Radical incarnation

Abstract

In his 1997 pamphlet Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Alain Badiou pointed to the cynical interaction between the burgeoning identitarian movements and neoliberal capitalism. As a bulwark against these tendencies, he proposed a creative reinterpretation of Christian universalism inspired by the Pauline letters. This article revisits Badiou’s argument in light of recent debates on the limits of identity politics. First, it gives a brief overview of Badiou’s innovative and thought-provoking reading of Paul, which gave significant impulses to the politico-philosophical debate in the subsequent years. Second, it discusses some of the lacunas of Badiou’s interpretation of Christian universalism. More specifically, it ponders whether these lacunas may help to explain why the radical left-wing universalism of the 2000s never really took off, but was instead replaced with radicalized identitarian movements on the political left as well as the political right. Finally, it argues that the Christian tradition of universalism nonetheless has significant insights to offer contemporary political philosophy. However, this will require that it learns from its past sins, notably its tendencies of legitimizing supersessionist patterns throughout history. The clue to such a “post-critical” Christian universalism, it is argued, lies in a radicalized emphasis on the incarnational nature of Christianity.

Last year, the half-forgotten word “postmodernism” was once more brought into public debate in Sweden. The debate was prompted by yet another endeavour by a politically conservative writer to detect in postmodernism the roots of all the social evils that we experience today, from the crisis in academia to cultural relativism and its purported indulgence with honour related violence and religious extremism.¹ It is noteworthy that the only time the concept ever appears nowadays seems to be precisely when it is used by conservative thinkers as a metonym for ideas and theories thought to have caused the current cultural and intellectual decay – something which may also explain why those who once used it for constructive purposes eventually dropped it.

As someone partly responsible for introducing the term in the Scandinavian theological context, this latest round of the debate has given me reason to return to the early 1990s and reflect on the ideas, trends and broader theoretical developments that were by then generally referred to as “postmodern”. Although the philosophical and aesthetic theories usually associated with the term had been around since the 1960s or at least 70s, it was by this time that these theories became bread and butter in academia, with catch words such as “discourse”, “identity”, “difference” and “the Other”, whether you were studying literature, theology, philosophy or history. These trends in the academic world at once mirrored and encouraged developments in the broader culture. The 1990s were marked by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, which by many was hailed as the end of the grand oppressive ideologies of the twentieth century. Furthermore, this was also a decade when an array of seemingly homogenous societies – for instance the Scandinavian ones – rapidly moved towards becoming ethnically and culturally diversified nations. Finally, these were the years when what was at the time labelled the “gay movement” had its breakthrough in the public sphere and in a rather short period of time prompted a vast change in attitudes towards LGBT+ people among the broader population.

I am recalling these developments as a reminder and explanation of why the new attention to the particular at this time in history felt so liberating. I can here only refer to myself as a young student. When I finished secondary school in the late 1980s, I had never, knowingly, met a non-heterosexual person, and to the extent that I had ever heard of other sexual orientations, it was exclusively as something deeply abnormal if not outright condemnable. Ten years later, it was such attitudes that were seen as crude and bigoted. Similarly, in the Swedish society in which I grew up, few people ever reflected on the flipside of the hegemonic narrative of the “people’s home” (folkhemmet) and the blessings of the welfare state. However, by the time I finished university in the late 1990s, this self-congratulatory narrative had been markedly shaken by a series of debates drawing attention to more sinister episodes of Swedish modernity, such as the stigmatization and marginalization of the Romani people, or the practice of compulsory sterilization of individuals deemed to be socially unfit, a practice that was formally abolished only in 1976.²

