Paul and the Philosophers 9780823292325

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Paul and the Philosophers

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Paul and the Philosophers

Edited by WA R D B L A N T O N

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

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and

NEW YORK

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HENT DE VRIES

2013

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Copyright 䉷 2013 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher. Paul and the philosophers / edited by Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8232-4964-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-4965-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-5041-7 (pdf) 1. Paul, the Apostle, Saint. 2. Philosophy and religion. I. Blanton, Ward. II. Vries, Hent de. BS2651.P38325 2013 225.9⬘2—dc23 2013030275 Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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Contents

Paul and the Philosophers: Return to a New Archive 1

WA R D BLA NTON

PA R T I . R E C O N S T R U C T I N G T H E A N C I E N T PA U L ‘ ‘ B E T W E E N AT H E N S A N D J E R U S A L E M ’ ’

The Address of Paul on the Areopagus 41

HANS CONZELMANN

Paul as a Hellenistic Philosopher: The Evidence of Philippians 52

PAU L A . HOLL OWAY

Paul among the Ancient Philosophers: The Case of Romans 7 69

EMMA WASSERMAN

PA R T I I . S O V E R E I G N T Y A N D T H E A P O R I A S O F UNIVERSALISM

Paul and Universalism 87

TROELS ENGBERG-PEDERSEN

Politics Between Times: Theologico-Political Interpretations of the Restraining Force (katechon) in Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians 105

MARC DE WILDE

The Culture of Crucifixion and the Resurrection of the Dispossessed: The Interpellation of the Subject in the Roman Empire and Paul’s Gospel as ‘‘Truth Event’’ 127

L. L. WELBORN

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CONTENTS

PA R T I I I . PA U L , M AT E R I A L I S M , A N D T H E C O N T I N G E N C I E S O F E M A N C I PAT I O N

The Philosophers’ Paul in the Frame of the Global: Some Reflections 143

ELIZABETH A . C ASTELLI

Paul as a Hero of Subjectivity 159

S TA N L E Y ST O W E R S

The Necessity of a Dead Bird: Paul’s Communism S L AVO J Zˇ IZˇ EK

175

Paul and Materialist Grace: Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s Reformation 186

ROLAND BOER

Radical Theology and the Event: Paul with Deleuze 210

CLAYTON CROCKETT

You Are Not Your Own: On the Nature of Faith 224

S I M O N CR I T C H L E Y

Paul the Apostle: Proclamation and Argumentation 256

PAU L RI CO EU R

PA R T I V . C O M M U N A L S PA C E S B E T W E E N T I M E S

Ablative Absolutes: From Paul to Shakespeare 281

JULIA R EINHARD LUPTON

The Saturday of Messianic Time: Agamben and Badiou on the Apostle Paul 297

ELEANOR K AU FMAN

Love and the Stick: The Worldly Aspects of the Call in the First Letter to the Corinthians 310

NILS F. SCHOTT

PA R T V . PA U L I N I S M A N D C U LT U R A L C R I T I Q U E

Freud’s Jesus (Paul’s War) 329

GIL A NIDJAR

Scandal/Resentment: The Antiaesthetics of the Banlieue ´ NIA S ZABARI ANTO

343

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CONTENTS

Paul’s Greek 354

STATHIS G OURGOURIS

Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos 381

GILLES DELEUZE

PA R T V I . E T H I C S A N D T H E F O U N D AT I O N S O F L AW

The Killing Letter and the Discourse of Spirit: Reading Paul Writing 397

IAN BALFOUR

‘‘Love your neighbor,’’ the Son, and the Sons’ Community: Reading Paul’s Epistles in View of Freud and Lacan 413

I T Z H A K B E N YA M I N I

The ‘‘Jewish Question’’ in the Return to Paul: Empire Politics 437

SHMUEL TRIGANO

Paul and the Political Theology of the Neighbor 449

KENNETH REINHARD

Inverse Versus Dialectical Theology: The Two Faces of Negativity and the Miracle of Faith 466

HENT DE VRIES

Notes

51 3

Contributors

62 5

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Paul and the Philosophers Return to a New Archive

Ward Blanton

In what is perhaps a peculiar paradox of the modernity at which we have arrived, in recent years Paul of Tarsus, self-proclaimed apostle of Jesus, has become a pressing object of reflection for contemporary political philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and literary studies. Why? Indeed, how? What institutions, social trends, fantasies, and antagonisms have conspired to create an atmosphere wherein philosophers actually feel pressured to pronounce on this ancient itinerant teacher? Moreover, should it be surprising to us that Paul has, in recent years, returned as a kind of contrarian philosophical figure in relation precisely to the touchstones of ‘‘the West,’’ ‘‘Christianity,’’ or ‘‘religion’’ that so often have claimed him as a kind of founding or canonical exemplar? Surely the unsettling, rebellious aspect of this recent figure of thought is not accidental, but where could we situate the source and limits of these philosophical energies? Are they straightforward repetitions of an ancient past, retrospective echoes of recent political and intellectual dramas, or surprising aleatory spinoffs of slow and disparate evolutions of social, political, or philosophical forms, forms that now select this figure to function as a crucial contemporary touchstone? Consider some initial examples. Why would some of the slogans of ancient Pauline writings come to constitute what is arguably the most concise summary not only of Giorgio Agamben’s Paul-inflected philosophy, but also of Roberto Esposito’s influential trilogy on ‘‘biopolitics’’ and the philosophical or political paradoxes of thinking ‘‘life’’ as such?1 To say the least, if Paul’s ‘‘problem of the law’’ (associated with Rom. 7), the myth of the katechon or sovereignty’s suppression of threatening chaos (associated with 2 Thess. 2), and a Pauline category of ‘‘flesh’’ (ambiguously straddling a distinction between biological and social life) together encapsulate philosophies of the biopolitical, then no doubt a

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great deal of genealogical work is needed to determine how such preestablished harmonies have come to be constituted. Similarly, while the forms of ‘‘dialectical materialism’’ on offer from Slavoj Zˇizˇek and Alain Badiou are differently inflected from the Italian philosophers of the biopolitical, they operate within a similar comparative circuit. Here, too, it is arguable that the most effective ‘‘introductions’’ to their philosophies may be found in Badiou’s Saint Paul: the Foundation of Universalism or in Zˇizˇek’s setting in motion a Paulinist radicalism against a more conservative Augustinianism in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic.2 As readers will soon see, these philosophical examples could be greatly diversified and expanded. But even this cross-section of recent activity is helpful for our initial question about why recent continental philosophy and critical theory are self-consciously inflected with a reading of Paulinism. Consider briefly the case of Badiou, whose committed Paulinism remains in important respects undertheorized, despite its having attracted so much comment and reaction. His Saint Paul was originally published in 2005, but one of his pieces of political theater, The Incident at Antioch, was first completed much earlier, in 1982.3 The piece is a striking theatrical reworking not only of traditional tales of Paul’s conversion, but also of The City, by Paul Claudel, a deeply Catholic staging of the question of revolution, revolutionary violence, and the haunting promise of justice. As in his rewriting of Plato’s Republic, Badiou codes this piece of theater in a way that renders it impossible to place in any simple moment in time or place. The dialogues of The Incident at Antioch are provocatively dislocated, hovering somewhere between Paris in the 1980s, Beijing in the 1950s, or Corinth and Antioch of the decades after Jesus’ death. Characters slip in and out of 1980s slang; archaizing phrasings evoke biblical tropes; and rhapsodic, flowery excesses echo the style of Claudel. Badiou’s play is a useful touchstone inasmuch as it highlights the complex negotiation between ancient history, multiple reception histories of the ancient material, and inherited and ongoing political struggles to determine the nature and limits of philosophy and politics alike: for example, understated but alive and well in Badiou’s theatrical rendering of a politicized Paulinism are his philosophical criticisms of Gilles Deleuze (the mystical lure of the One), Jacques Derrida (dissemination as failure of political thought), and various Communist regimes’ approaches to political takeover and control based on an imagined Totality. Paul also affords a stage whereon Badiou condemns the economic managerialism enacted in the emerging Western consensus about the global role of neoliberal democracy. In this rich me´lange of associations, Paulinisms are displaced in space and time, but are never merely incidental to the theatrical intervention. Indeed, one could read the play as, in part, Badiou’s answer to the self-styled neoPaulinism that the ‘‘new philosophers’’ Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet developed in the scripturalization of ’68 (referring to the nineteenth century rather than the first) in their 1976 The Angel.4 That book was part of an expansive effort to discern a new philosophy (one different from, e.g., Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Lacan) as a way

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of concretizing the ambiguous moment that was Paris in 1968. In the newly minted journal Nouvel Observateur, Bernard-Henri Le´vy had already claimed that The Angel was the ‘‘manifesto for a new philosophy,’’ presenting the book and its elaborate readings of early Christian writings as a banner under which the ‘‘nouveaux philosophes’’ could organize.5 Moreover, in his initial reaction to the much vilified post-Marxism of the ‘‘new philosophers,’’ Badiou criticizes Jambet and Lardreau’s Angel for its flat-footedly static repetition of a fantasized original Christian moment. Badiou writes: ‘‘There where Lardreau and Jambet go astray is when they think in terms of repetition and believe that our immobile question is that of Christianity. ‘As long as the hitherto eternal mode of cultural revolutions, as long as Christianity will not have been understood, what is this knowledge with its enchanting novelty to us?’ It is for this eternity that we have no use.’’6 When Badiou scripturalizes his own rendering of ’68 as a philosophical and political event, he therefore does so in a more complex and comparative conjuration of biblical traditions that refuses both simple repetition and the idealist imagination of a pure, original (‘‘eternal’’) form of cultural revolution. With this in mind, one sees immediately that historians of ancient Paulinism miss the point entirely when they sometimes declare that this or that philosophical neo-Paulinism is ‘‘anachronistic’’ in relation to the historical original. Such criticisms necessarily remain closed to the unsettlingly comparative and indeed philosophical nature of the discussions—as if the post-Heideggerian philosophers needed elementary lessons in the understanding, say, of being and time. Nevertheless, Badiou’s turn to Paul was not only part of a competitive struggle within a surprising but sustained interest in scripturalizing an ambiguous, temporary, or questionable revolution. In the end, the full shock of Badiou’s counterintuitive philosophical refusal of state power in The Incident at Antioch seems to need the ancient religious figure in order to make its own radical strangeness comprehensible. Badiou’s Paul is a kind of Epicurean apostle, theorizing new creation via foundational contingency or clinamen in a way that opens onto the freedom of communal life lived at a distance from the state. In Badiou’s provocatively scrambled archive, one lives ‘‘unknown’’ (as the Epicurean communities would have put it) not in order to hide but in order to organize more directly, more creatively, and without mediation a philosophical collective’s freedom of intervention. Paulinist itineracy (rather than centralized takeover) and hybrid Paulinist experimentation (rather than the purity of theoretical or ethnic enclosures) become Badiou’s theatrical provocation to invent new political and philosophical forms in a world without viable alternatives to this demanding, even demandingly conversionistic, task. Much more than the simple return of something previously existing but temporarily forgotten, therefore, the appearances Paul makes as an interlocutor for contemporary thought function as sites in which new ideas may find expression and new forms of cultural contest may be mobilized. At their best (as is richly witnessed throughout this book), recent encounters with the historical world and the imaginative or conceptual resources of a Second Temple Jewish community organizer like Paul can function as an

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intensely invested comparative counterpoint from which to illumine—and sometimes to circumnavigate—political (and perhaps theologico-political) deadlocks that we observe all too often around us today. Frequently, Paul’s name emerges where critical thought seeks to rethink, differently theorize, creatively sabotage, or simply ignore shifting borders constituting the inside and outside of ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘philosophy’’ alike. Such gestures necessarily unsettle the very idea of the ‘‘critical,’’ opening up renewed wonder about what critique is or might yet become. They negotiate a restructuring of the topics, imagined implications, and systems of cross-reference that constitute our place within inherited disciplinary archives, sometimes yielding new thematic juxtapositions or uncovering forgotten ‘‘Paulinisms’’ within received materials, sometimes recalling to memory old debates that have gone unremarked for some time. In this recent archival scramble, a panoply of Paulinist topoi about time, presence, and freedom have been set in renewed or skewed motion, in relation to the force of inherited codes of the normative, whether academic, legal, or ethnic. Other ‘‘returned’’ topoi explored in the essays in this book mark renewed questioning of the nature of written and unwritten rules of the normative in the light of expansive demands of neighborly love and intuitions of universal justice. Further essays here explore the political significance of messianism, not to mention its failures, its crucifixions at the hands of imperial functionaries. Perhaps all the recent discussions of Paul and the philosophers have been haunted by the question of violence, particularly in the form of the various modes by which something new has, must, or may be imagined to arrive. Perhaps to name all these issues at once, these essays also revisit new and old questions about how one construes hope in emancipatory community formations, precisely when such hope seems to constitute a form of proleptic, anticipatory, or otherwise ungrounded waiting. Just as importantly, this ‘‘library apocalypse’’ and the system of ‘‘postcards’’ it sets in motion manifest a distinctly philosophical valence as much as a Pauline force. And that in itself calls for thinking: about philosophy, about religion, and about the writings and history of this figure of Paul and Paulinism.7 Why, after all, would an inflation of Paulinist topoi indicate or inflict a peculiar pressure on philosophy?

Timely Untimely As what is best in the hermeneutical tradition has always reminded us, it is perhaps impossible not to send strangely filiating genealogical tentacles back through time (or, at the very least, postcards that are somehow—and sometimes disconcertingly—returned), even as we attempt to come to grips with contemporary questions and their stakes. In this respect, it may be useful to prepare the way for some of the essays that follow by saying, as a kind of brusque and undiplomatic starting point, that we should never forget the generic and serial nature of the executed Jesus within an imperial economy that could

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not function apart from crucifixion’s looming threat to slaves, traitors, and rebels.8 It was within such an economy that Paul began to speak, with a peculiarly dogged morbidity, about a crucified messiah. Consider the strange reduction he opposed to Corinthian ‘‘wisdom’’: ‘‘I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and this one [as] crucified’’ (1 Cor. 2:2). Perhaps our readings of Paul and of philosophy ought to start here, knowing something about the economy of information within which such a reduction was enunciated. Recalling the imperial contexts that made possible such a Gothic twist on various other types of Second Temple messianism on offer, L. L. Welborn writes: The only detailed descriptions of crucifixion in antiquity are those found in the Christian gospels. It is clear that the rarity of references to crucifixion in ancient literature is not an historical accident, but a reflection of the aesthetic and moral values of upper-class writers. The cultured elite of the Roman world wanted nothing to do with crucifixion, and as a rule kept silent about it. What makes the silence of the upper class with respect to crucifixion more significant is the fact that the practice was so widespread in the Roman world. In speaking of the ubiquity of the cross, we do not have in mind the occasional use of crucifixion as the ‘‘supreme penalty’’ (summum supplicium) in notorious cases of high treason, nor the more frequent use of crucifixion as a means of suppressing rebellious subjects in the provinces, but rather the daily employment of the cross as a punishment for slaves in cities throughout the Roman Empire. Just outside the Esquiline Gate at Rome, on the road to the Tibur, was a horrific place where crosses were routinely set up for the punishment of slaves. There a torture and execution service was operated by a group of funeral contractors who were open to business from private citizens and public authorities alike. There slaves were flogged and crucified at a charge to their masters of 4 sesterces per person.9 Welborn’s description of a ‘‘torture and execution service’’ allows us to step back behind a history wherein ‘‘the cross’’ seems always and already singularized, attached to a specific (by now decidedly Christian) story. Welborn’s analysis suggests that this essential state function was relatively machinic and anonymous, and to begin with that sets our thinking in motion differently. Even the apologetically oriented New Testament book of Acts acknowledges potentially uncomfortable comparisons between the early Jesus movement and the messianic or exodus-oriented theocratic followings of Theudas the Egyptian and Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:34 ff.). Both of these theologico-political movements, after all, similarly ended by being brutally suppressed by the Roman military. Acts’ indication of the cultural shadow of crucifixion as apparatus of torture and the suppression of anti-imperial dissent points in several interesting directions.10 Notice how Acts presents sage Gamaliel’s advice to the Jerusalem leadership: namely, not to suppress the Jesus movement actively, but rather to wait for God’s, as it were, Schmittian decision

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as to whether members of the fledgling Jesus movement should be opposed as enemies or embraced as friends. Gamaliel is imagined as urging the religious governors to ‘‘keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found to be fighting against God’’ (5:39). In this context, such a hands-off waiting for the judgment of the divine sovereign implies waiting to see whether this utopian messianic community would also be slaughtered and dispersed like the other utopian, messianic, or prophetic communities to which the teacher compares it. It is against such a backdrop that some of the essays here treat the otherwise triumphalist, self-serving mantra of ‘‘why Christianity succeeded where others (the movement of Theudas, Judas the Galilean) failed.’’11 The pressing comparative question with which these essays wrestle is slightly—but profoundly—different from the teleologically identitarian or triumphalist version: given that ‘‘messianic’’ protest and acts of resistance were suppressed and dispelled with brutal imperial efficiency, how was it, how is it possible not to allow serial suppression to have the last word?12 Is there perhaps a minimal gap between suppression’s effectiveness and its reception wherein life might appear, even an undying life? That Paulinism could function as a comparative site for negotiating such topics of pressing contemporary significance is a cause of acute unease for important voices on our contemporary scene in religion, history, and philosophy. To mention only a few examples, philosopher Michel Onfray describes Paul as a ‘‘hysterical, fundamentalist’’ individual, who later infects the world with dangerous, imperialist neuroses by way of Paulinism.13 Onfray chides, for example, Alain Badiou, in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, for not realizing that Paulinism leads to Constantinian imperialism. Whether—or how— such a causal historical chain is to be taken more seriously than, say, a suggestion that the pamphleteering Thomas Paine leads to the neo-conservative interventionism of George W. Bush two centuries later is difficult to tell, as Onfray provides us with no developed conceptual or historical arguments in this particular essay.14 But it is important to register the charged (and wonderfully quotable) rhetoric of Onfray’s protest in his Atheist Manifesto against neo-Paulinisms:15 ‘‘A shame that he [Badiou] considers Paul as standing alone in this role, without incorporating into his argument what Constantine added in order to make the planetary Church a possibility. The ectoplasm [i.e., the resurrected Jesus] needed the hysteric [Paul] in order to become flesh, but it was the dictator who managed the extension of Jesus’ body to the whole empire.’’16 Luhmannian systems theorist William Rasch says something similar about interest in Paul among philosophers in Sovereignty and Its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political: ‘‘When Paul proclaimed that there was no difference between Jew and Greek, he in effect erased the Jew from a world dominated by Greeks.’’17 Rasch goes on to claim that contemporary U.S. neo-liberal interventionism constitutes a similar ‘‘political theology that seeks out and eternally damns its absolute enemies—unto

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the end of the world.’’ Obliterating marks of difference, the majority—or the stronger—is able to present itself as the unmarked, the generic, the universal. Citing similar dangers, Lorenzo Chieza has wondered whether appropriations of Paul by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zˇizˇek—which Chieza reads as a response to the paradoxically interventionist multiculturalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair—do not find themselves subverted and appropriated in turn by a more radically interventionist George W. Bush. As Chieza wrote in 2006: Meanwhile, the world has definitely changed; although multiculturalism continues to reign undisturbed as the predominant dogma of vast quarters of academia, it is by now only a distant memory in the realm of actual ‘‘managerial’’ (war) politics. Here, we must therefore ask the inevitable question: are Badiou and Zˇizˇek still prepared to endorse their pronouncements on Paul and Christianity following the rise to power of Bush’s belligerent techno-theocratic ambitions? More precisely, can Paul today universally exemplify a radical subversion ‘‘for all’’ against dominant opinions— including, say, young Muslim women whom Badiou so vigorously defends against the hypocrisy and fear of the French state? Or, do Badiou and Zˇizˇek—like other leftists who follow the same trajectory—not risk unintentionally accelerating the ideological promotion of a religious ‘‘clash of cultures’’ whose creation ad hoc clearly represents the ultimate reactionary defence of Capital?18 The question is important, and the return of Paul less straightforward (and perhaps more risky) an intervention than is sometimes imagined. Indeed, this volume assumes that Paul may well be returning today in the same way he once described his presence in his own time, namely, as an appearance of ‘‘one untimely born’’ (1 Cor. 15:8, ektro¯ma), a term for which, as one classic commentator glosses, it ‘‘is not possible to decide whether Paul is describing himself as stillborn, or as a monstrosity.’’19 For good or for ill, timely or untimely, beneficent ghost or horrifying monstrosity, all voices onstage today agree that there will be no serious mapping of the space of the political or the ‘‘critical’’ in our time without a negotiation or contestation of the received and yet perhaps still malleable borders between ‘‘religion’’ and its outside. Such contest and malleability constitutes the general backdrop for the renewed question of Paul.20 It is in the face of the intertwined relationship between figure and background in the question of religion, politics, and violence that seems endemic to recent encounters with Paul—an intertwining that always brings with it the possibility of surprising shifts in perspective—that we have gathered avowedly interdisciplinary and comparative negotiations of the legacy of Paul and the philosophers. The multidisciplinary and comparative form of this volume is already a particular mode of intervention within the complexly interrelated and multi-layered territories that constitute religion, philosophy, and the political, on the one hand, and Paul, on the other. The form itself, in other words, already raises the essential question: Under what subject headings, in which institutions, or

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through which academic disciplines are we to think Paul today, much less the religious, philosophical, and political forces for which his name always already comes to stand? What will be the future of this Paul whose archival location or continued philosophical legacy is indistinguishable from a more generally recognized ‘‘politico-theological’’ question (if I may so gloss my reference to ‘‘religious, philosophical, and political forces’’)— one that seems to have forced itself on our multiple disciplines and plural spheres with some urgency? It is in light of the pressure of this question, the demand or necessity to intervene in an ongoing public negotiation and its all-too-real political issue, that each of these essays asks, in a variety of ways and to multiple effects: Who will claim the right to this name or the early Jewish or Christian legacy for which it has come to stand almost by synecdoche?

Paul Outside ‘‘Christian Origins’’? For those who are not familiar with the past century of biblical scholarship, it is worth mentioning that this synecdochic linking of Paul and ‘‘early Christianity’’ (as, ostensibly, some other to ‘‘Judaism’’) has relatively little to do with the self-understanding of the ancient actors in their own contexts and a great deal to do with a modern obsession to construct and guard a border separating these identities, preserving them in their imagined purity.21 It is still worth saying today that starting ‘‘another religion’’ or making some sort of new start that was in any sense ‘‘not Jewish’’ would have struck Jesus, Paul, or most of their early schismatic cohorts as absurd. Rather than perpetuating a constitutively unending quest to invest some small clue or subtle hint, therefore, with the full force of an idealistic, epochal break constituting ‘‘Christian origins,’’ a great deal of recent biblical scholarship has taken as its starting point the profound diversity, ab origine, as it were, of the groups we tend quickly to gloss as either Jewish or Christian. Taking such diversity seriously, making it a starting point for the work of historical reconstruction, substantially transforms earlier biblical studies’ effectively teleological efforts to designate some early clue as the cause for the fact that there eventually emerged two distinct and generally oppositional identities, with acts of identification as the one coming to imply that one is decidedly not the other. Above all, this paradigmatic transformation challenged earlier scholarship’s capacity to ignore massive differences, animosities, competitions, or persecutions (among, say, early Christian groups or within the New Testament writings themselves), even as it invested sometimes minor differences between Paul and some of his contemporaries with the full weight of ‘‘the break between Christianity and Judaism.’’ Of course, there are multiple modes in which to register paradigmatic or historiographical shifts of this sort. And, as I argue in Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament, such shifts are never merely historical or reconstructive. In the late 1980s, Jacob Taubes could still speak provocatively of trying to bring Paul

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the heretic back into the fold of a subversive, revolutionary Judaism.22 In terms of historical research, perhaps the drama of such a gesture was already ‘‘retro’’ at that point, though perhaps not without an edge (for Taubes, for us) in relation to contemporary identitarian distinctions between the inside and outside of Judaism or Christianity. Whether he was heretic or beloved comrade to his first-century contemporaries, of course we could read his work as yet one more strand in the lively contests of opinions, locales, practices, and institutions that constituted Jewish life in the first century. And in such a context, investment in ‘‘the difference’’ that makes the difference of ‘‘Christian origins’’ has as much to say about our own efforts to organize (and, more often than not, to police) the contemporary stew of theologico-political identities than it does about representing the Paulinist movement in terms that would have made sense, to Paul at least, in the first century. The difficult unpacking of the mutual borrowing, influence, and contestation at work between the modern historical quest to reveal the difference that makes a difference of ‘‘Christian origins’’ and the modern philosophical enterprise wherein ‘‘Judaism’’ and ‘‘Christianity’’ are deployed as philosophemes or philosophical exemplars of distinct modes of life remains to be carried through. Suffice it to say for now that, as simply as it may be stated, historiographical recognition of deep plurality and the political stakes of cutting into this diversity with a particular mode of counting (as this or that self-same identity) has not only deflated and rendered obsolete a massive panoply of historical distinctions that sometimes constituted the study of ‘‘Christian origins.’’ More interestingly, this recognition of deep plurality affects these identities as philosophemes. One of the ways to read some of the essays below (e.g., those in the section ‘‘Communal Spaces Between Times’’) is as a theoretical, comparative, and very contemporary reflection on the collapse of older models of reading Christian origins. If the standard narrative touchstones—the differences that crystallized or grounded the difference between Judaism and Christianity that we were looking for—have crumbled, then what are we to make of the philosophemes that were produced and disseminated in conversation with earlier construals of these topics, whether as theology, biblical studies, or history? What will become of philosophical traditions of law, tradition, and freedom; the past, present, and future of (messianic? political?) hope or utopian presence; the difference between ‘‘spirit’’ and its forms of inscription (and we could go on) once we begin to produce genealogies of these interrelated fields and the ways these interrelations made possible specifically philosophical readings, contestations, or overcomings of biblical texts, theological ideas, or historical glosses? Ultimately, philosophy today, no more than historical research, cannot simply repeat the great inventions of nineteenth-century narrations of religious history if we aim to untie or reconfigure the theologico-political knots that century tied (not to mention its gags and nooses). This is particularly so in relation to the knot that attempted to ground something profound about our secularity (or otherwise), our ‘‘critical’’ spirit, in our rightly discerning (usually in a self-serving and triumphalist fashion) the moment

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and rationale for ‘‘Christian origins.’’ Among other things, untying or reworking these knots demands a reworked model of identity and origin.23 Consider the way New Testament scholar Dieter Georgi generalized the first-century situation in a now quite dated but still provocative and worthwhile study of the political theology of Paul: Throughout the history of biblical Judaism, revolutionary revelation never hesitated before the gates of heaven. At the same time, this revolutionary critique impugned the mundane counterparts of these heavenly phenomena and especially the earthly power structures they supported. Precisely because they remained in solidarity with the biblical and Jewish community, Jesus’ followers and Paul could draw critical energy from that tradition, and could concentrate and strengthen it in a collectivizing direction. . . . these alternatives did not aim at a social structure apart from the biblical-Jewish community, and certainly not a new religion. Their aim was a true contrary, a contrary that criticized from within, not without. Paul and other followers of Jesus did not walk out of the Jewish community but conducted a migration within it.24 Such statements constitute Georgi’s effort to negate a supersessionist mythology of Christian origins that only works if ‘‘Judaism’’ appears as a monolithic backdrop and necessary sacrifice for the sake of ‘‘Christianity’s’’ triumphal progress beyond it. Georgi’s subtractive ‘‘migration within’’ creates distance and the space for critique, imaginative transformation, or strengthening in particular directions, thus retaining some force for recent readings of Paul. Nevertheless, to foreshadow some of the essays to come, we can scramble still further the nineteenth-century narrative model Georgi contests when we acknowledge that the ‘‘biblical and Jewish community’’—which, he suggests, was ‘‘concentrated’’ and strengthened in a ‘‘collectivizing direction’’ by Paul—was itself nothing but the contestation of the meaning, substance, or political significance of this imagined community identity by various partisan factions. The slight shift in focus is significant, as it affords a thinking of a system of identities constituted by partisan differences. Rather than an implicitly monolithic tradition that Jesus, Paul, or Gamaliel transformed at this pivotal moment, we could imagine, for example, the reigning Temple establishment, would-be Galilean revolutionaries and prophets, those who actively (militaristically) opposed Rome, those who withdrew passively into ‘‘the wilderness,’’ those who proclaimed a crucified criminal as the promise of messianism (and we could go on) all as being in effect bids to suture a name onto an otherwise unruly or diverse assemblage of possibilities. Put this way (and in keeping with what Ernesto Laclau elucidates as the elementary logic of hegemony and the production of collective identities), we could say much more strenuously than Georgi that the Paulinist twist, the

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agonistic torsion of his reworking of inherited possibilities (and, we should add, impossibilities), may be read as an instance of what Georgi could have understood as a more general, indeed common potential for ‘‘migration within.’’ Georgi wants to say that Paul produced a moment of ‘‘migration within’’ as one did in the tradition he calls ‘‘biblical and Jewish community.’’ But one could assert further that this or any identitarian naming of a community that affords ‘‘migration within’’ could obscure the generic, common, and indeed ‘‘communistic’’ structure of identity per se, its constitution as and through a performance of oneself and the tradition that is in no case neutral or objectively given. Such a thought has inspired recent philosophical reworkings of these texts, like those of Eleanor Kaufman and Ken Reinhard included here, but also (and contrary to a current polemical doxa against him) the writings of Alain Badiou.25 These issues are not simply theoretical. To articulate the question of Paul and early Jewish or Christian identities at both historical and formal levels is important politically speaking as well. This is so above all because historical recognition of diversity does not in itself always constitute an effective negotiation of the compulsion some feel to render an account—in one’s reading of Paul, Jesus, the early community of Christian storytellers (or even, as we have seen, of Constantine or George W. Bush)—of this difference that makes a difference between ‘‘Christianity’’ and ‘‘Judaism.’’26 There has been a longstanding drive to invest the idea of an original ‘‘parting of the ways’’ with profound hopes for significance and ongoing meaning. Indeed, some of the essays collected here remain keen to establish the limits of Paulinism and of the inside/outside of Second Temple Judaism, precisely (I would think) because so many of the forces constituting the modern identities in play in the old quests for ‘‘original Christianity’’ now prefer to continue orienting themselves around such distinctions. By incorporating multiple disciplinary perspectives on Paul, we seek to hold open these issues rather than to seal them off, to illumine and politicize the multiple stakes and drives at work in positing these distinctions. One way or another, Paul and the Philosophers is an effort to situate and often to intervene in the political and conceptual open-endedness of a Paulinism that has crept back onto our academic and political stage, particularly inasmuch as our negotiation of this open-ended legacy remains bound up in a processing of the legacy of philosophy and critical thought more generally.

Paul in the School of Tyrannus Paul entered the synagogue and for three months spoke out boldly [epparhe¯siazeto¯], and argued persuasively about the kingdom of God. When some stubbornly refused to believe and spoke evil of the Way before the congregation, he left them, taking the disciples with him, and argued daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus. This continued for two years. (Acts 19:8–8)

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To baptize Paul as a stand-in for the distinction between Jew and Christian—or between ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘philosophy’’—is not only an inheritance from or negotiation with our modern past, our agonistic present, and our uncertain future. The question about Paul and the philosophers extends back into the original Paulinist moment, and it was already a perplexing topic at the time of early Christian writings like the book of Acts. As with so many details of the early Jesus movement, it is sometimes difficult to imagine Paul apart from the shaping (and sometimes suffocating) representations in the New Testament book of Acts.27 Indeed, as some of the essays here demonstrate, Acts’ presentation of Paul’s meeting with ‘‘some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers’’ in Athens, culminating in a rhetorically charged speech on the hill of the Areopagus, remains a perennially productive image of the relationship between Paul and the philosophers. So influential has this imagined scene been throughout philosophical and religious history that it seems important to begin our collection with a classic interpretive essay of this story by Hans Conzelmann. There Conzelmann remarks: ‘‘The speech that Luke attributes to the apostle Paul during the latter’s stay in Athens (Acts 17:16 ff.) is the most momentous Christian document from the beginnings of the extraordinary confrontation between Christianity and philosophy, which was destined to continue through the following centuries and to determine the entire history of the Occident.’’ Conzelmann elaborates some of the ways in which an imagined speech of Paul to the leisured intellectuals at the famed heart of Greek philosophical culture may be interpreted as a text inhabiting multiple worlds. In Paul’s speech, for example, Stoic cosmological ideas blur into biblical stories of creation (and vice versa). Paul’s line of praise for the ‘‘devout’’ Athenians would have, moreover, doubled in the ears of Acts’ Christian audience as a backhanded slander against Athenian ‘‘superstitious’’ practice, inasmuch as the desidaimonia Paul finds in Athens could be read both ways.28 Indeed, Conzelmann wonders whether the entire scene should be taken as a retrojection of the failure of later ‘‘Christian missions’’ to find adherents among the learned: ‘‘If the philosophers were not converted even by a sermon of Paul, they will certainly not be converted [several decades later] today.’’ Conzelmann’s classic essay sets up discrete oppositional types of Weltanschauung or worldview. For him, the ‘‘Greek’’ worldview, or ‘‘philosophy,’’ and the ‘‘biblical’’ worldview operate as discrete types that can be internally contradictory or remain across time and space as self-contained causes for, or origins of, this or that statement. Later scholarship has noted, however, how frequently even Conzelmann himself refers to authors who must be described as some peculiar hybrid of these discrete types (e.g., Aristobulus, Philo, and Paul himself, as will be argued in essays here). As Frederick E. Brenk makes clear in his With Unperfumed Voice, the Areopagus speech may be understood as an articulation of a peculiar confluence of philosophical and religious theisms, marking a world in which ‘‘the contrast felt between monotheism and polytheism was not so great for Greco-Romans as for modern scholars.’’29 In fact, Brenk argues that the pagan philosophical rejection of Paul in this story rightly indicates

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a (Stoic) anxiety to preserve a monotheistic transcendence against what was perceived as Paul’s introduction of a new divinity in the earthly Christ. In any case, it may have been a convenient or cozy proposition for Conzelmann’s audience that ‘‘the Occident’’ was destined to be constituted by the perennial contest between ‘‘Christianity’’ and ‘‘philosophy,’’ which might make sense of the fact that Conzelmann can describe this scene as both perennial and ‘‘extraordinary’’ or exemplary. Such a comment makes clear a profound influence of Acts’ tableau of Paul and the philosophers. As Brenk suggests, and as essays in this book make clear, Acts’ imagined scene of the singular origin of a perennial struggle between Paulinism and philosophy does not really explain Paul’s own relationship to the philosophical schools of his time, much less the sweeping categories ‘‘Christianity’’ and ‘‘philosophy’’ or why the Occident would be constituted by the struggle between them. Bracketing Acts’ representation of the apostle, Paul Holloway (‘‘Paul as a Hellenistic Philosopher: The Case of Philippians’’) and Emma Wasserman (‘‘Paul among the Ancient Philosophers: The Case of Romans 7’’), for example, make clear some of the ways an ambiguity between Paul and the philosophers would have been encountered among the original audiences for Paul’s writings.

Reconstructing Paul Between Athens and Jerusalem In keeping with the intimations of Michael Foucault and Pierre Hadot that the philosophy of the Hellenistic and imperial periods was indistinguishable from a singular style of life, Paul Holloway takes up the question of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Holloway shows how Paul appropriated consolatory authorial strategies one finds in writers like Epicurus and Seneca. These consolatory strategies constituted a form of psychagogic care of the self, working through the philosophical problems of both desire and suffering. Paul, writing to the Philippians from prison and apparently uncertain whether he would be executed by Roman functionaries there, declares that he is in possession of the highest good (articulated as knowing and disseminating Christ), a highest good that renders the question of his personal life or death mere adiaphora, indifferent. Similarly comparing Paul to his philosophical contemporaries, Emma Wasserman shows how such comparisons challenge longstanding and still-reigning interpretations of Paul’s famous description of split subjectivity in Romans 7:7–25. Indeed, Wasserman’s essay could also be read in light of Foucault’s wonder, at the end of the third volume of his History of Sexuality, about the location of Paul in relation to the ‘‘moral systems’’ of a developed Christianity. Foucault distinguishes these ‘‘systems’’ from Greco-Roman moralism, particularly in terms of Christianity’s universalization of human nature and its subsequent demand to ‘‘decipher’’ the soul accordingly.30 In such a light, Wasserman’s comparative reading of the passage from Romans suggests that Paul drops out, as it were,

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from such later Christian theological systems, particularly inasmuch as Paul was not fascinated with interior spaces of the psyche or experiences of self-consciousness in the same way as were influential interpreters of this passage from Augustine to Hans Jonas and Rudolf Bultmann (or even, I should add, though in a modified way, Jacques Lacan). Even more importantly perhaps, as Wasserman argues, Paul does not imagine the split subjectivity seen in Romans as a ‘‘fixed ontological inheritance from Adam but rather as historically conditioned, ethnically specific, and mutable.’’ Wasserman’s reading creates significant ripple effects within the reception history of this passage.31 Both more and less than a theorist of generic or universal subjectivity, Paul appears instead as historicizing and localizing this split subject in keeping with firstcentury practices of what Denise Buell has called ‘‘ethnic reasoning.’’32 In this case, Paul explores split subjectivity in specific terms, namely, as an imagined Gentile attempting to allow Jewish nomos or law to function as a guide to the good. The split subjectivity we can see in Romans 7 constitutes Paul’s diagnosis of a historical symptom, the split subjectivity of a Gentile attempting to experience liberty and life by way of adherence to the nomos of another ethnic group. According to Wasserman, Paul’s diagnosis here coheres with the psychagogic promise he makes throughout the letter to the Romans, namely, that his news effects what other psychagogies cannot (including that of the religious sage who believes Jewish nomos will lead Gentiles to the good; cf. 2:17 ff.). Romans 7 becomes, in this reading, a psychagogical diagnosis of a peculiarly hybrid figure, the Gentile adherent to a form of nomos Paul wants to localize. In terms of Foucault’s problematic at the end of the third volume of The History of Sexuality, what we have in Wasserman’s reading is not a universalist deciphering of the generic structures of human nature but precisely the event-centered and contextual encounter Foucault valued so highly in his own work on parrhe¯sia and sexuality alike. By the same token, in Wasserman’s reading of Romans 7, Paul is not condemning ‘‘the law’’ as if by a radical inflation, generalization, and subsequent disavowal of Jewish tradition. Rather, in keeping with the specific rhetorical context, we see something like Paul the Pharisee, restricting law to a particular contextual sphere, restricting its power to condemn the Gentile, and this on behalf of the outsider that Paul, as it were ‘‘unnaturally’’ (cf. para phusin at Rom. 11:24), wants to include apart from this particular mode of policing.

Sovereignty and the Aporias of Universalism Troels Engberg-Pedersen has been at the forefront of recent efforts to find in Paul’s writings a form of first-century philosophizing, and he has explored this topic in two important books: Paul and the Stoics and Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit.33 In his essay here (‘‘Paul and Universalism’’), Engberg-Pedersen expands upon his own and other recent engagements with the historical Paul in terms of the question of

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identity politics. He argues that Paul was not a sufficient founder of universalism, as Alain Badiou and others have argued. Crafting an evaluation and critique of this position out of his interpretation of the apostle and Hellenistic philosophy, Engberg-Pedersen examines Stoic and Pauline statements to see if they enunciate a ‘‘universal ethic’’ that is not simply a mistaken generalization of a specific ‘‘way of life.’’ He argues that Paul demanded of Jews and Gentiles alike a ‘‘sacrifice’’ of a form of identitarian self-valorization as something that obstructs their ‘‘turn’’ to the general or universal principle. Having thus foreclosed, as Paul would put it, ‘‘boasting’’ in ethnic particularity, Engberg-Pedersen asks whether Paul was capable of returning the enjoyment of these identities to those same ethnic groups, as adiaphora, things indifferent in themselves precisely because they are not themselves generalizable (global) principle. With this question, the essay finds Paul caught in a very contemporary political (and perhaps theologico-political) deadlock. As Engberg-Pedersen writes, ‘‘Indifferents are allowed if that seems preferable—–as long as they are not taken genuinely to matter with regard to what the whole discourse is primarily about, which in Stoicism is the good and in Paul is justice, salvation, life.’’ With such a formulation, Engberg-Pedersen’s excellent contribution may be read fruitfully as having returned Paul to the horns of the perennial dilemma that has come to constitute not only Stoic or Pauline distinctions between philosophical truth and everyday appearances or between Paulinist truth and his adversaries’ obstructive investment in local practice. This forceful, perennial deadlock also operates, after all, within contemporary distinctions between reason and religion or the political and the religious. In every case, the universal appears simultaneously (and with striking complicity, therefore) with an obstruction in the form of the intransigent desire of the other that must be sacrificed in order to liberate the universal from its bondage to the merely local. So goes the serially repeated—which is perhaps to say structurally generated—story. Indeed, this problematic, and the historical shift in the form and force of sovereignty it indicates, may be read as an issue generating ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘liberal’’ biblical interpretation as such. A great deal of genealogical spadework (and simply interdisciplinary reading) still needs to be done on the (at once philosophical and historical) function of Paulinism in relation to modern constructions of the universal, making clear the borrowings, contestations, and peculiar repetitions to be discovered across these strata. For now, it is worth pointing out that an extraordinary start to such comparative labor may be found in recent work by Yvonne Sherwood (e.g., ‘‘The God of Abraham and Exceptional States, or the Early Modern Rise of the Whig/Liberal Bible’’).34 As Sherwood makes clear, the history of biblical interpretation concerning exceptions to established laws (in the church, in the university) cannot be extricated from a political and legal history where such possibilities were actually being explored, as if biblical interpretation and political history were mirroring each other very closely. As Sherwood writes of early modern legal theorists’ curious obsession with moments of divine and patriarchal

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exceptionality in the Bible: ‘‘they delicately negotiate with the biblical, in ways that mirror the delicate renegotiations with kingship at the Revolution.’’35 In that light, Engberg-Pedersen’s reading of a first-century writer strikes a strikingly relevant note, designating an issue that has also generated, and continues to generate, a great deal of interest in Pauline texts. As Stanley Fish has described the general problematic (while poking fun at John Rawls), political liberalism’s question for Paul is whether one can distinguish the (public) citizen Saul from the (private) apostle Paul or, perhaps more perversely, the question of how one would pare down the private ‘‘excesses’’ of the apostle until one arrived at the formal public citizen.36 As Rawls himself puts it, highlighting the significance of the issue, on this distinction between Saul and Paul hinges the distinction between ‘‘two kinds of commitments and attachments—political and nonpolitical.’’37 My point here is not only to repeat the example but also to suggest that permutations of the public/private distinction have a long and illustrious history within modern interpretations of Paul, permutations whose influence has yet fully to be registered.38 Indeed, the operational distinction (between public and private) has been essential to politics, religion, and critical thought as the modern period constructed it, and Paul has often functioned as a useful touchstone in such architectures. Consider John Locke, for example, whose patient readings of the Pauline texts are often credited as a great leap forward in the modern, historical reading of the Bible.39 Interestingly for our purposes, this leap was itself constituted by the fact that Locke attempted to bracket received dogmatictheological structures in order to attend to Paul as an individual, private author. The former dogmatic interests (Locke argues) have left Pauline texts fragmented and therefore incapable of the transparency sufficient to edify a solitary moral reader. The necessary task, therefore, the one that would save such readers from subservience to opaque or obstructive dogmatisms, was to find ‘‘Paul’s system in a clear and indisputable Sense.’’ One could do this, he believed, by attending to Paul as both individual moralist and solitary, private author.40 The leap forward in the invention of the historical mode of biblical interpretation, in other words (and perhaps ironically), oriented itself around the phenomenon of the morally coherent private self over against the vicissitudes of the ennervatingly contingent and fragmented ‘‘external.’’ Permutations of the distinction between public and private also govern the fascinating excoriation of Paulinism by Jeremy Bentham in his final book, some four hundred pages of biblical criticism urging modern society to prefer, as the title declares, Not Paul, but Jesus. Written under a pseudonym (significantly, Gamaliel Smith), Bentham hopes to counteract the confusing ‘‘supernatural effects’’ of Pauline deeds and declarations by focusing on and denigrating the private Paul, his ‘‘internal character.’’41 Repeating the assurance that a public/private distinction will function as a helpful safety mechanism against an otherwise dangerous excess within religious systems, Bentham confides in readers a desire to uproot the source of ‘‘useless privations’’ and ‘‘groundless terrors’’ by

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curing British obeisance to the apostle Paul. The aim of this profaning intervention, he asserts, is to ‘‘clear away’’ an ‘‘incumbrance’’ to what would otherwise exist as the beneficent purity of ‘‘religion, with its benevolent system of morals.’’ Repeating what has been and continues to be a powerful theologico-political gesture, Bentham attempts to excise an ‘‘incongruous appendage’’ from the history of the early church, thus uncovering a more primordial version of religion that would bring inner life rather than contingently external, institutional conflict—all the ‘‘groundless terrors’’ and noninstrumental ‘‘privations’’ such an obtruding limb produces. Throughout this voluminous appendix to Bentham’s life’s work, he seeks to show that the ‘‘religion of Paul’’ is not the same thing as the ‘‘religion of Jesus,’’ inasmuch as Paul’s writings afford a theological system that distracts citizens from the otherwise inward and universalizable moral sentiments to be found in Jesus. As the aged Bentham puts it: If, by cutting off a source of useless privations and groundless terrors, comfort and inward peace should be restored or secured;—if, by cutting off a source of bitter animosity,—good-will, and peace from without, should be restored or secured;—if, by the removal of an incongruous appendage, acceptance should be obtained for what is good in the religion commonly ascribed to Jesus. . . . good service will, so far, and on all hands, be allowed to have been rendered to mankind.42 Only that which is thought capable of translation, sublimation, or metamorphosis into the discourse of the formal-universal will survive, politically speaking, this ‘‘clearing’’ of the ‘‘incongruous appendage.’’ To exorcise the problematic of political liberalism is not a simple thing, though these texts do afford clues that have not really been followed through. As Foucault’s anxieties make clear (and also those of Wasserman, Fish, and Rawls), the question of Paulinism has become inextricable from the question of the interiority of the subject (and perhaps also of the autonomous subject of the ‘‘West,’’ which Rawls recognizes as a ‘‘political’’ subject). Indeed, Alexandre Koje`ve discerned this interiorizing of the object realm in the way specific ‘‘sins’’ become a general ‘‘sentiment of sin’’ in Paul, or in the way ‘‘salvation’’ is found in Pauline texts to be ‘‘immediate, without effort, without ‘works.’ ’’ Such things, Koje`ve explains, are the great ‘‘error’’ of Paulinism, which the church (and later Hegelian historical reasoning) must counter by focusing its long view on structures of ‘‘mediation’’ that Paul, we are told, could not think.43 We must, Koje`ve suggests, ‘‘mediatize’’ (me´diatiser) such interiorities if thinking is to find any substance in such moments. The question for the smooth operation of the public/private machine is whether, within the larger discursive and material constellations, some qualities or actions obtrude like so many ‘‘incongruous’’ appendages, even as others appear as generic and common to the citizenry. The history of the ‘‘Paul effect’’ (to borrow a phrase from Julia Reinhard Lupton’s essay below) is inextricable from a history of discursive and technological practices within which such differences register themselves as everyday,

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generic, and internalized, or, alternatively, as incongruously exceptional. Whether one imagines such a single process of cultural inscription and subsequent splitting into the profane and religious (or particular and universal, or personal and political) as an implicit demand to explore an ‘‘anthropology of secularism’’ (Talal Asad), an exploration of imaginary and technologically constructed ‘‘publics’’ (Michael Warner), or the effort to instill in others a ‘‘modern’’ subjectivity (Webb Keane), the ‘‘Paul effect’’ will always have been about a repetition (and sometimes contestation) of these diffuse patterns of inscription and the sense of inward selfhood they inspire.44 Interestingly, for example, Locke found himself, at moments when he sought to distinguish the personal-ethical from the external-dogmatic in and around Paul, curiously obsessed with the printer’s layout of the Pauline texts. He claimed that the fact that Pauline texts had come to be printed with paragraph breaks, systems of numbering, and even inserted chapter titles prevented moral readers from finding a transparent, individual system of practical reason in Paul, thus leaving him in the realm of the contingently fragmentary, opaque, or merely dogmatic. The mediating format of the text itself solicits a particular readerly experience, says Locke: ‘‘When the eye is constantly disturbed with loose sentences, that by their standing and separation, appear as so many distinct fragments, the mind will have much ado to take in, and carry on in its memory a uniform discourse of dependent reasonings, especially having from the cradle been used to wrong impressions of them.’’45 Concern about the particular role of the readerly sensorium is underexplored territory in the study of Paulinisms ancient and modern, though certainly not in other reworkings of the modern European ‘‘secular’’ and ‘‘religious,’’ as in Asad, Warner, or Keene. Ian Balfour’s essay in this book expands on his remarkable reflections in The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy to explore just such territory in light of Pauline statements about the ‘‘killing’’ effect of the ‘‘letter’’ on the ‘‘spirit.’’46 Sovereign Exceptions Of course, against the backdrop of the Paul who was read according to this tradition of political and philosophical liberalism, it is no great change of registers, and one that is never far from the primal scene of Paul and the philosophers, to pose the obvious (and perhaps Schmittian) question: Who or what sovereignty decides when a particular pleasure transgresses its proper limit and thus begins, illegitimately, to matter too much or in a way it should not? Engberg-Pedersen explores this question by examining Paul’s various, and to our sensibilities ad hoc, Pauline interventions on behalf of the universal against the pressure of some local practice ‘‘mattering too much.’’ Engberg-Pedersen’s interpretation of Paul’s engagements with circumcision, headscarves, and the style of cultic meals may therefore be read as an ancient mirror that encapsulates an ongoing politicotheological problematic governing a great deal of political theory and practice in our own time.47

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Indeed, this particular problem eventually leads Engberg-Pedersen to propose that Paul does not formulate a universal ethic but simply creates a new and different identitarian community, the famous ‘‘third race’’ of early Christian discussions, neither Jewish nor Greek in the usual senses, but a community with its own local norms. Significantly for the larger debates just described, Engberg-Pedersen’s article itself enacts the struggle between the particular ‘‘substance’’ of historical example and general or formal philosophical categories by presenting us with his own historical reading and the formal categories he finds in Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: the Foundation of Universalism. EngbergPedersen does not say, finally, whether the ‘‘Pauline’’ problem he articulates is a problem only for Paul, this problem being the apostle’s inability to transcend received ethnic distinctions on the way to a generic or universal commons without repeating the original, particularist gesture, without producing a new and equally ad hoc identitarian (or merely local) community. Is this a problem of the historical example only, or is it also a perennial and even structural problem for the very nature of formulating ethical engagement in the way Paul did, as someone laboring under the shadow of the ‘‘all’’ and the ‘‘for all’’? Engberg-Pedersen concludes, for example, with an admonition that the ad hoc interventions of Paul as a would-be universalist (against the excessive, local pleasures of received identities) are ‘‘probably the best kind of universalism one can get.’’ Much more interesting than the predictable talk of a historical or philosophical ‘‘disciplinary divide’’ to which discussions of Paul and the philosophers have frequently been subjected of late, EngbergPedersen’s remarks show clearly how a structural problem, a variation of the Enlightenment question of the distinction between the universal and particular, haunts our thinking of the ‘‘Pauline’’ project, a space that is never merely empirico-particular or formal-universal. Perhaps, we might say, it is not only Paul but modern ‘‘Western’’ philosophy as well that must face the aporetic trial of imagining an ‘‘all’’ or a ‘‘for all’’ from within a singularly ‘‘elected’’ local community (the aporetics of which are clear, in Paul’s case, in Romans 9–11). My reference to constitutive aporia and the sovereignty of that which will decide the difference or mode of interaction between the particular and the global brings us to Mark de Wilde’s discussion of Carl Schmitt’s fascination with the same problematic (‘‘Politics Between Times: Theologico-Political Interpretations of the Restraining Force [katechon] in Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians’’). This topic has become all the more pressing for our conversations with the organization and recent publication by Martin Treml and Thorsten Palzhoff of the extended correspondence between Schmitt and Taubes.48 On occasion, Schmitt imagined the issue as indicating an ongoing necessity of imperial order to ‘‘suppress’’ (katechon) open-ended chaos in order to preserve the identity of the state. Such, de Wilde shows, has been a longstanding interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2:6, where something undefined is portrayed as suppressing or restraining the ‘‘lawless one’’ until the messiah reappears to salvage the situation.49 It is at this point that de Wilde takes up a political history of the interpretation of this peculiar Pauline passage. He

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explores the reception history of this text’s imagination of a power that restrains or suppresses the appearance of an apocalyptic ‘‘lawless one.’’ De Wilde’s history makes clear not only the diversity of appropriations and redeployments of this early Christian passage but also its central significance within ongoing discussions of Schmitt and the ‘‘exceptional’’ moment at which sovereignty decides it must violently suppress critique and diversity in order to preserve the state from a more profound dissolution. Indeed, it may be possible to extend the decisionism imagined by Schmitt well beyond his usual imagined tableaus of a national sovereign anxious about unsettling critique and external influence. Analyzing and diagnosing contemporary indications of the proliferation of Schmittian dynamics beyond the mechanics of the realm of the dictatorial leader or the nation state, for example, Michael Dillon and Julian Reid write: The task thus posed [in the late modern period] through the liberal way of rule and war by its referent object of rule and war—the biohuman—is no longer that, classically, of assigning the human its proper nature with a view to respecting it. The proper nature of the biohuman has become the infinite re-assignability of the very pluripotency of which it is now said to be comprised, against the very threat of that pluripotency itself. This is the strategic goal of the liberal way of war because it has become the strategic goal of the liberal way of rule. From the analytics of finitude, politically, has thus arisen an infinity of securitization and fear.50 In light of such a haunting possibility, consider the way L. L. Welborn historically inflects our explorations of biopolitical sovereignties by invoking the ‘‘culture of crucifixion’’ in the Roman imperial period. Welborn considers how this culture helps us to understand the Paulinist ‘‘event’’ of community formation under the sign of crucifixion. To this end, Welborn considers philosophical, literary, and even theatrical presentations of selfhood in the Roman Empire of the Silver Age. He finds there striking depictions of imperial subjects and subjectivity, their reliance and dependency on imperial sovereignty, and their occasional explorations of the possibility that to be a subject of empire was (because always a potential ‘‘exception’’ to the empire’s life-preserving power) a form of death in life. Welborn’s culture of crucifixion is life exposed to sovereign power and its ever-present capacity to declare one an enemy of Roman rule. Welborn argues that his explorations of an imperial ‘‘psychology of the self’’ open up new ways of fleshing out the event-centered reading of Paul by Alain Badiou, for whom a Pauline ‘‘truth event’’ indicates the way a new form of life (indeed, an ‘‘immortal’’ life) tears the fabric of a preexisting mode of existence. How, Welborn asks, does a new community form burst into existence on the site of an imperial execution, in which someone is abandoned to the strategic imposition of imperial sovereignty? How, in such a case, can something happen besides the routinization of sovereign power? Welborn’s analysis attends to some of the specific textures of the ‘‘upsurge of the self’’ that was the

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community (as Paul put it) ‘‘of’’ and ‘‘in’’ the crucified. He wants to capture some of the exhilaration of this first-century form of identification by hearing it (and here is a key difference from Badiou) as a negation of the subjectivating power of imperial sovereignty. In doing so, Welborn makes a forceful case for construing the Paulinist truth event in more dialectical terms than Badiou’s, the resurrection becoming itself a communityforming no to the murderous negations and economic suppressions of the imperial order. To speak in this way is already to begin to reflect on the potential aggressivity and threat to sovereignty involved in such community-forming moments of de-negation, something that becomes clear in some recent encounters between Paulinism and materialist constructions of the subject.

Paul, Materialism, and the Contingencies of Emancipation Elisabeth Castelli (‘‘The Philosophers’ Paul in the Frame of the Global’’) makes a series of comparisons in order to highlight different modes whereby would-be Paulinist discourses make sensible categories like the universal or the global. Castelli’s comparative work makes clear how philosophical appropriations of a biblical or Paulinist ‘‘universal’’ could usefully be inflected by recent scholarly attention to the institutional and mediatic networks constituting various forms of ‘‘global Christianity.’’ At stake in Castelli’s analysis is nothing less than the question of the specific material networks in which projections, imaginations, or recognitions of global solidarities or universalist politics could be felt at all. With a remark that summarizes the central interests of our collective investigation of Paul and the philosophers, Stanley Stowers (‘‘Paul as a Hero of Subjectivity’’) distinguishes various renderings of Paul in relation to types of philosophy, presenting his analyses as a work of ‘‘comparative Paulinisms with genealogical ambitions.’’ Stowers is interested in the way a historical reading of Paul may serve as a contrapuntal touchstone for locating resources for thinking otherwise, in this case, otherwise than a modern world in which (he writes) ‘‘the universality of subjectivity’’ is as natural to philosophical thought as ‘‘was God for Paul.’’ Reading the history of Pauline interpretation against the backdrop of interiorizing theories of both the subject and its reification, Stowers finds structural affinities between what he describes as the ‘‘ultra-Cartesian project’’ and a ‘‘Western Paul.’’ Among other things, Stowers’s genealogical aspirations demand that we consider the paradoxical possibility that Paul ‘‘is more materialistic or physicalistic’’ than recent interpreters like Badiou and, indeed, that Paul is ‘‘less spiritual.’’ For Stowers, the comparative counterpoint in Paul is not outside the modern or the post-Cartesian so much as a potentially subversive element within it, inviting a reflection on a self that is not a subject.

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By contrast, Slavoj Zˇizˇek (‘‘The Necessity of a Dead Bird: Paul’s Communism’’) finds a significant interlocutor for contemporary materialist philosophies in a different Paulinist topos: namely, the peculiar ‘‘tarrying with the negative’’ constituted by Paul’s obsession with the imperial execution of his messiah. A more than minor disruption in the working out of political hope, the stupidity and shattering nature (e.g., moria and skandalon in 1 Cor. 1) of such a dismally failed political role itself becomes an essential element within Paul’s pronouncements, a point of identification from which Paul will then try to subvert the everyday, structured, and even philosophically developed ‘‘wisdom of the world.’’ Interestingly, this subversion also appears in Paul’s texts as an implicit threat to the world’s ‘‘rulers.’’ In a theologico-political line nourished in the imaginaries of early Jewish apocalypticism, he writes cryptically: ‘‘If they [the archai, rulers] knew what they were doing in executing the messiah, they would not have done it.’’ Paul repeats the sentiment again at 1 Corinthians 15:24, where he claims that the political telos of the crucified Christ is to rule ‘‘until all rule and authority and power are rendered inoperative’’ (katargeo¯). According to Zˇizˇek and Welborn, Paul is so focused on this element of his ‘‘news’’ that he even claims, at one point, ‘‘to know nothing but’’ this messiah, that is, the one ‘‘crucified.’’ As Brigitte Kahl, Neil Elliott, Peter Oakes, Davina Lopez, and Giorgio Agamben have recently argued in different ways, Paul does not seem to have been able to imagine that the community of the messianic kyrios (who died a ‘‘slave’s death’’) could attain recognition without a negation or rendering inoperative of the power of the imperial kyrios that placed dissident slaves on their crosses in the first place.51 Our own thinking about permutations of political negation and the implicit aggressivity it always carries with it is inseparable from the Nietzschean legacy of Pauline interpretation, wherein Paulinism becomes an expression of ressentiment among the powerless. Precisely this type of question (and, indeed, questioning) of philosophical traditions of agency, action, and the political has brought Paul into conversations about apocalyptic indifference (as in Walter Benjamin, Rudolf Bultmann, or Vincent Wimbusch), but also into comparisons with equally peculiar figures for philosophical thought, such as Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. For Zˇizˇek’s Paul, the new start of the newly imagined community of faith need not be distinguishable from a certain resentment, or, perhaps better, from a potential threat of aggressivity and violence. Zˇizˇek’s reading of Paul’s crucified messiah as a form of ‘‘materialist’’ tarrying with negativity, however, is strikingly different from Nietzsche’s interpretation of Paul as a popularized, pacifying Platonism. Far from a triumphal closure of hesitation and anxiety (in light of which one might sacrifice one’s life for a guaranteed future state, as in Nietzsche’s story), Paul’s tearing out from a crucified messiah some potential for new community formation may be compared profitably to the long history of catastrophes that, as Simon Critchley shows, have functioned as spurs to philosophical development.52 Zˇizˇek is interested in allowing a kenotic Paulinism and its ‘‘cross’’ to

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return to haunt the pretensions of Christian identity and its self-valorization as the good conscience of power.53 Re´my Bac summarizes some of the conceptual possibilities and historical contexts of such a move in an excellent book about the ontology of Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou. There he points out that Paul’s thinking of a crucified messiah has emerged as an alternative to Christian phenomenological reflection on the flesh or conscience (Bac’s christianisme du sujet). He envisions a Paulinist appropriation of contingency, exteriority, and event (defined by Bac as a christianisme de l’objet materiel) emerging to contest or internally fissure the identity of the Christian philosophical tradition.54 Philosophically appropriated at the level of the object rather than the subject, the Paulinist crucified becomes indistinguishable from the tropes or topoi of what Zˇizˇek (and Badiou) designate as a philosophical materialism. And with the collapse of the distinction separating Zˇizˇek’s ‘‘materialism’’ from Paul’s crucified messiah, Nietzsche’s construal of a calculating and calculated Pauline deployment of resentment falls to the side, in Zˇizˇek’s reading, as a misunderstanding of Pauline contingency and exteriority, what he explores in his essay below as the ‘‘necessity of a dead bird.’’ The link between Paulinism and materialism was also an integral part of the lifelong philosophical effort of Stanislas Breton to think through what Paul called in 1 Corinthians a ‘‘logos of the cross’’—a catastrophic starting point, indeed, an abject failure—as simultaneously a critique of power. Breton’s oeuvre brims over with surprising musings about Paul’s paradoxical logos staurou (‘‘word of the cross’’), musings that appear in contexts as diverse as Breton’s theory of ideology, his discussions of set theory’s reliance on a zero level or empty set, or his engagements with art and the museum industry. Interestingly, Breton found in Louis Althusser’s late writings, particularly their commitment to a thinking of void and of the swerve of encounter (the essential elements of what Althusser was then calling an ‘‘aleatory materialism’’), an important exemplar of Breton’s own avowedly Paulinist reflection on the logos of the cross.55 In a way that brings him close to Zˇizˇek’s reflection below on Paul’s ‘‘communism,’’ for Breton such comparisons were much more than an ethical reflection about how to think power ‘‘otherwise’’ than as strength and knowledge. On the contrary, Breton’s entire corpus (up to and including his thinking in Saint Paul) may be read as a metaphysical or (perhaps more accurately, postmetaphysical) ontological musing about how such a revolutionary project might be possible.56 It is a question of ‘‘Paul and the philosophers’’ indeed, one worth comparing to the discussions of Levinas and Rosenzweig in Martin Kavka’s compelling Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy.57 In this sense, moreover, the interrogations of Paulinism by Breton and Zˇizˇek are never very far from the reflections of Antonio Negri, who suggests that his own ontological explorations of the book of Job (The Labour of Job), begun in an Italian prison, were born of a ‘‘question of how to develop an adequate understanding of repression so as to resist it and to find a way to interpret political defeat as a critique of Power.’’58

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Negri imagines, in fact, that Paul had in mind the catastrophe of Job when he wrote that ‘‘Since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided through the stupidity [mo¯ria] of our proclamation, to save those who believe’’ (1 Cor. 1:21). One can see why Negri would find in Job’s reflection on injustice and inexplicable catastrophe a profound link with Paul’s message of a failed messianism or a crucified messiah, not to mention why, as a political prisoner himself (regardless of how one understands his incarceration), Negri was struck by this particular constellation of texts. How can failed political ventures—or inchoate carceral sufferings—ground a critique of power? More aggressively, how is it that organized power cannot resist, cannot close itself off from, the excluded realm of a failed coup—or from the cost in suffering demanded for the maintenance of power’s coherent identity? For Breton and Negri alike, the Paulinist question is not merely ethical but also ontological: can one think an executed messiah, and this as cultural critique? Or do executed messiahs themselves afford the space of cultural critique? The problem is not only a Pauline problem, as if buried away in the past, or as if not a question we may yet be compelled to repeat. Generalizing or formalizing the particular catastrophe at the core of Paul’s intervention, Zˇizˇek compares this aspect of the crucified within Paulinism to the ‘‘necessity of a dead bird’’ in Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige. The scandal of the crucified in Paul finds itself in conversation with the ineluctable material remainder or stupidly obtrusive passion that Zˇizˇek finds as a constitutive element in materialist philosophies, where all the self-enclosed idealisms and auto-telic grounds of philosophical reflection find themselves derailed by ‘‘material’’ obstructions. Zˇizˇek universalizes this traumatic, uncanny, and disruptive ‘‘zero level’’ of identification until it becomes genuinely common or even communistic. In other words, in an intriguing repetition of the Pauline moment, here the dispossession named in the executed messiah becomes communal property and a new source of political critique. The Paulinist gesture presented by these philosophers can be compared to what Michael Taussig explores in a different context as ‘‘defacement’’ and the ‘‘labor of the negative,’’ within which there emerges ‘‘an orgy of disproportion’’ that may reconfigure the everyday appearance of things. Paul—himself fetishizing, wearing as a mask, or otherwise memorializing and enacting what otherwise would have been simply another Roman execution of a would-be messianic leader—is not far from Taussig’s explorations of the moment when (as Paul would have put it) ta me¯ onta, things that ‘‘are not,’’ appear in order to ‘‘destroy’’ the ‘‘things that are’’ (1 Cor. 1:28).59 Perhaps here is the link between Paulinism, ontology, and the political, joined in the image of an implicit threat, even if always ‘‘weak’’ and ‘‘stupid’’ (to mo¯ron, to asthene¯s, 1 Cor. 1:26), that the Christians—now identifying as ‘‘crucified’’ with Christ and thus ‘‘dead’’ to worldly interpellations (cf. Gal. 2:20)—may constitute an excess that the summary putting away of Jesus could not have taken into account: again, ‘‘if the archai had known what they were doing [in excluding or rendering inoperable the theologico-political hopes appended to Jesus], they would

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not have done it.’’ In any case, one of the tasks presented by these philosophico-Paulinist constellations is to uncover the way radical dispossession irrupts in the contestation of existing, world-constituting logics, allowing for the invention of new identifications oriented around the formerly uncountable, zero-level status of the excluded.60 In a related encounter between Paul and philosophy, Jean-Luc Marion allows Paul to function as the ‘‘intervention of an instance’’ in a larger genealogical ‘‘outwitting’’ of Western ontology. Marion notes correctly that one may discern the ‘‘lexicon of the Greek philosophers’’ in Pauline statements about ta (me¯) onta, particularly in relation to the question of the one becoming the other (e.g., Rom. 4:17; 1 Cor. 1:28).61 Unlike the discourse of the science of being, here the transition (say, for ta me¯ onta to become ta onta, or vice versa) ‘‘befalls them from the outside,’’ by way of a call that is a ‘‘wholly extrinsic establishment.’’ Marion resists imagining this divine exteriority ‘‘without being’’ as a form of (say, Zˇizˇekian or Badiouean) materialism (though what was on Marion’s mind at the time was a Derridean atheism). But some of the interpretive moves being performed by Marion are otherwise isomorphic with such a stance.62 Perhaps, moreover, we should submit the intensity of all such distinctions between theology and philosophy, God and materialism, or the community of the crucified and philosophical accounts of political agency to the question of contemporary political spaces. How does the discourse of the partisan of the crucified cut across a discourse of being? How, in that light, would one understand Jon Sobrino’s echoes of 1 Corinthians 1:28 in his articulation of the various ways in which the poor of Latin America ‘‘are not’’? This constellation leads Sobrino to consider what might happen if the poor were to name this nonbeing a communal space of ‘‘the crucified.’’ With such an act of identification, Sobrino believes, the group would emerge into its place within a larger ‘‘copro-historical’’ genealogy, which, he hopes, may yet transform the consumerist commitments of the First World and ‘‘de-ideologize human rights’’ talk, once these commitments, and this ideology, likewise realize that nothing has become something—the indication of an epochal, transformative moment.63 To add another figure to this diverse installation of isomorphic Paulinisms, John Riches, in his excellent commentary Galatians Through the Centuries, points out that the philosophical master of the Kyoto School, Keiji Nishitani, discovered in Galatians 2:20 (‘‘it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me’’) potentially a significant indication of the West’s misrecognition of itself and its alleged philosophical commitment to the concrete individual self. Against the usual either/or of these cross-cultural encounters (all tricked out with an allegedly Western self versus Buddhist nonself), Nishitani began to ask Christian philosophers and theologians: ‘‘Who speaks these words, actually? Paul? Or another?’’64 The Paulinist koan, as it were, invites an experience of the self that is deferred, mirrored, and decidedly nonpresent, an indication of what Nishida described as ‘‘immanent transcendence’’ and, indeed, an indication of an ‘‘I’’ that is itself ‘‘a creative event out of nothingness.’’65

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As Ueda Shizuturu describes it, the effort to think the ‘‘I am’’ as a form of groundlessness, and this groundlessness as the origin of life ex nihilo, constituted an important moment in Nishitani’s efforts to overcome (Western) nihilism by way of a kind of intensification or radicalizing of nihilism to the point that it that negates itself (Shizuturu: ‘‘to overcome nihilism through nihilism’’). It is as a figure of such an enterprise that Paul emerges here as a significant link in an aggressively globalizing ‘‘Western’’ constellation that Nishitani wanted to analyze (as both poison and cure) by way of the juxtaposition (and assertion of profound identity) between Nishitani’s two Christian thinkers, Meister Eckhart and Friedrich Nietzsche. Interestingly, in light of Schweitzer’s suggestions below (namely, that Nietzsche ‘‘could have been Paul’’), here the identifying link between Eckhart’s passive affirmation of life ‘‘without a why’’ and Nietzsche’s active nihilation of modern, Christian values is, precisely, the Paulinist identification with the crucified, through whom ‘‘I’’ have become crucified to the world and it to me (cf. Gal. 2:20). Indeed, Shizuturu explains how Nishitani’s exploration of a Paulinist link between Eckhart and Nietzsche fits his articulation of an ontology in which there is neither the divine nor the human. In Nishitani’s making a koan out of a Pauline theologoumena, we discover a project not unlike Agamben’s readings of Paulinist messianism as a figure of the profane (neither religious nor secular) or Eric Santner’s discoveries in Paul of a figure of the ‘‘undead,’’ a life that is neither merely creaturely nor merely divine, but some point of indistinction between the two.66 In ‘‘Paul and Materialist Grace,’’ Roland Boer’s overall genealogical project is to rethink Marxism in connection with the political significance of contemporary biblical scholarship.67 In the essay here, Boer shows how axioms of Paulinist ‘‘grace’’ overlap with post-Marxist philosophies and contingency in how he situates some of Zˇizˇek’s engagements with the category of the universal, materialist or split subjectivity, and also legal sovereignty in relation to the writings of Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, Ernesto Laclau, and Julia Kristeva. Over the course of the analysis, Boer asks whether Zˇizˇek’s detour through Paul is not more necessary than one might otherwise imagine. Indeed, he argues, the tradition of radical contingency that we find within both Reformed and Paulinist descriptions of grace must be resurrected against the ‘‘cul de sac of ethics and love’’ (not to mention some of Lacan’s writings that, he argues, constitute this ‘‘trap’’). Boer’s study constitutes a striking and unexpected diagnostic device: Tell me what you think about Paul, and I will tell you what you think about revolutionary politics. In a closely related scrambling of inherited critical and philosophical identities, in his essay Clayton Crockett (‘‘Radical Theology and the Event: St. Paul with Deleuze’’) shows how a thinking of the Paulinist crucified finds in the materialist ontology of Gilles Deleuze an ally that Deleuze was himself unable to recognize. As Zˇizˇek’s essay also suggests, Paul may be a more significant interlocutor for contemporary critical theory precisely when we try to think beyond the limits (and without the guarantees) of foundationalist, ontotheological structures. Crockett finds, for example, in the Deleuzian proclamation of the

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death of God an exploration of the Deleuzian ‘‘fold’’ of being that simply cannot resist a kind of kinship with the kerygmatic event of the apostle. Communal sense emerges from a kind of ‘‘zero point’’ of non-sense and temporalization becomes the affirmation of an event that is always yet to come. Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and a particular construal of an apocalyptic Paul are, therefore, much closer than we, not to mention Deleuze, tend to realize. In keeping with his usual critiques of the subversive openness to contingency within the ontologies of his Parisian cohort, Paul Ricoeur, in ‘‘Paul the Apostle: Proclamation and Argumentation,’’ finds in his own reading of Paul a hermeneutical interlacing of tradition and newness that he believes to be underdeveloped in some recent interpreters of Paul, such as Giorgio Agamben. In doing so, Ricoeur situates Paul differently, and perhaps more compliantly, in relation to ecclesiastical interpretations of Paul inasmuch as Paul appears more interested in recognizing and maintaining inherited institutions and traditions.

Communal Spaces Between Times Building on her work in Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology, Julia Reinhard Lupton articulates Paul and Shakespeare as writers negotiating a cultural threshold that is both old and new (‘‘Ablative Absolutes: From Paul to Shakespeare’’).68 As she makes way for new and potentially heterodox imaginations of the (crucified) messiah, on the one hand, or incursions of the secular into Renaissance religiosity, on the other, Paul and Shakespeare become writers who both recognize and encourage or force a cultural splitting we will later articulate in chronological narratives of distinct epochs. As Lupton writes: ‘‘In speaking from a religious world-view to a secular scene whose parameters he helped found, Shakespeare, like Paul, worked a certain polemical transformation on the poles of address, but without making an exit or exodus from one position to another.’’ Lupton shows how Shakespeare appropriates Paul at important moments that constitute interstitial spaces between times, finding in both writers crystallizations of an epochmaking ‘‘forcing’’ of change that is far from a simple step outside the inherited tradition in question. What is at stake in such a reading of Paul or Shakespeare, Lupton makes clear, is not simply historical accuracy to a moment of vanishing mediation between two fully formed communities or two narrative epochs. Rather, in understanding these textual moments, in which meaning and validity do not cohere, we discover new ways of construing universality that do not collapse into the masked self-interest and violence that the category of the universal can so readily bear. Eleanor Kaufman (‘‘The Saturday of Messianic Time: Agamben and Badiou on the Apostle Paul’’) likewise situates her articulation of Paulinism in relation to a philosophical tradition within which inoperativity, splitting, and blockage of access constitute central

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topoi in relation to which philosophy’s quest for truth must discover itself. Kaufman weaves together dialectical reflections on law and transgression, tradition, and the forcing of the new from Sade, Lacan, Agamben, Taubes, and Scholem in order to think communal spaces of the neither/nor. How shall we imagine a gift of life in excess of death, a life that somehow inheres in the killing inoperativity of the smooth functioning of normalcy? That may be the central politico-theological question for incorporating Paul within the larger world of messianism he inhabits (then and now). With Taubes, Kaufman considers the comparison of Paul with Sabbatai Zevi, the apostate messiah of Nathan of Gaza and an object of fascination for Gershom Scholem’s understanding of messianism. Neither a simple step outside the tradition nor the smooth operation of tradition without radical transformation, these controversial—even apostate—moments in the history of Jewish messianism invite us to reflect on life that perseveres within symbolic catastrophe: ‘‘Apostasy is not equitable with death, nor is it purely the space of the negative; rather, it represents the ability to enter into that space, to be transformed by it, and ultimately to bear with it.’’ Like Stanislas Breton or Zˇizˇek, in her essay Kaufman considers the uncanny power of identity submitted to catastrophic dispossession, its potential for creative reinvention of the proper in a paradoxical moment of ‘‘sin beyond measure.’’ Paul called such a possibility the skandalon of the crucified Christ, which nevertheless permits new forms of identity—‘‘neither Jew nor Greek,’’ and so on. Kaufman, with Taubes, sometimes names the dynamic as a gathering of one of the heretics of the Jewish tradition back into the messianic fold. Nils Schott (‘‘Love and the Stick’’) situates Pauline texts comparatively through later manuals of institutional discipline in order to highlight material mechanisms of the management of behavior operative within Pauline discourses of love.

Paul and the ‘‘Deconversion and Reconstruction’’ of the West Such reflections on communal spaces of the paradoxically neither/nor are of central significance for our understanding of the return of Paulinist questions today, particularly as these questions name a reworking or contestation of inherited identity formations and the effort to unearth thereby unexpected resources of life yet to come. Indeed, the gesture may well constitute one of the significant ways that religion and the secular find now, as they have before, a kind of blind alley or displaced figure in Paulinism. Several years after Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma first appeared, for example, Arnold’s niece, Mary Augusta Ward, wrote an extremely popular three-volume novel about a minister’s loss of orthodox Christian faith, exploring the dynamics of deconversion in the process. In Robert Elsmere, a devout young evangelical parson in training moves to Oxford to experience the teaching of a Hegelian. After his formal education, the young, Hegel-inspired cleric spends his mornings reading modern historical scholarship

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about the Bible and religion more generally. Eventually, he decides that orthodox, apologetic biblical scholarship is simply untenable. Interestingly, Elsmere names as an example of such untenable work that of the great Anglican New Testament scholar B. F. Westcott. Work of this sort, the minister decides, operates by way of a refusal of genuine comparison of biblical ideas, texts, and tendencies with those of other ancient religions. Westcott, Elsmere complains to his old Hegelian mentor, who means so much nowadays to the English religious world, first isolates Christianity from all other religious phenomena of the world, and then argues upon its details. You might as well isolate English jurisprudence, and discuss its details without any reference to Teutonic custom or Roman law! You may be as logical or as learned as you like within the limits chosen, but the whole result is false! You treat Christian witness and Biblical literature as you would treat no other witness, and no other literature in the world. And you cannot show cause enough. For your reasons depend on the very witness under dispute. And so you go on arguing in a circle, ad infinitum.69 Despite himself, however, the character Elsmere finds that to try to read differently, outside the self-reinforcing circuit within which the Christian Bible is privileged and abstracted from a ‘‘world’’ of other religious and literary phenomena, leaves him feeling that he has lost his own orientation—even his own place within the world. Disenchanted, he discovers that his effort to read the Bible comparatively and like any other religious text is to stare directly into the gaze of ‘‘a medusa.’’ His own sense of piety and possibility become paralyzed by this comparative enterprise.70 Like the educated reader in Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, Elsmere eventually loses his faith in the exceptional, privileged, or ‘‘supernaturalist’’ reading of the Bible, with the narration of his personal crisis hinging on his avowed declaration that ‘‘miracles do not happen!’’ meaning that no culture should be treated as exceptional.71 Under the tutelage of his Hegelian advisor, however, Elsmere finds that the universalizing critique and subsequent collapse of the orthodox, supernaturalist or exceptionalist position opens up new possibilities for a kind of worldly spirituality, with the apostate cleric eventually starting a ‘‘New Brotherhood’’ in which old energies of faith return as emancipatory social activism. Not surprisingly, given what Lupton refers to as the ‘‘Paul effect’’ within later cultural formations, in this tale it is Paul who returns as a paradoxical guarantor of Elsmere’s move to simultaneously defuse and expand the role of religiosity: ‘‘I have had a letter,’’ [Elsmere] said to Flaxman one afternoon, ‘‘from a Broad Church clergyman in the Midlands, who imagines me to be still militant in London, protesting against the ‘absurd and wasteful isolation’ of the New Brotherhood. He asks me why instead of leaving the Church I did not join the Church Reform Union,

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why I did not attempt to widen the Church from within, and why we in Elgood Street are not now in organic connection with the new Broad Church settlement in East London. I believe I have written him rather a sharp letter; I could not help it. It was borne in on me to tell him that it is all owing to him and his brethren that we are in the muddle we are in to-day.’’72 This particular ‘‘muddle’’ of political and religious identities, however, can be cleared up by attending to the militant repetition of an early Christian, indeed Pauline, tableau. Elsmere continues: Miracle is to our time what the law was to the early Christians. We must make up our minds about it one way or the other. And if we decide to throw it over as Paul threw over the law, then we must fight as he did. There is no help in subterfuge, no help in anything but a perfect sincerity. We must come out of it. The ground must be cleared; then may come the rebuilding. Religion itself, the peace of generations to come, is at stake. If we could wait indefinitely while the Church widened, well and good. But we have but the one life, the one chance of saying the word or playing the part assigned us.73 Elsmere’s abrupt proclamation of a Paulinist ‘‘clearing’’ is certainly more violent and Marcionite than that explored in this book’s section of Paulinist communal spaces in between times. Indeed, one of the issues underlying almost all of the recent readings of Paul concerns the question of how one is to construe, historically and theoretically, the new, change, or that which is not captured by current regimes. In this respect, the nondialectical ‘‘event’’ of Alain Badiou, the ‘‘time that remains’’ of Giorgio Agamben, and the radical apocalyptic passivity of Jacob Taubes are all analytic devices to think in, with, and against Paul an alternative way of construing such lines of flight than mere clearing and reconstruction or negation and overcoming. Such efforts are obviously about more than the historical Paul, and they have a great deal to do with modern obsessions about clearing and reconstruction, of which Paul has often served as an exemplar. As Jean-Michel Rey shows in Paul or the Ambiguities, the Paulinist role, imagined as clearing and new social construction, can be traced throughout a remarkably wide array of nineteenth-century writing. Moreover, the inflation, expansion, and proliferation of this Paulinist function into other spheres (e.g., political philosophy) guarantees that a great deal of modern social rhetoric remained, in this precise sense, Pauline, despite its occasional claims no longer to deal with ‘‘religion.’’74 In light of such considerations of the veiled theologico-political legacy within which many political theorists continue to operate, we should not miss the way this particular Paulinist image stands ready-made in Ward’s novel as a weapon to be deployed against the self-preserving, reformist promises of the ecclesiastical institution.

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Indeed, Elsmere’s gamble on revolutionary clearing over reformist alteration implies that this (Paulinist) critique and overcoming of the tradition is the only way to remain faithful to the tradition. In this particular ‘‘Paul effect,’’ it is not enough to say that the Paulinist may be for or against the institutions that, as it were, nourished him. Rather, the Paulinist function here may be read as a power or function of self-destruction as selfovercoming and even self-preservation. In Ward’s presentation of Elsmere, Paulinism ‘‘saves’’ the tradition by allowing it to loosen its entrance requirements, by joining forces with the outsider and even the enemy, saving its life (to borrow Jesus’ line from the Gospels) by losing it. This may constitute the perpetual threat of Paulinism to institutionalized Christianity and (as Rey points out) not that alone. (As Lupton points out in her essay, the Paul effect is a free-floating function: Who knows who or what may yet stand in for it or in what contexts?) Is this is not already to suggest that the frequency with which one encounters the image and function of Paulinism during this period must challenge our capacities to narrate the progress of the ‘‘secular’’ in any straightforward sense? In his magisterial study A Secular Age, for example, Charles Taylor describes Ward’s novel in light of Arnoldian efforts to find a paradoxical movement of ‘‘de-conversion and reconstruction’’ of Christianity.75 Indeed, one is tempted to say that Robert Elsmere’s Paul has been serially repeated from his time into our own, with no signs of slackening. To extrapolate on Taylor’s gloss in light of the final, Paulinist speech of Elsmere, Paul is the apostle of deconversion and reconstruction. Paulinism returns (again, serially) as the power of reconstruction after a ‘‘clearing’’ that is indistinguishable from Elsmere’s ‘‘deconversion.’’ I therefore find Taylor’s hierarchicalizing narration of religions ‘‘with’’ or ‘‘without’’ ‘‘staying power’’ to be more problematic than it might first appear. He implies that Elsmere’s (or Arnold’s) impersonal deity—his postorthodox Christianity as a kind of Spinozist immanence—does not have ‘‘staying power’’ in the sense that the premodern, orthodox, personal God does. Yet the Paulinist function of ‘‘deconversion and reconstruction,’’ the kerygma of a deconverting ‘‘clearing’’ that precedes all acts of communal project, suggests the possibility of a different reading of ‘‘religion’’ and the ‘‘staying power’’ of orthodoxy, at least if Paul is imagined to be part of this equation. Given the ‘‘Paul effect’’ explored in different ways within our section on communities of the neither/nor, why do we not say, rather, that the only thing with real ‘‘staying power’’ in the modern European story of religion and the secular is the serially repeated Paulinist act of finding the essence of religion in precisely the moment of rendering its presence, whether in a preconstituted, inherited community or as an idea, inoperable? This free-floating discursive operation of Lupton’s ‘‘Paul effect’’ or Kaufman’s exploration of apostasy can always spring to life, disrupting or forcing a split within the smooth functioning of Christianity, religion, or any received institution. Here the paradoxical function of Paulinism within the quest to situate ‘‘religion’’ and the ‘‘secular’’ seems of paramount importance. Taylor suggests that ‘‘dogmatic-metaphysical compromises

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between Christianity and materialism’’ (such as Elsmere’s, or Arnold’s) empty modern, heterodox Christianities of their ‘‘staying power.’’ But the entire story—indeed, Taylor’s ‘‘immanent frame’’ as a stable category—is transformed if one attends to the paradoxical thread within these historical trajectories, the thread whereby ‘‘Paul’’ serially returns to herald the triumph of spirit and truth at the very site of ‘clearing’ and ‘‘deconversion.’’ Simple—and serially common—as it is, the thread could wind around an entirely different concept and narration of the being of religion and the self-possession of the ‘‘immanent frame’’ of the secularist. If Paul is taken to be a religionist (one could always disavow him as a scandal and offense against religion), then it is not the ‘‘staying power’’ of religion that defines its ongoing efficacy or being but rather its remarkable capacity to empty itself, to lose itself, and—as if finding itself again in the revolutionary rupture—to affirm itself in and as such moments of the given tradition’s inoperability. When Slavoj Zˇizˇek declares in his essay here, along with Jean-Luc Nancy, that the only significant form of Christianity today is that which takes seriously its own negation, the ‘‘Paul effect’’ returns once again, as one of the primordial theologico-political scenes of a tradition in which we inevitably participate.76 In the end, the ‘‘immanent frame’’ of the secularist cannot fully domesticate this scene any more than could the imagined ‘‘staying power’’ of religion as a stable transcendent ‘‘beyond.’’ Here again, we stumble upon a peculiarly, paradoxically Paulinist commons that the essays here explore as a communal space of the neither/nor.

Paulinism and Cultural Critique To recognize such a scrambling of boundaries between the inside and outside of religion in pivotal moments constituting ‘‘the secular age’’ can help us come to grips with what Gil Anidjar has shown to be the often elided or hidden agonistic dimensions of the history of debates about religion and secular society.77 Anidjar’s work has often highlighted the political need to remain aware of the specific forms and directions of the fluid contests designated or enacted by the distinction between religion and the secular. Such a need becomes all the more pressing if we conclude that ‘‘modernity’’ or the ‘‘West’’ should be read as a self-organizing, expanding (or ‘universalizing’) system that operates free of the constraints generally taken to inhere in a substantial distinction between religion and the secular.78 Perhaps the modern Paul names a structural liability of culture to the act of ‘‘clearing,’’ a constitutive openness to events of deconversion and reconstruction, that operates beyond the controls or maintenance of identity imagined under the terms ‘‘religion’’ or the ‘‘secular.’’ In Ward’s novel, for example, the Paulinist operation is neither religious nor secular, if we imagine these terms to designate a locational, conceptual, or political terra firma, or to constitute a limit to ‘‘the West’’ (or ‘‘modernity’’).

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To be sure, the ever-expanding discourse of religion and the secular continues to develop hand in hand with Western notions of governance, concepts of human rights, and market interests. As Edward Said argued admirably for so long, one may even read the academic and social distinction between religion and the secular as a primary motor of the self-expansion of the modern, rational West.79 Jacques Derrida repeats the same general observation about modern intellectual and political history more succinctly, formally, and theoretically than Said in his essay ‘‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.’’80 Like Said, Derrida describes the modern West as a system that organizes and expands itself precisely by way of the distinction between the (excessive or particular) religious and the (general, universal, or global) secular. In other words, the very naming of people, places, ideas, or events as religious or secular has been one of the fundamental tactics of a singular modern form of systemic self-expansion that Derrida calls ‘‘globalatinization.’’ To claim that the system works by way of the production and tactical exportation of this distinction between religion and the secular is not to claim that these terms in any way control or limit the self-organizing modern system of the West, as if from the outside. Rather, these distinctions are internal to the system, which it produces and exports precisely in order to expand and reorganize itself along new lines. Exploring the ways that an understanding of religion informs the political struggle to define the limits of Europe, Gil Anidjar (‘‘Freud’s Jesus [Paul’s War]’’) includes in his theologico-political genealogy (that is, a genealogy that is undecidably political or theological) a brief and illuminating engagement with Paul. Anidjar follows Taubes’s lead in finding in Paul’s letter to the Romans an extended reflection on the construction of theological enemies. Anidjar is particularly interested in how, within this letter (which directs one to love one’s enemies), there emerges a radical in-difference in the distinction between friend and enemy, constituting a theologico-political zone of indistinction. Through Paul there appears a profound theologico-political ambivalence about the friend/enemy, which is capable of irrupting into passionate attachments and passionate denunciations or violent exclusions. Anidjar further argues that ‘‘a reflection on submission and on absolute subjection—a constellation that includes . . . subjectivity and subjection, passivity and submission—constitutes an essential, if insufficiently acknowledged moment in the renewed reception of Paul.’’ If the friend/enemy distinction collapses, then, as Michel Foucault asked, ‘‘Is it useless to revolt?’’ In keeping with the question of negativity and resentment raised earlier, Anto´nia Szabari (‘‘Scandal/Resentment: the Anti-Aesthetics of the Banlieue’’) considers Pauline scandal against the backdrop of riots in the Parisian suburbs and their recent interpretations. How does one read such irruptions of protest, and what is the significance of declaring them indications of groundless or chaotic resentment? Between senselessness and simple political calculation, Szabari explores the Paulinist topos of ‘‘scandal’’ in relation to questions of political agency and expression.

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In another striking statement of the ongoing politics of the articulation of Paul ‘‘between Jerusalem and Athens,’’ Stathis Gourgouris’s essay (‘‘Paul’s Greek’’) considers the controversial statements of Pope Benedict XVI about Islam, religious violence, and the need to counteract the radical ‘‘dehellenization of Christianity.’’ Beginning with Pope Benedict’s lecture ‘‘Faith, Reason, and the University,’’ Gourgouris makes clear some of the political stakes of Benedict’s drawing up of distinct genealogical identities. Is there space outside reason, a gap or inoperative short-circuiting of logos, and, if so, with what ethnic or religious identities will such a possibility be identified, appropriated, or disavowed? Having articulated the stakes, Gourgouris’s essay moves into an engagement with both Paul and the representation in Acts of Paul speaking to Hellenic philosophers on the Areopagus in Athens. For Gourgouris, the critical issue in this image of Paul and Hellenic culture may be the fact that Paul points to the Athenian commemorations of an ‘‘unknown God’’ in order to colonize this space of the other for his own message of the divine. Paul claims that he proclaims the very deity commemorated in the Athenians’ tribute to the unknown. Paul thus exploits and appropriates the very openness to the other (and the stranger) that made possible the apostle’s own audience with the Hellenic sages. The political result of such an appropriation of alterity, Gourgouris suggests, is an absolutist scenario in which radical heteronomy takes over where the open discussions— and, consequently, autonomous politics—of the Hellenic sages leave off: he points out that Paul, and by proxy, the ekkle¯sia, become ‘‘slaves of Christ.’’ Gourgouris’s engagement may be read as urging a fidelity to the Nietzschean reading of Paulinism as a Platonism of the masses that offers slavery to all, against the recent trend among philosophers to find in Paul precisely what Nietzsche was looking for in his ruminations on Zarathustra or his other figures of poetic activism that survive the demise of classical metaphysics. In line with Nietzsche’s critique, Gourgouris’a Paul incarnates a life-denying delusion inasmuch as the apostle asks adherents to trust in an ultimately economic exchange, the freedom of life in the flesh for the assurance of an eternal life in another world, a barter Gourgouris describes as a ‘‘thanatopolitical theology.’’ As Gourgouris points out, the decision for or against Paul, for or against Nietzsche, is ultimately a decision about the question of fiduciary guarantee as it lurks behind the value-inverting proclamations of Paul. Far from a collapse of the ultimate fulcrum or guarantee of a cosmic cost-benefit analysis (as in the readings of Zˇizˇek or Breton), Gourgouris’s Paul represents the ultimate deification of calculation without alterity and excess: ‘‘The death of God in Christianity is thus marked by an uncompromising instrumentality. God dies so that he may be resurrected, as simple as that. The instrumental outcome is all that matters.’’ Gourgouris’s challenge to recent interpretations of Paul, paired with Deleuze’s classic essay ‘‘Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence, and Saint John of Patmos,’’ is crucial to the

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ongoing political and intellectual legacy of Paulinism. Deleuze underwrites D. H. Lawrence’s repetition of a long tradition of distinguishing ‘‘two types . . . two regions of the soul, two completely different ensembles,’’ differentiated by how one frames time in visions of an organized, prescripted, and therefore controllable telos of life. As Deleuze writes, in keeping with both Nietzsche and Lawrence: ‘‘Apocalyptic vision replaces the prophetic word, programming replaces project and action, an entire theatre of phantasms supplants both the action of the prophets and the passion of Christ.’’ Deleuze’s story about distinctions in the forms of religion in the early Jesus movement doubles as a critique of ‘‘the modern’’ and its ‘‘last men,’’ for whom power through control attains a kind of apotheosis. Indeed, in both the ancient and the modern ‘‘type’’ of this character, Deleuze finds the same horrific revelation, which occurs ‘‘when judgment—the abominable faculty—becomes the master faculty of the soul.’’ Deleuze concludes his reflection on Nietzsche, Lawrence, and Paul by evoking a question that drove much of his work: How are we to think physis without submitting its flows, links, and connections to the false and bloodless world of a ‘‘system of judgment’’? How, in short, can we remain open to the openness of worldhood, in which there is always more than the ‘‘false connection’’ that ‘‘mints subjects and objects’’ like so many prefabricated trinkets? Of course, earlier receptions of Paulinism stood at similar crossroads between the creatively disruptive ‘‘Paul effects’’ conjured by some and the radically pacifying populist metaphysics diagnosed in Nietzsche’s (or Lawrence’s or Deleuze’s) critique of modern Christianity. At least one such story is worth repeating here, as it attempted to find in Paulinism an indication of the kind of cosmic, material, and political bodies hoped for by Deleuze.

A Note on Nietzsche, Who Could Have Become Saint Paul A moment in the reception history of Paulinism that doubled as a fierce diagnosis and critique of modernity’s propensity to develop a metaphysical Calculation of all calculations can highlight the crucial political agonistics involved in this modern contest over the nature of Paulinism. In 1903, Albert Schweitzer, a young professor at a Christian seminary, wrote a letter to his girlfriend, Helene Bresslau. At that point, Schweitzer was already emerging as an important biblical scholar, and he was shortly to enact what he imagined to be a critical judgment of European culture by turning from the European academy to move to Lambare´ne´, Africa, as a physician and humanitarian. That career change and move was fueled by Schweitzer’s interpretation of a nineteenth-century tradition of biblical scholarship, theology, and philosophy that he summarized as both ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘liberal.’’ A central part of Schweitzer’s multi-faceted critique of these traditions was a reading of Paulinism as an ambiguously passivist/activist ‘‘mysticism of the everyday,’’ naming the very medicine modernity must take to cure itself of its obsessive desire to reduce Paulinism (and, indeed, all reality) to some mode of cosmic economic exchange.

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Schweitzer’s early private confession to a girlfriend shows that he imagined his Paulinist mysticism of the everyday to be a variety of Nietzscheanism. He writes: In Nietzsche was something of [Paul’s] spirit of Christ; to say this is a sacrilege. It is, however, true; in the end, only the blasphemous is true. But he [Nietzsche] lacked action; for this reason, his ‘‘pride’’ paced inside a cage like a captured lion; instead of coming out of his cave to attack his prey, he tore himself to pieces in the end. But he was noble, this man. Had he lived twenty centuries earlier, he could have become Saint Paul. Being a culturally engaged New Testament scholar, Schweitzer was aware of the cultural politics implied in the proclamation of an end of the metaphysical, theological, and political need for (or justification of) a sacrificial victim, and he was adamantly opposed to readings of early Christian figures that imagined them to crystallize some supersessionist advance over Judaism. In his attack on the ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘liberal’’ tradition of historical Jesus research, Schweitzer accused this tradition depicting Jesus as a ‘‘late Jewish’’ apocalyptic prophet, imagined as all the more sublime for having been mistaken in his calculations of the apocalyptic end. His reconstruction was immediately disavowed and even pathologized as a Jesus with a ‘‘degenerate physiology.’’81 No matter how one reacts to efforts like Schweitzer’s to resist the Nietzschean reading of the Paulinist ‘‘dysangelion’’ (what Nietzsche understood to be the ‘‘world-historical irony’’ in Paul’s alleged transformation of senseless tragedy into Christian-Platonic triumphalism), interpretive moments like Schweitzer’s remain close to some of the political dramas staged by ongoing engagements with the Pauline legacy.82 Shmuel Trigano makes this clear in his essay (‘‘The ‘Jewish Question’ in the Return to Paul: Empire Politics’’), where he echoes discussions concerning the problems of liberalism as a universal category. Trigano pursues two related ideas. First, he argues, all talk of Paulinist universalism brings with it the necessity to produce, to name, and to disavow as a ‘‘dead letter’’ some version of communitarian particular to non-Paulinist Judaism (though potentially transferable). Thus Trigano reverses the usual story, whereby there existed a Jewish ‘‘particularity’’ that Paul felt compelled to go ‘‘beyond’’ for the sake of a more universal discourse. Rather, the scope of Paulinist universalism, Trigano claims, can appear only by way of the exclusion of a (thereby) discredited obstruction, an exception to the universal’s general field of vision or some form of excessive particularity this vision sets up in order to crush, to sacrifice it. As Trigano writes: ‘‘Whether in its foundation (based on the exclusion of one for the advent of ‘all’) or in its accomplishment (the ‘recall of the Jews’), Pauline universalism is sacrificial in nature.’’ Trigano relates his understanding of sacrificial universalism to questions of globalization, recent constructions of Islam as a particularist obstruction to universal humanitarianism, and ongoing critiques of the ‘‘State of Israel and Jewish

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communities’’ alike: ‘‘We find in this respect the way in which Paul constructs transcendence (‘the spirit’) by assigning another (the Jews) to immanence.’’ In ‘‘The Killing Letter and the Discourse of Spirit: Reading Paul Writing,’’ Ian Balfour also explores the question of the dead, indeed deadening, ‘‘letter,’’ this time in aesthetic terms and in relation to the painting of Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro explorations of the difference between Saul and Paul, the singular moment of (Acts’ account of) conversion, constitute an important landmark in efforts to figure a thinking of ‘‘passage,’’ imagined as one ‘‘from Judaism to Christianity, from letter to spirit, from outside to inside.’’ As Balfour makes clear, efforts to figure such disparate passages were never simply about a re-presentation of an early Christian text or early Christian personality. The quest to discover an aisthe¯sis of passage may be read rather as an effort to conjure, for later times, a sense of the difference between literality and the spiritually figurative, latter-day apparatuses of art, literature, and philosophy, ready-made to generate (to repeat Lupton once more) so many untimely appearances of the ‘‘Paul effect.’’ The effort to construct a measure of the distinction between letter and spirit, therefore, is to name a vertiginous, elusive history constituted not only by constantly shifting aesthetic standards or concepts but also by changing technologies of data storage and communication, without which a difference between ‘‘letter’’ and ‘‘spirit’’ would have had no purchase. Balfour therefore presents us with a kind of media-historical analysis of Paul’s own (textual) disavowal of the letter in 2 Corinthians 3—comparable to Plato’s textual rendition of Socrates’ rejection of writing in the Phaedrus. Balfour delineates, therefore, a ‘‘killing letter’’ as an irrecoverable remainder or obstruction within the selffeeding circuits of spirit, a vexation and unsacrificeable loss that spurs—like a thorn in the side—art, religion, and politics. Itzhak Benyamini suspects a similarly insuperable problem in the effort to move ‘‘beyond’’ heteronomous law to an ethic of (narcissistic) love, articulating this Paulinist problem in relation to the writings of Jacques Lacan in an essay entitled ‘‘ ‘Love Thy Neighbor,’ the Son, and the Son’s Community: Reading Paul’s Epistles in View of Freud and Lacan.’’ In overcoming what, for his Gentile converts, would be heteronomously foreign ethnic practices (circumcision, maintaining kosher food observances), Paul sets in place a ‘‘law of Christ’’ (cf. Gal. 6:2) that is essentially narcissistic, a mirror image in ‘‘the Son’’ that is only of themselves. In this respect, Benyamini finds in Lacan’s work resources with which to intensify and crystallize what might otherwise be read as Paul’s intra-Jewish polemic (indeed, a Pauline polemic generally against other Jewish Christians about the relationship between Gentile converts and the law). Benyamini crystallizes and intensifies this polemic into a stark opposition between Judaism’s religion of the Father and Christianity’s religion of the Son. Following Freud’s distinction between ‘‘Christianity and Judaism’’ through the topos of narcissism, Benyamini pursues the thought of ego and its mirror through a wide array of Pauline texts. That accomplished, Benyamini reads Paul in light of striking articulations of the paradoxical interrelations of law, agency, and

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alterity that he finds in Lacan, but also in Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Hermann Cohen. To repeat the gesture of Balfour’s ‘‘killing letter’’ essay, the ‘‘sting of death’’ Paul associates at times with ‘‘law’’ may be a more peculiar necessity than we sometimes assume. Some of the basic coordinates of Kenneth Reinhard’s ‘‘Paul and the Political Theology of the Neighbor’’ are similar to those we find in Benyamini’s reading. Reinhard expands on the interest of Jacob Taubes in Paul’s failure at Romans 13 to fill out the ‘‘dual’’ fulfillment of law’s demand (as love of God and love of neighbor), the apostle mentioning only love of neighbor. Taubes finds in that Pauline text a nicely Freudian distinction between the theopolitical regime of the father over against that of the sons. Paul’s omission is, in other words, interpreted as polemical, an intentional problematizing of how a debt was imagined previously. As Reinhard puts it: ‘‘we can say that there is no way to redemption [in this view] except through love of the neighbor, for if Jesus is the incarnation of the father, he is also, and more immediately for Paul, the embodiment of the neighbour.’’ This type of maneuver, Reinhard argues, opens up an alternative to secularist versions of various biblical injunctions to love, inasmuch as it would be neither secular nor religious (the two being opposing modes that are nevertheless alike in naturalizing their demands). To inhabit this alternative space as neither religious nor secular, however, makes possible a more radical bracketing, a more profound inoperability, of their power. As the post-secular Paulinist (the farthest thing from a simple ‘‘return to religion’’) would have it: one should inhabit these oppositions ho¯s me, ‘‘as if they were not.’’ This book begins by invoking the plurality and open-endedness of the significance and function of both the name Paul and the question of philosophy. It is fitting, therefore, that our encounters with Paul and the philosophers close with a restatement and refashioning of the massive genealogical scramble of the archives of philosophy and religion that has characterized the work of Hent de Vries. De Vries’s essay, ‘‘Inverse Versus Dialectical Theology: The Two Faces of Negativity and the Miracle of Faith,’’ refashions and rewires his own project, even as it wrings from Paul new insights about the radically transformative event, negativity, antinomianism, and the eclipse of theoretical distinctions between Paulinist religiosity and secular critical theory.

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The Address of Paul on the Areopagus Hans Conzelmann

I The speech that Luke attributes to the apostle Paul during the latter’s stay in Athens (Acts 17:16 ff.) is the most momentous Christian document from the beginnings of the extraordinary confrontation between Christianity and philosophy that was destined to continue through the following centuries and to determine the entire history of the Occident. Even before the entry of Christianity into a world of antiquity, religion was involved in a far-reaching process of transformation. Philosophy exerted its own influence and also showed a new willingness to accept religious impulses (Posidonius). Monotheistic tendencies became more and more obvious (De mundo, Seneca, Epictetus). In the long run, however, another process proved to be more important: the influx of oriental cults. They not only brought foreign ideas, the dualistic belief in a heavenly world of light and salvation where the nonworldly deity resides, but they also contributed new forms of worship and a new structure of religious community. Congregations of a new kind arose, ignoring ethnic, social, and sexual differences and centering in the celebration of a mystery in a room set aside for cultic worship. It is astonishing that Luke’s historical work takes no notice of these new elements, even though the young Christian movement had long been involved in intense discussions with them (we note traces of them already in the letters of Paul). Twice Luke refers to the Greek gods: in the interior of Asia Minor, Paul and Barnabas are identified with Hermes and Zeus (Acts 14:11 ff.), and in Ephesus the struggle with the devotees of Artemis takes place (Acts 19:23 ff.). Significantly, however, we learn nothing specific about this goddess, who differs so markedly from her classical form. In other words, Luke draws a classicistic picture of Greek culture, a picture that in his time was approximated only in Athens, the museum of classical culture for the Hellenistic world. He thus reduces the discussion to two points, to polytheistic ideas as such

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(Acts 14) and to the official form of divine worship through images (Acts 17), simply omitting philosophy and popular piety. A similar curtailment made for the sake of polemics can be observed in the diatribes of popular philosophy. To develop his point, Luke uses the common literary means of ancient historiography, the inserted speech. Luke is the first Christian author who consciously tries to conform to the standards of Hellenistic literature (see the proemium of his Gospel, Luke 1:1–4). This is symptomatic: the first Christian generation had been waiting for the approaching end of the world. Now, however, the church is compelled to come to terms with a prolonged existence in this world. Inasmuch as Luke draws upon the form of secular historiography, we must interpret the Areopagus speech first of all as a literary speech of Luke, not a real sermon by Paul. We take this procedure for granted in our interpretation of the speeches of Thucydides, for example. It is no less relevant for the interpretation of Acts 17. Luke makes Paul say what he considers appropriate to the situation. The question whether he had reliable reports about what Paul had actually said is only a secondary one. In my own opinion, the speech is the free creation of the author, for it does not show the specific thoughts and ideas of Paul. Besides, the framework, clearly Luke’s own, purposely corresponds to the speech. Judging from a literary standpoint, this speech is not an extract from a missionary address, but a purely literary creation.

II It is of paradigmatic significance within the framework of Luke’s historical work that he places this speech exactly in Athens, the center of Greek intellectual life and piety (Acts 17:16, 18, 21–23). Since both the setting and the speech are the author’s work, the details related are of no value for the reconstruction of the individual historical events.1 The value of the description rests not in the historical worth of its details as sources of information about Paul’s conduct, but in the fact that it documents for us how a Christian around a.d. 100 reacts to the pagan milieu and meets it from the position of his faith. If one does not begin with the question of what happened during Paul’s visit but asks what results Luke draws from it, then the description of the scene, not entirely homogeneous at first glance (v. 17 seems to disrupt it), becomes logically consistent. It follows a well-known pattern: (1) arrival in a city, (2) first missionary attempt in the synagogue, (3) turning to the Gentiles. The topic of the scenery and the topic of the ensuing address have been adjusted to each other in such a way as to affect a contrast: kateido¯los (‘‘full of idols,’’ v. 16) is picked up in deisidaimo¯n (‘‘religious,’’ v. 22). In verse 16 the pneuma (‘‘spirit’’) of Paul is provoked; but in verse 22 the tone is friendly. That is not to be interpreted psychologically as a change of mood. In verse 22 we simply have the stylistically proper device of captatio benevolentiae (‘‘currying the audience’s favor’’). The typical motif of a periegesis, namely, sightseeing (v. 16), is picked up in verse 23. Verse 17 at first

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glance looks like an interpolation but actually has a firm position in the sketched pattern (starting missionary work in the synagogue).2 In the other places, the transition from the Jews to the Gentiles happens as a consequence of a clash. Here we find nothing like it, which must mean that Luke had no concrete reports but used his pattern somewhat mechanically. The Athenian atmosphere is suggested by describing some of the debaters as philosophers, others as typical, curious Athenians (vv. 18, 21).3 Of the four Athenian schools, Luke mentions the two more widely known ones: Stoics and Epicureans. Here, too, he does not necessarily have any concrete reports. He takes no account whatsoever of the particular teachings of either. The memory of Socrates is, of course, evoked by the location of the discussion, the Agora (and with the catchword dialegesthai, ‘‘carry on a dialogue’’). The conjecture of the listeners that Paul must be xeno¯n daimonio¯n katangeleus (‘‘a preacher of foreign divinities’’) contains a significant foreshadowing of the following address. Later Paul will show that he is not preaching a foreign god. Again one is reminded of the story of Socrates.4 However, this does not mean, as some commentators claim, that the Areopagus, to which Paul is led, is the court, rather than the well-known historical location, Mars’s Hill; that epilambanesthai (‘‘to take hold of’’) in verse 19 means to arrest, and that the events starting with verse 19 are to be interpreted as a court trial rather than as a philosophical discussion. The literary style of Luke rules that out: wherever he reports a trial he is absolutely unambiguous. Here, however, he barely hints at associations in order to create a stage setting, an atmosphere for the dispute. The question, therefore, is not whether Mars’s Hill was a location suitable for the discussion. Luke chooses the place not from his own geographical knowledge but because of its historical reputation. The somewhat playful shift from xenos (‘‘foreign’’) to kainos (‘‘new’’), and from xenos to xenizein (‘‘to be strange’’) is also done for the sake of atmosphere. It prepares the final scene (vv. 32 ff.) and indicates in advance the impression that the content of Christian teaching is to make upon the Greeks. The entire address presses toward the focal point of its theme, formulated as: Jesus and Anastasis.5

III The speech starts with the captatio benevolentiae (v. 22). How this tactful beginning is to be understood has already been indicated in verse 16. Of course, deisidaimo¯n here does not mean ‘‘superstitious’’ (Theophrastus’s character of deisidaimonia), but rather ‘‘devout.’’ The Christian reader of course hears the irony in it. Verse 23 introduces an inner connection between the address and the setting, a firm stylistic trademark of Lucan speeches. Not historical memory but a literary device takes the inscription on an Athenian altar, ‘‘to unknown gods,’’ well known to travelers through travel guides, changes it into

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the singular, and then uses this as a point of departure for Christian ideas.6 Surely Paul cannot have spoken this way, nor can the Christian missionary begin his preaching in this way everywhere. It can only be the work of an author developing his paradigmatic discussion. It is significant that Luke, in spite of his philosophical audience, does not start out from the monotheistic elements of contemporary philosophy (the Stoics), but from a subject of popular religion. And the transition from this to his own concern is not made by rational argumentation, but by an abrupt touto ego¯ katangello¯ humin (‘‘this I proclaim to you’’). The impression of abruptness becomes even stronger when one considers how the word family of angellein (‘‘to announce or carry a message’’) was used in early Christianity. At the beginning the Christians did not emerge as a new religious community within Judaism. They continued to consider themselves Jews. They did not teach a new idea about God but, within the frame of the old religion, proclaimed a new message: what Israel’s God of old has done in these days. He has sent the promised Messiah, Jesus, whom he raised after his death. This, this only, is the new topic that is proclaimed, the euangelion. The situation changes when polytheists are being addressed: now the doctrine of God, which can be assumed to be known among Jews, must become the explicit content of instruction. The confession that Jesus is the Messiah is enlarged by the further article of faith: there is one God. But, says the author, this one God is not new or foreign even to the Greeks; he has always manifested himself and was close to them, but they did not know him. With Luke, this point of contact does not imply a degree of compromise between the old and the new religion (such as the Stoics were prepared to make and indeed did make). On the contrary, it means that monotheistic thinking has carried through resolutely. A new God would only be another relative one, an idea with reference to the old gods. These, however, are completely ignored; they are not even mentioned polemically. By tacit implication the claim is made: you, too, had in truth always but one God, the only real one. After these preliminaries the main body of the address unfolds. The first part consists of verses 24 to 26. Deliberately the nature of this God is defined not by Greek (ontological) categories but by a biblical quotation.7 To be sure, the author takes advantage of a convergence between the Bible and Hellenism: poiein (‘‘to make’’) can be used by both Jew and Greek about God’s creative work. De mundo speaks of Heaven and Earth, whereas, by contrast, kosmos (v. 24) is not a biblical expression (except when used critically in speaking of the world or of this world; however, Hellenistic Judaism—for instance, Philo—had already adopted the term long ago). This confronts us with one of the most difficult problems of the address: How did the Greek ideas that echo through it reach the author? Directly from

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popular philosophy (diatribe), or circuitously through Hellenistic Judaism with its struggle against polytheism and idolatry? After the biblical coloring of verses 24–25, Stoic color dominates verses 26–28. But the same motifs without exception can be found within Hellenistic Judaism (including the quotation of Aratus in v. 28).8 The train of thought is this: The assertion that God is the creator is immediately given a critical turn: he needs nothing. That is a philosophical truism which was to spread widely through both Judaism and Christianity.9 He is not the receiver but the giver, a contrasting statement that is also found elsewhere.10 The specific deduction made from this is fundamental criticism of the building of temples, a criticism known among Stoics since Zeno (see Seneca).11 However, at this point there is a clear difference: Judaism uses the idea that God needs nothing precisely in order to justify the erection of the Jewish temple.12 Verse 26 poses the most difficult problem of detailed interpretation. Two problems intersect. First, how is the following to be understood? Does epoie¯sen . . . katoikein mean ‘‘He caused to live’’13 or ‘‘He made from one [Adam] every nation of men’’? To prove the former, Max Pohlenz points to the syntactical construction: if poiein were to mean ‘‘make,’’ ‘‘create,’’ two infinitives of purpose would stand asyndetically side by side (katoikein and ze¯tein, ‘‘to dwell’’ and ‘‘to seek’’). The result would be the nonsensical statement ‘‘God has created men to live and to seek,’’ when in reality he created them to seek, and for that reason made them to dwell. One must agree with Pohlenz that the construction is harsh if poiein is taken to mean ‘‘create.’’ And yet that is what it must mean, on account of verse 24 and the allusion to Adam (ex henos). Second, a further controversy centers around the meaning of kairoi (‘‘periods’’) and horthesiai (‘‘boundaries’’). Pohlenz takes kairoi to be the historical epochs into which Jewish historiography divides the course of world history (Daniel). Correspondingly, horthesiai means the boundaries of the habitations of the various peoples. Ex henos—pan ethnos anthro¯po¯n (‘‘from one—every nation of men’’) points to the differentiation of nations within originally undivided mankind. (Posidonius systematically builds upon this idea.) The author, Pohlenz thinks, had in mind the familiar proof of the existence of God e consensu gentium, in which this differentiation plays a role. Pohlenz can further point to the related verse Acts 14:16 (where, in place of pan ethnos anthro¯po¯n, ‘‘every nation of men,’’ we read panta ta ethne¯, ‘‘all the nations’’). But in the end the text itself revolts against such an interpretation: as if God had implanted the searching in all peoples, in spite of their ethnic differentiation. But the text does not say that. The expression pan ethnos anthro¯po¯n means unity, not diversity. (The author therefore emphatically says ex henos, alluding to the biblical story of creation.) Faced with this difficulty, Martin Dibelius suggests a different interpretation,14 calling it a philosophical one over against the historical one of Pohlenz. According to Dibelius, periods and boundaries of peoples are no proof of the existence of God. But the periods

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and boundaries of nature, its order and rhythm, can well be considered such. Kairoi, then, are the seasons. Indeed, seasons are usually ho¯rai, though Philo makes no clear distinction between the two words.15 Although Pohlenz appeals to Acts 14:16, the very next verse (14:17) supports Dibelius. Thus linguistically, the understanding of kairoi as seasons is a possibility. The ‘‘philosophical’’ interpretation runs into greater difficulties, however, with the concept of boundaries. Dibelius understands them to be the boundaries of the inhabitable surface of the earth and has the author allude to the doctrine of the five zones, only two of which are inhabitable. But here Pohlenz has, in my opinion, a decisive argument: it would indeed be a strange proof of God’s universal care that he made three-fifths of the earth uninhabitable. Besides, such an interpretation contradicts the text itself, which states: epi pantos proso¯pou te¯s ge¯s (‘‘on all the face of the earth’’) and pan ethnos didous ta panta (‘‘he gives to all men . . . everything’’). A new proposal comes from W. Eltester, in two articles.16 Substantially he agrees with the philosophy of nature interpretation, but he modifies the concept of boundaries in such a way as to escape the difficulties Dibelius faced: in Jewish hymns that praise the creation, God is extolled for having shielded the habitation of men, the firm land, against the sea. This is the boundary that is meant. But does this sharp alternative between natural and historical boundaries not perhaps introduce a problem of which the author was quite unaware? Eltester’s interpretation has met with wide approval. But the closest contemporary documents (from the tradition of the Poseidonian view of history and from Hellenistic Judaism) do not bear it out. And the new texts from the Dead Sea show that in contemporary Judaism one could naı¨vely place historical and natural periods and boundaries side by side.17 Moreover, the author’s concern is obviously not at all a positive development of a proof for the existence of God. His thesis is that men’s destiny is to seek God; about their finding him he speaks somewhat skeptically, in18:27: ei ara ge (‘‘in the hope that’’), in an optative (rare in the New Testament). And this reservation concerning what men are able to achieve is not canceled by the positive statement ‘‘Yet he is not far from each one of us,’’ though it is brought to a certain dialectical suspension. That brings us to the second part of the address. Dio Chrysostom has a surprising parallel to kai ge ou makran (‘‘yet not far’’);19 R. Reitzenstein even reckons they have a common source. For this, however, the similarity is not great enough, especially since the term ou makran also occurs elsewhere in a similar context . Still, the proximity to Greek popular philosophy is undeniable.20 It becomes even closer in verse 28, where we find statements that no longer have any parallels in the New Testament. To be sure, the triad zo¯men–kinoumetha–esmen (‘‘live–move–are’’) is not elsewhere documented word for word; it may be the author’s own formulation. But the material has its origin in the Weltanschauung of philosophy.21 We no longer hear of the proximity of God, but of the God-relatedness of man (again, cf. Dio Chrysostom), documented by a quotation—not from the Bible, which contains nothing like it, but from the Phainomena, by the Stoic Aratus.22 46

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The problem of this passage is not simply that it is reminiscent of various philosophical ideas, but the fact that the author evidently took over an entire philosophical complex of ideas which in itself is incompatible with the biblical idea of creation. But to what extent was the author aware of the original pantheistic sense of these words, and to what extent did he simply read into them his own biblically founded monotheism? This question becomes important when we realize how the Jewish author Aristobulus long ago made use of the same Aratus quotation for the sake of belief in the biblical story of creation.23 But let us quickly follow the address to its conclusion. Verse 29 again draws a practical conclusion, this time against images, as in verses 24–25 against temples. There, Jewish parallels were lacking, understandably, since the Jews themselves had a temple, at least until a.d. 70; now, understandably, in arguing against images, the parallels abound, for the rejection of idols is a fundamental commandment of Jewish religion (whence it was taken over by Christianity, where it repeatedly led to serious trouble). But is this argument logical? We are related to God and for that reason must make no images of the Divine. Why not? Would not the opposite conclusion be at least as natural? Apparently we have two conflicting ideas: (1) the genuinely Jewish one that the Creator must not be portrayed by created things; (2) the Greek philosophical critique of images, according to which living beings can be represented only by living beings. We are very close to an idea in which both reflections might be combined: man himself is the image of God. However, such a thought is not articulated. And finally, in the third part of the address, verses 30–31, we find a genuinely Christian statement. Its content unfolds with the same brevity as before: Jesus and the resurrection, judgment on the individual, and the resultant warning—the need for repentance. The philosophical elements are gone. The world is regarded no longer with respect to its being, but to its end. The course of world history is now divided into two periods: before and after the raising of Jesus. Man is regarded solely from the viewpoint of eternal salvation, with its corollary of possible eternal damnation. And this salvation hinges upon the proclamation of this fact, the resurrection of Jesus. There is nothing here of the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul (the address, in agreement with the entire New Testament, knows no concept of the soul in the Greek sense); rather, the dominant idea is the resurrection of the dead and the salvation of the righteous at the time of the final judgment, over which this very Risen One will preside. At verses 32–33, the scene comes to an abrupt end with the point that such teachings must sound strange to Greek ears.

IV We have observed both a Jewish and a Greek component. We have considered the possibility that the philosophical elements could have been mediated through Judaism and thereby already undergone a modification in the direction of the biblical conception of 47

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God, at least in the understanding of the author. We have further noticed the specifically Christian conclusion. How are these elements related? The philosophical element dominates the center of the composition, which at first glance also seems to be its content-core: after the nature of God has been established (in biblical terms), the crucial point remains the relation of man to God and his religious potentialities. That is the theme of the central part. It is therefore amazing that Eduard Norden in his Agnostos Theos—the pioneer work of modern investigation of this address—formulates the matter in terms of a Jewish-Christian principal motif and a Stoic accompanying motif. Should it not be turned around? Dibelius argued for doing so. Eduard Norden’s work has made it clear that the problem cannot be solved by considering the various motifs in isolation. The structure of the address as a whole must be regarded. Norden puts it into the category of a widespread type of religious propaganda literature found in both Jewish and pagan writings. Christianity took it over and used it, not only in the book of Acts.24 Norden proposes a further step: the address on the Areopagus is a literary imitation of a speech by Apollonius of Tyana; originating in the second century a.d., it was interpolated into the book of Acts. This hypothesis collapses because it fails to see that the address clearly shows Lucan characteristics and cannot be separated from the typically Lucan scenery. But, positively, Norden has proved its relation not only to non-Christian motifs but to entire complexes of motifs. He has not explained, however, the thoroughgoing reduction in which they are presented here. The typical catchwords of analogous Jewish missionary literature are missing, both the negative ones—the emphasis upon agnoia as guilt and upon the pagan gods as ‘‘nothing,’’ mataioi, ‘‘dead’’—and the positive ones, the central formula heis theos (‘‘one God’’), the predicates that God is the ‘‘true,’’ the ‘‘living’’ God. Of course, one can point out that the intent of the speech was to find a point of contact with Greek thinking, hence the polemic is restrained. But that is not yet the whole explanation. The restraint has a chiefly theological background. Abstract Jewish monotheism is modified by the introduction of the new entity, ‘‘Jesus,’’ in the definition of man’s relation to God. From this point of view, a new kind of discussion becomes systematically possible. Comparison with other missionary literature still leaves unexplained the specific tripartite structure: (1) God and world (creation and preservation); (2) God and man (proximity); (3) God and the individual (resurrection and judgment). To be sure, W. Nauck has pointed out an analogous three-way division within Jewish literature, the scheme of creatio–conservatio–salvatio.25 Nowhere, however, do we have a passage where this pattern provides the structure. Also, the analogy breaks down at the decisive point, where the middle part deals with a twofold anthropological aspect: the man-God relationship first being determined from above, as proximity, then correspondingly from below, as being ‘‘within God,’’ as kinship. This is a real innovation: to place this anthropological topic in the center, parenthetically between two other topics. The innovation, however, does not consist in the mere fact that the anthropological side of

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man’s relationship to God is treated as a subject in itself. The Stoics did that much more explicitly, through detailed cosmological and psychological analyses. And, mutatis mutandis, so did the Jews, both Philo and Aristobulus. We have only a few fragments of Aristobulus’s writings; these, however, are more closely related to the address on the Areopagus than any other Jewish text. The philosophers, too, worked out a strict pattern of precisely this two-way view from above and from below, apparently in the tradition of Posidonius. The most important documents for it are the second book of Cicero’s De natura deorum, the ‘‘Somnium Scipionis’’ in his De republica, and the anonymous work De mundo. In this pattern, a certain ontological understanding has found classical expression. It presupposes that the world is accessible to the one who seeks access. (A glance at Plato shows how little this presupposition was taken for granted even in Greek philosophy.) Starting from this presupposition, it makes no difference whether one begins from above, with Zeus, with the whole cosmos, or from below, with man, who understands it. All that matters is that both ways of viewing are oriented to each other from inner necessity: that cosmos and man correspond. Potential accessibility has become part of the concept ‘‘cosmos.’’ But now there is no way at all from this cosmologic-anthropologic correspondence to the three-way division of our address. The way its central part is bracketed has no analogy. The speech’s peculiar pattern of presentation emerges clearly, it seems to me, when one rids oneself of the still subconsciously present notion that we are dealing with a speech and instead analyzes the ‘‘speech’’ as a purely literary product. Luke is not offering an excerpt from a real address, wherever delivered, nor does he want to sketch a model sermon for handy use by a missionary. Rather, as a historian, he composes a unique situation, which is of permanent importance just because of its uniqueness (cf. what Hellenistic historians say about the pedagogical value of history, e.g., Diodorus Siculus). This address was not meant to be a general pattern to be repeated everywhere. On the contrary, Luke intends to show how this unique Paul at that one time dealt with the philosophers in Athens in a unique discussion. If the philosophers were not converted even by a sermon of Paul, they will certainly not be converted today. Thus the Christians find their own experience substantiated: these circles do not respond to Christian missions even ‘‘today’’; the truth of the faith is established in spite of its being rejected by the wise. And now we understand why Luke uses as his point of departure not philosophical monotheism but popular religion. Attention to the specifically literary pattern of presentation, then, seems to reveal one of its principles. Let us recall once more the original form of the Christian confession of faith. Here faith is not an inward mood. It has a clear-cut dogmatic content: Jesus is the Son of God, and God raised Jesus from the dead. Moreover, this one complex content is understood not as partial truth, as one ingredient of faith, but as the faith, fides salvifica (‘‘the faith that saves’’; see Rom. 10:9). We have already seen that within the Jewish sphere

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such a statement about Jesus suffices, since belief in the one God, the Creator, can be taken for granted, but that within the polytheistic sphere an explicit statement about God becomes necessary. Consequently, the basic form of the confession becomes: heis theos—heis kurios (‘‘one God—one Lord’’; I Cor. 8:6). This is the pattern that then is filled in with concrete details about the work of creation and the work of salvation. This is the confession that provides the first and the third parts of the address and constitutes the brackets around the central part, which is homogeneous in itself. Every Christian reader at that time would have recognized this immediately. The central part thus becomes the place where man is called upon to meet the proclaimed message, while the first part shows him his past and present (creation, providence), and the third part unveils his future and thereby the demand of the present (repentance). Only the first and third parts have really didactic content, and both are related to biblical passages. It is the achievement of the author to have given the confession of faith a literary form. That he can be credited with such deliberate labor is shown by the composition of his gospel, where he also works with a tripartite structure—in this case that of the entire book. Since for his gospel we know his sources to a large extent, we are able to follow his technique of composition and can see that precisely the tripartite disposition is his own work. By the literary application of current motifs within the framework of a given pattern of belief, the meaning of the various motifs themselves undergoes a change. The accessibility of the world in the philosophical, gnostic sense is replaced by access to the relation with God through metanoia (‘‘repentance’’), knowledge of God in the sense of pistis (‘‘faith’’). Luke evidently is fully aware of this change. We cannot miss the conscious harshness with which he stresses the strangeness of the doctrine of the resurrection at the end. Above all, the change in the understanding of God and the world becomes apparent in the understanding of history. Ever since Posidonius, history had been included as part of world analysis (e.g., as an aspect of the theme of origin and degeneration). Such an analysis of history is entirely foreign to Luke. He does not say that man formerly possessed a knowledge of God and later lost it, as Stoic theory would have had it. Rather, Luke asserts that such a knowledge was always possible but was never realized. Beside this Stoic understanding of history, the milieu of early Christianity knew an entirely different one, expressed in Jewish apocalyptic: the course of the world is determined by uniqueness, by a beginning and an end (arkhe¯ and telos). The end is not the result of a development but a direct act of God, who makes the world come to an end and creates a wondrous new world for the elect. Early Christianity took over the basic outline of this apocalyptic worldview. But Luke reduced the Jewish view, just as he did the Greek one. He abandoned the problem that for the apocalypticist is most important: how to divide universal history into epochs and to deduce from them the present stage in regard to the end of the world. All that remains is the sheer structure: beginning—end, and in between a single insertion that determines the situation of man in the world: the

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resurrection of Jesus, which introduces a historical epoch fundamentally new compared with the former one. This new epoch, however, is not characterized by factors of universal history but exclusively through the continuing proclamation of the authenticated gospel, which offers the possibility of salvation. But that means that salvation is not gained by developing the possibilities peculiar to man. Salvation rests upon the decree of the Judge of the universe. And again: since proclaiming the gospel takes place only after the resurrection of Jesus, the hitherto existing ignorance (agnoia) of man is relatively excusable—up to the present moment, the moment when Jesus is proclaimed. Now the possibility of faith has been irrevocably offered, but faith is thereby demanded. Refusal means ultimate perdition: akousantes de anastasin nekro¯n, oi men ekheuazov, oi de eipav, akousometha sou peri toutou kai palin (‘‘When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked; but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this’ ’’; Acts 17:32).26

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Paul as a Hellenistic Philosopher The Evidence of Philippians

Paul A. Holloway

There is nothing in my condition that could cause anyone to call me miserable, still less cause those to whom I am related to be miserable on my account. —Seneca, To Helvia

For those wishing to take a measure of Paul’s philosophical culture, the best place to begin is his moral instruction.1 In this essay, I examine Paul’s moral instruction in his letter to the Philippians, focusing in particular on his appropriation of current theories and practices of consolation. I have divided my essay into three parts. In the first I offer a brief survey of ancient philosophical consolation, paying special attention to the theories and practices most relevant to Philippians. In the second, I examine three ancient philosophical letters of consolation (two letters by Epicurus and one by Seneca) written in response to circumstances similar to those faced by Paul in Philippians. These letters will give us a sense of how recognized philosophers facing problems similar to Paul’s actually approached them in concreto. In the final part, I describe Paul’s use of philosophical consolation in Philippians.

Ancient Theories and Practices of Consolation Consolation was widely practiced in the ancient world and could in principle be offered for any misfortune.2 It had as its object the alleviation of grief broadly conceived (lupe¯, aegritudo),3 which was to be replaced with the opposite disposition of joy (khara, gaudium, laetitia), a theme that will figure prominently in Philippians.4 To reach these

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ends, consolers employed a range of therapeutic methods,5 the most common of which was rational persuasion bolstered by frank exhortation and, if need be, the occasional (often sexist) rebuke: ‘‘You are expecting words of comfort? Here’s a rebuke instead: You are taking your son’s death like a woman!’’6 Common misfortunes received stock treatment in the rhetorical handbooks.7 At Tusculan Disputations 3.34.81, Cicero mentions handbook discussions of death, poverty, exile, life without honors, the destruction of one’s country, slavery, illness, and blindness. Dio Chrysostom gives a similar list at Oration 16.3. Each of the major philosophical schools developed its own theory of consolation, based on such things as its view of the soul, its doctrine of good and evil, and its theory of the passions. Cicero surveys these in Tusculan Disputations books 1 and 3, summarizing them at 3.31.76: Some, like Cleanthes, believe that the consoler’s only task is to convince the person afflicted with grief that the alleged ‘‘evil’’ is not an evil at all. Others, like the Peripatetics, argue that the evil in question is not great. Others, like the Epicureans, try to avert our attention away from evil things to good things. Others, like the Cyrenaics, think that it is sufficient to show that nothing unexpected has happened. Chrysippus, however, believes that the most important thing in consoling another is to disabuse the mourner of [false] opinion lest he imagine that [by grieving] he is fulfilling a just and obligatory duty. In times of intense grief, of course, comfort was sought wherever it could be found, and school lines were frequently crossed. Thus Cicero goes on to say: ‘‘And still others favor employing all these types of consolation—for one person is moved in one way, while another person is moved in another—much as I in my Consolation tossed them all into one attempt to find comfort, since my soul was infected and swollen and I was trying to heal it by every means.’’8 The first view Cicero lists is that of the Stoic scholar Cleanthes, according to which ‘‘the consoler’s only task is to convince the person afflicted with grief that the alleged ’evil’ is not an evil at all’’ and that grief is therefore unwarranted. This is the Stoic ideal of ‘‘apathy’’ (apatheia) applied to the passion or pathos of grief.9 Three suppositions underlie the Stoic theory of the passions in general and Cleanthes’ theory of grief in particular: (1) that the soul is unitary and therefore wholly rational,10 (2) that the only real good is virtue, the only real evil vice, and that everything else is morally ‘‘indifferent’’ (adiaphoron),11 and (3) that the passions (including grief), deriving as they do from incorrect conventional judgments of good and evil, are always irrational and excessive and thus have no place in the rational soul.12 On this account, grief always originates in a false judgment of the form ‘‘X is an evil’’ (where X stands for some present state of affairs), when the correct judgment would have been ‘‘X is neither good nor evil but a matter of

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indifference.’’13 Cleanthes’ method was regularly employed in consolations treating lesser forms of misfortune such as poverty and exile, and we will have occasion to return to it below both in our discussion of the exiled Seneca’s letter to his mother Helvia and in Paul’s letter to the Philippians.14 However, since the method stipulated that grief in any measure was excessive, it was rarely used in consolations of death, where it was criticized as harsh and unrealistic.15 Cicero next mentions Peripatetic theory,16 according to which the consoler’s task is to convince persons afflicted with grief that ‘‘the evil in question is not great’’ and that they should therefore show moderation in their grief. Like the Stoics, the Peripatetics derived their theory of consolation from their doctrines of the soul, good and evil, and the passions. However, they differed from the Stoics in their interpretation of each of these central doctrines.17 First, they held that the soul was not unitary and rational, but partite, with both rational and irrational elements. Second, they did not limit good and evil to virtue and vice but in general accepted conventional notions of good and evil, provided that the objects thus encompassed were not overvalued. And third, they held that grief, when based on an accurate assessment of value, was a proper and reasonable expression of the irrational part of the soul. Thus Peripatetic consolation had as its goal not the complete erasure of grief, the Stoic ideal of apatheia, but its moderation, an ideal they expressed with the term metriopatheia, ‘‘measured passion.’’18 It is understandable that in treating death consolers almost without exception judged Peripatetic metriopatheia better suited to their task than Stoic apatheia. The third view Cicero mentions is that of Epicurus. Unlike Stoic and Peripatetic theorists, Epicurus was constrained by his hedonism to take most conventional forms of evil at face value.19 He did, of course, insist that ‘‘death is nothing to us,’’20 and he also distinguished between natural and unnatural desires, the latter of which were not to be cultivated.21 But in general he could not deny that experiences traditionally judged to be painful were indeed painful and therefore grievous. For Epicurus, therefore, the consoler’s task was to distract the grieving person from his or her current misfortune to other more pleasurable memories. Cicero explains: ‘‘He [Epicurus] places the alleviation of distress in two activities: calling the mind away from thinking about things that disturb us [avocatione a cogitanda molestia] and calling the mind back to the contemplation of pleasure [et revocatione ad contemplandas voluptates].’’22 And again in the words of Torquatus at On Ends 1.18.57: ‘‘It lies within our power both to bury unpleasant experiences in a kind of perpetual forgetfulness and to recall positive experiences with pleasure and delight.’’ Epicurus’s technique was simple and versatile. It proved popular with a broad range of intellectuals, who often modified its basic strategy of self-distraction to fit their own ideological preferences.23 Even Cicero, who on moral grounds rejected the technique’s focus on pleasure (voluptas),24 proposed a modified version that called for the contemplation of virtue: ‘‘But if, Epicurus, you call me back [revocas] to the above goods [i.e., courage, self-control, justice, and prudence], I obey, I follow, I make you my leader, I

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shall even forget evil, as you urge.’’25 Cicero’s modified version gained currency with subsequent consolers: Seneca makes use of it in two of his letters of consolation: To Polybius 18.8 and To Marcia 24.1–4,26 and it even appears later in Jerome, Letter 60.7.3. I shall argue that Paul makes use of Epicurus’s technique in both its original (hedonistic) and its modified (Ciceronian) forms in his letter to the Philippians. Cicero next mentions Cyrenaic theory, according to which grief is caused not by misfortune as such but by misfortune that is unexpected (inopinatus).27 Like Epicurus, the Cyrenaics were philosophical hedonists, but Cyrenaic hedonism differed from Epicurean hedonism in at least two significant ways. First, whereas Epicurean theory focused on ‘‘katastematic pleasure,’’ that is, pleasure as a state of being,28 the Cyrenaics understood both pleasure and pain to be types of motion, pleasure being a ‘‘smooth’’ motion (leia kine¯sis) and pain being a ‘‘rough’’ one (trakheia kine¯sis).29 And second, whereas Epicurus held that pleasure and pain were contradictories, so that the absence of pain necessarily implied the presence of pleasure,30 the Cyrenaics taught that pleasure and pain were mere contraries, there being a ‘‘middle state’’ (mese¯ katastasis) between the two that is ‘‘neither pleasant nor painful’’ (ae¯donia kai aponia).31 From this general theory of pleasure and pain, the Cyrenaics derived their special theory of consolation, which stated that ‘‘grief is not caused by every misfortune, but by misfortune that is unexpected and unanticipated.’’32 In other words, not all misfortunes produce the ‘‘rough’’ motion of grief, but only those that come about unexpectedly. Like the surprise attack of an enemy or a sudden storm at sea—two popular Cyrenaic analogies33 —misfortune overwhelms us when it catches us off guard. But when misfortune is foreseen, or when we have adequately prepared ourselves for it, this is not the case. To be sure, such experiences are not pleasant, that is, they do not produce the smooth motion that is pleasure, but neither are they grievous in the proper sense of the term. Rather, they fall in the third ‘‘middle state’’ between pleasure and pain. The Cyrenaics offered two practical remedies to grief, the first to be applied prophylactically before the advent of grievous circumstances, and the second after the fact. For those not currently experiencing misfortune, they recommended the contemplation of future evil (praemeditatio futuri mali) as a preparation for its eventuality.34 For those already afflicted with grief, they sought to stop the pain, that is, to calm the violent motion produced by unexpected calamity, with the reminder that ‘‘nothing unexpected has happened.’’ We have already seen Cicero’s summary of this technique at Tusculan Disputations 3.31.76. He describes the method again at Tusculan Disputations 3.23.55, this time in the words of a Cyrenaic interlocutor: ‘‘What need is there of arguments or of all the consolation that we so routinely offer when we want to lighten the grief of mourners? For in all but the most extreme circumstances we have ready to hand the words ‘Nothing should seem unexpected [nihil oportere inopinatum videri].’ ’’ Cicero does not find in Cyrenaic theory a complete account of grief, but he does agree that the element of surprise intensifies anguish, ‘‘for all sudden occurrences seem more serious.’’35

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Cyrenaic theory was obviously better suited to preventing grief than alleviating it.36 Nevertheless, the assumption that grief is due, at least in part, to the element of surprise is found in a range of consolatory texts.37 Seneca makes extensive use of the topos, employing it in each of his major consolations and in his consolatory letters.38 In Letter 107, where he complains that Lucilius has allowed himself to be ‘‘startled’’ (expavit) by an otherwise small misfortune, he selects the topos as his principal means of consolation and develops it at length by means of two traditional supporting arguments designed to make the case that misfortune is to be expected: (1) that many others have suffered similar misfortunes: ‘‘whatever you name, it has happened to many,’’39 and (2) that human suffering is ordained by God, ‘‘we must conform our soul to this [divine] law.’’40 These arguments, which focus respectively on a community of sufferers and on suffering as divinely ordained, find echoes in Paul’s use of the topos in Philippians 1:28–30, where Paul similarly urges the Philippians not to be ‘‘startled’’ (me¯ pturomenoi) by their present misfortune.41 The fifth and final theory Cicero identifies is that of Cleanthes’ successor Chrysippus. Chrysippus agreed with Cleanthes that grief can be traced to false conventional judgments regarding the nature of evil, and that as such it has no place in the rational soul.42 However, he located the proximate or immediate cause of grief in the additional opinion (opinio) that, given a particular misfortune, grief is an obligatory response: ‘‘grief is an opinion about some present misfortune in which is contained the [further judgment] that it is right to feel grief.’’43 Grief thus has its origin in a kind of double misjudgment: (1) that a misfortune has indeed occurred, and (2) that grief is the correct response. Only when one holds the second opinion as well as the first does grief occur: ‘‘But when to the opinion that some great evil has occurred the further opinion is added that it is appropriate, that it is right, that it is a matter of duty to be distressed at what has happened, then, and only then, does the passion of deep distress occur.’’44 In addition to these more technical philosophical strategies for consolation, it is possible to identify a number of popular consolatory arguments and techniques. These grew up independently of specialized philosophical reflection and were used by philosophers and nonphilosophers alike. Some of the more common of these arguments were: (1) time heals all grief; (2) grief is unhealthy; (3) grief accomplishes nothing; and (4) others have suffered similar things. Three popular arguments specific to death were: (5) grief does not benefit the dead; (6) the dead do not want their surviving loved ones and friends to grieve; and (7) death is gain.45 The last of these appears famously at Philippians 1:21: ‘‘for me to die is gain.’’46 A popular consolatory technique also relevant to Paul’s letter to the Philippians was the use of a substitute or surrogate to take the place of a lost or absent loved one. Seneca makes extensive use of the topos in his consolatory letters. In Letter 62.11–12, for instance, he advises Lucilius to replace his dead friend Flaccus with another: ‘‘You have lost a friend, seek another. Better to replace a friend than to weep for him.’’ Similarly, in To

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Helvia 18.3 he urges his mother, who is grieving over his recent exile to Corsica, to allow his two remaining brothers to serve as his replacements: ‘‘the gap that one [son] has left can be filled by the devotion of two’’ (18.3)—and if they are not enough, she can add her grandchildren and her favorite sister.47 Statius adopts this technique near the end of Silvae 2.6, which was written to console an otherwise unknown Flavius Ursus for the death of his favorite slave, Philetos: ‘‘The Fates, perhaps even the dead boy himself, will give you another Philetos [alium tibi Fata Phileton, forsan et ipse dabit].’’48 The children of an absent or deceased loved one were deemed especially compelling replacements. We see this topos already in Euripides’ Alcestis when Admetus promises the dying Alcestis that only her children (and not another woman) ‘‘will take your place.’’49 The early Greek novelist Chariton has his heroine Callirhoe¨ console herself with a similar thought after the supposed death of Chaereas: ‘‘Nevertheless you have given to me [in this child] an image of a most beloved man, so that I am not completely bereft of my Chaereas.’’50 Dido, of course, longs for precisely such a consolation after Aeneas’ departure: ‘‘If only I had conceived a child of yours before your flight; if only there were a little Aeneas [parvulus Aeneas] to play here in my halls, who might bring you back to me in the features of his face [qui te tamen ore referret]—then I would not feel so entirely vanquished and abandoned.’’51 Seneca employs this strategy in his letter of consolation to Marcia, the daughter of the Stoic historian Cremutius Cordus, regarding the death of her son Metelius: ‘‘Substitute for Metelius his two surviving daughters. Fill the empty place with them, and in so doing lighten your grief for one with the consolation of two.’’52 Tacitus deploys the topos at Annals 12.68, where after the death of Germanicus he has Agrippina, ‘‘as if overcome by grief and seeking consolation [solacia],’’ wrap Britannicus in her arms and call him ‘‘a true portrait of his father [veram paterni oris effigiem],’’ and again at the end of the Agricola, when he argues that his deceased father-in-law’s presence is to be found not in images and monuments but in the ‘‘soul’’ (animus) of his daughter, Tacitus’s wife.53 Paul offers Timothy as a substitute for himself at Philippians 2:19–22: ‘‘I hope to send Timothy to you shortly . . . for I have no one so much like myself [isopsukhon] . . . he has slaved with me like a child [teknon] with his father.’’ A great deal more could be said about ancient practices of consolation. Among other things, a fuller discussion would need to take into account the place of religion in consolation. The mysteries, for instance, offered great consolation in the face of death.54 Magic was also a source of comfort.55 More generally, prayer was used as ‘‘a consolation in every type of calamity and misfortune.’’56 ‘‘Pray to God and do not grieve,’’ writes Aesop.57 Not surprisingly, Paul recommends prayer for just this purpose in Philippians 4:6–7: ‘‘Do not be anxious for anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God . . . will guard your hearts and minds.’’58 Furthermore, in apocalyptic Judaism the promise of resurrection and the hope that one’s enemies would be harshly judged by God were particularly popular consolations in the first century. They can be found in virtually all forms of early Christianity

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and underlie Paul’s consolation throughout Philippians, especially at 1:28, 3:19–21, and 4:4–5. But since our concern in this paper lies with Paul’s appropriation of contemporary philosophical consolation, let us now, after this brief survey, turn to an analysis of the three philosophical letters of consolation already mentioned.

Three Ancient Letters of Consolation Consolation is attested across a broad range of ancient genres, but by far the best-attested genre is the consolatory letter.59 Three ancient letters of consolation have special relevance to Paul’s letter to the Philippians. They are Epicurus’s letters to Idomeneus and Hermarchus and Seneca’s letter-essay to his mother, Helvia.60 Like Philippians, these letters were composed by individuals suffering a significant misfortune (a painful death in the case of Epicurus, exile in the case of Seneca) in an effort to console a friend or loved one grieved by their suffering.61 I will begin with the last of these (Seneca’s letter), since it has the most similarities to Philippians. Seneca’s letter of consolation to his mother may be analyzed as a straightforward piece of Latin deliberative rhetoric, consisting of a short exordium or rhetorical introduction, a propositio or thesis statement (in two parts),62 a lengthy probatio or proof (also in two parts or ‘‘headings,’’ corresponding to the two parts of the thesis statement), and a brief peroratio or rhetorical conclusion.63 I will comment on these parts in order, noting along the way their relevance to Philippians. The exordium constitutes the first three chapters of the letter (1.1–3.2). It is taken up with the traditional topos of whether or not to write and adds little to our interpretation of Philippians directly.64 I would, however, note two items. First, at 1.2 Seneca complains that he has found no example of a letter in which ‘‘a man had offered consolation to his loved ones when he himself was bewailed by them’’ and that he is thus ‘‘in a novel situation’’ (in re nova). This is precisely the situation (and rhetorical predicament) Paul faces in writing to the Philippians, a point to which we will return below. Second, when Seneca finally gets around to expressing his resolve to write, he is at pains to distinguish the manly philosophical consolation he will offer—I take it that Seneca is in part at least showing off for his mother here—from the popular and to his mind more effeminate form of consolation by diversion or distraction typically offered to those who have lost or otherwise been separated from their loved ones.65 As he puts it at 4.1: ‘‘I have determined to conquer your grief, not to dupe it.’’ He will return to this theme later in the letter at 17.2, where he writes: ‘‘I am not going to point you to the expedients that I know many have used, suggesting that you distract or cheer your mind by [various means] . . . I would rather end your grief than beguile it.’’ Whatever the similarities of their approaches, it would seem that Paul lacked Seneca’s scruples on at least this point, for at Philippians 4:8–9 we read: ‘‘For what remains, brothers, whatsoever things are true,

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whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are pleasing . . . let your thoughts dwell on these things . . . and the God who gives peace will be with you.’’ We will return to this interesting piece of essentially Epicurean consolation below.66 This brings us to the propositio, or thesis statement, in 4.1.67 Seneca proposes that he will be able to alleviate his mother’s grief if he approaches her predicament from two directions. He writes: ‘‘And conquer your grief I shall, if, in the first place, I show that there is nothing in my condition that could cause anyone to call me miserable, still less cause those to whom I am related to be miserable on my account; and, secondly, if I turn next to you and prove that your fortune, which depends so much on mine, is not a grievous one.’’ Seneca’s strategy is commonsensical: his mother is grieved by his exile, and so he takes as his primary objective to prove to her that his exile is not an occasion for grief, either for himself or for her. An additional concern is that his exile might be creating hardships for his mother back in Rome, and so he adds as a second objective to show that his mother’s own situation has not been rendered particularly difficult by his exile. He will address these concerns in order in the probatio.68 The probatio (4.2–19.7) is in two parts or headings, corresponding to the two elements of the thesis statement. The first heading is 4.2–13.8. Seneca begins by restating more fully, and with considerably more bravado,69 the first element of his propositio, namely, that his mother has no reason to be grieved for his sake, since nothing bad has happened to him and he is himself not grieved by his present circumstances: ‘‘First, then, I shall proceed to prove what your love is eager to hear: namely, that nothing bad has happened to me [nihil mihi mali esse]. . . . I am happy [beatus] in circumstances that usually make others miserable. . . . [Indeed] it is not even possible to make me unhappy [ne fieri quidem me posse miserum].’’70 He supports this claim with two arguments. The first argument outlines his response to misfortune in general (5.1–6), while the second is more to the point, treating the specific misfortune of exile (6.1–13.8). With regard to misfortune in general, Seneca reports that he has protected himself against grief by two means. His first line of defense is the Stoic distinction between things that do and do not matter (5.1–2).71 He writes: ‘‘External things are of slight importance and have little influence in either direction: prosperity does not exalt the wise man and adversity does not cast him down’’ (5.1).72 The reason for this, he goes on to explain, is that the wise man endeavors always ‘‘to rely entirely upon himself [for his happiness] and to derive from himself all of his joy [gaudium]’’ (5.1).73 Seneca, of course, cannot lay claim to having actually become a Stoic wise man, so while retaining the Stoic position as his ideal, he flees to ‘‘another camp’’ (aliena castra), that of the Cyrenaics, where he finds a second, more realistic defense against grief in their practice of the praemeditatio futuri mali (5.3–6). ‘‘[Fortune’s] attack is heavy when it is sudden,’’ he writes, ‘‘but he easily withstands her who always expects her’’ (5.3). Seneca assures his mother that, because he has been careful to distinguish between the things that do and do not matter, and because

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in addition he has always kept himself prepared for reversals of Fortune, his present trials have not been inordinately hard to bear.74 This leads to his second and more specific argument regarding exile, which in good Stoic fashion he will insist is a matter of indifference (6.1–13.8). Common opinion judges exile to be one of the most extreme forms of hardship imaginable, involving loss of homeland (patria), enforced poverty (paupertas), and personal disgrace and scorn (ignominia et contemptus). Seneca goes to great length to refute this judgment.75 He treats in order each of its alleged evils: (1) the loss of homeland in 6.2–9.8, (2) the imposition of poverty in 10.1–12.7, and (3) the experience of disgrace and scorn in 13.1–8.76 He concludes that whether viewed separately or taken together these are all matters of indifference. All that matters for the happiness of a wise man is ‘‘his own virtue’’ (propria virtus) and his access to the goods of ‘‘Nature broadly conceived’’ (natura communis). Since neither of these is taken away in exile, exile is by definition a matter of indifference to the wise man. Seneca goes on to say that, for those like himself still making progress in virtue, exile and its hardships can actually work for good, as when, for instance, poverty removes the distractions of riches.77 This first heading (4.2–13.8) offers a number of striking parallels to Philippians. First, Seneca’s strategy to argue (1) that his exile is a matter of indifference to him, (2) that he is in fact happy (beatus) and full of joy (gaudium) in his circumstances, and (3) that if anything his circumstances are working for the good, parallels almost exactly Paul’s strategy in Philippians 1:12–26, as we will see below. Second, Seneca’s claims (1) that the wise man is self-sufficient, relying solely upon himself for his happiness, and (2) that, more specifically, he knows both ‘‘prosperity’’ and ‘‘adversity’’ and is therefore not unsettled by hardship are similar in both form and function to Paul’s claims in Philippians 4:11–12 that (1) he has learned ‘‘how to be self-sufficient [autarke¯s] in all things,’’ and (2) that he knows ‘‘how to be abased and how to abound, how to be full and to hunger, how to have abundance and to be in severe need.’’ Finally, Seneca’s decision to mix Stoic and Cyrenaic consolation in 5.1–6 finds a parallel in Phil 1:28–30, where, after having employed Stoic arguments in 1:12–26, Paul introduces the Cyrenaic argument that the Philippians should not be surprised (pturomenoi) by present events, since such suffering is ordained by God and since Paul’s own suffering both now and earlier at Philippi should have prepared them for it.78 Also noteworthy are a couple of differences between Paul and Seneca. First, while Seneca rejoices in ‘‘his own virtue’’ and in ‘‘Nature broadly conceived,’’ Paul rejoices in the progress of the Christian gospel and in his own salvation.79 And second, while Seneca focuses on the things that do not matter in his circumstances, mentioning in passing the things that do, Paul focuses on the things that do matter in his circumstances, mentioning in passing the things that do not. This can be seen most clearly in Seneca’s claim that ‘‘external things make little difference either way’’ (emphasizing the things that do not matter), contrasted with Paul’s prayer for the Philippians in 1:10 that the Philippians, like

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he himself, might learn to discern ‘‘the things that really matter’’ (ta diapheronta versus ta adiaphora). In other words, Seneca’s argument is, in effect, ‘‘Nothing bad has happened, and some good has occurred,’’ whereas Paul argues, ‘‘Several really good things are happening, and nothing bad has occurred.’’80 We will return to this below. The second part, or heading, of the probatio is in 14.1–19.7 and takes up the second element in the thesis statement, namely, that nothing bad has happened to Seneca’s mother either.81 Seneca can imagine two possible sources for grief here: (1) that with his exile his mother feels that she has ‘‘lost some protection,’’ and (2) that she deeply misses her absent son. Seneca dismisses the first possibility out of hand as unworthy of his mother (14.2–3), who has never worried inordinately for herself. He therefore addresses himself exclusively to the second possible source for grief, the fact that his mother misses him. ‘‘So I must direct all my efforts at consolation to the second point—the true source of a mother’s grief. ’I am deprived,’ you will say, ’of the embraces of my dear son. I may no longer enjoy the pleasure of seeing him, of talking with him’ ’’ (15.1). Seneca takes a variety of approaches to console his mother on this point: (1) he exhorts her to be strong, using explicit military imagery (‘‘you must engage with Fortune fiercely as with an enemy well known and often conquered’’)82 —note that this is direct exhortation and that it is typical of ancient consolation to move from argument to exhortation and back—(2) he advises her to consider the examples of other women who have variously been deprived of their sons (Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, and Rutilia, mother of the exiled C. Aurelius Cotta);83 (3) he recommends that she occupy herself with philosophical studies, not usually fit for women, but she is an exception;84 and finally, and here is where his emphasis lies, (4) he advises her to allow others to take his place, to act as his surrogates and thus fill the void of his absence.85 These substitutes include his two remaining brothers, her grandchildren and great grandchildren, her father, and last but not least, her devoted sister. Again there are several parallels to Philippians. First, like Seneca, who is sensitive to the fact that his mother misses him, Paul is sensitive to the fact that the Philippians miss him.86 Second, Paul also attempts to console by means of a surrogate, Timothy.87 And finally, Paul, like Seneca, also engages in direct exhortation to be strong (using military language; 1:27ff.) and to look to the examples of others (himself, Epaphroditus, and especially Christ).88 Seneca concludes his letter of consolation to his mother with a very short peroratio (20.1–2), in which he reiterates his initial Stoic arguments that he is happy, that nothing bad has happened to him, and that he is in fact being benefited by his circumstances. There is little new here to note, except that Paul will similarly end his letter to the Philippians by repeating some of his main consolatory arguments. This brings us to Epicurus’s two deathbed letters to his former students Hermarchus and Idomeneus,89 which can be dealt with much more briefly. All that remain of these letters are two short fragments, and so their precise genre cannot be determined with any

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confidence. It is clear from what does remain, however, that at least one of their purposes was to console these two disciples regarding Epicurus’s imminent and painful demise. Here again, then, we have a sufferer writing to console his friends regarding his own suffering. The letter to Hermarchus of Mytilene, who would succeed Epicurus as head of the Garden,90 is preserved in a Latin translation by Cicero at On Ends 2.96. The relevant lines are: ‘‘I am suffering from diseases of the bladder and intestines that are of unsurpassable intensity. But all these are offset by the joy [laetitia] I lay hold of in my mind by the memory [memoriam] of my theories and discoveries.’’ The letter to Idomeneus of Lampsacus is quoted, presumably in the original, in Diogenes Laertius 10.22. Again the relevant lines: ‘‘Strangury and dysenteric pains afflict me with an unsurpassable intensity. But holding ground against all these discomforts is the rejoicing in my soul [to kata psukhe¯n khairon] produced by the memory [mne¯me¯] of the discussions we have had.’’ I would note two items. The first is that in both of these letters Epicurus anticipates Seneca’s strategy of consoling those grieving over his suffering by assuring them that he has himself been comforted. In effect: ‘‘Don’t grieve for me, for I am not grieved.’’ Paul, of course, will take a similar approach.91 The second item of note is the means by which Epicurus claims to be comforted: namely, by pleasant memories (memoria, mne¯me¯), which he identifies as a source of joy (laetitia, to khairon) in his present distress. In the letter to his successor Hermarchus, these memories are, appropriately, of his philosophical discoveries. In the letter to Idomeneus, a former student and friend, the memories are of a more personal nature, focusing on their relationship and the many conversations that they have had.92 Epicurus’s report that he has found ‘‘joy’’ in his extremity through pleasant ‘‘memories’’ of his students, will find an interesting parallel in Philippians 1:3–5: ‘‘I thank my God for every remembrance of you [mneia humo¯n] . . . praying with joy [meta kharas] over your partnership in the gospel.’’93

Consolation in Philippians Let me turn now to Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Like all of Paul’s letters, Philippians is an occasional document, written in response to a particular situation. In the case of Philippians, the most salient feature of this situation is that Paul is in prison awaiting trial on potentially capital charges.94 Paul has recently been visited in his confinement by Epaphroditus, a member of the Philippian church, who has brought a gift from the believers at Philippi, as well as news of certain troubling developments in the church.95 Paul has not heard from his supporters at Philippi for some time,96 but he learns from Epaphroditus that they have themselves recently experienced several acts of hostility similar to what he is experiencing,97 and that this, coupled with their anxiety over his situation, have left them discouraged and disillusioned.98 Indeed, Epaphroditus is so concerned for his coreligionists that he is afraid that news of his own recent illness—he fell seriously ill on his

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way to Paul—has gotten back to them and rendered their already fragile condition even more precarious.99 Epaphroditus also reports that, as a result of these stressful circumstances, the church has begun to be plagued by fractiousness and in-fighting,100 which has affected even two of Paul’s erstwhile co-workers, Euodia and Syntyche.101 Paul writes from prison to console and correct. Scholars have long struggled to find a coherent structure to Philippians, and more than a few have argued that the letter is actually a compilation of earlier letter fragments.102 This is not necessary, and in fact once one identifies the letter as a letter of consolation an obvious logic emerges.103 Paul begins his letter with a short prescript (1:1–2), followed by what is for him a customary thanksgiving paragraph (1:3–11): ‘‘I give thanks to my God for every remembrance of you etc.’’104 Near the end of this paragraph, in what is also a customary form for Paul, a prayer report,105 he announces the theme or thesis of his letter (1:9–11): namely, that the Philippians are finding the present situation grievous because they have failed ‘‘to discern the things that really matter [dokimazeiv . . . ta diapheronta]’’ (1:10). Paul here adopts as his principal strategy of consolation the Stoic theory that grief lies in mistaking things that do not matter for things that do.106 This strategy provides the letter with both a thematic and a logical unity. Paul develops his thesis in the central portion or body of his letter under two headings (1:12–2:30 and 3:1–4:1). In both he argues by way of personal example. The first heading takes the form of a mission report of sorts, with Paul reporting to the Philippians what has happened to him: ‘‘I want you to know, brothers, that the things that have happened to me’’ (1:12). However, Paul has carefully shaped this report to provide the Philippians with an example (in himself) of how those engaged in the gospel mission should interpret and respond to suffering and hardship.107 The key, as he has already indicated, is to distinguish between the things that matter and the things that do not. It does not matter that he is in prison and that certain of his rivals are taking advantage of this, nor does it matter that he might be executed.108 What matters is the ‘‘progress’’ (prokope¯n) of the gospel, which in the present circumstances has only been aided by Paul’s imprisonment (1:12–18a), and the eventual ‘‘salvation’’ (so¯te¯rian) of the gospel missionary, which is accomplished as he or she submits to physical suffering and even death for the glory of Christ (1:18b–21). Because Paul has correctly made these distinctions, he is consoled in his present circumstances: ‘‘in this I rejoice, and I will rejoice’’ (1:18b).109 Paul interrupts his mission report in 1:27–2:16 to exhort the Philippians to take his example to heart: ‘‘I only ask that you [too] live your lives in a manner worthy of the gospel.’’ In particular, he urges them to ‘‘stand together’’ in the gospel ministry, and not to be ‘‘surprised’’ by the fact that others oppose them, but to see their present hardship as part of their calling ‘‘to suffer for the sake of Christ’’ (1:27–30).110 Paul is also concerned that they heal any divisions caused by their present discouragement (2:1–4). In doing so,

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they will not only be following Paul’s own example but, more importantly, Christ’s example of patient suffering (2:5–11). Ironically, their present conduct marks the only area in which Paul is disconsolate: ‘‘complete my joy, being of the same mind, with the same love, in full accord’’ (2:2). Paul also warns them not to allow his enforced ‘‘absence’’ to undermine their obedience to God and to jeopardize their own ‘‘salvation’’ (so¯te¯rian; 2:12–16). Paul returns to his mission report and his efforts at consolation in 2:17–30.111 He hopes to hear something definite about his trial soon, and when he does he will send Timothy to give a full report. Timothy, who is Paul’s child (teknon) in the service of the gospel, and who is just like (homopsukhon) Paul in his care for the Philippians, will also serve as Paul’s substitute—an alius Paulus, to adapt Statius’s expression—until he can himself make his way back to them (2:19–24). Paul is even now, however, sending Epaphroditus back with the present letter so that the Philippians can see for themselves that he is well (2:25–30). Paul’s hope is that, like Timothy, Epaphroditus will be a source of interim comfort for the Philippians: ‘‘in order that seeing him again you might rejoice’’ (2:28). Paul follows his mission report (1:12–2:30) with further consolation of a more theological bent in 3:1–4:1, which forms the letter’s second heading. Again the theme of what does and does not matter is in view, and again the argument proceeds largely by way of Paul’s example. But whereas in 1:12–2:30 Paul took as his frame of reference the gospel mission, where what matters is not the suffering of the Christian missionary but the progress of the Christian message, he now frames his argument around the religious experience of the individual Christian. What matters from this perspective is not earthly achievement—not even achievement in the Christian mission—but ‘‘the surpassing value [to huperekhon] of knowing Christ Jesus my lord’’ (3:8a). If a Stoic could say that the only thing that really matters for the student of philosophy is to make progress toward virtue, Paul could say with equal conviction that the only thing that really matters for the Christian is to come ‘‘to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings, even becoming like him in his death’’ (3:10). In pursuit of this ‘‘knowledge,’’ Paul claims to have lost all his previous gains in Judaism and to consider them ‘‘rubbish’’ (3:8b).112 Indeed, even as regards his work as a Christian apostle, Paul ‘‘forget[s] what lies behind’’ and presses toward the ‘‘one thing’’ (hen) that really matters: ‘‘the prize of God’s upward call in Christ Jesus’’ (3:13–14).113 This is one of the most elevated and emotionally charged passages in Paul’s extant corpus. This brings us to the concluding portion of Paul’s letter (4:2–23). Paul typically takes a while to conclude a letter, and his letter to the Philippians is no exception. In 4:2–9 he offers a series of specific recommendations, including how through ‘‘prayer’’ (4:6) and distraction (‘‘think on these things’’; 4:8–9) to find the ‘‘peace of God’’ in the present anxieties. Next, in 4:10–20 he appends a short thank-you note for the recent gift from the Philippians, being careful to avoid any impression that such externals really matter. This

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results in a certain awkwardness, a dankloser Dank, as numerous commentators have noted, but there is little else Paul could have done at this point in the letter, given his sustained argument that such things do not matter. Finally, Paul finishes with a more or less traditional letter conclusion in 4:21–23. Stoic Consolation Paul employs a variety of consolatory strategies in his letter to the Philippians. One is Stoic consolation. As we have just seen, the Stoic distinction between things that matter and things that do not forms the thesis of Paul’s letter (1:9–10), which he develops in two lines of argument, the first focusing on what matters in the gospel mission (1:12–2:30), the second on what matters in the religious life of the Christian (3:1–4:1). I will not review this evidence here, except to make three summarizing observations. First, Paul’s letter to the Philippians is remarkably similar to Seneca’s letter to his mother. In both cases the writers of these letters are suffering (Seneca in exile, Paul in prison), and in both cases they write to console loved ones who are grieving for them. Furthermore, they both choose as their principal strategy of consolation to argue that what has happened to them does not really matter and therefore does not constitute grounds for grief. They also both argue this point by way of personal example, certifying that they themselves are not grieved in their alleged hardships and that therefore their loved ones /co-religionists should not be grieved either. Second, and by way of slight contrast, whereas Seneca’s argument is essentially negative, focusing on the things that do not matter, Paul’s argument is essentially positive, focusing on the things that do (ta diapheronta). To put it another way, Paul’s consolation of the Philippians does not aim at the mere absence of grief (Stoic apatheia) but at the presence of joy.114 Chrysostom correctly notes Paul’s emphasis in his introductory comments on the letter: ‘‘Paul offers the Philippians much consolation regarding his imprisonment, showing not only that they should not be troubled but that they should rejoice [ou monon ou khre¯ thorubeisthai, alla kai khairein].’’115 And third and finally, while Paul’s argument is clearly Stoic, it is also unquestionably Christian. Indeed, we might say with only a little oversimplification that Paul’s consolation in Philippians is Stoic in form, but Christian in content. Formally, Paul distinguishes, as would a Stoic, between what matters and what does not. In terms of content, however, he assigns specifically Christian values: the progress of the gospel, the knowledge of Christ. Needless to say, this is an impressive synthesis, in which Paul succeeds in taking seriously both sources of his argument. Epicurean Consolation Paul twice employs Epicurean consolation in Philippians (1:3–5 and 4:8–9). We have already noted these two texts, and I have discussed both of them in detail elsewhere, so I

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will summarize here.116 It will be recalled that Epicurus’s technique of consolation by distraction took two forms: (1) its original form, which stipulated distraction by pleasant memories, and (2) its modified, ‘‘Ciceronean’’ form, which called for the contemplation of virtue and related moral goods. Paul employs both of these techniques in Philippians. The first he applies to himself in Philippians 1:3–5, where he reports that memories of the Philippians bring him relief in his present suffering: ‘‘I thank my God for every remembrance of you . . . with joy over your sharing in the gospel ministry from the first day until now’’ (1:3–5). Here the prisoner Paul finds joy [khara] in his memory [mneia] of the Philippians. This is precisely the strategy taken by Epicurus in his two letters to Idomeneus and Hermarchus: ‘‘but all these are offset by the joy [laetitia] I lay hold of in my mind by the memory [memoria] of my theories and discoveries’’ and ‘‘but holding ground against all these is the rejoicing [to khairon] in my soul produced by the memory [mne¯me¯] of the discussions we have had.’’117 Paul employs the second technique to the Philippians in 4:8–9. He promises them the ‘‘peace’’ of God if they will distract themselves from their present anxiety by the contemplation of virtue and other moral goods: ‘‘whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is pure, whatsoever is pleasing [hosa prosphile¯],118 whatsoever is commendable, if there is any virtue [arete¯], if there is anything worthy of praise . . . think on these things . . . and the God of peace will be with you.’’ Cyrenaic Consolation Paul’s use of Stoic and Epicurean consolation in Philippians is more or less obvious. The same cannot be said for his use of Cyrenaic consolation, though I think a good case can be made that the Cyrenaic thesis that grief is due in large part to surprise underlies Paul’s exhortation at Philippians 1:28–30. It will be recalled that in Letter 107 Seneca adopts Cyrenaic consolation as his principal strategy, urging Lucilius not to be ‘‘startled’’ (expavit) by his present misfortune, and that in support of this exhortation he offers the following two arguments: (1) that many others have suffered similar misfortunes, and (2) that human suffering is ordained by God. These arguments, which focus respectively on the exemplary suffering of others and on suffering as divinely ordained, are precisely the arguments Paul uses to support his exhortation in Philippians 1:28 that the Philippians not be ‘‘startled’’ (me¯ pturomenoi) by their suffering, arguing first in 1:29 that Christians are called by God to suffer, and then in 1:30 that the Philippians have himself as an example of one who has suffered similarly in the gospel mission. If we are correct in seeing Cyrenaic consolation here, then, it should be noted that, like Seneca in To Helvia 5.3–6, Paul is using Cyrenaic consolation to supplement his otherwise Stoic approach. Other Types of Popular Consolation in Philippians We have seen that philosophers like Seneca employed both popular and technical philosophical arguments in their consolations, and this is also the case in Philippians. Paul uses

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Jewish apocalyptic consolation to bolster his argument at Philippians 1:28, 3:20–1, and 4:5.119 He also offers various practical, ad hoc remedies, such as sending Epaphroditus back early ‘‘that you might rejoice in seeing him again’’ (2:28) or reassuring the Philippians that all will be well and that ‘‘I am certain that I shall continue and remain with you all for your progress and joy in the faith’’ (1:25), even though he is by no means certain of this.120 Particularly noteworthy is Paul’s announcement of his plan to send Timothy in 2:19–24. Grief caused by separation was often allayed by providing a substitute for the absent loved one. We have seen that Seneca uses this strategy in his letter of consolation to the mother,121 and it is likely that this strategy underlies Paul’s promise to send Timothy. Timothy is a ‘‘son’’ to Paul, and children often stood in for their parents, especially sons for fathers;122 even more emphatically, Timothy is ‘‘like souled’’ (isophukhon) to Paul. Paul also deploys the popular topos that ‘‘death is gain’’ in Philippians 1:20.123

Conclusion I do not want to engage in the kind of Pauline hagiography typical of an earlier generation of New Testament scholars. Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that Paul’s letter to the Philippians marks a substantial achievement, both personally and intellectually. As for Paul’s personal achievement, we must not lose sight of the fact that he is writing from prison, and although we do not know the precise terms of his imprisonment, he was evidently in mortal danger. Perhaps the experience of imprisonment and the possibility of execution served as a source of inspiration for him: letters from prison tend on the whole to be an impressive genre.124 At the very least he comes off better than the self-absorbed Seneca in his otherwise comparable letter to his mother from exile. But our concern here is not with Paul’s personal courage but with his intellectual achievement, regarding which I would make two concluding comments. First, there should be little disagreement that Paul wrote to the Philippians as a philosopher—a Christianizing philosopher, to be sure, but a philosopher nonetheless. He is struggling with questions of meaning, suffering, and death, and while the terms of his analysis are patently theological (even Christological), his mode of analysis is irreducibly philosophical, and in particular Stoic. That Philippians exhibits a certain philosophical eclecticism is no argument against this, since ancient consolation was often eclectic,125 and since even most straight-up philosophy in the late Republic and early Empire was a mixed bag. Paul was no hack and should not be dismissed as a mere spouter of Popularphilosophie,126 a dated and, frankly, elitist concept that fails to take seriously both the quotidian concerns of most Greco-Roman philosophy and Paul’s own obvious, if largely self-acquired, philosophical savvy. This leads to my second comment, which is that Paul’s appropriation of ‘‘pagan’’ philosophy in Philippians appears to be as genuine as it is creative and original.127 I have

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already suggested that Paul’s approach in Philippians may be fairly described as Stoic in form and Christian in content.128 Here I would add that not only does Paul deploy this ‘‘hylomorphic’’ argument in both headings of his letter (1:12–2:30; 3:1–4:1), but the emotional intensity with which he presses it actually increases over the course of the letter, most famously in chapter 3. Even more revealing is the fact that Paul is able repeatedly to illustrate his high ideals from personal example with no hint of dissimulation.129 I see no reason not to take Paul’s Stoicizing in Philippians at face value as an authentic expression of his moral theology.

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Paul among the Ancient Philosophers The Case of Romans 7

Emma Wasserman

Readers from Augustine to Martin Luther, Karl Barth, and Alain Badiou have made the monologue of Romans 7:7–25 into a centerpiece of reflection on sin, human nature, and subjectivity. Though sin, body, mind, and passions figure elsewhere in Paul’s letters, they are never given the sustained attention of 7:7–25, where a speaker agonizes at length about its inability to put the good into practice and speaks of its body and mind as if simultaneously in and outside them. Whereas this speaker claims confusion in 7:14 (‘‘I do not understand my own actions’’), eventually arrives at a clear-eyed evaluation of its condition: it is trapped by sin in the ‘‘body of death’’ so that it cannot free itself to put into practice God’s law (7:7–13) or the good (7:14–25) more generally.1 A number of influential Christian interpreters have taken the speaker’s incapacity to do the good as capturing something axiomatic about human nature. Thus Augustine understood this as exemplary of how even the best person fails before God and relies wholly on God’s mercy and grace.2 Due to Luther’s rediscovery of the Augustinian reading, the monologue has figured prominently in Protestant theological traditions as a prooftext for Luther’s famous dictum that man is simul iustus et peccator, at once a sinner and justified by God in spite of this depravity. To give only one example drawn from twentieth-century Protestant traditions, Rudolf Bultmann maintains the focus on Romans 7 as a prooftext for doctrines of sin, but he understands sin here primarily as a matter of reliance on the self as opposed to God.3 To the Augustinian-Lutheran tradition, Bultmann adds a modern conception of the subject as a special interior realm of thought and reflection, cut off from the world of objects. He thus reads the speaker’s agonizing reflection on and alienation from its body and mind as prefiguring the crisis of the subject coming to know itself as an object. Bultmann’s appropriation of the monologue demonstrates the interpretive richness

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of the text, but it is not hard to imagine that this reading is ahistorical, given the mutability of notions of self or personality.4 This essay aims to historicize Romans 7 by relating it to ancient intellectual traditions about the mind or soul as sources for human motivation. I argue that the language and argument of the monologue fit with certain Middle-Platonic traditions of moral psychology and that the text can be better understood as depicting the death of the soul, where the mind is radically disempowered and metaphorically killed by passions and appetites. These philosophical discourses and traditions shed light on the speaker as reason or mind and sin as a personified representation of the passions. They also explain the language about slavery, warfare, imprisonment, death, and the problem of self-contradiction, which the speaker describes at such length. Though it is not self-evident that such a historical analysis should matter to contemporary appropriators of Paul, a fine-grained account of Paul’s language and argument may prove interesting, and perhaps even generative, for other interpreters. One implication of this reading is that Paul does not posit something special about interior states and dispositions as compared to other objects of analysis because he does not work with a modern view of the self or subject. Thus, the crisis of the knowing subject so important to readers like Bultmann disappears because the mind is not a unique thinking self but a bundle of reasoning dispositions and capacities rendered inoperative by the passions. The division and alienation of the monologue reflects antagonism between ontologically distinct parts of the soul with different capacities and functions. One of the interesting things about Paul, then, is that, unlike Augustine, Luther, and Bultmann, he does not seem to regard this condition as a fixed ontological inheritance from Adam but rather as historically conditioned, ethnically specific, and mutable.

Self-Contradiction and Soul-Death Several decades of work among scholars of ancient philosophy has shown that Hellenistic and Roman philosophers make the soul’s passions and emotions a central preoccupation of ethics.5 Though they do not agree on what the mind or soul is or on what constitutes a passion or emotion, all schools of thought assume that the passions ultimately motivate immoral actions and so are responsible for human suffering and wickedness. Thus discussions of passions and emotions become central as intellectuals compete with one another to describe and contest their models of the mind or soul. More practically, moral writers make these theories foundational for developing ethical diagnoses and cures for human wickedness and suffering. With the notable exception of the early Stoics, they assume that these ‘‘patients’’ and their moral ailments can be arranged on a spectrum from the perfect sage to the perfectly unjust person.6 In spite of occasional generalizations about the evils of the masses or the general wickedness of mankind, philosophical writers seem to assume that even if most people sometimes act badly, others do so more regularly, and some

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always do. The Platonic condition of soul death captures the moral psychology of a person at or near the more negative end of such a spectrum. A consideration of the rhetorical structure of the monologue and the types of intellectual interests and skills operative in the text will help to frame the more particular argument about soul death advanced here. As Stanley Stowers has shown, the introspective monologue developed in Romans 7 reflects the formal characteristics of speech in character (proso¯popo¯eia or ethopo¯eia), a technique taught in basic rhetorical training.7 Speech in character involves the creation of fictitious stereotyped characters to further description, argument, and instruction. So the first-century c.e. rhetorician Quintilian explains: We display the inner thoughts of our adversaries as though they were talking with themselves (but we shall only carry conviction if we represent them as uttering what they may reasonably be supposed to have had in their minds); or without sacrifice of credibility we may introduce conversations between themselves and others, or of others among themselves, and put words of advice, reproach, complaint, praise or pity into the mouths of the appropriate persons. (Institutes of Oratory 9.2.30) Such instructions help to explain Paul’s creation of and conversations with fictive interlocutors in Romans, as in 2:1 ‘‘you there, mister’’ or 2:17 ‘‘you who call yourself a Jew.’’ These dialogue partners become objects of exhortation and sometimes interject with questions that advance the argument, as in 3:1 ‘‘is the law then sin?’’ or respond to questions, as in 7:7: ‘‘Is the law then sin? [interlocutor answers] By no means!’’8 The quote from Quintilian also suggests the possibility of an internal monologue that gives voice to ‘‘the inner thoughts of our adversaries as though they were talking with themselves.’’ Other rhetoricians underscore the use of speech in character to discuss passions and emotions, as Aelius Theon offers the temperate man and the lover as examples of how to develop characters with states of mind appropriate to proso¯popo¯eia (Exercises 8.115–16). Theon also remarks of speech in character that ‘‘This exercise is most receptive of characters and emotions’’ (Exercises 8.117).9 Several additional features of Romans 7 fit with the technique of speech in character. First, there is an abrupt change in authorial voice at 7:7, which is a form of enallge¯ or metabole¯ that signals a shift to a new topic or life situation. Second, the tenses in 7:7–8:2 reflect the formal characteristics of speech in character, as the interlocutor speaks of the past in 7:7–13, the present in 7:14–25, and the future in 7:24–8:2. Though rhetoricians usually recommend beginning with the wretched present and then turning to the past, Hermogenes and Aphthonius indicate that there is flexibility in the order of tenses.10 Finally, the cry ‘‘Wretched man that I am, who will rescue me from this body of death?’’ (7:24a) has strong parallels in tragedy and philosophical appropriations of tragic monologues. Seneca’s Medea cries, ‘‘What, wretched woman, have I done?’’; Ovid has Medea characterize herself as infelix (Metamorphoses 7:18); and Epictetus introduces his own Medea with a fictive ‘‘I’’ who asks, ‘‘Who is more wretched than I?’’ (Discourses 2.17.18).11

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The rhetorical texts suggest the possibility of the interior monologue of Romans 7, but the subject matter also has close analogues in drama and philosophical appropriations of dramatic monologues. This literature shows that Paul’s intellectual repertoire includes not only rhetorical skills like speech in character but also certain intellectual interests and skills drawn from Greek moral traditions. Philosophical writers often appeal to characters from epic and tragedy but tend to give the character of Medea special prominence in debates about the problem of acting against one’s reasoned reflection and judgment, sometimes discussed as akrasia. Writers often appropriate lines from Euripides’ Medea that depict her as wavering before killing her children and reflecting on her acts as bad, construing them as: ‘‘I know what I am about to do is bad, but anger is master of my plans, which is the source of human beings’ greatest troubles,’’ (Medea 1078–80).12 Thus understood, Medea typifies the problem of acting against one’s reason (here because of anger), a paradox that Socrates raises and that Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics all answer in distinctive ways. Whereas Socrates denies the possibility of such contradiction, Plato’s late theory explains this as the effects of the soul’s passions and appetites.13 His wellknown and influential tripartite model of reason, spirit, and appetite construes bad acts as resulting from the ill effects of the spirited and appetitive desires, not from any internal problem with reason or mind. The Stoics respond to Plato by insisting that there are no lower or irrational faculties, just reason; bad actions follow from bad thinking and passions are just bad thinking. Where Plato explains this as produced by struggle and antagonism between ontologically distinct parts, the Stoics counter that such contradiction arises because of a wavering between rationalized commitments within a single unified mind. Though arguably Platonic and Stoic theories of mind could be construed as complementary, philosophical polemics pose them as antithetical.14 Thus the second-century medical writer and Platonist Galen draws on the charioteer analogy from the Phaedrus (253c–54e) as he argues for a Platonic interpretation of Medea’s psyche: She knew what an unholy and terrible thing she was doing, when she set out to kill her children, and therefore she hesitated . . . Then anger dragged her again to the children by force, like some disobedient horse that has overpowered the charioteer; then reason in turn drew her back and led her away, then anger again exerted an opposite pull, and then again reason. Consequently, being repeatedly driven up and down by the two of them, when she has yielded to anger, at that time Euripides has her say: ‘‘I understand what evils I am going to do, but anger prevails over my counsels.’’ (On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato 3.3.14–16)15 Medea’s deliberation exemplifies the battle between reason and the emotions of the spirited part of the tripartite soul, and she commits infanticide when reason finally loses this struggle. In contrast, the Stoics respond to Plato by developing a unified, monistic theory

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of mind that understands immoral actions as the result of assents to false beliefs and irrational judgments. Thus Plutarch explains the Stoic position: Some people [meaning the Stoics] say that passion is no different from reason, and that there is no dissension and conflict between the two, but a turning of the single reason in two directions, which we do not notice owing to the sharpness and speed of change. We do not perceive that the natural instrument of appetite and regret, or anger and fear, is the same part of the soul, which is moved by pleasure towards wrong, and while moving recovers itself again. For appetite and anger and fear and all such things are corrupt opinions and judgments, which do not arise about just one part of the soul but are the whole commanding faculty’s inclinations, yieldings, assents and impulses, and, quite generally, activities which change rapidly, just like children’s fights, whose fury and intensity are volatile and transient owing to their weakness. (On Moral Virtue 446F–447A)16 Fast, imperceptible alterations in judgment cause Medea to waver between competing options. Theoretically, if a Stoic teacher could have intervened and corrected her false beliefs about the appropriateness of infanticide in this context, then she would not have killed her children. The competition between Stoics and Platonists on issues of moral psychology supplies at least some explanation for the continued status of self-contradiction as a relevant and interesting topic of discussion.17 Though Medea’s monologue becomes emblematic of the psycho-ethical conflict between reason and passion, this conflict is not limited to the specific case of anger versus reason. Of special relevance here are cases where the appetites have risen to rule in place of reason, a condition more severe than that of Medea as usually understood. On the Platonic model, the rational part desires wisdom and should ideally rule over its good reasoning desires, or forcibly harmonize them with those of the spirited and appetitive faculties, but the appetites pose a special problem for reason’s rule. Because appetites desire pleasures that are transient and unstable—like the temporary satisfaction of eating delicious foods or having sex—they ominously tend toward excess; if they are not checked, the person as a whole becomes a glutton, a drunkard, or a sexually licentious person. Appetites are therefore threatening to reason and thus to the moral actions and habits of the person to whom they belong. The Platonic tradition also associates the appetites (negatively) with the body, because they are misled by bodily senses into going after things that only appear pleasurable, as opposed to stable pleasures like knowledge and wisdom, which the mind alone desires.18 Thus Galen warns of the ill effects of the soul’s appetites: Strive to hold this most excessive (or violent) power in check before it grows and acquires unconquerable strength. For then, even if you should want to, you will not

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be able to hold it in check; then you will say what I heard a certain lover say—that you wish to stop but you cannot—then you will call on us for help but in vain, just as that man begged for someone to help him and to cut out his passion [pathos]. For there are also passions of the body which because of their greatness are beyond cure. Perhaps you have never thought about this. It would be better, then, for you to think now and consider whether I am telling the truth when I say that the passionate power [epithume¯tike¯n dunamin] often waxes so strong that it hurls us into desire [ero¯ta] beyond all cure, a love not only for beautiful bodies and sexual pleasures but also for voluptuous eating, gluttony in food and drink, and for lewd, unnatural conduct.19 This text describes the appetites as a violent and threatening faculty. The appetites are associated with the body (‘‘passions of the body’’) and cause the disempowerment of reason when they have grown too excess. The narrator warns of self-contradiction (‘‘you will say . . . you wish to stop but you cannot’’) and so typifies the plight of selfcontradiction in the second person as a form of direct exhortation.20 The Platonic tripartite theory explains immoral actions as motivated by the passions and appetites when they disobey their natural ruler, reason. Especially in extreme cases of immorality, such a model gives rise to important traditions of personification and metaphor that imagine the passions—and especially the appetites—as evil counter-rulers that hatch evil plans against reason. Book 9 of the Republic develops the tyrannical man as one such type. He appears as the last (and worst) moral character in Plato’s extended discussion of moral-psychological types and the forms of rule with which they correlate. Book 9 discusses the tyrannical type of soul at length as a case where appetites accomplish an evil coup against reason. In an extended series of analogies, an appetitive ruler (alternatively a ruling passion, monstrous winged bee, or vice) rallies the other appetites, conquers any good passions of the spirited part, and succeeds in imprisoning and enslaving the mind. He writes of ‘‘tyrant makers’’ who actively foster the appetites in the tyrant to be: ‘‘When those clever enchanters and tyrant makers have no hope of keeping hold of the young man in any other way, they contrive to plant in him a powerful erotic love [ero¯ta) to be the protector of his idle and prodigal appetites [epithumio¯n], like a great winged drone to be the leader of those idle desires [ero¯ta]’’ (Republic 9.572e–73a). When the rise of the appetitive ruler is complete, the tyrant has within him a tyrannical ruling passion: ‘‘the passion [ero¯s] that dwells in him as a tyrant will live in utmost anarchy and lawlessness, and, since it is itself sole autocrat, will urge the polity, so to speak, of him in whom it dwells to dare anything and everything in order to find support for himself and the hubbub of his henchmen’’ (Republic 9.574d–75a). The personification of a single desire or group of desires as an evil ruler seems to arise as if to answer the question ‘‘If reason is not in control, who or what is?’’ Working from similar assumptions, some later writers also imagine the disempowerment of reason as brought about by a personified ruler of the appetites. Thus Plutarch casts the appetites

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as led by ‘‘vice’’ in the abstract (On Moral Virtue 101A), and Philo of Alexandria depicts the mind ‘‘cast into the prison of the passions [patho¯n)’’ (That God Is Unchangeable 111). In the same text, Philo goes on to personify the passions as an evil jailor, as well as the jail itself. Echoing the Republic (9.579b), Philo writes: ‘‘The overseer and warder and manager of them, the governor of the prison, is the composite whole and concentration of all the vices [kakio¯n] crowded together and diverse, woven together into a single form’’ (That God Is Unchangeable 113). These texts personify a single appetite or group of appetites as an evil ruler within the soul, using analogies drawn from political power, warfare, and imprisonment. Such analogies could be multiplied, but further examples drawn from Philo also make broad use of the language of death and dying. As a Platonizing Jewish exegete, Philo appropriates a wide range of Platonic metaphors and analogies to dramatize moral-psychological states and possibilities. In keeping with the Platonic tradition, he regularly describes the divided soul using analogies drawn from political power and slavery, but in some contexts he also makes broad use of the language of death and dying.21 Thus he interprets God’s warning to Adam that he will die if he eats from the tree of life: The death is of two kinds, one that of the man in general, the other that of the soul in particular. The death of the man is the separation of the soul from the body, but the death of the soul [psyche¯] is the decay of virtue and the bringing in of wickedness [kakias]. It is for this reason that God says not only ‘‘die’’ but ‘‘die the death,’’ indicating not the death common to us all, but that special death properly so called, which is that of the soul becoming entombed in passions [pathesi] and wickedness of all kinds. And this death is practically the antithesis of the death which awaits us all. The latter is a separation of combatants that had been pitted against one another, body [so¯matos] and [psyche¯). The former, on the other hand, is the meeting of the two in conflict. And in this conflict the worse, the body, overcomes, and the better, the soul, is overcome. (Allegorical Interpretation 1.105–7) The text alternates between depicting the appetites as entombing passions, invading wickedness, the body, and the ‘‘worse part,’’ as opposed to the soul, virtue, or the better part. The association between body (the worse part) and wickedness makes sense on the Platonic premises that the appetites motivate wickedness and that they use the bodily senses to do so. The mind, by contrast, rightfully rules the soul and motivates virtue. The ‘‘worse part’’ is standard Platonic language for the passions and appetites (in contrast to the ‘‘better part,’’ the mind) and the use of soul to stand for reason or mind has many precedents in Platonic writings. In keeping with these Platonic assumptions, Philo uses death to convey the disempowerment of reason and takes pains to clarify this use of metaphor. This, too, reflects a Platonic model of moral psychology, since Plato and later Platonists often use violent imagery to explain the relation between the soul’s parts but

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deny that any part of the soul can actually destroy another. Though Philo’s use of death metaphors has no obvious precedent in the moral literature, the underlying phenomenon is the same as in the examples drawn from Plato, Plutarch, and Galen: when one part of the soul rises to dominate the other, this can be referred to variously as the dominant part imprisoning, entombing, making war, attacking, invading, enslaving, ruling, and in some cases killing or putting to death the dominated faculty. The metaphors can just as easily be reversed to capture the same underlying problem. Thus Philo continues: ‘‘the penalty-death takes place when the soul dies to the life of virtue, and is alive only to that of wickedness’’ (Allegorical Interpretation 107–8).

The Death of the Soul in Romans 7 Platonic traditions of representing extreme cases of immorality illuminate a number of difficult aspects of the language and argument of Romans 7. First, these traditions encourage a reading of death as a metaphor for domination, alongside the more standard Platonic metaphors of slavery (7:14), imprisonment (7:23), and warfare (7:23). This explains why a speaker that claims to have died at the beginning of the monologue then continues to speak for another twenty verses and fits with the moral-psychological picture developed in the monologue as a whole, where the problem appears normative and unrelenting. Second, these traditions suggest that sin should be identified as a personified representation of the passions and the speaker as reason or mind. Like Plato’s drone and ruling passion, Plutarch’s vice, and Philo’s jailor, sin in Romans 7 makes sense as representing the appetites that have risen to kill, make war, and enslave reason. Such a reading accounts for the division and alienation between sin and the speaking ‘‘I,’’ the association of sin with the passions (‘‘sin worked in me all kinds of desires’’ 7:8; cf. 6:12), the association with the body and members (7:18, 23, 24, 25), and the evil acts that result from sin’s dominion and rule. A Platonic model explains why Romans 7 imagines sin as spatially alienated from the speaker, as responsible for bad acts, and as attacking, deceiving, killing, and wresting control of the whole person.22 Interpreting the speaker as reason explains why the narrator reflects, judges, speaks, understands, and depicts itself as spatially alienated from sin. Throughout Romans 7, the speaker has consistently positive attributes and characteristics: it understands the good, wants to do it, and comes to understand (accurately) its terrible plight. Though it reduces the speaker to a reasoning voice crying out for help, this characterization fits with the types of extreme immorality explored previously among Platonists like Philo and Galen. The speaker claims confusion in 7:14, ‘‘I do not understand my own actions,’’ but from verse 14 onward it increasingly achieves clarity about the source of the problem: though the narrator distinguishes good from evil, wants to put the good into action, and delights in the law of God, sin pursues the bad unhindered, in league with the

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flesh and members. Thus the text resolves the initial confusion by posing two competing sources of motivation: it is not the same ‘‘I’’ but rather the mind and inner person that want the good and sin and flesh that bring about the evil. The result is that the ‘‘I’’ really does not do the things that the body (taken as a whole) does, because sin imprisons and enslaves the ‘‘I.’’ Hence the conclusion absolves the speaker, ‘‘If I do the thing that I don’t want to do, then it is no longer I that does this thing, but rather the sin which lives inside me’’ (7:20). Verses 21–25 repeat this resolution and depict the problem as normative and unrelenting. Whereas verses 14–20 establish the problem of self-contradiction, verses 21–25 bring this problem back to the issue of God and God’s law. Verse 21 restates the contradiction in terms of two competing laws or principles, one in the body, and the other in the mind or inner person: ‘‘I find it to be a law that when I want to put the good into practice, evil lies close by.’’ This verse introduces a wordplay on nomos (law) that has previously referred to God’s law (or the Tenth Commandment, in 7:8). This new ‘‘law’’ is simply the principle of self-contradiction, which has been described repeatedly in 14–20. A very literal reading of verse 21 allows us to appreciate the wordplay: ‘‘I delight in the law of God in my inner person, but I see another law in my members making war on the law of my mind and making me a captive to the law of sin that lives in my members.’’ These verses reflect the more basic domination of mind by the passions as a ‘‘law’’ or ‘‘principle.’’ The image of the inner person in 7:22 adds further support to a Platonic reading of the speaker as mind, because the inner person is a metaphor for the reasoning faculty that comes from the Republic (588c–91b). On this interpretation, the speaker is the mind, explaining that, though it does understand the goodness of God’s law, as with everything the mind knows to be good and just, it cannot put these judgments and plans into action. Though this requires that the mind seem to stand outside itself and speak about itself in the third person (‘‘my inner person’’ and ‘‘my mind’’) this is common in dramatic monologue and arises here out of certain Platonic commitments. So the ‘‘I’’ here alternates between seeming to claim responsibility for the actions of the person as a whole bodysoul complex and disowning responsibility, as in the statement ‘‘so then I myself serve the law of God in my mind, but in my flesh I serve the law of sin’’ (7:25). This alteration in the perspectives of the ‘‘I’’ makes sense in light of the Platonic view that reason or mind is in some sense representative of the true personality, while remaining a distinct faculty within the soul complex that is housed (somewhat unfortunately) inside a body. The life and death of the speaker in 7:9–10 seems to pose a problem for the argument that death functions as a metaphor for moral-psychological domination. Here the speaker states: ‘‘I was once alive apart from the law but when the law came in, sin came to life and I died.’’ According to the argument advanced here, the ‘‘I once was alive’’ should refer to a time when the mind was actually able to control the passions and its death, while ‘‘sin came to life,’’ should signal its disempowerment. Yet such an interpretation poses problems for the coherence of Paul’s thought in Romans, since elsewhere he casts

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sin as pandemic (e.g., Rom. 5:12–14). In Romans 7:9–10, however, it makes more sense to take the former life of reason and the death of sin as conveying the mind’s ignorance about its condition. In this way, the law has the effect of awakening the mind to the proper understanding of its true condition. Such flexibility and alteration in the use of metaphor have many precedents in the moral literature, and the use of life and death to convey a transition to a new state of awareness is similar to a use in Menander, a fourthcentury b.c.e comedian. Here is how Menander uses a monologue to depict a man ‘‘cured’’ by philosophy: Believe me, folks, I have been dead during all these years of life that I was alive. The beautiful, the good, the holy, the evil were all the same to me; such, it seems, was the darkness that formerly enveloped my understanding and concealed and hid from me all these things. But now that I have come here, I have become alive again for all the rest of my life, as if I had lain down in the temple of Asclepius and had been saved. I walk, I talk, I think. (Papyrus Didotiana b1–15)23 Here the old life is revealed as a kind of living death because it involved ignorance and lack of true understanding. Read on similar terms, the ‘‘I was once alive apart from the law’’ in 7:8 conveys a time before the mind really understood its plight. The law brings knowledge that it is truly dead or ‘‘killed’’ by sin. It might be objected that 7:7–8 claims that sin seemingly revivifies and that the law creates some kind of special opportunity for it, but this too fits the argument if it is allowed that some severe level of impairment exists already, even if the law exacerbates. The idea that extremely immoral persons are incited to further wickedness by laws or punishments also has some precedents in ancient literature.24 Such a characterization would fit with Romans 1:18–32, where God punishes idolators by handing them over to the domination of their passions; with 3:20, ‘‘the law brings knowledge of sin’’; and with 5:13, ‘‘sin was in the world before the law.’’ On these terms, the monologue of Romans 7 effectively transforms an issue with the law into a discussion about how the mind actually cannot do anything that it knows to be good and just. In other words, it attempts to recast the problem of the law as a species of a broader problem with sin and the passions, which, it seems, only God’s intervention with Christ can remedy. In spite of the extreme nature of the plight developed in 7:7–25, chapter 8 seems to suggest that these problems are resolved, or at least resolved to a significant degree, by the intervention of Christ and Christ’s pneuma. Thus 8:1 announces: ‘‘there is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.’’ Leaving aside the complex questions of what it means to be ‘‘in Christ’’ and what precisely has happened to change the condition described in 7:7–25, it does seem clear that 8:1–17 displays optimism about the possibility of self-control.25 So 8:10 explains, ‘‘if the pneuma of Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the pneuma is life because of righteousness,’’ and 8:13

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exhorts, ‘‘if by the pneuma you put to death the doings of the body, you will live.’’ As in Romans 7, certain Platonic assumptions help to make sense of these exhortations as conveying that the mind can now (somehow) use the pneuma to discipline the passions, or in other words, ‘‘put to death the workings of the body [i.e., the passions].’’ Such an interpretation also makes sense of the difficult language about the ‘‘thoughts of the flesh’’ and the ‘‘thoughts of the pneuma.’’ Though the Platonic passions do not literally have ‘‘mind,’’ aspects of mind are attributed to them in the context of certain metaphors and personifications. Understood in terms of Platonic assumptions, the ‘‘intelligence of the flesh’’ captures the bad desires or appetites that pursue objects such as sex, food, and drink to the point of excess. The person who thinks ‘‘according to the flesh’’ approves of those goods, is ruled by the passions, and will thus be hated by God and condemned to death at the final judgment. This makes sense of Paul’s subsequent statement in 8:6 translated as ‘‘to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the pneuma is life and peace’’ in the New Revised Standard Version. A more literal translation reads: ‘‘the intelligence of the flesh is hostile to God, but the intelligence of the pneuma is life and peace.’’ In service of the analogy, Paul poses two hostile powers within the body, flesh and spirit, and attributes to them antithetical reasoning activities. The language here is also reminiscent of chapter 6, which similarly addresses the person who is in Christ and can obey Paul’s exhortation: ‘‘do not let sin rule in your mortal bodies to make you obey its passions. And do not present your members to sin as instruments of injustice, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought to life from the dead, and present your members to God as instruments of justice’’ (6:12–13).

