"Badiou and Theology": a not so micro-review

Frederiek Depoortere, Badiou and Theology (Philosophy and Theology). New York: T&T Clark International, 2009.

Below is my review of Depoortere's recent book on Badiou.  For a less favorable review see Clayton Crocket's over at NDPR (he sees it as incoherent, but I think this broadly has to do with differing theological outlooks).  I would be very interested in any others interacting with Badiou on a theological level.  I would like to do more work with Badiou, but my dissertation may go a different direction for now.

While many have turned to Alain Badiou’s critique of contemporary politics and his theories of the event and the subject, few theologians have fully engaged in the task of understanding and assessing Badiou’s underlying ontological commitments.  But without this a truly theological appropriation and/or critique of Badiou has been lacking.  Frederiek Depoortere’s Badiou and Theology gladly, and impressively, steps into this gap.  Matching Badiou’s robust atheism with a clear-sighted theological orientation, Depoortere models theological engagement, even if one does not necessarily agree with his presuppositions.  The basic thesis of the book is that while Badiou understands his ontology as essentially atheistic, Depoortere argues that it in fact it does not foreclose belief in God, but actually opens toward a renewed proof for the existence of God with its own version of analogy. Depoortere accomplishes this by first examining Badiou’s understanding of the death of God and the contemporary state of the questions of the existence of God, then investigating Badiou’s ontology, and finally, by offering a theological reading of set theory.

            Depoortere begins by considering what Badiou means that God is died.  Ever since Plato’s Parmenides philosophy has labored under the impasse of the one and the many, ultimately needing to identify ‘being’ and ‘the one’.  Badiou escapes this dilemma with the axiomatic decision that ontologically ‘the one is not’ even if it is presented phenomenologically (11).  The unbinding of being from the one, accomplished via contemporary set theory, allows being itself to occupy the place of the actual infinite without recourse to a transcendent God.  Because of this set theory deposes the “living God of religion, the conceptual God of metaphysics, and the God of the poets” (18).  For Badiou, the metaphysical God is now known to have never existed, the religious God can no longer be encountered in thought, and the Romantic God of Hölderlin and Heidegger is revealed as merely nostalgic (19-20).  In outlining the contemporary understanding of arguments for the existence of God, Depoortere essentially agrees with Badiou’s typology, but against deconstructive returns to a poetic God (mentioning Caputo explicitly), he but argues for the unity of the God of religion and the God of metaphysics, siding with the First Vatican Council’s understanding of the twofold order of knowledge and the possibility of a proof for the existence of God.  Explicating this proof, and relying on Denys Turner’s recent work on Aquinas, Depoortere argues that the statement “God exists” must function such that ‘God’ is a proper noun, and ‘exist’ is a judgment of actuality rather than conceptuality (48-50).  Because of this, arguments for the existence of God must rule out a univocal use of being or existence without implying equivocity.  In other words, contemporary arguments for the existence of God must argue toward analogy, not from it (54-56).  And this, Depoortere argues, is exactly what Badiou’s ontology does.

            To show this Depoortere examines part one of Badiou’s Being and Event, and other relevant texts.  He centers around the themes of the being of the one, the void, and the infinite. Concerning being, Depoortere excellently explains how Badiou relates set theory to ontology as the presentation of being qua being.  Via the theory of the multiple, Badiou argues that “the ontological situation is that situation in which total abstraction is made of all particularity and in which no longer this or that is presented, but presentation as such” (64).  In this way, unlike contemporary constructivists, ontology is not derived from language, but the reverse (66).  This however, means that Badiou must postulate some initial place from which to infer being, since language does not accomplish this.  The ‘void’ achieves this as the multiple-of-nothing which puts set theory on its way as the pure multiple, before the one and the many.  The void is the multiple included within each presentation as nothing (69-72).  As Depoortere says, “Everything which is presented, the whole regime of presentation, characterized as it is by the dialectic of the one and the multiple, is a fabric woven out of nothing but ‘the void’ which is itself in-different to this dialectic because it is neither one nor multiple” (81).  And from this pure multiple springs the actual infinity of being, uncoupled from any transcendent grounding.  Based in the immanence of the void, transfinite numbers exist as actual infinities, even while themselves expanding into new levels of infinity (81-94).  For Badiou, the significance of set theory, then, is that it articulates an understanding of transfinite numbers that encompass and surpass the infinite succession of ordinal numbers, without recourse to a transcendent actuality.

