martin-badiou paul boyarin

8/6/2019 Martin-Badiou Paul Boyarin

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Bill Martin [email protected] Department

DePaul UniversityChicago, IL 60614

Future Paul: exemplary militant of the communist invariant (or, Badiou among thehistoricists) [presentation for the Paul of Tarsus Study Group at Northwestern University,May 10, 2011] [this is draft material, I will summarize some of it, and please do not quote

me without permission]

I've given a few talks on Badiou's Paul in the last couple of years, and I might as wellstart this one the way that I've begun the others . . . [I'm saving the next line for the actual

talk.]

By "Paul" I really mean something like "the Paul question in Badiou, or for Badiou." Mymain aim here will be to take up Daniel Boyarin's arguments concerning Badiou's

position, as presented in John D. Caputo and Linda Martin Alcoff, eds., St. Paul Among the Philosophers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). For Badiou, as I'm

sure you know, any real event bursts through into the world, it "breaks the world intotwo," and insomuch as this event has its truth, that truth is eternal and ahistorical.

Therefore, Badiou is resistant to historicizing arguments, at least insomuch as they aim toassimilate something that is truly new into a preexisting order of things. In St. Paul

Among the Philosophers, Badiou's interlocutors are either historians or otherwise of whatmight be called an historicizing bent; the most sophisticated of these is Daniel Boyarin,

the author of an influential book, A Radical Jew: Paul and the politics of identity. Now,it may turn out that Badiou is in love with a certain idea of Paul, so to speak, but the

question then becomes whether there is at least the basis for this idea--and the basiswould be something like whether Badiou is right that there really are events, which break

into history and break the laws of being. Here I really just want to "workshop" all of this,and I look forward to our discussion.

The main part of the material I am presenting here is from a long essay on St. Paul

Among the Philosophers, and I have developed this material as part of two other projectsthat are ongoing with me; I'd like to say a quick word about these just by way of setting

the context for this discussion, as I understand it.

Returning to my initial comment, not only am I not a Paul scholar in any sense, I am onlygoing to go so far in taking up the ever-growing body of work that presents us with what

can be called "the new Paul." It's not that I have anything against this work (Agamben,Taubes, Milbank, Theodore Jennings, Jr. [on Derrida and Paul], etc.), I wish that I had

time to delve into it--along with a hundred other things. I feel very sure that, if it werenot for the interest that Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have in Paul, I would not have

taken up this subject (at least in this particular phase of my work and life), despite havinggrown up as a "good Christian boy." For what it is worth, I was not overly fond of Paul

when I was young, and I think this was in large part because I felt (and I mean this, Isimply felt it without quite being able to articulate it) that the middle-class Protestants I



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grew up around hid too much behind a blithe reading of Paul's role as a persecutor of Christians and of his conversion. We can discuss these things a bit more, if you would

like, but again my point is that I doubt that I would find myself dealing with Paul at thisstate of things if it were not for Badiou's attempt, especially, to rethink the communist

hypothesis and his argument that Paul has an important place within this rethinking.

My own projects in recent years have concerned the post-Maoist dimensions of thisrethinking and more generally the legacy of French Marxism. I'm working at present to

complete two large projects on these subjects, under the working titles (we'll see if publishers go for either of them) "Ever since Mao: Alain Badiou and the renewal of the

communist project" and "To the Stalingrad Station: Legacies of French Marxism, fromSartre to Badiou." There are two engagements that have been a large part of my life that

are connected to these projects, with Maoism on the one hand, and with Christianity (andto some extent with Judaism) on the other. On the latter point, there is not only the

discussion around the way that Marxism seems quite "Christian" in some importantrespects, but also there is the important controversy around humanism and anti-

humanism, in light of which, to put it provocatively, comparisons between Sartre andAlthusser (when people both to make them, that is) seem a bit like "Christian-Buddhist

dialogue." Badiou claims that he is equally influenced by Sartre and Althusser (and he is perhaps the only major theorist who makes this claim--at least assuming that I myself am

not a major theorist!), and in this light a couple of other interesting things might be pointed out.

