{"kind":"task","effective_mode":"full","benchmark":{"kind":"benchmark","effective_mode":"full","slug":"longbench-v2","formal_name":"LongBench v2","introduction":"LongBench v2 evaluates deep understanding and reasoning over long contexts through multiple-choice questions. Its official description lists 503 questions spanning tasks such as single-document and multi-document QA and code-repository understanding.","introduction_ja":"","introduction_en":"","category":"Category not supplied","task_count":null,"acquisition_status":"Acquisition status not supplied","official_url":"https://huggingface.co/datasets/zai-org/LongBench-v2","indexing_mode":"noindex","profile":{"resources":[],"task_format":"","scoring":"","metric":"","size":"","answer_access":"","license":"","citation":"","maintainer":"","released":"","why_hard":"","related":[]}},"task_id":"bc1efde4-7951-5c05-9119-da19e7cb6666","task_key":"train--66ed875e821e116aacb2023e","task_revision_id":"3","upstream_id":"66ed875e821e116aacb2023e","short_description":"On what issue do Wang Hui and Badiou have similar views?","config":"","split":"train","body":"{\"choice_A\":\"Fixed identities should be transformed into dynamic identities\",\"choice_B\":\"The problem with contemporary politics is devaluation and neutralization\",\"choice_C\":\"The problem with contemporary politics is cultural relativism\",\"choice_D\":\"Ideology promotes the formation of subjective consciousness\",\"context\":\"SAINT PAUL \\n\\n\\nSAINT PAUL \\nThe Foundation of \\nUniversalism \\nAlain Badiou \\nTranslated by Ray Brassier \\nSTANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS \\nSTANFORD, CALIFORNIA \\n\\n\\nStanford University Press \\nStanford, California \\nwww.sup.org \\n© 2003 by the Board of \\nTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All \\nrights reserved. \\nOriginally published as Saint PauL: La \\nfondation de L'universaLisme, © 1997 by \\nPresses Universitaires de France \\nAssistance for the translation was provided by the French Ministry of Culture. \\nPrinted in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-qualiLY paper. \\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data \\nBadiou, Alain. \\n[Saint Paul. English] \\nSaint Paul: the foundation of universalism / Alain Badiou; translated by Ray \\nBrassier. \\np. cm.-(Cultural memory in the present) \\nISBN 0-8047-4470-X (cloth: aile. paper)-ISBN 0-8047-4471-8 (alk. paper) \\n1. Paul, the Apostle, Saint. \\n2. Bible N.T. Epistles ofPaul-Criticisl11, inter-\\npretation, etc. \\n3. Universalism-Biblical teaching. \\n1. Title. \\nII. Series. \\nBS2650·52.B3313 2003 \\nOriginal printing 2003 \\nLast figure below indicates year of this printing: \\n12 \\nII \\n10 \\n09 \\n08 \\n07 \\n06 \\n2002154091 \\nDesigned and typeset at Stanford University Press in II1I3. \\n5 Garamond \\n\\n\\nContents \\nT\\nranslator's Note \\nlX \\nPrologue \\nI \\nI \\nPaul: Our Contemporary \\n4 \\n2 \\nWho Is Paul? \\n16 \\n3 \\nTexts and Contexts \\n31 \\n4 \\nTheory of Discourses \\n40 \\n5 \\nThe Division of the Subject \\n55 \\n6 \\nThe Antidialectic of Death and Resurrection \\n65 \\n7 \\nPaul Against the Law \\n75 \\n8 \\nLove as Universal Power \\n86 \\n9 \\nHope \\n93 \\n10 \\nUniversality and the Traversal of Differences \\n98 \\nII \\nIn Conclusion \\n107 \\n\\n\\nTranslator's Note \\nIn rendering quotations from Paul into English, I consulted the \\nAuthorized, Revised Standard, and New Revised Standard Versions of \\nhis \\nepistles. Since my aim was to stick as closely as possible to Badiou's own \\nFrench rendition, I found the best results were obtained through a selec­\\ntive combination of the Authorized and Revised Standard Versions. I al­\\ntered or adjusted formulations from both whenever necessary. I trans­\\nlated the quotations from Pascal's Pensees in Chapter 4 myself. For the \\nNietzsche quotations in Chapters 5 and 6, I used R. ]. Hollingdale's \\ntranslation of The Anti-Christ (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, \\n1990). These were slightly altered to fit the French version used by Ba­\\ndiou. \\nThis is a book principally concerned with using Paul to redefine the \\nphilosophical category of \\n\\\"the subject\\\" as a \\\"universal singularity.\\\" Given \\nthis putative universality, many readers will balk at the persistent use of \\nthe masculine pronoun \\\"he\\\" to ref\\ner to this newly defined \\\"subject.\\\" Al­\\nthough su\\njet in French is a masculine noun for which the corresponding \\nmasculine pronoun if (which means both \\\"he\\\" and \\\"it\\\") is habitually sub­\\nstituted, it has become customary in English translations of contempo­\\nrary French philosophical texts to correct this gender bias by stipulating \\n\\\"he or she\\\" (or \\\"it\\\") whenever the French has if \\nstanding in f\\nor a term like \\nsu\\njet. However, in the context of the present work, two considerations \\nrendered this customary tactic particularly problematic: the first, practi­\\ncal and stylistic; the second, substantive and thematic. First, from a \\npurely practical point of view, there were too many sentences in which \\nthe concatenation of \\nabstract nouns meant that using the pronoun \\\"it\\\" to \\nrefer to \\\"the subject\\\" would have created ambiguity at best, unacceptable \\n\\n\\nx \\nTranslator's Note \\nconfusion at worst. In addition, there were equally many instances in \\nwhich substituting \\\"he or she\\\" for \\\"it\\\" would have destroyed the rhythm, \\npoise, and symmetry of Badiou's meticulously constructed sentences. Al­\\nthough such practical and stylistic considerations invited a disinterested \\nchoice between the consistent use of either \\\"he\\\" or \\\"she,\\\" it was the sec­\\nond, more substantive and thematic point of view that seemed to render \\nthe use of \\nthe masculine pronoun appropriate and that finally persuaded \\nme to opt for \\\"he.\\\" I refer here to Badiou's explicit comments throughout \\nChapters 4, 5, and 6 about the \\\"filiation\\\" of the Pauline subject, a filiation \\nnecessitating the latter's unequivocal characterization as a Son (in French, \\nfiliation already contains the word fils, \\\"son\\\"). \\nI would like to thank Alberto Toscano and Peter Hallward for their \\nfriendly but indispensable advice. \\nRAY BRASSIER \\n\\n\\nPrologue \\nStrange enterprise. For a long time, this figure has accom \\npanied me, \\nalong with others: Mallarme, Cantor, Archimedes, Plato, Robespierre, \\nConrad ... (and this is without venturing into our own century). Fifteen \\nyears ago, I wrote a play, The Incident at Antioch, whose heroine was \\nnamed Paula. The change of \\nsex probably prevented too explicit an iden­\\ntification. For me, truth be told, Paul is not an apostle or a saint. I care \\nnothing for the Good News he declares, or the cult dedicated to him. But \\nhe is a subjective figure of primary importance. I have always read the \\nepistles the way one returns to those classic texts with which one is par­\\nticularly familiar; their paths well worn, their details abolished, their \\npower preserved. No transcendence, nothing sacred, perfect equality of \\nthis work with every other, the moment it touches me personally. A man \\nemphatically inscribed these phrases, these vehement and tender ad­\\ndresses, and yve may draw upon them freely, without devotion or repul­\\nsion. All the