SBL Toronto 2002
Romans Through History and
Cultures Seminar
Reception
of Paul by Non-Christian Philosophers Today[1]
Alain
Gignac
“Most contemporary
receptions of Romans are
interpretations by Christians who read this text as Scripture.” (Grenholm and
Patte 2000, 1)
As part of the
“Romans through History and Cultures
Seminar,” I am presenting three contemporary readings of Paul proposed by
European philosophers.[2] Sign of the
times at the turn of the millennium? These reading have just been published in
French, one right after the other: Alain Badiou (1997,1998), Jacob Taubes
(1999, translation of the original posthumous German published in 1993), and
Giorgio Agamben (2000, translation from the original Italian published the same
year). The project pursued here is an ambitious one, since each of these works
could—and should—be the subject of a separate study. Three reasons prompt me to
undertake this daring task: to bring these works as yet unpublished in English
into public view; to bring to light the intersections linking them; and to
reflect upon the hermeneutic implications of these non-Christian and not
directly theological appropriations of Romans. But I would first like to explain why I became interested in
these thinkers who poach in the hunting grounds of theologians and exegetes,
and how this interest has come to be grafted, almost impertinently, on this SBL
seminar.
1. Why Summon Three Philosophers to This Seminar?
1.1 My reading
context: a secularized Quebec
As a Quebec
academic professionally dedicated to the interpretation of Paul’s writings, I
find myself in a paradoxical situation. I am paid by the State to do theology
in a society which is extremely ambivalent, even profoundly ill at ease, about
religious matters—now considered irrelevant. We are speaking of a society that
will not even draw on its Christian roots, however fertile they may be. Having
evolved on the outskirts of North America’s mainstream Anglo-Saxon society and
in estrangement from the international (but still Euro-centred) French-speaking
community, Quebec has a minority status in both linguistic spheres, but has
produced a very distinct culture. And, to my mind, Quebec is now perhaps one of
the West’s most secularized societies,[3] having in some
sort swung from one extreme to the other in the space of forty years (Lefebvre
2000, Lemieux and Montminy 2000).[4] Once derided as
a “priest-ridden province,” Quebec experienced the rapid transformation of its
state, social, and cultural institutions, amounting to a secularization which,
for all its quietness, was nonetheless radical: Hence, the now familiar tag
“Quiet Revolution” used to label the 1960-1980 era. The Church is no longer a
major social force; the Bible is no longer a touchstone; and religious
experience itself has been overshadowed or at least privatized in the extreme.
It will thus be understood that, in today’s Quebec, studying the Bible in a
scientific and faith-filled manner mindful of the ancient “fides quaerens intellectum”
maxim is no longer a given.
In the context
which is mine, why and how should Romans be
read today? Two paths quickly appeared to me as dead ends, or at the very
least, as unpromising. First, there is what I would call the canonical
approach, postulating that the biblical text’s authority and relevance abide in
its having been transmitted by the believing community and in its capacity for
transmitting that community’s experience.[5] Despite the fact
that I personally assume the canonical character of the Bible, I am no longer
able to proceed as if this postulate were evident. Besides, what relevance is
there in understanding Romans based
on traditional categories and issues, such as justification and salvation, when
these concepts are meaningless for my fellow citizens?[6] In my Quebec
context, I cannot read Romans solely from the believer’s perspective. If I want
to make room for the hermeneutic objective of interpretation—seeking to
understand myself through the text—, I cannot assert beforehand that I shall
reach that objective. Second, there is what I would call the academic approach
which undertakes the rigourous descriptive study of the biblical text as if it
were any other human artifact proposed for study. Despite the fact that I
endorse the demands of scientific principles, I cannot allow them to restrict
the scope of my reading. Where is the relevance in explaining Romans from an historical or literary
point of view, if this adds nothing to its meaning for my fellow citizens?
Notwithstanding the Quebec context—or perhaps because of it!—I cannot read
Romans as if this text were
insignificant and powerless to fuel the quest for meaning. If I want to honour
the heuristic objective of interpretation—explaining the text as it is—, I
cannot, a priori, restrict my
investigation to this sole objective.[7]
In sum, from
where I speak, I must question both my role as a theologian who reflects on the
coherence of the faith in and for a believing community and my role as an
academic who ensures the cohesion of a scholarly body of knowledge—without
denying either role. This questioning led me to the following working
hypothesis: read Romans today as a classic of Western culture, in
counterpoint to the contemporary philosophical query which is now commonly called
(post)modern.[8] Here, my
definition of “classic” will not be that of Gadamer (1996, 306-312)—a text
fusing two horizons opens onto a revelatory experience,[9] neither will it
be performative—a text whose intrinsic narrative and rhetorical qualities are
capable of transforming the reader. Though I do not exclude these two
possibilities, my criterion is more pragmatic: a classical text is one which is
still taught and transmitted because
it is deemed fundamentally relevant in its message and/or exemplary in its form
and/or capable of “reviving subjects through the word” whose trace it bears
(Panier 2002).
That Romans has
been a classic along with Augustine, Luther, and Barth is not open to
discussion; that it will remain so in the future is beyond demonstration; that
it remains a classic for current philosophical discussion—now, that is surprising. Yet, to the question:
“Can today’s questions be touched on in a reading of Romans?”, the three
philosophers with which we are concerned reply: “Yes.”
1.2 The Context
of the Romans Seminar
By proposing to
undertake a classical criticism
rather than a strictly speaking scriptural
criticism, does my contribution respect the spirit of this seminar, as
described in the preface to the first book in the collection of its published
works (Grenholm and Patte 2000)? Two objections occur to me. On the one hand,
the seminar takes a resolutely confessional stance: “Without denying the value
and insightfulness of non religious readings, this approach is deliberately
focused upon individual and communal interpretations of biblical texts by
believers, because these interpretations have been neglected for too long by
biblical studies.” (Grenholm and Patte 2000, 3). It is clear that the three
thinkers whom I present do not offer a religious reading—which does not mean
that they do not respect the religious perspective of the text. Quite to the
contrary, taking a view opposed to the above quote, I wonder whether these profane and secular readers of
Paul cannot help us rediscover the religious depths of Romans, by getting us out of our confessional ruts
and stereotypical readings. It even seems to me that these non-religious
readings have been too long neglected by the interpretative community of
theologians.
On the other
hand, the seminar wishes to establish a dialogue between “church historians,
theologians, specialists of present-day receptions of Romans, and New Testament
scholars.” (Grenholm and Patte 2000, 1). Now, I am not sure where I should
place myself in that enumeration. Trained as a New Testament scholar, I
nevertheless can no longer clearly distinguish my work from that of a
theologian. What is more, I am not speaking here as a Pauline expert submitting
his own interpretation of Romans (which I have done elsewhere in, for example,
Gignac 1999), but as a specialist in the current reception of Romans—which I am not!
In other words, I am here playing a role of mediation between Pauline studies
and the field of contemporary philosophy, even though I am all too aware of the
gaps in my philosophical training. Aware as well of my temerity, I take courage
in noting that Taubes, Badiou, and Agamben, in their own transgression of
disciplinary barriers, were also bound to commit certain faux pas, but this did
not prevent them from producing seminal analyses. Now it’s my turn to poach for
nutritious game in the hunting grounds of the philosophers.