An Ethnic Exemplar in Romans 7 Interpreters have long taken Paul’s thought about sin and salvation as universal, but internal and external evidence encourages a reading of the monologue of Romans 7 as representing a type of extremely wicked Gentile. Historically, the question of identifying the speaker has tended to dominate discussion about Romans 7, with options ranging from everyman to the pre-Christian sinner, the Christian sinner, Paul before or after his conversion, the Jewish sinner, the Gentile sinner, or perhaps the supposed prototype of all sinners: Adam. This focus on the identity of the speaker arises from the text’s theological legacy, as key interpreters have used the identification to support one or another view of human nature and have made the issue foundational for Christian theories of sin and salvation. The classic example of Augustine makes this point well. As Paula Fredrickson has shown, late in his career Augustine used Romans 7 to argue against the Pelagian view that the human being is basically good and capable of improvement and even perfection.26 Earlier, Augustine had taken the monologue as displaying the pre-Christian, so that 7:7–25 lays out the horrifying plight that ‘‘life in Christ’’ answers in 8:1 and following.

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But in order to undermine the Pelagians, Augustine later changed his position and insisted that the monologue in fact represents the Christian. For the late Augustine, there can be no substantive resolution to the plight of Romans 7, because human beings are not capable of moral progress; the Christian differs from others only in calling upon God’s grace. While most patristic commentators seem to assume that 7:7–25 refers to a non-Christian, Luther famously rediscovered the Augustinian reading in his own experience: ‘‘Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction.’’27 This insight became the bedrock of Luther’s view that human beings are fundamentally depraved but that God justifies them by grace in spite of this depravity. Luther’s critique of Catholic traditions thus made much of Paul’s language about sin, grace, and justification, and polemically aligned Catholics with Paul’s supposed opponents who rely on ‘‘works of the law.’’ As a result, this very dark view of the human being’s condition before God became foundational for the Lutheran doctrine of justification and thus lies at the heart of Protestant traditions. In the twentieth century, a number of important studies have undermined the Augustinian-Lutheran reading, as well as the supposed universalism of the text as a representation of human self-consciousness.28 In his now-famous essay ‘‘The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,’’ Krister Stendahl shows that readers from Augustine onward have taken Paul’s depiction of introspection and inner turmoil as a doctrinal statement about sin and human nature. Read in context, he argued, the text addresses specific concerns with the law rather than some timeless human condition. Furthermore, where Luther understood the speaker to be Paul using his own experience to typify the torment of everyman, Stendahl argues that such an interpretation generates contradictions when compared with Paul’s self-description in texts such as Romans 9:1, 2 Cor 1:12, and 1 Cor 4:4, where ‘‘the tone is one of confidence, not of plagued conscience.’’29 Stendahl also draws on the important work of Werner George Ku¨mmel, who had argued that the speaker introduced at 7:7 is a type of fictive ‘‘I’’ rather than an actual person or Paul himself. Ku¨mmel also points out that there is no evidence that the claim ‘‘I was once alive apart from the law’’ (7:8) could describe a Jew at any point in his or her life.30 Subsequent interpreters of Romans 7 have tried to take the critiques of Stendahl and Ku¨mmel seriously but have shown a pervasive tendency to prefer abstract and universalizing models of the speaker. Even though some still assert that the autobiographical reading has merit, for example, interpreters often supply the additional premise that Paul intends his own plight to convey something abstract and universal. According to many scholars, this could be Paul speaking of his pre-or post-conversion experience (add the possible interpretations of Augustine and Luther above) and intending this plight to capture his own experience, that of the ‘‘typical Jew,’’ that of ‘‘everyman,’’ or perhaps even some synthesis of the two.31 If one considers the evidence, however, little or none of it supports the idea that this speaker is a ‘‘typical Jew who relies on the law’’ or some

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paradigmatic figure like Adam, for the rather basic reason that there is no evidence for the ‘‘typicalness’’ of such a Jew or the use of Adam as such a paradigm for sin.32 The third option, that this is the plight of ‘‘everyman,’’ obviates the autobiographical particularity of the monologue and returns it to its status of proof text of human nature with limitless generalizing possibilities. This approach is sometimes preferred by the ecumenically minded, but it has the effect of seeming to take historical particularity seriously while rendering it irrelevant.33 Alternatively, if one takes the speaker to be ‘‘everyman’’ in some localized way (‘‘everyman’’ before Christ’s return), then, arguably, the condition depicted in 7:7–25 seems too severe to count as a model for all. That is, though Romans contains hyperbolic statements like ‘‘all are under sin’’ (3:20), the text regularly differentiates between good and bad Jews and Gentiles (e.g., the good Gentile in 2:12–16; in Romans 3:2, ‘‘what if some [Jews] are unfaithful?’’). Thus, at one extreme interpreters continue to insist that the monologue captures the de facto plight of ‘‘everyman’’—as if all reflexively agree on the deep moral conflicts that characterize human nature according to the Augustinian-Lutheran view—while others find that the monologue is simply incoherent as a description of the human plight.34 If there is one issue on which most interpreters seem to agree, it is that Romans 7:7–25 must turn out to be a de-ethnicized, departicularized human struggle with sin. In contrast to the universalizing tendencies noted above, some scholars have argued that Romans directly addresses Gentiles and that Romans 7 develops a paradigm of the Gentile sinner.35 I find at least four justifications for the position that Romans 7 represents a paradigmatic Gentile. First, 7:9 refers to the speaker living apart from the law, and, as Ku¨mmel argued decades ago, there is no evidence to suggest that a Jew could ever be described as living ‘‘apart from the law.’’36 Second, the direct address of the letter is specifically to the Gentiles at Rome (1:5–7, 13–5; 11:13; 15:15–16). In spite of the fact that Paul discusses issues of interest to Jews and Gentiles, the Gentile address makes good sense as a strategy that allows the letter to be overheard by a broader audience in a variety of ways, while overtly only addressing a Gentile audience. Though readers could certainly extend the vice list in 29–32 so as to indict gossiping and murderous Jews as well as gossiping and murderous Gentiles, it is important to distinguish the implied or encoded audience from the near-limitless possible interpretations by actual readers. Third, internal and external evidence suggests that Paul’s arguments here develop a Jewish tradition of viewing Gentiles (at least generally) as the characteristically immoral other.37 Such a view is expressed in 1 Thessalonians, where Paul refers to his former instructions ‘‘that you abstain from porneia; that each of you know how to control his or her own body with holiness and honor, not with passionate desires, like the Gentiles who do not know God’’ (4:3–5). Similarly, though Romans 1:16 explains that the Gospel is the power of salvation ‘‘for the Jew first and also the Greek,’’ the plight discussed in Romans 1:18–32 draws on and develops traditions about Gentile idolatry and God’s punishment for it. God hands over idolaters so that they become dominated by passions, desires, and a base mind; this

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provides a clear explanation, then, for the terrible moral-psychological condition of Romans 7. Fourth, scholars have noted that the punishment in Romans 1 is a moralpsychological one, since passions, appetites, impulses, and a base mind are the specific instrument of God’s punishment.38 Paul writes in 1:24, ‘‘therefore God gave them up to the desires [epithumiais] of their hearts,’’ in 1:26, ‘‘for this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions,’’ and in 1:28, ‘‘and so God gave them up to a base mind [noun].’’ Taking seriously this moral-psychological punishment of the Gentiles explains why 7:7–25 addresses an extreme moral-psychological plight (soul death) and why Paul’s language in Romans 6 and 8 describes God’s intervention with Christ as somehow restoring this lost capacity for self-control.39 Such a terrible situation is particularly problematic in light of a coming judgment, since Gentiles, unlike Jews, keep accumulating sins over time because they lack a system of atonement. With others, then, I find that the problem of particular interest to Paul is what to do about Gentiles given their near total alienation from God and the (impending) final judgment.40 Interpreting Romans 7 as describing a wicked Gentile raises certain issues with regard to the coherence of Paul’s thought about salvation and justification. f Paul views the problem of sin as distinctive of Gentiles, does it then follow that his solution (justification by the faithfulness of Christ) also differs for Jews and Gentiles? While some have argued that the answer should be emphatically ‘‘yes,’’ others remain uncommitted to a specific theory of how Paul views the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection for Jews.41 It does seem clear, though, that he consistently distinguishes between good and bad Jews and Gentiles and that the problem developed in Romans 7 is specific to the Gentiles. In light of these considerations, taking the speaker as an immoral Gentile of the type generically discussed in 1:18–32 makes most sense of the evidence as it currently stands.

Conclusions I have argued that Romans 7 appropriates certain key Platonic assumptions, images, and language to depict the death of the soul. Similar conditions are addressed directly by middle Platonists and alluded to by moral writers as an ominous kind of worst-case scenario where the appetites succeed in storming ‘‘the citadel of the soul’’ (Philo, Allegorical Interpretation 2.91–92; Plato, Timaeus 70a.; Republic 560b) to replace its rightful ruler, reason. Such alienation and strife fit particularly well with Platonic views of the soul and with Platonic traditions of self-contradiction, since the monologue explains this contradiction as arising out of two competing sources of motivation (sin and the ‘‘I’’) that are spatially alienated, in fierce conflict, and have antithetical capacities and functions. Such a reading suggests a relatively optimistic view of reason’s capacities and functions as good, at least compared with the very dark Augustinian-Lutheran tradition. Against this tradition, I have also sought to qualify the sense in which the human being in Romans 7 may

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count as a universal model for all. Not only does the moral condition fit the depiction of the Gentiles, but this condition also arises for a particular reason (idolatry) and for a particular span of time (before the parousia). If the reading proposed here has substantial merit, then it suggests that a text often taken as a model for the plight of mankind universally is best read historically as addressing the especially mangled souls of the Gentiles. This does not imply, of course, that there are not very important ways in which Paul’s thought can be described as universal or universalizing. Certainly, for example, his overarching commitments are to the reconciliation of all peoples to a God who is God of all. Yet for Paul this does not seem to imply that all will be reconciled to God in the same way or that all persons share the same fundamental ‘‘self.’’

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Paul and Universalism Troels Engberg-Pedersen

Is there an Archimedean point, standing at which one may legitimately claim to possess a perspective on human life that is genuinely universal in such a way that, in urging all groups of people to adopt it, one is not doing more violence to some groups than to others? No, there is not. Any claim to universality will probably favor at least one perspective more than others: its own. Does it follow, then, that there is no valid claim to any kind of universality? This essay will attempt to explain how the latter claim does not follow. At issue is the relationship between a universal perspective on human beings and particular perceptions of identity. If these two outlooks cannot in some way be reconciled, the practical result will probably be violence. I shall claim that there do exist perspectives of the required type. Furthermore, I shall argue that what makes it legitimate to urge all people to adopt them is the fact that these perspectives are not just universal but also to some extent allow for particular differences. In this interchange, both sides of the dichotomy give up something. They give up the idea that they are the only legitimate ones and hence that only what is shared or only what is particular can make a legitimate claim for itself. The issue of how to reconcile some form of universalism with ethnicity, in particular, is a burning one in contemporary politics of identity and has been so for the last few decades. The general trend has been to emphasize the realities of ethnic perceptions of identity and to question the disinterestedness of universalist claims. Is my claim to possess a universal perspective not just an attempt to make others adopt an enlarged version of my own particular outlook? What set of considerations would give me the right to brush aside the deeply engrained, particular perceptions of identity of others?

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Following the termination of the Cold War in 1989, this kind of concern for ethnicity was everywhere: in public discourse, in the academy, in Pauline studies, and in the broader study of the ancient world.1 The reaction was not slow to come, however. Thus, within Anglo-American moral philosophy, whereas British philosopher Bernard Williams had argued in 1985 that any kind of ethics is fundamentally a local phenomenon and that there are limits to the potential of philosophy to overcome theoretically the confrontation between incommensurable ethical views, in 1994 a group of philosophers around Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor addressed the politics of the recognition of differences within multiculturalist democratic societies.2 In the same year, Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam discussed the relationship between universal values and traditional ways of life in connection with pragmatism and relativism.3 In a French context, then, in 1997 Alain Badiou’s rich and fascinating reading of the apostle Paul directly addressed the issue of a legitimate form of universalist stance against the background of the current emphasis on the claims of local groups, whether ethnic or otherwise.4 The present essay aims to assess this reaction, with special focus on Badiou.5 With Putnam I shall insist that ‘‘pluralism should not be confused with naive cultural relativism,’’ that ‘‘many philosophers confuse the notion of a ‘universal ethic’ with the notion of ‘a universal way of life,’ and finally that ‘‘the ethic that is needed . . . [will] combine the great Enlightenment value of tolerance with the respect for the particularity of tradition.’’6 With Badiou, but also in some disagreement with him, I shall take a closer look at Paul and also at certain philosophers contemporary with him, the Stoics, who are not addressed by Badiou, in order to see exactly how universalism and a concern for particularity may be combined. I should make it clear here that I do not quite see Paul as the great founding figure of a viable form of thinking of the universal in the way he comes out in Badiou.7 For one thing, as I have argued elsewhere, the basic logical machinery employed by Paul to articulate his ‘‘universalist’’ perspective had been developed centuries earlier within Stoicism.8 Likewise, it is important to recognize—as I think Badiou does not, at least not sufficiently—that there are not only ‘‘universalist’’ but also distinctly ethnic strategies in Paul and that the resulting picture is thus a rather complex one. Finally, I think one has to recognize that the strong and direct concern for differences that permeates the modern discussion—though not Badiou’s—has no immediate counterpart either in Paul or in Stoicism, even when it is included in their ‘‘universalist’’ claim. In them, what is uppermost is a concern for a certain ‘‘universalist’’ perspective (different, but nevertheless closely similar in either case) that allows for differences without being very concerned about them. The aim of this essay is to bring out the exact content of this idea. If I am right, one may conclude either that the two ancient bodies of thought do not say quite enough about the relationship between the universal and the particular as part of a single view—or else, if one is convinced by the ancients, that one cannot, apparently, have a

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similar degree of concern for both the universal and the particular perspectives as part of a single view.9 To set the scene, and bring us back to the ancients, I shall give a long quotation from Paul’s near-contemporary, Plutarch (ca. 50–120 c.e.), who in book I of On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander (the Great) fantasizes about the relationship between the utopian theory presented in the Republic of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, and Alexander’s political practice. Here we find precisely the mistake noted by Putnam of confusing the notion of a universal ethic with the notion of a universal way of life. We shall see, however, that both the Stoics themselves and Paul could do better. Moreover, the much-admired Republic of Zeno, the founder of the Stoic sect, may be summed up in this one main principle: that we should not each of us live differentiated by each our respective rules of justice into separate cities and communities, but that we should consider all men to be of one community and one city, and that we should have a single life and world [eis . . . bios . . . kai kosmos], even as a herd that feeds together and shares the pasturage of a common field. This Zeno wrote, sketching, as it were, a dream or shadowy picture of a philosopher’s (understanding of) a well-ordered polity [ho¯sper onar ¯e eido¯lon eunomias philosophou kat politeias anatupo¯samenos]: but it was Alexander who gave effect to the idea. For Alexander did not follow Aristotle’s advice to treat the Greeks as if he were their leader, and other peoples as if he were their master; to have regard for the Greeks as for friends and kindred, but to conduct himself toward other peoples as though they were plants or animals; for to do so would have been to cumber his leadership with numerous battles and banishments and festering seditions. But, as he believed that he came as a heaven-sent governor to all, and as a mediator for the whole world [koinos he¯kein theothen harmoste¯s kai diallakte¯s to¯n holo¯n nomizo¯n], those whom he could not persuade to unite with him, he conquered by force of arms, and he brought together into one body all men everywhere, uniting and mixing in one great lovingcup, as it were [ho¯sper ev krate¯ri philote¯sio¯ meixas], men’s lives, their characters, their marriages, their very habits of life [tas diaitas]. He bade them all consider as their fatherland the whole inhabited earth, as their stronghold and protection his camp, as akin to them all good men, and as foreigners only the wicked; they should not distinguish between Greek and barbarian by a [Macedonian] cloak or [Thracian] shield or [Persian] sword or [Median)] jacket; but the distinguishing mark of the Greek should be seen in virtue, and that of the barbarian in vice; clothing and food, marriage and manner of life they should regard as common to all [koinas], being blended into one by ties of blood and children. (Moralia 329A-D) Alexander desired to render all upon earth subject to one law of reason [henos hupe¯koa logou] and one form of government and to reveal all men as one people, and

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to this purpose he made himself conform. But if the deity that sent down Alexander’s soul into this world of ours had not recalled him quickly, one law [eis . . . nomos] would govern all mankind, and they all would look toward one rule of justice [hen dikaion] as though toward a common source of light. But as it is, that part of the world which has not looked upon Alexander has remained without sunlight. (Moralia 330D)10 Is this the kind of universalism we are after in our present time and place? No. So, let us look at Paul in more detail, in relation first to his universalizing strategies, then to his ethnic ones. This will lead us to the point where we can see the logic of the deeper complexity of the Pauline picture: with a focus that is both universalizing and (quasi-) ethnically particularistic and exclusivistic, it also allows for ethnic (and other) differences within itself. Such complexity is derived, as we shall see, from the very content of the universalizing thought, a content that in itself bridges between the universal and the particular.11 And in this Paul is fundamentally at one with his Stoic predecessors.

Universalizing Strategies in Paul Galatians 5:6 and 6:15 may be quoted as well-known examples of a universalizing claim. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision has any force [ti iskhuei] nor un-circumcision, but [only] faith that is active through love [pistis di agape¯s energoumene¯]. (Gal. 5:6) For neither is circumcision anything [ti estin] nor un-circumcision, but [only] new creation [kaine¯ ktisis]. (Gal. 6:15) What makes these two claims universalizing is the idea that there is a single thing that matters (for ‘‘justice’’ and ‘‘life,’’ cf., e.g., 5:4–5 and 3:21) to Jews and Gentiles alike, while the traditional, ethnic distinguishing markers do not matter. Earlier in the letter Paul has famously extended the same idea to cover not just being circumcised or otherwise (Jew and Greek), but other fundamental social identity markers as well (slave or free, male or female): ‘‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus’’ (Gal. 3:28) . These are the classic examples in the letter to the Galatians of a supposedly universalizing bend of Paul’s thought. But there are much more intriguing ones. A close analysis of the passage 5:13–26, for example, in which Paul spells out what ‘‘faith that is active through love’’ (5:6) actually consists in, shows that Paul is here operating with some ideas that are distinctly Jewish and others that are distinctly Greek in a manner that makes

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them converge on what he himself wishes to say.12 He suddenly brings the Jewish law in again (5:14), though one would have thought it had by now been left out (cf. 5:1–4), and says that it has been fulfilled when Christ-believers behave the way he argues they should.13 Next he goes on to develop an argument (5:16–25) to show what his own preferred way of life consists in, drawing on a basic idea in previous Greek moral philosophy going back to Aristotle. Thus in his actual argumentative practice, Paul might himself be said to transcend a merely Jewish perspective and a merely Greek one and to use whatever he can from these two traditions to bring out what it means to live by the spirit, which belongs only to those who are in Christ (5:24–25). In the letter to the Romans, too, there are both well-known and more intriguing examples of the same universalizing trend. On a traditional—and, I believe, correct— reading of Romans 1:18–3:20, Paul aims to show that both Jews and Greeks outside Christ are ‘‘under sin’’ (3:9).14 They have all sinned and all fall short of God’s glory (3:23). Therefore, God has sent Christ in order that they may become just through faith (3:21– 26). In the overall argumentative structure of the letter these initial, dogmatic claims may be seen as part of a universalizing strategy whose aim is to bring about unity and harmony within the Roman congregations (see, e.g., 14:17, 15:5–6), across the lines that separate non-Jewish Christ-believers, who constitute the letter’s primary group of addressees, and Jews, no matter whether the latter are Christ-believers (chaps. 14–15) or have not yet become so (chaps. 9–11). All through, then, the aim appears to be unity across ethnic boundaries. In this letter, too, there are more intriguing examples of a universalizing trend, once more to be found in Paul’s own argumentative practice. Thus, for instance, in Romans 7 (7:7–25), he can be read as arguing that the best kind of life outside Christ, which is that of living under the Jewish law, is at the same time also exactly the kind of life that the Greek philosophical tradition had identified as a life led in the constant risk of akrasia, or weakness of will. Both types of life are then overcome in Christ, but here, too, the new life in Christ is once more said to fulfill the Jewish law (8:2–4).15 There is no need to multiply these examples of what has traditionally been seen as a universalizing trend in Paul. Instead, we should now note that there are just as many examples of far more particularistic, even ethnic strategies that aim to identify the group of Christ-believers as a distinct group with its own ethnic distinguishing markers—what one may well call an ethnie, or (quasi-)ethnie, of its own.16

(Quasi-)Ethnic Strategies in Paul We may begin by noting that, when Paul focuses so exclusively on Christ faith as the one thing that matters, he is in fact insisting that both Jews and Greeks must give up something crucial to their previous identities if and when they turn to Christ. If they do not

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make this sacrifice, then they will remain outside. Thus there is also a very strong element of exclusivity about Paul’s construction of the Christ faith. Jews must certainly give up something vital to their previous self-understanding, namely, seeing the requirement to follow the Mosaic law (including performing the various practices, such as circumcision, that separated Jews from non-Jews) as part of the road to justice and salvation. This is such a strong claim on Paul’s part that one can easily understand why other Christ-believing Jews reacted with anger against this downplaying of the Mosaic law. The issue is complicated by the fact that Paul himself insisted that the Christ faith was a genuine form of Judaism, in fact the genuine form (see most clearly Romans 9–11).17 It remains the case, however, that, by making the claim of Galatians 5:6 and 6:15 quoted above, Paul in fact pulls the carpet out from under the traditional Jewish claim that following the Mosaic law was a necessary condition for salvation and that it set Jews—God’s elected people—apart from all others. Gentiles, too, must give up something by ‘‘turning to serve the living and true God’’ (1 Thess. 1:9). They must take their new relationship with the one almighty God, who is, of course, also the Jewish God, so seriously that they will give up any real contact with their own old gods. When the Galatians consider being circumcised, Paul chides them with considering a move that will in fact mean going back to their earlier religious allegiances (Gal. 4:8–9). In short, the ties with the old ‘‘gods’’ must be severed. In the same vein, 1 Corinthians 8–10 famously discusses whether the Corinthians are allowed to participate in social events like shared dinners with their old companions that might take place in a pagan religious surrounding. Paul’s reply is exceedingly complex. He ends up (10:23–11:1) allowing this practice—as long as nobody either pays or draws attention to the fact that the meat they are eating may have been consecrated. But on his way to this fairly lenient position, he also attempts to scare the Corinthians away from ‘‘sharing with demons’’ (the old gods being in fact just that, 10:20). Heeding that advice would quite often mean giving up the traditional social eating in the precincts of a temple. Thus the Gentiles, too, must give up quite a lot in relation to their old gods and social practices connected with them. In these ways, then, Paul is in fact attempting to construct a new (quasi-)ethnie by pointing to elements in people’s previous lives—specifically as relating to God or the gods—that they must give up as part of belonging to the new group.18 In more positive terms, too, he can be seen to adopt quasi-ethnic strategies. Let us suppose, with Manning Nash, that ethnicity may be defined in terms of three features: kinship (blood), commensality (substance), and common cult (deity), which together constitute ‘‘the deep or basic structure of ethnic group differentiation.’’19 Let us also suppose, with Clifford Geertz and Fredrik Barth, that the features that define an ethnic group are fundamentally ascribed features, though obviously quite often with a real basis. Against this background we can see that Paul employs exactly these three features to distinguish the group of Christbelievers from all others. Take kinship. Christ-believers are ‘‘sons of God’’ (Gal. 4:6, Rom.

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8:14–17), the ‘‘seed of Abraham’’ (Gal. 3:29 and 3:6–29 as a whole; cf. Rom. 4:12,16–17) and ‘‘brothers,’’ even brothers of Christ (Rom. 8:29). Or take commensality. Paul’s rendering of the famous Antioch episode shows (see Gal. 2:11–13) how important it was to him that Jewish and non-Jewish Christ-believers be able to eat together. And his Eucharist text in 1 Corinthians (11:17–34) shows how he attempts to invest the Lord’s Supper with the religiously based meaning of a shared meal. Finally, take common cult. The Eucharist text and the discussion that follows in chapters 12–14 of speaking in tongues during the religious service show how important it was to Paul that the service should be a common one, shared by all in a manner that prevented it from falling apart into discrete practices. Thus throughout, Paul is employing ethnicity-defining features to construct a single, coherent (quasi-)ethnie that will thereby necessarily be separated from all other groups. This, then, leads to our question. How—if at all—may the supposedly universalizing and the clearly ethnic trends and strategies in Paul be combined into a single, coherent picture? In particular, how—if at all—may there be room within Paul’s construction of the Christ-believing (quasi-)ethnie for members of other groups (Jews and Gentiles) in such a way that these may also keep their own previous identities? The picture that we must try to understand further will look like this:

Christ-believers Non-Christ-believers Jews Flesh

Spirit

Gentiles Non-Christ-believers Flesh

And the precise question concerns the relationship between being a Jew inside and outside the group of Christ-believers and, similarly, the relationship between being a Gentile inside and outside that same group. The Content of the Christ Event and the Subjective Turn Toward It There are two fundamental points in Alain Badiou’s reconstruction of Paul’s universalist stance. One has to do with the Christ event, viewed in a radical way as an occurrence or event that changes the whole previous way of understanding the world. The other concerns the subjective turn of the individual toward this event. In the combination of the two features lies, as it were, the foundation for Paul’s universalist stance.20 What matters after the Christ event is only that event as experienced by Paul himself. Those to whom it matters, however, are not just Paul himself but everybody. So far so good. But there is another fundamental point in Badiou’s reconstruction that is far less satisfactory. As he elaborates the combination of the two earlier points, he constantly focuses on the formal combination itself to the complete exclusion of any substantive content to the operation. The reason is not far to find. To Badiou himself, as a modern atheist, the Pauline content of the Christ event, namely, his claim about Christ’s

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resurrection, is a myth or ‘‘fable.’’21 As stated in this bald form, I agree. However, for a reading of Paul himself and particularly for a proper understanding of the special form of his universalism, it is of the utmost importance also to bring in the substantive content of the two fundamental features: the Christ event itself and the individual’s subjective turn toward it.22 The Christ event was not just an event staged by God for inscrutable reasons of his own. For Paul it was part of a fairly precise view of the development of humanity since creation.23 Essential figures in this story are: Adam, Abraham, Moses, and then Christ. Basically, therefore, it was a Jewish story. But Paul was keen to fit Gentiles, too, into the story, at least to the extent that he aimed to show that they shared certain crucial features with Jews before the Christ event and might also be fitted into the picture of Jews after that event, both where Jews and Christians reacted with the proper response to the Christ event and where they did not. To spell this out, I must rely here on a general interpretation of Paul for which I have argued extensively in my Paul and the Stoics.24 For Paul, God had a very precise aim in staging the Christ event. He wanted at long last to bring about in human beings the kind of directedness toward God that would eradicate human sinfulness and mortality and bring human beings over to complete justice and eternal life. The Christ event was the means by which God aimed to achieve this end. Christ himself gave up his own exalted status, became a human being, died, and was resurrected. The proper reaction on the part of human beings to experiencing the shattering event of the resurrection was that human beings would similarly give up the directedness toward their individual selves that was the foundation of their sinning and dying. Instead, in entering into a faith relationship with God they would become totally directed toward Christ—the figure who had quite concretely ‘‘bent down’’ (from heaven) toward themselves in a saving gesture—and through Christ toward God in such a way that their previous self-directedness would be completely eradicated. In that way, then, God’s aim would be achieved. According to this picture, what matters in the Christ event is not just the event itself (of death and resurrection), but rather its comprehensive meaning and point as part of God’s plan for the salvation of mankind. In particular, it is the love (the ‘‘bending down’’) shown in that event by both God and Christ that matters, since it is in response to this love that human beings may be brought over to the place where God wanted them to be. Correspondingly, in the subjective response to the Christ event it is not just the formal, subjective element that matters, but the fact that in terms of its content this response matches from below Christ’s ‘‘bending down’’ from above. Through the Christ event, the love of God and Christ from above generates and is then ‘‘met’’ by the love of human beings from below. It is this combined movement that brings justice, salvation and life to human beings. Or so Paul argued. This meeting of minds is brought out in a number of famous passages. One is Galatians 2:19–20: ‘‘For I have died to the law through the law in order that I might live for

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God. I have been crucified together with Christ. As for living—I no longer live, but in me lives Christ. The life I live now in the flesh, I live in the faithfulness [pistis] of the son of God who felt love for me and gave himself over for my sake.’’ According to this text, the initiative from above (Christ’s love for me, etc.) was met by a directedness on Paul’s part toward Christ (Paul now only lives in the pistis of Christ, etc.), which has itself left Paul’s previous ‘‘I’’ behind (I no longer live, etc.). That ‘‘I’’ was one of the flesh, but it was also in some way connected with the law. Paul has now left all this behind and has come to live ‘‘for God,’’ which was the ultimate point of the whole operation. In Romans, too, Paul spells out the motif of the meeting of minds in precise detail. Whereas in Galatians 2:19–20 the state of mind in Paul (and by implication in all those who respond in the same way to the Christ event) was one of faithfulness (pistis), in Romans 5 and 8, as we shall see, it is rather love (agape¯), which is described as an expression of Christ-believers’ having the spirit (pneuma). The difference between pistis and agape¯ will prove important with a view to universalism.25 In Romans 5:5—‘‘God’s love is poured forth in our hearts through the holy spirit which has been given to us’’—the talk is of love coming from above, but the idea is also that love from above is reciprocated by love from below.26 How and why? Through the Christ event, as the immediately following verses show: because Christ died ‘‘for the sake of’’ human beings.27 On the way to the conclusion of this whole section of the letter (chaps. 5–8), Paul then makes explicit in chapter 8 that Christ-believers are animated by love for God: ‘‘We know that everything works together to the good for those who love God’’ (Rom. 8:28). This comes in the middle of a section that focuses on the spirit (beginning at 8:14 or, in a different way, already at 8:1), and it leads toward the final verse of chapter 8, in which Paul states that nothing ‘‘will be able to separate us from the love of God, the one in Christ Jesus, our lord’’ (Rom. 8:39). If nothing can ‘‘separate us’’ from that love, the reason will be that God’s love as shown in the Christ event has generated a reciprocal love of God in human beings that nothing can extinguish. This—in the briefest possible outline—is the content of the Christ event and the subjective turn toward it. We shall use a number of features from it in relation to universalism: the idea of giving something up (on Christ’s part and on Paul’s), the thoroughly internalized character of the reaction to the Christ event,28 the distinction between pistis and agape¯, and more. A Corresponding Structure in Stoicism Before developing all this further in Paul, with a view to understanding his stance vis-a`vis ethnicity and universalism, we need to bring in one more premise. I have argued elsewhere that structurally the Pauline picture I have presented of a relationship between human subjectivity below and a figure above that differs from the individual human being

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is closely similar to the picture given in the celebrated doctrine of oikeio¯sis, which lies at the heart of Stoic ethics. Here the Stoics describe how human beings may arrive at a full grasp of the good by undergoing a development from subjective individuality to an understanding of the subject as participating in, and fundamentally to be defined in terms of its relationship with, the logos ‘‘above’’—that is, reason as this is self-identically to be found in the world at large (the Stoic God) and in all other rational creatures, specifically, all other adult human beings.29 As in Paul, this development results in a kind of ‘‘meeting’’ of human consciousness from below, which now focuses on its rational capacity alone, and the rationality of the world at large, conceived as the polis (not the ‘‘kingdom of God’’ here, but compare Paul’s own talk of a politeuma in Phil. 3:20) that is made up of human beings and the gods. As in Paul, too, this development leaves behind the individual ‘‘I’’ as defined by the values that were dear to the rudimental, animal, and childish self that is overcome with the rise of the rational consciousness. Thus a Stoic wise man would be able to say, like Paul, that ‘‘it is no longer the animal and childish I that lives, but reason lives in me; and to the extent that I still live in my own individual body, I live (wholly) in homo-logy with nature or reason (logos),’’ that is, being wholly directed toward that, ‘‘as I have been filled with reason’’ (as it were from above). In short, I have argued, the structure of the Pauline and Stoic accounts of conversion is remarkably similar. Here I am entirely unconcerned about the question of the possible historical relationship between Stoicism and Paul. What matters is only the structural similarity and the light a comparison with Stoicism may throw on ethnicity and universalism in Paul. In this context we should note that, in addition to the similarity just mentioned with regard to what is left behind in the movement toward the proper grasp of the good, there is a further similarity in the relationship between the reconstituted subject—after conversion, that is—and the previous self, including the valuations that served to define it. We must look more closely at this relationship between the new and the old self. The development in Stoicism that leads to the reconstituted self is a development away from the evaluative perspective according to which what Aristotle had called ‘‘natural goods’’ were in fact good things. With the change to a rational self what is good becomes just one thing: living in accordance with reason, which is the sense of the famous phrase ‘‘living in accordance with nature.’’ However, this change does not leave the Aristotelian ‘‘natural goods’’ completely behind. On the contrary, reason itself sees that they have a certain natural value (one thinks of food, clothing, and the like). And so, while in one way they are completely ‘‘indifferent’’ to the good life—and hence deserve the famous Stoic epithet of being adiaphora—in another way they are ‘‘preferable’’ (proe¯gmena—and their opposites aproe¯gmena ‘‘dispreferable’’) and ‘‘to be taken’’ (le¯pta) if (and only if) circumstances and the unconditional obligation toward the good permit.30 Thus in Stoicism it is part of the turn toward reason both to leave ‘‘natural goods’’ behind—as goods, that is—and also to allow for a certain value (though certainly not the one of ‘‘goodness’’) to be ascribed to those things that were previously considered to be of the highest value.

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It is very important to see that both movements—the ‘‘negative’’ one away from ascribing unconditional value to the ‘‘natural goods’’ and the ‘‘positive’’ one toward ascribing some conditional value to them—are part of one and the same insight: that the good consists in one thing alone, which is acting in accordance with reason. For reason both tells human beings that it alone constitutes the good and also that ‘‘primary goods,’’ that is, the ‘‘natural goods’’ that were to begin with taken to be good, do have some (natural) value. Only their value is a conditional one, depending on whether obtaining them fits or falls under the unhindered development of the one unconditional value: the good that is the rational life itself. It would not be wrong to say that the intricate relationship that is implied in the distinction between the ‘‘good’’ and the ‘‘indifferents,’’ some of which are also ‘‘preferable’’ or ‘‘to be taken,’’ constitutes the essence of Stoic ethics. As we shall now see, the same logical distinction gives shape to Paul’s complicated stance vis-a`-vis ethnicity and universalism.

Ethnic Differences as Adiaphora in Paul We have already seen that Paul’s move toward Christ, as described in Galatians 2:19–20, leaves his pre–Christ-believing self completely behind in just the way that the Stoic wise man’s move toward reason and rationality leaves his pre-rational, bodily self behind. The same move is described later in Galatians with direct relevance to the issue of ethnicity when Paul declares that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any force, but only faithfulness that is active through love. In traditional theological thinking this move is described as one that leaves behind—the adiaphora. Thus traditional theological thinking implicitly recognizes that Paul is here making use of an idea originally developed within Stoicism.31 Suppose that is right. On the basis of our understanding of the precise logic of the Stoic distinction, we should then ask whether there is also in Paul the kind of movement from a position ‘‘above’’ and back toward the earlier values that were left behind in the encounter with Christ. Quite concretely, did Paul allow Jews who had come to the Christ faith to practice the lawlike behavior that had previously defined their Jewishness? And did he allow Gentiles who had come to the Christ faith to practice the kinds of behavior that had previously defined their Gentile status? Here it is possible to give an answer that is both sufficiently complex to be interesting and also intrinsically clear and in complete conformity with the Stoic picture I have presented. The answer to both questions is: Yes—and no. Paul did allow Jews and Gentiles to behave in their earlier ways—but only as long as these practices either did not run counter to exclusive directedness toward Christ or were not perceived to do so by those performing them. Jews were allowed to be circumcised—but only as long as they did not attach any importance to this practice vis-a`-vis what the Christ event was all about: justice,

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salvation, life. The moment, however, they would begin to attach importance to the practice, Paul would reject it. That would happen, of course, if and when Jewish Christbelievers would begin to argue that uncircumcised, non-Jewish believers should be circumcised, too. That claim clearly would mean attaching some significance vis-a`-vis salvation to being circumcised. Paul would then be adamant in his rejection. The whole of Galatians is about this particular issue. Thus Paul’s stance in that letter fits completely with reading the relationship between a Christian and a Jewish identity in the light of the precise logic of the Stoic relationship between the good and the indifferent (and preferable). Indifferents are allowed if that seems preferable—as long as they are not taken genuinely to matter with regard to what the whole discourse is primarily about, which in Stoicism is the good and in Paul is justice, salvation, life. The same pattern can also be found with regard to Gentiles. The discussion in 1 Corinthians 8–10 of the question of sharing a meal with non–Christ-believers in religious settings is a good example. We saw that Paul in fact aims to steer his addressees away from such a practice, since it would amount to ‘‘being partners with demons’’ (1 Cor. 10:20). However, he nevertheless ends up allowing the practice (10:23–11:1)—if it is not explicitly raised as an issue by anyone present (cf. 10:28). Since there is good Pauline argument for saying that the pagan gods were in themselves ‘‘nothing’’ (cf. 10:19 going back to 8:4–6), there was nothing to be said against participating in this kind of meal as something that is genuinely adiaphoron (though Paul does not use the exact term in this connection). The moment, however, the practice were to become a religious issue, Paul’s addressees should decline out of consideration for the person who had raised the issue and his conscience, though not because of their own consciences, which were and would remain free (10:28–29), thus allowing them to do ‘‘anything’’ (10:23). Once more the content of the Christ faith (the insight that ‘‘idols are nothing’’) allows a Gentile Christbeliever to behave in accordance with his old ethnic practices. And here too, once the character of complete indifference in the act is challenged, the allowance is withdrawn. The same pattern—though not its application to an ethnic issue—is found elsewhere in the letter. In 11:2–16, for instance, Paul ends up allowing the Corinthians themselves to decide on a question of women’s dress during service. Paul has his own view on the matter, which he backs up with a range of arguments. Still, the issue is apparently not of vital importance to the identity of the group as Christ-believers. Rather, we may suppose, it is something adiaphoron and Paul therefore in effect leaves the question open to the Corinthians themselves.32 In 11:17–34, by contrast, he treats a different question (on how to celebrate the Eucharist), which he quite understandably does consider to be of vital importance for the identity of the group. Here he tells his addressees with unswerving clarity how they should behave, making no allowance for their own decision as to what they would find preferable.33 The logic that underlies this very different way of consecutively handling two issues of practice that had been raised by the Corinthians is exactly the one we found in the Stoic concept of adiaphora. The principle is this. In matters that

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were genuinely indifferent vis-a`-vis justice, salvation, and life (and were also perceived to be so by all people involved), Paul was quite prepared to allow Christ-believers to choose their own preferred way of life, including one that reflected their previous ethnic identity. By contrast, in matters that were directly relevant to the significance of the Christ event, he did not allow for any difference of practice. Here one was either in—or out.34 The Rationale Behind the Two-Level Strategy Why did Paul allow for difference in matters that were indifferent in relation to the only thing that genuinely mattered? There are two possible answers. One is that this practice served missionary purposes. Paul himself describes this in a famous passage: For being free from all I have made myself a slave to all in order that I may win over as many as possible. Thus to the Jews I have become like a Jew, in order that I may win over Jews; to those under the law like one under the law—even though I am not myself under the law—in order that I may win over those under the law. To those outside the law like one outside the law—even though I am not outside God’s law, but inside Christ’s law—in order that I may win over those outside the law. To the weak I have become weak in order that I may win over the weak. To everybody I have become everything in order that I may in all circumstances win over some. (1 Cor. 9:19–22) This picture immediately fits a missionary strategy: become like those whom you wish to evangelize and work, as it were, from within their premises. The strategy raises a number of interesting questions. Did Paul think, for instance, that the significance of the Christ event could be informatively related to traditional Jewish and Gentile ways of life, perhaps even developed out of them?35 Also, the strategy certainly implies that to Paul himself the various traditional ways of life were matters of adiaphora. However, the concluding verse of the text, which is not always included in quotations of it, suggests that Paul found a more ideal backing for his supposedly merely missionary strategy in the content of the Christ event itself. What he says is this: ‘‘But I do it all because of the good news [euaggelion]: in order that I may become a partner with a share [sugkoino¯nos] in it’’ (1 Cor. 9:23). This seems to suggest that something about the content of the Christ event itself calls for the way of addressing other people that Paul has just described. What could that be? Other passages in the letter point to an answer. Paul repeatedly reflects, for instance, on the manner in which he should approach the Corinthians. That is the underlying question in 4:14–21, which comes at the end of chapters 1 through 4: ‘‘What do you want? Should I come to you with a stick or with love [agape¯] and the spirit [pneuma] of mildness?’’ (1 Cor. 4:21).

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Similarly, the whole section comprising chapters 8 through 10 is introduced (8:1–3) by Paul’s drawing a contrast between knowledge (gno¯sis) and love (agape¯) as a way of urging his addressees to let their practice with regard to sharing non-Christian religious meals be governed by the latter, namely, in relation to Christian brothers who might take offense at such a practice. The whole discussion ends with this statement: ‘‘Do not give offense, neither to Jews nor Greeks nor to the church of God, just as I too please all in all things, not seeking my own benefit, but that of the many, in order that they may be saved. Imitate me, just as I too imitate Christ’’ (1 Cor. 10:32–11:1).36 The second reason, then, why Paul allows for difference in matters that are indifferent is that this practice, which does have a missionary purpose (cf. ‘‘in order that they may be saved’’), is also proper because it reflects Christ’s own practice in the Christ event. It is a matter of love in the sense of giving up one’s own preferences (apart from the ultimate commitment to the Christ event itself) in one’s relationship with others, just as Christ had done (as described, for instance, in the famous Christ hymn, Phil. 2:11–16): the ‘‘bending down’’ toward others that constitutes the very content of the Christ event. In this way, allowing for difference—though still only in the field of adiaphora, difference among indifferents—reflects the central content of the Christ event itself.37 In this area, too, the structural similarity to Stoicism is close, for, as we have seen, allowing for some value to be given to Stoic adiaphora was itself dictated by the turn to reason.

Paul’s Special Form of Universalism So, what can we conclude about the idea of universalism from the relationship between ethnicity and universalism in Paul? 1. For Paul, the only thing that matters is the Christ event and what it means. This one thing is accessible to all, no matter what their original ethnic affiliation. It is accessible in the sense that it is something to be heard, grasped, understood, and then accepted for what it is: the only thing that matters. An element of crossing ethnic boundaries might seem to inhere in this idea (e.g., the boundary between Jews and Greeks). That is correct, as long as one considers the idea from outside of ethnic identification. Neither Jews nor Gentiles as traditionally understood would be able—ceteris paribus—to accept that the Christ event and its meaning is the only thing that matters. To Paul himself, looking from the inside of Judaism, the fundamental idea of the Christ event was not one of crossing ethnic boundaries; rather, he understood it to articulate what had now been revealed as the essence of Judaism with a content that could now make this essence also directly accessible to Gentiles. They, too, might now become real Jews—just as Jews might. Thus, even though the Christ event and its meaning are accessible to all ‘‘across ethnic boundaries’’ (as viewed from the outside), there is no universalism in this idea that is different from saying that a non-Christian Jewish—or indeed, Greek—(religious) way of life is

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accessible to all. Traditional Jews, too, had been quite willing to let Gentiles cross the ethnic boundary and become Jews.38 The reason there has erroneously seemed to be universalism in Paul’s construction of the Christ faith is twofold. First, there is the fact that Paul’s claim to be constructing the real Judaism covers over a break with traditional Judaism, as defined by the claim that Jews are bound by the Jewish law. To some extent—even though there is much more to be said about the issue of Paul and the law—Paul is cheating when he constructs a way of life that involves freedom from the Jewish law and then goes on to claim that that is now the true form of Judaism. Still, since Paul does make requirements of both Jews and Gentiles, does it not follow that he is articulating a perspective that is common to both parties and is in this sense universal? Second, there is the fact that, in articulating the Christ event and its meaning, Paul focuses so strongly on something internal—an understanding and acceptance—that, because it is internal, is immediately accessible to all. Furthermore, as we have seen, he is keen on showing—explicitly in relation to the Jewish law and more implicitly in relation to Greek wisdom and morality—that his own idea articulates a way of life that in fact constitutes the fulfillment of the aspirations of both the Jewish law and Greek wisdom and morality. Once more, then, does it not follow that he is articulating a perspective that is equally accessible to both parties and even fulfils the aspirations of both—and is, in this almost Hegelian sense, universal? The answer in both cases should be an emphatic no. What Paul is articulating is, rather (even though he did not himself see it that way), what came to be called a ‘‘third race’’ (where the two first are, of course, the Jewish and the Greek ones), with equal emphasis on both words. It is ‘‘third’’ as being distinct from both Jews and Greeks. And it is a ‘‘race’’ in the sense of a distinct (quasi-)ethnic group, on a par with (though different from) Jewish and Greek groups. This fundamentally ethnic and exclusive character of the Christ-believing group comes out in the application to it of the exclusive dichotomy of spirit and flesh. The Christ-believing group is spiritual, and the rest of the world is fleshly. Though non– Christ-believing Jews and Greeks differ in a number of important respects, they are alike in this respect, the only one that genuinely matters: they both differ from the Christbelieving group. They both fall short of the new ‘‘race’’ generated by God in a ‘‘new creation.’’ Is this a form of universalism in any intelligible sense? No. 2. Why, then, has it seemed so throughout the ages, and most recently to Badiou? As regards the ages, the answer is not difficult to find. Christians who were not Jews construed Paul’s articulation of a form of Christianity that was in fact different from Judaism (whether ancient or more recent—again, Paul himself did not intend it to be so) as the articulation of a ‘‘universal’’ religion (namely, their own, in contrast to the ‘‘particularistic’’ religion of the Jews), which would therefore rightly be the religion of all. In this way, later Christians were in fact celebrating themselves—as human beings generally tend to do.

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Badiou can see Paul’s religious stance as universalist because he fails to consider its content and sees it only in formal terms, as the articulation of a relationship between an event and a subjective stance toward that event. This is the position of the militant truth claim. ) Of course, as long as one leaves out any substantive content, the stance itself may be said to articulate a claim that is truly universal. The problem is that such a stance is always in fact—and even necessarily so (the world being as it is)—substantively filled. The ‘‘event’’ will always have some content or other. Correspondingly, the subjective turn toward it will also have either this or another substantive content that will place the militant stance in direct relationship with other similar stances. The moment that happens, the militant stance will no longer be a genuinely universal one in the sense intended by Badiou. A further point of contention is that Badiou does not distinguish sufficiently sharply between Paul’s missionary stance—toward outsiders, that is—and his stance toward differences of practice within the group of Christ-believers. The importance of this distinction will gradually emerge as we proceed. When Paul adopts his missionary stance, he is unconcerned about differences between his addressees. He has only one aim: to bring them over to Christ. That requires valuating negatively whatever values and defining features went into their previous identity. It is quite different when the group of Christbelievers has already been established. Then Paul is far more sensitive to differences among his addressees, allowing the differences to retain some positive value as long as they do not run counter to or in any way diminish the Christ faith. Badiou, however, conflates these two situations and takes Paul’s attitude toward the in-group stance to be also involved in his missionary stance. It is vitally important, however, to keep the two separate. There is a missionary stance, which implies a negative valuation of pre-Christian differences. And there is an in-group stance, which allows for a more positive valuation of such differences.39 But cannot Badiou invoke 1 Corinthians 9:19–23 in his favor, especially if it is read, as I have suggested above, in a way that combines a description of Paul’s missionary stance as allowing for Jewishness and Greekness in his addressees with the claim that this attitude springs from the content of the gospel itself? No, because what Paul is saying is this: he is himself a paradigm of the attitude for which he is arguing, the attitude of giving oneself up; he exemplifies this attitude in his missionary practice when he neglects, with regard to himself, the issue of living as a Jew or a Greek in order to missionize more successfully, and he behaves in this ‘‘self-deprecatory’’ way because that is what the gospel is all about. The point is that his immediate addressees should similarly cease to insist upon their own position in the in-group fight that Paul is addressing and ‘‘accept’’ instead the position of the weaker ones in the group.40 Thus Paul is using his own missionary stance as a model for the in-group behavior of his addressees with regard to ‘‘acceptance’’ and backing up both types of recommended behavior by the claim that the gospel is all

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about giving up oneself. He is not yet speaking of positively allowing something out of love.41 3. We should conclude that—so far at least—little in the Pauline picture may count as being genuinely universal. In particular, in his missionary stance Paul is exclusively concerned to establish a new group with many features that are characteristic of a distinct ethnic group. He is not positively concerned to find room for features that served to define the groups (be they Jewish or Greek) that he is aiming to leave behind. This is the stance from which Paul is fundamentally arguing, for instance, in Galatians. There is another side to the missionary stance, one we have noted from time to time. Not only is Paul not concerned to find room for the features that traditionally defined Jewishness or Greekness, he aims to redefine them in a manner that would fit them into the new perspective. This is most clearly true of traditional Jewish features, for instance when Paul claims, toward the end of Galatians, that the Jewish law is fulfilled in the Christ faith. But we have also seen that he implicitly wishes to show that the moral aspirations of the Greek world come to fruition only in the Christ faith. This is not universalism. Quite the contrary, it is the most potent expression of an exclusivist ethnic view. 4. Is there no indication, then, of something like a genuinely ‘‘universalist’’ perspective in Paul? Yes, but it has nothing to do with Paul’s missionary stance, the militant stance on which Badiou focuses. Instead, it emerges as part of Paul’s in-group stance, which—as we now know—is itself quite exclusivist and particularistic. What we seen in Paul is an attitude of openness toward difference in practice as long as the various practices do not run counter to or diminish the exclusive value of the Christ event and its meaning—and as long as they are not taken to do so. Do the Corinthians wish to participate in festive meals in a religious setting? Then let them do so—as long as they do not become partners of demons (1 Cor. 10:20), cause trouble to a weaker brother (8:13), or are made to participate in a religious ‘‘issue’’ (10:28), and so on. On issues such as these Paul shows himself remarkably liberal, basically leaving to his addressees themselves how they would like to behave. By contrast, as soon as a given type of behavior impinges directly on the Christ event and its meaning, Paul stands firm. Here it is either—or. We have also noted that Paul explicitly ties this double attitude within the group of Christ-believers to the concept that captures the full content of the Christ event, that of love. Paul construes love (agape¯) as an attitude of ‘‘not looking each one to one’s own interest, but rather (alla kai) everyone to that of the others’’ (Phil. 2:4)—the essence of ‘‘self-denial.’’42 Moreover, he is keen to apply this maxim to himself wherever possible and thus to leave his addressees where they want to be. That is an expression of a positive use of the gospel principle of love: looking not to oneself but instead, positively, to the interests of others. At the same time, however, Paul strikes back strongly and unhesitatingly whenever the principle itself is under threat—and for good reason, since that is what the Christ event is all about.

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5. We have also seen that Paul had available to him a concept other than the Christ event that would have been capable of bringing about this complex attitude to things in the world, a concept developed within Stoicism. He saw them as having the status of adiaphora in relation to the one thing that matters. That meant, first, that worldly matters were totally indifferent in relation to the Christ event. This is the valuation that underlies Paul’s missionary stance. Thus to be circumcised or not—the feature that defined being a Jew or a Greek—is totally unimportant. However, within Stoicism the adiaphora had a different role, too. If worldly things did not matter with regard to the one thing that does matter, then one might ‘‘take’’ or ‘‘prefer’’ one such thing or way or life to another. Similarly, a Christ-believing Jew might prefer to be circumcised, and that would be acceptable to Paul as long as it was not taken genuinely to matter vis-a`-vis justice, salvation, and life. Correspondingly, a Christ-believing Gentile might prefer to participate in festive meals with his or her non–Christ-believing friends, and that would be acceptable to Paul under the same conditions. 6. This is an attitude that does approach being a ‘‘universalist’’ one. While, on the one hand, insisting on a certain perspective that all must adopt, it does not, on the other, erase differences but allows them to stand at a different level. This attitude lies in between two opposing ones. On the one hand, we have the thoroughly universalist attitude, which aims to erase all differences.43 That attitude is exemplified by Plutarch in his description of Alexander’s supposed ideology. This attitude too has its own sharp distinction between inside and outside. Being inside (Greekness) was to be defined by virtue, being outside (barbarianness) by vice. Inside, however, all should adopt the same way of life. Here we see Plutarch—if not Zeno himself—succumb to a temptation Hilary Putnam warns against: that philosophers may ‘‘confuse the notion of a ’universal ethic’ with the notion of ’a universal way of life.’ ’’ On the other hand, we have a cultural or ethnic absolutism (or, as seen from the outside, relativism) whereby each group insists on its own account of what matters in confrontation with all others and with no attempt to find bridges between them in a rational way. Paul stands in between. Like the absolutists, he insists that there is one and only one thing that matters—to all. But, drawing on the Stoic idea of two levels of values, he also allows differences to stand, as long as they are not understood, in the original way, as being among the things that ultimately matter.44 This Stoic and Pauline conception is probably the best kind of universalism one can get. It does not give ethnic absolutists what they want. Nor does it give die-hard universalists what they want. But, while itself retaining central features of (ethnic or religious) absolutism, it does give something to all.

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Politics Between Times Theologico-Political Interpretations of the Restraining Force (katechon) in Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians

Marc de Wilde

The true restraining force is the empire [das Reich]: as long as it exists, the Antichrist will not come, and it will not collapse as long as the Last Day has not begun. —Hans Freyer

Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians contains an intriguing passage, in which the apostle tries to disabuse some of his readers of the impression that the end of time has already begun. He argues that it will not commence before the ‘‘falling away’’ has taken place and the ‘‘man of sin’’ is revealed. Although these might be at hand, something is delaying their arrival. It is at this point—the epicenter of the letter, halfway through the middle chapter—that Paul introduces the notion of a ‘‘restraining’’ force (katechon): ‘‘And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the lord will consume with the breath of his mouth and destroy with the brightness of his coming’’ (2 Thess. 2: 6–8).1 Paul begins his description of the restraining force with an appeal to the prior knowledge of his readers. He writes: ‘‘And now you know.’’ The problem is that we, his present readers, do not know: what or whom the apostle had in mind when referring to the restraining force has become a mystery to us. It is not even clear whether Paul’s contemporaries knew what he meant. As early as the second century a.d. different readings were already in circulation, and whatever knowledge there may have been, in antiquity it apparently had already been forgotten.

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Augustine, for example, in his City of God has to admit that he no longer understands the concept, insisting that he is ‘‘eager but unable to attain, even with an effort, to the Apostle’s meaning . . . I admit that I am completely at a loss as to his meaning’’ (4.20.19). It would take many centuries before theologians were prepared to admit that the key to understanding the concept might be ‘‘irretrievably lost.’’2 Yet despite its impenetrability, Paul’s concept of the katechon has, ‘‘since the second century a.d., worked like a riddle, even like a magical spell that one has tried again and again to solve.’’3 Therefore, to examine how it has been understood through the ages may be more interesting than speculating on its true meaning. In this context I want to argue, more specifically, that Paul’s mysterious verses have, in the course of history, come to serve as the foundation of a typically Christian political theology: in it, the sovereign ruler—for example, the Roman or medieval emperor—was represented as a restraining force. The sovereign thereby acquired a theological legitimacy, justifying state violence as a necessary means to prevent worse, namely, the ‘‘falling away’’ and the revelation of the Antichrist. Although probably the result of a misinterpretation of Paul’s verses,4 the notion would eventually develop into a powerful myth that, behind the realities of state power, meant to preserve the legal-political order, exposed the traces of another power, guarding the temporal order as such. In the first part of this essay, I will examine the history of theologico-political katechon interpretations, that is, readings that attributed political meanings to the Pauline motif. Following Wolfgang Trilling,5 I will argue that there were in fact two such traditions, one in which the motif was used to emphasize the need for sovereign state power (which I will call the ‘‘state-affirming tradition’’), and one in which it served to set limits to state power (to which I will refer as the ‘‘state-critical tradition’’). Although the former would remain dominant until the twentieth century, the latter was never absent. In this context I will show, more particularly, how in the 1920s and 1930s, on the eve of the Third Reich, the figure of the katechon would suddenly resurface. This topic has been neglected, which is unfortunate in light of the fact that some authors, particularly in the circles of the so-called Conservative Revolution, would eventually fall back on the Pauline figure—in the state-affirming explanation it had been given for centuries—to make sense of the Third Reich; for some it even seems to have made Hitler’s dictatorship acceptable. In the second part, I will discuss the work of one of these authors, the legal scholar Carl Schmitt. I believe Schmitt can be considered the most important representative of state-affirming katechon interpretations in the twentieth century. He recognizes the katechon as the ultimate guarantee of the legal-political order—an order that, since the decline of its classical types of legitimacy, has become exposed to numerous centrifugal and ‘‘neutralizing’’ forces. His thesis is that, even in a secularized world, sovereign state power can be adequately understood only in light of the katechontic, that is, as a restraining force that prevents the arrival of the Antichrist and the end of time. After having

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shown how Schmitt can be placed in the tradition of state-affirming katechon interpretations, I will examine his ‘‘doctrine of the restrainer’’ more closely, arguing that, in his later writings, he tries to carry out a program he had formulated in his Glossarium: to identify, for each century, concrete historical agents, persons, and institutions who had served as ‘‘bearers’’ of the katechontic ‘‘task.’’6

A History of the katechon In the almost two thousand years that have passed since Paul preached his doctrine of the katechon to the Thessalonians, the most diverse interpretations have been proposed for it: the restraining force has been attributed to, among others, the apostle, the Church and its believers, Christ, his gospel, and even to obscure angelic forces.7 Yet one reading would eventually come to overshadow all others: the so-called Rome interpretation. As early as the third century a.d., the Church Fathers Hippolytus and Tertullianus attributed the restraining force to the Roman Empire, since it had brought peace and security within its borders. Their interpretation contributed to the emergence of a typically Christian political theology, distinguished from others by the fact that it envisaged the political community, not primarily as a mirror of the divine, but rather as a ‘‘bulwark’’ against catastrophe.8 Although a different reading, the so-called mission interpretation, arose during the Reformation, it would never surpass the state-theological interpretation in popularity. Whereas the katechon was valued positively within the first tradition, namely, as restraining the end of time, within the second it would acquire a more negative connotation: pagans and unbelievers, who awaited their conversion or, worse, resisted it, were represented as an obstacle to eternity. In what follows I will examine the historical origins and developments of both traditions.

Antiquity Paul probably expected to witness the end of time in his own lifetime. In his first letter, he urges the Thessalonians to be vigilant, for the day of the Lord could come upon them at any moment like ‘‘a thief in the night’’ (1 Thess. 5:2). The believers seem to have taken Paul’s message to heart, for in his second letter the apostle deems it necessary to warn them not to lose their senses prematurely ‘‘as if the day of Christ is at hand’’ (2 Thess. 2:2). The tense anticipation of the end of time that apparently had taken hold of Paul’s contemporaries seems to have been forgotten mere decades later. The longer believers had to wait for the end of time, the more they were inclined to consider their residence in this world as quasi-permanent. In consequence, their temporal existence seems to have

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become more attractive, whereas fear of the end of time, for the works of Antichrist and the Last Judgment, seems to have diminished.9 This change of mentality is most clearly expressed by two authors, Aristides of Athens and Justin Martyr. Although they do not mention the word katechon explicitly in their writings, they are the first to refer to an instance delaying the end of time. In an apology addressed to the Emperor Hadrian, Aristides claims that ‘‘the world exists [only] because of the prayer of the Christians’’ (Apology 16.5.6). Justin, who in the year 165 would die a martyr’s death, expresses a similar understanding, though in his view it is God himself who ‘‘[delays] the fall and destruction of the world through which the bad angels, demons, and human beings will also come to an end’’ (Second Apology 6). In their apologies, Aristides and Justin seek to convince the emperor to consider the Christians as loyal subjects, who contribute by means of prayer to the preservation of the existing order. Yet their argument also implies a silent threat: were the emperor to interfere with their religion, disturbing them in their prayers, he would risk gambling away his empire and causing the end of the world.10 In all probability, the state-theological katechon interpretation originated from the identification of the Roman Empire with the fourth empire in the book of Daniel (see Dan. 2 and 7), as expressed by Irenaeus of Lyon (ca. 140–202 a.d.).11 The Church Father recognizes the Roman Empire as the ‘‘universal empire’’ prophesied by Daniel because it would serve as a bearer of all the historical forces aimed against God and his people. This universal empire—described as a terrible ten-horned beast—would be ‘‘tough as iron,’’ threatening to ‘‘crush’’ and ‘‘devour’’ the entire earth (Dan.2:40 and 7:23–27). Identifying the Roman Empire as Daniel’s fourth empire enables Irenaeus to represent it as the last empire before the end of time. However, in contrast to the Greek Apologists, Irenaeus does not mention the notion of a delaying force, nor does he refer to Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians. In Rome he merely recognizes the empire that precedes God’s, whether delaying its arrival or not. In a similar vein, Hippolytus, the later antipope and martyr of Rome (ca. 170–235 a.d.), believes the Roman Empire first has to be brought to an end before eternity can begin. He thus argues in his early work On the Antichrist (ca. 200) that the end of time and the coming of the Antichrist should not be feared as long as the Roman Empire exists.12 However, in contrast to Irenaeus, he explicitly refers to the katechon, quoting the relevant passages from Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians. He thereby takes a decisive step in the development of the theologico-political interpretation of the katechon: combining the empire motif of Irenaeus with the restrainer motif of the Greek Apologist, he is the first to identify the Roman Empire as the ‘‘restrainer’’ (ho katecho¯on) of the Antichrist and guardian of the existing order, as intended in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians.13

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By far the richest and most complicated katechon interpretation of antiquity is that of Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (ca. 155–220 a.d.), a Roman lawyer and contemporary of Hippolytus. In his Apologeticum (ca. 197–198), Tertullian notices a connection between the Roman Empire and the ‘‘delay of the end’’ (mora finis). The Christians of Carthage had been accused of neglecting their religious duties because they had refused to make the necessary sacrifices to the gods (crimen laesae religionis). Tertullian does not deny their refusal, but he argues that the Christians have prayed before their own God for the well being of the emperor and the preservation of his empire. More importantly, they would have done so not for opportunistic reasons only, for ‘‘there is,’’ Tertullian writes, ‘‘another need, a greater one, for our praying for the Emperors, and for the whole estate of the empire and the interests of Rome. We know that the great force which threatens the whole world, the end of the age itself with its menace of hideous suffering, is delayed [retardari] by the respite which the Roman Empire means for us. We do not wish to experience all that; and when we pray for its postponement are helping forward the continuance of Rome’’ (Apology 32.1).14 Whereas in his Apology Tertullian i claims that the Christians have prayed for Rome’s preservation, different tones can be heard in his Of Oratory (ca. 198–204 a.d.): ‘‘how,’’ the lawyer sighs, ‘‘could some people long for the continuation of this world, while the very empire of god, for the arrival of which we are praying, works toward a completion of this world?’’ (Of Oratory 5).15 This image seems to contradict the one evoked in the Apology: the Christians turn out to be praying not for the preservation of the Roman Empire but for the arrival of God’s, which can only appear after Rome has fallen and the world has been completed. In his excellent commentary on the text, Felix Grossheutschi tries to explain away the contradiction by referring to the different contexts. He argues that it is understandable that Tertullian, while pleading before the Roman authorities in his Apology, would choose to present them with a positive picture of Rome as katechon, whereas it will not come as a surprise either that, while addressing his fellow believers in Of Oratory, he presses for the rapidest approach of the end.16 Yet this can be only a partial explanation, for the distinction between positive and negative evaluations of the katechon, even when nuanced in view of their performative contexts, remains unsatisfying. It cannot, for example, explain why Tertullian’s reading would in the end also reverberate outside of an apologetic context. Thus, at the time of the Edict of Milan (313), which granted the Christians freedom of religion, an author like Lactantius Firmianus (ca. 240–320 a.d.) could still write: ‘‘Rome is the city which has kept everything going so far, and we must pray to God in heaven with due adoration—if, that is, his statutes and decisions can be deferred—that the awful tyrant does not come sooner than we think, that loathsome tyrant with his great task to achieve and the famous light to put out, at whose death the world itself will collapse’’ (Divine Institutes 7.25.8).17 I believe that a reading like this is neither positive nor negative, but rather ambivalent.

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Therefore, it does not seem farfetched to suggest that authors such as Tertullian and Lactantius, in contrast to their present-day commentators, perhaps saw no contradiction at all in their arguments that one should, on the one hand, pray for Rome’s preservation and, on the other, pray for the completion of this world, for they might have feared the revelation of the Antichrist as much as they longed for eternity.

The Middle Ages Contrary to what one might expect, the tradition of state-theological interpretations of the katechon does not come to an abrupt end with the fall of Rome. Instead, it lives on, initially in the East, where the Byzantine emperors presented themselves as heirs to the Romans, and later also in the West, where the Frankish rulers converted to Christianity sought to appropriate Roman imperial authority. Thus emerges, around the middle of the ninth century, the myth of the translatio imperii: with the coronation of Charlemagne, Roman imperial authority was held to be transferred to the Franks. Supported by this myth, the Rome interpretation would remain dominant throughout the Middle Ages.18 It became generally accepted among Christian authors. They represented the Byzantine, the Carolingian, and the Holy Roman empires as the successive heirs of Rome, guardians of this world and restrainers of its end. In the early Middle Ages this state-theological interpretation was defended by John of Damascus (676–749), Hrabanus Maurus (ca. 780–856), and Haymo von Halberstadt (ca. 778–853).19 The latter proposes an original reading of 2 Thessalonians 2:6–8: Paul refers to the ‘‘destruction of Roman rule, about which he speaks mysteriously, so that none of the Romans would read this letter and provoke persecution of him and other Christians by those who think they will rule the world for eternity.’’20 The apostle, Haymo suggests, has hinted at the finiteness of Roman rule in guarded terms in order not to offend the Romans, who considered it eternal.21 Whether this interpretation affirms or criticizes the state remains unclear. Haymo does not contest the legitimacy of the empire as such but rather points to a misunderstanding that could arise among the pagans: they could easily misinterpret the belief in the katechon as undermining their authority, thereby provoking them to persecute the Christians. By the twelfth century the state-theological interpretation became ideologically charged under the influence of the so-called investiture controversy. Whereas ideologists from the imperial entourage sought to explain the katechon in state-affirming terms, ecclesiastical authors understood it as criticizing the state, trying to rein in imperial claims to power. Traces of this polemic can be found in authors such as Peter Lombard (ca. 1095– 1160), Herve´ de Bourg-Dieu (1080–1150), and Otto von Freising (1114–1158). In an attempt to reconcile both powers,22 the last of these suggests that regnum and sacerdotium, secular and spiritual power, together serve to restrain the Antichrist.23 In less diplomatic

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wording, Herve´ de Bourg-Dieu, linking up with Otto’s argument and siding with the pope, argues that the apostle in 2 Thessalonians 2:6 intimates that ‘‘the Antichrist will not come before the Roman Empire is destroyed [nisi prius romanum deleatur imperium],’’ though he does not say this ‘‘openly and fearlessly,’’ for it would ‘‘provoke the Romans to persecute the church.’’24 While Haymo had still argued in more or less state-neutral terms that the Roman Empire would continue to exist ‘‘until the power of the Romans is carried away from the midst of the world [de medio mundi tollatur potestas romanorum],’’25 Herve´ claims, with a clear state-critical tenor, that the empire ‘‘has to be destroyed [destruendum esse],’’ since it stands in the way of eternity.26 In the late Middle Ages, this state-theological interpretation shows important changes because of the decline of the Holy Roman Empire: the figure of the restrainer tends to lose its explicitly political significance, becoming a spiritual category. This tendency first becomes visible in Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), who, in his commentary on 2 Thessalonians 2:6–8, writes: the nations have long been separated from the Roman Empire, yet still the Antichrist has not come. One must say that the [empire] has not yet come to an end but has been transformed from a temporal into a spiritual one . . .; therefore, the separation of the Roman Empire must be considered not merely [that] of the temporal, but also [that] of the spiritual, that is, of the faith of the Roman Church.27 Aquinas believes that the imperium romanum continues to exist in the Holy Roman Empire, yet he is also aware that, as a political institution it is no longer capable of guaranteeing the unity of the Christian world. Various nations have already separated from the empire to form independent states. But the Roman Empire cannot have fallen, for it would mean that the world itself would have come to an end. Aquinas, therefore, concludes it must have undergone a transformation: it has changed from a political into a spiritual realm.28 Aquinas, too, follows the traditional Rome interpretation, although for him Rome has become a spiritual category, that is, not the imperial institution but the community of believers. In this context, it is significant that the older interpretation of the Greek Apologists—according to which the Church or, more precisely, the prayers of Christian believers were delaying the end, remained influential throughout the Middle Ages; it is mentioned as an alternative interpretation by all the authors we have discussed.29 Unlike these, Aquinas succeeds in combining the two traditions into a logical whole: in it, Rome can once more appear as a restrainer of the Antichrist, but now in its spiritual form, that is, as the community of believers that prevents the revelation of the Antichrist and the end of time. Aquinas thus suggests that Rome, though it failed as a political institution, succeeded in preserving the unity of Christendom—and thereby of the world itself—as

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an idea. Aquinas’s interpretation marked the spiritualization of katechon interpretations, a process that continued during the Reformation.

The Reformation At first glance, it seems difficult to reconcile the Pauline figure of the restrainer with the religious doctrine of the Reformation, for according to the church reformers, the Antichrist had already appeared. He had revealed himself in the papacy, which, as Martin Luther (1483–1546) phrased it just before his death, had been ‘‘founded by the devil.’’30 In his Smalcald Articles (1536), referring to Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, Luther argues that the pope is ‘‘the real Antichrist, who has exalted himself above, and opposed himself against Christ because he will not permit Christians to be saved without his power.’’ .31 From this perspective, the katechon seems to belong to the past: had there been a restrainer, it must have failed, for the Antichrist came nonetheless. It is therefore remarkable that Luther upholds the Pauline doctrine and perhaps even more ‘‘awkward’’32 that he endorses the traditional identification of Rome as the delaying instance. He distinguishes himself from his predecessors only in that, for him, Rome has passed its age of glory, having become a despised power instead.33 John Calvin (1509–64) was the first to break radically with this tradition of statetheological interpretation. In his commentary on Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians, he begins by observing that the traditional identification of Rome as the delaying instance is understandable, considering the role it played in world history. He thus suggests, following the interpretation of the fourth century patriarch Chrysostom, that the Romans, by guaranteeing law and order, had restrained the lawless one. But, he continues, they had thereby also created a seat of world power that, once it had become vacant, could easily be occupied by the Antichrist. In an apparent reference to the Roman papacy, Calvin concludes that ‘‘none of these things . . . have remained unconfirmed by later developments.’’34 Although the Roman Empire had initially functioned as a restrainer of the Antichrist, it had eventually fallen into the hands of the lawless one and his representatives in Rome. This confronted Calvin with a theological problem: If the Antichrist had indeed revealed himself, how was it possible that the world still existed? Seeking to answer this question, the Genevan reformer proposes a new reading: Yet I think that Paul meant something else, namely, that the doctrine of the gospel had [first] to be spread throughout the world before almost the entire human race could be accused of obstinacy and deliberate maliciousness. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the Thessalonians heard about this obstacle, whatever it may have been, from Paul himself. For he recalls what he had taught [them] openly before. Now readers may decide whether it is more probable that Paul preached that first the

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light of the gospel had to be carried around the world before God, in the manner described, unleashes Satan—or that the power of the Roman Empire prevented the Antichrist from appearing, so that he could now appropriate an estate without a lord. I truly believe that we hear Paul talking about the conversion of the pagan peoples. He says that God’s grace has [first] to be offered to all humanity, and Christ with his gospel shall follow his course in the entire world, so that the godlessness of mankind will be all the more clearly demonstrated and irrefutably proven.35 Calvin, as the above quotation shows, identifies not the Roman Empire but the Christian mission, the preaching of the gospel among the pagan peoples, as the katechon. He suggests that the end of time cannot begin as long as there remain races that have not yet learned of the gospel. At first glance, his motive seems lucid and humane: before the Last Judgment can begin, everyone should have at least the opportunity to learn of the gospel. In this sense, Grossheutschi argues: ‘‘A simple love of mankind, the care for the soul’s grace, commands us to complete the mission to the pagans as soon as possible.’’36 But formulated thus, as humane and lucid, the argument does not seem to square with Calvin’s worldview, according to which man, whether Christian or pagan, is always already predestined for heaven or hell. The reformer thus seems to propose a sharper argument: what delays the end of days is the Christian mission, since it alone is capable of proving that the majority of mankind is ‘‘obstinate and deliberately malicious,’’ not prepared to accept the truth, even after it has been spread throughout the world. Strictly speaking, then, the function of the katechon is not, as Grossheutschi believes, to make possible the conversion of the pagans before the Last Judgment, but rather to prove the sinfulness of man beyond a reasonable doubt. Proof of sin, not its remedy, is what determines the Calvinistic understanding of the katechon. But how can Calvin claim that preaching the gospel serves as the katechon when the Antichrist has already been revealed in the Roman papacy? Before going into this question, let us recall that Paul himself writes that the ‘‘mystery of lawlessness . . . is already at work [to muste¯rion ¯ede¯ energeitai te¯s anomias]’’ (2 Thess. 2:6). This verse suggests that the restrainer prevents only the revelation of the Antichrist, not his coming. Without falling into contradiction, Calvin can thus argue that the Christian mission prevents the revelation of the Antichrist, while the Antichrist’s lawlessness is already secretly at work. This interpretation seems to be confirmed by the juridical formulation in which Calvin expresses his argument: following the style of Tertullian, he wants first to present a case, namely, that of true believers, then to unmask a culprit, namely, the papacy in Rome. Seen from this perspective, the apparent contradiction in Calvin’s katechon interpretation disappears, for the claim that the Christian mission is still delaying the revelation of the Antichrist does not exclude the idea that the latter is already secretly at work in the papacy. It strengthens it, rather, for according to Calvin the Antichrist has already come, even though he is not yet recognizable to everyone.

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Modernity In spite of Calvin’s reading of the katechon, the older state-affirming tradition remained influential. Partly because of the formal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, this tradition underwent some important changes: its spokesmen considered the empire no longer to be a political reality, but merely a historically effective ‘‘idea’’—a myth that seemed to prescribe a conservative approach toward the state. In this context, Trilling rightly speaks of a ‘‘sad chapter that, as a swansong, shows even more clearly the wrong track the tradition of world historical, actualizing interpretations had taken.’’37 A sad chapter it was, for this tradition would eventually result in an uncritical acceptance of and apology for the authoritarian state. Its representatives, both Catholic and Protestant, would thus describe the forces of the restoration after the French Revolution as katechontic, those of the Revolution as the lawlessness to be restrained. Qualifications such as ‘‘restrainer’’ and ‘‘Antichrist’’ thereby gained a polemical tenor; they would serve as battle cries, meant to demonize political opponents and to deny them their historical rights. To illustrate this conservative, even authoritarian tendency of katechon interpretations, Trilling quotes the later cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–90), who, in a lecture on the Antichrist from 1838, argues that ‘‘there is a fierce struggle, the spirit of Antichrist attempting to rise, and the political power in those countries which are prophetically Roman, firm and vigorous in repressing it.’’38 Choosing a more explicitly political formulation, the Catholic theologian August Bisping (1811–84), in his commentary on Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians of 1858, argues that it is the ‘‘Christian state . . . . that, as a delaying force [hemmende Macht], prevents the general denial of God and of the fundamental principles of morality, thus restraining [aufha¨lten] the apparition of the ‘man of sin.’ Therefore, each revolution against the existing . . . political order prepares the apparition of the Antichrist.’’39 Similar tones can be heard in Protestant circles, for example in the work of the Berlin theologian Hermann Olsenhausen (1796–1839), who, in his 1830 exegesis of Paul’s letter, claims that the ‘‘delaying force [hemmende Macht] is to be understood in light of the dominance of the Christian world in its German-Roman appearance on earth, that is, in light of its entire legally-ordered political condition.’’40 It is no coincidence that the false notes of imperialism and a bitter nationalism would soon intermingle with this talk of a universal mission of the Christian world in its ‘‘GermanRoman appearance.’’ Compared to nineteenth-century interpretations of the katechon, those of the twentieth century are characterized by a new complexity. Some seek to continue the tradition of conservative katechon readings (Wilhelm Sta¨hlin); others fall back on the mission interpretation of the Reformation (Oscar Cullmann); and still others try to resuscitate the old identification with Rome (Willi Bo¨ld).41 Instead of giving an exhaustive account of these positions, let me point out some tendencies. Perhaps most remarkable is that the Pauline

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motif now also appears outside of theological circles. The concepts of ‘‘delaying’’ and ‘‘restraining’’ forces sometimes even seem to have acquired such a general meaning and function that they no longer have to refer to the Pauline motif, though they may still resonate with it. Here, I want to suggest, we encounter traces of a typically modern, postsecular political theology, namely, a transposition of the theological motif of the katechon into the seemingly neutral and secular terms of ‘‘delaying’’ and ‘‘restraining’’ forces. In the Weimar Republic (1918–33), one of these interpretations gradually comes to the fore: the state-affirming one. It goes hand in hand with the so-called Reichsidee (‘‘idea of empire’’), which is propagated in a flood of conservative publications and eventually becomes a ‘‘cliche´ of German antidemocratic thought that appears, in one variety or another, in the work of almost every political author of the time.’’42 According to this Reichsidee, Germany is not an ordinary state among others but an ‘‘empire’’ with a ‘‘world historical mission.’’ It is burdened with the task of ‘‘binding together’’ (Moeller van den Bruck), ‘‘ordering’’ (Schauwecker), and even ‘‘redeeming’’ (Hielscher) the races of the world.43 Those propagating the Reichsidee often do so in a more or less explicitly theological language. As Kurt Sontheimer observes, ‘‘whoever speaks of empire prefers to speak of God; there are even readings in which the concepts coincide, forming an identity of the German Reich and the empire of God that is only revealed to the nationalistic believer, and belongs to the sphere of blasphemy.’’44 However, an important category of readings— which Sontheimer ignores—consciously tries to avoid such blasphemy. It utilizes a different theologico-political motif to characterize Germany’s world historical mission: in it, the German Reich does not appear as a mirror of the divine but rather as an essentially historical force, a force that is both temporal and fallible, itself belonging to the world of sin. Its aim, therefore, is not to triumph over but to ‘‘restrain’’ the forces of evil.45 In some cases, the image of the German Reich as a restraining force seems to have determined the experience and understanding of the Third Reich as well. Traces of this interpretation can be found in the work of Wilhelm Stapel (1882–1954), Heinz-Dietrich Wendland (1900–1992), and Albrecht Gu¨nther (1893–1942).46 In the historiography of National Socialism, this has remained an unwritten chapter. Although a lot has been said about the Third Reich’s ‘‘political religion,’’47 attention has largely gone to the National Socialist idea of a ‘‘thousand year Reich’’ with its accompanying rites and canonizations. By contrast, the state-affirming katechon interpretations are characterized, not by the idea of a quasi-eternal empire, but rather by the absence—or even rejection—of such theocratic notions. We encounter a striking example of this in a volume entitled The Nation Before God: The Message of the Church in the Third Reich), in which prominent theologians express their views of the new National Socialist state.48 In it, the later ‘‘Nestor of evangelical social ethics,’’49 Heinz-Dietrich Wendland, claims that the state serves as a ‘‘bulwark and front against the destruction of the human community.’’50 He consciously seeks to

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avoid theocratic figures of thought that would render the Third Reich identical or comparable to an eternal empire. Yet he endorses the ‘‘German task of empire’’ (Deutsche Reichsaufgabe), emphasizing its function of ‘‘world-preservation’’ (Welt-Erhaltung) and delay of the end of time.51 At the other end of the political spectrum, the notion of the restraining force also in some cases seems to have marked the perception of the Third Reich. Thus even some avowed opponents of National Socialism, such as Wilhelm Sta¨hlin (1883–1975) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45), referred to the Pauline motif in order to criticize the ‘‘mystical Reichs-utopia’’ of National Socialism as a fatal confusion of the temporal with the eternal. Instead, they tried to promote the more modest view of a state that could merely curb evil without being able to overcome it. We encounter an intriguing example of this state-critical interpretation in the work of Bonhoeffer, a famous Protestant theologian and member of the resistance, who was executed by the National Socialists just before the end of the war. ‘‘Two things alone,’’ he argues in his Ethics, ‘‘have still the power to avert the final plunge into the void. One is the miracle of a new awakening of faith, and the other is the force which the Bible calls the ‘restrainer,’ katechon (2 Thess. 2:7).’’52 Bonhoeffer identifies the latter as the ‘‘force of order, equipped with great physical strength,’’ a phrase he later concretizes as the ‘‘power of the state to establish and maintain order.’’53 Although its task is to prevent evil, it would not be able to escape evil itself: for, according to Bonhoeffer, ‘‘the ‘restrainer’ itself is not God; it is not without guilt; but God makes use of it in order to preserve the world from destruction.’’54 The theologian thus combines his criticism of the National Socialist evocation of a thousand-year Reich with a plea for a ‘‘force of order’’ that, aware of its own finiteness, would acknowledge the possibility that not only the other, the enemy, but also itself could be an instrument of evil.

Schmitt’s Sources The Catholic lawyer Carl Schmitt can be considered the most important representative of state-affirming katechon interpretations in the twentieth century. In support of his ‘‘doctrine of the restrainer,’’ Schmitt refers to a number of historical and theological sources. Scattered throughout his writings, we find references to authors such as Tertullian and Lactantius, Haymo von Halberstadt and Otto von Freising, Luther and Calvin.55 Whether Schmitt actually read these authors remains unclear. I suspect that, in some instances, he relied on secondary sources. This is suggested by a letter of June 4, 1942, addressed to the Heidelberg theologian Martin Dibelius, who at the time was considered an authority on Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians. In the letter, Schmitt thanks Dibelius for sending him one of his articles before asking him to explain his interpretation of the katechon. In this context Schmitt refers approvingly to the katechon interpretation of yet another author,

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the reformed minister Adolf Zahn.56 The letter is awkward, in that the katechon interpretations of Dibelius and Zahn do not seem to correspond with Schmitt’s own views of the restrainer. Instead, Zahn’s Calvinistic reading seems to result in a complete ‘‘depoliticization’’ of the katechon,57 while Dibelius proves to be skeptical about the possibility of identifying the restrainer as a historical force at all.58 There is every appearance, then, that Schmitt is indebted to these authors for another reason: in their works, both of them give comprehensive accounts of the history of katechon interpretations. Schmitt not only made good use of these historical sources, he also profited from contemporary interpretations. This matter has not received the attention it deserves. The two monographs on Schmitt’s doctrine of the katechon, those of Felix Grossheutschi and Gu¨nter Meuter, scarcely engage with the question of his contemporary sources.59 Although we will probably have to wait for Schmitt’s yet unpublished diaries of the time to find a definitive answer,60 I believe we may already doubt the uniqueness and originality of his views, for, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, there seems to have been a growing interest in the Pauline figure.61 I believe Schmitt, in developing his doctrine, was influenced by three of his contemporaries, Wilhelm Stapel (1882–1954), Erik Peterson (1890– 1960), and Hans Freyer (1887–1969). To the latter two he refers explicitly, while he does not mention, yet was in close contact with, the former.62 It is likely that Schmitt discovered the Reich interpretation through Wilhelm Stapel, with whom he had become acquainted in the 1930s.63 In his 1932 Christian Statesman, the Protestant author describes the Reich as an ambivalent force between heaven and hell, which is ‘‘given a vis conservandi, a force of preservation, but no vis salutis, no force of redemption.’’64 According to Stapel, the state can realize its ‘‘metaphysical essence’’ by taking on the form of an ‘‘empire’’; this empire would constitute the ‘‘meaning of universal history.’’65 In a contribution to the Conservative Revolutionary journal Deutsches Volkstum (The Character of the German People), Stapel seeks to specify this ‘‘metaphysical essence’’ of the empire, referring to 2 Thessalonians 2:7: ‘‘every state has the duty to secure order and peace, but the empire has this duty in a specific sense: if it fails, the ‘mystery of lawlessness’ will gain power; the latter does not consist merely in all kinds of anarchy, but is the satanic insurrection and perversion as such.’’66 Whereas, according to Stapel, it is the duty of ‘‘every state’’ to safeguard order and peace, only the empire would have an ‘‘apocalyptic responsibility’’: its task would be to preserve the existing order, not only preventing ‘‘all kinds of anarchy,’’ but restraining the ‘‘satanic revolt and perversion as such.’’ Stapel recognizes the empire as a katechontic force that, in contrast to the ‘‘ordinary’’ state, has the task of preventing the coming of the Antichrist and the end of days. This image of the empire as holding the middle ground between catastrophe and eternity would deeply influence Schmitt’s understanding of the katechon.67 In the autumn of 1924, the Protestant theologian Erik Peterson was appointed professor of church history and the New Testament at Bonn University, where Schmitt was a professor of constitutional law. ‘‘The only reasonable man,’’ Peterson reported in a letter

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to Karl Barth, ‘‘is the lawyer Carl Schmitt, who proves to be rather acute for a professor.’’68 Their shared interest in the problem of political theology soon became the basis of a friendship that, even after Schmitt had moved to Berlin in 1928, was continued in letters and visits. Five years later, however, Schmitt’s endorsement of National Socialism caused the friendship to flag. A low point was reached in 1935, when Peterson—who in the meantime had converted to Catholicism—chose to reject categorically the possibility of a Christian political theology.69 Although they would never break off contact completely, after the war Peterson passed a harsh judgment on his former friend and colleague: for him, only ‘‘a spiritual existence in penance and sin’’ would remain.70 ‘‘The friendship,’’ as Schmitt observed in retrospect, ‘‘has broken down on the problem of ‘political theology.’ Even now, I am enraged because of Peterson’s presumptuous remark that every political theology has become impossible because of the dogma of the Trinity.’’71 A diary entry from the summer of 1918 shows that Peterson had taken an early interest in the katechon: ‘‘The katechon . . . may stop its delaying [verzo¨gernde] effect. Let the final act be played!’’72 During the final days of the First World War, the figure of the restrainer was perceived as an annoying obstacle to eternity. Ten years later, in his essay ‘‘Die Kirche’’ (‘‘The Church’’), Peterson again referred to the motif, which he there relates to the refusal of the Jews to convert to the true religion: ‘‘The Messianic empire preached by Christ has not appeared. Why has it not appeared? Because the Jews as a people have not believed in the human son.’’73 Peterson concludes that ‘‘the Jews delay [aufhalten] the return of Christ because of their unbelief.’’74 Never before had the notion of the katechon been related specifically to the unbelief of the Jews; never before had the latter, via an appeal to the Pauline figure, been demonized as an obstacle to eternity.75 This interpretation would stay in Schmitt’s mind. Thus, many years later—in the meantime Peterson had publicly distanced himself from him—Schmitt could still write, not without rancor: ‘‘We know what the learned philologist and exegete Peterson has thought of the katechon: the unbelief of the Jews, their refusal to become Christian, which has continued to this very day, is delaying the end of the Christian age.’’76 It is likely that Hans Freyer and Schmitt met at the end of the 1920s; at the time, Schmitt is a professor of public law in Berlin, Freyer a professor of sociology at the University of Leipzig.77 Their acquaintance proved to be the start of a lasting friendship that, according to Jerry Muller, ‘‘follow[ed] from and contribut[ed] to their intellectual and ideological affinities.’’78 Against this background, it can hardly be coincidental that Freyer, a year after Schmitt had noted in his Glossarium that a hidden ‘‘concrete bearer’’ of the katechon is at work in every age,79 published in 1949 a substantial World History of Europe, 1949), in which he tries to uncover a ‘‘restraining force’’ (haltende Macht) for each period of history.80 For Freyer, the idea of the katechon had become almost completely secularized; he does not refer to ‘‘the restrainer’’ but to a series of ‘‘restraining forces’’ (haltende Ma¨chte). These ‘‘restraining forces’’ become visible in historical ‘‘states of exception,’’ turbulent times in which the existing forms of life disappear and horizons of meaning

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disintegrate. ‘‘In those hours of the world,’’ Freyer argues, ‘‘the belief in ‘restraining forces’ becomes a guarantee for the future.’’81 Writing in 1949, Freyer proves himself a late spokesman for the Reich interpretation. He claims that the Reich cannot have come to an end, for that would mean that the world itself had been completed.82 Freyer therefore argues that it must have taken on different shapes through the ages. He identifies Rome, Byzantium, the Church, and the ‘‘German Reich’’ as the successive bearers of the Reichsidee and as ‘‘restraining forces.’’83 Although Freyer, after his discussion of the German Reich, does not mention other restraining forces, we cannot conclude that their part has been played out. Instead, the figure reappears in a contemporary context in a 1952 essay entitled ‘‘Progress and Restraining Forces.’’ Here, it serves the purpose of inventing a viable form of conservatism that can prove a match for the forces of progress. Freyer criticizes the varieties of conservatism that categorically reject every new development, seeking merely to slow down the course of progress: ‘‘What merely delays and prevents change no longer plays a role in history; brakes will wear out, and then the wagon will really thunder on. But, most importantly, the positive meaning for progress of what exists and has been handed down to us is thereby denied. The concept of a ‘restraining force’ serves to place this in the forefront.’’84 According to Freyer, instead of rejecting progress out of hand, restraining forces seek to accompany it. Their function is to preserve the experiences of past generations, not by clinging to them, but by renewing them, that is, by meaningfully projecting them into ever-new contexts. ‘‘Their task is not,’’ Freyer writes, ‘‘to slow down the progressive course, but to appropriate it and to communicate to it osmotically that which can never emerge autogenously in secondary systems: vitality, human sense, human fullness and fruitfulness.’’85 Translating the Pauline motif of the katechon into the secularized language of ‘‘restraining forces,’’ Freyer sets the tone for its later, no longer exclusively theological reception.86 Schmitt would follow a similar strategy in his writings; he too sought to free the Pauline figure from its original theological context in order to introduce it into a secularized political discussion. Schmitt himself noticed the affinity in his article ‘‘The Other Hegel Tradition,’’ which he published on July 26, 1957, in the journal Christ and World: ‘‘Whatever since the nineteenth century has been called—and called itself— conservative, has become obsolete and outdated by the concept of the restrainer, which we encounter in Freyer’s world history.’’87 In his article, Schmitt expresses his approval of Freyer’s notion of the katechon as a force that not only restrains and conserves, but also creates and renews. He shares Freyer’s intuition that the restraining force, rather than focusing on the past, must engage with the dangers and challenges of the moment. That, Schmitt believes, is the main task of the katechon: not merely to conserve what has been, but to make it useful in the present, in a struggle against the lawless one that has continued into the present day.

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Schmitt’s Doctrine of the Katechon Schmitt’s postwar Glossarium contains the first draft of a letter in French to his friend the philosopher Pierre Linn: ‘‘You are familiar with my theory of the katechon; it dates from 1932. I believe there exists a concrete bearer of this force [un porteur concret de cette force] in each century, and the effort is to find it. . . . It consists in a total presence hidden under the veils of history [une pre´sence totale cache´e sous les voiles de l’histoire].’’88 I believe that this letter can be read as a summary of the theologico-political program guiding Schmitt’s later writings: to point out concrete historical instances in each century that have functioned as katechon, that have restrained lawlessness and delayed the end of time. Moreover, I will show that Schmitt actually tried to carry out this program: we thus find, scattered throughout his later writings, countless references to the katechontic ‘‘force’’ of this or that concrete historical instance. In what follows, I will bring these references together and attempt to reconstruct Schmitt’s doctrine of the katechon. Schmitt claimed to have developed his doctrine of the katechon in 1932.89 In fact, it would take years before he actually started to mention it in his writings. He introduced it simultaneously in two texts, the article ‘‘Involuntary Accelerators’’ and the book Land and Sea, both published in 1942.90 In the former, Schmitt characterizes the ongoing world war as a historical struggle between, on the one hand, sea powers such as England and the United States, which strive for an international order with an unrestricted right of intervention, and, on the other, land powers such as Germany, Italy, and Japan, which seek to create ‘‘great spaces’’ (Grossra¨ume) with a prohibition on intervention by ‘‘powers alien to that space.’’91 Schmitt first refers to the notion of the katechon implicitly when defining England’s role in the conflict. In the course of the nineteenth century, he observes, the ‘‘British island empire’’ had assumed the function of a ‘‘great delayer’’ of all world-historical development. The observation leads him to insert a brief account of the history of katechon interpretations into his text: ‘‘In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, people believed in a mysterious restraining force, which was denoted by the Greek word kat-echon (‘to suppress’ [Niederhalten]) and which prevented the long-overdue apocalyptic end of times from already having happened. Tertullian and others saw the old imperium romanum as a delayer that ‘maintained’’ the age by its existence alone and caused a postponement of the end. . . . But individual figures and personalities of political history can also, in a curiously symbolic way, take shape as restraining and delaying forces. The aged Emperor Franz Josef seemed time and again by his mere existence to prevent the end of the superannuated Habsburg Empire, and, if the opinion was then widespread that Austria would not collapse as long as he lived, it was more than ignorant superstition. After the world war, in 1918, the function of restrainer was assumed, to a relatively lesser degree, by the Czech President Masaryk. For Poland, Marshall Pilsudski became a kind of kat-echon.

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Perhaps these examples suffice to indicate the political and historical significance that resides in the role of the restrainer.’’92 That Schmitt begins by referring to the imperium romanum is hardly surprising, for that is the oldest and most classical interpretation; it was already known in Antiquity and would remain dominant throughout the Middle Ages. Schmitt attributes it to Tertullian. His decision to mention only the North African apologist is not without significance. As we have seen, Tertullian tried to convince the imperial authorities to consider the Christians as loyal subjects because they were praying for the preservation of the empire, which, in their eyes, was delaying the arrival of the Antichrist and the end of times. Tertullian thus tended to describe the restrainer from the perspective of the rulers. Schmitt implicitly endorses this reading by translating the word kat-echon as ‘‘suppressing’’ (Niederhalten)—an unusual translation, which suggests that the restrainer can be made comprehensible only in a state-affirming sense, that is, as the sovereign order that ‘‘suppresses’’ lawlessness from above. Yet he suggests this interpretation is not his own, but Tertullian’s. By contrast, the other katechons Schmitt mentions lack specific attribution. We have merely the ‘‘widespread’’ opinion that the ‘‘aged Emperor’’ Franz Josef, by his mere existence, had prevented the fall of the ‘‘superannuated Austrian empire.’’ This opinion, Schmitt adds, was ‘‘more than ignorant superstition.’’93 The addition proves to be ambiguous, for not only can it indicate the neutral observation that the superstition of Franz Josef’s contemporaries was understandable, since it was based on an age-old Christian belief, but it can also mean that those contemporaries, according to Schmitt, had correctly identified the emperor as the restrainer. The latter reading seems to be confirmed by the fact that Schmitt does not attribute the image of the two other katechons he identifies, the Czech and Polish statesmen Masaryk and Pilsudski, to anyone. Apparently, here we are dealing with Schmitt’s own opinion. But why does Schmitt identify Franz Josef, Masaryk, and Pilsudski as restrainers, that is, men who, despite the role they have played in the history of their countries, seem to have little ‘‘world-historical significance?’’ Here, only one answer seems possible: Schmitt mentions them because all three—as Grossheutschi points out—have at one time or another stood in the way of the German pursuit of a Grossraum.94 In particular, these statesmen have clung to the obsolete notion of ‘‘multi-peopled states,’’ thereby preventing the realization of the modern idea of Grossraum. Franz Josef, for example, embodied the anachronism of the ‘‘multi-peopled state’’ like no other, being the ‘‘aged Emperor’’ of the ‘‘superannuated’’ Habsburg Empire, which united many cultures and languages within its borders. But Pilsudki and Masaryk, too, ruled countries with diverse populations. From Schmitt’s point of view, their world-historical significance lies in the fact that each of them constituted an obstacle to the development of the ‘‘modern idea of Grossraum,’’ as they embodied the notion of multi-peopled states. The second time Schmitt discusses the katechon is in his small book Land and Sea, in which he describes the ‘‘history of the battle of sea powers against land powers, and of

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land powers against sea powers.’’95 Here Schmitt refers to the katechon twice—both times in passing. The first is when he tries to explain the position of the Byzantine Empire in the conflict between land and sea powers. The medieval empire, he observes, had been a ‘‘true restrainer,’’ since it had brought the Islamic advance in the Mediterranean to a halt; it had thus averted the ‘‘destruction [Ausrottung] of the ancient-Christian culture’’ and secured the future of a Roman-Christian Europe.96 Schmitt’s interpretation is rather curious if one recalls that Islamic scholars saved large parts of ancient literature from oblivion. Here, Schmitt’s perception of Islam diverges significantly from Hans Freyer’s. ‘‘The Arabs,’’ the latter argues, ‘‘have preserved the ancient science and philosophy with acuteness and have even continued it productively, also for later use in the West.’’97 Freyer’s phrase—referring to both the preservation and productive continuation of the ancient heritage—suggests that, at some point, the ‘‘Arabs’’ themselves had served as restrainers. Yet the suggestion is misleading, for Freyer, too, remains entangled in old stereotypes, arguing that ‘‘the Arabs have at no point become the inheritors of Rome. . . . At no point have they taken over or even renewed the empire; instead, they—and they particularly— have blown it apart and destroyed it.’’98 The second time Schmitt mentions the Pauline figure is in the context of the religious conflicts that divided early modern Europe. He suggests that in this period the epic struggle between land and sea powers was continued along religious lines, as a battle between, on the one hand, ‘‘universal Catholicism,’’ under the command of the land power Spain, and, on the other, ‘‘universal Protestantism,’’ led by the sea power England. In this context, Schmitt argues that the German Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) ‘‘had about him something of a kat-echon [etwas von einem ‘kat-echon’],’’ since he had succeeded in keeping Europe’s religious conflicts outside of Germany’s borders. He thus saved it for a time from a catastrophe that, in the end, proved inevitable. Rudolf, Schmitt emphasizes, was no ‘‘active hero’’; he was incapable of maintaining peace. Rather, his merit was to have temporarily averted the danger that threatened Germany. This is why Schmitt suggests that the German emperor ‘‘had about him something of a kat-echon’’; according to him, the katechon characteristically can guard his empire from catastrophe only temporarily. In the end, the katechon proves to be finite and temporary himself, and, while attempting to restrain lawlessness, he becomes aware of his failing. In a lecture entitled ‘‘The State of European Legal Science’’ (1943–44), Schmitt once more addresses the question of the katechon. Here he recognizes the legal scholar Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1861) and his contemporary Hegel (1770–1831) as ‘‘real restrainers, katechons in the concrete sense of the word, restrainers of the voluntary and involuntary precipitators on the road toward a complete functionalization.’’99 Schmitt refers to a change in legal thinking, the emergence of legal positivism and its ‘‘functional’’ approach to law, which Savigny and Hegel had resisted. He suggests that Hegel was the ‘‘stronger katechon’’ because, in contrast to Savigny, he recognized the danger of ‘‘involuntary precipitators.’’100 Although Schmitt does not explain what he means by this puzzling remark,

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I believe he must allude to Savigny and Hegel’s differing ideas on codification. While Savigny categorically rejected proposals to codify German law as premature, Hegel accepted and even advocated codification, arguing that its function was not, as Savigny had feared, to create new law, but rather to ‘‘reflectively grasp’’ norms that already existed.101 In Schmitt’s eyes, Hegel had thereby proven to be the ‘‘stronger katechon,’’ for, instead of rejecting codification out of hand, he had chosen to enrich it with historical experience. That Schmitt would also intensively engage with the idea of the katechon after the Second World War becomes clear from his personal notes, which covers a period from 1947 to 1951 and was published posthumously under the title Glossarium: it contains as many as ten references to the Pauline figure.102 These consist in two types of references: those in which Schmitt discusses whether or not some concrete historical agent can be regarded as a bearer of the ‘‘restraining force’’ and those in which he examines, more generally, what should be considered the defining qualities of the katechon. The former type appears to be dependent upon the latter: ‘‘I am certain,’’ writes Schmitt, ‘‘that, as soon as the concept has become sufficiently clear, we can agree about many names up to the present day.’’103 For his concrete identifications, in most cases Schmitt returns to examples that he had already presented elsewhere (the imperium romanum, the medieval empire, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Czech president Masaryk).104 All other cases are negative identifications, that is, examples of persons who, according to Schmitt, cannot be regarded as restrainers (the German author Oswald Spengler, the British statesman Winston Churchill, and the American diplomat John Foster Dulles).105 In the second type of references, those in which Schmitt seeks to bring to light the defining qualities of the katechon, a new element in his doctrine is announced. It comes to the fore in a thought he committed to his Glossarium a few days before Christmas, 1947: ‘‘I believe in the katechon; for me it is the only possibility for understanding history and considering it meaningful as a Christian. The Pauline doctrine is not more mysterious than, or even as mysterious as, any other Christian existence. Whoever does not know of the katechon out of his own experience cannot understand this passage.’’106 Schmitt begins his note with a confession: ‘‘I believe in the katechon.’’ He thereby sets the tone: apparently, the insight that restraining powers and forces are at work in history is not primarily of a theoretical nature but based on belief. Schmitt, moreover, suggests that the figure of the katechon cannot be an object of ‘‘knowledge’’ (Erkenntnis), but only the result of an existential ‘‘knowing’’ (Wissen), based on the experience of what it means to be part of a finite historical world in which eternity has been announced, but not yet begun. The doctrine of the katechon must remain a ‘‘mystery,’’ in that it can only be understood by those who know of the restrainer only through concrete experience—and that is true only of the believer.107 Another significant quality of the katechon can be derived from this passage: Schmitt suggests that we, being finite historical agents, cannot identify with the katechon himself,

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but only with his ‘‘task’’ (Aufgabe). Here, I believe, a crucial but neglected aspect of his doctrine comes to light: the figure of the katechon turns out to stand for a theologicopolitical responsibility, namely, the ‘‘task’’ of fighting evil without being able to overcome it definitively. Schmitt suggests that we cannot be certain in advance that we do not ourselves represent the very evil that we believe ourselves to be fighting. This, Schmitt suggests, is a certainty that Paul does not allow us—here too, the Pauline doctrine is a mystery, for it must remain unknown to us when and how the katechon was at work, and whether or not he succeeded in guarding us from evil.108 Thus the katechon himself may prove to be immune to evil, but not his concrete historical agents, the bearers of his ‘‘task,’’ who, as soon as they deem redemption to be at their side, have already joined the camp of those they assume they are fighting. The motif of the katechontic ‘‘task’’ resurfaces in Schmitt’s 1950 magnum opus, entitled The Nomos of the Earth, an inquiry into the foundations of European public law. Here Schmitt discusses the medieval Holy Roman Empire in light of his doctrine of the katechon. He argues that this empire characteristically kept its own finiteness and that of the world in view, yet was able to become a significant and effective ‘‘historical power.’’ This was far from inevitable, for the emperor could easily have fallen into an ‘‘eschatological paralysis,’’ an indecisiveness that would have caused his empire to become ungovernable and collapse. That this did not happen was, Schmitt believes, due to the image of the restraining force: ‘‘the decisive, historically powered notion behind its continuity is that of the restrainer, the katechon.’’109 By identifying with the Pauline figure, the medieval emperor acquired a unique form of legitimacy—an eschatological aura that made his authority almost sacrosanct. He thus, Schmitt argues, overcame indecisiveness and secured the continuity of his rule. Schmitt’s discussion of the medieval empire’s restraining force leads him to add a more general remark on the katechon: ‘‘I do not believe that, for an originally Christian belief, another image of history than that of the kat-echon is possible at all.’’110 The point Schmitt makes here is that belief in the katechon should be considered an indispensable element of every ‘‘originally Christian belief,’’ that is, not only for medieval times, but also in modern times, and even in the twentieth century.111 The phrase echoes an idea we have encountered before in his personal notes: ‘‘I believe in the katechon; for me he is the only possibility for understanding history and considering it meaningful as a Christian.’’112 In both cases, the katechon is presented as a matter of confession, introduced with the words ‘‘I believe.’’ Although in his Glossarium Schmitt characterizes the belief in the katechon as his own (he writes: ‘‘for me he is the only possibility’’), in The Nomos of the Earth he chooses a more general formulation (he writes: ‘‘I do not believe that . . . another image of history . . . is possible at all’’). The new formulation suggests that Schmitt has come to regard belief in the katechon—or rather, confession of the katechon—as an essential part of the Christian creed. Were Christianity to fail to recognize this, it would risk losing its grip on historical reality and, thereby, the possibility of a political theology.

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Evaluating Schmitt’s Doctrine Felix Grossheutschi is the first to have pointed out one development in Schmitt’s doctrine of the katechon. Initially, in his 1942 article ‘‘Involuntary Accelerators,’’ Schmitt seems to judge the Pauline figure negatively, identifying England (and in its wake the United States), Franz Josef, Masaryk, and Pilsudski as restrainers, since they had prevented the emergence of a ‘‘concrete order’’ of Grossra¨ume—a development Schmitt welcomed. That very year, however, Schmitt suddenly seems to value the Pauline figure more positively, arguing that the Byzantine Empire had prevented an Islamic conquest of Italy, thereby guaranteeing the future of the Christian West. Schmitt equally praises the early modern emperor Rudolf II for having delayed the outbreak of a conflict between Calvinism and Jesuitism on German soil. This rehabilitation of the katechon seems to be continued in Schmitt’s later writings, for example, in his lecture ‘‘The State of European Legal Science,’’ in which he identifies Hegel and Savigny as restrainers, because both delayed development toward a more instrumental and functional approach to law. Although Grossheutschi is essentially correct in the development he sketches, there are a few comments to be made. First of all, Schmitt’s initial negative judgment of the katechon turns out to be an exception, given that it can be found in only one of the works that contain explicit references to the motif (the others suggest positive or neutral interpretations). The exception is the article ‘‘Involuntary Accelerators,’’ in which England, Franz Josef, Masaryk, and Pilsudski are characterized as annoying obstacles to the realization of a global order of Grossra¨ume. However, as a more precise reading of the article shows, Schmitt—whether consciously or not—avoids a direct identification of the katechon here. He characterizes Pilsudski not as ‘‘the katechon’’ but merely as ‘‘a kind of kat-echon’’ [eine Art von kat-echon].’’113 England, Franz Josef, and Masaryk are not called katechons at all; the former is only described as a ‘‘delayer’’ (Verzo¨gerer), while the latter two are invested with ‘‘the function of a restrainer’’ (die Funktion eines Aufhalters).114 In view of these evasive formulations, I want to suggest that Schmitt did not recognize these figures as real katechons at all. Rather, he seems to have considered the Third Reich as such, because, in his view, it alone was striving to realize the ‘‘concrete order’’ of Grossra¨ume that could restrain lawlessness. More importantly, I believe that Grossheutschi’s distinction between positive and negative appreciations of the katechon is perhaps untenable as such. Not only does its explicative potential remain limited (some of Schmitt’s descriptions of the katechon being neutral), but the notion of the restraining force itself turns out to be marked by a deep ambivalence. This ambivalence stems from the particular temporal experience underlying the Pauline figure, that is, the experience of a time in which the ‘‘mystery of lawlessness’’ is already at work but not yet revealed, and redemption has already been announced but has not yet occurred. As an expression and metaphorical narrowing down of this temporal experience, the figure of the restrainer must appear to Schmitt as an essentially finite

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force, and its main bearer, the Reich, as an interregnum situated between redemption and fall, set against lawlessness, but without cherishing the illusion that it can itself represent eternity.115 In this context, I do not want to deny the significance of Grossheutschi’s normative distinctions, but I do want to put them in perspective, for Schmitt’s positive and negative appreciations of the katechon merely seem to indicate different aspects of the same temporal experience: he can thus sometimes praise the katechon as delaying the Antichrist, sometimes criticize it as an obstacle to eternity, without having to change his essentially ambivalent appreciation of the Pauline figure. Here we encounter a troubling aspect of Schmitt’s doctrine. Schmitt tends to explain the Pauline figure exclusively in a state-affirming sense. He is thus inclined to analyze the katechon from the perspective of the rulers, that is, as a force suppressing lawlessness from above. Particularly revealing in this context is the selection of authors he cites in support of his reading: he refers to Tertullian, Jerome, and Lactantius, all representatives of an apologetic or state-affirming tradition of katechon interpretation,116 and, for the Middle Ages, mentions the ‘‘German monks’’ Adso de Montier-en-Der and Haymo von Halberstadt, representatives of a state-affirming and state-neutral tradition, respectively.117 By contrast, the state-critical tradition, which had eloquent spokesmen in authors such as Hippolytus and Herve´ de Bourg-Dieu, is absent in Schmitt’s writings. Apparently, it did not fit his conviction that only belief in the katechon could have led to ‘‘such a great historical power’’ as that of the empire, and might even have seemed to contradict it. It is thus a weakness of Schmitt’s doctrine of the katechon that, because of his preference for state-affirming readings, Schmitt tends to endorse uncritically the rulers of the moment. More problematically, his doctrine leads him to accept the use of state violence as a temporary measure necessary to prevent worse violence, namely, lawlessness and anarchy.118 Yet he fails to see that this temporary violence could very well itself become the worst. Only one passage in his writings suggests this insight: a tentative meditation in his postwar Glossarium. Here, the experience of National Socialism leads him to consider the possibility that the state, instead of functioning as a guardian of law and order, can itself become a bearer of lawlessness. In retrospect, he now seems to see the Third Reich as a restraining force that has turned into its opposite, into the rule of lawlessness. In this context Schmitt suggests that, instead of viewing the katechon from above, from the perspective of the rulers, it might be necessary to change perspectives radically and consider the possibility of its opposite: ‘‘The katechon—it is shortage; it is hunger, need, and impotence. It is the people; everything else is the masses and the object of planning.’’119 Yet this striking suggestion—that, instead of the state, the people may be the katechon— remains an exception not only in Schmitt’s writings, but also in the wider tradition of theologico-political katechon interpretations.

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The Culture of Crucifixion and the Resurrection of the Dispossessed The Interpellation of the Subject in the Roman Empire and Paul’s Gospel as ‘‘Truth Event’’

L. L. Welborn

In Badiou’s Saint Paul, the philosopher applies his theory of ‘‘truth processes’’ to the founder of Christianity.1 Badiou finds in Paul’s epistles the formal model of the temporality of the truth event that had undergirded his earlier analyses of ruptures in the fabric of social life in the domains of art, science, love, and politics.2 A New Testament scholar might feel obliged to go along with on Badiou’s project, since Badiou heralds the rediscovery (by an atheist, no less) of the archetypal truth event in Paul’s declaration ‘‘Christ is resurrected.’’3 Drawn to this project by Badiou’s ability to articulate the relevance of Paul’s gospel in a secular idiom, the historian of Paul’s world will find work to do at the point of Badiou’s most important achievement—which is to have exposed the dark, mortal site from which new life emerges, for purposes of theologico-political reflection. As, in the course of this essay, we work toward an analysis of the construction of death in the Roman Empire, we will find ourselves approaching a more adequate understanding of the representation of the subject in the mid-first century, in particular, of the sense of disillusionment and catastrophe that pervades the literature of Paul’s contemporaries, to whom the message of the resurrection is addressed and from whom Paul hopes a new, liberated self may emerge through a subjective division. On the flip side of Badiou’s account of the Resurrection as truth event, we will encounter the limit of Badiou’s interpretation of Paul, in his insistence that Jesus’ death does not belong to the operation of evental grace. I shall argue that Badiou’s attempt to disjoin death from resurrection leads him to place the Pauline concept of the Christ in dangerous proximity to the Nietzschean idea of the Overman as a figure of pure self-affirmation.

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A disclaimer is in order, from the outset: the immanent critique of Badiou’s Paul that follows is informed by philosophical premises that have much in common with Badiou’s own. I was immersed in Heideggerian existentialism as a student, and an encounter with the writings of Walter Benjamin in the early 1980s led me to engage the works of Georg Luka´cs and Louis Althusser.4 I will also assume the usefulness of Lacan’s psychology for analyzing the representation of the subject, even in the literature of antiquity, especially as ethical dimensions of the Lacanian ontologization of the subject are reflected and mediated by Slavoj Zˇizˇek.5 Eric Santner’s account of the ‘‘undeadness’’ of the subject opened for me a fresh perspective on Paul’s understanding of death.6 Finally, this essay shares the professed aim of Giorgio Agamben’s seminar on Paul: ‘‘to restore Paul’s letters to the status of the fundamental messianic texts for the Western tradition.’’7 Thus, the reader should expect to find here, not a critique of Badiou’s philosophy in its entirety, but rather an attempt to think with and through Badiou’s reading of Paul, until, in the end, we venture to think against Badiou’s understanding of Jesus’ death, abandoning, finally, Badiou’s basic premise of the singularity of the resurrection in the operation of evental grace. For those who come fresh to Badiou’s philosophy, it may be useful to situate the book on Paul within Badiou’s larger project, by recapitulating the argument of his Ethics.8 Badiou’s concept of a ‘‘truth event’’ seeks to describe the ways in which human beings undergo tears in the fabric of their social lives, ruptures that, in principle, allow not merely for the emergence of new objects of desire, but also for a fundamental restructuring of the coordinates of desire through radical shifts in the direction of life. According to Badiou, our embeddedness in the customs and opinions of the world we inhabit is structurally susceptible to a disruption that ‘‘compels us to decide a new way of being.’’9 Such ruptures bring about a transformation of the social animal that I was into the human subject I am to become: ‘‘a socialized animal is convoked by certain circumstances to become a subject—or rather, to enter into the composing of a subject. That is to say, at a given moment, everything he is—his body, his abilities—is called upon to enable the passing of a truth along its path. This is when the human animal is convoked to be the immortal that he was not yet.’’10 Badiou gives examples of what can count as truth events from the realms of politics, love, science, and art: the French Revolution of 1792, the meeting of Heloise and Abelard, Galileo’s creation of physics, Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style.11 Each such event generates within our animal inertia a ‘‘vital disorganization’’ that can become the source of a radically new kind of subjective stance: Every pursuit of an interest has success as its only source of legitimacy. On the other hand, if I ‘‘fall in love,’’ or if I am seized by the sleepless fury of a thought, or if some radical political engagement proves incompatible with every immediate principle of interest—then I find myself compelled to measure life, my life as a socialized human

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animal, against something other than itself. And this above all when, beyond the joyful or enthusiastic clarity of the seizing, it becomes a matter of finding out if, and how, I am to continue along the path of vital disorganization, thereby granting to this primordial disorganization a secondary and paradoxical organization, that very organization which we have called ‘‘ethical consistency.’’12 An adequate understanding of Badiou’s notion of a vital rupture in the fabric of being requires us to probe more deeply into the circumstances in which the socialized animal is convoked to become a human subject. Badiou builds upon Althusser’s concept of interpellation to describe the process by which ideology compels us to accept our determinate place within the socio-symbolic edifice, which is a place of guilt and servitude.13 Badiou recognizes that a break emerges insofar as the norms of the socialized human animal are articulated around a void: ‘‘You might ask what it is that makes the connection between the event and that ‘for which’ it is an event. This connection is the void of the earlier situation. What does that mean? It means that at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated void,’ around which is organized the plentitude (or the stable multiples) of the situation in question.’’14 Badiou gives an example of such a ‘‘situated void’’ drawn from the realm of politics: ‘‘Marx is an event for political thought because he designates, under the name ‘proletariat,’ the central void of early bourgeois societies. For the proletariat—being entirely dispossessed, and absent from the political stage—is that around which is organized the complacent plentitude established by the rule of those who possess capital.’’15 Thus, Badiou draws the following conclusion about the relationship between the event and its circumstance: ‘‘the fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name the situated void of that for which it is an event.’’16 Now we are able to comprehend why Paul is a foundational figure for Badiou in the history of the emergence of a universal subject, and hence for the existence of any truth whatsoever: unlike effective truth procedures that aim at the production of a universal in the domains of science, art, politics, and love, ‘‘there occurs with Paul . . . a powerful break,’’17 whose ‘‘immense echo’’ reverberates backward and forward in time,18 a break that deserves to be called ‘‘theoretical,’’19 because the situated void Paul’s proclamation inscribes and names is nothing other than death itself. Paul’s declaration ‘‘Christ is resurrected’’ blasts open the continuum constructed around death. Badiou explains, ‘‘For Paul, the Resurrection is that on the basis of which life’s center of gravity comes to reside in life, whereas previously, being situated in the Law, it organized life’s subsumption by death.’’20 Badiou emphasizes that, for Paul, ‘‘death’’ does not signify a biological terminus, but rather a certain subjective stance or path, a way of dying to life within life, a living death.21 Badiou takes Romans 8:6 to be a ‘‘central aphorism’’:22 ‘‘The thought of the flesh is death; the thought of the spirit is life.’’ Badiou comments: ‘‘The death about which Paul tells us

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. . . has nothing biological about it, no more so, for that matter, than life. Death and life are thoughts, interwoven dimensions of the global subject.’’23 Death is ‘‘the real, configured through the subjective path of the flesh.’’24 ‘‘Resurrection’’ therefore designates the possibility of a disruption of this peculiar death in life, which constrains human existence. The crucial point for Badiou is that it is precisely from this void—that is, from this uncanny site of death in life, that the upsurge of life signified by the Christ event first becomes possible.25 That is the meaning of Badiou’s assertion that ‘‘death is the evental site immanent to the situation’’ and, in that sense, ‘‘enters into the composition of the event itself.’’26 Badiou explains: ‘‘Death is the construction of the evental site insofar as it brings it about that resurrection will have been addressed to men, to their subjective situation.’’27 He sums up: ‘‘Christ has been pulled ek nekro¯n, out from the dead. This extraction from the mortal site establishes a point wherein death loses its power.’’28 For New Testament theologians schooled on Bultmann, Badiou’s concept of death as a subjective path toward the void, a death-constrained immobility, will evoke the Heideggerian notion of ‘‘inauthenticity.’’29 But for Badiou the Marxist, our death in life is not a personal anxiety, distractedness, or numbness generated by our ‘‘thrownness’’ into being.30 Thus, for examples of what Badiou terms the ‘‘symptomal torsion of being’’ around the void,31 we should not look to the group of tombstone jingles, half prose, half verse, found in various forms in every quarter of Paul’s world: ‘‘I was not. I came to be. I am not. I don’t care.’’32 Rather, Badiou conceives of the void that ‘‘Resurrection’’ names as a social and political construct. Because Badiou articulates his understanding of the Christ event as a commentary on 1 Corinthians 1–4, ‘‘the ‘world’ that Paul declares has been crucified with Jesus is the Greek cosmos, the reassuring totality that allots places, and orders thought to consent to those places.’’33 I do not wish to deny that Paul understood his gospel as the overthrow of the regime of discourse that aimed at securing mastery for the wise man. But students of the cultural project of being Greek under Rome are increasingly aware of the various ways in which the ideology of wisdom, in the form of rhetoric and philosophy, served Roman interests and reinforced empire.34 Thus we may seek to supplement Badiou’s project of naming the situated void of the Christ event by exploring figures of subjectivity as ‘‘living death’’ in the Roman world of the mid-first century. In this experiment, we will be following the logic of Paul’s own exposition of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 1–4: after penetrating the ideological mask of Greek wisdom (1 Cor. 1:18–25), Paul exposes the naked face of ‘‘the rulers of this age,’’ who had ‘‘crucified the Lord of glory’’ (1 Cor. 2:6–8). In a handful of recent studies, critics of Silver Age literature have noted the number of works in which the characters seem to be dead before actually dying.35 What had changed in Roman society to account for this transformation in the figure of the subject? Paul Miller suggests that a fundamental split in the nature of subjectivity occurred in the late first century b.c.e., a split that was symptomatic of a change in the structure of power.36 The answer lies in the consolidation of the political and cultural order around

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the figure of the emperor. Perhaps we should have attended more closely to Tacitus’s bitter insistence that the slavishness fostered by Augustus and his successors had destroyed the Roman character.37 For an example of this split in the subject, we turn to Ovid. In his poetry from exile, Ovid constructs his condition as a living death in which true death, while desired, nevertheless eludes him: in Tristia 1.3, Ovid portrays his departure into exile as a funeral; in 3.2, he casts himself in the role of traditional erotic elegy’s excluded lover, knocking in vain on the door of death; in 3.3, he looks forward to death, since it will mean his longed-for return to Rome, once his wife has transferred his bones there; in 3.11, he describes himself as a ghost, his body already reduced to ashes and buried in a tomb; in Ex Ponto 1.9, he exhorts his friend Maximus to number him with the dead. Ovid’s exile poems are a testament to the consolidation of Augustus’s power. Indeed, in their expressions of dependency on the emperor’s mercy and frank acknowledgment of his authority, they provide a model of imperial subjecthood.38 Literature contemporary with the inception of Paul’s mission gives expression to a deepening disillusionment with the realities of Roman rule, especially in the aftermath of the Caligula crisis.39 This literature is also conspicuously haunted by figures of death in life, whether in the form of ghosts, of persons who have returned from the dead, or of pictures of the world as a ruined place, from which all vitality has been withdrawn.40 Making all proper allowances for rhetorical hyperbole in Philo’s invective against the Emperor Gaius,41 it is nevertheless clear how much genuine disappointment and later revulsion accompanied the revelation of madness and cruelty at the center of Roman power, as Philo and his contemporaries discovered that the weight of empire could turn a young man, whose accession had aroused so much hope, into a monster: As the author of general ruin and destruction, . . . you changed what gave pleasure and joy into discomfort and grief and a life which all men everywhere find unworthy of the name. And so insatiable and quenchless were your lusts that you stole all that was good and valuable, whether from east and west, or from all other regions of the world southwards or northwards, and in return you gave and sent them the fruits of your own bitterness and all things mischievous and hurtful that abominable and venomous souls are wont to generate. . . . You stripped the cities of all that tends to well-being and happiness, and turned them into hotbeds of what makes for confusion and tumults and the height of misery. . . . You rained miseries untold one after the other as from perennial fountains on every part of the inhabited world.42 Philo insists that knowledge of Caligula’s crimes was not restricted to those who, like himself, were highly placed: ‘‘In every mouth there was common talk about these inexpiable abominations, though quietly and in undertones, since fear prevented open discussion.’’43 The effect of Caligula’s reign upon Jews and Jewish sympathizers must have been shattering. God had intervened to save a remnant of the Jewish community of Alexandria,

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Philo believed, though many perished in the pogroms.44 But Philo’s confidence was broken: there is a bitter irony and a sense of hopelessness about Philo’s Embassy to Gaius that is not characteristic of his writing generally. Pessimism about human nature steals into Philo’s thought. An even darker vision of the world and human nature is found in Seneca’s tragedies.45 Here we enter a world of moral chaos, in which isolated individuals are driven to acts of violence by gigantic passions.46 Seneca’s Hercules returns from the underworld at the height of megalomania and resolves to storm the gates of heaven; descending rapidly into madness, he slaughters his wife and children.47 Making allowances for the nature of tragedy, it is difficult not to see the bleak world depicted in Seneca’s Hercules as a reflection of the macabre reign of Caligula, who likewise ‘‘overstepped the bounds of human nature in his eagerness to be thought a god,’’48 descended into madness, and murdered members of his own family.49 Amphitryon’s account of the paradoxes of his world echoes the dark experiences of Seneca’s own times: ‘‘Crime which prospers and flourishes is given the name of valor; good people take orders from the wicked; might is right, and laws are stifled by fear’’ (Hercules, 251–53). In Seneca’s Hercules, death manifests itself in the rhythms of everyday life: dawn and birdsong awaken ‘‘hard toil, bestir every care’’ (137–38); crowds in the cities are ‘‘conscious of fleeting time’’ and ‘‘hold fast the moments that will never return’’ (176–77); the throng moving through the streets is on its way to the underworld, ‘‘each with a sorrowful sense of being buried beneath the whole earth. . . . All around is turbid emptiness, unlovely darkness, the sullen color of night, the lethargy of a silent world, and empty clouds’’ (859–63); sleep is the ‘‘languid brother of hardhearted Death’’ (1069), from whom fearful humans gain advance knowledge of the ‘‘long night’’ that is to come (1075–76). In seeking the reasons for the pervasive insecurity that marks the characters of Senecan tragedy, it is worth remembering that ‘‘Seneca himself lived through and witnessed, in his own person or in the persons of those near him, almost every evil and horror that is the theme of his writings. Exile, murder, incest, the threat of poverty and a hideous death were the very texture of his career.’’50 Seneca’s epistles return repeatedly to the thought of suicide: he directs the reader’s attention to ‘‘any tree, . . . any vein,’’ as the path to freedom.51 In Letter 77 to Lucilius, he confesses a longing for suicide: ‘‘death little by little, in a steady weakening not without its pleasures, a peaceful annihilation I know well, having lost consciousness several times.’’52 A more thorough analysis of the representation of the subject in the mid-first century would demonstrate that the figure of death in life, which makes its appearance in Ovid, Philo, and Seneca, was by no means idiosyncratic. It was endemic, at least in the literature of persons of a certain social class. In the writings of those who were most self-conscious and articulate, we glimpse a subject cringing around a void, simultaneously registering

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and repressing knowledge of the death-driven situation by which his existence was constrained. The ground of this experience of disillusionment was not personal, despite Philo’s fixation upon the wickedness of Caligula, but structural: the geopolitical expansion of the Roman Empire and the emergence of sole sovereignty, exercised through an ongoing ‘‘state of exception,’’53 ensured that ‘‘the actions of one man, the emperor, could indeed affect the known world.’’54 And what if this one man was unable to bear the weight of empire and descended into paranoia, or exploded in megalomania? The family history of the Euryclids at Corinth demonstrates that the suspicion of a Tiberius could reach out to a provincial city and result in exile and the confiscation of property.55 In any case, the effect of the political changes of the first century upon the way in which men such as Ovid, Philo, and Seneca chose to represent the figure of the subject is writ large upon their works: they portray increasingly isolated individuals, wracked by obsessive emotions and a sense of supine powerlessness.56 We may reasonably conjecture that Paul’s converts in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Corinth would have been susceptible to these experiences, as well, even if they were less self-conscious and articulate than Seneca. Now let us imagine the day when a gentile Godfearer, someone like Gaius of Corinth (see 1 Cor. 1:14; Rom. 16:23), would have heard Paul preach for the first time at the house of Titius Justus, next door to the synagogue. The announcement that God had sent the Messiah (Acts 18:5), a figure of counter-sovereignty, would have signified an intervention—hoped for, but seemingly beyond hope—of divine power into a world where so much had gone awry. The message that God had raised Jesus from the dead (1 Thess. 2:10; 1 Cor. 15:4, 20), the very one put to death under Pontius Pilate (1 Cor. 2:8), would have signified a rupture in the chain of atrocities. The promise that the Messiah would reign, enthroned in heaven, until he subjugated every inimical authority (1 Cor. 15:24–25), must have signified that corrupt human power over the world had been broken, shorn, and undone. If the secret of the sole sovereignty of Augustus and his successors was that it located the center of gravity in death, in utterly dependant subjecthood, then Paul’s message of the Messiah’s resurrection must have restored the center of gravity to life, so that Gaius, in hearing Paul’s gospel, would have experienced an upsurge, an insurrection of the self, with the exhilarating sensations that attend the sudden emergence of a new subject—freedom, empowerment, hope. And in the company of others who were simultaneously experiencing and declaring the event of their faith, Gaius must have begun to sense the recovery of a community that had largely disappeared amidst the political changes of the preceding century. Naturally, we cannot know how deeply Gaius’s conversion penetrated, or how many of his social values were changed. But the baptism that Gaius received at Paul’s hands (1 Cor. 1:14) symbolized a death of the former self and the beginning of a new life (Rom. 6:3–4). We may assume that one who eventually placed his house at the disposal of the Christian community (Rom. 16:23) would have experienced a profound transformation as he responded to Paul’s gospel.

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Thus far, our exploration of the nature of subjectivity in the first century has focused on the literature of the elite; and for this reason, we took Gaius, ‘‘the host of the whole ekklesia’’ (Rom. 16:23) and perhaps the wealthiest person we know of from Paul’s assemblies,57 to illustrate the psychological effect of the Pauline gospel. Yet the majority of those who experienced a ‘‘calling’’ as a result of Paul’s gospel, even in ‘‘wealthy’’ Corinth, were uneducated, poor, and low born (1 Cor. 1:26).58 How would such persons—slaves and the urban poor—have experienced the vital disruption in the fabric of their lives that liberated a new and fully human subject? Is it possible to comprehend the specific construction of the mortal site from which the ‘‘nothings and nobodies’’ of the Roman world (1 Cor. 1:28) were extracted? As is well known, the obstacle to such an undertaking lies in the silence of the sources: the voices of the poor have vanished from history; as Walter Benjamin observed, the place where their lives are remembered is in the mind of God.59 Where, then, should we look for the poor as subjects in relation to the ‘‘situated void’’ of Roman society? In my own research, I have turned to popular comedy, and especially the mime, as a means of access to the thought world of the lower classes of the Roman Empire.60 On the stage, one encounters portraits of slaves and the poor in abundance, since, in accordance with the Greek and Roman theory of the laughable, their weaknesses and deficiencies, both physical and intellectual, were taken as subjects of ridicule.61 Here I found, initially to my surprise, that the figure of the subject is represented as one who suffers not death in general, but a particular kind of socially shameful death, namely, the cross.62 The most popular mime of Paul’s day was evidently the Laureolus of a certain Catullus.63 Numerous references by historians and satirists make it possible to reconstruct the plot:64 Laureolus is a slave who runs away from his master and becomes the leader of a band of robbers; in the final scene, he is crucified.65 The crucifixion was enacted with a considerable degree of stage realism. Josephus reports that ‘‘a great quantity of artificial blood flowed down from the one crucified.’’66 According to Martial, a condemned criminal was forced to take the part of Laureolus at a performance during the reign of Titus and actually died on the cross.67 In the opening scene of the ‘‘Adultery Mime’’ from Oxyrhynchus, the archmima orders that two of her slaves be ‘‘fastened to the trees.’’68 When a slave’s complicity in the plot to murder his master is uncovered, at the conclusion of the same mime, the master loudly calls for the ‘‘stake’’ to be brought.69 In the denouement of a mime-inspired tale in the tenth book of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, the slave who has assisted his mistress in an attempt to murder her stepson is hanged on the cross.70 The most vivid references to crucifixion in ancient literature are found in the comedies of Plautus, where the lives of slaves are portrayed with unparalleled sympathy.71 Examination of these passages indicates what a large space the specter of the cross occupied in the consciousness of the servile class.72 The slave Sceledrus in Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus (The Swaggering Soldier) confesses: ‘‘I know the cross will be my tomb.

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That’s where my ancestors rest—father, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-greatgrandfather.’’73 In Plautus’s Mostellaria (a story of a ‘‘haunted house’’), the slave Tranio, realizing that his demise looks imminent, asks: ‘‘Anybody here want to make some easy money? Anybody ready to be crucified in my place today? . . . I’m offering a talent to anyone prepared to jump on a cross . . ., after that he can come and claim the money, cash on the nail!’’74 The pages of Plautus are full of such gallows humor.75 Even more frequent are passages in which slaves use the word crux in vulgar taunts, calling one another ‘‘cross-meat’’ and ‘‘cross-bird,’’ or bidding one another to ‘‘go be hanged!’’76 How deeply slaves lived in the shadow of the cross is illustrated by episodes from satires and novels. Horace criticizes a master who crucified his slave for finishing off a half-eaten plate of fish which he had been told to remove from the table.77 In his novel, Petronius tells how one of Trimalchio’s slaves was crucified for having cursed the soul of Caligula; the notice of his death is read out by a clerk from a long list of things that happened that day on Trimalchio’s estate, such as the harvesting of wheat and the breaking in of oxen.78 The novelist Chariton, who was probably writing in the middle of the first century c.e.,79 gives a grim depiction of the crucifixion of sixteen slaves who were working on a chain gang in Caria. Shut up in a dark hut under miserable conditions, the slaves broke their chains in the night and tried to escape, but they failed because the dogs’ barking gave them away. Chariton relates the outcome: ‘‘Without even seeing them or hearing their defense, the master at once ordered the crucifixion of the sixteen men. They were brought out of the hut chained together at foot and neck, each carrying his cross.’’80 Juvenal describes a Roman matron blithely sending a slave to the cross, merely because she is of a humor to do so; when her husband asks what offense the slave has committed worthy of death, the lady replies that she has no reason, but, after all, a slave is not really a man.81 The omnipresence of the cross in popular literature portraying the lives of slaves stands in striking contrast to the social constraint upon discourse about the cross in the literature of the elite.82 Cicero is representative of his social class when he insists, in a well-known passage of the Pro Rabirio, that ‘‘the very word cross should be far removed, not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears. . . . The mere mention of such a thing is shameful to a Roman citizen and a free man.’’83 The surviving literature illustrates how consistently members of the upper class adhered to this principle. There are no references to the cross in learned Roman writers such as Lucretius, Virgil, Statius, or Aulus Gellius,84 and there is little or no mention of crucifixion in Greek writers like Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Aelius Aristides, or Maximus of Tyre.85 What is truly remarkable is the absence of the words crux and patibulum from the works of Caesar,86 despite the fact that he is known to have used crucifixion as a punishment;87 the same is true of the younger Pliny, who as governor of Bithynia must have condemned many to the cross.88 Inevitably, there are references to crucifixion in Greek and Roman historians who recount wars and rebellions,89 but even in such cases there is reticence and

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a tendency to portray crucifixion as a barbarian mode of execution.90 It is clear that the rarity of references to crucifixion in canonical literature is not an historical accident, but a reflection of the social and aesthetic values of upper-class writers.91 What makes the silence of the upper class with respect to crucifixion more significant is the fact that the practice was so widespread in the Roman world. In speaking of the ubiquity of the cross, I do not have in mind the occasional use of crucifixion as the ‘‘supreme penalty’’ (summum supplicium) in notorious cases of high treason,92 nor the more frequent use of crucifixion as a means of suppressing rebellious subjects in the provinces,93 but rather the regular employment of the cross as a punishment for slaves in cities throughout the Roman Empire.94 Just outside the Esquiline Gate at Rome, on the road to Tibur, was a horrific place where crosses were routinely set up for the punishment of slaves.95 There a torture and execution service was operated by a group of funeral contractors, who were open to business from private citizens and public authorities alike.96 There slaves were flogged and crucified at a charge to their masters of 4 sesterces per person.97 Passing references in the satirists disclose aspects of the grisly scene: Varro mentions rotting corpses;98 Horace speaks of whitened bones;99 Juvenal describes the way in which the Esquiline vulture disposed of the bodies: ‘‘The vulture hurries from dead cattle and dogs and crosses to bring some of the carrion to her offspring.’’100 An inscription from Puteoli confirms that such places of execution, with crosses and other instruments of torture, were found throughout Italy and probably outside the gates of every large city in the Roman Empire.101 At these places of execution, it is impossible not to recognize the real reason for the silence of the upper class with respect to crucifixion: crucifixion was the ‘‘slaves’ punishment’’ (servile supplicium).102 One can still hear the tone of shock and revulsion in the voices of Roman writers of a certain class when they speak of the exceptional circumstances under which the ‘‘slaves’ punishment’’ came to be inflicted upon Roman citizens and free men.103 Following Badiou’s suggestion that we direct our attention to the mortal site from which new life is extracted, we have arrived at a place where we are able to look more deeply into the ‘‘situated void’’ of Roman society. Now we can see that the cross was not merely a ‘‘lacuna in the discourse’’ of the upper class, to use Giorgio Agamben’s term,104 but is perhaps better described as the specific, material density within the situated void around which Roman power was constructed. Indeed, the cross was not only the ominous specter around which the consciousness of the slave cringed, but because the cross was the evil instrument by which the legal institution of slavery was maintained, which extracted the surplus upon which the power of the ruling class depended, it may be identified as the dark, gravitational center that, whether recognized or repressed, allotted places to all those who lived within the socio-symbolic edifice of the Roman Empire and compelled thought to consent to those places.

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In my view, it was an historic moment when Paul, in the course of his correspondence with Corinth, began to articulate his gospel as a ‘‘message about the cross’’ (1 Cor. 1;18).105 In Badiou’s terms, Paul dares ‘‘to name the situated void’’ of that for which Christ was an event. Paul seizes upon the cruel and disgusting term that the educated elite of the Roman world least wanted to hear and pronounces it with a vengeance. But what is surprising, from the point of view of Badiou’s philosophy, is Paul’s drastic reduction of the content of the gospel. He omits not only the details of Jesus’ life (which never mattered to Paul in the first place),106 but also, astonishingly, the resurrection. That this omission was conscious is demonstrated by Paul’s repeated choice of the perfect participle, estauro¯menos, to describe the Christ whom he proclaims (1 Cor. 1:23; 2:2): Paul insists that the continuing and present significance of the Christ, even after his death and resurrection, consists of nothing other than the fact that he is the crucified.107 How can we understand this development in Paul’s thinking? And what challenge does it pose to Badiou’s understanding of the Resurrection as the archetypal ‘‘truth event’’? I would submit that it is no accident that this drastic constriction in the content of Paul’s gospel is found in the portion of the writing known to us as 1 Corinthians, where Paul champions the cause of ‘‘nothing and nobodies’’ against the destructive partisanship of the rich and the strong, a partisanship driven by their over-valuation of ’’eloquent wisdom.’’108 Badiou rightly identifies as ‘‘the most radical statement’’ in 1 Corinthians 1–4 the following: ‘‘God has chosen the things that are not in order to bring to nothing those that are’’ (1 Cor. 1:28).109 But Badiou does not connect Paul’s provocative assertion that God has chosen the nothings of the world with Paul’s reduction of the content of the gospel to ‘‘the message about the cross.’’ The truer Marxist, Paul claims that the purpose of God’s intervention in history was not the liberation of a universal subject from the path of death, but rather the redemption of the many oppressed, whose identities are submerged in shame and whose lives are in danger of disappearing on account of the annihilating power of the cross. I propose to appropriate two concepts from Walter Benjamin in an effort to understand how the crucified rather than the resurrected Messiah could be a vital rupture in the death-constrained existence of the oppressed. Benjamin suggests that the redemption of those whose lives are in danger of being forgotten takes place, paradoxically, through a process of mortification and living on.110 Benjamin compares this process to the gluing together of the fragments of a broken vessel: the result does not constitute a new, seamless totality, but remains essentially fragmentary, a vessel of broken parts.111 In his last essay, Benjamin describes the messianic event as a moment of ‘‘arrest,’’ a ‘‘cessation of occurrences,’’ accompanied by a ‘‘shock,’’ after which the struggling, oppressed worldlings are able to live on, in openness to further moments of immanent redemption, by dint of a ‘‘weak messianic power.’’112 Applying these categories to Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 1:26–31, we infer that the proclamation of the crucified Messiah summoned the weak and

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the lowborn into the material density of the cross, where Christ’s willingness to suffer the very death that threatened their existence became the resource for living on in righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. This constant process of mortification and living on is expounded by Paul in a crucial passage of the writing known to us as 2 Corinthians: But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that it may be clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in our body the mortification [nekro¯sis] of Jesus, in order that the life of Jesus may be manifest in our body. For constantly we the living are being handed over into death on account of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may be manifest in our mortal flesh. (2 Cor. 4:7–11) Later in the same epistle, Paul penetrates more deeply into the psychology of the one who experiences the shameful death of the Messiah: ‘‘For the love of Christ constrains us, being convinced of this: that one died for all.’’ But notice that Paul does not continue as we might expect, ‘‘so that all might live’’; rather, Paul writes: ‘‘one died for all, and therefore all died. And on behalf of all he died, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for the one who for their sake died and was raised’’ (2 Cor. 5:14–15).113 In the operation of evental grace, Paul decisively shifts the balance between death and resurrection in favor of death, not death as the mortal condition, but death as the selfcontraction of the Messiah, on behalf of the oppressed.114 We may now attempt to imagine the day when members of the lower class—‘‘Chloe’s people,’’ let us say—heard Paul’s ‘‘message about the cross’’ and were ‘‘called’’ into the paradoxical experience of power in weakness, so that their lives came to be characterized by a sense of justice, sanctity, and freedom (1 Cor. 1:30). Paul makes it clear for whom his cross gospel had this unexpected consequence: for the most part, they were members of the lower class, those who lacked education, wealth, and birth (1 Cor. 1:26). It is at this point that failure to understand Paul’s thought is most significant. Martin Hengel, the most diligent researcher of crucifixion in the ancient world, opines that, because the cross was such a horror to slaves and the poor, the message of the crucified Christ ‘‘was hardly an attraction to the lower classes of Roman and Greek society.’’115 Nothing could be farther from an adequate understanding of the psychosocial dynamic of Paul’s gospel. In the message that the anointed one of God had died the contemptible death of a slave, slaves and the poor heard that they had been ‘‘chosen’’ by God (1 Cor. 1:27–28). The message that the Christ had shared the fate of a piece of human garbage, one of those whom life had demolished and who had touched bottom—this message was a power capable of rescuing those who trusted in it from despair at the nothingness of their lives (1 Cor. 1:18b, 21b, 24), so that, even if they lived in the shadow of the cross and died a bit every day, and even if the cross should be their tomb, as it was of their fathers and

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grandfathers, its power over them was broken and undone, so that they could live on with value and meaning and love and hope, because the one who had died in this contemptible way was the anointed one of God. Badiou’s most significant failure to understand Paul occurs at this point. Badiou asserts that ‘‘for Paul . . . the event is not death, it is resurrection.’’116 He reiterates, ‘‘Death . . . cannot be constitutive of the Christ-event. . . . What constitutes an event in Christ is exclusively the Resurrection.’’117 Thus, Badiou insists that Jesus’ death does not belong to the operation of evental grace, but is only ‘‘an operation that immanentizes the evental site, while resurrection is the event as such.’’118 Badiou is led to this disjunction between Christ’s death and resurrection by his desire to ‘‘de-dialecticize’’ the Christ event, to liberate the Christ event from its Hegelian captivity, in which resurrection is nothing but the negation of the negation, a moment in the self-realization of the Absolute.119 Badiou seeks to ‘‘avoid the pitfalls of the morbid masochist morality that perceives suffering as inherently redeeming.’’120 But is Badiou right to deny that Paul’s thought is dialectical? Badiou insists, ‘‘resurrection . . . comes forth out from the power of death, not through its negation.’’121 The emergence of new life is not a dialectical outcome of the dense materiality of death in life; rather, ‘‘the sudden emergence of new life remains of the order of grace.’’122 Surely, Badiou is right in insisting that one who is dead in sin cannot give to himself the possibility of new possibilities. ‘‘Something must happen, something beyond one’s own control, calculations, and labor, something that comes from the locus of the Other.’’123 But for Paul, the event that happens and that faith declares consists of Christ’s death and resurrection. Again, we may find ourselves asking whether a more instructive analogue to Paul’s proclamation of the Christ event as death and resurrection is not to be found in Benjamin’s notion of ‘‘dialectics at a standstill’’: at the moment when one hears the word of the ‘‘crucified Christ,’’ the constant motion of positing the self in a dialectic between law and desire is arrested, and sudden insight into the death of the Messiah on behalf of all ignites a revolutionary upsurge of life.124 Badiou’s answer to the question ‘‘Why Christ must die, and to what end Paul expands on the symbol of the cross?’’125 falsifies the argument of Romans 5. Badiou explains that ‘‘Christ dies simply in order to attest that it well and truly is a man who, capable of inventing death, is also capable of inventing life.’’126 But in Romans 5, Paul argues that Jesus died, not merely to manifest his share in the universal human condition, but to commend God’s love toward the weak and ungodly (Rom. 5:6–7). And Paul asserts that this hitherto unimaginable ‘‘act of righteousness,’’ namely, Jesus’ death for the weak and sinners, is the free gift of grace, the event that reverses the consequences of Adam’s sin and ends the reign of death (Rom. 5:12–21). Badiou’s interpretation of Romans 6 seems a willful misreading: ‘‘death counts for nothing in the operation of salvation.’’127 But Paul describes the saving event as ‘‘being united with Christ in a death like his . . . our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no

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longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is free from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him’’ (Rom. 6:5–8). As a result of Badiou’s misrepresentation of the Christ event as consisting only of resurrection without death, Paul becomes Nietzschean, and the new man in Christ becomes the Overman.128 Badiou asserts: ‘‘Both [Paul and Nietzsche] share the same desire to initiate a new epoch in human history, the same conviction that man can and must be overcome.’’129 How different is Paul’s final exhortation to Christians in the tenements of Trastevere who, beyond honor and shame, beyond the holy and the profane, beyond all superego inculpation, are enjoined to ‘‘enslave’’ themselves to the Messiah and seek to please not themselves but one another, the powerful ones being obligated to ‘‘bear the weaknesses of the powerless ones’’ (Rom. 14:18; 15:1–3).130

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The Philosophers’ Paul in the Frame of the Global Some Reflections

Elizabeth A. Castelli

At the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first, Continental philosophers have turned toward the first-century letters of Paul preserved in the New Testament as a resource for thinking about the question of the political in the contemporary moment. This trajectory of Paul’s political afterlife begins with Jacob Taubes’s 1987 Heidelberg lectures on ‘‘the political theology of Paul.’’1 It resurfaces a decade later in philosopher Alain Badiou’s 1997 reading of Paul as ‘‘the poetthinker of the event’’ and inventor of a universalism that makes possible a subject ‘‘devoid of all identity.’’2 Three years later, in a millennial year, Giorgio Agamben published his homage to Taubes, situating Paul as a precursor to Walter Benjamin, with whom he shares an obsession with messianic time.3 Meanwhile, the philosophers’ turn to Paul has generated a massive cottage industry of commentary, and ‘‘political theology’’ has emerged as a preeminent theoretical category for the first decade of the twenty-first century.4 Producing readings that are intentionally thematic, focused, and partial, these philosophers work in a mode that is neither traditionally exegetical nor concerned with historically contingent questions. That is, their methods are unencumbered by the customary practices of the field of biblical studies and shaped far more by the philosophical lineages in which the authors locate themselves. Their readings are also deeply selfconscious, even personal. But is there something more to these readings than their remaking of Paul’s letters into a sort of philosophical Rorschach test? Is there something beyond a nostalgia for biblical origins afoot in Paul’s resurrection into a series of philosophical afterlives? Moreover, if these Western philosophical appropriations of Paul represent one kind of decentering of biblical reading (away from exegesis and history), how do they line up next to another kind of radical decentering: the refocusing of Christianity itself away from its traditional

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Western orientation in a turn toward the global South?5 Both phenomena require one to account differently for the history of interpretation (whose readings count? on what claims or authorities are they based? what textual practices are legitimate, and who or what is the source of that legitimation? what relationships of responsibility exist between the reader and the text’s legacies?) and the history of Christianity (whose topography is radically recontoured when ‘‘global’’ history trumps the history of ‘‘the West’’). The critique of historical criticism that has characterized the last three decades of biblical scholarship in the Western academy has perhaps run its course and, in the process, arrived at multiple possible horizons, among them the decoupling of biblical interpretation from its own history in the interpretive practices of European philosophers, on the one hand, and, on the other, the irrelevance of that history for the Christian communities of the global South, which bring their own interpretive frameworks, historical legacies, and theoretical/theological investments. Whose politics? one might ask. Whose universalism or theology? Or, indeed, whose Christianity? a tradition whose contemporary iterations serve simultaneously as a rich resource for imagining social change and a foundation for intense religious/affective fervor and social conservatism.6 The ‘‘Christianity’’ that emerges here is not a stable and unified tradition but a complex and often contradictory expression of competing commitments and practices. As European (and American) thinkers seek to develop a coherent genealogy of Paulinism (following Taubes), the multiplicities, incoherencies, and efferevescences of Christianity on the ground seem to have a quite different agenda altogether. So, what conversation is possible? And who will set its terms? My purpose is not to make a simple comparison. I want rather to consider how, in these different engagements with biblical texts, text and temporality, materiality and authority, disciplinary practices and intellectual/religious lineages are variously constituted. As a consequence, I will focus less on the content of the philosophical arguments under consideration than on how they are staged, for and to whom they attempt to speak, and within which disciplinary and methodological regimes they operate.7 My efforts to suggest lines of engagement between the philosophical project, biblical studies, and global Christianity are merely suggestive and by no means definitive. It is simply a place to start. Jacob Taubes and Thinking Apocalyptically from Below Today I see that a Bible lesson is more important than a lesson on Hegel. A little late. I can only suggest that you take your Bible lessons more seriously than all of philosophy. But I know I won’t get anywhere with that, it isn’t modern. Of course, I never wanted to be modern, that wasn’t my problem. —Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul Who has determined the values of the Occident . . . more deeply than Paul? —Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul 144

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The Political Theology of Paul is a posthumous redaction of a series of lectures that Jacob Taubes gave in Heidelberg in 1987. At the outset, Taubes offers an autobiographical reflection on his sense of the pressing character of time: ‘‘When I accepted this invitation, I did not have the idea of being so ‘pressed for time’ [die Zeit so dra¨ngt],’’ he writes. ‘‘I was thinking more of apocalyptic time pressure, but did not know that time was pressing so personally, that is, because of an incurable illness.’’8 (Political 1; Politische, 9). Having been invited to lecture on 1 Corinthians, Taubes announces, ‘‘since I now know that time presses more for me than it does in general for us all,’’ he will abandon 1 Corinthians and ‘‘take up something that is a more secret concern [ein geheimeres Anliegen] of mine,’’ Paul’s letter to the Romans.9 Taubes’s sense of urgency emerges from this doubled sense of compressed time, his desire to respond to the apocalyptic claims of his interlocutor, the conservative legal theorist Carl Schmitt, and his sense of the closeness of the end of his own life. Bemoaning the isolation of the fields of philosophy and theology—‘‘I think the isolation of the theology departments is disastrous,’’ he writes in the introduction10 —he goes on to argue for an intersectional engagement between the reading of biblical texts and the philosophical project. Later, he lays claim to the status of ‘‘historian of religion, and not a theologian,’’11 a disciplinary self-positioning that allows him to see things that, apparently, the theologians cannot see. He is also stridently dismissive of biblical scholarship—‘‘Modern Biblical criticism, however, beginning with Spinoza. . ., I have no use for it,’’ he writes.12 Taubes’s rejection of the project of biblical criticism post-Spinoza is, in some measure, a religious objection, insofar as he views the Enlightenment project of modern biblical interpretation as a historically reductive, literalist project divorced from the context of religious community and the history of religious interpretation. Yet it possesses a certain resonance for those in biblical studies who have for several decades pointed out the limits and limitations of historical criticism and sought to remake the field, often with literary theory operating as a decompression chamber of a sort. In the process of his critique, Taubes makes a striking detour back through the history of interpretation, lifting up allegory—that ancient interpretive practice at once powerful and unpredictable, sidelined since the Reformation—and making a sweeping claim for its interconnectedness with the spirit-filled, the pneumatic: ‘‘the link of the pneumatic as life experience with allegorical textual experience.’’13 In the midst of an apocalyptic reading, Taubes stages a reaching back across time to a lost art, the art of reading otherwise or from another place. The pneumatic, a breeze that blows through the letters of Paul, alights in Taubes’s text. And yet, it is crucial to remember that Taubes’s reading of Paul is set very specifically within a debate with Carl Schmitt’s political theology. Just so, Taubes puts it pointedly in the first appendix to The Political Theology of Paul: ‘‘You see now what I want from Schmitt—I want to show him that the separation of powers between worldly and spiritual is absolutely necessary. This boundary, if it is not drawn, we will lose our Occidental breath. This is what I wanted to impress upon him against his totalitarian 145

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concept.’’14 The pneumatic is something to think with, perhaps, but poses a critical danger at the level of the political. Despite his brisk deposal of biblical criticism from Spinoza on, Taubes at the same time evinces a level of humility at the beginning of the lectures, observing that, in coming to Heidelberg, he has come to a center of New Testament scholarship.15 He goes on to tell an anecdote of an epistolary encounter, followed by a personal encounter, with Schmitt.16 The conversations that took place afterward ‘‘were conducted under a priestly seal,’’ writes Taubes. ‘‘Not that I’m a priest, but there are things one has to treat like a priest.’’17 According to the account, the two men then read Romans 9–11 together, and Schmitt concluded this conversation with the insistence: ‘‘Taubes, before you die, you must tell some people about this.’’18 Taubes goes on to say that this is how he came to write about Romans, ‘‘as a Jew and not as a professor.’’19 There may be some false modesty in Taubes’s assertion that he reads and writes about Romans ‘‘as a Jew and not as a professor,’’ insofar as he brings a focused erudition to the project. His reading travels through the Talmud to Benjamin, Nietzsche, and Freud, arriving at Freud ultimately as the one who ‘‘enters into the role of Paul’’ and who brings into the picture an entire theory of culture.20 This movement from the first century to the twentieth, from Jewish apocalyptic to the Jewish science (psychoanalysis), places Paul in quite a different trajectory from the one frequently assigned him by Christian interpreters. By contrast, Taubes adds his voice to a chorus of interpreters who have insisted that Paul be understood as a Jewish thinker, one undermining the customary identity markers of social difference (though not, perhaps, eradicating them altogether—pace Badiou) in light of the messianic logic of his eschatological moment. Taubes’s approach is methodologically fluid, and he inserts numerous asides into his commentary to situate himself vis-a`-vis his subject: referring to himself at various points in the text as ‘‘poor Job,’’ but also as ‘‘little Jacob Taubes,’’ as a historian of religion rather than a theologian, as a philosopher, as a nonauthority yet as someone who ‘‘pays my dues to scholarship,’’ as one whose interpretation (at a particular juncture) owes nothing to ‘‘literary exegesis’’ but instead is grounded in ‘‘a historical, concrete memory,’’ as a resister of anachronism—that ‘‘ruin of any venture into sensible textual study,’’ as one ‘‘embarrassed [in the presence of renowned biblical scholars] . . . to be practicing exegesis,’’ as a mocker of French scholarship, as Carl Schmitt’s interlocutor, and so on.21 Overarching in his self-presentation is his vision of himself acting ‘‘as a Jew, not as a professor,’’22 whose project he puts in these terms: ‘‘This is the point at which little Jacob Taubes comes along and enters into the business of gathering the heretic back into the fold, because I regard him—this is my own personal business—as more Jewish than any Reform rabbi, or any Liberal rabbi, I ever heard in Germany, England, America, Switzerland, or anywhere.’’23 Later in the book, at the end of his discussion of Nietzsche, Taubes says of himself, ‘‘Now I of course am a Paulinist, not a Christian, but a Paulinist.’’24

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For scholars of the New Testament, in some sense there is nothing particularly novel about placing Paul in the context of first-century Judaism, and a scholarly consensus about doing so emerged well before Taubes’s Heidelberg seminar—reaching back to W. D. Davies’s Paul and Rabbinic Judaism and E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and anticipating Daniel Boyarin’s A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity.25 Taubes did not perform his lectures for New Testament scholars, but for ‘‘an illustrious circle of scholars and artists,’’26 heirs to a particular narrative about the Western philosophical canon, a narrative that routinely posits Paul as the creator of ‘‘universal Christianity’’ over against ‘‘ethnically particular Judaism,’’ a narrative that renders Paul as one of the fathers of Christianity and reads him backward through the lenses of the Protestant Reformation. And so, as Taubes’s unpacking of Paul’s letter to the Romans goes forward, he works by way of a series of strongly worded theses. In the first instance, and most importantly for his overall argument, Taubes asserts, ‘‘my thesis is that . . . the Epistle to the Romans is a political theology, a political declaration of war on the Caesar.’’27 From this foundational claim emerges a series of others. Some theses will be historical: ‘‘my thesis is that the Gentiles whom Paul made into Christians were originally recruited from these sebomenoi (god-fearers) and that only later did other Gentiles join.’’28 Others are interpretive and focused specifically on the vexing problem of the law in Paul: ‘‘I want now to present this thesis, that the concept of law—and this again is political theology—is a compromise formula for the Imperium Romanum’’ and ‘‘this is why—and this now is my thesis—the critique of law is a critique of a dialogue that Paul is conducting not only with the Pharisees—that is, with himself—but also with his Mediterranean environment.’’29 Still others grow out of a history-of-religions sensibility that looks for repetitions, genealogies, and realignments of old figures and frameworks in new contexts: ‘‘Now it is my thesis that the Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, whose status in the Jewish calendar is the same as your Christmas, translates this controversy between God and Moses into ritual’’; ‘‘my thesis is that Paul understands himself as outbidding Moses’’; and ‘‘the Paul-Moses comparison is forced by Paul himself. My thesis thus implies that Christianity has its origin not properly in Jesus but in Paul.’’30 One can see how Taubes’s method operates to ‘‘bring the heretic back into the fold.’’ When Paul is positioned in a clear historical-symbolic lineage with Moses, when he is situated within the historical framework of first-century Roman imperial domination, the legal and political dimensions of the Paulinist critique emerge to the full. So much for theses in The Political Theology of Paul; everything else is a gloss. Paul’s declaration of war on Rome, as Taubes would have it, is predicated upon the inversion or transvaluation of values that resides at the heart of Paul’s message. This transvaluation has its roots in the ordinary illogic of the crucifixion narrative, in which the purported messiah is executed in the most ignominious fashion available to Roman imperial authorities. ‘‘This is a total and monstrous inversion of the values of Roman and

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Jewish thought,’’ Taubes says. ‘‘The faith in this defamed son of David becomes an equivalent for all—now we’re speaking in Pauline terms—works. . . . . the internal logic of events demanded a faith that is paradoxical, that is contradicted by the evidence.’’31 For Taubes, it is precisely this transvaluation of values in the historical context of first-century Roman imperial domination that should make Paul the hero of Nietzsche’s story, since ‘‘what Nietzsche discovered in Paul, the genius of the transvaluation of values, is contained precisely in the critique of the concept of law.’’32 The result is what Taubes’s commentators call ‘‘negative political theology,’’ an ‘‘unhinging’’ of the worldly order altogether and the undermining of the law as an ‘‘ordering power.’’33 The disruption of values and the critique of the law create, then, an opportunity for the reconstitution of the social in relation to God: ‘‘This is no blood kinship, but a kinship of the promise! . . . For Paul, the task at hand is the establishment and legitimation of a new people of God,’’34 a task that Taubes sees accomplished in Romans 9–11. Throughout, Taubes goes to great lengths to elaborate the view that the new people of God is an extension and expansion of the old category, not its cancellation. Taubes speaks out of a sense of personal urgency—he is speaking and writing against time, suffering from a terminal illness. But there are other registers of urgency operating in the text as well: political, philosophical, even theological urgencies. For his argument engages with temporality, figured apocalyptically, in an effort to interrupt a historical trajectory of interpretation that resolves/dissolves Paul’s Jewishness into a ready-made Christianity. Although the word antisemitism only appears three times in Taubes’s book,35 he is nevertheless deeply concerned with its theological, intellectual, and political effects. By seeking to coax Paul the Jewish heretic back into the fold, Taubes lays claim to the politically destabilizing quality of Paul’s apocalyptic, its disruptive potential.

Alain Badiou and Secular Universalism Basically, I have never really connected Paul with religion. —Alain Badiou, Saint Paul

Taubes reads Paul as a Jew. Alain Badiou, by contrast, undertakes his reading from a decidedly secular and purportedly disinterested place, understanding the letters not as scripture but as classic text. ‘‘I have always read the epistles the way one returns to those classic texts with which one is particularly familiar; their paths well worn, their details abolished, their power preserved. No transcendence, nothing sacred, perfect equality of this work with every other, the moment it touches me personally.’’36 Again, a personal project. Badiou’s interest in Paul is not to situate him in historical context but through him to make a much broader and historically noncontingent argument about the event, the

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subject, and universalism: ‘‘What is essential for us is that this paradoxical connection between a subject without identity and a law without support provides the foundation for the possibility of a universal teaching within history itself. Paul’s unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp, be it that of a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a social class.’’37 Where does the urgency of Badiou’s argument come from? At one level, he seems to be worried about or, perhaps put better, annoyed by the emergence, post-1968, of identity politics. ‘‘All access to the universal, which neither tolerates assignation to the particular, nor maintains any direct relation with the status—whether it be that of dominator or victim—of the sites from which its proposition emerges, collapses when confronted with this intersection between culturalist ideology and the ‘victimist’ conception of man.’’38 For him, such politics are simply the flip side of global capitalism: ‘‘On the one hand, there is an extension of the automatisms of capital, fulfilling one of Marx’s inspired predictions: the world finally configured, but as a market, as a world-market. . . . On the other side, there is a process of fragmentation into closed identities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this fragmentation.’’39 But how does Paul help with this? By repeating an early Christian baptismal formula in Galatians 3:28—‘‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female’’—a phrase Badiou quotes, though he omits the final clause of the sentence: ‘‘for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’’40 There is an important clue here to Badiou’s mode of operation: by deracinating the baptismal formula from its ritual context and, indeed, from its messianic setting, the noncontingent universalism that is the touchstone of Badiou’s argument remains unproblematically intact. Badiou goes out of his way to let his readers know that he is not reading from the perspective of religion: in particular, he introduces the specter of genetic predisposition, describing himself as ‘‘irreligious by heredity,’’ and the authority of his familial orientations—secular, schoolteacher grandparents who encouraged in him ‘‘the desire to crush the clerical infamy.’’41 At the same time, though, he (like Taubes and Agamben) feels compelled to assert the authority of his reading by laying claim to a scholarly apparatus: an established text (the critical edition of Eberhard Nestle and Kurt and Barbara Aland), a good French translation (by Louis Segond), and two scholarly books ‘‘for further reading’’ (Stanislas Breton’s Saint Paul and Gu¨nther Bornkamm’s Paul): ‘‘A Catholic, a Protestant. May they form a triangle with the atheist.’’42 This figure of the triangle constituted by Catholic, Protestant, and atheist is a confounding detail in Badiou’s efforts to establish his authority to enter into the conversation about Paul. He has ‘‘never really connected Paul with religion,’’43 and yet the three interpretive subject positions he invokes are religious subject positions. They seem, moreover, to cover, for Badiou, the relevant interpretive terrain, producing an oddly parochial effect in Badiou’s grand defense of universalism and its capacity to render all differences irrelevant.

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These moves toward establishing authority outside of the framework of Christianity, to read Paul with authority from outside—outside the disciplines of theology or biblical studies, outside the frame of religion itself—are striking: Who does Badiou worry is policing these boundaries? And what of his construction of an identity outside of the communitarian grasp, both in general and for that of Christianity? Is there, in other words, ever a subject without identity, as Badiou would like, a view from nowhere where he might perch? An especially troubling aspect of Badiou’s method of reading involves his predisposition to superimpose his one-size-fits-all ‘‘event’’ on everything he sees. Once he has declared Paul the poet-thinker of the event, all the elements of the archive must line up with this characterization. Just so, in his discussion of the Jerusalem conference (a meeting narrated in both Acts and Paul’s letter to the Galatians), Badiou appears to be reporting the historical facts of the matter but ends up trafficking in hoary old cliche´s about the ‘‘Judeo-Christians,’’ who are strictly observant and who misunderstand the the ‘‘postevental imperative of truth’’ by which the Christ-event renders the law a matter of indifference.44 But then he shifts gears: ‘‘The debate, philosophically reconstructed, bears upon three concepts: interruption (what does an event interrupt, what does it preserve?); fidelity (what is it to be faithful to an evental interruption?); and marking (are there visible marks or signs of fidelity?). The fundamental interrogation is crystallized at the intersection of these three concepts: Who is the subject of the truth procedure?’’45 In this paragraph Badiou’s approach to the text is crystallized: the event is the lone theoretical optic through which the text may be read, and so we cannot be surprised that it emerges centrally in Paul’s argument. Badiou’s postevental Paulinism has quite a bit in common with a long tradition of writing the history of early Christianity as a series of radical breaks and decisive historical shifts, placing ‘‘the parting of the ways’’ between Judaism and Christianity in the mid-first century and imagining these two complex, overlapping, and interwoven religious worlds transformed into separate spheres by mere force of philosophical argument. Given Badiou’s insistence on the universality of postevental Paulinism, it is not surprising, perhaps, that he takes fundamental issue with the prospect that Paul is talking straightforwardly about ethnicity or social differences when he speaks of the ethne¯ (translated sometimes as ‘‘Gentiles’’ or ‘‘the nations’’).46 Badiou is troubled by the repeated formulation—‘‘Jews and Greeks’’—observing rather positivistically that there are far more groups or ‘‘nations’’ than these populating the Roman empire. His solution is to posit that Paul is saying something else by his repeated reference to ‘‘the Jews’’ and ‘‘the Greeks’’: In reality, ‘‘Jew’’ and ‘‘Greek’’ are subjective dispositions. More precisely, they refer to what Paul considers to be the two coherent intellectual figures of the world he inhabits, or what could be called regimes of discourse. When theorizing about the Jew and the Greek, Paul is in fact presenting us with a schema of discourses. And this schema

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is designed to position a third discourse, his own, in such a way as to render its complete originality apparent.47 He goes on: What then is Greek discourse? The subjective figure constituted by it is that of the wise man. . . . Greek discourse is cosmic, deploying the subject within the reason of a natural totality. . . . Jewish discourse is a discourse of exception, because the prophetic sign, the miracle, election, designate transcendence as that which lies beyond the natural totality. The Jewish nation itself is at once sign, miracle, and election. It is constitutively exceptional.48 Whereas Taubes’s vision of Paul’s transvaluation of all values, including ethnic difference, involves the extension of the category of ‘‘the people of God,’’ Badiou recycles here an old (and some would say, pernicious) trope concerning the Greek universal and the Jewish exception. In the process, despite his claims to an interpretive position outside of religion altogether, Badiou nevertheless manages to reproduce a theory of Christian supercessionism, even if he does so outside of the frame of Christianity’s historic relationship to Judaism. Moreover, Paul ends up underwriting Badiou’s own suspicions of identity politics and the politics of difference: ‘‘Paul’s unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp, be it that of a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a social class.’’49 What we have in Badiou is far less an interpretation of a text than a projection of the interpreter, a kind of philosophical feedback loop. Badiou frets over the politics of difference, and Paul did too. Most distressingly, however, Badiou’s rendering of Paul as both a worrier over difference and the poetthinker of the event manages to recycle some of the most pernicious effects of Christian theology in its relationship to Judaism. At the same time, Badiou’s universalism bears an oddly parochial cast, with its insistence that the politics of difference serve only the unsatisfiable appetites of capital and that differences themselves are simply symptomatic, with the letters of Paul serving as touchstones and prooftexts.

Giorgio Agamben and the Structure of Messianic Time What does it mean to live in the Messiah, and what is the messianic life? What is the structure of messianic time? —Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains

Whereas universalism, the subject without identity, and truth beyond the communitarian grasp frame Badiou’s reading of Paul, for Agamben, the central trope of Romans

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resides in the figure of the christos, the messiah. As he states explicitly in the first sentence of the book, ‘‘This seminar proposes to restore Paul’s Letters to the status of the fundamental messianic text for the Western tradition.’’50 Paying a debt to Taubes, Agamben argues that the messianic has been effectively suppressed in Paul’s letters by means of ‘‘complicity between Church and Synagogue’’ in an effort ‘‘to cancel out or at least mute Paul’s Judaism . . . to expunge it from its originary messianic context.’’51 Dedicated in its entirety to Taubes’s memory, The Time That Remains can be read as an extended gloss on The Political Theology of Paul. Agamben’s method involves a close reading of the first ten words of Paul’s letter to the Romans, a passage that he posits contains the entirety of the text in itself.52 The approach is simultaneously philological and idiosyncratic: by working word for word, even including an interlinear translation as an appendix to the book, Agamben suggests that he will extract a more accurate (messianic) meaning from the text, but his focus on the word at the expense of the phrase or the sentence, emphasizing semantics over rhetoric, can at times produce translations dependent upon tortured syntax.53 Moreover, because he remains so committed to his interpretive framework as an apriorism in his reading of Romans, Agamben sometimes smooths out translational difficulties,54 and he downplays the full semantic range of certain important words, insisting that their meaning must derive from one genealogy (e.g., Hebrew precursors) over against others (e.g., common parlance or garden-variety administrative uses).55 Agamben’s philological method evinces a certain hard-headed rigor while resisting the prospect that textual ambiguities are part and parcel of the practice of interpretation. What is at stake for Agamben in these efforts to control the text through philological policing? Agamben’s argument consists of several overarching and interwoven theses, most critically this: Paul’s letter to the Romans is a messianic text. In a clear echo of Benjamin, for Agamben, the messianic has to do with the temporal and functions as an interruption in ordinary time: Messianic time is the time that time takes to come to an end, or, more precisely, the time we take to bring to an end, to achieve our representation of time. This is not the line of chronological time (which was representable but unthinkable), nor the instant of its end (which was just as unthinkable); nor is it a segment cut from chronological time; rather, it is operational time pressing within the chronological time, working and transforming it from within; it is the time we need to make time end; the time that is left us [il tempo che ci resta].56 Thus, to live in messianic time is to live in what Agamben calls ho nyn kairos—the time of the now.57 The existence of this quality of time produces for Agamben a recapitulation,58 but also a reconfiguration of things—not Taubes’s transvaluation of value but a disruption of conventional understanding. Therefore, on Agamben’s reading, nomos (law 152

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in its abstracted sense) is to the gospel as laws (in their ordinary, juridical sense) are to the state of exception.59 Agamben, picking up on Taubes’s apocalypticism from below, reads messianic time in Paul’s exhortations in 1 Corinthians 7 for his community to live ho¯s me¯, ‘‘as if not,’’ that is, to live in the suspended state of urgency that awaits the end. More traditional interpretations of 1 Corinthians 7 focus on the apocalyptic expectations that would have Paul, as a historical figure, frame his ethical exhortations to his followers in eschatological terms: live as if the culmination of history were just around the corner.60 (Agamben, for all his attention to philology, seems somewhat tone-deaf to the subjunctive mood implied by ho¯s me¯, the full implications of its capacity to express a condition contrary to fact remaining off-limits to him.) Yet for Agamben, the matter is not so much one of ethical exhortation as of the effort to use messianic time as a meaning-installing gloss on historical time, to insist on the messianic vocation as ‘‘the revocation of every vocation,’’61 and to assert the erasure of identity embedded in the messianic sensibility. This impulse toward turning things over, toward erasure, toward radical suspension that Agamben hears ringing through Paul’s letters has important resonances with Taubes’s reading. Meanwhile, in a direct attack on Badiou’s reading of Paul as the founder of universalism, Agamben takes the opposite tack. Badiou argues, ‘‘Paul demonstrates in detail how a universal thought, proceeding on the basis of the worldly proliferation of alterities . . . produces a Sameness and an Equality. . . . The production of equality and the casting off, in thought, of differences are the material signs of the universal.’’62 By contrast, Agamben posits a radical system of division and ‘‘division of divisions’’ which ‘‘forces us to think about the question of the universal and particular in a completely new way, not only in logic, but also in ontology and politics.’’63 In Agamben’s reading, it is not only time that remains but also the remainder or the remnant produced by the process of division—an excess, a ‘‘not-all,’’ a messianic remnant existing (for Paul, according to Agamben) in ‘‘the messianic now.’’64 Agamben’s reading of Paul, while staged in the frame of the philological and exegetical, is also structured, in a sense, biblically: The Time That Remains seminar takes place over six days, echoing the six days of creation, and culminates in what Agamben calls ‘‘the threshold or tornada,’’ a poetical term for the verbal and thematic recapitulation that follows the six highly structured stanzas of a sestina.65 The structure of time and the structure of the argument itself anticipate how the messianic breaks in, offered up by Agamben as a political alternative to historical time. Here again, we hear an echo of Benjamin, who inhabits the tornada that closes Agamben’s reading of Paul and, indeed, who literally has the last word in Agamben’s seminar. The Philosophers’ Paul and Global Christianity: Some Preliminary Reflections How, then, are we to think about this turn among some Continental philosophers to the letters of Paul, alongside the emergence of something called ‘‘global Christianity’’? It is 153

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too simple to divide the terrain along geographical lines (Europe versus the global South) or disciplinary boundaries (philosophy versus anthropology) or lines of religiosity or secularism (belief versus rational detachment/engagement) and so on. Primarily, I have tried to imagine Taubes, Badiou, and Agamben in the same room with the people whose engagements with the Bible and reading habits are described in a work like Philip Jenkins’s The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South.66 What would the conversation sound like? Along what axes would it be plotted? Jenkins offers a few suggestive snapshots of how Paul comes to be read in the Christian global South, and although these images do not map simply or straightforwardly onto the interventions of the European philosophers reading Paul, there are some striking resonances. One might think, for example, about the reactivation of the practice of allegory in both Taubes’s interpretation of Paul and a variety of postcolonial contexts. Recall that Taubes makes a particular analogy when discussing allegory, linking the pneumatic, the spirit-filled, and the allegorical: ‘‘the link of the pneumatic as life experience with allegorical textual experience.’’67 Paul emerges as an allegorist in Taubes’s reading of him, and Taubes thereby pulls a late ancient and medieval textual practice into his latetwentieth-century context. Meanwhile, the story of Paul in the New Testament and the arguments Paul makes in Romans and Galatians become themselves the textual basis for the allegorical interpretation of the contemporary Christian situation in postcolonial contexts. Most often, this allegorical method produces a scriptural foundation for making an argument about the life of Christian communities. So, for example, just as ethnicity and culture were not barriers to conversion in the early Christian church, according to both Paul and Acts, such barriers ought not to stand between potential converts in the present and full membership in the church. In terms of contemporary Christian interpretation of these ancient texts, old ethnic identities stand in for current ones. As Jenkins reports: ‘‘Just as Greeks and Romans did not have to be Judaized to receive salvation, ‘so also should the Igbo not be Europeanized or Americanized by the missionary message in order to be saved.’ ’’68 Likewise, the structures of opposition generated by Paul’s rhetoric (and highlighted for historically noncontingent purposes by the philosophers) can become a fruitful resource for Christian interpreters in the global South as they enter into institutional battles with their northern and Western coreligionists. The contestations within the Anglican communion over homosexuality are a case in point: mobilizing Paul’s construction of the conflicts in the Corinthian church as between those who are adepts in the wisdom of the world and those who embrace a godly foolishness, Anglican bishops in Nigeria have depicted liberal coreligionists in the West as figures for those who possess pride in wisdom in the first-century Corinthian community.69 With countless examples of this sort of allegorical engagement, one could argue that a fluid allegory functions as the dominant mode of interpretation in global Christian contexts across the political terrain, from left-leaning liberation theologies to conservative

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evangelical and Pentecostal movements. This mode of allegorization is made possible, in part, by a particular attunement to the apocalyptic—a heightened sense of living in what Agamben would call ‘‘messianic time’’—that governs much of contemporary Christianity across a wide swath, both North and South. In such a context, the current historical situation and the archaic biblical past are not separated by a great and unbridgeable divide. Rather, one temporality inflects the other, and time expands and collapses concertina-style, always caught in the structure of already not yet. Of course, apocalyptic thinking is always double-edged, an observation that calls to mind Taubes’s critique of Schmitt as ‘‘an apocalyptic thinker of counterrevolution,’’ who ‘‘thinks apocalyptically, but from above, from the powers; I think from below.’’70 The Christianity of the Southern Hemisphere has a long history of thinking apocalyptically ‘‘from below.’’71 The popularity and salience of the Book of Revelation, read as protest literature and as anti-imperial imagining, in the context of liberation theology in Latin America and elsewhere serves as one potent example of such apocalyptic thinking. Moreover, it is certainly not mere happenstance that the 1985 theological manifesto against South African apartheid was called The Kairos Document,72 using the Greek word kairos (so important to Agamben’s notion of messianic time) to signal the singular importance of the historical moment when the churches came together to condemn state-sponsored white supremacy. Another arena for reflecting further on the overlap between the philosophers’ readings of Paul and global Christianity might be to undertake a comparison of critical readings of specific texts. Taubes and Agamben, for example, offer opposing readings of Romans 13, the passage that begins, ‘‘Let every soul [person] be subject to the ruling powers’’ and goes on to argue that the rulers are owed obedience because they are appointed by God as God’s ministers [diakonoi, leitourgoi].’’73 Taubes links this passage to 1 Corinthians 7:29–31, where Paul urges the Christians of Corinth to live ‘‘as if not’’ because ‘‘the schema of this world is passing away.’’ Taubes concurs: ‘‘That’s absolutely right, I would give the same advice. Demonstrate obedience to state authority, pay taxes, don’t do anything bad, don’t get involved in conflicts, because otherwise it’ll get confused with some revolutionary movement, which, of course is how it happened. . . . for heaven’s sake, don’t stand out!’’74 By contrast, Agamben argues, ‘‘The only interpretation that is in no way possible is the one put forth by the Church. . . . which states that there is no authority except from God, and that you should therefore work, obey, and not question your given place in society.’’75 For Agamben, something is missing here, the very ‘‘as if not’’ through which Taubes reads the same passage: ‘‘What happens to the as not in all of this? Doesn’t the messianic vocation become reduced to a sort of mental reserve, or, in the best of cases, to a kind of Marranism [crypto-Judaism] ante litteram?’’76 Romans 13 has a long and complex interpretive history, ranging from blanket assertions of its literal and universal applicability through highly nuanced and politically grounded counter-readings.77 The text was routinely used as a theological justification for

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apartheid in South Africa, and Christian resistance to the state’s imposition of a policy of white supremacy called for a contextual reading of Romans.78 Meanwhile, in Latin American contexts, where liberation theologies in the latter half of the twentieth century linked their exegesis to the preferential option for the poor, Romans 13 also called for a contextual reading that allowed for resistance to illegitimate authorities. With the rise of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism in Latin America in recent decades, however, the effect of Romans 13 has been felt mostly in conservative ways.79 Yet, as one scholar exploring the shifting dynamics around race in Brazilian evangelical contexts notes, the evangelical predilection to take Romans 13 seriously has also lent authority to emerging antiracist projects among evangelicals, with the emergence of a different political context in Brazil and the state’s commitment to implementing resolutions from the 2001 Durban conference on racism.80 Philip Jenkins, meanwhile, attributes the contemporary Christian concern over the text’s call for submission to ruling authorities in parts of the world where Christians live as minority communities, often in contexts of violence. He writes, ‘‘Christians living under repressive Muslim regimes . . . ask seriously whether the words of Romans 13 should apply to them, and at what point Christian submission should give place to the martial spirit of the Old Testament.’’81 In seeking to cross borders between the philosophers’ readings of Paul and the scholarly study of global Christianity, given the centrality of political theology to the philosophical argument, one would be well served to approach questions of religion, secularity, and the state as potentially fruitful arenas of investigation. An alternative approach would be more thematic, focusing on a trope, image, or concept found in both the philosophical readings of Paul, on the one hand, and the lived worlds of global Christianity, on the other. All three of the philosophers under discussion, for example, attend to the theme of spirit/breath (in Greek, pneuma) in their readings of Paul. Even as each of these writers seeks, in his own fashion, to trouble the cliche´ that spirit has become in some Christian theologies—spirit standing in for the new, the impassible, the animating force of human life, and the opposite of flesh, of the old, the mortal, the deadening letter—one wonders how their readings of pneuma would line up against examples drawn from the world of contemporary global Christianity. Two examples suggest the direction such work might take. In his 2007 A Problem of Presence, Matthew Engelke invites his readers into a sustained encounter with the Friday Apostolics, a small group of Zimbabwean Christians who describe themselves as ‘‘the Christians who do not read the Bible,’’ who instead receive the Word of God ‘‘live and direct’’ from the Holy Spirit.82 Dismissed by some other Zimbabwean Christians as ‘‘primitive’’ and ‘‘mad,’’ the Friday Apostolics nevertheless take their rightful place in a long historical lineage of Christians who have struggled over the materiality of writing and its capacity to mediate revelation. Whereas students of Christianity might initially be temptedto dismiss the Friday Apostolics as a heterodox

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aberration or ethnographic exception, Engelke challenges such facile responses by elegantly showing how this community articulates, embodies, and inhabits a complex postcolonial theoretical stance that one might characterize as a semiotics of immateriality. Along with this mode of signifying practice—one that is profoundly performative and embodied—comes a radical critique and rejection of the Bible as a material object, a thing that becomes ‘‘stale’’ and ‘‘falls apart,’’ a document transmitting the propaganda of Europeans, a dangerous artifact. The spirit works in this context in a mode of radical immediacy, and in consequence, it should perhaps be no surprise that the spirit of Paul makes an uncanny appearance in the midst of one Friday Apostolic community late in Engelke’s book. Gregory Nzira is one of the critical figures in Engelke’s ethnography, a spiritual leader of the Apostolics who, when speaking as a prophet, goes by the name of Pageneck. As Engelke recounts the occasion, when a visitor from another group introduced himself at the beginning of a service, giving his name and announcing that he had come from another community in Hatcliffe, Pageneck responded dismissively: ‘‘I don’t have relationships with Galatians. I don’t eat with Galatians.’’83 In Engelke’s account of this moment, several witnesses expressed the view that Paul had spoken through the prophet, with Paul’s letter to the Galatians operating in the deep background of Pageneck’s rejection of the visitor from Hatcliffe. Remarkably, the critique of the Hatcliffe community’s failures, according to Pageneck, draws on a shared knowledge of Paul’s letter, even as the critique revolves around the Hatcliffe-Galatians’ inability to maintain a spiritual stance unmediated by (written?) proscriptions. As Engelke puts it, ‘‘The presence of the Bible is a precondition for its absence. . . . As a negative declaration, ‘We are the Christians who don’t read the Bible’ contains a dependency [that] . . . is always, in the end, there.’’84 The Friday Apostolics occupy an extreme end of the continuum along which the exploration of global Christianity’s engagement with the concept of ‘‘spirit’’ might be mapped. For if the Friday Apostolics position themselves and their religious practice as an unmediated, ‘‘live and direct’’ access to spirit, others embrace rather different strategies of theorization and mediation (and remediation) of the role of the spirit in their devotional lives. Take, for example, Marie Jose´ de Abreu’s 2005 article on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in Brazil. In this article, de Abreu focuses on the media-savvy efforts of Padre Marcelo Rossi, former bodybuilder and physical education teacher turned priest, to reorganize for his followers their notions of the universe, their own subjectivities, and their relationship to the spirit, using scripture as the template.85 For scripture to be the template for such a project is far from unusual, but Padre Marcelo’s techniques for achieving this reorganization of thought and self-understanding are. Blending traditional practices—the rosary cycle—with ‘‘pneumatic technologies,’’ including his well-known ‘‘aerobics for Jesus,’’ Padre Marcelo establishes complex connections between technology and scripture, body performances and inspiration, his own star power and the remaking of subjectivities among his large numbers of followers.

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Padre Marcelo’s pneumatic technologies and his ease with the practices of media emerged, as de Abreu explains, in a complex political and theological terrain: Padre Marcelo and his charismatic renewal movement, in contrast to Brazil’s strong tradition of liberation theology, insist that ‘‘spirituality and politics do not mingle’’ and turn to the New Testament story in which Jesus distinguishes between the things of God and the things of Caesar as a prooftext.86 The contrast is practical as well as metaphorical: the practices of liberation theology’s biblical interpretation are grounded in lived and temporal realities; those of the charismatic movement express what de Abreu, following Gaston Bachelard, calls ‘‘the aerial imagination.’’87 In a country where a Pentecostal conglomerate actually holds the trademark on the word gospel,88 the traditional modes of thinking about sacred texts—safely sequestered from media and market flows—are most certainly left wanting.

Conclusion The continuities between Continental philosophy’s fascination with the letters of Paul and the emergence of something scholars and journalists have come to call ‘‘global Christianity’’ are hardly straightfoward or exhaustive. That said, the discontinuities and oblique ways in which the European philosophical texts and the lived reality of Christianity in the global South overlap are nevertheless also informative. The methods of engagement in these two quite distinct domains are obviously very different from one another, and not only because of the insider/outsider dynamic put in play by the philosophers themselves. Most striking for me, as I have tried to read Taubes, Badiou, and Agamben in the political and intellectual contexts in which they operate, is how much their worlds comprise a narrow swath of (the intellectual centers of) Europe and North America, even as they seek to speak from outside the limits of time and place. Given this partiality, one wonders whether the universalism attributed to Paul by these thinkers extends fully to encompass the lived experiences of their global others. What would happen if, for the purposes of experiment and analysis, one deracinated Paul from the position in the history of ideas in the West (where the philosophers are happy to plant him) and deposited him in some completely other lineage, one recognizable to, say, the Friday Apostolics of Engelke’s study or the Brazilian charismatics documented by de Abreu? What would happen to the language of the apocalyptic, messianism, or univeralism in the process? And who would Paul be, under such newly reframed circumstances?

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Paul as a Hero of Subjectivity Stanley Stowers

There are many Pauls and Saint Pauls. There is the Paul of the ancient Church ‘‘Fathers.’’ There are the Pauls of Byzantine and Eastern Christianity. There is the Paul of the mature Augustine, the font of the Protestant and modern Western Pauls. Among others, one can add the Pauls of Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, of German idealism and Romanticism, and of ‘‘existentialist’’ reactions. Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zˇizˇek are participants in an amazing modern project that centrally concerns the subject, the individual, and the self.1 Their Paul is also a participant in this project. My question is whether it is possible to say something about the history and beginnings of this Paul. One might describe my project as a move in the direction of comparative Paulinisms with genealogical ambitions. I first want to reject one mode that discussion of these contemporary interpretations of Paul’s thought might take that is especially the temptation of the professional New Testament scholar. Such a discussion would involve rolling out one of the popular readings of Paul’s thought, ‘‘the assured results of Biblical scholarship’’—for example, liberation from the powers of sin, law, and death; justification by the individual’s faith alone; radical conversion into a new community of equality, reconciliation, and liberal resistance—and measuring the readings of Agamben, Badiou and Zˇizˇek against it. The biblical scholar would understand this move as measuring a contemporary interpretation against the historical Paul. I do not disagree with this last goal as an ideal for motivating inquiry. My craft is that of a historian. My rejection of this procedure does not stem from some form of idealism. Rather, I have no hope of simply looking at the historical evidence and finding the bare facts. Instead, I must give an account of my understanding of what will count as facts for some program of inquiry before I can hope to make good arguments about what is historical data and

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what can be made of the data.2 But this sort of inquiry is neither the only approach to writings of the past nor autonomous from other kinds of thinking and inquiry. Such a slick and quick procedure would preclude any engagement with the thought and projects of Agamben, Badiou, and Zˇizˇek. It would also ignore the fact that, on one level, the real historical Paul is not so important to their projects. If Badiou, for example, were to use a ‘‘not fully historical’’ reading of Paul to help in the explication of truths about how the constitution of an authentic and militant subject might come about, the historical inaccuracy does not matter, or at least not very much. In addition, I am skeptical about the historical reliability of the historical Paul of New Testament scholarship. In my estimation, perhaps the most striking thing about Badiou’s reading and his philosophy is the degree to which a subject-centered approach has been naturalized. Badiou, Agamben, and Zˇizˇek do not feel a need to justify the subject-centered method or the universality of subjectivity. It is as natural as God was for Paul. My procedure will be to attempt a brief discussion of Badiou’s reading, by way of an example, stressing points that ally it to similar modern projects regarding the subject. Then I want to ask to what extent Paul’s thought might fit into the patterns that I have discussed regarding the modern project, and if comparisons might illuminate both the modern and the ancient projects. In his Saint Paul, Badiou poses Paul’s gospel as a powerful antidote to the commodification of identity in ‘‘identity politics’’ and multi-culturalism that is central to neoliberal ideology and its process of globalization.3 Paul said that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but oneness in Christ (Gal. 3:28). This historical situation is for Badiou just a part of deeper and more universal problems. Human societies and cultures form totalities and ideological systems that both enable the dominant political regimes and straitjacket the potential for resistance and individual authenticity, the existence of a genuine subject. So he reads Paul’s proclamation of Christ against the world’s wisdom (1 Cor. 1:22). In Badiou’s interpretation, the Greeks erred by assigning humans to a place in a cosmic totality and the sign seeking and law keeping of the Jews was equally problematic. At base the problem and the solution is the nature of human subjectivity, although in this tradition subjectivity and socio-cultural-semiotic constraint are not separable. In his Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou writes, ’’I hold, moreover, that a single concept, that of the generic procedure, subsumes the disobjectivization both of the truth and of the subject, by making the subject appear as a simple finite fragment of a postevental truth without object.’’4 Why would someone want to ‘‘disobjectify’’ the truth and the subject? His language of subject/object and ‘‘truth’’ might seem puzzling to those unfamiliar with the ultra-Cartesian tradition of philosophy to which Badiou belongs, but it is essential for historically situating his reading of Paul. I will argue that Paul, like other ancient thinkers, does not have a conception of a subject in this sense. In the tradition begun by Descartes, there is a problematic gap between the subjectivity of experience and the world that the subject supposedly represents. Everyone knows

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the story of how Descartes arrived at this understanding. When he subjected his beliefs to radical doubt in order to rid himself of dogmatic slumber, only subjective certainty about how the world appeared to him remained, but he lost his faith in how the world is. A world of interior mental objects now stood between the self and the world. As Thomas Nagle, an adherent of this Cartesian tradition, writes: The idea of objectivity thus seems to undermine itself. The aim is to form a conception of reality which includes ourselves and our view of things among its objects, but it seems that whatever forms the conception will not be included by it. It seems to follow that the most objective view that we can achieve will have to rest on an unexamined subjective base, and that since we can never abandon our own point of view, but can only alter it, the idea that we are coming closer to reality outside it with each successive step has no foundation.5 The subject here is the thing that forms the conception that is locked in the inner realm created by Descartes and his successors. This subject can never form an objective view of itself and still be itself rather than an external object, a thing in the world. Thus arises the idea of a true or authentic self, a genuine subject-not-object, versus selves somehow formed by the external world. But how is it that this subject gets lost or destroyed or never formed or formed as the false self of objects in the external world? To illustrate some features of the broader historical tradition that will be useful for my discussion of Badiou and Paul, the now unpopular but genealogically crucial Arthur Schopenhauer is a good place to begin. He both mediated and turned away from the Romantic idealist post-Kantian projects of Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, and he paved the way for Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their appropriation in twentieth-century French thought. Thus I will be skipping Lacan, Althusser, and the other thinkers closest to Badiou’s project in order to seek broader patterns of a tradition. It was Schopenhauer from whom Nietzsche derived both his idea of will as the vital basis of experience and history, and the idea of a higher self as existence that is free from objectification.6 For Schopenhauer, human cognition and perception subjectively represent the world as the experience of separate stable objects (contrary to the true monism of the thing-in-itself). He radically interpreted Kant’s category of causality, one of Kant’s categories of understanding that make coherent perception/experience possible. The mind forces humans to interpret he world falsely as made up of stable particular objects that cause and receive effects. This fundamental shaping and constraint of the mind lies below the level of reflective consciousness. ‘‘The will’’ is the noumenal world of the ‘‘thing-in-itself’’ and is beyond the level of representation and reflective consciousness. Thus the subject is trapped in an illusory relation with the objective realm and alienated from the primal vital irrational source of life.

