Milbank K

Milbank K
Links
Reason
Pure reason erases the lived reality of the world, flattening
away the act of experience from our ontological registers.
Their epistemology is divorced from the Infinity which grants it
being.
Milbank 99 (John Milbank, KNOWLEDGE: The theological critique of philosophy
in Hamann and Jacobi, Radical Orthodoxy: A new theology, eds. John Milbank,
Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, Routledge, 1999, p. 25-26)
But how can I possibly substantiate these large claims for Hamann and Jacobis significance? And, in particular, how
could they possibly have challenged philosophy as such, that is to say the possibility of pure disinterested rational
inquiry as such? One key here is Hamanns deployment, after Francis Bacon, of the figure of Pontius Pilate, in
Aesthetica in Nuce.13 Pilate represents enlightenment, since he both rules and inquires after truth. What is truth?
he asks, as if to ask What is enlightenment? But, notoriously, he only jests, and will not stay for an answer. If he
had stayed, of course, he would actually have seen the truth, enthroned before him as a suffering body. Therefore,
Hamann suggests, in turning his back, Pilate has separated the inquiry after truth from sensory vision. Moreover he
has not simply turned his back on sensation and the body. His gesture of handwashing implies either that he is
about to eat a meal or that he has carried out a death sentence. The former, for Hamann, is the figure of a basely
sensual relation to reality: we consume it, altogether end it, for our pleasure. The second, however, is a figure for
purely rational relation to the world: it, too, ends the real (though without ingesting the
corpse) because it abstracts from it, or takes from it only what is absolutely
clearly graspable: but this of course must remove all its qualities, its
objective existence, and even its real spatiality, since this dissolves into
space-less points and lines. The rational gaze on space evaporates the
real into phantoms, whereas to hold on to each reality we must regard it
as an unfathomable revelation. Equally, a rational gaze which seeks the
objectively true, must seek the stable, and therefore that which can be
held still in a present instance. But since, argues Hamann in his Fliegende Brief, the
present moment is also a measureless point, here too the rational gaze on
time must lose hold of the real .14 Reason, pure philosophic reason, like modern
has, he claims, a totally non-realist impulse , which leaves commonsense
perception altogether behind. It turns out by contrastand here Hamann like Jacobi is
indebted to both Hume and Reid that a kind of faith is involved in everyday life when
we recognise the real.15 This does not at all mean for Hamann, or for Jacobi, that since we know only
science,
what we think, or our own inner sensations, we need faith to believe in an external world or our own noumenal
we see directly the

real world, not mirrored sensations from which we infer the real , and both also
believe that our ontological identity lies only in our characteristic patterns of
repeated external action.16 The question is ratherare these primary
appearances themselves disclosive of the real, or do they float upon a void
to which they afford no clue? If we assume the latter, then the only solid
reality in things will be what we can logically grasp as instantiating
repeated laws, and the commonsense reality of things will then evaporate
in the manner already indicated. As Jacobi argued in relation to Spinoza, if pure reason
can accept as real only the identically repeated according to logically
necessitated laws, then a fated chain without meaning must float above
an abyss identified by the fundamental law of identity: a=a. This abyss is
reality. On the contrary, both thinkers (especially Jacobi) believe, after Reid, that
the underlying real, and yet it is nothing; the only something is the
phenomenal fated flux, yet as only phenomenal this is also nothing . In this
fashion, Jacobi was able to argue that the Spinozistic absolute, being not in
addition to its phenomenal modes of expression, was a void, and that
Spinozism was really nihilism.17 Moreover, by claiming that Leibniz and Wolff equally identified the
real with the logically necessitated, Jacobi was also able to claim that all Germanic rationalism could take a
consistent form only as an immanentist nihilism on the Spinozistic pattern.18 Finally and supremely, he was able to
show that Kants critical turn left unperturbed the requirement that the real be only recognised before a court of
irresistible rational necessity (even if this now admitted the synthetic a priori) and with the same basic upshot: the
Spinozistic void re-appears as the things-in-themselves which are epistemologically nothing, and therefore beyond
Kant (as Fichte soon agreed with Jacobi) might as well be nothing. And again, what we truly know are only
appearancesso, in effect, once more: nothing.19
Rationalism turns everything into nothing

These steps of the argument are spelled out by Jacobi rather than Hamann; indeed Hamann denied that he was
prepared to affirm that Spinozism must lead to nihilism.20 And yet here, as elsewhere, there is a certain strange
peevishness about Hamanns response to Jacobi, which disguises the fact that he nearly always concurs with the
philosophical abstraction makes

real appearances vanish, and that without God, created things can only be
perceived as nothing since they are, indeed, in themselves nothing .21 His
latter. Hence in the present case, Hamann claims precisely that
short cryptic statements to this effect seem to require an elucidation along the lines of Jacobis argumentation. And
it is, in fact, this line of reasoning, despite Hamanns accusation that

Jacobi was too otherworldly, which alone secures the central Hamannian
insight that worship of God and celebration of corporeality and sensual
beauty absolutely require each other. For the point here for Hamann is that we have a
sense of the corporeal depth of things only because we take the surface of
things as signs disclosing or promising such a depth. This primordial and
spontaneous human attitude has, Hamann claims, a religious dimension in that
it takes appearances as disclosing the real, as declaring or revealing
something to us, such that the natural unseen depth of things goes, as it
were, all the way back the solidity of things derives from an eternal
permanence.22 Otherwise, as we have seen, if we take things as only finite,
their solidity paradoxically vanishes. Equally, certain apparently real
properties of things, like colours, being not fully comprehensible by
reason, will tend to vanish also. Hence there is a spontaneous trust involved
in perception that is indeed like a kind of faith, even an implicit faith in
God. And by comparison with this perspective, the Kantian view that we perceive
only within a supposed legal constitution of the finite is a false modesty
that must turn dialectically into Promethean hubris : since, if the finite does
not convey some inkling of the infinite, it might as well be a finitude our
subjectivity has somehow constructed and the infinite might as well be the
transsubjective abyss our subjectivity emerges from and again negatively
projectsas Fichte, Hegel and Schelling all in the last analysis concluded.23
Knowledge
Knowledge cant be separated from its source their
intellectual reflection implies an abstraction away from an
objects moment of creation or its apportionment within the
infinite
The very phrase I have already used, knowledge by faith alone, indicates this. For
Luther entertained no such
project: on the contrary, he broadly accepted the framework of late medieval nominalist philosophy.
Now this philosophy was itself the legatee of the greatest of all disruptions carried out in the history of European
of Duns Scotus, who for the first time established a radical

separation of philosophy from theology by declaring that it was possible
to consider being in abstraction from the question of whether one is
considering created or creating being. Eventually this generated the notion of
an ontology and an xepistemology unconstrained by, and transcendentally
prior to, theology itself. In the late Middle Ages and in early modernity, philosophy became
essentially the pursuit of such an ontology and epistemology, and the
Reformation did nothing to disturb this situation .5 Indeed, the Reformation was itself
predetermined by it, in that once philosophy has arrogated to itself the knowledge
of Being as such, theology starts to become a regional, ontic, positive
science, grounded either upon certain revealed facts or upon certain
grace-given inner dispositions or again upon external present authority (the
Counter-Reformation model). The very notion of a reason-revelation duality, far from
being an authentic Christian legacy, itself results only from the rise of a
questionably secular mode of knowledge. By contrast, in the Church Fathers or
the early scholastics, both faith and reason are included within the more
generic framework of participation in the mind of God: to reason truly one
must be already illumined by God, while revelation itself is but a higher
measure of such illumination, conjoined intrinsically and inseparably with
a created event which symbolically discloses that transcendent reality, to
which all created events to a lesser degree also point.6 Viewed from this perspective,
thought, namely that
it is easy to see how Jacobi and Hamann, unlike Luther, tacitly called into question the entire post-Scotist legacy. It
was possible for them to do so, in part because the much more scholastic character of German eighteenth-century
philosophy, compared with philosophy in France or England, carried with it, as it were somewhat more clearly on
view, the hidden scholastic founding assumptions of all modern philosophy: in particular, the transcendent univocity
of being as manifest in the clearly knowable object and the priority of possibility over actuality (I shall elucidate this
Jacobi and Hamann: first, they insisted that

no finite thing can be known, not even to any degree, outside its ratio to
the infinite; hence they denied the validity of the enterprises of ontology or
epistemology as pure philosophical endeavours , or else argued that if they were
valid their conclusions would be nihilistic and indeed it was Jacobi who first thematised the
notion of nihilism.8 Second, and correspondingly, they argued (and more especially Hamann here) that if the
truth of nature lies in its supernatural ordination , then reason is true only
to the degree that it seeks or prophesies the theoretical and practical
acknowledgement of this ordination which, thanks to the fall, is made
shortly).7 In two ways the legacy was questioned by
possible again only through divine incarnation .9 Hence there can be no

reason/revelation duality: true reason anticipates revelation, while
revelation simply is of true reason which must ceaselessly arrive, as an
event, such that what Christ shows supremely is the world as really world,
as creation (this point has been well re-asserted recently by Phillip Blond).10
Biology
Biology reduces all it encounters to pure death
Cunningham 2 (Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of
nothing and the difference of theology, Routledge, 2002, p. 246-247)
To take a previous example: Biologists
no longer study life . . . [indeed] biology has

demonstrated that there is no metaphysical entity hidden behind the word
life.79 If such a discourse is presented with a dead body how will it
speak of death? Furthermore, if science is to remain atheistic, that is, fully
immanent to itself, in the sense of not requiring the mediation of
transcendence, so that it says what it does say by itself, then it makes a
trade-off with philosophy leaving such concepts as life and death to the
latters domain. This might lead us to the conclusion that science incurs a loss of independence. But this is
not the case, because science takes account of the excess by discounting it,
reducing it, carrying it away, transferring any residual significance into
neutral terms. Then science will have, after all, borrowed nothing. Hence
the cadaver is dead, but there is no death to be explained, described or
negotiated. To reuse a quotation from Richard Doyle: one is a meat puppet run by
molecules , [which is an] effect of a univocal language of life, an Esperanto of the molecule;80 this is what
McGinn refers to as meatism.81 For this reason it is possible to argue that biology cannot tell the
difference between a dead body and a living body death escaping its
discourse as all is reduced to biological terms, which fail to register, in a
significant manner, any real difference. Therefore there are but formal
distinctions, which are only parochial articulations. Consequently, we can agree with
Adorno: Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer.82
The tears stream down my cheeks from unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? From time to time. There is
Like nihilism,
biology, to a degree, escapes the critique offered here by embracing the apparent
negativity and turning it into a positive or at least indifferent matter. Biology allows a nonscience, philosophy, to cart the body away in terms of death . Then
philosophy in its turn deflates any excessive signification, arguing that
there is no death, no soul and so on; or that death occurs before birth. In
this way death occurs, but does not happen; instead nothing happens. And
this allows biology philosophically to have the dead in the absence of
death. (It is not surprising that thinkers as disparate as Dennett and Deleuze employ an idiom that refers to
humans as machines.) Consequently, the biologist meets us only after death, for the
nihilist has provided him with a discourse which includes the living and
the dead without death and life.84 We can witness a parallel situation in the
different views regarding consciousness. Antonin Artaud refers to consciousness as
nothing saddening here. Perhaps its liquefied brain.83 (Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable)
nothing,85 while Roger Penrose speaks of consciousness as the phenomenon whereby the universes very
existence is made known.86 But as Badiou argues: we cannot know where the sensible finishes and the intelligible
any significance consciousness might be thought to possess

is but the result of an imputation, one which cannot immanently account
for itself; in other words, there is no thought of thought here to aid us past the
aforementioned aporia. So Artaud could say to Penrose, You have yet to say anything intelligible. For
begins.87 Therefore
what is existence, why is it to be deemed significant?. Furthermore, Penroses disclosure is empty, for
consciousness is of the universe.
Consequently, it is not the universes existence
which is disclosed, it is just the universe universing; in this way, it

neither exists nor does not exist. As Becketts narrator puts it in The Unnamable: To think of
myself as being here forever, but not as having been here forever . . . [T]here are sounds here, from time to time,
let that suffice.88 Penrose smuggles in the term existence with an unaccounted for significance. This term should
The nihilist, then, can

provide a metaphysics as it is something already discounted elsewhere . In
other words, nihilists can speak safely from within their skin, for they are but
genes and atoms. This is the provenance of a metaphysics which is not
something metaphysical: nothing as something. Does nihilism, so conceived, actually
in the name of parsimony be discarded, for all is already provided for.
presents us with genuine creation? Is the creation proffered by nihilism so creative that it lacks both a creator and
a creature, yet remains a creation nonetheless? For is it not Lacans insight that creation ex nihilo is atheistic
because a creation from nothing is so utter that every creation cannot register a need for a cause.89 In other words,
every creation from nothing remains nothing; nothing as something. For example, the subject, according to Lacan,
is a creation from nothing, in so far as it does not have being (manque--tre). Consequently, it is a nothing as
something, which means that the idea of a creator is otiose.
Nihilism Short
Secular metaphysics ZPH
Eternity for the
saved is not related to time. Instead, it is a practical perspective inhabited
knowingly by the enlightened: The more the mind understands things by
the second and third kinds of knowledge, the less it is acted on by
emotions which are bad and the less it fears death.76 This fear dwindles
further the more we experience our eternity: The human mind cannot be absolutely
Virtue, which is increased power and so a more persistent ratio, is its own reward.75
destroyed with the human body, but something of it remains which is eternal . . . eternity cannot be defined by time
Death is
defined by Spinoza as that condition in which the parts of a body are disposed
that they acquire a different relation of motion and rest .78 But death has
no reality, just as there is nothing actually bad in the world. Spinoza is adamant
nor have any relation to time. But nevertheless we sense and experience that we are eternal.77
about this last point because it prevents any notion of comparison that might again open up a space for a
Everything is perfect as it is, for it is absolutely necessary,

