He thus seeks guidance from God. He prays, “Abba,” – Jesus
is appealing to God in the most intimate manner, as a child to its
father,
“…Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup
from me: nevertheless not that I will, but what thou wilt.”96

Luke emphasizes the intensity and intimacy involved in this

appeal as an angel of the Lord appears to him to strengthen him: Yet
still “…being in agony he prayed more earnestly.” The personal
dilemma being expressed here cannot be missed. He is leaving this
physical world; his ministry is over. Christ Jesus, the basic life
expressed in humanity is vacillating and so is concerned along two
levels; the questions – the doubt! – that plague him enfold upon one
another. Has he been deluded in his faith? Has his life been a sham?
We have seen the problem that lay between the minimal and fully
human; the expression of the basic life in the heritage of humanity is
thwarted by the latter’s understanding that is based upon the Object.
Upon facing certain death, Jesus reflects upon the overwhelming
evidence of misunderstanding in the world, and this had been brought
to a head now with his disciples. In his ministry, the issue of his
disciples was put on hold while he went out into the world as a result
of the inherent consistency of meaning in the basic life of Jesus. Now
he is directly confronted with his impotent message, the message that
has fallen upon deaf ears, that his assumption of understanding by his
disciples, who now, as the fifteenth chapter of John shows that Jesus’s
disciples are more than mere followers, are “friends”, may have been
misplaced. Perhaps, Jesus worries, I have been wrong; perhaps I have
 Kair 119

been tricked; perhaps I have been delusional. Jesus is caught in the

paradox of being human. Even as he prays to God, he is doubting God
in himself, and asking God, since God is all powerful, if he will remove
the whole thing like it had been a bad dream; yet even as he may doubt,
the fact of his doubting denies that his doubt could be valid, since if
there were nothing to doubt then he could not doubt, yet he doubts,
and this doubt brings despair. Jesus’s despair is not so much that he
is going to die, but that his life has been in vain, for if it had not been
so, if it had not been exactly the life that it has been, then he would
not have this dilemma. His doubt is vanity, identification with the
Object. He asks God to “remove this cup from me”, this ‘cup’ that is his
experience in the basic life from which he ‘drinks’ and offers to the
world the absolute Object. He sulks in self introspection and doubt,
and this eternal cycle of himself that leads him out of his situation only
to bring him back to it through every avenue – he truly carries the
burden that is the weight of the world. In this doubting, Jesus’s vanity
enfolds upon itself; he has lead men out of their livelihood based upon
an insinuation of self perception upon the other, and based upon this
these men have forsaken their lives and followed him, believing that
he had something significant for them. Now he is going to die, and they
do not even perceive it, did not even know of it; even as he has told
them all along and now tells them again as it is here, they are
astonished. Indeed, Jesus must wonder, am I a selfish father leaving
his ignorant children to fend for themselves? He is left in his sullen
mire of doubt and faith, pleading to God to at once take away this
redundant assertion while implicitly asking God to reveal to him
which of his disciples has understood, for then Jesus would be renewed
and be confident that his life had not been in vain, that indeed his faith
and understanding was not a delusion, that he has carried a true
message. Do they understand? But he gets up and returns to Peter,
James and John to find them asleep, seemingly oblivious to the whole
situation. Jesus is flabbergasted and reacts rebuking their ignorance,
offended in his contemplation that is seem to be made moot, “couldest
not thou watch one hour?” And then he comes into himself as Christ

120 A Heresy

and gives them direction, “watch ye and pray, lest ye enter into
temptation”, as temptation is oriented upon the increasingly dogmatic
message (the rule of the Object) that Jesus sees they have gained from
him. Then he appeals to them in hope that they are not those dogmatic
souls, that indeed they might understand, and indeed see themselves
the minimal human; Jesus expresses his humanity but in the double
voicing that includes addressing the disciples, “the spirit indeed is
willing, but the flesh is weak.”

The problem Jesus faces of his existence is the problem

between the world of the basic life, the Subject, and the world human
heritage, the Object, exemplified most poignantly to himself,
illustrated by the story, by his situation of doubt against the disciples,
the objects of Jesus’s experience, who apparently do not understand
what Jesus has been saying, which is distinctly and eternally of the
Subject. His ‘friends’; how intimately he knows them like he knows no
other human beings; he doubts them because they are inevitably
objects to Jesus’s experience, he renounces them despite himself
because he has renounced the Object. The paradox is almost too much
to bare, as experience sways into knowledge, instead of knowledge (the
knowledge that would be the confirmation by his disciples that they
understood) moving experience. He goes and prays again the
underlying prevalence for God to show him who will follow him, but he
returns to find them asleep again. Now he comes to the resolution that
is the inevitability of his faithful life against the apparent ignorance of
even those whom he had thought understood. “Sleep on now, and take
your rest: it is enough, the hour has come…” and his quite ironic
statement of his situation, “behold, the son of man is betrayed into the
hands of sinners.” His disciples do not understand and they are
ignorant: They are also sinners. And so humanity, as historical
creatures, likewise sin. Jesus as human is revealed in his sin of
 Kair 121

demanding an objective correspondence of Subjects97; as he confronts

his mortality, he is come upon by the Object of his death, and attempts
to hold it in place, away from himself, so he may know it: He fulfills
the plight of being human in that he responds as fully human, desirous
of the Object to justify his experience in knowledge. Once this begins
to occur, we move into a different phase of the story. The single
ministry of Jesus begins to show its plurality in resonant fractures.
Jesus is coming to terms with the reality of being the minimal human
of faith.

* * *

So Jesus’s ministry comes to a close; now, by dying, he is to

come complete for absolution. The solution cannot be half gained; life
is only half, incomplete and segregated in its meaning. It is based in
the parameter defined by death, as death for the fully human life
marks the absolute limit of knowledge, and thus the opening for God,
the transcendent. Were Jesus in his life to say and do as much, but
then not be crucified, not be the target for the fully human resentment,
his life would mean nothing and there would be no Christ.

The struggle of the foregoing episode is balanced in his

resurrection, and a release from the tension begins in the garden of
Gethsemane, which Luke calls the Mount of Olives, which John says
lay on the other side of the brook Cedron; but not before the tension
culminates in terrible suffering. We have symmetry in the story of
Jesus Christ; the Passion counters in weight the length and breadth
of the ministry. Yet, as if by literary method, in the transition between
this symmetry, a break occurs in the garden. After crossing a brook,
which can be seen as symbolic of the transition, upon the Mount of
Olives, which is a symbol for peace98, an interlude, or intermission, a

122 A Heresy

pause marks the separation between the struggle of the life of the
minimal human that endeavors in a deep compassion, and the struggle
of his death, that proceeds in a deep passion; whereas his ministry can
be seen to have involved a type of intellectual or thoughtful plight of
concern for the world, his death involves the physical plight of the
ramifications concerning the world and its offense, its passion, its
hatred for the minimal human (indeed, we have seen this in Jesus’s
vacillations, of his realizing his approach upon mortality, above)99 .
This moment of peace before the tribulation takes place in the story as
if to show the comedy involved in the purposeful life. Jesus has nothing
more to say about his experience, but rather lets everyone else say it
while he merely rounds out the truth of the matter in blatant
contradiction of what his prosecutors expect.

Judas has led those who wish to arrest Jesus to where Jesus
will be, and Jesus expects them, so first we should notice the silliness
of the situation where the one who is to be put to death waits for his
executors100. He meets them and asks who they are looking for, as if
Judas could not tell them which one is Jesus. They tell him Jesus of
Nazareth and Jesus tells them “I am he”. Yet instead of them taking
him right then, they are so astounded by the ease of their find and his
ready stance that they fall back, actually fall to the ground. They
cannot believe that this is the guy. Again Jesus asks them who they
want, and they again tell him. One cannot miss the comedy if one
imagines Jesus standing there with his disciples overlooking the band
of men who have stumbled and fallen to the ground, who were sent to
arrest them. The situation is almost slapstick; the robbers have been
caught, but the police running so fast after them have fallen as if
coming up against a brick wall, which is really the hardly winded nor
startled robbers standing waiting for the police to come. And now the
robbers stand there with a curious expression on their faces looking at
 Kair 123

their pursuers on the ground in front of them. Everyone is kind of

stunned, and Jesus reprimands the idiocy of Judas’s crew, and says, in
effect, ‘I have told you I am who you are looking for, if you really want
me, then let my friends go and take me already.’ Simon Peter is the
first to come out of the stupor that is the processing of the realization
of the ridiculous picture before him, and pulls his sword out and
instead of killing one of them, joins Jesus in ridicule of the men by
cutting off the ear of one of them. Then as a segue back into the
immanence of the situation, Jesus responds to Simon Peter, answering
the question posed by his attack; “the cup which my Father hath given
me, shall I not drink it?”101 The minimal human determined, Jesus is
saying: How else could I proceed?


124


Doubt

In contrast to the acceptance of the minimal human of Jesus

we have the denial and resistance of Simeon Peter. Now, Peter is a
disciple. We are not to place him in the camp of the True Object; yet
we read that he places himself there as the high priest’s men took
Jesus. He followed behind them to watch what would happen and then
joined the crowd when a woman recognized him as a follower of Jesus.
In fact, three individuals recognize him. And three times he denies
that he even knows Jesus, as Jesus told him he would. Conventional
knowledge of the the fully human sees this event as an example of the
insecurity of humanity, and a statement about faith; one is supposed
to stand firm in their faith and testify the truth. Yet a few things
interest us for the version proposed in this essay of the minimal human
and absolution. We can approach through this interest by layers of
understanding; we will enter by a critical level that presents a
generalized form, and thereby situated, then proceed into the more
specific existential indications.

In John 18, verse 15, Peter and another disciple followed Jesus.
This other disciple is known to the high priest and goes in with Jesus
in to the palace while Peter stays outside. Now, given this setup we
can assume that Caiaphas, the high priest, was not interested in
persecuting anyone but Jesus. All that is said of the situation is that
125

126 A Heresy

this disciple was known to Caiaphas; we do not have a qualification for

what ‘known’ means. All we can say is that he was known enough to
be allowed into the temple even while he was known to be a follower
of Jesus; obviously this other disciple had nothing to fear. If we follow
this picture, we might see that the problem was seen as Jesus, and not
so much as his followers, and this other disciple was allowed to go with
Jesus maybe for support. Likewise, we do not know why Peter stayed
outside; perhaps the priests thought one friend was enough, and knew
one to boot. But we do get a feeling that Peter was afraid. Hence, we
have a picture of the situation at hand: The disciple who goes into the
temple is not afraid, but the one who stays outside is afraid. The
disciple who went inside the temple turned out ok, for all we are told
about him, even though – and this is key – going into the temple seems
like it should be the more dangerous place to go. It is just as easy to
assume that the disciple's being known to the high priest would put
him at risk of being also persecuted as it is to take the former view,
that he was allowed in because he was known, which would then paint
a picture of some type of understanding between them in his being
known. Given Peter's fear of going in, we might assume that he figured
that staying outside was the safer bet. Outside of the temple is where
the people are, where the trial is not taking place. But the story tells
us outright by what occurs that the opposite was true; the place where
the crowd is turns out to be the more dangerous place; the place where
Peter is tried. For all we know, nothing happens to the disciple who
went in.

In true ironic fashion, it is also meaningful to say that the

disciple who went with Jesus placed himself in the arena of the Object
(the court of Law) because he was firm in his renouncement of it. But
also, perhaps the temple is safe because it administers law. It is then
consistent that Caiaphas is not worried so much about what Jesus is
 Kair 127

saying but rather the potential for social chaos because he is saying
things; Caiaphas maintains the Law as the Law is what has been
handed down from God and is the pillar of social stability; Jesus is seen
as upsetting this stability. The trial of Jesus is a motion of Law, even
if this trial has an agenda. We see, in line with the foregoing discussion
in this essay, that the unrest is caused not so much because Jesus
might be claiming to be the Messiah – most likely, this is what has
been inferred by the people hearing him, and most probably many
other public preachers have been saying all sorts of questionable
things including things about a Messiah – but how he is saying things.
The implicit renunciation of the Object, which Jesus cannot but help
to express, is taken by those of the Law, which we will see with Peter
also includes the crowd outside, as a call to renounce the Law.

We should explore this 'saying of things'. The story of Jesus

sheds light upon a critical moment of this essay through exhibiting 1)
how the Subject is limited in its expression by the conventional Law
(fully human conventional reality), that is, the law which designates
(structures signs meaningfully) how truth may be situated for reality;
2) how this limitation reveals what is capable of being expressed,
which is to say, how the limitation evidences a true historical progress
by indicating the limits placed upon the expression of truth; 3) a
moment where Jesus is coming up against the Law in his use of it for
what he intends to express of the truth; 4) how the fully human who is
confined by the Law and thus comprehends nothing further than what
the Law appears to denote, which is, for a word, infinity, is offended
by the Subject, interprets this moment.

128 A Heresy

A key expression of this moment, and indeed, a significant

indicator of the meaning of this essay here, occurs in John 7 and 10; it
is most poignant in John chapter 10, verse 20:
“And many of them said, he hath a devil, and is mad; why ye
hear him?”

This expression of Jesus 'having a devil' begins to occur in these

latter chapters. In Chapter John 7:20,

“The people answered and said, Thou hast a devil: who goeth
about to kill thee?”

This is in response to Jesus accusing the Jews at the temple of

scheming to kill him, but is in a different tone: They are either being
defensive or ignorant. They are in effect saying either that Jesus must
be slightly paranoid because he thinks people want to kill him but
they, though earlier in John some are considering such activity, have
yet to have spoken of it overtly or have made any distinct assertions or
plans, or they indeed are startled because they did not think that Jesus
knew that people wished him dead; he must have a devil in him
because he is being so bold, indeed, he is offensive. What he is saying
in each of these moments has the effect of renouncing the Law of the
Object. Here, Jesus makes most clear his position, but the people will
not hear it, indeed, they will not hear of it.

In John 7:15-16, “...the Jews marveled...” at Jesus teaching in

the temple, at his apparent knowledge, his apparent authority 102 ,
“saying, How knoweth [the scripture, the Law], having never learned?
And Jesus answered, my doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.”

In this essay, we propose that the minimal human cannot but

do that which is his existence, and thus he is the expression of
 Kair 129

existence in human knowledge: Jesus's ministry is naught that but

what his existence determines, but further, that the knowledge of the
minimal human designates a particular view such that everything
makes sense. The Law of the Object, that of the individual, will not see
beyond the scheme that designates what may be real-true (truly real),
at that, of individual objects. Thus it is that the Jews only hear Jesus
through this scheme of truth, which can be called (as a type) rational
logic103. This is why the people do not hear Jesus, and is why we say
Jesus is really speaking to those who already understand, that in this
mode, he is really indicating for those minimal humans that 'now is
the time'. So Jesus says as much:
“If any man do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether
it be of God, or whether I speak of myself. He that speaketh of himself
seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh his glory that sent him, the
same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him.”104 (emphasis added)

People can make of anything what they want, but it is not hard
to see that plainly these verses make difficult sense. It appears that
Jesus is saying something to the effect that there are two types of
people, those who do their own will and those who do the will of he who
sent them (God). But a closer inspection shows that he might be saying
something else; in fact, he is speaking only of himself and those who
already understand the 'doctrine'. He is speaking along the margin of
Lawful meaning. He is saying that the minimal human cannot but
speak of himself, but that being the case, as he is minimally human,
he never speaks of himself. Of course we should see that Jesus is really
stating the fact of the matter of human existence, that indeed there is
no human being that acts any way or manner than is entirely himself
as well as entirely determined existentially – but this holds the issue,
this is where the story of Jesus gains its stature, and why the author
of John speaks in his writing more significantly than the other gospels:
He can only indicate that the problem is solved before it has become
problematic, but nevertheless, somehow, the problem remains and is
presented before us at every moment; the story tells of this

130 A Heresy

phenomenon and the story speaks this phenomenon. The people, in

contrast, in this chapter hear no indication of much except that Jesus
is not making very much sense. To them, he sounds as if he has made
a mistake in his rhetoric but then he gives no indication that he knows
he has made a mistake – and indeed he moves to back up what sounds
like a mis-speaking. Then he jumps into a seemingly unrelated topic,
apparently for the sole purpose of insulting the Jews who are listening:
“Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth
the law? Why go ye about to kill me?”105

But this is less an accusation than it is an indication. Only the

fully human set within the Law of the True Object will see this as
referring to the Jewish Law proper (Exodus, Leviticus, etc...), as if
Jesus is accusing the Jews of not following their own law – this is only
one meaning amongst layers of meaning; this obvious meaning is so
blatant that it hardly needs reiterating for the story, as much as it
does. One can only wonder how such a small meaning could have kept
so many: But indeed it is only through faith that such ignorance can
stay viable.

Jesus has come to fulfill the law of Moses, and since Jesus has
come to fulfill the law, we have to ask what this means. How can one
fulfill the ten commandments, or for that matter, the laws of Numbers
and Leviticus, or any compliment of rules? One might be tempted to
say 'well, its in that Jesus was without sin that he fulfills the law', but
then would not have Jesus himself thrown the first stone at the
adulteress in chapter 8? Indeed, Jesus confirms this analysis in this
chapter, verse 18, where he says, “I am one that bear witness of myself,
and the Father that sent me beareth witness of me.”. Perhaps some
might say that Jesus fulfills the law by defying death, evidenced with
Lazarus as well as Jesus (here, but now soon will be) returning in the
 Kair 131

revelation, as some sort of fulfilling of history kind of thing. But what

for those who see what is apparent needing faith?

The law of which Jesus speaks is that law which is reflecting

at all times the facts of the matter of existence, and/or supposed to lead
one to righteousness and so to God. But no such awakening or
enlightenment has occurred in either manner except that Jesus is
here; the Jews merely see the Law as designating truth and have no
further reflection upon the law than that of individual behavior in
social negotiation. Hence Jesus comes exactly at this right time. In
Jesus, as in Moses, the law has been fulfilled: The totality of the rules
by which terms may be linked to have sense. There is nothing about
the Law that Jesus negates, but in this, in his expression of the total
law, is also ironically the expression that is bound to no law
(remember, Moses could only do that he does also, could only express
existence) but exactly the law in its entirety which is the explication of
existence in knowledge; those who see not the law's truth, but instead
see the word of law as designating a truth for which they are less, are
partial towards, or not worthy except that they must live under it and
try – these faithful of the Law of the True Object cannot and will not
hear what Jesus is saying, and so cannot but see his expression in
terms of The reality (the only possible reality) of the Law of the True
Object, and thereby negate Jesus (inevitably) and see Jesus as 'having
a devil', as one who is possessed, as one who appears to be saying
something, but upon further investigation, is saying only nonsense. It
is they who are dead in reflection to life eternal (Jesus; the minimal
human; existence) and so want to make him like them, which is to kill
Jesus through requiring of him to be justified against the True
Object106. But Jesus will not be, and thus makes no accusation but
merely expresses the facts of the matter at hand. Likewise, in chapter
8, the Jews attempt to trap Jesus in fallacious logic, but it is just this
type of attachment to the Law of the Object for which Jesus has no
responsibility. Then in chapter 10, it is clear that he is not confronting

132 A Heresy

them the same way, but rather is making sense to them in a way that
they do not wish to make sense; it is this type of blatant denial that
designates true sinners.

In this verse of chapter 10, it is not difficult to find the very

human intersection of religion and science; possession and insanity are
often intricately linked in the fully human law-full reality. This is the
discernment that the author of John wishes to draw out; as the book
proceeds, the story winds into situation that brings Jesus up against
the Law and thereby shows the discrepancy between the fully and the
minimal human by juxtaposition of the the apparent increasing
inability (though how they try) of those of the Law to understand him,
with, all the while, the patent and implicit confirmation (implicit in
that this book was written as such) for those who understand him that
they indeed have found the way. If his previous ministries have not
been entirely clear to those who listened, they at least elicited an
interested curiosity, one that was somehow causing all sorts of stir.
But it is not a fluke of the author of John that this speech of Chapter
10 comes right after he causes a blind man to see, as well as right
before his most profound miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead;
these miracles occur, as a sort of culminating of action, right before the
part in the story we have called for this essay 'the departure': It is as
though what can be said in the open, to the public, to those of the Law,
the Jews, has been said, as well as demonstrated.

In the effort to be more precise and clear about the discrepancy

that is the Jewish misunderstanding, we shall explicate chapters 8, 9
and 10 where Jesus says,

“...he that entereth not by the door into the sheephold, but
climbest up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he that
 Kair 133

entereth in by the door is the shepherd of sheep. To him the porter

openeth; and the sheep hear his voice; he calleth out his own sheep by
name, and leadeth them out. And when he putteth forth his own sheep,
he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice.
And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know
not the voice of strangers.

This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understood not
what things they were which he spake unto them.”107

Again, this speech is nearly making no sense, or rather, it is on

the verge of contradicting itself. He seems to be speaking about all
sheep, and sheep of the shepherd, which might be commonly
recognized as all of humanity, God’s chosen and God, respectively. Yet
this shepherd enters by the porter (portal; gate) and calls his own
sheep out – but has not he already called his sheep: The Jews, the
chosen people? Then somehow God is calling his own sheep by name.
What name? The Jews? Does Jesus mean individual people? How
would I know if God has called my name? But are not we Jews the
chosen people? And inevitably some people would come to the
conclusion that Jesus, again, is speaking of himself, that he is the
shepherd in question, and they would thereby begin to be offended. For
God has given them the Law because they are the chosen people and
they are thus lead by the shepherd108.

Complimentary to the explanation above concerning chapter 7,

Jesus is attempting to make plain the truth, and, in plain speaking,
the condition of the Law of the Object, the rules that relate terms in a
proper scheme of truth, of the fully human, is not 'ready' to be able, the
condition of discourse is not well suited, or is just barely able to convey
the meaning that Jesus is expressing. Chapter 10 is a simple
statement that clarifies what he was attempting to convey in chapter
7, and shows existence 'in process', so to speak, of coming to terms with
the fully human convention, as knowledge, truth, is able to be
expressed in the moment; we see Jesus in the movement of

134 A Heresy

appropriating the terms of convention to express the truth of the

matter of human existence. So it is by chapter 10 he is able to be more
clear in his dialectic for those who are subjects of the Law (subject-
objects): That Jesus is not speaking to everyone, but only to those who
already know the truth109. Indeed, the proclamation at the beginning
of the story is 'repent: now is the time’. Jesus was not so much telling
everyone that some sort of great reckoning was about to occur, but
more that those who are of the minimal human experience may now
know that it is valid.

Here now Jesus says as much: Only those who are his sheep
‘know his voice’ and will understand him, and the reason that the Jews
do not understand him is because they are not his sheep110. Yet by the
fact that he is preaching as one who has authority, he obviously must
be at least attempting to convey some sort of message to everyone, and
some of these are obviously thinking they know what he is saying but
indeed this message will only be comprehended by those who are
capable of knowing. The Pharisees with whom Jesus is speaking in
chapter 9 want to understand what Jesus is saying and seem to think
that they indeed do understand him, that is to say, “believe on the Son
of God”111, and ask Jesus sardonically, “Are we blind also?”112, or no
longer blind in as much as they cannot refuse the testimony of the
healed blind man's parents, as well as the man's himself. They are
becoming offended, more so jaded, in this process, and Jesus plainly
confirms their offense and further does not wish to console or convince
them but merely bares witness to them of the situation: There is no
coming to faith through the True Object, through the Law. Jesus
plainly rebukes such faith, such a route of Objective position; John
9:41, “...but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.” “For
judgment I am come into the world,” that those who are blind might
see the situation, and those who see the situation, or think they do,
 Kair 135

might be made to see that they indeed are blind – a very truthful and
ironic response indeed. Only the minimal human, the expression of
existence in human knowledge, may rightly express a valid polemic,
one that is not reduced to relative behavioral applicability, one that is
not based in negotiation, that does not flee from contradiction.

So Jesus continues in John 10:7-18, again reiterating and

expanding on what he just said. “...I am the door of the sheep...” I am
(of Moses) the door, and he repeats this: “I am the door,” and again
reiterates in the attempt to discover the proper terms that will ring
true through the scheme of truth of reality (the Law): “I am the good
shepherd.” He that is not the good shepherd are those who came before
him, those who have the 'true-real' past, those of the Law, and these,
alluding to the priests but in fact everyone who is of the Law, “leaveth
the sheep” when they see “the wolf coming”; they are hirelings, those
who have been bought, or rather, those who have sold themselves,
those who have been taught what is 'true', those of the fully human
tradition, those of the True Object. These not only flee, but at once are
caught by the wolf (that is, fear, danger, death and the like) and
scatter; theirs is contingency and self concern, which is the individual's
concern of justification against the True Object, which is life accorded
and deemed to circumstance, whereas the good shepherd “lay down my
life for the sheep”. 'I am' the good shepherd because as such, the
minimal human, Christ, knows his sheep as the sheep know him: The
disciples, and whoever else 'hear the voice of the shepherd call their
name'. Indeed, there are 'others' who are not of the 'chosen people', but
who nevertheless are “sheep I have, which are not of this fold” (not
Jewish and not of the present group of disciples) yet these 'chosen
people' may be the sheep of the good shepherd, “…them also I must
bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold and
one shepherd.”

136 A Heresy

Like much of what Jesus says, due to the ability for

conventional terms to absorb and convey truth, the terms do not
remain consistent identifiers for identifying truth as the fully human
scheme as would dictate. Jesus begins by alluding to 'the' sheep and
the shepherd who enters into the sheepfold by the door and this is
taken to mean the chosen people of God. Then he says that what is
supposed by the Jews to mean God, the good shepherd, calls to his
sheep by name who hear him because they know his voice. Now Jesus
is speaking of a division of sheep within the sheepfold, as if there is
the chosen, but then there is the really chosen. The Pharisees do not
understand Jesus so he attempts to make it more clear by shifting
discursive register to be more plainly conventional but also to mock
their ignorance. He says that he, Jesus, is the door but also the good
shepherd. He also speaks of 'the Father', and this then would have the
Jews totally confused, since they would have been following what
Jesus is saying is the shepherd to mean God the Father.

This more, purportedly, clear or more precise iteration brings

the listeners to move from general misunderstanding to actual divisive
positions, as well as bringing Jesus to have to spell out the situation
in a more confronting manner. Some say he has a devil, or is possessed,
others say that this cannot be since he was able to make the blind see.
In the context of what is being told here in this story of Jesus, we have
a picture of the ignorant fully human; in discussion, some have reasons
to see one who speaks this way as insane, or having a devil, and others
who tend to justify what should be a consistent or even profound
meaning by his actions, even though they really do not comprehend
what was said in actuality. Yet according to Jesus, both of these types
are blind and sinful; these are the thieves and hirelings. The good
shepherd does not live by virtue of the Law, but fulfills it. 'I am' brings
all of his sheep into one fold and for this reason, for this purpose, does
 Kair 137

the Father love Jesus, loves 'I am', because “I lay down my life”, the
life that the Law of the Object determines is true, the proper method
by which one comes to and understands what life is, the contingent
and circumstantial life, “that I might take it again” – not for all sheep,
but for those sheep that hear their name and know the good shepherd's
voice, those who hear themselves called to the door. “No man taketh it
from me, but I lay it down myself.” There is no one who may dissuade
the disciples, the shepherd's sheep, from their knowing of the truth,
for they have been called.

Moving on, the story seems to change setting but is still

concerning the parable of the sheep. Here Jesus is brought into
describing the situation more particularly and poignantly; the story
ends with a quick exit of Jesus because now the Jews are so offended
by what he is saying that they almost stone him. The stage is set;
indeed the next story is that of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead as
if the emphasize the absolute discrepancy involved so far, that Jesus
must actually raise a dead person. But dead in what sense? This
precedes the departure. Much of this, the Jew's mounting energy of
frustration and offense over Jesus, comes about because Jesus (at least
in John) does his best to never answer questions with direct answers;
he never justifies the True Object, but he nevertheless is often brought
to answers that directly confront the questioner without implicating
himself as a True Object.

The Jews have again sought out Jesus, we are to suppose,

because his last parable left them in such a stir that they need a 'plain'
answer. The Jews say, “How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou
be the Christ, tell us plainly.”113 And Jesus says:

138 A Heresy

“I told you, and ye believe not: the works I do in my Father's

name, they bear witness of me. But ye believe not, because you are not
of my sheep, as I have said unto you. My sheep hear my voice, and I know
them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they
shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My
Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to
pluck them out of my Father's hand. I and my Father are one.”114

“Then the Jews took us stones again to stone him.” But Jesus
hits them with their own Law, which of course they do not enjoy
because they only function by the term of Law and not its spirit. He
asks them for which of the Laws do they want to kill him. They say not
for any of his 'works', but for blasphemy115, because they now see for
sure, as Jesus has been drawn out by the Law to expose himself, to
fulfill the Law, that he indeed is saying, indeed “makest thyself
God”116. Now Jesus smacks them again with their own law: “”Is it not
written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?117 If he called them gods, unto
whom the word of God came... say ye of him... Thou basphemest;
because I said, I am the Son of God?” (emphasis added). And Jesus
says for them to judge him by his works118; so they do but yet still,
again, “sought to take him”, and Jesus “escaped out of their hand.”

It is interesting that even though Jesus is telling them the

truth, and is entirely justified in this, he still has presence enough to
see that though his existence is sufficient, he still must get out of there
promptly. While his message is not for the Jews, the sheep in general,
it is somehow correct and righteous that he speaks to those whom he
knows do not understand; indeed, because of this condition one would
think that Jesus would have nothing to say to them, but that he must:
It is almost as if Jesus is mocking them. The symmetry involved in this
story balances itself; he leaves them and goes to where John first
baptized and “many believed on him there”119.
Kair 139


Knowledge

Chapter 11 is the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

The traditional interpretation does not stray far from its usual view.
Lazarus is sick, he dies, Jesus goes to rise him from the dead to prove
to everyone that he is indeed the Son of God.

The whole Bible, in fact, can be read as a recording of proof of

God. There are people sent from God, people who have visions of God,
of the future, battles are won, walls destroyed, suns moving backward,
the Son of God, demons banished, water into wine, little guy defeating
big guy, people sent from God reprimanding people who went astray;
the list goes on. Seems to me for all the good it is doing to make people
believe that God would have a better strategy. Even the end result is
not too convincing: Everyone will be judged, only a relative few will
end up judged righteous and the rest…well, we all know what happens
to them. For all its religiousness, it appears that the Bible itself is just
another reiteration of nihilism. It goes like this: God is so powerful
that He can do anything, including willing Himself to be above or
beyond contradiction. He creates the world; he creates humanity. God
creates the world according to His plan, so that it will unfold with
humanity’s separation from God, and end with humanity’s rejoining
with God. The plan is that Man will disobey God and then God will
send people to try to get people back in line, to believe, or at least
‘witness’ or vouchsafe for God’s existence and truth. He sends one
person to actually define what the laws are so then people might have
a better ability to meet God’s standards; nevermind that God made it
141

142 A Heresy

that people will need a set of rules that they will after all not be able
to follow. Most people will not listen. Then God will send the coup de
graie, his only Son, in the effort to recoup believers most of which who
will, according to the plan, still not believe or be able to follow God’s
rules, even a simple one like ‘just believe in Jesus’. We are to surmise
that God’s plan is to make more than one set of rules – might we
suppose to even further confuse us – to thus enact the eventual end of
judgment where most people will fall short. Amidst this God-permitted
confusion, we are also to figure that God actually created love by
creating humans. Love is proposed at times to be the ‘desire’ to reunite
with God, but then we get confused with love; again, all part of the
plan. Also, somehow God either is not the creator of all things, at least
in as much as there might be ‘giants’ and demons and such, and we
can’t forget Lucifer who rebelled against God who therefore must not
have been created by God – that is, unless we should revisit another
creation scenario. Or, God is the creator of all things whose ultimate
plan is beyond our ability to reckon. So, in the end, taken all together,
we have a choice to believe in God’s plan which has no meaning we can
make sense of all together (nihilism), or not believe because it makes
no sense (nihilism). The effect is the same: Some believe, some don’t;
there is no analysis that necessitates a One criterion for believing what
is true: That is the essence of our nihilistic situation. Any such
assertion of truth is merely an assertion of the criterion that cycles
back to the assertion, regardless of what meaningful strategy is
implemented.

Ironically, though, the point of that whole description (above)

is not to make an argument against the existence or truth of God, nor
even to rally against religion. The point is to recognize that the story
is here, intact, as it is, despite whatever anyone wants to believe about
it or not. And, because it is here, it must be attempting to communicate
 Kair 143

something. If it is that people should believe despite their best efforts

at reasoning behind it, or because of their God inspired reasoning, so
be it; such justifications are real at all times.

What is significant, then, is an explanation of a whole that is

consistent to itself yet while not being only sufficient unto itself. This
essay proposes that the criterion of such truth is thus not merely some
hermeneutical reading but more that its consistency is found through
a particular manner of appropriating discourse, and this manner, that
is referred to as a route, is really based in a teleology that is different
than what is typically relied upon to notice what is real. Already an
outline of the real teleological estimation of the Gospels has been made
and is being shed light upon; the indication, there, is that the only way
we might (are allowed to) have come upon a consistent meaning of the
Gospels is through a view that transcends real estimations; hence,
hegemonic, traditional, usual and real religious and spiritual positions
posit transcendence as an aspect of reality (God and or transcending
or otherwise ‘extra-real’ aspects are still real).

In contrast; the marginalized view has it that in order to have

transcended the real way to estimate the truth of things, its method,
its route, we cannot posit a further transcendence and we cannot posit
that somehow we have reached or are communicating with some
transcendent aspect or element. Only in reality can and do people
claim to have communed with what is transcendent, and then we all
get to discuss and come to our own ideas of whether they did or not or
in what way they did or did not. So this other route does not posit a
transcending element, and abstains from the reliance upon an
externally effective aspect. Likewise, it does not adhere to ‘immanence’
at least in the sense that there is ‘something else’ that the human
being may have the possibility of being at odds with, and neither does
it rely upon ‘chaotic’ or ‘unknown forces’ for its explanation. These are

144 A Heresy

reductive strategies connoting a certain method of a particular

teleology, and we concede the point made by and of real estimation, the
phenomenon, its yays and nays120. The evidence of this teleology that
no longer accounts for the consistency of a whole is its accounting in
reality, with all its correspondent traits and vehicles; namely, limited
view, negotiation, and transcendence 121 . There is no overcoming
reality through any sort of decision because every aspect of what
informs the decision is correlational. Ideology and politics are real,
affected by choices made by individual agents intuiting transcendental
truths, which are then applied to real material situations to effect
empirical outcomes. Hence, we have reiterated the necessary relation
of the possible aspects involved in the appropriation and development
of meaning. The fully human will not and cannot admit, believe,
understand any aspect that does not adhere to its rules of truth, which
in the story of the Gospels is the Law.

Bringing someone back from the dead is a breach of the Law;

it defies real estimations. What is at issue, though, is the meaning that
is gained by the real transgression.

From the beginning of this Gospel story, it appears that even

though we are told that a lot of people are coming to listen to Jesus,
very few people are really understanding what Jesus is saying except
the disciples (and indeed, there are more than twelve as the story
develops). Many people come to Jesus and ask him various things
about salvation and such, and Jesus heals a few people. A multitude
came out to hear Jesus talk, and through the Gospels we are told “And
 Kair 145

many believed on him there.”122 Yet, there seems to be a discrepancy

between all these people interacting and believing Jesus in the first
half of the story, and the crowd who wanted Barabbas spared over
Jesus at the end. The reason for this is said to be because the Priests
incited the crowd, but we might consider how much resistance in
general was put against Christianity over the next three centuries; one
can even make an argument that the imperial and institutional
conversion to Christianity was more a political move than a spiritual
one.

However; a more thorough involvement would begin to discern

the patchwork of stories that make up the Gospels, and how a certain
consistency pervades through the ministry that does not continue past
Lazarus; the consistency is that any consistency beyond merely being
strange appears contrived by the authors. We see this most
prominently in the parables (see below), but as well, similarly there is
a timbre of scene that holds after John chapter 12, the two evidencing
perhaps an authorial tying together of two literary types. I suspect
that there is a literary motif of the subversion by the priests that
appears to tie the whole Jesus plot together. We might see that what
we are calling the departure and subsequent chapters extend back into
the ministry in this way, and more so than the parabolic (parable-like)
stories and the teachings of the ministry appear to extend past
Lazarus. Further; if we uphold the idea of the proximity of the authors
of the Gospels that has been suggested earlier in this essay, we might
see that the less proximate the view is to the event, the more the
ulterior theme of subverting and killing of Jesus supplies a
cohesiveness of the story that thus implies in its structure as it hides
the suturing affect, the more solute and fluid telling of an actual man-
God. In short; the farther away the authorial voice, the more
comprehensive the story appears and the less visible the sutures that
bind segregate events become. This is to say, further, that the more
the story conveys a true literary form by its structure, the more a story

146 A Heresy

follows a logical plotline, and the more real and true it is argued to be.
So to sum: In this case where we are dealing with a blatant
confrontation of the rules that allow reality to be sensible: There is an
event most offensive, and there does the author stand back from it such
that fiction may appear as fact. This approach may be further affected
and discerned when we consider that only the story of John, of the four
Gospels, is told the closest to a first person narrative, and is actually
told in such a way to draw the reader toward her own conclusion and
then confirm a particular reading upon the reflection that the story
was indeed recorded by someone who has come across the significant
event. If Luke conveys a more intimate proximity to the event than
Matthew or Mark, then John conveys an actual situation even more
intimate than ‘close’, so that this notion of proximity loses its ability to
convey any distance at all. So in speaking again of consistency and
proximity, we have enacted another double-voice, one that still enacts
a ‘view upon’, and one that has appropriated the authority of the story.

Here though, we are dealing with a kind of double-blind. Here,

in dealing with this incredible story, it is easier and not very offensive
to ‘believe’ anything; it is easier to chop meaning into more digestible
portions of ‘what it means’ than it is to consider meaning itself. One is
more able to believe that God is involved than to know God is not, for
if God is not involved then something about the way I am coming upon
this situation must be the issue. Likewise is a person more able to
believe that no God was involved but that things can be explained by
natural cause, as we said, that whatever the real situation was, it was
due to the political, social, and environmental influences in which the
event was embedded, for again, if such influences did not cause the
situation then the manner by which I am appraising it must be at
issue.
 Kair 147

When we look squarely at the situation then we do begin to find

a little discomfort. Venture to say that somewhere there were many
people who not only merely believed Jesus, but indeed were ‘disciples’
but were not following Jesus around, and that ‘the disciples’ most
likely refer to the specific group of people with whom Jesus went
around the area123.

The story of Lazarus seems to show people who fit into the
category of disciple who were not walking around with Jesus
everywhere. In John 11 we are told that “It was Mary which anointed
the Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet with her hair, whose
brother Lazarus was sick.”124 In fact, there seems to be at least two
Marys who also may have been this sort of disciple; Mary Magdalene,
and Mary of Bethany, the brother of Lazarus, who, also had a sister,
Martha, that John seems is important enough to mention a couple
times.

Jesus has left town and Lazarus’s sister sent a message tell
him that Lazarus, “he whom thou lovest is sick.” Jesus says of Lazarus
that “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the
Son of God might be glorified.”125 This must so be the case that it seems
Jesus is not too worried126. One might say (those of the fully human)
that it is because Jesus knows that he can raise people from the dead,
so he is waiting for him to die so people might see his miracle so “ye
may believe”; Jesus waits two days after he heard of his sickness before
leaving to go to him, and by the time Jesus arrives Lazarus was in the
grave four days. Jesus waits two days and then gets ready to go back
to Judea, but his disciples tell him not to because that is where the
Jews want to kill him. But

“Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day?”127


148 A Heresy

It appears that Jesus knows he has all the time in the world.
Can it be that he is taking his position as the Son of God for granted,
or has some special communication with God who is telling him to
wait? Yet then we notice this is spoken in the context of Jesus saying
‘it is time to go now’. To this the disciples council him that it is too
soon, the disciples in this case being the people who are present,
namely and most likely Mary and Martha. So Jesus answers with ‘are
there not twelve hours in the day’, perhaps as an indication of those
‘disciples’ who actually walk around everywhere with him. Then Jesus
doesn’t talk about how much time that has passed, or how much more
might pass if they wait because maybe all of a sudden they need to get
there soon. Instead Jesus talks in terms, again, of the experience of
the minimal human being; there are the disciples that are present
there that include the twelve who walk with him, and there is the
disciple Lazarus, who has a sickness that is not unto death, but that
may be spoken about in a manner to say that he is indeed dead. ‘Are
there not at least twelve’ could be a better expression of his meaning
that talks about the possibility that there are more. In particular,
there is one more named Lazarus. To this situation, Jesus responds
with confidence because he is pretty versed in the experience of the
minimal human, and says
“If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he
seeth the light of this world. But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth,
because there is no light in him....”

His reference is always in the context of the minimal human,

the ‘I am’ of the situation that cannot be spoken outside of. With
reference to this disciple who is sick (Lazarus), he notes that there are
indeed twelve who may still not entirely come to terms with their
situation, but who nevertheless ‘were called’, and there will be yet
another: ‘Are there not twelve who walk in the light?’ So Jesus refers
to this moment of Being ‘I am’ as ‘light’ and ‘day’, yet as well in the
extended context as ‘life’ and what might be understood as its larval
 Kair 149

stage ‘death’. He says then that if anyone walks in the day he doesn’t
stumble (because he cannot do but what he does), because he sees the
light; but if a man walk in the night he stumbles because there is no
light in him. This is the situation of one who has been called but who
has not yet come to terms with what it means, what occurs for
meaning. The ‘Twelve’ disciples go with Jesus everywhere and so have
a constant reminder, council and example for what occurs (and we will
see soon how this becomes a stumbling block for them). Yet these other
disciples do not have such easy recourse. In certain occasions of
meaning the minimal human without such guidance, in the first sense,
and knowledge of the situation, in the latter sense, will find himself
‘dead’, because we are not talking here about what might be some ‘real’
or ‘actual’ death, because everything that is real is only and always
meaningful 128 . This is the case with Lazarus; he stumbled. Jesus
knows that the meaningful process must take its path, it must be
allowed to have its time, or Jesus’s presence will not be able to reach
Lazarus, and as well for people that are gathered not have a significant
effect. His is a story that evidences the significant division in meaning,
of the two routes of orientation upon objects.

In a foreshadowing of what is to come in what we call ‘The

Departure’, the disciples think Jesus is taking his time because he
knows that Lazarus is not actually dead but is merely asleep, in bed
sleeping. Jesus then clarifies for them to make no mistake “Lazarus is
dead”. But then Jesus makes a strange statement. He says
“And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent
ye may believe, nevertheless let us go to him.”129

The traditional version relies upon the idea that a purpose of

Jesus is to do things in the presence of people so they will then believe
that Jesus of the Son of God. We set this aside to for the real religious
discussion to have. When we read what is printed without referencing
something outside what is presented, though, we find an oddity. Jesus
appears to be saying one thing but hiding another meaning.

150 A Heresy

Let us entertain again, for a moment, the idea that though

Jesus is a part of his historical moment 130 he is nevertheless not
conveying anything that is necessarily divine, that he is not ‘speaking
enigmatically’ or being mysterious because there is something really
mysterious he is trying to convey or some mysterious God entity that
is actually trying to have Jesus promote him. Consider that the
placement of the story of Lazarus, of bringing someone back to life, is
at the end of the ministry; it is a crowning achievement, as if to save
the best for last. Yet Jesus appears as if this is no big thing; he appears
as if he doesn’t really care, almost as if he is kind of weary of this whole
proving through miracle thing. One would think that this big event,
the miracle of all miracles, would have Jesus stoked and energized,
like, ‘finally; if you didn’t believe before…!’ But oddly enough when he
is told the news, he is not even concerned; he shows no empathy to
Lazarus’s sisters at all, and his answer to them is rather blasé. In
effect, he says ‘Oh yeah; well… don’t worry girls, this sickness he has
is not one that will actually kill him. He’s just sick so I can show you
guys again that God and me are powerful dudes.’ We have to ask why
he would be so nonchalant. Then further, if we want to get very
disturbed, might we even dare think about the next verses:
“Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When
he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the
same place where he was.”131

Consider also what is meant he ‘loved’ these people. How does

it read? We are just greasing the wheels, for this is the big moment
before the big moment, the break between the ministry and the
departure. It is the last of his works, for Jesus’s resurrection is not one
of Jesus’s works, and it is also the last time that it is said that Jesus
loved anyone.
 Kair 151

A general assumption that rides through the Gospels as a

theme is that Jesus and the disciples loved one another, and indeed
they were most probably good close friends. But nowhere except John,
and not after the eleventh chapter of John, is it said that Jesus loved
anyone; Jesus speaks more specifically of believing and loving him,
and how God loves them, his disciples. As explained above, this is
partially accounted for because the focus of Jesus and the disciples
becomes much more intimate after the public ministry.

Still; Jesus loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and we have
another disciple whose name is not directly mentioned, that John calls
“the one whom Jesus loved”132. So here we have an indication of four
people whom Jesus loved. With a little scrutiny, we can find good
evidence, though, of who this ‘one whom Jesus loved’ was; to my mind,
it comes down to two people: From John 19, verses 26-27 we can say it
is James who is Jesus’s brother, but if we take the only other reference,
we might say it is Lazarus. Now, if it were either of these people then
we must ask why the pseudonym, why is it the book of John? Yet also
we can consider the relations; Jesus loved these siblings, Martha,
Mary and Lazarus; and, Jesus’s brother James. We might then see a
certain coincidence. Further; the name Lazarus means “My god has
helped”133. Does it seem quite serendipitous that the big miracle before
Jesus dies is done upon a man with a name that means “My God has
helped”?

