A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life

IN DELEUZE’S MOVING CONVERSATION WITH CLAIRE PARNET ABOUT the life and death of Foucault, I am struck by the way Deleuze’s typical fascination with Foucault under the name of the fold and the double emerges as a space within which to imagine the pressure of a crisis within Foucault’s thinking.¹ How does thought, or life, escape power relations once these are imagined, precisely, as ubiquitous? Could one cross a limit of knowledge and power in order to experiment, and to experiment with new communal forms? If so, has one crossed over a threshold of escape from power, or would such a (spatializing, temporalizing) metaphor necessarily prove unhelpful? Moreover, and with a Hellenistic philosophical inflection, in what way would such experimentation answer to a haunting sense of trauma, of disappointment, and the threat of death, such that a style of life affords an experimental therapy for the soul, for its fears and its accompanying enslavements? And would this question not remain all the more important even if these experimental quests for a freedom that is also a shelter must be, by definition, hesitating, risky, and short-lived?

In keeping with the previous chapter, in other words, I want to claim that Paul returns as an important figure with which to wrestle at a very specific philosophical moment, a moment in an unfolding ontology Foucault himself does not resist calling an opening of and toward a (very circumscribed, thoughtful, even hopeful) “nihilism.” If the strange messianism that is an aftermath of fidelity to the “crucified” returns at this point in intellectual history with some forcefulness, then its arrival (to echo Walter Benjamin) peers at us through a very particular sort of philosophical or theoretical aperture. In this section I want to take a measure of some of the dimensions of this aperture as it operates within important parts of Foucault’s work. In doing so, I want to say more clearly than I believe anyone has been saying up to this point why several fundamental problems within continental philosophy find such a nice articulation in Paul, but also how a comparative or genealogical reading of Pauline texts might unearth more important experimental insight still.

Recall the classic moment when Foucault writes in Discipline and Punish: “The body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence, with the force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite extreme of the new physics of power represented by panopticism.”² Above all, the spatial location of power has shifted in what Foucault at this point tends to articulate as a move from one economy of power relations to another, a shift in economy that effects a shift in the spectacular self-presentation of power to an image in which power “has its maximum intensity not in the person of the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations.”³ As each of our chapters argues in different ways, the spatial shift of aura or spectacular buzz (or, to echo Hent de Vries’s important work, the “special effect”) is the essential issue here. Without the locus of the sovereign’s effervescent body, for example, how is it possible to represent diffuse mechanisms of individualizing, normalizing power if power is itself dispersed into a multitude of bodies, decentralized and as it were unlocatable, both everywhere and nowhere? One of Foucault’s authorial modes throughout his career was about attending to such a formal and phenomenological problem. In this passage he declares brilliantly in a kind of Deleuzean vein that—without the ready-made locus of sovereign decision—the presentation and explanation of power relations becomes all the more “singular,” indeed, all the more audacious than a mere king making decisions over life and death.⁴ The audacity of the new spectacular economy emerges, ironically, inasmuch as it presents itself as a kind of normalcy, a routinized and efficient setup that best contributes to the proliferation of “life.”

This is an important issue to drag from Foucault’s prose here, as it points to the way an emergence of a logic of singularity was for him the essential distinguishing mark between his nineteenth-century “modernity,” with its emergent biopower, and a “prehistory” as the nonmodern. The frequency and significance of such a move in Foucault should not be missed for Foucault’s occasional stated hatred of the way “monumental” histories obfuscated a genealogical approach to the multiplicities of reality. In The Order of Things, for example, he summarized “the West” as having “known only two ethical forms”:

“Our modernity,” as he called it, cannot formulate a “law” or a “morality” or a representable “code” of conduct because, Foucault explains further, for modernity “thought … is itself an action—a perilous act.”⁶ Foucault sees in modernity something like a Heideggerian displacement of the economy of represention (where words are charted onto things) onto a more opaquely self-grounding economy of language, production, and life in which there is no model to re-present in thinking.⁷ Instead, we might say (echoing Foucault’s discussion of Deleuze), there are only singular exemplars which—for this reason—all the more opaquely or violently constitute the ground of their own operations. Outside a nomological economy whereby some “law” could function as the map by which to “deduce” good or useful action, the “imperative” of thought becomes all the more immanently, opaquely present a problem, indeed an essential Paulinist problem, as we have already explored in earlier chapters. In different language, in this latter episteme, as Foucault says, thought is itself an act. When Foucault concludes the section by saying that, therefore, “modern thought is advancing towards that region where man’s Other must become the Same as himself,” he is not suggesting the usual handwringing about an appropriation of the other by the same.⁸ Rather, the point is that the existence of the same, as a singularity, would bear its own burden of alterity, would carry around with it its own shadow, and this shadow as a kind of opaquely disconcerting imperative of its own being. Thought or existence within this setup would always bear the cut of finitude, forever indicating the absence of stable models by always ever and only conjuring the singular other, my “ownmost” other, as Heidegger could have put it. The thought of self-grounding regions like life, production, or language result in a situation in which

In addition to our construction of a genealogical echo chamber of Paulinism, the insight has astonishing implications for many of the standard construals of the ethical dimensions of Foucault’s analyses of discourses, institutions, and power. The crucial issue is not at all that, say, the rationality of the clinic is bad or must be resisted because reason constructs its own other in the categories of madness, that prisons are bad or must be resisted because society founds itself on the designation and organization of the criminal, and so on. The astonishing insight is rather, much more simply but also as a profound paradox: these are the modes in which existence appears as such in the modern period. This realization in turn helps us to understand why the generalization of power relations, the dispersal from the centralized site of the sovereign—even their generalization in carceral and clinical institutions—does not, in Foucault’s modernity, in any way imply that they become less singular than they were under the transcendent individual sovereign, a paradox that undoes not only the usual way of distinguishing the general from the particular but also a variety of Marxist dialectics that Foucault resists. Foucault’s thought of a generalized epoch of power is here a perfect counterpart to Heidegger’s thought of Being. In both cases what is intriguing (and paradoxical or aporetic) about power or being is that they are not (as Heidegger famously refuses in Kant and, indeed, in all “traditional” ontologies) “the most general categories.”¹⁰ Rather, liberated from the (imagined) totality in which generality or category traffick, the general itself becomes an instance or exemplar of existence in which the difference that constitutes it becomes, as it were, unplaceable. The existence, without representable model or a law to which it could remain obedient, becomes singular and singularly bearing the alterity which it itself is.

