The event,the messianic and the affirmation of life. A post-critical perspective on education with Agamben and Badiou

Abstract

In this article, we read together the work of two philosophers, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, as profound educational thinkers. This means that their philosophical approaches help us to articulate what is at stake in education today. As a starting point for this discussion we take their work on Saint Paul. This is because, throughout his Letters, Paul has found the appropriate words to think and speak about the fate of our world and about new ways of beginning with this world. Therefore, with their reading of Paul, Badiou and Agamben can be said to develop fresh ideas about the contemporary challenges of education. We argue that this joint educational reading of their work, opens a post-critical view on education. This is to say, the alternative we suggest is not just a criticism of the existing system, but an entirely affirmative one. It is about fidelity to an event which has the force to install a particular attitude towards life and which installs a messianic interruption of time. With Badiou and Agamben it can be shown that education is about the possibilities we have at our disposal to begin anew with our world – which turns education into an important political issue too. Following that thread, we give an ontological account of teaching, which defines the teacher not in terms of pedagogical expertise, but in terms of passion for a subject matter.

Introduction

In this article, we read together the work of two philosophers, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. There might be many reasons for doing this, for example, because both are influential present-day political philosophers who have criticized the current political situation and who have advocated without compromise a radical alternative to the biocapitalist and post-democratic societies we live in. In that sense, a conversation between Agamben and Badiou might be a fruitful one. At the same time, the alternative which Badiou defends and which consists of a newly invented universalism has been heavily criticized by Agamben as a mere continuation of the order both disapprove of, and as a fundamentally anti-political line of thought.

Although the political inspiration of both Badiou’s and Agamben’s ideas is important, as is there point of discussion, we believe that there is another and perhaps more important reason to engage in a discussion between both: according to us, they are profound educational thinkers too, at least in the sense that their philosophical approaches help us to articulate what is at stake in education today. It appears that much is to be gained by reading their work together and by developing a discussion about education between both these two thinkers. As a starting point for this discussion we take their work on Saint Paul. Both Agamben (2005) and Badiou (2003) have devoted a detailed study to the writings of the Apostle. However, being self-proclaimed atheists themselves, the nature of these books is not theological. It seems, both are fascinated by the figure of Paul for another reason. Throughout his Letters, they claim, Paul has found the appropriate words to think and speak about the fate of our world and about new ways of beginning with this world. For Badiou and Agamben alike, Paul is “our contemporary” (Badiou, 2003: 4–15; cf. Agamben, 2005: 135–136). And, we would like to add, with their reading of Paul, Badiou and Agamben can be said to develop fresh ideas about the contemporary challenges of education. As a common denominator of this joint educational reading of their work, we argue that it opens a post-critical view on education which is about fidelity to an event. This fidelity installs a particular attitude towards life and might bring about a messianic interruption of time. We also argue that this fidelity offers a very precise description of the work any genuinely impassioned teacher engages in.

We first have a closer look at their readings of the Apostle separately. We show that both thinkers grant the possibility of reconceiving what is at stake in education – something which is markedly different from mainstream views on education. At the same time, the alternative account we suggest is not just a criticism of the existing system, but an entirely affirmative, and hence a post-critical, approach. We argue furthermore that on the basis of our common reading of Badiou’s and Agamben’s work an ontology of teaching can be fleshed out. We use their accounts of education and teaching to draw attention to the possibilities we have at our disposal to begin anew with our world.

