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| Alain Badiou |
This article has a dual purpose, the first of which is to show how the concept of crisis undergirds and engages with the notion of subjectivity in two thinkers, Søren Kierkegaard and Alain Badiou. Both men share similarities in how they conceive an individual becomes a subject; a conception, moreover, that radically limits those who do (Hallward 2003, p. xxv). For separate reasons, both have placed considerable emphasis on Christianity, and significant figures and events within it (Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac for Kierkegaard, and the resurrection preached by Paul for Badiou), as being emblematic of the process whereby one becomes a subject. Both men, moreover, constellate the human within a framework that hinges upon a decisive moment of crisis that has been noted by theologian, John Milbank to bring the one into the theoretical orbit of the other (Žižek and Milbank 2009, p. 156). How one responds to that which the crisis instantiates decides both how and to what the life one lives is orientated, whether it is a form of Marxism (Badiou), God (Kierkegaard), a science, art, or erotic love (Badiou 2001, p. 28). Indeed, both men situate the subject within similar (if not identical) frameworks: in Kierkegaard, we have the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of existence; in Badiou we have aesthetic (art), ethical (love, politics, and science) as modes in which the subject enunciates truth. For both men the crisis of decision takes the form of an external challenge to the individual, and a necessary internal response; for Kierkegaard in particular, responding affirmatively opens the way to a second crisis more crushing than the first. Badiou, acknowledges the similarity between the apostle Paul and Kierkegaard when he writes that for Kierkegaard,
the key to existence is none other than absolute choice [...] which sums up all the others, into the instance through which the subject comes back to himself so that he may communicate with God (Badiou, 2009, p. 425).
The second purpose for this article is itself two-fold, in that the thought of Badiou offers a different perspective on Kierkegaard’s analysis of what he called the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’, whilst the latter in turn offers an advance on the contradictory aporia between religion and subjectivity in the former’s theory of the event. It is hoped that through bringing Badiou into an encounter with Kierkegaard an intervention or crisis can itself be achieved in the former’s thought, not to resolve the contradiction, but to bring it to light in such a way as to make it stand more aggressively as a contradiction. Kierkegaard in turn could indeed be criticised for disallowing all of Badiou’s four domains of truth, in that for him an individual is only truly a subject in relation to one’s Christian belief (Kierkegaard, 2000, p. 369). The point for Kierkegaard is, however, precisely the degree of uncertainty involved in that which the self chooses to cling; for Badiou, Christianity is too impossible, whereas for Kierkegaard, art, science, love, and politics are not impossible enough.
The choice of Kierkegaard's reading of the story of Abraham in this endeavour makes a better example than simply arguing the case for or against the resurrection espoused by Paul because it requires a truly horrifying suspension of the ethical in the face of evental-truth, whereas the resurrection merely requires a suspension of the believable. Primarily, the contradiction that is explored through this choice relates to Badiou’s paradoxical exclusion of Christianity (which, he never tires of reminding us, is a fable) from the domains of truth. Contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek comments:
[Badiou’s] supreme example of a truth-procedure [...] is a kind of religious interpellation. So no wonder that the best example, it’s religious! But paradoxically there is no place for religion. You know the irony is that the supreme example of the seminal structure of truth event that he tries to articulate, and it doesn’t count as a truth-event. (Delpech-Ramey 2004, p. 32).
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| Slavoj Zizek |
Žižek is speaking here about Badiou’s reading of the apostle in his Saint Paul. For Badiou, the apostle, whom he describes as ‘a poet-thinker of the event’ (Badiou 2003, p. 2) represents a paradigmatic example of the theory of the subject he has expounded since at least the publication of Being and Event in 1988. According to Bruno Besana, the notion of the subject has been central to Badiou’s entire oeuvre, being that which is neither free of material determinants nor limited to them, but constituted by how it is within and in excess of a given material situation (Bartlett and Clement 2010, p. 40). In Being and Event, Badiou draws a distinction between everything that falls within an existing knowledge-economy (the various multiplicities of Being), and the event, which is that in a given situation or knowledge-economy which cannot be accounted for or has been refused consideration (Woodard 2005, p. 29). Peter Hallward refines Badiou’s project to the asking of a set of questions which his theory sets out to answer (2003, p. xxi):
How can something entirely new come into the world? What sorts of innovation fully invite and deserve universal affirmation? How can the consequences of such innovations be sustained in the face of the world’s inevitable indifference or resistance? And how can those who affirm these consequences continue their affirmation?
