T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets

Eliot reading 'Burnt Norton' (what's that noise?-version)

Alexander Tucker / Alexander Turnquist

Kantian Ethics as an 'Evental Site'

As Kojin Karatani rightfully stresses, the time has come for a rediscovery of both subjectivity and rationalism against the prevalent forms of empiricism. Similar to authors as Michel Henry, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Karatani urges us to finally question the contemporary dogma of hermeneutic particularism in favour of a philosophy no longer condemned to an acceptance of the status quo. Especially the parallels with Alain Badiou’s project are striking, but while Karatani labels his project as explicitly transcendental (in a Kantian sense), Badiou turns Kant into one of his main enemies. This paper is the result of a certain wonder about this opposition. Why does Badiou oppose Kantianism so strongly?; is his philosophy not rather a new incentive to rethink the Kantian project and would a more positive relation towards Kant’s idea of transcendental subjectivity not serve well also Badiou’s own project of the rediscovery of universalism? I will not answer these questions head-on, but will focus on two possible types of Kantianism. While Badiou mainly refers to a specific sort of neo-Kantianism fashionable in France, Karatani considers Kant as prefiguring his own brand of postmarxist radicalism. Tracing these directions back to Kant’s own writings, I hope to shed some light on the possibility of overcoming the opposition, together with a better insight into the possible critical power of Kantianism today.

I. Kant versus Badiou

Before we move on to Kant himself, let me first say a few words about Badiou’s relation to Kant. Badiou recognises the importance of the Critic of Pure Reason for banishing the transcendent One from his ontology and so for the laicisation of the idea of infinity. But what Kant banishes from his ontology, he would resurrect in his ethics, succumbing to a strict register of objectified normality. Despite the apparent similarities of their project - both take their point of departure in a radically non-substantialist and supra-sensible idea of subjectivity - Kantian ethics comes to symbolize all what he detests in philosophy today. More specifically, Badiou reproaches Kant ideological conservatism: his ethics of duty and legality would lead to a philosophy of conformity; his nearly exclusive focus on the purity of motives would make any genuine political action beyond the acceptance of the given situation impossible. The main reason for Kant’s conformism is that he would lack an account of the ethical imperative as exceptional: Kant valorises human nature in general, implying a trust in the possibility of resurrecting a once and for all valid system of protecting the general human nature in terms of human rights.[2] The effect is double: first, he solidifies a given order (in terms of legality) as the home of the righteous attitude an thus objectifies right conduct. Second, he also objectifies evil, as that which threatens the stability of the given order. He would even go as far as turning this relation upside down: the a-priori identification of evil becomes the actual touchstone for the solidification of the legal system.[3] In other words, Badiou turns Kant into a very specific enemy: a right-wing conservative. In what follows, I will take a look at Kant’s ethics with these specific accusations in mind: to what extent do Kant’s own texts provoke the accusations and how much room would they still leave us for a different interpretation?

II. A Right to Revolution? (the Legal Picture)

Most accounts of Kant’s ethics almost exclusively focus on the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). This is not without reason, for it contains some of Kant’s most profound ethical ideas and intuitions. Nevertheless, this is only half of the story. Twelve years later, Kant published his Metaphysics of Morals (1979), as an attempt to complete the project of the Groundwork. This part is meant as a short systematic interpretation of the transition and of the ethical position of his later work by way of one specific question: is there a right to revolution? I will call the position discussed here the ‘legal picture’ of Kantian ethics. The ‘legal picture’ is thus not a specific side of Kant’s ethics, which would complement the insights of the Groundwork, but an overall interpretation of his ethical position. In the next part, I will contrast this picture with the ‘moral picture’ of his ethics, although it is noteworthy that the ‘legal picture’ is the one most directly supported by Kant’s texts.

So let’s start with our question: ‘is there a right to revolt, to disobey the orders of a tyrannically government?’ For a positive answer we could take our cues from Kant’s stress on freedom and personal responsibility. This is at least the road Hannah Arendt takes. In her reaction to Eichmann’s claim that he always had considered himself as a Kantian, Arendt points out that the categorical imperative doesn’t allow for a political interpretation. The lawgiver of the categorical imperative is the human subject as an individual: we owe obedience to the moral law that we give ourselves, not to the Führer. Eichmann’s Kantianism was nothing but an extremely cut down version of Kantianism, i.e. reduced to the formula: obey the law. Surprisingly however, Arendt’s own reply is based on a highly simplified version of Kant’s ethics, completely disregarding Kant’s own assertions on the topic of revolution and the disobedience to the lawgiver.

Kant was indeed known for his high appraisal of the French Revolution (he even got the nickname ‘the old Jacobin’), but we should not forget that his own philosophy categorically forbids something as a revolution. As he states himself in 1793, two years before the publication of the Metaphysics of Morals:

“All resistance against the supreme legislative power, all incitement of the subjects to violent expressions of discontent, all defiance which breaks out into rebellion, is the greatest and most punishable crime in a commonwealth, for it destroys its very foundation. This prohibition is absolute. And even if the power of the state or its agent, the head of the state, has violated the original contract by authorizing the government to act tyrannically, and has thereby, in the eyes of the subject, forfeited the right to legislate, the subject is still not entitled to offer counterresistance.”[4]

Arendt’s reply refers to a certain logic at work in the Groundwork: the universality-test is performed by the individual subject and there are no intermediary stages between application of the moral law and the subject. But this is certainly not the position of the later Kant. In the Metaphysics of Morals the direct authority of the categorical imperative is substituted for a specific taxonomy of duties. In order to know what we ought to do, we do no longer rely directly on a abstract application of the moral law, but we find ourselves in the midst of a whole network of interrelated duties. As we will see, this also explains Kant’s explicit condemnation of the right to revolt.

The most basic division Kant makes is between duties of justice and duties of virtue. The first are the kind of duties connected to juridical laws. These aim at protecting the external freedom of the citizen and only require that we obey them externally; here, we only have to act according to duty and not necessarily out of duty. Duties of virtue are those in which case the lawgiving not only makes an action a duty, but where the duty is at the same time the incentive to obey the law. In contrast with the first, they concern the inner freedom and cannot be coerced. They aim at morality, not at legality. As such, both domains have their own separate system of ‘legislation’: an external system of lawgiving aiming at external lawfulness versus an internal system aiming at action out of duty itself. However, the difference in lawgiving does not mean that both spheres are completely separated. Ultimately, both legislations are founded upon the formal and material dimension of the categorical imperative. Formally, this leads in the sphere of legality to what Kant calls the transcendental formula of right: “Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law.”[5] At the same time, the material dimension comes into play, and thus what is generally called the humanity-formula of the categorical imperative: the protection of the external freedom is founded upon the idea that humanity itself should be treated as an end. Kant thus suggests that the protection of the external freedom is a condition for the flourishing of moral life. Precisely at this point we witness how both spheres become connected: Kant stresses (in Religion within the Boundaries of mere Reason) that we have an ethical duty to overcome the ethical state of nature in order to become a member of an ethical community.[6] In the Metaphysics of Morals this implies an ethical duty to live within a state. This explains why even positive laws are discussed within the context of ethics: although the source of lawgiving remains different from ethics in the strict sense, every juridical duty is also an indirect ethical duty[7], because the worth of humanity itself requires us to respect these laws. In the direct sense, violating a positive law is a crime; indirectly, the violation is also an offence to humanity itself.

