Degruyter Opphil Opphil-2020-0142 625..656 ++

Open Philosophy 2020; 3: 625–656

Regular Article

Sofya Gevorkyan, Carlos A. Segovia* Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy: A Philosophical and Anthropological Critique

https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2020-0142 received August 10, 2020; accepted September 28, 2020

Abstract: Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty ﬁrst-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality.

Keywords: contingency, cosmopolitics, imperium, radical dualism, savage thought, worlding

1 Introduction

Radical contingency is one of the distinctive traits of contemporary philosophy. The increasing relevance bestowed on “diﬀerence” vs any form of “identity” in late twentieth-century philosophy (especially in postmodern and post-structuralist thought, but also in pragmatism) supplies an important aspect of its genealogy; for against any abstract essentialism tending to view things as approximations to, and deviations from, a self-identical exemplary original, their re-positioning as objects of random narratives, events, and negotiations can be said to pave the way to unpredictability. Yet we would like to explore here a diﬀerent aspect of radical contingency’s genealogy – one generally overlooked. We argue that it is possible to account for the role of radical contingency in contemporary philosophy through the interplay of four intersecting factors: (a) the symptomatic presence of Christian motifs in contemporary secular thought (as Sloterdijk points out, albeit probably not there where he points at); (b) the renewed interest in Paul’s (of Tarsus’s) thought as evinced in the works of Vattimo, Agamben, and especially Badiou (which inspires, in turn, Meillassoux’s plea for radical contingency);

 * Corresponding author: Carlos A. Segovia, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus, Madrid, Spain, e-mail: [email protected] Sofya Gevorkyan: Alicante, Spain

Open Access. © 2020 Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 626  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia

(c) the speciﬁcity of Paul’s “anarchist” κήρυγμα (which we propose to read in conjunction with the evolution of contingent logic in ancient philosophy, from Antisthenes onwards); and (d) Paul’s subsequent transformation of political resistance (which, as Badiou perfectly sees, is, ultimately, all Paul is about) into a proto-modern utopian quest for abstract freedom.

First, then, we briefly examine Sloterdijk’s suspicion regarding the encrypted presence of Christian motifs in contemporary thought. We discuss Sloterdijk’s view that they can be found in Heidegger, and point to their presence elsewhere instead – to wit, in the works of Vattimo, Badiou, Agamben, and, more recently, Meillassoux. Plus, rather than of speaking, as Sloterdijk does, of “crypto-Christian” motifs in the plural, we think it convenient to narrow down such description and to speak instead of a single “Pauline” motif, which can be said to inspire much of contemporary thought as a “metonymic cause” (to borrow from Althusser), “present” in its effects, and by its effects, while “absent” in itself or as such from them. This discussion is pursued in the section titled: “The ghost in the shell.” Next, we analyse the early contributions of both Lyotard and Vattimo – of which, somewhat unfairly, almost nobody talks anymore today in contrast to those of Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari – to the criticism of philosophical “totalities” and “normative foundations,” respectively. Furthermore, we ask whether such criticism is ultimately dependent on what we call the dialectics of the “One” and its “Absence,” and whether the lack of a “single normative foundation” implies the kenotic dissolution of any truth (to paraphrase Vattimo’s use of Paul’s concept of κένωσις) or whether it entails, alternatively, the emergence of different strategies to semiotise the real along differing conceptual axes. Also, we raise the question of how it might be possible to tell those differences that can coexist from those which cannot. All this will be found in the section titled: “In the wake of kένωσις – or, Vattimo’s appropriation of Paul’s thought.” Having thus gained some perspective on what we label as the “first” (in the sense of the earliest) “adventure of contingency” in contemporary philosophy (in connection to Vattimo’s “weak thought”), we move on to examine the (later) works of Badiou and Agamben, who also make recourse to Paul’s thought. As it is well known, Badiou relies on the latter to ground his philosophical–political project, i.e. the very idea of a philosophy of the “pure subject” without any “object,” and puts forward the expression “radical contingency,” whose philosophical cum anthropological questioning we endorse in this study. In turn, Agamben recovers Paul’s notion of “messianic time” qua non-predictable time via Benjamin and Taubes. In short Agamben and Badiou epitomise, we argue, the “second adventure of contingency” in contemporary philosophy; we introduce and discuss their respective uses of Paul in a section titled: “Dancing with Paul over radical contingency: Badiou and Agamben.” Subsequently, in a section titled: “Absolute contingency: from Badiou to Meillassoux,” we turn to Meillassoux, in whose work contingency, we claim, undertakes a “third” (and for now final) “adventure,” which Meillassoux himself describes as the “omnipotence of chaos.” Furthermore, we ponder the extent of Meillassoux’s indebtedness to Badiou and offer a succinct chronological distribution of Badiou’s own works around the question of contingency. Additionally, we look at Meillassoux’s argument on the “necessity of contingency” in dialogue with Brassier’s dual reading of it, thus distinguishing between its “strong” and “weak” interpretations and showing, moreover, that the former one should prevail against any attempt to diminish it. This gives us occasion to put Meillassoux’s argument into the broader perspective of philosophy’s history, with especial attention to ancient Scepticism and to Aristotle’s pioneering elaboration on the notion of “chance.” A twofold criticism of Meillassoux’s “either/or” approach to contingency and necessity follows, along two complementary expositive lines: one draws on the new valence conferred to the idea of “regularity” in contemporary biology and ethology, while the other one examines the concept of “compossibility” in both Leibniz’s monadology and today’s “ontologies of agency” in conversation with Hilan Bensusan. All this is found in the section titled: “A new path in the history of philosophy? Putting Meillassoux into context,” whose title echoes, in interrogative form, Badiou’s laudatory words on Meillassoux’s After Finitude. Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  627

Therefore, in the sections described so far, which form Part I of our essay (“Contingency’s three adventures in the contemporary philosophical arena”), we identify the theoretical contexts in which today’s plea for “radical contingency” ought to be (re)placed; we put such plea into historical–philosophical perspective; and we advance the concept that leads us to reject it as a necessary operational category for a post-metaphysical philosophy: the concept of “compossibility.” Interestingly enough, Paul plays the part of a ghost, or something of the like, throughout our survey. Not only do Vattimo, Agamben, and Badiou – in whose steps Meillassoux follows – insistently mention him: they build on his radical plea for contingency. Thus, in Part II of our essay (“Paul’s backstage laboratory and the passageway out of it”), we analyse the latter in historical–political setting. We argue that Paul bequeathed a false disjunctive to Western thought by opposing one form of universalism to another: an all- inclusive oneness that privileged contingency to Rome’s all-exclusive oneness that privileged authority instead. And we attempt at finding a possible alternative to it. In a section titled: “Ἀρχή as terror – or, the serpent’s egg,” we begin by examining Paul’s anti-imperial mode of reasoning in favour of contingency and his blatant dismissal of the very notion of ἀρχή – i.e. Paul’s alleged “anarchism.” Next, we highlight the implications of the latter and discuss its enduring effects, asking, furthermore, which may be said to be its correlation with Western “nihilism.” And immediately afterwards, we situate Paul’s κήρυγμα at the extreme of a conceptual spectrum inaugurated by Antisthenes’s eroding (mis)interpretation of Socrates’s elenctic method. Our aim is to demonstrate that, in the two cases, philosophy is brought to an abrupt end, be it “cynical” (Antisthenes) or “foolish” (to paraphrase Paul).We undertake this appraisal in a brief section titled: “Pleading for contingency in Antiquity: From Antisthenes to Paul.” But what is it that Paul dismisses with his rebuttal of the notion of ἀρχή? In a section titled “Re-wording ἀρχή – or, how to combine Heidegger with Pierre Clastres,” we venture a response to this question taking into account Heidegger’s warning on the danger of Latinising ancient-Greek terms by projecting onto them the shadow of Roman imperialism, and Clastres’s concept of “society against the state.” It is moreover possible, we contend, to interpret the nature of the ancient-Greek πόλις in light of such concept, just as it is possible to think extra-modern “indivision” and ancient-Greek “justice” with recourse to the notion of ἀρχή – provided the latter is reinterpreted according to its etymology – in opposition both to the Roman imperial order and to Paul’s anarchism. Hence comparative etymology and comparative politics go hand in hand in this section. We conclude Part II searching for a way out of the imperial frontier and of Paul’s camp, and find a passageway to escape them in the binary logic of extra-modern conceptual worlds, that is to say, in what Lévi-Strauss famously called “savage thought.” Let us quickly recall that the adjective “savage” amounted for Lévi-Strauss less to “primitive or archaic” than to “untamed […] as distinct from domesticated for the purpose of yielding a return.”¹ There is much dignity in the term, then. Etymologically speaking “savage,” both as a noun and an adjective, derives from the Latin silva, whose meaning is “forest”–in reference to the habitat of those whom the Romans wrongly thought deprived of social organisation: the silvatici (Germans, Picts, etc.). In turn, in early modern times “savage” became the preferred term to designate those whom the Europeans, in the image of the Romans, fancied deprived of social organisation: Amerindians, Australian Aborigines, Africans, etc. Accordingly, in this study, we use the term “savage” to denote that which is neither “Roman” (i.e. purportedly “civilised”) nor “barbarian,” i.e. belonging in any other despotic order (the Persian, the Punic, etc.). Thus in a section titled: “Becoming ‘savage’: The other way out of the imperial frontier,” we show that the binary logic of “savage” thought – which, additionally, we put in paleo-anthropological perspective in dialogue with the work of Leroi-Gourhan – is less rigid than creative; that it pervades numerous aspects of “savage” life including social organisation, mythopoiesis, ritual practices, and personal identity; and that, to avoid falling into inertia, it dynamically combines cooperation and rivalry, thus somehow opening onto Hobbes and Rousseau’s shared blind spot. Furthermore, we argue that its dialectics of same and other,

 1 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 219. 628  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia friend and enemy, oppose any form of universalism, which “savage” thought replaces with negotiation, since for any negotiation to be possible there must be two, not one – whether that “one” replicates the “all- exclusive” Roman One or the “all-inclusive” Pauline One it makes little diﬀerence. Contingency, we conclude, may well dictate when, where, and even who might be in position of negotiating, but the structure according to which the two positions ought to be distributed cannot be declared contingent in turn. Lastly, this takes us back to the concept of “compossibility,” on which we draw in the “Conclusion” to lay the foundations of a new “postulate” supplementary to the two postulates traditionally acknowledged, since Leibniz, as the two basic rules of thought: the postulate of suﬃcient reason and the postulate of non- contradiction. A “postulate of compossibility” presents the advantage, we claim, of allowing one to cir- cumvallate not only Paul’s universalism, but, in like manner, the axiomatics of post-Fordist capitalism, which is based on the very same pro-contingency premise that stands at the core of Paul’s κήρυγμα. Moreover, we add, such postulate makes possible the combination of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality we need to re-world the un-world we are trapped into on behalf of the “anything goes” that beats under the plea for radical contingency.

2 Contingency’s three adventures in the contemporary philosophical arena

2.1 The ghost in the shell

The encrypted presence of Christian motifs in modern and contemporary thought has often been under- lined. Thus, for example, Andrew Cole argues that to elaborate his theory on “The Fetishism of Commodity and Its Secret,” Marx drew not so much on Hegel’s philosophy of right, as Marcuse claimed long ago, as on Hegel’s early theological writings on the role of the eucharist in medieval Christianity.² In turn, Sloterdijk suspects a crypto-Christian in Heidegger. By denouncing (like Pascal, Fichte, and Schelling) the relation between “egoism” and “malice,” writes Sloterdijk, “Heidegger argues in the tradition of an anti-narcissism or ‘anti-humanism’ […] coded in Augustinian terms and […] molded in a crypto-Catholic anti-modernism that does not need to be explained.”³ Actually, an explanation would be very helpful to persuade us that Pascal, Fichte, Schelling, and Heidegger are talking about the same thing and for the same reasons; for even if some similarities between Schelling and Heidegger, and more loosely perhaps between both of them and Fichte, can be drawn despite their many and important differences – of which Sloterdijk surely knows too – Sloterdijk’s claim looks to us – if it is about going into comparisons – like Schelling’s “absolute” in Hegel’s (in)famous words: “like the night, in which all cows are black,”⁴ which happens to be a Yiddish proverb without there being any need to deduce from it – or should we? – that Hegel was a crypto-Jew.⁵ Furthermore, Sloterdijk assures us, both receptivity to being and language and the care of being, as endorsed by Heidegger, reflect too his crypto-Catholicism in such a way that “it would be pointless to enter into more details.”⁶ Yet here too we would be delighted to get at least some details. For we find a closer – if somewhat puzzling – parallelism between Heidegger’s take on the respect to language and the care of being and Davi Kopenawa’s conviction, as collected by Bruce Albert, that “to be able to make hereamuu [i.e. being-hypersensitive] speeches […] one must acquire the image of the kãokãoma loud-voiced falcon […] call

 2 Cole, The Birth of Theory,86–102. 3 Sloterdijk, Not Saved, 254. 4 Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit,9. 5 A deduction that Sloterdijk might label as “acrobatic,” since – he writes –“acrobatics is involved whenever the aim is to make the impossible seem simple” (Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, 196). 6 Sloterdijk, Not Saved, 203. Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  629

