a) Ruby’s three favourite things:
- Eggs.
- All the colours.
- Living on a boat.
We do not, in fact, live on a boat.
b) There is a new Spiral Jacobs tune, “With Eyes And Mouth Sewn Shut Forever”, over at the myspace page. It is, broadly speaking, about the end of history being a nightmare from which one is struggling to awake.
c) One barb of the “philosophical satanist” critique of Christianity is that Christianity encourages believers to renounce immediate gratification in the hope of obtaining “rewards in heaven”. These rewards, one is certain, will never materialize; thereforce Christianity is effectively about giving up the pleasure of life in exchange for, strictly speaking, nothing. The reading from Philippians at church last Sunday included an exhortation to set out banquets for the poor and needy; specifically, for those who would not be able to repay the favour. If you set out a banquet for your friends, you may reasonably expect that they in turn will do the same for you; therefore the gift is nullified, it becomes part of a formalised circulation of goods among those who already have what they need. Only if you set out a banquet for others from whom you can expect no recompense will you break this circuit, accomplishing a giving that is literally Christ-like (in the sense the it recapitulates God’s giving of himself in Christ). Of course, the text then says that if you do this, your reward will be in heaven. But if this is simply a form of deferred gratification, a storing up of riches elsewhere that one will later enjoy at one’s (infinite) leisure, then the Christ-likeness of the act (qua non-reciprocated gift) is entirely nullified; all one is really doing is making a metaphysically shrewd investment.
It is here that Badiou’s version of semi-realized eschatology may be of use. The dis-interestedness of giving is precisely what cuts across the horizon of human (animal) mortality. The animality of the human animal consists, Badiou says, in the having of interests; in speculation and calculation, in the making of investments that one hopes will accrue to those interests. (This is nothing specially human: all animals act in self-interest, or in the interests of that which acts selfishly through them). Dis-interested giving is the realisation - the making-real - in some particular time and place of an eternal and immortal principle of equality and justice. It is the localisation of an immortal truth - of the kingdom of heaven. The statement that one’s reward is in heaven is not a promise of deferred recompense, but the immediate verification that dis-interested giving participates in what will have been a truth, the truth that God’s self-giving in Christ has effaced the ledger of credit and debt.