Chapter 6 is for me one of the more difficult chapters to understand in this book. I think this difficulty in understanding comes from the conceptual content being both foreign and also heretical (from the perspective of historical orthodoxy). I was constantly trying to negotiate within myself whether or not I was actually understanding the content and if I was understanding it whether or not I could accept it. I found this in itself an interesting exercise in learning and reading.
This chapter deals with the role of death as it relates to the resurrection of Christ. Badiou begins by framing the chapter with the question of whether Paul is morbid as Nietzsche has characterized him; or in the more Hegelian framework whether death functions in dialectic of truth (I am woefully ignorant of Hegel to articulate this any further). Badiou maintains that if resurrection is caught up in this dialectic then the possibility of grace "is dissolved into an auto-foundational and necessarily deployed rational protocol." Grace rather is an "affirmation without preliminary negation." I can pick up Badiou's strand of thinking later in the chapter but here I lose him. He continues,
This de-dialectization of the Christ-event allows us to extract a formal, wholly secularized conception of grace from the mythological core. Everything hinges on knowing whether an ordinary existence, breaking with time's cruel routine, encounters the material chance of serving a truth, thereby becoming, through subjective devision and beyond animal's survival imperatives, an immortal.
What Badiou seems to be developing, and perhaps this is where my orthodoxy gets in the way of understanding, is the radical possibility of living truth apart from the apparatus of religious law or intellectual foundation. Badiou,
Let us posit that that it is incumbent upon us to found a materialism of grace through the strong, simple idea that every existence can one be seized by what happens to it and subsequently devote itself to that which is valid for all, or as Paul magnificently puts it, "become all things to all men."
Yes, we are the beneficiaries of certain graces, ones for which there is no need to invoke an All-Powerful.
I will set that final statement aside for now. From here Badiou articulates the non-dialectical nature of resurrection and how then death functions in relationship to it. Paul is not viewed as having a theology of suffering as such. Suffering is certainly to be expected but that is only because of living apart from the dominant discourses of wisdom and law. This changes how we understand the cross. For Paul then there is no "path of the Cross. There is Calvary, but no ascent to Calvary." This appears to be entering into another discourse that allows the play of competition and mastery. Elevation and status through suffering.
This leads us finally to Badiou's statement on death. In Paul death is placed on the side of flesh and law (subjectively conceived and not biologically or platonically) and therefore can have no sacred or spiritual function. Whereas death was the invention of man (Adam) Christ (the second Adam) comes to reveal the human possibility of life. Badiou makes a very important move here. With the death of the fully human Jesus God enters into complete filiation with humanity.
Such is the unique necessity of Christ's death: it is the means to an equality with God himself. Through this thought of the flesh, whose real is death, is dispensed to us in grace the fact of being in the same element as God himself. Death here names the renunciation of transcendence. Let us say that Christ's death sets up an immenentization of the spirit. [emphasis his]
The transcendent space between God and humanity exists only so long as the law occupies the mediating gulf. With death the gulf is collapses and establishes the site of the resurrection. This is the event of reconciliation though not of salvation. Resurrection (salvation) is that which emerges from the site. However Badiou again makes it clear,
Resurrection is neither a sublation, nor an overcoming of death. They are two distinct functions, whose articulation contains no necessity. For the event's sudden emergence never follows from the existence of an evental site. Although it requires conditions of immanence, that sudden emergence nevertheless remains of the order of grace.
Resurrection and life must not be contingent on the discourses of mastery which is the subjective of law and of death even though life emerges from the site of death. The language is not always clear to me in this area for we are not to speak of an 'overcoming' of death though on the same page Badiou speaks of a 'killing' of death. What is important is the universal 'yes' be maintained.
Here Badiou again brings this thinking into relationship with Nietzsche as sibling not opponent. Both are interested in introducing a 'new' man unfettered from law.
The truth is that both brought antiphilosophy to the point where it no longer consists in a 'critique,' however radical, of the whims and pettiness of the metaphysician or sage. A much more serious matter is at issue: that of bringing about through the event an unqualified affirmation of life against the reign of death and the negative. Of being he who, Paul or Zarathustra, anticipates with flinching the moment when 'death is engulfed in victory.' (1 Cor 15:24)
Christ comes out of death and does not remain contingent to it. There remains then not the dialectic of death and life but the subjective choice of death and life.
