Since I'll be away for a few days, I thought I'd share another piece of writing I did and few years back. This was presented on a panel at a conference. Let me know what you think. Any comments are always welcomed. I hope you enjoy.
Conversely, let us note in passing that, as I established in Conditions, the amorous procedure, which deploys the truth of difference or sexuation (rather than of the collective), proceeds from the 1 to the infinite through the mediation of the two. In this sense—and I leave the reader to meditate upon this—politics is love’s numerical inverse. In other words: love begins where politics ends.
The relation between love and politics has been of interest in Western philosophy since its birth, starting with the Pre-Socratics and Plato and moving progressively forward. Badiou’s philosophy is no different. He too continues the discussion of the affiliation between politics and love. Indeed, such a discussion in Badiou’s philosophy holds significance, since love is experienced in the moment of breakdown caused by the event, which is also the happening of the political as well. What ought to be a surprise, however, is that Badiou, in both his book on Saint Paul and in his essay What is Love?, argues that there is universalism at work in love. In these two works, Badiou argues that there is indeed a truth that extends to the whole of humanity. Yet has also argues that only the multiple is, seemingly creating a moment of impasse in his philosophy. However, in love Badiou finds that which is able to solve this impasse. Love accomplishes what politics must leave undone; love is able to unite the multiple that is Humanity. Perhaps surprisingly enough, given Badiou’s vehement atheism he nevertheless focuses on the figure of Saint Paul. For him, St. Paul embodies the figure of a subject born out of a militant fidelity to an event, in this case the ‘Christ-event’. Paul, as a subject, is the connection that establishes a passage between a proposition concerning the subject and an interrogation concerning the law. Let us say that, for Paul, it is a matter of investigating which law is capable of structuring a subject devoid of all identity and suspended to an event whose only “proof” lies precisely in its having been declared by a subject.
Paul, for Badiou, then, is of interest because it is in the figure of Paul that lies the capability of retrieving an answer as to why and how an individual is faithful to his or her declaration of an event. However, at the same time, Paul himself is asking what is the relation between the law and the event. In this essay, my main concern is simply to make clear, to the extent that I can, the relation between Love and Law. Or, to phrase it in a slightly different register, what is the relation between the law and the event? First of all, in order to answer these questions, we must look to the subject. Put simply enough, a subject is an individual who has declared fidelity to a particular event. While there is much to be unpacked in this sentence, for indeed this is what this essay is attempting to do, while the character of the subject is clear enough, it remains the individual who declares the event real. But in order to gain a foothold of the subject we must move another step back and first describe the event to which the subject is faithful. Badiou terms the events as being “not actually internal to the analytic of the multiple. Even though it can always be localized within presentation, it is not, as such, presented, nor is it presentable. It is—not being—supernumerary.” This is to say, the event itself is a site that cannot be totalized within the present state-of-the-situation. Furthermore, the event is that which is not counted among the count-as-one of the state-of-the-situation. This is not to say however, that that event does not in any part of it belong to the situation itself. Rather, the event cannot be completely included in any given situation. Nevertheless, all throughout Badiou’s philosophy the leitmotif of multiplicity runs rampant, and the event is no exception. That the event can be localized suggests that it cannot be found within a situation in its entirety. Therefore only a mere part of the event is to be found within the situation, but not its whole. So, the event itself is a one-multiple. Its constitutive parts are all the multiples belonging to its site, the situation, and the multiples that belong to the event itself. Yet why, despite his atheism, does Badiou discuses St. Paul specifically? And how does this tie in with his theory of the event? Certainly Badiou sees significance in St. Paul’s fidelity to the Christ-event—an event that Paul did not witness. I believe that Badiou’s Paul must be seen as an individual, who while laying the foundations for a State as such, did not, nevertheless, lay down Law. He should be seen as an exemplar progenitor of a State, e.g., as the Church itself should be viewed. Instead, St. Paul lays the foundation for a State that can never be lulled to sleep. By founding a state on love, a “law beyond law,” St. Paul has already nullified the State’s ability to form a metastructure that could ever claim to guarantee any of its claims. It seems, then, in the figure of Paul, Badiou understands an individual for which, if a State should be erected it should be done so under the Pauline structure. Yet how do we reconcile the event, even the Christ-event, with the multiple? First, let us first briefly describe the void in Badiou’s philosophy. For the void names Being: this is nothing other than the claim that the One is not and that only the multiple is. Badiou’s account of this claim is based upon set-theory. For example, a set is not is a totalization of its elements or predications. Cantor devises a formula through which a certain set is in excess of the resources of the language used to describe that set. In other words, he found that some