EMMANUEL FALQUE

Crossing: The INPR Journal

Vol. 1 (2020): 5–27
DOI: 10.21428/8766eb43.21806237

In Flesh and Bones1

Emmanuel Falque
The Catholic University of Paris
efalque@orange.fr

Translated by Christopher C. Rios

The University of Notre Dame
crios4@nd.edu

But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised?

With what kind of body do they come?’
1 Corinthians 15:352

“Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have”
(Luke 24:39). The mystery of the resurrection in flesh and bones is in these words,
difficult both to believe and to think. Indeed, we have a hard time adhering to this
mystery, and yet the Christian is supposed to put faith in it. Moreover, one must at
least partially conceptualize it, at risk of letting it go up in smoke. The most innocent
questions concerning the “carnal consistency” of the Resurrected One today indeed
are omitted (corpulence, resistance, digestion, restoration, integrality,
functionality…) for want of a suitable and contemporary anthropology for us to ask
them. There where the Resurrected One’s “becoming body,” including the material,
once filled the pages of the Treatises of the Church Fathers, as well as the
Commentaries on the Sentences and the Theological Summas of the medievals,

1
This essay was first delivered in French in the context of the seminar of the International Network
for the Philosophy of Religion (INPR), convened in Paris on Saturday, June 22, 2019. It was then
delivered in English in the United States on September 23, 2019, for the systematics colloquium of
the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Originally published in the French as
« En chair et en os », Transversalités, n. 153, Avril-Juin 2020, p. 5-33.
2
All scriptural citations come from the NRSV.

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 In Flesh and Bones

today nothing more is discussed, save to reduce the apparition accounts to a magic
difficult even for children to accept, much less for adults to conceive.

Everyone can agree that the mystery of the Incarnation is difficult to believe and to
understand, and yet it is precisely what Christians do not cease to profess: “He was
conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary” (the Apostle’s
Creed).3 But that one must believe and even understand the mystery of the
resurrection of the dead, when it is a matter of our own resurrection on the one hand
and of the resurrection of the body on the other, seems just as “un-believable”
(difficult to confess) as “un-thinkable” (impossible to think): “I believe…in the
resurrection of the [flesh], and the life everlasting, Amen.”4 Philosophy too must try
to render comprehensible this mystery of a God made body, even material for us
“from one end to the other,” a materiality of the body that must first be assumed in
order then to be transformed.

Whence comes the apt remark of John Damascene—this time amidst the debate over
iconoclasm (8th century)—in a formula which definitively enjoins one to take up
corporeality, but also to recapitulate materiality: “I do not venerate matter, but the
Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake and deigned to live in matter and
bring about my salvation through matter. I will not cease therefore to venerate
matter through which my salvation was achieved. But I do not venerate it in absolute
terms as God! […] Do not, therefore, offend matter: it is not contemptible, because
nothing that God has made is contemptible.”5

1. The Fright of the Body

The words pronounced on the day of the resurrection—“a ghost does not have flesh
and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39)—even today are as inaudible as
inconceivable. Whence the understandable “distress” provoked by the apparition of
the One who indeed seems to be the same as the one who was incarnate: “They were
startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost [or a phantom]. He

3
Catholic Church, “The Credo,” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Vatican: Libreria Editrice
Vaticana, 2012). http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/credo.htm. Accessed on
September 27, 2019.
4
Ibid.
5
John Damascene, “Discourse against those who speak ill against the images (Contra imaginum
calumniatores), I, 16, PG XCIV, col. 1245. Cited and commented upon by Pope Benedict XI, General
Audience of 6 May 2009: “John Damascene. http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-
xvi/en/audiences/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20090506.html. Accessed September 24, 2019.
Emphasis added.

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said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look
at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself’” (Luke 24:37-39). To be sure, we will
always be able to avoid the question and argue that it is a matter only of recognizing
him in his stigmatized body, rather than of doing right by our doubts with respect
to the materiality and consistency of this resurrected body. To be sure, it is entirely
a matter of recognition—“it is I myself” (egô eimi autos)—and not of knowledge, i.e.,
what are “these hands which are his” (idete tas cheïras mou) and “these feet which
are his” (kaï tous podas mou)? But by casting doubt on these doubts, by not mulling
over or showing their merits, we end by falsely imposing certitudes.

We too would be “terrified” (ptoêthentes) with the disciples, “afraid” (emphoboï),

“frightened” (tetaragmenoï), even full of “objections” (dialogismoï) if this happened
to us. If Christ had appeared as a “ghost” or a “phantom” (pneuma), to which we will
return, we in fact would have been less frightened, and probably the disciples would
been less frightened as well, inasmuch as their possibility does not destroy the
horizon of what can manifest itself. Bodies which are not really bodies haunt all
traditions (from Gnosticism to the angels even); we have simply grown used to it.
But that a body made of “flesh and bones” (sarxa kai ostea) can indeed now claim to
appear and reappear in what we ordinarily call a horizon of reality or objectivity, this
especially goes against our faculties of thought and even imagination. Whence
comes the necessity of approaching through a quasi-animal touch, or in any case one
stripped of every consciousness, in order to be truly persuaded of it: “touch me”—
literally, “palpate me” (psêlaphésate me)—and “look” (idete), “a ghost (pneuma)
does not have flesh and bones (sarxa kai ostea ouk ekeï) as you see that I have” (Luke
24:39). The body-to-body contact with the Resurrected One is sketched here more
on the model of “seeing,” too abstract and universalizing to truly penetrate, or better
to resist. But this contact is expressed only in touching or by the “touching-touched,”
which this time is no longer content with feeling or experiencing in a subjective body
(the lived body, Leib), nor with being held there in front in an objective body (the
extended body, Körper). Here this contact resists the one with the other in an
impenetrability that also constitutes our own common aim (the spread body, seen
as human or divine and which remains no less animal or even biological). Whence
the not insignificant question: Quid or what is this “flesh” (sarxa) and these “bones”
(ostea) to which the Gospel of Luke bears witness? We cannot hastily avoid this
question if it sufficed to recognize this flesh and these bones by the stigmata, and
therefore by the body’s lived experience of what it was.

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2. Of Flesh and Bones

Perhaps we can or could resurrect in flesh and bones, that is to say, “with” the “flesh”
(sarksa) and “bones” (ostea) in the sense with which we use those terms today. Such
would be the literal reading of the expression: “a ghost does not have flesh and bones
as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). The common formula en chair et en os or in flesh
and bones, at least in French, seems to convince us of it, whatever else the
philosophical diversity of the expression’s interpretations may be, to which we will
return. Whoever is present there—de visu, de tactu, or even better, in concreto—
truly does stand before me “in flesh and bones,” “with” his or her true body made “of
flesh and bones,” even of “veins and blood” or “organs and limbs.” Neither virtual nor
reduced to the purely emotional, the other is at my side or with me as the one whom
I can definitively touch and embrace. For the screen of the possible is finally
substituted the backdrop of the real—even what we had forgotten returns or
resurfaces: “to seize” or embrace each other, to take hold of or feel, to hold in each
other’s arms and console—so that the resurrection of bodies will cease realizing for
the screen alone what “flesh” and “bones” have themselves staged (but in what
sense?) if not in reality (Realität), then at least in effectivity (Wiklichkeit).

