k-punk
Spectres of Mark
Infinite Thought is right. It is totally misleading to construe Badiou as a religious thinker.
Attempts to dragoon Badiou into being a crypto-Catholic theologian will inevitably produce only distortion. The whole point of Badiou's book on St Paul is that is not a religious text. What Badiou wants to abstract from St Paul's texts, what fascinates him about them, is their theories of political militancy and universality. It would be better to say that Paul is Leninist than that Lenin is Pauline.
But it seems to me that the opposition theism-atheism is less interesting or significant than the opposition theism-anti-theism.
Badiou is certainly an anti-theist: but then so is Spinoza, who is also, needless to say, a theological - or should that be theo-rational? - thinker.
Think it's worthwhile trying to think through the relationship between anti-theism, mathematics, politics, Spinoza, Lacan and Badiou.
As a starting point, some ideas:
Badiou's reliance upon mathematics is one of the ways in which his Lacanianism differs from Zizek's. Zizek's Lacan is the inheritor-subverter of German Idealism, and one of Zizek's great virtues is his astonishing decontinentalization of that trajectory. But the Lacan that is suppressed in order to make Zizek's reading work is the Lacan who was fascinated with cybernetics, Godel and <a href=>Cantor. Lacan's processing of incompleteness and undecidability is one of the ways in which he can make good on the dismantling of the cogito that Zizek describes so well in the first chapter of <I>Tarrying with the Negative</i>. Yes, there is thinking, there is thinkability, but it has nothing to do with me. <i>It thinks, therefore I am not. </i>
That there is no set of sets, that there is no way of logicizing axiomatic systems, is one of the meanings of Lacan's gnomic claim that the true formula of atheism is not that God is dead, but that <I>God is unconscious</i>. Modern mathematics provides a rigorous demonstration that the God of classical theism - the all-powerful Father who knows All - could not possibly exist. It can be shown that there are things which not only we - particular, contingent animals - cannot know, but which no possible being could know. This excess is thinkable, even if it is not representable or experiencable.
Seems to me that a theology based upon the unconscious God would take us towards Spinozism. Zizek is notoriously ambivalent if not to say hostile to Spinoza. Badiou is less hostile, but still does not count himself as a Spinozist. Can Badiou and Lacan be usefully deployed as part of a neo-Spinozist moNONtheism?
Attempts to dragoon Badiou into being a crypto-Catholic theologian will inevitably produce only distortion. The whole point of Badiou's book on St Paul is that is not a religious text. What Badiou wants to abstract from St Paul's texts, what fascinates him about them, is their theories of political militancy and universality. It would be better to say that Paul is Leninist than that Lenin is Pauline.
But it seems to me that the opposition theism-atheism is less interesting or significant than the opposition theism-anti-theism.
Badiou is certainly an anti-theist: but then so is Spinoza, who is also, needless to say, a theological - or should that be theo-rational? - thinker.
Think it's worthwhile trying to think through the relationship between anti-theism, mathematics, politics, Spinoza, Lacan and Badiou.
As a starting point, some ideas:
Badiou's reliance upon mathematics is one of the ways in which his Lacanianism differs from Zizek's. Zizek's Lacan is the inheritor-subverter of German Idealism, and one of Zizek's great virtues is his astonishing decontinentalization of that trajectory. But the Lacan that is suppressed in order to make Zizek's reading work is the Lacan who was fascinated with cybernetics, Godel and <a href=>Cantor. Lacan's processing of incompleteness and undecidability is one of the ways in which he can make good on the dismantling of the cogito that Zizek describes so well in the first chapter of <I>Tarrying with the Negative</i>. Yes, there is thinking, there is thinkability, but it has nothing to do with me. <i>It thinks, therefore I am not. </i>
That there is no set of sets, that there is no way of logicizing axiomatic systems, is one of the meanings of Lacan's gnomic claim that the true formula of atheism is not that God is dead, but that <I>God is unconscious</i>. Modern mathematics provides a rigorous demonstration that the God of classical theism - the all-powerful Father who knows All - could not possibly exist. It can be shown that there are things which not only we - particular, contingent animals - cannot know, but which no possible being could know. This excess is thinkable, even if it is not representable or experiencable.
Seems to me that a theology based upon the unconscious God would take us towards Spinozism. Zizek is notoriously ambivalent if not to say hostile to Spinoza. Badiou is less hostile, but still does not count himself as a Spinozist. Can Badiou and Lacan be usefully deployed as part of a neo-Spinozist moNONtheism?