Materialism,dialectics,and theology in Alain Badiou

Introduction

In his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism published in 1908, Lenin (1970: 166) famously portrays the history of Western philosophy as a struggle between two different apprehensions of reality: idealism and materialism. Lenin's portrayal echoes Friedrich Engels' (1996: 21) account in Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy of the two diverging answers given throughout the history of philosophy to the question of the relationship between thinking and being: “The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other […] comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.”

According to the French philosopher Alain Badiou, this struggle continues with unrelenting strength today. However, as he emphasizes in his latest major work, Logics of Worlds (Badiou, 2009a), in our current situation there is a noticeable difference from the previous historical stages of this struggle, namely that the traditional frontline of the struggle, the dividing line between the two camps, has been displaced. As Badiou (2009a: 526) frames it: “[…] rather than opposing emancipatory materialism to a putative bourgeois idealism we should divide materialism itself.” And thus Badiou has as his declared ambition to produce a materialism which is not merely meant to dispute idealism, but which first of all opposes itself to a certain form of materialism.

Badiou begins Logics of Worlds by a brief consideration of what he takes to be the dominant contemporary conviction, or our natural belief, which according to him has as its axiom the following statement: “There are only bodies and languages.” He proposes to name this conviction “democratic materialism.” It is a kind of materialism in the sense that it reduces human life to its bodily dimension through the enforcement of the naturalistic norms of modern bio-politics, bio-ethics, and even bio-aesthetics. This conviction is democratic in so for as it recognizes the plurality of different language-games as reflected in multiculturalism, communitarianism, and politics of difference, or, in Badiou's (2009a: 2) words: “Communities and cultures, colours and pigments, religions and clergies, uses and customs, disparate sexualities, public intimacies and the publicity of the intimate: everything and everyone deserves to be recognized and protected by the law.” Against this democratic materialism he pits another kind of materialism, namely what he calls “materialist dialectics.” In short, Badiou's materialist dialectics aims to rectify the central claim of “democratic materialism” that “there is only bodies and language” by adding “except that there are truths,” but—and this is important—doing so without succumbing to the temptation of “endorsing an aristocratic idealism,” as Badiou puts it. So what does he mean by “materialist dialectics”?

It is evident from Badiou's remarks in the preface to Logics of Worlds that he, at least to some extent, understands his “materialist dialectics” as a continuation of the “dialectical materialism” promoted by Althusser (and by Badiou himself in his earlier writings), but that he refrains from using the latter term because of its biased history. In any case, this reference might seem surprising considering Badiou's (2006a: 4) explicit rejection of dialectical materialism in the introduction to his 1988 opus magnum Being and Event. Indeed, it might even be quite confusing for someone who has only read books like Saint Paul or Metapolitics, which are outright anti-dialectic. On the other hand, the usage of the term “dialectical materialism” and the attempt to renew the tradition that this term designates is not exactly something new to Badiou (1967), whose very first publication was a text entitled, “Le (re)commencement du matérialisme dialectique,” on Althusser's For Marx (1990[1965]) and Althusser and Balibar's Reading Capital (2009[1965]). It is likewise a very frequently used term in Theory of the Subject. This ambiguity raises the very reasonable question: So what is Badiou, a dialectician or an anti-dialectician? The significance of this question is clearly reflected in the fact that it is one of the most controversial issues in the reception of Badiou's work. ¹ The answer given to this question has far-reaching consequences for the understanding of several key aspects of Badiou's philosophy, not least in regard to the issue of materialism, because in Badiou's (2012a: 101–102) mind the only way of achieving a genuine materialism (that is, as we shall see, a materialism of scission) is by way of proper dialectics, which according to Badiou (2009b: 14; 2012a: 102) can be summarized in the Maoist slogan, “one divides into two, two doesn't merge into one.” However, this question of the role of dialectics is, as we shall see, also tied to and not without consequences for Badiou's understanding of and relation to theology.

