Begin Again

Easter is a tradition of death and resurrection. Something passes away so something new can live. But beginnings are hardly ever obvious in real time. You almost never know enough to be sure that “this” is the right moment. You don’t yet know what you need to know. This is where experience is created.

From a Badiouian point of view, a beginning is not something the situation hands to you, it is something you decide to treat as decisive. You might have an identity that pushes you to make certain choices. If you are determined to act like the person you have assumed you are, the choices come with the role and no new choices really begin. Life continues, but nothing actually starts.

Built into the idea of “choice” is the agency and freedom to choose. But we waste that power every time we fail to realise we are making a choice and often we are choosing not to choose by continuing with the same identity we are holding to. We tell ourselves that beginnings will arrive with better information, or a clearer sense of who we are, or a more convenient time horizon. Badiou’s uncomfortable point is that it works the other way round. There is no guarantee first and decision second. You choose, and that is what retroactively makes it a beginning.

For Badiou, what follows is called fidelity. Once you decide that something counts as a beginning, you then have to live as if that choice really mattered, even when the situation gives you no reassurance that it did. You keep returning to that moment, testing and retesting it in practice, allowing it to reshape your habits, your identity, your sense of what is possible. To begin is one thing. To remain faithful to the beginning is where the real work starts.

First we choose to let go of an identity for another one to be born. This is not the confidence that somewhere, beyond our limited perspective, there is a master plan. Instead it is learning to live with the fact that there is not one, that the gap we experience in ourselves runs straight through the heart of human experience.

So if Easter is a ritual of new starts, of death and resurrection, it is not because the calendar resets your life for you. It is because, once a year, you are given a socially acceptable excuse to decide that today, or tomorrow, will count.