Friday, May 06, 2005
(11:39 AM) | Dave Belcher:
Badiou: Lord of All?
Since some of you have accused Adam for not keeping discussions "rigorous" or "philosophical" enough as of late--and this is really more "our" fault than his--I thought I would throw y'all a bone.Let me be blunt: Alain Badiou is one of the most provocative--if not the most provocative--thinkers of our time. Heated discussions on the Weblog about Badiou are evidence enough of this thinker's ability to entice both agreement and opposition. Don't get me wrong, however; I am not saying that he is right. In fact, it seems to me that I cannot stand with much of what he says and still be a Christian theologian--that is, without compromising the specificity of the Christian discourse. Nonetheless, he intrigues me.
Most compelling is his post-humanist, or anti-humanist interpretation of traditional ethics. I want to confirm that the sorry picture of victimization is a result of the necessiticization (yes, I did just make up a word) of Evil, and that this picture must be strongly opposed with the picture of "the Good." Specifically important is the notion that Evil, for Badiou, derives from the Good and not the other way around, as for the Kantian "tradition." Even with my hesitancy to go along with the notion that "Evil exists" I am fond of the absolute possibility of the Good to puncture the symbolic order of pure difference at any moment.
However (come on, you knew there was going to be a "However"!), I cannot go along with Badiou's notion of "immortality"--and I know that this is constitutive of the stuff listed in the above paragraph. Here comes the disconnect between the specificity of the Christian discourse and Badiou's thought. The notion of the immortal seems to be highly indebted to Nietzsche's "overman," and even more broadly Nietzsche's entire genealogical critique of Christian morality. My problem here is not with Nietzsche's critique, which is--in my mind--pretty much right on, or to posit yet another "weak" theology of "subjection" to transcendent power in the weakness of Christ's suffering. Rather, it is the failure to see the possibility for a creative relation to the world and to the divine in the form of the cross. There is an ambiguity in Badiou, here. Note the comment from Ethics:
"But Man, as immortal, is sustained by the uncalculable and the un-possessed. He is sustained by non-being. To forbid him to imagine the Good, to devote his collective powers to it, to work towards the realization of unknown possibilities, to think what might be in terms that break radically with what is, is quite simply to forbid him humanity as such." (14)
While the "militant" community in fidelity to the truth of an event is "sustained by the...un-possessed," this un-possession (un-, rather than non-, since this is active) must necessarily be a break with what is--the sustenance of non-being here is exactly why I said that the truth event for Badiou is "non-ontological" in my post on "Badiou, Zizek, and St. Paul." In so doing, Badiou necessitates that the Good come from outside the ontological (here is why I said Badiou's "graced" event is "transcendent" in some sense), but from the empty void.
I want to posit contrary to Badiou that the "militant" community in fidelity to the truth of an event (the resurrection, for the Christian community) is in fact sustained by "un-possession"--or what I have been calling "poverty" for some time now--but this can only arise out of an understanding of the fundamental goodness of the (created) cosmos. What is required of this poor community is neither Badiou's fidelity to an event which lies completely outside our (ontological) purview, nor the simple stale subjection to the transcendent--if not simply because Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, Badiou, Zizek, Goodchild, etc. are linking any rhetoric of the transcendent with the now-reigning global market. Rather, the poor community must be a creative space of poverty in relationship both to God and the downtrodden of this world...in this way, the poor community clears out a space for the goodness of creation to be revealed as such. God does not, then, act on the world from a pure outside, nor does the community "co-operate" with the divine, but the community works 100% just as God works 100%. If this is at all unclear, it is definitely because I am simply trying out some of these ideas for the first time here. Please be nice. Thanks.