Event, fidelity and truth

For Badiou, the Resurrection of Christ could never have been the founding event of Christianity (and the Church) if not for Saint Paul. It was he who has recognized this happening (although, for Badiou, it is a fiction) as the event. “Event” is the key concept of Badiou’s philosophy and it signifies the possibility of the coming into being of something utterly new. ¹ The event brings about an interruption of the way the world is ordered, viz. a self-reproducing, solidified status quo. ² Because this solidity of the order of things is always a construct, from time to time something happens that does not fit. Although there are always many witnesses, that is, people who are aware that something important and unexpected has happened, there must also be someone who understands that after this interruption took place nothing remains the same – that is, that what has happened is the event. Badiou calls such an act of recognizing the event, and naming it, an intervention (Badiou, 2005: 202–203). This act is necessary, since the event is something not taken into account by the status quo. It is supernumerary, as Badiou calls it, and hence not-representable (Badiou, 2005: 178): “… it doesn’t belong to the language of the situation” (Badiou, 2005: 329). This is exactly why Paul has to invent a new discourse to express the event (cf. Badiou, 2003: 40–54), and to introduce its effects on the status quo. This is what Badiou calls fidelity to the event. The event – in Paul’s case, the Resurrection of Christ – is not understandable within the status quo (the situation and its state). It is impossible, irrational, beyond reach. So, it first needs to be expressed in a conceivable way, ³ and only then it can be related to the present status quo. Fidelity is, therefore, a process of giving the event its meaning by reinterpreting the elements of our status quo with reference to the event. This, conversely, means reconfiguring this status quo: recognizing and introducing the consequences of the event into the particularities of our life. This procedure is productive as it brings forth the truth about the event. The truth consists of the effects of an infinite ⁴ process of making faithful connections of particular elements of the current state of things to the event (Badiou, 2005: 335). Hence, the event and its truth “need” not only an intervening subject (recognizing it and giving it a name), but also the militant of this truth. Someone who will make others understand the event, who shows them the meaning of the event for their world, for their life, for everything that counts. Or even better: someone who introduces a new way of counting (i.e. differentiating what counts and what does not). As Badiou comments, such a militant fidelity is named agape (love) by Paul – a point to which we shall return later on in this text.

Fidelity is a procedure of making connections. It is about showing that there are some elements of our world that – in the face of the event – are not important any more, as there are some that have become more crucial (Badiou, 2005: 232–234). Christ’s Resurrection, for example, made the difference between the circumcised and not-circumcised redundant. In addition, it has put in the centre the commandment of love. So, by reconfiguring the situation and the state, Paul invalidates all the differences (circumcised/not- circumcised, Greek/Jew, man/woman, etc.) that were used to group people, to enumerate them, to assign to them their predicates, duties, ranks, and rights. ⁵ These differences are now “out of order”. They have become useless and no longer operational (as they are not connected to the event). In Badiou’s terms, Paul subtracts these differences, as the Resurrection of Christ was not the act of negating or overcoming of death, but rather of its subtraction (Badiou, 2003: 73). This means that after the event of Christ’s Resurrection death simply does not count any more. What counts is Life.

The messianic and the affirmation of life

Agamben’s main concern, in his reading of Saint Paul, is not so much the event of the Resurrection, as it is the messianic community (cf. Agamben, 2005: 18). This is a way of living, as individual human beings and as a collective of people, which is – as in Badiou’s reading – solely structured by the enactment of agape (love). Or at least, what is needed according to Paul’s teachings is that we come to relate in a different way to the “normal” way of structuring our communal life – which is according to nomos (the Law). As Paul claims, love will come and fulfil the (ancient Jewish) Law.

The Law, etymologically speaking, goes back to the verb nemo, which means to divide. For instance, it sets up exclusive divisions between Jews and the pagan Greeks. More generally, it neatly organizes societal life according to clear divisions between identities, positions and roles. However, the messianic community is not one in which this dividing mechanism is simply abolished. Rather, the mechanism is subtly deconstructed from within. More concretely, the messianic consists in a suspension of the division, viz. in dividing the division itself. In Paul’s letters, we see how traditional identifications get destabilized in that some Jews appear to be not Jews (they are circumcised, but are not Jews in their doings and their convictions) and some non-Jews appear to be not non-Jews (although they have a foreskin, they are Jews in their doings and convictions). As such, there is always the possibility of a remnant which prevents a closure of Jewish, or for that matter Greek or any other identity: we are all non-non-Jews. It is important to remark here that this does not imply a universally shared identity, but the ever-present possibility to destabilize any identity: there is always “a remnant between every people and itself, between every identity and itself” (Agamben, 2005: 52).

Likewise, the messianic community is one in which professional and hierarchical positions – “callings” – no longer make a difference. Again, what is at stake is not an abolishment of all callings – as an eschatological interpretation of Paul might imply (i.e. an indifference towards our callings in view of the end of time which is forthcoming), but rather a calling of these callings, that is, rendering these positions “inoperative”. This is what Paul means, according to Agamben, when he claims that in messianic time there will still be Jews and Greeks, men and women, well-off and poor people, slaves and free citizens. But, these oppositions lose their dividing power in that they are experienced as hos me, that is, “as not.” We live the life of slaves as not slaves, and of free men as not free men, etc. Social positions are “nullif[ied] in the very gesture of maintaining and dwelling in it.” (Agamben, 2005: 24). They are experienced as having no longer any meaning whatsoever.