1.3 Three
Philosophers
Taubes, Badiou,
and Agamben are little known in the United States; only the last named is
systematically translated into English. As part of their university teaching
(seminars), they have read Paul in their respective philosophical reading
traditions—I shall come back to this—as the culmination and verification of
their philosophical process. We are dealing with mature thinkers and not
novices. We can unhesitatingly affirm that they are attentive, curious,
erudite, empathetic readers who meet the text with what they consider urgent
and crucial questions. Broadly, what is at stake is nothing less than examining
the possibility of politics in today’s world where the collapse of Marxism
gives free reign to the only surviving proponent: neo-liberal thought. In this
context, how can the relationship of the subject to the event, to the
universal, and to history be thought out? As we shall see, the three are linked
by genealogy or rivalry—Agamben dedicates his book to Taubes and, like him,
takes his inspiration from Walter Benjamin; Agamben and Badiou, implicitly and
even explicitly, sometimes take aim at each other.
For each of the
three philosophers, we shall follow the same pattern of presentation. In
keeping with the procedure developed as part of the Romans Seminar (Grenholm
and Patte 2000, 2-3.25-36.42-43), we shall have to be attentive to their
general hermeneutical frame (their philosophical system), to their contextual
frame (the problem with which they are concerned), and to their analytical frame. In the last case, this
will mean presenting both the results of the reading (their theses) and the
manner in which they read. In the course of the exposition, I shall be marking
the reactive point of view of the exegete.
2. Three Readings of Romans
2.1 Taubes: Paul,
founder of a new people
Jacob Taubes
(1923-1987) is a non-conformist intellectual. A rabbi and son of a rabbi, a
practising Jew, first a citizen of Austrian and then a naturalised American.
Professor at the Freie Universität of Berlin (Brague 2000), his book Die politische Theologie des Paulus
(Taubes 1993, 1999b)[10] is the
posthumous publication of four lectures delivered to a theological audience in
rather peculiar circumstances. Suffering from terminal cancer—Taubes was
hospitalized between the second and third lecture—the philosopher was
determined to keep his commitment because he wanted his commentary on Romans to be his intellectual testament.
Indeed, he insisted that the recordings of his lectures should be published:
strange for a man who published so little during his career. Moreover, the
tone—by turns confiding, anecdotal, and trenchantly judgemental[11]—and the form—digressions, understatements, circular
thought, incomplete demonstrations—are both bewildering. Nor is Taubes devoid
of humour about himself: “I should have devoted myself to theology, but by
vanity and destiny, I became a philosopher.” (21). Finally, he ends up by
describing himself as a Pauline non-Christian (130).
System (world vision)
In a postface not
included in the French edition, the editors of the German edition of the four
lectures call Taubes’s thought negative
political theology, in as much as it proposes a new universalism which
undermines the legitimacy of every political order, whether imperial or
theocratic (Taubes 1993, 151-152). It would be more exact to speak in terms of
a political philosophy of enlistment in history, elaborated through two
Judeo-Christian theological concepts: the apocalyptic and the messianic. Hence
Taubes’s questions: “…at what epoch are we living? With what present are we
dealing ?” (83). Calling himself a “secular theologian” (113), Taubes positions
himself at the crossroads of theology and philosophy: this is in no way
exceptional, given the pre- and post-war intellectual climate in Germany,
Taubes’s stated adherence to Judaism, and, above all, the influences he has
accepted.
Die politische Theologie des Paulus reveals to us
the author’s intellectual itinerary. Taubes was first the disciple of Gershom
Scholem (25) who had himself been the close friend of Walter Benjamin. In
critical terms, Taubes falls in line with Benjamin who advocated transforming
the world through commitment to political action in the form of messianic
nihilism (106-112). So much for the Jewish influences. But, paradoxically,
Taubes’s whole opus, and especially the book with which we are concerned, is a
dialogue with the conservative Catholic jurist, Carl Schmitt.[12] This dialogue
could only be dramatic, since Schmitt , like Martin Heidegger, had given his
consent to the Nazi regime and its “theo-zoological” racism (81) and since
Taubes admired him, having delved into his writings from the start of his
university studies (Taubes 1999a, 153-154):
As a
counter-revolutionary apocalyptic thinker [=Schmitt], I knew and still do know
that there is an intellectual affinity between us. We are caught up with the
same themes, even though we have drawn opposite consequences from them. (Taubes
1999a, 160)
Carl Schmitt
thinks apocalyptically, but from the top down, from the domain of the powers,
whereas I think from the bottom up. But we both share the experience of time
and history as a delay. And this was, originally, the Christian experience of
time (Taubes 1999a, 164)
We knew that we were adversaries both in life and in death, but we understood each other
deeply because we knew, both of us, that we were speaking on the same level.
(106, emphasis added)
The word adversary, to which we may add the word enemy, is here of heavy significance.
It will determine the crucial importance of Rom 11:28 which, for Taubes,
becomes the key to the whole letter: “As regards the gospel they are enemies of God for your sake; but as
regards election they are beloved,
for the sake of their ancestors”(emphasis added). But, if we would understand
the full weight of the word, we must know Schmitt’s specific use of it.[13] On this, I shall
quote the limpid explanation given by Daniel Tanguay:
He intended this distinction to express a concrete and
existential meaning: the political struggle is constituted first by the clash
of groups which are gathered together on the grounds of a friends-enemies
criterion (See concerning this Carl Schmitt, La notion du politique: La théorie du partisan, Paris,
Calmann-Lévy, 1972, p. 65-77). What is here at stake is not some personal
antipathy pitting one individual against another, but much rather the watershed
dividing human groups between friends and enemies. This divide originates in a
primordial existential decision which assigns to a group or a people the title
of friend or enemy. This is the decision in which politics expresses its
essence. Schmitt will not stop at this simple agonistic definition of the
political. Behind the political struggle another struggle is taking form: a
struggle between spiritual forces which secretly dominate the actual political
struggle. For the political theologian that Schmitt was, this struggle pitted
Catholicism against the forces of anarchy and revolution (p. 134-135). But one
could say that this struggle was still only secondary to a more essential
rivalry: that of Christianity and Judaism concerning divine election. As in the
other struggles, Schmitt had chosen his side: the true enemy is the Jewish
people (Tanguay 2001, 365-366)
In sum, Taubes
institutes a veritable triangular dialogue: Paul, Taubes-Benjamin, and Schmitt.
Let’s now see what results it will have for the interpretation of Romans.
“It really does
take a certain cheek to tackle this text” (17). What compels Taubes to read
Romans is that time is running out,
in two senses: As I said, he knows that his days are numbered; but then his
entire career also bears the stamp of this apocalyptic urgency. Taubes tells
how, during his only meeting with Carl Schmitt, he had defended his apocalyptic
and Jewish reading of Paul, showing him the impossibility of founding a
Christian anti-Semitism on Rom 11. Schmitt had then made him promise to state
his case one day “before passing away” (19).
