Having considered in general terms how Badiou, Nancy and Meillassoux understand the relation of their post-theological ontologies to matters ethical and political, in this final chapter we take one political idea, namely justice, to serve as a case study of post-theological integration. In interrogating how our three thinkers understand and deploy the notion of justice we shall be asking whether their respective treatments succeed in avoiding both parasitism (seeking to be rid of God in ways that assume or require God) and asceticism (renouncing or retrenching, along with God, the scope of the theological notion of justice). Furthermore, can post-theological thought appropriate the notion of justice in a way that adequately addresses what Simon Critchley identifies as ‘the felt inadequacy of official secular conceptions of morality’? In particular, the question we shall pursue is whether post-theological integrations can secure a notion of universal justice.

MEILLASSOUX: UNIVERSAL JUSTICE AND RESURRECTION

Meillassoux's discussion of the question of justice in ‘L'éthique divine’, the third section of ‘L'Inexistence divine’, begins with a denial: justice is inaccessible both to theism and to atheism. Universal justice is absurd for the atheist, who has no hope of justice for those now dead, but it is also absurd for the believer, who can only hope for justice from a God whose reign is manifestly not one of justice (ID 286). There is no religion or system of morality, Meillassoux insists, that is not prey either to the atheist's problem, or to the theist's.