being a determined expression of Gods essence: Nothing happens in nature
which can be attributed to a defect of it: for nature is always the same .79
For example, Spinoza recommends a life of crime if that is indeed your
nature: If anyone sees that he can live better on the gallows than at his
table he would act very foolishly if he did not go hang himself. 80 This allows us
to realise that in the world of Spinoza there can be no difference between a Holocaust
metaphysics of purpose.
and an ice-cream .81 Any qualitative discrimination can only stem from the
function of our perspective, as a ratio seeking to persist. The individual is,
then, to realise that it is but a modification of God, while God will be but
those modifications, those individuals which are, as stipulated, nothing
(since they are not, ultimately, individuals). Every concept or category Spinoza
utilises is used to its own destruction. He radically alters the meaning of a theory, not by arguing
openly against it or proposing some change, but through a use of the word which initiates a transmogrification that
he fills each
concept to such a degree that it implodes; it is implosion rather than
explosion because that with which it is filled is literally nothing . This is a result
quickly forgets itself. The strategy adopted by Spinoza I call epistemic-anaplerosis, since
of Spinozas doublespeak. As Funkenstein comments, Spinoza uses terms and notions entrenched in the
philosophical and exegetical tradition of the Middle Ages, seemingly accepting their validity while inverting their
meaning.82 He translates each of these notions or terms into what Yovel calls systematic equivalents.83 It is for
this reason that Deleuze says that the Ethics is a book written twice simultaneously.84 The categorical implosion is
managed because Spinoza employs an extreme form of univocity and naturalism.85
Postmoderns
Postmodernism is post-apocalypticism it takes the nihilistic
disdain for being as an anti-foundation and builds philosophies
of negativity on top of it this cannot grapple with
transcendent being
Nihilism is postapocalyptic in more than one way. First of all, nihilism declares that
nothing is. Second, and more importantly, nihilism reads this assertion with a
particular strength, which is to say that nihilism is arguing that nothing is.
Throughout this book I have endeavoured to explore this strange logic, but maybe its more positive aspects have
not been presented. Mark C. Taylor intimates the positive aspect of nihilism when he argues that
ontotheology
leaves nothing unthought by not thinking nothing .19 This

sounds abstruse, but it is making an important point; ontotheology
presumes the significance of its categories and concepts, and in so doing
it fails to think the thought of thought. As a consequence, it employs only
logics of an ontic nature . In other words, it fails to think any ontological
difference: we saw this earlier when discussing causality; ontic models of causation forget
to question the space into which that which is being caused is from: cause
of causation. Instead they remain at the superficial level of the ontic. With regard
to ontotheology, it is possible to suggest that Taylor is arguing that it in thinking everything thinks nothing. In
this way it perpetuates what Adorno calls the lie of the question mark;20 or as Samuel Beckett expresses it:
Ontotheology has an exhaustive yet

unchecked knowledge of everything. For such ontic logics, to borrow a
mathematical analogy, always have a domain. A potential infinite in
mathematics always has a domain of which its variable is a value; in this
sense the potential is always actual, it is already, so to speak this is what Hallett calls the
Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning.21
domain principle.22 It seems that Taylor endeavours to both critique and escape these ontic questions. For him,
ontotheology has thought everything and so it has thought nothing; it has not thought at all. This being the case, a
in leaving nothing unthought,

ontotheology leaves us something to think, and so leaves us the chance
to think, which is to think difference. Taylor wants us to think nothing. The same could be said
space appears to open up within the corpus of ontotheology. For
for Derrida, who argues that in a certain way thought means nothing.23 In reality I said nothing at all, but I heard a
murmur, something gone wrong with the silence.24 (Samuel Beckett, Molloy)
For Taylor, we are to
know we cannot know. In other words, we are to think nothing in an effort to escape the ontic grip of
the something. For this something will eschew specificity, that is, difference. Consequently, every reditus will
precede any exitus, so to speak. In this way, to think something is to know nothing, while to think nothing may be to
Any
height that such thinking attains will still reside on the ground upon which
it rests. In other words, the perceived height is illusory; an illusion that distracts
thinking. The opiate of the something keeps the thinker on the ground. Therefore thought, it
seems, must be groundless. Here we are in the midst of a strange logic
that of nihilism. This is a logic that offers a seemingly fundamental
challenge to theology, because the theologian thinks of creation as ex
nihilo, yet this may turn out to be somewhat ontic. In contrast, nihilism urges
us to think of genuine creation (Deleuzes phrase) as nothing.25 Before considering such
know something. Similarly if our thought has a ground foundation it will fail to get off the ground.
Nihilism is
postapocalyptic, because it is past being apocalyptic. That is, it is otherwise
than merely negative. The apocalypse, which is passed through, or passed over, is that of the disaster.
an idea it may be profitable further to elucidate the nature of this nihilism.
This is Maurice Blanchots phrase; he speaks of writing the disaster.26 This is a disaster which is itself always
postapocalyptic, because when the disaster comes upon us it does not come.27 More instructive is the
What is this
disaster? What is it that could both ruin and keep that which it ruins
intact? Predictably the answer is nothing; nothing does actually, in a
sense, ruin and keep intact everything. For this is to be without being, a state of affairs
understanding of the disaster as that which ruins everything, while leaving everything intact.28
Blanchot refers to as possibility itself.29 Why is this possibility itself, what does it make possible? It seems that this
nothing may well make creation itself possible, and it will be at such a juncture that nihilism and theology approach
each other. To crown anarchy The Absolute of Nothingness as the univocity of Being.30 (Uhlmann)
The
disaster is to be without being, and this is to issue in a certain univocity, which was referred to
earlier as a univocity of non-being. What this means is that everything is not, or rather,
that all is nothing. For this reason the disaster is posthumous, in that our
suicide precedes us.31 Therefore, we only are after being nothing, but not in the
manner of ex nihilo, for that implies that we are no longer nothing. Instead we remain nothing, but as
we have seen, we are nothing as something. For the nihilist, language
says nothing, and for Derrida what is outside the text is nothing, or the
nothing (das Nicht). But as Deleuze and Guattari say, this outside is the not-external outside and the notinternal inside;32 it is, so to speak, the outside-in. Mark C. Taylor tells us that the question is How to do nothing
with words.33 But language, it seems, is doing just this, for language is saying nothing. And as we saw in an earlier
chapter on Derrida, if language says nothing it has uttered its outside, for it is nothing which is outside the text. In
other words, language has, in a sense, attained a reference other than itself, a reality of sorts. Such a reality will
lie beyond the purview of the ontotheologian, and so it will be otherwise than ontic (or otherwise than being). This is
the language of the disaster, for it is without being; a crowned anarchy.34 What could rule in such a land, who
would be the monarch? Surely it must be nothing, for nothing rules in the disaster, but make no mistake, it does
rule. Yet it must still be asked, what can such a kingdom provide?
Postmodernism is built on a fatalist apathy towards violence

that concludes in nihilism this ontological weakness is coopted by the worst elements of capitalism
Case 10 (Brendan Case, Why the IDF reads Deleuze, 1/19/2010,
http://secondparadise.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/why-the-idf-reads-deleuze/)
In 2006, Eyal Weizman, Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, authored
Lethal Theory, an article discussing the self-conscious appropriation of
poststructuralist theories of language and society by the Israeli Defense Force
(IDF) in articulating a new array of tactics for urban warfare : in an assault
on the Palestinian city of Nablus in 2002, the IDF used none of the
streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city,
but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through
holes blasted in ceilings and floors, literally carving out a maze of interior tunnels pervading
private residences so as to bypass the sniper-ridden and bomb-laden thoroughfares of the city. The soldiers
swarmed through the city in small, independent units, improvising an overall strategy in response to new
developments. Though the tactic is innovative (probably not so innovative as Weizman suggests), still more
remarkable is the armys own interpretation of it. Weizman interviewed the commander of the attack on Nablus,
Brigadier General Aviv Kokhavi, who described the strategy: The space that
you look at in this room is nothing but your interpretation of it [] The question
is, how do you interpret the alley? [] A weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us
behind the door. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical
manner, and I do not want to obey his interpretation and fall into his traps [] From now on, we all
walk through walls! Weizman writes that many IDF officers are university trained (Kokhavi has a degree
in philosophy), and that the reading lists of contemporary military institutions
include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the writings
of Deleuze, Guattari, and Debord). The influence of postmodern thought on Israeli military
strategy is largely due, Weizman suggests, to Shimon Naveh, who directs the Operational Theory Research
Several of the
concepts in A Thousand Plateaus became instrumental for usMost
important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts
of smooth and striated spaceIn the IDF we now often use the term
to smooth out space when we want to refer to operation in a space as if
it had no bordersWe want to confront the striated space of traditional,
old-fashioned military practice with smoothness that allows for movement
through space that crosses any borders and barriers. Now, Im certainly no military
Institute, and who explained the importance of Deleuze and Guattari to his work:
historian (and Weizman does acknowledge that many of the procedures and processes described above have been
part and parcel of urban operations throughout history), but, the postmodern jargon aside, the tactics set out in
this articlethe reinterpretation of space, the decentralization of forcesis surely familiar to anyone moderately
well versed in childrens science fiction: in Enders Game, Orson Scott Cards wonderful novel about an orbiting
school for military cadets engaged in an interstellar war, the action revolves around the students mock wars in the
Battle Room, a zero-gravity playing field in which opposing armies seek to disable one another with laser guns and
tactical formations. A crucial insight that allows Ender to become the most successful commander in Battle School
is that the orientation one ascribes to the gravity-less Battle Room is simply arbitrary. Rather than approach the
enemy across the room, leaving his body exposed, Ender chooses to fall towards the opponent: The enemys gate
is down. The most striking aspect of Weizmans article is his suggestion that the IDF is misappropriating critical
theory as an instrument in the power struggle against the Palestinians, turning it to ends that surely would have
been repugnant to the authors themselves (the classic example here being Derridas insistence that justice is the
undeconstructible element on whose behalf all deconstruction is undertaken). Naveh insists, The disruptive
capacity in theory [elsewhere Naveh uses the term nihilist] is the aspect of theory that we like and use This
theory is not married to its socialist ideals. As Weizman relates, the concepts deployed by the IDF were originally
conceived as part of a general strategy to challenge the built hierarchy o the capitalist city and break down
distinctions between private and public: The micropolitics of the time represented in many ways an attempt to
constitute a mental and affective guerrilla fighter at the intimate levels of the body, sexuality, and intersubjectivity
(68). For such practices to be appropriated by the very institutions they were meant to subvert is an irony of history
at best. However,
I think such a development more than ironic, but to some

extent fated: John Milbank and David Hart have each persuasively argued that postmodern
writers share an ontology of violence, which results in their conceiving
social relations as inevitably productive of strife. In such conditions, the
best that can be hoped for is that violence can be marshaled to the aid of the
marginalized by transgression, subversion, disruption, or deconstruction: the protection of the
helpless justifies violence of a new sort, and policing in new areas;
Intolerance will not be tolerated. Its redundant at best, but if all modes of speech
conceal the will to power, then by definition, every act of political or
military or social discourse conceals the will power: Nietzsche at least was
honest enough to realize that historical self-consciousness is not a Get
Out of Jail Free card from the prison of nihilism .
Left-Nietzschean pragmatism is homogenizing and selfdestructive its attempt to escape theological reasoning is an
inevitable failure
Milbank 6 (John Milbank, Preface to the Second Edition: Between Liberalism
and Positivism, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2 nd ed.,
Blackwell, 2006, p. xiii)
there was a great deal of protest from those influenced by
the left-Nietzscheanism stemming from the 1960s, an influence in which Theology and
Social Theory is itself clearly steeped. This protest almost always took the form of saying that I was wrong to see
this discourse as upholding nihilism and ontological violence rather it supported the diversity
of life and held open infinite possibilities of variegated coexistence with others fully acknowledged in their
otherness.6 In retrospect though, one can see yet more strongly how the leftNietzschean current constantly had to compromise a radical positivism
which seeks actively to affirm the ungrounded mythical content of
difference beyond mere formal tolerance, with a continued attempt to reinscribe some mode of stoic or Kantian formal resignation and collective
agreement as to abstract procedures. This is as true in the end of Deleuze
as it is more evidently true of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and even Badiou .
These thinkers, therefore, were trapped in the liberal/positivist oscillation .
Still more markedly,
Derrida
Derrida undermines all metaphysics within the non-being of
the trace this renders Being and even God as secondary to
nothingness
Derrida appears to provide26 continually semantic performances of the
nothing as something: pharmakon is both cure and poison, the hymen is
marriage and virginity. (Each side supplements the other, thus allowing
Derridas text to provide all that it does under erasure : to be without
being .) The most important example is that of the Plotinian ikhnos (trace). The unquestioning-question of
diffrance goes without saying . . . remaining silent.27 That is, language does proceed, but does
not say something. It does not seek something; instead it treats the nothing as
something. This lets it escape ontotheology, yet without lack. The silent a
of diffrance passes by unheard, like the intonation of this modern question: why something
rather than nothing? This inscribed trace, which continues to signal, is the nonproductive production we found in Plotinus and in Spinoza . (In Plotinus the One was
the all, while the all was the One; in Spinoza God is Nature, Nature is God.) The trace is, according to Derrida,
nothing.28 It is for this reason that in a certain sense thought means nothing.29
Just as deconstruction is nothing.30 In a sense the trace, like diffrance, is before presence and
absence, as it is a non-origin that is originary.31 This is the nothing as something, which for
Derrida is an occultation, a disappearing of the ground necessary for appearing itself:32 this sounds
like Hegel and, as we shall see later, also resembles moves made by both Sartre and Lacan. From where
does this trace issue without origins? It proceeds from the work of
Plotinus, who tells us that the trace of the One makes essence, being is
only the trace of the One.33 We know that, for Derrida, the trace is nothing and that this trace,
according to Plotinus, is the trace of the One which is itself otherwise than Being and therefore nothing. This
double bind resides within diffrance as primordial non-self-presence .34
(Maybe this is a hyper non-being, an immanentised negation that becomes plenitudinal.) Derrida speaks of this
Plotinian transgression: In a perhaps unheard of fashion, morphe, arche, and telos still signal. In a sense, or a nonsense, that metaphysics would have excluded from its field, while nevertheless remaining in secret and incessant
relation with this sense, form would in itself already be the trace (ikhnos) of a certain nonpresence, the vestige of
the un-formed, which announces-recalls its other, as did Plotinus . . . The closure of metaphysics, the closure that
For Derrida we must think

of diffrance as temporalization, diffrance as spacing.36 It seems that this is
another Plotinian trace.37 It was Plotinus who may have initiated a new
subjectivity, a new temporality. This temporality is the audacity of subjectivity. Audacity, as the
unquiet faculty of the soul stirs a desire, initiating a progression . The soul
refusing to see all at once, all as the One, generates an endless alterity,
an otherness which is the act of procession away from others (aie heterotes).38
the audaciousness of the Enneads seems to indicate by transgressing.35
(We find this Plotinianism in Alain Badious notion of the Two.)39 As Plotinus says, time begins with the soulmovement.40 It is with Plotinus use of the word parakolouthesis that a term translatable by consciousness
appears in philosophy.41 Furthermore, the term synaisthesis hautou, meaning self-perception in the sense of selfconsciousness, also appears for the first time in the Plotinian text. Time is no longer the image of eternity, there is
no Cosmic time, or recollection of eternal truths.42 Plotinus tells us of this new time: So it stirred from its rest and
that state too stirred with it; they stirred themselves toward a future that was ceaselessly new, a state not identical
with the preceding one but different and ever changing. And after having traversed a portion of the outgoing path
Soul moves itself audaciously away into difference; alterity