sets, i.e., multiplicities, cannot be totalized without contradiction. Badiou dubs this inability to totalize such multiplicities as ‘inconsistency’, by which he means that the unity of the One is impossible, it itself is inconsistent. In fact, the very being of the consistent is in fact inconsistent—all there is are multiplicities, the One does not exist. Therefore, to be is to exist in a multiplicity. Yet, the inconsistent is also the excessive. Thus the void, itself, is excessiveness, errancy, and unassignable. However, Badiou maintains that there are things that we say that are grouped together to make a one. Such a group is termed a situation; it is the count-as-one; this multiple is thought as existing as unified. To put it more clearly, the inconsistency of the multiple is that upon which a consistent count-as-one is built. This inconsistency whence the consistency is derived is named the void, “the void indicates the failure of the one….” Consequently, according to Badiou, every multiple is made up of further multiples, or what is the same, further situations. To counter the existence of the void there exists a structuring of the structure that helps to ward off the eradicating nature of the void, through the count-of-the-count. This is the state of the situation. The state of the situation maintains that the count-as-one is in the situation is certain. While the situation is presented, the state of the situation re-presents the situation. The count-of-the-count structures any certain situation and attempts to fix or present the situation as consistent. In other words, the state of the situation codifies the situations. Under the count-of-the-count the void is prohibited from occurring in the metastructure, or State, of the state of the situation. The State is the metastructure that exercises the power of counting all the subsets of the situation. In the state of the situation, that which belongs to the situation is also included within the situation as well. This is to say that the state of the situation, which desires to reaffirm itself against the void (against that which cannot be named under the state of the situation’s power) is able, now under the metastructure of the state of the situation, to defined as to what or who belongs and thus who is to be included in the situation. Moreoever, the true historical political State should be understood to have the same character as the state of the situation; we must understand the State as the state of the situation. The State is able to shore up its power by performing a count-as-one of the multiplicities that exist within it, i.e., groups of individual, classes, races, members of a political party, etc. The State’s role is to moderate each of the multiplicities found within it and to make sure that they are secured by the situation that is presented. This is to say, given the conditions (situations) as they exist in the State itself, the State will make sure that what is presented, the situation, is re-presented. Here, the State tries to define Oneness amongst the disparate situations. There is a kind of abstract homogenization at work in the State. It wishes to make all difference equal insofar as everything is able to be ordered. It covers over all differences that situations may contain. The guarantee that Oneness results in all things is made good by the State. No doubt it seems that the defining power of the State is unlimited. The State, then, is not founded upon a social bond of individuals, but rather upon the “un-binding” that it must prohibit. Through its ability not to recognize individuals or entire groups of individuals, the State defines itself by the internal oppositions with which it must contend, i.e., with the void inherent within it. The unbinding of the State is very clearly seen in Paul’s time. The Roman Empire defined itself just as much through whom it excluded than by those individuals it included. Christians, for example, were defined by the power of the Roman State through juridical exclusion, as were woman and slaves. These individuals are admitted into the State through their not possessing privileges. To overcome this unbinding, Paul’s message must be more than just a plea to the State to include those left out, just so that the State can include the disenfranchised through abstract homogenization. In this case, one will simply fall victim to statist abstract power. Instead, Badiou’s Paul wishes to include everyone, by making a law for the One insofar as it is for all. In so doing, Paul is creating a truth that is universal and not abstract. There are no particular identities for Paul: no Greeks or Jews; Men or Women; Free and Slaves; there are no subjects of a juridical type. For such a type of identity is built upon mastery or authority. To be such a subject, for Paul (and Badiou), does not require the authority of the juridical or statist power. One could argue that Paul is attempting to exceed the Law and in so doing exceeds any identity derived from the Law. Thus, Paul, as any militant, must find that which is inconsistent in the State, that which the State cannot represent. This unlimited power of the State, however, must be qualified. The State’s power is, in fact, unlimited to the extent that, given what has been already presented the State can re-present the previously presented situation in any manner it wishes. By homogenizing all situations the State is able to define both those groups that are included in the state of the situation and those groups that belong to the situation as being merely presented. And yet, the State cannot identify itself with that structure it lays out. The State must be in excess of, or larger than the initial multiple with which it is presented, since the State is more powerful than any situation it itself re-presents. Therefore, the extent of the State’s power is unmeasurable. Indeed, “the State itself is an excrescence.” To present