Taubes seems to
have a threefold objective: (1) to defuse the Christian anti-Judaism which
takes Paul as its source; (2) to defend his political vision one last time; (3)
to build a bridge between philosophy and theology: “Why have I ventured into
the theological field? I consider the isolation of faculties of theology fatal
to them. In my opinion, the most urgent task for these faculties consists in
installing a few windows in their monads.” (20) Inversely, Taubes deplores the
lack of biblical culture in his students of philosophy.
Ironically,
despite the muddled and disheveled style of his lectures, Taubes is the one
among our three philosophers who reflects most on his method, but by an accumulation
of little secrets, so to speak. Indeed, in keeping with his objective of
recuperating Paul for Judaism, Taubes, the philosopher and rabbi, proposes a
Jewish reading of Romans which is at once literal, intuitive, and associative.
He lets the word slip in reading the introduction to Paul’s Epistle: his
reading is in the Talmudic style (36). Then further on, he will shed light on
Rom 9:3 (to be anathema) with an exposé of the Talmudic treatise Berakhoth 32a
(52-56).
Taubes is aware
that his reading is not that of a theologian, and even less that of an
historico-critical exegete: “What I intend to expose here has nothing to do
with the Paul studied in the faculties of theology, rightly and legitimately,
besides.” (18) “I do not think in a theological mode. I am working with
theological material, but thinking from the viewpoint of intellectual history,
in line with historical reality. I am asking what political potentials the
theological metaphors conceal” (105); “I do not have a very high opinion of the
modern biblical criticism begun with Spinoza” (72). Yet, as we shall see, his
political interpretation of Paul presupposes and takes into account the
historical situation of the apostle. Specifically, he stresses the rivalry
between Judeo- and Pagan-Christians which is essential to any understanding of
Paul (38-41)—and Badiou will connect with him on this point.
In line with the
history of religions (67), Taubes proposes to be a philologist attentive to
religious symbolism which, according to him, is a risky intuitive method but
one which, if skillfully practised, can be fruitful. He wants to touch the
experience which emerges in the Pauline text, an experience that he more than
once correlates with the (mystical) Jewish experience recurring in history (79):
he relates Paul to Sabbatianism, the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the mentality
manifested in the current collections sent by the Diaspora to Israel, the
return of young American Jews to Israel, the experience of Walter Benjamin in
his youth.[14] Taubes calls this
a phenomenological reading: “How does this feel to a Jew?” (76). He thus pleads
in favour of a sensus allegoricus, an
interpretation contrived to point towards a life experience[15] (71-72).
However, Taubes
intends to stick closely to the text: “What does it say? not What does it
recount? but What does it say fundamentally?” (118) “The reader must not
pretend to be more intelligent that the author and attribute to him concepts he
does not possess nor want to possess” (43). Taubes’ definition of philology, a term which surfaces often
in his discourse, can doubtless be related to close reading.
Finally, I note a
broad hermeneutical openness, summed up in the following formula: “It is easy
to read Paul’s history unilaterally and not see the latent elements it
conceals. We may say that no one has understood it and that, all the same, no
one has entirely misread his words” (90).
What emerges in
the course of the reading? General remark: the (intuitive) grasp of the letter
as a whole is remarkable: “The Epistle to the Romans is a great fugue which
begins in 1:18 with the orgè theou
and which then unfurls in waves, in 5, then in 7, and which culminates in the
great shout of jubilation in Chapter 8” (49). In the first part of his book,
following his conversation with Schmitt, Taubes truly reads. Though indulging in occasional digressions, Taubes
gives a close coherent reading of the following passages: the letter’s
epistolary framework (Rom 1:1-17 and Rom 15: 30-33); Rom 8:31-9,5; and then Rom
9-11, relating it in an original manner to Rom 12 and Rom 13:
In 9-11 what is provided is the legitimization of the
new people of God: In the Epistle to the Romans 12 it is the Christian life
which is described, whereas in the Epistle to the Romans 13, he treats the
question of knowing how to behave as part of the Roman Empire which represents
evil. (67)
Taubes reads with
great finesse, not hesitating, for example, to advance a non-Christological
interpretation of the benediction in Rom 9:5 (51). I note with interest—and a good
measure of humility—that the broad lines of his reading of 9-11 coincide with
mine (Gignac 1999): the Apostle’s anguish; the parallel between Paul’s
estrangement in Rom 9: 1-5 and Moses interceding for his people[16]; the problem of
election; the mechanism of jealousy; key to Rom 9-11 found in Rom 11:28;
careful attention to intertextuality.
In the second
part of the book, we have rather to do with a passionate trip through the
history of philosophy’s reception of Paul in terms of the messianic motif: Marcion
and Harnack, Schmitt and Barth, Benjamin and Adorno, Spinoza, Nietszche, and
Freud. In my view, the figures of Benjamin, Nietszche, and Freud stand out from
this list as philosophers who can help us understand Paul.
The preceding
remarks have already introduced the main keys to reading the author; I shall
now take up these key points systematically and add to them a few critical
assessments:
1. On the one
hand, Jewish thought must reappropriate the heretic Paul and, on the other
hand, one can only understand him through the lens of Jewish sensitivity. Paul
is more of a Jew than many of today’s liberal reformed rabbis (29)! Even Paul’s
Greek, which is that of the Diaspora, affords a functional analogy linking his koinè with Yiddish (20). Paul is
certainly the Apostle to the Gentiles but this needs to be stated more
specifically: He is the Jewish messenger
who brings the good news to non-Jews (64.77). The Christian exegete assents to this Judaizing of Paul, in keeping
with a strong trend in recent research. Hence, it is perhaps in listening to a
Jewish commentary on Paul that this exegete will gain an even better grasp of
the Apostle’s Jewishness . Despite its intuitive cast, the analogical method
employed by Taubes makes it possible to perceive the Jewish sensitivity of the
Pauline text from within. The philosopher seems to have been aware that he was
thus throwing a paving stone into the pool of current Jewish theologians.
2. The writing of
Romans constitutes the founding act of a subversive political theology,
primarily in its criticism of the Nomos
which includes both the Pharisees and the whole Roman world (48): “This
theology of the Nomos brought law and order to the Roman Empire which, in the
Augustan era following the civil wars, was enjoying a long period of peace. At
that time, the different groups all participated equally in developing this
theology of the Nomos.” (46). In the letter’s opening words, including those of
the initial credo of Rom 1:3-4, the vocabulary is unmistakably political (34): Gospel, Lord, Messiah. Now, this letter
is being sent to a community in the city which is the very centre of the
imperial cult and power. We are reading a veritable declaration of war whose
aim is to establish a counter-power (36-37). Similarly, the whole of Rom 13
must be seen as a veiled threat to the imperial order, doubled with a strategic
imperative to show prudence in not arousing the suspicions of the authorities. To so highlight the political character of
Romans is extremely stimulating, opening up an original perspective which
compels us to reread the text. This insight falls in line with a new trend in
Pauline research (see, for instance, Horsley 1997 and 2000).
