For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God [Exod XXXIV: 14].
For the LORD thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God [Deut IV:24].
14. Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you.
15. (For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth [Deut VI].
Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Surely in the fire of my jealousy have I spoken against the residue of the heathen [Ezek XXXVI:5]. God is jealous, and the LORD revengeth; the LORD revengeth, and is furious; the LORD will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies [Nah 1:2].
Amongst the many partial anticipations of the modern thought of the transcendental in antiquity is the jealousy of Jahweh. Extricated from its childish psychological constriction—its commensuration to a personal being—this is one of the few religious thoughts to be found in the history of Western monotheism. To refuse to share, to coexist, to tolerate equivalence; these things are ruthlessly divine. In comparison to Jahweh, the God of the Christians is a wheedler; a door to door salesman. It is true, nevertheless, that the genocidal frenzy with which Jahweh asserts his monopoly can disconcert. Squeamishness is not a charge one can fairly bring against him:
1. When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
2. And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:
3. Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son’ [Deut VII].
16. But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
17. But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee [Deut XX].
Jealousy is inextricable from paroxystic violence, historically rooted in national chauvinism, before being sublimed into the cosmological intolerance of a divinity. What does it matter who is instrument here? Whether God serves the annihilating designs of a tribe, or the tribe serves to purify the earth of alien gods? There is no antagonism at the origin, but rather a perfect pact between the election of the chosen people and the brutal solitude of the unnameable One.
What the Jews never understood about this God (the Christians understood it even less of course) was the sovereignty of this jealous wrath. How could these feverish rages be subordinated to an end beyond themselves, to a mere persistence, as if God—too—was subject to inhibition? A God that held himself in check, submitting the splenetic extravagance of his moods to the exigency of being, would be something far less glorious than the sun (he would be humbled by a mediocre star). Each creature uselessly dispensing with its existence would outstrip his prodigality, deepening by a ratchet-notch his hatred for himself.
Could such a God glimpsing the impossible sovereignty of his fury—time opening as a dark shaft of impersonal loss—and, howling in utter loathing at the servility of self, restrain from scurrying to a squalid death on the cross?
> God savours himself, says Eckhart. This is possible, but what he savours is, it seems to me, the hatred which he has for himself, to which none, here on Earth, can be compared (I could say: this hatred is time, but that bothers me. Why should I say time? I feel this hatred when I cry; I analyse nothing) [V 120].
Why should anyone be interested in time? I cannot imagine. The scrawniness of an arm, a finger, the enigma of a face; these things make sense (hurt). Time, on the contrary, is as vacant as a marriage, or God alone in the dark.
At the moment I seize myself in the mire of being, swamped by the detestation of ulterior ends, I AM GOD AND TIME LAUGHS AT THE ETERNAL PRETENTION OF SLAVES. ‘This God who leads us beneath his clouds is mad. I know him, I am him’ [III 39]. (Bataille recommends that one chant: ‘I represent myself covered in blood, broken but transfigured and at one with the world, at once like prey and like a tooth of TIME which kills incessantly and is incessantly killed’ [I 557–8].)
* * *
Jealousy is as inextricable from a movement of abolition as it is essential to the being of God. Time cannot be limited to a property or attribute of divinity, for this would make jealousy posterior to a preliminary legislation of essence. It would, in any case, be impossible for God to resent the absolute wilderness of time, since his hatred must pander to the flow of erasure. Perhaps it is that God mistakes himself for time, until he sees things die without reluctance, and turns upon himself in unfathomable desperation. I AM THAT I AM is already a pre-emptive afflux of incinerating privilege, or it is nothing. In the beginning was the rage, or is it that we imagine God being disappointed by his creation? A surprised God? A bewildered God? His great work gone astray. This is the psychological divinity, taken aback by naughty children, the offended God that we tell our five year olds about. A God without wrath, but only ‘righteous anger’. A magistrate. What could such a being fail to botch? But jealousy is not indignation, and at the moment of unfettered rage, when God no longer serves anything, and the molten edge of his wrath delects in the submission of being to sovereign whim, then ‘authority no longer belongs to God but to time’ [I 471].
Bataille writes of ‘the catastrophe of time’ because security cannot establish itself, because time is jealous of being. It is in his early essay ‘Sacrifices’ (1936) that he first develops this thought to its rigorous conclusion in incompletion and collapse. No ontology of time is possible, and yet ontology remains the sole foundation for discursive accomplishment. There are only the shattered spars and parodies of philosophy, as ruinous time pounds thought into the embers of an unwitting sacrifice, wreathed in a laughter as cold and nakedly joyous as the void.