When confronted with the kind of slandering rhetoric on “postmodernism” or “cultural relativism” that has now become commonplace, it is therefore important to return to these years and remind ourselves why the academic preoccupation with difference, otherness and identity were seen as both necessary and needed. All that being said, it is true that the same words today, almost three decades later, do not immediately evoke senses of liberation and social progress. To be sure, the latest – powerful – wave of the Black Lives Matter movement could very well be seen as one of the fruits of the critical work carried out by postmodern and postcolonial theorists, aimed at giving recognition to marginalized groups and identifying racist structures at various levels of society. But in more recent years, the very same rhetoric of identity and difference has increasingly been seized upon by far-right networks as a means to legitimize their vision of a cultural order based on the separation of “supreme” and “inferior” races, giving a bitter aftertaste to the concept of cultural pluralism as it is turned into toxic notions of “ethnopluralism” and “right to difference”.³

Without losing sight of the particularizing discourses of past decades, this ongoing development of polarization in the political landscape certainly calls for a new reflection on universalism – on what a renewed public conversation about what unites people, rather than what divides them might look like. In this article, I will undertake this task by returning to the creative reinterpretation of Christian universalism offered by Alain Badiou in his 1997 pamphlet, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.⁴ Badiou’s innovative and thought-provoking reading of Paul had a huge impact and gave significant impulses to the politico-philosophical debate in the subsequent years. However, as those who have followed this debate know, the call for a new universalism by thinkers such as Badiou and Slavoj Žižek never really took off. As already hinted at, the past decade has instead been marked by radicalized identitarian movements on the political left as well as the political right. In the second part, I will ponder this development by pointing to some of the lacunas of Badiou’s interpretation of Christian universalism, which I think can be linked to his inability to account for differences and identities in a nuanced and reflective manner. Finally, I will reflect on whether such a thing as Christian universalism is still possible, let alone desirable, in the fragmented and polarized times we are living in. I will argue that the Christian tradition of universalism indeed has significant insights to offer contemporary political philosophy. However, this will require that it learns from its past sins, notably its tendencies of legitimizing both supersessionist and imperialist patterns throughout history. The clue to such a “post-critical” Christian universalism, I contend, lies in a radicalized emphasis on the incarnational nature of Christianity, hence the title of this article.

A materialist reinterpretation of Christian universalism

Returning to Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism with almost twenty-five years of hindsight, one aspect of his analysis stands out as particularly perceptive. In a time when notions of identity and difference were still untarnished and, in most contexts, had only positive connotations, Badiou discerned a more sinister process going on beneath the surface. More specifically, he pointed to the cynical interaction between the burgeoning identitarian movements and a voracious market, profiting from our relentless pursuit of our own special interests. It seemed, in other words, as though the new-found esteem for the particular fit hand in glove with capitalist market logic: for every new identity, there was a new potential body of consumers to exploit in the form of special magazines, “free” radio stations, or fashion products serving as identity markers.⁵

And yet Badiou’s concern was not primarily about the economic exploitation going on here. His real concern was instead about the fate of the political left. Not that he doubted that identitarian movements were for the most part driven by emancipatory motives, aiming at liberation and recognition of people on the fringe. But in splitting up the struggle for a just society into countless particular endeavours – sometimes at odds with each other – the left was increasingly undermining its own universal ideals. The devastating result of this was an ongoing collapse of public space, in which no-one any longer held anything for really true or important. All that mattered was that one’s own identity was preserved, irrespective of whether society as a whole grew more and more unequal.⁶

This was the point at which Badiou – somewhat unexpectedly given his materialist background – turned to Paul the Apostle. Badiou was not, however, interested in Paul as a religious figure. What attracted him was the structural level of Paul’s argument, his “unprecedented gesture” of subtracting truth from any particular group’s attempt to possess it. In contrast to such relativizing of the truth, Paul instead proclaimed a truth that directed itself to every single subject, most manifestly expressed in his famous words in the third chapter of Galatians: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:28). We can already here discern Badiou’s intention to use Paul as a bulwark against the ongoing fragmentation of the left. What Paul offers is nothing less than a role model for a new kind of political subject, a subject that is defined not by ethnic origin, social class or gender identity. What gives this subject its true identity is instead a fidelity towards a revolutionary event capable of shaking the existing order in its foundations. In Paul’s case, the event at stake was the salvatory message of the risen Christ. But as already indicated, Badiou’s interest lay rather in the general pattern that Paul established for political thinking, beyond any particular message.⁷