this notion differently, in a given situation, the parts counted by the metastructure have the validity of being that which shore up the count-as-one precisely because of its excess over the situation. Nevertheless, there is always something in the State that escapes its count—the void. This is what both gives the State its power and that which threatens it simultaneously. For, at the same time, the State can contract or expand its bounders as it were, while that which escapes the State’s count is the void. Inconsistency, then, haunts the State—the void is included in the State but does not belong to it. As a consequence of this haunting, another limitation on the State’s power is that “the State always re-presents what has already been presented.” By its very nature, the State cannot present something new, as this would indicate a lack of power and impotence on the part of the State to conceptualize all elements of the situation. The State must present itself as having total dominion over everything in order that its count-as-one be valid. Although haunted by it, the State must nevertheless deny the existence of the void. However, this inherent lack in the State, the very existence of the void in the State, makes possible the occurrence of the event. The event can be conceptualized as a rupture or a breakdown in the State’s law and order. The event is that which can neither be anticipated by the State, nor by any individual person for that matter, because of its relation to the void. A lack in the State’s power is now revealed in the situation. While the State can always re-present the state of the situation anew and rearrange the count-of-the-count, the State can never rid itself of the danger of the void and the event—for both are ontologically inherent in the structure of the State. The event is philosophically interesting because of its relation to the situation and to the void, the event has an intermediary status, to so speak, between the situation and the void—due to its undecidable character. “The event is not actually internal to the analytic of the multiple. Even though it can always be localized within presentation [situation], it is not, as such, presented, nor is it presentable.” The event neither belongs to the state of the situation and nonetheless reveals the void nor it is the void itself. Instead, the event calls forth the void. Belonging to the situation, but only partially, the event is undecidable from the position of the situation itself. Thus, to be living in any situation means that the event can neither be anticipated nor foreseen nor understood before it comes to pass. The event, and all that follows in its wake, cannot be homogenized. As a result, the event forces the state-of-the-situation to name the void. But let us look a little more closely at the structure of the event. Meditation sixteen lays out conditions for the evental site. It is here, perhaps, that we should delve deeper into the discussion of the event. The evental site is other-than-being; it is abnormal, instable, and antinatural. To be abnormal means to be a multiple that belongs to a situation and yet is not included in that situation. This suggests that none of its elements are presented, which is to say that although the site, as abnormal, is present, none of its particularities are presented. To translate this into mathematical jargon, the multiples are elements but are not subsets of a situation. Badiou tells us this means that other multiples, which do not at all belong to the situation, can be made from this first multiple. However, there can exist a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in a situation, this Badiou terms an evental-site. The site itself is presented and yet the ground whence it has grown is not presented in any manner; it cannot be known. It is a multiple that is allowed entry in the count without resulting from any previous count. Such a site as this is said to be ‘on the edge of the void.’ It receives this designation because, from the point of view of the situation, the site is a multiple that consists entirely of non-presented multiples. As a result of being on the edge of the void one cannot understand what lies underneath the event. Hence, when an event occurs, it is undecidable from the view point of the situation to which it belongs. Neither the truth nor the negation of the event can be demonstrated on the basis of the axioms belonging to the situation itself. The event’s undecidability has a two-fold function. Firstly, it makes known the void, and secondly, by interposing itself between the void and itself the event is able to name this particular expression of the void. There is an ‘intervention’, as Badiou dubs it: the situation is forced to admit its own void and to declare that this multiple be recognized as an event. Moreover, the nomination of the event must come from the void itself. Emerging from the void leaves the intervention and the nomination of the event subtracted from the law of the count-as-one, ruling over the situation. And as such, the naming process is illegal. It does not and cannot conform to any law of representation; consequently the state of the situation and the State itself are threatened by the event and its nomination. Although the event has its site in the situation it cannot be said to emerge from it and thus the State as such cannot name it. The Law of the State is interrupted. In this case, there is a new term, a new situation of which the State has no name, but which is named nonetheless by the participates of the event contra the State’s authority. The name of the event is chosen illegally and “only obeys the principle ‘there is oneness’ in absentia.” Both the event and its name are representatives without representation. There is no structure by which the event and its name can be presented. Nevertheless, the event holds the key to the peoples’ freedom. Citizens are held