contagion 12-13.

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EGO CREDO
MICHEL SERRES
Académie française and Stanford University

S
aint Paul combines in one singular person the three ancient formats,
Jewish, Greek, and Latin, from which the Western World sprang. A
devout Pharisee, he was born in Tarsus into a family of the Diaspora, and
educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel; he observed Mosaic Law and con-
stantly cited the Torah, both Psalms and Prophets, with erudition. It also
seems likely that he knew Greek philosophy, at least by way of Philo the Jew,
since he wrote and spoke the Greek language and cited some of its authors,
saying that he admired its wisdom, practiced its elegance, and dreaded its
reason. As a Roman citizen, like his father, he took pride in this status; he must
have known Roman Law, since after being sentenced by the imperial courts,
he addressed an appeal to them.
Saint Paul not only symbolizes the cultural melting pot among
Mediterranean sailors, port-merchants, and occasional scholars during the
Pax romana; he above all embodies the integral man built by the Law, the
Logos, and the Administration, three formats forged in the fires of Hebraic
monotheism, Hellenistic rational Wisdom, and Roman Law, themselves
respectively shaped by ritual in the Temple, harmony in the Cosmos, and the
City-State in the Empire. This triple belonging to an organized society, a sys-
tematic world, and an all-powerful god promotes excellent modes of conduct.
Triply formatted in this way, Saint Paul, newly named, rose up out of the
trinity of his belonging; he traveled the world over, and he invented the com-
ing era. In so doing, he braved three disasters: the persecution of his fellows,
the mockery of Greek philosophers on the Areopagus, and his trial and prob-
able execution by Rome. In and through Paul, all the superior and lasting
achievements of the Indo-European and Semitic traditions stem from this orig-
inal bifurcation; the good news he proclaims is incarnated and grafted on him
and through him; from him, the branch of a new creature springs forth.
Although his ancient formats imply a belonging to three different communi-
ties, the new man identifies with none of them in order to create something
entirely new. But what?

© Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture

Vol. 12–13, 2006, pp. 1–11
ISSN 1075-7201
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2 MICHEL SERRES

BELONGING AND IDENTITY

In a previous book, I wrote that my identity cannot be reduced to my belong-
ing to certain groups. So do not call me “old man,” a male, or a writer, but put
me, if you must, in whichever subcategory designates the corresponding age,
sex, or profession. Apart from these characteristics, who am I? Me. All the
rest, including what the government bureaucracy obliges me to write on my
so-called “identity” card, merely indicates some of the subcategories to which
I belong.
If you confuse belonging and identity, you make a logical error that is cer-
tainly serious, but, in the end, relatively benign. Moreover, you set yourself up
to make a deadly mistake, that of racism, which consists precisely in reducing
a person to one of his groups. We owe this distinction (which is so important
that I like to repeat it) to Saint Paul. We owe it to him both in theory, because
he elaborates it, and in terms of his life, because the Good News that he brings
breaks with the three ancient formats, all three of which were associated with
groups.
“There is neither Jew nor Greek,” says Paul, “there is neither bond nor
free, there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). All he mentions here are
classes, sexes, languages, or nations—in short, all categories or groups. What
he means is that there is no longer any belonging in the earlier sense, leaving
only the identity I = I: “But by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Cor. 15:10).
For Paul, the only thing left is this “new creature”: I, the adoptive Son of God,
through faith in Jesus Christ; I, full of faith and without works, without pride;
I, empty, poor, and nothing: universal.
Who am I? I am I, and that is all. If we put aside the subcategorical defi-
nition of belonging (x å A), the principle of identity becomes evident, not in a
formal way, as in the Aristotelian sense of a = a, but as an individual singular-
ity, whose ordinary, even minute aspect Saint Paul frequently emphasizes. (I
will return to this idea of emptiness.) Better still, the principle of identity
defines this singularity, not arbitrarily but as God’s free gift. Transcendence had
previously granted, in its mercy, election to a group; now transcendence gives
identity to the singular.
The first quotation above refers to the Greek, Jewish, and Roman commu-
nities, to social classes and to sexually defined roles; the second refers to the
initial event that allowed the self to emerge: the incarnation of Jesus Christ, his
death and resurrection. In these two brief sentences, belonging and identity
are distinguished for the first time. Identity breaks free from belonging. In
other words, Paul’s message breaks free from the formats.
When he speaks of the sinful flesh from which only faith in the
Resurrection can deliver us, Saint Paul refers not only or necessarily to the
body and its habits, needs, or passions, but to the immersion of the indi-
vidual in a group where, eager to feel its fusional warmth, he submits to its
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EGO CREDO 3

