“God is not dead, He just smells funny” – Reflections on the Syrian Massacre of the Innocents

Jean-Hyppolite Flandrin - "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem"

“Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a tank…” This paradoxical paraphrase of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Mt 21:5, Jn 12:15) went through my head when I tried to ‘digest’ the news about the latest UN report on the status of children in situations of armed conflict (www.un.org/children/conflict/english/index.html). The report expressed special concern about the deteriorating situation in Syria, where a growing number of children are among the casualties of what is by now a very bloody civil war. Apparently, militia’s are killing indiscriminately, women and children no less than men. Children whose parents are suspected rebels are tortured or simply executed. Some children have been found with their heads caved in. Also there are reports about children being used as human shields, positioned on top of tanks in order to discourage enemy fire.

The need to rewrite Holy Scripture
It was this image of a child on top of a tank that reminded me of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem: “Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a donkey […]. And most of the crowd spread their garments in the road; and others cut branches from the trees, and spread them in the road. And the crowds that went before him, and that followed, cried out, saying, ‘Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.’” (Mt 21:5-11)

Doesn’t the image of a child used as a ‘human shield’ on top of tank force us to rewrite Holy Scripture, as if Christ is again entering the city where his crucifixion will take place? Only this time that Holy City is not Jerusalem but the Syrian city of Hama. And the road is not strewn with garments and palm leaves but with enemy fire, with bullets singing: “Hosanna to the son or daughter of whomever!” And if we are thus rewriting Holy Scripture, we might as well rewrite the passage about the murder of the children under Herod, such that it is now not in Rama but in Hama where “a voice [was] heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted because they are not!” (Mt. 2:17-18; Jer. 31:15)

Giotto - "The Massacre of the Innocents"

“If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke”
This is what a father says about his son in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) – turned into a film by John Hillcoat. The narrative is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where due to some global disaster – whether natural, man-made or divinely ordained remains unclear – all civilization has crumbled and nature is dying. Those who are still alive are reduced to a sub-human existence of daily struggle for food and the realistic fear of cannibalism. In this world, where all hope and value is lost, this father has made it his sacred mission to protect his son: “the child was his warrant,” McCarthy writes. “What if I said that he's a god?” the father says about his boy to an old man who is amazed to see a child still being alive in the disaster zone the world has become: “When I saw that boy I thought that I had died […]. I never thought to see a child again.”

In this godforsaken world, where all faith has died, where God himself is “dead”, this father finds a superhuman faith through his son, who has for him become a divine being, indeed, Christ himself, the Incarnate Word of God. The grimness of McCarthy’s dystopian vision, however, is such that besides the father no one believes anymore. Not even the old man puts any faith in the divinity of the child: “Where men cant live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone. So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true. Things will be better when everybody's gone.” Even the living, walking and talking Word of God carries no weight anymore: the world of The Road is too far gone, too godforsaken for that. The father’s task to protect his child against rape, murder and cannibalism is indeed a superhuman task, a more or less impossible mission.

The Road

Optimistic dystopia?
In comparison the film Children of Men (2006) – based on the novel by P.D. James – offers an almost optimistic vision of post-apocalyptic dystopia. Here too the story revolves around the divinity of childhood in a seemingly godforsaken world. The premise is that due to some unknown cause – a virus or divine intervention? – mankind has become infertile and faces extinction in several decades. When the youngest person on the planet – celebrity Baby Diego, aged 18 – is killed by a disappointed fan over a refused autograph, people lose their last ounce of hope and give in to despair and nihilism, epitomized by the government-issued suicide drug Quietus. For why take care of the planet, indeed why take care of oneself if there is no future? The future after all is what a child is: the future beyond oneself. Then, miraculously, one black girl becomes pregnant, giving birth to a healthy baby amidst the brutal civil war into which the world is falling apart. Bullets are flying, bombs are exploding, people are dying on the spot, but when the mother and her newborn infant appear all falls silent, the fighting stops abruptly, people stand in awe, soldiers fall on their knees before this epiphany which can only be described as religious – underscored by correspondingly dramatic music. It’s a beautiful scene and arguably the high point of the film, far surpassing its dramatic ending when mother and baby are finally aboard the Tomorrow, the ship that will bring them to the utopian community of the Human Project.