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Schopenhauer, however, like almost every thinker in the tradition, posited a way out. One could bypass the mind and go to what he supposed to be the unmediated experience of the body. When we feel or have desire, moods, and drives, without representation or objectification, we have an unmediated connection with existence or being itself. These states participate in a form of the will that exists only for itself, without cause, effect, or objects. Schopenhauer thus thought that he had solved central (Cartesian) problems in Kant. The tradition has many quite different versions, but they all posit that the world we think we know is, for example, illusory, or ideology, or a linguistic prison house, and that any escape from this totalizing situation must be purely subjective and extremely rare. Nietzsche’s thought about subjectivity is far too complex and varied to treat here except for a few comments about largely uncontroversial features.7 The relevant and particularly crucial role of a very distinctive ‘‘French Nietzsche’’ is a large story that I must avoid here.8 The point again is to highlight some features of this Cartesian tradition that focus philosophy, including politics and ethics, on the question of subjectivity according to the structure noted above. Nietzsche consistently attacked and criticized subjectivity as ordinarily constructed. The Cartesian subject was a fiction that allowed people the illusion that they were individuals and that they were free. It gave them a kind of morbid stability of conventionality that eliminated the possibility of constant self-transcendence of which the very best humans were capable. The weak masses of humanity think that the subject causes or does this or that as if there were a ‘‘substratum’’ beneath the doing, the expression of power. Reflexivity and the distorting nature of language create the illusion of a complex interior life, but the strong are continually seeking new resistance that involves self-overcoming. Both the masses and the intellectually sophisticated nihilist cling to the socially formed and linguistically distorted self, but the rare hero embraces the suffering involved in destroying each subject formed by embracing a situation of struggle and creating a new subject for another moment. This idea forms the center of the will to power.9 An authentic subject is rare and discontinuous with conventional conceptions of the subject. Nietzsche’s critique and constructive ideas at times come close to getting rid of the Cartesian mental objects, interior homunculi, and obsessive dualisms that have bedeviled the tradition. But he both retained the dualisms in new forms and argued for the possibility of achieving a genuine and heroic subjectivity for special individuals. Nietzsche replaced Schopenhauer’s dualism of will and representation with the will to power, divided into two ways that humans relate to this fundamental value of pure becoming. The weak manifest the will to truth by basing their lives on the illusion of stability, objective values, and knowledge. Common humanity is seduced by the rigidity of conceptual thinking, the belief that they are subjects, and a lack of openness to constant self-overcoming. Nietzsche thought this self-creation to be impossible through reason and objectifying reflectivity or by ameliorative means. The superior individual, expressing the higher evolutionary principle found in the few great men from the best cultures and the openness to the contingency of values expressed in the drives of the body, could use

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situations of great challenge to express a power that would explode in an act of selfre-creation, a kind of subject of the particular challenge. If this account has merit, then Badiou’s comparison of Nietzsche and Paul is astute.10 Both are antiphilosophers with grand, universal visions. Badiou also misses an important similarity that is central to their forms of militancy, namely, their positive evaluations of suffering, in one case with and for Christ (the new life), and in the other case for overcoming the old man in order to create the new.11 But there are elements that resist this scheme of translation. Badiou writes that Paul had no interest in immortality.12 I think that he did and that such elements resist the subjectivization and spirituality that are part of the Cartesian pattern. The debt of such post-structuralist thinkers as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida to this tradition is clear, but Martin Heidegger is the crucial intermediary to the ‘‘post-structuralist’’ scene. Heidegger explicitly formulated his goal as accomplishing what Nietzsche had attempted but failed to accomplish: to escape the subject-centered approach of philosophy since Descartes. Heidegger even attributed the subject-centered approach to the whole of Western philosophy and claimed that it had infected thought more generally.13 As I will argue, this claim about ancient thought is almost certainly wrong. Even though the aim of Being and Time was to replace the bounded, stable and detached Cartesian subject with a transcending self that flows through time, Heidegger later saw that the approach was still too subject centered or at least too human centered.14 His early thought is well known for formulating the fundamental problem of human existence as one of objectification that blocks the possibility of transcendence. But even with his later turn to language and away from some of the elements of his thought that had allowed it to connect to National Socialism, the same central themes appear. In ‘‘Overcoming Metaphysics,’’ the evil triad is still ‘‘subjectivity, object and reflection that belong together.’’15 But the later analysis stresses the objectifying instrumental use of language, which belongs to the ‘‘modern metaphysics of subjectivity.’’ I think that Badiou is absolutely correct: Paul has nothing to do with a philosophy of finitude.16 Death and negativity are to be destroyed and not embraced. The Heideggerian readings of Paul’s letters radically distort his message. Nietzsche tried to overcome subjectivity partly by giving attributes and roles traditionally given to reason or mind to the body, but as concerns the broader Cartesian pattern that I have been illustrating, this was merely to change places. In Being and Time, Heidegger presents a profound challenge to the Cartesian tradition. The lasting contribution of the first part of that book is the largely persuasive non-Cartesian account of human cognition and human life. He tried to show that ‘‘the present at hand’’ (the Vorhanden) is a precipitate of the ‘‘ready at hand’’ (the Zuhanden) that is basic. The latter is a kind of preconceptual intentionality that structures human activity with normativity.17 It is a how-to-use ‘‘tools.’’ ‘‘Tools’’ or ‘‘equipment’’ are things that have been given significance by the roles that they play in human practices. Practices can be done in right and wrong

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ways. An implicit normativity is thus socially instituted. Having a domain of objects (Vorhandensein), non-normative things, is secondary, derivative, and dependant on the domain of normative social practices. Thus Heidegger reverses the tradition since Descartes, which posited a world of meaningless primordial objects that were then cloaked with subjective human meaning. Heidegger not only showed that ‘‘mind’’ is socially instituted, not just in the individual’s head, and broke down the Cartesian subject/object split, but he also accounted for ‘‘metaphysical’’ subjectivity as a projection of that domain of the object into the self. One can appreciate the brilliance and importance of Heidegger’s non-Cartesian account of the human animal without assuming what I take to be dubious elements of his thought that do not necessarily follow from the account and that led him in the direction of National Socialism.18 For the purposes of this essay, the importance of Heidegger lies in showing that subjectivity is neither natural nor necessary, even though I reject most of the uses to which he put his account. I want to briefly make three points that will be helpful in thinking about the relevant traditions of Pauline thought. First, I want to suggest that there are some broad similarities between Heidegger’s nonsubjective account of mind and action and ancient classical and Hellenistic thought about mind and action. The particular accomplishments of Being and Time mentioned above challenge the assumption of Pauline scholars who have assumed that modern conceptions of subjectivity are natural and universal and have thus read them into Paul and ancient accounts of moral psychology.19 Second, Heidegger follows the tradition of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and others in, once he has critiqued and dispensed with the Cartesian subject, reintroducing a kind of heroic subjectivity attainable by special individuals. Third, the tradition of interpreting Paul’s thought in the West contributed to this tradition of heroic subjectivity. Augustine created a new kind of person focused on an inner space.20 Here a privileged first person point of view replaced reason’s focus on the order of the cosmos, God’s law, or God’s economy of salvation. What is most important is one’s awareness of one’s awareness of God. My own experience becomes the inward road toward God. I would argue that it is Augustine’s Neo-Platonic ontology that predisposed him to read Paul’s letters as about radical sin and grace seen from this first person perspective. The entire creation has its being by participation in the Ideas of God. But in the fallen condition of creation, human memory of God is at best completely clouded. Only a self-knowledge that one’s entire being is sustained by God’s power and grace can turn one’s awareness toward God. Such a being, who is an emanation of God’s being but who lives as if self-sufficient, is deeply riven in will and desire. Sin involves the inability to will or to decide fully (Confessions 8.9).21 Self-knowledge that is knowledge of God can only be the result of strenuous inner struggle. Calvin and Luther were not Neo-Platonists and were in many ways far removed from Augustine’s intellectual milieu, but they inherited his inner space as the site of Christian selfhood. This is why, against exegetes like John Chrysostom and nearly the entire ancient tradition, they had to make Romans 7

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about the struggle of the Christian self rather than a pre-Christian person. This focus on interiority, when translated into Descartes’ subject cut off from the exterior world, produced an intellectual tradition that referred all questions to the problem of the subject. Badiou’s analysis of the divided self in Romans 7 identifies the ‘‘I’’ as Paul or the Christian and fits this tradition.22 I have commented on these three philosophers in order to suggest a set of characteristics of a broad tradition that I will call ultra- or hyper-Cartesian. The belief that controls the whole philosophical project is the idea of a subject/object split, the radical separation of the subject, however conceived, from the world. Access to the world must be filtered through a heavy gauze of mental objects, representations formed by the subject, which is itself formed by socialization and/or ideology and/or language or discursive systems. In adapting this fundamental Cartesian framework, this tradition is also very critical of aspects of Descartes’ subject and later developments such as Kantian autonomy. The subject is not conscious of all its mental processes, which are certainly not incorrigible for it. Nor, in many accounts, is the subject unified and centered. Thus, although the path of Badiou’s thought in working out his philosophy is very specifically through the neoSaussurian psychoanalysis of Lacan and especially the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser, among others, it shares a broader structure of features that I have been calling hyper-Cartesian.23 The result is that the problems of philosophy, ethics, and politics are all focused on the subject. The only imaginable conception of selfhood is subjective. The approach excludes a privileged third person perspective or a social participant (e. g., the proletariat) or a species point of view for working out philosophical, ethical, and political problems. One might ask, however, why a tradition—the Marxism of Badiou and company—for which such concepts as dialectical materialism, class, and the proletariat have been central, would renounce these collective-participant perspectives for subjectivity, even we-subjects particular to events. The tradition assumes that the subject can only eke out some measure of authenticity over against the objective point of view, or else risk the evil of objectification. Against the overwhelming constraints and inauthenticity imposed upon the subject, so that a true subject cannot be said to exist, there is some way for a few individuals rarely and occasionally heroically to resist or transcend and to establish some form of genuine subjectivity. The Western concept of conversion, based especially on readings of Paul, beginning with Augustine, sits easily with this structure of movement from subjugation (cf. assujetiment) and inauthenticity to dramatic reconstitution. For Augustine and Calvin and Luther, sin is an ontological problem that has both deeply and irredeemably corrupted the sociopolitical world and has made true inner love of God and the good impossible but for God’s grace, which paradigmatically appears in situations of crisis. Any genuine self comes from graced commitment but cannot in this life vanquish the struggle with the dominating fallenness of the ordinary self and the world. The structural similarity

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between the versions of the ultra-Cartesian project and this Western Paul goes even further. Just as the neo-Saussurian subject is a creation of the symbolic order and attempts to express its authenticity merely prove its semiotic construction, so in the AugustinianLutheran tradition, the self’s very attempts to do good express the self-assertion that is the essence of evil. That Badiou is a most creative heir to this tradition can be illustrated from his conception of truth.24 For him, Paul’s thought testifies to the process whereby a truth is established that is wholly subjective. Truth does not derive from some sort of correspondence to the world. There is no general truth, but only the truth of particular situations. Nor can it be deduced from the current situation because a semiotic-socio-culturalpolitical totality enmeshes and forms subjects. The subject cannot even know the truth of its own inauthenticity. Lacan and later Marxists provide resources for meager traces of reality, but these are so small and so obscured by the total system that Badiou does not go the route of others who use them to assemble truths that allow for a breakout. Rather, nothing less than a total subjective revolt against the paradigm and for a conviction (truth) can allow for a break from the effects of the Cartesian veil. Finding similarities to another interpreter of Paul, Kierkegaard, is not misplaced. Whatever the immediate relation between Badiou’s decision and fidelity to a truth and Kierkegaard’s faith of infinite passion, both are heirs of the Augustinian-Lutheran and Cartesian tradition of interpreting Paul. But Badiou has a theory of how a truth (generic procedure) involves a gamble on the intuition of an inconsistency in the totality. Rejecting any recourse to an object of truth, truth gets redefined and radically distanced from our everyday conceptions of it. Truth is an ungrounded commitment, a decision, of a subject that issues in an effort to test a commitment rigorously by working out its implications (fidelity) with others who have made the same commitment. Somehow—and Badiou does not adequately explain this—the solitary and singular subject thus created, becomes part of a we-subject on the basis of a commitment (fidelity) to a perceived ‘‘truth.’’ Somehow willpower or vision or intuition overcomes the indeterminacy of historical existence, of subjective imprisonment, and forges a deep commonality of cause. The thinness of the account here can be partly attributed to the formal mathematical nature of Badiou’s ontology.25 I can give only a suggestion of the richness of that ontology with some points relevant to my discussion. In mathematics, a set’s possible subsets are much greater in number than the set itself. The members of a set of numbers or class of items in the world can be combined in a large, often enormous number of ways in excess of the items in the set. In human affairs, this otherwise unknowable excess is infinite, and the gap between a set of members and the excess of elements in a subset is, according to Badiou, the real of being. This immeasurable excess haunts every human configuration and can only be exposed by a decision that intuits the haunting. To structure elements into a set presupposes an unstructured multiplicity that cannot be seen but that is implied when a structure makes something by making it come into existence. So any structure

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implies an unrepresentable void. On this ontological basis, which I have greatly simplified, Badiou founds his idea of ‘‘the situation.’’ A situation has an infinite number of components but can only be thought or appear in terms of a particular structure. So in his reading of Paul, Greek and Jewish discourse and Roman power structure the situation. The event of ‘‘the death and resurrection of God’’ is an anomaly in the structure of the situation that exposes its logic, what the logic excludes, and thus the possibility of a new universal, a truth. Again, I want to stress the way that both the ontology and the larger philosophy presuppose aspects of the Cartesian structure that I have discussed above. Badiou thinks that he has parted company with one form of the tradition (e.g., Neo-Kantianism) by refusing a subject that imposes order and meaning (representations) upon a neutral, meaningless world. In post-structuralist versions, such human imposition gets fossilized as regimes of culture, discourses, or the symbolic order. In my reading (not the contemporary French one), of Being and Time, Heidegger brilliantly argues that the tradition has turned things upside down and that an objective, meaningless, nonhuman world is a precipitate of human thought/language/consciousness, constructed out of the normativity implicit in social practices. Unfortunately, Heidegger was unwilling to leave the tradition behind and made the objective vision the result of a primordial fall rather than a useful result of human activity in practical interaction with the world. Badiou thinks that he has escaped the Cartesian problem of representation because mathematics is the thinking of reality. It is pure representation. In the Saussurian language of post-structuralism, it is a matter of pure signifiers bringing reality into existence rather than, say, with Derrida, signifiers merely chasing signifiers. Both of these are hyper-Cartesian, and it is difficult not to see Badiou’s approach as a kind of idealism, a charge that he acknowledges.26 Only in the hyper-Cartesian universe could it make sense to think that truth is subjective. Maintaining the basic dualisms has led to increasingly desperate solutions: signifiers stand for signifieds, signifiers stand for other signifiers, signifiers create reality. Badiou’s version of Lacan’s real (re´el), is not reality but a rather desperate attempt to connect to the world that hyper-Cartesianism has had to give up. The real becomes total resistance to representation in a particular situation, a leap of faith toward a path of rebellion against the prison house of representation. I want to argue that Paul does not have the problem of a subject/object or representation as part of his thought and therefore has a very different notion of selfhood. Here is the irony, though: as I have indicated, the interpretation of his letters has been a central source for the development of modern subjective selfhood. Of course, if, as Badiou and Zˇizˇek suppose, the Cartesian and Lacanian understanding is simply true and therefore universal, Paul was a subject even if he didn’t know it, and he may have unconsciously represented truths about subjectivity. By contrast, it might be useful to imagine Paul with a different kind of selfhood and think about how subjectivist readings of his letters compare. Stripped of its Cartesian interiority of consciousness, significance given to unique

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singularity, and privileged first person point of view, Badiou’s subject is not so different from Paul’s self, the new creation. Decision, action, faithfulness, and commitment are chief attributes of both. I find it helpful to begin with Paul’s ontological conceptions. Badiou writes that ‘‘Paul has no interest whatsoever in ontology’’ and that when Paul discusses the ‘‘sending of the son’’ he has no interest in substance, but only in the event.27 He rightly understands that Paul does not have the concept of the Trinity, but he assumes something like orthodox conceptions of the incarnation. Scholarship, however, has shown that ‘‘son of God’’ was an honorific title widely applied in Jewish, Greek, and Roman discourse. Thus I agree, but for different reasons, that Paul did not have an interest in the later debates about Christ’s divine nature. But I think that Paul did have an interest in ontology, because it plays a key role in his arguments and his thought. I believe that Badiou’s denial stems from a particular post-Cartesian interpretation of Paul. It was central to Rudolf Bultmann and his students that Paul had no interest in ontology, because Bultmann’s approach to theological anthropology employed the category of existence over against metaphysical speculation.28 Readers will not be too far off if they hear echoes of Sartre’s slogan for a generation of existence not essence. The binary replicates the Cartesian modernist meaning/matter, natural/supernatural oppositions. As is well known, though, Bultmann’s framework goes well back to his prewar Marburg days with his colleague Martin Heidegger.29 It does not come as a surprise that one of the two books on Paul mentioned at the front of Badiou’s Saint Paul is by a student of Bultmann, Gu¨nter Bornkamm’s Paul.30 But no one in Western antiquity articulated the concept of an existential dimension of human being, in the language of the Bultmann school, as an understanding of existence. Badiou’s reading of Paul, I believe, exhibits a lineage decisively formed by Augustine and Luther and then passing through Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Bultmann, among others. The last three read a critique of metaphysics and a postCartesian spirituality into Paul’s letters. That spirituality is totally alien to an objective world, accessible to science and technology, of cause and effect, matter and the uniform laws of physics. God and an authentic human subject cannot by definition be made commensurable with the principles of the world. The subject/object dualism replicates the pattern on the human level. Modernity did not leave the cosmic/microcosmic pattern behind. Badiou as a militant atheist seems to want to leave behind ‘‘cosmic’’ spirituality (e. g., God), but the subject remains as both a falsity and a necessity. Paul inhabited a very un-Cartesian world, consisting of a hierarchy of substances distinguished by inherent qualities and powers.31 Explanation in Paul’s religious thought comes in two forms: the agency of divine, demonic, and human beings, and the activity, interaction, and extension of the substances of which the created order consists. In all of this, Paul turns out to be a participant in the ancient Mediterranean cultures rather than uniquely at one with post-Cartesian conceptions. In his schema, these substances were created by the Judean God, god of the universe, as part of the divine plan for the human

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and cosmic telos. Bultmann rejected the mythology of what he thought of as a cosmos filled with ‘‘supernatural beings,’’ but he saw Paul’s language about substances (e. g., spirit, flesh) as symbolizing certain forms of post-Cartesian subjectivity.32 In some respects, Paul is more materialistic or physicalistic than Badiou and less spiritual. In 1 Corinthians 15, for instance, the substances of the lower and heavenly cosmos vary qualitatively in a grand hierarchy: ’’Not all flesh is the same flesh, humans have one flesh, but animals another, birds another, and fish another. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing and the glory of the earthly is different. The sun has one kind of glory, and the moon another glory, and different glory for the stars, in fact star differs from star in glory.’’33 Humans participate in Adam because they share bodies consisting of the same stuff as Adam, dirt or dust (15: 42–49). They are thus soulish (psychikos), and soul material is fragile and decays. At the end of his ontological explanation, Paul concludes that ‘‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.’’ It makes perfect sense that Badiou treats flesh and spirit in the letters in a way similar to the Bultmann school’s ‘‘understandings of existence.’’ He sensibly cannot subscribe to Paul’s ancient science. Badiou’s often insightful commentary is most jarringly at odds with the letters in his failure to admit the large and extensive explanatory role for pneuma, commonly and misleadingly translated into English as ‘‘spirit’’ or ‘‘ghost.’’ For Badiou, the resurrection is an ‘‘event’’ in an ‘‘evental site’’ in his brilliantly theorized senses. But Paul explains both Christ’s and the believer’s resurrection in terms of the divine pneuma. This is the heavenly substance that will replace a vulnerable decaying substance in the resurrected body. Pneuma raised Christ and made him divine in the resurrection, and those who are ‘‘in Christ,’’ who have been baptized into him, share it in this present world order by participation so that all are brothers of Christ and sons of God.34 Badiou emphasizes the universality in baptism into Christ and in sonship but ignores Paul’s explanations of these as the result of believers sharing portions of the divine pneuma bestowed in the resurrection.35 Just how literally and materially—in stark opposition to the post-Cartesian separation of meaning and matter—does Paul take this participation and pneumatic activity? The question can be addressed from many topics in which pneuma plays a role in the letters, but the question of the self is directly relevant to my argument. Paul certainly draws on Jewish traditions that spoke of spirits and of the spirit of God.36 But he reinterprets these in light of Stoicism and/or the prevailing Hellenistic science. 37 So all humans have pneuma, which is likely to be the stuff of mind (nous) in Paul’s thought, as it is in Stoic and other Hellenistic thought.38 It is the active stuff of intelligence, interior and exterior communication, and probably perception.39 Like the Stoics and others, he also has types or qualities of pneuma (i.e., human and divine). Similarly, at least the divine type of pneuma is capable of extension and interpenetration across the cosmos. The pneuma of Christ and the pneuma of the believer in some way relate or intermix.40 It is

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clear that in some sense both maintain their substantial natures and identities. This radical contiguity between the human self and the divine pneuma is about as far as one can get from the closed-off Cartesian self. In 1 Corinthians 2:11–15, the divine pneuma communicates between those in Christ and God: the pneuma searches all things, even the depths of God. For what person knows the things of a person except the person’s pneuma that is in him. So also no one knows the things of God except the pneuma of God. Now we have not received the pneuma of the world, but the pneuma out of God so that we can understand the things given to us by God.41 Romans 8:16 says that when readers cry, ‘‘Abba, Father,’’ ‘‘it is the pneuma [of God] itself witnessing together with our pneuma that we are children of God, and if children also heirs of God . . . and fellow heirs with Christ, provided that we suffer with him so that we might be glorified with him.’’ The fact that Paul can easily and without caveat (e. g., ‘‘I am speaking in a human way,’’ as in Rom. 3:5, 6:19) attribute types of pneuma to both God and humans shows that he participates in his ancient culture and Hellenistic thought about pneuma. Romans chapter 7, which is so important for Badiou’s description of the militant subject, is followed by chapter 8, which renders the new self in quite material terms of a divine pneuma that empowers the mind to overcome the flesh, connecting the self to all others with pneumatic endowment and even with the natural processes of the whole cosmos (8:18–23). This is far from the interiority of Cartesian subjectivity, its absolute separation of meaning and matter, or its remnants in some form of heroic transcendence or act of self-creation of a reduced, but authentic subject. Indeed, instead of a subject defined by its distinction from the objective physical world of things, Paul makes the self a physical part of that world. Badiou also rightly stresses Galatians 3:27–28 for the idea of a universal principle that overcomes difference, but Paul does not have that come about by a decision, a commitment or a leap of faith.42 Rather, all who participate in Christ by baptism into him share his divine pneuma and therefore possess a physical contiguity that makes them relatives.43 Again, instead of a heroic but reduced and complicated subjectivity that can somehow link up with others by virtue of fidelity to a common militant cause, the Pauline self is in its very constitution a social participant. The self here does not understand itself and the world from a privileged, first person point of view but as a connected fragment, an active participant, of the human and nonhuman world. Important and persuasive scholarship by Emma Wasserman has greatly clarified the moral psychology that Paul uses in Romans 7 and elsewhere.44 This scholarship helps us to understand with greater precision the ways that Paul was an ancient Hellenistic thinker and not a modern post-Cartesian. The reading of Romans 7 solves perennial difficulties

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with Paul’s language of the ‘‘I,’’ the personification of sin, the language of death, and the inciting role of the law. Wasserman shows that Paul uses a Platonic moral psychology with a core self or mind or reason and irrational passions and desires. This is a divided self, not the unitary existentialist person of the Bultmann school. The speaking ‘‘I’’ in that chapter represents the plight of reason in the case of extreme immorality. Philosophers and moralists had created a range of moral conditions that stretched from the limiting cases of the sage, on the one hand, to the case of extreme immorality, on the other. Romans 7 shares the basic psychology and the metaphors developed by Platonist explanations of the case of extreme immorality. This notably includes Paul’s contemporary fellow Jew, Philo of Alexandria. The person in Romans 7 is a character who by definition cannot put the good into practice, in this case, the law. Stoics explained such cases by appealing to false beliefs that constituted diseased emotional states. Platonists, by contrast, appealed to innate desiring and emotional parts of the person that were tied to the materially inferior bodily and fleshly part of the person. Wasserman shows that, in cases of extreme immorality, Platonists personified vice or wickedness just as Paul does sin. Vice or wickedness could be said to have stimulated passions and desires so as to have killed, imprisoned, ruled, and dominated reason. Philo in particular develops the metaphors of life and death in connection with reason either dominating the irrational parts or being dominated by wickedness through the passions. So also in Romans, the ‘‘I’’ conquered by sin via desire dies and sin comes alive (7:8–11). For reason to dominate the passions and desires in the bodily members is to put them to death. Chapter 7 describes the ‘‘I’’ as mind (nous) and as the ‘‘inner person.’’ The latter metaphor for reason comes from book 9 of Plato’s Republic and is used extensively by Philo.45 Wasserman’s richly documented and well-argued analysis, which I have only suggested above, shows us a Paul who was not a Cartesian and who shares a nonsubjective self with other ancient thinkers. I am convinced by a number of scholars who have argued that an inner realm of subjectivity and the subject did not arise for any known ancient thinker because the ancients did not think that a realm of mental objects stood between a human being and the world.46 Stephen Everson, writing about the Cyrenaics, who, of all ancient thinkers, seem (falsely) most like modern thinkers on subjectivity, says: For Cyrenaics, however, as for Aristotle, the affections [whatever has a physical affect on a person] of which the subject is aware are perfectly ordinary states of material objects, capable of being understood as other than objects of awareness. For one to be ‘‘whitened’’ or ‘‘sweetened,’’ one does not need to be a perceiving subject. The states which constitute the inner realm of the Cyrenaic mind are not of a different sort from those which (might) be found in the outer world. There is no introduction of a peculiar mental realm which somehow has to represent a material reality.47

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For Paul, then, even in the mind’s judging, committing, deciding and so forth, there is no bounded or protected or autonomous self or key role for consciousness of the self. The self is fully open to causes, perceptions, and forces from the outside and has only its own power to draw inferences, make commitments, and bestow entitlements on others. There is not even much of an inside/outside. The core self, reason, is one power contending among many, including the emotions and desires of its own body. The pneuma of which it consists is subject to attack by a demon, the assault of its own desiring, or interpenetration with a perfect form of pneuma sent from God by way of Christ.48 Paul’s solution to the self’s dilemma does not come from crafting some privileged subject of its own thinking and doing that is thus secure, autonomous, free, and significantly unique. Rather, the self’s destiny is secured or lost by its relations to external powers, to which it is always vulnerable. This reading still supports Badiou’s emphasis on the creation of a militant self and a person going from a situation of great restraint to a radically new world conception/selfconception. I think that we can rightly blame or praise Paul for being one source of these patterns. But I think that these come without having subjectivity (or subjectivity/ objectivity), significant singularity, and radical self-realization as the key. The letters do have a rich first person language in Paul’s voice, so that it is tempting to read our ideas about the unique morally and epistemologically privileged individual and his interiority into them. In Badiou’s account, ‘‘the symbolic’’ and ideology shape and almost totally constrain a so-called subject according to a heteronomous image. Paul saw that the only way out of this version of radical constraint, which was operative in his day (e.g., Greek philosophy, Jewish law, and Roman power) was to intuit the flaws in these totalities so as to see an alternative vision, one present, but hidden in the totality. One could then, through a sheerly subjective decision and a fidelity to the vision, both throw off the heteronomous norms of the totality (deobjectification) and self-create a set of one’s own norms from the event, the basis for a genuine subject. But passages where Paul speaks of himself are liable to a non-Cartesian story. These are the very places where Paul speaks of participating in the benefits of Christ’s own faithfulness (not Paul’s), of being in Christ and Christ being in him, of having Christ’s pneuma in him, and of participation in Christ. So, for example, I agree with those who would translate Galatians 2:19–20 along these lines: ‘‘For through the law, I died to the law so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And the present life that I live in the flesh, I live by means of the faith(fulness) of the son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.’’ Just as in baptism, Paul conceives the new interpretation of selfhood as a result of interpenetration by the divine pneuma given to Christ. From one point of view, believers are in Christ, and from another, Christ is in the believer. Paul presents himself as a model for others who have been decisively shaped by this physical-mental contiguity. Of course, we modern interpreters may downplay Paul’s ancient conception and choose to think of it as

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merely a change in self-understanding, but we should be aware that this is our translation. Paul treats the possession of Christ’s pneuma very realistically. For someone who is in Christ and has Christ in him to have sex with a prostitute is to join Christ to a prostitute (1 Cor. 6:12–20). Paul and believers experience the very sufferings that Christ experienced because they have his pneuma in them. Such contiguity and consistent physicality, with no totally other ‘‘spirituality’’ (in the modern sense), is dramatically un-Cartesian. In this scheme there is no sense to assigning all truth and value to transcending heroic acts of a self-creating subject who is radically cut off from an objective physical and social world. As Badiou has brilliantly seen, however, Paul was the creator of a militantly reoriented (I would say ‘‘possessed’’) vision of selfhood, against the background of a dualistic world of opposing forces and warring powers. But what is it, on my reading, that Badiou’s philosophy and Badiou’s Paul most centrally share with the Paul for which I have argued? The answer, I think, is that both are thinkers of discontinuities. Badiou’s philosophy resembles forms of later Platonism in many ways. Reality as normally construed is unreality/ideology. In his evental process, what is taken as reality is subtracted so as to clear the way for the formalization of the real. Truth is a disjunction from knowledge. Truth is subjective and a refusal of objective knowledge of the world. A decision of faith rejects reality for commitment to working out the logic of an alternative intuited from an inconsistency in the totality that is ‘‘reality’’/ideology. Badiou discerns the true nature of things by means of a mathematical ontology that contains the logic of reality, the event, and the real. I have argued that this solution is partly driven by the Cartesian structure that makes the subject discontinuous with the world, creating insoluble epistemological problems. The subject becomes either a self-contained author of activity and guarantee of truth and meaning or a deluded creation of society and the symbolic order. Badiou, like most continental thinkers in the last fifty years, has chosen the discontinuities. The Paul that I have suggested also stresses discontinuities, but they are not so absolute because they do not arise from a subject/object split or subjective selfhood. On one interpretation, ‘‘the wisdom of the world’’ and ‘‘Jews seeking signs’’ are incommensurable discourses within which the ‘‘Christ-event’’ is invisible.49 Badiou is right to see the power of Paul’s rhetoric in situating the event of a crucified criminal against these. That, indeed, is a discontinuous revelation of truth against what is taken as real and known. But this discontinuity does not result from the idea that truth must be subjective because the true reality cannot be represented and the representations within the subject ever certain, nor that the subject is formed from birth in an alienating symbolic order that drives the chances for a deobjectified authentic subjectivity into the unconscious. Rather, God hides and reveals truths as history unfolds in ways that suit his inscrutable purposes. Nevertheless, the basic truths of religion and morality and probably politics (our modern domains) are knowable through the normal perceptual processes. For the natural mind/reason of Romans 1–2 and 7–8, the truth is transparent and visible by perception (Rom. 1:18–21).

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Even the totally conquered intellect of Romans 7 sees its terrible situation with stark clarity. According to Paul, were it not for willful self-delusion, which created cultures that deform the truth by dethroning the one God from the monarchy of the cosmos, the nonJewish peoples would ‘‘clearly’’ know the truth (1:21–25). What humans can see only dimly through scripture and events is the precise course of history. But again, this problem is not traced to the limitations of a subject, but rather to the temporal unfolding of history by an inscrutable God (Rom. 11:25–36; 1 Cor. 13:12). Human and divine types of pneuma are both qualities of the stuff pneuma, which can intermingle in the present age, but Paul may have thought that divine pneuma would replace not only soulish flesh and blood, but also human pneuma in the resurrected body. Again, on this reading there would be a discontinuity, but one of substance and selfhood, not of the Cartesian’s purely subjective self relating to itself. Relating to a material ‘‘event’’ comes closer to Paul, but then for him there is no objective/subjective split. The result is a new human species, the sons of God. My goal in this essay has been to present a non-Cartesian Paul in order to illuminate the Cartesian Paul, built on Augustine and Luther, that has come to be in such hyperCartesian thinkers as Kierkegaard, Schelling, Heidegger, and Bultmann. The comparison suggests that one could have Paul as the antiphilosopher of a militant revolt against the status quo and creator of a revolutionary social formation without the focus on the subject and the larger Cartesian problematic. Badiou may find the modernist Paul more useful, but that Paul is not inevitable.

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The Necessity of a Dead Bird Paul’s Communism

Slavoj Zˇizˇek

When, early in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, a magician performs a trick with a small bird that disappears in a cage on the table, a small boy in the audience starts to cry, claiming that the bird has been killed. The magician approaches him and finishes the trick, gently producing a living bird out of his hand—but the boy is not satisfied, insisting that this must be another bird, the dead one’s brother. After the show, we see the magician in the room behind the stage, bringing in a flattened cage and throwing a squashed bird into a trash bin—the boy was right. The film describes the three stages of a magic performance: the setup, or the ‘‘pledge,’’ when the magician shows the audience something that appears ordinary but probably is not, making use of misdirection; the ‘‘turn,’’ where the magician makes the ordinary act extraordinary; and the ‘‘prestige,’’ where the effect of the illusion is produced. Is this triple movement not the Hegelian triad at its purest? The thesis (pledge), its catastrophic negation (turn), the magical resolution of the catastrophe (prestige)? And, as Hegel was well aware, the catch is that, in order for the miracle of the ‘‘prestige’’ to occur, there must be somewhere a squashed dead bird—in The Prestige, it is Angier’s drowned body. We should thus fearlessly admit that there is something of a ‘‘cheap magician’’ in Hegel, in the trick of synthesis, of Aufhebung. Ultimately, there are only two options, two ways to account for this trick, like the two versions of the vulgar doctors’ joke of ‘‘first the bad news then the good news.’’ (1) The good news is good, but it concerns another subject. (‘‘The sad news is that you have a terminal cancer and will die in a month. The good news is: you see that young beautiful nurse over there? I was trying to get her into bed for months; finally, yesterday, she said yes and we made love the whole night like crazy.’’) (2) The good news is bad news,seen from a different perspective. (‘‘The bad news is

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that we’ve discovered you have severe Alzheimer’s disease. The good news is the same: you have Alzheimer’s, so you will already have forgotten the bad news when you get back home.’’) The true Hegelian ‘‘synthesis’’ is the synthesis of these two options: the good news is the bad news—but in order for us to see that, we have to shift to a different agent (from the bird that dies to another one that replaces it; from the cancer-ridden patient to the happy doctor; from Christ as individual to the community of believers). In other words, the dead bird remains dead, it really dies, as in the case of Christ who is reborn as another subject, as the Holy Ghost. There is, however, a key distinction between Christ’s dead body in Christianity and the squashed bird in the magician’s trick: in order for his trick to be efficient, to work as a trick, the magician has to hide the squashed body from the view of the public, while the whole point of the crucifixion is that Christ’s body is displayed for everyone to see. This is why Christianity (and Hegelianism as Christian philosophy) is not cheap magic: the material remainder of the squashed body remains visible. Apropos Christianity and its overcoming, Jean-Luc Nancy has proposed two guidelines: (1) ‘‘The only Christianity that can be relevant today is one that contemplates the present possibility of its negation’’; (2) ‘‘The only atheism that can be relevant today is one that contemplates the reality of its Christian provenance.’’1 With some reservations, one cannot but agree with these two guidelines. The first proposition implies that today Christianity is alive only in materialist (atheist) practices that negate it (say, the Paulinian community of believers is to be found today in radical political groups, not in churches); the second proposition implies that a true materialism not only asserts that only material reality ‘‘really exists,’’ but has to assume all the consequences of what Lacan called the inexistence of the big Other, and it is only Christianity that opens up the space for thinking this inexistence, insofar as it is the religion of a God who dies. Nancy also points out that Christianity is unique among all religions in that it conceives its very core as the passage from, the overcoming of, another religious corpus, a fact palpable in the duality of its sacred texts, Old and New Testaments. The only way to account for this fact is to bring it to it self-relating extreme: Christianity includes in itself its own overcoming, that is, its overcoming (negation) in modern atheism is inscribed into its very core as its innermost necessity. This is why radical political movements, with their elementary move of ‘‘sublating’’ their dead hero in the living spirit of the community, resemble the Christological resurrection. The point is not that they function like ‘‘secularized Christianity’’ but, on the contrary, that the resurrection of Christ is their precursor, a mythic form of something that reaches its true form in the logic of the emancipatory political collective. At the Woodstock festival in 1967, Joan Baez sang ‘‘Joe Hill,’’ the famous Wobblies song from 1925 (words by Alfred Hayes, music by Earl Robinson) about the judicial murder of the Swedish-born trade union organizer and singer, which, in the ensuing decades, had become a true folk song, popularized all around the world by Paul Robeson. Here are the (slightly shortened) lyrics, which present in a simple

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but effective way the Christological aspect of the emancipatory collective, a struggling collective bound by love: I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night Alive as you or me. Says I, ‘‘But Joe, you’re ten years dead.’’ ‘‘I never died,’’ says he. ’’The copper bosses killed you, Joe, They shot you, Joe,’’ says I. ‘‘Takes more than guns to kill a man.’’ Says Joe, ‘‘I didn’t die.’’ And standing there as big as life, And smiling with his eyes, Joe says, ‘‘What they forgot to kill Went on to organize.’’ ‘‘Joe Hill ain’t dead,’’ he says to me, ‘‘Joe Hill ain’t never died. Where working men are out on strike, Joe Hill is at their side.’’ Crucial is here the subjective reversal: the mistake of the anonymous narrator of the song, who does not believe that Joe Hill is still alive, is that he forgets to include himself, his own subjective position, in the series: Joe Hill is not alive ‘‘out there,’’ as a separate ghost, he is alive here, in the very mind of workers remembering him and continuing his fight—he is alive in the very gaze that (mistakenly) looks for him out there. Christ’s disciples commit the same mistake of ‘‘reifying’’ the object they are searching for; Christ corrects this mistake with his famous words: ‘‘When there will be love between two of you, I will be there.’’ When, on May 18, 1952, Robeson sang ‘‘Joe Hill’’ at the legendary Peach Arch concert, in front of forty thousand people gathered at the U.S.-Canada border in the State of Washington (since his passport had been revoked by the U.S. authorities, he was not allowed to enter Canada), he changed the key line from ‘‘What they forgot to kill’’ into ‘‘What they can never kill went on to organize.’’ The immortal dimension in man, that in man which it ‘‘takes more than guns to kill,’’ the spirit, is what went on to organize itself. One should not dismiss this as an obscurantist-spiritualist metaphor— there is a subjective truth in it: when emancipatory subjects organize themselves, the ‘‘spirit’’ organizes itself through them. To the series of what the impersonal ‘‘it (das Es, ca)’’ does (in the unconscious, ‘‘it talks,’’ ‘‘it enjoys’’), one should add: it organizes itself

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(ca s’organise—therein resides the core of the ‘‘eternal Idea’’ of an emancipatory party). One should here shamelessly evoke the standard scene from science fiction horror movies in which the alien who has taken on human appearance (or invaded and colonized a human being) is exposed, its human form destroyed, so that all that remains is a formless slime, like a small pool of melted metal. The hero leaves the scene, satisfied that the threat is over—however, soon afterward the formless slime that the hero forgot to kill (or couldn’t kill) starts to move, slowly organizing itself, and the old menacing figure emerges again. Perhaps it is along these lines that one should read: ‘‘the Christian practice of eucharist in which the participants in this love feast or sacrificial meal establish solidarity with one another through the medium of a mutilated body. In this way, they share at the level of sign or sacrament in Christ’s own bloody passage from weakness to power, death to transfigured life.’’2 Is what we believers eat in the eucharist, Christ’s flesh (bread) and blood (wine), not precisely the same formless remainder, ‘‘what they/the Roman soldiers who crucified him/can never kill,’’ which then goes on to organize itself as a community of believers? We should reread Oedipus from this standpoint as a precursor of Christ: against those—including Lacan—who perceive Oedipus at Colonnus and Antigone as figures driven by an uncompromisingly suicidal death drive, ‘‘unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled,’’3 Terry Eagleton is right to point out the fact that Oedipus at Colonus: becomes the cornerstone of a new political order. Oedipus’s polluted body signifies among other things the monstrous terror at the gates in which, if it is to have a chance of rebirth, the polis must recognize its own hideous deformity. This profoundly political dimension of the tragedy is given short shrift in Lacan’s own meditations. . . . In becoming nothing but the scum and refuse of the polis—the ‘‘shit of the earth,’’ as St Paul racily describes the followers of Jesus, or the ‘‘total loss of humanity’’ which Marx portrays as the proletariat—Oedipus is divested of his identity and authority and so can offer his lacerated body as the cornerstone of a new social order. ‘‘Am I made a man in this hour when I cease to be?’’ (or perhaps ‘Am I to be counted as something only when I am nothing/am no longer human?’’), the beggar king wonders aloud.4 Does this not recall a later beggar-king, Christ, who, by his death as a nothing, an outcast abandoned even by his disciples, grounds a new community of believers? They both reemerge by passing through the zero-level of being reduced to an excremental remainder. Is this not Christ’s message of resurrection? What ‘‘God is love’’ means is: ‘‘No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us’’ (John 4:12, New International Version). Or: ‘‘No one has ever seen Joe Hill after his death, but if workers organise themselves in their struggle, he lives in them.’’ There is a triple movement of Aufhebung here. First, the singular person of Christ (Joe Hill) is

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sublated in his resurrected identity as the spirit (love) of the community of believers. Second, the empirical miracle is sublated in the higher ‘‘true’’ miracle. This follows a wellknown rhetorical figure: when Hegel talks about religious miracles, his point is that one cannot be sure if there are real physical miracles—which is a polite way to say that there aren’t—but that the true miracle is universal thought itself, the wonder of thinking. Today, it is popular to say that the true miracle is a moral victory, when, after a difficult inner struggle, someone makes the right difficult decision—to abandon drugs or crime, to sacrifice himself for a good cause. In Christianity, the true miracle is not the dead Christ walking around, but the love in the collective of believers. Finally, Christianity itself is sublated in political organization. Again, this miracle comes at a price: a bird’s body lies squashed somewhere—like Christ on the Cross, that supreme squashed bird. This passage through the zero-level makes Job a precursor of Christ. After Job is hit by calamities, his theological friends arrive, offering interpretations that render these calamities meaningful. The greatness of Job is less to protest his innocence than to insist on the meaninglessness of his calamities. (When God later appears, he accords the right to Job, rather than to the theological defenders of faith.) The structure here is exactly the same as that of Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection. It begins with a conversation between Freud and his patient Irma about the failure of her treatment due to an infected injection. In the course of the conversation, Freud gets closer to her, approaches her face, and looks deep into her mouth, confronting the horrible sight of her live red flesh. At this point of unbearable horror, the tonality of the dream changes, and the horror suddenly passes into comedy. Three doctors, Freud’s friends, appear, and, in a ridiculous pseudo-professional jargon, they enumerate multiple (and mutually exclusive) reasons why Irma’s poisoning by the infected injection was nobody’s fault. (There was no injection; the injection was clean . . .) So there is first a traumatic encounter (the sight of the raw flesh of Irma’s throat), which is followed by a sudden change into comedy, into an exchange between three ridiculous doctors that enables the dreamer to avoid encountering the true trauma. The function of the three doctors is the same as that of the three theological friends in the story of Job: to obfuscate the impact of the trauma with a symbolic semblance. This resistance to meaning is crucial when we are confronting potential or actual catastrophes, from AIDS and ecological disasters to the Holocaust: they have no ‘‘deeper meaning.’’ The legacy of Job prohibits a gesture of taking a refuge in the standard transcendent figure of God as a secret Master who knows the meaning of what appears to us as meaningless catastrophe, a God who sees the entire picture in which what we perceive as a stain contributes to global harmony. When confronted with an event like the Holocaust or the death of millions in the Congo in recent years, is it not obscene to claim that these stains have a deeper meaning in that they contribute to the harmony of the Whole? Is there a Whole that can teleologically justify and thus redeem/sublate an event like the Holocaust? Christ’s death on the cross thus means that one should drop unrestrainedly the notion of God as a transcendent caretaker who guarantees the happy outcome of our

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acts, who guarantees historical teleology—Christ’s death on the cross is the death of this God. It repeats Job’s stance; it refuses any ‘‘deeper meaning’’ that would obfuscate the brutal real of historical catastrophes. The theological term for this identity of Job and Christ is double kenosis: God’s selfalienation overlaps with the alienation from God of the human individual who experiences himself as alone in a godless world, abandoned by God, who dwells in some inaccessible, transcendent Beyond. In order for (human) subjectivity to emerge out of the substantial personality of the human animal, cutting links with that animal and positing itself as an I ⳱ I dispossessed of all substantial content, as the self-relating negativity of an empty singularity, God himself, the universal substance, has to ‘‘humiliate’’ himself, to fall into his own creation, to appear as a singular, miserable human individual in all its abjection, that is, abandoned by God. In short, man’s alienation from God (the fact that God appears to him as an inaccessible in-itself, as a pure transcendent Beyond) must coincide with the alienation of God from himself (whose most poignant expression is, of course, Christ’s ‘‘Father, father, why have you forsaken me?’’ on the cross): finite human ‘‘consciousness only represents God because God re-presents itself; consciousness is only at a distance from God because God distances himself from himself.’’5 So if Christ’s death is ‘‘at once the death of the God-man and the Death of the initial and immediate abstraction of the divine being which is not yet posited as a Self,’’6 this means that, as Hegel pointed out, what dies on the cross is not only the terrestrial-finite representative of God but God himself, the transcendent God of the Beyond. Both terms of the opposition, Father and Son, the substantial God as the Absolute in-itself and the God-for-us, revealed to us, die and are sublated in the Holy Spirit. The standard reading of this Aufhebung—Christ ‘‘dies’’ as the immediate representation of God, as God in the guise of a finite human person, in order to be reborn as the universal/atemporal Spirit—remains all too short. The point this reading misses is the ultimate lesson to be learned from the divine incarnation: the finite existence of mortal humans is the only site of the Spirit, the site where Spirit achieves its actuality. What this means is that, in spite of all its grounding power, Spirit is a virtual entity in the sense that its status is that of a subjective presupposition: it exists only insofar as subjects act as if it exists. Its status is similar to that of an ideological cause like Communism or the Nation: it is the substance of the individuals who recognize themselves in it, the ground of their entire existence, the point of reference that provides the ultimate horizon of meaning to their lives, something for which these individuals are ready to give their lives. Yet these individuals and their activity are the only thing that really exists, so this substance is actual only insofar as individuals believe in it and act accordingly. The crucial mistake to be avoided is, therefore, to grasp the Hegelian Spirit as a kind of meta-subject, a Mind, much larger than an individual human mind, aware of itself: once we do this, Hegel has to appear as a ridiculous spiritualist obscurantist, claiming that there is a kind of megaSpirit controlling our history. Against this cliche´ about the ‘‘Hegelian Spirit,’’ one should

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emphasize how Hegel is fully aware that ‘‘it is in the finite consciousness that the process of knowing spirit’s essence takes place and that the divine self-consciousness thus arises. Out of the foaming ferment of finitude, spirit rises up fragrantly.’’7 The (self)consciousness of finite humans is the only actual site of the Holy Spirit, that is, the Holy Spirit also rises up ‘‘out of the foaming ferment of finitude.’’ Badillon says in Claudel’s The Hostage: ‘‘God can do nothing without us.’’ This is what Hegel has in mind: although God is the substance of our entire (human) being, he is impotent without us, he acts only in and through us, he is posited through our activity as its presupposition. This is why Christ is impassive, ethereal, fragile: a pure, sympathetic observer, impotent in himself. We can therefore see how Aufhebung is not directly the sublation of otherness, its return into the same, its recuperation by the One (so that finite/mortal individuals are reunited with God, return to his embrace). With Christ’s incarnation, the externalization/ self-alienation of divinity, the passage from the transcendent God to finite/mortal individuals is a fait accompli, there is no way back; from now on all there is, all that ‘‘really exists’’ are individuals. There are no Platonic Ideas or Substances whose existence is somehow ‘‘more real.’’ What is sublated in the move from the Son to the Holy Spirit is thus God himself: after the crucifixion, the death of the incarnate God, the universal God returns as a Spirit of the community of believers. It is not that finite reality is sublated (negated—maintained—elevated) into a moment of ideal totality; it is, on the contrary, the divine substance itself (God as a thing-in-itself) that is sublated—negated (what dies on the cross is the substantial figure of the transcendent God) but simultaneously maintained in the transubstantiated form of the Holy Ghost, the community of believers, which exists only as the virtual presupposition of the activity of finite individuals. Such a virtual order of collective spirituality (what Hegel called ‘‘objective spirit’’ and Lacan the ‘‘big Other’’) is, however, clearly already present in Judaism. In what does its specifically Christian twist reside? In the idea that the reconciliation between God and man (the fundamental content of Christianity) must appear in a single individual, in the guise of an external, contingent, flesh-and-blood person (Christ, the man-god). Reconciliation cannot be direct; it must first be generated (appear) in) a monster. Hegel uses twice on the same page this unexpectedly strong word, ‘‘monstrosity,’’ to designate the first figure of reconciliation, the appearance of God in the finite flesh of a human individual: ‘‘This is the monstrous [das Ungeheure] whose necessity we have seen.’’8 The finite, fragile human individual is ‘‘inappropriate’’ to stand for God, it is ‘‘inappropriateness in general, as such [die Unangemessenheit ueberhaupt].’’9 Are we aware of the properly dialectical paradox of what Hegel claims here? The very attempt at reconciliation, in its first move, produces a monster, a grotesque ‘‘inappropriateness . . . as such.’’ In order to answer this crucial question properly, one should bear in mind the properly Hegelian relationship between necessity and contingency. The infamous ‘‘Krug’s pen objection to dialectics’’ is thus doubly wrong. (Krug was a contemporary of Hegel who challenged him to deduce dialectically the very pen with which he was writing those lines.

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Some philosophers claim that Hegel answered with a brisk dismissal, which could scarcely conceal the fact that he had no answer.) Not only does Hegel (quite consistently with his premises) deduce the necessity of contingency, that is, how the Idea necessarily externalizes itself (acquires reality) in phenomena that are genuinely contingent. Furthermore (and this aspect is often neglected by many of his commentators), he also develops the opposite—and theoretically much more interesting—aspect, that of the contingency of necessity. That is to say, when Hegel describes the progress from ‘‘external’’ contingent Being to the ‘‘inner’’ necessary Essence that ‘‘appears’’ in it, the appearance’s ‘‘self-internalization’’ through self-reflection, he is thereby not describing the discovery of some preexisting inner Essence, the penetration toward something that was already there (this would have been a ‘‘reification’’ of the Essence), but a ‘‘performative’’ process of constructing (forming) that which is ‘‘discovered.’’ Or, as Hegel puts it in his Logic, in the process of reflection, the very ‘‘return’’ to the lost or hidden ground produces what it returns to. What this means is that it is not only inner necessity that is the unity of itself and contingency as its opposite, necessarily positing contingency as its moment. Contingency likewise is the encompassing unity of itself and its opposite, necessity; that is to say, the very process through which necessity arises out of necessity is a contingent process. If Hegel were effectively to ‘‘deduce’’ contingency from necessity, he would have begun his logic with Essence, not with Being, which is the domain of pure contingent multiplicity. The standard counter-argument, according to which this entire process of dialectical passages is nonetheless necessary, forming a self-enclosed system, also misses the point: yes, it is—but this necessity is not given in advance; it is itself generated, forming itself out of contingency, which is why it can only be apprehended retroactively, after the fact. If we reduce this gradual process of necessity emerging through contingency’s selfmediation to a process of penetrating the deceitful appearance of things and discovering the (already-existing) underlying necessity, then we are back to precritical, substantialist metaphysics, that is to say, we are ultimately reducing/subordinating subject to substance. One of the culminating points in the dialectic of necessity and contingency is Hegel’s infamous deduction of the rational necessity of hereditary monarchy: the bureaucratic chain of knowledge has to be supplemented by the king’s decision as the ‘‘completely concrete objectivity of the will,’’ which ‘‘reabsorbs all particularity into its single self, cuts short the weighing of pros and cons between which it lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying ’I will’ makes its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality.’’10 This is why ‘‘the conception of the monarch’’ is ‘‘of all conceptions the hardest for ratiocination, i.e. for the method of reflection employed by the Understanding’’:11 the speculative moment that understanding cannot grasp is ‘‘the transition of the concept of pure self-determination into the immediacy of being and so into the realm of nature.’’ In other words, while understanding can well grasp the universal mediation of a living totality, what it cannot grasp is that this totality, in order to actualize itself, has to acquire actual existence in the guise of an immediate ‘‘natural’’ singularity. (Did

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the Marxists who mocked Hegel here not pay the price for this negligence in the guise of the Leader who, again, not only directly embodied the rational totality, but embodied it fully, as a figure of full knowledge, not only as the idiotic point of dotting the i’s. In other words, a Stalinist Leader is not a monarch, which makes him much worse.) The term natural should be given its full weight here: in the same way that, at the end of logic, the Idea’s completed self-mediation releases Nature from itself, collapses into the external immediacy of Nature, the State’s rational self-mediation has to acquire actual existence in a will that is determined as directly natural, unmediated, sensu stricto ‘‘irrational.’’ While observing Napoleon on a horse in the streets of Jena after the battle of 1807, Hegel remarked that it was as if he saw there the World Spirit riding a horse. The Christological implications of this remark are obvious: what happened in the case of Christ is that God himself, the creator of our entire universe, was walking there as a common individual. This mystery of incarnation confronts us with what one can call the ‘‘Hegelian performative’’: of course a king is ‘‘in himself’’ a miserable individual; of course he is a king only insofar as his subjects treat him like one; however, the very unity of our state, that which the king ‘‘embodies,’’ actualizes itself only in the person of a king. And, mutatis mutandis, therein resides the monstrosity of Christ: not only the edifice of a State, but the entire edifice of reality hinges on a contingent singularity through which it actualizes itself. When Christ, this miserable individual, this ridiculous and derided clown-king, was walking around, it was as if the navel of the world, the knot that holds together the texture of reality, was walking around. This monstrosity is especially disturbing for our multiculturalist, antiuniversalist sensibility. No wonder Levinas is so popular today among multiculturalist Left liberals, who endlessly vary the motif of impossible universality—every universality is exclusive, it imposes a particular standard as universal. . . . The question to be asked here is: Is every ethical universality really based on the exclusion of the abyss of the neighbor, or is there a universality that does not exclude the neighbor? The answer is: yes, the universality grounded in the ‘‘part of no part,’’ the singular universality exemplified in those who lack a determined place in social totality, who are ‘‘out of place’’ in it and as such directly stand for the universal dimension. This identification with the excluded is strictly opposed to the liberal sympathy for and understanding of the plight of the excluded and to ensuing efforts to include them in the social edifice. The distinction between those who are included in the legal order and homo sacer is not simply horizontal, a distinction between two groups of people. More and more it is also a ‘‘vertical’’ distinction between two (superimposed) ways of how the same people can be treated—in brief: at the level of the law, we are treated as citizens, legal subjects, while, at the level of its obscene superego supplement, of this empty unconditional law, we are treated as homo sacer. The true problem is not the fragile status of those excluded, but rather the fact that, at the most elementary level, we are all ‘‘excluded’’ in the sense that our most elementary, ‘‘zero’’ position is that of an object of

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biopolitics, and that eventual political and citizenship rights are given to us as a secondary gesture, in accordance with strategic biopolitical considerations—this is the ultimate consequence of the notion of ‘‘post-politics.’’ This is why, for Agamben, the implication of his analysis of homo sacer is not that we should fight to include such people, but that they are the ‘‘truth’’ of all of us, that they stand for the zero-level position of all of us. This is why this ‘‘part of no part,’’ the universal singularity of homo sacer, is not the exception constitutive of universality: it is not that, by excluding such people from public space of citizenship, this space constitutes itself as universal. This does not mean that the universality embodied in the ‘‘part of no part’’ is simply a ‘‘truly all-inclusive’’ one, impartial toward all its members without exception; it is a fighting universality. The reference to the Paulinian notion of the community of believers is indicative here. Christian universality is not an all-encompassing, global medium in which there is a place for one and all—it is, rather, a struggling universality, a site of constant battle. Which battle, which division? To follow Paul: not the division between the law and sin, but that between, on the one hand, the totality of the law and sin as its supplement, and, on the other hand, the way of love. Christian universality is a universality that emerges at the symptomatic point where those who are ‘‘part of no part’’ of the global order—this is where the reproach of exclusion gets it wrong: Christian universality, far from excluding some subjects, is formulated from the position of those excluded, of those for whom there is no specific place within the existing order, although they belong to it; universality is strictly co-dependent with this lack of specific place/ determination. To put it in a different way, the standard reproach to Paul’s universalism misses the true site of universality: the universal dimension he opened up is not ‘‘neither Greeks nor Jews but all Christians,’’ which implicitly excludes non-Christians; it is, rather, the difference Christians/non-Christians itself, which, as a difference, is universal, that is, which cuts across the entire social body, splitting, dividing from within every substantial ethnic or other identity. Greeks are cut into Christians and non-Christians, as are Jews. The standard reproach thus in a way knocks on an open door: the whole point of the Paulinian notion of struggling universality is that the true universality and partiality do not exclude each other, but that universal truth is accessible only from a partial, engaged subjective position. Therein resides Paul’s communism.

 The standard idealist question ‘‘Is there (eternal) life after death?’’ should be countered with the materialist question ‘‘Is there life before death?’’ This is the question Wolf Biermann asked in one of his songs. What bothers a materialist is: Am I really alive here and now, or am I just vegetating, as a mere human animal bent on survival? When am I really alive? Precisely when I enact the ‘‘undead’’ drive in me, the ‘‘too-much-ness’’ of life (Eric

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Santner). I reach this point when I no longer act directly, but when ‘‘it [es]’’—whose Christian name is the Holy Spirit—acts through me: at this point, I reach the Absolute. The paradox is that, in order to attain this level, to ‘‘really live,’’ one must undergo one’s own death. This is how Yamamoto Jocho, a Zen priest, describes the proper attitude of a warrior: ‘‘every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, ‘Step from under the eaves and you’re a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.’ This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand.’’12 This is why, according to Hillis Lory, many Japanese soldiers in the Second World War performed their own funerals before leaving for the battlefield: ‘‘Many of the soldiers in the present war are so determined to die on the battlefield that they conduct their own public funerals before leaving for the front. This holds no element of the ridiculous to the Japanese. Rather, it is admired as the spirit of the true samurai who enters the battle with no thought of return.’’13 This preemptive self-exclusion from the domain of the living is another name of freedom—or, as Seneca out it long ago: ‘‘Search for a way to wander without mixing with the dead, and yet removed from the living’’ (Oedipus 949–51).

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Paul and Materialist Grace Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s Reformation

Roland Boer

At a point close to the turn of the millennium, Slavoj Zˇizˇek underwent a ‘‘conversion,’’ if not a ‘‘reformation’’—he began to appreciate the role of Christian theology, especially of a Protestant variety. After a long and convoluted search that gets lost time and again in various cul-de-sacs (ethics, law, and love), in the end he fixes on the Protestant doctrine of grace, albeit with a materialist, political core. In what follows I begin with the challenge that led to Zˇizˇek’s ‘‘conversion.’’ For one who had held Christianity and Marxism at arm’s length, Zˇizˇek has emerged as a proponent of both at the beginning of the new millennium. He has done so, I suggest, in response to the challenge posed to him by Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.1 There Butler points out that psychoanalysis cannot provide the basis for a viable politics, particularly because it will constantly raise the issue of the constitutive exception to any political move, while Laclau picks up on the highly undeveloped status of Zˇizˇek’s more recent statements in favor of Marxism. And the criticism bites, so much so that it will lead eventually to his double ‘‘conversion,’’ one to Christ and the other to Marx. While the ‘‘conversion’’ to Marx, or rather Lenin, was not possible without the ‘‘conversion’’ to Christ, or rather Paul, and vice versa, it is not quite so balanced. Whereas Zˇizˇek has identified himself openly as a Marxist-Leninist, calling himself a ‘‘fighting materialist’’ like Lenin,2 he does not make the same move for Christianity, although he does venture an occasional ‘‘we Christians’’ or ‘‘true Christians.’’ You will not find him sneaking off to a Reformed worship service, although he would probably spend the afternoon arguing about the sermon with the minister over a glass of wine and a cigar. However, a major reason for his turn to Pauline Christianity is that it enables him to get out of the closed circuit of Lacan’s psychoanalysis, however fleeting and haphazard that escape might be, and make the move to Lenin. How does Zˇizˇek

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get from Lacan to Lenin? Through the founding figure of Christianity—Paul—a necessary and by no means vanishing mediator who enables the move from one to the other. He did not get quite so far in his initial responses to Butler and Laclau, for he first had to negotiate the insistent challenge from Alain Badiou. Although he will eventually draw the means of his breakout from Badiou’s book on Paul, in his initial engagement with Badiou, Zˇizˇek focuses on the challenge Badiou poses for psychoanalysis. That challenge is that psychoanalysis deals, however well, with our everyday world full of quotidian exploitation, political disappointment, and fundamental injustice. In Badiou’s terms, this is the Order of Being, while in Lacan’s terms it is the intertwining of law and desire— terms that are, in fact, those of Paul as well. For Badiou, the event named by Paul enables the militant revolutionary movement of which Paul’s early Christians are the prime model. Here I focus on Zˇizˇek’s response to Badiou, particularly in The Ticklish Subject. He answers Badiou in terms of the constitutive exception: every effort at emancipation, every Cause (Zˇizˇek’s preferred term for the truth event) has to face up to the constitutive exception, to the underside that both enables the Cause to get under way in the first place and hobbles it every step of the way. This argument renders Zˇizˇek unable to take up a distinct political position, however much he may wish to do so. What also interests me here is the way Zˇizˇek neglects other elements of Badiou’s work, particularly his discussion of materialist grace, to which Zˇizˇek returns only much later. By materialist grace I mean an imminent, this-worldly grace that retains the focus on the unexpected and undeserved experience of such grace. But what of the conversion? I cast this unapologetically in Protestant terms, namely, the gradual and halting realization of the implications of the theological notion of grace. The crucial distinction here will be that between ethics and the gospel, or law and grace (Pauline terms, although I will dispense with Zˇizˇek’s thundering capitals for them. Time and again Zˇizˇek glimpses the materialist and political possibilities of grace, only to slip back into the realm of ethics and the law. Again, Badiou will be important, more for what Zˇizˇek misses. Initially, Zˇizˇek comes out squarely on the side of ethics and gets caught in the cul-de-sac of love. Later he attempts to correct this slide into moralizing by shifting gears to the gospel. In order to locate a materialist version of grace, Zˇizˇek finally leaves Lacan, however reluctantly, in the care of the ethicists and philosophers of love and hitches a ride with Lenin, where revolutionary grace can flourish. For reasons that will become clear, I find this part of Zˇizˇek’s argument one of the most intriguing and promising.3

The Darkness of Lacan: The Challenge of Butler and Laclau Zˇizˇek truly emerges as a political writer only after the exchange with Butler and Laclau in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. In order to do so, he had to disperse the murk

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surrounding his Marxist-Leninist political credentials, and that could happen only with and by means of Paul. It is Badiou’s Paul that enables Zˇizˇek, eventually and with much hesitation, to make this crucial move, to be able to move out of the illuminating but ultimately closed circle of Lacan’s theory in order to become a political writer. Let us not jump the gun, however, and first deal with Zˇizˇek’s emergence as a political writer. Butler’s criticism is that the Lacanian constitutive exception—the excluded item that is, in fact, the basis of the system in question—closes down any possibility of taking a political position. In response to Butler, Zˇizˇek voices some quite traditional Marxist categories— class conflict, mode of production, the over-arching presence of capitalism—and he then comes in for a beating at the hands of Laclau for making this move. But Zˇizˇek had not always been so openly Marxist. In fact, up until the exchange, Zˇizˇek had always distanced himself from Marxism. That was the subject of jokes or illustrations of a particular Lacanian point, usually in terms of the old communist re´gimes in the former Yugoslavia or U.S.S.R., or in anecdotes about the personal lives of Marx and Engels.4 Zˇizˇek does, after all, hail from a ‘‘former’’ Communist country, and so it would not do for him to identify too closely with the old guard (hence his running for president for a liberal reform party). Butler’s challenge to Zˇizˇek is that in the end Lacanian psychoanalysis closes down any possibility for what is new, for a viable politics beyond capitalism. At two points in her first contribution to the dialogues, Butler comes back to the argument that psychoanalysis forbids any step out of the system, that Zˇizˇek’s dialectic works by generating an impasse at the very point where such a break opens up. She recognizes the astuteness of Zˇizˇek’s many recyclings of hegemony, which relies on the notion that the remainder or surplus—or, conversely, the lack, that which is left out—comes to be crucial for the construction and viability of whatever is in question. Given that hegemony is not so much a description of the status quo as an inquiry into the means of political change, the key issue is that of opposition to domination. But according to the Hegelian and Lacanian logic that Zˇizˇek employs, what happens is ‘‘that that very point of opposition is the instrument through which domination works, and that we have unwittingly enforced the powers of domination through our participation in its opposition.’’5 Butler is puzzled, throwing a series of questions at Zˇizˇek that all hinge on the impossibility of political action from within a Lacan read in terms of Hegel: ‘‘But where does one go from here?’’ she asks. ‘‘Does the exposition of an aporia, even a constitutive aporia at the level of the linguistic performative, work in the service of a counter-hegemonic project?’’6 Or, quite directly, where is the possibility of something new, especially in a social and political direction? In fact, what Zˇizˇek does, suggests Butler, is pursue the other dimension of hegemony, namely, the myriad ways in which consent operates, particularly in what constrains and limits us: But what remains less clear to me is how one moves beyond such a dialectical reversal or impasse to something new. How would the new be produced from an analysis of

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the social field that remains restricted to inversions, aporias and reversals that work regardless of time and place? Do these reversals produce something other than their own structurally identical repetitions?7 Butler’s questions concern not only the closed circle of Lacanian analysis, in which the break to something new is but another way we are contained within the system, but also the perpetual suspension of the domains of politics and history in the structures of Lacanian thought. In other words, how can Zˇizˇek conceive of a viable politics that seeks to have some historical impact and that remains within the aspirations of the Left? I will argue that Paul, initially via Badiou, provides Zˇizˇek with the beginnings of an answer, one that will set him on a path to Lenin. But first, in the dialogues Zˇizˇek responds with a series of points—that Butler has misunderstood Lacan on certain issues, that the opposition between a structural, ahistorical Lacan and the historical arena of politics is highly problematic, that we should not succumb to a premature historicizing, that Lacan’s arguments have a distinctly historical and political dimension—but it is noticeable that Butler’s criticism bites. Compared with his earlier texts, Zˇizˇek’s writing displays a greater political urgency, sounding more like Fredric Jameson than the ‘‘monogamous’’ Lacanian mass-cultural aesthete (if such a thing is possible) of some of his earlier material. In the dialogues, rather than sitting in the background among the jesters or finding himself usurped by Lacan, Marx is the initial means through which Zˇizˇek seeks to respond to the criticisms. Now, for Zˇizˇek that which is left out, the unnameable and unrepresentable ground of the political possibilities that both Butler and Laclau explore, the conditions for dispersed and shifting postmodern political subjectivities, the background to Laclau’s historical narrative of the move from essentialist Marxism to the contingent politics of postmodernism or to Butler’s account of the shift from sexual essentialism to contingent sexual formation, is capitalism itself. Or, rather, what we have here is not ‘‘a simple epistemological process but part of the global change in the very nature of capitalist society.’’8 Is this a much more political Lacan? In fact, it is straight Marxist theory illuminated by Lacan: the Real has become that which refuses to be historicized (the stages of capitalism) and politicized (the economy, which simply cannot be changed). What he is after is not the incompletion within a particular horizon but the exclusion that constitutes the horizon itself. For all his detailed response to Butler’s criticisms, her point remains valid. Despite all these attempts to correct her perception of psychoanalysis and even of Hegel, the question concerning the political possibilities of Lacanian psychoanalysis remains. As Butler points out in her second essay, Zˇizˇek conflates Lacan and Marx: capitalism becomes both the occluded and unrepresentable Real of hegemonic struggles and the specific background of those struggles. Or, in his effort to ‘‘patch’’ Lacan into a Marxist framework, Zˇizˇek argues that capitalism is the primary condition for hegemony and that the subject

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as lack is its primary condition, without any explanation as to how these two primary conditions—the one historicist and the other formalist—relate to each other.9 In other words, when he wants to make a political point, Zˇizˇek turns to Marx; Lacan has to fit in somehow. Laclau makes a similar point, although in more detail. Somewhat nonplussed by Zˇizˇek’s overt Marxism in the dialogues, he writes: I think that Zˇizˇek’s political thought suffers from a certain ‘‘combined and uneven development.’’ While his Lacanian tools, together with his insight, have allowed him to make considerable advances in the understanding of ideological processes in contemporary societies, his strictly political thought has not advanced at the same pace, and remains fixed in very traditional categories.10 Laclau castigates him for taking terms acritically from the Marxist tradition, or more precisely, from the writings of Marx and from the period of the Russian Revolution, without any awareness of the subsequent debates and intellectual history of the terms (Gramsci, Trotsky, Austro-Marxism, etc.). Laclau cites the questions of ideology, class, and capitalism, suggesting that Zˇizˇek’s assertions have little argument to back them up and that even then they are at best highly troubled: Zˇizˇek’s ‘‘discourse is schizophrenically split between a highly sophisticated Lacanian analysis and an insufficiently deconstructed traditional Marxism.’’11 Zˇizˇek’s problem as it emerges in the dialogues lies, I would suggest, in ambiguity over the ‘‘cure’’ provided by psychoanalysis. To put it crudely, whereas Freud explicitly sought an end to the analytic process, worrying when such a process failed (as with Dora), for Lacan the possibility of the end remained an open question. Would the analysand finally be cured, or was psychoanalysis a process without end? As Zˇizˇek points out in The Ticklish Subject, for Lacan psychoanalysis is not psychosynthesis: there is no new harmony, no new beginning for the subject. Instead, the desired moment is the void, wiping the slate clean.12 ( However, in the dialogues with Butler and Laclau he pursues two options. The first is to place the problem within Lacan’s own development:13 thus the later Lacan devalues the paternal function and the importance of the Oedipal conflict and stresses that paternal authority is an imposture, a temporary stabilization. If the early Lacan was given to conservative cultural criticism, then the later Lacan, especially starting in the 1960s, sought a way out of this framework, attempting to show that paternal authority, the Symbolic order, is a fraud. This is the Lacan of the Real, which shows up the fragility of every symbolic constellation, that every historical figuration of the limit of the Real is always susceptible to radical breakdown and overhaul. And what is this Real? Capitalism itself. In other, words, Lacan recognized the problem Butler identifies within his theory, and his shift to emphasize the Real is his effort to deal with the problem of the closed circuit. But note what has happened here: the Real is capitalism. Even in the discussion

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of Lacan, Zˇizˇek’s second and preferred option for dealing with the problem both Butler and Laclau present shows itself in his juxtaposition of Marx and Lacan. But Zˇizˇek will need to do more than throw Lacan and Marx together; rather than Lacan turning out to be a Marxist, or indeed Marx a Lacanian avant la lettre, some mediation between them must come into play. In response to Laclau’s criticism that he is insufficiently aware of the Marxist tradition, Zˇizˇek becomes a Leninist. But, as I have suggested, the step to Lenin, which is at the same time the necessary mediation between Lacan and Marx, is Badiou’s reading of Paul. Although Zˇizˇek relies on Badiou in his post‘‘conversion’’ books (The Fragile Absolute and On Belief), the mediation is already in place by the time of the dialogues, although Zˇizˇek does not utilize it at that point. I refer to the introduction of Badiou’s Paul in The Ticklish Subject. The Challenge of Badiou Zˇizˇek needs Christianity, or more specifically, Paul and the New Testament to crack the shell of Lacan. And Badiou gives him the strength to so do. Although he refers to Badiou at various points in his earlier works,14 only with The Ticklish Subject, Zˇizˇek’s first effort at a militantly political book,15 does Badiou come to the fore. In Zˇizˇek’s search for the ‘‘unacknowledged kernel’’ of the Cartesian cogito in the book as a whole,16 Badiou becomes the prime exhibit of the post-Althusserians, those who developed their theories of the subject by touching base with Althusser, then moving on. In this initial engagement, Zˇizˇek tries to absorb Badiou into Lacan. When he will not fit, Lacan goes Badiou one better. Zˇizˇek needs to do this, because the problem Badiou raises is once again whether ‘‘psychoanalysis is not able to provide the foundation of a new political practice.’’17 In other words, in Zˇizˇek’s eyes, Badiou raises the same challenge as Butler: namely, whether psychoanalysis remains only within the confines of that which is, the normal functioning of things, and cannot open any possibility of the new. This is how Zˇizˇek formulates the challenge: for Badiou, what psychoanalysis provides is insight into the morbid intertwining of Life and Death, of Law and desire, an insight into the obscenity of the Law itself as the ‘‘truth’’ of the thought and moral stance that limit themselves to the Order of Being and its discriminatory Laws; as such, psychoanalysis cannot properly render thematic the domain beyond the Law, that is the mode of operation of fidelity to the Truth-Event—the psychoanalytic subject is the divided subject of the (symbolic) Law, not the subject divided between Law (which regulates the Order of Being) and Love (as fidelity to the Truth-Event).18 The terms and ideas parleyed about in this quotation are indebted to Alain Badiou. However, the challenge for Zˇizˇek is: psychoanalysis (for Badiou) is of the domain of

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Being, of the law and its inextricable relation with desire, life and death. It cannot get out of that trap. How does Zˇizˇek respond? His immediate tactic is to bring to bear his usual panoply of Lacanian categories. Thus the event (laicized grace, for Badiou) turns out to be ‘‘the intrusion of the traumatic Real that shatters the predominant symbolic texture.’’19 In other words, Zˇizˇek opts for a thoroughly dialectical position: no truth event without its obscene obverse; no subject without the gap that the subject sustains in the very act of attempting to overcome it; and no historical and progressive political act without the ahistorical bar that destabilizes it. The upshot of all this, particularly in the political register at which Zˇizˇek is operating, is a negative one. Suspicious of Badiou’s notion of the Platonic truth event, Zˇizˇek offers a warning that drains the enthusiasm of any political movement: If there is an ethico-political lesson of psychoanalysis, it consists in the insight into how the great calamities of our century (from the Holocaust to the Stalinist de´sastre) are not the result of our succumbing to the morbid attraction of this Beyond but, on the contrary, the result of our endeavour to avoid confronting it and to impose the direct rule of the Truth and/or Goodness.20 In his debates with Butler and Laclau, Zˇizˇek perpetually returns to this point, although with myriad variations. More fundamental than any political act or truth event is the yawning void, the moment of radical negativity that destabilizes any act. So what is the authentic political act? It engages one at the level of the constitutive exception itself. For Zˇizˇek, this is none other than the Real, and so an authentic act can only be negative, one that is unnameable (innomable). Or, to put it in Badiou’s terms, the event simultaneously structures and destabilizes the order of ‘‘being.’’ It is less a break from being than the traumatic moment that enables being. Zˇizˇek always risks disappearing into the ether of theory, but this final point is crucial for the next step in Zˇizˇek’s search for a political position. I cannot help but feel that, with the unnameable political act that intervenes in the realm of the Real, Zˇizˇek is almost at a dead end. I hardly need to point out that he is still locked into the Lacanian universe, which manifests itself in the form of his argument: for any position that someone may advance, there is always a more fundamental element upon which that position relies. The position in question (here Badiou’s) thereby becomes a mode of avoiding or screening what is in effect the constitutive exception. But this position does not leave Zˇizˇek much room to move. There is, however, the smallest glimmer of hope, a break in the eternal circuit of the Lacanian system. And that comes in a crucial sentence, where Zˇizˇek writes of the ‘‘excessive, surnume´raire Real of a Truth-Event (‘Resurrection’) that emerges by Grace (i.e. cannot be accounted for in the terms of the constituents of the given situation).’’21 This parenthetical comment is really a tear in the fabric, a break that will eventually enable

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Zˇizˇek to slip through and develop a political position, albeit via many futile byways. More specifically, Zˇizˇek gradually works himself out of the closed circle of psychoanalysis not merely through Badiou and Paul but through the theological category of grace. In the same way that grace is inexplicable, entirely from outside the system, so also will Zˇizˇek turn to Lenin in order to provide some political bite. This is the content with which he will replace the theological content of grace. The problem is that we need to be extraordinarily patient, biding our time while Zˇizˇek spirals through one frantic effort after another to find his way through. Grace— laicized and politicized—may well have appeared fleetingly, but he will not realize its full potential for some time (over no fewer than three books). Instead, he finds himself caught in the cul-de-sac of ethics and love. In what follows I trace that wayward journey, which begins with a double sleight of hand: ethics becomes equated with politics, and Badiou’s laicized grace slides over to the question of love. So we find Zˇizˇek speaking of the ‘‘ethicopolitical lesson of psychoanalysis.’’22 The connection could hardly be closer: politics is ethics in a hyphenated fashion that merges the two zones. And then, when he waxes on Badiou’s truth event, Zˇizˇek inexplicably shifts the emphasis to Christian love: ‘‘On the other hand, we have the more radical division between this entire domain of the Law/ desire, of the prohibition generating its transgression, and the properly Christian way of Love which marks a New Beginning, breaking out of the deadlock of Law and its transgressions.’’23 Badiou’s stark contrast between the Order of Being and the truth event (laicized grace) becomes in Zˇizˇek’s hands an opposition between law and love. If the order of Being is the domain of law, then the truth event and fidelity to it, characterized by Paul and the early Christian communities, belongs to the way of love, or rather ‘‘the properly Christian way of Love [agape¯].’’ Innocent enough at first sight, but there has been a profound shift from Badiou’s emphasis on grace. As Zˇizˇek will admit later, the truth event is but a laicized or materialist version of grace. And yet, in this quotation, the point escapes him, for he replaces grace with love. The shift takes place in this sentence: ‘‘there is another dimension, the dimension of True Life in Love, accessible to all of us through grace.’’24 Unfortunately, for Paul as for Badiou love is not the same as grace. Even as agape¯, as ‘‘Christian Love,’’ such love cannot escape the bounds of the law. Love may follow grace, but it is not the same as grace.The biggest omission, then, in Zˇizˇek’s discussion of Badiou is grace, particularly in light of Badiou’s extensive treatment of grace in his Paul book.25 I will return to these pages in the next section. At this point, in Zˇizˇek’s engagement with Badiou in The Ticklish Subject, he is caught up in Badiou’s challenge to psychoanalysis. In gathering a psychoanalytic response, Zˇizˇek finds that he needs to draw upon the well of Lacanian ethics, even to the point of copying and then expanding the master’s errors. And this is a trap, for ethics is hardly the best response to the argument that the law has been overcome by grace. The result is that Zˇizˇek perpetuates the realm of law in his emphasis on love rather than grace, for love is still an ethical category, one that enjoins appropriate behavior (as in the famous text from 1 Cor. 13 that Zˇizˇek will

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later quote: ‘‘love is patient, love is kind’’). Lacan’s reading of Paul in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis, like Zˇizˇek’s attempt to base a political position on Lacan, cannot escape the domain of ethics. There Zˇizˇek will remain for the duration of The Fragile Absolute. Materialist Grace? The following analysis traces in some detail Zˇizˇek’s arguments across his Christian trilogy—The Fragile Absolute, On Belief, and The Puppet and the Dwarf. In The Fragile Absolute, Zˇizˇek pursues what may be called a Roman Catholic argument, perpetually caught in the cul-de-sac of the ethic of love. On Belief, however, throws all of this out the political window, realizing that in the previous book he was still locked into the realm of the law. Instead of drawing moral lessons for us from the writings of Paul, here Zˇizˇek takes as his slogan the Reformers’ non sub lege sed sub gratia, ‘‘not under the law but under grace.’’ It is as though from the first book to the second he has reenacted the move of the Protestant Reformers. For On Belief is a very Protestant, if not Reformed book, one that runs down the doctrine of grace until it blurts out all of its dirty little secrets: human beings cannot effect salvation on their own; there is no profit whatsoever in good works; and the worst thing you can do is look for a political ethics in theology. The Puppet and the Dwarf, by contrast, is a curious amalgam of the positions of the previous two books, revisiting them in many ways. Thus Zˇizˇek immerses himself fully in the question of love in chapter 4 of The Puppet and the Dwarf, only to shift to the question of grace in chapter 5, where we do in fact find the resolution of his long search for a materialist doctrine of grace. For Zˇizˇek, the main point is to find a means to break out of the liberal-capitalist hegemony, as he puts it, to cut his way through the absolute ground of any political thought and action, namely, capitalism. I have argued above that he is also attempting to extract himself from the political dead end of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Now that Zˇizˇek has strayed—no, boldly stepped—into the domain of dour Protestants, I can engage with him much more closely. The Cul-de-sac of Ethics and of Love All three books of the Christian trilogy are very similar in structure, giving over roughly their first half or more to an effort to depict the current situation under global capitalism and then portraying the distinctly political option that Christianity provides. Structurally, then, the three books are very similar to Badiou’s Saint Paul, which addresses the urgent need for a new militant political model. If there is a difference between the three books in the first part, it lies in the content: The Fragile Absolute concerns itself more with an analysis of the political and economic nature of capitalism, whereas On Belief and The Puppet and the Dwarf focus on the ideological and spiritual malaise of late capitalism, all the way from the ideology of the commodity and its empty promise, like the ‘‘Kinder Surprise’’ egg, to the tension between excess and denial in coffee without caffeine, war without casualties and so on.26

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I do not want to spend too much time on the earlier sections of these books, except to note a profound shift in the way Zˇizˇek organizes the discussion. The first part of both books is heavily Lacanian and Marxist. Zˇizˇek answers Laclau’s charge that he is split schizophrenically between a highly developed Lacanian analysis and an underdeveloped Marxist one not by becoming more Marxist, but in a more creative conjunction of the two. Just like Marx, Lacan’s theory provides the best theoretical frame for grasping the totality of capitalism, from the perverse forms of postmodern art to the inexorable and internal operation of global capitalism; it shows the degree to which transgression is indispensable for the functioning of capitalism. In The Fragile Absolute, before he gets to his Christian response, Zˇizˇek makes one major argument with this Marxist-Lacanian analysis, namely, that capitalism is the Real, the constitutive exception par excellence. Of course, he first made this point and was castigated for it in the dialogues with Butler and Laclau. The lengthy analysis in The Fragile Absolute (occupying nearly one hundred pages of text) functions as a detailed reply to his critics. The Real is the ‘‘inexorable ‘abstract’ spectral logic of Capital,’’27 except that now it marks a gap between capital and the reality of people involved in the processes of production and distribution. The former cannot be represented except through makeshift terms such as capital, yet the latter is everywhere present. For Zˇizˇek, it is precisely this gap that is the problem: the violence of capital lies in the abstraction or ‘‘spectrality’’ of a selfenhancing and self-fecundating capital, one that pursues profit with a sheer disregard for the people involved. Unable to represent capitalism in any adequate form, we can at least speak of its victims.28 The question, when he finally gets to the distinct contribution of the Christian legacy in The Fragile Absolute, is whether Christianity merely manifests the logic of Lacan’s constitutive exception or whether it breaks out of that logic. As he puts it to himself: ‘‘Or does it [Christianity] endeavour to break out of the very vicious cycle of Law/sin?’’29 Again: ‘‘Or does Christianity, on the contrary, endeavour to break the very vicious cycle of prohibition that generates the desire to transgress it, the cycle described by Saint Paul in Romans 7: 7?’’30 And again: ‘‘However, this superego dialectic of the transgressive desire engendering guilt is not the ultimate horizon of Christianity: as Saint Paul makes clear, the Christian stance, at its most radical, involves precisely the suspension of the vicious cycle of Law and its transgressive desire. How are we to resolve this deadlock?.’’31 This ‘‘vicious cycle’’ is, of course, familiar from Zˇizˇek’s engagement with Badiou. It is also a shorthand way of referring to the lengthy discussion of capitalism that precedes this question. But I cannot get over the incessant repetition. The same questions in exactly the same terms recur again and again, until we get this rush: What if the split between the symbolic Law and the obscene shadowy supplement of excessive violence that sustains it is not the ultimate horizon of our experience? What if this entanglement of Law and its spectral double is precisely what, in the famous

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passage from Romans 7: 7, Saint Paul denounces as that which the intervention of the Christian agape (love as charity) enables us to leave behind? What if the Pauline agape, the move beyond the mutual implication of Law and sin, is not the step towards the full symbolic integration of the particularity of Sin into the universal domain of the Law, but its exact opposite, the unheard-of gesture of leaving behind the domain of the Law itself, of ‘‘dying to the Law,’’ as Saint Paul put it (Romans 7: 5)? In other words, what if the Christian wager is not Redemption in the sense of the possibility for the domain of the universal Law retroactively to ‘‘sublate’’—integrate, pacify, erase—its traumatic origins, but something radically different, the cut into the Gordian knot of the vicious cycle of Law and its founding Transgression?32 Zˇizˇek faces his own trauma—hence the delay and then incessant repetition of questions—of the limits of psychoanalysis. Behind each question lie the figures of Badiou, Butler, and Laclau. Each time Zˇizˇek asks whether this is the ultimate horizon, whether it is possible to leave behind the domain of the law, whether there is a ‘‘cut into the Gordian knot,’’ whether we can break out of the vicious cycle of law and transgressive desire. Similarly, as The Fragile Absolute draws to a close, we get a run of examples, all the way from Stephen King’s ‘‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’’ to Toni Morrison’s Beloved and back again. Even Christ’s crucifixion joins the list, an endlessly repetitive list of examples of breaking out from the trap of the law. Yet repetition is the sign of a failed effort to deal with trauma. How does Zˇizˇek fail in The Fragile Absolute? A rift opens up between the Lacanian framework that he cannot leave behind and the notion of agape¯. But Zˇizˇek refuses to see the rift or, in psychoanalytic terms, the void that opens up. In The Fragile Absolute Zˇizˇek hauls love in to do the hard work of grace. Thus love apparently empowers him to break with the constitutive exception, to face the obscene supplement and stare it down, and to hang onto Lacan rather than dumping him on a quiet country road. All you need is love, seemingly. But love is not grace, and so it gets Zˇizˇek nowhere near the break he seeks, from Lacan and/or from the constitutive exception. Let us look more closely at how this happens in The Fragile Absolute, precisely to identify it as something we should avoid. To begin with, Zˇizˇek offers exegeses of two biblical texts, Luke 14:26 and 1 Corinthians 13. The text from Luke is the same one he had called on The Ticklish Subject .33 There he reads Jesus’ call to discipleship in terms of the constitutive exception: one must renounce everything for the sake of Christ in order to get it all back. Or rather, the necessary condition for social life itself—family, social order, established customs, in short, the whole panoply of a Christian society—is its renunciation, which is then the exception that holds everything together. Now Luke 14:26 is for him not the constitutive exception to the social order but the very means of breaking from it: ‘‘it is love itself that enjoins us to ‘‘unplug’’ from the organic community into which we were born.’’34 In a pattern that has become thoroughly familiar, Zˇizˇek throws together a whole series of

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variations on this unplugging, uncoupling, or, as he will call it in the final section, ‘‘breakout’’: the Buddha, Christianity, and Kierkegaard join the Jesus of Luke’s Gospel, who speaks not about ‘‘hatred’’—‘‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother’’ (Luke 14:26)—but the love of both Galatians 3:28 and 1 Corinthians 13. As for 1 Corinthians 13, Zˇizˇek throws in with Romans 7, conflating their messages. In the quotation above, Paul already speaks of agape¯ in Romans, at least for Zˇizˇek. Of course, Paul does not mention love at all in Romans 7: 7 (that Lacanian error once again), let alone in the verses surrounding it in chapter 7 as a whole. By contrast, 1 Corinthians 13 does speak of love.35 Zˇizˇek claims that it is Paul’s other paradigmatic passage, one that should be read dialectically with Romans 7. In other words love (1 Cor. 13) enables the breakout from the entanglement of law and transgression that Paul maps in the Romans text. Love is quite simply of another order, one that does not compute in the cycle of law and sin. Zˇizˇek’s argument can only appear to work if he casts 1 Corinthians 13 in with Romans 7. Yet Zˇizˇek seems to have forgotten Badiou’s argument that love is fidelity to the event and not the fundamental nature of the event itself. Somehow agape¯ has replaced grace. Thus at one of the few moments when Zˇizˇek refers to a theologian apart from Kierkegaard, he confuses grace with love. He quotes Rudolph Bultmann on the opposition of grace and law, only to comment that Lutheran theologians like Bultmann are among the strongest proponents of ‘‘this radical opposition between the law and divine love.’’36 Yet Bultmann is speaking of grace, not love, a word he does not mention at all.37 But Zˇizˇek likes to toss everything into the pot, and Badiou’s finely wrought distinctions between Paul and the Christ of the gospels fade away. Christ’s message, which now loses the mediation of the gospel writers themselves, is that of Paul. Love has become the disguise for grace, giving the impression that Zˇizˇek has found a way to break with the law. But as he crawls through the fence and makes a dash for the final perimeter, he finds that he is lugging Lacan along with him. He will not make it this time, for Lacan will trip him up. Thus Zˇizˇek finally gives in and allows Lacan to make the extraordinary claim that ‘‘love’’ in Lacan’s Seminar 20 is in fact Christian love.38 He will justify this along two related lines. The first is to argue that Lacan undermines the big Other in his later work, so that, by the time he gets to the almost dementia-ridden Seminar 20, there is no guarantee of the consistency of the symbolic space in which we dwell. In other words, the fundamental imbalance of Christian love, its threat to cosmic order, is the point at which it starts to look the same as Lacan’s notion of love. But this notion of love as disruption is not really a break from the cycle of law and desire. Thus Zˇizˇek makes a move that signals the complete breakdown of his focus on love. In the final section of The Fragile Absolute, ‘‘The Breakout,’’ as well as the last pages of the fourth chapter of The Puppet and the Dwarf, he suggests that the Christian notion of love may be understood in terms of Lacan’s feminine formulas of sexuation. While

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the masculine is the domain of the constitutive exception, the realm in which the lawtransgression relationship involves a tension between the universal law and its transgressive exception (the latter thereby constituting the former), the feminine is outside this logic. The feminine involves a paradox of the non-all, the non-universal. Let me return to the exegesis of 1 Corinthians 13 I mentioned a little earlier,39 which Zˇizˇek reads in terms of the paradox of completion and incompletion. First, Paul argues that, although one might have the gifts of the spirit (tongues and prophecy), all knowledge and the understanding of mysteries, even all faith and the ultimate sacrifice of martyrdom, if one does not have love one is and/or gains nothing. Second, all of these items are incomplete until the eschatological moment of completion, of seeing ‘‘face to face.’’ In the midst of this radical contingency, love is the greatest of the three—faith, hope, and love—but only until the mirror clears at the Eschaton itself. This paradox of (in)completion makes sense, Zˇizˇek argues, only in terms of the feminine formulas of sexuation. Love is therefore ‘‘not an exception to the All of knowledge, but precisely that ‘nothing’ which makes even the complete series/field of knowledge incomplete.’’40 Love cannot complete the series—gifts of the spirit, knowledge, understanding, faith, and martyrdom—for each item in the series is already complete. Rather, love shows them all to be nothing, but now a nothing aware of its own lack. And so, concludes Zˇizˇek, only an incomplete, vulnerable and lacking being can love. Yet this incompletion is in fact higher than completion, and so love is therefore higher, because incomplete, than any complete series. This paradox of the nonall, between the nothingness of completion and the necessary imperfection of love, is what Zˇizˇek claims to be characteristic of both the feminine formulas of sexuation and Paul’s excursus on love in 1 Corinthians 13. We find, then, that Zˇizˇek attempts to hold two positions together: love enables us to break out of the cycle of law and desire because it seeks to usurp grace, and love breaks the law only by means of the feminine formulas of sexuation. But this second position is none other than the one with which he finished his discussion of Badiou in The Ticklish Subject, where he argued that the point of breakage lies in following the law to the letter, so that it collapses under its own weight. In other words, love is no different from the law (hence Paul’s statements in the New Testament concerning the fulfillment of the law). At this point Zˇizˇek is absolutely correct, but in a different sense: love is still caught within the realm of the law. This is hardly the operation of grace, for grace is a radically external interruption into the realm of law, not one that arises from within. If we follow Zˇizˇek, we are left with the paradoxical conclusion, following on from the two statements above, that, although the feminine formulas of sexuation and grace are both forms of love, they are not the same as each other. The problem is that love is not grace, whereas Zˇizˇek’s problem is that he attempts to substitute love for grace. Not only does love enable him to dispense with the constitutive exception, it is also the means by which this ‘‘spectral obscene supplement’’ can be suspended.41 Yet I have argued that this is a failed effort: he attempts to break from this

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fundamental category, which has been present in all his work, while dragging Lacan along after him. Almost desperately he wishes to escape, as the focus on Stephen King’s ‘‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,’’ a story of escape from prison, in the last section of The Fragile Absolute shows. But love cannot accomplish this work of grace, and so his focus on love becomes the sign of his failure. Before he knows it, he slips into the realm of ethics and the law, precisely the zone he had attempted to escape by means of love. In fact, Zˇizˇek is much more comfortable writing about the superego cycle of law and transgression, readily slipping back into it at any opportunity that presents itself. The most telling mark of such a Roman Catholic regression comes when he revisits his response to Badiou in The Ticklish Subject. The uncoupling from the law that Zˇizˇek sees in love is, he argues, the same as Paul’s argument in2 Corinthians 5:16–17: being ‘‘in Christ’’ brings about a thorough realignment, a ‘‘new creation’’ in which ‘‘everything old has passed away.’’ For Zˇizˇek this is none other than the death drive, the moment of sublimation in which one wipes the slate clean in a moment of terrifying violence in order to make a radically new beginning. 42 Whereas in The Ticklish Subject the death drive places an everlasting question mark over any new start, questioning Badiou’s emphasis on grace, in The Fragile Absolute it becomes a characteristic of love as uncoupling. He cannot have it both ways. In the end, Zˇizˇek’s problem is not merely that he substitutes love for grace but that he aligns love with ethics (i.e., the law). In fact, I can’t help wondering whether love gets us anywhere. With all this talk of ethics and love, with philosophy undergoing a recovery of its own ethical task, it is perhaps time to take a stand against ethics and against love. And one should take that stand in the name of grace.

The Protestant Turn After too many byways, Zˇizˇek has finally almost stumbled upon grace. After the very Roman Catholic emphasis of The Fragile Absolute, the next work, On Belief, marks the beginnings of a turn to grace, but not before Zˇizˇek slips back into love as ethics before the encore of The Puppet and the Dwarf. It is as though Zˇizˇek has finally realized a simple statement from Badiou: ‘‘The pure event is reducible to this: Jesus died on the cross and resurrected. This event is ‘grace’ (kharis). Thus, it is neither a bequest, nor a tradition, nor a teaching. It is supernumerary relative to all this and presents itself as pure givenness.’’43 For Badiou, the key text is Romans 6:14, the Reformers’ slogan ‘‘since you are not under law, but under grace.’’ In his hands it becomes a paradigmatic version of the event, democratized, contingent, but altogether materialist, although it also means that grace itself is an inescapably radical and revolutionary theological doctrine. The signal of such a realization is that only in On Belief does Zˇizˇek become overtly Leninist. And it is not merely Christianity, nor even Paul himself, but quite specifically

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the Reformed concept of grace that enables him to become a Leninist. Let us focus on the sections of On Belief where grace becomes a political category. In that book, Zˇizˇek says: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The ‘‘good news’’ of Christianity involves the possibility of changing eternity, of a thoroughly new beginning; This new beginning is of the same order as Lenin’s actual freedom, over against formal freedom; This change involves the suspension and demise of the law; Lest the previous point be taken as anti-Jewish, Judaism has a dialectical relation to Christianity; Christology is crucial, that: a. Christ faces up to the constitutive exception and shows it to be empty; b. unlike pagan religions, in which one seeks to become more like God, in Christianity God becomes human; c. like the abandoned Christ, at the moment of being completely cut off from God, we are closest to God; d. this shows the fundamental imperfection of God that is the foundation for love beyond mercy.

The first two and the fourth points are by far the most important. I am less interested in Zˇizˇek’s efforts to specify Christian uniqueness by contrast to the various pagan temptations (5.b). And arguments that merely revisit rather standard theological positions (5.c) or reiterate points he has made earlier concerning both the law (3) and love (5.d) are not so tempting. Let me begin with a few comments on Judaism, although the whole discussion of the law in Badiou and Zˇizˇek is as much about Judaism as it is about Christianity. The overriding pattern is to oppose Judaism and Christianity, although not necessarily to the detriment of the former. The contrasts pile up, as usual: iconoclasm versus the renunciation of the beyond; Judaism is, in Hegel’s terms, ‘‘in-itself,’’ while Christianity is Judaism ‘‘for itself’’; the ban on images as opposed to Jesus Christ; the change in personal identity whereby God or the law moves from being external to internal (Christ); the gap between man and God becoming a split, an impotence, within God himself (the step from Job to Christ). Judaism does not come off too badly here; I sense a sneaking admiration in Zˇizˇek’s casting of Judaism as another means of overcoming the constitutive exception, although this time in terms of the transgressive act of obeying the law to the letter.44 It is almost as though Judaism provides an alternative breakaway from the constitutive exception, the obscene supplement of the law, and in Zˇizˇek’s response to Eric Santner in The Puppet and Dwarf he argues such a line.45 The ban on images, however, is an exception: Zˇizˇek takes this to be the mark of anthropomorphism or personification in

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Judaism. Precisely because Judaism does have a personal deity, because any representation would bring out this unbearable truth, Judaism needs the second commandment, against graven images. Here lies the imaginary excess that must be repressed. This excess takes a number of forms: spectral, phantasmatic history (Freud’s myth of the patricide of Moses is then an effort to expose such a history)46 as opposed to explicit symbolic history; the secret horror of divine impotence; the abyss of the Other’s desire, and so on. At this point, Christianity lays the truth bare: Christ is this image, this ordinary creature that Judaism cannot face. Or, as Zˇizˇek will argue at greater length in The Puppet and the Dwarf, Christianity shows up as empty the phantasmatic kernel of Judaism—the messiah has arrived.47 In the end, Zˇizˇek prefers the Christian version of ‘‘unplugging,’’ in which Christianity faces up to and embraces its own excess. Even though the Jewish version—obeying the law to the letter—looks for all the world like the feminine formulas of sexuation with which he tried to describe the Christian break in The Fragile Absolute, he will stay with the elusive search for materialist grace. In fact, in On Belief and The Puppet and the Dwarf the feminine formulas for sexuation, manifested in obedience to the letter of the law as the ultimate mode of undermining it, move from Christianity to Judaism. Obedience to the law, the concern with ethics, even (dare I write it?) Lacan himself become Jewish concerns. These options are extremely attractive for Zˇizˇek, for they open up the possibility of another path to a new beginning. Thus by the time of The Puppet and the Dwarf, the split is not between Judaism and Christianity: rather, Judaism and Christianity join forces against pagan initiatory wisdom. The problem with this, however, is that the closer they are to each other, the more Judaism prepares the way for Christianity. Without Judaism first identifying and remaining faithful to the phantasmatic kernel, Christianity would not have been able to identify with it and show it to be empty. Without the Jewish community constituted as an ethnic remainder, Paul would not have been able to claim that the whole of humanity is a remainder. All of which ends up being a renewed form of supersessionism: in part in response to Santner, in part due to the indelible stamp of Judaism on psychoanalysis. I want to suggest, however, that for Zˇizˇek the Christian break with Judaism is part of his necessary break with Lacan if he is to develop a political position. What of the other two points—the thoroughly new beginning and Lenin’s actual freedom? How do they explicate a political theology of grace? On the last pages of On Belief Zˇizˇek (seems) to come clean: Here enters the ‘‘good news’’ of Christianity: the miracle of faith is that it is possible to traverse the fantasy, to undo this founding decision, to start one’s life all over again, from the zero point—in short, to change Eternity itself (what we ‘‘always-already’’ are). Ultimately, the ‘‘rebirth’’ of which Christianity speaks (when one joins the community of believers, one is born again) is the name for such a new beginning.48

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This passage leans heavily toward theological rather than Lacanian terminology (earlier Zˇizˇek invokes the term miracle, quoting Lenin’s ‘‘in some respects, a revolution is a miracle.’’49 In fact, the only relic of Lacan lies in the notion of traversing the fantasy, crossing the gap that separates the mundane universe of meaning from its phantasmatic support. Christianity dares to bridge this gap, to stare down into the horrific and psychotic realm of the living dead that would, under normal Lacanian terms, result from this collapse of the Real (fantasy) and Symbolic (the universe of meaning): Christianity sends this realm scuttling away into a dark corner. Other than that, in these last pages Lacan has quietly slipped out the back. Instead, we find Kierkegaard, Marx, Evelyn Waugh, Brecht, Schelling, and Lenin. Of these, Lenin interests me the most. To get to him, let us pass by way of Brecht’s poem ‘‘The Interrogation of the Good,’’ translated by Zˇizˇek. The poem allows Zˇizˇek to stress the suspension of the ethical as the absolute basis of any authentic ethical engagement. We threaten to return here to the constitutive exception—the suspension of ethics as the basis of ethics—until we get to this statement: ‘‘And what is the Christian notion of being ‘reborn in faith’ if not the first full-fledged formulation of such an unconditional subjective engagement on account of which we are ready to suspend the very ethical substance of our being?’’50 This ‘‘unconditional subjective engagement’’ is of an order fundamentally different from ethics, so much so that it can hardly be called an ethical engagement, let alone ethics as such. Instead, what we have here is the hard-headed and hard-hearted reality of seizing the revolution and holding to it. In other words, Badiou’s militant declarations find their voice in Brecht’s poem with the need to execute the obnoxious ‘‘good man,’’ although now with a good bullet from a good gun up against a good wall. This is, of course, where Zˇizˇek’s increasing identification as a Leninist begins to take effect: by contrast to the contemporary elevation of ethics over politics, a return to Lenin rather than a depoliticized Marx places politics, or more directly, a ‘‘politics of Truth,’’51 at the center. Furthermore, like Paul with Christianity and Lacan with psychoanalysis, Lenin is outside the initial Marxist circle (he is Eastern, Russian, Tartar), but this externality allows him to wrench Marxism out of its original context and thereby universalize it. Finally, only through such a traumatic displacement can the theory become effective in an explicitly political sense. This is where Lenin’s absolute commitment to the revolutionary cause is key, the profound suspension of ethics in the name of a revolutionary cause to which everything must contribute in order to change the ‘‘coordinates of the situation.’’52 The coordinates in question are those of the liberal-capitalist world order. The terminology draws near to what Zˇizˇek uses for Christianity at the close of On Belief and to Badiou’s event in the midst of Being. A materialist notion of grace is beginning to emerge. But there is one more step, and that comes with the discussion of formal and actual freedom. Quite simply, actual freedom is the ability to step outside or transcend the particular context in question. It questions and overturns the cluster of presuppositions and determinations that constitute, in 202

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normal circumstances, the absolute horizon of thought and action. Formal freedom is then apparent freedom whose boundaries are in fact set by a certain situation: given the coordinates, the range of choice appears to be endless but is in fact limited. It operates within the terms of existing power relations. Actual freedom, by contrast, is not the choice between two or more options within a given situation, but the choice to change the situation itself. My ability to choose from various products in a supermarket is therefore formal freedom: faced with a bewildering array of choices, I fail to see that the political economic structure that generates supermarkets has already set the boundaries of the range of choice. The distinction between actual and formal freedom is an openly Leninist formulation of Badiou’s Being and event, or Paul’s law and grace. Or, in Zˇizˇek’s own terms, the ‘‘given coordinates’’ of a situation (Being, law, or formal freedom) must be opposed to that which overthrows and fundamentally rearranges those coordinates (event, actual freedom, and grace). However, Zˇizˇek will not let the opposition stand as it is, so he works his way through a thicket of examples—from Bill Clinton’s failed health-care reform through the French TV show ‘‘It’s My Choice’’ to the ‘‘collapse’’ of Communism in Eastern Europe—in order to argue that, in a situation of forced choice (Eastern Europe’s option either to choose capitalism or to return to ‘‘actually existing socialism’), actual freedom is the ability to act as though all options are available, as though the choice is in fact not forced. Furthermore, Lenin’s insistence on asking whose interest is served by ‘‘freedom’’—‘‘Freedom—yes, but for whom? To do what?’’53 —had the purpose of keeping open the possibility of a real choice, of an actual freedom. Finally, Zˇizˇek is inescapably dialectical, and so he will not rest, as does Badiou, with an utter divorce between actual and formal freedom. Rather, actual freedom is what rearranges the coordinates of formal freedom, or, in Badiouese, the event embodies within itself an inscription into the order of being—hence the thoroughly new situation to which the followers remain faithful, living both in terms of fidelity to the event (‘‘love’’) and with the confidence that they will win through (‘‘hope’’). In Lenin’s actual freedom, Zˇizˇek has finally tracked down the elusive materialist grace he set out to capture in The Ticklish Subject. And this time, for all of his criticism of Badiou’s antidialectical stand, he affirms against Badiou’s theologically illiterate critics that the event is a laicized grace.54 Of course, as I discussed in detail earlier, Badiou himself says as much more than once. Before moving on to some reservations concerning Zˇizˇek’s militant Protestantism, let me note what has happened in the argument of On Belief. On a minor level, Zˇizˇek has collapsed Badiou’s sharp distinction between Paul and Jesus, preferring to speak of Christianity as such. Far more important is the fact that Lenin has replaced Lacan as the primary point of reference. To be sure, there is plenty of Lacan in On Belief (can Zˇizˇek write in any other fashion?), but when he gets to the crucial politico-theological points, Christian theological terminology mixes it up with Lenin, and Lacan is nowhere to be found. Gone is the trap of ethics, to which Lacan kept him tied in The Fragile Absolute, 203

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gone is the desperate effort to find political mileage in Lacan, or indeed, to interpret the main points of Christian theology by means of Lacanian categories. In their place, we find a clear focus on grace, and it is Lenin who emerges as the embodiment of a materialist and political grace. Grace has, however, become a purely formal category, marking the unexpected break that overthrows the status quo. The term itself is then translated into Lenin’s actual freedom, passing through Badiou’s event. But let me pick up the features of grace that I identified a little earlier, especially the concern with salvation rather than good works or even election. In the Reformed understanding, grace is that which comes from entirely outside human agency, from God, to be precise. Human beings neither deserve salvation nor can they in any way effect salvation for themselves: grace is the undeserved and unearned gift of salvation from God. However, Zˇizˇek’s Leninist reading hardly has room for God: actual freedom is nothing other than the revolutionary act itself. In other words, human agency returns with a vengeance, and grace becomes an act of human intervention. I want to keep open the possibility that a materialist grace might in fact remove human beings as the agents of change, however difficult such a possibility might be. Kierkegaard’s Snare Zˇizˇek claims that his is a properly Christian reading, however—that this Leninist position is one with the revolutionary core of Christianity. But this is not something that he brings about through the force of his own argument. Rather, he brings about the LeninistChristian conjunction by means of a figure who quietly peers around the corner of some of the major points of his argument, namely Søren Kierkegaard. Now, Zˇizˇek utters not one word of criticism of Kierkegaard, citing him approvingly when he needs to peg his argument firmly to the ground. Kierkegaard is, of course, the Protestant, or rather Lutheran, philosopher par excellence, and it seems to me that the moment of Zˇizˇek’s own Reformation relies heavily on Kierkegaard. But Kierkegaard, at least on Zˇizˇek’s reading, skews his materialist theology of grace in terms of human agency. On crucial questions, such as the law and transgression, love, the religious suspension of the ethical, the fundamental Christian break, but above all redemption itself, Zˇizˇek defers to Kierkegaard. As far as transgression and the law is concerned—the point of Zˇizˇek’s struggle with Badiou and psychoanalysis—Zˇizˇek brings in Kierkegaard to back up an argument he has made before: the most dangerous and subversive act is to follow the law to the letter, to immerse oneself without reservation in the society/institution/ relationship/ideological system in question.55 This assumes a certain distance between the subject and the system in question, a pause in total identification that is fundamental to the functioning of that system. To close that distance without pause is the act of the prisoner who identifies completely with prison, the soldier who obeys commands to the letter, the citizen of any former Eastern European Communist country who actually

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believes that the state is the full realization of communism, Christ’s fulfillment of the law, and, most tellingly, the woman who identifies entirely with her lot as a submissive household chattel. Well, the last example is not quite Zˇizˇek’s, but he does argue that total identification is in fact consonant with the feminine formulas for sexuation, the Jewish form of uncoupling, and the radical break of Christianity. And yet the last example is the item in the series that Zˇizˇek cannot name, the point at which, it seems to me, the argument breaks down. How Kierkegaard comes in here is telling. Zˇizˇek quotes from Works of Love: ‘‘We do not laud the son who said ‘No,’ but we endeavour to learn from the gospel how dangerous it is to say, ‘Sir, I will.’ ’’56 Kierkegaard’s comment applies to Matthew 21:28–31 in his own characteristic fashion.57 Yet the issue is not obedience to the law, to obeying the father’s command. Rather, Kierkegaard reads this as the call of the gospel itself, the radical demand that requires one to give up everything in order to follow Christ. Even so, there is a catch with this reading, one that gives the human response great scope and one to which I will return below. At first it appears odd that Zˇizˇek misses the direction of Kierkegaard’s reading, for is he not himself interested in the radical break that Christianity provides? But this reference to Kierkegaard comes from The Fragile Absolute, which, I have already argued, slips back into the whole question of the law, in which Lacan and ethics find themselves at home. So also on the question of love: no matter how much Zˇizˇek or Kierkegaard emphasizes the uniqueness of Christian love, agape¯, the prescriptions on love are inescapably ethical. On two other occasions, Zˇizˇek cites approvingly Kierkegaard’s Works on Love. The first comes in a commentary on one of Zˇizˇek’s favorite texts from Luke 14:26—the one concerning hatred of father, mother, and so on—to suggest that one should in fact ‘‘hate the beloved out of love and in love.’’58 This is in fact the work of love, comparable to Che Guevara’s or Lenin’s revolutionary violence. And a little later, in a discussion wholly indebted to Kierkegaard on love and deception, ‘‘love believes everything—and yet is never to be deceived.’’59 Yet Kierkegaard is not so silly as to be trapped in the realm of love. He is, after all, a Protestant. And Zˇizˇek follows him, in On Belief and The Puppet and the Dwarf, in arguing for the religious suspension of the ethical. Behind Kierkegaard’s comments, whose importance is in inverse relationship to his all-too-brief citations, lie the three spheres of aesthetics, ethics, and religion. There is a distinct hierarchy, in which the religious is superior to both the ethical and the aesthetic. Religion—in particular, Lutheran Protestantism—then overrides the other two spheres, suspending them both in the name of the more fundamental category. For Kierkegaard, love may pass through all three spheres, but its truest expression comes with the religious. Betrayal may be aesthetic (betrayal of universality for a particular reason) or ethical (betrayal of the particular for a universal such as truth), but its ultimate form is religious betrayal. That is betrayal out of love: the sacrifice of the

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other, and thereby of oneself, in order to uncover the element that could only be uncovered by such a betrayal—Christ’s mission is of course the greatest example here. The religious suspension or rupture of ethics is but the first element of Zˇizˇek’s reliance on Kierkegaard for a formulation of the Christian break.60 Two other points are important: we are called upon to repeat this fundamental shift in coordinates for ourselves, by contrast to the Socratic process of recollection, and redemption is made possible but is not ensured by the break (Christ’s death). On the first point, the new beginning of Christianity is not, suggests Kierkegaard, like Socratic recollection (learning is therefore the process of recovering what we already knew before birth but lost in the trauma of birth itself). Rather, it is a repetition of that primordial choice, which was first made in Christianity.61 The paradox here is that we can make a new beginning yet again without endangering the uniqueness of the first beginning. The most telling debt to Kierkegaard comes with the notion of redemption, however. Let me quote Zˇizˇek at length: By taking upon himself all the Sins and then, through his death, paying for them, Christ opens up the way for the redemption of humanity—however, by his death, people are not directly redeemed, but given the possibility of redemption, of getting of the excess. This distinction is crucial: Christ does not do our work for us, he does not pay our debt, he ‘‘merely’’ gives us a chance—with his death, he asserts our freedom and responsibility, for us, to redeem ourselves through the ‘‘leap into faith,’’ i.e. by way of choosing to ‘‘live in Christ’’—in imitatio Christi, we repeat Christ’s gesture of freely assuming the excess of Life, instead of projecting/displacing it onto some figure of the Other. (We put ‘‘merely’’ in quotation marks, because, as was clear to Kierkegaard, the definition of freedom is that possibility is higher than actuality: by giving us a chance to redeem ourselves, Christ does infinitely more than if he were directly to redeem ourselves).62 Among the shouting capitals, the famous Kierkegaardian ‘‘leap into faith’’ finally appears. Here again, Christianity overcomes the constitutive exception—we appropriate through Christ the excess of life rather than leaving it with another—but this argument opens up a decisive breach with Reformed theology. We can see that in Zˇizˇek’s reading of Kierkegaard on the two sons. In response to the call of the gospel, one says ‘‘No’’ and the other ‘‘I will,’’ but the catch is that the final decision seems to be left up to the human agents. God offers the call; we have the option of refusing or accepting it, with all the consequences. The problem, then, is free will and grace. In his famous and vital debates with Erasmus, Luther argues firmly against any notion of free will, which for him entailed salvation by merit.63 Grace is an overwhelmingly alien act of God in Christ for the forgiveness of sins: there is no room for a natural or gradual path to salvation, nor can human beings

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play any role in the process of redemption. Erasmus was too much of a humanist to give up entirely on human agency or free will. For Luther, however, free will gave final control back to human beings, who could then choose whether to accept salvation or not. Zˇizˇek’s reading of Kierkegaard pushes him closer to Erasmus than to Luther, closer to traditional humanism than the decisive Protestant break. Ultimately, I would suggest, it means that he is unwilling, at least in On Belief, to take the step that sees at the heart of the doctrine of grace the removal of human agency.

Revolutionary Grace In On Belief, we find, disappointingly, yet another effort to locate grace in the realm of human effort—yet another form of salvation through works and not through grace. However, the curious intellectual mix in The Puppet and the Dwarf provides that final step. Here Zˇizˇek discards reliance on human agency: rather than suggesting that any materialization of grace shifts grace firmly back into the realm of human decision and activity, he finally realizes the full implications of the doctrine of grace itself.64 A materialist grace is nothing other than the unexpected, messianic moment of revolution Zˇizˇek’s text is saturated with the theological language of grace and predestination. (Lacan has again disappeared.) He makes use of it in two ways: one is the unexpected, unpredictable revolutionary moment, which comes entirely from outside; the second is the postrevolutionary task, the responsibility for building from the ground up. It seems to me that, for all his byways and choppy arguments, Zˇizˇek has hit on something here, namely, that theology can provide one of the most complex ways of speaking about revolution. Grace concerns salvation, and salvation cannot be earned, nor is it deserved. Theologically, of course, the name for such pure externality and contingency is ‘‘God.’’ Zˇizˇek has a good deal to say about God, but he also stresses the analogous impossibility of predicting revolution. We may assess the social and political situation in whatever way we choose in order to understand how a revolution may have taken place, but ultimately we cannot answer the questions ‘‘Why now? Why here? Why these people?’’ Objective analysis will not tell us the time, even in terms of the Marxist crisis of contradictions. Speaking about this in theological terms maintains the pure externality of the event. The doctrine of grace also enables Zˇizˇek to wrench himself away from human agency—the point at which he concludes On Belief. Grace inverts, or rather, undermines the usual focus on human activity. Instead, the focus is on God. God puts himself on the line, opening up the New Beginning: ‘‘God took upon Himself the risk of putting everything at stake, of fully ‘existentially engaging Himself’ by, as it were, stepping into His own picture, becoming part of creation, exposing Himself to the utter contingency of existence.’’65 After such a moment, we must help God, who now stands for the radically unexpected.

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Thus a materialist grace is external, unexpected, and beyond human agency (which is how we must then understand ‘‘God’’). However, the full Protestant turn in Zˇizˇek’s work comes only with his appropriation of deepest logic of predestination, without which grace could not be thought. It is not just that God predestines things and they turn out so in a quiet, linear progression; rather, predestination relies on the wholly contingent, unexpected role of grace. Once we have had the entirely unexpected and undeserved experience of grace, only then does it appear as foreordained. So also the revolution: only after the contingent moment of revolution can objective conditions be seen as leading up to it. Furthermore, with predestination, one cannot avoid seeing signs of the workings of grace, which will then become apparent in the work necessary for the new post-grace order. So also with revolution: the easy part is the revolution itself; the hard labor comes the morning after, when a new society must be constructed from scratch. Or, in Badiouese, the event is pure empty sign, and we have to work to generate its meaning. For Zˇizˇek, the truth of predestination lies here, in the expectation and responsibility that follow the event.

Conclusion Throughout this chapter, we have been on the trail of only one question, the materialist notion of grace in Zˇizˇek’s work: in the face of the disconcerting capacity of capitalism to generate and absorb any effort toward political emancipation, the only viable political option for the Left—what has usually been termed ‘‘revolution’’—lies completely outside the system. The doctrine of grace assumes both the utter futility of human efforts at salvation, understood in Roman Catholicism as a reward for good and hard work, and the complete externality of salvation itself. For Badiou this is the truth event, for Zˇizˇek it is Lenin’s actual freedom, the revolutionary uncoupling that is completely untimely. On the way to this position, Zˇizˇek follows with enthusiasm the byways and deadends of love as ethics and human agency, but he arrives at the doctrine of grace nonetheless. However, in order to locate that materialist idea of grace, he had had to pass from Lacan to Lenin, via Paul. In other words, one of the most intriguing elements in Zˇizˇek’s development, particularly in light of his position as a preeminent Lacanian cultural critic and philosopher, is that, to make this Protestant turn, he must in the end step beyond psychoanalysis. Only then can he become a fully engaged political thinker, that is, a Leninist. Finally, after much hesitation, Zˇizˇek faces the reality of this break with Lacan. He does not do so by raising the question of the end of psychoanalysis. For psychoanalysis: the treatment is over when the patient accepts the nonexistence of the big Other. The ideal addressee of our speech, the ideal listener, is the psychoanalyst, the very opposite of the Master-figure that guarantees meaning; what happens at the end of analysis,

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with the dissolution of transference—that is to say, the fall of the ‘‘subject supposed to know’’—is that the patient accepts the absence of such a guarantee. No wonder psychoanalysis subverts the very principle of reimbursement: the price the patient pays for the treatment is, by definition, capricious, ‘‘unjust,’’ with no possible equivalence between it and the services rendered for it.66 Contrary to what we might expect in light of the range of Zˇizˇek’s work, the end of analysis is not the moment of the Christian breakthrough. Rather, the whole logic is different: ‘‘Is not Christianity here, then, the very opposite of psychoanalysis? Does it not stand for this logic of reimbursement brought to its extreme: God Himself pays the price for all our sins?’’67 This is an extraordinary admission. Christianity simply does not follow the logic of psychoanalysis; it breaks all the rules and thereby enables the breakthrough Zˇizˇek has sought across four books. Apparently, even though Lacanian psychoanalysis is the best way of accounting for our situation within late capitalism, it cannot provide the means for stepping beyond capitalism.

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Radical Theology and the Event Paul with Deleuze

Clayton Crockett

The contemporary theoretical engagement with Paul has been touched off largely by Alain Badiou’s book St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Badiou reads Paul as a ‘‘poet-thinker of the event,’’ as well as a militant figure in his uncompromising fidelity to the event.1 Badiou reads Paul as an atheist; that is, Badiou discounts the truth of Paul’s event, which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.2 Badiou desires to capture the militant fidelity of Paul’s example for contemporary politics, although he brackets the particular truth of Paul’s revelation. In the United States, this encounter has largely been an encounter between Continental philosophy and historical New Testament scholarship.3 Into this exchange, I want to insert theology as a ‘‘vanishing mediator.’’ Slavoj Zˇizˇek, who has done much to bring the significance of Badiou’s work to an English-speaking public, borrows the term ‘‘vanishing mediator’’ from Fredric Jameson in order to relate German idealism, particularly Schelling, to Lacanian psychoanalysis in The Indivisible Remainder.4 A vanishing mediator is a third that brings together two alternatives or oppositions, but in doing so it hides itself in such a way that it seems to vanish, leaving most readers stuck within an alternative or oppositional logic. Ironically, theology becomes a vanishing mediator in contemporary discussions of Paul that oppose interpretivephilosophical and historical-exegetical strategies. Theology, however, is not simple or self-identical in its nature. Rather, it is divided at its origin into a traditional theology and a radical theology. This division is structurally similar to Derrida’s distinction between two essential sources of religion, ‘‘the experience of belief,’’ and ‘‘the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or of holiness,’’ in his essay ‘‘Faith and Knowledge.’’5 Traditional or orthodox theology is more concerned with restoring Paul to his originary stature as the primary apostle and theologian of the resurrection event and reclaiming

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or reestablishing fidelity to the truth of this event, however that is interpreted or understood, literally or metaphorically. Radical theology, by contrast, is willing to follow Badiou, setting the ‘‘event’’ free from the resurrection and reading Paul from the perspective of the death of God. Radical theology is here the shadow of the more properly atheistic philosophy of Badiou and Zˇizˇek, but it retains the form of theology as a discourse in its willingness to think philosophical formulations in terms of their ultimacy and to interrogate their meaning and value. According to Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Pierre Klossowski in an appendix to The Logic of Sense: it is our epoch that has discovered theology. One no longer had to believe in God. We seek rather the ‘‘structure,’’ that is, the form which may be filled with beliefs, but the structure has no need to be filled in order to be called ‘‘theological.’’ Theology is now the science of nonexisting entities, the manner in which these entities—divine or anti-divine, Christ or Antichrist—animate language and make for it this glorious body which is divided into disjunctions.6 After Deleuze, after the death of God, theology is no longer restricted to apologetics in the service of dogmatics. This traditional image of theology persists throughout the twentieth century and is what is essentially at stake in the contemporary debates between phenomenology and theology.7 However, it is not necessarily the only form of theology.8 In this chapter, I will reflect from the viewpoint of radical theology about the event of Paul’s thought as it affects contemporary theory, which is ultimately a thinking of the event. This reflection implicitly puts pressure on Badiou’s Platonic reading concerning the possibility of an event that coheres into an ontology, as well as Zˇizˇek’s dialectical and Hegelian reading of the event as an incredible contradictory tension, in relation to a Deleuzian becoming of the event. That is, I do not directly engage Zˇizˇek and Badiou, but their interpretations of the event provide a context for my reading of Deleuze. In order to investigate the temporality of the event, I will demonstrate that, despite superficial appearances, there is a resemblance between Heidegger’s temporality, which in its early version is inspired by Paul, and Deleuze’s exposition of the syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition. The temporality of repetition in Difference and Repetition rebounds in The Logic of Sense into a thinking of the event. These Deleuzian theses all pertain to what I claim is ultimately a theological question, that is, ‘‘What is an event?’’ By naming Deleuze as the contemporary thinker of the event, I am associating Deleuze with Paul, despite Deleuze’s declared opposition to Paul, following Nietzsche. Although Deleuze follows Nietzsche too closely in his antipathy toward Paul on the topic of judgment, by following the thread of the event we can assemble a Paul effect for Deleuze. This project also involves folding Deleuze’s other saint, Spinoza, back toward Paul.

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Paul’s Time Paul is the original Christian theologian, the closest interpretive account we can get of the event of Christ. Nietzsche calls Paul the first Christian, and this is a derogatory charge, implying that Paul mistakes or distorts the essence of Jesus’ quietist asceticism and creates a persecution machine, a priestly form of religion that encapsulates Platonism for the masses, whose main function is to root out and destroy profound and powerful desires.9 A century later, Jacob Taubes makes the same claim, but without the negative connotations. ‘‘My thesis implies,’’ Taubes writes, ‘‘that Christianity has its origin not properly in Jesus but in Paul.’’10 In fact, Taubes argues that Paul reduces Jesus’ dual commandment to love God and to love the neighbor, condensing it into one commandment, to love one’s neighbor: ‘‘No dual commandment, but rather one commandment. I regard this as an absolutely revolutionary act.’’11 This is Paul as precursor to Levinas. I will not reconstruct Paul’s understanding of time in a historical sense, but rather show how a certain interpretation of Paul provides the impetus for an altered approach to temporality that marks twentieth-century philosophy. Heidegger’s thought of being is indebted to his study of Aristotle in the 1920s, but his understanding of temporality can be traced to his phenomenological studies of early Christianity. In The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger grapples with Paul in his attempt to develop a phenomenological method that is adequate to lived experience. Heidegger develops his notion of formal indication early in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, out of an encounter with early Christianity. The formal indication is a more subtle, supple, and concrete way of thinking historical relationship and continuity than the general notions on which philosophy usually relies. It communicates, above all, a situation, or what is decisive in ‘‘factical life experience itself.’’12 Furthermore, this situation is paradigmatically related to Paul’s existential situation, that is, Paul’s historical enactment of proclamation. Heidegger, like Badiou, brackets the specific content of the object of proclamation (Jesus as Messiah), but he stresses that ‘‘Christian religiosity lives temporality as such.’’ This is a formalization, but not an abstract, empty formalization, because what is essential about Pauline early Christian experience is its distinctive relationship with historical existence. Heidegger writes: ‘‘Christian factical life experience is historically determined by its emergence with the proclamation that hits the people in a moment, and this is unceasingly also alive in the enactment of life.’’13 The temporal structure of proclamation, in the concrete situation in which Paul proclaims it, provides Heidegger with a key—a formal indication—to the nature of temporality itself: ‘‘Christian religiosity lives temporality as such.’’14 This primordial insight into temporality that Heidegger finds in Paul lies at the heart of the fuller expression of temporality as historical existence in Being and Time. Heidegger opposes his phenomenological and existential description of time to a linear conception

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of time understood as a progressive sequence of moments or now points. In Being and Time, Heidegger produces an existential analytic of the experience of being in the world on the part of the being that can ask the question of being, or Dasein. Being is understood in terms of care, or concerned existence, and Dasein is concerned about its existence because it exists temporally. Attention to concerned existence uncovers a more authentic understanding of time and prescribes a more authentic existential being in the world. In Being and Time, then, an authentic experience of time replaces the specifically Christian and Pauline notion of proclamation of the event. Heidegger explains the co-implication of past, present and future as follows: ‘‘Only in so far as Dasein is as an ‘I-am-as-having-been,’ can Dasein come towards itself futurally in such a way that it comes back. As authentically futural, Dasein, is authentically as ‘having been.’ ’’15 According to Heidegger, the essence of being is time. Time is not linear, however; it is projected toward the future as it faces and grasps the past in the present moment. Dasein experiences being historically, as temporality. This temporality is lived historically because it is only in terms of its relation to its past that Dasein extends into the future. The present is an effect of this attempt to take account of existence as Dasein undergoes the experience of being thrown into the world. Future, past, and present are folded together into the existence of the human being in a complicated way that is actualized in existence as a repetition. Because Dasein is oriented toward the past, it experiences temporality as a kind of repetition into the future. In some ways, chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition can be read as a commentary on this sentence of Heidegger in Being and Time, in which Deleuze attempts to radicalize Heidegger even further in the direction of difference and the direction of the future. In his later work, Heidegger attempts to retain the force of this insight into temporality while abandoning the subjective and humanistic connotations of thinking being from the standpoint of Dasein, and in particular Heidegger abandons any attempt to grasp temporality existentially and turns toward an understanding of how the event (Ereignis) of being in its temporal occurring appropriates us within it. Although Deleuze is more explicitly influenced by Bergson, a careful reading of Difference and Repetition shows that Heidegger’s thought is present, most explicitly in the ‘‘Note on Heidegger’s Philosophy of Difference’’ appended onto the end of chapter 1. Deleuze explains that difference in Heidegger does not primarily concern negation: ‘‘the not expresses not the negative but the difference between Being and being,’’ which is ontological difference. Furthermore, ‘‘this difference is not ‘between’ in the ordinary sense of the word. It is the Fold, Zwiefalt. It is constitutive of Being and of the manner in which Being constitutes being, in the double movement of ‘clearing’ and ‘veiling.’ ’’16 Deleuze develops a more elaborate thinking of the Fold in a metaphysical sense in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, but already in Difference and Repetition the three syntheses of time in chapter 2, ‘‘Repetition for Itself,’’ take the form of a fold or a folding. Just as Heidegger

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elaborates an ontological thinking of time in opposition to modern conceptions of subjectivity in Being and Time, in Difference and Repetition Deleuze enacts an ecstatic temporality in a threefold process dislocated from any substantial subjectivity. An event takes place; it occurs in and as time. Deleuze does not use the language of event in Difference and Repetition, but in many ways his thought in that book concerns the same topic as The Logic of Sense, which explicitly grapples with the logic of the event. Therefore, in Difference and Repetition the authentic repetition of difference should be understood as constituting an event. There Deleuze constructs a notion of repetition that is based upon difference rather than identity. Repetition occurs temporally, by means of three syntheses of time, divided into past, present, and future. Temporal synthesis or repetition constructs the subject, rather than a self-identical subject undergoing or performing a repetition. The self is constructed by temporal syntheses, in the same way that for Heidegger Dasein is temporal existence. The difference is that, for Heidegger, Dasein is essentially historical and oriented toward the past, whereas for Deleuze repetition based upon difference is ultimately futural. The first form of repetition takes place under the sign of the present, and Deleuze calls it a passive synthesis. The passive synthesis of imagination from Hume to Bergson constitutes the most basic form of experience, which is habit. A habit is a contraction that draws difference from repetition, and ‘‘these thousands of habits of which we are composed . . . thus form the basic domain of passive syntheses.’’ Finally, ‘‘the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self,’’ but it is a multiple and ‘‘dissolved self.’’17 The first synthesis of time ‘‘constitutes time as a present, but a present which passes.’’18 The first synthesis can take place only within the framework of a second synthesis, that of memory. Memory is an active synthesis; it constitutes time ‘‘as the embedding of presents themselves.’’ Deleuze appeals to Bergson’s Matter and Memory, as well as Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past, in order to explain how time as memory forms a representation that grounds the time of the first synthesis. Memory is an active synthesis because it provides context and continuity for experiences, as well as an orientation. At the same time, this orientation is always toward the past, because the second form of time synthesizes what has passed. The pure past in itself is reconstructed or resurrected out of contemporary experience in order to envelop it: ‘‘the present exists, but the past alone insists and provides the element in which the present passes and successive elements are telescoped.’’19 Now the problem becomes the difference between the active and passive syntheses, which leads to the third synthesis of time, described as futural. Deleuze introduces the third form of time by way of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, which takes ‘‘the form of a transcendental Difference between the Determination as such and what it determines.’’20 Kant determines existence by means of the ‘‘I think,’’ which takes place as a determination

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of time. Kant thereby uncovers ‘‘a paradox of inner sense,’’ because the temporal determination that determines identity also undermines it, dividing it in two. The Kantian self is split between the active transcendental apperception that performs the syntheses of knowledge and the empirical ego that appears under the transcendental conditions of representation. According to Deleuze, Kant incorporates time into the subject, and this fractures the subject: ‘‘It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other; fractured by the pure and empty form of time.’’21 This pure and empty form of time is the third form of time, and it both conjoins and disjoins the previous two. This pure and empty form of time means that ‘‘time itself unfolds (that is, apparently ceases to be a circle) instead of things unfolding in it (following the overly simple circular figure).’’22 Time ceases to take the form of a circle and unravels or unfolds. Time takes the form of a caesura, and this development both fractures the I and signals the death of God. ‘‘If the greatest initiative of transcendental philosophy was to introduce the form of time into thought as such,’’ Deleuze writes, ‘‘this pure and empty form in turn signifies indissolubly the death of God, the fractured I and the passive self.’’23 Furthermore, Deleuze asserts that it is Ho¨lderlin who draws out the consequences of Kantian thought here and is the true successor to Kant: ‘‘it is Ho¨lderlin, who discovers the emptiness of pure time and, in this emptiness, simultaneously the continued diversion of the divine, the prolonged fracture of the I and the constitutive passive of the self.’’24 Ho¨lderlin, of course, is for Heidegger the poetthinker par excellence, and I contend that this discussion of time in Difference and Repetition can be read as broadly Heideggerian. Repetition is the production of something new, rather than the repetition of something previously existing, and it is the third synthesis, the pure form of time, that indicates this aspect of repetition. The third repetition is ‘‘the repetition of the future as eternal return.’’25 By associating Nietzsche’s thinking of the eternal return with the pure and empty form of time, Deleuze provides an alternative reading of Nietzsche, based upon his earlier book Nietzsche and Philosophy. There he argues that the eternal return is not circular or substantial, because only what is different returns, or what returns is always different. The third synthesis is the ‘‘final synthesis of time,’’ in which ‘‘the present and past are in turn no more than dimensions of the future.’’26 The three forms of time are modes of repetition, but Deleuze arranges all of them under the sign of the future. Repetition is essentially futural, rather than recollective or passively constitutive. Deleuze mentions Kierkegaard and Charles Pe´guy as important thinkers of repetition, but he criticizes them ‘‘because they were not ready to pay the necessary price. They entrusted this supreme repetition, repetition as a category of the future, to faith.’’27 Faith is problematic because it restores or resurrects God and the self beyond all authentic repetition. Faith is inescapable at the level of belief, but when it becomes hypostasized as a vague but determined future, it takes on a comic aspect. In reference to Kierkegaard and Pe´guy, Deleuze claims

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that ‘‘there is an adventure of faith, according to which one is the clown of one’s own faith, the comedian of one’s ideal.’’28 By contrast, Deleuze names the pure form of time death. Death is the disjunction of life, a fracture or split within the living being that cannot be reduced to negation or limitation. Paul’s proclamation is a work against death, but death (the death of Christ) is what makes Paul’s proclamation possible, makes it an event. Death is the death of identity, in the process of eternal recurrence. This death is what splits time open into past (active synthesis, memory) and present (that which passes, passive synthesis, habit), and it is what gives a future, Deleuze proclaims, following Nietzsche, Paul’s antipode. Resurrection is not resurrection of any prior identity; it does not preserve the substance of self, Christ, or God. To have faith is to roll the dice, not to have the certainty of true belief. Living is being toward death, but death is not simply the terminus or telos of life; it is that which makes living possible, that from which life proceeds. Identity is an effect of difference. Differences are primary and constitute identities, which are not identical, but similar. At a second level, differences differentiate, that is, ‘‘they relate the first-degree differences to one another.’’29 Deleuze explains this process in relation to Heidegger: In accordance with Heidegger’s ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differentiator, a Sichunterscheidende, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition.30 The differentiation of differences is accomplished by an internal self-relation, but it is not a relation of identity. Differences relate according to a temporal process of differentiation, which Deleuze describes as a dark precursor. The dark precursor is ‘‘a force which ensures communication,’’ because although ‘‘thunderbolts explode between their different intensities . . . they are preceded in their path by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated.’’31 The dark precursor names the productive aspect of the empty form of time. The thunderbolt is the event, but it is presaged by the dark precursor, which Deleuze in The Logic of Sense calls the void. The dark precursor generates sense. The dark precursor is the Heideggerian Not, das Nicht, or, as Deleuze suggests earlier in chapter 1, the Zweifalt that relates Being and being. At the same time, Deleuze says that Heidegger does not go far enough in his attempt to think ‘‘original difference’’ because Heidegger cannot conceive being as ‘‘truly disengaged from any subordination in relation to the identity of representation.’’32 Deleuze radicalizes Heidegger’s philosophy of difference, and he does so primarily through his reading of Nietzsche’s

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eternal return against Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche as the last metaphysician. Nietzsche provides an interpretation of the third form of time that is productive because repetition is solely and completely related to difference. I am suggesting that a careful reading of Difference and Repetition reveals Heideggerian themes, most importantly in Deleuze’s discussion of time. That is, the temporality that mediates difference and repetition is inspired to a great extent by Heidegger’s meditations on time from Being and Time onward, even though Deleuze prefers to cite authors such as Bergson and Nietzsche in order to push beyond Heidegger. Furthermore, Heidegger’s intuition of a new thinking of temporality is generated out of an engagement with early Christianity, in particular, Paul. Heidegger’s insight into Pauline temporality seems eventually to pass into Deleuze’s thought, even if this is a somewhat speculative genealogy. Deleuze’s time is not directly Pauline, and it is also importantly Freudian and Nietzschean. Yet I am tracing an implicit connection that becomes more evident in relation to The Logic of Sense.

A Theo-Logic of the Event According to Deleuze, an event is an affair of language, a production of sense, rather than simply the interaction of bodies. The event is already associated with sense, that is, with meaning or signification. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze uses Lewis Carroll’s work to articulate two series: one of sense, language, and surface; and one of bodies, of affect and depth. In a proper sense, the event is associated with sense according to the former series. Deleuze says, ‘‘we will not ask therefore what is the sense of the event: the event is sense itself.’’33 An event concerns the passage from body to language, but it is a surface effect, taking place across a surface. ‘‘It is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the incorporeal.’’34 Events take place along an edge and spread like crystals. Sense is generated by the becoming of the event as it spreads across a body. Between these two series runs a cut. In addition to Lewis Carroll’s writings, Deleuze privileges the Stoics in The Logic of Sense. He quotes E´mile Bre´hier, who says that the Stoics distinguished two planes of being, corporeal and incorporeal being. Bre´hier writes, ‘‘when the scalpel cuts through the flesh, the first body produces upon the second not a new property but a new attribute, that of being cut.’’35 The attribute is an incorporeal quality that determines the corporeal being differently. The cut, or the distinction between body and attribute, explains the difference between body and sense. Sense concerns the attribution or orientation of corporeal being, which is a superficial determination that creates and communicates meaning. The cut is an example: that is, the difference between body and sense is not necessarily or literally a cut, but it is an invisible and imperceptible distinction.

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Yet Deleuze later associates the wound with a pure event. He ponders, ‘‘Why is every event a kind of plague, war, wound or death?’’36 I think that the wound of thinking an event constitutes must be related to death as the name for the pure and empty form of time that is the third synthesis in Difference and Repetition. The reason event is a more significant term than sense in The Logic of Sense is because, even though Deleuze associates event completely with sense, an event has the uncanny ability to connect up with a body, to pass from the corporeal to the incorporeal plane by means of spreading along an edge. And this passage directly concerns the third form of time, because the event in its relation to the pure and empty form of time generates sense and meaning on the surface plane of language. In a sense, the event is the dark precursor of sense, even though it can only be described in terms of sense. Sense is generated out of nothing, a void, or nonsense. Nothingness is not substantial or nihilistic, because it is directly productive. According to Deleuze, ‘‘nonsense functions as the zero-point of thought, the aleatory point of desexualized energy or the punctual Instinct of death,’’ and the termination of sense in nonsense explains why sense is essentially paradoxical.37 The paradox of the absurd at the limit of sense concerns an ‘‘extrabeing’’ added to signification that relates it to being.38 The becoming of this extra-being is an event that produces sense.

 So what sense do we make of Paul? Not Paul in his time, but Paul’s significance for us, now? Philosophically, Paul is important because he is the first philosopher of the Christ event. At least, he is the first theologian, that is, thinker or theorist of the event. Paul’s letters take place along the surface of language and concern the production of sense: namely, the production of the sense of Christianity. Paul’s interpretation of Christ is not simply a second-order reflection, but according to a Deleuzian logic it is already inherently an event. We cannot get behind sense or the surface play of language in order to descend into the depths of pure body. Jesus as Christ is pure body as incarnate being, and the passion of Jesus is the passion of body as body. The event of Jesus’ passion does not make sense, and attempts to represent the sense of the passion directly produce grotesque and tragicomic effects, as the movie The Passion of the Christ shows. When we shift from Jesus to Paul, we see a concomitant search for the historical Paul, an effort to retrieve the radical Paul from the clutches of orthodoxy, patriarchy, or worse.39 Paul now represents the sense of the passion of Christ, which cannot be located in Jesus. This is why Paul’s thought is an event. We cannot pass through Paul to get to Jesus; we can only access Jesus in terms of his significance through Paul. Now, the question for Paul, and this determines the sense of Christianity as a whole, is: How many events are there? One or two? Are crucifixion and resurrection one event or two distinct but sequentially related events? We can think of this situation in at least

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three different ways, if we consider Paul’s situation from the perspective of Deleuze. First, we could take the traditional view that they are one event, that is, two aspects of the same process. In this case, resurrection is an incredible reversal of crucifixion. One dies, is put to death as a criminal by the empire, and this is natural and normal. But what is stunning is the claim that this person is raised from the dead, even though this claim is not unique in the context of the ancient world. Two distinct moments of one event occur on the same plane of (supra) history and form the core of a salvation narrative that is then generalized or extended to all humans and all of history. The problem with this scenario, as its implications unfold over time, is the time inserted between the crucifixion and the resurrection, which takes the form of a pure Sabbath, a dead Saturday. To take the second view, this pure and empty form of time, in the Deleuzian sense, at the heart of the Christ event dislocates the reverse repetition of the resurrection and renders it inoperable. In a more Derridean sense, diffe´rance lies at the center of Christianity, and the temporalization of the passion means that resurrection is already delayed, deferred, and so on by the fact that the passion takes time and takes place.40 Once the resurrection is cut off from the crucifixion, the crucifixion takes the form of historical reality, and the resurrection is relegated to the realm of the fantastic imaginary. This interpretive process occurs during modernity, which is encapsulated synecdochally by higher biblical criticism, with its liberal and psychological conclusions about Christianity and religion in general. How, asks David Friedrich Strauss and many others, could this one man by raised from the dead and no others? What psychological effect must he have had upon his disciples in order for them to refuse to accept his death? Or else, what moment of mass psychosis must have struck to compel his followers, already stricken with grief, to convince them that their master has returned? One of the difficulties with this psychological reading, however, is its extension to Paul, whose dramatic experience comes much later and takes a very different form. I want to suggest that the traditional reading is incredible, despite its appeal to many contemporary readers. We cannot pass back into the immediate situation of Paul, unmediated by two thousand years of history and thought. We cannot sustain the same belief in a literal resurrection, however we modify its nature and significance to make sense according to our liberal and postliberal sensibilities. At the same time, however, the second reading is not Deleuzian enough. The pure and empty form of time that lies between the crucifixion and the resurrection does not concern chronos, a chronological order, but is a drop of time in its pure sense, what Deleuze in his Cinema books calls a time-image.41 The time-image is a cut that relates crucifixion and resurrection not in the manner of a before and an after, but in terms of the duality of The Logic of Sense. Deleuze argues that the event should not be ‘‘confused with its spatio-temporal realization in a state of affairs.’’42 Rather, in a third view, the crucifixion concerns the body, the pure body and its absolute passion and its depths, while the resurrection is an event of sense because it refers to the signification of Christ’s body, its transfiguration along a surface. This is

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a paradox, but Deleuze has shown how the logic of sense is paradoxical, because it is multidirectional: ‘‘good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction; but paradox is the affirmation of both senses or directions at the same time.’’43 Furthermore, the history of Christianity is nothing if not a series of paradoxes, and thus it could be said to demonstrate a logic of sense. But in what specific way is the Christ event a paradox? That is, how can death signify life? Recall that every event bears ‘‘a kind of plague, war, wound or death.’’44 Death is the kernel of every event, the death or passion of bodies in their becomings. According to Deleuze, willing the event is not resignation to the wounding of body, but ‘‘willing the event is, primarily, to release its eternal truth,’’ which means that ultimately ‘‘this will would reach the point at which war is waged against war, the wound would be the living trace and the scar of all wounds, and death turned on itself would be willed against all deaths.’’45 Deleuze appeals to Nietzsche’s formulation of Amor fati, to will and love what happens, which means not resignation to fate but a transvaluation of it. ‘‘We are faced with a volitional intuition and a transmutation,’’ Deleuze writes. This transmutation involves affirming the event in a particular way, to provide it a particular direction or orientation, and this is the production of sense. Willing the event involves ‘‘a change of will,’’ which is ‘‘a sort of leaping in place [saut sur place] of the whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will.’’46 The spiritual will ‘‘wills now not exactly what occurs, but something in that which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous conformity: the Event.’’47 We can read this striking passage from The Logic of Sense as a commentary on the Christ event, and thereby read Deleuze as a contemporary St. Paul. The passage from body as body that is expressed in the crucifixion to the sense or significance of the resurrection is the transmutation and the event. The proclamation of the resurrection is the result of an enormous spiritual will that transvalues the grotesque torture and death of a Jesus-body, hanging from a cross, to the good news that Christ is alive. The event makes sense in this paradoxical way. The resurrection is not a separate event, and it does not occur in ‘‘reality,’’ but it is the sense of the Christ event. The term event is crucial here, and in some ways it exceeds sense, because it overhangs sense and reaches down to the passion of bodies, in order to incorporate the wound and/or death into sense. At the same time, the event is never detached from signification. Using religious language, Deleuze calls the transmutation of what happens into an event an ‘‘immaculate conception’’: ‘‘the event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed. It signals and awaits us.’’48 Using Deleuze’s logic of sense, which is more profoundly a logic of the event, we can read the significance of the Christ event in contemporary theoretical terms. The event occurs along the cut between the crucifixion and the resurrection that ‘‘forms’’ the pure and empty form of time. Furthermore, this reading is the result of a truly radical theology that is willing to take responsibility for the event and to risk the generation of sense, rather than accepting it readymade based upon previous events of thinking. 220

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In this way, we can also consider Paul to be a ‘‘saint’’ for Deleuze, because he expresses the sense of the Christ event. Deleuze can be said to have three saints: Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, although he also terms Spinoza the Christ of the philosophers.49 Following Edith Wyschogrod’s lead in Saints and Postmodernism, we can read Paul as a postmodern saint, in this case a Deleuzian saint, even if we have to read against the grain of Deleuze’s intentions regarding him.50 This reading would roll Paul’s thinking of the event forward into Spinoza’s ontological substance, and fold Spinoza’s substance (Deus sive natura) back into Paul’s proclamation of the essential temporality of the event. Of course, Deleuze does not consider Paul a saint. Indeed, he closely follows Nietzsche in his antipathy toward Paul, most explicitly in his essay ‘‘Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos.’’ In this essay Deleuze accuses Paul of ‘‘inventing a new type of priest even more terrible than its predecessors,’’ because Paul relies on the doctrine of immortality to intensify guilt and sin in order to create ‘‘the doctrine of judgment.’’51 Deleuze opposes Paul to Nietzsche around Nietzsche’s reading of Jesus as a Dostoyevskian idiot, a simple and innocent being who inadvertently lends himself to the creation of the most terrible persecution machine the world has ever seen. Paul would be the inventor of this machine, and Paul’s opposition to the Roman Empire, combined with the image of the Apocalypse, the imminent return of Christ whose return is indefinitely deferred, ‘‘invents a completely new image of power: the system of Judgment.’’52 The Last Judgment is a program created to enslave the world in its image of vengeful power, to get back at the powers that be for their power, and it is the result of an enormous ressentiment. Nietzsche’s interpretation of Christianity is a powerful critique. I would not argue that it is wrong. Certainly Christianity has all of these elements, and it is and has been a brutal persecution machine, even if that aspect does not exhaust it. I am suggesting, however, that Deleuze follows Nietzsche too faithfully in his interpretation of ‘‘the black Saint Paul.’’53 Contemporary historical and biblical scholarship has emphasized the radicality of Paul, and his revolutionary significance, which precedes the establishment of a Christian orthodoxy. The line, if there is one, between revolutionary and reactionary does not lie between Jesus and Paul, but falls after them. In addition, as Jacob Taubes suggests, we can better see Nietzsche as a rival to Paul in his attempt to offer European thought a new system of values, and this viewpoint corrects Deleuze’s oppositional reading. Taubes says: Who has determined the values of the Occident, in Nietzsche’s own sense, more deeply then Paul? So he must be an important man. Because what did Nietzsche want? The transvaluation of values. Well, so there we have someone who pulled it off! And on this point, Nietzsche is very envious too. So he has to say: this guy pulled it off because the poison of resentment holds sway within him.54 Taubes argues that there is an incredible proximity between Nietzsche and Paul, because both were engaged in a similar struggle. Taubes also claims that Nietzsche interprets his 221

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experience of the eternal return as a great ecstatic experience in light of Paul’s Damascus experience. The eternal return is ‘‘the metaphysical key to understanding everything . . . just as the Damascus experience is the metaphysical key for Paul.’’55 Nietzsche makes a strategic choice for atheism, and Deleuze follows his lead, because he humanely opposes ‘‘the cruelty of the pang of conscience’’ and the fact that ‘‘Christianity hypostasizes sacrifice rather than abolishing it, and thus perpetuates it.’’56 We may or may not make the same choice, or we may not know exactly what it means to choose for theism or for atheism, Christ or Antichrist.57 At the same time, we can read Paul in a way that avoids a forced choice and appreciates his profound importance because he generates the sense of what becomes Christianity in terms of the event. Radical theology attends to the sense of the event, without being caught within the ‘‘either-or’’ alternative expressed by the opposition Paul versus Nietzsche, whose contemporary form is expressed as Christianity or nihilism: tertium non datur.58 Deleuze supplies a more supple, more paradoxical, and at its limits even a more theological thinking in The Logic of Sense and other books.

Conclusion: Our Political Situation We have no simple positive alternative with which to oppose our contemporary capitalist Empire. Historical understanding of early Christianity provides resources for contemporary radical political thought, because it sharpens the opposition between Christ’s kingdom and the Roman Empire that crucified him. The problem is that the Christ event has largely run its course. Its sense has oriented Western and world history for two millennia, but we cannot simply cling to it nostalgically. To proclaim an old-fashioned, worn-out event in a desperate attempt to short-circuit global capitalism is what Deleuze would call a bad repetition, because it is based upon a presumed identity. We are in search of a new event to proclaim; we are fumbling around, trying to make sense of an event to come. This event may or may not occur in the future. It is not simply a question of what will happen, but a futural possibility in the present, which is also the possibility of having a future. So long as we preserve this openness to the future, we have the possibility of an event. This approach is a Derridean variation upon Heidegger’s Gelassenheit. Gelassenheit means letting go or letting be, and one option is to stop grasping or trying, to let go and await the event, which may or may not come. According to Derrida, the event is ‘‘unconditioned’’ and ‘‘unforeseeable,’’ and therefore always ‘‘tocome.’’59 According to Heidegger, ‘‘Only a god can save us,’’ which means that we cannot save ourselves. The best we can do is adopt an appropriately faithful attitude toward being. Even though Badiou attempts to formalize being in quasi-mathematical terms, he ends up close to Heidegger and Derrida in some ways, because he spells out the conditions for the possibility of an event based upon his understanding of being, and then prescribes a militant fidelity to the revolutionary event when and if it occurs.60

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What if an event does not occur? Are we completely passive in relation to its existence? The choices seem to be to proclaim an ancient and possibly irrelevant event, prophesy the hope for a future event, or, finally, the nihilistic option of proclaiming the nothing. These alternatives presume that we no longer have faith in History, or the inevitable progress of humanity and life. Hegelian and Marxist teleologies seem incredible or impossible. If the Deleuzian alternative is credible, then we are forced back upon sense and body. As Spinoza famously remarked, we still do not know what a body can do. According to Deleuze in Cinema 2, the current situation involves a crisis of belief in the world: ‘‘whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world.’’61 The fabric that ties sense to body has become frayed and torn, and it needs to be reconstituted. The challenge is to stitch sense to body in order to create a new ethics that is anticapitalist, in the wake of a theo-political critique. The link between sense and body is an event; even though the event takes place from the side of sense, it reaches body in order to transfigure and express it. Paul functions as an example, an exemplary figure and an inspiration, but at the same time he is merely an example and not a model to be repeated. America is not ancient Rome. For us, this is both better and worse. Who has the vision to proclaim the event that is occurring at this moment, in its horrific brutality and its awesome opening to the infinite? My contention is that Deleuze provides the most theoretical resources to think the event, and therefore is a contemporary successor to Paul.

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You Are Not Your Own On the Nature of Faith

Simon Critchley

Reformation Saint Paul is trouble. It is simply a fact about the history of Christian dogma that the return to Paul is usually very bad news for the established church. As Adolph Von Harnack pointed out more than a century ago, ‘‘One might write the history of dogma as the history of the Pauline reactions in the Church, and in doing so would touch on all the turning points of the history.’’1 This is true of Marcion’s opposition to the Apostolic Fathers, Augustine after the Church Fathers, through to Luther after the Scholastics and Jansenism after the Council of Trent. Harnack continues, ‘‘Everywhere it has been Paul . . . who produced the Reformation.’’2 So the spirit of Paul is the movement of reformation. It is the attempt to clear away the corruption, secularism, and intellectual sophistry of the established church and to return to the religious core of Christianity, which is tightly bound up with its oldest extant documents, Paul’s Epistles. The Pauline motivation for religious reformation is also true of Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Rudolf Bultmann. Perverse as it might sound, I think it is equally true of Nietzsche, even and perhaps especially when he dresses himself in the tragi-comic garb of the Anti-Christ. Giorgio Agamben rightly sees Nietzsche’s adoption of the figure of the Anti-Christ from Second Thessalonians as a kind of parody of Pauline Messianism.3 Nietzsche’s call for a revaluation of values is based on a sheer jealousy of Paul: if anyone brought about a revaluation of values, then it was Paul. But also, Nietzsche’s revelation of the intuition into Eternal Return, ‘‘6000 feet above man and time,’’ is a kind of mimicry of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus. As Jacob Taubes writes, ‘‘Paul haunts Nietzsche all the way to the deepest intimacies.’’4

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To begin to turn toward my angle of entry into Paul, what goes for Nietzsche also goes for Heidegger’s passionate interest in Urchristentum, primal or primordial Christianity, in his lectures on Paul’s Epistles in the crisis years that followed the First World War. I will try to show below how the basic intuition of Heidegger’s reformation of thinking is deeply Pauline. The very gesture of attempting to recover a primordial Christianity is the desire for a repetition of the Pauline moment. We must slough off the sediment of tradition, what Heidegger called in his famous 1919 letter to his priest, Father Engelbert Krebs, ‘‘The system of Catholicism,’’ and reactivate the tradition’s sources in the name of an originary experience.5 The return to Paul is the attempt, in Heidegger’s word, at the destruction (Destruktion) or dismantling of a deadening tradition in the name of a proclamation of life. As Wayne Meeks points out, Paul is both ‘‘the most holy apostle’’ and ‘‘the apostle of the heretics.’’6 Since the time of his quarrel with Peter and the Jewish Christians, Paul has been the zealot foe of tradition’s authority and the opponent of any and all forms of authoritarianism. Paul is the proper name of a ferment in the history of Christianity, a ferment that places even the specificity of Christianity in question. For example, what the books by Daniel Boyarin, Taubes and Agamben share is a desire to show that Paul is much better understood as a radical Jew. As Boyarin notes, ‘‘Paul lived and died convinced he was a Jew living out Judaism.’’7 Taubes goes even further, claiming that ‘‘Paul is a fanatic, a Jewish zealot’’ and ‘‘more Jewish than any reform rabbi.’’8 Agamben’s governing hypothesis is to restore Paul’s epistles to their rightful place within the tradition of Jewish Messianism, a tradition reactivated through Scholem and Benjamin.9 If Paul’s essence consists in anything, then it is surely constituted by activism. This spells trouble for any and every church that sees itself as founded, funded, and well defended. What usually happens when Paul is invoked is that the established church is declared to be the Whore of Babylon and its hierarchy the Anti-Christ. The fact that there is so much interest in Paul at present shouldn’t therefore be seen as a conservative gesture or some sort of return to traditional religion. On the contrary, the return to Paul is the demand for reformation. It is the demand for a new figure of activism, or what Alain Badiou calls a new militancy for the universal in an age defined by moral relativism, a communitarian politics of identity and global capitalism.10 What is being glimpsed and groped toward in the return to Paul is a vision of faith and existential commitment that might begin to face and face down the demotivated slackening of existence under conditions of liberal democracy. The return to Paul is motivated by political disappointment.11

Troth Plighting: Faith as Proclamation In this essay, I am concerned with the nature of faith. I would like to address this issue directly by using Paul and some of his recent philosophical interlocutors as my guides.

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What kind of thing is faith and—more particularly—can someone who is nominally or denominationally faithless, such as myself, still have an experience of faith? Can one speak of a faith of the faithless? The idea I want to propose here and then develop more carefully through a reading of Heidegger is faith as a declarative act, as an enactment, a performative that proclaims. To this extent, I want to tie the idea of the gospel and evangelical good tidings (to euaggelion) to the verbal sense of ‘‘to proclaim’’ or ‘‘to announce’’ (euaggelizomai). Faith is an announcement that enacts, a proclamation that brings the subject of faith into being. To put it telegraphically, faith is an enactment in relation to a calling. It is proclaimed in the urgent and punctual literary form of the epistle. The letter, arising out of the address of a calling, is addressed to a specific community, usually at a critical moment in its existence. In other words, faith announces itself in a situation of crisis, where a decisive intervention is called for; it takes place in a situation of struggle. At stake in the struggle is the meaning of the future and the exact extent of the shadow that the future casts across the present—eschatological struggle. So, faith is not an empty, fixed or constant state with the distant payoff of final bliss in the afterlife. It is, rather, an enactment in the present that is shot through both by the facticity of the past (for Paul, the fact of the resurrection) and the imminence of the future (parousia). The passion that defines Paul’s proclamation in his letters concerns our relation to the futurity of a redemption that we anxiously await, but for which we must prepare ourselves. Paul’s conception of faith is not, then, the abstraction of a metaphysical belief in God. Nor is Christ some Hegelian mediation to the divine or a conduit to a transcendent beyond. Faith is, rather, a lived subjective commitment to what I have called elsewhere an infinite demand.12 It is the infinite demand of the risen Christ that calls Paul to proclaim. It is in relation to that demand that the subject is constituted through an act of approval or fidelity. Crucially—and we will come back to this—the subject is equal to the infinite demand that is placed on it. If it were, the demand would not be infinite, and the structure of faith would have the same shape as autonomy, namely, the law that one gives oneself, for example, in Kant. Rather, the infinite demand that calls Paul requires a faith in something that exceeds my power, the Faktum of Jesus Messiah. As we will see in conclusion, this infinite demand is a work of love in Kierkegaard’s sense. This Faktum heteroaffectively constitutes the subject in a very specific way. Faith does not consist in an assertive strength of the subject that makes it equal to the demand placed upon it. Rather, the infinite demand confronts the strength of the subject with an essential weakness or state of wanting (asthenia). As Paul writes (we will return to the quasi-nihilistic logic of his political theology): ‘‘God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things which are not, to bring to nothing things that are’’ (1 Cor. 1:27–28). As Agamben shows compellingly in his linking of Paul to Benjamin’s ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ messianic power is always weak.13 The adjective weak is not a qualification or diminution of messianic power, as

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Derrida seems to believe in Specters of Marx.14 As the Lord replies to Paul, ‘‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weaknesss’’ (2 Cor. 12:9). Faith, especially a faith of the faithless, since it lacks a transcendent, metaphysical guarantee, is a powerless power, a strength in weakness. On ‘‘The Sixth Day’’ of his reading of the ten opening words of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Agamben turns to the question of faith in a way that finds an echo in the claim I have just tried to make. In a gesture that one finds repeatedly in his writings, usually toward the end of his books—sometimes, indeed, on the final page—Agamben tries to keep open a space between law and life.15 His governing Benjaminian thesis is that history is the creeping juridification of all areas of human life, where the law is identified with violence. For Agamben, there is an essential decline in the experience of faith from Pauline pistis to the forms of sacramental faith that emerged in the centuries after Paul. The history of theology—and perhaps theology itself, the science of the divine—is the reduction of faith to creedal dogma or the articles of a catechism. When this happens, as Agamben lets slip in one his typically elliptical asides, ‘‘The law stiffens and atrophies and relations between men lose all sense of grace and vitality.’’16 In what is essentially a repetition of the reformational gesture that I noted at the beginning of this paper—Marcionite or Lutheran—Agamben finds that vitality of faith in Paul. Agamben links faith to the experience of making an oath, the domain of what he calls ‘‘pre´-droit,’’ ‘‘pre-law.’’17 Such an oath is a kind of pledge, or what I called above a proclamation. It is something that one swears. In this precreedal, prejuridical experience of faith, there is no split between belief in God the Father and God the Son, as in the Nicene Creed—even if they are two aspects of the same Trinitarian ontological substance. Furthermore, and crucially for Agamben, faith is not ontological at all. It is not faith that ‘‘Jesus is the Messiah,’’ where the latter is a predicate of the former. Rather, faith is expressed in the more compressed pledge of the Faktum: ‘‘Jesus Messiah.’’ Being is not something that we can predicate of Christ through a constative proposition or even Hegel’s speculative copula. Rather, Jesus Messiah is something otherwise than being or beyond essence, to coin a phrase. Similarly, Jesus Messiah is beyond existence, or rather, he is not proven through the fact of the historical Jesus. As Paul makes clear in Galatians, when Jesus Christ was revealed to Paul in order that he might preach among the Gentiles, ‘‘I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me’’ (Gal. 1:16–17). Rather, he disappeared into ‘‘Arabia,’’ which scholars suggest refers to somewhere in modern Syria or Jordan. Thus the experience of faith cannot be explained with reference to the category of being, whether conceived as essence or existence. As Agamben makes clear, between the words Jesus and Messiah there is no elbowroom into which the copula might squeeze its way. Faith, then, is the performative force of the words Jesus Messiah—nothing more, but nothing less. This is what Agamben interestingly calls ‘‘the effective experience of a pure power of saying.’’18

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Faith is a word, a word whose force consists in the event of its proclamation. The proclamation finds no support within being, whether conceived as existence or essence. Agamben interestingly links this thought to Foucault’s idea of veridiction or truth telling, where the truth lies in the telling alone.19 But it could equally be linked to Lacan’s distinction, inherited from Benveniste, between the orders of ´enonciation (the subject’s act of speaking) and the ´enonce´ (the formulation of this speech act into a statement or proposition). Indeed, there are significant echoes between this idea of faith as proclamation and Levinas’s conception of the Saying (le Dire), which is the performative act of addressing and being addressed by an other, and the Said (le Dit), which is the formulation of that act into a proposition of the form ‘‘S is P.’’ We are dealing here with a performative idea of truth as troth, an act of fidelity or ‘‘being true to,’’ rather than a propositional or empirical idea of truth.20 Truth is conceived as what, in a rather nicely antiquated English, can be called ‘‘troth plighting,’’ the faithful act of pledging or proclaiming. Truth as troth must be underwritten by love. The proclamation of faith is an act of betrothal, whereby one affiances oneself to another and where the other becomes one’s fiance´. This recalls the famous line of thinking from 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul insists that, if faith is not underwritten by love, then ‘‘I’m a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal’’ (1 Cor. 13:1). The context here, of course, is the polemic against glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, which seemed to have crept into the congregation at Corinth. But if faith is a troth plighting that proclaims the calling of an infinite demand, then the proclamation must be supported by love, which ‘‘bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’’ (1 Cor. 13:7). Faith without love is a hollow clanging that lacks the subjective commitment to endure. As Paul puts it in Galatians: ‘‘For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love’’ (Gal. 5:6). This is a point that Badiou makes well in his reading of Paul. If faith is the coming forth (le surgir) of the subject in the proclamation of an infinite demand, then love is the labor (labeur) of the subject that has bound itself to its demand in faith. Love is what gives consistency to a subject and allows it to persevere with what Badiou always calls ‘‘a process of truth.’’ Love, like faith, does not allow for copulative predication; it does not assemble predicates of the beloved as reasons for love. As Agamben insists, in a curious example (given the name of Jesus’ mother), the lover says, ‘‘I love beautifulbrunette-tender Mary,’’ not ‘‘I love Mary because she is beautiful, brunette, tender.’’21 Love has no reason and needs none. If it did, it wouldn’t be love.22

Heidegger on Paul Agamben explicitly places his interpretation of Paul under the sign of Benjamin’s Messianism and wants to see Paul, in Scholem’s words, as ‘‘a revolutionary Jewish mystic.’’23 We might identify this as a new, quasi-reformational orthodoxy in the reading of Paul

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that one also finds in Boyarin and Taubes. Given the long, bloody history of Christian anti-Semitism, which often sought justification in an interpretation of Paul, the new turn toward the epistles rightly returns Paul to a radical Judaism. However, as will hopefully become clear, Agamben owes much more to Heidegger’s reading of Paul than to Benjamin. I do not know—although one may guess—the reason why Agamben tries to play down his debt to Heidegger. Let me begin with an important biographical remark. Although a defective physical constitution prevented Heidegger from active combat in the First World War, so that he served his time behind the lines in the battle of Verdun with the Meteorological Service, involved with the dangerous business of weather-forecasting, the experience of the war had a significant metaphysical impact on the young philosopher. Heidegger might not have written epistles to the various congregations, but his recently published letters to his wife make fascinating reading in this regard. Although the early letters to Elfriede Petri from 1915–1917 betray a saccharine and sanctimonious sentimentality buoyed up with a rather priggish Catholicism and a voracious academic ambition, something dramatically changes in Heidegger when he’s deployed in the field in 1918. Ostensibly, the question at stake in the letters from this period is whether their recently born son, Jo¨rg, should be given a Catholic upbringing, like his father, or a Protestant one, like his mother. Heidegger doesn’t just concede to Elfriede’s request, he writes, ‘‘The decision has already been taken.’’24 It is at this point that the language of ‘‘elemental existence’’ and ‘‘primitiveness of existence’’ begins to enter the vocabulary of Heidegger’s letters for the first time. He also criticizes, ‘‘the Catholic system’s inner lack of freedom’’ and incapacity for a ‘‘free inner decision’’ (HL 50). In the final month of the First World War, Heidegger wrote an extraordinarily vivid series of letters criticizing the German political leadership for ‘‘hollow-eyed aimlessness’’ and arguing that ‘‘people have been systematically nauseated by pan-German pipedreams.’’25 At the same moment, Heidegger’s language becomes distinctly Pauline. He writes that ‘‘Only the young will save us now—& creatively allow a new Spirit to be made flesh in the world.’’26 Time and again, Heidegger speaks of the necessity for a ‘‘birth of the spirit,’’ one of the very philosophemes that he would explicitly say must be avoided early in Being and Time.27 Appearing to allude directly to Paul, Heidegger writes of a return ‘‘to the essence of personal spirit, which I conceive as a ‘calling.’ ’’28 In his final wartime letter, he writes, ‘‘only through radicalism—complete commitment of the human being as a whole—will we ourselves advance as real revolutionaries of the spirit.’’29 He concludes by criticizing his comrades in the military for ‘‘bourgeois mediocrity’’ and wanting to see a sign of the ‘‘Radically New.’’30 He concludes, suggestively, that ‘‘our effect will at first be limited to just small circles.’’31 There is perhaps much that we could say about the destiny of these remarks in relation to Heidegger’s future political commitment to National Socialism.32

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Less than two months after his return from the war, on January 9, 1919, Heidegger wrote a letter to his friend and priest, Father Engelbert Krebs, the Catholic priest who performed his simple wartime marriage to Elfriede in 1917. Heidegger writes that his philosophical research has made ‘‘the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me.’’ But he goes on to add, importantly, ‘‘but not Christianity and metaphysics— these, though, in a new sense.’’ It is this ‘‘new sense’’ that Heidegger sought to develop in what he called his ‘‘investigations in the phenomenology of religion.’’33 This is important: Heidegger does not reject Christianity and turn, like Nietzsche, to ‘‘the angry and coarse polemics of an apostate.’’34 Rather, his course leads him, in the lectures that began in 1920—although he started making detailed plans and notes on religion and mysticism in summer 1919—back to what he calls primordial, primal or originary Christianity (Urchristenthum). This leads to The Phenomenology of Religious Life, where the emphasis should be placed on the intimate connection between the terms religion and life. Primordial Christianity expresses an original experience of life in what in this period Heidegger was beginning to call facticity. All roads here lead to Paul. Heidegger’s break with Catholicism in 1919 leads him to Paul in 1920. The first thing to note here is the essential Protestantism of Heidegger’s turn to Paul. He writes, in the context of his reading of Galatians, ‘‘There are real connections of Protestantism with Paul.’’35 The obvious reference here is Luther, as Galatians was his favorite epistle. It is in his commentary on Galatians that Luther asserts, ‘‘The truth of the Gospel is that, that our righteousness comes by faith alone.’’36 In his notes for a lecture course to be called ‘‘The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism’’—a course Heidegger never gave—he writes, with some Husserlian throat-clearing: ‘‘Protestant faith and Catholic faith are fundamentally different. Noetically and noematically separate experiences. In Luther an original form of religiosity breaks out.’’37 The rejection of the systematic and dogmatic character of Catholicism leads Heidegger to Paul via Luther. But this has to be combined with what we might call the ‘‘cryptoHarnackianism’’ of Heidegger’s suspicion of the philosophical character of Catholicism.38 Heidegger writes: ‘‘It is a decrease of authentic understanding if God is grasped as an object of speculation . . . Greek philosophy penetrated into Christianity. Only Luther made an advance in this direction.’’39 Slightly later, when Heidegger is trying to uncover the original meaning of eschatology, he writes that its meaning ‘‘was covered up in Christianity, from the end of the First Century . . . following the penetration of PlatonicAristotelian philosophy.’’40 Although these remarks anticipate what Heidegger will call some years later the need for a destruction of the ontological tradition, at this point he is simply borrowing Harnack’s constant polemic against the philosophical interpretation of religious experience. For example, the German epigraph from Goethe von Eckermann that appears in the first volume of the History of Dogma begins: ‘‘The Christian religion has nothing to do with philosophy.’’41 In the course of his many volumes, Harnack shows the degeneration of Pauline Christianity into Catholic creed, on the one hand, and various

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forms of speculative heresy, like Gnosticism, on the other. Luther’s critique of Catholicism returns Christianity to its Pauline roots in the experience of faith. Such is the Harnackian dogma. The insistence on the antiphilosophical purity of faith leads Harnack to Marcion, to whom we will soon turn: crypto-Harnackianism is crypto-Marcionism, the possible dangers of which will hopefully become clear. The effects of crypto-Harnackianism can be felt in Heidegger’s insistence that we must approach Christianity, ‘‘not through a historical tradition, but through an original experience.’’42 The words historical tradition are an implicit reference to Catholicism. Surprising as it might sound, and I will come back to this below, this suspicion of philosophy and dogmatic tradition leads Heidegger to a messianic reading of Paul that has strong similarities with Agamben, particularly on the question of messianic time, as we will see below. Heidegger writes: ‘‘In the synoptic gospels, Jesus announces the kingdom of God [he¯ basileia tou theou]. In Pauline gospel, the proper object of the proclamation is already Jesus himself as Messiah.’’43 The defining character of Pauline experience is the proclamation of Jesus Messiah. What is at stake is an experience of faith that takes place in and as proclamation. The central concept in Heidegger’s reading of Paul is enactment (Vollzug) and his question is the following: How is Christian life enacted? The first thing one notices here is the presupposition that life is something to be enacted: ‘‘The enactment of life is decisive.’’44 Thus life is not a given or constant condition for a human being, like biological life; it is, rather, the consequence of a decision. How is that decision made? As we have already intimated, it is made in a proclamation (Verku¨ndigung), where the latter has the meaning of euaggelion, ‘‘announcement’’ or ‘‘gospel.’’ This proclamation is made in an epistle, which is defined by a sense of urgency in a context of crisis. In a way that is surprising in the early Heidegger, he is very interested in the literary form of the epistle, not for any aesthetic reasons, but because the letter is, as he puts it in a marginal note (and notice the recurrence of the language of decision), ‘‘the How of explication, concern appropriation of the enactmental understanding—decision!’’45 The proclamation is what enacts life. And the proclamation doesn’t occur in a treatise, but in a letter. This is because time is short and the situation is critical. Another key term that pervades Heidegger’s reading of Paul is ‘‘anguish’’ (Not), which obviously anticipates the concept of Angst in Being and Time. The basic Pauline subjective attitude is anguished waiting. This anguish has a range of senses: first and foremost, it is anguish in relation to a calling. As I have tried to show above, what defines Paul as Paul is the fact that he is called. This is the experience of ‘‘conversion’’ that he addresses elliptically in Galatians and Second Corinthians. If Christian life is enacted in a proclamation, then what is proclaimed is a calling. Such is the core experience of faith. Furthermore—and this will become important when we turn to Marcion—anguish is the only proof (endeigma) of the calling. Faith is not knowledge, nor is it justified with reference to the orders of essence and existence. Rather, anguish becomes the subjective

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mark of the calling. Faith—once again—is not some passive state of bovine tranquility or even the contentment of theoretical conviction, some Christian variant on Aristotelian eudaimonia. It is an anguished waiting, where anguish is both the ‘‘proof’’ of the calling and what Heidegger calls its ‘‘obstinate’’ character.46 Heidegger admires the obstinacy of Paul’s faith, what Taubes calls his zealotry, the fact that he persists in the face of an often terrible and finally fatal adversity. It is anguish that leads Paul to act, to intervene again and again in the life of the churches. Finally, anguish not only describes the condition in which ‘‘each stands alone before God,’’47it is also the anguish that Paul wants to induce in the readers or listeners of his epistles in order to bring them to the decision of faith. If the epistles are rightly addressed and reach their audience, then they will create communities of anguish.

Paul and Mysticism This brings us to the relation between Paul and mysticism. What concerns Heidegger is Paul’s apostolic proclamation of a calling, the infinite demand in relation to which his subjectivity is enacted. But what is essential to Paul’s calling is that he does not celebrate or even communicate directly the experience of being called. Thus, it is not Paul’s rapture that interests him or should interest us. On the contrary, it is Paul’s refusal of rapture that is essential: his insistence that faith in the Messiah can only be experienced in weakness. This weakness is interpreted by Heidegger as the weakness of life itself: ‘‘Not mystical absorption and special exertion, rather withstanding the weakness of life is decisive [der Schwachheit des Lebens wird entscheidend].’’48 This can also be connected with the passage that concludes Heidegger’s lectures on Paul. He writes: ‘‘There remains a deep opposition between the Mystics and the Christians.’’49 By ‘‘Mystics,’’ Heidegger refers to the passage in First Corinthians where Paul talks about imparting a ‘‘secret and hidden wisdom [sophia]’’ to the ‘‘mature’’ or ‘‘perfect’’ (teleios; 1 Cor. 2:7). This would allow for the kind of glorification of the soul and identification with the divine that we saw in Marguerite Porete. In such a pneumatic state of spiritual ecstasy, Heidegger writes, ‘‘The human being becomes God himself.’’50 Heidegger refuses such an interpretation of Christianity, which he sees as hermetic, and claims that the Christian knows no such ‘‘enthusiasm,’’ nor is she lost in some drunken, enraptured state. Rather, the Christian says, ‘‘Let us be awake and sober.’’51 Of course, we are touching lightly here on a vast theme in Pauline scholarship. Was Paul a mystic? Adolf Deissmann and Albert Schweizer both thought so.52 However, I find Martin Dibelius’s argument much more convincing. In ‘‘Mystic and Prophet,’’ he claims that Paul’s piety is prophetic rather than mystical—although I think ‘‘apostolic’’ would be preferable to ‘‘prophetic,’’ since the latter refers to the search for signs of the future coming of the Messiah, whereas for Paul the Messiah has come.53 Also, Dibelius insists

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that Paul is never concerned with a mystical proof of Christ, but rather rests his faith on salvational history, a soteriology rooted in the real, datable, historical event of Christ’s resurrection. It is certainly true that Paul always emphasizes a distance between himself and Christ and there is never any talk of a deification of the soul. Furthermore—and here is Paul’s real difference from female mystics like Porete, Julian of Norwich, or Teresa of Avila—there is no fruitio dei in Paul, no bodily jouissance or enjoyment of God. Paul suffers Christ in anxiety, rather than enjoying him. That said, Paul’s relation to mysticism is fascinating. Everything turns here on Paul’s relation to his calling in First and Second Corinthians and what we might call the peculiar logic of boasting. Paul admonishes the Corinthians in a very curious way. With regard to glossolalia, ecstatic experiences and reports of secret initiations, Paul doesn’t simply refuse these phenomena. He writes, for example, that ‘‘I thank God that I speak in tongues more than you all,’’ but he goes on, ‘‘Nevertheless in church I would rather speak five words with my mind, in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue’’ (1 Cor. 14:18–19). Glossolalia and other ecstatic practices are, Paul seems to suggest, egotistical and should have to be distinguished from preaching the gospel which is altruistic and directed toward the community of the church. Thus mystical experience tends toward selfish boasting, in which the universality of the gospel, which is addressed to all, is subordinated to the piety and purity of the few. Mystics are boasters and fools. With exquisite antithetical eloquence, Paul asks the Corinthians to accept him as a fool, ‘‘So that I too may boast a little’’ (2 Cor.: 11:16). Paul says, ‘‘I am talking like a madman’’ (2 Cor. 11:23), and he begins to list his achievements in the style of like a U.S. curriculum vitae: ‘‘Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendents of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants or slaves of Christ? I am a better one’’ (2 Cor. 11:22–23). Then we hear stories of lashings, stonings, three shipwrecks, being marooned at sea, hunger, thirst, toil, insomnia and danger everywhere: ‘‘Danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren’’ (2 Cor. 11:26). That’s quite a lot of danger. Then Paul adds, in a theme we have already encountered, ‘‘apart from other things, there is a daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches’’ (2 Cor. 11:28). He concludes, ‘‘Who is weak, and I am not weak?’’(2 Cor. 11:29). Paul, therefore, boasts, but only of those things that show his weakness. He then turns to his ‘‘visions and revelations of the Lord’’ (2 Cor. 12:2), which are recounted indirectly in the third person: ‘‘I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven’’ (2 Cor. 12:2). Paul has therefore known ecstasy and glorification more than any of the pneumatic infiltrators into the Corinthian community. But, Paul insists, he will boast only of his weakness. This is because ‘‘a thorn was given me in the flesh’’ (2 Cor. 12:7) to keep him from being too elated. When he inquired of the Lord the reason for this, he was told, ‘‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect

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in weakness’’ (2 Cor. 12:9). In place of any gnosis of the divine, the proclamation of faith is not knowledge but an orientation of the subject toward the happening of grace. The thorn in the flesh is the constant presence of anxiety, the call of conscience that prevents Paul from complacency and drives him on in his preaching, that is, in his political work. The ultimate difference between Paul and mysticism is that between the two possible meanings of the words ‘‘in Christ’’ that we noted above: (1) The immanence of Christ in the soul; and (2) membership in the waiting community. Although Paul never excludes the reality of mystical experience, it risks resulting in a politics of secession and abstraction, an egotistical boasting that ignores the centrality of the apostolic mission, the urgency of preaching as the means to forge waiting communities of resistance.

Parousia and the Anti-Christ What about that waiting community? What does it await? How does it await? This takes us directly to the question of temporality. Heidegger has two working theses with respect to Paul. First, he holds that primordial Christian religiosity is bound up with an experience of the enactment of life in the way we have described above. Second, he claims that Christian religiosity ‘‘lives time itself [lebt die Zeit selbst].’’54 Everything turns here on the interpretation of parousia, which can be variously translated as ‘‘presence,’’ ‘‘arrival,’’ or, more commonly, ‘‘the second coming.’’ Heidegger tackles this issue in his interpretation of Second Thessalonians, which some scholars consider apocryphally ascribed to Paul. The sense of parousia as the literal return of Christ doesn’t interest Heidegger much. He is concerned, rather, with the way in which parousia suggests a temporality irreducible to an objective, ordinary, or what Heidegger in Being and Time will call ‘‘vulgar’’ sense of time. That is, a temporality ‘‘without its own order and demarcations,’’ namely, the simple demarcations into past, present, and future.55 Rather, parousia refers back to the idea of life as enactment: namely, that what gets enacted in the proclamation of faith is a certain relation to temporality. Specifically, this is temporality as a relation with parousia as a futurity that induces a sense of urgency and anguish in the present. In short, what we see in the interpretation of Paul is a foreshadowing of ecstatic temporality in Being and Time, where the primordial phenomenon of time is the future. But it is the key insight into the finitude of time in Being and Time that reflects back so suggestively onto the reading of Paul. If, in Heidegger’s magnum opus, time is finite because it comes to an end with death, then the end of time in Paul turns on the concept of parousia as the eschaton understood as the uttermost, furthermost, or ultimate. The person ‘‘in Christ’’ proclaims in the present a relation to an already (namely, the historicity of resurrection) and a not-yet that is uttermost (the futurity of parousia). Temporality

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is not a sequential line, but a finite unity of three dimensions. In another cryptoHarnackian gesture, Heidegger claims that this Pauline experience of the eschatological was ‘‘covered up in Christianity,’’ already by the end of the first century, ‘‘following the penetration of Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy into Christianity.’’56 By contrast—and here we can note a further quasi-messianic moment in Heidegger—the original sense of the eschatological is ‘‘late Judaic [spa¨tju¨disch], the Christian consciousness [being] a peculiar transformation thereof.’’57 This is extremely suggestive, as it would allow us to bring together messianic temporality, rooted in the ho nun kairos, the time of the now, which Agamben links to Benjamin’s idea of Jetztzeit, now time, and Heidegger’s conception of the Augenblick, the moment of vision, which, of course, was Luther’s translation of kairos in Paul. Christian life, Heidegger insists, is lived without security, a ‘‘constant insecurity’’ in which the temporality of factical life is enacted in relation to what is uttermost, the eschaton.58 This sense of insecurity and anguish is at the heart of Second Thessalonians. This is where the figure of parousia must be connected with ‘‘the son of perdition,’’ namely, the Anti-Christ. Paul writes: ‘‘Now concerning the coming [parousia] of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him. . . . Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition’’ (2 Thess. 2:1, 3). The figure of the Anti-Christ massively heightens the sense of anguish and urgency among the waiting community of believers. He opposes all forms of worship and proclaims himself God. In one passage where Paul begins to sound like Marcion, as we will see below, the Anti-Christ is declared ‘‘the god of this world’’ (2 Cor. 4:4). Heidegger then makes a fascinating move and links the Anti-Christ to what would become, in the years to follow, the theme of falling, das Verfallen. Heidegger writes, ‘‘The appearance of the Anti-Christ in godly robes facilitates the falling-tendency of life [die abfallende Lebenstendenz].’’59 What is almost being envisaged here by Heidegger is a conflict between two divine orders: Christ and Anti-Christ. For Heidegger, the Anti-Christ reveals the fallen character of the world, in relationship to which, ‘‘each must decide,’’ and again, ‘‘in order not to fall prey to it, one must stand ever ready for it.’’60 Heidegger adds, ‘‘The decision itself is very difficult.’’61What the figures of parousia and the AntiChrist reveal is the falling tendency of life in the world. In a marginal note to the lecture course, Heidegger writes telegraphically of the ‘‘Communal world [Mitwelt] as ‘receiving’ world into which the gospel strikes,’’ and again, ‘‘this falling tendency of life and attitude in communal-worldly tendencies (wisdom of the Greeks).’’62 Our everyday life in the world, what Heidegger will later call das Man, is revealed to be abfallend, in the sense of falling, dropping, or melting away, but also of becoming Abfall, waste, rubbish, or trash. This discloses a peculiar double logic: in proclaiming faith and enacting life, the world becomes trash and we become the trash of the world. The waiting community becomes

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the unwanted offscouring that is seen as garbage by the light of Greek wisdom and sees, in turn, the existing communal world as garbage.

As Not—Paul’s Meontology As we noted above, Paul has one fundamental rule in all the churches: remain in the condition in which you were called. That is, ‘‘Let everyone lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him, and in which God has called him’’ (1 Cor. 7:17). He continues, and note the five repetitions of the words ho¯s me¯, which Heidegger translates ‘‘as if not [als ob nicht],’’ but which can be more literally be rendered ‘‘as not.’’ The Revised Standard translation reads: The appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none [h¯os m ¯ e], and those that mourn as though they were not mourning [ho¯s me¯], and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing [ho¯s me¯], and those who buy as though they had no goods [ho¯s me¯], and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with the world [ho¯s me¯]. For the form of this world [to¯ ske¯ma tou kosmou] is passing away. (1 Cor. 7:29–32) To say that this is an over-determined passage in recently published interpretations of Paul is to risk considerable understatement. It plays a crucial role in Heidegger’s reading of Paul and is equally pivotal for the interpretations of Taubes, Badiou, and Agamben. In a way that will decisively influence Agamben, Taubes tries to make a connection between this passage from Paul and Benjamin’s Messianism, in particular as expressed in the ‘‘Theologico-Political Fragment,’’ from 1921, the same year as Heidegger’s lectures on Paul.63 Following the faultline between the messianic and the profane, Benjamin concludes this fragment by declaring that profane world politics is nihilism. Seen from the messianic standpoint, the surrounding communal world must be seen ‘‘as not.’’ In Paul and Benjamin, Taubes concludes, ‘‘We have a nihilistic view of the world, and concretely of the Roman Empire.’’64 When Paul writes that the form or schema of this world is passing away, he is asserting his negative political theology against imperial power, a power that is nihilizing itself and must be nihilized. Paul is preaching a meontology, an account of things that are not. Furthermore, it is a double meontology. On the one hand, the form of this world is passing away or falling away and becoming nothing. This is the nihilism of world politics. But on the other hand, what will take the place of the ‘‘god of this world’’ is at present nothing. It is simply the anguished vigilance of the messianic standpoint, defined by its relation to the futurity of parousia. This is close to how Badiou interprets Paul’s words from First Corinthians that ‘‘God has chosen the things that are not [ta me¯ onta] in order to bring to nought those

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that are [ta onta]’’ (1 Cor. 1:28).65 What is being preached in the calling of Paul is not something that is—conceived politically, being is completely determined by the reality of the Roman Empire, which is the ‘‘state of the situation,’’ in Badiou’s jargon. Rather, Paul is announcing something that, in Badiou’s terms, breaks with the order of being in the name of an event that is not. The event is something indiscernible in the situation, which is how Badiou defines the central concept of his work: the generic God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the strong and the powerless to confound power. This is the compressed form of the double meontology: God has chosen the things that are not in order to bring to nothing the things that are. This is why we must become the filth of the world, the scum of the earth. Badiou’s word for trash or garbage is de´chet, which he links to de´che´ance, which means fall, downfall, decay, and das Verfallen, but also has overtones of abasement.66How does one live in a world that’s trash when one has declared oneself the trash of the world? One lives in it as if it were not, ho¯s me¯. A waiting community, an anguished community, an abased community, an ecclesia of the wretched of the earth, lives in the world as if it were not by attending to a call or demand that is not of this world. This brings us to the central claim in Agamben’s reading of Paul. Agamben wishes to read Paul’s letters as the ‘‘fundamental messianic text for the Western tradition.’’67 His question is: ‘‘What does it mean to live in the Messiah, and what is the messianic life?’’68 The answer is already clear: the messianic life is lived ho¯s me¯, as not. Agamben cites the final words of this passage from Corinthians, in his translation, ‘‘For passing away is the figure, the way of being of the world,’’ and continues: ‘‘In pushing each thing toward itself through the as not, the messianic does not simply cancel out this figure, but it makes it pass, it prepares its end. This is not another figure or another world: it is the passing of the figure of this world.’’69 It is at this point that Agamben’s reading of Paul crosses Heidegger’s 1920–21 lectures. I would like to track three slippages in Agamben’s reading of Heidegger that might lead us to question the former’s critique of the latter. The first, minor, slippage is that Agamben claims that Heidegger ‘‘briefly commented’’ on the passage from Corinthians on the ho¯s me¯, whereas in truth it is the climax and culmination of the argument of the entire 1920–21 lecture course.70 Let’s immediately note a second slippage, whose consequences will become clearer as we proceed: that which calls in Paul is the Messiah, and Heidegger’s reading of Paul does not seek to eliminate the messianic, but acknowledges it. Once the Christian has been called and enacted his faith and indeed his life in the proclamation ‘‘Jesus himself as Messiah,’’ how should he comport himself to the surrounding world, what was named above the Mitwelt?71 Heidegger notes first and rightly that ‘‘one must remain in the position in which you were called.’’ Which means that one must find a ‘‘new fundamental comportment’’ in the world.72 He then goes on, ‘‘The indeed existing [daseienden] significances of real life are lived ho¯s me¯, as if not.’’73A key term in Heidegger’s reading of Paul is genesthai, the infinitive of gignomai, ‘‘to become, to happen or to be born.’’ Paul writes in First Corinthians: ‘‘Were you called being a

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bondservant? Don’t let that bother you, but if you get an opportunity to become [genesthai] free, use it’’ (1 Cor. 7:21; my emphasis). Heidegger seems to mean genesthai in the sense of becoming (Werden) or having become (Gewordensein).74 Thus the Christian should remain in the state in which she was called, that is, in which she had become what she is. As Heidegger makes clear, the becoming of the Christian is a douleuein, slavery before God. As Paul says above, if one was called to Christ as a slave and one gets the opportunity to become free, then so much the better. But one is exchanging one form of bondage for another: one may no longer be the possession of any man, but one is the possession of God. Heidegger interestingly claims en passant that Nietzsche misunderstands Paul as an ethical thinker when ‘‘he accuses Paul of ressentiment. Ressentiment in no way belongs to this realm.’’75 Rather, Paul must be understood ontologically, or better, meontologically. This brings us back to the ho¯s me¯: Heidegger defines it in the following way: ‘‘all surrounding-world relations must pass through the complex of enactment of havingbecome [Vollzugzusammenhang des Gewordenseins].’’76 What this means is that one has to look at the world from the standpoint of what one has become through the enactment and the proclamation of faith. To push back in a proclamation against our tendency to fall toward the world and look at things ho¯s me¯, is to see the world in a messianic light, from the standpoint of redemption. But—and this is absolutely crucial to the argument I want to develop and it is the third and most important slippage in Agamben’s reading of Heidegger—that which we orientate ourselves toward in our enactment, namely, the infinite demand or calling, is not in our power. It exceeds human strength. It is something that cannot be willed. It is, of course, the work of grace. Heidegger writes, ‘‘The Christian is conscious that this facticity cannot be won out of his own strength, but rather originates from God—the phenomenon of the effects of grace.’’77 What the proclamation seeks to proclaim and the enactment seeks to enact is out of our reach. Heidegger continues: ‘‘The enactment exceeds human strength. It is unthinkable out of one’s strength. Factical life, from out of its own resources, cannot provide the motives to attain even the genesthai.’’78 Our becoming is not something that we can become. It is not a decision that we can take. As Paul puts it with much greater economy in First Corinthians, ‘‘You are not your own’’ (1 Cor. 6:19). Here in Heidegger, crucially, we see an affirmation of weakness, asthenia, which has significant consequences for how we think about the nature of authenticity and its relation to the inauthentic. We can rejoin Agamben at this point, when he writes, rightly, ‘‘It is through his reading of the Pauline h¯os me¯ that Heidegger seems to first develop his idea of the appropriation of the improper as the determining trait of human existence.’’79 Looking forward to Being and Time, this means that the authentic has no other content than the inauthentic. Authentic existence is not something that, as Heidegger

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puts it, ‘‘floats above falling everydayness.’’80 It is not the attainment of some new, transformed, transcendent state. To be authentic is simply to look at the inauthentic under a new, messianic aspect, namely, as if it were not. As Agamben writes in The Coming Community: ‘‘Ethics begins only when the good is revealed to consists in nothing other than a grasping of evil and when the authentic and the proper have no other content than the inauthentic and the improper.’’81 However, what Agamben criticizes in Heidegger is that, although the content of the authentic is the inauthentic, and the former is only a modification of the latter, this is nonetheless the way in which ‘‘everydayness is seized upon.’’ What Agamben objects to, and he is right, is the claim that existence can be subject to such a ‘‘seizure,’’ Ergreifen.82 This can be linked to a later passage in Being and Time, where Heidegger talks of the ‘‘moment of vision’’ as gaining momentary ‘‘mastery’’ over the everyday.83 Agamben concludes that, for Paul, the messianic subject is ‘‘unable to seize hold of himself as a whole, whether in the form of an authentic decision or in Being-towards-death.’’84 There is no doubt that Being and Time is decisively marked by an aspiration toward wholeness and autarchy. From beginning to end, Dasein is defined in terms of its potentiality or ability to be (Seinko¨nnen), with the emphasis on the ko¨nnen. Heidegger’s explicit concern is with trying to get Dasein into view as a whole. This means, concretely, getting the end of Dasein into our grasp. As the end of Dasein is death, the limit in relation to which Dasein’s authenticity is measured in Being and Time is being-towards-death. Thus, authenticity consists in appropriating one’s finitude in an act of potentialization, or what we could call, in a more vulgar register, an act of will. Death is essentially my death and the call of conscience, which is the internalization of finitude, is Dasein calling to itself. Dasein, defined as potency, is its own equal. What makes Heidegger’s reading of Paul so suggestive, which is something that Agamben accidentally—or perhaps deliberately—misses, is the marking of a limit to human potency. In speaking of an ‘‘enactment that exceeds human strength,’’ Heidegger embraces a logic of grace that entails that the project of how to become oneself is out of one’s reach. The human being is essentially impotentialized in its relation to the Messiah. The decision about who I am is not in my power, but becomes intelligible only through a certain affirmation of weakness. Authenticity is not so much a ‘‘seizing hold’’ as the orientation of the self toward something that exceeds oneself, namely the heteroaffectivity of an infinite demand that calls me. Freedom is not something I can confer on myself in a virile assertion of autarchy. It is something that can only be received through the acknowledgment of an essential powerlessness, a constitutive impotence. Freedom can only be received back once one has decided to become a slave and await in the endurance of love—for love endures all things. In his lectures on Paul, one feels the freshness and fervor of Heidegger’s insights into facticity and temporality communicated through the passionate urgency that he finds in the epistles. For once, the young Heidegger lets go of the banisters of his commitment to

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Husserlian phenomenology and doesn’t encumber his discourse with Kantian transcendentalist throat clearing or, indeed, Aristotelian noises about the inquiry into the manifold meanings of being. Rather, what emerges is a compelling account of the formation of the self in relation to a calling that exceeds it. Life is enacted in a proclamation whose activity cannot eliminate passivity. Furthermore, seen in the light of the heroic logic of autarchy that threatens to dominate the way in which human existence is conceived in Being and Time, the reading of Paul allows us to glimpse a reading of Heidegger that would be rooted in an affirmation of weakness. It might even allow us to imagine a conception of conscience as the mark or imprint of what Taubes calls, ‘‘a profound powerlessness’’ in the human being.85 Might such an approach permit a new interpretation of Being and Time? I think so. What I am dreaming of here is Heidegger with a thorn in his flesh: a little bit Gentile, admittedly, but also a little bit Jewish, to cite Taubes.86 Keeping Heidegger’s reading of Paul constantly in mind, I would like to turn in detail to Being and Time and analyze the logic of the call of conscience and its essential impotence.

