I am currently preparing for a paper I have been invited to give at the Center for Contemporary European Philosophy at Radboud University, Nijmegen in September, and I am trying to refine my understanding of what is ‘imitative’ about imitative atheism. It is a journey that is taking me from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus through Aristotle’s Physics, Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, Diderot, Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Miguel de Beistegui. The short version is that there’s a great deal more to say about imitation than I was able to include in Difficult Atheism, and the leisure-time pursuit of “spotting” theological motifs in purportedly atheistic thought is on even shakier ground than I indicated in my critique in DA of the idea that Badiou has recourse to the miraculous.
In the process of preparing for Nijmegen I am working through The Locus of Tragedy, and the book contains a word cloud in its front matter. I found it to be a great way of gaining a quick, intuitive sense of the main concerns of the book, and so I decided to visit wordle.net to generate clouds for Difficult Atheism, Phenomenology or Deconstruction? and the recent French Studies article ‘Thinking Equality Today’. The site can filter out either common English words or common French ones, but not both it seems, hence the preponderance of French prepositions and articles in the images below. Here they are…
Difficult Atheism
‘Thinking Equality Today’
Phenomenology or Deconstruction?
