Post Script to Law Life

Posted on January 24, 2017 in Uncategorized

footnote to previous part 2, regarding number and resurrection:

“In effect, it is law at the purest, formalist level, law as “the ideal of the
matheme,” that governs the new coming into being of the subject. Thus, to the
question: “But why is it necessary to reject law onto the side of death?” Badiou answers:
“Because considered in its particularity, that of the works it prescribes, the law blocks the subjectivation of grace’s universal address as pure conviction, or faith. The law ‘objectifies’ salvation and forbids one from relating it to the gratuitousness of the Christ- event.” As such, the event is, by itself, an “illegal contingency, which causes a multiplicity in excess of itself to come forth and thus allows for the possibility of overstepping finitude.” The evental situation, before subjectivation, is the site of “the excess of grace, thus, of a pure act,” i.e. the resurrection.

Although Badiou addresses a philosophical-political question in his analysis of
Paul and the law, what comes through the apparent antinomianism of the message is, unexpectedly – as if to corroborate the very evental process he describes – the
reanimation of law in a different guise. That is, in the truth-event, there is not a rejection or repudiation of law sensu stricto, but its realignment, rearrangement, to effectuate the resurgence (resurrection) of the subject.”

Re-interpretation of Paul’s Concept of Law
Tawia Ansah