Love in the smooth flow of becoming

Abstract

Beginning with Badiou’s insistence that Christianity deploys all of the parameters of the event, I examine how Nietzsche, Derrida, and Kierkegaard help us understand the relationship between the event and biblical principles. Nietzsche aligns the event with the command of conscience to recreate our values from nothing prior, also insisting that such a conscience is created by Christianity. For Derrida only the event as the irruption of the absolutely new makes possible the just decision that must come into existence as if nothing of the law previously existed. While Nietzsche and Derrida implicitly invoke (presuppose) the doctrine of creation from nothing, Kierkegaard shows creation to be the ontological expression of the biblical command to love that, itself created from nothing prior – from neither immediate self- nor immediate preferential love – provides the critical point of view from which to appropriate and espouse the smooth flow of becoming.