more so in my case, since, irreligious by heredity, and even \\nencouraged in the desire to crush the clerical infamy by my four grand­\\nparents, all of whom were teachers, I encountered the epistles late, the \\nway one encounters curious texts whose poetry astonishes. \\nBasically, I have never really connected Paul with religion. It is not \\naccording to this register, or to bear witness to any sort of faith, or even \\nantifaith, that I have, for a long time, been interested in him. No more \\n\\n\\n2 \\nPrologue \\nso, to tell the truth-but the impression was less striking-than I seized \\nhold of Pascal, Kierkegaard, or Claudel, on the basis of what was explic­\\nitly Christian in their discourse. Anyway, the crucible in which what will \\nbecome a work of art and thought burns is brimful with nameless impu­\\nrities; it comprises obsessions, beliefs, infantile puzzles, various perver­\\nsions, undivulgeable memories, haphazard reading, and quite a few idio­\\ncies and chimeras. Analyzing this alchemy is of little use. \\nFor me, Paul is a poet-thinker of the event, as well as one who prac­\\ntices and states the invariant traits of what can be called the militant fig­\\nure. He brings forth the entirely human connection, whose destiny fasci­\\nnates me, berween the general idea of a rupture, an overturning, and that \\nof a thought-practice that is this rupture's subjective materiality. \\nIf today I wish to retrace in a few pages the singularity of this con­\\nnection in Paul, it is probably because there is currently a widespread \\nsearch for a new militant figure-even if it takes the form of denying its \\npossibility-called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the \\nBolsheviks at the beginning of the century, which can be said to have \\nbeen that of the party militant. \\nWhen a step forward is the order of the day, one may, among other \\nthings, find assistance in the greatest step back. Whence this reactivation \\nof Paul. I am not the first to risk the comparison that malces of him a \\nLenin for whom Christ will have been the equivocal Marx. \\nMy intention, clearly, is neither historicizing nor exegetical. It is \\nsubjective through and through. I have confined myself strictly to those \\ntexts of Paul that have been authenticated by contemporary scholarship \\nand to the relation they bear to my thought. \\nFor the Greek original, I used the Novum Testamentum Graece, in \\nNestle-Aland's critical edition, published by Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft \\n111\\n 1993. \\nThe basic French text, whose formulations I have sometimes al­\\ntered, is that by Louis Segond, Le Nouveau Testament, published by the \\nTrinitarian Bible Society (1993 edition). \\nReferences to the epistles follow the customary arrangement by \\nchapter and verse. Thus, Rom. 1.25 means: epistle to the Romans, chap­\\nter I, verse 25. Similarly, we will say Gal. for the epistle to the Galatians, \\nCor. I and Cor. II for the rwo epistles to the Corinthians, Philipp. for the \\n\\n\\nPrologue \\n3 \\nepistle to the Philippians, and Thess. I for the first epistle to the Thessa­\\nlonians. \\nFor anyone interested in further reading, I would at least like to in­\\ndicate rwo works from among the colossal secondary literature on Paul: \\nStanislas Breton's robust little book, Saint Paul (Paris: Presses Uni­\\nversitaire de France, 2000). \\nGunther Bornkamm's P\\naul, translated by D.M.G. Stalker (Min­\\nneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). \\nA Catholic, a Protestant. May they form a triangle with the atheist. \\n\\n\\n1 \\nPaul: Our Contemporary \\nWhy Saint Paul? Why solicit this \\\"apostle\\\" who is all the more sus­\\npect for having, it seems, proclaimed himself such and whose name is fre­\\nquently tied to Christianity's least open, most institutional aspects: the \\nChurch, moral discipline, social conservatism, suspiciousness toward \\nJews? How are we to inscribe this name into the development of \\nour proj­\\nect: to refound a tlleory of the Subject that subordinates its existence to \\nthe aleatory dimension of \\ntile event as well as to the pure contingency of \\nmultiple-being without sacrificing the theme of \\nfreedom? \\nSimilarly, one will ask: What use do we claim to make of \\nthe appa­\\nratus of \\nChristian faith, an apparatus from which it seems strictly impos­\\nsible to dissociate the figure and texts of Paul? Why invoke and analyze \\nthis fable? Let us be perfectly clear: so far as we are concerned, what we \\nare dealing with here is precisely a fable. And singularly so in the case of \\nPaul, who for crucial reasons reduces Christianity to a single statement: \\nJesus is resurrected. Yet this is precisely a fabulous element [point \\nfabu­\\nleux], since all the rest, birth, teachings, death, might after all be upheld. \\nA \\\"fable\\\" is that part of a narrative that, so far as we are concerned, fails \\nto touch on any Real, unless it be by virtue of that invisible and indirectly \\naccessible residue sticking to every obvious imaginary. In this regard, it is \\nto its element of fabulation [point de \\nfable] alone that Paul reduces the \\nChristian narrative, with the strength of one who knows that in holding \\n\\n\\nPaul: Our Contemporary \\n5 \\nfast to this point as real, one is unburdened of all the imaginary that sur­\\nrounds it. If it is possible for us to speak of belief from the outset (but \\nPaul's entire problem concerns the question of belief or faith, or of that \\nwhich is presupposed beneath the word pistis), let us say that so far as we \\nare concerned it is rigorously impossible to believe in the resurrection of \\nthe crucified. \\nPaul is a distant figure in a threefold sense: his historical site; his \\nrole as Church founder; and his provocative centering of thought upon \\nits fabulous element. \\nWe are duty-bound to explain why we are investing this distance \\nwith the weight of \\na philosophical proximity, why the fabulous forcing of \\nthe real provides us with mediation when it is a question of restoring the \\nuniversal to its pure secularity, here and now. \\nWe are doubtless assisted in this by the fact that-for example­\\nHegel, Auguste Comte, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and again in our \\nown time, Jean-Franyois Lyotard, have also found it necessary to examine \\nthe figure of Paul and have done so, moreover, always in terms of some \\nextreme dispositions (foundational or regressive, destinal or forgetful, ex­\\nemplary or catastrophic) in order to organize their own speculative dis­\\ncourses. \\nFor our own parr, what we shall focus on in Paul's work is a singu­\\nlar connection, which it is formally possible to disjoin from the fable and \\nof which Paul is, strictly speaking, the inventor: the connection that es­\\ntablishes a passage between a proposition concerning the subject and an \\ninterrogation concerning the law. Let us say that, for Paul, it is a matter \\nof \\ninvestigating which law is capable of \\nstructuring a subject devoid of \\nall \\nidentity and suspended to an event whose only \\\"proof\\\" lies precisely in \\nits having been declared by a subject. \\nWhat is essential for us is that this paradoxical connection between \\na subject withom identity and a law without support provides the foun­\\ndation for the possibility of a