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

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in political philosophy as well as political
activism, and the latter would supposedly derive
its principles from the former. To elaborate this
point, a good place to start would be to look at
Paul’s contemporariness in terms of Badiou’s
thought by looking at the problematic that
Badiou has tried to tackle through this book.
Rightly so, Badiou has detailed this in the first
chapter of the book in the context of discussing
Paul’s contemporariness. He admitted that he
embarked on a philosophical investment of
Paul, who at first sight would seem distant from
the possibility of such an investment. Badiou,
however, saw a profitable engagement here,
precisely because the centrality of a fabulous
event (Christ’s resurrection) in Paul’s thought
provided a proper mediation for “restoring the
universal to its pure secularity, here and now”
(p. 5).
To explain what Badiou meant by restoring the
universal to its pure secularity, it is important
to remember his open contempt for relativism.
Badiou wrote this book in 1997, at a time when
the Marxist ‘universal’ project has declined.
He was also at odds with the postmodern
thought that yielded to the complexity of the
human condition and has given up on the
great narratives. Badiou, as Zizek puts it, is
still “aiming for, against the postmodern doxa,
(...) precisely the resuscitation of the politics
of (universal) Truth in today’s conditions of
global contingency.” (Zizek Ticklish 132)
Being a staunch post-Marxist he had a great
interest in finding new possibilities of political
resistance to the project of capitalism.
It is possible to see how Paul fitted into the
development of Badiou’s project of trying to
recover the ‘question of truth’ from cultural
and historical relativism, and ‘resisting’ the
current of “moral philosophy disguised as
political philosophy” (Being and Event xi), as
he lamented in his introduction to the English
translation of Being and Event.
The relevance of Paul to our time, in Badiou’s
view, couldn’t be greater, for he (i.e. St
Paul) has taken the risk of “assigning to the
universal a specific connection of the law
and the subject,” (7) and not without a price
paid by the law (the Jewish and Philosophic
laws being suspended) and the subject (the
traditional Jewish subject abandoning the
status of being one of the chosen, and the
pagan subject submitting to an event that
cannot be proved).
The Christ Event and the Pauline
Subject
According to Badiou, the subject is constituted
only by its active fidelity to the event of truth.
Paul’s uncompromising fidelity to the event of
Christ’s resurrection, and his insistence, that
faith in it alone was enough to constitute the
subject/follower of the ‘new way’, has both
defined his discourse and caused him much
trouble in defending it.
Paul’s conflict with the more observant
Judeo-Christians, who wanted all believers
to be circumcised, was seen by Badiou as a
tension between the potential universality of
the ‘postevental’ truth (the truth inferred by
the belief in Christ’s resurrection) and the
eventual site itself, which was located in a
singular situation (the Jewish tradition). Paul
has succeeded, after his famous meeting with
the historical apostles in Jerusalem (probably
head by Peter), to bind the singularity of the
new faith, with the universality of its message.
He refused to accept circumcision as a mark
of the Christian subject, like it was the mark
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