Chapter 9: Kierkegaard, Badiou, and Christian Hope
9
Kierkegaard, Badiou, and Christian Hope
While academic interest in political theology has exploded in the past decade, relatively little of this interest has attended to the political-theological concept of hope. If political theology explores the relationship between political and theological concepts, and political theology as a critical project unmasks such relationships concealed by secularism, hope would seem to be a prime site for political theological critique. Particularly in the US context, hope is a widely used political concept with clear but largely unacknowledged theological resonances.441 The Christian tradition considers hope, with faith and love, a theological virtue. But, in secular political contexts, invocations of hope can be difficult to distinguish from optimism, and the political rhetoric of hope often sounds vacuous.442 To speak politically of hope often seems to add as much to political discourse as a smile. For this reason, perhaps, hope does not frequently attract interest of political theologians, ceding the office of the critic to the likes of Sarah Palin, who famously dismissed Barack Obama’s “hopey, changey thing.” Yet there is an important role for political theologians to play with respect to hope. We can ask what form hope takes: Feeling? Desire? Virtue? We can ask about the object of hope: Is it merely appealing or is it genuinely good? Is the ultimate object of hope God? When we ask these questions, we challenge the secularist presumptions of politics, not only exposing the hollowness of political discourse (Palin does that), but holding political discourse accountable to what it implicitly acknowledges but officially disclaims: theological tradition.443 Critique is not an end in itself. It is an opportunity to evangelize, to speak to the world about what a robust and vibrant tradition is Christianity. It is an opportunity to transform the titillation offered by religious language spoken in public into embrace of a loving God.
This admittedly immodest task for political theology is masked by the field’s focus on sovereignty.444 The analogies between sovereign state, sovereign self, and sovereign God which are the cornerstones of modernity are certainly ripe for challenge. But what comes after sovereignty? Post criticism omne animal triste est. Instead of fixating on the imagined Death Star of modern politics to be shot with the laser guns of critique—such a phallic fixation—why not acknowledge the subtler ways in which Christian theology has a continuing influence on our social and political worlds? From those plural sites in which we are all implicated, we can reconstruct the community we want and need, whether or not Luke Skywalker makes his shot. Indeed, this is the way that the fantasy of sovereignty will come to an end: our desires will be directed elsewhere, in community, in divine and human complexity, and our libidinal investment in the fantasy will fade. Yet wallowing in complexity or imagined community clearly has limited political potential. The challenge for political theology is to rigorously examine, and politicize, the plural aspects of our lives alone and together. To think critically in this careful, expansive sense, Alain Badiou and Søren Kierkegaard lend assistance. They both refuse the fantasy of sovereignty and instead allow for the irreducible complexity of self and community—opening questions of hope. Badiou is attuned to questions of politics while Kierkegaard is attuned to questions of the self. Both take theology seriously. By placing them in dialogue, we can begin to construct a framework for approaching the political theology of hope.
Why hope and not faith? Both are theological virtues, dispositions oriented toward the divine. But faith, considered politically, lends itself to the same sort of binary, ultimately phallic reasoning that contaminates discussions of sovereignty. Too quickly questions of faith become questions of faith in God or faith in state or faith in self. This is not a defect in the virtue itself; faith has been overdetermined by modernity, affected by the gravitational pull of sovereignty, and so faith is difficult to retrieve.445 At its best, faith is oppositional: not faith in this or that, but faith in what cannot be seen, in what escapes the hegemony of the visible. This is faith that discourse, or ideology, or the symbolic is not all there is, faith in the unrepresentable. This is faith as critique of ideology (for Badiou), or idolatry (for Kierkegaard). Such faith is quite clearly twinned with hope. If the invisible will never become visible, faith is delusion. There would be no difference between idol and God. To have faith, there must be some expectation that the hegemony of the visible will, in the future, be broken—that God will be revealed. The question of hope, as a theological virtue, is the question of how such expectation manifests in practice. Kierkegaard and Badiou are known for their reflections on faith, but when we attend to how faith is twinned with hope, and when hope is where the critical potential lies, Kierkegaard and Badiou offer promising resources for a political theology of hope.
