The Revolution Is Dissent

Why Paul?

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” ¹ What does the apostle Paul’s still striking, and to his contemporaries’ ears simply staggering, claim mean today? Does it make Paul the revolutionary founder of a universalism upon which we still depend for the construction of an emancipatory politics that transcends narrow communalism? Or should Paul rather be read as revealing the impossibility that any people whatsoever, even the most universal among them, might be identical with itself, announcing instead the messianic gathering up of the remnant that will always be “cast off a strong nation”? ² Put simply, “Paul” is here, amongst other things, a fresh way into the now tired debate concerning the nature of universalism, specifically in what forms, if at all, it can be considered emancipatory.

Accounts of Paul in continental philosophy have proliferated over recent years. ³ Particularly influential, not to mention controversial, has been Alain Badiou’s recourse to Paul in order to rehabilitate universalism in politics, as elsewhere. ⁴ Badiou sees Paul not only as the founder of the universalism necessary, as he sees it, to emancipatory politics, but as an exemplary political figure in his own right. This double rehabilitation, both of a universalism now often identified with imperial oppression and of a figure frequently charged with making Christianity fit for empire, is intriguing. In contrast, the recent “messianic turn” in political theory has largely overlooked Paul. ⁵ Yet Paul too was a Jewish thinker of the messianic (for Jacob Taubes and Giorgio Agamben, the thinker ⁶ ), one for whom the title Christ was simply Greek for Messiah. In announcing the Messiah, Paul remained wholly within the Jewish messianic tradition. ⁷

Beyond the neglect of the Jewish Paul in political theory’s current Judaic turn, the bigger story is that an important strand of contemporary philosophising about the political appears to be indistinguishing itself from political theology through Paul. This shift would seem to support Carl Schmitt’s now familiar dictum that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” ⁸ It is impossible to read Badiou’s assertion that Paul is the founder of universalism without recalling this claim about the dependence of political theory on theology (except with the important difference that Badiou’s universalism aspires to be a significant concept wielded against the state). Agamben, meanwhile, who also considers Paul significant enough to devote a book length study to his letter to the Romans, is explicit that Schmitt’s thesis is not radical enough. Agamben signs off his latest work in political theology with the claim that modernity not only has failed to leave theology behind, but in some ways has done no more than bring the providential economy established by Trinitarianism to completion. ⁹ So far from being an obscure and tangential way of reading the political, theology here becomes the singular site of its legibility, and Paul the most significant thinker of this site. My own engagement with Pauline thought goes via Agamben’s and Badiou’s commentaries because I believe that something significant is at stake between these two divergent readings. This disagreement over Paul occludes an underlying affinity, which is a redemptive vision of the political premised upon the Pauline category of grace: that which deactivates the law. ¹⁰ The law in question here is that natural law which finds a place for everything and seeks to put everything in its place. In seeing the political as that which opens up the closed order of things, Badiou and Agamben echo the fundamental Pauline move whereby Greco-Roman eternal return, a cosmos governed by timeless laws, is countered with Jewish messianism, the coming of a new time and of a novel relation to law.

For Badiou, Paul is the founder of universalism in the sense that he is the first to articulate the idea of the universal, which has the structure of finding no distinctions in those it addresses. This reading also suggests that attempts to think beyond the law start with Paul too. Law is always particular; the other side of law as that which is due is “know your place.” Law is concerned with justice, and justice (this worldly justice, at least) differentiates. So the universal, being rather “for all” in finding no distinction, is precisely alegal. As far as the existing order of being is concerned, it is, of course, illegal. This order is the state of things, and Badiou often plays on the double meaning here, referring at the same time both to the State as a political institution and to the status quo. Law and the State are two sides of the same coin so that thinking outside the law means at once to think outside the State, and vice versa. For Badiou, prior to Paul there is Jewish law and there is Greek natural law, the cosmos as an ordered totality within which everything is defined by its telos, therefore having its place in the whole. Paul’s attempt to conceive of his law-governed world in terms other than law is, in Badiou’s eyes, breathtaking both in its originality and in its implications for our own attempts, to this day, to imagine a law that might serve life in the face of life wholly submitted to law.

Since Badiou’s reading, which is itself a challenge to an earlier Paul (Lyotard’s, which has a longer lineage in describing Paul as a dialectician with an imperial sensibility), Agamben has provided us with a Paul who stands as an explicit rejection of Paul the constructor of universalism. ¹¹ Agamben’s Paul is a rather a deconstructionist, preaching the failure of every identity, universal or otherwise, to coincide with itself and the coming of a messianic time (which is not the end time of eschatology but the time of the now) in which these remnants of each and every identity will be raised up. Thus although Agamben’s counter-reading of Paul shares Badiou’s endeavour to think life in a new or non-relation to law, it eschews notions of a “beyond” to law, of a new subject in some sense freed from law (which, as we shall see, is what Badiou gives us in his secularisation of Paul’s militant Christian subject), arguing instead that the Pauline deactivation of law works by producing a remainder in every subject of law. Agamben here emphasises the Pauline division within the Jew and the Greek according to whether the Jew/Greek is a Jew/Greek according to the spirit or according to the flesh (such that the difference between the Jew and the Greek ceases to be exclusive), arguing that the messianic vocation for Paul does not introduce a new, universal subject (the Christian), but rather renders each subject, and the difference between subjects, incomplete—precisely “not all.”

