Normalcy and Deviation

The most decisive conceptual event of twentieth century physics has been the discovery that the world is not deterministic. Causality, long the bastion of metaphysics, was toppled, or at least tilted: the past does not determine exactly what happens next… A space was cleared for chance.

– Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 1990

In doing empirical psychology, the researcher attempts either to extend the applicability of a new or existing theory to a new range of phenomena. The researcher proposes a concrete hypothesis by adapting the abstract general theory to the specific empirical situation under study. Does the researcher’s hypothesis provide a better explanation of the data than the generally-accepted alternative explanation? This question is usually evaluated statistically, by investigating whether the pattern of empirical results varies significantly from what would be expected if the hypothesis were not true.

It’s often the case that the psychological researcher is exploring new territory: the kind of data s/he collects hasn’t previously been investigated scientifically. In that case the generally-accepted alternative is known as the “null hypothesis.” Usually the null hypothesis doesn’t take the form of a precise prediction about how the results will turn out; rather, it states that the results will not deviate from what one might expect to find by chance alone, unaffected by the theoretical forces which the researcher claims will affect the results in some predicted way. But “by chance alone” doesn’t mean unalloyed randomness; rather, it means that the results are expected to conform to the statistical distribution typically found in similar kinds of data sets. This is the normal distribution, better known as the bell curve, in which most subjects cluster around the arithmetic mean while the rest tail away toward the right and left of the mean. So if the mean for one group of subjects differs significantly from that of another group as predicted by the researcher’s hypothesis, taking into account the observed amount of random variation in the bell curve, then the null hypothesis is rejected: statistically it’s very likely that something other than randomness is affecting the results.

Why is it that, for so many measures of measurable human performance, randomness takes the shape of the normal distribution? In grad school and in subsequent practice I don’t recall that anyone ever really asked this question, let alone answered it satisfactorily. Here are some quotes from famous statisticians related to the issue, as cited by Ian Hacking in his fascinating book on the history of statistical thinking.

In a given state of society, a certain number of persons must put an end to their own life. This is the general law; and the special question as to who shall commit the crime depends of course upon special laws; which, however, in their total action, must obey the large social law to which they are all subordinate. And the power of the larger law is so irresistible, that neither the love of life nor the fear of another world can avail anything towards even checking its operation. (T.H. Buckle, 1857)

The irrational approval given to the so-called Calculus of Chances is enough to convince all men of sense how injurious to science has been this absence of control. Strange indeed would be the degeneration if the science of Calculation, the field in which the fundamental dogma of the invariability of Law first took its rise, were it to end its long course of progress in speculations that involve the hypotheses of the entire absence of Law. (August Comte, 1851)

‘By chance’ — that is the most ancient nobility of the world, and this I restored to all things: I delivered them from their bondage under purpose. (Friedrich Nietzsche in Zarathustra, 1884)

Collective tendencies have a reality of their own; they are forces as real as cosmic forces, though of another sort; they, likewise, affect the individual from without, though through other channels. The proof that the reality of collective tendencies is no less than that of cosmic forces is that this reality is demonstrated in the same way, by the uniformity of effects. (Emile Durkheim, 1897)

I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by ‘the law of error.’ A savage, if he could understand it, would worship it as a god. It reigns with severity in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob the greater the anarchy the more perfect is its sway. Let a large sample of chaotic elements be taken and marshalled in order of their magnitudes, and then, however wildly irregular they appeared, an unexpected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been present all along. (Francis Galton, 1886)

Galton turning over two different problems in his mind reached the conception of correlation: A is not the sole cause of B, but it contributes to the production of B; there may be other, many or few, causes at work, some of which we do not know and may never know… This measure of partial correlation was the germ of the broad category — that of correlation, which was to replace not only in the minds of many of us the old categories of causation, but deeply to influence our outlook on the universe. The concept of causation — unlimitedly profitable to the physicist — began to crumble to pieces. In no case was B simply and wholly caused by A, nor indeed by C, D, E, and F as well! It was really impossible to go on increasing the number of contributory causes until they might involve all the factors of the universe… Henceforward the philosophical view of the universe was to be that of a correlated system of variates, approaching but by no means reaching perfect correlation, i.e. absolute causality. (Karl Pearson, 1914)