[ed] Kãomari […][which] gives the [essential] words […] their [due] strength”⁷ – those very words, he adds, that the “earth eaters”⁸ (read: the “white people,”⁹ whether “missionaries” or “garimpeiros”)¹⁰ seem to have forgotten,¹¹ which explains the greed out of which they destroy forests and rivers and shows that their “thought” is “full of darkness”¹² – or, one could venture in Heideggerian parlance, insensitive to being’s “clearing.”¹³ Now, Kopenawa, rather than a crypto-Catholic, is an extra-modern (Yanomami) shaman; perhaps, then, like Heidegger. Lastly, Sloterdijk interprets Heidegger’s conceptual merging of the verbs “thinking” and “thanking” as a “crypto-Catholic” move,¹⁴ thus omitting – distractedly, on purpose? – that the semantic intersection of these two verbs, which is reflected in their mirroring phonetics and easily perceptible, is perfectly attested in Proto-Indo-European.¹⁵ One cannot but wonder, then, if it is not Sloterdijk who, paradoxically, “crypto-Christianises” their relation. Nevertheless, Sloterdijk is on the track of something intriguing here, to wit: the encrypted presence of Christian motifs in contemporary philosophy. He is right in pointing it out, that is. But – we think – he misses the target. Thus, in the following pages, we will examine the presence of, in particular, a Pauline motif in Badiou, Vattimo, and Agamben as well as, more recently, Meillassoux. We are willing to call it “radical contingency.” As for its Pauline ascendence or, to put it in more forceful terms, “causality,” we are certain that it must be thought of in “structural” or “metonymic” terms, to use Althusser’s conceptual equivalence between both expressions, i.e. as the causality of a “cause” that is simultaneously “present” in its effects (and by its effects) and “absent” in itself (or as such) from them.¹⁶

2.1.1 In the wake of kένωσις – or, Vattimo’s appropriation of Paul’s thought

“Today’s philosophical conversation has at least a point of convergence: there is no single, concluding, normative foundation.” These are the opening lines placed by Vattimo and Rovatti at the outset of their iconic edited volume Il pensiero debole, published in 1983.¹⁷ Four years earlier, Lyotard, in turn, had closed his not-less emblematic La Condition postmoderne by aﬃrming: “Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witness to the unpresentable.”¹⁸ We are here before the two counter-foundational foundations of contemporary philosophy – which, as it is patent, express an “utter” resolution and provide a “single” point of convergence to it, thus risking themselves to fall in the quicksands of self-refutation. Not only. Even if there is no “single, concluding, normative foundation” for anything, as there are inﬁnite ways of semiotising reality and turning it meaningful, and innumerable conceptual axes around which to do

 7 Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 304. 8 Ibid., 261–81. 9 Ibid., 312. 10 Ibid., 168–204. Garimpeiros: mineral prospectors. 11 Ibid., 183. 12 Ibid., 183. 13 On which see e.g. Heidegger’s 1964 lecture “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” gathered in On Time and Being,55–73, esp. 64–73. 14 Sloterdijk, Not Saved, 254. 15 Mallory and Adams, Introduction to Proto-Indo-European, 323. 16 Which amounts to say that its “causality” is neither “transitive” (mechanicist) nor “expressive” (teleological), for we neither pretend to say that Vattimo and Meillassoux, etc., follow Paul, nor are we suggesting that Paul somehow leads their (and almost everyone else’s) efforts (from, say, Nancy to Negri and Morton), but that Paul somehow manages to be present in them, we shall see why. On the differences between the aforementioned types of causality, see Althusser et al., Reading Capital, 5, 108, 156, 317, 334, 337, 341–4, 346, 367, 372, 402, 418, 464, 532–3. 17 Vattimo and Rovatti, “Premessa,” 7–11, herein 7 (our translation). This “Premise” is missing from the English edition which, published in 2012, begins (after the translator’s “Introduction”) with Vattimo’s essay “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought.” A first English translation of Vattimo’s article had already been published in 1984 in a North-American philosophy journal under the slightly extended title of “Dialectics, Difference, and Weak Thought.” 18 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 82. Cf. Vattimo’s questioning of the correlation “truth”–“wholeness” in “Dialectics, Difference, Weak Thought,” 40–1. 630  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia so, it can be said that each difference has its own sense and each possible world its own ἀρχή – atermwe shall discuss below at length, but which can be preliminarily defined here as “the persistent ground (notional or otherwise) on which something takes root and makes sense.” Thought in Greek, for instance, the “Earth” is the one that shelters the dead,¹⁹ i.e. those who no longer shine forth;²⁰ but it is also Demeter, who is sometimes sad and sometimes happy on account of Persephone’s misadventures, as shown by the Earth’schanges in mood in winter and spring, respectively²¹ – the ἀρχή of the former portrayal is a synthesis of tragic awareness and poetic perception; the ἀρχή of the latter, a combination of poetic perception, cognition, affectivity, and imagination.²² Conversely, in Rome, observes Heidegger, “the Earth, tellus, terra,isthe dry, the land as distinct from the sea […] that upon which construction, settlement, and installation are possible”²³ – here, the ἀρχή is that of a settler colonialism. In turn, in Amazonian mythology the current Earth, which will be followed by other earths (namely, those which stand above the current sky) as it was preceded by others (those which stand under its current surface),isaprovisionalscenariofor(what we, non-Amazonians, call) “trans-species” relations, inter-crossing perspectives, and becomings²⁴–thus the Amazonian world (which we tend to reduce to the admixture of human tribes and rainforest) stands on a half-cosmopolitical, half-psychedelic ἀρχή. Let the reader then draw her/his own conclusions as to the type of ἀρχή at play in the following cases: in Christianity, the Earth is the place to which the flesh returns after the person dies, but also the place whence the body will be called out for its resurrection in the end of times; in contrast, for the ant (or, rather, for our own view of what we call the ant’s Umwelt),itisa“world” made out of “galleries” where “food supplies” are stored and which must be “defended” against any potential “intru- sion;” in Modernity, the Earth is a planet that gravitates around a star; in contrast, for the child learning how to walk, it is an abyss s/he must try to avoid falling back into instead. With this we want to stress that the fact that there is no “single, concluding, normative foundation” for anything, as Vattimo claims, (i) has always been more or less clear to everyone and (ii) does not tell us much yet about which differences can coexist and which ones cannot.²⁵ Besides, what should one deduce from this, let’s say, “plurality of truths?” That “truth,” which only Christian monotheism (and perhaps, too, Hegel)²⁶ aimed at turning into “one,”²⁷ should undergo, once more in the image of Christianity (cf. Paul’s notion of κένωσις in Phil 2:7),²⁸ a kenotic or “self-lowering” process²⁹ against all triumphalism, and that we, in turn, cannot but be “convalescent” of the illness in which the latter has plunged us into?³⁰ Will we not then be unable to see beyond the end of our own nose and therefore remain trapped in our own (once swaggering, now decaying) narcissism. Paraphrasing Althusser, who used to say (whether justly or not is a different matter) that Proudhon was the “unconscious prisoner” of Smith’s and Ricardo’s political economy,³¹ will we not thereby act as the “unconscious prisoner(s)” of Christian mono-theism? Would it not be reasonable, once and for all, to move outside the dialectics of the

 19 Heidegger, Parmenides, 60. 20 Homer, The Iliad, 23.226–44. 21 Hatab, Myth and Philosophy, 26–7. 22 Cf. ibid., 31. 23 Heidegger, Parmenides, 60. 24 Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism;” Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World,61–78. 25 More on this below. 26 Whose philosophy of the Spirit mirrors the Christian formula: Λόγος ἄσαρκος → Λόγος ἔνσαρκος, even if it adds to it a third, fulﬁlling, moment (“thesis” → “antithesis” → “synthesis”). Thus, Hegel’s view that “history has a reason,” against which Schelling opposed his that “reason has a history,” which he explored in his philosophy of mythology. See further Schelling, Historical-critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, as well as vol. 12 of his Samtliche Werke and, now too, the students’ notes in Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie in Drei Vorlesungsnachschriften. 27 On Christianity and the claim that “truth” can only be “one,” see Boyarin, Border Lines, 193–201. 28 Through Christ, God “emptied himself [ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν], taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Coogan, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 2063). 29 Vattimo, After Christianity, 24, 38, 53, 67–68, 80, 91, 120. Cf. his parallel references to pietas on p. 47. 30 Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 172–3. 31 Althusser, For Marx, 90. Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  631

“One” and its “Absence” and to start playing a new and eventually more fruitful game? As for Lyotard, are “difference” and “multiplicity” just to be “witnessed?” And can their celebration be endlessly prolonged after-hours, or must they be explored afresh under the guidance of a principle which can neither be that of sufficient reason nor that of non-contradiction (which are customarily regarded as the two basic principles of thinking): a principle (as we shall later see) of com-possibility. We would like to make the point that moving beyond what we have called the dialectics of the “One” and its “Absence,” which stand as the Pillars of Hercules of today’s thought, should permit us enter into the domain of “worlding”³² – let us add: on behalf of a logic of the “uncommon” rather than the “common,” since, because of the aforementioned differences, the world – is there any need to recall it? – is a pluriverse.³³ Anyway, it is a little bit unfair, we think, that today’s discourses on the “un(re)presentable,” the “extra- normative,” and the “fragmentary” which are as many as the waves of the sea (and not totally unrelated to the logic of twenty first-century capitalism) no longer honour Lyotard and Vattimo among their ancestors, responsible as they both are for the first of contingency’s “adventures”³⁴ in contemporary philosophy. Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari have had been more lucky in this sense, for everyone speaks of decoding such and such “regimes of power-knowledge” of “deconstructing” any self-evident meanings, and of imagining “new worlds of possibles” and “lines of flight.”

2.1.2 Dancing with Paul over radical contingency: Badiou and Agamben

Or, rather, almost everyone. Badiou does not. His project,³⁵ instead, is to reintroduce a philosophy of the pure “subject” in the empty grid left behind by the rival topological distribution of what he calls (a) philosophies “sutured to science” (which turn around the notion of an “object”), (b) those “sutured to politics” (which either endorse the notion of a “subject” emerging from some “objective” domain, like Marx does, or dissolve it in order to better understand the “object” in question, thus stitching themselves back to science, like Althusser proposes), and (c) those “sutured to the poem” (which question the theoretical reliability of any “subject” and any “object”) – a philosophy, then, of the “subject” without any “object.”³⁶ It is in relation to this possibility that Paul becomes meaningful for Badiou.³⁷ What, then, does Badiou find of so much interest in Paul? Simple: the fact that Paul makes of “pure conviction,” as Badiou calls it, the cornerstone of his thought.³⁸ For only “conviction” can persuade those who are under a “law” (νόμος) that discriminates them for what they are (peoples conquered by Rome or, in the eyes of the Jews and their own law, Gentiles) that whatever any law may say about their presumed faultlessness they are open to, and can experience, “grace” (χάρις).³⁹“Conviction” translates here Paul’s πίστις, i.e. “belief” or “faith,” upon which the “hope” (ἐλπίς) of those put in disadvantage by both the Roman law and the Jewish law stands.⁴⁰ Besides, the fact that the centre of that hope is what Paul preaches as a “Christ-event”⁴¹ does not trouble at all an atheist like Badiou,⁴² as, in his view, Paul’s “Christ-event” must be seen as an “event” capable of producing an otherwise inexistent “multitude” (out of a collection of singularities, i.e. out of peoples belonging in different tribes, speaking different languages, etc.) qua

 32 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble; Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. 33 Blaser, “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe;” Blaser, “Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible?” 34 This is an intended pun on Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, originally titled Le avventure (=adventures, in the plural) della differenza. 35 Since Théorie du sujet (1982). 36 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy,92–3. 37 Ibid., 93. 38 Badiou, Saint Paul (orig. pub. in 1997), 75. The relevance of providing the date of Badiou’s original works in French will become apparent when discussing Meillassoux’s and their respective chronologies in the next section. 39 Ibid., 75. 40 Paul, 1 Cor 13:13; Badiou, Saint Paul, 93. 41 Badiou, Saint Paul, 22, 27, 35, 47, 50, 53, 55, 56–7, 63, 65–6, 68, 73, 75–6, 90. 42 Ibid., 107. 632  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia revolutionary “subject”–and thus, ultimately, precisely, as an “event,” i.e. as something that disrupts the “being,” and thereby the norm imposed on any given state of things and its status quo: a “cast of dice,”⁴³an “excess.”⁴⁴ In other words, it is both Paul’s “all-inclusive” One (read: Paul’s “universalism”)⁴⁵ and Paul’s “anti-philosophy”⁴⁶ (since Paul’s bet on the event rejects being) that interests Badiou, who pairs Paul’s logic of “pure” (i.e. autonomous and self-positional) “subjectivation”⁴⁷ with a principle of “pure” or “radical contingency”⁴⁸ that restores its dignity to the pure “multiple” (i.e. to that which is more than x, being x the law that constrains things to be in this but not that way):

This is the root of the famous Pauline theme concerning the superabundance of grace. The law governs a predica- tive, worldly multiplicity, granting to each part of the whole its due. Evental grace governs a multiplicity in excess of itself, one that is indescribable, superabundant relative to itself as well as with respect to the ﬁxed distributions of the law.

