One more effort if you wish to be anti-theists
infinite thought gets stuck in to the analytic philosophers of religion:
> Judging by the intellectual standards of the conference, however, it wouldn’t be hard to reinvent oneself as
> a theologian - nothing that came up was in any way more difficult than the A level syllabus we teach to 16-
> 18 year olds (and, indeed, many of the criticisms presented were much the same as the students intuit
> using only their ‘pure faculty of reason’).
k-punk is right, too, to suggest that analytic philosophers don’t take their crazy thought experiments seriously enough (I’ve suggested before that the best way to account for the difficulty of disproving the hypothesis that we’re brains in vats is to accept that we actually are brains in vats, albeit vats called ‘bodies’). In contrast to the timidity of the anglo-american theists and atheists (proponents, as Badiou would say, of the ‘little style’ of philosophy), k-punk calls for “a modern naturalistic religion,” neither a supernatural religion nor a secularism which simply accepts the conclusions of religion while denying their foundations.
I’m not so sure about that and, in particular, I’m not sure about how much Badiou can be roped into this enterprise. Badiou is not just an atheist, he is, I think, fundamentally irreligious. k-punk argues for a naturalist, monist, pantheism by supporting, against Badiou, two distinctions from Spinoza: the distinction between ‘there is one substance’ and ‘the substance is One’, and the distinction between the world under the aspect of eternity and the world in lived reality. But Badiou does not simply neglect these distinctions; instead, precisely the parts of his philosophy that I believe k-punk wants to use (in particular, the demolition of postmodern indecision) depend on denying the coherence of these distinctions. Much as I’m sure he doesn’t want to, by remaining within a religious frame of reference, k-punk risks remaining a prisoner of the pathos of finitude.
What makes Badiou fundamentally opposed to any religion is his interpretation of rejection of the One as a rejection of totality. It’s impossible to think of the universe as anything but an infinite and inconsistent multiple; so it’s impossible to say anything about the universe in total. From this standpoint, saying ‘there is one substance’ presupposes that ‘substance is One’ if only in the minimal sense that substance is unified enough to be spoken of at all (I don’t know if he does, but I think Badiou ought to reject the whole notion of substance – interestingly, for pretty much the reasons Agamben does). Mark characterises Spinoza’s materialism as subtractive, but if it is, it is not just subtractive of the supernatural, but of the natural as well. If “nothing is more natural than anything else,� then ‘nature’ is not a concept at all, and cannot justify the claim that there is one substance: a subtractive naturalism, then, is anti-monist (a suggestion infinite thought makes in the piece to which k-punk is responding).
This also explains why Badiou cannot accept a distinction between lived reality and the aspect of eternity – because there is no eternity, no temporal whole. Again, this is an example of Badiou’s banalisation of the infinte: rather than an eternity which is infinitely distant from lived experience, Badiou talks about the infinity of truth procedures in which we directly participate. Perhaps Badiou is a strange sort of ultra-humanist (I can’t point to any textual evidence to back this up, but it follows from what I’ve been saying so far, and it’s a plausible position to attribute to a Lacanian) — going beyond the traditional humanism which deposes God by deifying humanity, Badiou deposes humanity too _in the name of freedom and self-determination_, the freedom of the ‘empty’ subject from which humanity has been subtracted .
Actually, I think that’s the nub of my disagreement (and explains the sense I get when re-reading k-punk’s post that he in fact already knows what I’ve just been saying). I’m not sure what religion _is_ if it isn’t the positing of an infinity to contrast with actually existing finitude; and where k-punk supports Spinoza against Badiou he seems to confirm this. Can Spinozist monism avoid this? Or should we oppose weasly religion and whimpish secularism, not with a naturalistic religion but with an anti-naturalistic atheism. Maybe monism does not go far enough, and instead we need what might logically be called _nihilism_.
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