These Arrows in My Flesh (Sebastianism as Method)

I call Sebastianism that method, or style of thought, which makes the critique of Christianity the fundamental vocation of philosophers of religion, without falling into either the eschatological ruse of endless deferment (the katechon) or the theological blackmail of a better, more perfect Christianity yet-to-come (messianism). 

I would like to reflect on a short passage from François Laruelle’s introduction to his 2004 book, Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy. The passage—just a couple of sentences, really—is highly allusive and is charged with political energy. It reads as follows. “The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul” (23). Here, Laruelle is engaged in a mediation between the various ‘deviations’ or ‘aspects’ of philosophy and non-philosophy. He has in mind the theoretical and political differences condensed in the thought of his philosophical contemporaries, such as Gilles Grelet, Michel Henry, and Alain Badiou. 

Let us briefly focus our attention on the latter, namely, Badiou, with whom I assume most continental philosophers will be familiar. Indeed, I suspect that many will recall the heady days of the Bush era, when Badiou and many, many others (including, perhaps most famously, Slavoj Žižek) turned to none other than Saint Paul for philosophical and political inspiration, albeit in an avowedly materialist and atheistic key. Saint Paul is our contemporary, says Badiou (St. Paul, 4-15). Paul is to Christ as Lenin is to Marx, says Žižek (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 9). Well, Laruelle took a rather different path than that of his contemporaries. It is this path that I would like to discuss.

On this path, we meet three (perhaps four) figures. On the one hand, there is a St. Paul and his church (or churches). On the other hand, we have a Sebastian and a Christ. I underline the fact that Laruelle speaks of a Christ rather than the Christ. He speaks of a Saint Sebastian (and, notably, brackets the word ‘saint’) rather than Sebastian himself. Indeed, he makes the same gesture regarding Saint Paul: Laruelle speaks of a Saint Paul rather than the Saint Paul. So, who, or what, are these figures? They are clearly religious figures, according to one or another rubric of what counts as ‘religious.’ But what sort of religion gives rise to such a usage of such figures, such that the arrows that pierce the naked flesh of a Sebastian are figured, precisely, as churches? What sort of religion figures a Saint Paul as the persecutor of a Christ? Given the figures at play, it must be a Christian religion of some sort, but, given the play of the figures, it must be a non-, or non-standard Christianity. In short, it must be a heresy. Yet, the only materials that this heresy has at its disposal are those it draws from the very tradition it seeks to subvert, mutate, or transform. 

Strange enterprise. Stranger still, given that these figures promise nothing and deliver nothing. They do not signify in any normal sense. Instead, what we have in view in the passage under consideration are a special class of non-philosophical ‘figures’ that are irreducible to either historical or rhetorical figures. In Laruelle, such figures are given not as figures per se, but rather as clones. Clones?—of whom? of what? and how? I will devote more time to these questions in the full paper presentation, but let it suffice to say for now that, for Laruelle, a clone is the way that a subject appears in and for the World. 

That a clone appears in the World is decisive, for a clone is effected by what Laruelle calls the Real (or the One, or Human-in-person, or, decisively, Victim-in-person) which is radically separated from the World and radically foreclosed to thought. So, a clone is in the World but not of the World. That a clone appears in the World for the world is decisive, for a clone is a subject who, being in the World but not of the world, registers the World as World according-to-the-Real. The World is a determinate structure that can be thought or theorized and the clone-subject, whatever its material cause, is this very theory of the World. Laruelle argues that what is human is not of this World, but the World, such as it is, is, in the last instance only, only what Human makes of it. 

In his later works, Laruelle establishes that another name for the Real is Victim. The Victim is Human, whose essence is determined as that which can be murdered and martyred. Thus, in inviting us to think according-to-the-Real, Laruelle invites us to think accordineg-to-the-Victim. To think according-to-the-Victim is not to play a ‘blame game,’ nor does it lead inevitably to ressentiment. In fact, the ‘figure’ of the Victim returns us straightaway to a Sebastian and to a Christ, for both this Christ and this Sebastian invoked by Laruelle are clones of the Real, of Human-in-person, of the Victim-in-person. Laruelle makes this clear regarding Christ when he asks, in another text, why we should bother to mimic or imitate Christ, when it is Christ who, in his being-cloned, already imitates the Victim (see Future Christ, 124). 

So, Christ, too, is a Christ-subject, who thinks, and must be thought, according-to-the-Victim, and whose persecutor is none other than a Saint Paul. Ditto Sebastian, whose rent flesh testifies against the churches that, against their originary gnostic impulse, loose their deadly bolts and, let us be honest, churn cunningly and not unconfidently the infernal philosophical, theological, and political mixtures of the World and its transcendental violence.

I will conclude the paper by articulating the specific messianic vocation of the Sebastian-subject, whose discourse, or practice, is condensed in the following oraxiom: “These arrows in my flesh—these are my ideas.”