Chance itself pours in at every avenue of sense: it is of all things the most obtrusive. That it is absolute is the most manifest of all intellectual perceptions. That it is a being, living and conscious, is what all the dullness that belongs to ratiocination’s self can self can scarce muster the hardihood to deny. (C.S. Peirce, 1893)

Rolling the Dice-Universe

My prior post on After Finitude looked at Meillassoux’s agenda for revivifying realism within continental philosophy. He wants to establish a basis for asserting the “facticity” of the world – its existence as an absolute independent of what and how people think about it:

We must grasp in facticity not the inaccessibility of the absolute but the unveiling of the in-itself and the eternal property of what is, as opposed to the mark of perennial deficiency in the thought of what is. (p. 52)

Prior rationales for the world’s facticity have relied either on God’s vouchsafing the truth of the world’s existence (Descartes) or on the reality of the world being structured in such a way that humans are able to perceive and to understand it (Kant). Both of these arguments ultimately rely on the world’s accessibility to human thought, on its intrinsic reasonableness. It’s a small step then to assert that there is a reason for the world’s reasonableness; i.e., of all the possible universes that could have come into existence, it’s hard to believe that chance alone would have generated one that is intrinsically comprehensible regardless of the minds doing the comprehending. Even more improbably, the universe retains its comprehensibility: the principles on which it is organized remain stable, effects predictably following causes rather than events randomly occurring or cause-effect relatonships changing capriciously from eon to eon or even from moment to moment. All this consistent reasonableness seems to imply that the universe came into being in such a way as to present itself to minds like ours; i.e., that the universe itself is contingent on sentience, such that sentience can only emerge in a universe where sentience “works.”

In other words, it is not absolutely necessary that causality governs all things, but if consciousness exists, then this can only be because there is a causality that necessarily governs phenomena. (p. 89)

At this point metaphysics throws up its hands. If the universe operates according to causal necessity, we can never know why this extremely unlikely possibility turned out to be the case. Meillassoux has no answer to this “why” question either. What he wants to question is the line of reasoning which suggests that a reason must be found. He does so by critiquing the improbability hypothesis; i.e., the idea that, among the vast number of a priori possibilities, a universe operating on the basis of stable cause-effect relationships would have been the one to manifest itself.

The idea that there is some underlying reason why, despite impossibly long odds, we live in a stable understandable universe is what Meillassoux calls the “necessitarian inference.”

The implicit principle governing the necessitarian inference now becomes clear: the latter proceeds by extending the probabilistic reasoning which the gambler applied to an event that is internal to our universe (the throw of the dice and its result), to the universe as such. This reasoning can be reconstructed as follows: I construe our own physical universe as one among an immense number of conceivable (i.e. non-contradictory) universes each governed by different sets of physical laws… Thus, I mentally construct a ‘dice-universe’ which I identify with the Universe of all universes, bound globally by the principle of non-contradiction alone, each face of which constitutes a single universe governed by a determinate set of physical laws. Then, for any situation given in experience, I roll these dice in my mind (I envisage all the conceivable consequences of this event), yet in the end, I find that the same result (given the same circumstances) always occurs; the dice-universe always lands with the face representing ‘my’ universe up. (p. 97)

Meillassoux’s critique of this hypothesized dice-universe is three-fold. First and all-too-briefly, Meillassoux (following Jean-René Vernes) contends that the whole logic of narrowing down from a priori possibilities to a single actuality is itself a product of human thought. In fact, the only real and absolute a priori is the universe as it is. The potentially limitless number of possibilities from which the actual emerged are actually the products of human imagination, contingent on the a priori fact that the really existing universe generated beings with the ability to imagine the nonexistent. There is no intrinsic reason to assert even the hypothetical reality of possibilities preceeding the actual.