As you no doubt know, Badiou came out of the Maoist milieu in France, and he still

"upholds" (as we Maoists say) his Maoism--even as he argues that something new isneeded in the world, perhaps something that "repeats Paul" as much as it "repeats Lenin"

(to borrow the latter expression from Zizek). One interesting thing about Mao is that heis the only major Marxist revolutionary and theorist whose cultural background is not

Jewish or Christian, but instead Buddhist. Badiou looks to Paul as the "origin of universalism," but the fact is that, even granting that Christianity has a special place in

history as a universalist truth procedure, there appears to have been a universalist truth procedure that came several hundred years before it, namely Buddhism. It is even quite

likely that Buddhism had some influence in the milieu out of which Christianity emerged,for example in the idea of missionaries going out in pairs. Badiou's own thinking of the

void (as the empty set) is much closer to Buddhism than anything in Christianity (or Judaism), and it could be said that Paul's own "awakening," at least as Badiou

understands things, has more in common with the notions of no-self and emptiness inBuddhism than with the resurrection of the body in Christianity. (There are other ways in

which Badiou is closer to Christianity--in Logics of Worlds, events are bound up with theformation of a new body, and Badiou even calls this formation "resurrection"--but this is

a future-oriented perspective.) Well, for my part I find all of this very interesting, but to pursue these questions would take us into quite different directions than those we have

convened here to pursue.

Like I say, I have been engaged with these questions in my life and work for a long timenow, but almost exclusively from the perspective of a theorist rather than a scholar. The



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distinction could be set out in various ways, but here I am especially concerned withtheory as an orientation toward the future, and it seems quite clear that Badiou's

perspective on Paul is also "theoretical" in this sense. Needless to say, I love the scholarsand in many ways envy them (or you).

The rest of what I will present here is taken from my longer draft chapter on Badiou,Paul, and St. Paul Among the Philosophers.

* [Zizek]

In a November 2007 interview (published in the International Journal of Zizek

Studies under the title, “Humanism is not enough”), Slavoj Zizek discusses the fluidity of identity in contemporary capitalist society, arguing that many “postmodern” responses to

what can be called the crisis of identity today (or simply even the crack-up of identity) isto insist that “we didn’t go far enough.” Zizek characterizes this approach as simply “late

capitalist libertarianism” and “radical liberalism.” As an alternative, Zizek speaks insteadof “the type of identity we should recreate,”

… it’s a very crazy thing, I know, here comes my reference, my God, I

have written three books, as a materialist, on Christianity. And here also, I belong to a movement, which is a very interesting movement, people who

are otherwise different. Badiou wrote a book on St. Paul, Agamben wrotea book on St. Paul, it’s practically a whole movement today of leftists

appropriating Paul. And I think what they are looking for in St. Paul?Paul is precisely the answer to your question [about the emergence of a

new type of identity].

This idea of a Paulinian community of believers, in an apocalyptic time,that is to say, how to avoid the dilemma of either the old substantial

community or dispersed liberal individualism. How to create a collectivewhich is not the old community? But of course also not a totalitarian

collective and so on.

The answer is, I think, given in this Paulinian engaged, strugglingcommunity of believers. This is what we are looking for there, this is

maybe a disappointment for somebody, but what interests me in Paul isnot theological premises [it isn’t clear that, strictly speaking, this is the

case]. We read Paul in the way of “God is dead,” God is telling us, “It’sup to you, I need your help.” So, to put it in very brutal terms, as Alain

Badiou once told me in a conversation, the Holy Ghost is the communist party, it’s the community of believers which are … [in the interview itself

Zizek trails off and returns to the critique of the “postmodern” view of identity, specifically Judith Butler’s view].

*



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[Caputo]The book opens with an excellent introduction by John Caputo, and then essays

by Badiou and Zizek. Prof. Caputo’s introduction has a provocative title that captureswell two issues that reappear throughout the collection: “Postcards from Paul:

Subtraction versus Grafting.” The first part of the title refers to the argument that Jacques

Derrida had with Jacques Lacan, over what it means for a letter to reach its addressee.With Paul’s letters, to be sure, we cannot help but think (or at least it could be said that, if we are not dogmatic fundamentalists we cannot help but think) about the curious

structure of the New Testament, being made up for the greater part by letters, and thegreater part of that by Paul’s letters. “Subtraction versus Grafting” goes to the question

of the evental status of Paul’s fidelity: is the messiah crucified the opening to somethingnew or an addition to something already present?

In this light, the structuring principle of the collection is that, for Badiou, Paul is

the singular apostle of the new, and then most of the rest of the book is a disagreement onthis point, or on Badiou’s way of making this point, from the standpoint of historical and

religious studies scholarship. At the end, one wants to ask if it is a matter of one side or the other not getting it, or are the two sides talking past each other.

*[some Zizek and Badiou background]

What we might say about Zizek instead is that, while he agrees with Badiou thatthere is no Christianity without Paul, he is also more willing to say that (transposing here)

there is also no Lenin without the Bolshevik Party and the October Revolution. And itcould be said that it is precisely here that the historians gain their traction, though Zizek

and Badiou would say that this traction is gained at the expense of erasing the singularityof Paul (and Lenin).

