A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul

A RADICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SAINT PAUL

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, editors

The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion.

After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins

The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Ananda Abeysekara

Nietzsche and Levinas: After the Death of a Certain God, edited by Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo

Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, Arvind Mandair

Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Catherine Malabou

Anatheism: Returning to God After God, Richard Kearney

Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, Peter Sloterdijk

Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, Clayton Crockett

Radical Democracy and Political Theology, Jeffrey W. Robbins

Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis

What Does a Jew Want? On Binationalism and Other Specters, Udi Aloni

WITH A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION BY WARD BLANTON

TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH N. BALLAN

Columbia University Press

New York

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © Presses Universitaires de France, 1988

Introduction and translation copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-52176-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Breton, Stanislas.

[Saint Paul. English]

A radical philosophy of Saint Paul / Stanislas Breton; with a critical introduction by Ward Blanton ; translated by Joseph N. Ballan.

p. cm. — (Insurrections : critical studies in religion, politics, and culture)

Originally published in French with title: Saint Paul.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-15104-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-15105-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-52176-5 (e-book)

1. Bible. N.T. Epistles of Paul—Theology. 2. Paul, the Apostle, Saint.

I. Title. II. Series.

BS2655.52.B7413    2011

227'.06—dc22                     2011012629

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

CONTENTS

......................

Dispossessed life:

Introduction to Breton’s Paul

Ward Blanton

A RADICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SAINT PAUL

Preface

1. Biographical outline

2. hermeneutics and Allegory

3. Jesus the Christ: Faith and the law

4. The Pauline Cosmos

5. The Church According to Saint Paul

6. The Cross of Christ

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

DISPOSSESSED LIFE

........................................

INTRODUCTION TO BRETON’S PAUL

WARD BLANTON

[It] beautifully expresses the wonder… when everything was still bathed in the light of an unsupervised [insurveillé] horizon.

—Stanislas Breton, A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul

For it is not a question of annihilating what has been made and inscribed in the density of a past, but of establishing in us a more difficult freedom that does not let itself be fascinated with the traces of its passage.

—Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross

We consequently relinquish the image of a simple body that the dream of a new alchemy would disengage under the sign of critique at the end of its effort. Authentic Christianity [sic] is not behind us: it is in front of us.

—Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross

IRONICALLY, CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL theory’s renewed fascination with an archive of religious texts, traditions, ideas, and transformative possibilities may turn out to be one of the most significant political gestures of recent academic labor. The gesture necessarily brings with it renewed scrutiny of (otherwise) obvious or unquestioned categories like religion and the secular, resulting in a radiating diffusion of academic, political, and social perplexity about how the destabilization of distinctions like this one relates to global prospects of justice, the political, freedom—in short, the prospects of cultural criticism and critical thought more generally. Precisely because a vibrant, modern, Western tradition of critique oriented itself (in its formal self-definitions and its empirical locations and useful tactics) on the critique of religion , the force of this critical tradition remains forever interlaced with genealogies of the religious. It is no wonder, in this respect, that the return of religion insinuates demands into our thinking today, and this to precisely the same degree that the self-grounding transparency of critique, criticism, or critical thinking is finding within itself both obstructions and essential moments of opacity. By the same token, it is in this respect not as surprising as it might first appear that an ongoing recalibration or reorientation of notions of democratic politics, the freedom of political intervention, and the emergence of new community forms has sought to articulate itself by way of a reworked understanding of the Early Christian figure of Paul.

Still, this particular symptom of a recalibration of critique and critical theory by way of an ancient apostle must be at least minimally disconcerting. It is certain that Marx already believed that the critique of social relations was entirely wrapped up with a critique of religion, leading us to think that a latter-day transformation of the one oppositional pole might rather intimately affect the other. But why would an apostle show his face again in the mad scramble to orient for our own time the calculable functions and incalculable aspirations of critical thought? The question is one that is always near to me as a critical theorist and biblical scholar, relating as it does to larger issues about the way the modern European tradition of critical rationality was not oriented simply formally, structurally, or logically on the critique of religion, but also by those specific modes and tactics of internecine warfare inherited from ecclesiastical traditions of biblical interpretation. As Michel Foucault puts it, provocatively: Let us say that critique is historically biblical.¹ So strikingly linked are the tactics shared by ostensibly post-Christian or secularist reason and avowedly doctrinal and religious moments of contest that a biblical scholar like Yvonne Sherwood can lament the way more recent formal or structural fiats of a religious–secular distinction (usually accompanied by the self-designation of oneself as on one side or the other of this divide) have functioned to occlude rather than to proliferate the tools, tactics, and cultural potentials readily noticeable within an otherwise premodern tradition of cultural agonistics that we might otherwise gloss as the history of biblical interpretation.²