In this article I will try to illustrate how more precisely some of these consequences are manifested by examining two theological decisive incidents in Badiou's oeuvre: his reading of Hegel's dialectics in Theory of the Subject and his anti-dialectical reading of the Christ-event in Saint Paul. The first section of the article serves as a necessary background for the succeeding sections. In this section I present Badiou's splitting of Hegel, in Theory of the Subject, into an idealist and materialist dialectic, and his account of the latter. In the second section I outline Badiou's critical analysis, in the same work, of the theological model implicit in Hegel's dialectics, and clarify how this, according to Badiou, undermines its materialist potential. In the third section I pursue this criticism of Hegelian dialectic further through a discussion of Badiou's reading the notion of “negation of the negation” in Theory of the Subject, and offer a corrective reading of this notion inspired by Slavoj Žižek. In the remaining four sections of the article I turn to Badiou's more or less explicit discussions of dialectics and materialism in his book on the apostle Paul, trying to trace continuities and displacements in relation to Theory of the Subject, and to critically evaluate the theological consequence of these discussions. Thus, in the fourth section I examine Badiou's polemical encounter with Hegel in Saint Paul. The issue at stake is no longer, as it was in Theory of the Subject, an alternative between an idealist and a materialist dialectic, but between (Hegelian) dialectic as such and a (Pauline) anti-dialectical “materialism of grace.” In the fifth section I illustrate the way Badiou works out this anti-dialectical materialism of grace through a reading of the Christ-event in Paul's letters, which radically separates the death and resurrection of Christ. In the last two sections I explicate how Badiou's fierce rejection of the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation in Saint Paul is intimately linked to this anti-dialectical reading of Paul and I argue that the consequence of this maneuver is, paradoxically, that Badiou's materialism of grace comes very close to the kind of idealist position that he sternly opposes in both Theory of the Subject and Logics of Worlds.

The aim of the article is thus not merely to demonstrate that Badiou on important issues such as dialectics and materialism thinks within the immediate vicinity of theology, but also to critically evaluate his interaction with theology, and not least to suggest how this interaction implies a theological potential in terms of a (yet to be produced) materialist reading of the doctrine of Trinity.

Hegelian dialectic split(s) in two

Hegel is, in several different ways, an essential and constant point of reference in Badiou's work, all the way from his Maoist pamphlets Theory of Contradiction, Of Ideology and, of course, The Rational Kernel of Hegelian Dialectic in the 1970s through, especially, Theory of the Subject from 1982, but also Being and Event in the late 1980s, up until Logics of Worlds published in 2006. ² Thus, in Logics of Worlds he claims that “[…] there are only three crucial philosophers: Plato, Descartes and Hegel” (Badiou, 2009a: 527). Of great importance for Badiou's relationship to Hegel is the issue of dialectics and more specifically dialectical materialism, which Badiou clearly embraced in his early work until he (presumably) broke with it in Being and Event, only to (apparently) return to, at least some variation of it, in Logics of Worlds. ³ Although Badiou's relationship to Hegel thus seems to be multifaceted, involving a certain ambiguity as well as fluctuation, the question for Badiou is not, in the words of Bruno Bosteels (2004: 156), “[…] whether Hegel should be revived, but rather which Hegel.” ⁴ However, the aim here is not to offer any in-depth, and much less any exhaustive, examination of the complex character of this relationship, but only to examine a few rather brief instances in the course of Badiou's engagement with Hegel, in which he comments on the well-known theological themes of the latter's philosophy. More precisely, Badiou's reading of Hegel is of interest in the present context exclusively in terms of a possible link between materialism, dialectics, and theology.

In a few rather condensed paragraphs in the first part of Theory of the Subject, Badiou explicitly comments on a key theological aspect of Hegel's philosophy, namely the Trinitarian character of his dialectic. To get a better grip on and to understand what is at stake on these pages, it is necessary to start out with a close examination of their immediately preceding context. Badiou begins his discussion in Theory of the Subject with a remarkable reading of Hegel's Science of Logic, claiming that we need to identify and distinguish between two dialectical matrices in Hegel: an idealist dialectic of alienation in which “[…] the idea of a simple term which unfolds itself in its becoming-other, in order to come back to itself as an achieved concept;” and a materialist dialectic of scission in which “[…] there is no unity that is not split” (Badiou, 2009b: 4). So, whereas the first dialectic has a simple or an un-split term as its starting point, the second begins with a split term. Badiou names this second materialist dialectic, “dialectic of scission.” After this initial division of Hegel, Badiou presents a detailed account of the three fundamental elements or stages in the second Hegelian dialectic, which he labels “scission,” “determination” (of the split term), and “limit” (of determination).