It is of the greatest importance to understand – and here Agamben departs completely from any standard interpretation of the Scriptures – that this messianic community is not a future state-of-being we have to await. In Paul, messianic time is now-time. It regards a moment here and now, a moment fully within ordinary time, which has the power to change our whole experience of ordinary time. It is a slip-up to regard this blissful moment (kairos), as the tradition does, as something to be glued to the course of time (chronos), after its end. This has caused the paradoxes and confusions about the messianic as a time that still has to come, but that never comes in the end. The messianic is Parousia, a technical term which is often identified with Christ’s Second Coming, but which literally just means “next-to, nearby, close at hand”. In other words, we must come and realize that the possibility of the messianic has already always been with us. The only thing which is needed is that we recognize this. And this is related to taking a particular, entirely affirmative attitude towards our lives. It is about seeing that “the messianic world is nothing other than the secular world” (Agamben, 2005: 56).

It is taking this attitude which turns life into something which is no longer susceptible to any order and divisionary logic the Law wants to impose. In that sense, love – as the affirmation of life – truly fulfils the Law. It is important, however, to note that this does not imply a plea for substituting the existing Law for a new Law. Also, it is not a calling for lawlessness (anarchy). The law needs to be deconstructed (not destructed) from the inside. That is, the Law (of love) which applies in the messianic now-time is a “non-normative figure of the law” (Agamben, 2005: 95). Or, as Agamben says, “the Messiah renders the law inoperative” (Agamben, 2005: 98).

Beyond dialectics/after critique

On the basis of this short discussion of what according to Badiou and Agamben is at stake in Paul’s writings, we would argue that for both thinkers Paul presents the possibility of an interruption of the existing dominant order, the status quo, and therefore the possibility of a revolution – of a new beginning, of a renewal of the world. A possibility which, almost two thousand years after date, still speaks to us. For Agamben, messianic time is most literally now-time, and for Badiou, the militant of truth is the figure which faithfully connects the present to the event past – otherwise the event is purely ‘past’ and therefore irrelevant.

In both Badiou and Agamben, this possibility of interruption and change which concerns us “now”, is thought of in a most uncommon way: it is beyond dialectics and beyond any traditional critical position. With this we mean that, more often than not, change is conceived by philosophers and educationalists alike in terms of a negative relation with the existing order. ⁶ This is very clear when we consider the Hegelian conception of Aufhebung, where the ultimate point of reference remains the thing which is being negated, since every sublation preserves what it had abolished (see Hegel, 2010: 81–82). The positive outcome of change is the negation of a negation.

Over and against this, what Paul conceives as the change instigated by Christ is a purely affirmative possibility of transformation. The event of Christ’s Resurrection, according to Badiou’s reading of Paul, is a “pure” event: life is not the negative side of death. Christ’s Resurrection just happened and that is what makes it into a real event. There is thus a possibility of affirming life which is not dependent upon the overcoming of death. That is why the event is so sudden and unexpected, and why it constitutes a really radical breach in time and in the existing order. That is also why the event remains to be, time and again, something which does not fit and which will never fit. Something which therefore requires a reconnection of elements of the status quo to the event. Now, in order to do so, we need to see death and life not as two moments of a dialectical relation, but as “subjective paths”, that is, attitudes or ways of being in the world (Badiou, 2003: 68).

Likewise, in Agamben’s reading of Paul, the messianic relates to the willingness to live our lives in a messianic mode. It is this which creates an interruption which is beyond any reference to the existing order. Slaves live as not-slaves. The order is not replaced by another one, nor is it completely abolished: if this were the case, change would be negatively connected to the order we transcend. The true new beginning is precisely expressive of an experience of life which is entirely affirmative and which does not need the negative reference to the criticized order to be able to wholeheartedly say yes to life as it is. That is also why Agamben, following Walter Benjamin here, defines the messianic not as a spectacular event, but as an almost insignificant happening: the messianic world is only slightly different, up to the extent that the Messiah comes almost without noticing (Agamben, 2005: 69). The messianic is not some completely new existence which suddenly happens to us. Rather, what is demanded is the willingness to relate affirmatively to the existing world, and this requires an attitude of love – an attitude which is the opposite of the destructive passion to negate the present in name of a lost past or a better future still to come.

