Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an ...

a more interesting consideration is why such an obvious inconsistency was left in place. Is it simply an indirect way of suggesting that there are different “voices” that can be heard, or is this another blind spot in the text? If we read both Acts 9 and Acts 22 as being true, then the reason for Saul's blindness is ultimately unknown; Saul and all his companions see the light and hear the “voice,” but only Saul is blinded as a result. In this sense, even the reason for his blindness is now unknown to us.

And it is in this situation of absolute blindness—Saul was blind, whilst blind to the cause of his own blindness, as we are too—that the Christian is born. It is in this blindness that the third—the Christian—that ruptures the binary opposition of Jew-Gentile is born. It is in this blindness that a new term (the Christian) was born within the existing system of thinking (Judaism); in Alain Badiou's terms, this would be an instance of a true event, where there is a new potentiality that opens up within an existing conception, an existing space, an existing world. For it is not as if with the coming of the Christian that Judaism was overthrown: the fact that they are similar for the most part suggests that Christianity is a new conception of Judaism, one in which the Jew-Gentile opposition no longer is crucial. The key moment would be the gesture of imagination—where something is done without any a priori knowledge of the consequences. After all, Saul had no idea that his moment of blindness, of not-seeing, of not-knowing—his illegitimate leap of faith—would lead to the birth of a new term, a new possibility. Only in this way might something new occur. ¹³