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Capitalism and Catholicity: Ecclesiological Reflections on Alain Badiou's Pauline Universalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Kyle Gingerich Hiebert
Kyle Gingerich Hiebert*
Affiliation:
The University of Manchester, Religions and Theology, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom
*
Email: kyle.gingerichhiebert@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
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Abstract

Emancipating Saint Paul from both his imagined “spiritual” prison and interpretations that cast him as Nietzsche's venomous priest, Alain Badiou reads Paul as providing the resources necessary for standing in the face of the endless flows of global capital that characterize the geopolitical landscape at “the end of history.” Read against the background of the apparent triumph of political and economic liberalism I will argue that the most compelling aspect of Badiou's reading is that he finds in Paul a universalism that resists the rampant automatisms of capitalism. Moreover, I will be primarily interested in the extent to which Badiou's reading of Paul radically calls into question the conclusions not only of those self-proclaimed prophets of the ethics of alterity but also of those theologians that are finally unable to give up the desire to control outcomes and master contingency. In this way I will argue that, despite his proclamation of Christianity as a fable, Badiou can be helpfully read as a profound theological resource that points toward the shape of a radical ecclesiology that refuses to be defined on the artificial terrain of modernity and struggles instead in all its fragility to remain faithful to the resurrection.

Keywords

CapitalismBadiouPauluniversalismecclesiology
Type
Original Articles
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 92 , Issue 1041 , September 2011 , pp. 574 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2011 The Dominican Council.

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References

1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Hollingdale, R. J., (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 98 [Aphorism 146]Google Scholar.

2 Novak, Michael, The Capitalist Revolution, (New York: The Free Press, 1993), p. 101Google Scholar.

3 See Manent, Pierre, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Balinski, Rebecca, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), especially pp. 20–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Manent helpfully notes the sense in which Hobbes’ definition of Leviathan's power resembles Anselm's famous ontological argument for the existence of God. See Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, p. 30. Equally important is the pervasive influence of Hobbes on modern politics and the sense in which he remains “modernity's instructor” with regard to issues of power. See Wolin, Sheldon S., Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expaned ed., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 214–56 & 393–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Cavanaugh, William T., “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House’: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State”, Modern Theology 11:4 (1995), pp. 397–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “The City: Parodies, Beyond Secular” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine and Ward, Graham (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 182–200Google Scholar. Particularly instructive is his claim that the “soteriology of the modern state is incomprehensible, however, apart from the notion that the Church is perhaps the primary thing from which the state is meant to save us.”

6 Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 329Google Scholar.

7 Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception, trans. Attell, Kevin, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 3Google Scholar.

8 See Cavanaugh, William T., Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2002), pp. 97–122Google Scholar. The logic of global capital, which is the pinnacle of the modern biopolitical paradigm, celebrates the illusion of diversity by mapping it within one global and universal marketplace, for example, in the facile multiculturalism of the food court. Fueled by its accelerating need for growth, which is to say its need for greater and greater profits, it seeks out ever more specialized products, prized for their novelty, that it subsequently envelopes within its commodifying mechanisms whilst simultaneously masking the rigid boundaries it underwrites. See also Kenneth Surin, “A ‘Politics of Speech’: Religious Pluralism in the Age of the McDonald's Hamburger,” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, ed. D’Costa, Gavin, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990), pp. 192–212Google Scholar. Surin helpfully notes the sense in which the “democratization of difference,” while premised on recognizing plurality, is always fatally linked to a homogeneous logic that irons out particularities and subsumes them under a totalizing global gaze.

9 Fukuyama, Francis, “The End of History?,” The National Interest 16 (1989), pp. 3–18Google Scholar.

10 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, Brian (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 434–5Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., p. 435.

12 Hardt and Negri take this analysis even further, arguing that since power takes on the form of a web of shifting alliances, clarifying a common enemy becomes exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. See Empire, pp. 56–7. It is helpful to note at this point that while this may present a rather hopeless picture, it is drawn from the heights of Deleuzian metaphysics where the line between oppressor and oppressed is obscured in a way that, as Hardt and Negri seem to realize, is brought into focus on the ground in places like Rwanda or Darfur.

13 Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Zohn, Harry, in Illuminations, ed. Arendt, Hannah (Suffolk: Chaucer Press, 1970), p. 255Google Scholar.