Yet even though Agamben sees in the Pauline messianic vocation (the “in Christ”) the very destruction of subjectivity (such that no universal or individual or indeed any self-identical subject can survive it), it is instructive that he nonetheless finds a political subject in Paul. At precisely the point at which the action usually seen as definitive of the political is deactivated, the political subject emerges as that which, by “rendering economic and biological operations inoperative,” demonstrates “what the human body can do,” opening it to “a new, possible use.” ¹²

As we shall see, these two very different political subjects are both yet constructed upon the Pauline dialectic of law and grace whereby the law, though it somehow remains in place, is deactivated. This shared starting point then extends to both parties making grace the privileged term in the dialectic. How Pauline grace is interpreted varies widely, with Badiou emphasising works (or action) and Agamben the sabbatical cessation of works (or “inoperativity,” which is not quite inaction but the rendering inoperative of all works). Nevertheless, the common point of departure in the Pauline dialectic, and the shared reading of this dialectic as a certain sublation of law, means that our two political subjects are not distantly related. Their family resemblance comes through in the mutual attempt to put the political subject in the place of the Pauline subject of grace, which leads in turn to an equation of the political with subjective possibility in the face of objectifying natural law.

As I shall elaborate, this location of the political subject in the place of grace involves a new form of subjectivity that is open to all (Badiou) and the refusal of this determinate subjectivity in the name of the indeterminacy of subjective possibility itself (Agamben). More than this, I will argue that if Badiou and Agamben are right that the motif of the political is subjectivation-grace as opposed to objectivation-law, then there is a time for Badiou’s “for all” and Agamben’s remnant, a new subject and its deconstruction. I seek to flesh out these two mutually necessary, if opposed, poles of redemptive politics by identifying them with the figures of revolution and dissent respectively. Redemption here, in its first moment, is the break with natural law and its fixing of subjective possibility which is allowed initially by the revolutionary construction of a universal subject. In its second moment, redemption is dissent’s deconstruction of this “new creature” in turn; that is, dissidence highlights the new form of subjective closure that the universal subject brings in its train, which, precisely because of its universality, is its exclusion of the possibility of not being included.

Dissidence, no less than revolution, is not a figure of liberal politics: it does not aim at the proliferation of subjectivities characteristic of identity politics (Agamben’s Paul is just as indifferent as Badiou’s to “worldly difference” in and of itself). Rather, dissidence is in a necessary tension with revolution in as much as it appeals to a gratuitousness that the revolution, though it first announces its coming, can never exhaust. Just as salvation for Paul has already come along with the Messiah and yet awaits its consummation on his return, so the universal subject, though a real break with other, closed subjectivities, is unfinished business, forever pointing beyond itself to the ontological openness, “the Nothing from which all creation derives.” ¹³

Badiou’s Paul

For Badiou, Paul’s pronouncement that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” makes him no less than the inventor of a revolutionary form of subjectivity which breaks for the first time with the communitarian subjectivities characteristic of the ancient world. ¹⁴ Because our own time of identity politics is diagnosed as equally defined by identitarian subjects, Badiou argues that progressive politics today depends as much on Paul’s revolution in subjectivity as in his time. Of course, as a secular thinker Badiou seeks to abstract from the specific content of the Pauline subject, which is given by the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, but the form of this subject, Badiou argues, is nothing other than the generic condition of universality itself. ¹⁵ When deploying the conceptual apparatus of universalism we should therefore give due “credit to him who, deciding that none was exempt from what a truth demands . . . provoked—entirely alone—a cultural revolution upon which we still depend.” ¹⁶

Being precisely for all, the universal will not tolerate being assigned to any particularity. The Pauline subject is thus the original universal subject because in it we find the downfall of all attempts to fix truth to any particular community; for the first time in history, truth is wrestled from the “communitarian grasp.” ¹⁷ The subject who is “in Christ,” unlike all “identitarian singularities” (Jews, Greeks . . .), lives by a “universalizable singularity.” This, for Paul, is the resurrection, a singularity which transcends difference by being addressed to all. ¹⁸ Only that singularity which breaks with cosmos, with the order of things and allotted places, can have this universal scope of truth. And only subjective recognition of the singularity of truth, which for the Pauline subject is faith in the resurrection, can avoid the fixing of that truth within a particular community, which would then block its universal deployment. ¹⁹ Although Badiou subtracts the religious content from the Pauline subjective declaration of fidelity to the risen Messiah, subjective declaration of the truth of the event as true for all remains the generic form of universality.