This is the coincidence of the story. Events unfold to the event

that is always in question such that it leads inevitably to the Event,
and nothing could have gone differently; nowhere in the story do
things get derailed, but the story itself speaks to an urgency, but as
well an honesty and an empathy. The honesty is the authority, but the
urgency is found in the lack of empathy, because no, the author was
never in the situation without authority. The urgency is the call to

152 A Heresy

understanding, to knowledge over faith, of the pleading with oneself

for the relief of undoing the authority of the identification with the
Object, as this comes out as, is indeed, ministry, administering to those
the honesty of the author’s situation, which is de facto their
situation134. It is this incessant and insistent situation that is revealed
at this big moment.

To support this notion, we must visit the parable in Luke about

the poor leper and the rich man. The poor leper is named Lazarus.

The parable and discussion of Jesus in the 16th and 17th

chapters of Luke 135 are another occasion to show how a possible
traditional reading may be upset through a different view, a different
orientation upon the object being presented in the Gospels.

The manner by which Jesus’s discourse moves is subtle but

decisive; almost stream of consciousness, the adaptation of terms’
meaning to the situation as it arises in the moment is what truly
marks him and brings all sorts of interest in him. The parable just
before this, in the first half of the chapter, concerns money and wealth,
or ‘mammon’, which is used to posit a contrast with God, as money and
material wealth might be evil, or at least in respect to spiritual
goodness, what one should want. So at verse 14 we have

“And the Pharisees also, who were covetous, heard all these
things: and they derided him.”
 Kair 153

They are getting mad at him and making fun of him. Yet we
are to wonder why the chapter appears more to set this introductory
response to the next parable of the poor leper, rather than a conclusion
of the previous one. It is certainly a transitional clause, a literary
device to suture the parables together into a ‘divine’ tapestry.
Accordingly, while it is not incorrect to read this as the Pharisees were
mocking him because he was making a comment upon how they are
wealthy priests, a larger significance arises when we consider that
what they were covetous of Jesus, was his ability to speak in the
manner that he does, to draw out ‘spiritual’ significance in the moment
through the appropriation of discourse136. Jesus sees this and indeed
speaks openly of it in verse 15.

“And he said into them, Ye are they which justifies yourselves

before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly
esteemed amongst men is an abomination in the sight of God.” (emphasis
added)

Then Jesus talks about the law in the manner already

described above,137 verifying this meaning by adding in verse 17 that
the law never fails. But then we have what appears to be an
inconsistency. Though he has been talking about a kind of
irreconcilable discrepancy between wealth and God, and brings in the
comment about how the law never fails, all of a sudden Jesus makes a
comment about the sanctity of marriage. If we could follow the parable
into a comment about the law, are we supposed to then see this
comment about marriage as an example how the law never fails?

The usual manner of interpreting this part of Luke follows just

this idea. We are to imagine that its abruptness is a sign of deep
astuteness, of the depth of spiritual analogy to which Jesus is
attempting to provoke listeners in the story and readers of the story.
Jesus, again in his historical moment, just may indeed be following
this theme of spiritual enlightenment, of seeing his knowledge as an

154 A Heresy

indication of his being responsible for shedding a deep spiritual

significance, but we are more concerned with the functioning of this
ability, what the ability denotes for what is occurring. Once we are
capable of describing this situation without recourse to God, then the
situation becomes much more humanly accessible. For this, one need
only look at the passage to notice a break that occurs in the stream of
the thought. Verses 16-18:
“The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the
kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it. And it is
easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail.
Whosoever put away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth
adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband
committeth adultery.”

Tradition is of the fully human who does not comprehend

things beyond a segregation of objects 138 . The break here, because
Jesus is conveying something that resonates in every human that
hears him, whether it be antagonism or acceptance, is thus viewed to
hold a significance that is even deeper than the meaning of the theme
of the overt flow of what he is talking about; namely, wealth and
spiritual bankruptcy, this conveys a certain spirit of the law that does
not fail, then as an example of this, the law that concerns marriage.
Most of the traditional interpretation show that this is the preferred
real manner for the attempt to come to terms with such breaks, that
we must study in depth to find the significant meaning139 as they occur
in various strengths throughout the parables; Jesus is speaking in
riddles that have to do with an inner spirit and its situation with God.
If one is involved in finding out the meaning of chapter 16, it is difficult
to read and not pause at verse 18; then it is only with some
consideration that the various interpretations upon a theme arise; as
our example, Jesus is talking about the Law of Moses and how when
it is applied as a command the violation of that law leads to the
consistent application of means, which is, the name of the prohibition;
 Kair 155

to wit, wealth equals worldly desires as opposed to what is Godly, the

priests are wealthy, the law proscribes how one is to be Godly, the
priests, who are supposed to be of God are not, just as the command is
to not commit adultery, and those who were married who are ‘put
away’ cause everyone involved intimately to commit adultery, the
priests are causing everyone to sin who follows them.

However; when we notice this pause it seems more consistent

to back up to the whole talk that Jesus is giving, to step back from the
closely inspected object that is the story as well as the proper method
of appropriating meaning from it.

Another way to notice that the minimal human can only do that
he does is to say that he improvises, that he works without a net, that
his activity is a kind of stream of consciousness. In fact, a certain type
of general spirituality calls for one to align herself with, what can be
called, the ‘Godhead’, such that the proper culmination of such
spirituality is that one’s behavior is always in line with what
‘God/spirit/true-self’ would have; indeed, this is also the motivation
behind Kant’s synthetic a priori140. However; the kind of improvisation
for this analogy is never a move toward surety, but rather more a
perpetual stretching of limits, of unsettling comfort as itself a kind of
comfort, a free style rap of definite beginnings and unknown ends, a
compelling and inescapable motion. If we can use this analogy, then,
we should note that the best improviser is one who takes risks within
the unfolding of the activity. While ‘improv’ and ‘jams’ itself has now
become quite a conventional routine, the most thoroughly enjoyable
moments of any performance is witnessing not just the dynamics of
amplitude and the exercise of perfection. Passionate vital (good) sexual

156 A Heresy

interaction should not be merely from point A to point B and repeat.

Intelligence should not be confined to identifiable features. The most
satisfying moment is when the improviser develops a simple theme
into a complexity that attempts to reach beyond the performer’s
ability, and then to watch and see how they work and weave
themselves out of or back down from the great artistic height; that is
also, if they indeed succeed in doing so and with what grace, apparent
fear (this is when you know a risk has been taken), and emotional
investment. To watch and be involved with an authentic improvisation
is to experience all the fortitude, doubt, wonder, fear, confidence and
achievement that life would have to offer, but in the few moments of
the performance. To be able to share that experience with the
performer in the moment is indeed a divine gift of communion.

The parables of Jesus found in the Gospels are a recording of

this type of rhetorical improvisation. The theme in this case is not so
much God and the true nature of things, but the nature of existence;
the theme is that which arises as the appropriative substrate whereby
or upon which every thing has meaning. In other words, once an object
is presented and the talk begins, it proceeds upon vectors of meaning
that the object determines. It is analogous to an improvisation
because, from a certain perspective, the person, or Jesus in this case,
does not know what the object is, does not know the point or result that
will come from the object. Jesus only knows that the object has aroused
a sense of completion given the condition of the object as it arises in
the real world against ‘nothing’, which is the substrative subject at
hand. It is the ‘subject of the object’. What the object means and the
point of that meaning given the existential condition of the moment;
i.e. what could be called the context, the uncountable and
unclassifiable aspects that go into a moment to have arrived at the
object being presented in this particular way to prompt a discursive
 Kair 157

iteration. This is why the parables all have their particular topics, and
appear to be talking about various objective real situations, but really
are talking about the same thing, indicating the same situation that
we may call the subject, but all the while it is not subjective in the
sense of personal opinion. Existence is differentiated only through
objects.

Verse 18 stands out like a sore thumb, but as we might expect

with any improvisation, there are also smaller stalls and moments of
reproach that signal the greater mounting development of the theme.
The topic of the series of parables leading up to this have to do with
two apparently different perceptions of a single event. Just before
Chapter 15141 Jesus is saying that a disciple must “hate” his father and
mother, and as well “bare his cross”, and suggests that this
discernment, the establishment of crossing this normative boundary is
necessary to finishing what was started by the mere idea of being a
disciple (of renouncing the law of the object, of being a minimal
human); a disciple must “forsaketh…all that he hath”. He says “salt is
good,” being disciple-like is all good and well but if the salt has no
flavor what good is it for seasoning? He finishes with the enigmatic
“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear”; again indicating the manner
of speaking by which the disciples are called.

He announces that bit to a “great multitude”, but then Jesus

beckons all the “publicans and sinners” to him, and the Pharisees
“murmured” about how Jesus socializes with sinners. Then Jesus
turns to the Pharisees, and he talks about how one particular thing is
valued more than the collection of things; then about how a son who
has been gone and been frivolous is valued more upon his return than
the son who had stayed around and was responsible. The listeners are
to gain from this that the judgment of the Pharisees concerning
associating with ‘sinners’ is based in an incorrect attitude of Godly

158 A Heresy

service and sin. This motif of ethical value moves over into how we
negotiate the value of things and in Chapter 16 he speaks to his
disciples about a steward who did not handle his employer’s wealth
well, and his boss is going to fire him. The steward could not work to
make money and neither wanted to beg for a living. So, he makes plans
to look good in the eyes of his debtors so when he gets put out, one of
his debtors might take him in to work for him. He goes to them and
requires that they pay only half of what they owe to his boss. His boss
is so stoked that he commends the steward. This first part of Chapter
16 we are told is said unto his disciples.

It is here that we come across a pause in our appropriation of

what Jesus is talking about, an adjustment in approach leading to the
break that occurs in verse 18. The motion of this scene of which
Chapter 16 is the end, appears like that of an improvisation; the initial
move is large and general, speaking to everyone, but it is those ‘sinners
and publicans’ who ‘have an ear’ who move in closer to hear better;
Jesus drew near unto him these sinners. But then something catches,
an antagonist that disrupts the stream but is actually integral to it; as
if on cue, the Pharisees, cannot bear the motion of what is occurring,
it offends their sensibility. The theme turns to accommodate this
object, this objection to the consistency of meaning that is occurring for
those who ‘have an ear’. But the object does not throw Jesus and
instead is incorporated into the theme because all objects are
equivocal, equal elements which arise in the appropriate
improvisational space given of the existential condition of the moment
at hand. Jesus continues with the theme of renouncement and its voice
while framing it in a context of explanation, but one that still will not
be heard by the Pharisees. Though he might be explaining to them, the
explanation is already dissipated and negated in the very act. This
then also supports the theme of the talk. Jesus ‘explains’ that God
 Kair 159

welcomes the ‘sinners’ because these are the people (evidently, by their
drawing near) who hear his voice through Jesus, and the reason for
this is similar to what occurs in the law; the corresponding examples:
The Pharisees may be like the flock of sheep that do not wander, or
like the hoard of silver that is not lost, or the son who does not leave
and is responsible. The disciples, though, are like the lost sheep that
the man goes looks for and is happy when he finds it; like the single
lost coin of silver that the woman is happy to have found again; like
the careless and irresponsible son who returns home.

So we follow this theme into Chapter 16 and we apply it

likewise: The disciples are like the irresponsible steward who saves his
boss’s wealth by being wise in worldly affairs. Pause. What? In verse
8 Jesus concludes the reiteration of the theme, and says to his
disciples, “And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he
had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation
wiser than the children of light.”

Here we are compelled to ask upon this apparent inconsistency

of theme. So it seems Jesus too has realized how the theme has slipped
just slightly but significantly away from the meaning he was going
with, and so he has to compensate for it. He says in verse 9

“And I say unto you, Make yourselves friends of the mammon

of unrighteousness;”

What? What has prompted us to the pause now was the break
just a few passages later, in verse 18 about marriage. This break comes
about because we noticed that the Pharisees are offended by what
Jesus just said about not serving two masters, what we understand as
‘worldly things’ like money and God, and that the Pharisees where
taking Jesus’s whole talk as an accusation against them. Now Jesus is
telling his disciples, the twelve but most likely those of the multitude

160 A Heresy

who drew near also, to be friends with the unrighteous, who in this
context are the Pharisees, even while he is supposed to be in an
explanation to the Pharisees why it is that Jesus can be associating
with sinners. The theme has wandered; we can begin to see thus how
this whole context may be a literary context, a patchwork of stories
sewn together with the help of the antagonizing element. The
improvisation is a motion that transcends time and space to bring
meaning which further negates the conceptual forces of time and space
itself, a motion that occurs within two conceptual frameworks at the
same time; one of the supposed actual event, and one of the event that
is come upon through the reading of the story of the event.

The adjustment in meaning has occurred against the straying

of the theme. This is needed because with the cue of verse 9, when we
step back from these parables, we might see the meaning in a different
light. We might begin to have an eerie suspicion of something terribly
un-Christian. The rest of verse 9:
“…that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting
habitations.”

Eeek! Oops. Are we to understand that Jesus is telling his

disciples to hedge their bets? Or that God is of mammon, so when the
disciples fail, God will take you in as sinners? If we allow that to creep
into our consciousness of what is occurring we then might begin to
draw back into a sort of doubt, a kind of vacillation. We pull back into
another kind of faith, of depression over affirmation. We might begin
to read the previous parables as all having this underlying meaning,
this kind of ulterior motive. Perhaps Jesus is saying that the disciples
should take care for those who have means to thereby come upon an
advantage for themselves, to be the lost sheep, the lost coin, the
returning son of those who would be so gullible? Be the spiritual means
 Kair 161

that allow such greedy wanting people to feel whole, and to thereby
secure themselves (the desciples) a comfortable place to reside if need
be? Yet then, if we back up a little further in Luke, we come in conflict
with the idea that a disciple must forsake all that he has, which is to
mean, have faith that God will provide for you. Why then, would Jesus
be instructing them to make friends with those of means, those wise of
the world sinners, those unrighteous greedy people who are more
concerned with wealth and money than Godly service? These are
dangerous waters indeed!

Now Jesus must move to make clear what he was really saying,
to re-collect the theme, to reconcile the shoal on which his improvised
rhetoric has been beached back with the theme upon which the motion
started. He says in the next verses142

“He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in

much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust in much.”

What? How does this have anything to do with making friends

with greedy people? Is this like the ideal mirror of heaven where
everything ethical is reversed for eternity?

“If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous

mammon, who will commit your trust the true riches?”

Huh? Should we assume then that it turns out that in heaven

there will be another heaven beyond that which will ‘re-mirror’ to
make up for the unjust situation now occurring where the Godly
commanded are now unjust by having faith for the sake of the unjust
for the sake of being just?
“And if ye have not been faithful in that which is another
man’s, who shall give you that which is your own?”

We begin to hear the theme again. The lost sheep has

renounced the law, the herd, the hoard, the family: They are faithful

162 A Heresy

not to what is their own, not to a situation of social identity, but in that
which is the other man’s; this is the condition of the minimal human,
that they get what is ‘their own’ through what is ‘not their own’.
Consistently, these people (disciples) are not wise of the ways of the
world; they do not function nor process the world through mammon,
through want and greed and the methods of attaining it. This
difference, when expressed by the disciple by virtue of the fact of their
being minimally human, draws the greedy by virtue of the resonance
of being, but also by virtue of the greed, their want for such an Object
(since they see it as a True Object). As we will see later, these two
human elements are complicit in the world, and the disciple should
seek to not deny, as the law and the Pharisees would have it, the real
world of money and power and the negotiation thereof. So Jesus’s
rhetoric is moving again, albeit tentatively – but that is the art of the
improviser, that he makes an appearance to have had control the
whole time. If a disciple cannot accept the world for what it is, as we
say, involving two routes, then he is no disciple, is salt without the
seasoning.
“No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the
one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the
other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

Ahhh, we say. The moves of a master. But the Pharisees do not

hear it this way, “and they derided him”.

We now may begin to see what function verse 18, the comment
about marriage, serves. Jesus has implemented, with a certain amount
of cognitive purpose, the double voice; so Chapter 16 begins “And he
said also unto his disciples,” (emphasis added). Jesus began with
 Kair 163

addressing the multitude; some of that group heard what Jesus was
saying and came forth. Then Jesus addresses “them”, implicating the
polemic with ‘sinners’ and the Pharisees. Now when he is addressing
his disciples and the Pharisees he is brought to a moment of pause,
and reconciles the rhetorical drift through emphasizing the polemical
nature of the world, as well then the two routes by which any world
may be known. He rides the margin; he knows he is saying one thing
to his disciples, a kind of verification and acceptance, and one thing to
the Pharisees that they are taking as an affront.

The pivotal moment in the speech is the polemical rhetoric

falling suddenly back into the one, suddenly back into the single
moment of the minimal human. The theme has grown complex, has
frayed its single vector and divided into a kind of musical counterpoint,
and then a further counterpoint. There is the real overt, ethical
meaning of the parables, and there is the True meaning. The ethical
meanings conflate into a ‘special’ spiritual meaning that
simultaneously indicates for the disciples the facts of the matter of
their existence. This also further segregates those who do not
understand. These latter, the Pharisees in particular, further are
included as indeed a necessary and vital part of the world, but instead
see this as a negative accusation of them. Like some maestro, all the
motifs are in play for Jesus, conducting the symphony of meanings yet
while enacting no essentially subjective (subject-objective) agency,
moving only in circles at once away and toward Being, following the
determination of the object, of its terms. He only does that he does. The
law is fulfilled in this way, at all times, and in the culmination of the
interworking of theme and motifs, Jesus returns to himself and finds
this the singular situation in an analogous reference and consolidation
of discrepant meanings of ‘the law’:

“Whosoever put away his wife, and marrieth another

committeth adultery.”

164 A Heresy

Why does this commandment seemingly arise out of nowhere?

Because the issue is of the two, and what occurs for what it means as
the situation of the one. Marriage concerns the binding of two into one,
but it is not brought here to say anything about a real social-religious
contract between two people unless we see Jesus as revealing some
hidden spiritual truth of God’s universe. On the contrary; Jesus is
again elaborating upon the situation of the minimal human and the
law of existence. The minimal human is capable of only serving one
master, is only available to enact the law as knowledge; as well, the
fully human cannot but ‘serve’ its method of real estimations, of value
and of ethical choice. In effect, and in recognition of this, the condition
of either is ‘married’; as we will see soon, each serves ‘the law’ in its
lawfulness, not as a command that may be chosen against, but as a
necessary behavior of the cosmos. Any violation of this maxim, this
existential mandate, is a sin, it is contrary to the meaning of the law
that is fulfilled.

Once this culmination arises, this ‘eruption’ of the fulfilled law

that interjects into the stream of meaning, the break moves past
smoothly into the support of the meaning come upon as the
improvisation. Now that the theme has been clarified, distilled, if you
will, it must play out, solidify, if we can say that, resonate in the
singularity.

The story of the poor beggar and the rich man and the first part
of chapter 17 in Luke, is the recapitulation of the parabolic theme of
the two routes of the object.
 Kair 165

The story tells of a rich man and a poor leper named Lazarus
who

“…laid at his gate [of the rich man], full of sores, And desiring
to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover,
the dogs came and licked his sores.”143

Both men die and Lazarus goes to heaven where he is

comforted by Abraham, and the rich man to the torment of hell. The
rich man looks up and sees Lazarus with Abraham and calls to him to
ask if Lazarus might be allowed to dip his finger in water and reach
down to “cool my tongue; for I am tormented by this flame”. But
Abraham says no he can’t do that, but more, that a chasm has been
fixed so that no one can come or go between. So then the rich man asks
Abraham if Lazarus might be allowed to go visit his brothers who are
still alive to tell them to change their ways. Abraham says that they
have Moses and the prophets to tell them, and the rich man says that
they would listen more to a dead man telling them. Then Abraham
replies that if they will not hear Moses and the prophets then they will
likewise not listen to a dead man.

The theme of the polemical nature of existence is expressed

here. Obviously there persists a motif that wealthy people will not go
to heaven and are somehow more sinful than the people who the
Pharisees see as sinful because they fail in the eyes of their Law, but
in considering the whole parabolic move of the improvisation, this
seems incidental. The mytho-religious characters are but a setting.
Notice further that the rich man in hell asks of Abraham for the
fortunate beggar to reach down to grant him some grace, if even for a
moment, to cool his tongue. He does not ask God, but asks Abraham if
the beggar might bestow upon him some relief of his condition. The
request is denied not for any logical reason, but that of some sort of
‘opposite’ reckoning; the rich goes to hell, the poor goes to heaven.
There is no reason in this, it only appears to make sense due to a

166 A Heresy

strange kind of worldly ethics that transcribes into a mirror world

after we die. To emphasize how there is no sense to be made but the
sense that it reflects of the reader, Abraham even tells the rich man
“And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf
fixed: so that they who would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can
they pass to us, that would come from thence.”144

Clearly by now the theme of not only the polemical nature of

existence but indeed two irreconcilable routes manifest. Granted, this
is in the context of a conversation, but it appears to further emphasize
that he is not so much ‘believing’ in a heaven and hell as he is using
these tropes to convey a meaning; Abraham says “between you and
us” 145 . The polemics have been forced into a context out of the
Pharisees response of their mistaken appropriation of the terms
presented; the motion of the parables has come down to Jesus ‘saying
unto them’, the Pharisees. The theme of forsaking all you have as an
imperative of the disciple 146 has drifted from sheep, to coin, to
wayward son, to wealth and its management, with supportive motifs
that correspond to particular contextual ordering (stories around each
motif), to then finally rich and poor. Similarly, we move from the motif
of repentance of the single sinner, to one that is found or returns again,
who in effect has already repented by virtue of his blatant and overt
sin. The developing discrepancy in the counterpoints then calls for the
adjustment mentioned above.

The meaning of each stem from a central theme that is the

situation of the minimal human being in the world, but it has been
apprehended by those who do not understand, those who also
contribute to and constitute the world of the minimal human, as
indicting them to their unrighteousness; but it is due to their
misappropriation of the discourse, which could indeed be called the
original sin, that indeed places them in the ‘other’ camp, of the fully
 Kair 167

human, of the value and identity of the True Object. So Jesus must be
more clear, be more direct in what he is saying, which completes the
recapitulation of the improvisation; in the last verse of Chapter 16
Abraham says to the rich man:

“If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be
persuaded, though one rose from the dead.”147

The beginning of Chapter 17 witnesses Jesus admitting the

improvisational foundering as a move back into the minimal human
experience. He is admitting the fault involved in what appears to be a
direct accusation of the Pharisees. As described above; Jesus walks the
rhetorical line and knows what he is saying and what he is meaning
even while is knows how others might apprehend what is said; but he
is not responsible to the Object. The theme of the improvisational
motion is the description of two irreconcilable routes, the Pharisees are
incapable of understanding what is irreconcilable, thus their offense
manifests not as being included in the discourse and understanding
the theme, but rather as accusation and jealousy.

Having recapitulated the theme and stated it outright, Jesus

now explains what has occurred to the disciples.
“Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that
offenses will come: But woe unto him through whom they come. It were
better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast
into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones. Take heed
to yourselves: If thy brother trespass against the, rebuke him; and if he
repent, forgive him.”148

The traditional bearing upon this lesson must reside in Jesus

conveying great ethical spiritual lessons from God. It is interesting in

168 A Heresy

this way how the parables are taken as a patchwork of a different

quality than as this essay suggests, above. Often enough, Jesus is
conveyed as spouting out enigmatic pearls of wisdom without any
reason, as if ‘things just come to him’; the only commonality, it seems
sufficient, between the parables is understood as Jesus teaching how
to be ‘spiritually ethical’. In the case of the first part of Chapter 17 of
Luke, we are to uphold a suspension of a requirement for a fluid
storyline and make merely a superficial linking between this
instruction and the parable just before it. Here in verses 1-5 Jesus is
understood to be talking about how people should try not to sin, but
should also forgive people who ask for forgiveness. Then verses 6-10 is
an instruction of how to have faith.

Just what makes the story line is an issue. The usual historical
view has it that there is this spiritual guy that walks around and
proclaims ‘really groovy shit’ everywhere, and because he is so
spiritual (he is the Son of God after all) he is laying it down, all the
sinning, where the sinning is at, applying the various kinds of sins to
their various occasions and applications, what faith is and and what
people need to do about it. The patchwork of parables is set in different
scenes of his spouting out really deep stuff. The consistency of the man
is found in his objectivity, of what he does, his intact identity, all of
which are taken to show who and what he is. He is the Son of God who
walks around preaching God’s message; that is who he is, what he is,
and the person that is constructed from these aspects is the subject
(subject-object) 149 and show all he is as a comprehendible person,
albeit, the Son of God also. All rejections of Jesus Christ also typically
follow this same orientation upon things.
 Kair 169

The story put forth in this essay comes from a different angle,
a different orientation upon the object. Here the consistency comes out
of the sensibility of the act; from there other objects gain their
consistency, their sensibility: The patchwork of parables are all talking
about the same thing from different views150. The order and setting of
the various situations serve as the context around which the parables
arise, the settings and the unfolding of the action determine what
terms are able to be used for that moment.

Jesus is the example of the minimal human being, what the

experience is as well as what happens. Jesus has just exemplified what
occurs and what can occur. What occurs is like a rhetorical
improvisation upon a theme; what can occur is in the act of
improvisation following the play of possible meanings that together
conflate into the particular meaning which is the experience of the
minimal human, the communication of the Subject that does not
become recouped by the subject-object – what can occur is that the
theme may develop toward a real object (a direct indictment of the
Pharisees) despite its being of a different order of communication. Why
this might occur settles no further than the fact that this is all taking
place in meaning, as opposed to indicating some psychological slip. We
know this because of how the break is reconciled in what makes sense
given the situation; rather than being an indication of a kind of
existential mistake 151 , it is taken completely out of its originating
consistent context, and automatically placed in a context that requires
multiple passes (stage, setting) to thereby argue back to the
originating object as if it has arisen from the argument in an act of
novel creation. One need only ask a Christian Biblical scholar and she
will grant you many examples that show the extent particular
spiritual-religious tropes are forced into the plain verse to develop
highly specified ethical lessons; the apparent and real nonsense that
the parables evidence are seen to contain a deep spiritual significance.
Similarly; terms are taken to refer to tropes even though no direct

170 A Heresy

reference is anywhere nearby in the story. Again the Biblical volume

is taken to be self-referential, to be self-evidently deep and spiritual,
so that the mere idea of the comprehensive scope of the Bible means
that any question posed by apparent non-sense will be vindicated by
some other Biblical reference or otherwise already integral ethical
theme. The conceptual and intellectual lengths Dogmatists go to to
draw meaning out of what appears overtly as nonsense is likewise the
redundant self-justification of the institution itself. Indeed, the term
scholar came out of this self-justified activity and the power it enacts.
The simple example here is that the word ‘offense’ in the first verse of
Chapter 17 of Luke is most often interpreted to mean ‘sin’ in the
general real ethical sense, even as there is nothing in the preceding
chapters that say anything about ‘offense’, in this instance, relating to
‘sin’152. In fact, the parable about the poor leper and the rich man says
nothing about any sin occurring but that of a rich man perhaps being
wealthy and maybe ignoring Lazarus the leper sitting outside his gate.
Thus besides a reiteration of an ethics that everyone already knows,
the significant thing that comes out of the parable is that there is a
‘gulf’ between two arenas that happen after life, or what we can say is
‘post-discursive’, with which we might find not too much difficulty in
understanding a correspondence what has occurred to be ‘post-
modernist’.

Jesus says that offenses will happen, the ‘improv’ will go out
onto thin limbs, and that when that happens it can be sucky, that it
would be better to be drowned in the ocean than to offend one of these
“little ones”. This is what it feels like, the anxiety, the risk that feels
as it is going to fall through at any moment and the jig will be up, and
the message, the line of communication will be disrupted, so that the
Object will have usurped the meaning before the proper time. The
“little ones” can be understood in the context of maturity, where the
 Kair 171

paramount ‘selfishness’ of the minimal human floods over into

absolute compassion for those who do not understand; Jesus is saying
that the disciples should not allow this selfishness to become an
Object, become a source of direct identification, direct accusation, for
then the Object is justified and the ministry becomes merely another
either/or expression of discontentment or ‘proper’ path toward
enlightenment. So in support of each other, when the disciples notice
this of each other, “Take heed to yourselves” 153to find themselves in
this way, in this situation, and forgive one another, no matter how
many times it occurs.

The disciples apparently do not totally understand yet, and

this reason may account for why we can notice a kind of intermission,
a sort of ‘changing of the props’, between the ministry, which ends in
John with Lazarus being raised from the dead, and the departure,
where, as we describe later, Jesus begins by telling the disciples what
is actually occurring in their experience and ends in Jesus dying and
rising from the dead. Here in Luke the situation is only indicated by
the disciples’ apparent ignorance weighted in incipient knowledge;
they understand him and so ask of him;
“And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith.”

The discrepancy in understanding occurs in the intimacy of the

moment. The common understanding, the line of communication, is
solute, yet is also displaced in the disciples’ question of faith, as if, at
once, they need a more or better faith so they will not fall into such
offending situations, but likewise in that they are asking Jesus to
increase their faith, they are still involved with the justifying Object,
namely Jesus, such that then, ironically, they are asking for more
knowledge of their condition. To this occasion, Jesus says that

“If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seen, ye might say unto

this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and thou be planted
in the sea; and it would obey you.”154

172 A Heresy

The significant meaning of this is the implication of the power

faith can hold, that if they were to have the tiniest amount of faith
they indeed could do magical things. He is telling the apostles that
they need no faith because it is only within the real context of faith
that faith itself, as hope or belief, extends itself beyond actual
possibility; the point here is that the very idea of faith is based in
nonsense, or real transcendence. Jesus is telling the apostles that they
do not have faith, so indeed there is no increasing faith; instead, he is
telling them by inference, what indeed will occur for them and how to
negotiate it.

So we see another break between verse 6 and 7 that is usually

forced into ethical objectivity 155 . Conversely, this break confirms
Jesus’s actual meaning, for it follows with minimal need for
explanation of itself, if one has the correct orientation upon the object
at hand:

“But which of you, having a servant plowing or feeding cattle,

will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, Go and sit
down to meat? And will not rather say into him, Make ready wherewith
I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and drunken;
and afterward thou shalt eat and drink? Doth he thank the servant
because he did the things that were commanded him? I trow not. So
likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are
commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that
which was our duty to do.”

First off; while we want to place Christianity in such high

regard to personal and social justice, why is he speaking about
ordering servants around? In fact, why would he even be using the
analogy if he were such an activist for freedom? Why would not he be
condemning the practice? The usual answer probably has something
to do with servitude being a common and regular practice of the day,
Jesus is used to it, and is thus using conventions of the day to
 Kair 173

communicate deep ethical and spiritual meanings. The marginalized

answer is that he is using an analogy to a common feature of reality to
convey the actual facts of the matter at hand. Instead of looking deeply
and drawing out meaning that could be any of a number of subjective
interpretations (this is why there is religious clerical councils, as well
as various denominations of religions: Because everyone has an
opinion), it is a much simpler matter when we see that Jesus is telling
the disciples to stop referring to their experience in terms of faith, and
see that they merely do things by virtue of the fact that they cannot do
anything else; they merely do that they do. Their situation is
analogous to that of a master and a servant. The master does not thank
the servant for doing what is it for a servant to do; to do so is a
disruption of the way things are 156 . For the master to do that is
equivalent to asking questions into contradiction, to ask why, for a
mathematical example, {1-1=0}157. There is no why to be found there;
it is a fact. To ask into it is also the same as having an element that is
further removed from it that accounts for it; it is to say “it is so because
--- made it so”. So likewise the conventional view of asking to have
one’s faith increased is to ask for knowledge that is deeper than what
is presented as the end of the question, which is really asking for more
proof or the associated feeling of confidence, and hence, less risk:
Metaphysical speculation158. Oddly enough, it is this latter quality of
experience that Jesus is saying is already available. For otherwise, are
we to assume that the disciples were asking Jesus to increase their
ability or capacity to hope?159

* * *

Returning now to the book of John and the story of Lazarus

who is dead.

“Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellow

disciples, Let us go, that we may die with him.”

174 A Heresy

Due to the initial misappropriation of the Gospels, the fully

human orientation that sees subjects as that substantial yet
transcendental position ‘in between’ objects 160 , Thomas’s comment
here is seen tangentially to such faith, as being sardonic; he is
supposed to be commenting on how they will be killed when they go
back. Yet, ironically to this defeatism, he is emphasizing the
consistency of the experience, that indeed, fellow disciple travelers,
lets go and die with Lazarus, that we may learn and know. This then
conveys a more consistent sense to this story and the accompanying
parable in Luke, this verse supplying the Hebrew as well as its Greek
version, both of which mean ‘twin’. One need look no further to
speculate as to who Thomas’s twin could be; not only is his name given
twice (twin names), but the meaning of his statement can be taken in
two ways, as well, that the meaning of the story concerns two routes.

The irony is that in this mode of communication, the disciples

were given a view and how to negotiate it in reality. Jesus waited two
days and by the time they arrived, we are told, Lazarus had been in
the grave for four days. We are also told that ‘having been told Lazarus
was sick’, he therefore waited two days; he was not dead yet, and he
was not yet put in the tomb. Perhaps we can surmise that the disciples
thought Jesus was just being wise by not returning to where the people
might kill him. But then Jesus says ‘lets go’ and the disciples suddenly
see that he had indeed been waiting, rather than stalling. Jesus says
that ‘our friend merely sleeps’, but then tells them ‘no, he is really
dead,’ and then in effect, ‘…and actually, guys, its good I was not there
because now you get to see what is really going on’161. The point here
is that if Jesus had been there, Lazarus would not have died, because
he would have had recourse to Jesus’s example and guidance (noted
above).
 Kair 175

There is still some confusion, though, going on with the

disciples. Martha comes to Jesus as soon as she heard he had arrived
and kind of scolds Jesus for not coming sooner, saying that if he had
been here he wouldn’t have died. She does not know that Jesus waited
on purpose, but we are told that Bethany is close to Jerusalem162, so
we have to wonder if Martha doesn’t get mad at him. She also is not
too clear about what is happening with Lazarus, but Jesus tells her
that Lazarus will rise again. To this she says ‘yeah I know he will rise
again in the resurrection the last day’. Then Jesus corrects her,
“Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever
liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?”163

Martha says yes, I believe you are the Christ, the Son of God,
and then leaves to go get Mary, who has stayed at the house, and tells
her, in effect, ‘we’re good; your turn’164. Now when Mary leaves to go
meet Jesus, the people who had come to comfort her figure that she is
going to the tomb to mourn, and they follow her.

Here we get another sense of the situation. In verse 33, when

Jesus saw Mary weeping and the Jews who followed her also weeping,
he “groaned in the spirit, and was troubled.” Despite what exact
translations may render the English terms, the idea expressed here is
all the same; upon seeing the arrival of the group, he was aggravated,
but ‘to himself’ made a gesture of irritation. Of course we might see
these Jews who came with Mary as those who wanted to kill him
before, the ones who the disciples warned him about, but we will see
in a moment that many probably were not of this antagonistic group,
but some probably were, but it is just as well that these Jews were
merely friends of Mary and Martha, who also knew Lazarus, who were
likewise upset. Regardless, though, of their attitude, Jesus’s attitude
is ‘troubled’. We might then recall how he mentioned that it was good
that they should come late so the disciples would ‘believe’. They come

176 A Heresy

finally and Mary, who we can say is one of the disciples, allows a bunch
of other people to come. By this situation Jesus is bothered, perhaps
not because so much that these others wanted to kill him, but more
that they simply were there, that the miracle of raising Lazarus now
would have to take on a different hue. Remember also that we have
noticed that Jesus acted almost bored and unconcerned when he heard.
We might see this as a particular end, where the confusion of the
disciples would otherwise have been explained, but yet for the others
that arrived with Mary, now Jesus has to approach the situation
differently than he otherwise would have.

Hence, we have a repetition of the object interfering with the

true motion, the motion of the minimal human that we described of
the parables in Luke (above) where the objective of the Jew, in this
case, functioned to thwart the ‘improvisational’ motion of Jesus Christ,
as well as foreshadowing of the the need to have a moment of intimacy
between Jesus and the disciples where Jesus can speak plainly about
what has been occurring and how to handle it without the risk of
objectival disruptions.

So Jesus continues the ministry albeit reluctantly. They go to

the tomb, and Jesus wept, and the Jews realize how much he loved
him. But it may very well be that because Jesus knew that Lazarus
was not dead but only sleeping165, it may be that he did not weep for
Lazarus, but that again the Jews misinterpreted the situation, which
further only served more toward the scene. If this be the case, then his
crying might be another indicator of the end of the ministry, of Jesus’s
weariness of having to continue to act in this manner for bunch of
people who not only do not understand him, but for whom he doesn’t
really care about one way or the other, as well, that at every turn he is
 Kair 177

prevented from being able to engage with his disciples intimately166.

We get again more support of this continuing idea in the next verses
because some of the Jews then said, ‘couldn’t he have come earlier and
saved him?’ And Jesus again groans as he approaches the grave.

We get a different feeling of what is going on now. Jesus is

weary and irritated at the never-ending, and seemingly cosmic joke
that keeps happening to his plans to speak to the disciples alone. He
tells Martha (who also came) to take away the stone that covers the
grave, but she says ‘dude, its gonna stink because he’s been dead for
four days in there’. And Jesus snaps back, in effect, ‘just open the
tomb!’

“Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou
woudest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?”167

They take away the stone, and Jesus looks up to the sky and
says,

“Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I know that
thou hearest me always…”

Jesus thanks the Father for the minimal human condition

because he cannot but do that which he does –
“But because of the people which stand by I said it, that they
may believe that thou hast sent me.”

This is to say: ‘But regardless of the fact that you hear me

always I am speaking these words for the benefit of those who are here,
for the disciples and well as the Jews who don’t believe.’ The
contradiction inherent of the minimal human is apparent and the
discrepancy is sometimes drawn upon. This is the same type of
disclaimer that we saw involved with the improvisation in the parable
of the poor leper and the rich man; that which drives Jesus to have to
apologize to the Father is the same reason for which he tells the

178 A Heresy

disciples about the inevitability of offense, but even though this

apology is a conditional necessity, the repetition of objective
interference is growing old. This one is more out of mere human
weariness.
“And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice,
Lazarus, come forth.”

The scene that is emerging is quite different than that of the

pious, compassionate yet stern holy man/Son of God, standing like a
magician, pronouncing words to channel the power of God in front of
an awed following of disciples and skeptics.

Here we have the disciples, Martha and Mary, who are a bit
frightened and worried because another disciple got sick and then
died. They send a message to Jesus to tell him that something went
terribly wrong and they are worried about it. Jesus is not very
concerned, and is actually, maybe not bored, but maybe annoyed. This
attitude would stem from the idea that the disciples should by now
understand what is going on in their experiences. So he doesn’t go right
away because he is giving Lazarus time to come to terms with what is
occurring. The disciples that are with Jesus even say not to go; they
also are not too worried, at least, weighing up the possibility of
Lazarus being sick to that of themselves being killed. Jesus tells them
that indeed Lazarus sleeps, and this they appear to understand for
then they figure the decision has been made not to go, since he will be
O.K. But Jesus points out that the disciples have missed the point;
they need to go back because indeed Lazarus is dead, but it is a death
that is but a sickness that brings a kind of sleep. Jesus thus instructs
the disciples here, and will continue the lesson back in Judea. Thomas
says, ‘sounds good, lets go’, evidencing a particular acknowledgment of
what is going on.
 Kair 179

From our modern estimation of Biblical distance, Bethany,

where Jesus is staying, is about 2 miles away168, so when Jesus and
the disciples finally arrive 4 or 5 days later, Martha goes to them and
scolds them because they took so long. Jesus then asks her of her
minimal humanity and she agrees and goes to get Mary. Mary is upset
and a bunch of people from the community have come to comfort her.
Martha tells her their friends have come and Mary goes and the Jews
follow. When they arrive, Jesus is more annoyed now because she
brought all these other people who do not understand what has
occurred. He puts on an act for the others, tells Martha to open the
grave, and in dramatic pose basically tells Lazarus to cut the B.S.,
snap out of it and come out already.

* * *

Jesus sees that the disciples still have not totally come to terms
with their minimal human experience. The conflation of activity and
events defies conventional estimations for objectivity. The minimal
human experience coincides with the motion of existence; in meaning,
the two cannot be extricated from the other. Awareness of this
situation brings forth the inevitability of duty; not chosen upon, but
completely within the synchronicity of thought, activity, and objective
autonomy. Everything unfolds exactly the only way it can. The
minimal human is Subject to this motion. Yet, he is still human. In
this contradiction, faith, trial, temptation and sin take on different
meanings than their real conventional counterparts wherein people
consider, choose and decide. One cannot decide into having a minimal
human experience. The only way that one can come to terms with such
an experience is through the experience itself, which occurs along
predictable lines.

180 A Heresy

Having come through the experience himself, Jesus becomes a

religious figure contingent with all its celebrations, rationale, debate,
injustice and dogmas, but arises only within a determination that
decries such real institutions. He cannot help but draw people who
likewise are coming upon the same situation.


The Departure

In John chapter 12, verse 23, Jesus announces,

“The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified.”

With this begins the departure, and so here we rejoin our

discussion.

The public is becoming unrested. It is probably not so much

that people believe or don’t believe that Jesus is the Messiah, but more
the confusion about facts that is typical of the public. Jesus is
aggravating the problem because he is not speaking methodologically
nor objectively; Jesus just so happens to be fueling this confusion
because he touches upon ideas that bring the Law into question (it is
all he can do as a minimal human being). We might see that in this
period the Law was ubiquitous to social living, much as now in the
United States and other countries’ Law permeates its citizens, often in
a somewhat vague, ambiguous fashion. All of its citizens know the
Law, but not really; they have a general idea of the Law but it is the
officers of the courts which really know the law. It is to them that the
maintenance of social order is given. So it must have been with the
Jews, but as opposed to modern, at least Western Democratic Law,
which is created specifically in the name of social order and has little
if any concern with the quality or integrity of one’s spiritually or
essentially human Being, the Jewish Law is impregnated with an
urgency that has to do with an obligation of one’s Being as this is
concerned and should be concerned with one’s People, the Chosen
181

182 A Heresy

People of God. The Law is not merely concerned with one’s behavior,
but is implicit in how one is constituted as a living social creature. The
Law determines what one is. Tradition, prophecy, heritage, relatives,
tribes, history – all play for the individual the individual in reflection
of her world. Jesus, as the expression of the basic life as human, pulls
from all of these aspects of Being (a Jew, as this is the case) when he
speaks, and in this respect, is not like other ‘prophets’ (false prophets)
who affirm the tradition while calling upon a secular obligation (which
is still of the Law). Jesus negates this Jewish tapestry of ideals,
expressing the whole of the Law while speaking particularly (as
opposed to speaking of the whole of the law while its expression is
through particulars: Hence the question of what it means to 'fulfill the
law'). But his talk is not of Objects, it is not of obligations; he is
addressing that which expresses life in those who hear him:
“And they were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them
as one that has authority, and not as the scribes.”169

This feeling, this intuition which Jesus touches in people,

arouses so much prevalence, so much anxiety170 , to the ears of the
people who hear his ministry that Jesus has to address it:
“Think not that I have come to destroy the law, or the prophets:
I have not come to destroy but to fulfill.”171

Jesus has not come to ‘destroy’ reality or the figures that they
hold as real standards, but has indeed come to fulfill reality in
meaning, to relieve the anxiety that accompanies the offense aroused
by the voice of the Subject.

Nevertheless, as with crowds, Jewish or not, everyone has an

idea of the social norm and this norm is being addressed now in a
different, and thus disturbing, manner. While this norm is operative
as a social parameter, there are those who more or less agree alongside
 Kair 183

with those who more or less disagree, but de facto law is in place
regardless of individual placement within it. Such it must be said of
the crowds of Jesus’s time. Jesus was a phenomenon; not like everyone
else. All types were interested, yea and nay sayers alike. Jews and non-
Jews; and most likely everyone had an opinion about what he was
saying or doing. But that which the opinions where settling around
was the movement occurring within those who heard Jesus because
Jesus was expressing the basic life, which is a part of every human
being, and most are fully human settled in the law of Objects. Jesus
now comes as a renouncer of the law of the Object, so everyone is
affected, and the social order based in the law is upset; it is disturbed
but threatened in a manner that is taken more seriously than the
usual rebellious call to actions, even though Jesus’s call has nothing to
do with destroying the Law. The Event of Jesus Christ allows for
perspective, a marking of view upon the operation of consciousness.
Thus we can see that it is not merely a Jewish issue, but that Jesus is
Jewish; we begin with the world of the Jews. Those who are not Jewish
are likewise effected, and this is making it difficult for the Jews, for
then the Romans, who often ask little more than that each religion
keep their constituents in line, might see a need to step more
prominently into Jewish jurisdiction.

Peter appears not very confident in his position, and yet he acts
in confidence; what he believes and what he knows are somehow at
odds 172 . As Jesus recognized earlier in thr story, the complexity of
Peter involves a presumption upon this minimal human experience, a
doubt vested of pure self-righteousness, a counterpart to the
immediate and straight forward ministry of Jesus and the decision of
Judas. This complexity involves the interplay of noticeable aspects of

184 A Heresy

humanity, so we will take a closer look at what each of the Gospels say
about the denial of Peter, as well then the betrayal of Judas.