Although Badiou turned to Paul with the aim of formulating a new universalism, it is nonetheless important to recognize that he was not playing out universalism against particularism in any simplifying way. On the contrary, he found in Paul an attempt to come to terms with the exclusive claims of Jewish particularism as well as with the abstract universalism of the Roman Empire. Paul’s announcement of the risen Christ in fact involved a radical break with both. Against the abstract universalism of the Empire, Paul counterposed a truth that spoke to every single subject: “all of you are one in Christ Jesus”. Yet this did not mean that he sought a new, restricted community which would be united under the predicate “Christian”. Paul’s greatness lay precisely in how he undermined any claim to possess the truth on the basis of a particular identity or tradition. It is also from this radical perspective that Badiou interprets Paul’s famous distinction between law and grace. For Badiou, grace denotes that which occurs “without predicate” – the miracle of new life, or in political terms, the unforeseeable advent of an order other than the present one. Law, on the contrary, is that which forces us to remain at our post: “The law is always predicative, particular, and partial”.⁸ Hence Paul’s endeavour to suspend the law. In Badiou’s interpretation, Paul saves the redemptory message from remaining an internal Jewish concern by literally declaring the law invalid for non-Jews. The messianic or revolutionary event thus constitutes a break with the law, a “pure excess over every prescription”.⁹

I shall leave aside the question about the plausibility of this rendering of Paul’s teaching on law and grace, albeit with the remark that few biblical scholars today would agree that Paul sought to suspend the law in such a categorical way.¹⁰ The reason why I nonetheless want to foreground Badiou’s juxtaposition of law and grace is that I see it as indicative of some of the problems that adhere to his political thinking. Before turning to these problems, however, let me first briefly summarize what I still see as valuable in his political analysis from the late 1990s. When Badiou pointed to the cynical interaction between market liberalism and cultural relativism, he probably did not foresee the current appropriation of identity politics by the far right (although one may fairly argue that he should have been familiar with the tendency through the steady growth of the National Front from the late 1980s onwards). What he did foresee, however, was the danger of progressive ideologies running out of steam, as their energy was increasingly channelled into competing identitarian struggles. Today, a few decades later, many emancipatory struggles seem to be governed by the premise that one’s interests and aims are defined primarily by cultural, ethnic or gender identity. However, the fact that nationalist ideologies today increasingly draw on a rhetoric of identity and difference is in itself enough a reason to call for a renewed critical reflection on the consequences of political and ideological visions that place too much emphasis on cultural and racial particularity.¹¹ Against this background, Badiou’s call for a new public discourse on what unites us rather than what divides us has lost nothing of its urgency.

Making difference between differences

So, why was it that Badiou’s bid for a new political universalism never really took off? Despite the fact that Badiou and his fellow combatant, Slavoj Žižek, gained the status of influential intellectual icons during the 2000s, the general tendency in academic as well as public debate has rather been an increased emphasis on particularity in the political struggle for social justice. The #MeToo movement as well as the Black Lives Matter movement are just the latest reminders that struggle for recognition and emancipation in a significant sense gain their force from particular experiences of oppression rather than from a universal idea of human equality.

I am not claiming to have an exhaustive answer as to why the universalist trend among some political philosophers by the turn of the century soon faded. However, by pointing to some of the flaws of the universalism Badiou offers through his reading of Paul, I think there are insights to be gained that may help us reflect more constructively on how to strike a good balance between universal ideals of emancipation on the one hand, and the need to take into account particular experiences of oppression on the other. To be sure, Badiou himself claims to be offering precisely such a balance when he places Paul in the tension between the abstract universalism of the Empire and the ethnic particularism of the Jewish covenant. By contrast, I shall argue that Badiou ultimately fails to account for particularity in a trustworthy way, and that his political thinking is permeated by a lack of sensitivity for concrete material circumstances.