In his remarks on “something” (Etwas) in the first chapter of Science of Logic, Hegel does not, according to Badiou, begin with “something,” but rather with a difference—more precisely, the “minimal difference,” between “something” (Etwas) and something “other” (Anderes), established by Hegel through the operation in the beginning of the chapter, where being and nothing are the same thing posited twice (Badiou, 2009b: 5; Hegel, 1989: 82–90). Because this minimal difference is established by a repetition, it has, as Badiou (2009b: 6) notes, no “qualitative support.” “This only differs from that by the statement of the difference, by the literal placement […] There is A, and there is Ap (read: “A as such” and “A in another place,” namely the place p distributed by the space of placement, or P).” However, the important insight of Hegel is that everything exists as split in itself between “something” (Etwas) and something “other” (Anderes); or, in Badiou's terminology, every “force” exists as split between something “as such” (A) and something “in another place” (Ap). In short, what Hegel demonstrates is, as Badiou states, that: “We must thus posit a constitutive scission: A = (AAp).” ⁵ It is the same kind of inherent scission that Badiou (2006b: 55–56) has in mind when he some twenty years later in The Century refers to the “minimal difference” between the geometrical figure and background in Kazimir Malevich's famous painting, White on White. Such a constitutive scission is, according to Badiou, the starting point of any genuine (materialist) dialectic.

From here Badiou moves on to the second aspect of the dialectical movement: the question of “determination,” i.e. the question of what determines the split force. As implied in the above, it is not “something as such” (A) that determines what something (A = AAp) is; rather, this is determined by the effect of the “space of placement” (P) on “something as such” (A), or, in Badiou's (2009b: 8) words: “Now, Hegel says that what determines the split term, what gives it its singularity of its existence, is not, of course, A, the generic term closed in on itself. It is rather Ap, A according to the effect or the whole into which it is inscribed.” The formula for the process of determination, the placement of a force and its resulting division, is thus Ap(A).

The third aspect of the Hegelian materialist dialectic is described by Badiou as the “determination of the determination.” This is the counter-process, which limits the process of determination. And more precisely, “[…] a process of torsion, by which a force reapplies itself to that from which it conflictually emerges” (Badiou, 2009b: 11). It is the process in which a force is able to turn its inner scission against itself and twist, or force, its way through the impasse of its own structural placement, thus limiting and exceeding the process of its determination. The formula of this counter-process is A(Ap). As the reader of Theory of the Subject will learn during the further course of the book, this is the (rare) process through which a subject comes into being. ⁶

Finally, Badiou also describes how the dialectical process might trigger—as a reaction—two extreme forms of relapses. The first is a deviation “to the right,” which in a return to the established order, claims that “nothing really took place but the place,” and thus denying the limitation of determination via the torsion of the force, or, as Badiou (2009b: 12) says, “[…] the possibility of the new inherent in the old.” The schema for this “rightist” deviation, which Badiou terms “mechanist materialism,” is Ap(Ap) = P. The second is a deviation “to the left,” which as “a radicalism of novelty” asserts the absolute and intact purity of the original force, and thus “[…] denying, so to speak, the old inherent in the new, that is, determination.” The schema for this “leftist” deviation, which Badiou (2009b: 206) names “dynamicist materialism,” is A(A) = A.

Badiou illustrates these two relapses via a reference to the two major heresies that marked the early history of the Christian church (or perhaps even, as Badiou suggests, the entire history of Christianity)—namely, “rightist” Arianism, in which Christ is perceived as wholly human (pure P), and “leftist” Gnosticism, in which Christ is perceived as wholly divine (pure A). Badiou ends his excursion into the history of the Church with praise for Hegel, because, according to Badiou (2009b: 17), Hegel precisely helps us to establish a rule of orthodoxy (dialectical materialism) against both of these relapses into the (idealist) illusions of purity. As we shall see, this is advice that Badiou himself does not always seem to persist in.