And while some have begun to speak in shrill denouncements about a loss of trust in the orienting power and beneficence of the religious–secular distinction, it is in light of recuperating and reinvigorating an archive of critical tactics that we could proceed along these questioning and questionable paths.³ And while there is no space here to delineate the mutual affectation of the invention of modern critical thought and modern negotiations of the figure of Paul (that is another book in its own right), we should not miss the way a great deal of what now passes under the heading of the turn to religion may be understood as organized, in part, by high-profile discussions of Paul and figures of Paulinism within modern philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis by Jacob Taubes, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj Žižek.⁴ Moreover, precisely because these philosophers articulate the apostle in relation to similar philosophical trajectories as Stanislas Breton, all of these readings are alternately foreshadowed, expanded, and subverted in important respects by the lifelong engagement with Paulinism by Breton.

More generally, at a moment like our own, when forms of thought, modes of life, or readily defined identity groups circumscribing the inside and outside of religion seem to be in flux, as if perplexed by an inheritance that has become too constrictive or predictable, Breton’s Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul becomes an essential interlocutor. Above all, Breton—among many other things a lifelong friend and intellectual ally in important respects of one of the great Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, Louis Althusser—presents us with a figure of Paul, described in relation to Western philosophical, theological, and political history, that helps us to understand the fundamental paradox of recent readings of Paul: that the self-proclaimed apostle of a resurrected Christ would stand in as perhaps the best indication, the shortest pathway, to a theory of subjectivity that is avowedly materialist.⁵ If we are witnessing today a short-circuiting of distinctions between the religious and the secular—and how else would we understand the phenomenon of Paul returning as the great guarantor of an effort to think, to ground a contemporary philosophical materialism—then it is not merely coincidental that Paul has reappeared as a particularly forceful index of this scrambling of received codes. And this is something Breton’s Paul helps us to understand.

BRETON AS PHILOSOPHICAL READER OF PAULINISM

Breton’s reading of Paul and Paulinism is decidedly eclectic, variously philosophical, political, and theological. often deeply involved in a reworking of neo-Platonic categories, Breton loves to uncover truth by way of negation, by way of showing what truth is not. It would perhaps not be offensive to him, therefore, to highlight what Breton’s reading of Paul isn’t in order to assist in making clear some of the things that are so stunningly significant for contemporary critical theory in his philosophical negotiation of Paulinism. It is perhaps also appropriate enough generally here to introduce Breton’s Paul by following Breton’s own model of approaching his topic—laterally—by setting up intersections or multiple modes of encounter between thoughts whose comparability may not seem obvious, prefabricated, or culturally readymade.

For starters (and by way of example), Breton knows very well that his is not an interpretive game emerging from strict historical method.⁶ When he speaks of Paul and allegory, for example, the philosopher uses two texts (from Ephesians and Hebrews respectively) which are, he fully acknowledges, not generally imagined by contemporary biblical scholars to be written by Paul himself.⁷ nevertheless, he invites, should they not preface any introduction to the allegorical method? Paulinism stands in for a kind of effective history of the Pauline legacy, a shifting, developing, and contested or ruptured legacy that, for all these reasons, affords an archive that, for the thinker, opens up a multiplicity of territories for expansive conceptual exploration and invention. In this case, for example, Breton’s caveats about historical authorship are immediately followed by a beautiful discussion of time plunging into eternity, of the Christ of Ephesians—caught up in such a plunge of the contingently historical into the permanency of the structural—becoming the copula of the universe, the mediating hinge between subject and predicates in a rhapsodic movement of cosmic reconciliation of (in the words of the letter to the Ephesians) the all in all. Breton’s philosophical reading of this passage solicits thought to consider this textual Christ in philosophical modes we might have otherwise missed. of course, by wiring ancient metaphysical (and, I am quick to note, sometimes anti- or post-metaphysical) axioms into the apocalyptic and mystical world of Paulinist insurgency, metaphysics (as well as the limits of metaphysical reasoning) lights up with a strange new hue as well.