Children of Men

“Everything of value is defenseless”
So where do we stand now, what is the status of our own world when children are used as ‘human shields’ on top of tanks? Are we closer to the ‘optimistic dystopia’ of Children of Men? Or are we in the truly hellish world of The Road where faith in the divinity of childhood has all but disappeared? Apparently we are right in between, since the sanctity of childhood is both recognized – for otherwise children would be worthless as ‘shields’ – and violated, since they are used as shields. As the Dutch poet Lucebert wrote: “Everything of value is defenseless.” The supreme value and defenselessness of the child is apparently also the supreme armor, not impenetrable for bullets, no not quite, but almost impenetrable for considerations that rationalize the killing of another human being. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas described the “Face of the Other” as that ultimate instance of vulnerability which calls the spontaneity of our violence into question. But what has become clear now is that this Face is first and foremost the face of a child. It is the ideal mask to hide behind. What has also become clear is that post-apocalyptic dystopia is not just a Hollywood genre, some entertaining vision of horrors predicated on the hypothetical question: “What if…?” No, dystopia is here and now: it is this-topia so to speak. The apocalypse is taking place again and again, each time an innocent child is brutally murdered, abused, raped. How can we believe in a God who lets such things happen? But then again, how can we stop believing in God if this means giving up the divinity of the child? We must have faith, then, simply for the sake of the children. This is the great strength of McCarthy’s line “If he is not the word of God God never spoke”. And therefore I say: “Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a tank…”

"After Auschwitz" – On regurgitating clichés
Obviously this ‘Christological’ reading of the Syrian ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ is meant to be abysmally cynical rather than as an expression of faith in the redeeming power of (forced) imitatio Christi. Confronted with such horrors, faith crumbles in despair. To repeat: How can one believe in a God who lets such things happen? This, of course, is an age old question, a powerless cliché nowadays, incapable of causing serious religious doubt. Why? Because we have already stopped believing in the goodness of God a long time ago. Auschwitz cured us of that, to use another cliché. This is the way the world is, we sigh, and then we look away and think about something else, lest we would have bad dreams at night. And we can’t have that, can we? No, we must be rested and fresh in the morning for another productive day.

But still… Doesn’t a feeling of sacrilege encroach on us when we hear the invocation of Auschwitz being reduced to a mere cliché? Who dares to say such a thing? True, some people – especially in academia – use it as a cliché when they unthinkingly repeat claims like “After Auschwitz there can be no more poetry” (Adorno) in order to please their professors and further a nice academic career. Such claims have become clichés all right, but they are all the more painful in light of the horrors of Auschwitz. And for Auschwitz we might as well substitute any of the other disasters that constitute the history of the modern world (as Joyce wrote in Ulysses: “History […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”). I won’t go into particulars – that is to say: I don’t want to ‘regurgitate more clichés’ – but just think about that child on top of a Syrian tank, that instance of supreme (in)vulnerability. Don’t we encounter here, despite all clichés, something sacred and divine? Something that suggests the image of Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey and perhaps even requires the rewriting of Holy Scripture in the indicated way?

Christianity and transcendental violence
Levinas spoke of a metaphysical and even religious dimension coming to paradoxical presence in the anti-phenomenon of the Face of the Other, who questions us from beyond the sphere of being and makes us responsible to the Platonic “Good beyond being”. Levinas, of course, was a Jewish thinker, who took his lead from the dialogical nature of the Judaic relation to God, who speaks to the individual through the personality (the “Face”) of the other human being – hence Levinas’ fondness of the Jewish proverb “the other’s material needs are my spiritual needs”. Yet one wonders if the metaphysical dimension he discovered – the supreme ethical authority of supreme vulnerability – isn’t more amenable to a Christian interpretation rather than a Jewish one, given the apparent necessity of sacrifice in order to bring this dimension to manifestation.