For Jean-François Lyotard, Paul is a dialectician who violently subsumes the Jew in the Christian. ²⁰ Badiou returns repeatedly to the notion that Paul’s message is dialectical, arguing that it is nothing of the sort. The universal, Paul’s singular achievement, can never be arrived at by the negation of particularity. ²¹ It is rather the “Judeo-Christian” faction which opposes Paul at the Jerusalem conference, the faction which requires of the new believers that they observe Jewish Law, which is dialectical. For this party, the resurrection effectively incorporates the Jewish faith by exceeding it: pure dialectics. ²² That the marks of tradition such as circumcision are now necessary for Jews and non-Jews alike means that they are sublated (“taken up and elevated”) by the Christ-event; transfigured in this way they arguably become more potent still. Paul’s faction, meanwhile, announces a new universality which, in proclaiming that salvation is for all regardless of custom or rite, avoids a dialectical relation to Jewish law altogether. The law does not become an object of negation but of indifference (“Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing” ²³ ). Though the resurrection depends for its being on the Jewish site, it remains absolutely independent of it in terms of its (universal) truth effects. Put another way: while the truth of the resurrection requires the Jewish context, it is in no way reducible to it since it does not follow from it. The Christ-event is not due, but is rather of the order of pure grace. Badiou sees in this Pauline refusal to do dialectics with the resurrection the outline of a “materialism of grace” in which, analogously to Pauline grace and its universal offer of glorious eternal life, we might be seized by an event and, thereafter serving what is valid for all, transcend the mundane existence of the human animal and become “an immortal.” ²⁴

The subjectivity anticipated by the Pauline subject is not only its indifference to law as custom and rite but also as cosmos and right. In other words, the Pauline subject is as far from being a Greek as a Jew. The “subjective upsurge” in response to the event (in Paul the resurrection, in Badiou—in terms of the political at least—the revolution) is not at all a matter of adjusting to the laws of nature in the manner of Greek discourse. ²⁵ The subject of the event is not wise in the manner of the Greek; he does not seek the fixed order of the world in order to deploy himself appropriately in the totality. The subject of the event, contra the Greek subject, does not find the key to salvation as already given in the cosmos. He recognises that the whole, the totality, can never be the starting point of salvation because, no less than the exceptionalism of Jewish discourse, submission to the totality “binds communities in a form of obedience (to the Cosmos, the Empire, God, or the Law).” ²⁶ Rather than proceed from the order of things, from natural law, one must instead start from the event, which is precisely “a-cosmic and illegal, refusing integration into any totality and signalling nothing.” ²⁷ Only thus can discourses of mastery, of the Father, be supplanted by a discourse of fraternity, of Sons who have filial equality as co-workers (“All equality is that of belonging together to a work” ²⁸ ). The revolutionary subject must break with the experts, for they can speak only of the old order, of history and necessity. But the event opens up a field of possibility that previously did not exist and was not possible: “It is grace, and not history.” ²⁹

Thus the discourse of the apostle differs from that of the philosopher analogously to how the discourse of the revolutionary differs from that of the political scientist: it is not natural law that is being propounded but rather an unheard of possibility, one dependent on an “evental grace” that will be the resurrection for the apostle and the revolution for the revolutionary. No doubt plenty a revolutionary has expounded a discourse of wisdom about the revolution concerning what must proceed and follow from it, just as plenty a theologian has inscribed the resurrection in a larger story of mediation between God and man. But for Badiou there is a clear distinction, one which endures throughout the epoch of revolutionary politics, between the revolution as something that must arrive in order that there might be something else, which would allow for revolutionary wisdom, and the revolution as “a self-sufficient sequence of political truth,” which would disallow it. ³⁰ For Badiou, the revolution is simply “what arrives” and, in his reading of Paul, Christ is similarly “a coming,” an interruption of the old order. Both the resurrection and the revolution, then, as “pure beginning” prove nothing and are simply what happens to us. “There is no proof of the event; nor is the event a proof.” ³¹ Whether there can be a new subject, another subjective path, is not a matter which (either theological or political) knowledge can settle. ³²

Paul’s “for all” is very important indeed for Badiou. Paul’s “genuinely revolutionary conviction is that the sign of the One is the ‘for all’, or the ‘without exception.’” ³³ Contra the differentiated totality of natural law, the “One” of Pauline monotheism, just as the “One” of communism, is either indifferently for all or it is nothing. It either finds no distinctions in those it addresses or it ceases to be universal at all. ³⁴ No law is capable of such universality, being always particular and partial. Law is intrinsically “statist” in that it must predicate in order to determine what is due, whereas the order of genuine universality makes no distinctions. Only grace can fulfil this function; grace is all that could be other to the law because only grace comes without being due. ³⁵ For Badiou, modes of subjectivity that are based on what is due objectify the subject and obscure a necessary understanding of man’s humanity as his subjective capacity. Human rights would be included amongst these objectifying discourses. Contra the logic of right, for Badiou’s Paul, nothing is due. Salvation, a gratuitous gift, does not come in the form of a wage or a reward. The Pauline subject, as the communist subject, is unwaged, receiving instead the pure gift, outside all economy, that is the grace of the event by which he is constituted. No subject can be universal if he receives what is due precisely only to him; rather, only the subject constituted “through the gratuitous practice of the universal address” can maintain that there are no differences. ³⁶ And because the subjects which uphold this universality are constituted by that which is in excess of them (the gift that was not due to them), they cannot be represented in any totality: “superabundance cannot be assigned to any Whole.” ³⁷ The revolutionary multiplicity (the revolutionary subject is not an individual subject) persists in the grace in which it is founded in its capacity to exceed its own limit. ³⁸ The revolutionary subject is not fixed in a totality; it is not captured by any law. Its future is open because the revolutionary event sundered the very cosmos, the totality. ³⁹