universal teaching within history itself. \\nPaul's unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the com­\\nmunitarian grasp, be it that of \\na people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a \\nsocial class. What is true (or just; they are the same in this case) cannot be \\nreduced to any objective aggregate, either by its cause or by its destina­\\ntion. \\n\\n\\n6 \\nPaul: Our Contemporary \\nIt will be objected that, in the present case, for us \\\"truth\\\" designates \\na mere fable. Granted, but what is important is the subjective gesture \\ngrasped in its founding power with respect to the generic conditions of \\nuniversality. That the content of \\nthe fable must be abandoned leaves as its \\nremainder the form of these conditions and, in particular, the ruin of \\nevery attempt to assign the discourse of truth to preconstituted historical \\naggregates. \\nTo sharply separate each truth procedure from the cultural \\\"his­\\ntoricity\\\" wherein opinion presumes to dissolve it: such is the operation in \\nwhich Paul is our guide. \\nTo rethink this gesture, to unravel its twists and turns, to enliven \\nits singularity, its instituting force, is without doubt a contemporary ne­\\ncessity. \\nWhat, in effect, does our contemporary situation consist of? The \\nprogressive reduction of the question of truth (and hence, of thought) to \\na linguistic form, judgment-a point on which Anglophone analytical \\nideology and the hermeneutical tradition both concur (the analytic! \\nhermeneutic doublet is the straightjacket of contemporary academic phi­\\nlosophy)-ends up in a cultural and historical relativism that today con­\\nstitutes at once a topic of public opinion, a \\\"political\\\" motivation, and a \\nframework for research in the human sciences. The extreme forms of this \\nrelativism, already at work, claim to relegate mathematics itself to an \\n\\\"Occidental\\\" setup, to which any number of obscurantist or symbolically \\ntrivial apparatuses could be rendered equivalent, provided one is able to \\nname the subset of humanity that supports this apparatus, and, better \\nstill, that one has reasons for believing this subset to be made up of vic­\\ntims. All access to the universal, which neither tolerates assignation to \\nthe particular, nor maintains any direct relation with the status­\\nwhether it be that of dominator or victim-of the sites from which its \\nproposition emerges, collapses when confronted with this intersection \\nbetween culturalist ideology and the \\\"victimise\\\" [victimairel conception \\nof man. \\nWhat is the real unifying factor behind this attempt to promote the \\ncultural virtue of oppressed subsets, this invocation of language in order \\nto extol communitarian particularisms (which, besides language, always \\nultimately refer back to race, religion, or gender)? It is, evidently, mone-\\n\\n\\n-\\n---\\n ----\\nPaul: Our Contemporary \\n7 \\ntary abstraction, whose false universality has absolutely no difficulty ac­\\ncommodating the kaleidoscope of communitarianisms. The lengthy years \\nof communist dictatorship will have had the merit of showing that fi­\\nnancial globalization, the absolute sovereignty of capital's empty univer­\\nsality, had as its only genuine enemy another universal project, albeit a \\ncorrupt and bloodstained one: that only Lenin and Mao truly frightened \\nthose who proposed to boast unreservedly about the merits of liberalism \\nand the general equivalent, or the democratic virtues of commercial com­\\nmunication. The senescent collapse of the USSR, the paradigm of social­\\nist States, provisionally suspended fear, unleashed empty abstraction, de­\\nbased thought in general. And it is certainly not by renouncing the \\nconcrete universality of truths in order to affirm the rights of \\\"minori­\\nties,\\\" be they racial, religious, national, or sexual, that the devastation will \\nbe slowed down. No, we will not allow the rights of true-thought to have \\nas their only instance monetarist free exchange and its mediocre political \\nappendage, capitalist-parliamentarianism, whose squalor is ever more \\npoorly dissimulated behind the fine word \\\"democracy.\\\" \\nThis is why Paul, himself the contemporary of a monumental fig­\\nure of the destruction of all politics (the beginnings of that military des­\\npotism known as \\\"the Roman Empire\\\"), interests us in the highest de­\\ngree. He is the one who, assigning to the universal a specific connection \\nof law and the subject, asks himself with the most extreme rigor what \\nprice is to be paid for this assignment, by the law as well as by the subject. \\nThis interrogation is precisely our own. Supposing we were able to re­\\nfound the connection between truth and the subject, then what conse­\\nquences must we have the strength to hold fast to, on the side of truth \\n(evental [evenementiellel and hazardous) as well as on the side of the sub­\\nject (rare and heroic)? \\nIt is by confronting this question, and no other, that philosophy \\ncan assume its temporal condition without becoming a means of cover­\\ning up the worst. That it can measure up to the times in which we live \\notherwise than by Battering their savage inertia. \\nIn the case of our own country, France, of the public destiny of its \\nState, what can we point to in the way of a noticeable tendency of the last \\nfifteen years? Notwithstanding, of course, the constant expansion of cap­\\nital's automatic functioning that shelters behind the signifiers of Europe \\n\\n\\n8 \\nPaul: Our Contemporary \\nand liberalism, an expansion that, being the law of the world-market, \\ncannot be taken as specific to our site. \\nAlas, the only thing we can point to by way of reply to this question \\nis the permanent installation of Le Pen's party,* a truly national singular­\\nity, whose equivalent we have to go all the way to Austria to find, hardly \\na flattering comparison. And what constitutes this party's unique maxim? \\nThe maxim that none of the parliamentary parties dare directly oppose, \\nso that they all vote for or tolerate those increasingly villainous laws that \\nare implacably deduced from it? The maxim in question is: \\\"France for \\nthe French.\\\" In the case of the State, this leads back to what served as the \\nparadoxical name given by Petain to a puppet state, zealous servant of the \\nNazi occupier: the French State. How does the noxious question \\\"What \\nis a French person?\\\" come to install itself at the heart of the public \\nsphere? But everyone knows there is no tenable answer to this question \\nother than through the persecution of those people arbitrarily designated \\nas the non-French. The unique political \\nreal proper to the word \\\"French,\\\" \\nwhen the latter is upheld as a founding category in the State, is the in­\\ncreasingly insistent installation of relentlessly discriminatory measures \\ntargeting people who are here, or who are trying to live here. And it is \\nparticularly striking that this persecutory real proper to identitarian logic \\n(the Law is only valid for the French) gathers under the same banner-as \\nis shown by the sorry affair of the flulard** \\n-resigned advocates of capi­\\ntalist devastation (persecution is inevitable because unemployment pre­\\ncludes all hospitality) and advocates of a \\\"French republic\\\" as ghostly as \\nit is exceptional (foreigners are only tolerable so long as they \\\"integrate\\\" \\nthemselves into the magnificent model presented to them by our pure in-\\n*A reference to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National, an extreme right-wing \\nparty that continues to enjoy significant electoral success in France.