NOTE: This is primarily pulled from my essay, “Trans-gressing Christianity”, in which I explored a number of topics related to IGF. Will probably adjust this as time goes on.
13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. 14 People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. 15 If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
Hebrews 11:13-15
To truly be seen is to be understood; but to be understood as an object — whether of fetishization, hatred, or violence — is to be made abject. While Emmanuel Levinas retheorized first philosophy as ethics, with the face of the Other being the quintessential ethical encounter, Deleuze and Guattari theorized the face in a much different way: it is more significantly the site in which bodies are disciplined and categorized in relationship to the penultimate face of Western history: the face of the (white, male, cishetero, imperial, colonizing) Christ. In Deleuze and Guattari’s expression, one is forced to have a face, to be recognized in hierarchical relationship to this transcendent face of the Western God-Man. The closer one is in appearance to this face, the closer one is to perfection; the farther away, to abjection, banishment, and death. Recognition — to be made a face, a stable thing, an identifiable object — is the tool by which the State apparatus categorizes, organizes, and distributes groups across the strata of the social hierarchy.
It is worth stating that in critiquing the systems of the face and of recognition, it would be very easy to abandon the work of Levinas’ first philosophy entirely. In fact, as has been noted in previous literature, Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the face is in direct response to Levinas. What is more difficult, on the other hand, would be to hold these two philosophical systems together in mutual expression — both the ethical imperative of the Other to be truly seen and welcomed and the critique of the white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, imperial, colonial system which relegates the Other to a necropolitical periphery through a stratified, codified facial recognition network. According to Levinas, the face of the Other’s alteriority precedes judgments about them. What Deleuze and Guattari point out, however, is that the face is already preinscribed with judgments. People are prejudged and profiled, often unconsciously, by the color of their skin, their level of attractiveness, their visible disabilities, and their gender, for instance; transphobia and the gender binary are no exception. Most trans people are misgendered constantly, both intentionally and unintentionally. We are frequently trapped inside cisheteropatriarchal gender boxes. To be recognized in one’s alteriority then is often a painful process of being boxed in, sometimes to great discomfort, other times to lethal results. So what is the point of being recognized in one’s alteriority when it leaves them in an abjective state? Perhaps, unfortunately, to be used as diversity quotas for neoliberal institutions?
In asking this, I am not suggesting that marginalized individuals and groups should not receive equitable expansions of rights and opportunities (they should). Significantly, however, I do not believe that Levinas is calling for mere cultural-institutional representation in his ethical project (a strategy and aim that has been endlessly critiqued by various anarchist, Marxist, post-structuralist, anti-racist, and decolonial thinkers), but instead a reformulation of the metaphysical relationship between Self and Other. While Hegel theorized the Self and Other as in a mutual struggle for recognition and mastery, Levinas instead sees the encounter with the face of the Other as that which ruptures conventional metaphysical, social, and personal desires with the command “Do not kill me”. In this way, the Other bears the mark of a transcendent ethical command. However, it is obvious from the history of human tragedy — from persecution to war to slavery to genocide — that this command bears the possibility of being ignored entirely. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, the system of the face is capable of radically-alienating some of our fellow humans from their humanity while inscribing a sense of glorification in others. Some are made abject; others are made lords and gods; and most live somewhere in between.
When it comes to the relationship of the face of the Other — both in terms of the ethical command to sanctify and the structural process of abjectification — we may catch sight of the two poles which queer and trans people are most often relegated. On the one hand, we are acclaimed by the liberal media and allowed our pride month to openly celebrate in progressive cities; on the other, we are chastised, abandoned, persecuted, and murdered in both those places and others. If the former is what Levinas means, then I fear that this ethical obligation is merely a fantasy being played out by slightly-left-of-center institutions and corporations to absolve themselves from what happens ‘over there’, on the other side of the political spectrum. That Gay Pride began as a riot organized and led by queer and trans people of color — for instance, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both members of the Gay Liberation Front and founders of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) — is a less marketable, safe, and sanitized expression of what it would mean to be truly seen. Being queer and trans ultimately means being viewed as less-than-human, as an abject form of humanity, particularly in the eyes of fascists and their religious equivalent, fundamentalist theocrats. To be made abject is to be made killable; to be a representation quota to help sell a product, a brand, and establish the ‘ethicality’ of corporations is to be fetishized and exploited, to be hyper-visible and yet erased at the same time. Thus to be seen in this double-bind might be less about parades and more about throwing bricks. In other words, when representation is a tactic of pinkwashing the abjective conditions of the queer and trans community, “do not kill me” may mean at the same time “do not represent me”.
In terms of literature on the subject of abjection, it has been explored quite valiantly by Julia Kristeva in her work The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, while the link between abjection and trans life/studies has been expressed quite significantly in the first issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly in a short essay by Robert Phillips. Judith Butler also delves into the subject of abjection in their book Bodies That Matter, describing (akin to Deleuze and Guattari) the way in which the repudiation (i.e. abjection) of certain bodies serves to uphold the power (i.e. subjectivity, faciality) of others. They write,
This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects,” but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. . .In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subjected, an abjected outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter
Might we recall the God of substance’s hierarchical ontology? For God (and men with Him) to have power, lasting historical presence, and a bolstered subjectivity, the Earth, flesh, women, and non-Christians had to be cast aside. In a different way, and rather ironically, we saw that in their attempts to carve out subjective space for themselves during the 1970s and ‘80s, some radical feminists chose a transphobic path. And most importantly, we must recognize how the West has built its identity during the last 500 years (and even longer if we look at the Crusades and the past 2,000 years of anti-Semitism in Europe) on racist conquest and genocide. In all of these examples, we see power formed through abjection, disgust, rejection, and desecration.