First, though, in order to set the stage whereby the same

minimal human experience expresses itself through different
meanings and phases, we should take a moment and attempt an
explanation of the different versions of the various tales apparent in
Mathew, Mark, Luke and John; we will take as our first example the
beginning of the hearings of Jesus. We notice by this examination the
feature of the gospels consistent with the markers of vacillation
described above; namely, that which justifies by the Object and that
which is justified in itself. In the beginning of this essay we have
outlined these general moments and how they are removed from each
other by the possible mediators; to wit, the authors of the gospels
merely recording what has been given them, they having not been
alive when Jesus may have been in his ministry, and the distance
compelled by the historical and philosophical interpretations of the
Christ phenomena, as well as religion in general, as all this has been
come upon by the reader now as it was by the writer. It should then
follow that the various versions reflect the influences of these and
other mediators as these are involved in the vacillation of the tellings.

In light of this idea, consider what may be most true of the

minimal human, and likewise then, the figure of Christ: That which
justifies with reference to the True Object might be said to be the
example which least reflects such an occasion 173 . If we began with
Luke, it is because he might be seen, in the logic evident by the order
of his presentation, that he is somewhat comfortable in this position.
He states as a matter of fact that he understands perfectly what has
come to him and so feels compelled to write it down. But still Luke, as
 Kair 185

well Mathew, must give a lineage, as though his position may be in

question. Mark is comfortable in his authority that has been given to
him, his justification found in the authority of the prophets. As
mentioned in the beginning of this essay, these authors were indeed
moved, but, we might see here now that the 'being moved' was not
sufficient to grant them absolution in the sense of our thesis; which is
to say, from the already fixed view placed upon the reading and the
translation (dissemination) that closes possibility to definite real
(institutional) articles, all four authors reflect the incompletion
applied to them as they are also supposed upon the justifying Object.
John, on the other hand, seems the surest of his position. He offers no
lineage and little recourse to the prophets, he relies on no Object but
only refers to the object of Christ; John's word is the authority. He
speaks of what is true: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God.”174 John needs no prior Object
to gain or propose his truth, except the truth which is the
determination of minimal human, which is thus and cannot be
otherwise The Truth. This resonates with the proposition of this essay,
that Christ may not have been a particular single individual, but that
there was a minority of people who had an experience who were
together in a sufficient density175 to come upon one another, and that
this occasion lent itself to some of these individuals eventually writing
of their experience against the significant occasion itself such that they
could speak of it as an Object, Jesus Christ, so that they might be
heard176.

Thus we have John. Like the object Jesus and the disciples,
John can be seen to be speaking of his experience, but through the
limiting vehicle of the mode and capacity of communication in his time,
writing in literary fashion as if pseudonymously, of himself177. Jesus
may have been a particular individual who was so moved as to be
noticed publicly, perhaps as a type of ‘primitive’ or ‘archetypal’ Marxist
who understood the call to action, where the demand for social justice

186 A Heresy

likewise requires people of marginalized experience to move out of

hiding in fear. Nevertheless, this then appears to rely upon the fact
that a particular segment of the populace was also privy to such
understanding. Christ Jesus, regardless of whether there was an
actual single particular person, may have become a type of trope or
communicative device that signaled the recognition and acceptance of
the significant experience as well as identified a particular discourse
that was being developed about it178. It is ironic and no wonder that at
least someone would have noticed, whether implicitly or explicitly, the
function of discourse to allow reality and thereby begin a statement of
such tropic understanding with “In the beginning was the Word”179,
because for such people the problem each would have come upon
everywhere (with some introspection) as they attempted to explain the
experience was how to explain it, which is to say, what words to use.
So it is that 'in the beginning', when the significant event was come
upon, the issue was exposed as 'the Word'. The question: How do we
tell of our significant experience using only the terms we have before
us, and yet stay true to the significance itself?180 For it appears that it
is not a common event, but likewise in the attempt to explain or
otherwise express it, it is taken as if we are talking about a common
event. The discrepancy that becomes significance is the description of
spiritual-religious history; the discrepancy is first come upon as an
indication of a supernatural or transcendent event, such that the few
who are come upon by it are revered as ‘special’, or for a word,
prophets. However, history appears to notice the discrepancy all the
time and everywhere such that discourse begins to reflect two sides of
existing; once the discourse about this situation is taken to have
occurred prior to the discrepancy instead of arising from it, once this
plays out in meaningful process, then there is no other conclusion to
have been made than that all discourse is a religious posture. This is
then the point in history that a pass is enacted, and the cycle of
meaning begins to repeat; which is to say, the unity that is passed over
 Kair 187

begins again in the objective unity of creation and develops along lines
to ever increasing subjective plurality181.

To better illustrate how the four Gospels may indicate a sort of

continuum of coming to terms with an experience, we look at the
conveyance of an event common in all four. All four gospels have Jesus
first come before the Jewish high priest. I quote each passage:
• Mathew 26:63-64. “...tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son
of God. Jesus saith unto him, 'thou has said: nevertheless I say
unto you, Hereafter shall you see the son of man sitting on the
right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.'”

• Mark 14:61-62. “...Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?
And Jesus said, 'I am: and ye shall see the son of man sitting on
the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of heaven.'”

• Luke 22:67-70. “Art thou the Christ? Tell us. And he said unto
them, 'If I tell you, you will not believe: and if I also ask you, you
will not answer me, nor let me go. Hereafter shall the Son of man
sit on the right hand of the power of God.'”

• John 18:19-23. “The high priest then asked Jesus of his disciples, and of
his doctrine. And Jesus answered him, 'I spake openly to the world; I ever
taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always
retort; and in secret have I said nothing. Why askest thou me? Ask them
which heard me, what I have said unto them: behold they know what I
said.'”

Right off, Mark is the only one who portrays Jesus in the trial
answering the priests directly, and conversely, John's answer is the
most derailing to the question. Mark's answer is based in the justifying
Object; he is, in effect, saying “this is so; it is True”. Mark's doctrine

188 A Heresy

evidences an 'either/or' mentality (an object is either this or that), that

Jesus either is the Christ, or he is not, and if he is not then there is no
Christ. But because Mark has been moved himself, there must be this
True Object, this particular man who is actually the Christ – because
Mark is not. Mark thus evidences a latter or more distant
appropriation of the issue: The discourse of Christ for Mark has
already established a footing such that its referents, its Objects, can
be True. Mark has been moved by the sensibility of the prophets into
a faith in another Object, The Object, which amounts to a True Object.
Mark is convicted; Mark has had an experience that stems from his
minimal humanity, but nevertheless is not that of the minimal human,
but rather leans upon his fully human position in the world; he uses
the clause ‘I am’ in the very conventional manner, as he references
himself in the Law of subject-objects. Concordantly, Mathew and Luke
are less resolved but indeed moved; Matthew, in effect, says ‘so you
have said’ but that doesn’t really matter, for it is not the issue here and
regardless of what you think “you will see” something incredible, while
Luke just tells them plain out that it doesn’t matter what he, Jesus,
says for it is beyond your comprehension, but the facts of the matter
are, et cetera. The experience of Matthew and Luke could be said to be
on the margin; their answer diverts the question to its rightful
direction, back upon the questioner as to their orientation. John's
answer most completely speaks with confidence and determination.
He plainly sees that the priests are of the Law and that there is no
getting them to renounce the Object; his answer not only places the
responsibility of the question back upon them but does so all the more
by referring the answer to yet another ambiguous item, the people who
have heard him. There the priest will surely get no sure answer for
everyone will give answers in the quality that matches the Gospels for
a straight answer as to Jesus Christ.
 Kair 189

With such distinction in mind, we now address the

issue of Simon Peter and Judas.

• Matthew 26:58,69-75. “But Peter followed him afar off

unto the high priest’s palace and went in, and sat with
the servants, to see the end…Now Peter sat without the
palace: and a damsel came to him, saying, Thou also
wast with Jesus of Galilee. But he denied before them
all, saying, I know not what thou sayest. And when he
was gone out into the porch, another maid saw him, and
said unto them that were there, This fellow was also
with Jesus of Nazareth. And again he denied with an
oath, I do not know the man. And after a while came
unto him they that stood by, and said to Peter, Surely
thou also art thou one of them; for thy speech bewrayeth
thee. Then began to curse and swear, saying, I know not
the man. And immediately the cock crew. And Peter
remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him,
Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he
went out and wept bitterly”.

• Mark 14: 54, 66-72. “And Peter followed him afar off,
even into the palace of the high priest: and he sat with
the servants, and warmed himself by the fire…And as
Peter was beneath in the palace, there cometh one of
the maids of the high priest. And when she saw Peter
warming himself, she looked upon him, and said, And
thou also wast with Jesus of Nazrareth. But he denied,
saying, I know not, neither understand I what thou
sayest. And he went out into the porch; and the cock
crew. And a man saw him again, and began to say to
them that stood by, This is one of them. And he denied

190 A Heresy

it again. And a little after, they that stood by said again

to Peter, Surly thou art one of them: for thou art a
Galilean, and thy speech agreeth thereto. But he began
to curse and to swear, saying, I know not this man of
whom ye speak. And the second time the cock crew. And
Peter called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him,
Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice.
And when he thought thereon, he wept”.

• Luke 22: 54-62. “Then they took him, and led him, and
brought him into the high priest’s house. And Peter
followed afar off. And when they had kindled a fire in
the midst of the hall, and were set down together, Peter
sat down among them. But a certain maid beheld him
as he sat by the fire, and earnestly looked upon him,
and said, This man was also with him. And he denied
him, saying Woman, I know him not. And after a little
while another saw him, and said, Thou art also of them.
And Peter said, Man, I am not. And about the space of
one hour after another confidently affirmed, saying, Of
a truth this fellow also was with him: for he is a
Galilean. And Peter said, Man, I know not what thou
sayest. And immediately, while he yet spake, the cock
crew. And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And
Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had
said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me
thrice. And Peter went out and wept bitterly.”

• John 18:15-18, 25-26. “And Simon Peter followed Jesus,

and so did another disciple: that disciple was known
 Kair 191

unto the high priest, and went in with Jesus into the
palace of the high priest. But Peter stood at the door
without. Then went out that other disciple, which was
known unto the high priest, and spake unto her that
kept the door, and brought in Peter. Then saith the
damsel that kept the door unto Peter, Art not thou also
one of this man’s disciples. He saith, I am not. And the
servants and officers stood there, who had made a fire
of coals; for it was cold: And they warmed themselves:
and Peter stood with them, and warmed himself…And
Simon Peter stood and warmed himself. They said
therefore unto him, Art not thou also one of his
disciples? He denied it, and said, I am not. One of the
servants of the high priest, being his kinsman whose
ear Peter had cut off, saith, Did not I see thee in the
garden with him? Peter then denied again: and
immediately the cock crew.

It is a stroke of simple teaching to view these excerpts as

referencing one event, but through different eyes. The event goes
something like this: Jesus is taken from Gethsemane to the palace of
the high priest. Peter follows behind so as to not get drawn up and
maybe likewise persecuted, sneaks into the palace to watch the
preliminary trial, and gets confronted a few times by people in the
house who say they think he is a disciple of Jesus. When Peter then
denies his association with Jesus, he recalls in some manner how he
just betrayed his faith, and is very upset. This event unfolds in the
story to emphasize how Jesus knew exactly what would happen, and
how Peter wavers in his faith.

Alternately, we can view this event as a single occasion

whereupon a few people had similar experiences. Here, the subject-

192 A Heresy

object that is Jesus is more an occasion to express an experience that

a few people are having, but likewise he could be an exemplar or
perhaps the most vocal of such group that he is taken. All three of these
situations can occur simultaneously without relegating or assigning a
‘actual’ or ‘more true’ situation that then rules out the others. So
further, if we can have this view, then we might see that Peter, in the
same manner as Jesus, has a significant role in this unfolding of the
story.

The group of disciples of Jesus Christ just had their Passover

meals182 where Jesus tells them some pretty intense stuff. A few of
them then go to the garden of Gethsemane to chill and Judas, who left
earlier, went and got the guards who then come and arrest Jesus. They
take him to the palace of the high priest, we can imagine, because that
is where the priests are, at a home also having the Passover meal; and
in comes the guards with bound Jesus.

Why is it that only Peter follows the posse? What did the other
disciples do? Matthew and Mark have the other disciples flee,

Matthew 26:56 "Then all the disciples forsook him, and fled.”

Mark14:50 “And they all forsook him, and fled.”

While Luke and John say nothing of what the other disciples
do, with this question we get to the more difficult reading, a reading
that indicts the reader to its (the reader’s) type. Again; so long as we
are reading the Gospels as an historical story about a God-man and
his followers who upset people in power who are proclaiming a
religious message of salvation and rejection of worldly temptations,
then we have only the interest that follows any similar telling of social
disturbance and religious proselytizing; maybe interesting, maybe just
 Kair 193

another noble human trial. But here is significance itself. Religious

people183 do not step out of their faith to look at what is occurring right
in front of them; they never question what they have been told; they
instead reify their faith in the potential of the Object. They just retell
what has been said. Significance is left to some heavenly supernatural
divine establishment 184 ; all contradiction and vagueness solved by
thought-full creativity upon a theme. For another example; if only
Peter was there (near or in the palace) among a bunch of people who
couldn’t care less than their condemnation and perchance for cruelty
or application of Law, then how did we get this story? Did Peter report
it of himself? Was there an anonymous reporter? Behind this question,
we can hear the echoes of the religious choir singing “I don’t know, but
God knows”.

So let us suppose not upon various views of one event where

Jesus is being yelled at and Peter forsakes Jesus in his time of trial
and need; for a moment again, let us set aside the need to remove
ourselves from the story. Instead, let us put ourselves there, ironically,
as an overseer of the event itself, the reporter reporting his own
experience, yet with empathy, where the most outspoken of an intimate
group that has been come upon by a similar experience of meaning (of
minimal human beings) has been arrested and is being taken away
most probably to be killed. The rest of the group is astonished and
surprised and some are ready to fight, but Jesus says no. This is a
group that is of a common knowledge, a common manner of
apprehending meaning that Jesus has just elaborated upon as to what
it means, what happens of it as well as the conditions of it. Jesus has
his moment of vacillation that is evidenced in an inability to have the
experience verified and validated by the others whom he is with. In
effect and in a manner of speaking, he leaves himself to find himself
in an other, fails to do so, and then returns to himself to thereby have
found himself through the other. This is a pretty intense experience
because while the story has it that Jesus is speaking to an audience

194 A Heresy

(objects, disciples), the meaning of the event suggests that what is

being described is indeed what is happening to the attendees, namely,
the disciples, or for a more general, inclusive term, the group of
minimal humans. One guy can’t hang; Judas leaves to get the people
who will come and get rid of Jesus once and for all (the Law); he goes
to effect the physical removal of what he understands as the source of
the uncomfortable intensity of the vacillation, the idea that is
offending his faith. Another guy is obviously shaken: Peter does not
just hang back in the garden nor flees, but has to go to see what is
going to happen to Jesus. The others either flee (according to Matthew
and Mark), or stay in the garden and chill or (in effect) just disappear
from view even after Jesus is taken (Luke and John don’t mention what
they do), but Peter goes with Jesus Christ, which we might say he thus
stays in the proximity and effectuation of the vacillation.

The vacillation takes on an even more imminent design. We

have a difference in experience between Jesus leaving himself to look
for justification in the object, what we have called the vacillation, and
where the object comes to him to demand justification for itself, which
is the physical act of the Law upon the body. Either way we have the
motions of departure: Jesus is taken from the disciples. In the former,
Jesus leaves the disciples in searching for justification of himself in
the disciples, and thereby affects or otherwise coincides with the
instigation of the vacillations of the disciples themselves, in the latter,
their Object of faith somehow losing its substantial quality in those
times. It is the odd situation that Jesus is involved with himself by
noticing his involvement and affect upon the disciples; the irony works
to prepare those involved for the change that is to occur and is
occurring. Where Jesus departs and ‘the Comforter’ remains, there we
have the disciples who seem not to have a vehement reaction, like in
Luke and John, and where the Comforter has not come yet, there we
 Kair 195

have three types of drastic reactions, as in Matthew and Mark where

they flee, but also exceptionalized by type with Judas and Peter; one
indeed ran right off even before the Law came (Judas went to get the
Law, and indeed brought the Law to the disciples), and one that
‘follows from afar’ (Simeon Peter).

Keep in mind that we have not left the bramble of I am, but
indeed ‘God’ calls us from out of the midst of the bramble. Here we
have a group of minimal human beings who are in the midst of the
determination of their being, of coming to understand what that means
and its conditions of meaning. At some point in every determination,
in order to distinguish itself from contingency, the contingency must
assert itself, must erupt into the determined state. If we are
determining what is the case, as we proceed upon this venture, we
align ourselves as to what is determined through occasional reference
to what is contingent. Where vacillation is understood as not
indicating anything imminent, there no reaction is called for because
no end recalls an anxiety. But in the kind of vacillation where we begin
to see that the end is near, it is in the nature of what exists to enter
into ‘fight or flight’ mode, but also it is just as natural to hesitate when
approaching its negation, to stumble, like the small tentative cuts of a
suicidal’s arm with a blade at hand. In meaning, faith is questioned
and that which requires faith may be viewed in those moments, during
those desperate times. But then, at least in some instances, the
ineffective comfort that had been catalyzing the hesitations reaches a
tipping point, if you will, and the comfort is finally upset by the
unknown end. The end asserts itself; in this instance, faith asserts
itself over Truth; the Law begins to reveal itself to its nature.

Within this setting, Jesus’s talk at the Passover (the week

thereof) does not stop at that scene, but rather continues through to
fruition in the story. No longer are we set in theory; Jesus and his

196 A Heresy

disciples are no longer in his ministry, no longer merely saying things,

no longer riding upon the motion that is the act of talk and the talk
that is the act. Now the talk is becoming segregated from the act; they
have talked the talk and now are walking the walk. As we indicate
below, the occasion is now in the hands of the Law, where talk is talk
and act the act, the object the True Object. Contingency, though, is still
in the sway of what has been determined. As we addressed earlier, if
Jesus does not leave the disciples then the Comforter will not come,
and in this statement we have the presentation of an event that
encompasses all the disciples and Jesus. It is not so much that Jesus
is ‘the’ singular and the disciples are having a particular event
centered around what is occurring to this god-man Jesus – this is the
conclusion that Jesus comes to through his vacillations, the ‘reason
why’ he must leave, the contingent meaning expressed within the
determined state. He thus not only vacillates in his experience, but
then foreshadows the next scene of Peter’s vacillation. The story itself
appears to repeat the same motion of the creation story of Genesis,
where it appears there are two creation events185 . Just as Jesus is
recognized as Christ first by John the Baptist, who in effect can be said
to be the catalyst that removes Jesus from the responsibility to the
object (see above), after which Jesus goes out into the wilderness where
he is tempted, so Jesus recognizes the disciples and then must leave,
so they, again, in effect, may be lead to their own wilderness, their own
temptations.

Similarly, what we will reduce to say ‘consciousness’ of the

minimal human being, is no longer caught up in the consistency of
things, in the overlapping and determination of activity and meaning.
The disciples are in the process, catalyzed by Jesus, of coming to terms
with their minimal human determinacy. ‘Jesus’ is ‘leaving them’. They
thus witness not only the guards coming and seizing Jesus, but
 Kair 197

likewise are witnesses coming upon the vacillation themselves of the

minimal human of faith. Hence, for the story, meaning itself bifurcates
along two lines that are equally foundational, equally valid, but that
do not reconcile in meaning to either of each other; one accounts for
the other, and the other denies the one, eternally dancing around each
other. This is to say, now, the universe moves in its proper form,
manipulating and establishing True Objects, where indeed a man is
taken to begin his trial unto death, and likewise, the object Jesus that
is ‘in the way’ of them coming upon their own minimal humanity is
being taken away, so that they ‘believe-know’ that they are ‘in the
Father and the Father in you’. Here is the beginning of the significant
event that resides in eternity.

The disciples in the garden are all coming upon the same
meaning, the same experience. This experience is the dissolving of
faith, but they will not give up their faith so easily. On one hand, the
disciple who does not wish his faith to dissolve, who is feeling most
prominently the question that the vacillations imply of his faith,
Judas, being so determined likewise minimally human, leaves,
actually gets himself away (or tries to get himself away) from the
vacillations of faith in order to keep his faith, in order to allow his faith
to continue to be validated by The Object Jesus. He thus removes
himself rather than the Object removing itself from him, but then must
return to actually destroy that True Object of faith because he sees it
is the source of the vacillations. He removes himself to escape the
vacillations that Jesus is arousing by his presence, by the presence of
Christ in the disciple’s experience; in order to keep the object of his
faith, he must then destroy this catalyzer of the vacillations, Jesus.
Then, because the vacillation is not caused by the Object but is indeed
instigated by Christ, by the determination of the minimal human
being, after his betrayal, he realizes his error and must thus destroy
himself. An ironic event indeed.

198 A Heresy

On the other hand, Jesus is being taken away from the rest of
the disciples and they will not let it happen without a fight; one so
moved, cuts the ear off of one of the high priest’s servant: This one who
reacts so vehemently, coincidentally has the name of a common object,
as we noticed, Peter “the rock”, a ‘subject-object’. Peter, as well as
Judas, is and can be viewed as a discursive and literary trope used to
discuss the common experience of the minimal human being from
behind a blind, so to speak, shielded from the repercussions of fully
humans’ offense186; we see what happens to a one who does not use
such a discursive ploy: He is killed187. So, as they take Jesus, Peter
follows from afar: The disciples who behold the vacillations as
indicating something essential, who are all coming upon this moment
of meaning of contingent determination, and the anxiety of coming
upon a choice in the midst of determinacy, ‘follow from afar’ as Jesus
is leaving them, that is in this case, being taken from them. The man,
perhaps the most outspoken one of the group, is being taken as Jesus
likewise is being taken to the beginning of his trial, which will
inevitably end in his death188. The disciples are in the trial of their
minimal humanity, the vacillation that began at the Passover meals,
that is continuing in its determined path. Their faith is being tried
against the True Object, the trial that will yield the Truth, ironically,
through the processes of Law that are upheld through faith, a Truth
that then transforms from faith in the True Object, to wisdom.


199


The Wisdom of Peter

When we become capable of viewing the story of Jesus as a

story involving a small group of people who have come upon a
particular manner of coming unto World, a group who view the world
differently than the common person, where the line of communication,
of meaning, occurs along a different order of things, then we might see
this as a story that tells of a determined and routine process involved
in such a view, with definite possibilities and particular vectors or
motions of meaning that indicate aspects of the situation of having
such a view. Here we begin to see the authors Matthew, Mark, Luke
and John, and others, but likewise Jesus, and we notice then the
motions of Christ.

At the Passover, the traditional Jewish observance of the night

when God came and killed the first born of the Egyptians, but passed
over the Hebrew households, God has the Hebrews follow strict
directions of what to do that night; namely, slaughter a lamb, use the
blood to mark the doors of Jews so God will Passover those homes,
roast the carcass, innards, head and all, eat and then burn any
leftovers. They are also to eat this meal ready to leave, with their
clothes and sandals on, staff in hand. At this Passover meal with Jesus
and his disciples, the disciples drink the ‘blood’ and eat his ‘body’ of the
‘lamb’ that will be slaughtered. It is difficult to miss the correlating
symbolic meanings between the Passover and the Last Supper, or for
that matter the story of Christ.

Consider, though, the vacillations of faith. To one so faithful,

any vacillation can be viewed as a catastrophe; to experience a

201

202 A Heresy

wavering of faith is definitely to encounter a type of anxiety, and as

this may be the case, then the discussions of Soren Kierkegaard report
a certain significant resonance189. The meaningful symptom of anxiety
goes right to the end, of an impending doom which is the death of faith.
Within such a moment, something must be done, something to end the
wavering, to re-establish the solace and comfort of faith. So we should
see that the story has gone this far upon a faith that has been
unquestioned; a determination that is Jesus’s ministry no doubt
occupies this space and the world of God emitted by the minimal
human being. The story is consolidated up until this point; Jesus is the
exemplar minimal human, but as we see now, with Jesus’s entreating
of them, the disciples are also minimal human. The story itself thus
speaks of a common experience in its commonality, of an experience of
a few people who discover in their determined motions, in their
ministries that there are others that they just know are having the
same experience because they can tell by not only what they are
saying, but how they are saying it. They attribute this different
manner of coming upon World as ‘of God’. They have a common
experience and a common way about them, so in the telling of their
stories they in effect really merely tell one story, perhaps exemplified,
as we have suggested, in a particular individual whom they know who
is the most outspoken: Jesus’s ministry. This is to say, they all spoke
in a particular manner that aroused a certain kind of interest and
performed miracles.

Further, it cannot merely be that there is a small group but a

correspondent society is also being effected, as well as effecting, both
part of the determined effect. By the Passover meal, in an all too
literary fashion, we get the feeling things are getting out of hand
everywhere. So, again, correspondently, the disciples begin to vacillate
in their faith, but not necessarily because there is some sort of civil
 Kair 203

unrest that is pointing toward them, or Jesus in particular; it is more

that such things are happening coincidentally; it is no mere
coincidence that things are coming to a head during the Passover. For
the minimal human, one could see a significance, but a culmination of
meaning. Yet if there is to be a distinction made between the ministry
and the departure, if you will, then the minimal human would have to
have a certain capacity for a kind of reflection again differentiated
from the true reflection spoken about earlier in this essay190. The true
reflection of a self-consciousness coming upon an other self-
consciousness, what we can say of the minimal human is God in-itself
(through faith but not through faith), must be visited upon by a further
difference191.

It is this occurrence in the determined motion of existence that

gains for us a reasoning for what we understand now as coming after,
the Christian phenomenon we know as Gnosticism. Though not unique
nor coined first by these sects, with them there is a sure reference and
secret knowledge that concerns a feminine aspect of knowledge, called
wisdom, that is personified to a name, Sophia. If knowledge can be
merely a kind of surety, then wisdom is that set of knowing that has
disrupted such sure knowledge, yet ironically which settles itself unto
itself. Though a door has been opened to a never-ending rambling on
the peculiarities of Gnosticism, it is enough to say here that the
transition between knowledge and wisdom is the move from faith to
truth, from knowing as a kind of belief, and knowing as a state of
Truth, and the beginning of this transition can be called vacillation.
So it is not too far from reason to suggest from this kind of orientation
that a woman might be involved in the plight of the minimal human.
And this is what we see in the Gospels.

A major issue with the Gospels has always been Mary

Magdalene. There are so many ideas, religious and secular,

204 A Heresy

superstitious and critical, behind who she was, what her relationship
to Jesus really was, and what her role is and means to the whole
Christian scheme of things if not the world; it is beyond the scope of
this essay here to concern ourselves in addressing them all192. For now,
it is enough to say the simplest answer is that she is the feminine
component in the minimal human determination; she is the wisdom
that accompanies faith as a catalyst or impetus through its ministries,
applications, vacillations, failure and absolution. Wisdom appears
when faith is on its way out.

The Bible, the Old and New Testaments, is a recording of the

minimal human beings’ involvement with World, and this World also
includes the fully human being(s). While the story of the Bible itself is
centered around the minimal human, it also tells of the fully human
response to the occurrences that arise due to the minimal human’s
presence. Due to the relationship the minimal human has with
existence, the playing out of each manifestation disrupts or can
otherwise be understood as ‘causing’ the fully human to encounter a
situation as a series of events that appear confused and or mostly
unexplainable. The component of what is difficult to explain is often
placed in meaning as an action of God. However; once the minimal
human is admitted in its difference and can be explained to its reasons
and reasoning, which is to say, for its own route of meaning, then we
find that there is no more reason to defer any religious text or
experience to an aspect that lay outside of what we might consider the
natural order of things, which for another term could be called human
existence, or if we want to get really technical, the objective
universe193, but we need also be careful of placing such ‘natural order’
back into the God of political and scientific appeasement and
contingency.
 Kair 205

When we look at the passages194 about the denial of Peter, we

might notice it follows the same scheme of proximity to the event.
Again; here we have the recordings of authors coming to terms with
their own minimal human experiences through the discursive tropes
that probably had already developed; these authors are thus not only
telling about their own experiences, but are using the story of perhaps
the ‘first’ group who came together under a common manner, who
worked or functioned together to develop the tropic scheme, a scheme
of terms that had meanings specific to the particular and marginalized
experience of what we are calling the minimal human being. We have
then proximity used with reference to how different individuals came
to terms with the significant event, that we might say is thus the
Christ event.

In each Gospel, Peter follows at a distance and then makes his

way to the palace where Jesus is brought, and there he is first
confronted by a woman. It is interesting to notice the different settings.
In Matthew, Peter “sat without the palace”; in Mark, Peter was
“beneath in the palace”; Luke has Peter “in the midst of the hall”; then
John has a slightly different situation “in the hall of the high priest”.
Matthew has Peter not even enter the palace, Mark’s is under the
palace, Luke’s as well as John’s is in the hall itself. How Peter is
confronted is likewise of interest. In Matthew, a “damsel” comes to him
and says, in effect, ‘you were with Jesus with the others’, to which he
says ‘I don’t know what you mean’. Then we imagine he’s trying to
conceal his identity and so goes out “into the porch” where another
woman sees him and says aloud “unto them that were there, this fellow
was also with Jesus”; whereby Peter “with an oath” said ‘I don’t know
the man’. Then, it seems people that are around are starting to wonder
about Peter and “they” said to him ‘I’m sure you are one of his followers

206 A Heresy

because your accent is from Galilee’. With this Peter gets pissed off
and yells at them that he doesn’t know Jesus. Then the cock crows and
Peter remembered what Jesus said about denying him, and he “wept
bitterly”.

Mark’s Peter “sat with the servants and warmed himself by the
fire”. We are to gather that he was underneath because that is where
the servant’s place was, and one of the high priest’s maids “looked upon
him, and said…thou also wast with Jesus”, and no, I don’t know what
you are talking about. Then he goes to the porch, like in Matthew, then
the cock crowed. A man then noticed him and announced “This is one
of them”, and Peter denied him. And then a few of the people noticed
his accent, and then Peter remembered what Jesus said, and he wept.

In Luke, Peter followed far off, but then “they”, who are the
people who took Jesus and led him to the palace, made a “fire in the
midst of the hall”, and when they had all sat down, Peter went over
and sat with them. Then a “certain maid…earnestly looked upon him,
and said, This man was also with him.” Luke’s story proceeds like
Matthew and Mark with the exception that after he denied him the
third time “the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter”, and Peter
remembered, and went out and “wept bitterly”.

The discrepancies of Matthew and Mark seem largely around

words. Yet, whereas Mark has Peter more sit with the servants, Luke
seems to convey that Peter somehow thought he could get away with
blending in with the posse. As well, the first woman does not merely
‘come to’ Peter, as in Matthew, nor only ‘looks upon’ him, as in Mark,
but more so ‘earnestly looks upon’ him. Further, as Peter denies the
 Kair 207

third time, Luke has “the Lord” look to Peter whereby Peter
remembers and weeps. Consistent with the idea presented earlier, we
can get a sense that Matthew and Mark viewed this event as from a
distance, as distinction fades the further back one is from an object. If
a narrative can reveal anything about an author’s view, or about the
picture he or she wishes to convey, it might seem that the setting of
Peter ‘without’ and ‘beneath’ the palace where Jesus is being tried,
might be significant. Luke’s narrative seems a little more intimate, for
it appears to have details that Matthew and Mark do not see, or did
not experience. With Luke, Peter is “in the midst of the hall”, and when
he denied Jesus, ‘the Lord’ actually looks over to him and brings about
his memory, where as in Matthew and Mark, Peter merely recalls.

The emphasis, that decreases through the order of the books,

in the first three seems more upon noticing how Peter is denying his
association with that certain man who is being tried, Jesus. Peter
appears to be accused; first the woman looks at him and says plainly
‘you were with him’ but not really to Peter, more to the other people in
the room, about Peter, which puts him immediately on the defensive.
Then, depending upon what book we are reading, either another
woman or a new man accuse him again; this time we can imagine this
person coming over to Peter as he is trying to get away from them,
then yelling back to the other people there, ‘yeah, this one was
definitely with Jesus.’ Then finally yet another person comes over an
actually talks to Peter but in an accusatory tone, ‘surely you are one of
them, I can tell by your accent.’

With John, though, we seem to have a different situation

altogether; he reports details that seem excessive and unnecessary,
but also that seem to convey a different feeling to the whole event. The
tone is different. The most obvious is that Peter goes with another
disciple who is known by the high priest. When they come to the door,

208 A Heresy

we can picture the two of them approaching and the one disciple going
in while Peter hangs back and doesn’t go in. There is a woman at the
door who is letting people in, and the disciple who went in realizes that
Peter is not behind him, goes back to the door and talks to the woman
to let Peter in. We might even imagine its kind of like a party, but a
Passover party that the posse crashed bringing Jesus195. This other
disciple knows the high priest; we don’t know how or why but he knows
him enough and apparently the staff knows him enough to not only let
him right in but also lets him bring in a friend. We cannot be sure, but
it seems like the ‘damsel who kept the door’ didn’t know that this other
disciple was indeed a disciple, but maybe she did. In either case,
though, she asks Peter if he isn’t one of this man’s disciples. I am not
a scholar of Biblical languages, and we must grant that there might
possibly be issues of translations and liberties that the translators took
in bringing the Gospels to English. Nevertheless, we have what is
given us. Can we be sure what is meant by “this man’s” disciple? Of
course, we are to assume that she is referring to Jesus.

It is significant that John does not refer to Peter and his friend
going anywhere but “into the palace of the high priest”. When we take
the books of the Gospels separately and listen to what they are saying,
the tone of John here feels like these two guys followed the posse that
Judas lead to apprehend Jesus as they took him to the palace of the
high priest. Upon arriving there, the one disciple just goes right in
because he is known there by, it seems, everyone. This kind of
familiarity is supported by the fact that they do not stay ‘without’ nor
were ‘beneath’ the palace, but indeed were ‘in the midst of the palace’,
but also that one of the servants was there who was the kinsman of
the man who’s ear Peter had cut off. We might even go so far as to
suggest that there was a certain community Jews who were familiar
with each other such that the disciples were not a set of some strangers
 Kair 209

but were indeed known among a certain social stratum; perhaps this
other disciple was known to Caiaphas because he was known to his
servants, and maybe the servants knew each other well enough that
an ear injury was viewed as a kind of ‘brotherly incident’, as brothers
often fight and injure each other over various things (we might
consider that though Peter supposedly cut the guys ear off, Jesus put
it back on196). Nonetheless, this is all in a certain light, say, a kind of
nether-world of the story, a transitional world that resides in between
the fully and the minimal human worlds. Peter may not have been so
well known in these circles, in this stratum of servants and laypeople.
So when the other disciple comes back for Peter, he tells ‘her that kept
the door’ to let Peter in, and she asks Peter if he is this man’s disciple.

We are in the vacillations of the minimal human, the reader’s

vacillations of the story of I am; we have just been spun around. We
can hear the loud protestations echo: How on earth can this be talking
about the disciple of this ‘other disciple’? Only Jesus has disciples. Of
course she is asking if Peter is a disciple of Jesus. Obviously, this
telling is offensive in many ways and reasons to the fully human faith
in the True Object; but we are not concerned with the True Object. We
are involved, at this moment, and we are dealing with the
repercussions and manifestations of meaning involved with the
vacillations of the minimal human being of faith. Indeed; it is at this
very moment that Judas realizes his mistake; in the sequence of
Matthew197 , Peter is denying Jesus just as Judas goes to the chief
priests, who we might suppose are in the very same palace, to give
them back the money he was paid to turn in Jesus. They will not take
the silver back so Judas throws them down and goes hangs himself.
The priests then use that silver to buy Judas a grave plot.

If we have been following the alternative meaning presented of

the story, it then should be no surprise that the woman is asking Peter

210 A Heresy

if he is this man’s, the man who just spoke to her to let Peter in,
disciple. In one sense, we can say she is not a disciple, not of the
minimal human experience, and so would have no idea what it entails;
she may have saw him in the group of ‘odd people’, but are we to think
that Jesus ‘leads’ the group around like some pied-piper? Even if she
knows that Jesus has been brought for a trial, there is no supposition
to be made for her upon some ‘special’ knowledge of what it really
means or what is occurring. This other disciple she knows and the high
priest knows him; is it so far fetched that the high priest knows that
this other disciple is indeed a disciple? What is special of Jesus we
discussed earlier; what Jesus is saying is causing a social disturbance
and perhaps Jesus is merely the most outspoken of the group, all of
which are minimal human beings having a particular experience that
at this time concerns the trial of Christ, Jesus as well as the disciples,
the physical body as well as the meaningful self, as these are complicit
in existence as World. The vacillation pronounces itself in Jesus, the
(subject-) object, its distinctions, and reverberates in Christ, which is
absolution. This is the story of the minimal human being coming to
terms with its experience; there is no sufficient segregation of
meaningful items that may coalesce in this instance to some ‘actual’,
‘subjective’ or ‘real’ event. It is a story of the situation at hand. The
woman asks Peter if he is one of this man’s disciple, and Peter says,
‘no, I’m not’.

We can feel the casual mood of this event through the next
verse because the servants were warming themselves and Peter
simply went over to warm himself with them. This casualness is an
indication of what is occurring; just as Jesus moved out and then back
in his vacillations of doubt, so Peter has ‘come back’ to himself. At the
door he doubts his experience and is anxious and so stops at the door
not to go in. This other disciple is not wavering, so here, in the
 Kair 211

confidence of this ‘other disciple’ we see Jesus Christ, who merely goes
into the palace with no fight, but also as we will see very soon, with no
worries. The disciple we are concerned with in this instance, though,
is Peter; it thus is not odd that this other disciple disappears, neither
had no specificity nor destination. Peter is in his vacillations of doubt;
Peter the literary device that is conveying a particular aspect in the
minimal human’s experience; the story of Peter that by each of the
authors’ telling of his story thereby tell of their experience, their own
vacillations of faith, who also thereby indicate a certain proximity to
the event itself by their versions of telling about it198. The author John
apparently conveys what is occurring for the rest most thoroughly.
Peter follows from afar with another disciple, the movement of doubt
dividing Peter upon himself, his faith in the True Object that is Jesus
and the knowledge of the Truth that is wisdom. Peter comes to the
door and this other disciple goes in while Peter himself, his doubt, his
faith in the True Object in question, stays outside. This other disciple
comes back and talks to a woman that is keeping the door, who then
lets him in and asks if he is a disciple of ‘this man’, and Peter answers
truthfully, and says No, I Am not. Peter is not a disciple of this man,
but is indeed Christ himself; Peter is coming to terms with the
situation at hand of the minimal human. He passes through this door
kept by a woman and goes over to warm himself with the other
servants and officers.

As we move through this transition, we will notice how this

story is situated within the movement of the hearing itself. In Matthew
and Mark, it is set just like an actual trial, albeit one-sided, where
witnesses for the prosecution come with all the drama of a trial one
would expect.199. Witnesses come and tell things, Jesus say nothing
and the priests get pissed off. With some difference, then, Luke simply
has Peter’s denial, then the scene discussed above, where Jesus merely
answers the priest’s question with their answers.

212 A Heresy

John, again, appears most consistent with our meaning. Peter

comes unto himself, comes back into faith, which by now is more so
knowledge, but he is still in the vacillations. While the first three
Gospels have Peter follow, then the trial by witnesses wherein we
notice the authorial proximity evidenced by the authors’ tellings
(above), and then the rest of Peter’s story of denial, John paints a
different scene. In the flow of the story, Peter is warming himself by
the fire, then the high priest asks Jesus “of his disciples and his
doctrine”. Now, in a scene of a trial by prosecutorial witnesses, where
everyone else is accusing Jesus and he is saying nothing, we have the
indication of the minimal condition of humanity in the relief of Jesus’s
silence in so much as the fully human reality is the accusation and
correspondent justification of position; Jesus’s silence announces that
this real route is impotent in its attempts to coerce and deceive one
who is of the truth, that in the last all it can do is destroy to justify its
ubiquity. So it is in John the general condition is specified to its use:
We have Jesus answering with the suggestion that the priests go out
and talk to everyone that heard him and his teachings200. The defense
is directed for the accusers instead of the defendant, toward the priests
and not Jesus; the justification is pushed back upon itself to show the
contradiction inherent of the method itself. The offense is noticed in
relief of the trial to be upon the priests, for then one of the officers
“stroke Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying Answerest thou the
priest so?” To which Jesus asks what he said that was so wrong, so
“evil”. We have to wonder if this offense that sees this ‘evil’ being
emitted from Jesus that we hear in verse 24, “now Annas had sent him
bound unto Caiaphas” (emphasis NKJ), is something Jesus gained for
the priests or something already intact, because in the very next scene
“…they led Jesus from Caiaphas unto the hall of judgment” (emphasis
added).
 Kair 213

Nonetheless, before “they led Jesus” there, Simon Peter still

“stood and warmed himself”, which can be to say, he stood comforted;
remember how he entered the palace? Then “They said therefore unto
him, Art not thou also one of his disciples?” Perhaps this time, they are
kind of amazed at his presence. But Peter says, I am not. Now, and
only now, does the kinsman of the servant who got his ear cut off by
Peter come over and accuse him, asking him if he didn’t see him in the
garden with him. Peter, having come resolved in himself, in his
knowledge, wherein he is comforted (by the Comforter201), seeing the
‘previous’ self, the subject of faith, the person who reacted to the taking
of the Object from him by attacking the ones who came to take it202, as
no longer true, no longer who Peter is – this new person of knowledge,
of wisdom, again answers his accuser honestly and denies he was that
person in the garden. Then the cock crows. In John, Peter does not
weep, for the cock crowing can at once be seen as a dawning of a new
day, as well as the signal, the indication that indeed all is proceeding
as planned, determined as such.

So it is interesting and significant for this essay the motions of

Simon Peter, because as a minimal human (a disciple), Peter's activity
can be none but that he acts. He responded and lashed out but Jesus
stopped him. To revisit this situation, Peter has indeed doubted his
actions as well as his capacity to act; he was anxious and afraid203. But
through this fear, he kept going, kept moving forward following the
removal of his object of faith, Jesus. Here his fears manifest regardless
of his attitude and regardless of whether he went in the palace or not,
but in fact it is because of his fear and because of his actions (his
actions that he could not have made differently) that his fears confront
him; he is accused. Peter cannot escape that which he is nor what
exactly will happen nor what he will do. Also Peter has chosen to place
himself in the camp of the True Object by following the object of faith

214 A Heresy

to the palace where Jesus is (likewise) being accused, and because of

this choice, he brings about the inevitable condition of reality that
causes him to fulfill Jesus's prediction despite his choice204, as well as
come true to his namesake: Jesus calls this of Peter, the 'rock', that he
was of minimal qualification for the Object, as a thing may be so simply
associated. Inevitably, because of and despite his fear, thereby
validating the motion of the fully human by virtue of his determined
minimal being, which is based in the denial of the nature of the True
Object, he thus establishes the church,

“...for flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee...upon this

rock I will build my church...And I will give unto thee the keys of the
kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be
bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou salt loose on earth shall be loosed
in heaven.”205

Jesus also refers to Peter as 'Bar-jona', which literally

translates into 'son of John'. In the context of this chapter of Matthew,
Jesus is reprimanding the Pharisees because they “seeketh after a
sign”(read: they sought proof through a physical transfiguration or
miracle)206 but Jesus says there will be no other sign but that of Jonah;
so it is that the sign was that Peter needed no sign (“for flesh and blood
hath not revealed it to thee”), yet he still, ironically, denied. Indeed
this sign (Peter/the rock) indicates the physically unsubstantiated
thing that nonetheless and because of which is, thus, significant, and
by this, this 'unsubstantiated thing' shall thereby be Peter given 'the
keys to the kingdom', the kingdom that is the reality of Law (albeit
religious law, perhaps as opposed to what will one day become a
secular world), the substantiation of what is physically true and real,
i.e. what we will come to call the term-object identity, whereby
 Kair 215

whatever is done on earth is likewise done in heaven, such that heaven

shall justify what is undertaken toward the Object; the mode of
operation of real method, real institutionalism, is upon the assumption
that discourse is indicating the ‘in-itself’ truth of actual and essentially
psychic-material-empirical-physical occurring objects, if at least
merely in potential. By virtue of this contradicting element becoming
manifest as the real contradiction, that mark of what is false, thus
history is set in motion through the denial of the contradiction, which
is hidden in plain sight and thus not believable in its nature207.

A controversial yet interesting and quite provocative theory

contributes to this idea: The story of Jonah and the whale could
actually be an allegorical representation of an experience gained by
the consumption of some sort of hallucinogenic substance, perhaps, as
been suggested here and there, Fly Agaric mushrooms208. If this be the
case, then Jesus may have been referring, again in the double voice, to
such an experience, that the only sign that would be given would be
that irrevocable sign that is found through such an experience: That
indeed, the irony of Peter, a ‘son’ of Jonah, his name meaning 'rock', a
most simple and basic example of an Object, being the prime and overt
example of one who needed no physical 'sign', as that of the Pharisees
– this ought to be savored, if not furthermore be indicted as the
evidence (see the story of Moses, above, where God proves himself to
Moses by telling him of his future) for his being the foundation of the
church – which will ironically then be the example of what is most un-
Christian in the true sense of this essay: That despite having faith,
such a faith is that which grants it’s conceivable negation, wisdom
through doubt, and the distance traversed by such a contradictory
experience, then stunted, is that which grants the common (fully
human) route of meaning. This then allows for ‘a beginning’ of

216 A Heresy

religious posture: That Christ would be a saving Object of faith; that

belief in Christ's objectivity will grant one absolution; that heaven
would be an actual place to be gained through proper ethics and belief;
that God would be of an actual trinity of entities, et cetera. Even so,
without the introduction of highly suspect theories, the situation
presented here is sufficient for the point at hand. Jesus has found the
disciple who will follow after him.