Second, Meillassoux observes that, even if these a priori possibilities were real, the logic of statistical improbability doesn’t apply. Calculating the probability of an event’s occurrence depends on the ability to enumerate the possibilities; e.g., the chances of rolling a die and getting a 3 is one in six because we know a priori that the die has six sides, only one of which displays 3 pips. But what if someone rolls a die and you don’t know how many sides it has? Or what if, instead of turning up one of its sides, a rolled die transforms itself into a bird and flies away, or splits itself into two dice? In that sort of crap game all bets are off. It’s not possible to quantify, even theoretically, the universe of all the possibities of which the actual universe is an element or a subset. The possibilities may be infinite and inconceivable, or they may be zero. Therefore, says Meillassoux, statistical reasoning can’t legitimately be applied to the problem.

Third, just because we can presumably enumerate the universe of possibilities a priori doesn’t mean that each possibility is equally likely. E.g., suppose you roll a 6-sided die and it turns up a 3 ten times in a row, or a hundred times, or a million times. On grounds of pure chance this outcome is almost infinitesimally unlikely, suggesting that some other principle is at work causing the die to turn up 3 over and over again. But if we’re playing with a loaded die, the other five sides never come up because they can’t – they’re hypothetical possibilities that can never actualize themselves. As Meillassoux observes, chance itself is nothing other than a certain type of physical law (p. 99).

M by Lang, 1931

But I can’t help it! I can’t… I really can’t… help it! What would you know? What are you talking about? Who are you anyway? Who are you? All of you. Criminals. Probably proud of it, too… proud you can crack a safe or sneak into houses or cheat at cards. All of which it seems to me you could just as easily give up if you had learned something useful, or if you had jobs or if you weren’t such lazy pigs.

But me? Can I do anything about it? Don’t I have this cursed thing inside me? This fire, this voice, this agony? I have to roam the streets endlessly, always sensing that someone’s following me. It’s me! I’m shadowing myself! Silently… but I still hear it! Yes, sometimes I feel like I’m tracking myself down. I want to run… run away from myself! But I can’t! I can’t escape from myself! I must take the path that it’s driving me down and run and run down endless streets! I want off! And with me run the ghosts of the mothers and children. They never go away. They’re always there! Always! Always!

Except… when I’m doing it… when I… Then I don’t remember a thing. Then I’m standing before a poster, reading what I’ve done. I read and read… I did that? I don’t remember a thing!

But who will believe me? Who knows what it’s like inside me? How it screams and cries out inside me when I have to do it! Don’t want to! Must! Don’t want to! Must! And then a voice cries out, and I can’t listen anymore!

Help! I can’t! I can’t!

Contacting the Real

The theory of primary and secondary qualities seems to belong to an irremediably obsolete past. It is time it was rehabilitated.

So Quentin Meillassoux begins his extended essay After Finitude (2006, English translation 2008). Briefly, a primary quality is a property of the world (e.g., the shape and size of an object); a secondary quality is the way a person subjectively experiences a property of the world (e.g., the color of an object). It’s become almost axiomatic to deny the very possibility of detecting primary qualities because all our awareness of the world is mediated by our sensations of these properties: we can detect the world only in the way we detect its presentation to us. This isn’t to say that the world doesn’t exist outside of our awareness of it: it’s just that we have no direct access to the world.

Meillassoux finds it ironic that, at the very moment in history when science began developing methods for decentring knowledge of the world from human subjectivity, philosophy began insisting that no such absolute knowledge could be attained. In its persistent linguistic turn, continental philosophy asserts that truth is a property not of the world but of statements, and that the words we use to describe the world gain their meaning not from the world but from the structural interconnections between the words. Language came to be understood as an interconnected system of meanings detached from the features of the world the words purport to signify. So the word “hot,” as well as the concept to which the applies, gains its meaning not from the features of the world but from its contrast with the word “cold” in ordinary social discourse. Meillassoux observes that this disconnect between signifiers and signifieds is dogmatically asserted by philosophers even as scientists refine the measurement systems intended to disconnect the words “hot” and “cold” from their manifestation to our senses.

