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Loading... Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalismby Alain Badiou
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Përse shën Pali? Përse ta kerkosh këtë "apostull", kur është dhe i dyshimtë e me sa duket edhe i vetëshpallur i tillë, madje që emrin ia lidhim rëndom përmasave më institucionale e më të mbyllura të krishtërimit: Kishës, disiplinës morale, konservatizmit shoqëror, dyshimit ndaj çifutëve? Si ta nënshkruajmë emrin e tij në realizimin e përpjekjes sonë: me ri-themelu një teori subjekti që ia nënvë ekzistencën e tij përmasës rastësore të ngjarjes si dhe kontingjencës së kulluar të qënies-së-shumëfishtë, ama pa sakrifikuar motivin e së vërtetës? Sipërmarrje e çuditshme. Prej shumë kohësh ky personazh më shoqëron me të tjerë, Mallarme, Cantor, Arkimed, Platon, Robespierre, Conrad... Pali eshtë për mua mendimtar-poeti i ngjarjes po aq sa ai që praktikon dhe shpreh trajtat invariante të asaj që mund të quhet gura militantë. Ai ngjiz lidhjen, integralisht njerëzore, fati i së cilës më mahnit, mes idesë së përgjithshme të një këputjeje, përmbysjeje, dhe idesë së një mendimi-praktik që është dhe materialiteti subjektiv i kësaj këputjeje. I just re-read-skimmed this, and was pleasantly surprised. I read it first as an undergrad, thrilled to be up to date and onto the next big thing and all that. Since then I've become a little jaded- more than a little. And there are definite eye-rolling moments in this one, but it's also a pretty gripping plea for progressive political thinking to be at least as idealistic as it is critical. Combined with his little book Ethics, in fact, he's managed to provide a great argument against much of what passes as 'radical' thinking: identity politics, relativism etc etc... Turns out that there's nothing politically impressive about these things at all. That said, his ontology's even more ridiculous than the fact that he has a real, serious ontology; and this book has very little to do with Paul. But then, it was never meant to. My first Badiou, and it would feel as if it were my first Paul, had it not been for my fundy upbringing. This is a Paul freed from the "religious thaumaturgy[,...] charlatanism....[and] masochistic propaganda extolling the virtues of suffering" of the Gospels (which, at any rate, appeared only after Paul wrote); a Paul freed from "obscurantist" mysticism; a Paul freed from Acts--fascinating for students of narrative, but unchallenging philosophically; and freed from Pascal and Nietzsche's misreadings to rest only in those few epistles that we can confidently assign to him (Romans, Corinthians I and II, Galatians, Philippians, and Thessalonians 1). This is a Paul without Hell, without any interest in the words or life of Christ, whose only interest in Christianity is in the resurrection, in the universal address articulated on the site of Judaism. It's a Paul that would be completely unfamiliar to the church that raised me. Good. It's still not as atheist as all that, despite Badiou's claims for his secular bona fides and despite his repeated assertions of his nonbelief in the resurrection. After all, he takes the literal existence of Jesus for granted, and, more to the point, he's reading Paul, not, say, Rashi or some other figure typically excluded from the so-called Western and especially "French" tradition. Thus he remains French, despite his disdain for "French identitarian fanaticism" as evidenced in Le Pen and French anti-veiling laws. And He still calls the Hebrew scriptures the "Old Testament"! He takes Paul's statements about the constraints of the Jewish law for granted (and he may be as credulous when it comes to Paul's attitudes towards Greek philosophy), and he engages in what strikes me as special pleading about Paul's attitudes towards women preachers (and note Badiou's dance with the word "filiation!"), towards effeminate men, towards bodies and sex, and so forth, all that makes Paul embarassing for the decent Christians I know. Badiou's Paul is therefore an ok Paul, without remainder, but only because Badiou decides not to engage the whole of the Pauline corpus, even within the limits he sets. So, a few representative bits from this thinker we might call Alain Paul Badiou:
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In this bold and provocative work, French philosopher Alain Badiou proposes a startling reinterpretation of St. Paul. For Badiou, Paul is neither the venerable saint embalmed by Christian tradition, nor the venomous priest execrated by philosophers like Nietzsche: he is instead a profoundly original and still revolutionary thinker whose invention of Christianity weaves truth and subjectivity together in a way that continues to be relevant for us today. In this work, Badiou argues that Paul delineates a new figure of the subject: the bearer of a universal truth that simultaneously shatters the strictures of Judaic Law and the conventions of the Greek Logos. Badiou shows that the Pauline figure of the subject still harbors a genuinely revolutionary potential today: the subject is that which refuses to submit to the order of the world as we know it and struggles for a new one instead. No library descriptions found. |
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