-Trans. \\n** \\nL'affaire du \\nfoulard refers to a controversy over the wearing of the tradi­\\ntional Muslim headscarf (foulard) by young Arab women in French secondary \\nschools. Since the French educational system explicitly prohibits the wearing of \\nreligious garb or paraphernalia in class, some teachers protested and refused to \\nteach students who insisted on wearing the headscarf, arguing that tolerating the \\ninfraction of one ethnic group provided a dangerous precedent that could only \\nincite students of other religious denominations to follow suit, thereby under­\\nmining the French educational system's secular ethos.-Trans. \\n\\n\\nPaul: Our Contemporary \\n9 \\nstitutions, our astonishing systems of education and representation). \\nProof that, so far as peoples' real lives and what happens to them is con­\\ncerned, there exists a despicable complicity berween the globalized logic \\nof capital and French identitarian fanaticism. \\nWhat is being constructed before our very eyes is the communita­\\nrization of the public sphere, the renunciation of the law's transcendent \\nneutrality. The State is supposed to assure itself primarily and perma­\\nnently of the genealogically, religiously, and racially verifiable identity of \\nthose for whom it is responsible. It is required to define rwo, perhaps \\neven three, distinct regions of the law, according to whether the latter are \\ntruly French, integrated or integratable foreigners, or finally foreigners \\nwho are declared to be un \\nintegrated, or even unintegratable. The law \\nthereby falls under the control of a \\\"national\\\" model devoid of any real \\nprinciple, unless it be that of the persecutions it initiates. Abandoning all \\nuniversal principle, identitarian verification-which is never anything \\nbut police monitoring-comes to take precedence over the definition or \\napplication of the law. This means that, just as under Petain, when min­\\nisters saw nothing wrong in surreptitiously defining the Jew as prototype \\nof the non-French, all legislation would be accompanied by the required \\nidentitarian protocols, and subsets of the population would come to be \\ndefined each time by their special status. This arrangement is taking its \\ncourse, as successive governments each bring to it their own special \\ntouch. We are dealing with a rampant \\\"Petainization\\\" of the State. \\nHow clearly Paul's statement rings out under these conditions! A \\ngenuinely stupefying statement when one lmows the rules of the ancient \\nworld: \\\"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, \\nthere is neither male nor female\\\" (Gal. 3.28)! And how appropriate, for \\nwe who will unproblematically replace God by this or that truth, and \\nGood by the service this truth requires, the maxim \\\"Glory, honor, and \\npeace for every one that does good, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. \\nFor God shows no partiality\\\" (Rom. 2.10). \\nOur world is in no way as \\\"complex\\\" as those who wish to ensure \\nits perpetuation claim. It is even, in its broad outline, perfectly simple. \\nOn the one hand, there is an extension of \\nthe automatisms of cap­\\nital, fulfilling one of Marx's inspired predictions: the world finally config­\\nured, but as a market, as a world-market. This configuration imposes the \\n\\n\\n10 \\nPaul: Our Contemporary \\nrule of an abstract homogenization. Everything that circulates falls under \\nthe unity of a count, while inversely, only what lets itself be counted in \\nthis way can circulate. Moreover, this is the norm that illuminates a par­\\nadox few have pointed out: in the hour of \\ngeneralized circulation and the \\nphantasm of \\ninstantaneous cultural communication, laws and regulations \\nforbidding the circulation of \\npersons are being multiplied everywhere. So \\nit is that in France, never have fewer foreigners settled than in the recent \\nperiod! Free circulation of what lets itself be counted, yes, and above all \\nof capital, which is the count of the count. Free circulation of that un­\\ncountable infinity constituted by a singular human life, never! For capi­\\ntalist monetary abstraction is certainly a singularity, but a singularity that \\nhas no consideration for any singularity whatsoever: singularity as indiffer­\\nent to the persistent infinity of existence as it is to the evental becoming \\nof truths. \\nOn the other side, there is a process of fragmentation into closed \\nidentities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this \\nfragmentation. \\nBoth processes are perfectly intertwined. For each identification \\n(the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that pro­\\nvides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more \\ncaptive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more \\namenable to the invention of new figures of \\nmonetary homogeneity, than \\na community and its territory or territories. The semblance of a non­\\nequivalence is required so that equivalence itself can constitute a process. \\nWhat inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this up­\\nsurge-taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so­\\ncalled cultural singularities-of women, homosexuals, the disabled, \\nArabs! And these infinite combinations of \\npredicative traits, what a god­\\nsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate \\nMuslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, \\nprematurely aged youth! Each time, a social image authorizes new prod­\\nucts, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls, \\\"free\\\" radio sta­\\ntions, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady \\\"public debates\\\" \\nat peak viewing times. Deleuze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorializa­\\ntion requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a perma­\\nnent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its prin-\\n\\n\\nPaul: Our Contem\\nporar\\ny \\nII \\nciple of movement to homogenize its space of action; identities, more­\\nover, that never demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same \\nway as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market. The capitalist \\nlogic of the general equivalent and the identitarian and cultural logic of \\ncommunities or minorities form an articulated whole. \\nThis articulation plays a constraining role relative to every truth \\nprocedure. It is organically without truth. \\nOn the one hand, every truth procedure breaks with the axiomatic \\nprinciple that governs the situation and organizes its repetitive series. A \\ntruth procedure interrupts repetition and can theref\\nore not be supported \\nby the abstract permanence proper to a unity of the count. A truth is al­\\nways, according to the dominant law of the count, subtracted from the \\ncount. Consequently, no truth can be sustained through capital's homo­\\ngeneous expansion. \\nBut, on the other hand, neither can a truth procedure take root in \\nthe