From the Void, Our Love

In a previous post, I canvassed our contemporary culture’s fascination with negation, an outworking of a culture of death which, as Romano Guardini observed, fetishes the “not yet” of our natures and making them come to a decisive terminus of the “not”.

When I first wrote on this, I presumed that the only solution to our culture’s preferential option for the void is to turn their attention away from emptiness to the fullness of life that only God can fill. And at one level, I still hold this to be true.

What I did not give full acknowledgment to, however, was the final paragraph in that post, in which the God who is the fullness of life, in his mercy, still leans into the voids in our life. In the liturgical language of Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World, the end of the void is transformed into the beginnings of new life by a loving God.

This motif of the void as a source (rather than an evacuation) of life and love whilst reading Alain Badiou’s forward to Byung Chul Han’s The Agony of Eros. In it, Badiou writes that in our milieu, dominated as it is by the commodification of love, has flattened and profaned Eros by rendering null any essential difference between the persons doing the loving (ix).

The counter to this pressure towards sameness, says Badiou, is the encounter with another. The thing about the encounter, Han suggests, is that it also demands the recognition of the Other in terms of “absolute negativity”, and furthermore, a giving over of self towards the absolute negativity.

In Badiou’s words, which echo John Paul II’s definition of love as the willing of the good of another (even to the point of death), true love demands the absolute revelation of the Other and the giving over of self to that other. “The experience of love” says Badiou, “is shot through with powerlessness” (ix).

Put another way, Han suggests that it is possible for the void to become the locus of an Event, an inbreaking of a new thing, the generation of new life. Theologically speaking, this is only because the void is shot through with the Lord of life, whose very nature is love.

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