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

193
2 0 1 1
مقاربات
51), Jacob Taubes, in his book The Political
Theology of Paul, has recognised Paul as a
founder of a new people. However, Paul did
that, according to Taubes who clearly came to
this conclusion from a Jewish point of view, by
enlarging the election of Israel. That reading
might comfortably set Paul as a Universalist,
but the admission to his universal group/set
is only possible via what Taubes calls “the
needle of the crucified one.” (Taubes 52)
We have seen that Badiou does not have a
problem with the requirement of fidelity, or
in other words faith, to the new truth event
on the part of the subject; in fact Badiou
has prescribed that fidelity as a necessary
condition for the becoming of the universal
truth. However, that requirement presents a
problem when considering the universality of
what Badiou calls the ‘new truth’. As Taubes
has highlighted in his own way, Badiou’s
universal set constitutes its own subjects, and
thus is not automatically universal as such to
the situation. The changed subject required
by Badiou’s universal set would make his so
called universal truth applicable only to the
particular set of the new believing subjects.
The Subjective Division
In a way that denied any relevance to the
Platonic concepts of ‘body’ and ‘soul’, Badiou
defined the relationship between the Pauline
concepts of ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit” through what
he called the ‘subjective division’. What Paul
named as the ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ were in fact
two subjective paths into which the Christian
subject, as constituted by the Pauline/Christian
discourse, is weaved into. This made the
Christian subject a divided one.
Badiou moved on to say that this subjective
division of the Christian subject disqualified
what other discourses identified as their
objects: the ‘finite cosmic totality’ in Greek
discourse, and the ‘elective belonging/sign’
in Jewish discourse. Instead, Badiou defined
the subject of the Christian discourse in terms
of the ‘figure of the real’ where the ‘real’ was
“that which is thought in a subjectivating
thought” (55). It is worth noting here that
Badiou made use of Lacan’s distinction
between real and reality. According to Lacan,
the real as being, in a situation, is a “point of
impossibility which allows us to think of the
situation as a whole, according to its real.”
(Badiou Ethics 119) The real, as the thought
being grasped by the two subjective paths that
constitute the divided subject deploys itself in
a relation to this division as ‘death’ and ‘life’.
In light of this theorisation, Badiou translated
Romans 8:6 in which Paul’s defines ‘flesh’
and ‘spirit’ as: “The thought of the flesh is
death; the thought of the spirit is life.” (55)
In comparison, this same verse was translated
in the New International Version of the New
Testament as: “The mind of the sinful man is
death, but the mind controlled by the spirit is
life and peace.” (Rom 8:6)
The consciousness of Truth
In the conclusion of the book, Badiou used the
term consciousness-of-truth as follows:
“In reality, the Pauline
break has a bearing upon
the formal conditions and
the inevitable consequences
of a consciousness-of-truth
rooted in a pure event,
detached from every
objectivist assignation
to the particular laws of
- 8 -