What all this points towards is the dialectical mediation of the “subjective” and “objective” dimension: “subkulak” no longer designates an “objective” social category but rather the point at which objective social analysis breaks down and the subjective political attitude directly inscribes itself into the “objective” order — in Lacanese, “subkulak” is the point of subjectivization of the “objective” chain: poor peasant—middle peasant—kulak. It is not an “objective” sub-category (or sub-division) of the class of “kulaks” but simply the name for the subjective political attitude of the “kulak.”
This accounts for the paradox that, although it appears as a subdivision of the class of “kulaks,” “subkulaks” is a species that overflows its own genus (that of kulaks), since “subkulaks” are also to be found among middle and even poor farmers. In short,”subkulak” names political division as such, the Enemy whose presence traverses the entire social body of peasants, which is why he can be found everywhere, in all three peasant classes.
This brings us back to the procedure of Stalinist dieresis: “subkulak” names the excessive element that traverses all classes, the outgrowth which has to be eliminated.
There is, in every “objective” classification of social groups, an element which functions like “subkulak” — the point of subjectivization masked as a subspecies of “objective” elements of the social body.
It is this point of subjectivization which, in the strictest sense of the term, sutures the “objective” social structure … What this also means is that the procedure of dieresis is not endless: it reaches its end when a division is no longer a division into two species, but a division into a species and an excremental leftover, a formless stand-in for nothing, a “part of no-part.” At this final point, the singular excrement reunites with its opposite, the universal; that is, the excremental leftover functions as a direct stand-in for the Universal.
In his polemic against Badiou’s reading of Paul, Agamben defines the singularity of the Christian position with regard to the opposition between Jews and Greeks (pagans) not as a direct affirmation of an all-encompassing universality (“there are neither Jews nor Greeks”), but as an additional divide that cuts diagonally across the entire social body and as such suspends the lines of separation between social groups: a (“Christian’) subdivision of each group is directly linked with a (“Christian’) subdivision of all other groups.
(The difference between Badiou and Agamben is that, for Badiou, this new “Christian’ collective is the site of singular universality, the self-relating universality of naming, of subjective recognition in a name, while Agamben rejects the title of universality.)
The common-sense classificatory approach would say, what’s the big deal? Being Christian or non-Christian is simply another classification that cuts across and overlaps with other classifications, like the fact that there are men and women, which also cuts across all ethnic, religious, and class divides.
There is, however, a crucial difference here: for Paul, “Christian” does not designate yet another predicate (property or quality) of the individual, but a “performative” self-recognition grounded only in its own naming; in other words, it is a purely subjective feature — and, Badiou adds, only as such can it be truly universal.
The opposition between the objective-neutral universal approach and the subjective partisan approach is false: only a radical subjective engagement can ground true universality.
The constellation here is therefore exactly the same as that of the “subkulaks” in the Stalinist discourse: “subkulaks” are also tbe “remainder” of kulaks which cuts across the entire field, a subjective-political category masked as a social-objective quality.
So, when Agamben defines “Christians” not directly as “non-Jews” but as “non-non-Jews,” this double negation does not bring us back to the starting positive determination; it should rather be read as an example of what Kant called “infinite judgment” which, instead of negating a predicate, asserts a non-predicate:
instead of saying that Christians aren’t Jews, one should say that they are non-Jews, in the same sense that horror fiction talks about the “undead.”
The undead are alive while dead, they are the living dead; in the same way, Christians are non-Jews while remaining Jews (at the level of their pre-evental, positive social determination) — they are Jews who, as Paul put it, “died for [in the eyes of] the [Jewish] Law.” 74-75