It is very important to recognize, for without this recognition the present volume

must appear very strange and even incomprehensible to even most philosophers andtheologians, and especially to historians, that Badiou makes his claim about Paul as the

singular apostle of the new not only in terms of philosophy but even in a sense as adefining feature of philosophy and as a defense of philosophy. (On this point the essay

by Daniel Boyarin is the most helpful, and it further helps that Boyarin not only dealsextensively with Badiou’s St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, but also his

Manifesto for Philosophy). What I find tantalizing, but what I could imagine some of sour disposition taking as a reason for calling the book a dud, is that the historians

response is, for the most part, “we’re not buying it.”

This skepticism begins with not only Badiou’s rejection of historicalcontextualization, but also what some of the historians and religious studies scholars

describe as the lack of “content” in Badiou’s Paul. At the last meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (October 2009, Alexandria, Virginia), there

was a session on the “new Paul” held under the auspices of the Society for ContinentalPhilosophy in a Jewish Context. One of the panel participants, as I recall, remarked that

Paul was in a sense the perfect example of a subject (of fidelity to a truth event) for Badiou, precisely because the “event” in question, the resurrection of Jesus the messiah,



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did not actually happen, as far as Badiou is concerned. Badiou writes in St. Paul ,somewhat infamously, that there is nothing for us today in the “good news,” and that the

resurrection is “merely a fable.” But of course this is not really the point, and I think Badiou himself made a mistake with this terminology, especially as Badiou often quotes

Paul’s famous question, “Death, where is thy sting?”

On the other hand, it is worth keeping in mind that both Zizek and Badiou are notonly giving “new Christian” formulations, they are also combative toward a certain “new

Jewish orthodoxy” that they associate especially with Levinas and to some extentDerrida. (There is a further argument to be had here within Marxism, for example the

scary phrase from the first of the Theses on Feuerbach, where Marx speaks of a “practice… conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation.” In the roundtable

discussion, Daniel Boyarin gives a very interesting gloss on the eleventh thesis, which isthe one that is always quoted, too much in my view, but we might interrogate the final

thesis in terms of this formulation in the first thesis, especially in consideration of EmilFackenheim’s compelling argument that Marx was the “last Lutheran” and a “left

Constintinian,” and Zizek’s claim that Protestantism is Pauline, while RomanCatholicism is Peterine and Eastern Orthodoxy is Johanine.) Just to make one

momentary contact with Badiou’s employment of set theory mathematics, we mightwonder what it is that is specifically missing from specific null sets. In the case of

Badiou’s Paul, clearly the content that has been evacuated is that of both historicalJudaism and of historical context itself.

(However, the idea of different null sets probably will not work for Badiou’s

scheme, as the very idea of a null set is integral to Badiou’s argument for not allowing anegative theology to insert itself into the sort of “spacing” operation that Derrida

describes in “ Differance.” The mathematical null set allows Badiou to avoid anytheologizing of “the nothing” or some similar notion; at least that is the claim.)

Badiou never claims otherwise, of course; what we get from Paul is a “model” for

fidelity to a truth event, and why would it matter at all to the model that its foundingevent did not actually happen? For all that this may seem crazy to a scholar oriented

toward historical context, an argument can be made that there is a good deal more to thisformalism than might at first meet the eye.

*

[Frederiksen]In the first essay of the second part of St. Paul Among the Philosophers, Paula

Frederiksen leads the charge of the historians: “Badiou proclaims the erasure precisely of [the] gap between Paris and Philippi, between the present and the past. ‘Paul,’ states that

chapter’s title, is ‘our contemporary.’ Such a position is a hard sell to historians” (p.61).One of the valuable aspects of Frederiksen’s essay is its insistence on taking stock of the

ontological concequenes of different historicist approaches (she especially develops thoseof Origen and Augustine), which ought to remind us, at the very least, that in Badiou’s

philosophy, taking mathematics as ontology is the result of a “decision,” and that it is notas if there are not some arguments for a different decision (for historicism).



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*[more Frederiksen and Dale Martin as set up for Boyarin]

So, one might say that, for Martin as for Fredriksen, Badiou’s project—and not only as itconcerns Paul—is not sustainable, and though neither exactly puts it this way (but each

comes close), this is because Badiou’s ontology does not seem to account for history (and

this is a problem even if Badiou is not interested in accounting for history). Put another way, both Frederiksen and Martin might argue that we can do well enough “within theconstraints of epistemology,” and that we are stuck with these constraints in any case, and

Badiou’s project of blasting through these constraints with “mathematics as ontology”doesn’t work.