As I wanted to indicate with my initial quotation of Deleuze, I read Foucault and Deleuze as here exploring similar problems of a philosophy of difference, problems that ring throughout with the kinds of Paulinist echoes evoked in previous chapters. Moreover, it is in this respect, it seems to me, that some of the recent criticisms of the Deleuzeanism of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri participate in a reading of Deleuze/Foucault (at this point) which is naive to this Heideggerian element in Foucault’s archival work on institutions. For example, of course Deleuze was often interested politically in the way proliferations of dispersed (and singular) rhizomes overload and escape the centralized (and representational) root structures of “arborescent” systems. On this score it is often pointed out that various oppressive contemporary economies or structures operate in the same way as the singularly rhizomatic: capitalist consumerism and the U.S. military, for example.¹¹ At times these criticisms assume that the point of a Foucauldian/Deleuzean thought of the singular was to unearth a guarantor of an emancipatory outside of the “modern” economy of power both of them saw emerging around them, but this of course is precisely what seems not to fit the paradoxical link between the generalization of power relations and their essential singularity within this epoch. As Valérie Nicolet Anderson describes nicely, Foucault offers an immanent social ontology in which one “tunes in” to new modes of existence rather than “uncovering” an emancipatory terra firma.¹² No wonder Nicolet Anderson has become obsessed with Foucault in relation to Paul’s conjuration of refuge for an experimental collective at the borders of political catastrophe (and what else could a crucified messiah be?).¹³ And here our reading of Paul will rather closely mirror our reading of Deleuze: no concrete shoes, no originary foundation, just tuned in turnings and folding for the temporary crystallization of the new, the alternative, the resistant. Or, in an echo of the initial quotational bricolage of this chapter, neither the revolutionary nor the nonrevolutionary mean anything; what matters is new creation.¹⁴

Similarly, we might wonder about the way the “modern” episteme to some degree—and paradoxically—recuperates the classical distinction between the immanent and the transcendent within an antinomy immanent to singular finitude itself. Is there in Foucault a similar dynamic as one finds in Heidegger, particularly that dynamic which led the young Heidegger back to Pauline texts as perhaps the indication of a logic of thrownness and the paradoxical facticity of being in a world without objective guarantee?¹⁵ As we have just seen, in Foucault there is a sense in which the singularization of thought leads to an inversion of a general mapping of being. In the classical regime, despite the proliferation of different objects on the table of classification, everything could be “spread out to form a permanent table of stable differences and limited [i.e., delimitable] identities; it was a matter of genesis of Difference starting from the secretly varied monotony of the Like.”¹⁶ In the modern regime, by contrast, the “analytic of finitude has an exactly inverse role: in showing that man is determined, it is concerned with showing that the foundation of those determinations is man’s very being in its radical limitations.”¹⁷ In a beautiful articulation of (specifically) Heidegger’s “analytic of finitude” and its descriptions of thrown-ness—the same logic as that of the generalized singular of modern power relations—Foucault’s “modern” sees, paradoxically, that the “contents of experience are already their own conditions.”¹⁸ Indeed, the effort to match constituted and constituting experience by the designation of “humanity” as essentially or radically finite effects a paradox that “shows how that [determining] origin of which man is never contemporary is at the same time withdrawn and given as an imminence; in short, it is always concerned with showing how the Other, the Distant, is also the Near and the Same.”¹⁹ Here again, the usual shibboleths about sameness and difference only lead us astray, as Foucault’s point is to assert that, despite appearances, the hurly-burly of detail characteristic of the classical tables of classification only masked the sameness underwriting them, while the universalization of the analytic of finitude springs loose, under the name of the recuperated Same, an unprecedented potential for irrecuperable, irrecoverable difference. In lines that could have been written by Deleuze on the “minimal difference” or the “swerve” of clinamen, Foucault summarizes that the Same in the postclassical setup becomes “identity separated from itself by a distance,” a repetition always of a self-differing Same.²⁰ In this mode, the Same as self-differing distance creates “a vacuum within the Same” in a way the proliferation of details and objects could not within the representational economy of the classical period.²¹ It is sameness eternally recurring under the name of the “hiatus” that is difference.²²

Or, to oscillate back and forth in our classical-to-modern theoretical problem, if the spectacular presentation of power relations becomes all the more singular, somehow all the more audaciously or spectacularly self-grounding, once released from its incarnation in the body of a sovereign monarch, then opposition to power in the latter epoch likewise becomes all the more difficult to conceptualize. One can ignore, contradict, and resist the dictates of the transcendent sovereign, the symbolic law of language, and so on, of course with sometimes violent repercussions or reprisals against the rebellious. But it demands a different order of thought to imagine ignoring, resisting, or contradicting the postsovereign diffusion of power that is nevertheless activated by scientific (which is often in Foucault to say generalizable) knowledge. As Foucault wrote, there is therefore a “slow, continuous, imperceptible gradation that made it possible to pass naturally from disorder to offence and back from a transgression of the law to a slight departure from a rule, an average, a demand, a norm.”²³ With these lines which we must not forget when we seek to understand the forceful return of a philosophical Paulinism in our own time, we pass from an economy of power symptomatized or indicated by “the crime, the order of sin” to new apparatuses of measurement for the general population, new forms of capture that are now so diffuse within the population that the exceptional status and exceptional declarations of the sovereign no longer serve as the exemplary index of law and limit. No longer the Hobbesian or Schmittian decision of the sovereign distinguishing friends from enemies of the state, “the social enemy was transformed into a deviant,” a transformation which demands a reworking of the idea of power and resistance alike.²⁴ As I discuss more in the following chapter, this formal issue determines the way that Paul’s “return” in recent theory has been mediated by Pauline statements in Romans 7 wherein precisely the secession of economic distinction between law and exception is what comes to the fore.

How, after all, does one resist when mechanisms of power are imagined not to come from a repressive outside but to emerge by way of new and populace-wide apparatuses of measurement, all those mechanisms by which the new economy of power attempts to more effectively proliferate “life”? Much more pointedly, and to summarize a great deal of recent discussion of the viability of Foucault for ongoing critical theory, the real question for resistance in the new economy of power is this: how does one resist when power is that which is imagined to be making the mode or way life is the way life is? This duplication or radically immanent self-grounding of power is the traumatic issue in moments of Foucault, who tries increasingly and in different modes later in his career to imagine an unrestricted economy of power relations or a “network” in which “there is no outside.”²⁵

As mentioned, the logic of Foucault’s story implies a new economy of power relations which are not less “singular” because now “generalized.” This is the essential issue for my current purposes, as the new economy is all the more grounded in specific, even (strangely) decisionistic, techniques of distinction-making, but without this distinction-making being localizable within the spectacular image of the sovereign. Here I agree completely with Jeffrey T. Nealon’s discussion of power and resistance in Foucault’s writings, particularly as he summarizes the relevant formal issues in an invocation of Kafka’s parable of the gatekeeper in “Before the Law.” As Nealon writes:

Consider the way Foucault himself is forced by his effort to articulate new logics of power into a number of profoundly labyrinthine statements due to the fact that he is trying to articulate how biopower is another way to describe the self-feeding investment of its effects back into itself without readily apparent outside or exit. He writes, for example, that a diffused panoptic “mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function.”²⁷ Rather, “it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through power relations.”²⁸ Those who understand Foucault as too dark, too pessimistic, leaving no place for “agency,” and so on, seem to me to miss the way the paradoxes, double binds, and aporiae of a text like this one emerge not from Foucault’s effort to describe “more” of a particular way of construing power but from his effort to think (closely with Deleuze) a different mode or ontology of power relations altogether, one that is decentered and disseminated always only into its enactments or performances. In the next chapter we will read Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Paul along the lines of the shift in power relations indicated when capitalism posits its own presuppositions, an indication that Lacan—even before the brilliant explorations of Slavoj Žižek on the issue—radicalized into the very nature of subjectivity itself, something we discuss further on in this chapter.²⁹

To play on the language we have seen in Foucault, now a singularized, immanent power must bear the burden of its own spectacular “self”-assertion, its own semblance, or (as Giorgio Agamben has put it, nicely twisting the genealogical issues) its own “glory.” Note, for example, how it is this intensely immanent construal of power which governs Foucault’s description of the shift in the role of power from a repressive to a productive function. When power is not imagined as existing exterior to the life of the populace, he writes, when it is “not localized” even in “the general form of the law or government,” then “there is neither analogy nor homology [to guide our thinking about power], but a specificity of mechanism and modality.”³⁰ As described in chapter 1, we are not very far here from the turn in Althusser toward a phenomenological approach to the “modes” of production which, as we saw, became indistinguishable from the performance of the call of interpellation.³¹ All power, we might say, has here become Pauline in the sense we discussed in relation to Breton, existing only in and as a kind of kerygmatic power which is “weak” in the sense that it exists only in its being believed. When power becomes immanent to life and those tactics believed to measure it, in other words, cultural critics are stuck with an “exorbitant singularity” that “masks” its sovereign impositions all the more by becoming indistinguishable from the measurable “way” of life itself.³² This exorbitancy, this excess which “makes” the given by acting as its effect constitutes a kind of swerve, a kind of faith which minimally displaces this given from a state of resting in itself. Thus it is not “more” of a particular construal of power that renders inoperable the step outside it, but an epochal, paradigmatic shift in the thinking of power which governs Foucault’s radical reworking of the inside/outside of power: “We must cease once for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces; it produces reality.”³³

This line within Foucault’s work seems to me the really difficult and productive problem accompanying an inventively comparative “return” of Paul for contemporary theory and its political formations. It is the problem, in fact, that necessarily (and despite the epochalism of some of Foucault’s statements) led him to an exploration of singular styles of life, even if Foucault tended to leave Paulinism as a figure of representation and sacrifice to the original rather than to inflect him along the lines of the technologies of selfhood he saw in Paul’s philosophical contemporaries. These styles are those differences without totalizing rule capable of justifying judgments about them, and to think about them is to think about lives and living that are singularly relational, comprehensible not under the nomination of a category or norm (which Foucault on important occasions happily terms law), but rather as a unique sphere of relationality. As Paul might have put the matter to his hesitant colleagues in Galatia, the only way to judge whether you have received the spirit or become part of the (creatively processual) “strange federation” is simply to taste the savor of the very experience in question, a statement we might explicate with the gloss: “My stupid colleagues, who has drugged you? Only one thing do I want to know from you: did you experience the liberation of spirit while living like Jews in Jerusalem or when you simply affirmed our conversations while living as you do in Galatia? Having started the movement in this style, will you now displace its convincing vibrancy by demanding that you now live like someone else?” (cf. Galatians 3:2f., 5:1). Here Heidegger’s appropriation of Paulinism was right on the mark, in the sense that it understood Paul as an exemplar, ultimately, of life which could only be judged from out of a singular style of care, of concern, which is itself the animating force of judgment rather than knowledge. Foucault, as we have already seen, tends to read “Christianity” as on the modern/epistemological side of what he describes as the eventual “inversion between the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity,” namely, the principles to know oneself and to care for oneself. In keeping with a potential modern break with knowledge as justified judgment in the form of application of an external rule, Foucault casts a genealogical eye back to “Greco-Roman philosophy in the first two centuries” in order to think with them the issue of thought as a singular style of life (philosophy as bios), and in so doing allies himself very closely to Heidegger. Unlike Heidegger, however, Foucault did not seem to press the very legacy of early “Christianity” for indications of alternative paths not taken, other modes of creating solidarities between oneself and others besides rule-based docility or (which amounts to the same thing) the experience of truth through self-renunciation. But we should distinguish here between what Foucault himself did and the framework of the driving problematic that drove Foucault to the archival projects he did pursue. By the same token, it should be clear by now that the basic story Foucault sketches also determines his late-career interest in risky political speech, that singular style of creatively countercultural solidarities expressed in the media of Greco-Roman experiments with parrhēsia. It was the (Deleuzean) interest in the style of philosophical bios which attracted the late Foucault to the formulations of Hadot, a thinker with whom he is otherwise separated by a profound intellectual and political gulf.

Likewise, for the moment, it is worth mentioning that this issue of style or singularity seems a problem many interpreters of the philosopher misunderstand. Recalling some standard clichés, we should point out that it is not simply that Foucault “goes too far” in his “pessimistic” views about the effectivity of specific disciplinary tactics, that panoply of specific, modern “micropowers” as so many measurable gestures, activities, habits of mind and affect. The difficulty here for the cultural critic occurs instead at the level of Foucault’s model whereby “life” and even “being” merge seamlessly into a thinking of “power.”³⁴ In that respect, we must hear echoes not only of the specific historical or genealogical stories Foucault tells (of the prison, of psychoanalysis, of population statistics, and so on) but also of the consistent, if often unmarked and unfootnoted, references to Nietzsche and Heidegger, the latter being that philosopher Foucault once claimed to think about the most but write about the least, the former being the philosopher who—as it were—interpreted Heidegger to Foucault.³⁵ Power becomes another name for “thrown” life, invested life, potential life—in a word, power names, simply, “factical” life. The comparison is useful inasmuch as it seems to me the case that most of the interpretations of Foucault’s descriptions of diffuse, dispersed power relations are premised on the idea that there must be some stable or self-same terra firma (in Aristotelian terms of which Heidegger was fond, a hūpokeimenon) that could exist without those energetics Foucault designates power. But it was the Heideggerian (also Deleuzean) effort to think contingencies (perhaps “history”) as constitutive of the various strata of reality rather than as epiphenomenal, detachable “ornaments” on a stable structure (like a hūpokeimenon) that, essentially, inverts the common understanding of power (as that which is, possibly or contingently, imposed from without) so that power may be read less locally, less detachably, as simply what “produces reality.”