Hegel's theological model

After his careful outline of the threefold dialectical movement of “scission,” “determination,” and “limitation,” Badiou illustrates, in the following section of the book, how the implicit model of this Hegelian dialectic is in fact imported from Christian theology. Hence, Badiou begins his analysis of Hegel's theological model by identifying “the principle of incarnation” as that which establishes the “split term” and thus the starting point of the aforementioned dialectic of scission. Incarnation is, in Badiou's (2009b: 15) vocabulary, that which provides a dialectical meaning to an otherwise meaningless or contradictory duality of the finite and the infinite:

What gives it [the contradictory duality between the finite and the infinite] meaning is its historicization in scission, which makes the infinite ex-sist in the finite. Therein lies the necessary stroke of genius of Christianity. For this to happen, God (A) is indexed (Ap) as specific out-place of the ‘splace’ of the finite: this is the principle of the Incarnation. God becomes man. God divides into himself (the Father) and himself-placed-in-the-finite (the Son). ⁷

Nevertheless, in Theory of the Subject, Badiou lingers on in the theological terminology, describing the other two aspects or stages of the Hegelian dialectical process in the following way: the second dialectical stage, “[…] designates the determination of the (infinite) identity of God by marking in the splace of the finite. The radicality of this determination is the Passion: God qua Son dies” (Badiou, 2009b: 16); and the third stage, “[…] designates the counter-determination (the limit of death) by the infinity of the Father: the Son is resurrected and rejoins (Ascension) the Father's bosom, which represents a figurative outplace” (Badiou, 2009b: 16). So, to sum up, the implicit theological content of “scission,” “determination,” and “limit” is incarnation (the consubstantiality of the infinite and the finite), the passion (the death of the finite), and the resurrection (the non-death of the infinite).

Concerning the outcome of this dialectical movement, this is where Badiou's (2009b: 16) rather short-lived theological enthusiasm ends and his critique of Hegel begins: “At the end of this redemptive adventure, you find in heaven a God who reconciles in himself, in his historical self-unfolding, the finite and the infinite. And on earth, what subsists is only the simple empty trace of the complete process […].” In short, Hegel's (supposedly) materialist dialectic, modelled on theology, is ultimately a circular movement, in which the end point does not exceed, but leads right back to the starting point, and thus the dialectical process does nothing but return us to status quo, to “the right side of the Father.” ⁹ In Badiou's reading, Hegel's potentially materialist dialectic thus relapses back into idealism (that is, the purity of unity of God), and so Badiou (2009b: 18) insists that: “Hegel […] must be divided once again,” this time between a dialectic of circularity, which despite commencing in a materialist manner with a “split” term, on account of its Trinitarian urge to integrate or “reconcile” this split term back into a redemptive Absolute, ends in idealism, and a materialist dialectic of periodization, which has the same starting point but proceeds in terms of a spiraled movement, rather than moving in circles, and thus does not lead back to anything. At this point in the book, Badiou (2009b: 21) takes leave (at least for a little while) from Hegel to focus on the elaboration of such a materialist dialectic of periodization: “Hegel has been given the proper salute, for us to take things up again from zero. For we must think periodization through to the end.”

Badiou's (mis)reading of the “negation of the negation”

Yet Hegel returns for a brief, but remarkable, appearance at the end of part one of Theory of the Subject, where Badiou suggests that Hegel reveals, in a short well-known passage at the end of Logic of Science in which he implies that a genuine dialectics requires a fourth term, that he in fact did have an intuition of a proper materialist dialectic of periodization. More precisely, Badiou (2009b: 48) designates this materialist intuition of Hegel's in the following way: “To count the negative (or difference), which is the very principle of contradiction, not as simple universal, but as Two, and thus to establish the period as quadruple: such is the materialist intuition at the supreme point of Hegel's Logic.” In other words, with his brief consideration of a period of quadruplicity, rather than a triplicity, Hegel was on the right materialist track of a “spiralled” dialectic. Yet according to Badiou (2009b: 48), this intuition of Hegel's is unfortunately at once annulled by the “obsessive” (Trinitarian) theme of the circular return to the beginning, or in other words, the insistence on reconciliation instead of a double scission. Although his short excursion back into the Hegelian dialectic was clearly meant as a closing remark by Badiou, this insight into Hegel's “materialist moment” seems to raise more questions than answers, such as: Did Badiou perhaps give up on Hegel too soon? Is another reading, not only of Hegel, but also his underlying theological model, perhaps possible? A reading, which is closer to the true materialist dialectic that “counts negativity twice” as Badiou suggests?