The Powerless Power of the Call of Conscience At times, reading a classical philosophical text is like watching an ice flow break up during global warming. The compacted cold assurance of a coherent system begins to become liquid, and great conceptual pieces break off before your eyes and begin to float free on the sea. To be a reader is either to try to keep one’s footing as the ice breaks up or to fall in the icy water and drown. This is true of every page of Heidegger’s Being and Time. But it is nowhere truer than in the discussion of conscience in division 2, which, to my mind, is the most interesting moment in Being and Time. I want to try to show where the ice flow of fundamental ontology begins to crack. What Heidegger is seeking in division 2 of Being and Time is an authentic potentiality for being a whole, which turns on the question of the self. If Dasein’s inauthentic selfhood is defined in terms of das Man, ‘‘the they,’’ and this is something over which I exert no choice, then what Heidegger is after in division 2, chapter 2,is a notion of authentic selfhood defined in terms of choice. I either choose to choose myself as authentic or I am lost in the choiceless publicness of das Man. Heidegger’s claim is that this potentiality for being a whole—for being authentic—is attested in the voice of conscience. Ontologically, conscience discloses something: it discloses Dasein to itself: ‘‘If we analyse conscience more penetratingly, it is revealed as a call [Ruf]. Calling is a mode of discourse. The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self; and this is done by way of summoning it to its ownmost Being-guilty.’’87 Conscience is a Ruf, a call. The call is a mode of Rede, a silent call, as we will see. The call has the character of an Anruf, an appeal that is a summons or a convocation (Aufruf) of Dasein to its ownmost being guilty. We will see

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below what Heidegger means by guilt, which is something closer to lack in the Lacanian sense or indebtedness than moral guilt or culpability. Heidegger insists that our understanding of this call, hearing this call, unveils itself as wanting to have a conscience, Gewissenhabenwollen. Adopting this stance, making this choice, choosing to choose, is the meaning of Entschlossenheit, resoluteness or decidedness or being determined or possessing fixity of purpose. Such is the basic shape of the argument in division 2, chapter 2 and the terminology employed. Heidegger argues that the call of conscience calls one away from one’s listening to the they-self, which is always described as listening away, hinhoeren auf, to the hubbub of ambiguity. Instead, one listens to the call that pulls one away from this hubbub to the silent and strange certainty of conscience: ‘‘The call is from afar unto afar. It reaches him who wants to be brought back.’’88 Hearing the call, the self turns away from the sound of the crowd in a movement of conversio that is opposed to the aversio of inauthentic life.89 To what is one called in being appealed to in conscience? To one’s eigene Selbst, to one’s own self. Conscience calls Dasein to itself in the call. What gets said in the call of conscience? Heidegger is crystal clear: nothing is said: But how are we to determine what is said in the talk that belongs to this kind of discourse? What does the conscience call to him to whom it appeals? Taken strictly, nothing. The call asserts nothing, gives no information about world-events, has nothing to tell. Least of all does it try to set going a ‘‘soliloquy’’ in the Self to which it has appealed. ‘‘Nothing’’ gets called to [zu-gerufen] this Self, but it has been summoned [aufgerufen] to itself—that is, to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.90 The call contains no information, nor is it a soliloquy, like the ever-indecisive Danish prince. It is the summoning of Dasein to itself, which occurs silently. This picks up on a remark where Heidegger writes, ‘‘Vocal utterance . . . is not essential for discourse, and therefore not for the call either; this must not be overlooked.’’91 So, conscience discourses in the mode of silence, in and as Verschwiegenheit, reticence, which is given an extraordinary privilege in the discussion of discourse in Being and Time. Reticence is the highest form of discourse. One says most in saying nothing. The logic of the call is paradoxical. On the one hand, the call of conscience that pulls Dasein out of its immersion and groundless floating in the world of das Man is nothing other than Dasein calling to itself, calling to itself by saying nothing. It is not God or my genes calling to me, it is me myself and I. As we will see, this logic will become more complex. But is it at all necessary to keep raising explicitly the question of who does the calling? Is this not answered for Dasein just as unequivocally as the question of to whom the call makes its appeal? In conscience Dasein calls itself. This understanding of the caller

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may be more or less awake in the factical hearing of the call. Ontologically, however, it is not enough to answer that Dasein is at the same time both the caller and the one to whom the appeal is made. When Dasein is appealed to, is it not ‘‘there’’ in a different way from that in which it does the calling? Shall we say that its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self functions as the caller? Indeed the call is precisely something which we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily performed, nor have we ever done so. ‘‘It’’ calls, against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet beyond me.92 This is a very interesting passage. The call comes from me, yet it calls from beyond me, Der Ruf kommt aus mir und doch u¨ber mich. It is this u¨ber mich (in which we find an ¨ ber-Ich or super-ego, baptized into being in 1923, a few years unwitting echo of Freud’s U prior to Being and Time) which is so uncanny, which happens against my will and is something that I do not voluntarily perform. Dasein is both the caller and the called, and there is no immediate identity between these two sides or faces of the call. How do we explain this? How do we explain this division at the heart of the call of conscience, ‘‘which everyone agrees that he hears,’’93 as Heidegger rather question-beggingly insists? Does everyone hear the call? A vast question. The least we can say is that those who do not hear the call are not truly Dasein and beings that are non-Dasein might be defined by the inability to hear the call. In order to explain the division within the call, Heidegger folds the analysis of the call structure back into the care structure. The situation of Dasein as being both caller and called corresponds to the structure of Dasein as both authentic and inauthentic, as anxious potentiality for Being or freedom and thrown lostness in das Man; that is, Dasein is both in the truth and in untruth. So, insofar as I am a thrown project, I am both called and the caller. This takes Heidegger back in a fascinating way to the theme of uncanniness that first appeared in the discussion of anxiety earlier in Being and Time. He asks: What if this Dasein that finds itself, sich befindet, in the very depths of its uncanniness should be the caller of the call of conscience? This leads us to the idea of the alien or stranger voice, die fremde Stimme: In its ‘‘who,’’ the caller is definable in a ‘‘worldly’’ way by nothing at all. The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the ‘‘not-athome’’—the bare ‘‘that-it-is’’ in the nothing of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self; it is something like an alien voice. What could be more alien to the ‘‘they,’’ lost in the manifold world’’ of its concern, than the Self which has been individualized down to itself in uncanniness and been thrown into the ‘‘nothing.’’94

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Note here the repeated emphasis on the word nothing and the general strangeness of the claim that Heidegger is making. The call of conscience is the anxious Unheimlichkeit of not being at home in the Heimlichkeit of domesticity, but then this ‘‘not at home’’ is claimed to be the nothing of the world (the word nothing mistakenly appears in quotation marks in the Macquarrie and Robinson translation). The self is thrown into the nothing of the world and into that nothing I hear the silent call, which strikes me as alien. The situation is thus acutely Pauline: once I have heard the call, I look at everything as if it were not and I look at everything that is from the standpoint of that which is not—such is Paul’s double meontology. Strictly speaking—and this is the thought that I want to get at—the self is divided between two nothings: on the one hand, the nothing of the world and, on the other, the nothingness of pure possibility revealed in being toward death. It is akin to Lacan’s idea of being ‘‘between two deaths’’ in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, but perhaps even more radical.95 The self is nothing but the movement between two nothings, the nothing of thrownness and the nothing of projection. Which is to say that the uncanniness of being human, being a stranger to oneself, consists in a double impotentialization. Heidegger insists that the uncanny call calls silently: The call does not report events; it calls without uttering anything. The call discourses in the uncanny mode of keeping silent. And it does this only because, in calling the one to whom the appeal is made, it does not call him into the public idle talk of the ‘‘they,’’ but calls him back from this into the reticence of his existent potentiality-forBeing. When the caller reaches him to whom the appeal is made, it does so with a cold assurance which is uncanny but by no means obvious.96 Note the unsentimental quality of the appeal here, the uncanniness of cold assurance, kalte Sicherheit. Uncanniness pursues Dasein down into the lostness of its life in the they, in which it has forgotten itself, and tries to arrest this lostness in a movement that Heidegger will call in the chapter that follows the discussion of conscience in Being and Time ‘‘repetition’’ (Wiederholung). It is only in the self’s repetition to itself of itself that it can momentarily pull clear of the downward plunge of das Man. When the self ceases to repeat itself, it forgets and ceases to be itself.

The Null Basis–Being of a Nullity: Dasein’s Double Impotence What does the uncanny call give one to understand? Conscience’s call can be reduced to one word: ‘‘Guilty!’’97 But what does Dasein’s guilt really mean? It means that because Dasein’s being is thrown projection, it always has its being to be. That is, Dasein’s being is a lack, it is something due to Dasein, a debt that it strives to make up or repay. This is

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the ontological meaning of guilt as Schuld, which means guilt, wrong, or even sin, but can also mean debt. To be schuldig is to be guilty or blameworthy, but it also means to give someone their due, to be owing, to be in someone’s debt. Schulden are debts, which have a material origin, as Nietzsche shows convincingly in the Genealogy of Morals.98 Life is a series of repayments on a loan that you didn’t agree to, with ever-increasing interest, which will cost you your life—it’s a death pledge, a mort-gage. As Heidegger perhaps surprisingly writes, although it should be recalled that he was writing in extremely troubled economic times in Germany, ‘‘Life is a business, whether or not it covers its costs.’’99 Debt is a way of being. It is, arguably, the way of being. This is why credit, and the credence in credit, its belief structure, is so important. Heidegger runs through the various meanings of guilt understood as having debts, being responsible for, or owing something to another. Although this would require separate analysis, it is fascinating to watch Heidegger try to separate his conception of guilt from the usual concept of guilt as responsibility to others or from any idea of guilt understood in relation to law or the Sollen, the Kantian ought, which Hegel criticizes and whose critique Heidegger implicitly follows. Heidegger, of course, is trying to get at an ontological meaning of guilt and avoid the usual legal or moralistic connotations of the word. What he is aiming for is a pre-ethical or pre-moral understanding of guilt, or perhaps an originary ethical understanding of guilt. It is at this point that we confront some of the most radical passages in Being and Time. As Heidegger tirelessly insists in Being and Time, Dasein is a thrown basis (ein geworfene Grund). It projects forth on the basis of possibilities into which it has been thrown. This is also to say, as we will now see, that Dasein is a null basis. Heidegger writes, and the German is dense and difficult to render here: In being a basis—that is, in existing as thrown—Dasein constantly lags behind its possibilities. It is never existent before its basis, but only from it and as this basis. Thus ‘‘Being-a-basis’’ means never to have power over one’s ownmost Being from the ground up. This ‘‘not’’ belongs to the existential meaning of ‘‘thrownness.’’ It itself, being a basis, is a nullity of itself. ‘‘Nullity’’ does not signify anything like notBeing-present-at-hand or not-subsisting; what one has in view here is rather a ‘‘not’’ which is constitutive for this Being of Dasein—its thrownness. The character of this ‘‘not’’ as a ‘‘not’’ may be defined existentially: in being its Self, Dasein is, as a Self, the entity that has been thrown. It has been released from its basis, not through itself but to itself, so as to be as this basis. Dasein is not itself the basis of its Being, inasmuch as this basis first arises from its own projection; rather, as Being-its-Self, it is the Being of its basis.100 This is fascinating. The claim is that Dasein is a nullity of itself. Dasein understood as being a basis means that it does not have power over itself. Dasein is the experience of

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nullity with regard to itself. The potentiality for being a whole that defines Dasein’s power of projection is revealed to be an impotentialization, a limit it runs up against and over which it has no power. It is the impotence of Dasein that most interests me. As we will see, it is a double impotence. As a thrown basis, Dasein constantly lags behind its possibilities. As Heidegger writes above, ‘‘In being a basis [Grund-seiend], that is to say existing as thrown [als geworfenes existierend—another of Heidegger’s enigmatic formulas], Dasein constantly lags behind its possibilities.’’ The experience of guilt reveals the being of being human as a lack, as something wanting. The self is not just the ecstasy of a heroic leap toward authenticity energized by the experience of anxiety and being toward death. Such would be the heroic reading of the existential analytic—and I do not doubt that this may well have been Heidegger’s intention—that sees its goal in a form of autarky: self-sufficiency, selfmastery, or what Heidegger calls ‘‘self-constancy’’ (‘Die Sta¨ndigkeit des Selbst).101 Rather, on my view, the self’s fundamental self-relation is to an unmasterable thrownness, the burden of a facticity that weighs me down without my ever being able fully to pick it up. This is why I seek to evade myself. I project or throw off a thrownness that catches me in its throw and inverts the movement of possibility by shattering it against impotence. I am always too late to meet my fate. Dasein is a being suspended between two nothings, two nullities: the nullity of thrownness and the nullity of projection. This is where Heidegger’s text is at its most extreme: Not only is the projection, as one that has been thrown, determined by the nullity of Being-a-basis; as projection it is itself essentially null. This does not mean that it has the ontical property of ‘‘inconsequentiality’’ or ‘‘worthlessness’’; what we have here is rather something existentially constitutive for the structure of the Being of projection. The nullity we have in mind belongs to Dasein’s Being-free for its existentiell possibilities. Freedom, however, is only in the choice of one possibility—that is, in tolerating one’s not having chosen the others and one’s not being able to choose them. In the structure of thrownness, as in that of projection, there lies essentially a nullity. This nullity is the basis for the possibility of inauthentic Dasein in its falling; and as falling, every inauthentic Dasein factically is. Care itself, it its very essence, is permeated with nullity through and through. Thus ‘‘care’’—Dasein’s Being—means, as thrown projection, Being-the-basis of a nullity (and this Being-the-basis is itself null). This means that Dasein as such is guilty, if our formally existential definition of ‘‘guilt’’ as ‘‘Being-the-basis of a nullity’’ is indeed correct.102 Dasein is a double nullity. It is simultaneously constituted and divided around this double nullity. This is the structure of thrown projection and the ontological meaning of guilt.

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That is, Dasein is guilty; it is indebted doubly; it is null at the heart of its being; it is essentially doubly lacking. Thrown projection means: das nichtige Grund-Sein einer Nichtigkeit, the null basis-being of a nullity. And this is nothing less than the experience of freedom. As Heidegger writes above, freedom is the choice of the one possibility of being: in choosing oneself and not others. But what one is choosing in such a choice is the nullity of a projection that projects on the nullity of a thrown basis, over which one has no power. Freedom is the assumption of one’s ontological guilt, of the double nullity that one is. Heidegger goes on to show that this existential-ontological meaning of guilt is the basis for any traditional moral understanding of guilt.103 Heidegger’s phenomenology of guilt, again like Nietzsche’s in the Genealogy of Morals, claims to uncover the deep structure of ethical subjectivity, which cannot be defined by morality, since morality already presupposes it. Rejecting any notion of evil as privatio boni, Heidegger’s claim is that Guilt is the premoral source for any morality. It is beyond good and evil. Is guilt bad? No. But neither is it good. It is simply what we are. We are guilty. Such is Kafka’s share of eternal truth. In the following passage, Heidegger brings together a large number of the themes discussed above and returns to the question of uncanniness: In uncanniness Dasein stands together with itself primordially. Uncanniness brings this entity face to face with its undisguised nullity, which belongs to the possibility of its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. To the extent that for Dasein, as care, its Being is an issue, it summons itself as a ‘‘they’’ which is factically falling, and summons itself from its uncanniness toward its potentiality-for-Being. The appeal calls back by calling forth: it calls Dasein forth to the possibility of taking over, in existing, even that thrown entity which it is. It calls Dasein back to its thrownness so as to understand this thrownness as the null basis which it has to take up into existence. This callingback in which conscience calls forth, gives Dasein to understand that Dasein itself— the null basis for its null projection, standing in the possibility of its Being—is to bring itself back to itself from its lostness in the ‘‘they’’; and this means that it is guilty.104 Guilt has been shown to be the innermost meaning of Dasein’s being, its very movement, its kinesis. Here and elsewhere in his work, Heidegger is simply trying to think kinesis as the rhythm of existence and ultimately the rhythm of being itself. This movement, which is the movement of thrown projection, or what I prefer to call ‘‘thrown throwing off,’’ is the structure of the call, which ‘‘calls back by calling forth.’’ It calls Dasein forth to take over its potentiality for being by taking it back to its thrownness and taking it over. Look closely at Heidegger’s words in the last quotation: Dasein is the nichtiger Grund seines nichtigen Entwurfs, the null basis for its null projection. That is, Dasein is a double

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nothing, a double zero. This is the meaning of thrown projection. Guilt is the kinesis of this nullity, a movement vor und zuru¨ck, back and forth, or to and fro, as Beckett might say. Such is the strangeness of what it means to be human, the uncanniness of being brought face to face with ourselves. As Heidegger writes in Introduction to Metaphysics, ‘‘Dasein is the happening of strangeness.’’105 The human being is the utter strangeness of action between two nothings. The self is a potentiality for being whose sole basis, limit, and condition of possibility is a double nothing, a double impotentialization, which, of course, is to say that it is also its condition of impossibility, an existential quasitranscendental. Impotence—finally—is what makes us human. We should wear it as a badge of honor. It is the signal of our weakness, and nothing is more important or impotent than that. Heidegger insists that Dasein does not load guilt onto itself. It is in its being already guilty. Dasein is guilty, always already, but what changes in being authentic is that Dasein understands the call or appeal of conscience and takes it into itself. Dasein as authentic comes to understand itself as guilty. Which means that Dasein as potent comes to understand itself as impotent. The human being is essentially marked by inauthenticity. All that changes in being authentic is that the way in which we are inauthentic is modified. But in undergoing such modification, Dasein has somehow chosen itself, er hat sich selbst gewa¨hlt, as Heidegger writes.106 This means that what is chosen is not having a conscience, which Dasein already has qua Dasein, but what Heidegger calls Gewissen-haben-wollen, wanting to have a conscience. This is a second-order wanting, what we might describes as wanting to want the want that one is. This requires an ontic or existentiell decision: ‘‘Wanting to have a conscience is rather the most primordial existentiell presupposition for the possibility of factically coming to owe something. In understanding the call, Dasein lets its ownmost Self take action in itself [in sich handeln] in terms of that potentiality-forBeing which it has chosen. Only so can it be answerable [verantwortlich].’’107 Thus, answerability or responsibility consists in hearing and assuming the call, in wanting to have a conscience. This choice, Dasein’s choice of itself, is—in Heidegger’s strange phrasing—taking action in itself. As Heidegger will remind us at a significant later date, ‘‘We are still far from pondering the essence of action decisively enough.’’108 Heidegger both uses the word action in Being and Time and continually reminds us that he wants to avoid it. Such—as Derrida taught us—is the logic of Heidegger’s avoidances.109 But what might action mean when conceived in relation to the double nullity we have described? What might potentiality for being mean when its condition of possibility and impossibility is a double impotentialization? Mastery opens onto slavery, grasping gives way to receiving that over which one has no power. Action in the world requires an acknowledgment of weakness. Its strength is its weakness, as Paul might say. Such a conception of action might be called tragic, or better, tragi-comic. As one of Beckett’s gallery of moribunds, Molloy, asks himself, tongue deep in his cheek, ‘‘From where did I get this access of vigour? From my weakness perhaps.’’110

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Crypto-Marcionism I would like to return to the question of faith with which I began and turn the inquiry in a rather different direction. In his Commentary on Galatians, Luther famously writes, ‘‘The truth of the Gospel is that, that our righteousness comes by faith alone.’’111 The return to Paul that defines the movement of reformation is a return to the purity and authority of faith. Luther draws the strongest of contrasts between faith and law, where ‘‘Law only shows sin, terrifies and humbles; thus it prepares us for justification and drives us to Christ.’’112 The effects of this radical distinction between faith and law in the constitution of Christian anti-Semitism, where the Jews are always identified with law, are well known and do not need to be rehearsed here.113 My question here concerns the relation between faith and law in Paul and what is involved in the affirmation of a radical Paulinism that would be based on faith alone. In the history of Christian dogma, of course, this is the risk of Marcionism. It is, to quote Socrates, a fine risk, but one that ultimately has to be refused. My other concern here is with the way in which a certain ultra-Paulinism asserts itself in figures like Agamben, Heidegger, and Badiou in a way that might lead one to conclude that the contemporary return to Paul is really a return to Marcion. As Taubes writes, there are two ways out of Paul: (1) the Christian church itself in its early centuries, the tradition of Peter; and, (2) Marcionism, which posed the greatest political threat to emergent Catholic Christianity, particularly in the latter half of the second century. Marcion, like Paul, was a gifted organizer and tenacious creator of churches. His followers were extremely numerous and lived in communities, in some cases whole villages, until the time of their persecution under Constantine in the fourth century. Marcionite communities reportedly endured here and there as late as the tenth century. For Marcion, Paul was the only true apostle. Marcion was his true follower. He called himself ‘‘Presbyteros,’’ leader of the true followers of the true apostle. For Marcion, the core of Paul’s proclamation is the separation between the orders of faith and law, grace and works, and spirit and flesh. Marcion radicalizes the antithetical form of Paul’s thought—his only known work is called The Antitheses, which is roughly dated to 140 a.d.—to the point of cutting the bond that ties creation to redemption. And Marcion is surely right here: creation plays a very small role in Paul; his constant preoccupation is redemption. Therefore, as Taubes notes: ‘‘The thread that links creation and redemption is a very thin one. A very, very thin one. And it can snap. And that is Marcion. He reads—and he knows how to read!—the father of Jesus Christ is not the creator of heaven and earth.’’114 As Harnack shows, in the obsessive and oddly moving book—fifty years in the making—Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, Marcion cuts the ontological link that ties creation to redemption and establishes an ontological dualism.115 The God of the known world, the God of creation, whom Paul suggestively calls ‘‘the God of this world,’’ is

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distinct from the God of redemption, the God who is revealed through and as Jesus Christ. In opposition to the known God of the Hebrew Bible, Christ is the unknown God, the radically new God. No word is more frequently used in Marcion’s Antitheses than the epithet new, and any critique of Marcion can be turned against the obsession with the new and the figure of novelty in recent philosophical readings of Paul, as we will see presently. The unknown God is the true God, but an alien God. Apparently, in the Marcionite churches, Christ was called ‘‘the Alien’’ or ‘‘the good Alien.’’116 This means that God enters into the world as an outsider, a stranger to creation. Marcion radicalizes the Pauline distinction between grace freely given and righteousness based on works and attaches them to two divine principles: the righteous and wrathful God of the Old Testament and the loving and merciful God of the Gospel. Of course, this sounds like Gnosticism, but crucially there is no gnosis for Marcion. In his History of Dogma, Harnack identifies gnosis with an ‘‘intellectual, philosophic element,’’ namely, some sort of intellectual intuition of the divine.117 When Harnack calls something ‘‘philosophical,’’ it is hardly a word of praise. Rather, it reduces religion to the categories of Hellenistic philosophy. We have seen Heidegger echo this Harnackian gesture in his reading of Paul. Marcion cannot be numbered among the Gnostics because he places the entire emphasis on faith and not on any form of gnosis. Harnack writes: ‘‘It was Marcion’s purpose therefore to give all value to faith alone, to make it dependent on its own convincing power, and avoid all philosophic paraphrase and argument.’’118 The consequence of this ontological dualism is dramatic: the alien God, being separate from the God of this world, frees human beings from the creator and his creation. For Marcion, as Harnack writes, ‘‘The God of the Jews, together with all his book, the Old Testament, had to become the actual enemy.’’119 Marcion refused the syncretism of Old and New Testaments and all allegorical forms of interpretation that understand the latter as the fulfillment of the former. Allegorically understood—and this is the core of Marcion’s critique of the Apostolic Fathers like Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch—Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism.120 By contrast, the two testaments need to be rigorously separated. This is what Marcion did in the very first attempt, allegedly completed around 144, to produce an authentic edition of the Old and New Testaments. The former was included in its entirety and treated as historical fact. The New Testament included some expurgated versions of Paul’s epistles and one gospel, that of Luke. Marcion writes, ‘‘One must not allegorize the Scripture.’’121 For Marcion, the Christianity of the Apostolic Fathers was a Jewish Christianity, which is, of course, the criticism that Paul levels at Peter and the Jerusalem Church. Emergent Christianity had, in Marcion’s eyes, poured the new wine into old wineskins and lost the radicality of the Gospel by seeing it continually in the rear-view mirror of the Old Testament. The formation of the Christian biblical canon is a direct response to the text that Marcion created and to that extent is directly due to his alleged heresy. This is why the very life of the emergent Catholic

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Church depended on showing the concordance between the Old and New Testaments— hence the centrality of allegorical interpretation. There is a Marcionite saying, ‘‘One work is sufficient for our God; he has delivered man by his supreme and most excellent goodness, which is preferable to the creation of all the locusts.’’122 Once the thread connecting creation to redemption has been cut, the task of the Christian is no longer to love creation but to separate oneself from it as radically as possible. The world is the prison cell of the creator God and it is full of vermin, locusts, and mosquitoes. There is a story of a ninety-year-old Marcionite who washed himself in the morning in his own saliva, in order to have nothing to do with the works of the evil creator God.123 In order to loosen the hold that the creator has upon us through the body, Marcion advocated a severe ascetic ethic that forbade all marriage and sexual intercourse among his believers following baptism. In Harnack’s words, for Marcion marriage was ‘‘filthy’’ and ‘‘shameful.’’124 This is simply the radicalization of Paul when he says that because ‘‘form of this world is passing away,’’ those who have wives should ‘‘act if it they had none,’’ and adds that ‘‘He who marries does well,’’ but, ‘‘He who refrains from marriage will do better’’(1 Cor. 7:29, 31, 38). Marriage, sex, and the whole business of the body are mere fleshly distractions from the urgency of the spiritual task at hand. Because ‘‘The appointed time has grown very short’’(1 Cor. 7:29), the little time that remains should not be wasted in anything that draws the spirit back to the flesh of creation. Taubes writes of Marcionism, ‘‘It’s a church with a radical mission that can’t rest on its laurels as a people’s church. . . . It’s a church that practices, or executes, the end of the world.’’125 The essence of Marcionism is constant activism: if followers are not permitted to reproduce, then the growth of the church can only be based on the continual winning of new converts. Harnack—and this is the implicit agenda of his book—sees Marcion as a secondcentury Luther, a powerful intellect possessed of a prodigious reforming zeal. Marcion was the first Protestant. Cutting the bond between philosophical dogma and the religious experience of faith, he accused the existing church of heresy. In Marcion’s eyes, Paulinism represented a great revolution that had, already at the beginning of the second century, been betrayed and required reformation. The core of this reformation consisted in asserting the radicality of the Pauline distinction between law and faith and asserting that grace alone was the purest essence of the gospel. Taubes thinks that Marcion’s adoption of dualism is an error, but an ‘‘ingenious’’ one that is consistent with a certain ambivalence in Paul in conceiving the relation between creation and redemption.126 For Harnack—to adapt Hegel’s dying words—Marcion is the only one who understood Paul, and he misunderstood him. But the conclusion that Harnack wants to draw from his study of Marcion is dramatic: the rejection of the Old Testament. For Protestantism, Harnack insists, the Old Testament is ‘‘the consequence of a religious and ecclesiastical crippling.’’127 Harnack wants to defend a radical fideism, where Christianity is nothing but faith in God’s revelation in Christ.

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Odd it might sound, I think Agamben’s reading of Paul is crypto-Marcionite in its emphasis on a radically antinomian conception of faith. In the ‘‘Fifth Day’’ of his interpretation of Paul, for example, Agamben focuses on the verb katargeo, which he wants to translate as ‘‘to render inoperative or inactive’’ or, most revealingly, ‘‘to suspend,’’ which recalls our discussion above of iusticium.128 Agamben implicitly links katargeo to the state of exception in Schmitt, where the sovereign is he who suspends the operation of the law. The messianic is characterized by Agamben as a lawlessness that, in a sovereign political act, suspends the legality and legitimacy of both Rome and Jerusalem. Agamben backs this up with a particularly willful reading of the idea of the figure of anomos or lawlessness in Second Thessalonians.129 To my mind, it is more than simply arguable that Paul’s reference to the ‘‘mystery of lawlessness’’ refers back to the ‘‘son of perdition,’’ the AntiChrist, who will appear prior to the parousia of the Messiah (2 Thess. 2:3–7). But Agamben wants to identify lawlessness with the messianic in order to radicalize the distinction between law and life, which is a Benjaminian theme one can find throughout his writings: if law is violence and the history of law is the history of such violence, which has led to the present situation of what Agamben calls ‘‘global civil war,’’ then the messianic occurs as the revolutionary suspension of law.130 There are moments when Agamben seems to want to push Benjamin’s messianism toward a radical dualism of, on the one hand, the profane order of the created world and, on the other hand, the messianic order of redemption. As we saw above, Agamben writes of ‘‘law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law.’’131 But this is Marcion, not Paul. Badiou gives a brief but compelling discussion of Marcion in his book on Paul. Although Badiou insists that Marcion’s ontological dualism is ‘‘an instance of manipulation’’ and cannot be based on any consistent reading of Paul, he nonetheless recognizes that ‘‘By pushing a little, one could arrive at Marcion’s conception: the new gospel is an absolute beginning.’’132 But isn’t Badiou’s position precisely that of Marcion? In opposition to Pascal’s Old Testament reliance on ‘‘prophecies, which are solid and palpable proofs,’’ Badiou asserts that ‘‘There is no proof of the event; nor is the event a proof.’’133 For Paul, ‘‘there is only faith,’’ and Badiou’s basic claim is that fidelity to the event is what breaks with the order of being. Badiou continues: ‘‘For Paul, the event has not come to prove something; it is pure beginning.’’134 But what is this ‘‘pure beginning’’ but the ‘‘absolute beginning’’ that Badiou attributes to Marcion? Might we not conclude that Badiou’s ontological dualism of being and the event, where the latter is always described as the absolutely new and where Badiou sees his project as the attempt to conceptualize novelty, is a Marcionite radicalization of Paul? In his insistence on the Pauline figure of Christ as the experience of an event that provokes subjective fidelity, is there not an essential disavowal of law and the ineluctable character of the facticity of being in the world? There is also something Marcionite in Heidegger’s reading of Paul. Tertullian famously lambasted Marcion for providing no proof for his views. But that is precisely

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Marcion’s point: to avoid all reliance on Old Testament prophecy, philosophical argument, theological conceptualization or even gnosis. Christianity must be based on faith alone. In a marginal note to his lecture course on Paul, Heidegger suggestively writes that proof (Beweis) lies ‘‘Not in having-had insight [im Eingesehen-haben]; rather, the proclamation is ‘showing’ [apodeixis] of the ‘spirit,’ ‘force’ [Kraft].’’135 That is, the proof of faith lies only in the showing of the spirit in a proclamation that is a kind of force or power. To demand a proof for faith is to misunderstand faith’s very nature. As I suggested above, there is an ultra-Protestantism at work in Heidegger’s reading of Paul, which is crypto-Harnackian in its refusal of the influence of Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic philosophy and its attempt to recover an Urchristentum against the dogmatic system of Catholicism. However, although Heidegger wants to affirm what I have identified as a messianic experience of faith as enactment in Paul, this has to be distinguished from Agamben’s more radical antinomianism. As we have seen, authenticity for Heidegger culminates in an experience of kairos, but it consists in nothing but seeing inauthentic, fallen everyday life in the world in a different light. Heidegger does not believe in the possibility of a radical faith that would absolutely break with the world. Law and life always remain in a relation of modification (Modifikation)—in many ways the key concept in Being and Time.136 The proclamation of faith always moves within the gravity of the inauthentic everydayness against which it pulls. The ‘‘nothing’’ of projection only projects from the ‘‘nothing’’ of a thrown basis that cannot be thrown off—the law of facticity is inexorable. There is an undeniable lure to Marcionism. Its ontological dualism and its separation of creation from redemption allows us to attribute all that is wrong with the world (locusts, mosquitoes, etc.) to the activity of the bad deity, rather than blaming ourselves through the standard Christian narrative of the fall, death, and original sin. The idea that religion consists in faith alone, a subjective feature that is not based in any gnosis or intellectual intuition and for which there can be no proof, has an undeniable power. It is the power of radical novelty, of an absolute or pure beginning. On the one hand, it fosters a conception of faith as a testing self-responsibility, while, on the other hand, holding out the possibility that we might be entirely remade, renewed, and redeemed: born again. Yet Marcionism has to be refused. Its dualism leads to a rejection of the world and a conception of religion as a retreat from creation. At its most extreme, it encourages a politics of secession from a terminally corrupt world, of the kind that we saw above in variants of mystical anarchism, the heresy of the Free Spirit and the neo-insurrectionism of the Invisible Committee. Marcionism becomes a theology of alien abduction. As Harnack writes—half-longingly—in the final pages of his book, Marcion, ‘‘Calls us, not out of an alien existence in which we have gone astray and into our true home, but out of the dreadful homeland to which we belong into a blessed alien land.’’137 Much as we might sometimes desire it—and this desire fills so much of our cultural void, from science fiction to Hollywood’s constant obsession with aliens which finds its most consummate

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ideological expression in James Cameron’s Avatar from 2009—it is precisely the desire for a blessed alien land that has to be rejected.

Faith and Law For Paul, we don’t escape from the law. This is why Paul’s Jewishness is essential. If the law was not fully within me, as the awareness of my fallenness and consciousness of sin, then faith as the overcoming of the law would mean nothing. If, with Marcion and Harnack, we throw out the Old Testament, then we attempt to throw away our thrownness and imagine that we can distance ourselves from the constitutive flaw of the law, from our ontological defectiveness. If we throw out the Old Testament, then we imagine ourselves perfected, without stain or sin. If we were ever to attain such a state, faith would mean nothing. Faith is only possible as the counter-movement to law, and the two terms of the movement exist in a permanent dialectic. There is no absolute beginning, and the idea of life without a relation to law is a puristic and slightly puerile dream. This, I think, is what Paul shows in the sinuous complexity of Romans 7 and 8. The question in Romans 7 is the nature of the relation between the law and sin. Paul writes, ‘‘If it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin’’(Rom. 7:7). Paul gives the example of coveting, namely, that we would never have known what it is to partake in the sin of coveting if the law had not said, ‘‘Thou shalt not covet’’ (Rom. 7:7). There is only sin in relation to the law, and without the law, ‘‘sin lies dead.’’ Paul goes on, ‘‘I was once alive apart from the law,’’ namely, there was a time prior to the law when human beings lived in paradise without sin (Rom. 7:9). ‘‘But when the commandment came,’’ namely the prohibition not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, we erred and fell. As Paul puts it, ‘‘sin revived and I died’’ (Rom. 7:9). Therefore, the very commandment that promised life proved to bring death. But is that to say—and this is where things begin to get nicely tangled—that the law, which is holy and by definition good, as it comes from God, brings death? ‘‘By no means!’’ Paul adds. It is, rather, that the law reveals negatively the sinfulness of sin, in order that ‘‘sin might be shown to be sin’’ and ‘‘become sinful beyond measure’’ (Rom. 7:12). For—and here we confront the extent of the antithesis between flesh and spirit—’’the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin’’ (Rom. 7:14). This dialectic between law and sin has the dramatic consequence that ‘‘I do not understand my own actions’’ (Rom. 7:15). That is, I do not do the thing that I want, namely to follow the law. Rather, I do the thing that I hate, namely, sin. But if I do not do the thing that I want, but do the thing that I hate, then what can we say of this ‘‘I’’? How might we characterize such a self? Such a self is a ‘‘dividual,’’ radically divided over against itself in relation to the law. Sin is the effect of the law and my being is split between the law and sin. As Paul puts it, at his oxymoronic best, ‘‘For I do not do the

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good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’’ (Rom. 7:19). That part of the self that does what I do not want is attributed to sin, ‘‘It is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me’’ (Rom. 7:17). The self is here radically divided between flesh and spirit. On the one hand, there is ‘‘my delight in the law of God,’’ which belongs to my ‘‘inmost self’’ (Rom. 7:22). But on the other hand, ‘‘I see another law at war with the law of my mind’’ (Rom. 7:23). This outermost self ‘‘dwells in my members’’ (Rom. 7:23). But inmost and outermost are not two selves, but two halves of the same self, which is divided against itself. Paul exclaims, Talaiporos ego anthropos, ‘‘Wretched man that I am!’’ (Rom. 7:24). The dialectic of law and sin is fatal, and it divides the self from itself. How, then, can this dialectic be broken? Or, as Paul puts it, ‘‘Who will deliver me from this body of death?’’ (Rom. 7:24). The answer, of course, is ‘‘Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!’’ (Rom. 7:25). But what does that mean? Of course, what is stake here is salvation through grace, which is precisely what cannot be willed by the self. The self, by itself, cannot be delivered from the body of death and the fatal dialectic of law and sin. It is only through God’s sending his son in the likeness of the flesh, and therefore in the likeness of sin and death, that sin and death can be overcome. But—and this is crucial—it is not a question, for Paul, of an Agambenian anomos, of lawlessness against law. Rather, what is at stake is ‘‘the law of the Spirit [nomos tou Pneumatos]’’ (Rom. 8:2). It is the law of the Spirit that can set me free from ‘‘the law of sin and death’’ (Rom. 8:2). It is, therefore, a question of law against law. I think this is what Paul means when he writes later in Romans of love as the fulfillment of the law (Rom. 13:10). Fulfillment does not mean negation of the law, but its completion in the single commandment: ‘‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’’ (Rom. 13:9). Fulfillment (pleroma) means filling up: it is a complement, not a replacement; a supplement, not a replacement.138 The key thought here is that redemption is not something that can be willed: ‘‘You are not your own.’’ All that can be willed is the dialectic of law and sin. Redemption exceeds the limit of human potentiality and renders us impotent. The appearance of the law of the Spirit in the person of Jesus is the unwilled possibility of redemption, the possibility that, with the resurrection of Christ, we receive ‘‘the spirit of sonship’’ and might become ‘‘fellow heirs with Christ’’ (Rom. 8:15). If we suffer with Christ, Paul insists, then ‘‘we may also be glorified with him’’ (Rom. 8:16). What is essential here is the subjunctive mood of Paul’s discourse: we may be glorified with Christ. The realization of this possibility is something we may hope for and patiently await. But there is no certainty here. Otherwise hope would not be hope. This is the deep logic of groaning in Paul: We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this

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hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Rom. 8:22–24) Corrupted by the fall but saved by the resurrection, creation groans in travail. That is, both human nature and external nature are pregnant and undergoing the pangs of childbirth. This is Paul’s understanding of the present time: it is pregnant with the possibility of redemption, and this gives us reason to hope. But hope requires patience and awaiting. This, I think, is the meaning of the phrase ‘‘remain in this condition in which you were called.’’ At the present moment, we patiently await, ‘‘For the night is far gone, the day is at hand’’(Rom. 13:12). We look at all things ho¯s me¯, as if they were not, in a messianic light. Finally, this is why the seduction of Marcion has to be refused and why contemporary crypto-Marcionist renderings of Paul are pernicious. If law and sin were not within me, then freedom would mean nothing. The self is broken, impotent, and wretched, but its wretchedness is its greatness: we know that we are broken.139 Furthermore, I can only hold out the hope for being put back together, the hope for ‘‘what we do not see,’’ if I know I am broken. In other words, the Christian can only be Christian if he knows him or herself to be Jewish, at least on his father’s side. On Paul’s picture, the human condition is constitutively torn between faith and law or love and sin, and it is only in the strife that divides us that we are defined. Only a being who is constitutively impotent is capable of receiving that over which it has no power: love. As I’ve tried to show in this chapter, this is one way—the most persuasive, in my view—of thinking the relation in Heidegger between the authentic and the inauthentic, between the kairos of the moment of vision and the slide back into falling. It gives us, I think, a powerful picture of conscience, that most enigmatic aspect of what it means to be human: both our power and our constitutive powerlessness.

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Paul the Apostle Proclamation and Argumentation

Paul Ricoeur

What is my place in relation to recent readings of Paul? I shall begin by stating my references and my preferences. My references. First of all, an old, precocious acquaintance with the Bible—‘‘For a long time I curled up with it early.’’ Next, the bombshell of Karl Barth’s commentary on the letter to the Romans, followed by Rudolf Bultmann’s bomb-clearing operation, then my ongoing reading of other exegetes.1 And beyond this, my reading of texts from philosophically trained commentators.2 Now, my preferences. Who am I? Paul’s homonym? ‘‘Untimely born’’ (1 Cor. 15:8), like him? Be that as it may, what I want to explore, in line with my own research in (medical and legal) hermeneutics, is the tie between proclamation and argumentation, starting from the relation between interpretation and argumentation. First I shall mark out the fault lines that run through the letters in question (Romans, Galatians, Corinthians, etc.) under the rubric of the central proclamation of the resurrected Christ; then I shall look in the aporetic character of Paul’s discourse for reasons for the transition from the declarative to the argumentative moments in these letters. Following this, I shall attempt to untangle the multiple lines of reinterpretation in terms of their argumentative strategy—as I go, I shall also detail my discoveries, my crosschecking, my reservations, my worries, and my admiration for what I found. I shall conclude with a brief discussion of the place of these letters in the canon of the New Testament by posing the question of a canon within the canon. Proclamation and Rupture Let me begin by recalling the core of the Pauline message: the proclamation of the resurrection of the crucified Christ. Exegetes and philosophical readers agree about the declarative, proclamatory, ‘‘kerygmatic’’

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aspect (as one says) of the Pauline message, setting aside for the moment the important displacement Agamben makes from the ‘‘evental’’ character of the resurrection to the structural one, which is brought about by the ‘‘messianic’’ designation (whereby Christos signifies ‘‘Messiah’’). This change in accent will govern the aporetic transition of my own reflections. There is a more nuanced agreement among these readers when it comes to the abrupt breaks that follow from this kerygmatic aspect, summed up by the polar opposition between law and faith. With Jacob Taubes and Alain Badiou, I will take this idea of a break to constitute a founding moment, whereas Stanislaus Breton takes it as certainly an important moment, but a derivative one in relation to what I shall call Paul’s allegorical strategy. Still, all these authors emphasize the assertive, vehement, even exhilarating aspect of the proclamation that Jesus the Christ died and was resurrected for our salvation. Yet whatever we may say about the addressee or beneficiary of this proclamation, Badiou wants to make it the illustration of a pure, unfounded, yet founding event, even while abstracting from its contents, which he takes to be a fable. Fable or not, what is important is what the apostle believes, that he is the apostle of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles. Gu¨nther Bornkamm agrees in that he insists that Paul’s theology is not a repetition of Jesus’ preaching about the coming of the Kingdom of God: ‘‘Jesus Christ himself and the salvation based on and made available through his death on the cross, his resurrection and his exaltation as Lord form the subject of Paul’s proclamation.’’3 There is no distance, therefore, between the event of proclamation and the proclaimed meaning. We cannot overemphasize how different this is from Jesus’ own preaching: ‘‘Nowhere does he make the slightest effort to expound the teaching of the historical Jesus. Nowhere does he speak of the rabbi from Nazareth, the prophet and miracle-worker who ate with tax collectors and sinners, of his Sermon on the Mount, his parables of the kingdom of God and his encounters with Pharisees and scribes. His letters do not even mention the Lord’s Prayer.’’4 Paul did not know Jesus, he was not one of the Twelve; he was directly designated by the Christ as his apostle, by the Christ who threw him to the ground on the road to Damascus. When the time comes, we shall return to the place of this autobiographical strategy among the strategies of argumentation.5 For Paul, Bornkamm continues, Jesus is not the one who announces but rather the one announced: ‘‘The gospel of the primitive church (the kerygma) was bound to change and make Jesus himself its subject matter.’’6 The introit to Romans and Galatians should be read in this way. To preach is not to recount, but to proclaim (2 Cor. 5:20). And to proclaim is to say what is revealed: ‘‘For in it the righteousness of God is revealed [apokolyptetai]’’ (Rom. 1:17). Bornkamm notes that the apocalyptic tone of this foundation comes with power: ‘‘it is the power of God for salvation to everyone’’ (Rom. 1:16). Having recalled this—the adherence of the event of the act of preaching to the content preached—the main line of rupture unfolds, imposed by both the abrupt and the exclusive character of justification by faith alone.7 All talk about a break follows from this sola fide emphasis. In this respect, Badiou constructs a structural model based on three

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types of discourse, plus a fourth that comes near to yet remains apart from them. These three types of discourse are those of the Greek, the Jew, and the Christian. The discourse that stands outside every norm is that of the visionary, the mystic.8 Greek discourse is that of philosophy, of wisdom (and not that of a people); Jewish discourse is that of election and being an exception, along with its signs (and no longer that of a people): ‘‘Greek discourse bases itself on the cosmic order so as to adjust itself to it, while Jewish discourse bases itself on the exception to this order so as to turn divine transcendence into a sign.’’9 These are two discourses of mastery, says Badiou—of totality on the one hand, of the literal tradition on the other—but owing to their antithesis they are not adequate to the universal intent upon which Badiou is going to focus his own discourse: ‘‘Neither Greek, nor Jew, and so on.’’ We shall return to this when we seek to tie together the pure event and the absolute universal along the ridgeline of the strategy of argumentation. For the moment, let us just say that Christian discourse equals new discourse and, in this sense, a discourse without mastery of either the world or tradition. The resurrection, notes Badiou, who admires the pure event beyond the fable, ‘‘is not, in Paul’s own eyes, of the order of fact, falsifiable or demonstrable. It is pure event, opening of an epoch, transformation of the relations between the possible and the impossible.’’10 The possible? That ‘‘we can vanquish death’’; the apostle is the one ‘‘who names this possibility. . . . His discourse is one of pure fidelity to the possibility opened by the event.’’11 Let us grant this. Later, I shall modulate the effect of rupture by speaking of the argumentative strategy and, prior to this, of the aporetic jumble at work here. But let us for the time being stay at the fault line: ‘‘This deadlock is folly [mo¯ria] for Greek discourse, which is a discourse of reason, and it is a scandal [skandalon] for Jewish discourse, which insists on a sign of divine power and sees in Christ nothing but weakness, abjection, and contemptible peripeteia.’’12 An antiphilosophy, therefore, and also an antiheritage. Another wisdom joined with power, power joined with weakness. Pure beginning. All right, but is this the quid of the theme of the fulfillment of the prophecies to which we must first come before referring to the tightening of the argumentation about subjectivity instituted by the pure event? If there is, as I am going to attempt to show, a conjunction between proclamation and argumentation, it is prior to any aporetic embarrassment, because the fault line running across the vast face of the three discourses in the first letter to the Corinthians narrows with the Jewish discourse in the letters to the Galatians and the Romans. (Badiou, pressing on to tie the pure event to the unlimited universal, does not take this narrowing into account.) This narrowing, which we must now consider, is imposed by the content of the message, which stands over against its ‘‘evental’’ aspect—I mean, the antithesis between faith in the resurrection and confidence in works, the works of the law: in short, with the confrontation faith versus law. It is surely this content of the ‘‘objectal’’ message that is at issue, if we are going to speak that way. To announce is to denounce.

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In speaking of a rupture, one must say what it is one breaks with. Bornkamm, being a good Lutheran, finds no difficulty in his thematic reconstitution of the well-known doctrine of justification by faith. To be justified means being ‘‘held to be’’ righteous. Still, what we need to hold onto here in the idea of ‘‘topics of discourse’’ (Badiou) is the idea that we cannot limit the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith to a polemic dependent on its circumstances. It does not have to do with a quarrel with one party, the historic Pharisees, if we were to put it that way. In this sense, Paul’s immense respect for what he rejects, the sadness and pain he feels (which we shall speak of more below with regard to his autobiographical strategy) prevents him from in any way condemning a designated group, unlike the treatment of the Jews in the gospels, especially in Matthew. At issue is the Torah, both as discourse and as a form of life (as we might put it, thinking of Wittgenstein when he speaks of language games). The sentence ‘‘the one who is righteous will live by faith’’ (Rom. 1:17) has as its precise contrary ‘‘the law does not bring life but death.’’ A negative universality—every sinner, all the dead—precedes any kind of positive universalization of a foundational type. First comes the ‘‘all’’ of perdition, Jews as much as Gentiles. This is the first ‘‘all’’—a negative one. In this regard, we cannot emphasize enough how much this theological—or better, christological—polemic stands apart from any anti-Semitism. It is not a question of human beings, of groups, but of a lofty tradition, that of the Pharisees, to be sure, but in the sense of one of the grandeurs d’e´tablissement Pascal speaks of in his discourse on the three orders of greatness. The law? To free up, so to speak, the thematic of the law from being simply taken for granted, we can risk, with Taubes, extending ‘‘Torah,’’ translated into Greek as nomos, to include the normative credo dominant in the Hellenistic world.13 In this way, Taubes claims that the Pauline message is fundamentally political, inasmuch as the hypostasis of nomos would have created a feeble consensus with the imperial cult. Paul, he says, breaks with this consensus: ‘‘It isn’t nomos but rather the one who was nailed to the cross by nomos who is the imperator. . . . Sure, Paul is also universal, but by virtue of the ‘eye of the needle’ of the crucified one, which means: transvaluation of all the values of this world.’’14 The break on the part of a diaspora Jew, an ancient zealot for the law, is immense, amounting—I cite Taubes—to his being ‘‘the genius of the transvaluation of values.’’15 I will start from this, Taubes continues: ‘‘In the various waves in which it is set up in Romans—with 1:18, the orge¯ theou, there begins a great fugue, and then 5 and 7, and it ends in the great jubilation in chapter 8.’’16 Later I shall refer to the ‘‘fugue’’ in Romans 9–11, which structures an argumentative discourse of a peculiar type. But first we must follow our fault line to its end, led by the idea that the law is the discourse of a certain ‘‘form of life’’ named ‘‘works’’—where this work is that of death and not of life. The sequence law-work-death stands in opposition to that of faith-righteousness-life.

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Before giving a personal twist to this battle between giants, which will turn it into an existential experience, as we shall see under the heading of the autobiographical strategy, we need to preserve its suprapersonal dimension. It is ‘‘grandeurs’’ that confront one another—subjective ones to be sure (Badiou speaks of a ‘‘division of the subject’’) but not personal ones in the sense of an unsubstitutable, even incommunicable individuality. They are subjective configurations in the sense of forms of life stemming directly from powerful ideal types: law, works, sin, death. It is by being placed in this sequence that the law is affected by a radical change of sign. For the tradition, the law teaches (in the sense of the word Torah), and it is through its teaching and the enlightenment study of it brings that it ‘‘restrained sin, saved a man from it, and indicated the way to what was good.’’17 Paul’s judgment is quite different. The law unmasks and awakens covetousness and in this way reveals sin, which does not come down to a moral fault but rather constitutes a power capable of transforming God’s commandment, which ought to stand against it, into an instrument that allows evil to affirm itself. This is why it leads to death. We are well beyond any economy of retribution in the sense of fixed penalties. When covetousness takes over from the commandment, instead of giving life, the commandment leads to death. This happened ‘‘when the commandment came. . . . For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me’’ (Rom. 7:9–11). As Bornkamm says, ‘‘In terms that might almost have been taken from myth, Paul here speaks of a duel in which only the one party can come out alive.’’18 We need to take seriously the mode of expression here: one ‘‘that might almost have been taken from myth’’ (and not one that is personal in the usual sense of this term). We are well beyond any psychologizing of temptation. There is subjectivity, yes, but as stemming from a hyperindividual contest that allows us to refer to ‘‘everybody’’—every sinner. In turn, this mythological, personified style draws from a whole ring of things, with ‘‘spirit’’ and ‘‘flesh’’ coming first, that we must also guard against psychologizing or existentializing. The problem of how to make this anthropological and, if I may put it this way, ontological dimension fit with the personal confession on the autobiographical level is a legitimate one. The status of chapter 7 of Romans depends on it. Flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma) go together, as do death (thanatos) and life (zoe¯). Romans 8:6 places them together in a square: ‘‘To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life.’’ What does it mean ‘‘to set the mind on [phrone¯ma]’’? We will discover this kind of question again when we examine the aporetic aspect of Paul’s discourse. Let us say, for the moment, that we do not have here a reflective (speculative) kind of thinking, but rather one that aims at what, following Bornkamm, we have called a mythological, personified style. Concerning this idea of setting the mind on, thinking of it as an ‘‘uprising,’’ Badiou says: ‘‘What constitutes an event in Christ is exclusively the Resurrection, that anastasis nekro¯n that should be translated as the raising up of the dead, their uprising, which is the uprising of life.’’19 The Platonizing traditions of reading have disfigured this dramaturgy. Everything hangs on the word flesh; the Pauline sarx finds itself reabsorbed

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into the Platonic so¯ma-sema (the body as tomb), to the benefit of the puritanical versions of the enemies of sex. Surely this disgraceful confusion is at issue, right-thinking people co-opting Paul just as they did and continue to do the Song of Songs. Flesh is the form of life governed by the pair law and works. When it is named ‘‘concupiscence,’’ this is not as a momentary transgression but as a regime where the self is caught up in fascination with itself. As Badiou rightly says, it is a question of two paths: ‘‘It is of the essence of the Christian subject to be divided, through its fidelity to the Christ-event, into two paths that affect every subject in thought.’’20 Broken in two, fallen. When this happens to a subject and constitutes it as a subject, it is what makes possible, as I shall say below, both the existential experience offered to a life-narrative and the universalization of the ‘‘neither Greek nor Jew’’ so valued by Badiou. This ideal-typical dimension is what makes the contest that crucifies the subject lend itself to ‘‘topics of discourse’’: Greek discourse, Jewish discourse, Christian discourse, and at their edge, mystical discourse. A more serious misunderstanding is put forward by Nietzsche, who accuses Paul of slandering life. Here Badiou courageously acts as Paul’s advocate: ‘‘For Paul, the Resurrection is that on the basis of which life’s center of gravity resides in life, whereas previously, being situated in the Law, it organized life’s subsumption by death.’’21 I will pass over the explanation Badiou gives for why Nietzsche falsifies Paul, his hatred of universalization to the benefit of ‘‘the most unbridled racial communitarianism.’’22 I do want to suggest, in passing, that Paul’s celebration of life brings him in an unexpected way close to John, who has been restored to philosophy by Michel Henry, and to the Enlightenment conception of the word of justification reaching us from the ‘‘outside.’’ The crossroad of life is common to Paul and John: ‘‘whereas previously, being situated in the law, it organized life’s subsumption by death.’’23 Another, perhaps more subtle misunderstanding is Hegelian, namely, the complete dialecticalization of the passage from death to life, under the heading of the Good Friday of the Absolute. Here again, Badiou is correct to begin his analysis by emphasizing what he calls ‘‘the anti-dialectic of death and the resurrection.’’24 There is no speculative capturing of the Christ event. Some reservation needs to be made here for the aporias engendered by this abrupt treatment of the opposition between faith and law, death and resurrection, and the paradoxes that respond to them, as I shall say in the next section. The moment has come to introduce the word grace, which must be added to the list of great things proclaimed. Grace corresponds to works as a job to be done, one that is not gratuitous and not yet gracious. To this gets added, in the economic order, the theme of superabundance, opposed to the equivalence that brings death: where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. A split internal to the theme of justice gets stated here: justice that is grace, justice that makes us just, that ‘‘justifies,’’ over against justice according to the law, the justice of works, the justice that equalizes. A division internal to these new

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concepts is indicated here, which we shall have to consider in the next section under Agamben’s guidance. But we have not finished with the play of synonyms. The fire of the spirit is opposed to the water of drowning, for example, and that strange burial in water repeated as a rite of passage in baptism by immersion: ‘‘we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so too we might walk in the newness of life’’ (Rom. 6:4). The sea before creation, the one crossed in the miraculous passage at the Reed Sea—the one we call the Red Sea—is symbolically conquered anew. Ought we not to add another foundational metaphor, that of the stone and its hardness, which the apostle compares to the letter (gramma), another antithesis to the spirit? This gives the odd composite figure of letters chiseled on stone tablets.25 Badiou speaks in this regard of the deadly immobility of the law, that ‘‘ministry of death.’’ It all comes down to ‘‘extraction from the moral site’’ and the many variants of ek nekro¯n, ‘‘out from the dead,’’ signified by the resurrection, its sudden appearance, its ‘‘uplifting,’’ if I may put it that way.26

The Aporetic Transition Having come to the point of counterbalancing this vehement moment—which is really doubly vehement, through the proclamation of faith and the rupture with wisdom and the law—with a moment I will risk calling an argumentative one, I propose looking in the aporetic jumble of the leading notions of the ‘‘kerygmatic’’ discourse for reasons that strengthen this direct and to-the-point discourse through developments that can almost be called rabbinical. I owe this idea of an aporetic transition between proclamation and argumentation in the Pauline epistles to Agamben’s vigorous The Time That Remains. For this subtle reader, it is not at all a question of concessions to the guardians of paradox, but rather of results that emerge from a very close reading of the text of the epistles in terms of their concepts, syntax, and prosody. This immense respect for the text is intended to serve a reading hypothesis that shifts the axis of interpretation from the theme of resurrection as pure event to that of messianism as the structure of history over the long term. It is a question, we are told straightaway, of restoring ‘‘Paul’s letters to the status of the fundamental messianic text for the Western tradition.’’27 In this sense, Jesus crucified and resurrected is indeed a question of the Messiah. What is announced, through the features of the event, is a coming, the coming of the Messiah. Yet, by accentuating the messianic title, Agamben gives to the event of his coming the dimension of a full actualization of a quest we can call hyperevental. The word Messiah has always signified something, and still does today, beyond Christian

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preaching, as in Kafka and Benjamin, if we leap in one bound from one extremity to the other in the course of an unruly theme. In this, Agamben extends Taubes, whom he praises fervently at the beginning of his book, Taubes, who gave the title ‘‘Messianic Logic’’ to the part of his study devoted to the place of Paul in ‘‘Jewish religious history,’’ who did not hesitate to compare Paul’s appearance in Judaism to that of the seventeenthcentury Sabbatianism discussed by Gershom Scholem in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and who added to the subtitle of his Political Theology of Paul the names of Schmitt, Benjamin, Nietzsche, and Freud. What is at issue, says Agamben, is ‘‘a messianic institution,’’ or rather, the founding of ‘‘a messianic community.’’28 This important dimension of the Christ event—which will be rebaptized ‘‘messianic’’—has been covered over by treating the Greek term christos as a quasi–proper name, bracketed with that of Jesus. For Christian memory, we say Jesus Christ (French even adds a hyphen: Jesus-Christ!) or Jesus the Christ. In this way, the work of forgetting, applied to the ‘‘originary messianic context’’29 and pursued without ill will, began covering over the messianic title of Jesus, even as regards his name. The restitution of this messianic designation can be read through a simple translation of the ten words that open the letter to the Romans, which Agamben proposes to read with no punctuation and in a single breath: ‘‘Paul called as slave of Jesus the Messiah separated as apostle for the announcement of God.’’ Agamben organizes the six days of his seminar on the basis of this sequence. An event is announced, to be sure, but a ‘‘messianic event,’’30 one that inaugurates ‘‘the new messianic condition,’’ whose temporal aspects Agamben undertakes to deploy on the basis of the expression ho nun kairos—‘‘the now time’’—which is also ‘‘the time that remains’’ (used as the title of his book). This regime is ‘‘a central event in Paul’s individual history, as it is for the history of humanity.’’31 The problematic of the universal, so dear to philosophical commentators, will thereby be reopened to questioning. Someone may ask: In what way does this messianic opening have anything to do with our problematic of proclamation and argumentation? It does so in that it fills the discourse with aporias and assures, on my reading, the transition from one mode of discourse to the other. These aporias, these paradoxes, which reach their height in the paired terms chronos kairos, are present starting with the way the apostle presents himself, the way in which he announces his name, or rather his surname, Paulos, the ‘‘small,’’ that is one of those ‘‘weak’’ things (1 Cor. 1:27). Next comes the word doulos, ‘‘slave,’’ another messianic reference. The open paradoxes begin with ‘‘called’’ (kletos): Is not everyone asked to ‘‘remain in the condition in which you were called’’ (1 Cor. 7:20)? The believer is not called to another condition, but to the transformation of the same estate from within. There is no reason, therefore, to oppose ‘‘religious vocation’’ (Ruf), with its note of ‘‘eschatological indifference,’’ to ‘‘worldly vocation’’ (Beruf), as Max Weber does in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The mutation is an inner one, as in the well-known paradox in 1 Corinthians 7:29–32: ‘‘I tell you, brothers, time is contracting itself. Remain therefore . . . those who weep as not weeping, those who are rejoicing as

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though they were not rejoicing . . . those using the world as not using it up.’’ Here is the syntactic core of the paradox that leads to the aporia: as . . . not (ho¯s me¯, quasi non). The reversal of meaning takes place between use and possession—use without using, that is, without abusing as masters do. And this reversal takes place on the level of time: ‘‘time contracted itself’’ (7:29) ‘‘for passing away is the present figure of the world’’ (7:31): ‘‘as though the ‘passage’ of time to come contracted itself’’—he will later say that ‘‘it recapitulates itself—in the time of now.’’ Starting from this ‘‘as not,’’ Agamben roams in the direction of Marx, Kafka, Heidegger, Adorno, and, above all, his favorite, Benjamin. I want to draw our attention to the argumentative strategies used in the aporias of the law. The word aphorismenos (‘‘separated’’), which the apostle applies to himself when he presents himself at the beginning of Romans, will lead us there. How can someone who has broken with his own class, the Pharisees, the advocates of separation, say ‘‘separated’’? He who elsewhere proclaims the destruction of the ‘‘wall of separation’’? We must reconsider the great separations opposing faith to law if we are to rediscover the new separations that run through the very idea of law. Let us bring together several texts: ‘‘Do we then deprive the law of value by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law’’ (Rom. 3:31; Agamben proposes a more interesting translation); but also Romans 7:23, ‘‘I see at war in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members’’; and Romans 10:4, ‘‘For Christ is the end of the law, so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes’’; and even stronger, ‘‘Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith’’ (Rom. 3:27). A key to reading these paradoxes, which torment Paul’s language, can be sought in the expression to ‘‘deprive the law of value.’’ Agamben lingers over the verb katargein, derived from the classic semantic family of power and act (energeia/dunamis). It is a question, he says, of ‘‘disactivating’’ the law, of ‘‘rendering it inoperative,’’ ‘‘depriving it of power.’’ This inner disarming of the law has to be placed alongside the ‘‘as not’’ referred to earlier: that those who weep be as those not weeping; those who use as those not using. What is more, Paul goes so far as to draw a line of division internal to every division across himself, a line comparable to the wellknown ‘‘cut of Apelles,’’ that impossible brushstroke capable of dividing in two, along all its length, the finest line. Otherwise, how could Paul say, ‘‘I am outside the law with those outside the law—me, who am not without a law of God, being under the law of Christ—so that I might win those outside the law’’ (1 Cor. 9:21)? Is this not an echo of the ‘‘as not’’ of those who weep not weeping? Obviously, one is never finished with the law. Agamben wants to push the paradox in order to help reconstruct the crazy logic of the ‘‘remainder’’ (according to Rom. 11:1–29): a remainder that will not be a quantity to subtract or add to the division between Jews and non-Jews, but the expression of a

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noncongruence between the very notions of part and whole that preside over the presumed clarity of the shares. (Paul echoes Amos, Isaiah, and Micah in the theme of the ‘‘remnant that will be saved.’’)32 I will come back to this universalizing argument. For the moment, I will stay with this ‘‘without the law, not without God’s law’’ (1 Cor. 9:21). Enough has been said so that we do not expect from this partition, this detotalization, anything other than a sharp universal claim, in the Greek manner of Breton and the modern one of Badiou. The plero¯ma (‘‘accomplishment’’) greeted from afar will be an overall recapitulation only if there remains . . . a remains . . .; at least in ‘‘the time that remains,’’ the ‘‘now time’’ (1 Cor. 9:15), which is also a ‘‘time for amends’’ (Eph. 5:16), the ‘‘time of the end’’ (1 Cor. 7:29). In drawing together the discourse about the basic opposition between faith and law, let us proceed following the line of the ‘‘as if not.’’ In the final word of the opening sequence of the letter to the Romans, ‘‘for the gospel of God,’’ we are confronted with the notion of ‘‘believe in’’—pistis. In pistis is summed up the ‘‘power,’’ the dunamis (Eph. 3:7) denied to the law. The preemptory tone of Romans 3:20 and 4:13 reaches its limit when we read: ‘‘Since no one will be judged before him by the practice of the law, the law gives only consciousness of sin,’’ and again, ‘‘In fact, it is not through the intermediary of the law that the promise made to Abraham or to his descendants to inherit the world comes about, but by the righteousness of faith.’’ And yet, we must oppose the resistance of the very word law to this enterprise of deactivation to which we see it submitted. ‘‘Do we then deprive the law of its value (making it inoperative)? By no means. We confer its value upon it’’ (Rom. 3:31). In order to resolve this aporia regarding the law, Agamben, faithful to his commitment to reading under the sign of messianism, proposes dissociating the promissory aspect of the law from its prescriptive—normative—one. What is thereby ‘‘suppressed’’ is ‘‘that law of precepts with its commandments (nomos to¯n entolo¯n)’’ (Eph. 2:15), elsewhere called the ‘‘law of works’’ (Rom. 3:27–28). If a secret dimension of the law were not preserved, why would Paul defend himself for being someone ‘‘outside God’s law,’’ anomos theou (1 Cor. 9:21)? We discover once again the katargein, the ‘‘disactivation,’’ to use an expression that occurs twenty-six times in Paul’s letters. What we must assume, therefore, is the ‘‘messianic inversion in the potential-act relation,’’33 the ‘‘messianic disactivation of the law.’’34 Is it not the great German and Hegelian adventure of Aufhebung that appears here, through Luther’s translation of katargein by Aufheben? And if we do not allow ourselves to be swept along toward the horizons of the problematic messianism of a Kafka or a Benjamin, can we fearlessly turn toward the side of the archaisms of a ‘‘pre-law,’’35 toward regions of meaning where we find a promise, an oath, a pact, a binding covenant? Does not Ephesians 2:12 speak of ‘‘covenants of promise’’?

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If so, we must not think that in calling on a law of grace, we have finished with all the paradoxes and aporias. Agamben fires off the following: ‘‘A Kafkaesque universe of grace is specifically present in Christian dogma, just as a Kafkaesque universe of law is present in Judaism.’’36

The Argumentative Strategies Focusing on the aporias arising from the reversals of meaning in Paul’s discourse brings us to the complex and often twisted arguments that balance the vehement moment characteristic of the proclamation of the gospel with an argumentative one, which confers an intelligibility that measures up to the reader’s expectations, and, if one may put it this way, the traces of dulled-down understanding that they contain. Such a way of articulating the relation between proclamation and argumentation in Paul’s letters was first suggested to me by a comparison between a similar way of stating things drawn from other spheres, for example, on the level of judicial and medical judgment, between the moment of interpretation and that of argumentation.37 Still, it was in reading Agamben that I formed the idea that the lines of argumentation I could disentangle in the text of the letters stood in close relation to the aporias of the law and, more precisely, to the paradoxes with which Paul replies to these aporias and prevents them from turning into ‘‘mortal questions,’’ as one contemporary philosopher likes to characterize the questions over which philosophy scratches its head. In this regard, the text of Paul’s letters offers an impressive interweaving of strategies of argumentation, stirred up by an astonishing Jewish polemicist from the first century of our era. 1. I shall begin with a strategy that consists in rewriting the history of the Hebraic tradition. I shall speak of it as a genealogical or, better, a generational strategy. We all know how much the Hebrews were concerned to situate themselves at every moment in the sequence of generations following a filiation that was both carnal and symbolic. Let me recall the famous ‘‘credo’’ of Deuteronomy 26:5–10, which Gerhard von Rad, the wellknown Old Testament exegete, took to be the core of the narrative theology of the Hebrews.38 It is the great narrative of the great memory of a people. Paul dares to displace the center of gravity of this narrative, centered on the figure of Moses, the prophet of the Law, to the benefit of Abraham, the prophet of faith, according to the Torah itself in Genesis 15:6—‘‘Abraham believed in Yahweh who counted him as righteous.’’ Paul places himself in this older lineage, which disconnects him from the Law: ‘‘What then do we say therefore about Abraham, our father according to the flesh? If Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about. But not as regards God! For what does the Scripture say: ‘Abraham believed in God and this was reckoned to him as righteousness’ ’’

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(Rom. 4:1–4), not in the sense that he was really or independently righteous owing to the fact that he believed, but in the sense that, as regards God, faith and righteousness are one and the same thing. Galatians 3:6 says the same thing: ‘‘Thus Abraham believed in God and this was reckoned to him as righteousness [with the same citation from Genesis 15]. Understand therefore, those who claim to follow the faith are the sons of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the pagans through faith, announced this good news to Abraham in advance. In you shall be blessed all the nations, be blessed. So those who claim to follow the faith shall be blessed along with Abraham the believer’’ (Gal. 3:6–9). Note the expression ‘‘understand therefore.’’ It appeals to an understanding of faith based on an argument drawn from scripture. To reinforce this argument, Abraham was reckoned to be righteous before he had been circumcised. Circumcision, as a sign, counts only as a ‘‘seal of the righteousness of faith’’ (Rom. 4:10–12). In this way, Abraham is the father of both the circumcised and the uncircumcised. What should we say, then, about the argument that starts in Galatians 3:15: that, according to a well-reasoned testament, Abraham’s line of descent has to do with just one and not many, namely, with the Christ? Outside the Law, but not outside a line of descent, or a heritage: ‘‘In fact, it was not through the intermediary of some law that the promise made to Abraham and his descendents to inherit the world acts, but by means of the righteousness of faith. For if the inheritance belongs to what stems from the Law, faith has no object and the promise no value’’ (Rom. 4:13–14). It is in this sense, taking everything into account, and despite everything, that ‘‘salvation comes from the Jews.’’ This long-term inheritance unfolds against the background of a break with the short-term one, a break that will be appropriated, internalized in the confession of the man divided within himself in Romans 7, to which we shall return below under the heading of the autobiographical strategy (we cannot overemphasize the plurality of strategies and their reciprocal conflicts). Therefore, a break, in the short term, filiation in the long term. Confronted with this type of argumentation, one is tempted to exclaim with Taubes, who cites a well-known Hellenist: all this doesn’t sound like Greek, but Yiddish! Agamben reinforces this: medieval Jews spoke Yiddish, just as the Jew Paul spoke Greek. Greek was his Yiddish. 2. This meeting point between break and filiation that makes all the difference for the second argumentative strategy, that of the allegorization of the figures of the old covenant. Breton makes this the centerpiece of Paul’s argument, with the effect—if not the design—of attenuating the shock of the break: faith versus Law. At the same time, this sets a limit to Lutheran radicalism, which the Maoist Badiou goes a step beyond, deliberately ignoring the hermeneutic technique that Breton assigns to the Greek side of Paul. But this is not really true as concerns the figures themselves, as I shall say below. Taubes rightly calls what gets put in place the great fugue of Romans 9–11. Besides Abraham, already named, Sarah, Rebecca, Isaac, Jacob, and Esau flash by, along with the

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well-known verse from Malachi 1:2–3 concerning the freedom of divine election, a verse about which Luther and Calvin had much to say: ‘‘I have loved Jacob and I have hated Esau’’ (Rom. 9:13). Marie Balmy, for her part, has courageously considered it in parallel to another such pairing: Abel and Cain. We should be thankful to Breton for opening his reading of Paul with a preliminary chapter titled ‘‘Hermeneutics and Allegory,’’ in which Paul is compared to Philo of Alexandria.39 Breton considers all the details, in particular the dialectic of time and eternity (based on Rom. 8:28–30), ending with a schema that, according to him, well illustrates the implied relationships in terms of a subtle ‘‘conceptual and linguistic network’’: ‘‘The conceptual network in which the pairs considered figure constitutes, it seems to me, the a priori for reading and for the context of thinking about an allegorical hermeneutics.’’40 It is a particular use of this system that brings into play an ‘‘allegorical narrative’’ such as we find, for example, in Acts 7:1–53, where the preaching of the deacon Stephen unrolls the ‘‘long narrative’’ that recapitulates the history of Israel, from Abraham to the prophets, passing through the mediation of Moses and the Law. We are not far from the famous exhortation, ‘‘Hear, O Israel’’ (Shema Israel) of Deuteronomy 6:4. There is the same pedagogy of an appeal to memory. Nor will we forget the ending, where, before being stoned, Stephen asks: ‘‘Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, the very one you have just betrayed and murdered’’ (Acts 7:52–53). Nor can we forget Paul’s unsuccessful speech on the Areopagus and his ill-fated reference to an ‘‘unknown god’’ (Acts 17:2–3). But whatever may be said about the Greek, the Hellenistic kinship of Pauline allegory works by adding one text to another and thus helping to establish a long-term memory. In this regard, the allegory of two ‘‘covenants,’’ the one with Hagar, the servant banished toward Arabia and servitude, the other with Sarah, the free woman who orients our gaze toward the promise, has a strategic place in Paul’s argument (see Gal. 4:21–31). In effect, it combines the figurative and the filial bonds (‘‘Abraham had two sons, the one by a servant, the other by a free woman’’) and, in the same stroke, our two strategies, the generational and the allegorical. Going beyond this, Agamben links these two operations to the aporias arising from the problematic of the law. Are not filiation and figuration, taken together in the allegory of the two women, Hagar and Sarah, to be connected to the major operation that consists in making the law ‘‘inoperative,’’ drawing on the sense of the Greek verb katargein, ‘‘to deactivate’’? Can we not say that the law of faith, following the maternal figure of Sarah, ‘‘renders inoperative’’ the Mosaic law of the commandments, referred to the other parental figure, Hagar? In this way, the allegorical strategy directly hooks up with the paradoxical treatment of the aporias of the Law. Not only is this second strategy placed in the service of the first one, it adds to it by integrating a figure that never was part of the narrating of the ancestors, that never reached back further than Abraham (Gen. 12). But Paul dives into the prehistory of the great pre-Abrahamic saga, all the way back to Adam and the myth of creation. The result

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is a dazzling antithesis: Adam, the first human according to sin and death, versus Christ, the first one according to faith and life. We all recall the proud declaration that humanity is saved through a single human being (Rom. 5:12–21). In this way, we reach the most fundamental genealogical universal, preceding the deontological universal so dear to Badiou: neither Greek nor Jew. All in Adam, all in Christ. We also know the disaster caused for Christian thinking by the literal—both biological and juridical—interpretation of original sin in the wake of the aged Augustine. We need to hold this Adamic figure apart from the narrative of the ancestors that begins with Abraham in Genesis 12. Adam has only a mythical-poetic existence, one given consistency only through the Adam-Christ antithesis. This is why I did not speak about this in relation to the first strategy of ancestral filiation. It is hyperfilation, ‘‘mythical’’ rather than ‘‘ancient.’’ This is also why the Old Testament pays no further attention to this figure that German scholars call the Ur-figur (a primordial, not ancestral figure). Paul adds to his thesis the declaration found in Galatians 4:24: ‘‘This is an allegory [hatina estin alle¯goroumena].’’ Adam, Breton notes, is indeed ‘‘the figure of the one who was to come’’ (Rom. 5:14). The allegorical, I would say, here dives deeper than does the genealogical: the ‘‘Christlike’’ versus the ‘‘Adamlike.’’ Breton then tops off the great hermeneutic of the Church fathers articulated in terms of the four senses of scripture. What Breton calls ‘‘the hermeneutics of allegory’’ [unfolds there]: conceal/unconceal, the ‘‘semantic genealogy of Christ,’’ so unlike the genealogies of Jesus according to the flesh in Matthew and Luke (which Paul undoubtedly did not know), Christlike, therefore: ‘‘The paradox of a more than human man who appeared in one moment of history and who, dwelling in the finitude of his condition, towers over the course of time.’’41 Whatever may be said about the subsequent course of this hermeneutics in the Church fathers and during the Middle Ages, it plays a precise function for Paul, that of ‘‘reestablishing an essential connection between the old and the new—beyond the cut brought about by his own conversion and, more generally, by ‘Christian being.’ ’’42 If this is indeed the case, we must not separate the allegorical from the genealogical or transgenerational strategy. Why not? Because if allegory is separated from this memorial connection, the Jews of can legitimately accuse it of reducing the ancients to the status of a shadow, which is a way of negating them, something that is only partially true. On the contrary, past characters, institutions, and events must have their own consistency if they are to play the role of announcing, of anticipation. Another image, less reductive than that of being a shadow, then presents itself: that of the veil removed from the face (of Moses). What is more, this counts only for those contemporary Jews who refused the Christ, not for those in the past, who, like Moses at Horab, found in the veil protection against the overwhelming encounter with the face of God. Perhaps this reaffirmed consistency of the figures of the past also contributes to saving the argument through allegory— allegory as an argument—from another objection, one raised by people today, the objection about a vicious circle: where the demonstrandum works to make a selection

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among the figures invoked by the argument. Perhaps we may also find in this consistency of the figures referred to a way of responding to the Nietzschean accusation, put forward in Daybreak with extreme violence, about the offense against Redlichkeit, honesty, in which the allegorical highjacking of meaning ends up. Would not a possible reply to this double attack, that of antihermeneutical logic and that of condemning moral dishonesty, place the accent less on the presumed Hellenism of the interpretation than on its latent Judaism in the sense of being a midrash? The New Testament as a powerful midrash on the Torah? Following this line of interpretation, Paul would surely remain a Jew, the Jew saluted by Jacob Taubes with such surprising enthusiasm (which, by the way, contradicts his indulgence elsewhere for Freud and Nietzsche). Here is his enthusiasm for the well-known capital from Ve´zelay: There’s a marvelous picture that my friend and colleague [Jan] Assmann has sent me (and which can also be found on the cover of Gu¨nther Bornhamm’s Paul Book), which I particularly treasure and carry around with me in my bag, because with the naı¨vete´ of the medieval stonemason, it says everything for those who know how to read. It comes from a capital in the cathedral in Ve´zelay, which is for me the only church of which I can say that the sacred has become stone. (To me, Chartres is already kitsch compared to Ve´zelay. It’s also one of the things I wish for, to be able to visit Ve´zelay again [Taubes was dying at the time that he gave this lecture].) The picture shows Moses, who pours in grain from above, and the apostle Paul, who collects it below in the sack of the gospel. The text that explicates the scene was written by Suger, the Abbot of St.-Denis. I don’t want to torture you with my Latin: that’s why I translated it for myself right away. (One word remained unclear, and I had to have a call placed to the department of medieval Latin. It was the first time they had ever been phoned by anyone at all.) The text goes: By working the mill, thou, Paul, takest the flour out of the bran. Thus makest known the inmost meaning of the Law of Moses. From so many grains is made the true bread without bran. Our and the angels’ perpetual food. I think that is wonderful. This text I carry it around with me, and if I forget what I think, I look at it, and then I realize again where I stand.43 There is no trace of dishonesty or of a vicious circle there, in the miller’s gesture. Taubes prefers to speak of an overbidding: ‘‘My thesis is that Paul understands himself as outbidding Moses.’’44 He does so by way of an analogy that does not subtract but amplifies.45 Paul, according to Taubes, is Moses’ rival, not Christ’s: ‘‘His business is the same: the establishment of a people. That’s what’s accomplished by chapters 9–13; in 9–11 the

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legitimation of the new people of God is given; in 12 the Christian life is described; and 13—well, we’re living in the evil Roman Empire, so how are we living there?’’46 This is about a political and finally an anti-Roman project, not an abstract universalism like that of Badiou. It is within this project that the genealogical rereading and the allegorical figures take on meaning, without any hate and, as I shall say below, with great pain. When we return to Agamben’s messianic reading after this political one (in the sense of Carl Schmitt and in competition with him) of Taubes, it takes on a new shape: the unforgettable messianic tradition does not allow itself to be caught up in, limited to, an anti-Roman project, but neither does it allow itself to be caught up in, limited to, the quarrel between the Church and the Synagogue. Another universalism, a historical one in its own way, is opened by the figure of the always-expected Messiah, even for Kafka and Benjamin. 3. I now take up the autobiographical strategy, which brings on stage the singular and exemplary individual. Accounts given by an ‘‘I’’ occupy an important place in the letters to the Romans, the Galatians, and the Corinthians (as well as elsewhere), but always in different ways, depending on whether the accent falls on an unsubstitutable singularity or on Paul’s exemplarity. The claim raised by the apostle, the apostle to the Gentiles, is especially singular. And ‘‘claim’’ is the appropriate word for the situation of someone who has been called yet is foreign to the circle of witnesses to and companions of Jesus. The introductions to Romans and Galatians are striking in this regard, as is the one to the Corinthians; they convey self-presentation and self-affirmation, under the sign of a call and a mission: ‘‘Paul, servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart to proclaim the gospel of God’’ (Rom. 1:1); ‘‘Paul, apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother’’ (2 Cor. 1:1). The opening to the letter to the Galatians is still more abrupt: ‘‘Paul, apostle, not on the part of men, nor through the intermediary of a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the father who raised him from the dead and all the brothers who are with me’’ (Gal. 1:1). We can understand the abrupt tone and the insistence on being an apostle directly chosen: ‘‘We have already said, and I repeat, if someone proclaims to you a gospel different from the one you have received from me, let him be anathema’’ (Gal. 1:9). Taubes is correct to say that self-presentation is part of a discourse of legitimation and goes together with the other types of argumentation we have spoken of. As has been noted, Agamben constructs the whole schema of the message in Romans on the basis of the self-presentation of the apostle in the opening of the epistle. The proclamation of the message about the messianic event is itself an event worthy of being proclaimed. This is the case for all testimony that appeals to the credibility of a witness. The argument about the tribulations suffered by the apostle, beyond the narratives of his life relative to his mission, falls under the same heading of singularity. Nowhere is the tone more vivid than in 2 Corinthians 10–11 (which undoubtedly was the original

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core for this composite letter). Attacking the ‘‘super apostles’’ head on (2 Cor. 11:5), Paul dares to say: ‘‘since so many others boast according to the flesh, I am going, also, to boast about myself’’ (2 Cor. 11:18). What follows is the account of his tribulations.47 Here the missionary becomes the militant, so dear to Badiou, who asserts and proclaims himself. With great difficulty, he holds back his resentment by letting the militant briefly take over from the missionary and the missionary from Christ’s envoy: ‘‘If I must boast, it is my weaknesses I shall boast about’’ (2 Cor. 11:30). The reference to someone being caught up in a mystical experience is situated in this context, but Paul will not let himself boast about that (2 Cor. 12:1–6). This is the fourth kind of discourse, according to Badiou, the forbidden discourse, beyond those of the Jew, the Christian, and the Greek. Yet the apostle does call upon this discourse, that of the enlightened person, whatever we may make of the enigmatic reference to a ‘‘thorn in the flesh’’ (2 Cor. 12:7f.). One could hardly go any further than this along the line of unsubstitutable singularity. Yet Paul did go further in dealing with exemplary singularity—with the ‘‘me’’ of Romans 7. ‘‘Do we say,’’ he asks, ‘‘that the law is sin? Certainly not. Only, I would not have known sin except through the law. And, in fact, I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said: you shall not covet. But, seizing the occasion, sin by means of the precept produces in me every kind of covetousness: for without the law, sin is simply dead’’ (Rom. 7:7–8). In this way the figure of scission as a divided self gets internalized and appropriated. ‘‘In truth, what I do, I do not understand: for I do not do what I want, but what I hate. Now, if I do what I do not want, I recognize, in accord with the law, that it is good; in reality, it is not me who does the action, but the sin that dwells within me’’ (Rom. 7:15–17). This is an astonishing text, in which the autobiographical voice echoes the confession of the agnostic regarding principalities and powers. The two lines of argumentation cross in the ‘‘inner man’’ (Rom. 7:22). ‘‘For I take pleasure in the law of God from the point of view of the inner man; but I catch sight of another law in my members that fights against the law of my reason and chains me to the law of sin that is in my members’’ (Rom. 7:23; my emphasis). Note that the vocabulary is one of discernment: ‘‘I understand,’’ ‘‘I recognize,’’ ‘‘I take delight in,’’ ‘‘I catch sight of the law of my reason.’’ Is this a more Greek than Hebrew vocabulary? Or is it, rather, a language common to Hellenistic culture, as much Jewish as Greek? The ‘‘inner man,’’ it is true, gets called upon in other texts in the sense of a new man, for example, in 2 Corinthians 4:16 and Ephesians 3:16. But the question comes back again with the term nous (translated here by ‘‘reason’’), which does not coincide with pneuma, in Romans 7:25. Yes, the vocabulary of discernment governs the discourse about lucidity in this astonishing chapter, and that vocabulary makes it possible to speak of the division that comes about in us. Perhaps we should even understand that this nous of a divided singular subject joins up with the principle of the division of the subject that Romans 8:6 puts in terms of the phronima: ‘‘The thought of the flesh is death, the thought of the spirit is life.’’48 In this sense, the subjective division is both individual and collective, singular and exemplary. We shall see

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below how the universalization, in the sense of the nondifference between Jew and Greek, is articulated in terms of the subjective division as ‘‘pure event.’’49 But first let us deepen the fissure—it might be better to say the wound—in Pauline subjectivity. This is the pain that comes with the loss of Jewish identity, on which Taubes focuses his magnifying glass. It is expressed strongly in Romans 9:1–5: I am speaking the truth in Christ, I am not lying—my conscience bears witness to it in the Holy Spirit—I feel a great sorrow and an incessant pain in my heart. For I wish myself to be anathema, separated from Christ for my brothers, those of my race according to the flesh, those who are Israelites, those to whom belong the filial adoption, the glory, the covenants, the legislation, the cultus, the promises, and also the patriarchs, and from whom the Christ has come according to the flesh, who is above all, God blessed forever! Amen. This wish to be anathema is stupefying. By a kind of inverted oath, it consecrates the confession of the loss of identity resulting from the sacrifice of part of a heritage: ‘‘ Anathema . . . for my brothers . . . to whom belong . . . the promises and also the patriarchs’’! But this is the whole Jewish heritage! Here, Taubes makes a swerve that is stupefying, coming as it does from what one could call a frightening Hebrew tradition. The Jewish scholar from Berlin turns to the threats of extermination in Deuteronomy 9:14 (‘‘Let me alone, I want to exterminate them’’) and Exodus 32:10 (the episode of the Golden Calf): ‘‘Leave me alone, my anger is going to explode against them and I will exterminate them, but of you I shall make a great nation.’’ Moses’ prayer follows: ‘‘Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you declared, swearing: I will make your posterity as numerous as the stars of the sky’’ (Exod. 32:13). ‘‘Let go of your anger . . . and God renounced destroying his people with the misfortune he had threatened them with’’ (Exod. 32:14). To which we can add Numbers 14–15, which parallel Exodus 32. I have spoken of a swerve on Taubes’s part. In effect, after having gone back to the narrative about the desert, he makes a spiraling return move to the ritual of pardon on the Day of Atonement in today’s Jewish communities. These are ‘‘dreadful days’’—‘‘shaking’’ the family ritual, the funeral garment of the wedding day. What has all this to do with the terror that Paul refers to? ‘‘I feel a great sorrow and an incessant pain in my heart’’ (Rom. 9:2). Taubes believes him, finding in Paul, the Jew of those days of dread, the realization that destruction is always possible. He concludes, ‘‘Paul faced the same problem as Moses.’’50 The rejection of Christ by the Jews of his time repeated the old sin of the people castigated by Moses and the prophets. Does Taubes go too far? I do not think so. And Agamben proves him right by placing the drama of Pauline subjectivity against the background of messianic hope, always disappointed and always renewed. As for Hebraic dread, have we paid enough attention to the fact that the great fugue of which Taubes speaks begins in Romans 1:19,

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with the reference to orge¯ theou, God’s wrath? ‘‘For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all human impiety and unrighteousness, which holds truth captive in unrighteousness’’ (Rom. 1:18). The contrast is all the greater in the jubilation that concludes the great fugue: ‘‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ?’’ (Rom. 8:37). Here is the whole hymn: What are we to say about all this: if God is for us, who will be against us? He who did not withhold his son but delivered him up for us all, how with him will he not grant us every [pan] favor? Who will be the accuser of those whom God has elected? It is God who justifies, who therefore will condemn? [Citing Isaiah 50:8.] Christ Jesus, he who is dead, what do I say? Resurrected, who is at the right hand of God, who intercedes for us? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation, anxiety, persecution, hunger, nakedness, perils, the sword? According to the word of Scripture: For your sake we are put to death all the day long, we have passed for sheep in the slaughterhouse [citing Isaiah 52]. But in all this we have no difficulty in triumphing through him who has loved us. (Rom. 8:35–37) Taubes asks: Why still speak of separation? Who will be the accuser of those whom God has elected (Rom. 33)? Did not Luther experience a parallel terror, a similar fear of being accused and condemned? And, in a less dramatic mode, did not Karl Barth thunder against the accommodations made by modern Protestantism? But let us get back to Paul. Before the neither . . . nor, neither Greek, nor Jew, there is therefore another neither . . . nor: ‘‘Yes, I am confident, neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor present, nor future, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God manifested in Christ Jesus our Lord’’ (Rom. 8:38). ‘‘Neither . . . nor’’—but does the defiance succeed in suppressing the denial? Only in the eschatological future can this denial make sense. Without a doubt, it is here that two intermediaries converge to assure a projection of hope into life as lived. First, there is the internalization of the confession of faith, pushed to a total immanence in the present. Here is where all the occurrences of ‘‘in’’ (en christo) that Breton so strongly emphasizes come in—‘‘being in’’ going with ‘‘being toward,’’ the two categories dear to him: ‘‘If I live it is not me that lives, it is Christ who lives in me’’ (Gal. 2:20). Even the Lutheran Bornkamm slows down here, though with some reticence: ‘‘Nevertheless, they are not to be played off against his gospel of justification, or separated from it or ranked above it. Influential as the mystic-ontological concepts and expressions are, Paul hardly ever uses them unqualified by his doctrine of justification.’’51 But is this really so? I do not understand his dogmatic hunger. Is not Paul sufficiently tormented by the wrath of God and the pain of losing his ties as a zealot Jew that we can grant him the respite of happiness that gives fullness to this neither . . . nor?

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And doesn’t Paul here extend a hand to Saint John—whom he does not know—the John so dear to Michel Henry? There is a second intermediary on the way to the fulfilled present. It is the perception of creation as a whole as being in the process of giving birth. The exclusive domination of the soteriological theme is held at bay here, as though the history of salvation should have nothing to do with the becoming of creation. Here, Badiou is wrong to refuse to Paul any interest apart from history and the history of salvation. At the same time, Breton is correct in his great chapter ‘‘The Pauline Cosmos’’52 —the geographical and geopolitical cosmos of the Roman empire, of Hellenistic culture, and of Paul’s missionary voyages, but also the cosmos in the process of the becoming of creation, in its birth pains. One must not marginalize Romans 8:19–25, ‘‘the waiting creation’’ that ‘‘groans in labor pains.’’ And not it alone: ‘‘we ourselves possess the beginnings of the Gospel, we too groan inwardly in the expectation of the redemption of our bodies.’’ I leave all this to Breton’s ample commentary,53 which already associates this text from Romans 8 with the wonderful hymn in Colossians 1:15–20 about Christ the ‘‘image of the invisible God,’’ the firstborn of all creation,’’ principle, ‘‘firstborn from the dead.’’54 No, truly, soteriology is not everything. The doctrine of creation also demands a hearing. Therefore the series of neither . . . nor’s in Romans 8 does not remain without a positive counterpart. This can be heard, on the one hand, in the voice happy to share the unique Life, on the other, by listening to the groans of nature as it gives birth: ‘‘We too groan inwardly.’’ And is it not with these very neither . . . nor’s, with their historical force, neither Jew nor Greek, that Badiou constructs his invigorating reading? 4. I will speak here of a universalizing strategy. Badiou analyzes its impulse in the following terms: a pure event (coupled, he says, to a fable, the ‘‘christic’’ fable) projects itself on history as the denial of differences; essentially, communal differences. The back cover of the French edition of his book sums this up as follows: ‘‘Paul’s hitherto unheard-of gesture was to subtract truth from any communal grasp. Whether of a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a social caste.’’ But as the text of his book unfolds, since the event does not draw its meaningful force from his proclaimed content but from its pure evental character, it becomes necessary to take up the paradox of a ‘‘universal singularity,’’ which is equivalent to a ‘‘post-evental truth.’’55 It seems to be totally paradoxical to couple the universal to an event. In truth, the rest of the book adds considerable nuance to this professed paradox. Chapter 8 is titled ‘‘Love as Universal Power.’’56 The Christian subject, Badiou says, is not apart from the law. There exists a transliteral/literal law, taken in the sense of the letter that kills in opposition to the spirit that gives life, according to 2 Corinthians 3:7, a law of the spirit, according to the formulation in Romans 13:10: ‘‘Love is the fulfillment [plero¯ma] of the law.’’ This is what yields a postevental truth: ‘‘It is incumbent upon love to become law so

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that truth’s post-evental universality can continuously inscribe itself in the world, rallying subjects to the path of life.’’57 In other words, ‘‘love is precisely what faith is capable of.’’58 This transition through the law of law brings back in force the aporias of the law referred to by Agamben under the sign of messianism—better, the idea of plero¯ma attributed to the law transforms the aporia into not only a tolerable paradox, but a beneficial one. To speak with Badiou of love as a universal power is to answer the ‘‘disactivation’’ (kartagein) of the law of works with a new ‘‘dynamization’’ that is the work, the ‘‘energy’’ of love. But if this is so, the neither . . . nor’s that follow are less abstract and less negative than they appears with regard to the energy of love, which Badiou nicely describes as ‘‘fidelity to the Christ event.’’59 But are we not here far beyond what he calls the ‘‘theorem of the militant’’? Badiou presents this as follows: ‘‘What grants power to a truth, and determines subjective fidelity, is the universal address of the relation to self instituted by the event, and not this relation itself.’’60 In this way, we link up again with the marvelous hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13:13: ‘‘If I have not love, I am nothing.’’ Is love not thereby placed even higher than the law and hope? Does it not give body to the ‘‘all’’ envisaged by way of the neither . . . nor? And is Badiou correct to identify hope, detached from its projected outcome at the presumed end of history, with the force of perseverance, of tenacity, of obstinacy, in short, with the power to continue? Does not this power to continue deploy a positive energy that does not exhaust the repeated denial of differences? Otherwise, how could one ‘‘glory in the hope of the glory of God’’ (Rom. 5:2)? Badiou puts it well: ‘‘experienced fidelity,’’ identical with the ‘‘taking-place of the truth.’’61 This gives his last theorem: ‘‘Where the imperative of his own continuation is concerned, the subject supports himself through the fact that the taking-place of the truth constituting him is universal and thereby effectively concerns him. There is singularity only insofar as there is universality. Failing that, there is, outside of truth only particularity.’’62 But is this not something other than a universalism of a pure negation of differences? Of course, one has to read Badiou to the end. He speaks, finally, not only of the denial of differences but about the ‘‘traversal of differences,’’ even ‘‘of new differences, new particularities to which the universal might be exposed.’’63 Yet do we not remain short of the intended plero¯ma—the fulfillment of the law by love—when we speak of ‘‘an indifference tolerant of differences’’? Here it is necessary to read Agamben’s reservations concerning what Badiou says about the universal, especially if one emphasizes the theme of the ‘‘production of the ‘same.’ ’’ To the clear polarity between universal and particular, even between communal and communitarian, Agamben opposes the paradoxes and subtleties of the messianic ‘‘cut of Apelles,’’ which never comes down to a universal, because it joins non-Jews and nonnon-Jews in a ‘‘remnant’’ that cannot be a quantity but is rather an indication of the noncoincidence between each identity and itself, thanks to which the divisions of the law with itself would be ‘‘rendered inoperative.’’64 The messianic dimension of the Pauline message is what is at stake here.

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Whatever may be the case regarding the exegesis of ‘‘neither Greek, nor Jew,’’ which Badiou is careful to not separate from ‘‘neither male, nor female’’ and ‘‘neither free, nor slave,’’ I do not think that it is necessary to give priority to the universalizing strategy in relation to the genealogical and autobiographical strategies in the equilibrium between an unsubstitutable and an exemplary subjectivity. The diversity of Paul’s discourse must be respected. 5. With regard to this diversity, I would like to conclude by honoring a strategy that we can call one of recapitulation. It succeeds in giving a concrete turn to the presumed universality. In the end, Paul projects his theme of reconciliation against a Jewish horizon reaffirmed in terms of its historical structure. This is how we should read the penetrating and prudent commentary Bornkamm devotes to the theme of ‘‘the saving event,’’65 particularly his paragraphs concerning the particular ‘‘precedence’’ of the Jews in the history of salvation. More than once, Paul speaks of ‘‘the Jew first, then the Greek’’ (e.g., Rom. 1:6f.). The difficult eleventh chapter of Romans struggles with this enigma. Reconciliation will not happen apart from the Jewish root of the Judeo-Christian tree and its grafted Hellenic-Christian branch. This is a difficult discussion, with its adventurous suggestion that, concerning the Jews, ‘‘their stumble has procured salvation for the pagans, in order to excite their jealousy’’ (Rom. 11:11). If so, ‘‘how much more will the totality add up to!’’ (Rom. 11:12). ‘‘As for you, non-Jew, wild stock grafted to the olive tree . . . if you want to boast about yourself, it is not you that bears the root, it is the root that bears you’’ (Rom. 11:16–18). Paul gets quite carried away by these images of grafts and roots: ‘‘yes, if you were cut from the wild olive tree to which you belong by nature and grafted, against nature, to a cultivated olive tree, how much more, the natural branches, will they be grafted to their own olive tree!’’ (Rom. 11:23). Thus, all Israel will be saved, according to the prophet Isaiah (59:21–21): ‘‘for the gifts and call of God are beyond repentance’’ (Rom. 11:29). Here, we can say, is the plero¯ma, the concrete universal: ‘‘For God has imprisoned all men in disobedience so that he may be merciful to them all’’ (Rom. 11:32). The two uses of ‘‘all,’’ one that condemns and one that reconciles, encompass all the ‘‘neither . . . nor’s’’ of Paul’s tormented discourse. The implications are great: what Paul undermines is first of all the elitist representation of an election that excludes the other, but also, I would say, the representation beyond history of a Last Judgment that will draw a line separating the condemned and the fortunate saved. Here hymn takes over from judgment, in every sense of the word judge: ‘‘Oh the depth of richness, and the wisdom and the knowledge of God! His secrets are unfathomable and his ways incomprehensible’’ (Rom. 11:33). With this chanted confession of a mystery, has Paul moved beyond some Christian ‘‘discourse’’ antagonistic to every other discourse, whether that of the Jew or the Greek? If this is not the non discourse of the

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mystic, a discourse constantly near at hand but never invoked or demanded, an impossible, ‘‘ineffable’’ discourse—is it that of eschatology? Perhaps. But of an eschatology that will have replaced the announcement of catastrophe by Revelation, in the fullest sense, following the very genius of the word Apocalypse. With this word, we leave behind the pairing of proclamation and argumentation with which I have organized both my reading of some of Paul’s letters and my reading of other readings by some contemporary thinkers. It is right that we end up defeated in this unequal combat with the text. —Translated by David Pellauer

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Ablative Absolutes From Paul to Shakespeare

Julia Reinhard Lupton

In 1987, Jacob Taubes, historian of religion and Jewish man of letters, gave a series of lectures on Paul at the Protestant Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Heidelberg. He was sixty-four years old at the time, and suffering the final stages of cancer, whose urgency infuses the lectures with the pressure of what Giorgio Agamben calls, in reference to Paul and in memory of Taubes, il tempo che resta, the time that remains.1 The lectures were published posthumously and translated into English by Dana Hollander under the title The Political Theology of Paul. Like a number of other readings of Paul, including that of Agamben, Taubes locates Paul inside rather than outside Judaism.2 He places special weight on Paul’s calling from the Jews, to the Gentiles, a phrase he reconstructs from Romans and repeats several times in the course of his discussion. Taubes insists, we might say, on the ablative grammar of this from: Paul speaks from, out of, the world of the Jews, remaining a Jew even as he speaks to the Gentiles, giving them his messianic message. Yet within the situatedness mapped by this ablative from, Paul’s epistles nonetheless exert a certain accusative pressure and directionality— ‘‘accusative’’ here in the syntactical but also in the polemical sense, indexing a place out of which and a place into which a subject transits. If Paul speaks from the Jews, his letters, through their act of address to the Gentiles, transform the Judaism from which they are enunciated. The accusative character of Paul’s address forms the main stream of Pauline interpretation in Christianity; Taubes, we might say, is concerned to restore the ablative origin of Paul’s speech acts (Paul as Jew), while still attending to their polemical effects (Paul as first Christian). Shakespeare, I argue here, walks a parallel path with respect to secularization. He speaks from religion—from a world built on the narratives, iconography, liturgical patterns, and moral teachings deposited by

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the three monotheisms, in their contests with themselves, each other, and classical and nonclassical paganisms. The biblical allusiveness of his language and the sacrificial, martyrological, and regenerative archetypes of his plots indicate Shakespeare’s sustaining sojourn among the varieties of Renaissance religious experience. But Shakespeare was neither rabbi, minister, nor saint; if he spoke from within a religious worldview, it was in order to address secular modernity. Whether played in the public theaters or at court, Shakespeare’s characters thrive in the largely profane environments of erotic courtship, city business, and the affairs of state, and his global impact on later developments in secular literature (dramatic, poetic, novelistic, and philosophical) remains uncontested and unsurpassed. In speaking from a religious worldview to a secular scene whose parameters he helped found, Shakespeare, like Paul, worked a certain polemical transformation in the poles of address, but without making an exit or exodus from one position to another. Whereas Paul’s epistles trigger the transformation of a portion of Judaism into Christianity while remaining attached to an intermediary district between the two, Shakespearean drama participates in an epochal shift from religion to its secularization while delimiting a region between sacred and profane formations.3 These transit corridors manifest the features of what Eric Santner calls the ‘‘psychotheology of everyday life.’’ Reading Freud and Rosenzweig, Santner writes, ‘‘with the ‘death of God’ the entire problematic of transcendence actually exerts its force in a far more powerful way in the very fabric of everyday life. What is more than life turns out to be, from the post-Nietzschean perspective, immanent to and constitutive of life itself.’’4 This rendering immanent of bits of transcendence, through the trauma of broken tablets and suspended covenants, is a fundamental problematic not only for the post-Nietzschean figures of Rosenzweig and Freud, but also, I argue, for Paul and Shakespeare, who, each in his distinct arena, struggle with the signs, symptoms, costs, and consequences of religious change. If this were merely an analogy—Shakespeare, like Paul, both announces and remains separate from a sea change with which he has become identified—we would be proceeding on grounds more poetic than philosophical. I would like to argue further, however, that Shakespeare speaks from religion to secularity precisely by taking up Pauline tropes and rhythms. That is, Shakespeare reads Paul as a fellow traveler of inter-communal negotiation and epochal transformation. Such a reading is most evident in the plays concerning the Old Law and the New: The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Measure for Measure, and The Winter’s Tale all take up Pauline typology in order to map a passage from a sphere identified with a harsh, jealous, overzealous law (sometimes identified as Jewish, Islamic, or Catholic) into a region of mercy whose qualities combine Protestant, secular, and civic attributes.5 Hence Shylock’s conversion to Christianity, Othello’s recircumcision in suicide, Isabella’s marriage to the Duke, and the rebirths of Leontes and Hermione announce both a reform of Jewish, Islamic, and Catholic legalisms and a passage into

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forms of citizenship and mimesis that will ultimately separate from their Protestant envelopes as distinctive secular realms. Yet these plays’ movements out of the law into mercy— what I am calling the accusative nature of epochal address—also carry embedded knots that continue to bind letter and spirit, Old Law and New, religion and its secularization, beyond any typological sublation. I call these elements of continued debt, responsibility, and love ‘‘ablative absolutes’’: traces of religious affiliation, at once intransigent and intransitive, that float free from their traditional syntaxes in order to become elements in new social and psychic formations. This approach to Paul and Shakespeare, to Paul in Shakespeare, aims to reevaluate the ideational and temporal transits effected by both figures, but also to expose and reencounter the theo-political binding of being, thinking, and doing in the contemporary moment. At stake is not only how we understand Shakespeare’s relation to religion, or Paul’s relation to Judaism, but also how the region of interpenetration delimited by both thinkers might bear on the contemporary scene, where religious and secular world views are often expressed as an either/or. As William Connolly has argued in Why I am Not a Secularist, liberalism has relegated religion to the private realm, purging the public sphere of all theology. Fundamentalists of all stripes, by contrast, reacting to the increasing thinness of secularized public discourse, want to restore a theocratic regime that would neutralize both religious pluralism and the diversity and authenticity of nontheistic positions. The case of Paul and Shakespeare provides a template for rethinking the creative interval between politics and theology in modernity, with consequences not only for our understandings of these two key figures in the history of the West, but also for our own navigations of psychotheology in everyday life.

Paul in Heidelberg Taubes begins his Heidelberg lectures with an extended exegesis of Paul’s salutation to the Romans: In what follows I want to try to show you the substance of the salutation by means of a comparative reading. Here goes: Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called [⳱ chosen!] to be an apostle, So what we have here is not a conversion but a calling. Whoever looks at what Galatians 1:15 says about what is commonly called the conversion, the Damascus experience, knows that what is being talked about here is not a conversion but a calling, and that this is done in the language and the style of Jeremiah [1:5: ‘‘Before I created you in the womb, I selected you. Before you were born, I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet concerning the nations.’’] Beterem etsorekha, before you

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were born I chose you to be a navi la-goyim, a prophet for the peoples. And this is how Paul sees himself called to be an apostle—one always has to add this, otherwise one misses what is essential—from the Jews to the Gentiles.6 Paul’s vocation is a ‘‘calling’’ and not a ‘‘conversion’’ for the same reason that being called ‘‘from the Jews to the Gentiles’’ is for Taubes an ‘‘essential’’ point, easily missed. In Taubes’s reading, Paul’s apostleship, contrary to Christian iconography, is not a conversion (implying the revolutionary rejection of one faith for another), but rather a calling (affirming the ongoing commitment of the prophet to his people, speaking ‘‘from’’ in the sense of ‘‘from within’’ Israel). Nonetheless, prophets are called at moments of political and religious crisis, and hence bear an uneasy relationship to the law and the people constituted by it, whose parameters they may need to expand, contract, or suspend in order to reform and renew. In grammatical terms, the ablativity of the prophet—the passionately situated character of his speech—is complemented and potentially compromised by his accusative stance, his movement outside the norms of discourse into modes of address that can border on scandal, heresy, apostasy, or treason. Taubes travels this topology, which consists of a location turning into a movement, repeatedly throughout his book. Two unlikely guides assist him: Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophical reconstruction of Jewish liturgy in The Star of Redemption, and Carl Schmitt’s political theology. Rosenzweig had died by the time Taubes reached his majority, but Taubes became Schmitt’s uneasy interlocutor during the years following the Second World War, when the conservative Catholic jurist and architect of Nazi dictatorship was eager to rehabilitate his reputation through dialogue with this rising Jewish intellectual, who had semi-privately confessed—in an epistle of his own—his uneasy admiration of Schmitt’s thought.7 Although Rosenzweig and Schmitt wrote in distinct, even inimical, worlds, Kenneth Reinhard has argued that ‘‘the Star is a book of political theology in a sense very close to that proposed by Carl Schmitt, with the crucial proviso that Rosenzweig’s political theology is messianic, that is, it involves a redemptive possibility that would transform the meaning of politics by creating Benjamin’s ‘real state of emergency.’ ’’8 Another way to put this—a way intuited and enacted by Taubes—is that both Schmitt and Rosenzweig were fundamentally concerned with the event announced by Paul’s struggle with law and its suspension. From Rosenzweig, Taubes teases out a pattern of suspended oaths, beginning with Moses’ advocacy for Israel with God on Sinai regarding the destruction of the Jewish people in response to the Golden Calf episode. God and Moses have the following interchange: ‘‘I see that this is a stiff-necked people. Now, let me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them, and make of you a great nation.’’ But Moses implored [va-yehal] the Lord his God, saying, ‘‘Let not Your anger, O

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Lord, blaze forth against your people, whom You have delivered from the land of Egypt with great power and an outstretched hand. . . . Turn from Your blazing anger, and renounce the plan to punish Your people. Remember Your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, how You swore to them by Your Self and said to them: I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, and I will give to your offspring this whole land of which I spoke, to possess forever.’’ (Exod. 32:9–13)9 God is angry at the people for their idolatry and prepares to destroy them; Moses assuages his wrath by recalling God to his earlier promise to the patriarchs. God suspends his immediate oath by reaffirming his commitment to an earlier one. The JPS Torah Commentary notes that the passages containing Moses’ plea, 32:11–14, ‘‘comprise the Torah reading at the afternoon (minhah) service on fast days other than Yom Kippur’’ (Sarna Ex 32:11–4n). The passage is liturgically significant, Taubes argues, because ‘‘va-yehal means not only ‘he prayed,’ but that he performed a rite of releasing God from the oath of destruction.’’10 And this prayer, omitted on Yom Kippur, nonetheless functions as what Taubes calls ‘‘the primal scene’’ of Yom Kippur: ‘‘The day itself forgives,’’ writes Taubes; ‘‘My thesis—which is not arbitrary—is that the evening of Yom Kippur is in the grip of this trembling.’’11 In relation to this claim, Taubes presents an extended reading from The Star of Redemption. Taubes quotes Rosenzweig on the meaning and function of Kol Nidre, the service on the eve of Yom Kippur when vows made the previous year are lifted: the congregant ‘‘had in that prayer for the annulment of all vows, all self-consecrations and good resolves, attained to pure humility to step—not as his knowing, no, now merely as His sensing [wa¨hnend] child—before Him who might forgive him, just as He forgave ‘all the congregation of the children of Israel, and the stranger that sojourneth among them.’ ’’12 To annul vows made by and to himself prepares the congregant to ask God to lift His anger against Israel, paralleling the ‘‘va-yehal’’ of Moses. For Taubes, what is at stake on Yom Kippur is the suspension of the law, a moment when God’s attribute of mercy supersedes his attribute of judgment. Taubes is in effect reading Rosenzweig with Schmitt, finding a Schmittian proposition in the liturgical opening made by Rosenzweig, while pinning a Jewish star on Schmitt’s political theology. Taubes is also marking a difference between them: the scene at Sinai and its Kol Nidre replay diverges from Schmitt’s scenario insofar as God suspends judgment in the current moment by being recalled to a former promise still in effect, refolding the sovereign sublimity of mercy into the framework of covenant, and at man’s request (va-yehal). This ‘‘primal scene’’ (Taubes’s phrase) leads not to the aggrandizement of the merciful sovereign over his forever-indebted subjects (Portia’s famous ‘‘quality of mercy’’ speech is a handy digest of absolutist political theology), but rather to the self-limitation of the sovereign, in response to human petition and in relation to a prior speech act. Taubes savors the chutzpah at work here: ‘‘This is what is played out over and over, and the difficulty consists in this:

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How can God be released from his oath? Yes, he can be, happy is the master who has such a student! Who dares to release him from his oath.’’13 In the Mosaic scene, God suspends the law in order to reaffirm the law. Such a move might seem identical to the sovereign decision as defined by Schmitt, for whom, in Agamben’s gloss, ‘‘the rule maintains itself in relation to the exception in the form of the suspension.’’14 But the scene disclosed on Sinai differs in revealing a gap between a prior promise and the current oath; in relation to this division, God exercises his sovereignty by exhibiting mercy, but does so in order to submit himself to an earlier speech act, expanding His power in order to contract or recontain it. Paul, Taubes suggests, ‘‘stands before the very same problem’’ that confronted Moses: should Israel be destroyed, and a new nation founded in its place, because they have rejected Jesus as the Messiah? Taubes suggests that Paul, unlike Moses, accepts God’s offer (agreeing to found a new people among the Gentiles), yet remains bound up with his Mosaic identification (speaking still as a Jew from within Israel). The key passage for Taubes is Romans 9–11, which he recalls reading with none other than Carl Schmitt: This is where an almost ninety-year-old man [Schmitt] sat with someone who was a little over fifty and spelled out 9–11. That’s when we came to the sentence: ‘‘As regards the gospel they are enemies’’—enemies of God! Enemy is not a private concept; enemy is hostis, not inimicus. . . . Here, in any case, we are not dealing with private feuds, but with salvation—historical enemies of God. ‘‘Enemies for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their forefathers’’ (11:28).15 Paul, according to Taubes, echoes the Mosaic appeal: Israel may be inimicus in the present, and hence deserving of destruction and abandonment, but the prior oath to the patriarchs continues to bind God, reserving a place for Israel (or its remnant) in God’s plan. Paul departs from Moses in allowing a new people to be founded (Paul, unlike his predecessor, speaks to the Gentiles), but he remains faithful to Moses in recalling God’s former promises (Paul continues to speak from the Jews). Paul puts it with Mosaic firmness, ‘‘The gifts and the call of God are irrevocable’’ (Rom. 11:29). Reading Paul over the shoulders of Schmitt, Taubes, and Rosenzweig, we can see the proximity between divine mercy (as the lifting of an oath of destruction) and the state of emergency (opened when the sovereign founds, secures, or reforms the law by stepping outside it). And what is messianism if not the lifting of the law? For Paul, ‘‘Christ is the end [telos] of the law,’’ its goal but also its termination (Rom. 10:4); God sent his own son ‘‘in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us’’ (Rom. 8:4). But this fulfillment is neither antinomian (announcing an era free of law, be it Jewish, Roman, or natural), nor simply Schmittian (for whom the state of emergency ultimately strengthens both the law and the sovereign). Rather, Paul’s fulfilled law evokes the Mosaic

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scenario of an oath whose suspension momentarily self-limits or de-completes the sovereign by reaffirming the validity of an earlier promise. In the Mosaic scene, the law reasserted by the act of suspension is prior to, off stage from, the oath that is suspended in the current instance. Whereas the Schmittian paradigm always draws a spatial figure of borders, bans, and exclusions, the Mosaic paradigm pursued by Taubes in response to Paul emphasizes a temporal division between the now and the then. How does this work in Paul? Let us return to our opening formula. In speaking to the Gentiles, Paul argues for a suspension of Jewish laws concerning circumcision and table fellowship. These laws are suspended now, in the messianic time in which the commonwealth of Israel is opened to the Gentiles. (Taubes recounts a story in which a Swede earnestly inquired if he belonged to the commonwealth of Israel: ‘‘There,’’ Taubes reflects, ‘‘I saw what Paul had done: that someone in the jungles of Sweden—as seen from where I’m standing—is worrying about whether he belongs to the ‘commonwealth of Israel,’ that’s something that’s impossible without Paul.’’16) But this lifting of Jewish membership requirements in the messianic era does not negate the historical fact of Israel’s priority in God’s plan: addressing the mixed congregation of the church in Rome, Paul writes, ‘‘it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek’’ (Rom. 1:16; my emphasis). Whereas ‘‘faith’’ functions as a shorthand for the relaxing of naturalization laws in the current era, the two-step placing the Jew before the Greek recalls the promises to the patriarchs, which continue to carry weight. This two-step reflects both sides of the epistolary situation: Paul speaks to a mixed congregation of Jewish and Gentile Christians in Rome, and he is careful to honor both in his address; but he also speaks from the Jews, still situated in their midst and quick to recall their priority. Agamben writes of law under the state of emergency that is has ‘‘validity’’ but not ‘‘meaning.’’ In the ecological, political, and philosophical states of emergency in which, according to Agamben, we now subsist, laws continue to be ‘‘valid’’ (to press on us as dicta that we must obey), but they have lost their meaning (religious, ethical, and political traditions, bankrupted by their indefinite suspension, no longer animate the codes they have bequeathed us). Agamben writes: ‘‘We can compare the situation of our time to that of a petrified or paralyzed messianism that, like all messianisms, nullifies the law, but then maintains it as the Nothing of Revelation in a perpetual and interminable state of exception, ‘the ‘‘state of exception’’ in which we live.’ ’’17 A similar description might be applied to Pauline Christianity: the Mosaic law, as embodied in the Decalogue, retains a kind of superegoic function, chastening us with its memorial ‘‘Shalts’’ and ‘‘Shalt nots,’’ but stands divorced from the Jewish traditions that had given it significance. But the opposite is also the case: that is, if the validity of Israel is cancelled or suspended in the Messianic moment, the meaning of Israel—as historical origin and repository of promises and prophesies, remains alive for Paul, who continues to speak from Israel, to whom ‘‘belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises’’

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(Rom. 9:4). In Erich Auerbach’s assessment, Paul’s treatment of Hebrew Scriptures aims to ‘‘strip the Old Testament of its normative character and show that it is merely a shadow of things to come.’’18 The transformation of the Torah into the Old Testament through the installation of the New operates by canceling the validity of Jewish law and at the same time sealing the meaning of Jewish narratives, a meaning that will forever include as part of its content the story of the suspension of the law’s original force. In this second strand of the Pauline legacy, the Torah, turned into the ‘‘Old’’ or suspended ‘‘Testament,’’ also begins to turn into ‘‘literature,’’ a region of discourse whose validity rests in its meaning, rather than (like scripture) its meaning resting in its validity. Thanks to both the internal operations and institutional vicissitudes of Paul’s Epistles, the Old Testament in Christian consciousness represents both validity without significance (the law continuing to bear on us with its onerous demands while operating outside of the institutional, liturgical, and communal frameworks of Judaism that gave those demands shape and meaning), and significance without validity: a repository of stories, tropes, and rhythms that enrich and backlight the Christian narrative, but only by being separated from the code of law they had once ornamented. Although these destinies of Israel in Christendom can be attributed to Paul, the epistles cannot be reduced to this distillation. That is, the brilliance and pathos of the epistles lies not in their cancellation of the Law but rather in Paul’s insistent Mosaic binding of Judaism to Christianity, in his refusal to release their relationship, which forms part of the pressure and power of the messianic moment. We could say that the Paul effect (the Pauline legacy in Christendom) is covalent with Schmitt’s political theology, but that the Paul event (the force and meaning of Paul’s epistles as originary speech acts) is closer to the political theology attributed by Taubes to Moses and Rosenzweig.19 That is, Paul insistently recalls the earlier promises made to Israel, maintaining them in both their meaning and their validity, though now separated from each other and revalued, asserting them as the recollected and reaffirmed precedent to the suspension of citizenship laws initiated in the state of emergency called messianism. The Israel of this ‘‘real’’ Paul still exists in and as a gap. First, there is the gap between the meaning and the validity of Israel, which Paul isolates and suffers in the tension and trauma of their separation. Whereas the post-Pauline Church condemns the Law of the Jews to dance in the halls of Christian iconography both as absurd rule and as decommissioned story, Paul confronts and embraces their cut as a definitive feature of messianic time. Second, there is the interval between the promise of a future and the oath of destruction, which forever binds Israel to what will become Christianity. This interim reveals two possibilities: that of an infinite and singular God who nonetheless limits, withdraws, or de-completes himself; and that of a people or their advocate who takes an active role in negotiating redemption. This gap reveals, that is, the possibility of a political theology after political theology, which de-completes the sovereign and empowers the people, positing

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political formations that would be constitutional and profane rather than absolutist and divine, but without being fully synonymous with a secular liberalism it helps found. Rather than tracing the outlines of this other political theology in a reading of the epistles alone, I’ve chosen to test its forms, moods, and shapes as they emerge in the body of another’s work: namely, the plays of Shakespeare, where we can pursue the literary, philosophical, and political consequences of Paul’s struggle with Israel via Shakespeare’s reworkings of Paul. Although Shakespeare’s creative engagement with Paul—with this ‘‘other’’ Paul reclaimed through Taubes and Agamben—can be tapped at various points across his oeuvre, I focus here on avatars of Paul in The Merchant of Venice, where the question of Israel is posed with the greatest urgency.

Paul in Venice At stake in The Merchant of Venice is the kol nidre theme of oaths and their suspension. In one version of such a scene, Shylock plays the part of the Old Testament sovereign, who holds onto the inviolability of contract for far too long; when he is finally forced to accept the ve-yehal of Antonio’s intercessors, Shylock finds himself undergoing a selfcontraction of the most momentous sort: conversion to Christianity. In an alternative staging of the kol nidre theme, Shylock, facing the sovereignty assumed by the Duke and Antonio, becomes the advocate for his own private Israel when he asserts as a coda to his new contract with Venice the affective proviso, ‘‘I am not well.’’ Shylock, that is, at once consents to conversion and inserts a measure of discontent, of Pauline ze¯mia, into the public sphere, which will rezone itself around the difference he embodies. As Shakespeare’s readers have long noted, the Pauline theme of the circumcised heart animates both the trial of Shylock and the suicide of Othello.20 One of the most exegetically conscientious of these readings is that of James Shapiro, in his magisterial study Shakespeare and the Jews. Shapiro cites, for example, the complex and sensitive gloss of Paul given by commentator Andrew Willet in 1611, who read circumcision of the flesh and circumcision of the heart as ‘‘two parts of one and the same circumcision which are sometimes joined together, both the inward and the outward.’’21 Yet Shapiro’s summary of Paul’s discourse on circumcision remains, I would argue, too firmly within the thrall of the post-Pauline legacy, and hence insufficiently responsive to the pathos inflaming the scar of circumcision in the real time of Paul’s own discourse.22 Shapiro writes: ‘‘In repudiating circumcision, Paul sought to redirect the Covenant, sever the genealogical bond of Judaism, distinguish Jew from Christian, true Jew from false Jew, and the spirit from the flesh.’’23 Shapiro goes on to map this reading of Paul onto the character of Antonio: ‘‘When Antonio demands that Shylock ‘presently become a Christian,’ a demand to which the Duke readily agrees, the ‘christ’ning’ that Shylock is to receive will metaphorically uncircumcise him.’’24 I move that we supplement this normative reading of the Pauline

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legacy in Shakespeare with a messianic reading of Paul’s presence in the play, reconstructed along the lines of Taubes and Agamben. In this second reading, which shadows and underlines without replacing the first, Shylock functions as a repository of the losses and remainders recorded in the epistles, recording, recollecting, and bodying forth the gap between meaning and validity introduced by the Messianic event. Shylock’s recording of Pauline loss ‘‘unlocks’’ at least a portion of the dignity that accrues to Shylock’s presence in the play, despite its anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic strains. To read Shakespeare and his Shylock in relation to the Paul of Taubes is not to re-Christianize the play in reaction to the anti-Venetian consensus of recent decades, but rather to retrieve the Jewish lining of Paul’s epistles as it manifests itself in Merchant. Such a reading acknowledges the violence done to Jews and Judaism in Paul’s name, but refuses to rest content with accounts of Paul that leave him stripped of his expressed commitments to Israel, an interpretation that ultimately does service to neither Jews nor Christians. Shakespeare’s gathering, dividing, and melding of motifs from Paul is distinctively his. The style of exegesis pursued here, however, could be extended to other major elaborators of Paul in Western letters, including Rembrandt, Spinoza, Milton, Freud, and Nietzsche, each of whom confronts and identifies with Paul at key moments in his art and thought.25 In Romans, Paul writes: ‘‘For he is not a real Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal. His praise is not from men but from God’’ (Rom. 2:28–29). These lines, taken by themselves, exemplify with the greatest precision the division between validity and meaning accomplished in Pauline typology. Real circumcision is ‘‘spiritual,’’ having a symbolic function, and not ‘‘literal,’’ no longer valid in the messianic era. Circumcision, as a real mark on the flesh inscribing males (Jewish infants or adult proselytes) into the nation of Israel, is sublated into a metaphor and image for a psychological state within. And what I have called the ‘‘Paul effect,’’ the Pauline legacy in official Christendom, accepts, codifies, and disseminates this conversion of circumcision from law into meaning. Yet the internalizing symbolization of circumcision does not exhaust its significance in Romans or in the epistles more generally. Paul goes on to say, ‘‘Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews are entrusted with the oracles of God’’ (Rom. 3:1:2). Here we see the Mosaic move that Taubes discloses in his reading of Paul: a particular commandment—the commandment of circumcision—has been lifted in the present moment, but this does not negate the historical significance of the Jews in God’s plan; indeed, the lifting of the commandment moves God’s prophet to recall the promises that came before. We can read this move rhetorically: Paul addresses a mixed congregation in Rome, and he must reassure his Gentile congregants concerning the indifference of circumcision, while also assuaging the Jewish Christians’ sense of historic priority. But Paul is also speaking from Israel; like Moses at Sinai, recollecting the promises to the Patriarchs means holding God to His

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word: ‘‘What if some [Jews] are unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Let God be true though every man be false’’ (Rom. 3:3–4). Paul affirms the goodness of God by insisting on the continued validity of his promises, but this praise of God is also an act of advocacy on behalf of Israel, paralleling the Mosaic example. In Paul’s discourse, circumcision remains the signature of a distinct relationship, a mark that continues to bind Israel to God, a scar that cannot be simply internalized, generalized, or rendered symbolic. Circumcision remains, even in ‘‘the time that remains’’ (Agamben’s il tempo che resta) that distinguishes the messianic state of emergency. Paul’s decision to circumcise Timothy, ‘‘the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek,’’ recorded in Acts 16:3, demonstrates the degree to which circumcision for Paul retained a measure of validity even as he struggled to attach to it a new meaning.26 The force of this remainder both inflames and chastens Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians. The verse begins violently: ‘‘Look out for the dogs, look out for the evilworkers, look out for those who mutilate27 the flesh. For we are the true circumcision, who worship God in spirit, and glory in Christ Jesus, and put no confidence in the flesh’’ (Phil. 3:2). These lines recall the operation of Romans but in an accelerated rhetoric of mutilation, in which the Judaizing Christians devolve into mere creatures (cave canem) in the dogged physicality of their covenantal agenda. Taken alone, these lines, like the parallel verses in Romans, effect the severance of validity and meaning that circumcision suffers in the post-Pauline Church. Yet Paul’s highly accusative stance resounds from an equally deep ablativity. He continues, with confessional pathos: ‘‘Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh. If any other man thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless. But for whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ’’ (Phil. 3:4–7). Paul presents his identity card, a passport demonstrating his affiliation with Israel and a curriculum vitae signed and sealed by the enrolling mark of circumcision, a signature that remains on his flesh, heading the list chronologically and remaining a sign of his continued registration in Israel, his dual citizenship, as it were. He counts all of this as ‘‘loss’’ (ze¯mia), a word repeated twice more in the succeeding lines: ‘‘Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse [‘‘dung’’ in the King James Version] in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him’’ (Phil. 3:8–9). The pathos with which Paul measures the distance from his righteousness under the law to his finding of Christ gives a name to the gap between meaning and validity, ‘‘the loss of all things,’’ describing the trauma undergone by Paul on behalf of the law. Although this tremendous expenditure finances an even greater gain in Paul’s calculus of redemption, Paul insistently confronts himself and us with this loss as a sublime quantum, an interval of the real that defines both his life and the current moment in the state of messianic emergency witnessed by the epistles.

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The normative Paul of Christendom, tracked so effectively in Shapiro’s reading and in other recent Jewish reconstructions of the play, can be found everywhere in Merchant. Pauline typology, for example, provides the symbolic archway shaping and sheltering Jessica’s conversionary flight from ‘‘blood’’ to ‘‘manners,’’ from ‘‘flesh’’ to ‘‘promise,’’ from Judaism to Christianity, and from kinship to citizenship. Crossing over the double threshold drawn by Jewish and Venetian laws, Jessica can trade the ring for a monkey because the complex set of affiliations it had bound together (marital/familial, religious/ covenantal, legal/communal) have been broken apart and refigured. If Jessica represents the softer side of the Epistles, the accusative voice of Paul to the Philippians inflames Gratiano’s court-room invective: gratiano: O be thou damned, inexecrable dog! And for thy life let justice be accused! Thou almost mak’st me waver in my faith, To hold opinion with Pythagoras That souls of animals infuse themselves Into the trunks of men. Thy currish spirit Governed a wolf who, hanged for human slaughter, Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolvish, bloody, starved, and ravenous. (4.1.128–38)28 Paul’s canine epithet, picked up by Gratiano and others in Merchant, locates Shylock outside the circle of humanity, as a mere creature. Unlike Paul, however, Gratiano does not mitigate and circumscribe his antihumanist expletives by recollecting his own relationship to Israel or the promises to the patriarchs. Gratiano’s Paul is a depraved and deprived Paul, a prophet who has abandoned all sense of situation. I think we are meant to hear the gratuitous character of Gratiano’s citation, the flippancy of his Philippians. This is a Paul so full of grace (gratioso) that he has become truly graceless. In the terms of Taubes and Badiou, Gratiano evokes a ‘‘Marcionite Paul,’’ a Paul whose antilegalism has been pushed to the point of heterodoxy, instituting a kind of dictatorship of the spirit, a permanent state of emergency that has lost all sense of beholdenness to covenant.29 Yet Paul’s passion for Judaism—the passion that Judaism undergoes in Paul—keeps track of the travel expenses when Jessica and Gratiano no longer can or will, gathering the costs of historical transformation and handing them over to Shylock as their nominal repossessor. The pathos of Shylock’s famous ‘‘Hath not a Jew eyes’’ speech (3.1.50–69) rests on the paradox of Shylock’s claim to participate in the general circle of humanity,

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voiced from within the particular world of the Jews. (He too speaks from the Jews, to the Gentiles.) His cascade of rhetorical questions insists on his human affinity with his Venetian compatriots: ‘‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?’’ Yet when he asks if we are not ‘‘fed with the same food,’’ he poses the limits of commensality drawn by both Venetian social practice (eating with Jews, along with other forms of intimate intercourse was actively discouraged by the Venetian polity) and Jewish law. When Shylock asks further, ‘‘If you prick us do we not bleed?’’ he hits directly on circumcision as a contested symbol in the two traditions. Enrolling the infant or adult proselyte into the nation of Israel by cutting the physical body, circumcision in Judaism functions as a (de)naturalizing rite. Yet Shylock’s evocation of circumcision in this speech is closer to Paul than to Abraham: if we all bleed when we are pricked, does not our common participation in the ethne¯ (‘‘nations’’) of the world supersede enrollment in any particular ethnos? Shakespeare draws on the audience’s Christian knowingness to limit the impact of Shylock’s plea; surely it is not Shylock but Shakespeare who evokes Paul, mobilizing the epistles in order to dissolve Jewish difference in the promise of Christian universalism. Yet Paul, unlike the gentile Church Fathers, remained ‘‘pricked’’ in the flesh as well as in the heart. Not unlike Paul, Shylock is willing to lay claim to participation in something universal (call it human being) based on the deep procedural specificity of his membership in the nation of Israel. And, finally, there is the question of Shylock’s conversion. Portia’s last legal gambit humiliates Shylock, stripping him of all rights. The Duke partially restores his protections as a resident alien, an offer, however, that Shylock defiantly rebuffs. Antonio, the defendant turned plaintiff, responds with a new bargain: Shylock will regain half his wealth, and the other half will go to Antonio, who will bequeath it to Jessica and Lorenzo—on condition, however, that Shylock convert to Christianity: So please my lord the Duke and all the court To quit the fine for one half of his goods, I am content; so he will let me have The other half in use, to render it Upon his death, unto the gentleman That lately stole his daughter. Two things provided more: that for this favor He presently become a Christian, The other, that he do record a gift Here in the court of all he dies possessed Unto his son Lorenzo and his daughter. (4.1.378–88) Shapiro, we saw, associates Antonio’s deal with Pauline typology, in which the Jew’s becoming Christian figures the supersession of the Old Testament by the New. Shapiro

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cites as an analogue Peter Martyr’s commentary on Romans: ‘‘In civil judgments, when any is to be condemned which is in any dignity or magistrateship, he is first deprived of his dignity or office, and then afterward condemned. So the apostle first depriveth the Jews of the true Jewishness, and of the true circumcision, and then afterward condemneth them.’’30 Yet insofar as it is Shylock who converts, Shylock more than Antonio holds the position of Paul. Shylock’s conversion, of course, is very different from the scene on the road to Damascus, occurring in a court room as part of a legal settlement and with the penalty of death attached to it.31 Yet Shylock, like Paul, undergoes a conversion with remainder, a condition that uncannily links their political theologies at the end of act 4. Unlike the parallel conversion effected by Jessica, we anticipate a less than full entry into Christian fellowship for Shylock. And in this discontent, he remains at odds with Jessica, who has achieved a more ‘‘Marcionite’’ covenanting with Venice, largely free of remainder, regret, or obligation. Jessica marries into Christianity; although Shylock, like Jessica, must also leave his Judaism at the gates of the city, unlike Jessica he remains both single and singular, inhabiting and holding open what Paul calls the ‘‘loss of all things,’’ the division between validity and meaning that Paul exposes in Philippians. In this gap, Shylock achieves not universalism (what the Christians appear to offer) but rather universality. While universalism is a species of ideology, an ‘‘inflated particular’’ in Ernesto Laclau’s terms, universality aims at truth, often emerging precisely when universalism reveals the cynical violence of its self-interest—for example, when conversion to community can only be secured by death threats, bankrupting the promise of freedom it proffers. Shylock’s conversion holds open the gap between consent and discontent, between the new covenant and prior promises, between politics and theology, and between literature and its secularization. As such, Shylock’s conversion, like Paul’s calling, does not simply submit to the false universalism of an official Christendom that can tolerate differences only by negating and subsuming them, nor does it devolve into a cultural or identity politics by refusing all communion with the gentiles. Universality is always in contest with the inveterate territorialisms of both universalism and particularism, each belied by the marked singularity of the Shylock posited at the end of the play. When Paul declares the law suspended, he breaks with the main stream of Judaism, but, unlike Marcion, he never forecloses the promises to the patriarchs. So too, the converted Shylock will no longer belong to the incorporated Jewish community of Venice, yet his singular discontent, unlike Jessica’s marital union, will create an empty space, the chance of a genuinely mixed constitution, in the universalism of Venetian Christendom, forever holding it accountable to its diverse constituencies and its variegated history of legal borrowing, translatio, and incorporation. Shylock’s universality lies in the fact that his being is ultimately irreducible to either the cultic nationalism of particularism or the global homogeneity of universalism. Whereas particularism is all ablativity—the embracing of situation as an end in itself—universalism excises all memory and trace of situation, violently cutting off and disinheriting the means of its own production.32 Universality is

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neither. Universality is the kingdom of ablative absolutes, which dislodge key topoi from their situations in the process of establishing points of commonality and conversation, yet always bear the badges, stains, and scars of their origination, recalling new covenants to prior promises. Universality conceived in this way is not a set of constant qualities or essences, but rather a recurrent struggle with universalism itself. Shakespeare’s Venice may be a city of churches, yet it is also alive with the energies of capital and the possibilities of constitutionalism. I have argued elsewhere that Shylock’s conversion (from one religion to another) must also be conceived as a naturalization (from the juridical category of the resident alien to that of the citizen or proto-citizen).33 Shakespeare’s testing of the depths and limit points of Pauline theology ultimately pushes beyond theology into the realm of a possible politics, emblematized by the constitutional identity of Venice in the republican imagination of Europe. In Paul himself, conversion carries a distinct political and juridical content. In Galatians, Paul compares conversion to manumission: ‘‘God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons’’ (Gal. 4:4). The passage mobilizes a set of interlinked juridical operations, including manumission, adoption, and naturalization. Paul compares life under the law to slavery; the coming of Christ ‘‘redeems’’ or manumits these slaves, who are now eligible for adoption (freed slaves were often adopted by their masters) and also, implicitly, for citizenship, since in Roman law, manumitted slaves automatically became citizens, leaping over the category of peregrine, or foreigner.34 Using the categories of Roman law, Paul understands conversion as a form of legal naturalization, a formal entry into citizenship. Paul himself, unlike Jesus or the twelve apostles, was not only a Jew of Tarsus, but a citizen of Rome, perhaps because, according to ancient tradition, his parents were manumitted slaves.35 In any case, he did not hesitate to use his citizenship status to his advantage when called before Jewish and Roman courts.36 In Merchant, naturalization (a political concept) and conversion (a theological concept) form a kind of Mo¨bius strip, in which the typological structure of Pauline conversion reveals a juridical lining imported directly from Roman law. Meanwhile, the scene of the Jew’s conversion, staged in the courthouse of Europe’s most continuous republic, not only evokes millennial fantasies of the conversion of the Jews, but also opens onto the public square of a fundamentally mixed polity, insofar as Shylock’s discontented consent marks a reserve of Jewishness on Shylock’s part—not an obdurate racial reserve, as Janet Adelman has argued, but rather, like Paul’s recollection of the promises to the patriarchs, a fund of continued political identification with the Jews, in and for the civic order that he provisionally joins. If Paul converts juridical categories into religious ones, Shylock’s movement into Venice begins to reverse the process, pushing religious categories into political ones. By voicing his discontent (‘‘I am not well’’), he begins to manifest the subjective split of thought that characterizes the conscience and self-consciousness of ordinary men in their capacities as critical citizens.37 Whereas Jessica exemplifies what

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Hannah Arendt calls the parvenue—the Jew whose acculturating impulses jettison any emancipatory project that would unite the Jews as a political bloc—Shylock may well remain a pariah even after formal entry into Christian society, representing the possibility of a politics founded on something other than the complete erasure of ablativity. In Arendt’s words, the willed or conscious pariahs ‘‘get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of the gentiles.’’38 Shylock’s ‘‘I am not well’’ is his Mosaic ve-yehal, recalling the promise to the patriarchs in order to decomplete, if just by a margin, the sovereignty reconstituted in the new contract he has negotiated. In Shakespeare’s dramas, in part through his dialogue with Paul, literature achieves universality. Shakespeare’s plays break out of purely normative religious thinking, in the act of performing deep imaginative work on the structures and rhythms of religious thought as such. Yet, unlike later variations on the secular theme, Shakespeare’s dramas remain deeply responsive to the great paradoxes, contests, and prophesies of monotheism in its several destinies and thus form an essential resource and reserve for encountering political theology today. The theo-political issues transmitted from Paul to Shakespeare may take their signature from circumcision, but they extend to the constitution of the social body,39 the nature of election, and the forms and figures of emancipation. These questions take their bearings from exegesis and iconography, and in this sense rely on the work of traditional historicism. By focusing on problems of political theology, including the symbolic life of sovereignty and the protocols of group membership, these questions also share concerns with cultural studies. They differ from both, however, insofar as they do not restrict religious motifs to specific contexts, confessions, or power structures, but rather approach them as players on the experimental stage of thought, free to make new combinations and arrive at new truths through acts of criticism that are both thoughtful and creative, responsive to the laws of literary interpretation in their historicity and distinctiveness, yet willing to suspend them when called to, in order to hear their commands anew.

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The Saturday of Messianic Time Agamben and Badiou on the Apostle Paul

Eleanor Kaufman

There has been a striking theological turn in contemporary continental thought over the past two decades. Philosophers ranging from Derrida to Lyotard to Zˇizˇek and including Agamben and Badiou—all thinkers not generally noted for being theologically inclined—have turned toward Christianity, or, in the case of Derrida and Agamben, toward a Judaically inflected notion of the messianic, as a way of reconfiguring a certain strain of Marxist thought about what constitutes the political. Here I will focus on what are probably the two most diametrically opposed approaches to the politico-theological, both articulated through readings of Paul’s epistles: on the one hand, Badiou’s claim that Paul represents a model of revolutionary universalism and, on the other, Agamben’s use of Paul’s epistles to outline a theory of messianic time. My observations are oriented toward a notion of what constitutes the messianic for Agamben and Badiou (the latter does not embrace this term), and I will claim that there is a latent messianism embedded in Badiou’s consistent preoccupation with questions of number. It is not, I think, too strong of a statement to assert that nearly all of Agamben’s oeuvre is oriented toward demarcating a doubleness whereby one thing is actually exposed to be two terms in relation, and the slight shift of perception that comes with this insight is for Agamben the mark of the messianic. In The Coming Community, Agamben delineates this mechanism very precisely, especially in his description of the virtually imperceptible shift that will take place with the advent of messianic time: There is a well-known parable about the kingdom of the Messiah that Walter Benjamin (who heard it from Gershom Scholem) recounted one evening to Ernst Bloch, who in turn transcribed it

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in Spuren: ‘‘A rabbi, a real cabalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this bush or this stone just a little, and thus everything. But this small displacement is so difficult to achieve and its measure is so difficult to find that, with regard to the world, humans are incapable of it and it is necessary that the messiah come.’’ Benjamin’s version of the story goes like this: ‘‘The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.’’1 In the first recounting of the messianic story by Bloch, the marker of the slight displacement is something inhuman, a cup, bush, or stone, and the measure of the slight displacement so difficult to achieve that it is beyond the human. This situation of the messianic at the limit of the human underlies the strain of Agamben’s work that is explicitly engaged with questions of life, the human, and the messianic.2 In The Open, the encounter with the inhuman is exemplified by the animal, and a chiasmic opening to the closedness of the animal is the marker of the human (though it is not clear that the animal need be present at all for this opening within the human to take place). Agamben outlines this dialectical relation of the open and the closed through a reading of Heidegger and situates this encounter with the extra-human space of blockage (which, again, is ultimately still part of the human) as the hallmark of the mystical: Heidegger seems here to oscillate between two opposite poles, which in some ways recall the paradoxes of mystical knowledge—or rather, nonknowledge. On the one hand, captivation is a more spellbinding and intense openness than any kind of human knowledge; on the other . . . , it is closed in a total opacity. Animal captivation and the openness of the world thus seem related to one another as are negative and positive theology, and their relationship is as ambiguous as the one which simultaneously opposes and binds in a secret complicity the dark night of the mystic and the clarity of rational knowledge.3 For Agamben, then, the rational is inseparable from the mystical, the positive from the negative, life from death. This is not so much a redemptive reading of the ‘‘negative’’ term—though it is that, too—as it is a focus on a complexity of relation between two contradictory movements that nonetheless reside together in the same place or entity, so much so that it would be easy not to perceive their distinct valences. In State of Exception, Agamben links this mystical element to the state of exception and in doing so mentions in passing that it is not unlike Le´vi-Strauss’s ‘‘floating signifier.’’4 What is notable about this formulation—and crucial for the connection to Badiou

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that I will develop—is that the floating signifier is above all the index of a type of relation, one between signifier and signified that is marked by the excess of the signifier but is nonetheless inextricably linked to the structural relation between the two terms. As Deleuze emphasizes in his reading of Le´vi-Strauss in ‘‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’’ the structure itself is more important than the set of (often fourfold or chiasmic) kinship or mythical relations it is evoked to analyze. Yet because it is at once the driving analytic motor and virtually devoid of signification in its own right, it is not unlike a mystical glue. Deleuze writes that ‘‘the Structure, consisting of the interrelation of the distinct entities, remains in itself opaque, thwarting all attempts at interpretation.’’5 So, too, although Agamben never quite says this in so many words, it seems that his readings are as much about the structure of relation as they are about the concrete entities related. In State of Exception, he differentiates between two related yet distinct elements regarding the law. One is the normative and juridical element of law, the other the state of exception from law, what he also refers to as force-of-law, where ‘‘what is at stake is a force of law without law.’’6 Agamben writes that ‘‘As long as the two elements remain correlated yet conceptually, temporally, and subjectively distinct . . . their dialectic—though founded on a fiction—can nevertheless function in some way. But when they tend to coincide in a single person, when the state of exception, in which they are bound and blurred together, becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a killing machine.’’7 Here, the state of exception, the force-of-law, is the mystical glue that underpins the whole system, and when it is made to coincide entirely with the law, the dialectic of slight displacement that kept the system running breaks down. Indeed, it is when two parts of a system not perceived to be distinct are forcibly unified that the system faces its biggest crisis and potential for breakdown (which is precisely what Marx argues in ‘‘Crisis Theory’’8). At issue, then, is the necessity that the messianic preserve the disjunctive tension between two terms that might risk being collapsed into one. Agamben’s emphasis on the messianic and even the mystical would seem to put his book on the apostle Paul resolutely at odds with Badiou’s book on Paul, which preceded it and which Agamben comments on obliquely yet critically. In many respects— argumentative, stylistic, and otherwise—these readings could not be more dissimilar. Yet Badiou and Agamben converge in a preoccupation with the complexity of number and counting, with two terms that may be mistaken for one and the importance of registering this dialectic as a relation between two rather than a pure one. Before exploring this convergence—as well as the way these two texts on Paul that would seem to be so diametrically opposed might share a secret preoccupation with messianic time—it is first necessary to situate and outline Badiou’s reading of Paul within the context of his larger oeuvre.

 In Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Paul serves as a model and mouthpiece for Badiou’s philosophical system. As someone who remains faithful to the event of Christ’s

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resurrection, founding through this a universal truth process that shuns the particular, the dialectic, and the law, Paul is the exemplary militant figure for Badiou. One of the refrains of Badiou’s analysis is the way in which Paul does away with the dialectic between life and death: ‘‘For Paul, there is an absolute disjunction between Christ’s death and his resurrection. For death is an operation in the situation . . . while resurrection is the event as such.’’9 Although Christ had to die in order to be resurrected, the event of the resurrection, which belongs to the domain of grace, is an effect that outlives and supersedes its cause, much as for Paul both the Greek cosmological order and the Jewish law are superseded by a then-unnamed overarching third term—Christianity. Badiou’s reading of Paul shuns the mention of death in any fashion, even the dialectical relation of Christ’s death as conduit to everlasting life. Unlike Agamben, whose writings repeatedly focus on this hinge point between life and death, Badiou’s thought leaves no room for a space of ambiguity or relation between the two terms. If anything, Badiou the avowed atheist affirms this supersession by the third term in a less ambiguous fashion than Paul himself. This is particularly evident in Badiou’s discussion of Paul’s treatment of the relation between law and sin in his Letter to the Romans. Unlike the event of the resurrection, the law is particular rather than universal and is in direct relation to desire and death.10 For Badiou, law is akin to a type of evil that is not in itself a radical evil but has an evil function insofar as its prohibitory structure creates desire, which leads directly to sin and death. Such a reading is in diametric opposition to Lacan’s juxtaposition of Kant and Sade in his seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and especially in his essay ‘‘Kant with Sade,’’ published several years after the 1959–60 seminar. Though the spirit of Kant’s and Sade’s works could not be more dissimilar, Lacan focuses rather perversely on a striking parallel of form, demonstrating that Kant’s categorical imperative of acting so that one’s maxim is always universalizable takes on the same structure as Sade’s formula of always maximizing one’s pleasure. Furthermore, both formulations are in fact form- and not content-based, for they give no specific measures of conduct. In a particularly noteworthy twist at the end of ‘‘Kant with Sade,’’ Lacan upbraids Sade, as it were, for not recognizing the structure of desire that is linked to the dialectic itself, to the dialectic of law: ‘‘Sade thus stopped, at the point where desire is knotted together with the law. If something in him held to the law, in order there to find the opportunity Saint Paul speaks of, to be sinful beyond measure, who would throw the first stone? But he went no further.’’11 Here Lacan points out that Sade, like Freud, holds too strictly to a refusal of the Christian precept of loving the neighbor to escape, as he might want to, the structure of that refusal’s law (as opposed to the law of selfless love that Paul—and Badiou following him— would see as not a law at all).12 Like those who for Paul are still beholden to Jewish law, Lacan’s Sade remains entangled in a dialectic of law and desire. And Lacan would imply that the apostle Paul is himself not immune from such an entanglement. Could it also be that Paul, in his discussion of sin and its relation to the law in the seventh chapter of his Letter to the Romans,

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does not elaborate just what ‘‘sinful beyond measure’’ might mean (Rom. 7:13)?13 Just what is this ‘‘opportunity,’’ as Lacan puts it, of being sinful beyond measure, and is there not some desire at work in Paul’s letter that shows a drive toward that unrealized opportunity? Is there not a certain tension at the heart of Paul’s letters, an indicator that, if nothing else, Paul was caught up in a certain dialectic of life and death, even though his message is of choosing life as a means beyond this very dialectic? In the process of hailing this life beyond death, Paul simultaneously imagines a ‘‘sin beyond measure’’ that in some scenario might be the very inhuman limit that is a consistent preoccupation of both Lacan and Agamben and that, according to Badiou, Paul never broaches. Yet things seem a bit different if we look at the beginning of the seventh chapter of the book of Romans, which is none other than an example of the law concerning marriage. Paul uses the death of the husband as an analogy for the way that life in Christ supersedes the law: ‘‘Thus a married woman is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives; but if her husband dies, she is discharged from the law concerning the husband. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress. In the same way, my brothers,14 you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God’’ (Rom. 7:2–5). It is odd that the example Paul employs to illustrate the merits of the law-superseding life in Christ takes as its pivotal point the death of the husband. For it is only through the husband’s death that the law of marriage is suspended.15 If anything, this passage from Romans affirms Antigone’s unorthodox claim that a husband and children are ultimately replaceable, but that a brother is not. Is this not to some degree an example of the expendability of the couple and the permanence of the (unnatural?) family—here the brothers in Christ?16 Not only, it would seem, does Paul envision, surely in spite of himself, a realm of sin beyond measure, but also one of the impermanence of the couple. It is this heterodox Paul, the one who ‘‘went no further’’ than this, that Badiou views exclusively as a radical subverter and overturner of the law. This is certainly also the case, but following Lacan, I would suggest there is simultaneously a more perverse logic at work in Paul’s epistles. This perverse logic is bound up with the dialectic of life and death, the dialectic (if it can be labeled as such) that is at the heart of Agamben’s work. Interestingly, Agamben does not highlight the life-death dynamic in his book on Paul as much as in many of his other works, yet the book’s central themes of the remainder and of messianic time have the same structural logic as this dynamic. Although Agamben explicitly devotes only two pages of The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans to a critique of Badiou’s notion of universalism, the entirety of his philologically based close reading of Paul’s epistles might be seen as pitted against the pure positivism of Badiou’s reading,

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for Agamben repeatedly gestures to a richness and ambiguity in Paul’s language that is at odds with a simple overturning of the law. Agamben argues that the very act of wanting to overturn the law, especially insofar as the law can be linked to the state, is symptomatic of an inability to escape the thought structures of the law and the state. This is precisely the point that Lacan makes in arguing that Sade ultimately reinforces the Kantian system rather than undermining it, for the very fact of trying to overturn the law or the state means that one is still embedded in its logic. As Agamben writes with respect to Badiou: This is how, in the book just referred to, Badiou is able to think about Paul’s universalism as ‘‘benevolence with regard to customs and opinions’’ or as an ‘‘indifference that tolerates differences,’’ which then becomes ‘‘that which must be traversed in order for universality itself to be constructed’’ (Badiou 98–99). Despite the legitimacy of concepts such as ‘‘tolerance’’ or ‘‘benevolence,’’ which in the end, pertain to the State’s attitude toward religious conflict (one can see here how those who declare their wanting to abolish the state are often unable to liberate themselves from a point of view of the state), these concepts are certainly not messianic. For Paul, it is not a matter of ‘‘tolerating’’ or getting past differences in order to pinpoint a sameness or a universal lurking beyond. The universal is not a transcendent principle through which differences may be perceived—such a perspective of transcendence is not available to Paul. Rather, this ‘‘transcendental’’ involves an operation that divides the divisions of the law themselves and renders them inoperative, without ever reaching any final ground. No universal man, no Christian can be found in the depths of the Jew or the Greek, neither as a principle nor as an end; all that is left is a remnant and the impossibility of the Jew or the Greek to coincide with himself. The messianic vocation separates every kle¯sis from itself, engendering a tension within itself, without ever providing it with some other identity; hence, Jew as non-Jew, Greek as nonGreek.17 This passage captures many of the central claims that Agamben makes about the messianic and correlatively about messianic time. Rather than insisting on the separation between the Christian and the Jew or the Christian and the Greek, Agamben tries to show that Paul does not merely divide Jew from non-Jew but also makes other divisions, such as that between spirit and flesh. What ensues in this fashion is a whole series of divisions such that there is always a remainder, always something that is not clearly divisible into one compartment or another. Agamben links this notion of the remainder to the way Christ’s coming renders the old law inoperative. Indeed, this insistence on the positive force of the inoperative is central to Agamben’s whole oeuvre, for the inoperative is not simply death, but a force of suspension of life that might be said to enhance life by the very proximity it opens to the space of the negative. This force of suspension might be

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translated, to evoke a phenomenological resister that is not exactly Agamben’s, as a structure of perception that is able to look unflinchingly upon seemingly negative states— death, stuckness, immobility, inertia—and take away from this encounter a potential for transformation. At issue is thus not simply the negative or death, nor the liminal space between life and death, but the perceptual encounter with that negative space from another space that is distinct from it. In this regard, Antonio Negri’s critique of Agamben as simply reiterating a Heideggerian preoccupation with death seems like a wrong-spirited reduction of Agamben (and, for that matter, of Heidegger).18 Agamben in fact goes to great lengths to show the difference between overturning a law and making it inoperative, dwelling on Paul’s repeated use of the verb katargein, which would indicate coming out of an act, or being suspended, as opposed to undoing or destroying, as this verb is often rendered. In this fashion, it is not so much a question of a dialectical undoing of the law but rather of its suspension, or of its being rendered inoperative. Agamben notes, for example, how the word katargein is formed from the word argeo¯, which in the Septuagint indicates rest on Saturday. Agamben writes that ‘‘it is certainly not by chance that the term used by the apostle to express the effect of the messianic on works of the law echoes a verb that signifies the sabbatical suspension of works.’’19 On this reading, the sabbatical suspension is perfectly parallel to the state of exception. In other words, the sabbatical suspension is to the working days of the week what the force-of-law is to law: at once part of the entity in question, even a sort of endpoint toward which it is oriented, yet also that time or space where the rules of the work week or the law are overturned, effectively the exception that proves the rule. Agamben in fact includes a short section just after this passage entitled ‘‘State of Exception,’’ in which he poses the question ‘‘What is a law that is simultaneously suspended and fulfilled?’’ and responds by referring to Schmitt and Taubes, linking their political theology to Pauline messianic suspension of law, an argument fully anticipating State of Exception.20 Agamben’s interest in these questions is, of course, not unique to him, falling as it does at the end of a lineage of twentieth-century Judeo-inflected writings on the messianic, and more specifically on messianic time. Agamben concludes The Time that Remains with a chapter on Benjamin and proposes several links between Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit—the time of the now, the time that can ‘‘blast out of the continuum of history’’— and its ‘‘weak messianic power,’’ with the Pauline messianic.21 The book’s penultimate paragraph begins: ‘‘Whatever the case may be, there is no reason to doubt that these two fundamental messianic texts of our tradition [Paul and Benjamin], separated by almost two thousand years, both written in a situation of radical crisis, form a constellation whose time of legibility has finally come today, for reasons that invite further reflection.’’22 Agamben’s reflections on messianic time are preceded not only by Benjamin but even more proximately by Derrida’s Specters of Marx, which arguably inaugurates the whole turn toward the politico-theological of the past two decades. Through a reading of Hamlet, Derrida characterizes messianic time as a time ‘‘out of joint.’’ Downplaying any links

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to an actual Judeo-Christian messianism, Derrida labels this time (or even space) a ‘‘messianicity without messianism.’’23 Without further elaborating these examples, I would simply suggest that Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben all draw on a certain Judaic vision of the messianic while keeping it at arm’s length. Given the parameters of this genre of evoking the messianic without recourse to messianism proper, the addition of a fourth thinker to this group of three takes on added significance. The thinker in question is Jacob Taubes, whose lectures collected as The Political Theology of Paul were given in Heidelberg in 1987 about a month before his death. (According to the preface to the posthumously published lectures, ‘‘Taubes, who did not have the strength to stand even for a moment, could lecture to us with the greatest intellectual intensity, four days out of the week, for three hours at a time, about his reading and contextualization of the Epistle to the Romans.’’24) What Taubes emphasizes, in several elliptical and startling moments in his lecture, is the fundamentally paradoxical if not perverse nature of Jewish messianism, and he does not shy away from embracing this term, something that neither Benjamin nor Derrida—nor ultimately even Agamben— embraces in such an unqualified fashion. Taubes puts Paul’s messianism squarely within a history not only of Jewish mysticism but also of Jewish apostasy: ‘‘This paradoxical faith is what I’ve tried to explain to you from the point of view of religious history with respect to the messianic logic in the history of Jewish mysticism, as a logic that is repeated in history. Whoever understands what Scholem presents in the eighth chapter of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism can penetrate more deeply into Paul’s messianic logic than by reading the entire exegetical literature.’’25 This messianic logic touches on several dynamics at once: it recognizes the motor force of acts of transgression or apostasy; it ‘‘tarries with the negative’’ in that the perception it affords is only accessible through limit conditions such as death, illness, or despair; and it seeks to maintain a barely perceptible register of slight difference so that two things that might appear to be the same are recognized as distinct.26 Like the Lacan of the seminars, Taubes takes a continually provocative stance toward his listening audience, berating them for what they surely haven’t read and don’t understand and often not deigning to clarify for them the extraordinary connections and observations that are just thrown out and left there. Not surprisingly, then, Taubes does not say what it is that Scholem presents in the eighth chapter of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. (I had not opened Scholem’s book for many years, partially because of the associations it had for me with a friend who had died, a friend with whom I read Heidegger and discussed Jewish mysticism, though I have no recollection of what we said about those topics. In his last letter to me, a month before he committed suicide on Yom Kippur, my friend told me I should spend a month reading about Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenthcentury Jewish mystic who proclaimed himself the messiah before turning apostate and converting to Islam. I never did this, instead suspending all I may have known about

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Sabbatai Zevi. It so happened, some years after my friend’s death, that I was staying in my aunt and uncle’s house, which, unlike the house I grew up in, was full of books on Judaism, and there I opened a Jewish encyclopedia and read the entry on Sabbatai Zevi, in this fashion learning that he had died most probably on Yom Kippur. It was not, however, until teaching Taubes’s The Political Theology of Paul that I opened chapter eight, the penultimate chapter, of Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, a book dedicated to his friend Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide in 1940 as he fled from the Nazis, and discovered this chapter to be on Sabbatai Zevi.) Scholem’s chapter 8 treats Sabbatai Zevi’s relation to Nathan of Gaza, his young disciple who around 1665 (the year Spinoza suspended his work on the Ethics to write the Theologico-Political Treatise) had a Damascus-like revelation, except that it was in Gaza. The revelation was that Sabbatai Zevi—who at that point, according to Scholem, was a rather average manic-depressive mystic—was in fact the messiah. And according to Scholem, it was this revelation to Nathan of Gaza that in turn allowed Sabbatai Zevi to then proclaim in Gaza that he was the messiah. As Scholem writes: Nathan represents a most unusual combination of character traits. If the expression be permitted, he was at once the John the Baptist and the Paul of the new Messiah, surely a very remarkable figure. He had all the qualities which one misses in Sabbatai Zevi: tireless activity, originality of theological thought, and abundant productive power and literary ability. He proclaims the Messiah and blazes the trail for him, and at the same time he is by far the most influential theologian of the movement. . . . The great historical force of this new Messianism was born on the day on which Nathan discovered that Sabbatai Zevi, this curious sinner, ascetic and saint who had occasionally dreamed of his Messianic mission, was indeed the Messiah, and having discovered him, made him the symbol of a movement and himself became its standard-bearer.27 Insofar as Nathan of Gaza is both John the Baptist and Paul to Sabbatai Zevi’s Christ, he also embodies the out-of-jointness of messianic time, for he is at once the precursor and the follower of the Messiah.28 This is an upending and dizzying form of time, not without its additional affinities to what Freud has termed Nachtra¨glichkeit, a kind of uncanny repetition, the trauma that is only experienced belatedly and retrospectively once it is finally repeated, but in a slightly new fashion. The other aspect of Sabbatai Zevi that Scholem emphasizes is that he conjoins the figure of the Messiah with that of the sinner-apostate. Scholem highlights the paradox of this conjunction by comparing Sabbatai Zevi to Christ: To return to our comparison, the fate of the Messiahs is entirely different and so is the religious paradox. The paradox of crucifixion and that of apostasy are after all on

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two altogether different levels. The second leads straight into the bottomless pit; its very idea makes almost anything conceivable. The shock which had to be surmounted in both cases is greater in the case of Sabbatianism. The believer is compelled to furnish even more emotional energy in order to overcome the terrible paradox of an apostate Savior. Death and apostasy cannot possibly evoke the same or similar sentiments, if only because the idea of betrayal contains even less that is positive. Unlike the death of Jesus, the decisive action (or rather, passion) of Sabbatai Zevi furnished no new revolutionary code of values. His betrayal merely destroyed the old. And so it becomes understandable why the deep fascination exercised by the conception of the helpless Messiah who hands himself over to the demons, if driven to its utmost limits, led directly to nihilistic consequences.29 This nihilistic vision of the messianic is what I take to be at the heart of Taubes’s lectures on Paul at the end of his life. But here the term nihilism should be qualified, because what is at issue is not so much nihilism per se, but the way divine apostasy may pass for nihilism. As Slavoj Zˇizˇek points out in The Puppet and the Dwarf, Judas’s betrayal, when read from a different perspective, might be seen as a higher form of fidelity in that it allows for the carrying out of Christ’s divine mission.30 It is also notable that Scholem in this passage contrasts the paradox of Sabbatai Zevi’s apostasy to that of Christ’s death, and while apostasy represents the more damnable state, it is also not simply reducible to death as the negative—it is something that, in the spirit of the messianic, registers beyond the simple boundary between life and death. Apostasy cannot be equated with death, nor is it purely the space of the negative; rather, it represents the ability to enter into that space, to be transformed by it, and ultimately to bear with it.31 Apostasy is more extreme in that it exemplifies the perverse logic that traverses the Jewish messianic moment. Indeed, it is the thought of the sin beyond measure. This sin beyond measure seems proximate to what Taubes characterizes with reference to Benjamin as ‘‘creation as decay’’: ‘‘Benjamin—this is the astonishing parallel—has a Pauline notion of creation; he sees the labor pains of creation, the futility of creation. All of this is of course to be found in Romans 8: the groaning of the creature. Open this text and read it out loud, and then read Benjamin: You’re going to be amazed. Romans 8:18. That’s what Benjamin is talking about. That is the idea of creation as decay, since it is without hope.’’32 What I want to distill from this is, once again, not so much an out and out nihilism or hopelessness, but the act and force of energy and disjointed temporality entailed in coming to that recognition, which is not without profound relation to the movement of the Pauline revelation, but perhaps represents its darker side. Again, this is not nihilism, not eschatology, but a recognition of a difference of one, of one month, of one number in the count, often perceived at the end of a life.

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This difference of one signals the importance of the count, of counting and numbers and dialectic as they relate to the politico-theological, which is ultimately what gives the work of Agamben and Badiou a certain unlikely proximity. Given the philological emphasis of Agamben’s analysis, it is only fitting that the very same verb, katargein, has a link to none other than the Hegelian dialectic. As Agamben writes, with no small element of provocation: At this point, I must return to the discovery I alluded to concerning the posthumous life of the verb katargein in the philosophical tradition. How does Luther translate this Pauline verb, whether in Romans 3:31 or wherever else the verb occurs in the Letters? Luther uses Aufheben—the very word that harbors the double meaning of abolishing and conserving (aufbewahren and aufho¨ren lassen) used by Hegel as a foundation for his dialectic. A closer look at Luther’s vocabulary shows that he is aware of the verb’s double meaning, which before him occurs infrequently. This means that in all likelihood the term acquires its particular facets through the translation of the Pauline letters, leaving Hegel to pick it up and develop it. . . . This is how a genuinely messianic term expressing the transformation of the law impacted by faith and announcement becomes a key term for the dialectic. That Hegel’s dialectic is nothing more than a secularization of Christian theology comes as no surprise; however, more significant is the fact that (with a certain degree of irony) Hegel used a weapon against theology furnished by theology itself and that this weapon is genuinely messianic.33 Agamben goes on from this to suggest that the Hegelian dialectic is nonetheless not messianic enough, for it foregrounds too emphatically the third, resolving term that would gesture toward a more apocalyptic end of history (and he connects this to the apocalyptic version of Hegel presented by two Franco-Russian Hegel scholars, Alexandre Koyre´ and Alexandre Koje`ve). Agamben is again at pains to distinguish the messianic, which represents a sort of suspended present time, from the apocalyptic or eschatological, which focuses on the end. What Agamben does not envision—and this is where I will return to Badiou in a more redemptive fashion—is the possibility of a fourth term of the dialectical process that would capitalize on and in fact be the realm of the messianic that is already embedded in the Aufhebung of the Hegelian, and Marxian, dialectic. Badiou notes at one point in Saint Paul that Hegel gestures to this fourth term at the end of his Logic.34 And Badiou himself mentions at several points that perhaps there should be four terms in his analysis of Paul: the Greeks, the Jews, the Christians (which Paul represents), and the mystics. This fourth term is ‘‘the discourse of the ineffable, the discourse of nondiscourse.’’35 Badiou goes on to elaborate: The fourth discourse (miraculous, or mystical) must remain unaddressed, which is to say that it cannot enter into the realm of preaching. . . . But it cannot be denied that

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there is in him, and he is alone in this among the recognized apostles, an ethical dimension of antiobscurantism. For Paul will not permit the Christian declaration to justify itself through the ineffable. He will not allow the Christian subject to base his speech on the unutterable. . . . Let us say that, for Paul, the ethics of discourse consists in never suturing the third discourse (the public declaration of the Christ-event) to the fourth (the glorification of the subject personally visited by miracle). This ethics is profoundly coherent. Supposing I invoke . . . the fourth discourse . . . and hence the private, unutterable utterances, in order to justify the third (that of Christian faith), I relapse inevitably into the second discourse, that of the sign, the Jewish discourse.36 Although acknowledging it, Badiou resoundingly avoids this fourth space, leaving him in this regard not un-Hegelian. This fourth space is too close to the Judaic, and though Badiou himself does not use the term, too close to the state of suspension or exception that is the hallmark of Agamben’s messianic.37 This refusal of the fourth term is consistent within the context of the book on Paul, but it is strikingly at odds with the larger corpus of Badiou’s oeuvre, which is systematically organized around the four-part breakdown of what Badiou terms ‘‘truth-processes’’ into the domains of politics, art, science, and love. Badiou’s concept of the truth process is in many ways hard to define, but examples of such a truth procedure might be the events of May ’68, the intellectual energy around French Maoism, or the model of love between two people. My point here is not to explicate the truth event as Badiou outlines it, but rather to note that it is singularly accessed through the four categories of politics, art, science, and love. These categories recur with exemplary consistency throughout Badiou’s work.38 This penchant for four-part schemas has an interesting resonance with Badiou’s multiple writings on the philosophy of mathematics and numbers. In a commentary on Lacan (who is also notably drawn to four-part schemas, as, for example, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis or the four discourses that he develops several years later in his seminar 17, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis), Badiou expressly addresses the differences between the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4. He asserts, in reference to a four-part system in Lacan, that ‘‘to attain 3, we need to come back from 4. But what is 4? 4 is the cipher of discourse. You know that any discourse organizes the S/ of the subject, the S1 of the master signifier, the S2 of the derived signifier and the object a. The discourse is a figure of the 4. We can also say that with 4, we know how to count. We have, starting with 4, the discourse of the Number.’’39 Now all this would reinforce the symbolic power of 4 as the ultimate structure of discourse and argumentation, something that Badiou’s work as a whole certainly underscores. But what is striking here is the relation of 3 and 4 in Badiou’s model. He notes that ‘‘the 3 will be obtained by descending from 4, starting with the discourse. . . . the 3 has skipped between 2 and 4: we can only obtain the structure starting with the

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discourse. We can then only obtain the 3 starting from the 4.’’40 What this typology of numbers represents is something actually quite close to the messianic structure that Agamben locates in Paul’s epistles. Like the messianic, the 3 is suspended between the 2 and the 4; it is the inoperative moment of the 4 of discourse. It is the 4 displaced, the subtraction of one. It is not unlike what Badiou writes about truth at the beginning of Saint Paul: ‘‘A truth is always, according to the dominant law of the count, subtracted from the count.’’41 This subtraction from the count is remarkably similar to what Agamben characterizes as the ‘‘Saturday of messianic time.’’ Agamben cites a Rabbinic commentary on the book of Genesis that proposes that Saturday represents the taking of an element of profane time and adding it to sacred time, but beyond that stands in for the very displacement between Saturday and Sunday. Agamben comments that ‘‘Saturday—messianic time—is not another day, homogeneous to others; rather, it is that innermost disjointedness within time through which one may—by a hairsbreadth—grasp time and accomplish it.’’42 Insofar as the messianic can be represented by an adjacent day or number, which is not the last (that would be the apocalyptic) but the penultimate, not the seventh day as the day of rest but the sixth (the difference between the Christian and the Jewish sabbath): insofar as this space of difference in the count could be said to mark the messianic, then it seems that such a space of subtraction from the count is the latent messianic element in Badiou’s work. More than subtraction in the sense of loss, it seems that Badiou uses this term to signal a difference of one, or a relation of the penultimate, as opposed to an exclusive recognition of only the last and most visible term. Why, then, in a work where Badiou makes the apostle Paul stand in as the marker of an ultimate, universalizing truth event—in other words, the epitome of Badiou’s logical system—are there only three terms: the Jew, the Greek, and the Christian? Isn’t the exalted category of the Christian based, as Agamben shows, on an inoperative and messianic fourth term from which the third category of the Christian might be read, not as the dialectical surpassing of the Greek and the Jew, but as itself the thing subtracted or displaced from its messianic remainder? If this were explicitly acknowledged, then the specifically Judaic dimension of Agamben’s messianic might be opened—in a gesture partaking of apostasy or grace or both—to the Christian and even beyond.

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Love and the Stick The Worldly Aspects of the Call in the First Letter to the Corinthians

Nils F. Schott

The opening verses of Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth announce the theme at the heart of the epistle: how properly to be a Christian, that is, how to be a worthy follower of and successor to Christ.1 The idea of the call—as calling from God and, once accepted, as (missionary) call to others, instituting a community—guides the discussion of theological as well as very practical problems: Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 1:1–3) The points Paul raises in these lines—the vocation of the believer as being called by God to be holy, his own vocation as a believer, as an apostle who is called to spread the good news (euaggelion) of Jesus, and the invocation of God on the part of all believers—he spells out from a Christological and missionary perspective. In the name of the Corinthian congregation, Paul thanks God for the grace shown them. This thanks on his part is due because it is in this congregation that his call, his proclamation of and testimony to Christ, has been heard. It is through Paul—thanks to his call and calling—that the congregation has received the strength to persevere in the faith until the return of the messiah. The gift of faith, unlike human knowledge, is an enduring one if the precepts of the Church, the community of those ‘‘called [by God] into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord,’’ are followed. This is more than a theoretical point; it is the guiding thread of Paul’s

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engagement with the practical problems he sees himself faced with in the governance of the church at Corinth. In this chapter, I propose to show how the call to a community instituted by the call from God, from the first lines to the last, serves to convey Paul’s concerns, namely to establish scripture as practical, written guidance in the Old and New Testaments,2 to affirm the authority of apostolic succession, and to preserve the unity of the community, internally and over against the outside, as fellowship of Christ. The primacy of love and of the spirit he affirms throughout complicates the status of what I would like to call the worldly aspects of the call, which are scripture, apostolic succession, and the Church. Paul articulates his understanding of the call as a gift; a gift can be accepted as a gift only when it is not accepted for oneself but handed on, given as a gift and used for the benefit of others. The difficulty lies in knowing what one is called on to do. Paul’s letter provides assistance in assuming one’s vocation, and, to judge from the tone of the letter, which invokes not just love but also the ‘‘stick,’’ his advice is advice is sorely needed. The interest of Paul’s letter lies in the categories it can provide for a theoretical reconstruction of catechesis, pedagogy, and disciplinary practices generally. In proclaiming a necessary knowledge and in organizing a community such that this message can be absorbed and made manifest, Paul sets a precedent for what, in the eighteenth century, will be understood as the attempt of practical philosophy to bridge the divide between theory and practice. Paul’s successors turn to him because his conception of the call and of living up to our calling, individually and communally, responds to their desire to shape the world according to supposedly universal principles. To be sure, the didactic imperatives that characterize this tradition—most importantly abbreviation, systematization, adaptation, and repetition of the knowledge conveyed—are not exclusive to Paul. Yet the sense of urgency of Paul’s mission, his rigorous derivation of practical rules from the spiritual principle of love, and the sheer success of Christianity make his work the most widely invoked authority in matters of education. The reading presented in the following pages therefore seeks to establish, from within 1 Corinthians, the defining traits of a selfstyled Paulinian pedagogical tradition. It places the letter within a perspective and, however implicitly, a historical trajectory whose single concern, the urgent practical application of saving, that is, necessary knowledge however defined, remains insufficiently theorized. The conceptual coherence I find in Paul’s letter derives from this perspective.3 What, then, is Paul worried about that makes his response so powerful and influential?

Paul’s Spiritual Children Above all, Paul sees the unity of the congregation in jeopardy: ‘‘I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be

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no divisions among you, but that you may be united in the same mind and the same purpose’’ (1 Cor. 1:4–10). All members, irrespective of who actually baptized them, were baptized in the name of Jesus.4 As Jesus is one, so those who follow him must not be divided. What is more important than the external act of baptism, however, is what it gives expression to. The words of the act must not be mistaken for human words: they express the power of God. Accordingly, it is not baptism but the gospel, the narrative of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection that is central to Paul’s calling, to his being called and his calling out. Yet the ‘‘message of the cross’’ is clad in human words and may thus be judged to be foolish. After all, it defies common thinking that a god should die. Such judgment, however, is shortsighted and ignores the wisdom particular to faith; it clings to the merely external. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block [skandalon] to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than man’s wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Cor. 1:10–25) Human wisdom is a negligible exterior, yet nonbelievers hold onto it and value it highly. It is thanks to the call of God that we come to understand wisdom, influence, or noble birth to be irrelevant. Indeed, they are obstacles; at the very least, they are distractions, as are the demands for miracles or logical proofs. The wisdom of God does not translate directly into human wisdom. For this reason, the necessity of giving human form to the gospel, proclaimed in a language that is not different from that used by its detractors, is turned into a virtue: the very ‘‘foolishness of our proclamation’’ is employed ‘‘to save those who believe.’’ The words of the son manifest the power of the father, our ‘‘righteousness and sanctification and redemption,’’ in a paradoxical reversal: the apparent foolishness of a weak God sacrificing himself defeats the strength of human wisdom. The contrast between unsophisticated speech and refined discourse, between what is despised and what is revered figures the fundamental contrast between divine and human wisdom (1 Cor. 1:20–31). Paul draws on his personal experience as apostle to make this point. All that he has known since his conversion, he claims, has been ‘‘Jesus Christ and him crucified.’’ Without the trappings of eloquence and wisdom, Paul is terrified by his ineptness so long as he understands his vocation simply to be one of verbal communication. Yet if he reminds himself that the wisdom he tells of is not of this world, that it is a secret wisdom not understood in the terms of this world, he understands that his preaching

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must disdain the ways of the world in order to achieve its goal: ‘‘My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom but on the power of God’’ (1 Cor. 2:1–10). As manifestation of the spirit, Paul’s words are understandable only by the spirit and for the spirit. For someone who does not believe, they must remain unintelligible. They are spoken ‘‘in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.’’ The faith of the believer, which he only possesses because he is called and has heard the call of God, compares the spirit of the words heard with the spirit within. Nothing external intervenes, neither signs nor arguments; that is why the gospel is a skandalon, a stumbling block or simple foolishness to the unbeliever:5 ‘‘the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God’’ (1 Cor. 2:10–14). On the one hand, this entails that the believer has a standard by which to judge the world and all other humans; on the other, it also means that as believer, he is not subject to anyone’s judgment but that of God and of those who are, like himself, believers ‘‘in the fellowship of Jesus Christ.’’ Yet while Paul acknowledges a spiritual being in those he addresses, a being transcending the merely human that they partake of through faith,6 their actions, he claims, show that they have yet to grow: ‘‘For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, are you not behaving according to human inclinations?’’ (1 Cor 3:3). The divisions in the Corinthian community—where some claim to follow Paul, others to follow Peter or Apollos—reveal a misapprehension of faith and of the role of the ministers of the Church. What is important is not who builds on the foundation that is Jesus Christ but how they build on it. Nothing can come to fruition if we go ‘‘beyond what is written’’ (1 Cor. 4:6), that is, if we lose sight of the spiritual foundation of the law (the new and the old). Hence the importance of Paul’s vocation: in the succession of Christ, the word become flesh (John 1:14), Paul is called upon to preserve the unity of the call of scripture, to remain faithful to the spirit of the call and to maintain it in its fullness.7 A servant of Christ,8 Paul understands that his authority does not derive from this world and that the Church must not be tainted by worldly considerations. Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Quite apart from us you have become kings! Indeed, I wish that you had become kings, so that we might be kings with you! For it I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals. We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are so wise in Christ! (1 Cor. 4:8–10; my emphasis)

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This understanding of his role, despite the self-effacing ‘‘quite apart from us,’’ makes Paul superior and puts him in the position of a father (1 Cor. 4:15), not merely a ‘‘brother’’ in the fellowship of Christ.9 His understanding of the exterior foolishness (for Christ) and the interior wisdom (in Christ) enables him to endure being treated as ‘‘the rubbish of the earth’’ (1 Cor. 4:13); this understanding, again, is predicated on his vocation, which effectively grants him the certainty of knowing that what he teaches is right: I am not writing this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you might have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers. Indeed, in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. I appeal to you, then, be imitators of me. For this reason I am sending you Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful child in the Lord to remind you of my ways in Christ Jesus, as I teach them everywhere in every church. (1 Cor. 4:14–17) The unity of doctrine and personal life must not be misread as an engagement with the world; what is at stake is the unity of the church as a spiritual community and thus the integrity of the call. Given this, and given that the members of the community in Corinth are still ‘‘mere infants in Christ,’’ still of little faith and tied to the world, Paul’s vocation must include some decidedly nonspiritual elements pertaining to the practical matters of church governance; these have to be brought to light such that they can be dealt with appropriately: some of you, thinking that I am not coming to you, have become arrogant. But I will come to you soon, if the Lord wills, and I will find out not the talk of these arrogant people but their power. For the kingdom of God depends not on talk but on power. What would you prefer? Shall I come to you with a stick, or with love and a spirit of gentleness? (1 Cor. 4:18–21) Just as the power of God is not to be found in human speech—in the human wisdom rejected earlier—so Paul’s role as father of the Church cannot be described in terms of combating the foolishness of his children with the foolishness of mere words. The alternative he poses between the spirit and the stick is the alternative between two ways of acting as the father that he is. The members of the congregation, once Paul comes to visit, have a choice between being treated as fellow believers and being disciplined like children. In the meantime, Paul’s letter has to stand in, calling out to the Corinthians.10

Fornication: Betrayal of the Call Careful to avoid a mere repetition of the (old) law, Paul issues a series of commands to govern life in the Christian community. These commands, contained in chapters 5

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through 7, concern two interwoven sets of questions: fornication and marriage, on the one hand, and disputes and their resolution, on the other. The ‘‘being puffed up,’’ the arrogance or pride Paul seeks to remedy with love or with the stick, condones or at least covers up all kinds of fornication11 and leads to divisive quarreling. The significance of the extensive treatment of fornication is less that it sees marriage as the most basic element of social relations (for those are external) than that it highlights both the idea of succession and the notions of authority and fatherhood just introduced by Paul. As we will see in a moment, succession in the flesh, that is, procreation, must be sanctified; fornication, however, is a transgression that gives way to carnal and thus worldly, decidedly unsaintly impulses. The ‘‘sanctity of marriage’’ is a function of the continuity of succession, of keeping the commandments, and thus a function of the call that institutes the Christian community.12 Hence Paul’s insistence on his authority: while he has no business judging outsiders—that is a prerogative of God—it is imperative for him to preserve the unity of the call and thus of the institution, the Church. The betrayal of the call—here, fornication committed by ‘‘anyone who bears the name of brother’’ (1 Cor. 5:11)—is not just a misdemeanor, it is a threat to the integrity of the foundation of the community. It must be judged as such and punished by excommunication: ‘‘Drive out the wicked person from among you’’ (1 Cor. 5:13).13 Since it is the hearing and acceptance of the call that makes the believer, that makes one a member of the fellowship of Christ, the material, external situation or state in which someone has been called—one’s vocation, properly speaking—is the standard by which his or her role within the community is to be determined: ‘‘Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called’’ (1 Cor. 7:20).14 This, to be sure, is also a question of hierarchy, yet that remains purely external: better be a slave among men and free before the Lord, having heard his call, than be a free man among humans, turning a deaf ear to God’s call (1 Cor 7:21–24).15 In other words, being free or being enslaved has nothing to do with being a member of the Christian community. Sexuality, however, does, for it directly concerns the body, which is ‘‘a temple of the Holy Spirit’’ (1 Cor. 6:19), the place of the gift of faith. Since the body thus stands in direct relation to the call—‘‘Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?’’ (1 Cor. 6:15)—what we do with our bodies is not a matter of indifference.16 In a way, it does not matter much what others do to us and our bodies. What we do to them, however, does matter, for to us, our own bodies are not external. Ideally, once we have heard the call, we would fully devote ourselves to the spirit. A life of chastity, as Paul claims he himself is leading (1 Cor. 7:7), sanctifies the body. Fornication, at the other extreme, desecrates the body and turns it away from spirit. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, ‘‘The two shall be one flesh.’’ But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit

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with him. Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. (1 Cor. 6:15–20)17 Paul is pragmatic enough, however, to see that a life of chastity is not for everyone. He sees the danger of a split between a devotion to the flesh (tied as it is to a world of sin) that is manifest in sexuality and a devotion to God that is manifest in the spirit. In response, he reaffirms the foundational character of the call and thereby solves the dilemma of the believer as an always still worldly being. I am supposed to remain in the external, in this case, marital state I was in when I was called; if this is not possible for me, I am to do as the Lord tells me in scripture. If such guidance from the call that is scripture is not available (as is the case, for example, when it comes to those who are not yet married), then I am to act according to the rules set out by Paul, bearer of the call and of the spirit. While the temptation of the flesh remains a threat, it can be contained; better to live with a threat contained than to provoke, through unbearable prohibitions, a betrayal of the call and thereby an assault on the foundation of the community: ‘‘So then, he who marries his fiance´e does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better’’ (1 Cor. 7:32–40).18

False Knowledge and the Commandment of Love Another danger to the call is knowledge misunderstood. The distinction between worldly wisdom and divine wisdom, between the knowledge of the flesh and the knowledge of the spirit, which Paul draws in the epistle’s first chapter, does not become irrelevant in the everyday life of the Church. We may think that we have knowledge, yet this very thought reveals, if not always the falsity of our knowledge, then an insufficiency. Knowledge is not a one-way street: Our knowledge is not unilateral in the sense that we, on our own, know something that could very well remain oblivious to us; our knowledge is not self-grounded: ‘‘we know that ‘all of us possess knowledge.’ Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him’’ (1 Cor. 8:1–3).19 Not only is our knowledge not true, saving knowledge when it is not sanctified by our love for God—itself predicated on his love for us, on the call—it also fails to be saving knowledge for others. Misconceived knowledge is a temptation, a threat, and it can be a sin—namely, when it becomes a scandal that causes others to sin. Paul spells out the difference between sanctified knowledge (love or faith) and what we mistake for it (doctrine, if you like, purely external knowledge) by using the example of food sacrificed to idols. I may think my ‘‘knowledge’’—namely, that what really counts is not my external actions but my love for God—makes it irrelevant which of the old rules I follow and which I discard. To a certain extent, Paul writes, that is true, for ‘‘ ‘Food

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will not bring us close to God.’ We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do’’ (1 Cor. 8:4–8.) Yet when I conceive of this freedom of mine, a freedom from rules, as a freedom to act on my newfound knowledge, it can quickly become a threat to those who have no knowledge, who are infirm in their belief. In confusing them and thereby blocking their access to true knowledge, my ‘‘knowledge’’ reveals itself to be misconstrued: I have given undue prominence to the worldly, to the external, and I have violated the commandment of love. In not taking into account my brother’s weakness, I have abused my freedom and precluded the possibility of my brother becoming free. I have sinned against my brother, and thus I have sinned against Christ: ‘‘So by your knowledge the weak brother for whom Christ died is destroyed. But when you thus sin against your brothers, and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food is a cause of my brother’s falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause my brother to fall’’ (1 Cor. 8:9–13).20 This echoes the ideal of chastity: the more we divorce ourselves from worldly concerns and external rules (not following the rules in this instance curiously means following the rule of abstaining from eating meat sacrificed to idols), the more we will be able to heed the call, which is also an exhortation to love our brothers in Christ. A similar ideal is set forth by Paul in his treatment of litigation between members of the Corinthian congregation: true knowledge, the knowledge of those sanctified by faith, would reveal the quotidian objects of litigation to be completely inconsequential. After all, what could holy men have to quarrel about? Yet the very act of quarreling reveals the Corinthians to be still worldly,21 and, in strict analogy with the way he introduces the precepts of sexual behavior in the same chapter, Paul writes that, since they are weak, the least they can do is to keep their affairs to themselves, not to institute outsiders as judges. Nonetheless, the absence of conflict, like chastity, is only the external sign of an inner transformation: ‘‘But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God’’ (1 Cor. 6:1–11). Being baptized in the name of Christ, becoming through faith in Christ a member of the fellowship of Christ that is the Church, hearing and heeding the call, at once marks, constitutes, and entails a complete, albeit purely spiritual, internal transformation. It is no mere transition from one state to another (as marriage would be, for example, or being freed from slavery) but a conversion that opens up a completely new—and properly critical, that is, decisive—perspective from which all other distinctions derive their significance or insignificance. The quarrels among members of the congregation, such as conflicts over hierarchy, circumcision, sacrifice, and so on, are relevant only insofar as they pertain to the unity of the call of which the unity of the Church is one aspect. Ideally, injustice is to be suffered, whether it comes from inside the community or not, for it is extrinsic as such to the new law. If God were not to love me, he would be right to do so; if my brother does not love me, justly or not, it is incumbent upon me to love him all the more. Justice, and thus

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injustice, are not questions of love. This law, the double commandment of love, is revealed through the love of God, through the call.22 The call thus becomes a criterion of judgment: Is there any need for judgment to be passed? Does an absence of judgment (and of retribution) endanger the community, or can the injustice in question be suffered without infringing on the love of God or our neighbor? What is revealed is not only a measure of relevance, though; it is the very precondition of judgment, of a judgment that does not decide mere trivialities but matters beyond life and death: ‘‘But, as it is written: ‘What no eye has seen, no ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’—these things God has revealed to us through the spirit. . . . But we have the mind of Christ’’ (1 Cor. 2:9–10 and 16).23 Hence the urgency of Paul’s epistle. What is at stake is not whether a Corinthian Christian hires a gentile lawyer or has extramarital sex; what is at stake is the unity of the call in three of its aspects: the unity of scripture, the unity of apostolic succession,24 and the unity of the Church as the community of those who have been called as fellows of Christ, of those who are to live and to perpetuate the call. The overcoming of certain aspects of the old law by the new does not invalidate the former as preparation for the coming of Christ and as example for those who follow him; in fact, Christ reveals the spirit of the old law and it is therefore through Christ and in following him that the unity of scripture is maintained and that its mandates, insofar as they are spiritual, are upheld. The unity of apostolic succession stands in the service of preserving the unity of the call expressed in scripture, guaranteeing a consistent, spiritual interpretation of the old and application of the new law—hence the emphasis that it does not matter by whom one was baptized and the highlighting by Paul of his own actions. Finally, the unity of the Church, as the community of those who have been called as fellows of Christ, of those who are to live and to perpetuate the call, figures the universality of the call.

Paul’s Role In the letter, the addressee, the congregation in Corinth, is accorded a prominent status, yet before Paul turns to the, if you’d like, originary call—the message of God, the Good News—in his discussion of the gifts of the spirit (love, prophecy, charisma, and speaking in tongues), he uses his own calling and the calling that is Hebrew scripture as examples. Throughout the epistle, Paul insists on his role as the one who has heard the call and calls out to the Corinthians. That the congregation has heard the call is proof of his having been called, and it should be proof enough. Those who doubt his position as apostle have not understood what he has understood: his authority does not derive from this world; it derives from his calling as apostle.25 While this would entitle him to any number of benefits—Who else would be more deserving of reaping the benefits of what he has grown than the one who planted the seeds and tended to the fledgling plant?—this very thinking

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in terms of benefits misses the point: the calling is a gift, and passing on the gift is its own reward.26 If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission. What then is my reward? Just this: that in my proclamation I may make the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my rights in the gospel. (1 Cor. 9:1–18)27 The recurring rejection of rewards is the overcoming, ever anew, of the quid pro quo logic of the old law.28 The independence Paul gains he turns into a dependence for didactic purposes, a dependence of the caller on the capacity of those he is calling. Because he is not attached or indebted to anything or anyone but God, Paul is free to attach—to adapt—to anyone. This articulation of adaptation, one of the most important pedagogical principles of later catechists, deserves to be quoted at length: For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as [o¯s] a Jew, in order to win the Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings. Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified. (1 Cor. 9:19–26) In order to be of as universal an appeal as possible and yet to remain unified, the manifestation of the call has to be diversified, made accessible to the spirit of and embrace as many people as possible. Knowing that it is the spirit that makes the call, not its material or rhetorical trappings, Paul removes the stumbling blocks and the appearance of foolishness as much as he can, which puts the emphasis on a different aspect of communication from chapter 2. The concern now is not to insist on the newness and extraordinariness of the gospel, but to make it accessible. Hence what is new and extraordinary about it has to be tempered for the gospel not to be rejected out of hand: ‘‘I have become all things

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to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.’’ The second sentence is significant, for it negotiates the problem of the reward and the question of succession. Because he has heard the call, Paul must pass it on. This, however, is the reward he earns. If he were not to ‘‘share in the blessings’’ of the gospel, which he does by passing it on, if he were not rewarded, he would not heed the call. In other words, Paul is not being rewarded for anything; he is rewarded in simply accepting—as gift—the gift of the call that he did nothing to deserve and does everything not to keep to himself. Only in passing it on can the gift remain a gift and be accepted by Paul. Put this way, it becomes clear that, taken on its own terms, neither the call nor the blessings of the gospel has anything to do with rewards. The sports metaphors Paul uses, if taken literally, would undermine themselves, since Paul is not running strictly for himself or even by himself. Running for himself, by himself would be misunderstanding his role as apostle. The asceticism, the discipline to which he subjects himself is necessary not only for himself to be saved but also for him to effectively preach and make the call to others; he is running for himself so that he can run for others, and only in running for others can he run for himself. Yet this is nothing but heeding his call as apostle. The goal, therefore, is not to approach a future event but to preserve the unity of the complete transformation that is marked by the call he has already received and must pass on. The prize is an everlasting one, and it has already been acquired. The selfcontrol exercised by Paul is thus not a means to a future reward but an attempt to do justice to the gift received. Yet this attempt, constitutively, must fail, for we are not purely spiritual beings, which is why we stand in need of grace. In its harnessing of the body, Paul’s asceticism underscores the spiritual nature both of his own conversion and of the all-encompassing call to others; it also points to the necessary adaptation of his call to others to their particular and worldly situations. Paul supplements the exposition of his exemplary status of his own calling with an elaboration of how Jewish scripture serves as example and warning to Christians. Paul’s demonstration—and interpretation—that there are analogies in scripture to what he has previously said serves several purposes at once:29 it shows the relevance of the old law; it reaffirms the idea that the new law reveals the spirit of the old; and it endows Paul’s call and calling with added legitimacy. He summarizes his position, touching on the three aspects of the call we have discussed here: So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God. Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, so that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions just as I handed them on to you. (1 Cor. 10:31–11:2)

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Having fused the authority of scripture with his own apostolic vocation to uphold the unity of scripture, Paul proceeds to giving ‘‘instructions’’ that directly concern the unity of the community (in the schema proposed here, the third aspect of the call). Thanks to Paul’s passing on the story of the Lord’s supper, it can be celebrated in the Church. It is a spiritual matter and has to be kept free from material considerations—‘‘If you are hungry, eat at home.’’ It proclaims the death of Jesus and thus reaffirms the status of the members of the Church as members of the body of Christ. It also reaffirms the primacy of faith, the acceptance of the gift, over external actions. The expression of this primacy is, once more, a judgment, whose category30 is the call. If we took our calling seriously, we would understand ourselves to be capable of judging matters of the spirit and would therefore not only be able to judge for ourselves whether we are worthy of participating in the Lord’s supper but would indeed judge for ourselves and thus judge ourselves. Yet we do not do so, but instead violate the new law when we abuse the Lord’s supper for nutritional purposes. First, we transgress the commandment of love of our neighbor when we ‘‘humiliate those who have nothing’’; second, we transgress the commandment of love of God not only in humiliating our neighbor but also in profaning the ceremony that proclaims the new covenant and enacts our participation in the body of Christ. According to Paul, we thereby bring on ourselves the judgment of God—sickness, weakness, and death—which judgment, however, serves as a warning to tear ourselves away from the world. Paul admonishes the Corinthians to eat at home and to celebrate together. Further ‘‘instructions’’ will follow (1 Cor. 11:17–34).31

The Gifts of the Spirit and the More Excellent Path of Love Paul casts the turn away from the selfish needs of the body as a turn to the life of the spirit, celebrated in the veneration of the body of Christ. This body is a spiritual one and assembles, harmonizes, and synthesizes the several gifts of the spirit. Paul insists on the unity of the spirit, which alone allows us to recognize—to know—Jesus Christ. There is only one spirit. There are, however, several gifts of the spirit. As we receive the gift of grace, we are called not only for our own sake: ‘‘To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good’’ (1 Cor. 12:7). Each Christian is called to use the gift received for the benefit of others, be it by prophesying, speaking in tongues, or healing the sick. In this way, spirit enables each believer to adapt: ‘‘All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots them to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses’’ (1 Cor. 12:11). This adaptation allows each believer to fulfill a specific function (and strictly parallels Paul’s adaptation in fulfilling his apostolic function, spreading the gospel), just like the members of a body: ‘‘For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were

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all made to drink of one Spirit’’ (1 Cor. 12:12–13). Through baptism, we are inducted into the community of the spirit—the fellowship of Christ—that is the Church. This is not a worldly, a material community; it is a spiritual one, as Paul’s previous exhortations have established. Nonetheless, it manifests itself as a congregation: as Christians, the Corinthians are not just fellows of Christ, they are members of the body of Christ, which entails that they all have a specific role that has been assigned to them—they are not all the same: ‘‘God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, but one body’’ (1 Cor. 12:12–20). This implies an interdependence of the several parts of the body, of the members of the community. Being parts of one body, none is inferior and none can think of himself as independent, pretend he could do without the others. Anyone’s nobility is predicated on another’s ignobility; therefore, in a reversal familiar from the early parts of the letter, the more ignoble members are honored all the more, preserving a balanced unity ordained by God: On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members that we think are less honorable we clothe with special honor, our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. (1 Cor. 12:21–26) The figure of the Church as body of Christ thus articulates heeding the call as fulfilling the double commandment of love, cherishing one’s neighbor as well as honoring God by obediently living up to the role one has been given. Interdependence, nonetheless, is not an absence of hierarchy. In the verses that follow the quotation just given, the enumeration ‘‘first . . . second . . . third’’ is not merely a chronological one. Against the background of the emphasis Paul puts on succession, the preeminence of the apostles and his subsequent insistence that not everybody is an apostle, that not everybody can teach, prophesy and so on, underscores a different aspect of unity, not interdependence but a hierarchical yet harmonious organization: ‘‘Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues’’ (1 Cor. 12:27–28).32 These different gifts (charismata) are as many paths to living up to the demands articulated in the double commandment of love. Accepting the gift in the situation one is in, living up to one’s proper vocation, is equivalent to serving the community that is the

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body of Christ, thus equivalent to honoring God. The charismata are the individual aspects of the gift; they are individual paths that figure a path that exceeds all others, a via excellientior. This is the path of love, the path of the highest gift we should all strive for:33 But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to my childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly [en ainigmati, literally: in a riddle, i.e., a stumbling block to rational knowledge], but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have fully known. And now [after the passing of knowledge, prophecy, tongues] faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor. 12:31–13:13) Note the subjunctive mood of the first person verb lalo¯, if I spoke, in Paul’s explicit thematization of his endeavor’s dependence on love—agape¯. Earlier, Paul had explained that mere communication was not enough and that it was spirit that made up for his, Paul’s, rhetorical ineptness. The point he makes now is more forceful and more general: not just his, but also the most perfect language, human or even angelic, is marked by a fundamental insufficiency. The subjunctive mood, therefore, does not suggest that Paul does not speak—he clearly does—but that he has love. A further, albeit somewhat ambiguous indication is contained in the following verse, in which Paul assembles and characterizes as by themselves insufficient prophecy, which is credited with building community (1 Cor.14:4), mysteries, and the acquisition of a complete knowledge, even faith. Paul thereby reiterates the problematic we have described as the worldly aspects of the call: They are aspects, precisely, and must not be mistaken for what they manifest. This rejection of the worldly, the exterior, is brought to its most concrete extremes in the rejection of property (for charity, no less) and the sacrifice of the body. Anything I

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give is worthless without the gift I must have received, the gift that I may strive for but can do nothing to deserve: love. The love Paul speaks of cannot be reduced, therefore, to any activity on our part, to anything we do. ‘‘To have love’’ is not only ‘‘to love’’ but also ‘‘to have received love.’’ These two aspects are intertwined; together they characterize the sanctified life. The qualities that Paul lists are responses to his earlier admonishments: patience, selflessness, and discipline are remedies to fornication and quarreling. And because love does not boast or inflate itself, is patient and selfless, it is superior to knowledge (1 Cor. 13:4–7).34 Love’s cardinal virtue, patience, allows us to withstand adversity in this world at this very moment; faith, as trust in God, and hope, as anticipation of being in his love, strengthen patience by relating us to something greater than the present moment. Love is greater than ourselves, and yet is not imposed on us but offered as a gift. Unlike prophetic speech, speaking in tongues, or knowledge, love is not bound by time; love does not come to an end. Thus, through love, we partake of perfection.35 This is why the intervention of love in the form of the call, of conversion, marks such a decisive break: it opens us up for perfection, prepares us for the second coming, the moment when the imperfections that necessarily come with being in the flesh are overcome. Yet for most of us, this remains merely a possibility; given the dangers of the world, we are all like children: we talk, think, understand as children do; we know imperfectly, and we see but ‘‘through a glass, darkly.’’ We must leave this world, our history (our childhood) behind us to fully know as we are already known—to come face to face with God.36 For the moment, however, we live in this world and are but children in the spirit, and it is therefore incumbent upon us to understand that worldly knowledge, prophecy, speaking in tongues, and all other abilities we may have received are tools to strengthen our individual and communal faith and hope for the second coming. They are not ours to keep but derive from the greatest gift of all, love, which in the form of the double commandment promises eternal life. Hence the imperative—the call—to ‘‘Pursue love’’ (1 Cor. 14:1). This does not mean that the other gifts of the spirit are to be neglected; they must, however, be properly understood and given life by love. Accordingly, Paul encourages every member of the congregation to translate, as it were, the individual gift for the benefit of the community: For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unproductive. What should I do then? I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also. . . . I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you; nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind, in order to instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue. (1 Cor. 14:1–19) This translation applies to all other gifts of the spirit as well.