But is it, then, in this sense—that is to say, this purely and exclusively realist sense—
that Christ resurrected in flesh and bones, as the immediate interpretation of
Caravaggio’s painting, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, might suggest, where the
apostle seems to study the open side of Christ like a surgeon examines a wound in
order to ascertain its thickness and seriousness? In short, this is not very believable
(to give it an act of faith), or at least not very credible (to give reasons for it), insofar
as it shocks consciences and even does not necessarily make sense. We will then have
to quickly “pass” over the formula in flesh and bones, charging quickly towards the
“flesh” or the lived experience of the lived body (Leib) to realize what the physical
body (Körper) cannot. In phenomenology (apparition or auto-affection) as in
theology (resurrection), it is easier to treat the manner than it is to treat the matter,
the lived experience than the substance, and therefore it is easier to treat the “flesh”
than the “body.”

The fact remains that we will not quickly flee the reality of the Resurrected One’s
body, for such is precisely what produces the fright of the body and also makes the
resurrection an “impossibility” to be sidestepped, especially by thought. The apt
remark by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa contra Gentiles, according to which we
will resurrect with our stomachs or with our sexual organs but without having to use
these organs, because we will no longer nourish ourselves after the resurrection, is

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certainly something to smile at, today perhaps more than in times past. 6 But this is
to confuse the aim of restoration (to return in the same way, but without the
usefulness) and that of integration (to omit nothing in the act of resurrection): the
risen “will, therefore, have all the members of this sort, even though there be no use
for them, to re-establish the integrity of the natural body.” 7 In short, if nothing
expresses that in flesh and bones means “with” flesh and “with” bones, at the very
least in the sense of their employability or their usefulness, then nothing indicates
either that they should be necessarily and integrally suppressed. Besides, the
Catechism of the Catholic Church says nothing else than this, according to a
“principle of continuity” and a “law of transformation” of the resurrected body that
we must not forget: “The risen body in which he appears to them is the same (idem)
body that had been tortured and crucified, for it still bears the traces of his Passion.
Yet at the same time this authentic, real body possesses the new properties of a
glorious body: not limited by space and time but able to be present how and when
he wills; for Christ’s humanity can no longer be confined to earth, and belongs
henceforth only to the Father’s divine realm.”8

What Thomas Aquinas did in his day for hylomorphism we must do today for
phenomenology, though on a smaller scale: namely, to consider the resurrected body
anew for our culture as well (which is no longer solely that of hylomorphism). But
the difficulty is redoubled with respect to precisely what is “of our time,” for a certain
danger of Gnosticism menaces phenomenology, just as it haunted theology in the
epoch of the early Fathers of the Church. It is not certain that by dint of insisting
upon the lived experience of the lived body (Leib) we have not lost everything or
nearly as much of its materiality as of its organicity, even here below. If we seek an
“expansion of the body,” or a certain form of the spread body between the “extended
body” of Descartes and the “lived flesh” of Husserl, it is not in this alone that we
would somehow need to “compensate for the flesh by the body” in the hereafter; it
is rather that the possibility of a “body without flesh” in death (the cadaver or corpse)

6
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Four: Salvation, trans. Charles J. O’Neil (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), chapter 88: “One ought, nevertheless, not hold that
among the bodies of the risen the feminine sex will be absent, as some have thought. For, since the
resurrection is to restore the deficiencies of nature, nothing that belongs to the perfection of nature
will be denied to the bodies of the risen…Neither is this opposed by the fact that there will be no use
for those members, as was shown above [in chapter 83, ‘That Among the Risen There Will Be No Use
of Food or Sexual Love’]. For, if for this reason such members are not to be in the risen, for an equal
reason there would be no members which serve nutrition in the risen, because neither will there be
use of food after the resurrection.” Ibid., 328-329.
7
Ibid., 329. Emphasis added.
8
Catholic Church, “The condition of Christ’s risen humanity,” in the Catechism of the Catholic
Church (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2012), § 645.

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must no longer lead to a total “flesh without body” in the resurrection (ethereal
body). Everything therefore depends on what we understand by in flesh and bones,
at least in philosophy but also for theology, in order to determine what truly is this
“ghost [which] does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39).
With Christ’s apparition “in flesh and bones” to the Eleven or to the apostle Thomas,
to whom we will return, we have a true “expression,” in every sense of the term: a
manifestation of a body and a linguistic formula. It is by examining this expression
that we will better know what can be trusted.

3. Phenomenology of the Flesh

To be sure, the equivalence between sarxa kai ostea in the Greek of Luke’s Gospel
(“with flesh and with bones”) and leibhaftig in the German of phenomenology (“in
flesh and bones”) is not self-evident, though it is the least we can say. One could
object that cultures are different and that the Scriptures were recorded in Greek,
spoken in Aramaic, and have nothing to do with the phenomenological tradition
composed in German or French or in any other language. But this is to forget yet
again what Thomas Aquinas, for example, accomplished in his time. For there is no
more equivalence between hylomorphism and resurrection (accomplished form of
the body) than there is between phenomenology and resurrection (in flesh and
bones). Rather than fearing passages—from one culture to another—we will claim
them as our own instead. At least in Catholic theology, there is no more an
overcoming of metaphysics than there is the creation of another culture, even a
counter-culture. Quite the contrary, it is through and by a tradition, be it
transformed from within, that the reading of Scripture will be renewed and will make
sense for us today.

In the two cases of theology (sarxa kai ostea) and phenomenology (leibhaftig), it is
therefore a question of what we name the apparitions described as “in person”—
whether it is in Husserl (“the presence of the incarnate person [leibhaftigen
Selbstgegenwart] to an individual object” [Ideas I, §39]) 9 or in the Gospel of Luke

9
See J.-F. Lavigne’s new translation of Edmund Husserl’s, Ideen I (1913): Idées directrices pour une
phénoménologie pure et une philosophie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), §39, p. 117: “Toute
conscience percevante a cette particularité, qu’elle est conscience de la presence de la personne incarnée
(leibhaftigen Selbstgegenwart) d’un objet individual—Any perceiving consciousness has this
peculiarity, namely, that it is a consciousness of the presence of the incarnate person (leibhaftigen
Selbstgegenwart) of an individual object.” This is translated by Paul Ricœur (Ideen I, Paris: Gallimard,
1950/1991, p. 126) by “conscience de la presence en personne d’un objet individual—consciousness of
the presence in person of an individual object.” Whence the surprising relation between “in flesh and
bones” (leighaftig) and “in person” (en personne) in the whole of phenomenology. [Trans.: For a

