Sunday, March 27, 2005
(11:39 PM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
A Self-Proclaimed Atheist Filled with the Holy Ghost
Badiou at Duke 3-26-05:Perhaps a more interesting question than the one Adam pointed us to recently (what will happen when materialist readings of religious texts really take off ... they may latch on to Barth and never let go), is the correlative: what will happen when radical orthodoxy folks quit jerking their knees against the pricks and really latch on to Badiou? I think those who are complaining that Badiou opens the door way too wide for we 'religious' folks is dead on. Why fight Badiou at all when he simply gives you everything you want and then says, "yeah that would work, it's just not my way."? In other words, what would radical orthodoxy and Badiou really have against each other (not that Badiou cares a shit about RO) if they simply bracketed the question of transcendence? Does Badiou's version of immanentism influence his thought in other ways that are at all antithetical to RO's main themes? Maybe partisan's of either could help me out here. (I've been quite clear that, contra Roland Boer's talk yesterday, the Resurrection is verifiably true. My relationship with orthodoxy is somewhat less clear cut. To paraphrase our greatest living poet: I don't want to blow you, carve you, or prop you up ... .)
Case in point: the point of departure for the bulk of Badiou's talk here at Duke yesterday was the relationship between subject and body. Badiou suggested that the two major current options are 1. subject is identical with body 2. subject is seperable from the body/body unfortunately limits the subject. The problem with the former for AB is that the pursuit of jouissance is the subject's telos (the West) and with the latter sacrifice in this life for pleasure in the next becomes the modus operandi (Islam). In either case, death dominates (a familiar theme for AB). In the first option this is because jouissance is pursued by way of experimenting with death in life. The target or targets of option one were obvious. Discard, of course, thinks his current beloved can easily avoid such a charge, and I don't have any reason to doubt him.
Badiou called his third way something like "an immanent multiplicity" where the subject is neither identical with his body, nor separable from it. I immediately leaned over to our friend writing his diss. on Aquinas' anthropology and said "Thomas would have no problem with that." Badiou apologized for not having the time to elaborate further on what he meant by 'immanent multiplicity' and went on to spell out the consequences of such a position. In the q&a which followed Badiou was asked why a transcendental unity of the subject wouldn't likewise resolve the problem as laid out. 'It would, but it's not my way.' (Of course, transcendental unity invokes something like the solution of Personalism, adhered to variously by such folks as Pope John Paul II and Martin Luther King Jr.)
Do Christians really need such lob passes thrown our way?