> Time is not the synthesis of being and of nothing if being or nothing do not find themselves except in time and are nothing but arbitrarily separated notions. There is not then in effect either being or nothing in isolation, there is time [I 96].
> [T]he existence of things is not able to enclose the death which this existence brings, but is itself projected into the death that encloses it [I 96].
Time is the suicidal jealousy of God, to which each being—even the highest—must fall victim. It is thus the ultimate ocean of immanence, from which nothing can separate itself, and in which everything loses itself irremediably. The black mass of jealous rage swells like a cancer at the core of the universe, or like a volcanic ulceration in the guts of God, and its catastrophic eruption consumes all established things in the acidic lava of impersonality. We say ‘time’—and become philosophical—to describe jealousy purifying itself of God (but with God purity collapses also).
> Perhaps there is still passion in God, but it is passion as the dog is the dog when the dog is on a leash. There is no possibility for the passion of God to unchain itself, since God is reason. Perhaps the experience of the mystics is in accord with me, because it shows that from the sacred one must leave a place for an unchaining which receives no limits, since, from the sacred, it is necessary to break every species of boundary, to no longer consider limits either of reason or morality as possible. But, once again, at this moment, is it not evident that God dies? [VII 370].
That jealous time erases all things is in no sense the acknowledgement of a dematerialization, since the only place to escape from matter was God. The thought that matter is not a content of time is perhaps the preeminent shadow of a truth that is ‘at once’ an impossibility and an abomination (also an ecstasy). As the shockwave of jealousy ejects the universe’s lactescent debris from the crater of reason, transcendent matter loses the perfection of its inertia (design), and nature implodes into the spasms of its own laceration. As the destroyer the universe is time, and as the destroyed nature, but in the destruction nature sloughs-off the crust in which it had petrified itself and infests time like rot, regressing to its molten core; base-matter, becoming, flow, energy, immanence, continuity, flame, desire, death. ‘Ecstatic time is not able to find itself except in the vision of things that puerile hazard makes brusquely appear: cadavers, nudities, explosions, spilt blood, abysses, bursts of sun and of thunder’ [I 471]. There is every reason to resist such insanity, reason is nothing else. Nothing could be more evidently intelligible than the fact that: ‘no enterprise has cost a sum of labour greater than that which sought to arrest the flow of time’ [I 504]. ‘Civilization’ is the name we give to this process, a process turned against the total social calamity—the cosmic sickness—inherent to process as such. If the deluge, which is danger in itself, is the final motor of history, it is the great civilizations which are the engines or composite machines, channeling flows and engendering the mirage of function. As with an ant’s nest, what emerges in the aggregate is a frenetic immobilism, a literal robotism, converting process into work, and work into the further embalming of process. Everything is set against ‘the explosive immensity of time’ [I 472]. Insofar as a civilization functions, therefore, it becomes increasingly sclerotic and pyramidalized; rituals, customs, codes, all hardened against the release of unendurable forces that would follow from the meltdown of the energy source (which is pushed further and further upstream, purified).
> The long period stretching from the Ancient empire of Egypt to the bourgeoise monarchy of Orleans—which elevates the obelisk in the square ‘to the applause of an immense populace’—has been necessary to man in order to achieve the setting of the most stable limits to the deleterious movement of time. The mocking universe being slowly delivered to the severe eternity of its All-Powerful Father, guarantee of deep stability. The slow and obscure movements of history have their place here at the heart and not the periphery of beings and it is the long and inexpiable struggle of God against time that they figure, it is the combat of ‘established sovereignty’ against the shattering and creative madness of things. Thus history endlessly resumes the response of the immovable stone to the Herakleitean world of flows and flames [I 505].
This is a movement of synchronization; distilling-out an absolute time to provide a form for history without impingement, extrinsically compiling events into manipulable series. Every civilization aspires to a transcendent Aeon in which to deposit the functional apparatus of chronos without fear of decay. What is dammed-up in the Aeon is the densely material time of rupture and ruthless re-creation, whilst what remains to anaemic chronology is time as the medium of homogeneous, commensurable, and reproducible processes; a domesticated temporality adjusted to work, from which catastrophe has been abstracted-out through sublimation into the infinite. Synchronization is founded upon an immense and precarious stabilization; the petrification of a pure and absolute time, or the completion of time as such (the timeless essence of time). Synchronization has as its basic presupposition the Aeon as final register of events, as the perfectly immaculate scroll upon which creation’s unfolding is inscribed, and it is because of this that it corresponds to the servility of God; to his proper function and cosmic duty as bookkeeper of the universe. In other words, synchronization has as its condition of possibility the imperative rationality of the divine. Nietzsche tells us that—even after it has occurred—it takes a long time for the death of God to arrive, but that does not mean it is delayed, rather: it unleashes the asynchronicity whose ultimate repression God was. To be too early—unzeitgemäß—is not at all to wait. It is to suffer the eruption of real time. Neither is death the arbitrary content of asynchronicity; a subject predicated by it. Death is not extrinsically, but inherently, asynchronous.