3. Consider this
corollary to the foregoing thesis… As Nietzsche had clearly seen, with the
spite and envy of one who would make himself the rival of Paul (117-130), the
Apostle is operating a revolutionary reversal of values: “…it is not the Nomos
but the Crucified One on behalf of the Nomos who is the Imperator. […] By this
reversal of values the whole world of that time is turned upside down: the
whole Jewish-Roman-Hellenistic theology of the ruling class, all of Hellenism’s
eclecticism—all turned upside down. Paul is certainly also a universalist, but
in his case the universal is drawn through the eye of the needle of the
Crucified One. And that means reversing all the values of this world.” (47). It would be interesting to look closely at
how the letter’s rhetoric induces in the reader such a transformation of his
identity and behaviour.
4. Paul is the
founder of a new people, by enlarging the election of Israel; but he does not
renounce his solidarity with Israel nor does he deny the permanence of its
election: a universalism which does not destroy Israel’s special status (47)—pace Badiou! Paul thus perceives himself
as a new Moses in rivalry with the first Moses (66-67). Recalling Exod 32-34
and Num. 14-15, Taubes contrasts the two figures: “Moses who, as the spokesman
of the people of Israel, refuses, who twice refuses, to accept that a new
people be born of him and that the existing people of Israel should be
annihilated—and Paul who accepts this” (19), in anguish and fear, but with the
hope that, in the end, all of Israel will be saved. As I have already pointed out, this reading connects with mine, but
sets out from another path that explores the Jewish experience throughout the
ages.
5. In several
places (83, 87, 135), Taubes insists on the following observation: Paul
modifies the dual commandment of love for God and love for neighbour which
seems to go back to Jesus; when only the love of neighbour is considered (cf.
Rom 13:9): “attention is fixed on the son, on man; there is already no longer
any question of the father in this commandment” (83). Here again, another surprise, founded however on a judicious
observation. Where Luther had problematicized Romans anthropologically(the justification), where Calvin problematicized it
theologically (the justice of God), Taubes brings us back to the
anthropological but by means of ethics.
6. This leads us
to a final, somewhat obscure thesis which closes Taubes’s seminar like a swan
song: there needs to be a new interpretation of Paul based on Freud and his
book Moses and Monotheism (139).
“Freud who treats the fundamental experience of guild is a direct descendant of
Paul” (131). Judaism would be a guilt-bearing religion of the Father, because
of the repression of the primordial murder of the Father. Paul could be said to
have attempted a reconciliation with the Father through the avowal of this
original sin, a sin expiated by the obedience of the Son. But in divinizing the
Son he could not escape the fatal necessity of demoting the Father (138). How should this insistence on guilt and this
return to a sacrificial interpretation of the death of Jesus be received,
envisaged no longer as the vengeance of God but rather as the relief of human
guilt? In any case, what we do have is a Jewish reader who reminds us that this
question must be raised again and again in our attempts to understand Romans.
For better or for worse, this question is an essential current in the
Wirkungsgeschichte of Romans, acting like a subterranean force guiding the
text’s interpretation.
2.2 Badiou: Paul,
founder of universalism
Alain Badiou
(born in 1937) teaches at the École
normale supérieure in Paris where he read Romans with his students and this
led to the publication of his Saint Paul:
La foundation de l’universalisme (Badiou 1998).[17] His frame of
reading is much more elaborate, rigourous, and exact than that of Taubes and
this requires our taking a rather long look at it.
Philosophical system (world vision)
At the
cross-roads of philosophy and mathematics, Badiou takes an original approach to
certain problems or concerns raised by the Marxist Louis Althusser and by the
psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, adding to them mathematical concepts of set
theory borrowed from Georg Cantor and Paul Cohen, among others. Badiou’s
project consists in re-founding philosophy on new bases (Sedofsky and Badiou
1994). The title of his major work, L’être
et l’événement (Badiou 1988), bowing as it does to Heidegger and Sartre,
reflects this pretension.[18] More
specifically, it is a matter of “re-founding a theory of the subject which
subordinates its existence to the random dimension of the event, as to the pure
contingency of multiple-being, without sacrificing the motive of truth.” (5)
What does that mean?
Based on
mathematical postulates,[19] Badiou opposes
being and event, the set of “there is” and that of “it happens,” posing them as
separate but indissociable. On one side, we have the “ontological” order of
being, accessible to knowledge and characterized by multiplicity: being is the
juxtaposition of individuals and the locus of particularisms. In a word, it is
the situation. On the other side, we have the event which produces the truth of
that situation and emerges from it in a contingent, unpredictable, and
undemonstrable manner—on the horizon of knowledge, a truth always appears
impossible. “For a truth to arise factually requires that it should be without
number, without predicate, uncontrollable” (80). The event, as procedure of
truth, implies unity (the One), requires that a subject should arise to
proclaim it and that it should belong to the realm of singularity (in contrast
with that of multiplicity, individuals, and the particularisms of being).
In sum, the
ordinary and the extraordinary are in a face off.
There is one
point I want to stress as important to the understanding of Saint Paul. The truth in question is
that of a subject (in the dual sense of the objective and subjective genitive):
the event gives rise to a subject who, simultaneously and by backlash, gives it
existence through an act of nomination. The subject interprets the event as
event and this interpretation is part of the event. Here, Badiou speaks of intervention, a subjective decision
which retroactively gives birth to the event. In other words, subject and event
exist in mutual dependence. Now, the event is teleological and normally leads
to a reconfiguration of the initial situation from which it has unexpectedly
arisen. What is required on the side of the subject is unwavering, active, and
faithful commitment, without which the event ceases to be an event at all and
risks being perverted, that is ontologized, reduced to an element of being and,
hence, trivialized.
Badiou
distinguishes four types of truth and, consequently, of events: love, art,
science (mathematics), and politics, not to be confused with their counterfeits
when they become the objects of knowledge (and of merchandising) on the side of
being, in the form of sex, culture, technique, and management (13). What
example can be given to make this comprehensible? Badiou puts forward the
French Revolution (1789-1794), which arose from the situation of the Ancien Régime (Badiou 1988, 201). But it
could also be the Russian Revolution, falling in love, the atonal revolution in
music. Through the chaos apparent in rebellions and riots, the revolutionary
subject has discerned the unprecedented novelty of a Revolution aimed at
universal emancipation (liberty—fraternity—equality) and the institution of
democracy. But the revolutionary ideal was rapidly betrayed to serve particular
factions.
A second
example—a very paradoxical one since it concerns neither love, art, science nor
politics and since our author calls himself an atheist (Zizek 2000, 141-142)—is
of the utmost interest to us. In Badiou, Christian faith appears almost to be
the ultimate paradigm of the event: “…at the heart of Christianity there is
this event, situated and exemplary, which is the death of the son on the cross.
And, at the same time, the belief does not relate centrally to the being-one of
God in His infinite might: Its active kernel is the meaning to be built up out
of that death and the organization of faithfulness to that meaning. […] All the
parameters of the doctrine of the event are thus deposited in Christianity…”
(Badiou 1988, 235). Thus the reading Badiou makes of Romans in Saint Paul is already
intuitively present ten years earlier as he reflects on Pascal in L’être et l’événement (Badiou 1988,
“Méditation 21”, 235-245).
