Spring 2004 issue of Journal of Philosophy and Scripture
Badiou has some kind of natural, gut-feeling resistance toward the topic of death and finitude. For him, death and finitude, animality and so on, being-towards-death, death-drive—he uses the term sometimes in a purely nonconceptual way, “death drive, decadence” as if we were reading some kind of naïve Marxist liberal optimist from the early 20th century.
This is all somehow for me interconnected. Although I am also taking St. Paul as a model, a formal structure which can then be applied to revolutionary emancipatory collectivities, and so on, nonetheless I try to ground it in a specific Christian content, which again for me focuses precisely on Christ’s death, [his]
death and resurrection. …
Now in Badiou’s reading of psychoanalysis, he totally dismisses death drive. But the paradox for me, as I try to develop in my work, is that death drive is a very paradoxical notion if you read Freud closely. Death drive is basically, I claim, the Freudian term for immortality. Death drive has nothing to do, as Lacan points out, convincingly, with this so-called nirvana principle where everything wants to disappear, and so on. If anything (and because of this I like to read Richard Wagner’s operas where you have this), death drive is that which prevents you from dying. Death drive is that which persists beyond life and death. Again, it’s precisely what, in my beloved Stephen King’s horror/science fiction terminology he calls the “undead”: this terrifying insistence beneath death, which is why Freud links death drive to the compulsion to repeat. You know, it can be dead, but it goes on. This terrifying insistence of an undead object.
Point two: … The big breakthrough of Heidegger is to totally reconceptualize the notion of finitude. Already we have this in the early Heidegger with special reference to Kant. Already you see precisely how the other of finitude, the big stuff—infinity, eternity, and so on—is a category, modality, horizon of finitude. This was, for Heidegger, Kant’s big breakthrough: transcendental as opposed to transcendent is a category of finitude. All this somehow gets lost, in Badiou. [But] the whole category of “event” works only from the category of finitude. There are events only in finite situations.
Badiou is … cannot elevate finitude to its transcendental a priori dignity. He remains precisely, at a certain level, a pre-kantian metaphysician.
My desperate problem is how to draw, how to extract the Christian notion of redemption from this financial transaction logic. This is what I’m desperately looking for. Here I think it is crucial to read Christ’s sacrifice not literally as paying a debt. It is also—we should just trust our intuitions here—
because the message of Christ’s sacrifice is not “now I take it for you, you can screw it up again.” No, it just opens the space for our struggle, and this is the paradox I like.
This is what I like in what maybe is the best chapter of this book, the fifth one [of Puppet]. To put it in very simple terms, Christ’s redemption doesn’t mean that, OK, now we can go watch hardcore movies because we are redeemed each time. No, it’s done, the Messiah is here, it’s done, means that the space is now open for struggle. It’s this nice paradox that the fact that the big thing happened does not mean it’s over. It precisely opens the space for struggle.
This is what I find again so incredible. Which is why to the horror of some of my Jewish friends, who doesn’t like this idea that in Christianity everything happened whereas in Judaism the Messiah is always postponed, always to-come, and so on.
No, I like here this crazy radicality of Christianity which is that, no, it happened, it already happened. But precisely that doesn’t mean everything is already decided.
No, again, what intrigues me is that I find here such a shattering revolution of the entire economy. . .
And another aspect which is linked to this entire economy—and here I do agree with Badiou—I do not agree with his critics who think Paul’s famous “for me there are no Jews nor Greeks” simply means everybody can become a member, it is universally open. Then you can play all these games: if you are out, then you are not even human, there are only my brothers and if you are not my brother you are not even people. OK, OK, but my point is that Badiou nonetheless is still more precise. I speak here ironically
of Badiou’s Leninism. The shattering point is that truth is unilateral, that universal truth, no less universal for that reason, is accessible only from an engaged position.
We don’t have, “you are saying this, I am saying that, let’s find the neutral position, the common.” Truth is unilateral.