* *

The irony of Peter comes short after the comedy of Jesus's

apprehension in the garden, and, with the admixture of the comic
interlude, moving transparently like a ghost into the inevitable
tragedy, arrives as Jesus is brought before his judges, those of the Law
who will sort out and clear up, once and for all, the contradictions
present in the whole affair of speaking. Jesus may now leave in
actuality for the comforter has arrived for Peter.

* *

At verse 19, chapter 18 of John, the Jewish elders, as well the

group of accusers, we are told in Luke, ask Jesus directly if he is the
Christ. It is significant that Jesus never calls himself Jesus Christ; he
thus answers them, in a most elusive yet true way, which comes off to
the guardians of the Object as he is mocking them:

He says, “if I tell you, you will not believe.”209

 Kair 217

This is to say, on one hand and from a certain arguable

perspective, that Jesus has never told anyone that he is the Christ; in
fact, he only called to his disciples, and because they followed him, he
knew that they understood what he was about, and that they also were
of the basic life. He spoke to them only in as much as he was speaking
to himself, and thus for the rest of humanity; everyone is grounded in
a minimally human existence, and so Jesus resonates with them also.
So, for Jesus to answer ‘yes, I am the Christ’ would effectively establish
him in the objective, confirming himself as the Object everyone wanted
him to be; the world would have its Object and so Jesus, as a renouncer
of the Object, would lose his significance – but gain insignificance: The
True Object; this is significant, that the True Object is never attained
in the eternal discrepancy. The guardians of the Object would have
their doubt and offense justified as truth. By his answer, Jesus does
not allow them their justification and so their actions proceeding from
here, which are inevitable, lay in the justification that is the sin of the
world. So it is, on the other hand, that Jesus, again, is merely stating
the facts of the matter; i.e. ‘if I were to tell you’, which is, if indeed you
were to hear me, if my saying were indeed telling you in truth the
truth, then you would not be believing, but would indeed be knowing.
And in so much as this is not the case (this case is determined: The
future inherent in the present) I am thus not telling you.

If he would justify their True Object, they would not be sinful

in action, but would indeed be justified by the True Object he would
have given them by his being thus, the claimed, Christ, which is
blasphemous against the Law, the rules of the True Object. If this were
the case, then Jesus would be – by virtue of the absurd, that is, the
contradiction inherent to what would then be the inconsistency of
existential roles (i.e. that those of the Law would be able to hear the
Truth) – one who would come to destroy the Law like any other false
prophet, but he has indeed come to fulfill it. Further, he continues in
this vein, beckoning the palatability of his irony, which they will miss

218 A Heresy

for their True Object. Jesus knows that they do not understand what
he is about, nor have they understood him, and indeed they cannot;
“And if I also ask you, you will not answer me.” Just in the same way
that Jesus has not answered them, they will not answer him; but there
is a subtle difference: They will not answer because they cannot
answer truthfully, but only through a rebuttal that is losing credence,
that is, by Jesus continually placing the impetus of prosecution back
upon the rhetoric of Law for its application210 . The integrity of the
minimal human is seen here intact, especially in John where Jesus
speaks with no fear and is actually being a smart-ass in the face of
people who he knows are going to kill him211. Jesus says 'don't ask me;
ask anyone who has heard me,' and then when the officer smacks him
for his insolence, Jesus points to the ridiculousness of the whole affair
by saying that if indeed he deserves what punishment is already in
play then bring proof. At that the priests had had enough.

* *

The whole episode with Pilate marks the ending of the

interlude, and brings the comedy through the irony and back into the
seriousness and determination of the minimal human. We have made
it through the vacillations of faith, through the slapstick of the
repetitions that allow them to come to an end, to the satire that
manifests within utter seriousness. Again, the narrative of John offers
detail that is excluded in the other gospels, ironic detail that indicates
John's minimal humanity. Now the comedy is poignant, near
ridiculous, and mocks the whole theater of the trial. Pilate asks the
priests of what Jesus is accused. The inadequacy of their position
against Jesus is clear by their response; “They answered and said unto
[Pilate], If he were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him
 Kair 219

unto thee”212; which is to say, 'if he were not a very bad guy we would
not have brought him to you'. Pilate, being wise of the world and seeing
through the priest’s intentions, tells them to take him back and deal
with him themselves. They indicate that they do not want Jesus
around by reminding Pilate that “It is not lawful for us to put any man
to death”213, the implication being that they want him to be crucified
but that one, they could not put a man to death during the Passover,
and two, crucifixion is a Roman penalty, a penalty that would have
greater significance to not only the Jews but all who were interested
in him – that nevertheless he is a really very bad guy and needs to be
put to death; he has been unsettling the people and claims to be a king.
So Pilate indulges the priests and meets with Jesus alone, because the
priests could not go into the judgment hall, for a 'higher' authority
judges on the Passover.

Mathew, Mark and Luke each have Jesus answer but once to
his accusations. Jesus's answer to the question of if he is the Christ is
'so you say', and then nothing more214. Luke, as if to emphasize the
irony and profound ridiculousness of the trial, as well as the
inhumanity of Jesus, even has Pilate return Jesus to the Jewish
governor, Herod, where people continue to throw accusations about
Jesus and Jesus makes no rebuttal, no response. Then in Luke 23,
verses 11-12, because Herod thought Jesus a fool, he returned him to
Pilate; Pilate then may have felt validated, because Luke says that
Herod and Pilate became friends whereas before there was “enmity
between them”. This alliance has been forged due to both having a
common sense that Jesus is ridiculous and does not deserve death
under either Law. We might see that whereas Pilate saw Herod as a
Jew before a Roman citizen, now Pilate can see that indeed the Law is
what reigns, that Herod is not falling upon any religious Law
necessarily opposed to the Law of the State (of Rome, of the True
Object), but that they are 'friendly' in the Law of Reality that sees
Jesus as just another religious fanatic, as opposed to Caiaphas, as

220 A Heresy

John has it, who saw “that it was expedient for one man to die for the
people”215.

Still; in Luke, upon Jesus being returned, Pilate attempts to

have sympathy upon Jesus and nearly takes his side, offering the Jews
a compromise where he will 'chastise' Jesus but then release him, for
Pilate probably figures that the public ridicule should be sufficient to
change the tide of this whole thing. John, on the other hand, has Pilate
and Jesus one on one, in a short discussion which brings in relief the
actual discrepancy between the minimal and fully human, and shows
the dynamic of the significant moment.

“Then Pilate entered into the Judgement hall, and called Jesus,
and Said unto him, Art thou the King of the Jews?

Jesus answered him, Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did

others tell it thee of me?”216

If there is a more quintessential movement of the minimal

human, it is doubt. Jesus has no stake in the outcome; the outcome is
determined; Jesus says over and over through the Gospels that the
scriptures must be fulfilled. Pilate, in his capacity, for the story, is not
of the Law; Pilate is the Law, that is to say: Pilate is the True Object,
and at that, of the story, the true point of telling the story. If there is
no Pilate, then everything else has no significance. The Jews, or at
least the priests and Pharisees (Herod showed he was likewise
complicit in the Law), are of the Law, they have faith in the Object.
Here we have the representations of a possible reality in respect to the
human being. The Object is a designator of a state or situation of
existing, an indicator of orientation, and does not connote a necessary
 Kair 221

singularity across a what might otherwise be actual existence; on the

contrary, the State enforces such a singularity. Within human arenas,
while we may say that those of a group may have faith in such a
singular object, for example, the Jews and God, we should see that it
is their orientation upon the object (that calls forth the True Object)
that allows for a positing of such Truth, Law, and Absolute God. As
explained earlier, the term 'True Object' indicates a particular
condition of consciousness for existing; as one may be oriented toward
'a' True Object, they are thus prone to and resolute in positing such
ability or capacity to know the truth of a thing because there is a thing,
an object, that exists out there in the world that may and can be known
absolutely, now or one day, by the individual or group217. Whether the
object is physical or psychical makes no difference; one is oriented
upon the (actual/true) possibility of there being an object of which we
can know in its truth, which is to say, absolutely218. In this way, Pilate
likewise has little stake in the business of the True Object because
Rome is the Law of the Real World, the True Object already manifest;
it is the State of reality.

With this in mind, we have the real possibilities of the story.

Pilate is, in effect, the Object because he decides; where there is a True
Object, due to the intuited property of all objects, a decision resides in
a contingent position219. The Jews have faith in the True Object (not
necessarily Pilate) because they have and refer to the Law to find
truth. Jesus is, in effect, not the object, so no faith is needed; he is
determined. Jesus (but more so Christ) is at once the indistinguishable
object as well as the faith that is not faith that knows the True Object.
Hence, John has it the significant rational conversation between the
two significant teleologically polemical entities. While their Being may
concern the same reality, their position-as-purpose belies such a
common ontology.

222 A Heresy

Pilate is asking Jesus the matter-of-fact issue at hand. Jesus

has offended the Jews by supposedly claiming that he was their king,
so he asks him if this is true; the either/or question: Do you believe you
are the king of the Jews? Obviously to Pilate, Jesus is not the king of
the Jews. Luke has the accusations resound with treasonous
implications, such as that Jesus tells people not to pay homage to
Rome, but this, as said, could be to emphasize the seemingly minimal
humanity, the 'lawlessness', of Jesus, that some faith is being offended.
Pilate merely wishes to gauge who this man is; it is no Roman crime
to say one is the king of the Jews. Jesus come upon by the Jews offends
them because Jesus challenges their faith (in the Law, which
designates and bestows power by the reality of the True Object). Jesus
come upon by Rome (Pilate) offends nothing, but merely presents an
alternative interpretation of the Law, the True law being that law to
which everyone of a real law must refer. The Jews are not the last word
because they have faith in the Law and so must recourse in their
activity to that which binds them in situ: The Law itself, which is the
designator of what is really true: The in-itself, taken as matter of fact,
expression of the Object: The World, and the World is Rome. The
Object is that which binds those of faith, that to which Jesus is not
bound, as symbolized, realized and actualized by his (inevitable, soon
to come) crucifixion.

Pilate is matched by Jesus, because he grants Pilate no

recourse to the objective he seeks, which is located in the either/or
clause. Jesus did not return a question back upon the Jewish priests
but instead told them he would not answer because they would not
answer him his question either. Jesus asks Pilate if he thought this
himself, and so if he wonders if it is true or if others told him and is
thus asking a different question. Pilate, of course, did not think it
 Kair 223

himself, but rather wonders of a man who would be accused of claiming

to be the king of the Jews such that he would be brought, as now,
finally, to Pilate, who says as much:
“Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief
priests have delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done?”

Pilate is obviously not a Jew and so would not have thought

anything of anyone claiming to be the king of the Jews. Plainly is
Pilate asking Jesus, not so much as a law-breaker or someone who has
offended him or Rome, but rather, as an equal citizen of the world: A
Being. This implication cannot be missed given the following
statement by Jesus, since the kingdom is that world of the Law of
Rome; Israel is but a nation of the world. Pilate is saying that it is not
Rome that accuses you (he did not come up with it himself) but it is his
own nation, the Jews, that makes you to be something more than you
are, for Jesus is exactly what he is, nothing more or less. This
discussion between Jesus and Pilate is one of equivocality – he asks
him what he has done because he expects that Jesus will not avoid him
– which is in contrast to his trial before the priests. Thus Jesus,
likewise, answers Pilate plainly, telling him that perhaps he has done
something but it is something not ethically compromised but actually
non-ethical220:
“Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my
kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should
not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.”

Pilate is not offended by Jesus and has told him as much;

likewise, Jesus is not offended by Pilate and tells him so. If Jesus were
of this world, of the Law or having faith in the Law, then his rhetoric
and his ministry would have incited physical resistance, destruction of
the Law. Instead, no resistance has been offered because Jesus is not
of this kingdom. He is of another kingdom, another world. Just as
Pilate is the Law, Jesus is another Law; as Pilate represents the world
(Rome), Jesus represents another world.

224 A Heresy

“Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then?”

And in the summation of the determination of both the fully

and minimal human:

“Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was

I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness
unto the truth...”

Jesus was born so that the Object, the True Object, the Law
itself, this representative of the world of the True Object, Pilate, would
bare witness himself the truth of the minimal human, which is the
actual renunciation of the True Object: That “I should bare witness
unto the truth”: Pilate “sayest”; Pilate is the Law; The Law is the (real)
Truth221. And at the same time, exuding every last bit of irony from
this crux of meaning, Jesus drops the pivotal statement of the minimal
human:

“Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”

And concordantly Pilate, the Law itself, echoes the same ironic
proclamation from the standpoint of the Object:

“Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?”

Together they find no blame, no accusation against each other,

posit no otherness but only the mere fact of existing that finds equity
in absolute discrepancy. It is only sensible that the voice or
representative of the Law should make the final announcement of the
existential situation at hand:

“And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews,
and saith unto them, “I find in him no fault at all.”222


PART THREE

Whom do you seek?

225


227


The Second Moment of Decisive Significance

What is critical in existence is always in reference, not to what

returns, but what divides. There is a certain critique of philosophy that
says it is based itself in decision, at that a prior decision223, but what
this decision is, as a philosophical proposal, a proposal based in an
autonomous function of a universal totality, is highly vague.
Nevertheless, when the impetus of discussion is placed upon what is
divisive, which is the event of the decision itself, the moment wherein
decision occurs, as opposed to what is implied of decision, which is a
return upon the investment of consideration, the discernment of what
exactly such a decision is and what accounts for that which is the
content of in front of or before, is not difficult to define. This ability
occurs within the context of meaning itself, and is not found in its ease
when what divides 224 is seen as a consequence that conveys ‘a
movement from’, or for a usual meaning, a truth gained from an
exposure of a falsity. It is what this essay shows; we have already
nearly laid it out in its entirety, the uncommon description but not the
critique, and hence we beckon for the return to the beginning, if
ironically.

Where the One humanity has an historical story of religious

dimensions shrouded in mystery and unknowns, there we have the
activity of such players being subject to a modern scientific attempt to
point blame and establish cause. The way it is done is to show real
dynamics, where the same human being, the human being of the
common sort, acts within an arena of natural, ecological, political and
229

230 A Heresy

social influences to bring about certain decisions. It says that some sort
of natural universal condition allowed for the arena wherein choices
were made and through a storm of contingent possibility, history came
about just so. If there is a better description of God inscribed into a
conflation of multiple events, diffused, if you will, in a ‘Godly’
discourse, where the terms of the subject cannot avoid the heavenly
return, I could not create it myself. Such a discourse seems to demand
a certain type of offensive experience, a certain type of known
behavior, in as much as there indeed is a commoner who is behaving
in such a manner, a human being no different than me, there, somehow
appealing to my sense of mystery because I am able to understand this
experience of her and him, and yet, still somehow, as I proceed into
this mystery before me the activity before my knowledge seems
incredible, seems simultaneously foreign – an experience that relives
me from the responsibility I have to that knowledge thereby
comprehends the demand as command, at that, from a necessity
removed from that commonality, and yet, due to its removal, likewise
allowing for the common type.

This is the meaning of the Jewish resentment of which

Nietzsche speaks225, the divisive recouped for the common. This is why
we may begin to understand conventional philosophy as a religious
argument, a theological apology. Philosophers want to be so open
minded and liberal, separated from religious posturing, but it is indeed
the reduction involved with the attempt to reconcile what is seen
through a lens as obviously “different” that moves in religious circles;
two examples226 are Hegel’s ‘higher consciousness’ through sublation,
which is a reconciliatory move, and Nietzsche’s ‘ubermensch’, which
appears more like a kind of reprimand. The continuance of this hope
against its perpetual incompletion is the meaning of the post-
postmodern notion that requires a relinquishing of truth for the sake
 Kair 231

of the multitude227; the ubermensch so often now merely supplies novel

material, it seems, but we can begin to understand why the crowd
demanded Barabbas, a thief and a murderer, be released instead of
Jesus, for they could not (were incapable) receive the truth. Jesus
supplies the material by which the crowd makes or had made its
decision.

Where different modes, different kinds of existence are allowed

to be what they are apart from any want for return, existence that is
rooted upon a different kind of reduction, a different kind of
methodology, there we have the indication of decision as, indeed, based
in a division. On one hand, there is a choice, in the very common and
conventional sense, and then on the other, as well, the prior decision
that is spoken about indicated through a very plain sense of the term.
Here we have the prior decision of infinite causal reduction that
brackets cause within the True Object, and as well, the prior decision
as a decision that cannot be made because it was made prior to the
occasion of meaning; which is to say, of decisive significance as it
applies to the subsequent apprehension of sort and kind. The
disruption that is the significant event then occurs due to the
existential allowance that asks for no permission, and that defaults to
no real causal authority. This is a different manner of coming upon
reality that does not answer, in the last instance, to the authoritative
convention, but instead is the answer, such that reality, as a scheme
or scaffolding of meaning, answers to this different manner228.

In the context of our rendition of the Gospels, the meeting by

polemical realities, represented by Jesus and Pilate, upon neutral
ground ends the transition. Each player takes his position against the

232 A Heresy

other in their respective ways, as only they should and can. This
departure marks the second moment of decisive significance, where
significance itself becomes bifurcated into two modes. On one hand,
the acceptance of Being for being, and vice versa, where Pilate indeed
must play his role as ‘King of Objects’, symbolized by Pilate’s washing
of his hands of blame for the killing of the ‘King of Subjects’ for the
sake and will of the multitude.

This is a second moment because Jesus is already reconciled in

the decision that could not be made, the moment of decisive
significance of the first instance. What is significant about this
moment, this second moment, is that there is an awareness of
contradiction, what we might call an absurdity. This awareness does
not occur in Jesus, again, because he is already reconciled by virtue of
what is conventionally (real and fully human) absurd; if one can say
that Jesus has faith then it must be said that he has faith by virtue of
the absurd229. No; Jesus may be aware of the absurdity, but again, it
is significant in a different way. Such an awareness that an event has
become absurd is a move of significance. The first moment sees no
absurdity, while the second moment brings forth the significance of
the first in that its notice concerns the decision. It is the second
moment of decisive significance that is not so reconciled, one that
needs to decide for its own, within its world, by its own route for truth,
that brings about a need for a real spiritual solution, but as well the
irony of the condition of the first moment.

*
 Kair 233

The Law has been breached, and it is for this reason that Jesus
has come unto Pilate, who is the Law: To bear witness unto the truth,
and the truth here, the absurdity of which Pilate becomes aware, is
that he, as the Law, the King of Objects, can only affect Objects. Pilate
comes to understand that he has no jurisdiction, no power in himself,
over the King of Subjects.

Returning to the crowd, having found no fault in Jesus that

would warrant death, Pilate finds the crowd unreasonable,
unrelenting and undeterred. They cry ‘give us Barabbas’ and ‘crucify
Jesus’ 230 . This would seem to be getting tiresome to Pilate, for in
Matthew and Mark he implores them again to reconsider by asking
the crowd ‘Why? What evil has he done?’ 231 Then Pilate “willing to
content the people”232 gives in.

Yet in John we have a more revealing telling of events. The

crowd overrides Pilate’s appraisal of the prisoner, Jesus. We then see
immediately that Pilate “took Jesus and scourged him”233 . We might
see that Pilate then had the soldiers put a crown of thorns and a purple
robe on him hoping that the crowd will be satiated by making a
mockery of Jesus, but it is enough that the soldiers do it on their own
volition since the soldiers are likewise of the Law. Pilate returns again
before the crowd, this time with Jesus as a mock king, “that ye may
know that I find no fault in him”234, and further to emphasize, albeit
the objectivity of Jesus, he says “Behold the man”. Still the crowd will
not relent and Pilate then shows his frustration and says, in effect,
‘why don’t you go and kill him yourself, for I don’t find any fault in
him’.

234 A Heresy

It is here, in response to the Jews’ reply that we find the

significance of the second sort, which is that of spiritual awareness,
the moment of coming upon what Rudolf Otto might call the mysterium
tremendum235, the tremendous mystery that in confronting reality is
absurdity itself. The Jews answer Pilate by telling him that they have
a law that says Jesus should die because “he made himself the Son of
God”236 It is here that the moment begins:
“When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he was the more
afraid.”237

This moment is so significant that he goes back into the

judgment hall (who is being judged here?) and asks Jesus “Whence art
thou?” Of course it is not difficult to see that Pilate is asking Jesus
from where he comes, but it is quite odd that this last statement of the
Jewish crowd would suddenly propel Pilate to ‘see the light’, so to
speak, as conventional wisdom might have it, that he is somehow now
moved to consider finally that Jesus might indeed be the Son of God,
or of some heavenly or divine occurrence. Nevertheless, indeed: This is
the second moment of decisive significance. Of the reader so distanced
to the Book’s telling suddenly compelled to an intimacy is due to – but
not due to; more upon the instance of – the missing of the first
significance, there is already a distance that is closing. This event is
viewed as a first event that is significantly significant, for it is most
likely the first time that such a one has been let to a closing of the
distance between subject and object, between the agent of free will,
which is the universally segregated agent, and its object. This agent
thus sees the closing of the gap as an instance of encountering the
transcendence by which real objects gain their substance and
meaning, and because of the agent’s orientation of True Objects, such
an encounter likewise follows suit to grant the Object of
 Kair 235

transcendence, namely, God, but at least an encounter of some

spiritual kind238.

The meaning of the second moment is a meaning of power, of

agency itself, such that we see Pilate with a certain anxiety. The
question that is paved over by spiritual significance is that upon why
Pilate ‘was the more afraid’. Conventional wisdom merely confirms the
religious maxim that already pervades the telling of the True Object:
The crowd is already making him fearful of large unrest or rebellion;
the idea that the Jews had of Jesus’s blasphemy is more offensive to
them than Pilate could have guessed or is estimating; the coincidence
of the Jewish outrage and the apparent disconcern of Jesus causes
Pilate to be so moved to see that Jesus may indeed be from a divine
source. This essay, though, shows the human condition without
recourse to a transcendental True Object (God). Here, the opinion of
the Jews do not move him; rather, he was already afraid, as were the
Jews, since they are Lawful, of the fully human estimation of truth.
Already Pilate is fully human. He is reduced to this state from his
objective stature of being the Law, the World, through his encounter
with the authentic Being, the True Subject, the actual subject of the
story in which he is involved, for Pilate himself was with Jesus in the
judgment hall, together meeting on equal grounds. Now though, we
find the distinction of existential difference in the players. Pilate
comes unto his own being because of his interaction with an authentic
Being, as the story suggests, the King of Subjects, as Pilate is also a
subject, but at that oriented upon True Objects, Lawful real objects.
Through this significant moment, Pilate is so moved by the
transcendent clause, inherent of such an orientation, to be that being
that he is, which is the Law, the King of Objects.

Jesus has nothing further to say because Pilate is knowing all

there is to know about the situation, having come upon the significant

236 A Heresy

moment. And Pilate reacting to this anxiety, the anxiety that marks
the coming upon the eternal void within every True Object, the actual
subject of the object, the ‘substance’ of every term, the abyss of freedom
that lay beyond words239, transcending the mockery itself because the
whole trial is a mockery; the stubbornness of the Jews confirms this.
It is as if the whole event is meaning this Event: The moment of
decisive significance, that moment wherein a decision must be made
that cannot be made, of hesitation, of repetition, because it is a
moment not of making decision, but instead of coming to terms with a
decision that has already occurred, the prior decision.

The moment must be revealed in the only manner it can; Pilate

can only behave the way he does. Pilate must revolt from the abyss of
freedom, from the determination of his Being. He must become his
agency, the agent of transcendence, and so to assert this power upon
the Object of judgment, Jesus Christ. In John 19:10, the equity of
Being has been given to the polemic of truth:
“…Speakest thou not unto me?”

…how dare you, I am the agent of transcendence...

“…knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and
have power to release thee?” (emphasis added)

But Jesus, who is not an agent of transcendence, who is merely

a minimal human, sees through Pilate’s experience, and
“Jesus answered, Thou couldest have no power at all against
me except it were given thee from above: therefore he that delivered me
unto thee hath the greater sin.”

‘He that delivered me unto thee’ is the transcendent, the True

Object of transcendence, the effective transcendent clause involved
 Kair 237

with every Lawful Object and its agents. In answering to itself, it is

seen as unethical by its own standards. So,

“…thenceforth Pilate sought to release him: but the Jews cried

out, saying, If thou let this man go, thou art not Cesar’s friend…”

Pilate is in the midst of the significant experience and the Jews

sing to him like a tragic Greek chorus, letting the reader into Pilate’s
intimate thoughts, while reminding him, the character in the play,
invested of the significance, that indeed Pilate is Cesar’s friend.
“When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he brought forth
Jesus, and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called the
Pavement, but in the Hebrew, Gabbatha.” Then Pilate says to the Jews,
“Behold your king.”

Because this whole event is an accounting of the significant

event of Pilate, we should unpack the possibilities involved in John
19:15-22.

The conventional telling of these verses paints a picture of

Pilate bringing Jesus out and Pilate going to sit on the seat where he
will make his final proclamation of judgment. Pilate, by now defeated,
attempts one last time to appeal to sense, and says to the crowd ‘here’s
your king. Do you really want to kill your king?’ And the Jews then
say, basically, ‘yes, because he is not our king.’ Then Jesus was
crucified.

The other telling concerns Pilate, the fully human who judges
the world and places the subject within the contingency of real choice.

238 A Heresy

Pilate sits on the ‘raised pavement’, the ‘higher place’ in the hall, the
place of judgment, with Jesus before him below, and says “behold your
king”. The story of Pilate, having traversed the second instance of
significance, now resounds with irony, in the double voice, but split, as
this orientation can only hold one true thing at a time, in the scene in
the hall of judgment: The reader himself is asked to make a judgment
that cannot be made because it has already been made, even while in
the story, that objectification of being, the decision has likewise
already been made by the Jews: Behold your king, the man himself,
Pilate, whom you just announced is (at least) the presiding king (the
representative of Cesar), the King of Objects. The Jews have admitted
that they have no king but that of the True Object, the transcendental
clause that is seen to reside at the absolute basis of real identity; their
king is Cesar, a quite ironic proclamation for the Jews. Indeed, Luke
23:34, has Jesus up on the cross saying “…Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do.”

“And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the
writing was, JESUS OF NARARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.” 240

Because it was near the city, it was posted in the three

languages common to the city, so everyone would understand it. The
priests did not like that sign, and told Pilate to change it to say ‘I am
the king of the Jews’, but Pilate, probably because he has had enough
of all the nonsense, says, in effect, screw you; “What I have written, I
have written.”

What is the difference between the two signs? Convention

would have it that the priests wanted it to be more clear that this man
up on the cross, Jesus, claimed that he was the king of the Jews, as
opposed to Pilate’s sign that might be vague in this distinction. But we
should not forget the significance of ‘I am’. What we have is further
 Kair 239

indication of the irony that has infiltrated the story in a particular way
through the arrival of Pilate. Pilate’s sign reflects his new but not new
situation, the ‘after’ encounter with significance, where if he did not
know it before, he was now an agent of transcendence, and this is
verified rhetorically, symbolically, by the Jews announcing Cesar as
their king.

Note the significance of becoming an agent of transcendence

through the second moment: Nothing changes. The significance of the
second moment is that something is seen to have changed in the
person, but nothing really changes; the person proceeds as if upon a
new basis, but there is no evidence beyond the affect experience (and
the terms used to refer to it) that the person would not have acted in
the very same manner despite the event241. The experience is always
left out, always transcendent to the situation. It is only through faith
that behavior is understood to have changed, only through faith that
the Event has any meaning, at that, because Objects are viewed
differently as to their Truth. The transcendental clause has had an
effect due to the meaning of the True Object that was already invested
of identity. Pilate, being so moved, thus behaves as he should have
behaved in the first place, as he can only behave: As a judge. But
instead it is Pilate who has been judged. He thus projects this
judgment upon the Objects of his view, the Objects over which he rules
as an agent of transcendence. He begrudgingly crucifies Jesus, against
his better judgment and because of this, because his judgment is not
supposed to come from some subjective place, but from an objective
place, from the subjects (-objects) that he presides over, he does exactly
what he should and would do. He (in effect, as we have said) is the
World, the Law. Having encountered the significant moment, he now
must enact decision, but this action has already been decided. The
mockery of a trial is the trial of Pilate. He washes his hands of blame242
because he has encountered his ‘subjectivity’ as Truth yet still must
act as he is determined. He has encountered the True Subject, but it is

240 A Heresy

not what it seems; it is an odd sort of knowing, an ironic situation. He

therefore must enact a division, and washes his hands because he
must force the blame from himself, because he has encountered the
transcendent, and now must perform his existential duty because it
has been determined of him from the start.

He writes the sign. The sign says “JESUS OF NAZARETH

THE KING OF THE JEWS” because it is a Jewish event –as some
philosophers have analyzed—but more because he is indicating the
truth of the Jewish situation as it involves transcendence. Remember,
the arrival of Jesus marks the inclusion of the world in the Jewish
estimation of things, or vice-versa. Ironically, it is the Jews who ‘know
not what they do’ who end up spelling out the originating basis of their
whole tradition, the moment of decisive significance first come upon
by Abraham and then Moses. But it is too late. Just as the golden calf
was erected by people, the sign of the ages will not read the Truth, i.e.
“I Am King of the Jews”, but indeed reads the fully human distanced
expression of Objective Truth.
 Kair 241

Afterword

In Gayatri Spivak’s English translation of Jacques Derrida’s

“Of Grammatology”, she uses pretty much of a quarter of the book for
the Translators Preface, the beginning of which concerns Derrida’s
concern for Hegel’s idea of the preface. To Derrida, there is no preface;
or rather, a preface is an attempt at reconstituting the ‘philosophical
work’ for the next moment. Nevertheless, the most interesting aspect
of his whole book, though, is not the various essays themselves,
because the various essays are to not ever exclude the Preface.

I might add another introduction to Spivak’s Preface to explain

where she takes from, which then should further implicate that there
is no Preface. So we then ask: How long must we preface the prefaces
that occur at every reading of Derrida before we come to some
conclusion? The answer might be the thesis of Badiou’s “Being and
Event”, that reality persists out of novelty supplied by the eruption of
the void into the multiple, but then have we not merely extended the
Preface even further? I should think then that the only way to stop
this incessant extending of the Preface is to call it out: Derrida is
making no sense whatso ever. What the hell is he talking about? And:
Who the hell knows what he is talking about, and what then is that
person talking about. Shock! Disbelief! Condemnation of my ability to
understand involved and sustained intellectual discourses! But we
should not be so ready to perpetuate any particular reading of Derrida;
from my perspective, my somewhat informed perspective, to defer to
what Derrida is supposed to be meaning seems to somehow contradict
what he is saying, for if indeed I understood what he is saying, why
then would I need to read him?243

242 A Heresy

Hence, the meaning and placement of the foregoing essay. My

simple answer is to convey the meaning of Derrida’s point without
referring to Derrida because the meaning that is proposed to be
intended necessarily removes itself from the meaning gained from the
text itself, what he called the ‘trace’ and ‘erasure’. What is only proper
to call an indication of historical movement, as opposed to arguing with
others 244 over what he had correct or incorrect, is the conflation of
difference upon the text to thereby have to trace back to what he may
have said to thereby erase it by reading it again. Still no one
understands what the hell he was talking about, let alone what I am
talking about because if they did then then we wouldn’t be discussing
what he meant; we would simply be using it as a philosophical
colloquialism: It would function as a fact. Indeed, he outlines a
particular nether-world moment of text, and then goes on to arm
against the barrage of real rebuttals as this moment conflated with
real concerns. But Derrida, nor Spivak, does not put it in these divisive
terms, for they are in an attempt to negate the negation of the meaning
of what he is saying by placing an even larger encompassment that is
proposed to define what is occurring; which is to say, his work traces
what has occurred in the writing “Of Grammatology” only to then take
it back, or ‘erase’ the very meaning by placing its meaning in some sort
of segregate isolationist static chamber. In short, she and he attempt
to reconcile the point of his work to real estimations. Strangely enough,
though, while a certain enclave of Derridians may be fluidly embracing
the Derridian as existential dogma, we are not; this essay does not.
Even as we might discuss Derrida we have to talk about this chunk
and that chunk, and but he said this, and that, and have you even read
him. Where his, and others of his moment, still try to produce a viable
metaphysics that overrides the necessity of further discussion, even as
further discussion might be part of the real metaphysics, we (I; the
existence of this essay) simply say “Yeah, we agree. Now, what does
 Kair 243

that mean.” Not, what did he mean by what he said, but rather now
that we got it, let’s move on.245. The simplicity of Derrida without his
incessant and negating return is that he was describing what was
occurring.

So avoiding the necessity of performance that seems cannot be

avoided in the telling of the impossibility of a preface, if even the
possibility of an Afterword, we are reminded of Martin Heidegger’s
essay on “The Work of Art”; the turn that occurs from the presumption
of topic to the matter that is actually addressed emphasizes the
performative aspect of the subject: The subject that is performing, that
is, as opposed to some sort of human Agent-Being; it is a subject of
discourse that is performing. Indeed, what twist is enacted in that
simple sentence? At no point does any definition avoid the subject that
occurs of discourse; might we substitute ‘text’ and we recede at least
35 years in time, but still then do we remain at the subject, the issue
at hand246. For at no time am I excluding what is rightly the subject of
the foregone essay. The conflating of meaning in unexpected ways is
the performative aspect of the subject; the object is always presented
against a static arena. We have to wonder, then, about discourses that
speak ‘directly’ without the sort of ironic twist that certain authors
evidence by their authorship, because the irony of any discourse is not
located so much in this performative aspect as it is in the appropriative
concern. While this development is indeed interesting, it seems at least
Derrida and Heidegger set aside the Kierkegaardian near derogatory
‘interesting’ and instead make their bed within it (what is critical
theory anyways?).

244 A Heresy

With a peculiar introspection, we might want to try to escape

this ‘either/or’ situation, but the question is no longer about some
manner of reconciliation, for the reconciliation itself is the
performative aspect: We see that this route, of the attempt to reconcile,
is the lie, the basis of qualifying illusion, of the assertion towards
finding a this over that, and if I may, of violence itself. What is
appropriated is already appropriated in the only way it can be; hence,
the problem this essay has treated. When we admit only description
as our approach, then we have a view that has been discounted: Then
the irony is that in the process of the attempt to be honest, to approach
and disseminate the idea with integrity, the integrity is already lost
through two ways, often at the same time, and this concerns the
appropriation of meaning. One, a placing of the criterion of the idea
upon a distanced object; which is to say here, that thing or stuff that
we accept as well as argue over and propose upon in the same breath
called (albeit tentatively) knowledge, that is conveyed through the
traditional lineage, the common, sensible and real lineage of authors,
texts and schools. Integrity here is supported through the objective
case by a further obscurity of institution and its method; the
institution is taken as a given. Two; perform, in the sense that is, lie.
But this extrapolation is not an overt type of dishonesty, more an
enfolding of truth, rather, more a type of denial. The means by which
the idea is found would disrupt usual method and thereby disqualify
serious consideration by ‘close readers’ and scholars, so creativity, in
this case, is used to avoid contradicting the established route by which
the author has been allowed her place; which is to say, her identity.
The whole thing occurs in a situated meaning. The author must come
up with a way to express the situation – their situation, the situation
that is the institutional establishment of identity, this being, of course,
reality itself, where the motion of discourse must link itself to an
outside object innately and identically despite what meaning is
conveyed to the contrary – of the idea. Unfortunately, though, because
 Kair 245

the true direct expression amounts to a loss of credibility, the route

then always leads around the idea.

Hence we find a need for an opening247. Fiction, spirituality and

religion fall in place here due to the discursive quality that those
arenas permit and even promote. In these domains, people can speak
of ‘the history of elves’, ‘aliens’, ‘trans-‘ and ‘post-‘ humanities, as well
as ‘hyperspace’ and ‘warp drives’ in the same prose that they describe
authentic human activity and emotional interaction, while others may
speak of ‘alternate planes of existence’, ‘aural energies’, ‘psychology’,
‘ghosts’, and ‘karma’, while still others can talk about ‘God(s)’,
‘daemons and devils’, ‘heaven and hell’, and ‘one’s soul’. These arenas
hold a place for such things, such really true things, that may or may
not actually have an effect upon people’s lives and worldly matters, in
such and such a way, direct, indirect, influential and fantastical.

Unfortunately, our authors here, however, do not have this

luxury, but while still involved in a segregation of human moments
(child, adult, philosopher, beer drinker, gourmet chef, computer
hacker, firefighter, wife, friend, intellectual, shooter-of-the-shit, et
cetera) nevertheless routinely fall prey to such fictional tropes; the
best example being that reality contains all that is possibly true as
well as false, and that the compartments of human role-playing imply
a single arena to and within which such compartmentalizations take
place, and must always take place. This is the problem inherent of the
postmodern moment that would propose to be speaking of some sort of
sole discursive element by which reality must adhere and conspire to
be true. Might we supply a negative possibility248, then the very act of
postmodern application defies that their theories are anything but
fictions249; which is to say, obviously, metaphysical speculations, but
fantasies of the (fearful?) imaginations. And as it proceeded (or

246 A Heresy

proceeds) as a liberal ideal, nothing less than an activity of

colonialism250.

We do not have the ability to do anything but entertain such

notions, to behave in reality speaking through a negotiation of those
arenas, those compartments; our authors are in attempts to speak and
know precisely about specificities, to locate and identify truths. We
cannot be haphazard in what we say, nor how we know, for these are
one in the same, or at least, are offered in and as the attempt. Yet,
notwithstanding this philosophical proposal, we can begin to see where
those ‘common fiction’ writers, those commoners of simple thought, are
actually more honest. Thus, if we can follow a certain historical
understanding and find the end, then we begin to see through what is
occurring in the conventional time, and therefore, we must say that
there is no reconciliation, that any attempt to do so now shows its flaws
ironically, eternally, as the social issues. Due to this, we see that
Derrida was correct 251 , but is incorrect; we see that he was set,
determined, in the very situation that would require of him to
constrain the irony and offer its linear situation, which is, that in the
attempt to be honest he has 1.) relied upon a false route (reality), and,
but because he 2.) could not expose his own route (truth). The irony
being that this was all he could do for his moment and so was indeed
relying on the only route he had to express the truth. He was incapable
of advocating two routes. This makes sense in the light of his (pre)
occupation with Spirit (it seems), but also his own reason for his
authorial undertaking. It is not just that he could have understood
what we are saying here, but more that he did not come to this
conclusion, and yet, was rigorous in his undertakings. In fact, oddly
enough, it most likely (I am not a scholar, have not come across this in
what I have read, but would not put it beyond him) would not be
difficult now to find this contingency in his writings, since that is the
 Kair 247

nature of real sense, of making meaning in reality 252 . This thus

indicates the route we must take.

The talking around the situation, facing or oriented upon that

object, that true thing that cannot be expressed, is the
misappropriation of irony, as Georg Hegel might have agreed,
ironically. On one hand, the object that is the institution; on the other
hand, that object which is the criterion of which the institution
proposes to be addressing, that Derrida, and Spivak as well, is
proposing to also address. Yet, we cannot fault ignorance, because the
way to expose it is routinely routed back into the reconciliatory route
of ends. Reality cannot be set aside by discourse (what?); this is what
Deleuze is saying. So it is, we are not merely reinstating what has
already been said, but exposing why it has been said, why it was a
necessary situation, why the situation was presented the way it was,
is at it is, as well as instigating then how that situation should be no
longer the case.

What is significant and really interesting, then, I would say,

the significant question, it seems, should be why would it be not only
necessary for Spivak to spend a quarter of the published English
translation to introduce the “Of Grammatology” text itself, to explain
Derrida’s Heidegger and Nietzsche, but further, why would it be
necessary for Derrida to have an issue with the preface that he would
likewise have to explain it? What is going on here?

*

248 A Heresy

Kierkegaard was being honest – metaphorical and poetic but

blatantly honest (I find it amusing that in those discourses wherein
Kierkegaard is most defeated some commentators have found him
most honest, but really honest), but it is this honesty that brought him
to a certain anguish, for often enough his honesty was and is not being
understood for its plainness; he was fighting against his own situation
of being in a reductive reality that was understood to reflect a grand
One truth, as he should be the agent of this truth (but alas, I do not
have the faith of Abraham253). This is why he finds that ‘the crowd is
untruth’254, and speaks to the one and not the many; on one hand, only
‘the one’ in a million would understand him, but also on the other
hand, ‘the many’ evidently could not understand him. The
presumption was that everyone is involved in a common real arena.
His aguish was that he could not relieve himself of this want for
justification by the many, could not will himself to be relieved of his
faith. So it is that the solution to this problem of enlightenment would
seem to be found in there actually being two routes not being subject
to the further reduction of another one route; that the enlightenment
was a self-righteous pompousness, necessary, but self-centered
historical and cultural colonialism. The removal of this transcendent
agency that supplied the arena for Kierkegaard and by which Sartre
found existence, thus reveals actually two routes, for we might see now
that it is indeed transcendence itself that overcomes the gap between
them. See, though, that we are not reiterating or recapitulating a
postmodernism; this is not an invitation for multiple realities; all those
things occur in reality. We are not advocating any sort of reality but
reality itself, and hence, again, two routes for meaning. Reality is but
one of those routes. We need somehow come to terms with our
colonialism (colonihilism), that the defiance as well as fear of a great
reckoning are the features of the colonial modern, regardless of the
terms that frames it.
 Kair 249

There is a type of irony that invites deception. A more recent

kind of philosopher is keen and cunning; they argue capital while
using it as a means to support their argument255. In effect, they saw
Kierkegaard’s despair and armed against it for the purpose of creating
scarcity for the material they then pedal; identity capital is the new
‘immaterialist’ material. They corner the market by enacting the
redundancy that they cannot escape because they are arguing the
market scarcity by their theoretically redundant position. The act of
the argument is the coincident proposal of idenity, and they must
prove not only their argument but also that the material that is the
argument has a certain value, but this value is their identity.
Consistent with the idea of the subject being a conflation of objects,
such argumentative method is a vacuous activity. They become a ‘they’
due to what they withhold by the proper method, the ‘difference’
invested into the inflated material, the method of creating a subject
out of an object, (magic; alchemy) of withholding the ‘nothingness’ of
its vacancy for the purpose of asserting its objectivity as a free agent.
They become we when they cease arguing to prove their subjective case
and instead start to describe the object. In the meantime, whatever
they might argue to the contrary or resist, they inevitably end up in
the contradiction that we usually call hypocrisy, but are held back from
it in this specific ideological case. By doing so, they again are permitted
to project their limit out upon the institution so to see the institution
such that their view expresses then the vacancy of the ‘nil subject’ as
ideological necessity256. This is to say, they use the limit to argue that
the discourse (text) that contains all that may likewise be true in its
fullest mythological capacity, is the unimpeachable and ubiquitous
universal and total truth. Through argument that relies upon the

250 A Heresy

dynamic mutability of discourse, they nevertheless posit by their

theories its ontological stasis and validity.

This is not an argument to be proven, to stand up to some

theoretical test; it is a fact of reality. To argue against it is merely
another way to assert real essential agency.

There is a different way. This is the way that must be

understood before we can get anywhere257. The understanding that is
gained through the terms of reality, as opposed to yet complicit with
the understanding by and for which the text is written, seems
sufficient to make grand comments upon the truth of any matter. By
this we can make better sense of Slavoj Zizek’s references to Chinese
emperors:
“…a ruler had at his disposal an excessive number of laws
which...partially contradicted each other. Within such a complex
framework of laws, where submission to one law readily brings one into
conflict with another, a mere accusation will find almost anyone of any
station in violation of something…This enables the ruler’s agents to
practice ‘shu’, the tactic or art of choosing which law to enforce in a
specific situation: power is enacted not only through the prosecution of
the law, but also in the selection of which law to enforce, and by the
absence or cessation of enforcement due to some other contravening law.
Such a selective enforcement of laws ultimately occurred at the pleasure
of the ruler: in this way the mystery of the emperors pleasure was
communicated to the masses.”258 (emphasis added)

Zizek says that this is ‘totally Lacanian’, but see that Zizek is
also speaking out of a context that evidences two routes, though his
reconciliation is found within and of his discourses: Zizek is in the
middle of it all, evoking Lacan in the same manner as I evoke Zizek
 Kair 251

(and Kierkegaard, and Hegel, and Derrida for that matter). He

understands all too well a type of non-philosophical meaning but also
the extent of possibility that is correspondently philosophical. In the
quote above, and indeed through all his rhetoric, he is describing the
situation in which he finds himself. We cannot say, though, that he is
hiding a proposal of divine audience; it is only within a particular side
of a polemic that we might take Zizek as advocating a type of personal
subjectivity, and this is exactly what the Postmoderns are armed
against. On the contrary; Zizek has no need to arm himself any longer
since he is already finding himself in the situation of having to arm
against despair; whereas the Postmoderns had yet to be finding
themselves in the mire, they were involved in finding the mire, the
mire that Hegel never recognized let alone noticed, Nietzsche tried to
stomp over, and that Kierkegaard sunk into. The void (nil subject) that
arises as Zizek, does so not in defiance to ideological standards, but
rather in correspondence to the ideological objects around him; despite
what conventional Lacanian psychological breakdowns, he finds
himself in the Law of objects, and due to this discovery, this uncovering
of his situation thus amounts to and allows for his agency. He thus is
able to “practice ‘shu’”. He does not find himself as subject to the
ideological discourse that is the rules by which reality may be true, he
finds himself in the situation as being totally determined by such
objects, and in so being, sees the extent and purview of the application
of this law, of laws which ‘partially contradict each other’. It is
incorrect to view Zizek (or maybe more, at least, within discourses)
within parameters or along lines of a ‘common humanity’, for even the
measure of truth which should be able to convey such humanity is
likewise in question through the series of contradictions by which it
gains its meaningful stature as a (one-sided) lateral of a certain
polemics. We find that Zizek represents a certain pivotal moment in
the performative activity of enlightened agency, because it is with him
that we find the saturation of directive polemics, a nexus where the
subject itself finds its meaningful submersion in the objects of its
consideration. We find him in the performance of appropriation. But

252 A Heresy

this is not praxis or some psychologically measurable state; rather, it

is entirely about the determination of terms for the issue at hand. After
Zizek (and we use ‘after’ in its most existential and philosophical
context) we find the same method but now exposed such that denial is
the only way to continue using it. With the evidence of a certain
manner of speaking which is the ability to choose “…which law to
enforce in a specific situation:” (which coordination of terms to use)
“power is enacted not only through the prosecution of the law,” (as
argumentative rebuttal to proposals ) “but also in the selection of
which law to enforce, and by the absence or cessation of enforcement
due to some other contravening law”. From the subject now entirely
determined by the objects of its concern, such operators are able to
navigate gracefully and almost effortlessly around the stalwart real
and definite law-abiding objects of arguments that are effectively
proposals for ideologically True objects. Zizek is being tactful
considering his political station, but make no mistake, “in this way the
mystery of the emperor’s pleasure was communicated to the masses,”
in this way the void is disseminated through the one, to the multiple.