being the principle of procession.44 Motion measures this subjectivity. What we find is
that time is an intensive expression of heteronomy as endless
consciousness. This expression pays witness to the silent provision of that which is. By this is meant the
they produced time.43
provision of being in the absence of being. Contemplation causes this passage of time as it produces the production
of bodies: I contemplate and the lines of bodies realise themselves as if they fell from me.45 But that which is
produced is produced within a silent vision.46 It is here that we notice the heritage bequeathed to diffrance.
Diffrance silently produces language (doing so by silencing language), for it goes without saying, like the a of
Diffrance
is the trace of the Plotinian One, which is non-being. Furthermore, diffrance
temporalises and spatialises. It is for this reason that Derrida will announce that at
this very moment in this work here I am.48 In this moment Spinoza and Plotinus
are conjoined. Diffrance is transcendentally generating the space for
time and the time for space, in terms of a certain subjectivisation of
reception. The temporality of time and the spacing of space are found in
the I am, which goes without saying. I am time, a possession which is a procession,
the written diffrance, to speak of a letter which cannot be heard nor apprehended in speech.47
allowing space to measure itself within this endless arrival: to occupy its own space. The space which space
occupies is that of an audacious work, an ergetic generative becoming. (By this term I intend to imply work:
Descartes I think therefore I am, is an example of this in so far as the cogito must do something to be. In this
God is
immanentised within the arrival of a work, which can be thought of as
nature. Nature and God arrive together, each as the other. This divinity is the effect of the
case, the cogito must think.) This I am is comparable to the Deus of Spinozas Ethics.
trace, just as we saw that the Plotinian (and Avicennian) One requires the finite, arriving only within the finite (as
the arrival of the finite). The arrival of the effects, which are always already within the movement of diffrance,
belies the differing and the delay of all that does come.
God is different and deferred , in that
God is an endless act of Nature, while Nature is an eternal God. Consequently, it too remains
different and delayed. As with Spinoza, both terms cancel each other out yet, in so
doing, an appearance is allowed. This is the nothing as something .
Derridean diffrance collapses differences into

meontotheological subservience to nothingness this postenlightenment nihilism eradicates the singularity of our given
Cunningham2 (Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of
nothing and the difference of theology, Routledge, 2002, p. 162)
For Derrida the nothingness outside the text is the requisite space for the
movement of signification. There is a degree of truth in this, but Derrida still operates
within a metaphysical system, hence the dualism: Text/Nothing . This
metaphysics is what has been referred to as meontotheology . It is named thus
because Derrida et al. recognise the aforementioned aporia . As a result they do
endeavour to elude, and so escape, ontotheological categories and logics which
suppress the need for thought to be supplemented. Otherwise every question asked is only asked by answers. Yet
the manner of this escape is meontotheological; consequently the problem
is merely transposed to another level. Part II examines and explains this meontotheology. It is
sufficient to say here that such a logic replaces the reductive ossification of the
ontotheological something, which has but an infinity of answers or
answering, with the meontotheological nothing which has but the infinite
sameness of an infinite questioning : a perpetual asking that coagulates
into silence . In this way Derridas questions, like the ontotheologians, fail to ask
anything, for they are predicated on a foundational nothing . We see this when we
realise that for Derrida all difference is the same difference and for this reason
it is indifferent. Derridas meontotheology takes him beyond language,
beyond being, beyond the attempt to say something . Instead he resides in
the post-linguistic heavens of the One beyond Being . This One provides
Derridas monism that covertly supersedes his dualism of Text and
Nothing. The One beyond Being is but one difference, one question asked
an infinity of times: Derrida names it diffrance; Primordial non-self-presence.51 Such
monism results in the elimination of every particular , as there is a war of
all against all. Because difference is the same difference, the other the
same other, every existent is eliminated for the sake of this blank
anonymity and in the name of a greater alterity. (See Part II, Chapter 10.) For this reason
we can agree with Peter Dews when he makes the point that Derrida is offering us a philosophy of diffrance as the
absolute.52
Derridas critique of metaphysics can resolve itself only

through subtle, insidious appeals to a monistic nothingness
which constitutes immanent being
It may be instructive to recall some of these dualisms: Heidegger grounds Being in das Nicht; Deleuze, sense in
nonsense, thought in nonthought; Hegel, the finite in the infinite; Fichte, the I in Non-I; Schopenhauer,
representation in will; Kant, the phenomenal in the noumenal; Spinoza grounds Nature in God, and God in Nature.
Each of these dualisms collapses into a monism as each dualism resides

within a symbiotic unicity; a unity which is at times named, alluded to or ignored. For example,
Derrida employs a dualism of text and nothingness, or presence and
absence, but these are the by-product of a higher name diffrance
although such a name is immanent to the dualism. According to Derrida, diffrance is
the primordial non-self-presence.3 Furthermore, diffrance is . . . what makes this presentation of the being
present as such.4 Indeed, diffrance makes possible the opposition of presence and absence possible.5
Derrida indicates the fundamental nature of this supplement when he

argues that it is the strange essence of the supplement not to have
essentiality.6 Yet this simply transposes the aporia to another level. Similarly,
Schopenhauer collapses his dualism of will and representation into what he terms nothing: After the complete
abolition of the will . . . is nothing, [indeed] this very real world of ours, with all its suns and galaxies, is nothing;7
the world is but objectified will, but will is itself nothing.8 As we saw in an earlier chapter, Hegel names his single
ultimate Geist, into which the finite and infinite slide.9 Likewise, Heideggers Being and Time fall into the das Nicht,
or alternatively Being and Nothing rest upon and within the Abgrund, while Gilles Deleuze rests his dualism of sense
and non-sense on what he calls the groundless ground [which] engulfs all grounds.10 And the name of this
groundless ground is the One-All,11 for which there is but a single voice (univocity). Consequently, there are not,
argues Alain Badiou, really thoughts in the plural.12 Incidentally, Badiou names the One-All the void, which he
deems the proper name of being.13 The monistic nature of these names becomes more obvious if we take the
example of Deleuze as instructive. For Deleuze the absolute outside is an outside more distant than any external
world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world.14 This outside which is not external, is the
supplementation of sense by nonsense, or thought by nonthought. What Deleuze is endeavouring to do is to avoid
Derrida
endeavours to elude the aporia in a similar fashion, arguing that
diffrance is thought that means nothing . . . the thought for which there
is no sure opposition between outside and inside .15 The success or otherwise of such
transposing the aporia onto a new level, which would identically repeat the problem. Likewise,
philosophical moves is explored below following a re-examination of nihilism. This re-examination presents the
possibility that nihilism offers a positive element, one which theology can sublate as part of its fundamental
content. In this way, the Hegelian sublation of religion is reversed and radicalised. In other words, just as Hegel took
philosophys content from religion, theology can take some of its content from nihilism, recapitulating it within the
form of faith-tradition as explicated by theology. Nihilism: the consummate philosophy? The moving desert The
desert is squeezed into the tube-train next to you. The desert is in the heart of your brother. (T. S. Eliot, The Rock)
There is a poem by Shelley called Ozymandias. In this poem a traveller comes across the remains of a statue in a
desert, upon which there is an inscription that is still readable. It reads: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look
on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. Such an inscription can be taken as a critique of vanity, the pretension of
Someone like Derrida takes the mobility of the sign to be the

iterability of the sign; signs are repeatable by definition outside any
particular context in which they were first uttered. In other words, signs are
acontextual, hence they can be employed and re-employed at different
times or in different places. For example, the inscription in the poem can still
signify, yet its significance has altered, even though the signifiers remain
the same. This is relevant to nihilism, because if we take this iterability of
the sign seriously, then all signs always signify in a desert , which is
analogous to the nothing as something. If nihilism is correct, we inhabit
cities which resemble the sets of Western films , for there is only faade, so
to speak. Indeed, the fact that thought cannot, it seems, think itself, indicates that
thought is somewhat lacking; since it is full of something other than
thought. Every signification is, then, underwritten by an in-signification,
for we do not travel to the desert as it is always, already, before us .
importance.
Interestingly Deleuze refers to the One-All as a moving desert.16 Of course, this movement would be on the spot,
otherwise there would be places other than the desert, and such places would be outside the One-All; an outside
that could possibly evade Deleuzes ScotisticSpinozistic advocacy of a univocity of being. This will be elaborated
upon below.
Deleuze
Deleuzes reduction of being under the meaninglessness of the
virtual eradicates meaning and encapsulates all difference
within a barren secular desert
It may be instructive to recall some of these dualisms: Heidegger grounds Being in das Nicht; Deleuze, sense in
nonsense, thought in nonthought; Hegel, the finite in the infinite; Fichte, the I in Non-I; Schopenhauer,
representation in will; Kant, the phenomenal in the noumenal; Spinoza grounds Nature in God, and God in Nature.
Each of these dualisms collapses into a monism as each dualism resides within a symbiotic unicity; a unity which is
at times named, alluded to or ignored. For example, Derrida employs a dualism of text and nothingness, or
presence and absence, but these are the by-product of a higher name diffrance although such a name is
immanent to the dualism. According to Derrida, diffrance is the primordial non-self-presence.3 Furthermore,
diffrance is . . . what makes this presentation of the being present as such.4 Indeed, diffrance makes possible
the opposition of presence and absence possible.5 Derrida indicates the fundamental nature of this supplement
when he argues that it is the strange essence of the supplement not to have essentiality.6 Yet this simply
transposes the aporia to another level. Similarly, Schopenhauer collapses his dualism of will and representation into
what he terms nothing: After the complete abolition of the will . . . is nothing, [indeed] this very real world of ours,
with all its suns and galaxies, is nothing;7 the world is but objectified will, but will is itself nothing.8 As we saw in an
earlier chapter, Hegel names his single ultimate Geist, into which the finite and infinite slide.9 Likewise, Heideggers
Being and Time fall into the das Nicht, or alternatively Being and Nothing rest upon and within the Abgrund, while
rests his dualism of sense and non-sense on what he calls the

groundless ground [which] engulfs all grounds .10 And the name of this
groundless ground is the One-All,11 for which there is but a single voice
(univocity). Consequently, there are not, argues Alain Badiou, really thoughts in
the plural.12 Incidentally, Badiou names the One-All the void, which he deems the proper name of being.13
The monistic nature of these names becomes more obvious if we take the
example of Deleuze as instructive. For Deleuze the absolute outside is an
outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside
deeper than any internal world.14 This outside which is not external, is the
supplementation of sense by nonsense, or thought by nonthought. What
Deleuze is endeavouring to do is to avoid transposing the aporia onto a
new level, which would identically repeat the problem. Likewise, Derrida endeavours to elude the aporia in a
Gilles Deleuze
similar fashion, arguing that diffrance is thought that means nothing . . . the thought for which there is no sure
opposition between outside and inside.15 The success or otherwise of such philosophical moves is explored below
following a re-examination of nihilism. This re-examination presents the possibility that nihilism offers a positive
element, one which theology can sublate as part of its fundamental content. In this way, the Hegelian sublation of
religion is reversed and radicalised. In other words, just as Hegel took philosophys content from religion, theology
can take some of its content from nihilism, recapitulating it within the form of faith-tradition as explicated by
theology. Nihilism: the consummate philosophy? The moving desert The desert is squeezed into the tube-train next
There is a poem by Shelley

called Ozymandias. In this poem a traveller comes across the remains of a
statue in a desert, upon which there is an inscription that is still readable.
It reads: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye
Mighty, and despair. Such an inscription can be taken as a critique of
vanity, the pretension of importance. Someone like Derrida takes the mobility of the sign to be
to you. The desert is in the heart of your brother. (T. S. Eliot, The Rock)
the iterability of the sign; signs are repeatable by definition outside any particular context in which they were first
uttered. In other words, signs are acontextual, hence they can be employed and re-employed at different times or in
different places. For example, the inscription in the poem can still signify, yet its significance has altered, even
This is relevant to nihilism, because if we take

this iterability of the sign seriously, then all signs always signify in a
though the signifiers remain the same.
desert, which is analogous to the nothing as something. If nihilism is

correct, we inhabit cities which resemble the sets of Western films, for
there is only faade, so to speak. Indeed, the fact that thought cannot, it
seems, think itself, indicates that thought is somewhat lacking; since it is
full of something other than thought. Every signification is, then,
underwritten by an in-signification, for we do not travel to the desert as
it is always, already, before us. Interestingly Deleuze refers to the One-All as a
moving desert.16 Of course, this movement would be on the spot, otherwise there would be places other
than the desert, and such places would be outside the One-All; an outside that could possibly evade Deleuzes
ScotisticSpinozistic advocacy of a univocity of being. This will be elaborated upon below.
Lacan The Real

The Lacanian order of the Real obliterates all meaning by
undermining it before an anti-idealized ugliness of
transcendent Reality this displays a deep and irrational
distaste for existence itself
The One, or being, is for nihilism voided; as a result, difference escapes out from
under its skirt. For Sartre, this voiding was a result of mans nihilation of being, while Lacan
attributes it to language. Likewise, Deleuze, here following Heidegger, understands the voiding of
being to arise from a universal ungrounding160 afforded by the perpetual repetiton of a question; namely, the
putting into question of being: Everything has its beginning in a question, but one cannot say that the question
what is important here is how such a questioning not only

puts being into question but does so with beings, so inducing the
aforementioned war of all against all; the erasure of all specificity . Indeed, in
itself begins.161 Now,
voiding the One, beings are also voided . It is said that the One is not, but
this vertical pronouncement falls out of a now denounced sky onto
earth and horizontally negates every-one , so to speak. The voiding of the One
becomes the a-voiding of everyone , as a result of the Plotinian
understanding of causality which governs this movement, whereby one
comes from one. The nihilation of the One gives rise to only one effect,
which is able to escape from the plenitude of its desert only by repeating
a desertion. We see this problem running from Plotinus, through Avicenna, and on to Derrida: Derrida has
but the one effect emanate from the nothing, and this is the Text; the univocity of one text. Now, this one
effect that squeezes out from the nihilated, reflects its source, in the
sense that difference is problematic. As Schelling says: What is not . . . is under what is.162 In
a sense this is the bare existence that precedes every essence. Schelling goes further: If we were able to penetrate
the existence of things, we would see that the true self of all life and existence is horrible.163
This horrible
truth is what Lacan calls the Real (rel), which is, in a sense, tre-en-soi, to put it in Sartrean
terms. And, according to Zizek, The Real is the unfathomable remainder .164 We
see such a remainder becoming apparent in Sartres novel Nausea: Existence has
suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract
category . . . all these objects . . . How can I explain? They inconvenience
me; I would like them to exist less strongly, more dryly .165 The crisp, clean,
ideality of words, categories, and so on slip from every face, revealing
something that escapes us; a horrible excess, one that leaves us
suspended before a sublime void; words slide from their objects, on which
they had settled in a contented fashion, like a hen on her eggs. Instead,
these eggs hatch a fox that eats the hen. For such words are moribund in the face of this
ineluctable, indivisible remainder. This is the naked strengh of compressed being, the Real. For Schelling,
Sartre, Lacan and Zizek, to mention but a few, this remainder is ugly . Indeed,
Zizek speaks of the shock of ugliness,166 an ugliness arising from the Kernel of reality, for this kernel is horrible;
this kernel that remains beyond and in a

sense before every essence, every idealisation, is excremental ;168 the
it is the horror of the Real.167 Furthermore,
Real is shit, as Zizek puts it.169 The neat world which we have constructed through linguistic
division, in our effort to decompress being, hides the reality which it seeks to cover up; but from underneath the
blanket comes the indelible stench. And we can catch sight of this reality the what is not, that lies beneath the
what is. We see it in the stain which every desire seeks to ignore, to clean up. For example, the social construction
of wife and husband, which is there to disguise the univocal nature of eros,170 domesticating it, by hiding desire in
But the truth of desire does not know any such

distinction; like being it suffers indistinction. In other words, the truth of eros is
just as much a desire for the mother as it is for the spouse . Indeed, and even more
disturbingly, it is as partial to children as it is to the other parent. For example, this truth can be
witnessed the Real of eros is seen as it erupts, striking out from
underneath the settled hen in the form of rape; but rape is no more or less
dramatic than other manifestations of univocal desire. Was this not what
the great masters of suspicion had begun to tell us, for each in his own
way pointed us beyond the faade of the name, to the pulsating reality
that lay behind the accepted account?
the clothes of legitimate relationships.
Impacts
Nihilism 1NC
Holocaust is our impact
-
Systemic description = standing reserve