I confess that I find Lacan’s oddly paradoxical formulations about power-as-solicitation to be more useful, ultimately, than some of Foucault’s. But what is interesting about the thematics of power in Foucault’s writings is not whether he has become too pessimistic (and so on), but rather the ways we can in his writings observe the striking paradoxes (again, comparable to the thematics of Heidegger’s facticity and Dasein) as demands for a reworking of our usual ways of thinking. Most importantly, Foucault transforms how one would understand “resistance” to power. Here we should remind ourselves that it was a similar problematic which inspired Lacan to reverse the anxiety of “old father Karamazov” about the death of God, inasmuch as (the old father believed) the death of the divine sovereign would mean that “everything is permitted.”³⁶ If the sovereign (divine) monarch, the paternal law which functions as the system’s fulcrum, leverage point, or external ground is removed—Lacan countered—then the problem is rather that nothing is permitted. In a question that takes us to the heart of similar paradoxes about freedom from law, the play with rhetorics of slavery, and the idea of freedom to belong “to another,” in Paul, we are invited to wonder how—without the external measure of repressive prohibition—one would even distinguish between muling subservience and bold transgression.

To stay with the Karamazov story and its Lacanian inversion for a moment (we will discuss Paul and Lacan in the following chapter), the collapse of an “outside” position from which power is exerted (but also in terms of which power is sheltered, preserved, saved) cuts loose an explosion of indeterminacy and ambiguity about power and its contestation. Or, to make the line fit with what is to follow in and outside of Pasolini’s Paul, with this collapse of an external sovereign power emerges Foucault’s occasional despair about the possibility of “liberation”—as well as all those moments of exhilaration in which those interpreters of Foucault, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, proclaim that, finally, “biopolitical” immanence has liberated the significance of productive bodies. And just here, between the utter loss of a site of emancipation and a paradoxical explosion of new life, will be situated the return of Paulinism in these writers.

As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue in their book Commonwealth, the turn from stable, transcendental structures of cognition (here: Kant) toward an immanent phenomenology (Hegel) is a move that necessarily questions the proper limits—or property rights and divisions of labor—of common being itself.³⁸ As such, Hardt and Negri point out, the move toward an immanent phenomenology is a move that bears a strong family resemblance to the Foucauldian gesture of handing over without reserve “the subject” to an immanent realm of power relations constituting a “biopolitical” sphere. This sphere, of course, is one in which—as in Hegel’s post-Kantian phenomenology—all dreams of stable structuring roles on the “outside” of such immanent divisions of labor appear as a “ruse,” an obfuscating and even comical moment of thought, the humor of which is generated by the way—we should note—that in this passage divisions of labor and represented proprietary structures do not and cannot coincide. Indeed, in this transformation from Kant to Hegel (or, in fact, the early materialism of Marx) to the late Foucault, Hardt and Negri find a clue for the unleashing of productive bodies into a sphere in which no structures may circumscribe themselves as safe and unquestionable realms of the transcendent. This move, Hardt and Negri claim, will constitute liberation in a biopolitical space of the “phenomenology of bodies.” But it is also the move which constitutes, with some caveats, the fascination with Paulinism in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Eric Santner, to name several important touchstones.

Hardt and Negri are perhaps the most hopeful of interpreters of Foucault when they see in the death and dissemination of sovereignty a profound opening for political subjectivity. For Foucault, they argue, the death and dissemination of central authority is not simply the death of the sovereign monarch but the death of all self-protectively abstract and stable sovereignties that might be articulated in terms of transcendental argumentation, whether Kantian categories or even categories of nameable and self-same material substrata, as in the “subject” of the early Marx. What is beyond these epochs of “transcendental” power is, therefore, an epoch in which there is no fulcrum found in any “outside” of the immanent space of bodies and their productions. Unlike many of Foucault’s interpreters, however—who tend to see this transfer from one economy of power into another as the end or annihilation of all spaces of resistance, Hardt and Negri focus on the way it is likewise the end or annihilation of all spaces within which active power could be safely cordoned off from the effects of bodies and their productive capacities. Freed from a deferral to transcendent structures of thought, Foucault, and we in his wake, are able to traffic in a “phenomenology of bodies” that is indistinguishable from “biopolitics”: “Its first axiom is that bodies are the constitutive components of the biopolitical fabric of being.”³⁹ Echoing Hegel’s demonstration of the “ruse” of Kantian schemata, they write: “Labor, freed from private property, simultaneously engages all our senses and capacities, in short, all our ‘human relations to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving.’ When labor and production are conceived in this expanded form, crossing all domains of life, bodies can never be eclipsed and subordinated to any transcendent measure or power.”⁴⁰ Or, as Giorgio Agamben might put it, the transcendence of any transcendent measure would necessarily exist only so long as its self-performance as a kind of aura or “glory” would. Life as fad and intensity, a constitutive concern for a while (to echo Heidegger). Or, in keeping with the way these dynamics often play out today, organizing, juridical measures only exist so long as the managers making a living off them—so to speak—can convince everyone of the grandiosity of the particular mode of management implied in their apparatuses of measurement and organisation. Note, incidentally, that it is precisely the perennial possibility of the splitting off and co-optation of immanent, phenomenological life by a would-be manager and his metrics that causes others like Roberto Esposito to resist the immanent politics of phenomenological bodies. Speaking of Hardt and Negri through Foucault, Esposito writes of the latter:

The problem of the horror of life turning against itself in order to secure itself is, of course, not missed by Hardt and Negri. Nor do they miss the odd significance of ancient Paulinism as a comparative touchstone in relation to which to process these issues. One should not miss, for example, the way Negri’s own ontological explorations of the biblical book of Job (The Labour of Job), begun in an Italian prison, were borne 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.”⁴⁵ The reading is integrally related to Negri’s understanding of the age of biopower, as Job presents us (Negri argues) with a negotiation of unjust power relations precisely after all hope of any justificatory ground outside this oppressive, invasive relation—any stable “measure”—begins to seem impossible. Negri reads Job’s situation as does the divine voice (or the narrator) at the end of the biblical book, both claiming that the efforts of Job’s counselors to justify the patriarch’s suffering in terms of some calculation of cause and effect were for nothing.⁴⁶ Job’s refusal of the calculable justice of the would-be counselors, in fact, coincides with Negri’s own break with Marxism, a theoretical and practical project grounded in “a culture of measure.”⁴⁷ Without external leverage or measure by which to distinguish oppressive power from space of resistance (or, incidentally, by which to discern measured ground by which to justify resistance), it is no wonder that Negri claims it was Job who “led [him] to a close friendship with Foucault.”⁴⁸

Nor should we miss the way the aporiae and deadlocks of power/resistance arrived at here repeat very closely a problem that had been haunting Marxist analysis for some time: the problem in the study of religion of the explanation of myth.⁴⁹ In a way which repeats the basic structures of Hegel’s move beyond Kant that we described previously, the young Hegelians forced the collapse of standard earlier explanations of religion as useful ideology manufactured by ruling classes in order to dupe the masses.⁵⁰ Just as in representational cognition, so with belief: stable representational and proprietary economies are displaced into productive events, acts of organization, the open-ended agonism and performative indeterminacy of which is unavoidable.