Badiou concludes the chapter by confusing (offending?) me in even further. In trying to understand why this event offer as universal ability to suspend differences Badiou instructs us that, "it is essential to remember that for Paul, Christ is not identical with God, that no Trinitarian or substantialist theology upholds his preaching." This conceptual framework must be divorced from the metaphor of "the sending of the son." In this way the infinite does not die on the cross. It is important for Badiou that "terminating the abyss of transcendence, be immanent to the path of the flesh, of death, to all the dimensions of the human subject." That Christ must be entirely and solely human. And so Badiou arrives at the statement, "Paul's thought dissolves incarnation in resurrection."
I cannot for the life of me follow all his thinking here. It appears important that it not be the 'infinite' that dies but that it is a fully human expression. That it is the human who invents death and also that it is the human that experiences and expresses the possibility of the infinite through the immanentization of the spirit. This should of course be obvious for Badiou from the outset appropriates this as the secular reality/possibility of the event. Does this disqualify it outright for the orthodox believer? We'll keep plugging along for now.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
I Bid You Badiou - Chapter 6; The Site of Death / The Event of Life
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Ministers of Death
A couple of significant events this past week.
First was being able to have this terrible picture taken of myself and Mr. David Bazan (formerly of Pedro the Lion). Does it look like I let on that I am a fan? :)
I have been listening to his music for some ten years now. Bazan's music has always represented a brave and engaged criticism of Christian religion. What sets his approach apart from more reactionary criticism is how honest he remains in his own sense of hopefulness to the spirit of faith. After the show I talked with him and asked if he kept any personal ties to the church. He said that his wife and daughter attend church but that he had 'made his exit' (adding a comment of it being a hopeful exit; I think is how he put it). Having grown up as a pastor's kid he has tried to distance himself from the institution with an attempt to suspend his received assumptions. What remains is still a sense of God's existence, which in his words has created a strong dissonance to where he thought he was going. He admits that this could simply be the result of such an entrenched world view that he received growing up. I would have liked to talk longer.
David Bazan remains for me as a type of minister of death. A minister in the truest sense (though prophet may be a more appropriate term) that his engagement with the social implications of faith and religion remain significant in his work. The role of death remains prominent in much of his lyrics whether it is physical death, the death of a relationship or the death certain beliefs. To those in the church who will listen this ministry of death injects needed perspective and the possibility of change and movement. I am hoping to invite David to read this post and offer further comment. I would love an opportunity for further engagement on his journey. In transition to the second significant event of the week here are his lyrics to "Priest and Paramedics" (see IndieVision to the right).
Paramedics brave and strong
Up before the break of dawn
Putting poker faces on
Broken bodies all day long
The neighbors heard a fight
Someone had a knife
It must have have been the wife
Husband's lost a lot of blood
He wakes up screaming, "Oh my God
Am I going to die?
Am I going to die?"
As they strapped his arms down to his sides
At times like these they'd been taught to lie
"Buddy, just calm down, you'll be all right"
Several friends came to his grave
His children were so well-behaved
As the priest got up to speak
The assembly craved relief
But he himself had given up
So instead he offered them this bitter cup
"You're going to die
We're all going to die
Could be twenty years, could be tonight
Lately I have been wondering why
We go to so much trouble
To postpone the unavoidable
And prolong the pain of being alive"
I performed my second funeral yesterday and the first on my own. I had never met the man who passed away. He was 48 and died of a heart attack in his sleep with no warning (a husband and father of two). As a minister of death who works firmly within the institutional church my work stands in some contrast to David Bazan's. I hope to make death a little more palatable that its hemorrhaging force move through the system with less resistance. I remember the words at the close of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Marlow is trying to recount the words of judgment at Kurtz's death to Kurtz's wife. He fails in transmitting this message of death instead he says that Kurtz uttered her name at his death. Marlow says this in response to his action,
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall on my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he only wanted justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark - too dark altogether . . .
David Bazan appears liberated to speak some of the dark words, but what is his community that needs to hear the dark words of faith if he remains largely unheard outside the church walls? My speech is modified within these walls and not all for bad. Some things are too crushing and need mediating, but the right mediator is crucial. I wrestle between the ministries of death. I hope to continue in both, in some way.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Dead Man Walking
In my previous post I ended with the statement that, “theory and moral formation is only as good as it postures the individual towards what I can only describe at this point as death.” This is one of the only viable options I can see in the hope of genuine movement or what should be better characterized as transformation. That is, if we want to discard magical or mechanistic appeals to the Big Other or flaccid hopes of the “power within”. It should be stated at the outset that murder and suicide do not have a monopoly on the social and existential importance of “death” as I am conceiving it. More often than not murder and suicide carry with them a sense of fierce preservation or control that does not allow the movement of death.