Till so far the general distinction. Concerning the possibility of a conflict of duties: Kant thoroughly denies the possibility [for all duties are founded upon reason and there can be no conflict within reason itself. He only admits the possibility of two conflicting grounds of obligation. It remains a little obscure what is meant by the idea of a ground of obligation, but the most sound interpretation seems to be the combination of facts with an action (material circumstances) and relevant duty.[8]] of a conflict a priori, though must admit that conflicts may arise at the level of actual application. Kant hardly discusses any of these kind of conflicts explicitly. Luckily, his theory is robust enough to provide us the criteria to judge those conflicts. The general principle is that a formal principle has precedence over a material principle.[9] The formal principles consist of a principle consistency and universality. The material one refers again to the formula of humanity, as a principle to promote the flourishing of reason and humanity as an end in itself.

Let us go back then to the case of revolution. First, can it be legally justifiable? Kant refuses the Hobbesian idea that it is conceptually impossible for a lawgiver, the sovereign to do injustice. The sovereign is also bound to the demands of natural reason, to the standards of justice founded upon the categorical imperative. This does however not mean that it can be just for us to disobey an unjust law. Once a political regime is installed, the highest authority belongs to the lawgiver, the sovereign and to include a permission to ignore or oppose the given laws would be contradictory. Logically, there can be no legal authority to oppose the highest legal authority. The opposition would have to be based on a higher legal authority and as a result it would deny the fact that in a juridical state the sovereign represents the general will of the people; it would deny the idea of legality altogether. As Kant argues: “For a people to be authorized to resist, there would be a public law permitting it to resist, that is the highest legislation would have to contain a provision that it is not the highest and that makes the people, as subject, by one and the same judgment sovereign over him to whom it is subject. This is self-contradictory.”[10]

If revolution cannot be justified on legal grounds, what about a possible moral justification? Kant’s answer is again negative. As we have seen, duties of justice are indirect also duties of virtue, in the sense that our respect for legality as legality is in itself an ethical duty; and because a revolution would not only undermine the actual system of legislation, but the whole idea of legality, it is also our moral duty to preserve the legal conditions of justice. Even the direct application of the categorical imperative would not legitimate a revolution, for universalising the maxim of the revolutionary shows it as self-contradictory. The argument is similar as above: at the same time it is willed that there is justice and that there be no justice (by denying the highest authority of the lawgiver).[11] The crucial Kantian premise is again that justice demands a highest legal authority, and that from the moment on a sovereign comes to represent the general will of the people, the will of the people is only legally knowable by way of what the sovereign commands. Of course, Kant does not deny that the successful outcome of a revolution might be morally desirable; but Kant is not a consequentialist; moral desirability may never be confused with moral legitimacy. At the same time, Kant’s non-consequentialism does not imply that moral ends do not matter in moral reasoning. To the contrary, the formula of humanity (of the CI) allows us to take ends explicitly into account. It is even part of our ethical duty to work towards a just society in which the freedom of all people is maximised. The idea of a revolution could therefore be supported by the humanity-formula, were it not that formal criteria have always precedence over material.

At a few occasions, Kant however makes room for a kind of disobedience, more specifically when we are commanded to do things that are evil in itself and thus directly opposed to the ethical law.[12] But we should note that this is only a passive disobedience subjected to some specific criteria. First, it only concerns acts which are deemed immoral. Second, the act of disobedience should not undermine the authority of the sovereign, for in that case the passive disobedience would become an active one, undermining the idea of legality. As a result, it remains highly questionable if Eichmann would have been able to disobey the commands of the lawgiver on Kantian grounds: the test of the legitimacy of disobedience fails to meet both criteria. Eichmann was probably more Kantian than he could have ever imagined, at least according to the legal picture.

III. The Singular Imperative (the Moral Picture)

Coming back to Badiou finally: that he opposes Kantianism as a philosophy of duty comes as no surprise. Not completely unlike in some Islamic theologies, Kant’s stress on the radically noumenal and thus transcendent nature of the moral law has an awkward effect: it tends to revert into a quasi making absolute of the given, positive order of law, into an ideologically conservative valorisation of what we can call in Lacanian terms the ‘symbolic order’.

Nevertheless, we are still confronted with a certain paradox: how is it possible that Kant was that enthusiast about the French Revolution, while theoretically condemning all possible sorts of revolution? To one report even “he said that all the horrors in France were unimportant compared with the chronic evil of despotism from which France had suffered, and the Jacobins were probably right in all they were doing”[13] and in The Contest of Faculties Kant himself refers to the enthusiasm for French Revolution as an example of an event that demonstrates the possibility of moral progress. So, at least we still need an understanding of the operations of the categorical imperative which allows us to align Kant’s theoretical innovations with the expressions of his personal belief.

Christine Korsgaard for example, a Kant-scholar and pupil of Rawls, is willing to accept the case of the virtuous revolutionary. She describes this situation as the opening up of a gap in the moral world.[14] As a good, virtuous person caring for wellbeing of the people, the revolutionary takes the law into his own hands. He therefore places himself in a position he detests the most: acting independent of the established procedures of consulting the general will of the people, his stance towards society is one of paternalism and thus despotism. In order to save the procedures of justice, the revolutionary violates his respect for these procedures. The gap itself results from the fact that it remains undecidable from the stance of morality to know when things have gone too far. In Korsgaard’s words: “Morality cannot tell you when to leave the moral law behind, in order to make sure that the world remains a place where morality can flourish. In making this kind of decision, you are entirely on your own.”[15]

But does this really help us out, evoking a kind of Kierkegaardian exceptionality, beyond the ethical? As such, morality remains confined within the logic of legal conformity, destined to function as a complete decision mechanism. Moreover, there is very few evidence in Kant’s own writings for the acceptance of a existential sphere beyond morality. For the time left, I would like to consider the possibility of finding a solution starting from Kant’s own ethical principles. Could there be any legitimation of revolution on Kantian grounds, and what would be the outlook of such a Kantianism? My intuition at least, is that there could be serious evidence for pro-revolution stance, though only at a high cost: condemning the Metaphysics of Morals as unKantian – Kant failed theoretically to apply his own transcendental principles – or reading it as a political work of absolute faithfulness to the event of the French Revolution: the prohibition of revolution concerns possible counterrevolutions[16] and should not be read as a general philosophical theory (it’s the work of a situationist). Anyway, in both cases we have to explain why the Metaphysics of Morals should not be read as a sound Kantian philosophical theory.