Like other commentators on Paul, Badiou has to confront the question of whether, given the deactivation of law and the coming of grace, the Pauline subject is entirely lawless. ⁴⁰ Again, like other commentators, Badiou recognises that this is not Paul’s thesis, which then requires the extraordinarily difficult task of articulating “a transliteral law, a law of the spirit.” ⁴¹ At this point, Badiou introduces Paul’s conception of love as the fulfilment of the law, ⁴² arguing that, for the postevental subject, love is the name for a nonliteral law by which that subject attains its consistency in the universal proclamation of the truth of the event which founded it. In other words, Pauline love, for Badiou, has a wider relevance for revolutionary subjectivity, which Badiou expresses in the following theorem: “A subject turns the universal address of the truth whose procedure he maintains into a nonliteral law.” ⁴³ The striking upshot of this theorem is that, for the revolutionary as much as for the Christian, the event must be publically declared. There is no private or solitary truth; “Truth is either militant or it is not.” ⁴⁴

For Badiou, Paul is the founder of universalism, of the very thought of the universal, because the apostle sees that while differences abound, every truth procedure collapses these differences. Difference is what universality must address but universality is constructed only by difference being traversed. Both Greek and Jew can be appropriated with the “immutability of principles” that allows their difference even while transcending it. ⁴⁵ This thesis is characteristic of militantism ever after. Maoist injunctions to “follow the mass line” or to “serve the people” were similarly based upon the supposition that, after the revolutionary event, people were capable of rising above mere custom. ⁴⁶ The crucial Pauline move, for Badiou, is an indifference to difference that tolerates particularity without being drawn into the conflicts and confrontations between customs that difference engenders. The militant must maintain a lofty unconcern with all of this just as Paul did when imploring the Roman congregation not to waste precious time arguing about opinions. ⁴⁷ Notwithstanding a number of lyrical concessions to difference, ⁴⁸ Badiou is clear that the “material sign” of the universal is the production of equality. The shedding of difference in thought produces, as its material effect, the subsumption of that which is other by sameness. ⁴⁹

Agamben’s Cut

For Agamben, contra Badiou, Paul does not abolish the division in the law between Jews and gentiles but rather divides this division itself with a new cut. He who lives in Christ does not inhabit the (empty) universal category of neither Jew nor gentile but rather dwells in the remainder or remnant of this new division as the non-gentile who is neither a Jew. The generic category of neither Jew nor non-Jew is here replaced with the aporetic one of non non-Jew. For Agamben, this formulation is critical, forcing us to fundamentally rethink universality and particularity whether in logic, ontology, or politics. ⁵⁰

Agamben’s cut, as a division of divisions, requires a sharp blade, but his putdown of Badiou is blunt: “it makes no sense to speak of universalism with regard to Paul.” ⁵¹ Badiou tries to demonstrate how Paul’s universal thought produces a sameness and equality. “But is this really accurate? And is it really possible to think a universal as ‘the production of the same’ in Paul?” ⁵² For Agamben, the non non-Jew is not a universal category but, rather, represents “the impossibility of the Jews and goyim [non-Jews] to coincide with themselves; they are something like a remnant between every people and itself, between every identity and itself.” ⁵³ At the “decisive instant” characteristic of the messianic moment, “the elected people, every people, will necessarily situate itself as a remnant, as not-all.” ⁵⁴ Far from modern universalism, with its universal category of the human and its indifference to, or tolerance of, differences which are seen as traversed in the human (Badiou is mentioned by name at this point and his tolerance is condemned for reproducing “the State’s attitude towards religious conflict”), Agamben is sure that Paul rather announces a messianic call, not a call for toleration. For Paul’s “neither Jew nor Greek” is not a sameness, nor is it a transcendent principle. It is rather a singular operation that, in dividing the very divisions of law themselves, deactivates them. ⁵⁵