hostage by the unassignable errancy of the State. And it is politics that interrupts the State’s errancy; freedom lies in measuring the State’s power through establishing bounds for its excess. Paul speaks in very similar terms when he speaks of grace. The event, while it has its location in the situation its grounding cannot be found in the situation, and as such cannot be counted. The subject cannot predict or rely on the event. One cannot even say that one ‘deserves’ the event; instead, the event comes upon one like grace, or a gift [charisma]. Grace, like the event, can have no predicate, it is translegal, and it is “that which happens to everyone without an assignable reason.” Badiou even goes so far as to write that unlike the law, grace comes to an individual without being due. Consequently, that which founds the subject is that which is not due it. The event in the language of Pauline doctrine is a gift that is freely given. And only such a gift can be given to all, it is universal. It comes upon all without exception. This character is due to grace’s excess, it is in excess of the juridical. As a result of its being in excess of itself, grace (or the event) cannot be embodied in a totality. The lack of a totality suggests that grace cannot be denied to anyone, and so is universal. But in its universality the State cannot qualify it. As universal, grace cannot be assigned a specific individual to whom it is aimed. No group of individuals are homogenized and as such, Humanity itself must be seen and understood in its various guises, diversity, and multiplicity. Consequently, grace is outside of the constraints of the juridical. Grace, for Paul, is that which brings salvation. Grace is the opposition to the law and to sin. In fact, for Badiou’s Paul, law and sin are equivalent. Law shapes an individual’s societal interactions, but does so, as we have seen, in such a way that constrains the individual. The State un-binds and in so doing restricts the actions of the individuals held under its power by threatening to exclude them as exceptions to the law’s power. The State gives such a narrow path to follow that there is truly only one path, that of the State’s. One becomes a thoughtless subject, a mere automaton. One’s societal desires are automated, by the law. The subject’s will is bound to the State’s power regardless of whether the subject desires that path or not. The subject dies under the power of the State. The subject is not himself or herself, instead the subject’s power belongs to the State—the subject belongs to the State, as idea made clear by the view that, “the letter mortifies the subject insofar as it separates his thought from all power.” We see Paul’s conviction in this regard in the following statement: So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law that was with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members (Romans 7.23). Clearly, salvation lies is thought’s reunification with the power of subjective action. In other words, Badiou hears in Paul’s notion of salvation his own notion of truth procedure. A truth procedure, remember, is a subjective event; there is no literal or objective form of a truth procedure. Likewise, there is no objective form of salvation; one cannot give a guideline for salvation. In fact, if one follows such a codified form of salvation, it is, then, the same as if someone were to follow a codified process for a truth procedure. One becomes a mere automaton, unthinking in everything one does. One simply acquiesces to the juridical and statist powers. Salvation, in Badiou’s eyes, lies in the ability to disjoin the automatic doing and thoughtless living. Salvation brings with it power and thought; it brings with it a “deliteralization” of the subject. Out of grace and salvation arises a transliteral subject. The subject is resurrected from thoughtless death, i.e., the juridical. To put it more precisely, it is thought itself that is resurrected from its own powerlessness in following a truth procedure. The transliteral subject is resurrected, as it were, through the excess of that grace represents, the excess of which the State has no account. Grace, itself, is not a mere starting over again, as if one begins anew only to begin to think differently. Instead, grace is the name for the power of thought that exceeds its own order of thought. The desire born out of grace outstrips itself. For, “‘grace’ names the event as condition for an active thought.” Grace is in excess of its own conditions, and as such has the potentiality for infinite power. In his work on Saint Paul, Badiou speaks briefly, but revealingly, of the subject. For example, in the chapter ‘The Division of the Subject’ there is described a ‘not…but’ structure of the subject that bears the universal structure of the subject. In fact, when the subject is caught up and taken over through the subjectivation of the event, the subject itself is the ‘not…but’. The ‘not…but’ refers to Paul’s statement in Rom. 6.14, “for you are not under law, but under grace.” In the above passage, the former phrase emphasizes a suspension of the destiny of the law, while the latter indicates fidelity to the exception of the law found in the ‘but’. In keeping with the spirit of Being and Event, the subject is split in ‘Two’ due to the event. But here, in his writings on Saint Paul, Badiou draws out the implications of the juridical more clearly. To further reveal the structure of the ‘not…but’, Badiou states that the ‘not’ is the dissolution of closed particularities, by this he means the Law, while the ‘but’ indicates the process of fidelity opened by the event. For it is important to note that “a structuring of the subject according to a ‘not…but’ through which it must be understood as a becoming rather than a state.” In other words, the subject is born out of the resistance to the State’s power. To resist is to engage in the process