To find oneself in possession of a restored vitality is not the same as what it means to be accorded more or less mortality, but could be what aids it. It’s an improbable formulation that might help to explain an otherwise odd concern brought to my awareness in a book review by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Knausgaard analyzes the plot of Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Submission, said to depict “society’s total upheaval”:

“The election is won by a Muslim party with which the left collaborates in order to keep the National Front from power, and France as a result becomes a Muslim state. But maybe that isn’t so bad? Maybe it doesn’t matter that much? Aren’t people just people, regardless of what they believe in and of how they choose to organize their societies? It is these questions that the novel leads up to, since this entire seamless revolution is seen through the eyes of Francois, a man who believes in nothing and who consequently is bound by nothing other than himself and his own needs. The novel closes with him looking forward in time, to the conversion ceremony of his own submission to Islam, a travesty of Huysmans’s conversion to Catholicism, not because Francois becomes a Muslim rather than a Catholic, but because his submission is pragmatic, without flame, superficial, whereas Huysmans’s was impassioned, anguished, a matter of life and death” (“Michel Houellebecq’s Submission,” 2013-2020, 188).

My first thought on having read this was to preach what, to my mind, should go without say (which hardly ever leads to anything interesting). In the West at least, Muslims who are also politicians would have already been excluded from a relationship of identity between church and state. If anything, their presence might remind us of the “once upon a time” separation between the two. It also appears the character Francois had already submitted to the idea of state religion conceived as necessity, an outcome stemming from “want of resilience,” as Knausgaard diagnoses it just before the passage cited above. It becomes a predicament because the framework of a state religion is retained as a necessity that one expects from its civic leaders rather than as an enterprise that, as with a Weberian conception of capitalism (which I imagine at some point was sincere), is accompanied by something other than matters of policy.

But is the question raised here even a ‘true’ question, having a real vitality of its own? Or are we dealing rather with the movement of fallacious reasoning that, as with Descartes’ remarks that animals are without souls because they can’t reason, continues to move about unchecked in any way that it can? In that case, we could be talking about so-called “empty space” in which questions of truth or falsehood don’t seem to apply since there is no mind to sustain it, either through sense-awareness, memory, or subjective reasoning.

Empty space springs from a withdrawal of these “relata,” leaving only matter without concrete qualities (Whitehead). If such a space can be said to include toothless abstractions, specters in want of passage, I think it would be the correct context in which to have the opening discussion, since those remarks seem to speak to a slipping from consciousness of something taken to be a constant.

In fact, constant factors do tend to slip from consciousness. Whitehead discusses them as what tends to be overlooked when discussing what are the ways in which mind and nature are associated. He also defines a constant as an object that does not pass, that has escaped passage, that doesn’t have properties of nature, and is in possession of logical man-made abstractions. These various characterizations suggest to me a project whose objective is not quite the same as what we tend to associate with mummies, say, who don’t wish to be forgotten.

Rather it seems what’s being advanced through a series of approximations can just as well be a route to guide the mind to forgetting that which doesn’t pass on its own. This might be why Houellebecq, unwittingly or otherwise, sets up a parallel in the way he does, and why Knausgaard continues it. The direct comparison of faiths along these lines, even where it appears to be a stretch, could be with the aim of restoring vitality to a ‘state religion’ construct. But Knausgaard’s analysis doesn’t seem to support that view, which suggests to me a construct whose very legitimacy is being interrogated. The jury may still be out on that one.

What can be concluded, though, at least with respect to man-made constructs, is that one can forget how to die, and the play of virtuality (the abstractive set) might be just the thing to catch it out. The method seems to have been recognized in Mallarme as well: “All of language, measured by meter, recovering therein its vitality, escapes, broken down into thousands of simple elements…” (“Crisis of Verse,” 1897).

The vitality spoken of here is on the side of the virtual, and virtual particles are said to behave more ‘truly’, i.e., more freely than do their real counterparts, which are oftentimes compelled to act due to their particular positioning in space and time, a view belonging to Aristotle’s definition of the tragic.

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