د. هيا بنت علي النعي٠ي د. نـــــــادر كاظــــــــ٠د. ج٠ال ... - جا٠عة البحرين

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But for Paul, Badiou argued, Christ was a
pure event. He was “a coming; he is what
interrupts the previous regime of discourse.”
(48) Similarly, ‘traditional’ communists look
up for the revolution to arrive so that there can
be something else, while Badiou would like
to think of a revolution as a “self-sufficient
sequence of political truth.” (48)
Here, Paul’s political orientation is made to
fit into Badiou’s political activism. At the
time when he wrote the book in 1997, he has
already become disillusioned by the role of
the party in revolutionary politics, and as a
result has adopted a new approach of political
activism without a party. To be able to practice
that kind of political activism, he formed
l’organisation Politique with some of his close
friends in 1985. (Badiou Ethics interview 95)
It would be fair to say that, in approaching
Paul, Badiou was searching for a non-party
militant that fitted very well with the type of
engagement he had with the l’organisation
Politique. This mode of “subjective” activism
that Badiou has resorted to, a mode that
enabled him to be politically engaged without
a party, allowing him to escape participation
in the parliamentarian democracy, which he
deplored, and at the same time sparing him
from any need to adopt a revisionist stance to
his Leninist-Maoist ideology.
Zizek saw Badiou’s notion of truth event as
very close to Althusser’s notion of ideological
interpellation (i.e. ideology subjectivating the
pre-ideological individual transforming him
or her to a subject proper). When an individual
is, in Badiou terms, subjectively engaged, in a
case that is a truth event, then that engagement
is strikingly similar to Althusser’s notion of the
individual being ideologically interpellated.
Badiou also provided an exposition of Paolo
Pasolini’s Project for a Film of St. Paul, the
film that Pasolini never made but left its script.
Pasolini was clear about his political motives
behind the project, as Mariniello noted: “By
replacing the conformity of Jews and Gentiles
with that of today’s bourgeois (religious or
not), the text historicizes the past, and biblical
history, introducing elements of a materialist
analysis: of institutional religion’s and
liberalism’s relation to power.” (St. Paul: The
Unmade Movie 72).
Badiou found in Pasolini’s work an
endorsement of his attempt to designate
Paul as a militant of truth. In intersecting
the question of Christianity with that of
communism, Pasolini had as result intersected
the question of ‘saintliness’ with that of the
militant. Badiou concluded that Pasolini’s
Paul, was, in a revolutionary fashion, “our
fictional contemporary because the universal
content of his preaching, obstacles and failures
included, [remained] absolutely real.” (37)
Given the closeness in the ideological stands
of Badiou and Pasolini, it would be possible
to accept Badiou’s interpretation of Pasolini’s
motives for the film of St. Paul.
Conclusion
I have argued that there are problems with
Badiou’s concept of the universal truth,
especially when considering Badiou’s
subjectivating truth procedure embedded in
that universality, which inevitably requires
“changed” subjects, and thus would form a
particular set in addition to the existing sets
in the situation.
Moreover, Badiou’s event sounded like an
ideology that completely defines, and thus
confines its subject. It nullifies the existing
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