In this respect, the criticisms of Foucauldian notions of power by Jean Baudrillard seem to press on an open door in the sense that they repeat, rather than contravene, Foucault’s work. Playing on the same young Hegelian move toward immanence without stable transcendental coordinates, Baudrillard writes—with a dismissiveness that seems to me more self-serving than illuminating—that Foucault “substitutes a negative, reactive, and transcendental conception of power which is founded on interdiction and law for a positive, active, and immanent conception, and that is in fact essential.”⁵¹ In this immanence, Baudrillard continues, there comes to exist a profound ambiguity, therefore, between “desire” and “power.”⁵² Exactly. And while Baudrillard urges us to “forget Foucault,” his criticisms seem rather an important supplement to a (Foucauldian) genealogy of power which Baudrillard assumes as well but tends to articulate in slightly different modes. Baudrillard’s supplement concerns the question of resistance to an ontology of cultural process in which nothing can escape relational emergence, therefore calling into question the significance, or possibility, of resistance or the constitution of an outside of power. Significantly in relation to our articulation of Paul, Baudrillard opposes an economy of “seduction” to those ontologies of production and force that he senses are finding a peculiar apotheosis in the work of both Deleuze and Foucault. Against these ontologies, seduction “withdraws something from the visible order and so runs counter to production, whose project is to set everything up in clear view, whether it be an object, a number, or a concept.”⁵³

Baudrillard’s thinking about seduction has not yet been brought into discussions of Pauline notions of kenosis (cf. Breton) or the twinned emptying of divine and imperial power, not to mention the way Paul, Bartleby-like, suggests that believers prefer to live “as if” worldly structures were “not” (cf. Phil 2, 1 Corinthians 7, 15). But the link needs to be processed. Just for a start, for example, and in a way that aligns Baudrillard with Stanislas Breton’s meditations on the cross and the nonpower of the neuter, the kenotic exodus from being, and the void at the heart of determinate existence, Baudrillard’s criticism of Foucault remains obsessed with a strangely auratic or spectacular forcefulness of, precisely, a withdrawal from the space of organized contestation, a withdrawal from that position within a contest which would constitute force, power, or the political in the first place. Foucault—and indeed a long history of materialist political critique—have not yet thought radically enough about how to escape (rather than to reformulate) the problem of power, thinks Baudrillard:

In his repetition of traditional oppositions even at the moment of their radical reformulation, Baudrillard finds missing (in the very positivity of Foucauldian power) a lack that solicits a more profound “exorcism” (his terminology) of power than is possible in the old master-slave language of power and resistance.⁵⁵ As we will see shortly, Deleuze’s reflections on the potential subversion inherent in radical passivity explores the same philosophico-political terrain. And in the next chapter we see Lacan and Pasolini unearthing the same nonpower within power relations constituting the (merely) auratic or spectacular power of a consumerist economy. For the moment we note that Baudrillard’s criticisms echo Walter Benjamin’s formulations of a pure or sacred revolutionary violence (as opposed to calculated or instrumental violence) that, in turn, is comparable to the reading of Paulinism by Giorgio Agamben. Baudrillard writes, for example: “But the turnaround Foucault manages from power’s repressive centrality to its shifting positivity is only a peripateia. We stay effectively within political discourse—“we never get out of it,” says Foucault—although we need precisely to grasp the radical lack of definition in the notion of the political, its lack of existence, its simulation, and what from that point on sends the mirror of the void back to power. In effect, we need a symbolic violence more powerful than any political violence” (my emphasis).⁵⁶ “Consider yourselves dead … but alive” as Paul would have said to the partisans of a messiah already effectively repressed by Roman authority. Or, in an echo perhaps even more striking: “You have died (with the failed messiah). Why then do you submit any longer?” Indeed, alongside Breton we should read Paul and Baudrillard as alike deploying perverse (almost non-) strategies for a reflecting back to power, as in a mirror, a void. This interest in a kind of opening onto a new economy afforded by inoperativity or a void within effective economic relations seems, on my reading, to be a useful point of comparison inasmuch as all of these thinkers share with the ancient Stoics a fascination with a peripatetic “turn” within a plane of immanence, a turning around which itself threatens the very hinge along which domination and submission remain operable. In this respect, Paul is not only comparable to Baudrillard but also to Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze tended always to imagine Paul in a clichéd Nietzschean mode, but what he says of the inversion of power in Sacher-Masoch is perfectly apropos of the Pauline statements we have noted:⁵⁷ “In Lacan’s words, the law is the same as repressed desire. The law cannot specify its object without self-contradiction, nor can it define itself with reference to a content without removing the repression on which it rests. The object of law and the object of desire are one and the same, and remain equally concealed.”⁵⁸ We should pause over the words, taking a moment to think them through, indeed, with a new genealogical constellation.

Again, for my purposes, it is important to say that Deleuze’s reflection on Sade and Masoch is premised on a thinking of immanence, and it is precisely the immanence of the aporetic life of law which opens law to its own subversion. In Deleuze’s interest in the simultaneous or egalitarian emergence of both proscription and proscribed, we encounter a dynamic comparable to Heidegger’s refusal of a transcendent metaphysical Frame, which leads Heidegger, significantly, to a thinking of being in which forgetfulness and veiling become constitutive of being itself. A comparison between Deleuze and Heidegger is here important to note in relation to the fact that often notions of the critique of totalized systems from “postmodern” philosophies of difference tend to focus on what is lacking from the whole. In both these philosophical instances, however, we could just as well say that the lack (of framing, justifying, or stabilizing totality) emerges as if directly from an excess of information, an excess of information that unhinges the earlier workings of the system itself (whether Heidegger’s metaphysics or Deleuze’s economy of law). Consider that in the case of Deleuze it is as if law can no longer bear the too-present actors who constitute the drama on its stage of legal operations. The pervert, so to speak, whether sadist or masochist, finds rather too much on hand, a kind of excess in relation to the workable economy of law or norm. She finds, as it were, that her place on the stage of normativity is operable only because of a larger machinery of staging (of movements, of sets, of words and gestures) which exceeds her but with which she could identify with a gesture which dramatically transforms the drama in question. Note Deleuze’s specific and very Pauline example here: feeling the whip intended to suppress his unlawful or inappropriate sexual desire, the masochist finds that the very thing intended to prohibit desire has given him an erection.⁶² The erect member of the smitten masochist is, therefore, an indication of what Deleuze refers to, in another intriguing echo of the Pauline tale, as the “ways of twisting the law by excess of zeal.”⁶³ In an isomorphism we need to understand more and more, the “pervert” has gone mad with a properly Pauline madness, as if knowing that the prohibition is really an invitation to enjoy the very thing proscribed. The slap, the rebuke, even the whip are absorbed into the extraordinarily zealous knowledge of the masochist: that the punishment is itself the means, rather than the obstruction, to the promised land of no-longer-forbidden delight. And with the salvation of the pervert is discovered something of singular importance.