The closest we came to a possible legitimation of revolution on Kantian grounds was by reconnecting it directly to the categorical imperative, and more precisely to the formula of humanity: a revolution could be seen as necessary in the light of our duty to promote the flourishing of humanity as an end in itself. Nevertheless, formal criteria overrule material criteria, and our case failed to pass the formal test of the categorical imperative: the maxim of revolt resists universalisation. But does it really? The crucial question is still how maxims are to be articulated in the application of the categorical imperative.[17] Let us take a more simple example, discussed by Kant himself: the possibility of lying. The case goes as follows: someone knocks on your door and asks if your friend, who is hiding in our house, is inside the house; you know he is a murderer and that he is there to kill your friend. Do you have the right to lie? Kant’s answer is categorically ‘No’, for the maxim of lying does not pass the universality-test.[18] But for what reason does Kant only consider the most simple and unqualified version of the maxim? A more finely-differentiated maxim would yield different results: for example, is it possible to will as a general law, lying to a murderer who shows up to kill an innocent person? In the application of the categorical imperative, Kant indeed dismisses the role of the situation in the process of application; a dismissal which might be questionable even on Kantian grounds. First, it seems morally arbitrary to reduce the maxim to its most unqualified version. Kant is very well aware of the need of judgement in moral reasoning. Moreover, as he explicitly confirms in the Critique of Practical Reason, moral life does not take place within a vacuous sphere of pure noumenality. This would turn us into automatons, gesticulating everything well, but acting as puppets without life in the figures.[19] Moral life implies moral struggle, suggesting at least that there can’t be any principle prohibition of taking the situation into account. Second, the option for the most simple version of a maxim tends to slide again into heteronomy. Kant disregards the situation because he is looking for a moral law which is truly universal, valid for all and for all times. Taking material conditions into account, would only imply a possible threat to the sought-after universality, he believes. But does it really? As we have learned from Badiou (and to a certain extent also from Kierkegaard), ‘situationism’[20] and universalism do not have to exclude each other. Of course, it is not Kant’s conclusion, but it should have been, inherent as it already is in his anti-substantialist idea of subjectivity, and necessitated from the perspective of avoiding heteronomy. Kant insists on the demand that the moral law is given by the subject itself and thus on the impossibility of turning the law into something externally given. I have to give myself the law; as a giving it is a singular happening. Nevertheless, by disregarding all possible material conditions of the giving, he disrobes the act of all singularity, pretending the act is performable within an ideal, abstract space, allowing us to translate the categorical imperative into a set of objective rules as ‘never lie’, ‘never revolt’… as if we could generate a list of duties existing somewhere ‘outside’. In other words: if we fail to singularise the imperative, we risk undoing Kant’s main ethical intuition.

This is however not the same as materialising the categorical imperative[21]. Singularising the imperative does not preclude the distinction between the formal and material dimension; they don’t collapse into one formula. Neither does it devaluate the required universality of the maxim. The application of the first formula remains a strictly formal operation, independent of the particular language-game of the context. As we have seen (according to the legal picture), the prohibition of revolution results from a shift of the direct authority of the imperative to an intermediary logic (the network of duties), towards a stress on our being embedded within a community. The problematic character of the legal picture is itself the result of contextualizing the imperative. Singularisation is nothing less but an opposite movement: taking the situation into account should prevent us from sliding back into the heteronomy of a positive legal system; it subtracts the validity of the imperative of what is considered as valid within the ‘symbolic order’. In other words: every ethical act as ethical remains exceptional, for as an ‘evental’ happening the act is undecidable in terms of the ‘symbolic order’. Would the moral law ever gain an objective status, as being “there” before we act, it would destroy our autonomy.[22] Kant himself realised this, stressing the subjective and unconditioned nature of the ethical act; only as a result of his abstract, non-situational approach of the imperative, he tends to bypass his own insight. But isn’t that why precisely Badiou is so important for Kantianism today: instead of being an incentive for a dismissal, it is Badiou who offers us the opportunity to deepen Kant’s own quintessential insight, reconnecting again the universal with the singular. Might not the time have come for a new alliance?



[1] Dialectic of the Enlightenment, p. 83
[2] Cf. especially Badiou, Ethics
[3] Cf. Badiou, Ethics (ned. 29).
[4] Cf. I. Kant, On the Common Saying: That may be correct in Theory, but it is of no use in practice, in I. Kant (ed.), Practical Philosophy, Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1793), 273-309.
[5] I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in I. Kant (ed.), Practical Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1797), 353-603, p. 387.
[6] Cf. I. Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998 p. 108.
[7] Cf. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in, p. 384. : “Ethical lawgiving cannot be external, although it does take up duties which rest on another, namely an external, lawgiving by making them, as duties, incentives in its lawgiving.”
[8] For this interpretation, cf. especially R. McCarthy, Moral Conflicts in Kantian Ethics, in History of Philosophy Quarterly 8 (1991) 65-79.
[9] Cf. I. Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, in I. Kant (ed.), Practical Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1795), 317-351, p. 344.: “In order to make practical philosophy consistent with itself, it is necessary first to decide the question, whether in problems of practical reason one must begin from its material principle, the end (as object of choice), or from its formal principle (resting only on freedom in external relations) in accordance with which it is said: So act that your maxim should become a universal law (whatever the end may be). The latter principle must undoubtedly take precedence; for, as a principle of right, it has unconditional necessity, whereas the former necessitates only if the empirical conditions of the proposed end, namely of its being realized, are presupposed.”
[10] Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in, p. 463.
[11] Cf. also P. Nicholson, Kant on the Duty Never to Resist the Sovereign, in Ethics 86 (1976) nr. 3, 214-230, p. 222.
[12] Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, p. 110.: “As soon as something is recognized as a duty, even if it should be a duty imposed through the purely arbitrary will of a human lawgiver, obeying it is equally a divine command. […] the proposition ‘we ought to obey God rather than men’ means only that when humans beings command something that is evil in itself (directly opposed to the ethical law), we may not, and ought not, obey them.”
[13] G. P. Gooch, Germany and the French Revolution, New York, Russell & Russell, 1966, p. 269.
[14] C. M. Korsgaard, Kant on the Right of Revolution, in A. Reath, B. Herman & C. M. Korsgaard (ed.), Reclaiming the History of Ethics. Essays for John Rawls, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 297-328, p. 319.
[15] Ibid., in, p. 321.
[16] Historically, this seems indeed to be the case. Cf. for example in Zum Ewigen Frieden (AK VIII 346), where he explicitly denies other sovereigns to intervene in French affairs. Cf. also L. W. Beck, Kant and the Right of Revolution, in Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971) nr. 3, 411-422, p. 417.
[17] Cf. also T. E. Hill, Questions about Kant's Oppositio to Revolution, in Journal of Value Inquiry 36 (2002) 283-298, p. 295.
[18] Cf. I. Kant, On a Supposed Right to lie from Philantrophy, in I. Kant (ed.), Practical Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1797), 611-615.
[19] Cf. I Kant, CpR, p. 258.
[20] I use this term to refer to the idea that every truth is the truth of a situation.
[21] Some tend to conflate both, cf. for example R. W. Davis, Is Revolution Morally Revolting?, in The Journal of Value Inquiry 38 (2004) 561-568.
[22] Cf. ook C. Lotz, The Events of Morality and Forgiveness: From Kant to Derrida, in Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006) 255-273, p. 259.; A. Zupančič, Ethics of the Real. Kant, Lacan, London/New York, Verso, 2000, p. 60.