Slippages/fading of the trace effects all structures
Relativism leads to error replication and violent adjustment
No difference between holocaust and ice cream cone in your fw
Cunningham 2 Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of

nothing and the difference of theology, Routledge, 2002, p. 173-176
The form of this discourse of epistemic disappearance is analogous to the internalexternal infinitude of a
Every description literally takes the place of that which it

describes; reducing it to nothing , except the formal difference of an
epistemic signification. This is also analogous to the nothing which resides
outside Derridas text a nothingness which comes within the text in the
form of the effected disappearance.13 The intelligibility, the signification,
rests on this internalexternal nothingness.14 The aforementioned leaf is carried away by
Spinozistic attribute.
the wind of systemic description. As a result we will have nothing as something. It is possible to argue that
systemic erasure is the basis of modern knowledge in all its postmodern

guises. The truth of this argument will not really become apparent until Chapter 10. For the moment let us
tentatively, yet somewhat insufficiently, endeavour to develop an understanding of this disappearance; a
every being which falls under such

description is lost, and every trace erased.15 Such a term is not completely satisfactory but
disappearance referred to as a holocaust, because
it does help to some degree in expressing the idea being developed in this chapter. (Chapter 10 argues that the
argument presented here is not wholly fair, and that the situation may actually be somewhat more complicated.)
the form of nihilisms

discourse is complicit with a certain holocaust. It will speak a holocaust .
But how can one speak a holocaust?16 We do so if when we speak,
something (or someone) disappears , or if our speech is predicated only on the
back of such an erasure. We have to think of those who are too many to
have disappeared. They must have been made to disappear ; we may be able to
discern three noticeable moments in modern discourse which encourage the speaking of a holocaust.17 The
first moment is when the systemic description effects a disappearance . This
is accomplished by placing what is described outside the divine mind,
rendering it ontologically neutral a given rather than a gift . The notion of a given
Those who are made to disappear What we may begin to realise is that
allows for the invention of such neutrality.
That which is becomes structurally amenable
to experimentation, dissection, indefinite epistemic investigation .18 For

the first time there is something which can render the idea of detached,
de-eroticised, study intelligible. There is now an object which is itself
neutral, the structural prerequisite for objectivity . This holocaust is the
a priori of modern knowledge. The second moment comes when modern
discourse describes the initial disappearance, the first moment. Consequently,
the first moment, the event of disappearance, disappears . Modernity will
ask us what can it mean to disappear? Any hole is filled up, every trace
erased.19 More obviously, but with greater caution and difficulty, we see modern discourse describe
the disappearance of a number-too-great to disappear, in terms that are completely neutral. It is unable to
describe this dia-bolic (meaning to take apart) event in a way that is

different from its description of the aforementioned leaf. 20 The loss of
countless lives can only be described in neutral terms, however
emotionally.21 But discourse is predicated on a nothing to which every
entity is reduced .22 (For example, a human is reduced to its genes, while
consciousness is reduced to chemicals, atoms and so on.) Our knowledge
of a holocaust causes that holocaust to disappear (like leaves from a
tree in a garden fire: kaustos). We see the disappearance of a holocaust
as it is erased by its passage through the corridors of modern description:
sociology, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, and so on . All these
discourses speak its disappearance.23 Holocaust, ice-cream, there can be
no difference except that of epistemic difference, which is but formal .
Both must be reducible to nothing ; the very possibility of modern
discourse hangs on it. In this sense all holocausts are modern . The structures,
substructures, molecules and the molecular all carry away the substance
of every being and of the whole (holos) of being . The third moment comes
upon the first two. We see modernity cause all that is described to disappear, then we see this
disappearance disappear.24 In this way a loss of life, and a loss of death is witnessed . It is
here that we see the last moment. If we think of a specific holocaust, the historical
loss of six million Jews during the Second World War, we see that the
National Socialist description of the Jews took away their lives and took
away their deaths. For those who were killed were exterminated,
liquidated, in the name of solutions. The Jews lose their lives because they
have already lost their deaths.25 For it is this loss of death that allows the
Nazis to remove the Jews. That is to say, if the Jews lose their deaths then the
Nazis, by taking their lives, do not murder. This knowledge, that is National
Socialism, will, in taking away life, take away the possibility of losing that life
( death becomes wholly naturalised ). This must be the case so that there is no loss in terms of
negation. In this way
National Socialism emulates the form of nihilistic
discourse . There is nothing and not even that. There is an absence and an
absence from absence. (This is the form Nietzsches joyous nihilism took.) So we will not have a lack
which could allow the imputation of metaphysical significance: The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries
weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no
help came: What their foes liked to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And
The life that is lost is

always lost before its death. They who lose their life are already lost in
terms of epistemic description. When their life is physically lost it is
unable to stop the disappearance of that life, and the death of that life . So
the living-dead are always unable to die ; death is taken away from them
before their life, in order that their life can be made to disappear without
trace and without loss. Thus, the living are described in the same manner
as the dead. Modern discourse cannot , it seems, discriminate between them . In
died as men before their bodies died.26 W. H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles
some sense, it takes a loss of life and a loss of death to engender holocaust. For it is this which forbids the
registration of any significance any significant difference between life and death. Modern
description
has no ability to speak differently about lost lives, because before any
physical event dissolution has already begun to occur (all that remains is for the
bodies to be swept away). The preparation is carefully carried out so that a
nonoccurrence can occur. The fundamental, and foundational neutrality
in modern discourse is here extremely noticeable. Its inability to speak
significantly, to speak real difference, carries all peoples and persons
away. In modern death there are no people, no one dies. Here we see the
de-differentiating effect of nihilism. Bodies come apart as different
discourses carry limbs away. This cool epistemic intelligibility of a
Dionysian frenzy fashions whole systems of explanatory description .
Nihilism 2NC
Secularism equals nothingness theology is key to moral and
political distinctions anything else produces relativist decline
towards holocaust
In order to give an example of nihilisms ontological myopia, let us think of
nihilistic eyes gazing across a piece of land; this land upon which nihilism
gazes is full of shapes, pointed configurations, odours, ratios, proportions,
smells, noises and so on. Modern discourse, I suggest, cannot see or say
death.27 For it cannot see pits full of bodies and twisted limbs, as there can
be no loss, there being only an immanent plenitude. As Adolf Portmann says, For
pre-modern thought, death was the great puzzle of human existence; for
us, today, life is the great puzzle.28 Witness the descriptions offered by
biology, chemistry, sociology, physics and so on. They provide only formal
distinctions , or differences, la Scotus. These all must have a loss of loss just to
function. The immanent reductionism of their nihilistic form , the hole
with which they fill the world, cannot but cause difference to disappear . For
example, when biology comes to describe what lies before it, there will not be
any visibility. As one commentator puts it, we are but meat puppets run by
molecular machines [which is] the transformation of the organism into an effect of a univocal language of
life, an Esperanto of the molecule.29 This is what Colin McGinn calls meatism.30 Indeed, as one Nobel prize
winning biologist argues: Biologists
no longer study life today [because] biology has

demonstrated that there is no metaphysical entity behind the word life .31
Everything remains unseen and, in this sense, unsaid; for what difference is there, biologically speaking, between
an organism that is biologically now in one way and now in another? The system of explanatory description will offer
only nominal or diacritical difference because its immanent identity relies on this inability. As Doyle argues, such
discourse is predicated on the ability to say that is all there is.32 For as Gunon declares: The
modern
mentality is made up in such a way that it cannot bear any secret nor even
any reserve . . . [This is] the suppression of all mystery .33 (This mystery is
analogous to Pguys mystique.)34 Likewise, as Foucault says: Western man could constitute himself within his
language, and gave himself, in himself and by himself, a discursive existence, only in the opening created by his
own elimination.35 Indeed, life, according to Foucault, is a sovereign vanishing point within the organism.36 For
this reason Smith argues that physicalism should adopt the ontology of nihilism: True, a physicalist ontology is
ontologically simple; but it is another question as to whether it is ontologically adequate. The ontology of the
ontological nihilist is even more economical: nothing exists at all. If considerations of solely ontological economy
dictate our world making, then the physicalists are recommended to become ontological nihilists.37 (Chapter 10
These discourses depend upon a descriptive

reduction that perpetuates a structural plane of immanence, which is but
an identical repetition of the same. Biology must reduce that which it
describes to nothing, that is, nothing outside its descriptive abilities (DNA, etc.).
This is the text which biology is, and this text has nothing outside it
returns to a discussion of biology.)
(recalling Derridas aphorism).38 Indeed, George Gamow, who heavily influenced Francis Crick, describes DNA
protein as a translation.39 The Word has not become flesh, rather flesh has become words (in an almost Hegelian
manner). When biology studies life (bios), it does so on the axiomatic assumption that life does not exist.
Affirming life would require a metalevel as it displays an excessive

moment that breaks free of immanent description, yet validates the
immanent. Biology can neither afford nor provide such a meta-level . All modern
discourse, it seems, reduces that which is described to the description and its particular mode (these modes are
somewhat akin to Scotistic intrinsic modes which differentiate univocal being, without themselves having to be).
This is the extreme erasure that has already been mentioned. Each discourse appears to conjure up intelligibility
That which is
described therefore becomes only the internal logic or intelligibility of that
discourse (an intrinsic mode, so to speak). The difference between that which
describes and that which is described collapses, for only in this way can
nihilism occupy every place and everything. As it speaks, as intelligibility
is gained, the nothingness that surrounds and perpetuates this
signification draws it always back to a double disappearance ; a
nothingness which is always within every description. Biology cannot see
the loss of life. Death is never seen, again no one dies. This is to re-enact
a holocaust. Here in this modern world nothing happens, nothing is or is
not. The cancer of my body is a world unto itself. My leg becomes apart
from me, it grows as it re-narrates my body, in a manner of which Kafka
would be proud. Our bodies come apart as knowledge rips them asunder,
even though it may keep them intact. Our very being is carted away, to
live and breathe as humus would. (Chapter 10 argues that the living are treated as cadavers.)
The instructive reductionism articulated above displays the form of
nihilistic discourse. This form is to some degree the inheritor of a legacy which has been outlined in
within the nothing upon which they are predicated returning only ever to themselves.
earlier chapters: Plotinus meontotheological constitution of finitude; Avicennas necessitarianism; Ghents

Avicennian essences, and analogy of the concept, which, following Avicenna, places res as the highest
transcendental name; Scotist plurality of forms, and intrinsic modes with their univocity of being; Ockhamian
cognitions that appear only within the sides of supposition, and the logical function, or performance, of
propositional terms; the intensional modality of the Ockhamian-Scotist-Ghentian-Avicennian axis, with its extended
world of logical possibilities; the externalinternal infinitude of Spinozistic attributes; the Kantian subject-object, and
noumenalnominality, which causes all phenomenality to disappear in its very appearance;40 the Hegelian absolute
that is a site of a perpetual vanishing, and an ending of discourse; the Heideggerian show of Being and Time as an
externalinternal nothingness, that is but Death; Derridas economy of diffrance.
AT: Nihilism Good

Any benefit to nihilism is nullified by its founding world-denial;
it retains all the worst trappings of ontotheology without the
kernel of Hope necessary for transcendence and significance
There is certainly a degree of truth in nihilism, to the degree that reality
does exceed every idealisation that would seek to domesticate it . And it is true
to point out, as Samuel Beckett does, that notions such as friendship, family, employment, money and so on
distract us from life, like an insidious opiate. We are indeed sedated by the mindless chatter of gossip; call it
politics, sport, economics, romance or whatever. There is a shameful absurdity in this, for do we not juxtapose
incongruous bedfellows; the management consultant and the emaciated child? And is this not what both the Old
Testament and the New Testament condemn? Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against
the rock (Psalm 137, v. 9). Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers
and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple (Luke, ch. 14. v. 26). Is it not true that desire is held
captive by such worldly categories, making it easier to colonise? And does not the above call to dash ones
children against the rock and to hate ones father and mother, life itself, not check this colonisation, disrupting the
nihilism draws our attention to this facile, yet

extremely dangerous, incarceration of desire, and domestication of existence within the
odourless idealities that divide up the spoils of being, while hiding us from the reality of
being: you are not!. We live in a world without chairs, true, and from this
we learn much. But a corollary of this is that we live, then, in a world
without neighbours; lives without life . Furthermore, is not the notion of the
indivisible remainder, of ontological shit, not the epitome of an idealism,
however perverse? For is not the Lacanian Real still the really real (ontos onta)?
And does not this reality, this kernel, one so typical of philosophy in its
endless pursuit of the essential, represent a pure ideal: pure reality,
absolute shit, devoid of shape and distinction? Is this brown
monochrome world not a univocal being or non-being? Let us hear Badious
domestication of desire? To be sure,
translator explain this philosophers achievement: It is Badious achievement to have subtracted the operation of
truth from any redemption of the abject, and to have made the distinction between living and unliving, between
finite and infinite, a matter of absolute indifference.172 And we know already that Badiou is indifferent to
differences. Since all the various incommensurable events of new truth and new love still rest on the same univocal
grace of self-referring finite origination.173 In this way, there is but one difference that emanates from the one
There is also a blatant