This is not an exhaustive or a rigorous account of Kierkegaard and Badiou on hope; I leave that to others. The point here is to construct a framework that advances discussions in political theology and to speak to how Kierkegaard helps us see the role that hope ought to play in that work. To do so, this chapter first suggests how Badiou might politicize Kierkegaard, then it explores how Kierkegaard pushes Badiou on the question of hope’s political relevance. While this may seem to take us far from Obama’s “hopey, changey” rhetoric, the intellectual task of political theology is to think seriously and carefully at a distance from the tumult of political practice, offering new ways of seeing and understanding that practice—and, hopefully, eventually, authorizing new ways of doing politics.
Badiou’s Political Theology
For reasons largely having to do with the oscillations of academic celebrity culture as amplified by American philosophical Francophilia, Alain Badiou is hot. A student of Louis Althusser whose leftist political views became harder as others became softer or disappeared altogether, Badiou has developed an elaborate philosophical project over the past quarter century that supports his Maoist (or post-Maoist) politics.446 Badiou’s writings include both the metaphysical—he is unapologetic about developing a metaphysical “system”—and the political, applying that metaphysical framework to questions of political philosophy and to current events. He wrote, for instance, a pithy book on Nicolas Sarkozy, and he also frequently comments in French newspapers and other public forums. Badiou insists that his metaphysical views result in his political views and not the other way around; furthermore, he contends that his metaphysical views derive from mathematical logic. It is natural to be suspicious of these claims for reasons directly related to his popularity as a philosopher. Academic celebrity is more often awarded for novelty than for genius, and both the specifics of Badiou’s system (all the mathematical notation incomprehensible to the vast majority of his “theory” readers) and the very fact that he offers a system (something postmodernism was supposed to have put an end to) certainly have secured his novelty—and his status in certain circles as authority.
From the perspective of political theology, what is most compelling and useful about Badiou is not the technical authorizing apparatus, nor his ever-present rhetorical swagger. It is, rather, his attempt to marry the critique of ideology with the promise that we can affect radical transformation. (His Ethics is a particularly compelling example of this.) This marriage, when attempted by others, often has gone wrong. Gilles Deleuze tells a story about metaphysical flux concealed by the status quo but ends up commending his readers to wallow in the flux—a politically and ethically impotent conclusion.447 Michel Foucault uncovers stories about radical transformations, from one arrangement of the world to another, that have been concealed by the status quo, but Foucault is often frustratingly silent on how we ourselves might affect such a dramatic change.448 In contrast, Badiou persuasively attempts this marriage by enlisting “philosophy,” in a rather Platonic sense, to officiate. For Badiou, the project of philosophy is committed to the interrogation of conventional wisdom—in a more Marxist than Platonic idiom, the ideas of the wealthy and powerful masked as common sense—in search of truth. This truth would stand beyond the world, orthogonal to the bodies and languages (Badiou’s phrase) that we deal with on a daily basis. We realize our humanity, becoming more than an object, more than an animal, when we relate to truth. And truth can overturn the ways of the world.
To make this account persuasive, Badiou must elaborate what he means by “bodies and languages” and what he means by “truth.” This is where Badiou turns to mathematical logic, as explicated in the weighty volumes Being and Event (1988) and Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II (2006). Among Badiou’s innovations is that he understands truth in the plural, and he understands these truths as events. As events, they effectively have no content other than their disruptive potential. That disruptive potential is realized when individuals recognize and commit themselves to a truth, allowing themselves to be pulled in whatever direction the truth may pull. When subject to a truth (and recall that, for Badiou, one is also made a subject by a truth), the old wisdom of the world seems hollow, even absurd. The world is organized in a new way for those committed to a truth, and they act accordingly, making themselves seem irrational or even insane to those around them who ignore the truth. The status quo can only be maintained by rejecting truths, so to be committed to a truth is to be embattled. This commitment Badiou names faith.449
Badiou is generalizing the Kuhnian paradigm shift or Foucaultian epistemic shift, but he is also, crucially, adding an agent. Where Kuhn and Foucault’s examples of radical transformation are so grand that they seem impersonal, Badiou suggests that we place love, political revolutions, and artistic innovations in the same category as scientific revolutions. In these several cases, it is much easier to see the commitment of the individual (lover, revolutionary, artist) to a cause or “truth” despite the world’s rejection of that truth. (Badiou commendably catalogs the techniques those invested in the status quo will use to discredit or destroy truths as well as the dangers of the misleading appearance of quasi-truths. For this last category, which he labels “evil,” Badiou makes Nazism paradigmatic.)