The profound ontological thesis here is that universalism supposes one be able to think the multiple not as a part, but as in excess of itself, as that which is out of place, as a nomadism of gratuitousness.⁴⁹

Hence, Badiou does not only approach Paul: he ﬁnds in Paul the axiomatics of a restored philosophy of the “subject” as “event” and, thereby, the axiomatics of a fully “political” philosophy:⁵⁰

Why Saint Paul? Why solicit this “apostle” who is all the more suspect for having, it seems, proclaimed himself such and whose name is frequently tied to Christianity’s least open, most institutional aspects: the Church, moral discipline, social conservatism, suspiciousness toward Jews? How are we to inscribe this name into the development of our project: to refound a theory of the Subject that subordinates its existence to the aleatory dimension of the event as well as to the pure contingency of [the] multiple […] without sacriﬁcing the theme of freedom?”⁵¹

By a dual equation: Being = Law; Event = Freedom, which is what Paul endorses against the former. In a nutshell: Badiou interprets “being” in a Roman way, i.e. as imperium, and, for that very reason, champions Paul’s anti-imperial commitment to what Andrew Gibson calls the “absolute privilege of contingency.”⁵² On his part, Agamben finds in Paul a different type of conceptual companion for rethinking the possibility of a political philosophy – one that has less to do with re-figuring out the conditions that must be met for a revolutionary “subject” to be there than with fancying the conditions of possibility of an interruption of the power-shaped time (this, he takes from Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History)⁵³ we are imprisoned in (in a Foucauldian sense). What, then, does Agamben discover in Paul? What Nietzsche called a radical “inversion” of all values (“whenever I am weak, then I am strong”)⁵⁴ and, with it, the opportunity of disrupting at any moment (“now!”, as Benjamin dreamt)⁵⁵ what is imposed on us

 43 See further Badiou, Being and Event, esp. 184–98. 44 Badiou, Saint Paul, 78. Put differently: Paul’s “consciousness-of-truth[,] rooted [as it is] in a pure event, [is] detached from every objectivist assignation to the particular laws of a world or society” (107). 45 Ibid., 76. 46 Ibid., 108. 47 Ibid., 87. 48 Ibid., 4, 77; cf. 81: “illegal contingency,” since the “event” transgresses any legal “assignation.” 49 Ibid., 78. 50 Surely there is no need to recall here that Badiou was one of Althusser’s disciples. He learned from Althusser that no revolutionary “subject” can actually be extracted from the objective structure of modern class struggle, since the latter’s subjects (i.e. the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) are (both) its (coimplied) mathematical functions. There are two ways out of Althusser’s impasse: to ignore it by clinging to the alleged “autonomy” of the working class (like most post-Gramscian Marxists did in Italy) or to substitute the revolutionary subject itself by the notion of a “molecular revolution” (à la Guattari). Badiou, on his part, seems to remain nostalgic of a bygone “subject” which, nonetheless, he attempts to re-found on a different conceptual basis. 51 Badiou, Saint Paul,4(emphasis added). 52 Gibson, Intermittency, 24. 53 Benjamin, Illuminations, 196–209. 54 Paul, 2 Cor 12:10 (Coogan, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 2038). Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  633 as something apparently closed.⁵⁶ For I can always decide that your supposed strength is your weakness and my supposed weakness my strength, and take advantage of it to perform something unexpected that reverses, or at least disturbs, any situation in which you might seem to be the winner and I might seem to be the loser, thus putting any distribution of power upside down and allowing for new unpredicted possibilities to emerge in the horizon of the possible understood as the contingent. It is thus that my “redemption” or “deliverance” (ἀπολύτρωσις, Erlösung) takes place.⁵⁷ “Now-time” (Jetztzeit)⁵⁸ or “contracted time” like that about which Paul speaks in 1 Cor 7:29: a “messianic time”⁵⁹ which is no longer the “end of times,” the “last day” of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, but the time that “contracts” itself and “begins to end.”⁶⁰ Benjamin and Paul? That, exactly, is Agamben’s thesis, based on Benjamin’s own stress, in Theses on the Philosophy of History,ontheadjective“weak” (schwache) when writing about “messianic power” (messianische Kraft) – a stress that Agamben attributes to Benjamin’sreadingofPaul.⁶¹Agambensup- ports his interpretation on Taubes’ssurmise⁶²concerningtheplausibleinfluence of Rom 8:19–23 on Benjamin’s Theologico-Political Fragment.⁶³ Yet Agamben skates over Taubes’semphasisonBenjamin’s inclusion of the term “Messiah” (not just “Messianic,” says Taubes)⁶⁴ in the latter.⁶⁵ If,aswehaveseen, Badiou dispenses with Christ, keeping from Paul’s “Christ-event” the event alone and thus positing a Christ-event without Christ; Agamben, in turn, dispenses with the “Messiah” and keeps from Paul the messianic time alone: a messianic time without Messiah. Vattimo would probably say that such extreme secularisation is, anyway, all the more Christian, as it carries the logic of κένωσις all the way through, extracting from it its most extreme, if paradoxical, implications: Christianity must finally dispense with Christ (the Messiah).⁶⁶ In conclusion, according to Agamben Paul must be viewed not only as the “secret presence” behind Benjamin’sreflections on the revolutionary qualities of “messianic” time,⁶⁷ but also as the ultimate referent for a political philosophy – which can only be, by definition, the philosophy of a messianic, i.e. non- predictable, contingent, time. In the end, we are not so far away from Badiou, as, here too, the unforeseeable or contingent claims its rights against any determination, be it that of a “law” (like the Jewish Law) that “makes one man a Jew and the other a goy [=non-Jew]”⁶⁸ (for any law consists in “instituting divisions and separations:” such is its “principle”)⁶⁹ or that of a pre-assigned revolutionary subject⁷⁰ – here too, then, we are before a philosophy of freedom. Furthermore, we would like to venture that we are, in both cases, before the fulfilment of Christian thought. If Heidegger famously said that Nietzsche had put an end to the history of Western “metaphysics” understood as the history of the forgetting of the “truth” of “being”–in the sense

 55 Benjamin, Illuminations, 205, 208. 56 See Agamben, The Time that Remains, 139–40. 57 Ibid., 144. 58 Ibid., 140. 59 Benjamin, Illuminations, 208–9. 60 Agamben, The Time that Remains, 62. 61 Benjamin, Illuminations, 197; Agamben, The Time that Remains, 139–40. 62 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 305–6; Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 70; Agamben, The Time that Remains, 140–1. 63 Benjamin, Selected Writings, 305–6. 64 Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 70. 65 And in the concluding lines of his Theses, it should be added: “every second of time [is] the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 209). 66 Vattimo, “The God Who Is Dead,” in After Christianity,11–24, herein p. 24: “If it is the mode in which the weakening of Being realizes itself as the kenosis of God, which is the kernel of the history of salvation, secularization shall no longer be conceived of as abandonment of religion but as the paradoxical realization of Being’s religious vocation.” 67 Agamben, The Time that Remains, 140. 68 Ibid., 23. 69 Ibid., 47. 70 “[T]he fact that the proletariat ends up being identified over time with a determinate social class – the working class that claims prerogatives and rights for itself – is the worst misunderstanding of Marxian thought. What for Marx served as a strategic identification – the working class as klēsis [=calling] and as historical figure contingent on the proletariat – becomes, to the opposite end, a true and proper substantial social identity that necessarily ends in losing its revolutionary vocation” (ibid., 31). 634  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia that the Nietzschean “will to power” represents its culmination, the point after which only something else can begin, if it does – it is also possible to affirm that Badiou and Agamben (like Vattimo, if in a different way) put an end to the history of Christian thought by accomplishing it. And is not such possibility, anyway, what Laruelle, too, has in mind when he “heretically” appropriates the figure of “Christ” qua God’s reverse, or as “in-man”-ness?⁷¹ We are tempted to label this as contingency’s second “adventure” in today’s philosophical thought.

2.1.3 Absolute contingency: from Badiou to Meillassoux

It is in Quentin Meillassoux, however, that contingency is absolutised – and thus allowed a third “adventure.” In the Preface to Meillassoux’s After Finitude⁷² – which is tellingly subtitled: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency – Badiou presents Meillassoux’s advocacy of contingency as having “open[ed] a new path in the history of philosophy.”⁷³ For, he says, while Kant had upheld the “necessity of the laws of nature,”⁷⁴ even if our “perceptual experience […] provides no guarantee whatsoever for it,”⁷⁵ by positing that it ensues from the “constituting activity” of the “transcendental subject”⁷⁶ – i.e. from our thinking – Meillassoux “demonstrates [instead] that there is only one thing that is absolutely necessary: that the laws of nature are contingent.”⁷⁷ This is not exactly a new path in the history of philosophy, though, but an old one opened long ago by Democritus, for whom, as Pierre-Marie Morel writes, “worlds due their existence to contingency or chance, rather than to necessity,”⁷⁸ even if, once each world is formed, ἀνάγκη replaces τύχη in it – a paradox Aristotle discusses in Physics, B, 4, 196a25–35 (=Democritus, DK 68A 69). Meillassoux rather walks and widens that pathway, as Badiou himself does, or, more exactly, as Badiou himself had already done: “There are only multiplicities and nothing else. None of them on their own is connected to another. […] Being is subtracted from any connection;”⁷⁹ “what […] surfaces […] is Being itself in its redoubtable and creative inconsistency. It is Being in its void […] This is what I call an ‘event.’ […] The event occurs[,][…] as Mallarme would say, at that point one is then in the waters of the wave in which reality as a whole dissolves.”⁸⁰ In fact, it can be argued that in Brieﬁngs on Existence – from which these two brief excerpts are taken – Badiou develops the ontological implications⁸¹ of what one year before, in his essay on Paul, he had called the “pure,”⁸² “radical,”⁸³ “illegal contingency”⁸⁴ needed in turn to set up, in the image of Paul’s anomic “superabundance of grace,” a “nomadism of gratuitousness,”⁸⁵ and glossed in his book on Deleuze,⁸⁶ inspiring himself in Mallarmé,⁸⁷ as “the aﬃrmation of the totality of chance.”⁸⁸ Moreover, he does so in close dialogue with Lucretius, whose notion of clinamen (the “unpredictable swerve of atoms” of

 71 Laruelle, Future Christ. 72 Orig. pub. in 2006. 73 Badiou, “Preface,” vii. 74 Ibid., vii. 75 Ibid., vi. 76 Ibid., vii. 77 Ibid., vii. 78 “[C]’est à la contingence ou au hasard, bien plus qu’à une nécessité déterminée, que les mondes doivent leur existence” (Morel, Atome et nécessité,26). 79 Badiou, Brieﬁngs on Existence (orig. pub. in 1998), 162. 80 Ibid., 168. 81 Notice the subtitle: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, which is actually the original title of the book in French: Court traité d’ontologie transitoire. 82 Badiou, Saint Paul,4. 83 Ibid., 77. 84 Ibid., 81. 85 Ibid., 78. 86 Orig. pub. too, like Saint Paul, in 1997. 87 To which Meillassoux himself dedicated in 2011 the monograph: The Number and the Siren. 88 Badiou, Deleuze,73(emphasis original). Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  635 which reality is made) Badiou makes his.⁸⁹ Ultimately, Badiou had laid the foundations of this project – which, in short, Meillassoux fulﬁls – in Being and Event.⁹⁰ Yet such project goes back to Théorie du sujet,⁹¹ where Badiou writes against Heidegger, for whom Hölderlin is obviously the metaphor therein:⁹²

Remain in exile – or, as Rimbaud says in A Season in Hell: “stay there where one gains nothing;” it is this Hölderlin could never cope with, as, for him, the exile calls for a cruciﬁed meditation on the need to return.

Courage cannot be deﬁned otherwise: it is the acceptance of exile without return.⁹³

It is the defence of this “courage,” not only against Hölderlin and Heidegger but also against Sophocles and Aeschylus,⁹⁴ i.e. against ancient-Greek tragedy en bloc,⁹⁵ that Badiou undertakes in his writings against the “shuddering” of those not courageous enough to embrace that for which “nihilism” is, he says, a poor “signifier.”⁹⁶ Yet this means that at the very bottom of Badiou’s philosophy there is a question of value.Itis from a decision, then, that it all follows: in the end “cekomça,” as Pierre Clastres might have ironi- cally said.⁹⁷ It is that same “courage,” furthermore, that inspires Meillassoux’s After Finitude and, to a certain extent given its simultaneous indebtedness to Laruelle’s “anti-philosophy,”⁹⁸ Brassier’s Nihil Unbound.⁹⁹ Thus, Meillassoux: “Contingency expresses the fact that physical laws remain indifferent as to whether an event occurs or not – they allow an entity to emerge, to subsist, or to perish.”¹⁰⁰ For “anything might happen, even nothing at all.”¹⁰¹ According to Meillassoux, this means two things: “first, that contingency is necessary […]; second, that contingency alone is necessary”¹⁰² –“or in other words, […] the omnipotence of chaos;”¹⁰³ and this, in turn, requires that a “principle of unreason”¹⁰⁴ be introduced against Leibniz’sprincipleof“sufficient reason:”¹⁰⁵ “if something is, then it must be contingent.”¹⁰⁶ Yet while this implies turning Leibniz upside down, it simultaneously maintains, albeit