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Organizing the Body of Christ The remainder of the chapter concerns the way in which one’s particular gift, once recognized, is to be made fruitful for the community and in which it allows for the double commandment of love to be followed. Three points stand out. First, in an explicit reference to ‘‘the law,’’37 Paul reiterates his point that one’s gift must be made intelligible to others. This, however, for him also means that the presence of God in the spiritual gifts becomes intelligible to nonbelievers by adapting the message. Paul thereby justifies the way he follows his vocation as apostle to the gentiles. Second, he uses an appeal to the old law and to common usage among Christians—the ‘‘churches of the saints’’—to justify the subordinate role women are to play in the life of the community.38 The last verse of the chapter, ‘‘but all things should be done decently and in order,’’ in its vagueness aptly summarizes the practical aspects of Paul’s exhortation. Everything will be all right if everybody does what they are appointed to do—which allows for all sorts of arbitrary interventions.39 Third, the appeal to the old law and to common usage, in its articulation of a concern with the unity of scripture and with the unity of the Church, can be seen as establishing a relation to the call; in both instances, traditions are kept intact and, at the same time, brought within the purview of the new law. The connection to the third aspect is established by Paul’s sleight of hand—if anyone thinks he has the spirit, he will recognize in Paul’s words a commandment of the Lord’s, yet if he fails to see this, he will not be recognized as having the spirit (1 Cor. 14:37–38)—which reaffirms his calling as apostle, as bearer of the spirit. This is all the more significant because by attributing peace to God and explicitly opposing peace to disorder,40 Paul presents himself as the guarantor of peace and as the one invested with the authority to prevent and, if necessary, remedy disorder ‘‘with love or with the stick.’’ The discussion of resurrection in chapter 15 clarifies the themes of the epistle by placing them in an eschatological and Christological perspective.41 The discussion of the resurrection of the body epitomizes the problem of the relation of world and spirit. What will happen at the last sound of the trumpet is a sudden transformation from the mortal (and the already dead) to immortality. This is the perfection Paul has promised, the moment at which we come to know as we are known, face to face, a perfection we already partake in and are prepared for through the loving sacrifice of Christ and our participation in his body, the Church. Our efforts in this world, in anticipation of the moment in which we shed our flesh and blood and receive our heavenly bodies, are not in vain if only we follow the path—and that is also, the commandment—of love (1 Cor 15:42–58).42 The transition from those efforts to another effort, a financial one this time, may appear somewhat abrupt, yet it fits into the concerns of the epistle as a whole: to keep on calling out, the Church has to be given the means to subsist; to keep it unified, all must share in this effort (1 Cor. 16:1–3).

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In closing, Paul gives one more example of love properly understood. After one last admonishment, ‘‘Keep alert, stand firm in your faith, be courageous, be strong,’’ Paul presents the household of Stephanas as a model of service to the community and derives from this service the claim they have to being honored and obeyed. He follows this up with greetings he relays from all Christians everywhere and seals them with his name: ‘‘I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand,’’ thereby closely associating, once more, his vocation with the universality of the Church. The threat that introduces the last iteration of love merely serves to highlight its importance: juxtaposed with the mercy of Jesus, a love that cannot be reciprocated, not even trying to love must seem all the more unforgivable. In the invocation of love for the Lord, by the Lord, and by the apostle, the last verses of the epistle rearticulate the call of the opening verses in terms of the via excellentior that is love: Let anyone be accursed who has no love for the Lord. Our Lord, come! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. My love to all of you in Christ Jesus. Amen. (1 Cor. 16:13–24)

Conclusion Paul’s task in this letter is to help the congregation at Corinth build its faith on the right foundation, not on arbitrary rules but on faith. In preparation for encountering God face to face, in preparation for perfect knowledge, he seeks to convey the spiritual meaning of the gospel he has preached. His instructions aim at organizing the life of the community and of its individual members such that each believer can come to know, assume, and live up to the call he or she has received and make use of his or her gift according to the commandment of love. Love is the higher path towards realizing one’s gift, but Paul makes it clear that the Corinthians might still stand in need of the stick, that is, they still have not developed the kind of discipline that relegates the selfish impulses of the flesh to their proper place, outside of the community, and enables an understanding of the various gifts and individual callings as manifestations of one and the same spirit. Here lies the importance of Paul. He is the exemplary giver in that it is his vocation to pass the gospel on to others, and the success of his calling depends on his ability to diversify the way he calls out—adapts—to the Jews and the Greeks. His personal example, proclaiming the one gospel to all, thus figures the challenge of doing justice to the call as it manifests itself in the world. Because there is only one spirit, Paul insists on the unity of the call: scripture, apostolic succession, and the Church are three aspects, in this world, of the work of the spirit. In 1 Corinthians, Paul thus presents a way to discern, with the help of love and if need be the stick, the spirit at work, through each believer’s vocation, in the world.

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Freud’s Jesus (Paul’s War) Gil Anidjar

‘‘Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives.’’1 Thus Emmanuel Levinas, who, from the very beginning of Totality and Infinity, describes the violent opening of a space within which the question of the enemy will have at once emerged and vanished. In this space of suspended morality—the space and state of war, of which the enemy may be subject or object, presupposed or produced—the enemy has already drawn away, having traversed the distance opened, the ´eloignement produced by a rupture that does not signify alterity. The enemy is not the other—and the movement by which the enemy vanishes into the distance (something that, neither recoil nor retreat, exceeds all strategy) is a movement that remains within the space of the same, there where what there is, what one catches sight of, is the permanent possibility of war. The movement of the enemy thus has to be distinguished from that of the other who comes from afar, the neighbor or prochain who, before the subject, comes. Symmetrically opposed—rather than asymmetrically approaching—the enemy departs and vanishes, which is to say that the enemy also remains as departing and vanishing. The space within which this movement takes place is defined by Levinas as the space of the political, as the space of war. This (that is to say, war) is what philosophy—the exercise of reason—thinks. ‘‘The art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means,’’ which is to say, ‘‘politics,’’ is ‘‘the very exercise of reason.’’2 Politics is philosophy, and its thinking is a thinking of war, and a thinking at war. Echoing Carl Schmitt who defined the political as the ‘‘ever present possibility of conflict [die reale Mo¨glichkeit des Kampfes], . . . the ever present possibility of combat,’’3

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Levinas insists that philosophy is a response to the ‘‘permanent possibility of war [la possibilite´ permanente de la guerre].’’4 ‘‘We do not need obscure fragments of Heraclitus,’’ Levinas continues, ‘‘to prove that being reveals itself as war to philosophical thought.’’5 Thus, ‘‘does not the experience of war and totality coincide, for the philosopher, with experience and evidence as such?’’6 Thought as totality, being constitutes the space of the same as the permanent possibility of its own destruction.7 But being—that is, war (‘‘war is produced as the pure experience of pure being’’—is not a lawless space, not a space without order.8 Rather, being is the order of the same, a world order that, however shattered, allows for no exteriority, leaves no room for alterity. Being—that is, war—‘‘establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same.’’9 It is an order that places (or violently throws) law in a state of suspension, a temporal suspension, or a suspension in time. In this time and at this time, law is not destroyed, nor is it abolished. Rather, law moves into a different time. In the permanent possibility of war, in what Freud calls ‘‘wartime,’’ law is suspended, divested, and stripped (Levinas uses the verb de´pouiller) of its eternity, provisionally cancelled, annulled ‘‘in the provisional [dans le provisoire].’’ In war, then, in the permanent possibility of war, we find ourselves in a space and a time where law is both nullified and maintained, and where the enemy cannot be other.10 In war, there are no others, only enemies. It was Jacob Taubes who strikingly suggested that this space where law is suspended, upheld but not abolished (‘‘Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law’’; Rom. 3:31), this space of war, is the very space of Paul’s Letter to the Romans.11 Romans, Taubes claims, is ‘‘a political declaration of war [eine politische Kampfansage],’’ that is to say, it is a political theology.12 For Taubes, Paul makes himself into an enemy of Rome, but, more importantly, he becomes a thinker of enmity. Like Levinas’s philosopher, Paul’s ontology (which is also the end of ontology, even an anti-ontology, a concern for ‘‘the things that do not exist’’; Rom. 4:17) is an ontology of war and wrath, whose obviousness makes it, perhaps, as invisible as being itself. Much like Levinas’s assertion that war is the suspended space of indifference, where alterity has no place—the enemy is not the other—Paul’s thought is famously one of adiaphora, in-difference. It is only within that space of indifference as the suspension of all obligations that we can recognize the state of war within which Paul writes and out of which he too ambivalently enjoins his followers to care for their enemies. Paul cites Proverbs and recasts a love of enemy that leaves room for the wrath of God (Proverbs 25:21–22). Shower your enemies with love, Paul says, a love that would bury them under a pile of burning coals. ‘‘Beloved, never avenge yourself, but leave room for the wrath of God . . . if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads’’ (Rom. 12:19–20).

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F R E U D ’ S J E S U S ( PA U L ’ S WA R )

If being is the permanent possibility of war, then, if being is being-at-war and being-as war, then Romans is also a theory—and a history—of the enemy.

 Like Carl Schmitt, his main interlocutor, Taubes was a formidable reader of Paul.13 (We will leave Levinas aside for now, much as he himself will leave war behind or, more precisely, beneath: ‘‘Only beings capable of war can rise to peace’’).14 But whereas Schmitt underplays the political meaning of the enemy in the New Testament (contrasting it with the ‘‘private enemy’’ alone),15 Taubes raises the question of the theological enemy—the enemy of God—and emphasizes its momentous function. Taubes narrates how he inflicted the formidable sentence (gewaltige Satz) of Romans 11:28 upon Schmitt in a unique and all but peaceful meeting (Auseinandersetzung) that took place at Schmitt’s house before his death and during which the two read Romans together. ‘‘As regards the gospel,’’ says Paul enthusiastically quoted and punctuated by Taubes, ‘‘they are enemies— enemies of God!’’16 Before considering the ways in which this sentence, and with it the notion of the theological enemy, secretly resonates, perhaps even thunders, in the reception of Paul’s letter, it is worth noting that the importance of the friend-enemy distinction does not explicitly figure in Schmitt’s own Political Theology.17 Having stressed in this early book the importance of theology for an understanding of the political, Schmitt took a few more years to place the enemy at the center of his political theory in The Concept of the Political. Schmitt ended up never making explicit the connection between political theology and the concept of the enemy. Moreover, he maintained that the only relevant opposition within this concept was that of private versus public or political enemy. My question, therefore, emerges out of Taubes’s remark: Is there a history of the enemy— Taubes explicitly links the enemy of God to history as Heilsgeschichte, as history of salvation—and if there is such a history, where does the ‘‘theological enemy’’ figure in it? Who or what is the ‘‘enemy of God’’? It is possible to follow a significant thread or a path—one could even call it a warpath—in Romans whereby the figure of the theological enemy emerges as an uncertain preview or repetition of what Paul elsewhere calls ‘‘the last enemy,’’ namely, death (1 Cor. 15:26: ‘‘the last enemy to be destroyed is death’’).18 In Romans, they—a ‘‘they’’ who are seldom named19 —are ‘‘god-haters’’20 and ‘‘inventors of evil’’ (Rom. 1:30), and they know that God’s law regarding what they do is to ‘‘deserve to die’’ (1:32). They have been abandoned by God, given or passed over, displaced and even betrayed by him (the Greek is paredoken; the Latin gives tradidit): ‘‘God gave them up’’ (1:24, 26, 28).21 ‘‘Their throats are open graves’’ (3:13) and they are ‘‘slaves of sin’’ (6:20). It is well known that the ‘‘wages of sin is death’’ (6:23), and it is quite possible that they are, in fact, dead (11:15).22 That is something even ‘‘we’’—we who were ‘‘enemies [echthroi]’’ (5:10)—knew: ‘‘While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our

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members to bear fruit for death. But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit’’ (7:5–6). This captivity in death resonates with that of a prisoner of war (aikhmalotos; captivus),23 and it testifies further to the fact that, for Paul, there is indeed a war on.24 Paul’s own call to arms resonates twice in Romans, first in 6:13 (‘‘No longer present your members to sin as weapons of wickedness, but present . . . your members to God as weapons of righteousness’’) and second in 13:12 (‘‘let us lay aside the works of darkness, but let us put on the weapons of light’’). The permanent possibility of war, in which body parts can always become weapons, to be put on like armor, proclaims that being is being at war: ‘‘I see in my members another law at war [antistrateumenon; repugnantem] with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members’’ (7:23).25 Furthermore, in this war that makes one at once into a battlefield, as Theodor Zahn has it)26 and into a prisoner of war, activity and agency are anything but granted. War, then, is also an experience in subjection. Commenting upon it, Ernst Ka¨semann observes that the war is on but in it the self is not fighting. He is the ‘‘I see’’ that witnesses the war, no more than an ‘‘impotent spectator.’’27 One might say that the self is a good theoretician, indeed, a philosopher. One should not presume to understand the different laws, the different modes of being and existence under or before the law, such as those called ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘death,’’ that appear in Paul’s letter, especially when they have been, and with good reason, the object of much exegetical and critical attention. For my purpose here, what is more important is to consider that the relation between these different modes is described as one of open hostilities, for ‘‘the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God [echthra eis theon; inimicitia est in Deum]’’ (8:7). It does not submit to God’s law—indeed, it cannot. Those who remain with the flesh remain, and must remain, hostile to God. And though he himself wishes that he could stay with them—‘‘I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own brothers, my kindred according to the flesh’’ (9:3)—Paul cannot. In complicated ways, he is and he is not their brother, much in the same way that they belong and do not belong to God. There is thus a perspective according to which they are still God’s, and God’s beloved—Israel and not Israel—and another perspective according to which they are his enemies: ‘‘As regards the gospel, they are enemies [echthroi] of God for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors; for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable’’ (11:28–29).28 ‘‘Paul never wrote a sentence that he crafted more carefully, and it sums up all that has gone before,’’ writes Christopher Bryan.29 Indeed, 11:28 is justifiably at the center if not of the letter, at least of a long controversy. And it highlights more than Paul’s writing skills. As Taubes recognizes (and ultimately, it would seem, Schmitt does as well), it is a momentous verse, in which the question of enmity is brought to the foreground of Paul’s entire doctrine, and where it is tied to, and divided by, the question of subjection. Much

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as theostuges may mean ‘‘god-hater’’ as much as ‘‘god-hated’’ (1:30),30 and the word for ‘‘enemy,’’ echthros, in ‘‘we were enemies’’ (5:10) can, in this context, be read equally as active or passive.31 In other words, enemies—and enemies of God, with a double genitive—might be those who actively hate God or they might be those who are subjected to God’s hate.32 Paul suggests as much when he establishes a parallel between being weak or powerless (‘‘while we were still weak’’; 5:6) and being an enemy (‘‘while we were enemies’’; 5:10).33 There is a crucial distinction to be made, of course, between and within these terms, but it nonetheless remains an undecidable one. Most scholars simply ignore the controversy here and maintain that the word is to be read as passive (in other words, Paul would have ‘‘in view the attitude of God rather than man’’),34 while others affirm the oscillation inherent to the text, asserting, for example, that ‘‘Israel’s situation is distinguished from that of others by ambivalence.’’35 I want to suggest that this ‘‘ambivalence’’ is far from limited to Israel, and that the kind of relation without relation (‘‘God gave them up’’) to God’s law being described in Romans as ‘‘proper’’ to the enemy is repeatedly figured as one of hostility, as that of a ‘‘state of war,’’ as the permanent possibility of war between God and (a part of) humanity. But the question of the enemy also figures a peculiar and ambivalently marked kind of subjection. This ambivalence of the enemy as enemy or as subject (who submits to another law, or must be subjected to the will of God) links the question of war and enmity to the question of law and subjection (and announces as a distinction between jus divinum and jus naturale, a division, perhaps, between theology and politics). In other words, the state of war, the permanent possibility of war, is precisely the situation that Paul describes, one whereby law is suspended, not abolished. In the context of this ongoing war, Paul’s assertion—‘‘Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law’’ (3:31)—echoes quite precisely Levinas’s formulation with which I began: ‘‘The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives.’’36 Insofar as he is of God, belonging to God while having been abandoned, given up, and betrayed by him, insofar as he is under God’s law while refusing to submit to it, insofar as he is at war with God’s law, at once under the law and excluded from it, the theological enemy—at once enemy and beloved—is at the center of Romans.37 Having been put aside (paredoken) by God, he is both under the law and outside of it. He is the exception to the sovereign whom God also gave away and put aside (paredoken), the Messiah himself, Jesus, son of God.38 Jacques Derrida has brought further this understanding of the messianic as a structural possibility, the permanent possibility of a state of war as the suspended state of the law by suggesting that it bears the structure of a relation to law as exception, dividing the law and the subject of the law under what one could call a ‘‘generalized messianicity.’’ In ‘‘Before the Law,’’ Kafka narrates this divided, interrupted relation to the law. Commenting upon Kafka’s text, Derrida argues that its elaborations require a reading of Paul’s

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Letter to the Romans. In talking to his ‘‘brothers,’’ then, Paul would already be explaining that ‘‘in order to have a rapport of respect with [the law], one must not have a rapport with the law, one must interrupt the relation.’’39 Before the law one is therefore ‘‘both a subject of the law and an outlaw.’’40 This has everything to do with the messianic, as becomes clear in a striking passage of Politics of Friendship. ‘‘Who has ever been sure,’’ Derrida asks, ‘‘that the expectation of the Messiah is not, from the start, by destination and invincibly, a fear, an unbearable terror—hence the hatred of what is thus awaited?’’41 ‘‘The messianic sentence,’’ Derrida continues, articulates a structural contradiction that ‘‘converts a priori . . . the friend into the enemy.’’42 The appearance of a division within and between the Jews and Jesus, within and between the Messiah and the enemy, and finally within and between the enemy (as subject and object of hatred, as object—and subject?—of love) is not simply another case of God’s ambivalence. Rather, as Giorgio Agamben shows in his book on Paul, it is an effect of the messianic as ‘‘a theory of the interrelation between the messianic and the subject, a theory that settles its differences once and for all with presumed identities and ensuing properties.’’43 The messianic is an ‘‘operation’’ that cuts and ‘‘divides the divisions of the law themselves and renders them inoperative.’’44 It operates a cut within the identity of any subject, at once producing and eradicating the space of sameness according to the law.45 Much as ‘‘not all of those from Israel are Israel’’ (Rom. 9:6), the subject of Paul’s letter is at war with himself, making it impossible to sustain the division suggested by Schmitt, which, as most New Testament scholarship maintains, would have either a ‘‘personal’’ or a ‘‘political’’ enemy, to the exclusion of others and of other enemies.46 What the messianic constitutes and deconstitutes, beginning with Paul, is the theological enemy as both personal and political and neither personal nor political. The divided subject of Paul is both enemy and beloved, slave and sovereign, subject and subject,47 Israel and not Israel. This internal division—which continues to operate within each of the terms—is a temporally extended state of war, the permanent possibility of a war of subjection, where law, institutions, and obligations are suspended, stripped of their eternity. But this narrative, which would give away—carry over, give up and betray, paredoken—its subject from enmity to subjection is also the structural division that affects enmity as undecidably active or passive. What fails to come together but offers itself to reading here is a history of the enemy as the internal division of a subject that is first active then passive, and both active and passive. The narrative version echoes throughout Romans and in 1 Corinthians but maintains a non-narrativized, structural link between subjection and enmity, activity and passivity: ‘‘for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay’’ (8:20). Even emancipation remains an experience in passivity. It is war. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For ‘‘God has put all things in subjection under his feet.’’ But

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when it says, ‘‘All things are put in subjection,’’ it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all. (1 Cor. 15.25–28) What begins to appear here is Paul’s own link between enmity and the messianic—more precisely, we witness a doubling of the messianic as what divides the subject (here, the son) in his very subjection (‘‘Therefore one must be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience’’; Rom. 13:5), as what divides the enemy as beloved (‘‘love your enemies’’). We will have to attend to these divisions and to the history of their elaborations, for in them and through them the Messiah has become hated and beloved. (And, in the shadows of that link, another thread will have begun to guide our reading of the enemy: absolute subjection.48) The Messiah, ‘‘who came and, as one says, became the neighbor [qui iam advenerat et proximus, ut dictum est, factus fuerat],’’ the Messiah, then, has become the enemy.49 Such would be one of civilization’s great discomforts.

Inter-diction 1: Absolute Subjection ‘‘My power,’’ said Jesus, as quoted by Paul (in older versions of 2 Corinthians), ‘‘is made perfect in weakness’’ (2 Cor. 12:9). Weakness, then, unlike power, and certainly unlike revenge, is not mine. If the subject is the subject of power—double genitive— weakness seems to precede the subject as that which is not owned, indeed, as that which disowns and dispossesses it. As Judith Butler puts it, ‘‘the subject is initiated through a primary submission to power,’’ a power that can—if it can—then, and perhaps infinitely later and after many turns, become ‘‘mine.’’50 We have been awakened anew to the weakness that precedes and follows power, to subjection in and after submission, and to subjection as submission, through Foucault’s work. But Foucault does not ‘‘elaborate on the specific mechanisms of how the subject is formed in submission.’’51 Butler’s book, subtitled Theories in Subjection, is an attempt to address the formation, the making of the subject by answering the ‘‘how’’ of submission, by ‘‘thinking the theory of power together with a theory of the psyche.’’52 Her work, then, is precisely that, a work, a ‘‘making work’’ that asks how ‘‘we might make such a conception of the subject work as a notion of political agency.’’53 It is remarkable that the importance of subjectivity and subjection, as well as the reflections on agency that continue to dominate the field of cultural studies, have not brought about more considerations of what submission might mean, or more precisely, what its sense and meaning might be. For if, as Butler also argues, ‘‘power assumes this present character’’ by performing ‘‘a break with what has come before’’

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and dissimulating ‘‘as a self-inaugurating agency,’’54 if, in other words, power dissimulates as agency, then what of ‘‘what has come before’’ as another power, as the other of power? If the agenda continues to be to articulate a theory of agency and freedom (‘‘Is it useless to revolt?’’—as Foucault’s title has it—remains the question: Is agency possible?), a theory of formation, the making and the giving of form to the matter at hand, it would seem unsurprisingly necessary to address as well not quite another side of it but rather the question of passivity and of submission, perhaps of absolute submission, if only to determine what it is that we—and power itself, in its dissimulation—appear to want to escape, to emancipate ourselves from, by way of acts, action, formation, production, labor, praxis, and work. In other words, and these are already Paul’s words, in contemporary theory we are given the works, ta erga. And it becomes possible to consider that the lexicon of action, the ‘‘syntax of doing,’’ as Avital Ronell calls it, ‘‘subjected’’ as it is ‘‘to procedures of legitimation,’’ is, like work, evocative of a ‘‘reduction of the human figure’’ that renders ‘‘the human equal to the laboring animal.’’55 As Ronell puts it further, ‘‘servile by nature and affecting docility, work, at the core of the modern experience of alienation, is inhumane and antisocial.’’56 Subjectivity and subjection, agency and submission, cannot, therefore, be understood apart from each other. Yet the question emerges: Is there a history of absolute subjection, an account of absolute submission? In what follows I want to argue that a reflection on submission and on absolute subjection—a constellation that includes in ways yet to be clarified subjectivity and subjection, passivity and submission—constitutes an essential, if insufficiently acknowledged, moment in the renewed reception of Paul. A self-defined ‘‘slave of God,’’ possibly even a ‘‘super slave [hyper doulon],’’57 beginning with the opposition of faith to works, with a body that ‘‘has its place, albeit subordinated to the spirit,’’ Paul could be said to reappear on the ‘‘European’’ scene as a thinker of absolute subjection.58 Jacques Derrida’s most extensive discussion of Paul occurs as a reading of Galatians, where Paul’s paralyzing blindness—a blindness and a madness to which Paul’s body is helplessly subjected—is both a model of the self-portrait and of that which strikes its ruin at the very beginning, ruin as the very beginning.59 After The Experience of Freedom, Jean-Luc Nancy’s exhilarating ‘‘deconstruction of Christianity’’ concludes by recalling—and opposing—‘‘servility.’’60 Before his death, Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard became particularly interested in Paul and turned his attention importantly to the slave (and the child) as defined by a ‘‘regime of belonging and not of servitude.’’61 Lyotard wondered about emancipation and the permanent possibility of a mancipium. He reread Paul and included him (and Augustine) among ‘‘the moderns’’ who promised emancipation, calling attention to what was, for Paul, ‘‘unsubmissive flesh, ’’ as opposed, perhaps, to ‘‘God’s slavery.’’62 Giorgio Agamben, who has relentlessly attended to the powerlessness of ‘‘bare life,’’ points out that we owe Paul a third of all occurrences of the word doulos—

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‘‘slave’’—in the New Testament (47 times out of 127).63 Finally, Alain Badiou begins (and ends) his Paul book by arguing that what is at stake in Paul is a theory of subjection and of subjectivity in which the subject’s existence is placed under, placed under order and ordainment, subordinated and submitted to the event.64 Badiou’s Paul is, in fact, one of the most striking Pauls that extends—if not acts—throughout the renewed continental reception of his letters, so I will linger with it for a moment. Badiou says that we know very little of Paul’s life: ‘‘We know in any case what he does not do.’’65 A non-doer who cared little about ‘‘what Jesus said and did,’’66 Paul was the theoretician of a nonaction that orients a different history, a history of submission. It is a history that refigures freedom as, in the last resort, en dernier ressort, as Badiou puts it, the question of a relation between the law and the subject: ‘‘Is every subject configured in the form of a legal subjection?’’67 Even when he answers that Paul’s discourse situates itself as a becoming son (in the spirit of a Deleuzian becoming woman or becoming animal) in opposition to a being slave (‘‘For Paul, one is either a slave, or a son’’;68 see Gal. 4:7, ‘‘So through God you are no longer a slave but a son’’), as an emancipation from a ‘‘figure of knowledge’’ that ‘‘is itself a figure of slavery,’’69 Badiou strikingly illustrates that the question of freedom, subjection, submission, and subjectivity is crucial to a reading of Paul. Yet it is remarkable that Badiou appears to dismiss a slavish submission as what would have to be left behind when Paul himself reinscribes it. Badiou writes, ‘‘Jesus is certainly ‘lord’ (kurios), and Paul his ‘servant’ (doulos).’’70 ‘‘Certainly,’’ yet there is a ‘‘but’’ that must carefully be asserted, that itself protects from and prevents confusion: ‘‘that we must serve a truth procedure is not to be confused with slavery.’’71 Badiou goes on to buttress the distinction by eradicating the risk of confusing emancipation with passive submission. He does so by affirming work and labor: the operation of the ‘‘but’’ indicates a ‘‘task,’’ a ‘‘faithful labor’’ of which the subjects are the ‘‘coworkers.’’72 The confusion, so quickly passed and labored over, may still have to be taken into account if, as Badiou himself puts it a few pages later, ‘‘Faith is what saves us, not works.’’73 Badiou’s Paul is a subject of power, one who opposes the works of law as ‘‘what constitutes the subject as powerlessness of thought’’ and seeks to unify the thought and action, that law had separated.74 Badiou’s Paul is a subject of power who is no longer under order, no longer subordinated, but rather a subject who ‘‘maintains thought in the power of doing.’’75 This ‘‘living unity’’ of thought and action is a power, one that Badiou calls a ‘‘universal power of subjectivation,’’ which ‘‘grants power to a truth’’ and ‘‘bears the force of salvation.’’76 It is a work and a labor; it is love as labor and the labor of love: ‘‘ ‘Love,’ ’’ writes Badiou, ‘‘is the name of that labor.’’77 And universalism too is a ‘‘production.’’78 Is there hope of a break? Of a vacation from the discourse of work? There is hope, though perhaps not for us, as Kafka said, not for us as the working subjects of power, but hope nonetheless. Indeed, in a surprisingly Levinasian echo Badiou writes that this hope is ‘‘the pure patience

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of the subject.’’79 Patience reverses the syntax within which the subject of power found itself. No longer the subject of, the subject is preceded by a patience, submitted into existence prior to its coming to language.

Freud’s Jesus For how will it be possible for anyone to be a friend to a man who, he believes, may be his foe [cui se putabit inimicum esse posse]? —Cicero, On Friendship, 16.59 one is tempted to admit that all Christianization is at war with its contrary. —Derrida, ‘‘Above All, No Journalists!’’ Won’t You Be My Neighbor? —Mr. Rogers

‘‘Every individual,’’ Freud writes in The Future of an Illusion, ‘‘is virtually an enemy of civilization [virtuell ein Feind der Kultur].’’80 But what is it that ‘‘disturbs our relations with our neighbor’’? And how is it that civilization produces such discomfort, such internal discord and enmity, even between neighbors? How is it that civilization is ‘‘perpetually threatened with disintegration, under the looming threat of what appears as a ‘‘primary mutual hostility of human beings’’?81 With this distinct but permanent possibility of war, under the threat of a virtual enemy—every individual—civilization is forced or induced to open hostilities. Civilization becomes an enemy, itself an adversary violently opposed to alterity—be it that of neighbors, enemies, or sexuality. What is ‘‘the necessity’’ that causes this opposition, that ‘‘causes [civilization’s] antagonism, to sexuality’’?82 Seeking to answer these questions, Freud proposes a return to the origins of ‘‘our’’ civilization, that is to say, to the beginnings of Christian civilization—the foundational ‘‘universal love between men.’’ From this universal love follows as ‘‘an inevitable consequence,’’ the ‘‘extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it.’’83 Seeking to account for civilization and its discontents, Freud proposes a return to Paul and to Jesus. The answer, then, to civilization’s discord and discomfort lies in a ‘‘disturbing factor,’’ the ‘‘ideal demand’’ that runs: ‘‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’’ Freud is taken aback, but, as always, he does not hold back. He thus articulates his own ‘‘surprise and bewilderment,’’ as well as the difficulty (‘‘it will be hard for me’’), the deep ambivalence (‘‘but if I am to love him [with this universal love] merely because he, too, is an inhabitant of this earth, like an insect, an earth-worm or a grass-snake’’), the outright resistance (‘‘what is the point of a precept enunciated with so much solemnity if its fulfillment cannot be recommended as reasonable?’’), and the yet ‘‘further difficulties’’ that

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plague him when confronting this foundational imperative.84 And there is more. There is, Freud writes—here acknowledging what appears as a resistance, or at least an opposition and a struggle—a second commandment. Freud writes: ‘‘And there is a second commandment, which seems to me even more incomprehensible and arouses still stronger opposition in me. It is ‘Love thine enemies.’ ’’85 As in so many instances, Freud here opens the door to an enormous if covert history. Indeed, the history of that second commandment, the paradigmatic way in which, even more than the love of neighbor, it articulates the incomprehensible, indeed, the impossible (‘‘it is something that is impossible,’’ Aquinas had written86), the impossibility of a relation of love to the enemy, is a history that remains to be written. And if it is true that the love of neighbor is a commandment that is ‘‘known throughout the world and is undoubtedly older than Christianity which puts it forward as its proudest claim,’’ the resounding echoes of the commandment to love one’s enemies nonetheless appear more deafeningly Christian, constituting one of the most striking legacies of Jesus of Nazareth.87 The difference between the two commandments—love of neighbor, love of enemies—is quantitatively marked (singular neighbor, plural enemies—and the question of number, as Derrida demonstrates, is of the essence). It also indicates an increased intensity, as the second commandment ‘‘arouses still stronger opposition in me.’’ Yet, the dissymmetry signals, or perhaps promises, a qualitative difference, the difference, in fact, between neighbor and enemy. It is at this point that we, too, might be unable ‘‘to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment’’ at Freud’s gesture, a gesture that consists in closing the door he has himself opened. There will be no history, no account of this second commandment. It deserves no history of its own, for ‘‘at bottom it is the same thing.’’ Freud writes: ‘‘If I think it over, however, I see that I am wrong in treating it as a greater imposition. At bottom it is the same thing.’’88 Freud does not provide much by way of an explanation for this equal, even identical, state of affairs, nor does he account for the surprising gesture by which he cuts the struggle short, putting up what does not quite appear as resistance. Freud simply and abruptly puts an end to hostility, to hostilities, understandingly pushing them under the rug of a history of faith (‘‘I then understand that the case is one like that of Credo quia absurdum’’).89 One may consider that he obscured things further when in a footnote on Heine (and in the subsequent citation of a dignified and admonishing voice), Freud illustrates the love of neighbor (or, what is now the same thing, the love of enemy) with and as a murderous wish. Giving expression to ‘‘psychological truths that are severely proscribed,’’ Heine puts it clearly: ‘‘one must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies—but not before they have been hanged.’’90 Freud further ventriloquizes the voice of undiscriminating recognition, stating that ‘‘your neighbor is not worthy of love.’’ He is, ‘‘on the contrary, your enemy.’’91 The neighbor is the enemy. This, then, would be Freud’s Jesus. ‘‘You have heard the commandment, ‘You shall love your countryman but hate your enemy.’ My command to you is: love your enemies, pray for your persecutors’’ (Matt.

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5:43–44). To the extent that it is a distinct commandment, then, the second commandment is second to what are already two commandments—famously known as the double love commandment: to love God and to love the neighbor. Were we to follow Freud’s guidance, who, when approaching the first commandment (‘‘love your neighbor’’) suggests we comport ourselves naively, as if we were hearing of it for the first time, we could be inclined to grant the second commandment a certain singularity, even if provisional.92 Yet, Freud tells us, the second commandment is the very same as its predecessor. What, then, is the reading that Freud advocates? More precisely, perhaps, the question is: what is there to read in the second commandment that has brought Freud to his conclusion?

 The commandment to love one’s enemies remains a forbidding and impressive, a mad commandment, which ‘‘has never been considered a basic part of Christian theology and never been seen as belonging to the kernel of the New Testament kerygma.’’93 One of Jesus’ peculiar and difficult sayings, it ‘‘was the most frequently cited’’ in the second century. And yet from that time on, up ‘‘to modern times, the idea has been either relegated to the personal realm or more frequently confined to a select group of Christians in religious communities, either in monastic orders, or, since the Reformation, to people generally dismissed as ‘enthusiasts.’ ’’94 This cannot fail to be somehow surprising, given the striking place of love—and of enemy love, in particular—in Jesus’ teachings, its role in Augustine’s definition of ‘‘true religion’’ or in the first book of On Christian Doctrine, or the well-known representation and self-presentation of Christianity as the religion of love.95 The commandment to love one’s enemies, moreover, installs a peculiar logic of momentous consequences. As Derrida explains: where there can be an enemy, the ‘‘there must be the enemy’’ or the ‘‘one must love one’s enemies’’ (seine Feinde lieben) transforms without delay enmity into friendship, etc. The enemies I love are my friends. So are the enemies of my friends. As soon as there is need or desire for one’s enemies, one can only count friends. Including the enemies, and inversely, here is the madness that threatens us.96 Jesus’ mad commandment, the madness of a commandment to love one’s enemies indiscriminately, is already at work and ‘‘reverses, perverts and converts (good) sense, makes opposites slide into each other and ‘knows’ very well, in its own way, how the best of friends are the best of enemies . . . hence the worst.’’97 Jesus’ commandment thus places us on the brink of madness, or, as Derrida puts it later, it puts us ‘‘on the brink of a work of infinite reading.’’98 To love the enemy—what could it mean? What is the obligation that Jesus’ commandment imposes? To love the enemy as one love one’s neighbor would at least begin

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with a generalized ambivalence.99 Indeed, in another striking account of enmity, Freud argues for this generalized ‘‘law of ambivalence of feeling,’’ which makes one rejoice at the death of the beloved one who, ‘‘since in each of the loved persons there was also something of the stranger,’’ had, therefore, ‘‘also been an enemy.’’ We ‘‘rejoice,’’ then, even at the death of loved ones, ‘‘for they were in part still others, and as others, they appear to confirm by their disappearance the persistence and survival of the self.’’100 Thus, ‘‘these beloved dead had also been enemies and strangers, who had aroused . . . some degree of hostile feeling indiscriminately.’’101 To love the enemy would thus mean not to rejoice, not to deny a relationship to the other, not to remain in the ‘‘denial of death,’’ which maintains itself by attributing death ‘‘to an other that is definitely separated from the self.’’ As Samuel Weber explains, ‘‘the denial of death—through its attribution to an other that is definitely separated from the self—is, like all denial, first and foremost the denial of a relationship.’’102 To love the enemy would thus mean not to distinguish, not to separate ‘‘things that once belonged together,’’ not to isolate the self from the enemy. Instead of isolation, to love the enemy means that ‘‘what most belongs together and has been torn apart is the inseparability of self and other.’’103 This lack of separation, what one might call an in-difference, the irrelevance of distinction, is at the core of the commandment to love one’s enemies. With this commandment, Jesus explicitly cites and re-cites the old law, offering a new law and raising—for centuries to come—the question of the relation between the two. Does the new law include the old law or does it radically alter it, perhaps to the point of breaking and doing away with it? Here, at the very least, the new emends the old in four ways. First, it cites the old commandment (‘‘Love your neighbor as thyself’’) and adds to it (‘‘and hate your enemy’’). Second, it shortens what now appears as a double commandment. Whereas the old mentions both neighbor and enemy, the new mentions only the enemy. Third, the new telescopes the old: ‘‘You shall love . . your enemies.’’ Finally, the new adds and multiples: out of one neighbor, and one enemy, it makes a plural ‘‘enemies.’’ By way of this fourfold emendation, the new law asks for the abolition of a difference, the difference between neighbor and enemy.104 The law substitutes the enemy for the neighbor (thus suggesting that their substitution is possible according to a rhetorical equivalence, rendered possible through the one affect commanded: love), but it also generalizes enmity by subsuming, as objects of the same love, neighbors and enemies. A complex rhetorical gesture of condensation and displacement, of analogy and substitution, maintains and transforms the neighbor as one object of love among many, following which, neighbor and enemy are to be loved equally.105 Both enemy and neighbor become, as Paul has it, ‘‘one in Christ.’’ The name that remains, the name of what (or who) remains to be loved has also (not) changed. It is ‘‘enemies’’ as the one (plural) object of love. The new law thus includes and alters, it resignifies and renames, it generalizes the old. With it the neighbor has become (like) the enemy in that he will have to be loved along with the enemy, like the enemy, and as an enemy.106 The neighbor has thus become

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an enemy, a member of the new and extended group now deserving of the same love. Like the (singular) enemy, the neighbor and the enemy have both been subsumed under a new heading: they are both enemies, that is, they are both to be loved. But the new law does not put an end to what Freud calls ‘‘isolation,’’ whereby an ‘‘experience is not forgotten, but instead, it is deprived of its affect, and its associative connections are suppressed and interrupted so that it remains as though isolated.’’107 Rather, the new law sets up an idea, an ideal demand and an ideal of perfection (‘‘you must be made perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’’) as the promise that isolation should come to an end—were love to be achieved. Failing love, and love of the enemies, in particular, the enemies remain. Having generalized the notion of the enemy as the name of an analogy and of an inclusion; having made the neighbor and the object of Christian love into an enemy, Jesus may have failed to abolish the distinction between self and other; he may have failed to put an end to enmity. But he did succeed in creating a new kind of enemy by establishing a new zone of indistinguishability: the enemy as neighbor and the neighbor as enemy. More precisely put, with the commandment to love the enemy, the neighbor, the fellow man, becomes the enemy. With Jesus, then, we witness the becoming enemy of the neighbor.

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Scandal/Resentment The Antiaesthetics of the Banlieue

Anto´nia Szabari

But the human being is also a no. [Mais l’homme est aussi un non.] No to the contempt of a human being. No to indignity of a human being. No to the exploitation of a human being. And to the destruction of freedom, which makes one human. —Frantz Fanon, ‘‘Le Ne`gre et la reconnaissance’’

In his recent book Violence, Slavoj Zˇizˇek seeks to rehabilitate the concept of resentment by characterizing the suburban riots that occurred in the fall of 2005 in various working-class suburbs around several French cities as ‘‘unarticulated’’ expressions of ‘‘resentment’’: ‘‘There was only an insistence on recognition, based on a vague, unarticulated ressentiment. Most of those interviewed talked about how unacceptable it was that the then interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, had called them ‘scum.’ In a weird self-referential short circuit, they were protesting against the very reaction to their protests.’’1 I cite this passage because Zˇizˇek’s suggestion that the riots were ‘‘unarticulated’’ (i.e., locked in a circuit of self-referentiality) picks up on the opinions offered by wellintentioned social scientists and observers that the rioters had no real ‘‘cause’’ (in other words, they were not Islamists; they did not riot in the name of any ideology or truth) and that they did not defend their own culture (they allegedly have none, for their culture is a bricolage of American and other cultures, as, for example, political scientist Olivier Roy, not without sympathy for the uprooted youth, affirms).2 Zˇizˇek does not just repeat these views, he makes a specific point about selfreferentiality: namely, that the rioters called attention to themselves in the face of a state that does not recognize them, where they are not represented by the democratic institutions whose powers of law enforcement punish them. Moreover, what they fight against is this greater

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violence political and symbolic effacement. They insist on being treated as citizens (which they are), but this means, as Zˇizˇek suggests, that they must ‘‘call for the construction of a new universal framework.’’3 French universalism’s failure vis-a`-vis France’s own immigrant population, including its Muslim citizens, has often been criticized. Zˇizˇek seems, however, to be making a more radical point in equating the crowd’s acting out or random and violent blame, which amounts to Nietzschean ressentiment, with a call for a new universalism. He refers to the religious and specifically Christian history of universalism, whose greatest promoter was the apostle Paul, and I am tempted to interpret his move as opposing this kerygmatic universalism to French Republican universalism. One of the ‘‘fighting Paulinists,’’ to borrow Ward Blanton’s apt term,4 Zˇizˇek emphasizes that the construction of a new and authentic universal framework, one that would include and give equal rights to citizens who inhabit impoverished suburban areas, requires a certain act of negation. He sought to rehabilitate the notion of resentment not just against its powerful Nietzschean condemnation but at a time when politicians like the then French Minister of Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, in a different context, was talking about the need for ‘‘breaking the endless cycle of resentment.’’5 Although both insist on reviving Pauline ideas outside the fields of theology and the church, Zˇizˇek and Alain Badiou disagree concerning the nature of the ‘‘event’’ that grounds any universality. For Badiou, the ‘‘event’’ is a positive, albeit contingent, occurrence that, once it occurs, calls into being a subject—a collective subject—who will be defined by fidelity to the event as Truth. Badiou’s most striking example of this structure of the emergence of a universal Truth is Paul’s annunciation of the crucifixion. In The Ticklish Subject, Zˇizˇek argues that ‘‘(what will become) the Event necessarily appears as skandalon, as an undecidable, chaotic intrusion that has no place in the State of the Situation (or, to put it in mathematical terms, that is ‘supernumerary’); once the Event takes place and is assumed as such, the very previous situation appears as undecidable chaos.’’6 This essay is an extended note on Zˇizˇek’s contention that an event that founds a universal framework appears as an ‘‘undecidable chaos,’’ like the Pauline scandal, from the viewpoint of the ‘‘situation’’ that foregrounds it but morphs into a ‘‘Truth.’’ Somewhat contrary to Zˇizˇek, I will try to show that the riots are not merely ‘‘unarticulated’’ forms of civic protest or civic movement. Rather, they form part of, or at least they have been appropriated by and into, a larger culture of the banlieue that remains loyal to the event (i.e., the repeated eruptions of violence that punctuate the present life of the banlieue as well as its past, about which I will say more later). Rather than simple acts of ‘‘acting out’’ (Zˇizˇek’s term), these acts and this strange site called the banlieue can be used to achieve a ‘‘cognitive mapping’’ (Zˇizˇek’s citation of Frederic Jameson’s concept). The Clear-Sightedness of Resentment In a later comment in the book on violence, Zˇizˇek explains that this authentic resentment is ‘‘anti-Nietzschean,’’ because it is precisely the opposite of the self-justifying reaction of 344

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the weaker to the stronger. He borrows his concept of resentment, this feeling of saying, ‘‘Yes, I got all this, but nevertheless, how could you have done it? Your story about it doesn’t make sense!’’7 that arises in the face of past injustice, from the writer W. S. Sebald, who in turn borrows it from Jean Ame´ry, the Vienna-born writer and Holocaust survivor.8 Ame´ry’s resentment is rooted in his profound experience of exile, repeated deportation, and torture. Above all, he responds to the postwar ‘‘normalization’’ of the Holocaust, when, after the rise of a democratic West Germany and the establishment of the Jewish nation-state Israel, he felt that his ‘‘hatred’’ of the perpetrators no longer found sympathizers in a world busy treading the road of modernization and rebuilding itself along the lines of new political alliances and animosities: It was not at all necessary that in German towns Jewish cemeteries and monuments for resistance fighters be desecrated. Conversations like the one I had in 1958 with a South German businessman over breakfast in the hotel were enough. Not without first politely inquiring whether I was an Israelite, the man tried to convince me that there was no longer any race hatred in his country. The German people bear no grudge against the Jewish people, he said. As a proof, he cited his government magnanimous policy of reparations, which was, incidentally, well appreciated by the young state of Israel. In the presence of this man, whose mind was so at ease, I felt miserable: Shylock, demanding his pound of flesh. Vae victoribus!9 Ame´ry articulates this experience in German, his native language, infusing it with terms from his native Austrian dialect, Gallicisms, and Latinisms, so that his language bears traces of his personal history. The ‘‘resentment’’ he articulates in this way has nothing to do with Nietzsche’s concept of the self-flattering ‘‘resentment’’ of the weak. Rather, it calls to mind the thinking of another Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin, whose angel of history stands with his back to the future, gazing at the debris of past catastrophes piling up before him, which he would like to restore to wholeness were it not for a strong wind ‘‘blowing from Paradise.’’ Ame´ry describes ‘‘resentment’’ as the ‘‘logically inconsistent’’ condition of the demand ‘‘that the irreversible be turned around,’’ which ‘‘blocks the exit to the genuine human dimension’’ of the future.10 His disillusionment, including the lack of any illusion that such a reversal could be brought about in postwar German democracy, echoes the experience of the ‘‘the jails and the camps of the Third Reich,’’ whose inhabitants, Ame´ry reports, ‘‘scorned rather than pitied ourselves because of our helplessness and all-encompassing weakness.’’11 This immunity to ‘‘self-pity’’ is the only prize to be gained from an experience that deprives people of the experiences that constitute their identities: another Holocaust writer, Imre Kerte´sz, in Fatelessness, describes the Nazi work camp as a site where the experience of freedom is gained in the face of an almost total loss of self. A sense of freedom seems to stem precisely from refusing to relinquish the backward gaze, in a gesture that signifies fidelity both to the event and to an emotion that makes no sense to the citizens of a new democracy. The clarity provided by this 345

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disillusionment allows Ame´ry to situate his experience in a meaningful whole, to claim for himself a moral stance. For Ame´ry, to be ‘‘Jewish’’ means to be deprived of messianic and national hope. He assumes the place of the subject that nation-states exclude in order to constitute themselves. This definition of Jewishness—as ‘‘impossible,’’ as being ‘‘without God, without history, without messianic-national hope’’—leaves no possibility for reintegration.12 The essay ‘‘Resentments’’ ends with a somber note about how the combative force of resentment, despite the clarity of any individual moral stance, is dissipated in the mass media. The radio audiences whose adverse judgment he fears are busy reclaiming God (or such ideologies as progress and science), their history, and their sense of national belonging: I travel through the thriving land, and I feel less and less comfortable as I do. I cannot say that I am not received everywhere in a friendly and understanding manner. What more can people like me want than that German newspapers and radio stations grant us the possibility to address grossly tactless remarks to German men and women, and on top of this to be remunerated for it? I know: even the most benevolent will finally have to become as impatient with us as that young correspondent cited earlier, who is ‘‘sick and tired of it.’’ There I am with my resentments, in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Cologne, and Munich. If you wish, I bear the grudge for reasons of personal salvation. Certainly. On the other hand, however, it is also for the good of the German people. But no one wants to relieve me of it, except organs of public opinion-making, which buy it. What dehumanized me has become commodity, which I offer for sale.13 The system will succeed in asserting moral superiority—and Ame´ry anticipates condemnation of those who have been given so much, yet cannot stop complaining. At the end of the essay, Ame´ry’s lesson is a bitter one: despite the clear articulation of one’s ethical and historical position, the media blunt the force of ‘‘resentment’’ by sapping the justness and force of one’s speech. In the media, Ame´ry finds resentment muted into a commodity, thereby depriving the one who speaks of a proper voice. Stathis Gourgouris notes an intensification of the commodification of violence (qua decontextualization) in the late 1960s: Official media coverage succeeds in generalizing the event’s singularity by virtue of suspending its actual time frame and reconstructing it on the basis of the mass dissemination of the image. This sort of mass visibility leads to a certain streamlining of the field of vision, a condition where history becomes a blur. Although we must not underestimate the historical importance of social violence being brought into everyone’s living room in the 1960s (the effects were quite real and verifiable), we also cannot discount the fact that this orchestrated visibility of violence did much

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more for the launching of televisual culture than for the actual problems in the social arena.14 ‘‘History becomes a blur.’’ The mediatized framing of events, including those that prompt people to ask for social change, while it reaches a larger audience than an eye-witness account, is in itself degrading because it characterized above all by, to rephrase the Pauline vocabulary, an ‘‘unfaithfulness to the event.’’ What this entails is not so much the simple forgetting or misrepresentations of events—they can be corrected by the relentless critical power built into the media—but the loss of the universal frame of reference whose condition is the singular human being. The skandalon easily becomes an ordinary media scandal. Sarkozy’s insulting epithet ‘‘scum’’ reveals that he viewed the protesters not in their historical singularity but as their own mediatized images.

Who Said ‘‘Hatred’’? Is it correct to say that the riots are expressions of resentment? The predicament Ame´ry sums up as three ‘‘withouts’’—‘‘without God,’’ ‘‘without history,’’ and ‘‘without messianic-national hope’’—can be likened to the situation of the banlieue, which is characterized by lack of a shared culture of origin, a situation inextricably linked to France’s colonial past. Yet the history of colonialism tends to be reduced to lessons taught by institutions that condone part of that history while censuring or gliding over other parts, leaving the experiences of a portion of the population unrepresented, with the result that France excludes a part of its population from the fiction of nationhood. What is the banlieue? Originally, it was a neutral term, which in the feudal state designated the territory that was one lieue (one French league) away from a city yet over which the city extended its ban, its proclamation of an order or regulation of agricultural work. In addition, the French word ban also means ‘‘exile.’’ Although this meaning is not at the origin of the word banlieue, the sense it conjures up is not altogether inappropriate today. With the word ban we enter into the realm of jurisdiction and sovereignty. Not all banlieues are poor and working class, but in the media, in common parlance, and in academic (for example, sociological) discourse the word has come to denote poor, working-class suburbs, inhabited mostly by second-generation immigrants of North African and African origin, people whose lives are intimately linked to France’s colonial past, although white working-class poor also live in the same low-income housing. In the 1950s, many of these suburban neighborhoods were included in social development projects such as Zones d’Urbanisation Prioritaire, zones where urban development was a state priority and where cheap housing projects, known in French by the acronym HLM, were constructed). Historically, however, attempts to include the working poor and immigrants led to ever greater economic and social exclusion (enferme´ dehors) through the

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development of bureaucratic and institutional control (school, social workers, and police). The result was the development of a ‘‘penal state’’ in certain areas of the French republic.15 Since the early 1980s, the banlieues around major French cities—Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux, and so on—have been sites of riots, several of which were sparked by the injuring or killing of banlieue youth by the police. In their last collaboration, a short film entitled Europe 2005, 27 Octobre, the filmmakers Jean Marie Straub and Danie`le Huillet included a lingering camera shot of the electric station where one of two teenagers who were trying to hide from the police was electrocuted—sparking the riots on the date noted in the film’s title. In this short film of about ten minutes, the camera sweeps across a nondescript banlieue street (five times, at different times of the day), starting with the graffiti ‘‘Stop! Do not risk your life!’’ on a fence, then moving to the right along the fence to show the main building of an electric station, then moving further to the right to reveal a cheap apartment building directly adjacent, before finally swinging slowly back to the left to settle on the electric station, where the two boys tried to hide to escape the police. The filmmakers give the names ‘‘gas chamber’’ and ‘‘electric chair’’ to this proximity of the dwelling place to the electric station, which they take to epitomize the violent penetration of state control into the living space of the peri-urban poor. The barking dog that we hear in the soundtrack recalls both the dog as guardian of the house and the police/military dog. Indeed, we are in a living space that is also a zone of policing, law enforcement, and punishment. We are ‘‘somewhere in Europe,’’ says a subtitle, suggesting that this collapsing of the boundary between home and the place of surveillance is what best defines ‘‘Europe’s’’ predicament at this date. The graffiti on the wall—‘‘Stop! Do not risk your life!’’—mocking the official warning signs posted around the electric station, has already revealed this to be a site where human life is in danger, a lethal dwelling place. This cultural inscription on the wall, this piece of street art, renders an otherwise arbitrary occurrence of violence (the death of a teenager) into a sign of truth (that of the banlieue as penal state). What has changed since the 1950s, when Ame´ry was touring Germany giving interviews and talks, is that now resentment is not simply bought and disseminated by the media, but it has come to inhabit them. As a generic term, banlieue has been reappropriated and integrated into an eclectic counterculture consisting of Thai boxing, HipHop, graffiti, and, in general, a multi-ethnic culture adopted in part from American films and rap music and in part from African, Southern and Eastern European, and Caribbean cultures. This culture is summarized in an iconic fashion in Matthieu Kassovitz’s classic film Hatred, made in 1995. It features Supreˆme NTM’s famous antipolice song ‘‘Fuck the Police.’’ as well as songs by L’Assassin. The film’s plot begins the day after a riot that broke out two days after police brutalized a teenager, leaving him in the hospital in critical condition. It follows three teenagers, the Arab Saı¨d, the Jewish Vinz, and the black African Hubert, through their day in the poor working-class suburb, their trip to Paris (where

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they try and fail to collect drug money, in the process being both picked up and tortured by the police and attacked by skinheads), then back to the suburb the next morning. At first sight, the film’s title may seem to summarize both the helpless reactivity of these young people, stuck in the impoverished housing project and idling away their days after their school has burned down in the riots, and the institutionalized violence (by police and media) to which they are subjected. Indeed, Hubert, the most clear-sighted and ambitious of the three, condemns the perpetuation of violence in the film, reminding his friends that ‘‘Hatred breeds hatred’’ and advising Vinz—who strongly identifies with gangster culture appropriated from American cinema—to get rid of a gun that has fallen into his hands. But when at the end Hubert pulls the trigger, locked in a deadly standoff with a police officer who has ‘‘inadvertently’’ pulled the trigger (and whom we see frightened by his own unforeseen act) and killed Vinz (an ambivalent example of the frequent police bavure, the ‘‘unfortunate mistake,’’ as police brutality is often euphemistically called in the media), it is no longer a perpetuation of violence but simply resentment. As viewers, we are not led to regret that hatred indeed breeds hatred; rather, we judge Hubert’s act to be not just gut-level reaction but somehow a just protest, a way of opposing disavowed violence. The ambiguity the word hatred gains by the end of the film speaks to the theme of resentment. The disavowal of institutionalized violence becomes evident in the language of the clip from the television news (Journal te´le´vise´, or JT) that reports on the riots: in reporting the number of injured ‘‘on the side of the forces of order’’ and the number of those captured as ‘‘among the rioters,’’ and using the term ‘‘unfortunate mistake’’ (bavure) to talk about the fatally injured teenager. The violence of representation in the mass media is thematized in a scene in which we see the teenagers idly sit around in a playground dominated by an enormous hypopothamus figure. (Saı¨d is telling an obviously exaggerated story of sexual prowess, which his friends do not buy.) A journalist and a cameraman arrive, and the journalist begins asking the boys questions. This is a staged confrontation, in which the boys ‘‘act out.’’ To the formally ‘‘polite’’ questions of the journalist—which are in fact loaded with stereotypes (‘‘Good evening sirs, we are from the television. Did you take part in the riots last night? Did you break something, did you burn cars?’’)—the boys respond with just indignation (‘‘Do we look like thugs to you? What do we look like to you?’’), challenging her to come down to them. (The car in which the journalist and the cameraman are riding has stopped on a bridge above the sunken playground where the three boys are killing time.) They become more and more angry and accuse the journalist of being interested only in ‘‘making a scoop.’’ In the next shot, we see the enraged boys as they appear through the lens of the camera, angrily gesticulating, insulting, violent, uncivilized: this is what they ‘‘look like’’ to the media. The film suggests that this is also a form of invisible, impersonal, and diffuse ‘‘hatred,’’ transmitted by the media through stereotyped portrayals of the boys, turning their emotions into scandalous spectacle.

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There exists a musical culture that reappropriates the banlieue, including the riots, rechannels violence, and provides cognitive mapping for an audience that is largely opposed to the public created by mass media and therefore can be called a ‘‘counterpublic.’’16 In the face of the media’s ‘‘streamlining’’ our vision away from the singular toward the general, it seizes and repeats the stereotypical images and representations in order to appropriate them. But it does more than that. Publics are, Michael Warner suggests, involved in ‘‘poetic world making’’: ‘‘There is no speech or performance addressed to a public that does not try to specify in advance, in countless highly condensed ways, the lifeworld of its circulation, not just through its discursive claims . . . but through the pragmatics of its speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise-ensce`ne, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on.’’17 Among the citational field of Hip-Hop culture is France’s colonial past, especially the Algerian war of independence, slavery, and the long history of police violence in France. The rap group L’assassin, for example, coined the self-designation ‘‘Academie Assassin’’ to oppose an institutionalized forgetting of the past in the ‘‘one-minute scandals’’ of the media and the way in which education seeks to inculcate a consciousness of the past through ‘‘the ‘groove’ when it is sung in the classrooms’’:18 Your history does not have to be mine, asshole! But it’s your history that made me land on your territory. So I attack and I educate myself to find out why I am here, But the State does not help me by teaching me about my culture!19 Hip-Hop culture inculcates its own sensibility of the past, including a connectedness between first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants with France’s former colonial territories, both because it is generally recognized as the music of the African diaspora but also through conscious evocation of historical events and institutions: France’s colonial past, slavery, police violence, the names of victims, and so on.20 The first line seem to suggest a fragmentation of views between ‘‘your history’’ and ‘‘mine,’’ pointing to the formation of a counter-culture that steers clear of the universalism that is claimed by the mainstream culture of the French Republic. Yet the second line belies any easy separation between the history of the colonizing state and that of the victims of colonialism. To recapitulate, Zˇizˇek’s argument is that the protesters of the banlieues ‘‘call for a new universal viewpoint.’’ The groups that have adapted and disseminate banlieue culture and claim the riots through frequent references criticize the French state’s false claims to universalism, but it is unclear whether they do so in the name of universalism or rather simply to present a counter-history. Hip hop culture actively engaged and provoked the French state through lyrics such as ‘‘France Is a Bitch’’ The song ‘‘France’’ (Sniper, 2001), which has been accused of ‘‘libel against the state,’’ stages a radio interview—the song is a response to questions put to

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singer Tunesiano by journalist Olivier Cachin. One of the singer’s explanations consists in this description of the role of the media: Then they call us ‘‘racists’’ and throw mud at us in the JT [the news on television]. They even speak about anti-semitism, which is just another one of their accusations. Then the media begin the chase; they attack us, they flatter us, And sometimes they show us only the better to knock us down. We are forced to defend ourselves to avoid ending up in the slaughterhouse, To respond to their shameful and false accusations. Hip-Hop groups often deliberately choose to assume a posture of self-defense in the face of the all-encompassing power of the mass media to perpetrate negative images of immigrants, ‘‘insults.’’ Behind the media lurks the invisible face of the Republican state and its ideology of failed universalism.

‘‘I am only speaking on behalf of my own [word]’’ The combative or ‘‘hard-core’’ music serves, like the graffiti on the wall of the electric station, as a cultural inscription that allows a ‘‘cognitive mapping,’’ an understanding of the situation in the context of a larger, meaningful whole rather than as arbitrary violence done to specific individuals. To evoke the life-world of suburban culture, Hip-Hop draws on sound and graffiti culture, incorporates the argot and verlans of the suburbs, indulges in violent and insulting language, and parodies adverse cultural stereotypes of immigrants. This can be seen in the ‘‘outlaw’’ status created by references to American pop culture, from Taxi Driver in Hatred to the ‘‘Wanted Brothers’’ in clips by Kourtrajme´ artists. In the colonial regime, slaves did not have the right to litigate, either as defendants or as litigants. The ‘‘Code Noir’’ published under the reign of Louis XIV specifies that their masters have to defend them if ‘‘insults’’ or ‘‘excesses’’ have been committed against them.21 Conscious of the historical constraints colonial regimes placed upon selfrepresentation, rap bands choose to combat institutional constraints on self-representation by education, the media, and even academic discourse. To do so, they reappropriate verbal violence, insults, and inarticulate cries of rage from disparaging representations of banlieue speech. Hip-Hop artists consciously challenge the limits to the freedom of speech within the French Republic: namely, censorship. Since the 1980s, bands such as NTM, Sniper, La rumeur, and others have fought legal charges (with some exceptions, successfully). In 2002, in a brochure designed for circulation among the limited audience who bought the band’s first album, Shadow on Tempo (L’ombre sur la mesure), Hame´, co-leader of the rap band La rumeur, criticized the media for depicting immigrants as largely responsible for

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‘‘insecurity’’ and accused Sarkozy, who had just been appointed Minister of the Interior, of using the media to advance his political campaign and of failing to acknowledge police violence committed against banlieue youth, as well as the general discrimination and economic hardship that reign in poor suburban areas. Sarkozy then accused Hame´ of ‘‘public libel of an institution,’’ in a suit that was not resolved until 2008. Jacques Denis, in a September 2008 article in Le monde diplomatique, distinguishes two main trends in contemporary French rap music: those who want to please and those who do not.22 On the one hand, some draw on the mass media and adopt a reconciliatory rhetoric. Two examples mentioned by Denis are Abd Al Malik, who infuses his music with Sufism to promote an aesthetics of fraternity and patriotism, and Diam, whose songs disseminate positive images of the people of the banlieue. Her ‘‘My Own Private France’’ is a fantasy of integrating modest banlieue values into a larger national community, of a utopian breaking down of the barrier of prejudice through song. By contrast, bands like La rumeur unflinchingly treat the media as instruments of exclusion, which one must resist by way of clandestine distribution, to which their name refers. The line ‘‘I will murmur [a song about] the hatred that takes up residence in the enclaves of ZUP’s [neighborhoods with low-income housing projects] around Paris,’’ from their song ‘‘Shadow on Tempo,’’ can serve as an icon for the predicament of the banlieue. This band spurns any aesthetic that might appeal to the public of the mass media, adopting a rhetoric that ‘‘voluntarily insults’’: With texts that sit very raw in your cupboard, bastard, La rumeur in pulverized form [or in excerpts; en extrait] voluntarily insults you. Conscious textual strategies are evident throughout the band’s lyrics. Their insults are textual edifices, ‘‘excerpts,’’ but also words that are indigestible and uncivilized (with ‘‘raw’’ being a possible reference to Le´vi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked) to those who still hold onto the excuse of a civilizing mission for colonialism and the internal colonies of the banlieues. Some of the symbolic gestures of banlieue culture are very far from being inarticulate cries. Rather, they involve staking out territory from which to speak, a site within the limits of the nonrepresentable, the censored, for ‘‘speaking on behalf one’s own word.’’

‘‘My song sticks to reality’’ This site in which speaking on behalf of one own word becomes possible is the banlieue as reappropriated into a culture that is musical and textual, a culture of writing and sounds, of graffiti and ‘‘excerpts.’’ In the ‘‘La rumeur affair,’’ the members of the Supreme Court of Appeals in Versailles discussed the question of whether the band’s statements

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were to be judged as artistic expressions, whose mode of speaking is symbolic, or as literal statements that describe a reality. Symbolic, artistic expression has enjoyed special rights ever since the trial of Charles Baudelaire for obscenity after the publication of Flowers of Evil. However, the band insists that their ‘‘words stick to reality,’’ reclaiming the riots and their validity. In an interview given to www.undergroundconnexion.com in 2007, E´koue´, co-leader of La rumeur, states that ‘‘the riots were useful because they showed that you are either in one camp or in the other.’’ Warner’s ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘counter-culture’’ are useful terms in describing the ability of Hip-Hop to travel and to be translated into different languages and for different communities, many of which define themselves as diasporic, with multiple histories and cultural references. One may wonder, however, what the self-declared incendiary lyrics of the group La rumeur may achieve by reinscribing within a colonial past the contemporary riots, in which the main weapon of the masses was cars set on fire: They hate us like fire, say it out loud, we no longer deceive ourselves. They hate us like fire, yeah, say it out loud: I am the fire that blazes [or declares itself; se de´clare] in a field of cotton. What does Pauline universalism entail for Zˇizˇek and Badiou? For Badiou, it is faithfulness to an event. To define Christianity as faithfulness to the crucifixion is to divest it of dogma and institutional past and see it as pure event. Zˇizˇek adds to this view the idea that the event starts out as less than this mere event, as a skandalon, repeating the biblical image of the ‘‘stumbling block,’’ something that has no other appearance than that of an ‘‘undecidable chaos.’’ The songs of the group La rumeur ‘‘stick to reality,’’ in this case, the riots. But they also reclaim the banlieue as a site of declaration. The alleged self-referentiality of rioting thus gains a deep historical significance that includes slavery and colonialism, in which history, in repeating itself (and not without comic effects, to judge from some Kourtrajme´ shorts), reveals itself as a choreographed movement to those who assume it. The violent, in-your-face lyrics ‘‘stick to reality’’: verbal violence becomes to some extent instrumentalized to demand the freedom of speech, but this speech burns holes into the drapery of alleged universalism donned by the Republic. Insofar as the incendiary word, ‘‘the fire that blazes in a field of cotton,’’ is instrumental in a fight for the freedom of speech, it does not count for much for Zˇizˇek. Insofar as it is a fire that blazes in a cotton field devoid of historical context, a cotton field outside history, it becomes a potential event to anchor a new collective subject and a new Truth by which this subject defines itself. Zˇizˇek sees the banlieue essentially deprived of history and tradition as such a symbolic place. Music transforms historical references into rich symbolic and imaginary sites of identification, movement, and affect. It channels the backward gaze of resentment, in Ame´ry’s sense, into survival by creating a habitable imaginary space. It brings out the optimism of Zˇizˇek’s provocatively bleak and empty visions of transformative violence. Why could music groups not be prophets of universalism?

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The Pope’s Word The lecture by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg (where he had been a student and later was professor of theology) became an instant cause cele`bre. The clamor was such that in the American headlines it displaced the aftermath of the fifth anniversary of 9/11—the lecture took place just one day later, on September 12, 2006—which had been orchestrated by a media blitz as an outpouring of Christian faith and patriotic resolve. The controversy centered on what was to become for weeks afterward a notorious quotation: ‘‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things that are only wicked and inhumane, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached..’’ The fact that these were not the Pope’s own words, that he was quoting the fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, was dismissed as inconsequential, in remarks that attributed to Benedict the shrewdness of a rhetorician—using a front to speak his mind—and went so far as to claim that, whatever the rhetorical technique, slighting Islam was indeed the Pope’s intention.1 Setting aside discourses of intentionality, no doubt the quotation carries an anti-Islamic gesture. But this disparaging, en passant gesture should hardly raise our eyebrows, when set beside the profoundly antiIslamic practices of American government officials—or, for that matter, the overall history of Christianity. That it became such an issue is the outcome of mass media, both Christian and Islamic, feeding precisely on such rhetoric of polarization. That scholars and academics got hung up on this phrase, however, is a disappointing reminder that, in fact, they do not read. Surely the Pope’s lecture could be deemed controversial from a certain standpoint, yet this standpoint—as the impetus and

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theses of the lecture demonstrate—has only symptomatically to do with Islam. The lecture is addressed to the conditions of contemporary Christianity, both internal and external, and serves as a call to reconsider current theological and religious practices.2 The lecture is aptly titled ‘‘Faith, Reason, and the University,’’ and it delivers what it promises with stark symmetry. The three notions are used as co-extensive tools in an inquiry into how Christianity can reclaim the ground of universitas from the domain of secular life: ‘‘the reality that, despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we make up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason’’ (my emphasis). Whatever its multiplicity, this ground is marked by a single language—it may be conjured up as the passage by which communitas becomes universitas—and this language is at once something more than a language, or perhaps something more than language as such. It is ‘‘more than’’ because, however we measure it, this ground is accessible specifically by a sort of compulsion to exceed—a compulsion to be more than ourselves, more than our one self, by a commitment to sharing what might be called our indebtedness to reason. For, from the outset, the stipulation is that universitas, this univocal space, is achieved not merely by the community that exists in it and by virtue of it, but in many ways against it, beyond it, and, it might be fair to add, in spite of it. Unlike the notion that a university is a space where a multitude (a community) of discourses—indeed, antagonistic, contentious discourses—exist in abundance, the pope’s notion is animated by an injunction: ‘‘sharing responsibility for the right use of reason.’’ I don’t need to belabor the point that this sharing (this communitas) is, in effect, a misnomer, since the plurality to which it alludes is automatically undone by its object: the univocal, the unique, the one and only, which is how the pope understands universitas. It is by virtue of this monological framing that reason is right—not the other way around. Again, the pope’s invocation is not a call but an injunction. It is not a call to enter the community of rational exchange, whereby presumably there exists de facto the understanding of contention and antagonism (in other words, the dream space of liberalism), but it is an injunction to participate—sharing, yes, but in one voice (a ‘‘single rationality’’)—in the right use of reason. Nor do I need, thus, to belabor the point that this move from exchange to sharing spells out a move from the secular university to the univocal congregation of the faithful. This passage is exactly what the lecture conceives as its object, what it calls forth (from the darkness of history, we might say) as the singular space that claims to know, claims to own, what is right. That this, in essence, dogmatic claim showcases the work of reason cannot be reduced to yet another play of the dialectic of Enlightenment. But, no doubt, it mobilizes the most authoritative Enlightenment rationalism to raise the stakes beyond a simple devotional exhortation or theological intervention. In speaking of ‘‘reasonableness of faith’’ or ‘‘coherence within the universe of reason,’’ the pope is speaking like a Kantian. Given Kant’s own piety, this is hardly a joke. In a lecture in which she

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briefly glossed over this passage, Judith Butler quipped bemusedly, in reference to the pope: ‘‘Whom has he been reading?’’—the playful answer presumably being ‘‘theory.’’ But there is a real and obvious answer, as far as I’m concerned. He has, of course, been reading Manuel Paleologus, but there is no doubt he has already (long ago and at length) read his Kant, his Hegel, his Nietzsche, his Heidegger. And though he embodies the supreme authority of Catholic theology, he knows his Martin Luther by heart. There is a simple, worldly, secular fact here that everyone deems too trivial to notice: the former pope is a German intellectual, and as such he is the product of German Bildung. If we ignore this historical element, if we read the Pope as another dogmatist speaking to the servile constituency of the faithful, then his extraordinary demand to repeal ‘‘the dehellenization of Christianity’’ would appear capricious or inscrutable.3 Whatever we might want to say about this lecture, whether we concentrate on its anti-Islamism, its anti-mysticism, its anti-Protestantism, or its anti-secularism—and it pertains to all at once—or, however we might want to criticize it, attack it, or discredit it, we will have achieved nothing if we don’t encounter this demand as its core thesis, its raison d’eˆtre. What the pope names straight out as the ‘‘dehellenization of Christianity’’ is what he brings to the table for consideration, discussion, critique—what, by the conclusion of his lecture, he will define in expressly Kantian terms as a ‘‘critique of modern reason from within.’’ His decision to bring Manuel Paleologus out of the library dust—by way, it must be said, of Adel The´odore Khoury, an Arab Catholic theologian and one of the most eminent Church scholars of Islamic theology and history—cannot be understood outside this gesture. In the continuation of the controversial passage about Islam, the Pope focuses on Manuel’s secondary elaboration: ‘‘not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.’’ The translation (drafted directly from Khoury’s French) pales before the Greek phrasing, burdened as it is with modernity’s weight on signification. The original—to me¯ syn logo¯ poiein allotrion Theou—could be rendered, somewhat clumsily, as follows: ‘‘not creating [poiein] by partaking of reason [syn logo¯] is alien [allotrion] to God.’’ It is important to notice here the detail of the phrasing syn logo¯ (with or alongside reason, partaking of reason) and not en logo¯ (within reason, in the purview of reason). Nowhere do we see a sense of the total inclusiveness or total significational dominance of logos. Given the multiple meanings of poiein and logos, of course, the phrase could easily mean, in simple language: ‘‘not acting with words is alien to God.’’ In any case, for Manuel Paleologus, God is merely—but so profoundly and essentially—a matter of logos, which is almost banal considering the opening of John’s gospel. Whatever is deemed to be alogon (as Paleologus goes on to elaborate) is confined to an essential otherness, a domain radically excluded from the provenance of God, an alien space. Given that the erudite Byzantine emperor names this otherness as specifically concerning the use of violence in the profession of faith and the proliferation of conviction (i.e., religious conversion) is inordinately ironic, not in reference to Islam (to which it is addressed), but in light of the entire history

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of Christianity, not to mention the fact that it was produced at an encampment during a respite from battling the infidels.

Dehellenization? The pope’s key question is brutally clear: ‘‘Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?’’ For those who don’t dismiss him out of hand as just the pope, the question is classic: Is knowledge and praxis a matter of external historical dynamics or immanent to itself, intrinsic to the very terms that make it knowable? This classic, perhaps typical, question is treated with a rather typical equivocation: history—in this case, very specifically, the historical import of Greek philosophy—is commensurate (his word is ‘‘harmonious’’) with the internal plenitude of the Christian faith. In other words, an old problem is shoved right in our face: What is the relation of Christianity to ancient Hellenism? That the Pope opts to situate the beginnings of an answer in the opening of John’s gospel—‘‘In the beginning was the Word’’—is a gesture far beneath the magnitude of the question, and hardly flattering to his evident intellect. But dogma is dogma, after all, and to demand more from him—much like to demand from him respect for Islam—is a useless expectation. The question he articulates, however, is extremely important, particularly since it pertains to one of the most significant institutions of secular modernity: the university. Given, moreover, the historical specifics of the situation, the object in question is the German university, the institution that bears the quintessential tradition of German Bildung from Wilhelm von Humboldt onward. (This historical signpost is not a pedantic matter but the cipher to the whole problem.) The point is that, whatever resort one might have to the immanence and prescience of dogma, any examination of the tumultuous conjuncture in the Hellenistic world that eventually produced the global domination of the Christian Church cannot be conducted strictly in terms of ancient history proper. It passes through the history of modernity, indeed the history of secularization itself, through which it achieves a paradoxical condition. On the one hand, that conjuncture expands the domination of Christianity even further, to extents unfathomable even by the Pauline ambition of universal expansion; on the other hand, it produces the social imaginary (in the last instance, unavoidably Nietzschean) that will dare to proclaim a horizon beyond Christianity, even if such a horizon could only be a void. The pope essays a clever path out of this quandary by proclaiming modernity itself, in its paradoxical condition, to embody the annihilation of the ancient conjuncture that makes it possible. That he does this with the weapons of modernity—as I said, he speaks like a Kantian—is one of the most glaring lapses in his argument. But let us consider what he says more carefully. The pope predictably refers to Paul as the signator of the fact that

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‘‘the encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.’’ That he attributes a providential character to a historical accident, by invoking Paul’s dream-visions of the call to convert the Gentiles as a divine ‘‘distillation of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry,’’ hardly bears comment. What should be emphasized instead is his insistence on the necessary entwinement of a decidedly pagan sensibility of interrogating the divine with the spiritual affirmation of an imagination that is existentially dependent on the certainty of revelation and redemption. What is the nature of this necessity? What produces it? In what terms, internal or external, is it justified? What sort of cognitive armory does it mobilize in order to abolish the historical contingency that produces it? These questions are not addressed, but we cannot allow them to remain unaddressable. The pope’s historical consciousness paints a picture in which the ‘‘profound encounter between faith and reason . . ., between enlightenment and religion’’ in the antiquity of early Christianity is betrayed first by medieval theology (in the hands on Duns Scotus, he tells us) and then—no surprise there—by the Reformation. The result is the emergence of an idea of God that propels divinity to the position of absolute alterity and an idea of religious practice that propels the faithful to a boundlessly voluntaristic devotion to communicating with this alterity by means of the Word: the Lutheran call for sola scriptura. We might say that, in both gestures, we discern an enchantment—the Word becomes magic, as much as the encounter with God, now an unnamable mystery, involves the working of a radically personal miracle. The pope sees the ‘‘dehellenization of Christianity’’ to be conducted in three historical instances: sixteenth-century Reformation; nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal theology; and the contemporary conjunction of theological fundamentalism and cultural relativism. It isn’t immediately clear what thread might have brought these instances together in a process that has taken up the last four centuries of ‘‘Western’’ history. The first instance inaugurates a radical disengagement of faith from knowledge, but also, in consequence, from history, understood here in terms of Gramsci’s notion of ‘‘inventories of the present.’’ According to this logic, the Reformation granted faith a disembodied otherworldliness that solidified its heteronomous hold over the human sphere, even beyond strict adherence to the discourse of religion. This leads the pope, interestingly, to argue that Kant’s radical opening to practical reason was borrowed from the otherworldly space of faith, even when his explicit object is a worldly morality. In effect, the pope argues that both Luther and Kant eradicate philosophy in favor of morality and make knowledge the object of faith—in God and in reason, respectively. In the second instance, whose identified patrimony is the liberal theology of Adolf von Harnack, theology and morality were reduced to a sort of humanistic scientism, ultimately pushing not only philosophy but also faith as such out of the axiomatic boundaries of knowledge. As a result, theology became religion (by now split between the customary practices of the faithful and an academic discipline of comparative historical

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inquiry), much as the project of practical reason turned into the project of natural science. For the pope, classic nineteenth-century secularization signifies the second defeat of philosophy. He says the least about the third instance, which he identifies as ‘‘dehellenization in progress.’’ The implicit gesture alludes to the danger of a cultural relativism that has no tolerance for even the historical construction of the so-called Greco-Western imaginary institution, producing crude, uneducated anti-Westernisms. There seems to be an attempt here to criticize whatever efforts seek to return to a primary Christianity that can be absolved from the excesses of modernity and, having been thus cleansed, can be made available to whatever new ‘‘inculturation’’ may seem fit. His target is both the secular dismissal of the cognitive propensities of religion and, yet also the (equally secular) politics of identity that claims Christianity to be an ahistorical entity that can be bent and shaped according to whatever—here we must say (though the pope does not) political— purposes a given constituency (Christian or non-Christian, Western or non-Western) sees fit. Secularist reason, ‘‘which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion to the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures,’’ the pope concludes, though he is either unaware or dismissive of the implications that his concern—‘‘the dialogue of cultures’’—finds its essential significance in a secular cognitive realm, regardless of the residual theological content. What he does imply, as far as I can tell, but does not engage in any direct sense is that the degradation of Protestant sectarianism, which has produced American fundamentalist evangelical cults, is but one more instance in the long process of the ‘‘dehellenization of Christianity.’’ This process, much like Christianity itself, the pope implies, is a historical matter. This historicity doesn’t take anything away from the internal theological integrity of the faith. On the contrary, ‘‘dehellenization’’ is a code term for the charge of disregarding and violating the historical parameters of the faith, which de facto signifies the distortion and violation of the theological plenitude of the faith. Taking seriously this assertion of ‘‘the dehellenization of Christianity’’ hardly means adopting the pope’s concerns or his conceptions of what this assertion might mean. Nevertheless, the assertion does demand that, by inference, we consider the question of Christianity’s hellenization. What might this mean? Did it ever happen? If not, what is the pope talking about? If yes, it did happen, is the field of inquiry opened up by the event of hellenization a matter of historical or philosophical inquiry? And what does ‘‘hellenized’’ mean in relation to ‘‘hellenic’’? Surely, they are not equivalent. The past participle denotes a transformation—Christianity was at some point hellenized, therefore it was not hellenic, which begs the question of what it was before this moment of alleged hellenization: Was it Christianity, or was it something else? If it was not Christianity, the notion of its hellenization becomes incomprehensible—What was the entity that was hellenized?—unless we go so far as to assert that it is precisely the event named ‘‘hellenization’’ that makes Christianity comprehensible, that makes it Christianity. But then, the charge of its having

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been dehellenized would have to mean that Christianity has long ago been annihilated, and the brutal reality of history disputes such hypotheses. These questions regarding hellenization may now seem an old and lapsed issue, one with which theologians have not been concerned since antiquity, in effect since the time when Hellenes who had not yet become Christians existed outside the perimeters of the early Christian communities. When the question is broached by historians, either it can yield important insights into what Peter Brown has named ‘‘the making of late antiquity,’’ or it can easily be reduced to the neoclassical Orientalist theses that laid the foundations for the institution of world religions in the nineteenth century.4 Whatever the case, the theological (or, some would say, philosophical) dimensions of the matter remain at the level of cliche´, indicatively invoked by the pope with a matter-of-factness that, from a historical standpoint, is mind-boggling: ‘‘The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed.’’ Serious commentary fails against this baffling statement. Let me just say that even simply the notion of ‘‘the Greek spirit’’ is quintessentially un-Greek—I mean this in historical terms, if measured according to the self-conceptualization of society and its modes of knowledge that prevailed in antiquity, even late antiquity. We can perhaps speak, as Cornelius Castoriadis does, of a Greek imaginary (and even then he denotes it precisely as a ‘‘political imaginary’’). We can speak of Greek conceptions of the polis or the psyche, even (with an enormous degree of generalization) of divinity or the cosmos. But to speak of ‘‘the Greek spirit’’ is already to speak in a Christian sense, which remains tacit behind the assertion that modernity, as a ‘‘Greco-Western’’ institution, can lend its terms to all of history, past and present.5 No doubt, to say that this spirit had matured along with the prophetic development of the Old Testament into the New is dogmatically (i.e., theologically) Christian and absurd in any other sense. What remains is the equally absurd—or, let us say kindly, intellectually stretched out—notion that the language in which a text, the text, is written is inspired, instilled, imbued, imprinted with a spirit that bears the name of this language. The very phrasing attributes an a priori sacredness to the Greek, by virtue of a spirit inhabiting and passing on through language, which is—this, if nothing else—positively un-Greek. It establishes, in other words, a Christianization of the Greek at the primary level of signification, thereby provoking us to consider that, contrary to the Pope’s logic, it is instead the advent of Christianity, particularly insofar as it is textually woven with the Greek language, that signifies de facto—in a specific, historical sense—the dehellenization of certain societies in the ancient Mediterranean. Paul’s Greek Yet the query is a matter of language, all the more because it isn’t a matter of spirit. It is noteworthy (though hardly curious) that the pope mentions the New Testament in general as the Greek text in question, at least in terms of the language that provides its 360

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textuality, instead of, even if only parenthetically (noting the point of its inclusion), naming Christianity’s actual encounter with the Greek language: the texts of Paul. The significance of Paul’s writings, before one ventures to examine their philosophical and political value, is that they are the initial Christian texts, predating the first gospel by two decades. They are the only texts that can literally be called a testament, because, as epistles, they are declamatory and testimonial, with a specific addressee and always with a specific and deliberate purpose. These texts encounter their addressees and their purpose with the same clarity with which they encounter the specific conditions of their production. Paul may articulate, with grand and poetic gestures, the power of the void, but he makes sure we all know that he does not address the void—that he addresses real Christians in real circumstances, with real bodies and real minds, with the mark of the world all over them, in them, and around them. It would be more precise to say that he addresses the real—the worldly, for that is what he is most anxious to encounter— conditions of becoming and being a Christian, the reality of being a Christian.6 This reality, this outmaneuverable specificity, demands that Paul address his audience in Greek. The Greek language merely bears the worldly reality of his project. It is not incidental or instrumental in his project; it is immanent to his project insofar as this project has an explicit political and institutional aim. Thus, Greek is not the language of Christianity as a philosophical language but as the language of reality. It is the most tangible element of Christianity’s worldliness, no matter what may be the content or the signification established in this language, which promises to abolish worldliness altogether. By the hand of Paul, Christianity learns to speak Greek in order to enter the world, in order to actualize itself as a worldly project, and only as a consequence of this actualization does Christianity then get to claim Greek as its idiom, desiring its philosophical currency only insofar as Christianity seeks to make its newfangled theology current. Making theology current means not only making it contemporary with its time frame (which in another language will come to mean to secularize theology) but, at the same time, endowing theology with a powerful and flowing force across boundaries—in effect, universalizing it. The resulting theologization of a philosophical idiom with the aim of universalism subsequently becomes the very mark of Christianity’s occultation, for there is nothing generically universalist in Greek philosophy, despite the enormous and exceedingly hegemonic legacy of Platonism. The contemporary reinvocations of Paul as a political theologian of actual philosophical power (even when this is coded in an antiphilosophical gesture, as in Alain Badiou’s reading) propose a different account of this encounter. The most drastic and impressive remark about Paul’s Greek occurs in Jacob Taubes’s anecdotal introduction to his remarkable lectures on Paul at Heidelberg in 1987. These lectures mark a rare occasion when a text honestly merits the claim of being a life’s work. They are the actual culmination of an idiosyncratic intellectual life, as they chronicle the battle of a restless mind to persevere against the finality of a body already (and irredeemably) claimed by death. Consequently, Taubes strikes from the outset a testimonial tone, for his evident object of inquiry (Paul) 361

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is, in effect, himself. I am not saying merely that Taubes sees himself in Paul. I am saying that contemplating the significance of Paul is tantamount to the barest philosophical gesture: contemplating the question of life as this is signified by the encounter between oneself and the world. To risk a blunt conclusion from my impression of reading his text, I could say that Taubes’s desire for Paul’s vision is so overwhelming as to provoke us to imagine that he could in effect desire to be a Christian solely and exclusively on this basis, while at the same time relishing, as a Jew, a celebration of the most radical Jewishness of Paul, a Jewishness that the overwhelming majority of Jews, Taubes implies, just don’t understand. Therefore, the testimonial drama of this text rightly demands an anecdotal, selfreferential introduction to the problem of Paul’s Greek, which also happens to be the veritable introduction to the text proper—as it very well should. The question of Paul’s Greek, as I have said, is not merely a matter of using language. It is a matter of the world signifying and being signified by this language, and, in this sense, being the core figure in the assessment of Paul’s historical significance. Taubes relates two instances: one in which his teacher in Zurich, Emil Steiger (a Germanist and Classicist) quips (‘‘with great bitterness,’’ Taubes tells us) that Paul’s language ‘‘isn’t Greek, it’s Yiddish!’’; and second, some years later in New York, when Taubes pursues the issue by posing the same problem to Kurt Latte, a historian of religion and ‘‘a great philologist’’ with an alleged ‘‘special ear for Greek and Latin,’’ as Taubes testifies, in order to receive the answer: ‘‘You know, Mr. Taubes, I cannot grasp [Paul’s Letters] with my Greek ear.’’7 This stunning statement, if not Taubes’s entire enterprise, should make us pause. We fail profoundly if we don’t ask, very simply: a Greek ear? What is a Greek ear? Surely not the ear of a philologist. Not any more than the ear of an Orientalist is a Persian ear, or an Arab ear, or a Jewish ear. Or perhaps I’m acting quickly. The ear of a German philologist may be the quintessential Greek ear. Insofar as the stigma of one’s language cannot— does not—register its meaning without the action of what Jacques Derrida, so long ago already, once called ‘‘the ear of the other,’’ insofar as from the entire history of modernity read backward we glean the stigma of ‘‘the Greek’’ as always having been registered by ears other than Greek, insofar as the so-called Greco-Western institution attributes to ‘‘what is Greek’’ all the projections of myriad histories of myriad others as to ‘‘what is Greek’’ (others within it and others against it)—well, then, yes, the Greek ear is the ear that discerns in the Greek its own otherness. Or, we might equally say, by the most elemental demand of dialectics: it is the ear that discerns the otherness in the Greek. But in evoking this resonance, I’m moving too fast. The otography that Taubes finds necessary to procure from his ‘‘hellenized’’ teachers and colleagues is a double for the explicit autography his contemplation of Paul signifies: ‘‘This is the point at which little Jacob Taubes comes along and enters into the business of gathering the heretic back into the fold, because I regard him [Paul]—this is my own personal business—as more Jewish than any Reform rabbi, or any Liberal rabbi, I ever heard in Germany, England, America,

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Switzerland, or anywhere.’’8 The blunt idiosyncracy of this phrasing is positively Nietzschean. ‘‘I live on my own credit,’’ says Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, the quintessential gesture of declaring the matter of one’s life to be radically one’s ‘‘own personal business,’’ unencumbered by an external arche¯. The literary gesture by which the fictionalized figure of autography sheds the rhetorical play of the diminutive third person for the gravity of first-person witness to the story of oneself—a story of multiple spaces within the presumed single history of a diasporic people, whose presumption Taubes exposes while, by virtue of reconfiguring the heretic Paul, reaffirming it—showcases the daring of the gesture in Ecce Homo that Derrida explicitly draws upon to articulate the question of historical destination in writing an otobiography.9 In this case, the ear of the other is just as much that of the Jewish political theologian trained to the sounds of Judaism as of the classicist philologist trained to the sounds of Hellenism. To say that Paul is heretic to Judaism is as elementary as to say that Christianity, theologically speaking, is a Jewish heresy. Both are disregarded here. Taubes’s excavation purports to establish the Messianism of Paul as a diasporic Messianism—not only in a historical sense but in the metaphorical one as well: a Messianism of dispersal at the core of the Law, a rebellious Messianism that elicits out of the Law not a conformist tradition but an intransigent, ‘‘unlawful’’ one. Taubes’s treatment of Paul is utterly idiosyncratic, but this does not mean it does not leave behind a path to be retraced. Certainly, Giorgio Agamben picks up the track in full acknowledgment of his predecessor (including the claim to Paul’s idiosyncratic Messianism10), adopting Taubes’s anecdotal beginning as his own historiographical beginning. Yes, Paul’s Greek sounds like Yiddish, Agamben says, because ‘‘Paul belongs to a Jewish Diaspora community that thinks and speaks in Greek (Judeo-Greek) in precisely the same manner that the Sephardim would speak Ladino (or Judeo-Spanish) and the Ashkenazi Yiddish.’’11 And he goes further in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Derrida’s argument in Monolingualism of the Other: ‘‘There’s nothing more genuinely Jewish than to inhabit a language of exile and to labor it from within, up to the point of confounding its very identity and turning it into more than just a grammatical language, making it a minor language, a jargon (as Kafka called Yiddish).’’12 To be fair, Derrida would never allow the phrasing ‘‘more genuinely’’ or determine the confounding of identity to be the outcome of a willful, independent act. His point, rather, would be that, yes, one inhabits language as an other, yet language is the space where identity is made unintelligible at the same moment that, as an ideological phantasm, we might say, it is (thought to be) consolidated. In this respect, the identity of exile too—or diaspora, for that matter—can be constructed, like any identity, as a self-same condition, its minoritarian phantasm being yet another instance of the self-occultation of a heteronomous command. Although historically accurate, Agamben’s reasoning is ultimately facile when viewed in this light. There’s nothing jargonish about Paul’s Greek; on the contrary, the idiom is perfectly canonical. I mean canonical as a language, as enunciation, not by virtue of its theological content. If I may be allowed the conceit, Paul’s Greek does not disrupt my

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ear—certainly not the ear of a philologist—in the least. In fact, Paul’s phrasing is established as one of the richest inventories of style in contemporary Greek poetry. This is, I repeat, in spite of its content. The crucial point that needs to be interrogated here—one that none of the recent excavations of Paul dare posit—is precisely the discrepancy between the content and the language. The ‘‘foreignness’’ of Paul is not due to his use of Greek, but to the fact that he uses a perfectly recognizable Greek to expound on an engagement with the world that is, if not quite inconceivable, certainly otherworldly to the Greek frame of mind. What needs to be interrogated—and this is a massive task, of which a bare skeleton is produced here—is the occluded underside of this disjunction: not the alleged ‘‘un-Greekness’’ of his language, but the problematic ‘‘Greekness’’ of this language insofar as it threads together a set of worldly injunctions and prohibitions with an uncannily (by the historical terms of Greek societies) unworldly set of eschatological exhortations. The disjunction is also, simultaneously, a conjunction. The alienation of Hellenism by virtue of the stark deployment of a Hellenic idiom against the grain is marked by a double and duplicitous gesture: Christianity’s de facto dehellenization of society (in historical terms) is at the same time fashioned as an extension of a Hellenic intellectual architecture that, in this case, will exponentially surpass even the Roman assimilation.

Athens Unknown A notorious incident from Pauline history, as reported in the Acts, exemplifies this duplicitous condition. Although the presumed author of the Acts (Luke, the Evangelist) is not considered altogether reliable—since his purpose was to produce an hagiographical construction of apostolic history that would consolidate into a narrative corpus the early principles of Christian practice and the institution of the new Church—the story itself seems likely enough. In any case, the actuality of its truth as event is irrelevant. Indeed, the real event is the rhetorical actuality of Paul’s gesture, as it is reported in self-evident convention, whether it occurred or not. After all, this gesture is what remains, what becomes canonical, indeed, sacred. I speak of the famous scene of Paul’s visit to Athens, about which so much has been written as to deserve an exclusive book-length annotated bibliography. Here, I touch on just a couple of things, pertaining specifically to language. The narrative situates Paul’s appearance amidst the Athenians in conventionally Athenian terms, foregrounding the social conditions that are conducive to expounding and discussing new ideas: Athe¯naioi de pantes kai oi epide¯mountes xenoi eis ouden heteron eukairoun ¯e legein ti kai akouein kainoteron—which I would translate, in the barest terms, as follows: ‘‘All Athenians and foreign inhabitants found it best to spend their time in nothing other than talking about or listening to the newest thing’’ (Acts 17:21). The forward simplicity of this sentence, borne out by the trope of stating the obvious,13 is

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nonetheless framed by a pair of terms that are crucial: xenos (‘‘foreign’’) and kainon (‘‘new’’). These are, in all contexts, evident terms of alterity, yet here they register as quintessential figures of what the polis does and by what it is bound. The suggestion is that alterity is internal to the polis; it’s difficult to imagine another phrase that could spell this out more succinctly. To Athenians, alterity in-habits the polis; it is the register of inclusion, and even more, the foremost (ouden heteron) conduit of desire for all (pantes) inhabitants, even those who do not cease to remain foreign. This hardly signifies the desire to assimilate—to annihilate—the foreign and the new, but rather the urge to encounter it (indeed to seek it out) in its full foreignness and unknowability. Assimilation is not the purpose, because alterity already belongs to the imaginary of the city and does not need to be eliminated. Let us note that the text has already articulated two instances of the foreign, one for each side—Paul and the Athenians. The very first sentence pronounces Paul’s distress— ‘‘the aggravation of his spirit’’ (paro¯xuneto to pneuma autou)—at encountering the sight of the city resplendent with idols (kateido¯lon).14 By contrast, the Athenians’ response is to invite Paul to the Areopagus, the venerated space of free and public discourse, precisely because what he has been disseminating in the streets—and he is indeed identified as a disseminator (spermologos)—sounds foreign: xenizonta gar tina eisphereis eis tas akoas he¯mo¯n literally means ‘‘because you bring alien matters to our ears’’ (17:20). Curiously, this ancient text stages the very rhetoric of the ‘‘ear of the other’’ we’ve encountered in the question of the authenticity of Paul’s Greek. But what decidedly resonates as other to the ears of the Athenians is not, let us say, the syntactical parameters of the language but the tactical ones: the foreign or ‘‘alienating’’ elements (xenizonta) pertain explicitly to Paul’s ‘‘proclaimed teaching’’ (laloumene¯ didakhe¯). The contrast between Paul’s initial impression upon entering Athens and the city’s response is striking. For him, the sight (of idols) distresses and repulses the spirit; for them, the sound (of words) prickles the senses (the ears) with a curious impulse for elaboration. There is indeed an epistemological chasm—which is, after all, articulated precisely in Romans. On the one side, the spirit cannot tolerate the senses because it is terrified of the worldliness of the body; on the other side, the senses cannot grasp the disembodiment of the spirit because there is no world without the body, except the netherworld, the (un)world of shades. This is why the Athenians draw the line on just one thing in Paul’s discourse: the resurrection from the dead as a worldly event (17:32). But Paul’s politics also finds the end of the line on the same issue. It’s not a matter of language; it is a matter of what a language can or cannot say. The hunch that Paul’s Greek was impeccable is confirmed by the mode of addressing the Athenians. The discursive convention is unmistakable and revealing. Not only is the rhetorical form deliberately Socratic, but the gesture of extending an invitation to listen is predicated on the acknowledgement of Athenian hospitality, of the political conditions that enable Paul to extend such an invitation in the first place—conditions that distinguish the polis as essentially a

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space of listening. Paul’s trick is to declare, in as flattering a mode as possible and with an explicit gesture of veneration—‘‘as even certain of your own poets have said’’ (17:28)— that the Athenians, precisely because they are ‘‘in all ways most adept at matters of the divine’’ (17:22), already know what he proclaims. Except, despite their knowledge, they are not listening carefully, properly. Evangelism has been relentlessly attached to reception and receptivity from the outset, always seeking to determine and control the conditions of listening, indeed, to eradicate all other modes of listening. Counting on their listening, Paul engages them with a peculiar philosophical gesture. He frames the matter in terms of how one configures the known. They may know what he proclaims, yet, he suggests, they do not know it—this essence, this substance—as they should, as it must be known, as it can only be known: essentially, substantially (17:23). Configuring the known is conditioned precisely by some mode of knowing the unknown. Paul recognizes that he faces a great predicament, which, at the same time, offers a fabulous opportunity. The Athenians, in their inimitable sophistic care to hedge their bets with the divine realm, had set aside a temple dedicated to divinities they did not know. This, in itself, is an extraordinary gesture that nonetheless feeds on an elemental plane of the Greek sense of the world, certainly inconceivable outside a polytheistic cognitive universe and evidently linked to the primacy of the imaginary of hospitality (philoxenia), of hosting precisely what is alien. But this gesture is also—or had become by that time—a figure in a perfunctory cult, an almost pedant attitude toward the devotional terrain that rounds out the multiplicity of gods by closing off the set with a determined and thus exhaustible X factor. Paul latches onto this very sense of conventional and lax relation to the divine, exploiting hospitality in the most actual sense. The temple’s dedication literally lacks definition. The unknown element of whatever divinity is to be worshipped there is all pervasive; the unknown is addressed to the entire range of names and representations. In fact, it is only insofar as a divinity is worshipped at this site that he or she is—becomes thus—unknown. But by the same structure, the unknown is, as such, provisional. The presumption is that, as new divinities become known and cults develop around them, the proper temples, named and dedicated, will be built, with the added satisfaction that the path of this now-professed worship had already been laid. The meaning of provisional is, in this respect, exceedingly accurate and profoundly imbedded in the whole structure of time in the polis: it encompasses both the temporary (the transient and timeless present) and the providential (the future, projected and anterior). One of the most remarkable aspects of the Greek understanding of divinity is that the gods, though they are immortal, are nonetheless not eternal. Their immortality refers to divine nature—the only register of meaning that absolutely differentiates the divine from the human. Eternity concerns merely power. The Greek imaginary understands the divine realm as like everything else in the universe: a struggle between rival powers. Gods reign by assuming power, and whenever power is open to struggle, eternity is meaningless.

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But, of course, to lose power does not mean to lose your divine nature (physis); it merely means to lose your position (thesis) in the grid of divine power. For this reason, gods from different historical moments—how we understand the significance of the divine being open to history is one of the most crucial registers in understanding the Greek political imaginary—can come to coexist, as power relations shift, without the least contradiction. This suggests that the practice of worship, even when certain gods or certain rituals are favored (and each city, or even groups within each city, had a particularly instituted and ritualized mode of favoritism) can, nonetheless, never be exclusive. The call for a singular or exclusive devotion to one god, one ritual, one idea, and so on was a major transgression (the hubris of monos phronein, as is criticized in Antigone). Instead, the tendency is to go to the opposite extreme: to extend inclusion even to the unknown, not, of course, as the bona fide Unknown but, rather simply, as the not yet known.15 To say that the Athenian temple’s dedication lacks definition is to say that the devotional inscription literally lacks the definite article. It’s simply Agno¯sto¯ Theo¯—the distinctive capitalization of both God and Unknown is obviously biblical. The clear translation is: ‘‘to god unknown.’’ The temple thus refers to the primordial universe from which gods emerge indefinitely but not eternally, whereby they belong to an otherness that precedes the institution of the other as absolute singular limit. Paul’s brazen and ingenious notion of reading the inscription otherwise, of transfiguring it from the provisionally unknown to knowing the quintessentially unknown—from ‘‘god unknown’’ to the God, the one and only God, who is by definition the Unknown (the Unnamable)—may be seen as the practical application of a shift in the understanding of alterity that grants the Other absolute singularity.16 Paul’s God is the other par excellence, the One and Only Other, who now commands exclusively the terms of social definition. Ironically, this God cannot belong to this Athenian temple of devotion, for in the polytheistic horizon he would be just another god, a god whose name is not unknowable but for the time being just unknown. In the Athenian psychic universe, the unknown is provisional because the possibility of knowledge is a worldly matter. But Paul presents the unknowable as terminal, prohibitively singular and singular because prohibitive. Once God is known as the Unknowable, he occupies the entire range of the prohibition of knowledge, prohibiting all other gods at the same time that he prohibits access to his own name. No doubt, there is more to say here about the co-incidence of prohibition and devotion. One of the core elements of Paul’s political theology, which is foundational to Christian morality, is the establishment of a devotional mode based on prohibition. (The matter is primarily political and only symptomatically theological.) Perhaps this is why Paul’s gesture, for all its rhetorical ingenuity, fails. Of all the instances of proclaiming the gospel in Greek cities, as recounted in Acts, Athens is the only place where Paul fails to establish a congregation, taking the few converts along to the next stop in his journey. Yet his invocation of this Unknown God is a gesture of erasure that the imaginary of a temple to ‘‘god unknown’’ cannot fathom. In effect, Paul’s invocation has abolished the symbolic

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field and, as a radioactive proposition, has set in motion an unbeknownst annihilating power. The Athenians, whom Paul leaves behind unconvinced and unconverted, thus remain, in their inconvertibility, a dying breed.

The Itinerant Trauma As disseminator, Paul exists in constant vagrancy; the most meaningful mode for him is to be on the road. Even his texts are mobile. The epistolary form confirms his errant condition at the same time that it seals the permanence of the addressee. These missives are also missiles of foundation. They mean to eradicate the runaway tendencies of doubt and strengthen the rooting of the newly established congregations, or more precisely, to immobilize the instituted community of the faithful while mobilizing the instituting force of the faith. (Without its conscious instrumentality, its avowed purpose to establish an institution, Paul’s language is pure delirium.) Being on the road becomes thus an essential precondition of foundation, the errant distance needed to make the power of the word more proximate. Such is, literally, the nature of apostolic labor. In Paul’s case, however, it is all a matter of repetition, the compulsive reenactment of an inaugural traumatic event. Paul is perpetually on the road to Damascus. His restless peregrinations may be driven by the singular obsession of a man utterly convinced that his access to the truth demands that it be available to all—the basic psychic framework of all evangelism, which will be instituted as a collective repetition compulsion for Christian missionary work for centuries on end—yet underneath this self-evident demand, Paul’s peregrinations are driven by something darker and singular. Paul goes on the road in a desperate attempt to recreate the shuddering disruption of his own interpellation. This is not merely narcissistic or self-referential. It carries the added exigency of putting into action the disruptive mechanics of a reproducible coup de foudre, so as to engineer what must be henceforth self-generating and self-proliferating. He labors under the compulsion both to reenact his own traumatic experience and, at the same time, to reproduce this experience in others. The point is therefore to produce a myriad others who are thus ordained into an infectious state, no less traumatic, which can be managed only by further externalization and wider dissemination of the trauma. This extraordinary passing on of the contaminant-traumatic kernel from self to other constitutes an order whose condition can only be characterized—and I understand the risk of this metaphor—as viral. The event of Paul’s interpellation on the road to Damascus cannot be labeled simply a conversion. It becomes the arch-event for all subsequent evangelical Christianity and the born-again syndrome. The common enunciation ‘‘I have found God!’’—to which a genuine believer can only, incredulously, respond ‘‘I didn’t know He had been lost!’’— reveals a truth that is immediately repressed, whereby the (self-)authorizing subject

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occludes the autonomy of the act. It seeks to confirm that God has called me, has found me, lost among the sinners, and so on. It must be a real experience of interpellation if it is to have the power of transforming the subject, who will, from now on, begin a new life. But, like all interpellation, it is, in the last instance, a self-interpellation: after all, I am the one who got the call; I am the one who has been born again in Christ; I am the one who is to bear henceforth God’s word, and so on. Equally evocative is the henceforth conventional utterance ‘‘God has spoken to me!’’ which transfers to an anonymous and disembodied voice the fact of my enunciation. What is implied and, one assumes, registers its full force in the unconscious at its moment of oblivion is a self-confirmation: indeed, a bona fide moment of subjection. The occlusion of self-authorization is essential to the whole process. There is no image more magically evocative of this than the description of a transformed Paul, who is blinded by having his eyes totally opened. In the symbolic power of the narrative of the event on the road to Damascus (where he was, after all, on a zealot mission to persecute Christians), Paul exemplifies the heteronomous gesture. He embodies an act of extraordinary desublimation by which the victimizer joins the ranks of the victims in order to endow them with a victimizing zeal whose dogmatism will henceforth wreak havoc throughout the centuries. This repetition compulsion is crucial to Christianity’s proliferation. Alain Badiou goes further, by taking even the incident at Damascus to signal a repetition, to ‘‘mimic the founding event,’’ Christ’s resurrection: ‘‘The event—‘it happened,’ purely and simply, in the anonymity of the road—is the subjective sign of the event proper that is the Resurrection of Christ. Within Paul himself, it is the (re)surgence [(re´)surrection] of the subject.’’17 In a more subtle rendering, we could consider, alongside Badiou’s observation, Taubes’s insistence that Paul reproduces the Jewish trope of the ‘‘elect’’ by involving himself, symbolically, in a process of ‘‘outbidding’’ Moses (the word is Taubes’s) and outdoing Mosaic law.18 We thus have a composite figure, whereby Paul simultaneously incorporates a fundamental element of the Jewish imaginary with a fundamental element that abolishes it. This composite figure is crucial to understanding what Paul will eventually come to signify as ‘‘grace.’’ A phrase from Romans is often quoted: ou gar este upo nomon alla upo charin (‘‘for you are not under law but under grace’’; Rom. 6:14). It’s difficult to understand exactly how Paul understands the meaning of the two enormously complicated Greek notions he uses with such abandon. But let us assume, along with Badiou (but also Taubes, Agamben, and Zˇizˇek, though they all angle things differently), that, whatever the historical usage, Paul institutes a new set of significations.19 The deviation from established meaning matters only in our assessment of the meaning of Paul’s project, which can only be a contemporary assessment. In this sense, the polemics are conducted against the inheritors of Paul and their response to the new institution. Badiou’s execution of this inheritance is crucial because of the kind of politics he pursues, whose emancipatory claims are undermined by the signifying framework he imposes on this particular nexus of Pauline notions.

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One of Badiou’s central claims regarding Paul is that, as an antiphilosophical enterprise, the Pauline theology of resurrection shatters the rules of the dialectical relation between life and death: ‘‘I shall maintain that Paul’s position is antidialectical, and that for it death is in no way the obligatory exercise of the negative’s immanent power. Grace, consequently, is not a ‘moment’ of the Absolute. It is affirmation without preliminary negation; it is what comes upon us in the caesura of the law. It is pure and simple encounter.’’20 And also: ‘‘Resurrection is neither a sublation nor an overcoming of death. They are two distinct functions, whose articulation contains no necessity. For the event’s sudden emergence never follows from the existence of an evental site. Although it requires conditions of immanence, that sudden emergence nevertheless remains of the order of grace.’’21 From these two straightforward statements, which are duly expressive of Badiou’s theorization of the event, let us consider together the two notations of grace as interruption (caesura) and as encounter. The co-articulation is caught in an elementary contradiction. Even if an encounter precipitates an interruption, it brings forth a connection, an emergent relation. Though this encounter becomes the arch-referent of a new radical imagining—let us note, by the way, that as arch-referent it itself becomes absolute—it does so by repressing the contours of its very emergence, both the unavoidably aleatory nature of its occurrence (true of any encounter) and the actual traces of the discontinuity it celebrates. Badiou disputes the notion that the event is equivalent to creation ex nihilo, precisely because, he argues, the event is always worldly and this worldliness is what enables its rupturing power, whose elements can be traced (even if retrospectively) in the new historical parameters that the event radically institutes.22 The event matters historically because it emerges out of the historical matter of which it is composed, even if in an altogether altered (and therefore rupturing) configuration. The relation between what once was and now is—as something altered, as an emergent radical otherness—is the most important element in theorizing the event, though I doubt Badiou would place emphasis there. It is certainly more important than the rupture itself, if we are not to become mere pawns to the forces the event unleashes. In any case, by virtue of its worldly character, no evental site can efface entirely the parameters of the rupture the event produces. If it could, the rupture would be unreadable, and the event would never register at all. An elementary understanding of Foucault’s attention to historical discontinuity (including what he called ‘‘history’s unrealized instances’’) would be a good thing to employ here. In these terms, the encounter at Damascus may produce the birth of Paul, but, as Paul himself never ceases to recount, this birth is a rebirth. It is linked to a network of significations that it does, of course, set out to destroy, but in this very destruction it continues to be linked to them, no matter what the rhetoric. No bornagain discourse can do without the ‘‘again,’’ despite the aspiration to have erased or severed all past traces. The sheer zealotry of the Christian Paul is but an elementary particle of the force of anti-Christian zealotry that brought about the event of his apostolic

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election. There is no way out of this equation, and neither the most apocalyptic evangelism nor the most revolutionary theory of rupture can conjure up a way out, even as mere language.

God’s Gift Language here is hardly straight. Paul’s opposition between law and grace is but one fold in a multifold opposition that sometimes is articulated as flesh (sarx) versus spirit (pneuma) or, at the core, as death versus life: to gar phrone¯ma te¯s sarkos thanatos, to de phrone¯ma tou pneumatos zo¯¯e —‘‘because the thought of the flesh is death, while the thought of the spirit is life’’ (Rom. 8:6). Badiou goes to great lengths to disengage all these notions from their philosophical parameters, as Paul would have inherited them in a Hellenistic world. This world, however, already provides unprecedented conditions of syncretism, which makes whatever Paul is said to be inheriting already nebulous and multivalent. Even the juxtaposition between philosophy and antiphilosophy, as Badiou theorizes it, becomes problematic. So, even if we accept the radical resignification that Paul is said to enact, we cannot summarily qualify, at least with any demonstrable clarity, the already-signified material against which he signifies a rupture. This makes the rupture itself unclear. Be that as it may, Paul’s enormous success at altering the signification of a widely used Greek vocabulary (whether popular or philosophical, strictly speaking, makes no difference) by enacting an extraordinary manipulation and downright occlusion of his own signifying process is much graver and worthier of interrogation than any theorization of rupture. It is impossible to understand ‘‘grace’’ outside the social imaginary parameters of the gift. I understand both Badiou’s logic and his strategy of declaring this notion an antidialectical gesture that undoes the dialectical engagement of the subject with the law. But I sense that this logic involves instead a gesture of crypto-dialectics that not only dissimulates the dialectical encounter it mobilizes but disallows any possibility of the dialectical undoing of this encounter, any possibility of real self-alteration. Surely, no bona fide Christian discourse would dispute that God’s grace is God’s gift. Yet, while the association that comes immediately to mind is one of gratuity and graciousness, this is but an instance of veiling what is really at work: an order of economy and exchange.23 Indeed, grace and faith (its necessary twin) are the two foundational notions of the economy of Christianity, and this is to be understood both in the classic etymology of the term (oikonomia: the laws that keep one’s house in order) and in the conventionally modern meaning: the signifying framework of producing, regulating, and circulating wealth. It is essential to emphasize here that what sustains the economic integrity of the gift is not acquisition and accumulation but expenditure and dissipation, as Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille have theorized in exemplary fashion. And expenditure requires an effective mechanism

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of exchange that is based on the commitment—or more accurately, the conviction—that the stakes are all-consuming. In Mauss’s apt formulation, ‘‘the gift necessarily entails the notion of credit.’’24 His impetus is to assail evolutionary economic theories that suppose the trajectory from barter to cash sales to credit as the map of civilization’s progress, arguing not only that the gift is the primary stratum of all social exchange but also that the institution of credit is present in all archaic economic and juridical systems, from Babylonian societies onward. The phrase, however, is apt for our purposes. If we apply to it a Pauline idiom, as we might mix two substances in a catalytic encounter, we see that the pair gift/credit is no different from the pair grace/faith. The relation and even the signification are the same, because each pair inherently deciphers the other. Though the Latin derivative etymology is different, faith is a condition that partakes of all the signifying variants of credo. Drawing on Emile Benveniste’s pioneering linguistic studies, Agamben argues for an intimate relation between credo and fides in the Roman world, whereby the more archaic root of the first eventually yields to the hegemonic position of the second, especially in juridical discourses.25 What is more interesting is the explicit association of the root signification of credo—kred—with the notion of giving and of giving in: in effect, trusting. The whole signifying complex (in all its variants) between gift, credit, faith, and trust is evoked in the Greek word pistis, which becomes Christianity’s key imaginary signification, registering the first instance whereby pistis achieves an autonomously religious signification, if not the signification of religion as such. Agamben quotes David Flusser, the most recent editor of Martin Buber’s works, on the fact that this complex of meanings inhabiting the Greek word pistis is the same as in the Hebrew word emunah, thereby disputing one of Buber’s crucial arguments about the differences between the Christian and Jewish notions of faith. In the context of the entwinement between the economic, the religious, and the juridical that characterized the archaic societies of the Mediterranean, this makes sense. The difference lies not where Buber sees it but in the fact that Christianity institutes as its foundation the notion of pistis as an exclusively religious term, thereby occluding the word’s other parameters. In economic terms, Christianity (re)signifies faith as a religious monopoly. Flusser, nonetheless, attempts to rescue from Buber an unacknowledged (perhaps unwitting) understanding about a difference that, he claims, exists in the juxtaposition between pistis and emunah: namely, that in Christianity there is an inherent split within the notion of faith between the faith of Jesus (according to the historical narrative of a man and his actions in Judea) and faith in Jesus (according to a theological institution of the notion that the Son of God died for our sins and was resurrected). Though one might argue that these two instances reflect the tension—arguably traceable in the entire history of Christianity up to our time—between a secular narrative of religious foundation and a messianic performative of a transcendental desire, nonetheless both Flusser and Agamben, who builds on his argument, are too careless in disavowing the paradoxical signification that

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has reigned at the heart of Christian theology since the defeat of the Monophysites and is designated by a Greek word that does not correspond to any sort of Greek concept: theanthropos (god-man).26 This utterly illogical and historically neological notion bypasses even the father-son complex (insofar as it enables the two notions to become consubstantial) and forms the significational basis of the Trinitarian substance. In effect, Christianity is incomprehensible without assuming the impossible identification of the divine and the human in a single figure that is at once individual and total and, as a sort of protean substance, can assume the form of either or both together, as the occasion demands. But this is not the place to delve further into this particular terrain. What should concern us is that, despite an incisive discussion of the notion of grace, Agamben does not acknowledge that Christianity, in institutionalizing Paul’s obsessions, enacts a religious monopoly over the signification of pistis, whereby gift, trust, credit, and faith are all robbed of their juridical-economic meanings. No doubt, the whole edifice is built on Paul’s own (re)signification of the notion of grace (charis), the first term of the pair. The word may be one of the most multivalent in the Greek language, a language in which multivalence is the norm. The primary substratum of meaning, already present in the Homeric texts, seems to be aesthetic: charis, in the most objective sense, pertains to an idiomatic quality of beauty, what we have come to translate as gracefulness. The subjective extrapolation from this objective substratum divides meaning between the one performing the action (distributing goodness, bestowing favor, showing preference) and the one receiving it (which includes all the notions of thankfulness and appreciation). In all these meanings, already in place in the Aeschylean era, one finds connotations of pleasure, in both giving and receiving, which is often (but not necessarily) sexualized—both homoerotically and heteroerotically—and coupled with adoration, with all the accoutrements of appreciating what is adored and adoring, the elements of worship. Eventually, the term comes to bear the signification of cause, rarely seen in English (perhaps, but not quite, in the phrase ‘‘by the grace of’’). Nowhere do we see the meaning of gratuity in the sense signified colloquially by the phrase ‘‘as a favor’’—gratis. The exchange inherent in the notion of charis remains intact throughout, because articulating appreciation is a necessary component. This dimension has never been absent in Christian discourse and is most precisely signified in the speech act (and ritual) of ‘‘saying grace’’—not to mention in the literal meaning of the Eucharist, which is the liturgical application of total exchange and total expenditure between God’s gift and the appreciation/incorporation of grace by the entrusted faithful (pistoi). Yet Paul’s injunction that ‘‘we are not under the law but under grace’’ epitomizes the mode of thought that occludes the principle of exchange by putting forward an exclusive resignification of charis as gratuity, charity. Of this, Agamben remains uncritical, indeed gratuitous. His interest is to uphold Paul’s direct opposition between charis and nomos, which he takes to be a symptom (and yet a cure) of an already instituted split between the juridical and the religious that, in effect, inaugurates the two realms of law and religion as

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such. If there were a split at all (which would, as a result, establish the boundaries of a prelegal or prereligious society—a highly precarious enterprise), it would consist of whatever enacts a differentiation in the discourses and rituals of obedience. This is an enormous matter for discussion, but in this context we can safely say that Paul did aspire to reconfigure the terms of both the practice and the understanding of obedience. His obsession with discounting the exchange mechanism in God’s grace has to do, more than anything else, with his drive to establish a new imaginary of obedience. In this, he is driven both by his renunciation of Mosaic law and by his enmity toward the remnants of the juridical imaginary of the polis in the Hellenistic world. His frustration at not succeeding in Athens must have reinforced his resolve. After all, his object was to conquer (convert) Rome, which is why Romans is the gravest and most canonical of the Pauline texts.27 In any case, Agamben sees Paul’s notion of grace as an excessive term that reverses its symptomatic nature and acts as a cure for the fracture between law and faith: ‘‘The promise [of grace] exceeds any claim that could supposedly ground itself in it, just as faith surpasses any obligation whatsoever. Grace is that excess, which, while it always divides the two elements of prelaw and prevents them from coinciding, does not allow them to completely break apart.’’28 I have no investment in disputing Agamben’s insistence that Paul sought to articulate a complex relation between law and faith that rescinded their centrifugal tendencies.29 I merely question his attachment to the signification of grace as total excess, which is no doubt motivated by his general attraction to the exceptional. In this case, the exceptional, configured as the messianic, signifies a mere reproduction of the Pauline denial of the gift’s exchange economy, of what Mauss, in Agamben’s words, understood as ‘‘the paradoxical bond between gratuitousness and obligation.’’30 Agamben correctly criticizes Mauss’s political incentives as ‘‘social-democratic and progressivist’’ but misses the radicalism of his particular formulation of the gift economy, which ultimately challenges this politics, much as he misses Bataille’s correction of Mauss, which he also invokes. It’s useful to look at Bataille’s formulation more carefully: The gift would be senseless (and so we would never decide to give) if it did not take on the meaning of an acquisition. Hence giving must become acquiring a power. Giftgiving has the virtue of a surpassing of the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the subject appropriates the surpassing: he regards his virtue, that which he had the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now possesses.31 What Bataille sees here so sharply is that excess produces power for the one who wields it. God’s grace as God’s gift empowers God, not the faithful—even when it appears to be an act of gratuitous giving, of gracious magnanimity.32 Or, more precisely, it empowers God because it actually stages an act of gratuitous giving, which, much like a mimetic performance, produces the sense in the recipient—the spectator—of having been

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endowed, blessed, with great power by being witness (martyr) to something extraordinarily altering and singular. As witnesses to God’s grace, the faithful perceive God’s performance to pertain to themselves directly. The discourse of ‘‘God gave me this gift’’ is ubiquitous in Christian America, but what enables it is this attention to ‘‘me,’’ this discursive self-empowerment that occludes the interpellation. The often-used phrase has less to do with God than it has to do with me, the recipient of the gift, the one who believes he enacts the power of the gift and is thus confirmed as a believer. The power resides and is (grammatically) attributed to God, but it always pertains to, signifies, and is performed by ‘‘me’’—the position that is simultaneously subject and object of the act. It is this position that seals in fact the exchange economy, precisely what theorizing the gift as gratuity misses. Let us see exactly how Bataille specifies this acquisition of power, what sort of relation it entails: But [the gift giver] would not be able by himself to acquire a power constituted by a relinquishment of power: if he destroyed the object in solitude, in silence, no sort of power would result from the act; there would not be anything for the subject but a separation from power without any compensation. . . . The wealth actualized in the potlatch, in consumption for others, has no real existence except insofar as the other is changed by the consumption. In a sense, authentic consumption ought to be solitary, but then it would not have the completion that the action it has on the other confers on it.33 Bataille not only confirms the Maussian exchange economy of total expenditure but adds an element that Mauss’s essentially structuralist system does not allow: the exchange hinges on a transformation, on an alteration of the power relation, which is why the expenditure is total only provisionally. The gift actually empowers the giver, who may indeed have expended his all but regains it in the form of power over the other, who is thus transformed by believing (thus becoming a believer) that he has been endowed with power. (It is elementary to note that the other becomes other in the very process of this exchange.) I cannot think of a more precise and evocative depiction of the relation between grace and faith, in which the silent and essential third term—the hinge—is obedience. Under God’s infinite grace, I thus become the subject of faith—which means both that I become faithful and that I enter the faith; I achieve pistis and I become pistos. Both as an internal(ized) capacity and as an external(ized) identity, faith then becomes the means by which I convey my appreciation by uttering it back (‘‘saying grace’’), as if in an infinite echo, in order to be reborn and replete with God’s grace, in an interminable (that is to say, quintessentially repetitious) dance of gestures that ensure God’s interminably (repeatedly) reauthorized power. Grace and faith, power and submission, are thus interlocked in a repetitive ritual replay ad absurdum.34

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Doulocracy This repetitious interplay is occluded in Paul’s formulation because he challenges obedience to the law in favor of another framework of obedience. His concept of nomos is predicated on an essentially Mosaic juridical understanding and bars him from any sort of understanding of what autonomia may once have meant in the context of the democratic polis. On the contrary, he attributes to God’s grace a totalizing plenitude—en panti pantote pasan autarkeian, literally, ‘‘in everything always total self-sufficiency’’ (2 Cor. 9:7–8)—which Agamben mysteriously understands as the definition of the ‘‘real ‘sovereignty’ (autarkeia) of the messianic in relation to works of law.’’35 I have to presume that the insertion of sovereignty here has a metaphorical impetus, because there is nothing etymologically (or even philosophically) in autarkeia that would link it to any permutations of arche¯. Nor would there be in it any connotation of autonomy, since any dynamic sense of autonomy would suggest an unsettled condition, enacting and enacted by a horizon of self-interrogation and self-alteration. Autarkeia presupposes an imaginary of completion in oneself, and at best, in the Hellenistic era of despotism, it might have connoted a certain self-distancing from power. This notion of self-sufficiency has nothing to do with either pre-Socratic or Socratic frameworks of meaning; it emerges with the Cynics and changes the previous boundaries of signification, as Foucault observes specifically in regard to the hereby altered framework of parrhe¯sia.36 Whichever the meaning, in the Athenian political imagination—which, against all odds, still persisted in Paul’s time, as we saw in Acts—this notion would be absurd. The complications of the Pauline juridical idiom, generally speaking, derive from the fact that he grafts onto the heteronomy of Hellenistic despotism a nomos that is still a matter of Mosaic law, despite the obvious condition of radically questioning and subverting established Mosaic institutions. The discrepancy between language and signification is no doubt the most exhilarating aspect of the Pauline text. Where one stands in relation to it, however, is altogether a matter of politics, nothing else. It inheres, it requires, a politics. Perhaps better than nomos, the word that encapsulates this discrepancy is ekkle¯sia. Paul theorizes ekkle¯sia in such a way as to abolish the classic Greek dialectic between polis and oikos, taking over what is otherwise a technical term that, at least in Athenian democracy, pertained to government as an arch-social signifier. The classic Pauline argument that encapsulates the content of ekkle¯sia is often quoted: ‘‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave or free, there is neither male nor female’’ (Gal. 3:28). A common interpretation (Badiou also abides by it) is to take this to be a revolutionary signification that undoes the exclusionary framework of the polis. This argument is either naı¨ve or cunningly deceitful. Although, no doubt, the members of the ekkle¯sia in early Christianity were not differentiated by class, gender, or ethnicity, this equitability was authorized and sustained by an overarching submission to a singular external authority. They were all God’s slaves—the word is actually douloi—or, as Blumenfeld so charmingly quips: they

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constitute a ‘‘ ‘doulocracy,’ a republic of cheerful slaves, ruled by a saving, absolutely just God.’’37 That they are all equally God’s slaves, that they are all slaves without exception, cannot possibly qualify for a figure of autonomy or freedom, except by the Orwellian logic of being free in total submission, free because of total submission. On the other hand, while no doubt the ekkle¯sia in Athens, as the assembly of citizens, excluded women, slaves, foreigners (xenoi), and resident aliens (metoikoi), those who belonged to the ekkle¯sia, who had political rights in the city, were themselves the source of their authority. Their freedom was consubstantial with their forming and having access to an ekkle¯sia, and the polis, which the ekkle¯sia was meant to serve, did not exist in any greater or external sense. In the strictest terms, the alleged liberation from Greek exclusivity that Christianity effects is actually the reverse: an all-inclusive subjugation. Suffice it to say, I am not suggesting anything more than what Nietzsche theorized in The Genealogy of Morals, which remains inimitable in capturing the inner logic of Christian doulocracy. That this extraordinary book is systematically ignored in currently fashionable critiques against secularism—no matter what specific agenda they are serving—should be treated (but it’s not) as scandalous scholarship.38 Something also needs to be said about the difference between the two uses of kle¯tos, the root term in ekkle¯sia, which is explicitly invoked by Paul in the salutation of Romans. In Athens, kle¯tos is the one called upon to perform his citizen duties, no more and no less. If he performs them irresponsibly, he is subject to anakle¯sis—literally, to being recalled. In other words, he is not tied to his duties by any sort of entitlement, expertise, or authoritarian appointment. By contrast, the notion of kle¯tos in Christianity, as instituted by Paul, is tantamount to being chosen or called upon once and for all, permanently bound to the heteronomous calling. Kle¯tos and doulos are identical notions; they pertain to the permanent privilege of submission that produces the new (kaine¯) identity. What influenced Paul’s resignification of kle¯tos was probably the privilege that resides in the Hebraic notion of being chosen by God. However that may be, ekkle¯sia for Paul means the assembly of submission, the assembly of those who elect heteronomy, thus effacing the autonomy of their act by attributing their election to the unquestioned alterity of divine authority. Even if we deemed it appropriate to hold onto the notion of the elect in the case of the ekkle¯sia in Athenian democracy, we would have there the crucial dimension that the elect (those elected) are also, simultaneously, the ones who elect. Between election by God and election by the de¯mos exists an epistemological chasm.39 In this respect, Christianity, which was profoundly political from the outset, effaces the polis from its vocabulary and deconstitutes both its imaginary and its social hold by expanding the meaning of oikos to include a public dimension (which, in another way, means domesticating the public dimension) and by making ekkle¯sia the primary social and political imaginary institution, sanctioned as the House of God (Oikos tou Theou).

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Thanatopolitical Theology If Paul can be considered the instigator of Christianity’s remarkable capacity to resignify notions of freedom into notions of submission and the reverse—in what is, in the domain of signification, a carnivalesque performance of unprecedented magnitude—nothing encapsulates his perverse ingenuity better than the way the sign of resurrection trumps the signifying relation between life and death. Badiou is the most articulate spokesman of this Pauline daring, making it the spearhead of his politics of the universalizable singularity of truth and the event. Therefore our analysis must inevitably traverse his reading. Badiou is keenly aware that his main opponent in this domain is Nietzsche, whose understanding of Paul’s thanatopolitics still remains the most incisive. Encountering Nietzsche in this regard raises the stakes on a whole lot of fronts, most significantly on the question of whether Paul’s (political) theology is at all a philosophy, thereby seeking to outmaneuver Nietzsche’s explicitly philosophical concerns.40 From my standpoint, the whole encounter is staged erroneously the moment Badiou claims that philosophy is existentially dependent on mastery,41 instead of fostering, by the most conventional Socratic standards, an enterprise of interminable (self-) interrogation. In the latter terms, Paul is indeed the quintessential antiphilosopher, as Badiou desires. He is the greatest enemy of (self-) interrogation in favor of a politics of mastery at all levels, from the domain of the individual body and mind to the domain of the imperial body politic. Philosophy as (self-)interrogation is, at an undeconstructible level, a politics of life, an interrogation of life based on the understanding of something irredeemable: the finitude of life. Therein lies the tragic dimension that shatters the allure of abounding heteronomy, the fact that its ubiquitous presence passes for reality. Christianity gave heteronomy a rejuvenated politics. Let us not lose sight of a crucial principle: when Paul speaks of ‘‘life in Christ,’’ he is not speaking in tropes. He is indeed articulating an extraordinary condition by which life exceeds the bounds of the living body and gives itself over to the mastery of another—in this case, the One and Only Other. Strictly speaking, the phrase ‘‘life in Christ’’ is tantamount to possession, and it is hardly surprising that the history of Christianity is replete with instances of depriving of life a whole variety of ‘‘enemies’’ under the charge of ‘‘spirit possession.’’ Very simply, Paul’s theology is based on the demand that people surrender their life—to God, to Christ, to faith.42 It is a thanatopolitical theology ingeniously woven around a singular figure that claims to defeat all death once and for all: the resurrection. Badiou is following his own obsession when he dubs the resurrection ‘‘anastasis nekro¯n, the raising up of the dead, their uprising, which is the uprising of life.’’43 And later on: ‘‘Resurrection suddenly comes forth out from the power of death, not through its negation.’’44 Bracketing for a moment Badiou’s explicit intention to strip from the figure of the resurrection any sort of dialectical play in order to endow it with the rupturing power of the event, we see that in any other sense his signification of life and death follows

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Paul’s. Pauline scholarship abounds with discussions of how the meaning of the two notions is inverted: Biological life, dependent on the permutations of the flesh (sarx), which come down to one and only condition—sin—is death. Death—which in the world marked by the event of the resurrection is in a sense no longer one’s own, as Christ himself has already performed it for us all, for those who have lived and died and those who are to live and to die until the end of time—is life, insofar as it defeats the world of sin and opens the door to the rule of the spirit (pneuma): ‘‘But if we have died with Christ, we believe [pisteuomen] that we shall also live with him. For we have seen that Christ, rising from the dead, will never die again, will never be conquered by death. For the one who died in sin died once and for all, while the other lives, lives in God’’ (Rom. 6:8–10). One can understand the inspirational resonance of this promise to ears bereft of any sense of autonomy. It is a more refined, more alluring heteronomy than what presides over life burdened either with the ceaseless demand of the discriminating covenant with God or with the arbitrary rule of earthly despotism. Nonetheless, this splendiforous promise is nothing but the promise of eternal life in another world and by another’s law. The affirmation of life that Paul extols with such rapture is very simply the zealous adoration of the afterlife, nothing more, nothing less, an adoration, moreover, in which death is inherent, as the curious tenses in Paul’s quotation above suggest: belief emerges out of having died with Christ (who has died for/with all). And it is this desire, this adoration for the afterlife—the life that exceeds death—that subordinates life, real life, to death. Badiou is right to see in the event of Christ’s resurrection a call for repetition. Having died for everyone, Christ calls on everyone to partake of his death as a form of eternal (after)life, in an eternal repetition ritualized in the Easter liturgy but played out in the psyche of every devout Christian every day. One thus dies continuously (in one’s mind) before one actually dies, with the belief that death, as the key to eternal life, is the worthiest element of living in/with Christ. In this particular sense, Christianity is a religion essentially propelled by a death drive.45 It is especially interesting to note that the finality in this promise of redemption is exempted from the discourse of death, even though it is pure death—no other death imaginary can come even close to the purity of Christian afterlife as a condition that annihilates all previous signification. The death of God is a Christian proposition; the absence of God, the void, is not. Christianity is the first (and so far the only) religion to be founded on an altogether perverse notion of killing God. Of course, access to knowledge of the perversion is barred from the founding moment, because in Christianity the killing of God is neither gratuitous nor an act of rebellion. God is put to death precisely so as to claim conquest over death. The death of God in Christianity is thus marked by uncompromising instrumentality. God dies so that he may be resurrected, as simple as that. The instrumental outcome is all that matters (the abolition of sin happens with the resurrection, not the crucifixion),

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and the reality of God’s death—God’s suicide, to be exact—vanishes behind the interminable ritual repetition of a mythical spectacle rendered sacred. The ontological status of the Christian God, therefore, is somewhat like the ‘‘living dead,’’ the undead, like one of those astounding monsters in horror movies. It’s hardly surprising that such creatures in movies are inevitably associated at some point with something Satanic—the singularity of the Satanic being the Christian invention of God’s other side. In retrospect, after two millennia, it seems that the death of God in Christianity was meant to abolish once and for all the possibility that God may be rendered truly irrelevant to our existence, that God may be voided. It is a mark of humanity’s ultimately untamable psychic core that such an imaginary possibility has still not been extinguished. Nietzsche’s ‘‘death of God’’ may be considered, on the one hand, as the final act of Christian thinking, but, on the other hand, it may be the first act of un-Christian thinking from within, because it also signaled the death of the resurrection and a return to life as actualization of mortality. Living with a sense of utter mortality, of plain finitude, diminishes the hold of death over life. If death is zero, then all life before it curiously becomes infinity and plenitude, in every infinitesimal, ephemeral, and unreproducible moment. If the zero of death is undone by the promise of an eternal afterlife, a promise that turns infinity itself into a promise, then death’s zero expands backward over all life and, like a radioactive cloud, envelops it and removes from it all temporality. It annihilates its (life) force and hollows it out into a perfunctory shell, yearning to be filled with promise. It is one thing to identify death as the life of the flesh, even if this is the bare limit of the frail dignity of being human. In any case, the gesture belongs to a long history of renunciations of the real. Paul, after all, had an avowed aversion to all matters of the flesh—to all matter—to the point of having to devise the extraordinary division between flesh (sarx) and body (so¯ma), which he finally stripped of all things somatic. But to call life what, even by the standards of the renunciation of the real, is a kind of permanent unliving, the deprivation of all that is human, is to proliferate the present of a delusion: present, here, being understood in its double meaning—both as indication of a certain vertical temporality and as the actuality (presence) of the gift. At the very least, this thanatopolitical reconfiguration of life raises a great many questions as to the political acumen of those who seek in Pauline theology signs of human emancipation, whether they call it universalist or messianic.

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Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos Gilles Deleuze

It’s not the same, it can’t be the same . . .1 D. H. Lawrence intervenes in the scholarly debates of those who ask if the same John wrote both the gospel and the Apocalypse.2 He does so with very passionate arguments, which have all the more force in that they imply a method of evaluation, a typology: the same type of man could not have written the gospel and the Apocalypse. It matters little that both texts are complex or composite, including so many different things. The question does not concern two individuals or two authors, but two types of man, two regions of the soul, two completely different ensembles. The gospel is aristocratic, individual, soft, amorous, decadent, always rather cultivated. The Apocalypse is collective, popular, uncultivated, hateful, and savage. Each of these words would have to be explained in order to avoid misunderstandings. But already the evangelist and the apocalypst cannot be the same. John of Patmos does not assume the mask of the evangelist, or that of Christ: he invents another mask, fabricates another mask that unmasks Christ or, if you prefer, that is superimposed on Christ’s mask. John of Patmos deals with cosmic terror and death, whereas the gospel and Christ dealt with human and spiritual love. Christ invented a religion of love (a practice, a way of living and not a belief), whereas the Apocalypse brings a religion of Power [Pouvoir]—a belief, a terrible manner of judging. Instead of the gift of Christ, an infinite debt. It goes without saying that Lawrence’s text is best read after having read or reread the text of the Apocalypse. We can immediately sense the topicality of both the Apocalypse and Lawrence’s denunciation of it. This topicality does not consist in historical correspondences of the type ‘‘Nero ⳱ Hitler ⳱ Antichrist,’’ nor in the suprahistorical sentiment of the end of the world, nor in the atomic, economic, ecological, and science-fiction panic of the millenarians. If we are steeped in the Apocalypse, that is because it inspires ways of living, surviving, and judging in

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each of us. It is a book for all those who think of themselves as survivors. It is the book of Zombies. Lawrence is closely related to Nietzsche. We can assume that Lawrence would not have written his text without Nietzsche’s Antichrist. Nietzsche himself was not the first. Nor even Spinoza. A certain number of ‘‘visionaries’’ have opposed Christ as an amorous person to Christianity as a mortuary enterprise. Not that they have an overly accommodating attitude toward Christ, but they do feel the need to avoid confusing him with Christianity. In Nietzsche, there is the great opposition between Christ and Saint Paul: Christ, the softest, most amorous of the decedents, a kind of Buddha who frees us from the domination of priests and the ideas of fault, punishment, reward, judgment, death, and what follows death—this bearer of glad tidings is doubled by the black Saint Paul, who keeps Christ on the cross, ceaselessly leading him back to it, making him rise from the dead, displacing the center of gravity toward eternal life, and inventing a new type of priest even more terrible than its predecessors. ‘‘Paul’s invention, his means to priestly tyranny, to herd formation: the belief in immortality—that is, the doctrine of ‘judgment.’ ’’3 Lawrence takes up the opposition once again, but this time he opposes Christ to the red John of Patmos, the author of the Apocalypse. This was Lawrence’s mortal book, since it only slightly preceded his red, hemoptysical death, just as the Antichrist preceded Nietzsche’s collapse. Before dying, one last ‘‘joyful message,’’ one last glad tiding. It is not that Lawrence simply imitates Nietzsche. Rather, he picks up an arrow, Nietzsche’s arrow, and shoots it elsewhere, aims it in a different direction, on another comet, to another audience: ‘‘Nature propels the philosopher into mankind like an arrow; it takes no aim, but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere.’’4 Lawrence takes up Nietzsche’s initiative by taking John of Patmos as his target, and no longer Saint Paul. Many things change or are supplemented from one initiative to another, and even what they have in common gains in strength and novelty. Christ’s enterprise is individual. In itself, the individual is not necessarily opposed to the collectivity; individual and collective stand opposed in each of us like two different parts of the soul. Now, Christ rarely addressed himself to what is collective in us. His problem was rather to undo the collective system of the Old Testament priesthood, of the Jewish priesthood and its power, but only to liberate the individual soul from this morass. As for Caesar, he would give him his due. That is why he is aristocratic. He thought a culture of the individual soul would be enough to chase off the monsters buried in the collective soul. A political error. He left us to manage with the collective soul, with Caesar, outside us and inside us. On this score, he constantly deceived his apostles and disciples. We might even imagine that he did so on purpose. He did not want to be a master or to help his disciples (only to love them, he said, but what did that hide?).

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He did not really mix with them, or even really work or act with them. He was alone all the time. He puzzled them utterly, and in some part of them, he let them down. He refused to be their physical power-lord. The power-homage in a man like Judas found itself betrayed. So it betrayed back again.5 The apostles and disciples made Christ pay for it: denial, betrayal, falsification, the shameless doctoring of the Good News. Lawrence says that the principal character of Christianity is Judas.6 And then John of Patmos, and then Saint Paul. Each of them took advantage of the protest of the collective soul, the part neglected by Christ. The Apocalypse takes advantage of the claims of the ‘‘poor’’ or the ‘‘weak,’’ for they are not who we think they are: they are not the humble or the unfortunate, but those extremely fearsome men who have nothing but a collective soul. Among Lawrence’s most beautiful passages are those on the Lamb. John of Patmos foretells the lion of Judah, but instead a lamb appears, a horned lamb that roars like a lion and has become particularly cunning, and that is made all the more cruel and terrifying by being presented as a sacrificial victim and no longer as a sacrificer or an executioner. But the lamb is a more dreadful executioner than the others. ‘‘John insists on a lamb ‘as it were slain’: but we never see it slain, we only see it slaying mankind by the millions. Even when it comes on in a victorious bloody shirt at the end, the blood is not its own blood.’’7 In truth, it is Christianity that becomes the Antichrist; it betrays Christ, it forces a collective soul on him behind his back, and in return it gives the collective soul a superficial individual figure, the little lamb. Christianity and above all John of Patmos, founded a new type of man, a type of thinker that still exists today, enjoying a new reign: the carnivorous lamb, the lamb that bites and then cries, ‘‘Help! What did I ever do to you? It was for your own good and our common cause.’’ What a curious figure, the modern thinker. These lambs in lion’s skin, with oversized teeth, no longer need either the priests’ habit or, as Lawrence said, the Salvation Army: they have conquered many other means of expression, many other popular forces. What the collective soul wants is Power [Pouvoir]. Lawrence does not say simple things, and it would be wrong here to think we have understood him immediately. The collective soul does not want simply to seize power or to replace the despot. On the one hand, it wants to destroy power; it hates power and strength [puissance]; John of Patmos hates Caesar or the Roman Empire with all his heart. On the other hand, however, it also wants to penetrate into every pore of power, to swarm in its centers, to multiply them throughout the universe. It wants a cosmopolitan power, not in full view like the empire, but rather in every nook and cranny, in every dark corner, in every fold of the collective soul.8 Finally, and above all, it wants an ultimate power that makes no appeal to the gods but is itself the power of a God without appeal, who judges all other powers. Christianity does not form a pact with the Roman Empire but transmutes it. With the Apocalypse, Christianity invents a completely new image of power: the system of Judgment. The painter Gustave Courbet (there are numerous resemblances between Lawrence and Courbet)

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spoke of people who wake up at night crying, ‘‘I want to judge! I have to judge!’’ The will to destroy, the will to infiltrate every corner, the will to forever have the last word—a triple will that is unified and obstinate: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Power singularly changes its nature, its extension, its distribution, its intensity, its means, and its end. A counterpower, which is both a power of nooks and crannies and a power of the last men. Power no longer exists except as the long politics of vengeance, the long enterprise of the collective soul’s narcissism. The revenge and self-glorification of the weak, says LawrenceNietzsche. Even the Greek asphodel will become the Christian narcissus.9 And what details are provided in the list of vengeances and glories . . . The weak can be reproached for only one thing, and that is for not being hard enough, for not being puffed up enough with their own glory and certainty. Now, for this enterprise of the collective soul, a new race of priests, a new type, would have to be invented, even if this meant turning against the Jewish priest. That priest had not yet attained universality or finality; he was still too local, still waiting for something. The Christian priest would have to take over from the Jewish priest, even if both would have to turn against Christ. Christ will be made to submit to the worst of prostheses: he will be turned into the hero of the collective soul; he will be made to give the collective soul something he never wanted to give. Or rather, Christianity will give him what he always hated, a collective Ego, a collective soul. The Apocalypse is a monstrous ego grafted onto Christ. John of Patmos’s efforts are all directed toward this aim: ‘‘Always the titles of power, and never the titles of love. Always Christ the omnipotent conqueror flashing his great sword and destroying, destroying vast masses of men, till blood runs up to the horses’ bridles. Never Christ the Savior: never. In the Apocalypse, the Son of Man comes to bring a new and terrible power on to the earth, power greater than that of any Pompey or Alexander or Cyrus. Power, terrific, smiting power . . . So that we are left puzzled.’’10 For this, Christ will be forced to rise from the dead, he will be given injections. He who did not judge, who did not want to judge, will be made into an essential cog in the system of Judgment. For the vengeance of the weak, or the new power, achieves its utmost precision when judgment—the abominable faculty—becomes the master faculty of the soul. (On the minor question of a Christian philosophy: yes, there is a Christian philosophy, not so much as a function of belief, but as soon as judgment is considered to be an autonomous faculty and for this reason needs both the system and the guarantee of God.) The Apocalypse won: we have never left the system of judgment. ‘‘Then I saw thrones, and seated upon them were those to whom judgment was committed’’ (Rev. 20:4). In this regard, the working method of the Apocalypse is fascinating. The Jews had invented something very important in the order of time, which was postponed destiny. Having failed in their imperial ambition, the chosen people had been put on hold, they were left waiting, they had become ‘‘a people of postponed destiny.’’11 This situation remains essential throughout all of Jewish prophetism and already explains the presence of certain apocalyptic elements in the prophets. But what is new in the Apocalypse is that

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this waiting now becomes the object of an unprecedented and maniacal programming. The Apocalypse is undoubtedly the first great program book, a great spectacle. The small and large death, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven vials, the first resurrection, the millennium, the second resurrection, the last judgment—this is what fills up and occupies the wait. A kind of Folies-Berge`re with a celestial city and an infernal lake of sulfur. All the details of the sufferings, the scourges and plagues reserved for the enemies in the lake, the glory of the elect in the city, the need of the latter to measure their selfglory through the suffering of others—all this will be programmed down to the minute in the long revenge of the weak. It is the spirit of revenge that introduces the program into the wait (‘‘revenge is a dish that . . .’’).12 Those who wait must be given something to do. The wait has to be organized from start to finish: the martyred souls have to wait until there is a sufficient number of martyrs for the show to begin.13 And then there is the short wait of half an hour before the opening of the seventh seal, the long wait lasting a millennium . . . Above all, the End must be programmed. ‘‘They needed to know the end as well as the beginning, never before had men wanted to know the end of creation. . . . Flamboyant hate and a simple lust . . . for the end of the world.’’14 There is an element here that does not appear as such in the Old Testament but only in the collective Christian soul, which opposes the apocalyptic vision to the prophetic word, the apocalyptic program to the prophetic project. For if the prophet waits, already filled with ressentiment, he nonetheless does so in time, in life—he is waiting for an advent. And he waits for this advent as something new and unforeseen, something of which he can merely sense the presence or gestation in God’s plan. Whereas Christianity can no longer wait for anything but a return, the return of something programmed down to the smallest detail. If Christ is dead, then the center of gravity is effectively displaced—it is no longer in life but has passed beyond life into an afterlife. Postponed destiny changes meaning with Christianity, since it is no longer simply deferred but ‘‘postferred,’’ placed after death, after the death of Christ and the death of each and every person.15 One is now faced with the task of filling up a monstrous and drawn-out time between Death and the End, between Death and Eternity. It can only be filled with visions: ‘‘I looked, and behold . . . ,’’ ‘‘and I saw . . .’’ Apocalyptic vision replaces the prophetic word, programming replaces project and action, an entire theater of phantasms supplants both the action of the prophets and the passion of Christ. Phantasms, phantasms, the expression of the instinct for vengeance, the weapon of the weak’s vengeance. The Apocalypse breaks not only with prophetism but above all with the elegant immanence of Christ, for whom eternity was first experienced in life and could only be experienced in life (‘‘to feel oneself in heaven’’). And yet it is not difficult to demonstrate the Jewish sources of the Apocalypse at every point: not only in the postponed destiny but in the entire system of reward/punishment, sin-redemption, the need for the enemy to suffer a long time, in his spirit as much as in his flesh—in short, the birth of morality, and allegory as the expression of morality, as the means of moralization . . . But what is even more interesting in the Apocalypse is

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the presence and reactivation of a diverted pagan source. That the Apocalypse is a composite book is not extraordinary; it would have been surprising in this period if a book were not composite. Lawrence, however, distinguishes between two kinds of composite books, or rather, two poles: in extension, when the book includes several other books, by different authors, from different places, traditions, and so on; and in depth, when it straddles several strata, traverses them, mixes them up if need be, making one substratum show through the surface of the most recent stratum, a probe book [livre-sondage] and no longer a syncretic book. A pagan, a Jewish, and a Christian stratum: these are what mark great parts of the Apocalypse, even if a pagan sediment slides into a fault line in the Christian stratum, filling up a Christian void (Lawrence analyzes the example of chapter 12 of the Apocalypse, in which the pagan myth of a divine birth, with the astral Mother and the great red dragon, fills the emptiness of Christ’s birth).16 Such a reactivation of paganism is not frequent in the Bible. One can assume that the prophets, the evangelists, and Paul himself were well aware of the heavenly bodies, the stars, and the pagan cults; but they chose to suppress them to the maximum, to cover up this stratum. There is but one case in which the Jews had an absolute need to return to this stratum, namely, when it was a matter of seeing, when they needed to see, when Vision assumed a certain autonomy in relation to the Word. ‘‘The Jews of the post-David period had no eyes of their own to see with. They peered inward at their Jehovah till they were blind: then they looked at the world with the eyes of their neighbors. When the prophets had to see visions, they had to see Assyrian or Chaldean visions. They borrowed other gods to see their own invisible God by.’’17 The men of the new Word have need of the old pagan eye. This was already true of the apocalyptic elements that appear in the prophets: Ezekiel needed Anaximander’s perforated wheels (‘‘it is a great relief to find Anaximander’s wheels in Ezekiel’’).18 But it is John of Patmos, the author of the Apocalypse, the book of Visions, who most needs to reactivate the pagan source and who is in the best situation to do so. John knew very little about Jesus and the evangelists, and what he knew he knew poorly, but ‘‘it seems to me he knew a good deal about the pagan value of symbols, as contrasted with the Jewish or Christian values.’’19 Here we see Lawrence, with all his horror of the Apocalypse, through this horror, experiencing an obscure sympathy, even a kind of admiration, for this book, precisely because it is sedimented and stratified. Nietzsche also experienced this peculiar fascination for what he found horrible and disgusting: ‘‘How interesting it is,’’ he said. Lawrence no doubt has a certain sympathy for John of Patmos: he finds him interesting, perhaps the most interesting of men; he sees an excessiveness and presumptuousness in him that are not without their charm. This is because the ‘‘weak,’’ these men of ressentiment who are waiting to wreak their vengeance, enjoy a hardness that they use to their own advantage, to their own glory, but that comes to them from elsewhere. Their profound lack of culture and the exclusivity of a book that for them assumes the figure of the book—the book, the Bible and especially the Apocalypse—allows them to remain open to the thrust of a

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very old stratum, a secret sediment that others no longer cared to know about. Paul, for example, is still an aristocrat: not an aristocrat like Jesus, but a different type of aristocrat, who is too cultivated not to be able to recognize, and thus to efface or repress, the sediments that would betray his program. What censorious treatment Paul is able to apply to the pagan stratum, and what selection to the Jewish stratum! He needs a Jewish stratum that has been revised and corrected, converted, but he needs the pagan source to be and to remain buried—and he has enough culture to do so himself. John of Patmos, however, is a man of the people. He is a kind of uneducated Welsh miner. Lawrence opens his commentary on the Apocalypse with a portrait of these English miners, whom he knows well and marvels at: hard, very hard, endowed with ‘‘a rough and rather wild, somewhat ‘special’ sense of power,’’ religious men par excellence, brandishing the Apocalypse with vengeance and self-glorification, organizing dark Tuesday-evening meetings in their primitive Methodist chapels.20 Their natural leader is neither the apostle John nor Paul but John of Patmos. They are the collective and popular soul of Christianity, whereas Paul (and also Lenin, Lawrence adds) was an aristocrat who went to the people. Miners know all about strata. They have no need to be well read, for the pagan depth rumbles deep within them. They are open to a pagan stratum, they set it loose, they make it come to them, saying only: it’s coal, it’s Christ. They bring about the most fearsome diversion of a stratum so that it can be used by the Christian, mechanical, and technical world. The Apocalypse is a great machinery, an already industrialized organization, a Metropolis. By drawing on his own lived experience, Lawrence thinks of John of Patmos as an English miner, and the Apocalypse as a series of engravings hung in the miner’s house—the mirror of a popular, hard, pitiless, and pious face. It is the same cause as Paul’s, the same enterprise, but it is by no means the same type of man, or the same process, or the same function. Paul is the ultimate manager, while John of Patmos is a laborer, the terrible laborer of the last hour. The director of the enterprise must prohibit, censure, and select, whereas the laborer must hammer, extend, compress, and forge a material . . . This is why, in the Nietzsche-Lawrence alliance, it would be wrong to think that the difference between their targets—Paul for one, John of Patmos for the other—is merely anecdotal or secondary. It marks a radical difference between the two books. Lawrence knows Nietzsche’s arrow well, but he shoots it in a completely different direction, even if they both wind up in the same hell, dementia and hemoptysis, with Paul and John of Patmos occupying all of heaven. But Lawrence soon recovers all his distrust and horror for John of Patmos. This reactivation of the pagan world, sometimes moving and even grandiose in the first part of the Apocalypse—what is it used for, what is it made to serve in the second part? It would be wrong to say that John hates paganism. ‘‘He accepts it almost as naturally as his own Hebrew culture, and far more naturally than the new Christian spirit, which is alien to him.’’21 His enemy is not the pagans but the Roman Empire. Now, the pagans are not the Romans, but rather the Etruscans; they are not even the Greeks, but the Aegean

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peoples, the Aegean civilization. But to ensure the fall of the Roman Empire in a vision, the entire Cosmos must be gathered together, convoked, brought back to life—and then it must all be destroyed, so that the Roman Empire will be brought down and buried under its debris. Such is the strange diversion, the strange expedient through which one avoids attacking the enemy directly: to establish its ultimate power and its celestial city, the Apocalypse needs to destroy the world, and only paganism furnishes it with a world, a cosmos. It therefore calls up the pagan cosmos only in order to finish it off, to bring about its hallucinatory destruction. Lawrence defines the cosmos in a very simple manner: it is the locus of great vital symbols and living connections, the more-than-personal life. For cosmic connections, the Jews will substitute the alliance of God with the chosen people; for the supra—or infra—personal life, the Christians will substitute the small, personal link of the soul with Christ; for symbols, the Jews and the Christians will substitute allegory. And this pagan world, which, despite everything, remained alive and continued to live deep in us with all its strength, is flattered, invoked, and made to reappear by the Apocalypse—but only to make sure that it is definitively murdered, not even out of direct hatred, but because it is needed as a means. The cosmos had already been subjected to many blows, but it is with the Apocalypse that it dies. When the pagans spoke about the world, what interested them was always its beginnings and its leaps from one cycle to another, but now there is nothing but an End lying at the limit of a long flat line. Necrophiliacs, we are no longer interested in anything but this end, since it is definitive. When the pagans, the pre-Socratics, spoke of destruction, they always saw it as an injustice that resulted from the excess of one element over another, and the unjust one was above all else the destroyer. But now it is destruction that is called just; it is the will to destroy that is called Justice and Holiness. This is the innovation of the Apocalypse. It does not criticize the Romans for being destroyers, nor does it want to, for this is a good thing; Rome-Babylon is criticized for being an insurgent, a rebel, for sheltering rebels, great or small, rich or poor. To destroy, to destroy an anonymous and interchangeable enemy, an unspecified enemy, has become the most essential act of the new justice. The unspecified enemy is designated as anyone who does not conform to God’s order. It is curious to note how, in the Apocalypse, everyone will have to be marked, will bear a mark on forehead or hand, the mark of the Beast or of Christ; and the Lamb will mark 144,000 persons, and the Beast . . . Whenever a radiant city is programmed, we can be assured that it is a way to destroy the world, to render it ‘‘uninhabitable,’’ and to begin the hunt for the unspecified enemy.22 There are not many resemblances, perhaps, between Hitler and the Antichrist, but there is a great resemblance between the New Jerusalem and the future that we are now being promised, not only in science fiction but in the military-industrial plans of an absolute worldwide State. The Apocalypse is not a concentration camp (Antichrist); it is the great military, police, and civil security of the new State (the Heavenly Jerusalem). The modernity of the Apocalypse

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lies not in its predicted catastrophes but in its programmed self-glorification, the institution of glory in the New Jerusalem, the demented installation of an ultimate judiciary and moral power. The New Jerusalem, with its wall and its great street of glass, is an architectural terror: ‘‘And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it. . . . And nothing unclean shall enter it . . . but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life’’ (Rev. 21:23, 27). Involuntarily, the Apocalypse at least persuades us that what is most terrifying is not the Antichrist but this new city descended from heaven, the holy city ‘‘prepared like a bride adorned for her husband’’ (Rev. 21:2). All relatively healthy readers of the Apocalypse will feel they are already in the lake of sulfur. Among Lawrence’s most beautiful pages are thus those concerning this reactivation of the pagan world, but under such conditions that the vital symbols are in complete decline, and all their living connections are severed. ‘‘The greatest literary falsification,’’ said Nietzsche. Lawrence is at his best when he analyzes the precise themes of this decadence and falsification in the Apocalypse (we limit ourselves to indicating certain points): 1. The transformation of hell. With the pagans, hell is not separated off, but depends on the transformation of elements in a cycle: when the fire becomes too strong for the soft waters, it burns them, and the water produces salt like the child of injustice who corrupts it and makes it bitter. Hell is the bad aspect of the subterranean water. If the unjust are gathered there, it is because hell is itself the effect of an elementary injustice, an avatar of elements. But the idea that hell is itself separate, that it exists for itself, that it is one of two expressions of the final justice—these are ideas that would have to wait for Christianity. ‘‘The old Jewish hells of Sheol and Gehenna were fairly mild, uncomfortable, abysmal places like Hades, and when a New Jerusalem was created from heaven, they disappeared’’ in principle in favor of a ‘‘brilliant sulfureous torture-lake’’ where souls burn forever and ever.23 Even the sea will be poured into the pond of sulfur for good measure. That way there will no longer be any connections at all. 2. The transformation of the riders. To try to rediscover what a truly pagan horse is—what connections it establishes between colors, temperaments, astral natures, and the parts of the soul as riders—it is necessary to examine not the horse as seen, but rather the lived symbiosis of the man-horse. White, for example, is also blood, which acts as a pure white light, whereas red is merely the clothing of blood furnished by the bile. A vast interlinking of lines, planes, and relations.24 But with Christianity, the horse is nothing but a beast of burden to which one says ‘‘Come!’’ and what it bears are abstractions. 3. The transformation of colors and of the dragon. Lawrence develops a very beautiful becoming of colors. For the oldest dragon is red, golden-red, extending through the cosmos in a spiral or coiled around man’s vertebral column. But when the moment of his ambiguity arrives (Is he good? Is he bad?), he still remains red for man, whereas the good cosmic dragon becomes a translucent green in the midst of the stars, like a spring breeze. Red has become dangerous for man. (Lawrence, let us not forget, is writing in the midst of his fits of spitting blood.) But finally the dragon turns white, a white without color, the

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dirty white of our logos, a kind of large gray worm. When does gold change into currency? Precisely when it ceases to be the reddish gold of the first dragon, when the dragon takes on the papier-maˆche´ color of pale Europe.25 4. The transformation of woman. The Apocalypse again renders a fugitive homage to the great cosmic Mother, enveloped in the sun, with the moon under her feet. But she is planted there, severed from any connection. And her child is taken away from her, ‘‘caught up unto God’’; she is sent out into the desert, which she will never leave (Rev. 12:5). She returns only in the inverted form of the Whore of Babylon: still splendid, seated on the red dragon, promising destruction. This seems to be the woman’s only choice: either to be the dragon’s whore or to make herself prey to ‘‘all the grey little snakes of modern shame and pain’’ (today’s women, as Lawrence says, are told to ‘‘make something worth while’’ of their lives, to make the best of the worst, without ever thinking that this is even worse; this is why women assume a strangely policelike role, the modern ‘‘policewoman’’).26 But it was the Apocalypse that had already transformed the angelic powers into odd police agents. 5. The transformation of the twins. The pagan world was not only made up of living conjunctions, it also included borders, thresholds and doors, disjunctions, so that something passes between two things, or a substance passes from one state to another, or alternates with another while avoiding dangerous mixes. The twins have precisely this role as disjunctors: masters of wind and rain, because they open the doors of heaven; sons of thunder, because they part the clouds; guardians of sexuality, because they maintain the opening in which birth insinuates itself, and make blood and water alternate, while outlining the mortal point in which everything would be mixed without measure. The twins are thus the masters of flows, their passage, their alternation, and their disjunction.27 This is why the Apocalypse needs to have them killed and rise to heaven—not for the pagan world to reach its periodic excess [de´mesure], but for its measure to come from elsewhere, like a death sentence. 6. The transformation of symbols into metaphors and allegories. The symbol is a concrete cosmic force [puissance]. Popular consciousness, even in the Apocalypse, retains a certain sense of the symbol while adoring brute Power [pouvoir]. And yet what differences there are between a cosmic force and the idea of an ultimate power . . . One by one, Lawrence sketches out certain characteristic features of the symbol. It is a dynamic process that enlarges, deepens, and expands sensible consciousness; it is an ever increasing becoming-conscious, as opposed to the closing of the moral consciousness upon a fixed allegorical idea. It is a method of the Affect, intensive, a cumulative intensity, which merely marks the threshold of a sensation, the awakening of a state of consciousness: the symbol means nothing, and has neither to be explained nor interpreted, as opposed to the intellectual consciousness of allegory. It is a rotative thought, in which a group of images turn ever more quickly around a mysterious point, as opposed to the linear allegorical chain. Consider the Sphinx’s riddle: ‘‘What is it that goes first on four legs, then

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on two, and then on three?’’ It would be rather foolish to see this as three linked parts whose final response would be Man. It comes to life, on the contrary, only if one feels the three groups of images in the process of whirling around the most mysterious point of man: images of the animal-child; then those of the creature on two paws, a monkey, bird, or frog; and then those of the unknown beast on three paws, from beyond the seas and deserts. This is precisely what the rotative symbol is. It has neither beginning nor end; it does not lead us anywhere; and above all it has no final point, nor even stages. It is always in the middle [au milieu], in the midst of things, between things. It has only a milieu, milieus that are ever more profound. The symbol is a maelstrom; it makes us whirl about until it produces that intense state out of which the solution, the decision, emerges. The symbol is a process of action and decision; in this sense, it is linked to the oracle that furnished it with these whirling images. For this is how we make a true decision: we turn into ourselves, upon ourselves, ever more rapidly, ‘‘until a center is formed and we know what to do.’’ Just the opposite occurs in allegorical thought, which is no longer an active thought but a thought that ceaselessly postpones or defers. It replaced the force [puissance] of decision with the power [pouvoir] of judgment. Furthermore, it wants a final point as the last judgment. And it places these provisional points between each sentence, between each segment, as so many stages in a path preparing for the second coming. No doubt it is the sense of sight, books, and reading that have given us this taste for points, segmentary lines, beginnings, ends, and stages. The eye is the sense organ that separates us: allegory is visual, whereas the symbol evokes and unites all the other senses. When the book was still scrolled, it perhaps retained its power as a symbol. But how, precisely, can we explain the strange fact that the book of the seven seals is supposed to be a scroll, and yet that the seals are broken successively, in stages—apart from the fact that the Apocalypse needs to put points everywhere, to install segments everywhere? The symbol is made up of physical connections and disjunctions, and even when we find ourselves before a disjunction, something nonetheless happens in the interval, a substance or flow. For the symbol is the thought of flows, in contrast to the intellectual and linear process of allegorical thought. ‘‘The modern mind apprehends parts, bribes, and pieces, and puts a point after each sentence, whereas the sensible consciousness apprehends the whole as a flow or flux.’’ The Apocalypse reveals its own aim: to disconnect us from the world and from ourselves.28 Exeunt the pagan world. The Apocalypse made it rise again for one last time in order to destroy it forever. We must therefore return to the other axis: no longer the opposition between the Apocalypse and the pagan world, but the completely different opposition between the Apocalypse and Christ as a person. Christ had invented a religion of love, that is, an aristocratic culture of the individual part of the soul; the Apocalypse invents a religion of Power, that is, a terrible popular cult of the collective part of the soul. The Apocalypse turns Christ into a collective ego, it gives him a collective soul—and then everything changes. The vitality of love is transmuted into an enterprise of revenge, and the evangelical Christ is transmuted into the apocalyptic Christ (the man with the sword

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between his teeth). Hence the importance of Lawrence’s admonition: the John who wrote the gospel is not the same John who wrote the Apocalypse. And yet perhaps they are more united than if they were the same. And the two Christs are more united than if they were the same, ‘‘two sides of the same medal.’’29 To explain this complementarity, is it enough to say that Christ had ‘‘personally’’ neglected the collective soul, thereby leaving it a wide-open field? Or is there indeed a more profound, a more abominable reason? Lawrence here throws himself into a complex affair: it seems to him that the reason for the deviation, for the disfiguration, was not simple negligence but instead has to be sought in Christ’s love, in the manner in which he loved. For this is what was already horrible—the manner in which Christ loved. This is what would permit a religion of Power to be substituted for the religion of love. In Christ’s love, there was a kind of abstract identification, or worse, an ardor to give without taking anything. Christ did not want to meet his disciples’ expectations, and yet he did not want to keep anything, not even the inviolable part of himself. There was something suicidal about him. Shortly before his text on the Apocalypse, Lawrence wrote a novel entitled The Man Who Died: he imagines Christ resuscitated (‘‘they took me down too soon’’), but also nauseated, telling himself ‘‘never again.’’ Found by Mary Magdalene, who wants to give up everything for him, he perceives a small glimmer of triumph in the woman’s eye, an accent of triumph in her voice—and he recognizes himself in it. Now this is the same glimmer, the same accent, of those who take without giving. There is the same fatality in Christ’s ardor and in Christian cupidity, in the religion of love and in the religion of power: ‘‘I gave more than I took, and that also is woe and vanity. . . . It only means another death. . . . Now he knew . . . that the body rises again to give and to take, to take and to give, ungreedily.’’ Throughout his work, Lawrence tended toward this task: to track down and diagnose the small and evil glimmer wherever it may be found, whether in those who take without giving or in those who give without taking—John of Patmos and Christ.30 Between Christ, Paul, and John of Patmos, the chain closes in on itself: Christ the aristocrat, the artist of the individual soul, who wants to give this soul; John of Patmos, the worker, the miner, who lays claim to the collective soul and wants to take everything; and Paul, who closes the link, a kind of aristocrat going to the people, a kind of Lenin who will organize the collective soul, who will make it ‘‘an oligarchy of martyrs’’—he gives Christ the aims, and the Apocalypse the means. Was not all this essential to the formation of the system of judgment? Individual suicide and mass suicide, with self-glorification on all sides. Death, death, this is the only judgment. Save the individual soul, then, as well as the collective soul, but how? Nietzsche ended the Antichrist with his famous Law against Christianity. Lawrence ends his commentary on the Apocalypse with a kind of manifesto—what he elsewhere calls a ‘‘litany of exhortations.’’31 Stop loving. Oppose to the judgment of love ‘‘a decision that love can never vanquish.’’ Arrive at the point where you can no longer give any more than you can take, where you know you will no longer ‘‘give’’ anything, the point of Aaron or The Man Who

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Died, for the problem has passed elsewhere: to construct banks between which a flow can run, break apart or come together.32 Do not love anymore, do not give of yourself, do not take: in this way you will save the individual part of yourself. For love is not the individual part; it is not the individual soul; it is, rather, what makes the individual soul an Ego [Moi]. Now, an ego is something to be given or taken, which wants to love or be loved; it is an allegory, an image, a Subject; it is not a true relation. The ego is not a relation but a reflection, it is the small glimmer that makes a subject, the glimmer of triumph in an eye (‘‘the dirty little secret,’’ as Lawrence sometimes said). A worshipper of the sun, Lawrence nonetheless said that the sun’s glimmer on the grass is not enough to make a relation. He derived an entire conception of painting and music from this. What is individual is the relation; it is the soul and not the ego. The ego has a tendency to identify itself with the world, but it is already dead, whereas the soul extends the thread of its living ‘‘sympathies’’ and ‘‘antipathies.’’33 Stop thinking of yourself as an ego in order to live as a flow, a set of flows in relation with other flows, outside of oneself and within oneself. Even scarcity is a flow, even drying up, even death can become one. Sexual and symbolic: in effect, they amount to the same thing, and have never meant anything else—the life of forces or flows.34 There is a tendency in the ego to annihilate itself, which finds a certain propensity in Christ and its full realization in Buddhism: hence Lawrence’s (and Nietzsche’s) distrust of the East. The soul as the life of flows is the will to live, struggle, and combat. It is not only the disjunction, but also the conjunction of flows that is struggle and combat, like wrestlers engaging each other. Every accord is dissonant. War is just the opposite. War is the general annihilation that requires the participation of the ego, but combat rejects war: it is the conquest of the soul. The soul refuses those who want war, because they confuse it with struggle, but also those who renounce struggle, because they confuse it with war: militant Christianity and pacifist Christ. The inalienable part of the soul appears when one has ceased to be an ego; it is this eminently flowing, vibrating, struggling part that has to be conquered. The collective problem, then, is to institute, find, or recover a maximum of connections. For connections (and disjunctions) are nothing other than the physics of relations, the cosmos. Even disjunction is physical, like two banks that permit the passage of flows or their alternation. But we, we live at the very most in a ‘‘logic’’ of relations. (Lawrence and Russell did not like each other at all.) We turn disjunction into an ‘‘either/or.’’ We turn connection into a relation of cause and effect or a principle of consequence. We abstract a reflection from the physical world of flows, a bloodless double made up of subjects, objects, predicates, and logical relations. In this way we extract the system of judgment. It is not a question of opposing society and nature, the artificial and the natural. Artifices matter little. But whenever a physical relation is translated into logical relations, a symbol into images, flows into segments, exchanged, cut up into subjects and objects, each for the other, we have to say that the world is dead, and that the collective soul is in turn enclosed in an ego, whether that of the people or a despot. These are the

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‘‘false connections’’ that Lawrence opposed to Physis. According to Lawrence’s critique, money, like love, must be reproached not for being a flow, but for being a false connection that mints subjects and objects: when gold is turned into loose change . . .35 There is no return to nature, but only a political problem of the collective soul, the connections of which a society is capable, the flows it supports, invents, leaves alone, or does away with. Pure and simple sexuality, yes, if what one means by that is the individual and social physics of relations as opposed to asexual logic. Like other people of genius, Lawrence died while carefully refolding his bandages, carefully arranging them (he presumed that Christ had done the same), and by turning around this idea, in this idea . . . —Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco

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The Killing Letter and the Discourse of Spirit Reading Paul Writing

Ian Balfour

A (Disposable) Preamble on the Image of Saul/Paul Do we not often approach Paul, even in advance of reading or thinking about his letters, with an image in mind, that of the momentous conversion and the convert, the one who turned in an instant on the road to Damascus from Jew to ‘‘Christian’’?1 If we are to believe Diderot—and why not?— such an image would not be one among other topics when it comes to the art of painting: If ever there was a great subject for a painting, it is the conversion of St. Paul. I would say to a painter: Do you feel you have what it takes to conceive such a grand scene and the knowledge to arrange it so that it will astonish? Do you know how to make fire fall from heaven, to instill sheer terror in men and horses? If you have ever been master of the magic of chiaroscuro, take up your brush and show me Saul’s adventure on the road to Damascus.2 The subsequent lines from Diderot’s account—of Jean-Baptiste-Henri Deshays’s rendition of the scene—make clear that this painter had not lived up to the supremacy of his subject matter. But perhaps some other artist did so or came much closer? Maybe Raphael, whose tapestry dominated critical opinion for centuries? Or Michelangelo or Rubens, to say nothing of some less celebrated but still compelling artist?3 Michelangelo’s rendition has likely become the most canonical, that is, typical and authoritative, version: a large, busy fresco, it provides a powerful, commanding view of the scene, earth and the heavens bifurcated, as are humans and the divine, with an almost solid shaft of light bridging the two, emanating from Christ,

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the visible face of God. In this work one sees at least an attempt to live up to Diderot’s demand that the artist present a ‘‘grand scene’’ (Friedlaender calls it a ‘‘great celestial spectacle echoing the turmoil on earth’’4), including, if not quite ‘‘fire from heaven,’’ then at least something remarkable and close to it. Yet perhaps the most arresting, distinctive version is that by Caravaggio (the one commissioned to be adjacent to the Cerasi chapel altar in Rome’s Santa Maria del Popolo), not least for its enigmatic abstraction—or subtraction. From Michelangelo’s or Rubens’s canvases one could more or less reconstruct the story of which the scene presented is one highly charged moment. With Caravaggio’s, however, there is much less to orient or inform the viewer.5 The painting foregrounds, without foreground, Saul smitten: fallen to the earth, Saul is prostrate below the horse, which is far and away the dominant figure in the painting, with one of the horse’s hooves suspended precariously over him. (There is much bending of knees in this painting, including the horse’s one bent leg, and in the two other paintings in the tiny chapel in which one is meant to kneel, Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of Saint Peter directly opposite and Annibale Carracci’s Ascension of the Virgin.)6 Only one other human figure is portrayed, partially: an elderly man whose head and part of his legs are visible on the far side of the horse and whose hands hold its bit. It may be strategic that there is at least one witness here, for Paul will rely massively on this singular experience of theophany to persuade others of the truth of Christ and of his own vision. The horse seems oblivious to this moment, which might be the most crucial in the history of the West. In the Caravaggio canvas, as in numerous of the conversion scenes, Paul’s eyes are closed: we see only the lids, with their resemblance to the eerie blank eyes of ancient Greek statuary. Casting the eyes in this way makes perfect sense, for there are, as we shall see, two sorts of blindness associated with Paul. In keeping with the accounts in Acts, Paul is blinded by the light, with this blindness accompanied, presumably, by an inner light just now made possible.7 It’s a new sort of blindness, different from the one Paul will associate with the Jews who do not recognize Jesus as Christ, as the Messiah. Caravaggio seizes on the moment when one figural blindness is replaced by another, literal one, but a literal blindness all the more conducive to spiritual enlightenment, with Saul as a sort of Christian Tiresias. The ground of Caravaggio’s canvas is typically dark, a state of affairs that makes what light there is all the more striking. With this signature tenebrism, Caravaggio departs from the majority of Pauline conversion scenes, which tend to present the event as taking place during the day—‘‘about noon,’’ as the account in Acts 22:6 specifies it. Caravaggio, by contrast, seizes on the possibilities for visual contrast by having the scene occur at night or what looks almost like night. In the Caravaggio painting, which was most likely seen in a rather dark chapel, illuminated sometimes by candlelight, the horse is highlighted as much as Saul/Paul, with an emphasis on the alternation of dark and light, a combination of chiaro and scuro echoed, as it were, in or from the figure of Paul.8 The need for masterly chiaroscuro is one of Diderot’s prime stipulations for the treatment of this subject matter, which makes perfect sense, given that Saul’s conversion is a sudden and absolute movement from darkness to light, from blindness to sight, even if this new inner sight takes the form of phenomenal blindness, a new blindness 398

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to the phenomenal that casts all the more light on spiritual, inner light. The pronounced verticality of the painting highlights, among other things, the effect of light emanating from some unseen source above (Friedlaender stresses this point: we see the effects, not the cause), as if the light were all the more spiritual and otherworldly for its inscrutable source.9 The painting marks, performs, or even embodies the transition from blindness to insight, old to new, and literal to spiritual that would be a principal burden of Paul’s thinking in the wake of his conversion.10 Caravaggio’s image already operates within the distinction between letter and spirit that will be one major consequence of the moment it is depicting. Diderot’s promotion of the conversion of Paul as the ideal subject for painting, however hyperbolic, also makes sense in the light of Lessing’s arguments for the specificity of the visual image, on the (relatively) fixed, instantaneous character of the image versus the sequential dynamics of the literary text. Pairing the legendary Laocoo¨n statuary group with Virgil’s brief account of the menace to Laocoo¨n and his sons in The Aeneid, Lessing develops his notion of the ‘‘pregnant moment’’ as the sort of configuration of which the visual arts can best take advantage. Largely without the resources to represent the Nacheinander, or sequential character, of time-based media, painting and sculpture can nonetheless ‘‘capitalize’’ (not Lessing’s word) on the implication of a ‘‘before’’ and an ‘‘after’’ not usually presentable as such in a single visual image.11 And surely there are few more pregnant moments in Western (one hesitates to say Judeo-Christian) culture than the conversion of Paul,12 which is also to say (though these terms remain to be complicated): a certain passage from Judaism to Christianity, from letter to spirit, from outside to inside. Whereas Saul’s conversion is in most ways not as ‘‘momentous’’ as the birth, death, or resurrection of Jesus, in another way it does mark the beginning of Christianity, of what would soon be an articulated religion, articulated in texts on their way to becoming, decades and decades later, scripture.13 Caravaggio stages in striking fashion this moment of rest and arrest, a moment ‘‘without action,’’ as Giovan Pietro Bellori noted of the painting early on, that will nonetheless give birth to so much action.14 Bellori meant the comment as a critique (not as a neutral description), not least by calling it a ‘‘story without action’’ (istoria . . . senza attione), a seeming contradiction in terms.15 Yet one could, by contrast, acknowledge the strange power of this arresting of action, which is about to give way or give birth to nothing less than a world-historical revolution, implying the outlines of the grand story of Christian salvation. So much of Western history and thinking, then, turns on this moment between moments, poised between past and future, a future to be forged in significant measure by Paul’s reading, writing, thinking, and acting.

 ‘‘Ohne Buchstabe, kein Geist.’’ —Friedrich Schlegel

The circumscribed—but infinite, vertiginous—task of this essay is to take the measure of the foundational Pauline distinction between the letter and the spirit. My starting 399

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point is one aspect of the ground-breaking formula in 2 Corinthians that tends to have been overlooked or erased over time: namely, the way the dictum ‘‘the letter kills, but the spirit gives life’’ has been misunderstood by being turned into—domesticated into—a doctrine of the ‘‘dead letter’’ versus the vivifying spirit. I think we need to attend to the importance of the characterization of the letter as killing, which is an utterly different matter from the letter simply being dead. In the Church Fathers, such as Augustine and Origen, the sense of the letter as ‘‘killing’’ is still vivid, but in many commentators more or less contemporary with us (even, say, in Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, someone well attuned to discursive and ideological violence) this letter is often transformed into the mere ‘‘dead letter.’’16 To revisit this agon of letter and spirit is one way to approach the vexed matter of universality, one of the principal topics addressed in the recent engagement with Paul’s letters in relation to or even as philosophy. Let us begin by recalling the famous verses in question from 2 Corinthians 3:1–6: Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tablets of stone, but on the tablets of human hearts. Such confidence we have through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit: for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.17 The letter, which seems from one point of view not even to be alive, nonetheless, according to the letter of the text, kills. What the letter kills is left, grammatically, open: the phrase ‘‘the letter kills’’ has no particular object. The letter just kills, indiscriminately, threatening, at the extreme, everything or even everyone who lives. Perhaps the letter here kills everything that is not spirit or not of the order of spirit, with spirit being cast as eternal or immortal, though this passage could be read as if the letter constitutes a threat to the spirit. To the extent that the letter kills, it is anything but dead: indeed, it is alive, a relentlessly active force, always killing.18 In this passage we already find ourselves in the throes of distinguishing between literal and spiritual, even just to make sense of Paul’s dictum. From the outset it seems unlikely that anyone would interpret literally the term ‘‘letter’’ (gramma), nor would one be much tempted to construe the term ‘‘kills’’ (apokteinai) literally. The very texture of the pronouncement entails something of an unspoken injunction to interpret spiritually, figuratively. As a literal dictum, ‘‘the letter kills but the spirit gives life’’ verges on nonsense or unintelligibility. Understood nonliterally, Paul’s pronouncement is both a doctrine about letter and spirit and a prod to adopt some version of that teaching.

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To acknowledge, however, that some of the key terms of this verse cannot be taken literally is by no means to dismiss them as harmless. The letter is not just any figure, for whatever it is Paul means by it (the law? the Torah? a ‘‘literalistic’’ or Pharisaic understanding of the law?)19. Even less possible is it to dismiss the force of the word kills to characterize the activity and the being of the ‘‘letter,’’ for it is hard to overestimate the violence of this figure. It is partly against the permanently active threat of the killing letter that the new dispensation, of which Paul becomes one huge source, is so concerned to mark the letter as, or pretend that it is, a thing of the past. For the spirit is almost systematically aligned with the new and the letter with the old, even though we know that temporally the letter and spirit, no matter how they are defined, co-exist, and indeed in Paul’s conception are locked, at the extreme, in a life-and-death struggle. Paul is sometimes divided between casting his (new) opponent, his newly older ‘‘other,’’ as dead or alive. Note that the letter/ spirit distinction is invoked in 2 Corinthians almost in the same breath as the notion of the new covenant or testament (kaine¯ diathe¯ke¯) (3.5). ‘‘Old’’ might not mean ‘‘dead,’’ exactly, but it does imply that the old dispensation or covenant is superannuated or superseded (and not just ‘‘prior’’).20 Romans 7:6 poses the opposition in categorical terms: ‘‘now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code (grammatos).’’ (The RSV and TNIV translate as ‘‘written code’’ what was previously so often translated, as in the King James Bible, as ‘‘letter.’’) Paul’s letters often attempt to promote an absolute distinction between old and new, aligned with the letter and the spirit, yet the very texture of his language, rhetoric, and thinking betrays a less categorical division. Paul’s letters both avow and disavow the force of the letter, acknowledging and rejecting the (mere) Judaic law or aspects of it, if that is indeed what ‘‘the letter’’ primarily refers to.21 Even so learned a reader as Jacob Taubes is at a loss to say what exactly the ‘‘law’’ refers to: ‘‘I am not qualified (it’s not so easy, I think) to sort out what Paul means when he says ‘‘law.’’ Does he mean the Torah, does he mean the law of the universe, does he mean natural law? It’s all of these in one. Everything is bound up with everything else.’’22 Yet a good many readers have understood it primarily as Paul’s invocation of the law or, more precisely, a certain ‘‘literalistic’’ interpretation of the law, not least given the proximity of such a pronouncement to some by Jesus on his and what should be our desired stance to the law. With respect to Paul’s avowal, the Judaic law is most prized when it is being ‘‘fulfilled’’ by the new dispensation of Christ, as, for example, when the ‘‘commandment’’ to love oneself as one’s neighbor involves summing up and transforming the Ten Commandments. Moreover, Paul will often quote the scriptures without qualifying the status of the law or Torah, by appealing to what ‘‘is written’’ in more or less direct, more or less literal fashion. That implicitly accords a huge authority to the Judaic law and the scriptures more generally, even if Paul will sometimes posit a rather tenuous leap from the

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Judaic letter to the Christian spirit. (We shall return to the matter of quotation.) Jesus, after all, was born and raised a Jew, he was called rabbi, and his teaching certainly has the texture of a kind of radical and revisionary Judaism, whether or not one believes he is or identifies himself as the Messiah. (The Hebrew scriptures predicted many things about the Messiah but not, conspicuously, how he would transform the sense of the law or one’s desired relation to it.) It comes as no surprise, then, if there is massive continuity between the Judaic and the Christian. Paul, as we have seen, sometimes decisively casts the Judaic dispensation of the law as old, a thing of the past, rather than as one among other bodies of religious doctrine that one could choose to believe in. But it is difficult to maintain this opposition, and sometimes Paul presents a rather different picture of the relation. The ambiguous status of the old dispensation is also signaled in the passage immediately following the landmark distinction between the letter and the spirit: Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, transitory though it was, will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? If the ministry that brought condemnation was glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness! For what was glorious has no glory in comparison with the surpassing glory. (2 Cor. 3:7–10) What does the Mosaic law amount to? The Mosaic dispensation is first recognized as glorious, then downgraded to relatively glorious, only to be, in the next breath, reduced to nothing by the newer and greater glory attendant on the coming of the Messiah. The sequence is: graven letters, stone, faded and then vanished glory, death. Paul, like the Lord, giveth and taketh away, as what Moses stands for goes from glory to nothing in one brief passage. Paul goes on to gloss, via some rather revisionary interpretation, the mechanism by which ‘‘we’’ arrived at this situation: We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read, it has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Cor. 13–18) As long as one operates in the mode of the letter, one is veiled, one cannot even see what is happening, one cannot read properly (which would include being able to distinguish

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between the proper and the improper or figurative). And yet the truth of Christianity is, in part, already present lurking in the letter, in the Hebrew scriptures, as long as they are read in the mode of the spirit by which they were, in principle, always already informed. Christian hermeneutics by and large posits that the ancient Jews were blind to their own scriptures.23 (The consequences of this are in the first instance hermeneutic, but they extend beyond mere interpretation in the pitched battle between the killing letter and the enlivening spirit.24) In the passage above, Paul, the former Jew, implies that the Jews had figured, unwittingly, their own blindness via the veil of Moses, unable to see that they could not see. Initially only blind to the future (but who isn’t?), the Jews are now blind to the truth of the present and the new truth of the past (as such and when looking to the texts of the past that, now and then, look to the future). Here the literal veil of Moses gives way to a figurative one (moving from outside to inside, face to heart), standing in the way of almost all spiritual sight and insight.25 And it goes without saying: not seeing is not believing. The letter/spirit distinction is clearly implicated in the complicated structure and texture of the converted Paul’s relation to Judaism.26 One can well imagine how Paul’s conversion could seem or be more absolute than most, given the miraculous appearance of Christ to him. There is no trace of doubt in the Pauline corpus about the essential truth of Christ crucified, even if, on other weighty matters, there is at least the appearance of improvisation and a certain pragmatism.27 One thing that makes the conversion appear so absolute has to do with the prior vehemence of Saul’s or proto-Paul’s persecution of the early Christians, those in what Wayne Meeks and John Gager, among others, calls ‘‘the Jesus movement’’ (since it is hard to date when exactly ‘‘Christianity’’ gets codified as such—arguably it is not until Paul’s letters or just after28). Paul is the first to admit the fervor of his persecutions of the earliest ‘‘Christians,’’ which, after his conversion, seemed to him to have been utterly mistaken. His texts bear all the hallmarks of the hyper-zealous believer, more Christian than the Christians. The stakes seem far higher for him than for others, given the singular theophany that was the event that triggered the conversion.29 This is all the more reason that the distinction between Judaism and Christianity seems, at some moments, so absolute, so categorical. Yet the character of Jesus’ relation to Judaism has already prepared the way for a not-so-absolute distinction between Judaism and Christianity, in no small measure due to the status of the Hebrew scripture. Paul’s stance to Judaism is some version of Jesus’ own—Jesus who came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it.30 The logic of fulfillment, of ple¯ro¯ma, posits a lack in what is to be fulfilled, either in action or in understanding.31 This has a hermeneutic correlative in the ‘‘system’’ of typology, of which Paul is a chief architect. He uses the term ‘‘type’’ or ‘‘typical’’ (tupikos) in 1 Corinthians 10:6, just as he is the one who explicitly invokes the related category of allegory as a mode of biblical writing, a mode that—the veil being lifted—seems best interpreted long after the fact of enunciation or inscription.32 The two modes are intimately related: typology, we might say, is allegory extended along the axis

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of history. Paul invokes allegory in his understanding of what was then on its way to becoming the ‘‘Old’’ Testament, first simply an old dispensation, as in his reading of the story of Sarah and Hagar as an allegory of (the) two covenants, new and old, free and enslaved (Gal. 4:21–26), a reading decisive for Augustine’s and much subsequent hermeneutics. It is not a matter of indifference that Paul invokes allegory precisely where what is at stake is the marked difference between the old covenant and the new, allegorical understanding being itself aligned with the spiritual and with the new. Augustine sees something general, what he calls a ‘‘manner of interpretation’’ in Paul’s protocols of reading precisely at the allegorical moment of understanding Hagar and Sarah, old and new (The City of God, bk. 15, chap. 2). Augustine is concerned with the (Pauline) distinction between the children of the flesh and the children of the promise, the latter being crucial to a vision of the ‘‘free city’’ of the absolute future. After citing Galatians 4:21–25, rehearsing Paul’s discourse of the two sons of Abraham, one born of a slave (Hagar), one of a free woman (Sarah), together with his interpretation of this bifurcation (flesh/promise, enslaved/free) as an allegory of ‘‘two covenants,’’ Augustine comments: ‘‘This manner of interpretation, which comes down to us with apostolic authority, reveals to us how we are to understand the Scriptures of the two covenants, the old and the new.’’33 Paul had no idea that there would be a second, distinct body of Scripture, a ‘‘New Testament,’’ but Augustine has no problem in mapping the two dispensations, charted by Paul, onto what had in the meantime become the Old and the New Testaments. Giorgio Agamben, in his commentary on Romans, diverges from the primary letter in question to discuss this passage on the two covenants, as if to underscore its paradigmatic importance for Pauline hermeneutics, as well as to emphasize the importance of how the promise to Abraham overrides the Mosaic law, a verbal promise that predates Moses and that cannot be contained in an ordinary (even divine) written text but rather is something like the one written ‘‘on hearts of flesh’’ in the famous passage from Corinthians.34 This Augustinian hermeneutic, derived from Paul and exemplified most clearly in the passage on Hagar and Sarah, is closely related to another paradigmatic passage of Augustinian hermeneutics invoking the foundational divide between letter and spirit: one must take care not to interpret a figurative expression literally. What the apostle says is relevant here: ‘‘the letter kills but the spirit gives life.’’ For when something meant figuratively is interpreted as if it were meant literally, it is understood in a carnal way. No ‘‘death of the soul’’ is more aptly given that name than the situation in which the intelligence, which is what raises the soul above the level of animals, is subjected to the flesh by following the letter. . . . It is then a miserable kind of spiritual slavery to interpret signs as things, and to be incapable of raising the mind’s eye above the physical creation so as to absorb the eternal light.