With those difficult issues in mind, let us consider the way that Daniel Boyarin

“turns the corner” on Badiou. It is helpful to have the essays by Frederiksen and Martinas a build-up to Boyarin’s effort; the first of these doesn’t accept Badiou’s contribution in

any way that has anything to do with the actual, historical Paul, even in terms of anattempt to capture some feature of Paul’s “conceptual scheme,” so to speak. Fredriksen

at the conclusion of her essay says that Badiou’s “Paul” is indeed “our contemporary,”insomuch as this “Paul” is a “an early-twenty-first century Postmodern Parisian,” which

of course the real Paul was not. You could say that Prof. Frederiksen’s contribution is togive a philosopher a seemingly much-needed dressing down from an historian, a

sophisticated version of simply asking, “Where are you getting this stuff?” If the philosopher is using an example from history to make a point, or to construct a concept,

does the philosopher have some sort of responsibility to get at least some of the historyright? (One might raise the same question with regard to liberation theology, where Jesus

the messiah is seen as a liberator; suppose it turns out that Jesus turns out to have been— shall we say—a “progressive” figure in his time, and certainly a thorn in the side of the

Romans in some way, but not exactly a revolutionary? I’m not saying this was the case,what I wonder about is the dependence of the status of the question in philosophical,

theological, or political terms upon the status of the question in historical terms.) While Idisagree with the direction that Frederiksen takes this inquiry, at least insomuch as it

concerns Badiou’s philosophy (I especially think it is time to pack away all language of “postmodern Parisians,” and in any case as regards Badiou it is not accurate and really a

cheap shot), I think she has thematized the difficulties quite well and posed a significantchallenge. Of course her case is aided by the fact that Badiou and Zizek both make a

point of not concerning themselves with historical detail or context, so that, especially inBadiou’s case, “Paul” becomes purely a “figure of” . . ., well, “something.”

. . .Dale B. Martin develops the conceptual framework more, but then questions

Badiou both on grounds of historical detail/context and on the value of any concept of universalism in our time. And it might be added that Badiou’s attempt to give a

philosophical grounding to a concept of universalism in our postmodern times (where, for instance, concepts such as political legitimation seem to have very little traction) would

certainly separate him from “postmodern philosophy,” to the extent this terms meansanything at all. So then Daniel Boyarin goes even much further in both directions, he

develops the case for the value of Badiou’s ideas much further, but he also deepens thecritique and brings onboard questions about the difference between rhetoric and



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philosophy as a way of interrogating what might be understood as Paul’s “Platonic”credentials.

For Martin as for Fredriksen, Badiou’s project—and not only as it concerns

Paul—is not sustainable, and though neither exactly puts it this way (but each comes

close), this is because Badiou’s ontology does not seem to account for history (and this isa problem even if Badiou is not himself interested in the question). Put another way, bothFrederiksen and Martin might argue that we can do well enough “within the constraints

of epistemology,” and that we are stuck with these constraints in any case, and Badiou’s project of blasting through these constraints with “mathematics as ontology” doesn’t

work. For Badiou, the twentieth-century problematics of language and interpretation(whether under the heading of continental hermeneutics or analytic philosophy of

language) are part of an exhausted, Kantian, subject-centered paradigm.*

[Boyarin]At the expense of sounding a bit hyped-up, I will say that for many years now I

have found Prof. Boyarin’s work to be very impressive, and his essay for the presentvolume is by itself worth the price of admission, it is exceedingly rich. There is so much

to learn and work with here. Most important is the fact that Boyarin is the least equivocalwhen setting out Badiou’s specific contribution to the discussion of Paul, going so far as

to say that “contra a certain mood or tendency among Paul scholars, … Badiou isfrequently enough a very good and close reader of Paul. … Badiou’s language of event

and militance captures something about Paul’s texts … that more openly theologicallanguage misses” (p.112). Boyarin is especially concerned with the way that the question

of law, which is crucial in Badiou’s understanding of Paul, plays out in Galatians 2: “byworks of law shall no one be justified … if justification were through the law, then Christ

died to no purpose” (quoted on pp.112-13). Here is where Boyarin credits Badiou’scrucial contribution (also coining the not-overly-felicitous term “Badiouish,” which

however does have a nice Yiddish ring to it, also resonating with an expression not socommon anymore, to refer to someone’s attitude or comportment as “Bolshy”):

A Badiouish reading of this passage makes sense of it in a way that

nothing else can, in my view. There are deep flaws in Paul’s logic here,for there is nothing in what he says that disqualifies the Jacobean … idea

that faith in Christ comes to add to the law and not to subtract it, that whenJesus says (as, to be sure, he will only say a generation after Paul) that he

comes to fulfill the law, he means just that, to supply its meaning andfulfillment, to complete it, not to abrogate it. Keeping the law and having

faith in Jesus Christ would not be, on that account, in any waycontradictory, and, I repeat, there is nothing in Paul’s argument as it is

usually understood that disproves such a theology. Badiou’s Paul,however, makes sense of this passage. Faith here does not mean believing

in Christ, or even trusting in his faithfulness to us, in any conventionalsense, but fidelity to the event of the absolute newness that has entered the

world with the crucifixion. (p.113)



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There is much to discuss in this passage alone, but the crucial point that I want tounderline is that here we see the fundamental difference between Badiou and the

historicists (or historical contextualizers, at any rate): it is entirely possible to interpretPaul as a “radical Jewish activist-thinker” or as “the first Christian, even more radical.”

