I've not yet read the book on St Paul from which this quotation comes
(review here: http://www.bookforum.com/archive/apr_06/boyarin.html ),
so I can't say how this notion of Paul's life/letters as a "work of
art" plays out there.
Badiou has a habit of bestowing novel definitions on familar words,
giving them a "technical" sense that is deliberately at cross-purposes
with conventional usage. (This is hardly a novel procedure, especially
in French letters). So it's worth asking what he means in this case by
"a work of art": based on some of his comments on art elsewhere, I
believe he has in mind a *purified* object, an ensemble drawn from the
wider "fury and...mire" according to some particular process of
enquiry with its own criteria of evaluation and methods by which its
"raw material" is separated from its original context and transformed.
The "becoming" of a work of art in this sense would then be the
"truth-procedure" through which its elements were chosen, mutated and
composed, a kind of diagonalisation of the artist's world.
I think Badiou's right to suggest that (at least for those "works of
art" that can be usefully described in this way, if there are any) it
is the trajectory of this procedure that is of interest, and that
there is little to be gained from sifting through the psychic clutter
("mere complexities") it traverses, looking for clues as to its
motive. The point about diagonalisation is after all that it
generates, out of the elements of a potentially infinite ensemble, a
value that is nevertheless not counted within that ensemble (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_diagonal_argument ).
If anyone's interested, I wrote a bit on purification, "the passion of
the real" and related topics in Badiou a while back - see here:
http://codepoetics.com/poetix/?p=287
Dominic
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