Coming from a given configuration of contingencies, the event cannot be understood from within that which brought it forth, requiring a wholly new interpretation, which is the truth of the event (2010, p. 41). Distinct from knowledge of things, truth for Badiou is essentially something that takes place and is located in the conditions of the time and place it emerges (Hallward, p. xxv). Consequently, the event cannot be known within an existing knowledge-economy either as an event or as truth because it constitutes a decisive break with that regime, appearing at best opaque and at worst as a non-event (Badiou and Žižek 2009, p. 18). In order for the truth to appear within a given contingency it is necessary for someone to recognise that an event has occurred; his or her tenacity in articulating this occurrence constitutes the coming to subjectivity of the individual in evental-truth.
For Badiou, the event, be it the political, artistic, amorous, or scientific, constitutes a restructuring of an individual’s subjectivity in fidelity towards that which has brought about the new situation. If it were possible to make a decision based on current knowledge then the event would not be an event, because what makes it an event cannot be known in advance from a given situation, which is why an unprovable event requires a personal decision, an interventionist break with the current possibilities of the known. The subject is thus defined as one who ‘decides an undecidable’ (Badiou 2005, p. 407). Objectively uncertain, the event imposes the need for a response on a given individual. The choice that the individual encounters in the universality of the event (for or against fidelity) is a crisis of a very personal variety because it is undecidable; indeed, thereafter, the choice determines the whole character of that individual’s encounter with the world. Once the event has been recognised, it not only enters into the existing regime of knowledge, but re-organises it, as in the case of Galileo, whose cosmological investigations created not just new knowledge but a new type of physics (2005, p. 38). In this sense, the event requires a new way of thinking and speaking because the truth of the event cannot be enunciated from within or according to the terms of the reigning orthodoxy (Bartlett and Clement, p. 43). Galileo is a good example here, because the new physics were not just subjectively true, but were, as with all events of truth, universal in scope. The potential for universality in the evental-truth is Badiou’s criteria for one becoming a subject. Hallward writes (2003, p. xxvi):
Individuals become subjects in Badiou’s sense of the word if and only if this [event], conceived as a new criterion for action, is further consistent with a properly universal principle – that is, only if it is an [event] with which everyone can in principle identify.
Moreover, the choice for or against fidelity is one which only that individual can make, being quite literally a life-defining crisis through which they leave the world of merely animal needs and desires and, it follows, become genuinely free in everything except the continued fidelity which grounds them (2003, p. xxxi). Through fidelity the new subject enters a new way of being in the world which Badiou calls ‘immortality’. The idea of the immortal for Badiou is the transcendence of the merely animal life which constitutes not just the physical in human existence, but also the petty struggles in which we find ourselves embroiled (be it struggles for work, status, the latest gadget, etc). He writes (Badiou 2001, p. 12):
The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters Man’s identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an-animal to which circumstances may expose him.
In this break the critical nature reveals itself in the event as that which cannot be sought or chosen in advance by the potential subject; rather, he writes, ‘[t]o enter into the composition of a subject of truth can only be something that happens to you’ (2001, p. 51). The choice (if it can be called that) comes in the decision to be faithful to the event of truth, not in choosing how the event will arrive. For Badiou, the apostle Paul’s decision to remain faithful in enunciation to the event of the resurrection as universally true (thus breaking with all previous modes of human being), made Paul an ideal example of a subject of evental-truth; however, the undoubted impossibility of resurrection means that there has been no event or truth in which to remain in fidelity: Paul is a fraud. He writes (2001, pp. 123, 124):
What is important about Paul is that we can read the texts he left behind, quite independently of the story of his personal grace, and of the way this grace itself did or did not depend on the resurrection. Paul’s thought is a thought of the event, a thought of the truth as consecutive to an event, a thought of fidelity, and also a certain thought of the universal, and what interested me was to examine it as such.