This brings me back to my claim that Badiou’s reading of the Pauline notions of law and grace is indeed symptomatic of a larger pattern in his philosophy. Despite Paul’s clearly manifested will to adhere to the law of his people while simultaneously struggling to come to terms with non-Jews’ relationship to the law, Badiou places all emphasis on Paul’s purported suspension of the law. The message conveyed by this reading is that the law, as a metonym for the particular, stands in the way of true liberation: the law is always “predicative, particular, and partial”, in contrast to grace, which occurs “without predicate”.¹²

On the one hand, this idea of liberation as radical disruption with existing orders merely mirrors Badiou’s general political temperament: as a sworn Rousseauian, true politics for Badiou consists in revolutionary moments of will and decision. On the other hand, these voluntarist and decisionist elements of his thinking betray a disregard for the specific historical, social and cultural conditions that surround any emancipatory movement. His portrait of Paul is in this respect revealing. As Daniel Boyarin has remarked, Badiou’s account of Paul is permeated by a kind of “Christian-Platonic spiritualization” that, when all is said and done, shows negligible interest in the concrete material circumstances that ultimately made Paul the radical figure he was. What interests Badiou is the revolutionary structure of the event announced by Paul, not the unique mixture of memories, narratives and experiences that allowed the announced event – Christ’s resurrection – to have any meaning for Paul and his addressees.¹³

I share Boyarin’s critical concerns and would like to extend the analysis further by drawing attention to Badiou’s general inability to account for differences and identities in a nuanced and reflective manner. Let me here briefly return to his critique of the interplay between identity politics and market liberalism, which I pointed to as one of his more perceptive analyses of the contemporary cultural condition. While I still think this is the case, there is a detail in one of the paragraphs where he deals with this interplay which I have always found both disturbing and revealing in its insensitivity. The paragraph is found in the opening pages of Saint Paul, where Badiou rails against the unprecedented production of new identities in the current era:

What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in 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 predicative traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic paedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth!¹⁴

What is particularly grating about this contemptuous inventory of “communities demanding recognition” is how Badiou lumps together every kind of difference without discrimination. The demands for recognition by black homosexual people and disabled Serbs seem to be neither more nor less legitimate than those of Catholic paedophiles.

What is the motivation behind this nonchalant attitude towards concrete social differences? The most immediate answer to this is probably Badiou’s professed communist conviction that preoccupation with particular identities stands in the way of the universal struggle for justice and emancipation.¹⁵ But there is another answer which has to do with his stated aversion to the language-oriented philosophies of difference that were promoted by many of his peers in the same generation, from Derrida to Lyotard and Kristeva. Éric Marty captures this well when he argues that it is precisely Badiou’s neglect for how meaning is generated from relational structures that prevents him from developing a more sophisticated reflection on real social differences:

Badiou conceives of difference in substantialist terms, and thereby confuses difference with particularism, difference with hierarchy – and as a consequence, he expresses a violent phobia of the very idea of difference. […] He is not able to envision difference that unfolds through a system of relations established through this very difference. Nor is he able to understand the extent to which difference is one of the necessary conditions for authentic equality, for there is no equality without relational structures and there are no relational structures without difference.¹⁶

To be fair, it should be recognized that Badiou indeed has done some reflection on plurality, in particular in his magnum opus Being and Event, published a decade before Saint Paul. As indicated by the title, Badiou here introduces a distinction between “being” and “event”. While the study of being (ontology) is conventionally held to belong to the domain of philosophy, Badiou suggests that such need not be the case, and declares that only mathematics is properly qualified to deal with the question of being. This somewhat controversial claim allows Badiou, himself schooled in mathematics, to invoke set theory in order to define being as pure multiplicity, prior to any ordering by a higher principle or substance. Strictly, this implies that all that exists are singularities. Despite this, efforts are continually being made to structure and define these singularities according to a particular logic. This is where the event comes into the picture. The event marks a break with the structuring entirety and a distancing from the long arm of ontology. For this reason, the event also cannot be explained or predicted from the order of being, but appears as a deviation and overturning of the present state of order.¹⁷