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(“Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself” [egô eimi autos], in person
[Luke 24:39]). There is an equivalence if not in terms, then at least in the fields of
manifestation. To know what is here of these “flesh” and “bones,” or of the givenness
in what we are in person, is certainly worth considering for phenomenology (the
status of corporeity and perception), but also and perhaps more yet for theology
(substantiality of the resurrected body, even our own, in via to be sure, but also in
patria).

a. In flesh and bones, or ‘in person’

What Edmund Husserl in fact first teaches us in the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology (1913) is that “leibhaftig” or presence “in flesh and bones” constitutes
the heart of phenomenology. Thus the famous principle of principles in §24 of Ideas
I, where the “effectivité en chair en os—effectivity in flesh and bones” as translated
by J.-F. Lavigne, or even the “réalité corporelle—corporeal reality” as translated by P.
Ricœur, constitutes the very content of the originarily giving intuition: “that every
originarily giving intuition is a source of legitimacy for knowledge, that everything
which is offered to us originarily in intuition (that is to say, in its effectivity “in flesh
and bones”—leibhaften Wiklichkeit) is to be taken simply as it is given, but also
within the limits in which it is given there.”10 What is important here, at least in our
interpretation, is less the limits of that by which the thing is given than what gives
itself. And what gives itself, and in all cases in phenomenology, is a form of
“effectivity” (Wirchlichkeit). But this effectivity, far from being a form of reality, even
dialectically engendered (Hegel), is a form of the corporeity of what gives itself
(leibhaften), even though it would be here less a question of a “real body” [corps réel]
than of a “genuine body” [corps réal], less a question of what is given than of the
lived or hyletic material of what is “impressed” upon me: “The German expression
‘leibhaftigen Selbstgegenwart’ (presence in incarnate person),” the French translator
of Husserl notes, “clearly indicates the twofold essential determination of every
perception conferred by an essence in the mode of its object’s presence: it is present
‘in person’ (selbst), that is to say, it itself is present in its singular identity; moreover,
this identity is given as unsurpassable, because it is ultimately manifested—beyond
any representation, symbol, or signifier: it is the at once direct, total, and ultimate
character of this presence that Husserl intends by the expression ‘Leibhaftigkeit,’

current English translation of this text, see: Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. General Introduction to a Pure
Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), 83.]
10
Husserl, Ideen I, op. cit. §24, s. 43 (“The Principle of All Principles”), trans. Lavigne, p. 71 (cf. Ricœur,
p. 78: “dans sa réalité corporelle pour ainsi dire—in its corporeal reality so to speak”). [Trans.: See
Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 44.]

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presence ‘in flesh and bones’ or ‘incarnate’ (leibhaft)—even when the object so given
cannot in any case be sensible or given to sensibility.”11

We must admit, at least for the uninitiated, that this is full of phenomenological
technicalities and complexities. But passing through this perhaps narrow way will
allow us to say what it eventually affords theology, with its Christ who moreover is
resurrected or, in other words, who is “in flesh and bones.” The whole of the analyses
of leibhaftig in the Ideas I (1913) in reality only determines the possibility and even
effectivity of this full and complete presence “in flesh and bones” (leibhaftig) of the
phenomenon, taking into account the content of its datum, but extending it also
beyond sensibility alone.12 We will thus be able to speak of a perception “in flesh and
bones,” but also of an imagination “in flesh and bones,” and even of an idea “in flesh
and bones” (leibhaftig)—according to the celebrated Husserlian principle of a
broadening of intuition relative to Kant.13 It is precisely because some thing or some
quid is intuited that it is given “in person” or “in its person.” But what remains, or
rather what is “in flesh and bones” is not the thing as such, obviously reduced here,
but the lived experience of the thing which first makes sense. Paradoxically, at least
to confront this thesis with the weight of the “thing” in Karl Marx, to whom we will
return, the thing (das Ding) can be not given, at least in phenomenology, but the
same cannot be said of the lived experience of the thing (die Sache). If something is
“effectively given” when it gives itself “in flesh and bones,” this quid is less the
thingliness of the thing, as it were, than the lived experience by which it is felt or
undergone. There is no thingliness without lived experience, but there can be lived
experience once thingliness, at least understood as exteriority, is reduced: “every
thingly element given in flesh and bones can equally not be; no lived experience
given in flesh and bones cannot equally be not given.” 14

b. The Bridge of Weidenhausen

11
Note of J.-F. Lavigne, in Husserl, Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie pure (Ideen I), op. cit,
117.
12
Here we warmly thank Michel d’Hueppe, auditor at the Catholic Institute of Paris, for having sent
us the ensemble of occurrences of leibhaftig in Ideas I (and Cartesian Meditations) serving as the
basis for the present work.
13
See Jean-Luc Marion, “The Breakthrough and the Broadening,” in Reduction and Givenness, trans.
Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 4-39.
14
Husserl, Ideen I, op. cit. §46, s. 86, p. 140. As translated by P. Ricœur: “Toute chose donnée
corporellement peut également ne pas être; nul vécu donné corporellement n’a la possibilité de ne pas
être également—Every thing given corporeally can equally not be; no lived experience given
corporeally has the possibility of not being equally.” [Trans.: See Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology, 102.]

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Heidegger will then take this up, or rather (and it is worth saying) “will give body” to
the Husserlian “in flesh and bones” (leibhaftig), recognizing as he does the value or
the addition of the “perceived” in the mode of incarnate givenness on the one hand
(it is not the same, and in fact it is even more, to perceive than to imagine), and
giving a descriptive form to the apparition in flesh and bones on the other hand (the
Weidenhausen bridge), which his teacher, Husserl, had not yet been able to
accomplish. This advance will require the theological apparition to be enriched with
its more to come (this time “of flesh and bones,” sarxa kai ostea), or the necessity of
the mode of the perceived for phenomenological apparition (this time “in flesh and
bones,” leibhaftig).

Such is the meaning of the 1925 course delivered in Fribourg entitled History of the
Concept of Time: Prolegomena, where the phenomenologist sees clearly and
precisely in the “in flesh and bones” (leibhaftig) a form of “self-givenness,” but also
of an “incarnate self-givenness”: “The perceived as such has the character of
incarnation (Leibhaftigkeit), which signifies that that being which is presented as
perceived has the character of being there in the flesh (Leibhaft da—là-en-chair). It
is not only given as itself, but as itself in its flesh (in selbst in seiner Leibhaftigkeit—
dans sa chair). There is a difference between being given-in-flesh and being self-
given.”15 This analysis is complex, and it is obviously not the objective of the present
essay to develop it. It will suffice for us to note (and this is already to say a lot) that
it is not enough to “be given” in order to be “given in flesh and bones.” In other words,
every incarnation is a mode of givenness, but every givenness does not take place in
the mode of incarnation. The perception of the phenomenon brings something else,
even something more, to the simple representation or imagination. In order to
perceive one must stand there, with or before what is perceived. For Martin
Heidegger it is a matter of practically and almost physically moving in person, and
of recognizing that there is a genuine place for intercorporeity, which is precisely
what gives meaning to perception as “in flesh and bones” (leibhaftig). This is not
because the thing exists there independently from me, but because by its

15
Martin Heidegger, Prolégomènes pour une histoire du concept de temps (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 71-
71, as cited in Didier Franck, Chair et corps, Sur la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Éditions de
Minuit, 1981), 20-21. For a current English translation of Heidegger’s text, see Martin Heidegger,
History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1985), 40-41. We are following Franck’s translation here. [Trans.: Because the
English translation of Chair et corps employs available English translations of sources rather than
translating from Franck’s idiosyncratic French translations, upon which the present author’s
conclusions are based, all passages from Chair et corps are here translated from the French. See
Didier Franck, Flesh and Body: On the Phenomenology of Husserl, trans. Joseph Rivera and Scott
Davidson (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).]

