24,656
edits
Changes
no edit summary
<b>Slavoj Zizek</b>: My problem with Badiou, although I admire his book very much, is that Badiou... allows for only four truth procedures: science, art, politics, and love (and then philosophy is just the study of these genetic procedures ...). The point is that his supreme example of a truth-procedure‹event, and so on‹its implicit model 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.<br>
Which is why I refer, in the last pages of my <i>On Belief</i> , to that weird English catholic novel by Evelyn Waugh <i>Brideshead Revisited</i>, where you have exactly this. For the heroine, it would be ethical to marry the guy, now [at the end], because she is divorced. But she says no. Her only way to maintain fidelity to God is to go on changing lovers like crazy. Ethical would be, as Kierkegaard puts it (in a wonderful way apropos Abraham) the ethical is sheer interpretation itself. To act ethically, as opposed to religiously... from a religious perspective ethics is not something you should stick to against temptation. The ethical, as such, is the temptation. Which is why, again, this crazy leap of faith into the religious, can well appear, to external observers, to those not within the event, as merely aesthetic, as some kind of aesthetic regression. And again I think that to return to a diagnosis of where we are today, I think that precisely what I find horrible in these new forms of spirituality is that we are simply losing our sense for these kinds of paradoxes, which are the very core of Christianity.<br><br>