Suffering

In the case of religion, this asymmetry becomes dramatic because whenever you want transcendence, you get what you don't want: Immanence.

The effect is the negative occupation of immanent world, which, no matter how much one may pedal, holds in itself every communication related to transcendence, every thought related to transcendence. Structures and processes oriented toward transcending immanence are immanent structures and processes, in the case of transcendence-related communication devastatingly this-worldly social systems.

Religion systems form, one could say, behind the back of transcendence-related communication. The non-preferential world is continually produced, and in this sense the paradox of the unity of the immanence/transcendent schema [Immanenz/Transparenz; sic!] is catalytic, and in this sense it produces the typically Christian Suffering from the world. One can make this paradoxical figure sensuously tangible by means of the stagyriths, the column saints, who – ascending into the vertical – seek to escape what they – fleeing – produce themselves: the abstruse, the inescapably consistent hirsuteness of the column.

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LUHMANN, Niklas and FUCHS, Peter, 1997. Reden und Schweigen. Suhrkamp.