January 29th, 2013 at 4:21PM

Badiou’s Hope (By Way of Saint Paul)

Against this classic judicial eschatology, Paul seems instead to characterize hope as a simple imperative of continuation, a principle of tenacity, of obstinacy.  In Thessalonians I, faith is compared to striving (ergon), and love to grueling work, to the laborious, to the troublesome.  Hope, for its part, pertains to endurance, to perseverance, to patience: it is the subjectivity proper to the continuation of the subjective process.  — Alain Badiou,  Saint Paul: the Foundation of Universalism 

Hope not as wish for future judicial outcome, but as an element of the ongoing process of fidelity to (a) truth.  Hope is perseverance, which along with faith (striving) and love (working) forms a radically subjective and universal process which is liberated from desire, the “wish” that defines a particular and judicial object.

1 note #badiou#saint paul#universalism
May 30th, 2012 at 2:11PM
For each identification (the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that provides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory or territories. The semblance of non-equivalence is required so that equivalence itself can constitute a process. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments is this upsurge —taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities —of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs! And these infinite combinations of predictive traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth! Each time, a social image authorizes new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls, “free” radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady “public debates” at peak viewing times. Deluze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action; identities, moreover, that demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market. — Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism (via autochthones)

(via dagseoul)
21 notes #badiou