Isn’t this the gist of Derrida’s essay “Violence and Metaphysics” where he criticizes Levinas for ignoring the fact that the otherness of the Other – and hence his ethical authority – can only become manifest through the violence perpetrated against her? Thus Derrida spoke of a transcendental and pre-ethical violence as the condition of possibility of the ethical relation to the Other: “For this transcendental origin, as the irreducible violence of the relation to the other, is at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other.” (Derrida 2002: 160) Hence the intimate relation – which is more than etymological – between sacrality and sacrifice: only through the violence of the latter is the former truly revealed. But this transcendental violence as the precondition for the sacred authority of the Other – isn’t this first and foremost the crucifixion, as the violence that reveals the divinity of Christ? Derrida himself does not investigate this suggestion, despite the fact that “Violence and Metaphysics” shows a strong Christian undercurrent in the reciprocity envisaged by Derrida between (the transcendental violence of) Greek logocentrism and (the ethical authority of) Jewish heteronomy. For isn’t it clear that Christianity is this reciprocity as a historical ‘synthesis’ of Hellenism and Hebraism? Derrida suggests as much when he writes: “Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek […].” (Idem: 191) For this, of course, is not just an allusion to Joyce’s Ulysses (“Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.”), but ultimately refers to St. Paul’s statement that “There is neither Jew nor Greek […], for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

The divine emptiness of God's grave

The presence of divine absence
Paul’s meaning, of course, is that such parochial distinctions are no longer relevant in light of the universality of the Christian revelation, which addresses humanity as such (see Badiou 1997). Yet we might also interpret his statement more creatively as pointing to the special nature of Christianity as being between Greek philosophy and Jewish religiosity: it is “neither Greek nor Jew” since it is both, as the impossible excluded middle between these contradictories. Christ as the incarnation of God is both ‘Greek’ insofar as He is the veracious presence of the divine logos, yet He is also ‘Jewish’ in that this presence manifests a constitutive absence of the divine, of God as “wholly Other” who as such cannot be made present – and the attempt to do so can only kill him. Hence the Incarnation of God is only truly fulfilled in the Crucifixion: the moment when God dies – that is the moment when He is truly present/absent, when his absolute authority is truly manifested in his absolute (in)vulnerability. As I said, Derrida doesn’t investigate these suggestions, although they are clearly implicit in “Violence and Metaphysics”. One wonders why he remained silent…

Be that as it may, the suggestion with which I want to end is that the Syrian child – put as a ‘human shield’ on top of a tank – manifests this Christological dimension of sacrifice. Doesn’t this child force us to rethink our (post-)modern disbelief vis-à-vis the divine? “God is dead,” we say following Nietzsche, and we say so especially “after Auschwitz”. But doesn’t God die again in that Syrian child? And how can He die again if He was already dead? Shouldn’t we say then that God is not (yet) dead but rather dying, continually dying in all the innocent victims of human violence? To paraphrase Zappa’s famous statement on the status of rock music: God isn’t dead, He just smells funny… And it would indeed almost be funny if it wouldn’t be so horrific.

-Alain Badiou (1997), Saint Paul et la foundation de l’universalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris.

-Jacques Derrida (2002 [1964]), “Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas”, in: Derrida, Writing and Difference. London and New York: Routledge, pp.97-192.

A relation to end all relations: On Badiou’s scandalous closeness to Levinas and Buber

The central aporia of Badiou’s philosophy, the unavowed kernel of his thought, is the paradoxical relationality of unrelation. As Peter Hallward remarks – albeit only in passing – in his excellent book on Badiou: the latter stumbles “over the problem of relationality in its broadest sense” (2003: 180). Despite his subtractive conception of thought, despite his rejection of all relation in favor of the axiomatic punctuality of truth, despite his stress on the infinite multiplicity of isolated singularities, Badiou cannot prevent to single out one relation as all-important: the impossible interrelation of the Two – viz. the subject and the real – an interrelation that ‘takes place’ in the truth event; an interrelation Badiou variously thinks as love, address and response, subjectivization, encounter, and of course fidelity. It is a paradoxical relation not just because it is founded on the impossibility of relation but also because it is a relation that suspends all other relations: it is the ‘relation to end all relations’, like the never-ending ‘war to end all wars’. For it is this impossible relation to the void of the real – taking place in the evacuation of place – that tears both subject and real away from all existing structure and community, away from their re-presentation by the State. It is thus the relation to the real which establishes the absolute universality of absolute singularity. Sure, Badiou declares explicitly that there can be no relation with the void, that a truth event should not be understood in relational terms, and that the subject is nothing more than a finite fragment of the infinite void itself as it erupts in a truth event. Nevertheless, relational language keeps creeping up in Badiou’s conceptualization of the truth event. Ultimately, after all, his is a philosophy of the encounter with the real – and that is surely to say: of the encounter as such and thereby of the relation as such. In short, this crucial relation is the repressed real of Badiou’s anti-relational thought. And given the centrality of such essentially linguistic activities as address, response and naming in the truth event, Badiou appears to be committed to a thoroughly linguistic conception of the truth event as a form of communication, indeed as communication par excellence, where the absolutely bifurcated somehow make contact. The truth event seems to be an event happing first and foremost in language, despite Badiou's emphatic rejection of hermeneutics and the linguistic turn. 