In this deactivation of law, the messianic, unlike the universal, never reaches any final ground, no generic “human” can be uncovered at the heart of the Greek or the Jew. ⁵⁶ Rather, all that remains is a remnant and, with it, the impossibility that the Jew or the Greek might be self-identical. ⁵⁷ The messianic vocation for Agamben, as the Messiah for Agamben’s Paul, therefore sunders every identity, making identity non-identical with itself. It does not provide a new, more universal, identity. The universal here, if it can be thought at all (Agamben would prefer to call it the messianic), produces difference, not sameness or equality. It operates beneath, not above, cuts and divisions. ⁵⁸ Rather than abolishing divisions between individuals, it cuts even to the heart of individual identity, dividing us not only from others but from ourselves. And it is the remnant that this division of divisions introduces in all identity which prevents cleavages such as Jew-Greek from being exhaustive; Jews and non-Jews are now not “all.” ⁵⁹ Transcendence here is defiantly deconstructive; it constructs nothing, certainly no universal. Indeed, the very attempt to identify a universal political subject such as the human is, for Agamben, to isolate bare life. And the isolation of bare life in western politics is, in his view, analogous to the isolation of pure Being in western metaphysics: both seek to abstract from the many forms of being or concrete life. In Agamben’s eyes, we thereby see revealed a deep and troubling connection between western politics and metaphysics: both tend towards the empty and indeterminate, exposing western subjects to the violence of sovereign power accordingly. ⁶⁰

While Badiou’s Paul, after Badiou himself, gestures towards a generic subject, Agamben’s Paul, following Agamben’s deconstructive instincts, radically problematises any identity whatsoever. The messianic moment announced by Agamben’s Paul destabilises every subject position, siding only with that in itself which it is not. Messianism, then, is not constituted by a politics, but rather gathers up the remainder of every political identity. ⁶¹ Agamben thus cites Micah 4:7 as indicative of messianism:

In that day, says the Lord, I will assemble the lame, and gather those who have been driven away, and those whom I have afflicted. Of the lame I will make a remnant, of those cast off a strong nation. ⁶²

This identification with the remnant of every people is of a piece with Agamben’s earlier unveiling, in Homo Sacer, of political belonging as pure violence, as an operation of inclusive exclusion or a “zone of indistinction” between inside and outside. ⁶³ Political belonging, from the very beginning, is to be exposed to sovereign violence over life: from the life which is defined as inside/outside in the classical polis to the life which is to be fostered or denied in biopolitical modernity. Thus while the “original political relation is the ban”, the archetype of modern politics is no less than the camp. ⁶⁴ It is then no surprise that Agamben finds the “political legacy” in Paul’s letter to the Romans as revolving around the concept of the remnant. ⁶⁵ What the concept of the remnant allows, Agamben argues, is a decentring of our antiquated notions of a people and a democracy, a fissuring of sedimented political thought which reveals that

the people is neither the all nor the part, neither the majority nor the minority. Instead, it is that which can never coincide with itself, as all or part, that which indefinitely remains or resists in each division, and, with all due respect to those who govern us, never allows us to be reduced to a majority or a minority. This remnant is the figure, or the substantiality assumed by a people in a decisive moment, and as such is the only real political subject. ⁶⁶

The thought of Walter Benjamin animates this vision of the political. For Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, a treatise on Messianic time as against the historical time of the victors of history, “Not man [universal] or men [particular] but the struggling, oppressed class itself [the remnant] is the depository of historical knowledge.” ⁶⁷ In its excessive relation to both the all of universalism and also to the part of particularity (the messianic remnant is, so to speak, beneath the all and above the part), Agamben’s messianic vision of the political is equally opposed to the particularity of the “Greek” and the universalism of the “Christian.” It critiques the exclusions inherent in both the “part” and the “all.”

Contrary to Badiou’s reading of Paul as the one who pronounces a new subject, for Agamben the messianic vocation enunciated by Paul has no specific content but is rather the “revocation of every vocation.” ⁶⁸ Is this not akin to Badiou’s indifference to difference? Remaining in the nothing (“circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing” ⁶⁹ ) does not imply indifference because revoking a condition is to put it radically in question even as one adheres to it. It is not to abandon it in the name of a more authentic vocation, which would require some transcendent norm by which to choose between vocations. ⁷⁰ What differentiates Agamben’s messianic revoking of worldly vocation (that nonetheless leaves that vocation intact) from Badiouian traversal of difference (that also leaves differences as it finds them) is that, for Agamben, “the messianic tension does not tend towards an elsewhere,” there is no production of a new subject. ⁷¹ The messianic vocation rather has done with the subject, dislocating, indeed nullifying, it. ⁷² We therefore remain as we are called. The new wine is contained in old wine skins—Paul’s “new creature” is none other than the messianic use of the old, a use that takes the form of the Pauline “as not” (“From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not” ⁷³ ). ⁷⁴ For Agamben, this “as not” is the opening up of a different relation to worldly identity through laying bare the contingency of each and every figure of the world. ⁷⁵ The messianic vocation, which is effectively a coming to awareness of this arbitrariness, allows for the usage of identities that were previously naturalised and therefore closed down. ⁷⁶