Here we see the political implications of Badiou’s metaphysical project. The work of politics is the work of discerning when a genuine event is happening (when a genuine truth is affecting the world and calling for fidelity), preparing oneself for that moment, and embracing that moment when it does occur. This work involves criticizing the status quo (as contingent and ultimately false), cautioning against the appeal of quasi-truths, and coordinating with others who share a commitment to a given truth.
It seems plausible that what Badiou presents as politics might better be labeled political theology, in the sense of a critical method, as described above. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the presence of the theological in Badiou’s work: he posits truths that exist outside the world, the capacity for faithfulness to these truths as constitutive of our humanity, and of course his privileged example of St. Paul, illustrating how faithfulness works.450 Badiou, however, vigorously proclaims himself an atheist, and he locates his work within a philosophical, not a theological, tradition (he develops his account of the event through critical engagements with Plato, Spinoza, Hegel, Leibniz, and Descartes, among others). However, political theology concerns implicit, rather than explicit, theological commitments, and it is hard not to read Badiou’s views about politics—the patient political subject waiting for unrequested and unexpected revelations of truth to which she will be entirely devoted and so become fully human—as wholly resting on secularized theological concepts.
That Badiou critically engages with the work of Kierkegaard provides an opportunity to further explore how both Badiou and Kierkegaard might be part of a tradition of political theology that is expansive, critical, and that attends to questions of hope. More important than terminology is the framework Badiou helps to sketch of the politicized subject: politicized not in the sense of engaging with particular worldly institutions or networks of power but in precisely the opposite sense, which is a theological sense. The subject is politicized (note that to be a subject, for Badiou, is always to be politicized) to the extent to which she rejects the ways of seeing and acting in the world that are determined by those worldly institutions and networks of power and instead directs her allegiance elsewhere. This elsewhere could be given a name, God, but in the noblest of theological traditions, negative theology, namelessness is the essence of that elsewhere. The pressing question—the question of faith and also of hope—is how such a rejection of worldly ways is lived.
Badiou’s Kierkegaard
Alain Badiou and Søren Kierkegaard are both, essentially, philosophers of faith. They both take faith to mean a commitment to that which is irreducible to worldly terms. Despite the obvious and profound similarities between Badiou’s thought and the thought of Kierkegaard, it is only once, and relatively recently, that Badiou has engaged with Kierkegaard in print.451 This is in stark contrast to, for example, Plato and Leibniz, who Badiou repeatedly discusses and lauds. Badiou’s writing on Kierkegaard is found in Logics of Worlds’ sixth “book,” “Theory of Points,” in which Badiou is exploring how it is that an individual can be caught up by a truth (Badiou defines a point as “the appearance of the infinite totality of the world . . . before the instance of the decision, that is the duality of the ‘yes’ and ‘no’”).452 In Being and Event, it was Pascal who played an analogous role, putting Badiou’s metaphysics in contact with the Christian tradition just at the crucial moment, when a truth might be taken up by a human. Now it is Kierkegaard who plays the guide, or who lends authority, as Badiou develops the heart of his metaphysical project—more precisely, the nexus between metaphysics and epistemology in Badiou’s philosophy.
Badiou’s discussion of Kierkegaard proceeds through broad-stroke explanation of themes strategically chosen so as to complement Badiou’s larger project. We learn that “for Kierkegaard, the key to existence is none other than absolute choice”453 (425); that in this choice “the subject attains the being-there of what Kierkegaard names ‘subjective truth’ or ‘interiority’” (425);454 “the Christian paradox is . . . a challenge addressed to the existence of each and everyone”;455 “choice—as the guarantor of the connection between subjective time and eternity—localized the subject to the element of truth”;456 and so on. It is clear how these themes help fortify Badiou’s own theory: he has an ally in his attempt to show that each individual becomes human (or more precisely a human subject) when she confronts head-on the inadequacies of the world and commits herself, all the way down, to the other-worldly truth that speaks directly to her. Badiou walks the reader through the ethical, the aesthetic, and the religious, bringing us to ultimate choice, to the possibility for “the abiding of subjectivity in the absolute paradox.”457 Badiou notes the benefits, according to Kierkegaard, of choice independent of the objects of choice, that choice brings one near God even if God is everywhere.
