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

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a world or society yet
concretely destined to
become inscribed within a
world and within a society”
(p. 107).
Without having more explanation from Badiou
about what he meant by consciousness-oftruth,
it was possible to see, however, how it
alluded to the Christian terms ‘consciousness
of Christ’ or ‘consciousness of church’. A
consciousness-of-truth could then be thought
of as a state of a direct knowledge of truth,
without having to apply reason, as in Greek
philosophical discourse, or use of signs or
miracles, as in the Jewish prophetic discourse.
Badiou used consciousness-of-truth to
describe the state of the subject that has been
transformed and made ready to enter the realm
of Universalism.
Using the terms Being and Event as Badiou
established them in his Being and Event book;
we can describe how this transformation
occurs. The key to universalism, according to
Badiou, is the opening up of a generic set of
a being of truth, and thus making it possible
for a subject that belongs to a particular set
to have, through its faith in an event that was
declared as true by another subject, a sort
of a consciousness-of-truth that enables it
to transgress its established set, and thus to
enter a universal set to which anybody can
subscribe. The consciousness-of-truth is the
state in which the transformed subject finds
itself, after it submits to faith in the declared
event. The founding of a universal set, where
the discourse of truth is removed from the
distinctive communitarian sets of the Greeks
and the Jews (the historical aggregates) was,
according to Badiou, the contribution of Paul.
So, what are, according to Badiou, the generic
conditions of a universal truth? A truth that
meets the generic conditions is one that despite
being situated in the world “does not retain
anything expressible from that situation”
(Being and Event xiii). The work of truth in
this context is that of a ‘generic procedure’
and the subject is constituted by becoming an
active dimension of such procedure.
Paul as a Revolutionary Militant
As Badiou was seeking to rethink the structure
of the Political through Paul, he has not lost
faith in the power of revolutionary politics. In
seeking exactly to strengthen such politics by
retrieving through Paul a model for thinking
the event and living militantly, he was
motivated by the potency of Paul as a militant
figure.
The ‘militant of truth’ subject, according to
Badiou, is that who is actively proclaiming
an event of truth. The militant of truth is
the ‘artist-creator’, who “opens up a new
theoretical field”, while “working for the
emancipation of humanity in its entirety.”
(Being and Event p.xiii) It is useful to
remember here that Badiou’s reading of Paul
in this book was already initiated in his earlier
book Being and Event in his 21 st mediation
about Pascal. In contrasting between Paul and
Pascal in relation to the truth event, Badiou in
consequence contrasted between ‘traditional’
communist revolutionaries and his own post-
Marxist conception of militancy. The event for
Paul and Pascal was Christ, while it was, and
probably still is, for Badiou and his ‘comrades’,
the revolution. Pascal saw the Christ event
as mediation, or in Badiou’s mathematical
language, a ‘function’, through which we
get the knowledge of God and Christianity.
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