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independent existence from me I am engaged there in a certain mode called

“perception,” which confers upon the phenomenon the character of a “full presence
in the present” that neither imagination, representation, memory, nor anticipation
possess: “What is essential is the notion of ‘Leibhaftig’…of presence there ‘in flesh
and bones’: in perception what enters into presence affects my lived body in flesh
and bones (in der Wahrnehmung ist das Anwesende ‘leibhaftig’).”16

Such is the example of the bridge of Weidenhausen, to continue Martin Heidegger’s

analysis. According to this example, one must distinguish between the
representation of the bridge in which it is for me truly “given” (the image of the
bridge is only a mere copy of bridge called real), and the perception of the bridge by
which it is for me “given in flesh and bones,” that is to say, with all the richness of
the perceived that can only be delivered by the “now” of the perceived in the sensible
profusion of the corporeity of the object, according to the philosopher of Fribourg:
“I can now re-present the bridge of Weidenhausen to myself. I place myself before
the bridge. In this re-presentation, the bridge is itself given, I aim at or intend the
bridge itself and not at an image of the bridge or a fantasy, but it itself. Yet it is not
given in flesh [and bones] (leibhaftig). It would be given in flesh and bones if I went
down to place myself before the bridge itself. This is to say that what is itself given
(selbst gegeben) has no need of being given in flesh [and bones] (leibhaftig), but,
conversely, that every being given in flesh [and bones] (leibhaftig) is itself given
(selbst geben). Incarnation is an exemplary mode of a being’s self-givenness.”17

c. The Richness of the Perceived

The richness of the perceived over the imagined, and so the presence there in flesh
and bones in moving oneself around and standing physically “before the thing,” such
is the authority and contribution of Jean-Paul Sartre, at least in his
phenomenological period (The Imaginary, 1940). In the tradition of Husserl, but
especially of Heidegger, there is in Sartre more in perceiving than in imagining, and
this moreover makes it so that an apparition in the mode of perception will be more
rich than an apparition in the mode of imagination: “in perception, a knowledge
(savoir) is formed slowly; in the image, knowledge is immediate…But I can keep an
image in view as long as I want: I will never find anything there but what I put
there…In the world of perception [to the contrary], no ‘thing’ can appear without

16
Martin Heidegger, “Protocole du séminaire du Thor” (September 8, 1968), as cited in Franck, Chair
et corps, 20, n. 14.
17
Heidegger, Prolégomènes pour une histoire du concept de temps, 71-71, as cited in Franck, Chair et
corps, 20. [Trans.: Falque’s brackets.]

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maintaining an infinity of relations…If I perceived this patch of grass, I should study

it for some time to know where it comes from. In the case of the image, I know it
immediately: it is the grass of such-and-such a meadow, at such-and-such a place.”18

If, therefore, there is “in the image…a kind of essential poverty,”19 what appeared as
an asset from the point of view of modality—a single sheet of white paper (or a single
body) given “in person” whether it be perceived or imagined—reveals in reality a
weakness from the point of view of materiality.20 There is always more in the
perceived (the surprising richness of the grass that I will never have finished
observing once I dive into it) than in the imagined (the grass integrally given by the
imagination, whose effort to scrutinize will bring nothing more than what was
initially deposited there). No one can be content with the imagination in this sense.
Not only does it deceive us, but in that way it also remains rich exclusively by what
it has produced (and therefore in the unique richness of itself or of what one has put
there oneself), and so remains the place of the greatest poverty: “Hence a kind of
overflowing in the world of ‘things’: there is, at every moment, always infinitely more
than we can see; to exhaust the richness of my current perception would take an
infinite time.”21

4. Phenomenology of Christ in Flesh and Bone

a. The Eleven

With Jean-Paul Sartre as phenomenologist, but also with Martin Heidegger before
him (the bridge of Weidenhausen), the apparition “in flesh and bones” expresses the
given “in person,” but with this particularity that the “here in person”—which one
indeed finds in the “It is I myself” (ego eimi autos) of the apparitions of Christ (Luke
24:39)—will also have to pass through the richness of perception in order not to
remain in the poverty of imagining it alone. If Christ is there in the Cenacle of the
Last Supper “in flesh and bones,” or better “of flesh and bones” according to the
Greek (sarka kai ostea), it will then be ineluctably necessary, at least in the first
instance, that there was then something perceived which overflowed the act of
imagining—whence the “fright of the body” experienced by the disciples, precisely

18
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans.
Jonathan Webber (New York: Routledge, 2004), 9 & 10. Emphasis added. [Trans.: Falque’s brackets.]
19
Ibid., 9.
20
For Sartre’s example of the white sheet of paper given “as image” in contrast to “in person,” see
Jean-Paul Sartre, Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor, MI: The
University of Michigan Press, 1972), 1-6.
21
Sartre, The Imaginary, 9. [Trans.: The author here reproduces the original emphases in the French
text.]

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because it was unimaginable. As we had indicated in the “fright of the body,” if the
Eleven in the Cenacle “were disbelieving” while they were “in their joy” of seeing him
again (Luke 24:41), perhaps it is precisely in this that the genuine enjoyment of
aiming at him “in the mode of the perceived” consists (he therefore was not a ghost
or phantom [Luke 24:39]), nonetheless accompanied at the same time by a greater
strangeness yet. For it most likely would have been less frightening or horrifying to
see a ghost or phantom (a double of the one that they knew) than what strictly
speaking we call in French a revenant, or one who returns from the dead and gives
her- or himself to be seen or perceived in their body. Paradoxically, the fright of the
body is redoubled when it is seen in the mode of the perceived and not in the mode
of the imagined alone, which greatly distances us now from the simple “itself in the
flesh” of the Husserlian Leibhaftig. An “of” flesh in “in flesh and bones” is necessary,
just as there was “flesh,” or rather “body,” in the incarnation according to
Tertullian—precisely in order “to carry the flesh” (carnem gestare) and not only “to
carry the cross” (crucem gestare).22