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| St Paul |
Thus the paradox of the primary example of a subject of evental-truth being excluded from any possible truth-domain on the grounds that resurrections are outside the realm of the possible. That Pauline Christianity should have a paradoxical relationship to Badiou’s own theory is not surprising, considering that Badiou himself recognises Christianity as ‘one of the possible names for the paradox of truths’ (Badiou, 2009, p. 428) The paradox here though is not in whether or not Badiou believes in resurrections (which of course are impossible), but in the two-fold contradiction in which Paul becomes for Badiou a supreme example of the subject of evental-truth, whilst the truth he espouses is impossibly undecidable. Badiou and Žižek both insist that it is because of the rise of a scientific knowledge-economy that Paul’s claim cannot be accepted (Žižek 1999, pp. 142, 143). This remains a valid point, but surely Paul knew as well as Badiou that the event he enunciated precisely did not fit any religious or philosophical discursive system, remaining literally impossible and unnameable in those terms (Badiou 2003, p. 46). As with himself, Žižek indicates that Badiou’s interest in Christianity is tactical (Žižek 2000, p. 2). Through openly acknowledging his theoretical political debt to Christianity Badiou keeps his friends close, and his enemies closer, thus warding-off the return of Christianity in repressed form. It is because, moreover, Badiou wants to preserve both the idea of scientific truth in an age of anti-philosophical relativism and the theoretical structure of truth, which he sees in Paul, that the apostle is both admired and discredited (2003, pp. 6, 108). What we have in Badiou’s appeal to the structure of Paul’s thought in rejection of the content, to borrow from Žižek much-repeated observation, is the theo-philosophical equivalent of the arid super-ego injunction to enjoy everything as much as possible, with the malignant content of that enjoyment removed. In Žižek’s terms, this is:
[C]offee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol [...] the list goes on. (Žižek 2003).
In the case of Badiou, what we have is the supreme subject of a truth-event (Paul) with neither a truth (Christianity) nor an event (resurrection); we have, in effect, a Christianity deprived of its mythological (and thus malignant) content, and Paul the pedlar of a fable (Badiou 2003, p. 3). The celebrated resurrection of Paul for contemporary philosophy turns out to be as fantastical and empty of content as that of Christ’s. Indeed, by including Paul within his oeuvre, Badiou strategically negates in advance any comparisons between his thought and the apostle’s, permanently ensuring Paul’s exclusion from the domains of truth. As a consequence of the impossibility of Christ’s resurrection being recognised within any knowledge-economy, even Paul’s own (2003, p. 45), no amount of proofs or counter-proofs solve anything: it is literally Paul’s word against Badiou’s. Not being provable is in any case how Badiou understands the existence of an event within a given situation (Hallward, p. 115). An intervention is required to break the dead-lock of circular thinking; and so we turn to Kierkegaard, who, theologian Marcus Pound says, himself turned to the story of Abraham as a means of traumatising his contemporaries against their neurotic quest for objective certainties and religious guarantees (Pound 2007, pp. 97, 112). An intervention in this sense follows Badiou’s own use of the word, in which what is important or interesting is not the circular debates regarding whether an event has taken place, but rather the enunciation of it (Hallward, p. 125). In the case of Kierkegaard's Abraham, there is no event to speak of; there is only fidelity to a truth that makes impossible (and immoral) demands that explicitly contradict earlier pronouncements.[1] The implications of drawing Badiou into closer orbit around Kierkegaard is for a challenging and deepening of the theological discussion regarding his work that he has welcomed, if not encouraged (Miller, 2005, pp. 41, 42).
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| Kierkegaard |
The moment is that ambiguity in which time and the eternal touch each other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time.
At this point the charge could be brought against both philosophers that this definition of truth appears individualistic to the point of solipsism. For Badiou, though, the four paradigms to which he refers the evental-truth all include a social dimension in the outworking of that which seizes the artist, the politician, the scientist, or the lover. Likewise, for Kierkegaard, the subjectivity of truth does not collapse within itself, as though the subject were capable of remaining faithful to a reality of their own private imagining. The necessarily created finitude of man for Kierkegaard always mitigates against any charge of solipsism. Thus he is not proposing that the individual creates that to which he remains faithful, but is instead subject to it, being seized as much as seizing.
From this perspective, moral dilemmas are no substitute for the decision of whether or not to cling, or to continue clinging, to that which has seized one as a truth-event and which constitutes the defining moment of one’s life. The conclusion of which, is that it is better to cling to that which has come upon one as a crisis of evental-truth than it is to worry about the universal ethical concerns of society. For Badiou, one is either true to that by which one has been seized, or one is not in a relation to the truth at all; there can be no relation to truth in general. Once more, as will be discussed below, the shadow of Kierkegaard goes before Badiou.
Abraham: Monster Or Saint?
