THIERRY DE DUVEHe ‘‘shares in a constitutive dimension of the divided human subject’’—which is right,
but in my view for quite different reasons.^13 Because God the Father relinquishes his
power of intervention in the realm of the incarnate beings that we are, everything comes
to pass as if He were acquiescing in turn to Joseph’s acquiescence; Joseph too refrained
from intervening in the process of incarnation. Or it is as if God were acknowledging
receipt of the foster father’s act of faith in the faith of his woman. It was addressed, but
to whom? Or it is as if He were replying to the launch of incarnation by approving all its
consequences, including the death of his Son and the radical redefinition of his own
paternity. I read God’s consent to the sacrifice of his Son in a light, almost disrespectful
way, free of pathos, because I see in God’s abstention from the course of earthly things
the very opposite of a mediation. The abandonment of the Son by the Father is neither
the negative moment in a dialectical process nor simply the ‘‘site’’ of the resurrection. It
refers back to Christ’s birth, and every birth is the particular resurrection of the life that
is transmitted through it—there is absolutely no need to believe in the Christian fable to
be in awe of this. In due course, women and the feminine should take, in this reading, a
place quite different from that in historical Christianity.
All I can do in this essay is point to a few possible directions. One brings us back to
the question of the other as recipient, as addressee. The universal address of the Christian
‘‘glad tidings’’ overlooks sexual difference, just as it overlooks ethnic and class differences.
St. Paul writes: ‘‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor
female’’ (Galatians, 3:28). How should we read this leveling of differences in universality?
It is fashionable to promote difference for difference’s sake, and those who give in to
fashion will be feminists, multiculturalists, and antiuniversalists, all in the same breath.
Politically speaking, this is neither very clever nor very relevant. Organically without truth,
says Badiou.^14 For all this, should the field be left open for the ‘‘ungendered’’ interpreta-
tion of Paul’s universalist message, as broadcast by the French Revolution when it trans-
lated it as ‘‘fraternity’’? We would be giving credit to the repression of the feminine when
it uses the so-called neutrality of the masculine as a pretext. Or, as Badiou does, should
we defend Paul by stressing the novelty of the ‘‘reversibility of the inegalitarian rule’’
introduced by him, in relation to the customs of the period?^15 I’m not sure that this is
sufficient, because Badiou clings to the ‘‘necessity of traversing and attesting to the differ-
ence between the sexesin order thatit become undifferentiated in universality.’’^16 In fact,
the difference between the sexes is not just any old difference. It is not contingent but
constitutive, and it is unclear whether it can or should be undifferentiated in universality,
especially when one envisions both the problem of the universal and the problem of
incarnation in terms of structure of address. It seems to me peculiar and quite valuable
that in most languages—in any event, in those spoken by Christianity—the pronoun of
address (the second person,you) makes no distinction between the genders, whereas the
pronoun of the referent (the third person,he,she) does. Ifyoudid so, there would be a
distribution of addressees as men and women. Let us not conclude that the pronoun of
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