laws and adopts its reactive aggressiveness. The Epistles thereby illustrate
what I have in the past called the libido of belonging. We commit the
majority of the sins of the flesh because we have been mimetically trained
by peer pressure and by our blind enthusiasm for group, national, tribal,
team, and family solidarity, by special interests, favoritism, and corruption.
Who has the courage to say I? We commit these sins more often than I does,
since the sin concerns us collectively, which is to say the Law, rather than
the personal I that frees us from the Law. When Saint Paul “frees [us] from
the Law,” he first and foremost releases our own identity from any collec-
tive bonds.

THE NOVELTY OF THE I

Did the I ever exist in the eras that preceded Saint Paul’s Epistles? The demo-
cratic citizens of Athens (“democratic,” in the sense that they were concerned
with distinguishing their elite group from slaves, foreigners, and other out-
siders without any sort of work or profession) busied themselves with the
affairs of their city-state: they made sacrifices to their namesake Athena at des-
ignated ceremonies; they warred from time to time with Sparta, Thebes, or
the Persians; thus they organized, honored, and defended their us. As a group,
they denounced both those who objectively observed the heavens, and
Socrates, who subjectively advised one to know oneself. No Greek philosopher
ever says I. These political animals, to use Aristotle’s term, willingly excluded
the subjective and the objective. Their standards, norms, and formats derive
from their belongings.
Similarly, ever since their covenant, the Chosen People have turned to
their Law: respecting it, revering it, and teaching their children its sacred
history, fighting in its name when necessary, against the Philistines and the
Samaritans, and throwing the ethnoi out of the Temple. The us manifests itself
in God’s covenant of election. God is the only one who states the principle of
identity: I am that I am. I do not know if Rome, with its immortal invention,
the Law, designated any other legal categories beyond male heads of house-
holds, senators, tribunes representing plebeians, and citizens—always repre-
sentatives of a group. In this sense, Rome was just as sparsely populated with
individuals as Greece.
So by the beginning of the first century AD, the notion and practice of
belonging were widely disseminated throughout the entire Mediterranean.
Greek culture taught one type of belonging, which was at once political and
cosmic; the tradition of Israel transmitted a second type, holy belonging; and
Rome a third type, juridical belonging. Still another type, economic and social
belonging, which separates slaves from those called free and born as such, was
practiced by civilizations the world over. And dominant males were convinced
that nature had inscribed in the body a final type: sexual belonging. Saint Paul
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4 MICHEL SERRES

announced the extinction of this ancient man defined exclusively by his

groups and their genealogy, yet without ever, to my knowledge, saying
“Christian” or “Christianity,” probably out of a desire not to create a new influ-
ence group or any other measure of collective reference. Forsaking these
formats thus implied for him forsaking their respective belongings. And so he
left behind the truths that made him what he was.
What an extraordinary new project: to spread throughout the world a
subjectivity that does not refer to any one culture, that is not linked to any one
language (at least not since Pentecost), that is not attached to any one tradition
or lineage, and that is not bound by contract. I do not mean to say that Saint
Paul entirely controlled this project or that he was immediately successful in
bringing concrete social and historical changes with it. I am simply saying that
I perceive in his Epistles a first glimmer of this project.

THE INITIAL EVENT: DAMASCUS

Both the Acts and the Epistles say many times that Saint Paul’s conversion took
place on the road to Damascus. Serious historians have long disdained the
stories of Archimedes’s bath and Newton’s apple. However, anecdotes often
say more and say it better than explanations.

