Marx, Badiou, some thoughts

I recently met with some friends to read Alain Badiou’s book on the apostle Paul, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. I’d flicked through a couple of his books before, but this was the first time I’d read one through.  To brutally summarise it, Badiou, who wastes no time in telling you he has no time for the content of Paul’s gospel message, his God, or the supposed reality of the events to which Paul refers (Badiou designates it ‘fable’), is rather interested in the manner of Paul’s declaration as a universal address.  That is, it is to Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, men and women.  It addresses all in their singularity, without fragmenting truth into a fractal, regionally relative niche.  The declaration as addressing anybody, anywhere is what Badiou would like to take, shorn of any of the religious trappings.

In order to achieve this, he devotes his attention to a description of the apostle, and readings of some of his major letters (after he carefully notes which letters are acceptable, according to the historians he deems acceptable).  His reading of Paul is curious, and skewed at various points, but at others he has some intriguing insights.  The discussions of our reading group traversed this aspect quite a bit – just how good is Badiou’s reading of Paul?  Not that great we thought, but not without merit either.

My thought for today, however, is this.  I was reading some Marx at roughly the same time, and reflecting on where Marx opens his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte with the famous remarks on history (after Hegel) happening as tragedy and farce, including the following:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.  The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a mighty nightmare on the brain of the living.  And just when seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. (p.15)

Marx goes on to give Luther as an example, donning the mask of the apostle.  In Badiou’s puppetry of the apostle, has he simply fulfilled the farce of Marx’s thought here?  Is Badiou wishing to dress up his philosophy with the power of a Christian heritage that weighs on his brain like a mighty nightmare?  Moreover, I’m struck with how the rhetoric in the New Testament – although it appeals to the Law and Prophets, something Badiou seems uncomfortable with in his reading of Paul – is marked by the newness of the event.  The newness is, of course, something Badiou recognises, and wishes to appropriate.

Thoughts, anyone?

Filed under: Marx, books, history, quotations, random thoughts , 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Badiou, Marx, Saint Paul

Gods and materialism

I’m on holidays, and currently sitting in an internet cafe in Katoomba.  Thought I’d make a quick post though.  The opinion pages of yesterdays Herald were fascinating them.  Among them, this interesting piece on religion, materialism and Marxism:

“Religion resists the oppressive efficiency of time management because there is nothing to measure.  Atheists think that it’s the fatal weakness of the God idea that it lacks empirical verifiability.  But a world where everything is measurable and testable, and can be turned into a league table, is a world where competition can find its way into every nook and cranny of life.  This, in turn, allows no escape from the imnipresence of market forces.”

Also worth checking out was a fascinating article by Steve Biddulph predicting that the Greens party would replace the Liberals in opposition over the next two election cycles.

Filed under: Marx, Politics, media, quotations , escape from materialism, Newspapers, religion, Sydney Morning Herald, taking time out

End of history?

Check out Scott Stephens guest-posting over at Faith & Theology.  He’s a local commentator with a brilliant edge to his thinking, who has, among other things, edited a couple of volumes of Zizek’s collected writings.

He makes some interesting points on capitalism with the help of Marx, and it’s ability to absorb criticism and reproduce it as itself.  I wonder what this means for history?  The whole thing seems to have a whiff of an ‘end of history’ argument about it…

Filed under: Marx, history , capitalism, Marx, Scott Stephens