It is quite clear that Badiou's main quarrel with Hegel's dialectic concerns the conceptualization of its third moment, the “determination of determination,” or, in Hegelian terms, the “negation of the negation.” Even if Badiou (2009b: 48), as we have just seen, acknowledges the potential for another, more materialist, reading of Hegel's Science of Logic, he eventually concludes that Hegel's dialectic remains circular and therefore idealist. In other words, Badiou adheres to a reading of the Hegelian “negation of the negation” or “sublation” (Aufhebung) as an annulment of negativity, which, in theological terms, institutes a reconciliation of the Father and the Son as the (Absolute) endpoint, rather than sustaining an ongoing (spiralled) process of scission. As Oliver Feltham (2008: 73) implies in his introduction to Badiou's philosophy, Badiou's reading in Theory of the Subject here echoes Mao's rejection of the Hegelian notion of “negation of the negation” in the polemics that he advances against Engels in Practice and Contradiction. There is certainly nothing surprising in this, because Mao is a key reference, not only in Theory of the Subject, but in all of the preceding works that Badiou published during the 1970s (see Bosteels, 2005).

This link is nevertheless not without some interest, if we take into consideration the critical reading of Mao's Practice and Contradiction proposed by Slavoj Žižek in In Defence of Lost Causes from 2008. The centre or key target of Žižek's critique is precisely Mao's rejection of Hegel's “negation of the negation.” According to Žižek, Mao was right in rejecting the standard notion of “dialectical synthesis” (“negation of the negation”) as “reconciliation of opposites,” but he was very wrong in formulating this rejection in terms of an ontology of “eternal struggle of opposites,” because this will in Žižek's (2008: 185) view get him tangled up in the non-dialectical notion of “bad infinity” (i.e. the infinite reduced to an endless succession of finite elements). Mao opposes continued division, or scission, of his dialectic of contradiction to “dialectical synthesis” of the Hegelian “negation of the negation,” but by doing this he fails, in Žižek's eyes: “[…] to grasp how the “negation of the negation” is not a compromise between a position and its excessively radical negation, but, on the contrary, the only true negation. Also, it is because Mao is unable to theoretically formulate this self-relating negation of form itself that he gets caught in the “bad infinity” of endless negating, scissions into two, subdivision …” (Žižek, 2008: 191). How, then, does Žižek, more precisely, understand the “negation of the negation” as the “only true negation”? In brief, the essential message of Žižek's many variations on this theme is that the Hegelian notion of “negation of the negation” should be read, not as a transition to a higher third stage of a synthesis that “sublates” or “reconciles” all differences and negativity, but rather as a repetition and radicalization of the first negation (the antithesis) that will shatter the very framework in which the first negation is negation and thus in a certain sense no longer appears as a negation (Žižek, 1989: 176; 1992: 30–33; 1993: 120–124; 1999: 70–75). Or, in Žižek's (2008: 189) own words: “After all, what is the Hegelian ‘negation of the negation’? First, the old order is negated within its own ideologico-political form; then, this form itself has to be negated.” Against the backdrop of this reading of “negation of the negation,” Žižek (2008: 194) very instructively summarizes what he takes to be the problematic political consequence of Mao's rejection of this notion:

His problem was precisely the absence of the ‘negation of the negation,’ the failure of the attempts to transpose revolutionary negativity into a truly new positive order: all temporary stabilizations of the revolution amounted to just so many restorations of the old order, so that the only way to keep the revolution alive was the ‘spurious infinity’ of endlessly repeated negation which reached its apex in the Great Cultural Revolution.

Is this not precisely a dialectic that “counts negativity twice,” that is, the kind of dialectic that Badiou calls for? If so, then perhaps Žižek can do what Badiou apparently will not, that is, provide another, more materialist, reading, not only of Hegel, but also of his underlying theological model? I will return briefly to this question of Žižek's reading of Hegel's dialectic in the final section, but first let us take a look at Saint Paul, and see how Badiou's dismissal of Hegel's (and more generally, any) dialectical reading of the Christ-event, not to mention the incarnation, gets him into a muddle that will drive him hazardously close to the kind of idealist conception of the pure event which he himself fiercely renounces. ¹⁰

Hegel in Saint Paul

In the beginning of his book on the apostle Paul, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism from 1997, Badiou (2003b) reels off a string of names of philosophers, who have previously examined the figure of Paul, hereby not only placing himself in venerable company, but also underlining that he is entering a well-trodden path. One of the predecessors mentioned by Badiou (2003b: 5) is Hegel. Although Badiou does not go into a more detailed discussion, like the one he carries out of Nietzsche's reading of Paul, Hegel's name nevertheless comes up a few times during the course of the book, most substantially in chapter six, entitled “The antidialectic of Death and Resurrection.”