We see now Zizek, in this case, is not speaking of some sort of

essentialist objective political case, but entirely from the situation that
is my appropriation of discourse. But by present conventional
standards, it is improper to say ‘my’ and still hope to convey the
meaning, however immediate and fantastical I had to really be just
then. It is not the subjective ‘I’ appropriating personal meaning as
opposed to everyone else and their own subjective appropriations; in
the estimation of two routes, we are talking about ‘I am’ in true self-
reflection as ‘us’ in opposition to ‘them’. Zizek’s perpetual conflating
and segregating discursive enactments that are presented to him is
exactly the example of the enlightened agent – not of transcendence,
though, merely enlightenment (this is his irony) – while also of the
 Kair 253

antithesis of such an agent, that which we call an ‘operator’, a person

who has such fluid access to the dialectical material that they cannot
but produce surgically relevant statements at every juncture of
objective quality. Yet he is not sovereign; it is more that he is exhibiting
the features of an operator of truth, more that he enacts the void as
multiple in its most truly ironic sense. Every law-abiding, real
situation is exhibited in relief by the set of contradictions,
contradictions that Zizek never denies except when, but while in the
act, he has the occasion before him through which to speak. He is the
example of Kierkegaard’s Abraham, the standard by which
Kierkegaard is able to speak of his, and as well the general conditions
of, faith, even while this situation brings forth the commentary by
Kierkegaard of the situation that is the exact contradiction of which
he does not entertain, indeed, cannot entertain. There is no matter to
consider of how Zizek himself might be different, or how his case might
exhibit a compartmentalization of behaviors, for if it were the case that
Zizek were to exhibit himself any differently than the situation itself
by which he has been and is being presented, then, as we argue, Zizek
or myself, that is the subject itself, is enacting a deception, or indeed,
contradiction would equate to the end of the world; and this never
happens. Every moment of sense corresponds with the making of
meaning.

It is this paradox that through the postmodern signal

inevitably brings (or should bring) the enlightenment to a close – that
is, except that we are speaking only of discourse, of the condition that
discourse evidences as a particular meaning, or as well, a particular
existential mode. If we are considering truth, we cannot leave
ourselves the out of relying upon every possibility that can arise to the
imagination, for when we do, when we ride the wheel of identity
politics, we find ourselves firmly in reality, without any escape of the
imagination but blatant denial, even without any viable philosophical
route but a philosophy which contradicts philosophy itself. In short,

254 A Heresy

we find our selves in the very situation that we have just described in
this essay: Actually two routes.

Hegel appears to fully admit his own faux pas in this matter
(despite Kierkegaard’s rebuttal), his excepting of the preface, and
directly states that his book “The Phenomenology of Spirit” is the
philosophy, is the truth of the matter, and that whatever comment he
may have made upon it should be set aside from it. It would appear
that Deleuze and Guattari were more Hegelian than Derrida, at least
in as much as they have somewhat low opinions upon conversation and
discussion. But I admit my scholarship is lacking in many places, and
I should automatically give Derrida the benefit of doubt that he
somewhere attempted to address this phenomenon involved with
discourse. Yet strangely, it would appear sensible that Derrida (but all
three of these guys) was too close to the Event, too close to the moment
of significance, and was consumed by it such that he could only argue
upon the last instance of reconciliation, which is, the last turn of
deception, and yet the first. He admits somewhere that he is so
concerned with discourse because of what may be beyond discourse; I
would say that is a good approach, to fully explore and remove all the
facets of responsibility that language holds or is capable of holding.
But perhaps where we begin to doubt Derrida, should we forgive
Heidegger? His apparent support of Nazism, the somewhat recent
papers that have caused a stir around whether to continue to accept
him259, the ethical ramifications, is not the proper site for philosophical
considerations. Rather, the result of Nazism, its complete (or near
complete; Neo-Nazism is a kind of blasphemous post-modern rendition
of it) destruction is the mark that tells us that if ‘historical
 Kair 255

consciousness’ and Dasein were to continue it would have to under

disguise. Modern becomes post-modern. What more perfect ruse than
that of irony, Dasein’s native waters. Do not be fooled: Dasein
continues in the disguise that would conflate a preface into the total
work as to annihilate it; hence the really interesting thing about, at
least, Of Grammatology. But that is a topic for another essay.

The next essay will be concerned entirely with the Second

Moment of Decisive Significance.

256 A Heresy

‫סוֹף‬

‫اﻟﻨﮭﺎﯾﺔ‬

Fin

Konec

Ende

結束

Τέλος

Hopena

đầu

अंत

End


Author’s Note

I anticipate that the most obvious and common rebuttal to this

essay will be that I did not address every sentence, event, story,
parable, nor comment in the Gospels; that I point out things and do
not correlate them to all similar occasions through the books, for
example, all the times the Priests sought to kill Jesus for this and that;
that I do not speak to all the various miraculous occasions, that I
centered my talk mainly around the book of John; et cetera. I can
already hear “Well, what about this?... and, what about this?...you said
nothing about this…”

My answer to this type of criticism is that I have worked with

significant features to indicate what is common through the Gospels,
and these points I feel can be applied through the Gospels to the
various occasions and events without much difficulty. I hope to have
conveyed a consistency of the story sufficiently enough to suggest this
alternate reading. By this reading, perhaps I have likewise brought
into question the assumed ubiquity of any asserted route, supported
by tradition or not, upon any text. Nevertheless, though, I repeat, my
intent is not to prove that the traditional reading of the Gospels is
false; merely that an alternate view without recourse to some
explaining external (traditional, theological as well as supernatural;
spiritual; transcendental) affect appears at least as cogent. It is
possible to explain the events of the Gospel as stemming from actual
human attitudes and events without the aid of God and as well modern
psychological diagnoses. Yet, at some point I do hope to fill out the
257

258 A Heresy

entirety of the Gospel to this consistency, every book, every story and
event told by it; I imagine it will be a very long book indeed. Still; there
will be those who insist on a reasoning and rationale that while indeed
involved in an ontological appraisal, simply are not applicable in this
case. One need only consider how we might communicate between
teleologies.

Of course this is but the second book of the series “The

Philosophical Hack”. I am confident that subsequent books will fill in
what may be missing of the argument as well as the picture. We will
see just what pans out.

Above all, though, the question that should be forefront in one’s

mind should be how the situation presented through this essay might
make sense, and then to see that while this may be an exercise of proof
through validation, it thus should not be taken to connote or endorse
some more real, more true, or more proper way of Being; rather, the
essays of the Philosophical Hack do the work of exposing that which
has been hidden or otherwise held to silence.


259


260


Notes

261


262


1 See Meillassoux’s book “Beyond Finitude”. ©2008. Continuum.

2 This is the second book of the series “The Philosophical Hack.” Book three will

concern what I call the Second Moment of Decisive Significance.

3 Michel Foucault is one author who has talked about this approach. See his book

“The Order of Things”, (©1970. Pantheon) this title an English version of the French title
that translates ( I am told) into “The Words and the Things”(©1966. Éditions Gallimard)

4 Theodor Adorno comes to mind.

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament#Dates_of_composition

6 While this may appear as non-sense, it can be an example of an object that

withdraws from view. The issue is brought forth by the consideration of truth; the
question is: If it was true then why is there still discussion about it? This is to say, if there
was an event that was true, then what was it? Of course we will inevitably see that there
is no definitive statement that can be made, no finite and repeatable statement that can
lay by itself that tells of the truth of the matter in question. Always, there is more to be
said about it.

It is therefore a simple replacing of terms; so when talking about ‘the truth of

the matter’, we can instead refer to the ‘object’. Replacing ‘event’, we can say ‘object’. The
point of the discussion is then, at every juncture, the object, and thus it is not difficult to
see that the object withdraws from view by virtue of the effervescent and eternal
discussion that arises about it, and in a very truthful way, around the object.

263

264 A Heresy

7 Immanuel Kant. “Was ist Äuflarung?” (What is Enlightenment). 1794.

8 My source for this inference, the essay “Cogito and the History of Madness”

(“Cogito et l’historie de la folie.” Lecture delivered March 4, 1963 ), comes from a

compilation of Derrida’s essays gathered over the course of his life, called “Writing and
Difference”. Translated, with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass. The
University of Chicago Press. 1978.

9 This is to say that what we might call the New Realism is based upon a pass in

the sense that Bruno Latour has given us. They are allowing another pass that is given, or
rather, unnoticed (not given notice) in their ruminative processions. The question before
us is this given pass that is routinely set aside; this first pass validates further passes of
the same type. But keep in mind that we do not here associate these passes with the
moments of significance discussed in the foregoing essays. It is the closing of a particular
route that allows for the continuance of the same route via a pass. In this case, the closing
has been associated with the dead end of the phenomenological reduction of Edmund
Husserl, I believe noted by Graham Harman, and Copernicus, noted by Quentin
Meillassoux, (Ray Brassier and Levi Bryant also have a claim, but I have not encountered
them as much) though both suggest a problem with the limit involved with a Kantian
universe. The pass enacted here is twofold; an (typically) overdetermined phenomenal
reduction fails to account for every occurrence without the aid of ‘spiritual’ aspects to
account for ‘outside’ phenomena, and second, which is currently the more rigorously
philosophical, that the limit of language, or discourse, is seen to be able to evidence what
can be beyond discourse. With both there is a plain ‘setting aside’ of what is
uncomfortable or seemingly useless (for the development and maintenance of
hierarchical identities) to consider any longer. They thus pass over what they cannot
reconcile, as well get a pass from the community that sees objects only along or within a
certain teleo-ontological horizon, such that a change in discourse is somehow equated
with a change in reality (another pass). But the ‘real’ pass is the one noticed explicitly by
Alain Badiou; namely, and I paraphrase, that the operator of truth must relinquish that
truth for the value it has in reality. Strangely enough, the move most distinctive and
possibly most consistent with this essay might be the closing that occurs with the

 Kair 265

extension of the end that requires a pass to its furthest and most offensive situations,
what could be seen as a taking of nihilism past its reactionary end to its absolute end.

My over generalization of ‘New Realists’, I admit, is based in a type of academic

laziness, but from what I have read, to me, it does not appear very far-fetched to place a
whole culture of philosophical rhetoric of the early 21st century under a ‘Realist’ title. I
may appear naïve and unscholarly, but it is likewise not too obtuse to place much of our
world concern associated with ‘terror’, under the rubric of ‘terrorism’. It would seem that
somehow the revealing of humanity unto itself during the 20th century was terrible
enough to elicit if not demand more ‘concrete’ discourses, called ‘solutions’, that can be
applied to specific and impeding dooms, armageddons that move for a ‘skip’ over the
terrorizing end to thereby offer ‘passing’ solutions. Indeed; Heidegger’s Dasein persists,
but it would seem we needed to get beyond existence to ‘what’s real’ and keep it real;
apparent acceleration and apparent ‘more’ information somehow correlates with a
capacity for ‘better’ solutions, leaving Dasein to be ignored for the glamour of ‘a better
world’. But the focus of the lens through which ‘realism’ looks becomes more refined but
effectively smaller, more myopic. We can thus find all sorts interesting objects now;
Zizek-Lacan-Hegelian ‘real’ psychological discourses, as well as reductions of the human
phenomenon to desire-production-machine, and even more abstract, computer
operations, GNP and like estimations of monetary value, credit and Wall Street markets,
and bit coin. It is the type of limit revealed by such ‘serious’ theoretical considerations
that brings one to consider how we might now be in the formative stages of a ‘real’ gestalt
‘catholic’ world religion. But this too is probably but another hype.

10 See note 9 above.

11 “Being and Event” by Alain Badiou. ©2005 Continuum. I mention the (extinct)

blog ‘In The Salt Mine’ because I am concerned with the ‘modern’ capital-communist
overpowering motion of authors and identity who all too often merely list the “Big
Names”, when, again, often enough, it is the smaller names that usually have more
tangibility and access upon the subject, which is the subject of communication. As if we
are all down, or should be down with the ‘natural flow’ of information; whatever that
might mean.


266 A Heresy

12 Specifically, I am speaking of Graham Harman’s Object, and the trans and

post-humanist discussions that consider the strange and odd situations that can arise
outside or after modernity, such as an encounter with absurdity or the interfacing and
conjunction of technology with the human body. This of course, is a kind of response to
the human situation that Slavoj Zizek noticed: We might say that humanism responds by
reifying the human limit of itself by taking as given the un-reflected, or otherwise stifled
move toward reflection that being human may entail, to enlist the appearance of freedom.
Freedom, where extended to every potential of inclusion, tends to argue a particular kind
of economic interaction, a product itself the modern ideological situation of Capitalism;
this situation is almost impossible to imagine our way out of.

This impossibility, though, is tempered by what I am calling conventional faith.

The issue has entirely to do with limits, yes, but the view by which such limits become
known do so not through intellectualizations and conceptual apparatus. They become
known through something else, and the terming of this something else again evidences
the essential-generic motion discussed in this essay. We want to avoid the want to
substantiate through arguing a conventionally manifested object, so we instead speak of
effects. This is to say that once the object is understood, and this understanding begins to
be presented, then the Subject (in the context of this essay) has a genuine responsibility
for it. Hence, simply speaking, we have Harman talking about the Object; then by real
extension, the objects for which he has claimed responsibility by the presentation of the
(singular understood) Object, as an initial impetus, withdraw from view.

Similarly, though I am not yet well read here, we can stand to make a few
statements about these other real discourses. If what is human is retained as a
conventional reality for a subject such that there is a corresponding object, then the
situation of what remains, beyond this noticed conventional situation, can be viewed as
a transitional substance, a kind of material that moves between what is real and what, we
should suppose, is not yet real. This ‘substance’ thus enters the field of conventional
reality through the discourse that speaks of what is determining the modern real subject,
which is, to be technical, not merely an object, but indeed technology. We have here a
trans-human discussion. Further then, we might imagine reality to be conflated with what
it is to be human, albeit as a kind of humanist incarnation. With the introduction of a
technological object of its own making, the human being finds an exit from the
redundancy that analyzes things into nothingness. It thereby constructs an object
through the apparent agency that entirely overcomes so as to depart from the humanist

 Kair 267

situation, from human agency itself, so this being the situation at hand anyways, hence
we have a post-human discussion.

While this is a very brief, general, and most probably ill-informed description of
various ways of addressing the issue at hand, notice that these types tend toward a kind
of real reconciliation. Harman’s reconciliation is in the explication of how it is that objects
may be withdrawn and what that means for reality. Trans-humanist discourse appears
as a sort of inaccessible yet present possibility of the future, since what is of the future is
already displaced by the atemporality of what allows for the transition from human
creator of technology to human technology defying what it is or was to be human, yet
while retaining the possibility of a real humanity. What is post-human occurs through the
same type of displacement by which post-modern departed from what is modern in the
conventional sense, and I might add, is most probably subject to the same issues as its
forerunner given a calibration for a new set of defining terms (we will see). Nevertheless,
all of these proposals have to do as they are intimately involved with reality.

The present essay, while complimentary and implicit, moves in the opposite
direction of these humanist, post-humanist and trans-humanist discourses. The
discussion of ‘empty set’ is well beyond the scope of this essay, but its meaning is
pertinent to the philosophical ramifications of such a divergence implicated. Consider
briefly that conduit that is supposed to run from the thinker to the ‘outside world’, what
informs us of the subject and the object. The issue of object orientation displaces this
vector of sense: The basic idea is that it is the object that determines what thought may
occur. When we begin to absorb the meaning of this situation, it is possible to consider
that what we have typically, usually, traditionally, and commonly known as the thinking
subject occupies a space that no longer exists in the same position, for the same meaning,
as it did before; in fact, we can begin to understand that the ‘thinker’ is actually a naught
point, a place of emptiness that is the conflation of meaningful objects. If we continue to
ask into this thing that is ‘creating’ the meaning, as a sort of central spirit or
consciousness, we have enacted thus a distance, and it is the arena in which the act of
motion of creating distance occurs that I call reality. From this real perspective that is
capable of noticing this kind of logical move, this is the ‘empty set’. We can also say, as
Zizek does, that this situation of the ‘empty subject’, the object that is this ‘nothingness’,
is an indivisible remainder (Zizek’s book of the same name).

Now; there is a larger issue of foldings and returns that this essay also
addresses, but here simply speaking we can say that it is non sequitur (out of order) to
argue that this empty set has existed for all time such that even in the past there was this
indivisible remainder. What occurs is that this remainder has come about through a


268 A Heresy

particular method of argument, as a result. It does not occur as a common knowledge, so

to speak, or we would not have, for example, Zizek’s book about it. The Remainder comes
about as a result of a particular argumentative protocol, a particular method. But we are
not yet here to argue over the veracity of the Teleological Argument (that things have
indeed occurred in just this way, that reason and logic let reality to knowledge in just this
so and so way). However; we can say that the Remainder being a result, and inso much
we can say we found the situation as such, it is not unreasonable nor unsound to
understand it as coming after. What has it come after? Likewise, if we can say there was
a common sort, and this common sort is human, then it is not difficult to see what Post-
human might be, or what is occurring in Post-humanism. Trans-human likewise can be
associated more closely with humanism, with a caveat that emphasizes the motion of
change, of a transversal of objects that work to establish the universe.

Again; if what constitutes ‘Object, Trans, and Post’ (real) of these discussions
can be viewed as a central theme from which each discussion moves along its own
meaningful path elliptically to enrich or otherwise fulfill a real problematic, then this
essay tends to form a polemic with them. However, because all of our discourses appear
to displace the central phenomenal subject to thereby be concerned with the object, and
(supposedly) not an argumentative object (which is a relapse back into the phenomenal
subject), the ellipse this essay presents concerns the figure made by the others’ interests
with real estimations, and thus forms no ellipse, no return, or perhaps a return of a highly
eccentric orbit, the centrist subject being the orbital path itself. This essay thus can be said
to concern a polemic through a procedure that ‘divides the divided house’ to be able to
speak of the minimal and fully human being, since what is real can be said to be already
divided unto itself. The minimal human being is that which is the ‘withdrawn object’, the
‘transition’ as well as the ‘post’ of the real situation; correspondent with inclusive real
interests, or the interest that is based within the inclusivity of reality and its concept, this
essay concerns what is not real.

13 For this essay, the minimal human is taken as a developed position. In as

much as Jesus is the Son of Man and the Son of God, absolution must come from the
removal of this distinction, but this aside from mere conceptual evaluations. Indeed, this
is the problem of the ages: The categorical mistake. Indeed, in John 14:16, Jesus says “I
am the Way”.

 Kair 269

14 This is some of the issue that Kierkegaard takes up in his book “Philosophical

Crumbs”, specifically, the section about ‘The Situation of the Contemporary Disciple.’ As
we will see shortly, it is the issue concerning this whole essay as an underlying link, so to
speak, where the more overt and stated topics can be seen as kinds of ‘patsies’, of sorts,
for the true issue, which concerns the Contemporary, that may begin with Jesus, move
through Luke, through Kierkegaard, even to the event of the current essay, and indeed to
that un-crowded reader for whom it is written. To this end Kierkegaard becomes most
exemplary; for we must ask why it would be necessary for him to assume pseudonymous
authorship. Why did Kierkegaard approach his topics through the various guises?

At first glance is will be obvious that he was attempting to tell us something, but
we need not get into another full length volume to talk about all those meanings; I am
sure it has been well written about and all the interesting creative meanings investigated.
Nonetheless, the fact that indeed he did use fictitious names, even though everyone
reading him supposedly knew it was indeed Soren, says something even more obvious:
He was uncomfortable about presenting the topics and discussions in the manner he felt
necessary. Yet when we contrast this wit the fortitude of his statements, of his authorial
style, say, we have to then say something more. The question that slips by everyone’s
conception while they apply Kierkegaard’s words to a general and common humanity,
the generality that then might be seen as that very element that brought about his
duplicity and apparent (ironic) insecurity, is more directly and properly stated in the
context of Luke (see below): How is it possible that someone who did not live at the time
of Jesus knew perfectly what Jesus was not only saying and meant, but what he was talking
about, which is to say, even before he encountered the Jesus-story-text? And this would
be to speak for Kierkegaard most boldly: “How could I know?”

15 Luke 1:1-3

16 Notice with the proposal of this essay that the usual notion of faith is
overturned. The notion of faith is turned on its head. We find this necessity in the signal
that is modern philosophical Object orientation, but aside and complementary to its
Object Ontology; in as much as it might be an ‘ontology’ there do we have the mark of a
theoretical proposal indicating a real manifestation, as though something new has
occurred, as if reality itself has somehow changed. Correlationalism, an idea coined by


270 A Heresy

Quentin Meillassoux, shows that such an orientation must assert itself, thereby leaving
the truth of the matter as a residual piece that nevertheless has withdrawn such that the
rhetoric says it needs not be addressed anymore (nevermind for now the irony of
Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology; perhaps it is merely being addressed differently),
since, here we are. Philosophical rhetoric being an incident that we comment upon, the
summation is that if such an ontology is in fact Real, or even just has an effect upon what
reality is or may be in itself, then reality is, in itself, in fact, a theological manifestation, or
perhaps to put it more kindly, a mythological effect, or even more kind, a functional
ideology; which is to say finally: Reality occurs through faith.

What this means in the context of the topic of this essay is that where there has
been an overturning, there has been a feature that has not turned. If the manner by which
we speak of reality does indeed change and or otherwise establishes reality, then this
essay speaks of that by which such establishment is challenged; it speaks of an historical
motion that defies the human agent user of discourse, the progressive directional
enforcement of thought to discourse to reality. In this meaningful arena we can thus say
that faith is usually understood as another type of agency, at that, of believing. I agree
with Bruno Latour that the idea of belief is vacant, but perhaps go beyond him to notice
that awareness of this idea is not sufficient to change any sort of believing (ironically);
still we believe. Hence, we say that where belief is operative, now we have reality, but not
the reality by which this essay finds its true meaning. Hence, it is non sequitur to apply
our sense of belief, or not-belief as the case may be, to the sense put forth of this essay of
the gospels. We cannot, in good faith, say that I believe the sense I have of the gospels is
true; if the gospels are true, that is, if the meaning they convey is the truth then it has
nothing to do with what I might believe, but yet if I say I believe it, then there is evidence
that the meaning I have might not be true and I must have faith for it to be true. If the
sense I have of the gospels might not be true, I then proceed upon an insecurity that
moves in the mentioned directional manner of proof through argument.

In this way we might apply the original sense of post-modern, as well as modern
in the sense that Latour uses it. It is not like somehow in the past there were humans that
occurred in reality any differently than the way we do now. It is more proper to say that
the terms of reality have changed. But to belay argument, we instead leave reality to those
most concerned with what it may or may not be.

So in the gospels, when the authors say ‘faith’ and ‘belief’, they are surly
upholding the meaning that stays consistent through Soren Kierkegaard, as well as our

 Kair 271

usual veins. The difference, though, to bring in Kierkegaard, is that his intervention
critically opens the door for this overturning of which I speak. By this we need also revise
our idea of the length of the past, for even upon his notice, there still we needed Husserl
and Heidegger, if not all the rest of the more contemporary philosophers and theologians,
until now; it took 150+ years to take the step indicated by Kierkegaard.

In contrast to this kind of faith that tends to become belief, the significance of
this overturning is that reality is a product of faith. Yet, in the moment of the gospels
reality was just reality, and this means that humanity was understood to exist upon a
universal and omnipresent plane, such that what might be experienced or come upon by
one human being occurs in the continuum of a humanity, and this is to say that what can
and cannot be communicated, as well as what can and cannot be experienced, exists in
the same potential across all human beings. Hence, the experience that this essay speaks
of, more, the situation that is come upon by Jesus and the Apostles (at least), should be
able to be be communicated as well as understood and known it its absolute manifestation
of truth. Unfortunately, because this is not the case, because, for example, the default put
forth by Alain Badiou if not François Laruelle and others (Latour might also be guilty of
this), where truth is relinquished for the sake of reality, the one for the multiple, is still a
bad compromise (rooted in bad faith), we thus speak of the truth to those who are of an
experience that defies the common human potential, a truth that has nothing to do with
whether one believes or not. Truth is evident, and, faith makes true. This is the irony of
our time.

17 We will take up how the story traverses what we will call the ‘scenario’ in

Part 3 of our series The Philosophical Hack.

18 The significance of this story feedsback upon itself; as to my thesis, though

the story is presumably about Jesus Christ, the Subject, its significance is found against
the true and pure antagonist: Not the Jews, but Pontius Pilate, the True Object. As we will
see; the story is about the existential situation of the subject-object, and Christ is thus a
patsy, an occasion to speak about consciousness and the nature of reality.

19 The genre always vacillates with experience even as the experience is held

onto for the rejection of the Object genre; it can be viewed as the tie between the


272 A Heresy

individual and the group. The silence, on the other hand, having successfully parted from
the Object, thus falls either into a marginalization, which is the reassertion of the Object
and a rejection of one’s success (if ever one was of a minimal humanity), or a resignation,
where the minimalist ‘re-signs’ reality; which is to say, Jesus, as Moses, was resigned to
the world. The former explains the predominance of individuals who may be said to have
been tested and failed, but who then thus establish themselves, as volition, within the
margin. They consciously, yet in denial, manifest the boundary which holds the
experience at bay to be objectified in knowledge as spirituality or ‘faith’ (this may be said
of the tragic hero), and the latter explains the ‘one of silence’ who sees the basic sign in
the reiteration of generic individuals.

20 This is the basis of what Latour has called a ‘pass’ [see his book, “An Inquiry

into Modes of Existence” ã2013. Harvard], for it is only in this last instance that the pass
is capable of being noticed; this is also where faith is noticed for its real effect. In the last
instance, just before the truth of the matter is come upon, faith asserts itself, and a pass
is enacted. The pass is a suture (Badiou) of reality; it allows for a seamless transition
between real paradigms, as it upholds the mythology of the static True Object.

In light of Deleuze and Guattari’s contribution, a pass is a part of the machine

operation. The machine cannot ‘produce itself’; its product, reality, is itself, is its
production, its desire is founded as the ‘house divided unto itself’, and discourse is
likewise a reflection, a production of a production, so to speak, of the mechanistic
situation. The object is not then so much some sort of ‘human reproduction’ of some in-
itself object, but is rather a denied projection of the house that is divided unto itself. The
denial manifests as reality, through a relative organization of True Objects. The irony that
occurs in reality is found due to the production that is itself projecting thus itself, as
looking for itself. It searches through the only means it has available: Not thought, but
discourse. But discourse, language, is always involved in a holding the division in check,
of keeping the thinker from the object of the thought. One might by now already be able
to discern the problem; where the check is not held, or is seen to not hold, and or where
a reconciliation is posited, there we have spiritual essences. Yet, philosophically speaking,
and avoiding the hiatus of spirituality, a reconciliation is always a moment of
contradiction, the machine almost coming upon itself through the (thought) reason, so its
philosophical recourse at such junctures, such ends, is to ‘create’ the meaning that we
come upon as ‘nothing’, or similarly the real discursive state ‘nihilism’. It is the inclusivity,

 Kair 273

the meaning unto itself of the machine operating to establish reality, that would have
anything that is beyond the machine’s operating as such to be ‘nothing’.

Unfortunately for those who love to adhere to metaphysical structures, we see

by their analysis that they were premature in their assertion. Rather, theirs indicate a
particular historical juncture, an historical mark. There is only nothing beyond the
machine producing desire in as much as the object of desire is taken to be a True thing
(True Object), whereby nothing exists outside of its designations. We know now that this
is not entirely correct, but that ‘nothing’ is merely another pass occurring in the last
instance. Generating real categories of experience, the machine coming upon itself is the
production of nothing. Hence we can begin to understand: The particular paradigm of
meaning eventually cycles upon its own meaningful products. In conventional method,
the ‘phenomenological reduction’ occurs anywhere contradiction can be found, but at
some point the contradiction indicates a ‘final’ reduction. Here then by conventional
reasoning, ‘nothing’ is taken to be a sort of cosmological foundation, because it appears
to be a necessary end result of reasoning, at that, a historically accurate traditional
meaning. Such a reason is not thereby taken to mean that it has come upon an indication
of the fallacy of the method of reason that brought itself to that conclusion, but is indeed
taken to mean that the universe is limited on all sides by nothingness, and likewise
conscripts the mode by which such providential knowledge has occurred, discourse,
together implicating a transcendental clause, to act as the keeper of the gates of truth and
route every investigation back into the (now) designated true-reality. This occurs in
every reality at some point, and is the rationale behind not only the Abrahamic dogmatic
theology, but also the Eastern ‘philosophies’ such as Hinddu and Buddhism that subscribe
the the notion of reincarnation. All lean on the apparent reality where not everyone is
capable, due to various social and mental faculties and limitations, of understanding the
overarching real-truth.

21 The irony of the Western democratic “right to remain silent” is its foundation

in choice. All irony occurs in a moment of decision that offers no choice upon the outcome
of the situation; the meaning of the situation merely ‘reveals’ itself. In reality, the Law
proscribes an individual’s right to choose to speak or not speak to the situation; the right
not to speak to it is founded in the legal danger of incriminating oneself. A choice made in
irony, where one must decide upon either this or that, is an incriminating move.


274 A Heresy

22 Concerning Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak’s noted essay “Can the Subaltern

Speak?”. The political silence must be addressed first, however it ends, concordant with
the philosophical motion of recession (philosophy is always too concerned with the past);
only then can that which is denied for the sake of reality be voiced. Reality must be
universally solute; which is to say, no longer caught in the ideal of ‘different humanities’;
humanity must attain the veracity of a True Object, so that essence can again extricate
from it. In effect, colonialism must have worked for the historicity of the matter to be able
to be discussed. Everyone concerned must be included in what it is to be human, even if
in subsequence we find that indeed there is no common humanity. This is ‘the fact’ that
underlies history.

23 The situation of the term is itself a contradiction in terms. This is the irony of

the whole real effort for the True Object. The question that should be asked is always:
Does the term reach the object? This is the problem of Emmanuel Kant. Do terms indicate
or otherwise link or attach to objects of their supposed reference? In the case of the term
‘multiple’, here we mean to show how the idea of multiple is contradicted by the use of
the term itself, for all of the items that are supposed to be of a multiple identify thus a set,
a unity, a singularity. Hence we could say that the term ‘multiple’ only reaches its object
under certain conditions. This is the issue that Badiou entertains in his book “Being and
Event”: Is there a set that can be said to not be of another set?

24 One might want to call this anachronism therefore a mythologically extrinsic

notion, but we should be careful of this type of designation. To say that that the notion of
‘God’ has become extrinsic would be to say that the Object to which the term ‘God’ refers,
the ‘supernatural agent’, so to speak, is no longer effective, and many might take this
enforcing a kind of atheism. On the contrary. We posit that a mythos is the entirety of
functioning meaning, and that discourse can be evidence of the mythos, with a caveat; if
a term is used, the meaning associated with the term is not excluded from the mythology.
Here, it is not proper to use a definitional exclusion; argumentative reference is not
sufficient to define a mythos. Hence, to say that ‘God’ is anachronistic idea or term, is to
point specifically to a particular manner of using terms, a particular manner of coming
upon the world, what we say indicates a route, but also indicates one’s orientation upon
objects. There is no bridge between these routes, nor is there a reduction that can

 Kair 275

reconcile their stations. God has become a mythologically extrinsic idea within the
context that this essay attempts to pose.

25 The minimal human is constant through history, objects determine his path,

and the fully human changes and progresses with the Object of its pursuit. There is a
calculus of objects yet to be explored.

26 This blind spot might be said to be similar to what Slavoj Zizek might call the

‘parallax gap’. Yet see; despite what theoretical elucidation of the situation might grant,
the manner by which experience occurs defies the theory: The meaning of the theory, or
the object that the theory is supposing to account for, is offensive to experience. But not
just common experience. Indeed, the gap itself is due to a theoretical situation; it is not
that the theory is somehow true, but more that it is real.

27 My use of the term ‘existence’ does not have the same connotations as the

existence that Martin Heidegger finds. Existence here is a foundational term; it is that
which ‘is’. So, while I concede to and agree with much of what Heidegger puts forth
regarding Dasein (English is usually translated as ‘being-there’), and grant that Heidegger
even argues against this: I simply grant that Being is existing in so much as when
something ‘is’ then it exists, and when something exists, it does so ‘there’ within the ‘is’,
since, in as much as Heidegger may be correct, what is ‘there’ is just as apparent as what
‘is’, and together they thus ‘be-there’ as this apparent meaning that amounts to the
minimal human experience discussed in this essay.

Likewise, while I may say ‘experience’, and still consistent with Dasein, there is
only an experience in existence in as much as we are speaking of meaning only, albeit, of
the appropriation of discourse, as said, of route and orientation.

The discussion about reduction of meaning to a one common human standard,

which is to say, the reason why Heidegger might be talking about ‘Daseins’ (plural; a nod
to Graham Harman’s objects), as though every individual Being (universal object) is ‘a’
Dasein, has already been addressed by the two routes: It is a categorical error that is
addressed by the meaning of this essay. The purpose of having one route is to reconcile
the True Object of faith to experience of the one route of meaning; this can indicate the
redundancy of conventional discourse, but it also defines that which arises as


276 A Heresy

contradiction in effort. To posit something that is beyond is a type reconciliation by

defeat; hence, often enough, spiritual and religious postures and proclamations. It is the
effort of reconciling one’s meaning to indeed a one meaning that has been defeated;
always insisting upon one side or the other, discourse itself is already bifurcated as
material, already established in an object of faith that must be True, because, as we say,
‘faith makes true’. This is why in the effort for truth (as opposed to the True Object) doubt
is instrumental but essential. We have here the makings of a type of historical calculus,
an opening for an analysis of history by its terms, rather than by the True events that
must have occurred in this or that manner.

28 Though the term ‘existential’ is often associated with the 20th century

philosophical object coined by Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘Existentialism’, unless specifically

sited, we will stick with the usual meaning ‘of or relating to existence’.

29 It is ‘wise men’ that inform us, as if from nowhere, of the situation, as well

mark the situation as significant.

30 The virgin mother, Mary, and the surrogate and or step father, Joseph, convey

a different reality by their parenthood.

31 This is no slight upon families of homosexual or ‘alternate lifestyle’ parents,

merely a usual, typical or common sense ideal based upon the historical-traditional egg-
sperm biological mandate. There is always a polemical relationship involved with
existing in a world.

32 This
is the basis for the conventional, objectival psychotherapy. Where
neuroses and problem are the impetus, the patient is supposed to be in a process with
the therapist whereby the former is guided to identify and express, to speak or talk about,
repressed elements of their psyche (the object of neurosis) and thereby solve or
otherwise heal their problem. But, as more thoroughly explicated by Jacques Lacan, this

 Kair 277

method merely begs the question of a stable basis of health, and the process thus sees
that basis as merely an intermediary stage in the process of attaining health since such a
basis itself is merely another representation of repression, which is to say, merely
another story based in a ‘factual’ beginning. It is no mere coincidence that that ‘purpose’
of psychotherapy advocated by Lacan is the ‘dissolving’ of the therapist/patient
dichotomy, but not as a sort of co-dependent projection or absorption; indeed, the
desired result is a state of being where discourse is appropriated in the manner that is
put forth by this essay of the minimal human. Lacan proposes to be able to arouse or incite
a moment of decisive significance of the first type, but the categorical error is most often
that the contradiction that must ‘dissolve’ remains such that in bringing it about, the
second type is usually enacted.

33 Mathew 3:1-10; Luke 3:1-9; John 1:15

34 Luke 3:8

35 See also John chapter 15

36 John 3:3-21

37 Recall Badiou’s difference as difference noted above.

38 We should be careful in seeing a breach of politically correct cultural relativity

to this statement. While indeed people of different traditions and cultures have different
beliefs, and that to reduce all the various human manifestations to a one common
metanarrative or explanatory trope is by definition a colonizing act, we should not forget
that in applying such a liberal political ideology to interactions between different
cultures, 1) various cultures left to their own have evidently and historically not
developed such a liberal attitude across the globe; 2) such a liberal approach to the
propriety of various cultural norms is a contradiction in terms, because 3) the very idea


278 A Heresy

of cultural relativity patronizes the very cultures it holds as noble enactments. We should
keep in mind when we assert such ethical propriety that we are doing nothing less than
holding such cultural autonomy within our own imposition of ethical norms. We must be
able to see that those who would not acquiesce or otherwise agree to our ethical
standards are no longer around or are shortly to be eliminated by the simple fact that we
would de facto not be able to know them as ethical human beings, since in as much as we
might know of a human being, we must know them within the context of cultural
relativity. We recall Badiou’s instruction of ‘difference as difference’, which is to say, a
difference that does not beckon nor answer to our requirements of what constitutes
difference. I cannot signify more the placement of this essay at this time.

If a human being were not to be included in the meaning of this statement, then
I would be exhibiting again a contradiction in terms, and it would be utterly comic or very
serious. If we have reached the comic then we do not need this note of the text. If we are
serious then we are dealing with what it means to exist in the world, and in order for any
sort of common global humanity to exist in the world, it must now exist as a capitalized
entity. This means identity: It must adhere and comply with the dictates of what it means
to be a human in the global economy, which includes not only physical health, but mental
health, and therefore does not exclude existential status of the individual from the whole
populace of the Earth. Everyone is allowed to believe whatever they want. Yet, even if one
were, say, a believer in Voodoo, where spirits are everywhere and practitioners can win
over spirits to work for them as well as have spirits ‘ride’ on them, the discussion of what
is actually occurring for them for everyone is only reduced in partiality toward the
practitioner’s logic as it is a total commoditized product of the global economy. While we
may never be sure as to what the future holds; we can be sure that there is no global
economy that reduces to a ‘voodoo-centric’ explanation of process, but only in as much a
such voodoo-centric process has its basis in the explanation the ‘rational world’. In short,
we cannot disregard the total colonialization of the globe has occurred, and it cannot be
discounted merely by a stroke of political theory. Besides; even if there is a human being
that is not included in this maxim, such that in a discussion I could not get a person to
understand or make any sense out of what it might mean, they would be summarily
discounted and be allowed to go on their way, having their own belief, and no difference
would come of it. We cannot arbitrarily decide that ‘education’ has no stable basis; we
should not get too philosophical with policy and suppose that any statement might exist

 Kair 279

absolutely outside a situation that concerns the implementation of power. The possibility
of communication is already an issue.

39 As Issac was saved from Abraham, and from God by God due to Abraham’s

faith, one can no longer rely upon a proxy. Indeed; it is the equivocation of Abraham and
Jesus as objects, albeit ‘holy’ and distinguished – blessed, chosen – subjects (-objects),
that Jesus rebukes, and likewise Abraham rebuked even then, as shown by the willingness
to bring Issac, whom he loved (as God so loved the world) to the truth, to God, by any
means. The God of the Law that Issac has been raised to believe in, as well the reason why
Abraham goes to sacrifice him: To exemplify Abraham in one view, and to show Issac in
another. The mythological transference that occurs in the fully human projection of its
own incompletion is not to be abided.

40 Matthew 3:17

41 Recall the difference between that which informs a position, and the

consideration of that information. The Gospels can be understood as a story about the
interrelation of these facets of experience. Presently, that which informs the position has
been relinquished, such that consideration of the position takes place as a ‘fasting in the
wilderness’.

42 Matthew 4:17. “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”; Mark 1:15.

“The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand”.

43 Here comes to mind the notions overdetermination and underdetermination

suggested by Graham Harman. As we will get into the second book, the problem we face
always concerns meaning, but also the reaction to what is being apprehended. We speak
of route meaning a particular path, a method or scheme by which things make or have
sense. When we totalize, the suggestion of two routes wants to show that meaning occurs
along particular lines but more so within a certain encompassing (but invisible, or given)
meaning, what we can call a certain particular ethical horizon of right, wrong, correct and


280 A Heresy

incorrect, good and evil. Within this horizon falls the correct ordering of real things,
including real beings such as humans, the subject and the object. As we say, this
conventional route is redundant, it occurs to prevent an exit. So we might also say that
this convention is a rout, and we begin then to understand how the ideas of contradiction
and paradox and such are markers for retreat, they show automatically and axiomatically
where and when the rout should begin.

The ideas of over and under determination suggest the meaning that occurs
with a rout. This is similar to the ‘magical thinking’ queried by Quentin Meillassoux;
symbols tend to show a ‘sign’ to many people of how they should proceed or what an
event might mean. Here, the event is usually ‘more’ than what is common or apparent.
Yet while we can say this route occurs within an ethical horizon, meaning is gained
through what we might say is a vertical dimension, what we could even say is a veridical
dimension, as we say, of a transcendental truth. The encountering of these moments
cause movement, arise in themselves as an ironic moment that thereby arouses an
impending need for a decision to be made as to what might be occurring. Yet, the decision
made is always a failure of the moment and an assertion of faith. We can be said to
overdetermine meaning toward some revealing of hidden truth gained from ‘above’, and
we underdetermine meaning when we say that the occasion’s ‘larger’ meaning was false.
The perpetuation and re-enforcement of such avenues to the extreme thus can bring
religion in the first sense, and science in the latter. But we should always keep in mind
that I am not suggesting that these ways are inherently incorrect, rather, that they occur
anyways despite what opinions we have of their veracity, and that we have yet to uncover
the full potential of this imperative of human consciousness.

Jesus as the True Object that can bring about the sought after absolution
through believing that he is the Son of God sent for that purpose is a meaning of this type,
a meaning that is determined in the reaction to the ironic moment. This is the spiritual
experience of the Christian theme, the ‘holy ghost’ moving one’s soul. The experience is
seen to not only have been aroused due to a particular linkage of term and object, but
likewise is being expressed as that linkage, as though the object Jesus has effected a link
in its truth to the subject that has been before this point separated from God.

44 See John 14:10. Just how the fully human interpretation has commandeered

discourse to a one proper meaning becomes exceedingly obvious when we compare at

 Kair 281

least English translations; namely, the King James Version interpretation to that of
subsequent interpretations. Keep in mind that we are not talking about terms per say, but
rather about meaning, but indeed, the terms of meaning. When this is taken into account,
we might then see that the ancients had a significantly better grasp on what was
occurring with this whole Jesus thing, and whereas groups tend to have a general feeling
if not a direct understanding of what occurs under their view, what is ‘modern’ might
better indicate a mark of when such ‘feeling’, such meaning, has moved out beyond the
grasp of the common sort.

I admit I do not read ancient Greek, nor any of the ancient languages wherein
the books of the Bible were written; but I submit that it would not matter. If I need not
hold an example of my own personal experience with original texts, then I surely can
point to others, such as Heidegger, that show for me that indeed what I put forth does not
veer from our historical move. If Indeed the King James Version was the first English
translation, then we should no longer look to some ‘proper’ linguistic term-meaning with
reference to some ‘the times’ and then come to our current modern ‘better’ translation.
This is indeed what people have done, and we show thereby that we are dealing with two
routes, the second of which that we wish to elucidate by this essay. We should see that
the writers of the King James version most probably, intuitively if not cognitively,
understood something that people of our day do not commonly wish to understand, nor
are capable of understanding and in fact are often so blinded by faith that they will
vehemently and sometimes violently act out their defiance to that understanding; the
developing myopia is evidenced in the subsequent translations.

One need only go on the internet to find a comparison of translations, but we

need only two to make our point here. [passages taken from biblehub.com]

King James Version: “Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?
the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself; but the father that dwellest in me, he doeth
the works.”

The point for this text note is that the terms of discourse are the issue, but more
that it is about one’s orientation upon the terms, and the object conferred by the terms.
This passage was translated in mind of staying as true as possible to the original text
available, but in as much as the meaning that occupies the space between the original and
translated text cannot be mitigated, set aside or disregarded, whatever that may be.


282 A Heresy

Clearly Jesus is saying that the words that he is speaking has nothing to do with himself,
which can be to say, the real Object-subject that is Jesus before them, but that the father
that dwells in Jesus the Object-subject does the works. The transitivity of ‘words’ and
‘works’ cannot be missed, that is, unless you are already reading it from a distanced
privileged place.