Tony Conrad - Dream Music/ Early Minimalism

"Repetition itself creates bliss. There are many ethnographic examples: obsessive rhythms, incantatory music, litanies, rites, and Buddhist nembutsu, etc.; to repeat excessively is to enter into loss, into the zero of the signified. But: in order for repetition to be erotic, it must be formal, literal, and in our culture this flaunted (excessive) repetition reverts to eccentricity, thrust toward various marginal regions of music."

Roland Barthes (as quoted by Tony Conrad)

Read Conrad's essay "Preparing for the Propaganda War in the Time of Global Culture: Trance, Form, and Persuasion in the Renovation of Western Music" here

Tony Conrad with Faust - The Pyre of Angus was in Kathmandu (mp3) (reissue on Table of the Elements)

The Grandeur of Reason - conference

Looks like universalism is back en vogue; a post-9/11 effect? Anyway, the perfect location for this topic and an interesting choice of keynote speakers: Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, David Schindler...

The Grandeur of Reason
Religion, Tradition, Universalism

Rome, 1-4 september 2008

Conference organised by 'The Centre of Theology and Philosophy' of Nottingham University

Conference website

Valet - Naked Acid

Having recently discovered Honey Owens' first Valet album, this sophomore album (out on Kranky) comes as a pleasant surprise. Even more haunting than one the first, her voice really stands out. The atmosphere reminds me a bit of German krautrock, but in a more American, bluesy kind of way. Definitely one of the best psychedelia-albums of this year. Added you find the song 'Fire', one of the more quiet ones, but also a highlight of the album.

"These songs were Inspired by the Pacific Northwest landscape, semi-conscious dream states and the idea of one's DNA code being accessed as eternal memory."

Valet - Fire (mp3)

Cornell conference

looking forward to my first conference in the US

The Substance of Thought: Critical and Pre-Critical

keynote speakers: Simon Critchley (The New School for Social Research) and Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, April 10th-12th, 2008

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/trg/conf2008.html

The last few decades have witnessed a struggle within continental philosophy between those thinkers who accept Immanuel Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” and those who refuse critical philosophy in favor of a “classical” metaphysics that, in the words of Alain Badiou, “considers the Kantian indictment of metaphysics…as null and void.” This conference will consider the conflict between “critical” and “classical” or metaphysical strains in contemporary thought. Has critical philosophy run its course, as Badiou suggests? Or has Kant’s critical turn determined the horizon of all future philosophical work? Or is there an alternative path?

We are interested in analyzing the contemporary division between thinkers who prescribe a return to the pre-critical metaphysics of, for example, Spinoza, Leibniz, or Lucretius, and those who continue to take up various trajectories of Kant's critical legacy. The former camp might include Deleuze and Badiou as well as Negri and Althusser, while the latter might include Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Derrida. We particularly wish to encourage work that takes a stand on the conflict between the two camps, as well as work that considers the implications of the conflict for the arts and social sciences. The wide range of our inquiry includes interrogations of the nature of critique, the fate of aesthetics, the privilege accorded to immanence or transcendence, and the status of materialism.

Herzog vs Jean Paul

oh, they can be so dramatic, these Germans!

"I heard only the eternal storm, which no one rules, and the shimmering rainbow, strechted over the abyss and falling into it. And when I looked up to the immeasurable world in search of the divine eye, only an empty eyesocket stared back at me; an eternity lay upon chaos and gnawed at it and chewed upon itself. Cry out, raise a cacophony, scream until the shadow breaks, for He is not! ... Rigid, speechless nothing! Cold, eternal necessity! Insane chance!"

Jean Paul, Siebenkäse (1796)

Werner Herzog on the obscenity of the jungle

Few filmmakers are so thoroughly modern as Werner Herzog, so thoroughly romantic, but in a disillusioned, anti-romantic kind of way.

"the trees are in misery, the birds are in misery; I don't think they sing, they just schriek in pain […] but there is some sort of harmony; the harmony of overwhelming, collective murder”

Six Organs of Admittance - Eight Cognition / All You've Left

(K-RAA-K)3 festival - 1 March 2008 Brussel

MARSHALL ALLEN [us] & PAUL HESSION [uk] BARDO POND [us]
CERAMIC HOBS [uk]
CHERRY BLOSSOMS [us]
DRAGONS OF ZYNTH [us]
RICHARD CRANDELL [us]
ENTRANCE [us]
HELLVETE [b]
TON LEBBINK [nl]
ALEX MACKENZIE [ca]
SEAN MEEHAN [us]
PINK REASON [us]
HENRI POUSSEUR´s "Voix et vues planétaires" [b] PSYCHEDELIC HORSESHIT [us]
R.O.T. [b]
SILVER APPLES [us]
UP-TIGHT [jp]

+ FILMS LAFMS: The Lowest Form of Music NOT THERE HOMMAGE AU SAUVAGE: Henri Pousseur LUC FERRARI DEVANT SA TAUTOLOGIE LABRAT MATINEE + DJ´S after midnight in recyclart + record stands

Official site kraak festival 2008

Josh T. Pearson - Kierkegaard as a Cowboy

"The time has come that you must decide... to take two steps towards Texas tonight"

Few regions are as polarized as America's South: "either you're in the bar, or you're in church". Josh Pearson has spent quite some time in both. Born in Texas as a son of a preacher, he started to play 'devil-music' in 1996 with his band Lift to Experience, releasing just one album, the magnificent the Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads (an apocalyptic concept album about Texas as the promised land). Unfortunately, he gave his companions 'the boot' shortly after the album-release in 2001. He left Texas for Europe, trying to make a living here (or maybe just living by faith alone) and playing some concerts every now and then. A solo-album has been planned for years. Let's hope he finds the inspiration. Desperate, honest outsider-music; a beacon of hope in our times.

