RT Article
T1 Capitalism and Catholicity: Ecclesiological Reflections on Alain Badiou's Pauline Universalism
JF New blackfriars
VO 92
IS 1041
SP 574
OP 590
A1 Gingerich Hiebert, Kyle
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2011
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1780352204
AB Emancipating Saint Paul from both his imagined “spiritual” prison and interpretations that cast him as Nietzsche's venomous priest, Alain Badiou reads Paul as providing the resources necessary for standing in the face of the endless flows of global capital that characterize the geopolitical landscape at “the end of history.” Read against the background of the apparent triumph of political and economic liberalism I will argue that the most compelling aspect of Badiou's reading is that he finds in Paul a universalism that resists the rampant automatisms of capitalism. Moreover, I will be primarily interested in the extent to which Badiou's reading of Paul radically calls into question the conclusions not only of those self-proclaimed prophets of the ethics of alterity but also of those theologians that are finally unable to give up the desire to control outcomes and master contingency. In this way I will argue that, despite his proclamation of Christianity as a fable, Badiou can be helpfully read as a profound theological resource that points toward the shape of a radical ecclesiology that refuses to be defined on the artificial terrain of modernity and struggles instead in all its fragility to remain faithful to the resurrection.
K1 Ecclesiology
K1 Universalism
K1 Paul
K1 Badiou
K1 Capitalism
DO 10.1111/j.1741-2005.2010.01391.x