Physical survival outweighs ---- any value requires it and it best maximizes happiness

On an occasion when I have been given so many reasons to feel joy and gratitude, it seems appropriate to begin my response with a reflection on happiness, or more exactly on the possibility of being happy. At the outset of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identifies happiness as "that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else" (2001, 1097a). Even when we seek the most elevated virtues, we do not seek to attain them only for their own sake but also because we believe that they will make us happy. In seeking happiness, on the other hand, we do not seek any state of being beyond happiness itself. Happiness is thus the highest good because we desire it as an end in itself. When Aristotle analyzes this end, however, he runs into the problem of temporality. Aristotle himself defines happiness as [End Page 227] an activity, which means that it takes time to be happy. But in being temporal, happiness is exposed to a future that may shatter it. Even at the moment one is happy, the moment is passing away and opens the experience of happiness to loss. According to Aristotle, happiness therefore requires a "complete life" (1098a), namely, a life that has come to an end. As long as one is alive happiness is never secured, which would seem to mean that one only achieves happiness through the completion of life in death. "Surely this is a paradox," Aristotle remarks, "that when a man is happy the attribute that belongs to him is not to be truly predicated of him because we do not wish to call living men happy, on account of the accidents that may befall them" (1100a).1

The problem outlined by Aristotle is at the core of the deconstructive logic I develop in Radical Atheism. If one defines the highest good as a state of absolute immunity—for example, as a happiness that is immune from accident and loss—it is inseparable from a state of death, since nothing can happen to it. Inversely, happiness or any other state of being requires a process of survival that takes the time to live by postponing death. On the one hand, to survive is to retain what passes away and thus to keep the past in resistance to loss. On the other hand, to survive is to live on in a future that separates itself from the past and opens it to being lost. The movement of survival is thus characterized by a double bind. Life bears the cause of its own destruction within itself, so the death that one defends against in the movement of survival is internal to the life that is defended. No matter how much I try to protect my life, I can only do so by exposing it to a future that may erase it, but which also gives it the chance to live on.

According to Derrida, the common denominator for all religions is that they promote an ideal of absolute immunity beyond the condition of survival, namely, the ideal of something that would be unscathed by time and loss. Atheism has traditionally denied the existence of such an ideal, in accordance with one of three different models. The first model is what I will call melancholic atheism. This type of atheism renounces the belief in the unscathed, but laments its absence and holds that we are doomed to disappointment because we can never attain the timeless transcendence we desire. One of the contemporary proponents of this view is Simon Critchley, who defines his atheism in terms of "religious disappointment: disappointment that what [End Page 228] I desire but lack is an experience of faith, namely, faith in some transcendent God" (2004, xviii). The second model is pragmatic atheism. This type of atheism argues that, while the fullness of being is an illusion, the religious desire for fullness is operative in all our commitments to the world. A prominent representative of this view is Ernesto Laclau, whose work I analyze at length in the final chapter of Radical Atheism. For Laclau, to be committed to an ethical or political cause is to invest it with the desire for fullness. We must consequently learn how to engage this desire in a progressive rather than conservative fashion. Whether we are struggling for secularism or fundamentalism, democracy or totalitarianism, we are driven by the desire for fullness. The pragmatic question becomes how to channel this desire in the best possible direction. Finally, the third model is therapeutic atheism. Unlike pragmatic atheism, therapeutic atheism does not seek to activate but rather to treat the religious desire for fullness, which is seen as the source of both individual psychological neurosis and collective political fanaticism. Beginning in the materialism of Epicurus and Lucretius, therapeutic atheism has a rich, differentiated history and today its most sophisticated defenders can be found in psychoanalytic philosophy.

The common denominator for all these models of atheism is the assumption that the religious desire for absolute immunity is operative. When we desire the good we desire an absolute good that is immune from evil, and when we desire life we desire an absolute life that is immune from death. The fundamental drama of human existence is thus seen as the conflict between the mortal being that is our fate and the immortal being that we desire. In contrast, radical atheism seeks to demonstrate that the limitation of mortal life is not a lack of being that we desire to overcome. Rather, I argue that the attachment to mortal life precipitates every positive and every negative affective response. If one were not attached to mortal life, one would not care either about oneself or any other. Only a mortal being requires care, since only a mortal being can be lost, injured, or violated.

The desire for survival—namely, the desire for a mortal being to live on—is thus presupposed in all our engagements with the world. For example, all the virtues that traditionally are assumed to be based on religious faith—compassion, love, responsibility for the other, and so on—in [End Page 229] fact presuppose the radically atheist desire for survival. To feel compassion or take responsibility for the other, I have to be invested in a being who is susceptible to suffering and who consequently is mortal. The same goes for the experience of love. To love someone or something is to distinguish it from everything else as singularly precious. If the beloved could not die, however, it would not be possible to distinguish it as precious in the first place, since the beloved would not be irreplaceable. It is because the beloved can be lost that we seek to keep it. Or more generally: it is because things can be lost, because they have not always been here and will not always be here, that we value them.

This argument is one aspect of my notion of the unconditional affirmation of survival. A recurrent question in the responses concerns the exact status of this affirmation, so I want to be very clear on this point. Contrary to what Adrian Johnston holds in his paper, I am not proposing a life-affirming atheism. Rather, I argue that the affirmation of survival is presupposed in all responses to life. Without the affirmation of survival there would be no compassion and love (since one would not be committed to anything), but there would also be no resentment and hate (since one would not be threatened by anything). Even the most suicidal desire to end all survival presupposes the affirmation of survival, since one would not care to end all survival if one did not care about what will happen and thus cared about survival. The only way to be truly indifferent to survival is to be dead, which is to say that it is impossible for a living being to be indifferent to survival. This is the exact sense of the unconditional affirmation of survival. It spells out that whatever one does one is invested in the fate of a mortal temporal being. If one were not invested in the fate of a mortal, temporal being, one would not be invested in the fate of anything at all, since one would not care about anything that has happened or anything that may happen.

Thus, I argue that affectivity in general presupposes the care for survival. If one does not care for survival, one does not care about what happens. And if one does not care about what happens, one is not affected. In my work on psychoanalysis, then, I propose to rethink the constitution of the libidinal economy on the basis of the drive for survival. Arguing against the notion of the death drive in Freud and Lacan, I seek to demonstrate that the drive [End Page 230] for survival allows for a better account of phenomena such as mourning, trauma, and repetition compulsion.