Epistemological Explorations I. Taylor’s Anglo-American Concept of Modernity

In ‘What is Secularity?’, a recent article by Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher develops a conceptual scheme to understand the shift from a premodern, religious perspective to a modern, secular way of living. Crucial would here be the emergence of what he calls ‘closed world systems’ (CWS), as world systems which leave no place for the ‘vertical’ or ‘transcendent’. In order to understand better the phenomenon of Modernity, he therefore investigates different versions of CWS as ways in which people, who claim to be modern and secular, legitimate their position vis-à-vis religious people (who are then labelled as premodern from the perspective of CWS). His actual aim becomes clear at the end: to reconcile the spirit of Modernity with the possibility of religious belief, and so to deconstruct all at least rigid versions of CWS (he received the 2007 Templeton-prize). I will first shortly present Taylor’s account of CWS. In a second part, I will try to indicate how Taylor lures us into his conclusion by presenting a too flat image of modern secularity, and how he silently switches from a descriptive to a normative level. This last heavily weighs on the status of his conclusion, for his conclusion presented as normative might finally be nothing more than a philosophical generalization of a world system which fits his own psychological constitution.

Basically he identifies two main forms of CWS, the first as a strictly epistemological version, the second as a more existential one. They do not exclude each other; the second is mainly a more sophisticated, broader one. CWS 1: this comes down to the specific structure of modern epistemology, which operates “with a picture of knowing agents as individuals, who build up their understanding of the world through combining and relating, in more and more comprehensive theories, the information which they take in and which is couched in inner representations.” (Taylor, 59) Characteristic is then a series of priority relations, which do not only tell us what is learned before what, but what can be inferred on the basis of what. Applied: one starts with mental pictures, and from there on one affirms the existence of the outer world; then, on the basis of this trust in experience one starts making more complex scientific claims, for example about the laws of the universe. Thus, one always has to start with the natural, and claims about the transcendent are necessarily at the most fragile end of a series of inferences. Further, CWS 1 proclaims the primacy of the individual’s sense of self over society. The subject of science is a disengaged, independent subject, controlling his own thought-processes. He/She is not driven by particular interests or values, but claims to proceed on the basis of a pure epistemological, scientific method. We can be short here about Taylor’s critique, for it’s the same as for CWS 2: CWS 1 claims to be neutral, but it is not. It only functions because the adherents are driven by a specific set of values.
CWS 2 is labeled by Taylor as the ‘death of God’ paradigm. This tells us that “conditions have arisen in the modern world in which it is no longer possible – honestly, rationally, without confusion or fudging, or mental reservation – to believe in God.” (Taylor, 62) As a result, we are left with only human affairs, for belief in something transcendent is now seen as emanating from a childish lack of courage. Concerning the origins of the conditions which have arisen, Taylor identifies two sorts: “first, and most important, the deliverances of science; and then, secondarily, the shape of contemporary moral experience.” (Taylor, 63). The first is so strong, because Taylor believes the whole trust of modern science is to establish an all-around materialism. Modern science is not only interested in investigating very specific objects with their strict method of so-called neutral observance, but functions as a meta-narrative. In other words: it functions as a specific ideology. Adherents claim their package of truths is plausible, because science would have shown this and that, but what actually drives them is the broader project of a materialism, which is in itself not epistemically driven. This brings us to the second origin, as actually inseparable from Taylor’s deconstruction of the first: the ‘death of God’ paradigm is founded on a specific moral, humanist project: what matters are human affairs (welfare, human rights, human flourishing…) and this leaves no place for belief in God. In his words: “my contention is that the power of materialism today comes not from the scientific ‘facts’, but has rather to be explained in terms of the power of a certain package uniting materialism with a moral outlook, the package we could call ‘atheist humanism’ or exclusive humanism.” (Taylor, 67) His strategy is double: first, he states that epistemically the transition from science to full-blown materialism is unconvincing, that it is always full of holes (his examples here are evolution-theory, sociobiology and the work of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett). Second, he tries to show that people are in fact moved by certain values and that this undercuts their own image of objective research. Of course, Taylor stress on CWS as one, historically constructed understanding of human agency is not meant as a further purification of the scientific method. What he tries to argue for is that all types of understanding are always historically constructed, that there is no neutral gaze. This however does not imply a return to premodern understanding. He laments that the moral order of CWS 2 is formulated on the basis of a substraction-theory (at least by the adherents): it is formulated on a negative basis, as a doing-away with everything which might be an obstruction for human welfare (thus in the first a transcendent authority as God). What we should defend instead is a modern project as sustained by a positive visions of the good; and this might on its turn leave more room for transcendence, myths…

Till so far Taylor’s presentation. My objections concern his presentation of CWS 1 & 2 as typical for Modernity and the logical consistency of his critique and own positive proposal. I might agree with Taylor that we should not forget that Modernity has its own positive spiritual vision. But first: that it should not be conceived as a particular story is inseparably linked with its spiritual vision; and second, the positive spiritual vision is precisely the discovery of transcendence. Of course, modern transcendence has nothing to do with the existence of God. But this does not mean we’re lacking transcendence as such. The religious claim depends on an ontology no longer accepted by modern standards. Moreover, from a modern point of view, what was called transcendence becomes debunked as a foundational principle within Being; God as a highest Being, which is as such not something transcendent but a function of human understanding in search of a highest principle. The discovery of Modernity then concerns a transcending of Being within the sphere of human subjectivity. The human subject is understood as not locked up within the phenomenal sphere, but as opened (from the inside) towards what eludes its grip (this from Kant’s notion of the noumenal, to Levinas’ autrement qu’être, Derrida’s Khora and Lacan’s Real). Moreover, Taylor’s conviction that Modern epistemology is driven by an attempt to establish a full-blown materialism does not seem hold. In his description of CWS 1 he refers to the classic sources of modern epistemology, but some of the most crucial figures here do not envisage something as materialism. Let’s just take Kant: his epistemology is mainly in line with Taylor’s description of CWS 1. But it’s hard to see the connection with what Taylor describes in CWS 2. Kant’s philosophy is thoroughly dualistic, and his moral project has not much to do with materialism or naturalism (the same holds for Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Derrida…). Taylor’s account of CWS 2 is therefore mainly a Anglo-American version of Modernity, as a version which is a rather simplistic rendering of the original one (just look at his examples: Dawkins, Dennet…).