* * *
12. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
13. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
14. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
15. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire [Rev XX].
But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death [Rev XXI:8].
It seems that something is in fact annihilated. The end and the beginning correspond. At the beginning was God alone. Therefore things will be brought to a point where there is again nothing but God alone. Thus all creatures will be annihilated—voice of Aquinas’ heretical interlocutor [A XIV 51].
No text has programmed the thought of death in the Western tradition more fundamentally than chapters XX and XXI of Revelation, where its historically dominant topic is established, namely, the ‘second death’, or terminal fate of the soul (see also Rev II:11, XX:6). Augustine’s City of God, written between AD 413 and 427, established the orthodox interpretation of these passages. The ‘second death’ is first mentioned in Book XIII chapter 2 [CG 510], but the decisive text is chapter 12 of the same book, where he remarks:
> the first death consist of two, the death of the soul and the death of the body; so that the first death is the death of the whole person, when the soul is without God and without a body, and undergoes punishment for a time. The second death, on the other hand, is when the soul is without God, but undergoes punishment with the body [CG 522].
He concludes this brief discussion with the words:
> the last or second death, which has no other death to follow it [CG 522].
The second death is thus aligned rigorously with eternal damnation, which is in turn conceived on the basis of the language found in Revelation and elsewhere: the infernal terminology that has provided the West with its imagery of ultimate torment for two millennia. To die the second time is to burn forever, suspended without cessation in the flames of Hell. This infinitely protracted combustion process transcends the terrestrial arbitrariness of the first death, constituting a limit to the operation of the negative; an unsurpassable incendiary horizon.
As is always the case with Augustine, his account is characterized by its vulgarity, gracelessness, and complete destitution of intelligence. This oafish crudity was to provide a crucial model for later Christian discourses on the subject, and captures very well the essentially brutal nature of the faith, which even the more spirited Christian writers would continue to propagate in the mode of traditional authority. Thus it is that Thomas Aquinas—who demonstrates intellectual and literary powers immeasurably outstripping those of Augustine—places those powers in the service of the Augustinian dogmas, typifying the most noble pattern of orthodox Christian culture: that of sophisticating an inherited spiritual loutishness.
It is Aquinas’ stupendous Summa Theologiae—an intellectual cathedral that is perhaps the greatest single achievement of Christian civilization—that Bataille parodies in his own Somme Athéologique (‘everything that one sees is the parody of another, or perhaps the same thing in a deceptive form’ [I 81] as he remarks in The Solar Anus). It is Aquinas’ meticulous construction of the inherited faith in this work that provides the first solid cultural foundations for the exercise of Christian authority, a function analogous to that of Kant in our own age (in which epistemology—or regulated scepticism—comes to replace theology under the impetus of a massive infrastructural transformation of sociohistorical production processes). Aquinas began writing the Summa in 1265, when he was forty years old, and continued it—with intermittent interruptions—until his death in 1273. Far more than the messy, wildly inconsistent, and arbitrarily compiled text we know as ‘the bible’, it is the Summa that provides a doctrinal basis for hegemonic Christianity, and the return to primary scripture—associated above all with Luther— marks the beginning of an inexorable degeneration process.
The central accomplishment of the Summa is that of establishing a rational basis for the Augustinian rantings that had become embedded in the faith, and prominent amongst these is the conception of the ‘second death’ as eternal torment, bound to the doctrine of the soul’s natural immortality (the deepest well-spring of Christian ressentiment). The heart of Aquinas’ argumentation on this matter is found in the four articles of Question 104 [A XIV 35–55], which is arguably the most important text in the entire sweep of scholastic philosophy.