element of \\nidentity. For if \\nit is true that every truth erupts as singular, \\nits singularity is immediately universalizable. Universalizable singularity \\nnecessarily breaks with identitarian singularity. \\nThat there are intertwined histories, different cultures and, more \\ngenerally, differences already abundant in one and the \\\"same\\\" individual, \\nthat the world is multicolored, that one must let people live, eat, dress, \\nimagine, love in whichever way they please, is not the issue, whatever cer­\\ntain disingenuous simpletons may want us to think. Such liberal truisms \\nare cheap, and one would only like to see those who proclaim them not \\nreact so violently whenever confronted with the slightest serious attempt \\nto dissent from their own puny liberal diff\\nerence. Contemporary cos­\\nmopolitanism is a beneficent reality. We simply ask that its partisans not \\nget themselves worked up at the sight of a young veiled woman, lest we \\nbegin to fear that what they really desire, far from a real web of \\nshifting \\ndifferences, is the uniform dictatorship of what they take to be \\\"moder­\\nnity.\\\" \\nIt is a question of knowing what identitarian and communitarian \\ncategories have to do with truth procedures, with political procedures for \\nexample. We reply: these categories must be absented from the process, \\nfailing which no truth has the slightest chance of establishing its persist­\\nence and accruing its immanent infinity. We know, moreover, that the \\n\\n\\n12 \\nPaul: Our Contemporar\\ny \\nmost consequential instances of identitarian politics, such as Nazism, are \\nbellicose and criminal. The idea that one can wield such categories inno­\\ncently, even in the form of French \\\"republican\\\" identity, is inconsistent. \\nOne will, of necessity, end up oscillating between the abstract universal of \\ncapital and localized persecutions. \\nThe contemporary world is thus doubly hostile to truth procedures. \\nThis hostility betrays itself though nominal occlusions: where the name \\nof a truth procedure should obtain, another, which represses it, holds \\nsway. The name \\\"culture\\\" comes to obliterate that of \\\"art.\\\" The word \\n\\\"technology\\\" obliterates the word \\\"science.\\\" The word \\\"management\\\" \\nobliterates the word \\\"politics.\\\" \\nThe word \\\"sexuality\\\" obliterates love. The \\n\\\"culture-technology-management-sexuality\\\" system, which has the im­\\nmense merit of being homogeneous to the market, and all of whose terms \\ndesignate a category of commercial presentation, constitutes the modern \\nnominal occlusion of the \\\"art-science-politics-Iove\\\" system, which identi­\\nfies truth procedures typologically. \\nNow, far from returning toward an appropriation of this typology, \\nidentitarian or minoritarian logic merely proposes a variant on its nomi­\\nnal occlusion by capital. It inveighs against every generic concept of at·t, \\nputting the concept of culture in its place, conceived as culture of the \\ngroup, as the subjective or representative glue for the group's existence, a \\nculture that addresses only itself and remains potentially nonuniversaliz­\\nable. Moreover, it does not hesitate to posit that this culture's constitutive \\nelements are only fully comprehensible on the condition that one belong \\nto the subset in question. Whence catastrophic pronouncements of the \\nsort: only a homosexual can \\\"understand\\\" what a homosexual is, only an \\nArab can understand what an Arab is, and so forth. If, as we believe, only \\ntruths (thought) allow man to be distinguished from the human animal \\nthat underlies him, it is no exaggeration to say that such minoritarian \\npronouncements are genuinely barbaric. In the case of science, cultural­\\nism promotes the technical particularity of subsets to the equivalent of \\nscientific thought, so that antibiotics, Shamanism, the laying on of \\nhands, or emollient herbal teas all become of equal worth. In the case of \\npolitics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for de­\\ntermination, be it the state's or the protestor's, and finally it is a matter of \\nstipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of \\n\\n\\nPaul: Our Contemporary \\n13 \\nthese traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant \\npolitical operators. Lastly, in the case of love, there will be the comple­\\nmentary demands, either for the genetic right to have such and such a \\nform of specialized sexual behavior recognized as a minoritarian identity; \\nor for the return, pure and simple, to archaic, culturally established con­\\nceptions, such as that of strict conjugality, the confinement of women, \\nand so forth. It is perfectly possible to combine the two, as becomes ap­\\nparent when homosexual protest concerns the right to be reincluded in \\nthe grand traditionalism of marriage and the family, or to take responsi­\\nbility for the defrocking of a priest with the Pope's blessing. \\nThe two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogene­\\nity of capital and identitarian protest) are in a relation of reciprocal main­\\ntenance and mirroring. Who will maintain the self-evident superiority of \\nthe competent-cultivated-sexually liberated manager? But who will de­\\nfend the corrupt-religious-polygamist terrorist? Or eulogize the cultural­\\nmarginal-homeopathic-media-friendly transsexual? Each figure gains its \\nFotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each \\ndraws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most \\ntypical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling \\npoints and salable images has for its counterpart the ever more refined \\ncompetence that the most insular or most violent groups display when it \\ncomes to speculating on the financial markets or maintaining a large-scale \\narms commerce. \\nBreaking with all this (neither monetary homogeneity nor identi­\\ntarian protest; neither the abstract universality of capital nor the particu­\\nlarity of interests proper to a subset), our question can be clearly formu­\\nlated: What are the conditions for a universal singularity? \\nIt is on this point that we invoke Saint Paul, for this is precisely his \\nquestion. What does Paul want? Probably to drag the Good News (the \\nGospels) out from the rigid enclosure within which its restriction to the \\nJewish community would confine it. But equally, never to let it be deter­\\nmined by the available generalities, be they statist [hatiquesJ or ideologi­\\ncal. Statist generality belongs to Roman legalism, and to Roman citizen­\\nship in particular, to its conditions and the rights associated with it. \\nAlthough himself a Roman citizen, and proud of it, Paul will never allow \\nany legal categories to identifY the Christian subject. Slaves, women, peo-\\n\\n\\n14 \\nPaul: Our Contemporary \\npie of every profession and nationality will therefore be admitted without \\nrestriction or privilege. As for ideological generality, it is obviously repre­\\nsented by the philosophical and moral discourse of the Greeks. Paul will \\nestablish a resolute distance to this discourse, which is for him the coun­\\nterpoise to a conservative vision of \\nJewish law. Ultimately, it is a case of \\nmobilizing a universal singularity both against the prevailing abstractions \\n(legal then, economic