Both interpretations fit the facts, so to speak—this would appear to give us a classic case

of what Quine called “ontological relativity.” But we cannot elude the fact that all of thehistorical-contextualizers, including Boyarin, come down on the side of Paul as radicalJew.

So then we have to look at the difference within the difference: what is necessary

for the contextualizers is an epistemological and synthetic approach (where we can have both law and grace, in some measure where each is significant and one is not completely

subordinate to the other), while what Badiou is recommending is an ontology that makessense of the possibility of the new, and the development of the consequences of this

ontology.

Boyarin speaks to this difference early in his essay, significantly framing hisformulation within the context of “non-Christian thinkers who read Paul seriously,”

attempting “to learn from Paul [even] if we don’t believe Christian theological claims per se” (p.110). Again we see the two approaches:

Much is lost when we don’t read Paul at his theologically strongest points,

tantamount to those points which are entirely contained within a believingChristian’s discourse. But even more is lost when we read them only that

way. In other words, if we are to consider the value or interest of aPauline contribution to theory—one way, at least, of understanding “Paul

among the philosophers”—it will be precisely by bracketing or evendenying the theological claims of his text. And so, it seems, thinks Alain

Badiou, as well. I share with Badiou the sense of Paul as a radical thinker but differ significantly on what that means. For both of us Paul is a

radical. For me, however, he is a radical Jew in a particular time andhistorical clime, the first Bolshevik indeed, but only metaphorically so.

For Badiou, after his operations of subtraction, Paul is simply aninstantiation of the Idea of the radical, the militant per se, almost literally

Lenin himself. (p.110)

I wrote “wow” in the margin when first reading this last bit (and you see now where theBadiouish Bolshiness comes in), but it seems clear to me that Boyarin nails not only the

difference in interpretations, but also points to the problem of the indeterminacy of theevent—which then gives rise to the battle of truth procedures.

Badiou’s side of this is spelled out in Being and Event , of course, but it is also

crucial to the discussion of Paul to attempt to figure out how the language of truth-event,fidelity, nomination, and truth procedure is—at least in some important, qualitative

way—distinct from what we used to call the “conflict of interpretations.”



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All of this is very complicated, of course, as Boyarin goes on to demonstrate, butlet it also be said that there is something very simple at stake, too. The difference is

between philosophy as first of all concerned with ontology, as opposed to a philosophythat holds that “there is nothing outside of the hermeneutic circle,” or as Derrida put it,

“there is nothing outside of the text” (perhaps better translated, as Derrida said in Limited,

Inc., “there is no outside-of-the-text” or “there is nothing outside of context”), or even, to borrow a formulation from Donald Davidson, a philosophy holding that “there is nodifference between knowing one’s way around a language and knowing one’s way

around a world.” (These references are important in the larger discussion of Badiou’swork because Badiou has argued that there is a certain philosophical trajectory that

comes out of Immanuel Kant, of intersubjectivity and intertextuality, that has run itscourse with Derrida and Davidson; furthermore, the hermeneutic circle reference is

important because, for Badiou, while there is an “ontic/ontological difference,” it is notone in which “Being” is “one”—in this sense, there is no “Being” as such, and no “God,”

either, at least in this sense of the term.) To further simplify, we are on the terrain of the battle between ontology and hermeneutics, and, in the end, Boyarin, as much as the other

historians, presses the case for hermeneutics.

Or, as Boyarin provocatively develops the conflict, we are again (or still, after allthese years) on the terrain of Plato versus the Sophists. Boyarin not only defends the

Sophists, or at least a version of what they were about, he places Paul in this camp. Theresult is that Paul is on the side of “Jewish hermeneutics and rhetoric,” so to speak, rather

than Platonic ontology. What then becomes of Paul as exemplary militant, and what then becomes of Badiou’s conception of the event?