The position Aquinas inherited from Augustine can scarcely be described as philosophical. It is at most an attempt to construct some semblance of doctrinal consistency on the basis of conscientious but talentless scriptural exigesis conducted in the context of an anti-pagan polemic that aspires to persecutory authority. Not that this in any way compromises Augustine’s claim to be exemplary of Judaeo-Christian piety, on the contrary; his rabid intolerance responds perfectly to the dominant tone of monotheistic belief. Nevertheless, one can only sympathize with Aquinas, trying to argue for the rationality of the faith, whilst behind him reverberate deranged barkings such as this:
> But in that last condemnation, although a man does not cease to feel, his feeling is not that of pleasure and delight, nor that of health and tranquillity. What he feels is the anguish of punishment, and so his condition is rightly called death rather than life. The second death is so called because it follows the first, in which there is a separation of natures which cohere together, either God and the soul, or the soul and the body. It can therefore be said of the first death that it is good for the good, bad for the bad; but the second death does not happen to any of the good, and without doubt it is not good for anyone [CG 511].
*
Aquinas’ extraordinarily intricate task was to reconstruct the Christian doctrine of death on orthodox grounds (but this time rational ones), without succumbing to the humanistic impiety latent in the notion of the soul’s natural immortality. Both Irenaeus and Arnobius had challenged this doctrine, considering it incompatible with the absolute dependence of all created things upon God, and even Augustine himself seems at times to undermine it. Once the natural immortality of the soul is questioned, however, it is but a short step to the thought that the unreformably wicked might be simply extinguished— after an appropriate period of rigorous punishment—rather than eternally tortured: a doctrine that Irenaeus seems to have held, and Arnobius certainly did. This is the extreme heresy of annihilationism, later to be associated with the Socinians (who were vigorously persecuted for it) and other Arians. It was considered so heinous a belief throughout the hegemonic period of Christian domination that professing it was literally suicidal, since it merited a reaction on the scale of atheism itself: torture and death (both first and second, although atheists were no doubt more concerned about the first). D.P.Walker, in his discussion of seventeenth and eighteenth century annihilationism, remarks that: ‘atheists and Socinians, who were supposed to believe in the annihilation of the wicked, were generally considered outside the bounds of even the broadest religious tolerance; since they were socially dangerous, it was the business of the state to eliminate them’ [DH 4].
It is thus a mark of considerable integrity that Aquinas—some 400 years earlier— insists upon the (limited) plausibility of the annihilationist case. He divides his argument into stages, first affirming God’s power to annihilate, and only then denying that this power is in fact exercised by a benevolent being (eternal damnation as the sentimentality of God). He concedes, in the first stage of this argument:
> just as before things existed God had the power of not giving them existence, and thus of not creating, so also once they are created he has the power of not continuing to uphold them in existence; they would then cease to be. That is annihilation [Quod est eas in nihilum redigere] [A XIV 49].
Annihilation or—more precisely—the return to nothing, is related to two interconnected concepts of decisive importance to scholastic theology; those of creation and conservation. The nihil of annihilation is the nothing from which creation brings forth the being, since ‘what is created comes out of nothing [ex nihilo]’ [A VIII 41]. Creation both draws the being out of nothing, and holds it out of nothing, or conserves it. The perpetual conservation of the being is a positive and incessant causation that relates it immediately to God, so that ‘[w]ere God to annihilate, it would not be through some action, but through cessation from action’ [A XIV 51]. Annihilation is thus a release from action’, a relapse that has a merely negative relation to God. It is the being’s own tendency that leads it to annihilation, as soon as God ceases to interfere in the creature’s relation with absolute death (which is alien to God, since his relation to nothingness is purely inhibitive). In one sense the being of the creature communes with God as its cause, but as a difference from the nihil the tension of the creature relates only to death, and God’s participation is that of a third party incidentally impinging upon a communication that escapes him. God and the nihil squabble over creation as jealous rivals fight over a shared lover, except that the creature—however much it might respect God—is torn by its desire in quite the other direction, whilst the nihil has all the tantalizing indifference that naturally flows from incomparable powers of seduction.
* * *
The heresy of annihilationism, by ridding itself of the distracting circus of damnation, clarifies the fundamental impetus of Judaeo-Christian monotheism as no other doctrine can. This God is the antagonist of zero, and therefore the fortress of identity, personality, individuation. To be exiled definitively from such a God—to lose his protection—is to relapse into indivisible non-being; decreated into the nihil. That annihilationism has failed to have a significant influence upon Christian orthodoxy attests in part to the tenacious privilege that folk religion and superstition have always maintained over intellectual consistency within the churches, but more importantly, it indicates the voluptuary and disciplinary investment in the thought of the eternal torment of the wicked (exemplified by Augustine).