now), and against communitarian or particularist \\nprotest. \\nPaul's general procedure is the following: if \\nthere has been an event, \\nand if \\ntruth consists in declaring it and then in being faithful to this dec­\\nlaration, two consequences ensue. First, since truth is evental, or of the \\norder of \\nwhat occurs, it is singular. It is neither structural, nor axiomatic, \\nnor legal. No available generality can account for it, nor structure the \\nsubject who claims to follow in its wal(e. Consequently, there cannot be \\na law of \\ntruth. Second, truth being inscribed on the basis of \\na declaration \\nthat is in essence subjective, no preconstituted subset can support it; \\nnothing communitarian or historically established can lend its substance \\nto the process of \\ntruth. T\\nruth is diagonal relative to every communitarian \\nsubset; it neither claims authority f\\nrom, nor (this is obviously the most \\ndelicate point) constitutes any identity. It is offered to all, or addressed to \\neveryone, without a condition of \\nbelonging being able to limit this off\\ner, \\nor this address. \\nOnce the texts transmitted to us are all seen as local interventions, \\nand hence governed by localized tactical stakes, Paul's problematic, how­\\never sinewy its articulation, implacably follows the requirements of truth \\nas universal singularity: \\n1. The Christian subject does not preexist the event he declares \\n(Christ's resurrection). Thus, the extrinsic conditions of his exis­\\ntence or identity will be argued against. He will be required to be \\nneither Jewish (or circumcised), nor Greek (or wise) . This is the \\ntheory of discourses (there are three: the Jewish, the Greek, the \\nnew) . No more than he will be required to be from this or that so­\\ncial class (theory of equality before truth), or this or that sex (the­\\nory of \\nwomen). \\n2. T\\nruth is entirely subjective (it is of the order of a declaration that \\ntestifies to a conviction relative to the event). Thus, every sub-\\n\\n\\nPaul: Our Contemporar\\ny \\n15 \\nsumption of \\nits becoming under a law will be \\nargued against. It \\nwill \\nbe necessary to proceed at once via a radical critique ofJewish law, \\nwhich has become obsolete and harmful, and of Greek law as the \\nsubordination of \\ndestiny to the cosmic order, which has never been \\nanything but a \\\"learned\\\" ignorance of the paths of salvation. \\n3. Fidelity to the declaration is crucial, for truth is a process, and \\nnot an illumination. In order to think it, one requires three con­\\ncepts: one that names the subject at the point of declaration (pistis, \\ngenerally translated as \\\"faith,\\\" but which is more appropriately ren­\\ndered as \\\"conviction\\\"); one that names the subject at the point of \\nhis conviction's militant address (agape, generally translated as \\n\\\"charity,\\\" but more appropriately rendered as \\\"love\\\"); lastly, one \\nthat names the subject according to the force of displacement con­\\nferred upon him through the assumption of the truth procedure's \\ncompleted [acheve] character (eLpis, generally translated as \\\"hope,\\\" \\nbut more appropriately rendered as \\\"certainty\\\") . \\n4. A truth is of itself indifferent to the state of the situation, to the \\nRoman State for example. This means that it is subtracted f\\nrom the \\norganization of subsets prescribed by that state. The subjectivity \\ncorresponding to this subtraction constitutes a necessary distance \\nfrom the State and from what corresponds to the State in people's \\nconsciousness: the apparatus of opinion. One must not argue about \\nopinions, Paul says. A truth is a concentrated and serious proce­\\ndure, which must never enter into competition with established \\nopllllOns. \\nThere is not one of these maxims which, setting aside the content \\nof the event, cannot be appropriated for our situation and our philo­\\nsophical tasks. All that remains is to deploy their underlying conceptual \\norganization, while giving credit to him who, deciding that none was ex­\\nempt from what a truth demands and disjoining the true f\\nrom the Law, \\nprovoked-entirely alone-a cultural revolution upon which we still de­\\npend. \\n\\n\\n2 \\nWho Is Paul? \\nWe could begin in the sanctimonious style of the usual biographies. \\nPaul (actually Saul, the name of the first king of Israel) is born in Tarsus \\nbetween 1 and 5 A.D. (impossible, from a strictly scholarly perspective, to \\nbe more precise) . Thus, he is of the same generation as Jesus, who, as \\neveryone knows-but the circularity is interesting-is born and concur­\\nrently establishes his own date of birth by instituting year I of \\\"our\\\" era \\n(\\\"his,\\\" rather) . Paul's father is an artisan-retailer, a tent maker. He is a Ro­\\nman citizen, and hence so is Paul. How did this f\\nather obtain citizenship? \\nIt is simplest to suppose, despite the absence of evidence, that he bought \\nit. It would not be beyond the means of \\nan affluent retailer to bribe a Ro­\\nman civil servant. Paul is a Jew of the Pharisaical tendency. He is an ar­\\ndent participant in the persecution of Christians, who are considered \\nheretics by the orthodox Jews and, as a result, legally prosecuted but also \\nbeaten, stoned, and driven out, in accordance with the varying power \\nstruggles between different factions in the Jewish communities. \\nChrist's execution dates approximately from the year 30. We are in \\nthe reign of \\nTiberi \\nus. In the year 33 or 34, on the road to Damascus Paul \\nis struck by a divine apparition and converts to Christianity. He begins \\nhis famous missionary voyages. And so on. \\nWhat use is all this? You can consult the books. Let's cut straight to \\nthe doctrine. \\n\\n\\nW\\nho Is Paul? \\n17 \\nAnd yet, no, let us pause instead. Paul is a major figure of antiphi­\\nlosophy. But it is of the essence of \\nantiphilosophy that the subjective po­\\nsition figure as a decisive factor in discourse. Existential fragments, some­\\ntimes anecdotal in appearance, are elevated to the rank of guarantor of \\ntruth. Can one imagine Rousseau without the Con\\nfessions, Kierkegaard \\nwithout our being informed of \\nthe detail of \\nhis engagement to Regine, or \\nNietzsche not inviting us to pay witness, throughout Ecce Homo, to the \\nreasons entitling him to ask the question \\\"Why am I a destiny\\\"? For an \\nanti \\nphilosopher, the enunciative position is obviously part of the state­\\nment's protocol. No discourse can lay claim to truth if \\nit does not contain \\nan explicit answer to the question: Who speaks? \\nWhenever Paul addresses his writings, he always draws attention to \\nthe fact that he has been entitled to speak as a subject. And he became this \\nsubject. He became it suddenly, on the road to Damascus (if, as we be­\\nlieve, in this particular instance one can, for once and once only, trust \\nthat fabricated biography of \\nPaul that the New Testament presents under \\nthe title Acts of \\nthe Apostles) . The story is well known: while traveling to \\nDamascus as a zealous Pharisee in order to persecute Christians, Paul \\nhears a mysterious voice revealing to him both the truth and his vocation. \\nIs the term \\\"conversion\\\" appropriate to what happened on the road \\nto Damascus? It was a thunderbolt, a caesura, and not a dialectical