Ethics after god's death and the time of the angels

Abstract

The philosophical idea of the death of God (God understood in pre-modern terms as living presence) has had various semantic operations within dominant (post)modern positions on human empowerment. Beginning with the significance of this, the article aims to discuss the half-life of a God who has become a metaphor. In other words, it explores the reverberation of God and God's death in secularized philosophy as well as the consequences of this for ethics and the conception of the Good. Then, the article illustrates the complex connection of this aim with the Occidental delimitation of human potentialities through gleanings from Murdoch, Arendt and Badiou´s ideas about the constellation ‘worldlessness, rupture, human frailty and everydayness’. It shows that such delimitation, operative in theories that share most of the assumptions surrounding the above constellation, re-sacralizes the justification of ethics as (in)humanist programme. Finally, it indicates how this particular delimitation of human potentialities can be revisited through the revival of the dead metaphor of the angelic and the kind of ethics it can animate.