THIERRY DE DUVEreceptiveness and the assumption of the place of the addressee rather than that of the
addressor in the structure of address are the substance of the Jewish act of faith, a sub-
stance that in this respect can be called feminine. (I wonder if it is not this cultural trait
of Judaism that explains intolerance of the other to have been so frequently focused at
once on hatred of the Jews and of the feminine). Badiou does not talk only about the
God of Christians, he also talks about what themonoinmonotheismmeans, and thus,
above all, about the Jewish God, when he says that ‘‘The One is that which inscribes no
difference in the subjects to which it addresses itself.’’ Not even sexual difference? The
pronoun of the address is two-gendered, and it becomes differentiated only on reception.
Mary receives Gabriel’s ‘‘I greetthee’’ as a woman. When Joseph acquiesces in Mary’s
acquiescence (and it doesn’t matter whether it is to an angel appearing to him in a dream
or to Mary directly), he also finds himself in a state of receptiveness vis-a`-vis a message
addressed to him, which the act of faith consists in welcoming. We can say that he wel-
comes it with his ‘‘feminine’’ side; we can also say that, in this act of faith in Mary, Joseph
behaves ‘‘like a Jew.’’ And it is the second stage of Joseph’s act of faith, his act of faith in
God whose address is his love for Mary, that transforms the Jewish God into the Christian
God, the God-Law into the God-Love. It took the sequence of these two successive acts
of faith on Joseph’s part to make love become the universal address of faith. It is not my
intent to minimize Mary’s part, quite the contrary; I merely want to alleviate and shift
her responsibility in the advent of the doctrine of incarnation. Even if they did not sleep
together, she and Joseph needed to get together as a couple to make it happen. They in
fact first brought God the Father into being, then God the Son only as the result of a
ricochet, if you’ll excuse the term. I use it with a dash of humor: like any earthly father,
God the Father awakens to his paternity nine months before the birth of his Son. The
unprecedented novelty is that He awakens at the very same time to a new definition of
paternity: God gets ‘‘Josephized’’ by becoming Father. (He is very rarely called ‘‘Father’’
in the Old Testament.)
Thirty-three years later, this God who is still the God of the Jews, but who is now
simply an agent of the law of the signifier and not the author of the Law, lets his Son die
on the cross. I said earlier that everything came to pass as if He acquiesced in turn in
Joseph’s acquiescence or as if He acknowledged receipt of the foster father’s act of faith in
the faith of his woman. He who throughout the Old Testament was the Sole Enunciator,
deaf—with a few memorable exceptions—to the prayers and entreaties of his people (this
deafness is an essential factor of his transcendence), finds himself in the addressee’s posi-
tion—in a ‘‘Jewish’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ position. ‘‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?’’ God does not reply; He acknowledges receipt, which is not the same thing. Insofar
as an acknowledgment of receipt is nonetheless a message sent back to the sender, God
does as He has always done when men’s prayers forced him to forego his deafness: He
talks through signs; Christ dies and the clouds darken. What is Christ’s death the sign of?
Not only of the fact that the Father has lost his omnipotence, but also of his acquiescence
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