We note that
Badiou uses traditional philosophical vocabulary: ontological, being, event, subject, truth, but in giving it an
entirely different thrust. The exegetes who have reviewed Badiou’s book, for
the most part favourably (Quesnel 1999, for example),[20] have not picked
up on the potential for misunderstanding implied. Thus, when Badiou speaks of
the fable of Christ’s resurrection
(5) it is surely to avoid laying himself open to the criticism… of have become
a Christian. And taking an interest not
in the content but in the structure of “resurrection” event, he neutralizes and
secularizes it. Nonetheless, the word fable
is more ambiguous than it may appear. On the one hand, it can be used to
describe an effect of language where the ineffable attempts to express
itself—an intuition present in Lacan but explored in depth by De Certeau (1992)
and not to be confused either with naiveté or with myth. On the other hand, the
word can refer to the very meaning of event which I have just briefly
presented: Is it not characteristic of the event to be…fabulous?
Why invoke and analyse this fable? Let us make
something very clear: for us, it is very precisely a fable […]: Jesus has
risen. Now, this is indeed the fabulous point, since all the rest, the birth,
the preaching, the death may after
all be tenable. What is “fable” in a narrative is that which, for us, fails to
touch anything real, if not that invisible and indirectly accessible residue
which clings to whatever is patently imaginary. In this respect, Paul brings
the Christian narrative back to its sole point as fable, with the forcefulness
of one who knows that, holding this point as real, one is spared the whole imaginary
fringe surrounding it. (5)
When Badiou affirms “let us say that for us it is rigourously impossible to believe in the resurrection of the Crucified One.” (6) this is not to belittle the resurrection but to affirm the impossibility he feels—contrary to Paul—to name it an event. In any case, like any event “the Resurrection of Christ is neither an argument, nor an accomplishment. Nor is there any proof of the event, nor is the event itself any proof (52).”
In line with this, our closing remarks turn to the main criticism raised against Badiou (for example Lyotard 1989, 240ff; Zizek 2000, 143-144). If the event is not “in the order of a falsifiable and demonstrable fact” (47), will not the ‘intervention’ which names the event arise from the purely arbitrary? What is to distinguish the option for Nazism from that for the French Revolution? What in the event calls upon the subject to discern something unprecedented and imperative? Badiou would no doubt answer that the subject must be in order with equality, thus with the universal (Terray 1990, 75).
And this leads us
to Badiou’s Saint Paul.
The questions
driving Badiou’s reading of Paul are clearly developed in chapter 1 “Paul’s
Contemporaneity” (5-16). Seeing the upheaval we are experiencing, specifically
that revolutionary disillusionment arising from the disappearance of any
mobilizing utopia, we find in Paul a model for thinking the event and living
militantly. For, notwithstanding the content of his message, Paul makes it
possible to rethink the structure of the political, since he is “himself a
contemporary of a monumental figure of the destruction of everything political
(the beginnings of the military despotism called ‘the Roman Empire’)…”
(8)—here, Badiou connects with Taubes.
By renouncing the
concrete universal of truths in order to affirm the right of racial, religious,
national or sexual minorities, the current epoch no longer has any tools to
obstruct the abstract homogenization of the circulation of capital and its
complete disregard for persons. Cultural globalization and the retreat into
ethnic enclaves are two sides of the same coin: “The capitalist logic of
general equivalence and the identity and cultural logic of communities or
minorities form an integral whole” (11, cf. 14).[21] We must be open to a reading of Romans which allows us to state clearly some
criticism of the current political crisis.
Badiou does not
hesitate to accord Paul the status of a classic, but he fails to define this
status: “I have always read the Epistles as one returns to classical texts
which are particularly familiar, well-worn paths, details abolished, power
intact.” (1). He will read Romans as he reads Pascal, Heidegger, and Plato,
which means through the lens of being and event. The pieces of the puzzle
retrieved from the analysis of Paul fall almost too perfectly into place to
reconstitute Badiou’s philosophical system, so much so that, when he writes:
“Paul points out,” we would be tempted to read “Badiou points out.” We also
have the impression that Badiou keeps less closely to the text than Taubes,
though he thinks in a more rectilinear fashion and quotes more Pauline passages
in extensio than does the German
philosopher.
I want to stress
this point: Badiou rereads Paul to find his own conception of the event there.
From the start, his reading template is obvious: “The philosophically
reconstituted debate covers three concepts. Interruption: What does an event
interrupt, what does it preserve? Fidelity: What does being faithful to an
event-based interruption imply? Marking: Are there visible marks or signs of
fidelity? At the intersection of these three concepts the fundamental inquiry
builds up: Who is the subject of the process of truth?” (24)
Badiou’s reading
is a-historical, in more ways than one. First, running counter to all exegesis
of Romans over the last twenty-five years (Donfried 1991), one can and even
must dispense with any contextualization of Paul’s letters, since there is no
causal link between the event and the situation which saw its birth—therefore,
in the case of Paul, between the Gospel and the Roman Empire (16): “There we
have, under the imperative of the event, something dense and timeless,
something which, precisely because it involves a thought destined to
universality in its emerging singularity but is so independently of any anecdote, we can find intelligible
without recourse to complicated historical mediations…” (38). Regarding
biographical elements and the circumstances in which the text was written,
Badiou will write: “What good is all that? Look at the books. Direct tickets to
doctrine.” (17). Yet, in his chapter “Who is Paul?” (17-23), this does not
prevent him from being surprisingly well informed with regard to the
discussions surrounding the authenticity of the letters, the situation of
Judaism in the Roman Empire, the debate stirred up by opening Christianity to
pagans and their relation to the Jewish Law, and the political issues involved
in Pauline collections. Similarly, his remarks on the reasons for canonizing
the Pauline corpus are enlightening and incisive. Nor, as we have seen, is he
prevented from making an analogy between our epoch and that of the Roman
Empire.
Second, Badiou
connects with Bultmann: “All is brought back to one sole point: Jesus, son of
God […], and thereby Christ, died on the cross and was resurrected. The rest,
all the rest, is of no real importance. We would even say: the rest (what Jesus
said and did) is not the reality of the
conviction but encumbers and even falsifies it.” (35, cf. also 67).
Moreover, we note
that, except for Pascal and Nietzsche (64-67.75-77), Badiou, unlike Taubes,
spends little time dialoguing explicitly with philosophers who have read Paul
before him. And when he does, it is to insist on the fact that they have not
understood Paul… Could it be that Badiou finally has? This attitude stands in
contrast to that of Taubes for whom, I recall, no one has entirely understood
Paul, just as no one has been completely led astray in interpreting him.
Spelled out and
commented on in the six points enumerated below, one thesis stands out: “…for Paul it is a matter of exploring what law can structure a subject stripped of all identity, and
suspended from an event whose only ‘proof’ is exactly that a subject proclaims it […] this paradoxical
connection between a subject without identity and a law without support founds
the possibility within history of a universal
predication” (6, emphasis added).