It is clear now that for both Agamben and Badiou the work of the Apostle is about articulating the possibility of a renewal of our world which is not based on critique and overcoming of the negated status quo. What Badiou calls being faithful to the event is very close to what Agamben describes as the recapitulation which comes with kairos, that is, the summing up of what we knew or/and believed in before the Messiah was present-near-by (see Agamben, 2005: 75–77). Both, fidelity to the event as well as recapitulation in the messianic time are creating something new (a counter-state, an exception) within the dominant order – not in opposition to it. They create a gap or a slot that does not fit, that cannot be taken into account.

Therefore, neither Agamben nor Badiou set forth a critical or a dialectical relation to the world. What they propose is also not a simple inversion of its structure, as it is not some kind of utopian dream of a brave new world. On the contrary, what is at stake is the possibility of introducing the impossible into the status quo. This is brought about by the series of small alterations that may seem to be irrelevant or irrational, but that in fact are reconstituting the operative order of things. As such, a sphere is created in which such an order is not operational any more. This order is present, but as if not itself. It is being reconfigured, it is put out of order.

What is at stake here is not critique. It is not about distancing oneself from and overcoming the oppressive order of the present status quo. ⁷ Instead the work of the Apostle creates a breach that makes possible a new beginning with life for all. It is not a work of a critic, it is a work of an amateur, who makes it possible for everyone else to fall in love, and therefore to live a fallen in love life: a life that happens within the conditions of the here and now, but that is not overwhelmed by them, and that therefore has the power to reconfigure these conditions.

The ontology of teaching

We argue that we are dealing here with the possibility of renewing our world by virtue of love to a thing belonging to the world. This is, we are dealing here with an implicit attempt to formulate an ontology of teaching. With this we mean that teaching is more than a profession which consists of the possession of a set of technical skills, but a way of being which consists of being passionately in love with a subject matter (cf. Arendt, 1958). ⁸

Badiou argues that the truth is a process that takes place after the event is being recognized and named (intervention), a process that takes place by the virtue of the procedure of fidelity, that is by the decision of a militant to connect, or not-connect particular elements of the status quo to the event. And, this means reconfiguring (recounting) the existing order of things (the state and the situation). What is striking in his commentary on Saint Paul is that Badiou, referring to the notion of agape, claims that “Love is precisely what faith is capable of. […] In Paul’s thought, love is precisely fidelity to the Christ-event” (Badiou, 2003: 90, emphasis in original).

Love is therefore the work of a militant of truth, the work of a subject introducing the event and its consequences into the status quo. ⁹ Badiou recalls here the Letter to the Galatians: “faith works only through love” (Galatians, 5: 6). Love is therefore labour ¹⁰ : an infinite, consequent and relentless work of recounting and reconfiguring that is renewing our world in the face of the event. It means making the event that has happened present again, by installing it in our status quo, by reorganizing the situation and its state because of the event. However, such an identification of fidelity with love changes the whole of Badiou’s ontological argument, since before love there is a moment of falling in love – which corresponds to what Badiou calls the intervention, but which could not be rendered as such.

Love is something that is not a matter of choice. It comes from “the outside” and presses itself upon us. We fall into it. That is, we submit to its powers, we are taken away by it: love leads us thereafter. Now, for Badiou the event is a coming [une venue] (Badiou, 2003: 48). And, the intervention is a decision that establishes the subject. The same goes for love. Nonetheless, love is a particular sort of intervention. It is close to the decision to recognize and name the event. However, love is also an encounter which completely demands our attention and takes over our lives. Indeed, falling in love is not simply a matter of a decision that brings forth a subject (a militant of truth) into the status quo. It also involves letting oneself go. One is “under the spell” of the beloved and that cancels out, to a certain degree, subjective self-control. We argue that Badiou’s idea that love and fidelity to the event are identical, opens the possibility to understand in a new way how his fundamental ontological concepts (i.e. event, intervention, fidelity, subject, etc.) are related. More importantly, this way of viewing opens up a possibility to conceptualize anew what teaching is all about.