These are the big questions at stake in the attempt to place Paul among the

philosophers, and we can go so far as to propose that philosophy itself is at stake in thesequestions. Perhaps philosophy can only be done as long as the historians are not able to

get their mitts on our exemplars. Perhaps we can only do philosophy with concepts andwould do well to take no person or subject as an exemplar—which does seem to be

Badiou’s approach to Paul, after all. Perhaps philosophers and historians really havenothing to say to each other, even regarding the history of philosophy. All of this seems

to make of Badiou an analytic philosopher, someone who would hold, with Quine, thatthere is a basic difference between philosophy and history of philosophy (and history

more generally). However, let us return to the question of history in the conclusion,when we will take up Badiou’s remarks from the roundtable discussion. Here let us

spend one more moment on the fact that Boyarin seems to affirm something essential inBadiou’s reading of Paul but then turns away from this affirmation. Boyarin’s argument

concerns not only the status of history in Badiou’s philosophy, but also Badiou’s claimsabout the universalism essential to any real politics.

Boyarin’s turn comes in the middle of his essay; to return to what I said at the

opening of the present essay regarding the “new Paul,” I didn’t see it coming, given whathad come before. Perhaps this is the moment to mention the title of Boyarin’s essay,

which should have been a tip-off, “Paul among the anti-philosophers; Or, Saul among thesophists.” (It can be mentioned that Badiou makes a distinction between “anti-



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philosophy,” a term he takes from Lacan—a term that Lacan applied to himself—and“sophistry.” Boyarin more or less collapses the distinction, though he does explain why

he is doing this and gives an interesting historical argument for making this maneuver inthe case of Paul specifically. Still, we might wonder if returning to Badiou’s distinction

would give us a different reading, one that does not assimilate Paul to Saul once again.

But these are once again just variations on the big questions about philosophy andhistory, ontology and hermeneutics.) Still, when the turn comes, it is dramatic; as sooften is the case, the turn is signaled by the seemingly harmless phrase, “at the same

time.”

Badiou’s philosophy of the event and fidelity makes better sense of Paul’sdiscourse of faith opposed to the law than any interpretive structure I have

seen. At the same time, mindful of the injunction to always historicize, Iinsist that something vital is lost when Paul is read in a way so

disrespecting of time, place, and circumstance, simply repeating Paul’sgesture as if indicative of the non-being of ethnicity, gender, and class.

The radically thematized dehistoricizing that constitutes for Badiou thevery structure of the event renders all revolution the same revolution and

all militance the same militance. It seems to me not unfair to see in this aninstantiation of a modernist Platonism of a radical sort in which the event

is, unbearably, a newness in the noumenal world that changes nothing ,can change nothing in whatsoever, in the phenomenal world [my

emphasis—BM]. Lenin and Paul are both embodied avatars of the Formof Militance in precisely the same sense that Agathon and Antinous are

embodied avatars of the Form of Beauty.

Badiou is entirely on the side of the philosophers when he insists thatwhatever truth is—Paul’s truth, Badiou’s true reading of Paul, Badiou’s

truth—it cannot be a matter of a particular time, place, historicalcircumstances, conflicts, and possibilities. It has to be radically subtracted

from anything “communitarian.” Having been made out to beantiphilosopher, Badiou’s Paul ends up strangely philosophical precisely

in the insistence that the Truth Procedure involves radical subtraction of history. (pp.120-21)

So here we begin a rhetorical turn, but let us note that Boyarin has given us a definition

of philosophy, where truth involves the radical subtraction of history and ideas canchange nothing in the phenomenal world. We will return to these issues in the

conclusion.

The question then becomes, assuming that Boyarin, and for that matter the otherswho are more concerned to return and reinscribe Paul within his historical and textual

context(s), has indeed established Paul’s bona fides as an employer of rhetoricalstrategies, what remains of Badiou’s contribution, if anything? Boyarin hopes to “revise

[Badiou’s] reading in a historicist direction, … to preserve … its signal insight, as well ascapture something of its import that is lost in the resolutely antihistoricist mode of



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Badiou’s own reading” (p.124). Although there is only one reference to Derrida inBoyarin’s essay, what Boyarin proposes here clearly (and, I’m sure, intentionally) has

affinities with what Derrida called a “double reading.” In the end, does it work, and willany similar strategy—one that attempts to bring Badiou back within a framework of

historicization or interpretation—work, even while preserving Badiou’s “signal insight”?

At the furthest parameters this is the question whether mathematics is outside of the hermeneutic circle. It is the question of the foundational metalanguage. But it is also

the question whether there can be real, qualitative change in the world. Clearly this is themotivating question for Badiou, in all of his work, and Paul is not his exemplar of

militant fidelity simply because Paul changed something in the noumenal world. Here itis worth thinking about the fact that, for Badiou, the same goes for Lenin, and we need to

think more carefully through what it means that the contributions of Paul and Lenin weremanifest in qualitative changes in the phenomenal world. For my part, I don’t know that

Boyarin makes sense of all of this—qualitative change in the phenomenal world, and adouble reading where history and interpretation do not collapse into Platonic forms—but

it is of course not clear that Badiou makes sense of these things either. It may be that weneed the one thing and we need the other thing, and how the two things get along with

each other will be a matter of long-term negotiation.