By contrast, and historical displacement, we have the

International Standard Version: “You believe, don’t you, that I am in the Father and the
Father is in me? The words that I say to you I don’t speak on my own. It is the Father who dwells in
me and who carries out his work.”

Notice how the ISV has made more clear a distinction such that a kind of
distance is enforced in the reading. Clearly here Jesus is speaking about a True Object (-
subject) called the ‘Father’. This textual evolution can be seen to more thoroughly
emphasize the inability to reconcile in meaning the message of the Gospels; thus the
meaning that find offense creates a meaningful way to reconcile it. The Subject becomes
more subjectivized and the Object more objectivized. As the offense continues, the fully
human gets more angry and defensive and God becomes more and less True and False;
which is to say, the religious comes to mean something actually manifest and or indicating
as a real thing, as well as atheism comes about and is seen to be speaking of some actual
True thing or aspect of reality.

45 This rebuttal is where the early 21st century Speculative Realist and Object

Oriented Ontology ideas take up and begin to repeat the historical discussion. This oddity
will be taken up in my next essay on the Second Moment of Decisive Significance.

46 The term-object identity is the assumed situation of the fully human. It figures

an attitude upon all that may be, an orientation upon objects where terms have a sort of
essential linkage or are able to represent or otherwise convey some aspect or elementary
part of an object in question. The term-object-identity assumes that there is indeed a one

 Kair 283

ubiquitous truth that somehow and or somewhere permeates all of the universe and
existence, and that this one truth may be conveyed through terms of discourse, in
potential. It is the vehicle by which our current idea of progress has veracity.

The Kantian ubiquity of knowledge is not discounted here; rather it becomes a

moot point. The assumption of Kant as well as upon Kant is that he indeed was conveying
or attempting to convey a distinct and particular meaning, which we must count as the
truth of his proposals. Kant is therefore not only attempting to convey a True Object, or
the truth of an object, but likewise is figuring upon the static and definite ideal of terms
to be able to convey this truth.

If we must follow the usual and conventional interpretation of Kant, then we

can now safely set aside his proposals as a kind of Lacanian mistake. We thus no longer
are in the attempt to make an argument about some essential nature of things; on the
contrary, we have moved beyond such pubescent ponderings to now describe what is and
has been occurring in the traditional philosophical method.

Further, the argument that would deny that there is any such term invested link
with truth due to the apparent discussion over what any particular term actually means,
is missing the issue for the sake of making an ontological argument and is missing the
significance of description over argument; an argument about ontology is always based
in an ontology that is taken as given, and thus missed by the argument. Given now that
philosophy likes to reside upon an arena that has no fundamental substance, no essential
truth by which to anchor itself, the predominance of argument in philosophy should be
called what it is, which is critical method, and oddly enough, because it gets no further
than itself, which is to say, the argument that itself has deemed as essentially true, we
should place such rebuttal at the level of freshman comment, and get on to address what
is significant of philosophy, so to be able to use the term, ironically, to mean something
specific.

We first need to see that we are in an effort of description of function, purpose,

and method. At dinner, we do not argue over what I shall pass to my friend who asks for
the salt. Likewise, we must begin with that there is agreement over what we are talking
about, and move beyond the self-centered hallucinations of discursive glamour and
science fiction fantasy. If we can get to a point where we are writing fantasy that we wish
to be considered as serious input, then let us not disguise it in phantasms of philosophical
mushy deception and exhibitions of academic discursive gymnastics.


284 A Heresy

47 Our particular philosophical paradigm.

48 Quentin Meillassoux, in his book “After Finitude” poses the idea of

‘correlationalism’ on this same idea. The problem then is how to get beyond it. But this
problem is often mis-appropriated. Indeed, Meillassoux himself attempts to locate some
sort of mathematical primacy, but so far as I’ve seen, he is not faring well for this. The
problem, though, is indeed what this essay addresses, as he puts it in a context of agency,
“magical thinking”, as I put it the evidence of communicative mechanism, “transcendental
clause”. Perhaps we are speaking of slightly different aspects. It should be so then in that
if the question is how to get beyond correlationalism, then my answer is that we don’t
ever get there, that there is no getting there.

Religion and rationality (read: philosophy) are merely two sides of the same
real coin: The only way we might get there is through the never-ending discursive process
of poses and postures, argument and rebuttal, the truth of any time being the real
manifestation of discourse within a proper and posed one real and true manner of
meaning. This is redundancy itself; that sentence describing and exemplifying the
redundant motion.

It might then be more proper to say that the upheld one reality ‘floats’
tentatively upon a sea of what we might otherwise call a ‘chaos’ of unknownness. Indeed,
there are many modern authors who have taken their ideas from this. But what some
might not admit, the situation where in the question of how to get beyond
correlationalism arises, is no smaller than the ideas that would write (science-)fictions
about the possibilities of some of the ‘trans- post- or non-human’ existences; which is to
say, they get no further than the correlational reality. Hence the intrusion into reality by
this chaotic field, could just as well be called a miracle as it could be a monster. Whatever
it might be, though, Slavoj Zizek’s rendering is cool: Something went terribly wrong.

There is no ‘getting’ beyond correlationalism. We only are already there.

Despite what academic capital correlationalism might want to wield, and despite what
author might have coined the term for some ‘actually meant’, the term is best seen to
reside as a kind of nether-word, since it just came up at a time when many people already
were standing around it. The mistake of the Speculative Realist ‘thing’ is that it took place
under the guise of a certain sect of the academy, and so will always now be in the throes
of argument and rebuttal that is always and perhaps did already miss what it should have

 Kair 285

meant if it doesn’t already. It should not be seen as a temporal-theoretical mark of some

‘actual’ state of – I don’t know what; thats what all the talk is about.

The question of the honesty that may or may not reside around this nonsense is
also taken up in my next book.

49 Not necessarily correlational. It is certainly possible that the absolute

unknown vastness, incomprehensibility and general ‘unknown-ness’ of the universe

allows for a free will that completely negates as it transcends our ability to know. In this
instance of last case, we then have to come to terms with whether or not such unknown-
ness is allowed or able to enter into our field of knowing, as well as how that might occur.
It is not enough to merely transpose or re-place the subject into is capacity for an
imagination that nevertheless can follow logical suppositions. It is this type of positioning
that merely sets aside the more significant question of how such creativity can be true.
Again; my next book will address this blatant commercialist philosophy.

50 Remember, we are not in an effort to reduce meaning to a one proper

meaning. There are two routes.

51 We have a description: The functioning of absolute objects tells of objects

entering and exiting the human field of view; this opposed to the True Object which is an
object of faith, a type of Platonic form. Nevertheless, it is a True Object that is able to move
in and out of view of human beings.

52 As we will discuss the unfolding and coincidence (the simultaneity and

coordination) of existence, the meaning of the temporally paired events is not missed by
the minimal human being and is in fact relied upon as it is known and as the ministry
proceeds. This is such that case that we can generally expect to understand that
significance is in play when a story includes two different tellings of the same occasion
that take the same form or structure such that they are often placed as two separate real
events; for example, the Creation stories of Genesis, this reiteration of the Passover, and
as we will see next, the further repetition involved of the vacillations.


286 A Heresy

Often enough, a story is taken to have an identity to actual (mundane, worldly,

physical, historical) events; this too is a repetition of the term-object-identity. But keep
in mind that we are not dealing here with real political-ideological contingencies of causal
setting. The distinction in this instance is the proposal of two routes; for, there is a
necessary route that must deal with things as contingent entities, as subject of choice, real
things of essential, individual and segregate temporally enveloped objects; yet as well
there is the negated route that is (unfortunately for hard-headed the common folk) the
substantiation of this real situation.

What we have in these situations (of the story) is what might be called initial and
subsequent ordinations. The primary issue with all (current?) philosophical addressing is
what ordination is presented; that is, the first question that must be asked if we are to
discern what exactly distinguishes philosophical from methodological is whether the
proposal is of subsequence; we must begin to have this conversation to find out what is
indeed actually occurring. This of course coordinates with the first and second moments
of decisive significance. The current (eternal) problem with philosophy is that no
distinction of these ordinations are made in coming upon a proposal; always, the offense
inherent in the reduction to the common One world, removes the ordinal distinction such
that all proposals are understood as of consequence (subsequence). In effect, to those so
keen, we are thus putting forth one possible manner to distinguish synthetical a priori
indications, as to when the story is addressing and signaling minimal human occasions.

Of course there are other types of indications, but we do not even know what they
might be. This is again due to the assumption of the ubiquity of subsequence, and this is,
of course, the automatic address that places the Subject always as a subject of political
ideology. Many noted current authors take this as an essential essence, take any and every
discussion that may be had as ‘born’ of ideology and politics, indeed as a political
statement. As we might see now, this is not the case, but is only the case of the 20th century
bookend of an enlightened discourse that places all human beings, indeed all things and
beings, within the scope of potential that involves transcendence. Sensibly enough, this is
why we have the contradiction inherent of capitalist democracy: We are not all essentially
equal, but only equal under the Law. While enlightenment views itself as a trail burner of
progress in every field, we might be seeing now that as this idea is taken as obvious to
nearly everyone who lives within the capitalist reach (which is everyone), the application
of the enlightenment maxim of action, even by those who should otherwise appear to
know better, is yielding a kind of intellectual recession, a glut of enlightened rationale

 Kair 287

where you turn this corner and see this reason as reasonable, and turn that corner and
find a just as reasonable reason completely contrary to the one you just agreed with; the
only out then is to assert your own enlightened reason to discern what constitutes the
best way forward. Sometimes it is discussion and negotiation, but just as likely it is
violence and killing. Both are a reaction, a motion of subsequence.

Nonetheless, it is not that this manner may be incorrect or that somehow humanity
will change in this respect; it is more that we are using the term ‘enlightenment’ to fill in
and or account for a significant gap in understanding, and that despite the term, its real
failure is in its presumption of ubiquitous knowledge and the reluctance – defiance,
rather, in the face of difference – to venture new paths. Enlightenment, as an historical
project has failed; which is to say, where the term may indeed identify some aspect of
being human in the universe, it is in so much as this becomes a generic term for an
essential aspect of a True universe does it eventually dissipate and fail.

Where we are merely using the term ‘enlightenment’, and not relying upon it as some
sort of ‘manifest destined universal saving grace’, we have the indications that synthetical
a priori knowledge is being presented, but where very few have the resource to be able
to access it; oddly enough, in a quite Hegelian sense, it is the discourse of enlightenment
that allows the situation we are elucidating, of not only allowing for difference, but in fact
prescribing that difference as a mandate to use in whatever way its meaning seems fit, so
long as the essence of the generic meaning stays intact, to advocate access while holding
within its awareness the understanding that access is very limited. In fact, the denial of
the lack of access is the instrumentation of inequality that then invests in the offense by
most to take recourse in the route of meaning to mean every person and her thinking,
which in Christian terms is ‘sin’. The political attempts to reconcile such ‘sin’ can be found
in the variously acknowledged political systems that we know of in our day, which
function to project ideology into the future (teleology) by defining Being (ontology), and
vice versa, redundantly; Fascism attempts to retain the inequality precipitated from the
enlightened awareness to there by enact a type of historical-universal propriety (the
apparent propriety involved in becoming enlightened); Western democratic liberalism,
which assumes to be able to allow for a shifting of present strata thereby to hear all the
voices of enlightenment; Communism, which assumes to be able level the field to allow
for ‘common’ enlightenment through the necessitation of the enlightened agent having to
curb its enlightened ‘endowment’. In this scheme, we are let to seeing a process whereby
the enlightened agent is brought down from its presumptuous loft.

This is the reason behind the post-postmodern solutions. These solutions are still
involved with the project of enlightenment and so find themselves in a particularly sticky


288 A Heresy

situation because in the real historical play, they are 1) not allowed to assert their
privilege, 2)have found that what they are attempting to communicate is not translating,
3) are never thus having a level playing field. But they are indeed still stuck in the quite
insistent situation of their being enlightened, or such an agent thereof (however one
would put that now). They thus have found various ways to disguise themselves. A type
of Speculative resurgence attempts to find a manner of revealing their enlightened view
in a ‘softer, gentler’ way, by turning attention to ‘Reality’, in the hopes that their agency
will be now view as a ‘real’ occurrence as opposed to a sort of ‘ideal’ occurrence. Others
have turned to ‘objects’, because enlightenment has usually been associated with a
‘subject’.

Yet all modern philosophical authors have the task of finding a legitimate teleo-
ontological justification for their ability to have such views. Bruno Latour has suggested
the idea of a ‘pass’; this appears necessary since one is wanting to overlook that such real
objective proposals are still rooted in the modern enlightened situation that they appear
to want to critique. For example, the idea that novelty arises as chaos erupts into the
stream of the real. If we can be honest; this is just a different way of situating what past
authors might argue is the inspiration of God, and this then is also really nothing larger
than the void interacting with the multiple. Then we have a more overt disclaimer that
accompanies the modern transference of responsibility: Alain Badiou’s general notion
that the operator of truth must relinquish such truth for the sake of reality. Not only is
Badiou showing his access, but he is denying it through the necessity to answer to
arguments that are stemming from a position of no access, and thereby unwittingly is
granting credence to the ubiquity of subsequent ordination. They are still arguing over
the facts, what are the facts, what constitutes facts, and what the facts then are, what
details may be describes of the facts (Wittgenstein was not apologizing for modernity in
his ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, but indeed was trying to weaken its hold; the
seriousness his proposals then merely brought about a necessary (historical) furthering
unto absurdity with the post-modern). Can we just say plainly to the very enlightened
intelligentsia: Lets get over our incessant self-righteous capitalization of identities and
bring academics back to the matter at hand: The facts are now already there! We might
just need to admit that there are existential situations that not everyone has access to, be
done with it, and get on to the description of the facts themselves. But we should imagine
that this will not happen for some time, if it ever does. A carpenter or engineer may
describe to a layman the general features of why a structure is constructed the way it is,
but she does not refer to the layman for the reason why it should be built in any particular

 Kair 289

manner, that is, beyond how it may need to appear, which is to say, beyond aesthetics.
But ironically, this is why we say philosophy is more an art: The carpenter may indeed
have to answer to how the person wishes her house to be built, but the artist answers
only to the necessity of structural requirements. Again; we have barely even begun to
look at what these limits might be.

Once we may understand what has been signaled, then we find that the Gospel story
itself, linked as it is with the Creation story of Genesis, is an initial occasion, and the reader
is thereby involved in an order of subsequence, such that the story that is then told in
subsequence merely reiterates the initial occasion. The fully human will always have it
that this is improper and nonsensical, but we do not deny here that it is absurd. Likewise,
though, when the second moment of decisive significance is come upon by the same judge,
he thus sees the moment as indeed caused by some initiating factor, aspect or element.
Nevertheless, we have already seen how John the Baptist as well as Jesus treats this fully
human ‘realization’ in Luke chapter 3 and John chapter 3.

53 John the Baptist announces Christ is coming; Judas announces that Jesus is

‘going’. So it might seem that the one that is left, the one that Jesus seeks now, is the one
who will announce that Jesus Christ is ‘always here’

54 John 13:31-32

55 John 13:38. Also in Matthew 26:34 and Luke 22:34;

56 Jesus realizes this situation since faith is required only of the fully human

57 John 14

58 Believe in me. We might take this to mean not to segregate the object of belief

from the act that is believing in its truth. To ‘believe in me’, then, is to have the belief of
oneself where there can be no object beyond or outside the inherence of the belief itself,


290 A Heresy

which would then deny that there is an object segregate from the act. ‘Believe in me’ can
be understood as the negation of the conventional idea of belief.

59 John 14:6

60 In particular, this connotation comes from Wikipedia, ‘burning bush’. “The

Hebrew word used in the narrative, that is translated into English as ‘bush’, is seneh,
which refers in particular to ‘brambles’. Wikipedia sites Cheyne and Black 1899,
‘Encyclopedia Biblica’, the ‘Jewish Encyclopedia’, and ‘Peake’s Commentary on the Bible’.
Many internet references confirm this meaning of ‘thorn bush’, ‘thorn’, even to associate
with a particular tree called the acacia. Other similes have to do with mountains or rocks,
but even more interesting is that seneh also refers to a mountain range near Jerusalem,
as well as deriving from the Arabic ‘to lift up’, or ‘high’. Though our discussion centers
around its meaning as ‘bramble’, none of these other meanings contradict the discussion
that follows in this essay, and in fact the discussion could be taken along the varied
vectors of meaning; if ‘tree’, I am just as sure the Kabbalistic inference would not be
missed as I am that the meanings of ‘high’, and ‘rocky mountains’ would not be missed for
their possibly less privileged esoteric connotations, by many. The point here could follow
from the situation of the minimal human having no responsibility to the True Object.

61 The discussion of content, of how there may be content or what that content

may be is a real metaphysical discussion.

62 I was raised American heartland Lutheran Protestant; a nod to some

embarrassment of my picture of Charlton Heston’s rendition in the movie “The Ten

Commandments”.

63 Exodus 3:6.

 Kair 291

64 Here we have a reasonable implication of why we can say that Truth concerns

the orientation upon objects, and that the terms are thus the issue at hand. This approach
can account for the age old distinction between what we have called ‘spiritual’ and
‘mundane’, but also referenced to the subject and object, as well as what has been called
‘speculative’ and ‘practical’, among a plethora of probably other dyadic systems. Where
terms (discourse) are viewed to be tools of consciousness, already we have a division that
informs all subsequent investigations. This is why all investigations taken to their end
result in contradiction; investigations that ‘taken to their end’ do not yield contradiction
are those that have a ‘buffer’, or ‘patsy’, term that acts as an interlocutor, intermediary,
or for a modern term, ‘firewall’, against contradiction, that thus allows for their being
‘True’. For conventional reality, these firewalls are the subject and the object; they
function to inform meaning as to its purpose, as to its parameters (we might now
investigate just how meaning gains these parameters), because it is a contradiction to
indict thought, since it is thought that is doing the considering. We have yet to discover
what firewalls there might be in considerations that are not conventional.

So just as we have a real object, we also have a real subject. The real object
cannot be breached, or, it can only be breached along certain vectors of acknowledgment,
because only certain meaningful paths can apprehend anything, can ‘get a hold of’,
something that can then be knowledge that we can then use in various ways. Yet even
along these paths, science has moved so far into the object, breaching various ‘levels’ of
objectivity, that what they have found is a kind of ‘contradictory objectivity’ that they
have called ‘quantum physics’. But even this has not stopped them from going further;
still they ‘find out’ about things through the various paths.

Likewise, the real subject is breached and inevitably finds contradiction, not the
least nor the earliest of which we have called ‘correlationalism’, but Phenomenology is no
less an investigation that leads to contradiction; and again, Dasein; and again, Hegel’s
‘historical consciousness’, and again Kant’s imperatives and such. All of these junctures
find a contradiction that is found a way out of through, again, vectors of meaning that
correspond with how the contradiction is proposed upon. But not only in the Western
Philosophy, just as well Eastern Philosophy has a whole compendium of investigations
that lead to contradictions that are proposed upon for a way out. Philosophy is likewise
always ‘finding a way out’ of the contradiction. The most noted of this is the notion that
at the ‘center’ of the field of the world there is ‘merely an awareness’, or some ‘source’, or
any other type or kind of some spirit or energy, a kind of ‘pre-consciousness’ that is before
or at root of everything else that can be experienced. Further then, religion also is a


292 A Heresy

positive assertion of the negative character of subjective investigations that yield

contradiction; the Ten Commandments are rules that are derived from encounters with
the contradiction in meaning, but at times when the way is was understood as divine
providence such that prohibitive rules are put forth, rules that tell people how to look,
how to see, what to see, what it means, but as well, implicitly if not explicitly, as where
they should not look.

Hence, if we can see that there are many types of meanings that stem from the
same situation, then we might come to a link that can, not perhaps reconcile, but maybe
‘re-settle’ science and philosophy. We merely describe the situation. The problem is
always that a contradiction is located and a way out is proposed. At each of these
junctures, the moment is seen to arrive as purpose, as a moment ‘that could not have
arrived in any other way’. In other words, what ever the investigation, it is understood to
have arrived necessarily, that is, that the understanding did not arrive any other way. The
understanding is that for whatever could have happened, the fact that it did not happen is
ignored for the sake of the revealing moment; the fact that it did not happen is incorporated
into the meaning of the moment, the event. In this way, meaning itself is viewed as a
divinely inspired event because it did not mean anything else; meaning is understood
axiomatically to have arrived via the inevitably proper use of the tool of discourse, as this
tool is conveying the actual truth of the thing to which it has been applied. This is what
we call the transcendental clause. It is a clause of meaning that remains eternally
transcendent to the operation at hand for the purpose of establishing the purpose of the
moment. At each moment, each revelation, each moment of culminated meaning, the
subject views itself or otherwise has an understanding of itself as a significant contributor
to the progress of reality, whatever that is or means, good or bad, whether it is cognitively
put in a ‘religious’, ‘discovery’, ‘scientific’, ‘social’, ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘self-reflective’ or any
other arena; every human being behaves as if it is a part of the progress of humanity. The
point here is that the human being always acts within an arena of free agency that we call
‘reality’, upon, what we have called, the True Object; we behave as if the terms of our
knowing relate to us objects ‘in-themselves’.

This relation thus may denote orientation, and hence, the minimal and fully
human. Where God commands as from a hierarchical position, there is also enforcement
of a boundary, of rules, of prohibitions. Such are terms that hold a potential of themselves
as tools to convey true things to the user of discourse, the ‘knower’, thus equivalent in
function to True Objects.

 Kair 293

On the other hand; the thought, using discourse as a tool, when we focus on the
tool operating as a tool, obscures itself, removes itself from the picture, such that some
kind of truth is conveyed, whether it is a ‘false’ truth, a falsity that in its falsity is true, or
a ‘true true’, a truth that is indeed true. The removal, the withdrawing of the tool from
view further allows for its user to have an essential quality about itself; it can mean itself
to itself that it is a true thing, and is why we call the subject in this situation a ‘subject-
object’. This meaning of the operation functioning as such is that there is an essential
‘operator’, a subject, that is opposed to another essential aspect that we call an object. The
mediation, the tool, is contradiction itself. Once this is viewed an element that belongs to
the real equation, instead of projected up, out or beyond, then we have to begin to think
about the world in a different manner. The meaning of the world takes on a different
dimension; we are moved to a different place; we have thus a different meaning of
ourselves.

More on this topic in a later essay.

65 In all conventional fully human respects for knowledge, the fact of the matter

is what gains for us an ability to come to an orientation as to a truth of the matter, of the
occasion of the fact. The problem at the heart of the question of God or no God, is located
exactly here: In as much as I have to assert that (a) God exists, I have effectively negated
its possibility for the realm it is supposed to inhabit, which is ‘other-worldly’ or ‘heavenly’
or similar such places; I have exhibited the compromised security of my position, my
being in reality. For, I have proposed this possibility of God from the position that God
has chosen me to convey that He/ She exists, and thus I enter into an arena of debate,
whether diplomatically or violently, a negotiation, of what is true. This is exactly
conventional, of the fully human, where no such absolute truth exists except in the
negotiation itself, justified by which ever side ‘wins’ the debate; we just hope, have faith,
that my assertion of God comes out in the wash. Thus, no absolutely true God exists, God
does not exist, and I am being merely assertive of such truth in denial of my flawed
position. Yet, in as much as conventional knowledge cannot have arisen from itself, that
is, ‘spontaneously by the free will of humanity (nudge, nudge, wink, wink to the
contradiction inherent of evolutionary progress gained through free will. Through free
will is proposed that the theory of evolution is solute in the cosmogony by which human
beings arrived on the scene, and this arrival thus argues that free will is itself a slight upon
the theory. This is the paradox of the True Object: Only one or the other can be true. Hence
we have a matrix of determinate meaning. Free will is always a religious position and at
heart argues against the pure evolution of the scientific kind. Evolution has yet to offer a


294 A Heresy

solute accounting for how free will, the appearance of free will and choice, could come
about through natural selection; the best it can do is say that human consciousness that
includes the apparent free will is an evolutionary product, choice an apparent ‘result’ of
having extremely complex adaptational manifest. In other words, we literally ‘behave’ as
if there is choice, but, ‘in reality’ or ‘actually’, choice is a kind of illusion. Yet while we are
now beginning to find scientifically just how our behavior is determined in many
instances, the contradiction involved in this awareness of scientific proof is always
downplayed, is always projected out to ‘another’ subject; the individual who comes
across these instances of instinctual behavior and the ‘illusions’ of our sensual apparatus
somehow seems to be able to overcome this evolutionary determination for the sake of
understanding these ‘conditioned responses’. Are we thus ‘conditioned’ to be able to
come to an understanding where only some of our understanding and activity is
conditioned? In so much as we might notice these determined-like responses, we are
always left an out where only some of our behavior is conditioned-instinctual and the rest
is indeed left to actual choice of decision and free will, not to mention that a whole causal
series of chosen activity went into the moment where we found that in a certain instance
we were instinctually conditioned-determined.), there must be some sort of effective
‘God force’. The issue here then is one this essay deals with; the possibility of such
‘foreign-thing’ (God) may inject itself into this contained existence, the possibility of such
a God being known, and or knowledge having a capacity for expressing such a force as it
is ‘in-itself’ absolute.

By this, then, the question is left entirely to the issue of this essay and not so
much to the question of whether knowledge may be able to reflect such a force against
itself (knowledge) such that knowledge may actually know and or reflect the immanence
of the kinetic ‘God’ (for the fully human Law of truth has foreclosed the possibility of God
in just this way, by reducing all subjects to a subject-object, and likewise the term ‘god’ to
a buzzword or merely a shorthand expression, a colloquialism, a term of analogy, a jargon
similar to the meaning of karma that has it that what we do in life is returned to us as
benefit or retribution); the issue of whether reflection occurs is already answered by the
denial of self that is inherent in the idea that a mind can view itself objectively; it cannot.
Rather, the conventional idea of self-reflection, the fully human idea of self-reflection, of
real self reflection, is based in an inability to come upon a true self reflection; it denies its
inability, and its offence (evidenced by the denial) thus reduces its inability to reject the

 Kair 295

possibility of any other kind of self reflection beyond its own type of reflection that is a
justified extension of free will called ‘objective reflection’.

Hence, the question of being ‘chosen by God’ is dealt with and the issue closed
in this moment by the occasion of this essay: Jesus is not speaking to everyone but only
those who have indeed been come upon by a true self reflection. The question of God’s
existence is moot; since existence is a quality of knowledge, we can only say that the
ethical God of religious position, the one (or more) that are supposed by the faithful to
exist as some sort of entity that is involved with this world in some way, from his or her
other-world, is by default of its own proposed ethics and rationale, not true: God as such
proposed religious focus and impetus does not exist beyond the negotiation of human
knowledge for truth, and this is most evident at the extremes of negotiation: Violence. So,
in as much as this may be this case, God exactly does not exist, because this world of
existence is informed by knowledge of what is true in reality such that, for fully human
knowledge, reality and existence are equivalent and subjectively limited reflection is the
only self reflection that can possibly occur. This knowledge (of reality) then is situated
and determined in orientation as proposed by this essay, minimal and fully human
knowledge – and it is not so much a question of whether this is true, but instead should
be a discussion about the ramifications of its veracity for negotiated, conventional
knowledge, once the parameters of the situation have been delineated.

66 Exodus 3:6

67 Exodus 3:11

68 Exodus 3: 12-13

69 If someone will have faith, as an imperative witnessed of the future by the

present, then that person has faith, but more so because that person does not need to
believe.


296 A Heresy

70 Exodus 3:14-15

71 John 14:7

72 A game Jesus plays with himself. In a way, the vacillations are the ironic and

repetitive result f Jesus in an effort to ‘trick’ himself out of the vacillating motion. This
cannot be done, though, and in fact it is the playing of the game to its results, so that the
results eventually become expected, and then soon relied upon, that is the process of
doubt in faith that leads to wisdom (see below).

73 John 14:7

74 John 14:9

75 Paraphrase of John 14:10

76A strange sympathy resides between the actual ability to heal and the minimal

human. While indeed physical healing is a knowledge and skill that is often passed down,
there is also a further innate knowledge that is somehow able to inuit what the problem
is and what to do about it. There are plenty of examples; the shaman and curandera are
but two.

For what are we speaking of when we say healing? In one sense, it is only a
correction of one self unto oneself; healing here is based upon an unsegregated person (a
body without organs?). We might see this as correlative with a minimal humanity. In light
of this, we might also understand that modern scientific medicine on a whole does not
correct a body unto itself so much as impose a correction upon the body from what is

 Kair 297

foreign to it. These kind of observations thus bring into question what we mean when we
say ‘life’ and what such notions as ‘quality of life’ really mean.

77 John 14:11

78 Again, faith that does not have responsibility to the True Object.

79 John 14:15

80 Here
we can notice the grammatical transference of ‘I am’ Being, to the
communicative metalyptical expression of possession; ‘my’ commandments, witness a
shift from the directional [my®object] to the conspiratorial [my/Object], the ‘commands’
thereof begotten by the father are not so much orders or instructions that should be (but
might not be) carried out, but rather categorical imperatives. We make distinction
between the subject-object and subject/object here to indicate the conventionally ironic
state as a polemical option, either subject or object, a directional imperative, as opposed
to a conspiratorial imperative that is a category in-itself.

81 Being responsible for rather that to the object. Responsibility for an object

confers an ethics that ties existence and Being together, inseparable, both aligning as an
imperative of the category. Responsibility to an object confers the existence that will not
admit its existential intimacy to the object, such that what is ethical becomes a command
to be obeyed or disobeyed.

82 In as much as there may be a Subject in-itself, thereby do we indicate an

exposure of the nature of a thing of the universe: An object. Until this moment, we have
only subject-objects and object-subjects. The meaning of this distinction is real; this is to
say, in reality subjects and object refer to relative things that always and never reduce to
each other in a never ending correlational cycle of redundancy that is stopped at arbitrary
moments that exhibit faith and point to the True Object. For example; the infamous


298 A Heresy

ontological analysis of a table (to be brief) of which finds that at no time do we ever find
‘table-ness’, but in fact, a table is merely the Name of an infinitude of interrelating
universal aspects and elements. Here we have an object-subject; the object is taken as a
substantial and segregate actual thing that is not part of the human consideration of it,
but yet in the consideration of what it might be, as well as its uses, the thing reduces to
the very human (subjective) consideration, which is never exhausted. Likewise, but
opposite, the subject is taken as a universal agent, consciousness a ‘working catalyst’ of
things that may or may not come about in the universe, its effect is directional such that
there indeed is a table which can be used and situated in a multitude of contexts for a
plethora of meanings, particular, actual and metaphorical, yet, when the table is taken out
of its potential for use, the table becomes a thing in-itself, a common and universal thing
that is distinct and particular unto its own existence. This is the subject-object.

Similarly, by the use of ‘subject-object’ in this essay to refer to the fully human,
I mean to denote an ‘already in transition’ state, that what the conventional agent views
of itself as a subject of discourse, is but merely another object of the universe. This is the
case due to the usual misappropriation of the term ‘subject of discourse’ to mean a
universally segregate agent of affect and cause, of mediation, that uses things that are
‘given’ to her from an essentially unknown source. This is to say the conventional subject
of discourse has discourse as a tool to accomplish things, for example, construct her own
reality. No one has yet to describe how or from where such a condition arises to avoid its
own exemplary redundancy.

The point here is that we need begin with the redundancy, that neither of these
views may be relieved of the other, but only in the relativity by which each and the other
are found themselves as real universal things. The manner by which then to find what is
True of an object in itself is not to look to real relative qualifications, for this route merely
avoids one or the other aspects of its relative reckoning of universal being. This is to say
that we cannot find the object in itself until we come to terms with the subject of this
situation. We must find the Subject in itself to thereby find the Object that is humanity.
We must admit that which is withheld by contingency for the purpose of establishing
reality. The question is not ‘what is this thing we call human’, for then we leave open the
possibility to merely call it something else, to use another term, and then by our ingenuity
proclaim that the human being is a malleable object because we can use discourse to
name it something else. No; by that route we merely have covered one manner of
consideration while cloaking the other. The question must be ‘what is its nature?’ and

 Kair 299

‘what does it do?’. We cannot hide behind a privilege of viewer/viewed; we must take
notice of what the human being is doing to find out what its nature is. In short, it makes
sense. That’s all. We must first admit that in order to avoid its own nihilistic existence,
human beings rely upon a transcendent aspect, and have a relationship with this
transcendent aspect; to expose this feature of the human being truly, we therefore, like
the material of a forensic analysis, in effect, destroy the transcendent, if even for a fraction
of one moment.

83 Heidegger’s Dasein, in different terms.

84 John 15:1-9

85 The term-object identity.

86 Here we refer to healing of the latter sense, of correction of the body through

the imposition of something foreign to it. See also note 64.

87 For our current ideological paradigm, this, of course, is the general scientific

effort to reduce the works of Jesus Christ and other miraculous events in the Bible to
‘natural’ or what can be said as ‘not supernatural’ or un-miraculous explanations. Of
course, the significance of this effort is not understood by the fully human beyond its own
intrinsic mythological significance, which is that of discovering the true explanation of
what those past (and present) ignorant and superstitious peoples ‘believed’. The
significance, again, of course, is that mythology is that which is the ‘story of truth’, and
faith is the operative element of mythological reality. This is to say, that, of course, science
would be able to reduce such superstitious events to its own rationale for truth, for that
is the operation of consciousness: To make sense of the universe; ‘to make’ the indicator
of the limitation involved in the human experience. And, of course, it does not mean that
this or any other scheme of this making sense has any actual relation to any truth of
existence beyond what can be said to be an ideological justification of power (a redundant
justification), but it can implicate a true universal motion of which the behavior of


300 A Heresy

consciousness is included, at that, in the possibility described by this essay: The

possibility of an exclusion that is not recognized by the real mythological reckoning.

In this latest sense, a miracle is an historical mark that indicates what distance
is being enacted by the mythological redundancy through its own theoretical posturing.
Hence; the question aroused by this essay might just be how the author is able to come
across such an understanding. This question has been posed in various places as to how,
if discourse is an enclosure (we have come upon a term for this: Correlationalism), then
is it that an author may suppose to gain a view that is outside of discourse, or for a more
regular or common meaning, outside of the real universe, outside of the enclosure that it
surly is? They key is to see that the solution to every problem is encoded in the the
situation of the problem itself. It is not so much, now, that there is a solution that exits
from the matrix of the problem.

To step gingerly into the philosophical tennis match: When Guiles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari talk about a ‘plane of immanence’ as opposed to ‘thought’ (maybe), as a
kind of analogy to a thinking subject and political object or world, we can see the type of
repetition I have noted above concerning the possibility of a synthetical a priori
operation. Yet just as significant is the anachronism that is enacted by bringing their ideas
into the current state; for then the repetition occurs again, and we risk gleaning from this
occurrence that indeed repetition is an existential maxim, and again refer to D and G or
others for the solution to how it all fits together. They are thereby arguing their own
predicament, but not an existentially True situation. The deception perpetuates in a type
of Lacanian mistake. The repetition does indeed occur, but only in reality.

We might see how the repetition is mechanized in the simple statement taken
from their book ‘What is Philosophy’:

“The plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be

thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives itself
of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings
in thought…”

The very simple idea here is that there is a redundancy involved in the
statement, and this redundancy can be solved by one of two moves that are consistent
with this essay. The first and most usual move is to see agency. Here, this statement is

 Kair 301

exhibiting the potential of the True Object, involved in itself with a capacity to present an
objectively True thing of existence, and or the human being. As an author has commented,

“The task, then, is to construct the image of thought adequate

to our historical present since it is the plane itself that determines what
Thought (and philosophy) can rightfully call it’s own, or properly
understand its broader social-political function in the present.” (from the
site/blog: thetragiccommunity.wordpress.com: We Head for the Horizon
and Return With Bloodshot Eyes. Posted April 9, 2016. Used with
permission)

It is not difficult to see that there is a kind of ‘spirit’ (for a term) at work ‘behind
the scenes’, a kind of immanence that functions to grant real conditions against which
thought then may work to bring about a particular world for itself.

The second manner of appropriating this statement by D and G is to see that

they are presenting a contradictory situation. The question must be: How are we to
conceive of a conception that is “not a concept”? Here, we follow their lead and see that
even the concept of a Plane of Immanence is a faulty conception. The idea that there is a
plane that resides behind thought, behind conception, is itself merely a conception, and
so should be set aside. This situation then corresponds with the minimal human of this
essay. The concept that activates the fully human agency is where the image of thought is
the material by which thought itself is allowed as a real estimation; this is an objective
reflection.

An issue that this essay also treats is where the question stops its teleo-
ontologial cycle, for this stopping is not made by a choice, but indeed reflects an
existential condition of the question itself. The question involved with its solution enacts
as it reflects an inherent distance between what is proposed as true, which argues its own
limitation as a relative position within an infinity of unknowable relations, what I call
Real, and what is actually True given the entirety of the condition of discourse at hand. So
the question of how one might step outside the correlational limit is really merely a notice
of where, within the potential that lay in the correlational scheme of meaning, thought
‘begins and ends’, which is to say, for another term, where faith lay. The point of
philosophy that is concerned with ontology and teleology is to locate where and or when
in the questioning of things thought finds its end, and this, to mark a person’s Being in
existence, where thought becomes offended, and thus, in the extension that we call
humanity and then the world, the real True Object.


302 A Heresy

88 In this light, technology (the object) can be seen as the actual determining

element of reality. Since, if knowledge proceeds along particular vectors that are limited
by conditional clauses, then it is no longer sound to ‘believe’ that humanity is discovering
or creating anything, but rather is merely unfolding in being lead along a particular
universal objective path, a path, the objective, purpose or end of which, ironically, is
eternally obscured and essentially unknowable.

89 Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” If
neither of these elements were ‘created’, or rather, established, then neither could exist,
but likewise any juxtaposed Object. Ironically, in our particular scheme of knowledge, it
is the earth, the element with which we have an absolutely necessary relation, that allows
for heaven. The earth in this sense, relationally speaking, might be seen analogous to the
Object. In order for there to be a minimal human, there must have been a fully human, or
everyone would just be human, and there would be no history, or rather, there would be
only one correct history – which again, ironically, is exactly what the fully human truth
proclaims within its disclaimer of relativity. Thus, the impetus of this essay: That this is
the case ironically.

90 John 15:11

91 John 15:26

92 The fascination of the fully human for the minimal human gradually wears

off; this is the reason for the foreshadowed torment the disciples will soon encounter, as
well as Jesus’s inevitable crucifixion. This is because the fully human being cannot suffer
against what it knows as true, which is the Object of faith. Its minimal human basis,
though, (everyone is at least human) hears or otherwise senses its own resonance in the
subject, and so is ‘called to’ by the voice of the ‘true Subject’ (its own voice), so to speak,
that is the ‘Subject of Truth’. But because the truth of the Object is founded in the

 Kair 303

individual’s renouncement of its own subject (-object) –hood, the fully human is
ultimately offended at the Subject’s voice (the Object of faith constitutes the effective
basis of true reality, the real truth of all that is possible), for it announces the fallacy of
the individual’s Object of faith. Echo Nietzsche: The offense is resolved through individual
resentment, which is an assertive motion based in the denial of its own basis of existence.
The end result is always the same: The individual will not tolerate the constant assault
upon its bases of truth (reality) and so must remove the threat, which is always fatal, for
the Subject (of truth) never stops its insulting barrage. Though at first the subject-object
thinks it may relent at some critical but as of yet unknown moment, and so entertains
what the Subject says because the beginning of the Object is always the announcement of
the subject, which is to say, the subject ‘hears itself’ in the Object as a type of longing for
home (do I hear Heidegger’s Hölderlin lecture?), the discrepancy is soon felt all too close
to the ‘real home’ in the individual’s (real) heart of truth, so the Subject (truth) must die
so the Object (faith) may live.

93 John 17:1

94 At some point I will write an essay that will discuss how it is that someone

can be human and be determined in its motion despite moments where choice appears.
In short, it is because at each juncture of decision the ramifications of the decision become
already manifest, so the ‘decision’ is always in line with that which must be. Yet due to
this and that it cannot be recognized and implemented as reality, there must be two ways,
two means, to teleologies to contend with. The first is the situation wherein the two routes
play at once, but always irreconcilable to real estimations. This means, for example, there
is no having a knowledge of illusionary objects and acting upon the illusionary object; if
one were to act upon an illusionary object then the idea that it is illusionary is just that,
an illusion. There is no entertaining some concept of truth that thereby becomes reality;
the two are of the same nature, of the same teleological substrate. There is no ‘being
enlightened’ that transcribes into or as reality, except that other discursive explanations
allow for such a transformation of thought into what can be real. The first situation is then
opposed, in its nature, to the complete misunderstanding and misapplication that would
reduce such states to a real psychology or some sort of possibly trauma enforced
behavior. One can never get through to a scientist that reduces everything to the results
of science, nor convince them that there is a human existence that does not follow its
rules: Faith makes true. The situation that is intolerable to such orientation upon things


304 A Heresy

is that the orientation as a function operates alongside of another that is not included in
its proclamations.

95 Matthew 26:37-38

96 Luke 22:42-44

97 We are again reminded of Moses. In Numbers 20, the congregation that Moses

has lead into the desert has run out of water and are beginning to complain. Moses and
Aaron go and pray to God and God tells Moses to speak to a rock out in front of the people
and it will begin to flow with water. They then go out to the people and do not follow
God’s command:

“And Moses and Aaron gathered the congregation together

before the rock, and he said unto them, Hear now, ye rebels; must we
fetch you water out of this rock? And Moses lift up his hand, and with his
rod he smote the rock twice: and water came out abundantly, and the
congregation drank, and their beasts also.” (Numbers 20:10-11)

Because of this, Moses is not allowed by God to enter into the Promised Land
when they arrive there later on. Some biblical scholars want to ponder why this
transgression was any more terrible that others that Moses exhibits, but they miss the
issue: This is the same thing that happens to Jesus. The issue is that the neither Moses nor
Jesus are allowed to know for sure, the fulfillment of their lives; they are not allowed their
justification by the Object. This occurs not due to some random human frailty, not some
obviously human fault, such as being angry or violent; rather, the transgression is the
questioning of God. With Jesus, we have quite overt situation that is described of Jesus
looking for validation in the Object, but with Moses it is not as clear.

 Kair 305

Conventional religionists want to place all sorts of special existential

circumstance upon everyone for different reasons; for example, Jesus is the Savior, the
Son of God, not a chosen human being, while Moses is indeed merely a chosen human
being; Abraham different again also, yet, once we begin to see the consistency involved in
an alternate reading of the story, we might begin to question explanations of narratives
that give special privileges at random occasions. This is the fault of the supposed ‘real’
discourse of things: It proposes upon an infinity of possibility confined within an
allowance for unknown or as yet unexplainable situations. The example in this situation
is the non-religious calling of Moses and Jesus as human beings, but then asking into the
‘natural’ explanations that reduce such humanity to modern scientific reductions. For one
occasion, the human occasion, Moses and Jesus and indeed the people there to witness
their activity, are reduced to psychologies that leave massive holes in the possibility of
the theory’s probability; for the next, the next, natural events are more often viewed as
causes to the story of the human situation, for example, the parting of the Red Sea is seen
to be an actual natural and explainable occurrence that then brings the human beings to
elaborate and exaggerate the situation for any number of possible political or cultural
motives. Also similarly, Jesus is seen to be a product (caused by) his political
environment, such that modern story tellers take this theme and run for the religious
hero by having Jesus being merely ‘inspired by God’ by the reaction for the political cause.

The more plausible explanation does not segregate and sort out meanings to
probable causal events, as if living occurrence is really a method of hypothesis and
experiment. As we suggest of the Gospels, the same goes for Moses. Here we notice that
Moses and Aaron brought the people together and said effectively, ‘Hey you rebels; are
you so blind that we have to get water from this rock for you to really see whats
occurring?’ They are blind in the same manner that Jesus cannot believe that the Disciples
will not confirm to Jesus that they indeed understand what the whole ministry was about.
With Moses, he repeatedly confronts the congregation with their lack of understanding,
what we can in this notice call faith. The similarities between the stories of Moses and
Jesus are nearly too obvious to set aside, and indeed it is the obviousness of what this
might imply that is likewise the notice behind the obstinacy that Moses and Jesus both
witness of others around them who they figure should understand, but then really don’t.
The reason is this: This is not to say that these are merely stories to thus suggest that
some sort of actual and real human activity did not take place, but neither is this to say
that the actual events occurred in such a way but that their resemblance is merely
coincidental, like a parallel or convergent evolution has occurred, here the isolation being
created by time and the analogous structures the common theme of the story, or even
traditionally referential where the later Jews perhaps unwittingly rehashed the story of


306 A Heresy

Moses for a contemporary crowd. Yet even if these be the case, we would have to ponder
how the crowd would have missed or be open to the obvious retelling of Moses, and again
we come upon the significance of Kierkegaard’s consideration of the ‘contemporary’. The
coincidence is in the consistency of the story of the minimal human in reality and the
concordant apprehension of meaning (comprehension is posterior the event) that occurs
with the minimal human but not in the fully human. The minimal human occurs through,
as we have already suggested, the same ‘storyline’, and it is the story line that marks the
presence of the minimal human in history.