In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Kierkegaard works through his idea that any truth which is merely the correspondence of mind with its object is the worst kind of truth: a truth that is boring because it is true only in an objective sense. Who would die, for example, to defend the truth that 1 + 1 = 2? ‘In a mathematical proposition [...], the objectivity is given [as certain], but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth’ (2000, p. 207). The more objectively certain we can be about a truth, the less personal stake such a truth can claim for itself. Only that which is grasped subjectively as an internal truth in which the individual has a personal stake, as with Badiou’s ‘event’, is a truth for Kierkegaard worthy of the name. Thus, to stake one’s life on what does not give certainty, security, and guarantee in an objective sense is the ‘highest truth’. He writes (2000, p. 207):
An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person.
To stake one’s life, therefore, on that which can be objectively guaranteed is to not stake one’s life at all; it is merely to be in possession of the existential version of a receipt. For Kierkegaard, one can be entirely correct, but still be in untruth, because the point is to take the risk even of being wrong in order to emerge as a subject of truth. The point is that such a truth is inherently risky, because one’s whole subjective orientation is directed towards that which cannot be objectively verified, but can only be grasped in and as that which is uncertain.
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| The angel intervening in the Sacrifice of Isaac |
“That I ought not to kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God – of that I am not certain [...].” (Kant 1996, p. 283).
The moral horror with which Kant views the story is not lost on Kierkegaard. Yet, it is precisely this disjuncture between the ethical duty of care for one’s son and obedience to God which propels the tension of the story; he writes (Kierkegaard 1983, p. 112), ‘I cannot understand Abraham – I can only admire him.’ More recently, the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, not surprisingly, recognised the possibility in Kierkegaard’s reading of the story to transcend the ethical through fidelity to the objectively uncertain (i.e. religious belief) and justify violence. He writes (Lévinas 1996, p. 72):
Harshness and aggressivity in thought [...] henceforth justify this violence and terrorism. It is not just a question of literary form. Violence emerges in Kierkegaard at the precise moment when, moving beyond the esthetic stage, existence can no longer limit itself to what it takes to be an ethical stage and enters the religious one, the domain of belief.
Kierkegaard, in this respect, is closer to Badiou than Lévinas, for whom the latter’s ethics precludes the possibility of anything breaking with the hegemony of that which is ethically certain within a given situation (Woodard, p. 35). Summing up the central dilemma, Ronald Green (Hannay and Marino 1998, p. 263) writes:
Fear and Trembling [...] produces a jarring inconsistency. [It] seems to hold up as exemplary and somehow worthy of imitation a kind of conduct that we cannot possibly encourage, defend, or understand in terms of general moral values.
As with Kant, Kierkegaard acknowledges that the ethical is universal in its claims, whereas the individual is singular; unlike Kant, he sees faith as the reversal of this order, placing the commands of ethics below his fidelity to God. From Badiou’s perspective this means that the truth by which Abraham has been seized, and which he in turn seizes, calls for him to sacrifice the son who, not incidentally, had originally come to him as a result of his prior fidelity to this truth. In Kierkegaard’s case this truth refers to the God of the Bible; for Badiou, by contrast, the religious category of evental-truth is absent. For him, while being able to see the form that the event of truth took in the writings of Paul, the suspicion remains that Christianity, or religious thinking in general, could become a means of reintroducing abstract universal ethical truths through the backdoor, so to speak. God becomes, in this case, not so much an instantiation of evental-truth as a guarantor of bourgeois morality. Badiou thus dismisses any attempt by Lévinas, to insinuate religion back into philosophical discourse, under the cover of and via investigations into the phenomenology of otherness. He writes (2001, p. 22):
The Other, as he appears to me in the order of the finite, must be the epiphany of a properly infinite distance to the other, the traversal of which is the originary ethical experience.
This means that in order to be intelligible, ethics requires that the Other be in some sense carried by a principle of alterity which transcends mere finite experience. Lévinas calls this principle the ‘Altogether-Other’, and it is quite obviously the ethical name for God.