While played out at a fairly abstract and formal level, the political undertone of the argument is unmistakable for those familiar with Badiou’s larger thinking and points forward to the more explicit political agenda of Saint Paul. Behind his interest in sets and singularities, one can thus recognize a concern with concrete structural injustices, in particular the exclusionary nature of present liberal states, where a large number of individuals live within a particular state without being counted as part of that state. While this broader context of Badiou’s argument certainly should be born in mind, I nonetheless want to maintain that his formal disapproval of any attempt to order singularities into larger sets or categories that could be compared and discussed, ultimately means that he renounces the critical tools for making difference between differences – for distinguishing, for example, between the ethical status of black homosexual people and that of Catholic paedophiles. As Elisabeth Paquette has recently argued, this inability to recognize meaningful differences also means that he is unable to ascribe any positive role to particularity in emancipatory politics. Even more seriously, his disavowal of difference and particularity as relevant political categories tends to foreclose the possibility of paying critical attention to the particularities that inevitably undergird any political analysis, including his own, with the consequence “that his political theory cannot safeguard itself against assimilationist or Eurocentric frameworks”.¹⁸

Universalism and incarnation

This brings me back to the question of how to strike a sound balance between universal ideals of emancipation and particular experiences of oppression. Despite my critique of aspects of Badiou’s thinking, I do contend that his endeavour to revitalize the tradition of Christian universalism has much that speaks for it. And yet one may ask, given the polarized times we are living in, whether a discussion of universalism that is already predicated as “Christian” is really what is needed. One answer to this is that, whether one likes it or not, Christianity is already on the table. Over the past two decades, there has been a growing investment in Christianity among nationalist actors and parties, where Christian rhetoric and symbols are being deployed to support political agendas with marginalizing and divisive effects.¹⁹ As a theologian, you could either ignore these tendencies or you could challenge them through a more thoroughgoing engagement with the Christian tradition. I contend there are good reasons for the latter response.

But there are also more constructive reasons for engaging in a renewed critical reflection on the legacy of Christian universalism. Like Badiou, I believe that this particular legacy has substantial insights to contribute to a more general reflection on political universalism. However, in order to avoid repeating some of the pitfalls of the Christian past (and present, to be sure), such a reflection needs to set out by acknowledging Christianity’s long history of legitimizing supersessionist forms of thinking and acting. By “supersessionist”, I refer to the tendency to present the Christian truth as a higher stage in history that has replaced or, precisely, superseded an earlier stage. This tendency could be traced back to the very origins of the Christian tradition, and more specifically, to the early theologians’ struggle to regulate the relationship of the Church to its Jewish sources. To this end, an array of rhetorical strategies were deployed, the most persistent of which was the notion that a forward-looking and universal Christianity had superseded an archaic and exclusive Judaism.²⁰ This fundamental pattern has accompanied Christianity throughout history and highlights both the strength and the weakness of its universalist impulse: on the one hand, a generous inclusion of all people irrespective of their specific background or status; on the other hand, a constant temptation to subdue or even eliminate the particularity of the other.