Josh T. Pearson - the Clash (mp3) (lofi live-registration Nantes, France, 2003)

Lift to Experience - With the World Behind (mp3) (live, Peel-session 2001)

Cindy and Bert - DER HUND VON BASKERVILLE

the good old days of German Schlagermusic

"My blood is clean, but the devil is in me"

Although we inevitably keep on thinking about music in traditional categories and genre-distinctions, nothing is as fascinating as witnessing young musicians doing away with this, not for the fun of 'everything goes', but because the 'old forms' have lost their urgency; because their creativity asks for a new language. Of course, this is the way 'free jazz' musicians have understood themselves from the sixties on, but even 'free jazz' has become a niche, a respectable institution with its canon, instruments and techniques.

One of these youngs guys deserving our attention here is definitely Chris Corsano. Mostly known for his collaborations with saxofonist Paul Flaherty, he takes 'free jazz' beyond the jazz-idiom, bringing some hardcore-punk energy within a jazz-setting or adding some noise-folk-psych influences together with people as Thurston Moore, Matt Valentine, Jandek... Below you find a song from his album 'The Radiant Mirror' (out on Textile Records), a performance together with Mike Flower, who plays here the shahi baaja (a japanese electric dulcimer/auto-harp).

I also added a song from a great psych album I recently discovered: Blood is clean from Valet (out on Kranky). Valet is the solo-project of Honey Owens (who has previously played with Jackie-O Motherfucker). Haunting impressionistic guitar-playing with beautiful, etheral vocals.

Flower Corsano duo - Wind (mp3)

Valet - Blood is clean (mp3)

Ben Chasny. An American Mystic

In some way or another, in our personal life, we are all shaping something like our inner destiny. We are looking for these works of art, for these philosophies, for these people which might help us to refine this essential, singular project. If we are asked though to explain this destiny, we do not find the right words. Of course, we do not give up on reflection. We do not neatly separate life from thought. There is philosophy, as a meaningfull and indispensable figure on this path; but there is no ready-made intellectual framework which fits this destiny. The great joy of music is that (in rare cases) it allows us to catch a glimpse of precisely our own project; that it embodies a vision which is so closely connected to our own destiny, that it strikes us immediately, on a wordless and intuitive basis.

Speaking for myself, Ben Chasny's Six Organs of Admittance hits the right chord there. Independent of his personality, his interests or his lyrics, most of his music embodies a perspective which haunts me in a partly incomprehensible but direct and effective way. Added you find the opening song of his new album 'Shelter from the Ash', out on Drag City. Reading the liner notes, I was very surprised to discover that the song takes its title from a book from Henry Corbin, a French philosopher and scholar of Islamic Mysticism. In his explicitly gnostic readings of the three monotheistic traditions, Corbin is known for affirming their essential unity in strictly dividing the inner religion (the 'inner church') from the different ecclesial masks. As such, together with his pupil Christian Jambet and Michel Henry, Corbin represents the fascinating other side (the esoteric side) of French postmodernism, opposing the superficial playfullness of the exoteric postmoderns with a deeply spiritual vision.

Six Organs of Admittance - Alone with the Alone (mp3)

Postmarxism, also for non-(post)marxists. Kojin Karatani's resetting of the agenda

"I, too, was part of this vast tendency - called deconstructionism, or the archeology of knowledge, and so on - which I realized later could have critical impact only while Marxism actually ruled the people of many nation-states. In the 1990s, this tendency lost its impact, having become mostly a mere agent of the real deconstructive movement of capitalism.

Skeptical relativism, multiple language games (or public consensus), aesthetic affirmation of the present, empirical historicism, appreciation of subcultures (or cultural studies), and so forth lost their most subversive potencies and hence became the dominant, ruling thought. Today, these have become official doctrine in the most conservative institutions in economically advanced nation-states. All in all, this tendency can be summarized as the appreciation of empiricism (including aestheticism) against rationalism. In this sense, it has become increasingly clear that the return to Kant in recent years has actually been a return to Hume."

K.K., Transcritique. On Kant and Marx, p. xi

Julianna Barwick

Julianna Barwick is an American solo artists, who has just released her debut album 'Sanguine'. All the 13 short songs are variations on one theme: she loops her own, mostly wordless, vocals and adds some spheric effects to create a circular microcosm. It reminds me a bit of the way Animal Collective makes use of vocal loops, although Julianna's approach is definitely more minimal and introspective.

A live performance at the Portuguese radio station 'Ma Fama', can be found here.

Julianna Barwick - Sanguine (mp3)

"Xenakis, prophet of insensibility" (Milan Kundera)

In doing some reading about Xenakis, I came across an intruiging essay by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera. Through a short sketch of some of the basic parameters of western music, he explains the revolutionary character of Xenakis's music. Reading the passage together with the former (on immediate revelation) might help us to understand his work as the musical equivalent of a 'transcendental materialist' position.

"European music is based on the artificial sound of the note and the (tone) scale; it opposes the brutal and objective sonority of the world. As a result of an unbreakable convention European music is obliged from the beginning to express a subjectivity. It seems to fight the sonority of the outside world, like a sensitive being resisting the insensitivity of the universe. European civilization (from the year thousand on) is one of the only civilizations accompanied by a huge and dazzling history of music. This civilization - with its adoration of the suffering of Jezus, its courtly love, its cult of the bourgeois family, its patriotic passions - shaped the sentimental man. Music has played an integral and decisive part in the ongoing process of sentimentalization. But it can happen at a certain moment (in the life of a person or of a civilization) that sentimentality (previously considered as a humanizing force, softening the coldness of reason) becomes unmasked as ‘the supra-structure of a brutality’. This was the moment at which music appeared to me as the ear deafening noise of the emotions, while the sound-world in the works of Xenakis became beauty; beauty purified of the dirt, purified of sentimental barbary. To be a ‘prophet of insensibility’ Joyce could remain novelist; Xenakis had to step out of music. Xenakis opposes the whole of the European history of music. His point of departure is elsewhere; not in an artificial sound isolated from nature in order to express a subjectivity, but in an earthly ‘objective’ sound, in a mass of sound which does not rise from the human heart, but which approaches us from the outside, like raindrops or the voice of wind."

M. Kundera, Prophète de l’Insensibilité, in M. Fleuret (ed.), Regards sur Iannis Xenakis, 1981, Paris. (the translation is mine)

Iannis Xenakis - Concret PH (mp3) (A short piece written for the Phillips-pavillion (cf. picture) at the World Expo 1958. Manipulation of the sound of fire).