1. Paul, like a
Nietzsche—who saw in him his rival, as Taubes already pointed out—is an
anti-philosopher (18.62.76), but in a radical sense: not “that philosophy is an
error, a necessary illusion, a phantasm, etc., but that there is no longer any
place to receive its pretension.” (62) What is more, the figure of Paul is that
of a militant, a resistance fighter, as the film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini so
well understood (38-41) in his film project on Paul (Pasolini 1980).[22] Much like a
Party faithful or union delegate, Paul is an activist encountering adherents, sympathizers,
and opponents; he writes to organize the former or to contest the latter and he
busies himself collecting funds for the cause. Taubes had already presented
Paul as a political agitator, but without going into as much detail. This Pauline “reconfiguration” is
refreshing, after so many centuries of hagiography. However, it is done at the
expense of a very dangerous historical uncoupling. Moreover, this recuperation
leaves somewhat puzzled: why does a Marxist philosopher like Badiou feel the need
to go looking for his figure of the militant in the religious field? Could it
be that available revolutionary models no longer exist? Could this be yet
another example showing that Marxism is a secularized Christianity (see Agamben
in the next pages)? As for the anti- philosophical (philosophical!) category…
there’s a question to dig into, but one which puts Paul solidly in the
philosophical tradition! In a similar manner, why shouldn’t Paul be presented
as an anti-theologian?
2. Badiou finds
in Paul, i.e. in 1 Cor 1:17-19, a topological dynamics[23] of four
subjective discourses similar to Lacan’s figures of discourse[24] (chapter IV,
43-57). This topology shows that Paul is in actual fact the subject witnessing
the event. Taking the Jewish and Greek discourses as two opponents propping
each other up, Paul dismisses them both as unsatisfactory: the first is that of
the prophet who asks for a sign in the frame of a particular election; the
other is that of the sage who questions nature in the frame of a universal
cosmos. “ ‘Jew’ and ‘Greek’ designate properly nothing that we could
spontaneously understand in the word ‘people’ […] it is a matter of what Paul
considers the two coherent intellectual figures in the world which is his”
(43-44). To these two master discourses which are also discourses of the
father, Paul opposes a third one, the apostle's discourse which proclaims the
truth of an event surpassing all discourses based on knowledge, whether of sign
or of reason. Paul thereby institutes the discourse of the son in which one
will note the apparent convergence with Taubes’s reading of Freud. The
destitution of the two master discourses—Jewish particularism and (false) Greek
universalization—founds the equality of the sons, which is true universalism.
(63) There exists a fourth discourse, that of the mystic, which is in the order
of the ineffable and the non-discourse. According to 2 Cor 12: 1-10, Paul is
acquainted with it, but refuses to use it, as this would be returning to the
discourse of the sign. Hence the expression: “There is neither Jew not Greek.” The analysis of 1Cor 1 is interesting.
However, the conceptual interpretation of the Jew/Greek couple in Paul has
three weaknesses. (1) Jew/Greek is in fact a polarity of ethnic identity
expressed from the Jewish point of view. (2) This polarity does not work the
same in Rom as in 1Cor: “there is no longer any difference” (Rom 10:12, quoted
by Badiou), but from one end to the other of the letter, the Apostle’s argument
is based on this difference! Paul’s universality does not level differences.
(3) The analysis of Rom 9-11 shows clearly that by opening election to the
Greek, Paul does not obliterate the election of the Jews; it seems to me that
here Taubes’s reading of Paul is better. Moreover, the relation with Lacan’s
topological system needs to be verified (Zizek 2000, 162-165).
3. The subject
who discerns the event and is roused by it is a divided subject (chapter V,
59-68 and Badiou 2000, 327-330). Here again we perceive the influence of Lacan
(1977). Contrary to the other three discourses (Greek, Jewish, and mystical)
that of the Apostle witnessing the resurrection-event does not unify the subject, but braids together
two simultaneous subjective paths: the flesh and the spirit, death and life,
the Law and grace, the situation and the effects of the event. In other words,
the Christian lives, at the same time, the situation of the first Adam and of
the second Adam (73). The flesh refers to the closed identities from which one
must liberate oneself: this is the reign of particularistic multiplicity of
accountability, it is the refusal of the event. The spirit refers to the
consequences of the event to be brought forth, it is the reign of the
multiplicity of overabundance, it is the One offered to all. “…an event-made
rupture always constitutes its subject in the divided form of ‘no…but.’ and it is precisely this form which bears the
universal. For the ‘no’ is a potential dissolution of closed particularisms
(whose name is ‘law’), whereas the ‘but’ indicates the task, the faithful
labour in which the subjects of the process opened by the event (whose name is
grace) are the co-workers” (67-68). This
reinterpretation of the flesh/spirit duet as an analogy of the situation/event
duet is daring, but adequately expresses the still- there/already-there paradox
which characterizes the co-existence of the two ages of the Pauline
apocalyptic.
4. In relation
with the above thesis and still from a Lacanian perspective: the Law is the
mechanism by which the Ego (to be distinguished from the subject) is assigned
to death so that Sin should live, that is so that desire should rampage in the
form of an automatism (chapter VII, 79-89). Rom 7:7-23 is then read as an
autobiography of what Paul experiences after
Damascus (59,84): “The law makes death live, and the subject, as life according
to the spirit, falls on the side of death. The law distributes life on the side
of the way of death and death on the side of the way of life. The death of life
is the Ego (in the death position). Sin is the life of death.” (86) “Sin is
nothing other than the permutation, under the effects of the law, of the
positions of life and death.” (88) “Only a resurrection redistributes death and
life to their rightful places, by showing that life does not necessarily occupy
the place of death.” (89) By clearly
identifying the “I” of Rom 7 with a Christian Pauline “I”, Badiou clearly takes
sides in a controversial debate—a plausible option beside the Adamic “I” and
the Mosaic “I”. He also follows in the tracks of many readings done from a
psychoanalytical perspective (for instance Lacan 1992, 83-84), but his reading
of Lacan has been strongly contested (Zizek 2000, 152-156).
5. Basing himself
on Rom 6:4-8, Badiou affirms that the relation between death and resurrection
is not dialectical as would be two moments of the same reality (chapter VI,
69-78). “The resurrection is neither the co-optation
of death[25] nor the fact of
overcoming it, but something else” (Badiou 2000, 330, emphasis added). As
event, the resurrection emerges from a situation (death) but is not caused by
it. Consequently, the proclamation of a crucified Messiah remains folly and is,
thereby, the bearer of great rhetorical power, but it does not make “suffering
an intrinsically redemptive” function. (74) In sum, unlike the conclusion of
Nietzsche’s analysis, there is nothing death-dealing in the Pauline message: to
be resurrected, Christ had to die, obviously, but he is not resurrected because
he was dead.
Now, ‘death’ here does not refer to the biological
reality, but to one of the two facets of the divided human condition (cf.
thesis 3). According to Badiou, the ‘death’ of Christ allows God to enter into
solidarity with the divided human being and permits the latter to opt for life.