Badiou as a philosopher of communication?
In the following I would like to corroborate this immanent critique of Badiou’s thought by relating him to such arch-relational philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber. I realize that this must seem ridiculous to those ‘Badiouians’ who substitute fashionable epigonism for real fidelity to the truth. Yet Badiou's closeness to Levinas and especially Buber cannot be ignored. It is indeed this unexpected closeness – willy-nilly – which testifies to the central aporia of Badiou’s thought, the unresolved issue of the paradoxical relationality of unrelation. The point is that Levinas’ and Buber’s variations on the theme of the linguistic encounter with the absolute Other find many surprising echoes in Badiou's thought. Much like them Badiou conceives of the encounter with the real – that is, the happening of the truth event – in surprisingly communicative terms like responding, naming and subjectivization. For Badiou, the subject becomes subject only by responding to and naming the truth event by which she/he is addressed. Subjectivization by the truth event, then, presupposes an at least minimally linguistic relation between the event and its “addressee,” the subject-to-come.

This relation of address and response in Badiou’s conception of the truth event has been noted before, notably by Žižek who in The Ticklish Subject critically remarked that Badiou is paradoxically close here to Althusser’s notion of ideological interpellation, where an individual is subjectivized by responding to the call of the other – paradigmatically exemplified by the “Hey you!” of the policeman – who represents the big Other sustaining the symbolic order (Žižek 1999: 128, 141). Obviously, if Badiou’s truth event were indeed just a variant of ideological interpellation, then that would be disastrous for his militant project to separate truth from the State of being. For the truth event would then be nothing but the re-integration of the subject into the State as re-presented by the symbolic order. I think, however, Žižek has overemphasized Badiou’s association with Althusser in this regard. As I said, Badiou seems much closer here to Levinas and Buber, whose conceptions of the encounter with the Other are – in contrast to Althusserian interpellation – primarily subversive, as the encounter tears the subject away from the ruling State of being (ontology for Levinas, the I-It relation for Buber).

“relation without relation” – Badiou’s closeness to Levinas
To start with Badiou's relation to Levinas, the latter's conception of subjectivity as response-ability, and of the subject as an ethical response to the call of the Other, seems strangely echoed by Badiou’s insistence on the subjectivizing power of fidelity. What is fidelity if not a properly ethical relation to the øther, that is, to the real? Badiou’s conception of fidelity as a “passion for the real” also tallies well with Levinas’s emphasis on the passivity of the ethical relation to the Other. Like Badiou’s truth event, the Levinasian call of the Other comes from beyond being and tears the subject away from the prevailing order of things, thus disrupting the “totality” that represses the “infinity” of the Other. On the basis of this absolute otherness of the Other, escaping the totality of ontology (compare Badiou’s count-as-one), Levinas conceives the ethical relation to the Other as a “relation without relation”, that is, a relation that derives its ethical force precisely from its own impossibility: “In metaphysics [as opposed to ontology, PS] a being separated from the Infinite nonetheless relates to it, with a relation that does not nullify the infinite interval of the separation – which thus differs from every interval.” (Levinas 2001: 80) It is perhaps in this respect that Badiou is closest to Levinas, since fidelity as a relation to the real is precisely like that: a relation without relation, founded on the impossibility of relation, on the lack of common measure. Thus for Badiou the encounter with the real operates “in the element of non-rapport, of the un-related” (1989: 64).

