Above all [Deleuze] extricated Bergson from what the latter had laid himself much too open to, in the way of a recuperation of the injunctions of the Open by Christian spiritualism and an adjustment of his cosmic vision to a certain global teleology of which Father Teilhard de Chardin was for a time the herald.

Alain Badiou Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, trans. by Louise Birchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 99.

To adore…That means to lose oneself in the unfathomable, to plunge into the inexhaustible, to find peace in the incorruptible, to be absorbed in defined immensity, to offer oneself to the fire and the transparency, to annihilate oneself in proportion as one becomes more deliberately conscious of oneself, and to give of one’s deepest to that whose depth has no end…

Disperse, O Jesus, the clouds with your lightning! Show yourself to us as the Mighty, the Radiant, the Risen! Come to us once again as the Pantocrator who filled the solitude of the cupolas in the ancient Basilicas! Nothing less than this Parousia is needed to counter-balance and dominate in our hearts the glory of the world that is coming into view. And so we should triumph over the world with you, come to us clothed in the glory of the world.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life, trans. by Bernard Wall (London: Fontana 1964), pp. 127-9.

Impossible for anyone not thoroughly lost to a certain spirit of Catholic high-campery to receive that ejaculation about “the Pantocrator who filled the solitude of the cupolas in the ancient Basilicas!” without some slight inward shudder of mirth…Our intuition here is not that Badiou owes a hidden debt to Père Teilhard, but that (albeit in a different fashion to Houellebecq) he explicitly ironizes him.

…The mutual attraction of the sexes is so fundamental that any explanation of the world (biological, philosophical or religious) that does not succeed in finding it a structurally essential place in its system is virtually condemned. To find such a place for sexuality in a cosmic system based on union is particularly easy. But this place must be clearly defined, both for the future and the past. What exactly are the essence and direction of “passionate love” in a universe whose stuff is personality?

(Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, On Love (London: Collins, 1972), p. 15

For Badiou, the very idea of “a cosmic system based on union” is intrinsically absurd: the One is not, and cannot consistently be. Teilhard’s “evolution” towards an “omega point” of maximal cosmic personalisation is the formation of a chimera. One does not require the resources of set theory to demonstrate this. “The personal” is the affair of distinct persons; its realization in union effaces its condition.

But there is something suggestive, all the same, in Teilhard’s insistance that the world is becoming Christ’s body, a pleroma in which “like lightning, like a conflagration, like a flood, the attraction exerted by the Son of Man will lay hold of all the whirling elements in the universe so as to reunite them or subject them to his body”. What if “the Son of Man” were not a point of centrifugal centripetal concentration, but a strange attractor? Does not Badiou’s Event, which also eventuates “like lightning, like a conflagration, like a flood”, convoke a body and a “creative present” for which Teilhard’s term “surcreation” seems quite apposite?

What Teilhard called “the evolution of chastity” sounds distinctly like a variety of lesbian bed death:

I have come to the point where, it seems to me, two phases in the creative transformation of human love are emerging for me. During a first phase of humanity, man and woman concentrate upon the physical act of giving and the concern for reproduction; at the same time a growing nimbus of spiritual exchanges is gradually being built up around this fundamental act. At first this nimbus was no more than an imperceptible fringe; slowly, and yet ever more clearly, there is a shift, and the fruitfulness and mystery of union move into that zone; and it is on that side that the balance finally gives way and comes to rest. At that very moment, however, the centre of physical union from which the light was radiating is found to be incapable of accepting any further intensification. The focus of attraction suddenly shifts further and further - endlessly, indeed - ahead…Virginity rests upon chastity as thought rests upon life: each is arrived at through a reversal of direction, or by passing through one unique point.

On Love, pp. 28-30

One can imagine this becoming a popular doctrine: the way to restore one’s virginity is to have ever-increasingly intense monogamous sex, until one reaches the point where the “spiritual nimbus” surrounding the act assumes the “focus of attraction” and carries it off indefinitely into the Beyond. This view of (capital “V”) Virginity as a spiritual state consequent upon the exhaustive expression of physical sexuality is not without charm, as much as one sympathises with Houellebecq’s rage against the prissiness and snobbery behind it.

Is Teilhard’s cosmic vision Bergsonism gone bad, as Badiou asserts? Yes, undoubtedly; but his is at least a cosmos capable of change, of purification through “separation and aggregation”, and the operators of this transformation are perhaps worth examining even if the teleology which organises them is unredeemable.