Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fabulous little book, 28 Dec 2006
There are many reasons why I like this book, but the most significant of these must be that it confronts the reader and challenges him or her to think differently about the politics of Christianity (and hence, perhaps, politics itself). It is not blasphemous (unless one considers atheism blasphemous a priori) and nor, by and large, does it seek to conspiratorially debunk Christian doxa (unless one counts a fine eye for political context as 'debunking'). Rather, it attempts to wrest the political content of Paul's gospel away from the historical ephemera, out of the hands of the reactionaries, and into a position where we can ask what he can teach us about present cultural entanglements and political impasses. As such I personally think it to be of benefit to the reader almost regardless of whether one is theistic or not: the secularist is asked to consider what Christianity can teach, the Christian is asked to reconsider how to be 'faithful' to their belief. One could even go so far as to say that when set against a backdrop of rising cultural tension, in which religion, faith and 'identity' are increasingly conflated, Badiou provides a rough sketch of how to go about breaking down the barriers.
On an academic level, I believe this book has a unique place in Badiou's oevre too. It provides the reader, through its mix of politics and poetics, with a supplement to the far more opaque and logically based book Being and Event. Indeed, I'm tempted even to say that - although I'm sure Badiou and his more militant followers wouldn't agree - it offers a challenge to the axiomatic schema drawn up in his more weighty offerings.
Lastly, regarding the unfamiliar reader, I would urge them not to be put off by other people's reactions to Badiou's teminology. It's certainly understandable that, when faced with Badiou's description of someone as a 'poet thinker of the event,' a commonsensical individual might reasonably respond with a frustrated "qua?!" Nonetheless, the idea that he seeks only to obfuscate, or even does so unintentionally, is tantamount to character assasination. At his acerbic best Badiou writes angrily, wittily, relevantly, passionately and with uncommon concision. In particular, his short shrift for the marriage between consumerism and identity politics leads him early on in this book into a nigh-on hilarious rant about the limitless ability of the profit-motivated to 'create' identititarian categories of "disabled Serbs, Catholic paedophiles" and "prematurely aged youth," among others. The book is, to my mind, quite possibly worth the cover price for the chance to have a chuckle at that bit alone.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
St Paul without religion!?, 12 Jan 2006
I found this to be an excellent read. It helped having a prior knowledge of Badiou's work (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil is a good place to start. Badiou's project in this book is to show that Paul was a theoretician of truth, not truth as revelation but truth as Truth in good old philosohical terms.
After a short introduction to St Paul, Badiou gets stuck into the meat of his theory. Where the resurrection (for Badiou nothing more than a fable) is the good news of Paul, nothing new here. What Badiou does however is remove the religious aspects of Paul to show that what he was really doing was explicating and founding universal truth. In the end though because Paul is basing his truth upon a fable Badiou claims that Paul is in fact an antiphilosopher. A very interesting book.
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11 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Jewgreek is Greekjew, 16 Oct 2003
St Paul is famous for his blinding illumination on the road to Damascus. I experienced a similar 'event' in the reading of Badiou's book. For the first few minutes my synapses were contorted in mental arthritis - then, light was, salvation: the book is a hoax, the product of a fine ironist, like Sokal. Who but a satirist could write such a sentence as: "The pure event can be reconciled neither with the natural Whole, nor with the imperative of the letter"? Or this sublime reflection: "What thought identifies as properly real is a place, a sojourn, which the wise man knows it is necessary to consent to." Sometimes I wake up in the middle of a nightmare, thinking: there really exists a philosopher, a grave French professor who wrote this seriously and with full intent. I then read a sentence or two (more cannot be borne) and laugh off such an absurd fear. No, the book is truly a wonderful pastiche of fashionable philosophic "discourse" and I salute the new tailor of the Emperor's Robe.
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by Alain Badiou
by Alain Badiou
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