Let’s deal now with Taylor’s own method. His whole argument seems based on a problematic shift from a psychological-descriptive level to a normative one. In his critique on both CWS 1 and 2 he mainly states that most adherents do not stick to it on epistemological or scientific grounds: he perceives that they are driven to it on the basis of a particular package of values which is compelling for them. We are here on a descriptive level, and it is indeed very likely that it mostly works like this: people are in need of a certain worldview which fits their own (psychological) needs, although they will not legitimate their worldview by referring to attractivity of the values implied by their worldview. In this case, one of the options is to display a new honesty: to admit that our worldview is just a particular, historically constructed story, which we have chosen, not because it is so epistemically compelling, but because its moral package fits us best. This is the road Charles Taylor wants us to take. But why wouldn’t there be another option? Why should we admit that CWS 1 compels for different reasons than epistemological ones? That a lot of the adherents have an extrinsic motivation tells us nothing about the validity of the epistemology itself, nor about its power to convince. In Taylor’s words: “the whole package (of CWS 1 and 2) is meant to plausible precisely because science has shown… and so on. That’s certainly the way the package […] presents itself officially; that’s the official story. But the supposition here is that the official story isn’t the real one; that the real power that the package has to attract and to convince lies in it as a definition of our moral predictment.” (Taylor 64). Again: this might be true for a lot of the adherents, but it tells us nothing about the possibility of being epistemically driven. A reaction to Taylor’s descriptive analysis, from the perspective of CWS 1 could therefore be as follow: ‘thank you very much Mr. Taylor for your sharp observation. There were indeed a lot of people claiming to be part of CWS 1, but there membership was false. Their motivation was extrinsic, and from now on all these people will be expelled. They do not longer represent CWS 1.’ And it might be possible that are not many left in this case of purification. But the quantity of adherents has nothing to do with the validity of the official story, namely that science itself has the power to compel. Taylor thus switches silently from a pure descriptive to a normative perspective. He switches from the mere observation to the idea that it always should be like this.
Of course, Taylor knows that the mere observation of extrinsic motives does not really discredit the validity of the epistemology itself. He therefore also comes up with an epistemic response. This is correct in the light of a modern epistemological approach (and even necessary for a dialogue with CWS 1/2), but it becomes highly problematic in the light of his own philosophy. We have already mentioned his actual response above: to him all the arguments from modern science to materialism are unconvincing, and the theories are full of holes. But why would we believe this? His whole philosophy is an attempt to show that what drives us is a particular ethical worldview, and not the so-called neutral insights of epistemology and science; there are no neutral observations, for all observations already reflect the larger ethical package for which one has chosen. He defends this theory in general and applies it here to CWS 1 and 2; but this also holds for his own philosophy. Therefore: his argument that modern epistemology is unconvincing is not to be taken as neutrally valid, but it is already the reflection of his own particular worldview. Further: his whole attack on epistemology in general is thus not based on his the actual insight into the weaknesses of epistemological reflection, but already the logical outcome of his own moral package. To understand then why he reacts so harsh against (modern) epistemology, we only have to take a look at this package of him: Taylor wants to be religious and modern at the same time. In his package he wants to embrace modern ethical values, while remaining a religious person who believes in the existence of God. He knows that this combination is hard to achieve while holding on to a strict epistemological reflection, and thus turns epistemology itself into an enemy. To be coherent, I believe Taylor should have refrained from an epistemic response (remember the option of honesty: do not pretend your argument is neutral) and embrace a harsh relativism; but then this would undermine his modern ethical project.

(I will later argue why Alasdair MacIntyre and John Milbank present more convincing versions of a similar argument; MacIntyre by giving up on a modern ethical project and Milbank by truly embracing the radical relativism still eschewed by both Taylor and MacIntyre)

Reference: C. Taylor, What is Secularity?, in K. Vanhoozer & M. Warner (eds.), Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology. Reason, Meaning and Experience, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, 57-76.

Ignatz

Belgian FreeFolk-DroneBlues

The blues may find its historical roots in American negro-songs, Ignatz (the alter ego of Bram Devens) shows us how universal the language of blues has become. With just an acoustic guitar, some pedals and a sampler (sometimes also voice) Ignatz creates his own universe of broken-down and slowly rebuild melodies, of meandering finger-picking guitarlines subtly surrounded by haunting distortion. And what is so amazing about it: it all sounds so natural; like he was born 100 years ago in the Appalachian Mountains and has played this kind of music for ages. The obvious reference is of course John Fahey. But instead of just becoming a Fahey-adept, he manages to find his own voice, injecting some more Asian/Indian raga-elements, together with contemporary noise/drone influences.

Ignatz - Drawn (mp3)
(Taken from "Addiction for Slumber", a 2006 Tape Release)

Traversing Particularity. From Badiou back to Kant

Zu fragmentarisch ist mir Welt und Leben! Ich will mich zum deutschen Professor begeben. Der weiß das Leben zusammenzusetzen, Und er macht ein verständlich System daraus; mit seinen Nachtmützen und Schlafrockfetzen stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbaus

Heinrich Heine

I. Introduction

In this small poem, Heinrich Heine can be read as prefiguring the project of postmodern consciousness. In his picture of the German professor, he actually distrusts all possible attempts to develop a Totalsystem. Of course, he dreams of a homecoming within a final whole, but he is too much aware of what he calls the gaps of the universe, of the impossibility of a direct access to or adequate representation of Being itself. He suffers from what in postmodernity is called the crisis of representation and what has become a rather general human condition, at least in the West. However, when we take a look now at contemporary philosophy, something strange seems to happen. A widely influential philosopher as Alain Badiou for example is trying to come up with some kind of post-postmodernity. He laments the anti-platonism, the distrust of speculative metaphysics and the hermeneutic perspectivism of postmodernity and urges for a classical, anti-kantian philosophy which would enable us to counter the false modesty of modern and postmodern consciousness.

