Martin Buber's Theopolitics

This Pathless Hour | 265

succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the

century, which can be said to have been that of the party militant.^86

For Badiou, contemporary cultural and historical relativism too easily accom-
modates the false universality of global capitalism, and it can be challenged only
by another universalism. The necessary militancy of that universalism is Ba-
diou’s insistent theme.
Like Agamben, Badiou sees Paul as opposing two dominant discourses. But
whereas Agamben sees apostleship as a new attitude to messianic time, situated
between the prophetic and the apocalyptic, for Badiou apostleship is an attitude
to dominance, situated between the Jewish prophet (constructed, as in Agamben,
as a figure who speaks of the future) and the Greek philosopher. “If one demands
signs,” Badiou writes, “he who performs them in abundance becomes a master
for him who demands them. If one questions philosophically, he who can reply
becomes a master for the perplexed subject. But he who declares without pro-
phetic or miraculous guarantees, without arguments or proof, does not enter into
the logic of the master.”^87 Paul is the spokesperson of weakness, claiming no va-
lidity for his message other than the message itself. Badiou notes that in contrast
to much later Christian tradition, Paul “firmly holds to the militant discourse of
weakness,” refraining from either miraculous demonstration or philosophical
proof. Paul’s fidelity to the crucified messiah has a lesson for anyone who “is the
subject of a truth (of love, of art, or science, or politics).”^88 Attempts to convince
others through logos, or signs, or mystical testimony, seem pious but in reality
they claim power for one’s self. The faithful subject knows that only the event and
the fidelity to it ensure subjecthood.
Badiou’s insistence on militancy, however, risks being untrue to his insights
into fidelity:

The lengthy years of communist dictatorship will have had the merit of show-

ing that financial globalization, the absolute sovereignty of capital’s empty

universality, had as its only genuine enemy another universal project, albeit a

corrupt and bloodstained one: that only Lenin and Mao truly frightened those

who proposed to boast unreservedly about the merits of liberalism and the

general equivalent, or the democratic virtues of commercial communication.^89

Badiou takes the ability to generate fear, the historical “success” of state commu-
nism, as an index of its effectiveness. Since this fear, according to Badiou, arises
for those in power (little is said here of the fear of communism felt by the power-
less), this indexing is one more way in which Badiou belongs to those who, despite
refuting the state, as Agamben suggests, “are often unable to liberate themselves
from a point of view of the state.”^90 If the function of the militant in Badiou’s text
is only “the public declaration of the event by its name,” then why the need to
measure?^91 The temptation to measure the effectiveness of militancy through its
ability to generate fear among the enemies of the event may be understood as an