Consider here that we are reading Deleuze, perhaps one of the greatest Stoic physicists in the history of Western philosophy. One does not learn so much of a tactic by which to circumvent or short-circuit law so much as one catches a revelatory, emancipatory glimpse of the nomos of an immanent universe. Deleuze is clear: the pervert does not try to “overthrow the law” (89). She realizes instead that she is herself a crystallization of that “divine interval” constitutive of, reducible to, law. It is a radical Stoic immanence which throws into comedically, erotically charged clarity the lie of the Aristotelian mean and its measure of masters and slaves. As Deleuze writes, “In every case, law is a mystification; it is not a delegated but a usurped power that depends on the infamous complicity of slaves and masters” (86, my emphasis). And to see the staged, performed, enacted complicity of these actors is already to see emerging (to evoke Romans 7 once more) another law at work in our members. It is to realize that one is playing one’s part in a larger drama, and all the more so as we do not play these directly or straightforwardly. This, I am suggesting, is the Deleuzean prokopē, or progression in thought, those displacingly ascending or expansive modes of identification by which we are led out of our individual bit parts in order to identify, precisely, with the hegemonic totality in which we find our roles. No wonder that, in order to explain the subversive revelation of this Stoic immanence, Deleuze would resort to that trademark topos of Stoic counterculture, the paradox: “A close examination of masochistic fantasies or rites reveals that while they bring into play the very strictest application of law, the result in every case is the opposite of what might be expected (thus whipping, far from punishing or preventing an erection, provokes and ensures it). It is a demonstration of the law’s absurdity.”⁶⁴ And with the inversion through immanence of the cause and effect of law or prohibition we return to Heideggerian immanence as well. I am particularly interested in the way Heidegger points out that the collapse of stable metaphysical frames completely ruins mechanized readings of cause and effect, a topic we will explore in our reading of Pasolini and Lacan. In place of this primal scene of linear cause and effect we have the event, the Ereignis, in which not just the specifics of cause and effect, but causality as a structure, becomes arrested under the sign of a radical contingency, read as a singularized “repetition” or performative enactment outside of which there is nothing, whether ground or original. Or, once our apostles and perverts have given us a demonstratio of “the law’s absurdity,” we have glimpsed a universe constituted by the joke, a singularly comedic act none of us will escape except, as Deleuze has suggested, by “mystification” or “usurped power.”⁶⁵

It is in this precise sense that one might accept wholeheartedly the critique of Foucault as a Spinozist “quietist,” precisely the charge laid against him by Edward Said and—often without the specific reference to Spinoza—many others. As Said put it in The World, the Text, and the Critic:

Nor should we miss the way it is precisely a kind of intensified Stoic immanence which becomes the premise for the Deleuzean politics of inversion, not by the “step outside” of immanence (nor still some vitalistic essentialism of “life”) but rather by way of surprising “foldings” of it and within it. And once we move beyond Nietzsche’s effort to see Paul as always believing in or peddling the big Other of a metaphysical or ultimately conciliatory frame, we can immediately recognize important moves of a kind of Paulinist baroque radicalism. Against Said, the answer to the “problem” of political contestation tends to be read in Deleuze as the “demand” to invert the inside into the outside, to create ways to show “emergence” or to show how a new “exterior” space can unexpectedly become a temporary and processual subject-ground. Thus not at all far in important respects from the “aleatory materialism” of Althusser, such processes become the Deleuzean “event” whereby a new political subject emerges from the flux for a period of life indistinguishable from its affirmation of a kairotic chance.⁶⁸ In short, what is being explored by Foucault and Paul alike is what is being said by Deleuze: “resistance” must free itself from dialectical oppositions that work out into repetitions of the same types of scenario, the same hierarchies of power. For all these thinkers, forget oppositional politics: we must have—to repeat this chapter’s initial gloss on a Pauline text—a politics of new creation. Or, differently, there is no real freedom in “opposition,” but only in new creation, a politics (if we should still call it that) of a “self” (if we should still refer to this term) emerging at once as both a radical passivity and a surprising involution of the effective powers through which it emerged in the first place. As we might say, “Consider yourselves dead … but alive.”

This, incidentally, is a Paulinism beyond Nietzsche, indeed a materialism for the masses. At one level, such maneuvers, conjurations, or proclamations will afford only a series of minor transformations of life under empire, life in its immanent technological manufacture, but these minor transformations can in turn constitute an assemblage of minimal differences in which we may yet sense the emergence of a remarkable difference, even a difference that makes all the difference. Immanence does not yield stuckness, except on a superficial level. Rather, it yields the capacity for remarkable “turns” which do not so much overturn power relations as undo them, reconfigure them, and in ways essential for recent cultural theory. At the end of Baudrillard’s effort to outbid a Foucauldian biopolitics, for example, it is no wonder that we get a hopeful invocation of a Kafkaesque zombie-Christ, Baudrillard’s dead being raised not to hot-blooded life (which would be to repeat the triumphalism of presence and positivity Baudrillard himself diagnoses at the heart of ontologies of production) so much as to a realm of simulation, seduction, and the generation of ungrounded, rogue, or noninstrumental “desire-effects.”⁶⁹ You have died, Paul might have put it, so why do you submit any longer? In this way Baudrillard’s “forgetting” of Foucault—ironically, by pressing Foucault to his (fully acknowledged) paradoxical limits—is extremely close to Breton’s reflection on a kenotic, Pauline logos staurou or “word” of the cross. It is in this respect that one begins to sense some of the ways in which Baudrillard’s critique of the alleged traditionalism of Foucault’s articulation of power and resistance are themselves reinforcements of things Foucault had himself said clearly at that point. More importantly, however, in exploring the parrhesiastic and counterintuitive or paradoxical topoi of Stoic immanence, both Baudrillard and Foucault veer much closer to a materialist Paulinism than they ever recognized. In his paean to the Heideggerianism of Blanchot, for example, Foucault plainly stated some of the assertions Baudrillard pretends to use against Foucauldian biopolitics. There the analyst of the micropolitical writes, for example, that one must not think of a dialectical “contradiction” (which would totalize and stifle the play of difference in the oppositional poles) but rather of a “contestation that effaces” the very coordinates of the field in which it emerges.⁷⁰ You have died. Why do you submit? Beyond submission, beyond mastery, Paul comes close to Sacher-Masoch and the paradoxical inversions of power in a game of immanence we have yet to process fully.