Although it does away with the subject, the messianic does not have done with the law. Rather, in rendering the works of the law inoperative, the messianic gives potential back to them. For Agamben, Paul’s formulation of the “dialectical aporia” of the law, which declares that faith both deactivates and preserves the law, simply expresses this paradox coherently. “Justice without law is not the negation of the law, but the realization and fulfilment . . . of the law.” ⁷⁷ Politically speaking, the messianic revelation of the inoperativity of the law brings to light the fundamental illegitimacy of the powers that be. ⁷⁸ Translated into the terms of modern law, the Pauline antithesis between faith and law sets the constitution against positive law, or, better still, “plays the level of constitutive power against the level of established law.” ⁷⁹ Seen from this perspective, messianism is the struggle, immanent to the law, whereby the constituent power seeks emancipation from the norm. ⁸⁰ Faith in the constitutive pact or promise tends towards self-emancipation from positive law, indeed from any obligatory conduct. ⁸¹ This echoes the strong link between faith and grace in Paul, where grace names that gratuitousness which breaks with all economies of obligation, counterservice, or command. ⁸²

If law attempts to capture in precepts, faith’s contrary orientation is towards keeping open, outside of any particular determination. ⁸³ This latter, messianic, orientation opens up space for “gratuitousness and use,” which is an expression of nothing less than the subject’s freedom in contrast to “his subjection to a codified system of norms and articles of faith.” ⁸⁴ Agamben sees this dialectic of law and faith not only reflected throughout the history of the Church but indeed in all human society. It is a necessary tension that all too often gives way, leaving only the (dead) letter of the law in place. ⁸⁵ Indeed, the messianic is this tension between law and grace where the word is neither “infinitely suspended in its openness” (this, in essence, is Agamben’s critique of Derridean deconstruction) nor closed up in dogma. Here we encounter that potentiality that remains unconsumed in any act whatsoever. ⁸⁶ That this remnant of potentiality is weak, that it cannot be captured by any dogma or applied in any law, does not make it passive. Rather, its very weakness is its strength since, by deactivating the law through deconstructing worldly identity, it makes these identities “freely available for use.” ⁸⁷

Revolution and Dissidence

Badiou and Agamben differ over Paul, but like most disputes there is a common heritage at stake. Their disagreement is fuelled by a shared sense of the profound importance of the Pauline dialectic of law and grace. Agamben reads Paul’s “neither Jew nor Greek” as a cut of the divisions of law which, in introducing a gap between each identity and itself, produces a remnant. This endless division of identity renders the law inoperative by sundering the ground on which it is built—the settled, customary identities that Badiou, too, finds a way of robbing of their objectivity and so also of their power. The messianic vocation in Agamben, as much as the universal subject in Badiou, is an emancipatory deactivation of law (at once a denaturalisation of identity) that gives agency to the “that which is not” of every order, whether in the form of a new subjectivity that is open to all or through the “gratuitousness and use” of existing, now denaturalised, subjectivities. Whether grace is the event that sunders the cosmos within which everybody finds their place, or an always-ready-to-hand deactivation of “know thy place,” whether the messiah has come or is always already here, grace, not law, is the moment of the political. ⁸⁸

Given that gratuitousness (that which is not due or the absolutely free gift received outside of all economy) is definitive of grace for Agamben and Badiou, both posit constitutive power, whether latent or actualised, against established law. Both see the Party as dogma which would return grace back to the law and both see the necessary tension between law and grace as possible only when law is understood as an expression of subjectivation (making something from nothing be) rather than being naturalised and thereby operating to desubjectify. Both our Pauls are therefore resolutely anti-State. Paul is either the constructor of a gratuitous universalism that traverses the customary differences that State power both produces and depends upon, or he is the deconstructer of State power in the name of the remainders cast off by its identity. Both the universal subject and the remnant, then, can only come from that in the established order which is not. Taubes’s reading of Paul as, first and foremost, an anti-imperial thinker is in each case retained. ⁸⁹

Yet this reading of the political on the side of grace does not mean, anymore than grace did for Paul, lawlessness. Law remains, but what has changed is that it is now opened up for subjective use: the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. For Badiou, revolutionary “love” is the fulfilment of the law, expressed in subjectifying fidelity to the proclamation of the truth of the event as for all. For Agamben, law never gets beyond the necessary tension with the subject’s freedom, which is nothing positive but rather its fundamental dislocation, its being capable of not being included. (Agamben is elsewhere categorical on this point: inoperativity is the very essence of “man” in as much as human life, contra Aristotle, lacks any essence or aim; the very purposelessness of the human species, that “sabbatical animal,” is precisely what makes its characteristic purposefulness possible. ⁹⁰ ) This difference of emphasis is of course highly significant: grace, for Badiou, is to be subject to a determination of the event; for Agamben it is subjective capacity from any particular determination.