While this pattern has been emblematic in relation to Jews and Judaism, it has continued to foster exclusive and often violent forms of universalism that are mirrored in colonial, imperialist and even secularist enterprises up to our present time. In all these instances, a less evolved stage of history or culture is narratively juxtaposed with a purportedly more mature, enlightened or civilized stage.²¹ If it is true then, as Mika Vähäkangas has recently phrased it, “that Christianity is an inherent intellectual and mental factor behind the emergence of globalization”,²² then it is reasonable to conclude that Christian universalism, directly and indirectly, continues to serve inequality throughout the world. And yet – as Vähäkangas would be the first to recognize – reality is more complex. For the very same universalist impulse that has rendered legitimacy to colonial projects around the globe has recurrently inspired colonized people to turn against their “Christian” lords – from the earliest revolts of the indigenous peoples of Latin America to contemporary postcolonial movements.²³ The theological challenge is therefore to identify and safeguard this benign strand of Christian universalism while not refraining from condemning its imperialist manifestations throughout history. The clue to such “post-critical” Christian universalism, I shall argue, lies in a radicalized emphasis on the incarnational nature of Christianity, which finally brings me back to the title of this article.

By “incarnational”, I mean something more thoroughgoing than the Christian idea that Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnated – although, to be sure, the Christological dogma is certainly the most emblematic expression of the Christian belief that the divine is not alien to finite, material reality.²⁴ But my point is that this idea of God incarnate in fact mirrors a broader and much older tradition that could be traced back to the Hebrew Bible. To this tradition belongs not only a strong universalist impulse which follows from the emerging monotheism – the idea that there is only one God who is the God of all humanity. Equally pervasive is the reverence for the particular in the sense of specific experiences in their concrete historical contexts. Nowhere is this as clearly manifested as in some of the Prophetic Books, which are imbued with a concern for the poor and the vulnerable in all their bodily exposure. More generally, the reverence for the particular is also mirrored in the absence from the Bible of moral-philosophical reflections of a more abstract nature. On the contrary, allusions to “justice” and “righteousness” – which abound – are regularly made in relation to specific situations involving concrete figures, such as estate owners who expropriate the poor from the land, judges who take bribes, or merchants who manipulate their scales. Abraham Heschel captures this ethos aptly when he observes that justice, in the prophetic tradition, always exists “in relation to a person, and is something done by a person. An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt”.²⁵

When I refer to the incarnational nature of Christian theology, it is thus in relation to this long tradition of emphasizing at once the particularity of human exposure to injustice and the universality of the call to justice. To be sure, as already stated, Christianity has all too often betrayed its incarnational nature, and one may fairly argue that the Jewish tradition has generally been much better in keeping in line with the prophetic concern for the particular. But when Christianity has been true to what I contend is its theological core, it has managed, precisely, to strike this fine balance between the universal and the particular, as echoed in the famous saying of Jesus: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt 25:40).

It is also here that I see a resource in Christian theology for tackling the problem of both arrogant forms of universalism and the kind of identitarian thinking that only serves to reinforce an ongoing cultural polarization. I have already addressed the first problem in relation to Badiou, whom I have argued regularly fails to account for particular experiences of oppression in a trustworthy way. But there is also a growing problem today with certain forms of identity politics, not only in the sense that they tend to give ammunition to the far-right trend of rebranding nationalist or even fascist ideology as a defence of “indigenous” white identity. Equally problematic is the tendency of some identitarian debaters to adopt a rhetoric centred on one-dimensional notions of race or gender. The problem with such rhetoric is twofold. First, it fails to do justice to the multitude of particular experiences and power relations within each specific “identity”, thereby neglecting decades of intersectional theorizing. Second, it tends to deny the reality of fundamental human experiences across gender or race boundaries, such as when in a recent Scandinavian debate in connection with the tragic suicide of the Danish poet Yahya Hassan, it was insinuated that only persons of colour were fully entitled to mourn a coloured author.²⁶