Gnosticism in the embittered nihilist who sees horror and shit as the
kernel of reality: If we want to get rid of the ugliness, we are forced to
adopt the attitude of a Cathar, for whom terrestrial life is a hell and the
God who created this world is Satan himself, master of this world (Zizek).174
Not forgetting the excess which does escape our idealisation of existence,
is there not a whiff of resentiment fuelled by the bitterness of the
void the nothing outside the text; here we are still with Plotinus and Avicenna.
impotent? In other words, is this nihilism not the fruit of the castration complex ,
of a disappointed idealist who is no longer playing the game because he
cannot win: I cannot capture life, therefore there is no life. Indeed, does the
nihilist not, then, move to re-capture being by invoking a new name ; for
example, the Real, indivisible remainder, diffrance, tre-en-soi, the void, and so on? It is well known that
Parmenides equated being and thought. To be sure, there is something problematic with this, and the history of
ontotheology, as creatively delineated by Heidegger, displays this with acumen. What Lacan and Zizek seem to be
It seems to be true
prima facie that being does exceed thought, and that if it did not there
could not be creation, so to speak. For all would suffer the paralysis of a strict
idealism; as we witness in ontotheology, which confines being with its
unthinking categories and presumed significance. Indeed, can it not be said that life can
pointing to is the incongruity between being and thought, and with good reason.
only take place existentially occur in the space between thought and being? In other words, the difference
between the two allows for difference. Yet the problem with such an approach is that it invites a new idealism, in the
form of a new name, which actually realigns thought and being by bridging, and so removing, the difference; it is
arguable that this is what meontology is guilty of. These new names come in many guises. For example, because
thought and being are not the same, accidents happen, tragedy arises. But the danger is that if one simply renames
life as tragic, tragedy disappears, for its now metaphysical status its reality leaves it without the requisite
to say that the world is full of suffering

and so is meaningless, is to dilute the very suffering that initially
motivated the negative judgement: there is suffering in life, therefore life
is meaningless, therefore there is no suffering . Absurdity and nihilism
operate in a similar fashion, for they are names that settle into the gap
between being and thought, reforging a novel chain. This is the Devil of
the Gaps, who is a bridge to the void, after which it lusts.
space for tragedy to occur. To put it another way,
Alt
Faith
Faith provides better access into both the contingency and the
infinite determination of existence only thinking the Whole of
existence as created gives meaning to our positions within it
Milbank 99 John Milbank, KNOWLEDGE: The theological critique of philosophy
Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, Routledge, 1999, p. 27-28
Now it might well seem that what we have here in the radical pietist account of knowledge as faith is a kind of
appeal to natural religion by a natural theology. And in a sense this is true: Hamann and Jacobi were children of the
natural faith is very much that it requires

faith in the God who creates ex nihilo and sustains all in being, rather than
a remote, designing deity. Furthermore, for Hamann at least (though Jacobi sometimes echoes this)
we can never have an abstract faith in God as author of nature, sustaining
the reality of things, without reading these things in their specific,
Enlightenment. And yet the logic of this argument about
revealed and always historical contingency as the primary divine

language. Here again it is a question of invisible depth as alone securing the
reality of the apparent. Hamann persistently claims, in Aesthetica in Nuce and elsewhere, that we
only see things when they speak to us, or that we cannot have sight if we
are deaf.24 What exactly can this mean? Hamann explicates his position with the
biblical phrase, one day tells another, and night makes known to the
other.25 What he seems to mean is that we never grasp a thing in isolation, but only
as articulated with something else , and yet that in such articulation there is a
necessary taking together, or reading of the conjunction over and above
what merely appears: for example a tree does not appear to me as one tree,
rather I construe this. Yet if such reading or construing is taken as nonarbitrary this means that what is invisible in the tree speaks to me as
one tree, just as day must speak to day if they are to form an organised
series of categorised periods. It is for this reason that Hamann always links the
depth in things with the depth in the human subject which images the
creative power of God (especially in Aesthetica in Nuce). Day may speak to day, and
night to night, but I know this only if I creatively express it , and make the
sign day a non-identically repeatable expression. Following Berkeley, Hamann
understands universal concepts as having a non-abstractive validity in this necessary use of signs to decipher the
analogically continuous aspects of reality.26 This shows clearly that he was not, like Luther, a nominalist, but rather,
like Jacobi (and Berkeley), a subtle sort of realist, and is further evidence that his critique of abstraction belongs to a
Jacobi-style assault upon the nihilism of philosophy, rather than a somewhat tame empiricist critique of
The idea that the natural human response to the world in faith is
a reading of the world as a language emanating from a mysterious source
directs faith, as I have said, already in a somewhat contingent, historical direction,
especially when the necessary mediation by culturally specific human
language is allowed for. But Hamanns reflections upon time take us further down the path of revealed
specificity. Here, if the parable for truth in space was the case of Pontius Pilate, the parable for truth in
time is the story of the three wise men.28 These magi, according to Hamann, lived
prophetically, by faith, which is to say that they retained in their memory certain
images which they judged appealingthe legend of a star and a birthand
universals.27
projected these into the future according to their desires. Since , as we have
seen, for Hamann the present moment is never punctually present , objective
vision is always interfered with by selective memory and prompting
desire.29 To know, Hamann repeatedly suggests, is to select and desire, and even
chains of reasonings, beyond the case of mere tautology, are only
aesthetically preferred patterns.30 Thus, for Hamann, the philosopher and the
natural scientist who take their knowledges for the final truth are merely
men with a highly stringent, puritanical sense of taste. But not so the real wise
men they set off, on a pure whim, on a lure, irresponsibly into the
unknown. In doing so they abandoned their own legal king for a rumoured
monarch, precipitated the massacre of innocent babies in a foreign land and forced the baby messiah they
sought to flee to Egypt. The story, claims Hamann, shows the uselessness of good
intentions, as also of all assumptions, upon which reason nonetheless
relies for the magi sought a king, but found a baby. But despite their
apparent failures to do good or know the truth, the wise men are
nonetheless justified by faith because, unlike Pilate, they have lived solely to
see the truth, and thereby have become a part of the story of this truth
and its sign.
Radical Faith is a better starting point for knowledge than

nihilist abstraction theology is key to phenomenal expression
and experienced value anything less collapses into
meaninglessness and denial
God alone is good, alone true, alone being , and as
there is nothing extra alongside God, the best we can do is wait to
discover our identity which is hidden with Christ in God . But this waiting is
also a journey : since, after the fall, we no longer persist in our identity in
God, we must set off on an eschatological pilgrimage in which we hope to
see Gods restoration in person of the human form. After the fall, there is
nothing we can do or know for ourselves that is either good or true ,
beyond this journeying in expectancy. However, though we cannot guarantee either our
intentions or observations, it is enough to discern and desire in trust and hope that
we will then participate in some fragmentary way in the divine design . There
The lesson here, for Hamann, is that
is, one should note, no Lutheran duality of faith and works involved here: rather, Hamann plays up the more radical
antinomian side of Luther when he suggests that faith itself is a new kind of doing good , and
he affirms this by making love, in a Catholic fashion, as vital for salvation as is faith.31 This story, in effect, is
Hamanns attack on the beautiful soul: like Hegel afterwards, he seems to place the political, in the sense of a
risky acting for the human future, above a personal attempt to be moral; unlike Hegel, however (as Oswald Bayer
he does not seek to secure this action in trust in an objective

universal knowledge, any more than in a reliable intuition. Instead he
secures it in a recollection (Wiedererinnerung) of the divine word which (unlike the
Enlightenments reason) was never perfectly present to us in the first place, and
therefore must be ceaselessly heard and expressed in action ever anew .32
rightly points out),
it is precisely this political dimension which

integrates the spirit of observation with the spirit of prophecy for
although the present moment is never simply there, neither is Hamann
content (like poststructuralism) to dissolve time into a pure formless flux. The point
of life is rather to set up, in hope, certain contingent structures of truth
and justice to set up Jerusalem not Babylon , and no Lutheran duality of law and gospel is
invoked hereinformed by our entire feeling-imbued and also hermeneutically
discursive response to the world and present only in so far as they are
taken to reflect eternity, since eternity alone can truly be present at all .33
Here one can see most acutely how Hamann and Jacobis realism involves no mimesis
of an external real but rather (and in this instance Jacobi like Herder echoes Spinoza) the
expressive registering of the other according to our own creative modality .
We correspond to the other only in so far as our expressions approximate
to the entire expression of the thing by the mind of God, which is the
things actual existence over against nothing. This is not at all like the constructivism of
One should note here also that
German idealism, which oscillates between or combines a pure voluntarism and a pre-determination of the will by
logic, since it still assumes an empty subject over against a given alien object in the Cartesian mode. Instead, for
creative expression is the answer of

a specific, positioned subject to an object which itself mediates a personal
address, and it is governed neither by will nor by logic, but by faith which
seeks simultaneously to utter an adequate song of praise to the divine
and to construct a more adequate humanity. We are to act, with the whole person,
which is to say religiously, rather than simply to know which is always to
deny, to negateor than simply to feel, which would be to dissolve into
the night of poetic Romanticism or pagan fatalism which for Hamann is dialectically
the radical pietists (Herder as well as Jacobi and Hamann)
identical with its seeming opposite, philosophical abstraction.34
Faith Solves Pomo

Only centering philosophy around a search for theological
truth escapes the nihilism of postmodern life
Milbank et al. 99 John Milbank, Graham Ward and Catherine Pickstock,
INTRODUCTION- Suspending the material: the turn of radical orthodoxy, Radical
Orthodoxy: A new theology, eds. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham
Ward, Routledge, 1999, p. 1-3
For several centuries now, secularism has been defining and constructing
the world. It is a world in which the theological is either discredited or
turned into a harmless leisure-time activity of private commitment . And yet in
its early manifestations secular modernity exhibited anxiety concerning its own lack of ultimate groundthe
today the
logic of secularism is imploding. Speaking with a microphoned and digitally
simulated voice, it proclaimsuneasily, or else increasingly unashamedly
its own lack of values and lack of meaning. In its cyberspaces and
themeparks it promotes a materialism which is soulless, aggressive,
nonchalant and nihilistic. The present collection of essays attempts to reclaim the world by situating
scepticism of Descartes, the cynicism of Hobbes, the circularities of Spinoza all testify to this. And
its concerns and activities within a theological framework. Not simply returning in nostalgia to the premodern, it
visits sites in which secularism has invested heavily aesthetics, politics, sex, the body, personhood, visibility,
spaceand resituates them from a Christian standpoint; that is, in terms of the Trinity, Christology, the Church and
What emerges is a contemporary theological project made

possible by the self-conscious superficiality of todays secularism. For this
new project regards the nihilistic drift of postmodernism (which nonetheless has
roots in the outset of modernity) as a supreme opportunity . It does not, like liberal theology,
transcendentalist theology and even certain styles of neoorthodoxy, seek in the face of this drift to
shore up universal accounts of immanent human value (humanism) nor
defences of supposedly objective reason. But nor does it indulge , like so many,
in the pretence of a baptism of nihilism in the name of a misconstrued
negative theology. Instead, in the face of the secular demise of truth, it
seeks to reconfigure theological truth . The latter may indeed hover close to nihilism, since it,
also, refuses a reduction of the indeterminate. Yet what finally distances it from nihilism is
its proposal of the rational possibility, and the faithfully perceived
actuality, of an indeterminacy that is not impersonal chaos but infinite
interpersonal harmonious order, in which time participates . This new theological
the Eucharist.
approach may be placed under the rubric radical orthodoxy. In what sense orthodox and in what sense radical?
Orthodox in the most straightforward sense of commitment to credal

Christianity and the exemplarity of its patristic matrix. But orthodox also
in the more specific sense of re-affirming a richer and more coherent
Christianity which was gradually lost sight of after the late Middle Ages . In
this way the designation orthodox here transcends confessional boundaries, since both Protestant biblicism and
posttridentine Catholic positivist authoritarianism are seen as aberrant results of theological distortions already
dominant even before the early modern period. Much of this perspective is in profound continuity with the French
nouvelle thologie which partially undergirded the reforms of Vatican II, but where radical orthodoxy wishes to
reach further is in recovering and extending a fully Christianised ontology and practical philosophy consonant with
authentic Christian doctrine. The consequences of modern theological decadence for philosophy and the wider
culture were never fully considered by the nouvelle thologie (and indeed it sometimes uncritically embraced
various modes of secular knowledge) and while this certainly was considered by Thomistic currents in the wake of
Gilson and Maritain, the exclusively Thomist perspective is not seen by radical orthodoxy as necessarily decisive. At
the same time radical orthodoxy, while sharing a great deal with Barthian neoorthodoxy, departs from this theology
also, in a somewhat similar fashion: by refusing all mediations through other spheres of knowledge and culture,
Barthianism tended to assume a positive autonomy for theology, which rendered philosophical concerns a matter of
indifference. Yet this itself was to remain captive to a moderneven liberalduality of reason and revelation, and
ran the risk of allowing worldly knowledge an unquestioned validity within its own sphere. By comparison with this,
radical orthodoxy is more mediating, but less accommodating since, while it assumes that theology must speak
also of something else, it seeks always to recognise a theological difference in such speaking. But just as important
as a contrast in substance, here, is a general contrast of approach and style: where Barthianism can tend to the
ploddingly exegetical, radical orthodoxy mingles exegesis, cultural reflection and philosophy in a complex but
Radical, first of all, in the sense of a return

to patristic and medieval roots, and especially to the Augustinian vision of
all knowledge as divine illuminationa notion which transcends the
modern bastard dualisms of faith and reason, grace and nature . Radical,
second, in the sense of seeking to deploy this recovered vision systematically
to criticise modern society, culture, politics, art, science and philosophy
with an unprecedented boldness. But radical in yet a third sense of
realising that via such engagements we do have also to rethink the
tradition. The fact of its late medieval collapse, the fact that such a
collapse was possible, can sometimes point to even earlier weaknesses .
Equally, since the Enlightenment was in effect a critique of decadent early
modern Christianity, it is sometimes possible to learn from it , though in the end
the Enlightenment itself massively repeated the decadence. Fourth, the great Christian critics of
the EnlightenmentChristopher Smart, Hamann, Jacobi, Kierkegaard, Pguy, Chesterton and others in
different ways saw that what secularity had most ruined and actually
denied were the very things it apparently celebrated: embodied life, selfexpression, sexuality, aesthetic experience, human political community.
Their contention, taken up in this volume, was that only transcendence, which suspends
these things in the sense of interrupting them, suspends them also in
the other sense of upholding their relative worth over against the void .
coherently executed collage. And just how is it radical?
Such radicalism indeed refuses the secular, but at the same time it does re-envision a Christianity which never
sufficiently valued the mediating participatory sphere which alone can lead us to God. This is not at all to deny that
the worst Christian puritanismacts of disciplinary confinement, categorisation of banished human categories
(homosexuals, lepers) and the worst otherworldly piety upholding a centralised tyrannising politics were the result
once one has realised, following the great English