This is a difference that turns out to be productive, however. For Agamben, in the messianic time announced by Paul worldly identities (Greeks, Jews, etc.) remain but are now rendered indeterminate or open, allowing their gratuitous use where previously what they were, and thus how they could be used, was determined and thereby closed. This emphasis allows us to identify a limitation of Badiou’s Paul, the Paul who announces the new, universal, subject: the messianic is here viewed as a one-off event rather than an enduring possibility. This evental rather than everyday reading of the messianic is reflected in the centrality of fidelity in Badiou’s thought concerning Paul, as elsewhere in his oeuvre. Fidelity is the means by which the subject who is constituted by the event is able to attain consistency and endure. But endurance also presents a problem—universal subjects, of all subjectivities, must remain open for free use if they are not to reintroduce the law in place of grace. Agamben’s messianic is the ceaseless production of that remnant in each and every subject that allows for this. Given that one cannot but be included in the all (this is the aporia of inclusion: the more inclusive the more exclusive it gets), this messianic function, which announces that the all is precisely not all, is especially important in the case of the universal subject. Badiou’s emphasis on the endurance of this universal subject is potentially a double-whammy in terms of the closure of subjective possibility: we all get included, which is of course also all to be excluded from other possibilities, and we all get to remain in this inclusion, which is even worse.

This closure of subjective possibility threatened by the emphasis on endurance is connected to Badiou’s retention of works. For Badiou, (co)work by and for the event is the revolutionary subject’s free labour of love; it has done with unfree works of the law. Because the meaning of the event is not given, the subject of the event must labour to elaborate its truth. Agamben is clear, on the contrary, that as soon as one enters into works one is no longer in a state of grace. For Agamben, for whom the definitively human praxis is, paradoxically, the cessation of works, it is no accident that the verb Paul uses to signify what being in the messiah does to works reflects a verb used to express the suspension of work on the Sabbath. ⁹¹ Indeed, Agamben makes clear in his most recent work in political theology that messianic deactivation, which he now additionally calls “sabbatism,” is nothing other than the “metaphysical operator” of the political itself:

[I]noperativity . . . by liberating the living man from his biological or social destiny, assign[s] him to that indefinable dimension that we are accustomed to call “politics.” . . . The political is neither a bios [form of life] nor a zōē [natural or biological life] but the dimension that the inoperativity of contemplation, by deactivating linguistic and corporeal, material and immaterial praxes, ceaselessly opens and assigns them to the living. ⁹²

Agamben’s sabbatism stands in striking contrast to Badiou’s working week of those who labour by and for the truth. But what came before the creation of the world and in what will the elect share after its passing away, Agamben asks? Nothing but the rest of God from all his works. ⁹³ The action that in his own way Badiou, latest in a long line stretching back to the Greeks, identifies with the political is here referred back to a more primordial inactivity that forms its very ground. Dissidence or revolt (though revolt is a word perhaps too associated with action) are possible names for this figuration of the political, since inoperativity is not strictly speaking inactivity, inertia or rest, but a messianic “praxis” that actively deactivates. ⁹⁴

The difficulty of thinking a use that keeps open that which it uses is at the heart of the aporetic relationship between revolution and dissent (or revolt), also. If the revolution is revolt, then it cannot be institutionalised in any way. But how then can the revolution be used? It is in search of ways to express this paradox that Agamben takes his reading of Paul into the surprising territory of revolutionary theory. Agamben first recalls Max Stirner’s way of distinguishing between revolution and revolt, with the former political or social act aimed at the creation of new institutions and the latter understood as a revolt of individuals without the thought of what institutions will emerge from it. Here, in Marx’s paraphrase, it is not a case of “a struggle against what exists, for if it prospers, what exists will collapse of itself; it is only the setting free of me from what exists.” ⁹⁵ Agamben calls Stirner’s approach the “ethical-anarchic interpretation of the Pauline as not” and its libertarianism clearly fits ill with his emphasis on the Pauline “as not” as an abiding in worldly vocation rather than its simple rejection. ⁹⁶ Marx’s interpretation does not make this mistake, refusing as it does to differentiate revolt from revolution, political acts from individual and egoistic needs. ⁹⁷ But the problem here is that if revolution maps perfectly onto revolt, why is the Party (or indeed any form of institutionalisation of the revolution) necessary? If, as Georg Lukács argued, this boils down to the party being the bearer of “right theory,” then a gap is reintroduced between revolution and revolt, one that can only be closed by party dogma (in which case, revolution and revolt do not perfectly coincide after all). ⁹⁸ Just as in revolutionary politics the Party is the dogma that revolt is insufficiently revolutionary, so also the problem of correct doctrine arises in messianic community when it tries to give itself an organization at once distinct from the community while pretending also to coincide with it. ⁹⁹

