Pasolini, Badiou, Žižek und das Erbe der christlichen Liebe

This article appears in a collection of interdisciplinary papers that brings together a variety of contributions which question the re-affirmation of Christianity in contemporary critical theory and includes articles by well-known critical theorists such as Simon Critchley and Alexander Garcia Duttmann. While Christianity still remains an object of criticism, it is often at the same time a positive point of reference for a number of European, especially Italian and French, leftist theorists (among others, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou). This article focuses on Pier Paolo Pasolini's analysis of the incompatibility between Christianity and the new consumeristic power of late-capitalism as expressed in a number of political articles of the '60s and '70s and in his screenplay on Saint Paul. It also scrutinises Pasolini's pathbreaking insight into the forthcoming inevitable clash between hedonistic Capital and a leftist politics of agape as a politics of poverty. In addition, the article shows how Pasolini's emphasis on Christian love as a force of political emancipation anticipates and supplements some of the principal coordinates of Badiou and Žižek's recent attacks on late-capitalism. An English translation of this article, ‘Pasolini, Badiou, Žižek, and the Legacy of Christian Love’, was published by the journal HTVNews. A Dutch translation is forthcoming in a collection of essays entitled Libericide.