rever­\\nsal. It was a conscription instituting a new subject: \\\"By the grace of God \\nI am what I am [eimi ho eimz]\\\" (Cor. 1.15-10). What this absolutely alea­\\ntory intervention on the road to Damascus summons is the \\\"I am\\\" as \\nsuch. \\nIn a certain sense, this conversion isn't carried out by anyone: Paul \\nhas not been converted by representatives of \\\"the Church\\\"; he has not \\nbeen won over. He has not been presented with the gospel. Clearly, the \\nencounter on the road mimics the founding event. Just as the Resurrec­\\ntion remains totally incalculable and it is from there that one must begin, \\nPaul's faith is that from which he begins as a subject, and nothing leads \\nup to it. The event-\\\"it happened,\\\" purely and simply, in the anonymity \\nof a road-is the subjective sign of the event proper that is the Resurrec­\\ntion of Christ. Within Paul himself, it is the (re)surgence [(re\\n}surrectionl \\nof the subject. This is the exemplary matrix of the link between existence \\nand doctrine, for Paul draws from the conditions of his \\\"conversion\\\" the \\n\\n\\n18 \\nWho Is Paul? \\nconsequence that one can only begin from faith, from the declaration of \\nfaith. The sudden appearance of the Christian subject is unconditioned. \\nAccordingly, if we are to grasp his message, we can in no way neg­\\nlect the circumstances of Paul's life. In this regard, it is fortunate that \\nthose circumstances to which we accord the highest importance are the \\nones he himself incorporates into his epistles. For reliable independent \\nevidence is extremely rare. The narrative of the Acts of the Apostles is, as \\nwe have already mentioned, a retrospective construction whose inten­\\ntions modern criticism has clearly brought to light, and whose form is \\nfrequently borrowed from the rhetoric of Greek fables. To distinguish its \\nreal elements from the edifying (and politically charged) fable in which \\nthey are enveloped requires an exceptional and suspicious rigor. And we \\nhave practically nothing else to go on, unless it be the ability to verify \\nsuch and such a detail through the intermediary of Roman historiogra­\\nphy, which couldn't have cared less about these little groups of Jewish \\nheretics. Moreover, one must be suspicious even of \\\"Paul's epistles,\\\" \\ncanonically gathered together in the New Testament at least a century af­\\nter the apostle's death. Scholarly exegesis has demonstrated the apoc­\\nryphal nature of many of them, to the extent that the corpus of this fun­\\ndamental author must, in the final analysis, be reduced to six rather brief \\ntexts: Romans, Corinthians I and II, Galatians, Philippians, and Thessa­\\nlonians 1. This is nonetheless enough to establish certain major subjective \\ntraits and guarantee certain decisive episodes. \\nThus, for example, a point of the highest importance, which Paul \\nrelates to us with noticeable pride (Paul is certainly neither introverted, \\nnor f\\nalsely modest): What does he do after the Damascus experience? We \\nknow in any case what he does not do. He does not go to Jerusalem; he \\ndoes not go to see the authorities, the institutional apostles, those who \\nknew Christ. He does not seek \\\"confirmation\\\" for the event that appoints \\nhim in his own eyes as an apostle. He leaves this subjective upsurge out­\\nside every official seal. The unshakable conviction as to his own destiny \\nprobably dates from here, a conviction that will on several occasions \\ncause him to come into conflict with the core of historical apostles, \\namong whom Peter is the central figure. Turning away from all authority \\nother than that of the Voice that personally summoned him to his be­\\ncoming-subject, Paul leaves for Arabia in order to proclaim the gospel, to \\n\\n\\nW\\nho Is Paul? \\n19 \\ndeclare that what took place did take place. A man who, armed with a \\npersonal event, has grounds for declaring that impersonal event that is \\nthe Resurrection. \\nPaul stays in Arabia for three years. Doubtless, in his own eyes, his \\nmilitant efficacy provides a sufficient guarantee, so that having endured \\nthis delay he is finally entitled to meet the Church's \\\"historic leaders.\\\" We \\nshall see later that although stubborn, even violent, where matters of \\nprinciple are concerned, Paul is also a politician, one who knows the \\nvalue of reasonable compromise, \\nand particularly of verbal compromises, \\nwhich only slightly impede his freedom of action in the places and terri­\\ntories he chooses (preferably those where his opponent has the least foot­\\ning). Thus, \\nPaul goes to Jerusalem, where he meets Peter and the apostles, \\nthen leaves again. We know nothing of the issues debated in this first \\nmeeting. It seems it did not convince Paul of the necessity of frequently \\nconsulting with the Jerusalemite \\\"center,\\\" because his second period of \\nmilitant voyage will last f\\nourteen years! Cilicia, Syria, \\nTurkey, Macedonia, \\nGreece. The ex-centered dimension of Paul's action is the practical sub­\\nstructure of his thought, which posits that all true universality is devoid \\nof a center. \\nWe lmow roughly how these militant peregrinations functioned. At \\nthat time Judaism was still a proselytizing religion. To address oneself to \\nGentiles was not, as is often thought, an invention of Paul's. Jewish pros­\\nelytism was substantial and developed. It divided its audience into two \\ncircles that could be called, using a risky political anachronism, the sym­\\npathizers and the adherents: \\n(a) The \\\"God-fearing\\\" recognize monotheism's global legitimacy \\nbut are exempt from the prescriptions of the law, and notably from \\nClrcumC1SlOn. \\n(b) The converted are committed to following the prescriptions of \\nthe law, and must be circumcised. Circumcision here indexes its \\nfunction as a form of branding, of primary initiation. \\nThus, it is not primarily the fact that he addresses Gentiles that iso­\\nlates Paul from the Jewish community. Moreover, Paul begins his teach­\\ning by basing himself on that community's institutions. When he arrives \\nin a town, he first intervenes in the synagogue. Unsurprisingly, things go \\n\\n\\n20 \\nWho Is Paul? \\nbadly with the orthodox, for reasons of doctrine: the stubborn persistence \\nin affirming that Jesus is the Messiah (remember that \\\"Christ\\\" is simply \\nthe Greek word for \\\"messiah,\\\" so that the only continuity between the \\nGood News according to Paul and prophetic Judaism is the equation Je­\\nsus = Christ), an affirmation that, in the eyes of \\nthe majority ofJews, and \\nfor extremely powerful and legitimate reasons, propounds a fraud. Fol­\\nlowing incidents that, in the conditions of the time, could be extremely \\nviolent, and where, basically, one risks one's life, Paul abandons the syna­\\ngogue and withdraws to the home of a local sympathizer. There he tries \\nto set up a group comprising Judeo-Christians and Gentile-Christians. It \\nseems that very quickly the Gentile-Christians will constitute the major­\\nity among the adherents of \\nthe group. In light of \\nthe minimal concession \\nPaul makes to the Jewish heritage, particularly so far as rites are con­\\ncerned, this is not in the least surprising. Once the group has been suffi­\\nciently consolidated in his eyes (it will then