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NOTES TO PAGES 652–66

Thierry de Duve, Come On, Humans, One More Effort if You Want to be Post-
Christians!

An earlier version of this essay appeared in the catalog for Heaven, an exhibition held from
July 30 to October 17, 1999, at the Kunsthall Du ̈sseldorf, and from December 11 to February 27,
2000, at the Tate Gallery, published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany.

1. Marcel Gauchet,Le De ́senchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion(Paris:
   Gallimard, 1985), v.


2. Ibid., 12.


3. Max Weber,The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism(London: Routledge, 1992).


4. Olympe de Gouges (1755–93), French woman of letters, of revolutionary persuasion, au-
   thor of theDe ́claration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne(1792).


5. See: Hans Jonas,Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz: Eine ju ̈dische Stimme(Frankfurt am
   Main: Suhrkamp, 1984); Emmanuel Levinas,Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo,
   trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), andTotality and Infinity: An
   Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).


6. Levinas,Ethics and Infinity, 99.


7. ‘‘To my mind, the Infinite comes in the signifyingness of the face. The facesignifiesthe
   Infinite. It never appears as a theme, but in this ethical signifyingness itself; that is, in the fact that
   the more I am just the more I am responsible; one is never quits with regard to the Other’’ (ibid.,
   105). And also: ‘‘The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whosemeaningconsists in
   saying: ‘thou shalt not kill’ ’’ (ibid., 87).


8. See Marie-Jose ́Mondzain,Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Sources of the Contemporary
   Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).


9. Alain Badiou,Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford:
   Stanford University Press, 2003), 74.


10. Ibid., 59.


11. ‘‘We are confronted here with a profound general problem: Can one conceive of the event
    as a function, as a mediation? We should mention in passing that this question ran through the
    entire epoch of revolutionary politics. For many of those faithful to it, the revolution is not what
    arrives, but what must arrive so that there can be something else; it is communism’s mediation, the
    moment of the negative.... For Paul, by contrast, just as for those who think a revolution is a self-
    sufficient sequence of political truth, Christ isa coming[une venue]; he is what interrupts the
    previous regime of discourses. Christ is, in himself and for himself,what happens to us.And what
    is it that happens to us thus? We are relieved of the law.... This question is decisive for Paul,
    because it is only by being relieved of the law that one truly becomes a son. And an event is falsified
    if it does not give rise to a universal becoming-son. Through the event, we enter into filial equality’’
    (ibid., 48–49).


12. Gauchet,Le De ́senchantement du monde,195–97.


13. ‘‘Through Christ’s death, God renounces his transcendent separation, he unseparates him-
    self through filiation and shares in a constitutive dimension of the divided human subject. In so
    doing he creates, not the event, but what I call its site’’ (Badiou,Saint Paul,70).


14. Ibid., 10–11.


15. For example: ‘‘The wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does... and
    likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does’’ (1 Corinthians 7:4, quoted
    in ibid., 104).

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