Bear with me another moment, however, as we attempt to take stock of what itwould mean to make Paul more “this-worldly,” as opposed to having him (and Lenin) on

the side of Plato and Kant in the realms of the forms and the noumenal. Boyarin arguesthat there is a distinction to be drawn among sophists, that some really are in it just for

the money, so to speak, while others actually care about truth but are willing to employrhetorical strategies and devices to get people to see the truth. Boyarin places Paul and

Socrates on this side of sophism. (It would be interesting to develop Lenin’s perspectiveand activism in this context. On the one hand, he would often do things for the sake of

expediency, not being held up by Kantian niceties such as treating people as ends rather than as means only. On the other hand, there was no more strident critic of opportunism.

In perhaps the most famous example, Lenin’s conception of “revolutionary defeatism,”where people must absolutely be confronted and told the truth about their patriotic

support for imperialism, Lenin cites the story of the cave from Republic, saying that people will “tear” the revolutionaries “limb from limb,” but this must be endured for the

sake of the truth. Here it might be said that Lenin is closest to a conception of truth and politics such as we find in Badiou.) Significantly, and indeed a subtle point that needs

extended examination, this distinction among kinds of sophistry (or perhaps less pejoratively we can call it “rhetorical strategy”) plays out as another distinction, between

two conceptions of the event, and two conceptions of “making the weaker the stronger.”

The difference between Plato’s (and Paul’s) “true” rhetoric and the falserhetoric of sophists comes down, then, to a matter of intention alone;

Socrates and Paul do it for the Truth, the sophists for the money, but for this latter judgment we have only the word of their enemies. I would

rather suggest that the difference lies here: the sophists in their travelsfrom place to place, from culture to culture, have learned that everywhere



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folks have different customs. They relativize truth and teach an art of living well and honestly in a world in which there are two sides to every

question, while Plato finally cannot stand such a world and thus escapes toanother one in which finally there is an extramundane, extralogical source

of Truth, the Forms. Paul is all things for all people, among sophists a

sophist, but like Plato in that he too finally seeks that extramundaneabsolute truth—for Paul, Christ and him crucified. …

Paul is aware of the weakness of his position from the point of view of logic [wisdom] and scripture/Jesus’s traditions [signs], and yet seeks

mightily to make the weaker cause the stronger. (p. 130, bracketed termsin original)

Now we see a transition and a distinction in terms of the question of the event:

… Paul is to be found at least as much among those ancient

antiphilosophers, the sophists, as among the philosophers, and in myusage, the sophists are explicitly antiphilosophers. At least as much as

Paul calls for fidelity to an event, he envisions also social change in whichthe weak are made strong: “If rhetoric is to mean anything as a practice, a

theory of discourse, or a philosophy by which to understand the world, itmust be given the potential to transform the world. If there is to be a

substantive difference between ‘rhetoric’ and ‘propaganda,’ then it muststart from the following distinction: propaganda is the invitation to

envision the world according to the people who own and rule it. Rhetoricis the invitation to change the world,” (p.131; the embedded quotation is

from Omar Swartz, The Rise of Rhetoric and Its Intersections withContemporary Critical Thought ; Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press,

1998; p.40)

Where is Badiou once this turn is fully made, whether it be from philosophy to rhetoric,or from the event as the crucifixion of the messiah to a radical change in the world in

which the weak become the strong, the meek inherit the earth? Certainly it can be wellestablished that Paul’s life, writings, and activism are exemplary of both of what can be

called the problematic of “the cross and the kingdom.” To say that there was one amongus, who was brutally murdered by the powers that be, by the state, and who represented a

different kingdom, and who we will continue to follow, to this kingdom, is an ongoingthreat to the existing powers that are predicated on the interest of the stronger. Boyarin’s

concern regarding Badiou, finally, is whether there really is any basis for turning from a“pure militance” in the noumenal realm to substantive change in the phenomenal world.

Does Badiou’s radicalism remain, as Hegel said of Kant, an “empty formalism”? Putmore pointedly, is there a way in Badiou’s philosophy to go “from the cross to the

kingdom”? Badiou does respond on these points in the roundtable, to which we will turnin conclusion.