b. Thomas the Apostle

We could then believe all too quickly that it suffices to pass from the apparition to
the Eleven (Luke 24:36-53) to the apparition to the apostle Thomas (John 20:24-29),
so as to bring along this element of corporeity and even exteriority and objectivity,
which supposedly would be missing from the one resurrected: “Then he said to
Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in
my side. Do not doubt but believe” (John 20:27). But this would be premature, and
for two reasons. First, because a pure objectivity of the resurrected body as “in itself”
or as that with which I myself would not be involved will be difficult to maintain in
philosophy as well as in theology; second, because a return to the “thing” understood
no longer simply as “what concerns me” (Sache), but as “what involves me in my
existence or praxis” (Ding), first demands a complete phenomenological analysis
where the “flesh” or the “lived body” (corps propre, Leib) is first spread out. We will
return to this second point. If it is necessary or will be necessary for us to pass if not
from the “flesh” (Leib) to the “body” (Körper) in the resurrection, at least from the
“lived body” to what we have elsewhere named the “spread body,” it is first in this
that we will have pushed the subjective or subjectivist analysis of the apparitions of

22
See Tertullian’s De Carne Christi, translated in English as Tertullian’s Treatise on the Incarnation,
trans. Ernest Evans (London: S.P.C.K. Publishing, 1956), V, 1, p. 17. For our commentary, see:
Emmanuel Falque, “The Solidity of the Flesh (Tertullian),” in God, the Flesh, and the Other, trans.
William Christian Hackett (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 143-165.

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the Resurrected One to its limit—including the apparition to the apostle Thomas,
which seems, however, to lead everything in the opposite direction.

When Thomas doubted the apparition of the Son of God to the Eleven during his
absence—“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the
mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25)—he did
not first question the reality of the body itself, but more importantly he saw and felt
in the mode of the anticipated and the imagined what he never thought he could
one day experience in the mode of the present and the perceived. In other words,
the anticipation of the imagination is without perceived intuitive fulfillment even
though something is given in the Husserlian sense (the imagination of Christ
appearing), but not “in flesh and bones” in the Heideggerian or Sartrean sense of the
words (the perception of Christ appearing). Thomas’ doubt certainly bears upon the
aforementioned “reality” of the resurrected body (to which we will return), but first
it bears upon the impossible passage from the imagination to perception that he
must, however, one day carry out. Where the other apostles already perceived the
Resurrected One without actually having imagined him except by a “fabulation
function” or a “miraculous hallucination” in order to defend themselves from it or to
not realize it, Thomas conversely imagines him in the aftermath, since someone told
him about it and he doubts being able, like them, to perceive him.23 The path is
reversed, or rather different: from perception to reproductive imagination for the
disciples (we have truly seen him), from the imagination to the impossible
productive perception for Thomas (I will not see him).

And when “a week later,” while “Thomas was with them” and “Jesus came and stood
among them” though “the doors were shut” (John 20:26), something “new,” or rather
something different then occurred. For what “enters into presence” (Anwesende)—
to take up Heidegger’s formula, though this time by making it pass from the bridge
of Weidenhausen to the resurrected Christ—first affects Thomas “in flesh and bones”
(leibhaftig) or in his own body, when Christ appears to him this time after he had
doubted. In his flesh or his lived body by way of the body-subject, Thomas is changed
by another body, or better, another flesh; he is changed less by the body-object
independent of him than by the body-subject that is like him. Body-to-body, or
rather flesh-to-flesh, which makes it so that the movements of the body are

23
See Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra & Cloudesley
Brereton (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1974), 109-110, and in particular the example
of a “lady” on the landing of the floor of her hotel who sees the elevator doorman push her back,
though the elevator had in fact opened upon a void and the operator was only the object of a fiction
or a “fabulation function”: “She had been about to fling herself into the gaping void; a miraculous
hallucination had saved her life.” Ibid., 110.

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addressed to him by the gestures or kinesthetic movements which are precisely the
chiasm or intersubjectivity of two “lived bodies”: “Put your finger here and see my
hands; reach out your hand and put it in my side” (John 20:27). If nothing explicitly
says that Thomas touched or penetrated this body with its stigmata, the possibility
of accomplishing or effecting this, for him at least, puts him in face of a veritable
intercorporeity before which to present himself.

c. Body-to-body or flesh-to-flesh

We will have understood it, then, at least as long as we keep to phenomenology

alone. The fecundity of the analysis at this point of our itinerary has less and perhaps
even nothing to do here with the thickness or the materiality of corporeity than it
does with the empathic possibility of encountering or even penetrating it. The “body-
to-body,” or better the “flesh-to-flesh” takes precedence over the “body of flesh,” or
rather over the “flesh of the body” (in the usual sense of the term), in that the
question of the solidity of the body’s vitality and organicity has been evaded for the
moment. The resurrected body is given “in flesh and bones” because it is fully given
according to the great richness of what can be given—that is, the perceived rather
than the imagined—but the perception still remains a mode of subjectivity or
interiority, so that it itself is what must first be transformed. Leibhaftig: God is given
“in flesh and bones” or “in person,” as himself and in the greatest profusion of
himself—such is what makes his givenness truly a “givenness of himself,” but also an
“incarnate self-givenness,” since he is perceived in the mode of corporeity. But that
there is “flesh” (sarxa) and “bones” (ostea) in the sense of materiality matters little;
what alone matters is the lived experience of the body by which the thing is given,
and especially by which it is identified and recognized in an event of intercorporeity.

And yet the question remains, and is now posed: is what we gain on the one hand
(manifestation by the flesh) not entirely or nearly lost on the other (the thickness of
the body)? In other words, if now it is not a matter of substituting, in a pure and too
simple inversion, a “body without flesh” for the “flesh without body” (which would
be at the very least an all too facile solution to which the “spread body” as an
intermediary body, or rather as a frontier zone has already responded), shouldn’t we
nevertheless draw from the side of the body an apparition of the Resurrected One
that we have as yet thought only from the side of the flesh, or from the recognition
through the lived experience of the flesh (the voice with Mary-Magdalene, the

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manner of eating with the apostles by the shore of the lake, the shared meal with the
disciples in Emmaus, etc.)?24

5. Metamorphosis of the Body

Phenomenologically speaking, the apprehension of the object in “flesh and bones”

(the bridge of Weidenhausen, for example) does not therefore presuppose an
“exteriority” of the object as such, including in the mode of perception. What is
essential, we have said, is not that the bridge (or the Resurrected One) be objectively
there before or in front of me, but that I be phenomenologically there before it in my
capacity to receive it in all its richness and amplitude (to stand before it, to go round
it, to constitute it, or to be constituted by it). Everything is always a matter of
subjectivity in the apparition of the phenomenon “in flesh” (Leiblichkeit), and what
counts is first the mode of receiving it. But a supplementary step could and should
be taken from the point of view of philosophy, but also from that of theology.