After rehearsing themes from Kierkegaard’s thought, Badiou offers something of a critique. This is not so much a demonstration of Kierkegaard’s faulty argument or inconsistency as it is a critique based on tradition.458 Badiou situates himself in one philosophical tradition, which he asserts is correct, which a variety of philosophers before him also participated in, and which Badiou sees himself as advancing. Kierkegaard is largely situated in this tradition, but he is not wholly orthodox. Among other characteristics, this tradition is defined by a rejection of Hegel. For his assistance in this philosophical struggle, for developing the critique of Hegel, Badiou at first praises Kierkegaard. What Hegel represents is the location of truth within the world, unfolding through history. Kierkegaard’s localizing the eternal in the moment of choice rejects this and, similar to Badiou, offers a way of thinking truth perpendicular to the world, as it were.459
Badiou complains that Kierkegaard occasionally moves too close to Hegel and so strays from the center of the philosophical tradition Badiou commends (and of which Badiou himself is the paradigmatic figure). From Badiou’s vantage point, Kierkegaard’s hierarchy of the ethical, the aesthetic, and the religious is unjustified and compromising. In one sense, this is simply because Badiou is not a Christian and so puts all encounters with truths on equal footing, whether they are scientific, amorous, political, philosophical, or religious.460 But Badiou offers an additional line of critique. Building on the Kierkegaardian formulation that “aesthetics in a man is that by which he is immediately what he is; ethics is that by which he becomes what he becomes,” Badiou suggests we might add “the religious is in a man, when all is said and done, the becoming of what he is at the same time as the being of what he becomes”461—a result troublingly close to Hegel. What seems to worry Badiou here is not so much the moment of choice but what happens after that choice: the training, or character development, which occurs to one who has faced that choice. That this post-choice life is in some sense sanctified leads to the alignment of Kierkegaard and Hegel: each acknowledge paradox and each resolve paradox by describing a world educated by paradox—and in doing so each inserts the eternal into the ordinary, transcendence suffusing immanence.
The crux of Badiou’s critique, however, has to do with despair. The choice Kierkegaard commends is the choice of despair, and only through that choice can we become ourselves. Who, then, was doing the choosing if the subject only comes into existence after a choice is made? Badiou charges that there is no way to make these two subjects one without specifically Christian commitments to God. The Christian God is two at once: eternal and other-worldly but also, in Jesus Christ, historical and human. In order for Kierkegaard’s account of choice to hold, for the chooser and the one having chosen to be the same, we must believe that the same God (or the absolute) dwells outside and inside the world. This, again, uncomfortably aligns Kierkegaard with Hegel.462 Instead of the absolute (or divine) unfolding in the conceptual realm, as it does for Hegel, for Kierkegaard the absolute unfolds in the affective realm, in the dynamics of despair of the subject. Badiou sees apostasy from the philosophical tradition he defends: truth is allowed too great a foothold in the world. Badiou concludes the Kierkegaard chapter, in Logics of Worlds, by characterizing Kierkegaard’s position thusly: “God, beholding [man’s] despair, lets him know that despairing is the true condition of every hope”463 (435).
Badiou, Kierkegaard, Hope
This is one of the very few places where Badiou substantively addresses hope—and here hope is a symptom of the approach to philosophy that Badiou condemns. Hope is effectively absent from Badiou’s two major works of metaphysics, Being and Event and Logics of Worlds. It is tempting to read his political philosophical (or political theological) project as one commending faith without hope, commitment to struggle without an ultimate object. Indeed, on the purely metaphysical level, Badiou’s conceptual maneuver of effectively voiding truth of content would support this reading. Badiou does gesture toward the traditional triptych of theological virtues in his Saint Paul, but hope is reduced to “a maxim enjoining us to persevere in this trajectory [of truth].”464 Here hope is not a virtue at all but rather a rhetoric, a word used to persuade. The apparent work of hope, persevering through hardship, is entailed by the virtue of faith—indeed, this just is the meaning of the virtue of faith.465
Badiou could learn some important lessons about hope from Kierkegaard, and staging such an encounter is productive for a political theological engagement with hope. First, though, note the ways in which Badiou politicizes, or at least shows the political potential of Kierkegaard’s deep suspicion of idolatry. Badiou finds an ally in Kierkegaard because what Kierkegaard calls idolatry Badiou calls ideology. The ideas of the ruling class, of the wealthy and powerful, that are made to seem natural, obvious, and unavoidable—ideology—is another way of describing the wisdom of the world that is treated as eternal truth, attracting and holding our attention and so distracting us from the divine, i.e., idolatry. For Badiou, Kierkegaard teaches us a lesson in how to strengthen our suspicion of ideology and how to commit ourselves to a life lived in the attempt to construct a new way of seeing the world, a new set of ideas unacknowledged by the world as it currently exists. But Badiou does not offer a particularly robust account of what leading this kind of life looks like. Indeed, faith, as presented by Badiou, is not even really a virtue. It is not a disposition to endure despite hardship; it is a monomaniacal drive to create. How is this sustainable, particularly if there is no God offering assistance along the way? Might there not be shared characteristics of the figures whose lives Badiou extols as truth-directed—St. Paul, Abelard and Heloise, Mao, Picasso—which would fill out what a disposition toward truth might look like?