In other words, Boyarin not only does not carry off the double reading that he



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seems to have proposed, it is clear that, once he develops a perspective on Paul as one of the “good sophists” (a sophist actually concerned with the true and the good, but who

recognizes that the only way to get there is with rhetorical strategies that take stock of languages, cultures, and histories), he seems to have talked himself out of its necessity or

usefulness. Philosophically, the most salient point is that Boyarin does establish well

that there is a double-reading for Paul, that Paul was already a double-reader, as it were, but this would be a Paul who situates truth in terms of history and rhetoric, and not theother way around (and again the argument is that the situating doesn’t seem to work from

the other way around, a difficulty which does seem to be exemplified in Badiou’s ownattempts at cultural criticism). And yet for Boyarin, even this turn to an affirmatively-

valued sophistry does not go far enough in capturing Paul as primarily a radical Jew:

… I cannot abandon my sense that even such a more complexly theorizedPaul still evacuates of significance histories, memories, practices,

discourses that I hold most dear as my own. There is something troublingabout itinerant sophists who relativize everything in both their

cosmopolitanism and insistence that for everything there are two logoi.(p.132)

So in the end, despite a very nuanced treatment, or perhaps because of it, Boyarin leaves

on the smallest room in his mansion of rhetoric and Jewish philosophy for Badiou:

In his own zeal against the sophists … Badiou cannot see the sophist inPaul, and, this proud adherent of the third sophistic [Boyarin himself]

would argue, therefore misses much that is valuable for thought in theepistles. The task is (and I agree with Badiou that it is) somehow to make

sense of a Paul for those of us who do not know Christ and him crucified.But it is precisely here that I don’t somehow “get” Badiou. To my mind in

the subtraction of everything but militance itself and fidelity, Badiouleaves us with almost nothing of value. … The manner of his militance,

the dehistoricization of all truth, is critical. It is not fortuitous. For Badiou in some profound sense, all historicism is the antithesis of truth:

“Philosophy must break, from within itself, with historicism … It must be bold enough to present its concepts without first bringing them in from the

tribunal of their historical moment.” [The quotation is from Badiou’sManifesto for Philosophy, p.114.] In denying the name philosophy to

Wittgenstein and Derrida (whom he referred to as neo-sophists), Badioureproduces the Platonic denial of the name philosophy to Gorgias,

Protagoras, and Isocrates, claiming it only for his brand of “transversal”thinking. For this sophist, at any rate, such philosophy will always be a

dead letter or at least an unreadable one. (p.132)

So, again, wow—one feels oneself to be at the scene of devastation at the end of thisessay. What we might not first recognize, but the point needs underlining, is that what is

lost in this operation, vis-à-vis Badiou, but also as regards history and politics, may seemvery small, simply the kernel of something, but it is also very big. Indeed, what is lost is



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in some sense the kernel of something, a seed with no guarantee to grow, or that may be buried underground with no apparent life left in it for long periods of time. But just to

put it provocatively, as Zizek undoubtedly would: at the end of Boyarin’s essay there isno “Paul” in the sense that there is no new thing that is Christianity, and therefore neither

is there Lenin, the Bolsheviks, or communism. And of course there are some who would

say this would all be well and good, though I don’t want to attribute this to Boyarin.*[points for further discussion]

In the end we are left with a series of interrelated questions. Does mathematics allow usto circumvent questions of language, meaning, hermeneutics, and epistemology, at least

for a crucial “moment,” a pure moment of the new? Is Paul truly the example for this pure moment, or is it instead the case that the only “Paul” who could be such an example

is an absolutely pure, contentless, and certainly inhuman “Paul” who just as well might be given any other name for a non-existent person? It seems here that Badiou’s “truth”

comes awfully close to a pure fiction! In Christianity, it would seem that, even apartfrom methodological questions of historicity we would need to be able to speak of, as

Lenin put it, “intervention in history,” and clearly this is Badiou’s concern as well.Without the work of the contextualizers, however, it is unclear where we would connect

with the history upon which the intervention occurs. Again, this is where thecontextualist essays in St. Paul Among the Philosophers do us a great service, by showing

very well what Badiou is up against in making a philosophical (even an ontological)example of Paul. However, on the other side, the question is whether this work of

historicization effectively means that there is nothing new, there are no turning points inhistory, there is nothing that can (to cite a phrase from Nietzsche that Badiou has taken

up) break the world into two.

[Badiou’s contributions to the roundtable, while only taking up about three pages, arewell worth study, especially as he addresses Boyarin’s arguments head on and takes up

Boyarin’s contestation of the term, “philosophy.” One would have wanted much more,of course, especially around the questions of history and historicity, and yet what Badiou

says in his brief remarks is immensely helpful. For whatever reason, Badiou breaks off after these two interventions early in the roundtable (he may have had a plane to catch,

for all I know), but then Zizek, as one would expect, comes roaring back in, and hiscomments serve to remind us once again that there is the question of Paul, but there is

also the question of Christianity (and Judaism, for that matter, and from there Westernmonotheism, the existence of God, the meaning of this last question, and so on), without

which we would be no more concerned with Paul than most people are concerned withvarious other controversial figures of the Early Christian Movement.]

martin-badiou paul boyarin

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