At this point, I want to reconnect briefly with the reflections I made at the outset regarding the current critique of certain forms of constructivist thinking. For although I have little patience with the kind of vulgar critique of “postmodernism” referred to, I nonetheless think that there are critical questions to be posed about the flipside of decades of academic theorizing that has placed a very strong emphasis on the constructed nature of human experience. While these theories have certainly sharpened our sense for the pernicious effects of purportedly neutral or universal claims that are in fact representative only of a very limited part of humanity, they have also contributed to discredit the very idea that we can share profound human experiences across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Hence, we increasingly tend to end up in conversations of the sort referred to a moment ago – that you can never fully understand my pain or my fear or my joy, because you belong to another culture, race, gender or sexual orientation. To an important extent, this is, of course, true. Decades of poststructuralist and hermeneutical thinking have made us aware that experiences are interpreted from the very moment they affect us, that is, even long before they are put into words or become the subject of reflection. But acknowledging that such is the case is not tantamount to saying that there are no extra-linguistic experiences in the sense of fundamental bodily experiences that are recognizable to humans across cultural and linguistic boundaries. On the contrary, as a growing number of theorists today argue, our very being as humans is premised on our capacity to use our own bodily experiences to intersubjectively recognize those of others.²⁷

This brings me to my final point and the key argument I wish to put forth in relation to the question of how to strike a balance between universalism and particularism. More precisely, I want to suggest that the key to such a balance lies in radicalized focus on the sensual, embodied or incarnate level of common human life. While the problem with many forms of universalism is that they are not genuinely universal, just as many forms of identitarian thinking are not enough attuned to particular experiences, such a perspective will allow us to rethink the implications of the fact that incarnate life is at once the most particular and the most universal level of human existence. On the one hand, fundamental bodily experiences such as pain, fear or hunger are irreducibly particular in the sense that they are uniquely bound to my own innermost being; on the other hand, they are unconditionally universal in the sense that they are shared by all human (and, to be sure, many non-human) beings. While we remain profoundly shaped by our cultural and linguistic formation, to deny our capacity to recognize fear or agony in the face of another human being across cultures and languages would simply be to deny our humanity (and, once more, this argument could certainly be extended to our relationship with an array of non-human beings).

Conclusion

To conclude, with the notion of radical incarnation, I have been aiming to explore the resources of the Christian tradition for a renewed reflection on universalism. More specifically, my claim has been that Christianity has significant perspectives to offer by virtue of its long tradition of connecting the most universal, that is, the divine message of redemption, with the most particular: a broken, bruised and suffering human body. Far from being limited to the paradigmatic suffering of Christ on the cross, this way of connecting the universal command to justice with the particular predicament of each human being has profoundly shaped Christian anthropology throughout history, manifested in the call to recognize that every other is potentially this suffering body: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”.²⁸

This focus on the incarnate dimension of our being finally sheds new light on Alain Badiou’s materialist reinterpretation of Christian universalism. For all his professed materialism, this notion of the exposed and suffering body at the heart of the Christian Gospel is the missing correlate to his vision of universal redemption or liberation.²⁹ It is the absence of this correlate, I think, that prevents him from acknowledging that “black homosexuals” and “Catholic paedophiles” are not just interchangeable instances of “communities demanding recognition”; that, in the first case, we are speaking of a discriminated-against group of people demanding justice, whereas in the second case, we are speaking of people inflicting unimaginable pain and trauma to others – to concrete bodies in their physical exposure. The body in pain, recalling the title of Elaine Scarry’s significant book,³⁰ is also the least insufficient criterion we have today for discriminating between different identitarian claims. Hence, to refer to events in recent history, it offers us at least a rudimentary compass for arguing that the vicious spreading of the slogan “White Lives Matter” is not just another identitarian endeavour alongside the Black Lives Matter movement:³¹ while the latter sprang from concrete bodies being shot or suffocated, the former is a resentful reaction refusing to acknowledge that an act of injustice is committed, not first and foremostly when a law is broken, but “when a person has been hurt”. Navigating between universal ideals of justice and particular experiences of oppression is both as simple and as complex as recognizing that.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Lundberg, När postmodernismen kom.