that sexual puritanism, political
disciplinarianism and abuse of the poor are the result of a refusal of true
Christianity (see Lear and Measure for Measure), one is led to articulate a more
incarnate, more participatory, more aesthetic, more erotic, more
socialised, even more Platonic Christianity.
of late medieval theological deviation. However,
literary visionaries William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe
Framework
Meaning
Meaning is the fundamental question. The aff can say or do
nothing without theistic investment its only a matter of
whether this is done faithfully or nihilistically
nothing and the difference of theology, Routledge, 2002, p. 236
I think x or y, but what is it to think either of these or what is it to think?
When we think, do, or see something, we presume a certain significance
for each of these events. Yet this significance cannot, it seems, be accounted
for within the immanent realms of any of them. In other words, how am I to
decide that the sound emitted by my mouth is different from the sound of
waves, the silence of stones, or dogs barking? An answer may be that one communicates
in a sophisticated and extremely complicated fashion while the others do not; but such a reply attends merely to
this does not explain, or even address, the

presumed significance of this no doubt complicated act . Therefore a further
edition of the same question must be issued; what is it to communicate,
why should it be considered important? Such questions bring us face to face with the
aforementioned aporia: if we lean back in our chairs declaring that there just are
metaphysical questions to be asked, then we have not attended to the
significance required, and so presumed, in this utterance . It seems we require
a thought of thinking , or a thought of thought. In other words, a meta-level is required. But
the identification of such a need does not escape the aporia; instead, it
deepens it. If thought requires its own thought, then it can either be
another thought or something other than thought; the former would
initiate an infinite regress, for the supplementary thought would require
its own thought and so on. Such a thought would be reducible to the
previous thought, failing to escape, and so explain, the immanent act . The
latter would ground thought in that which is not thought, but this means
that all thinking would rest upon its own absence, as its foundation would
not be the same as itself. Yet this returns us to the previous position, in
which thought had not addressed its own immanent activity, simply
presuming its significance. But if thought does endeavour to think itself, it
then bases itself on what is not thought. As a result all thinking would, as
before, fail to think . We have paid witness to this quandary in earlier chapters, where the dualisms
employed to cope with this aporia (which was the fundamental problem bequeathed to German
idealism by Jacobi) display the difficulties involved.
the mechanics of the procedure. Consequently,
Gift > Given

Our being is gifted, not given experience as experience of
something created for us is more valuable
Milbank 3 John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and pardon, Routledge,
London, 2003, p. xi
The methexis of donation, which complements the methexis of language,
has two aspects. First of all, for theology there are no givens, only gifts.
Normally, in our secular society, one can say Oh, theres a box , an inert
given, and then maybe in addition one can say, yes, it was a gift . But in
Creation there are only givens in so far as they are also gifts : if one sees
only objects, then one mis-apprehends and fails to recognize true natures .
Here something can only be at all as a gift, and furthermore never ceases to be
constantly given; in this case the act of giving is never something that reverts
to the past tense. It is just because things as created can only be as gifts, just
because their being is freely derived, that one has to speak of Creation in
terms of participation and of analogical likeness of the gift to the giver
since if his mark is not upon the gift, how else shall we know that it is a
gift? Those who imagine that participation is for Christian theology some sort of alien Hellenistic theme (besides
the fact that they can never have read the Bible with any attention) fail to see just this, as they equally fail to see
that for Greek philosophy there was an uncreated material residue that was not created, and so not a gift, and
which therefore limited the sway of methexis. The second aspect of the methexis of donation is linked to the
gift is an exchange as well as an

offering without return, since it is asymmetrical reciprocity and nonidentical repetition. Because gift is gift-exchange, participation of the
created gifts in the divine giver is also participation in a Trinitarian God.
argument (which will only be fully made in the second book) that
Answers
AT: Perm
The perm is flimsy liberal theology this retains too much
projection of humanist metaphysics onto our encounter with
the radical otherness of God causes nihilism and narcissism
Modern theology on the whole accepts that philosophy has its own legitimacy,
its own autonomy, apart from faith. Philosophy articulates categories of
being in general, or else of what it is to know in general, but speaks only
obscurely, if at all, of God. Theology reserves to itself the knowledge of God as a loving creator who
has also redeemed the human race. But various currents of liberal theology seek to
articulate this knowledge in terms of philosophically derived categories of
being and knowing, the legitimacy of which liberal theology has forfeited
the right to adjudicate. In the case, by contrast, of various currents of neo-orthodoxy, an attempt is
made to articulate this knowledge in terms of categories proper to theology itself: usually this means granting a
methodological priority to the full revelation of God in Christ, with all its narrative specificity, over the seemingly
what often remains unclear

is the degree to which these theological categories are permitted to
disturb a philosophical account of what it is to be, to know and to act,
without reference to God. In the case of Karl Barth, a broad acceptance of a post-Kantian
more general and abstract acknowledgement of God as creator. And yet
here
understanding of philosophy is turned to neo-orthodox advantage, in that he can insist that natural reason discloses
nothing of God and yet that this opens the way to a renewed and, indeed, now more radical recognition that only
God discloses God in the contingency of events as acknowledged not by reason but by faith. But, here one might
does not this leave behind a certain liberal residue, a certain

humanistic deposit? For it seems that natural reason can recognise certain
features of the created orderwhether ontological or epistemologicalin their pure
finitude, without reference to any ratio of finite and infinite, as well as
certain features of the fallen created order, which it nonetheless fails to
decipher as fallen. Moreover, this liberal deposit arguably looms large, like an
ask,
enormous slag-heap , undermining the intent of neo-orthodoxy, and

obscuring its gaze upon the transcendent. For if philosophy determines
what it is to be and to know, then will it not pre-determine how we know
even Christ to be, unless we allow that the structure of this event reorganises also our ordinary sense of what is and what we can know , in
such a way that the autonomy of philosophy is violated . The danger here is, as is well
exemplified in Barth, that if we fail to redefine being and knowledge theologically ,
theological difference, the radical otherness of God, will never be expressible in
any way without idolatrously reducing it to our finite human categories.
Hence Barth is confined to a Christomonism, in which Christocentricity
reduces to a focus on an enormous black hole , so radically other that it
cannot be at all pictured or conceptualised as the new characteristic
practice of the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit . And, worse still,
Barths continued and heterodox reduction of Christs personal, and expressively imaging, character to a mere
conveyance of the Paternal will betrays the fact that he projects God as the supreme instance of what a postKantian philosophy, as Fichte correctly realised, must logically understand human existence to be: namely, a willed
positing of reality without other constraining grounds of necessity. Therefore, while the Barthian claim is that postKantian philosophy liberates theology to be theological, the inner truth of his theology is that by allowing legitimacy
to a methodologically atheist philosophy, he finishes by construing God on the model, ironically, of man without
God.1
Its all or nothing shedding modernist conceits is key to value

anything less reverts to nihilism
Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, Routledge, 1999, p. 32
Because they point theology to a
radical orthodoxy they also show how theology can outwit nihilism . Not by
And herein lies the heart of their significance for today.
seeking to reinstate reason , as many opponents of postmodernity would argue. This is

absurd, because nihilism is not scepticism, nor relativism . No, as Hamann and
Jacobi understood, the rational Enlightenment already in effect taught nihilism. For
nihilism is the purest objectivity, since it is possible objectively to
conclude that there is only nothing. Indeed, as Catherine Pickstock has argued, only
nothing fulfils the conditions for a perfectly inert, controllable and
present object.48 What the radical pietists realised was that to be human means, primarily,
that we must reckon with an immense depth behind things. There are only
two possible attitudes to this depth: for the first , like Kant, we distinguish
what is clear from what is hidden: but then the depth is an abyss, and
what appears, as only apparent, will equally induce vertigo . This is why
critical philosophy, the attitude of pure reason itself, is also the stance of
nihilism. The twist added by postmodernism is simply that appearances
themselves cannot be made clearly present, but are in ceaseless flux. The second
possibility is that we trust the depth , and appearance as the gift of depth,
and history as the restoration of the loss of this depth in Christ . By
comparison with this reasonChristianitywe can see easily the secret
identity of all impersonal religions which celebrate fate or the void with
the nihilism of modernity. Hence it is indeed for radical orthodoxy an
either/or: philosophy (Western or Eastern) as a purely autonomous discipline, or
theology: Herod or the magi, Pilate or the God-man.49
AT: Gods Not Real

Only Gods grace endows being with significance their
epistemic skepticism effaces value to life by relying on ontic
and fallible constructs of ontology
There is little doubt that beings excess becomes a pornography of the void in the works of Zizek, Lacan, et al., as
Graham Ward has argued.175 For Zizek does seem to display a lust for the void based on the excremental horror he
claims to discern in lifes excess; the excess which life is. Hamann would surely have disagreed with Zizeks
for Hamann all that is made is clean, in so

far as what God makes is clean, so we must not call it profane. Indeed,
according to Christianity, God became man and so He had genitalia, bowel
movements and so on. Consequently, Hamann rejoices in the very physicality of
the body: It is noon and I enjoy what I eat and what I drink and also just
as much the moment I become free of both and give back again to earth
what has been taken out of her.176 Hamann goes on: Man must not deny the pudenda of his
pejorative interpretation of the Real, because
nature. For to do so would mean estrangement from God;177 in a letter to Herder, Hamann continues this idea:
The
pudenda seem to me to be the unique bond between creation and

creator.178 Dickson puts it well: for Hamann, God has made us, passions, desires,
excrement and all; what God has made, we must not call unclean .179 Indeed,
just because that which manifests itself escapes our categories (appearing
ugly)180 to dismiss it as horrible is to remain reactively consituted by an
idealism that displays a distinct lack of caritas. For as Jean-Luc Marion says, The very
disfiguration remains a manifestation.181 This means that for the Christian, sin is
a matter of egurgitation, as it does not stem from the world, but comes to
it. Furthermore, we cannot abandon what is because it appears to be less than
ideal. For this reason, to name the world as horrific is to entertain the Devil of
the Gaps. Instead there must be, and here I somewhat follow Adorno, a priority of the
object . For does the object reality not call to us in all its rich forms;
forms which, as Adolf Portmann puts it, are a conveyance for receivers?182 Indeed, is
Roger Caillois not correct to speak of An outrageous outpouring of resources beyond
vital interest.183 For this reason, nature is not to be deemed a miser.184 As a result,
we can agree with Portmann when he calls for an expansionist approach to existence,185 one that responds to what
Merleau-Ponty calls an inexhaustible richness,186 that lies in the perceived; a richness that is an urge to selfdisplay, to use Portmanns phrase.187 Consequently, is it not correct to agree with Caillois when he speaks of an
autonomous aesthetic force in nature,188 a force present in the very being of manifestation? When Adorno calls
for a prioritisation of the object, he does not leave it at that. As Buck-Morss puts it: Truth
resided in the
object, but it did not lie ready at hand, the material object needed the
rational subject in order to release the truth which it contains.189 Hannah
Arendt echoes a similar sentiment: All objects because they appear indicate a subject,
and, just as every subjective intention has its intentional object, so every
appearing object has its intentional subject.190 The accusation of
anthropomorphism can easily be levelled at such an understanding of
appearance. However, this accusation is contradictory, because nonanthropomorphism is itself anthropomorphic; just as nihilism is somewhat
anthropocentric: I cant do it, so it cant be done. Anthropomorphism is
avoided because man is not fully present to himself; man, too, exceeds his
name. This is the non-identity which Adorno finds in being. And it is this nonidentity which discerns the present excess, an excess that does not lead
to an elsewhere, but moves resonates on the spot. As Adorno says, What is,
is more than it is.191 For this reason we must, as Adorno suggests, view
everything from the standpoint of redemption .192 Such redemption
stands within the disruption that the aforementioned excess is. Interestingly,
Adorno finds hope in what he calls the name.193 Yet, as Dttmann reminds us: A name always wants to be the
only one to name what it names, that is its narcissism, narcissism itself.194 But, of course, this is to repeat the
problem, for narcissism here threatens to become the only name; the name of every name. Instead, the hopeful
name displays a certain amnesia, and therein lies its redemption: Forgetting always involves the best; for it
involves the possibility of redemption (Benjamin).195 And here we can agree with Zizek when he says, in a manner
reminiscent of Pguy, that Christianity
calls upon us to thoroughly reinvent

ourselves . . . Christianity enjoins us to REPEAT the founding gesture . . . .196
We return to the object because it calls us again, and we have forgotten
the hue of its beauty, for we cannot quite recall the plenitude of its form;
is such a non-identical repetition not the only way to return to the face of
our lover? Indeed, is this not the rich thrust of desire, one that keeps pulling
us back to the very depth of the surface? Consequently, the phenomenological resistance
met in the handshake or in intercourse, is not to be read as a failure of intimacy; resistance being read as an
resistance does not mock our efforts to encounter; indeed,

the logic that generates such an understanding is governed by a vicious
idealism that hates the body, which it deems a creation of Satan, and which it seeks to destroy; to
meet the demands of pure encounter, would the hand not have to be
squeezed to obliteration, which would be annihilation, not intercourse? In
returning to the object we answer a call this is our calling doing so with the
offer of a hopeful name; and we are called by a name that we too exceed.
In this way, being is not beyond thought; it is the beyond of thought .
excluding distance. For such
AT: There is no such thing as a human