My question here will be: is Badiou justified in making a radical distinction between his project and (post)modern philosophy? Badiou himself is often keen to criticise postmodern writers, especially for their linguistic charlatanry and playful scepticism, but he might stand closer to some of them as presumed. With his notion of pure event, he tried to escape classical monism and in his privileging of singularity he comes quite close to writers as Bataille, Derrida and Lacan. He even seems to offer a Sartrean dualism without mediation, for there seems to be no relation between the meaningfulness of an event and the meaninglessness of the cosmos of infinite sets.[1] But especially the similarities with a Kantian project are striking. Both Kant and Badiou establish a sort of direct relation between the singular and the universal. In contrast to the still largely prevailing Hegelian model, the access to the universal does not run through the mediation of particularity. Particularity is traversed, but it does not function as what uplifts us in the direction of universality. Moreover, the so-called Sartrean dualism can in fact be traced back to Kant, and more precisely to his anti-cosmism which prevents the subject to conceive itself as the highest creature in the chain of being. The Kantian/modern subject is radically out-of-joint, it has no place within the positive order of Being.

Of course, this is not meant as a scholarly comment on the work of Badiou. I would like to focus here shortly on Badiou because he could help us avoiding the pitfalls of particularism and reinforcing our faith in universal truth. In contrast to Badiou, I would however not label this as a counter-(post)modern movement. We have often been presented with a false or at least quite distorted picture of postmodernity as the consciousness of particularity. The essence of postmodernity would consist of the awareness of the particularity (contextuality) of all truth-claims. And this is true: all claims are particular; but, it is too often interpreted in a hermeneutic sense that we are locked up in a set of particular narratives. The consciousness of particularity is only one side of the story. We could therefore label the modern/postmodern subject, with a notion of Hegel, as ‘unhappy consciousness’, as split between the mastery of being a universal negating consciousness and the slavery of being just a miserable contingent individual. The unhappy consciousness does not cover up particularity, as the stoic does, nor does he cover up universality as the sceptic does. In this sense, there is a straight line connecting Kant, Kierkegaard and Derrida, as three forms of unhappy consciousness. But I’ll come back to this at the end.


II. Badiou’s cultural critique: the problem of communitarianism

Let me start here with Badiou’s cultural critique and his furious attack on what he calls the reduction of the question of truth to a linguistic form. Together with an author as Slavoj Zizek, he refuses the postmodern common-sense ‘anti-essentialist’ identity politics according to which there are no men or women as such, but only white-middle class women, black lesbians, single mothers….[2] He rejects these insights as trivial, for the philosophical question actually lies in how the universality of ‘men’ or ‘women’ emerges out of the endless multitude. But there is more at stake then just philosophical laziness. Badiou tries to point out that the real unifying factor behind the attempt to promote the cultural virtue of oppressed subsets consists of “monetary abstraction, whose false universality has absolutely no difficulty accommodating the kaleidoscope of communitarianisms.”[3] In others words: if one claims that we can no longer tell master-narratives, this logic works neo-conservative, for it allows the space between the micro-stories to be occupied by the master-narrative of neo-liberal capitalism. On the one side, he thus perceives an extension of the automatisms of capital, this as the world-market whose configuration imposes the rule of an abstract homogenization.[4] On the other side, he discerns a process of fragmentation into closed identities. But both processes, of globalisation and tribalization, are perfectly intertwined. “For each identification creates a figure that provides a material for investment by the market.” Abstract universality and the particularity of interests proper to a subset, are finally two sides of the same coin. Badiou's program can therefore be stated as such: to break free from the spell of communitarianism and to establish again the idea of a universalist truth-procedure. Or in his own words: “Ultimately it is a case of mobilizing a universal singularity both against the prevailing abstraction (legal then, economic now) and against communitarian or particularist protest.”[5]


III. Being and Event (From Sartrean Dualism to Deleuzian/Spinozist Monism?)

To work out his program, Badiou mainly focuses on the question of ontology and what he calls the event. The latter will allow us to understand his notion of subjectivity. In the beginning of his book on Saint Paul, Badiou therefore explains his philosophical project as an attempt “to refound a theory of the Subject that subordinates its existence to the aleatory dimension of the event as well as to the pure contingency of multiple being.”[6] For him ontology itself is a matter of mathematics, in which the totality of Being is understood as an infinite set of sets. The only problem with mathematics is that it remains unable to come to terms with Being as such, with Being as Being. In its abstract procedure it only has a relation to Being as far as it is represented. The real ground of Being is the simple fact that it happens. The infinite set of sets is thus not founded on some other eternal ground, but rests on the contingency of happening, as the groundless ground of Being. Badiou therefore speaks about the event, as something which escapes the totality of representations and in which Being as such presents itself. Being as such (not as represented, but as presentation) is thus not a set, as other sets. It’s only present as an empty set, and it only presents itself in detached elements; detached, in the sense that they are no longer a part of one of the existing specific sets. What thus happens in an event, is that the existing order of sets is disturbed; it reveals that at the root of every order, there is no specific constellation of sets grounded in an ultimate ontological principle. Ultimately, every order resides in pure contingency; the contingency as the happening of Being itself. Truth becomes then a matter of faithfulness to the event. In the event, as a singular happening, all particularistic notions of truth are unmasked, for these are only dependent on settled constellations of sets, masking the contingency of Being itself. The subject of the event is thus the bearer of faith in an empty set, as the only set which can lay a claim to universality.