 89 Ibid., 73, 76. 90 Orig. pub. in 1988. 91 Orig. pub. In 1982. 92 Like Nietzsche is the metaphor for Deleuze and Mallarmé is the metaphor for Badiou himself in Badiou’s aforementioned book on Deleuze. Badiou’s take on Heidegger is eloquent in Manifesto for Philosophy (orig. pub. In 1989): “Philosophy de- nounces or showers praise upon ‘nihilistic modernity’ only to the extent of the difficulty it has itself in grasping where current positivities pass in transit, and given its inability to conceive that we have blindly entered into a new phase of the doctrine of Truth, that of the multiple-without-One, or of fragmentary, infinite and indiscernible totalities. Nihilism is a least-worst signifier. The true question remains: What has happened to philosophy for it to refuse with a shudder the liberty and strength a desacralizing epoch offered it” (58–9) – as also is, consequently, Badiou’s dismissal of Hölderlin (69–77). 93 “Tenir l’exil – ou comme dit Rimbaud dans Une saison en enfer: « tenir le pas gagné » – c’est ce que Hölderlin ne pouvait pas supporter, l’exil n’étant jamais pour lui que la crucifiante méditation du retour. Le courage n’a pas d’autre définition: exil sans retour” (Badiou, Théorie du sujet, 185). 94 Ibid., 185. 95 Euripides, most likely, goes unmentioned due to his “rationalist” reputation, but his Medea – where the absence of ground and ἀρχή is portrayed as a catastrophe, as Pasolini saw very well – should grant him, too, a place in the list. 96 Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 59. 97 Clastres, Archeology of Violence, 226, 230, 235, while reviewing Claude Meillassoux’s ethnography. 98 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 118–49. 99 Which derives from Badiou its thesis that “being is nothing” (ibid. 148); see further ibid., 95–117. Surely there is no need to recall that, before the publication of Nihil Unbound (2007), Brassier had translated both Badiou’s Saint Paul (in 2003) and Meillassoux’s After Finitude (in 2006), and co-edited and translated with Alberto Toscano Badiou’s Theoretical Writings (in 2004). On the role of contingency in today’s philosophical panorama, see also Mackay’s edited volume The Medium of Con- tingency (orig. pub. 2011, i.e. the year before Mackay’s own translation of Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren saw the light). 100 Meillassoux, After Finitude,39(emphasis original). 101 Ibid., 63. 102 Ibid., 65. 103 Ibid., 71 (emphasis original). 104 Ibid., 73. 105 Ibid., 77. 636  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia corrected, the validity of Leibniz’soriginalintuition:“it is necessary that there be something rather than nothing because it is necessarily contingent that there is something rather than something else.”¹⁰⁷ As Brassier observes, “[t]his claim is liable to a ‘weak’ and a ‘strong’ interpretation. The weak interpretation states that if and only if something exists, then it exists contingently. The strong interpretation claims that it is absolutely necessary that contingent entities exist.”¹⁰⁸ On the weak reading, “not only is existence contingent; that contingent entities exist is itself nothing but a contingent fact. But the claim that it is not necessary that contingent things exist has to invoke a second-order […] contingency in order to deny the necessity of contingent existence at the level of fact.”¹⁰⁹ Yet even “though we can conceive of an existing entity as contingent, we cannot conceive of existence per se as contingent – fortodoso would be to think its possible inexistence, and we are perfectly incapable of thinking nothingness.”¹¹⁰ Therefore, the strong interpretation prevails: contingency is both necessary and what is.

2.2 A new path in the history of philosophy? Putting Meillassoux into context

Undeniably, Meillassoux’s take on contingency goes beyond what the ancient Atomists fancied. In this sense, it could seem that it opens – as Badiou claims –“a new path in the history of philosophy.” Yet Bensusan opportunely reminds us that, within the ancient Sceptic tradition, Aenesidemus, unlike Sextus but like Pyrrho perhaps, did not merely endorse the “exercise of doubting” as a way “to cure people of [dogmatic] conviction[s],”¹¹¹ but made of it an “ontology,” i.e. a thesis about the world’s “furniture.”¹¹² Meillassoux’s stance is not very diﬀerent from Aenesidemus’s and Pyrrho’s, then. Yet Pyrrhonism must be viewed as an exception internal to ancient-Greek culture; or, even better, as an exception partly external to it, since Pyrrho’s ontological scepticism took shape through his contact with pre-sectarian Buddhism during Alexander’s campaign in India.¹¹³ There is actually something intrinsically modern in the “ontologisation” of doubt, which, Pyrrho’s “Buddhism” aside (but is Buddhism not an “a- theism,” anyway?),¹¹⁴ only makes sense once the world has been deprived of all consistency in favour of an other-worldly God and/or once that God has been declared dead. Experienced in a Greek way, τύχη – which we hasten to keep untranslated – meant instead something altogether diﬀerent from modern “contingency:” not so much ontological indetermination as the “meaningful experience” of that whose “reason why” cannot be known, i.e. of the events and “encounters that either bless us or ruin us”¹¹⁵ in a world in which the “gods” (read: the shining-forth of its ever-living immanent forces) are “permanently present.”¹¹⁶ Besides, the Greeks generally assumed that if something can be indeed experienced as τύχη it is, precisely, because some kind of “order” (τάξις) prevails despite any possible exceptions to it:

we observe that some things always come to pass in the same way, and others for the most part. It is clearly of neither of these that chance, or the result of chance, is said to be the cause — neither of that which is by necessity and always, nor of that which is for the most part. But as there is a third class of events besides these two — events which all say are by chance — it is plain that there is such a thing as chance and spontaneity; for we know that things of this kind are due to chance and that things due to chance are of this kind.¹¹⁷

 106 Ibid., 73. Cf. Badiou, Being Event, 315–23, where this move is explicitly anticipated. 107 Ibid., 76 (emphasis added). 108 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 71. 109 Ibid., 71. 110 Ibid., 72. 111 Bensusan, Being Up for Grabs, 145. 112 Ibid., 144–8, 156–9. 113 Beckwith, Greek Buddha. 114 Panikkar, El silencio del Buddha. 115 De los Ríos, “La experiencia griega del azar,” 37. 116 Ibid., 34. Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  637

Furthermore, they did not necessarily view τύχη and “ﬁnality” (τέλος) in contradictory terms:

Of things that come to be, some come to be for the sake of something, others not. Again, some of the former class are in accordance with intention, others not, but both are in the class of things which are for the sake of something. Hence it is clear that even among the things which are outside what is necessary and what is for the most part, there are some in connexion with which the phrase “for the sake of something” is applicable. […] Things of this kind, then, when they come to pass accidentally are said to be by chance. […]

Example: A man is engaged in collecting subscriptions for a feast. He would have gone to such and such a place for the purpose of getting the money, if he had known. He actually went there for another purpose, and it was only accidentally that he got his money by going there; and this was not due to the fact that he went there as a rule or necessarily, nor is the end eﬀected (getting the money) a cause present in himself – it belongs to the class of things that are objects of choice and the result of thought. It is when these conditions are satisﬁed that the man is said to have gone by chance. If he had chosen and gone for the sake of this – if he always or normally went there when he was collecting payments – he would not be said to have gone by chance.¹¹⁸

Aristotle here limits contingency in two ways: on the one hand, its existence does not preclude that of regularity; on the other hand, contingency exists inside a complex causal web from which it cannot be isolated. Therefore, it is not to be absolutised.¹¹⁹ In other words, Aristotle, who is also the first philosopher to have addressed the notion of τύχη in a systematic manner, refuses to take an either/or approach to chance. Likewise, Plutarch will later attribute to most Greek philosophers from Anaxagoras to the Stoics the view that chance (regardless of whether one may take chance to be a type of cause or the name we give to what exceeds our knowledge) concurs with necessity, fate, choice, and spontaneity.¹²⁰ In contrast, Meillassoux puts forward an either/or approach to chance. But with this he does not really open “a new path in the history of philosophy”–he merely reinstantiates Pyrrho’s and Aenesidemus’s somewhat marginal gesture. Additionally, Meillassoux’s recourse to modern science – in particular, to the mathematical possibility of iteration without repetition – to prove his point on radical contingency, marginalises, in turn, recent developments in contemporary biology which we deem fair to briefly mention here. Not only is regularity intrinsically connected to genetics (so that from an egg fly there is no chance that a lizard or a turtle are born). Relationality, which over the past few years has become something like a leitmotif in theoretical biology, is based on regularity on two levels: interspecies alliance (symbiosis) and non-invasive distribution of the species that constitute a specific ecosystem: thus the recurrence of “mutualism,” when the relationship between two organisms is mutually beneficial (+, +), and “commensalism,” when the relationship between two organisms just benefits one of them (+,0), in addition to competition (–, –) and predation (+, –); itcanbearguedthatitisonlyexceptionally that one species puts at risk the survival of another one, be it in the form of “amensalism,” when the relationship between two organisms damages one of them without benefiting the other one (0, –),orintheformof“parasitism” (+, –). Furthermore, relationality is not limited two two- species interaction. As David George Haskell writes, “[l]ife is embodied network.”¹²¹ Similarly, Scott Gilbert comments:

When you think of a cow, you probably envision an animal grazing, eating grass, and perhaps producing methane at her other end. However, cows cannot do this. Their bovine genome does not encode proteins with the enzymatic activity needed to digest cellulose. What the cow does is chew the grass and maintain a symbiotic community of microorganisms in her gut. It is this population of gut symbionts that digests the grass and makes the cow possible.

The cow is an obvious example of what is called a holobiont, an organism plus its persistent communities of symbionts. The notion of the holobiont is important both within and beyond biology because it shows a radically new way of

 117 Aristotle, Physics, B, 5, 196b10–16 (ed. Barnes, 26). 118 Ibid., 196b18–197a5 (ed. Barnes, 27). 119 See further Diano, Form and Event. 120 Anaxagoras, DK 59A66. 121 Haskell, The Songs of Trees, viii. 638  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia

conceptualizing “individuals.” Recognizing the holobiont as a critical unit of life highlights process and reciprocal inter- actions, while challenging notions of genomic purity.¹²²

None of this is due to chance, even if contingency undeniably plays a role in the making of life’s network.¹²³ Also, ethology is another important window to bio-regularity:

The part of the brain that stores spatial information gets larger and more complex, allowing the birds to remember the locations of the seeds and insects that they cache under bark and in clusters of lichen. […]

[Besides,][i]f one bird should happen on a novel way of ﬁnding or processing food, other will learn from what they see.¹²⁴

And so, too, is chemistry, which does not only intervene in the formation of organisms but also in their behaviour in an extraordinarily complex way:

If the chemical signals and cell growth occur in the right sequence, root and fungus entangle and begin an exchange of sugars and minerals. In addition to food, the root chimera moves information from one plant to another in the form of chemical signals that travel through the fungus. These molecules carry messages about attacking insects and drying soil, the stressors of plant life […]

Decisions are made in these networks based on ﬂows of information involving thousands of species.¹²⁵

Finally, to all this one must decidedly add teleo-dynamics, which is gaining prominence in evolutionary biological thought as a plausible explanation to what, as Terrence Deacon stresses, escapes both entropy and accidentality:

How [can] the chemistry of life embody the information necessary to instruct the development of organisms and maintain them on the path that defends them against the incessant increase of entropy? In other words, what controls and guides the formation and repair of organism structures to compensate for the ravages of thermodynamics and just plain accident, and what makes it possible for living processes to be organized with respect to speciﬁc ends, such as survival and reproduc- tion?¹²⁶

“Teleodynamic organization,” Deacon goes on to say, opens for us the door to comprehend the essential part that the “virtual” plays in all life processes, thus “enabling the potentially indeﬁnite to enable something intrinsically incomplete to bring itself into existence”¹²⁷–against any materialist reductionism, that is. Probably, we touch here upon a fundamental issue, namely, the relation between materialism and contingentism, both of which depend on a restricted (eﬃcient, mechanicist) understanding of causality, be it that they portray it as necessary, as accidental, or, more often, as a combination of necessity and contingency. Besides, from a strictly philosophical perspective, Hilan Bensusan has recently shown the problematic (in the sense of too-far-reaching) nature of Meillassoux’s radical contingentism. Even if “contingency is what we should primarily look at in order to ultimately come to terms with the sensible or the concrete,” he writes, the “accident itself” cannot be seen as “an absolute principle or an ultimate element to which

 122 Gilbert, “Holobiont by Birth,” M73. 123 Networked biological “stories take their form from seemingly minor contingencies, asymmetrical encounters, and moments of indeterminacy” (Gan et al., “Introduction,” G5, emphasis added); “in polytemporal, polyspatial knottings, holobionts hold together contingently and dynamically, engaging other holobionts in complex patternings” (Haraway, “Symbiogenesis, Sym- poiesis,” M 26, emphasis added). Notice that in a scenario “ruled” by pure contingency, no stories would ever be in position of taking “form” and no “patterns” would be possible either. 124 Haskell, The Songs of Trees,34(emphasis added). 125 Ibid.,38–9 (emphasis added). 126 Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 281. 127 Ibid., 541. Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  639 everything else is to be reduced.”¹²⁸ Accordingly, Bensusan’s purpose is “not to state the sovereignty of contingency […] but rather to spell out the details that makes possible its governance,” inasmuch as contingency “is not the upper hand, but […] a primary component of what there is.”¹²⁹ Put differently: one needs not so much to affirm contingency as to “investigate it with care” considering its many names and aspects.¹³⁰ Contra Meillassoux’s, Bensusan rightly recalls Iain Hamilton Grant’sfar-more nuanced model for thinking accidentality.¹³¹ Contingency, for Grant – says Bensusan –“is not a principle that assures the lightness of everything,” as it does not compromise “substantiality.”¹³² Nature – to employ a common term for the sake of simplicity – is both unconditioned,i.e.“not sponsored by anything – except itself,”¹³³ and substantial, “albeit ever-changing and built on non-necessities.”¹³⁴ But it is mostly on Leibniz that Bensusan relies.¹³⁵ For Leibniz, he underlines, substances (“monads”) have no substrata: “nothing assures their identity but the infinite discernible predicates that indicate the events they go through;”¹³⁶ that is to say, monads are permanently exposed to otherness even if they have “no windows:”¹³⁷