by which the subject comes to be. Consequently, to sink back into the judicial is to lose one’s life; it is to return to a non-thinking state, i.e., Death. As a process of pure becoming there seems to be no proper structure to which one can ascribe to the process of resisting. One may ask, then, if there is no structure by which the event is to be presented, by what right can one name the event, and does not the naming foreclose the event as event? Furthermore, does one not simply fall victim to the power of the State and the defining authority of the state of the situation? How can one decide whether the event has a place in the situation or not? Whatever the case may be, the decision must be a wager. This decision Badiou calls axiomatic. The decision is an axiom because it has no basis other than the event itself. There is no guiding law by which the name of the event and whether or not it has a place in the situation can be founded, the event is entirely new, outside of the law and illegal, thus there could be no guiding law. Given that there is no guiding law, and that the event is undecidable within the situation, one is presented with two indiscernibles, the choice of whether or not the event belongs to the situation. As the name suggests the indiscernibles have no objective difference between them—there are no distinguishing marks by which one can differentiate them. The cannot be enumerated by predicative definitions. Nevertheless one must choose between the indiscernibles. The process by which one is to choose between indiscernibles is what Badiou terms a truth procedure: e.g., politics, love, art, or science. Resulting from a truth procedure, an individual is taken up into the event, forcing a subject to come to be born. The truth procedures compel a subject to choose between the indiscernibles, by a process Badiou terms forcing. Forcing is the process by which a truth procedure risks assertions on the assumption that in the future, the as of now undecidable choice will be the viable extension of the two indiscernible. The choice is born from forcing a kind of hypothetical clause, if this is the case (that this indiscernible is correct), then this statement concerning this or that element is the consequence of that choice. Badiou wants to make it clear that this choice between indiscernibles is random or aleatoric—a mere role of the dice. But in choosing, the event occurs. Furthermore, from out of this forcing a subject is born. Perhaps ‘born’ is not the correct term. For a subject is a “local status of a procedure.” The subject is overtaken by the interventional nomination of the event, what Badiou now terms subjectivization. Subjectivization occurs from the point of view of the situation, and is a special count, separate from the count-as-one; it is contra the State’s representation of the situation. The count of subjectivization is the count of that which has fidelity to that which is connected to the event’s occurrence, i.e., the subject. Entering into a fidelity of truth is not up to the subject, instead it only happens to the subject. Now, the subject is neither the intervention nor it is the operator of fidelity, but instead is the initiation of the Two. Therefore, the subject is the incorporation of the event into the situation by means of the generic procedure. A subject is both the fidelity born from the intervention and also the generic procedure that comes from the fidelity. And yet, these judgments cannot be known by the subject to be the truth, since the subject only encounters multiples that are present in the situation, while the truth is unpresented in the situation. So, the subject must have fidelity to the declaration that the event has occurred in the chosen indiscernible. Moreover, the subject is always declaring meaning “in the future anterior.” Any declaration of truth, although present in the situation, exceeds the situation. As a result, the meaning of the statements made by the subject can only be retroactively placed in the situation. It is only after the fact, that the declaration of truth can be known to be true or false. One thing that can be said of the subject thus far is that the subject does not have an interest in a particular occurrence as such. ‘Interest’ for Badiou is defined as “perseverance in being,” as if for instance, one had an interest in an occurrence one would have an interest to remain within that situation, thus falling victim to the State’s death sentence. Instead, the true subject, the militant, maintains itself in a state of disinterested interest. Badiou means to suggest, on the one hand, that there is an interest in engaging in the motivation of self-perseveration, while on the other hand he means to suggest that the subject is disinterested to the extent that the subject lets itself become overwhelmed by the force of the excess of the event. The subject gives itself over to that which is beyond itself and in so doing the subject cares not where it is taken. Fidelity to a particularized event becomes fidelity to fidelity itself. The subject cares nothing for its own self interests but only to the fidelity itself. All the power that the subject once used for its own self-perseverance is now “poured out into the future consequences” to which the subject has fidelity. We have now seen several references to the future, first in connection to forcing in Being and Event and now in Ethics with reference to fidelity. In both cases there is a declaration involved. Declaration involves a subject who “emptily names the universe to-come which is obtained by the supplementation of the situation with an indiscernible truth.” In declaring one’s fidelity, or what Badiou’s Paul names faith, one is in truth, claiming that what the law commands is not the only possible path by which one can walk. However, the path is not clearly laid out; it is hazardous to the extent that the universalization that names