In a recent review of Badiou's essays, Žižek's cover blurb was quoted: "one final "figure like Plato or Hegel [who] walks here among us!"" (It elicited a negative reaction from Brian Leiter.) Now cover blurbs are designed to sell books, of course, but Žižek's jokes are often serious play (cf. Plato, say, Laws, 803). It is worth reflecting briefly on the fact that Žižek is cutely echoing (or transforming) Exodus 29:45 or Leviticus 26:12. If we free-associate a bit then we can say that God is divided in three (Plato, Hegel, Badiou). So, Žižek is (like Nietzsche and a few others since) closing the metaphysical tradition, yet again. Žižek is also not-so-subtly dissing the rest of us; If Plato-Hegel-Badiou are Godlike, the rest of us are the Israelites (enuff said) with Žižek playing the scribe. As Jeff Bell reminded me, in the introduction to Being and Event, Badiou present himself as a part of (maybe even provoking) -- to quote Badiou -- a "new departure," or, in my terminology, philosophic prophecy. His book is, as Badiou tells us, "in conformity to the sacred mystery of the Trinity,...'three-in-one.'"
But as we learn from the start of the Timaeus, there is a missing fourth: Descartes, who had, in fact, better use for the Gods: "Dii male perdeant [sic]/Antiquos, mea qui praeripuere mihi." In Lachterman's translation: "Let the Gods cruelly destroy/the Ancients, who snatched my things/away from me beforehand." Leaving aside Descartes' expansive notion of property rights, Lachterman (The Ethics of Geometry, 128) notes that Descartes expresses the wish to embrace "radical novelty" (excplicitly accepting the violence that this presupposes). That is, Descartes wishes to be like Adam in Paradise. Lachterman, who is oddly unread, goes on to quote a poem by Constantijn Huygens in which God and Adam are dispensed, and the mathematician Descartes gives birth to himself from nature (129-130).
For many of us it often seems that the alternatives are a tradition of sacred mystery and (outsourced violent) autonomous-self-construction.
[Update: thanks to Michael Kremer, who caught some typos in the Latin quote from Descartes.--ES]
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