Agamben and Badiou are rarely discussed together, especially in the context of politics. Even though both authors reached the height of their international fame at the same time and represented the next wave in continental philosophy after the predominance of ‘post-structuralism’, the difference of their interests, influences and, not the least, styles often makes it difficult to see what common tendency these authors exhibit. While a number of studies have addressed affinities between Agamben and Badiou in terms of their interest in formalism and the problems of reference, the discussions of the two authors have generally tended to accentuate the differences between them, even when they are addressing the same theme, for example, Pauline messianism.

This is easy to understand, since the differences in question appear so evident as to form pedagogically helpful oppositions, between, for example, Badiou's rehabilitation of grand systematic philosophy and Agamben's reinvention of the fragmentary genre, Badiou's daring abandonment of the linguistic and discursive focus of French philosophy and Agamben's insistence on the ontological significance of language, Badiou's reaffirmation of radical emancipatory politics and militant activism and Agamben's wariness of communism and revolutionary politics as complicit in the biopolitical tendency of the West. In this chapter we will challenge at least the latter opposition, not because it is incorrect as such but because it occludes an important proximity between the two authors in the ontopolitical dimension. The elucidation of this proximity will also help render the contribution of both authors to radical politics more intelligible, offering a more nuanced interpretation of Badiou's alleged overcoming of nihilistic biopolitics in favour of militant communism and a more explicitly political reading of Agamben's often arcane meditations on the form-of-life.

We shall begin by addressing the two areas of explicit disagreement between Agamben and Badiou in order to demonstrate that the two authors’ positions are in fact much closer than they themselves cared to admit. Firstly, we shall address Agamben's criticism of Badiou's interpretation of Paul as a universalist and his alternative interpretation of Pauline messianism in terms of the logic of the remnant. We shall argue that Agamben's critique would only be valid if Badiou affirmed a traditional hegemonic notion of universalism, which he definitely does not.