Leibniz understands perception in the broader context of how diﬀerent entities co-exist while taking into consideration the others. His monads need no windows because what they ought to perceive is already within their inner constitution; and still they perceive and the act of perception is itself an event. […]

On the other hand, no entity is disconnected from its world-mates. Interconnectedness of all monads is achieved through perception: every monad perceives others that in turn perceive others. Interconnectedness is therefore experience-based. Leibniz considers that for whatever is concrete, existence depends on being perception. There can be no worldly vacuous actuality; that is, there is no worldly actuality that fails to aﬀect (or have an eﬀect on) anything.¹³⁸

Therefore, Leibniz’s monadology can be deﬁned as an “ontology of perception” in which “all entities perceive others.”¹³⁹ Plus the fact that it presupposes and articulates interconnectedness makes of “compossibility” its subject: “the most important modality in a monadology is compossibility,” as “no monad is strictly necessary and none is possible on its own.”¹⁴⁰ Furthermore, “[c]ompossibility is the monadological tactic to deal with contingency:” insofar as they are not possible on their own or by themselves, “things are contingent on other things to their bones,” so that “events happen because it is compossible for them to happen.”¹⁴¹ This, though, brings back regularity into the picture: “nothing subsists without sponsoring and those sponsors are, ultimately, what explain both regularities and whatever lies behind them.”¹⁴² Hence, “monadologies” can also be said to be “ontologies of agency” and interaction, concludes Bensusan.¹⁴³ Thus too his proposal to re-think contingency in terms not only of “fragments” but also of “rhythms”¹⁴⁴ and even

 128 Bensusan, Being Up for Grabs,15–6 (emphasis original). 129 Ibid., 16. 130 Ibid., 17. 131 In Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, orig. pub. in 2006, like Meillassoux’s After Finitude. 132 Bensusan, Being Up for Grabs, 32. 133 Ibid., 32. 134 Ibid., 32. 135 Like Tarde, Whitehead, and Latour, on which see ibid., 100. 136 Ibid., 96. 137 Leibniz, Philosophical Writings,4. 138 Bensusan, Being Up for Grabs,98–9. 139 Ibid., 101. 140 Ibid., 104. On the term “compossible,” see Leibniz, Philosophical Writings, 36. 141 Ibid., 104. 142 Ibid., 102 (emphasis added). 143 Ibid., 102. 640  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia

“series,”¹⁴⁵ to which we are sympathetic. In fact, towards the end of this study, we shall return to the notion of “compossibility,” which we ﬁnd much more suitable than that of “radical contingency” in the context of a post-metaphysical philosophy.

2.3 Transition

We have surveyed contingency’s three adventures in contemporary thought, from Vattimo to Badiou, Agamben, and Meillassoux, who, despite his philosophical originality, prolongs Badiou in the quest for radical contingency. Now, throughout our survey we have repeatedly encountered Paul, since Vattimo, Badiou, and Agamben refer to him insistently, and build expressly, if variously, on his thought. In the sections that follow we examine and contextualise Paul’spleaforcontingency,whose roots are less theological than political. We argue that Paul bequeathed a false disjunctive to Western thought by opposing one form of universalism to another: an all-inclusive oneness that privileged contingency, to Rome’sall-exclusive oneness that privileged authority. And we try to identify a possible alternative to it.

3 Paul’s backstage laboratory and the passageway out of it

3.1 Ἀρχή as terror – or, the serpent’s egg

Our thesis is that even if the amalgamation of ancient Atomism (stripped of any ἀνάγκη), ancient Scepticism (conveniently ontologised), and modern materialism (of a non-necessitarian type) can partly explain the rise of “radical contingency” to the firmament of today’s philosophical categories, it would be hard to ignore Paul’s ongoing influence in Western culture and thought as an exceptionally salient factor thereof. Furthermore, Paul is also indirectly responsible of the modern disenchantment born from the ashes of the God that Paul himself asked everyone to believe in as the antidote to any pretended security one would be tempted to seek in this world. Contingency, then, was Paul’s ally from the very beginning. There are five crucial passages in this sense in Paul’s correspondence with the Galatians, the Corinthians, and the Romans – an interesting ethnocultural landscape indeed, as in what follows we will be talking about those whom Rome tried to civilise (including the Gauls and thereby too the Galatians of Anatolia), those whose culture Rome allegedly bettered (the Greeks), and the Romans themselves: • No. 1 – 1 Cor 15:24: “Then comes the end, when he [=Christ] hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed all dominion [ἀρχή] and all authority¹⁴⁶ and power.”¹⁴⁷ • No. 2 – Gal 3:13 “Christ redeemed us from the curse [κατάρα] of the law [νόμος].”¹⁴⁸ • No. 3 – Rom 10:4 “Christ is the end [τέλος] of the law so that there may be righteousness [δικαιοσύνη] for everyone who believes [πιστεύοντι].”¹⁴⁹ • No. 4 – Rom 3:21-24: “21But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed […]22 the righteousness of God through faith [πίστις] in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction

 144 Ibid., 163–94. 145 Ibid., 32. 146 Literally ἐξουσία: “that which is permitted.” 147 Coogan, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 2020 (trans. slightly modiﬁed, since Coogan renders πᾶσαν ἀρχὴν as “every ruler,” thus conﬂating ἀρχή and ἄρχων). 148 Ibid., 2046. 149 Ibid., 1990. Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  641

[διαστολή],23 since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God;24 they are now justiﬁed by his grace [χάρις] as a gift [δωρεάν], through the redemption [ἀπολύτρωσις] that is in Christ Jesus.”¹⁵⁰ • No. 5 – Gal 3:28 “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one [ἕν] in Christ Jesus.”¹⁵¹

Paul preaches, then, the destruction – the abolishment – of all ἀρχή (No. 1) and νόμος (No. 2), which are to be seen as a “curse” (No. 2): Christ brings an “end” to any law (No. 3) so that God’s “justice” (Nos. 3, 4) may be “graciously” and “gratuitously” (No. 4) extended to those who “believe” (Nos. 3, 4) regardless of “who” they are (Nos. 4, 5); only by thus becoming “one” (No. 5) they will be “delivered” (No. 4) from Rome’s oppressive “power” (No. 1) and become something else than what the Roman law (with its distinction between “slaves” and “free men” [No. 5]) and the Jewish law (with its distinction between “Jews” and “Greeks”) determine they are (No. 1). Neil Elliot and Brigitte Kahl provide the setting of Paul’s insurgent preaching. The Romans attributed the “destinies” of the peoples to the “meritorious piety of their ancestors,”¹⁵² and the “fact” that Aeneas – by bringing safely his father, his son, and his ancestral gods to Ilium after the destruction of Troy, as the legend has it – could be said to have been the most “pious” of all ethnic ancestors, granted them legitimacy to dominate those peoples whom they conquered. Roman domination was therefore based on division (we and the others),divisiononuniqueness (we above all others, i.e. the same type of uniqueness Christianity would later reclaim for itself), and this implied putting forth a subordinative oneness (others have no choice but submit to Rome). Paul opposes to it a universalist or all-inclusive κήρυγμα established upon a counter-legend, namely, the biblical legend of Abraham,¹⁵³ who, unlike Aeneas, abandoned his father and his father’sgods“to follow God in trust that he would receive a new posterity.”¹⁵⁴ In like manner, Paul opposes Christ, “whose death [and resurrection] made possible the incorporation of ‘many nations’ as Abraham’s descendants,”¹⁵⁵ to Augustus, the prototype of all Roman emperors¹⁵⁶ “whose vengeance against his father’s murderers secured peace for all who share[d] ritually in his sacriﬁce.”¹⁵⁷ Kahl writes:

That Jesus “gave himself” for a sinful other […] and that it was precisely as an inferior and unworthy other condemned to death, [that] he was raised by God […] to represent lordship (kyrios, […]) and universal power according to the true will and image of God the Father – all this profoundly disturbs, confuses, and disorders the clear-cut constructs of enmity and antagonism, identity and alliance underlying the semiotic “battle square” of empire […][thus making possible] a movement out of the battle order.¹⁵⁸

 150 Ibid., 1981. 151 Ibid., 2047. 152 Elliot, The Arrogance of Nations, 137. 153 On which see Van Seters, Abraham in History and Tradition; Sperling, The Original Torah,75–90. 154 Elliot, The Arrogance of Nations, 137. 155 Through the belief in the saving qualities of Christ’s death and resurrection, and hence in his role as σωτήρ or “saviour.” On how this did not amount for Paul to invent a “new religion” but to broaden the concept of “Israel,” see further Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles; Gaston, Paul and the Torah; Nanos, The Mystery of Romans; Gager, Reinventing Paul; Campbell, Paul and the Creation of Christian Identity; Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs; Eisenbaum, Paul Was Not a Christian; Zetterholm, Approaches to Paul; Boccaccini and Segovia, Paul the Jew; Boccaccini, Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation. On how it did prove problematic, nonetheless, for some of his fellow Jews, see Boyarin, A Radical Jew; Piñero, Guía para entender a Pablo de Tarso. 156 Paul knew ﬁve: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. 157 Elliot, The Arrogance of Nations, 137. 158 Kahl, Galatians Re-imagined, 263. 642  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia

Figure 1: “Exodus and Messianic Dissolution of the Combat Order,” in Kahl, Galatians Re-imagined, 264.

A movement of which “love” (ἀγάπη rather than ἔρως) is the “driving power that throws the combat square into an irreversible spin of messianic ‘revolution;’”¹⁵⁹ or, in other words, into “a metamorphosis that does not simply replace one empire with another empire, the kingdom of Caesar with a counter-kingdom of God,”¹⁶⁰ but brings “the perpetual war of civilization,” i.e. the fight of the One against the Many, to a “halt” by means of a “messianic revolution”¹⁶¹ which turns the Many into an even-more-powerful One. The crucial point is the premise on which the whole κήρυγμα stands: Paul’s dismissal of any ἀρχή, i.e. of any “ruling principle,” but also (as we shall see in the next section) of any “bedrock” or “footing,” and ultimately too of any “beginning” or “starting point” (since ἀρχή is also the “end of a rope”) and of any “base” or “place” on which to stand (χώρα). The implications are huge. For no world can lack an ἀρχή. A world (any world) is, as Patrice Maniglier puts it, “a possible way of making identity and difference”¹⁶² (night/day, war/peace, up/down, inside/outside, etc.) or, as Lévi-Strauss says, a possible “classification”¹⁶³ or a collection of many intersecting classifications that “proceed by [and hence are based upon the articulation of] pairs of contrasts […][and which] cease when it is no longer possible to establish [any further] oppositions.”¹⁶⁴ Furthermore, behind each term of any given opposition there is always a principle that inspires it,¹⁶⁵ that is to say, a particular ἀρχή. This means, first, that any possible world stands upon a collection of ἀρχαί; and, secondly, that the logic of any possible world is binary. Yet unlike the one Paul fights against, the purpose of this binary logic is not meant to divide and subordinate, but to divide in order to incorporate, so that “opposition, instead of being an obstacle to integration, serve[s] rather to produce it”¹⁶⁶ – thus its designation as “union of opposites,”¹⁶⁷ which is not the same as the “dissolution” and

 159 Ibid., 265–6. “Love,” thus understood, is a recurrent notion in Hardt and Negri’s Empire (69, 78, 114–115, 186, 204, 216, 361, 388, 408, 413), who stress that “rebellion” must become “a project of love” (413); the Pauline overtones of this assertion are most notable. 160 Which seems to have been instead the object of Jesus’s preaching (see. e.g. Mark 1:14–15). 161 Kahl, Galatians Re-imagined, 266. 162 Maniglier, “Anthropological Meditations,” 127. 163 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 61. 164 Ibid., 217. 165 Ibid., 60. 166 Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 89. 167 Ibid., 88. Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  643

“subsumption” of these into an empty oneness. No ἀρχή (no ἀρχαί), no world. Therefore, Paul’s “anarchism”–or, even better, Paul’s un-archeology, to adopt and reuse in a different context Bensusan’sex- cellent term¹⁶⁸ – must be seen as the serpent’s egg of Western “Worldlessness”–and as one of the poles between which Western history oscillates, for in it numberless permutations of Paul’s u-topia have been essayed only to be betrayed by the dys-topian resurgence of new Roman-like forms of “imperial” power. There is, of course, a trick in all this: insofar as it relies on the view that God’s ἀγάπη is the sole principle by virtue of which everyone (i.e. anyone) is justified, Paul’s anarchism is pseudo-ἀρχή-less, i.e. it makes of God’s ἀγάπη a sort of an-archic (and earthbound-less) ἀρχή; therefore, it proves self-refuting in logical terms (like Vattimo’s claim against any “single foundation” and Lyotard’s against any “totality”). But it is in practical terms all the more corrosive, as it rests on a negative (and, again, earthbound-less) principle capable of melting all differences, of turning them into nothing. In Paul, then, not only does the negative become positive: anarchism and nihilism mirror each another.