STEPHEN
But even before the story Paul tells of his conversion, an event so widely com-
memorated by painters, musicians, and poets, there is another story—perhaps
a darker, more historical account, since he himself clearly witnessed it, but a
decisive one. Seated upon the robes of his companions, Paul sees the lynching
of Stephen. As the stones fly, the victim cries out, “I see the heavens opened,”
and, destroyed by the blows, he dies.
The distance of his observer position allows Saint Paul to see the conse-
quences of the Law. Forged as he was out of three powerful materials—ritual,
logos, and order—he suddenly reflects upon that which these three ancient
formats were founded: collective violence. From here onward, I will no longer
analyze the historical Acts or legendary traditions, I will no longer cast my eyes
upon this ghastly array of facts, but I will instead reread the Epistles. What is
it that Saint Paul will soon write? That the Law creates Sin. Be released from
the Law, he says, which is to say from the Flesh. This means (at least in part):
be released from social affiliations. Deliver yourself from the Law, from the
Flesh, which is to say from Sin. Abandon the Law, the Flesh, Sin, in other
words, Death . . . resurrect yourself. . . .
Now, let us put down these explosive texts, stop reading them, renounce
their commentary, and return to the narratives. Let us look unflinchingly upon
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EGO CREDO 5

the bloody act that I did not wish to describe. What do you see there but the
execution of the letter of the Law: a group of persecutors united as one social
body, with its libido of belonging, and, at the center of the group, another
body—crushed, set upon, subjective, and bloody? You see the unspeakable
violence, yes, the sin, that brings together the group that commits it, and at
front and center, an individual subject, isolated by Death. All gather around
Stephen: this is the us, according to the Law, which the letter kills indeed. The
deacon has been assassinated, buried beneath the stones; here is the subject,
sub-jectus, thrown under. The I under the us. In this story we can touch the
flesh of the future Epistles.

THE THREE CONTINGENCIES OF UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS

In order to construct this subject, the Epistles give a new meaning to three
terms: a verb, a substantive, and a subject.
Credo no longer means “to believe,” in the sense of opinion, confidence,
or conjecture (pistis). I write these words in Greek and in Latin, to better show
that the verb “to believe” does not translate them. Instead, their meaning is the
following: assume that “1” represents the objective truth (or from a subjective
standpoint, the certainty or conviction that this truth entails), and let “0” rep-
resent, on the other hand, objective falsehood and the subjective refusal of
such an error. Henceforth, “to believe,” newly defined, means to trace one’s
whole life—hesitating, trembling, and shaking—along the axis that separates
and unites them. Faith ventures forth in this contingent trembling. Paul says:
“For we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7).
Fides no longer means good faith or contractual confidence in a promise
made by or to others; it is no longer a term of anthropology or Roman Law,
nor is it the revered bona fides of the Roman religion, but rather a contingency
that combines certainty and doubt, conviction and its negation, light and
shadows, knowledge and ignorance, yes, faith, this simmering folly, unknown
to previous ages. Who could thus doubt more than the Son who, at the
moment of death, cries that his Father has forsaken him?
As an act that cannot be reduced to any collective reference, this new faith
creates the ego that becomes its subject. Ego is the implied first word of the
Christian Credo—as if it were still buried beneath the stones—(ego) credo—and
in the end, it defines the universal subjectivity induced by the trembling, per-
petual motion of faith. Who am I? The contingency of my faith. I am the one
that faith justifies, sustains, and saves. Again, who am I? The opposite of cer-
tainty; a fear that wavers between existence and nonexistence; in short, I am
a consciousness. I am thus the exit and ending of all belonging.
Thus modern consciousness is born: unique, double, multiple, trem-
bling, thrown into both time and eternity. It undoes mastery. In a single stroke
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6 MICHEL SERRES

