Badiou on immigration

April 10th, 2006 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

In my religion seminar class “Paul as Contemporary Cultural Theory,” we are reading the book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism by Alain Badiou. Badiou himself is French, and he speaks from his own vantage point, but I find what he says in the early pages of the book to be particularly relevant to current discussion regarding immigration in the US.

Badiou says:

Moreover, this is the norm that illuminates a paradox few have pointed out: in the hour of generalized circulation and the phantasm of instantaneious cultural communication, laws and regulations forbidding the circulation of persons are being multiplied everywhere.¹

In other words, in an era when global travel, trade, and communication is soaring, our need to stamp down on immigration becomes heightened. Badiou later says, “Deleuze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization.”² Now, here’s the kicker:

How clearly Paul’s statement rings out under these conditions! A genuinely stupefying statement when one knows the rules of the ancient world: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3.28)!³

And all of this from a self-proclaimed atheist.

1. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: the Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2003. 10. ↩
2. Ibid., 10. ↩
3. Ibid., 9. ↩