Agape – (Post)Modern? Žižek, Badiou, Taylor: (Post-)Säkulare Rezeptionen einer biblischen Kategorie

Abstract

In recent decades, some continental philosophers from nonreligious perspectives have systematically assumed fundamental categories of the Jewish-Christian tradition. This essay focuses on the Biblical notion of agape (love); on the one hand, it seeks to analyze its original semantic enigma and, on the other hand, it aims at enlightening its reception and revision by the thinking of the philosophers Charles Taylor, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. The re-interpretation of the Jewish-Christian category of love can offer a significant contribution to a new self-understanding of religion in the present condition. At the same time, the Biblical notion of love can represent an actual reactive factor with regard to violence in all its expressions, to the loss of meaning and lack of future and to the growing cynicism and fundamentalism of global society. The essay’s main thesis is that crucial categories of the Jewish-Christian tradition can achieve a new legibility through a process of dislocation and translation in other contexts and cultures.