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9. Badiou and the Prospects for Theory
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9 BADIOU AND THE PROSPECTS FOR THEORY ■ New: that which is unforeseen by the order of creation. —Alain Badiou Badiou would seem to be a genuinely bizarre source of inspiration for “religious theory.” While most of our present-day celebrity postmodern thinkers, including even Deleuze, have been amenable to God-talk or religion-speak in some fashion, Badiou has resolutely maintained his youthful stance of Sartrean atheism and Marxism. The irony, of course, is that Badiou in his later years became fascinated in a more conspicuous way with Christian thought that any of his contemporaries . His book on St. Paul is a landmark in religious thought. In St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism Badiou the philosophical formalist and apostle of set theory in mathematics becomes his own kind of apostle to the French intellectual community concerning the philosophical importance of Paul’s message of salvation. Did Badiou have his own Damascus-road conversion? There is no suggestion at all that Badiou underwent his own philosophical metanoia and suddenly acquired a Christian theological cast of mind. What does seem to have occurred is that Badiou, in both reading , and reading about, Paul, discovered a leverage point in the history of Western thought—as Heidegger did with the pre-Socratics—for his own take on philosophy as a whole. Badiou’s contributions to contemporary philosophy at large are at this stage not as sizable perhaps as those of Derrida in the 1980s and Deleuze in the 1990s. Like Derrida, B A D I O U A N D T H E P R O S P E C T S F O R T H E O R Y 185 Badiou sets out to establish a discourse that is postmodern because it is more “Jew-Greek” than “Greek-Jew” (as Hegel was). Whereas Greek discourse is that of the concept or eidos, “Jewish discourse,” Badiou asserts, is “the discourse of the sign.”1 The Discourse of the Sign But Badiou’s discourse is not merely that of the sign. The sign is an action or an indicator, but it is not in itself the basis for a philosophical operation. A Jew-Greek philosophy would find a means of adequating the concept to the sign in order to express the former through the latter rather than the other way around. We discern in this endeavor a willingness to take Deleuze further than Deleuze himself was able to go. Badiou makes clear in his homage to Deleuze that the latter exhibited “a great power of speculative dreaming,” one that is “prophetic , although without promise.”2 Badiou believes he is himself carrying out the promise. He obviously reads Deleuze with a jaundiced eye, and not only are their two styles utterly incompatible, it is not obvious that what Badiou calls the latter’s “tonality” can be transposed into his own philosophical register. Deleuze was a philosopher by trade and by ascription. Badiou seeks to restore philosophy from what he views as a stage of postmodernist disrepair into the grand mansion it supposedly once was. For Badiou, philosophy is concerned chiefly neither with the sign (although thought must be semiotically sensitive) nor with the concept (although it must attend to the general beyond the particular) but with the event. “Event” is the bon mot in all of Badiou’s philosophy. According to Badiou, Paul is the thinker of the event in this sense. “Paul’s project is to show that a universal logic of salvation cannot be reconciled with any law, be it one that ties thought to the cosmos , or one that fixes the effects of an exceptional election. It is impossible that the starting point be the Whole, but just as impossible that it be an exception to the Whole. Neither totality nor the sign will do. One must proceed from the event as such, which is a-cosmic and illegal, refusing integration into any totality and signaling nothing .”3 Because Badiou does not rely on the familiar theological argot of Pauline Christianity, which has become the staple for orthodoxy, it is a bit mind-bending to attempt to understand how he unrolls his own theoretical discourse as a kind of parallel text to scripture itself. Greek and Jewish discourse, Badiou argues, “are both discourses of the Father,” insofar as they “bind communities in a form of obedience (to the Cosmos, the Empire, God, or the Law).” Conversely, Paul’s is [52.90.181.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:03 GMT) S...