The question of fairness to Foucault aside, we should note here that the reflections of Baudrillard on the zombie-Christ and Negri’s reading of Job as a Pauline creation submitted to mataioti or “futility” (cf. Romans 8:20, a clear echo of the “futility” of the Septuagintal translation of Ecclesiastes) are very close to Slavoj Žižek’s articulation of Paul’s “communism.”⁷¹ In each case, all are attempting much more than a simple ethical reflection about how to think power “otherwise” than as strength and knowledge. Indeed, they are close to Breton’s lifelong corpus (up to and including his thinking in Saint Paul), which may be read as a metaphysical or (perhaps more accurately, postmetaphysical) ontological musing about how such a revolutionary project might be possible.⁷² To put the question in Baudrillard’s terms: what does it look like to think beyond the political, oppositional model of Foucauldian biopolitics and resistance? How would one navigate a space of a postpolitical or even, to echo Benjamin, a properly sacred violence?

In this sense, and Baudrillard’s caveats about formulation notwithstanding, explorations of Paulinism by Breton and Žižek are never very far from Baudrillard’s efforts to think around oppositional, productivist, politics of metaphysical realisms. Nor are they ever very far from reflections of Antonio Negri, who suggests, in his own ontological explorations of the book of Job (The Labour of Job), that Paul had in mind the catastrophe of Job when Paul wrote that “since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided through the stupidity (mōria) of our proclamation, to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21).⁷³ 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 (and this, importantly, regardless of exactly how one understands his incarceration), Negri was struck by this particular constellation of texts.⁷⁴

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 that cost in suffering demanded for the maintenance of power’s coherent identity? For Breton, Baudrillard, and Negri alike, the Paulinist question is not merely ethical but also ontological: can one think an executed messiah, and this as a peculiar form of cultural critique? Or, do executed messiahs themselves afford the space and time of cultural transformation? 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, Žižek 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 Žižek finds also as a constitutive element in materialist philosophies, where all the self-enclosed idealisms and autotelic grounds of the philosophical reflection find themselves thrown off the rails by way of “material” obstructions. Traumatic, uncanny, and disruptive, this “zero level” of identification Žižek universalizes 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 thus becomes communal property and a new source of political critique or, perhaps said better via Baudrillard, a transformation of the regnant political seduction. In presenting, even identifying with, the necessary “dead bird” (Žižek) of power’s self-performance as a mode of political “glory” (Agamben), one tells the secret of power precisely by performing it so profoundly that the specific elements of theatricality and (necessary) performance appear directly. The masochistic submission of Paul to power implied by his intention “to know only Christ, and this [Christ] as crucified” (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:2), gives rise not just to one zombie-Christ (as in Baudrillard) so much as multiple communities of the undead “body of Christ,” each of them experimenting, in their communal organization, their concepts of power, and the sexual/familial practices, with singularly inventive new modes of having “died with Christ” so that a new mode of “life” could slip through the cracks in the very split between the colonial Roman and colonized Jewish communities. Where there was once a squaring off of power and resistance, now there was what Larry Welborn describes as a Pauline “theater of fools” in which an army of singular zombie-Christs are walking around, as if not capable of judging properly whether they are either dead or alive.⁷⁵ Cicero (as we have seen) would have blanched.

Such dynamics may be usefully compared to what Michael Taussig explores in a different context as the enactment of “defacement” as a “labor of the negative” within which there emerges, precisely, “an orgy of disproportion” which may yet reconfigure the everyday appearance of things.⁷⁶ 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 mē onta, things that “are not” appear in order to “destroy” the “things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:28). Perhaps just there is the link between Paulinism, ontology, and the political, linked in the image of an implicit threat, even if always “weak” and “stupid” (cf. to mōron, to asthenēs at 1:26), that the so-called Christians—now identifying as “crucified” with Christ and thus “dead” to ready-made or worldly interpellations (cf. Galatians 2:20)—may perform or masquerade an excess for which the summary putting away of Jesus could not have taken account.⁷⁷ Perhaps this larger drama itself is what Paul was talking about when he wrote that “if the archai [rulers] had known what they were doing [in excluding or rendering inoperable the theologico-political hopes appended to Jesus], they would not have killed him”! (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:8). 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 emergence of a different political masquerade oriented around the formerly uncountable, zero-level status of the excluded.⁷⁸ And whether we are describing a contemporary biopolitical immanence or an ancient resurrection movement, what we are talking about is the performance of masks, personae, and “glories” with no ground outside their theatrical enactment. As remarked in an earlier chapter, we could thus render Paul’s famous statement to the Corinthians in this way: “We testify to messiah executed, which is only scandal and stupidity except for those interpellated by this testimony. Those so interpellated should look at their emergence as things which do not exist now assembling together for the destruction of what is.”⁷⁹

Or, as Judith Butler writes, Foucault’s subject of power is a body “for which materialization [as a substratum, as a body] and investiture [by power] are coextensive.”⁸⁰ Such is Butler’s mode of framing the way that, in Foucault, we are trying to think an economy of relations in which there is no neutral “outside” onto which “power” would inscribe itself, if “power” begins to function as the level of ontology itself. The question, then, is straightforward, and Butler’s Psychic Life of Power grapples with it consistently: “Where does resistance to or in disciplinary formation take place?”⁸¹ Or, in a more dialectical mode, if the interiority of the modern subject is intimately related, indeed an effect, of an exterior realm of techniques, tactics, and disciplinary apparatuses, “how are we to understand ‘interiority’ in Foucault?”⁸²

As it must, given Foucault’s story, Butler’s reading becomes oriented around questions of the “self-subversion” of power and sites of “resistance” that are not themselves power, moments of power’s “failure” to interpellate subjects into its machinations.⁸³ Or, to spin the questions as an echo of Paulinism, Butler’s reading becomes (necessarily) oriented around questions of tragic self-subversion or self-emptying, the (im)potential for weakness to affect or become a sort of power, and the capacity for such moments of inversion or short-circuit to hollow out within power relations a self-enclosed or invaginated space of communal subjectivity.

