Liquid Bodies, Unbecoming

What began a couple of weeks ago as a single post on the theme of the liquid body, has unexpectedly developed into a trilogy.

The first post looked at the theme of writing as a way of anchoring a body that has been rendered liquid in postmodernity, while the second post looked reviewed the metaphysics of potency over act as that which makes the body liquid in the first place.

At the end of the second post, I mentioned how the theme of the Incarnate Word as a coincidence of opposites (a theme defended by St Bonaventure), could act as the crucial bridge between the body’s being and becoming, and avoid the impulsive choosing of one extreme or another.

One other contingency was left unaddressed, and that is what happens if, in the drive for the body to embrace endless possibility, the body becomes so liquified as to be erased. To put another way, what is to happen if the body, in the drive to bear the capacities of infinite becoming, actually undergoes an “unbecoming” and faces the threat of ceasing to be?

Here I wish to put forward the thought of Chiara Lubich, the founder of the ecclesial movement Focolare. In particular, I wish to draw out her theme of Jesus Forsaken, which forms an essential core of the spirituality of Focolare. 

In Christ’s cry of dereliction, Lubich wrote that Jesus goes beyond articulating a feeling of forsakenness, but also an ontological state. Christ, through whom all things have being, emptied himself to enter the negation of being on the cross. Paradoxically, Lubich argues that it is precisely in the negation of being whereby Christ unlocked the reality to all being, which Lubich defined as “the great ocean of existence in which human beings are in communion with everyone and everything”. In other words, in Christ, negation of space does not negate sociality in turn, but rather unlocks it. Furthermore, Christ Forsaken is only possible through the spirit, since it is the spirit that Christ gave up on the Cross. Thus, in the Spirit, non-being no longer negates being, but rather reveals it. Thus in Lubich’s words, Christ is one who “makes himself nothing to make us everything”. 

In other words, Christ’s embrace of non-being is precisely what makes him the saviour of everything that is; even if what we face is the unbecoming of the liquid body, Christ’s embrace of of non-being metaphysically anchors each and every one of us in the land of the living.

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