The Revolution Is Dissent: Reconciling Agamben and Badiou on Paul

Abstract

Underlying Giorgio Agamben's and Alain Badiou's disagreement over the apostle Paul we find common cause: following Paul's deactivation of law, both Agamben and Badiou see the fixed identities necessary to the naturalised nomos of State politics as transfigured by a politics of grace. This transfiguration is differently rendered as either the emergence of a universal subject (Badiou) or the opening up of existing subjectivities (Agamben), but both the messianic vocation in Agamben and the universal subject in Badiou allow subjective possibility to that which is not in the present objectified order. Developing this theme of a basic emancipatory affinity, two moments of the political which exist in a difficult but necessary tension are identified: revolution and dissent. While revolution signals subjective possibility itself by determining that the truth of the event is for all, dissidence keeps that possibility alive by pointing to the human subject's fundamental indeterminacy.