Moses does not bring the people together and tell the rock to give water as God
commands, “to sanctify me [God] in the eyes of the children of Israel” (Numbers 20:12),
but instead inadvertently shines the light upon himself, first by validating their
complaints through complaining himself of their complaints, sarcastically calling them
“rebels”, but then further mocks their lack of understanding (faith) by pointing out the
obviousness that they should have already been relying upon, that Moses has it under
control, further signified by him striking the rock with his staff. This is the sacrilege
against the “I am”, but it is not so much that God punishes Moses who failed to follow
God’s command; this interpretation is brute force, it stumbles through possibility; it has
no subtlety, no finesse. This transgression appears more like a slight, because the water
sill ran. It would appear that something else is going on. Yet first we shall set aside the
speculative anthropomorphizing of God where we have to think about the contradiction
and ethical ramifications inherent in God making the water flow even when Moses
disobeyed and then reprimanding him for doing so; for we have to ask: Should not the
water have run only when Moses did what God commanded?

It would seem that there was already water behind or within that rock. It would
appear that Moses and Aaron knew something despite the ‘great powerful God complex’
manifesting reality and attempting to guide a couple people he chose to do the right
things by God. We might add another quality of the minimal human: Intelligence. Keep in
mind that Moses was raised as royalty, and the people he lead out of Egypt were slaves;
we should have no illusions around what it takes for a civilization to arise and be
maintained, how institutions arise that overreach what may be their religious roots. This
was not the Hebrew empire that the Egyptians left. Perhaps, if we can speculate, there
was a ‘rock’ that held back a spring and it wouldn’t have mattered if Moses just went over
to it, kicked it over, and then called to the congregants to come over and get some water.

 Kair 307

Something more than a simple religious tradition of great Gods and humble chosen
servants was going on.

James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough” comes to mind. Particularly, his suggestion
is that many magicians and priests of various cultures were not actually doing any magic,
per say, that they likely were not caught up in the believing the magical religion, not swept
up in the understanding of themselves as seriously ‘magical’, but rather they were most
likely aware of their social position and power, putting on a performance for a certain
effect and to create a certain glamour over the tribe or group for the purpose of inciting
emotional and psychic states, whether it be for individual healing or group cohesion. In
this light, a certain doubt arises as to Moses being a sort of channel for God in the same
light as Jesus’s ‘works’.

Still; we might want to temper this picture with skepticism and refrain from
placing our most modern manner of intelligence and perchance to deceive in the position
of early shamans, priests and holy people. We should better imagine that that a kind of
honesty and goodness informs great people noted of religions, though not to the lowest
factor that involves other people; rather, to the highest factor. The situation is more
significant when we see that by Moses behaving in the manner that he did, he placed the
“I am” in the pure objective, as a True Object for the congregants, as if indeed Moses was
doing this miracle. This ‘faux pas’ is of a most intimate trespass, such that when the
moment occurs the minimal human already knows what has occurred. And Jesus indeed
does not find out who will follow him before he dies, but only has a hint with Peter, even
as the story of Peter enfolds into the non-conventional historical telling of the situation
at hand.

Indeed, already this early in the Biblical story (Moses) we have the seeds for the
rest of the whole narrative: Regular (fully human) people do not understand, they will
always have faith in the True Object if given half a chance and whatever they think is their
understanding will always, in the last analysis, contradict itself. And, always the minimal
human takes certain overt occasions to mean that other humans do understand. Then,
disregarding the personal transpirations of Moses, we notice that the congregants didn’t
care either way; not only did the water run despite what Moses did, but also even as Moses
did draw attention to himself rather than God the people still ‘believed’ as they always
had; fickle, one might say. So it is, if we can follow a certain historical line through the
Bible, but the history of philosophy also: The Gospels witness a different telling of the
same story, they witness the same story as a different reality, a different effective
teleology (and not merely some subjective ‘ideal’, personal belief or psychological
pathology), but more, as though in deed the story of humanity is progressing, albeit, along


308 A Heresy

some spiritual path. So similarly, it is the realization that history (the fact of history called
historicity) defies the real sensibility, that any particular discourse is incapable of
conveying the truth of the matter for real appropriations, for fully human knowledge, that
then allows for the story to occur along a further bifurcated track. On one hand, the story
withdraws from history for the sake of the real progress of objects, such that the story
then begins to tell of a ‘journey of the soul’, so to speak. On the other hand, we can surmise
then that once this journey of the soul is revealed (told) in a sufficiently meaningful
manner for the real estimation of things (real history) that the pass mentioned at the
beginning of this essay bridges the ‘end’ to the ‘beginning’ of the story, such that the story
begins again to allow for the discourse to apprehend the object once again and become
coincident with the telling of history through significant figures, as opposed to merely a
thoughtful subjective appropriation of a soul’s journey. This seems the case because
ironically, the soul’s journey by this time becomes another useful trope, which is to say,
another forensic sample destroyed for the sake of finding out what happened, such that
consistent with earlier in this essay, the subject is again ‘pushed out’ of its essential
meaning for the sake of the Object. At this point, the subject must first recoup itself in the
Object to then find this route insufficient, to then essentialize itself once again: A Hegelian
historical movement that occurs in a quite Kierkegaardian mode.

98 Genesis 8:11. “…Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.”

But where to land? If Jesus had not already known, by now ‘the waters were abated’: The
‘deluge’ was the encroachment of the Object upon his Being in the vacillations; in the book
of John there is no ‘last temptation’ but the temptation of the Object represented by his
disciples. One may be tempted to associate the deluge with the upcoming passion, the
physical torture and such, but by that time the move had already been made. Indeed, we
can make sharper the distinction explored later in this essay: Matthew and Mark, those
authors who seem more to have justified their faith by the Object, have Jesus respond
again to the taunting Objects (objections); Luke and John have Jesus remaining detached
and secure. Since the storm has run its course and ‘the waters cover the face of the earth’,
now a dove returns with an olive branch, so Jesus knows for sure (the Mount of Olives
can be either a sign of ‘the comforter’ of Jesus’s, or at least as a mark of the story) that the
waters were abated and that he would soon find landfall, that his destiny, his purpose,
was intact.

 Kair 309

99 The Cross is a literary device and symbol, but not merely and only these. The

coincidence of appropriation, meaning, performance and activity are not independent

events of a causal arrangement. In a sense they can be said to be correspondent in
existence, inextricable to a causal field. Nevertheless; A life that is not fulfilled still ends
with death, but Jesus’s life ends at its fulfillment. This can be seen as the difference
between the life of faith and eternal life; again, the term ‘death’ can be read in two ways
as well as unfold upon two routes.

100 John chapter 18 leads this next section.

101 John 18:11

102 See also Matthew 7:29.

103 This is the real method we know as argument towards proof. Everything

does not make sense automatically and indeed to overcome the gaps in sensibility one
looks for proof and presents arguments that are tempered by rebuttal and counter
argument. The route upon which one looks for and finds proof is the issue at hand; or
rather, whether or not or how well the route is bound by thickets and walls.

104 John 7:17-18

105 John 7:19

106 See Fredrich Nietzsche’s “The Antichrist” where he talks about the Jewish

resentment against Christ.


310 A Heresy

107 John 10:1-6

108 Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”

109 Jesus
is speaking as this process indicates the potential in hand for the
moment that would have the subject-object be able to comprehend the Truth if indeed
one were able to use the correct terms. This situation thus indicates a more substantial
historical motion. Yet even as Jesus indeed is using an ‘unlawful’ manner of discourse
aimed at the very few, the contradiction inherent of the minimal human at this moment
can be seen in that there is still a vision that sees a common humanity, where all may be
recouped by a common discursive meaning, this under the rubric of ‘everyone can be
saved’.

History might be better understood in this light as a coming to terms with the
actual human being of an irreconcilable existential situation; hence, the need for the
projection of faith that perpetually reconstitutes the reconciliation under various
headings, various meanings, like some sort of ‘living motor’ of humanity, creating a
‘future’, but caught in a redundancy of repetition. These ideas have been tossed around
for some time, but we have never come upon how it actually occurs; it seems always left
to ‘the spirit’.

The historicity of humans being might be seen as cycle of forgetting, of ‘missing’

the determination of the object for the sake of the choice upon the True Object. Here
change occurs at significant junctures of meaning that would expose the fallacy of the
real, but junctures of meaning that are passed over, set aside and effectually denied.
However, change is the retaining at each juncture the continuity that the pass allows, such
that something is learned; this is to say, the ‘mistake’ is seen to be ‘cause’ –not a mistake
that causes, but actually of a rejection, a revolt, toward which the object is reconstituted
under the exclusion of the previous ‘incorrect’ meaning. By this route, through small,
cumulative progressive meaning(s), the capacity involved in the possibility of
consciousness, is ‘filled out’, so to speak, in and as history such that a divergence
precipitates out of the ‘one route’ to establish the two irreconcilable conditions, and ‘a’

 Kair 311

present reveals a sort of finality. Evidenced in the apparent prevailing conflicts of

humanity over various True Objects, the collapse of the world itself is avoided in the last
instance, the end itself is passed over, humanity itself as an exclusionary group recoups
its unity in the total explanatory trope, the true ‘meta-discourse’ by which all human
activity may by accounted for as ontological-teleological purpose (some theorists have
called this transition ‘Capitalism’ to ‘Communism’, but the effective move seems would be
more toward a universal catholic religion), and history ‘begins again’ in the new basis
from which humanity may diversify into its various affective truths; which is to say, the
meaningful accounting of human activity begins to fail. History, as a total accounting, is
forgotten. But this forgetting has nothing to do with what symbolic manifestations might
remain, for we are speaking of the appropriation of meaning. This is a topic for another
essay.

110 Though religious dogma and theological affirmations may indeed have a

valid interpretation, they are insufficient to the meaning here. The many ‘born again’
Christians will argue their positions by all sorts of discursive strategies. As much as the
Christian will pose exclusivity against the want for belief, though, it is obvious (to some)
that such clauses are not exhibiting exclusive meanings posed within the the necessity of
‘witnessing’. The problem is that such Christian clauses are understood all too well by
believers and non-believers alike. The effective partition between believers and non-
believers, that the believers understand as semi-permeable, is not the situation presented
of this essay, as much as it may be analogous. Indeed; there is no impetus here to argue
for some sort of conversion, no imperative to enlighten, but only a description of the
situation at hand.

111 John 9:35

112 John 9:41

113 John 10:24


312 A Heresy

114 John 10:25-31

115 ‘…Not for works, but for blasphemy’. This can be seen as pivotal, since the

term ‘blasphemy’ is generally understood to mean ‘to speak evil of’

[http://www.etymonline.com/blasphemy]. Hence, in the sense that this essay suggests,
where his works might actually be words, the power of discourse, by this part in the story,
the glamour of the arousal of the minimal human echo that lay within the fully human is
starting to give way to plain confusion. Whereas before people were interested yet leery,
now people are awakening to the apparent nonsense; whereas before they thought they
were coming upon something in Jesus and his ministry, some event, of a person that is
significant, awed by the plain auspiciousness of the occasion, now their fully human
heritage is asserting itself in the call for identity, and are finding none.

Further; the story itself seems to incorporate a creative technique, literary

devices, to emphasize what is occurring, telling about the turning while exemplifying the
turn in the mechanics of the story itself. At this point the ‘words that are the works’, which
is a kind of glamour of smearing distinction, are falling into distinction, into identity, such
that if the works were indeed experiences upon words, the experience in meaning and of
meaning itself, now there is a questioning upon what exactly was going on. The fully
human is beginning to seek the Law in the works such that some sort of actual activity
must have occurred apart from mere words. The tension has nearly peaked because the
echo of the minimal humanity is fading and credence is moving toward the Law of the
fully human, and Jesus as an identity is getting in the way of what sympathy might have
been resonating. The contradiction that is the existence of God is becoming pronounced,
becoming palatable, and it is not comfortable; in fact, it is offensive.

They go to stone him (to kill him) and Jesus asks them for what, and they say
not for any of his works. Whatever had occurred prior to this they are not so concerned;
whatever miracles may have happened is not the issue now. Now the words and the
works become distinguished against the Law, as though recognizing the remaining
overlap that still is informing them to what Jesus may be, they are going to stone him for
‘speaking evil of…’ – to specify the intensive meaning here – that which is The Good’.
Contradiction now emerging as the indicator of what is false. But the glamour, the
resonance, is still there, albeit barely, and Jesus still talks his way out of it by referring to
the scriptures.

 Kair 313

116 John 10:33-39

117 Psalms 82:6

118 Jesus attempts to appeal to the intact experience of the minimal human, but

it is fading.

119 John 10:42

120 The scholastic method behind the effort of looking into terms for more
definition as to what is particular to the (any) object results in one of two meanings. 1)
Objects are seen to exist in relative space, interacting with one another to allow for the
other’s objectivity. This is the same meaning as liberal social relativity, where reality is
manifested in a negotiation of terms; or, 2) the inability to find the object of the term
shows that there is no object. Here the object in-itself becomes bifurcated: A) In order for
there to be an object of the term, an object that the term is indeed locating and or finding,
a linkage must be effected, since, apparently the route of analysis has arrived at no object
in-itself and yet somehow when we behave in the real world there is apparently an object.
There must be some sort of effective suture that allows for reality to be known as such.
So again, we call this situation where a suture is demanded, faith, and the object (the
multitude of objects) that is effective to grant reality the True Object. Or, B) Terms are
objects. Here there is no segregation nor identification, no link or suture that needs to be
effected, because the term is the object.

With this conclusive matrix of meaning we have clearly two irreconcilable

situations: Reality is that arena where terms identify objects to be negotiated in relative
social, political and ideological space; and the arena where ‘all terms are objects’ reflects
the true condition of reality but in a manner that does not require reality to adhere or
recognize into any ability to apply this situation for coming to a reasonable manner of
negotiation; this is to say, it cannot be willed to apply to any situation. This is the reason
we can speak of orientation upon objects, because there is no real occurrence, no real


314 A Heresy

negotiation that does not rely upon True Objects. Nevertheless, what is true is that there
is no segregation of term and object, as well no real manner to incorporate such an
understanding into the negotiation of reality. The understanding is already intact, already
occurring despite what real estimations would like to identify even unto its consistency
with its truth.

This situation does not connote another linking, and does not mean some sort
of ‘zen state’ of unblinking presence. Only in a further real linking that makes another
mean of this situation does some spiritual ‘actual’ truth occur that presents the ‘essential
truth’ of the universe; in this move, all that has occurred is another real negotiation as the
attempt to will the situation to mean something ‘more true’ or ‘more real’. Hence the only
real way to speak about this situation is to say that it is not real but True. There is no
‘illusion’ happening anywhere, neither some subjective fantasy nor some ‘reality an
illusion’. It is not something to believe in nor have any belief about, and neither can real
negotiation remove its effectiveness as evidencing the truth of the matter at every
occasion. Therefore, it is only honest to speak of this situation of two irreconcilable
situations as consisting of two routes of meaning, but two effective teleologies, because
one is not referring to the other to gain is meaning. One is not more true than the other;
neither can be reduced to the other nor be made to cause the other to come under its
effective sway. Yet, in so much as it may be seen to, there do we have another manner of
analyzing and negotiating reality. So nevertheless and again, the repetition that is
occurring in reality does not occur for what is not real; what is not real is the orientation
upon objects where the term is the object. We might even reiterate the situation again.

121 There is no use of positing ‘immanence’ without a corresponding

‘transcendence’ to argue against, hence both notions pertain to the same thing.

122 One example is right before the story of Lazarus, John 10:42

123 We get a confirmation that indeed there is and will be those who are not Jews

and who are not disciples who nevertheless ‘follow’ Jesus in John coming up in the story.
As well John 8:31-32. “Then Jesus said to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue

 Kair 315

in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth
shall make you free.”

Yet, this is not to say Jesus and the disciples, as subject-objects of which the story
may be about, are not compassionate and kind or not concerned with other people. The
fact that much of the Gospels is Jesus telling people about how they might believe
properly does not necessarily reveal what Jesus himself believes. Indeed; it is only in the
supreme selfishness of the minimal human that a compassion that reaches to all humans,
even as it may be telling them that the truth of their situation is that they do not
understand. This is the meaning of the sacred lie (esotericism).We might be tempted to
say that this essay is a ‘negative’ or ‘darkened’ version that speaks of what lay ‘between
the conventional lines’ of traditional real conveyance.

124 John 11:2. The rest of this section concern this chapter of John.

125 I concur and rely upon Soren Kierkegaard’s appraisal put forth in his “The

Sickness Unto Death”, with a caveat that I discuss elsewhere. Nevertheless, I will not
reiterate him here, but offer a little something more.

126 The truth of the matter is revealed in its own time.

127 John11:9-11

128 See Kierkegaard’s “The Sickness Unto Death”. Lazarus’s sickness is not the

sickness unto death, but indeed he is dead in the sense that is allowed in order to glorify
God, which is to say, everyone counted him as indeed physically dead, and that is why
they buried him.

129John 11:15


316 A Heresy

130 The ‘historical moment’ is intended to reference the facticity of history over

the negotiated interpretation of it. The difference is found when we consider that we have
yet to exhaust the phenomenonalist intension (a subject-agent of transcendence). The
conventional method of finding truth that is likewise involved with an establishment of
identity is problematic. This is why there is and has been an issue with some ‘continental
philosophers’ suggesting their ideas might denote a kind of science, or that we might be
able to develop some sort of a phenomenologist scientism. What we might call a ‘pure’
method of science is one that moves in laborious increments punctuated by momentous
insights that cannot be anticipated, not only around perhaps a single scientist with a
purpose in mind, or an aspect to investigate, but through all the multitudinous scientists
likewise working on often tiny aspects of the same issue. While one could argue there is
a kind of concern for identity in every person (as well as the kind of ‘subjective bias’ such
as Bruno Latour proposes to have uncovered), the science itself, for the hard core
scientist, is what is important and drives the effort.

Admittedly, this might be a bit deluded in ideal, but if we are going to apply a
philosophical reduction (not necessarily a phenomenologist reduction) here likewise,
then we would have to ask how even science itself, the proper science of physical
mechanics and such, functions in the way it does for accomplishments (at least Karl
Popper and Bruno Latour have attempted to answer this question). Of course we cannot
completely dismiss real subjective ‘interference’ with objectivity, but the issue here is not
about absolutes. This issue concerns methods. The issue concerns the real cohesion of
disparate situations. What we are calling ‘conventional method’ is meant to specifically
draw our attention to philosophy and its domain; we suggest that there is a type of real
endeavor that works to draw all things unto itself, to reconciliation, and this is the motion
of identity, of real objects. This motion for the human being is thus involved with what
we usually call subjectivity but is really more an indication of ‘being value’. In other
words, this translates for the human being into having ‘self-worth’ or even ‘relevancy’ or
‘importance’; we might even say that there is a libidinal drive for identity, and this is
indeed part of the constitution of reality.

So it is that in reality, the conventional method misses vital components of truth

for the sake of identity and even argues identity as a ubiquitous feature of what might
possibly be true; conventional method draws all things unto itself and then argues its
truth as if it is the only truth possible. And this is to say that even allowing for the

 Kair 317

possibility of more than one truth is indeed a move of this drawing toward unity. It is a
unitive proposal to say that there is more than one reality. This is, in itself, a
phenomenalist move (Hursselian in the strict sense, as well as of the the ‘centrist subject’
or ‘Cartesian subject’ in general). The point here, though, as I have said, is that such a
method is completely incapable of entertaining that which lay outside is purview, but this
does not mean that there is ‘nothing’ that it does not address or is capable of addressing;
rather, this is to say that reality is the negotiation of terms and thus the historicity of the
situation can never be contemplated by the conventional method due to its foundation in
what is real. Conventional method is thereby centered around a subjective interpretation
of what is occurring and the negotiation of these relative subjective agents. Also, again;
this is not to say that somehow it is incorrect, but only that this is the way it behaves, this
is the true description of how real philosophical negotiation occurs.

Thus when we speak of the ‘historical moment’ of Jesus, we mean to refer to that
fact not negotiated. Here then, we can only be speaking from the historical motion itself;
and this is to say that in this particular historical moment, the event of the minimal human
experience is seen to involve ‘God’ as this universal and basic form can be communicated
across disparate arenas, which we are finding through our venture through the Gospels
here, are two different teleological fields, as we say, two routes of coming upon the object.
The historical moment of Jesus is that moment wherein there is only a real human
experience, a one common ontological arena, such that what is definitively and absolutely
two teleological bases is understood as implicating a further unity, at that, as ‘secret’ or
‘spiritual’ unity, as if a real ontology necessarily, automatically, axiomatically and
omnipresently involves the totality of all things.

The problem then of the usual conventional philosophical route is that because
it is incapable of allowing for anything that is not determined in subjective negotiation,
when the logic of the ends of discourse is presented in history, it is understood as such
rather than experienced; which is to say that there are two types of what is called
‘experience’ that is supposed to equate to the meaning the same thing. The logic of the
ends is viewed upon as a logical conclusion based upon the subjective center of thought
‘thinking and considering’ such logical pathways. This is to say that despite what
definitions might arise to say reality is this-and-that different than before or what another
definition might have proposed, still the thinker is thinking these things through,
considering various discursive designations from a central and prioritized Self-
consciousness, or subjective agency. Even if we were to somehow logically crawl step by
step to be able to say “From dog flower spichz consliger tomorrowpd cloud ke ring flies
to refridgerator” and mean something significant, the metaleptical slide that has occurred


318 A Heresy

to be able to have that clausal phrase mean something meaningful gets nowhere further
that the sentences we are using at this moment to convey an idea. And this is to say that
the human being will always be a human being despite what clausal structure we set upon
it. The political and ideological structure may change, but the question is always how we
were able to develop a global society out of different ‘humanities’ speaking different
languages, formed of different cultures, who all have different terms and even grammars
that order various ‘realities’ if we were not all human? Does it matter if one day we are
all “tchegts”?

The conventional philosophical method has thus ‘skipped’ (what Latour might
call a pass) the end of phenomenology through the application of logic upon it to thereby
posit by a sort of reasoning that we should move to consider something else besides the
dead end phenomenological reduction. This is because the conventional method requires
novel ideas (an ignoring of redundancy). But these ideas are based into the
phenomenologist move, as we said above, these ideas are based in the reduction, in
drawing all meaning unto a centrist occasion. Hence phenomenology has not ended but
was merely passed over for the sake of establishing another real identity. It matters little
if anyone prescribes to Hursserl’s method or moves along his methodological pathway to
a particular (non?) definitional ‘experience’ because when it comes down to it, this kind
of method or attitude upon definitional paths, merely yields another definitional situation
(that here we can call the ‘phenomenological reduction’); an individual moving along
Husserl’s clausal path to his meaning avoids the path that is already being allowed for the
ability to even take his path to any meaning, whether it agrees with him or not.

The point here is that while conventional philosophy would sooner not have to
argue over how identity is a feature that must be dealt with in reality at all times, and as
well not have to expose the weak point of the platform by which the institutional
methodology continues, because the whole platform that is taken as a necessary
condition of real negotiation has already been argued and found lacking. But where these
arguments have occurred they are taken in stride to merely be another part of the
negotiating of the ubiquitous ever-presence. Therefore, in order to come to terms with
what is actually occurring, conventional method must be set aside as a feature of a kind
of functioning of human consciousness. When this happens, or may be seen to be possible,
we begin to see how scientism might become viable, but the only way is to disregard what
the conventional method has to say about it, but more, that whatever it has to say about

 Kair 319

the analysis based upon this view, is itself more evidence of what consciousness does. The
question of origins is necessarily one of real metaphysics.

131 John 11:5-6

132 This reference only occurs in the book of John, and there has been some

dispute through the ages over who this refers to. Nevertheless, we are to gather from John
21:24 that the Gospel of John was written by an eye witness of the events of the book. The
traditional issue has been just who this John was.

133 Lazarus seems to mean any number of variations of “God is my help”, “God

helps”, “My God has helped”. Yet, see one:

http://www.behindthename.com/name/lazarus

134 This is the religious moment. A human organism exists by virtue of it being

a part of a group; there is no human who is alone. Only in conceptual space may a human
be alone. Of course, a human may be isolated from other human beings for any period,
but the fact and ability of the concept negates that it arose by itself.

This may seem extraneous and even silly to state, but the condition is so
ubiquitous as to mean ‘given truth’. Without acknowledging that this is the case, human
beings begin to talk about absolutely true things as if they indeed were absolutely ‘Be-
ing’ that way, universally, eternally manifested in their Being despite the human being
there to conceive of it (the platform on which cause and effect, and decision arise). Of
course, the argument for such real reality is most often taken to these ends (for example,
this is the reasoning behind the noted physicist Stephen Hawking’s proclamation
‘philosophy is dead’), but in fact, one could say that because of this, due to the regular
person not even really being able to extend any argument of Being out to this conclusion
shows 1) that this is indeed the case; 2) that the argument that is made to this end includes
the person who is not able to make the extension; and 3) that the assumption is that we
humans are part of a common group.


320 A Heresy

This means that we are involved with finding only the truth of the human being,
but, where this is not acknowledged or accepted, then we have the notice for a divergence
of reckoning, but not so much because some subject of the common human group wants
to express its subjectivity. Rather, because the common manner of coming upon reality
does not reflect upon its limitation as human, but enacts it as it is, we might say, sublated
in real activity. This sublation thus includes everything within its reckoning as a matter
of course, as obvious but indeed as True and not to be messed with. Yet, once reflection is
taken out of its objective (purpose filled; teleological field) to thus be able to notice as a
real thing this reality, then something interesting happens: Belief loses its substantial
basis. The meaning of believing becomes a quality of a person like ‘this chair is fuzzy’. But
not only this; reality itself becomes qualitative as a thing in-itself, and the negotiation of
argument and belief becomes so much religious conversation, a discussion around the
refining the tenants of dogma. Reality is upset.

We should be able to see then by now that all such polemical philosophical
notions, such as, transcendence and immanence, plural and monist, heaven and hell, real
and illusion, while allowing an identity to be situated in the world, only indicate the True
situation; not that what is real is an illusion, but as we have said, that there are two routes
unto the world, what we can call the ideological-political route that works toward
consolidation of terms under a unified heading, religion, and then there is the True route,
that at first functions disrupt the religious motion, but then by this disruption, becomes
an effort of forensic analysis that is beyond the intension of the phenomenal real subject
of transcendental agency. This is because the transcendental agent will always look for
the reconciliation of political identity through ideological terms. This is then the topic of
my next book “The Second Moment of Decisive Significance”.

However; religion arises here due to the moment wherein Jesus may be talking
to himself as he is addressing himself in the guise of what is presented for the purpose of
his Being, what we can correctly call ‘Being-there’ (Dasein). Religion, as a development,
is a reaction to what is offensive and arises in the misappropriation of the meaning of the
situation, and this is the reason why what might apply for Derrida (below) also applies
for Heidegger: Dasein is a particular manner of coming upon reality, a particular manner
of appropriating meaning and not exactly a conventional summary description of all
Beings. When we speak of humanity we are not also likewise speaking of Daseins.
Heidegger’s attitude is often taken to implicate a common humanity, some sort of
metaphysical constitution of all Beings, even to have incited Harman to extend such

 Kair 321

Beings to non-human Beings. But this sense, in as much as Heidegger and Harman may
have to then defend such a proposal, they are thus withholding something. It is thus the
accompanying proposal that this withholding is an essential aspect of Being that calls
forth the need for an opening such the likes of Bruno Latour, because what is withheld
and what withdraws from view only behaves this way so much as this is a conscious
situation. The attempt to bring a case to a court that is incapable of hearing it, results in
(what is said of the case, which is, to use Lyotard’s analogy, the damages accrued to be
accommodated for) the actual Event for which the case is brought being withheld as well
as withdrawing from view; the difference between these clauses being only one of the
moment for which it is used, as in tool use.

The point here is that the mistake usually allows for conventional religion as an
institution of grace in that same capacity as, say, engineering is an institution; it appears
(to meaning of meaning) that religion is accounting for something essentially
instrumental for all of humanity, whereas engineering does not base itself on a
misappropriation of the facts. Mechanics cannot be said to mistake facts because its
system is entirely limited by its own elements called facts. Religion, though, has an issue
in that it does not address true facts but only real facts, by virtue of the situation we
describe through this essay. There is a double narrative in play that is avoided for the
sake of avoiding its offensive suggestion, avoided through such real tropes of dogmatism
such as spawned through subjective interpretation; again, the more precise stating of this
situation is ‘subjective interpretation of subjective interpretation’ (redundancy). The
double narrative occurs in the decoupling of the overwritten discourse. Such decoupling
then sees that when Jesus is talking to himself about himself, he is thereby by virtue of
the fact not excluding their (the fully human) situation, since all that occurs does so within
a teleological frame that real reckoning, a particular orientation upon objects, cannot
account for and cannot hear. This is the strange situation that conventional reckoning
would call ironic in the sense of some real spiritual motion, because conventional
reckoning cannot make sense of that which resides in meaning outside its manner of
discerning objects, and this is to say, the arena wherein subjectivity lay, which is, a
particular teleo-ontological frame; hence its requirement for True Objects. The issue of
the return of being in ‘presence’ of this real teleology is taken up in the Afterword.

135 Luke 16:14-31, and 17:1-10


322 A Heresy

136 The appropriate thing to say at any moment usually occurs through

considering the moment, but Jesus’s appropriation is already manifest, he has only the
propriety of existence as it unfolds by its terms; thus what is spoken occurs in the moment
often as an ironic twist of what is at issue there.

137 Pg 128; “Jesus has come to fulfill the law…”

138 Even to understand some zen type meditational unity, some peaceful
nothingness achieved through deep contemplation is still a situation of a segregated
object, namely, this state of zen (so to speak). The feeling of meditational zen bliss
nothingness is a real state, but it is only that; the indication that such an experience
denotes a fundamental truth of some universal sort is, however offensive this may seem,
merely another objective state of separation. We will find this same meaning in certain
Eastern texts, which means, in short, that the idea that one has attained enlightenment is
a sign that enlightenment has not been reached. This is axiomatic to the situation we
attend when it comes to spiritual knowledge of which Judaism and Jesus mark a
processual pause. Were we never to pause, we would need no epistemological pass to
prove to those who don’t know or understand that enlightenment is the last ironic
position, the position that shows by its being manifest within the context of proof through
a real evidentiary hearing is, nonetheless, not the state that it is supposed to be.

139 I call this kind of method for finding a correct interpretation forced. See note

below concerning ‘ethical objectivity’.

140 We see this effort everywhere. Aleister Crowley has his infamous “Do what

thy wilt shall be the whole of the Law”; Scientology proposes that through its method one
might become ‘clear’; Christian Science proposes a ‘correct’ understanding of the Bible;
Christianity itself is modeled around the want for such ‘perfection’ and the inherent
human inability to have it; Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs tends to indicate the
same possibility, at least as a potential to guide the effort; certain meditational techniques
have their focus the alignment with a spiritual center; Buddhism is proposed upon an end

 Kair 323

goal of ‘enlightenment’. In fact, near every religious and psychological proposal has in
mind an ideal state of Being where the individual is not at odds with itself, and this feature
seems to identify a real approach to understanding human activity.

The heretical view that is put forth through this essay is the complete opposite
of such real estimation; we could even say that the ‘undefined’, or transcendental object
of such real estimations is the object this essay uncovers.

141 Luke 14:25-35

142 Luke 16:10-12

143 Luke 16:21. This foregoing segment’s excerpts are from Luke 16:19-31

144 Luke 16:26

145 See the Afterword for more on this feature of world.

146 A categorical imperative cannot be chosen upon: It is a category that can only

occur along its true bases. The idea that there may a choice as to a proper manner of being,
whether it be a chair to a chair, a dog to a dog, or a proper manner of activity for any
object, which is to say, for any situation, is entirely ethical, and based in a real negotiation;
this take upon a categorical imperative amounts to the key issue of real activity.

147 Luke 16:31

148 Luke 17:1-3


324 A Heresy

149 Recall the nil subject is a conflation of objects.

150 Again, Zizek; the parallax view.

151 If it were some psychological slip then it would have been noticed long

before this essay because there would have been some unsettling aspect about it, some
itch that need to be scratched through all the interpretations. Religion would never had
held up as long as it does. It is the seamless movement of clauses that reveals the real fully
human to its minimal basis (it’s a posteriori orientation to be a priori) that allows for a
real religious establishment. This is also how we may tell the difference between ‘false
prophets’ and what we then can say are ‘true’ prophets; false prophets always have a
noticeable real psychological component in what they overtly preach; for example,
vehement protestations against what appears commonly accepted. Though psychology
might wish to place Jesus Christ under their microscope, what agreement they could
come to will always be left in doubt as to how or why he became so widely controversial;
it will always have to incorporate objective real aspects (ideological, cultural, political) to
thereby argue backwards into the subject as a conflation of objects (as opposed to being
determined by them). What is missed in the psychological analysis is exactly what is
missed by the psychological gaze: The psychologist itself.

152 Sin is offense, but not in the manner it is applied for conventional religious

estimations of sin. There are two operations at work here for this. We have described the
meaning of conventional reality and how faith is required for estimations of real things.
This is due to a particular route of logical analysis of objects that finds no object in-itself,
but only objects of knowledge. Objects with which we interact on a routine and common
basis is apparent; real occurrence seems to defy that reality is an illusion. The idea that
consciousness would be so able to deceive itself merely through some ideal of knowledge
requires that some other element is responsible, some aspect that is transcendent to the
situation; even if there is no outside aspect we cannot but help for a want to reason into
this ‘illusory otherness’, if we must say that. If a transcendent is operating, then for

 Kair 325

consciousness of the logical reduction, it is faith that allows for its operation. This is all to
say that reality functions through a denial of contradiction. So it is not all improper for
Jesus to say “offenses will come”, since behavior in reality is based in a denial of the
offensive situation. However, at the same time, it is this ‘original sin’ that allows for the
concept of an ethical sin.

Yet, this is not concerning how sin might be an offense; such an idea only comes
once existence has begun to be viewed for what it is, which is to say, with Kierkegaard.

153 Luke 17:3

154 Luke 17:6

155 By ‘ethical objectivity’ I mean to indicate that manner of appropriating

meaning through force. This is to say what has just been said, that there is a kind of
presence or presentation that appears to have meaning, but it is one that is not readily
available; hence one ‘creates meaning’ by forcing meaning into the confusing situation.
He thus brings in sensibilities and parallel examples that have nothing to do with the
situation at hand. This is not dissimilar the psychological experiments where subjects are
shown a set of unrelated pictures in a random sequential order and told there is a
common thread that links a set of pictures; many of the subjects will spontaneously create
sensible meaning out the the situation of pictures, including remarkably involved
narratives and or explanations. The point concerns the making of meaning. The link
involved in such a forcing is what has been described in the first part of this essay of the
minimal and fully human conditions. The fully human is compelled to make a meaning
out of a feeling (of its minimal humanity, that ‘part’ of being human that has been
renounced for the sake of the human heritage) around clausal structures of which he
cannot immediately find meaning, structures the sensibility of which he cannot
apprehend. Due to this ‘feeling’ he thus ‘constructs’ a meaning that makes sense merely
from the imperative to make sense of it.

Hence, even if we will set aside the idea that there are two irreconcilable routes
to say that this is what consciousness does at all times for every human, then the manner
by which we might find truth should be counted by the principle of Ockham’s Razor,


326 A Heresy

where the sensibility that relies upon the fewest outside assumptions should be the one
counted correct, rather than counting correct the sensibility that has the most votes.

In this essay, the term ‘objectivity’ is always used in its conventional sense,
whereas, unless otherwise specified, the term ‘object’ is based within the set of equivocal
universal beings. ‘Objectivity’ always concerns an ethical construct, where ‘object’ is
merely a situation. The use of the term ‘ethical objectivity’ is used then merely to remind
the reader of this specific type of existential identity.

156 In the beginning, a catastrophe occurred. As Zizek has said, “Something went

terribly wrong.”

157 This is not the same as a proof through contradiction. Asking into a
contradiction is to ask, for example, why contradiction is contradictory. The only answer
in these certain cases is another answer, but one that avoids the original situation through
a particular definitional structure. For a further example; a contradicts b. Why? Because
a= c+d. We have not actually found why a an b are contradictory, we have merely avoided
the situation of (a,b) by amending the meaning of the original set, by actually denying its
meaning. This, of course, is not to say that such moves cannot be mathematically viable,
but only that certain situations present contradictions that are only solvable by this kind
of move.

This, of course, is the reason why we identify conventional philosophy, to

distinguish how it supposes to be able to arise out of these mathematical types of
contradictory truth, albeit, through a subjective agency. It does this because it does not
recognize the redundancy that occurs when its ‘sacred and unimpeachable’ agency is
forced through ‘ending’ contradictions.

158 All falls together, for the plight of the real fully human individual is indeed to

find confidence in oneself, which then amounts to all the other confidences one can have:
Trust in others, security in living, the feeling that what one is doing is valuable. All these
things come for the fully human through action that is set upon a different basis from

 Kair 327

thought; the whole of real human activity is based hoping what one does supplies
satisfaction.

Even the idea that a person is trying to escape a situation, say, through using
drugs, is based in the effort to be satisfied. In this way no one is trying to escape anything,
but is rather taking the most sensible course which reconciles act and thought, activity
and its corresponding faith. One could even say that a person becomes addicted when
what has been supplying them with the satisfaction of Being is suddenly understood as
not granting them the corresponding reflection of value. Perhaps we might then center
efforts to treat drug addicts by viewing their activity through this lens of functionality,
instead of the lens that sees their behavior as dysfunctional.

159 Indeed; once this is permitted, the door is open into the argument for
transcendental agency, and eventually for such agency being an existential given of being
human. The salient argument is the ontological argument for the existence of God.
Specifically, once we may ask into a truism, beyond the bare fact, then does the answers
that arise become themselves evidence of the existence of not only an extra-worldly or
supernatural agency, but also that such an agency is speaking or communing directly with
the agent herself. This is the foundation of the sovereign, and with its corresponding
inspired discourse of freedom, eventually we have a whole world of sovereigns with
equal but varying degrees and qualities of communion. This then requires that such
populace of sovereigns be regulated, and soon, as much as the regulation is being
developed by these inspired agents as well as being applied to their situation, the need
for idea upon which governmentality has arisen becomes problematic. The only two
options left is either all-out war and violence upon the perceived incorrect view(s) that
would assert both God and no-God (either positions behave in the same manner and can
become a reason for violence), or a dissolution of the need for a transcendental agency
itself; which is, as we say, the impetus for an understanding of two routes.

160 As every real thing exists in a relation, relative to everything else, and thus

involves segregated True Objects (people, rocks, quarks), so the subject, the human
thinker, can be said to exist in between Objects, a mediator of objects and knowledge of
them.


328 A Heresy

161 John 11:15. Jesus says I am glad for your sakes…to the intent that ye may

believe’. Jesus wanted them to witness not so much because they still doubted anything;
he wanted them to watch and see ‘how its done’.

162 John 11:18

163 John 11:25-26

164 No difficulty should arise in seeing this statement of ‘believing’ as meaning

‘knowing’, but further that this is spoken in a manner that does not negate the possibility
that Martha likewise is ‘Christ’. In effect, Jesus is asking her of her minimal humanity, and
in a way ‘re-settling’ her experience within the experience. He says “I am” the resurrection
and the life; he who knows, knows. The death of Lazarus is merely sleep, for the glory of
God. Lazarus’s glory of God, but the disciples’ knowledge of the situation at hand.

165 The indication of the two routes. Dead but only sleeping to Jesus and the

disciples, and dead for all intents and purposes for everyone else.

166 The inability to willfully bring about what appears be the sensible and logical

step in a motion is a recurring theme of the minimal human.

167 John 11:40. The rest of this section follows through the verses of John
chapter 11.

168 Wikipedia: “Five furlongs are about 1.0 kilometer (1.00584 km is the exact

value, according to the international conversion)”. John says that Bethany was nigh unto
Jerusalem, about fifteen furlongs off. Google conversion has 15 furlongs=1.875 miles.

 Kair 329

169 Mark 1:22

170 See below.

171 Matthew 5:17

172 It is easy to conclude that this is where faith becomes operative as a means

to salvation; indeed, the whole of Christendom, if not Islam but all types of religious
posture, can be said to involve the insecure individual, willing to believe this religious
item over what she knows seems questionable. As we have said: There is no overcoming
faith, and such a faith is found in redundancy; faith allows recourse ‘out of’ the
redundancy through its effective denial. It is the necessity to resolve the double move of
meaningful existence to one side or the other, apply it to the either/or mandate, to
thereby reconcile it to a sort of fulfillment, that arrives with the distinctions of belief, faith,
knowledge and all sort of variation of the theme. Irony is the suspension of this mandate.

It should be no surprise that Kierkegaard’s original contribution is the question

of epistemological teleology. “Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical”, is not an
ethical question; it is not to be applied in its original meaning to questions of ‘the spirit’.
It is not an ontological question that everyone is concerned about. The questions of spirit
that Kierkegaard considers are based in his moment, where the failure to reconcile this
polemical condition means a necessary recourse to some ideal agent, some essential
extra-universal interlocutor that solves the problem and reconciles the discrepancy;
Kierkegaard could not see for his moment that the discrepancy occurs only in a particular
scheme of meaning, by a particular orientation upon reality. Irony is not an uncertainty,
as Kierkegaard (ironically) evidences by his writings. It is the aggregate of opinions that
attempt to keep the suspension for the sake of uncertainty, as an uncertainty, to thereby
reify a faithful comfort through the fully human methodological route, to justify reality
and its mandates, it commandments, that miss the true stakes of the issue.

Faith is thus the hope and wish for certainty in a cloud of meaning that is
uncertainty itself. As history moves away from the sensibility involved or behind any
faith, faith itself comes to posit more and more absurd qualities of this Object, as its Object


330 A Heresy

is supposed eternal and immovable, such that we find with Kierkegaard a positing of
Christ as an actual (non) –Object, whereby only faith can traverse the abysmal gap
between the position and its Object, at that, brought down as an analogy in ‘Christ’, which
then must be the first and primary ironic object. We see, though, by this ‘irony of irony’ a
historical mark, a mythological stratum, so to speak. Irony in its suspension, rather than
in its recollection to reality, on the other hand, is founded in certainty, in knowledge of
the truth, but it is the appearance of this truth that calls for faith in its reflection (as idols
are only an ‘appearance’ of truth). Again; the Gospels are a telling, a working, of the
minimal human conditions of meaning, of humanity coming to terms with itself, the
movement from faith in reality, to knowledge of truth.

This is the significance of Peter, and why Peter becomes the basis of the church:
Because his condition marks a factual instance of historical meaning. If one has only faith,
then no church is founded but merely rises and falls by the dictates of her religion. Peter
searches for the truth, and finds it in the very real situation of being, through actual
occurrences.

173 That which is is justified by the True Object is justified by nothing, emptiness;

this is to say, there is no knowable object ‘in-itself’ except that which is justified by a type
of Kantian intuition, which is for my terms, conventional faith. But the irony does not stop
there. The manner by which we might even say that there is no object in-itself, is, in itself,
merely a manner of meaning, which means, albeit redundantly, that there is no knowable
object in-itself because that is how we are knowing things through this particular manner
of meaning, an ‘evidence’ of a particular historical motion, a certain indicator of historical
phase. Conventional faith is the ‘suture’(pass) by which the manner, route, or orientation,
of knowing may be solute, that is, may operate for a viable reality; faith is the counter
weight of such meaningful limitation that allows for the logical invocation of the
transcendent. The exposing of the transcendent to the sensible appropriation of human
experience without the need for fantastical explanation, forms the impetus of this essay.

174 John 1:1

 Kair 331

175 “…sufficient density…” This sentence suggests that such a significant
experience (Christ) is a form of common human experience, one that nevertheless is
uncommon or exceptional. We mean here then to indicate what is ‘common’ in the sense
of the unknown potential involved with the inability to know which person might be privy
to the experience, and not common in the sense that surely every human has within them,
within their being, the potential to come upon the experience. It is this exceptionality that
this essay addresses. So it is, it seems so exceptional that it would eventually have to be
put into context in the manner of the Gospels, as, indeed, an exceptional event. Because
of the offense involved in most people not having been come upon by the experience
(though one would have maybe liked to have been), this exception is the indicator of what
is not common in the potential of some whole human organism, as well as the indication
for a divergence and the pronunciation of power.

The gist of having a ‘sufficient density’ of people who are come upon by such an
experience relies upon the notion that such people are or were diffused within a certain
populace, any particular group, and so the expression of such an experience was
necessarily subordinated to what I have termed ‘fully human’ discourse, as I describe,
which could for a more general description of this situation involving various culture
groups be more properly called a ‘priority discourse’, a proper manner or method by
which to make meaning of any situation. Such priority discourse thus has then given us
various tellings of such events yet disguised or appropriated for the fully human
discourse of what is real, keeping in mind, though, that our description here is in the
context of our ability to know and designate, and that such ‘diffusion’ most likely merely
constituted the gestalt affect cohesion that is the group itself; which is to say, in
supernatural, superstitious, and mythological ‘realities’ that go to explain away ignorance
for those who are so ignorant, for example, elves, ghosts, daemons, witches, possession
and such. Such a posited divergence then indicates a pivotal moment of such affect. The
inherent resistance of those people for whom were come upon by such an exceptional
experience must be seen with reference to the frustration imparted by the counter-partial
magnanimousness or mere strangeness of such people by the majority as the former dealt
with the challenge of expressing such apparently (to such person) intimate and important
knowledge, as the priority discourse repeatedly and surely usurped for itself, the fully
human (true-) reality, the meaning the person was trying to convey. (I am reminded of
the part in the story “Fight Club”, when a man dies because of the antics of Project
Mayhem, and the narrator, the ‘sane’ half of the authorial duo, is trying to get the people
to see the insanity of the Project through the reality of the man’s death. The whole scene
represents the ‘real’ insanity of the narrator’s actual situation.) Hence we may have
extrapolated the meanings of certain cultural contexts of ‘possession’, ’blessed’ and


332 A Heresy

‘auspicious’ into what the rationalism of the West typically associates with insanity, but
vice versa, where the idea of insanity may thus find a more exclusive, particular and
limited definition of itself. Indeed, now, for example, Derrida’s and Foucault’s use of
‘madness’ likewise had asked us to further make a distinction between actual mental
disease, and mere alternate if also divergent ways of coming upon and knowing reality.