Saint Paul thus invented, as a writer, the tradition of recognizing the timid and
modest self, of confessing one’s life (long before Saint Augustine), and the
tradition of the autobiographical novel (in the company of one or two of
his contemporaries). The self derives its existence from the three theological
virtues—Faith, Hope, and Charity—but which actually describe in detail the
three contingent axes that structure the New Man. Faith constructs him first.
Fortunately, Hope moves the New Man. No one has understood this bet-
ter than Charles Péguy, who represents Hope as a little girl darting and hiding
behind the skirts of grown-ups on a walk, tirelessly going from one to another,
and covering twice the distance. Adults, you have the firm intention of reach-
ing your destination, whereas she blindly and merrily comes and goes, back
and forth, along the limits of your journey, full of youthful energy. Hope is
a motivator; it leads and drives. Where to? Who can say? Does Hope guaran-
tee access to triumphant life beyond all doubt? No, it merely promises and
anticipates, but without ensuring. “The plowman should plow in hope”
(1 Cor. 9:10). Does he know if he will harvest? Like Faith, Hope trembles and
doubts of Paradise, trying to live eternity in the present moment. Hope molds
time; it models and stretches it.
Time, as both Faith and Hope experience it, is saturated with arrivals,
happenings, events, and beginnings. They both plunge the self into this time
of coming events. They strip it of all of its formats and immerse it in newness.
Faith is what happens when the self, without any certainty, settles down and
lives intensely in and through contingency. Hope is movement without cer-
tainty, and lives, held in and from contingency. Thus modern consciousness
is shaped and molded.
Finally, Charity fills relations with others with love. Inverting the contrac-
tual, political, and juridical relations of ancient communities, this total con-
nection with others is forged in a complete uncertainty of reciprocity. However
one responds to it—with aggression, disrespect, insults, blows, indifference,
disdain, hostility, or mockery—it remains a Love that “bears all things, believes
all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). Charity’s whole-
ness integrates Faith and Hope and plunges, without any guarantees, into the
shifting and dangerous contingency that is specific to relationships. This
integration is adventurous and generous. This integration allows the new I to
join in relations with the universality of mankind, whatever the origin of one’s
belonging may be.
The new self is built on a triple contingency—on faith and doubt; on hope
for an indefinite period of time; and on bonds of unconditional love—three
weaknesses and three strengths. Less than two millennia after Saint Paul,
Descartes tried to reframe the question, by seeking certainty. I am not con-
vinced that he succeeded, since contingency and the lack of certainty—in
short, doubt—presided over the birth and formation of his subject. Montaigne
grasped this desperate trembling much better.
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EGO CREDO 7

Only faith, hope, and charity remain, removed from all virtue; they
describe with precision the nonontology of this new subject: this word clearly
signifies its noninstallation, its noncertainty, its nonbeing, its nothingness.

CREDO AND COGITO

I do not really know what I mean when I say, I think. But I do not know any
more at all what I mean when I say, I am. The cogito starts in uncertainty and
ends in obscurity.
When the first Christians said, I believe, they suddenly knew that they
were no longer either slaves or senators, foreigners or women, Jews or Greeks,
sailors or farmers. They were for the first time singular individuals, alone
before God and by the grace of Jesus Christ. Moving in this way from cate-
gories into universal subjectivity, they were resurrected. Overcome with char-
ity, they had hope and faith in Him who recreated them.
The rigorous credo engenders the vague cogito. The credo precedes the
cogito like an ancestor. The former says more than the latter.

PAUL, THE SON

Let us come back to relationships. Who makes Jewish Law? Who speaks the
Greek truth? Who declares Roman Law? Who makes this faultless Law with
hundreds of articles monitoring every gesture and every minute of the day?
Who speaks this unfailing truth underlying daily thought and behavior, the
universe, and the global system of things and men? Who righteously declares
this jurisdiction and these policies to be applied from the Capital to the very
ends of the Earth? Who can demand of others what is Just, True, and Powerful,
if not He who is just, true, and all-powerful: the Father prophet, the Father
philosopher, and the Father judge. God the Father, the Wise Father, the
Emperor Father. Paul bears a Trinity of Fathers on his shoulders, a universal
trinity of universal Fathers. All of the ancient formats refer to a father figure.
It is significant that right before saying “I am what I am,” Paul speaks
of himself as “one untimely born” (1 Cor. 15:8) and as an adoptive son
(Gal. 4:5)—not as a figure of speech, but as the pure truth. For he himself
leaves his respective Fathers when he delivers us from Jewish and Roman Law
and from Greek Wisdom, and he wants us to do the same. The contingency of
grace and faith thus replace the necessity of the Law. Insanity and Weakness
replace Wisdom and Force. Has the father figure failed?
Who henceforth is full of grace, lawless, insane and unwise, weak and
powerless? The Son. He was once born of a Pharisean father and Roman citi-
zen; once ill-born for having collaborated in the stoning death of Stephen;
once reborn at the feet of Gamaliel; and once again reborn in the middle of the
road to Damascus, where he saw the Son. Aborted, adopted, a prodigal Son, a
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8 MICHEL SERRES