the ‘new individual’ of faith, not the abstract homogenization of humanity that occurs through the Law, is “held in suspense.” An ontological chasm opens, splitting the subject itself: between the situation and the state of the situation. The declaration of the truth, i.e., whether the situation is shored up by the state of the situation, is always unknown to the subject. Thus, the subject must have fidelity to a truth that it will not know whether or not the truth will come to be. It is here in this chasm that thinking first occurs for the subject. Thinking occurs when there is an irruption in the State’s power and in the state of the situation. One becomes a thinking subject when the situation cannot be placed within a state of the situation, especially when speculation and fidelity to an event are allowed to roam free. Thinking is thinking the inconsistency in the state of the situation. This is, perhaps, why Badiou, as we have seen, claims the State does not think, for all multiples are ordered and placed in their ‘appropriate’ places. Instead, what Badiou’s Paul is emphasizing is a life that is free from alienation. It is a society made up of individualized identities, i.e., subjects, that are equal and free, creating a civil-life that is beyond the alienations of suffering and death that make up today’s globalized society and State sovereignty. By contrast, the One that is for all, found through faith in Paul’s messianic message, is a process or an ongoing historical truth procedure. By freeing humankind from the constrictive Law, one is able to love humankind in all of its particularities. Through this liberation one is able to form a disinterested love that will manifest itself in “an indifference that tolerates differences.” Nonetheless, out of differences, however, paradox will naturally arise; for example, men and women, free and slave, Greek and Jew. If truth is to be transpositional, love must overcome this paradox, and love is the site where this paradox is negotiated. Of all the truth procedures, love is the operation uttered in paradox. Moreover, love does not attempt to relieve the paradox, instead and more strongly it “makes truth of the paradox itself.” In other words, love will treat the disjunct that the State’s exploits, and in treating the disjunct, love turns it into a truth. A situation that is a disjunct is, as Badiou tells us, a law. This law differs from statis and juridical law insofar as the law, as a declaration of law, comes to be from the void of the site itself. The void, here, is the unknown disjunction. It declares that the Two, e.g., man and woman, free and slave, Greek and Jew, will be nominated as One, although it cannot guarantee this. It is a law that can only be seen retroactively and as such one must always be open to the future, one cannot exclude anyone from the situation, since one can only wait to see the coming of the law. Such a law is applicable to everyone precisely because it is a law, and yet as futural it says and prescribes nothing. Only a law such as this can guarantee the universality that Humanity needs. It may be useful to summarize this long and winding detour through Badiou’s ontology before proceeding. My intention for this detour was two-fold. My first intention is to demonstrate Badiou’s understanding of the situation and the State (of the situation); my second intention is to briefly sketch the subject’s fidelity to the event borne by the situation and its relation to the void. As to the former intention, it is important to emphasize that the State as a political entity will always attempt to order the situation or the multiple as count-as-one, and to ensure that this count-as-one, as secure in its Oneness the State, will count a second time, legislating that the count belongs and is included in the state of the situation. The State exercises its authority to make and suspend law in any manner it wishes if it so chooses to recount the count-as-one. The latter intention is simply a brief sketch, to be later fleshed out in more detail in light of our discussion on Saint Paul, and of the event and the subject’s relation to it. Remember, according to Badiou, the event is an irruption in the State’s juridical powers and authority. It calls into question the State’s juridical power to shore up its count; it shows a lack in the State’s ability to count and account for itself. The event is undecidable from the perspective of the situation. Such undecidability induces a subject of the event. The fidelity of the subject relies on the subject saying, ‘an event has taken place, it is something which I can neither evaluate nor demonstrate but I will nevertheless be faithful to it’. As long as the subject has fidelity to the event the juridical rule of the State does not hold sway over the subject. The subject is illegal, it cannot be held under the State’s defining power of law. As such, the subject, in its fidelity to an event, must hope that the event does not or cannot fit into the situation. This would be the ultimate event to which to hold fidelity, event that in no way can be subsumed by the State. Here the subject has founded a non-institutional fidelity. It is such a fidelity, only the event can belong to itself, such a fidelity is in no way able to be counted in the state of the situation. Such fidelity is distinct from the State because at least one element of the event cannot be assigned to the function of the State. The State has no concept for such fidelity. One may ask, however, in what way is the subject not held under the hold of the juridical or statist law? We must remember that the subject, just as the event, is an originary Two. The Two, the event and the site of the event—between the situation and the void—is an incoherency in the State’s eyes. It is an enigma which must be done away with, an incoherent multiple. The State understands the event and the subject to be “a