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But the form this slavery took in the Jewish people was very different from the experience of other nations, since notwithstanding their enslavement to temporal things the idea of monotheism was presented to them in all sorts of ways.35 The enslaved character of the Jews, with their slavishly literal mode of interpretation, separates them absolutely, in one respect, from the Christians and their spiritual mode. But then Augustine goes on to specify that the Jews were ‘‘very close to being spiritual.’’36 Being ‘‘very close to being spiritual’’ both separates them from and links them to the Christians to come. They are not yet spiritual because still enslaved and reading slavishly, tied to the letter, to flesh, to death. The motif of slavery, like the general stance of spiritual interpretation, links the passage from the City of God with that of On Christian Doctrine, both of which ground their authority in what Augustine takes as Pauline doctrine.37 The relation between the old, literal slavishness and the new, spiritual freedom is grounded, for Paul, in the Hebrew scriptures themselves. Paul often argues for his emergent version of Christianity or the new covenant by invoking, as the evangelists had (though some more than others, Matthew more than John or Mark), the authority of those scriptures, sometimes indicated via the formula ‘‘it is written’’ and its varying contents.38 The phrase is prominent in Paul’s major letters, though its frequency varies a lot, being very prominent in Romans, for example, as makes sense given its thematic insistence on the law. Sometimes the occasion is weighty and doctrinal, as in the very first instance in Romans 1:17: ‘‘For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from the first to the last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.’ ’’ At other times the citation is rather innocuous, with neither the doctrinal nor the interpretive stakes being high. Even in these latter instances, however, the very gesture of invoking scripture as authority almost always helps legitimate whatever it is that Paul wants to say. Yet at times the invocation of what ‘‘is written’’ undermines the scriptural passage, even at a moment when its content is about the absolute importance of what is written in the law, as in Galatians 3:10: ‘‘All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written: ‘‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.’’ Yet Paul cites this only to counter it: ‘‘Clearly no one is justified before God by the law, because ‘‘the righteous will live by faith’’ (3:11). Or consider the final pronouncement by Paul recorded at the end of Acts (28:23–29), where, faced with resistance to his teaching ‘‘about Jesus both from the law of Moses and the prophets,’’ Paul has recourse to the hard saying from Isaiah 6:9–10 predicting that the people ‘‘will listen but never understand’’ and ‘‘look but never perceive.’’ Paul cites this as proof that God has sent this salvation to ‘‘the Gentiles’’ who ‘‘will listen.’’ This stops far short of the devil quoting scripture, but it is one of numerous remarkable passages in the gospels and Paul in which a passage from the Hebrew Bible is cited against the Jews, as if they were blind and deaf to the message of their ‘‘own’’ prophets, their ‘‘own’’ God.

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The vast majority of invocations of what ‘‘is written’’—even and perhaps especially when the message is directed against the Jews—grant scripture a huge, usually absolutesounding authority. In appealing to scripture, Paul rarely contests what it says, though often he is hardly taking scripture at its literal, face value. Wayne Meeks calls attention to a considerable freedom on the part of Paul (a virtue explicitly associated with the spirit and thus with spiritual interpretation), noting that Paul can blithely abandon the literal meaning of a text in order to make it say something altogether different. Thus: ‘‘when he quoted a text in Romans 10:6 with the introduction, ‘‘The Righteousness of faith says,’ ’’ Meeks cautions ‘‘let us remember that when Paul said that, he then proceeded to give that text a meaning that was outrageously different from its contextual, grammatical plain sense.’’39 What then is the old if it is taken to authorize the new, even if the old is now understood in the mode of—from the vantage of—the new (which is spirit, as in Romans 7:6)? As in the Hagar/Sarah example, the ‘‘old’’ (an incident or figure in the Hebrew scriptures) has been divided against itself into the merely old (superannuated, superseded) and the proto-new, which is what makes it so malleable for Paul’s rhetorical purposes. What Paul terms old is, in part, newly old: it becomes old with the arrival of the Messiah or, worse, after Paul’s conversion. And the old—self-divided with its peculiar relation to the new (both negative and positive)—is, once again, systematically aligned in Paul with the letter. The new qualifies, negates, and transforms the old, retroactively, so as to make the new truly new and the old truly old, at the same time as it (often) maintains a profound relation between the old and the new.40 This is the structural ambivalence or ambiguity of Paul’s stance (not unlike that of Jesus himself), which can be variously mobilized or exploited, something that contributes to making Paul’s texts endlessly debatable. (Schleiermacher thought of interpretation as an ‘‘infinite task,’’ but the task of interpreting Paul seems a little more infinite than usual.) The passage on Hagar and Sarah is typical of how Paul can stress the absolute (or seemingly absolute) difference between Judaism and ‘‘Christianity,’’ and/or the profound continuity, for the old contained in advance the truth of the new, even if not in the mode of the new. This relation is extraordinary difficult to fix in conceptual, doctrinal, and rhetorical terms, since it is often negotiated strategically and sometimes, in Paul, seems downright improvised. It’s remarkable that in the very passage where Paul invokes a categorical distinction between the letter and the spirit, valuing only the latter, he addresses the Corinthians, whom some scholars call the ‘‘spirit-people,’’ as themselves being a letter (epistole¯).41 We should not be mislead by the false homonymy of letter and letter (in English), the former in the sense of ‘‘epistle’’ and the latter in the sense of a ‘‘character’’—alpha, say, or omega. Yet an epistle cannot not consist of letters: they are both units of writing, and thus there is a certain link between them, even though it stops far short of identification.42 Even if the epistle is addressed by a spirit or spiritual person to spiritual people (pneumatikoi) such as the Corinthians, and even if the content is of the order of the spirit, the medium remains that of the letter. The point of Paul’s striking metaphor—the Corinthians are a

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letter—seems calculated to stress that his addressees are themselves a discursive, almost self-evident proof of the viability and truth of Christianity, hence no need for literal letters of recommendation. It is a remarkable figure also insofar as it imagines that Christ has written this nonliteral letter, given that Christ notably was, like Socrates, never recorded as having written anything, unless one construes his making a mark in the sand as such. But before inquiring further into the status of writing, let us step back and look at the network of oppositions and near-oppositions that tend to organize Paul’s thinking and writing. A somewhat arbitrary and circumscribed list could read thus: letter/spirit flesh/spirit body/spirit body/soul physical body/spiritual body outside/inside Jew/‘‘Christian’’ Jew/Gentile Jew/Greek stone/heart death/life old/new visible/invisible law/love circumcision/uncircumcision blindness/sight law of death/law of spirit temporal/eternal slavery/freedom earth/heaven corruption/incorruption43 We are often taught these days to be suspicious of binary oppositions, as if they were necessarily too simple, too violent and reductive. In general I too subscribe to this tendency and perhaps indulge in it at some points in this essay. Yet some binary oppositions make more sense than others, and, in any event, one of the powerful features of Paul’s discourse is his insistent and sometimes seductive mobilization of them. It’s no wonder that someone reared on the Hebrew scriptures, with their ubiquitous parallelism and one of parallelism’s prime configurations, namely, antithesis,44 would so often have recourse to a rhetoric of oppositions. There is indeed often simply a categorical difference, an oppositional difference, between the terms of some of the pairs listed above. Yet the list also suggests how sometimes a given term that seems to be one pole of a sharp division

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can—in another, more complicated formulation—be enlisted on both sides of what elsewhere had been a divide. Thus in the invocation in Romans 8:2 of the distinction between ‘‘the law of sin and death’’ and the ‘‘law of the spirit,’’ law is a swing term, a hinge category, aligned with the negative one of death and/or the positive one of spirit. In the (sometime) opposition between law and love, love would be aligned with spirit (and freedom and more), but then we are also told that the law is spiritual (Romans 7:14), a notion that dissolves (or complicates) what is elsewhere an opposition. The same is true of flesh, which cuts both ways. At times it is strictly opposed to spirit, only in other contexts to be aligned with it, as in the key passage from 2 Corinthians 3, with the fleshly tablets of the heart as figures of the permanently vital. Being alive, flesh is, understandably, often allied with life. Yet flesh, insofar as it is ‘‘mortal’’ (that is, alive but subject to death) and carnal can come just as often to be aligned with death as with life.45 This brings us back to the opposition that concerns us the most, that between letter and spirit, which has a kind of vertiginous complexity, not least because it has to do with the character of writing. We are now broadly familiar with the Derridean tracing of the problematic of writing, in its outlines and some of its stark particulars, as in Plato and Rousseau, characterized by an almost systematic promotion of speech at the expense of its ‘‘dangerous supplement’’ of writing, even if, as Derrida shows, virtually all the supposedly problematic features of writing are already present in speech itself. Yet the tradition still, almost systematically, insists on the priority, in more ways than one, of speech over its more suspicious other, writing. To judge simply from the dictum that ‘‘the letters kills, the spirit gives life,’’ one might be tempted to think that in Paul’s view writing was, to put it crudely, a ‘‘bad’’ thing. Yet inspection of any number of related passages reveals a more complicated picture, not unlike the Platonic division between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ writing, cure and poison.46 It would be strange if Paul were condemning writing altogether, since epistles are so crucial to his ministry. And he is acutely aware that he is writing epistles (‘‘See what large letters I use as I write you with my own hand’’; Gal. 6:11). Paul already has a rather high opinion of these epistles, though this attitude pales in comparison with his far loftier opinion of the scriptures, which he calls graphe¯ and thinks of under that rubric. Faced with the potential and real problems that beset writing—distance, translation, miscommunication, absence or death of the author—any number of discourses tend to posit an ideal or idealized mode of writing that transcends the all too empirical versions we know in everyday life. Thus if writing risks being too external, one imagines an internal version of it, such as that located in the heart. And if it too risks being too fixed, one imagines it as part of an organism (flesh), vital and perhaps vivifying. Hence the crucial passage from 2 Corinthians 3 quoted above, with the writing on fleshly tablets of the heart being posited as vastly superior to writing in ink. Yet this idealized version of writing is haunted by its empirical model: even scripture or graphe¯ (one instance of idealized writing, if conceived

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as divinely inspired, in general or in all its details) cannot escape the banal materiality of the letter (gramma) as the precarious medium of spirit.47 Another way to approach the vast question of the universal in Paul is to broach the discourse surrounding the vexed matter of circumcision, which is not without its analogical relation to writing, and its implication in the dialectics of literal and spiritual. From the outset it might seem that circumcision would be among the most literal instances of the literal and indeed a privileged figure for the literal, inscribed, as it is, indelibly on the body. Is there not only circumcision or uncircumcision, without the twain ever possibly meeting? Yet circumcision, so decisively carnal and literal, is from the moment of its institution, as we hear of it in Genesis 17:10, made into a sign, a sign of nothing less than the covenant between God and his people. Thus this most literal inscription is also, in principle, spiritual through and through, from its inception. Still, a lot seems to turn on the literality, the materiality, of circumcision, which is to distinguish Jews (or Israelites), or more particularly, Jewish males from all those not of the chosen people (even if the Jews may have ‘‘borrowed’’ the practice of circumcision from the Egyptians). For Paul, the literality and externality of circumcision poses a problem for his pervasive program of the spiritualization of his former religion. It is perhaps no wonder that there would be a somewhat ambivalent or divided discourse on the central matter of circumcision. In 1 Corinthians 7:19 we read: ‘‘Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God’s commandments is what counts.’’ (Thus the TNIV, though it is possible to reading the sequence as saying ‘‘nothing but the keeping’’ [ouden estin alla te¯re¯sis], much as it is rendered in other English versions.) Only the content of the covenant matters. This undercuts the value of literal circumcision, because such circumcision is not at all necessary to keep the commandments of God, not even, one assumes, the now outmoded ‘‘law’’ to be circumcised. Circumcision appears superfluous and perhaps worse, since it was supposed to be a sign of the covenant but may not function at all as such. It can be just as easily a false or misleading sign, a pseudo-sign. Circumcision guarantees nothing. Yet elsewhere Paul will acknowledge the value, it seems, of literal circumcision, as in Romans 2:25: ‘‘Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised.’’ Though so much of Paul’s discourse tends to align Judaism with the external and the literal, Paul goes on in Romans (2:28–29) to specify that ‘‘a person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly [‘‘hidden,’’ krupto¯] and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code [grammati].’’ So often Christian discourse poses itself as spiritual and internal as opposed to the literal and the external, but here, in what might seem to be a Christian retroactive spiritualization of the Jew, it is in fact itself a thoroughly Judaic discourse, for the crucial notion of the circumcision of the heart comes straight from Deuteronomy (10:16; 30:6) and from Ezekiel (44:7). The same applies to ears and lips, repeatedly

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invoked by the prophets. While heart, ears, and lips are admittedly all body parts (and thus easily associated in general with the carnal), they are parts of the body all known or thought to be portals for internal or spiritual matters of consciousness, feeling, or language, understood here as the real or potential externalization of what is interior.48 At times Paul seems to be ‘‘Jewish’’ in appealing to this Judaic discourse of the circumcision of the heart and at time ‘‘Christian’’ in chastising the Jews for abiding in sheer, unspiritual externality. Paul wants to spiritualize circumcision out of (literal) existence (or at least pertinence), while retaining the spiritual meaning it had from its inception. Yet the letter remains, inhabiting the spirit that aspires to vault above or beyond it. Paul cannot maintain rhetorically the theoretical, conceptual or even doctrinal division that the distinction between letter and spirit attempts to institute, perhaps not least because the nondistinction marks his own history. Paul’s program of spiritualization (which is also to say, of freedom, of the new, and more) is no doubt one of the main things that contributed to the recent engagement with Paul among philosophers and philosophically oriented intellectuals. Spirit aspires to universality, though it may be that those aspirations are brought down to earth by their inscription in the letter. In the current tendency to consider Paul as a ‘‘philosopher,’’ as a thinker of doctrine,49 doctrines whose timeless character is, as it were, retroactively underscored by the letters that have become scripture, we perhaps too quickly forget the improvisational quality of the texts, their having been embedded in rhetorical situations that were nothing if not volatile. Pauline scholarship, of course, often duly attends to the fact of Paul’s addressing a certain audience: Romans, Corinthians, or Galatians. And Paul is the first to admit that he molds himself to the audience he is attempt to persuade: For though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak, I became weak, to win the weak, I have become all things to all people. (1 Cor. 9:19–22) Badiou insists this is not to be understood as opportunism on Paul’s part.50 Northrop Frye has a dimmer view of the rhetoric gestured at in this and related passages, as expressed in the relatively unguarded medium of his notebooks: ‘‘Well: the contrast of naturata and naturans creation accounts in Genesis recurs in Paul’s telling the lawobsessed Romans that the law is fulfilled by the Gospel, & then the eros-obsessed Corinthians that the gospel fulfills love.’’51 Hand in hand with the sense that Paul has to calculate what he says to whom and how he says it goes the equally powerful sense that Paul is absolutely convinced of the truth of his message(s). How does one argue with someone who firmly believes he has had a direct, personal revelation from God? (‘‘And I think that

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I have the Spirit of God’’; 1 Cor. 7:40.) The person to whom God has revealed himself tries to communicate the truth and the texture of what is now emerging as Christianity to any number of people who have not received such a revelation themselves. The (particular) universal addresses the particular in order to bring it into the fold of the universal. A good deal of the recent interest and perhaps even rehabilitation of Paul has turned on the claim to universality in his ‘‘thinking,’’ the touchstone for which is most often the famous passage in Galatians proclaiming the abolition of difference—or the indifference of the distinction—between Jew and Greek, bond and free, male and female.52 When it is invoked, and especially when that is done briefly or almost in passing, the passage is typically foreshortened. Here is how the celebrated verses are first presented in Badiou’s well-known study of Paul (to him usually ‘‘Saint Paul’’): How clearly Paul’s statement rings out under these conditions [i.e., identitarian protocols such as the special status of the Jews under Pe´tain]! A genuinely stupefying statement when one knows the rules of the ancient world: ‘‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female’’ (Gal. 3.28)!53 As it happens, what Badiou cites is not even the whole of 3:28: he omits the final, decisive phrase. But does not almost everything turn on what precedes and what follows what Badiou cites? Let us rehearse the longer passage (now from the TNIV) in which the celebrated verse is embedded: So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile [or Greek, Helle¯n], neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Surely the closing phrase of this verse qualifies drastically the claim to universality by specifying the ‘‘medium’’: it is only ‘‘in Christ’’ that the difference between Jew and Greek (or Gentile), male and female, slave and free, becomes irrelevant. A similar determination marks the other passages closely related to these ringing lines from Galatians. In Romans 10:12 (‘‘For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is the Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him’’) the absence of difference is predicated on an explicit calling on the Lord, that is, a certain faith in Christ. In Colossians 3:11 (‘‘Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all’’) we find a similar insistence that difference disappears when resolved into the all-encompassing totality of Christ. Finally, in Romans 3:22, when Paul says, with respect to ‘‘all men, both Jews and Greeks,’’ that ‘‘there is no distinction,’’ that too is linked to ‘‘faith in Jesus Christ’’ and in the subsequent verse tied to ‘‘redemption which is in Jesus Christ..’’ That is to say, each of the proclamations of universality or

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absence of distinction is bound up with and predicated on the universality of belonging to or being in or calling on Christ. Thus we have a rather particular universality, something other and less than a universal universality, because it has to be determined as ‘‘in Christ’’ and not everyone is ‘‘in Christ.’’ Returning to the passage from Galatians, one might note that the verses immediately following the proclamation of in-difference underscore the circumscription of this quasiuniversality or lack of difference: ‘‘If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.’’ The startling consequence of this is that one is only ever Abraham’s seed retroactively. The lineage of the promise is no longer confined to the biological linearity of the Judaic line, but it is now, even as it is being spiritualized and opened up, just as emphatically limited to those whose faith is in Christ, who ‘‘belong to Christ.’’54 Outside this realm, it appears, there is Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free. Indeed, the subsequent verses (Gal. 4:1ff) go on to detail some conditions of slavery. Even if Badiou’s citation of the passage from Galatians is misleading to the extent that it miscasts, by underdetermining it, the character of universality spelled out in the larger passage, it nonetheless cannot be denied that Badiou is eminently aware of the massive, determining force of Christ, especially the event of Christ crucified, for Paul. Yet there is something peculiarly violent in omitting, in his initial quotation, what is arguably for Paul the decisive stipulation of universality: that one be ‘‘in Christ,’’ that one ‘‘belong to Christ’’ for the pertinence of identities such as male and female, Jew and Greek, slave and free to disappear. The universal is conceived in opposition to all that lies outside it (though what can be outside the universal?)—everything that is not ‘‘in Christ.’’ Christ is the principle and force of universalization, as and through the medium of the spirit. The very formulation of this (quasi-)universality, reinforced by the way it is sometimes partially quoted, emphasizes its still polemical character. This is not to say there is not something of a genuinely universalizing gesture in this resonant passage in Galatians. And indeed the Pauline gesture is trying to separate itself from and to be far more, perhaps infinitely more inclusive than an older Judaic dispensation that would insist on the special character of the Jews, even as the chosen people. Paul looks forward to the impertinence of such ethnic distinctions, but they disappear only when resolved by being in or belonging to Christ. The letter remains and the letter risks remaining a remainder, as it were, not assimilated to the spirit, a certain stubborn Judaism or a version of Judaism that resists the Christianity to come and will stay resistant, for having not accepted Christ as the Messiah and all that comes with it. The letter is not just one among other elements resistant to the spirit: it is actively not of the order of the spirit and indeed threatening to it. The letter that kills—as—opposed, again, to the ‘‘dead letter’’—remains a thorn in the side of spirit, guaranteeing an agonistic, vexed relation, to say nothing of a constant threat to the discourse of a certain Paul formerly known as Saul. The animus against the old letter is all the more vehement in that the distinction between letter and spirit is not so absolute.

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‘‘Love your neighbor,’’ the Son, and the Sons’ Community Reading Paul’s Epistles in View of Freud and Lacan

Itzhak Benyamini

For several decades, Paul’s epistles have been the focus of academic and philosophical debates revolving around questions pertaining to Jewish law, love in relation to the law, the nexus between Judaism and Christianity, and so on. What is it about Paul’s writings, a short collection of only a few epistles, that makes for such passionate discussion? In what ways can they be viewed as a key to understanding Western civilization? In this essay,1 I present my analysis of the perception of love and identification with Jesus in Paul’s epistles. Paul was the first and greatest Christian theologian. He emerged after Jesus’ death and sought to spread the messianic gospel beyond the religious and social boundaries of the Jewish people. In most of Paul’s epistles, generally directed to the Mediterranean Christian communities, most of which he himself had founded, he addresses the concept of the law—nomos in Greek—as signifying the legislative aspect of the Torah. For Paul, the law—which distinguishes between Jews and nonJews (gentiles) and has its place in the ‘‘carnal’’ realm—is characteristic of the ‘‘old,’’ antiquated Jewish experience. ‘‘Spiritual’’ belief, on the other hand, is characteristic of those who follow Jesus Christ—the ‘‘new Jews.’’ In order for Paul to go beyond the realm of the law, beyond the domain of pedestrian, allegedly ‘‘unspiritual’’ life, he had to put forward an eschatological redemption wherein one does not live by the Law of the Father but rather by the Law of Jesus, the Son. Nevertheless, Paul did not seek a total departure from the law; he needed it at least in part to organize the community of disciples of Christ. To this end, Paul put forth new tenets, primarily derived from the biblical commandment ‘‘Love your neighbor,’’ as well as rituals that establish the community’s borders and its inner disposition through love for both one’s fellow human and for Jesus.

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Following Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, I will suggest that Paul should be regarded as the founder of a narcissistic community of sons who emphasize the image of the Son at the center of their experience. At first, it seems that this Son, Jesus, who is presented as the Son of God, is the sons’ object for imitation. But Jesus’ image is also a projection of the Pauline believer himself. Thus Paul is the founder of an imagined community that establishes its identity through games of identification with the reflection of its own image / Jesus’-image in the proverbial mirror.

The Menacing Father, the Loving Son Is the motif of rebellion against the Father-God imbedded in Pauline theology? To begin with, Paul’s opposition to the law, the very law that establishes sin, is expressed specifically in Romans 7. Paul demands divergence from the logic of the law—not merely some abstract law, but one associated with a concrete image: God the Father. The Father-God, as Paul presents him in Romans, entices people to experience the sins of the flesh (in fact, to deviate from the heterosexual economy God himself had invented in Eden), to expose oneself to lust (jouissance, excess pleasure, which is situated in the Lacanian Real): Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men and working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient. (Rom. 1:24–28) The Pauline thinking of predestination holds not only that people merit God’s justice through divine election but also that their sin is the result of God’s will: So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, ‘‘Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth’’ [based on Exodus 9:16]. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and who he will be hardeneth. (Rom. 9:16–18) Therefore, God established the exposure to sin/jouissance from which Paul seeks to escape. This is the basis for Paul’s blatant rebellion against the law and his veiled rebellion against

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the Father-God. Nothing but the love of Jesus the Son can release the believer from the paradoxical action of the law/Father in establishing sin. This love on the part of the Son is contrary to the Father’s cruelty in tempting sinners to sin even further; indeed, the Father even seems to take pleasure in their sin. This is the superego within Jewish law, presented as Yahweh—the divine Father——who takes pleasure in enforcing decrees upon believers and in humiliating sinners after he himself has amplified the magnitude of their sins. Love, by contrast, is presented as a defensive ‘‘shield’’ against the Father’s cruelty, as it shall be manifest on the day of the Lord, at the end of days. Paul’s rebellion against the Father (aided and abetted by the Son) is not overt. Rather, this rebellion is hidden within the supportive words of the menacing Father, since Paul’s crafty strategy is to introduce a distinction between old Judaism and new Judaism, as well as between Father and Son——while blurring this distinction in such a way that the Son subsumes the Father and the new religion subsumes the old one. This inclusion may be defined as smothering love (but love nonetheless). This conflation is expressed in Paul’s use of the Greek term kurios for Lord, to denote the Father and the Son alike. At times Paul seems to be referring to the old Father, at other times to the Son, and sometimes his intention is difficult to determine with certainty. The following quote, for instance, from 1 Thessalonians, with the Greek expression he¯mera kurio can be translated as ‘‘day of Yahweh’’ but also as ‘‘day of the Lord.’’ The word Lord in the New Testament can be understood as both a translation of Yahweh (following the Septuagint and the use by Jews ever since the time of the Second Temple of the Hebrew word Adonay in lieu of God’s name, Yahweh) and as a reference to Jesus. (A hint that the Lord’s name was given to Jesus can be found in Phil. 1:9.) The relation of Paul’s epistle to the ‘‘Old’’ Testament is thus often akin to looking indirectly into a distorted, warped, translating mirror. The product of the twisted, borrowed use of the biblical signifiers within the Hellenistic world, such as the terms Yahweh (‘‘Lord’’), Davar (‘‘logos’’), Torah (‘‘law’’), rea‘ (‘‘neighbor’’), is the creation of Christianity——whose logos seeks to cut a path through man’s abstract logic, incarnate in the flesh, Yahweh’s uncompromising nature. My psychoanalytic reading of Paul leads me to push his thinking further in order to make a sharp distinction between Judaism and Christianity, Father and Son—in order to clarify and further sharpen the unconscious logic behind Pauline ideology, so as not to adopt the principle of indistinction between Father and Son, as though Judaism were a religion of the Father alone. One might say that attenuating Paul in such a way could ironically resemble the gnostic move so opposed by the Church Fathers—given that it was the product of the Pauline dialectic between Father and Son (as argued, inter alia, by the scholar of Gnosticism Hans Jonas).2 I also seek prevent the Christian obfuscation in seeking to embrace that which is Jewish (though part of this confusion stems from a trend in Jewish apocalyptic literature at the time of the Second Temple, namely, to assign divine

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attributes to various figures, such as the Messiah, Metatron, etc., so that the essence of the dispatcher is cast on the dispatched, thereby rendering it divine as well3). Recognizing the apocalyptic tendency in the following passage from Paul’s epistle, one might assume that the expression ‘‘day of the Lord’’ refers both to Yahweh God and to Son-Jesus, but it can be claimed that the terror exuded by Yahweh’s Son, the terrifying Messiah dispatched at the time of redemption, originally emanates from the Father, the dispatcher.4 Consequently, even if we accept the argument that the expression ‘‘day of the Lord’’ refers to Jesus, I would add that the Son himself consists of two ‘‘sides’’: on the other hand, the aspect of the ‘‘rival,’’ the wrath of God the Father, the Dispatcher who must be defended as against a dangerous thief—and, on the other, the aspect of the ‘‘friend,’’ Jesus the Son, who has it within his power to deliver the believer from the Father. Behind this confusion, one can discern the following dualist distinction: the Father’s rage, also embedded in the Son, belongs to the nocturnal, dark realm of lusts and sin, whereas the pure Son, along with his believers, belongs to the realm of light and day, love and faith. In other words, the expression ‘‘day of the Lord’’ can be regarded as a reference to both Father and Son, but the affect of wrath is attributable more to God the Father: For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the children of light, and the children of day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on breastplates of faith and love; and for an helmet the hope of salvation. For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him. (1 Thess. 5:2–10) The following passage from 1 Corinthians teaches us a great deal more about the Pauline terror of God the Father, the punishing God. Paul’s obvious context is the God of the children of Israel at the time of the Exodus from Egypt. He also associates this God with the terrible dark angel (ha-mashhit, ‘‘the destroyer’’), against whom the special protection of the blood of the lamb was needed. Then Paul speaks of his own time, on the verge of redemption, the terrible end of days, and asserts that the blood of the sacrifice, this time that of Jesus the Lamb of God, will protect believers from God’s wrath: ‘‘Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed of serpents. Neither murmur ye, as some of them also murmured, and were destroyed of the destroyer. Now

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all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the end of the world are come’’ (1 Cor. 10:9–11). Paul therefore seeks to prepare the believer to come to grips with the arbitrary nature of the cruel God, through a coalition with the Son, given that, through the Father’s sacrifice of his only Son for the sake of the sons, they can in turn redeem themselves from sin, from the law, and from the cynical game the Father plays with his own subjects through law and sin. It seems as though Paul is promising all this in order to escape death: when one reads Paul’s epistles through, one becomes immediately aware of the obsession Paul the man has with death and suffering.5 This is the impetus of his agenda to deliver himself and the members of his community from man’s finality, the very finality that sin evokes and that leads to man’s end in death. Paul’s logic in identifying with the death of Jesus is homeopathic:6 to die, in order to be saved from death; to die in Jesus in order to be saved from the physical death sin entails.

The Sons Versus the Father and His Angels Freud has already presented Judaism as the worship of the Father and Christianity as that of the Son, conferring on interreligious conflict the nature of an intergenerational/Oedipal struggle.7 There is indeed some merit (perhaps from the Christian point of view) to the argument that the two religions contradicts the other’s various references to the image of God as a Father/Son. There is also some merit to the argument that early Christianity has an ambivalent attitude to the image of the Jewish God as lawmaking Father. This aspect is particularly underscored in Paul’s epistles. Throughout, they allude to the complex relationship between the sons (Jesus and the believers), who represent emancipation from the law, and God the Father,8 creator of heaven and earth, whose faithful servants, the ‘‘old’’ Jews, claim to be so because they keep his commandments. Early Christianity in general, and Pauline theology in particular, seems to have exposed and emphasized this mythical/Oedipal conflict, which Judaism sought to suppress: the rebellion of Son(s) God(s) against Father(s) God(s). This essential motif is prevalent in early religions, for example, in Greek mythology (Zeus versus Chronos and Apollo versus Zeus) and in Babylonian mythology (Marduk and other young gods rebel against the monstrous old goddess Tiamat). According to Michael Mach, biblical and Second Temple Jewish scriptures suppress this tradition in order to conceive Yahweh as the sole God, without any pantheon or mythic dynasty consisting of fully fledged deities in their own right, alongside Yahweh as chief God. The compromise between the monotheistic theological imperative to posit a single deity and the mythic impetus to found a dynastic pantheon was to portray the

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angels as the Sons of God—but not as independent gods, at least prima facie.9 (Mach adds that some of the Hebrew angels are late manifestations of Canaanite gods.)10 In Paul, the sons’ rebellion against the Father relates to his aim to diverge from the world of the law, from the circle of the practical life which (the enticing) God has created. Paul instigates the sons’ rebellion against Yahweh the Father by positing an eschatological redemption in which one does not live by the law of God the Father, but rather by Jesus’ love. Nevertheless, Paul is careful not to go against the Father outright. After all, he is the primordial God, whom Paul (like Jesus before him) ‘‘still’’ serves. Paul goes against the legal arm of God, that is, the angels. In this he opposes the radical Gnostics, who went so far as to explicitly oppose Yahweh the Father. In this respect, Paul is a proto-Gnostic. This is apparently how Paul resolves his ambivalent attitude to the laws of the Torah. On the one hand, Paul claims that the law is irrelevant, and on the other, he recognizes the sanctity of the law of the Father, given at Sinai, and that ‘‘the law is spiritual’’ (Rom. 7:14). Paul projects the irrelevance of the Father and his law (concomitant with heaping praises on God the Father) onto the angels, who mediate between the law and humankind: ‘‘and it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator.11 Now, a mediator is not a mediator for one, but God is one’’ (Gal. 3:19–20). The law was given through the angels to the world, so that the latter might serve as guardian for the Jews (Gal. 4:1–7), as a guide (Gal. 3:24–25). However, the angels’ mediation between the ‘‘true sons’’ and the Father is no longer relevant following the crucifixion of the Son, who has come to redeem the sons who are bound to the law. While Paul relies on the perception of the angels and of Moses in Hellenistic Judaism as mediators between God, the law, and the people of Israel,12 he nevertheless adds a negative context to this perception as part of his efforts to delegitimize the law and to invalidate belief in the divine origin of the law. According to Paul, God spoke directly to Abraham the believer (the ancestral father of Christians) and delivered unto him the promise to the believers13 —whereas the ‘‘old’’ Jews received the law through the angels, rather than from God himself. Paul’s attitude toward the angels is mostly adverse: apart from pointing to them as the keepers of the law, he warns his disciples not to receive any gospel other than his, not even from ‘‘an angel from heaven’’ (Gal. 1:8). Paul reverses the hierarchy between the believers (the new sons) and the angels: ‘‘Know ye not that we shall judge angels?’’ (1 Cor. 6:3). Paul also associates the angels with the pagan demons (Rom. 8:38–39) and draws a parallel between the angels and Satan (in connection with false prophets): ‘‘for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light’’ (2 Cor. 11:14). Paul uses these roundabout ways to disenfranchise the angels from their status as the sons of God, thereby conferring this status on Jesus and his believers, while the (new) mediator between God and the believers is not an angel but rather Jesus himself—the chief Son. In revoking the angels’ status as sons, as well as in positioning them as keepers of the law, Paul seeks to resolve his ambivalent/Oedipal attitude to God the Father. First, Paul

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wants to retain the love of God the Father and to belong to the sons of God. Second, Paul is somewhat in awe of the law handed down by God the Father. It seems that the angelic figure provides Paul with a solution to his dilemma: (1) the angels are ‘‘deposed’’ as sons of God in favor of the new sons; (2) responsibility for the law is imposed on the angels, rather than on the still-menacing Father. The figure of the angel serves as a compromise solution to the ambivalent emotional complexity of the God figure in both Judaism and Pauline Christianity. While Jews feel they must distance the God figure from the material world of humankind, they nevertheless must be sure of his involvement in this world. Paul feels the need to remove the law of the Father from belief in God, to claim his status as a son at the expense of those who are considered God’s sons (the angels), and yet to retain belief in God. Thus all the emotional/theological problems, Jewish and Pauline alike, that could not be resolved through the theological treatment of the figure of God the Father were therefore projected onto the angels.

The Pauline Identification with the Son The Pauline identification with Jesus the Son is fundamentally narcissistic. A reading of Paul’s message in 1 Corinthians and Galatians can show the degree to which he seeks to establish a literally self-centered community. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul grapples with intracommunal crises whose background is social and theological. He seeks to unite the members of the congregations socially around belief in Jesus: ‘‘Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment’’ (1 Cor. 1:10). Paul’s goal is to organize the congregation as one whole, complete with various organs, all attached to the same body—the body of Christ. He is clearly inspired by Plato’s political philosophy: each organ has a different role, like the difference between hand and foot. All the organs, the weaker ones too, are essential to the body’s proper functioning: ‘‘Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular’’ (1 Cor. 12:27)— each member is different in terms of its function, but they are all equal before the Lord. Paul mentions this allegory in connection with the desired quality of the Lord’s Supper (the Eucharist), emphasizing the theological and social importance of coming together around the figure of Jesus (as opposed to the social divides in Corinthian society). All the while Paul is pointing out that any insult to the Lord’s Supper is tantamount to an insult to the congregation itself—given the community’s identification with the figure of Jesus as Son and as sufferer. The community sees itself in the image of the consummate Son, Jesus the Messiah who has founded it, as a congregation of believer-sons standing before God the Father.

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For Paul, the community must hold Jesus up as a model for emulation, the ideal according to which the special relationship of the believers to God is constructed: When the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ. (Gal. 4:1–7) The sons, experiencing melancholia as a result of the death of their love object—Jesus their Messiah—identify with his image, with their ideal ego, until it merges with their self. The figure of Jesus becomes the source of narcissistic idealization, just as someone suffering from melancholia satisfies his or her narcissistic need through idealization of the love object, as Freud explains in ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia.’’14 This can also be linked to what Freud says in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego concerning the congregation’s (the Church’s) identification with leader-Jesus. Through their love for him, members of the community experience love for one another.15 This does not necessarily mean that the emulation is practiced solely by the community toward Jesus. Rather, the Jesus figure also emulates the sons—their existential, social, economic and political suffering.16 The direction of emulation is not unequivocal: it is impossible to determine which is the source and which is the copy, since this is an imaginary-reflexive identification of the believer with Jesus’ suffering. This suffering is, after all, the projection of the believer’s own suffering. Paul therefore employs two levels of emulation with regard to the audience of his epistles. First, he presents God’s chosen believer as weak and unfortunate in this world, while Jesus is a figure who emulates his own believers: For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in his presence. (1 Cor. 1:26–29)17 Second, Paul demands that community members emulate Jesus’ ‘‘loser’’ image as he himself emulates this body image of Jesus. (Paul has already represented them as inferior and Jesus as emulator of their inferiority.) That is to say, Paul demands that they emulate Jesus the emulator and Paul the emulator as he plays the role of intermediary-emulator: Even unto this present hour we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling place; and labor, working with our own hands:

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being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it: being defamed, we intreat: we are made as the filth of the world, and are the offscouring of all things unto this day. I write not these things to shame you, but as my beloved sons I warn you. For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel. Wherefore I beseech you, be ye followers of me. For this cause have I sent unto you Timotheus, who is my beloved son, and faithful in the Lord, who shall bring you into remembrance of my ways which be in Christ, as I teach everywhere in every church. (1 Cor. 4:11–17) Paul the man is an intermediary-emulator because the Pauline theology of identifying with the cross originates in his own suffering in the most personal and physical sense. It would be best not to present a pathological diagnosis or some psychobiographical reading of that pathology, as it were, though it is clear that Paul had indeed experienced suffering due to his mission for Jesus and his persecution for it. Nevertheless, this suffering also originates in his own body, without respect to his vocation. Could it be that this physical suffering is what moved Paul to identify with Jesus’ suffering on the cross? Thus when in Galatians Paul situates the Galatians in a framework of identifying with Jesus’ physical infirmity, that framework would be reinforced by what they could see with their own eyes: Paul’s suffering: Brethren, I beseech you, be as I am; for I am as ye are: ye have not injured me at all. Ye know how through infirmity of the flesh I preached the gospel unto you at the first. And my temptation which was in my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus. (Gal. 4:12–14) And what did they see? This is how Paul ends this epistle: ‘‘From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the marks [ta stigmata] of the Lord Jesus’’ (Gal. 6:17).18 In a prominent passage in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul mentions a certain man who has experienced a revelation of Jesus. It gradually becomes clear that this man is Paul himself, but he does not wish to brag about it.19 Something prevents him from boasting, in the most physical sense: And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh [edothe¯ moi skolops te¯ sarki], the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, my grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in

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persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong. (2 Cor. 12:7–10) Paul demands of his listeners the following chain of identifications: Paul’s suffering ⳱ Jesus’ suffering on the cross ⳱ the congregation’s suffering. The suffering of all three is physical in its origin, and its ultimate goal is to lead the believer to a different body—to disengage from the present body in favor of the heavenly body of Jesus, which he was awarded for the suffering he experienced on the cross. These are Paul’s words in the First Epistle to the Corinthians and in the Epistle to the Philippians: The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. (1 Cor. 15:47–49) For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself. (Phil. 3:20–21)20 Paul’s suffering is above all a means of convincing his listeners of the one true faith. Paul even attests that through his cunning, he seeks to capture the believers (2 Cor. 12:16), and to this end he will adapt to the conditions of any situation (1 Cor. 9:19–23). In the face of the suffering of Jesus/Paul, all discord must cease, and unity of mind is called for (1 Cor. 1:10). All dissensions have but one purpose—to reveal who really believes in Christ and lives in him (1 Cor. 11:19). Hence, Paul sums up his discourse in 1 Corinthians, mixing loving words with threats: ‘‘If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha [literally, ‘‘you are put under the ban’’]. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen’’ (1 Cor. 16:22–24).21 It can be argued that Paul seeks to attain ‘‘sameness,’’ the uniformity of the community in imitating the ideal,22 in order to leave no cracks for other gospels to enter. One might add that Paul achieves this by establishing a prefabricated communal identity (the miserable and wretched), on which he can base the image of Jesus, and then—the emulation of that emulation. The Christian looks at the figure of Jesus (or at the intermediary figure of Paul), which is an emulation of his own image, thereby constituting his own identity—just as in the Lacanian ‘‘mirror stage,’’ the ego is constituted through gazing at the image before him in the mirror.23 That is why in Romans Paul uses the term icon (eiko¯n), with its biblical overtones of creating man in God’s own image, when he illustrates what is for

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him the ideal method for constituting the Christian ego: ‘‘For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren’’ (Rom. 8:29). Lacan notes that during the mirror stage the image the infant gazes at is not the infant himself as such. Hence, the ego the infant constitutes for himself, being based on an image that is strange to him, is actually fictitious. And does the Christian, when he constitutes his identity based on the reflection of Jesus’ mirror image, gaze at an icon that is strange to him despite its resemblance to him? Paul remarks that, when the time comes for the perfect image to form, the Christian will be able to break free of this dependency on the mirror that holds the strange icon and will be able to look directly and see his own reflection as such, as seen from the outside, for the ego cannot gaze at itself from the outside. This is a proto-Lacanian insight of Paul, who holds that the mirror image is not the same as the ‘‘original.’’ All this takes place through communal love. When it is complete, the emulation will be perfect, no different from the original: Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Cor. 13:8–13) Paul’s is here probably basing himself on the following passage from Numbers, when God, in his anger at Miriam and Aaron, describes his close relationship with Moses, which is far closer and more intimate than with any other prophet. And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman. And they said, Hath the lord indeed spoken only by Moses? hath he not spoken also by us? And the lord heard [it]. (Now the man Moses [was] very meek, above all the men which [were] upon the face of the earth.) And the lord spake suddenly unto Moses, and unto Aaron, and unto Miriam, Come out ye three unto the tabernacle of the congregation. And they three came out. And the lord came down in the pillar of the cloud, and stood [in] the door of the tabernacle, and called Aaron and Miriam: and they both came forth. And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you, [I] the lord will make myself known unto him in a vision, [and] will speak unto him in a dream. My servant Moses [is] not so, who [is] faithful in all mine house. With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and

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the similitude of the lord shall he behold: wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses? And the anger of the lord was kindled against them; and he departed. (Num. 12:1–9) Following this passage, it seems that Paul suggests that he and his listeners are on a high spiritual plane, like that of Miriam and Aaron, but that there is a much higher plane yet to which to aspire. Therefore, Paul promises that instead of gazing at some hazy, dreamy image in the mirror—some enigmatic image that is not the thing itself—the future encounter with the Lord Jesus will be face to face. Then there will be an intimate and mutual closeness in which the mode of self-recognition will also change—yielding a true reflection of the ego. The external form of recognition will resemble the internal one, without any inner split in the subject—and without any narcissism of the private individual either. The passage above is part of Paul’s discussion of speaking in tongues and prophecy (1 Cor. 12–14). Speaking in tongues and prophesying without charity (communal love) are but ‘‘sounding brass.’’ They do not enable communication between the members of the community, for they are merely partial and childish talk (1 Cor. 13:1). Only through charity (love) does prophetic talk release the ego from its egotism, so that ‘‘He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself; but he that prophesieth edifieth the church’’ (1 Cor. 14:4). In other words, language is divine yet also comprehensible, and therefore it serves as a means of building the community. Later on in chapter 14, Paul introduces a distinction between speaking in tongues and prophesying. The latter is situated on a higher plane by virtue of its social benefits; this is unlike the distinction in Numbers, which pertains merely to closeness with God. Paul hints that prophecy, if it employs charity (love), can reach a higher plane than that of Miriam and Aaron, closer to Moses’ position vis-a`-vis God. This will be a mutual love with Jesus like the mutual love between the members of community. Love is the promise that total mirroring will obtain among members of the community, as it does between the community and its Lord Jesus (1 Cor. 13:7). In his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul elaborates on this aspect of gazing in the mirror by introducing a contrast between gazing at Moses’ face and gazing at Jesus’ face, and the glory that emanates from both. That is to say, Paul pushes to the extreme his promise to advance beyond Moses’ gazing at God face to face. The experience of being with the Messiah coalesces with the direct gaze at the divine glory unveiled (in contrast to the experience of the ‘‘old’’ Jews). Here is Paul’s mystic promise to abolish the veil, the separation, between the believer and Jesus: But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away: How shall not the ministration

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of the spirit be rather glorious? For if the ministration of condemnation be glory [doxa], much more doth the ministration of righteousness exceed in glory. For even that which was made glorious had no glory in this respect, by reason of the glory that excelleth. For if that which is done away was glorious, much more that which remaineth is glorious. Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech: and not as Moses, which put a veil over his face, that the children of Israel could not steadfastly look to the end of that which is abolished: but their minds were blinded: for until this day remaineth the same veil untaken away in the reading of the old testament; which veil is done away in Christ. But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the veil is upon their heart. Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the veil shall be taken away. Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. (2 Cor. 3:7–18) Paul presumes to establish a Christian community complete with its demarcation from Judaism and paganism. The congregation will be characterized by internal harmony, revolving around the figure of Jesus. Accordingly, Paul, who sets out to oppose the Jewish tradition of the Fathers, to which he used to belong (Gal. 1:14)—thereby constituting himself as an autonomous subject—founds the narcissistic community of sons, which establishes its identity through an image that emulates it in return. This narcissistic religious framework presumes to bypass the sin/pleasure of the covenant with the Father (Rom. 7). That is carried out through Jesus and his love, which rescue the sons from the arms of the Law of the Father. Believers acquire the status of sons to the Father God, in the shadow of the chief Son, Jesus, beloved of his Father, Yahweh. The sons’ partnership with and presence in Jesus are a baptism into the presence of Jesus: by taking on his image, by emulating him and identifying with him in the act of baptism, and by eating and drinking him in the Lord’s Supper, wherein his image is constructed as a projection of the believer’s own image, as degraded and as a Son of God. Living in Jesus shatters boundaries and hierarchies, given that everyone is a Son of God by virtue of identifying with the Son Jesus. In his struggle against the Law, Paul seeks to exchange the sons’ position in the Symbolic order for the Imaginary one (in the Lacanian sense), which points to establishing identity between the ego and the other—they are all identical to Jesus, and they all love him like sons who love each other by virtue of their sameness: For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ

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Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. (Gal. 3:26–29)

‘‘I am burning with love for myself ’’ Whether or not Paul was familiar with the myth of Narcissus, it is interesting to compare his epistles with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written at about the same time. Both texts may show traces of cultural attitudes to the problem of human self-reflection, as well as the underpinnings of the modern concept of narcissism, which originates in this period. The Pauline discourse produces a unique textual subject—the epistles’ addressee, who can be found only in the text itself. This can be compared with Ovid’s textual subject. By returning to Ovid, to the origin of the Freudian concept of narcissism, we may learn something of the compass of Pauline narcissism. In fact, Freud imported the term and concept of narcissism from late-nineteenth-century medical and psychiatric discourse into his unfolding psychoanalytic discourse without having reread and analyzed Ovid’s text, which is taken to be the source of the myth. Lacan, however, in a short note in his E´crits, returns to Ovid to explore the aggressive dimension of the mirrorlike Imaginary, the suicidal tendency that attends narcissistic loving: Narcissus, in love with his own reflection in the water, dies from yearning.24 Indeed, Lacan’s return to Ovid’s text succeeds in delineating a case study no less insightful than those of psychoanalytic theory. Ovid’s Narcissus, like Christian gazing at the mirror-Jesus, involves a main character who is self-centered and preoccupied with his own reflection. The Christian bases his image on the image of Christ, though it is constructed through his own gaze at himself, taking it to be a unique image that requires total identification with itself, with its own icon. Paul proposes a complete identification with this image, a union with Jesus’ image, by eliminating the frustration of gazing at the image opposite: no more alienation, no more gap, no more distance, but rather a spiritual experience of coalescing with the image of Jesus. By contrast, the experience Ovid describes is frustration, the quintessential, unbridgeable gap between man and his beloved self-image: ‘‘I am burning with love for myself. I move and bear the flames. What shall I do? Surely not court and be courted? Why court then? What I want I have. My riches make me poor. O I wish I could leave my own body!’’ (lines 464–67).25 This is the punishment of the youth who did not welcome the advances of the nymph Echo, whose unrequited wooing echoes in the words by which he responds to her and anticipates the relationship between his mirror image and his own image. The story of Narcissus ends with his human body disappearing, while the community of those who love him encircles him, trying to experience at least a small part of him by sacrificing a part of themselves:

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Death closing those eyes that had marvelled at their lord’s beauty. And even when he had been received into the house of shadows, he gazed into the Stygian waters. His sisters the Naiads lamented, and let down their hair for their brother, and the Dryads lamented. Echo returned their laments. And now they were preparing the funeral pyre, the quivering torches and the bier, but there was no body. They came upon a flower, instead of his body, with white petals surrounding a yellow heart. (Lines 503–10) And what of Paul’s Christian community? It too deals with the disappearance of the real body of the beloved, who is in love with himself and exchanges his beautiful body for the body of the community members, in the framework of a union that transforms them into one. The body of Jesus is gone, but there remains the image of Jesus lovely in his wounds on the cross—which is itself the object of belief. This is its meaning for Paul: there is no underlying message behind the cross except the cross itself, except the waking dream of Jesus wounded on the cross, except this splendid vision. In this respect, the icon of Jesus on the cross is not meant to transport us to some ulterior message—rather, it is the thing itself. This icon is an image without any reference to some underlying reality. This icon is Christianity, and the Christian ego is left to identify with a perfect gestalt of suffering— out of the ego’s own imperfection. This is the Christian ego’s ideal ego. Paul therefore turns his own physical suffering, as well as the believer’s, into a sublimely imaged ideal self. The tension between the believer’s imperfection and the perfect imperfection before him gives rise to an anxiety that is relieved when the Christian cries.26 As Lacan says in Seminar V, one should distinguish between a joke in the sense of Witz in Freud,27 which correspond to the linguistic-symbolic process of the unconscious, and the comic in the sense of slapstick, in which a person such as Charlie Chaplin falls, provoking our hilarious laughter. Beyond what can be construed as an elitist position with regard to popular humor, one may also draw a lesson concerning the Christian case. In Lacan, this comic moment has to do with the mirror stage and our fantasy concerning our body as a whole gestalt (ideal ego) vis-a`-vis our actual imperfect body. Aggressive laughter at the sight of a person falling is related to relief of the anxiety stemming from the tension between the appearance of gestaltic perfection and the imperfection of someone like us, who is falling. Perhaps in this respect, Christianity is in fact the religion of slapstick. The ‘‘show’’ of the wounded man on the cross arouses our aggressive crying out at the spectacle of the gestalt of the wounded man. Paul’s genius turned the wound itself into something whole, just as the fall of the man played by Chaplin becomes comic perfection in the cinematic text. From this perspective, Christianity is ultra-imaginary, not only because of its narcissistic side vis-a`-vis emulation, but especially in its emulation of this gestalt image (which is the ‘‘original’’ image). Christianity is completely absorbed by the single image of Jesus on the cross: ‘‘For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and

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him crucified’’ (2 Cor. 3:7–18). This is a religion that has taken upon itself to bestow a mirror image on humanity out of its own existential suffering (perhaps without any dimension of fatherhood). The Protestant theologian Ludwig Feuerbach regarded Christianity as the one true religion, because it is a projection of man’s own distress in the fullest sense. In The Essence of Christianity, published in 1841, he argues that God completes the lacks of human frailty and finitude. In chapter 5, concerning God’s suffering, Feuerbach puts forward an existential position that Jesus is the sum total of the suffering of humankind and that the believer participates in the religious experience through the heart, through his feelings of suffering. This Protestant stance emphasizes the inner aspect of the religious experience over communal experience. In George Eliot’s translation (1853), we encounter phrases such as ‘‘Religion is human nature reflected, mirror in itself’’ and also ‘‘God is the mirror of man.’’28 According to Feuerbach, the believer who identifies with Jesus identifies back with his own distress, taking upon himself the female-passive position of Jesus, a position that reflects existentially the position of the human son vis-a`-vis the world and the Father.29

‘‘Love your neighbor’’ When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence. —Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Having pointed out how Paul seeks to base the community’s sons’/Imaginary identity on its relationship to Jesus the Son, I would like to examine the community’s unifying, ‘‘adhesive’’ element: Love, and in particular the commandment ‘‘Love your neighbor’’ as Paul employs it in order to establish the Christian community. I shall focus primarily on Galatians and Romans, as these epistles articulate this most profoundly. Paul is careful not to create a new set of laws that would form a ‘‘pure’’ symbolic set of laws such as the Mosaic Law, for he preaches against subordination to the ‘‘law of the flesh’’: law has become irrelevant since the advent of Jesus. Moreover, law encourages transgressive sin (as in Rom. 7:7: ‘‘I had not known sin, but by the law’’). Nevertheless, Paul is not consistent in his stance of total departure from any law whatsoever, partly because he has to organize the community of believers in Jesus, a community he must establish with his own hands (as he says in most of the epistles). To this end, he invents for the Christian communities new prohibitions, mostly moral ones based on Mosaic Law, and in particular on the commandment ‘‘Love your neighbor’’ (Lev. 19:20: we’ahabta

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le-reaka kamoka; Septuagint: agape¯seis ton ple¯sion sou ho¯s seauton ), which contains within it the principle of all Torah Law, as a formula of reductio in unum.30 Unlike the Jew, who adheres exclusively to the law, the Christian performs ‘‘good’’ deeds—fulfilling the command to love within the framework of freedom emanating from the Holy Spirit: For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another [dia te¯s agape¯s].31 For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another. (Gal. 5:13–15) In fact, Paul seems to have two diametrically opposed positions concerning loving one’s neighbor, and identifying him or her. He is faced with two options concerning the excess hatred that results from seeking to channel internal competition and hatred toward love: the first is to direct excess hatred toward Paul’s competitors, outside the community; the second is to turn this aggressive energy inward, through conscience or feelings of guilt. In the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul channels the competitive energies within the congregation of Christian brethren toward feelings of brotherhood and partnership. The demand for love seeks to balance out the terror of freedom, where law is no longer supposed to be relevant, since excessive freedom is liable to usher in the triumph of the flesh and the disintegration of the community. Love is meant to remove from the community aggressive conflicts, such as evil carnal pleasure. Yet such carnal pleasure does not simply vanish—it clears a new path for itself. As Freud claims, people form communities and join together out of love for one another. In order to satisfy their aggressive impulses, they direct them towards those who are close, yet far. Our narcissistic relations with someone who is close to us lead to two diametrically opposed positions—excessive love or excessive hatred.32 In Galatians, the love of a son of the community leads to directing this excessive negative energy in a disguised way toward one who is near yet far, who competes for the Lord’s beneficence or for possession of the right gospel. In this epistle Paul is furious at his rivals, who promote rival gospels and seek to preach a different path to faith in Jesus. He even curses them (Gal. 1:8–9, 5:12). Paul also denies the Jews’ right to divine benevolence—using the allegory of Hagar and Sarah to hint that Ishmael, who stands for the ‘‘old’’ Jews, must be cast out:33 ‘‘Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise. But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now. Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman’’ (Gal. 4:28–30).34 In Romans, by contrast, excessive love for anyone diverts negative energy inward, toward the Christian-Pauline ego. If excessive hatred or aggressiveness is not directed outward, it is turned inward in the form of the conscientious

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superego against the ego, as Freud noted.35 The Pauline ideal-ego stance is one of humility and meekness, given its emulation of Jesus’ ways, but it stems in part from egoistic motivations, as though this ego had said, ‘‘I shall suffer now, but at the end of days I shall be very happy at Jesus side’’ (see Philippians 3:10–11). Paul expresses the necessity for civil obedience, especially in Romans, where he demands that his audience ‘‘be subject’’ to imperial rule. The reason, apart from the obvious practical ones, is that the demand for universal love of one’s fellows is the call of conscience: Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. For this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour. Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. (Rom. 13:5–10)36 Paul pushes to an extreme the breach between the Father’s religious law (which is Jewish and particularistic) and the emperor’s civil law (which is Roman, i.e., universal). The sons try to extricate themselves from the Father’s law, whereas the emperor’s law makes possible the community’s peaceful existence. Love releases the believer from the law of the Father/God, but paradoxically it is also the framework and rational for submission, for ‘‘Lutheran’’ obedience to the civil law of another lord: the Roman Empire. This is no contradiction, for Paul does not oppose law as such. Rather, he preaches against Mosaic Law as a self-serving tool used by the Jews to separate themselves from the gentiles. According to Paul, the Jews use the Law to appropriate God’s love and beneficence for themselves alone—that is, they use the Torah to establish a ‘‘pure’’ Symbolic order founded exclusively on (God’s) law, rather than on the Imaginary and on love (as Paul would have it). Consequently, the infuriated, energetic Paul in Galatians (written before Romans37) ordains particularistic love (toward another son of the community) instead of the particularistic law of God the Father. In Romans, however, Paul is more settled and level-headed. He seeks universal love, which lives in perfect harmony together with the particularistic imperial law. Through conscience this universal love prevents any form of sociopolitical subversion, and it leads to suppression of the ego. Reading Galatians and Romans, we learn of a double-edged Pauline strategy vis-a`-vis excessive hatred and aggression (jouissance): in Galatians, when love is restricted to the

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community, aggression is directed outward. In Romans, by contrast, when love is universal in character, then aggression is directed inward, toward the community itself, toward the Christian ego—in the name of conscience. Love is directed inward for want of an alternative outlet: the Christian must love everyone (one and all, leaving absolutely no one who could be a target for hatred). In either case, Galatians and Romans, love relates to the law in a different way: in Galatians, love is the alternative to particularistic Jewish law; whereas in Romans, love refers to universal imperial law and even supports its necessity.

‘‘Love your neighbor as yourself ’’: Narcissism and the Ethics of the Other The Pauline outlook, which conceives of love as reciprocity and doing good, seems akin to the psychoanalytic concept of love as attached to Narcissism (as per Freud) or the Imaginary order (as per Lacan) of the ego’s relations with its various reflections. Lacan discusses Christian love in Seminar VII. He argues that, so long as love consists, at least in part, of voluntary altruism, then love also consists of egoism at the level of the Imaginary. For as long as a person loves himself or herself, assuming the other person is similar, then this other person is worthy of assistance. For this reason, Lacan is of the opinion that helping the neighbor is not in contradiction to egoism, but rather is in line with a self-serving approach. One has no greater pleasure than to bestow a gift on someone like oneself, a neighbor, even in the cruel sense of not caring in the slightest whether the recipient is interested or not. On a first reading, it seems as though loving one’s neighbor is the epitome of releasing oneself from self. After all, if I love my fellow and do not care only for myself, is this not breaking free from my own narcissism? Upon closer inspection, however, it seems the answer is ‘‘no,’’ for it all depends on how we understand the word neighbor (Hebrew rea‘). If it is taken to mean someone close, an actual neighbor, then this is indeed narcissism in the fullest Freudian sense. Narcissism in Freud does not mean love turned toward the self as such in the simple sense, but rather love for the image of myself as it is embodied in someone else. In this respect, the biblical passage contains both aspects of the ‘‘neighbor’’: the reciprocal-narcissistic and the non-narcissistic. Various interpretations may reflect either of these aspects: Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the lord. Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee. (Lev. 19:17–19)

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This passage appears to describe the Imaginary aspect of love for one’s fellow man, included in the statute ‘‘love your neighbor as yourself’’; the other aspect, to be described later, is Real and hidden. Has the author of Leviticus sought to position this statute in a narcissistic intra-ethnic context—the neighbor being someone close to you or the same as you, that is, of your own people? Does the context of this statute suggest that ‘‘neighbor’’ means ‘‘of your own people,’’ and that love for your neighbor is bound up with the prohibition of proximity between different kinds? The statute in this context may indeed demarcate the boundaries of the separatist Jewish nation and prohibit any ethnic ‘‘mix.’’ However, this statute may also be understood as part of God’s demand that people behave justly toward the other, for all the statutes in this chapter end with the phrase ‘‘I am Yahweh your God’’ or ‘‘I am Yahweh.’’ In the dictum ‘‘love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the lord (Yahweh),’’ the expression ‘‘I am Yahweh’’ serves to inject into the reciprocity between the ego and the other a third party—the divine Other. In the Septuagint, the expression ‘‘I am Yahweh’’ is translated as ‘‘I am the Lord’’ (ego¯ eimi kurios). In Paul, this can also be taken to mean Lord Jesus, the Messiah (as is frequently the case, as noted earlier, concerning the transition from God’s name in Hebrew to the name in Greek, kurios, ‘‘Lord’’). Here enters the mimetic aspect of emulating Jesus the Son rather than God the Father, while doing away with the idea of the absolute Other as a third, asymmetrical party. You should love your neighbor just as Jesus loves you and you love him. Conversely, the biblical text (Leviticus) does not highlight the aspect of reciprocity, but rather God’s guiding presence, making a general demand for holiness. In the beginning of the chapter, God commands, ‘‘Ye shall be holy: for I the lord your God am holy.’’ This holiness does not derive from emulation, but rather emanates from God. In the context of Galatians, of the seminal portrayal of the autonomous Christian ego, the Imaginary aspect is stronger, as opposed to ‘‘mingled’’ faith, rather than ‘‘mingled’’ ethnicity. Paul’s passage can be taken to mean that neighbor (ple¯sios) signifies the one who is proximate, not the distant other. The statute is directed toward love as the founding element of intracommunal solidarity. This love does not allow the Christian ‘‘ego’’ to take an outward turn, but rather entails wallowing in the image of Jesus, the Son identified with the ego of the sons, by turning one’s back on the ‘‘carnal’’ Jew, despite the universal potential of love: ‘‘As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith’’ (Gal. 6:10). It is important that love be directed to all, but it should be directed especially toward members of the community. Freud says of this Christian love in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego that, as with any form of love, it defines those within and those outside the circle of faith. Narcissistically, the latter are denied this love. Love is by nature confined to those near and dear, despite the natural pretense of universalism.38 The point where Paul seeks to withdraw from evil (the flesh) and to uphold the good that is within the community (spirituality, love) is the very point where he contradicts his

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own objection to the law. Paul indeed wants love to function at the imaginary level in an egalitarian manner among community members, like the love founded on the mirroring of the ego in the other (another community member or Jesus). But in effect Paul enforces his own will (from his own perspective) in a way very similar to that of the Jewish rabbinical legal system he opposes, especially by enjoining love in the framework of an ethical imperative. As we have already seen, love at the ethical level engenders aggression: in Galatians, inward; in Romans, outward. Hence, just as in the dialectic law/transgression, love for one’s neighbor as an ethical imperative also involves dialectical relations with aggression/jouissance. In order to understand the Real/jouissance aspect of ethical love, let me refer to Levinas’s and Lacan’s writings on ethics and the on the injunction to love one’s neighbor.39 In his Seminar VII, Lacan states that once love appears as an ethical directive, it no longer refers to the Imaginary and instead refers to the Real. This very much resembles Levinas’s ethical position. Levinas, too, points to the nonimaginary aspect of the ethical directive, thereby extending Lacan’s discussion for us. Levinas posits a broad definition of the neighbor/other, to whom the directive of love applies, based on his unique reading of the Bible and the Talmud. The meaning of the ethical relation to another person that one bears is infinite responsibility for the other. This is an asymmetrical responsibility, which does not require the other’s reciprocity, and is contrary to altruism. Levinas’s position seems to be echoed in Lacan’s: ‘‘It is the nature of the good to be altruistic. But that’s not the love of your neighbour.’’40 For Levinas, altruism is different from the ethical imperative in that it is the product of free choice, whereas ethics imposes a burden of responsibility on a person. No one can take the place of the ego by placing oneself in the other’s position. Ethics therefore intermingles one and the other. It leads to a merger of sufferings: the Ego undergoes the other’s suffering. In an interview in 1975, Levinas notes that he interprets ‘‘love your neighbor’’ as relating to some ‘‘other’’ who is not just a fellow member of the community or some fellow member of one’s own nation.41 For Levinas, the definition of the ‘‘neighbor’’ includes the foreigner, as well. Levinas proves this based on a later verse in the same chapter: ‘‘But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the lord your God’’ (Lev. 19:34). This interpretation by Levinas (the neighbor as including the foreigner) is opposed to the interpretation of ‘‘neighbor’’ as someone close to you, an interpretation reflected in the translations of this word, following the Septuagint and New Testament’s ple¯sios: ‘‘neighbor’’ (English), prochain (French), Na¨chste (German). Levinas points out that in these translations the other is the one near and dear to one, as Paul himself perceives the other, despite his universalist pretence (Gal. 6:10). For this reason, Levinas prefers the German translation proposed by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig: ‘‘Halte lieb deinen Genossen, dir gleich.’’42 The emphasis is also on the

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comma, which divides the statute in two. The German translation is ‘‘Love your acquaintance, he is like yourself.’’ The Buber-Rosenzweig translation places Hebrew rea‘ in the context of friendship and partnership, in contrast to Martin Luther’s translation, Na¨chste, which is the same as Paul’s ‘‘neighbor.’’43 A justification of this translation may be found in Martin Buber’s introduction to Hermann Cohen’s book The Neighbor, in which Cohen opposes the prevailing rendition of the biblical statute, especially that of the Septuagint, which can be translated as ‘‘love your neighbor as you love yourself.’’ Buber suggests that this verse be read as a call to ‘‘act as you would act on your own behalf,’’ for the verse concerns behavior rather than emotion. After all, the statute does not say ‘‘love your rea‘ ’’ but rather adds ‘‘love for the benefit of your rea‘ .’’ This love is not restricted to one’s own people, but also extends to the stranger—to everyone under the auspices of God.44 Levinas deduces from the Buber-Rosenzweig translation that ‘‘as yourself’’ does not refer to the other but rather to the loving: the love itself is like you, part of yourself, a part of the divine claim on yourself. This is in line with Levinas’s position concerning the supremacy of the other over the ego and the absolute responsibility that the ego bears toward the other. In this sense, the ‘‘neighbor’’ (re‘) is always ‘‘the other,’’ so mention of the ‘‘stranger’’ in this connection is not incidental but rather the norm. The interpretations of Buber and Levinas can easily be applied to Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, where he places ‘‘love your neighbor’’ within the universal ethics of biblical (non-Christian) monotheism.45 His thesis finds striking expression in Rashi’s commentary on Leviticus 19:34 ‘‘I am the lord your God— your god and his God am I.’’ Is Hermann Cohen’s attempt to point out the universal basis of love for the other no more than a reaction to Christian assertions in this regard? Despite the similarity between Rashi and Herman Cohen, I maintain that from every point of view—Rashi, the biblical author, Levinas, Lacan, and Freudian discourse—the intention is not to extend the issue of the neighbor to its universal dimension but rather is restricted to its opposite: to the other’s uniqueness and singularity, the other’s Real dimension, while closing the door on the narcissistic perception of the other as my equal. The latter possibility—narcissist universalism—lies at the heart of Christianity’s fantasy of universal harmony. These Jewish thinkers’ commentary and insight lead me to ask: Could it be that the narcissistic interpretation of the statute ‘‘love your neighbor as yourself’’ made its way from Paul to Western civilization as a whole? Was the presence of God the Father, toward whom we are bound by symbolic identification, a sine qua non of an ethics of antiharmony? By contrast, can the religion of the Son, which places both worshipers and their object of worship in the rubric of imaginary reciprocity, not evade the mirror-image relations of the ego and the other? Furthermore, are we incapable of going back and perceiving this biblical other without this Christian affect?

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Lacan’s position concerning the statute to love the other comes across in Seminar VII, in which he reads Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. Lacan seeks to point out the essence of the law following ‘‘the death of God’’—the law that remains intact even in its abrogation: ‘‘God, then, is dead. Since he is dead, he always has been.’’46 Lacan emphasizes that the law persists even after ‘‘the death of God,’’ just as Freud maintains that the superego persists after the father dies, and because of his death (or the fantasy of his death) in the Oedipal complex and in the myth of Totem and Taboo. Lacan’s conclusion is that it is Christianity that preserves the law, paradoxically, although Christianity opposes the Father, the founder of the law (thereby, on the one hand, removing fatherhood along with its positive identification and, on the other, intensifying the negative, conscience-based identification).47 In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud emphasizes that the Christian-Pauline statute ‘‘love your neighbor as yourself’’ is inhuman, impossible, and senseless, because it is too broad and contrary to the basic human desire to satisfy one’s urge to pleasure. Moreover, the neighbor is not worthy of love, but rather of hatred, as the neighbor seems to think, as well.48 Lacan, reading Freud (who opposes the realization of this statute as depriving one of pleasure), demonstrates the extent to which this ethical statute, as a Christian Aufhebung49 of all other biblical tenets, both abrogates the law of the Father and at the same time conserves it, raising it to the level of the abstract superego of negative identification. Lacan adds that the moral imperative, even that of loving one’s fellow, is not necessarily ‘‘a good thing,’’ just as Freud, who speaks in the guise of a common man seeking happiness, tries to refrain from upholding this statute of love.50 Therefore, whenever Freud refers to this statue, the issue of the fundamental evil of the neighbor surfaces. Lacan adds that, if that is indeed the case, then I too possess this fundamental evil jouissance, for the neighbor arouses it, in something that I dare not approach. For if I do touch it, then the aggression I am trying to escape will act upon me in the form of the latent law, the superego, whose role is to protect me from this very danger. Lacan wishes to clarify these aspects of the relationship between the statute and jouissance in Civilization and Its Discontents, for he maintains that Freud himself did not adequately clarify them. Ethical law is in some sort of coalition with jouissance beyond the pleasure principle.51 Psychoanalysis points out that aggression is also the product of the superego, and that once we tread this path of the superego, there is no going back. The more the ego strives to satisfy the compulsive dictates of the superego, the more vociferously the latter will express them. The moral tenet itself entails evil jouissance. Therefore, adhering to the statute ‘‘love your neighbor’’ leads, inter alia, to jouissance erupting through the back door of the superego,52 and also to a confrontation with the jouissance of the other. In the wake of the commentaries by Levinas and Lacan, we can clarify the Real aspects of love at the ethical level that undermine Paul’s attempt to found a community devoid of jouissance and permeated by love at the level of reciprocation. Paul prefers to present

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spiritual love as opposed to both the sex drive and carnal desire.53 Pauline love seeks to transform sexual passion into its sublimation. Paul seeks to bind agape¯ directly to devotion, kindness, and compassion toward one’s fellow Christian (or a stranger who, thanks to love, may soon be baptized), as emanating from the Holy Spirit and as standing diametrically opposed to desire or appetite in the sense of a drive—as epithumi. Pauline love seeks not to relate to privation, as it is manifest in desire (according to Lacan). Paul wishes to separate himself from the law and from desire, as well as from the problematic dialectic between them. Nevertheless, when Paul abolishes Jewish law, upgrading it to the ‘‘higher’’ level of ethical law (love for one’s neighbor), he unwittingly upholds jouissance—even though it seems as though jouissance disappears within the ‘‘healthy’’ society consisting only of love. This jouissance is retained exactly where love is supposed to function at the imaginary level of voluntary altruism, precisely because this love is adhered to through ethical law. The moment the law makes demands, jouissance returns, even more forcefully, in the framework the superego opposes to the ego. In the name of Jesus’ law of love, Paul demands that his subjects, the members of the sons’ community, desist from hatred and violence: they must love the neighbor. Yet love, as a commandment and as a renewed encounter with the neighbor, once again triggers the jouissance aggression from within the inherent evil of man —Translated by Guri Arad

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The ‘‘Jewish Question’’ in the Return to Paul Empire Politics

Shmuel Trigano

The rehabilitation of Paul in the thinking of certain contemporary philosophers constitutes an ideological phenomenon whose meaning can be understood only by hindsight, as it were—against the backdrop of European history. While confessing their atheism, they find in the Pauline doctrine a politics appropriate to an age of globalization; moreover, Paul’s doctrine resonates with these philosophers’ previous adherence to Marxism. In Paul, Alain Badiou seeks a ‘‘new militant figure . . . called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century, which can be said to have been that of the party militant.’’1 They make of Paul a ‘‘Lenin for whom Christ will have been the equivocal Marx.’’ In short, in Paul’s doctrine, Badiou finds the framework of a renewal of Marxism. Here I will not discuss in depth the root of this paradoxical combination, but will concentrate on one of the fundamental aspects of Pauline thought adopted by those who advocate the rehabilitation of Paul (which certainly also revives some remnants of Marxism): the Jewish question. It is disturbing to note that their reading of Paul transposes into contemporary thought intellectual (in this case mythological) interpretations whose harmful potential has been demonstrated by history. Those interpretations above all concern the State of Israel, but the image of Jews traced here has wider implications in view of one of the principal interests of the rediscovery of Paul: postnational universalism, as postmodernism sees it. ‘‘Paul’s unprecedented gesture consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp, be it that of a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a social class.’’2 ‘‘What does Paul want? Probably to drag the Good News (the Gospels) out from the rigid enclosure within which its restriction to the Jewish community would confine it.’’3 Arguably referring to the memory of the Holocaust, Badiou

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justifies a universalism that ‘‘neither tolerates assignation to the particular, nor maintains any direct relation with the status—whether it be that of the dominant or the victim—of the sites from which its proposition emerges.‘‘4 He writes: A Jew among Jews, and proud of it, Paul only wishes to remind us that it is absurd to believe oneself a proprietor of God, and that an event wherein what is at issue is life’s triumph over death, regardless of the communitarian forms assumed by one or the other, activates the ‘‘for all.’’5 What Paul must be given exclusive credit for establishing is that the fidelity to such an event exists only through the termination of communitarian particularisms.6 the event renders prior markings obsolete, and the new universality bears no privileged relation to the Jewish community.7 It is no exaggeration to say that such minoritarian pronouncements [i.e., those of the Jews] are genuinely barbaric.8 Paul wished ‘‘to be delivered from the disbelievers of Judea (Rom, 15:31).’’ This is the least that someone who identifies his faith only by repetition of a statement of the communitarian and customary differences could do. What Badiou glorifies in Paul is ‘‘Universalizable singularity,’’9 which ‘‘necessarily breaks with the identitarian singularity.’’10 ‘‘Ultimately, it is a case of mobilizing a universal singularity both against the prevailing abstractions (legal then, economic now), and against communitarian or particularist protest.’’11 This universal singularity is the opposite of the figure of the Jew (but it needs that figure in order to be presented. Badiou repeats here the Pauline logic of ‘‘neither Jew nor Greek’’ that passes for the formula of the universal.12 This offers the opportunity to offer once more the litany of Pauline antinomies on the Jew as letter: ‘‘ ‘the letter kills.’ . . . The letter mortifies the subject insofar as it separates his thought from all power.’’13 It is a matter of the ‘‘persecuting reality of the identitarian logic,’’ of the law reserved for a community, or the terrible commandment of the letter, or the community marking, all classifying categories for the Jews, which are furthermore dangerously transposed into the economic field (according to the world market): There is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory or territories. The semblance of a nonequivalence is required so that equivalence itself can constitute a process. . . . The capitalist logic

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of the general equivalent and the identitarian and cultural logic of communities or minorities form an articulated whole.14 In short, Jewish particularism is the structure of world capitalism. Marx is not dead. Similar thoughts are expressed by Giorgio Agamben, who speaks of the ‘‘’’Jewish‘‘ subset’’: The principle of the law is thus division. The basic partition of Jewish law is the one between Jews and non-Jews, or in Paul’s words, between Ioudaioi and ethne¯.15 Let us take the fundamental division of the law to be that of the Jew/non-Jew. The criteria for how this division works is both clear (circumcised/foreskin) and exhaustive, for it divides all ‘‘men’’ into two subsets, without leaving a remainder [resto] or remnant.16 The problem then becomes the following: What is Paul’s strategy when confronting the fundamental division? How, from the messianic perspective, does he manage to neutralize the partitions of the law?’’17 Under the effect of the cut of Apelles, the partition of the law (Jew/non-Jew), is no longer clear or exhaustive, for there will be some Jews who are not Jews, and some non-Jews who are not non-Jews.’’18 In short, for these two authors the reactivation of Paul entails a repetition of the core of the Pauline doctrine which oriented itself around the question of the recognized signs of Jewish particularity. Examining how this takes place can reveal to us the wider implications of the ideological and political vision involved:19 since Pauline ideology pivots around the Jew as sign, to analyze his discourse on the Jews can inform us of its wider scope of its wider scope, well beyond the Jewish question. I generally accept the premise of a ‘‘Jewish particularism’’ and the claim that Paul went ‘‘beyond’’ it, subsuming both the Jewish people and Judaism in ‘‘universalism.’’ For the last twenty centuries, what has thus been at stake is the metaphysical, historical, and political destitution of the Jewish subject that Paul constructs in order to serve the needs of his cause. The rehabilitation of Paul, besides indirectly deposing the contemporary Jewish political and metaphysical subject, revives the terrible heritage that gave rise to twenty centuries of antisemitism. It is depressing to see self-declared atheist thinkers irresponsibly repeating modes of thinking that the Church has been trying to surmount for years. For the neo-Paulines, beyond their rhetoric and aesthetic philosemitism,20 assume today this deposing of the conditions of existence of the Jews (State of Israel and Jewish communities) which become the obstacle to anti-globalization and at the same time the (negative

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and dialectical) planetary pivot of its progress. Delegitimation of the post-Holocaust forms of Jewish existence is in fact very widespread today in Europe (besides the Islamic world). We find in this respect the way in which Paul constructs transcendence (‘‘the spirit’’) by assigning another (the Jews) to immanence.

The Pauline Operation and the Invention of Jewish Particularism What counts above all for Paul is not universalism but identity. He thinks of the katholikos,21 the morphological framework of the new faith, as an identity that feeds on Jewish identity while destroying it (or at least exhausting it) and taking its place. Israel thus becomes the object of a desire (naturally exposed to the temptation of appropriation and control) as strong as the condemnation Paul directs at it. Everything derives from his ambition to found this ‘‘universalism’’ as a ‘‘new Israel’’: an enterprise that of necessity is deployed in the symbolic (if not carnal) framework of Israel, while Israel exists and continues in its being. The jealousy invoked by Paul against the Jews (Rom. 11:11–15) is a basic trait of katholikos, whose primordial impetus is to appropriate Israel’s symbolic and existential sphere. The problem then posed for Paul is to know what to do with this Israel, which is borne by the Jews, without whom there could be no ‘‘New Israel.’’ Paul is thus led to elaborate an identitarian economy, an economy (oiko-nomia22) of the ‘‘House of Israel,’’ in which Jewish being is constructed (against its will) in a perspective that serves the needs of his ‘‘universalism,’’ in fact, of the specific identity that he is attempting to construct. Catholic universalism will be attained by deposing the Jewish people and reducing them to singularity and particularism. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that this is a universalism minus one (the Jewish people), a universalism constructed to exclude Israel ‘‘according to the flesh,’’ a critical foil for the new identity born of the splitting of Israel. A dialectical system governs this symbolic economy of the Jew as sign, because it involves combining the reprobation and exaltation of Israel in the same logical unity. The fall of Jewish Israel will enable the rise of the ‘‘New Israel.’’ But the Old Israel will also be maintained; otherwise all this rhetorical architecture collapses: Now Israel has rejected God, and you have been shown mercy. (Rom. 11:29) Their failure made it possible for the Gentiles to be saved. But if the rest of the world’s people were helped so much by Israel’s sin and loss, they will be helped even more by their full return. (Rom. 11:11–12) Some of Israel have become stubborn, and they will stay like that until the complete number of you Gentiles has come in. (Rom. 11:25)

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Indeed, the Jews cannot be totally ‘‘lost,’’ since the category of ‘‘Israel’’ remains that of the chosen, of the salvation Paul values. Of necessity he must imagine an ‘‘economical’’ (dialectical) solution in which the Jews will be converted at the end of days (and thus will disappear—at last—as Jews), entering into the body of the Church (note the metaphor of grafting onto the olive tree cited as proof of Paul’s benevolence toward the Jews; rather, it expresses a negation of Judaism, which he abandons, and of the Jews, whom he does not leave in peace, since their conversion will be the sign that Christianity has been accomplished. They will disappear by fulfilling themselves as ‘‘Israel’’ in its Pauline version.23 The Jews will be recognized only when they become Christians, that is, non-Jews. The Pauline reconstruction of the Jew is based on a series of antinomies:24 individual/ universal, Jews/nations, ethnos/katholikos, letter/spirit, body/soul, law/grace, master/slave, egoism/compassion. The play of the letter against the spirit is the archetype of this. It is the mainstay of the Pauline construction of the Jew as sign, both in Paul’s text and as a symbol: the spiritualization of the ‘‘New Israel,’’ the disincarnation and dehistorization of Jewish being, making it apt for transfer through allegory to another entity that will replace it. ‘‘Israel according to the spirit’’ comes from ‘‘Israel according to the flesh’’ and rises up against it. The flesh is execrated but vital. It extinguishes the Jewish people within the category of ‘‘Israel,’’ which is conserved in that the ‘‘New Israel’’ arises there. Paul’s rhetorical manipulation of circumcision is significant in this regard. Paul transforms the sign of the covenant and thus of culture into biological determinism, ethnic tattooing. He reduces it to nature and corporeality in order better to dissociate it from the spirit that it contains (Rom. 2:25): ‘‘For circumcision is indeed profitable if you keep the law; but if you are a breaker of the law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision.’’ Again Paul shifts the meaning of words by dissociating the signifier from its signified: Therefore, if an uncircumcised man keeps the righteous requirements of the law, will not his uncircumcision be counted as circumcision? And will not the physically uncircumcised, if he fulfills the law, judge you who, though having the letter of the law and circumcision, are a transgressor of the law? For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter. (Rom. 2:26–29). This is to take up a teaching of Judaism while ejecting Jews from it: it is ‘‘Israel’’ with the ‘‘Jews’’ removed. The entire Pauline policy of the letter is summed up here: to foreclose the Jew in his flesh, cut off from any sense, to make way for the ‘‘Jew according to the spirit,’’ the Christian, who therefore does not exist outside this foreclosure of the Jew. The same operation will be adopted for the Torah reconstructed in ‘‘Law,’’ which is an invention not deriving from Judaism (except perhaps in the Septuagint of Philo of Alexandria, which brings it into line with the categories of the Greek philosophers),25 a

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law that is, furthermore, destructive, at the origin of sin. The Torah, by contrast, is considered the vehicle of grace, of mastery of rigor (din), without which the world would not exist. Thus, according to the Jewish commentary, Isaac (din), is bound by Abraham (grace) on the altar of Mount Moriah and, unlike Jesus, he is not sacrificed but enthroned as the son. In the Pauline antinomies, the negative element is always represented by the Jew (particular, ethnic, body, letter, law, egotism . . .) but (for the sake of economy) it is integrated into the production of the element with enhanced value (universal, katholikos, spirit, soul, grace, compassion . . .). This is necessary, since the New Israel must rise from the ruins of the Old Israel and take its place. The latter anchors the former. The object of the Pauline operation is to preserve election while removing the Jews. In fact, Paul simply invents a Judaism that did not exist, understanding the election of Israel as a refusal of salvation for other nations. Israel must be blackened in order to exonerate the identity Paul will substitute for it. To do so, Paul elaborates a deficient version of election that accuses the Jews of monopolizing salvation: ‘‘Is God only the God of the Jews? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith?’’ (Rom. 3:29–30). And the Jews ‘‘keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved’’ (1 Thess. 2:15). This version of Judaism does not correspond to the doctrine of the Torah or of the Talmud, which in Paul’s time had already been a work in progress for two centuries. In Judaism, on the conceptual level the election of Israel is the opening of the horizon of salvation for mankind, as the text of Genesis on the election of Abraham shows (‘‘and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you’’; Gen. 12:3). The Talmud, compendium of a boundless discussion, contains a universalistic reading of the Torah.26 The concept of ‘‘righteous Gentiles’’ confirms the idea of equality in salvation: ‘‘There are righteous Gentiles and they have a part in the world to come’’ (Talmud, Sanhedrin 13b, 105a), according to Rabbi Yoshua. However, this salvation, both for Israel and for the nations, is the result of effort. It is not acquired automatically, like the salvation procured by faith in Christ. In this, Judaism does not eliminate the moral trial of life, and therefore the Law is required to form one’s soul. The idea of salvation is the excessive counterpart of the excessive consciousness of sin: ‘‘original sin.’’ Logically, therefore, the Law of Moses has its counterpart for non-Jews. The Talmud defines this as ‘‘the Noahide Law,’’ considered to be at the basis of the morality and salvation of the portion of mankind not subject to the Law of Moses. The rabbis discover this law in Genesis 2:16, at the end of a brilliant interpretation of the verse. In this text, from which Christianity draws the idea of original sin, the Talmud finds, on the contrary, a law for the redemption of all mankind, leading to the same salvation as the Torah for the Jews. If a non-Jew wishes to share Israel’s history, then ‘‘a gentile who engages in study of the Torah is like the high priest,’’ replies the

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Talmud (Avodah Zarah 3a), that is, more than the high priest, since the high priest cannot stand where the gentile stands. Thus the non-Jew’s effort can completely offset the ‘‘Merits of the Fathers ’’ (of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), from which Jews benefit as the fruits of their spiritual ordeal. This explains why there has been little Jewish proselytism: it is not necessary to be Jewish in order to be saved. For Paul, on the contrary, it is necessary to adhere to Jesus’ sacrifice in order to be saved: ‘‘a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law’’ (Rom. 3:28). The crux of the matter is here: Pauline universalism is ideological, and that is why Jews who think otherwise are excluded from it. Conversely, Judaic universalism is legal, and that is why non-Jews are included in it; it concerns acts and not thoughts or beliefs, without the mediation of an instance dispensing salvation. Therefore, the imitation of Christ, identification with the saving sacrifice, is equivalent to denial of the Law, mythicized as the enemy of salvation, in a completely gnostic way: ‘‘If righteousness comes by the law, then Christ is dead in vain’’ (Gal. 2:21). In its Judaic understanding, election is not, therefore, in principle centered on the ego in an identitarian way, ignoring those who do not benefit from it. On the contrary, the covenant that founds it is based on the responsibility of the contracting parties, defined by contractual statutes. Thus in Hebrew, in order to say ‘‘to form a covenant,’’ one says ‘‘to break a covenant’’ (likrot brit). What the covenant breaks is identification with one’s self. The exodus from Egypt brings Egypt’s Pharaonic solipsism crashing down, but it also pushes Israel to consent to heteronomy. (Consider the ‘‘parliamentary process’’ between God and his allies.) Election designates the status of ally in this covenant. Paul interprets it deficiently as a hierarchical principle and a natural privilege. Yet the Jewish people was not founded on an autochthonous basis but in the exodus to the desert. Originally it was not the first born but the last born of the peoples, cut off from them. The Torah begins with the creation of the world and of mankind, not with Mount Sinai. Election is based on a written law, not on a mystery. Paul’s katholikos, by contrast. is corporatist, a body whose members have no contract specifying the terms of their consent, a body whose head is Christ (1 Cor. 12:12–27). Paul lays what will become the foundations of a powerful bureaucracy, the Church. The works of Ernst Kantorowicz have shown that this is the primitive scene of European politics.27

Is Pauline Universalism Altruistic? The Pauline operation is officially justified by the motif of altruism, of the necessity of opening salvation to all mankind instead of keeping it restricted to Jewish egocentrism. This preconceived notion is accepted by all commentators, but it is a religious dogma and not what Pauline discourse implies. Let us examine the flagship text of this dogma: ‘‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female:

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for you are all one in Jesus Christ’’ (Gal. 3:28). We can understand with Hegel the ‘‘surpassing’’ of the master and the slave, at a pinch, that of the Jew and the Greek (although the ‘‘nations’’ [goyim] have no relation to the non-Greeks, who for the Greeks are the ‘‘barbarians’’). However, in the parallelisms thus established, there is a major obstacle: the male and the female. To what does this refer? To the end of distinction between the sexes? This would mean the disappearance of mankind by extinction of its reproduction. Of genders? Did Paul invent queer theory before its time? This would signify the end of differentiation, which is the principle of the creation of the world according to Genesis. In stating this program, Paul tries to justify a conception of being without otherness, all collected in ‘‘spirit’’ and dissociated from the imperfection implied by otherness, which is supposed to stand outside the ego-centered subject and thus to be corporeal and objective—in his opinion, the decadence of the flesh. This appears clearly in a text where he compares conjugal sexual relations with prostitution, placing both in competition with the relation to God. To these ends, he has no qualms about distorting the meaning of a text from the Torah: ‘‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’’ (Gen. 2:24). He writes: ‘‘Do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, ‘The two will become one flesh.’ But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality . . . your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit’’ (1 Cor. 6:14–20). In this way, he diverges from the altruism of the Torah, which is based on differentiation and separation. This is the (very gnostic) apologia for celibacy as a mode of human existence (barring an alternative for those who cannot; see 1 Cor. 7:1–6) and manner of relation to God. It is the opposite of the loving and conjugal model of the covenant characterizing Judaism (cf. the Song of Songs and the prophecy that understands the relationship of the covenant as a conjugal relationship). The ‘‘spiritual body’’ (1 Cor. 15:44–47) that Paul proposes as a model refers to the second ‘‘Adam who is from heaven.’’28 It is clearly chauvinist, asserting that the head of woman is man, and the head of man is Christ, and the head of Christ is God: (1 Cor. 11:3–7) and that ‘‘Man is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man.’’ Indeed, the female must be brought back to the male, model of unity. This is what the announcement of the end of male and female means. The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas thus makes Jesus say about Mary: ‘‘I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven’’ (Ts. 114). Strangely, Badiou accepts this relegation of women to a secondary status. He considers that the veil Paul imposes on women, sign of an ‘‘acceptance’’ of the difference between the sexes, means: that the universality of this declaration includes women who confirm that they are women. . . . It will be objected that this constraint . . . is flagrantly unequal. But such is not the case, on account of the subsequent symmetrization. . . . The necessity of

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traversing and attesting the difference between the sexes in order for it to become indifferent in the universality of the declaration culminates in symmetrical, rather than unilateral, constraints within the contingent realm of customs.29 This chauvinist outcome of the logic of Pauline antinomies implies that mankind’s unity that will transcend identitarian antagonism, the imperfection of otherness, has as its horizon the disappearance of any otherness, of any difference, and not the opening up to others that is the proclaimed and supposed justification of the Pauline operation. Hence, the end of Greek-Jewish difference could also mean bringing all into line with a single exclusive model. What could this be if not that of the Roman Empire, strangely absent from the Pauline antinomy? ‘‘Neither Greek nor Jewish’’—obviously Roman, then. The katholikos thus proclaimed offers to become the imperial ideology of Rome, then cruelly dominating Judea and poised to exterminate it a few decades later. Indeed, three centuries later, the empire became Christian.

The Everlasting Sacrifice Whether in its foundation (based on the exclusion of one for the advent of ‘‘all’’) or in its accomplishment (the ‘‘recall of the Jews’’), Pauline universalism is sacrificial in nature. Its sophisticated dialectic lays the ground for the sacrificial treatment of the Jews that would be deployed for twenty centuries in Europe and that is being revived today.30 The dialectical relationship that underpins it is characteristic of the attraction-repulsion of desire and sacredness: attraction for the Israel signified, repulsion for the sign. This manner of maintaining Israel while rejecting it so as to identify oneself, transferring sameness to the Jews and presenting oneself as their other, has proved particularly pernicious in the course of history. Israel thus became for Europe a desired object to be appropriated while exorcising the anguish of those who happen to be Jews. This is the height of mimetic rivalry, and it is hard to know what to make of Rene´ Girard’s theory that the end of mimetic rivalry followed the advent of Christianity. It should be noted that Christianity, according to Girard, is an ideal that he feels has been betrayed by the Church. The problem is that, with Paul, we are in an era that predates the Church, still in the pre-Christian Jewish world. I subscribe to the fact that Paul is a Jew. Such rivalry, which increases desire and the desirable tenfold, was certainly a motivating force behind the rapid expansion of the new religion that ‘‘the militant’’ Paul spread indefatigably: it was proposed to the Romans, who were told that they had been preferred over the chosen people, the Jews, of whom they had perhaps never heard, so that the Romans could now benefit from their very rare and desirable election. There is no better way to enhance the value of a message than by arousing mimetic rivalry with a target that

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gives it exceptional power. Thus Christian identity affirmed itself in relation to the Jews (the New Israel), and against them (the Old Israel): by projecting onto them the flesh, the condemned letter, so that Christians could affirm themselves in the ‘‘spirit.’’ The Jews thus assumed the role of the pharmakos of ancient Greece. The pharmakos was supported and revered for a year by the city; at the end of this period, he was beaten, expelled, or killed, in a rite of purification. Have not Europe’s recurrent anti-Semitic crises illustrated this fatal cycle for the last twenty centuries? Since the French emancipation of the Jews in 1791 (taking only this pivotal date), Europe has experienced such a crisis every forty years. In the classical period of this rite, this sacrifice was performed at Easter, the festival celebrating the Passion: the Jews accused of the deicide of Jesus, who died in order to save mankind, were the target of bloody pogroms. The death and the suffering weighing upon Christian consciences (since Christ died to save them) were transferred to the Jews, who were accused of having inflicted (albeit a saving) death on Jesus. During a new antiSemitic crisis in the early twenty-first century, we may be at an interim moment in such a process. Is the delegitimation of the Jewish people, for the moment symbolical if not legal, the harbinger of a new bloody development? The Sacredness of Europe The Jews, who in this way became totems (desirable) and taboos (detestable), the glorious pariahs of Europe, have thus for the last twenty centuries embodied sacredness in its eyes. As we know from Durkheim, sacredness is the product par excellence of a dialectical system of attraction-repulsion: their heterogeneity constitutes the limit between the sacred and the profane, which is of more importance than the nature and the contents of either. Europe is born from a founding exclusion of the Jews. Therefore Jewish is revised and maintained as a sign each time that a swerve in European identity occurs: such updatings are totemic moments, during which European identity first is regenerated within in its original waters, then rejects them once the new version of identity has fully crystallized. After having been revered, acclaimed, and supported (because he makes atonement possible), the pharmakos is beaten, excluded, or killed (because he carries guilt away with him). This diastolic-systolic movement represents the heartbeat of Europe. In the Middle Ages, Jews were enclosed in the letter, the body, and the notion of a people: they were the foreign par excellence, the only ‘‘people’’ (shut up in their ghettos) within the (supposedly universal) empire of the double-edged sword, the papacy and the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, embodying Catholicism, the ‘‘spirit.’’ Then the Reformation arrived, advocating a return to the Hebrew letter in renewed translation of the Bible. The body and the people similarly reemerged in the modern nation and the nation-state, which then sprang up in Europe against the empire and the pope. What happened then? Until that time, the Jews had been the only people, as opposed to European universalism. Now they suddenly lost their attribute as a people,

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and their status became progressively that of individuals, whose only relation was religious and not national. This would be decreed by the French emancipators in 1791. In the words of the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre: ‘‘Nothing for the Jews as a nation, everything for the Jews as individuals.’’ The Jewish nation would be detested (and still is in the guise of the State of Israel), as is shown by all the anti-Semitic myths of the modern period (the ‘‘world Jewish plot,’’ ‘‘tribalism,’’ the accusation that Zionism is as violent as Nazism and racism), whereas the Catholic empire broke up into nation-states. The Jew is still the excluded other of the West, the dialectical referent of its self-definition. In his two Israels Paul constructed an infernal machine that is at the origin of Europe’s congenital antiSemitism, as can be affirmed by a recent crisis, sixty years after the Holocaust: namely, in ceremonies conducted to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The Contemporary Return of the Jewish Question What is happening today, if not a new stage in this process? Shock at the Holocaust has raised Israel to the status of a taboo, the sacred point for an entire civilization; this can be seen in the memorial ceremonies across Europe that marked the sixtieth anniversary of the ‘‘liberation’’ of Auschwitz.31 At the same time, the State of Israel and Jewish diasporic communities are demonized, accused of atrocities against the Palestinians (who are anything but innocent) comparable to those of the Nazis, or of ‘‘tribalism.’’ The early twentyfirst century is witnessing an explosion of anti-Semitism, especially among leftist, antiglobalist movements, that is strongly marked by the dialectics of the dual movement I have been tracing. The word anti-Semitism has been forbidden, but when someone decrees in his living room that the State of Israel is a historical error and that it must disappear, what is he supporting if not the extermination of five million Jews? Please note, however, say the holders of such an opinion, this is not ‘‘anti-Semitism’’ but ‘‘antiZionism.’’ Furthermore, there are Jews, and even Israelis, who preach this idea. But we should not be surprised: Paul was a precursor of this syndrome of self-hatred. Moreover, the return to Paul is occurring, at this very moment. It could reveal that something else is brewing, for instance, a new age as Europe emerges from modernity. At a time when postmodernists decree the end of the nation-state and are dazzled by the (profoundly totalitarian) dream of a world state that is virtuous, multicultural, of mixed blood, they execrate the Jews by their persistence in maintaining an overly strong group identity and, above all, for mapping it onto the nation-state of Israel. To judge from the historical experience of the Jews, the best of worlds that they preach greatly resembles the medieval empire. The rehabilitation of Paul thus takes on an unexpected significance. Besides reaffirming classic European identity, it exhibits a classic search for transcendence and for the sacredness needed to legitimize a new power. The self-transcendence of Europe is again attained by a reductio ad corporem, ad populum, ad litteram of the Jews, namely, by again making them taboo. The supposed surmounting of this again allows the

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pleroma of Europe, this time ‘‘globalized.’’ Still moral and virtuous, at the summit of being, but . . . imperial. We must hope, like Marx, that history repeats itself as farce. Yet in this respect, Europe’s most recent history is in no way amusing. We can see all too well what is brewing with this reactivation of history’s ‘‘first militant.’’ It is a corporealization of the collectivity as the masses, an insidious return to totalitarianism and to a single party. Criticism of the nation-state then reveals its true colors: it heralds a denunciation of liberal democracy (called ‘‘the market’’). We can now understand the fascination of the postglobalists (in particular, Antonio Negri) with the Islamic umma, another aspect of the ‘‘multitude.’’ ‘‘Postmodernism’’ is thereby revealed to be merely neo-Marxism. Marxism’s incapacity to think the nation and, more generally, the people is one of its constituent characteristics, at the root of its bitter historic and intellectual failure. The neo-Marxists, following Benjamin, in fact try to revamp Marxism, making it into Messianism, a quest for transcendence, and, just like Benjamin or Marx in his On the Jewish Question, they find the Jew as sign to be an obstacle in their path, in the form of Israel, the symbol of evil, of the capitalism of yesterday, of globalization today, but also a symbolic fertilizer, rich in inspiration. The Mosaic State still emerges as the model of the democratic republic in face of the Pauline empire.32 It is more than ever a powerful source of inspiration for democracy, the theoretical proving ground from which to reflect on the politics of the twenty-first century. —Translated by Ste´phanie Nakache

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Paul and the Political Theology of the Neighbor Kenneth Reinhard

Saint Paul has recently become the object of intense interest for a group of philosophers, psychoanalysts, and political theorists not usually associated with biblical topics. This recent body of work has emphasized the radical implications of Paul’s thinking, his continued value for us today—believers or not—theoretically, politically, and existentially. Alain Badiou reads Paul’s experience of the risen Christ as prototypical of what he calls an ‘‘event,’’ an occasional, immanent interruption of the dominant situations of politics, science, art, or love that can be extended through a practice of ‘‘fidelity,’’ with revolutionary consequences for both subjectivity and collectivity. Giorgio Agamben reads Paul as a Messianic Jew whose urgent experience of transformed temporality and possibilities of freedom offers new resources for contemporary theory and politics. Agamben’s work on Paul is largely dependent on two precursors, Jacob Taubes (to whom his book is dedicated) and Martin Heidegger, whose early seminar on Paul lays the ground for Agamben’s project. In the lectures on Paul delivered shortly before his death, Jacob Taubes read the Letter to the Romans as both a theory and an act of political theology. Taubes’s notion of political theology is indebted to that of Carl Schmitt (and his Paul lectures were undertaken at Schmitt’s urging), but his lectures also resist and revise Schmitt’s ideas and suggest consequences quite different from those imagined by Schmitt. By following Taubes’s interpretation of Paul as it passes by way of Schmitt, Benjamin, and Freud, we can begin to describe the Christian sources of what I would like to call the political theology of the neighbor. For Taubes, Paul’s messianic theory involves an account of social love that only Freud’s theories of love and group psychology begin to explain. Taubes finally sees Paul and Freud as allies in the struggle to loosen the burden of the relationship to the Father and the paternal law—a struggle, ultimately, between two modes of political theology.

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My project here is to find support in these readings for the articulation of a political theology of the neighbor in the Pauline letters, one that does not simply oppose but acts as a supplement to the traditional political theology of the sovereign. This essay is part of a larger project that reconstructs a political theology of the neighbor from its biblical source texts through their modern repetitions, repudiations, and reinventions. The fundamental gesture that underwrites political theology is the attribution of at least some features of the monotheistic divinity to the person or function of the sovereign.1 In Schmitt’s account, just as God may decide to suspend the laws of nature through a miracle, so the sovereign may declare a ‘‘state of exception’’ in which the laws of the land are temporarily suspended. I have suggested elsewhere that this structure also underlies Freud’s description of the primal horde and his account of the unconscious structure of both primitive groups and modern communities. I argue that the legitimacy of such exceptional political powers is underwritten by the love owed God in biblical discourse (and transferred from there to political theories of sovereignty) for the three great acts that express God’s infinite love for mankind: creation, revelation, and redemption.2 In return, mankind is commanded to love God ‘‘with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might’’ (Deut. 6:5), although this love can never fully reciprocate the boundless gift of God’s love. Similarly, politics, according to Schmitt, implies an incommensurate and asymmetrical bond of fealty between ruler and ruled, a political love that both constitutes and legitimates the sovereign’s ability to act in the exceptional and unpredictable ways that are required by the contingencies of political life.3 But, as every reader of the Torah and its extensive history of commentary, Jewish and Christian, knows, there are two great injunctions of love: for God, and for ‘‘the neighbor.’’ This second mode, although it is often taken as a banal moral truism, has proven in many ways to be more inscrutable than the first, and has provoked more controversy. I will argue that neighbor love constitutes the other side of political theology and that the link between it and the commandment to love God must be restored in political-theological thinking, both for historical-textual reasons and for what it can add to our political and existential possibilities of living today.

Paul’s Critique of Jesus In his 1987 lectures in Heidelberg, Taubes argues that Paul’s letters radically transform the modes of both political and theological thinking available in the earlier Jewish world and its Christian sects. Taubes asserts that Romans is a ‘‘political declaration of war on the Caesar,’’ that is, that the critique of nomos in Romans must be read as addressed not only to Jewish law, but also to Hellenistic and Roman legal and political structures more generally.4 For Taubes, the singularity and force of Paul’s political-theological thinking lies in his disconnection of the commandments to love God and the neighbor. Taubes

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argues that Paul’s isolation of neighbor love must be understood as an ‘‘absolutely revolutionary act,’’ as a polemic against Jesus, who, according to the Gospels, presents the commandments together as the embodiment of what is enduring in the law. Jesus’ conjunction of the commandments found in Deuteronomy to love God and in Leviticus to love your neighbor as yourself is, according to Taubes, ‘‘one of the deepest recollections of the [early Christian] congregation.’’5 In Mark and Matthew, Jesus is represented as aligning love of God and love of neighbor as the ‘‘first’’ and ‘‘second’’ principles of the law, virtually fusing them into a single commandment, the ‘‘greatest’’ of all, and later commentators often refer to them in the singular as ‘‘the dual commandment.’’ The pairing of the two commandments may have been a commonplace in Second Temple Jewish thought as well, where love of God and love of neighbor were linked to the two tablets of the Ten Commandments, and thus are understood as a synecdoche for Torah itself.6 When taken up by Jesus in the gospels, the conjunction seems uncontroversial, a truism without obvious polemical thrust, accepted by his Jewish audience as orthodox.7 In the Letter to the Romans (one of two places where Paul cites Leviticus 19:18, among others where he alludes to it), we find a much more developed presentation of neighbor love than those in the gospels—with no association whatsoever to love of God: Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. (Rom. 13:8–10) We will have more to say on this passage later, but for the moment let us turn directly to Taubes’s comments on it: This sounds sentimental and so on, but it really isn’t at all. This is a highly polemical text, polemical against Jesus. . . . Paul doesn’t issue a dual commandment, but rather makes them equivocal; I almost want to say, following Koje`ve, that he pulls a Feuerbach here. Forgive me, Feuerbach doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in this context, but it is the love not of the Lord, but of the neighbor that is the focus here. No dual commandment, but rather one commandment. I regard this as an absolutely revolutionary act.8 Taubes argues that the only way to understand this passage in Romans is as a direct attack on a position conventionally associated with Jesus. The combination of the two commandments, to love God and the neighbor, Taubes argues, ‘‘belongs to the primordial core of Jesus’s Christian tradition. And that Paul couldn’t have missed. This is why this is a polemical formulation: this and only this is valid.’’9 But if Paul’s isolation of the

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command to love the neighbor from the command to love God is the revolutionary act of the Letter to the Romans—on a par, in some sense, with Feuerbach’s evacuation of God from Christianity—in what way is this so? What are the political-theological implications of this polemic? Taubes does not immediately clarify the significance of Paul’s excision, but he returns to the question indirectly in the second part of his lectures by examining Paul’s comments on love in Romans and elsewhere. Referring to 1 Corinthians 13:13, where Paul writes ‘‘And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love,’’ Taubes asks, ‘‘Why is love the greatest? . . . what does love mean?’’10 Love, Taubes argues, will continue to have the function of need for the subject of redemption: I am not centered in myself . . . I have a need. The other person is needed. . . . Now it is of course possible to say: If the kingdom of God arrives and everyone is resurrected, what do I need love for then? Then we’ll be perfect! The point in Paul is that even in perfection I am not an I but we are a we. Meaning that need consists in perfection itself.11 Faith and hope are fulfilled in the messianic era, realized and resolved: we will see clearly what are now matters of faith, and we will become then what now we hope for. But love in the state of redemption will retain its restless drive. Love will not be satisfied, but remains intrinsically needing, demanding, desiring in relation to the other. Hence when we read that love is the ‘‘fulfillment of the law,’’ as Romans 13 argues, we must not misread this as implying that love will be ‘‘fulfilled’’ and transformed in the redeemed world. The law may perhaps be fulfilled in love, but love will continue to be the aim that directs us, rather than a goal we arrive at. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, ‘‘love never ends . . . make love your aim’’ (13:8; 14:1). Indeed, it is as neighbor love that love persists in its nonsatisfaction, according to Taubes, and that will constitute the fundamental structure of the redeemed community. Taubes argues, against the gnostic account of perfection as self-sufficiency, that Christian redemption is not merely individual but always communal: ‘‘the ontology, even of redemption, brings in need and presupposes the body of Christ, a commonality . . . in our need we are together in the body of Christ.’’12 Hence neighbor-love is the singular commandment for Paul, according to Taubes, insofar as it expresses the plural, communal nature of the subject of redemption, the loving multitude that ‘‘we’’ will be in the heavenly city. Moreover, by locating this community of the spirit in the ‘‘body of Christ,’’ Paul brings out its material character and situation. Love of the neighbor will abide as a commandment, not suspended by the new dispensation, because it itself constitutes redemption, it is the embodied content and political structure of the redeemed life. According to Taubes, we can find the traces—or perhaps the symptoms—of this aspect of Paul’s thought in the Marcionite heresy, which develops out of it. Taubes suggests that Paul’s scission of the dual commandment in Romans is the hidden source of

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Marcion’s division of God into the wrathful ‘‘demiurge’’ of creation reported in the Hebrew Bible and the ‘‘Stranger God’’ who brings redemption through Christ. Taubes’s point here is that Paul’s elimination of the imperative to love God is part and parcel of the same impulse that leads him to deemphasize God as creator to focus almost exclusively on God the redeemer, which is how Marcion reads him. The church, of course, rejected Marcion’s interpretation, which scuttled the entire Hebrew Bible as the product of a nonredemptive God, and instead constituted itself squarely contra Marcion by reading the Torah redemptively, as part of the Christian canon. Taubes writes: This Gnostic tendency begins in Paul, and my question was: Where is this beginning? After all, he could easily have introduced the dual commandment with a sentence in 1 Corinthians 13 and especially in Romans 13. . . . It’s not a question of showing, pedantically, where Marcion diverges from Paul; that’s easily done. The question is where he does capture an intention—and he does take himself to be Paul’s true disciple. . . . God’s love, which Paul presumes, is very, very, far away. By powers of earthly and heavenly provenance . . . this love of God, of the father of Jesus Christ, is interrupted. The ray does not get through. Were it not for the fact that the face . . . of Christ is present, is there.13 For Marcion, God the creator is the deus absconditus; it is only through his reflection in ‘‘the face of Jesus’’ as redeemer that we have access to him. Taubes argues that, despite the church’s rejection of his ideas as heretical, Marcion is hitting on something in Paul that is otherwise buried in the development of the dominant Christian tradition. Paul’s ‘‘polemic’’ against Jesus, we might say, is spurred by Jesus’ ‘‘Judaizing’’ tendencies in linking love of God and love of neighbor, his failure to fully realize his own singular and necessary role in salvation—that there is no way to the Father except through the Son. For Paul, Jesus represents a new possibility of redemption that makes any previous path nugatory. This must be made manifest not only in a new positive credo of love, but also in the negative act of sundering what in the law had been fused. To expand on Taubes’s argument, we can say that there is no way to redemption except through love of the neighbor, for if Jesus is the incarnation of the father, he is also, and more immediately for Paul, the embodiment of the neighbor.

Be Subject to the Governing Authorities But does this mean, according to Taubes, that Paul gives the love of God no role in redemption? By no means! We must continue to follow Taubes’s argument as it passes through texts by Benjamin and Freud in order to understand the relationship of love of neighbor to love of God in political theology. Taubes insists that we can only make sense

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of Paul’s exclusive citation of neighbor love in the context of the rest of Romans 13, which divides into three parts, the first (13:1–7) on ‘‘obedience to authority,’’ the second (13:8–10) on ‘‘neighbor love as the fulfillment of the law,’’ and the third (13:11–14) on the rapidly approaching end of days and the exigencies of living in the brief time that remains. The first part of Romans 13 is famously controversial, potentially embarrassing to those who would read Paul in the service of ‘‘liberation theology.’’ The passage begins: ‘‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God as appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment’’ (13:1–2). New Testament scholar Douglass Moo writes, ‘‘It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the history of the interpretation of Rom. 13:1–7 is the history of attempts to avoid what seems to be its plain meaning.’’14 It is not clear to me that this ‘‘plain meaning’’ is really so plain, but there is no doubt that critics have frequently felt the need to apologize for this passage. Some scholars assume that a later redactor added it, since it appears to contradict Paul’s statements elsewhere; others argue that Paul must have been responding to a specific political situation in the Roman church (perhaps a tax rebellion) and that his call to respect civil political authority must be read as occasional and localized; still others argue that Paul is calling for ‘‘submission’’ or ‘‘subjection’’ to the authorities (the Greek word is hu¯potasso¯), but not necessarily full obedience, leaving open a window for the religious duty of inner dissent or civil disobedience. Other readers argue that Paul’s assertion of secular authority is conditional, meant only for the moment, for soon time itself will end—and Taubes’s reading is not far from this position. The first and third parts of Romans 13, Taubes argues, are linked insofar as the parousia expected any day will dissolve all fleshly sovereignty; there is no reason to disobey Rome and call down its harsh sanctions, for the end is nigh. For now, earthly authorities must be respected, earthly debts must be honored, but tomorrow, as Taubes writes, ‘‘the whole palaver, the entire swindle’’ will be over, so bide your time and live cautiously.15 Taubes’s point, however, does not seem to be simply that Paul is arguing from expediency, that the rapidly approaching end of all things renders existing political structures meaningless. What is his argument about this passage? Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, Aleida Assmann, and Jan Assmann, the three authors of the ‘‘Afterword’’ to Taubes’s lectures in Heidelberg, question whether Taubes’s messianic political theology can really take into account Romans 13: ‘‘If Taubes was concerned with an (apocalyptic) confrontation between imperial and messianic sovereignty, then isn’t this reading made impossible by the quietism of Romans 13—a text which demands accommodation to a state power that is declared to be legitimate?’’16 This remains an unanswered question for Hartwich and the Assmanns. In order to approach it, they establish a key distinction within the general notion of political theology and oppose Schmitt and Taubes in these terms:

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Political theology is centrally concerned with the embodiment of divine sovereignty. But at this point there already clearly emerge two differing interpretations of political theology. In the one case divine sovereignty is embodied in the people. The explosive power of Israel’s political theology consists in the fact that here the people replaces the sovereign as the incarnation of divine sovereignty. The earthly sovereign is the representative of the God-King; the people is the partner in the alliance with God. . . . It is from these differing interpretations of the embodiment of divine sovereignty that the dual (and even contradictory) meaning within the concept of the political is to be derived. This meaning refers, on the one hand—in keeping with the Greek meaning of polis, ‘‘city’’—to society, community, the public sphere, that is . . . the ‘‘social.’’ . . . But, on the other hand, and above all, the concept of the political refers to sovereignty, to the structure and organization of commanding power in the social sphere. The political thus has a horizontal and a vertical dimension. . . . The same is true of the concept of political theology.17 Hartwich and the Assmanns describe this horizontal dimension of the political as the communal axis of political theology: ‘‘For [Taubes], political theology is first and foremost the doctrine of the formation of a Ver-Bund (as he calls it), a union-covenant in the sense of a people of God.’’18 They describe this as the Jewish perspective that arises after the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah (in 586 b.c.e.), where grief for the loss of political sovereignty was displaced into hopes for its messianic restoration. Whereas Schmitt’s position remains ‘‘Christian,’’ focused on the vertical, hierarchical nature of sovereignty, Hartwich and the Assmanns argue that Taubes takes the Jewish perspective, where the political is understood as a question of ‘‘religious communization and its binding powers,’’ manifested and deployed through a discourse of covenantal messianism. This distinction between two types of political theology is very helpful; indeed, it parallels my distinction between the political theologies of sovereign and neighbor. But we can’t fully understand either Schmitt or Taubes by reading them as simply embodying two opposing political theologies, one Christian, the other Jewish. These two axes are internal to political theology, and as such represent noncontradictory polarities, the one supplementing, rather than opposing, the other. If political theology crucially involves a theory of decision (as nontheorizable, purely contingent), this should not be construed as a decision to be made between the positions of Schmitt and Taubes or between the competing claims of sovereignty and community, let alone Judaism and Christianity. These supplementary modalities are intrinsic to political theology, and are expressed as such in any simple opposition of Taubes and Schmitt.19 Indeed, Taubes does not apologize for the ‘‘quietism’’ of Romans 13 by claiming that it is negated by the messianic urgency expressed in the chapter’s conclusion or that it is a temporary expedient that will soon be unnecessary. If Paul meant that the coming end of the world obviated all questions of

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secular authority, wouldn’t he have expressed it in terms of ‘‘indifference,’’ as he does in regard to the question of obedience to Jewish ceremonial law?20 Taubes’s point here is more complicated and requires following him in his close reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘‘Theological-Political Fragment,’’ where Benjamin presents a model of messianism that reconceives the political-theological relationship between the divine and the creaturely: Only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic. For this reason nothing historical can relate itself on its own account to anything Messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be set as a goal. From the standpoint of history it is not the goal, but the end. Therefore the order of the profane cannot be built up on the idea of the Divine Kingdom, and therefore theocracy has no political, but only a religious meaning.21 Benjamin’s notion of political theology here is not based on the analogy of the powers of God and kings, nor on divine investiture of the earthly sovereign, nor on the monarch’s Godlike ability to decide on the state of exception. Rather, this messianic account of political theology is founded on the absolute disjunction of the sacred and profane realms; the Messiah enters not to complete history, to provide its final chapter, but as already outside history, to declare its termination. We recall Benjamin’s critique of historicism in ‘‘On the Concept of History,’’ where he describes the historical-materialist perspective opened up by messianic thinking: ‘‘every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.’’22 Benjamin does not suggest a notion of political theology based on the continuity between the cities of God and humanity; the theological ideal cannot serve as a template or goal for human progress. Rather, messianism articulates a radical cut that interrupts human history and any narratives of linear or dialectical development it may tell itself. It is the ‘‘end’’ that may come at any moment, and, as such, it is experienced as the release of every instant of history from its apparent spatiotemporal determinations. Benjamin’s account may seem to violate what might be imagined as political theology’s necessary premise: that there is (or should be) a commingling of the ‘‘political’’ and the ‘‘theological,’’ on some level. But this precisely is its power, that it insists on the radical discursive and operative separation of politics and religion, while presenting an account of their strong relationship, where one constitutes the limit, the outside, of the other—an outside that may appear inside the political, at any moment and anywhere.23 This catastrophic messianism is experienced not as a gradualism of world historical progress through negation and sublation, but as a natural history of decay. Benjamin describes the world we live in as ‘‘profane,’’ defined by its pursuit of ‘‘happiness,’’ worldly success, and as such it follows a trajectory opposed to that of the messianic. Nevertheless, the intensities of the two vectors reinforce each other:

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The order of the profane should be erected on the idea of happiness. The relation of this order to the Messianic is one of the essential teachings of the philosophy of history. . . . Just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in the opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The profane, therefore, although not itself a category of this Kingdom, is a decisive category of its quietest approach. For in happiness all that is earthly seeks its downfall . . . .Whereas, admittedly, the immediate Messianic intensity of the heart, of the inner man in isolation, passes through misfortune, as suffering. To the spiritual restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality, corresponds a worldly restitution that leads to the eternity of downfall, and the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal totality, the rhythm of Messianic nature, is happiness. For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away. To strive after such passing, even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism.24 The profane world of politics hastens the coming of the messianic era not by aspiring to emulate it, but by intensifying its own profanity, and thereby speeding its fall. The more the world follows its intrinsic drive to ‘‘happiness,’’ the more natural it becomes, subject to ‘‘passing away,’’ eternal decay, entropy.25 According to Freud, the human search for ‘‘happiness’’ follows the rhythms of the pleasure and reality principles, in which homeostasis provides a transitional respite on the way to death. Insofar as the profane world’s embrace of ‘‘happiness’’ aligns it with natural decay, it participates in a historical materialism that Benjamin here calls ‘‘nihilism’’ and that Taubes associates with Nietzsche. This must be distinguished from the purely private relationship to messianism as the longing for spiritual restoration, what Benjamin calls an ‘‘intensity of the heart.’’ Such personal messianism seeks redemption through the ‘‘suffering’’ of the self and can only be experienced in the historical world as factionalism and alienation. Thus it has no political implications, and, as Benjamin writes, there is no notion even of ‘‘theocracy’’ that can be built on this purely inner experience. Taubes also insists on the difference between Benjamin’s ‘‘substantial’’ messianism and an aesthetic messianism he, rightly or not, associates with Adorno. Taubes claims that, whereas for Adorno messianism is merely a speculative concept, for Benjamin it is a much more serious matter, something ‘‘hard’’ and real.26 The messianic element (the possibility of interrupting historical teleology) cannot be introduced into world politics through the emulation of divine models, but only by the human becoming more human, more creaturely, by intensifying the cut between the earthly and the divine.27 Taubes argues that Benjamin’s notion of the natural history of decay involves the same political theology as what Paul describes as the ‘‘futility of creation,’’ which is expressed existentially in his recommendation to live in the messianic moment ho¯s me¯—

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‘‘as if not’’—suspending every act of life in its very execution.28 According to Taubes, Benjamin’s notion of ‘‘nihilism’’ is remarkably similar to Paul’s account of the difficult experience of life leading up to the final parousia. Here is what Paul says about this in Romans 8: I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole of creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. (18–23) Just as in the passages where Paul advises his followers to live as if not, this account of a world created ‘‘in futility’’ is precisely what makes it political for Benjamin. The fact that we recognize ourselves as unwilling creatures of a world in ‘‘bondage to decay’’ (douleias te¯s phthoras), slaves to a suffering creation, reveals the weak, transient foundations of political reality, and opens the possibility of its radical transformation. Taubes comments, ‘‘I see Benjamin as the exegete of the ‘nature’ of Romans 8, of decay, and of Romans 13, nihilism as world politics.’’29 (74). Thus Taubes does not apologize for the ‘‘quietism’’ of Romans 13 by arguing that all secular political authority will soon be eliminated, replaced by the coming messianic era of redemption. Rather, the political order in its decadence is precisely what will bring about the messianic era. Moreover, Paul’s mixed metaphors of ‘‘rebirth’’ and ‘‘adoption’’ in Romans 8 suggests the Marcionite division of God (and Paul’s division of the obligation to love) into two distinct halves: if the world in its flawed and futile state of creation suffers ‘‘labor pains’’ preceding rebirth, the subjects who inhabit that world await adoption (huiothesia: that is, Paul’s figure is not simply that a new (Christian) heir will be adopted by God, replacing the originally chosen, ‘‘natural’’ (Jewish) child, as is often assumed by commentators. Creation, being both ‘‘in bondage to decay’’ and groaning with ‘‘labor pains,’’ signifies the ineluctable condition of the flesh and earthly institutions, waxing and waning, growing and rotting. ‘‘Adoption’’ not only signifies a new spiritual legitimation of inheritance that installs a new heir, but also and more crucially implies that another parent awaits the subject of redemption: the God of creation, the ‘‘natural’’ parent according to the flesh, will cede to an unnatural parent, the God of redemption. Hence we should not read love of God as simply missing or excluded from Romans 13, but as marked in its absence. To obey Caesar is not to take the safe course and bide

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one’s time before the parousia but to hasten the advent of redemption by participating in the decadence of the law—not, by any means, through breaking the law, but by obeying it. Taubes’s insight into Romans 13 is truly astonishing and does not stumble over the acknowledgement of secular authority, as Hartwich and the Assmanns suggest. Moreover, we can extend Taubes’s reading by considering the pericope on obedience to authority, often considered to be a later editorial interpellation, as standing in the place of the missing injunction to love God. That is, obedience to Caesar conspicuously holds open the place of love of God, neither canceling nor advancing but suspending it, and preventing any earthly figure from fully representing it. Indeed, if the final messianic part of chapter 13, where all human law will be fulfilled by divine love, is related to the policy of political acquiescence recommended in the first part, it can only be by way of the middle section, and the account of neighbor love presented there, that marks the synaptic leap between Roman authority and the redeemed world: Owe no one anything, except to love one another [alleilon]; for the one who loves another [heteros] has fulfilled [pleroo¯] the law. The commandments, ‘‘You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,’’ and any other commandment, are summed up [anakephalaioutai] in this word, ‘‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor [ple¯sion]; therefore love is the fulfilling [ple¯ro¯ma] of the law. (Rom. 13: 8–10) According to Paul, the laws of Torah are ‘‘summed up’’ in the sense of placed under the heading of neighbor love, which is thus a metonymy that stands as an abbreviation, a part taken to represent the whole law. This is very close to Hillel’s famous dictum in Tractate Shabbat: ‘‘what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is commentary thereof; go and learn it’’ (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a). But for Paul neighbor love is more than that; it also fulfills the law as such: to practice neighbor love is to practice the whole law, synecdochally. Neighbor love is a hologram for God’s law as such, the fragment that expresses the whole, and in fulfilling the law it also fills it up, brings it to completion, even conclusion. Nevertheless, as we saw before, neighbor-love is also a law that remains infinite, open, unfulfillable, unsatisfiable. Whereas Paul has just urged obedience to the law of Caesar—above all, the discharge of all debts (‘‘Pay to all what is due them’’)—the one exception to this rule of full payment is the love for the neighbor, which is a debt that cannot be amortized: ‘‘Owe no one anything, except to love one another.’’ The law of neighbor love represents an ongoing practice, the very texture of the messianic world, a law we can never be done with, even in redemption. Nevertheless its practice completely fulfills the law. Indeed, there is a verbal echo between ‘‘neighbor’’ (ple¯sion) and ‘‘fulfillment’’ (ple¯ro¯ma) in Paul’s letter: love of the neighbor, we might say, is always fulfilling, but never fulfilled.

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Taubes, Paul, and Freud In his 1957 essay ‘‘Religion and the Future of Psychoanalysis,’’ Taubes argues that the goals of both Paul and Freud are finally the same: release from the burden of guilt for the murder of the Primal Father. But whereas, according to Taubes at this early date, Paul’s proclamation of the good news is eschatologically ‘‘delusional’’ in its belief that guilt can be washed away, Freud sees the authentically tragic structure of guilt clearly and resigns himself to living without hope of redemption. For Freud, according to Taubes, the history of Western civilization is an endless series of failed attempts to expiate the primal crime of murdering the Father through sacrificial violence, and Christianity is simply one more iteration of this futile compulsion to repeat. In his lectures in Heidelberg thirty years later, Taubes revised his account of Freud and Paul, seeing even closer connection between their projects. At the end of his life, Taubes comes to regard Freud’s program as not merely analytical in the sense of producing knowledge of a situation in which it cannot intervene, but as ‘‘subversive.’’ Now he locates Freud alongside Paul, as partners in pursuit of a fundamental revolutionary problematic: ‘‘How is it possible to suspend the law?’’30 Once again, Taubes raises this question in relation to the radicalization of neighbor love. As part of a series of lengthy citations from Moses and Monotheism and other Freudian texts, Taubes recounts the Oedipal version of the Jewish-Christian relationship: ‘‘Judaism had been a religion of the father; Christianity became a religion of the son. The old God the Father fell back behind Christ; Christ, the Son, took his place, just as every son had hoped to do in primeval times.’’31 ( Taubes comments: ‘‘This is also a contribution to the problem of the dual commandment and its radicalization in the love command: the focus on the son, on the human being; the father is no longer included.’’32 For Taubes, Paul is the first psychoanalyst—and, we might suggest, the first Lacanian. His radical intervention is to make a cut, a break; not, however, as is often claimed, the break between ‘‘the law’’ and ‘‘love,’’ but between the law to love God (the Father) and the law to love the neighbor, embodied in Jesus, God’s Son. The commandment to love God with ‘‘all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might’’ is the purest embodiment of the law’s impossible demands and the infinite guilt for our failure to love absolutely that is its result. How, we might ask, can we find it in ourselves to love anyone else, let alone a neighbor, given this overwhelmingly absolute call to love God? The key ‘‘act’’ of Paul as apostle is neither to add anything to the law nor to take anything away from it, but to divide it from within. The commandment to love God is excised from its place beside the commandment to love the neighbor for the sake of freeing us all—Christians, Jews, and all others—from the guilt induced by the weight of the paternal law. This is not in any sense to diminish the role of God the Father or his laws, but to create a breathing space, a realm for living in the narrow place, not beyond but between the laws. In the final words of his lectures, Taubes suggests we are at a new beginning:

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Only now can an interpretation of Paul be begun—on an entirely new level. In essence I have done nothing more than to present to you prolegomena to these passages in Freud, under the yoke of philology. . . . So: Begin anew to interpret Paul! . . . I believe that Freud, so to speak, enters into the role of Paul, of the Paul who supposedly brings redemption only phantasmatically, while Freud realizes it through this new method of healing, which is not only an individual method but also a theory of culture. Freud is a doctor not only of the individual, but a doctor of culture.33 For Taubes, both Pauline Christianity and psychoanalysis are ‘‘Jewish sciences’’ that attempt to transform the way we live under the burden of the paternal law. Freud enters into the place of Paul and continues his work by striving to liberate us from the burden imposed by the obscenely cruel paternal agency that we harbor within ourselves.34 By understanding the relationship between the psychoanalytic and Pauline accounts of love, we are able to qualify the role of the decisionist structure that Schmitt attributes to political theology. To love, even—or perhaps especially—when it is commanded, can never simply be a decision. When we say that we fall in love we acknowledge that love is not a freely willed act—which is, however, not to say that it is simply passive. This is why, for example, the spectacle of a ‘‘love potion’’ working its magic on a Tristan or a Siegfried does not diminish our investment in their tragedies but makes intuitive sense as an objectification of love’s suspension of the will. According to Badiou’s revisionary readings of Freud and Lacan, love involves a singular logic of subjectification, one that is distinct from the collectivization particular to politics but that nevertheless cannot be dismissed as apolitical. Love is not about two people joining together as ‘‘one,’’ according to Badiou, but involves the production of the two, of difference as such—both intra- and inter-subjective difference.35 The decision involved in love is, after the fact, the decision to remain faithful to the love event, the vanishing ‘‘point’’ around which it crystallizes. Freud argues in Group Psychology that the libidinal work involved in love and group formation, even if originally united (as in the myth of the primal horde), are ultimately at cross purposes: the libido that organizes the group binds individuals into larger and larger entities, whereas love insists on stopping at two. But the dyad is already more than one, if less than three, and as such it marks the limit between the individual and the group. Love is necessary for moving individuals into larger units of organization and also makes synthetic and totalizing organizations impossible. In this sense, if love is the source of the binding impulses that bring together groups, it also introduces something that destabilizes the group, allowing it to transform, to revolutionize itself and rearticulate itself according to a new principle of organization. Freud writes: the more important sexual love became for the ego, and the more it developed the characteristics of being in love, the more urgently it required to be limited to two people—una cum uno—as is prescribed by the nature of the genital aim. Polygamous

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inclinations had to be content to find satisfaction in a succession of changing objects. Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction, in so far as they seek for solitude, are making a demonstration against the herd instinct, the group feeling. The more they are in love, the more completely they suffice for each other. . . . There are abundant indications that being in love only made its appearance late on in the sexual relations between men and women; so that the opposition between sexual love and group ties is also a late development. Now it may seem as though this assumption were incompatible with our myth of the primal family. For it was after all by their love for their mothers and sisters that the mob of brothers was, as we have supposed, driven to parricide; and it is difficult to imagine this love as being anything but undivided and primitive—that is, as an intimate union of the affectionate and the sensual. But further consideration resolves this objection to our theory into a confirmation of it. One of the reactions to the parricide was after all the institution of totemic exogamy. . . . In this way a wedge was driven in between a man’s affectionate and sensual feelings.36 If the bond called for by Deuteronomy 5, to ‘‘love God with all your might,’’ is the love of the group that identifies itself as a unified totality precisely through this exclusive love and the covenant that expresses and legalizes it, expanding the monogamous function of exclusivity and separation to the collective subject ‘‘Israel,’’ there is another love, one that does not lead simply to massification. Leviticus 19, ‘‘love your neighbor as yourself,’’ acts as a challenge to that homogeneous and closed universal. Whereas love of God establishes the political on the model of monogamous love, between a unified ‘‘we’’ and a singular ‘‘God,’’ neighbor love leaps across the gap between the amorous and the political, without imagining the latter in the image of the former, without trying to bridge them. It is only as discursively dissonant, antagonistic to social bonds, that love can enter into the realm of the political. Political love raises problems of difference rather than forging imaginary identities. The call to neighbor love opens fissures in the totality of the collective, decompleting rather than consolidating its unity. This occurs through ambiguity and ambivalence, first of all, through the ambiguity of its object, ‘‘the neighbor’’: Is it singular, a collective plural? Does it mean ‘‘fellow Israelites’’ or ‘‘strangers,’’ non-Jews? Only monotheists, or pagans and nonbelievers too? The understanding of the command’s scope varies over time, reflecting the more exceptionalist or universalist values current in a particular historical situation. Second, neighbor love introduces ambivalence into the social relationship: What does it mean to love someone ‘‘as myself’’? Does this mean in the way or to the extent that I love myself? If I don’t love myself, does this contaminate my love for the other? Or if I do, then I am always in the position of questioning whether I love the other enough. Moreover, the rabbinic account of ethics suggests that my responsibility is first to myself, prior to the other; according to the Ethics of the Fathers: ‘‘If I am not for myself, who will be?’’ And what if we read the commandment as Levinas

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does, as the injunction to love the other who is yourself, or even as the subjective declaration that my love for the other ‘‘is’’ myself? Both are ethical modes of Rimbaud’s aperc¸u Je est un autre, tending to deonotologize the subject interpolated by the commandment and remain prior to and in excess of the subject’s political organization. Hence the commandment to neighbor love demands a new and not fully specified social relationship that calls into question the social bond established on the basis of the love of God. The notion of a ‘‘dual commandment,’’ in which the two are understood as the twin elements of a single, all-encompassing law of love, has the rhetorical effect of mapping an imaginary totality, creating the vertical and horizontal axes of a unified and stable system. Paul separates out neighbor love in order to retrieve its originary force, to free it from the consolidating effects of the love of God, and to allow it to stand once again as the impossible link between the political and the amorous. But what use can we make of Pauline neighbor love or its precedents and antecedents in Jewish law? What are the consequences of Paul’s cut between the love of God and the love of the neighbor, and of political theology more generally, if we continue to insist (as I believe we must) on the separation of church and state? We recall Schmitt’s famous dictum, ‘‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,’’37 and the debate on the notion of secularization and the legitimation of modernity that emerged between Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg. Blumenberg argued that Schmitt’s account of the relationship between premodern theological concepts and modern political ones is merely analogical and does not account for a real transfer of concepts from one discourse to another. For Blumenberg, what is key is that modernity cannot be legitimated either as the continuation of premodern ideas and institutions or as selfconstituting, a tabula rasa built on Enlightenment notions of reason. Secular modernity does not ‘‘empower’’ itself in terms of either reason or religion, according to Blumenberg, but asserts itself, finds ideological support in ideas such as reason and freedom. Schmitt argues that, whereas Blumenberg’s notion of secular modernity’s ‘‘self-assertion’’ merely accounts for its ‘‘legality,’’ political theology truly legitimates modernity through the continuities it establishes between premodern theological structures and modern secular ones.38 But we should recall that, in his ‘‘Theologico-Political Fragment,’’ Benjamin does not talk about the relationship between theological ideas such as ‘‘the Messiah’’ and the ‘‘secular’’ political world, but about the profane.39 What does Benjamin mean by this word, and what can it mean for us today? In his book Profanations, Giorgio Agamben conceptualizes the profane in terms that exceeds the sacred/secular opposition. Agamben argues that the word religion does not derive, as is commonly claimed, from religare, meaning to rejoin, and signifying the connection between the human and the divine, but, as Cicero argued, from relegere, which implies the scrupulous attention that ought to characterize our relations with the gods, the careful rereading that is necessary in order to preserve the separation of the human

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and divine.40 Agamben writes, ‘‘Religio is not what unites men and gods but what insures they remain distinct. It is not disbelief and indifference toward the divine, therefore, that stands in opposition to religion, but ‘negligence,’ that is, a behavior that is free and ‘distracted.’ . . . To profane means to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or, rather, puts it to a particular use.’’41 ‘‘Religion’’ is not a word or a concept in Judaism, but the key Jewish concept of ‘‘holiness’’ involves the idea of separation; perhaps the association of religion with the connection between the human and divine derives from Christianity, with its central concept of the incarnation. For Agamben, the profane is opposed to the sacred as that which has been taken back from the separated realm of the holy, through either carelessness or the freedom to transgress.42 That which has been ‘‘profaned’’ is something sacred, separated off as the gods, that has been restored to use, in particular to the playful use that neither honors nor abolishes the sacred. In this sense, Agamben proposes a further distinction between the ‘‘profane’’ and the ‘‘secular’’: Secularization is a form of repression. It leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one to another. Thus the political secularization of theological concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power) does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact. Profanation, however, neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate loses its aura and is returned to use. Both are political operations: the first guarantees the exercise of the power by carrying it back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized.43 We recall Benjamin’s discussion of the relationship between the messianic and the profane in his ‘‘Politico-Theological Fragment’’: it is the profane, not the ‘‘secular,’’ that hastens the coming of the messianic world. Whereas the notion of the secular simply inverts that of the sacred, maintaining its structures and thematics of separation in repressed, distorted form, the profane means literally ‘‘outside the temple,’’ that which is desacralized. Hence the profane is that which has fallen away from the sacred, that which may celebrate or lament its fall, but which, in any case, is fully aware of its lapsarian condition. The political theology of the secular world is one that, paradoxically, imagines that it has simply rid itself of religion and hence can be legitimated in the vocabulary of reason, autonomy, and progress. In truth, however, the categories of religious discourse retain their power in the secular world, albeit in different shape, distorted or repressed in the mechanisms of the law and the obscenity of the superego. Schmitt’s political theology demonstrated that sovereignty is based on ‘‘secularized theological concepts,’’ the transfer of the exceptional powers attributed to God to the political realm. That is to say, secularism is based on an unconscious political theology: whether it knows it or not, the secular

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state assumes a notion of sovereignty—the ability to decide on the question of the exception—at the margins of legality, between law and lawlessness.44 The political theology of the profane world, by contrast, knows that it is merely a decadent echo of the religious; it establishes the earthly city in the allegorical shadow of heaven, knowingly transgressing the line separating gods and men and, like Prometheus, stealing something from heaven that was sacred and restoring it to use. To profane something means to remove its sacred force, to desecrate a sacred space, to deactivate it insofar as religious purposes are concerned, but through that to liberate it for more profound usefulness, as Agamben writes, to ‘‘return to common use the spaces that power has seized.’’ To take the injunction to ‘‘love your neighbor as yourself’’ as the motto of a political theology of the neighbor is to enact precisely such a profanation of the sacred, to restore to common usage something that was previously sacrosanct—indeed, Leviticus 19:18 forms part of Kedoshim, the holiness code itself. Moreover, this is also to rescue neighbor love from the banalization of secularization, where it functions at best as a platitude of ethical reason, the empty universal par excellence, or at worst as an ideological cloak for institutional indifference and social cruelty. The political theology of the neighbor would reappropriate a certain space, in order to open it for renewed use, as neighborhood.

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Inverse Versus Dialectical Theology The Two Faces of Negativity and the Miracle of Faith

Hent de Vries

In memory of Hendrik Johan (Han) Adriaanse (1940–2012)

Paul’s God plays dice. —Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul

Few recent philosophical readings of Paul and his modern reception are more fraught with ambiguity than Jacob Taubes’s impromptu commentary on the Epistle to the Romans in The Political Theology of Paul.1 Taubes alternates between contentious claims about the ‘‘messianic logic’’ first summarized and analyzed by Gershom Scholem (‘‘my teacher,’’2 Taubes says, although the admiration wasn’t mutual)—and a host of now exuberant, now scathing comments on a whole series of thinkers in Critical Theory, biblical hermeneutics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. His ‘‘style,’’ as Martin Treml has aptly characterized it, is that of ‘‘the last expressionistic thinker of German Judaism, who ‘grabbed onto the last corner of the Jewish prayer shawl as it was flying away—as wrote Franz Kafka, whom Taubes called ‘the Raschi before Auschwitz.’ ’’3 Like Scholem in a letter to Benjamin, Treml argues that Taubes comes close to attributing to Kafka ‘‘the opposite [das Revers]’’ of kabbalistic doctrine, claiming that, instead of praising the positivity of God’s creation, he emphasizes in its place the ‘‘nothingness of revelation [Nichts der Offenbarung].’’4 Mutatis mutandis, Taubes’s dialectical negations set up a critical foil against which the—now minimal, now maximal—contours of a different, an ‘‘inverse,’’ theology become visible, drawn with the faintest of lines, yet introduced with the greatest aplomb. Whereas his seminar

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on Paul seems at first to offer only a sharp, deeply personal, and idiosyncratic portrait of a whole generation, on further reflection, Taubes’s observations suggest a deeper cultural ‘‘logic’’ of ‘‘messianism’’ and its political analogues that has lost none of its relevance for our understanding of a Judeo-Christian ‘‘apocalyptic’’ that should be conceived ‘‘from the bottom up,’’ not—following imperial, sovereign, authoritarian, or bourgeois historical models—‘‘from the top down,’’ allowing us to glimpse an irreverent, anarchic impulse in political theology.

‘‘Absolute Inversion’’ Taubes places Paul in the context of the ‘‘messianic logic’’ that animates the Jewish tradition and ‘‘occidental eschatology’’ as a whole. Building upon a long-established consensus concerning the links between Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, Taubes sees Paul not as a ‘‘Christian’’ but as a Jewish ‘‘fanatic’’ and ‘‘zealot’’ (his words), an eschatologist and apocalyptic.5 Taubes treats all of these terms as synonymous. He is intrigued by Paul’s ‘‘political genius,’’ as demonstrated by the fact that his most telling letter is addressed ‘‘not to any other community, but to the community in Rome, the seat of the world-empire,’’ thereby revealing ‘‘a sense of where to find power and where a counter-power needs to be established.’’6 Starting with its opening address, Taubes claims, this letter constitutes a ‘‘political theology, a political declaration of war on the emperors [Ca¨saren].’’7 Bruno Bauer has similarly written that ‘‘Christian literature is a literature of protest against the flourishing cult of the Caesar,’’8 just as Taubes seeks to remind his readers that the ‘‘whole Torah’’ is, in fact, ‘‘anti-Egyptian; even the nonmention of the resurrection in the Torah is anti-Egyptian.’’9 In the Letter to the Romans, this plays itself out in the opening words, which announce Paul as apostle and Jesus Christ as ‘‘his Anti-Caesar’’:10 Paul, a servant [or slave] of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all nations, including yourselves who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. (Rom. 1:1–6) Taubes reads Paul as a ‘‘troublemaker,’’ who, as the founding father of the gentile churches, endangers the position of Judaism as a tolerated religion (religio licita), disturbing ‘‘the precarious balance of Jews who were able to get around the emperor cult without

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being accused of revolution.’’11 Hence, Taubes extrapolates with a sweeping accusation reminiscent of Scholem, Paul distances himself from the whole ‘‘diaspora mentality,’’12 which continues to the present day and which prefers a particular and relative outsider position (‘‘Just keep things quiet, don’t stick out and so on’’13) and hence the ‘‘status quo’’ instead of the revolutionary—and radically universalist—claims of messianic logic. In contrast to the religious attitude of acquiescence and assimilation, Paul is identified with a strategy of ‘‘absolute inversion,’’ of invoking an ‘‘anti-symbol’’ that, for all its concentration on the resurrection of Christ, is paradoxically in sync with some of the most orthodox currents in Judaism. Paul’s illiberalism (both religious and political) is one of Taubes’s most insistent themes, though he never forgets the ‘‘racist theozoology’’ that, between 1933 and 1936, Schmitt ‘‘grafted’’ onto the ‘‘folk traditions of church antisemitism.’’14 Taubes develops this motif via parallels between Paul’s world and ours, marking the difference between ‘‘literary exegesis,’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘historical, concrete memory’’ of the ‘‘structure’’ of communal relationships in the early church—especially the matter of ‘‘legitimation’’—on the other.15 Yet Taubes does not find the ‘‘present actuality’’ of the logic of messianism, which he ascribes to Paul and the rabbinical tradition alike, in conceptual, analytical, or demonstrative theologemes and philosophemes. Rather, with what seems a Catholic rather than a Protestant gesture, Taubes declares his ambition ‘‘to develop theology out of liturgy,’’16 and he praises Franz Rosenzweig for having offered an interpretation of Judaism—and Christianity—based not on texts or dogmas but on liturgy, in particular, on the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. He writes: ‘‘And Paul, after all, if one tries to summarize it, speaks of nothing other than atonement [Verso¨hnung].’’17 A paradoxical ‘‘inner experience’’—not to be confused with any ‘‘magical function’’—of forgiveness, of a ‘‘day that forgives,’’ is at work here, one rooted in the concrete-historical tradition and liturgy that also serves as the basis for Rabbinic Judaism.18 Hence Taubes’s contempt for tendencies toward ontologization and liberalization in biblical scholarship, especially in scriptural hermeneutics: ‘‘I believe the texts that are close [to the events in question] more than [Rudolf] Bultmann’s pupils, especially those of the second generation.’’19 And yet Taubes shares with Bultmann at least one ambition: not the program of demythologization in view of an existential—or worse, existentialist— reading but the destruction of all myth, pure and simple. This is one of the most Benjaminian of Taubes’s overall themes, together with an appeal to a sensus allegoricus that, he insists, is ‘‘not only textual but a form of life,’’ more precisely, an understanding of ‘‘the link of the pneumatic as life experience with allegorical textual experience.’’20 Interestingly, Taubes credits Spinoza, not Luther, with the invention of modern biblical criticism, that is to say, with an emphasis on the historical and literal senses of a text and therefore with an ‘‘attempt to cut off the basis or lifeline of church and synagogue interpretation, that is, of Rabbinic and Christian interpretation, by recognizing the sensus

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historicus or the sensus literalis exclusively as the sensus out of which a text may be interpreted.’’21 Indeed, Taubes continues: ‘‘Now, whether or not that is demonstrated more geometrico in the Ethics, certainly in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus it is the sensus nudus.’’22 Taubes also develops his reading of Paul in terms of ritual practice with explicit reference to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose courses he had attended and whose Apocalypse of the German Soul, published in three volumes from 1937 through 1939, had deeply impressed him. In fact, Taubes’s Occidental Eschatology has been seen as a critical Jewish rejoinder to the work of von Balthasar, one of the first commentators on the work of Karl Barth, also a major source of inspiration for Taubes’s lectures.

The Need for Legitimation The way in which Paul introduces himself to the Christian community of Rome is dictated by the ‘‘restlessness’’ of someone ‘‘who as thirteenth apostle is of course not an apostle at all’’ and hence feels a ‘‘need for legitimation.’’23 The reasons seem clear enough: ‘‘This brand new generation doesn’t know, of course, what it really is. It wasn’t with the Lord, didn’t accompany Jesus, doesn’t have any personal knowledge, no first-hand experience; nothing. Hence the word ‘chosen.’ ’’24 Without saying so explicitly, Taubes touches upon the strange subjectivist-universalist dialectic in the act by which apostolic speech legitimates and institutes the very subject and communal context—the ecclesia—that will become its expression. How is this done? ¨ berbietungsstraAccording to Taubes, Paul adopts a ‘‘strategy of outbidding [U tegie]’’—of outdoing and outwitting—Moses, just as the Sermon on the Mount is said to be typologically related to the giving of the Mosaic law. As throughout the New Testament, Taubes states, ‘‘All of salvation history is an imitation.’’25 The origin of Christianity must therefore be found in Paul rather than in the life and works of Jesus, more specifically, in the ‘‘parallelism of Moses and Paul,’’ which is also a ‘‘polemical relationship, the way Paul measures himself up against Moses.’’26 From here it is a small step from Taubes’s position to the one espoused by Marcion in his outright rejection of the Old Testament, along the lines laid out by Adolf von Harnack, to whose study Taubes refers approvingly in the second part of The Political Theology of Paul. Taubes suggests that Paul even measures himself against Christ, in what he calls Paul’s anthropological, more precisely, ‘‘Feuerbachian’’ turn, culminating in the equivalence of the love of one’s neighbor with all other theist or soteriological claims in the Gospels. Of Romans 13 he notes: This is a highly polemical text, polemical against Jesus. Because from the Gospels we know the dual commandment. Jesus is asked: What is the most important commandment? And he says, You shall love your Lord with all your strength and your soul

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and your might, and after this follows: Love your neighbor as yourself. Paul doesn’t issue a dual commandment, but rather makes them equivocal; I almost want to say, following [Alexandre] Koje`ve, that he pulls a Feuerbach here. . . . I regard this as an absolutely revolutionary act.27 The quest for the historical Jesus—once a privileged preoccupation in New Testament scholarship, as witnessed by Albert Schweizer’s classic study—is the least of Taubes’s concerns. He focuses instead on the problem Paul and Moses share: that of the establishing or ‘‘founding a people [die Gru¨ndung eines Volkes].’’28 This motivates Romans 9 through 13, which evoke a singular transfiguration of the old into the new, in which ‘‘the old ways and old things end up unclear [dass das alte in eine Verundeutlichung gera¨t].’’29 Indeed, for all his mimicry of Moses, Paul is taking on a task that is ‘‘unprecedented and unique.’’30 Taubes sees it as in part encapsulated, appropriated, and also distorted in the allegorical-typological medieval scene of Moses pouring grain into the hopper of Paul’s gospel— the ‘‘sum total of Christian experience’’—which is explicated by the eleventh–century Abbot Suger of the abbey of St. Denis: ‘‘By the working of the mill, thou, Paul, takest the flour out of the bran./Thou makest known the inmost meaning of the Law of Moses./ From so many grains is made the true bread without bran,/Our and the angels’ perpetual food.’’31 Taubes sees Paul against a Jewish background and disagrees strongly with Martin Buber’s attempt to set up a radical distinction between the Jewish experience of emunah and the supposedly Hellenistic-individualistic concept of faith as personal belief, or pistis. Nonetheless, there is for Taubes an eminently philosophical point to Paul’s text that goes unnoticed in what he derisively calls the ‘‘humanistic-Humboldt-cultural idea,’’ codified in the ‘‘interpretatio graeca of European history.’’32 Somewhat provocatively, he insists that departments of philosophy would be well advised to pay more attention to the Bible in general and to Paul in particular, since it is in his writings and in the Pauline corpus generally that certain systematic decisions are taken that anticipate much of the later debates in Western thought, including its paths not taken.

No Transitions Taubes notes that in Paul’s writings ‘‘faith’’ should not be interpreted in a Protestant light—that is, in its ‘‘sense of an individual, ahistorical relation to God,’’33 to quote his editors—but is instead reconstructed as ‘‘a paradoxical experience of salvation in the catastrophic dimension of history.’’34 Likewise, the ‘‘theme of law is not related to Jewish law as the paradigm of fixation on the letter and self-righteousness, as Christian exegesis would have it,’’ but rather Paul’s critique of the law is, according to Taubes, ‘‘directed

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against the Hellenistic theology of the sovereign.’’35 Furthermore, Taubes undoes the Lutheran opposition in ‘‘faith not works’’ by distilling from Paul a distinct revolutionary and apocalyptic ‘‘political theology.’’36 In other words, ‘‘Paul’s radical critique of law is assessed not as a Christian polemic against Judaism but as a Jewish potential for liberation, one in a series of Jewish forms of liberation from the law.’’37 This sheds light not only on the guiding motifs of Romans but also on other epistles, such as the following passage from Galatians: ‘‘Therefore He who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you, does He do it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?’’ (Gal. 3:5). One way of undoing or at least relativizing the interpretatio graeca is to insist on the peculiar temporal logic—the paradoxical, antinomian temporal experience of the Galgenfrist (‘‘reprieve’’)—that Paul would have had in common with the messianic movements that preceded and followed him in the Jewish tradition as discussed by Scholem, with whom Taubes here agrees wholeheartedly: ‘‘Whoever understands what Scholem presents in the eight chapters of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism can penetrate more deeply into Paul’s messianic logic than by reading the entire exegetical literature.’’38 The logic in question repeats beyond the ancient and modern interpretatio judaica, reaching up to Benjamin’s ‘‘Theologico-Political Fragment.’’ As Taubes asserts, ‘‘Benjamin shares Scholem’s idea . . . that apocalyptics knows no transitions, but posits between the Now and the Then a time of catastrophe, a time of silence, a time of total destruction and annihilation.’’39 We can now understand why the phenomenological-hermeneutic or existentialdialectical approach is the type of appropriation from which Taubes seeks most to distance himself. While identifying with apocalyptically revolutionary thinkers such as Benjamin and Schmitt, he views with scorn all attempts, such as Heidegger’s or Bultmann’s, to formalize Paul’s view in fundamental-ontological terms. They seem to him to strip Paul’s message of what matters most to his own political-historical (and eminently ritual) reading. In a course description announcing his final seminar at Berlin, entitled ‘‘On the Political Theology of Paul: From Polis to Ecclesia,’’ Taubes states: The Epistle to the Romans by the Apostle Paul has at decisive stations of the Christian era—Augustine, Luther, Karl Barth—informed the self-understanding of the Church and of Christendom. But all of these stations of exegesis were characterized primarily by an ‘‘existentialist’’ element. We will attempt to make out the ‘‘political’’ charge of Paul’s reflection. I read the Epistle to the Romans as a legitimation and formation of a new social union–covenant [(Ver)Bund], of the developing ecclesia against the Roman Empire, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the ethnic unity of the Jewish people.40 Paul’s idea was thus that of a ‘‘political Christology,’’ a ‘‘political messianism,’’ or, in Taubes’s own words, a ‘‘negative political theology,’’ which consisted in the simultaneous delegitimation of the ‘‘ethnic community,’’ on the one hand, and the ‘‘Roman Imperial

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order,’’ on the other.41 Paul’s originality, on this reading (a reading with which Alain Badiou largely agrees), consists in undoing all natural, cultural ties of ethnos, nomos, and polis. He is portrayed as denying the ultimate force of every law, thereby undoing the legitimacy of ‘‘all sovereigns of the world, be they imperial or theocratic.’’42 In Benjamin’s ‘‘Theologico-Political Fragment,‘‘ Taubes claims, this is abundantly clear: ‘‘There is a Messiah. No shmontses like ‘the messianic,’ ‘the political,’ no neutralization, but the Messiah. We have to be clear about this. Not that we are dealing here with the Christian Messiah, but it does say: the Messiah. No cloudy Enlightenment or Romantic neutralization.’’43 According to Taubes, there could be no better example of this ‘‘paradigm of a faith that suspends all natural ties’’ than the story of the sacrifice of Isaac as recounted by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling.44 All this must be understood against the backdrop of the shock of ‘‘the people of God no longer being the people of God,’’ of an ‘‘inner dialectic’’ (cf. Romans 9) that would bring in the gentiles ‘‘in order to make Israel jealous’’ and set in play an opposition between the ‘‘rest’’ and the ‘‘whole’’ of Israel.45 This dynamic should be distinguished from the paradigm Taubes discerns in Rosenzweig’s hypothesis, in The Star of Redemption, of the ‘‘two paths’’ of Judaism and Christianity, one outside and one within the realm of history.46 Taubes’s thesis is that the concept of law—‘‘and this again is political theology’’—is nothing but a ‘‘compromise formula’’ for what was known as the ‘‘Imperium Romanum’’ and its ‘‘aura, that is to say, as ‘‘a general Hellenistic aura, an apotheosis of nomos.’’47 The critique of the law, Taubes further surmises, is the fruit of Paul’s ‘‘dialogue’’ not merely with the Pharisees—‘‘that is, with himself’’—but ‘‘also with the Mediterranean world surrounding him.’’48 Whereas most understood something different by the term law (the Torah, the law of the universe, cosmos, or nature, the hypostasis, as in Philo of Alexandria—the list goes on), Paul is only seemingly ‘‘of the same universality.’’49 Taubes asserts that this simple fact has been overlooked by New Testament scholars such as Bultmann. Paul inhabits ‘‘nomos liberalism,’’ Taubes counters, only to wage a ‘‘totally illiberal’’ war against its principles and aims: this is someone who answers the same thing in a completely different way, that is, with protest, with a transvaluation of all values: It isn’t nomos but rather the one who was nailed to the cross by nomos who is the imperator! This is incredible [unheimlich], and compared to this all the little revolutionaries simply nullities. This transvaluation stands Jewish-Roman-Hellenistic upper-class theology, the whole melting pot [Mischmash] of Hellenism, on its head. Sure, Paul is also universal, but by virtue of the needle’s eye of the one who was crucified, which means: transvaluation of all the values of this world.50 Indeed, Taubes goes on to note, ‘‘what Nietzsche discovered in Paul, the genius of the transvaluation of values [Umwertung der Werte], is contained precisely in the critique of

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the concept of law.’’51 ‘‘Israel’’ comes to stand for a ‘‘community of solidarity [Solidarita¨tsgemeinschaft],’’ no longer based on ‘‘blood kinship [or consanguinity, Blutsgemeinschaft]’’ but related only by a promise, by a ‘‘kinship of promise [Verheissungsverwandtschaft].’’52 And, as we hear a little later, ‘‘ ‘all’ according to the flesh is not identical to ‘all’ according to the promise,’’53 according not to a past promise now suddenly realized, but to a promise held out for the immediate, imminent future, as well. Hence the curious mixture of eschatological-apocalyptic revolutionary spirit and seemingly ‘‘nihilistic’’ quietism expressed in the positive (and not merely negativeaesthetic, that is, Adornian) ho¯s me¯, the ‘‘to have as if one doesn’t have’’ of which the First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 7:29ff., but also, in Taubes’s interpretation, Rom. 13:11ff.) makes so much.54 Pleased with what he sees, Taubes exclaims: ‘‘now here comes a subterranean society, a little bit Jewish, a little bit Gentile, nobody knows, what sort of lowlifes are these anyway.’’55 Yet the end of consanguinity takes place only through the expiation of the blood of one. The people of Israel, while now a remnant, will become pan, a totality, a potentially universalist whole. But the exclusivist-inclusivist dynamic is more complex, as is clear from Romans 5:8–10: God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. Or, again, in Romans 5:18–21: as one man’s trespass [namely, Adam’s, ‘‘who was a type of the one who was to come’’; Rom. 5:14] led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous. Law came in, to increase the trespass; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. In consequence, Paul writes, ‘‘sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under the law but under grace’’ (Rom. 6:14). We are dealing, then, with a ‘‘universalism’’ that is identified with the ‘‘election of Israel,’’ first with the ‘‘rest,’’ then with the ‘‘whole (or all)’’ of Israel, following a schema according to which virtually or almost everything and everyone is condemned yet virtually or almost all are—or will be—saved: ‘‘Only that

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Israel is now being transfigured and then in the end it says pas Israel,’ ’’56 the whole or all of Israel, ‘‘the establishment and legitimation of a new people of God.’’57 It is hard to spell out what ‘‘transfiguration’’ and ‘‘universalism’’ by way of singularity might mean. Yet it is clear that Taubes sees in Paul the ‘‘most dramatic process that one can imagine in a Jewish soul,’’ not least because its basis is the ‘‘orge¯ theou, the wrath of God wanting to annihilate the people because it has sinned, because it has become unfaithful,’’58 in an uncanny dialectic of election and rejection, which sets up the grand scheme for the later interpretation of predestination and justification through belief, more precisely, the righteousness of faith. This ‘‘logic of pneumatics’’ escapes human categories of distributive justice and fairness and remains, in Paul’s own terms, a ‘‘mystery,’’ of sorts. As Taubes observes: ‘‘And he hardened Pharaoh’s heart.’’ He, God. In other words, things aren’t happening according to enlightened philanthropy. From this example, which completely escapes from ethics—for these aren’t deeds, works, but elections!—it goes on.59 This structure of near-total rejection by way of (and in response to) Israel’s and the gentiles’ hardening of hearts and universal redemption through saving grace alone forms the matrix between whose extremes Paul’s theology of providential history (in partial resonance with contemporary views, such as those of Flavius Josephus) is stretched out. To the extent, further, that Romans dwells on the promise to Abraham—‘‘I have made you the father of many nations’’—as well as on Abraham’s faith against all odds (‘‘In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations’’; Gen. 17:5) one can read Paul against the backdrop of Kierkegaard’s treatment, in Fear and Trembling, of the sacrifice of Isaac and the horror religiosus (Kierkegaard’s term) that it inspires. As Taubes insists, ‘‘the evening of Yom Kippur is in the grip of this trembling,’’60 just as for Paul, in a ‘‘curious mixture of allegoresis and typology,’’ conjoining prehistory and present history, the ‘‘binding of Isaac is the prelude to the crucifixion.’’61 On the whole, Paul’s logic seems configured as ‘‘the repetition of a primal scene [Urszene].’’62 The ‘‘Super-Rabbi’’ Who Played a Risky Apocalyptic Game Called a ‘‘Super-Rabbi [Wunderrebbe]’’ by some,63 a charlatan by others, Taubes engages in extensive and at times hyperbolic religious phrasing, whose logic and rhetoric of theological exaggeration and exasperation forces sweeping statements to go hand in hand with the effective exhaustion (of saying everything and nothing at once). The political theology of Paul, as Taubes reads him, is a risky apocalyptic game (a Vabanque or va banque, i.e., ‘‘hit the bank’’) that remains instructive as a pragmatic model, though it risks overstatement and understatement at once.

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It is not by chance that the philosophical renaissance of interest in Paul coincides with the return of a certain specter of Marxism (as, e.g., in Badiou or David Graeber), as well as of Capital, to dominate the geo-political scene. We are witnessing various forms of direct democratic action—revolts, revolutions, popular insurgencies, national uprisings, civil disobedience—that elude modern forms of parliamentary representation and ideological affiliation. The impossible turns out, surprisingly, to be possible, as civil courage and acts of heroism lead to events that seem nothing short of the working of miracles. It is in this context that the writings of Paul seem newly relevant for philosophy and philosophers. The current interest in the idea of ‘‘communism’’—albeit reconceived beyond the doctrines that inaugurated its dismal historical failures—as well as new senses given to ‘‘community’’ or communitas and the ‘‘common’’ (independent of any state’s, party’s, or group’s ambition to monopolize power), together with the surprising efficacy of political, economic, and cultural resistance (Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, etc.) in places where they had long seemed least likely to appear or to succeed, hint at experiments and energies that had not been anticipated by European traditions of social democracy or AngloAmerican versions of political liberalism. These new movements seem unlike the all but forgotten legacies of religious socialism in Europe and the Social Gospel in the United States, not to mention anarchism, radical democracy, and the single-issue social protest movements of so-called identity politics, which had their historical moment. Messianism and apocalypticism, together with the theologico-political interpretations for which they continue to call, stand as alternative historical and political paradigms, drawing on an archive that reaches back and out—vertically and laterally, as it were—thus offering a dimension of perspectival depth and metaphysical weight to our most pragmatic and down-to-earth preoccupations. The importance of Taubes’s The Political Theology of Paul is that it looks back on and, as it were, calls out to forms of political agency and their intellectual justification (or lack thereof) that for too long have been ignored as viable alternatives to the teleologies and projects that have dominated Europe since the Enlightenment. In other words, Taubes imagines chances that have continuously been offered, if rarely taken: ‘‘Paul’s God plays dice [Wu¨rfel],’’ Taubes writes, varying and parodying Einstein’s bon mot.64 But what does that mean? On Actualizing Interpretation: Taubes With and Against Barth Taubes’s attempts systematically to modify and reorient our understanding of Paul turn out, on closer examination, to be surprisingly reminiscent of Barth’s exegetical and hermeneutic strategies. Both perform moves that are historicist and antihistoricist at once.65 Take this statement, from the 1918 preface to the first edition of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans:

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Paul, as a child of his age, addressed his contemporaries. It is, however, far more important that, as Prophet and Apostle of the Kingdom of God, he veritably speaks to all men of every age. The differences between then and now, there and here, no doubt require careful investigation and consideration. But the purpose of such investigation can only be to demonstrate that these differences are, in essence, meaningless. . . . my whole energy of interpreting has been expended in an endeavor to see through and beyond history into the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit. What was once of grave importance, is so still. What is today of grave importance— and not merely crotchety and incidental—stands in direct connection with that ancient gravity. If we rightly understand ourselves, our problems are the problems of Paul; and if we be enlightened by the brightness of his answers, those answers must be ours. Long, long ago the Truth was found, A company of noble minds it has bound. Grasp firmly then—that ancient Truth The understanding of history is an uninterrupted and increasingly sincere and intense conversation between the wisdom of yesterday and the wisdom of tomorrow, which is one and the same.66 Barth’s exegesis of Romans at once frees the apostle’s testimony from the stifling cultural conformism and moralistic complacency of late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Protestant liberalism in Germany, maintains a link to Barth’s own contemporary moment, and is aware of the differences between historical periods. I refer to such a stance as ‘‘actualizing interpretation,’’ meaning exegesis that makes an idea real, actual, for a writer’s contemporary situation, while not losing perspective on the gaps between that moment and other historical times. In the words of Jacques Derrida’s final interview, this is the need to find oneself to be ‘‘the ‘anachronistic’ contemporary of a past or future generation.’’67 Both Barth’s and Taubes’s readings express an intellectual and political climate of multigenerational ‘‘crisis,’’ reflecting, in Barth’s case, the generation that had witnessed the Great War and the onset of internal strife in the young Weimar Republic and, for them both, the sense of hopelessness and political doom in the period after World War II, in the aftermath of the Shoah and in the midst of the emerging Cold War and the pretenses at reparation. The sense of the ‘‘negative [das Nichtige]’’ in Barth’s later writing leaves nothing to be imagined in this regard.68 To put actualizing interpretation into practice, however, we must see Barth’s and Taubes’s interpretations as both bearing historical weight as documents marked by their time and being our contemporaries, as still speaking directly to us. For the theological

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and critical tasks they set themselves in their readings of Paul have lost nothing of their pertinence and urgency. Hence, their tasks must continue to inform present-day discussions of Paul’s engagement with—and ultimate disengagement from—the themes, methods, and discipline of philosophy and the general Hellenistic culture, including its political ramifications. Taubes and Barth, like Paul (in Barth’s words), thus speak ‘‘to all men of every age’’ and, while undeniable ‘‘differences between then and now, there and here, no doubt require careful investigation and consideration,’’ these necessary nuances do not cancel out their actualizing relevance. Barth is right, therefore: ‘‘the purpose of such investigation can only be to demonstrate that these differences are, in essence, meaningless.’’69 This insight lays the foundation for Barth’s later claim, in the opening pages to his Church Dogmatics, that the academic field of Church history is not ‘‘an independent theological discipline,’’ strictly speaking, but merely ‘‘an auxiliary,’’ if ‘‘indispensable,’’ scholarly tool for the more stringent inquiries of exegetical, dogmatic, and practical theology proper.70 The unmistakable historical and cultural differences between authors do not relegate the philosophical question of their possible or eventual agreement, commonality, and common cause to a secondary plane, nor do they render such inquiry pointless or obsolete.

‘‘Zealots of the absolute and of decision’’ Part of the charm of Taubes’s book is the witty way in which he characterizes intellectual constellations in the reception of Paul’s epistles.71 Especially striking is his brief portrait of Karl Barth and Carl Schmitt—strange bedfellows—as ‘‘two zealots of the absolute and of decision,’’ though one also savors his references to the writing of Benjamin and Adorno as ‘‘nihilism as world politics’’ and ‘‘aestheticized messianism,’’ respectively. In both cases there is no doubt where Taubes’s sympathies lie. Schmitt and his antipode Benjamin are undeniably the heroes of his seminar on Paul and, indeed, most of his earlier writings. Taubes sees them as addressing the motif and motivation of ‘‘Pauline enmity [Paulinische Feindschaft],’’ which Treml rightly identifies as the center of his own preoccupation, together with the ‘‘universalization of gnosis,’’72 or, more specifically, of ‘‘political Marcionism.’’73 Barth and Adorno, by contrast, serve him as negative examples to profile apocalypticism ‘‘from the top down,’’ which he attributes to Schmitt, and to contrast all three to Benjamin’s apocalypticism‘‘ from the bottom up.’’ Barth and Adorno point to a path that is treacherously near the one to be taken, but their work remains, for him, a travesty of the true task of thinking and acting. By contrast, Taubes feels that the apocalypticism offered by Schmitt and Benjamin, though from opposite ends of the political spectrum, exhibits an iron logic that he took to be the sign of genuine thought and political practice.

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To be a ‘‘zealot’’ of the ‘‘absolute’’ and of ‘‘decision’’ in its most uncompromising expression results in the ‘‘nihilism’’ whose global political maxim—that is, whose dramatic outand overreach as ‘‘world politics‘‘—Taubes, in his strange amalgamation of a latter-day Super-Rabbi and Marcionite, ferociously advocates. In a resolutely liturgical reading—a meditation and spiritual exercise sui generis, as it were—Taubes thus stresses the antinomian illiberalism of Paul and his true heirs. He takes this to be the real (and politically realistic) matrix of all later revolutionary engagement, including those that punctuated his own days: namely, 1968 and the other student movements of the late sixties, the protests against the Vietnam War, Latin American liberation theologies, and postcolonial struggles. By contrast, all ‘‘aestheticized’’ interpretations of Paul’s gospel strip away what is left of its ‘‘weak messianic power,’’ in the words of Benjamin’s ‘‘Theses on History,’’ echoing Luther’s translation of 2 Corinthians 12:9–10). Taubes knows its force is to invert—that is, to turn upside down and overthrow—the powers that be, thus rendering all that exists virtually nil, while bringing into existence what had seemed never quite to be there. Agamben aptly describes this as: the intransigent messianic principle articulated firmly by the apostle, in which those things that are weak and insignificant will, in the days of the Messiah, prevail over those things the world considers to be strong and important (1 Cor. 1:27–28: ‘‘But God hath chosen . . . the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty, . . . and things which are not, to bring to nought the things that are’’).74 Furthermore, Agamben concludes that Taubes was the only scholar to note the possible influence of Paul on Benjamin, but his hypothesis referred to a text from the 1920s, the Theologico-Political Fragment, which he connected to Romans 8:19–23. Taubes’s intuition is certainly on the mark; nevertheless, in that particular instance it is not only impossible to speak of citations (except perhaps in the case of Benjamin’s term Verga¨ngnis, ‘‘caducity,’’ which could correspond to the Lutheran translation of verse 21, vergengliches Wesen), but there are also substantial differences between the two texts. While, for Paul, creation is unwillingly subjected to caducity and destruction and for this reason groans and suffers while awaiting redemption, for Benjamin, who reverses this in an ingenious way, nature is messianic precisely because of its eternal and complete caducity.75 How could Taubes have so entangled and amalgamated Schmitt and Barth in what was to be his last word on the question of political theology? Conversely, how could he have separated so violently the names and projects of Benjamin and Adorno—or, at the least, ‘‘nihilism’’ and ‘‘aestheticism’’—given that these authors formed an integral part of

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the same intellectual configuration, that of early Frankfurt School Critical Theory? Is he right to suggest that the differences between Schmitt and Barth, both avid and partisan readers of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, are, from a messianic and apocalyptic political viewpoint, not really that telling?76 Similarly, are the differences between Benjamin and Adorno—who refer to Paul quite obliquely—perhaps not as important as Taubes claims? To complicate matters even more, do these respective pairings of thinkers not also, in their turn, secretly and inadvertently shade (and cross over) into one another; and, if they do, what consequences might that have? Do they, on Taubes’s reading, not only partially overlap but become virtually exchangeable, so that we contemporary readers can no longer discern on criteriological (i.e., epistemological, exegetical, hermeneutical, or otherwise normative grounds) which is which? If so, is this not precisely the fear and trembling, the woe and wonder in which the theological crisis, together with the no less urgent need to decide—to call things by their name and be called out by them in turn—puts us at any given moment, no matter what the concrete historical circumstances would seem to dictate, requiring us to submit to a judgment, a moment and momentum, whose arrival and outcome we cannot control? This interchangeability should inspire us to revise our understanding of twentiethcentury religious thought. Both ‘‘progressive’’ and ‘‘conservative’’ movements have taken forms whose contours are deceptively similar, even as their doctrinal content and political impetus remain opposed. We need an alternative optics—what I will develop below as a ‘‘dual aspect seeing’’—to register and explain the oscillation of reactionary and revolutionary moments, movements, motifs, and motivations. In them, religion—and, a fortiori, political theologies—is revealed to be a complexly dual, Janus-faced phenomenon. Under the pressure of global commerce and communication, new markets and media, this ‘‘global religion’’ has been expanding dramatically. To give an example of this interchangeability, Taubes remarks that Benjamin’s ‘‘Theological-Political Fragment’’ should be seen ‘‘from the point of view’’ of the second, 1922 edition of Barth’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.77 From this angle, Taubes goes on to say, Benjamin’s aphorism reveals itself to be a ‘‘dialectical theology outside the Christian Church,’’ that is to say, not so much ‘‘dogmatics and so on’’ but the original ‘‘dialectical theology of 1920 . . . in its very first phase in lay-theologese.’’78 He thus takes Benjamin’s text to be reminiscent of the radically modern effort, under the name ‘‘dialectical theology,’’ to expunge from theology as a project, a discipline, or a Wissenschaft all philosophical, natural, historical, and cultural presuppositions. (In this, Barth was more rigorous, relentless, expansive, and daring than many of his fellow travelers, among them Eduard Thurneysen, Friedrich Gogarten, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich.) Taubes thus praises Benjamin for having ‘‘a hardness similar to that of Barth’’ and adds that, just as in the latter’s commentary on Romans, so in the ‘‘Theological-Political Fragment’’ there is:

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nothing there having to do with immanence. From that one gets nowhere. The drawbridge comes from the other side. And whether you get fetched or not, as Kafka describes it, is not up to you. One can take the elevators up to the high-rises of spirituality—it won’t help. Hence the clear break. You can’t get anything out of it. You have to be told from the other side that you’re liberated.79 By contrast, he ridicules Adorno for treating redemption as a ‘‘comme si affair,’’ that is to say, as a fictionalist-aesthetic ‘‘as if.’’ This is not to say that Adorno thinks of redemption in terms of a religious a priori, as Neo-Kantians such as Hermann Cohen and Hans Vaihinger had proposed. Rather, Taubes sees in Adorno’s more cautious and hesitant stance merely a softening and flattening out of the harder, deeper, and more daring Pauline perspective taken by Benjamin and Barth.80

Nihilism, Marcionism? Paul’s invocation in First Corinthians (1 Cor. 7:29 ff.) of the ho¯s me¯, the as if not, the injunction to have one’s possessions and place in the world as if one does not have them, is, Taubes assumes, a fundamentally ‘‘nihilistic’’ operation.81 This New Testament invocation finds one of its strongest echoes in the excommunicated second-century bishop Marcion of Sinope’s ‘‘Gospel of the Alien God,’’ reconstructed by Adolf von Harnack in 1921. Taubes writes of Marcion’s very first sentence in the book that we don’t have, but that is reconstructed by Harnack out of various sources. Here the gospel is understood as gift and is introduced as follows: ‘‘O what wonder upon wonder, what amazement, and overpowering astonishment it is, that people who have not a thing to say about the gospel, that they do not think about it, nor that it can be compared with anything at all.’’ That is, certainly, not with anything of this world. It is alien. The alien God—an expression of Marcion’s deus alienus—meets with something equally alien in us.82 For Marcion, this alien God is not the Creator God of Hebrew Scripture. He writes: ‘‘O what wonder of all wonders [Wunder aller Wunder] that in spite of this world . . . there is redemption.’’83 In his discussion of Marcion, Taubes is after a certain messianic and apocalyptic or ‘‘nihilistic’’ logic he believes Marcion and Paul shared: ‘‘It not a question of showing, pedantically, where Marcion diverges from Paul; that’s easily done. The question is where he does capture an intention—and he does take himself to be Paul’s true disciple.’’84 Harnack too finds Marcion to be one of the ‘‘most significant phenomena in church history between Paul and Augustine.’’ He writes:

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Marcion affords us the key for unlocking a number of the difficult problems that are presented by the transition of the church from the postapostolic to the old Catholic period. Here one can dismiss every individual Gnostic without loss, but we cannot omit Marcion if we wish to understand the dynamic development, indeed the metamorphosis, that occurs in the time of that transition—not only because Catholicism is constructed as a defense against Marcion but, in a still higher degree, because it appropriated from this heretic something fundamental. Still greater is Marcion’s hitherto sadly neglected significance in the general history of religion, for he is the only thinker in Christianity who took fully seriously the conviction that the Deity who redeems one from the world has absolutely nothing to do with cosmology and cosmic theology. The new life of faith and freedom was for him something so ‘‘alien’’ as over against the world that he based its emergence upon the same doubtful/daring hypothesis by which Helmholtz proposed to explain the emergence of organisms on the earth.’’85 Taubes takes von Harnack’s intuition one step further, bluntly noting that ‘‘Creation has no role in the New Testament.’’ On the contrary, he adds, there is ‘‘only one thing there: redemption,’’ and the ‘‘thread that links creation and redemption is a very thin one. A very, very thin one. And it can snap. And that is Marcion.’’86 He finds a similar echo in Benjamin’s adoption of a radically ‘‘Pauline notion of creation,’’ one that emphasizes its ‘‘labor pains’’ and ‘‘futility,’’ as announced in Romans 8: ‘‘the groaning of the creature. . . . The idea of creation as decay, since it is without hope.’’87 Indeed, Taubes writes: ‘‘I see Benjamin as the exegete of the ‘nature’ of Romans 8, of decay, and of Romans 13, nihilism as world politics.’’88 His characterization of Benjamin as ‘‘a modern Marcionite’’ situates this Marxist-Messianic author’s theologicopolitical view squarely within the context of Jewish messianism, in all of its apocalyptic, theocratic, dialectical, and revolutionary democratic aspects.89 On Taubes’s account, the only way out of the predicament of both nature and empire, of creation and the second nature of the sociocultural normative order, would be nothing short of a wager and a miracle—a terrifying gamble and throw of the dice, the fatality of divine providence and predetermination no less than a stroke of good luck—that would defy scientific laws and the logics of probability and untie the age-old knot between determining causes and their proportionate effects. Taubes inscribes a necessary contingency in the very heart of the divine (of the God of love, the ‘‘other’’ or ‘‘alien’’ God, who— unjustifiably, by any standard—chooses or elects to acknowledge (i.e., save) only some, while avoiding (i.e., affronting and immobilizing) most others: ‘‘Paul’s God plays dice. He elects and condemns. In the Calvinist form this is a game of dice. One is born to election and born to damnation. . . . And we—just as the pot can’t ask the potter—can’t ask why he created us this way.’’90 He goes on to say: ‘‘it’s a different matter whether one decides, in whatever way, to understand the cosmos as immanent and governed by laws,

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or whether one thinks the miracle is possible, the exception. . . . The question is whether you think the exception is possible—and it is on the exception, after all, that the whole law of natural science runs aground, because natural science is based on prognosis.’’91 The wager and the miracle, the divine throw of the dice, escape our understanding and experience of causality and finality, probability and randomness, relation and correlation, the analogy of being (analogia entis) and, perhaps, even the analogy of faith (analogia fidei, cf. Rom. 12:6). In fact, there is nothing quite like it; its ‘‘effect’’ is ‘‘special’’ in the most emphatic, the most paradoxical and aporetic of ways. Put differently, the concept of miracle stands here for the fact that ‘‘God’’ and ‘‘faith’’—that is, the Messiah’s arrival, resurrection, and all the rest—condemn the premises and organizing concepts of natural and dogmatic theology. Moreover, its improbable and, strictly speaking, impossible possibility similarly challenges the coherence of the theism underlying biblical, ecclesial, dogmatic, and mystical theology. But, especially in the writings of Barth, even such theology knows that it stands condemned and assumes the negative: the nullity of its affirmations, including that of the ‘‘positivity,’’ let alone ‘‘positivism,’’ of its concept of revelation—the ‘‘positivism of revelation’’ (Offenbarungspositivismus)—to which it, also in its dialectical reorientation, was so often and so falsely reduced. As Barth, following Harnack, notes in the preface to the second edition of The Epistle to the Romans: ‘‘Paulinism has stood always on the brink of heresy.’’ Yet, Barth continues, we should ‘‘reflect whether the persistent covering up of the dangerous element in Christianity is not to hide its light under a bushel. Perhaps Spengler was right when he told us that we were entering upon an ‘iron age.’ If this be so, theology and the theologians are bound to bear the marks of it.’’92 What then, is this ‘‘dangerous element’’? And how does Barth succeed in keeping at bay some of its strongest historical and contemporary interpretations, such as those proposed by Marcion or by the radical Reformer Thomas Mu¨nzer, instigator of the violent farmer’s revolts in sixteenth-century Germany, whom Ernst Bloch reads as a ‘‘theologian of the revolution’’? After all, it was to both of these figures that the author of the theological commentary with the dry, inexpressive title The Epistle to the Romans was quickly compared by detractors and sympathizers alike. As Barth notes: Harnack’s book on Marcion appeared whilst I was immersed in the writing of my commentary. Those who are familiar with both books will understand why I am bound to refer to it. I was puzzled, on reading the earlier review of Harnack’s book, by the remarkable parallels between what Marcion had said and what I was actually writing. I wish to plead for a careful examination of these agreements before I be praised or blamed hastily as though I were a Marcionite. At the crucial points these agreements break down.93

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What are these crucial points in which Barth’s Paul and Harnack’s Marcion seem to converge, intersect, overlap, and touch upon each other—tangentially, as it were—if only to depart in altogether different directions, as the apparent agreement breaks down? The most likely candidate is reference to the ‘‘nothing [Nichts]’’ to which the New Testament reduces the powers that be (whether the power of nature and of the cosmos, political hegemony, or the forces of the flesh and of sin). The order of fallen creation and of the Creator-God is thereby exposed to crisis, as in Barth’s early dialectical theology.94 Another candidate is insistence on the paradoxical nature of redemption in Christ (and nowhere else). This effects a second crisis within Christianity. In Marcion’s case (in the years 150–90 c.e., as Harnack reconstructs them), this crisis is the single most important religious, theological, and, perhaps, messianic event between the conversion of Paul and the confession of Augustine, as we have seen. The depth of this crisis resembles the later declarations of Martin Luther, although Marcion’s gospel constituted a more radical challenge of the Church than would be represented by the Reformation, even in its most quasi-apocalyptic, antinomian, and politically revolutionary manifestations.95 Indeed, in his dissertation Harnack had already identified Marcion as the ‘‘modern believer of the second century, the first reformer,’’ indeed, as a ‘‘radical modernist,’’ whose actuality could be seen in the widely felt need to refuse both syncretism and compromise.96 That said, however, the difference between von Harnack’s and Barth’s views of Marcion’s place in the history of the Church is mirrored in the unbridgeable distance between their conceptions of the essence of Christianity and the task of Religionswissenschaft, steeped in the nineteenth-century liberal and high-cultured Protestantism (the cultural syndrome of bourgeois and moralistic complacency known as Kulturprotestantismus) that bore von Harnack’s signature and in dogmatic-biblical theology—eventually, a ‘‘critically realistic’’ Church Dogmatics—that would become Barth’s resolutely radical response to it.97 The fundamental contrast between the two projects became publicly manifest in the official break between the two when von Harnack, like most of the teachers of Barth’s generation, sided with the belligerent policies of Kaiser Wilhelm at the outbreak of the First World War, provoking the need for a new start and reorientation among those who were to come after them.

‘‘A trans-theistic stage of consciousness’’: Paradoxical Faith, Contradicted by the Evidence On Taubes’s account, Barth’s dialectical theology is a modern expression of ‘‘messianic logic,’’ that is to say, of the view that ‘‘the internal logic of events’’ requires ‘‘a faith that is paradoxical, that is contradicted by the evidence.’’98 Aside from a few references in passing in Occidental Eschatology, this diagnosis is elaborated in two essays (published in the American Journal of Theology in 1954 and included in 1996 in From Cult to Culture)

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entitled ‘‘Dialectic and Analogy’’ and ‘‘Theodicy and Theology: A Philosophical Analysis of Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology,’’99 as well as in a brief review in Commentary under the title ‘‘Christian Nihilism.’’100 In them, Taubes asserts that Barth’s theology, at least in the period of the 1922 edition of The Epistle to the Romans, subverts Scholastic philosophy, with its theologia naturalis (natural theology), based upon the principle of analogia entis and the ‘‘double bookkeeping’’ of a duplex ordo in which the infinite realm of the ens increatum (i.e., God) and the finite domain of the ens creatum (i.e., nature and humans) harmonize and cohere with each other as unequal parts of a single whole. Barth replaces the presumed hierarchical order of things and the chain of being with an altogether different model. In Taubes’s terms: As a theology of co-contemporaneousness [Aktualismus], dialectical theology contradicts Thomistic philosophy and theology on the basic notion of being. The symbols of creation, sin, and redemption are not interpreted in the pattern of naturalsupernatural, but in a temporal (transhistorical) scheme. Its categories are not the unfolding of the nature of things, but the unfolding of a sequence of events [Ereignissen]. Only such an ontological philosophy would be adequate to express a basic schema [Grundschema] of dialectical theology that could develop the temporal structure of its categories. Bergson’s or Heidegger’s anti-Aristotelian philosophy may provide the epistemological and ontological foundation of Barth’s historical categories—as a kind of ‘‘eventlessness [Ereignislosigkeit].’’101 Despite this suggestive comparison, Barth’s theological universe seems eons removed from the philosophies of Bergson and Heidegger (who are, in different ways, neither antiAristotelian nor quite on the same page with Barth on much else). Nor does Barth’s thought strike one as being based on a ‘‘basic notion of being’’ (unless one claims that every thought, including all theology, must be, quod non). Moreover, if ‘‘updating’’ (i.e., aktualisieren) is really the term one wants to invoke, then it is hard to see how this would sit well with either ‘‘basic schema’’or ‘‘eventlessness.’’ That said, Taubes is right to comment that Barth may well have written a ‘‘new chapter in the history of dialectics,’’ that is to say, in the history of method and ontology that, as Heidegger claims in Being and Time, Aristotle had already successfully overcome in its Platonic variety (and that Heidegger would come to dismiss in its Hegelian expansion). Barth, Taubes goes on to note, offers a theology without theodicy, thus opening the possibility of a religious language in an age of the eclipse of the divine. The language of dialectical theology seems able even to absorb the atheism of Nietzsche and [Franz] Overbeck as stages in the purification of man’s image of God and could accept the realm of necessity as a veil of the divine. Karl Barth opened a gate to a trans-theistic stage of consciousness, but he opened the gate to this stage as a theologian.102

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Taubes quickly gives in to the temptation to read these general statements as a specimen, not just of political theology (as he claims throughout), but of ‘‘political Marcionism’’—a ‘‘political demonology’’103 premised on the ‘‘doctrine of an alien God,’’ as von Harnack had interpreted the early Christian heresy. In Barth’s and Taubes’s hands, ‘‘political Marcionism’’ would thus seem to undermine the cultural and moral complacency of liberal Protestantism and hence to anticipate the crisis out of which Barth’s dialectical theology, as well as the theological ruminations of Friedrich Gogarten, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich would emerge.104 Yet dialectical theology—like ‘‘inverse’’ or ‘‘other theology,’’ to invoke the terminology of Adorno and Benjamin—engages the order and the powers that be, including the events that inevitably come to interrupt them, in ways that are more hesitant and paradoxical than the dualisms of Marcionism, together with ‘‘antinomianism’’ of all stripes (‘‘antinomianism’’ being one of Taubes’s favorite notions). An altogether different explanatory model, an alternative ‘‘messianic logic,’’ if you like, seems to be called for. Instead of ontological dualism, what is in play here is an ontological-theological prioritization, an inverted hierarchy, as it were, a novel optics of aspects of absolute as opposed to merely relative values, from whose perspective all things can be seen and set right (creation and revelation, history and its fall, messianic redemption and the restitution of all in all, the restitutio in integrum, in which the ‘‘origin’’—call it the paradisiacal state and adamitic language—is, once again, the ‘‘goal’’). Taubes summarizes things aptly when he sides with Barth (and with Benjamin and Kafka) against Adorno, whom he—somewhat unfairly—accuses of reducing messianic optics to a mere ‘‘idea’’ and, eventually, to a purely aesthetic ‘‘as if’’: ‘‘If God is God, then he can’t be coaxed out [herauszukitzeln] of our soul. There is a prius there, an apriori. Something has to happen from the other side; then we see, when our eyes are pierced open. Otherwise we see nothing. Otherwise we ascend, we strive until the day after tomorrow.’’105 To put things differently and apodictically, adopting a formulation used by Bruce McCormack, one that strives to undermine all ‘‘fictionalism,’’ every reduction of redemption to the ‘‘as if’’: if God is God, then He must be ‘‘not a possible God but the God who is.’’106 Neither an anatheistic God who ‘‘may be’’ nor a speculative materialist ‘‘inexistent’’ and ‘‘virtual’’ God who must still be produced, but a ‘‘critically realistic’’—and, in that sense, dialectical—conception of God Who Is What He Is and Will Be. A crucial question remains: After all, is what we call ‘‘God’’ God? Is the phrase ‘‘if God is God,’’ as Taubes uses it here, anything more than an empty, near-formal tautology, whose formulation and formalization—‘‘if A, then A’’ or ‘‘A ⳱ A’’—can yield no content or meaning or force worthy of the name (of the Divine Name, that is)? Barth’s probing meditation on Anselm’s ‘‘ontological argument’’ for the existence of God, published in 1931 under the title Fides Quaerens Intellectum and often described as

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Barth’s discourse on method, offers a tentative response to these questions.107 Interestingly—otherwise than as Taubes suspects—Adorno’s own dictum that all philosophy revolves around our understanding and giving of the ontological proof for the existence of God (after Kant had seemed to destroy it) is another.

The Other Theology Versus the Theology of the Wholly Other In the remainder of this essay, I will venture a hypothesis regarding Barth and Adorno, helped by the concept, or rather, the enigmatic formula of ‘‘inverse theology.’’ Adorno first uses it in his correspondence with Benjamin, with reference to the reception of Kafka. Later, however, he gives it much broader relevance in conversations with Max Horkheimer, speaking of ‘‘the other theology [die andere Theologie]’’ more abstractly. I believe that the latter, broader use of the idea of an ‘‘other theology,’’ which implicitly includes and cannot be understood without the earlier motif of an ‘‘inverse theology,’’ is quite pressing for us today. In the final chapter of my Minimal Theologies, I offer a first attempt to sketch this ‘‘other theology,’’ suggesting that the critique of ‘‘idolatry,’’ in all of its material and conceptual forms, might offer such matrix.108 In what follows, I will expand on this previous analysis. Two reasons, at least, undergird the need for this expanded discussion. The first is that in Adorno’s earliest formulation the contrast between the idea of ‘‘inverse’’ or ‘‘other’’ theology and the competing concept of ‘‘dialectical theology’’ is not at all clear. We will need to examine just how Adorno’s idea of an ‘‘inverse’’ or ‘‘other theology’’ relates to the need for ‘‘a ‘wholly other’ theological foundation’’ that Edward Thurneysen had suggested to Barth in their weekly correspondence, when they were pastors in adjacent villages and about to initiate a revolution in Protestant thought.109 How can one differentiate between ‘‘the other theology’’ and the theology of ‘‘the wholly other,’’ given that their respective ‘‘object’’ or ‘‘subject’’ is absolute, indeed, the Absolute, and hence absolves itself from every conceptual determination, divine nomination, image, or picture? Indeed, any attempt to fix it in a concept or representation risks blasphemy and idolatry, as it reaches beyond the tangential and infinitesimal point at which the two theologies touch, if only fleetingly and often vainly. The second reason is that the semantic and political force of the concept of the ‘‘other theology’’ was limited and all but lost in one of its most influential expressions, Horkheimer’s ‘‘Longing for the Totally Other,’’ the title of a 1970 interview with Der Spiegel. I will ask what, by drawing Adorno’s formulation away from Horkheimer and toward Barth, we might retrieve for the concept of ‘‘inverse theology’’ today.