3.2 Pleading for contingency in Antiquity: from Antisthenes to Paul

Formulated in Greek, which, while not being the oﬃcial language of the Roman Empire, was, nevertheless, the κοινή of the eastern imperial territories and the language of philosophy,Paul’s κήρυγμα both targets one of the key notions of Greek philosophical discourse (the notion of ἀρχή) and represents the culmination of an eroding logic that, as Felipe Martínez Marzoa observes,¹⁶⁹ had already made its way into Greek philosophy with Antisthenes (about a hundred years before the “birth” of Pyrrhonism, then) and haunted it ever since: the logic of contingency. To understand this, we must brieﬂy go back to Plato – and Socrates. As Sean Kirkland contends, Plato’s presentation of Socratic philosophizing in the Apology is the key with which to interpret Socrates’s approach to philosophy (as seen by Plato, but this means it could be viewed thus):

In the Apology, Socrates focuses upon, […] explains and defends, his own expressly elenctic and aporetic philosophical activity, that very same activity we ﬁnd repeatedly and more or less consistently portrayed [in Plato’s early dialogues]. […] That is, here and here alone Socrates’ questioning and searching way of discourse is itself thematized and treated extensively. Moreover, this self-presentation by Socrates is directed toward the everyday attitude, i.e. toward that understanding of our world, including ourselves and one another, prior to philosophy’s interrogation of our unarticulated principles and values. [Thus] Plato names this pre-philosophical attitude by reference to those who are largely conﬁned to it, “the many (hoi polloi),” and his term for the mode in which we relate to the world when immersed in our everyday lives (and indistinguishable from “the many”) is “doxa.” [Hence], we can say that the Apology thematizes Socratic philosophizing most centrally in its problematic relation to the everyday attitude and doxa, insofar as it is here that Socrates attempts to bring himself to light qua philosopher before “the many,” embodied by a jury of (likely) 501 of his fellow Athenian citizens.¹⁷⁰

Socrates’s method is elenctic because it aims at opening the possibility of questioning that which is otherwise always-already too-quickly and too-uncritically taken for granted or at face value, and thus answered, beforehand. And it is aporetic because far from attempting to reach a clear-cut response about that which it questions – a response that could be thereupon employed in a dogmatic way – it aims at underlining the need to think it rather than to know it in advance,¹⁷¹ i.e. the need to keep reﬂecting on how x, y, and z appear to us and pondering how we can better inquire into their being.¹⁷² Yet in Antisthenes this changes dramatically. For Antisthenes makes of Socrates’s propaedeutic negativeness something positive instead.¹⁷³ As a result any “rule” capable of supplying any indication (no matter how provisional) on how

 168 Bensusan, Being Up for Grabs, esp. 61–94. 169 Martínez Marzoa, Historia de la filosofía antigua, 118–9, 151–5, 171–5. 170 Kirkland, The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato’s Early Dialogues, xxiii. 171 Or have it written down, on which see Hyland, Plato and the Question of Beauty, 115–35. 172 Cf. Martínez Marzoa, Historia de la filosofía antigua, 103. 173 Ibid., 118. 644  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia the questioning should be carried out (so as to not fall back into the particularity of the departing δόχαι) is voluntarily abandoned.¹⁷⁴ In other words, knowledge becomes deictic and the world contingent. But with this – as Martínez Marzoa sees very well – the domain of any philosophical questioning is “disqualified” as such.¹⁷⁵ If no “rules” can be set, no “limits” can be fixed either. Hence subjectivism wins over the philosophical terrain, turning it into a desert. And since “limits” are by definition two-sided (“Ais what not-A is not,”¹⁷⁶ “things ought to be approached not like that but like this,” etc.) the binary logic that also helps to distinguish the “necessary” from the “contingent” vanishes, which means that the latter can claim prevalence over the former, or rather be made identical to it and hence turned absolute. There are only three possibilities before this. (1) One is to say that things are fine in this way. (2) Another one is to not give up and pursue the work of philosophy. (3) Finally, there is the option of placing elsewhere a ground that may bring consistency to an otherwise radically contingent (un-)world. Cynics and skeptics chose 1. Aristotle and the Stoics clang to 2. The Epicureans remained in between 1 and 2. The Neoplatonists, between 2 and 3. When Christianity reached Greek culture, it place itself within the third option: a Christian is someone who is in this world to give testimony of a truth which is not from this world. And when the truth – which is no longer experienced as “disclosure” but as “norm”–is put elsewhere but wants to be reached, there are two possible ways of reaching it: to extend ourselves towards it, as the Gnostics fancied, or to contract it so that it may reach us, as Paul’s followers taught instead. And how can the truth contract itself? By lowering itself to the point of becoming entirely contingent, e.g. by becoming dependent on, and in rigour identical to, a contingent event: Jesus’s death and resurrection. In this way too, the contingent becomes absolute, only that, now, “the absurd becomes thesis.”¹⁷⁷ Notice that Paul chooses very carefully his words: his κήρυγμα is a “scandal” (σκάνδαλον) for his fellow Jews, who could have never imagined their God die, let alone be humiliated on the cross; and it is “foolishness” (μωρία) for the non-Jews, i.e. for the Greeks – and their philosophy.¹⁷⁸

3.3 Re-wording ἀρχή – or, how to combine Heidegger with Pierre Clastres

But what is it that Paul leaves behind with his dismissal of the notion of ἀρχή? We would like to venture a response to this question by means of combining two apparently unrelated conceptual tools, namely, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and in particular his warning concerning the danger of Romanising ancient-Greek terms by projecting onto them the interpretative shadow of Roman imperialism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Clastres’s ethnographically-based concept of “society against the state,” through whose lens – we think – it is possible to interpret the nature of the ancient-Greek πόλις. But if we are correct, this means, then, that “savage” indivision and ancient-Greek “justice” mirror one another. This is the ﬁrst point we would like to make in this section, which, nonetheless, we open with a few etymological

 174 Ibid., 118. Voluntarily also means “unilaterally” (119). 175 Ibid., 155. 176 Clastres, Society Against the State, 173; Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy’s Point of View, 254. 177 Ibid., 175. 178 Paul, 1 Cor 1:23. In Society Against the State (169–75), Pierre Clastres tells of a Guarani tribe whose members wanted to leave this “imperfect earth” (ymy mba’emegua) for a “land without evil” (ywy mara-eÿ), persuaded that “they were not created for misfortune” (171); a people of “arrogant madness” (174) that felt, consequently, “impelled […] to search for another space where they might know the happiness of an existence healed of its essential wound” (171–2), which “they [too] imagined [like the Christian do] in the direction of the rising sun” (174). Yet “having arrived on the beaches, at the edges of the evil world, almost in sight of their goal, they were halted by the same ruse of the gods, the same grief, the same failure: the obstacle to eternity, la mer allée avec le soleil [the sea, allied with the sun (Rimbaud)]” (174). Clastres says they “were never good savages” (171). One could venture they were, like Paul’s followers, earth’s “aberrant sons” (Kahl, Galatians re-imagined, 272); with one important difference, though, as they merely dreamed of what Paul’s followers managed instead to establish: not so much a “land without evil” as an unrooted, stumbling world lacking any ἀρχή. On the Guarani tribe in question, see also Hélène Clastres, The Land without Evil. Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  645 remarks. Subsequently, we will try to show that the aforementioned coincident political model (“savage” and “ancient Greek”) can be thought with recourse to the notion of ἀρχή, provided the latter is reinterpreted according to its etymology, in opposition both to the Roman imperial ideal and to Paul’s anarchism. Let us begin with a few diverging etymologies. In his course on Parmenides, Heidegger warns about the “appropriation of Greek words by Roman-Latin thought,” which, he says, entails “a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking;”¹⁷⁹ and he adds: “The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.”¹⁸⁰ Thus Γαῖα, the “Earth” that shelters all the living, is different from tellus, the dry element on which to build.¹⁸¹ Ἀληθής, i.e. “true” in the sense of “dis-closed,” is the opposite of verum, which denotes instead something “closed,”“concealed.”¹⁸² Ψεῦδος, the “dissembling” capable of de- ceiving, has nothing to do with falsum, which means “fallen,” i.e. that which is no longer rectum.¹⁸³In turn, in rectum the proper meaning of ὀρθός: “on and along the way,” is lost, as rectum denotes “that which is directed toward what is above because it directs from above and commands and ‘rules’ from above.”¹⁸⁴ Lastly, from the “political,” i.e. from that which is relative to the πόλις, any notion of imperium or “command” must be decidedly removed.¹⁸⁵ This latter issue is especially relevant for our purpose here. For indeed the πόλις – and with this we transit from the domain of compared etymology to that of compared politics – is not a place of command.It is reminiscent instead, we should like to argue, of the extra-modern societies studied by Pierre Clastres (in the Paraguayan Chaco, but the argument is extensive to most extra-modern societies in America, Africa, Australia, Oceania, and part of Asia), in which “the chiefs are not there to command” but to “prevent [everyone] from fulfilling an[y] eventual desire for power,” so as to “ward off the irruption of division into the social body.”¹⁸⁶ Myth, language, and ritual coalesce around that goal. Myth provides a normative foundation at once “immediate” and “exterior” to the undivided social body: it is the “ancestors” and the “gods,” whose time is the ground of every presently-lived time, that decree the law on which the living together of the community relies.¹⁸⁷ In turn, the mission of the chiefs is to look after the myth by perpe- tuating its words, which they must not only transmit with their speeches, but also know when to apply so as to make justice, i.e. non-division, prevail there where conflicts may eventually arise.¹⁸⁸ For “language is the very opposite of violence.”¹⁸⁹ In consequence too, the chief must also be generous, as otherwise he himself would promote social division;¹⁹⁰ and if he does, “the village or band will simply abandon him and throw in a leader more faithful in his duties.”¹⁹¹ In short then, “generosity” and “talent as a speaker” go hand in hand.¹⁹² Yet “[a]s the purveyor of wealth and messages the chief conveys nothing but his dependence on the group, and the obligation to exhibit at every moment, the innocence of his office.”¹⁹³ Besides, speaking – which is therefore the privilege of the chief – is less a privilege than a duty,¹⁹⁴ which means the chief remains by all means “the group’s prisoner.”¹⁹⁵ Finally, the ritual inscribes the law on the body of

 179 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 23. 180 Ibid., 23. 181 Heidegger, Parmenides, 60. 182 Ibid., 47. 183 Ibid., 39. 184 Ibid., 81. 185 Ibid., 45. 186 Clastres, Archeology of Violence, 213. 187 Ibid., 214. 188 Ibid., 214–5; cf. Clastres, Society Against the State, 29, 36. 189 Clastres, Society Against the State, 46. 190 Ibid., 31; cf. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 225. 191 Clastres, Society Against the State, 45. 192 Ibid., 36. 193 Ibid., 45. 194 Ibid., 41. 195 Ibid., 46. 646  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia all the members of the group, indistinctly; and painfully enough¹⁹⁶ so that its signs remains forever on their skin (as scariﬁcations, mutilations, tattoos, etc.):

“You are one of us. Each one of you is like us; each one of you is like the others. You are called by the same name, and you will not change your name. Each one of you occupies the same space and the same place among us: you will keep them. None of you is less than us; none of you is more than us. And you will never be able to forget it. You will not cease to remember the same marks that we have left on your bodies.”

[…] The mark on the body, on all bodies alike, declares: You will not have the desire for power; you will not have the desire for submission.¹⁹⁷

We can draw from this one provisional conclusion: the extra-modern chieftainship matches neither the model of the ancient Oriental kings nor that of the Roman emperors; clearly the ancient-Greek “ruler” (ἀρχός, ἄρχων) offers a closer analogy. Thus, in Homer, the fact that the “rulers” hold the “scepter,” which they serve rather than use to be served by others,¹⁹⁸ means, first and foremost, that they have the duty to “speak”¹⁹⁹ to administer “justice,” which is considered to be “divine”²⁰⁰ – Heraclitus will later suggest that justice stands above the gods,²⁰¹ and Sophocles identifies its source with that of the noblest speech.²⁰² Likewise, when the “elders” sit to decide about something according to “justice,” they do so on “polished stones” in a “sacred circle,” holding their “scepters” and respecting their “turns.”²⁰³ The essence of the πόλις is there in nuce. Justice (δίκη) lies at its core – as it lies at the core of Plato’s Πολιτεία – and language (λόγος) is its vehicle. For without the proper words, there can be no justice; without justice there is no peace; and without peace life becomes a homeless wandering around. Hence Sophocles’s term for the one who indulges in ὕβρις or “excess”–of which Heraclitus says that “it needs to be put out more than a house on fire”²⁰⁴ – and therefore acts unjustly: s/he is ἄ-πολις.²⁰⁵ How to define the πόλις, then? Drawing on Plato and Aristotle, Heidegger says that it is both “the ‘where’ to which man as ζῷν λόγον ἔχον belongs” and “the ‘where’ from which alone order is ordained.”²⁰⁶ There is little mystery in the reciprocity of the two parts of this definition, since, thought in a Greek rather than Roman way, “order” is but another name for the “justice” (δίκη)²⁰⁷ before which all are evenly brought by the λόγος – which, as Heraclitus says, is “one” (ἕν), “wise” (σοφόν), and “common” (κοινόν) to all.²⁰⁸ The parallelism with what Clastres describes is extraordinary: the Guarani

god Namandu […] ﬁrst creates the Word, the substance common to the divine and the human. He assigns to humanity the destiny of collecting the Word, of existing in it and protecting it. Humans, all equally chosen by the deities, are Protectors of the Word, and protected by it. Society is the enjoyment of the common good that is the Word. Instituted as equal by