Agamben’s implicit preference is for a third possible perspective on the aporia of revolution and revolt, one which he terms the “anarchic-nihilistic interpretation” as developed by Taubes in Benjamin’s footsteps. This approach, in deconstructive fashion, plays on the “absolute indiscernability between revolt and revolution” without ever, as Marx does, reducing the difference between them to nothing. For Agamben, such indiscernability echoes Paul when he “says that he does not recall seizing hold of himself, but only of being seized, and from this being seized, straining forward toward klēsis.” ¹⁰⁰ In this case, revolt coincides with the movement of the revolutionary calling towards itself. Ultimately, states Agamben, the only interpretation of the aporia of revolution and revolt which is unsustainable is the one which denies the validity of questioning one’s given place in society, and this must of course remain true in the society of the revolution. ¹⁰¹

This choice for revolt as the preferred term in the binary of revolution and revolt has its drawbacks, however. We might also say: Badiou’s Paul helps us to identify a limitation of Agamben’s Paul. Agamben overlooks that the gratuitousness and use of existing subjectivities (messianic presence or everydayness) is dependent on the production of a new subject (messianic coming or eventalness). Badiou, who provides a grateful genealogy of our relation to the Pauline message, reminds us that it is only thanks to Paul’s proclamation of a new subject that is “neither Jew nor Greek” that we get beyond identitarianism to the gratuitousness and use characteristic of Agamben’s messianic subjectivity at all. Analogously, in the register of the political it is only by subjectively determining the meaning of the revolutionary event as universal, as being “for all,” that we are first pointed beyond communitarianism, beyond a world in which everybody has, and should know, their place. Of course, the revolution is not only a rupture with communal determination but with the determinism of natural law itself. Lenin’s critique of those who sought guarantees of revolutionary action in “objective” conditions reminds us that such an approach will never make a revolution at all (in arriving only when it must, revolutionary agency becomes a non sequitur). The true revolutionary must accept the abyss that lies beneath the act, but this abyss only appears as such when the revolution breaks not only with the ancien regime but even with the conditions deemed necessary for its overthrow. ¹⁰² The revolutionary actualisation of subjective possibility reveals the contingency that lies behind it and opens the way for further revolt.

The subjective determination of the event as “for all,” gratuitous though it is, is where the danger lies also, however. For the ontological truth of the event is that it is pure indeterminacy; the revolution is dissent. ¹⁰³ Given this, and given also his own argument that the revolution is not part of a wider sequence of truth but is a truth always to be determined, is Badiou’s “for all” a deterministic desertion of the politics of grace? In point of fact, Agamben’s preference for the indeterminate does not place him entirely at odds with Badiou here, since potentiality takes the form “yes” as well as “no.” “For everyone a moment comes in which he or she must utter this ‘I can’, which does not refer to any certainty or specific capacity but is, nevertheless, absolutely demanding.” ¹⁰⁴ This form of affirmation, which is a moment of indiscernability between freedom and necessity, is how many of the faithful recount their religious conversion, but it is also a common description of revolutionary action. In short, in revolutionary time “yes” retains its relation to potentiality while “no” may place itself on the side of the counterrevolutionary forces of reaction which seek to renaturalise the law, putting everyone back in their place. In addition to Agamben’s reading of messianic time as always at hand, everything would then depend on knowing whether this is the Messiah, whether the moment is revolutionary or not. If it is, then the proclamation of the “for all” is a response to an absolutely demanding call made with a yet completely free affirmation of political possibility. In post-revolutionary time, however, though no doubt these temporalities will not be simply sequential, the “no” is not counter-revolution but dissidence (recalling that the revolution is dissent). Now we inhabit the temporality of the State; moreover, one in which the “for all” threatens a most radical closure of potentiality in universalised actuality. Now it is dissidence that is timely: keeping the possibility of political possibility alive, resisting any determination of that which is indeterminate.

Conclusion

Revolution and dissent both have their moment in any account of the political not in the sense of linear time, but in the deconstructive sense that each pole of this redemptive politics remains at once irreducible to and inseparable from the other. Both changing the world and dissenting from that world in turn are mutually necessary, if opposed, moments of subjectivation-grace in which naturalised law is deactivated. The revolutionary subject depends on the grace that is the event that comes in order to determine its truth. Dissidence, which here marks no subject at all, but rather that in the revolutionary subject that does not coincide with itself (which is precisely not “all”), depends on the grace that is the indeterminacy of human being in the face of any determination whatsoever. Dissidence cannot come without the revolution that sunders natural law, but the revolution requires dissidence to carry forward its fundamental work, which is to keep the law open for use.

This free use, as in the difficult Pauline dialectic of law and grace, does not imply freedom as licence. Whether the political redeems by way of the construction of a new and universal subject or through the deconstruction of all subjectivity, the political subject is made subject and does not make itself. Yet this being subject, while it is no longer a self-determination, is not to be determined or fixed in place in the manner of the law. Although the political subject is itself subject, it is subject now to that which is open rather than closed. To put this point the other way round: both revolution and dissent are forms of political agency that depend upon a certain gift (whether understood as the openness of the political event or the openness of human being per se) which, though it comes freely, arrives in circumstances not of our choosing. The political ceases to be a site of autonomy but it remains a state of grace: the political subject, like Paul’s subject in Christ, is that which comes out from under the law.