On the one hand, this solidarity is called reconciliation, an equalization
which distinguishes itself from salvation (Rom 5:10): “we become like Christ
for he becomes like us” (Badiou 2000, 330). On the other hand, to resurrect, to
be saved, is to opt for life: “The whole point is to know whether any
existence, breaking with the cruel ordinariness of time, encounters the
material opportunity to serve a truth and to thus become an immortal, within
the subjective division, quite beyond the survival instincts of the human
animal.” (70) By this conceptual formalization, Badiou operates as well a
“secularization of grace” (70, see also 91). This thesis is Badiou’s most daring. It discards the existential
interpretation of “being-for-death” (cf. Heidegger) and a good part of Latin
soteriology as well, but it is not without some analogy with Greek soteriology
which stressed divinization—”God became human so that the human being might
become God.” In this sense, it relativizes the sacrificial interpretation of
the death of Christ and replies directly to the Taubes-Freud duet. The
theologian, for his part, sits stunned by this immanentization of salvation,
its reduction to the opportunity of embracing an intra-wordly cause-event.
Moreover, it is remarkable that Badiou revisits the all important
reconciliation/salvation distinction in Romans, but from an entirely different
perspective, which allows me to note that he never refers to the metaphor of
justification—much like Taubes, in fact. Finally, the question remains: Does
Badiou do justice to the ‘for us’ of the death of Christ?
6. Finally,
Badiou gives an original interpretation of the Paul’s three theological
virtues, in the sense of a militancy faithful to the event proclaimed (chapters
VIII and IX, 91-103). Faith, love, and hope thus become conviction, love, and
certainty. To the very end, Badiou
pursues his project of immanentizing the event proclaimed by Paul.
2.3 Agamben:
Paul, Founder of the Messianic Fracture
Giorgio Agamben
(born in 1942) is a professor at the University of Verona. A jurist concerned
with the question of language, he stands at the cross-roads of poetry and
philosophy. He is celebrated for the quality of his writing, the finesse of his
reasoning, and a remarkable erudition, which are all evident in his book Il tempo che resta—a book which is
subtitled a comment on the Letter to the
Romans (Agamben 2000a, 2000b).[26] This book is the
complement of an unfinished trilogy (Agamben 1998, 1999): as with Badiou’s,
Agamben’s reading of Paul cannot be understood without some knowledge of the
progress of his thought over almost thirty years.
System (vision of the world)
In an interview
with the French daily Libération
(Marongiu and Agamben 1999), the Italian philosopher indicates how his meeting
with Heidegger had constituted a philosophical vocation[27] and how Benjamin
had been for him an antidote to the traces of poison Heidegger’s thought could
contain (!) In the interview, he also describes himself as “an epigone […] who
is trying to finish, to complete what others, far better than himself, have
left undone,” explaining that his political reflections owe a great deal to
Benjamin, whose works he edited in Italian, and to Foucault. We should add that
Il tempo che resta, dedicated to
Taubes, takes up things where the Jewish philosopher had left them off. Several
of Agamben’s key concepts had already been outlined in Taubes: the hôs mè of 1 Cor 7:29 (Taubes 1999b,
83.109), the Paul-Benjamin relationship, the katechon of 2 Thess 2:6-7 (Taubes 1999b, 105).
In his Homo sacer trilogy, Agamben intends to
unmask the hoax of modern politics, whose model is not the city, i.e. the State
founded on law and discussion, but the concentration camp, i.e. the State
founded on exception and suspension of the law. He thus dismisses both democracy
and totalitarianism as unsatisfactory: Auschwitz only revealed the logic of a
system which, since the Second World War, has grown more perfect. No longer
exercised by citizen subjects, power is exercised upon an object, “life naked and reduced to the silence of
refugees, deportees or the banished: that of an “homo sacer” whose biological body is exposed, without mediation, to
the action of a force of correction, of imprisonment, and of death.” (Grelet et al. 1999, emphasis added). The
expression Homo sacer, sacred man,
thus designates the object of this
modern anti-politics for which Agamben has coined the neologism biopolitics. In Roman law, the condemned
person became sacer, outlawed and
banished. He had no identity: neither religious—he was unfit for sacrifice—,
nor civil—he could be executed summarily and with impunity (Custer 1997, 217).
As in a camp, the modern State, constantly and at its wills, operates on each
“citizen” a desubjectivization, followed by a resubjectivization meant to
provoke the subjection of persons who are no longer persons, but naked
lives—numbers.
Confronted with
this impasse, time and the subject must be rethought. Hence, the interest in
the messianic (substantivized adjective), a concept which in Agamben plays a
role analogous to the concept of event in Badiou. Hence also, the detour by way
of Paul, for the messianic time of Romans
can and must become the paradigm of historical time.
Problematics
Il tempo che resta speaks of urgency and of Paul as
the prototype of the messianic thinker, but it never explains the reason for
this urgency or the interest held by the messianic idea—very much in contrast
with the very clear problematics of Badiou. We must look elsewhere for that:
for example in the Homo sacer
trilogy. Faced with the aporia of current biopolitics, we must give politics a
new foundation. “What does it mean to live in the messiah, what is the
messianic life? And what is the structure of messianic time? These questions
which are those of Paul, must also be
ours” (36, emphasis added), because—are we to imply?—patients in the maw of the
bureaucratic health system, people with AIDS, illegal immigrants, and the
elderly, among others, are prisoners in a vast concentration camp. In other
words, but still only implied: the Pauline structure of time can allow us to
subvert the political alienation to which we are being subjected.
Reading approach
“What interests
me in the texts of Paul is not so much the domain of religion, but this
punctual domain, the messianic, which has to do with religion but does not
coincide with it: this is a domain very close to the political. ” (Grelet et al. 1999) Like Badiou, Agamben
proposes first of all a philosophical and secular reading of Paul. He follows
in the path of the great German philosophical tradition, where Paul is
interpreted through Luther’s translation. He shows that the great thinkers of
modern political philosophy have honed their concepts by secularizing Paul’s
messianic: the Puritan work ethics in Weber (39-41), class in Marx (51-58),
appropriation of the unsuitable in Heidegger (59-60), Hegel’s Aufhebung (158-164), and, above all,
the conception of history in Benjamin (215-227).
This being said,
of the three philosophers presented here, Agamben is the closest to the exegete-philologist
model—in that, very different from Taubes. He is attentive to words, to
etymology, to textual criticism, to punctuation, to grammar, to the history of
theological interpretation; he even proposes his own translation of the
passages studied. None of this means that Agamben’s exegesis is not
disconcerting, as Denis Müller points out. According to Müller, this
interpretation is a “fertile exegetical subversion, free of historico-critical
cliques, but just as far removed from certain psychoanalytical or Hebraizing
over-interpretations typical of a certain contemporary coquetry.” Agamben reads
the text from his position of a reader, without postulating any certainty as to
its meaning” (Müller 2001, 52). If for Taubes (Taubes 1999b, 33), everything
was found in the exordium of the
letter, Agamben conceives his book as “a commentary ad litteram and ‘in every sense’[28] of the first ten
words composing the first verse of the Epistle to the Romans.” (8) The titles
of the six chapters—which correspond to the six days of the seminar—thus take
up the words in Rom 1:1: Paulos doulos
christou Ièsou / klètos / aphôrismenos / apostolos / eis euaggelion theou.
