Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [51]
The third advantage is that here too tumbling dominates. Here too, to say the least, the tendency is to fall. But it’s less systematic. It’s a rule but like all rules it permits exceptions. The giving of the law, for example; the word thrown up to heaven by the thousands of prophets scouring the region. And even death, the very moment of death, which is when you have to vacate your room, it is specified that the ruah, far from returning to earth and being reabsorbed by it, far from becoming dust like the mortal coil shuffled off, rises to heaven. There’s always that.
The fourth advantage is the possibility of a subject. I’ve already demonstrated that in a book entitled Le Testament de Dieu. It’s always said that it’s the weight of religion that prevents the affirmation of the subject and particularly of the free subject. Well, my thesis at the time was that it is paganism that, by mixing everything up, defining individuals as pure packages of matter, stones, atoms, excludes the possibility of a subject conscious of being a subject, while it is Judeo-Christianity with its ruah, the transformation of divine into human breath, in other words the hypothesis of a soul made in the image of God, that makes this subject conceivable and possible. In thirty years, I haven’t budged an inch from that view. I still believe that the only way of thinking that distinguishes us, you and me, from the tree, the stone, or your dog Clément is to emerge from Greek thought and as tradition says to play Jerusalem against Athens. This is what allows the second model. This is its other advantage over the Epicurean apocalypse.
Fifth, there’s the form of this subject. That there is a subject is one thing, but it’s quite another to know how, with what status, in what guise, and in what light it exists, whether it is this lethal subject, this small, completely round sphere, outlined once and for all, detached from the external world, as related to us by the theory of the stone, or if this is a living, moving subject, which keeps on being transformed, even though it is said to be fixed, and of which you and everyone else have had a concrete, lived experience. For that subject, again the biblical model is irreplaceable; in particular, the biblical model as updated by its modern interpreters, its great leaders and exegetes, beginning with Spinoza. What did Spinoza say and what did he have to offer in this debate? His big contribution is the idea of substance, the great one and only substance whose subjects are said to be modes. For Leibniz that was the mistake. In his opinion as soon as you approach Spinoza’s intermeshing of substantiality, you begin to lose your way, since creatures are condemned to differ only by degrees, a bit like the way the waves in the sea differ from each other. In reality, the opposite is the case. There are other charges—and what charges!—to be made against Spinoza. But on this point he’s right. His idea of the One Substance has something to recommend it. It blasts through the boundaries of the stone. It explodes the membrane separating interior from exterior. It allows subjects that may extend the territory of their subjectivity, contract it, and extend it again according to their mood, circumstances, and stage in life. It’s like a polder, an individual. Or like an island, yes, an island, which is always, at every instant, engaged in a struggle with the sea. It advances, it retreats. It annexes portions of the territory, then loses them again. It’s not a state, it’s a process. It’s not rest, it’s work. And it’s a work that goes on—that’s the marvel of it—as long as we live. Yes, that’s it, that’s what is the brilliant idea. To put it clearly, it means that the subject is no longer substance.