The theomasculine project of stratification that simultaneously establishes acceptable identities, recognizes these identities institutionally, and engulfs them in normative ideologies is what needs to be dismantled — something that I believe is reflected in the title of Fred Moten’s three-part series, consent not to be a single being. This can also be linked to D&G’s flip of the Whiteheadian formula “the many become one and are increased by one” into the subtraction of the One (n – 1) that produces multiplicities. In Alfred North Whitehead’s sense, each multiplicity becomes a unity and becomes an element of further unities; in D&G’s sense, however, it is unity which is subtracted, leaving pure multiplicity. Rather than allow ourselves (or the Other) to be trapped in an identity box, we must ask instead to consent to being multiplicities, to see ourselves and each other as a multitude of forces, power relations, affects, desires, orientations, and positionalities. We must deterritorialize further and further beyond the codifications, experimenting with lines of flight toward (an)Other world(s), where, by being more than a single being, we constitute a crowd — a fugitive crowd that cannot easily be reterritorialized by faciality’s apparatus of capture.
All-in-all, I think this is not a project that can or will be done at the molar level, but instead must be activated through micropolitical engagements with what is exterior, what is outside. We must begin to dream differently, to breathe life into a world that does not yet exist, that may be an impossibility from our current vantage point. To desire the future that could have been and that could only come about through the sheer miracle of everyday acts, gestures, hopes, fantasies, affects, beliefs, and conspiracies. To see another world, we must begin to feel its presence beyond the horizon.
To conclude, I ask a fundamental question to my community: What would happen if, in affirming ourselves, we were able to also affirm our abjectivity? If instead of trying to wear the faces given to us by an anti-Christian empire founded on white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, classism, colonialism, and anthropocentrism, we rather admitted that we are ‘foreigners and strangers on earth’ and allowed our abjection to be our passports for ‘a country of [our] own’? To have the strength to affirm both our alienation and our capacities for dreaming of a world beyond it? To dream of a life where instead of yearning for representation from our oppressors we (re)begin to represent ourselves to each other along the margins? If the structures of cisheteropatriarchy cannot define us in relation to its penultimate face, we reach a state of imperceptibility and become a blackhole for the powers of faciality, pulling the representative capacities of the center apart through an affirmation of trans-abjectivity. The face of the colonizing European Christ haunts the world, haunts the soul, and haunts the flesh. What would it mean then to dissociate from this image of Christ and instead gather together and resurrect the body of God as a multiplicity of difference-in-itself, enfleshed and in communion? Difference not in relation to some hierarchical standard of holiness, but a difference that is truly singular in its uniqueness, and yet deeply intertwined within a sea of univocal, differential Being; a post-Christian, yet also postsecular multitude that allows the face to be encountered anew, as a radically-transgressive anti-face; a non-hierarchical, rhizomatically-aligned anti-fa(s)cism? Moving beyond a concept of humanity that does not include us, we yearn towards a state of posthuman spiritual and political possibility. Deep underground, we might begin to connect the wires necessary to make our Otherness not a territory that the Self can master and overcome, but instead a plane upon which new modes of escape become possible. Reaching out into the void, we call forth a new creativity, a new people, and a new earth: that which exists beyond cisheteropatriarchal, capitalist, and colonial normativity. As Ralph Ellison’s invisible man declares at the end of his eponymous novel, driven below the world of exploitation and into the heart of the sewers, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Perhaps in our abjectivity, we may speak to and welcome those yet-to-come; and let us imagine in doing so that the luring God is calling us to ‘a country of [our] own’, spoken through ‘on the lower frequencies’ — a place to call home.
A final note: I cannot write this post without at least mentioning the pivotal connections between colonialism, gender and sexuality, abjection, and Christianity made by Manuel Villalobos Mendoza in his book Abject Bodies in the Gospel of Mark. It is with great pleasure that I discovered Mendoza’s meditation on the Gospel of Mark: Having already started this section of the paper and nearing completion in November 2021, I discovered that much of the connections I had made were already prefigured in this book, published in 2012. For instance, Mendoza writes,
. . .my hermeneutics of el otro lado [the other side] relies heavily on the insight of Judith Butler. . .[such as their] understanding of the vulnerability and precarious nature of the body, of how some bodies become human and others do not. . .[though] instead of reading philosophers through the lens of Butler, I have decided to go ad fontes, for example to Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, Emanuel Levinas’s understanding of the face, and Michel Foucault’s understanding of power.
Manuel Villalobos Mendoza, Abject Bodies in the Gospel of Mark
Considering that Mendoza independently linked Butler, Kristeva, and Levinas — and quite specifically in the same manner as I have — is a blessing and also incredibly humbling. To have my thoughts validated in such a way is wonderful; to see that they have already been expertly deployed in near perfect fashion makes this section potentially redundant. However, I do believe that I have offered some originality to the conversation; and if not, then it is still with pleasure that I say that Mendoza has provided a beautiful example of trans-gressive theology, one which I now cherish dearly.
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