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

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entities in society), Badiou asked the question:
“What are the conditions for a universal
singularity?” (13) For a start, the truth as
a universal singularity has to be entirely
subjective. A person has to embrace it on a
purely subjective basis without intermediary
or mediation. Consequently, this truth, and
it’s believing subject, have to pay the price
of breaking up with established rites and
markings specific to the subject’s locality
before being reconstituted by that universal
truth. Without qualification, the new truth has
to stand suspended on its own, supported only
by the uncompromising fidelity of its followers.
Badiou still saw his truth procedures at risk
of being dissolved into cultural ‘historicity’
by the moral opinion, and he expressed his
intent in this book to use Paul as a guide to
subtract that cultural historicity from those
truth procedures.
Badiou touched on the Jewish and Greek
identity in mathematical terms, in relation
to their objects of the respective discourses,
positing the claim that Paul’s profound idea,
which lead to his universality, was that “Jewish
discourse and Greek discourse are two aspects
of the same figure of mastery.” (42) Note that
this ‘figure of mastery’ was referred to at a
different location in the book as the ‘figure of
the real’ which in short could be thought of
as the objects of the respective discourses; i.e.
the ‘elective belonging/miraculous sign’ for
the Jewish discourse and the ‘cosmic totality’
for the Greek discourse. Badiou continued
to argue that “the miraculous exception of
the sign was only the ‘minus-one,’ the point
of incoherence, which the cosmic totality
requires in order to sustain itself.” (42) This
mathematical representation forced Badiou to
place both the Greek and Jewish discourses as
opposites that suppose the persistence of each
other. If it was possible to accept that the Jewish
‘monotheist’ subject defined itself against the
Greek/Roman ‘pagan’ subject, there was no
reason to assume that this held true for how
the Greek/Roman subject defined itself. After
all, the Jewish minority in the Roman Empire,
although a sizable one as A. N. Wilson argued
(Wilson 6), was just one of other minorities
in the Empire. In addition, the Roman subject
was probably constituted by the discourse of
wisdom inherited from the Greeks but also by
the Roman legal discourse of what constituted
a ‘free’ citizen. Such was the significance of
Roman citizenship that Paul himself tapped
into it when he needed to be granted a wider
legal immunity during his trial in Rome than
what a normal ‘minority’ Jew would get in the
Roman Empire.
Badiou asserted that the truth procedure didn’t
comprise degrees, and Paul has fulfilled that
assertion when he stood against some Judeo-
Christians who felt strongly for the Jewish
law to be applied to the Gentile followers,
especially circumcision, and did not consent to
making any distinction between the Jewish and
non-Jew Christians (21). Paul’s determination
in transgressing both the Jewish law and the
Greek wisdom was the manifestation of total
fidelity to the truth event that nonetheless may
or may not triumph in making possible a new
truth. This fidelity to the event on the part of
the militant was always “a diagonal trajectory
that rarely meets with success.” (28)
In reading Paul’s saying in his letter to the
Romans: “A hardening has come upon part of
Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles has
come in.” (Rom 11:25 – wording from Taubes
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