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Against Natural and Supernatural Interpretation What, today, is not ‘‘theology’’ (apart from theological chatter [Geschwa¨tz])? Is E. Ju¨nger less ‘‘theology’’ than Bultmann or Brunner? Kafka less than Karl Barth? —Jacob Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt

The term inverse theology appears in a letter from Adorno to Benjamin dated December 17, 1934. In it, Adorno reports on his reading of Kafka, later more elaborately documented in ‘‘Notes on Kafka.’’110 In the later text we find the most extensive indications of Adorno’s conception of an ‘‘inverse’’ theology. For all we know, Adorno suggests, ‘‘inverse theology,’’ as opposed to ‘‘straight’’ or ‘‘dialectical’’ theology, may call for the representation of something altogether different and unheard of, something not of this world yet not otherworldly. The concept had long been in preparation in Adorno’s writing, however, and it casts a long shadow well beyond the essay on Kafka. We find echoes of ‘‘inverse theology’’ in the essays on Scho¨nberg’s Moses and Aaron, on Beckett’s Endgame, and in Metaphysics, the series of lecture courses leading up to the publication of Adorno’s magnum opus, Negative Dialectics, in 1966. In the correspondence with Benjamin and in ‘‘Notes on Kafka,’’ Adorno contests a certain theological interpretation of Kafka’s oeuvre that would ascribe to him a ‘‘religious position,’’ perhaps even ‘‘the religious archi-position as such [die religio¨se Urposition schlechtin].’’111 Here Adorno takes issue less with Barth (or, as one might have expected, Max Brod, who was the main proponent of the Jewish-theological interpretation of Kafka, whose literary legacy had been entrusted to him) than with Hans-Joachim Schoeps.112 He mentions Barth and Brod in passing but saves his ire for Schoeps’s appropriation of what Adorno calls ‘‘dialectical theology’’ to interpret Kafka in terms of a ‘‘Barthianism without mediator [Barthianismus ohne Mittler],’’113 that is to say, without Christ (or any other intermediary instance or connecting instant) to bridge heaven and earth. Schoeps had also been a target of ridicule in the correspondence between Benjamin and Scholem in the spring of 1933, both with regard to alleged dilettantism in his interpretation of Kafka and also in view of his conservative, nationalist Prussian political sympathies (whose National-Socialist implications Schoeps—who went into exile in Sweden and lost family members in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz—would vehemently deny, both in correspondence with Brod and in an unpublished riposte to the publication of the BenjaminScholem letters).114 Schoeps had sent his 1931 Jewish Faith in Our Time: Prolegomena to the Foundation of a Systematic Theology of Judaism to Barth and had met him in person; a correspondence in which Barth responded critically to Schoeps’s theses followed roughly a year later.115 In fact, Schoeps is somewhat apologetic about his choice of words in characterizing Kafka as

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‘‘Barthianism without mediator [or mediators, since Mittler is the same in singular and plural].’’ He writes: ‘‘If we want to typify Kafka’s worldview, then it is—sit venia verbo [‘‘if you will pardon the phrase’’]—a Barthianism without mediator. Not only the path from earth to heaven, but also the one from heaven to earth is too long, ever to be followed.’’116 Adorno’s reservations about dialectical theology, then, seem aimed less at Barth directly (though he takes issue elsewhere, unconvincingly, with Barth’s theology of the ‘‘wholly other’’) than at the announcement, in the afterword to Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, published by Schoeps and Brod in 1931, that in a forthcoming book Schoeps would seek ‘‘to present a detailed interpretation of Franz Kafka’s entire work as ultimately expressing a negative actualization [negative Aktualisierung] of the Judaic understanding of revelation, and one conditioned by the advancing process of secularization.’’117 The phrase ‘‘negative actualization’’ is deeply puzzling, indeed, downright paradoxical. After all, is a ‘‘negative actualization’’ not precisely an active, pro-active or retro-active deactualization, of sorts? Or is a ‘‘negative actualization’’ of the Judaic understanding of revelation a de facto Christian understanding of that revelation, brought about by ‘‘the advancing process of secularization’’? By implication, is secularization not yet a fully actualized phenomenon, but merely an ‘‘advancing process,’’ one that might well be forever ongoing? Such suggestions, I suspect, especially the suspicion of a creeping Christianization, may have spurred Scholem to write the open letter to Schoeps in which he categorically but politely rejects this author’s position in Jewish Faith in Our Time and protests against his abundant and uncritical use of ‘‘Protestant terminology.’’118 Schoeps claims that, for Kafka, the human soul needs a mediator (or a series of mediators) and that without such mediation transcendence remains final and our distance from it without hope. Without a mediator or mediators, he path to the next human heart, just like the road between heaven and earth, is simply ‘‘too long, to ever be followed.’’ Revelation may be a given—indeed, may be continually given—but a redemption fails to arrive. Schoeps cites a fragment from Kafka: ‘‘Through words come remnants of light [Quer durch die Worte kommen Reste von Licht].’’ Note the plural, ‘‘words’’ rather than ‘‘the Word,’’ as Barth’s ‘‘theology of the Word’’ would have insisted. The ‘‘miracle [Wunder]’’ of God’s ‘‘unfathomable act of love,’’ which alone is capable of bridging the gap, of crossing the divide, has, in Kafka’s eyes (in his ‘‘worldview,’’ Schoeps claims), simply not happened.119 Kafka’s Barthianism, his insistence and, perhaps, reliance on a wholly other, remains without mediation. There is, no doubt, the absolute—call it an infinity of access to infinite hope—but none of it is accessible to us, just as nothing in and of heaven finds its way back to earth. Still, one wonders what a ‘‘Barthianism without mediator’’ could mean, since for Barth the theological concept of revelation is centrally tied to the figure of Christ—the positive rather than negative actualization of revelation, so to speak—more precisely, to his resurrection, which, in Barth’s view is the sole instance, the single ‘‘Word,’’ that puts

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all powers—all gods, all of history, every culture, each anthropology, including the natural theologies that built upon such created being—to shame and renders them nothing. The resurrection actively deactivates and deactualizes all that exists in a relentless phenomenological epoche¯, out of which alone a new world may emerge and be given meaning, either again or for the first time: The Gospel [Heilsbotschaft] of the Resurrection is the ‘‘power [Kraft] of God,’’ His virtus (Vulgate), the disclosing and apprehending of His meaning, His effective preeminence over all gods. It is the action [Handlung], the supreme miracle [Wunder aller Wunder], by which God, the unknown God dwelling in light unapproachable, the Holy One, Creator, and Redeemer, makes Himself known: ‘‘What therefore ye worship in ignorance, this set I forth unto you’’ (Acts 17:23). No divinities [Go¨ttlichkeiten] remaining on this side of the line of resurrection; no divinity which dwells in temples made with hand or which is served by the hands of man; no divinities that ‘‘need anyone,’’ that is to say, any human being that pretends to know them (Acts 17:24, 25), can be God. God is the unknown God and, precisely, as such He bestows life and breath and all things. Therefore the power of God can be detected neither in the world of nature nor in the souls of men. It must not be confounded with any high, exalted force, known or knowable. The power of God is not the most exalted of forces, nor is it either their sum or their fount, but the crisis [Krisis] of all powers, the wholly other [das ganz andere], that by which all power is measured, and by which it is pronounced to be both something and nothing, nothing and something. . . . The power of God stands neither at the side of nor above (‘‘supernatural [supranatural]’’) the limited and limiting powers; not to be confused with them, not to be ranged among them, it cannot, save with the greatest caution, be compared with them. The power of God, the instauration [Einsetzung] of Jesus as the Christ, is in the strictest sense of the word a pre-supposition [Voraus-Setzung], free from any content that can be grasped.120 Given the negativity traced by Barth here, Kafka’s deepest insight and profound ‘‘unrest’’ paradoxically might, as Schoeps goes on to suggest, be closer to a Barthian Christian ‘‘truth’’ than is the faith of nominally ‘‘devout’’ Christians, who all too quickly assume their own salvation. Had it been taken to heart, such a truth would do greater justice to the disturbing fact that in Kafka the position of heaven vis-a`-vis earth remains fundamentally ‘‘off,’’ that is, ‘‘crooked’’ and ‘‘warped,’’ just as the relationship between God and man retains an element of ‘‘oppressive uncertainty.’’121 And yet to say and experience as much, Schoeps intimates, is the original, authentic, and ultimate religious disposition, ‘‘the religious archi-position as such [die religio¨se Urposition schlechthin].’’ In his letter to Benjamin, Adorno insists that the ‘‘inverse theology’’ in which Benjamin’s and his own conceptions of Kafka converge—or, more precisely, ‘‘disappear [verschwinden]’’—is that of a fundamentally different ‘‘position or disposition [Standort],’’

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one that is ‘‘directed against natural and supernatural interpretation alike.’’122 In other words, it is as if the very distinction between a nontheological (i.e., ‘‘natural’’) and theological (i.e., ‘‘supernatural’’) interpretation collapses or no longer matters. From here on, evidently something else does: some other ‘‘position,’’ ‘‘disposition,‘‘ or even ’’imposition‘‘—this time orienting itself and gesturing toward somewhere else or, perhaps, oriented to and attracted from elsewhere, beyond this world and beyond the otherworldly that would be its abstract, all too simple negation. In consequence, ‘‘inverse’’ or ‘‘other theology’’ is neither nontheological and atheistic (i.e., natural, humanist, secular, or profane), nor theological and theistic (meaning, in this context, dialectical and dogmatic, as Barth or Schoeps would have defined it). Yet in subverting these extremes and the very metaphysical dualisms they impose—in other words, in an unknown and altogether different sense—‘‘inverse’’ or ‘‘other’’ theology is still deeply, if otherwise, ‘‘theological.’’ Unlike the ‘‘theology of the other’’ (which is the Barthianism Schoeps adopts), the ‘‘other theology’’ inverts all apparent oppositions. It reduces them to a virtual sameness against which the ‘‘other’’ of the ‘‘other theology’’ stands in a relation of total negation, even though, strangely, it somehow leaves this sameness in place and intact. Not of this world, ‘‘inverse’’ or ‘‘other’’ theology is in this world, all the same. Yet in fact this resembles the position—the Standort beyond natural and supernatural interpretation—that both Barth (in his early reading of Paul) and Schoeps (in his reading of Kafka) sought to develop or, more indirectly, gestured toward. Our question, therefore, must be simply this: Why, in what sense, and how far does Adorno see Barth’s or Schoeps’s insistence on the ‘‘inner dialectic’’—the ‘‘restlessness’’ and ‘‘truth’’—of the subject and object of theological thinking going so badly wrong? How is it at fault when viewed from the perspective of a consistently negative and dialectical or, indeed, ‘‘inverse’’ or ‘‘other’’ theology? What would an ‘‘other,’’ in Schoeps’s words, ‘‘negative actualization of the understanding of revelation,’’ whether Judaic or Christian, look like? How could it be differently ‘‘conditioned’’ and, perhaps, not rely on an ‘‘advancing process of secularization’’ at all? In his correspondence with Brod, in his afterwords, and in several essays on Kafka’s ‘‘spiritual form [geistige Form]’’ and the ‘‘theological motif’’ held to be central to his literary oeuvre, Schoeps construes the image of a fictional and narrative style in which human institutions can no longer uphold ‘‘any claim at religious authority,’’123 indeed, are without mediation or mediator(s) and thus stand under genuine theological critique. As one commentator, Margarete Kohlenbach, points out in an essay in German Life and Letters, this is exactly the opposite of what Adorno suspects the dialectical-theological reading would produce, which is ‘‘the view of Kafka’s castle as God’s rule on earth.’’124 What else could the ‘‘theology of the Word of God,’’ of the wholly other, signify but the image of an absolute sovereignty that leaves its imprint on creaturely matters? Yet, Kohlenbach rightly observes, the dialectical-theological reading Schoeps proposes in fact can and does ‘‘accommodate the social critique inherent in Kafka’s depiction of power

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. . . without having to dismiss, as Adorno does, Kafka’s engagement with religion as irrelevant to his work.’’125 By extension or implication, following the logic of Kohlenbach’s account of Schoeps’s reading of Kafka, Barth’s dialectical theology—which does not discuss Kafka but draws on Dostoevsky and Ibsen instead—might well reveal the same potential for redemptive, call it ‘‘realistic,’’ critique. Just as Barth’s early writing, starting with the first commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, published in 1919, could be seen, in its ‘‘antibourgeois rhetoric,’’ as a ‘‘Protestant counterpart’’ to Benjamin’s observation of the loss of ‘‘ ‘experience [Erfahrung]’ and its transmissibility,’’ so too it could be seen as being finely attuned to the ‘‘structure that informs Kafka’s dilemma’’ (i.e., the need to think hope and redemption in a world that leaves no room for either).126 Kohlenbach continues: ‘‘While [Kafka’s] writings are far from upholding any belief in Christ, they display a cultural profile similar to that of Barth’s early teaching: an existential interest in redemption and revelation that co-exists with a strong mistrust of both traditional religion and its modern re-enactments.’’127 How is it that Adorno finds Kafka’s writings display nothing of the sort?128 Put differently, why would Adorno’s concept of an ‘‘inverse’’ and ‘‘other’’ theology be any less suspect of being politically dangerous or impotent, that is, of ‘‘mimicking the worst’’ or leaving everything as it is? 129 Should not Adorno’s own work be read, precisely, in light of Kafka? To begin to answer these questions, we must determine further what the ‘‘inverse’’ or ‘‘other’’ definition and deployment of ‘‘theology’’ means here, spelling out its direction and evaluation of the things that exist. Most importantly, we must clarify in what sense its program consists in deploying what I would like to call a methodological— more precisely, optical—device, one that allows us to imagine a materialist hypothetical and deeply pragmatic perspective, though it is a perspectivism or perspectivalism for the sake of the Absolute, ad maiorem Dei gloriam, as it were. Etymologically, inversus is the perfect passive participle of inverto (invertere), a verb that signifies ‘‘to invert,’’ that is, ‘‘to turn upside down.’’ A classic expression is daemon est deus inversus, ‘‘the devil is God,’’ not so much seen ‘‘through a glass darkly’’ but as if in a mirror image, as God’s flipside, idol, or counterfeit. In short, when the devil is taken for God, the worst is seen as the best. In ‘‘Notes on Kafka,’’ Adorno asserts that the ‘‘material’’ or ‘‘substance’’—the Stoffgehalt—of Kafka’s narratives is hardly a reference to divine governance, just as The Castle and The Trial are not ‘‘two forms of expression of the very same being that the theologian is used to call ‘Grace [Gnade]’ and ‘Judgment [Gericht],’ ’’130 as Schoeps had too hastily claimed. In Adorno’s words: ‘‘Dialectical theology fails in its attempt to appropriate him . . . because in Kafka, unlike in Fear and Trembling, ambiguity and obscurity are attributed not exclusively to the Other as such but to human beings and to the conditions in which they live. Precisely that ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ taught by Kierkegaard and Barth is leveled off.’’131 Our very idea of ‘‘the other’’ and of the human condition is idolatrous, Adorno seems to imply. And yet we should not forget that nowhere in his writings does Barth ‘‘appropriate’’ Kafka for

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theological, let alone apologetic, purposes—unless we are to take the reference to the one who is waiting at the door in the opening pages of the second edition of his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans as an oblique reference to Kafka’s ‘‘Before the Law.’’ Once again, the dialectical theology at which ‘‘Notes on Kafka’’ takes critical aim is above all Schoeps’s interpretation or, at least, presentation of it, not Barth’s own. This is not to say that there is in Adorno’s writings no direct confrontation with Barth. He is explicitly mentioned in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment and such other important documents as the 1958 dialogue with Eugen Kogon entitled ‘‘Reason and Revelation,’’ the lecture course Metaphysics, and Negative Dialectics.132 On the whole, the critique of the dialectical-theological interpretation of Kafka, for all its oblique characterization of the Barthian alternative, gives us sufficient material to work with. But before interrogating its pertinence and philosophical grounds, let me briefly mention one further example of Adorno’s categorical rejection of Barth’s dialectical-theological view in his later work. Asked in 1965 by his former mentor Paul Tillich what he thought of ‘‘the new phase of theology which—following Heidegger’s and Bultmann’s philosophy of language— replaces all ontology with the ‘Word of God’ ’’ and, indeed, lets ‘‘language be as the ‘house of being,’ but without any ‘being’ in the house,’’ Adorno responded emphatically and, as so often, apodictically: The word-of-God theology . . . I reject no less than you do. The mystical conception of language of which it is so reminiscent has meaning only in the context of a positive theology. Otherwise the philosophy of language becomes something like a fetishism of language. What is the word of God supposed to mean without God? No that won’t do, and not only will it finally lead to a resurrection of the liberal-secular moralization of theology, but these theologians will make common cause with the logical positivists, for whom language has a very similar function, namely to replace the subject.133 This would seem to settle the matter decisively and, one assumes, for Tillich satisfactorily (after all, in his magnum opus, Systematic Theology, he did not hesitate to describe Barth’s dogmatic theology as a ‘‘demonic absolutism which throws the truth like stones at the heads of people not caring whether they can accept it or not’’134). And yet what Adorno says critically here of the Barthian and Bultmannian ‘‘wordof-God theology,’’ together with what he had detected earlier in Schoeps’s dialecticaltheological exegeses of Kafka, holds—at least, formally or structurally and logically—true of much of his own view of negative dialectics and the metaphysical or spiritual experience (geistige Erfahrung) on which it rests. The critique directed toward the ‘‘theology of the wholly other’’ merely reflects the one directed inward. The ‘‘inverse’’ or ‘‘other’’ theology stands equally condemned with dialectical theology, even if only implicitly.

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‘‘Inverse’’ and ‘‘other’’ theology—like the project of negative dialectics, with its ‘‘metaphysical meditations’’—must thus fall under the same suspicion of letting the powers that be, well, just be. To say this is not to condemn Adorno’s objection against Schoeps or Barth as a whole, just as this observation is hardly fatal to Kafka’s world as he reads it. It is merely to suggest that what Adorno dismisses in Schoeps and Barth he takes as a standing risk of his own conception and larger undertaking as well. ‘‘Inverse’’ or ‘‘other’’ theology is thus not so different—formally, structurally, and logically—from the earliest articulation of dialectical theology as he had received it, just as the latter’s ultimate transformation, in Barth’s Church Dogmatics, into a ‘‘critically realistic’’ doctrine of faith sheds light on some of the consequences Adorno and his followers soon had to draw from the premises (‘‘concepts,’’ ‘‘categories,’’ and ‘‘models,’’ Negative Dialectics calls them) whose deep pragmatic relevance we have, perhaps, been slow to appreciate. Is there a more substantial distinction that would allow us to demarcate the two projects of rethinking the task and object (or subject) of ‘‘theology’’ under modern conditions? We can arrive at it by asking a simple question. Does Barth attribute dialectic(s) equally to the object of dogmatic theology—that is, the divine subject and its predicates— and to the human subject that seeks to ‘‘know’’ it through grace? In other words, is there a necessary contingency and conceptual—and, hence, theological—instability that affects the very heart of the Word of God? Is crisis our lot, as creaturely, fallen, and sinful, beings? Is it not the scandal of biblical and historical faith to postulate a contradiction—a kenosis and crucifixion, perhaps, even an antinomianism—in God himself? Ana- and post-theists have long drawn this conclusion.135 But does Barth? And is this what a ‘‘Barthianism without mediator(s)’’ finally comes down to? Should not Adorno agree? The very assumption of a subject’s—even the divine subject’s—self-sufficiency and plenitude (that is to say, its original unity and final redemption) would seem to run counter to the dialectical apparatus that Adorno puts in place in Negative Dialectics, and well before. The one assumption—a silent theological axiom much more than an explicit hypothesis—that Adorno might no longer be willing to share is the claim that, irrespective of any mediation and every mediator, God’s own Word, God’s very own theology and thought (since God speaks the first, the lasting, and the final word and ‘‘only God has a concept of God’’), is in and of itself true. To assume this is to postulate an un- or nonor antidialectical ‘‘God’’; in other words, it is to believe that the divine is expressive, expressed, or expressible in toto. At the very least, it is to think that the Word of God has an integrality and integrity or intactness that, while unintelligible to us, retains an ineffable truth. God, on this reading, is the only ‘‘speculative realist’’ worthy of the name, since He alone knows and sees or wills what objectively exists or what is fully revealed and given, even independent of any correlative perception, witnessing, or knowledge. How different is the claim made by Levinas that ‘‘the Infinite’’ does not exist first in and for itself, only in order subsequently to reveal—or express—itself, in part? Barth’s God is not the Infinite but ‘‘eternity [Ewigkeit],’’ whereas for Levinas there is neither a

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first nor a last word, but much and many in between. But also for Barth, as McCormack reminds us, God’s ‘‘speech’’ is the very ‘‘mystery of God,’’ that is to say, it is premised on a ‘‘dialectic of veiling and unveiling in revelation,’’ which is the central assumption undergirding dialectical theology from beginning to end.136 Echoing Benjamin and Scholem, Adorno calls this the ‘‘Scripture’’ and ‘‘tradition’’ of ‘‘Kabbalah.’’ His program is not that of a ‘‘faith seeking understanding [fides quaerens intellectum]’’ nor that of an understanding seeking—or finding—faith. Instead, it is that of a thinking (Nachdenken) of what has already been said and done, thought and suffered, desired and enjoyed in light of an idea of redemption, even resurrection, that must remain negative. In that sense, negative dialectics and negative metaphysics, as Adorno sees them, follow not so much a credo as a tradition (i.e., ‘‘Scripture’’ and ‘‘Kabbalah’’). Adorno neither affirms nor denies that a ratio veritatis, a ratio summae naturae, lies behind or beyond this tradition, unlike Barth, who, in Fides Quaerens Intellectum, claims that the ratio fidei (i.e., the credo) is ‘‘not identical’’ with the ratio veritatis (i.e., ‘‘the Word’’).137 What Adorno might accept is that, in any tradition worthy of the name, what is needed is ‘‘a special movement of thought which goes beyond mere reading.’’138 Likewise, Adorno would not deny that ‘‘ontic ratio precedes and grounds noetic ratio.’’139 After all, this is the ‘‘primacy and prevalence of the objective [Vorrang des Objektiven],’’ of which Negative Dialectics makes so much from beginning to end. While Adorno avoids the terminology of the ‘‘ontic’’ (Heidegger) and ‘‘noetic’’ (Husserl), one can rightly surmise that this ‘‘prevalence of the objective’’ is the overall material and materialist direction that ‘‘inverse’’ theology aims to take. By contrast, when Adorno speaks of the ontological proof around which all philosophy ought to revolve, he thinks of Kant and perhaps Descartes, not Anselm. There is no such thing in Barth—nor could there be in any dogmatic theology, however freely conceived—as a dialectical logic of contradiction, of determined rather than abstract negation all the way through, that is, all the way down to the very origin and supreme cause of the Creator God and his Revelation. Nor is there dialectics or contradiction all the way up into the very telos (alpha and omega) of it all: eschatology, the apocalypse, and all the redemptive features of the Kingdom of God, the restitutio in integrum. Even Barth’s most brazen speculations about God’s being in terms of a ‘‘pure negation’’ in The Epistle to the Romans or about the ‘‘Nothing [das Nichtige]’’ in the Church Dogmatics form no exception to this general rule. As McCormack writes: ‘‘to speak of Barth as ‘anti-metaphysical’ refers to his attitude towards a particular way of knowing (the path taken); it does not entail a bracketing-off of particular regions of discourse from discussion in an a priori fashion.’’140 This means than an ‘‘anti-metaphysical stance in theology’’ is, in Barth’s eyes, fully compatible with an alternative discursive consideration of themes concerning the being and attributes of God, the doctrine of the Trinity, the dual nature of Christ, and so on.

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What Barth rejects is a metaphysical method that would consist in ‘‘extrapolating from observed phenomena’’ so as to ascertain a ‘‘First Cause’’ or ‘‘First Principle.’’141 Knowledge of God is an event, a miracle—nothing less, nothing more. Again, the only radical, original, or originary difference between Adorno and Barth concerns the reality and nature of the postulated origin (the Ursprung) and end (the telos or all in all), neither of which can be strictly affirmed or negated, known or inverted. Their opposition, then, entails a distinction that we cannot make yet cannot but make and that, moreover, when all is said and done, makes no difference either way. Paradoxically, what might seem the fullest and most substantial distinction is thus also the emptiest, leaving only the thinnest line of demarcation between the two authors— or, rather, the two complexes of authors: Benjamin and Adorno, Schoeps and Barth—and the critical philosophical and theological projects for which they stand. (Indeed, the distinction in question runs between other authors, such as von Harnack and Taubes, and between these two and Marcion, just as necessarily). Between the two faces of negativity, only the miracle of faith—or, for that matter, of any epistemic or normative position or disposition—decides. The question, then, is how to understand and relate a positively posited ‘‘real’’ Infinity/Eternity that is dialectically and critically reflected and refracted in an infinitely finite, interminable interpretation, dialogue, and discourse (which would be Barth’s view) and an ‘‘infinity’’ that has itself become infinite movement, that is to say, infinitely—and hence only in that sense negatively—dialectical in its finite realization, its realization as something ultimately or potentially finite (which would be Adorno’s perspective). Yet a further question would be: How does one distinguish these two visions of the other from yet another idea of the infinite other, one that is merely the nonmethodological longing for an abstractly negated finitude tout court (which is, finally, Horkheimer’s philosophical and political impasse). Here I can only mention the possible direction that the much-needed reimagining of these different perspectives on theological difference might take if it were to borrow from recent developments in phenomenology and in ‘‘post-continental’’ and ‘‘post-analytic’’ thought. Only by learning from these very different schools of thought can we envision a further formalization and de-formalization of the task that ‘‘inverse’’ or ‘‘other theology’’ sets itself. Neither Barth nor Adorno—much less Schoeps, Taubes, Benjamin, or Horkheimer— offers the necessary theoretical and conceptual tools that would allow us to avoid the affirmation or negation of some posited positive ‘‘Real’’ (whether as Ursprung or Ziel, object or subject). Whether such a ‘‘Real’’ is seen as given in revelation and accepted in faith (as is claimed by Barth and Schoeps, albeit on different grounds) or denied and withheld in a strictly conceptual and deeply ascetic gesture of redemptive critique, the perennial avoidance of idolatry, conceptual or not (as in the case of Adorno), matters little. In both cases, the matter at heart—the Thing itself—calls for a far more radical

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philosophical model of phenomenological reduction or dialectical logic, of deep pragmatism, as I have said. It is clear that, in Adorno’s and Benjamin’s writings, no simple continuation of either traditional dogmatics or any of its well-known ‘‘heresies’’—such as Gnosticism, Marcionism, or even antinomianism—is ever intended. ‘‘God’’ is not so much ‘‘interrupted’’ (as Benjamin Lazier seems to imply) as exposed to a ‘‘messianic reduction’’ (in Peter Fenves’s coinage),142 whose precise procedure can be detailed only with the help of phenomenological-analytical means as yet to be developed. Such investigation requires the use of what might seem an unlikely ally: the language and formalism of mathematical, geometric precision (speaking of tangents and circles, points without spatiotemporal extension, number and set theory, and the like). Merely to speak of a secular or even postsecular theology, of sorts (as I have myself suggested at times), means to keep using designations that remain vague and do not truly capture the specificity of the inverse, other theology, as it seeks to demarcate itself from its apparent opposites, Barth’s dialectical theology and ‘‘critical realism,’’ to begin with.

Inversion as Direction In the letter to Benjamin, Adorno characterizes Kafka’s work as ‘‘a photograph of our earthly life from the perspective of a redeemed life [eine Photographie des irdischen Lebens aus der Perspektive des erlo¨sten],’’143 whereby the latter reveals itself in a strange—and estranged—optical light, in reverse, inversely, as a special effect without determining and proportionate cause that precedes the very act and order of creation as a sign of the causa sui. Hence, being sui generis, as it were, redeemed life is discernible only after the fact, by looking and leaning backward from where we, here and now, happen to find ourselves. As Kohlenbach rightly observes, the passage suggests a ‘‘directional’’ interpretation of the ‘‘inversion’’ that theology must undergo to begin to do justice to the world as Kafka’s imagined and evoked it: We must assume that non-inverted, straight theology conceptualizes or ‘‘sees’’ God from the perspective of human, earthly life; and we must assume that Kafka and inverse theology look at earthly life from God’s point of view, or from the standpoint of redemption. Straight theology looks up to God in heaven, inverse theology looks down on man on earth. The inversion consists in the theological inquiry being turned around by one hundred and eighty degrees. This directional understanding of ‘‘inversion’’ is confirmed in the finale of Minima Moralia, where Adorno insists that knowledge requires a light that emanates from redemption and is shed onto the world. Inverse theology provides a picture of earthly life that is seen, or receives the light by which it can be seen, from a transcendent position.144

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Adorno’s inverse theology, not unlike Barth’s dialectical theology, thus stands opposed to ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘philosophical’’ theologies and ontotheologies. But if this is so, both can also be said to ‘‘share one cognitive perspective,’’145 albeit one that, for all its emphasis on reason, on faith seeking understanding (as Barth explains in Fides Quaerens Intellectum), and on the at once noetic and dianoetic aspects of rationality, broadly and speculatively conceived (in the case of Adorno), reveals itself as deeply paradoxical and aporetic at heart. The faculty or process of cognition may not be the locus of this ‘‘spiritual experience,’’ but certainly there is a minimal—call it tangential—intersection of optics, though not necessarily a single optic as its result. For God to be God—and, in a nutshell, the claim that ‘‘God is God’’ sums up Barth’s entire dialectical theology and subsequent Church Dogmatics146 —he cannot be allowed any analogical presentation or representation in the realm of being, since he eludes the chain and hierarchy of its causes and proportionate effects. With comparable emphasis on ineffability, Adorno in one place says and virtually everywhere throughout his oeuvre implies that ‘‘even to think hope forsakes hope and works against it,’’147 so that ‘‘one who believes in God therefore cannot believe in God. The possibility for which the divine name stands is maintained by whoever does not believe.’’148 For Barth, by contrast, following a long tradition in modern theological thinking from Augustine via Aquinas and the Reformation up to at least Schleiermacher, God is ‘‘not a possible God but the God Who is.’’149 We have to wait until contemporary articulations of a certain post-theism or anatheism before this presupposition looses its self-evidence. But the qualification of Barth’s ‘‘realism’’ as ‘‘critical’’ and Adorno’s use of what could be described as materialist hypotheticals (not to be confused, as Taubes unfairly does, with some aesthetic or fictionalist ‘‘as if’’) may well be a step in that direction. Thus, at least formally speaking, Adorno and Barth share a comparable inversion of the concept and metaphysical implication of analogy, of the traditional scholastic or onto-theological analogia entis, as well as of any figuralmetaphorical transposition of finite onto infinite predicates. And any predicate, at least every predicate that we know of, is by definition finite, limited and limiting, hence in principle an instance of conceptual idolatry. This insight and circumstance is the predicament of predication. Both inverse and dialectical theology put into question the mainstay of both philosophical and dogmatic reflection throughout the history of Western theism, which is, first, the analogia entis and, second, that of the analogia fidei. They do so by means of a paradoxical logic that is more rhetorical (if deeply pragmatic, a form of ‘‘cultural politics,’’ as the late Rorty might have said150) than ontological, even though through the very dialectics of discourse—of determinate negation, as Adorno says—certain indelible effects in the nature (origin, essence, and subsequent causes) of things are both projected and triggered as well. That is to say, both Adorno and Barth excel in developing a rhetoric of radical transcendence and equally radical immanence, portraying the latter as the negative image

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or foil of the former and the former as the—now hidden, then revealed—‘‘ground [Ursprung]’’ or vantage point of the latter, to the point where one inverts and reverts into the other. It is as if playing up the relentless immanence of things, while demythologizing older accounts of the animation and teleological movement of animate beings and material things, paradoxically yields a perspective that could not be envisioned without the preceding negative operation, that is, without a phenomenological epoche¯ or reduction, of sorts. Kohlenbach aptly describes this feature of inverse theology: ‘‘While the straight theologian sees redemption in both God and God’s hidden dominion on earth, the inverse theologian sees nothing but damnation, absolute alienation, universal blindness, and the hell of history . . . inverse theology replaces salvation history by its opposite.’’151 But what would it mean, exactly, to replace ‘‘salvation history by its opposite’’? Do both Adorno’s negative dialectics and Barth’s dialectical theology assume the form of an inverse theodicy, meaning that they demonstrate on historical and systematic grounds that, paradoxically, the conditions of possibility for the best and the worst, for wonder and woe, must, for all their contingency, be necessarily the same, and this, precisely, if the worst is not to have the final word? The divine promise—the ‘‘hope of redemption,’’ as Adorno says—would then be stripped of any foothold in being, whether defined in ontological or empirical (historical, psychological, anthropological, political, and, indeed, even ‘‘religious’’) terms. And yet we cannot not ‘‘think’’ or gesture toward it. In this respect, Adorno and Barth share a further motif: namely, that of the ‘‘unthinkability of desperation,’’ the Unausdenkbarkeit der Verzweiflung. Inverse theology thus muses about the interface between the planes of history as immanence (of its negative totality, that is), on the one hand, and of redemptive transcendence (i.e., of expressive, material revelation and realization), on the other. In other words, it muses about the miracle—if not necessarily the mediator or, more abstractly, the medium—that would allow us either to see or to project, as we will and indeed must. In fact, Schoeps’s formula of a ‘‘Barthianism without mediator(s)’’ captures the very sense and force of a position and disposition that ultimately both Adorno and Barth seem to espouse. It would seem, then, that they both espouse what in Wittgensteinian and Spinozist terms one might call a dual aspect theory of reality, that is, a dual aspect concept of seeing and being, of seeing as being, of optics as ontology. That is to say, they portray history and hell, history as hell and history as redeemed, as two proverbial extremes that touch upon each other. But what would such touching mean? How and why, when and where, does the phenomenon of ‘‘the world as we find it’’ let itself be seen now as a rabbit, now as a duck, without ever being analogically related to either one of them and without these aspects having any single thing in common, save the elements of the world and their sum total, while being totally different, nonetheless? The unredeemed and the redeemed world are co-extensive in every respect and yet touch upon one another merely as a tangent

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upon a circle; in other words, the point at which they touch has no extension in historical time and empirical space. The two perspectives cannot be bridged organically, teleologically, or in a piecemeal or approximate fashion. They are ‘‘the same,’’ yet different. In sum, then, in some of their most striking and characteristic formulations, Adorno and Barth share a dialectical rhetoric less of question and answer, of looking backward and moving forward, than of a surprisingly apodictic and paratactic quality: a logic of exaggeration whose occasional harshness and sheer daring—revolving around two contrasting negativities, as we have seen—is hard to believe, let alone follow.152 And yet it is in their resolute and contemporary decisiveness that their current relevance for philosophy and theology may reside. They challenge and break away from the presentation and representation of religious content and theological form that a long legacy of JudeoChristian meditation on the existence and essence of the divine names has taken for granted and that has obvious parallels in Islamic thought as well. Inversion as Evaluation We can thus conclude that the two faces of negativity that Adorno and Barth portray are strikingly similar in both contours and rhetorical styles. Whether the world stands already redeemed (which must be Barth’s view, despite the crisis mode and almost expressionistic mood of his work on Romans) or as unredeemed and quasi-unredeemable (which would be the lesson Adorno draws from Kafka), inverse and dialectical theology, that is, the ‘‘other theology’’ and the ‘‘theology of the wholly other,’’ cohere—indeed, virtually overlap—in their phenomenological and reductive depiction of the world as we know it and the ‘‘messianic logic’’ for which it calls. And yet clearly their respective worlds are not the same—conceptually, theologically, metaphysically and politically. The distinction between their ‘‘all is (or will be) saved’’ and ‘‘all is (or may yet be) lost’’ is not grounded criteriologically but requires—indeed, calls for—something else: a performative gesture or passionate utterance that is neither an affirmative nor a negative statement or proposition, one that is, further, neither axiomatically decided and postulated nor deduced or hypothesized, but requires nothing short of a miracle, the belief in a miracle, the rethinking of belief as a miracle. In the context of Barth’s work this seems plausible enough, but does it also hold for Adorno? It does if we realize that Adorno’s more memorable statements stand out not only by their negativity—by being made half in jest, with wry humor and tongue in cheek, if not insincerely or cynically—but also by the fact that as sweeping statements they obey an iron logic of rhetorical exaggeration, of outbidding and hence outwitting the no less firm grip of historical doctrine and the realities they reflect. Let me give two examples: it is only in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban

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into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be positively pictured; this is the substance of its negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology. Its great desire would be the resurrection of the flesh, a desire utterly foreign to idealism, the realm of the absolute spirit.153 And: ‘‘Christian dogmatics, in which the souls were conceived as awakening simultaneously with the resurrection of the flesh, was metaphysically more consistent—more enlightened, if you will—than speculative metaphysics, just as hope means physical resurrection and feels defrauded of the best part by its spiritualization.’’154 As for Barth, the rhetorical flavor of his negativity can perhaps best be seen in his debates with his Catholic interlocutors and critics. McCormack summarizes the debate with one of his most formidable detractors, the Jesuit Erich Przywara: To Barth’s wholly other God, Przywara contrasted Augustine’s God of the ‘‘analogia entis’’—a momentous phrase destined to play a larger role in Barth’s debate with Catholicism. In Przywara’s view, Barth has put ‘‘in the place of the ‘analogy’ between God and the creature pure ‘negation.’ ’’ If the analogia entis of the Catholic concept of God means the mysterious tension of a ‘‘similar-dissimilar,’’ corresponding to the tension of the ‘‘God in and above us,’’ then in the Protestant concept of God, the ‘‘similarity’’ has been completely crossed out.155 On Przywara’s reading, then, Barth would not allow for a ‘‘true unity’’ between God and man, as signaled by the mystery of incarnation, still less for the ‘‘continuing presence of God in the world,’’ indicated by the existence of the historical Church. This objection, McCormack leaves no doubt, ‘‘could hardly be set aside as simply mistaken,’’ at least insofar as the Barth of the second edition of his work on Romans and his 1922 lecture ‘‘The Word of God’’ are concerned.156

Inversion as a Methodological Device In the conceptual nexus between the two approaches—that is, between a dialectics that seeks to stay ‘‘negative’’ and a dialectics that seeks to stay, well, ‘‘dialectical’’—inversion becomes a methodological device that consists in ‘‘retaining theological categories but ‘shrouding them in black.’ ’’157 It reminds one of Heidegger’s—and, in explicitly theological matters, Jean-Luc Marion’s—procedure of ‘‘crossing out,’’ whether of ‘‘being,’’ ‘‘God,’’ or ‘‘God’’ defined as ‘‘being.’’ For Adorno, such ‘‘shrouding in black’’ or ‘‘crossing out’’ is hardly provisional, merely strategic, preparation for a renewed access to an original Creation that has somehow been lost or anticipation of a final redemption still certain to come. As in Barth, the ‘‘bomb-craters’’ and ‘‘empty spaces’’ in the historical plane of

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immanence are the only points of reference we can truly rely on. Everything else stands under the prohibition of images, the Bilderverbot, or gives itself ephemerally, as a ‘‘trace of the other [Spur des Anderen]’’ alone. The ‘‘origin’’ is a ‘‘goal’’ and cannot be seen, experienced, assumed, or postulated as an original ‘‘given.’’158 The ‘‘fallacy’’ of all traditional and modern metaphysics and dialectics, then, is that it does not stay ‘‘negative’’; it is ‘‘the direct elevation, the critique of what merely is, into positivity, as if the insufficiency of what is might guarantee that what is will be rid of that insufficiency. Even in extremis, a negated negative is not a positive.’’159 Like Barth, Adorno is fully aware that the theologoumena he invokes are ‘‘scandals [Ansto¨sse] to modern thought’’ and imply nothing less than a ‘‘crisis of human perception.’’160 But they need to be evaluated, that is to say, thought, expressed, decided, and followed up on, nonetheless, since they alone enable a paradoxical freedom whose nearimpossible possibility remains a mere chimera—that is to say, a sheer impossibility— without them. Inverse theology allows us to see this. Adorno drives home this point in a letter written to Horkheimer in 1941: I have a weak, infinitely weak, feeling that it is still possible to think the secret, but I am honestly not yet in a position today to formulate the way in which it might be possible. The premise that theology is shrinking and will soon become invisible is one motif, while another is the conviction that, from the central point of view, there is no difference between theology’s relation to the negative and its relation to the positive. . . . But above all I think that everything we experience as true—not blindly, but as a conceptual impulse—and what presents itself to us as the index sui et falsi, only conveys this light as a reflection of that other light.161 In the same vein, responding to Horkheimer’s comment that ‘‘You never say anything about the positive object of negative theology, yet you leave no doubt that such a theology exists,’’ Adorno responds: ‘‘I have no secret doctrine. I believe, however, that I have an eye for picking up from things the reflection of a source of light that could not be the object of intentions and thoughts.’’162 Here we see, once more, an optics. As in Levinas’s and Spinoza’s concepts of expression,163 we find that Adorno’s resolutely negative metaphysics substitutes a becoming infinite of discourse for traditional infinity (the substantial ens increatum at the very beginning of things or the universal gathering of the all in all, the alpha and omega at the end of days). And yet Adorno leaves no doubt that we cannot not think, say, or write, what can no longer be thought, said, or written (and, perhaps, never could). The metaphysical objective, with its putative object and inevitable objectifications, remains fully operative, even though the conditions of its possibility are not yet realized and may very well not be realizable—being neither of nor for this world. Yet even in the midst of a necessary conceptual and practical askesis, we cannot exclude this unlikely possibility, that is to say, this possible impossibility. We cannot turn critical

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thought into a resigned affirmation of the negative. Negative metaphysics, as Adorno sees and practices it, is not a metaphysics of the negative, like the negative Schopenhaurianism of Horkheimer. There must be some postulation of a ‘‘divine light,’’ indeed, of saturated phenomena (of gesa¨ttigte Anschauung, as Adorno says). As Kafka had written: ‘‘Through words come remnants of light.’’

Impossibility, Paradox, Miracle Whoever says God says miracle. —Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans

There is no more telling characterization of the mode and modality of the event of revelation and the faith it requires (and not just inspires) than the fourth chapter of the second edition of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, entitled ‘‘The Voice of History.’’ In this chapter, Barth claims that faith is, according to Paul, not the annihilation of the law but the fulfillment of its ‘‘meaning’’ and, in this sense, a ‘‘radical miracle.’’ For Barth, as for Taubes, the question of revelation (or faith) and the miracle requires a critique of historical reason. ‘‘Religion’’ can and must be historicized, but the miracle of revelation and faith can and must not. McCormack summarizes the problem as follows: The historian qua historian has no access to revelation and miracle. The historian works only with relative magnitudes, not absolutes. According to Barth, no objection could be raised against the employment of the method of the historians of religion. It corresponded to the demand for truthfulness, which had been self-evident within the bounds of science since Kant. But he quickly added that in employing this method, the historians of religion had stepped completely outside of the circle of peculiarly theological problems. ‘‘Where there is no talk of a religious relationship to the object, of revelation and miracle, but rather only of scientific knowing, of causes and effects, there faith and the doctrine of faith (i.e., theology in the strictest sense) are not involved.’’ The work of historians of religion is not entirely irrelevant to theology, however. It can and has performed essential service to theological work as a ‘‘profane propaedeutic.’’ It has had the effect of clearing the ground of all false objectifications of the object of theology.164 This may be the profound meaning of Barth’s ‘‘critical realism,’’ which, although it breaks away from the confines of the nineteenth-century historicist conception of the science of religion (Religionswissenschaft) and conceives of itself as theological dogmatics, nonetheless aspires toward a proper rationality of its own. This to say that Barth assumes

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a certain preponderance of the object, while leaving no doubt that any subjective category, when brought to bear upon it, will stand in need of critical correction by the divine light of creation, revelation, and redemption.165 Indeed, the Prolegomena to Church Dogmatics state explicitly that the ‘‘religious relationship’’—that is to say, faith—is the result of an act of divine grace, hence a miracle: even in reaching its goal in man, even in the event of human faith in the Word of God, the Word of God is God’s miraculous act. We must believe in our faith no less than in the Word believed, i.e., even if we think and should regard our attitude to God’s Word as positive, even we thus confess our faith, we can regard it as positive only as it is made possible and actual by God, only as the miracle of the Holy Ghost and not as our work.166 Or again: The Word of God becomes knowable by making itself known. . . . The possibility of knowing the Word of God is God’s miracle in us just as much as the Word itself or its being spoken . . . our concern is to realize that the mutual indwelling and or union of the divine and human possibility, of man’s knowing and his being known by God, is an event in the freedom of man, and yet that it cannot be in any sense be regarded as its product, as the result of an intuition, of a conceivable or attainable deepening or enhancing of the life of the human soul.167 Where it is spoken, the Word of God may (no, will) be prone to human, ‘‘nominalistic misunderstandings concerning the predicate’’ that, Barth adds, ‘‘cannot be rooted out unequivocally or definitively.’’168 This, as we said above, is the predicament of predication, which requires nothing less than a miracle (of reference, as it were) for its own—always temporary or provisional, that is to say, dialectical—overcoming. As Barth explains: It is the miracle of revelation and faith when the misunderstanding does not constantly recur, when proclamation is for us not just human willing and doing characterized in some way but also and primarily and decisively God’s own act, when human talk about God is for us not just that, but also and primarily and decisively God’s own speech. . . . The miracle of real proclamation does not consist in the fact that the willing and doing of proclaiming man with all its conditioning and in all its problems is set aside, that in some way a disappearance takes place and a gap arises in the reality of nature, and that in some way there steps into this gap a nakedly divine reality scarcely concealed by a mere remaining appearance of human reality. . . . The willing and doing of proclaiming man . . . is not in any sense set aside in real proclamation. As Christ became true man and remains true man to all eternity, real

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proclamation becomes an event on the level of all other human events. It can be seen and heard on this level, and its being seen and heard is thus no mere appearance but must take place in full essentiality. Without the ambivalence, the liability to misunderstanding and the vulnerability with which this takes place, with which it is itself one event among many others, it could not be real proclamation.169 Barth’s ‘‘realism’’ consists in the assertion that divine proclamation takes place as an apparent event among others in the human world, albeit it one whose phenomenon is of the essence (and, indeed, is the essence) of the matter itself, die Sache selbst.170 McCormack cites Michael Beintker to drive this point home: ‘‘Barth’s placing of the reality before the possibility is the consistent result of his struggle for a thinking ‘from God to us,’ or alternatively, a ‘viewing things from God’s standpoint.’ ’’ In McCormack’s own words: First, knowledge of God is an event . . . God must ‘‘show’’ Himself to our thinking if it is really to be conformed to Him, our knowledge is dependent upon a dialectical movement on God’s side (Realdialektik) . . . because the intelligere is qualified in an event, ‘‘correct’’ thinking which conforms itself to its object is not an enduring state of affairs . . . the intellectus fidei stands radically under an eschatological reservation. It is what human beings can do in the meantime, as they wait upon a fresh event of revelation.171 In that sense, Barth’s concept of revelation and of eschatology is less dialectical than affirmative. Even if we reject the characterization of Barth’s theology in terms of a positivism of revelation (as we should), something all too affirmative or positive, in critical dialectical or negative dialectical terms, seems still to remain. One might be tempted to say either that Barth operates within a horizon not just of metaphysical themes but also of their overall premises, framings, and aims—irrespective of the fact that he follows a distinctly theological method—or that, even if the theological content does not measure up to the metaphysical substance, then it must exclude or transcend the parameters of traditional biblical and dogmatic theology. The Epistle to the Romans and the Church Dogmatics seem to have broken free from both the analogia fidei and the analogia entis. This is not to say that Barth proposes a ‘‘negative natural theology’’—like an oblique Marcionite—just as Adorno could not be said to propose a ‘‘negative metaphysics,’’ sensu stricto. It is, rather, to suggest that at certain points Barth’s and Adorno’s projects seem formally indistinguishable. More precisely, there is a formally decidable point of indecision, which is the common invocatio of a messianic light or logic (a ‘‘theo-logic’’) that is nonextensive in its substance and touches upon the historical in its totality as a tangent upon a circle.

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Indeed, Adorno’s inverse, other theology relates to Barth’s theology of the wholly other—and vice versa—just as each author’s conception of the nonidentical relates to history and its immanence. Against the latter, they formulate an optics that requires a critical and realistic—hence, deformalized or phenomenologically concretized— perspective to orient itself in and beyond the world as we know it. Put differently, at a certain level of abstraction or nuance, their respective positions do not seem to matter. Whether inverse or dialectical, whether an other theology or a theology of the wholly other, they each remain at an infinite remove from the object (or subject) they seek to express. This is only consistent, for only what is without concept (the nonidentical, das ganz Andere) adequately names what no concept—indeed, no name—can adequately capture as such. Only God has an idea (a concept, name, word, or rather Word) of God. Indeed, as Barth notes in Fides Quaerens Intellectum: ‘‘Every theological statement is an inadequate expression of its object. . . . Strictly speaking, it is only God himself who has a conception of God. All that we have are conceptions of objects, none of which is identical with God.’’172 McCormack draws a simple but radical conclusion, namely, that for Barth—and, we might add, also for Adorno—‘‘the ‘dialectic of life’ has no capacity in itself to bear witness to God and the recognition of contradictions of life can in no way be construed as a precondition on the human side for the revelation-event.’’173 He continues: ‘‘That Barth was convinced that an affirmation and understanding of God can and does come about is clear. But how is this possible? The short answer is that God can only be known through God. Knowledge of God is possible as a divine possibility (miracle!) and never as a human possibility.’’174 There is therefore an inescapable petitio principii— ‘‘the impossible possibility of faith’’175 —which makes faith rather than its natural, historical, or positive forms as ‘‘religion’’ a self-contained and self-giving construction, which inaugurates (indeed, posits) what it must presuppose as its condition. As Barth puts it in Epistle to the Romans: the Gospel is ‘‘a communication which presumes faith in the living God, and which creates that which it presumes.’’176 But can we have a ‘‘theology’’ or ‘‘faith’’ without concepts, without form—that is to say, without philosophy, history, indeed, ‘‘religion’’? Would this—a theology of faith without standpoint or position—if it were possible, not yield a form of un-faith as well? A truly radical contradiction would seem to have to extend to the very idea, figure, or reality of resurrection and the miracle of faith itself, that is to say, to the ‘‘medium’’ that, in Barth’s view, at once veils and unveils God’s revelation and the impossible possibility of redemption it both presents and represents. Adorno’s late paradoxical references to the motif of ‘‘resurrection,’’ the ‘‘ontological argument’’ for the existence of God, and ‘‘hope’’ suggest as much. Why was Barth not willing or able to follow Adorno on this path? Two tentative answers to this question can be given. First, as McCormack explains, Barth drew on the work of his brother, Heinrich, whose concept of Ursprungsphilosophie entailed ‘‘the idea

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that the Ursprung grounds human knowledge precisely by negating its prior attainments.’’177 The ‘‘salvation-event’’ thus introduces a new relationship between ‘‘the ‘new humanity’ (an eschatological reality),’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘the ‘old humanity’ (the sinner living in time, in history),’’ on the other.178 Barth would claim that: ‘‘What occurs in the revelation-event is an awakening to an original relation long forgotten.’’179 There is fine nuance then—perhaps a de facto imperceptible line of demarcation—between the anamnestic relation that theology speaks of and the salvaging critique that Adorno, systematizing Benjaminian intuitions in the most consistent, if not always most faithful, of ways, sees at the heart of all genuine thought, of metaphysical and spiritual experience, as he calls it. Second, Barth spent enormous efforts on understanding the ‘‘ontological proof’’ in the version presented by Anselm of Canterbury. Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether his book on that topic, the 1931 Fides Quarens Intellectum, constitutes his discourse on method—‘‘a decisive turning point’’ in his intellectual development—or whether scholars have made too much of what can only be called, if not a ‘‘false start,’’ then at best a somewhat inconclusive detour. Does Barth’s book, as Hans-Urs von Balthasar claims, represent a ‘‘turn from dialectic to analogy,’’ whereby, McCormack explains, ‘‘ ‘dialectic’ was seen as an attempt to ground theology philosophically by means of the categories provided by existentialism and phenomenology; ‘analogy’ as an attempt to develop a ‘pure’ theology, grounded in revelation alone’’?180 Or is this hypothesis of a clear caesura far too schematic? Whether one considers the Church Dogmatics a continuation of dialectical theology or not, there seems little disagreement that this massive edifice theorizes God and His revelation ‘‘from within,’’ that is, without taking any lead from either created nature, anthropological givens, or cultural value, to say nothing of human conceptions of morality and politics. Art and, especially, Mozart may form an exception. In a different context, I have discussed Adorno’s professed claim that he saw ‘‘no other possibility than an extreme askesis toward any type of revealed faith, an extreme loyalty to the prohibition of images [Bilderverbot], far beyond what this once originally meant.’’181 I argued that this statement implies an aporetic and minimal theology, of sorts.182 The massive posthumous publication of Adorno’s lecture courses and correspondence largely corroborates this view. It is further strengthened by the surprising fact that an endorsement of the ontological proof is a recurrent motif in Adorno’s oeuvre.

Max Horkheimer’s ‘‘Longing for the Totally Other’’ To speak of ‘‘theology’’ in terms of its ‘‘inversion’’ or ‘‘otherness,’’ like recasting theology in light of ‘‘the wholly other,’’ risks either tying its questioning inquiry and unquestioned faith back to a putative past or collapsing it into some unapproachable, ephemeral quality

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that must remain unnamed. Must this dual predicament necessarily—indeed, theologically—be avoided at any price? Should it not rather be affirmed, as the very tension in and from which theology lives, from utterance of the very first word (or Word) that it speaks? Neither inverse nor dialectical theology approaches the ‘‘argument’’ (though its tone is more that of a lament) Horkheimer propounds at the end of his life in his 1973 interview with Der Spiegel entitled ‘‘The Longing for the Totally Other.’’ In it, Horkheimer declares that ‘‘Critical Theory contains at least one idea about the theological, the other’’ and adds that it is ‘‘a yearning for a state in which the murderer might not triumph over the innocent victim.’’183 An interesting recent study by Pascal Eitler on the ‘‘politicization of religion’’ in Germany during the late sixties can shed light on this interview.184 Was the impasse into which Horkheimer pursued his theological considerations partly to blame for the fact that the second and third generations of Frankfurt School theorists shunned religion until quite recently, when its renewed public assertiveness finally left them no choice but to give the ‘‘post-secular’’ condition its due? If so, we owe it to Ju¨rgen Habermas’s intellectual integrity to realize the normative deficit of Critical Theory and, beginning with his dialogue with then Cardinal Ratzinger, to address what was missing head on.185 Horkheimer reduces to a simple impasse what in Adorno and Barth is ‘‘dialectically’’ and paradoxically, indeed, rhetorically and aporetically, forged and kept together, thus inviting philosophy and theology—which stood, in their views, for autonomous and dogmatic thinking—to enter into a new constellation and conversation. Adorno thus differs from Horkheimer in not lamenting this predicament or accepting it with resignation but affirming it in a way that fixing it in negative statements cannot. The latter strategy leads merely to abstract yearning or to the unhappy conscious of a musical thinking that, as Hegel knew, cannot arrive at a concept. In this respect, then, Adorno would seem closer to Barth than to Horkheimer. But what good do such comparisons do? In reading Adorno with and against Barth (and vice versa) a possible answer to this question begins to emerge. It insists on the critical need and pragmatic usefulness of a return to these archives, including the involuntary memories that can surge up from them. Neither Adorno nor Barth thinks of the ‘‘wholly other’’ as a merely abstract counterpoint to the phenomenal world as we find it. It is the ‘‘miracle of faith’’ (Barth) and the ‘‘immediacy’’ to which even a resolutely negative dialectics—proceeding through determinate negation and respecting the prohibition on images—remains answerable (and, deep down, attuned). More than merely reacting to the totally regulated and administered world that seemed to be closing in, Adorno’s negative dialectic—especially as it takes the form of a ‘‘meditation,’’ ‘‘contemplation,’’ or ‘‘spiritual experience,’’ of sorts—follows the ‘‘trace of the other’’ in the most material and corporeal experiences of qualitative instances and

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instants, whose minimal difference may yet make maximal difference in the world (inviting, demanding, and forcing its total recall and total makeover, nothing less). By the same token, Barth’s miracle of faith and the miracle of revelation—of God’s Word and of God speaking—concerns a ‘‘proclamation’’ that, for all its ambiguous and hence contestable, even revocable nature, where it is heard and obeyed leaves nothing untouched. Neither model, the materialist and the ecclesial—or, rather, the minimal and maximal theological—optics that I have described here succeeds in demarcating itself fully from what seems its clearest opposite. In fact, I would claim, they find a common agreement in distancing themselves from the gratuitous gesture of all appeals that take ‘‘that which is other than what exists’’ to be a mere idea, however critical, but too good to ring true. The as if perspective, or, as I have called it, the dual aspect seeing of negative dialectics and its ‘‘spiritual experience’’ is anything but a resigned aestheticism, as Taubes unjustly insists. Yet if there is a meditative, contemplative aesthetic perspective in Adorno’s writing, it resembles the way in which Barth’s Church Dogmatics paints a whole universe ‘‘from the standpoint of God.’’ That the result is not necessarily conformism or apologetics, naturalism or supernaturalism, indicates that the front lines between philosophy and theology, reason and revelation, knowledge and faith, no longer run between secular modernity and a supposedly traditional (if increasingly public and global) religion, but through each of these ‘‘domains’’ individually, and often where we expect them the least. It is not enough, then, to claim that the ‘‘modern disintegration of religion as a comprehensive social system means that writers and intellectuals can be in agreement with traditional theology and religion in some regards while opposing them in others’’;186 nor does it suffice to characterize Adorno’s position in terms of ‘‘secular theology.’’187 Similarly, it will not do to ‘‘abandon any unqualified dichotomy between the religious and the secular’’ or to ‘‘resist the dubious attraction of combining these concepts in a paradoxical or obscure fashion.’’188 What other option do we have? What, in other words, does ‘‘inverse’’ or ‘‘other’’ theology have to offer us? Adorno ties theology, in its positive, negative, mystical, and, one suspects, practical, liturgical, and aesthetic expressions to its reverse, its inverse, so as to bring out that our conceptualization, sense, and experience of the best (the highest good, justice, love, the Kingdom of God, redemption) share the same conditions of possibility as our conceptualization, sense, and experience of the very worst, the horror religiosus of which Kierkegaard speaks. Adorno further makes dramatically and rhetorically palpable that the inverse or other theology—even or especially in the minimal axiom that it shares with metaphysics ‘‘in the moment of its downfall,’’ that is to say, dialectically and negatively conceived—is not only paradoxical, provisional (a near-interminable set of ‘‘prolegomena,’’ as Barth claims) but aporetic, that is, self-contradictory, all the way down. Yet as we have seen, this negative dialectical view by no means excludes the adoption—in both ‘‘critical’’ and

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‘‘realistic’’ terms—of a God’s eye point of view, a messianic light seen from God’s perspective. In the same measure, the affirmative, the ‘‘critically realistic,’’ dialectical stance and method that characterize Barth’s work by no means excludes the view that Christian dogmatics has no other eyes to see with than its own, that is to say, that it always speaks on its own account and hence says either too little or too much. Mutatis mutandis, the same aporia—the same tangential point of contact between a discourse and its other—is at work in any philosophy or any theology worthy of the name. At times, it seems that Adorno believes that metaphysics provides us with an idea, a possibility that theology then imposes on us as a reality, if not necessity. Barth, by contrast, places reality before possibility as he seeks to retrace the movement ‘‘from God to us.’’ Yet if the ‘‘inverse’’ and ‘‘other’’ theology resists both natural and supranatural interpretation, then it must refuse both these perspectives, especially when each of them presents itself in isolation.189 It is far from clear that Taubes’s conception offers a way out of this predicament. As he notes, in his lectures he does not ‘‘think theologically’’ but works with ‘‘theological materials’’ from an ‘‘intellectual historical’’ or ‘‘actual historical [realgeschichtlich]’’ viewpoint: ‘‘I ask after the political potentials in theological metaphors, just as Schmitt asks after the theological potentials of legal concepts.’’190 Moreover, Taubes adds, these metaphors are not so much ‘‘theologoumena’’ as a condensation of ‘‘experiences.’’191 Such a view could hardly be espoused by Barth or Adorno. Dialectical and inverse theology share the conviction that experience is not an indubitable given whose myth we should live by. Their perspective—indeed, their perspectivism or perspectivalism—is radically different and takes root beneath and beyond the contents and categories that make up the historical and the political. Like Schmitt and Benjamin, they represent an ‘‘apocalypticism from the top down’’ and ‘‘from the bottom up,’’ although less radically, that is to say, less consistently and consequentially, so. What always marks apocalypticism, Taubes suggests, is a radical breaking away from the ‘‘apotheosis of the early,’’192 so prominent in Heidegger and Buber and put into question by Alois Riegl and Benjamin. To phrase this in different, temporal and anti-Hegelian terms, centering around the now and the fulfillment, if not annulment, of time, we could draw on Agamben’s insight that, for Paul (as for Taubes): ‘‘the messianic—the ungraspable quality of the ’now’—is the very opening through which we may seize hold of time, achieving our representation of time, making it end. . . . the Torah finds its ple¯ro¯ma therein. . . . Hegel, however, thinks the pleroma not as each instant’s relation to the Messiah, but as the final result of a global process.’’193 Both Adorno and Barth, then, are resolute anti-Hegelians in this respect. Furthermore, if the meaning of Anselm’s proof, for Barth, was that of an explicatio,194 an unfolding and exposition of the truth and act of faith within a single argument (unum argumentum), then the meaning and force of inverse theology is, by contrast, that of a multifaceted implicatio. ‘‘Inverse’’ stands here for a folding and leading back of theological content into the very forms of life (i.e., the experiences and idioms) from which faith must begin by setting

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itself apart. But it also signals the fact that these forms can and must be turned— returned—to the richness and virtual presence of the religious archive from which it escapes, in turn.

Conclusion As I have reconstructed it, ‘‘inverse theology’’—the radically ‘‘other theology’’ rather than the ‘‘theology of the wholly other’’—is the thinking and implication in reverse of modern givens (whether concepts, practices, things, images, sounds, silences, etc.) within the theological contents and legacies from which they seemed to have emancipated themselves. Such reverse implication is a movement that runs counter to much of the hermeneutic tradition of scriptural exegesis or biblical interpretation, since it inscribes materials into an archive whose anamnesis and cultural memory needs—and merits—salvaging in its otherness. I want to suggest that both Adorno’s and Barth’s projects, for all their differences, find some confirmation in recent philosophical programs. These are very different in (and among) themselves, in turn, but at least they seem to share a common intuition: the deeply pragmatic—deep pragmatist—view that the object of our knowledge is constituted by a subject that is itself instituted or called upon by the object in question, to the point of becoming almost responsible for (if not exchangeable with) it. I am thinking of Stanley Cavell’s noncriteriological view of ‘‘calling a thing so,’’ whose claiming, acclaiming, and proclaiming retains or receives all the structural features of the religious speech act, of ‘‘the passionate utterance.’’ In Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell writes that ‘‘In its defense of truth against sophistry, philosophy has employed the same literary genres as theology in its defense of the faith: against intellectual competition, Dogmatics; against Dogmatics, the Confession; in both, the Dialogue.’’195 In this passage, ‘‘Dogmatics’’ refers to the theology of von Harnack, as well as to Barth’s revolt against the culture of liberal Protestantism for which it stands. In Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, Cavell further mentions Barth, together with Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, among the representatives of the ‘‘new Christian theology’’ that seemed capable of forming a bulwark against ‘‘the storm of logical positivism’’ that overran American campuses virtually uncontested.196 Why was the theology of the wholly other more helpful in opposing it than Frankfurt School Critical Theory? That question has, to my knowledge, so far neither been asked nor answered. A tentative answer might be that, paradoxically, only the most relentless—negative or critically realistic and dialectical—theology does not enshrine the world as it is, as it presents itself to us in its natural, created, mechanistic, and lawlike immanence, whose crust seems impossible to pierce or transcend. And yet we must not become transfixed by the authority that the forces that be hold over us, just as we must not let ourselves be

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trapped in the existing patterns of our individual and public lives by the apparent statistical fact that all odds are against escape. The good news is that what is historically and, perhaps, metaphysically—in any case, ontically and ontologically—determined to move in certain rather than other ways (or, more often than not, to stay in place or move in circles) reveals itself, theologically speaking, as mere contingency, that is, as finite and created, such that things, beings, and their relation are not necessarily what they now may seem. Their apparent necessity, even predestination, can be graced with an alternative gesture—call it love—that can invalidate and undo it. Taubes finally may have intuited as much in the culmination to The Political Theology of Paul: ‘‘Romans 13—here I agree with Karl Barth—begins already with the end of 12, with the statement: ‘Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good!’ . . . If you stare at the topic of authority as if it were a predator [or rather: snake, Schlange], then it’s hard to see how to get out of there.’’197 Only in light of the broader context—the end of Romans 12, the remainder of Romans 13, with its declaration of love as the fulfillment of the law—Taubes continues, can the ‘‘absolutely revolutionary act’’ of the ‘‘one commandment,’’ namely, to love the Lord with all your strength and your neighbor as yourself, become apparent. Indeed, Taubes concludes, ‘‘it belongs to the primordial core of Jesus’s Christ tradition. And that Paul couldn’t have missed. This is why it is a polemical formulation: this and only this is valid.’’198 Or, to put it once more in terms of the ‘‘inner logic of the messianic’’ and its paradoxical psychology, as Taubes sees it: ‘‘Here something is demanded at such a high price to the human soul that all works are nothing by comparison. . . . This is the point.’’199

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Paul and the Philosophers: Return to a New Archive, by Ward Blanton 1. See Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 157–69; Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 6–19, 102–11; and Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (New York: Polity, 2011), 59–80. 2. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Slavoj Zˇizˇek et. al., The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). 3. Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch: a Tragedy in Three Acts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 4. Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, L’Ange: Ontologie de la re´volution (Paris: Grasset, 1976). 5. Quoted in Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007, p. 276. 6. In Alain Badiou, ‘An Angel Has Passed’ (1976), in The Adventure of French Philosophy. Edited and Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London: Verso, 2012, p. 213, n. 8. 7. Jacques Derrida died at about the time I had begun to conceive this book and to correspond with him about a potential contribution. His voice in these debates is missed profoundly. 8. Davina Lopez also attempts to forge stronger connections between Paul’s interest in a crucified messiah, a messiah as crucified, and Paul’s mission to ‘‘the nations,’’ reading these themes in light of propagandistic imperial iconography of the conquests of Rome (Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008]). Richard Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman add an interesting thought when they suggest that the counterfactual utopian imagination of early Christians in the New Testament Gospels begins not with their presentation of the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, but with the very idea that Jesus’ followers were able to remove his desecrated body from the Roman apparatus of execution and psychological warfare in order to singularize it once more, to care for it, ritually to restore some dignity to it by placing it in a tomb. More likely, Horsley and Silberman argue, Jesus’ body would, like so many anonymous others, have been left to rot as carrion in the spectacle of punishment that was integral to the effectiveness of the empire’s crucifixion industry. See Richard A. Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman, The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 89f). 9. L. L. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1–4 in the Comic-Philosophic Tradition (London: T. & T. Clark, 2005), 130f. 10. There is a great deal more to be said about Acts, from its historical inaccuracy (Judas lived before Theudas, and the latter emerged years after the events imagined in Acts) to its deft narrative use of outsiders to ‘‘the way’’ as the ones who acknowledge some of these awkward associations

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between the followers of Jesus and the other followers of other messianic figures. In this text, the profound first-century tensions between Galilee, Judea, and Rome are almost entirely displaced onto Romans and ‘‘Jews,’’ with ‘‘Christians’’ appearing as a different group, one recognizable precisely through this displacement. Perhaps the weakest aspect of the recent readings of Paul by Badiou, Zˇizˇek, and even Agamben is that they do not develop the political implications of the insight that the historical development from Judaism to Christianity was less a matter of working out ideas internal to Judaism (and thus one having anything to do with Paul) than a slightly later strategic, self-protective effort, by which gentile converts to a branch of first-century Judaism sought to distance themselves from the Galilean and Judean rebellion against Rome. It was the power of Rome and the retroactive narratives of origin produced by would-be collaborators that produced the earliest and most powerful efforts to distinguish ‘‘Judaism’’ from ‘‘Christianity,’’ an enterprise completely foreign to Paul. Much of the interpretive and political drama played out in this volume as distinctions between Paul and Constantine could be rephrased in terms of Paul and even his very early reception in a New Testament book such as Acts. 11. I am thinking not only of the ideology reflected in course titles like ‘‘Introduction to New Testament’’ or ‘‘Christianity from Jesus to Constantine’’ but also of the long history of historical narration to be seen, e.g., in Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal, Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in a Few Centuries (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1997) or The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2006). James Crossley’s Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins 26–50 ce) (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2006), transforms and subverts the genre as it is usually understood. To focus specifically on Paul, however, is to subtract oneself from these teleological apparatuses. The worthwhile political tale to emerge from an encounter with this moment in the early Jesus movement, I think, is not Christian triumphalism one but rather the question of why the movement does not just die. The question becomes all the more intriguing when we consider Paul as our earliest exemplar of it, obsessed not with a triumphalist global takeover but rather with the ‘‘undeadness’’ of a crucified messiah, the electricity of identifying with this remainder of the Roman colonial machine. 12. I use the term messianism in an interdisciplinary and comparative context to highlight several things. First, without underwriting all of Agamben’s (or Taubes’s) uses of the ‘‘messianic’’— particularly its stark distinction from the ‘‘apocalyptic’’—like them I find the name useful because it allows one to read Paul’s teachings in light of, and as a form of , early Judaism. To put things this way also flags the fact that the epochal gesture of the ‘‘Christian break’’ from Judaism was not simply ‘‘historical’’ or representational, but itself a formal mechanism of narrating the emergence of the different, the new. Second, the term messianic is also useful inasmuch as it designates the indistinguishability between ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘the political’’ within both ancient and contemporary conversations. The logic here is elementary: to construct a taboo is to solicit transgression, and once the drive to annihilate ‘‘religion’’ (or fully to step out of it) comes to the fore, there can be no end to what the structure might discover as religion, whether acknowledged, latent, secularized, forgotten, or repressed. Finally, however, messianic denotes the obvious historical issue: our earliest sources from the Jesus movement—Paul most of all—remember him as the messiah in a messianic movement. 13. See Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007), 131 ff. 14. Matthias Martinson rightly reminds me that Onfray’s efforts to draw lines of distinction— and demands for action— are sometimes paradoxically more demanding of respect when the argumentation is less than compelling. See Martinson, Perseverance Without Doctrine: Adorno, SelfCritique, and the Ends of Academic Theology (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2000).

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15. I borrow the term neo-Paulinism from Alberto Moreiras, whose excellent engagements appeared in early editions of The Bible and Critical Theory. See parts 1 and 2 of ‘‘Children of Light: Neo-Paulinism and the Cathexis of Difference,’’ The Bible and Critical Theory 1, nos. 1 and 2 (December 2004).1–16 and 1–13, respectively. 16. Onfray, Atheist Manifesto, 131f. 17. William Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2004), 29. 18. Lorenzo Chieza, ‘‘Pasolini, Badiou, Zˇizˇek and the Legacy of Christian Love,’’ unpublished translation of ‘‘Pasolini, Badiou, Zˇizˇek und das Erbe der christlichen Liebe,’’ in Marc de Kesel and Dominiek Hoens, eds., Wieder Religion? Christentum im zeitgeno¨ssischen kritischen Denken (Lacan, Zˇizˇek, Badiou u.a.) (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2006), 107. 19. Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 259. 20. As I argue in Displacing Christian Origins, we have inherited Paul as an index of the question of the inside/outside of ‘‘religion,’’ however surprising that may now seem. We should not naturalize this distinction, as if a delimitation of ‘‘religion’’ were simply a generic political necessity or an act that constitutes an ‘‘step outside’’ that could then (as in so many recent discussions of the secular) operate as a distinction between ‘‘us’’ (who have taken the step) and ‘‘them’’ (who have not). Such a failure of analysis yields responses like the so-called clash of civilizations or the paranoiac policing of ‘‘conspicuous’’ displays of religion, as in official French pronouncements about the wearing of head coverings in public schools. (See the excellent analysis by Joan Wallach Scott, Politics of the Veil [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007], for an engagement with the aporias—and hypocrisies—of the French debates.) Compelling efforts to establish a critical genealogy of ‘‘religion’’ and its ‘‘secular’’ overcoming, with particular attention to a critique of this distinction’s allegedly universal scope, include Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007); Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 21. Excellent recent discussions of the question of historical narration and the ‘‘parting of the ways,’’ include: the excellent survey and analysis by Dale B. Martin of the distinction between ‘‘Judaism and Hellenism,’’ as it has related to the interpretation of Paul, in ‘‘Paul and the Judaism/ Hellenism Dichotomy: Toward a Social History of the Question,’’ in Troels Engberg-Pedersen, ed., Paul Beyond the Judaism Hellenism Divide (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 2001); John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora from Alexander to Trajan (323 bce–117 ce) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Judith M. Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and GraecoRoman World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: the Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Denise K. Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). James Crossley explores both historical background and ongoing cultural obsessions in Why Christianity Happened: A Sociohistorical Account of Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 26–50, and in Crossley, Jesus in an Age of Terror: Scholarly Projects for a New American Century (London: Equinox, 2008). For a focus on the modern politics of interpretation organizing its historical reconstructions, see: the excellent work of Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Sean Kelly, Racializing

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Jesus: Race, Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship (London: Routledge, 2002); and Halvor Moxnes, ed., Jesus Beyond Nationalism: Constructing the Historical Jesus in a Period of Cultural Complexity (London: Equinox, 2009). Important considerations of critical periods of modern biblical scholarship are considered in Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); and Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions. 22. As Taubes announces himself early on in his lectures on the political theology of Paul: ‘‘So far, so good. This is the point at which little Jacob Taubes comes along and enters into the business of gathering the heretic back into the fold, because I regard him—this is my own personal business—as more Jewish than any Reform rabbi, or any Liberal rabbi, I have ever met in Germany, England, America, Switzerland, or anywhere’’ (The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004], 11). 23. Failure to provide such a model is one of my disappointments in the brilliant critique of modern supersessionist and universalizing readings of Paul by Daniel Boyarin. Boyarin makes clear how a reading of Paul (alongside Philo) as a universalizing denigrator of local practices—the standard modern and largely Christian reading—is inverted by postmodern criticisms of totality. In his compelling inversion of the value of this earlier reading, however, Boyarin nevertheless allows the earlier reading to continue to stand as a basic historical outline. See Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 24. Dieter Georgi, Theocracy in Paul’s Praxis and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 21. 25. Like Ernesto Laclau, both Stanislas Breton and Alain Badiou assert that the specific historical contests between identities cannot not be understood without some more general mode of understanding identity and difference per se. See Laclau’s ‘‘On the Names of God,’’ in Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 137–47.) Badiou explores these issues most fully in his writings about the naming of identity and the nature of politics (e.g., in his discussions of the Master Signifier and the political and philosophical sense of the word ‘‘Jewish’’ in Polemics [New York: Verso, 2006], 157ff). Badiou’s important summary of this earlier polemical moment, ‘‘Can the Word ‘Jew’ Be a Philosophical Concept?,’’ was presented at the University of California, Irvine, on Februrary 7, 2009. Breton tends to read Paul’s thinking of ‘‘the cross’’ and the self-emptying of Christ as indications of a social (me)ontology he also finds in Plotinus’s One, Eckhart’s ‘‘exodus,’’ and set theory’s necessary positing of an empty set. I discuss Breton more substantially in my critical introduction to Stanislas Breton, A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, trans. Joseph Ballan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 26. See Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) or The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). My own focus here on the (political) question of ontology attempts, as do her studies, always to push beyond questions of mere historical reconstruction. 27. Two recent studies that do an excellent job of circumventing the capture of Paul by the book of Acts are: John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’ Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), and Richard I. Pervo, The Making of Paul: Constructions of the Apostle in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010). Pervo wants to ‘‘describe how Paul becomes a, even the, pillar and founder of catholic Christianity, by which I mean the emerging ‘great church’ of the period from 150–250 ce, and later. In order to accomplish this great task Paul (not unlike Jesus) had to die’’ (xii). Indeed, and as Pervo goes on to discuss, the symbolic sacrifice occurs by way of the depiction of Paul in the book of Acts.

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28. The question of ambiguity and even sophistic play (in this text and in the historical Paul generally) is explored by Mark D. Given in Paul’s True Rhetoric: Ambiguity, Cunning, and Deception in Greece and Rome (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 2001). For a pathbreaking exploration of the cultural history of the concept desidaimonia, see Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Indeed, as we have already suggested, the genealogical distinction between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ religion, rational religion and superstition, is never far from the scene of ‘‘Paul and the philosophers’’ in ancient contexts, in the modern distinction between ‘‘universal’’ and ‘‘particular’’ or ‘‘national’’ religions, and into our own time. One thinks, among others, of recent efforts to revive an open-ended, radical Paul against, say, fundamentalist Christianity (e.g., Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2001). 29. Frederick E. Brenk, With Unperfumed Voice: Studies in Plutarch, in Greek Literature, Religion and Philosophy, and in the New Testament Background (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007), 471. Important related recent studies reflect on the fact that, in their reaction to popular religious practices, GrecoRoman philosophers were extraordinarily interested in monotheism: e.g., Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Stephen Mitchell and Peter Van Nuffelen, One God: Pagan Monotheism and the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 30. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self (New York: Vintage, 1988), 269f. The discussion of Paul is in the appendix, a section I explore in more detail in A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 31. See also Didier Franck, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, trans. Bettina Bergo (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011). In Franck’s ingenious project, thoughtful contemporary engagement with nihilism and the question of technology might begin by staging once more the confrontation between Paul and Nietzsche, with the latter supplanting the apostle’s proposed salvation with a different one, an immanent surre´surrection of the everyday. Such a project looks different if we attend to Wasserman’s suggestions about the specific and decidedly non-Platonic nature of argumentation in Romans 7, even more so if we attend to the fuller description of the Pauline body in Dale Martin’s The Corinthian Body (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). 32. See Buell, Why This New Race. 33. See also: the excellent work of Runar Thorsteinsson, Roman Christianity and Roman Stoicism: A Comparative Study of Ancient Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Niko Huttunen, Paul and Epictetus on Law: A Comparison (London: T. & T. Clark, 2009); and George Van Kooten, Paul’s Anthropology in Context (Berlin: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). Some useful related essays can be found in Tuomas Rasimus, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Ismo Dunderberg, Stoicism in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2010). 34. Yvonne Sherwood, ‘‘The God of Abraham and Exceptional States, or the Early Modern Rise of the Whig/Liberal Bible,’’ The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (June 2008): 312–43. 35. Ibid., 324. 36. Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 21. 37. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 31. 38. Interestingly poised between the materialities of communication, religion, and questions of political liberalism as his work usually is, John Durham Peters offers a more substantial reading of Paul ‘‘as a theorist of communication and of public space’’ in Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005), 29 ff.

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39. See almost any of the standard histories of New Testament studies (e.g., that of Werner Ku¨mmel). Yvonne Sherwood points out how such standard discussions often elide the rigorous exegetical work of Locke and others, an elision constituted in large part (she argues) by received disciplinary boundaries. See Yvonne Sherwood, ‘‘The God of Abraham and Exceptional States.’’ Here I am only pointing out the obverse as well. Ku¨mmel’s classic narration of modern biblical studies is an excellent example of the way a teleology of ‘‘historical’’ research conveniently obscures a larger political history that should be inextricable from the ‘‘historical’’ research of someone like Locke. 40. John Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul to the Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians: to Which is Prefixed an Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul’s Epistles, by Consulting St. Paul Himself (London: Rivington, 1824), xxi. 41. Jeremy Bentham (aka Gamaliel Smith), Not Paul but Jesus (London: Printed for John Hunt, 1823), xivf. Similar language is used frequently throughout the book. Much of Bentham’s critique is devoted to demolishing the historical credibility of the book of Acts. 42. Ibid., vi–vii. 43. Alexandre Koje`ve, Introduction a` la lecture de Hegel : Lec¸ons sur ‘La Phenome´nologie de l’Esprit’ (Paris : Gallimard, 1947), 263. 44. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, chap. 1; Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2005); and Keane, Christian Moderns, esp. chaps. 1–3. 45. John Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul to the Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians: To Which Is Prefixed an Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul’s Epistles, by Consulting St. Paul Himself (London: Rivington, 1824), vii. 46. Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). While there is a great deal of work to be done on the ancient contexts, I should mention two excellent thinkers of religion and media. Werner Kelber’s classic The Oral and Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) is still provocative. Some of Kelber’s earlier ideas are taken up and discussed in Tom Thatcher, ed., Jesus, the Voice, and the Text: Beyond the Oral and Written Gospel (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2008). The discussions of media and religion in Elisabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), esp. the chapter ‘‘Martyr’s Memory,’’ are comparable to the interests driving another excellent piece, Bernard Stiegler, ‘‘Anamnesis and Hypomnesis: the Memories of Desire,’’ in Technicity, ed. Arthur Bradley and Louis Armand (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006). See also the excellent book by Arthur Bradley, Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technicity from Marx to Derrida (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 47. For two relevant points of comparison, see the expansion and reworking of the categories of Schmitt and Agamben in Aihwa Ong’s ‘‘Sisterly Solidarity’’ chapter in Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 31–52. See also the excellent historical and theoretical engagements with the aporias of liberalism in Scott, Politics of the Veil, and Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 48. Thorsten Palzhoff and Martin Treml, eds., Carl Schmitt—Jacob Taubes: Briefwechsel (Stuttgart: Fink, 2011). 49. I have explored some of the surprising philosophical and political ramifications of this remarkable early Christian text in Displacing Christian Origins, chap. 3, ‘‘Paul’s Secretary: Heidegger’s Apostolic Light from the Ancient Near East.’’ There I explore the modern, philosophical implications of the fact that 2 Thessalonians may have been penned by a Pauline impersonator, as biblical scholars have recognized for more than a century.

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50. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London: Routledge, 2009). 33. Note, in this context, the excellent essays on Schmittianism and biopolitics in Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher, eds., The Politics to Come: Power, Modernity and the Messianic (London: Continuum, 2010). 51. See: Brigitte Kahl, Galatians Re-imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010); Neil Elliott, The Arrogance of Nations: Reading Romans in the Shadow of Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 50–57. Peter Oakes’s earlier statements tend to be more subdued, though likewise suggestive of the kind of implicit antagonisms I am highlighting here; see Peter Oakes, Philippians: From People to Letter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129–74, 204–10. See also Davina Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), e.g., 171–73; Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), esp. 19–58. 52. As Simon Critchley introduces his excellent political intervention: ‘‘Philosophy does not begin in an experience of wonder, as ancient tradition contends, but rather, I think, with the indeterminate but palpable sense that something desired has not been fulfilled, that a fantastic effort has failed’’ (Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance [London: Verso, 2013], 1). Critchley explores the impetus to philosophy against the backdrop of a nihilating force that threatens to annihilate the highest values, thus gutting our motivations for community action. It is precisely at this point—the emptied (or ‘‘kenotic’’) deity of, say, Philippians 2—that Paulinism returns as a significant interlocutor for Critchley’s project, precisely inasmuch as this return does not seem simply to repeat, say, the oppositions between meaning and non-sense, God and the death of God, motivation and passive nihilism that tend to be assumed when Critchley names his project as a ‘‘secular’’ one. Indeed, if Paul now returns as this uncanniest of guests, he does so because he found himself scheming community formation and resistance at the moment of messianic failure, when there was no real guarantee of persuasive or social success. No wonder Paul made a great deal out of ‘‘proclamation’’ and the centrality of ‘‘trust’’—he had no leg to stand on other than such ephemera, if something like ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘freedom’’ was to be ripped out of a messianic corpse, or if the brutal reduction of a messianic movement to the ‘‘slave’s death’’ of Philippians 2 was, impossibly, to be resisted. No wonder Paul seems to feel, at the moment of finding in this community’s identification with the ‘‘slave’s death’’ a glimmer of a threat against the crucifying archai or rulers, simultaneously a sense that the entire movement is a kind of cosmic joke, all the more laughable for its weakness and exposure to extinction (see 1 Cor 1, 4:8–13). Here Critchley’s sense of the tragicomic is perhaps the best way back into the Pauline moment. The disavowal of death’s power, the allowing of Jesus’ death to be ‘‘for’’ them (thus acting as if they were beyond death’s ‘‘dominion’’) defines a virtual community of people identifying with that death and the undeadness they discover in it, without a real sublation or overcoming of the originary trauma. The movement generally remains, in Paul (though not for much longer), a ‘‘scandal’’ and a spectacular joke (see 1 Cor. 1:23, 4:9f.). The strange link between catastrophe and freedom marks the interest in Paulinism in Milan Machovec, A Marxist Looks at Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), or, earlier, Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity (London: Verso, 2009). 53. One could perhaps track references in Zˇizˇek’s writings to his self-definitional materialism, observing when these began to be associated in his work with a particular Christian legacy. At what point, and to what effect, does atheism as source of critique of power come to be identified with the Paulinist ‘‘cross’’? We find a similar move, repeating a distinction about power and its lack, in Cornel West’s distinction between ‘‘Constantinian’’ and ‘‘prophetic’’ Christianity (see, e.g., West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism [New York: Penguin, 2004], 147f). The

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confusion of these positions names a striking moment in the paradoxical ‘‘turn to religion’’ in which Paulinism participates. The ongoing dialogues between Zˇizˇek and John Milbank are instructive here; see Slavoj Zˇizˇek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed Creston Davis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). There the debate is no longer set up between the inside and outside of ‘‘Christianity’’ or ‘‘theology,’’ but rather between Milbank’s avowedly Augustinian legacy and Zˇizˇek’s Paulinism. 54. Re´my Bac, La soustraction de l’eˆtre: La question de la verite´ de Heidegger a` Badiou (Paris: Le Grand Souffle, 2008). 55. As far as one can tell from Breton’s archives at l’Institut Catholique de Paris, Breton was a lifelong friend of Althusser. He discusses or mentions the isomorphism between his own Paulinism and Althusser’s ‘‘aleatory materialism’’ on several occasions in the archival material (e.g., 786.28.1.a. Althusser-Breton). I develop this material in my introduction to Breton’s Saint Paul. 56. As for the ambiguously (post)metaphysic nature of his work, Breton said fairly often that the best way to think the limits of metaphysics was by eschewing the illusion that one had stepped outside of them. 57. Martin Kavka, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 58. See the preface to Antonio Negri, Labor of Job, trans. Matteo Mandarini (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 59. See Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford. Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). For an excellent engagement with Taussig, see Kenneth Surin, ‘‘The Sovereign Individual and Michael Taussig’s Politics of Defacement,’’ in Nepantla: Views from South 2, no. 1 (2001): 205–20. 60. The weakness and, properly speaking, stupidity of the gesture to valorize a failed messiah deserves more attention, as what is at stake is not a Romanticizing of powerlessness but a paradoxical reworking of notions of power and agency. I know of no better interlocutors for these suggestions of Paul than Taussig, Breton, Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008); and Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Although she does not engage directly with Paul, Wyschogrod offers a good indication of why Paulinist weakness and stupidity have returned in the act of community formation: ‘‘The saint’s life is not simply one of action but one of authorized action. The authorization of moral action in a postmodern context in which the general presuppositions for authoritative discourse fall under criticism requires renouncing power’’ (60). Alain Badiou, Incident at Antioch, poses a similar question in relation to revolutionary violence. The ‘‘Paul effect’’ thus concerns a moment in a crisis of legitimation and is very far from the closure, leveraging, and sacrifice that constitute an act under a metaphysical warranty. 61. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 87. 62. An excellent engagement with Marion and Derrida on just this point may be found in Thomas A. Carlson, Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 190–237. 63. Jon Sobrino, No Salvation Outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books), 4, 35, 12. Thanks to Neil Elliott for the suggestion to see what Sobrino does with ta me¯ onta.

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64. John Riches. Galatians Through the Centuries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 141f. See also Ueda Shizuteru, ‘‘Jesus in Contemporary Japanese Zen: With Special Regard to Keiji Nishitani,’’ in Buddhist Perceptions of Jesus: Papers of the Third Conference of the European Network of BuddhistChristian Studies, ed, Perry Schmidt-Leukel and G. Ko¨berlin (t. Ottilien: EOS, 1999). I am grateful to two excellent colleagues, Gereon Kopf at Luther College and Perry Schmidt-Leukel at the University of Glasgow, for their intriguing suggestions here. 65. John Riches, Galatians Through the Centuries, 141, citing Ueda Shizuteru. 66. See the articulation of the ‘‘undead’’ in Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), and also his readings of Paul in On Creaturely Life: Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 67. See, e.g., Roland Boer, Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology (London: Haymarket, 2009), and Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 68. See Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 69. Mary Augusta Ward, Robert Elsmere (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976), 2:315. 70. Ibid., 3:136. 71. Ibid., 2:291. 72. Ibid., 2:315. 73. Ibid., 3:476. See Stephen Prickett, ‘‘Biblical Prophecy and Nineteenth-Century Historicism: The Joachimite Third Age in Matthew Arnold and Mary Augusta Arnold,’’ Journal of Literature and Theology 2, no. 2 (September 1988): 219–36. Prickett elaborates further links between the theme of deconversion in the novel and the image of a ‘‘new Reformation.’’ 74. Jean-Michel Rey, Paul ou les ambiguite´s (Paris: E´ditions de l’Olivier, 2008). Rey discerns ‘‘Paulinist’’ structures at work in modern and contemporary logics of signification and temporality. Discussing the ‘‘Paul effect’’ at that level problematizes the usual efforts of biblical scholars to detach Paul from the disastrous ‘‘Paul effects’’ that some of these structures or logics continue to produce. Rey points out that the interchangeability of the Paulinist story of ‘‘Christian origins’’ and the philosophical story about universalism and history itself names a serious problem for the sense of the term secular as well as the assumption that we have stepped outside of a nineteenth-century discourse that may rightly be called theologico-political. 75. Charles Taylor. A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 385. 76. See Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘‘The Deconstruction of Christianity,’’ in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 139–57. 77. Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: a History of the Enemy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), and Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007). 78. See, e.g., his essay ‘‘Secularism’’ in Semites, 39–66. 79. For an excellent discussion, see Gil Anidjar, ‘‘Secularism,’’ in Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 52–77. I explore similar motifs in Ward Blanton, ‘‘Neither Religious nor Secular.’’ in Secularism and Biblical Studies, ed. Roland Boer (London: Equinox, 2010), 141–61. 80. See, e.g., Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,’’ trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 1–76.

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81. I explore more fully the philosophical, historical, and political contexts of Schweitzer’s interrelated projects in chap. 4, ‘‘Reason’s Apocalypse: Albert Schweitzer’s ‘Fully Eschatological’ Jesus and the Collapse of Metaphysics,’’ in Displacing Christian Origins, 129–65. As for the pathologizing of the ‘‘degenerate’’ Jesus, see the latter half of my ‘‘ ‘‘Biblical Scholarship in the Age of Bio-Power: Albert Schweitzer and the ‘Degenerate Physiology’ of the Historical Jesus,’’ in The Bible and Critical Theory (February 2006), 1–25. 82. For a broader study of Nietzsche’s appropriation and contestation of New Testament studies, see Hans Hu¨bner, Nietzsche und das Neue Testament (Berlin: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). From the philosophical side, see also the important reflections of Bettina Bergo in Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo, Nietzsche and Levinas: ‘‘After the Death of a Certain God’’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). See also Tyler T. Roberts, Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

The Address of Paul on the Areopagus, by Hans Conzelmann note: This essay first appeared as Hans Conzelmann, ‘‘The Address of Paul on the Areopagus,’’ in Studies in Luke-Acts, ed. Leander E. Keck and J. Louis Martyn (London: SPCK, 1968), 217–30. Reprinted by permission of Abingdon Press. 1. Whether Luke used a written source for the stage setting is a matter of dispute. Verse 18 and verses 19–20 sound like duplicates. 2. Luke has in mind a theological conception of the relationship between the church and the people of Israel; see Acts 13:46. 3. Cicero, On the Ends of Goods and Evils 5.5: ‘‘Though in fact there is no end to it [i.e., finding tokens of great personages] in this city; wherever we go we tread historic ground.’’ Cf. Strabo 9.1.16; Pausanias 1.17.7. As for Athenian piety, Josephus, in Against Apion 2.130, refers to the Athenians as thought to be ‘‘the most pious of the Greeks.’’ Cf. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 260: ‘‘Athens, as men say, is god-fearing beyond all.’’ As for the multitude of statues, Livy writes, in The History of Rome 45.27: ‘‘Athens is full of the traditions of its ancient glory, but it nevertheless possesses many things worth seeing: the citadel, the harbor, the walls connecting the city with the Piraeus and the dockyards; memorials of great commanders; statues of gods and men, splendidly wrought in every kind of material and form of art.’’ 4. Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.1.1The indictment against Socrates was that ‘‘Socrates is guilty of rejecting the gods acknowledged by the state and of bringing in strange deities.’’ 5. Is Luke being facetious again? Does he make the audience misunderstand Paul as if he were bringing a new pair of oriental divinities, as if Anastasis were (mis)understood as a proper name? 6. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.1.4: ‘‘The Athenians have also another harbor, at Munychia, with a temple of Artemis of Munychia, and yet another at Phalerum, as I have already stated, and near it is a sanctuary of Demeter. Here there is also a temple of Athena Sciras, and one of Zeus some distance away, and altars of the gods named Unknown, and of heroes, and of the children of Theseus and Phalerus.’’ Philostratus, in Life of Apollonius of Tyana 6.3.5, writes: ‘‘it is a much greater proof of wisdom and soberness to speak well of the gods, especially at Athens, where altars are set up in honor even of unknown gods.’’ Jerome, in the fourth-century Commentary on Titus 1.12, claims that Paul appropriated an inscription that read: ‘‘To the gods of Europe and Asia and Africa, to unknown and foreign gods.’’ 7. Isaiah 42:5; see also Genesis 2:7; 2 Maccabees 7:23.

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8. Aristobulus, fragment 4 in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 13.12.3 ff., 2.191 ff. 9. Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.4.10: ‘‘Here Aristodemus exclaimed, ‘Really, Socrates, I don’t despise divinity, but I think it is too great to need my service.’ ’’ Seneca writes, in Letters 95.47: ‘‘Precepts are commonly given as to how the gods should be worshipped. But let us forbid lamps to be lit on the Sabbath, since the gods do not need light, neither do men take pleasure in soot. Let us forbid people to offer morning salutation and to throng to the doors of temples. Mortal ambitions are attracted by such ceremonies, but God is worshipped by those who truly know him.’’ Pseudo-Apuleius, Asclepius 41, says: ‘‘For nothing is there which he needs, in that he is all things, or all are in him.’’ 10. Corpus Hermeticum 2.16: ‘‘God is the one who gives everything and receives nothing.’’ See also Corpus Hermeticum 5.10. 11. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata or Miscellanies 5.76.1: ‘‘The teaching of Zeno is that one should not build temples of the gods, for no such work is worthy of the gods.’’ Seneca writes, in Lactantius, Divine Institutes 6.25: ‘‘Temples are not to be built to God with stones piled up on high. Rather he is to be consecrated by each in his own breast.’’ 12. 2 Maccabees 14:35: ‘‘You, Lord of all who needs nothing, were pleased that there be a temple for your dwelling among us.’’ 13. Max Pohlenz, ‘‘Paulus und die Stoa,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r di Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 42 (1949): 69 ff.; W. Eltester, ‘‘Gott und die Natur in der Areopagrede,’’ in Neutestamentliche Studien fu¨r R. Bultmann (Berlin, 1954), 202 ff.; idem, ‘‘Scho¨pfungsoffenbarung und natu¨rliche Theologie im fru¨hen Christentum,’’ in New Testament Studies 3 (1957): 93 ff. 14. Martin Dibelius, ‘‘Paulus auf dem Areopagus,’’ Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie (1939); also in Studies in the Acts of the Apostles (London, 1956). 15. Philo, Special Laws 3.56f.; On the Creation of the World 59. 16. See note 13, above. 17. Franz Mussner, Biblische Zeitschrift 1 (1957): 125 ff. 18. Cf. Philo, Special Laws 1.36. 19. Dio Chrysostom 12.28: ‘‘For inasmuch as these earlier civilizations were not living dispersed far away from the divine or beyond his borders apart by themselves, but had grown up in the very center of things, or rather had grown up in his company and had remained close to him in every way, they could not for any length of time remain senseless beings.’’ 20. Josephus, Antiquities 8.108, writes that when asserting that God is not localized, Solomon claims nevertheless that temple worship functions for people ‘‘constantly to be convinced that [God] is present and not far distant.’’ By contrast, Seneca writes, in Letters 41.1, that Lucilius does not need to worship in a temple because ‘‘God is with you, near you, in you.’’ 21. Cf. the stages of existence according to Posidonius in Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 2.12–13, 33–34. (somatic-psychic-noetic). These can already be seen in Plato, Timaeus 37c. 22. See also Cleanthes, ‘‘Hymn to Zeus,’’ Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta 1, no. 537. 23. See n. 8, above. Aristobulus makes direct use of Aratus for his interpretation of the biblical narrative and understands the pantheistic statement as referring simply to the omnipresence and universal rule of the Creator. If Hellenistic Judaism (or Jewish Christianity) stands as a mediator between the Stoics and Luke, then Luke already found the Stoic ideas as having a monotheistic modification. 24. Odes of Solomon 33; Corpus Hermeticum 1.27–28, 7.1–2, etc. 25. W. Nauck, ‘‘Die Tradition und Komposition der Areopagrede,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Theologie und Kirche (1956), 11 ff. 26. Among more recent literature, I should mention H. Hommel, ‘‘Neue Forschungen zur Areopagrede, Acta 17,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 46 (1955): 145 ff. The most

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detailed discussion can be found in Bertil Gartner, The Areopagus Speech and Natural Revelation (Uppsala, 1955). An important recent commentary on Acts is Ernst Haenchen, Die Apostelgeschichte, Meyer Series, 13th ed. (1961). More literature is mentioned in H. Conzelmann, Die Apostelgeschichte, Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, vol. 7 (Tu¨bingen, 1963), 102 ff.

Paul as a Hellenistic Philosopher: The Evidence of Philippians, by Paul A. Holloway 1. This is due in large part to the work of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Hellenistic Moral Philosophy section. Of course, other aspects of Paul’s thought could have been chosen, such as his anthropology, to take an obvious example. See: Emma J. Wasserman, The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Sin, Death, and the Law in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Hans D. Betz, ‘‘The Concept of the ’Inner Human Being’ (ho eso¯ anthro¯pos ) in the Anthropology of Paul,’’ New Testament Studies 46 (2000): 315–41; David Aune, ‘‘Anthropological Dualism in the Eschatology of 2 Cor 4: 16–5:10,’’ in Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide, ed. Troels Engberg-Pedersen (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 215–39, 309–16. 2. This first section abbreviates Paul A. Holloway, Consolation in Philippians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55–83, and idem, ‘‘Alius Paulus: Paul’s Promise to Send Timothy at Philippians 2.19–24,’’ New Testament Studies 54 (2008): 542–65. More generally, the literary sources for consolation are collected by: Carl Buresch, ‘‘Consolationum a Graecis Romanisque scriptarum historia critica,’’ Leipziger Studien zur classischen Philologie 9 (1886): 1–170; Rudolf Kassel, Untersuchungen zur griechishen und ro¨mischen Konsolationsliteratur (Munich: Beck, 1958); J. Hani, ‘‘La Consolation Antique,’’ Revue des Etudes Anciennes 75 (1973): 103–10. For the nonliterary papyri, see Juan Chapa, Letters of Condolence in Greek Papyri (Florence: Gonnelli, 1998). Inscriptional evidence can be found in Richmond Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1942). 3. See, e.g., Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.31.75: ‘‘these are the responsibilities of those who offer consolation: to completely eradicate grief [aegritudinem], or to allay it, or to decrease it as much as possible, or to stop it and not permit it to go further, or to redirect it.’’ In the consolatory tradition, lupe¯ (aegritudo, also maeror, tristitia) was broadly conceived as any form of mental pain or discomfort, including such things as worry or anxiety (for sollicitudo, see Seneca, To Helvia 17.5, 18.5, 9; To Marcia 24.4; for phrontis, see Pseudo-Plutarch, To Apollonius 109e; Cassius Dio 38.20.1; for merimna, see Plutarch, On the Tranquility of the Soul 477e; see also Phil 4:6: ‘‘be anxious [merimnate] for nothing’’). It is tempting to translate lupe¯ by some general term such as ‘‘distress,’’ but this temptation should be resisted, because it obscures the connection with consolation, which is of primary importance here. 4. To speak of joy in the context of grief is to speak of consolation. See: Seneca, To Marcia 3.4 (laetam); To Polybius 10.6 (gaude . . . gaudere); Letter 99.3 (gauderes); To Helvia 4.2–5.1 (beatus . . . gaudium); Plutarch, On the Tranquility of the Soul 469d (khairein). For the Apostle Paul, ‘‘joy’’ (khara) and ‘‘consolation’’ (parakle¯sis) are frequent synonyms: 2 Cor. 7:4, 13; Phlm. 7; cf. Rom. 12:15. 5. Paul Rabbow, Seelenfu¨hrung: Methodik der Exerzitien in der Antike (Munich: Ko¨sel, 1954), 16–71. 6. Seneca, Letters, 99.2. See further: Seneca, Letter 99.32 (castigarem); Cicero, To Brutus 1.9.1; Gregory Nazianzus, Letter 165; Jerome, Letter 39.3–4; Ambrose, Letter 39; Chrysostom, Letters to Olympias 8.3.11–13, 17.4.32–43 (Malingrey).

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7. See: Kassel, Untersuchungen zur griechischen und ro¨mischen Konsolationsliteratur, 40–48; C. C. Grollios, Tekhne¯ alupias koinoi topoi tou Pros Polubion tou Seneka kai pe¯gai auto¯n (Thessaloniki/Athens: Christou & Son, 1956). 8. Tusculan Disputations 3.31.76; cf. To Atticus 12.14.3; J. E. Atkinson, ‘‘Seneca’s ’Consolatio ad Polybium,’ ’’ Aufstieg und Niedergang der ro¨mischen Welt, pt. 2, vol. 32, ed. Wolfgang Haase, 870–72. 9. The Stoics recognized four principal ‘‘passions’’: desire (epithumia), pleasure (he¯done¯); fear (phobos), and pain (lupe¯, perhaps better translated ‘‘mental pain’’ and in certain contexts ‘‘grief’’). Various species of these were distinguished, but the lists were by no means standardized. Cicero distinguishes fourteen species of ‘‘pain’’ (Tusculan Disputations 4.7.16), Ps-Andronicus twenty-five (On the Passions 2 ⳱ Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. Von Arnim [hereafter SVF], 3.414); Diogenes Laertius nine (7.11 ⳱ SVF 3.412); Nemesius four (On the Human Nature 19 ⳱ SVF 3.416). 10. Chrysippus, according to Galen, On the Opinions of Hippocrates and Plato 4.4 (p. 115.22–25 DeLacy) ⳱ SVF 3.462. ¨ ber den Zusammenhang 11. Seneca, Letter 13.4; cf. Maximilian Forschner, Die stoische Ethik: U von Natur-, Sprach- und Moralphilosophie im altstoischen System (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 160–82. 12. Stobaeus, Selections (Eclogae) 2.88.10 Wachsmuth ⳱ SVF 3.378. 13. Marcus Aurelius, 8.47: ‘‘If you are grieved by anything external to yourself, it is not that thing that troubles you, but your judgment about it.’’ 14. Seneca, To Helvia 5.1; Phil. 1:10. Other examples include: Teles, fragment 3.22.1f. Hense (citing Stilpo); 29.2f. Hense; Musonius Rufus, fragment. 9.42.6 Hense, cf. 50.9f. Hense; Plutarch, On Exile 599d; Philiscus according to Cassius Dio 38.26.2; Dio Chrysostom, Oration 13.8; Favorinus, fragment 22.22.44–48 Barigazzi. For the topos in John Chrysostom, see Leokadia Malunowiczowna, ‘‘Les e´le´ments stoı¨ciens dan la consolation grecque chre´tienne,’’ in Studia Patristica 13/2, ed. E. A. Livingston (Berlin: Akademie, 1975), 35. 15. Crantor, according to Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.6.12–13; Seneca, To Polybius. 2.1, 4.2, 18.5; To Marcia 6.1–2; Letter 63.1; 77.12; but see Teles, fragment 7.56–7 Hense; Epictetus, Handbook 16. 16. Platonism is passed over, no doubt, because it never developed its own theory of consolation. Antiochus of Ascalon, followed by Plutarch and Calvenus Tarsus, sided with the Peripatetics, while Eudorus of Alexandria, followed by Albinus and Atticus, sided with the Stoics. Philo preferred the Stoic line, but did not stick to it all the time. See John M. Dillon, The Middle Platonists: A Study in Platonism, 80 b.c. to a.d. 220 (London: Duckworth, 1977), 44, 123–24, 146–48, 251–52, 299. 17. John M. Dillon, ‘‘Metriopatheia and Apatheia: Some Reflections on a Controversy in Later Greek Ethics,’’ in Essays in Ancient Philosophy II, ed. John P. Anton and Anthony Preus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 508–17; Robert C. Gregg, Consolation Philosophy: Greek and Christian Paideia in Basil and the Two Gregories (Cambridge, Mass.: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1975), 81–123; H. T. Johann, Trauer und Trost: Eine quellen- und strukturanalytische Untersuchung der philosophischen Trostschriften u¨ber den Tod (Munich: Fink, 1968), 41–50. 18. The Peripatetic mean lay between apatheia, the inhumana duritia of the Stoics, and duspatheia, the alleged infinitus dolor of the unphilosophical masses. See Pseudo-Plutarch, To Apollonius 102c-e; cf. Seneca, To Helvia 16.1. The metriopathic ideal is articulated, among other places, in Plato, Menexenus 247c–248c; Cicero, To Atticus 12.10; To His Friends. 5.18.2; Seneca, To Marcia 7.1–2; To Polybius 18.5–6; Letter 63.1, 99.14–16. The motif became common in late antique Christianity: see Ambrose, Letter 39.8; On the Death of His Brother Satyrus 2.11; Paulinus of Nola, Letter

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13.10; Augustine, Letter 263.3; Basil, Letter 28.1.62; Gregory Nazianzus, Letter 165.2; John Chrysostom, Letter 197; Jerome, Letter 39.5.2, 6.4, 60.7.3 (cited by J. H. D. Scourfield, Consoling Heliodorus: A Commentary on Jerome ‘‘Letter 60’’ [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], 130–32). 19. Epicurus could not appeal to virtue as a supervening good, as did both the Stoics and the Peripatetics, since in his theory the virtues were of purely instrumental value. The relevant texts are collected with commentary in Anthony A. Long and David N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1:112–25 and 2:114–29. 20. The relevant texts are: Key Doctrines 2: Letter to Menoeceus 124: Philodemus, Against the Sophists 4.7–14: Lucretius 3.830–31. See further: Traudel Stork, Nil igitur mors est ad nos: Der Schlussteil des dritten Lukrezbuches und sein Verha¨ltnis zur Konsolationsliteratur (Bonn: Rudolf Habelt, 1970), 25–42; David Furley, ‘‘Nothing to Us?’’ in The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics, ed. M. Schofield and G. Striker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 75–91. 21. Epicurus actually distinguishes three types of desires: (1) those that are both natural and necessary (phusikai kai anagkaiai), (2) those that are simply natural (phusikai kai ouk anagkaiai), and (3) those that are neither natural nor necessary but the product of empty opinion (oute phusikai out’ anakaiai alla para kene¯n doxan ginomenai); Key Doctrines 29 (with scholia), 30; Letter to Menoeceus 127; Vatican Sayings 59. 22. Tusculan Disputations 3.15.33 (fragment 444 Usener); cf. 3.31.76; 5.26.73–74; Epicurus, Vatican Sayings 55; Philodemus, On the Gods 3 col. d (2) 23; On Death 38.21. 23. See: Pseudo-Ovid, Consolation to Livia. 377–400 and 411–16; Seneca, To Polybius 5–8 and 12–13; To Helvia 18–19; To Marcia 2.3–4, 4.3–5.6, 24.1–4; Letter 63.4, 99.3–5; On Anger 3.39.4; On the Shortness of Life 10.2ff.; On the Happy Life, 6.1–2; On Benefits 3.4.1; Plutarch, On the Tranquility of the Soul 468f–69d; On Exile 600d; To His Wife 608a–b, 610e; Pseudo-Plutarch, To Apollonius 116a-b; Pliny, Letter 8.5.2; Julian, Oration 8.246c-e. In early Christian literature, see: Ambrose, On the Death of His Brother Satyrus 1.3; Jerome, Letter 60.7.3, 108.1.2, 118.4.2; Basil, Letter 5.2, 269.2; and Paulinus of Nola, Letter 13.6. The so-called ‘‘apocalyptic cure’’ of 4 Ezra 7:16 and 2 Apocalypse of Baruch 81.4 also resembles this technique. I discuss this technique, in Ben Sira, of all places, in ‘‘ ’Deceive your soul’ (Sir 14:16; 30:23): An Epicurean Theme in Ben Sira,’’ Vetus Testamentum 58 (2008): 1–16. 24. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.17.37. 25. Ibid. Cicero will apply his modified method in To His Friends 4.13. However, when Servius Suplicius Rufus offers the same consolation to him after the death of Tullia (To His Friends 4.5), Cicero is unable to accept it (To His Friends 4.6.2–3). 26. Charles Favez, La consolation latine chre´tienne (Paris: J. Vrin, 1937), 106–26; C. E. Manning, On Seneca’s ‘‘Ad Marciam’’ (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 47–48, 71–72, sees in the Seneca passages, in which he would include To Marcia 12.1–2, a combination of the Epicurean technique of distraction (avocatio) with the theme of laus mortui; see J. C. Logemann, De defunctorum virtut. in carm. sepulcr. lat. laudatis (Rotterdam: T. de Vries, 1916). 27. See further Constantine Grollios, Ad Marciam: Tradition and Originality (Athens: Christou, 1956), 44–51. 28. Diogenes Laertius 10.136 (fragment 1 Usener), 2.87 (fragment 450 Usener); see J. C. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 365–86. 29. Diogenes Laertius 2.86–87; cf. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 12.546e; Cicero, On Ends 2.6.18; Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.215; The Suida 2.553.4. 30. Cicero, On Ends 1.11.38; see Erich Mannebach, Aristippi et Cyrenaicorum Fragmenta (Leiden: Brill, 1961), 109.

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31. Diogenes Laertius 2.90, cf. 2.89. 32. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.13.28. 33. Ibid. 3.52; Seneca, To Helvia 5.3; Letter 47.4; On Providence. 4.6, 13; On Clemency 1.7.3; Pseudo-Plutarch, To Apollonius 112d; John Chrysostom, Letters to Olympias 15.1; Malingrey (see Malunowiczowna, ‘‘Les e´le´ments stoı¨ciens,’’ 39). 34. Kassel, Untersuchungen zur griechishen und ro¨mischen Konsolationsliteratur, 66; Johann, Trauer und Trost, 63–84; Rabbow, Seelenfu¨hrung, 160–79. As a practical technique, the praemediatio futuri mali extended well beyond Cyrenaic consolation theory: Diogenes of Sinope taught it (Diogenes Laertius 6.63), as did Chrysippus (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.22.52), Panaetius (Plutarch, On Restraining Anger 463d), Posidonius (Galen, On the Opinions of Hippocrates and Plato 372.14), Carneades (Plutarch, On the Tranquility of the Soul 474e), Epictetus (Dissertations 3.10.1ff.; Handbook 21), Seneca (To Helvia 5.3; On the Tranquility of the Soul 11.6), and Plutarch (On the Tranquility of the Soul 465b). Cf. Virgil, Aeneid 6.103–5. 35. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.13.28, cf. 3.22.52ff. 36. Kassel, Untersuchungen zur griechishen und ro¨mischen Konsolationsliteratur, 66–7; cf. Epictetus, Dissertations 3.24.115. 37. Pseudo-Plato, Axiochus 370a (cf. 364b); Pseudo-Ovid, Consolation to Livia 397–400; Plutarch, On Moral Virtue 449e; On the Tranquility of the Soul 476a-d; Pseudo-Plutarch, To Apollonius 112d; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.45. 38. In addition to the texts cited in the remainder of this paragraph, see Seneca, To Marcia 9.2; Letter 63.14; On the Happy Life 8.6; On the Shortness of Life 9.4. 39. Seneca, Letter 107.5; cf. To Marcia 2.1–5.6; To Polybius 14.1–17.6. See also Thomas Kurth, Senecas Trostschrift an Polybius: Dialogue 11—Ein Kommentar (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1994), 26–34, 167–216. 40. Seneca, Letter 107.9. All are subject to this law: ‘‘Fate leads the willing, and drags the unwilling’’ (Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt; ibid. 107.11—paraphrasing Cleanthes’ famous Hymn to Zeus). 41. For this topos in 1 Peter and elsewhere in early Jewish and Christian literature, see my ‘‘Nihil inopinati accidisse: A Cyrenaic Consolatory Topos in 1 Peter 4:12,’’ New Testament Studies 48 (2002): 433–48. 42. Chrysippus treats the passions in his On the Passions in four books, the last of which was ‘‘therapeutic.’’ (This book was known to Galen variously as to Therapeutikon or to E¯thikon). The fragments of the Peri patho¯n, most of which are from books 4 and 5 of On the Opinions of Hippocrates and Plato, are collected by von Arnim at SVF 3.456–490; see Phillip De Lacy, Galen: On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato—Third Part, Commentary and Indexes (Berlin: Akademie, 1984), Index s.v. therapeutikos, ¯ethikos. 43. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.31.74; cf. 3.11.25, 4.7.14; Stobaeus, Selections (Eclogae) 2.90.14–16 Wachsmuth; Ps.-Andronicus, On the Passions 1 ⳱ SVF 3.391. See further Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 148–51; Adolf F. Bonho¨ffer, Epictet und die Stoa: Untersuchungen zur stoischen Philosophie (Stuttgart: Enke, 1890), 281–82. 44. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.26.61; cf. 3.11.25, 3.27.64; cf. Posidonius’s criticism in Galen, On the Opinions of Hippocrates and Plato 370.7. 45. Representative texts may be found in Mary Evaristas, The Consolations of Death in Ancient Greek Literature (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1917), and Mary E. Fern, The Latin Consolatio Mortis as a Literary Type (Saint Louis: University of Saint Louis, 1941). 46. D. W. Palmer, ‘‘ ’To Die Is Gain’ (Philippians i 21),’’ Novum Testamentum 17 (1975): 203–18.

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47. Cf. Seneca, To Polybius 12:1: ‘‘Turn your mind from [your dead brother] to your other accomplished brothers, your wife, your son.’’ 48. Lines 103–4. The text is difficult. Statius apparently is imagining some sort of metempsychosis, as at the end of Virgil, Aeneid 6, where Aeneas observes souls preparing to reenter the world; cf. Harm-Jam van Dam, P. Papinius Statius, Silvae Book II: A Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 391. The language is strikingly similar to the departing Jesus’ promise to give ‘‘another advocate’’ (allos parakle¯tos) in John 14:16, 16:7; see Friedrich Vollmer, P. Papinii Statii Silvarum Libri (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898), 372: ‘‘I cannot find evidence for the notion that a dead man sends back to earth a replacement for himself apart from the Christian idea of the Parakle¯tos. The child whom Philetos sends will be made by Philetos himself to be his almost identical replacement.’’ 49. Euripides, Alcestis 328–29. 50. Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe¨ 3.8.7; spoken to Dionysius, Callirhoe¨’s husband, who thinks that the child is his, while Callirhoe¨ knows that it is Chaereas’s. 51. Virgil, Aeneid 4.327–330. 52. Seneca, To Marcia 16.8; cf. Jerome, Letter 79.7. 53. Tacitus, Agricola 46.4; cf. Basil, Letter 302, where Briso’s widow is pointed to his surviving children as ‘‘living [empsukhoi] images’’ of their deceased father. 54. Cicero, On Laws 2.36: ‘‘to die with a better hope’’; Isocrates, Panegyricus 28: ‘‘a rite of initiation that imparts to those initiated a sweeter hope regarding both the end of life and eternity.’’ 55. Hans Dieter Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Spells, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xlviii: ‘‘Magic is the art that makes people who practice it feel better rather than worse, that provides the illusion of security to the insecure, the feeling of help to the helpless, and the comfort of hope to the hopeless.’’ 56. Plutarch, Coriolanus 35.2 (230e). According to Chrysostom, prayer is ‘‘a consolation [paramuthia], a medicine that heals grief and hardship and all that is painful’’ (On the Letter to the Philippians, homily 14.1 [Patrologia Graeca, ed. Migne, 62.283.51–4]). 57. Aesop, Fables 228 Hausrath: ‘‘Pray to the god and grieve not.’’ Chrysostom offers similar advice to Olympias at Letters to Olympias 7.3.4–5 Malingrey. 58. Cf. 1 Pet. 5:7. 59. Pagan examples would include: Cicero, To His Friends 4.5; (Sulpicius Rufus) 5.16, 5.18; To Atticus. 12.10, 15.1; To Brutus 1.9; Seneca, Letter 63, 93, 99; Pliny, Letter 1.12, 3.21, 9.9; Fronto, On the Loss of His Grandson 1, 2; To Lucius Verus 2.9, 10; Apollonius of Tyana, Letter 55, 58; Julian, Letter 69, 201; Libanius, Letter 344, 1473; cf. Phalarius, Letter 10, 103; The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, ed. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, 1.115; New Classical Fragments and Other Greek and Latin Papyri, ed. Grenfell and Hunt, 2.36; The Wisconsin Papyri, ed. P. Sijpesteijn, 84 (letter 1). Christian examples include: Jerome, Letter 23, 39, 60, 66, 75, 77, 79, 108, 118, 127; Augustine, Letter 92, 259, 263; Paulinus of Nola, Ode 31 (cf. also the doubtful Obitus Baebiani [Ode. 33]); Letter 13; Basil, Letter 5, 6, 28, 29, 139, 140, 238, 247, 256, 257, 301, 302; Ambrose, Letter 15, 39. Several longer letter essays also survive: Seneca, To Polybius, To Marcia, To Helvia; Plutarch, On Exile and To His Wife; PseudoPlutarch, To Apollonius. 60. Seneca was exiled in 41 c.e. to the island of Corsica on the charge of adultery with Caligula’s sister Julia Livilla (Cassius Dio 60.8; Tacitus, Annals 12.8.3), whence he was recalled at the urging of Agrippina in 49. Since he apologizes in 1.1–3 for not writing his mother immediately, we may tentatively date the To Helvia to 42 c.e. 61. Chrysostom’s Letters to Olympias, written on the occasion of his exile, are also of this subgenre but are much later and so will not be considered here except by way of ancillary comment. See Anne-Marie Malingrey, ed. and trans., Jean Chrysostome: Lettres a` Olympias; vie d’Olympias (Paris: Cerf, 1968).

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62. Because the propositio of 4.1 is complex (i.e., in two parts), some ancient critics would have called it a partitio (cf. Quintilian 4.4.7). It not only states the thesis to be argued but effectively outlines the division of the letter. 63. Peter Meinel, Seneca u¨ber seine Verbannung: Trostschrift an die Mutter Helvia (Bonn: Habelt, 1972), 30–6; Karlhans Abel, Bauformen in Senecas Dialogen: Fu¨nf Strukturanalysen—dial. 6, 11, 12, 1 und 2 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1967), 58; Charles Favez, L. Annaei Senecae Dialogorum liber XII Ad Helviam matrem de consolatione, texte latin publie´ avec une introduction et un commentaire explicatif (Lausanne and Paris: Payot, 1918), xlii–iii, 10. 64. For this topos in its various forms, see Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 2 vols. (Munich: Max Heubler, 1960), §§ 776–78. 65. The reference here, of course, is to the method of Epicurus, which, despite his exhibitionistic protestations to the mother, Seneca makes extensive use of elsewhere, as we have noted above. 66. See further Paul A. Holloway, ‘‘Bona Cogitare: An Epicurean Consolation in Phil 4:8–9,’’ Harvard Theological Review 91 (1998): 89–96. 67. Abel, Bauformen in Senecas Dialogen, 48, following Quintilian 4.4.1ff., calls To Helvia 4.1 a partitio and 4.2 (the beginning of the first proof) a propositio, a second propositio (or in this case transitio) coming at 14.1 (the beginning of the second proof). The prayer report in Phil 1:9–11 is for all practical purposes that letter’s propositio. 68. Seneca’s overall approach as adumbrated here in the propositio offers us a promising perspective from which to approach Philippians. Although Paul does not structure his letter exactly as Seneca does, he writes with a view both to his own situation and to that of the Philippians. He focuses first on his own dire situation in 1:12ff.: ‘‘I want you to know, brothers, that the things that have happened to me [ta kat eme; 1:12],’’ and then on the emergent situation at Philippi in 1:27ff.: ‘‘I only ask that you live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel, so that . . . I might hear of things with you [ta peri humo¯n; 1:27) that you are.’’ He observes this distinction again in 2:19–23: ‘‘I hope in the Lord to send Timothy to you soon, so that I may be consoled by news of things with you [ta peri humo¯n] . . . as soon as I see how things are going to go with me [ta peri eme].’’ 69. Further showing off for his mother (e.g., ‘‘it is not even possible to make me unhappy!’’). 70. Seneca, To Helvia 4.2–3. Abel, Bauformen in Senecas Dialogen, 54: ‘‘He is not only her consoler (consolator), but her consolation (solacium)’’; cf. To Helvia 1.4. Seneca urges the same strategy on Polybius at To Polybius 5.5: ‘‘you ought to be both a consolation (solacium) to them [his brothers] and a consoler (consolator).’’ 71. Meinel, Seneca u¨ber seine Verbannung, 22–25. 72. Meinel, Seneca u¨ber seine Verbannung, 58. 73. Cf. Seneca, To Helvia 13.4; On Firmness 5.4. 74. Meinel, Seneca u¨ber seine Verbannung, 61. On surprise, see Seneca, To Marcia 9.1–2; see also C. E. Manning, On Seneca’s ‘‘Ad Marciam’’ ( Leiden: Brill, 1981), 59–70; Constantine C. Grollios, Seneca’s Ad Marciam: Tradition and Originality (Athens: Christou, 1956), 44–51. 75. Meinel, Seneca u¨ber seine Verbannung, 73–75. 76. Ibid., 75; cf. On Firmness 8.3; Thyestes 923–25. 77. Cf., e.g., Seneca, To Helvia 9.2: ‘‘This too we must keep in mind, that earthly things . . . cut off the sight of these [true] goods.’’ And again, in 10.3: ‘‘If a man despises such things, what harm can poverty do him? And if he covets them, then poverty actually becomes a benefit to him’’ (my emphasis). 78. Seneca’s further point, that nothing in his situation should grieve his mother, finds a parallel in Phil. 2:17–18, where Paul urges the Philippians not to grieve over his imprisonment, even if it turns out to mean his death: ‘‘But even if I am being poured out as a libation over the sacrifice and

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offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all of you—and you also in the same way must be glad and rejoice with me.’’ 79. Phil. 1:12, 18a: ‘‘I want you to know, brothers, that the things that have happened to me have resulted in the progress of the gospel [eis prokope¯n tou euaggeliou] . . . and in this I rejoice’’ (1:18b–19); ‘‘and I will rejoice for I know that . . . this will turn out for my salvation [eis so¯te¯rian (moi)].’’ 80. This accounts for the emphasis on the positive theme of ‘‘joy’’ in Philippians: 1:4, 18, 25; 2:2, 17, 18, 28, 29; 3:1; 4:1, 4, 10. 81. Seneca restates this in a renewed statement of the propositio in To Helvia 14.1; cf. Abel, Bauformen in Senecas Dialogen, 48. 82. Seneca, To Helvia 15.4. 83. Ibid. 16.6–7 84. Ibid. 17.4–5. This is, of course, a form of distraction that Seneca said he would avoid (4.1, 17.2). But the nobility of philosophy must have, to his mind, justified it. 85. Ibid., 18.1–19.7. 86. I take it that this awareness lies behind the assurances in Phil. 1:25–6: ‘‘I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that your exulting will abound when I come to you again.’’ Paul’s absence is frequently alluded to in the letter: Phil 1:27 (‘‘whether coming and seeing your or remaining absent’’); 2:12 (‘‘as not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence’’), and 2:23 (‘‘I hope to send him quickly as soon as I see how it will go with me’’). 87. See the discussion of this popular consolatory strategy above, in the first part of this essay. Epaphroditus also very likely plays such a role in Phil. 2:25–30. Others who follow Paul’s example are mentioned in 3:17, and those associates of Paul, including the mysterious ‘‘my loyal companion’’ or ‘‘true yokefellow,’’ in 4:2–3. This may also have something to do with the singling out of the ‘‘bishops and deacons’’ in 1:2. 88. Paul himself (throughout the letter, but explicitly at 3:17), Epaphroditus (2:29), and especially Christ (2:5–11). 89. Epicurus died in Athens in 270 b.c.e. 90. For Epicurus’s will, naming Hermarchus as his successor, see Diogenes Laertius 10.16–21. 91. Cf. Bengel’s apt summary of Paul’s argument in Philippians, Gaudeo, gaudete (‘‘I rejoice, now you rejoice!’’), in J. Abrecht Bengel, Gnomon Novi Testamenti, 3rd ed. (1773; Stuttgart: J. F. Steinkopf, 1860) 766. 92. Cf. Plutarch, To His Wife 610e: ‘‘We must not remove from our memory [exairein . . . te¯s mne¯me¯s] the two intervening years [between the birth of their daughter and her death]. . . . For in circumstances like these the one person who in greatest measure draws upon the memory of good times [ho malista te¯s mne¯se¯s to¯n agatho¯n aparutomenos] either extinguishes grief altogether or, by mixing it with these things, make is small and dim by comparison’’; cf. 608e. 93. See my ‘‘Thanks for the Memories: On the Translation of Phil 1.3,’’ New Testament Studies 52 (2006): 419–32. 94. Phil. 1:7, 13–14, 17, 19, 21–22, 29–30; 2:17–18, 23, 29–30; 4:14. 95. Ibid. 1:5; 2:25, 30; 4:10, 14, 18. 96. Ibid. 4:10. 97. Ibid. 1:7, 29–30. 98. Ibid. 1:24–26; cf. 1:27 and 2:12, where the problem of Paul’s forced absence is an obvious and overriding concern. 99. Ibid. 2:26.

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100. Esp. ibid. 2:1–4; see Nicholas Walter, ‘‘Die Philipper und das Leiden: Aus den Anfa¨ngen einer diedenschristlichen Gemeinde,’’ in Die Kirche des Anfang, ed. Rudolf Schnackenburg et al. (Leipzig: St. Benno, 1977), 423: ‘‘[Paul] is speaking to [gentile] Christians, for whom the idea of suffering for Christ and for the Gospel is anything but familiar and therefore threatens not only their faith and their resolve but also their unity with one another.’’ 101. Phil. 4:2–3. See esp. Nils A. Dahl, ‘‘Euodia and Syntyche and Paul’s Letter to the Philippians,’’ in The Social World of the First Christians: Essays in Honor of Wayne Meeks, ed. L. Michael White and O. Larry Yarbrough (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 3–15. 102. See my discussion of this problem in Consolation in Philippians, 7–33. 103. It is precisely in the assigning of genre, I believe, that modern analyses of the letter have gone awry. This is odd, since both Jerome and Chrysostom are clear that Philippians is a letter of consolation: Jerome, On the Letter to the Philippians (Patrologia Latina, ed. Migne, 30.842C): consolatur eos de sua tribulatione, ‘‘he consoles them regarding his own suffering’’; Chrysostom, On the Letter to the Philippians, hom 3.3 (Patrologia Graeca, ed. Migne, 62.201.36–37), tauta de¯ panta pros paramuthian to¯n Philippe¯seo¯n legei, ‘‘he says all these things for the consolation of the Philippians.’’ 104. Paul’s Thanksgiving Periods were first studied in detail by Paul Schubert, Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgivings (Berlin: To¨pelmann, 1939). Subsequent studies include: James M. Robinson, ‘‘Die Hodajot-Formel in Gebet und Hymnus des Fru¨hchristentums,’’ in Apophoreta: Festschrift fu¨r Ernst Haenchen, ed. W. Elterster and F. H. Kettler (Berlin: To¨pelmann, 1964), 194–235; Peter T. O’Brien, Introductory Thanksgivings in the Letters of Paul (Leiden: Brill, 1977); and, more recently, Peter Arzt, ‘‘The ’Epistolary Introductory Thanksgiving’ in the Papyri and in Paul, ’’ Novum Testamentum 36 (1994): 29–46, and Jeffery T. Reed, ‘‘Are Paul’s Thanksgivings ’Epistolary’?’’ Journal for the Study of the New Testament 61 (1996): 87–99. 105. For the programmatic nature of Paul’s introductory Prayer Reports, see Gordon P. Wiles, Paul’s Intercessory Prayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 175–229; see also Schubert, Form and Function, 62; O’Brien, Introductory Thanksgivings; Wayne A. Meeks, ‘‘The Man from Heaven in Philippians,’’ in The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, ed. Birger A. Pearson (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 333. 106. Commentators have long recognized that Paul is appropriating technical philosophical language here, but they have not made the connection with philosophical consolation; see, e.g., Ernst Lohmeyer, Der Brief an die Philipper (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1953), 32–33: ‘‘ta diapheronta [’’the things that really matter‘‘] is an unambiguous expression of Hellenistic Moral Philosophy’’; Joachim Gnilka, Der Philipperbrief (Freiburg: Herder, 1968), 52; Wolfgang Schenk, Die Philipperbriefe des Paulus: Kommentar (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1984), 112–13. 107. Both Seneca and Epicurus argue by way of personal example in their letters of consolation. 108. Paul signals his indifference by the expression ‘‘whether . . . or [eite . . . eite]: ’’whether in pretense or in truth‘‘ (1:18); ’’whether by life or by death‘‘ (1:20); cf. ’’whether I come again and see you or remain absent‘‘ (1:27), where it is applied to the Philippians. The listing of such contraries was typical in Stoic discussions of indifferent things: ’’Indifferent things are such as these: life and death, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, sickness and health, and the like‘‘ (Zeno according to Stobaeus, Selections (Eclogae) 2.57.18 Wachsmuth ⳱ SVF 1.190). Note also the expression ti gar, ’’So what?‘‘ 109. Recall Seneca’s sustained boast in To Helvia 4.2–5.1 that he is happy (beatus), full of joy (gaudium), in circumstances that would make others miserable (miser). 110. Like Seneca, Paul here supplements his basically Stoic arguments (1:12–26) with the Cyrenaic topos that those suffering should remind themselves that they are not to be ‘‘surprised’’ by misfortune. (The New Revised Standard Version translation ‘‘not be intimidated’’ is unfortunate

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and reflects a failure discern this important consolatory topos.) Paul’s argument that suffering is ordained by God (1:29) and that he himself has set the example (1:30) employs traditional supporting arguments; cf. Seneca, Letter 107 (discussed above). 111. The disposition of 2:17–18 in the letter is problematic. Most commentators and NestleAland (Novum Testamentum Graece) make a major division after 2:18, reading 2:17–18 with 2:12– 16. I would rather see 2:17 resuming what was left off in 1:25–26: ‘‘I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith [1:25]. . . . But even if I am poured out as a libation over the sacrifice and offering of your faith . . . [2:17].’’ On this reading, Paul digresses from his mission report in 1:27–2:16 and returns to his situation in 2:17. I discuss the disposition of 2:17–18 in more detail in ‘‘Alius Paulus,’’ 553–54. 112. Not just adiaphora but skubala (lit. ‘‘so much crap’’). 113. The intensity with which Paul writes in chap. 3 has been an obstacle to interpreters of the letter, since it seems to contrast sharply with the preceding material. The shift from 3:1 (‘‘rejoice in the Lord’’) to 3:2 (‘‘Watch out for dogs, etc.’’) has been particularly difficult. This has led to the theory, already noted, that our Philippians is actually a compilation of earlier letters. At the root of this problem lies a failure to see just how serious Paul has been in chaps. 1–2, and in particular how seriously he takes the topic of ‘‘joy’’ in the letter. For Paul, as for Seneca, joy is a ‘‘res severa’’ (Seneca, Letter 23.4). There is no shift in intensity or seriousness between chaps. 1–2 and chap. 3. 114. As already noted, this accounts for the letter’s leitmotif of ‘‘joy’’: 1:4, 18, 25; 2:2, 17, 18, 28, 29; 3:1; 4:1, 4, 10. 115. Chrysostom, On the Letter to the Philippians, praef. 1 (Patrologia Graeca, ed. Migne, 62.179.38–40); he later takes the same approach in his letters of consolation to Olympias: ‘‘This is what I am seeking for you, not simply to rid you of your despondency, but to fill you with a great and everlasting joy’’ (Letters to Olympias 10.1.21–3 Malingrey). 116. ‘‘Bona Cogitare: An Epicurean Consolation in Phil 4:8–9’’ and ‘‘Thanks for the Memories: On the Translation of Phil 1.3.’’ 117. Cicero, On Ends 2.96; Diogenes Laertius 10.22. 118. It has often been noted that the vocabulary Paul deploys in 4:8–9 is unusual for him. But this is no doubt due to the topos in play. Cf. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.23.67: ’’all things which are lovely, honorable, distinguished [omnia quae pulcra, honesta, praeclara], and esp. Plutarch, On the Tranquility of the Soul 468f–469d: ‘‘we ought not to lose sight of whatsoever is pleasing [hosa prosphile¯] and attractive in our present circumstances.’’ 119. Unlike Greco-Roman consolation, early Jewish consolation has rarely been discussed. I collect with short commentary the principal texts in Coping with Prejudice: 1 Peter in SocialPsychological Perspective (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 86–112. See also my short essay ‘‘Consolation. 2. Second Temple and Hellenistic Judaism’’ in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, vol. 5, ed. Dale C. Allison, Jr., et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, forthcoming). 120. Note the caveat at 2:17–18! 121. Seneca, To Helvia 18.1–19.7. 122. Virgil, Aeneid, 4.327–30; Tacitus, Annals, 12.68; Chariton 3.8.7. See also Seneca, To Marcia 16.8, where a daughter fills the void left by the death of their father, and Euripides, Alcestis 328ff., where children take the place of their mother. Here see esp. my ‘‘Alius Paulus.’’ 123. Palmer, ‘‘To Die Is Gain.’’ The idea that suffering is gain underlies the consolation in Phil. 3:1–4:1, that to suffer brings one mystically closer to Christ: ‘‘to know him, the fellowship of his sufferings,’’ etc. 124. For an important recent discussion, see Ioan Davies, Writers in Prison (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

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125. Recall esp. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.31.76. 126. For a similar assessment of this term, see Troels Engberg-Pedersen, ‘‘Stoicism in Philippians,’’ in Paul in His Hellenistic Context, ed. Troels Engberg-Pedersen (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 262n10. 127. Paul’s appropriation of Stoicism stands at the head of a long tradition. See: Michel Spanneut, Le Stoı¨cime des pe`res de l’E´glise: De Cle´ment de Rome a` Cle´ment d’Alexandrie (Paris: Seuil, 1953); Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1985); and, more recently, Richard Sorabji, ‘‘Stoic First Movements in Christianity,’’ in Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations, ed. S. K. Strange and J. Zupko (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 95–107. Colish has also written helpfully on the willingness (or unwillingness) of New Testament scholars to admit Paul’s debt to Stoicism: ‘‘Pauline Theology and Stoic Philosophy,’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47 (1979): 1–21. 128. Paul consoles by distinguishing between what matters and what does not matter, a uniquely Stoic move, but in filling in these categories he assigns unambiguously Christian values, such as the progress of the gospel and the knowledge of Christ. 129. This unique combination of language, thought, and emotion strongly invites the question whether Paul’s discourse here approaches what at least one ancient critic called ‘‘the sublime [to hupsos]’’ (Pseudo-Longinus, On Sublimity 8). Especially impressive are the brilliant crescendos of 1:20–21 and 3:7–11; however, it is precisely in these moments of rapid ascent that Paul also descends into some of his most disturbing invective (e.g., 3:2). Of course, such vituperatio was not uncommon in Paul’s day: see Valentina Arena, ‘‘Roman Oratorical Invective,’’ in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric, ed. William Dominik and John Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 149–60; Luke Timothy Johnson, ‘‘The New Testament’s Anti-Jewish Slander and the Conventions of Ancient Polemic,’’ Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989): 419–41.

Paul among the Ancient Philosophers: The Case of Romans 7, by Emma Wasserman 1. Translations of Paul’s letters are my own. All other translations are from the Loeb Classical Library unless otherwise noted. 2. Paula Fredrickson has shown that this interpretation is characteristic of the late Augustine, in ‘‘Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the Retrospective Self,’’ Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1987): 3–34. 3. Rudolf Bultmann, ‘‘Romans 7 and the Anthropology of Paul,’’ in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, trans. Schubert Ogden (Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1960), 147–57; this view of Pauline anthropology permeates his Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Scribner, 1951), e.g., 109, 164–83. 4. See esp. Christopher Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); ‘‘Is There a Concept of the Person in Greek Philosophy?’’ chap. 9 of Psychology ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 166–93. 5. To cite only a few examples, see: Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); A. W. Price, Mental Conflict (London: Routledge, 1995); Everson, ed., Psychology; Juha Sihvola and Troels EngbergPedersen, eds., The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998). In Roman thought, see Susanna Morton Braund and Christopher Gill, eds., The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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6. The early Stoics held that there was no such progress, but rather a total, sudden, and completely transforming commitment; later thinkers adapted schemes of progress and reform to Stoic ethics. 7. Stanley Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 269–72. On the dialogical style, see also Stowers, The Diatribe and Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981). My discussion also draws on Christopher Gill’s ‘‘Did Chryssippus Understand Medea?’’ Phronesis 28 (1983): 136–49, and ‘‘Two Monologues of Self-division: Euripides, Medea 1021–80; and Seneca, Medea 893–977,’’ in Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, ed. M. Whitby and P. Hardie (Bristol: Classical, 1987), 25–37. 8. Rom. 7:7 seems to elide the voice of the interlocutor, who asks questions, and the voice that answers, but this is characteristic of Roman-period apostrophe (Gill, ‘‘Two Monologues,’’ 33). 9. George A. Kennedy, trans., Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003). 10. Stowers, Reading Romans, 270–71. See: Hermogenes, Preliminary Exercises, 9.21–22; Apthonius, Preliminary Exercises, 11.35R. 11. The translation is from Stowers, Rereading Romans, 271–72. Cf. Plato, Meno 77e–78b and Gorgias 468b–d. 12. Gill’s translation (Personality, 223). Gill (Personality, 216–26) argues persuasively against the post-Kantian interpretation of these lines. 13. This draws on Plato’s theory as described in the Phaedrus, the Republic, and the Timaeus rather than the earlier Phaedo. See A. W. Price, Mental Conflict (London: Routledge, 1995), 30–103, and John M. Cooper, ‘‘Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation,’’ in Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 118–37. 14. See Christopher Gill, ‘‘Did Galen Understand Platonic and Stoic Thinking on Emotions?’’ in Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. Sihvola and Engberg-Pedersen, 113–48. 15. See also On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato 4.6.17–27, 4.2.27; for a translation, see Phillip de Lacy, ed. and trans., Galen: On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato (Berlin: Akademie, 1978). 16. See also Plutarch, On Moral Virtue 441C; 446F–49D. The Roman Stoic Epictetus explains that Medea commits infanticide by appealing to her reasoning: ‘‘It is because she regards the very indulgence of her passion and the vengeance against her husband as more profitable than saving her children’’ (Discourses 1.28.6–8). 17. Though I build on their work, I argue against Stowers (Rereading Romans, 269–72) and Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (London: T & T Clark, 200)], 239–246. EngbergPedersen, ‘‘The Reception of Greco-Roman Culture in the New Testament: The Case of Romans 7:7–25,’’ in The New Testament as Reception, ed. Mogens Mu¨ller and Henrik Tronier (New York: Sheffield Academic, 2002), 32–57, both argue that the monologue depicts a moral condition of akrasia (‘‘weakness of will’’). 18. The spirited part, which gives rise to emotions such as anger and shame, has a more intermediate status between reason and appetite, as such emotions can be morally relevant even if not strictly rational. 19. Ku¨hn, Claudii Galeni opera omnia, 5.29; Harkins, Galen, 48. Translation modified. 20. Such texts show that the contradiction between mind and passions is not always limited to cases of akrasia, as this case is considerably more severe than akrasia as usually understood. For further discussion of Aristotle’s criteria for distinguishing akrasia in Nicomachean Ethics 7 and its later reception, see my The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Sin, Death, and the Law in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).

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21. I draw on the excellent essay by Dieter Zeller, ‘‘The Life and Death of the Soul in Philo of Alexandria: The Use and Origin of the Metaphor,’’ Studia Philonica Annual 7 (1995): 19–55. Zeller, however, focuses on the metaphors and their origins rather than the underlying condition they capture. 22. See Stowers (Rereading Romans, 269–72), who also finds a popular Platonic view of the soul at work in Rom. 7. 23. This is Zeller’s translation; the Greek text is from E. J. and L. Edelstein, eds., Asclepius, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945), 1n.419. Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 5.19; Philo, On Drunkenness 140; On Dreams 2.234; On Agriculture 163. 24. See, e.g., Plato, Republic 8.563d–e; Leg. 3.689a–d; Josephus, Antiquities 1.60; Polybius, Histories 1.81; Seneca, On Clemency 1.23. 25. See Stowers, ‘‘What Is Pauline Participation in Christ,’’ in New Views of Jewish and Christian Self-Definition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). 26. Paula Fredrickson, ‘‘Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the Retrospective Self,’’ Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1987): 3–34. 27. Lewis W. Spitz and Helmut T. Lehmann, eds., Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1960), 34:336. 28. Krister Stendahl, ‘‘The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,’’ in Paul among the Jews and Gentiles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 78–96. 29. Stendahl, ‘‘Introspective Conscience,’’ 90. 30. Werner George Ku¨mmel, Ro¨mer 7 und die Bekehrung des Paulus (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929; rpt., Munich: Kaiser, 1974), esp. 81. Though Ku¨mmel limits himself to considering the fictive ‘‘I’’ only in Paul’s other letters, Stowers develops this basic insight in terms of Greek and Roman rhetorical conventions (Rereading Romans, 264–72; discussed above). 31. I cite only one or two examples of each of the main positions. For the autobiographical reading, see C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans (London: Collins, 1959), 104–5; for that of a Jewish boy prior to a mature interaction with the law, W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1948), 15–35; for the late Augustinian reading of 7:7–13 as the plight of mankind generally, and for 7:14–25 as the Christian, C. E. B. Cranfield, The Epistle to the Romans (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1979), 341, and James D. G. Dunn, Commentary on Romans (Dallas: Word, 1988), 382–383; for the unregenerate human being generally, Ernst Ka¨semann, Commentary on Romans, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980), 192. Many interpreters argue for some kind of allusion or direct connection to Adam, but on very different grounds. Thus Cranfield (Romans, 350) understands Rom. 7:7–25 as a direct exposition on the text of Gen. 2–3; Ka¨semann insists that ‘‘methodologically the starting point should be that a story is told in vv. 9–11 and that the event depicted can refer strictly to Adam’’ (Commentary, 196); for a similar approach, see Gerd Theissen, Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology, trans. John P. Galvin (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 183. In a different way, N. T. Wright (The Climax of Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992], 227) states without argument or explanation that Paul views the arrival of the law as a recapitulation of the sin of Adam; Glen Holland (‘‘The Self Against the Self in Romans 7:7–25,’’ in The Rhetorical Interpretation of Scripture: Essays from the 1996 Malibu Conference, ed. S. E. Porter and D. L. Stamps [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999], 265) argues that the character should be understood as a kind of Adamic Gentile; and Pheme Perkins (‘‘Pauline Anthropology in Light of Nag Hammadi,’’ Catholic Biblical Quarterly 48 [1986]: 517) understands the voice speaking throughout as that of Adam, as does R. N. Longnecker (Paul, Apostle of Liberty: The Origin and Nature of Paul’s Christianity [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1976], 92–97).

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32. Though taking this as a ‘‘typical Jew’’ still finds support, both politics after the Second World War and the important work on Judaism by E. P. Sanders (Paul and Palestinian Judaism [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977]) have brought about greater sensitivity to Christian caricatures of Judaism that these approaches usually assume. The Adam reading founders on the vagueness of the connection and the lack of evidence for Adam traditions that would legitimize it. For devastating critiques, see Robert H. Gundry, ‘‘The Moral Frustration of Paul Before His Conversion: Sexual Lust in Romans 7:7–25,’’ in Pauline Studies: Essays Presented to F. F. Bruce on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Donald A. Hagner and Murry J. Harris (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980), 229–32; Stowers, Rereading Romans, 86–88; and L. Ann Jervis, ‘‘ ‘The Commandment Which Is for Life’ (Romans 7:10): Sin’s Use of the Obedience of Faith,’’ Journal for the Study of the New Testament 27, no. 2 (2004): 193–96. 33. A good example of the synthetic-ecumenical option is found in Dunn, Commentary, 382–83. 34. The latter view was articulated early in the twentieth century by Alfred Loisy, who remarks that Rom. 6–8 contains ‘‘a fantastic argument, a massive and magical conception of sin, of the redemption and of the Spirit, a system constructed in the air, which is too often celebrated for a psychological value of which it is in reality almost completely void’’ (Alfred Loisy, L’e´pıˆtre aux Galates [Paris: Nourry, 1916], 232; cited and translated by Heiki Ra¨isa¨nen in Paul and the Law [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986], 13–14). 35. Stowers, Rereading Romans, 6–33; Runar Thorsteinsson, Paul’s Interlocutor in Romans 2: Function and Identity in the Context of Ancient Epistolography (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2004), 87–122. 36. Of course, this has not kept interpreters from trying. See Gundry, ‘‘The Moral Frustration of Paul, 228–45. 37. Stowers, Rereading Romans, 8–88; Scot McKnight, A Light among the Gentiles: Jewish Missionary Activity in the Second Temple Period (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 11–29; O. Larry Yarbrough, Not Like the Gentiles: Marriage Rules in the Letters of Paul (Atlanta, Scholars, 1985). 38. See Stowers’s work on Rom. 1:18–32 (Rereading Romans, 8–88) and Engberg-Pedersen (Paul and the Stoics) 200–205. 39. Though biblical interpreters have made a number of tortured arguments for why 1:18–32 refers to Jewish disobedience or a general Adamic fall, there is simply no evidence to suppose that writers thought of Adam in such ways, and the idea that ‘‘images of corruptible men, birds, fourfooted animals, and reptiles’’ somehow refers to the Golden Calf episode on Mt. Sinai abuses the idea of literary echoes in the service of universalizing the text. Such a reach also makes little sense given that there is a more proximate explanation: idolatry is, in many writings, the quintessential cause for Gentile alienation from God. For unpersuasive attempts to argue that 1:18–32 alludes to the fall, see: Dunn, Commentary, 53; Morna Hooker, ‘‘Adam in Romans 1,’’ New Testament Studies 6 (1959–1960): 297–306; Hooker, ‘‘A Further Note on Romans 1,’’ New Testament Studies 13 (1966– 67): 181–83; A. J. M. Wedderburn, ‘‘Adam in Paul’s Letter to the Romans,’’ Studia Biblica 3 (1978): 413–30. By contrast, both Joseph Fitzmyer (Romans: A New Translation and Commentary [New York: Doubleday, 1993], 274) and Stowers (Rereading Romans, 84–86) persuasively argue that it is impossible to connect the fall literature with Rom. 1 without conceptual gymnastics. 40. Stendahl, ‘‘Introspective Conscience,’’ 78–96; Stowers, Rereading Romans; John G. Gager, Reinventing Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 41. See Gager, Reinventing Paul for discussion and further bibliography. I attribute the more agnostic view to Stowers in Rereading Romans.

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Paul and Universalism, by Troels Engberg-Pedersen 1. For a concern with ethnicity in the academy generally, see, e.g., the Oxford Reader on the subject, J. Hutchinson and A. D. Smith, eds., Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). For concern with this topic in Pauline studies, see, e.g.: J. C. Walters, Ethnic Issues in Paul’s Letter to the Romans: Changing Self-Definition in Earliest Roman Christianity (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press, 1993); Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); S. K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994). On ethnicity in the ancient world, see, e.g., J. M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); see also Hall, Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). The whole issue has been taken many steps further in Benjamin Isaac’s The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). 2. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana/Collins 1985); Amy Gutmann, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 3. Hilary Putnam, ‘‘Pragmatism and Relativism: Universal Values and Traditional Ways of Life,’’ in Words and Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 182–97. 4. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul : The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. 5. Long before I got hold of Badiou’s book, I addressed some of the same themes in ‘‘Universalisme og etnicitet hos Paulus,’’ in Etnicitet i Bibelen, ed. N. P. Lemche and H. Tronier (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1998), 108–23. I should emphasize that here I can take issue with only a few of the many suggestive points in Badiou’s comprehensive reading of Paul, those that most directly pertain to his construction of Paul’s idea of universalism. This essay was originally written in 2005. I have not attempted to take into consideration the spate of work that has appeared since then on the readings of Paul by Badiou and other contemporary philosophers. I believe that the points I am making against Badiou have remained valid. 6. The quotations are from Putnam, ’’Pragmatism and Relativism,’’ 193, 184 and 195–96, respectively. 7. ‘‘Paul is a founder, in that he is one of the very first theoreticians of the universal’’ (Badiou, Saint Paul, 108). 8. This claim presupposes the conclusion for which I shall argue in the rest of this essay: that Paul’s ‘‘universalism’’ does not have the exact form ascribed to it by Badiou. On Paul and Stoicism generally, see my Paul and the Stoics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000). I did not address the theme of universalism in that book. 9. The latter solution fits Badiou’s reading of Paul, which strongly emphasizes Paul’s concern for the universal and does not speak of any real concern for the particular. Yet Badiou does not recognize that Paul positively allows for differences without being concerned about them. This, I suggest, is a major deficiency in his picture of the kind of universalism we should ascribe to Paul. Thus, even though Badiou may speak of a ‘‘benevolence with regard to customs and opinions,’’ which presents itself as ‘‘an indifference that tolerates differences’’ (99, Badiou’s emphasis), his Paul sees such differences only quasi-negatively, as places ‘‘to which the universal might be exposed,’’ and thus only from the perspective of ‘‘a succession of problems requiring resolution’’ (99, Badiou’s emphasis). 10. Plutarch, Moralia, trans. F. C. Babbitt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936),

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11. 4:. In thus trying to combine ‘‘the empirical existence of differences’’ with ‘‘their essential nonexistence,’’ I shall come down in favor of what Badiou calls ‘‘an amorphous synthesis’’ (Saint Paul, 99). I hope to make it less amorphous, though. 12. For a detailed defense of this claim, see my article ’’Stoicism in the Apostle Paul: A Philosophical Reading,’’ in Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations, ed. S. K. Strange and J. Zupko (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 52–75. 13. Cf. also Gal. 6:2, where he even speaks of fulfilling ‘‘the law of Christ,’’ which I take to mean the Jewish law under the sign of Christ. 14. This reading is famously questioned by Stowers in A Rereading of Romans. For a defense of my own reading, see chaps. 8–9 of my Paul and the Stoics. 15. For a detailed defense of this reading of a strongly disputed text, see my article ’’The Reception of Graeco-Roman Culture in the New Testament: The Case of Romans 7.7–25,’’ in The New Testament as Reception, ed., M. Mu¨ller and H. Tronier (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 32–57. 16. I speak of quasi-ethnicity because it would probably be giving Paul too much credit to take it that he alone aimed, or even managed, to create a distinct ethnos. In emphasizing the (quasi-)ethnic dimension of Paul’s thought and practice, I am beginning to move away from Badiou. He focuses exclusively, as we shall see, on the supposedly universalist character of Paul’s stance. But the (quasi-) ethnic dimension is also there. And that is what raises the problem. 17. Badiou discusses the relationship between the Pauline Christ faith and Judaism, e.g., Saint Paul, 19–20, 22–23, 35, 101–3. He sees quite clearly that ‘‘The task Paul sets himself is obviously not that of abolishing Jewish particularity, which he constantly acknowledges as the event’s [i.e., the resurrection of Christ’s] principle of historicity, but that of animating it internally by everything of which it is capable relative to the new discourse, and hence the new subject. For Paul, being Jewish in general, and the Book [i.e., the Old Testament] in particular, can and must be resubjectivated’’ (ibid., 103, Badiou’s emphasis). Still, Badiou emphasizes, and thinks Paul emphasizes, ‘‘rupture rather than continuity with Judaism,’’ albeit as ‘‘a militant, and not an ontological thesis’’ (ibid., 35). In thus lifting Paul’s Christ-believing stance—where it really matters (the ‘‘militant . . . thesis’’)—out of its cultural context, Badiou can give it the special universalistic shape that is his concern. However, the fact that Paul himself saw the Christ faith as the genuine form of Judaism immediately places him in the real world of ethnic differences on the same level as Greeks and non–Christ-believing Jews. This point is strengthened by the fact that, in developing his special form of Judaism, Paul in fact drew indiscriminately on his whole cultural context, which was Greek no less than Jewish: see the introduction to my edited volume Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide (Lousville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 1–16. 18. To repeat, Badiou would agree with this point but not accept that Paul’s new ’’discourse’’ remains a (quasi-)ethnic one. This is due to the special construction he places on the defining feature of that discourse: that the ‘‘event’’ (i.e., the resurrection of Christ) is without empirical content, a ‘‘pure event’’ (e.g., Saint Paul, 45, 48, 57, 63)—and hence universalizable. (See more below.) 19. I am quoting from the extract of Manning Nash’s book The Cauldron of Ethnicity in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) in Ethnicity, ed. Hutchinson and Smith, 24–26. 20. Here is one formulation of the combination: ‘‘the Christ-event establishes the authority of a new subjective path over future eras’’ (Badiou, Saint Paul, 63). For the way in which this is taken by Badiou to generate universalism, see n. 22, below.

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21. On Badiou as an atheist: see Saint Paul, 3, cf. also 5: ‘‘it is a question of restoring the universal to its pure secularity, here and now.’’ On Christ’s resurrection as a fable, see ibid., 4–5, 108. 22. By contrast, Badiou ties Paul’s universalism to the emptiness (my term) of the ‘‘event’’ itself and the subjective turn toward it. He is fundamentally concerned (e.g., Saint Paul, 7, 59) about the relationship between ‘‘truth’’ and the subject. He sees ’’truth’’ (which one might perhaps paraphrase as the content of certainty or conviction) as a ‘‘universal singularity’’ and finds the conditions for this in the combination of subject, event, and declaration, as follows: ‘‘(l) The Christian subject does not preexist the event he declares (Christ’s resurrection). . . . (2) Truth is entirely subjective (it is of the order of a declaration that testifies to a conviction relative to the event). . . . (3) Fidelity to the declaration is crucial, or truth is a process, and not an illumination’’ (14–15). In accordance with this, Badiou is concerned to remove any content from the whole configuration: e.g. it is under the condition of ‘‘grace’s universal address as pure conviction, or faith’’ that there is an ‘‘essential link between event and universality’’ (75). Or again: ‘‘There is an address for all only according to that which is without cause’’ (77). Correspondingly, he conceives of ‘‘truth’’ in terms of a process (e.g., 22) that addresses every empirically filled cultural way of life with a ‘‘not . . . but’’ (64, 73), though he never states in positive terms what the ‘‘but’’ consists in, other than the ‘‘pure event’’ of Christ’s resurrection. In fact, the ‘‘but’’ does something else: ‘‘the ‘but’ indicates the task, the faithful labor, in which the subjects of the process opened up by the event . . . are the coworkers’’ (64, my emphasis). It is difficult to get rid of the feeling that what Badiou is really after, as he himself says, is ‘‘the militant figure (2) throughout the ages and with no concern at all for the content of the message of this particular ‘‘militant figure’’ (the Pauline one). 23. Perhaps this is the root of my disagreement with Badiou. I see Paul as constantly concerned to spell out the full meaning of the Christ event. And I take him to be quite willing to employ contemporary philosophical ideas in that attempt. For Badiou, by contrast, Paul is ‘‘a poet-thinker of the event’’ (2), ‘‘a major figure of antiphilosophy’’ (17), for whom there is a radical ‘‘incompatibility between Christianity and philosophy’’ (47), which makes him an ‘‘Antiphilosopher of genius’’ (108; see also 27–28, 31, 58, 72). 24. See my Paul and the Stoics. 25. Pistis and agape¯ are also closely connected, however. In fact, the connection is already made in Galatians. Thus in Gal. 3–4 Paul twice introduces a chronological sequence of pistis and then the pneuma (3:14; 4:6–7, based on 3:26–29). And in chap. 5 we get the famous expression of ‘‘pistis being active through love [agape¯]’’ (5:6), which stands as the title for 5:13–26, in which Paul then focuses on the pneuma (5:16–25) and the connection between that and agape¯ (5:22). The latter connection is later spelled out in Rom. 5 and 8. 26. This follows from the fact that love from above is said to be poured into the hearts of Paul and his addressees and that this happens by means of the spirit that has been given to them. 27. The preposition huper is repeated four times in 5:6–8, and the motif of God’s love for human beings as shown in the Christ event is once more explicitly stated in 5:8. 28. As I have explained the Christ event, it is all about states of mind—on God’s part, on the part of Christ, and on the part of human beings. Of course, there are also external and at least partly publicly ascertainable sides to it. Human beings, if we begin from that end, will act upon their renewed state of mind. And that is something that can be seen. Also, they have gone through a public ritual of baptism, on which occasion they received the spirit. That could partly be seen, partly be heard, inasmuch as, arising from the baptismal water, they suddenly addressed God as father in Aramaic (‘‘Abba!’’). On the side of Christ, too, his death was obviously a public event for anybody to see. As regards God’s part—both the ‘‘sending’’ of ‘‘his son,’’ Jesus the Christ, and the

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resurrection of him after his death—these events were evidently not publicly ascertainable. But they were no less certain in Paul’s mind for all that. The resurrected Christ had actually been seen by a whole range of early witnesses, including, as ‘‘the least of the apostles,’’ Paul himself (1 Cor. 15:3–11). God had ‘‘revealed’’ Christ to Paul (Gal. 1:12; 15–16) and although when Paul himself comes closest to describing the character of this revelation, it is a distinctly internal experience (2 Cor. 4:6), the fact of Christ’s resurrection was no less certain to him for all that. This external side to the experience of the Christ event must never be forgotten. It remains the case, however, that Paul conceives of the Christ event primarily in internalizing terms. Thus far, then, Badiou is right. But the kind of contrast he draws in his extended comparison of Paul and Pascal (47–54) between Paul’s form of subjectivity and any kind of proof of the truth of Christianity, even one that refers to ‘‘the ineffable personal revelation’’ (53), hardly fits the Pauline text. One is tempted to exclaim: ‘‘Paul belongs to antiquity!’’ 29. I study Stoic oikeio¯sis in The Stoic Theory of Oikeio¯sis: Moral Development and Social Interaction in Early Stoic Philosophy (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1990). For a brief account, see chap. 2 of my Paul and the Stoics and, more recently, ‘‘The Relationship with Other: Similarities and Differences Between Paul and Stoicism,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 96 (2005): 35–60. 30. The basic texts are in Ioannes ab Arnim, ed., Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, vol. 3, chap. 3 (1903 and later). 31. Similarly, of course, Badiou again and again speaks of the indifferent, but only–and very importantly—in the negative sense: e.g., ‘‘With regard to what has happened to us [i.e., the event], . . . differences are indifferent, and the universality of the true collapses them’’ (106). 32. For a detailed defense of this reading, see my ‘‘1 Corinthians 11:16 and the Character of Pauline Exhortation,’’ Journal of Biblical Literature 110 (1991): 679–89. Badiou reads the verse differently, taking it as an expression of Paul’s ‘‘inflexible impatience’’ vis-a`-vis ‘‘this barrage of problems, far removed from what, for him, identifies the Christian subject’’ (100). By contrast, I argue that Paul is here applying his understanding of the meaning of the Christ event to his own practice. 33. For a detailed defense of this reading, see my ‘‘Proclaiming the Lord’s Death: 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 and the Form of Paul’s Theological Argument,’’ in Pauline Theology, ed. D. M. Hay, vol. 2: 1 & 2 Corinthians (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1993), 103–32. 34. I understand this principle of allowance with regard to adiaphora very differently from the ‘‘benevolence with regard to customs and opinions’’ that Badiou describes as ‘‘an indifference that tolerates differences’’ (99, Badiou’s emphasis). Where Badiou speaks of this in connection with Paul’s ‘‘universal militantism,’’ or what I shall later call his missionary stance, which is geared to bringing nonbelievers to faith (pistis), the kind of allowance I am talking about falls under his ’’in-group stance’’ and is an expression of love (agape¯), which is an in-group phenomenon only (contra Badiou). 35. Badiou would not allow such an idea, since for him the three discourses (the Jewish, the Greek, and the ‘‘new’’ one) are not at all on the same level. 36. Note how precisely Paul is here drawing on, and even summarizing, 9:19–23, quoted earlier. 37. This idea adds a whole dimension to Paul’s thinking on the relationship between his universally valid message and individual ways of life, a dimension of which I can find no trace in Badiou. There, by contrast, Paul comes off as a single-minded champion of the subjective truth claim of the militant. The self-reflecting questioning of oneself is missing. 38. Thus I am insisting, contra Badiou, on keeping Paul’s idea of the new group on the same level as any other contemporary group.

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39. It is difficult to see how Badiou can bring the one value—that of agape¯—underlying the ingroup stance into the missionary stance when he constructs the latter as a completely empty, ‘‘militant’’ stance, because agape¯ is directly derived from the meaning of the Christ event. For Badiou’s reasoning in this regard, see pp. 87–92 in his chapter on agape¯. More important is the fact that Paul never speaks of agape¯ in regard to outsiders. It is an in-group phenomenon only. (For discussion and defense of this claim in connection with Romans 12–13, see my Paul and the Stoics, 276, 373–74, 376.) 40. This is the raison d’eˆtre of Paul’s suddenly beginning to talk of himself in chap. 9 as a whole, in relation to the issue treated in chap. 8. The freedom that he himself has (9:1, introducing 9:1–18 as a whole) should be used (by the Corinthians) in the way he then explains in 9:19ff. 41. As we shall see, there is an important difference between the way the gospel principle of giving oneself up is applied in the two situations. In the missionary situation it is applied, as Paul himself says, for Paul’s own sake: in order that he may himself become partner in the gospel by applying it to himself and acting upon it. In the in-group situation, by contrast, the gospel principle is understood as being love for the ‘‘brothers’’ in Christ and hence of concern for their well-being. 42. For a detailed defense of this understanding of the translation and meaning of a crucial verse, see my ‘‘Radical Altruism in Philippians 2:4,’’ in Early Christianity and Classical Culture, ed., J. T. Fitzgerald, T. H. Olbricht, and L.M. White (Leiden: Brill 2003), 197–214. 43. It is interesting to see that—as Giorgio Agamben also notes—Badiou ends with the idea of a Pauline ‘‘production of the Same’’: ‘‘what takes place is the subsumption of the Other by the Same. Paul demonstrates in detail how a universal thought, proceeding on the basis of the worldly proliferation of alterities (the Jew, the Greek, women, men, slaves, free men, and so on), produces a Sameness and an Equality (there is no longer either Jew, or Greek, and so on). The production of equality and the casting off, in thought, of differences are the material signs of the universal’’ (109, Badiou’s emphasis). (For Agamben, who has a quite different reading of the issue, see The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005], 49–53.) 44. In presenting this historical and exegetical reading of Paul, intended for modern philosophers concerned with universalism, I ask myself whether I have been fair to Badiou, who explicitly states, ‘‘My intention . . . is neither historicizing nor exegetical’’ (2), and who wishes, rather, to examine the figure of Paul in order to organize his own ‘‘speculative discourse’’ (5). I believe, on balance, that I have. It is difficult to see how Badiou’s reading could not be, in practice, just as much a responsible, historical, and exegetical reading as any other, including, for instance, the one by Agamben, which is explicitly a ’’commentary’’ on the letter to the Romans.

Politics Between Times: Theologico-Political Interpretations of the Restraining Force (katechon) in Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, by Marc de Wilde 1. Quoted from the King James Version. 2. See J. Schmid, ‘‘Der Antichrist und die hemmende Macht,’’ Theologische Quartalschrift 129 (1949): 330. 3. W. Trilling, Der zweite Brief an die Thessalonicher (Zurich: Benziger, 1980), 89. 4. Ibid., 107. 5. Ibid., p. 92. 6. Carl Schmitt, entry, January 11, 1948, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1947– 1951, ed. Eberhard Freiherr von Medem (Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1991), 80.

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7. For an exhaustive treatment of these interpretations: see P. Metzger, Katechon: II Thess. 2:1–12 im Horizont apokalyptischen Denkens (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005),15–48. 8. In this emphasis on the political community as a bulwark against catastrophe, the Christian types of political theology seem to differ from, e.g., Islamic ones, according to which rulers must consider it their task to unite the universal community of believers, the umma, in a political nation. This is true not only for political Islam but also for what Olivier Roy has called ‘‘neofundamentalism,’’ that is, the relatively recent movement that has tried to realize the umma across state borders (see Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, trans. Carol Volk [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996], 12–13). See also Talal Assad’s attempt to subject these political theologies to a genealogical critique: ‘‘The Islamic umma in the classical theological view is . . . not an imagined community on a par with the Arab nation waiting to be politically unified but a theologically defined space enabling Muslims to practice the disciplines of din [‘‘religion’’] in the world’’ (Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003]. 197). 9. F. Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996), 41. 10. A. Strobel, Untersuchungen zum eschatologischen Verzo¨gerungsproblem (Leiden: Brill, 1961), 121–26. 11. Trilling, Der zweite Brief an die Thessalonicher, 96. 12. Strobel, Untersuchungen zum eschatologischen Verzo¨gerungsproblem, 139–40. 13. Cf. Hippolytus’s later explanation in: Hippolytus, Kommentar zu Danie¨l, in Hippolytus, Werke, ed. Georg Nathanael Bonwetsch, 2nd rev. ed., ed. Marcel Richard (203–4; Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 2000, 1.4.21.198–199. 14. Tertullian, Apology, ed. and trans. T. R. Glover, G. H. Rendall, and W. C. A. Kerr (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 154–55. 15. See also Strobel, Untersuchungen zum eschatologischen Verzo¨gerungsproblem, 134. 16. Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon, 51–52. 17. Lactantius, Divine Institutes, trans. Anthony Bowen and Peter Garnsey (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2003), 437. 18. Ibid., 51. 19. The attribution to Haymo von Halberstadt is controversial. Another reading suggests that the author in question is his contemporary Haymo of Auxerre. See B. Gansweidt, ‘‘Haimo von Halberstadt,’’ in Lexikon des Mittelalters (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977–99), vol. 4, col. 1844. 20. Haymo von Halberstadt, ‘‘Expositio in epistolas sancti Pauli,’’ in Patrologia latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: Garnier), vol. 2, col. 780 D. 21. Haymo seems to fall back on an earlier reading by the Church Father Jerome (342–419), who had suggested that Paul expressed himself in guarded terms in order to prevent reprisals against the Christians. See Jerome, ‘‘Ad Algasiam,’’ Patrologia latina, vol. 22, col. 1037. 22. Not long before, the investiture controversy had culminated in Pope Gregory VII’s 1076 decision to excommunicate Emperor Henry IV. 23. On Otto von Freising’s Rome interpretation in relation to the investiture controversy, see H. D. Rauh, Das Bild des Antichrist im Mittelalter: Von Tyconius zum deutschen Symbolismus (Mu¨nster, Aschendorff, 1973), 352–53. 24. Herveus Burgidolensis, ‘‘In epistolam II ad Tessalonicenses,’’ Patrologia latina, vol. 181, col. 1393 A and B. Cf. Peter Lombard, ‘‘In epistolam II ad Tessalonicenses,’’ Patrologia latina, vol. 191, col. 21 and 191, col. 0318A and 0318D. This interpretation was canonized in 1261; see Accursius, ‘‘Glossa ordinaria,’’ Patrologia latina, vol. 114, col. 0622A.

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25. Haymo, ‘‘Expositio in epistolas sancti Pauli,’’ 781B. 26. Herveus, ‘‘In epistolam II ad Tessalonicenses,’’ col. 1393 A. 27. Thomas Aquinas, ‘‘Super II epistolam b. Pauli ad Thessalonicenses,’’ in Sancti Thomae de Aquino expositio et lectura super epistolas Pauli apostoli, ed. Roberto Busa (Turino, 1953), chap. 2, lectio 1. 28. See Trilling, Der zweite Brief an die Thessalonicher, 100, and Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon, 54. 29. See, e.g., Peter Lombard, ‘‘In epistolam II ad Tessalonicenses,’’ col. 0318B, and Herveus, ‘‘In epistolam II ad Tessalonicenses,’’ col. 1393B. 30. Quoted in Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon, 55. 31. Martin Luther, Schmalkaldische Artikel, ed. Hans Preuss (Erlangen: Martin Luther, 1937), article 2.4, pp. 18–19. 32. Trilling, Der zweite Brief an die Thessalonicher, 100. 33. Ibid., 55. 34. John Calvin, ‘‘Commentarius in epistolam ad Thessalonicenses II,’’ in Ioannis Calvini opera, ed. Wilhelm Baum, Eduard Cunitz, and Eduard Ruess (Braunschweig: C. A. Schwetschke, 1895), 51:200. 35. Ibid., 200. 36. Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon, 56. 37. Trilling, Der zweite Brief an die Thessalonicher, 100. 38. Newman, quoted in ibid., 101. 39. Bisping, quoted in ibid., 101. 40. Olsenhausen, quoted in ibid., 101. 41. See: W. Sta¨hlin, ‘‘Die Gestalt des Antichristen und das katechon,’’ in Glaube und Geschichte: Festgabe fu¨r Joseph Lortz, ed. E. Iserloh and P. Manns (Baden-Baden: Bruno Grimm, 1958), 2:11; O. Cullmann, ‘‘Der eschatologische Charakter des Missionsauftrags und des apostolischen Selbstbewusstseins bei Paulus: Untersuchung zum Begriff des katechon (katechoon) in 2 Thess. 2:6–7,’’ in Cullmann, Vortra¨ge und Aufsa¨tze: 1925–1962, ed. Karlfried Fro¨hlich (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1966), 332; W. Bo¨ld, ‘‘Das Bollwerk wider die Chaosma¨chte: Eine problemgeschichtliche Studie zur Staatstheologie von 2 Thess. 2:6 ff.,’’ (Ph.D. diss. University of Bonn, 1938). 42. K. Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1994), 222. 43. A. Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich, (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1931), 14; Schauwecker, quoted in Sontheimer Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik, 228; F. Hielscher, Das Reich (Berlin: Das Reich, 1931), 375. 44. Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik, 226. 45. H.-D. Wendland, ‘‘Staat und Reich,’’ in Die Nation vor Gott: Zur Botschaft der Kirche im Dritten Reich, ed. W. Ku¨nneth and H. Schreiner (Berlin: Im Wichern, 1933), 181. 46. See: W. Stapel, ‘‘Das Reich: Ein Schlusswort,’’ in Deutsches Volkstum: Halbmonatschrift fu¨r das deutsche Geistesleben, 15 (second issue of March 1933): 183; Wendland, ‘‘Staat und Reich,’’ 174ff..; A. E. Gu¨nther, ‘‘Der Ludus de Antichristo: Ein christlicher Mythos vom Reich und dem deutschen Herrscheramte,’’ Der fahrende Gesell 20 (1933): 67–75. 47. See: U. Tal, Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Third Reich (Londen: Routledge, 2004); M. Ley and L. Schoeps, eds., Der Nationalsozialismus als politische Religion (Bodenheim bei Mainz: Philo, 1997); R. Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); C.-L. Ba¨rsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002).

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48. W. Ku¨nneth and H. Schreiner, eds., Die Nation vor Gott: Zur Botschaft der Kirche im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Im Wichern, 1933). 49. This characterization stems from a press release by the University of Mu¨nster, dated July 7, 2000, announcing a symposium in honor of the centennial of Wendland’s birth. 50. H.-D. Wendland, ‘‘Staat und Reich,’’ 181. 51. Ibid., 193. 52. D. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Neville Horton Smith (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 108. 53. Ibid., 108. 54. Ibid. 55. See Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Vo¨lkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), 29–33; Schmitt Glossarium, 63; Schmitt, ‘‘Drei Stufen der historischen Sinngebung,’’ Universitas 5 (1950): 929ff. 56. Letter from Carl Schmitt to Martin Dibelius, dated June 4, 1942, quoted in R. Gross, Carl Schmitt und die Juden: Eine deutsche Rechtslehre (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 298. 57. See ibid., 299. 58. See M. Dibelius, ‘‘An die Thessalonicher II,’’ in Handbuch zum Neuen Testament (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1925), 11:43. 59. Grossheutschi ends his historical account of the interpretation traditions abruptly after having described that of the Reformation (though elsewhere he does mention Schmitt’s reference to his contemporary Hans Freyer (see Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon, 98ff.), whereas Meuter does not discuss the origins of Schmitt’s doctrine at all (see G. Meuter, Der Katechon: Zu Carl Schmitts fundamentalistischer Kritik der Zeit [Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994]). 60. See Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon, 57n.2. 61. This is true, e.g., of the so-called Conservative Revolution: aside from the katechon interpretations of Albrecht Gu¨nther, Wilhelm Stapel, and Hans Freyer, there is also that of Martin Heidegger, which, in contrast to the others, seems to remain strictly theological, free from political connotations. See Heidegger, Einleitung in die Pha¨nomenologie der Religion, ed. Matthias Jung, Thomas Regelhy, and Claudius Strube, in Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), 60:114–15). 62. The reference to Peterson can be found in Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II: Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder politischen Theologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996), 64; that to Freyer in Schmitt,. ‘‘Die andere Hegel-Linie: Hans Freyer zum 70. Geburtstag,’’ Christ und Welt 10, no. 30 (1957): 2. 63. G. Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000), 120. 64. W. Stapel, Der christliche Staatsmann: Eine Theologie des Nationalismus (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932), 185. 65. Ibid., 244. 66. Stapel, ‘‘Das Reich: Ein Schlusswort, 183. 67. See G. Meuter, Der Katechon: Zu Carl Schmitts fundamentalistischer Kritik der Zeit (Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1994), 213. However, in a letter to Stapel written on the eve of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of the Reich, Schmitt expressed certain reservations concerning the ‘‘dangerously state-undermining way’’ in which the notion of the empire was sometimes being used. In this context he seems to have preferred the concrete concept of the ‘‘state’’ to the more idealistic notion of the ‘‘empire’’ (letter from Schmitt to Wilhelm Stapel, January 23, 1933, quoted in S. Lokatis, ‘‘Wilhelm Stapel und Carl Schmitt: Ein Briefwechsel,’’ in Schmittiana, ed. P. Tomissen

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[Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996], 5:47). See A. Mohler and K. Wiessmann, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1918–1932: Ein Handbuch (Graz: Ares, 2005), 183. 68. Letter from Carl Peterson to Karl Barth, n.d. (probably written ca. New Year 1925), quoted in B. Nichtweiss, ‘‘Apokalyptische Verfassungslehren: Carl Schmitt im Horizont der Theologie Erik Petersons,’’ in Die eigentlich katholische Verscha¨rfung: Konfession, Theologie und Politik im Werk Carl Schmitts, ed. B. Wacker (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1994), 40. 69. Erik Peterson, ‘‘Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem,’’ in Peterson, Theologische Traktate, introd. Barbara Nichtweiss, vol. 1 of Ausgewa¨hlte Schriften (Wu¨rzburg: Echter, 1994), 23 and 81n.168. 70. Letter from Peterson to Anni Krauss, July 5, 1947, quoted in Nichtweiss, ‘‘Apokalyptische Verfassungslehre,’’ 38. 71. Letter from Carl Schmitt to Dietrich Braun, March 4, 1965, quoted in ibid., 42. 72. Diary entry, July 7, 1918, quoted in ibid., 61. See B. Nichtweiss, Erik Peterson (Freiburg, Herder, 1992), 481. 73. Peterson, ‘‘Die Kirche,’’ in Peterson, Theologische Traktate, ed. and introd. Barbara Nichtweiss, 1:247. 74. Ibid., 248. The same idea can be found in an undated letter from Peterson to Friedrich Dessaur: ‘‘Can one say, ‘The Romans remain,’ when it should be ‘The Jews remain until the last day’?’’ (quoted in Nichtweiss, ‘‘Apokalyptische Verfassungslehren,’’ 61n117). 75. It is true that, particularly in a Calvinist tradition, the notion of the katechon had been often related to the conversion of both pagans and Jews. But Peterson seems to take a decisive turn, claiming, with a subtle anti-Semitism, that ‘‘in the order of grace, pagans and Jews are . . . different by nature’’ (Peterson, ‘‘Die Kirche,’’ 1:247). In less subtle wording, he will argue, in the course of the 1930s, that ‘‘the Jew . . . is an enemy of Christ in a different and more original sense than the pagan,’’ as the Jew has ‘‘taken part in all the persecutions of the church from the days of the apostle until now’’—sentences highlighted by Schmitt in his copy of the text (Erik Peterson, ‘‘Der Ma¨rtyrer und die Kirche,’’ Hochland 34 [1936–37]: 385–94). See Nichtweiss, ‘‘Apokalyptische Verfassungslehren,’’ 50. 76. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, 64. 77. See: J. Z. Muller, ‘‘Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer, and the Radical Conservative Critique of Liberal Democracy in the Weimar Republic,’’ History of Political Thought 12, no. 4 (1991): 695ff.; W. Goldschmidt and W. D. Hund, ‘‘ ‘Ernstfall’ und ‘Volksgemeinschaft’: Zur konservativen Besinnung auf Hans Freyer und Carl Schmitt,’’ Bla¨tter fu¨r deutsche und internationale Politik 28 (1983): 1588ff. 78. Muller, ‘‘Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer, and the Radical Conservative Critique,’’ 698. 79. See Schmitt entry, January 11, 1948 (Glossarium, 80). 80. H. Freyer, Weltgeschichte Europas (Wiesbaden: Diederich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1948). 81. Ibid., 2:616. 82. Ibid., 616. 83. Ibid., 616, 620–21, 635, 650, 683. 84. H. Freyer, ‘‘Der Fortschritt und die haltende Ma¨chte,’’ in Freyer, Herrschaft, Planung und ¨ ner (Weinheim: VVH Acta Humaniora, Technik: Aufsa¨tze zur politischen Soziologie, ed. Elfriede U 1987), 82. 85. Ibid., 82. 86. Ju¨rgen Habermas, for example, in a discussion with Joseph Ratzinger on the normative foundations of Western democracy, refers to this notion of ‘‘restraining force.’’ According to Habermas, one of the most urgent questions of our time is whether ‘‘a fully positivized constitutional

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order would be in need of religion or any other ‘restraining force’ in order to secure cognitively the foundations of its validity’’ (Habermas, ‘‘On the Relations Between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,’’ trans. Anh Nguyen, in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan [New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 253; trans. modified). 87. Schmitt, ‘‘Die andere Hegel-Linie,’’ 2. 88. Schmitt, entry, January 11, 1948 (Glossarium, 80). 89. Ibid. 90. Carl Schmitt, ‘‘Beschleuniger wider Willen; oder, Problematik der westlichen Hemispha¨re,’’ in Schmitt, Staat, Grossraum, Nomos: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1916–1969, ed. and introd. Gu¨nter Maschke (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995), 435–36; Schmitt, Land und Meer: Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1942), 11ff., 56ff. 91. Schmitt, ‘‘Beschleuniger wider Willen,’’ 431. 92. Ibid., 436. 93. Ibid. 94. Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon, 63. 95. Schmitt, Land und Meer, 9. 96. Ibid., 12. 97. Freyer, Weltgeschichte Europas, 608. 98. Ibid., 608–9. 99. Carl Schmitt, ‘‘Die Lage der europa¨ischen Rechtswissenschaft,’’ in Schmitt, Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsa¨tze aus den Jahren 1924–1954 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1985), 428. 100. Ibid., 428. 101. G.W.F Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Hamburg, Felix Meiner, 1995), 183 (§ 211). 102. Schmitt’s entries on the katechon are: December 19, 1947; December 27, 1947; January 11, 1948; March 13, 1948; April 9, 1948; May 23, 1948; June 16, 1948; July 4, 1949; September 25, 1949; and October 1, 1949 (Glossarium, 63, 70, 80, 113, 125, 153, 165, 253, 272, and 273). 103. Schmitt, entry, December 19, 1947, Glossarium, 63. 104. See Schmitt, entries, December 19, 1947, March 13, 1948, and October 1, 1949 (Glossarium, 63, 113, and 273). 105. See Schmitt, entries, December 19, 1947, and April 9, 1948 (Glossarium, 63 and 125). 106. Schmitt, entry, December 19, 1947 (Glossarium, 63). 107. The affinity with Heidegger’s katechon interpretation is striking, for he too emphasizes that the motif of the restraining force can be adequately understood only in light of a ‘‘performance of the Christian experience of life,’’ referring to the Christian experience of time as ‘‘delay’’ (Frist). See Heidegger, Einleitung in die Pha¨nomenologie der Religion, 112. 108. In the biblical tradition, the notion of the secret has always already been inscribed into the structure of responsibility. This is, e.g., true of the sacrifice of Abraham: for him, God’s will had to remain a mystery, so that he could not hide behind an order or imperative and was forced to decide Isaac’s fate on his own. See Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 77. 109. Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde, 29. 110. Ibid., 29–30. 111. See Grossheutschi, Carl Schmitt und die Lehre vom Katechon, 93. 112. Schmitt, entry, December 19, 1947 (Glossarium, 63). 113. Schmitt, ‘‘Beschleuniger wider Willen,’’ 436.

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114. Ibid., 436–37. 115. See Schmitt, entry, January 16, 1950 (Glossarium, 291). 116. See above, under the subhead ‘‘Antiquity.’’ I have not discussed Jerome’s katechon interpretation , because it consists merely of a casual remark, in which he suggests that the empire as katechon serves the interest of the Christians. See Jerome, ‘‘Ad Algasiam,’’ col. 1037). 117. See Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde, 29–39. See also Adso Dervensis, De ortu et tempore Antichristi, ed. Danie¨l Verhelst (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), 26, ll. 109–24. For a discussion of Haymo’s ‘‘state-neutral’’ interpretation, see above, under the subhead ‘‘Antiquity.’’ 118. See Marc de Wilde, ‘‘Safeguarding the Constitution with and Against Carl Schmitt,’’ Political Theory 34, no. 4 (2006): 510–15. 119. Schmitt, entry, September 25, 1949 (Glossarium, 272).

The Culture of Crucifixion and the Resurrection of the Dispossessed: The Interpellation of the Subject in the Roman Empire and Paul’s Gospel as ‘‘Truth Event,’’ by L. L. Welborn note: This essay is the revised text of a paper presented at a special session of the Pauline Epistles section of the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) in Boston, November 2008. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to all those who offered responses and criticisms, especially Lou Martyn, Ward Blanton, John Barclay, Neil Elliott, John Riches, Wolfgang and Eckhard Stegemann, and Robert Jewett. For sustained dialogue on Paul and the philosophers, I am especially grateful to Locke Welborn and Rabbi Bernard Barsky. 1. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). 2. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006). 3. Badiou, Saint Paul, 4, 17. 4. Georg Luka´cs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972); Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971). 5. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000). 6. Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 7. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 1. 8. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. P. Hallward (London: Verso, 2001). 9. Ibid., 40. 10. Ibid., 41. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 60. 13. Louis Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ in Lenin and Philosophy. See also Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory ((London: New Left Books, 1979) 100– 111; Zˇizˇek, The Ticklish Subject, 128, 141–42, 145. 14. Badiou, Ethics, 68. 15. Ibid., 69.

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16. Ibid. 17. Badiou, Saint Paul, 107. 18. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 108; see Zˇizˇek, ‘‘The Politics of Truth, or, Alain Badiou as a Reader of St. Paul,’’ in The Ticklish Subject, 143–44. 20. Badiou, Saint Paul, 62. 21. Ibid., 55–56; see. Zˇizˇek, ‘‘Badiou as a Reader of St. Paul,’’ in The Ticklish Subject, 146. 22. Badiou, Saint Paul, 55. 23. Ibid., 68. 24. Ibid., 68–69. 25. See Eric Santner, ‘‘Miracles Happen,’’ in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Zˇizˇek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 119. 26. Badiou, Saint Paul, 70. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 73. 29. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1953). 30. Badiou, Saint Paul, 73, distinguishing Paul’s thought from that of the early Heidegger. 31. Badiou, Being and Event, 25; see Zˇizˇek, ‘‘Badiou as a Reader of St. Paul,’’ in The Ticklish Subject, 131. 32. Inscriptiones Graecae, 14, 2190; for further examples, see: R. Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962) 84–85; W. Peek, Griechische Grabgedichte (Berlin: Topelmann, 1960), 323. Note the conjecture of Imre Peres, Griechische Grabinschriften und neutestamentliche Eschatologie (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 28: ‘‘Probably this or similar ideas of life typified of upper levels of society in the larger cities, above all, inspired by the cultural life of the theater and the possibilities of achieving the good things in life.’’ 33. Badiou, Saint Paul, 71. 34. See, e.g., Simon Goldhill, ed., Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic, and the Development of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 35. T. N. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); P. A. Miller, Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); B. Dufallo, The Ghosts of the Past: Latin Literature, the Dead, and Rome’s Transition to a Principate (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007). 36. Miller, Subjecting Verses, 184–209. 37. Tacitus Annals 1.2.1; 4.1. 38. Miller, Subjecting Verses, 210–36; Dufallo, The Ghosts of the Past, 123–27. 39. On the importance of the Caligula crisis, see A. Barrett, Caligula: The Corruption of Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale university Press, 1990) 140–91. 40. Dufallo, The Ghosts of the Past, 123–27; J. G. Fitch, Seneca Eight Tragedies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) 39. 41. There is a pressing need for rhetorical analysis of Philo’s political writings, In Flaccum and Embassy to Gaius, where virtually every line is shaped to meet his rhetorical ends. Philo’s rhetorical subtlety is so great that he sometimes leaves impressions contrary to what occurred, without complete fabrication. See the brief treatment of rhetorical aspects of the Legatio in: Daniel R. Schwartz, ‘‘On Drama and Authenticity in Philo and Josephus,’’ SCI 10 (1989–90): 113–29; Manuel Alexandre, Rhetorical Argumentation in Philo of Alexandria (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999). There is relevant material in the insightful articles by Allen Kerkeslager, ‘‘The Absence of Dionysios, Lampo,

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and Isidoros from the Violence in Alexandria in 38 c.e.,’’ Studia Philonica Annual 17 (2005): 49–94; ‘‘Agrippa and the Mourning Rites for Drusilla in Alexandria,’’ Journal for the Study of Judaism 37 (2006): 367–400; ‘‘Agrippa I and the Judeans of Alexandria in the Wake of the Violence in 38 c.e.,’’ Revue des E´tudes Juives 168 (2009): 1–49. I owe him sincere thanks for guidance in the matter of Philo’s rhetoric. 42. Philo Embassy to Gaius, 89–90, 101. 43. Ibid., 66.. 44. Ibid., 347–48. 45. D. and E. Henry, The Mask of Power: Seneca’s Tragedies and Imperial Rome (Warminster, 1985). 46. J. G. Fitch and S. McElduff, ‘‘Construction of the Self in Senecan Drama,’’ Mnemosyne 55 (2002): 18–40. 47. Seneca, Hercules, in Seneca Eight Tragedies, 48–159. 48. Philo, Of the Legation to Gaius, 75. 49. Barrett, Caligula, 213–41. 50. C. J. Herrington, ‘‘Senecan Tragedy,’’ Arion 5 (1966): 430. 51. Seneca, Letters 70. 52. Ibid., 77; see the comments of P. Veyne, Seneca: The Life of a Stoic (New York: Routledge, 2003), 167. 53. On the Principate as a ‘‘state of exception’’ in the Schmittian sense, see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 65–88. 54. J. G. Fitch, in Seneca Eight Tragedies, 9. 55. K. M. T. Chrimes, ‘‘The Family and Descendants of C. Julius Eurykles,’’ in Ancient Sparta: A Re-examination of the Evidence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1952) 169–204; G. W. Bowersock, ‘‘Eurycles of Sparta,’’ Journal of Roman Studies 51 (1961)a; 112–18. 56. The difficulty of drawing inferences from such highly rhetorical sources as the exile poetry of Ovid, the political writings of Philo, and Senecan tragedy prevents me from speaking, as some classicists do (e.g., Fitch), of the ‘‘psychology of the self’’ in the first century. Instead, I have contented myself with the language of the ‘‘representation of the subject.’’ But to the rhetorical inventio of these writings belongs the calculation of what would have been plausible to contemporary readers. Hence, it is significant confirmation of Badiou’s account of the ‘‘situated void’’ of Paul’s gospel that the figure of the subject as a ‘‘living dead’’ appears so consistently in the literature of Paul’s contemporaries. 57. Steven Friesen, ‘‘Poverty in Pauline Studies: Beyond the So-called New Consensus,’’ JSNT 26, no. 3 (2004): 352. 58. Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 71–73. 59. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Task of the Translator,’’ in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. M. Bullock and M. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 254. 60. L. L. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1–4 in the Comic-Philosophic Tradition (London: T & T Clark, 2005). 61. Aristotle The Art of Poetry. 1449a30; Cicero On the Orator 2.236; Quintilian Institutes of Oratory 6.3.8; M. Grant, The Ancient Rhetorical Theories of the Laughable (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1924), 19; G. M. A. Richter, ‘‘Grotesques and the Mime,’’ American Journal of Archaeology 17 (1913): 148–56; R. Garland, The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Greco-Roman World (Ithaca. N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 108–10; Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ, 34–48.

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62. Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ, esp. 129–47. 63. M. Bonaria, ed., Mimorum romanorum Fragmenta (Geneva: Instituto di Filologia Classica, 1955), 112. On the popularity of the Laureolus mime, see: A. Nicoll, Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Studies in the Popular Theatre (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), 110–11; R. Beacham, The Roman Theater and Its Audience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) 136. 64. Josephus, Antiquities 19.94; Suetonius, Life of Caligula 57; Martial, Of Spectacles 7; Juvenal 8.187–188; Tertullian, Against the Valentinians. 14; see T. P. Wiseman, Catullus and His World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 183–98, 258–59. 65. For reconstruction of the plot, see: H. Reich, Der Mimus (Berlin: Weidmann, 1903), 564– 566; Nicoll, Masks, Mimes and Miracles, 110–11. 66. Josephus, Antiquities 19.94. 67. Martial Of Spectacles 7. 68. Oxyrhynchus Papryrus 413, ll. 123–24; see H. Wiemken, Der griechische Mimus: Dokumente zur Geschichte des antiken Volkstheaters (Bremen: Schu¨nemann, 1972), 94–95. 69. Ibid., l. 186; see Wiemken, Der griechische mimus, 101. 70. Apuleius, Metamorphoses 10–12; on the mimic elements in this scene, see J. Winkler, Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s Golden Ass (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 77–78. 71. E. Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952) . 72. Ibid., 137–69. 73. Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, 372–73. 74. Plautus, Mostel, 359–64; see J. Meggitt, ‘‘Laughing and Dreaming at the Foot of the Cross: Context and Reception of a Religious Symbol,’’ Journal for the Study of Religion, Ethics, and Society 1 (1996): 9–14. 75. Examples from Plautus are: Miles Gloriosus (The Swaggering Soldier) 539–40, 610–14; Persa (The Persian) 855–56; Stichus (The Parasite Rebuffed) 625–26; Asinaria (The Ass Dealer) 314, 545–61; Epiducs (The Fortunate Discovery) 610–14. 76. Examples from Plautus are: Aulularia (The Pot of Gold) 522; Bacchides (The Twin Sisters) 584, 902; Casina (The Strategem Defeated) 93, 416, 641, 977; The Persian 795; Captivi (The Prisoners) 551, 563, 577, 600, 659.; The Ass Dealer 940; Cur. (The Forgery) 611, 693; Menaechmi (The Brothers Menaechmus) 915, 1017; Mostellaria (The Haunted House) 1133; Poenulus (The Carthaginian) 271, 495, 511, 789, 1309. 77. Horace, Satires 1.3.80–83. 78. Petronius, Satyricon 53. 79. B. P. Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 17. 80. Chariton 4.2; trans. in Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 67. 81. Juvenal 6.219–223. 82. M. Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 38–43. 83. Cicero, On Behalf of Rabirius 5.16. 84. Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World, 38. 85. Ibid., 77. 86. Ibid., 38. 87. Caesar, On the Hispanic War 20.5. 88. Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World, 38.

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89. Examples are Livy 30.43.13; Valerius Maximus 2.7.12; Appian The Civil Wars 1.120; Strabo 3.4.18; Dio Cassius 49.12.4. 90. Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World, 23. 91. Ibid., 38. 92. See, e.g., Cicero Against Verres 2.5.158–165; see P. Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 122–31. 93. See, e.g., Josephus Wars of the Jews 2.75; 2.241; 2.253; 2.306, 308,; 3.321; 5.289; 5.449–451; Antiquities 17.295; 20.129; see also Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World, 46–47. 94. J. Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 49–50, 60, 86–90; K. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 118–23; K. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 113–37. 95. Plautus, Miles Gloriosus 359–60; Tacitus, Annals 2.32.2; 15.60.1; CIL VI, 31577, 31615; R. Lanciani, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries (London: Macmillan, 1888), 64–67; Wiseman, Catullus and His World, 7–8. 96. O. F. Robinson, ‘‘Slaves and the Criminal Law,’’ Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fu¨r Rechtsgeschichte 98 (1981): 223–27; Wiseman, Catullus and His World, 7–8; K. Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 166. 97. L’annee´e ´epigraphique (1971), 88.2.10. 98. Varro, The Latin Language 5.25. 99. Horace, Satires. 1.8.8–13. 100. Juvenal, 14.77–78. 101. L’anne´e ´epigraphique (1971), 88 and 89; see also Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World, 54; Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, 166. 102. W. L. Westermann, ‘‘Sklaverei,’’ Real-Encyclopa¨die der classischen Altertumswissenschaft suppl. 6. 980–81. 103. See, e.g., Livy, 29.18.14; Valerius Maximus, 2.7.12; Tacitus, Histories 4.11.3; see also Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World, 51n1. 104. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 105. The pre-Pauline kerygmatic formulas do not contain the word ‘‘cross’’ at all. The formula preserved in 1 Cor. 15:3 speaks of the death of Christ, but not of the manner of his death. In Paul’s earliest epistle, 1 Thess., both the noun and the verb are lacking. See T. Heckel, ‘‘Der Gekreuzigte bei Paulus,’’ Biblische Zeitschrift 46 (2002): 194–95; Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ, 252–53. 106. 2 Cor. 5:16. 107. H.-W. Kuhn, ‘‘Kreuz,’’ Theologische Realenzyklopa¨die 19 (1990): 720; Heckel, ‘‘Der Gekreuzigte bei Paulus,’’ 196–200. 108. 1 Cor. 1:17; Welborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ, 102–16, 147–60. 109. Badiou, Saint Paul, 47. 110. Benjamin, ‘‘The Task of the Translator,’’ 253–63; A. Chowdhury, ‘‘Memory, Modernity, Repetition: Walter Benjamin’s History,’’ Telos 143 (2008); 28–29. 111. Benjamin, ‘‘Task of the Translator,’’ 258; see Paul de Man, ‘‘Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’ ’’ Yale French Studies 69 (1983): 43–44. 112. Benjamin, ‘‘On the Concept of History,’’ in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), thesis 17, pp. 396; trans. modified. 113. See the comments on this text by R. Bultmann, Der zweite Brief an die Korinther (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976).

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114. Cf. Zˇizˇek’s differentiation of the Lacanian subject from the subject as represented by Badiou in The Ticklish Subject, 152–61. 115. Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World, 61–62. 116. Badiou, Saint Paul, 66. 117. Ibid., 68. 118. Ibid., 70. 119. Ibid., 65–66. 120. Zˇizˇek, ‘‘Badiou as a Reader of St. Paul,’’ in The Ticklish Subject, 146. 121. Badiou, Saint Paul, 73. 122. Ibid., 71. 123. Santner, ‘‘Miracles Happen,’’ in The Neighbor, 123. 124. See the analysis of the relevant passages in Benjamin’s ‘‘Theses’’ and the ‘‘Arcades Project’’ by Rolf Tiedemann, ‘‘Dialectics at a Standstill,’’ in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 929–45. 125. Badiou, Saint Paul, 68. 126. Ibid., 69. 127. Ibid., 70. 128. Ibid., 71. 129. Ibid., 72. 130. See the insightful commentary on these passages by Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 829–85.

The Philosophers’ Paul in the Frame of the Global: Some Reflections, by Elizabeth A. Castelli 1. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). 2. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). 3. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005). 4. See, e.g., Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Zˇizˇek, eds., Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), and Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). ‘‘Political theology’’ here is distinct from the political theology of Christian socialism (e.g., Dorothee So¨lle, Political Theology, trans. John Shelley [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974]), liberation theology, or radical and left-leaning political activism on the part of some Christians. The current discussions of political theology are instead engaged with debates over sovereignty, often in debate with Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 5. The literature here is wide-ranging and diverse. For starters, see: Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Lamin O. Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003); Fenella Cannell, The Anthropology of Christianity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Lamin O. Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (New York:

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Oxford University Press, 2008); Birgit Meyer, ed., Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses (New York: Palgrave, 2009); and volumes in the University of California Press series on the Anthropology of Christianity, edited by Joel Robbins. 6. The fault lines of these debates reside most obviously in the realms of gender and sexuality. The Anglican communion’s conflicts over homosexuality are a singular case in point. See MaryJane Rubenstein, ‘‘An Anglican Crisis of Comparison: Intersections of Race, Gender, and Religious Authority with Particular Reference to the Church of Nigeria,’’ Journal of American Academy of Religion 72, n. 2 (June 2004): 341–65; Mary-Jane Rubenstein, ‘‘Anglicans in the Post-Colony: On Sex and the Limits of Communion,’’ Telos, no. 143 (Summer 2008): 133–60. 7. I owe a debt to biblical scholar and Christian theologian Alain Gignac for his essay ‘‘Taubes, Badiou, Agamben: Contemporary Reception of Paul by Non-Christian Philosophers,’’ in Reading Romans with Contemporary Philosophers and Theologians, ed. David W. Odell-Scott (New York: T. & T. Clark, 2007), 155–211, and look forward to his forthcoming book, Lire Romains aujourd’hui. 8. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 1. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 4. 11. Ibid., 40. 12. Ibid., 42. 13. Ibid., 44. 14. Ibid., 103. 15. Ibid., 2. 16. The letter is published in an appendix to The Political Theology of Paul, 110–13. 17. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 2. 18. Ibid., 3. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 95. 21. Ibid., 3, 4, 52; 11; 16–17; 18; 21; 27; 45–46; 51, respectively. 22. Ibid., 3. 23. Ibid., 11. 24. Ibid., 88. 25. W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (London: SPCK, 1955); E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977); and Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1994). 26. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 2. 27. Ibid., 16. 28. Ibid., 20. 29. Ibid., 23 and 25, respectively. 30. Ibid., 32, 39, and 40, respectively. 31. Ibid., 10. 32. Ibid., 26. 33. Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, Aleida Assmann, and Jan Assmann, ‘‘Afterword,’’ in ibid., 122; see also 130, 134, 139. 34. Ibid., 28. 35. Ibid., 51, 91, 105. 36. Badiou, Saint Paul, 1. 37. Ibid., 5. 38. Ibid., 6. Or a little later on: ‘‘What is the real unifying factor behind this attempt to promote the cultural virtue of oppressed subsets, this invocation of language in order to extol communitarian

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particularisms (which, besides language, always ultimately refer back to race, religion, or gender)?’’ (ibid., 6). 39. Ibid., 9–10. Because he frames the issue in these terms, it is possible for him to critique the relation between the two domains and throw decorum to the wind as he makes his argument and mocks the always already aggrieved in the process: ‘‘What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this upsurge—taking the form of comunities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities—of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs! And these infinite combinations of predicative traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth! . . . identities, moreover, that never demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market’’ (ibid., 10). 40. Gal. 3:28, quoted in Badiou, Saint Paul, 9. All translations from the New Testament are my own. My translation of the Greek passage reflects the nonparallelism between ‘‘there is no male and female’’ and the two clauses that go before it (‘‘there is neither Jew nor Greek,’’ ‘‘there is neither slave nor free’’). Not only does Badiou omit the final phrase of the verse but he also omits the prior verse, which makes it clear that this paean to nondifferentiation occurs only under the aegis of baptism ‘‘into Christ’’ by those who have, as a consequence, ‘‘put on Christ’’ as a garment. 41. Badiou, Saint Paul, 1. 42. Ibid., 2–3. 43. Ibid., 1. 44. Ibid., 22–23. 45. Ibid., 23. 46. For approaches that take ethnicity and the use of ethnicity seriously, see Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), and Caroline Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 47. Badiou, Saint Paul, 40–41. 48. Ibid., 41. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 1. 51. Ibid., 2. 52. . Ibid., 6. 53. The discussion of the punctuation and possible alternative translation of Romans 1:1 (ibid., 6–7) is a case in point. The interlinear translation appears at 147–85. An interlinear translation provides a word-by-word translation of individual terms but cannot by its very nature attend to issues of syntax, grammar, and idiom. 54. The most striking—and for Agamben’s argument, most important—translational problem involves the phrase mallon chre¯sai in 1 Cor. 7:21 (ibid., 26). The verse reads: ‘‘If called as a slave, let it not be a care to you [or never mind]. But if you are able to become free, mallon chre¯sai.’’ The phrase mallon chre¯sai can be translated either ‘‘make the most of [something], take advantage of [something]’’ or ‘‘be all the more useful’’—that is, ‘‘work that much harder’’ or, more colloquially, ‘‘make the best of things.’’ The standard study of the phrase and its history of interpretation is S. Scott Bartchy, MALLON CHRE¯SAI: First-Century Slavery and the Interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:21 (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1973). 55. Agamben’s discussion of the term apostolos, conventionally translated ‘‘apostle,’’ illustrates this approach (The Time That Remains, 59). 56. Ibid., 67–78.