traveler, a drifter, Paul forsakes the power and the truth of Fathers. To my
amazement, I hear in Saint Paul’s Epistles the language of a philosopher-son,
spoken for the first and perhaps the last time ever. Everyone before him—
prophets of Israel, the wise and learned of Athens, the juris-consults of
Rome—had played the role of the father on the stage of the universal. Think
of Plato’s zeal in rushing before the tyrant of Sicily and of Aristotle before
Phillip, then of Descartes at the palace of the Queen of Sweden, Voltaire with
Frederick, and Diderot with Catherine the Great. And after them, philosophers
and scholars, critics and interpreters, writers and professors, intellectuals
and instructors have all competed to adopt the power and the role of the
Father as soon as possible, even after their own is dead, carelessly murdered
by their own hand. It is a question of being right, seizing power, judging, dom-
inating knowledge, changing the course of history, understanding everything,
elaborating global systems, advising, never being mistaken, commanding; of
destroying and criticizing until every text has been reduced to ashes. It is
always a question of power, never of knowledge. I have never read anything
but Fathers, either from the Church, the University, or Science; and they were
all saints, heroes, or geniuses. I was raised from childhood by people and
words that were never wrong.
And so I was grateful to meet the outcast and the orphan. I am like him,
at least in his weaker points. Paul, the Son, is not always right; he does not
know everything; he does not command or advise; he seeks; he hesitates; he
stumbles; he drifts; he makes mistakes; he turns back; he risks error, transgres-
sion, whippings, lapidation, storms and shipwreck, hunger and thirst, impris-
onment, solitude, the descent down a prison wall in a basket. He is a fragile
clay vessel, pressed on all sides but not broken; unsure what to hope for but
not in despair; persecuted but not forsaken; beaten, but not shattered. Saint
Paul lives like a Son, thinks like a Son, and acts like a Son at least three differ-
ent times, toward his three different Fathers—Jewish, Greek, and Roman—
before whom his failures inevitably accumulate: he is persecuted, ridiculed,
and tried. The Son’s faith replaces the father’s truth and law; the Son’s hope
replaces the father’s assurance and certainty; the Son’s charity replaces the
father’s power and glory. But far from killing him, he prays: “For you did
not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received
the spirit of sonship. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bear-
ing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:15).
We all live, suffer, think, drift, and invent as sons. Such is the universal-
ity of the ego-son, which Descartes himself would not have understood,
because it makes one tremble with faith, hope, and love. The philosopher-son
haunts the tent of contingency whose walls shudder in the wind. I could not
understand why we lived in the era of the Son, I could not make sense of the
theology of the Son, before grasping this philosophy, whose very difficulty lay
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EGO CREDO 9

in the fact that its author does not present himself as a Father. Paulos means
slight or small: a son.

THE ADOPTIVE SON

He is a son then, not by blood, so to speak, but by adoption. This destabilizes
genealogy: content with his role as guardian, Saint Joseph never has children,
and Jesus invokes his and our Father in Heaven. Father and son forsake their
roles, their bonds, and, I’m tempted to say, their rivalry. Likewise, Jesus’s
fraternal relation to James, whether metaphorical or biological, is hardly men-
tioned in the Bible, and its significance is for historians an endless subject of
erudite speculation. As for Jesus’s mother—whose existence is biologically
unavoidable, but who remains a virgin after childbirth (to the disbelief of
many)—her innocence partly erases her motherhood. The age-old scenario
of procreation, replayed and modified, turns into adoption, in which affection
replaces blood ties (Serres 2001, 174–78). Indeed, genealogy had to be
reworked in order for a philosopher-son to be conceivable. It goes without say-
ing that this deconstruction of blood relations through adoption, legalized by
Roman law, favored the universalization of humankind that God promised
Abraham. In order for all men and women to become members of the elect,
they could not come from Sarah’s bosom alone.
Conversely, more recent returns to blood ties represent a dismal throw-
back to ideas that are sick and outdated. From the very beginning, Western
thought has marked time according to this new adoptive genealogy that goes
beyond blood ties. Ever since, we have not been born and will not be born
from either earth or flesh and blood, but instead from grace or free will—
indeed, from adoptive bonds, which is to say, love. Thus were established a
new measure of time, a new way of thinking, a new conscience, a new era,
and probably Science as well. But we must still adopt humankind, since, in
this long and perhaps never-ending process of hominization, we have yet
to define it.