If the lectio facilior of the resurrected Christ “in flesh and bones” as “in person”
(Husserl) is already complicated by its lectio difficilior as before or in front of…, being
“perceived” and not only imagined (Heidegger, Sartre), the lectio maxime difficile or
the most difficult this time will come down to saying and thinking and even
experiencing that there is truly “some thing” or “some one” there in the order of a
certain objectivity or exteriority. Not that we must go back to an “in itself” or a form
of naïve realism unwelcome in philosophy and even more so here in theology as soon
as it is a matter of apparitions in the mystery of the resurrection. For only a vital
praxis could truly transform me, even if only to both exist and subsist, without
reducing me (or reducing him) to the sole mode of immanence or interiority.

a. A Praxis of the Body

Curiously, but quite certainly, one then must appeal to Karl Marx and his Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in order to see and express (and philosophically
at that) what becomes of presence in flesh and bones, so as not or (this time) no
longer to forget the materiality of the body, even in the resurrection. We should take
care here, however, and be clear. In referring to Karl Marx, which might surprise a
number of established phenomenologists, it is not a matter here of Marxism—far

24
See my Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection, trans. George Hughes (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

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from it—but rather of so-called Marxian thought.25 As if in advance, and due to his
concern for a certain relation to matter, the young Marx sees a certain pitfall for us
that we will only later discover at the very heart of phenomenological thought: an
excess of interiority, or even subjectivity, which lacks all or nearly all of exteriority
or even everything of a certain sense of objectivity. With Marx it is no longer only a
matter of an apparition in flesh and bones within some intercorporeity, but of an
existing in flesh and bones in its materiality.

If nothing says that it is necessary to possess a “flesh” (sarxa) and some “bones”
(ostea) in order to appear (phenomenal flesh), even here in Marx, nevertheless we
must now possess it in order to exist, or at least in order to accomplish the visceral
desire which is not only that of seeing, but also that of touching, penetrating, even
assimilating and eating (praxical flesh). Here it is not a matter of denying the flesh
(Leib) to the sole profit of the body (Körper), nor of extending the notion of the flesh
to the whole of the world ( the “flesh of the world” in Merleau-Ponty), but rather of
understanding that the relation of one person to another is always mediated, or
better, always immediately given in the relation of the person to nature in general.
Nature, and not the subject exclusively, is the “lived body” (Leib) of the human
person according to Karl Marx, for every individual must “constantly remain in
contact” with it in order not to die, and therefore quite simply to live (e.g., to eat,
drink, reproduce). In flesh and bones will no longer be a mode of manifestation, but
the existential and even material means of subsistence: “The human person is a
generic being…Nature, that is to say, the nature which is not itself the human body,
is the non-organic ‘lived body’ (Leib) of the human person. That the human person
lives from nature means: nature is his lived body (Natur ist sein Leib) with which he
must necessarily remain in contact in order to not die. To say that the physical and
intellectual life of the human person is inextricably linked with nature means
nothing else if not that nature is linked to itself, for the human person is a part of
nature.”26

25
[Trans.: The author alludes here to a distinction made by Michel Henry in his text, Marx: A
Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 1983), to which he refers below. The distinction here is between, on the one hand, those who
view Marx’s thought as a strictly scientific program (i.e., Marxists, such as Friedrich Engels and, in
France, Louis Althusser) and, on the other hand, those who insist on its fundamentally philosophical
character, exemplified in Marx’s earlier writings (i.e., Marxians, such as Michel Henry and, we see
here, Falque himself).]
26
Karl Marx, Manuscrits de 1844, trans. J. Salem (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion), first manuscript
(“Alienated Work and Private Property”), § 24, p. 114. Emphasis original. Which translation we
modify, or rather clarify, following Franck Fischbach in: Karl Marx, Manuscrits économico-
philosophiques de 1844: Texts et commentaires, trans. Franck Fischbach (Paris: Vrin, 2007), 122. See
Ibid., 213, n. 165: “Up to this point, Marx utilized the term Körper. Here he employs the term Leib.

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Even here the technical nature of this discussion could throw us off track. Indeed,
we will ask ourselves why it could do so in our departing from and coming back to
Karl Marx in order to understand the presence in flesh and bones of the Resurrected
One, when the sole intercorporeity of phenomenology to date should have been
sufficient for us to do so. But it is necessary for us at least to admit it, at the risk of
an ultimately little justified hegemony: phenomenology does not say everything, and
cannot say everything. Perhaps its nobility would be precisely in recognizing the
pitfalls by and in which it will eventually be renewed. Even better, the young Marx
did not cease to remind us of a sense of exteriority and objectivity, namely, that of
the body in an immediately given relation to nature, from which I could never deliver
or extract myself. Exteriorly and physically, I have need of another corporeity in
order live, whether that of food (biological), of work (economic), or of others (social).
Here the expression of being “in flesh and bones” bears upon the “physical,” which
the “phenomenological” sense of the expression had somewhat obscured.

b. The real man “in flesh and bones”

We thus come now to the use of this expression “in flesh and bones” (leibhaftig) by
Karl Marx himself, but this time in an entirely different sense than the one given it
in phenomenology, whether that of Husserl or Heidegger. So it is with the German
Ideology (1846), which already, and as if in advance, reverses every form of “interior
phenomenalism.” The recourse to the formula “en chair et en os” or “in flesh and
bones” in French to translate anew (but in Karl Marx this time) leibhaftig and later
leiblich will not or will no longer express “in person” alone, even if it is by the flesh
(Leib) and in the mode of incarnate self-givenness of what “enters into presence”
(Wahrnehmung). Rather, it will express what becomes “physically,” even
“biologically” living and appearing, and this in a quasi-animal body or in any case a
body joined to the whole of nature (Körper).

What seems but a quarrel of words or of translation will in fact be of considerable

importance, even for theology. Suffice it say that one need only refer to Luther’s
German translation of the Bible (1522), and specifically the translation of the famous
passage of the apparition to the Eleven, in order to face the facts: “ein Geist hat nicht
Flesch und Bein, wie hir sheet, daß ich habe—a ghost does not have flesh and bones

We translate der Körper by ‘the body [le corps]’ and der Leib by the ‘lived body [le corps propre].’”
[Trans.: Because the author’s thesis relies on the interpretive decisions made by the French
translators of Marx’s German text, these passages are here translated from the French. For an English
translation of the original passage by Marx, see: Karl Marx, The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 112.]