Christs body as the figure of redemption is all the humanism
we need everything else is totally contingent and differs from
animality only in degree
The above considerations suggest that any neo-orthodox accusation that Hamann naturalises faith would miss the
point of his radical questioning of dubious modern distinctions. But at the same time we should resist, also,
Balthasars Catholic accusation that Hamann fails to respect the specificities of our natural existence.39 I doubt
if for them, as Balthasar,

nature was finally defined by its orientation to the
supernatural, then this leaves nothing in nature which the light of faith
might not re-interpret and indeed no true nature which has not been
transfigured by grace. Thus Aquinas says that all the conclusions of
philosophy are open to deepening and transformation by theology (ST I. q.1.
a1, a5). And even if Hamanns Lutheranism renders him more radical than ancient tradition, he is still not
necessarily wrong. After all, his conclusions are informed by a correct sense,
unavailable to the ancient tradition, of the sheer natural and cultural
contingency of all our reasonings. This suggests, indeed, that our only solid
anthropological resource may now be Christological : that is to say that we can
whether this suggestion is true to the Greek Fathers, Augustine or even Aquinas, since
following de Lubac, recognises,
construe some faint human integrity only from the point where we
glimpse an absolute integrity . Thus Hamann, in an astonishing fashion, denies, against
Herder, all the usual claims to the effect that we have some attribute
distinguishing us from the animals. All supposed differences in kind cannot
really be distinguished in kind, he says, from differences in degree: we are
simply a more various, more imitating, more multi-voiced, more openended sort of animal.40 Our language derives from no special faculty (since
what would we know of this outside external linguistic practice?) and is just our peculiar mode of
animal behaviour, given with us, expressed by us, but not invented by us.
This would seem to leave us but a higher gorilla, an unruly, nihilistic, aggressive animal, were it not for Hamanns
The relation of spiritual depth to bodily surface in

us, he suggests, is like that of the hypostatic union of God and Man in Christ,
construed in terms of the Lutheran communicatio idiomatum .41 Just as with
Christ, we see only his human nature, and his divine nature is manifested
in the unique narrative pattern of his life which has the integrity of the
divine person and logos, so also all we see in human beings are animals,
but it is the beauty of their unique form of life, their strange political
blending of solitude and sociality which displays, in human personhood, a
human nature.42 Hence it is only our faint anticipation and then echo of a
divine redeemed humanity, intelligently erotic, erotically intelligent, which
at all distinguishes us as more than animal, more than nihilistic . But for
philosophy, Hamann allows that there is no longer any stable identifiable
human essence. Therefore Balthasar is wrong to think that any natural integrity of humanity has here been
remarkable Christological overlay.
violated by an over-hasty anticipation of grace. On the contrary, it is surely true that the idea of soul makes sense
only as the echo in the creation of a creative source, and that the idea of soul/body unity only makes sense as the
anticipated achievement of a right dwelling with other creatures: a right aesthetic judging and desiring of them as
creatures under God.
Nuclearism Module
Impact 1NC
Nuclearism is a violent and totalitarian means of social
relation, obliterating all meaning to life outside of continued,
escalating violence. We come to regard total annihilation as
preferable to a constant state of paranoia - politically, this
provides the actual basis for nuclear weapon use, which turns
the aff.
Chapman '90 (G Clarke Chapman, chair of the department of religion and
philosophy at Moravian College, Facing the Nuclear Hersey, 1990,
[http://www.colorado.edu/ReligiousStudies/chernus/4820ColdWarCulture/Readings/FacingTheNuclearHeresy.pdf])
It is ironic that such religiosity is devoted to the Bomb. For that weapon is the culminating
achievement of those very historical processes that have eroded the
traditional modes for symbolizing the sense of immortality and larger
connectedness. Under the nuclear threat it is impossible to be confident of posterity, for
instance, or of cultural and social achievements that will endure, or even of the capacity of nature to survive.48 Nor
rely on conventional religious beliefs in an afterlife, if we accept the

report of survivors of Hiroshima, for whom traditional religious symbols
and doctrine suddenly were emptied of meaning at the very time they were most
needed. The only mode remaining, experiential transcendence or ecstatic "high
states" of consciousness, therefore, must bear the additional weight in meeting our
needs for psychic nurture. This helps explain, by the way, the restless demands
of our generation for new thrills, heightened sensory awareness, or exotic personal
experiences; these are in a complex sense religious quests for transcending the anxiety of extinction. " So
`flexible' is the human mind that it can, in this way, contemplate annihilation
as a joyous event, more joyous than living with the sense of being meaninglessly doomed."49 The danger
grows that the weapons themselves may be subconsciously perceived as "the
most Dionysian stimulants of all."50 That would tempt humans to indulge
themselves in the ultimate orgy-as is reflected in the apocalyptic ending of the classic
film, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Slop Worrying and Love the Bomb, where the bomber pilot
can we
straddles the nuclear weapon and rides it down to its target with a wild Texas yodel. And so, as Lifton remarks,
"The
weapon itself comes to usurp all of the pathways to symbolic

immortality."51 The heritage of images for death and immortality that formerly sustained us has become
contaminated with forebodings of holocaust. Lately many people have turned in frustration to conservative religions
that promise security from nihilism. But this resurgence of traditionalism will be ineffectual, Lifton believes, for " as
death imagery comes to take the shape of total annihilation or extinction,

religious symbolism becomes both more sought after and more inadequate."" When
basic symbols lose their nurturing power and plausibility in a culture, one desperate
response is-so to speak-to turn up the volume. It is no wonder that all over the world
in the 1970s and 1980s there has been an upsurge of fundamentalist religion and
politics. "Fundamentalism is a form of totalism with a very specific
response to the loss of larger human connections. It is a doctrinal restatement of those
connections in which literal, immutable words (rather than the original flow of vital images) are rendered sacred and
made the center of a quest for collective revitalization."' 3 However Lifton does not dwell long upon the dangers of,
say, Protestant literalists who understand little of the profound nature of symbolization, and who thereby only make
the problem worse. His real concern lies elsewhere, and so with disconcerting nonchalance he takes up this
religious term primarily to bend it to his earlier point of reference: " Nuclearism, then,
is the ultimate
fundamentalism of our time. The `fundamentals' sacrilized [sic] are perverse products of technicism
and scientism-the worship of technique and science in ways that preclude their human use."54
Nuclearism Link
Their extinction scenarios are mythology produced by
nuclearism - the affirmative presents images of total
annihilation to give us a comforting end to the perils of the
nuclear age. This produces political restriction in the face of
the enormity of the Bomb, ceding power to the elites of
nuclearism.
Lifton's analysis is carried further by a gifted young scholar in the study of history of religions. Ira Chernus of the
University of Colorado at Boulder has been an inspiration to many, including myself, in his pioneering work of
applying cross cultural studies and symbolisms to the hold which nuclearism has on our inmost heart. Like Lifton he
sees religion as rooted in a profound hunger to experience spiritual power and transcendence through images that
numbing is both cause and effect

of the mind's inability to produce culture specific images that link death to
these continuities. But he goes further than Lifton: our numbing towards the nuclear threat cannot
uphold the larger continuities of life.74 He agrees that psychic
account for the lurid fascination such themes nevertheless have for the public imagination. Popular culture returns
again and again to such pictures, and yet somehow the public never attains a concrete understanding of what
In thinking about nuclear war,

we have largely set aside our rational, analytical faculties and our capacity
to think in realistic detail. The reality they depict has an elusive, blurredat-the-edges quality, an open-endedness, a questionable mooring in everyday reality, and an
emphasis on a few central, intensely concrete sensory images linked by
unpredictable distortions of ordinary logic. For the student of religion, these
characteristics remind one of nothing so much as that puzzlingly unreal
reality found so often in myth. And the student of religion is well prepared to predict that
constellations of images relating to fundamental issues of life and death
will be likely to assume mythic forms.75 Analysis of mythic forms takes on a most practical
function. "So psychic numbing is only half the story. It tells us why we fail to face the nuclear issue. The
mythic approach tells us what happens when we do face the issue: We are
fascinated, deeply moved, and somehow fulfilled in ways which we only
dimly perceive or understand. Numbing and mythologizing thus reinforce
each other, and the upshot of this secret alliance is political paralysis ."16
Those knowledgeable in religion can fathom how this numbing emasculates traditional
symbols of faith just when they are most needed while also impelling us to
generate new mutations of mythic content. "The crisis of psychic numbing is, at its most
nuclear war would actually be like Why not? The answer lies in the
fundamental level, a religious crisis."77 Chernus describes several examples of cherished mythic images of nuclear
war. One is the myth of the "heroic survivors" or the "big bang," so popular in science fiction plots: civilization is
destroyed, but a band of people ("blond and beautiful and creative") survive the purgative fires and build a new
society that is better than the past. We are beguiled with the promise of a fresh start after the traumas of rebirth. A
the myth of "no survivors" or the "big whoosh." Here, instead of narratives, we are
charmed by simple images of' mushroom clouds and "the end" of
everything, in a universally quick and painless death. Somehow the notions
suggests a comforting regression to primal chaos and unity, a fantasy of
"return to the womb." This gives expression to what Lifton calls the experience
second is
of transcendence, the Dionysian ecstasy of letting go one's self-consciousness and merging with cosmic
nothingness. 78 Together these two myths present a pair of attractive options as ways of maintaining sanity in
the nuclear age: either I will survive and become a member of the heroic remnant, or I will be painlessly vaporized
rest upon a third theme, the myth

of "Destiny or Fate": the belief that one is powerless as the End
approaches, and So under no obligation to make decisions. These mythic perceptions
operate in reciprocity with numbing, shielding us from the concrete realities
and the vast scale and chaos of what a holocaust would be. "When we face the
immense, our minds revert to the modes of childhood and dream thinking-symbolism,
fantasy, archetype, myth"'9-and in direct proportion to the enormity of thermonuclear
war. In effect these several myths "all share the common characteristic of making that war in some way
along with everyone else in an ecstatic "big whoosh." Both alternatives
acceptable or even attractive."8 0
Nuclear Exchange Link

Rhetoric of nuclear exchange sanitizes and legitimates
nuclear violence their process of psychic numbing is what
permits current nuclear politics to spiral out of control
A variant form of numbing, as a defense mechanism, is "denial." An unacceptable
image is repressed by the mind until it actually disappears from the field of our
perception. Nicholas Humphrey has given an early example of this striking self-deception.61 Two hundred
years ago, when Captain Cook's great sailing ship reached Australia and anchored in Botany Bay, it passed within a
quarter of a mile of some Aborigines fishing offshore. But they showed no reaction whatever. Apparently they could
not "see" a huge shape that was utterly without parallel in their experience. But they finally did take alarm when
Cook put down some rowing boats, which presumably resembled dangers known from past experience. In modern
assistance is given by inappropriate

language that distorts perception, often with endearing or evasive labels. Lifton
describes some examples of what has come to be known as "Nukespeak": the domesticating
or "anesthetizing quality of the language of nuclear weapons ."6z The Hiroshima
and Nagasaki bombs, for instance, were named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," respectively. A "nuclear
exchange" sounds like a party with mutual gift-giving, and so jargon
obscures the grisly realities of carnage. There are, furthermore, many examples beyond those
times we have more subtle forms of denial. Great
listed by Lifton. In the recent trial of the Plowshares Eight, Christian activists who were accused of damaging missile
nosecones, the General Electric officials testifying insisted on calling the nosecone "the product," and warheads
"the physics package. "63 "Doublespeak Awards" are given annually by the National Association of English Teachers
to public officials using language that is "grossly deceptive, evasive, euphemistic, confusing, or self-contradictory";
a 1983 award went to the officer who described the Titan 11 missile and its nine-megaton warhead as a "potentially
disruptive re-entry system ."61 Currently a renowned example of euphemism is the MX, our largest and most
accurate offensive missile, which President Reagan has renamed "Peacekeeper"-possibly unaware that the cognate
affectations of
language are not just happenstance. They have the effect of blocking
images or of diverting intense emotion that would normally accompany
any symbolization of mass destruction. The unthinkable is denied, the
potential anguish benumbed, and all with a joyless intensity resembling
religious fervor. This avoidance by "linguistic detoxification," "a way of
talking about nuclear weapons without really talking about them ,"66 is a
prerequisite for the many illusions we cherish about the Bomb. Lifton lists, for
instance, the illusion of limit and control (the supposition that thermonuclear warfare could be
managed rationally and without escalating into global havoc), the illusions of effective foreknowledge,
preparation, and protection, the illusion of stoic behavior while under nuclear attack, the illusion of
recovery afterwards, and a more encompassing illusion of "systems rationality" that projects
an aura of insane logic over the whole structure of nuclear strategy .6' Selfword "peacemaker" has a history as a humorous name for a gun or warship .65 Such
deceptions of this kind depend upon "Nukespeak" and a habitual numbing against unspeakable images of
holocaust. Moreover the entire process of denial is structurally reinforced and encouraged by the postwar growth of
"chronic secrecy," as part of our government's mythic quest for national security .68
Sacrilege Impact
Nuclearism converts social panic into pseudo-religious
withdrawal faith is invested in a state war machine bent on
total destruction
We begin with Robert Jay Lifton, a research psychiatrist at Yale University who is best known for his 1962 studies of
survivors of the Hiroshima bomb." This experience has impelled him over the years to expand his findings into a
range of articles and books which probe our attitudes towards death, as well as the effects on the psyche of living in
a post Hiroshima world. He goes beyond the older Freudian views that one's own death is so unimaginable that the
Lifton stresses the positive role of symbols

in helping both the conscious and the unconscious to transcend that
personal finality. He sees "the symbolizing process around death and
immortality as the individual's experience of participation in some form of collective life
continuity," of which there have been historically five modes." The biological mode of symbolic immortality is
mind tries to repress all thought of it. Instead
expressed in the confidence of living through one's children and their descendants. The religious mode consists of
rituals and formal beliefs about an afterlife. Creative works that live on through artifacts, the arts and sciences, or
other service to humanity, forms a third mode. Fourth is nature itself, which is seemingly eternal; Hiroshima
survivors often comforted themselves with the ancient saying, "The state may collapse but the mountains and
rivers remain." Finally and most fundamentally, there is the altered state of consciousness which Lifton calls
"experiential transcendence," such as induced states of momentary ecstasy through drugs, meditation, or various
disciplines. We depend on these symbolic affirmations of life - continuity for our sense of inner well-being. But
especially the first four of the five have been steadily eroded and impoverished in modern times, which in turn
dislocation of vital symbols

opens the way for what Lifton calls "ideological totalisms," which rush in to fill the dreaded
vacuum. Such totalisms vainly promise symbolic immortalities by "an all-ornone subjugation of the self to an idea"43 such as a fascist or totalitarian state. This fatal
unleashes an ominous sequence of reactions in the unconscious .42 This
remedy is supported both by victimization, since absolute claims to virtue require a contrasting image of incarnate
evil as a scapegoat, and by the distinctively modern blend of passion and numbing that permits mass violence to be
organized. Readers of Lifton cannot mistake the religious implications of this analysis for an understanding of
totalitarianism: it is an idolatrous answer to the death anxieties of vulnerable

modern humans, once desymbolization has reached a certain stage. Lifton goes beyond a critique of police state
ideologies, however. By 1945 technology had cleared the way for the ultimate extension of this totalism (even in
constitutional societies), namely "nuclearism." Lifton's work has helped us arrive at a name for what has thus far
been described as the religious challenge posed by atomic weapons. We have sketched the functional
characteristics of wholeness and ultimacy, and that tenacious hold which the Bomb has on its adherents' loyaltiesall of which the Catholic bishops' pastoral letter, Jonathan Schell, and Gordon Kaufman seem unable to explain. But
the complex of ambivalent attitudes towards nuclear weapons may be