Death is of course the ultimate movement. Because of this artists and scientists alike give it much attention. Though it should be noted their pursuits often diverge in almost opposite directions. Scientists like Ray Kurzweil pursue, with hope and substantial funding, the possibility of immortal biological life. I make no critique here of modern medicine only the observation of its relationship to the artists engagement with death. Without the aid of technology or significant capital the artist reflects on the reality of life’s movement which is the movement towards death. The Russian novelist Boris Pasternak says that art “always meditates on death and thus always creates life.” What is significant is that consistently in history artists have found currency and in fact excess in their reflection on death. It has not taken it has repaid ten-fold. It is in these spaces that openings occur and with it the possibility of transformation.
In his reflections on art Rowan Williams looks to Flannery O’Connor as one who understands death as “getting somewhere”. This notion must be treated with some care so as not to fall into a vague nihilism. The artist points to death because it is the only perspective that maintains integrity (that is not falling into one of the “false options” noted at the beginning). In a recent seminar that I sat in on we were asked to bring for the first class images of transformation. Invariably there was a point of “death” in each one that preceded some sort of qualitative shift in life (Raskolnikov’s transformation at the end of Crime and Punishment). There is no great life that does not engage death. Otherwise death always holds the upper hand in any given “system”.
Unless true dispossession of self is accounted for in theory and reflection I would hold little hope transformation. If the entirety of a particular theory remains strictly within the movement of human reason or perhaps more specifically of logic, without so much a hint as to the immanent external (and perhaps beyond), then movement remains a reshuffling.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
The End of Theory (as the Goal of its Beginning)
In my second year of college likely in winter (though seasons held little relevance in my basement apartment with its single subterranean window funneling indirect light) I sat at my study table in my bedroom. The memory now is void of my initial purposes. I remember simply looking forward when out of the corner of my eye I saw something fall. Perhaps it was something hanging on the wall or leaning somewhere on my desk. Nothing immediately perceptible caused that object to fall. In my mind it just fell. The only sense I could make of it at the time was the phrase, "everything is moving". This was long before I understood the significance of movement in the work of theory and philosophy.
Of course from an atomic level this statement makes perfect sense as even a dead or inanimate object continues to "move". Orthodox theology (as well as deists I suppose) also has had no difficulty in its positing of an Unmoved Mover who has set the world in motion. I am encountering more and more discussion around the question of movement and source, particularly in terms of the theoretical explanation of or impact on society. How has change happened and how can change happen. Hollywood has resolved this in much the same manner that most theoretical or religious thought has. The change comes from the miraculous "outside" source or from some hitherto unknown "inside" source. Appealing to any "outside" source remains highly prone to suspicion. What good is rigorous critique if the impassible "outside" knocks our house of cards down with a single stroke.
Very well, let's remain on the inside. I am tempted to ask where the currency and origins of the immanent sources being applied to are from in posts at Rough Theory and Now-Times but that tends to lead towards an impasse. I suppose it can remain un-addressed in many contexts. I proceed with some hesitation given a recent comment NP made on her own post. I am not an expert in their field of study but I enter in as someone concerned with the questions being asked and a belief that truly inter-disciplinary discussion (as should reflect the best of blogging) would be helpful.
What troubles me in their posts is the notion that substantive social change, transformation (group or individual), can come as the reslut of public awareness or the formation of "critical thinking". These are not insignificant pursuits, do not get me wrong (why else am I carrying the illusion that someone may be reading this). I am also not reaching for the miraculous "outside" though I also have no essential problem with it. And I can most certainly sympathize with talk about a "moral, first person reflection" if I understand that correctly. And while I am qualifying myself here I should also mention that I can recognize that "change" certainly occurs through the process I just criticized. However, I would be careful before I viewed these changes as being qualitatively different than a recent advertisement I saw. Turn your change into cash. It was pasted on a machine in which you dumped your spare change in a grate in order to receive your money back in higher denominations (at a cost of course). The end result is positive but not substantively different in the larger play of relations.
I am moving towards the position that theory and moral formation is only as good as it postures the individual towards what I can only describe at this point as death. As I observed in my early college days their is movement to be observed and engaged but our participation in it remains elusive to much theoretical grasping. Stay tuned for more on "death" (see Ralph Stanley on IndieVision for now).