disconnected connection, an irrational couple, a one-multiple whose one is lawless.” Such is the work of real politics. Politics fixes the power of the State. The State’s excessive power is placed within a measure. Furthermore, one may ask if non-institutional fidelity is possible, will not the militant subject be completely lawless? If the task of politics is to split the subject such that the State cannot contend with the event to which the subject has fidelity, how is the subject to become one? What is after politics? These are the questions Badiou takes up in his writings on Saint Paul and love. So let us turn to them now. It may seem strange that Badiou turns to Paul with such vehement fervor, given Badiou’s atheism. However, in the figure of Paul, Badiou sees the militant par excellence, the individual taken over fully by his fidelity to the event. Moreover, I believe that in the figure of Paul, Badiou sees a progenitor of the Church, a special example of the State. In fact, Badiou admits as much, and admits that he is not the first to do so: “I am not the first to risk the comparison that makes of him a Lenin for whom Christ will have been the equivocal Marx.” What I would like to claim is that intentionally or not Saint Paul represents a militant for which the foundation of a new type of State is able to come to the fore. To put it even more strongly, I will claim that for Badiou the Christ-event is the future foundation upon which he wishes to think politics and the political, “but the Christ-event establishes the authority of a new subjective path over future eras.” This type of ‘State’, if the word even applies here, is a state that can never bloom. It is a ‘State’ that will never be able to recount the count-as-one; there can be no dogmatic fidelity in such a state. The law of love prohibits any such dogmatic belief as dogma necessarily is concerned with the past, while love by its very nature is directed toward the future. Paul’s fidelity represents an interrogation of the law by a subject, “Let us say that, for Paul, it is a matter of investigating which law is capable of structuring a subject devoid of all identity and suspended to an event whose only ‘proof’ lies precisely in its having been declared by a subject.” In this case, for Badiou, what is important is the connection between a subject without identity and a law that is unsupported. Furthermore, Paul’s greatest achievement is subtracting truth from any particular community of people, “what is true cannot be reduced to any objective aggregate.” Consequently, by assigning a universal connection between a specific subject (and not a community as such) and the law, Badiou asks, what is the consequence? Paul throughout his writings is concerned with the coming end times, the time of the Messiah. The messiah’s arrival acts as a limit concept to the State’s power. The messiah fulfills the Law, paradoxically, by transgressing the Law. This fulfillment of the Law by means of its transgression, I believe, is a law that is in force and yet does not command anything; it cannot, lest it fall into the lifeless and unthinking realm of the juridical. Such a figure looks merely to the potentially of the Law, a law that as law holds no juridical power, and yet holds powers in a guiding fashion. How does the messiah and the Messianic perform this transformation? Badiou tells us, perhaps cryptically in Being and Event. “It is the event which belongs to conceptual construction, in the double sense that it can only be thought by anticipating its abstract form, and it can only be revealed in the retroaction of an interventional practice which is itself entirely thought through.” ‘Anticipating’ is the key word in this quotation. The true militant does not attack the State in a head on assault, but instead, “is a patient watchman of the void instructed by the event, for it is only when grappling with the event that the State blinds itself to its own mastery….” The messiah/militant simply waits until the moment of the event and the void to make an appearance. We have made mention of the import that the future has for Badiou. The militant gives himself over to the possibility of the future. And through the possibility of the future opened via the event, the subject becomes freed from the subjugation of the law. But this waiting is neither an inactive waiting nor a lawless waiting, but rather a waiting dictated by law, a law that is beyond law, and a law that transcends all laws as such. The ‘new man’, the individual seized by the Christ-event, has broken with the law, a “law of the break with the law, law of the truth of law.” To illustrate the oddity of this law, Badiou, returning us to the theme of paradox, asks us to think through with him two paradoxical statements: “Christ is the end of the law” and “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” What he is asking us think is what it means to have a law that is beyond law, or as theorem 5 states, “A subject turns the universal address of the truth whose procedure he maintains into a nonliteral law.” The law, it would seem, is only fulfilled through a transgression of this very law. The law, through its transgression, is brought into fulfillment and restored to its original state, and through this the human-being is made to live again. As we saw above, as a becoming, the structure of the subject under the Christ-event cannot be completed; the count-as-one cannot be recounted under the state of the situation by the State. And yet, the universal is neither on the side of the Law, nor is it on the side of the pure individualized subject, for it is not a private truth. The universal law that captures the subject, then, holds a middle ground, and thus holds the subject in this same ground; it is this middle ground that I want to argue is the law of the messiah, the law that is in force but prescribes nothing. It is quite apparent that the law Badiou