Jalal Toufic: “‘Another disciple said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead”’ (Matthew 8:21–22). The grave problem with this is that very few dead people can legitimately assert: ‘I know when one is dead and when one lives’ (Shakespeare, King Lear, 5.3.261). The dead are far less proficient than the living at detecting whether someone is definitely dead, and hence tend on a substantial number of occasions to bury the living too. With the coming of Jesus Christ, many people became alive. Jesus Christ, ‘the resurrection and the life’ (John 11:25), made of burial alive at the moment of organic demise a fundamental condition. The two earliest examples are: Lazarus, since the latter, through his belief in Jesus, was alive (‘He who believes in me will live, even though he die’ [John 11:25]) when he was buried (‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up’ &leftbracket;John 11:11&rightbracket;); and, obviously as well as paradigmatically, Jesus Christ. ‘Jesus said, “This is a wicked generation. It asks for a miraculous sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, so also will the Son of Man be to this generation”’ (Luke 11:29–30; cf. Matthew 12:40: ‘For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’),” “Bury Me Dead,” in Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 2005; available for download as a PDF file at →), 83–84.
The Gospel of John refers several times to “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” for example in 21:20–23: “When Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them … he asked, ‘Lord, what about him?’ Jesus answered, ‘If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? …’ Because of this, the rumor spread among the believers that this disciple would not die. But Jesus did not say that he would not die; he only said, ‘If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?’” This disciple is not named. Who was a disciple who, properly speaking, could not have been named and about whom rumors could, indeed did spread among the believers that he would not die? A disciple who was resurrected, thus who was fully alive, no longer a mortal, that is, no longer dead while alive, therefore no longer subject to over-turns: “It never occurs to those mortals living then to call the resurrected, because, at the most basic level, he no longer needs the call since, as is the case of most animals, he faces himself in the mirror naturally, i.e., since his facing himself in the mirror is not the result of a successful interpellation, and, at a derivative level, because he happens to be facing the mortal whenever the latter needs him to be in that direction. From the time of his resurrection to his subsequent physical death, no one called the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha” (Jalal Toufic, What Were You Thinking? [Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm/DAAD, 2011], 52–53; alternatively, see “The Resurrected Brother of Mary and Martha: A Human Who Lived then Died!” e-flux journal, no. 30 &leftbracket;12/2011&rightbracket;, at →)—referring in John 12:1–2 to the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha by name, by the name he had while a mortal, was a mistake. The over-turn is both one of the conditions of possibility of the call and one of its conditions of impossibility. If we view the matter through the example of the mirror, then while the over-turn is what introduces the possibility to be called, since only those who are subject to over-turns do not naturally have their faces to themselves in the mirror (a condition that would do away with the need for the call), it is also what makes us cease calling since, by undoing the addressee’s turn to answer the call, it makes the caller come to the conclusion that he is mistaking the one who has his back to him with someone else who happens to have a very similar back. How come the image in the mirror that the dead or the schizophrenic (someone who died before dying) faced did not turn toward him? It was because the turn of the one in the mirror, a(n) (un)dead, to answer the sous-entendu call using his proper name was overturned by an over-turn; or because the one facing the mirror was then assuming other names, if not all the names of history as his name(s), and so called the one in the mirror by one of these other names, with the infelicitous consequence that the latter had no reason to turn, considered that it was another who was being called. Did Antonin Artaud at some point see himself with his back to himself in the mirror? Was it because he had at that point already died, as indicated in one of the letters of Nouveaux Écrits de Rodez : Lettres au docteur Ferdière (1943-1946) et autres textes inédits, suivis de Six lettres à Marie Dubuc (1935-1937) (1977), the one dated February 12, 1943 and signed by Antonin Nalpas: “Antonin Artaud est mort à la peine et de douleur à Ville-Évrard au mois d’Août 1939 et son cadavre a été sorti de Ville-Évrard pendant la durée d’une nuit blanche comme celles dont parle Dostoïevsky et qui occupent l’espace de plusieurs journées intercalaires mais non comprises dans le calendrier de ce monde-ci—quoi&leftbracket;que&rightbracket; vraies comme le jour d’ici” (Antonin Artaud died to trouble and of pain in Ville-Évrard in the month of August 1939 and his cadaver was removed from Ville-Évrard during a sleepless night like those Dostoevsky talks about and that occupy the span of several intercalary days that are not included in the calendar of this world—though they are true as the day from here)? How is it that the publisher, Gallimard, and the editor (“présentation et notes”), Pierre Chaleix, could so casually place as the epistolary book’s sole author Antonin Artaud notwithstanding that some of the letters, those from the period of February 12, 1943 to August 19, 1943, are signed by Antonin Nalpas (while Nalpas is the maiden name of Artaud’s mother, Artaud is clear that this is not why his surname became Nalpas: “Quant au nom de Nalpas, c’est comme je vous l’ai dit, le nom de jeune fille de ma mère … Mais ce n’est pas pour cela que j’en ai parlé, et je m’étonne grandement de l’avoir fait. Car ce nom a d’autre part des origines Légendaires, Mystiques et sacrées …” &leftbracket;As for the name of Nalpas, it is, as I’ve told you, the maiden name of my mother … But that’s not why I spoke of it, and I am greatly surprised that I did. Because this name has, on the other hand, Legendary, Mystic and sacred origins …&rightbracket;)? The book should have been published as coauthored by Antonin Artaud and Antonin Nalpas. The change from the first name to the second followed the death of Antonin Artaud. What happened so that the later letters of the book are signed once again “Antonin Artaud”? Was Antonin Artaud resurrected (by the Christ, whom he keeps invoking in the letters &leftbracket;and did the latter then tell him not to disclose that he was resurrected by him?&rightbracket;?)? If so, then, given that the resurrected is nameless, either he improperly reassumed the name he had while a mortal, or that name was thenceforth strictly a pen name.
