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

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of the Jewish subject.
Here, Badiou used the concepts he developed
in his book Being and Event; the event is
established (i.e. comes to Being) in a particular
site, it nonetheless has to transgress it in order
to succeed as a truth procedure. That is how
Badiou concluded that for Paul, although the
resurrection of Christ’s event was dependent in
its Being on its site (i.e. the Jewish tradition),
its truth should be independent of that
particular site. Paul’s assertion in his letter to
the Corinthians: “Circumcision is nothing, and
uncircumcision is nothing” (I Cor. 7:19), was
a testament that “the new universality bears no
privileged relation to the Jewish community.”
(23)
In Badiou’s terms, Jews and Greeks were
subjective dispositions, and regimes of
discourse (to copy Foucault), in opposition of
which Paul presented a third discourse which
was his own. In this case, Paul has “instituted
‘Christian discourse’ only by distinguishing its
operations from those of Jewish discourse and
Greek discourse”. (41) A by-product of Paul’s
discourse was a fourth one, which Badiou
called ‘mystical’ discourse. More specifically,
Badiou claimed, it was a product of the ternary
dialectic between the three discourses: Jewish,
Greek and Pauls. This dialectic should require,
as Hegel would demand as part of his routine
of the ‘Absolute Knowledge’ of a ternary
dialectic, a fourth discourse, which was in this
case the mystic discourse of miracles.
Universalism: A Universal Singularity
Fighting the “abstract universality of our
epoch” (Being and Event p.xii) that was made
possible by the alliance between the ‘free’
market forces and liberal parliamentarianism,
Badiou tried to provide an alternative model of
universality, which he called ‘universalism’.
By characterizing the capitalist universality
as abstract, Badiou pointed it out as a ‘false
universality’, whose monetary abstraction of
value was not hindered by accommodating
the “kaleidoscope of communitarianisms.” (7)
This has produced a ‘false’ sense of liberty in
society.
The four truth procedures identified by Badiou
in the “Art, Love, Politics, and Science”
typology face the risk of obliteration at the
hand of capital’s false universality, as each truth
procedure was merchandised and packaged in
a category of ‘commercial presentation’ via
a process of ‘nominal occlusion’: “the word
‘culture’ comes to obliterate that of ‘art’.
The word ‘technology’ obliterates the word
‘science’. The word ‘management’ obliterates
the word ‘politics’. The word ‘sexuality’
obliterates the word ‘love’.” (12)
Theoretical Support for capital’s false
universality came from the liberal conception
of the relativity of truth. Against this
relativism that celebrated and effectively
emboldened the cultural differences in society,
Badiou advocated that if truths existed in a
situation, they would have to be “indifferent
to differences” (Being and Event xii) because
differences couldn’t play a ‘normative role’;
a role in finding the truths in the situation.
This fundamentally anti-relativist doctrine
was what drove Badiou to formulate his
universalism.
After a polemic attack on what he called the
‘articulated whole’ of the abstract homogeneity
of the capital (which abstracted everything to
monetary value) and the identitarian protest
(which manifested as cultural/ethnic groups
sought to be recognised as separate cultural
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