finds in Paul’s epistles is love, dubbed love “law beyond law. This law of love is clearly to be distinguished from the statist law or juridical. Law as juridical “‘objectifies’ salvation and forbids one from relating it to the gratuitousness of the Christ-event.” There is much happening in this brief sentence, and it will be unpacked, but for now what is important is that the juridical blocks one from the subjectification of the event, i.e., one is not taken up with the event. When one objectifies a thing it becomes calculable, predicable, and nameable, it is able to control the situation; it becomes everything that the event is not. In exceeding itself, does this suggest that the subject, now as a thinking or a thoughtful subject, is lawless? Is the subject under the Christ-event, and indeed the Badiouian subject par excellence, defined as thinking beyond any bound of law whatsoever? Does the subject have license to do whatever he or she wishes? Certainly not. How will the subject avoid falling again into death, without following a ‘law’ as such, especially considering that it is ‘law’ that strips one of power? In chapter 8, Badiou explores love as the universal power. Love is that which will bestow the power of thought to all people without regard for their status. Badiou argues that, “love names a nonliteral law, one that gives to the faithful subject his consistency, and effectuates the postevental truth in the world.” Yet, what indeed is a nonliteral law, especially a nonliteral law that is able to guide and give consistency to someone? Badiou may give us a hint when he defines love as a “law beyond law.” Yet the relation between love and the event remains an issue, “one must proceed from the event as such, which is a-cosmic and illegal, refusing integration into any totality and signaling nothing.” There is not a logic of mastery or totality; it instead is a discourse of fidelity to the possibility opened up by the event. It is a law that states that one must be open to the multiplicity of the human-being. It is a law that is ‘for all’ insofar as the One, the non-abstract universal, is opened. And while the event makes this a possibility, it is only love as law beyond law that makes it a reality. Love and hope admit that there are in fact differences, and indeed Pauline universality seeks out new particularities to which one might be “exposed.” The search for exposure leads Paul to dislocate any specific evental site and the wish to spread the good news, as any good militant wishes. On Badiou’s account, Paul is not attempting to eradicate differences, homogenizing the world to the Christ-event. Instead, Christ’s resurrection transcends all differences. Any difference is greeted with an indifference. This indifference tolerates and allows differences to exists side-by-side. This returns us to the conception of the law of love as loving ones neighbor as oneself. If one turns ones back on love, one condemns oneself to a life of judgment and of being judged. One, then, is punished and handed over to the power of death, and as a result the rule of law will be a tyrant over human-life. Because of the tyranny of the law Badiou, via Paul, looks to the figure of Abraham. Unlike Moses, Abraham required no juridical law, and consequently no one was excluded from the ‘law’ of the God of Abraham: “it pertained to ‘all the nations’, rather than to Jewish descendents alone.” No one individual can claim to own God’s grace, as this would particularize the event and simply make it a law. Instead, Abraham, Paul and even Badiou are looking toward a kind of law that activates the ‘for all’, and “through which the One of genuine monotheism sustains itself.” Here, I think, we must not understand Badiou to be a proponent of religion as such nor is he siding with a monotheism in which one worships a god that is fully known. But rather the monotheism mentioned here is the law of love, a law beyond law. Only such a law can truly be impervious to a bifurcation and a particular or singular interpretation. In fact, any law that is a real non-juridical law exacerbates differences but does so to conquer them. Badiou calls attention to Paul’s decree that women, when declaring faith publicly, must cover their heads. Perhaps what is happening here—as patriarchal as it seems to our modern ears—is that by calling attention to that which by nature separates and signals a difference among the sexes (length of hair) actually makes indifferent the difference. Therefore the indifference might occur in the following manner. First, love as a truth procedure articulates the non-relation between male and female (or between Greek and Jew); no experience is shared between the two. But the actual twoness is actually retroactively assigned, e.g., when children ‘discover’ themselves. But there is no hors-sexe, there is nothing that transcends the two sexes by which to ‘objectively’ contemplate them. In the amorous encounter of the two, humanity is brought to the fore. Humanity itself does not fall within the disjunction of the two sexes, it is in excess, it is the void. Humanity is a singular object, it is not objectively defined. And yet, without Humanity there is neither female nor male (nor Greek nor Jew). Thus there appears a paradox. Because there is no objective third transcendent entity, we are forced to think what is love; and to think is to live, and to love is to live. Love is the excess occurring from the encounter of the two. It is the void by which the multitude is begotten. Love is real politics, it names a State that, by its own definition cannot come into being because it is always futural, it is always messianic, and yet this is precisely the law that it follows, a law that says nothing but that Humanity is. Bibliography Badiou, Alain, “A Speculative Disquisition,” Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005).
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