It is not unsound to suggest that in the time just prior the Roman Empire, such
distinct and segregated cultural discourses, beforehand being only marginally and
superficially integrated perhaps through trade, were held apart from the intimacy
required of communicating their respective ‘world views’ by physical distance as well as
the tendency for cultural hegemonic propriety active within respective groups. The
enjoining of such distinct groups through the encompassing empire (‘the world is Rome’),
may have brought a certain opportunity for more intimate and integral communication.
Likewise, people of such exceptional experience would have an opportunity to find each
other and speak openly to each other by a different form of communication that would
then be developed in their interactions to the opposite effect of the oppressing situation
wherein such people had found themselves beforehand, but likely the situation by which
such people found themselves different came about with the arrival of Rome.

An example is the hermaphrodite. Certain cultures have had meaningful room

for such anomalies in their society, whereas other cultures required some sort of physical
disruption to place them within the social order. It is such subaltern experience, removed
from its political foundations and connotations of the 20th century, that then can be seen
to come to a head in the telling of the Gospels. Replace the political meaning, we are able
to draw an analogy from the cultural isolation of yesteryear to the politically enforced
isolation of our day where reality itself is a particular proper and legal existential mode.

Yet despite what cultural conflations may have allowed for of those different
people coming together, there is of course the more plain occurrence of the cultural
conflation of products. In as much as there may be a group of Jews, say, that came upon or
were come upon by some products of another culture, practical, discursive and material
products, products that were foreign, or perhaps were made foreign over time by the
consistent enactment of prohibitions to the shared cultural experience, there could be
groups formed, perhaps, that through the engagement of such products, found
themselves apprehending the world differently, which is to say, in the manner and logic
that this essay espouses, such that a unique form of the invasive cultural product emerged
in the presence of this new medium, namely, the Hebrew worldview, such that both were

 Kair 333

transformed. The material itself can also thus be said to have or otherwise attained
sufficient density.

176 From this notion, it suddenly becomes easier to make sense of the ‘disciple

whom Jesus loved’ discussed above, for then there is no mistaking that the disciple was
and is all disciples.

177 The further question raised in this essay is whether all the Gospel authors

are likewise merely talking about themselves, and to what extent or in what capacity for
meaning might this be true. Obviously something happened; books were written. We
cannot dismiss the reporting of some actual fact of empirical history, but likewise we
should not easily assume the end of it. The more significant Event concerns the complicity
of discourse and activity.

178 As an analogy of this situation, we might see of this difference, this difficulty,

an expression of a three-plus dimensional state expressed as two dimensions. The

difficulty does not lay in that fact that a multidimensional space can be sensibly reduced
to two dimensions, but it is the expressing of that two dimensional state (of the three-
plus state) in the terms of the three-plus state that poses a challenge, because the
‘continental bound native’ of the three-plus state will always want to see the expression
of the two-dimensional state as a three-plus expression. The difficulty arises in the
primary sense of what is foundational; if multidimensionality is primary, then any
expression of two-dimensional space is automatically relegated to its being within a
multidimensional ‘truth’ for its sensibility. It is the recurrent instalment of
multidimensionality to the disruption of multidimensionality (seeing disruption as
evidence that three-plus equals three-plus) that may be analogous to the correlational
limit of discourse. Again: The limit is solved by suspension.

179 John 1:1


334 A Heresy

180 This is the question that Jean François Lyotard addresses in his book “The

Differend”. The question he poses is of the historically advanced situation: How can a
plaintiff get justice for a case that the court cannot (incapable) hear?

181 This, of course, is a particularly philosophical end-product. There is never

any evidence that this mean is accounting for a greater whole humanity or universal
existence; rather the evidence self-reports; hence our situation of plurality. At this point
it is no longer precise to think of things in terms of ‘belief systems’, since we are no longer
dealing with what people may be able to choose to believe. Nevertheless, there is still a
choice in what people believe; but moreover, we are dealing with a particular manner of
coming upon reality that we can call the Truth, and hence we may invoke ‘truth systems’,
or even Badiou’s ‘truth procedures’, but the estimation of what these various truths may
be are merely part of the historical working of unity. Again we come upon two routes of
meaning, what we can call effective teleology.

As Badiou notes, once we enter the two, the door is opened for the multiplicity,
so the philosophical issue concerns the two. The consideration of plurality is a real
concern, but we might see that it is less a philosophical concern and more one of social
critique (or political, or ideological, or environmental, medical, psychological, et cetera.).
The discussion between a Christian Creationist, atheist evolutionary biologist, and
ontological philosopher may never find resolution except by the reckoning of each, and
together the acceptance of difference. They may understand the various reasons why
each sees theirs is the best, and each may even alter their individual belief or amend what
is considered for their position as to how they might talk about their truth (‘the truth’),
but this manner develops only a real arena, which is in this moment, of multiple truths,
beliefs, realities, what we tend to put under the umbrella of pluralism.

182 The event that can be conflated into moment of the Crucifixion begins before

the Passover. After the story of Lazarus, the situation begins 6 days before the Passover
culminating in a shift of action on the night of the Passover when Jesus is apprehended.

 Kair 335

183 A more precise way for this classification might be ‘people who believe in the

dogma of the religious institutions’, but the manner by which the Judeo-religious doctrine
has been disseminated through scholastic teaching will not exempt near everyone from
the ‘religious’ category. The persistent and incessant problem with some areas of
academic philosophical effort is found in the inability of many people to get at the
meaning of the philosophical texts. In this manner, many philosophical discourses are
misappropriated as they are misunderstood. This arises due to a confusion involved with
method; it is always founded upon an assumed common practice and or arena of practice.
This is to say, on one hand, quite often if not historically proper, those who would be
appropriating a kind of ‘correct’ meaning still involve themselves in an effort to exhibit
and prove for others – but everyone – the veracity of their solution. And, on the other
hand, those who indeed are misappropriating and misconstruing the texts are confirmed
in their mistake (that it is no mistake) by the former authors addressing the latters’
objections. This is the problem we come upon presently. The issue at hand is confused as
it is conflated into a one common discourse. It occurs of course because it is offensive and
illegal, as well as institutionally undemocratic, to presume privilege upon any situation.
No one is allowed to understand anything that does not present itself in a continuum of
common human potential. Ironically, this is what eventually allows all discourse its
inherent ideological hierarchy, which is to say, religious founding. For, if we could admit
that there is knowledge that is privileged in an essential case, then, again ironically, we
would have the conditions for a true egalitarian and democratic state. But of course, as
we see and are coming to terms with, this never happens, and further this is the reason
why it appears to some philosophers that some kind of grand reckoning is occurring,
some final and all ‘end of the world’. What seemed to be the ethical and proper route for
discovering or uncovering a ‘saving truth’ is actually turning out to be contradictory in-
itself; that is, to be unambiguous as possible, as a route for meaning, those who are
invested in the discourse of term-identities see the state of discourse (its meaning-full
state) as revealing its collapse as if the world is actually in the throwes of dying; it becomes
evident everywhere. They await as they are witnessing the great world catastrophe; this
is a religious view. The meaning of the texts is found through a misappropriation, an
incorrect route, and this route followed leads to catastrophe – but only unto itself. So it
is, we need not and cannot simply decide that this calls for no action; on the contrary, real
estimations must be acted upon because they are real.

Hegel and others are always already lost because humanity is caught by a
method that must always reduce meaning to the lowest common strata of inclusion. We
never become lifted up; or rather, we only become lifted up in so much as we rise on the


336 A Heresy

shoulders of others, whether they want us to or not, and often even against their
protestations.

184 …or some ‘given/unknown-effect’ rationality. Most critical theory resides

upon the given situation that is unquestioned. The term ‘God’ is excluded from most of
these ‘social-political’ analyses to avoid aggravating already foggy inroads to the situation
at hand.

185 I am of course referencing the notorious oddity of the Genesis Chapters 1 and

2. Conventional religious are often heard explaining that the second chapter is just an
elaboration of the first chapter, but we might gain a better meaning when we see the
literary function involved as reflecting an actual situation of being human (already
‘created’). Consciousness has a type of experiential occurrence of meaning that conveys
or projects its meaning into the actual occurrence of activity come upon in subsequence.
The subsequent occasion unfolds differently but the meaning upholds its consistency
throughout the events. In this specific case, Jesus first comes upon the experience for
itself and draws the meaning of it in itself. He then is in a position to recognize the
experience once it is going to occur again, but albeit, this next time, as an actualized
objective event, what we call proof, and thus verification of the Truth.

186 We should be careful not to reduce this manner of description to mean that

its meaning must fall to one side or the other. To say ‘discursive trope’ can be taken to
imply that it is all merely a literary device, and reduce the human being back into the
common contingency of human choice and activity; which is to say, political and
ideological psychological theories. We are not dealing here with a segregated real-truth,
but instead are involved with the presentation of truth itself, which then conveys the
consistency of the literary and the physical, the metaphor and the historical, as inevitably
coincidental.

 Kair 337

187 This is the beginning of the conventional religious mistake; the beginning of

the True Object.

188 The death of the True Object of the subject-object.

189 See Soren Kierkegaard’s “The Concept of Anxiety”, and as anxiety might

culminate in despair, as well “The Sickness Unto Death”. And of course never to forget,
“Fear and Trembling”. There is a reason why Sartre called Kierkegaard the first
existentialist. Kierkegaard understands original sin as a particular state of ancestral
inheritance, and wants to reduce the Christian narrative (as this essay does) to human
existential Being. This inherited state is thus not of truth or faith, but of ignorance, of
limitation, of being separated from God. Hence Christ becomes for him an example of
what faith should strive for as a type or conditional quality, which is to say, that which is
completely beyond rationality, what he calls absurd. The example being, in this case, that
a human being could indeed be sent from God, the Son of God, who actually was
resurrected bodily from physical death. Here we will not get into the details of where
Master Kierkegaard went wrong, but suffice to see where he was right: He sees faith as
that into which the leap arrives, and not as a basis from which to leap in the conventional
sense, i.e. a ‘leap of faith’. With respect to Master Kierkegaard, though, and his exemplar
of faith, Abraham, if we remove Abraham from the possibility of faith and instead see him
as acting through knowledge of the Truth, then it is likewise a simple conceptual
displacement to understand the situation presented in this essay. If the leap is into faith
and not of or from faith, and this situation or state of being in faith is not one of hope nor
any decision about whether one should or shouldn’t follow ‘God’s command’, then I feel
it is a better and more precise designation to call this a state of knowing, of having
knowledge instead of having faith. Hence, the leap then coincides with the more common
sense idea of what faith is, such that one would make a leap of faith in hopes that the
Object of faith will justify the move. In contrast, neither Abraham, nor Moses, nor Jesus
hope for any justification; they may question at times the odd situation in which they find
themselves, but when the hope arises, as with Jesus’s vacillations, it is a signal that a
correction is needed, which is then the correction that no hope is needed, but only
knowledge. One does not have faith that God has their back, one simply knows that indeed
God does, at that, despite what momentary doubts might question that state of Being.


338 A Heresy

190 See the discussion about Moses and the Burning Bush.

191 We are reminded of Derrida’s commentaries upon women and the feminine.

The truth, in this view, is a kind of double departure, a double withdrawal; a disruption
of sorts that thereby disrupts by coming forward and then retreating from the advance.
The self-consciousness thereby has no self-consciousness prior to this moment but is
instead involved with merely a motion of faith, determined as such in contingency. The
advance is thus a kind a ‘falling out of grace’, against which the retreat disrupts everything
that has been known ‘of faith’ until that point. It amounts to the question that must be
answered but continues to supply questions as a sort of route, which we might say, is a
route out of faith and into truth. Nonetheless, there is no transcending transcendence;
rather, where faith posits transcendence in a redundancy where the Object of faith is seen
to have intervened to grant faith, there only may we transcend transcendence. But Hegel
was incomplete; Kierkegaard completes the motion. What occurs in this ‘second’
transcendence is actually a return to, not immanence, but existence, and at that, its
material. As Nietzsche, we return back ‘to the earth’, to actuality, and this is because we
(in regards to the rebuttal at hand: The fully human) are already oriented upon
transcendence. Where the fully human sees in its meaning an essential meaning, an
inspired meaning, there do we have indicated the real ability to transcend this ‘mundane’
reality. All this occurs in a specific paradigm of meaning, and, if we can reference the
simple translation of books, this specific paradigm was indeed masculine; in the Bible we
have ‘The Father’. In reference to this state, whilst occupied by this real-truth, the only
meaningful way to transcend this situation is found within the structure of meaning itself,
that which carries and informs what masculine is, what faith and spirit is. The distance
that is occurring, that is suspended within this paradigm, is exactly what is feminine, what
is ‘not-faith’, ‘not-transcendence’, ‘not-sinful’, this last meaning in reference to the
Kierkegaardian sin, ‘not in despair’ and ‘not stemming from offense’. We there by face
what is before us without reference to anything outside the paradigm and address it as
such: As actuality. Hence, it is the feminine that leads one out of faith, to wisdom.

192 One day, perhaps, I will write a book that considers all we have on the topic,

though this essay might do very well at closing the need for such a volume.

 Kair 339

193 The indication of repetition is present in this. Once we are able to explain a

situation without reference to an outside influence or creator, then what is left is how
that situation came to be. This is the default ground from which all religious speculation
arises, and is why we can say that if history is a process of humanity coming to terms with
itself in the universe, its placement and purpose, then with this explicatory disclosure,
history will now begin to repeat, because the fully human will not be able to resist, again,
positing what this outside aspect may be, and will develop, again, further rationales and
explanatory theories that appear, again, sensible and reasonable, which is to say, they will
develop another meaningful encompassing identity (institution) that we call the True
Object.

Such an explanation must encompass not merely what means, such as

psychology and neuroscience decide upon, but more so must address route of meaning,
for the current platform of sciences will not ever get into just what is occurring so as to
be able to come across their own scientific proposals – for example, no matter what
chemical-neuro pathways, no matter what plasticity might explain how the organ of the
body functions to make meaning, it will never directly access nor address the scientist
who is using such knowledge; as we might say, the scientist always withdraws from its
findings, for its use. The issue of route, nevertheless and strangely enough, just may allow
us to come to terms with our situation so that we no longer have such paralyzing
meanings that propose endless arguments for the sake of the the faith invested by the
Truth of the term in questions, arguments that are never communicating to one another
but are rather asserting their difference upon one another. Maybe not now, but at some
point, everyone will have to be included, for we are still caught in the truth that faith is
providing; as Slavoj Zizek has been noted to say, ‘it is the most difficult thing to imagine
outside of capitalism’.

194 The same just noted; Matthew 26:58, 69-75; Mark 14:54,66-72; Luke 22:54-

62; John 18:15-18, 25-26.

195 Maybe we could even say that the posse brought the Lamb to be sacrificed

for the Passover, but where this time, God is going to ‘passover’ the Jews so as to allow
them to remain dead.


340 A Heresy

196 Luke 22:51

197 Matthew 27:1-8

198 There is a certain kind of honesty that is not found in capitalistic states. We

might imagine that the vacillations are indeed a personal experience of intimate
insecurity, and the Gospels were the product of various people who had indeed
experienced such sorry moments, such anxiety and came together to talk about them,
finding the commonality of such experiences. This as opposed to the capitalistic mode
which upholds the insecurity and keeps it for oneself and uses the experience, the lack of
confidence, to gain leverage and advantage upon everyone else. We might find thus a new
definition of individualism in this withholding of insecurity.

199 Matthew 26:59-62; Mark 14:55-60

200 John 18: 19-24

201 Many modern English translations have this terms a ‘advocate’ to emphasize,

in a manner of speaking that Jesus, The Object of their faith, advocates for their sinfulness.
One has to wonder of the term ‘advocate’ did not exist yet at the time of the first
translations of the Bible into English.

202 It is significant that Jesus rebukes such retaliation, such attack and reaches

out to replace the stricken ear.

 Kair 341

203 Like Jesus in his vacillations. So this story of Simon-Peter might be seen as

conspiratorial with this story (of Jesus) in which it is embedded. That together they
evidence a beginning of a type of existential historical motion.

204 Peter has overridden the choice that is no choice. He has made and is an

example of the real act and therefore of redundancy yet set aside, which is the object. I
will take up this question more thoroughly in my book “The Significant Event. Absolution
and The Second Moment of Decisive Significance.”.

205 Matthew 16:18-19

206 Matthew 16:4

207 This is to say that the item does not reside with a potential of capacity to have

an act of belief apply to it. It is not that one finds it incredible or difficult to believe, but
rather that in fact it is outside the purview of what belief may apprehend through its
meaning. Belief has no operation here; what one may believe is moot; belief does not
apply.

208 The book of Jonah is the story of Jonah who is told by God to go preach to a

city that was wicked, but Jonah doesn’t go there and instead attempts to flee from the
presence of God because, we are to presume, he thought the city should be destroyed
rather than be given the opportunity to be saved. He gets on a ship that is leaving and God
sends a terrible storm upon it. Jonah tells the crew to throw him overboard because he is
the reason that the storm is upon them. He goes into the water, gets swallowed by a whale
who spits him up after three days. Jonah ends up going to the city and telling them that
God will destroy the city if they don’t stop their evil ways, and everyone including the
king repents and God saves the city. But Jonah is still pissed because he thought they
shouldn’t have been saved. He prays to God to take his life because it’s better to die than
have to deal with the city being saved. So he goes out of the city and sits under booth to
wait to see what God will do. God then has a wind come up and blow his booth over, so


342 A Heresy

the sun beats down on Jonah so hot until he passes out. Then God has a gourd grow over
his head to shield it from the sun, and when he woke he was very happy. But then a worm
comes and kills the gourd so the sun bakes Jonah again, to which he is sad and wants to
die. God asks him if it is good enough to want to die because the gourd is gone, and Jonah
says yes. God then notices that Jonah did not get mad at the gourd for withering away but
instead got angry and wanted to die; Jonah thereby had pity on the gourd that caused him
grief because he was not mad at the gourd. God asks if the city should not be given as
much grace because, like the gourd, they don’t know any better nor thereby have a choice
upon the matter of their being wicked.

The point to be taken away from this short story is that here is a person who is
willing to forsake his life for the wellness of others, yet even while appearing to have no
concern for them. The point is not so much that he disobeyed God by not doing as he
commanded, but that he was mad because while he was faithful, God still wished him to
give others a chance whom Jonah thought should not have a chance. On the boat, the crew
ask who is on the boat who is causing the storm, and Jonah offers himself not because he
was concerned for the crew, but because he knew that God was after him, and he figured
(hoped) that he would probably die by going in the water. But he didn’t die; rather he was
‘born again’. He was swallowed by a huge fish inside of which he lived for three days and
prayed to God. While he is in there he realizes “They that observe lying vanities forsake
their own mercy” (2:8) – which is to say, he who adheres to what selfishness dictates –
and vows that he will go to the city and do God’s will. He goes, and does what God said to
do, but then still gets mad for the same reason.

The story of Jonah can be understood as an early version of the vacillations of

faith, of a process of the minimal human that is integral and inevitable to its experience.
This is irony in its early form; the story ends in the ironic situation of being selfish yet
coming upon how the activity of such a state arises, in the end, as grace. This, and as well,
including the beginning of the rationale behind what arises later as the ministry of Jesus.

209 Luke 22:67

210 Luke 22:68

 Kair 343

211 John 18:20-23

212 John 18:30

213 John 18:31

214 Matthew 27:14. Also note that while Mark has Jesus answer directly to the

high priest that indeed he is the Christ (Mark 14:62), later with Pilate present in Chapter
15, verse 2, Jesus replies merely “Thou sayest it” and then upon further pleading by Pilate,
in verse 5, “But Jesus yet answered yet nothing.” This would seem to support the
suggestions of this essay that Mark was indeed moved, but could be seen to merely be
iterating what he heard, being the most distanced from the event and so evidencing an
orientation toward the truth of the story rather than the event that the story is about.

215 John 18:14

216 The forgoing excerpts are from John 18:33-38

217 This flies completely in the face of the conventional Kantian universe. The

point is that even if there is indeed no object, as Kant put it, ‘in-itself’ that we can know,
the fact that is insinuated in the notion that knowledge is the only possible platform upon
or through which to know of any object, is that such objects behave as ‘in-itself’ objects. To
argue that any particular object is true or false, and then to bracket this postulate within
an arena of essential not-true-ness, is – might we say that Kant was indeed correct in his,
perhaps unrecognized, irony – a metaphysical proposal; which is to say, utterly contained
within a certain ideological frame, which is also to say, utterly mythological. Human
beings must have True Objects by which to negotiate reality; in order to posit anything
about the ultimate nature of reality, True Objects are objects in-themselves.


344 A Heresy

218 Direction could be another manner of indicating the same meaning as

orientation, as well that these can suggest route. We might imagine two objects next to
each other. The meaning of orientation has to do with which way the sense of knowledge
moves. Let us say object (A) is the subject of the situation, (S), and the other object is the
object (B). We say that conventional reality is oriented upon the True Object in the sense
that all knowledge arrives through the vector AàB, what we can call (S1); the subject (A)
has the ability, is the active part of the duo in which the object (B) is neutral or passive.
This is a real imperative and never occurs in any other way despite what definitional
structures are in place. This is because definitional structures (definitions that are
supposed to do more than indicate, but are actually taken to be able to mean something
into existence) are themselves based upon or occur by the AàB imperative; the meaning
of this orientation is that discourse is able to reach its object, that the terms reflect or
otherwise can link the subject (A) in some sort of essential manner to their object (B). The
theoretical notion that might deny this situation (for example, see note about the Kantian
universe) is likewise based in this orientation, this route for meaning. There is no
theoretical motion that overcomes this conventional route; though this could be better
said as there is no conventional theory that is not based in this orientation upon objects.
Theory does not and cannot displace this route; hence the meaning of redundancy and
the idea that conventional method contradicts itself. Yet remember, this does not mean
that it is not real, an illusion or somehow not operative and valid, but it is actually the
basis of the motion of history. This is to say, the belief that discourse not only reaches an
object in potential but likewise may affect outcomes, supplies the model that describes
that by which history is able to have movement.

On the other hand, truth stems from a displacement of the central object (A) of
the conventional situation. This orientation, AßB, which is more precisely pictured as
AßàB, supplies knowledge due to no central subject-hood of (A); discourse thus
becomes a description of what is occurring as knowledge as opposed to a possible
reflection of the object; no object needs reach any other object. This is the meaning of
Graham Harman’s ‘vicarious causation’, because the conventional vector of the situation
(S1) is where causation actually takes place. The subject here is both A and B, or what we
must call S, the situation at hand, or to be more precise, (S2).

Thus we can say the difference between these two situations is one of
orientation upon the object; the former real situation always understands knowledge as

 Kair 345

a vector from the subject (A) toward or upon the object (B), even as it might define the
situation differently; it always takes as assumed the primary thought and corresponding
thinker. This, again, is the real situation. The latter situation comes upon things
differently; the latter is from the object (if we must situate definition in this way for view).
Discourse always being real, it thereby is the issue at hand, and becomes the obstacle to
negotiate, rather than the conventional method that sees discourse as a tool for
understanding True Objects. We thus may also talk about the issue as being about the
appropriation of meaning.

S1, the conventional situation, is founded in essential separation where a

multitude of real objects constitute the possible universe. S2 is founded with reference to
S1 as nothing but objects, where objects are expressed in the only manner that they exist.
These routes are not reconcilable and do not reduce to either state. They represent
divergent teleologies as this situation only occurs at particular historically meaningful
junctures.

219 Phenomenological intension is the real aspect of the fully human. Yet,

regardless of what discursive formations or conceptual exercise, the situation may be

more properly understood as a result of the intuited object. When we turn the usual
understanding of faith on its head, we find, possibly contrary to the Husserlian idea, that
intentionality is an object derived affect, that objects have intension that are reflected in
our concepts of them. This can be easily realized when we attempt to honestly form a
concept around an object for which is inconsistent with the presented object; it is not a
contradiction that arises but plain and simple nonsense. We might be able to use this
adjusted formulation to distinguish when authors are merely ‘using their creativity’ to
come up with ontological possibilities. Here, we are attempting to relieve ourselves from
theories that should be set more in artistic arenas. We call to mind the Sokal Hoax,
perpetrated by Alan Sokal, that, at least for a moment, called out certain post-modern
theoretical presentations. Just because human beings can sculpt terms and squeeze out
detailed meaning from clausal structures, does not mean they contain any actual truth.
There are still theoreticians who love to stay within this paradigm of discursive fantasy.
So, one of the issues of truth is how it is possible for a human being to see nonsense as
sensible. But we know why they might have credence and staying power: Because human
consciousness makes sense, and because faith makes true. One cannot argue sensibility
into a person through arguing with the sense they make; this yields all the more violence
as the nonsensical object of faith asserts the propriety of its sense.


346 A Heresy

Of course; there will be those ‘social advocates’ that will move in to suggest
there is some sort of attempt at hegemony going on here, but those activists should first
see that I am not proposing that reality can occur in any other way than it does, and then
see that everyone (every political identity) is already included in the discussion of how
they might be excluded or marginalized; the issue is that indeed we assert a hegemony
when we propose certain people and situations be heard in their own voice. I am not
suggesting that reality is incorrect in its determinations; I am pointing out that reality and
its ideological constructions, such as psychology, have yet to be able to account for all that
may exist of the human being, most probably because the psychological framing of the
human being is founded upon subjects that are already admitting or otherwise assumed
to be or are evidencing that they are encountering a problem with their Being.
Nevertheless, the presumption of potential is a faulty, even as it is necessary, real
conception. The issue should not be what is the in-itself object, but how it behaves.
Presently psychology is entangled with presenting the object of humanity by the
reasoning from effects. Hence as we have mentioned elsewhere, the idea that there are
other human beings and or other cultures, social, gender and racial groups that amount
to existing in an ideologically enforced silence is founded upon an incomplete motion. To
end with ideology and politics is to be fully invested in the mythology wherein such
political ideology resides, as well as to assert an historical static and determined common
human subject; we have come to call this ‘correlationalism’. Yet see; we have reached a
moment of humanity where everyone is included automatically, despite what ignorance
may be, where the process of social justice has become an ideological norm, a means for
identity and generating capital, a routine process of modern colonialization.

220 This can be to say not real but true. Jesus’s ministry is a correction and not a

negation. The correction is upon that discourse that understands its power to be of
negation.

221 See John 5:31-39 for a certain correspondence.

222 John 17:38

 Kair 347

223 This is a pivotal notion in the Non-Philosophy of François Laruelle.

224 “What divides…” is a question here, placed in the declarative. If there is a

thing, then the conventional route sees an investigation into that thing as a manner of
dividing, of looking into its components. These components are thus found to be a ‘reason’
for the thing, as these components are likewise viewed within a particular contextual
vector of further division to get to cause. In this scheme of meaning, the process has
yielded a progress; the information gained through the process of dividing is understood
as a ‘progressed’ knowledge, more knowledge, better knowledge, more thorough…et
cetera. The significant question upon this situation, though, is whether or not a different
result could have been gained through the exact same application; the answer that says
that there are never the same exact circumstances has never gotten further than
Heraclitus stepping in a particular stream: We cannot step in the same stream twice, then
might we completely disrupt that keen observation and suggest that we cannot even
once!? (Thank you for that, Soren.) The actual question concerns if the result was different
that it is; the situation is so absurd to conventional method that one should not even
attempt to get through that faithful direction. In all these considerations, though, it should
be amply clear that no, the situation could only have yielded the result it did, and it did
yield only that result. Hence, if this is indeed the case, then ‘what divides’ is the result
itself, but that which then constituted the situation in the first place. The same can be said
of any decision and thus to find what this prior decision is, is merely a matter of
describing the situation at hand. Also, though – and this is key: A description of how a
thing is, functions and or operates does not negate that thing for what it really is and still
is; e.g. when one describes a table it does not invalidate, negate nor remove the table from
its existence or its being a table. Still I sit and type this essay with my paper, books and
computer sitting on the table. The description that the table may be multiplicity of
aspects, an infinitude of sub-molecular particles that have no mass or even negative mass,
or a social-linguistic construction does not remove the table from it being a table. I might
suggest that those who would unilateraize social constructions of objects as a ubiquitous
human function is really a Capitalist who is conflicted in drawing profit from her
theoretical privilege, and should draw a couple more bong rips while contemplating
whether the THC in the herb is really doing anything to relax her or change her mood, or
if she is just thinking that is occurring due to the social construction behind “marijuana”.
Regardless; likewise does the description of how reality functions do nothing to argue
that it should be any different than it is; this is not an argument of how this thing called


348 A Heresy

‘progress’ occurs as though somehow progress is a fallacious term or idea. Progress may
be a problematic notion, but the description of how or why progress occurs does nothing
to suggest that it is an illusion or somehow faulty in its conception. This is simply to say
that where progress is viewed as accounting for the entirety of how the universe occurs,
often enough, the description of a prior decision becomes a problem in-itself, vague and
full of opinion, and hence then my point of an object in-itself.

225 See Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “The Antichrist”. Published 1895

226 …from a conventional reading. We cannot blame authors for their moment

nor their responses to misunderstanding, but we can blame conventional appropriations

of their works.

227 This is one translation of the meaning of the collusion in Alain Badiou’s

discussion of void and multiple.

228 This different manner is equity of universal objects. No one asks a table to

reconcile to a chair, and if I walk my face straight into the low branches of a pine tree, I
will most likely find discomfort; when glaciers melt oceans may rise. They behave as
objects unto themselves. A True Object reduces such horizontal equity to existential
conditions that are ‘more true’ and that we call metaphysical speculations; yet, science is
more a vertical substantiation.

229 See Soren Kierkegaard, “Fear and Trembling”.

230 Matthew 27:22-23; Mark 15:13-14; Luke 23:21-22; as well, John 19:15

 Kair 349

231 John does not have this reproach, as we continue to discuss.

232 Mark 15:15

233 John 19:1-2; Mark 15:17; Matthew 27:29. If there was any possibility of Jesus

not being crucified before, there is no turning back now. The soldiers mock Jesus by
draping him in a purple cloak, put a crown of thorns on his head, and giving him a reed
staff. They then take a knee and worship him; the full mock. Yet the irony has just come
complete to end the mockery of the trial and to begin the real mockery, the real trial that
humanity thenceforth is occupied in acting out, that is, real history of the subject-object.
Before this, there was no question. The crown of thorns is reminiscent of the burning
bramble of Moses mentioned earlier. By Jesus, the True Subject has reached a level of
conventional exposure; whereas before there was always a certain amount of legitimate
denial in plain ignorance that is found in the newness of things and events. The Old
Testament might then be seen to be the repetition that occurs in cycling of learning, of
showing, forgetting most of it, re-presentation, revelation, denial, and then the
acceptance that only comes through reality witnessing a divergence with itself, a splitting,
since such an experience is not common to humanity, but only a part of humanity. History
now becomes the story of humanity coming to terms with itself in denial, humanity as a
product of justifying itself against what is denied of itself.

234 John 19:4-6

235 Otto, Rudolf. “The Idea of the Holy”. ã1958 Oxford University Press.

236 John 19:7

237 The foregoing concerns John 19:8-15.


350 A Heresy

238 In the context of the Bible, so as well this essay, we can say ‘God’, but the

same formula follows for any transcendence come upon even as it might be denied and
placed into some sort of ‘other’ category, such as, spirits, psychological diagnoses, or
natural phenomena. In general, what becomes ‘transcendence’ is an irregular occurrence
of meaning where the consistency of understanding is disrupted, to then be placed,
whether it be momentarily or lasting, in an alternate context or frame of meaning that
calls into question the former framing. In a manner of speaking, we can call such
movements of frame as ‘common real possibility’, and thus come to categories of
experience that thereby, by such inevitable reductive displacement to infinite
redundancy, are allowed to be broken by such essentially ‘other’ possibility, or for
another term, essential transcendence. The idea of ‘God’ and a monadic ‘first’ of anything
or situation is the term that is most always ultimately called upon to support or refute,
but any term may occupy that pivotal and or axiomatic position in meaning, and any term
may be reduced to the same base of transcendental-immanence. Yet (we must ask why),
no other term resides in ultimate primacy; always ‘God’ (yes or no God) becomes the
pivotal essential position. Even science’s ‘Big Bang’, or philosophy’s ‘nothingness’ or
‘void’ or ‘chaos’, never completely avoids a fundamental positing of ‘God’ meaning. This
is why ‘redundancy’ is an appropriate idea: It gains slightly more than ‘repetition’.
Nevertheless; if we do argue a teleological argument then by now there is no by-passing
the truth of its sense; that is, unless there is another possible teleology. This then, in
contrast to an absolute kind of chaotic realm in opposition to the orderly state of reality,
as we say, would have to be teleology that is not real but nevertheless true as opposed to
real and possibly true.

239 Many philosophers through through the ages have talked about an abyss in

the context, if not explicitly, of freedom. Even in esoteric Judaism, the Kabbalah Tree of
Life has an abyss (Daleth) that separates the lower 7 Sephirot of ‘worldly human states’
such as emotional sentiment and physicality, from the upper three, knowledge, wisdom
and the ‘Crown’, which is proposed the Godhead; even here the abyss is proposed as a
kind of unpassable barrier –hence the need for esotericism and magic to get beyond it.
The basic idea is that there is a limit and what is beyond the limit is an abyss. The implicit
theme involves an encounter with this limit as in incurs what is beyond it, which is, for
all meaning in every context, nothingness, void, or with some authors, even God.

 Kair 351

The distinction that we find with the second moment, exemplified with Pilate,
concerns a founding term. The founding term is a type of ideological base where when all
routes of meaning have been exhausted, which can be to say, when one comes upon the
mysterium tremendum, the nothing that resides behind the thing, she encounters the
contradiction inherent of the situation and she, as Sartre says, revolts from it. The
meaning of this move makes sense if we consider that if a person were to really encounter
nothingness, then there would be nothing left for us to be considering it; not just for her
but all would simply…

This is the case because nothing cannot exist and still be known. If there was a
nothing that was known then it would no longer be nothing, in fact, it would be something,
the thing that is nothing (again, the issue of the founding term). So it is, the only possible
manner by which knowledge may encounter nothing, which is to say, the only manner
that consciousness may ‘know nothing’ is for there to have been a break, a discontinuity
in the stream of knowing wherein knowledge ‘make sense’. The break must be effective
and not merely another type of understanding; it is not un-consciousness, memory loss
or the like because these occurrences reside within the sensibility that marks the
knowing of real things. The break therefore institutes another knowledge, another
manner of knowing.

Hence it is the meaning of the revolt that is significant. In the Existentialist-post-

modern sense, the revolt allows for a new agency. The person sees that all reality is made
of arbitrary constructs and so she is now able to move freely. Having an awareness of how
the constructs are not merely arbitrary, the agent herself sees her involvement in that
very construction. The existential agent thereby is free to construct her own reality. The
founding term is that first condition that allows for the revolt; which is to say, she revolts
back into the conventional construct with a new awareness of it. In this modern
existential case, the founding term is ‘nothing’, or perhaps ‘void’, but in every case, the
term itself is understood implicitly to be the first and only term that is not arbitrary, the
first identification of a True Thing, the only term that transcends the situation of coming
upon a nothingness on the other side of the limit to be able to ‘link’ itself to an essential
substrate of the universe. In this case the essentially True Thing ‘nothingness’ somehow
is not included in the real construction of reality; upon this ‘void’ the agent thus finds the
freedom to construct a new reality. The issue we treat in this essay is the elimination, or
at least displacement, of the founding term, but the next book will deal more squarely
with the repercussions of this situation.


352 A Heresy

240 John 19:19

241 The most controversial psychological explanation is also quite common. It

describes the incision where the conventional discipline of psychology falls in two like
philosophy. The proposal is that the individual in question is involved with two aspects
of behavioral representation. Overt behavior might be said to be the ‘face’ that can reveal
any number of meanings. Behind the face, psychology resides as the thought comes to
question and answer itself. A ‘spiritual awakening’ is when there no longer is a series of
thoughtful considerations upon the basic question of which of two thoughts should
preside. See though that this is not a comment upon a function of a thinking mentality;
the ‘spiritual’ answer is already involved in the manifestation of the individual. The
spiritual awakening occurs when the consciousness allows itself to stop deciding; thereby
is the ‘real’ person relayed. This also brings in the question of Law, or for a term, the
Name, and when decision has ceased it is because either the Name has changed
(conventional spirituality), or the Name has disappeared. This last is when we find a more
proper indication of the motion of history.

Admittedly, there is no proof that this is the case. One cannot prove that there
was this actual person inside a façade of behavior that is suddenly or at some point
allowed to take over. The point is that likewise one cannot prove that the experience
would not have happened otherwise.

The significance of the second moment is that thereby is a first moment wherein
consciousness is not allowed to reveal itself unto itself: The first moment is when
consciousness is forced to reveal itself unto itself, which is to say, when one comes upon
a choice that cannot be made. Herein lay the irony of the second moment, as well, the
irony of the typical mistake of the conventionally enlightened that sees irony as an
indication of a spiritual meaning.

242 Matthew 27:24

243 Of course Derrida addressed many topics. This is the issue of the discourses

of subsequence. While we could have this category absorbed into reality by arguing

 Kair 353

retroactively the objective situation of the subject (see the beginning of this essay),
thereby do we situate what is subsequent as real discussion. Derrida’s point is analogous
to the minimal human of this essay, albeit of a different moment that saw reconciliation
still possible. In fact, his is the description of the reconciliatory state, as there are many,
and thereby evidences the problem he solves by various real discursive maneuvers. We
have found, though, that such discursive moves serve only to deny his point, which is
actually the point that everyone keeps coming upon to posit something of subsequence.
So we have now the only real way to balance the trace/erase nonsensical move is to let
the metaphysical proposals stay in the denied state of the infraction; which is to say, let
that moment stay of the subsequent despite the rallying protestations.

244 Jacques Derrida died in 2004.

245 Every thing in reality gains in potential to be discussed and discussed again,

applied and replied to various situations; this topic will come upon the “Second Moment”.
Still; what we got from Derrida is the closing of a moment, if Deleuze and Guattari
stretched and squished it, if Lyotard opened it. What do we do when a case cannot be
heard but only compensated for? After collecting all the compensation and found that it
does not indeed compensate for the damages, we stop attempting to bring our case to the
court. We drop the real case.

246 It is in this moment that we become able to speak only of objects, but that

topic is for another essay.

247 Bruno Latour is the first author I have been let to find who has attempted to

develop a theoretical avenue to be able to allow for such an opening. Likewise, Francois
Laruelle and his Nonphilosophy has allowed for an opening that I believe is often being
framed as ‘philo-fiction’, but unfortunately, I have to tell, it appears the intensity as well
as the depth of his nonphilosophical discourses have lead many instead into a type of
‘philo-fictional-hell’, where the result of his dense verbosity has been a kind of secular-
philosophical-religion of sorts; a clergy who lay in a nonphilosophical dogma of


354 A Heresy

misinterpretation. Laruelle’s fears were warranted: what should have been an opening
has been shut in to another philosophical object.

In either case, the need for an opening has been understood. As much I might
lament the monster that has been made of Laruelle’s Nonphilosophy by some philo-
religio zealots, as the meaning of Laruelle’s works may fall simply under the route that
this essay presents, Latour seems to have granted us the least harmful of theoretical
frameworks by which to move forward the process to actually gain an opening (the
operative term here is ‘seems’). See “An Enquiry into Modes of Existence”, by Bruno Latour.

However; we should also keep in mind that philosophers, especially of the

infamously Continental type, for the past 200 years or so have been trying in their various
ways to create an opening, but they did not put it in this way due to what we might call
the ‘modern’ mode of justification. The opening of the modern was the possibility of force,
of appealing to logic and sense. We find now that an opening is needed due to the
foreclosing of the modern route, because the modern route, we have found, reduces, in
the last instance, to nothing; which is odd because, one, we are still here, and two, possibly
despite Latour’s book (“We Were Never Modern”), we are apparently still modern.

Might I add; I do not subscribe to the idea that the Postmodern got us anywhere
else but more-modern. To understand this, one must first come to terms with the
contradiction inherent of theoretical proposals. So it is that if we got further than the
modern by the post-modern, then we must be talking about real estimations in the same
manner that I may no longer be a Lutheran because now I am a Buddhist. Must we
segregate ourselves for identity at all times?

Further; I cannot but help asking how it is that we might not be modern when
everywhere I hear referrals to our modern era, how this or that technology or how the
new interior design of a house is modern. My conclusion is that some critical theory takes
itself too seriously and sees its theories as occurring when they go out to the bar to play
darts and drink beers, or even shop for a new car; but I could be wrong. I wonder if such
theorists go to buy their new Honda Civic and correct the salesperson who points out the
modern features.

248 Yes; I have evoked Theodor Adorno. Once we begin to describe the Event, it

could only have already occurred but is occurring, yet in so much as it seems apparent

 Kair 355

that it has not happened, that there indeed are people who are trying to figure it out and
or trying to find out what has already happened, that there might be this realization that
what seems so obvious and omnipresent is yet more prosaic, there we might say that it
has not happened and will at some point occur. Yet by this description, we undoubtedly
must say that it indeed did occur and was missed, and so will never occur. For at some
point we need see that our faith is not sufficient to bring about the product and hope of
its affect, and indeed merely serves, at some point, to cause to bring down the whole
façade upon itself due to the eternal denial it upholds over what is truly occurring.

249 Again, effective denial.

250 This is where feminist critique gains its foothold. Recall the earlier
discussion about wisdom. Though the post-modern is often taken in its moment in the
same stride a post-colonialism, we find inevitably that post-modernism was a patsy, a
puppet discourse of colonialism for the purpose of reifying and reinstating the modern
as the ubiquitous and inescapable condition of The world. We can say this because of the
dual voice that sounds at every event; the distinction between, say of big names, Hegel,
historical consciousness, Nietzsche, Ubermensch, Dasein, Heidegger, Nazi Germany,
modernism and post-modernism is ultimately found only within the post-modern
discourses (note: distinguish between post-modern theory and post-modern method. The
method produces much nonsensical gibberish that is often upheld as intellectual validity
only through a certain academic cadre of ‘scholars’. This essay always refers to post-
modern theory, unless otherwise specified) that propose as well as suppose that it is the
inescapable limit of discourse that finds modernism as a particular political movement, a
particular ideological enforcement. Through this late 20th century critique, though, we
find the re-enforcement of the ideology by post-modern argument as it has gained a
certain dogmatic ubiquity: It is not so much that, as Zizek has said, capitalism is so difficult
to think beyond; it is more that particular post-modern arguments have become axiomatic
in the discernment of what reality is. The backlash we sometimes see against Zizek is the
condition he propounds, which is the post-modern condition. Yet his is also to say that
Dasein persists as well as our modern state. It is the purpose of ideology to replicate itself
for the purpose of enforcing power. While the post-modern proposed to relieve
oppression and bring about some sort of freedom, some sort of human equality, give voice
to the oppressed, we find now that all that has happened is that everyone can speak the
‘same language’ about what is occurring; everyone can say stuff. Everyone has become


356 A Heresy

modern, or at least is in the process of ‘catching up’, everyone has RSVP’d or assumed to
have done so; and the evangelist wing of the modern that we may put in the category of
capitalist is looking for those who are not modern so we can welcome them in. Everyone
has been colonized. In some form, it is this condition that some of the ‘speculative realists’
as well as ‘object ontologists’ are attempting to get beyond, attempting to break free of.

If we can say that this whole affair is quite ironic, then we should see that
feminism, while using the platform of post-modern and post-colonial, (in the same way
as the disciples ‘use’ the Jewish rhetoric) is ironic to the irony. This then does not mean it
returns itself to the modern state in which irony tends to indicate some great enlightened
future, on the contrary; what is ironic of irony is that irony is revealed unto itself, not as
saying the opposite of what is spoken, and not as a flattened horizon of inspired ethical
agency, but as to what it does. The attempt is to stop (if I can use Harman’s terms)
‘overmining’ and ‘undermining’ real estimations of things. The feminist critique has
always been an effort to get back to the things in themselves, and to reveal what is
occurring in the encoded politics of modern ideological thinking. We might then call this
wise.

251 But probably all the names…

252 At the time of publication of this book, it appears that Andrew Culp just may

have alighted upon this feature of Deleuze in his book “Dark Deleuze”, just out in 2016 by
University of Minnesota Press. Though I have yet to read it; I could be wrong.

253 Soren Kierkegaard. “Fear and Trembling”.

254 Ibid. “The Crowd Is Untruth”.

 Kair 357

255 How else can they proceed? They are arguing for the insertion of the silent

agent into modern reality.

256 Though I do not believe Slavoj Zizek uses this notion ‘nil subject’, it is
possible to derive this term from the meaning he intends. See Zizek’s book “The Parallax
View”.

257 But I doubt we will get anywhere…

258 Slavoj Zizek. “Living in The End Times”. © 2011 Slavoj Zizek. Pg. 15-16.

259 The Black Notebooks. I have not seen them; I have only heard about them.