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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 post- modern 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 expres- sion “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

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