Let us take the example of Saint Paul. Badiou turns to him, not because he believes Paul’s claim about Jesus’ resurrection (he is a radical atheist), but because he would have established such 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.”[7] Of course, to designate the event Paul uses the word ‘resurrection’. Nevertheless, we should be able to look further than this as a claim with a specific theological content. In using the word ‘resurrection’ Paul undermined the existing discourses of his time. He focused on the site where all the particular discourses lost their representative ground. In contrast with the settled position of the Jews and the Greek, Paul thus came to look Being right in the eye. In experiencing the failure of the existing discourses, he was confronted with the pure contingency of Being itself, as a singular experience which opens up a universalism, for all people actually share in this contingency. Resurrection designates for Badiou thus finally Paul’s affirmation of Being itself, of the life-giving contingency and so of the impossible Real, not understood as the horror of death but as the source of life. As such Badiou formally repeats a certain Lacanian move, but also seems to establish a specific dualism. We enter the world of truth through grace as a pure and simple encounter, and the world of particularity can never function as a mediation. There is a direct connection between the singular and the universal, and the world of truth as such remains opposed to the world of particularity. Of course, Badiou knows that we live in a world of particularity, but truth can only be established by traversing all particular differences.[8]

The problem with this analysis is however that Badiou’s story does not end here and that he risks to smuggle particularity and mediation surreptitiously back in. The graceful encounter with the Real can be understood as revolution: it shatters the existing configuration of discourses. Till so far, there is not really a problem of mediation. But Badiou also believes that on the basis of this revolution a new politics can be grounded in which the encounter can be solidified. First, he thus seems to presuppose that every true revolution turns out as something positive. But can he do that? The criterium for a true revolution is absolutely formal: what matters is the connection with the contingent happening of Being as such, and the rupture with settled, particular systems of truth. So in some way he is implicitly claiming that Being itself is something good: a claim he cannot make on the basis of his formal approach[9]. Second, how can a political system be directly founded on an encounter with the Real, without turning it into a new symbolic order, and so without smuggling particularity back in? Badiou presents his politics as a pure politics and he is keen to argue that this politics has left behind the mediation of a Hegelian economy.[10] But can this convince? As if his maoist program is devoid of very particular preferences, as if a political system at all can be devoid of particular preferences? Purity as a kind of solidified state remains highly doubtful and we might do better, for the sake of good politics, not to think here in terms of purity.


IV. Retrieving Kant’s anti-ontological trust

In the solidification of the event, Badiou thus risks to undermine his own intent. He stresses that the Event is unforeseeable in terms of the existing conditions and that the Event cannot have any ontological guarantee[11]. It cannot be reduced to, or deduced from a previous situation. It escapes the ontological representation of Being, although it emerges from Being as presentation. In this sense, Badiou agrees with Zizek that true evil does not lie in an excess of subjectivity as such, but in its ‘ontologization’, in its reinscription into some positive order of Being. 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 (of ideas) which suddenly emerges and which suspends the validity of the Order of Being”[12]. Nevertheless, in the case of Badiou it remains doubtable if he is able to uphold this rupture. Let’s take an example that he uses himself: he considers the Russian October revolution as an Event, and admits that Stalin betrays the Event by turning it into new positive order of Being. But where do we draw the line? Can we make such a strict distinction between a Leninist and Stalinist relation to the Event? It is more plausible that the Stalinist ontologization is already at least prepared by installing a political and thus coercive regime on the basis of the Event. Badiou all too easily presumes that an inner relation can be adequately captured by an outward system, and that such a system would be at once able to remain an open logic, and thus not a new particular subset. Moreover, his understanding of the subject as the product of faithfulness to the Event, risks to reinstall the ideology he is precisely trying to fight himself. He insists on the immanence of the Truth-event and so has to admit that the Truth of the Event only appears for the Agents and not for external observers. This means that an Event is only recognizable as a true Event, if one has already taken the decision to be an agent of the Event. In other words: one has to be part of the club, to recognize the truth (which turns Badiou of course into an anti-communitarian communitarian).

My suggestion is therefore that we conceive the relation between subject and event differently. In other words: we have to turn Badiou into a Kantian. But beware: I’m not referring here to Kant as the German professor of Heine’s poem, but as the unhappy consciousness who is aware that the order of Being in itself remains non-totalizable, that the ‘Lücken des Welltbaus’ can never be chinked up, for in a Kantian logic das Weltall is itself dependent on a finite subject. As Heidegger has argued in his discussion with Ernst Cassirer, the transcendental subject has to be understood as a Dazwischen, unable to flee into an eternal absolute, nor into the world of things, of particularity.[13] Too often, one has interpreted the Kantian Subject as the Stoic of Hegel’s scheme, as freely operating in a sphere of pure noumenality, and as unattached by a condition of contingency. But if we take a closer look, especially at his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, we see how Kant himself wrestles with the problem of a split subjectivity. At some point, he even explicitly praises nature for our bad creation, for our dim and ambiguous sight: if we would be able to leave fully behind all the contingency or the pathological order of particular inclinations, there would not be any moral struggle, and our moral relation would become pure mechanical. As in a puppet show, we would gesticulate everything perfectly, but it would be a lifeless happening.[14] As such, Kant thus reintroduces the problem fragmentation, but now in the heart of the human subject, as split between two heterogeneous intentionalities. However, it remains important to see that this not a support or supplement of the cultural fragmentation Badiou is trying to oppose. As humans, we all share the split of subjectivity; the split is a universal condition, and only if we are ready to embrace this condition as universal, will we be able to oppose the communitarian seduction.
Of course, Badiou could protest against the Kantian universality that it remains an abstract universality, and that by consequence it works itself in favour of communitarian perspectivism, very much like in the case of capitalism. And I’m afraid he has a point. But here, it might eventually be possible to supplement Kant with Badiou’s logic of the Event, (without however turning the subject into a product of this event.) As an example of how we reach universality, Badiou takes the gender-distinction and defends the position that we only come to know the disjunction between men and women as a universal truth about humanity, through the encounter of this difference in the amorous relation. In and through love we realize the truth about the difference between sexuated positions. The same goes for politics, science and art: the truth of these domains is finally a truth for everyone, although it becomes only realized through the concrete encounter of the event. Till so far, I’m tempted to agree with Badiou. But could we not affirm both positions at once?: and the subject precedes the encounter, and the subject realizes herself through the encounter. As Derrida argues against all strong conceptions of revelation, Offenbarkeit has to precede Offenbarung, and nor Levinas, neither Marion can do away with the transcendental condition of understanding. One must be able to understand the other, in order to remain faithfull to the call of the other. The same might therefore hold for Badiou’s Evental interruption. If he really wants to install a singular-universal connection, and if the universal means ‘for everyone, independent of having any particular determinations’[15], he must in some way admit that we should all be receptive for the events, through which we realize the truth of love, science, politics and art and thus ourselves; he will have to admit that a transcendental subjectivity cannot be made dependent on the encounter, and that only on the basis of this transcendentality he can adequately counter the relativistic glorifying of particularity.

