La Fidélité au Réel

Then was there again spoken unto me as a whispering: "It is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world.
Thus Spake Zarathustra, 44.

For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.
1 Thess. 5:2- St. Paul.

It has been rightly said that Nietzsche owed Paul a great debt, the very man he poured so much contempt upon. Here the Event cannot be predicted. The very act of naming it has already denied its realization, has missed the mark. It is as the Old Man once said:

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Thus the Event loses its universal character through the act of prophecy. It is not the Event, but a simulacrum of the Event which here presents itself through the words of the prophet. There is no sign which precedes it: it must catch us unaware. As the immortal Badiou has said, “The universal is always an incalculable emergence, rather than a describable structure.” For Badiou, every universal is singular, or is a singularity, not a regularization of the particular, but a singularity that is subtracted from identitarian predicates (though which obviously proceeds via these predicates). The universal originates in the Event, and the Event is intransitive to the particularity of the situation. So, to take Badiou’s examples, political universalism depends entirely on fidelity (or infidelity), not to a certain doctrine, but to The French Revolution, the Paris Commune, Oct. 1917, etc.

Here at last I ask the question: Has the Church not been guilty of delegitimizing the Event, of attempting to complete the singularity, a singularity that in order to remain universal must remain open and incomplete? It should not be forgotten that Paul again and again recalled to his listeners the fact of Christian telos, of realities’ openness to the eschaton, and of Christian hope, which continually longs for what it does not possess. It is precisely this longing, this recognition of the openness of life and existence that displays its fidelity to the Christian Event. Here there is no recognition of that presumption so common in the Church. Here one finds mirrored (not a mere feigning) the fundamental commitment, and decision, not to a particular event, but to “a possession forever”, the result: the infinite generic multiple of the Event.