What Badiou says could be connected to insights recently developed by Gert Biesta when he argues that teaching is about the possibility of an introduction of a transformative experience of an encounter with the unknown, the unexpected, the other. It is not about equipping students with some cognitive schemes or packages of data, but about making a difference in the way they live (Biesta, 2014, 2015). Following Badiou’s reading of Paul, we could add to this that teaching also originates in the experience of transformative affirmation, the experience of falling in love with a thing belonging to the world, that is, a subject matter, and therefore, the very act of teaching consists of being faithful to this event. Teaching is an attempt to bring into presence this event of falling in love when working with students. It is an attempt to “confirm” this love, to make it true. The teacher is the militant of this truth, since the theorem of the militant means that: “No truth is ever solitary, or particular” (Badiou, 2003: 90). The truth is never a private matter. ¹¹ Teaching therefore means: turning one’s private experience of falling in love with a particular subject matter into an event, a shared or common experience. Teaching can touch and transform students’ way of life only because it is an attempt to make the students fall in love with a subject matter, as it is a public testimony of a teacher’s love towards a thing belonging to the world.

In his reading of Paul’s faith in the Messiah, Agamben presents a figure of the faithful that comes close to what we have just analysed as the teacher who is passionately devoted to a subject matter. In order to understand what faith (pistis) is all about, we need to take into account that there is always an ambiguity between the propositional content faith pertains to and the act faith consists of (Agamben, 2005: 89). On the one hand, faith is obviously about something (when someone says “I believe”, we want to know what it is she believes). On the other hand, faith requires that we actually do something which makes a difference (it is actually important that we do confess to something and are willing to bear the consequences). Our words of faith are performatives: they make something happen almost like magical words or curse words do.

As such, we are close to the origins of both language and law, a sphere to which Agamben also refers as “prelaw” (Agamben, 2005: 114): the experience of naming things, which gives us a glimpse of the power which is present in language. We have, in other words, an exceptional experience of what it means to be able to speak, that is, that our words can refer to things and can convey messages. This is the most profound meaning of the word evaggelion – which only later became the name of a canonical text, that is, the gospels (Agamben, 2005: 114). In origin, however, the evangelical refers to “an experience of language in which the text of the letter is at every point indistinguishable from the announcement and the announcement from the good announced” (Agamben, 2005: 90). The messianic faith happens precisely at the moment when the distinction between the content of the message and the magic–performative deed can no longer be drawn (Agamben, 2005: 90). As Agamben says, faith “enacts its meaning through its utterance” (Agamben, 2005: 131). It is an act of pure affirmation.

That is also why Paul’s “message” cannot be adequately defined in any standard epistemological way. Significantly, Paul never says that he knows that Jesus is the Messiah (Agamben, 2005: 127). This is to say that, apart from the historical fact that Paul never knew Jesus and thus cannot make that truth claim, “he only knows Jesus Messiah” (Agamben, 2005: 127). In the end, Paul’s faith is not a belief in a propositional content (Jesus truly is the Messiah). Rather, the “knowledge” involved here is close to the relation we have with our beloved ones. When we say, we love someone, for example, “beautiful-brunette-tender Mary” (Agamben, 2005: 128), we do not mean that we love her because she is called Mary, she is beautiful, tender and brown of hair, etc. “Love has no reason, and this is why, in Paul, it is tightly interwoven with faith”, Agamben says (Agamben, 2005: 128). Both love and faith come down to being taken by something which entirely determines our own being, in such a way that we cannot separate lover and her object, confessor and the object of confession.

In a sense, this is a very precise ontological account of what teaching might be all about. The teacher does not have the choice not to profess the event that has made her a teacher, that is, her passionate attachment to a subject matter. Her subject matter is her gospel, her evaggelion – her way of saying yes to life, to affirm life beyond negativity and dialectics. She is so fully taken by it, that it would be utterly senseless to ask why it is important, why we need to take care for it and why we need to pass it on to the next generations. It is also in that sense that we can understand Paul’s dictum that love fulfils the whole Law – which he identifies, as we said earlier on, with recapitulation: what we love is experienced as unconditionally good (i.e. worthy of affirmation). And, it is so good that we must pass it on. The good of fulfilment is beyond “good works”, that is, the things that are good in view of the Law. As such, the “good” teacher is someone who performatively embodies a subject matter and who shows to others why it is important. Therefore, it is she who has the capacity to turn something into an object of attention and care.