[1] For the critique of dualism, cf. for example Catherine Pickstock, The Univocalist Mode of Production, in C. Davis, J. Milbank & S. Zizek, Theology and the Political. The New Debate, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 315.
[2] Cf. for example, S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 133.
[3] A. Badiou. Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, p 7.
[4] Ibid., p. 9.
[5] Ibid., p. 14.
[6] Ibid., p. 4.
[7] Ibid., p.5.
[8] 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.”[8] 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). A similar ambiguity concerns the question of separation. In Badiou’s reading Paul’s universalism does not exclude all forms of separation, but the separation involved is itself intertwined with universalism. The actual separation is between the old man and the new man: through our faith in the event, we have separated ourselves from the old man, and out of this separation the newness of life is born. What distinguishes Paul then from Jewish ‘communitarianism’ is that there is no limit to this separation. “It proposes something that is open to everybody, a collective determination, the realization of a separation in a universal field.[…] The division is internal to the subject itself.” 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. For Badiou, this implies that there can never be a closure, nor a new fixed system of particular truths.
[9] Mark de Kesel therefore speaks about Badiou’s catholic ontology. Cf. M. De Kesel, Ontologie als katholicisme. Over Alain Badiou’s Paulusinterpretatie, in Yang…
[10] Just as also Paul does without mediation. Cf. A. Badiou, p. 48.
[11] Cf. A. Badiou, Eight Theses on the Universal, in A. Badiou, Theoretical Writing, New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 143-152, p. 145: “A universal singularity is not of the order of being, but of the order of a sudden emergence.”
[12] S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 133.
[13] Cf. Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin Heidegger, in M. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Frankfurt a.M., Vittorio Klostermann, 1998, p. 274-296, p. 279: “Kant spricht von der Vernunft des Menschen als Selbsthalterin, d.h. einer Vernunft, die rein auf sich selbst gestellt ist und sich nicht flüchten kann in ein Ewiges, Absolutes, sich aber auch nicht flüchten kann in die Welt der Dinge. Dieses Dazwischen ist das Wesen der praktischen Vernunft.”
[14] I. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, A 265: “Das Verhalten der Menschen, so lange ihre Natur, wie sie jetzt ist, bliebe, würde also in einen bloßen Mechanismus verwandelt werden, wo, wie im Marionettenspiel, alles gut gestikulieren, aber in den Figuren doch kein Leben anzutreffen sein sein würde.”
[15] Cf. A. Badiou, Eight Theses on the Universal, in A. Badiou, Theoretical Writing, New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 143-152, p 151.

George Bataille's Impossible Dualism. Towards a Postmodern Gnosticism

“The non-narrative fascinates me so much because it’s so close to real life. Non-narrative is how we live, although everyone thinks to live ‘narrative’. Or thinks that there is a story or meaning guiding their live. Nothing is less true. The narrative idea is only there to give us a satisfied feeling.”

This is quote by Jonathan Weiss, a young filmmaker who adapted into movie J. G. Ballard’s book ‘the atrocity exhibition’, and who laments that nearly all cinema proceeds in a narrative way. But the problem pof cinema is symptomatical . A lot of contemporary theology (hermeneutic theology, liberationist theology, Radical Orthodoxy) is a theology of mediation, in which the access to the universal is mediated by the particular. My question is therefore: can we still imagine a different option, namely the possibility of a singularity which cannot be inscribed within a particular chain of meaning, which disrupts and cannot be mediated? To explore this question, I will focus mainly on Bataille, who in his critique of Hegel, has deeply struggled with this question. In a second a part, I will also deal with the thought of Badiou, who at first sights adopts a similar dualism.
Of course, I know that the attempt to escape Hegel has been a major theme in the whole of postmodern philosophy, but what bothers me is that often they have too easily presented it as a promising ethical and political enterprise. They were too much of a democracy-to-come delegation. With Bataille, we get a different, and maybe more honest postmodernism, stripped from its liberal-political promises, with a little more drama and some sharper edges.


II. Bataille’s Dualism

Bataille’s relation to Hegel is a quite ambiguous one, and it’s hard to distil a systematic critique out of his very unsystematic writing. He also didn’t just want to oppose Hegel, for he knew all too well that in simply opposing him, he would not escape him. As he therefore says himself: “My efforts recommence and undo Hegel’s Phenomenology.”[1] Nevertheless, I will try to identify some of the recurrent themes in his discussion of Hegel, or maybe better the French Hegel. In the thirties Bataille attended the famous lectures of Kojève on Hegel and mainly kept on reading him through the lens of the widely influential Kojève-interpretation. Bataille’s main criticism is however not focused on the thesis of the end of history; nor does he lament Hegel’s stress on the labour of the negative. In some way, he seems to agree with Kojève that we have reached the end of history. Everything what could be achieved is already achieved. All work is done. But what happens with the negative?

“If action is – as Hegel says – negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has ‘nothing more to do’ disappears or remains in a state of ‘unemployed negativity’. Personally, I can only decide in one way, being myself precisely this ‘unemployed negativity’.[…] I imagine that my life – or, better yet, its aborting, the open wound that is my life – constitutes all by itself the refutation of Hegel’s closed system.”[2]

The negative is for both Hegel and Bataille the fuel of all dialectics. And Bataille himself does not oppose dialectics itself: the self-consciousness proceeds dialectically. What Bataille reproaches both Kojève and Hegel for, is that they do not take negativity seriously enough. The negative can include everything; everything can be its object. But the negative cannot include itself. Thus, when everything is negated, what remains is an unemployed negativity, as negativity without content. Bataille speaks here about a desire for nothing and about a desire to lose rather than to gain. This gives way to the inner experience, as a movement towards an infinitely withdrawing object. Crucial is that the ‘umemployed negativity’ implies a rupture with the immanence of the Hegelian economy in which the meaning of any negation still lies in the anticipated result.[3] As such, it opens a domain of an otherness that resists integration. This is however not the Levinasian otherness of the other. Its features are rather those of the il y a or maybe more of the mystical night, but then discovered through an analysis of self-consciousness and understanding. To road to divinity here is a highway of despair and the divinity itself that which does not give any satisfaction.