As Breton writes of the Christ of the letter to the Ephesians becoming the copula of a universal philosophical system: it is in the energy of a circuit, or loop-like construction, of action that—once narrative time is plunged into structures of eternity—mimics… the aseity or self-sufficiency of the Absolute. Breton is speaking here of the way Ephesians 1.9–12 imagines a teleological movement of divine intention, planning, and effective carrying through of an action to gather into God, by way of a cosmic Christ (Breton’s copula of the universe), ta panta (all things). As is typical of him, however, here we see Breton squeezing together mystical and philosophical texts tighter still, forcing each, as it were, to bleed into the other. Compressing his religio-philosophical construction further, Breton adds the final twist: when, he tells us, religious narrative mimics ancient philosophical structure (and vice versa), readers are confronted with a play of gestures in which a teleological reading of the structure of the universe explodes to life, precisely, as a semantic order, as if the meaning of Being, or the structures of ontology itself, could be read in the forceful imperative of a speech performance like Let there be light!

I am unpacking this moment in Breton’s reading because it exemplifies an intensity of interpretive juxtaposition and mutual explication of intellectual traditions that characterizes Breton’s book generally. To keep up with Breton, readers must endeavor to be agile, for in forging such connections, quickly and schematically, this philosophical Paulinist takes us from statements of a Pauline disciple (say, the author of Ephesians), back into Paul (Romans), and then out again into classical Greek philosophy (Aristotle) and its mystical interpreters (Meister Eckhart), finally arriving at a subtle commentary not only on Martin Heidegger (the meaning of Being) but also on Louis Althusser (for whom emergence into being and subjection to the performative speech act of sovereign power occur simultaneously). To think with the Pauline legacy, Breton’s reader finds, is to grapple also with ontologies and theories of power and subjection in which a being in the world emerges only in, with, and through a yes-saying to a substance best understood in terms of a performative speech act—Let there be light!—or, as in Louis Althusser’s famous example of the policeman addressing someone in the street: You there! When the light switches on, or when that someone turns to the authority to answer, You mean me?, then reality starts to appear as summoned (in Althusser’s terminology, interpellated) by the call that is itself the movement of self-reinforcing power. At Breton’s instigation, now listen to an Althusserian depiction of power’s revelatory function in the call of ideology, this time keeping predestinarian Pauline texts in mind. In an interview with Fernando navarro, for example, Althusser says:

There is a paradox here. It is as if, when I believe in a notion… I were not the one who recognizes it and, confronted by it, could say: That’s it, there it is, and it’s true. on the contrary, it is as if, when I believe in an idea, it were the idea that dominated me and obliged me to recognize its existence and truth, through its presence. It is as if—the roles having been reversed—it were the idea that interpellated me, in person, and obliged me to recognize its truth. This is how the ideas that make up an ideology impose themselves violently, abruptly, on the free consciousness of men [sic]: by interpellating individuals in such a way that they find themselves compelled freely to recognize that these ideas are true—compelled to constitute themselves as free subjects who are capable of recognizing the true wherever it is present, and of saying so, inwardly or outwardly, in the very form and content of the ideas constitutive of the ideology in question.… That is the basic mechanism that transforms individuals into subjects. Individuals are always-already subjects, that is to say, always-already-subject to an ideology [emphasis added].⁸

As Breton is pointing out so clearly, the basic circuitry of Althusser’s construal of subjects as effects of power issuing as a call to individuals is comparable to the surprising Pauline move in Ephesians or Romans 9 to imagine the individuality and qualities of individuals as effects or machinations of sovereign power. Breton’s reading allows us to feel the rhythms of Althusserian notions of ideology in Paulinist conceptions of predestination. By the same token, of course, and perhaps more surprisingly, Breton invites us to intuit a form of Pauline sovereignty and Paulinist allegory (with their respective visions of the aseity of the divine) in Althusserian notions of ideology. Wiring all these links back into his construction of Paul, readers of Paulinist texts of predestination and mysticism are therefore led to the heart of a logic in which, as Meister Eckhart had