THE MURDER
Did the son then go and take the place of his father? He became a father, most
likely because of his age and his responsibilities, as others become fathers out
of the love of a woman. He had children out of charity in Corinth and in
Philippi, and among the Galatians and the Romans; the fatherly love he felt for
them made him shed real tears when they faltered in turn. He had become a
father. Does this mean that he forsook the role of the Son?
No, because he never tried to kill the Father. Neither Jesus nor Paul—who
were both sons, the one in flesh and blood, and the other in theory, although
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10 MICHEL SERRES

both were in some sense adopted—advise parricide, like Plato against

Parmenides and Oedipus against Laios, making us believe that this act is
indelibly inscribed in our subconscious. But both Jesus and Paul teach us to
love the Father as he loves the Son. “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the
form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emp-
tied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient
unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him”
(Phil. 2:6–9). Through their pardoning of one another, the Son and the Father
love one another. Seated eternally face to face, they mutually honor and pay
tribute to each other.

DEATH
Paul thus departs from the fundamental format that sums up all others, the
format that says to become a father, one must kill his own and follow there-
after in his footsteps. Before reading Saint Paul, I did not cognitively under-
stand how a philosopher-son thought, nor did I understand the meaning of
the religion of the Son. The entire West descends from this son and finds itself
in him
Forced into reason’s format, we repeat the roles of the Master. An exam-
ple of this is the Master/Slave dialectic. Both Master and Slave function in
accordance with dialectical motion like mechanical dolls; they appear to be at
odds, but in reality they both respect the Empire of Death, each acting as
Death’s slave. The Master only acquires power through death and only domi-
nates through the terror it inspires. Saint Paul saw death under the Law, he
uncovered this truth and desired life instead; he never wanted to reign like a
Master. Like his divine model, he suffers death, but does not impose it.
If there is a Lord, Paul is a Son, like me, like you, like us all. If a Father
does exist, He is not here, but in Heaven, transcendental and eternal. The real
world knows only Sons. Here, they renounce power, repetition, format, and
necessity. By undoing these laws, they forget death. They are thereby resur-
rected. How do you become a Son? By abolishing the Law of Death.
When this happens, the reconciliation of Father and Son will come to
pass. The Father will love the Son and the Son will love the Father. At last,
each will be in his place: the Son to the right of the Father. Resurrection:
death’s reign will end.
The Acts of the Apostles tell how Paul escaped from Damascus by being
lowered down the city walls in a wicker basket; how he fled safe and sound
from countless cities throughout Asia and Europe; how he was persecuted,
judged, occasionally lapidated, frequently whipped, struck, exiled, and pur-
sued; how an earthquake freed him from prison; how he arrived in Malta
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EGO CREDO 11

despite storm and shipwreck. These are all stories in which the Apostle of
the Gentiles escapes death. Thus the story of his life conveys, in action and
on a smaller scale, what Saint Paul declared in words: the Resurrection.
Life, his and ours, is a struggle against death. His faith tells him that this
struggle is won. “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?”
(1 Cor. 15:55). Does the story in the Acts stop without warning in order
to avoid announcing Paul’s martyrdom and his final disappearance? I think so.
The lack of an ending fits so perfectly with his repeated announcements
of ever-new beginnings that it is almost inevitable that the Acts and Paul
do not end.

NOTE
The author used the Revised Standard Version of the Bible in preparing this article.

REFERENCE
Serres, Michel. 2001. Hominiscence. Paris: Le Pommier.