It is on these points, we might add, that Butler’s reading of Foucault and subjectivating techniques becomes very similar to philosophical receptions of Paul by Giorgio Agamben or (for that matter) Stanislas Breton. In both philosophers, Paul’s writings are of acute interest precisely because of the way they stage a community-founding identification with an event of crucifixion (and therefore effective suppression) of a messianic figure as something that subverts power. It is useful to play on language of “event” here, as Badiou’s Paul stands in stark contrast at just this point. For Badiou, the event is, rather, resurrection, a difference in interpretive focus that is mirrored, for example, in the way Badiou sometimes chides Simon Critchley’s story about negativity as a source or ground of new forms of political subjectivity. As Critchley introduces his 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.”⁸⁴ Indeed, Critchley explores the impetus for 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”) and ultimately gutted 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/non-sense, God/death-of-God, motivation/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, a figure of a new materialism, he does so because he found himself scheming community formation and resistance at the moment of messianic failure, and this with no real guarantee of persuasive or social success. No wonder Paul made a great deal out of “proclamation” and the centrality of “trust”—obviously he had no other leg to stand on than such ephemera, if something like “life” and “freedom” (as he liked to say) were 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 (cf. 1 Corinthians 1, 4:8–13). Here Critchley’s sense of the tragicomic is perhaps a useful way back into the Pauline tableau. The Paulinists’ disavowal of death’s power, their allowing Jesus’s death to be “for” them (thus acting as if they were beyond death’s “dominion”) nevertheless remains a merely 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 much longer), a “scandal” and a spectacular joke, as Paul sometimes acknowledged (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:23, 4:9f.).

In each instance, Paul’s writings are worth thinking about inasmuch as they imagine this moment as one in which “nothings and non-beings” (cf. ta mē onta,) miraculously emerge to “annihilate” the categories and self-understanding of the ready-made world in what we might call (in one of those beautiful Britishisms) a peculiar kind of piss-take (1 Corinthians 1:28). We discussed earlier the way Breton follows Rudolf Bultmann in important respects to find in Paul an example of “heroic meontology” (or heroic theory of nonbeing), a project that fits well with Butler’s interest in a mute, weak resistance (and therefore a form of power) that nonetheless is not in itself a power capable of “dismantling the [interpellative] injunction or changing the terms of subject constitution.”⁸⁵ Butler wants to think, with Foucault, not the liberation of a “hidden or repressed” subject existing “outside” the “law” of power, but rather the capacity (of what? from where?) for “a refusal” of subject formations that cannot contest the dominant forms of social discipline that they only seem not to mirror.⁸⁶ How to think, as Timothy Mitchell describes in a different but significantly related field, the emergence of a “virtue of recalcitrance”?⁸⁷

The point should be clear by now, and Butler’s slippage in vocabulary between “power” and “law” (of subjectivation) may mark the occasion to push our conversation more decidedly in a Pauline direction, if only to prepare the way for that revelation of a Paulinist “scandal,” the significance of which means a great deal for the projects both of Foucault and Pasolini. How are we able to think, to be, transgression, sin, crime, once power becomes identified with normalizing bios, with life itself? How are we able to think, or to act, as a transgressive force once power becomes another name for being itself? How are we able to articulate an effect of transgression on law that originates not from outside law but rather from law itself? How does “law” (of life, of being)—to repeat Paul’s intriguing statements in Romans 7 or Galatians—produce its own transgression? (Or, in an ontological mode: how do we think prohibiting law and transgressive desire as the same thing?). As we will see in the next chapter, Pasolini’s Paul provides a useful “machine with which to think” (as Deleuze used to say of the great books of philosophical history) in relation to these pressing Foucauldian problems.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that, in another encounter of Paul and the philosophers, Jean-Luc Marion also allowed Paul to function as the “intervention of an instance” in a larger genealogical “outwitting” of Western ontology. Without exploring details, Marion notes correctly that one may discern the “lexicon of the Greek philosophers” in Pauline statements about ta (mē) onta, particularly in relation to the question of the one becoming the other (e.g., Romans 4:17; 1 Corinthians 1:28).⁸⁸ Like Breton of the “underground current” of a new materialism, Marion suggests that, unlike the discourse of the science of being, here the transition (say, for ta mē onta to become ta onta, or vice versa) “befalls them from the outside” by way of a call that is a “wholly extrinsic establishment.”⁸⁹ Despite the fact that his book is an exploration of this divinely interpellating exteriority as “without being,” Marion generally seems very anxious to resist a Žižekian, Badiouean, Baudrillardean materialism, though what seems to have been the anxiety on Marion’s mind at the time was rather a Derridean form of atheism. As I am saying, however, some of the interpretive moves being performed by Marion are otherwise isomorphic with these stances.⁹⁰

As I have said from the beginning, I am not really interested in aged or prefabricated territorial disputes between theology and philosophy, God and materialism, or the community of the crucified and philosophical accounts of political agency, but rather in the question of contemporary biopolitical spaces. In that sense, 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 of identities leads Sobrino to consider what might happen if the poor name this non-being as the communal space of “the crucified.” With such a performative identification, Sobrino believes, the group will emerge into its place within a larger “copro-historical” genealogy that, he hopes, may yet transform the consumerist commitments of the first world and, importantly, “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.⁹¹ Despite initial appearances, then, a formulation like Sobrino’s is close to Baudrillard’s reflection on those history-defining moments in which factions took up a place of what Paul called ta mē onta or what Baudrillard calls the place of the nothing. As Baudrillard writes:

Indeed, think, too, of the Jewish quarter in the Roman colony of Corinth in 44 when a wandering vagabond of a crucified messiah organized a cell of little “crucifieds,” parodically taking the sting out of the effective imperial forcefulness that counted Jesus as one of the serial repressions constitutive of the maintenance of empire. The violence of this gesture Paul registered at the level of variations of the same identitarian predilection to extrapolate signs of cosmic or divine beneficence in the effective history of the world: “to the Jews, foolishness, to the Greeks, stupidity.” But the violence of an identification with a serially repressed messianic figure was also registered at the level of a faint hope that this form of identification with the crucified might be part of a heterotopian “rule” in which “all authority” might itself be emptied (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:24–5). Among other things, to remember the Jewish quarter of 44 alongside the Latin quarter of ’68 is to recognize that Baudrillard, too, places his hope in the zombie-Christ, brought back from the dead in ungrounded desire-effects that do not try to found a new form of power so much as to find precisely in power’s ungrounding and emptying a paradoxical form of emancipation.

I want to add one final figure to this little testimonia collection of isomorphic immanence and Paulinism. Here one needs to mention the way 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?”⁹⁴ 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.’”⁹⁵ As Ueda Shizuturu describes, 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 negates itself (in Shizuturu’s words, “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 Albert Schweitzer’s suggestion, mentioned already, 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. Galatians 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 Eric Santner’s discoveries in Paul of a figure of the “undead,” that life which is neither merely creaturely nor merely divine, but some point of indistinction between the two.⁹⁶ By the same token, Nishitani’s Paul is here very close to Giorgio Agamben’s notions of both Paul and politics, namely, that they circulate around the “empty throne” of power, the center of power as, precisely, a void in quest of a spectacular proxy.