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as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). Indeed, it seems that here in this translation it
is a matter of a “true flesh” (Flesch) and “true bone” (Bein), far from mere
phenomenological considerations of the being “in person” or the being recognized
“by its flesh” (Leib) alone. But “flesh” and “bones” cold not wholly define an
individual person, nor even man itself in the broad sense of the term. There is in
surgery, according to French usage, the words mou or “soft” and dur or “hard,” from
which we would be incorrect to judge that they could return in the same way in the
resurrection according to theology—the hardness of bones, joints, the skull or
skeleton on the one hand, the softness of the flesh, the stomach and intestines on
the other. But is it in fact enough to be or to have the “soft” (the “flesh”) and the
“hard” (the “bones”) in order to be human? Nothing is less sure. In other words, if
we are truly human—“in flesh and bones”—are we not also and moreover but a
simple labile form of “flesh” upon a skeleton made first and also of “bones” (in flesh
and bones)? Maurice Merleau-Ponty has already taught us as much in a
phenomenological vein, and we must not forget this. It is not enough for us to have
“flesh and bones” in order to recognize ourselves in our plasticity (Fleisch). We must
still introduce there life itself or the living flesh (Leib/leben) to express our particular
way of existing or inhabiting our body: “everyone recognizes his own silhouette or a
filmed version of his own gait,” the Phenomenology of Perception points out, but
“we do not recognize our own hand in a photograph.”27

We will therefore not hasten to accuse Karl Marx of being a “materialist” adversary
of “idealists.” For if brusquely and in no uncertain terms the author of the German
Ideology challenges the “idealists,” and in particular the figure of Ludwig Feuerbach,
it is less in order to establish the existence “in itself” of matter than to reproach him
for having omitted the intercourse, the conflict, and the interaction that we always
have with matter—such that this praxis or this action of being “always already
engaged in nature” properly constitutes us. Against Feuerbach to be sure, but in
critiques that would just as well apply with respect to Husserl or Heidegger, “in flesh
and bones” means not only to aim at or intend “in person,” be it in the mode of the
perceived and no longer the imagined, but also to stand “on earth,” with “real men”
and in their real life process—a question, to be sure, that we will not be able not to
address in turn to the status of the body of the Resurrected One. To return to the
real man “in flesh and bones”—leibhaftig, to take up the very term used later by
Husserl—is therefore in the young Marx to return to the effective man, and not only
the thought or even aimed at or intuited man. This is no longer to go from heaven
to earth (or from thought to the world), but from the earth to heaven (or from the

27
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes (London: Routledge,
2014), 150.

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world to thought): “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from
heaven to earth (von Himmel auf die Erde), here it is a matter of ascending from
earth to heaven (von der Erde zum Himmel). That is to say, not of setting out from
what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined,
conceived, in order to arrive at men in flesh and bones (aus bei den leibhaftigen
Menschen anzukommen); but setting out from real, active men (wirklich tätigen
Menschen), and on the basis of their real life process (aus ihrem wirklichen
Lebenprozeß) demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes
of this life-process.”28

c. Against the idealism of the flesh

This is what we have been saying. Karl Marx’s lively invective towards Ludwig
Feuerbach in The German Ideology would equally apply to Husserl and the whole of
phenomenology. When praxis prevails over theoria it is not a matter only of the
primacy of the practical over the theoretical, but also of a possible “transformation
of the self” by the world and in the world. Far from remaining in the unique and
singular sensation, which will also be the whole phenomenological perspective as
well, Marx invites Feuerbach to return to the real and active man. It is not enough to
be ‘in person” (leibhaftig) in order to be in flesh and bones, nor even to be “perceived”
with what “enters into presence” (Wahrnemung); one must also be inserted in the
“real” or “effective” (wirklich) world, made of activity and not only passivity, of body
and not only of flesh, of chaos and not only of meaning or sense. 29 Feuerbach, though
we could probably also say it of Husserl and the whole of phenomenology, “never
arrives at the actually existing, active men (wirklich existirenden), but stops at the
abstraction ‘man,’ and gets no further than recognizing [in sensation] ‘the actual,
individual man [in flesh and bones]’ (wirklichen individuellen, leibhaftigen
menschen), i.e., he knows no other ‘human relations’ ‘of man to man’ than love and
friendship, and even then idealized…Thus he never manages to conceive the
sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity (lebendiche sinnliche Tätigkeit)
of the individuals composing it.”30

28
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, trans. anon., 3rd ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 42.
[Trans.: Translation modified to read “in flesh and bones” to correspond with the French. See Karl
Marx, Idéologie allemande (1845) (Paris: Éditions sociales, 2014), 298-299.]
29
The three pitfalls of phenomenology. See Emmanuel Falque, “Philosophy to Its Limit” in The
Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist, trans. George Hughes (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2016), 11-30.
30
Marx, The German Ideology, 46-47. Emphasis added. [Trans.: Translation modified to correspond
with the French.]

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Here in theology we will therefore not stay with Karl Marx’s “in flesh and bones”
alone, understood as leibhaftig or “in person.” Or rather, if there is “flesh and bones,”
in German as in the French translations, we will express it this time by “living in
flesh” (leilbich) rather than by “lived experience in flesh” (leibhaftig), by man in his
body (Körper) rather than in his flesh (Leib), upon earth (Erde) rather than in heaven
(Himmel), exercising his force or strength (Kraft) rather than remaining in passivity
(Passivität). Whence the celebrated formula from the Manuscripts of 1844, which
already announced the turn: “when real man, in flesh and bones [or ‘the man of flesh’
(leibliche)], stood firmly on the solid and round earth, the man who inhales and
exhales all the forces of nature (alle Naturkräfte), establishes his essential forces.”31

Everything happens, then, as if man “in flesh and bones” (leibhaftig), or rather the
“man of flesh” (leiblich), has taken in advance and as by an indirect consequence the
opposite view from that of the lived experience of the flesh. If the interpretation of
Michel Henry’s Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality certainly has the merit of
showing that praxis is accomplished in interiority and in the transformation of the
self by the self, it probably lost some of the weight of exteriority and of the thing as
such in Nature itself.32 Facing the subjective, we will rediscover the objective, at least
in praxis; against the reduction to sensibility, we will rediscover the sensible; against
the sole return towards interiority, we will rediscover exteriority. “In flesh and bones”
to be sure, but not only understood here as “in person” or recognized by its flesh
(leibhaftig); rather, living from its flesh and by its flesh (lebendig), now in the quasi-
physical and even biological sense of the term (leiblich)33: “as a natural being, in flesh
and bones (leibhaftig), sensible, objective, man is a suffering being, dependent and
limited like the plant and animal…To say that man is a being in flesh and bones
(leibliches), endowed with natural, living, real, sensible, objective forces, is to say
that he has for the object of his being, for the manifestation of his life, real, sensible
objects; and that he can manifest his life only in real, sensible objects. To be

31
Marx, Manuscrits de 1844, op. cit., p. 169. Translation original. Translation by “the man of flesh”
comes from F. Fischbach, op. cit., 165. [Trans.: Falque’s brackets. See Marx, The Economic &
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 180.]
32
So it is in Henry’s text for practically everything, according to the rereading of Karl Marx by Pierre
Rodrigo, in Sur l’ontologie de Marx: Auto-production, travail aliéné et capital (Paris: Vrin, 2014), and
in particular p. 50: “Not having interpreted the Manuscripts as the investigation of an a priori mode
of being open within which sensible man and nature come forth co-originarily, Michel Henry finds
himself compelled to double the interiority of modern subjectivity by a ‘reciprocal interiority’ of all
ontic needs, which would be joined in Marx to a need which would finally be ‘life itself.’”
33
See, for example, the German expressions: “Leiblich Mutter bedeutet nicht besser—Biological
mother does not mean the best mother,” or “Ich hätte nicht gedacht, Sie leiblich zu sehen—I could
not have imagined that you would appear in flesh and bones” (de visu or “first hand,” in the corporeal
sense of the expression).

