Chapter I. Paul's Modernity

Why the Apostle Paul? Why turn to this dubious "apostle," especially since he proclaimed himself an apostle, and his name is usually associated with the most institutional and least open dimensions of Christianity: the church, moral discipline, social conservatism, distrust of Jews? How can this name fit into our attempt to rejustify the theory of the Subject, which makes existence dependent on the problematic significance of an event, while presenting the latter as a pure possibility of a multitude being, without sacrificing the motive of truth?

Perhaps we may also be asked how we intend to deal with the tenets of the Christian faith on which it seems inadmissible to distinguish between the person of Paul and his texts. Why refer to this fable and analyze it at all? After all, in fact, everything is quite clear: we are talking about a fable. This is especially true of Paul, who, as we shall see later, was able to reduce Christianity more thoroughly than others to one single statement: Jesus was resurrected. But that is what fabulousness consists of, for everything else — birth, preaching, death — may in the end look quite realistic. A "fable" is something whose narration has nothing to do with the real for us (except perhaps due to invisible associations), and the roundabout access to which is adjacent to everything that is clearly imaginary. The point, however, is that although Paul reduced the entire Christian narrative to this one point of the fable, he was able to incorporate it into the real one, freeing it from all the imaginary that surrounds it. As a result, we are able to talk about faith (and faith itself, or belief, or what is meant by the word pistis, is Paul's problem), while asserting that it is absolutely impossible for us to believe in the resurrection of the crucified.

Paul is a distant figure in at least three respects: in his historical position, in his role as a church planter, and in the way in which thought is centered on the fabulous element that we can identify as provocative.

We are compelled to explain why we are moving the burden of philosophical consideration so far, why the fabulous forcing of the real is conducive to reflection when it is a question of reconstructing the universal in its purely secular sense, here and now.

In this we will be assisted by such thinkers as, for example, Hegel, Auguste Comte, Freud, Heidegger, as well as the philosopher of our days, Jean-François Lyotard. All of them considered it necessary to study the figure of Paul, always, however, in accordance with extreme dispositions (fundamental or regressive, fateful or forgotten, normative or crisis), and always in order to regulate their own speculative discourse.

The focus of our attention will be on a peculiar relationship that can be formally separated from the fable and which, in fact, Paul discovered: the relationship between the statement about the subject and the question about the law. Let's put it this way: Paul found that the study of a law can structure a subject that is devoid of any identity and "suspended" on an event whose only "evidence" is precisely that the subject declares it.

What is essential for us in this case is that through this paradoxical relationship between the subject without identity and the law without support in history, the possibility of universal preaching is created. Paul's extraordinary gesture was to rid the truth of the influence of the community (whether it was a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a social class). For what is true (or just, in this case it is the same thing) does not need to appeal to any objective unity, either according to its cause or according to its purpose.

Of course, it may be objected that "truth" in this case turns out to be a mere fable. And this is true, but it is the subjective gesture that is important, captured in its fundamental power, if we talk about the conditions for the generation of universality. The rejection of fabulous content preserves the form of such conditions and only deprives it of any binding of the discourse of truth to predetermined historical unities.

The operation that Paul shows us is to clearly separate any process of truth from the "cultural" historicity in which opinion intends to dissolve it.

To reinterpret this gesture, to unravel all its moves, to revive its uniqueness and creative power – all this, I believe, is necessary for the modern world.

What is relevant today? It must be admitted that the gradual reduction of the question of truth (and, consequently, of thought in general) to the question of the linguistic form of judgment (and this is where the convergence point of the analytic Anglo-Saxon ideology and hermeneutic tradition is located, which together fetter modern academic philosophy) leads to cultural and historical relativism. The latter acts today as public opinion, and as a "political" motivation, and as a paradigm for the human sciences. Extreme forms of such relativism—already in use—are attributed even to mathematics exclusively to "Western" unity. In doing so, they help to pronounce any obscurantist or symbolically derogatory verdict on any other human subset (or better yet, to make the members of that subset themselves believe in such a verdict so that the community thinks it is made up of known guilty members). Thus, such a crossing of culturalist ideology with the concept of the guilty man only at first glance closes all access to the universal, on the grounds that the universal does not tolerate attachment to the particular and has no direct relation to the status—dominant or sacrificial-subordinate—of those places where judgments evaluated from the point of view of truth are expressed.

The long experience of communist dictatorships has convincingly shown that the role of the real enemy of financial mondialism, expressing the undivided dominance of the senseless universality of capital, can really be claimed only by another universal project, so corrupting and bloody: only Lenin and Mao managed to arouse real fear, which forced capitalism to ceaselessly glorify the liberal values of universal equivalents or the democratic virtues of free trade. Senile insanity and the collapse of the USSR, the paradigms of all socialist states, eliminated this fear for a while and unleashed the empty monetarist abstraction that undermined the thinking of everyone and everything. And it is becoming clear that the devastation it has caused is certainly not to be deterred by the rejection of the concrete universality of truth by defending the rights of "minorities," whether racial, religious, national, or sexual. Meanwhile, the monetarism of "free exchange" and its mediocre political counterpart, the parliamentarism of capital, the poverty of which is barely covered up by the beautiful word "democracy", can no longer become instances of truth and thought for us.

That is why we are so interested in Paul, a contemporary of the colossal destruction of the foundations of all politics and the beginning of the military despotism called the "Roman Empire." Prescribing to the universal a certain connection between the subject and the law, he asked the question with all rigor: what are the consequences of this prescription both for the subject and for the law? The same question worries us. Suppose we have succeeded in re-establishing the connection between truth and subject, what will be the consequences of our efforts both for truth (eventual and accidental) and for the subject (chosen and heroic)?