For the pious annihilationist the perpetuation of existence beyond death is conceived as a reward, reserved only for the deserving, more precisely, the good. More profound than the vulgar empiricity of torment, it is non-being that is the true punishment. The souls of the wicked are subject to the undifferentiable pole of an absolute judgement; simple extinction. For those who remain stubbornly unenticed by the prospect of the long postnecroid haul under God there is thus a surgical and non-penitentiary alternative.
Like all blocks of reactive libido, annihilationist Christianity mapped a displaced active impulse within itself. Utter dissolution is offered as a lure, but safely imprisoned in a system of ethicological exclusion processes; permeable only to that inarticulate ardour which springs from the repressed materiality of the human animal. The taint of evil, or of divine (paternal) disapproval, serves as one barrier screening the ego from the non-image of death. Even more important—because more deeply concealed—is a trap simultaneous with the origin of the logical; that of viewing death from the perspective of God. God—a being—is conceived as thinking both being and its negation with unperturbed mastery, so that non-being is thought through the power of a (supreme) being; as being qualified by absolute impoverishment, and as the inferior pole of a bifurcation within being. Above all, non-being is simply to be thought, and the divine model of logical relatedness secures being in its privileges; adorning it in the robes of methodological presupposition. Death expresses the law, and thus subordinates itself to the highest being. The intellectual neutrality that is thus attributed to God in his comprehension of non-being is the real possibility of a thanatology, or logic of death.
Pious annihilationists are committed not only to the possibility of thanatology, but to its effective existence in the divine intellect, as the absolute pinnacle of reason and justice. For them thanatology is architecturally fundamental to divine law. Such servile annihilation is an eliminative negativity, which can be thought of in two broad ways: either as a formal or as a speculative relation (deconstruction is happy to accept it as either before displacing it). Formal elimination corresponds to a positivity understood as extraneous to its negative qualification, whilst speculative elimination—formalistically (mis)conceived—is the simultaneous inherence and non-inherence of such qualification to positivity. In both cases the content of such a negation is determined by that which is qualified by it, which is the precise definition of elimination. The Spinozistic principle that Hegel enthusiastically embraces as the speculative restlessness germinal in formal reasoning—Omnis determinatio est negatio—means that a positivity is determined by its exact elimination, or, in the words attributed to Hegel in the Zusatz to his lesser Logic: ‘[t]he foundation of all determinateness is negation’ [H VIII 196].
The inof indetermination can only be read as either the formal negation or the speculative development of determination if it is itself understood as eliminative, which is to say, determinate. Such a move is of course—when fully explicit—Hegelianism itself. Quite different is the indeterminate sense of indeterminate negation, which is not eliminative, but ferocious. Ferocious negation is radically heterogenous in respect to the annihilation it effects, so that it is intrinsic to its definition that it cannot be derived from its eliminative consequences by either formal or speculative logic. Far from being topic neutral, logic is reasoning from the basis of secure existence, which is to say, in the absence of time (Hegel thinks history, but not time). The laws of identity, noncontradiction, or determinate negation attain their rigour only by qualifying itself with respect to metamorphosis: insisting upon the simultaneity of logical relations, or the absence of temporal differentiation (asynchronicity). Such a qualification is constitutive for ideality, whether in the weak (scientistic) or the strong (theological) sense. In other words; ideality is nothing other than logical obedience or pure being, and the topic of logic is ontology. It is unfortunate for the logicians that suicide is not a mere decision, but also a technical problem, exemplifying the irreducibly heterogeneous relation between the ‘being’ and its potential for inexistence (which is never even remotely its own). Such a heterogeneity is attested more generally by the struggle for oblivion and the positivity of the sacrificial process. It is the ferocity of death that entangles it in eroticism. ‘The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space’ [VII 21]. Unlike a logical negation, death requires a complex occasion: intricate conjunctions, the interpenetration of bodies, turbulent flows. There are innumerable ways to die, but this proliferation of routes out of the maze does not lead to the simplicity of a general negative possibility. Ferocity is not reflectively determined through the exercise of a negation, indeed, it has no determination at all, but only a real composition generated in a violent collision of heterogeneous elements, whose issue is a complex synthesis. The various negativities consummated in complex syntheses have no logical equivalence, but only real consistency, or, in Bataille’s terms, community. It is because the realization of expenditure requires the assemblage of a complex synthesis that there is a problem of consumption, finding its inevitable issue in an impossibility, in the sensation of dying or undeath: existence out of excess. Nature, far from being logical, ‘is perhaps entirely the excess of itself [III 219], smeared ash and flame upon zero, and zero is immense.