be called an ekl\\ndesia, from \\nwhich e\\nglise [church] undoubtedly derives, although the former should be \\nenvisioned in terms of a small group of militants), Paul entrusts its run­\\nning to those whose conviction he holds in high regard, and who will be­\\ncome his lieutenants. Then he continues on his voyage. \\nNothing bears witness to Paul's certainty concerning the future of \\nhis action so much as the identification, toward which he is constantly \\nproceeding, between a small core of the constituted faithful in a town and \\nthe entire region. Who are these Thessalonians, these Corinthians, to say \\nnothing of these Romans, to whom Paul addresses, in an animated and \\nmajestic tone, his epistles? Probably a few \\\"brothers\\\"-which is an ar­\\nchaic form of our \\\"comrades\\\"-lost in the city. Through their commen­\\nsurability with a truth, anonymous individuals are always transformed \\ninto vectors of \\nhumanity as a whole. Let's just say that the handful of \\nRe­\\nsistance fighters in the year 1940 or 1941 occupy the same position as \\nPaul's Corinthians: it is to them, and to them alone, that it is legitimate \\nto address oneself if \\nseeking to indicate a real proper to France. \\nHowever far away, Paul never loses sight of these enclaves of the \\nfaithful whose existence he has played midwife to. His epistles are noth­\\ning but interventions in the lives of \\nthese enclaves, and these are possessed \\nof \\nall the political passion proper to such interventions. Struggles against \\ninternecine divisions, reminders of fundamental principles, reassertions \\n\\n\\nWho I\\ns\\n Paul? \\n21 \\nof \\ntrust in local organizers, examinations of \\nlitigious points, pressing de­\\nmands for continuing proselytizing activity, organization of finances . . . \\nNothing that an activist for any organized cause would not recognize as \\nfundamental to the concerns and passions of \\ncollective intervention. \\nAfter fourteen years of \\norganizational wandering, of \\nwhich no writ­\\nten trace remains, we are roughly in the year 50. About twenty years have \\npassed since the death of \\nChrist. It has been seventeen years since Paul re­\\nceived the Damascus convocation. He is in his fifties and refers to him­\\nself \\nas \\\"the old PauL\\\" His earliest texts that have been handed down to us \\ndate from this period. Why? A few hypotheses can be proposed. \\nSince he is responsible for several groups largely comprised of \\nGen­\\ntile-Christians, Paul resides in Antioch, a very large city, the third city of \\nthe empire after Rome and Alexandria. Recall that Paul was born into a \\nwell-off family in Tarsus, that he is a man of the city rather than a man of \\nthe country. This is more than a detail. His style owes nothing to those \\nrural images and metaphors that, on the contrary, abound in the parables \\nof Christ. If \\nhis vision of things fervently embraces the dimension of \\nthe \\nworld and extends to the extreme limits of the empire (his dearest wish is \\nto go to Spain, as if he, the Oriental, could only accomplish his mission \\nat the extreme edge of the Occident), it is because urban cosmopoli­\\ntanism and lengthy voyages have shaped its amplitude. Paul's universal­\\nism also comprises an internal geography, which is not that of the peren­\\nnial little landowner. \\nIf Paul begins to write about points of doctrine, if his texts are \\ncopied and circulated, we believe it is because he becomes aware of the \\nnecessity of engaging in a large-scale struggle. The situation forces him to \\nconceive of himself as leader of a party or faction. \\nDuring Paul's stay in Antioch, some Judeo-Christians of \\nstrict ob­\\nservance arrive. They confront the apostle, sow discord, demand the cir­\\ncumcision of all the faithful. Once again, it is not proselytism toward \\nnon-Jews that is in question. The point is that Paul cannot consent to the \\ndistinction between two circles among those whom he has rallied, the \\ndoctrinal sympathizers and the \\\"true\\\" converts, initiated and circumcised. \\nFor him (and we shall grant him this point), a truth procedure does not \\ncomprise degrees. Either one participates in it, declaring the founding \\nevent and drawing its consequences, or one remains foreign to it. This \\n\\n\\n22 \\nWho Is Paul? \\ndistinction, without intermediary or mediation, is entirely subjective. \\nRites and external markings can provide neither a foundation, nor even a \\nqualification f\\nor it. Such is the price for truth's status as a universal sin­\\ngularity. A truth procedure is only universal insofar as it is supported, at \\nthat point through which it indexes the real, by an immediate subjective \\nrecognition of \\nits singularity. Failing which, one resorts to observances or \\nparticular signs, which can only fix the Good News within the commu­\\nnitarian space, blocking its universal deployment. Thus, Paul considers all \\nconverts as fully practicing f\\nollowers, whatever their background, and re­\\ngardless of whether they are circumcised. Judeo-Christians of strict ob­\\nservance maintain the practice of distinguishing between degrees of be­\\nlonging and find it genuinely scandalous that individuals possessing \\nneither the markings nor the ritual practices of the community can be \\nconsidered as equals. People who, in a word, have neither the slightest \\nknowledge of, nor respect for, the Law. \\nA grave dispute ensues. It is finally decided that the issue be settled \\nwith the historical apostles in Jerusalem. It is Paul's second encounter \\nwith Peter, and this time we have inf\\normation about what \\nwas at stal(e. It \\nconcerns a major conflict, one in which the destiny of the new doctrine \\nis at issue. To what extent does the latter remain dependent on its origin \\nin the Jewish community? In my own language: What is the exact rela­\\ntion between the supposed universality of the postevental truth (that is, \\nwhat is inferred from Christ's resurrection) and the evental site, which is, \\nindubitably, the nation bound together by the Old Testament? Of what \\nimport are the traditional marks of belonging to the Jewish community \\nfor the construction of \\nthis truth, f\\nor its deployment in the people of \\nthe \\nempire? \\nThe Jerusalem conference (in 50? in 51?) is of \\ndecisive importance \\nfor these questions, which coordinate the binding of singularity and uni­\\nversality. Specifically at stake in it is circumcision, and Paul deliberately \\ncomes to Jerusalem accompanied by Titus, an uncircumcised follower. \\nBut in the background the question is: Who is called? What is it to be \\ncalled? Is the call indexed by visible signs? And finally: Who is a subject? \\nWhat marks a subject? \\nThe Judeo-Christian faction, which maintains strict observance, as­\\nserts that the Christ-event does not abolish the old order. Its conception \\n\\n\\nWho I\\ns\\n Paul? \\n23 \\nof the subject is dialectical. It is not a question of \\ndenying the power of \\nthe event. It is a question of \\nasserting that its novelty conserves and sub­\\nlates the traditional site of faith, that it incorporates it by exceeding it. \\nThe Christ-event accomplishes the Law; it does not terminate it. Thus \\nthe marks inherited from tradition (circumcision, for example) are still \\nnecessary. One might even say that, tal