In this chapter Badiou attempts to “de-dialecticalize the Christ-event” by demonstrating that Paul's account of this event is in fact radically anti-dialectical. Although Badiou only refers directly to Hegel on half a page at the beginning of the chapter, where he explicitly criticizes the latter's dialectical conception of the Christ-event, this Hegelian conception is, as the title of the chapter indicates, nevertheless the main target of Badiou's critique throughout the chapter. ¹¹ However, Badiou also criticizes Hegel in a more implicit manner, because his attempt to “de-dialecticalize the Christ-event” involves purifying Paul's position entirely from any link to the highly dialectical themes of Incarnation and Trinity, which are at the heart of Hegel's philosophy. It thus seems as if a decisive displacement has occurred in Badiou's reading of Hegel: in Saint Paul the issue at stake is no longer, as it was in Theory of the Subject, an alternative between an idealist and a materialist dialectic, but, as we will see in the following, between dialectic tout court and, to put it in Badiou's Pauline terms, an anti-dialectical “materialism of grace.”

The concise, but unmistakable, critique of Hegel's dialectical conception of the Christ-event that Badiou raises on the first pages of chapter six in Saint Paul has two interconnected aspects. Firstly, Badiou criticizes Hegel for the function that he assigns to death in his dialectic, referring to the famous passage in the Phenomenology of Spirit on “tarrying with the negative,” in which Hegel (1998: 19) suggests that “the life of spirit is the life that withstands death.” Secondly, Badiou (2003b: 65) objects that, caught up in Hegel's dialectical apparatus, the event of the resurrection just becomes a moment in the self-development of the Absolute, whereby “[…] the event as supernumerary givenness and incalculable grace is dissolved into an auto-foundational and necessary deployed rational protocol.” Whereas this second point of critique is obviously related to the critique that Badiou raised in Theory of the Subject against the “circularity” of Hegel's theological informed dialectic, there is no critique of death, of negativity as such, in Theory of the Subject.

Against Hegel's dialectical appropriation of the Christ-event, Badiou (2003b: 66–68) opposes what he calls Paul's anti-dialectical position, maintaining that for Paul death is in no way part of the operation of salvation, it has no redemptive function, and cannot be constitutive of the Christ-event. What constitutes an event in Christ is solely the resurrection. The evental grace of the resurrection is not, as Badiou (2003b: 66) underlines alluding to Hegel, subordinated to the “labour of the negative” and neither can it therefore be appropriated as a moment of the Absolute; rather, grace “[…] is affirmation without preliminary negation […]. It is pure and simple encounter.” The point of this de-dialecticalization of the Christ-event, claims Badiou (2003b: 66), is that it will allow us to establish a wholly secularized “materialism of grace” “[…] through the strong and simple idea that every existence can one day be seized by what happens to it and subsequently devote itself to that which is valid for all […].” However, this raises several questions. First, what is the background against which Paul's (presumably) anti-dialectical position should be understood? That is, why, more precisely, cannot death be (part of) the operation of salvation for Paul? Or to put it yet another way, what is it that leads Badiou to assert a radical dissociation between Christ's death and his resurrection? Second, what are the consequences that Badiou draws from this?

“Death is not, and can never be, an event”

To understand why Badiou, in his reading of the Pauline letters, drives a wedge between the death of Christ and the event of resurrection, we will need to take a closer look at his account of what death means and how it functions in Paul. In his exposition of the “division of the subject”, introduced in the preceding chapter (five) and developed further in the succeeding chapters, Badiou construes the Pauline opposition between life and death, and the corresponding opposition between spirit and flesh, in the following way. For Paul, this opposition of life and death, spirit and flesh, has nothing to do with the Platonic dualism of body soul and body, or with the biological distinction between life and death as moments in a cycle of creation and decay. Rather, life and death, spirit and flesh, designate two “subjective paths,” that is, two existential attitudes, or ways of living one's life (Badiou, 2003b: 55–56, 68). The meaning of these two subjective stances in Paul is further illuminated by Badiou through the reading he presents in the succeeding chapters (six and seven) of Saint Paul. In summary, we can say that, although the path of the flesh (death) is a subjective stance caught in the vicious cycle in which the law itself incites the desire of its transgression, Paul famously describes in chapter seven in the Epistle to the Romans that the subjective stance of spirit (life) is the subjective stance, which, through fidelity to the Christ-event, is able to break out of this cycle. Sin is therefore not to break the law, but not to break with the law, that is, sin is to remain stuck in the vicious cycle of law–desire in which one takes pleasure in feeling guilty about one's transgressions. ¹² These two opposed existential attitudes—the way of the flesh and the way of the spirit, death and life—which Badiou (1998: 40–57) finds in Paul obviously match his own distinction, as outlined for instance in his Ethics, between the human animal, the individual who is determined by his self-content life-rhythm, and the subject of truth breaking with this. For Badiou, between these two existential attitudes there is not, and cannot be, any relationship, but only a radical rupture. ¹³