The symmetry of the truth event – Badiou’s closeness to Buber
Yet what in the end distinguishes Badiou’s position from that of Levinas is the strict symmetry envisaged by Badiou between a truth event and the subject that proclaims it, in contrast to Levinas who emphasizes the asymmetry of the ethical relation to the Other. We can also put this by saying that whereas Levinas conceives of the ethical relation as a supreme heteronomy, where the spontaneous autonomy of the subject is “called into question” by the infinite defenselessness of the Other, for Badiou in contrast the impossible relation to the real is precisely what founds the autonomy of the subject, his unjustified freedom, literally based on nothing, on the void of the real. It is precisely the symmetry involved in the truth event which allows this absolutely liberating character of the encounter with the real. For in Badiou’s system it is not just the subject who is called into being by the truth event – this constitutive process works the other way around as well, since a truth event can only be said to take place insofar as it is recognized and “named” by a subject. Thus the subject axiomatically posits itself – note the Fichtean connotation – when it declares the happening of a truth event. In set-theoretic terms this means: a truth event counts its own name as one of its elements, thereby violating the prohibition of self-reference that holds for normal, structured sets. It is indeed through this axiomatic self-positing – mediated by the subject’s naming response – that the truth event explodes the established structure of a situation. The relation between truth event and subject is therefore one of reciprocal (chiastic) constitution: the truth event subjectivizes the subject, and at the same time the subject calls the truth event into being, axiomatically, by naming it. One is reminded here of the constitutive symmetry or “mutuality” of the I-You relation in Buber’s dialogical philosophy, where both I and You only come into existence through their meeting. With respect to the reciprocity between truth event and subject, then, Badiou seems closer to Buber than to Levinas, who after all severely criticized Buber for ignoring the hierarchic asymmetry of the ethical relation as it is dominated by the “height of the Other”. Buber's emphasis on the symmetric equality of I and You in their irreducible difference (what Buber calls their “arch-distantiation”) is therefore more in line with the strict egalitarianism of Badiou's approach.

Love as the reciprocity of the Two
Buber's dialogical focus on the arch-distantiated intimacy (ex-timacy?) of the I-You relation is moreover strangely echoed by Badiou's insistence on love as a (or even the) paradigmatic truth event. In love erupts the truth of sexual difference and more generally the truth of the “Two” as such. The “Two” is a central concept in Badiou's thought, although it is also – as Hallward remarks – one of its “most elusive aspects” (2003: 45). The Two seems to play for Badiou a similarly foundational role as the I-You relation does for Buber. In Badiou's though, the Two appears to indicate the pure bifurcation or absolute lack of common measure that separates a situation from its real. Hallward: “At its most abstract, it is this notion of a pure two, without the third element that would be the relation between the two, that lies at the heart of Badiou's alternative to dialectical or relational philosophy.” (2003: 46) With respect to individuals the Two indicates their absolute strangeness to each other, which is precisely the strangeness of the real in the other (or øther) loved by the subject. Thus love for Badiou reflects, in the individual sphere, the “evental status of the Two” (1989: 18). In that sense love for Badiou can be defined as fidelity to the øther, to her/his irreducibility to my situation, her/his je ne sais quois that unsettles me. Love, then, is a paradigmatic case of the encounter with the real. Hallward: “Love is, first and foremost, a matter of literally unjustified commitment to an encounter with another person. Everything begins with the encounter.” (2003: 187) The last sentence –  “Everything begins with the encounter” –  certainly reads as one of the poetic-religious lines from Buber's Ich und Du. This association with Buber is further reinforced by Badiou himself when he writes: “the sexes do not preexist the loving encounter but are rather its result” (Badiou 1995: 56). Or more elaborate: “Before this chance encounter, there was nothing but solitudes. No two preexisted the encounter, in particular no duality of the sexes... The encounter is the originary power of the Two [...].” (Badiou 1992: 357) This, of course, is much like Buber's claim that it is only through their encounter or meeting that I and You come into existence.

The mathematics of love vs. the intimacy of the Between?
In other words: the reciprocal constitution which, as we have seen, takes place between subject and truth event, also takes place in love where subject and øther call each other into existence, axiomatically, through a mutually mediated self-positing. As Hallward puts it: “Love proclaims the truth of sexual difference, or, in other words, love effects the axiomatic disjunction of sexual positions” (2003: 186 – pun apparently not intended). Yet this closeness to Buber – this focus on reciprocal constitution – is also apparently the site of Badiou’s distance from Buber. At least on the superficial level of style, Badiou substitutes an anti-sentimental mathematization of love (Lacanian in origin) for the soggy and cliché-ridden language of the I-You relation practiced by Buber – an unbearable language which, as Adorno once remarked, has “the oily tone of unbeleived theology” (1973: 277). It is not so clear, however, whether this stylistic difference also corresponds to a real systematic difference on the level of philosophical content.