Though the book’s
title and procedure stress urgency—there is too little time to comment on the
whole letter!—we discover along the way that his structure in six “days” and a
conclusion titled “Tornada” also
relate to temporality. On the one hand, we have a nod at the “6 + 1” biblical
arithmetic, the time of creation and the time of rest, which allows a kind of
recessed consideration of the whole time of creation. Saturday is not a “day
like the others but rather […] the messianic recapitulation and abbreviation of
history and creation” (135). On the other hand, this structure is that of a
redundant poetic form which Agamben analyzes and which is supposed to be the
model of messianic temporality (130-140). This very rigid poetic form, the
sextine, is made up of six strophes of six verses, to which is added a last
strophe of three verses, the tornada,
recapitulating the whole but somewhat apart from it. Only six words can end
the verses, they each appear once by strophe, but never in the same sequence,
following an order of complex but regular permutation. They also all appear in
the final tornada. “The sextine […]
is a soteriological machine which through the sophisticated, mèchanè of annunciations and repetitions of rhyming words (which
correspond to topological relations between the past and the present) transform
chronological time into messianic time.” (134) In other words, the
chronological linear time of the reading of the poem (36 + 3 verses), i.e. the
time it takes for the poem to end is, in the process, metamorphosed into a
recessed time, a rest time, that of the three verses of the tornada, and it does so by folding back
on itself—the repetition of the words at the end of the verse constantly
referring to what comes before and after in the poem.
This observation
on the structure of the book anticipates its most complex thesis on time, but
also describes very well Agamben’s style of exposition which, from one chapter
to the next relentlessly repeats the same intuitions, but with different
shadings or utterances.
Agamben’s overall
objective is “to restore the Epistles of Paul to their status as the
fundamental messianic text for the West.” (9) Where Taubes scarcely explained
what he meant by the term messianic,
except in reference to the history of Jewish mysticism, Agamben’s book explores
this term methodically. The seven theses that I comment on correspond to the
order of the chapters in the book.
1. The messianic
perspective erases identity:
a) On the one
hand, christ is a title and no longer
the proper name of Jesus Christ. According to the author, this is an
unquestionable philological conclusion (!)—no polemical or Judaizing prejudices
intended (33): Christology does not interest him, but rather the meaning of the
word christos, messiah (35). This preliminary thesis makes it possible to
examine Romans through the messianic prism. Agamben, while justifying his
reading of christos in a functional sense, is very well aware that he is going
against the consensus in Pauline research. Now, his argumentation is too rapid,
exegetically speaking, and this has a measurable theological impact. In the logic
of Romans, can the title of Messiah and the person of the Crucified be
dissociated so easily? Obviously, this question is always open to
re-examination—for any number of different motives, even if only out of
defiance towards the TDNT (Grudmann
et al. 1974). However, it is obvious
that christos designates someone who has some of the traits of the Messiah, but
who at the same time explodes this category. And if Christologists like
Moltmann (Moltmann 1993) have wanted to re-messianize Jesus in ways which resemble
those of Agamben, this is not without its problems: the hiatus existing between
christ and Christ is perhaps the gap which founds Christology (St-Arnaud 1998).
Be that as it may, where Taubes is content to stress the Jewish nature of faith
in Christ, Agamben proposes to us a messianic without a Messiah.
b) Moreover, the
free man Saul has become the slave of Christ; he now has only one messianic
name, Paul, and no identity—he can then become the model of the modern
messianic subject. This prepares the way for the second thesis. But this slave without identity, can he not
also become the model of the non-subject of biopolitics, i.e. of the prisoner
in the concentration camp who has only a number tattooed on him by his guards?
Here we touch on one of the problems of Agamben’s political position: Isn’t the
messianic a flight from the problem? (Grelet et al. 1999) What is the
difference between the no-subject of Auschwitz and the messianic subject? A
partial response to this objection will be found in theses 2 and 6.
2. The messianic
vocation is the revocation of all other vocations and the suspension of all
identities. The word klètos, at the
heart of Rom 1:1, is also the pivot of Agamben’s interpretation which analyses
at length the working of klèsis in 1
Cor 7: 17-32, particularly the last verses (v. 29-31) which repeat five times
the expression hôs mè, translated by as not.[29] “To be
messianic, to live in the messiah means dispossession, in the form of as not, of all judicial and factual
status (circumcised/ uncircumcised, free/slave, man/woman); but this
dispossession does not found a new identity, and the ‘new creature’ is only the
use and messianic vocation of the old one.” (48) “[…] vocation calls to
vocation itself, the former is like an urgency working and hollowing the latter
from within, cancelling it to the very extent that it holds its own and abides
there.” (44) Messianic faith does not envision salvation as an unrealizable
“impotential” utopia, which would imply acting as if it were true. Neither does it envision salvation as the
ineluctable necessity of what is to come. Neither does it feed on resentment
against the world. Messianic faith envisions salvation instead as an exigency
for this world now. “To repeat the words of Benjamin, it [=the messianic
subject] contemplates salvation only to the extent that it loses itself in what
cannot be saved.” (72) Agamben’s subject
without identity has something in common with the subject of
Badiou—notwithstanding the quarrel between the two men. It is also with this
subject that Agamben replies to the objection raised above concerning a flight
from the biopolitical problem. This subject can destroy the system without
replacing it, by living what this system demands that we live otherwise: making use of everything while possessing
nothing legally. The almost mystical nature of this call which is called only
to be called again… is fascinating. From this perspective, could we not rethink
Christianity’s eschatological hope, which is too often lived in a mood of
indeterminate postponement— thus as unreal—or, worse, in a mood of resignation?
Finally, what would happen if we applied this intuition to a specific Messiah
who, against all expectations, also made himself a slave, renouncing the
messianic vocation even as he assumes it? Even more scandalous: a Messiah
having been condemned to the infamy of the cross and cursed by the Law, who
thus becomes the Homo sacer? It would be ironic to have Christology use the
idea of a philosopher who wants nothing to do with the Messiah.[30]
3. Paul is not the founder of universalism (87-88, against Badiou). Far from cancelling the division between Jews and Gentiles, he divides it again fourfold. Paul himself, from the separated Pharisee that he was, has become the Apostle set aside (aphôrismenos): his experience is also the division of a division. On this subject, Agamben evokes the tale of the Greek painter Apelles who had succeeded in cutting in two with a brush stroke the already untrafine line drawn by Protogenes. He draws on Rom 2:28-29 (the Jew according to the flesh and the Jew according to the spirit) and Rom 9 (Israel and Israel) to affirm that there exists “a sort of rest between each people and itself and between each identity and itself” (87). With Badiou especially in mind, Agamben perhaps denounces the danger of a universalism, of a catholicity which, in the name of an event, would replace one totalitarianism… with another. He dismisses as unsatisfactory particular monolithic identities—which in reality are never monolithic—as well as the universal, for the messianic offers an eccentric position which makes it possible to criticize both. The new cut, the fracture established by Paul, concerns all peoples, without levelling differences. We also note that where Badiou thinks in terms of individuals, Agamben thinks in terms of communities. Though, from their point of view, these two philosophers see that their quarrel about the interpretation