Bodies Still Unrisen, Events Still Unsaid

The New Testament is all about bodies – bodies that are paralyzed, fevered, lame, leprous, blind, deaf and dumb, bodies that are seized by demons, tortured, crucified and dead bodies. It is no less about bodies that are miraculously healed, bodies from which demons are driven out, bodies that pass through walls, walk on water, the maternal body of a virgin, a babe born under heavenly signs, about bodies that glow with a white glory in a transfigured state, about resuscitated and even risen bodies. As I have pointed out elsewhere, all of this represents a missed opportunity for Gilles Deleuze, who was otherwise attentive to texts like this. For here is a world that is every bit the match for anything produced by Lewis Carroll, at least as unusual as any rabbit with a pocket watch or the telescopic changes in size undergone by Alice’s body after falling down the rabbit hole. Here was a perfect illustration of what Deleuze meant by the ‘‘event’’ of ‘‘sense’’ and by the origin of sense in non-sense by which he meant a kind of neutral or proto-sense. What Deleuze meant by sense is what Averroes called an ‘‘absolute nature,’’ that is a meaning, form or structure that in and of itself is neither universal, particular nor individuated, neither abstract nor concrete, but is of itself absolved and set loose from all the conditions of mind (logical classes) or of existence (individuals). The eventiveness of the event lies in its ability to migrate freely between these spheres, heedless of the laws of logic that govern classes and of the laws of physics that govern real bodies. Curiously, that structure prior to or liberated from the conditions of logic and physics is also part of what Husserl called a pure Sinn. The event is a kind of epistemic free radical that can migrate through many strata, the analysis of which reveals to us a sphere of the absolutely possible, of hitherto suppressed possibilities, previously undisclosed openings, and unimagined, unrealized unsuspected futures. While this is the sphere of hopes and dreams, it is no less the sphere of monsters and nightmares, john d. caputo