At first sight, such a systematic difference appears to be obvious. For isn’t Buber the philosopher of “the Between” par excellence? The reciprocal constitution of I and You in dialogue implies for Buber the ontological primacy of the Between, of the intermediation as the source from which both I and You derive. In contrast, Badiou’s position is precisely based on the rejection of any between, of any common measure or medium between the Two. Hallward: “The essential thing to remember is that the configuration of a two always eliminations relations between two elements. Such relations are indeed, as Badiou argues, describable only from the position of an implicit third element. The “between” is external to the two.” (2003: 47) This lack of an intrinsic Between is precisely what constitutes the relation of the Two as an un-relation, an impossible relation based on absolute bifurcation. In this regard, with respect to love, Badiou sticks to the Lacanian claim that “there is no sexual relationship,” that is, no common measure between the sexes. As Badiou writes: “far from governing ‘naturally’ the supposed relation of the sexes, love is what makes truth of their unrelation” (1997: 261). Yet, paradoxically, love effectuates a relation (for it would be absurd to deny that love – like fidelity – is a relation) on this impossibility of any sexual relationship. Love precisely is a sexual relationship that celebrates its own impossibility or absence or permanent crisis. Here, of course, we meet again the central aporia of Badiou’s though, its unavowed kernel: the paradoxical relationality of unrelation as the relation to ends all relations. In this respect, then, Badiou seems less closer to Buber than he is to Levinas, who at least conceived of the ethical relation to the Other as a “relation without relation”.

God and the love of truth
Yet Buber cannot be written off so easily. His language of the soggy intimacy of I and You and the primacy of their Between might be misleading insofar as it covers over their elementary disjunction – their “arch-distantiation” as Buber says – which conditions the dialogical encounter in the first place. Buber is quite clear on the fact that true dialogue (and hence language) only takes place when the I is confronted by absolute otherness, that is, the infinite Other, who Buber – like Levinas – ultimately conceives as God. The You is ‘simply’ absolute otherness as it appeals or speaks to (‘interpellates’) the I. One can say, then, that what establishes the primacy of the Between for Buber is precisely the arch-distantiation, the absence of any bridging between I and You. In other words: the true Between is the absence of any positive between which could act as common ground. Isn’t this precisely what Badiou’s position is in the end all about?  

What makes this closeness to Buber all the more ‘incriminating’ for Badiou is the fundamental importance of love for his entire philosophy. The point is that love occupies an ambiguous position in his system, being both one kind of truth procedure among others and at the same time being the overarching ‘structure’ of all truth procedures in general. For fidelity to a truth event, as the driving force behind any of the four truth procedures (love, science, art and politics), is itself also a kind of love, a love for truth. As Badiou writes: “the subjective process of a truth is one and the same thing as the love for that truth” (1997: 97). Or as Hallward puts it: “what motivates any subject is always a love of truth” (2003: 185). More generally, philosophy – as the discipline drawing the consequences from love, science, art and politics – is for Badiou “love of truth” as such (1992: 196). Doesn’t this mean that love is the highest set, encompassing all other sets, while at the same time including itself as its own part? Isn’t love then the One the existence of which Badiou so emphatically denies? Here I am reminded of the Gospel of John (4:8) where it is said: “God is love.” Add to this Jesus’ claim that “I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword” (Matthew 10:34), and it seems we have all the elements for a Badiouian position beyond Badiou.

Theodor Adorno (1973), Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Alain Badiou (1989), Manifeste pour la philosophie. Paris: Seuil.
Alain Badiou (1992), Conditions. Paris: Seuil.
Alain Badiou (1995), Beckett: L’incrévable désir. Paris: Hachette.
Alain Badiou (1997), Saint Paul et la foundation de l’universalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris.
Emmanuel Levinas (2001), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Slavoj Žižek (1999), The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso.