            After outlining Badiou’s ontology, Depoortere turns to Badiou’s conception of actual infinity to offer his theological evaluation.  While Badiou rejects Cantor’s theological conclusions, who founded set theory, and announces an ontological atheism, Depoortere interrogates Cantor’s distinction between “the transfinite ‘increasable actual infinite’ accessible to mathematics and ‘the unincreasable or Absolute actual infinite’, or God, not accessible to mathematics” (110). Depoortere points out that Cantor even speaks of created and uncreated infinity suggesting a possible “up-to-date version of Aquinas’s distinction between created being as finite and uncreated being as infinite” (112).  Cantor postulated an Absolute actual infinite because increasable transfinite numbers do not make sense without it (113).  From the level of everyday mathematics, one need not account for this Absolute, and indeed can axiomatically reject it, which Badiou does.  But, Depoortere argues, once mathematics has been elevated to the level of ontology, as Badiou also does, this restriction begs the question in favor of atheism (120).  If this restriction is eliminated there is no reason to assume the atheistic nature of set theory, but rather it makes it possible to rethink a traditional distinction.  Instead of placing a divide between creature and creator as that between the finite and infinite (124), the divide is between the finite and transfinite on the one side, and absolutely infinite on the other (125).  Or rather, “Aquinas’s distinction between finite creation and infinite Creator can simply be kept on the understanding that ‘finite’ now includes both what has traditionally been understood by it and the transfinite” (125).  The upshot of this conclusion, for Depoortere, is that the Absolute is still partially comprehensible within the transfinite as limit concept.  Or rather, set theory itself suggests a principle of analogy completing the requirements of a modern proof for God’s existence (126).  Of course Depoortere notes this proof still needs to be developed, but within the set-theoretical universe, this proof does not seem excluded out of hand as Badiou had hoped.

            For as short as the book is Depoortere does a remarkably good job digesting the relevant information regarding Badiou’s ontology and offering a succinct critique and proposal (which is insufficiently reflected in the above summary).  But he does admit it is merely a first step towards a theological evaluation of Badiou.  Nevertheless, while Depoortere states his intention to only focus on Badiou’s ontology, Badiou is explicit that his ontology is in service to his theory of the event and the subject it produces, and therefore a lack of engagement in the later realms of Being and Event hinders Depoortere’s theological evaluation in two ways.  The first concerns Depoortere’s criticism of Badiou’s axiomatic decision, against Cantor, to affirm those aspects of set theory that set it against all versions of theism.  Badiou would argue that in the figure of the subject itself is revealed the halting point of set theory and is the beyond of mathematics, contra the assumption of a grounding Absolute infinite.  In this sense Badiou is eminently a modern Cartesian and/or Hegelian cum Lacanian.  Second, a more robust engagement with Badiou’s theory of the event, and its production of the subject, would problematize Depoortere understanding of the relation of faith and reason grounded in the First Vatican Council.  While Depoortere is certainly to be praised for resisting the circle of faith presupposing faith expressed in various enclave or sectarian theologies (see his long final note on 146-147), Badiou’s work precisely questions what is and is not sectarian in regard to politics and thought itself and the function of faith, which needs to be grappled with theologically.  All in all, while one might disagree with Depoortere juxtaposition of a rationalist version of Thomism and Badiou, its results are very compelling as an attempt to actualize a contemporary proof for God within the Scientific Age.

Comments

[Itself.wordpress.com]

Did my comment get eaten or was it just not welcome?

[geoffrey holsclaw]

it must have been eating.

[Adam Miller]

Thanks for this review, Geoffrey. I've been working on a number of other projects and haven't gotten around to this book yet.

By way of shameless self-promotion, if you interested in a divergent reading of Badiou's importance for theology, I believe my book (also published with Continuum) may be the only other book-length treatment of the subject.

My best,
Adam

[geoffrey holsclaw]

adam,

i would like to get at you book sometime soon, but current research might not lead through Badiou. but hopefully it will.

[Jason Knott]

Adam--

As fascinating as I find the issue of Badiou and theology, your book costs $100 on Amazon. I'm sure it's worth it and all, but is there somewhere we can get a thumbnail sketch of your treatment?

[Adam Miller]

It's on sale for just $100! (Actually, don't get me started about this . . . )

At any rate, Jason, you can find a generous review and summary of the book by Tom Grimwood here.