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objective, natural, sensible; to have an object, a nature, a being outside or in front of

oneself; to be oneself an object, nature, to be sensible, outside of oneself; to be
oneself an object, to be sensible for a third, everything is the one and the same
thing.”34

6. The Praxis of Christ in flesh and bones

With the praxis of Karl Marx, since it designates a relation wherein the body is always
already engaged with matter, something is therefore immediately given that the new
sense of Leibhaftig (joined to the engagement with matter) comes to innervate—
including for its effects, in view of an eventual interpretation of the resurrected body.
Everything proceeded or will indeed proceed for the better, as much for the Eleven
gathered in the Cenacle (Luke 24:36-53) as for the apostle Thomas (John 20:24-29),
so long as it was enough to recognize the Christ “in flesh and bones,” that is to say
here “in person,” whether in order to remove the “distress” or to reduce the “doubt”
that such an apparition can provoke: “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I
myself” (egô eimi autos) (Luke 24:39). Here, everything then would only be a matter
if not of identity, at least of personality. He whom we met yesterday is the same as
he whom we see today—whence the presence of the stigmata as the absolute and
distinguishing criterion in the two scenes. The question is not first one of having or
being a body in order to be resurrected, but above all of carrying and recognizing the
“pathic traces” of what happened (the stigmata). What is true for the Eleven—“And
when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet” (Luke 24:40)—is also
true for Thomas: “put your finger here and see my hands…Do not doubt but believe”
(John 20:27). Manner always takes precedence over matter, lived experience over the
organic, or flesh over the body.

But everything becomes complicated (and severely so) from the moment that this
body, which for the time being only seemed to appear in order to be recognized,
invokes the biological requisites to share and to make shared its reality, this time by
the shore of Lake Tiberias: “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still
wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’”—literally, “something
edible” (ti brôsimon). “They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate
in their presence”—literally, “before their eyes” (enôpion autôn) (Luke 24:41-43). We
must therefore once again “drink” and “eat,” and this surprisingly applies just as
much to the Resurrected One: “Hunger,” Karl Marx highlights and adds on the same
page of the Manuscripts of 1844, “is a natural need to be satisfied, to be appeased; it

34
Marx, Manuscrit de 1844, op. cit., 170-171. [Trans.: See Marx, The Economic & Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, 181.]

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needs a nature, an exterior object…A being which does not have nature outside of
itself is not a natural being, it does not participate in the being of nature.”35

If nothing says with certainty that this body returned from the dead truly has need
of drink and food in order to live (we must indeed after all keep his intestines or his
genital organs without keeping their usefulness, as we read in Thomas Aquinas
above), it is nonetheless on this that every body first lives: in eating and in drinking,
joined and in touch with a true nature and exteriority. Even in his resurrection the
Son of God assumes the part of our vital praxis without which we would not exist.
Because one must drink and eat in order to live, drinking and eating are assumed no
longer only in their modality, but also in their materiality. This does not mean that
there is an identity of matter, at least in the sense of a return to the exact same of all
bodies, but that there is a recapitulation of matter in a transformation and a cosmic
recovery or elevation of all bodies. To the question of Thomas Aquinas and his
followers, in the supplement of the Summa theologica, “Whether in the resurrection
the soul will be reunited to the same identical body?,” the Aquinian responds
forthrightly that “the matter that will be brought back to restore the human body
will be the same (eadem materia) as that body’s previous matter” (q. 79 a. 1, ad. 3).
But this is so only inasmuch as he adds: “the body in rising again differs, not in
identity (aliud corpus numero resurgat), but in condition (sed alio modo se habens),
so that a difference of bodies corresponds proportionally to the difference of souls”
(ad. 2). Integrity and transformation therefore make the resurrected body in its
constitution, but do not effect a return to the identical according to numeration, if
for Thomas number means the exact same in its entirety; this does not mean that
each member returns as identical to what it constituted for us previously (such was
the problem of the missing limb or the amputee in the Middle Ages). 36

* *

35
Ibid. [Trans.: See Marx, The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 181.]
36
See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, Supplement, q. 79, a. 1: “Whether in the resurrection the
soul will be reunited to the same identical body?” (Utrum idem corpus numero anima resumptura sit
in resurrectione). https://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/XP/XP079.html#XPQ79OUTP1. Accessed
on October 5, 2019. On this point, see the excellent article by G. Rémy, “Résurrection des corps et
corps de resurrection,” Revue thomiste (October-December 2014): 569-619, and in particular pp. 682-
585: “Raisons anthropologiques de l’identité.”

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Here in this integration and metamorphosis which is the resurrection, there is

therefore, to speak in contemporary language, a veritable praxis—in the sense where
the transformation is no longer that of the ego or “me” alone (phenomenalism of the
interior world), but also that of nature and the world, inasmuch as I am directly
involved there. The reality of the body, including for the Resurrected One, needs
must come from its outside and its exteriority rather than from taking refuge in its
pure inside and interiority. It is therefore impossible for praxis (Marx), and probably
just as well for the resurrection understood both as recapitulation (Irenaeus) and
integration (Thomas Aquinas), to sacrifice objectivity to the sole profit of a pure
interiority or subjectivity. I am wrestling with nature and I am in nature by a certain
form of materiality. To conserve this link, even this transfigured matter, is what the
anti-Gnosticism of theology accomplishes or must accomplish against a certain form
of what phenomenology could produce today: “It would therefore be necessary for a
theology of matter,” Marie-Dominique Chenu notes in a work by that name, “to
envisage, even before matter’s substantial place in man as we did above, the cosmic
and ontological density of matter in the total project of creative emanation. It is not
possible to fashion a theology of man without a theology of nature, just as it is
impossible to fashion a theology of the incarnate Word without a theology of the
creator Word.”37 Such is the unique assurance of not forgetting anything, especially
in the resurrected Word, as the celebrated adage of Gregory of Nazianzus does not
cease reminding us: “that which He [God] has not assumed He has not healed; but
that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.”38

37
Marie-Dominique Chenu, Pour une théologie de la matière (Paris: Cerf, 1967), 13.
38
Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101 (Letter to Cledonius), PG (Migne), XXXVII, col. 181c, in Early
Church Texts.
http://www.earlychurchtexts.com/public/gregoryofnaz_critique_of_apolliniarianism.htm.
Accessed October 14, 2019. [Trans.: Literally, “all that is not assumed is not saved, and only what is
united to God is saved.”]

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