Alain Badiou: Between theology and anti-theology
by Phelps, Hollis D., Iv, Ph.D., THE CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY, 2011, 344 pages; 3445422

Abstract:

This dissertation interrogates the relationship between the philosophy of Alain Badiou and Christian theology. More specifically, the argument of this dissertation is that Badiou’s philosophy, despite its professed atheism, remains conditioned by Christian theological concepts and the formal elements of Christian eschatology. For this reason, it is possible to read Badiou’s philosophy as situated somewhere between theology and anti-theology. To make this claim, this dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 reads Badiou’s philosophy as structured around the theme of the death of God, which he understands in a threefold sense as the death of the God of religion, the God of metaphysics, and the God of the poem. Chapter 2 interprets the main elements of Badiou’s ontology—the identification of mathematics and ontology, the multiple-without-one, the void, and the infinite—as an anti-theology. Chapter 3 examines in detail the formal aspects of Badiou’s theory of truth and the subject, including the categories related to the latter. Chapter 4 discusses the truth procedures of science, art, love, and politics as conditions for philosophy, the interrelation among them, and the roles that sophism and anti-philosophy play in the construction of philosophy. On the basis of the ground covered in the first four chapters, Chapter 5 isolates a theological element that coincides with anti-philosophy at the heart of Badiou’s philosophy, and argues that this element is, in turn, structured by a formalized eschatology.

 
AdviserRoland Faber
SchoolTHE CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY
SourceDAI/A 72-06, p. , Apr 2011
Source TypeDissertation
SubjectsReligion; Philosophy; Theology
Publication Number3445422
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