 196 Cf. Kahl’s contrast (in Galatians Re-imagined, 272) between Paul’s notion of divine compassion and the “pitilessness” of Athena, which the Greeks portrayed as the goddess of “intelligence” and “counsel” (Otto, The Homeric Gods,50–2). 197 Clastres, Society Against the State, 186, 188. This ritual cruelty contrasts with the daily tenderness displayed by the members of the group, on which see Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 281–93. 198 Homer, The Iliad, 2.100–8. 199 Ibid., 2.109. 200 Ibid., 1.233–9. 201 Cf. Heraclitus DK B 30 and B 94. For the Presocratic frags., see Kirk et al.’s compendium. 202 Σοφοκλῆς, Ἀντιγόνη, 450–7. In most translations Antigone reproaches Creon to have issued a decree that contradicts Zeus’s law; this misses the point that it is something above Zeus, instead, that inspires Antigone to speak. We therefore opt to give the reference to the original Greek text. 203 Homer, The Iliad, 18.503–506. See further Benacchio, “Una aproximación a la idea de polis y justicia en Homero y Hesíodo.” 204 Heraclitus, DK B 43. 205 Σοφοκλῆς, Ἀντιγόνη, 370. Here, too, most translations wrongly interpret that whoever indulges in ὕβρις is to be “expelled” from the “city.” 206 Heidegger, Parmenides,95(emphasis added). 207 Cf. δίκη and τάξις in Anaximander, DK A 9. 208 Heraclitus, DK B 2, B 30, B 32, B 41, B50, B 72, B 89, B 108, B 114. Cf. Parmenides DK B 8. On the intimate relation between λόγος and μύθος in this context, see Heidegger, Parmenides, 112. Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  647

divine decision […] society assembles as a whole, that is, an undivided whole […] so that the men of this society are all one.²⁰⁹

Let us quickly add: not in the Pauline sense, as, untamed, their “savage thought” still responds to the strict binary logic – in terms of exogamous alliances,²¹⁰ lineage distribution,²¹¹ totemic classifications,²¹² and/or mythopoiesis²¹³ – on which, as we have stressed following Lévi-Strauss and Patrice Maniglier, any true world is ultimately based.²¹⁴ Furthermore, we should like to stress that what Clastres calls the equalitarian “law” that grants its non- division to the extra-modern group, and the justice glowing at the heart of the Greek πόλις, may be thought with recourse to the original meaning of the term ἀρχή. Back then to etymology, if shortly. As it is known, the semantics of the term ἀρχή is twofold. On the one hand, it means “beginning”–in connection to ἀρχαῖος, “original,”“ancient,”“old.” On the other hand, it means “reign”–in connection to ἀρχικός, “to put into power.” Yet from these two meanings the former one (attested in Homer) is also the oldest one (for ἀρχή as “reign” is first documented in Pindar). In fact, ἀρχή is a verbal noun of ἄρχω, which means “to be the first,” thence “to begin” (and only derivatively “to rule”).²¹⁵ Additionally, the Proto-Indo-European semantic field in which ἀρχή belongs includes, too, the root *h₂erǵ-, which carries with it the meaning “glittering,” whence terms like “silver” (Avestic , Latin argentum) and “white” (Sanskrit अर्जुन, Greek ἀργός) derive. It would be therefore possible to translate ἀρχή as: the old which gleams and thereby guides.²¹⁶ Notice that we have not written “which dominates.” Not only do we want to resist any imperial logic: we do not see any reason to introduce it at this point. Quite the opposite, actually. And the beginnings of philosophy are rather telling in this respect. Thus Heidegger, in his 1941 course titled Ground Concepts, interprets Anaximander’s shortest sentence: ἀρχή τῶν ὄντον τὸἄπειρον²¹⁷ as follows: “The disposition for what each time shines forth into unconcealement²¹⁸ is the impeding of [any] limits” (emphasis added)²¹⁹–in Gary Aylesworth’s translation: “Enjoinment for the respectively present is the repelling of limits.”²²⁰ Considering all we have said, rendering ἀρχή as “disposition” is an excellent option. For “[t]he Greek word ἀρχή,” observes Heidegger, “is not yet used here in the later sense of principium and ‘principle.’ […]. ἀρχή is that from [sic] whence something emerges.”²²¹ So far so good. But how can ἀρχή, thus understood, be τὸἄπειρον, as Anaximander seems to have held? Once more, Heidegger proves helpful. “[O]ne translates, [and] that already means one ‘interprets,’ τὸ ἄπειρον with ‘the limitless,’ the ‘infinite,’”²²² remarks Heidegger. “The translation is correct,” he adds.

 209 Clastres, Archeology of Violence, 188. 210 On which see Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship. 211 On which see e.g. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 199–246. 212 On which see Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, and its sequel: The Savage Mind. 213 On which see Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques, and their sequels: The Jealous Potter and The Story of Lynx. 214 A note on the “and/or” above: not all possible registers are always structured thus; hence, for example, “even though the Tupi have not made a place for dualism in their social organization or in their pantheon, dualism nevertheless organizes their mythology” (Lévi-Strauss, The Story of Lynx, 238). It should also be clear that “[d]ual organization is not in the first place an institution […]. It is, above all, a principle of organization, capable of widely varying and, in particular, of more or less elaborated, applications” (235). 215 Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 145. 216 “Guides:” oἰακίζω (Heraclitus, DK B 64). Hence, in this case, we do not agree with Bensusan’s criticism of the notion of ἀρχή in Being Up for Grabs (15, 43, 55, 58, 61–94), which looks to us too conventional (see esp. p. 64, where ἀρχή is merely defined as “determination,” and the equivalence established in p. 138. between that which is “determined” and the non-relational or “immune to any interference […] to anything else”). 217 Anaximander, DK 12 A 9, 12 A 10, 12 A 12. 218 Lit. “which is each time ‘presenced,’” or what becomes present. Cf. Anaximander’s (long) sentence, i.e. DK 12 A 9, as per Heidegger’s analysis of its meaning in Off the Beaten Track, 242–81. 219 “Die Verfügung für das jeweilig Anwesende ist die Verwehrung der Grenzen” (Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 51.107). 220 Heidegger, Basic Concepts, 92. 221 Ibid., 92–3 (trans. slightly modified: the German original has ἀρχή in lowercase in all cases; instead, Aylesworth’s rewrites “Ἀρχή” in its second occurrence, i.e. right after the omitted text). 222 Ibid., 94. 648  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia

“However, it says nothing.”²²³ It says nothing because τὸἄπειρον cannot be an “ens” (Seiende), i.e. a particular “being;” nor can it be the “universal cosmic matter” (allgemeine Weltstoff)²²⁴ out of which everything would be made, because this would be a non-early Greek way of understanding what ἀρχή means. “τὸἄπειρον,” writes Heidegger, “is the ἀρχή of being [and in this sense] τὸἄπειρον is the repelling of limitation. It relates itself to being […] and that means, in Greek, to the presencing of what presences.”²²⁵ It can be argued, therefore, that τὸἄπειρον is, qua being’s ἀρχή, something active: the action of impeding any limits. But what does this mean? If Anaximander is not thinking here in some-thing infinite, what, then, are the limits thus impeded by what we are told that consists in impeding them? Clearly, they cannot be the limits imposed from within by the presencing (i.e. by the being, since “being” and “presence” are one and the same thing) of that which is brought into presence each time,²²⁶ for that which shines forth into unconcealment becomes present as such and such, i.e. it enters the region of being in an aspectual and hence delimited way, thus receiving its own “portion” (μέτρον) and “gleam” (κόσμος),²²⁷ which it cannot overstep, as that would entail indulging in ὕβρις. Consequently, the limits that τὸἄπειρον impedes must be those that what shines forth into unconcealment may eventually try to unfairly impose on other beings against their own right to shine, they too, into the open. Put differently: Anaximander’s limits are any particular, hence arbitrary, abusive restrictions imposed on being’s inherent justice, no matter which and made by no matter whom.²²⁸ Finally, it should be noted that if δίκη lies at the core of the πόλις as its transcendental condition, a non-delimited space likewise lies at its geographic centre: the ἀγορά or, in Sparta, the ἀπέλλα (which means literally “stoneless:” ἀ-πέλλα); another name for it is ἐκκλησία, which names the place where those who are “called” (καλέω) “out” (εκ-) from their own homes and concerns gather – unlike the Christian ecclesia, which is the “common place of gathering” where everyone acquires, by means of the eucharist, an even greater degree of personal intimacy with God. “None of you is less than us; none of you is more than us. Hence you will not have the desire for power; you will not have the desire for submission.” Invoked in the ἀγορά, inscribed in the body, pronounced by the chief or the elder: these are the words of old of “savages” and Greeks alike. This is their ἀρχή and their law – one that demands that a difference be made between those who comply to it and those who transgress it; for the world, any world, is based on the identification of opposite ontological categories into which everything fits: bright and pale, bow and basket, enemy and friend.

3.4 Becoming “savage”: The other way out of the imperial frontier

Rome had perverted the very notion of ἀρχή by transforming it into imperium: “with Rome or against Rome, to which you will sooner or later submit all the same,” which means that sooner or later everything will become “One.” Paul adds another twist to this very perversion: there is no diﬀerence between enemy and friend, we are all equally justiﬁed by God, we are all “One.”²²⁹ In other words, Paul’s all-inclusive oneness replaces Rome’s all-exclusive oneness – one type of oneness substitutes for another one. In one case (Rome),

 223 Ibid., 94. 224 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 51.110. Aylesworth has “being” and “universal world-stuff,” respectively (Heidegger, Basic Concepts,94–5). 225 Heidegger, Basic Concepts,95(emphasis added). 226 Anaximander, DK 12 A 9. 227 Heraclitus, DK B 30, B 89, B 94. 228 Which means that, being an action (a persistent disposition) instead of a substance, τὸἄπειρον limits anyone from imposing any arbitrary limits on anyone else. There is no paradox in this, however; for there are three different types of limits at stake here: (1) the limits that anything receives when entering into the region of being (so as to shine forth as this or that), i.e. its aspectual delimitation; (2) its assigned lot or portion, which is limited by time and must not be overstepped; and (3) the arbitrary limitations that something may eventually pretend or even succeed to impose on something else, which are those limits that τὸἄπειρον dissolves. How? By assigning a lot or portion to everything according to the order of time (2), in addition to conferring a determinate or delimited aspect to it (1). Therefore, time, being, and justice co-imply each other. There is no other way of interpreting together Anaximander’s saying and his alleged identification of ἀρχή with τὸἄπειρον. Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  649

One results from privileging, of Two terms, One over the Other to the extent of declaring that Other inexistent in the short or the long run, i.e. from corrupting an originally Binary structure (“we, Romans, and everyone else”) and making it Univocal instead (“we, Romans, and everyone else like us”). In the other case (Paul), it results from declaring that everything is One to begin with (“we are all justified by God in the same way”). It is clear, though, that there was/is another possibility of contesting imperial domination – a possibility that has remained insufficiently explored due to the fact that Western history has basically oscillated between Roman (and later Christian and modern) imperialisms and their Pauline (and later anti- Christian and postmodern) subversions, i.e. (to repeat it once more) between the many permutations of Paul’s u-topia and the many dys-topian resurgences of its denial. We are not thinking, however, in the alternative: against the One – whether an a priori One (Paul) or an a posteriori One (Rome) – the Many understood as the One’s numberless virtual transpositions: “this,” and “that,” and “that” too, etc. Nor are we thinking in the negative rendering of such formula: “neither this,”“nor that,” etc., so that any identity is subverted and made impossible beforehand. For, as we shall see, no world can be established upon these premises either. Suppose, then, that we could move out of the Roman frontier in an altogether different direction: either via Greece or via the forest (silva) inhabited by those silvatici whom the Romans thought deprived of any social organisation. What would we find there? Again: a binary logic. But we would find it too if we move backwards along the history of human evolution. Thus in Gesture and Speech – which, originally published in 1984, is one of the earliest, most original, and successful attempts to elaborate a theory of human biocultural evolution – Leroi-Gourhan asserts that all “reference systems” of “Paleolithic thought,” as we find them displayed in what is often if improperly called Paleolithic “art,” were “ultimately based on the alternation of opposites – day/night, heat/cold, fire/water, man/woman, and so on.”²³⁰ Leroi-Gourhan talks of “binary complementarity”²³¹ and explains through it as well, among other things, spatial distributions,²³² social cooperation,²³³ and the “dynamic equilibrium” between security and freedom.²³⁴ In his “Introduction” to the English edition of Leroi-Gourhan’s book, Randall White speaks in turn of the “basic binary oppositions” implicit in the “operational sequences”–which are always, he adds, “more- or-less subconscious,”“unverbalized,” and “unrecognized”–that guided the creation of earliest human “material culture,”“social organization,” and “cosmology.”²³⁵ It is relatively easy to figure out why: bipedalism entailed the liberation of the forearms and this, in turn, brought about a very wide range of both potential “un-focusness” and potential “multi-tasking,” as Leroi-Gourhan suggests. Put otherwise: everything became excessive for those-who-we-seem-no-longer-to-be-but-still-are. Herder makes a similar argument in his Essay on the Origin of Language.²³⁶ Now, before excess and un-focusness there is only one