This is precisely where Kierkegaard may offer assistance.466 While it is not obvious that hope is a crucial theme for Kierkegaard, despair certainly is, and Kierkegaard defines despair as hopelessness. There are worldly hopes, false hopes, that Kierkegaard rejects. They are cleansed through despair; despair teaches the futility of worldly hopes. Only then can we achieve a genuine and eternal hope: a truly Christian hope. That genuine hope, after despair, is at once a gift of God and essentially human: it comes from that part of the human created in the image of God. This deeper sense of hope, closely tied to love, extends equally to others as to oneself; worldly hope is more closely linked with desire, and more closely tied to self-interest. For Kierkegaard, hope is an expectation of a good; worldly hopes are expectations of worldly goods while hope in the sense Kierkegaard commends is an expectation of an other-worldly good. More precisely, hope is the latter, “authentic” sense is the virtue produced by such an expectation.
Many otherwise perceptive commenters on Kierkegaard have taken faith and hope to be effectively interchangeable concepts for him.467 I suspect that separating them may be quite fruitful, particularly when our interest is in what happens after the extreme encounter with paradox, back in the ordinary world. There, the relationship to the encounter with the absolute is maintained through hope of the proper sort. Where Badiou reads Kierkegaard as asserting that despair and hope paradoxically coexist, Kierkegaard himself suggests that genuine hope is a stage beyond despair—and that hope signals the receptivity to the absolute that Badiou also commends. Indeed, Badiou does not present a good answer to the question: what disposition is the individual to have before encountering a truth—politically, before the revolution? There is not yet a truth to command allegiance. Kierkegaard suggests an answer: the individual should be hopeful. When God is removed from the story, when truths become plural as they do for Badiou, perhaps we find ourselves in the curious situation of commending hope without faith, or at least before faith. Yet in the Christian story, the story Badiou resists, the two are twinned. A life of commitment to the invisible is also a life oriented toward the future interruption of the visible by the invisible. Crucially, for Kierkegaard but not Badiou this interruption has a moral valence: it is good. Hope is not just expectation, not just orientation to transformation; it is directed at the good. Badiou wants to have this moral valence as well. He names partial transformation evil, and he commends total transformation, but he does not take the next step and say that the proper orientation to transformation would then involve hope.468
The political-theological lesson Kierkegaard teaches us about hope, when read with Badiou, is that our view of hope need not focus on hope’s object—inevitably an object of fantasy, that ties us to the world, rather than opening us to another worldly possibility.469 If the virtue of hope is to be commended, what that means in practice is that we must learn how to despair.470 This is what Kierkegaard teaches so elegantly in The Sickness Unto Death. Despair must advance from the simplistic, not getting the object of our desire, to the sophisticated, not knowing the subject who desires—not knowing ourselves. Experience in the world, and reflection on that experience in classrooms, in literature, and in philosophy, can aid us in despairing better. This is not to imply that the better we despair, the better we hope. Rather, we must push the extremes of despair in order to be primed to hope. The ascent of despair requires worldly engagement; without engagement, despair remains in its most primitive form. When this insight is brought to politics, the practical implications of the political theology of hope commended by Badiou are quite different than they seem. Instead of waiting patiently for an encounter with a truth or fixating on a truth, we must engage with the social and political world in ways that are necessarily unsatisfactory. The more we have such deeply unsatisfactory engagements the more we are primed to recognize the possibility of genuine political transformation. We are then better able to recognize the simulacra of truth: to know when we are becoming followers of a Hitler. On this account, the political theology of hope means standing with Sarah Palin as she rejects the rhetoric of hope. Such language is ejaculatio praecox, taking away the possibility of genuine satisfaction that hope at its best provides. Hope at its most political, at its most theological, means the results of the frustrating work of an education in despair. That work makes possible hope at its best, hope oriented to its proper object, consummated in the revolution, in the divine. It is a consummation of which we must not speak, but its mute possibility animates Christian life and ought to animate politics.