[T]he Copernico-Galilean decentring carried out by modern science gave rise to a Ptolemaic counter-revolution in philosophy… While modern science discovered for the first time thought’s capacity to accede to knowledge of a world indifferent to thought’s relation to the world, philosophy reacted to this discovery by discovering the naivety of its own previous ‘dogmatism’, seeing in the ‘realism’ of pre-Critical metaphysics the paradigm of a decidedly outmoded conceptual naivety… [S]cience’s decentring of thought relative to the world led philosophy to conceive of this decentring in terms of thought’s unprecedented centrality relative to the same world. Since 1781 (the date of the 1st edition of [Kant’s] Critique of Pure Reason), to think science philosophically has been to maintain that philosophical Ptolemaism harbors the deeper meaning of scientific Copernicanism. Ultimately, philosophy maintains that the patently realist meaning of the claims of modern science is merely apparent, secondary, and derivative; the symptom of an attitude that is ‘naive’ or ‘natural. (p. 118f.)

Meillassoux regards the Ptolemaic counter-revolution in continental philosophy as a big mistake. He maintains as philosophically sound one of the fundamental premises of empirical science:

all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object itself. (p. 3)

He’s not very thorough in justifying mathematics’ unique status in achieving direct and absolute contact with the Real; rather, he tends toward proclamation:

it is meaningful to think (even if only on a hypothetical register) that all those aspects of the given that are mathematically describable can continue to exist regardless of whether or not we are there to convert the latter into something that is given-to or manifested-for. (p. 117)

In reading along with Meillassoux my first reaction was to minimize the distinction Meillassoux makes between language and mathematics. Isn’t mathematics, like language if not more so, a structured system of signifiers decoupled from the things in the world they signify? Doesn’t any single number or operation derive its meaning from the others in the larger system? Doesn’t advancement in scientific understanding depend in part on the human invention of new kinds of mathematics; e.g., the number zero in the 2nd century or so, the contemporary situation in physics where future advances in N-dimensional string theory depend on mathematical theory that hasn’t yet been completely thought through and formalized? Perhaps most importantly, aren’t the mathematics of scientific formulae and hypotheses mapped onto theoretical constructs that must be stated linguistically?

While I still think all that’s true, I think it’s fruitful to follow Meillassoux’s lead and extend the recision of the philosophical Ptolemaic counter-revolution from mathematics to language. Like mathematics, language is a tool for separating the world from our direct experience of it. When something “goes without saying,” it’s inextricable from subjective and intersubjective experience — this is how infants and other animals experience the world. To say something about the world is to call someone else’s attention to a particular feature of the world. To arrive at interpersonal understanding of meaning is at least in part contingent on arriving at an agreement about what the words refer to in the world. Science formalizes the process of linguistic precision by continually refining the “operational” definitions of terms. Operationalization is an intersubjective process, but the agreement refers specifically and precisely to the way in which a term describes a feature of the world that’s not dependent on the perceptions of any particular scientist. Operationalization entails a formalization of language that veers toward mathematics, further blurring the distinction between these two registers of thought.

It’s not necessary to assert that mathematics or language represent the real world, or that mathematico-linguistic structure mirrors the structure of the world. It’s also not necessary to assert a raw materialism, in which scientific knowledge entails the direct apprehension of the world as it presents itself to us. Meillassoux observes that

very few truths can be attained through immediate experience and that generally speaking, science is not based upon simple observations, but rather upon data that have already been processed and quantified by ever more elaborate measuring instruments. (p. 114)

Scientific assertions about the world aren’t just refined observations; they are, says Meillassoux, “part of a cognitive process.” It’s “only” necessary to claim that empirically-grounded cognitive processes, of which science is a particularly refined version, make it possible to describe the world in a way that’s at least partially separable from our subjective and intersubjective experiences of it.

Meillassoux acknowledges that he’s not able — yet — to demonstrate the ability of mathematics to give us access to the primary qualities of the world. Rather, he’s making an argument for pursuing a line of philosophical investigation broadly construed as “speculative realism.” He wants to reopen to serious inquiry “the most urgent question which science poses to philosophy;” namely, the possibility of arriving at true thoughts about the world that don’t depend entirely on human subjective thought processes. Meillassoux wants to answer this question through mathematical realism; I think he should extend this exploration also to linguistic realism.

