Malebranche by Alain Badiou;Kenneth Reinhard;

Author:Alain Badiou;Kenneth Reinhard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI046000, Philosophy/Individual Philosophers, PHI022000, Philosophy/Religious
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2019-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

Session 5

April 29, 1986

Malebranche might be said to have had an acute awareness of the contradiction between the assumption that God is a subject and the assumption that he is perfect. Even though Malebranche doesn’t formulate it in exactly those terms, it is in his eyes undoubtedly the central contradiction of a Christian ontology. There is a contradiction between the absolute self-sufficiency that perfection, infinite perfection, implies and the regime of action, the regime of intervention that the position as subject implies. This is why I proposed—in language that is not entirely Malebranche’s but, as we’ll soon see, is not so far off after all—the idea that, ultimately, what interests him is to think God as a desiring being, and thus to introduce in fine a radical split into his self-sufficiency. No matter how you approach the question—even without using the most sophisticated problematics of desire—it is clear that anyone who desires is not self-sufficient. So if you think God as a subject, you must think that God desires, and you’re forced to undermine his self-sufficiency, or at any rate his self-sufficiency as plenitude, as full substantiality. I also stressed that what is crucial for Malebranche is that God desire to be God. It is not enough for him to be God, which is why he is not, strictly speaking, self-sufficient. Indeed, it is clear that if God desires to be God, this implies that his desire is situated in the place of the other. There must therefore be an ex-centering, a place of the other, where this desire to be God can be something other than being-God.

This question has two sides to it. The first is that God in no way created the world capriciously; he created the world so that there would be the place that is other than his desire to be God. This is really the meaning of Malebranche’s formulation: “He created the world in order to establish his Church.” For the Church is the temple of God’s desire. Neither a capricious fulguration, nor an incomprehensible excess, the world was created by God because he is a desiring being, one that should be thought as a subject, which requires that there be the place that is other than his desire to be God. What Malebranche calls “glory” is precisely this complex structure, this divine desire to be God, linked to the need for there to be this place that is other for his desire. The other aspect of this problem—which I examined at great length—is the following: this other place where God can give form to his desire, or more precisely the object of his desire—i.e., himself, but in the form of something other than himself (that’s why there’s the Father and the Son)—is necessarily the place of nothingness, for being that fully is, is God. Therefore, the other-than-God is not-being.

And as a result, God can only be a subject through the mediation of nothingness. In Malebranche’s eyes, this is what Christianity alone can think because, ultimately, at the heart of things, there is the death of God.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.