Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux (review)

Anyone who might have assumed, in these secular times, that atheism was a matter of a simple decision will have to think again, and indeed think very hard! In Difficult Atheism Christopher Watkin offers an excellent and lucid account, written with real brio, of the work of the three major contemporary French 'post-theological' thinkers in his title, and he does full justice to the complexity of their thought. If received understanding tells us that modern philosophy, at least since Enlightenment rationalism, and particularly since Nietzsche, left God behind a long time ago, the recent 'return to religion' we find in Badiou, Nancy, and Meillassoux is a puzzling phenomenon that has not, until now, been the object of a sustained and rigorous study. As Watkin correctly notes, in each case this turn back to theology represents a determined and carefully calculated challenge to theism in all its forms, in an attempt to exhaust its apparently infinite capacity, even after the so-called Death of God, for self-reinvention. This variously takes the form of what the author terms 'imitative atheism' (in its poetic or metaphysical guises), or 'residual atheism' (where philosophies of finitude, for example, rely ultimately on an enduring ontotheology), or 'ascetic atheism' (which has the unfortunate consequence of throwing out, along with the bathwater of theism, the baby of the humanist values it might hope to retain). Each of the strategies the three philosophers espouse in order to move beyond the theological as such is charted with extreme care, and with attention to the detailed nuances of their articulations: Badiou's axiomatic ontology, which uses set theory as a means of accomplishing a radical (and radically atheistic) break with history, and a properly philosophical reintegration of the (mathematical) infinite, via a thinking of multiplicity rather than a thinking of the One; Nancy's recent and extensive engagement with Christian themes in the two volumes of Déconstruction du christianisme, in which he mobilizes different forms of a deconstructive 'singular plurality', as a way out of the 'parasitic atheism' of all 'principial' paradigms; finally, the possibly surprising strategy of Quentin Meillassoux, who elects to occupy the terrain of theology precisely because, as he puts it, God does not exist, thus enabling the development of an entire philosophy of 'divine inexistence'. Watkin's own interventions reveal a keen awareness of the pitfalls around the edges of their thinking, and he provides an assured and insightful running commentary on the subtleties and trenchancy of the various key exchanges and reciprocal critiques among the three thinkers. The final two chapters of the book are slightly rushed and crowded 'real world' applications of the atheisms of each respective philosopher, testing their claims about justice and the political. The conclusion — the enduring difficulty of ever attaining a truly atheological thinking — also seems something of an anticlimax, given how much the preceding chapters ratchet up the stakes. This should, however, take nothing away from what is a major contribution to contemporary debates on atheism, as well as to our understanding of these thinkers.