Concerning the function of Christ's death on the cross, then, according to Badiou, this death basically signals man's equality to God: what Christ's death shows is that man is not only capable of inventing death (the instituting of the vicious cycle of law and desire by Adam), but also of inventing life, of producing truth, of being true to an event, and thus becoming an immortal subject of that truth-event. In short, Christ's death simply indicates that eternal life is accessible to every human being, that anyone can be seized by the grace of a truth-event and take part in the domain of immortality, or, in Badiou's (2003b: 69) words: “The operation of death […] constructs the site of our divine equality within humanity itself.” So, once more it is not the death of Christ, but the resurrection alone that constitutes the event. ¹⁴ Death merely prepares the site for the event of resurrection by making manifest that the infinite dimension of immortal truth is also accessible to mortal human beings. Thus, not only is there no dialectical relationship between death and resurrection, there is no relationship at all: “[…] there is an absolute disjunction between Christ's death and his resurrection” (Badiou, 2003b: 70), or, in Badiou's philosophical terminology: there is no relation at all between the evental site (Christ's death) and the event (Christ's resurrection), i.e. the event of resurrection is a “pure” event, an absolute rupture, entirely new. Yet is this not very close to the position that Badiou (2006a: 210–211; 2009b: 10–12, 16–17) in his outline in Theory of the Subject of the dialectical relapses describes as a “leftist relapse,” and in Being and Event criticizes under the heading of “speculative leftism” (or in theological terms “Manichaeism”)—that is, the position of “absolute of novelty,” which denies the possibility of the old (the site/death) inherent in the new (event/resurrection)? Also, is not the assertion of such a radical rupture, absolute break, one of the main features that Badiou ascribes to antiphilosophy, namely the radically groundbreaking act or event?

The lure of anti-dialectics

The conception of death outlined above and the resulting assertion of a radically anti-dialectical position will lead Badiou (2003b: 59, 73–74, 102) to purify Paul's position completely from any association with the doctrine of Incarnation and Trinitarian theology. ¹⁵ Of course, this raises the question of how Badiou explains the relationship between the Father and the Son if he does not want to make use of either the doctrine of Incarnation or the doctrine of Trinity. In contrast to the (philosophical) relationship between the Master and the Disciple, Badiou (2003b: 59) describes the Son as “one whose life is beginning,” and he continues: “The possibility of such a beginning requires that God the Father […] has assumed the form of the Son.” Spontaneously one thinks here of incarnation, but according to Badiou this is not at all the case. So how does Badiou explain that “God the Father assumes the form of the Son”? He does so by referring to what Badiou himself admits to be an “enigmatic term”—the “sending” of the Son. As Badiou (2003b: 59) puts it:

Later, theology will indulge in all sorts of contortion in order to establish the substantial identity of the Father and the Son. Paul has no interest at all in such Trinitarian questions. The antiphilosophical metaphor of the ‘sending of the son’ is enough for him, for he requires only the event and refuses all philosophical reinscriptions of this pure occurrence by means of the philosophical vocabulary of substance and identity.