14 Žižek, Slavoj, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Badiou, Alain, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Brassier, Ray, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 5Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., p. 33. Or, again, “Jesus is resurrected; nothing else matters, so that Jesus becomes like an anonymous variable, a ‘someone’ devoid of predicative traits, entirely absorbed by his resurrection” (63).

17 Ibid., p. 5. Emphasis added.

18 Badiou, Alain, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Hallward, Peter, (London: Verso, 2001), p. 43Google Scholar.

19 Hallward, Peter, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. xxivGoogle Scholar.

20 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 49 and 43, respectively.

21 Ibid., p. 18.

22 See Ibid., pp. 20–1.

23 Ibid., pp. 107–9.

24 Ibid., p. 108.

25 Indeed, Badiou explicitly claims that his admiration of Blaise Pascal consists in “the effort, amidst difficult circumstances, to go against the flow; not in the reactive sense of the term, but in order to invent the modern forms of an ancient conviction, rather than follow the way of the world.” See Badiou, Alain, Being and Event, trans. Feltham, Oliver, (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 222Google Scholar.

26 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 109.

27 Badiou, Ethics, pp. 18–25.

28 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 110.

29 Ibid., pp. 9–10.

30 Ibid., p. 10.

31 Ibid., p. 11.

32 Badiou, Ethics, p. 25.

33 For a helpful excursus on the traditional charges of misogyny and anti-Semitism that are routinely leveled against Paul see Boyarin, Daniel, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), especially pp. 136–57 & 201–27Google Scholar.

34 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 99.

35 See, for example, Bell, Daniel M. Jr., “Badiou's Faith and Paul's Gospel: The Politics of Indifference and the Overcoming of Capital,” Angelaki, 12:1 (2007), pp. 97–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 106. Emphasis in original.

37 Ibid., p. 78.

38 See Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 67. For an alternative view that complicates Badiou's radical separation of cross and resurrection see Breton, Stanislas, Saint Paul, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998)Google Scholar, with whom Badiou triangulates his own reading of Paul.

39 Bell, “Badiou's Faith and Paul's Gospel,” p. 97.

40 Ibid., p. 98. Emphasis original.

41 Ibid., p. 98.

42 Ibid., p. 102.

43 Ibid., p. 100.

44 This easy dismissal of Badiou based on his affinities with modernity belies Bell's claim to have exposed the sense in which Badiou fails on his own terms. His claim that “Badiou's thought approaches the level of the dogmatically modern when it begins simply with the supposition that the theological has been finished off once and for all,” (100) remains insufficient to characterize Badiou's thought as modern.

45 Ibid., p. 103.

46 Ibid., p. 105.

47 Ibid., p. 104.

48 This possibility of becoming the unconscious agents of capital itself is precisely what the vulnerability of Badiou's position consists in and this possibility, which is by no means a necessary one, must remain perpetually exposed. Bell's attempt to cover it over by linking it with an obliteration of difference is unconvincing at best and is not sufficiently demonstrated in his argument against Badiou. Moreover, Bell seems not to recognize the possibility that becoming a conscious agent of capital might itself work as a kind of redistribution that hollows out the abstract permanence of capital's repetitive homogenization from within. Many of the immigrant communities in Manchester, where I currently live, work precisely to send money back home and serve as an example of how this kind of redistribution is already happening.

49 Badiou, Ethics, p. 114. See also Badiou, Alain, Manifesto For Philosophy, trans. Madarasz, Norman, (Albany: SUNY, 1999), especially pp. 56–8Google Scholar where he is more positive about a point of collusion with capital.

50 Bell, Badiou's Faith and Paul's Gospel, p. 103. Emphasis added.

51 Bell, Daniel M. Jr., Liberation Theology After the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering, (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 12Google Scholar.

52 Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 106.

53 This term is Žižek's. See The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 109.

54 See Badiou, Saint Paul, pp. 53 & 78.

55 Eagleton, Terry, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 165Google Scholar.

56 See Badiou, Saint Paul, pp. 58–9.

57 Romand Coles makes an insightful case for this in his reading of Rowan Williams in Hauerwas, Stanley and Coles, Romand, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations Between a Radical Democrat and a Christian, (Eugene: Cascade Books, 20080), especially pp. 174–94Google Scholar.