 229 Interestingly, sectarian opposition to Paul in the first centuries of Christianity, as displayed, e.g. in the Pseudo-Clementine homilies and recognitions, made use of the binary logic of Jewish apocalypticism that Paul had reworked in a more universalist fashion. We are grateful to Antonio Piñero for this information (personal communication of July 24 [07:45 GMT + 1], 2020). 230 Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 395–6. 231 Ibid., 396. 232 Ibid., 335. 233 Ibid., 151–7. 234 Ibid., 338. After all, he underlines, the development of life on earth responds to binary choices and patterns: plants and animals (i.e. chemical vs mechanical food intake), radial and bilateral symmetry among the latter, invertebrates and vertebrates with locomotive or relational forelimbs, etc. (ibid., 25–60). 235 White, “Introduction,” xvii–xviii. Cf. Roy Wagner’s “reciprocity of perspectives,” on which see his posthumously-published The Logic of Invention. 236 Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 141. Also, Bataille, The Accursed Share, builds in his own way on the notions of dépense and excès. Our approach is different from his in that it does not posit “excess” as the underlying principle of what we do but, rather, as what we try to avoid; which in the end intersects, nonetheless, with Bataille’s view that “excess” is what we do not admit. Therefore, our take on what Bataille deems negative is positive, and vice versa. Yet our point of departure is different from his, as it is not the criticism of bourgeoise utility, but the problem of how to “world”“worlds” out of “chaos,” which is not a negative concept: with Guattari (Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 103–8), we see “chaos” as the “hypercomplex” domain of all emergence and “morphogenesis,” or as the “prime mater of all virtuality.” 650  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia chance to make it through, namely, to turn the Multiplicity of what can be sensed (which is practically infinite) into a world, i.e. into a de-limited Multiplicity; and this means to structure it. Language serves no other purpose, in the sense that naming permits us to identify this and that.²³⁷ But everything named must then be distributed somehow. And the most immediate and, ultimately too, effective way of doing it is in pairs of opposites: “day/night, heat/cold, fire/water, man/woman, and so on.” First, because our own body – and the mind can be said to be its idea²³⁸–is organised (not systematically but often enough) in dual terms: we have two eyes, two arms, two legs, etc. And second, because our experience reports to us about the recurrence of dual phenomena – or in any event we map them thus: above and below, in and out, in front of and behind, right and left, concave and convex, striated and smooth, absent and present, dark and bright, etc. This explains, among other things (including the binary code of modern computer programming), the system of synonyms and antonyms on which the vocabulary of any language is based, gender roles – which need neither be rigid nor hierarchical²³⁹–like e.g. those studied by Clastres among the Aché (“basquet” and “bow”),²⁴⁰ and binary classifications of all sorts. (a) Totemic classifications, for instance; for, as Radcliffe- Brown – who defines “association by contrariety” as “a universal feature of human thinking”²⁴¹ – sus- pected,²⁴² and as Lévi-Strauss shows, these display “theorical associations”²⁴³ based on the characteristics of “symmetrically-opposed species.”²⁴⁴ Or, more broadly, (b) social organisations, which totemic alliances, in turn, help to vertebrate: thus social groups are often divided into two exogamous moieties to which opposite symbolic qualities and roles are attributed,²⁴⁵ so that, for example, the shaman of the group belongs in one moiety whereas the chief belongs in the other moiety – something similar, then, to the two kings (ἀρχαγέται) of Sparta, which belonged in the Agiad and Eurypontid families that carried with them the lineages of the mythical twins Eurysthenes and Procles, respectively. This additionally means that extra-modern systems of kinship (and kinship in general) are (is) based on a binary logic, i.e. on the distinction between affinity and consanguinity, and, therefore too, that a “living person is not an individual but dividual,a[composite] singularity of body and soul internally constituted by the self/other, consan- guine/affine polarity”²⁴⁶ – a singularity that is “decomposed at death, which separates a principle of affinal alterity, the soul, from a principle of consaguineal identity, the body, […][thus] releas[ing] the tension [.] between affinity and consanguinity that impels the kinship process.”²⁴⁷ So we have not only totemic classifications and social organisations, but also (c) individuals (which are no longer individuals but “dividuals,” to use once more Marilyn Strathern’s term) affected by a binary logic that Lévi-Strauss hesitates to define as being co-substantial to human thought; still, he says, “many peoples” have “chosen” it,²⁴⁸ which seems to us to be a subtle way of affirming that it is co-substantial indeed to human thought – for

 237 Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 147, 155. 238 Segovia, “Spinoza as Savage Thought.” 239 Gender-role shift is relatively frequent among extra-modern peoples, and can eventually stand on performative premises (on which see Astuti, “The Vezo Are Not a Kind of People”). On the other hand, matrilineal social formations, which are many and widespread, make the men rather than the women circulate, assign to the father no role whatsoever vis-à-vis his children (his figure is actually replaced by the mother’s brothers), punish quite severely any violence that men may exert on women (which is therefore extremely rare in them), and grant both property and sexual freedom to the women alone. 240 Clastres, Society Against the State, 101–28. 241 Radcliffe-Brown, “The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology,” 118. 242 Ibid., 114. 243 Rather than a principle of mystical “participation” àlaLévy-Bruhl, or “utilitarian” considerations àlaMalinowski (Lévi- Strauss, Totemism,80). 244 Ibid., 80–9. 245 Lévi-Strauss’s first paper on it is “Reciprocity and Hierarchy,” from 1944. 246 Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native, 129. 247 Ibid., 129. 248 Lévi-Strauss, The Story of Lynx, 239. Cf. though The Savage Mind, 90, where Lévi-Strauss openly sustains that binary logic is “like the least common denominator of all thought, a direct expression of the structure of the mind (and behind the mind, probably, the brain) and not an inert production of the action of the environment on an amorphous consciousness.” Manifestly, the allusion to the brain has to do with its two hemispheres. Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  651 where and when were those “many peoples” given the choice to choose it, and how did they make their choice thereof? Add to this list (d) myths, like those of the aforementioned legendary great–great–great grandsons of Heracles and the widespread American twin-myths like those of lynx and coyote among the Nimiipuu and their neighbours,²⁴⁹ to which one could add just as well the Proto-Indo-European myth recently reconstructed by James Mallory and Douglas Adams in which “the universe is created from a primeval giant [man][…] who is sacrificed and dismembered, the various parts of his anatomy serving to provide a different element of nature,”²⁵⁰ i.e. one of the oldest myths we know of about the reciprocal articulation of nature and culture. And add also (e) rituals, like those which, from South-East Africa to Central and Western Australia (notice the geographical disparity!),reflect a bemusing regularity when it comes to the binary chromatics (e.g. red/white, red/black, 0/white and black) employed in funeral and fertility rites.²⁵¹ Three important nuances are in order here before we continue. First, “contrariety” means something else than “complementarity,” in the sense that it means something more complex which, in rigour, must be formulated neither as 1/2 + 1/2 = 1 (i.e. as a “unity”) nor as 1 + 1 = 2 (i.e. as a “duality”). For, as Viveiros de Castro observes apropos extra-modern binary social organisations, “each moiety […] is the inverse of the opposite moiety,”²⁵² with which it thereby forms “neither [a] unity nor [a] duality but something almost exactly in the middle”²⁵³ that is better mathematically transcribed as √2, given that √2, he goes on to say, “is such a number that its multiplicative inverse is equal to its half, i.e.: 1/√2 = √2/2,” so that “[t]he inverse of the ratio between the terms is equal to half of the ratio.”²⁵⁴ Second, to avoid falling into inertia dual organisations often imprint on their binary structure a principle of “permanent” or “dynamic disequili- brium.”²⁵⁵ In this way, commonality and competition, cooperation and rivalry, reinforce one another and help to avoid each other’s risks (for example, a feast can include dance contests which nobody wins and shared meals which everybody enjoys). Aside: is this not Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s blind spot? Third, binary structures – we have already alluded to it – are anything but closed systems. On the one hand, they are always flexible enough to admit changes; on the other hand, they do not overdetermine but from the distance, so to speak, the events in which life consists. We find Roy Wagner’s ethnography particularly interesting in this regard. “If Americans and other Westerners create the incidental world by constantly trying to predict, rationalize, and order it,” he writes:

then tribal, religious, and peasant peoples create their universe of innate convention by constantly trying to change, readjust, and impinge upon it. Our concern is that of bringing things into an ordered and consistent relation – whether one of logically organized “knowledge” or practically organized “application”–and we call the summation of our efforts Culture. Their concern might be thought of as an effort to “knock the conventional off balance,” and so make themselves powerful and unique in relation to it. […]

The conventionally prescribed tasks of everyday life, what one “should” do in such a society, are guided by a vast, continually changing and constantly augmented set of differentiating controls […] These include all manner of kin and productive roles, magical and practical techniques, possible modes of conduct for personal deportment. And if the ethnographer finds it difficult to standardize these controls, or catch a “native” in the act of explicitly “performing” one of them, it is because their very nature and intent defies the kind of literalness that “standardization” or “performance” (as well as the ethnographer’s own professional ethic of consistency) implies. They are not Culture, they are not intended to be “performed” or followed as a “code,” but rather used as the basis of inventive improvisation. […] The person who is able to do this well – even to the point of inventing wholly new controls – is admired and often emulated. The controls are themes to be “played upon” and varied, rather in the way that jazz lives in a constant improvisation of its subject matter.

And so we can speak of this form of action as a continual adventure in “unpredicting” the world²⁵⁶

 249 Ibid., esp. 231–4. 250 Mallory and Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, 435. 251 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind,64–5. 252 Viveiros de Castro, Radical Dualism, 20. 253 Ibid., 22. 254 Ibid., 20. 255 Lévi-Strauss, The Story of Lynx, 63, 230–1, 235, 238–9; Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native, 119. 652  Sofya Gevorkyan and Carlos A. Segovia

– in between the lines of unconscious binary structures, that is.²⁵⁷ And how else but as negotiation can this inventive improvisation be thought of in political terms? Yet for negotiation to be possible there must be two, not one: friend and enemy, same and other. Contingency may well dictate when, where, and even who might be in position to negotiate, but the structure according to which the two positions ought to be distributed cannot be declared contingent in turn.

4 Conclusion: Compossibility, not contingency

Consequently, binary structures, with their reciprocal articulation of co-dependent terms, must be seen as a formal condition to compatibility. Otherwise, anything could be incorporated into whatever else no matter why and no matter how. This “anything goes” was already Paul’s aspiration – since, for him, God’s χάρις makes no distinctions – long before it became the axiomatics of post-Fordist capitalism, which can be summarised thus: “the potentially-limitless combination of whatever with whatever else is only a potential subset of another potentially-limitless combination of whatever with whatever else, and so on and so forth endlessly,” i.e. {[nnnnnnnn ×(…+…+ )⊂ ×(…+…+ )]⊂ ×(…+…+ )}⊂ ×(…+…+ )… This, ultimately, is the principle of contingency upon which contemporary capitalism rests. Evidently, no world can be established upon such principle. And yet it is urgent for us to “re-world” the “un-world” we are trapped in,²⁵⁸ in which all things have been transformed into conveyors of an abstract variable magni- tude: capital. But if compatibility, rather than contingency, is what is at stake for us, this means we are in need of a new postulate. Borrowing loosely from Leibniz,²⁵⁹ we are willing to call it a postulate of compossibility. For it is clearly not enough with the two postulates traditionally acknowledged, since Leibniz himself, as the two basic rules of thought: (i) the postulate of sufficient reason (“for whatever it exists, there is a reason”),by virtue of which the actuality of anything can be explained, and (ii) the postulate of non-contradiction (“one thing cannot be what it is and its opposite”), by virtue of which it is possible to explain what anything is in differential terms in respect to what it is not, and thereby anything’s identity. These two postulates inform us of what individual things are in logical and existential terms, respectively. But they tell us nothing about their relational compatibility with others. Therefore, and with this suggestion we would like to put an end to this essay a postulate of compossibility – which, as we have seen, Bensusan somehow deduces too as a corollary of any monadology²⁶⁰ – is required. A postulate, that is, that may allows us to combine ontology (“what is X?”) with cosmopolitics (“can X and Y fit in the same world?”) and with modality (“are X and Y possibly compatible?,”“is their compatibility moreover probable?,” etc.). Yet most likely, for one to realise the usefulness of such postulate, one should be capable of devising more than anything and less than everything, which is precisely what Paul and his ancient and modern, direct or indirect, followers, with their universalist aspiration to turn anything into everything, have untrained us to do.

 256 Wagner, The Invention of Culture,66–7. 257 Or in connection to tonal centres despite the absence of a proper functional harmony in most post-1950s jazz, which is therefore modal rather than tonal but also seldom atonal strictu sensu. 258 On dwelling as a post-nihilist condition, see Gevorkyan and Segovia, “Post-Heideggerian Drifts” and “Deterritorialising Heidegger in the Anthropocene.” 259 Leibniz, Philosophical Writings, 145. 260 Bensusan, Being Up for Grabs, 104. Cf. too Bensusan’s argument for a metaphysics of situations in “Towards an Indexical Paradoxico-Metaphysics,” to which we are very sympathetic, for with it Bensusan aims at foregrounding the role of “otherness” and “exteriority” as “a main constituent of the furniture of the universe” (personal communication of July 24, 2020). Paul and the Plea for Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy  653

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