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441. See, e.g., Delbanco, Real American Dream.
442. On the conflation of hope and optimism, see esp. Lasch, True and Only Heaven.
443. In other words, if political discourse is accountable to the norms of a community, and the norms of a community are entangled with the norms of a religious tradition, even if that community proclaims itself religion-neutral the norms of that religious community remain relevant when evaluating political discourse.
444. In contrast, hope was central to the development of political theology in the German theological context, most notably in the work of Jürgen Moltmann. The term “political theology” names both a secular, political theory conversation and a specifically Christian theological conversation; the latter often remains in dialogue with the work of Moltmann whereas the former is largely unaware of Moltmann, instead focusing on the concept of sovereignty. In this chapter, I am writing of political theology as a critical method employed in the best work of both those participating in the secular and the Christian theological conversations.
445. This point has been made, for example, by Asad in Genealogies of Religion.
446. Badiou’s most significant philosophical works are Being and Event and Logics of Worlds. His book Ethics is an accessible introduction to his work that links philosophical and political themes. The Meaning of Sarkozy is a fully political intervention.
447. While Badiou develops a critique in his book Deleuze, Hallward’s Out of This World is more attentive to the theological dimensions implicit and unworked in Deleuze’s thought.
448. See Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism, ch. 9; Lloyd, Law and Transcendence, ch. 2.
449. In these pages, I am summarizing the relevant argumentative themes that occur throughout Badiou’s work.
450. On the role of religious ideas in Badiou’s thought, see, e.g., Phelps, Alain Badiou; Depoortere, Badiou and Theology. See Belhaj Kacem, Après Badiou, for an account of Badiou as “crypto-Catholic.”
451. For an overview of Badiou’s use of Kierkegaard, see O’Neill Burns, “Alain Badiou,” and O’Neill Burns, Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy, ch. 5. I regret that I had already completed this essay when O’Neill Burns’s book appeared, as we appear to have some similar concerns.
452. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 591.
453. Ibid., 425.
454. Ibid.
455. Ibid., 426.
456. Ibid., 432.
457. Ibid., 430.
458. To put it more explicitly, I think it may be useful to read Badiou through a lens crafted by Alasdair MacIntyre.
459. John Milbank contrasts Badiou’s anti-Hegelian Kierkegaard with Slavoj Žižek’s uncomfortably Hegelian Kierkegaard, aligning himself, and his project of political theology, with the former. See Milbank, “Double Glory,” 110–233.
460. In fact, Badiou treats the religious as analogous to the four forms of truth rather than as a fifth.
461. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 434.
462. For a recent reevaluation of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Hegel, see O’Neill Burns, Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy, 18–22, 71–114.
463. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 435.
464. Badiou, Saint Paul, 93.
465. On this all-too-common confusion regarding hope, see Lloyd, Problem with Grace, ch. 3.
466. Recent scholarship on Kierkegaard’s account of hope that I have found helpful includes Bernier, Task of Hope; Fremstedal, “Kierkegaard on the Metaphysics of Hope”; and McDonald, “Hope.” Bernier sees hope as unifying Kierkegaard’s thought, and he defines despair as an unwillingness to hope, and he understands hope as taking up the task of the self, moving toward unity. It remains unclear on Bernier’s account how this sense of hope as expectation might be reconciled with the sense of hope as virtue present in the theological tradition. I would suggest that worldly hopes, for Kierkegaard, involve expectation whereas “authentic” hope involves virtue—and it is the latter that has political theological significance.
467. Bernier makes this point in Task of Hope in Kierkegaard.
468. While Moltmann, for example, comes close to equating the new (in the proper sense) with the good, he takes this from the Christian theological tradition (see his Theology of Hope). How Badiou can make this claim outside of that tradition remains obscure.
469. Hope’s object, if it can be put this way, is the highest good, but worldly descriptions of this highest good necessarily describe it wrongly. Theologically, God cannot be reduced to worldly terms.
470. I develop this point in the context of hope for racial justice in my article “For What Are Whites to Hope?”