accounted for under the hypothesis that we are actually dealing with a
covert religion. Or at least the phenomena described by Lifton suggest something close to an alternate
now
religion, once we look beyond the conventional indicators of the major historic faiths in the West: formal scriptures,
creeds, houses of worship, and clergy. Explicit forms of such identifying features represent one way, but not the only
way, in which human spirituality comes to expression-for good or ill. To resume a description of Lifton's analysis,
here is his definition of this final modern totalism: nuclearism: the passionate embrace of nuclear weapons as a
Nuclearism is a secular
religion, a total ideology in which "grace" and even "salvation"-the
mastery of death and evil -are achieved through the power of a new
technological deity. The deity is seen as capable not only of apocalyptic
destruction but also of unlimited creation. And the nuclear believer or "nuclearist"
solution to death anxiety and a way of restoring a lost sense of immortality.
allies himself with that power and feels compelled to expound on the virtues of his deity. He may come
to depend on the weapons to keep the world going. 44 To enter this or any other religion usually entails a
conversion experience. In the case of nuclearism this means "an immersion in death anxiety followed by rebirth into
At the heart of the conversion experience is an overwhelming

sense of awe-a version of Freud's `oceanic feeling' in which one's own insignificance in
relationship to the larger universe is so extreme as to feel oneself, in effect,
annihilated ."45 That awe shines through the strikingly religious language used by early witnesses to atomic
the new world view.
explosions. For example Lifton notes that a "language reminiscent of a `conversion in the desert"' and "images of
rebirth" are found in the words of a science writer, William Laurence, in describing the Almagordo test: "On that
moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pinpoint. It was as though the earth had opened and
the skies had split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World.... The big boom
came about a hundred seconds after the great flash - the first cry of a newborn world. . . ."46 The same writer
compared it also to witnessing the Second Coming of Christ. Elsewhere Lifton has extended a description of the
numinous awe inspired by the Bomb to include the rest of us who have never been eyewitnesses. For us,
our
fear is amorphous, corresponding to the invisibility of the dreaded

radiation; we have a sense of mystery because the precise effects cannot
be known; we feel a presence of nemesis and of being related to the
infinite by tapping an ultimate force of the universe ; and we sense our creatureliness
and absolute vulnerability.47
Numbing Impact
Nuclearism is psychically disastrous - numbing is deployed as a
coping mechanism to the flood of nuclear imagery, which sets
the stage for escalatory violence as an attempt to recapture
meaning. This "death in life" sacrifices the subject to the altar
of Nuclearism.
take note of some of the psychic traits associated
with nuclearism, the new totalism. Lifton sees two major categories of these consequences:
"Dislocation creates a special kind of uneasy duality around symbolization:
a general sense of numbing, devitalization, and absence of larger meaning on the
one hand; and on the other, a form of image-release, an explosion of symbolizing
forays in the struggle to overcome collective deadness and reassert larger
connection."55 To take the latter one first, the "image-release" and flood of "symbolizing forays" characterize
Finally, this summary of Lifton should
what Lifton labels as the Protean self of the modern age. Like the figure in ancient mythology who changed shape at
the self nowadays seems embarked on an endless series of

experiments in seeking identity. Belief systems, careers, marriage partners, or lifestyles often are
will, so
switched with bewildering ease. Fads come and go, discordant ideas may be held simultaneously, or ever new
Because one's outer, public world is

no longer coordinated with one's inner, symbolic world, a sense of
absurdity prevails-and the best defense mechanism becomes a tone of
mockery affected towards every experience.56 It seems that ony old, stable societies are
personal experiences sought in unending quests for rebirth.
able to breed durable personal identities in their members. But we moderns find ourselves overwhelmed by the
nuclear threat, the cultural dislocation of our symbols, and the flood of unrelated fragments of imagery from our
mass communications. No wonder a person's role or identity may change as abruptly as turning the channel switch
on one's TV set! The other main category of effects of the Bomb on us all, "psychic numbing," moves in the reverse
Alongside the excitation of multiple images and successive selfidentities- what Lifton calls "an
explosion of symbolizing forays"-there is also an implosion . That is, we find a
widespread muting and repression of affect, a sense of inner emptiness and
direction.
devitalization. Lifton first noted this general "psychic shut-down" in his early research: "We thus encounter in both
Hiroshima and concentration camp survivors, what can be called a pervasive tendency toward sluggish despair-a
more or less permanent form of psychic numbing which includes diminished vitality, chronic depression and
constricted life space, and which covers over the rage and mistrust that are just beneath the surface."57 But
psychic numbing is not limited to victims of catastrophe . In one degree or another

similar reactions to death anxiety have been reported also in empirical studies of
people who earlier had taken part in 1950s nuclear air-raid drills, or in recent
questionnaires given to school children.58 Assailed by images of grotesque annihilation,
the mind's protective mechanisms act quickly to block painful feelings or
impressions. For those present at, for instance, Hiroshima, it means the mind is telling itself something like
"If I feel nothing, I cannot be threatened by the death all around me .... I am
not responsible. . . ." And for those not present back then, it means the mind sees to it that the
trauma becomes repressed, even "unimaginable."' 9 This numbing is a breakdown
in the normal human symbolization process which in itself is a miniature
"death in life," a symbolic death of the self, or "knowledge without feeling." In turn this
only perpetuates the general malaise within a beleaguered society. "We

can also speak of a profound symbolic gap characteristic of our age, a gap between the
capacity for technological violence on the one hand, and our much more limited
capacity for moral imagination on the other."6 It is ironic that in repressing pictures
of mass death, the mind instead-and in devious ways-"contracts" on the
installment plan for an inward imitation of death.
Framework
Theological analysis first
All these are consequences of nuclearism on the human psyche, which have been delineated by Lifton in his
writings for two decades. Now, however, there is a much wider recognition of these effects. Attestation has been
added by medical and psychiatric research by John E. Mack, Michael J. Carey, and Jerome D. Frank .69 A still broader
audience has been reached by Jonathan Schell's descriptions of living a double life (that is, by trying to ignore the
peril we secretly know could at any time obliterate everything) and its pervasive effects on marriage, human
In a nuclear age, explains another prominent writer, composing

fiction is difficult now "that the story of any individual . . . may not be able
to sustain an implication for the collective fate ."" And in his Albert Einstein Peace Prize
speech, former ambassador George F. Kerman characterizes our obsession with overkill: We have gone on
piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile, new levels of
destructiveness upon old ones. We have done this helplessly , almost involuntarily,
like the victims of some sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings heading for
relations, politics, and art.'
the sea, like the children of Hamlin marching blindly along behind their Pied Piper. And the result is that today we
have achieved, we and the Russians together, in the creation of these devices and their means of delivery, levels of
redundancy of such grotesque dimensions as to defy rational understanding.72 So
it defies rational
understanding? But of course! Not because it is instinctual behavior, as supposedly is the case with
lemmings heading to the sea, but because it is religious behavior. This is the point
that is so often overlooked by antinuclear critics who shake their heads over the mindless
futility of the arms race. Whether they realize it or not, they seriously overestimate the role of
rationality in human nature. Here Lifton's depth psychology marks a great improvement. But more is needed.
What is required finally is a religious diagnosis. For religion has always
known that human beings will sacrifice reason and even life itself , if need be,
for the sake of repressing chaos and securing cosmic meaning for their
restless lives. Even suicide can be a last ditch grasping at self-vindication and defiance! Instead of puzzling
over these lemming-like actions, we may gain more understanding as well as improve
our chances of averting disaster if we address nuclearism at last as an
appealing and effective new religion." And so we now move on to consider what religious
studies as a discipline may have to contribute.
Only theology reveals the religious functioning underpinning

contemporary liberalism and nuclearism
Thus Chernus offers a significant exposition of the specifically religious and yet self-deceptive role of myth for our
crisis. Moreover-and in marked contrast to anti-nuclear critics such as Schell, Kaufman, and Lifton-Chernus does see
a notable role as well for the church. Although making no claim to be a theologian, he points out that, "while the
churches have a unique problem in the nuclear age, they also have a unique
opportunity to illuminate our situation and respond creatively to it."84 Most antinuclear activity has come from a liberal ideological perspective. But there is a major failing which
liberals share, whether they are within the church or outside the church. That failing is an
overconfidence in human reason and its capacity to move people to realize
and act upon their genuine self-interest. This prompts a liberal bent toward
intellectualizing, if not moralizing as well-in effect a doom and gloom
scolding about how incompatible the Bomb is to our survival or our
morality. Then liberals puzzle over why their message has so little effect!
The answer is, as we have seen, that nuclearism is itself an enticing covert
religion. It arises because most people in their heart of hearts would prefer-and indeed
demand-a sense of personal identity and cosmic purpose , over and above mere survival
or morality. Even self destruction, in the last analysis, is preferable to meaninglessness.85 The role of the
church, therefore, ought to be in redirecting anti-nuclear efforts towards
deeper symbolic and even soteriological levels of communication. Chernus
goes on to apply the same critique of rationalism to both sides of the conventional debate over whether war has
become incompatible with human survival. On the one hand there are the "defense intellectuals" in Washington
who, since the Kennedy administration, seek both to identify rational purposes for nuclear weapons and to design
rational ways of using such weapons for those purposes-a vicious circle between ends and means. "Abstract,
technical, mathematical reason is the god at whose throne they worshipthough the Bomb seems to be seated at
this god's right hand."" On the other hand, there are the anti-nuclear critics of the defense intellectuals who claim
that there can be no rational ends or means for weapons of mass destruction. They say that escalation would be
inevitable, and so warfare by the Superpowers has become obsolete. Thereby, however, the critics admit that they
share the same unspoken premise with their opponents: nuclear war is normally a rational activity! Still a further
form of rationalism emerged when the Reagan administration sought to allay public fears about its steep buildup in
nuclear forces. The result has been "the myth of rational balance,"87 in other words, a professed support for arms
control as well as deterrence, as a dual pressure on the Soviets to come to terms. We are asked simply to trust our
experts, under whose benevolent and rational control the world can be kept in balanced tension indefinitely. In such
assertions about the

rational function or dysfunction of war, says Chernus, only serve to ignore the realities of
what is actually its religious function. He illustrates this from the works of three authors who have
impressed him. James Aho,89 first of all, says that in every religion, war has had the role of acting
out some mythic scenario for the purpose of preserving a sense of "nomos" or
cosmic order. This in turn holds back what humanity has always dreaded the most: "anomie,"
chaos, a final loss of orientation and sense of reality. In some cultures (especially Asian) war is an end in itself, a
a fashion, it is claimed, "the weapons will save us from themselves."88 All of these
ritual combat that reenacts the structure of the cosmos. Thereby war is play, in the sense of drama and a game. In
other cultures (especially Semitic or Protestant) war is a means to an end, a purification of the world from
personified evil or anomie. Thereby war is work, in the sense of goal-oriented behavior with no limits on the means
all wars, both ancient and modern, fulfill

deep hungers for imposing anew a sense of orderliness on the stubborn
irrationalities of life.
utilized to exterminate that evil. Thus, as Chernus likewise agrees,
AT: Deterrence
Deterrence theory assumes rational pursuit of self-interest
that just doesn't exist under nuclearism - symbolic dependency
overwhelms technical reasoning
Kaufman's preferred theological method and heritage stem from the
Enlightenment and its critical rationalism. So when he turns to consider nuclear holocaust he assumes
that after careful thought people must surely renounce such supreme
irrationality. But this procedure itself, Chernus might reply, resembles that
confidence in technical reason and literal truth which actually sustains our
mythic fascination with nuclear weapons. Perhaps a comparison of the two writers in the last
analysis must turn, not on their ideas about God (for both are procedurally quite reticent to allow much to be said
here), but instead on their concepts of human nature. Is the human self relatively univocal, a rational self
is the
human self a bundle of complexities which depends on symbolization to
construct bridges within itself as well as to the outside world, as it
grapples with the tensions of finitude and self transcendence ? Here I believe it is
consciousness that is only secondarily restricted by passion, ambivalence, folly, or self-indulgence? Or
clearly Chernus who is both more faithful to the Judeao-Christian vision, and more capable of advancing our
understanding of the nuclear dilemma.

Milbank K

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we see directly the

Rationalism turns everything into nothing

philosophical abstraction makes

it is, in fact, this line of reasoning, despite Hamanns accusation that

Luther entertained no such

of Duns Scotus, who for the first time established a radical

Jacobi and Hamann: first, they insisted that

possible again only through divine incarnation .9 Hence there can be no

no longer study life . . . [indeed] biology has

any significance consciousness might be thought to possess

Consequently, it is not the universes existence

which is disclosed, it is just the universe universing; in this way, it

The nihilist, then, can

Everything is perfect as it is, for it is absolutely necessary,

leaves nothing unthought by not thinking nothing .19 This

Ontotheology has an exhaustive yet

in leaving nothing unthought,

For Taylor, we are to

Postmodernism is built on a fatalist apathy towards violence

I think such a development more than ironic, but to some

For Derrida we must think

Soul moves itself audaciously away into difference; alterity

God is different and deferred , in that

Derridean diffrance collapses differences into

Derridas critique of metaphysics can resolve itself only

Each of these dualisms collapses into a monism as each dualism resides

Derrida indicates the fundamental nature of this supplement when he

Someone like Derrida takes the mobility of the sign to be the

rests his dualism of sense and non-sense on what he calls the

There is a poem by Shelley

This is relevant to nihilism, because if we take

desert, which is analogous to the nothing as something. If nihilism is

Lacan The Real

what is important here is how such a questioning not only

this kernel that remains beyond and in a

But the truth of desire does not know any such

Systemic description = standing reserve

Cunningham 2 Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of

Every description literally takes the place of that which it

systemic erasure is the basis of modern knowledge in all its postmodern

every being which falls under such

the form of nihilisms

allows for the invention of such neutrality.

That which is becomes structurally amenable

to experimentation, dissection, indefinite epistemic investigation .18 For

describe this dia-bolic (meaning to take apart) event in a way that is

National Socialism emulates the form of nihilistic

The life that is lost is

no longer study life today [because] biology has

These discourses depend upon a descriptive

Affirming life would require a metalevel as it displays an excessive

earlier chapters: Plotinus meontotheological constitution of finitude; Avicennas necessitarianism; Ghents

AT: Nihilism Good

nihilism draws our attention to this facile, yet

There is also a blatant

to say that the world is full of suffering

natural faith is very much that it requires

revealed and always historical contingency as the primary divine

Radical Faith is a better starting point for knowledge than

he does not seek to secure this action in trust in an objective

it is precisely this political dimension which

creative expression is the answer of

identical with its seeming opposite, philosophical abstraction.34