THINKING WITHOUT GOD?

So far we have charted and critiqued the very different ways in which Badiou and Nancy seek to respond to the death of God, Badiou in terms of the threefold affirmation that ‘God is dead’ and Nancy with a deconstruction of Christianity. They seek to avoid both the parasitism of imitative atheism (seeking to be rid of God in ways that assume or require God) and the asceticism of residual atheism (renouncing or retrenching, along with God, the notions of truth, goodness and beauty and so on that he underwrites) by searching for an post-theological integration that is neither parasitic nor ascetic. Now we come to the apex of our study: the question of atheism itself. In this chapter we seek to penetrate to the heart of Badiou's and Nancy's approaches to post-theological integration and to scrutinise their respective dominant motifs, asking whether either position succeeds in thinking without God. For Badiou post-theological integration hangs on his deployment of axioms. Both being and truths are axiomatic for Badiou, but because truths require the context of a mathematised ontology, we shall examine in the main the primary ontological axioms of the void and of infinity, upon which the rest of Badiou's thought rests.