Iannis Xenakis

"Art has something in the nature of an inferential mechanism which constitutes the platforms on which all theories of the mathematical, physical and human sciences move about. Indeed, games of proportion - reducible to number games and metrics in architecture, literature, music, painting, theatre, dance, etc., games of continuity, of proximity, in or outside of time, topological essence - all occur on the terrain of inference, in the strict, logical sense of the word. Situated next to this terrain and operating in reciprocal activity is the experimental mode which challenges or confirms theories created by the sciences, including mathematics. […] It is experimentation that makes or breaks theories, pitilessly and without any particular consideration for the theories themselves. Yet the arts are governed in a manner even richer and more complex by this experimental mode. Certainly there is not nor will there ever be an objective criterion for determining absolute truth or eternal validity even within one work of art, just as no scientific "truth" is ever definitive. But in addition to these two modes - inferential and experimental - art exists in a third mode, one of immediate revelation, which is neither inferential nor experimental. The revelation of beauty occurs immediately, directly, to someone ignorant of art as well as to the connoisseur. This is the strength of art and, so it seems, its superiority over the sciences. Art, while living the two dimensions of inference and experimentation, possesses this third and most mysterious dimension which permits art objects to escape any aesthetic science while still enjoying the caresses of inference and experimentation."

I.X. Art/Science. Alliances

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) is Greek/Romanian composer and architect (he often worked together with Le Corbusier), known for his highly intellectual approach to music. Experimenting with mathematical algorithms, the relation between sound and space, and the manipulation of sound, he became one of the pioneers of electro-acoustic music. Some of his later electronic music is even surpringsly noisy, in a way you wouldn't expect from a modernist composer. Bohor, a work from 1968 is probably the heaviest piece of Avant-garde music I've ever heard (think of Sunn O))) plays John Zorn's Kristallnacht). In contrast also to the work of some of his contemporaries in Avant-garde music, most of his work is very dense, calling to mind the saturated universe of orthodox spirituality (although his language and imagery isn't religious at all).

The Community of Non-Community. Philosophical Anthropology as a Challenge to Theology (Laclau, Badiou, Žižek)

Introduction

"The unity of all divided humanity is the will of God. For this reason he sent his Son, so that by dying and rising for us he might bestow on us the Spirit of love. […] Division “openly contradicts the will of Christ, provides a stumbling block to the world, and inflicts damage on the most holy cause of proclaiming the Good News to every creature.”[1]

In the first chapter of Ut Unum Sint John Paul II situates the core of the ecumenical enterprise in God’s universal will of salvation. Divided humanity should be re-united into the one Body of Christ and the division between different Churches and ecclesial communities will have to be overcome. One particular church, the Roman-Catholic represents the universal Church of Christ, although elements of truth may be found outside this particular community. But also in the latter case, internally these elements tend towards a reintegration within the Catholic community.

"The Church of Christ "subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him", and at the same time acknowledges that "many elements of sanctification and of truth can be found outside her visible structure. These elements, however, as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, possess an inner dynamism towards Catholic unity”.[2]

As such, with the notion of Catholic Unity the Catholic Church reaffirms again the centrality of the idea of ‘universality’: God’s message is addressed to all men and to reorient the focus to the particularity of truth is thoroughly anti-Catholic. In more recent documents, the Vatican continues to stress this aspect, especially since some deviations within the Catholic community tend to undercut this central and indispensable aspect of Catholic faith. Pope Benedict XVI for example observes that some theologians are more willing to please a community of post-Christians, than to rethink difficult and unfashionable topics as the universality of truth.[1] Having discovered the ‘linguistic turn’ they reduce truth and rationality to what is meaningful within a very particular language game: this allows them to hold on to their so-called tradition while being at the same time a modern pluralist.[2] Tradition then, stripped from its inner grounds and conditions of possibility, becomes a package of identity-features; an outward costume that allows the cultural Christian to know about his identity in the midst of religious plurality. People might have these psychological needs, but as the Vatican and the whole Catholic theological tradition - at least till Johann Baptist Metz - realises, the consequences of this logic are disastrous. Metz even turns the safeguarding of universality into the special mission of the theologian today: “The theologians will be the last universalists in our highly differentiated world of science, and they will have to remain so, whether they like it or not.”[3]
Till so far the Catholic statement: no Christianity without universalism. More precarious is to understand the actual nature of this universalism. How are we to conceive universality and what is its precise relation to particularity? The intuition of my paper consists of the idea that the Catholic tradition defends with good reason the universalist dimension of Christianity, but that there is a risk of a certain misunderstanding of the universality of Christianity. As a result of the latter, the Catholic universalism (as represented by doctrinal documents) might turn out to closely resemble a particularistic position. In other words: the Catholic anti-communitarianism risks to lapse itself into a hidden form of communitarianism. The first part of the paper is meant as a short reconstruction of Catholic universalism. I will undertake this in the light of Ernesto Laclau’s postmarxist philosophy. In a second part, I will take a look at Alain Badiou’s reading of Saint-Paul as an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of a Christian particularism.


I. Ut Unum Sint versus Ernesto Laclau

Coming back to the quotes from Ut Unum Sint, we witness a strict distinction between universality and division. Division contradicts the will of God, for God wants us all to be united. Universality is therefore understood in terms of unity; a unity that can be reached by overcoming the division between different communities, and more specifically through a reintegration of the different extra-Catholic communities within the unity of the Catholic Church. The ultimate source of Christian universality is thus God’s will; a will mediated by one particular community. The mediation itself is not arbitrary. As a result of God’s own incarnation, the body of Christ comes to subsist in the Catholic Church, which as a community governed by the ‘Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him’ can clearly be designated as a particular community. The Catholic Church thus becomes Hegel’s concrete-universal: as the reign of the Spirit, it is the perfect synthesis between the divine and the earthly principle, giving flesh to the universal not just in the singular person of Jesus, but as a reality now accessible to all, through the institutional mediation. The objection to this logic is obvious: the Church may claim it represents the universal, but formally its universality is a generalization of a set of particular truths. Nevertheless, I will refrain here from judging whether the Church claims this with good reasons or not. The function of the objection is to help us to recast the scene and to enter the dialectics of particularity and universality.
Let us then start again, from a more general philosophical perspective, in order to see where the Church might fit in. As Ernesto Laclau[4] remarks, our postmodern condition is characterized by an increased awareness of the particularity of all identity; all discourses are particular discourses and none of them is in itself capable of bringing about the fullness of communion. This results in the common proposition that the validity of any statement is contextually determined. At first sight, the logic of differentiality at work here looks unproblematic: we are living in a culturally pluralistic world, with different identities shaped within different contexts. But, as Laclau points out, a strict logic of differentiality is actually self-defeating and confronts us with a paradox: if all identities are defined within a context and if we are to avoid a complete dispersion of identity, the context will have to be a relatively closed context. But how can we define the limits of a context? If we start from the fact that differences are constitutive for identities, we cannot appeal to something beyond differences. At the same time, we cannot overlook the Hegelian insight that we can only define limits by pointing out what is beyond them. The first solution would thus be to argue that beyond the limits are new differences. But in this case, it becomes impossible to know whether these new differences are internal or external to the context. If there is only contextuality, the very possibility of a limit and thus of a context becomes a problem. Laclau thus argues:

"the only way out of this difficulty is to postulate a beyond which is not one more difference but something which poses a threat (i.e. negates) to all the differences within that context – or, better, that the context constitutes itself as such through the act of exclusion of something alien, of a radical otherness."[5]

By consequence, antagonism is constitutive of all identity: an excluded, non-dialectizable element constitutes the system of differences and allows the context to define its limits.
How does this argument relate to the concept of universality? Laclau directs our attention to the absent focal point where all differences meet, namely ‘the beyond’ as implied by the logic of particularity. In two ways, the logic at work reveals something as universal. Firstly, to make identity-formation possible, ‘the beyond’ has to differ from the logic of differentiality and therefore refuses integretation within a particular discourse. As a result of this distance, it can be labelled as universal. Secondly, because ‘the beyond’ is at the same time a threat to the logic of differentiality, it introduces a universality of equivalence between the different particular discourses: as an ultimate limit it is a threat to all the differential identities, which render them interchangeable concerning the relation to the limit; all identities become equivalent with regard to the void of their outside.[6] The universal is therefore necessarily an elusive, vanishing point, required by the system of differential identities, though at the same time a threat which reproduces a relative universality between the particular identities. It would lead us too far to sketch all the different consequences of such an approach. What concerns us here is the basic structure of Laclau’s analysis as a peculiar tension between the universal as non-dialectizable and the logic of particular discourses; a structure which not only holds for the functioning of discourses, but which has its ontological condition in the subject as “immanently antagonised”[7].
Taking a look again at Ut Unum Sint, Laclau helps us to question an all too easy distinction between universality and division. The risk of such a distinction consists of cancelling the non-dialectizable universality of the beyond in favour of the relative universality between the discourses. The strategy then oscillates between two extremes: either all different discourses come to a full agreement and are united by a newly structured discourse, or one discourse is generalized as the final, all-encompassing discourse. But beside the fact that the Catholic Church tends to opt for the latter strategy, what becomes questionable is not the strategy, but the whole attempt to locate universality at the level of discourse. From the moment, universality is set in opposition with division, a counter-productive logic is set free: universality becomes the end of a process aimed at the erasure of division, and because division is finally understood as a division between different particular discourses, the process of erasure will inevitably turn into a battle of the discourses, all striving for a hegemonic position.
Paradoxically, the opposite thesis might make more sense: true universality is the universality of division. What divides us is finally not our being part of certain community, as distinct from other communities, but our being divided within ourselves. We are split between the sphere of the non-dialectizable and the order of representation. The latter explains how our identity is inevitably a particular construction within a particular community; the first explains why the particular construction does not exhaust who we are and why all construction is always under threat. Does this then leaves us with an opposition between two perspectives on universality, a Christian one which despises division on the one side and a postmodern which embraces division on the other side? Not immediately: the thesis of true universality as the universality of division might be more Christian than one usually thinks. In what follows, I will take a look a the reading of the New Testament by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. As postmarxists, they are not the most orthodox readers of the gospel, but they might help us to get rid of a too communitarian interpretation of Christianity.


II. Saint-Paul and the Foundation of Universalism

In continuity with earlier existentialist interpretations, Badiou and Žižek assist us in detecting a fundamental tension cutting across the whole corpus of the New Testament. The tension is the following: we are split between two lords, and we cannot serve both (Mt 6:24). Obeying the will of the Father is radically incommensurable with obeying Mammon. Of course, this is just one specific formulation, and the different authors of the New Testament each have their terminology to designate the fundamental tension. John focuses on the idea of the world, as a sphere incommensurable with the Life of the Divine: “I am not praying for the world” (Jn 17:9), “My kingdom is not of this world” (Jn 18:36). For Paul, the tension is one between Love and the logic of grace on the one side, and the Law and the supplement of sin on the other side. Formalised: we are split, like in Laclau’s scheme, between the non-dialectizable and the economy of representation, for grace cannot be counted, it doesn’t allow any calculation from our side. At different places, the gospel is clear about this radical split which refuses all mediation: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mt 16:24). The law, tradition, family… are radically surpassed, unable to mediate between our human condition and the life of faith.
Let us make this a little more specific. As an atheist philosopher, Badiou turns his attention to Paul, not because he believes the traditional claim about Jesus’s resurrection, but because Paul has established a universalist truth-procedure:

"Paul’s unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp, be it that of people, a city, an empire, a territory or a social class. What is true cannot be reduced to any objective aggregate."[8]

Badiou stresses that Paul’s notion of ‘Resurrection’ is not meant as an historical claim about the body of Jesus (no wonder that Paul has no interest in the historical Jesus). ‘Resurrection’ functions rather as an empty signifier which designates the pure event of the liberation from the Law. With this notion Paul was able to undermine the existing discourses of his time, by focusing on the site where all the particular discourses lose their representative ground. In contrast with the settled position of the Jews and the Greek, this allows Paul to open up a different relation to reality through his experience of the failure of the existing discourses. More specifically, Paul lays bare how both the Jewish and the Greek discourse are aspects of the same form of mastery. The Jewish discourse is the discourse of the exception, of the prophetic sign and the mastery of its deciphering. The Greek discourse bases itself on the cosmic order and the idea of a direct mastery of the totality through wisdom. The Jew is in exception to the Greek. In both cases their theory of salvation is tied to mastery.