In a very Hegelian mode thus, the proceeding is dialectal, as a process within self-consciousness trying to come to terms with the abyss it has found in its heart. But in contrast with Hegel, the evolution is not one from the unknown to the known.[4] Finally, the human subject discovers that his understanding is always haunted by a blind spot.[5] The recognition of this opens the domain of the unknown. The subject realises that what truly matters is not what can be known, but what resists the Hegelian inclusion.

In L’Expérience intérieure, he imagines Hegel himself having reached this extreme limit.

“He was still young and believed himself to be going mad. I even imagine that he worked out the system in order to escape.[…] His memory brought him back to the perceived abyss, in order to annul it. The system is the annulment.”[6]

Now, this is not to say that Hegel actually excluded all sovereign moments from his account of history. The problem is that Hegel finally inscribed them within a totalizing discourse which strips them from there irreducibility. They again become part of a regime of servile labour. Hegel therefore would have been deeply embarrassed with things as poetry, laughter, and ecstasy which are never means to an end. In itself, they open up the domain of the sacred.

The core duality of Bataille’s thought is thus between the profane and the sacred. In a first moment, this distinction can be read along the lines of the double intentionality of self-consciousness, very much like in the case of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness. For Bataille, the human being is split between the mastery of sovereign life and the slavery of having to work and to be part of an everyday profane system. This double intentionality then implies a distinction between two economies. The logic of the profane is determined by an economy of accumulation. Here, every gift, every risk, all negativity exists for the sake of a higher, and so a finally positive good. The logic of the sacred is one of pure expenditure, of waste: there are no goods to obtain, there is no work to be done and no projects to be realized. Here, we are lost in the dark night of the soul; we enter the unknown and do not longer know what happens to us.

Of course, there are several problems connected to his critique of Hegel, and his own construal of the duality and the inner experience. For he tries at the same time to contest two traditions: first, theological and mystical notions of the sacred sphere as a beyond, and second, the Hegelian location of the “beyond” within the sphere of discourse. That the exteriority of the sacred should not be read as a separate ontological sphere, as a Hinterwelt, should be clear for him:

“It [the inner experience] robs of meaning everything that is an intellectual or moral beyond, substance, God or immutable order, or salvation. It is an apotheosis of that which is perishable, apotheosis of alcohol and flesh as well as of the trances of mysticism. […] It renews the kind of tragic jubilation that man ‘is’ as soon as he stops behaving like a cripple, glorifying necessary work and letting himself be emasculated by the fear of tomorrow.”[7]

So while at one point, we see Bataille approaching the divine in a very similar way as Hegel, namely as a journey of self-consciousness, he nevertheless comes in his criticism of Hegel quite close to the mystical idea of unmediated union with the divine (and an ontological understanding of the externality).

Some commentators (as Mark De Kesel and in his vein Slavoj Zizek) have tried to solve the riddle by assuming Bataille tends toward an antique, closed worldview.[8] They argue that Bataille understands Being from an energetic point of view, according to which a self-wasting energy lives within everything and outlives everything. Nevertheless, as such they all too easily risk to cover up the way Bataille struggles to avoid this and other kinds of monism. For finally Bataille always confronts himself with the tension between on one side the inability to live outside of language and on the other side the necessity to somehow escape the work of language. And precisely this tension makes it impossible for him to develop an overarching ontology. I will come back to this later. Let me first make a little detour.


III. Badiou. On the surreptitious Hegelianism of a Political reading (or the Betrayal of Dualism)

Georges Bataille was not the only one trying to oppose Hegelian monism, in a new plea for a dualist approach. Sartre, also influenced by Kojève, tried to defend a strict dualism between the en-soi and the pour-soi, and in some way several other French postmodern writers tried to counter monism in a quite similar way. I therefore like to focus on a maybe less obvious parallel, namely the work of Alain Badiou, this in order to understood better the actual nature of Bataille dualism.

Badiou himself is often keen to criticise postmodern writers, especially for their linguistic charlatanry and their false modesty, but he might stand closer to some of them as presumed. With his notion of pure event, he also tried to escape Hegelianism and in his privileging of singularity he comes quite close Bataille. He even seems to offer a Sartrean dualism without mediation, for there seems to be no relation between the meaningfulness of an event and the meaninglessness of his cosmos of infinite sets.[9] But is this really the case, and what would be the difference with Bataille?
In the beginning of his book on Paul, Badiou explains his philosophical project and his attention for Paul as an attempt “to refound a theory of the Subject that subordinates its existence to the aleatory dimension of the event as well as to the pure contingency of multiple being.” For him ontology is a matter of mathematics, in which the totality of Being is understood as an infinite set of sets. The only problem with mathematics is that it remains unable to come to terms with Being as such, with Being as Being. In its abstract procedure it only has a relation to Being as far as it is represented. The real ground of Being is the simple fact that it happens. The infinite set of sets is thus not founded on some other eternal ground, but rests on the contingency of happening, as the groundless ground of Being. Badiou therefore speaks about the event, as something which escapes the totality of representations and in which Being as such presents itself. Being as such (as not represented, but as presentation) is thus not a set, as other sets. It’s only present as an empty set, and it only presents itself in detached elements; detached, in the sense that they are no longer a part of one of the existing specific sets. What thus happens in an event, is that the existing order of sets is disturbed; it reveals that at root of every order, there is not a specific constellation of sets grounded in an ultimate ontological principle. Ultimately, every order resides in pure contingency; the contingency as the happening of Being itself. Truth then becomes then a matter of faithfulness to the event. In the event, as a singular happening, all particularistic notions of truth are unmasked, for these are only dependent on settled constellations of sets, masking the contingency of Being itself. The subject of the event is thus the bearer of faith in an empty set, as the only set which can lay a claim to universality.

