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In this bold and provocative work, French philosopher Alain Badiou proposes a startling reinterpretation of St. Paul. For Badiou, Paul is neither the venerable saint embalmed by Christian tradition, nor the venomous priest execrated by philosophers like Nietzsche: he is instead a profoundly original and still revolutionary thinker whose invention of Christianity weaves truth and subjectivity together in a way that continues to be relevant for us today.
In this work, Badiou argues that Paul delineates a new figure of the subject: the bearer of a universal truth that simultaneously shatters the strictures of Judaic Law and the conventions of the Greek Logos. Badiou shows that the Pauline figure of the subject still harbors a genuinely revolutionary potential today: the subject is that which refuses to submit to the order of the world as we know it and struggles for a new one instead.
Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the E?cole normale sup�rieure and the Coll�ge international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works, including Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, Manifesto for Philosophy, and Gilles Deleuze. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy, Ethics, Metapolitics, Polemics, The Communist Hypothesis, Five Lessons on Wagner, and Wittgenstein's Anti-Philosophy.
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Ray Brassier
Translated by
Ray Brassier is Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut and a founding member of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR), which aims to promote critical thought and analysis with a special focus on Lebanon and the Middle East. His first book was Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. He is the translator of Alain Badiou's St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude. He edited Alain Badiou's Theoretical Writings (with Alberto Toscano), Nick Land's Fanged Noumena (with Robin Mackay), and Herbert Marcuse's Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Philosophy: Five Lectures. He lives in Beirut, Lebanon.
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