Notwithstanding Matthew 26:26–27, according to which “while they were eating, Jesus took bread, … broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take and eat; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, … gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant,’” Jesus’ words at the Last Supper were addressed mainly—exclusively?—to the disciple to whom he would say on the cross while referring to his own mother, “Here is your mother” (John 19:26–27), and who, also according to the Gospel of John, was present at that supper, indeed “was reclining next to him [Jesus].”
If, as the Qur’ân asserts, “they slew him [the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, Allâh’s messenger] not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them” (4:157), then, fatefully, the one who was crucified in Palestine in place of Jesus Christ on a day in which “the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom” and “the earth shook” (Matthew 27:51) was someone who tried his utmost not to remain human, all too human; announced in a September 14, AD 1888 letter to Paul Deussen “an immeasurably difficult and decisive task which, when it is understood, will split humanity into two halves”; wrote in an October 18, AD 1888 letter to Franz Overbeck, “That the first book of the transvaluation of all values is finished, ready for press, I announce to you with a feeling for which I have no words. There will be four books … I am afraid that I am shooting the history of mankind into two halves”; reiterated in a December 6, AD 1888 letter to Georg Brandes, “I am readying an event, which it is highly likely will break history in two halves”; and shortly after signed some of his final (known) letters with, “The Crucified,” Friedrich Nietzsche (see footnote 41 in my book ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins &leftbracket;Beirut, Lebanon: Forthcoming Books, 2005; available for download as a PDF file at: →&rightbracket;).
Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems, trans. Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland, edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Vilain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 195.
“‘The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise.’ But they did not understand what he [Jesus] meant and were afraid to ask him about it” (Mark 9:31–32); “again he &leftbracket;Jesus&rightbracket; took the Twelve aside and told them what was going to happen to him. ‘We are going up to Jerusalem,’ he said, ‘and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him’” (Mark 10:32–34); “From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life” (Matthew 16:21). How mistaken were the authors of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew!—properly speaking, Jesus Christ, the life, cannot be killed. And yet concerning the ones who crucified Jesus Christ, the following can be asserted: act as if you are murdering the life, and you will be treated as if you did!
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, translated, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974; the first German edition was published in 1882), 181.
The death (on the cross) of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, one of the hypostases of the divine Trinity, could have functioned as a step toward returning to a strict monotheism; did the Holy Spirit also die, and if so in what circumstances?