Let us take the example of Paul. Badiou turns to him, not because he believes Paul’s claim about Jesus’ resurrection, but because he would have established such 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.”[10] Of course, to designate the event Paul uses the word ‘resurrection’. Nevertheless, we should be able to look further than this as a claim with a specific theological content. In using the word ‘resurrection’ Paul undermined the existing discourses of his time. He focused on the site where all the particular discourses lost their representative ground. In contrast with the settled position of the Jews and the Greek, Paul thus came to look Being right in the eye. In experiencing the failure of the existing discourses, he was confronted with the pure contingency of Being itself, as a singular experience which opens up a universalism, for all people actually share in this contingency. Resurrection designates for Badiou thus finally Paul’s affirmation of Being itself, of the life-giving contingency and so of the impossible Real, not understood as the horror of death but as the source of life. As such Badiou formally repeats a certain Lacanian move, but also seems to come close to Bataille’s dualism. We enter the world of truth through grace as a pure and simple encounter, and the world of particularity can never function as a mediation. There is a direct connection between the singular and the universal, and the world of truth as such remains opposed to the world of particularity. Of course, Badiou knows that we live in a world of particularity, but truth can only be established by traversing all particular differences.

The problem with this analysis is however that Badiou’s story does not end here and that he risks to smuggle particularity and mediation surreptitiously back in. The graceful encounter with the Real can be understood as revolution: it shatters the existing configuration of discourses. Till so far, there is not really a problem of mediation. But Badiou also believes that on the basis of this revolution a new politics can be grounded in which the encounter can be solidified. First, he thus seems to presupposes that every true revolution turns out as something positive. But can he do that?: the criterium for a true revolution is absolutely formal: what matters is the connection with Being as such, and the rupture with settled, particular systems of truth. So in some way he is surreptitiously claiming that Being itself is something good: a claim he cannot make on the basis of his formal approach. Bataille is therefore more coherent (and maybe also in a similar vein Nietzsche and Lacan), for not establishing the encounter with truth as the birth of a new political system: the Real is beyond good and evil, and the encounter is just as horrific as beautiful. Second, how can a political system be directly founded on a encounter with the Real, without turning it into a new symbolic order, and so without smuggling particularity back in? Badiou presents his politics as a pure politics and he is keen to argue that this politics has left behind the mediation of a Hegelian economy.[11] But can this convince? As if his maoist program is devoid of very particular preferences, as if a political system at all can be devoid of particular preferences? Purity as a kind of solidified state remains highly doubtful and we might do better, for the sake of good politics, not to think here in terms of purity. (The same might go for love also.)

A similar problem arises in the thought of his revolutionary friend, Slavoj Zizek. In a reaction to Bataille and a certain Bataillian interpretation of Lacan, he uses dialectics to overcome transgression, by distinguishing between particular and absolute transgression, the latter as the transgression of the transgression. This would lift us above the messiness of desire and open up the domain of love. But isn’t he going a little too quick here? Of course, one can try to transgress transgression itself, but does this really make a difference. Take a successful hedonist-transgressive manager who opts at the age 60 for a simple life in the mountains. Or take a Casanova who at the age of 40 suddenly opts for marriage. Is the choice for the simplicity or marriage here not finally just a more subtle move in the very same economy of desire. Now, I do not want to suggest that we are only slaves in an economy of lust, but my question is if the encounter with the Absolute or the Real can be consolidated (by founding a new symbolic order on this encounter), this then as an open-narrative, or as the order of love or of pure politics. Indeed, if one’s final aim consists of out-narrating an existing narrative (let’s take the capitalist narrative) such a consolidation might be crucial. But is this not an all too easy instrumentalization of the interruption? Is this not precisely an attempt to take the sting out of it, by presupposing that the interruption itself can be anchored within a counter-narrative? Anyway, this brings us back to Bataille (and the eventual necessity of an unsystematic approach).


IV. Postmodernity’s gnosticism

Just as Sartre, Badiou and Zizek, Bataille is fascinated by the idea of revolution. But contrary to them, he doesn’t expect that life will be truly different after the event of the revolution. Not unlike someone as Ernst Jünger, who was of major influence here, Bataille considers the essence of revolution and war not as something political, but as the possibility of a confrontation with an excluded extremity. “In the infinite horror of war man has access to the extreme point which terrifies him.”[12] Bataille thus turns to phenomena as war and eroticism because it presents him with the ‘representations’ of the impossible, of the unimaginable.

Of course, he knows that in some way he is very Hegelian here, that by trying to represent the unrepresentable, he succumbs to a project of mediation. But it is precisely this recognition which enables him to question Hegel, and this without again installing a beyond, and an absolute purity, in which one presupposes to be freed from the messiness of mediation. His strategy is thus to fight reason with its own weapons, to rise above project through project. And while inner experience is itself the opposite of action, of project, of knowledge, it is nevertheless led by discursive reason. “Reason alone has the power to undo its work, to hurl down what it has built up.”[13] This also explains for him the necessity of a mystical-poetical approach; and not poetry as a means to express the extreme limit, not to master it in a work of art, but as way of putting language at risk; to destabilize language in order to seduce us into the silence of non-knowledge.[14]