Badiou is not unaware that such an idealist danger is lurking in his conception of the event. According to Badiou, this is precisely what the notion of evental site is designed to remedy. By designating it as a “fragment of being,” Badiou (2004: 101) seems to suggest that the “evental site” is capable of anchoring the event in the situation, but without compromising its “supplementary” and exceptional character. However, as we have already seen, in Saint Paul, the evental site (death) in no way forms a “bridge” between the event and the situation in which it takes place; quite the contrary, Badiou's assertion is that there exists an “absolute disjunction between Christ's death (the evental site) and the event of his resurrection.” Here Badiou (2003b: 50–53) seems to contradict his own critical reading of Pascal earlier in the same book, in which he via Paul distances himself from an antiphilosophical conception of the event as a miracle without any relation to the situation in which it occurs. Apparently Badiou has trouble keeping the necessary distance to what seems to be an inherent antiphilosophical or idealist tendency in his own philosophy. ¹⁶

Concluding remarks on Incarnation and representation

However, it is not only Badiou's emphasis on the “sending of the son,” but also his understanding of the Incarnation and more generally the doctrine of Trinity, that is problematic. What is significant about Badiou's rejection of the Incarnation (and the doctrine of the Trinity) in Saint Paul is that it is obviously based on animosity towards its declaration of “the substantial identity of Father and Son.” This is an issue which takes us to the very heart of the doctrine of Incarnation, if not the very heart of Christian theology as such. ¹⁷ So let us take a closer look at Badiou's perception of the Incarnation and the issue of the substantial identity of Father and Son. Badiou's assertion of the “substantial identity between Father and Son” in Saint Paul suggests a shift in his perspective in relation to Theory of the Subject. In the latter, Badiou does not once refer to “substantial identity between Father and Son;” however, he does use the expression “The Son is consubstantial with the Father” (alluding to the Nicene Creed). Badiou (2009b: 15–16) also qualifies “consubstantiality” further, namely as an inherent scission in God: Although God the Father and God the Son are “of the same being (substance)” there is a difference between them, but a difference with “no qualitative support,” that is, a non-substantial difference (the incarnation is the formula of this non-substantial scission). One could argue that conceptualizing this is precisely the point of the technical term “homoousion” (όμοούσιον), created by the Nicene Fathers. ¹⁸ In Saint Paul, by contrast, Badiou in no way qualifies his reference to the “substantial identity between Father and Son” in a similar way.

Badiou does not go into any extensive discussions or give any direct definition of incarnation in Saint Paul, but he does nevertheless provide an indirect definition. At the very end of chapter seven in the paragraph on the “sending of the son”, which I have already quoted in the above, Badiou underlines that although Christ must be fully immanent to all dimensions of human life, including death, this does not in any way entail that “[…] Christ is the incarnation of God, or that he must be thought of as the becoming-finite of the infinite.” This exact description of the incarnation as the “becoming-finite of the infinite” is echoed in Badiou's (2005b: 3, 11; 2006b: 153–154) critical discussions in Handbook of Inaesthetics and The Century of what he terms the “romantic schema” in modern art, which he regards as part of the broader contemporary tendency of “romanticism.” To put it briefly, Badiou criticizes the romantic schema of privileging art as the singular place of truth, of its celebration of human finitude, and most importantly in the present context, of entailing a transposition of the schema of incarnation, and the specific conception of infinity that it involves, into the domain of art. Thus, in The Century, Badiou (2006b: 153–154) describes one of the main features of the romantic conception of art in the following way:

Art is the descent of the infinity of the Ideal into the finitude of the work. The artist, elevated by genius, is the sacrificial medium of this descent. This is a transposition of the Christian schema of the incarnation: the genius lends Spirit the forms it has mastered so that the people may recognize its own spiritual infinitude in the finitude of the work. Since in the end it's the work that bears witness to the incarnation of the infinite, romanticism cannot avoid making the work sacred.

If we should try to place Badiou's reading of Hegel's dialectic, and thus also its underlying theological model, in relation to the struggle between materialism and idealism, there is little doubt that Badiou (2009b: 117–121) would place Hegel as well as the Christian doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity on the side of idealism. However, at the same time, Badiou himself comes precariously close to the idealist side of this dividing line in his anti-dialectical quest to purge Paul of every trace of Incarnation and Trinity by asserting the absolute separation of the death of Christ and his resurrection. However, the pressing question is, of course, whether Badiou's indirect portrayal of Trinitarian theology as circular and the Incarnation as counterpart to representational logic is really the only possible, or in fact even a fair, reading. As the preceding illustrates, I do not think it is, and, as I have hinted throughout this article, a materialist (in Badiou's terms) reading of the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity would be possible. Indeed, in spite of its dismissive conclusion, Badiou's exposition of Hegel's dialectic in Theory of the Subject clearly implies a potential for such a reading, but that is another article.