On the Bus

Riding the bus from Denver International back to Boulder, I noticed that the young fellow sitting across the aisle from me was so ruddy of face, so florid, that I thought maybe he’d been in a fire. His hair was pale nearly to the point of transparency, so I figured he’s probably just one of those very fair-complected, nearly albinic people who can’t tolerate sun in even the smallest doses. I gave this guy a pretty good once-over because he kept looking up from his scholarly-looking hardback book in order to glance at me. Finally I caught his eye and smiled, inviting him to explain his evident interest in me. “You look just like Robert Fripp,” he said. Really? “You know Robert Fripp?” Yes. “I mean, you know who he is?” Yeah, sure. “And no one has ever told you you look like him?” No, can’t say as they have, although after all I am a twenty-first century schizoid man. “I know the song,” the red-faced fellow replied, “but mostly I’ve come to know his newer stuff, since about 2000.” When at last the bus arrived at my stop I nodded amicably toward the musically-inclined scholar. “Check out Robert Fripp’s picture on the internet,” was his parting remark, and, disembarking, I promised to do so.

So here’s an image. I suppose I can see the resemblance, although Fripp is far older than I am.

By way of contrast, here’s a recent photo of me taken at the circus. I think you’ll agree that the differences are striking.

Gone With the Wind, 1939

Abandoned by Rhett, Scarlett drapes herself decoratively across the grand stairway of her Atlanta pied-à-terre:

“I can’t let him go, I can’t! There must be some way to bring him back. Oh, I can’t think about it now — I’ll go crazy if I do. I’ll think about it tomorrow… But I must think about it, I must think about it. What is there to do? What is there that matters?”

Scarlett lapses into a fugue state, in which voices from the past swirl around the soundtrack:

(Her father) “You don’t mean to tell me, Katie Scarlett O’Hara, that Tara doesn’t mean anything to you? Why land’s the only thing that matters. It’s the only thing that lasts.”

(Ashley) “Something you love better than me, though you may not know it: Tara.”

(Somebody else, I think maybe her second husband) “It’s this from which you get your strength: the red earth of Tara.”

Rousing herself from her hysterical torpor, Scarlett makes a decision:

“Tara! Home. I’ll go home. And I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, etc.”

THE END

An Affair to Remember, 1957

UPDATE, 7 August 08 — And now here are the parallel scenes from Love Affair, 1939. The quality of the print isn’t very good, so the images aren’t as clear.

I didn’t include the parallel to the scene by the villa overlooking the sea. The 1957 version takes place in Villefranche, which is the next town over from Nice where we used to live, and so I included the screen shot for personal nostalgia’s sake. In the original 1939 version the events take place on Madeira, which looks lovely as well.

Law Versus Love

[This post concludes a series of four on Saint Paul by Alain Badiou.]

“For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law. Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the grounds of their faith and the uncircumcised through faith.” (Paul in Romans 3:28-30)

God is One, not as an abstract Greek principle of Oneness but as the one God for everyone without exception. Israel is the exception, and the Mosaic Law marks its particularity. Law functions according to an economy of what is due, establishing conditions of righteousness on the basis of mutual obligations. The Christ event operates outside of law as an act of grace, a gift that exceeds all contractual and juridical exchange. Likewise participation in the Christ event entails no fulfillment of contractual rights or duties: this act of subjectivation takes place outside of law. The place of the universal, of the oneness of God, is to be encountered not in universal law but in the gratuitous event that surpasses Law. And it is through this unlawful encounter with the universal that the subject escapes from his static legal coordinates on the structural grid and emerges as a revolutionary agent of the unprecedented and the underdetermined. In surpassing the intricate structure of particularities prescribed by law, the gracious event of the resurrection opens up the possibility of difference on a universal scale.