This figure has to be opposed, most firmly, to someone who is merely concerned about outcomes that can be judged from the standpoint of the Law. This last figure would be the accountable and entrepreneurial teacher whose teaching must be judged according to the measurable outcomes she realizes, that is, according to the benefits she brings to students and to the whole of society. Over and against this, the “faithful” teacher, in a Pauline sense, is entirely griped by something she “knows”, that is, something she knows to be intrinsically good. Her teaching is therefore a pure gift: “a pure and common potentiality of saying, open to a free and gratuitous use of time and the world” (Agamben, 2005: 136). Her gift is literally for everyone, so that they can begin anew with the world.

The gift of teaching. Or: making a difference in our contemporary world

Of course, there is no guarantee that this gift will be accepted. Students can easily reject it or remain utterly indifferent. Nonetheless, the teacher’s free gift has made something happen. It has itself made a difference. The gift of the passionate teacher produces the conditions for the emergence of a sphere which is out of the ordinary: a sphere of suspension or subtraction, where everything except for the subject matter (the object of love) is temporarily bracketed out.

With Agamben and Badiou, we have analysed this possibility of a rupture within the normal course of things as a “counter-state” and as an “exception”. When a militant is faithful to the event and when the believer affirms in life what she confesses, the possibility of a gap in the dominant order of things is granted. This is not the result of criticizing or negating the given order of things, nor of dialectically overcoming it, but – as Badiou argues – of a reconfiguration of the status quo: the revolution consists of a re-description – that is, a recounting and recapitulation – of the world we live in. This, Agamben would add, goes together with the creation of a specific kind of time. What we need to reconfigure is not an ideological narrative, a discourse, a political strategy, social institution or a rule of law. Instead, we need to build the conditions for this other experience of time to emerge. This time is kairos, now-time, which Paul opposes to chronos – the ordinary three-dimensional time of past–present–future, that is, the time of the dominant order. Drawing from Masschelein and Simons’s account (2013), it could be said that this particular time which allows for a recounting and recapitulation of our common world is school time – following the original ancient Greek meaning of this word skholè (free time). The time during which the existing order of things is suspended, so that we can begin anew with the world.

However, Agamben and Badiou also stress that this slot in the order of day-to-day business is not a matter of supernatural causes. Neither is it an accident. It is made by humans, and it requires their effort and discipline, their faith (pistis) and their love (agape): “grace itself is no more than the indication of a possibility” (Badiou, 2003: 91). This is, skholè, an exceptional condition. It is a condition (i.e. something given), but it also requires an uncommon effort and work – not unlike love which is an emotion that affects us involuntarily (falling in love) and that is also something to sustain and develop (labour of love). Of course, this is to say that school cannot happen everywhere and anytime, which seems to be the creed of the current educational policies (geared at life-long learning and turning education into a matter of securing total employability). We must grant the possibility for a passionate encounter between the generations, between someone who is taken by a devotion to a subject matter and those who might, inspired by this passion, transform our world.

When teaching passionately, that is, when being faithful to the event of falling in love with a subject matter, true educational time comes about. However, this pure gift of teaching runs counter to the current ordering of educational space and time. This order is, on the one hand, a productive regime which does not tolerate that we lose ourselves, that we truly follow a passion. Everything we do must be accounted for of in view of what it contributes to individual and collective development and success. What happens in a learning context must be useful and beneficial for something else. On the other hand, it concerns also an order which aims at safeguarding the status quo. The only change that is permitted is a change which increases productivity and which guarantees success, and therefore a true new beginning with our world is ruled out (cf. Simons and Masschelein, 2006).

As such we argue, with Agamben and Badiou, that Paul is indeed our contemporary. He offers the vocabulary and the philosophical tools to address an issue which has become ever more pressing in today’s educational world: how to conceive of the possibility of truly educating, that is, offering the possibility to the new generation to radically transform a given order of things by introducing them into our common world. Therefore, the figure of the teacher, passionately devoted to a subject matter, is a messianic believer and a life-affirmative militant: she has a major political relevance for our times which are at risk of reducing the educational to a matter of maximizing productive forces and sustaining a given state of affairs. ¹²