Hegel’s words, “The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity—a wealth of infinitely many representations, images … here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. [For from his eyes] the night of the world hangs out towards us,” apply to human beings as mortals, thus as dead even while still physically alive. Thus, Hegel’s aforementioned words apply neither to the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha, who was no longer a mortal, nor to Jesus Christ, who was never a mortal. “‘And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden &leftbracket;including the tree of life&rightbracket; thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die’ (Genesis 2:16–17). If the God who gave the command was the Living, then he would have expected that man would either comply with his advice not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or … eat of it only after eating from the tree of life. Mortality, not knowledge of good and evil, was the unsuspected temptation, and non-mortal man (the Hebrew ‘âdam) and woman fell for it! An unexpected, Gnostic disaster happened as man perversely chose not to eat first from the tree of life before eating from the mortality-causing tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thus introducing and unleashing a mortality that is not based on life, therefore a mortality of which God was unaware. If we can possibly understand that someone may choose mortality as such over life, it is because we are already fallen, mortal.… If Iblîs is a disbeliever, he is so first of all in the incredible perversity of man (and woman)—he incited man to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but did not specify the order in which the latter opted to do so …” (Jalal Toufic, (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film, revised and expanded edition &leftbracket;Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 2003; available for download as a PDF file at: →&rightbracket;, 213–214). The incarnation of the Son of God required that were men to be given the occasion to choose again, and notwithstanding the calamity of Adam and the resultant compulsion to repeat the latter’s choice, some man would opt to partake of the tree of life before or without partaking of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Such a man would not be a mortal, that is, would not be dead even while physically alive. Jesus proved to be that man (does the circumstance that Jesus made a different choice imply that God made him alone of all humans relive that primordial choice before his earthly birth? No; it implies rather that, prior to their earthly birth, all humans, including Lazarus, were given the chance to choose again, but they made the same choice as Adam, to become mortals, to be dead while alive). Even when he miraculously died physically, and even in the tomb, Jesus Christ, the life, was not a mortal and therefore was not open to jouissance and did not contain a night of the world in the Hegelian sense. Jesus Christ had no knowledge of Good and Evil (he had knowledge of good and bad), so when he was questioned about evil, he was reduced to quoting mortals’ words about it in the Old Testament and paraphrasing the words about it uttered by the mortals he encountered.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel and the Human Spirit, A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805-6) with Commentary, translation with commentary by Leo Rauch (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 87.
A thorough death of the God of Christianity would involve at least three deaths: of the Son, which took place on the cross; of the Holy Spirit; and of the Father.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 180.
Ibid.
Given that “Joseph took the body [of the dead Jesus Christ] … and placed it in his own new tomb” (Matthew 27:59–60), he must have remained himself without burial—did he encounter the resurrected Jesus Christ and the latter resurrected him, i.e., made him, who was, as a mortal, dead while alive, fully alive, with the consequence that to him too applied Jesus Christ’s response to Peter regarding the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha (the disciple he loved), “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?”?
We are informed about this twice by the footnotes to John 11:16 and 20:24 in the New International Version translation of the New Testament!
Cf. “Martha … came to him and asked, ‘Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself?’” (Luke 10:40); “So the sisters sent word to Jesus, ‘Lord, the one you love is sick’” (John 11:3); “‘Lord,’ Martha said to Jesus, ‘if you had been here, my brother would not have died’” (John 11:21); “When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died’” (John 11:32).
There is an insistence in Acts (Acts 2:22–24: “Fellow Israelites … you, with the help of wicked men, put him [Jesus of Nazareth] to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead”; Acts 2.32: “This Jesus hath God raised up, of which we are all witnesses” …) and in the Epistles of Paul (1 Thessalonians 1:10: “… his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus …”; Galatians 1:1: “Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— …”) that God raised His Son from the dead. Given that God the Father did not raise his Son from the dead, at least not directly—the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha did—the author of Acts and Paul “are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:15).
Cf. Psalm 104:1: “Give glory to the Lord, and call upon his name.”
“Nietzsche wrote, ‘Nothing is less Christian than the ecclesiastical crudity … of a “kingdom of God” that is yet to come, a “kingdom of heaven” in the beyond …’ and, ‘The evangel was precisely the existence, the fulfillment, the actuality of this “kingdom.”’ Nietzsche’s words have to be qualified: Jesus Christ, who had a double nature, divine and human, belonged conjointly to an unredeemed world and to a redeemed one. In the unredeemed world, where one could encounter people possessed by demons, he sometimes performed miracles (‘When evening came, many who were demon-possessed were brought to him, and he drove out the spirits with a word’ [Matthew 8:16]); but in the redeemed world, he did not perform miracles—what most if not all others viewed as miraculous transgressions of natural laws should rather have been viewed by them as a vision of how the redeemed world is. ‘During the fourth watch of the night Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake … Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”’ (Matthew 14:25 and 14:30). For the interlude before seeing the wind and instinctively panicking or becoming apprehensive that he was back in the unredeemed world, Peter was already walking in the redeemed world. ‘Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “Why did you doubt”’ (Matthew 14:31)—that ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near’ (Matthew 3:2, 4:17 and 10:7), indeed that you are walking in it?” (footnote 30 in my book What Were You Thinking? &leftbracket;Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm/DAAD, 2011&rightbracket;).
Can someone who contributed in no small measure to the death of two people and who condoned their burial by youths from his fledgling community (“Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet. Then Peter said, ‘Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit …’ When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died…. Then some young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him. About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened…. Peter said to her, ‘How could you conspire to test the Spirit of the Lord? Listen! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.’ At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband” [Acts 5:1–10]) be considered a Christian? No; Peter is no Christian, that is, he is not a disciple of the life, who on the three occasions he encountered physically dead people characteristically resurrected them and who taught others to “let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22).