The profound ontological thesis here is that universalism supposes one be able to think the multiple not as a part, but as in excess of itself, as that which is out of place, as a nomadism of gratuitousness. If by “sin” one understands the subjective exercise of death as path of existence, and hence the legal cult of particularity, one thereby understands that what is maintained of the event (which is to say, a truth, whatever it may be) is always in impredictable excess of everything circumscribed by “sin.” (Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 78 )

In other words, the law establishes a reticulum of obligations which defines violation and its consequences. It’s this whole system that turns the person into a dead object of impersonal systemic operations. Badiou contends that this whole economy of dead life is what Paul means by “sin.” The two subjective paths, death and life, whose nonrelation constitutes the divided subject, are also two types of multiplicity. The particularizing multiplicity of the law prescribes its own limits; the universal multiplicity of the event exceeds the legal limit, exceeds its own limit.

But why is law so closely associated with sin? Here Badiou picks up the complex theme of desire by exploring the labyrinth of what he calls Paul’s most famous, yet also most intricate text : Romans 7.

“If it had not been for the Law, i should never have known sin. I should not have known what it is to covet if the Law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, wrought in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the Law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the Law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died; the very commandment that promised life proved death to me. For sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, seduced me and by it killed me.” (Romans 7:7-11)

Paul says that, before he became aware of the Law, he was alive: his desire was free and he was free to desire. So sin isn’t desire; rather,

Sin is the life of desire as autonomy, as automatism. The law is required in order to unleash the automatic life of desire, the automatism of repetition. For only law fixes the object of desire, binding desire to it regardless of the subject’s will. It is this objectal automatism of desire, inconceivable without the law, that assigns the subject to the carnal path of death. Clearly, what is at issue here is nothing less than the problem of the unconscious (Paul calls it the involuntary, what I do not want). The life of desire fixed and unleashed by the law is that which, decentered from the subject, accomplishes itself as an unconscious automatism. (p. 79)

The law defines prohibition; transgression takes place when the object of prohibition becomes the object of desire. It’s in this way that the law produces desire in the subject, regardless of what the subject wants. The subject loses his autonomy and instead becomes a dead object in the automatic operation of the law that links prohibition to desire. In order to break with the automatized death of the prohibition/desire/sin complex, Paul concludes that it’s necessary to break with the law.

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate… So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells in me.” (Romans 6:16-17)

The extreme tension running through this text comes from the fact that Paul is striving to articulate a de-centering of the subject, a particularly contorted form of its division. Since the subject of life is in the place of death and vice versa, it follows that knowledge and will, on the one hand, agency and action, on the other are entirely disconnected. This is the empirically verifiable essence of existence according to the law. Moreover, a parallel can be drawn between this de-centering and the Lacanian interpretation of the cogito (there where I think, I am not, and there where I am, I do not think.) Let us generalize a little. For Paul, the man of the law is one in whom doing is separated from thinking. Such is the consequence of seduction by commandment. This figure of the subject, wherein the division lies between the dead Self and the involuntary automation of living desire, is, for thought, a figure of powerlessness. Basically, sin is not so much a fault as living thought’s inability to prescribe action. Under the effect of the law, thought disintegrates into powerlessness and endless cogitation, because the subject (the dead Self) is disconnected from a limitless power, that of desire’s living automation. (p. 83)

In Badiou’s reading of Paul, salvation is the empowerment of the subject when thinking is no longer divided from doing. Instead of being incapable of controlling the movement of autonomous desires that animate him like a zombie, the saved person knows what he wants and is able to do it. But thought can only be raised up to the position of power by something that exceeds static thought. “Grace” is the name of the excess; “resurrection” is the source of the power, and “love” is its name.

The Self is a closed form of the subject, divided against itself, impotent in its cogitations, animated by outside forces operating beneath conscious awareness, occupying the place of the dead. “Christ” is the name of the resurrected subject, open to the grace that exceeds all fixed boundaries assigned by the letter of the law. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:6, “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” There is a law of the spirit (Romans 7:14), universal but nonliteral, that gives consistency to the life of the resurrected subject. The subject is faithful to the truth of the event that brings him life, and it is this faithfulness that is the unwritten law of love. Life itself becomes the universal law, a law of possibility made manifest in the unique trajectory of each subject who lives it.

