Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Quentin Meillassoux

Crosscurrents

by Christopher Watkin

Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death of God in ways that take the debate beyond the narrow confines of atheism into the much broader domain of post-theological thinking. Christopher Watkin argues that Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux each elaborate a distinctive approach to the post-theological, but that each approach still struggles to do justice to the death of God.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology

296 pages, Hardcover

First published May 16, 2011

Reviews

[Michael A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Persuasively demonstrates the difficulty of thinking "post-theologically" (post- "Death of God"). Watkins makes a distinction with two atheisms: imitative and residual/ascetic. The former is putting a secular placeholder ("Man", "Reason", "Community") where God once occupied. Residual, or ascetic, atheism is "to make do with the meagre residue left over after the departure of God, Truth, Justice, Beauty and so on." (5)

The problem, as I read it, is that both atheisms are open to theological reinscription, that is in a sense they are still theological. Badiou, Nancy, and Meillassoux try to think past the dual atheisms, and Watkin seems to admire the project, but the main criticism he seems to level at them at the end is that their philosophical orientations are unjustifiable, or only have force if we give them certain presuppositions (Badiou: axiom, Nancy: demand, Meillassoux: intuition/jolt [234]).

Watkin states that "Are Meillassoux, Badiou and Nancy showing three paths up the same mountain? To approach this question we msut return one last time to that point at which our three thinkers diverge, namely the decision that chooses one fundamental philosophical orientation over another in the first place... Further work on post-theological thought needs to engage with the question of fundamental philosophical orientation, for the failure to account adequately [for this] .... will always beg the question of any philosophy, whatever position it occupies in relation to the theological." (241)

I think he hits on a wonderful point here. And I think a very important one. What would it be like to demonstrate the validity or truth of a philosophical system or proposition that isn't in some way rooted in an axiom (something 'self-evident') a demand (we must believe it for ethical-political reasons) or an intuition (it was revealed to me)? Personally, I don't think it's possible, and I have a feeling (call it an intuition!) that every philosophical argument/disagreement will come down to an unshared axiom/demand/intuition. Now is there a way to adjudicate these disagreements? That, I'm not sure of (out of ignorance rather than skepticism).

As Watkin quotes two fantastic passages at the beginning of the conclusory chapter that sums this up, here they are reproduced in full:

"The kind of philosophy one chooses thus depends upon the kind of person one is. For a philosophical system is not a lifeless household item one can put aside or pick up as one wishes; instead, it is animated by the very soul of the person who adopts it." - Fichte

"Every dogmatic thinker, by virtue of a fiction which deceives him and to which the public has grown used, speaks, teaches, and decrees while boasting of the authority of an impersonal reason and an indubitable apperception of the true, as if experience had never taught us that this so-called reason contradicts itself from one philosopher to the next and that, where the moral and intellectual direction of the person leads, their thinking will follow, nothing more and nothing less." - Renouvier

[Tim Jaeger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the topic however this read a bit too much of a ‘paint-by-numbers’ let’s summarize Badiou then Nancy then we top it off with Meillassoux. Felt like it was just too long with the summarization however there were some interesting threads that could have been expanded upon and extrapolated to even more interesting conclusions (e.g. the only absolute is contingency therefore….miracles and belief in God?)

“Secondly, one can believe in God because he exists, but this according to Meillassoux leads to the deadlocks of fanaticism, a flight from this world, and the confusions of holiness with mysticism and of God as love with God as power. It is the religious form of hope. Thirdly, one can not believe in God because he exists. This is the Luciferian posture of revolt, maintaining a haughty indifference which in effect is a mixture of animosity towards God (in which the displayed indifference is only hatred expressed in the most hurtful way) and classical atheism, whose deadlocks (namely cynicism, sarcasm towards every aspiration, and self-hatred) it exacerbates. It is the religious form of despair. The fourth way of relating man and God, and the option which has until now remained unexploited, is to believe in God because he does not exist: the immanent form of hope. This is the option with which Meillassoux identifies his philosophy”

So after this time to dig into some more Meillassoux!

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

Part of me really wanted to give this impressive comparative study a three stars. Yet its lack of the attention paid to the specifically dogmatic content of any minimal endorsement of the divine (by virtue of which it is theological, and not atheistic) starts to become an issue about halfway into the book if you are not by then already convinced that the triangulation between Badiou's set theoretic extermination of the One-All, Nancy's division of Reason from within as its own inaccessible otherwise than Other, and Meillasoux's hyperchaotic deflation of necessity, have wider implications for our understanding of the experience of theosis beyond the Western problematic of the Death of God. I mean, if you posit a kind of immanent transcendence, are you still surreptiously clinging to the absent throne left behind by the One-All? For example, many Eastern religions too can lay claim to their own share of theological content centred around the notion of 'bliss'. This is why I am left with the impression tnat it may be futile to conduct a 'post theological' discussion at such a high level level of abstraction.

[James Ritchey · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books. Written by a Christian seriously engaging with contemporary French philosophy.