The call of the mother: Towards a feminist Christology (part 1)

The fetal awakening “During the course of things one comes to self-awareness. Like a sleepwalker wakes up during his walk as he bumps up against something...” (See my first post.) That’s obviously an exaggeration. In reality, man’s coming to self-awareness is a gradual process that begins in the womb and only peaks in late adulthood (to fizzle out and die in the latter part of life, at least for most people). Likewise, language – as the milieu in which consciousness is rooted – is something you slowly grow into. As I said, it starts in the womb. Hearing and responding to the mother’s voice is one of the first steps towards subjectivity in the fetus, to intentionality, the subjective focus on something. As Peter Sloterdijk writes: “In listening [to the mother’s voice, PS] the ear accomplishes the primal act of the self: All later acts of I can, I want, I come necessarily hook up with this first movement of spontaneous life… This going-outside-itself is the first gesture of the subject… It accomplishes the birth of intentionality from the spirit of listening…” (Sphären I, pp.513-515) There is also an imprinting of the mother’s voice in the fetal brain, enabling the child after birth to recognize the mother’s voice and thereby laying the basis for vocal interaction with the mother and thus for linguistic competence as such (in this context Sloterdijk speaks strikingly of “acquired acoustic universals” and “Platonic ideas of hearing” – Sphären I, p.518).

The good Matrix In this sense one can say that the mother’s voice calls the fetal subject into being. Should we not say then that God – as the one who calls man into being – is primarily a woman? From a psycho-genetic perspective, that seems a lot more obvious than the Judeo-Christian identification of God as man, as father and lord. The born child recognizes in the voice of its mother the voice that revived it in the womb. The voice of the mother evokes in the child – in a quasi-Platonic anamnesis (compare Sloterdijk on the Platonic ideas of hearing) – the memory of its original milieu, the womb, the swaying warm darkness where it came into being and grew until it was ready to come into the world. This arch-memory is reinforced by drinking at the breast. The sucking child feels the warmth of its mother’s body and hears again her heartbeat, the reassuring basso continuo that accompanied the maternal soprano, singing the child awake in the womb. And while the mother’s milk satisfies the child and lures it into sleep, the child feels again – always too short – that “oceanic” arch-feeling (Freud), that being one with the nurturing milieu from which it emerged. Isn’t then the uterus the real “divine milieu” (Teilhard de Jardin)? If man has a natural conception of God – or perhaps better: an intuition, a pre-linguistic sense of God – must this natural God not be a woman, the Great Mother, the Matrix? The early 19th century theologian and philosopher Schleiermacher saw the “feeling of absolute dependence” as the experiential basis of all religion. But isn’t this feeling first and foremost the oceanic feeling of the fetus in the caring milieu of the mother, whose voice calls the fetal subject into being?

The palimpsest of Genesis How strange – how nightmarish – is it in this regard to read Genesis, the original text of the Jewish and by extension the Christian tradition? The voice that calls man and all of creation into being (“And God said, Let there be light ...”) is here not a melodious female voice, but a heavy, menacing male voice, the voice of the Father and the Lord, the jealous God of vengeance. In light of the natural conception of God as female, reading Genesis is like looking at a beautiful woman who, when she opens her lovely mouth to speak, suddenly produces a man’s voice! Monstrous, grotesque! (Later on she even appears to have a beard ...) 

Thus Genesis reads like a palimpsest, a text written over on an older text, which is now hidden, erased. But scratch the top layer of ink away and you find the remains of the original text . This also holds for Genesis: Scratch the voice of God the Father away and you can again vaguely hear the voice of the Great Mother. “Adam, where are you?” God asked. And Adam replied: “Here I am.” (Genesis 3:9) Jewish philosophers like Buber and Levinas explain this passage as the founding text of the typically Jewish dialogical relationship between God and man: God calls human beings into existence, and man answers, man is the answer. Human existence is and remains answering to the original call of God. Thus it is throughout the Old Testament. Throughout the history of Israel, God intervenes and participates in the “conversation which is man” (Hölderlin). But isn’t this history based on a falsification of the beginning? The voice that calls the human being into existence is primarily not the voice of man but of woman, the mother, the original milieu of the fetus. It is the mother’s voice to which the fetus originally directs itself. That voice and the fetal response form the original text, the arch-dialogoue behind the palimpsest: “Adam, where are you? Here I am.”