COLLAPSE IV 264 Meillassoux – Spectral Dilemma 265 noble words – love, justice – with his odious practices: isn’t this a good deﬁnition of hell? You say that in the dazzling presence of such a God, I will grasp the inﬁnitely loving nature of his attit ude to his creatures? Y ou only succeed i n exacerbating the nightmare you promise: for you suppose that this being has the power to spiritually transform me in such a radical fashion as to make me love He who allows such atrocities to occur , for having l et those atrocities occur . This is a promise of a spiritual death inﬁnitely worse than a merely bodily death: in the presence of God, I will cease to love the Good, for He would have the power to make me love Evil as if it were Good. If God exists, the exit of the dead is thus aggravated to inﬁnity: their bodily death is redoubled in their spiritual death. T o this hell you wish for them, I prefer, for them as for myself, nothingness, which will leave them in peace and conserve their dignity, rather than putting them at the mercy of the omnipotence of your pitiless Demiurge. ’ W e can see that each of these two positions is only supported by the weakness of the other: the atheist is atheist because religion promises a fearful God; the believer anchors his faith in the refusal of a life devastated by the despair of terrible deaths. Each masks his speciﬁc despair by exhibiting his avoidance of the other’s despair . Thus the dilemma is as follows: either to despair of another life for the dead, or to despair of a God who has let such deaths take place. W e will call

spectral dilemma

the aporetic alternative of atheism and religion when confronted with the mourning of essential spectres.

3

In this aporetic alternative, we

3. I have called ‘religious’ every position which brings together the thesis of a life beyond the grave with the existence of a personal God; ‘atheistic’ every position

what I hope for spectres. But I myself am but a spectre in waiting. I can be Sadducean for myself, and for others, but I will always be Pharisean for spectres. Or again: I might be rigorously atheist for myself, might refuse to believe in immortality for myself, but I could never do so for them: For the idea that all justice is impossible for the innumerable massed spectres of the past corrodes my very core, so that I can no longer bear with the living. Certainly, it is they, the living, who need help, not the dead; but I think that help to the living can only proceed given some hope for justice for the dead. The atheist might well deny it: for my part if I were to renounce this, I could not live. I must hope for something

for