Christianity

1AC

Resolution
1965 Resolved: That nuclear weapons should be controlled by
an international organization.

1AC
Give your bodies to Atom, my friends. Release yourself to his
power, feel his Glow and be Divided.
Come forth and drink the waters of the Glow, for this ancient
weapon of war is our salvation, it is the very symbol of Atom's
glory!
Behold! He's coming with the clouds! And every eye shall be
blind with his glory! Every ear shall be stricken deaf to hear
the thunder of his voice!
Yea, your suffering shall exist no longer; it shall be washed
away in Atom's Glow, burned from you in the fire of his
brilliance.
Each of us shall give birth to a billion stars formed from the
mass of our wretched and filthy bodies.
(Church of atom, a cult)

Nuclearism is psychically disastrous and become the status

quo of policy debate - 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.
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])
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,
Finally, this summary of Lifton should

the "image-release" and flood of "symbolizing forays" characterize what Lifton labels as the Protean self of the

the self nowadays seems

embarked on an endless series of experiments in seeking identity . Belief systems, careers,
modern age. Like the figure in ancient mythology who changed shape at will, so

marriage partners, or lifestyles often are switched with bewildering ease. Fads come and go, discordant ideas may

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
be held simultaneously, or ever new personal experiences sought in unending quests for rebirth.

mockery affected towards every experience.56 It seems that ony old, stable societies are 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.

That converts social panic into pseudo-religious withdrawal

faith is invested in a state war machine bent on total
destruction
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])
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 transcen d 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
mind tries to repress all thought of it. Instead

historically five modes." The biological mode of symbolic immortality is 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 unleashes an ominous sequence of reactions in the unconscious .

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-or-none subjugation of the self to an idea "43 such as a fascist or
42 This

totalitarian state. This fatal 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

totalitarianism: it is an idolatrous answer to the death

anxieties of vulnerable modern humans, once desymbolization has reached a certain stage. Lifton goes beyond
analysis for an understanding of

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'
loyalties-all of which the Catholic bishops' pastoral letter, Jonathan Schell, and Gordon Kaufman seem unable to

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 religion, once we
explain. But now

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 solution to

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" allies himself with that power and feels compelled to expound on the
death anxiety and a way of restoring a lost sense of immortality.

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

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
anxiety followed by rebirth into the new world view.

atomic 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

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
the numinous awe inspired by the Bomb to include the rest of us who have never been eyewitnesses. For us,

This renders the world as holocaust

-

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
Spinozistic attribute.

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 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 disappearance referred to as a holocaust, because

every

being which falls under such description is lost, and every trace erased .15 Such a term is
not completely satisfactory but 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

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 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
somewhat more complicated.) Those who are made to disappear What we may begin to realise is that

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 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 .
died as men before their bodies died.26 W. H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles

Thus I affirm to cede the focus of nuclear weapons to

international organizations and as students engage in the
quest of theological truth in the debate space. Our faith based
discourse 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
in Hamann and Jacobi, Radical Orthodoxy: A new theology, eds. John Milbank,
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
Enlightenment. And yet the logic of this argument about

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, 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 non-arbitrary 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-

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
style assault upon the nihilism of philosophy, rather than a somewhat tame empiricist critique of universals.27

upon time take us further down the path of revealed specificity. Here, if the parable for truth in space was the case

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 appealing the legend of a star and
a birthand 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.
of Pontius Pilate,

This 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 can we 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 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

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
extinction,

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

Meaning is the fundamental question. Its only a matter of

whether this is done faithfully or nihilistically
Cunningham 2 Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of
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

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.
do not; but such a reply attends merely to the mechanics of the procedure. Consequently,

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
Cunningham 2 Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of
nothing and the difference of theology, Routledge, 2002, p. 256-258
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 domestication of desire? To be

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 translator explain this philosophers achievement: It is Badious achievement
sure,

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 void the nothing outside the text; here we are still with Plotinus and Avicenna.

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 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 pointing to is the incongruity between being and thought, and with good

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 only
reason.

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 space for

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.
tragedy to occur. To put it another way,

We take a stance between Kierkegaards pure transcendence

and Camuss passive optimism be a dude we must act
through the agency of the Holy Spirit yet abide simply at the
same time faith based narrowing is a questing within limits,
not a passing of agency to the higher
Sermons of the Sofa 10, dudeism dude http://dudespaper.com/dudeism-forchristians.html/
Let go of stuff. Relax. For being followers of such a mellow dude, Christians are
really uptight people. We kill each other over little doctrinal points most of us dont
understand very well, anyway. For people of faith, we dont much trust in God.
Somebody said faith was radical trust. We dont even seem to have ordinary,
unradical trust. If we dont defend orthodoxy, the universe will go to hell in a flower
pot. As if God would let it go that far! Have a little faith, folks! Just believe, and
leave the theological hair-splitting to the dead white guys named St. So-and-So. God
will figure out the rest. Hes better equipped for the task than you are, anyway.
Have some faith. Letting go of ideas is hard, but letting go of material stuff is
harder. Big house. Job titles, or post-nominals, or whatever. Refinement. Fine
threads. Fancy cars. Distractions. A lot of you guys claim to be Christians, but you
dont want to be taxed. You like your money. Nevermind that Jesus said it was easier
for a camel to fit in the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of
God, or that the early church held property in common, or that the Apostle says the
love of money is the root of all evil. Judas betrayed his God for a bit of cash. Your
God tells you to stop being a slave to money; are you going to keep on being
Judases? Poor or rich, a stinking corpse is a stinking corpse. You cant take it with
you. bizarro heaven Stop thinking your respectable lifestyle wins you point in
heaven. The Jesus said, Youre like whited sepulchres: fair without, but full of bones
and corruption within. Were all sinners, way better at being animals than decent
human beings. Even the noblest, most respectable member of any community is
guilty of something, be it pride, or greed, or sloth. Chimps in suits, and the monkey
wont go unfed. You can find any number of people who are bigger jerks than you,
or dont live the right lifestyle, or have the wrong kinds of friends . But you being
pleased with your own righteousness doesnt do much to justify Gods effort in
Creation. The good news, luckily, is that God loves you anyway, despite your
pompous righteousness. Bad news is that he loves the unrighteous, too. So be thou
not a dick! Be thou mellow, instead, and verily chillax. Bless the creeping snails,
love the Walmart clerks and the gas station attendants, have pity for the suits who
cant think beyond their stock options and mega-mortgages, and pray for their
conversion. Theyre friends of God, too. And friends of friends arent bad friends to
have. Love and bless and just be; trust your good Buddy, which art in heaven, to
take care of the rest. Amen.

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