last week I proposed three questions stemming from the comments on my article “A Revolutionary Community :: Repositioning Justification by Faith.”
they were:
1) How does the particularity of Jesus ‘break out’ of the capitalist ideology (the Real of Capitalism)?
2) Where does the Church fit along the particular-universal line?
3) What is Love, and why does it ‘break out’ of capitalism?
here is my brief answer to questin #2:
Where does the Church fit along the particular-universal line?
put simply, the Church is the space where the particular expands and becomes universal. It is where the particular participates with the universal. Through Jesus, who cancels economic-political-ethnic-gender division in His body through death by the power structures of the World-System, makes available a new Life. And our participation in that Body (through the Baptism and Eucharist) moves us through the particularity (maybe I should say singularity) of Jesus to the Universality of mankind entering the Divine Life of God.
Alain Badiou has written a small book on Paul where he investigates how Paul theorizes the “event” of “resurrection” and how it produces a revolutionary “subject.” His project is explicitly self serving as he appropriates Paul for his own political/theoretical agenda, but he still makes a multitude of insight comments which we can learn from. So maybe I’ll write a piece investigating Paul’s revolutionary “subject” but adding an ecclesiological component which Badiou excludes by necessity. I guess it would be a part two to the Zizek/justification article and would answer this question more explicity.