Abstract
The title of François Jullien’s book refers to Christianity potentially being a resource but not the “root” for a community, as something to value and as a creedal faith might otherwise demonstrate. His modern rereading of Christianity involves an “exploration” and “exploitation” of this resource, not an adherence to it as a cultural identity or source of sectarianism, but the site of its claims to universality. Its universality is defined as the event that Christianity signals through the Gospel of John’s adherence to believing in truth as the superabundant life within a life that is more than the biological, vital life that one assumes as foundational for human existence.
Explicitly, J. outlines the originality of the possibility of an event in Christianity, the possibility of the impossible, of an advent or a becoming that is the event. This is a becoming of a new form of life as the event of Christianity, and what is possible within the vital life that one takes for granted. In short, Christianity introduces a break with history, to “change everything,” to bring the “unheard-of” into what is heard, as it introduces the event into thought. This is something that Greek philosophy had been unable to do, dedicated as it was to the distinction between Being and beings, and which Chinese thought had neglected due to its processional logic. The testament that this religion offers is to allow humanity to know that something could happen, could become, beyond ordinary human existence.
As such, he argues, “Event as advent is life” (39). The focus John’s Gospel takes is the possibility of having life within oneself in such a way as to introduce a division into life (as the Greek distinction between zoe and bios also maintains to some degree). This division is what he calls a de-coinciding, where one does not identify vital life with the superabundant life, a non-coincidence that begins with God’s not coinciding with God’s own self (although J. does not mention the Trinity as he might). Accordingly, the subject overcome by this internal division experiences a sense of vertigo in that the displacement of life that John’s Gospel invokes, as it “hollows out” and internalizes life, “detaches it from its objective, obvious comprehension, by subjectivizing it” (67).
John’s Gospel portrays the division of a “living,” “superabundant,” “expansive” or “eternal” life from one’s vital and immediate life in order to give birth to a spirituality that is not reducible to mere symbolism. The Christ event tries to access the “livingness of life” (52), what appears when God does not coincide with God’s own self. It is this de-coinciding that enables God to be a living force that is also “life-giving” to others. This is Christianity’s universal proclamation: a de-coinciding with the world that allows humanity to abide with the Other, in the Other, as Christ abided in God. “This exteriority with respect to the world is thus the condition of a shared interiority between the other and the self” (97). The establishment of a Christian subjectivity in relation to alterity takes place through an internal division (in human life, in God) that opens up an internal space (“interspace”) for questioning oneself while simultaneously “going beyond” oneself (ecstatically).
Pilate’s question of “What is truth?” merely highlights John’s main point, that truth has been displaced by life: “Truth no longer refers back to content: this is its truth. What now constitutes truth is a subject” (73). Truth is only to be witnessed in the sovereignty of the subject, sovereign because only the self-subject (in its ipseity) can guarantee its own truth, and, as such, “no longer be a vassal to the world” (94).
There is some engagement with the works of Michel Henry, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricoeur, but the resonance with Alain Badiou and the various philosophers who have taken up Pauline thought in a European philosophical context (e.g. Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, Jacob Taubes, Stanislas Breton)—all unmentioned—dominates the backdrop of this work. J., I would suggest, needs to distinguish better between Paul’s use of dualisms (flesh–spirit) and John’s frequently utilized dualistic imagery. He claims that John’s Gospel does not engage in Pauline inversions (i.e. making the weak strong, the foolish wise), but introduces an inner division instead. He critiques Pauline thought, as well as the Synoptic Gospel accounts of Christ, opting instead to utilize John’s Gospel as a resource to think a particular strain of Christianity anew. And yet his reading of John is precisely how Agamben, for example, also reads Pauline thought, offering us the possibility to read J.’s efforts here more in line with Paul’s writings than he allows. Nonetheless, this was a brilliant philosophical rereading of John’s Gospel that very much shares with other contemporary continental philosophical accounts of Christianity a daring challenge to Western thought.