For Badiou, Lévinas’ attempt to found an ethics on the inter-relationship between self and other, a relationship which is grounded upon an absolute Other (God), merely restates the idea in philosophically sophisticated language of the impossibility of moral goodness without a guarantee provided by the divine. It amounts to saying, he writes, that ‘[t]here can be no ethics without God the ineffable’ (2001, p. 22). Such philosophy, according to Badiou, is not philosophy, but has, rather, been ‘annulled by theology’ that is not so much a theology as an excuse to find a stable ground for ethics (2001, p. 23). As a potential category of truth religion thus occupies a highly unstable space within Badiou’s thought, bearing the formal characteristics of an event as epitomised by St Paul, whilst ostensibly moving in the opposite direction back towards an ethics of conventional morality. In drawing Kierkegaard close to Badiou one can see an opposite effect occurring. The point here, though, is not to argue for or against either Badiou or Lévinas, and certainly not for the inclusion of religion as a guarantor of universal ethics of society within the former’s categories of evental-truth. In this, no doubt, Kierkegaard and Badiou would be in complete agreement, insofar as any attempt to secure for ethics a hook in objective certainty, religious or otherwise, misses the movement that the event of truth takes within the coming to humanity of the one caught up in the crisis of it. The point here, rather, is to peel back the layers of the original crisis which precipitates the event of truth for the subject in Badiou, to an illumination of that which is a crisis for the original crisis, and for which Kierkegaard’s study of Abraham is the best example. What this means for Kierkegaard is that Abraham’s continued fidelity to the uncertain event of faith placed the subject (himself) of that event necessarily in doubt; e.g. is Abraham righteous in his faithfulness (and justified thereby) or is he simply a moral monster? It is within what Kierkegaard described as the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ that can here be seen a step beyond the avowedly a-religious model of evental-truth espoused by Badiou; not as a step towards a spurious objective certainty but towards a fidelity which is itself a crisis of the first order. The use of bringing Kierkegaard into a discussion of Badiou’s notion of evental-truth becomes clearer, in that the former is able to both confirm the latter’s position whilst also radicalising it and allowing for that which is the exemplar of an event to be readmitted without slipping an ethics of religious certitude into the bargain.
The crisis for Abraham consists, then, not in making the initial leap into the uncertain subjective truth to which he adheres (and for which he had shown his fidelity by submitting to the call to leave Mesopotamia, a name change, and circumcision[3]), but in his continual submission to such a truth in the teeth of universally valid ethical demands that rightly condemn infanticide. Kierkegaard is right to point out here that for Abraham the temptation is not to some morally dubious perversion, but rather a temptation to the ethical itself, a temptation to not murder his son in the face of the demands of that which constitutes his evental-truth (2000, p. 100). The religious, or however one wants to frame that which has become the truth of Abraham, can hardly here be seen to be supporting an objectively certain ethics in the model of, say, the Kantian Categorical Imperative to make one’s actions universally valid for all people at all times (Kant 1976, p. 67).
In Badiou’s terms, by orientating himself in fidelity towards the evental-truth, Abraham faces this second crisis when that truth brazenly conflicts with universally valid ethical demands. By staking his life in fidelity to the evental-truth that had seized him, Abraham not only placed his trust in that which was objectively uncertain (God), but in that which was in direct opposition to the objectively valid demand that a father must not murder his son: his fidelity literally knew no bounds, neither good nor evil. In order to stay true, to remain a human subject of the kind Badiou describes, Abraham faced the soul-destroying possibility that this event, this God, to whom he is faithful may be either non-existent, mad or evil. Abraham’s situation represents an extreme form of the ‘personal crisis’ which beset people from time to time. In this case, the crisis does not consist so much in a transition from one sense of personhood to another (as in, for example, ‘coming out’ narratives), but rather in clinging to that which for him by constituting his horizon of truth made him who he was. Insofar as fidelity to the original event constitutes the horizon of possible subjectivity, freedom, and being ‘immortal’ the crisis encountered by Abraham consisted in being faithful to the point at which that very subjectivity, freedom and ‘immortality’ themselves are at stake. This is the chief crisis to which this essay has been aiming, the crisis of the possibility in Kierkegaard of subjective annihilation through that which has been opened up by the evental-truth described by Badiou. Through entering into fidelity Abraham attains to what Kierkegaard (2000, p. 101) describes as the
teleological suspension of the ethical. As the single individual he became higher than the universal. This is the paradox that cannot be mediated. [...] If this is not Abraham’s situation, then Abraham is not even a tragic hero but a murderer.