To abstractly propose two distinct principles would be too easy and would not work. As Denis Hollier, a scholar of French Studies, argues: “Dualism is not a dualist system but a will to dualism, a resistance to system and homogeneity.”[15] At the point where the duality holds only the place of a thesis, it has already become monism. “For to be true to its inspiration, dualism must remain imperfect, surprising, extravagant.” This demands that one with one’s whole existence works his way out of language, instead of abstractly assuming this has already happened. Badiou then might all too easily presuppose to be able to overcome the contamination of particularity and Hegelian mediation. As a result of this, his dualism risks to remain an abstract dualism, that finally turns out to be just another monism. His dualism risks to be not impossible enough, and therefore not possible as a dualism. Maybe we could say there is just not enough unhappy consciousness in Badiou. As in Hegel’s account of it, Bataille’s subject remains eternally split, condemned to a life of work, but always called to the sovereignty of spiritual life; unable to escape the particularity of language, and at the same time unable to realise the only thing which truly matters within particularity; eternally restless, as a tragic Sisyphus resisting homogeneity.
To conclude: is this promising as a (philosophical or theological) project? I’m not sure. Morally or politically, it’s not promising at all, I’m afraid. But I have the impression that Bataille’s impossible dualism, his struggle is the expression of a deep existential experience, and that his whole thought is an attempt to do justice to this. It even might be a crucial contemporary outline of a spiritual program, as a refusal to divinise the world and as readiness to face the worst. In this, he seems to be the heir of a longstanding tradition. As Hans Jonas has argued, there is close connection between nihilist existentialism and Gnosticism, for they seem to be rooted in a similar experience.[16] The Gnostic sees himself confronted with the indifference of the universe to human aspirations. “The starry sky now stared man in the face with the fixed glare of alien power and necessity.” “Gone is the cosmos with whose immanent logos my own can feel kinship, gone the order of the whole in which man has his place.” The gnostic still experiences the world as a cosmos, as an order, but the problem now resides precisely in its completeness: it’s understood as a strict system of law, alien to our spiritual call. The cosmos is no longer a home; values are left ontologically unsupported, and the self is thrown back upon itself. And just as in Bataille’ story, it is dread which marks the awakening of the inner self from the slumber or intoxication of the world.

Of course, the Gnostic tradition still operate with a clear metaphysical framework, but also then might the Gnostic God be not so different from Bataille’s empty place after the dead of God. “A transcendence withdrawn from any normative relation to the world is equal to a transcendence which has lost its effective force.”[17] The Gnostic God is a Deus Absconditus, a stranger to the world, not revealed or even indicated by the world. He is the unknowable in terms of any worldly analogies. In the work of Bataille, He only seems to have become more strange; strange till the point of dying, and to point where man takes his place as a stranger to the world, losing his head in a dark night. The problem of widening the gap between heaven and earth, between the sacred and the profane, might therefore not just be the result of developments within modern physical science, or late medieval theology, but it might be rooted in an experience which is at least just as old as Christianity itself. It up to us to decide where to go with it, but we might do well not to dismiss it too easily.


"die findigen Tiere merken es schon, daß wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind in der gedeuteten Welt"

Rainer Maria Rilke


Endnotes
[1] G. Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure,
[2] This quote is taken from a lettre from Bataille to Kojève. For the English translation, cf. The Bataille Reader, F. Botting & E. Wilson (ed.), Oxford, 1997, 296.
[3] This is for Bataille at once a criticism of Kojève’s atheism.
[4] Cf. G. Bataille, L’expérience intérieure, Paris, 2004, 119: « La vie va se perdre dans la mort, les fleuves dans la mer et le connu dans l’inconnu. La connaissance et l’accès de l’inconnu. Le non-sens est l’aboutissement de chaque sens possible. »
[5] Cf. G. Bataille, L’expérience intérieure, 129 : « L’action introduit le connu. […] Mais le désir, la poésie, le rire, font incessamment glisser la vie dans le sens contraire, allant du connu à l’inconnu. L’existence à la fin décèle la tache aveugle de l’entendement et s’y absorbe aussitôt tout entière. […] La poésie, le rire, l’extase ne sont pas les moyens d’autre chose. Dans le ‘système’, poésie, rire, extase ne sont rien. Hegel s’en débarasse à la hâte : il ne connaît de fin que savoir. Son immense fatigue se lie à mes yeux à l’horreur de la tache aveugle. »
[6] G.Bataille, The Bataille Reader, p. 74.
[7] G. Bataille, The Practice of Joy Before Death, in G. Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 1996, p. 237. Cf. also, G. Bataille, The Sacred, The Practice of Joy Before Death, in G. Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 1996, p. 241: “If one now wants to represent, with an initial clarity, the ‘grail’ obstinately pursued through successive, deceptive and cloudy depths, it is necessary to insist upon the fact that it could never have been a substantial reality; on the contrary, it was an element characterized by the impossibility of its enduring. The term privileged instant is the only one that, with a certain amount of accuracy, accounts for what can be encountered at random in the search.”
[8] Cf. M. De Kesel, A Sovereign’s Anatomy: The Antique in Bataille’s Modernity and its impact on his Political Thought, in … , p. 218; S. Zizek, The Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy, …
[9] For the critique of dualism, cf. for example Catherine Pickstock, The Univocalist Mode of Production, in C. Davis, J. Milbank & S. Zizek, Theology and the Political. The New Debate, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 315.
[10] A. Badiou. Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, p.5.
[11] Just as also Paul does without mediation. Cf. A. Badiou, p. 48.
[12] The Bataille Reader, 75.
[13] The Bataille Reader, 77.
[14] “If poetry expresses it, the extreme limit is distinct from it: to the point of not being poetic, for if poetry has it as an object, it doesn’t reach it. When the extreme limit is there, the means which serve to attain it are no longer there.” The Bataille Reader, p. 80.
[15] Cf. D. Hollier, The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille, in Yale French Studies 78 (1990) 124-139, 127. Cf. also the work of Simone Pétrement, who was a scholar of Gnosticism and with whose work Bataille himself was familiar: “If faudrait donc dire qu’il ya contradiction dans l’idée même de dualisme. Ou bien le dualisme est métaphysique, il est vraiment une doctrine des principes, de ce qui compose le tout, et alors il est un dualisme faible, tout près de tomber dans le monisme. Il y a des principes, mais non la dualité. Ou bien il est la croyance à quelque chose de séparé, à une dualité irréductible, à une distance infranchissable; mais alors il n’est pas une doctrine des principes. […] Le dualisme ne peut donc être un enseignement dogmatique, mais il exprime la pensée active, la critique de soi-même.” S. Pétrement, Le dualisme chez Platon, les Gnostiques et les Manichéens, Brionne: Gérard Montfort, 1947, p. 312-313.
[16] Cf. H. Jonas, Gnosticism, Nihilism and Existentialism, in H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity, Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, 320-340.
[17] H. Jonas, Gnosticism, Nihilism and Existentialism, p. 328.