2 One of the first critical studies to appear on the practice of compulsory sterilization was Maija Runcis’s dissertation, Steriliseringar i folkhemmet. However, already before it was published, journalist Maciej Zaremba brought attention to her research in a series of articles in Sweden’s largest daily, Dagens Nyheter, and thereby launched a huge public debate on the issue. The growing attention to the long history of discrimination against Swedish Romani was testified to, for example, by the establishment in 1996 of a governmental working group commissioned to analyze and suggest improvements to the situation of the Romani minority.

3 For an up-to-date overview of these ideological developments, see e.g. Hermansson et al., The International Alt-right.

4 Badiou, Saint Paul.

5 Ibid., 9–11.

6 Ibid., 11–12.

7 Ibid., 4–15; 55–64.

8 Ibid., 76.

9 Ibid., 57.

10 For a recent overview of this debate, see e.g. McKnight and Oropeza, Perspectives on Paul.

11 On the increased emphasis on identity in contemporary far-right political ideology, see – in addition to the already mentioned volume The International Alt-right – Zúquete, The Identitarians, and, with particular regard to the French context, Dupin, La France identitaire.

12 Badiou, Saint Paul, 76.

13 Boyarin, “Paul among the Antiphilosophers.”

14 Badiou, Saint Paul, 10.

15 That this conviction has not faded over the years is evidenced in the interview-based publication In Praise of Politics, 29, where Badious summarizes one of the basic principles of communism as the endeavour “to put an end to the obsession with identities and in particular with national identity”. He then continues: “Let’s not forget that, among other things, Marx said, with a certain vehemence, that ‘the workers have no country’. So, let’s stop imprisoning politics in a straitjacket of identities, be they racial, national, religious, sexual, or other.” Similarly, in Black – the one of his publications in which he most explicitly addresses the question of race – Badiou states that it is his aim to “put an end to any use of so-called colours in all forms of deliberation and collective action.” (102).

16 Marty, Une querelle, 27–28 (my translation).

17 Badiou, Being and Event, 93–103.

18 Paquette, Universal Emancipation, 116.

19 For a recent account of these tendencies, see e.g. Strømmen and Schmiedel, The Claim to Christianity.

20 On the original ideological polarization between Judaism and Christianity, see e.g. Fredriksen, “The Birth of Christianity.”

21 For an extensive discussion of these patterns, see – to mention only a few seminal works – Anidjar, Semites; Asad, Formations of the Secular; and Mahmood, Religious Difference.

22 Vähäkangas, Context, Plurality, and Truth, 10.

23 See, in addition to Vähäkangas, also Patricia Lorenzoni’s trenchant reflection on the continuity of theologically inspired resistance in the Latin American context in “‘One Who Should Die’.”

24 On the ethical, political and anthropological dimensions of the incarnational nature of Christianity, see also Napolitano, “On the Touch-Event”.

25 Heschel, The Prophets, 276.

26 See Maja Lee Langvad’s “Danmark klarar inte av att sörja en brun författare” in Sydsvenska Dagbladet (June 8, 2020). See also the critical comment by Fredrik Ekelund/Marisol M., “Oavsett hudfärg kan vi sörja tillsammans” in Svenska Dagbladet (June 29, 2020).

27 I am referring here to recent developments in theoretical fields as various as sensory anthropology, critical realism, embodied cognitive science, somaesthetics and phenomenology.

28 This is, to be sure, not to deny that the Christian theology of the cross has an ambivalent history, not least from a feminist perspective. For a nuanced discussion of this ambivalence, see Guðmundsdóttir, Meeting God.

29 Interestingly, as Mads Peter Karlsen points out, Badiou originally (in his early readings of Hegel) showed considerable interest in the incarnation as a fruitful theological trope. However, by the time of Saint Paul, this interest had vaporized completely, which casts yet further light on the idealist nature of his reading of Paul’s universalism; see Karlsen, The Grace of Materialism, 126–155.

30 Scarry, The Body in Pain.

31 See e.g. Murdoch, “Rising Racial Nationalism.”