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HENT DE VRIES

been ‘‘condemned to being the medium and the vehicle of incarnation, receiving their
own incarnation only as feedback from this Word made flesh through their agency’’
(something that can be countered by artistic and conceptual counterimages, such as ‘‘an
incarnate image not born from the breath of a God and the womb of a Virgin,’’ as pre-
pared by some contemporary artworks; p. 661). Another would be to consider some
central tenets of post-Holocaust Judaism, as differently articulated by Hans Jonas and
Levinas, which dismantle the Christian doctrine of incarnation from a different vantage
point.
Rather than pursuing this line of thought, de Duve reexamines how Mary’s virginity-
maternity has historically been privileged over Joseph’s ‘‘virginity-paternity’’—which, in
accord with Jacques Lacan’s ‘‘Christian translation of Freud,’’ he takes to symbolize the
patriarchal fear concerning uncertain paternitytout court—and insists that the phallus,
not unlike political sovereignty and its equivalents, is thus ‘‘a sign without any signified.’’
Rereading the Gospels thus, against the grain, yields a psychoanalytically conceived reli-
gious exit from religion, or, as de Duve says, a ‘‘post-Christian utopia’’ that resembles the
modern predicament of skepticism, as theorized by Stanley Cavell: ‘‘when it has been
understood that paternity consists in acquiescing in a basic uncertainty through an act of
faith, and faith in the faith of the other—which is to say, that the man who gives his name
to a child relies blindly on the trust he puts in the faithfulness of his woman—the power
of the fathers evaporates. Obviously, this has been understood from the outset, but one
doesn’t wish to admit it because it calls for too much love. Foolish are those who think
that a DNA test can be a substitute’’ (p. 663).
A further inquiry addresses, via a reading of Alain Badiou’s suggestive interpretation
of St. Paul, what de Duve calls ‘‘the political meaning of the resurrection of Christ,’’ which
as ‘‘laicized grace’’ (Badiou) and a pluralization of the event and eventhood of incarna-
tion, ‘‘proceeds by way of humankind’s becoming the son—humankind transfixed by an
event, like Paul on the road to Damascus.’’ In this view, ‘‘Revolutions, including the
French one, may be such events’’ (p. 664). This is another way of breaking away from the
doctrine of incarnation, conceived in terms of ‘‘mediation,’’ albeit this time not by exiting
religion (for which Badiou seems to have no further use or concern) from within (as
de Duve himself, following Gauchet, attempts). Incarnation becomes the event of God’s
renouncing His transcendent separation, which de Duve takes as His renouncing His
patriarchical omnipotence. This brings us back to the earlier point: ‘‘The abandonment
of the Son by the Father is neither the negative moment in a dialectical process nor simply
the ‘site’ of the resurrection [as Badiou asserts]. It refers back to Christ’s birth, and every
birth is the particular resurrection of the life that is transmitted through it—there is
absolutely no need to believe in the Christian fable to be in awe of this’’ (p. 666). In the
end, it also refers to a further scene of abandonment, which exceeds the one that left
Adam his freedom to sin further (and still allowed men to ‘‘wait for the Messiah who will
deliver them’’; p. 669). Now, as the Father abandons the Son at the cross, this situation

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