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

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it makes visible what the ‘official’ state of the
situation, that is its Being, represses.
The subject then emerges after the Event and
is completely defined by its fidelity to the
event. The subject retroactively gives birth
to the event by interpreting it as event. The
interpretation becomes part of the event.
The new truth starts from fixing the current
situation, but is only achieved when it succeeds
to evade it.
To Badiou, philosophy takes place under
four conditions: Art, Love, Politics, and
Science. Badiou called these condition ‘truth
procedures’, in the sense that they can, under
the right conditions, produce truths.
An important proposition in Badiou’s thought
was the contingent nature of the truth event,
and thus the contingency of truth produced
by a truth-procedure based on that event. The
event is contingent because of the multiplicity
of the situation in which ‘random’ events may
or may not succeed in forming a rupture in
the situation to enable the truth-procedure to
work.
Insufficient Profanity
In Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
Badiou started by claiming, in the prologue to
the book, his undisputed right to draw on Paul’s
letters freely, without devotion or repulsion.
He stressed his secular inclinations to his
subject-matter and spoke of the resurrection of
Christ as a fable. However, that apparently did
not deter Christian scholars from positively
receiving his work, which was probably a
sign that he did not fundamentally contradict
religious convictions in his reading of St Paul.
A possible indication that Badiou’s work
could be accommodated, at some level, within
the religious circles was what Alain Gignac,
the professor in the Faculty of Theology
at the University of Montreal, reported as
‘favourable’ reception of Badiou’s book in
the part of exegetes. (Gignac 16) Gignac even
attempted to lighten the impact of the word
fable used by Badiou as a belittling of the
verity of the Christian faith: “the word fable
is more ambiguous than it may appear. On the
one hand, it can be used to describe the effect
of language where the ineffable attempts to
express itself (...). On the other hand, the word
can refer to the very meaning of the event
(...): Is it not characteristic of the event to be
‘fabulous’?” (Gignac 16)
Badiou, however, assured us that what
interested him in Paul was a ‘gesture’ that was
“formally possible to disjoin from the fable”
(5). The ‘fable’ was stripped out of its fabulous
element by Badiou’s meticulous use of formal
mathematical language in the course of his
analysis. Paul’s gesture was the bridging of
the ‘communitarian’ divide between Jews and
Pagans by offering a proposition of a subject
that transgressed the communitarian identities
via the belief in an event “whose only ‘proof’
lies precisely in its having been declared by a
subject” (5). The ‘declaring subject’ was Paul
himself, and the faith in the event has become
a law without a supporting evidence; a truth.
Paul has succeeded in subtracting the truth
from what Badiou called “the communitarian
grasp.” (5)
Why Paul Now?
Being convinced that Badiou’s exploitation of
Paul was far from religious, the question that
still remained, however, was: Why was the
rethinking of Paul’s gesture a “contemporary
necessity”? (6) Badiou tried to answer the
question by making Paul work for his projects
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