Joining the Sorry Parade

At Church and Postmodern Culture, Dr. Carl put up a post about Deleuze and Globochrist. Dominic Fox was the first to comment, calling the post “a sorry parade of solecisms.” Now that I’ve submitted to Dominic’s stern discipline, now that I’ve naughtily whispered the blasphemy (“Badiou is a PoMo heeheehee”) without getting caught, I think maybe it’s safe for me to come out from under the covers.

I’m looking at the article that Dominic tossed in before slamming the door behind him (“and don’t make me have to come back in here…”), where Badiou sets up a contrast between himself and Deleuze with respect to THE EVENT. I’m not wondering about whether Badiou is a disciple of Deleuze or whether Badiou is “taking Deleuze from behind,” producing a monstrous offspring that is no longer purely Deleuzian. I’m not even yet prepared to decide whether Deleuze or Badiou is right, or which position I agree with more. I’m wondering about the question they’re asking and why it’s important.

Here is Deleuze’s Axiom 1: Unlimited becoming becomes the event itself.

In contrast, here is Badiou’s Axiom 1: An event is never the concentration of a vital continuity, or the immanent intensification of a becoming. It is never coextensive with becoming. It is, on the contrary, on the side of a pure break with the becoming of an object of the world, through the auto-apparition of this object. Correlatively, it is the supplementation of apparition by the emergence of a trace: what formerly inexisted becomes intense existence.

By staking out his position Badiou answers a prior question: is an “event” continuous or discontinuous with the conditions that precede and lead up to it? I ask whether this question is interesting to me. What is an “event”? I don’t mean the “Christ event,” or even Biblical events more broadly, but events in contemporary life. If every event is an outgrowth of the conditions that led up to it, does this imply a continual and deterministic unfolding of whatever was present “in the beginning”? If, on the other hand, an event is a “pure break,” does it imply that every event is something like a miracle?

In contemplating human creation I wonder whether the creative act is natural “from the ground up,” an eventual manifestation of nature transforming itself, or whether the creator has to transform nature by some other power. If it’s the former, can we really call it creation; if the latter, is it still strictly human?

I’m also interested in psychological practice. In unblocking the passage between inside and outside, between desire and fulfillment, does the self become so thin as virtually to disappear? On the other hand, if the self transforms everything, both inside and outside, does the self become a “pure break,” something radically other than nature?

Even though I’m not well-read in Deleuze or Badiou, the question they ask about THE EVENT and the contrasting answers they offer are directly relevant to my ongoing projects of creation and therapy. It’s possible to conduct a broad and aimless survey, but at some point you have to have something of which you’re trying to make sense. Having this question of meaning puts you in collaboration with others who also are trying to make sense of the same thing.

Th emerging Christians have recruited the PoMos in their critique of Modernism and in exploring new Biblical hermeneutics. Sometimes it seems that the Christians merely want to plug these thinkers into predetermined slots — Badiou sees event as pure break, Badiou sees the Christ Event as paradigmatic, therefore Badiou supports the Christian story. That approach seems like a distortion and a waste of time — the Christians ought to be able to mount their own cultural critique and their own apologetics. But if the Christians can think about the questions that are being asked and decide whether these are also questions a Christian might ask, then these writers become colleagues in the search for an answer, or at least for a trajectory. Is THE EVENT immanent or transcendent — not just the Christ event but any event, regardless of its religious significance or whether Christians are involved in it? If this is an interesting question to Christians, then it should be possible to mount a project and a series of focused readings. The PoMo engagement becomes something more substantial and meaningful.