Meillassoux on Badiou’s latent Christian eschatology
May 15, 2008
“Badiou is thus here in extreme fidelity… – with the structure, if not the contents – of Christian eschatology. It is by no means the denial of this dream, as it is he who makes of Paul the “founder of universalism”: that which seized the first militant nature, and not the erudition, of truth. In this sense it without doubt represents one of the possible evolutions of Marxism, shared since the beginning between critical thought and revolutionary eschatology. A great part of the ex-Marxists renounced eschatology, considering that it was effectively religious residue, a principal source among the promethean disasters of real socialism. The singularity of Badiou seems on the contrary to consist of this: that he isolates from Marxism its eschatologic share, separates it from its pretension, that he considers economic scientificity illusory, and delivers it, burning, on the disseminated subjects of all kinds of struggles, political as well as amorous. With the place of the religious illusion of eschatology dissolved by criticism in the writings of Badiou, eschatology becomes irreligious so that the event can deploy its critical power on the colorless present of our ordinary renouncements.”
from his essay, History and Event in the Writings of Alain Badiou. Trans. Keith Tilford