Faith publicly acknowledges that the subjective apparatus commanded by the law is not the only possible one. But it becomes apparent that faith, confessing the resurrection of one man, merely declares a possibility for everyone. That a new assemblage of life and death is possible is borne out by resurrection, and this is what must first be declared. But this conviction leaves the universalization of the “new man” in suspense and says nothing as to the content of the reconciliation between living thought and action. Faith says: We can escape powerlessness and rediscover that from which the law separated us. Faith prescribes a new possibility, on that, although real in Christ, is not, as yet, in effect for everyone. (p. 88 )

“He who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law,” Paul says in Romans 13:8. To love your neighbor as yourself is to apprehend the neighbor by faith and hope, according to the universal law of possibility, not as a dead self but as a living subject. In Paul’s thought, says Badiou, love is precisely fidelity to the Christ-event… love bears the force of salvation. The resurrection life is not a solitary one; it is relational, and militantly so. Love is the work we do together that actualizes the possibility of grace universally.

Flesh and Spirit

το γαρ ϕρονημα της σαρκος θανατος, το δε ϕρονημα του πνευματου ζωη και ειρηνη. “For the flesh’s way of thinking is death; but the spirit’s way of thinking is life and peace.” (Paul in Romans 8:6)

After centuries during which this theme has been subjected to Platonizing (and therefore Greek) amendment, it has become almost impossible to grasp what is nevertheless a crucial point: The opposition between spirit and flesh has nothing to do with the opposition between the soul and the body. That is precisely why both the one and the other are thoughts. (Badiou, Saint Paul, pp. 55-56)

Badiou contends that, confronted with the “Christ-event” of death and resurrection, the subject finds himself divided in how he grasps and responds to that event. But this inner division isn’t the movement of a dialectic, whereby through the negation of the negation death is supplanted by resurrected life. Rather, the two moments are held in tension simultaneously and continually until the moment when resurrection suddenly comes forth out from the power of death, not through its negation. Paul doesn’t laud the redemptive efficacy of suffering as a means of mortifying the flesh and bringing forth the spirit. Suffering is inevitable in this world, but the Christ event offsets suffering with the consolation of hope. [Note: in Romans 5:3ff, when Paul writes that he exults in tribulation because it brings about hope, he’s not saying that the tribulation burns away his doubt, making him a more hopeful person. Rather, he’s saying that hope is what lets him exult while in the midst of tribulation. Both tribulation and hope, death and life, flesh and spirit, are present in him at the same time.] When Paul describes his own sufferings in some detail in 2 Cor. 11, he does so only to emphasize his own weakness, bearing the precious gift in an earthen vessel, in contrast to the discourse of power to which the Jews are accustomed.

Let us propose a formula: in Paul, there is certainly the Cross, but no path of the Cross. There is Calvary, but no ascent of Calvary. Energetic and urgent, Paul’s preaching includes no masochistic propaganda extolling the virtues of suffering, no pathos of the crown of thorns, flagellation, oozing blood, or the gall-soaked sponge. (pp. 67-68 )

Death cannot bring salvation because death is on the side of the flesh. He’s not talking about flesh as body, destined to perish while the soul lives forever. After all, the glory of the Christ event is the resurrection, the glorified body. Rather, the flesh is a ϕρονημα, a way of thinking about everything, including the body and the soul. Paul’s response to the ϕρονημα of the flesh is a resolute “no”. No to law and self-abnegation; likewise no to transgressive desire and self-gratification; most importantly, no to death. Paul says “yes” to the ϕρονημα of the spirit, to the uniqueness of the Christ event, to the resurrection.

In sum, death is only required insofar as, with Christ, divine intervention must, in its very principle, become strictly equal to the humanity of man, and hence to the thought that dominates him, which as subject is called “flesh,” and as object “death.” When Christ dies, we, mankind, shall cease to be separated from God, since by filiating Himself with the sending of his Son, He enters into the most intimate proximity to our thinking composition. Such is the unique necessity of Christ’s death: it is the means to an equality with God himself. Through this thought of the flesh, whose real is death, is dispensed to us in grace the fact of being in the same element as God himself. Death here names a renunciation of transcendence. Let us say that Christ’s death sets up an immanentization of the spirit. (p. 69)

Next: law versus love.