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(C. Jardin) #1
COME ON, HUMANS, ONE MORE EFFORT!

highlights all the more the difference between a God withdrawing into the purely symbolic
function of paternity and a God, creator of the Law, and thus omnipotent, who from
time to time manifests his power by intervening in earthly matters. It also highlights the
fact that in the Old Testament Abraham is the father and God is the Law. The Old Testa-
ment had to take extraordinary measures to remind men that fathers are subject to the
paternal law, the law of the signifier. The progress made by the New Testament is mea-
sured: God finds himself, so to speak, in the position of Abraham, and this is quite a blow
for the patriarchate. You don’t have to read the Scriptures (it’s enough to go to the
movies) to find out that when the patriarchate feels threatened, it never hesitates to sacri-
fice and humiliate its sons. It is reproduced in just this way when the Oedipus complex
no longer plays its normative role (as in, e.g., Thomas Vinterberg’s filmFesten). Then the
Oedipal conflict, settled by the humiliation of the son, is the perverse driving force behind
the reproduction of a patriarchate that is all the more inured because humiliation and
not the normative resolution of the Oedipal conflict is the channel through which the
phallic torch is passed down; the phallus, henceforth, can be conceived only as a power
to humiliate in turn.
But reproducing the patriarchate is not what the humiliation of Christ abandoned by
his Father at Golgotha is meant to do. I would advance as a sign, though not a proof, of
this the total absence of Oedipal conflict. ‘‘Thy will be done,’’ the Son says to the Father,
and the clouds darken—another concession to belief and to the miraculous, but one that
ill disguises the new and scandalous powerlessness of the Father. Without this powerless-
ness, one could not understand why the resurrection is the event. It would just be acoup
de the ́aˆtre, with the Father pulling the strings. But the Father is helpless and the Son arises
on his own. It is only then that humankind is ‘‘filialized’’ in the equally shared hope of
its own resurrection. This prompts Badiou to say that the death of Christ is merely the
siteof his resurrection. Yet it seems difficult to me to separate, as Badiou does, the resur-
rection from the Passion and to claim—a somewhat mechanical consequence of this re-
fusal of mediation—that it is possible for us to take the place of the Son. It is his very
own utopia. For my part, I think that Badiou is insufficiently disenchanted because he is
too militant, that instead of disentangling the political and the religious, he ties them up
in knots again, and that he runs the risk of once more eliding the issue of the feminine.
For Gauchet, on the contrary, it is impossible for us to take the place of the Son because
it is already taken.^12 In consequence, humankind is ‘‘filialized’’ for no more than the
time it needs to be emancipated. Paradoxically, this will be humankind freed from its
subordination to the power of the father because it refers its fraternity—and its soror-
ity—to the empty place of the symbolic father rather than the filled place of the incarnated
son. Because Badiou abstracts the event from its ‘‘site,’’ he holds that ‘‘God renounces his
transcendent separation’’ precisely where I would tend to see him renouncing his patriar-
chal omnipotence, that He ‘‘unseparates himself through filiation’’ precisely where I
would tend to see him keeping stalwartly in his separate, symbolic father’s place, and that


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