"One may also say: Greek and Jewish discourses are both discourses of the Father. That is why they bind communities in a form of obedience (to the Cosmos, The Empire, God or the Law)."[9]

‘Resurrection’ then designates the reign of the Son, as the event of the opening up of the original closure of truth within particular discourses (of mastery); an event which reconnects us with the impossible Real (the non-dialectizable) as the source of life. As such, Paul makes a strict distinction between the world of truth (which we enter through grace as a pure and simple encounter) and the world of particularity. Of course, Paul knows that we live in a world of particularity, but truth can only be established by traversing all particular differences.[10] As a result, Paul refuses to play the subtle game of identity-construction; since we are all one in Christ, he refuses to set up dividing distinctions: “It is not being circumcised or being uncircumcised that can affect anything – only faith working through love” (Gal 5:6).[11] This is not to deny the idea of a Christian identity. But the identity has now become something paradoxical, as the identity of non-identity, for there are essentially no particular characteristics which shape the identity of being Christian. Moreover, precisely this paradoxical point has become the place from where Christian universality is defined: the universality emerges from the point where those who are ‘part of no-part’ speak. Or as Žižek states:

"Christian universality is formulated from the position of those excluded, of those for whom there is no specific place within the existing order, although they belong to it; universality is strictly codependent with this lack of specific place/determination."[12]

The universal dimension discovered by Paul is therefore not the ‘neither Greek, nor Jew, but all united as Christians’. As Žižek argues, this would exclude the non-Christians and reduce Christianity to a particular discourse with a specific identity. Paul’s insight is that Christian universality is the universality of division. What is universal is the difference itself between Christian (the new man) and non-Christian (the old man). This division cuts across the whole social body: “It proposes something that is open to everybody.[…] The division is internal to the subject itself.”[13]


III. Conclusion

Both Badiou and Žižek agree that true evil does not lie in an excess of subjectivity, but in its ‘ontologization’, in its reinscription into a positive order of Being (cf. the Greek discourse of mastery). At once, this is for both the great insight of Christianity, that “the global cosmic ‘chain of Being’ is not ‘all there is’, that there is another Order which suddenly emerges and which suspends the validity of the Order of Being”[14]. Love, as non-negotiable, as non-dialectizable, as grace cuts through our being emerged in a particular subset of Being. As such, this kind of Urspaltung (a primal cut) is what connects us all; it opens up a true universality, which is no longer the generalization of a particular discourse. Also ecumenism might be driven by an attempt to avoid the model of generalization. But as an ecclesial practice, it becomes highly questionable if it will ever be able to escape the pitfalls of communitarianism. Theology in general tends to get stuck in a logic of differentiality. In a ever more secular world, it suffers from a strong need to affirm its own particular identity. These needs are human, without doubt, but the consequences of this logic might be disastrous: here, Christianity tends to degrade itself to a particular life-option, to a subset/dogmatism/fundamentalism among others, suppressing the universality of division in favour of the comfort of its own niche.

"There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ" (Rom 3:22-24)

[1] Cf. for example in Dominus Jesus, § 4: “The roots of these problems are to be found in certain presuppositions of both a philosophical and theological nature, which hinder the understanding and acceptance of the revealed truth. Some of these can be mentioned: the conviction of the elusiveness and inexpressibility of divine truth, even by Christian revelation; relativistic attitudes toward truth itself, according to which what is true for some would not be true for others.” Cf. also the recent notification on Roger Haight’s Jesus Symbol of God: “This theological position fundamentally denies the universal salvific mission of Jesus Christ (cf. Acts 4:12; 1 Tim 2:4-6; Jn 14:6) and, as a consequence, the mission of the Church to announce and communicate the gift of Christ the Saviour to all humanity (cf. Mt 28:19; Mk 16:15; Eph 3:8-11), both of which are given clear witness in the New Testament and have always been proclaimed as the faith of the Church, even in recent documents.”
[2] For an Anglican perspective, cf. especially the thought of John Milbank. Having flirted with a rather particularistic Yale-school approach (in Theology and Social Theory), he more and more comes to stress the universalist aspects of Christianity. “Once again theologians have been caught out in their inauthentic pusillanimity. In deference to liberal fashion, they have foresworn Christian claims to uniqueness, to a transcending of the Jewish legacy and so forth. Now they are wrong-footed by Marxist atheists who recall us to the facts of historical phenomenology: Christianity was the first Enlightenment, the first irruption of an absolutely universal claim.” J. Milbank, Materialism and Transcendence, in C. Davis, J. Milbank & S. Žižek (ed.), Theology and the Political. The New Debate, Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2005, 393-426, p. 35.
[3] “Die Theologen werden die letzten Universalisten in unserer hochdifferenzierten Wissenschaftswelt sein, und sie werden es – um Gottes und der Menschen willen – bleiben müssen, gelegen oder ungelegen, immer auch mit der Bereitschaft, einen gewissen Ungleichzeitigkeitsverdacht auf sich sitzen zu lassen. […] Der Theologe, der nicht sich selbst und andere betrügen will, der Theo-logie treibt, und zwar nicht als dies oder das, sondern als den immer neuen Versuch der Rede von Gott, ist und bleibt auf Universalität verpflichtet.” J.B. Metz, Zum Begriff der neuen Politischen Theologie: 1967-1997, Mainz: , 1997, 156.
[4] E. Laclau, Subjects of Politics, Politics of the Subject, in Differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7 (1995) nr. 1, 146-164, p. 150-153.
[5] Ibid., in, p. 151.
[6] Cf. also S. Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2006, p. 36.
[7] Laclau agrees here with Žižek that we finally will have to make this move and that we cannot treat the distinction as one between two externally opposed views. Cf. E. Laclau, Politics, Polemics and Academics: An Interview by Paul Bowman, in Parallax 5 (1999) nr. 2, 96-107, p. 100. For the reason why we have to interiorize this, cf. Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 36.
[8] A. Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, trans. by R. Brassier, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 5.
[9] Ibid., p. 42.
[10] This does not mean however, that Paul is trying to abolish particular differences. His strategy is more subtle. Take for example his relation to what is Jewish. As Rom 9:1-6 makes clear, Paul’s relation to the Jews is essentially positive. It is therefore not all Paul’s aim to discredit particularity. But he finally praises particularity only to be able to traverse it. In Badiou’s words: “Paul fights against all those who would submit postevental universality to Jewish particularity. […] The task Paul sets for himself is obviously not that of abolishing Jewish particularity, which he constantly acknowledges as the event’s principle of historicity, but that of animating it internally by everything of which it is capable relative to the new discourse, and hence the new subject.”[10] Moreover, Paul does not conceal his own strategy here: “To the Jews I became a Jew, in order to win the Jews; to those under the law, I became as one under the law – though not being myself under the law – that I might win those under the law. […] I have become all things to all men” (Cor. I.9:19-22). Ibid., p. 102.
[11] Cf. also Paul’s disdain for customary casuistry: within the order of particularity everything is essentially admitted. “In truth, all things are clean” (Rom 14:20). Also on the level of intersubjectivity, Paul displays a similar generosity: “Why, then, does one of you make himself judge over his brother, and why does another among you despise his brother? […] Let us each stop passing judgement, therefore, on one another” (Rom 14:10-13). To protect the universalism, he even explicitly warns that one must avoid doctrinal quarrels as much as possible. “Give a welcome to anyone whose faith is not strong, but do not get into arguments about doubtful points” (Rom 14:1)
[12] Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 35.
[13] A. Badiou, An Interview with Alain Badiou. “Universal Truths and the Question of Religion”, in Journal of Philosopy and Scripture 3/1 (2005) 38-42, p. 40.
[14] S. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 133.