The stakes, indeed, are high, and in one sense, then, Abraham gets off lightly in his crisis from faith for faith because God provides a ram for the sacrifice, allowing Isaac to live. In another sense there is very little to distinguish Abraham from a murderer except his fidelity to a truth-event which posits the teleological suspension of the ethical described by Kierkegaard. The problem that Lévinas might rightly have with both the believer Kierkegaard and the atheist Badiou is that they posit the potentially terrifying possibility of a good beyond ethics, of a good not grounded in morality (conventional or otherwise) but still requiring fidelity in the absence of certainty. In this regard, Badiou also exposes the a-morality made explicit in Paul’s writings through his fidelity to the event of the resurrection (Badiou 2003, p. 101). We do not have here the certainty of religious fundamentalism (which is simply the degeneration of faith to the level of an imagined objective guarantee), but the uncertainty of fidelity; and this fidelity, as Badiou bears witness to, is as much a potential danger for each of his four secular categories as it is in the case of Abraham’s religion. This of course highlights the necessarily ambiguous nature of that which Badiou has attempted to illustrate through his idea of the event. That is, that where fidelity itself is raised to the level of the prime good, where fidelity defines that which is good, the result may well look to those under the sway of social morality as either unambiguously good or unambiguously evil: only time (which itself is opened up by this event) will tell. In the story of Abraham this was circumnavigated through the displacement of Isaac on the altar by a ram provided at the last moment (though Abraham was given no assurance that this would be so). This further underlines the point made by Badiou that the truth of such events are not necessarily known either before or during their occurrence, but rather awaken retroactively in the hole that is punched by them in the prevailing knowledge-economy (Badiou 2001, p. 43). This ambiguity is that which Lévinas justly fears, and Kierkegaard acknowledges so much when he states that, contrary to the idea that actuality is heavy and possibility light, ‘possibility is the weightiest of all categories. It is true that we often hear the opposite stated [...]’ (2000, p. 154). He continues:
[I]n possibility all things are equally possible, and whoever has truly been brought up by possibility has grasped the terrible as well as the joyful. So when such a person graduates from the school of possibility, and he knows better than a child knows his ABCs that he can demand absolutely nothing from life and that the terrible, perdition and annihilation live next door to every man [...].
What we have then is a situation in which for Lévinas ethics, being founded upon an absolute Other, is not saved from being in thrall to socially recognised morality; indeed, the absolute Other acts to guarantee the continued reign of such an ethical system. Badiou recognises this and rightly condemns Lévinas’ position as a philosophy infiltrated by a form of thinly disguised theo-ethics. For Kierkegaard, however, if one reads him following Badiou’s theory of the event, the absolute Other by no means guarantees the realm of ethics, but instead monstrously subverts that system by making ethical behaviour itself a temptation to be resisted. The monstrosity of Kierkegaard’s God is a monstrosity in the Kantian sense of the mathematically sublime, as being the inability of the imagination to apprehend that which confronts it in the demands it makes upon the fidelity of one such as Abraham to those demands. Kierkegaard would seem to agree with both Lévinas and Kant when he points out the inherent dangers of this as being the potentially terrible perdition of the one who ‘graduates from the school of possibility.’ Freedom, then, as the possibility of future potentiality both allows for the coming-to-be of who or what we are, and draws that very same fidelity-orientated subjectivity into the orbit of the philosophical/ethical version of a black hole, the centre of which provides no objective certainty. The problem with Badiou’s exclusion of Christianity from the domains of truth is not that he doesn’t believe in God, but that he too reasonably draws back from the empty abyss marked by the absence of God. By rejecting the religious category in evental-truth he makes his philosophy safe from this abyss in a way that Kierkegaard was manifestly not afraid to do.
In fidelity to the truth-event the subject is left in radical uncertainty, which only retrospectively reveals itself as being what it is. Clearly, what is not being argued for here is the idea that the principle of the event can be applied to determine any kind of socially recognised ethics, since what then would distinguish the labour of a Ghandi from the labour of a Hitler except the judgement of historians? Indeed, to argue for an ethics based on the model provided by either Kierkegaard or Badiou would be inherently antithetical to that model since any event or choice cannot be forced. One can argue that Kierkegaard both provides a way out of the theo-ethics of bourgeois morality apparently espoused by Lévinas, and beyond the contradictions of Badiou, who by tearing evental form from content in a figure like Paul effectively turns wine into water (2000, p. 95). That such a position opens the subject to terrifying possibilities is par for the course for Kierkegaard for whom certainty is no basis on which to stake one’s life.
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