Critical Theology: Introducing an Agenda for an Age of Global Crisis by Carl A. Raschke

Author:Carl A. Raschke [Raschke, Carl A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830899968
Published: 2016-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Badiou and the Event

The Frankfurt school recognized that certain “idealist” strains of thought could harbor tremendous emancipatory potential, inasmuch as they served not just as powerful “transcendental” critiques of the established order but also as motivating and mobilizing sparks for revolutionary undertakings. For Badiou, the “event” is both the occasion and the promise for an unprecedented transformation of the world as we know it. According to Badiou, the event is much broader in scope than the singular “split” that happens at a certain moment when the affirmation of the subject and the insurrectionist act takes place. The ultimate “evental” site, henceforth, is Golgotha itself, when “God renounces his transcendent separation.” Such a renunciation is what Badiou terms an instance of “grace,” which changes the direction of the course of history. As a result, God “creates, not the event,” but “its site.” The evental site becomes the nucleus of the composition of the event itself, “addressing it to this singular situation, rather than another.”24 The death of Christ serves as the “site” for Badiou’s truth event, which is the experience of the resurrection and its impact on others from that time forward. The resurrection as event is the engine of historical action and transformation. The event “redistributes” the trajectories of historical meaning and the will to action. The event itself is only made possible by the “splitting” of the historical subject at the site of its occurrence—in this case marked off for all time perhaps by the disjunction between the expectation of Jesus’ followers concerning his mission and destiny as Messiah, the “savior of Israel,” and the humiliation of the cross followed by his wholly unanticipated appearance on Easter morning to the women and later to the disciples. The “grace” implicit in this unforeseen series of circumstances is what reconfigures the significance of history as Heilsgeschichte (as the German theologians would call it), that is, “salvation history.”

What makes Badiou’s take on the universal significance of Rudolf Bultmann’s “Christ event” is that it shifts the language of critical theory from what Hegel and Marx regarded as the “power of the negative”—or the thrust of dialectical rationality—to what Christians understand as “faith.” Faith, for Badiou, therefore functions as the term that “names” the subjectivity of the subject in the composition of the truth event. What Badiou in 1 Corinthians regards as Paul’s “third” discourse, the discourse of “Christ crucified” (1 Cor 1:17-25), wielded in opposition to the Jews who “seek signs” and the Greek philosophers who demand cogent arguments, is the enunciation of a universal instance of “becoming-subject” marking fidelity to the event. And, as Paul suggests in the opening chapter of his initial letter to the Corinthians, there can be no extrinsic “demonstration” of the truth of this event. The truthfulness of the truth event resides in the new discourse of collective fidelity, the “faith” of the witnessing community. “It is not the singularity of the subject that validates what the subject says; it is what he says that founds the singularity of the subject.

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