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57. Ibid., 2, 61, 63, 65, 70, 74, 75, 78, 143. 58. Ibid., 75–77. 59. Ibid., 107–8. See also Gignac, ‘‘Taubes, Badiou, Agamben,’’ 191. Agamben puts it epigrammatically: ‘‘The messianic ple¯ro¯ma [fullness] of the law is an Aufhebung [sublation] of the state of exception, an absolutizing of katarge¯sis [rendering inoperative, deactivation]’’ (The Time That Remains, 108). 60. Agamben knows something of this reading of Paul, as can be seen in his discussion of Weber’s interpretation of the notion of ‘‘call’’ in Paul as ‘‘an expression of ‘eschatological indifference’ ’’ (ibid., 22). 61. Ibid., 23. 62. Badiou, Saint Paul, 109. 63. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 51. 64. Ibid., 55. 65. Ibid., 78–87. Agamben advocates as an ‘‘epistemological paradigm . . . that rhyme issues from Christian poetry as a metrical-linguistic transcodification of messianic time and is structured according to the play of typological relations and recapitulations evoked by Paul’’ (ibid., 85). 66. Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 67. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 44. 68. Jenkins, The New Faces, 54, 212n31. See also Hinne Wagenaar, ‘‘Stop Harassing the Gentiles!’’ Journal of African Christian Thought 6, no. 1 (2003): 44–54, 52. 69. Jenkins, New Faces, 4. For a sustained assessment of the conflicts over sexuality in the Anglican communion, see Rubenstein, ‘‘An Anglican Crisis of Comparison,’’ and Rubenstein, ‘‘Anglicans in the Post-Colony.’’ 70. Jacob Taubes, ‘‘Carl Schmitt—Ein Apokalyptiker der Gegenrevolution,’’ in Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebig Fu¨gung (Berlin: Merve, 1987), 7–30. ‘‘Carl Schmitt thinks apocalyptic from above, from power; I think it from below’’ (ibid., 22). 71. Jenkins, New Faces, 150–53. 72. Ibid., 152, 231n57. The Kairos Document, September 25, 1985: available at http://www .bethel.edu/⬃letnie/AfricanChristianity/SAKairos.html (accessed March 19, 2010). See also Bonganjalo Goba, ‘‘The Kairos Document and Its Implications for Liberation in South Africa,’’ Journal of Law and Religion 5, no. 2 (1987): 313–25, and Tristan Anne Borer, Challenging the State: Churches as Political Actors in South Africa, 1980–1994 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998). 73. Rom. 13:1–2, 4, 6. 74. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 54. 75. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 33. 76. Ibid. 77. Primary sources from the Christian tradition may be found in Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmanns, 1999). The interpretive literature devoted to Romans 13 is extensive. In addition to literature cited in note 78, see also N. Samuel Murrell, ‘‘Wrestling with the Bible in the Caribbean Basin: A Case Study on Grenada in Light of Romans 13:1–7,’’ Caribbean Journal of Religious Studies 8 (April 1987): 12–23. 78. The Kairos Document, 2.1; Allan A. Boesak, ‘‘What Belongs to Caesar? Once Again Romans 13,’’ in When Prayer Makes News, ed. Allan A. Boesak (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 136–56; Winsome Munro, ‘‘Romans 13:1–7: Apartheid’s Last Biblical Refuge,’’ Biblical Theology

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Bulletin 20 (Winter 1990): 161–68; Jan Botha, ‘‘Creation of New Meaning: Rhetorical Situations and the Reception of Romans 13:1–7,’’ Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, no. 79 (June 1992): 24–37; P. J. Strauss, ‘‘God’s Servant Working for Your Own Good: Notes from Modern South Africa on Calvin’s Commentary on Romans 13:1–7 and the State,’’ Hervormde Teologiese Studies 54 (March-June 1998): 24–35; Jonathan A. Draper, ‘‘ ‘Humble Submission to Almighty God’ and Its Biblical Foundation: Contextual Exegesis of Romans 13:1–7,’’ Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, no. 63 (June 1988): 30–38. See also Adrian Hastings, ‘‘Christianity and Revolution,’’ African Affairs 74, no. 296 (July 1975): 347–61, where Hastings opens his discussion of early-1970s Christian political thought by quoting Romans 13:1–3, observing ‘‘St. Paul’s curiously optimistic, one might almost say naı¨ve, view of political authority’’ (ibid., 347). A few years later, Hastings would diagnose a radical change in both political climate and biblical interpretation, mapping the theoretical constrast between ‘‘a Romans 13 view and a theology of liberation’’ (Adrian Hastings, ‘‘The Christian Churches and Liberation Movements in Southern Africa,’’ African Affairs 80, no. 320 [July 1981]: 353. 79. Stephen L. Selka, ‘‘Ethnoreligious Identity Politics in Bahia, Brazil,’’ Latin American Perspectives 32, no. 1 (January 2005): 72–94, esp. 79; Christian Smith, ‘‘The Spirit and Democracy: Base Communities, Protestantism, and Democratization in Latin America,’’ Sociology of Religion 55, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 119–43. 80. John Burdick, ‘‘Why Is the Black Evangelical Movement Growing in Brazil?’’ Journal of Latin American Studies 37, no. 2 (2005): 311–32, esp. 321–22. 81. Jenkins, New Faces, 130. This passage appears in a long chapter entitled ‘‘Persecution and Vindication,’’ and it adopts an interpretive framework drawn directly from the literature of the ‘‘persecuted church’’ movement. For an analysis of this movement, see Elizabeth A. Castelli, ‘‘Praying for the Persecuted Church: U.S. Christian Activism in the Global Arena,’’ Journal of Human Rights 4 (2005): 321–51, and Elizabeth A. Castelli, ‘‘Theologizing Human Rights: Christian Activism and the Limits of Religious Freedom,’’ in Nongovernmental Politics, ed. Michel Feher with Ga¨elle Krikorian and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 673–87. 82. Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 83. Ibid., 195. 84. Engelke, A Problem of Presence, 196–98, 198. In this section, Engelke also traces the authority claims of the prophet, who, at points, speaks as the apostle Peter (ibid., 192). 85. Maria Jose´ Alves de Abreu, ‘‘Breathing into the Heart of the Matter: Why Padre Marcelo Needs No Wings,’’ Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds 1, no. 2–3 (2005): 325–49. 86. Ibid., 333. 87. Ibid., 336. 88. Larry Rohter, ‘‘Brazil’s Top TV Preachers Land in Hot Water in Miami,’’ New York Times, March 19, 2007.

Paul as a Hero of Subjectivity, by Stanley Stowers 1. Among many writings that to various extents treat Paul, these have been especially influential: Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans.

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Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). 2. An excellent account of the kind of approach to historical inquiry that I am recommending is found in Curtis Hutt, ‘‘The Ethics of the Representation of the Religious Past’’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1997). 3. See e. g., Badiou, Saint Paul, 5–15. 4. Alain Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 75. 5. Thomas Nagle, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford, 1986), 68. For another defense of strong Cartesianism in analytic philosophy, see also John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), e. g., 19. 6. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. H. J. Payne (New York: Harper and Row, 1958). 7. Most important for my discussion are the notes collected and published as Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968), and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin Books, 1978). 8. Two important examples are Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), and Bernard Pautrat, Versions du soleil: Figures et syste´me de Nietzsche (Paris: Seuil, 1971). 9. Here I follow the important interpretation of Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 101–47. 10. Badiou, Saint Paul, 72. 11. Ibid., 66–67. Badiou is right that Paul ultimately wants to abolish suffering. But life in Christ involves suffering, and it is at least instrumental in getting to that final goal. On the centrality of embracing suffering to Nietzsche’s self–overcoming and will to power, see Reginster, The Affirmation of Life, 113–14, 133–36, 160–63, 229–35. 12. Badiou, Saint Paul, 71. 13. On this relation to Nietzsche, see Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornel University Press, 2003). I think that Bambach’s interpretation of Nietzsche ought to be corrected, especially by Reginster’s work (Affirmation of Life). 14. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 15. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Overcoming Metaphysics,’’ in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 78. 16. Badiou, Saint Paul, 73. 17. My account of Heidegger here has been influenced by Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 75–82, 298–47. 18. These dubious elements, in my view, include treating objectivity as fallenness, Heidegger’s communitarianism, his anti-modernism (with primordialist nostalgia), his concept of resoluteness, and other generally authoritarian elements. 19. Equally challenging non-Cartesian approaches are found in Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991), and Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).

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20. For similar understandings of Augustine, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 127–42, and Phillip Carey, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 21. Taylor, Sources, 185. 22. Badiou, Saint Paul, 54–64. I have argued that the person depicted in Romans 7 is the Gentile of chapter 1. See my Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974). I have been followed by others, including, most recently, A. Andrew Das, Solving the Romans Debate (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007). 23. In this Marxist version, roughly shared by Althusser and Badiou, the determining economy and the state are the primary sites and ‘‘causes’’ of objectivity. The individual subjects of the state are the site of ideology. The overdetermination (excess in representation) or multiplicity of the social whole provides the movement and instability that allow for the possibility of subjective selfdetermination and for heroic subjectivity. Of course, Althusser is famous for, in some sense, getting rid of the subject altogether. 24. Particularly clear on Badiou’s concept of truth is his Being and Event, trans. Oliver Felthan (London: Continuum, 2005, but see also The´orie du Sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982). 25. I follow mainly Being and Event and The´orie du Sujet here. 26. ‘‘This position has a bad reputation, because it is evocative of the absolute idealism of Bishop Berkeley. And yet what I am attempting to do is to occupy it, while keeping that in mind’’ (Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie, 74). 27. Badiou, Saint Paul, 76 and 59, respectively. 28. On this use of understandings of existence see, e.g., Kerygma and Myth, ed. H. W. Bartsch (New York: Harper and Row, 1953), 11–43. 29. ‘‘It was precisely because Being and Time was in part the issue of an attempt to formalize the structures of factical Christian life that it was greeted with such enthusiasm by Protestant theologians such as Rudolph Bultmann (with whom it had in part been worked out during Heidegger’s stay at Marburg)’’ (John Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993]). 30. Badiou, Saint Paul, 3, referring to Gu¨nter Bornkamm, Paul (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). 31. For this case and bibliography, see my ‘‘What is Pauline Participation in Christ,’’ in New Views of Jewish and Christian Self-Definition: Essays in Honor of E. P. Sanders, ed. Fabian Udoh, Susannah Heschel, Mark Chancey and Gregory Tatum (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2008). 32. On the demythologizing, see Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth, and on the Pauline ontic concepts treated as relations of existence, see Rudolph Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951 and 1952), e. g., 227–31, and throughout. 33. On the concepts of flesh, body, soul, and so forth and on the hierarchy of being, see Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). 105–36. 34. See, e. g., Rom. 1:3–4, 8:11–17, 28–29; Gal. 3: 26–18. 35. See, e. g., Badiou, Saint Paul, 59, 73. 36. John R. Levison, The Spirit in First Century Judaism (Leiden: Brill. 1997). 37. On the wide influence of Stoic thought, see the remarks by Samuel Sambursky, The Physical World of Late Antiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 4. 38. Heinrich Von Staden, ‘‘Body, Soul and the Nerves: Epicurus, Herophilus, Erasistratus, the Stoics and Galen,’’ in Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem

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from Antiquity to Enlightenment, ed. J. P. Wright and P. Potter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 79–116. 39. This is the implication gained from reading together such texts as: Rom. 7:22–23, 8:16; 1 Cor. 2:10–11. 40. See my ‘‘What is Pauline Participation’’ on the Stoic idea of krasis. 41. All translations in this essay are my own. 42. Indeed, modern scholarship has read Paul as arguing that salvation and being in Christ result from the believer’s faith. My claims are partly based on the increasingly popular subjective genitive reading of pistis Christou, i.e., Christ’s own faith/fullness. See my A Rereading of Romans, 194–250, and ‘‘What is Pauline Participation.’’ 43. Arguments for this sharing can be found in my ‘‘What is Pauline Participation’’ and in an important book by Caroline Johnson Hodge, ‘‘If Sons, Then Heirs’’: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 44. Emma Wasserman, The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Sin, Death, and the Law in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Wasserman, ‘‘The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Revisiting Paul’s Anthropology in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology,’’ Journal of Biblical Literature 126 (2007): 793–816; Wasserman, ‘‘Paul among the Philosophers: The Case of Sin in Romans 6–8’’ The Journal for the Study of the New Testament 30 (2008): 387–415. See also Wasserstrom’s essay in the present volume, ‘‘Paul among the Ancient Philosophers: The Case of Romans 7.’’ 45. Theo Heckel, Der Innere Mensch: Der paulinische Verarbeitung eines platonischen Motivs (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993); Christoph Markschies, ‘‘Innerer Mensch,’’ Reallexikon fu¨r Antike und Christentum 18 (1997): 266–312. 46. Christopher Gill, The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Gretchen Reydams-Shils, The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). See also the pioneering study of M. F. Burnyeat, ‘‘Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,’’ Philosophical Review 91 (1982): 3–40. 47. Stephen Everson, ed., Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 131. 48. Instead of possessing autonomy and being self-legislating, the pneuma enables the one who is in Christ to do what the law requires (Rom. 8:4). 49. In a fuller account of Paul in relation to Badiou’s reading, I would stress Paul’s asymmetrical account of Jewish and Gentile error. The Augustinian-Lutheran tradition has made them symmetrical with doctrines about Jewish legalism and boasting, but Paul attributes only a basic and nearly total epistemological and moral disorientation to Gentiles (Rom. 1:18–32; 1 Cor. 1:18–2:13). The problem with Jews is their failure to follow Jesus Christ (Rom. 9–11).

The Necessity of a Dead Bird: Paul’s Communism, by Slavoj Zˇizˇek 1. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘‘The Deconstruction of Christianity,’’ trans. Michael B. Smith, in DisEnclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 140; trans. modified. In the first of these maxims, Nancy is quoting Luigi Pareysson, cited after E´mile Poulat, L’e`re postchre´tienne: Un monde sorti de Dieu (Paris: Flammarion, 1994).

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2. Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). 3. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge 1992), 176. 4. Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers. 5. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel (New York: Routledge 2005), 112. 6. Ibid., 107. 7. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3:233. 8. Ibid., 3:238–39. 9. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 17:272. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), para. 279. 11. Ibid. 12. Quoted in Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen War Stories (London: Routledge, 2003), 132. 13. Ibid.

Paul and Materialist Grace: Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s Reformation, by Roland Boer 1. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000). 2. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute; or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000). 3. I focus on four main texts by Zˇizˇek: The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999); The Fragile Absolute; On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001); and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). These often cover very similar arguments, albeit not without progression. Since I wrote this essay, Zˇizˇek has reflected further on theology, but the substance is largely the same. See Zˇizˇek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 68–123, and Zˇizˇek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). 4. See Roland Boer, ‘‘The Search for Redemption: Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zˇizˇek on Marx, Psychoanalysis and Religion,’’ Filozofija i Drusˇtvo (Philosophy and Society) 37, no. 1 (2007): 153–76. 5. Butler, Laclau, and Zˇizˇek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 28. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 29. 8. Ibid., 106. 9. See ibid., 137–39. 10. Ibid., 206. 11. Ibid., 205. 12. Zˇizˇek, The Ticklish Subject, 153–54. 13. Butler, Laclau, and Zˇizˇek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 219–23, 254–55. 14. Zˇizˇek, For They Know Not What They Do, 188, 270; Zˇizˇek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 4; Zˇizˇek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 26, 59, 92. 15. ‘‘While this book is philosophical in its basic tenor, it is first and foremost an engaged political intervention, addressing the burning question of how we are to reformulate a leftist, anticapitalist political project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement, liberaldemocratic multiculturalism’’ (Zˇizˇek, The Ticklish Subject, 4).

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16. Ibid., 2. 17. Ibid., 3. 18. Ibid., 162. 19. Zˇizˇek, The Ticklish Subject, 142. 20. Ibid., 161. 21. Ibid., 143. 22. Ibid., 161. 23. Ibid., 151; my emphasis. 24. Ibid., 147. 25. Badiou, Saint Paul, 63, 66–67, 74–85. 26. Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 145–55 and 95–97. 27. Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute, 15. 28. Ibid., 54–63. 29. Ibid., 113. 30. Ibid., 135. 31. Ibid., 143. 32. Ibid., 99–100. 33. Zˇizˇek, The Ticklish Subject, 115. 34. Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute, 121. 35. Ibid., 145–46; Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 114–15. 36. Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 118. 37. Here is the quotation from Bultmann: ‘‘the way of the works of the Law and the way of grace and faith are mutually exclusive opposites. . . . Man’s effort to achieve his salvation by keeping the Law only leads him into sin, indeed this effort itself in the end is already sin. . . . The Law brings to light that man is sinful, whether it be that his sinful desire leads him to transgression of the Law or that that desire disguises itself in zeal for keeping the Law’’ (Rudolph Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament [London: SCM, 1952], 1:264–65). 38. Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute, 118. 39. Ibid., 145–47; see the repeat in Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 114–16. 40. Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute, 146; Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 115. 41. Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute, 130. 42. Ibid., 127. 43. Badiou, Saint Paul, 63. 44. Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute, 119, 127. 45. Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and Dwarf, 112–13, 117, 119. 46. Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute, 129–31; Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and Dwarf, 128. 47. Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and Dwarf, 128–30. 48. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 148. 49. Ibid., 84. 50. Ibid., 151. 51. Ibid., 2. 52. Ibid., 3. 53. Ibid., 114. 54. Ibid., 112. 55. Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute, 147–48. 56. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 102.

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57. ‘‘ ’What do you think? A man had two sons; and he went to the first and said, ‘‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’’ And he answered, ‘‘I will not’’; but afterward he repented and went. And he went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘‘I go, sir,’’ but did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?’ ’’ They said, ‘The first’ ’’ (Matt. 21:38–41). 58. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 114; cited in Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute, 126. 59. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 221; cited in Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute, 127. 60. Back in The Ticklish Subject, Zˇizˇek was already onto the break with ethics, only to lose and then recover that insight. He writes: ‘‘The notion of belief which fits this paradox of authority was elaborated by Kierkegaard; this is why, for him, religion is eminently modern: the traditional universe is ethical, while the Religious involves a radical disruption of the Old Ways—true religion is a crazy wager on the Impossible we have to make once we lose support in tradition’’ (The Ticklish Subject, 115, after quoting Rom. 13:10). 61. See Zˇizˇek, On Belief , 148–49. 62. Ibid., 105. 63. Martin Luther and D. Erasmus., Luther and Erasmus: On the Bondage of the Will and On the Freedom of the Will, ed. E. G. Rupp and P. S. Watson, vol. 17 of Library of Christian Classics (London: SCM, 1969). 64. Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and Dwarf, 133–38. 65. Ibid., 136. 66. Ibid., 169–70. 67. Ibid., 170, my emphasis.

Radical Theology and the Event: Paul with Deleuze, by Clayton Crockett 1. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2. 2. In the prologue, Badiou singles out two secondary works on Paul, one by a Catholic, Stanislas Breton (Saint Paul) and one by a Protestant, Gunther Bornkamm (Paul). In situating his contribution, he writes: ‘‘A Catholic, a Protestant. May they form a triangle with the atheist’’ (3). Now, any book that seriously considers Paul’s political significance today would have to have at least four sides or corners, to take into account the 1987 lectures by Jacob Taubes, translated into English as The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). 3. As witness the conference at Syracuse University entitled ‘‘St. Paul among the Philosophers: Subjectivity, Universality, and the Event,’’ April 12 to 14, 2005, featuring Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zˇizˇek, along with New Testament and Paul scholars and historians. See my review, from which this introduction partially draws: ‘‘St. Paul and the Event,’’ Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6, no. 2 (April 2005). 4. See Slavoj Zˇizˇek , The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), chap. 2, ‘‘Schelling-for-Hegel: The Vanishing Mediator,’’ 92–186. 5. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,’’ in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 33 See also Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 6. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 281.

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7. See Dominique Janicaud et.al., Phenomenology and the ‘‘Theological Turn’’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 8. See Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics after Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); this essay has been revised and expanded into chap. 7, ‘‘Radical Theology and the Event,’’ 126–44.. 9. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 565–656. 10. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 40. 11. Ibid., 53. 12. Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 63. 13. Ibid., 83. 14. Ibid., 55. 15. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 373. 16. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 64–65. 17. Ibid., 78. 18. Ibid., 79. 19. Ibid., 85. 20. Ibid., 86. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 88. 23. Ibid., 87. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 90. 26. Ibid., 93. 27. Ibid., 95. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 117. 30. Ibid. Deleuze does not distinguish between differentiation and differenciation until chap. 4, where he uses this pairing to explain the relationship between the virtual and the actual. ‘‘Differentiation’’ translates the French diffe´rentier, which is a formal mathematical term, and concerns virtual differences. ‘‘Differenciation’’ translates the French diffe´rencier, which is a more common word that means what we call in English differentiation; Deleuze associates this word with the actualization of differences (see ibid., 207). This is a crucial distinction in Difference and Repetition, but the two terms and processes have not yet been separated out in chap. 2, where Deleuze uses the more general word (in French) differenciation. 31. Ibid., 119. 32. Ibid., 66. 33. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 22. 34. Ibid., 10. 35. Quoted in ibid., 5. 36. Ibid., 151. 37. Ibid., 241. 38. Ibid., 35. 39. See John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).

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40. See Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Diffe´rance,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 1–27. 41. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 42. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 22. 43. Ibid., 1. 44. Ibid., 151. 45. Ibid., 149. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. See Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 60. 50. See Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 51. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 37. 52. Ibid., 39. 53. Ibid., 37. 54. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 79. 55. Ibid. 85. 56. Ibid., 87. 57. See Deleuze’s opposition of the order of God and the order of the Antichrist in his reading of Klossowski in the appendix to The Logic of Sense. The title Antichrist may be too literally Nietzschean, but here Deleuze understands God as the master of the disjunctive syllogism, who preserves himself from its operations. By contrast, the order of the Antichrist occurs when ‘‘the disjunctive syllogism accedes to a diabolical principle and use, and simultaneously the disjunction is affirmed for itself without ceasing to be a disjunction; divergence or difference becomes objects of pure affirmation’’ (The Logic of Sense, 296). Later, in The Fold, Deleuze subjects God explicitly to this thinking of disjunction as disjunction, or pure difference, which means in Leibnizian terms that God passes through the possibles and the imcompossibles. Contrasting Whitehead with Leibniz, Deleuze claims that, for Whitehead, ‘‘God desists from being a Being who compares worlds and chooses the richest compossible. He becomes Process, a process that at once affirms incompossibilities and passes through them.’’ See The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), chap. 6, ‘‘What Is an Event?’’ 81. We could elaborate an alternative Deleuzian reading of Christ, specifically in terms of his divinity, along these lines, but that is beyond the scope of the present chapter. 58. See the expressions and formulations of Radical Orthodoxy, including John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), and Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002). See also their essays in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, ed. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Zˇizˇek (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). 59. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 143. 60. See Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003): ‘‘some human beings become subjects: those who

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act in fidelity to a chance encounter with an event which disrupts the situation they find themselves in’’ (6). 61. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 172.

You Are Not Your Own: On the Nature of Faith, by Simon Critchley 1. Adolph von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. N. Buchanan (London: Williams & Norgate, 1901), 1:136. 2. Ibid, 136. 3. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 112. 4. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 83. 5. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Letter to Father Engelbert Krebs,’’ in Supplements, ed. J. van Buren (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 69. 6. Wayne Meeks, ed., The Writings of St. Paul (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 435. 7. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 2. 8. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 24, 11. 9. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 1. 10. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 4–15. 11. For a rather different, but wonderfully detailed account of Paul’s politics, which attempts to show the extent of Paul’s debt to the traditions of Hellenistic popular and political philosophy, see Bruno Blumenfeld, The Political Paul (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001). 12. Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding (London: Verso, 2007), chap. 2. 13. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 138–45. 14. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 15. See, e.g., the final paragraph of Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 88, which begins, ‘‘To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law.’’ We will come back to this phrase below. 16. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 135. 17. Ibid., 114. 18. Ibid., 136. 19. See ibid., 133–34, where Agamben is referring to unpublished lectures by Foucault given in Leuven in 1981 called ‘‘Mal faire, dire vrai.’’ This is closely related to the also unpublished fourth volume of The History of Sexuality, The Confessions of the Flesh, which deals with the practice of confession and monastic discipline. 20. This is worked out more thoroughly in my Infinitely Demanding, chaps. 1 and 2. 21. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 128. 22. As Agamben relatedly writes in The Coming Community (trans. Michael Hardt [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 2): ‘‘The lover wants the loved one with all its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such—this is the lover’s particular fetishism.’’

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23. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 144. 24. Martin Heidegger, Letters to His Wife 1915–70 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 50. 25. Ibid., 54. 26. Ibid., 55. 27. Ibid., 55; see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 72. 28. Heidegger, Letters to his Wife 1915–70, 57. 29. Ibid., 58. 30. Ibid., 59. 31. Ibid. 32. I discuss this topic in more detail in ‘‘Originary Inauthenticity,’’ in my On Heidegger’s Being and Time (London: Routledge, 2008). 33. Heidegger, ‘‘Letter to Father Engelbert Krebs,’’ in Supplements, 69. 34. Ibid., 70. 35. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 47. 36. Ibid., 239. 37. Ibid., 236. 38. See the reference to Harnack in Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 50. 39. Ibid., 67. 40. Ibid., 73. 41. Book epigraph to Harnack, History of Dogma, vol.1. 42. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 49. 43. Ibid., 83. 44. Ibid., 56. 45. Ibid., 95. 46. Ibid., 79. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 70. 49. Ibid., 88–89. 50. Ibid., 88. 51. Ibid., 89. 52. Adolf Deissmann, Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History, trans. W. E. Wilson, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1926); Albert Schweizer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. W. Montgomery (New York: A. & C. Black, 1931). 53. See Martin Dibelius, ‘‘Mystic and Prophet,’’ in The Writings of St. Paul, ed. Meeks, 395–409. 54. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 57. 55. Ibid., 73. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 80. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 82. 62. Ibid., 102. 63. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theologico-Political Fragment,’’ in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1978), 312–13.

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64. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, 72. 65. Badiou, Saint Paul, 46–47. 66. Ibid., 56. 67. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 1. 68. Ibid., 18. 69. Ibid., 24–25. 70. Ibid., 33. 71. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 83. 72. Ibid., 84. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 84–85. 75. Ibid., 86. 76. Ibid., 86. 77. Ibid., 87. 78. Ibid. 79. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 34. 80. Heidegger, Being and Time, 179. 81. Agamben, The Coming Community, 14. 82. Heidegger, Being and Time, 180. 83. Ibid., 371. 84. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 34. 85. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, 87. 86. Ibid., 54. 87. Heidegger, Being and Time, 269. 88. Ibid., 271. 89. On the applicability of the terms conversio and aversio to Heidegger’s distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, see Reiner Schu¨rmann, On Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. S. Levine (London: Routledge, 2008), 61–62. 90. Heidegger, Being and Time, 273. 91. Ibid., 271. 92. Ibid., 275. 93. Ibid., 281; my emphasis. 94. Ibid., 276–77; my emphasis. 95. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 270–87. 96. Heidegger, Being and Time, 277. 97. Ibid., 280. 98. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 62–63. 99. Heidegger, Being and Time, 289. 100. Ibid., 284. 101. Ibid., 323. 102. Ibid., 285. 103. Ibid., 286. 104. Ibid., 286–87. 105. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 158. 106. Heidegger, Being and Time, 287.

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107. Ibid., 289. 108. Martin, Heidegger, ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 193. 109. See Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 110. Samuel Beckett, Molloy (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 79. 111. Meeks, ed. Writings of St. Paul, 239. 112. Ibid., 240. 113. See Daniel Boyarin on this point, A Radical Jew, 40–56. 114. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, 60. 115. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. J. E. Steely and L. D. Bierma (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1990), 1–14. 116. Ibid., 80. 117. Harnack, History of Dogma, 1:223. 118. Ibid, 1:267. 119. Harnack, Marcion: Gospel of the Alien God, 23. 120. For a selection of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, see A. Louth, ed., Early Christian Writings, trans. M. Staniforth (London: Penguin, 1987). 121. Harnack, Marcion: Gospel of the Alien God, 12. 122. Ibid., 66. 123. Ibid., 111. 124. Ibid., 96. 125. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, 58. 126. Ibid., 61. 127. Harnack, Marcion: Gospel of the Alien God, 134. 128. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 95–96. 129. Ibid., 108–11. 130. See Agamben, State of Exception, 87. 131. Ibid., 88. 132. Badiou, Saint Paul, 35. 133. Ibid., 48, 49. 134. Ibid., 49; my emphasis. 135. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 97. 136. See, for example, Being and Time, 130, where Heidegger writes: ‘‘Authentic Being-one’s-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a conditions that has been detached from the ‘they’; it is rather an existentiell modification of the ‘they’—of the ‘they as an essential existentiale.’ ’’ 137. Harnack, Marcion: Gospel of the Alien God, 139. 138. On love as the fulfilling of the law, see Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, ‘‘But there is no quarrel between the law and love, no more than there is between the sum and that of which it is the sum’’ (Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. H. and E. Hong (New York: Harper, 2009), 111. 139. I owe these thoughts to conversations with Lisabeth During.

Paul the Apostle: Proclamation and Argumentation, by Paul Ricoeur 1. Gu¨nther Bornkamm, Paul, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997).

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2. Stanislas Breton, Saint Paul (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). 3. Bornkamm, Paul, 109. 4. Ibid., 110. 5. ‘‘Now I would remind you brothers and sisters of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which you also stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you. . . . For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me’’ (I Cor. 15: 1–11). 6. Bornkamm, Paul, 112. 7. ‘‘So far from his doctrine’s being common property in the primitive church, it is a specifically Pauline creation. Nowhere else is faith in Christ, which links Paul with the rest of early Christianity, advanced, considered, and worked out along this line and expressed by these means. It not only made deadly enemies of the Jews: it also brought Paul into discredit with the Christians of his day and made him an outsider. And yet, just because of it, he became the apostle to the Gentiles, and not only caused the severance of Christianity from Judaism but also gave the unity of the church composed of Jews and Gentiles its first real theological basis’’ (ibid., 115). 8. Badiou, Saint Paul, 40–54 (‘‘Theory of Discourses’’). 9. Ibid., 41–42. 10. Ibid., 45. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 46. 13. ‘‘I want now to present this thesis, that the concept of law—and this again is political theology—is a compromise formula for the Imperium Romanum. All of these different religious groups, especially the most difficult one, the Jews, who of course did not participate in the cult of the emperor but were nevertheless religio licita (and it was clear that one wouldn’t get anywhere with them, there’s no point, either you provoke riots or you perform mass killings in Alexandria, Philo talks about this; hence: religio licita), represented a threat to Roman rule. But there was an aura, a general Hellenistic aura, an apotheosis of nomos. One could sing it to a Gentile tune, this apotheosis—I mean, to a Greek-Hellenistic tune—one could sing it in Roman, and one could sing it in a Jewish way. Everyone understood law as they wanted to. See Philo, see Josephus: law as hypostasis’’ (Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 23). 14. Ibid., 24. 15. Ibid., 16. 16. Ibid. 17. Bornkamm, Paul, 126. 18. Ibid. 19. Badiou, Saint Paul, 68. 20. Ibid., 56. 21. Ibid., 62. 22. Ibid.

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23. Ibid. 24. Ibid.; the title of his chapter six. 25. ‘‘Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tables, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory?’’ (2 Cor. 3:7–8). 26. See Badiou, Saint Paul, 73. 27. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary to the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 1. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 2. 30. Ibid., 13. 31. Ibid., 14. 32. ‘‘It is therefore neither the all, nor a part of the all, but the impossibility for the part and the all to coincide with themselves or with each other. At a decisive instant, the elected people, every people will necessarily situate itself as a remnant, as not all’’ (ibid., 55; emphasis original). 33. Ibid., 97. 34. Ibid., 106. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 123. 37. See Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Decision Making in Medical and Judicial Judgments,’’ in Reflections on the Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 200x), 213–22. 38. ‘‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there be became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders, and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me’’ (Deut. 26:5–10). 39. ‘‘The allegorical method, expanded to an analogy, therefore, is not a Christian invention. The question is to determine the significance of its being taken up and used in the New Testament, especially by Saint Paul’’ (Breton, Saint Paul, 27). 40. Ibid., 31. 41. Ibid., 36. 42. Ibid., 38. 43. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 38–39. 44. Ibid., 39. 45. Somewhere I read this proverb attributed to Shakespeare (but where?): ‘‘When one tells, one lifts things up, when one suggests, one adds to them.’’ 46. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 40. 47. ‘‘But whatever anyone dares to boast of—I am speaking as a fool—I also dare to boast of that. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are the Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I. Are they ministers of Christ? I am talking like a madman—I am a better one: with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked, for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people; danger

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from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, gotten without food, cold, and naked. And, besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I am not indignant?’’(2 Cor. 11:21–29). 48. See Badiou, Saint Paul, 55–64. 49. Ibid., 57. 50. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 37. 51. Bornkamm, Paul, 152. 52. Breton, Saint Paul, 86f. 53. Ibid., 84–91. 54. See ibid., 72–84. 55. Badiou, Saint Paul, 87. 56. Ibid., 86–92. 57. Ibid., 88. 58. Ibid., 90 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 97. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 99. 64. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 95–97. 65. See Bornkamm, Paul, 135–56.

Ablative Absolutes: From Paul to Shakespeare, by Julia Reinhard Lupton note: This essay develops arguments about Paul and Shakespeare that I have put forth in CitizenSaints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life; my thanks to the University of Chicago Press for letting me rehearse some of this material again in this forum. I would also like to thank Daniel Boyarin for several conversations and exchanges on Shakespeare and Paul that are reflected in these pages. 1. Agamben takes the phrase il tempo che resta from 1 Corinthians 7:29, rendered in the Revised Standard Version as ‘‘the appointed time has grown very short.’’ Agamben dedicates his first lecture on Paul to the memory of Taubes, whose emphasis on the messianism of Paul he takes up (Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005]). All citations from Paul are taken from Wayne Meeks, The Writings of St. Paul (New York: Norton, 2007), unless otherwise noted. 2. Writing from within New Testament studies, James D. G. Dunn writes, ‘‘At this stage in its growth, the new movement of Jesus’ followers would almost certainly still think of themselves as a development of and within the religion of the Jews (a form of eschatological, messianic Judaism’’ (Jesus, Paul and the Law [Louisville, Ky.: John Knox Press, 1990), 136. Agamben, writing from a philosophical rather than philological or historical perspective, mounts a similar argument. Since World War II, a major strand of Paul studies, whether conducted as part of New Testament studies, Jewish or Near Eastern studies, or philosophy and critical theory, has involved rethinking Paul’s relationship to Judaism. In Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of

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California Press, 1994), 39–56, Daniel Boyarin offers a brief history of these critical developments in relation to Jewish studies. In Paul, the Law and Justification (Leicester: Apollos, 1996), 27–52, Colin G. Kruse offers a similar survey in relation to New Testament studies. Major statements in New Testament studies include Hans Hu¨bner, Law in Paul’s Thought (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1984), and E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). Gerald F. Hawthorne, et al., eds., Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), has useful articles on ‘‘Law,’’ ‘‘Israel,’’ ‘‘Paul the Jew,’’ and ‘‘Circumcision.’’ 3. On political theology in Renaissance literature, see Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, eds., Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). For accounts of political theology more generally, see Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 4. Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 10. 5. There is a growing body of work on Paul and Shakespeare, much of it written in response to the impact of Agamben and Badiou on contemporary receptions of Paul but with an eye to philological and confessional problems unique to the early modern period. See, e.g.: Paul Cefalu, English Renaissance Literature and Contemporary Theory: Sublime Objects of Theology (New York: Macmillan, 2007); Gregory Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern Literature: The Poetics of All Believers (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Jane Degenhardt, Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2010); Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); Randall Martin, ‘‘Shakespearian Biography, Biblical Allusion, and Early Modern Practices of Reading Scripture,’’ Shakespeare Survey 63 (2010): 212–24; James A. Knapp, Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and James Kuzner, ‘‘The Winter’s Tale: Faith in Law and the Law of Faith,’’ Exemplaria 24, no. 3 (2012): 260–81. On Badiou and Agamben, see Eleanor Kaufman, ‘‘The Saturday of Messianic Time: Agamben and Badiou on the Apostle Paul,’’ in this volume. 6. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 13–14. 7. The story is recounted and letters translated in ibid., 97–113. 8. Kenneth Reinhard, in Zˇizˇek, Santner, and Reinhard, The Neighbor, 5. 9. All citations from the Hebrew Bible are taken from the JPS Torah Commentary, ed. Nahum Sarna (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), unless otherwise noted. 10. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 30. 11. Ibid., 32. 12. Ibid., 36. 13. Ibid., 47. 14. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed., trans., and introd. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 162. 15. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 51. 16. Ibid., 41. 17. Agamben, Potentialities, 171. Agamben derives the formula of validity without meaning from an interchange between Benjamin and Scholem over the conception of law in Kafka’s work. Santner develops the ‘‘psychotheological’’ implications of this distinction in The Psychotheology of Everyday Life. 18. Erich Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ in Scenes from the Drama of Western Literature (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 50.

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19. Badiou distinguishes between Paul as ‘‘saint’’ (the real Paul, the Paul event) and Paul as ‘‘priest’’ (the Paul of what Kierkegaard calls Christendom, Christianity in its institutional form): ‘‘How does genuine saintliness . . . bear the ordeal of a History that is at once fleeting and monumental, one in which it constitutes an exception rather than an operation?’’ (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003], 38). Agamben distinguishes the ‘‘real’’ Paul from that constructed by both the Synagogue and the Church in the first centuries c.e.. 20. On circumcision in Merchant, see, e.g., Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), 81; James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 119–30; Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 213–14; Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 101–12; Matthew Biberman, Masculinity, AntiSemitism, and Early Modern Literature (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2004), 62; and Janet Adelman, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 100–109. See also political-theological readings of the play by Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), and Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), as well as the ground-breaking typological reading of Barbara Lewalski, ‘‘Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 327–42. 21. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 128. 22. To Shapiro’s credit—and his book is invaluable to anyone working in this field—he writes of the epistles themselves that Paul’s ‘‘actual remarks about circumcision are enigmatic and confusing’’ (ibid.), in essence confronting the distinction between the Paul of the epistles and Pauline Christendom. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 130. 25. Taubes initiates such a project in relation to Freud and Nietzsche in his lecture ‘‘Paul and Modernity,’’ whereas Zˇizˇek has made related suggestions concerning Paul and Lenin. In The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination, Machiavelli to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), Graham Hammill develops Mosaic readings of Machiavelli, Milton, and Spinoza. Zˇizˇek argues that Jesus is to Paul as Marx is to Lenin, in The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2001), 1–2. 26. Scholars infer that Timothy had a Jewish mother. The Dictionary of Paul and His Letters puts it rather blandly in the article on ‘‘Circumcision’’: ‘‘Thus by circumcising Timothy Luke shows that Paul did not forbid Jews from practicing the Law. Paul had no animosity toward circumcision as a cultural practice; neither circumcision nor uncircumcision were anything significant in themselves’’ (139). It is worth noting here that circumcision in Judaism is not linked to salvation, a fact increasingly acknowledged in postwar Pauline studies. Cf. Sanders’s reconstruction of ‘‘covenantal nomism’’ as the doctrine of the Jews of this period: ‘‘All those who are maintained in the covenant by obedience, atonement, and God’s mercy belong to the group which will be saved. An important interpretation of this last point is that election and ultimately salvation are considered to be by God’s mercy rather than human achievement’’ (Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 422). 27. Meeks comments on ‘‘mutilate’’: ‘‘katatome¯, ‘incision’ or ‘mutilation,’ a pun on peritome¯, ‘circumcision’ (following verse)’’ (Writings of St. Paul, 99n). 28. All citations from The Merchant of Venice have been taken from the Arden edition, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1959). Historical critics have pointed out the possible topical

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connection to the hanging of the wolfish physician Lopez, and secular defenders of Shylock have suggested that the Venetians’ bestialization of the Jew shows the limits of their own humanism. Daniel Boyarin first alerted me to the connection between Shakespeare’s circumcised dogs (cf. Othello) and Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. On the Lopez affair, see Brown’s Introduction, xxiii. 29. Marcion was a Gnostic reader of Paul who distinguished the God who fathered Jesus Christ from the Creator of the world. Taubes picks up a Marcionite strand in German Protestant theology of the nineteenth century: ‘‘Creator of this world means creator of all the world’s flaws, which can be discerned in his works. And that’s the way he is: jealous, angry, in other words, everything that Protestant theology later reproaches the Old Testament for’’ (The Political Theology of Paul, 57). Badiou also discussed the ‘‘ultra-Pauline’’ Marcion in Saint Paul, 34–35. I develop the dangers and elisions of the Marcionite Paul in Thinking with Shakespeare, 219–46. 30. Peter Martyr, cited in Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 130. 31. It is perhaps worth noting that the covenant at Sinai was, according to Rabbinic tradition, accepted only under the threat of death, with God pictured as holding the mountain of Sinai above the Jews in order to insure their consent. Saul himself falls to the ground and is blinded by a flash of light from heaven (Acts 9:3–9). 32. Judaism, one must assert here, is not pure particularism, except in its most insidious nationalist and culturalist formulations. Judaism as a religion has a strong universal strand within it, as attested by Rosenzweig, Levinas, and the Rabbinic tradition. See Zˇizˇek, Santner, and Reinhard, The Neighbor. 33. See Lupton, Citizen-Saints. 34. Jane Gardner, Being a Roman Citizen (New York: Psychology Press, 1993), 7–51. 35. See Gerald F. Hawthorne, ed., Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, entry for ‘‘Citizenship, Roman and Heavenly,’’ 139–41. 36. Cf. Acts 18:14–17; 21:39, 22:25. 37. Phillip Hansen glosses the significance of citizenship for Arendt: ‘‘the true citizen does not obey, because the notion of obedience is intimately associated with politics as rulership, a conception Arendt specifically challenges’’; and with reference to Nazism, ‘‘the people most willing and able to resist these demands were not necessarily those who had highly developed intelligence or sophistication. Rather it was those who were able to think and judge for themselves’’ (Hansen, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993], 198). 38. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘We Refugees,’’ in Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America, ed. Mark M. Anderson (New York: New Press, 1998), 262. Arendt borrowed the opposition between parvenu and pariah from Bernard Lazare. 39. The Pauline author of the Epistle to the Ephesians institutes a corporate body that is firmly hierarchical in its disposition of sexual and social relations (Eph. 5:22), ratios that, crowned by the additional figure of the king, would regulate and conserve social relations in the ancien regime. Yet the corporate metaphor presented by Paul to the Romans is rather different: ‘‘For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of another’’ (Rom. 12:4–5). Taubes comments on the democratic character of the image: ‘‘Twelve, it seems to me, after the great jubilation at the end of 11, is intended to depict the life of the congregation. Paul speaks of the worship and the graces in the service of Christ’s body. The organological imagery also has a role in Roman thought, and it also shows up in Exodus. But there it’s always the head, whereas here what we’re dealing with is a body. ‘One body in Christ,’ for all members are equal, even if they have different functions’’ (The Political Theology of Paul, 52).

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The Saturday of Messianic Time: Agamben and Badiou on the Apostle Paul, by Eleanor Kaufman 1. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 53. 2. See Agamben’s recent reframing of this in The Church and the Kingdom, trans. Leland de la Durantaye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 3. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 59. Agamben elaborates on this complicity between mysticism and rule in both The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, with Matteo Mandarini (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011), and The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford, 2013). 4. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 37. 5. Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’’ in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974), trans. Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e)/Double Agents, 2003), 37. 6. Agamben, State of Exception, 39. 7. Ibid., 86. 8. Karl Marx, ‘‘Crisis Theory,’’ in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 443–65. 9. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 70–71. 10. Badiou links the law to the state and to death: ‘‘The law is always predicative, particular, and partial. Paul is perfectly aware of the law’s unfailingly ‘statist’ character. By ‘statist’ I mean that which enumerates, names, and controls the parts of a situation. If a truth is to surge forth eventally, it must be nondenumerable, impredicable, uncontrollable. This is precisely what Paul calls grace’’ (ibid., 76). He continues: ‘‘The law is what gives life to desire. But in so doing, it constrains the subject so that he wants to follow only the path of death. . . . The life of desire fixed and unleashed by the law is that which, decentered from the subject, accomplishes itself as unconscious automatism, with respect to which the involuntary subject is capable only of inventing death’’ (ibid., 79). 11. Jacques Lacan, ‘‘Kant with Sade,’’ October 51 (Winter 1990): 74. See also Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 12. See Freud’s damning critique of the commandment to ‘‘love thy neighbor as oneself,’’ in Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 62–67. For three essays that situate the love-hate relation to the neighbor in the register of the politicotheological, see Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 13. All citations from the Bible are taken from The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 14. ‘‘Friends’’ is given in the Oxford version, but other versions render adelphoi as ‘‘brothers’’ or ‘‘brethren,’’ though in Greek this term can also signify ‘‘siblings.’’ 15. For a fictional illustration of an extreme pushing to the limit of the laws of marriage, see Pierre Klossowski’s trilogy, Les lois de l’hospitalite´ (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). 16. Jacob Taubes observes that the real difference between the Old and the New Testaments is that the Old Testament recounts case after case of a barren woman conceiving, whereas human

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lineage and reproduction is, in the New Testament, entirely beside the point. See Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 59. 17. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 52–53. 18. Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, ‘‘It’s a Powerful Life: A Conversation on Contemporary Philosophy,’’ Cultural Critique 57 (Spring 2004): 151–83 (see esp. 171–74). 19. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 96. Agamben in turn links the Greek word to a transliteration from the Hebrew that I have been unable to verify to my satisfaction. Other scholars have questioned some of Agamben’s philological claims in this text, but such difficulties do not have direct bearing on my argument. 20. Ibid., 104. 21. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 254, 261. 22. Agamben, The Time That Remains , 145. See also the chapter ‘‘Threshold or Tornada,’’ 138–45. 23. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 24. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, xiii, my emphasis. 25. Ibid., 49–50. 26. An example of two apparently similar things being rendered different is the celebrated distinction that Agamben makes between bare life (zoe¯) and form of life (bios), a difference that becomes remarkable only when extreme circumstances, such as the concentration camps, collapse the two into one. Agamben has been criticized for glorifying the negative and elevating bare life to the sublime. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). Criticisms include: Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 366. By contrast, Agamben’s recent The Highest Poverty sketches the powerful coincidence of life and its form in the context of the monastic rule. In a sense, this would appear to be the example that all of Agamben’s corpus was striving for and finally reached. 27. Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), 295–96. 28. This is not unlike what Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, characterizes as Aion, the time of becoming that conjoins both past and future, as opposed to Chronos, the more static time of the present. See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Moreover, at the end of The Time That Remains, in trying to establish Paul as a secret inspiration for Benjamin, Agamben draws on Scholem’s text on Sabbatai Zevi: ‘‘Scholem’s attitude toward Paul, an author he knew well and once characterized as ‘the most outstanding example known to us of a revolutionary Jewish mystic’ [Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 14] is certainly not lacking in ambiguity. Yet the discovery of a Pauline inspiration [for Benjamin] must have bothered [Scholem], although he certainly never would have raised the issue himself. Nevertheless, in one of his books—just as cautiously as when, in a book on Sabbatai Sevi, he establishes a relation between Paul and Nathan of Gaza—he seems to actually suggest, albeit in a cryptic fashion, that Benjamin may have identified with Paul’’ (144). Scholem’s assessment of Sabbatai Zevi seems to become more favorable in the course of his oeuvre.

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29. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 308–9. 30. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 17. Such an argument is given added weight by the discovery of the redemptive scrolls relating to Judas. 31. This is akin to what Deleuze describes as the ‘‘larval subject,’’ which has the ability to bear forces that a more mature subject could not. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 32. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 72. My essay has benefited from a very perceptive and critical anonymous reader. Against Taubes, this reader argues that, to the extent Benjamin addresses creation, he does so with respect to the destructive force, which is ultimately one that preserves hope, such as the force of divine violence. While I agree with this reading of Benjamin, I do not think that Taubes’s recognition of hopelessness is itself without hope. That is, to acknowledge the overall hopelessness of a situation is not necessarily the position of despair it would seem to be. Such overall acknowledgment and recognition in fact may be what makes the situation bearable from moment to moment. 33. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 99. 34. Badiou, Saint Paul, 41. 35. Ibid., 51. 36. Ibid., 52–53. 37. See ibid., 41, 52, 98–99, where Badiou makes an overture to the fourth term, the mystical, and just as quickly shuts it down. I find Badiou’s relation to the Judaic highly fraught. It partakes of the philo-Semitic anti-Semitism that marks a text like Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration on the Etiology of Hate, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1948). Badiou’s collection of essays about the word ‘‘Jew’’ is exemplary in this regard; see Circonstances, 3: Porte´es du mot ‘juif ’ (Paris: Lignes, 2005), translated in the collection Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006). There Badiou goes so far as to claim that ‘‘it was above all the Nazis who, before anyone else, and with a rare zeal for following through, drew all the consequences from making the signifier ‘Jewish’ into a radical exception’’ (Saint Paul, 164–65). For a scathing review of this book that would see nothing redemptive in Badiou’s strategy of subsuming the particularity of the Jew to a universal term outside the realm of victimization, see E´ric Marty, ‘‘Alain Badiou: L’avenir d’une ne´gation,’’ Les temps modernes 635–36 (November-December 2005 /January 2006): 22–57. For a discussion of the larger question of anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism in France in the wake of Sartre, see Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 38. For a critical analysis of Badiou’s four terms of the truth process and his notion of the event as it relates to ethics, see my ‘‘Why the Family is Beautiful (Lacan Against Badiou),’’ Diacritics 32, no. 3–4 (2002): 135–51. 39. Alain Badiou, ‘‘One, Two, Three, Four and Zero Too,’’ unpublished essay. 40. Ibid. 41. Badiou, Saint Paul, 11. 42. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 72.

Love and the Stick: The Worldly Aspects of the Call in the First Letter to the Corinthians, by Nils F. Schott 1. Biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Edition (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Michael D. Coogan, 3rd ed.

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[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001]); the original Greek is taken from Stier and Theile’s Polyglotten-Bibel (Das Neue Testament unsres Herrn und Heilandes Jesu Christi [etc.], vol. 4 of Polyglotten-Bibel zum praktischen Handgebrauch: Die Heilige Schrift Alten und Neuen Testaments [etc.], ed. Rudolf Stier and Karl Gottfried Wilhelm Theile (Bielefeld: Velhagen und Klasing, 1846). 2. I have chosen to maintain these Christian terms for the tanakh and the euaggelion because they convey the distinction, crucial to (even if not always explicit in) Paul’s argument, between the old law (the nomos, the law of Moses) and the new law (the double commandment of love), though the two cannot be separated. 3. My methodological approach and theoretical vocabulary draw on and are indebted to many other readings, too numerous to name here, and not all limited to explicit engagements with Paul. That said, my initial understanding of Paul has greatly benefited from: E. P. Sanders’s Paul: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983); William David Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology, 3rd ed. (London: S.P.C.K., 1970); and Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). The following texts have helped convince me of Paul’s place in a particular pedagogical tradition: Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004); and Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). 4. This is sometimes translated as ‘‘baptized into the name of Jesus,’’ which not only suggests a vicarship of the Church exercised in the physical absence of Jesus, as ‘‘in the name of’’ does, but emphasizes the identity of the Church with Christ, an understanding of the Church as fellowship with Christ and even as the spiritual body of Christ. 5. Thus, when Paul later (at 1 Cor. 9:22) speaks of becoming ‘‘all things to all people,’’ he can make so extreme a claim without contradiction. Even if his words happen also to be wise and persuasive, their efficacy derives from the spirit of which they are a manifestation. Indeed, it is a manifestation of the spirit when an uncouth tent maker (which is how Paul understands himself) suddenly is able to persuade a skeptical philosopher. This persuasion removes the stumbling block and grants access to the spiritual meaning of the proclamation. 6. Cf. 1 Cor. 2:16 and 3:21–23. 7. Cf. Gal. 1:7–10. 8. See, e.g., 1 Cor. 3:5. 9. For ‘‘brother,’’ see, among many other instances, 1 Cor. 1:10, 2:1, 3:1, 4:6. There is a sarcastic ring to these remarks, yet this does not take away from their sincerity if indeed the goal is not to shame but to admonish Paul’s readers. 10. Paul’s letter, then, is more than just words—but, as he notes again later (at 1 Cor. 14:37–38), it takes one to know one: one must have received the spirit to recognize the spirit. 11. The term used at 1 Cor. 5:1 is porneia, also translated as ‘‘immoral sexual behavior.’’ The justification of fornication by pride is linked to the specificity of this pride as the pride of (supposed) knowledge that considers itself so much superior in its understanding of the law that it considers itself above the law. Paul refutes this position in detail in his discussion of food sacrificed to idols in chapter 8. 12. The relevant verse—‘‘Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing; but obeying the commandments of God is everything’’ (1 Cor. 7:19)—implicitly distinguishes between God’s command (entolo¯n theou, which is still valid and which is an important aspect of the call) and a purely external law or sign thereof (here circumcision). It reiterates the distinction between the spiritual and the worldly, the call and its manifestation in scripture.

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13. This is a direct reference to Deut. 17:7, 19:19, 21:21, 22:21, 22:24, and 24:7. 14. This verse is repeated almost to the letter at 1 Cor. 7:24. 15. This verse mirrors the argument made at 1 Cor. 4:10: it is better to be a fool for Christ than a wise man for men. 16. Much could—and should—be said about the body as the interface of spirit and flesh and thus as the place of politics; I must limit myself here to pointing to the regulation of sexuality and the frequent invocation of order and discipline, which are, later in the letter, placed within the perspective of a spiritual transformation of the body. 17. The reference is to Gen. 2:24. 18. An important corollary is that Paul, in channeling sexual energy away from fornication, also preserves the possibility of ordered succession, albeit in the flesh. 19. Choosing the distinction between idols and the true God as his example for this point, Paul also places knowledge in a Christological perspective: ‘‘for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist’’ (1 Cor. 8:6). True knowledge is not merely a possession, it is a living relation, which is why ‘‘love’’ can—and, to a certain extent, must—stand in for ‘‘knowledge,’’ as we will see. 20. Cf. Matt. 25:40: ‘‘whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’’ 21. Cf. 1 Cor. 3:3. 22. This call is also the call of scripture, for the new law (see Matt. 22:23–46, esp. 34–40 and 46) is taken from the old law (see Deut. 6:5 and Lev. 19:18), of which it expresses the spirit. It is in this sense that Augustine speaks of the new law as a revelation of the old. 23. Most editors surmise here reference to a variation of Isa. 64:4. 24. Cf. Matt. 18:18: ‘‘Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’’ The stress Paul puts on his role as ‘‘father in Christ’’ owes much to the need to reconcile two kinds of succession: that founded on an encounter with Jesus the man and that based on an encounter with Jesus resurrected. Paul himself—unlike Peter, for example—does not have the advantage of having been called in a manner intelligible to all. Yet he turns this disadvantage into his greatest strength, e.g., in his letter to the Galatians: ‘‘But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being’’ (Gal. 1:15–16). 25. As we have seen, this means that his authority derives from his having understood that he is merely the bearer of the call and that his mandate is to carry the call into the worldly realm. It is only because he has the spirit (within) that he has authority (without); how, we shall see in a moment. 26. This is not the place, unfortunately, to expand on the question of the gift; suffice it to say that the call is a gift because, by definition, it infinitely exceeds the called one’s ability both to acknowledge and, a fortiori, to return it. There is no exchange. Whereas reciprocity is demanded (we are to love God), it can never adequately be achieved, and the fact that we are not rejected by God for not paying him back, so to speak, is a confirmation of the donative nature of the call. 27. Apparently, this point was not made forcefully enough. After a ‘‘painful visit’’ (2 Cor. 2:1), Paul defends himself at length, seeking both to reconcile himself with the congregation and to assert his apostolic authority; see esp. 2 Cor. 3–4 and 11–13. 28. Paul claims never to accept any reward for himself; if he accepts anything, whether the gospel or money, it is to pass it on (see 1 Cor. 15:3 and 16:3). In doing so, he rejects the negative,

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i.e., external, argumentation of the old law, where the absence of transgression is ‘‘rewarded’’ by an absence of punishment. For Paul, this misses the point of the Law: it is meant to keep alive the promise God made to Abraham, a promise now fulfilled in Christ. 29. Thus, e.g., the lesson that Paul draws from the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt—‘‘So, if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall’’ (1 Cor. 10:12)—is an illustration of the point he makes in chapter 8 about the precarious nature of knowledge. 30. The term category suggests the fundamental difference between faith and the actions of the body. When we judge partaking of bread in terms of food intake, rather than in terms of the call that makes us participate in the body of Christ symbolized by the bread and thus ‘‘proclaim the Lord’s death,’’ we are committing a category mistake. 31. Less directly than before, Paul invokes the three aspects of the call: no new covenant without the old; no Lord’s Supper without Paul passing it on; the sacrament as a communal proclamation of the faith. 32. An additional, more implicit point made by Paul is that if the Church is the body of Christ, then those called upon to preserve its unity are custodians of Christ and thus inherently endowed with authority. 33. The notion that we should strive for something that we can do nothing to deserve, for a gift, is a problematic one for Augustine, but even more so for Luther. 34. This superiority does not mean that love has nothing to do with the truth; quite the contrary, it is concerned with the truth that is Jesus Christ as telos of the Law (see Rom. 10:4). 35. The love we receive ties it all together. This is expressed in the double commandment of love: love God (a reciprocity attempted but never achieved) and love your neighbor (something that can actually be done). This also means fulfilling the old law, for the double commandment is derived from scripture: the new law, as the gift of love, as the call, gives meaning to the old, reveals its spiritual meaning (cf. 2 Cor. 3:14–16). 36. Note how, in direct visual contact, love becomes indistinguishable from true knowledge. 37. This reference at 1 Cor. 14:21, the editors of the New Revised Standard Version point out, is to be found ‘‘Not actually in the law but in Isa 28.11–12.’’ 38. This shaky reference to Gen. 3:16 can be found at 1 Cor. 14:34. 39. Since there is no possibility of saying beforehand what will be necessary, there is need for flexibility, adaptation to specific circumstances. The decision lies with those who, like Paul, have the gift of making that call. Compare also the discussion of Paul’s rules concerning marriage and the body above. 40. This guarantee of order by an enforcement of the law and by common practice is also used to justify the subordinate role of women: ‘‘As in all churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?’’ (1 Cor. 14:33–36). To invest the mere asking of questions with such a potential for disorder, potentially threatening the word of God, indicates a fear on Paul’s part that is beyond my scope here. 41. The apparent paradox of a human rising from the dead also mirrors the apparent paradox of a God dying, discussed by Paul in the epistle’s first chapter; both paradoxes are paradoxes only if understood literally, not spiritually. 42. The beginning of the chapter both establishes the centrality of Christ’s resurrection to Christian dogma and reaffirms the apostolic succession in which Paul inscribes himself as the bearer of the good news (see esp. 1 Cor. 15:1–11 and 23). This succession in the spirit is then validated by

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the discussion of the physical and the spiritual body in verses 40–44. A related point is made in the stark phrasing of verse 56: ‘‘The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.’’ It takes the contrast of the death and life, sin and redemption, body and spirit, the old law and the new, to realize that God ‘‘gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ’’ (1 Cor. 57). It is worth noting, as well, that the body always comes in at crucial moments, for it marks the problematic boundary between world and spirit. Like a temple (cf. 1 Cor. 6:19), it is a receptacle, material but sanctified by the spirit—and thus subject to possible defilement by the sins of the flesh.

Freud’s Jesus (Paul’s War), by Gil Anidjar 1. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21. 2. Ibid., 21. 3. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 32. Cf., of course, Hobbes, who writes that ‘‘a state of war consists not in actual fighting, but in the disposition thereunto’’ (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 1:62). 4. As Derrida notes, ‘‘Levinas never speaks of Schmitt’’ (Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999], 147n95). Schmitt is thus ‘‘situated at the opposite extreme from Levinas,’’ evoking an ‘‘absolute opposition’’ and embodying ‘‘the absolute adversary.’’ The discourse of the enemy, Derrida continues, is, in Schmitt at least, ‘‘the discourse of totality.’’ There are, therefore, ‘‘paradoxes and reversals’’ in that Levinas seems to grant Schmitt the political—rather than ethical—dimension of the enemy, thus affirming the nonalterity of the enemy. It is perhaps in the suggestive context here offered by Derrida that one could read Levinas’s terrible answer (in 1982, following the massacres at Sabra and Chatila) to the following question: ‘‘For the Israeli, isn’t the ‘other’ above all the Palestinian?’’ Levinas does not quite explain why, but he recoils from the question and rejects it: ‘‘My definition of the other is completely different.’’ Where there is war (‘‘if your neighbor attacks’’), Levinas seems to say, the other is not the other but the enemy—alterity, but ‘‘with another character.’’ Thus it would be only ‘‘in alterity’’ that ‘‘we can find an enemy.’’ Levinas says: ‘‘The other is the neighbor, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbor. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong’’ (Levinas, ‘‘Ethics and Politics,’’ trans. Jonathan Romney, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sea´n Hand [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989], 294). 5. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 21. 6. Ibid., 24. 7. Hence, as Edith Wyschogrod explains, Levinas does not simply ‘‘identify war with the order of the same.’’ Rather, ‘‘war is at its most primordial level the law of being’’ (Wyschogrod, ‘‘Derrida, Levinas, and Violence,’’ in Derrida and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh J. Silverman [New York: Routledge, 1989], 190). 8. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 21. 9. Ibid., 24. Cf. Schmitt: ‘‘It is not war as such that shatters order . . . the essence of the European jus gentium was to circumscribe war. The essence of these wars was meant to measure

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forces in an orderly fashion, in front of witnesses and in a circumscribed space. Such wars are the very opposite of disorder. They include the highest form of order of which human efforts are capable’’ (Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Vo¨lkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum [Cologne: Greven Verlag, 1950], 157–59). 10. Jean-Luc Nancy writes that war is the ‘‘execution or putting to work of sovereignty itself’’ (Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000], 102). But in making a decision over the enemy, the sovereign seeks to strip another sovereign of his sovereignty, to subject him, even destroy him. What is thus confronted is not other, but an alter ego. ‘‘The right to wage war is the most sovereign of all rights because it allows a sovereign to decide that another sovereign is its enemy and to try to subjugate it. . . . It is the sovereign’s right to confront his alter ego’’ (ibid., 106). If Nancy is right that sovereignty remains to be thought (‘‘No possibility anywhere for thinking sovereignty hic et nunc or for thinking beyond it’’; ibid., 109), I would want only to add that this failure of thought is all the more striking regarding the enemy, at the opposite side—apparently—of sovereignty. 11. All references to Paul’s Letter to the Romans are to the New Revised Standard Version. 12. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 16. 13. ‘‘I am a Jew and I have been elevated by Carl Schmitt to the rank of hereditary enemy’’ (Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebige Fu¨gung [Berlin: Merve, 1987], 23). 14. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 222. Wyschogrod points out that, ‘‘although it is a central motif in his thought, nowhere does Levinas provide a sustained discussion of war’’ (Wyschogrod, ‘‘Derrida, Levinas, and Violence,’’ 190). In the section I just quoted, Levinas reconsiders the equation between war and totality and argues that war does testify to exteriority, ‘‘it is a relation between beings exterior to totality’’ (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 223; see also Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998], 119, where a provisional definition of the ego is offered as ‘‘a free subject, to whom every other would be only a limitation that invites war’’).Yet this relation of war is not, finally, a relation of alterity; it is derivative of that: ‘‘Violence can aim only at a face’’ (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 225). Prior to war, one finds a ‘‘relation that subtends war, an asymmetrical relation with the other, who, as infinity, opens time, transcends and dominates the subjectivity.’’ This relation ‘‘can take on the aspect of a symmetrical relation’’ (ibid.). It is notable that Levinas maintains the word ‘‘adversary’’ (adversaire) rather than ‘‘enemy’’ throughout. One notable exception operates a momentous substitution: ‘‘The enemy or the God over whom I can have no power, and who does not form a part of my world remains yet in relation with me’’ (ibid.,236). 15. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 28–29. 16. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 51. 17. Schmitt does conclude his main critique of liberalism with the charge that liberalism ‘‘wants to dissolve metaphysical truth in a discussion.’’ With such discussions and with endless negotiations, Schmitt continues, liberalism defers ‘‘the decisive bloody battle’’ and, more gravely, permits ‘‘the decision to be suspended’’ (Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985], 63). The decision is postponed along with the ‘‘decisive’’ bloody battle, but with it the question of enmity begins to emerge within Political Theology itself. 18. It is important to note that in the ‘‘oldest surviving commentary on Romans, written by the most important Christian theologian between St. Paul and St. Augustine,’’ namely, that of Origen of Alexandria, the ‘‘last enemy’’ is already (or still) God’s enemy (‘‘Introduction’’ to Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. T. P. Scheck (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of

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America Press, 2001], 1–2). It is ‘‘he who sinned beyond all others’’ who ‘‘is recorded by Paul as the last enemy to be destroyed’’ (ibid., 299). 19. Commenting on Romans 9, Lloyd Gaston emphasizes that, exegetical history aside, the Jews are not always mentioned as the targeted adversary (Gaston, ‘‘Israel’s Enemies in Pauline Theology,’’ New Testament Studies 28 [1982]: 411). More specifically, regarding 1:18–3:20, Richard Longenecker notes that ‘‘problems begin to take form when one attempts to identify exactly who is being talked about or addressed in the passage. Is it Gentiles in 1:18–32, Jews in 2:1–5, Gentiles in 2:6–16, then Jews again in 2:17–3:19, with a conclusion in 3:20? Or is it Gentiles in 1:18–32 and Jews in 2:1–3:19 with a conclusion pertaining to both in 3:20? Or is it humanity generally in 1:18–2:16 and Jews (or a particular type of Jew) in 2:17–3:19, with a conclusion in 3:20? Earlier interpreters such as Origen, Jerome, Augustine and Erasmus wrestled with this issue, and it continues to plague commentators today’’ (Longenecker, ‘‘The Focus of Romans,’’ in Romans and the People of God: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Fee on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. S. K. Soderlund and N. T. Wright [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999], 51). This is exegesis as the permanent possibility of war. 20. An alternate reading has ‘‘god-hated,’’ thus announcing the debate over the passive versus active reading of enmity in Rom. 11:28, to which I return below. 21. The very same verb, paradidomi, appears where God is said to have ‘‘given up [paredoken]’’ his own Son: ‘‘He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us’’ (Rom. 8:32). This very common verb is found in the New Testament with a variety of meanings that recall earlier usage elsewhere in ancient Greek texts, namely, ‘‘to hand over, give back, become ripe, commend (oneself), transmit, deliver, betray’’ (Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, ed. Ceslas Spicq, trans. James D. Ernst [Peabody, Mass.: Hendrikson, 1994], 3:13). Though common in its usage, the term has been the object of exegetical questioning (see, e.g., Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation [New York: The Anchor Bible/Doubleday, 1993], 272ff.; Fitzmyer later notes the parallel use of the term for Jesus’ being ‘‘given up’’ in 8:32 [ibid., 532]). Furthermore, the New Testament, and Paul first of all, made it a ‘‘technical term for Jesus’ passion’’ (ibid., 21). It is to be ‘‘taken first in its legal and judicial sense, but it conveys moreover a moral or psychological nuance and a theological value.’’ Spicq concludes by mentioning that that same term was used to describe the actions of Judas Iscariot, namely, treason (paradosis; prodosia). On other uses of similar language to describe Jesus and the Jews, see Jennifer Glancy, ‘‘Israel vs. Israel in Romans 11:25–32,’’ Union Seminary Quarterly Review 45, no. 3–4 (1991): 192ff., and see also Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scriptures in the Letters of Paul (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). 22. As Glancy writes, Israel’s deferred inclusion in the narrative of salvation (‘‘For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead!’’; Rom. 11:15), ‘‘entails life from the dead’’ (Glancy, ‘‘Israel vs. Israel,’’ 197). 23. See C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 150; and see also Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), 289–90. 24. On the divine warrior and the call to divine warfare, see Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld, ‘‘Put on the Armour of God’’: The Divine Warrior from Isaiah to Ephesians (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). Although Neufeld focuses on Ephesians rather than on Romans, he points out some important parallels (in military imagery, for example) between the two letters (see esp. 76 and 85–86). 25. Scholars have long commented on ‘‘the metaphor of warfare’’ upon which Paul calls. James D. G. Dunn also notes that the motif of slavery and captivity is ‘‘consistent’’ with the images of war, ‘‘since defeat in battle usually resulted in the prisoners of war being sold as slaves’’ (Dunn, Word Biblical Commentary 38A [Romans 1–8] [Dallas: Word Book, 1988], 395).

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26. Theodor Zahn, Der Brief des Paulus an die Ro¨mer (Leipzig: A. Deichert, 1910), 360. 27. Ernst Ka¨semann, Commentary on Romans, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980), 205 28. The word God in ‘‘enemies of God’’ does not appear in Greek or in Latin, although it appears to be implied from the context. Some commentators (and many modern translations) fill it in, while others extrapolate the enemies of God from elsewhere in the text. Thomas Aquinas, for example, does not spend much time on the enemies of Rom. 11:28, but reads 5:10 as the occasion to consider the ways in which man is said to be inimicus Deo. 29. Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Romans: Notes on the Epistle in Its Literary and Cultural Setting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 183. 30. In the restricted context of Rom. 1:30, Bryan may be right in stating that ‘‘there seems to be no particular reason that an active sense, ‘hating God,’ should seem preferable’’ (Bryan, A Preface to Romans, 80n37). Yet the larger context regarding activity and passivity is clearly troubled, as Bryan himself recognizes (see esp. 73). 31. The debate rages on here, too, and one could probably trace a number of theologicogrammatical parallels as a kind of history of its interpretations. From Paul himself to Origen (‘‘each person becomes as bad and as detestable an enemy of God as much as he multiplies deeds which merit enmity’’; Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 299); Pelagius (‘‘sinners are enemies because they show contempt’’ [Pelagius’s Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, trans. Theodore de Bruyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 91]). who emphasizes the active participation of the enemies (Pelagius reads the enemies of 11:28 as Paul’s enemies: ‘‘they are my enemies because I preach Christ to you,’’ 130); to Martin Luther, who states unequivocally: ‘‘This term enemies in this passage is taken in the passive sense, that is, they are worthy of being hated and God hates them, and for this reason so do the apostle and all who are of God’’ (Luther, Lectures on Romans, trans. Walter G. Tillmanns and Jacob A. O. Preus, in Luther’s Works [Saint-Louis: Concordia Publishing, 1972], 25:431–32). Not surprisingly, Aquinas is no less categorical in the opposite direction: ‘‘it is impossible that He should hate anything’’ (Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. A. C. Peges et al. [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975], vol. 1, chap. 96, 292). And yet a third solution suggests itself: ‘‘In this case there is no reason it [i.e., the word echthroi] should not be understood as mutual hostility between God and sinners’’ (Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation, 401). The difficult relationship between agent and object of love—and hate—is explored by Plato in Lysis (‘‘And so, not the object of hatred is the enemy, but the hater,’’ 213a, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961], 156). 32. Here emerges, perhaps, what can be called, after Catherine Malabou, the ‘‘plasticity’’ of the enemy, as the ‘‘originary unity of agency and passivity, of spontaneity and of receptivity’’ (Malabou, L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticite´, temporalite´, dialectique [Paris: Vrin, 1996], 249). The enemy, one could say, is ‘‘plastic’’—that is to say, also explosive. It would therefore demand what Malabou refers to as an ‘‘explosive reading.’’ The necessity of a distinction between activity and passivity is, of course, a political question. Kant, for example, considers it to be constitutive of the political concept of citizen. Finding its point of departure in the ‘‘quality’’ of free will, Kant writes that this quality ‘‘requires a distinction between active and passive citizens (Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], §46, 92). 33. ‘‘The background is not so much one of ‘trespassers’ (2 Cor. 5:19; Col. 1:21) and ‘estranged persons’ in an alien universe (Col. 1:21), as ‘enemies of God’ who stand in need of being delivered from their exposure to ‘the wrath of God.’ And human impotence to secure deliverance is accepted here, since men and women are both ‘powerless’ and ‘ungodly’ ’’ (Ralph Martin, ‘‘Reconciliation:

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Romans 5:1–11,’’ in Romans and the People of God: Essays in Honor of Gordon D. Fee on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. S. K. Soderlund and N. T. Wright [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999], 44). John Piper comments on Rom. 5:10 that ‘‘ ‘enemies’ is also rendered ‘helpless.’ . . . The Christians are being called upon to let their enemies experience what they experienced while they were still God’s enemies’’ (Piper, ‘‘Love Your Enemies’’: Jesus’ Love Command in the Synoptic Gospels and in the Early Christian Paraenesis. A History of the Tradition and Interpretation of Its Uses [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979], 104). 34. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. G. Kittel, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmanns, 1964), 2:814. Ralph Martin compares with somewhat exaggerated confidence the different states of affairs (i.e., states of war) regarding the interpretation of various verses on hostility. He writes of Rom. 5:10 that ‘‘interpreters are hopelessly divided over the question: does ‘being enemies’ mean ‘while were hating God’ (active) as in Romans 1.30; 8:7, or ‘while God was opposed to us’ (passive)?’’ and concludes that in this case ‘‘two arguments tip the scales on the side of the latter’’ (Martin, ‘‘Reconciliation,’’ 38). Martin later asserts that ‘‘God’s hostility to sinners is the essential background of Paul’s doctrine’’ (ibid., 42). 35. Ka¨semann, Commentary on Romans, 315. 36. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 21. 37. Commenting on Levinas’s ‘‘state of war,’’ Derrida shows that the structure of the exception is at work regarding God as well. God ‘‘is implicated in war,’’ and his name is ‘‘a function within the system of war.’’ Yet, Derrida continues, ‘‘war supposes and excludes God.’’ War—the permanent possibility of a state of exception—is the condition of possibility and impossibility of our relation to God: ‘‘We can have a relation to God only within such a system’’ (Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], 107). 38. In the state of war—i.e., in the permanent possibility of war—law is ‘‘reduced to the zero point of its significance, which is nevertheless in force as such’’ (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998], 51). 39. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Before the Law,’’ trans. Avital Ronell, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 203–4. 40. Ibid., 204. 41. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 173. 42. Ibid., 174. 43. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 41. 44. Ibid., 52. 45. See also Alain Badiou on ‘‘the division of the subject.’’ Arguing that the subject is the ‘‘weaving together of two subjective paths, which Paul names the flesh (sarx) and the spirit (pneuma)’’ and that ‘‘the opposition between spirit and flesh has nothing to do with the opposition between the soul and the body’’ (Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 55, 55–56, Badiou nonetheless insists on reinscribing a relation of absolute distinction between genealogy (filiation) and enslavement. Badiou admits that Jesus is ‘‘ ‘lord (kurios)’’ and Paul a ‘‘ ‘servant’ (doulos)’’ (ibid., 62), but the new subjective path constituted by the ‘‘Christ event’’ . . . is not to be confused with slavery.’’ On the contrary, it ‘‘differs absolutely’’ (ibid., 63). 46. Cf. Schmitt’s famous distinction and see also Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (art. echthros, echthra), which considers only ‘‘personal and national enemies,’’ even when discussing ‘‘enemies of God.’’ As far as I could find, the expression ‘‘theological enemy’’ appears rarely, if at all, in the literature on these issues.

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47. On ‘‘subject and subject,’’ see E´tienne Balibar, who argues that ‘‘the whole history of the philosophical category of the ‘subject’ in Western thought is governed by an objective ‘play on words,’ rooted in the very history of language and institutions. . . . Simply the fact that we translate as subject the neutral, impersonal notion of a subjectum, i.e. an individual substance or a material substratum for properties, but we also translate as subject the personal notion of a subjectus: a political and juridical term, which refers to subjection or submission, i.e. the fact that a (generally) human person (man, woman or child) is subjected to the more or less absolute, more or less legitimate authority of a superior power, e.g. a ‘sovereign.’ This sovereign being may be another human or supra-human, or an ‘inner’ sovereign or master, or even simply a transcendent (impersonal) law’’ (Balibar, ‘‘Subjection and Subjectivation,’’ in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec [London: Verso, 1994], 8). A more extensive consideration of the enemy (and of Paul’s enemy) would both reinforce and extend the history traced by Balibar. 48. In Plato’s Republic, a central moment of the discussion on the enemy is ‘‘What should be the attitude of the soldiers to one another and the enemy?’’ (Plato, Republic, 468a). The first matter brought up in the answer to this question is ‘‘the matter of making slaves of the defeated’’ (469b). 49. I quote from Peter Abelard’s commentary on Romans in Abelard, Expositio in Epistolam ad Romanos, trans. J. Marenbon and G. Orlandi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2:494. 50. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 2. 51. Ibid., 2. 52. Ibid., 3. 53. Ibid., 18. 54. Ibid., 16. 55. Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 5. 56. Ibid., 56. 57. See Agamben, The Time That Remains, 13. 58. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 7. 59. ‘‘In the beginning, there is ruin’’ (Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: A Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 68). 60. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘‘The Deconstruction of Christianity,’’ trans. Simon Sparks, in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 112–30. 61. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber, The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1999), 1. 62. Ibid., 5, 19, and 8. 63. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 12. 64. ‘‘A theory of the Subject that subordinates its existence to the aleatory dimension of the event’’ (Badiou, Saint Paul, 4). 65. Ibid., 18. 66. Ibid., 33. 67. Ibid., 25. 68. Ibid., 49. 69. Ibid., 59. 70. Ibid., 63. 71. Ibid.

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72. Ibid., 64. 73. Ibid., 75. 74. Ibid., 83. 75. Ibid., 84. 76. Ibid., 88, 90. 77. Ibid., 92. 78. Ibid., 109. 79. Ibid., 98. 80. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961–), 21:6. 81. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961–), 21:112. 82. Ibid., 109. 83. Ibid., 114. 84. Ibid., 110. 85. Ibid. 86. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Thomas Gilby et al. (New York: Blackfriars/McGrawHill/Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1975), 2a2ae. 25.8, 34:105. 87. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 109. 88. Ibid., 110. 89. Ibid., 111. When he returns to the commandment to love the neighbor at the end of the book, Freud no longer invokes or mentions the love of enemies (cf. ibid., 143, and see also Freud’s ‘‘Why War,’’ where love of neighbor, but not love of enemy, is mentioned again as ‘‘more easily said than done’’)/ 90. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 110n1. 91. Ibid., 111. 92. Ibid., 109. 93. William Klassen, ‘‘ ‘Love Your Enemies’: Some Reflections on the Current Status of Research,’’ in The Love of Enemy and Nonretaliation in the New Testament, ed. W. M. Swartley (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), 1. It is surprising that the ‘‘love of enemies’’ has not occasioned a larger number of scholarly studies. Commenting on this poor state of critical studies as of 1979, John Piper expresses his surprise at the fact that ‘‘(to my knowledge) no monograph exists which treats in a thorough way the history of this commandment in the various level of the New Testament tradition’’ (Piper, ‘‘Love Your Enemies,’’ 1). Looking, more modestly, for an interpretation of the commandment in the twentieth century, Wolfgang Huber writes of ‘‘a shocking vacuum’’ (Huber, ‘‘Feindschaft und Feindesliebe: Notizen zum Problem des ‘Feindes’ in der Theologie,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Evangelische Ethik 26 [April 1982]: 129). If one turns to the Middle Ages, however, the situation is quite different. To mention but a few major examples, ‘‘Love your enemies’’ is discussed at length by Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana and by Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles. It is ‘‘perhaps the most frequently cited Scriptural reference in Francis [of Assisi]’s Opuscula’’ (Tomaz Mastnak, Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002], 193). What remains either implicit or simply unthought here is not that there are enemies and that they should be loved—even if this might turn out to be impossible—but the meaning of the word enemy. It is as if the ‘‘concrete’’ question of who the enemy is cannot be addressed in properly theological (one might say, theoretical and abstract) discussions.

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94. Klassen, ‘‘Love Your Enemies,’’ 8. 95. Augustine, City of God, 10.3. Augustine elsewhere explains that ‘‘the will of God, in the principle of loving God and neighbor [diligendo deo et proximo], is concisely introduced to all believers, since from these two precepts hang the whole law and all the prophets (cf. Matt. 22:37– 40)—that is, the love of our neighbor which the Lord himself commends to us even to the point of loving our enemies [dilectionem autem proximi, id est, dilectionem hominis usque ad inimici dilectionem]’’ (Augustine, Augustine on Romans: Propositions from the Epistle to the Romans, Unfinished Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, ed. Paula Fredriksen Landes [Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1982], 79). 96. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. modified, 32–33. 97. Ibid., 64. 98. Ibid., 285. 99. For an indispensable account of such generalization, see Derrida on ‘‘generalized writing,’’ in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), e.g., 55. 100. I quote here from Samuel Weber’s ‘‘Wartime,’’ a reading of Freud’s 1915 ‘‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,’’ (Weber, ‘‘Wartime,’’ in Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997], 98). 101. Freud, ‘‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,’’ trans. E. C. Mayne, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961–), 14:293. 102. Weber, ‘‘Wartime,’’ 100. 103. Ibid., 101. 104. Nietzsche knew this difference, of course, when he wrote that ‘‘the Christian . . . makes no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and non-Jew’’ (Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, in Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [London: Penguin, 1990), no. 33), and so did William James, who suggested that, although Jesus’ statement might constitute ‘‘mere Oriental hyperbole,’’ it promises ‘‘a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of differences between man and man, that even enmity may come to be an irrelevant circumstance’’ (James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature [New York: Modern Library, 1999], 311). In a similar spirit, Klassen writes that the commandment ‘‘transcends all human divisions which are in fact brought into unity in Christ’’ (Klassen, ‘‘Love Your Enemies,’’ 2). John Piper concurs and evokes the Pauline adiaphora: ‘‘because it seemed in general to devaluate the distinction between Jew and gentile—a distinction grounded in the Torah, Jesus’ command to love the enemy as well as the friend contained the seed for the dissolution of the Jewish distinctive’’ (Piper, ‘‘Love your Enemies,’’ 92). In her dissertation on Augustine, Hannah Arendt argues that, in this case, ‘‘the neighbor loses the meaning of his concrete worldly existence, for example, as a friend or enemy’’ (Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, trans. Joanna V. Scott and Judith C. Stark, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 94; see also 101ff.). 105. ‘‘All people should be loved equally,’’ writes Augustine when discussing love of God, of neighbor, and of enemy (Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 21). 106. Huber is therefore right when he asserts that the commandment’s radicality resides in its new definition of the enemy as to be loved (Huber, ‘‘Feindschaft und Feindesliebe,’’ 139). Yet, no less importantly, the commandment redefines the neighbor as not to be distinguished from the enemy.

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107. Freud, ‘‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,’’ trans. Alix Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961–), 20:120.

Scandal/Resentment: The Antiaesthetics of the Banlieue, by Anto´nia Szabari note: I am grateful to Edwin Hill for sharing his music library and his ideas, in numerous conversations. My argument here is greatly indebted to the commitment to the banlieue and its culture that he shared with me. I would also like to thank Hent de Vries for letting me co-teach with him a seminar entitled ‘‘Paul and the Philosophers’’ at the Johns Hopkins University in 2004, in a wonderful atmosphere of intellectual generosity. 1. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Violence (London: Picador, 2008), 74–75. 2. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 3. Ibid., 78. 4. Ward Blanton, ‘‘Disturbing Politics: Neo-Paulinism and the Scrambling of Religious and Secular Identities,’’ Dialogue: A Journal of Theology 46, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 3–13. 5. See Sarkozy’s speech commemorating the members of the French Resistance shot by the Gestapo in 1944, in which he resorts to remembering the ‘‘martyrs’’ of the French Resistance rather than acknowledging the activities of the Vichy government, Bois de Boulogne, May 16, 2007. 6. Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso), 138. 7. Zˇizˇek, Violence, 190. 8. Ame´ry was born in 1912 as Hans Mayer. He lived in exile in Belgium from 1938 until his suicide in 1978. In 1948, he was deported from Belgium to the Gurs camp in the Southern Pyrenees. He escaped from there, but in 1943 was captured by the Gestapo, tortured, and subsequently sent to Auschwitz. 9. Jean Ame´ry, ‘‘Resentments,’’ in At the Mind’s Limits, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 67. 10. Ibid.. 68. 11. Ibid., 68. 12. Ame´ry, ‘‘On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,’’ in ibid., 94. 13. Ibid., 80. 14. Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 63. 15. The political geography of the banlieue is described in Mustafa Dikec¸’s Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and French Urban Policy (London: Blackwell, 2007). 16. See Michael Warner, Publics and Counter-Publics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 17. Ibid., 114. 18. L’assassin, ‘‘A qui l’histoire (Le syste`me scolaire)?’’ from their album Le futur que nous reserve-t-il?, which was first released in 1993. 19. Ibid. 20. ‘‘Individuals of these cultural backgrounds [the former French colonies, notably, Senegal, Algeria, Morocco, Congo, Cameroon, and Martinique] seem to hold a particular and specific relationship to Hip-Hop, which is again characterized by diasporic intimacy, in large part because they conceive of the cultural producers of Hip-Hop, African Americans, and themselves as being part of

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African diasporic whole’’ (Samir Meghelli, ‘‘Returning to The Source, En Diaspora: Historicizing the Emergence of the Hip-Hop Cultural Movement in France,’’ Proud Flesh: A New African Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness [online] no 3 [2004], 3). 21. Laurent Dubreuil, in L’empire du langage: Colonies et francophonie (Paris: Hermann, 2008), outlines the historical background that deprives the slave of language, from Aristotle to the Code Noire, and of what he calls parlure, the stereotypical representation of the speech of the inhabitants of the colonies as inferior to ‘‘real’’ French. This is the speech that Frantz Fanon, writing in the 1950s, describes as parler petit ne`gre, a condescending attitude of addressing people of the colonies in broken French, which carries the message ‘‘stay there where you are.’’ See his ‘‘Le Noir et le langage,’’ in Peau noire masques blanc (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 13–32. 22. Jacques Denis, ‘‘Rap domestique´, rap re´volte´,’’ in Le monde diplomatique, September 2008, http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2008/09/DENIS/16290.

Paul’s Greek, by Stathis Gourgouris 1. I am quoting from the English translation distributed by the Catholic Church, after they corrected the initial phrasing ‘‘things only evil and inhuman’’ to ‘‘things wretched and inhumane’’—the German text being Schlechtes und Inhumanes. Paleologus’s original Greek text (kheiron kai apanthro¯potaton) is clearly closer to the German and the revised English phrasing. The notion of evil, whether in the typical Christian sense or any other, is altogether absent. The original text (a letter sent by the Byzantine emperor to his brother from the battlefield in 1391), along with its French translation and meticulous introduction by theologian and historian Adel The´odore Khoury, was published as Manuel, II Pale´ologue, Entretiens avec un Musulman (7e Controverse) (Paris: Cerf, 1966). The pope’s text can be retrieved from the Libreria Editrice Vaticana online on the Vatican’s website. 2. An extraordinary number of responses were issued to the pope’s Regensburg address, worthy of an altogether separate study. Most famous among them, from the Muslim world, was Open Letter to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, issued exactly a month after the address by thirty-eight Muslim authorities and scholars worldwide (http://www.ammanmessage.com/media/openLetter/ english.pdf), and, a year later, A Common Word Between Us and You, a statement by a broader group of clerics and intellectuals declaring the common ground between Christianity and Islam (http://www.acommonword.com). Of the multitude of critical texts circulated on the Web, I select two that deviate from the horde (albeit in different directions) and engage the pope on issues that matter: ‘‘The Final Word on the Pope: History, New Worlds, and Islam,’’ by Radwan al Sayyid, Professor of Islamic Studies at the Lebanese University, which was published on the Asharq Alawsat newspaper website in English (http://www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section⳱3&id⳱6607); and ‘‘Greek Reason at Regensburg,’’ by Dimitri Krallis, Professor of Byzantine History at Simon Fraser University, posted at the website of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Michigan (http:// www.lsa.umich.edu/modgreek/detail/0,2250,6740%255Farticle%255F49228,00.html). 3. All these dimensions are evident and at play in Joseph Ratzinger’s teˆte-a`-teˆte encounter with Ju¨rgen Habermas a year before the then cardinal was elected pope. The conversation was published as The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005); an excerpt of which can also be found in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 251–68. 4. See, indicatively, the thesis of Tomoko Masuzawa in The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of

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Chicago Press, 2005). See also Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 5. The often-rendered notion ‘‘Greco-Western institution’’ is comprehensible only as a Christian notion. It has little to do with the pre-Christian world in the eastern Mediterranean, which has also been just as erroneously summarized as ‘‘Greco-Roman.’’ In this respect, much can be learned from Derrida’s insistence on his neologism globalatinization, especially as a qualifier for discourses of and about religion. See Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,’’ trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–78. If the discourse on religion is derived from Latin, we can no longer speak thoughtlessly of the ‘‘Greco-Roman.’’ If, indeed, the Greco-Roman has some meaning, this would be starkly different from the Global-Latin, which now comes to stand for the Greco-Western. Understanding the provenance of this naming is precisely what the interrogation of the relation between Hellenism and Christianity is about. The Latinized Greek of the Greco-Roman is obliterated in the Latin of globalatinization, whereas the Greek in the Greco-Roman is obviously pre-Christian. Although Christianity hellenized itself in order to succeed, this hellenization in language was quickly surpassed by the latinization of Christianity as an institution—at least, the Christianity that became a global religion, that came to monopolize the discourse on religion. No doubt, the historical parameters of this overlap are key instances to query, because in this overlap also resides a schism—not the theological schism of the Christian Church (this is but a symptom), but a historical and perhaps even epistemological schism that has largely lapsed from the language. 6. This reality is rendered a living being: ‘‘Our letter is you’’ (2 Cor. 3:2). The ‘‘you’’ here is plural as well. 7. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.; Stanford University Press, 2004), 4. 8. Ibid., 11; my emphasis. 9. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Otobiographies: The Teachings of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,’’ trans. Avital Ronell, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 1–38. 10. Incidentally, Agamben’s choice to retranslate ‘‘Christ’’ in The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005) back into ‘‘Messiah’’ is hardly motivated by philological accuracy. In any language other than Hebrew and Greek, where the word’s literal meaning (‘‘the anointed one’’) remains present and intact, the words Christ and Messiah work as proper names, whose signification is surely not interchangeable. Very simply, the first has come and is present; the second is to come— not quite a petty theological difference. Agamben’s retranslation obliterates the literal equivalence (and therefore Paul’s negotiation) and simultaneously performs two authorial resignifications: (1) It erases from the name the notion of the elect; (2) it saturates the name with all the subsequent configurations of Messianism. 11. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 4. 12. Ibid., 4–5. By the same token, Paul’s Jewishness, like any social-imaginary attribute or identity, is relativized within historical and geographical orbits: e.g., when Christianity became fully established in Seleucid Mesopotamia a couple of centuries later, there was a strong remembrance of ‘‘that pagan Paul’’ (Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity, 72). 13. See David M. Reis, ‘‘The Areopagus as Echo Chamber: Mimesis and Intertextuality in Acts 17,’’ Journal of Higher Criticism 9, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 259–77. Reis maps the range of Socratic tropes and also provides an extensive bibliography of the multitude of relevant writings.

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14. Jean-Luc Marion offers a brilliant reading of this scene, pointing out that this assessment of Athens as being overwhelmed with idols was all in Paul’s mind. He goes on to theorize that Paul offers his own idolatry, the ‘‘icon of the invisible God.’’ See Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 19–26. 15. For a concise discussion of this particular configuration of divinity in ancient Greece, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 101–19. 16. I have in mind here Hans Blumenberg’s argument concerning the shift from the power of the other as absolute neutrality (das Andere) to absolute singularity (der Andere), which, of course, personifies alterity and shifts its internal affinity with the cosmic chaos to the configuration of an object that mobilizes a singular psychic investment. Monotheism may be exemplary of the shift from das Andere to der Andere, from the Other to the One (and only other); Paul’s reconfiguration of the inscription on the temple is certainly a practical application of this shift. Incidentally, Blumenberg considers Paul’s reconfiguration unintentional, an instance of misreading, an interpretive error. Since the historical verity of the matter is undecidable, his point is not a helpful path. But he is right to call it a demythifying gesture, one that signals Christianity’s initial transfiguration of mythos to logos, a move that will appropriate and at the same time demolish the primacy of Hellenic thought in the Mediterranean world. See Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 22–25, 253–55. 17. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 17. 18. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 28–54. 19. In this essay, I have not addressed any of Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s views on Paul, because they are included in another piece I have devoted entirely to Zˇizˇek, a short version of which, titled ‘‘Zˇizˇek ’s Realism,’’ is published as part of the DVD production The Reality of the Virtual (Olive Films, 2007). 20. Badiou, Saint Paul, 66. 21. Ibid., 71. Clearly, without the triumphant history of Christianity, Badiou would have no ground to grant to the resurrection the status of such a rupture. But the ground emerges out of the groundlessness this figure fosters for itself and its legacy, via a theology and a politics that is in fact hardly rupturing, but, on the contrary, assimilative to an unprecedented extent. The resurrection itself, as a figure, is a particular performance of the nomos empsychos principle, which was the most prevalent juridical and political notion in the Hellenistic kingdoms of the era. The animation of law in the body of the king—or, simultaneously, the spiritual animation of the king’s body by the incorporation of the law—can easily be perceived in the figure of Christ that Paul sought relentlessly to sculpt. Paul resignifies the notion of the permanent presence of the divine within the human by a shift in direction: from assimilating the unworldly into the worldly to elevating the worldly into the unworldly. We might consider this shift the force that eventually will animate Christianity’s peculiar relation with secularization. 22. Of course, this distinction between creation ex nihilo and event will come into play only if creation ex nihilo is conceptualized theologically. Castoriadis has given us the most thoroughly materialist theorization of creation ex nihilo, and in his formulation the figure signifies merely the capacity of humanity to imagine things that don’t exist in the world and act on that basis. The nothingness out of which a human creation emerges makes sense only if we cannot, retrospectively, place the creation in an altogether signifiable and identifiable field of causes, already in place, already present in their potentiality. This hardly means that human creation conjures matters out of thin air. One of the more radical ways we can understand the overused notion of the ‘‘cunning of history’’ is to understand that history can produce conditions of radical alteration that are not traceable to an a priori intact (or merely just recognizable) formation—that, in other words, history

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produces events that, in comparison to the existing formation, do seem to emerge from nothing, do signify nothing (by reference to what exists). Creation ex nihilo marks Castoriadis’s own way of exploring the problem of discontinuity in history—an enormous and vital domain of historical study that has, nonetheless, nothing theological about it. See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 195–210. 23. Though we are speaking in Christian terms here, because our subject is Paul, it is fair to note that no god has ever produced a gift without producing an exchange—the practice of devotion. Even the signification of manna, the quintessential figure of God’s gratuity and graciousness, is linked to the economy of election and the covenant. Likewise, no eschatological/salvational discourse can trump the law of exchange: it exists on the promise of plenitude and finality of redemption, for which one exchanges the thankless task of trying to fight the untotalizable and contingent vicissitudes of life. 24. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990), 36. 25. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 115. 26. The notion hemitheos (‘‘half-god’’), reserved for certain heroes fathered by gods (Hercules being the supreme example), is obviously not the same and cannot be considered as a source of conceptual derivation, because it pertains to a divine framework that is strictly polytheistic. Moreover, as the word itself suggests, hemitheos designates a fragmented substance—a partial god—while theanthro¯pos, as the epitome of the incarnation of the divine, invokes a unifying principle, whatever might be the theological arguments about consubstantiality. To put it dramatically, in assuming human flesh, God is indeed One: God overcomes the chasm of abstracted divinity and produces oneness where it is most lacking, in the human realm as such. In this respect, Christianity—though permeated by remnants of pagan practices—is, theologically, the quintessential monotheism. 27. Bruno Blumenfeld, whose work is a must read on the issue of Paul’s historical relation to the Hellenistic world, points out that Paul was hardly driven to topple the Roman imperial regime and that, on the contrary, he honored its laissez-faire treatment of the imperial fringes and foresaw the advantages of Roman political and juridical structures for the establishment and development of a new mode of social-political organization, signified by the early Christian communities. See Bruno Blumenfeld, The Political Paul: Justice, Democracy, and Kingship in a Hellenistic Framework, (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 276–87. In this respect, Taubes and Badiou, each for reasons of his own, romanticize and exoticize Paul as a rebel against the Romans, even though the very history of Christianity and the ultimate political uses of Pauline theology discredit them. 28. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 120. 29. For an elegant account of Agamben’s negation of law and faith (as well as of their epistemological contours in Pauline thinking), see Lorenzo Chiesa, ‘‘Giorgio Agamben’s Franciscan Ontology,’’ Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2009): 105–17. Chiesa makes a convincing argument that, in The Time That Remains, Agamben Christianizes the thinking that begins with Homo Sacer in a specifically Franciscan direction. 30. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 123. 31. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Press, 1988), 69. 32. The essential Pauline phrase for what I’m invoking is do¯rea en chariti (Rom. 5:15). The phrase actually grammatically shows that charis does not imply gratuity by rule, but only in this case. Only by the hand of God does grace bear a gift: ‘‘gift in the form of grace’’; ‘‘gift by means of grace’’; ‘‘gift within grace.’’ What most readers of Paul miss is that the hermeneutical emphasis should be placed on ‘‘gift,’’ not ‘‘grace’’—or at least, on the fact that this phrase separates the gesture in two words, of which ‘‘gift’’ has the defining force.

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33. Bataille, The Accursed Share, 70. 34. It’s curious—or perhaps not—to see Jean-Luc Nancy entrapped like Agamben into ignoring Bataille (whom he also invokes) while discussing the workings of gift and grace in reference to James’s epistle—which he correctly diagnoses as, in utter contrast to Paul’s epistles, neither containing nor producing a theology. Like Agamben, Nancy is seduced by the presumption of a gratuity in grace that will annul the tyranny of exchange. But when he concludes that ‘‘the receptivity must equal the donation in gratuity,’’ he inevitably reiterates the framework of exchange, even in the presumption of a zero sum game, especially because he occludes the crux of James’s practical purpose: to establish the real (not merely theological) terms of obedience to God—the praxis of obedience, or more accurately, the ergon of obedience. Thus, Nancy’s phrasing that epitomizes the self-determination of the gift—‘‘to give oneself in turn to the gift’’—should be amended, if not altogether rephrased, as ‘‘to give oneself up in return for the gift.’’ See ‘‘The Judeo-Christian (on Faith),’’ trans. Bettina Bergo, in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 42–60. 35. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 120. 36. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (New York: Semiotexte, 2001), 120. 37. Blumenfeld, The Political Paul, 93. 38. Badiou does engage with Nietzsche, as I mention below, but only insofar as he seeks to bolster his claim concerning Paul’s antiphilosophy. In effect, he too ignores the Nietzschean basics. In fact, his attempt to configure Paul as the retroactive dismantler of ‘‘the empty universalism of global capital’’ is spurious, if nothing else. Of course, it is true that this ‘‘empty universalism’’ fosters a communitarian particularity that is limited and neutralized by a petty logic of identity. Yet the ‘‘empty universalism of global capital’’ enforces precisely the condition of the abolition of difference that Badiou evokes from Paul’s Galatians—the emptying out of all value and the flattening of distinctions. The relativist particularism that global capital cultivates as alleged resistance to ‘‘globalization’’ is the virtual reality of this emptiness. As virtual reality, it is painfully most real in its virtuality, so as to shield us from the capacity to interrupt it and thus make it real. After all, there is nothing more consistent in the history of Christianity—always in the name of the same—than the pursuit of the radical delineation that nurtures racial, political, and sexual inequities, on the basis of which the history of Christianity is tantamount (after a certain point, but yet to be reversed) to the history of global domination by capital. 39. Agamben embarks on another trajectory in the Hebraic tradition that elicits from Paul’s usage of kle¯tos what he calls ‘‘the messianic vocation’’—namely, the fact that all worldly and juridical duties specifically are conducted in the shadow of the messianic event and are thus always already annulled: ‘‘The messianic vocation is the revocation of every vocation’’ he indicatively notes (The Time That Remains, 23; his italics). But this hardly annuls the chasm. 40. On the extremely questionable grounds as to whether political theology is philosophy—but with an impetus quite unlike Badiou’s—I have dedicated a few remarks in an essay on Carl Schmitt: ‘‘The Concept of the Mythical’’ in Does Literature Think? (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 90–115. The matter is, of course, enormous and hardly evident. 41. Badiou, Saint Paul, 58. 42. The fanaticism with which early Christians gave themselves over to their martyrdom and exploited their persecution for their own benefit is, arguably, a psychological symptom of welcoming the authority of this demand to give your life over to faith. In effect, the discourse of the desire for martyrdom is not different from the discourse of spirit possession. It is interesting that nowadays, when this symptom is proliferating in certain ranks of Islam, no one—whether against or in favor of such martyrdom in the name of Islam—seems to recall this Christian history of surrendering life to faith.

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43. Badiou, Saint Paul, 68. 44. Ibid., 73. 45. I find wonderfully provocative Blumenfeld’s historically substantiated claim that Paul’s rhetoric of ‘‘preference for death over life’’ was driven by the wide popular diffusion of such notions among itinerant Cynics in Asia Minor, who considered suicide the key to divine life. Blumenfeld is daring enough to conjecture that Paul may have committed suicide in Rome. See The Political Paul, 22. Foucault also points to this association between Cynic renunciation of life or indifference to death and early Christian techniques of preaching and proselytizing. See Fearless Speech, 116–20.

Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos, by Gilles Deleuze 1. This essay was originally published as the preface to D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (Paris: Balland, 1978), 7–37, where its authorship is ascribed to ‘‘Fanny and Gilles Deleuze.’’ 2. For the text and commentaries on the Apocalypse, see Charles Bru¨tsch, La clarte´ de l’Apocalypse (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1967). On the question of the author or authors, see 397–405; the scholarly reasons to assimilate the two authors seem very weak. [In the notes that follow, the page numbers refer to the definitive text established in the Cambridge edition of the works of D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); the numbers in brackets refer to the pagination of the more readily available Viking edition of the Cambridge text, which does not include the critical apparatus: D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, ed. Maria Kalnins (New York: Viking, 1982). Citations of the Book of Revelation are from the Revised Standard Version. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), §42, p. 618. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘‘Schopenhauer as Educator,’’ in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), §7, p. 177. 5. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 69 [14]. 6. D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 77–78: ‘‘Don’t you see that it’s the Judas principle you really worship. Judas is the real hero. But for Judas the whole show would have been manque´ . . . When people say Christ they mean Judas. They find him luscious on the palate. And Jesus fostered him.’’ 7. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 100 [52]. 8. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §17, p. 585: God is ‘‘at home anywhere, this great cosmopolitan . . . Nevertheless, he remained a Jew, he remained the god of nooks, the god of all the dark corners and places. . . . His world-wide kingdom is, as ever, an underworld kingdom, a hospital, a souterrain kingdom.’’ 9. D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places (New York: Viking, 1933), 22. 10. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 81 [28–29]. 11. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 80 [27]. 12. [Deleuze is referring to the expression La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid— ‘‘Vengeance is a dish best eaten cold.’’ –Trans.] 13. Rev. 6:10–11: ‘‘O sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth. Then they were . . . told to rest a little longer, until the number of their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.’’ 14. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 80 [27–28].

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15. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §42, p. 617: ‘‘Paul simply transposed the center of gravity of that whole existence after this existence—in the lie of the ‘resurrected’ Jesus. At bottom, he had no use at all for the life of the Redeemer—he needed the death on the cross and something more.’’ 16. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 119 [74]. 17. Ibid., 82 [30]. 18. Ibid., 83 [31]. 19. Ibid., 84 [32]. 20. Ibid., 66 [7]. 21. Ibid., 86 [34–35]. 22. Certain thinkers have today painted a properly ‘‘apocalyptic’’ picture, in which three characteristics can be identified: (1) the germs of an absolute worldwide State; (2) the destruction of the ‘‘habitable’’ world in favor of a sterile and lethal environment or milieu; (3) the hunt for the ‘‘unspecified’’ enemy. See Paul Virilio, L’inse´curite´ du territoire (Paris: Stock, 1986). 23. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 112 [66]. 24. Ibid., 102 [54]. The horse as a vibrant force and lived symbol appears in Lawrence’s story ‘‘The Woman Who Rode Away,’’ in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (London: Martin Secker, 1928), 57–102. 25. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 123–29 [78–86]. 26. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 119 [74] and 126 [82]. 27. Ibid., 116–117 [70–71]. 28. These different aspects of symbolic thought are analyzed by Lawrence throughout his commentary on the Apocalypse. For a more general exposition concerning the planes, centers, or foci, the parts of the soul, see D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: Viking, 1960). 29. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 144 [104]. 30. D. H. Lawrence, The Man Who Died (London: Martin Secker, 1931), 23, 41 (emphasis added), 51. It contains the great scene of Christ with Mary Magdalene: ‘‘And in his heart he knew he would never go to live in her house. For the flicker of triumph had gleamed in her eyes; the greed of giving . . . A revulsion from all the life he had known came over him again’’ (47–48). There is an analogous scene in Aaron’s Rod, chapter 11, in which Aaron returns to his wife, only to flee again, horrified by the glimmer in her eyes. 31. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, 176–78. 32. On the necessity of being alone and of attaining the refusal to give—a constant theme in Lawrence—see Aaron’s Rod: ‘‘His intrinsic and central isolation was the very center of his being, if he broke this central solitude, everything would be broken. To cede is the greatest temptation, and it was the final sacrilege’’ (189–201), and ‘‘Let there be clean and pure division first, perfect singleness. That is the only way to final, living unison: through sheer, finished singleness’’ (128). 33. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1961), 173–77. 34. On this conception of flows and the sexuality that follows from it, see one of Lawrence’s last texts, ‘‘We Need One Another’’ (1930), in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1936), 188–95. 35. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 149 [110–11]. This thought of false and true connections animates Lawrence’s political thought, notably in Phoenix and Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (London: Heinemann, 1968).

The Killing Letter and the Discourse of Spirit: Reading Paul Writing, by Ian Balfour 1. I was tempted to say ‘‘from Saul to Paul,’’ as the change in name is so often thought of as a result or sign of his conversion. There is no direct textual support for this: indeed, the evidence tilts 596

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the other way. See ‘‘A Short Outline of Paul’s Life,’’ in The Writings of St. Paul, ed. Wayne Meeks and John T. Fitzgerald, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2004), xix. Nonetheless, I tend to follow this groundless convention by referring to ‘‘Saul’’ as if that were the proper preconversion name and ‘‘Paul’’ as if it were the postconversion one. (I am grateful to Tatiana Senkevitch, Alexander Nagel, Elizabeth Legge, Herbert Marks, Ward Blanton, and Helen Tartar for numerous helpful comments on drafts of this essay.) 2. Denis Diderot, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. Geoffrey Bremer (London: Penguin, 1994). Translation modified slightly. The original comes from the Salon of 1765, section 31 ‘‘la conversion de Saint Paul.’’ 3. Diderot would have been able to see reproductions of the major European depictions of Paul’s conversion. In Paris Diderot could have seen numerous original versions of the conversion by Laurent de la Hyre and Lelio Orsi, among others. 4. Walter Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies (Princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955), 6. 5. This is not to say that an educated viewer would not know what was going on: anyone knowing the biblical accounts of Paul’s conversion and knowing that this was a painting of Paul would be able to fill in some blanks. Certain differences between the conversion scenes can be ascribed to their different forms, formats, and settings: Raphael’s is a large tapestry; Michelangelo’s, a large fresco; Caravaggio’s (smaller) easel painting is set in the small Cerasi chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. Still, the smaller format (230 x 175 cm.) of Caravaggio’s painting seems not enough to explain its tiny cast of characters (Paul, a horse, and the head, hands, and lower legs of another man). (Parmigianino’s version of the scene partly anticipates Caravaggio’s, as it displays only Paul and his horse.) Caravaggio, as the current attributions suggest, did another version of the same subject, now in the Odescalchi Balbi Collection, Rome. This painting is somewhat closer to the mainstream of the tradition, with its fuller version of the scene, though still circumscribed and compact compared to the Michelangelo. Friedlaender takes the Santa Maria del Popolo Conversion of Saint Paul as something of a paradigm for the artist’s work in his Caravaggio Studies, its opening chapter being ‘‘The Conversion of Saint Paul: An Introduction to the Art of Caravaggio.’’ It contains illuminating discussions of the iconographic traditions preceding Caravaggio. For a very informative, spirited analysis of Michelangelo’s fresco and the tradition of Pauline conversions, see Leo Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Last Painting: The Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina, Vatican Palace, (London: Phaidon, 1975). See, however, the critique of Steinberg by E. H. Gombrich, ‘‘Michelangelo’s Last Paintings,’’ in Reflections on the History of Art, ed. Richard Woodfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 81–90. See also Leo Steinberg’s earlier classic essay, ‘‘The Cerasi Chapel,’’ in The Art Bulletin 41, no. 2 (June 1959): 183–90. 6. Elizabeth Legge helpfully points out the importance in the central Caracci Assumption painting of its sharp vertical movement, in a painting much taller than it is wide. 7. On the motif—but it is not only a motif—of —blindness in a certain tradition of drawing and painting, see Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Derrida comments briefly on the Caravaggio Conversion of Saint Paul in the context of this tradition on pp. 112f. Michael Fried notes how Paul, in Caravaggio’s Cerasi chapel painting, ‘‘exemplifies the motif of the limitations of seeing’’ that he suggests ‘‘runs through Caravaggio’s oeuvre.’’ See The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 148. 8. It may well be that Caravaggio and others import ‘‘notions’’ derived from the postconversion writings of Paul into the scene of conversion itself. 9. With regard to the other painting of Paul’s conversion now generally attributed to Caravaggio, Helen Langdon describes what she calls the ‘‘irrational light’’ that illumines parts of the painting. See Caravaggio: A Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1998), 185. Steinberg, by contrast, 597

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reacts against earlier critics who speak of ‘‘mystical’’ light by protesting that ‘‘Its source is surely the painted heaven in the oval ‘dome’ of the ‘crossing,’ inhabited by the Dove,’’ and thus ‘‘from an indicated and localized source‘‘ (‘‘The Cerasi Chapel,’’ 185). 10. For a provocative reading of the painting in the ‘‘light’’ of Paul’s thinking in his letters, see Christopher Braider, Baroque Self-Invention and Historical Truth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), esp. ‘‘The Fountain of Narcissus: The Ontology of St. Paul in Caravaggio and Rembrandt,’’ 75–110. 11. There are some exceptions in the history of painting, as in Poussin’s Gathering of Manna, where different moments of a biblical story are all visible at once. These exceptions prove the almost absolute rule. 12. One hesitates to say ‘‘Judeo-Christian’’ because it is precisely the articulation of the Judaic and the Christian that is, all of a sudden, at stake. Moreover, it’s not at all clear that there is a stable identity that can properly be called the ‘‘Judeo-Christian.’’ On the problematic of the hyphen by which the Judaic and the Christian are linked, see: Jean-Francc¸ois Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber, The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christianity, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1999); Jill Robbins, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, Levinas (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1991); and the beginning of Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘‘Church, State, Resistance,’’ in Political Theologies, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 102–12. In his Heidegger and ‘‘the jews,’’ trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), Lyotard remarks that the notion of the ‘‘Judeo-Christian’’ is ‘‘fashionable nowadays after Auschwitz, a way of conserving the horror by repressing it, where the forgetting of the forgotten, of the Other, persists’’ (39). The popularity of the hyphenated phrase, however, is not limited to or by those forces. 13. This is not to say that Christianity exists in Paul. It is only fully formed in the wake of Paul, yet he is arguably the foremost formulator of what will be codified as Christian doctrine and discourse. 14. Friedlaender reproduces in Italian and English parts of Giocan Pietro Bellori’s biographical sketch in his Caravaggio Studies. Bellori’s judgment on the absence of action is found on p. 249 (English) and on p. 241 (Italian). In Bellori’s classicist aesthetics, there is a premium on the portrayal of heroic action and on history painting more generally. 15. Friedlaender actually misquotes Bellori’s original istoria as storia, perhaps because he takes the phrase, as I do, to point to the lack of action precisely where one might expect it. As far as I (imperfectly) understand it, istoria could mean something more like ‘‘subject matter.’’ The recent translation of Bellori’s The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl, ed. Hellmut Wohl and Tomasso Montanari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), opts to keep istoria in Italian, presumably so as to not reduce it to one of its multiple senses. I am grateful to Alex Nagel for pointing me to Charles Dempsey, ‘‘Response: ‘Historia’ and Anachronism in Renaissance Art’’ (a response to an article in the same issue by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood) in The Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005): 416–21. There Dempsey refers to a translation of Alberti (for whom the term historia was crucial) in which historia was the single word left untranslated, suggesting, once again, reasons for reducing the polysemy of the word (if indeed historia and istoria are the same term). 16. This ‘‘domestication’’ of the ‘‘killing’’ into the) dead letter occurs even in some scrupulous and close readers, as, e.g., in Richard B. Hays’s extended reading of the passage (see his Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Saint Paul [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986], 31). It seems that there is some powerful resistance to recognizing this figure as saying what it actually says. A convenient collection of key passages from early Christian intellectuals is Gerald Lewis Bray and

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Thomas C. Oden, eds., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture 1–2 Corinthians (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 1999). The principal source for Augustine’s thoughts on the matter can be found in ‘‘The Spirit and the Letter,’’ in Augustine: Late Works, ed. John Burnaby (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955), 195–250. For Lyotard’s invocation of the ‘‘dead letter,’’ see The Hyphen, 24. The phrase occurs in a discussion of Paul and the ‘‘Voice,’’ which seems to stress the voice rather more than Paul’s epistles or even the gospels do, as if to heighten the tension between voice and writing. Often commentators or critics will invoke the doctrine of the ‘‘dead letter’’—it has become something of a cliche´ or formula—even when elsewhere they are attuned to the ways the letter is not at all dead. On the crucial and massive influence of the letter/spirit distinction, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology, 600–1300 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). This is vol. 3 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. 17. Unless indicated otherwise, quotations from Paul are from The Writings of St. Paul, ed. Wayne A. Meeks and John T. Fitzgerald, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2004). The text is based on Today’s New International Version (TNIV). 18. This character of the letter raises a question astutely framed by Daniel Boyarin in his superb study A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): Is the crucial distinction between letter and spirit a hermeneutic or ethical or political one? Or all of the above? When this passage from 2 Corinthians is turned into a doctrine of the dead letter, the matter seems hermeneutic more than anything else: a given text or event understood in a narrowly literal, unspiritual way will be dead as ‘‘as if’’ dead. Yet the ‘‘letter that kills’’ suggests action and agon, and thus implication in the realm of ethics and politics. 19. Paul acknowledges himself to be a Pharisee (Phil. 3:5). 20. That characterizations of the relation between the old and new dispensations, and the rival dispensations when not even characterized as old and new, are so many and so different is one reason why that relation is still so hotly contested, as commentators stress this or that position, none of which seems to occupy the whole field of Pauline letters, or even just what are acknowledged as the major and genuine letters. 21. Northrop Frye tended to think that by the letter (of the law) Paul only occasionally meant an extreme or hard-line Pharisaic doctrine, not the Torah, much less Judaism as such. Various passages in Frye’s numerous notebooks suggest that it is a sometimes opportunistic polemical gesture of Christianity (as in the Epistle to the Hebrews). 22. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 24. Notice, however, that Taubes goes on to venture what Paul means, even if the meaning is capacious. (Taubes’s tone is often casual throughout this ‘‘text,’’ as his remarks were made in seminar.) 23. I explore how this unfolded in some eighteenth-century Protestant interpreters (Warbuton, Hurd, and company) in my The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). 24. See also Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The Lutheran Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003), for an account of various takes on the status of the ethical. For a pointed account, see Richard B. Hays, The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdman, 2005), esp. ‘‘The Role of Scripture in Paul’s Ethics,’’ 143–62. 25. Hays, Boyarin, and others sometimes seize on the strange ‘‘externality’’ of the spirit in Paul (based on his sometime insistence that it be visible and knowable to everyone), but there are even more indications to the contrary: that the law is spiritual, and that law is invisible. Whereas it is true and important that spirit is sometimes cast as external, Paul clearly wants to have it both ways.

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That is the power and the scandal of Paul’s conception/image of spirit. This is linked to the instability of the distinction between Judaism and Christianity in Pauline discourse. 26. Among the most useful studies of this relation are several by E. P. Sanders, including Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) and Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977). A more concise and recent statement of his views can be found in Paul: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Within these books, see esp. the section of Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People entitled ‘‘Paul’s Critique of Judaism and of Legalism in General’’(154–59). On the conversion proper and its consequences, see the valuable study by Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). 27. It is good to recall that Paul had no idea that what he was writing would one day be canonized as scripture. He writes of many things in relation to scripture and takes strong positions in relation to it, but he hardly, even in his most self-exalted moments, imagines that his texts will be put on a par with the Hebrew scriptures or that they will become part of what would later be codified as the New Testament. (The poet David Berman writes that ‘‘we are all auditioning for a ‘‘newish testament’’; ‘‘Cantos for James Michener Part II,’’ in Actual Air [New York: Open City, 1999], 37.) Paul’s letters often have a markedly improvisational character or the appearance of one. He often asks some version of ‘‘What then shall we say?’’ The rhetorical gambit of pausing to ask ‘‘What shall we say, then?’’ has the virtue of inscribing the reader/listener into the situation, as if ‘‘we’’ were all part of the process of working out the notions at hand. Such improvisational phrases or sentences have no doctrinal content, no ‘‘message,’’ no proclamation on the state of the things. They tell us nothing about sin, God, faith, works, grace, or the law. They are, however, characteristic of Paul’s rhetorical situation, a sign of needing to say something now, to think something now, as if we were watching the formation of doctrine before it risks congealing into doctrine. 28. Taubes points out to his seminar students that ‘‘the word ‘Christian’ never occurs in Paul, that might surprise you, but that’s the way it is’’ (The Political Theology of Paul, 39; trans. modified). 29. Taubes calls Paul—once again, in the context of a seminar and thus ‘‘chattier’’ than most published texts—‘‘a fanatic, a zealot, a Jewish zealot [Judenzealot]’’ (ibid., 24). The appearance of Christ to Paul is a both a boon and a problem for Paul: he speaks with utter conviction and passion (though not to the exclusion of a certain ‘‘logic’’), but he must try to convince others not graced by a personal appearance from Christ of the truth to which Saul was oblivious before that divine appearance. 30. Northrop Frye does note, in the voice of William Blake, that Jesus seemed to have broken ‘‘all ten commandments, in theory at least’’ (Fearful Symmetry [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969], 79). 31. For a superb analysis of this dynamic in Hegel, including Hegel’s understanding of how the Bible works, see Werner Hamacher, pleroma—Reading in Hegel, trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). Wittgenstein has a very striking and problematic formulation of the incomplete character of the Hebrew Bible, with his figuration entirely in the spirit of Augustine’s de doctrina christiana: ‘‘The Old Testament seen as the body without its head; the New Testament: the head; the Epistles of the Apostles; the crown on the head. When I think of the Jewish Bible (Judenbibel), the Old Testament on its own, I feel like saying: the head is (still) missing from this body. These problems have not been solved. These hopes have not been fulfilled. But I do not necessarily have to think of a head as having a crown’’ (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Wright [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 36. Needless to say, for a philosopher the head is not exactly one among other body parts. 32. On the related matters of type, typology, allegory, and figure, with reference to their ‘‘origin’’ in Paul and beyond, see the magisterial essay by Erich Auerbach, ‘‘Figura,’’ in his Scenes from

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the Drama of European Literature (Gloucester, Mass., Peter Smith, 1959), 11–78, esp. 49ff (on Paul). For a strenuous critique of Auerbach on Paul, see Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). 33. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Betteson, ed. David Knowles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 597 (bk. 15, chap. 2). 34. See Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 121–22. 35. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. and ed. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 72–73. Both Hegel and Freud would, in their separate ways, see the Jewish ‘‘idea of monotheism’’ as being a or even the decisive step forward for (Western) civilization. 36. Ibid., 73. 37. It’s not a matter of indifference that Paul sometimes refers to himself as a slave (doulos), as in Rom. 1:1 and Phil. 1:1. 38. This aspect of Paul has been expertly studied in Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, as well as in his essays collected as The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel’s Scripture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 2005). See also E. P. Sanders, Paul, The Law, and the Jewish People (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1983). On the consequences of Paul’s conversion for his exegesis, see Segal, Paul the Apostate. I am not competent to assess how much Paul owes to late Jewish hermeneutics, about which I have read in only a very partial way. Herbert Marks kindly directed my attention to Aryeh Carmell’s Aids to Talmud Study (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1980), which notes several formulas akin to ‘‘it is written,’’ something that could help explain its prevalence among Paul and the evangelists. From what I have read in and of midrash, Paul’s hermeneutics seem somewhat less tied to the ‘‘signifier’’ than the most widely known examples of midrash. On midrash generally, see Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds., Midrash and Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), esp. James Kugel, ‘‘Two Introductions to Midrash,’’ 77–103. For an incisive general statement on Judaic hermeneutics, see Emmanuel Levinas, ‘‘On the Jewish Reading of Scriptures,’’ in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 101–15. 39. Wayne Meeks, ‘‘Literalism, Common Sense, and the Price of Dogs,’’ Yale Review 94, no. 1 (January 2006): 13. The essay is, in general, a fine reflection on the slippery status of the literal in the Bible and in thinking about it. From Nietzsche’s point of view, Paul would be one of the origins of the nefarious appeal in modern Christian philology to what ‘‘is written’’: ‘‘How little Christianity educates the sense of honesty and justice can be gauged fairly well from the character of its scholars’ writings: they present their conjectures as boldly as if they were dogmas and rarely in any honest perplexity of the interpretation of a passage in the Bible. Again and again they say ‘I am right, for it is written—’ and then follows an interpretation of such impudent arbitrariness that a philologist who hears it is caught between rage and laughter and asks himself: is it possible? Is this honourable? is it even decent?—How much dishonesty in this matter is still practised in Protestant pulpits, how grossly the preacher exploits the advantage that no one is going to interrupt him here, how the Bible is pummeled and punched and the art of reading badly is in all due form imparted to the people’’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. M. Clarke and B. Leiter [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], bk. 1, section 84, p. 84). 40. The Hegelian concept/word/mechanism of Aufhebung (‘‘sublation’’) is not unrelated to this biblical dynamic as understood by Christianity. On this motif in Hegel, see, once again, Hamacher’s pleroma and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Speculative Remark: One of Hegel’s Bons Mots, trans. Ce´line Surprenant (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001). Hegel, as a young theology student,

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was steeped in the Bible, and one of his first narrative experiments was a Life of Jesus. It is no accident, in this vein, that Lyotard calls Paul a Jew who ‘‘dialecticized’’ Judaism (The Hyphen, 16). 41. See, e.g., Jerome Murphy O’Connor, ‘‘1 and 2 Corinthians,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to St. Paul, ed. James D. G. Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 42. Numerous commentators stress the difference between gramma (‘‘letter’’) and graphe¯ (‘‘writing,’’ and Paul’s term for ‘‘scripture’’), but the difference is far from absolute. See, e.g., Karl Kertelge, ‘‘Buchstabe und Geist nach 2 Kor 3,’’ in Paul and the Mosaic Law, ed. James D. G. Dunn (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1996), 117–30. 43. Boyarin provides a shorter, related, but somewhat different list in A Radical Jew, 31. It is worth noting that the ‘‘opposition’’ between speech and writing is seldom a pertinent one in the letters of Paul, a situation that may partly be ascribed to Paul’s sense of the importance and ephemeral character of his letters. Lyotard is one of the few to focus on the writing/speech relation. 44. Paul is more than capable—despite this tendency—of inventing a strategic triad now and then, such as that of faith, hope, and love, thus breaking out of the dyadic pattern (to say nothing of the occasional very long list). For a well-informed study of Paul by a historian of rhetoric, see George A. Kennedy, New Testament Interpretation Through Rhetorical Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), esp. chap. 4, ‘‘Judicial Rhetoric: Second Corinthians.’’ Debates still rage as to how rhetorically Paul should be read. Though in general I think it is neither possible nor advisable to overlook the rhetorical situations in Paul, see the extended argument by Lauri Thuren, Derhetoricizing Paul: A Dynamic Perspective on Pauline Theology and the Law (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr Siebeck, 2000). 45. The New Testament mines the metaphorical possibilities of this situation. 46. For a concise, suggestive reflection on the character of writing in religion(s), see David Tracy, ‘‘Writing,’’ in Critical Terms in Religious Studies, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 383–94. For Derrida’s classic analyses, see ‘‘Plato’s Pharmacy,’’ in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), and Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 47. See, e.g., Rudolf Bultmann, Der zweite Brief an die Korinther, ed. Erich Dinkler (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976), and Karl Kertelge, ‘‘Buchstabe und Geist nach 2 Kor 3,’’ in Paul and the Mosaic Law, ed. James D. G. Dunn (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1996), 117–30. 48. One could also appeal here to the full-fledged and fairly pervasive discourse of spirit (ruach) in the Hebrew Bible, the importance of which is ignored in the Christian construction, retroactively, of the ‘‘externality’’ of the Judaic. 49. Alain Badiou, however, treats Paul as an antiphilosopher who nonetheless gives one a lot to think about and with. 50. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 99. For a later version of Badiou on Paul’s universalism, see the interview with him in Philosophy and Scripture 3 (Fall 2005): 38–42, as well as his ‘‘St. Paul, Founder of the Universal Subject,’’ in St. Paul among the Philosophers, ed. John D. Caputo and Linda Martin Alcoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 27–38. For trenchant critiques of Badiou’s book on Paul with respect to the claims to universality, see, in St. Paul among the Philosophers, Dale B. Martin, ‘‘The Promise of Teleology, the Constraints of Epistemology, and Universal Vision in Paul,’’ 91–108, and Daniel Boyarin, ‘‘Paul among the Antiphilosophers; or, Saul among the Sophists,’’ 109–41. 51. Northrop Frye, Late Notebooks, 1982–1990, Notebook 27 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 83. 52. In addition to Badiou, Agamben, and others who address the question of Paul’s universality, see the interesting intervention by Grant Farred, ‘‘Politics of Prosthesis: Paul Against Neo-Pauline

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Universalism,’’ Polygraph 18 (2006): 149–65. Farred raises, among other things, the complicated matter of gender politics, in the tradition of Boyarin. Occasionally attempts are made (not by Farred) to get Paul off the hook by appeals to the widespread sexism of the time. Yet some of Paul’s pronouncements on the status of women are so breathtakingly bad as to be proof that they are not possibly of divine origin. 53. Badiou, Saint Paul, 9. 54. On the importance of being ‘‘in Christ’’ apropos the passage from Galatians, see Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). Paul also argues for the crucial importance of being ‘‘in Christ’’ when it comes to circumcision, such that it emerges that the only ones who are truly (but not literally) the offspring of Abraham are those who are ‘in Christ.’’ Boyarin argues that for Paul to say ‘‘in Christ’’ is ‘‘virtually equal in force’’ to saying ‘‘in spirit,’’ but that seems to me to go slightly too far. (A Radical Jew, 125.) ‘‘Christ’’ may imply ‘‘spirit’’ in a way that ‘‘spirit’’ does not necessarily imply ‘‘Christ.’’

‘‘Love your neighbor,’’ the Son, and the Sons’ Community: Reading Paul’s Epistles in View of Freud and Lacan, by Itzhak Benyamini 1. This essay translates a chapter from my book Paul and the Birth of the Sons’ Community: An Investigation into the Foundations of Christianity Following Freud and Lacan (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007); in English, Narcissist Universalism: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul’s Epistles (London: Continuum, 2012). 2. When presenting the dualist teaching of the second-century Christian Gnostic Marcion of Sinope in The Gnostic Religion, Hans Jonas claims that Marcion’s decisive dualism between the evil God of the law and the good God of race is an over-simplification of the dialectic between Father and Son in Paul (The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 3rd ed. [Boston: Beacon Press, 2001], 141–43). Cf. Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, trans. Robert McLachkan Wilson (1977; rpt. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 300–302, who points to the relations between Pauline theology and gnostic theology, also with regard to law. Rudolph claims that, under the prevailing Hellenistic influence, Paul used ideas and terms that might be regarded as gnostic in hindsight, rather than merely opposing them. Many scholars disagree with Rudolph on this point. Rudolph adds that, through Paul, Christianity became the religion of salvation in the gnostic sense and that the Gnostics who followed Paul even regarded him as ‘‘one of their own,’’ who preceded them. Also cf. Elaine H. Pagels, The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975); she claims that Paul was a Gnostic ‘‘in retrospect.’’ 3. See Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Parisee (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), esp. chap. 2. 4. An affirmation of the eschatological tension between the Father and the Son, a hierarchy between them, can be found in 1 Cor. 15:27–28, where Paul emphasizes that, at the end of days, all will be bound to the Father, including death and the Son. 5. Other New Testament epistles do not exhibit such extremes as the Pauline theology of death. See the epistle of James (probably Jesus’ brother), which expresses, especially in chap. 2, indirect opposition to Paul’s perception of the law. Also cf. the epistles by John, Peter, and Jude. 6. Cf. Freud’s discussion in Totem and Taboo (1913), following anthropologist James Frazer (author of The Golden Bough) concerning derivative or homeopathic magic, which solves a problem

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by repeating that problem (in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey [London: Hogarth, 1953–74], 13:81). 7. Ibid., 154; Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays, Standard Edition, 23: 87–88. 8. To a certain extent, the parent-son relationship between the believers and God is also echoed in the relations between Paul and his audience. Paul refers to the members of the congregations he has founded rather paternalistically, as his prote´ge´s. See Galatians and 1 Corinthians 3:1–2. 9. Michael Mach, Entwicklungsstadien des judischen Engelglaubens in vorrabbinischer Zeit (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1992). 10. Ibid. 11. It is perfectly reasonable to take ‘‘mediator’’ to be a reference to Moses. See James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 139. 12. This tradition is based on Deut. 33:2, concerning the angels who came with Moses at Sinai. In the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, too, the angels deliver the Halachaic aspect of the Torah (Jubilees 1:27, Ethiopic Enoch 72:1). This tradition is also intimated elsewhere in the New Testament, e.g., in Stephan’s speech in Acts (‘‘Who have received the law by the disposition of angels, and have not kept it’’; 7:53). Cf. Heb. 2:2, concerning the angels as those who hand down the laws of the Torah (Mach, Entwicklungsstadien des judischen Engelglaubens in vorrabbinischer Zeit). 13. Paul relies in particular on Gen. 12 and 15, concerning God’s promise to Abraham, following the latter’s belief (Gal. 3:7–9, Gal. 11). 14. Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia,’’ Standard Edition, 14:237–58. 15. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Standard Edition, 18:94. 16. See Erich Fromm, ‘‘The Dogma of Christ,’’ in The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 34–39, concerning believers’ identification with Jesus at the economic and political level. 17. Cf. Heb. 2 (the entire epistle was probably not authored by Paul), which highlights the bidirectional, mimetic dynamics between the suffering of Jesus and the suffering of the believers. 18. Cf. Phil. 1:20–26, concerning Paul’s predicament as caught between life in physical suffering and longing to die; 1 Cor. 11:26–27, concerning Paul’s enslaving and suppressing his own body, and 1 Cor. 15:31, concerning ‘‘I die daily.’’ Phil. 4:12, in which Paul claims that he can stand suffering as well as plenty, raises the question of whether Paul is not influenced by some Hellenistic or Stoic moralist teaching of suspicion vis-a`-vis the body. 19. See Segal, Paul the Convert, 36, where Segal identifies the ascender to heaven as Paul himself, contrary to Morton Smith, ‘‘Ascent to the Heavens and the Beginnings of Christianity,’’ Eranos Jarbuch 50 (1981): 403–29, which ascribes Paul’s verse to Jesus. 20. Cf. Rom. 12:1 and 2 Cor. 4:10, in which Paul demands that his audience to identify with Jesus’ suffering through his own. 21. See also Paul’s words in 2 Cor. 10:6 concerning the need to punish those who break uniform communal discipline. 22. Cf. Elizabeth Castelli’s argument, following Foucault: Elizabeth A. Castelli, ‘‘Interpretation of Power in 1 Corinthians,’’ in special issue Poststructural Criticism and the Bible: Text/History/ Discourse, ed. Gary A. Phillips, Semeia 51 (1990): 216. See also her Imitation Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville, Ky.: John Knox, 1991). 23. Jacques Lacan, ‘‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,’’ in E´crits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 75–81. 24. Jacques Lacan, ‘‘Presentation of Psychial Causality,’’ in E´crits, 152. 25. http://www.tkline.freeserve.co.uk/Metamorph3.htm噛Toc64106193. 26. Jacques Lacan, Le se´minaire V—Les formations de l’inconscient, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1998), esp. lessons 1–7.

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27. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Standard Edition, 8:9–236. 28. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1989), 63 29. Ibid., 71. 30. See Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Church in Galatia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 274. Lacan phrases this using the corresponding Hegelian term Aufhebung (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 7 [London: Tavistock, 1992], 193). Paul customarily proved his theological arguments against Torah laws using commentary on Scripture, rather than resorting to extra-biblical sources: ‘‘Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?’’ (Gal. 4:21). This implies that the Torah has a truer, more allegorical, basis, which consists of knowledge directed against the Torah itself, against having to comply with its statutes: ‘‘For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God.’’ (Gal. 2:19). Paul presents the Torah as consisting in a mechanism of ‘‘self-destruction’’ that it unleashes against itself. For Paul, the Torah’s law consists of actual proofs for the transient validity of the Torah’s statutes, the transience of its laws, and his assertion that the law is no longer relevant now that Jesus has been crucified. As far as Paul is concerned, the reason the Torah programs its own demise is that ‘‘Christ is the end [telos] of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth’’ (Rom. 10:4). 31. In speaking of the relationship of love between God, Jesus. and humankind, New Testament authors preferred to use the Greek term agape¯, as Paul does in his epistles. This term was associated with the Hebrew hessed ( ‘‘grace’’). The New Testament authors refrained from using eros, the other Greek term for love, because of its sexual overtones. 32. Freud, Group Psychology, 102. 33. Cf. Paul’s blatant appeal to the Thessalonians against the Jews: ‘‘For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews. Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men. Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins always: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost’’ (1 Thess. 2:14–16). 34. The passage is based on Gen. 21:10–12. 35. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Standard Edition, 21:123–24. 36. The source for subjugation to Caesar is Jesus himself, whose answer to the question of whether the emperor is to be paid taxes in a similar context was ‘‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s’’ (Matt. 22:21). 37. Galatians is believed to be earlier than Romans, among either the first or the intermediate of Paul’s epistles. In it, Paul is addressing communities he himself had established and for which he felt responsible. The epistle indicates that Paul felt threatened and ridiculed in the wake of the advent of rival bearers of the gospel, who demanded, in the name of Jesus, that members of the community uphold the statutes of the Torah, including circumcision. Romans is addressed to a Jewish-Christian community Paul had not yet founded; in the epistle to them, he presents the highlights of his theological teaching. He also asks them to house him in the course of his journey to the western Mediterranean, and he therefore does not reveal his angry side. According to Betz, Galatians, 11–12, and many other scholars, the Epistle to the Galatians was penned between 50 and 55 c.e. and represents the early stage of Paul’s writings. This is manifest in its enthusiastic and spontaneous tone, by contrast to Romans, which was penned later (probably in 56 or 57 c.d.), when his thought had crystallized. 38. Freud, Group Psychology, 98.

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39. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, esp. chap. 14. 40. Ibid., 186; trans. modified. 41. Roger Burggraeve, From Self-Development to Solidarity: An Ethical Reading of Human Desire and Its Socio-Political Relevance According to Emanuel Levinas (Leuven: Peeters, 1986). See also Emmanuel Levinas and France Guwy, ‘‘What No One Can Do in My Place: A Conversation with Emmanuel Levinas,’’ in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 305. 42. See Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Schrift (Berlin: L. Schneider, 1926–37). 43. Ibid., 110. 44. Martin Buber, Introduction to Hermann Cohen, Der Na¨chste: Vier Abhandlungen u¨ber das Verhalten von Mensch zu Mensch nach der Lehre des Judentums (Berlin: Schocken, 1935). 45. Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, ed. Bruno Strauss (Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1978), 143–44; see also Hermann Cohen, Der Na¨chste: Vier Abhandlungen u¨ber das Verhalten von Mensch zu Mensch nach der Lehre des Judentums (Berlin: Schocken, 1935). 46. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 179. Lacan opposes to the categorical ‘‘God is dead’’ in its atheist sense ‘‘the death of God’’ as a myth stemming from castration anxiety. This myth masks both the existence of God and his laws, even after God is removed. Dialectically, death revives God. In fact, Lacan is thinking in the framework of the identity between death and the revival of the law, and death and the revival of God, based on the Freudian identification between God and the Father as representative of the law. For more on Lacan’s perception of the ‘‘neighbor’’ and the contexts of political theology, see Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 47. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 193. 48. Freud Civilization and Its Discontents, chap. 5. 49. As Giorgio Agamben shows in The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), the Hegelian term Aufhebung originates in Paul’s attempt to present the transition from the Old Testament of law to the New Testament of love. Agamben points to Luther’s translation of Rom. 3:31, ‘‘Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law [nomon oun katagroumen dia te¯s pisteo¯s; me¯ genoito, alla nomon istanomen]’’ as ‘‘heben wir das Gesetz auff.’’ Luther translates the word katagroumen as aufheben, a German verb meaning both ‘‘to abolish’’ and ‘‘to preserve,’’ thereby providing Hegel with the noun Aufhebung to denote what he perceives in the framework of his philosophy as at once abolishing, preserving, and ‘‘uplifting.’’ Agamben’s discussion (99) follows that of Derrida on Hegel (Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). In this context, see also the criticism of Hegel’s position on Judaism by Raphael Zagury-Orly and Joseph Cohen, ‘‘Hegel, les Juifs et nous,’’ Les Temps modernes 608 (March-May 2000): 279–95. 50. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 194. 51. Ibid., 186. 52. Ibid., 193–94. 53. Freud refers to the ‘‘extended’’ psychoanalytic term ‘‘love,’’ which includes both sexual love and refined, target-inhibited love for the benefit of social needs (Freud, Group Psychology, 91).

The ‘‘Jewish Question’’ in the Return to Paul: Empire Politics, by Shmuel Trigano 1. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). 606

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2. Ibid., 5. 3. Ibid., 13. 4. Ibid., 7. 5. Ibid., 103. 6. Ibid., 108. 7. Ibid., 23. 8. Ibid., 12. 9. Ibid., 11. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 14. 12. Ibid., 9. 13. Ibid., 83. 14. Ibid., 10–11. 15. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 47. 16. Ibid., 49. 17. Ibid., 48. 18. Ibid, 50. 19. For a fuller demonstration, see Shmuel Trigano, L’e(xc)lu: Entre Juifs et chre´tiens (Paris: Denoe¨l, 2003). 20. The presence of Hebrew letters in Agamben’s books as an aesthetic device and the constant reference to biblical figures by him, as well by Negri and Badiou (though solely to New Testament figures) is a significant, in fact very Pauline, symptom. Paul deposes Israel in Israel’s name. 21. This Greek term means the ‘‘general,’’ the ‘‘universal.’’ 22. Oiko-nomia is derived from oikos, ‘‘the home’’; it means, in short, a ‘‘rule of home management.’’ 23. The same pattern of thought exists in Marxism. Communist society, without classes or differences, without Jews or Christians, was to have been born out of the contradictions of the bourgeoisie. In On The Jewish Question, Marx mythically identifies the Jews with the bourgeoisie par excellence and decrees that Communism will be born when the Jews (the bourgeoisie) disappear. 24. Paulinism is basically gnostic and dualist, can be seen from the first developments of Christianity with the profoundly anti-Judaic movement of Marcionism. 25. Torah means not ‘‘Law’’ but ‘‘teaching’’—literally, ‘‘teaching of shooting’’ (Yaroh, ‘‘to shoot with bow and arrow’’). It also has a parental connotation (Horeh, ‘‘parent,’’ and moreh, ‘‘teacher’’). Objectively, it would be difficult to define it as law, since while it contains law, it also contains narrations. 26. This has been studied by Menahem Hirschman in La Tora pour tous les vivants (Hebrew, Tora lekol baei Olam) (Tel Aviv, 1999). See also ‘‘Rabbinic Universalism in the Second and Third Centuries,’’ in Harvard Theological Review 93 (2000): 115. 27. See Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s seminal work, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 28. This interpretation is based on the first two narratives of the creation of man (Gen. 1:27; 2–7) and in particular on Philo’s interpretation (Legum allegoriarum [Allegorical Commentary], 1:31). 29. Badiou, Saint Paul, 105. 30. See Shmuel Trigano, Les frontie`res d’Auschwitz: Les de´rapages du devoir de me´moire (Paris: Hachette, 2005). 31. Here one can see at work a self—gratifying rewriting of history: the liberation of Auschwitz was never an Allied war objective. 607

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32. For the notion of a ‘‘Mosaic state,’’ taken from the terminology of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, see Shmuel Trigano, Philosophie de la Loi: L’origine de la politique dans la Tora (Paris: Le Cerf, 1991).

Paul and the Political Theology of the Neighbor, by Kenneth Reinhard 1. In the Afterword to Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, Wolf-Daniel Hartwich, Aleida Assmann, and Jan Assmann distinguish three basic thematics that orient political theology: ‘‘representation,’’ where the earthly sovereign is considered to be acting as God’s representative; ‘‘dual-sovereignty,’’ where earthly and divine authority are understood as parallel but strictly distinguished elements; and ‘‘theocracy,’’ where political sovereignty is presented as the direct institutional embodiment of divine sovereignty. They describe Schmitt’s account of political theology as a version of the ‘‘representational’’ theory, insofar as it argues that political orders cannot be legitimized on the basis of any immanent categories, but must have recourse to divine categories such as God’s will (trans. Dana Hollander [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004], 138–39). 2. See ‘‘Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor,’’ chap. 1of Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 3. In John Wyclif’s famous phrase, ‘‘Dominion is founded in grace.’’ Stephen Lahey comments on Wyclif’s political theology: ‘‘The instrument through which divine dominium moves is grace, which instills in human rulers an essential love defining their every ruling action. Thus, every case of just human dominium entails a constant reliance upon grace as the hallmark of its being an instantiation of God’s universal dominium’’ ‘‘John Wyclif’s Political Philosophy,’’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2006 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum‘2006/entries/wyclif-political/. 4. The meaning of nomos in Paul has long been disputed; some critics argue that it refers exclusively to Jewish law (written, oral, or both), others—more convincingly—that it often has a much wider connotation in Paul’s letters, referring to ‘‘principle,’’ ‘‘order,’’ or ‘‘rule’’ more generally. See Thomas Schreiner, The Law and Its Fulfillment: A Pauline Theology of Love (Ada, Mich.: Baker Publishing Group, 1998), 33–40. Taubes cites Bruno Bauer’s argument in Christ and the Caesars that, in Taubes’s paraphrase, ‘‘Christian literature is a literature of protest against the flourishing cult of the emperor.’’ 5. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 55. 6. There are several linkages of the two commandments in literature from the beginning of the Common Era; the Didache (according to The Jewish Encyclopedia, ‘‘originally a manual of instruction used for the initiation of proselytes in the Synagogue, and was converted later into a Christian manual and ascribed to Jesus and the Apostles’’) opens with the conjunction: ‘‘There are two ways, one of life and one of death, but a great difference between the two ways. The way of life, then, is this: First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself, and do not do to another what you would not want done to you’’ (http://www.earlychristianwritings .com/text/didache-roberts.html). In the pseudepigraphic Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (70– 200 c.e.), we find several linkages of the two commandments, including Dan 5: ‘‘Observe, therefore, my children, the commandments of the Lord, and keep His law; and depart from wrath, and hate lying, that the Lord may dwell among you, and Beliar may flee from you. Speak truth each one with his neighbour, so shall ye not fall into lust and confusion; but ye shall be in peace, having the God

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of peace, so shall no war prevail over yon. Love the Lord through all your life, unit one another with a true heart.’’ See the ‘‘Christian Classics Ethereal Library’’: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/ anf08.iii.ix.html. 7. See Mark 12:32–33. 8. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 52–53. 9. Ibid., 53. 10. Ibid., 55. 11. Ibid., 55–56. 12. Ibid., 56. 13. Ibid., 57–58. Taubes refers here to 2 Corinthians, probably meaning chap. 4: ‘‘And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. . . . For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’’ (2 Cor. 4:3–6). 14. Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids. Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), 806. Moo gives an excellent account of the history of readings of Rom. 13:1–7. 15. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 54. 16. Ibid., 139. 17. Ibid., 140. 18. Ibid., 141. 19. In Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Hent de Vries describes the relationships and differences between their thinking, which cannot be reduced to a simple opposition: ‘‘If Schmitt’s work is characterized by an apocalyptics according to a top-down model, Taubes’s universe, by contrast, is marked by a sense of history as catastrophe, that is to say, by an apocalyptics that is not contained by political schemata, but disrupts the categories of immanence from the bottom up’’ ([Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999], 187). Also see de Vries’s commentary on Taubes in Religion and Violence, where he expands and refines the distinction he makes here. There, de Vries presents an exceptionally strong and succinct formulation of Taubes’s understanding of the relationship of theology to the political: ‘‘Theology is taken to be a commentary on the segments of meaning that remain in situations of crisis, after the disintegration of all symbolism’’ (Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002], 249). For a historical account of the relationship between Taubes and Schmitt and a summary of some of their intellectual similarities and differences, see Marin Terpstra and Theo de Wit, ‘‘ ‘No Spiritual Investment in the World As It Is’: Jacob Taubes’s Negative Political Theology,’’ in Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology, ed. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens Ten Kate (New York : Fordham University Press, 2000), 319–53. Terpstra and de Wit emphasize what they call the negativity of Taubes’s political theology: ‘‘For Taubes, this is the first and everrenewing task of political theology: separating the spiritual from the secular claims and powers’’ (341). For them, however, unlike Benjamin, this separation ultimately implies a complete lack of relationship between the two discursive orders, at which point it is hard to understand it as political theology at all. They argue that Taubes, although ‘‘sympathetic toward the oppressed,’’ did not see real political potentiality in messianic thinking (342). 20. Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s argument about Paul has certain interesting parallels with that of Taubes. Zˇizˇek argues that Paul understands the messianic era to imply the suspension not of the law that regulates our daily life, but of its ‘‘obscene unwritten underside: when . . . Paul basically says ‘obey the laws as if you are not obeying them,’ this means precisely that we should suspend the obscene

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libidinal investment in the Law. . . . The ultimate paradox, of course, is that this is how the Jewish law, the main target of Paul’s critique, functions: it is already a law deprived of its superego supplement, not relying on an obscene support’’ (The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity [Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003], 113). For Zˇizˇek, the real question, however, is whether there is not only a love that is excessive within the law and disguises obscene superegoic injunctions, but also a ‘‘love beyond the law,’’ as Lacan suggests at the conclusion of his seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton, 1978]), a love that is drained of its superegoic demands? The intertwined injunctions to love God and to love the neighbor can be taken as representing such a split, but the question remains as to whether we can have one without the other or whether they are, as I would argue, not fully separable, only spaceable. 21. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theologico-Political Fragment,’’ trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 312. More recently, the text has appeared as ‘‘Theological-Political Fragment’’ in the Selected Writings of Benjamin, vol. 3, 1935– 1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 305–6, in a translation also attributed to Edmund Jephcott. Whereas the first translation renders the word Profanen as ‘‘profane,’’ in the later translation the word secular is used. (The German word sa¨kular does not appear in Benjamin’s text.) I am using the earlier translation here, for the sake of accuracy, even if it is not always as elegant as the later one. 22. ‘‘On the Concept of History,’’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 397. 23. On the difference between Benjamin and Schmitt on political theology, see Giorgio Agamben’s chapter ‘‘Gigantomachy Concerning a Void,’’ in his State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Agamben’s account is, in some ways, exactly the opposite of that of Terpstra and de Wit, who argue that Schmitt’s political theology is purely transcendental, whereas Taubes’s is immanent. Agamben argues that, whereas Schmitt’s theory of the sovereign exception tries to contain violence within the law, Benjamin locates a ‘‘pure violence’’ radically outside the law and that this is decisively influential on Taubes. Agamben suggests that Benjamin presents a notion of messianism in which the law exists without force, without sovereignty: ‘‘The decisive point here is that the law—no longer practiced, but studied—is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity—that is, another use of the law. . . . One day humanity will play with the law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it’’ (64). Such a relationship between practice and study does not require a messianic era, but is already part of post-Temple Judaism, when many laws that can no longer be literally obeyed, such as those of sacrifice, are understood as being fulfilled by studying the Talmudic discussions of them. What is rabbinic discourse and halakhic practice other than a very serious sort of ‘‘playing’’ with the law? Agamben’s notion of a new use that emerges only after the expiration of usefulness itself presents a powerful model of the nonreligious uses of religious discourse, a project Agamben elsewhere describes as profanation, as opposed to secularization. We might even suggest that this is precisely the status of Judaism, not just after the destruction of the Temple, but after the advent of Christianity: only then, after the dispensation from the yoke of the law has been announced, can play begin in earnest. See Agamben, ‘‘In Praise of Profanation,’’ in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 72–92. 24. Benjamin, ‘‘Theologico-Political Fragment,’’ 312–13.

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25. Recall Paul’s discussion of the relationships among the law, sin, and redemption in Rom. 7. Even though the law as the commandments is ‘‘holy and just and good,’’ there is another law in me, ‘‘a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my innermost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members’’ (Rom. 7:12; 21–23). 26. Agamben takes exception with Taubes on this point, arguing that Adorno does not exactly ‘‘aestheticize’’ messianism, but presents philosophy as the encounter with the missing of its own redemption, and aesthetics as the manifestation of philosophy’s experience of that missing: ‘‘The fact of having missed the moment of its realization is what obliges philosophy to indefinitely contemplate the appearance of redemption. Aesthetic beauty is the chastisement, so to speak, of philosophy’s having missed its moment’’ (The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005], 37). 27. In his book on the origins of the German Trauerspiel, Benjamin describes this connection between ‘‘natural history’’ and redemption as allegorical. His point is that the disjunctive relationship presented by allegory presents redemption by insisting on the reality of earthly life, as a kind of negative theology: ‘‘The bleak confusion of Golgotha . . . is not just a symbol of the desolation of human existence. In it transitoriness is not signified or allegorically represented, so much as, in it own significance, displayed as allegory. As the allegory of resurrection. Ultimately in the deathsigns of the baroque the direction of allegorical reflection is reversed; on the second part of its wide arc it returns, to redeem’’ (The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne [London: New Left Books, 1977], 232). 28. See Agamben’s brilliant account of the ho¯s me¯ and its fundamental difference from the Kantian als ob, ‘‘as if’’: ‘‘The as not is by no means a fiction . . . it has nothing to do with an ideal. . . . the messianic is the simultaneous abolition and realization of the as if, and the subject wishing to indefinitely maintain himself in similitude (in the as if), while contemplating his ruin, simply loses the wager. He who upholds himself in the messianic vocation no longer knows the as if, he no longer has similitudes at his disposal. He knows that in messianic time the saved world coincides with the world that is irretrievably lost, and that, to use Bonhoeffer’s words, he must now really live in a world without God. . . . The messianic subject does not contemplate the world as though it were saved. In Benjamin’s words, he contemplates salvation only to the extent that he loses himself in what cannot be saved’’ (The Time That Remains, 41–42). 29. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 74. 30. Ibid., 90. 31. Quoted in ibid., 92. 32. Ibid., 92. 33. Ibid., 94–95. 34. Taubes, however, does not discuss Freud’s extended commentary on the commandment to love the neighbor in Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud emphatically repudiates it as immoral, impossible, and a token of the hypocrisy that thinly masks human aggressivity and social violence. If for Taubes Paul isolates the neighbor from God the Father for the sake of mankind’s liberation, for Freud there is no simple way to untangle the command to love the neighbor from the structures of excessive guilt and ruthless self-punishment that are the Father’s legacy. Freud could not help but see the cruelty that underlies social structures, and, like Nietzsche, he regarded the call to neighbor love as an ideological ruse meant to dissimulate the law’s constitutive violence. According to Lacan, however, Freud’s repudiation of neighbor love is not cynical, but a sign of his moral integrity, of his deep belief in the human values that are destroyed on a daily basis under the cover of ethics and religion.

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35. Badiou writes in ‘‘What is Love?’’ that ‘‘love is precisely this: the advent [l’ave´nement] of the Two as such, the scene of Two’’ (Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran [New York: Continuum, 2008], 188). See also his essay ‘‘The Scene of Two,’’ trans. Barbara P. Fulks, Lacanian Ink 21, pp. 42–55. 36. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 18:140–41. 37. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 36. 38. See chap. 8, ‘‘Political Theology I and II,’’ in Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 90–121. See Schmitt, Political Theology, as well as the second volume, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). See also Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher’s account of the Schmitt/Blumenberg exchange in The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism (Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 405–414. 39. See note 23, above. 40. The OED provides the following etymology for ‘‘religion’’: ‘‘a. AF. religiun (11th c.), F. religion, or ad. L. religin-em, of doubtful etymology, by Cicero connected with relegre to read over again, but by later authors with religre to bind, religate (see Lewis and Short, s.v.); the latter view has usually been favored by modern writers in explaining the force of the word by its supposed etymological meaning.’’ 41. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, 75. 42. Agamben’s discussion here depends on that of Emile Benveniste in his remarkable account of the etymology of the word religion in Indo-European Language and Society, trans. E. Palmer (London: Faber and Faber, 1973). Benveniste defends Cicero’s account of the origin of the word religio as derived from legere: ‘‘In some, religio is a hesitation, a misgiving which holds back, a scruple which prevents and not a sentiment which impels to action or incites to a ritual practice’’ (521). Religion thus primarily signifies maintaining the separation of the sacred and the quotidian, hesitating before crossing the line. 43. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, 77. 44. According to the OED, secular comes from saecularis, meaning a human age or cycle of the world: ‘‘secular, a. and n.: [In branch I, a. OF. seculer (mod.F. se´culier), ad. L. sæculris, f. sæcul-um generation, age, in Christian Latin ‘the world,’ esp. as opposed to the church: see secle, siecle. In branch II, directly ad. L. sæculris, whence mod.F. se´culaire (which has influenced some of the uses in Eng.). Cf. Sp. seglar, secular, Pg. secular, It. secolare.] A. adj. I. Of or pertaining to the world. 1. Eccl. a. Of members of the clergy: Living ‘in the world’ and not in monastic seclusion, as distinguished from ‘regular’ and ‘religious.’ secular canon: see canon n.2 secular abbot: a person not a monk, who had the title and part of the revenues, but not the functions of an abbot.’’

Inverse Versus Dialectical Theology: The Two Faces of Negativity and the Miracle of Faith, by Hent de Vries note: An early version of this essay was presented as the Eberhart L. Faber Lecture at a conference entitled ‘‘Rhetorics of Religion in Germany, 1900–1950,’’ organized by the Departments of German and of Religion at Princeton University from March 31 to April 2, 2011. I would like to thank

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Michael Jennings and Leora Batnitzky for their kind invitation and for a host of insightful comments in the ensuing conversations. A later version of the essay was presented as a plenary lecture at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University on July 16, 2012. I thank Amanda Anderson for her generous invitation to offer a six-week seminar entitled ‘‘Miracles, Events, Effects’’ and the participants in the program for helpful promptings to strengthen my argument. 1. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). 2. Ibid., 7. For helpful commentary on Taubes’s work as whole and his interpretation of Paul in particular, see: Richard Faber, Eveline Goodman-Thau, and Thomas Macho, eds., Abendla¨ndische Eschatologie: Ad Jacob Taubes (Wu¨rzburg: Ko¨nigshausen & Neumann, 2001); and Christoph Schmidt, ‘‘Review Essay of Jacob Taubes’ The Political Theology of Paul,’’ Hebraic Political Studies 2, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 232–41, who describes the book as ‘‘a condensed manual of his thought’’ (232). See also: Joshua Robert Gold, ‘‘Jacob Taubes: ‘Apocalypse from Below,’ ’’ Telos 134 (2006): 140–56; Michael Maidan, review of Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology and From Cult to Culture, in Philosophy in Review 30, no. 6 (2010): 449–56; and Elias Sacks, ‘‘Finden Sie mich sehr amerikanisch? Jacob Taubes, Hermann Cohen, and the Return to German-Jewish Liberalism,’’ in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 57 (2010): 187–210. 3. Martin Treml, ‘‘Paulinische Feindschaft: Korrespondenzen von Jacob Taubes und Carl Schmitt,’’ in Jacob Taubes and Carl Schmitt, Briefwechsel, ed. Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, Thorsten Palzhoff, and Martin Treml (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2012), 276. 4. Ibid., 277. 5. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 24. For the consensus on which Taubes builds, see: W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology (London: S.P.C.K., 1948); Martin Hengel, Judentum und Hellenismus: Studien zu ihrer Begegnung unter Beru¨cksichtigung Pala¨stinas bis zur Mitte des 2 Jh.s v. Chr. (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1973); Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their Encounter in Palestine During the Early Hellenistic Period, 2 vols. (London: SCM Press, 2012); E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM Press, 1977); and Sanders, Paul: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 6. Ibid., 15–16. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 16. 9. Ibid., 31. 10. Ibid., 24. 11. Ibid., 17. 12. Ibid., 18. 13. Ibid.; cf. ibid., 54. 14. Ibid., 51. This anti-Semitic tradition, Taubes explains, has to do with the confusion between the meaning of hostis and inimicus in the sentence ‘‘As regards the gospels they are enemies.’’ As Taubes insists, like Derrida in The Politics of Friendship, in this invocation of the enemies of God: ‘‘Enemy is not a private concept. . . . When it say, ‘Love your enemies’—yes, perhaps. I’m not sure what it means there in the Sermon of the Mount. Here, in any case, we are not dealing with private feuds, but with salvation—historical enemies of God. ‘Enemies for your sake, but as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their forefathers’ ’’ (ibid.). 15. Ibid., 18–19. 16. Ibid., 38. 17. Ibid., 32. Taubes terms Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption an ‘‘ingenious breakthrough,’’ which seeks to ‘‘interpret the religious community through its liturgy’’ (34).

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18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 25. 20. Ibid., 44. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 19. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 39. 26. Ibid. 40. 27. Ibid., 52–53. 28. Ibid., 40; trans. modified. 29. Ibid., 41; trans. modified. 30. Ibid. 31. Cited after ibid., 39. Cf. Erwin Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 74–75. 32. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 5. 33. Ibid., 116. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 117. 38. Ibid., 50. Cf. Jacob Taubes, Der Preis des Messianismus: Briefe von Jacob Taubes and Gershom Scholem und andere Materialien, ed. Elettra Stimilli and Astrida Ment (Wu¨rzburg: Neumann & Neumann, 2006). 39. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 71. 40. Ibid., 117. 41. Ibid., 118, 121, and 117, respectively. 42. Ibid., 121. 43. Ibid., 70–71. 44. Ibid., 123. Fear and Trembling is also central to Derrida’s understanding of Paul, although, in sharp contrast with Taubes, he distinguishes between ‘‘the messianic’’ or ‘‘messianicity’’ and ‘‘a Messiah’’ or historical messianisms, while acknowledging that the former remain contingent up and contaminated by the latter. I have analyzed these notions at length in Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), chaps. 3 and 4. 45. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 38. 46. This parallelism has also been remarked by Levinas and Derrida, though in different ways; see Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also my Religion and Violence, chap. 4. 47. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 23. 48. Ibid., 25. 49. Ibid., 24. 50. Ibid., 24; trans. modified. 51. Ibid., 26. 52. Ibid., 28. 53. Ibid., 47. 54. Ibid., 53.

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55. Ibid., 54. 56. Ibid., 25. 57. Ibid., 28. 58. Ibid., trans. modified. 59. Ibid., 48. 60. Ibid., 32. 61. Ibid., 46. 62. Ibid., 47. 63. Treml, ‘‘Paulinische Feindschaft, 279. Treml attributes the expression to Michael Brenner. See also Michael Angele, Herbert Kopp-Oberstebrink, and Martin Treml, ‘‘Netzwerker, Projektemacher, Charismatiker: Die goldenen Jahre der Philosophie an der Freien Universita¨t Berlin, ‘‘ pt. 2, ‘‘Ein Gespra¨ch u¨ber den abwesenden Herrn Taubes,’’ der Freitag, no. 14 October 14, 2010, p. 17 (http://www.freitag.de/autoren/michael-angele/netzwerker-projektemacher, last accessed January 9, 2013. 64. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 84. 65. Indeed, there was even an oblique personal connection between the two thinkers: Taubes’s father, Hayim Zwi Taubes (1900–66), the Chief Rabbi of Zu¨rich, visited Barth on June 25, 1944, to share one of the first reports on the deportation and execution of East-European Jews. See: Eberhard Busch, Unter dem Bogen des einen Bundes: Karl Barth und die Juden 1933–1945 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996), 515n.58; Mark R. Lindsay, Barth, Israel, and Jesus: Karl Barth’s Theology of Israel (London: Ashgate, 2007), 34. 66. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 1, trans. modified. Barth quotes the second stanza of Goethe’s poem ‘‘Legacy.’’ See also Richard E. Burnett, Karl Barth’s Theological Exegesis: The Hermeneutical Principles of the Ro¨merbrief Period, Foreword by Bruce McCormack (Grand Rapids., Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004). 67. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, N.J.: Melville House, 2007), 27. 68. See Matthias D. Wu¨thrich, Gott und das Nichtige: Eine Untersuchung zur Rede vom Nichtigen ausgehend von par. 50 der Kirchlichen Dogmatik Karl Barths (Zu¨rich: Theologischer Verlag Zu¨rich, 2006). 69. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 1. 70. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 13 vols., trans. G. W. Bromily, G. T. Thomson, and Harold Knight (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 1.1:3. 71. Among the philosophical authors who have engaged with Paul in twentieth- and twentyfirst-century thought are Gilles Deleuze, Stanislas Breton, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Henry, Jean-Michel Rey, and Bernard Siche`re. See: Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); Stanislas Breton, A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, trans. Joseph N. Ballan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Paul Apoˆtre: Proclamation et argumentation (Lectures re´centes),’’ in: Esprit, February 2003, pp. 85–112; Bernard Siche`re, Le jour est proche: La re´volution selon Paul (Paris: Descle´e de Brouwer, 2003); Jean-Michel Rey, Paul ou les ambiguı¨te´s (Paris: L’Olivier, 2008). Some additional relevant studies authored by theologians, biblical scholars, and Talmudic scholars are: Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); John Ashton, The Religion of Paul the Apostle (reading Paul, in the context of comparative religion, as a shaman); Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Bruno Blumenfeld, The Political Paul: Justice, Democracy and

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Kingship in a Hellenistic Framework (New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001). All these should be seen against the background of a much older tradition of scholarship, e.g. the essays collected in Karl Heinrich Rengstorf, with Ulrich Luck, eds., Das Paulusbild in der neueren deutschen Forschung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964). 72. Treml, ‘‘Paulinische Feindschaft,’’ 275. ¨ ber modernen Marcionismus (Wu¨rzburg: Ko¨nigs73. Richard Faber, Politische Da¨monologie: U hausen & Neumann, 2007). 74. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 10. 75. Ibid., 140–41; my emphasis. The reference to reversal calls to mind the logic of inverse proportions that Peter Brown distills from Augustine’s wrestling with the popular belief in miracles. For an argument that, in Augustine, the miracle serves as an organizing principle, as the paradoxical, spatiotemporal logic that informs (and forms itself in) the messianic event, see Hent de Vries, ‘‘Fast Forward; or, The Theologico-Political Event in Quick Motion (Miracles, Media, and Multitudes in St. Augustine),’’ in How the West Was Won: Essays on the Literary Imagination, the Canon and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger, ed. Willemien Otten, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Hent de Vries (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 255–80. 76. Schmitt refers to dialectical theology and to the Barthian phrase the ‘‘wholly other [ganz Andere]’’ in the preface to the second edition of his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 2: ‘‘Among Protestant theologians, Heinrich Forsthoff and Friedrich Gogarten, in particular, have shown that without a concept of secularization we cannot understand our history of the last centuries. To be sure, Protestant theology presents a different, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as the ‘wholly other,’ just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as the ‘wholly other.’ We have come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced. This also holds for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitical theology.’’ Cf. Dieter Schellong, ‘‘Jenseits von politischer und unpolitischer Theologie: Grundentscheidungen der ‘Dialektischen Theologie,’ ’’ in Der Fu¨rst dieser Welt: Carl Schmitt und die Folgen, ed. Jacob Taubes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink/Ferninand Scho¨ningh, 1985), 292–315. On Barth’s politics, see William Werpehowski, ‘‘Barth and Politics,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 228– 42. On Barth and Schmitt, see Mathias Eichhorn, Es wird regiert! Der Staat im Denken Karl Barths und Carl Schmitts in den Jahren 1919 bis 1938 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994). 77. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Theological-Political Fragment,’’ trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 305–6. 78. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 75. As Bruce L. McCormack, in Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), recalls: ‘‘It is well known that Barth disdained the term ‘dialectical theology’ as a piece of self-description. Given, above all, the tensions which existed between the members of the dialectical theological movement throughout the 1920s and their eventual break-up, Barth’s reticence in this regard is understandable’’ (464). McCormack gives this as one of the reasons for his own preference for the phrase ‘‘ ‘critically realistic,’ ’’ which allows him to distinguish Barth’s undertaking from the dialectical theologies of the early Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich. At the same time, McCormack states: ‘‘Karl Barth remained a dialectical theologian throughout all the phases of his development subsequent to, say, 1915’’ (Bruce L. McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the

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Theology of Karl Barth [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2008], 292). Or again: ‘‘Barth’s development was indeed the unfolding of a single material insight through several differing models of explication’’ (McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 20). 79. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 75–76. 80. Ironically, Barth is the target of a similar critique by his younger colleague Erik Peterson, whose pamphlet ‘‘Was ist Theologie?’’ accuses him of thinking in paradoxes, of saying everything and nothing, hence, of becoming vacuous and abstract. 81. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 53. 82. Ibid., 60. In Taubes’s 1984 essay ‘‘The Iron Cage and the Exodus from It, or the Dispute over Marcion, Then and Now,’’ in Taubes, From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Amir Engel, introd. Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, and Wolf-Daniel Hartwich (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 137 –46, the opening of Marcion’s lost Antithesis is cited in another version: ‘‘O wonder of wonders, rapture, power, and marvel, that one can neither say nor think anything of the Gospel, nor compare it with anything’’ (145). Cf. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott—Eine Monographie zur Geschichte der Grundlegung der katholischen Kirche & Neue Studien zu Marcion (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftfliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), 256; partially translated as Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, by John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 1990). See also Gerhard May, ‘‘Marcion ohne Harnack,’’ in Marcion und seine kirchengeschichtliche Wirkung / Marcion and His Impact on the Church, ed. Gerhard May, Katharina Greshat, and Martin Meiser (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 1–7. Benjamin Lazier, in his God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination Between the World Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008) devotes a chapter to ‘‘The Gnostic Return’’ (27 ff.), pointing out that Harnack’s hero was, precisely, a ‘‘non-gnostic Marcion’’ (30). 83. Cited in Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 57. 84. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 57. 85. Von Harnack, Marcion, Foreword to the First Edition, iii, iv. Harnack’s claim here anticipates a later and deeply Augustinian claim by Hannah Arendt, in ‘‘What is Freedom?,’’ Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 2006), 142–69, that there is a striking resemblance between miracles—which capture or name the ‘‘divine birth’’ of beginnings, as she calls it in The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958])—and the ‘‘infinite improbabilities’’ of the genesis of cosmic formations and organic and intelligent life. Quentin Meillassoux adopts this conception almost verbatim in the few published fragments we have of his L’inexistence divine: Essai sur le Dieu virtuel, albeit without reference to Arendt (Graham Harman, ‘‘Interview with Quentin Meillassoux [August 2010],’’ in Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011], 162–63). But Arendt follows the gospels rather than Paul’s letters, and Meillassoux apparently ignores them both. 86. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 60. 87. Ibid.,72. 88. Ibid., 74. 89. Jacob Taubes, ‘‘Walter Benjamin—Ein moderner Marcionit? Scholems BenjaminInterpretation religionsgeschichtlich u¨berpru¨ft,’’ in Taubes, Der Preis des Messianismus, 53–65. For an overview of the Marcionite current in early- and mid-twentieth-century thought, see Faber, Politische Da¨monologie. We do not know whether Benjamin was familiar with Harnack’s writings on Marcion, but we do know that in the spring of 1918 he was immersed in Harnack’s threevolume Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (Jean-Michel Palmier, Walter Benjamin: Lumpensammler, ¨ sthethik und Politik bei Walter Benjamin, ed. Florent Perrier, trans. Engel und bucklicht Ma¨nnlein—A

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Horst Bru¨hmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 399n.290). At about the same time, he was also steeped in reading Heidegger, in whose ‘‘nihilism’’ Taubes’s later wife, Susan Anima Taubes, would detect ‘‘Gnostic foundations,’’ in an article that captures something of the spirit of the times in which Sein und Zeit was received and categorized (Susan Anima Taubes, ‘‘The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism,’’ Journal of Religion 34 [1954]: 155–72). See also Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950–1951, ed. Christina Pareigis, with Almut Hu¨fler (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011). 90. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 84–85. 91. Ibid., 85. 92. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 13. 93. Ibid. 94. On the motif of ‘‘nothing,’’ see von Harnack, Marcion, 2. ¨ berlieferung u¨ber die Lehre 95. Ibid., 18, and Appendix 6 in the German edition, entitled ‘‘Die U Marcions und u¨ber seine Kirche,’’ 314 ff. 96. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Der moderne Gla¨ubige des 2. Jahrhunderts, der erste Reformator, critical edition of the 1870 prize manuscript, ed. Friedemann Steck (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003). It is no accident, therefore, that Marcionite elements have been detected in modernist authors. One might mention Charles Baudelaire, in Flowers of Evil, Thomas Mann, in Doctor Faustus, Paul Celan, and Samuel Beckett. See Faber, Politische Da¨monologie, 32–36, 38–44. 97. Cf. ‘‘Ein Briefwechsel zwischen K. Barth und A. von Harnack,’’ in Anfa¨nge der dialektischen Theologie, ed. Ju¨rgen Moltmann, vol. 1, Karl Barth, Heinrich Barth, Emil Brunner (Munich: C. Kaiser, 1974), 323–47. 98. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 10. 99. Jacob Taubes, ‘‘Dialectic and Analogy,’’ From Cult to Culture, 165–76; idem, ‘‘Theodicy and Theology: A Philosophical Analysis of Karl Barth’s Dialectical Theology,’’ From Cult to Culture, 177–94. See also Dieter Schellong, ‘‘Jakob Taubes zu Karl Barth,’’ in Abenlandische Eschatologie, ed. Faber, Goodman-Thau, and Macho, 385–93. 100. Jacob Taubes, ‘‘Christian Nihilism’’ (review of Karl Barth, Against the Stream), Commentary 18 (September 1954): 269–72. 101. Taubes, From Cult to Culture, 182–83; trans. modified. 102. Ibid., 193–94; my emphasis. 103. Cf. Faber, Politische Da¨monologie. 104. Cf. Moltmann, ed., Anfa¨nge der dialektischen Theologie, vol. 1, and idem, ed., Anfa¨nge der dialektischen Theologie, vol. 2, Rudolf Bultmann, Friedrich Gogarten, Eduard Thurneysen (Munich: C. Kaiser Verlag, 1967). 105. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 76. 106. Bruce McCormack, ‘‘Not a Possible God but the God Who Is: Observations on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of God,’’ in The Reality of Faith: Studies in Karl Barth, ed. Bruce McCormack and Gerrit Neven (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 111–40. 107. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, trans. Ian W. Robertson (London: SCM Press, 1960; rpt. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2009). 108. Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), chap. 12, 601–30. 109. Cited after James C. Livingston, Francis Schu¨ssler Fiorenza, Sarah Coakly, and James H. Evans Jr., eds., Modern Christian Thought: The Twentieth Century, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 64.

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110. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘Notes on Kafka,’’ in Prisms, trans. Shierry and Samuel Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 245–71. 111. Hans Joachim Schoeps, ‘‘Die geistige Gestalt Kafkas,’’ in Im Streit um Kafka und das Judentum: Der Briefwechsel zwischen Max Brod und Hans-Joachim Schoeps, ed. Julius H. Schoeps (Ko¨nigstein: Athena¨um, 1985), 171. The article first appeared in Martin Rade’s Christliche Welt, the leading liberal Protestant journal, in August 1929. See also Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, ‘‘Das wissenschaftliche Werden von Hans-Joachim Schoeps und seine Vertreibung aus Deutschland 1938,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 32 (1980): 319–52. 112. Schoeps, who had corresponded extensively with Barth and had published in Die christliche Welt, which Barth had joined as an editorial assistant in 1908, was known for his German-Jewish nationalist writings. Ever delicate in these matters, Taubes calls him ‘‘the Prussian Jew Hans Joachim Schoeps’’ (Taubes, From Cult to Culture, 46). See also Richard Faber, Deutschbewusstes Judentum und ju¨dischbewusstes Deutschtum: Der Historische und Politische Theologe Hans-Joachim Schoeps (Wu¨rzburg: Ko¨nigshausen & Neumann, 2008). 113. See Margarete Kohlenbach, ‘‘Kafka, Critical Theory, Dialectical Theology: Adorno’s Case Against Hans-Joachim Schoeps,’’ German Life and Letters 63, no. 2 (April 2010): 153. 114. Cf. Julius H. Schoeps, Introduction to Im Streit um Kafka und das Judentum, ed. Schoeps, 7–30, 21 and 29n.53 and 29n.54; Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, Briefwechsel 1933–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), letters numbered 7, 13, 16, and 58. 115. Andreas Pangritz, ‘‘Musste ‘die Opposition fast durchgehend’ sein? Zu Walter Benjamins und Gershom Scholems Wahrnehming Karl Barths und der ‘dialektischen Theologie,’ ’’ in Profanes Leben: Walter Benjamins Dialektik der Sa¨kularisierung, ed. Daniel Weidner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 310. 116. Hans Joachim Schoeps, ‘‘Die geistige Gestalt Kafkas,’’ 173. Other references to Barth can be found in the 1929 essay ‘‘Max Brod’’ in Im Streit um Kafka und das Judentum, ed. Schoeps, 145–54, 152–53. 117. Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 71–72n.5; trans. modified. See Max Brod and Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Foreword, in Franz Kafka, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer: Ungedruckte Erza¨hlungen und Prosa aus dem Nachlass (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 2008), 250–66. 118. Gershom Scholem, ‘‘Offener Brief an den Verfasser der Schrift ‘Ju¨discher Glaube in dieser Zeit,’ ’’ in idem, Briefe, vol. 1, I 1914–1947, ed. Itta Shedletzky (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994), 468. 119. Schoeps, ‘‘Die geistige Gestalt Kafkas,’’ 172. 120. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 35–36; trans. modified. The reference to an ‘‘unknown god’’ is also taken as a point of departure by von Harnack, who suggests that Marcion developed this notion from that of an ‘‘eventual god’’ to that of a radically ‘‘alien’’ God, thus departing from the Hellenizing and gnostic tendencies of his time that Paul confronted, as the scene on the Areopagus in Acts testifies. Moreover, the idea of an absolutely presuppositionless assumption or instauration is an eminently phenomenological operation, which brings Barth into the vicinity of Husserl, with whose concept of the phenomenologically originally given—together with the ‘‘reduction’’ and neutralization of the natural disposition—it shows remarkable parallels. See Hendrik Johan Adriaanse, Zu den Sachen Selbst: Versuch einer Konfrontation der Theologie Karl Barths mit der pha¨nomenologischen Philosophie Edmund Husserls (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), and also Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011). 121. Schoeps, ‘‘Die geistige Gestalt Kafkas,’’ 172. 122. Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, 67.

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123. Kohlenbach, ‘‘Kafka, Critical Theory, Dialectical Theology,’’ 153. 124. Ibid. 125. Ibid. 126. Cf. Kohlenbach, ‘‘Kafka, Critical Theory, Dialectical Theology,’’ 149. 127. Ibid., 151; my emphasis. 128. Ibid., 154: ‘‘In 1963, Adorno publicly acknowledged that, while much of the German (dialectical-theological) Kierkegaard reception merged with the extreme right, Barth himself was unwavering in his active resistance to National Socialism. In the light of this concession on Adorno’s part, the general political indictment of dialectical theology in ‘Notes on Kafka’ proves untenable. ¨ sthetSee Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘Kierkegaard Noch einmal,’’ in Kierkegaard Konstruktion des A ischen,’’ Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 293–320. Here is not the place to begin to analyze Adorno’s invectives against Barth and dialectical theology generally: one should start with Jargon of Authenticity. 129. Cf. Kohlenbach, ‘‘Kafka, Critical Theory, Dialectical Theology,’’ 154: ‘‘A radical concept of transcendence favors the mistrust in social institutions and political power but cannot, due to its very nature, determine the way in which the individuals or groups upholding such a concept actually engage with practical institutions and power relations. . . . If anything is wrong with dialectical theology, it is not that it is intrinsically ideological but that it is political unhelpful.’’ 130. Schoeps, ‘‘Die geistige Gestalt Kafkas,’’ 170. 131. Adorno, ‘‘Notes on Kafka,’’ 259. Adorno attributes to Kierkegaard’s influence on Barth a far greater role than is borne out by the facts; see McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 235–40. 132. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmitt Noerr, trans. Edmond Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 179. See also Ralf Frisch, Theologie im Augenblick ihres Sturzes: Theodor W. Adorno und Karl Barth, Zwei Gestalten einer kritischen Theorie der Moderne (Vienna: Passagen , 1999). 133. Theodor W. Adorno Archive, Paul Tillich to Adorno, undated, early October 1965, and Adorno to Tillich, October 9, 1965. Cited after Adorno Metaphysics, 182n.4. 134. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3:186. 135. See, e.g., H. J. Adriaanse, ‘‘After Theism,’’ in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 392–412; and Hent de Vries, Henri A. Krop, and Arie L. Molendijk, eds., Post-Theism: Reframing the Judeo-Christian Tradition (Leuven: Peeters, 2000). 136. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 428–29. The reference is to Barth’s Church Dogmatics, 1. 137. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 430. 138. Ibid. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid., 246. 141. Ibid. 142. See Lazier, God Interrupted, and Fenves, The Messianic Reduction. 143. Benjamin and Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, 66. 144. Kohlenbach, ‘‘Kafka, Critical Theory, Dialectical Theology,’’ 159. 145. Ibid. 146. Ibid. 147. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 402; trans. modified. 148. Ibid.

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149. Bruce L. McCormack, ‘‘Not a Possible God but the God Who Is: Observations on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Doctrine of God,’’ in The Reality of Faith in Theology: Studies on Karl Barth (Princeton-Kampen Consultation 2005 ed., McCormack and Gerrit Neven (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 111–39. 150. See Hent de Vries, ‘‘Introduction: Why Still ‘Religion’?’’ in Religion: Beyond A Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 1–98. 151. Kohlenbach, ‘‘Kafka, Critical Theory, Dialectical Theology,’’ 160. 152. Cf. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 243–44: ‘‘The frequent depiction of the rhetorical style of Romans II as expressionistic is correct as far as it goes, but it does not tell the whole story. . . . What makes the style of Romans II distinctive is the tone of anger with which it is written; its proclivity for ‘indirect communication’ . . . and paradoxical forms of expression (i.e., ‘through faith, we are what we are not!’). Above all, the second edition is radical in its one-sidedness.’’ But, strictly speaking, this (‘‘one-sidedness’’; seeing one side of things at once) is, precisely, what dual aspect seeing implies. One does not see two sides at once, with each side excluding the other. Both are true de jure and appropriate de facto, that is to say, in the relevant pragmatic context. McCormack makes a further reference to expressionism, suggesting that the journal Zwischen den Zeiten—founded in 1923 by Barth, Thurneysen, and Gogarten, as a medium for ‘‘progressive, anti-establishment theology’’—‘‘was to theology, one might say, what Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm had been to expressionistic painting and Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion to expressionistic literature in pre-war Berlin: journals whose very names breathed discontent and rebellion’’ (ibid., 314). 153. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 207. 154. Ibid., 401. 155. Erich Przywara, ’’Gott in uns oder u¨ber uns? (Immanenz und Transzendenz im heutigen Geisteslebe,‘‘ in Stimmen der Zeit105 (1923):350, cited after McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Dialectic Theology, 320–21. 156. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Dialectic Theology, 321. Cf. Karl Barth, ’’Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie,‘‘ in Anfa¨nge der dialektischen Theologie, ed. Moltmann, 1:, 1497–218. 157. Pritchard, ‘‘Bilderverbot Meets Body in Theodor W. Adorno’s Inverse Theology,’’ 305n.30, with reference to Rene´ Buchholz, Zwischen Mythos und Bilderverbot: Die Philosophie Adornos als Anstoss zu einer kritischen Fundamentaltheologie im Kontext der spa¨ten Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991). 158. See de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 216. 159. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 393. 160. Cf. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 12 and 10. 161. Cited after Rolf Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule: Geschichte, theoretische Entwicklung, politische Bedeutung (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1986), 503. 162. Cited after Matt F. Connell, ‘‘Through the Eyes of an Artificial Angel: Secular Theology in Theodor W. Adorno’s Freudo-Marxist Reading of Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin,’’ in Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, ed. Philip Leonard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 214; my emphasis. 163. See my ‘‘Spinoza, Levinas, and the Theologico-Political Meaning of Scripture,’’ in Political Theologies: Public Religions in the Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 232–48. 164. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 74. The quotes are from Karl Barth, ‘‘Der christliche Glaube und die Geschichte,’’ in Schweizerische theologische Zeitschrift 29 (1912): 1–18; 49–72, 4, and 5.

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165. See also D. Paul La Montagne, Barth and Rationality: Critical Realism in Theology, Foreword by Bruce L. McCormack (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2012). 166. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 1:1, 180. 167. Ibid., 260. 168. Ibid., 95. 169. Ibid., 95–96. 170. Adriaanse, Zu den Sachen Selbst. 171. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 425, 432–433, and 434. 172. Barth, Fides Quaerens Intellectum, 29. 173. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 239. 174. Ibid., 248. 175. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 114. 176. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 28. 177. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 237. 178. Ibid., 238. 179. Ibid. 180. Ibid. 181. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘Reason and Revolution,’’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 142. 182. See de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 601–30, and passim. 183. Max Horkheimer, ‘‘Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen,’’ Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, Vortra¨ge und Aufzeichnungen 1949–1973 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1985), 398 and 389. The translation is cited after an editorial note to Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 181n.3. 184. Pascal Eitler, ‘‘Gott ist tot—Gott ist rot’’: Max Horkheimer und die Politisierung der Religion um 1968 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2009). 185. Ju¨rgen Habermas, ‘‘On the Relation Between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,’’ and Pope Benedict XVI, ‘‘Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic,’’ in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 251–68. For a discussion of Habermas’s writings on religion, see Hent de Vries, ‘‘Global Religion and the Post-Secular Challenge: Ju¨rgen Habermas on God and the World,’’ forthcoming in Habermas and Religion, ed. Jonathan van Antwerpen, Craig Calhoun, and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Social Science Research Council and Polity Press, 2013). 186. Kohlenbach, ‘‘Kafka, Critical Theory, Dialectical Theology,’’ 147. 187. Ibid. 188. Ibid., 148. 189. Agamben may have a point when he relates ‘‘inversion’’ to Scholem’s understanding of the peculiar temporality of the messianic idea: ‘‘One of the theses (the eighty-third, to be exact) Scholem wanted to offer Benjamin on his twentieth birthday in 1918 reads, ‘Messianic time is time of inversive waw.’ The Hebrew system of verbs distinguishes between verb forms not so much according to tense (past and future) but according to aspect: complete (which is usually translated by the past), and incomplete (usually translated by the future). If, however, you put a waw (which is, for this reason, called inversive or conversive) before a complete form, it changes it into an incomplete, and vice versa. According to Scholem’s astute suggestion (which Benjamin may have recalled years later), messianic time is neither the complete nor the incomplete, neither the past nor the future, but the inversion of both. This conversive movement is perfectly rendered in the Pauline typological

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relation as an area of tension in which two times enter into the constellation the apostle called ho nyn kairos. Here, the past (the complete) rediscovers actuality and becomes unfulfilled, and the present (the incomplete) acquires a kind of fulfillment’’ (Agamben, The Time That Remains, 74–75, cf. 97). The passage quoted from Scholem is from The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 295. Note that, on Agamben’s reading, the messianic time or kairos is less timeless ‘‘time’’ or another time, than this time altered and, as it were, curved or warped: ‘‘for Paul, the messianic is not a third eon situated between two times; but rather, it is a caesura that divides the division between times and introduces a remnant, a zone of undecidability in which the past is dislocated into the present and the present is extended into the past’’ (Agamben, The Time That Remains, 74). Or again: ‘‘Kairos (which would be translated banally as ‘occasion’) does not have another time at its disposal; in other words, what we take hold of when we seize kairos is not another time, but a contracted and abridged chronos’’ (ibid., 69). All this means that, as 2 Cor. 12:9 has it, ‘‘Power [or potentiality] realizes itself in weakness [dynamis en astheneia teleitai].’’ Or again: ‘‘God has chosen weak things of the world to shame the things that are mighty’’ (1 Cor. 1:27)’’ (Cited after ibid., 97). This, Agamben goes on to suggest, means that things of the world—and, indeed, the law—are not annihilated but rendered ‘‘inoperative,’’ ‘‘ineffective,’’ that is, ‘‘deactivated‘‘ (ibid., 97–98). 190. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 69. 191. Ibid., 73. 192. Ibid., 7. 193. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 100–101. 194. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 434. 195. Ibid., 70–71. 196. Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts From Memory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 457–558. 197. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 52. 198. Ibid., 53. 199. Ibid., 10.

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Contributors

Gil Anidjar is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Religion at Columbia University. He is the author of: Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (2008); The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (2003); and Our Place in al-Andalus’: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (2002). Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the E´cole Normale Supe´rieur and the College international de philosophie. His books to have appeared in English include Logics of Worlds (2008), The Century (2007), Being and Event (2007), St. Paul: the Foundation of Universalism (2003), and Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2002). Itzhak Benyamini lectures at Haifa University and Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. He is the author (in Hebrew) of: The Laughter of Abraham: Interpretation of Genesis as Critical Theology (2011); Lacan’s Discourse: The Revision of Psychoanalysis and JudeoChristian Ethics (2009); and Paul and the Birth of the Sons’ Community (2007; published in English as Narcissist Universalism, 2012). Ward Blanton is a Reader in Biblical Cultures and European Thought in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kent. He is the author of Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (2007), and A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (2014). Ian Balfour is Professor of English and of Social and Political Thought at York University. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (2002); the editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly entitled Late Derrida(2007); and the co-editor, with Atom Egoyan, of Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (2004), and, with Eduardo Cadava, of the South Atlantic Quarterly special issue And Justice for All: The Claims of Human Rights. He is currently completing a book entitled The Language of the Sublime. Roland Boer is a Research Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His most recent publications are Criticism of Earth: On Marx, Engels and Theology (2011), Cave Droppings: Nick Cave and Religion (2011), and Lenin, Religion, and Theology (2013).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and part-time professor at Tilburg University. His many books include: Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2013); The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Philosophy (2012); and The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009). Clayton Crockett is Associate Professor and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of several books, including Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics after Liberalism (2011), and Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event (2013) as well as co-editor, with Slavoj Zˇizˇek and Creston Davis, of Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics and Dialectic (2011). Troels Engberg-Pedersen is Professor of New Testament at the Department of Biblical Studies, Faculty of Theology, Copenhagen University. He is the author of: Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (2010); Paul and the Stoics (2000); The Stoic Theory of Oikeiosis (1990); and Aristotle’s Theory of Moral Insight (1983). The books he has edited include: Paul Beyond the Judaism/Hellenism Divide (2001) and Paul in His Hellenistic Context (1997). He is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and the Norwegian Academy of Science. Stathis Gourgouris is Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is author of Lessons in Secular Criticism (2013), Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (2003), and Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (1996), and the editor of Freud and Fundamentalism: Psychical Politics of Knowledge (2010). He is currently at work on The Perils of the One, from which the present essay has been taken. Paul A. Holloway is Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins in the School of Theology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He has written Coping with Prejudice: I Peter in Social Psychological Perspective ( 2009) and Consolation in Philippians (2001). He is currently completing a book on Romans, entitled Diatribe, Declamation, and Desire: Reading Romans with Pierre Bourdieu, as well as a commentary on Philippians. Eleanor Kaufman is Professor of Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, the co-editor of Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (1998), and the author of: Deleuze. The Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being (2012); The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (2001), and At Odds with Badiou: Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben (forthcoming).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her most recent books are Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (2011) and, co-authored with Ellen Lupton, Design Your Life: The Pleasure and Perils of Everyday Things (2009). She is also co-author, with Kenneth Reinhard, of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (1993) and the author of Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (2005) and Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (1996), as well as numerous essays on Shakespeare, critical theory, and religion. Kenneth Reinhard is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is co-author, with Slavoj Zˇizˇek and Eric Santner, of The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (2006) and, with Julia Reinhard Lupton, of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (1993), as well as articles on Freud, Lacan, Levinas, Rosenzweig, Badiou, Henry James, Jewish studies, and the Bible. He is completing a book entitled The Political Theology of the Neighbor. Nils F. Schott studied philosophy and comparative literature at the American University of Paris and at the Johns Hopkins University, where he completed a dissertation on the relationship between religion and Enlightenment in catechetical literature. His publications include reflections on conversion as well as many translations. Anto´nia Szabari is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Less Rightly Said: Scandalous Words in the French Reformation 2010) and is currently at work on the revival of paganism in Renaissance France. Stanley Stowers is Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University and the author of A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews and Gentiles (1994) among other books and numerous articles. He teaches and publishes in the areas of ancient Mediterranean religions, including early Christianity, and in the theorization of religion. Shmuel Trigano is Professor of Sociology at Paris Nanterre University. He is the founder and director of the Colle`ge des E´tudes Juives at the Alliance Israe´lite Universelle and founder of the journals Parde`s and Controverses. He has written eighteen books in the domains of political philosophy, spirituality, Jewish studies, and historical sociology, the most recent of which is Politique du peuple Juif_: Les Juifs, Israe¨l et le monde (2013). Marc de Wilde is Professor of Legal Theory at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include a book on the political theologies of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, Verwantschap in Extremen: Politieke Theologie Bij Walter Benjamin en Carl Schmitt (2008),

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CONTRIBUTORS

Hent de Vries is Professor in the Humanities Center and the Department of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University, where he holds Russ Family Chair and serves as the Director of the Humanities Center. He is currently also a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and, from 2014 to 2018 he will serve as the Director of the School of Criticism and Theory, at Cornell University. His principal publications include: Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (1999), Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (2002), and Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Theodor W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas (2005). He is the co-editor, with Samuel Weber, of Religion and Media (2001) and the co-editor, with Lawrence Sullivan, of Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (2006). In addition, he is the General Editor of the five-volume series entitled The Future of the Religious Past as well as the editor of its first volume, Religion: Beyond a Concept (2008). Emma Wasserman is Assistant Professor of Religion at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Sin, Death, and the Law in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology (2008). Her current research focuses on the epistles of Paul, apocalypticism, and the social description of ancient intellectuals. L. L. Welborn is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Fordham University. He is the author of three books on Paul: An End to Enmity: Paul and the ‘‘Wrongdoer’’ of Second Corinthians (2011); Paul, the Fool of Christ: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1–4 in the Comic-Philosophic Tradition (2005); and Politics and Rhetoric in the Corinthian Epistles (1997). He is co-author, with Cilliers Breytenbach, of Encounters with Hellenism: Studies in First Clement (2002) and co-editor, with Kathy Gaca, of Early Patristic Readings of Romans (2006). He served for six years as co-chair of the Seminar on Romans Through History and Cultures of the Society of Biblical Literature. With Dale Martin, he edits the book series Synkrisis: Comparative Approaches to Early Christianity in Greco-Roman Culture. Slavoj Zˇizˇek is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Llubljana, Slovenia, and Codirector of the Center for Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. His many books include: The Parallax View (2006); The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (2000); and Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (1993).

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